Through the ages men have waited for voices to speak from out the great unknown. Answering to this universal longing for larger light, to this search for truth, there has been the conviction that, where our own scanty knowledge ended, there something akin to revelation would give us light. We have been listening for voices that would speak with an authority transcending that given to our fellows.
Cold reason may mock at revelation, but the soul struggling in darkness, baffled by its problems, lost in the night, still looks up and hopes. For what awaits us but despair if the mysteries of the universe are forever sealed, our questions forever unanswered, and no higher appeal to be known than that to our own selfish interests? It is not strange that men have heeded those who, though often mistaken or but impostors, have cried, "Thus saith the Lord!"
It would be strange if in a world of spirits there might be no communication of spirit. If the fairest thought of our era is that which was given us when man was taught to think of the omnipotent as father, it would be strange if there should be no way by which such a father might speak to his children. Such a world would contradict all our best instincts. Such a world would mean that man was better than his maker.
The divine voice speaks, but we too often listen in the wrong direction. It falls not from the skies; it comes not in strange, unusual ways of visions and portents. But it is ever speaking through the things of daily life; it is ever revealing truth and beauty to the inner ear, for it comes not from without but springs up within; heard by the heart rather than by the ear.
The best things have not dropped down; they have grown up. Life is not from without, but from within. God speaks not in thunders, but in the hopes and the longings of hearts. Even the voice we hear in the sighings of the wind or the message we read in the rays of setting sun must be in us before it means aught to us.
The ten commandments owe their force not to any writing on stone but to their writing on our hearts; to them the soul of man answers affirmatively. The only moral code we can follow is that which speaks with the authority of a conscience convicted. That does not mean that man is his own God, nor that he knows no law higher than himself; it does mean that by the laws of spiritual development the law is being written on every heart.
Every real revelation is a divine revelation, since all truth is divine. Once we thought the scientist the enemy of religion; now we know that whenever science lays bare one of the facts of the universe we do but look on what the finger of the Infinite has written. When religion fights truth simply because truth speaks an unfamiliar tongue or fails to respect her traditions, she is fighting against God Himself.
Our need is not some strange, awe-inspiring voice that shall break the silence of the midnight sky; our need is an ear trained to hear, a spirit to understand and reverence the sublime voices that are ever speaking in our world, the voices of the beauty of nature, the joy of living, the stories of every-day divine heroism, the forces that are making a new world to-day as truly as ever one was made long ago.
The life of our day has not less of the divine than the life of long ago; but the message is harder to read; it is for an educated race; it is spiritual rather than merely material; it is from within; it is found in every good impulse, in every outgoing sympathy, in the kindling of eye as friend greets friend, in the good that men are doing, in the toleration that is becoming wider, the love stronger between man and man.
God speaks to men now as He spoke to Moses or to David, though the manner may have changed. But the poor in spirit, those with whom pride of the past has not served to make them unwilling to learn, these hear the voice; the pure in heart see Him; the seekers after truth find Him, and to all He comes in the thrilling moment or in the quiet hour when the voice of the heart makes itself heard.
The Price of Success
The Law of SelectionThe Fallacy of NegationThe Secret of All
No life is lost that is lived for love.
The only wealth you can possess is that you have in the heart.
Love never knows hardship, even when it meets it.
When men pray for harvest they often get a plow.
A man's holiness is to be measured by the happiness he creates.
The only way to reach heaven is by attempting to realize heaven now.
Whatever is saved by selfishness is lost to the true self.
One of the worst offenses against humanity is the pretense of divinity.
Weapons that fly off the handle have little effect on the walls of sin.
Many a man thinks that taking a lease on a front pew gives him a freehold on a corner lot in heaven.
Success is not in an endeavour to do a great things but in repeated endeavours to do greater things.
Jesus said, "If thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee," but this age finds it hard to accept that saying. It asks, If we are to throw life away why should it have been given to us? Why this selfhood with its passions, its surging desires, its great longing to be untrammelled and free if all is to be restrained and the passions are to be perpetually denied? If religion means, as some plainly have said, doing the things you don't want to do and leaving undone those you desire, then it is a mockery, a contradiction of our lives and natures.
Therefore there exists another philosophy which says, boldly: Live out all that is in you; do all the things you want to do; your passions in themselves are sufficient justification for their gratification. They say man is free; therefore, let him realize himself by giving free and full expression to every thought, inclination, appetite, and possibility within him.
When the average man puts the two philosophies in contrast he is likely to conclude that the path of self-denial, of stern repression, is the mistaken one; for, he will say, does it not contradict nature?—does it not involve the repression of natural instincts and make all life a perpetual fight against ourselves, a waste of forces, instead of, as it should be, a plan by which a man might find success through the realization of the best in himself?
But let another test be put to this philosophy—the test of life. How does it work out? What are the best lives, the lives that are richest and that have most enriched the world? Are they those that have given free rein to every fancy, that have nurtured and brought to fruitage every growth of the heart's garden, whether it be thistle, brier, or poison root, or fair, nutritious product? Are they those that have given the tiger and the beast of prey free and full range of the life?
There is striking unanimity in the answer. The rich and the enriching lives have been those that have come by the path of the cross; they have learned repression, practiced denial, and suffered death. In every sphere the lights that have illumined the way of man's advance have not been the dancing flames of selfish, sensual passion but the consuming of the bodies of the martyrs and heroes, either burning in their passion for others or denying and losing all rather than denying truth and light.
The law runs through all; if you would have a perfect flower you must deny existence to many weeds, you must repress the rank growth, you must pluck off many a leaf and nip many a bud that the one may come to the fullness of its beauty. Through the grain of character goes the wise husbandman, and death is in his hand—the death of the less worthy, the harmful, and the enemy that life may abound yet more and more in that which is worthy.
In those fields where all things grow in their own way the weeds become the standard for all; license brings all down to the level of the lowest. But life is not license—it is choice, selection, sacrifice, death. Pain is the only price at which perfection may be purchased. Self-realization comes not by permitting all things to have their way but by subjecting all parts to the securing of that high end.
It is but cowardice that cries for the so-called natural outworking of everything within man; it seeks to save the labour of weeding, the pain of cutting here and pruning there. It asks only to be left alone. But that way lies the deepest pain of all, the pain of a life where there is nothing but tangles of weeds—no flowers, no capacities for joy, no power to will, no eye to see the good and true and beautiful.
No; the great Teacher was right when He called for self-denial and self-victory. He only is great, he alone has found life who has learned to bring all his parts and faculties into service, who brings all his body and self into subjection that all may be keen and well kept tools in the work he is doing as a servant of his brothers and his age. This service gives the supreme and sufficient motive for the suppression and elimination of all things that might hinder; the development of the best self for the best service by means of the cutting off of anything that might hinder or thwart the high and holy service purposes of a life.
The ancient law that nature abhors a vacuum holds true in the moral realm. The heart of man is never long empty. And yet the whole scheme of modern ecclesiastical regulation of life is built on the plan of making a man holy by emptying him of all evil and stopping there, leaving a negative condition, without a thought of the necessity of filling the void.
So long have we been trained in this that we are all a good deal more concerned about the things we ought not to do than about the things we ought to do. We spend our days nipping off the buds of evil inclinations, pulling up the weeds of evil habits, wondering how it happens they multiply so fast, forgetting altogether the wiser plan we would adopt with weeds and briers in our gardens.
There are many who still think of the pious man as one who succeeds in accomplishing the largest number of repressions in his life, the ideal being the colourless life, never doing a thing that is wrong or subject to criticism. The energy of many a life is being spent in a campaign against a certain list of proscribed deeds. Blessed is the man—according to their beatitudes—who has the largest number of things he does not do.
But if rightness is abstinence from evil, then a lamp-post must always be better than a man, for it justly can lay claim to all the negative virtues. What an easy way of life is this, simply to find out the things we know other people like to do and to determine that if we only can leave them undone we are holy in the sight of heaven.
But not only is this a way of folly, it is a way of positive harm, a way fatal at last to the true life. To do no more than to turn out one set of devils only is to invite other and worse devils into the heart. To seek emptiness only is to invite yet more iniquity. An empty heart is as dangerous as an empty hour.
Emptiness is not holiness, it is idiocy. There cannot be an empty heart. To take a bad thing away from a man gives an opportunity for a worse thing to enter unless you simply choke the bad by implanting the good. Some of the most dangerous people are those who feel pious because they can say, We never did any harm.
Religion often has come to mean only a multitude of repressive regulations, apparently a scheme for making others abstain from those things for which we have no appetite. Little wonder that children feel only repulsion for a church which seems to take delight in finding impiety in every natural pleasure; that men turn from a path which, according to its prospectus, promises nothing but pain, privation, and emptiness.
We do not object to the pain and privation provided they have their purpose. But all nature objects to a course of life that maims, pinches, and restricts without corresponding and compensating development and liberty somewhere. We fight against every law of life and court the ways of death so long as we endeavour to develop character by putting it into bandages, leading strings, and legal restrictions.
There is evil to be eliminated; there are thousands of things we ought not to do. But the best way to get rid of the tares is to sow good wheat in abundance. The way to avoid the things we ought not to do is to do the things that ought to be done. The empty life is a standing invitation to temptation; the busy man seldom finds the devil's card left at his door.
Live the life above the things you would overcome. It never has been found necessary to pass a law prohibiting the president from playing marbles; larger interests fill his life so that these things do not even occur to him. Give a man a great work to do and you will save him from a thousand temptations to do small and unworthy things. Do not allow the modern conception of religion as gloom and denial to keep you from that which is your right as a spiritual being, the strength, joy and beauty of the divine life.
Holiness of life is not in innocence of evil but in positive forcefulness for good; not in doing as little harm as we can, but in filling the whole life with worthy, helpful, uplifting deeds. The good life not only has no debts—it has large assets, deep and lasting value; it enriches all life. It offers to the world not barren land claiming the virtue of freedom from the thorn and the brier, it crowns all with the abundance and glory of fir and myrtle.
The words hold a large place in every alert life: Happiness, Health and Heart; some may put them Success, Strength and the Soul. It is easy to recognize the importance of the first two; that of the third is more remote. Some have imagined that religion emphasizes the last alone and ignores the other two.
Evidently it is a legitimate thing for the Christian to pray for prosperity; and it is right for him to try to answer his own prayers. Poverty is no proof of piety. Nothing about God is or can be poverty-stricken. He gives us a rich and glorious world, prolific in its resources; its life is rich and prosperous. Nature is running over, fairly rioting in splendour and wealth. The Creator has given man this garden of glory that he might enjoy it. It is a sin not to enter into its possession; he is dead already who does not desire prosperity, who no longer seeks success in life. It is an easy matter for the man who has made an all around failure to talk about the dispensations of Providence and the compensations of the future. Prosperity is always a sin to the man who lacks the pluck to secure it.
Yet many who seem to have failed may have succeeded best of all. Prosperity often comes in strange packages; it may even be labelled Adversity. Not all will succeed according to popular standards. Many will be more fortunate; they will win the riches of influence, friendship, family, thought, knowledge, love, character. It is not the things we have that make us rich; it is the amount of life we are capable of enjoying. The soul determines prosperity. It is the energizing spirit of man, stirring him out of the ignoble dust, creating the desire for more of the things of life and then for more of life itself. It determines values. It has a way of reversing things so that one man gets more out of a dollar book than another gets out of a million dollar bond. It alone gives appetite and appreciation, and, without these, though there may be many possessions, there is no prosperity.
What is true of prosperity is true also of health. Happily the days are gone when sickness passed for saintliness. No longer is red blood counted a foe of righteousness. We are getting back to the simpler, earlier thinking. It is not only right to seek health; it is wrong not to. The haggard face no longer indicates the holy heart; it is likely to evidence the opposite. We are getting over the notion that God is glorified by ruining the fair temple He has given us. Men no longer count on being beautiful angels in the skies because they have looked like walking sepulchres on our streets. It is an imperfect holiness that does not have health. Health, that is physical prosperity, is a duty.
And here, also, the soul is central. The clean heart, pure thoughts, controlled appetites, aspiring hopes, these make health. Evil temper, lust, worry, care, envy, these are the soul processes that disturb the life and destroy health. Happiness is health, and happiness is wholly of the heart. The soul is but the sum of all the things within, the force that moves all things in life; if within the man looks up, then he lives up; if the soul droops, he decays. What you are within determines what you are without; he who is poor in heart, in this inner life, will be poor in prosperity and weak in health, no matter how much he possesses. But he who with his soul takes in the world of beauty, of love, of joy, who reaches out to heaven and God, all these things are his and he is rich and strong indeed.
Divine Service
The Ideal ServiceThe Orthodox ServiceThe Heavenly Service
Kindness is the evidence of kingliness.
The surest way to impoverish your heart is to hoard up your love.
A really smart man will refrain from saying things that smart.
Many a prayer for vision ought to be changed to a petition for vertebra.
The damning doubts are those that deter us from good deeds.
The leaders of men are not the ones who are trying to get ahead of their fellows.
Folks who are too good for anything are good for nothing.
It's hard to steer a straight course if your conscience is in your pants pocket.
You do not have much faith in your Father unless you have some in His family.
No man can have a place in the kingdom of heaven who is complacent to the ills of earth.
Never was the greatest of all greater than when He put about Him the badge of the servant. His example has made the towel, the apron, the badge of true honour. Nothing could have surprised those men who were quarrelling over their precedence more than that their great Master should stoop to perform this menial service of washing their feet. Like many who call themselves His to-day they strove over chief seats, honours, titles, and dignities. They were seeking the chief places and by their strife showing themselves fit only for the lowest. Nowhere is the sense of honour more easily slain than in the search for honours.
The only dignity that really adorns a man is that which comes without his demanding it. How often have the servants of the meek and lowly Jesus turned the world away from Him by their examples of vanity, greed, lust for power, their pomp and pride of self-glory. They who were sent to be the shepherds of men have fleeced the flock for their own adorning and then fought amongst themselves to see who should wear the choicest robes. History has shown that they were wrong and their Master was right. The greater their greedy ambition the greater their shame; the higher the place they have claimed the lower has been that which the voice of humanity has awarded them.
On the other hand there shine forth those who have followed Him in lowly service; theirs is the honour to-day. Because He took upon Him the form of a servant then now is the kingdom and the power and the glory His.
So it has always been, sovereignty comes by way of service; heaven and earth unite in honouring those who have not scorned the humble place of helpfulness. John says that it was because Jesus was conscious of His divine origin and His glorious destiny that He took the towel and did the work of the slave. Only those who realize their true greatness can ignore the littleness of man's petty dignities, can lose all sense of stooping, of condescension when they serve others, and so can be of service to mankind. A man proves that he is the son of a heavenly Father by his service for his least brother. When that dignity, heaven born, is in a man's heart there is nothing in the dirt he may touch by deeds of kindness that can defile him; contact does not contaminate.
Love never thinks of any of its services as loathsome. That from which a superficial dignity would revolt love does with rejoicing. It thinks nothing of the honour or the dishonour, but only of the helpfulness it may render. It is not asking whether men are approving or whether promotion is coming. It needs no promotion or approval; the work itself is the highest reward; the service elevates to the loftiest of all positions.
The world's sovereigns are its servants. He makes an alliance with God who helps a fellow man. Work is that by which the Creator has lifted man above the creatures of the field, and the work that sacrifices that it may serve is that by which God lifts man to Himself. The heavenly gate may be shut to robes and miters, epaulettes and crowns; but it shall be open wide to that great throng who bear the stains of toil, who have served their fellows, who wear the apron of sacrificing service; and the Son of the carpenter shall lead them in.
This is a working world; its Maker is pictured as a worker; there is no better evidence of religion than willingness to serve. Work determines a man's worth to the world. And religion must be known by the things it does, and not, as many have fondly supposed, by the dreams it has.
This is a working world, with no place for the idler, whether he be high or low, rich or poor. The measure of a man is the service he renders humanity. Actions are measured by the same rule. The value of religion to life, its right to time and place, is measured by this, Does it help or inspire men to service, does it increase the quantity or improve the quality of the work that they do for their world?
Men rightly ignore the piety that satisfies itself with platitudes on the duties of others, or with philosophical speculations on problems which, if they were accurately solved, would contribute nothing either to our peace, our possessions, or our personal characters. Yet, how many imagine that they are profoundly pious because they cherish properly indorsed opinions, duly certified as to their antiquity.
They who profess to follow the Man of Nazareth cannot do it by sitting in their pews or kneeling at their altars; they cannot do it by dreaming of a place of bliss or picturing one of torment. One of the first lessons He gives His disciples is that it is not he that speaketh the word, but he that doeth the will, who is pleasing to God.
Nor do men do His will in any important or complete sense by going to church or serving in its meetings or on its committees. When a man is ordained to divine orders, that is, to give himself wholly to do the will and work of the Most High, it is said that he becomes a minister. If "minister" means anything at all it means servant, one who works for others, who ministers to them. The Master spoke of Himself as being among men as one who served them. The only orthodox service is the service of humanity.
This is religion, such a consciousness of the reality of the Infinite Spirit that you will steadily do the things that that spirit of love is doing in this world, ministering to men, binding up the broken in heart, lifting the lame, and leading the wandering, feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, bringing light and love and cheer to those that sit in darkness, you will become feet and fingers to God.
One does not need to wait for a special garb to do this religious work; one does not need to wait for formal ordination; whoever loves men already is divinely ordained to serve them. One does not need to wait for a church or a special organization; the sufficient motive is deep, sacrificing love; the method will be just what the Master's was, to go where men are and help them.
After all, what this world needs is not so much that men shall go to their fellows with money, with clothes, or even with employment; it needs that they shall just go to them. The good mixer, who mingles with men, who knows how they live, and what they think, how they suffer, and what they feel, if, going amongst them, he carries a clean heart, a love for his fellows, a firm faith in heaven, and hope for men, is doing them more good by his presence than he who may send carloads of goods.
Men did not need that Jesus should wear a label saying that the Most High was with Him; the more He mingled with men, the more clearly they saw He belonged to God. What He was willing to do for them showed that they, too, were the children of the Most High. If any man would have that infinite presence with him, if he desires the deep sense of the spiritual, let him seek it not in closet or convent, but in the touch of hand and in the sight of the face of friend and fellow being.
Many of us are worried at times because our lives seem wasted in doing little things; we would become immortal by saving our powers for some great deed. We need to remember Him whom the world most easily remembers and most highly honours, the Man of Nazareth, whose life was spent in trivial services, doing the next thing that came to hand, helping ordinary people in every-day needs. Yet God was with Him, as He ever is with those who love their fellows in sincere service.
It seems easy to see something peculiarly holy, something deeply religious in the occupations and acts of the priesthood or the ministry. But thinking of these as religious and of such service as divine we fall into the habit of thinking that they alone, in all the world of action, are divine. We set on one side of life the religious service limited to these formal acts and on the other side what we call the secular life and service.
We have sacred days, sacred deeds, sacred callings, religious services; all separate from the rest of life, belonging in a department, a pigeon-hole, by themselves. Whatever is not of these is of the world, worldly, secular, lacking in the peculiar aroma of sanctity that attaches to the church or the profession of religion.
There are many who desire to do some religious work; who fain would engage in divine service. There is in almost every breast a desire to do something high and holy, something that is not necessary, utilitarian, with some other motive than bread-winning. But there seems to be no opportunity; such deeds are supposed to belong to special callings; one must be ordained to do divine service.
The truth is, divine service is the duty and high privilege of every human being; we all are divinely called to the ministry; the service of God and humanity belongs to us all. We must not wait for ordaining hands nor ecclesiastical robes nor for the environment of official sanctity. Every impulse to do good, to show human love, and do loving service is a commission from high heaven.
The good Master invites men and women to His kind of service, the highest and holiest known to all the ages. He never was separated to a clerical calling; He did not wait for an ordaining council nor did He confine His divine service to prayer and praise or to the activities of the church ritual. His divine service was the service of the sons of men, the going about doing good.
Heavenly work is not work for some far off heaven; it is the work of making this present earth like heaven. The work of God is not working for an absent deity; it is doing the work that the God of all love would do in this world; it is being feet and fingers, voice and lips to the great Spirit who is over and in us all. It is making that spirit of love real, actual, concrete to our fellows.
The holiest work in this world may be done in the humblest places; the most divine service may not be in the cathedral but in the cottage; the angels may pass by the intoning choir to listen to a mother's crooning cradle song or to watch the patient service, the loving kindness shown in washing the faces or wiping away the tears of dirty and destitute children.
The holy service which will fill your heart with joy and give you the unfading crown of eternity, never will be done if you are waiting for some ecclesiastical uniform to do it in. Whatever is done in the spirit of the infinite love, in the spirit of the great Master, that truly is divine and glorious.
It is the good work that is glorious. It is a thing more truly divine to do well your daily duty, to put out good, honest work, than it is to wear a clerical garb or perform professional religious duties. The honour, the worthiness, the glory of your work may be measured by the spirit in which it is done and by its helpfulness and worth to the world.
All life becomes glorious as we see that even in the least of our daily tasks we may be doing the will of God, that it may be just as necessary a part of the divine service that I should serve at a desk, a counter, or a machine, should sweep a room or tend a child as that another should preach or pray. For the great Master of all who knows all our work, measures it all, not as we do; He sees the glory of the cup of cold water and the divinity of the commonplace.
Our Father and Our Fellows
The Primary ReconciliationFaith in Our FellowsThe Law of Forgiveness
Sorrow is sympathy's school.
Love makes the heaviest load seem light.
To be willing to be saved alone is to be lost.
The truly godly see something divine in all.
Your appreciation may be another's inspiration.
Kindness is the sign of divine kinship.
You cannot knit the souls of men with soft sawder.
You cannot be a leader and lose sight of those who are to be led.
The shortness of the day excuses no man from greatness of endeavour.
When a man thinks of nothing but his sins and failures he will have nothing else to think of.
Lots of people who talk of their lives as blue are only colour blind, they either are green or yellow.
He is only shortsighted who pronounces the world bad after looking in his own heart.
Many a man is waiting for an inspiration who would find success at once if he was not so afraid of a little perspiration.
Men in the days of the great Teacher were as we are to-day, prone to compound for the neglect of duties near at hand by the adoration of spiritual delights far off. They talked about getting right with God while they continued to do wrong to men. The problem of the hypocrite who is so thrilled with the delights of heaven that he scorns earthly duties and decencies is not a new one.
How easy it is to substitute syllogisms for service, to think that we do our duty by describing it, so to exhaust oneself in pleasant and seductive dreams of a distant heaven that we have no power left to apply to the problems of a needy present-day world.
The mockery of religion to-day is that men and women are going to the churches, singing themselves into ecstatic complacency and imaginary harmony with their God while their greed is crushing the hearts of the helpless and they are blinding themselves to the world's gloom and pain that unhindered they may enjoy spiritual delights.
Things cannot be right in our relations to the Father of spirits until they are made right in our relations with our brothers in the flesh. In Christianity social righteousness is basic to spiritual blessing. The ideal kingdom waits for ideal conditions and relations amongst its subjects.
The way to the Father lies through the brother. If you would learn to love God—and how indefinite and idealistic that seems to most of us—the lesson is simple, first learn to love His other children, especially the helpless, needy, and wronged. Delights high and spiritual always will be remote until duties near at hand are done.
The revival we most of all need to-day is a revival of the social conscience, the recognition of the fact that we can offer no gift acceptable, in the temple of worship or the place of prayer, until we have washed our hands from the blood of our fellows, that we can pay nothing to God until we have in earnest set about paying our debts to men.
Anxious, perhaps, to claim our rights as children of the Father in heaven, we have forgotten that that title is promised to the peacemakers. What avail is it to pray, Thy kingdom come, if we block its advent by cherishing enmity in our hearts? What use is it to carry hearts torn with malice, souls sunken in selfishness, and spirits torn with pride and covetousness to the place that belongs to the meek and lowly?
Many a man is going to church and coming away empty in heart; perhaps he has given up any hope of finding solace in religion, who would find, as it were, the windows of heaven opened up if he should give himself for an hour to making some other helpless lives happy, to righting some wrong or bringing some joy to lives embittered and oppressed.
The pathway to God is a plain one, strikingly lacking in romance, with no attendant visible angelic choir. It is the doing of whatever duty or kindness I owe to those near me, the breaking down of walls of prejudice—spite fences built in ignorance and hatred—the learning to love and help, the seeking of peace, good feeling, and harmony with all men.
This does not mean that all must become professors of sociology; the study of social theories often is a substitute for the practice of social duties; but that we must seek out the good in men, we must set ourselves right with them, we must discharge all our responsibilities towards men before we can realize God. The kingdom comes as we recognize the kingliness in all the sons of the kingdom, as we express our faith in God by friendship for our fellows.
Poor Peter has never been much of a favourite with the preachers; he was so thoroughly unstable, unideal. But the people have always had a tender feeling for him, partly because he was a fisherman, partly because he was so much like the rest of us. Nothing is more striking in the life of Jesus than His affection for ordinary men. The cultured Pharisees, the philosophical Sadducees seem to have much less attraction to Him than the rude fisherman and the toiler. These men were often weak, sometimes cowardly, obstinate, dull, mediocre; yet He committed His kingdom to them; He believed in them. Before they had faith in Him He had faith in them; and that ultimately made them men.
It sounded much like cruel sarcasm when He told that weak, vacillating Simon that he was a rock. Those who knew Peter best must have smiled; he was more like a jellyfish. But Jesus could see the best that was in a man. He detected the hidden good even in Peter. He proves His own goodness by His faith in the good in every man.
Somewhere in every man there is some good. Overlaid it may be by passion, by habits, by prejudice grown out of wrong and suffering perchance; but still it is there. Faith in this and sympathy, these are the golden keys that unlock the doors to where the good lies buried.
The saviours of society have always been those who looked for the best in it. If you go through life seeking the beast in man, you will find it, and the chances are it will devour you; if you look for the beauty that is from above you will find it, and it will bless you. It is just as necessary to have faith in man as it is to have faith in God. If men cannot become good, then there is no God in the sense of a power that makes for goodness. The optimist not only believes in the best, he creates the better.
Some there are who reluctantly admit that God is a little better than they are, though that may be due to His circumstances, but they have never imagined for an instant that any one else is at all good. Believe that men are wholly bad and they will not disappoint you. Every man somehow responds to the expectations of others. You had better damn a man than despair of him. Neither a church nor an individual can help this world when they have more confidence in the power of evil to become all pervasive than in the power of the Most High to make His purposes felt in every heart as truly as He makes His sun to shine on the just and the unjust. The church first consigns men to perdition and then wonders why they are reluctant to walk with it the other way. So long as you have faith in total depravity you will find some facts to substantiate it.
But there is a better way. Sympathy with men will do more for them than sermons on their sins. Look for the best in them and you will find things better than you expected. There are flower beds as well as garbage heaps in every heart; at least, there are spots where seeds of the fairest flowers of heaven may be sown.
You do not have to be a fool to have faith in your fellows. You do not need to take the padlocks off your house; but you do need to take them off your heart. There may be those whom it would be wrong to trust with your cash box; but it is a greater wrong to withhold from them your kindness. You can show them that you believe the best instead of the worst of them.
The great Teacher told men that He came not to condemn but to give life. His followers have too often occupied themselves wholly with condemnation and then wondered that their sentences saved none. Every soul knows its own sentence; what it needs to feel is that God and all good men are with it, helping it to shake off that sentence, to arise and return to the Father, that, instead of all things conspiring to keep a man down, there is a cloud of witnesses cheering him on, a mighty choir invisible inspiring his heart. And there is nothing any man can do of greater worth to the world than to cheer on another by his faith in him, his high expectation of him, his wise blindness to some little faults, and his propagating approval of the least beginnings of any good. Men are the saviours of men by their faith in men.
A silly interpretation often leads to the utter rejection of a law. Sentimentalists have caused men of sense to pronounce Christ's law of forgiveness an impractical one. Yet we indorse it every time we utter the Lord's prayer, and still we hope to be forgiven whether we find it possible to forgive or not. If this law means the mental flabbiness that sends bouquets to bloody criminals and petitions the pardon of murderers and the release of the foes of humanity, we must reject it as the utterance of one unacquainted with the rugged facts of life.
But forgiveness and pardon are two different things; forgiveness is between man and man; pardon is a matter of executive power. You can forgive a child and still punish him. The forgiveness that does away with consequences would make this an immoral world. No greater wrong can be done to a man than to protect him from the deserts of his evil deeds. This is as unjust as to withhold the rewards of the right.
The difference between the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth and the law of the great Teacher lies largely in the spirit of dealing with the offenses. The old spirit was that of getting even with the wrongdoer. His act was largely regarded from the personal standpoint; a crime was individual and not social. Revenge followed wrongdoing.
But Jesus says it is better to lift a man up than to get even with him. It is better to help men to the right than to satisfy your desire for revenge. Forgiveness is more than saying, "Go without punishment"; rather it says, "Come learn a better way; live without sin." Forgiveness takes malice from the mind of the offended; it substitutes for it the motive of friendship for the offender.
Revenge says, "I will make it worse for you than you have made it for me." Sentimentalism says: "Let the poor victim of circumstances go; send him a rosewater spray and an embroidered text and he won't do it again." But love, she of the clear eye and the steady hold, takes him by the hand in silence, lifts him up, and leads him, perhaps by paths of pain, to his better self. Love puts his sins behind her back and teaches him to face her way. Love lets the wrong teach its own lesson, bear its own fruit. And in her labour for him she forgets her own pain and loss caused by his offense.
The best way to forgive a burglar would not be to let him out of jail, but to teach him the laws of property, to train him in the self-respect that would lead to industry, to make him a brother and a fellow worker among men instead of an outcast and a social parasite. The test of any forgiveness is its helpfulness, the manner in which it wipes out the enmity of the victim and turns the guilty into better ways.
Many say, I can forgive, but I cannot forget. No one asks you to forget; but you cannot fully forgive unless you will forego the feeling of enmity and the desire for revenge. You cannot make any one forget that which he has once known; but you can substitute helpfulness for hatred and restoration for revenge. True love simply discounts the past as a ground for present action; it refuses to determine its personal bearing and deeds in to-day by the other's ill deeds of yesterday.
All we are asked to do is to forgive as we are forgiven. Our hope is that when we have fallen our friends will not lose their faith in us nor entirely forsake us, that they will give us another chance; not that they will shield us from the fruitage of our follies and our falseness, but that they will not shut us off forever from their faces.
So far from forgiveness being the weakness of the thoughtless, it is the helpfulness of the strong and the wise. To forgive a man will not mean to escape from the trouble of securing his punishment; it will not mean the weak complaisance of indolent tolerance. It will mean thought for his weakness, taking up his burden, doing the brother's part for him, the endeavour to do for him what we would like to have the Father of us all do for us all.
Men and Mammon
Riches and RighteousnessReligion and BusinessThe Moral End of Money-Making
Better a sweet failure than a sour success.
An itching palm causes a crook in the fingers.
Many a moral squint comes from a money monocle.
The fortunate people are those who believe they are.
We are always building bridges for things with wings.
The best way to wipe out a friendship is to sponge on it.
Many a man thinks he is pious when he is only petrified.
A little plain honesty is worth untold professional holiness.
The religion that runs to fever usually evens up with chills.
Nothing is easier than being benevolent with other people's money.
Let no man take it, that the statement on the inaccessibility of heaven to the rich involves the opposite, how easily shall they that have nothing enter in. The people who have lived pulseless lives are apt to point to their poverty as the proof of their piety. But righteousness is neither a matter of riches nor of rags. The great Teacher glorifies neither. The qualifications for citizenship in His kingdom strike deeper than that.
His words have nothing to do with the bitter envy of the demagogue who denounces those who have earned that for which he would not labour. He measures men not by that they have but by that they are. He looks through both the fine linen and the tattered rags to the man. Money interests Him only as it affects character. The question of riches and poverty is not a matter of housing and eating, but what a man does for himself and his world with that which he has.
Riches of themselves do not bar a man from heaven; but they full often eat into his heart, become of absorbing interest, and so effectually and forever blind the inner vision to the best things. It is not that heaven has shut its gates, but that the love of money, the selfishness, born of cupidity, has paralyzed those spiritual senses by which he might have found his way therein.
The possession of wealth is not a sin; to some it has come almost without effort, even against their wills; but it does constitute one of the most severe tests that can be set before a soul. It increases the difficulties of the right life, because it enlarges so greatly the responsibilities. The greater the wealth the greater the trust laid upon a man as the steward of the produce of the earth.
The principle holds of all possessions; all are tests of character. A man can love gold just as ardently when he has but a grain as when he has possessions beyond computation. A single dollar, laid on the heart, can shut out the light of heaven as effectually as can a million. The relation between riches and righteousness is not determined by the balance in the bank, but by the balance that a man succeeds in maintaining in his heart between his own interests and the trusteeship which possession places upon him.
Money makes men as well as unmakes them. The burdens, the tests, the responsibilities it entails, the temptations it presents, all form part of life's great lesson. Out of the struggle between self and the service we owe the world, out of the keen fighting against covetousness, and the battle against the debasing tendencies of the love for gold and the greed for gain arise the giants—or fall the lost souls.
The rich young ruler came to Jesus and faced his test; the demand that he should sell all and give to the poor simply put his heart on trial; it set before him the great choices; it decided as to the things which he held first. To him the possession of things was more than the possibilities of using them in service; before the great test he fell.
It is just as easy and often fully as dangerous to set your heart on the gold you haven't got as it is to fall into the snare of the miser. Everything depends on the place you give to riches in your life. One man seeks them as a prize to be won and enjoyed for his own gratification, his own glory and fame; another seeks them only as larger avenues to usefulness, and to him riches come as tools, as servants, as possibilities of making his life count for more.
Some men die with their houses full of tools unused; they have made the fatal mistake of setting their hearts on the tools instead of on the work. Others come to their accounting possessing as many tools, but all of them shining from hard use, and counting as their treasures not the tools but the things produced, the good accomplished. Wealth is for work and the work is for the making of the man. They enter the kingdom who are kingly, whether they learned the royal lesson and acquired the heavenly character through the school of poverty or that of riches.
The question, can a man be a Christian and succeed in business, though old, is still asked every day. There are yet a great many who regard religion and business as conflicting pursuits, and they attempt a compromise by the clear-cut division of time into business hours and church time. Others are answering this question in the negative. "Look at me," they say. "I have always been pious and honest, and therefore I have failed to make money or achieve success; religion does not pay."
If the question means, can a man take out his backbone and succeed in business, there need be no hesitancy as to the answer. If becoming a Christian means the elimination of all virility from the character, the substitution of soft soap and sawder for strength and diligence, religion cannot be regarded as a help in business. There are too many people who think that sloth is a sign of spirituality and that you cannot be a saint unless you have softening of the brain.
But it is simply whether you can keep your whole life, in the market or out, up to the level of a certain ideal, whether you can be honest, true, fair-minded, unselfish, merciful, and kind and at the same time do the work and meet the exigencies of modern commercial and industrial strife. It is whether you can measure steadily towards heaven's ideal while mastering earth's daily duties.
The question is either a reproach to religion or to business. It is assumed by many, with especial conviction by those who know business only by reputation, that it demands the sacrifice constantly of honour, truth, mercy, and every other virtue. The man who thinks that he is pious because he is pulseless, draws a fancy picture of red-blooded men fighting, intriguing, slaying, like demons new from the pit; and that, he thinks, is modern business.
Strife is everywhere. If religion means sequestration from temptation we need to pray to be delivered from it. There is as much danger of a man's losing his character, selling his soul, in the church as in the market. The temptation to the merchant to misrepresent his goods for a larger profit is not greater than that which comes to the minister to magnify his abilities for an increase in fame.
Things honourable are the same everywhere; they are written deep within us, and by them church and mart both are judged. Every man knows that the chief business of life, whether through commerce, toil, study, recreation, or worship, is to develop the best life, to make of himself a true, full grown man, who shall render to this world a full man's service.
Business is a more effective school of character than any other we have. If some of the standards of that school have been unworthy—and who shall say they have not?—it is our duty to revise them, to make them higher; not to abolish the school, not to stay away from it because it is imperfect, but to make it fit to serve its true purpose.
Business always will be immoral as long as it is an end in itself. The product is greater than the machine, the making of character greater than the mechanism by which we make a living. The serious danger comes when a man begins to lay his soul on the counter, when he reverses the course in this school of character and makes the end serve the means, when he sacrifices honour, truth, and the soul that business may succeed.
Only failure lies that way. No business ever became permanently great by making its people small. Success here is to be measured by the soul. No matter what a man may be doing he must keep himself above his task. The work must serve the worker.
The question is whether we are serving business or it is serving us. If a man lives for his wage he will sacrifice everything to get it, but if he works that he may find life, then he will ever refuse to lose the things of which life is made in the pursuit of success. He knows he does not have to make money, but he does have to make manhood. That is the end both of religion and of business.
There are those who talk of money and business as though these were necessarily and intrinsically evil. It is often supposed that capacity for goodness is established by incapacity for business, while those to whom poverty seems inevitable find consolation in regarding it as evidence of piety.
Large numbers of otherwise sensible people feel that there is some unavoidable conflict between the ideal and the real, between what they call the sacred and the secular, between the things they would like to do and to be and the things they actually have to do as part of their daily affairs and duties.
Probably the greater number try to meet the difficulty by dividing their lives and interest into separate parts. They say, business is business; religion is another thing altogether; I will work hard and honestly at my business and look forward to the comforts and pleasures of religion and ideal things.
So it happens that there are those who feel that to speak of religion on a week-day reveals a lack of the sense of the fitness of things, while other good people are quite sure that it is a wholly irreverent thing to speak of business on a Sunday. We tend to dwell alternately in two sets of apartments, the practical and the pious.
Even where there are no such sharp lines through the life we feel that manufacture and the market, money-making, and trading tend to blunt the finer sensibilities and act as a hindrance to the realization of our ideals, while, on the other hand, we are sure that the life of ideals is unfitted for business.
The result of this separation and apparent antagonism is that we cannot develop our lives symmetrically; we are torn by conflicting purposes; we fail to see any ideal ends in business or to find any practical values in religion. Religion without business tends to dreamy, purposeless moral enervation; business without ideal ends and aims to grossness and materialism.
We need to spiritualize all our acts, our whole lives, our business, our work, our pleasures, by giving them moral intent and value, so as to unify the sacred and the secular, the utilitarian, and the ideal by making each serve the other.
It does not make so much difference whether a man is engaged in money-making or in writing poems and picturing the fair dreams of better things; the question is this, is the money-making for the sake of the money or for some high and worthy end? What is the motive that impels either the dealer in dollars or the dealer in dreams?
Our ideals, visions, aspirations, and our religion become most damaging if they fail to find expression in conduct and work; lacking the practical, they result in a character that is satisfied with contemplating the good instead of realizing it. The man who sinks his soul in dollars may personally be no worse than he who allows it to atrophy while he dreams.
Here in religion are the dynamic and the motives that bear men on and buoy them up to do the toil, bear the burdens, stand in the fight of daily living; here are the visions that lift our eyes from the desk and the machine, from profits and discounts, and help us to see the worthy prizes of life.
No man could become a saint by separating himself from this world's turmoil and reading his Bible alone; neither can any man find strength and stability for life's business and battle, find satisfaction in its service and rewards, unless he sees through its dollars and its dirt the moral ends of all this world's work.
This noisy mill of daily living may be the greatest blessing we know; it is the opportunity for the expression of our highest ideals, for the translation of religion into terms of daily living; it is the place where character is molded by its stress, its calls to the strong will, and its manifold opportunities for the service of all mankind by each man in his place.
The Every-Day Heaven
The Beauty of HolinessThe Gladness of GoodnessThe True Paradise
Self shrinks the soul.
The keen eye needs the kindly heart.
There's no argument equal to a happy smile.
Imaginary evils have more than imaginary effects.
You never find truth by losing the temper.
Menial work may be noblest service.
They who live off the flock are never willing to die for it.
The life that would be fruitful seeks showers as well as sunshine.
Kindness makes all kin.
All we get from heaven we owe to earth.
Pain is a small price to pay for the joy of sacrifice.
He who gives on feeling generally begrudges in fact.
Every loss met by love leads to gain.
The long look within ourselves will cure us of a lot of impatience with other folks.
The last person to enter heaven will be the one whose religion has all been in the first person singular.
We often talk a good deal about the salvation of souls in order to escape service for the salvation of society.
Much that is called orthodoxy is scepticism at heart, fear to examine the foundations lest there are none.
Religion ought to be the most natural, desirable, and attractive thing to man, for it simply stands for the development of the best in us, the coming into the full and rich heritage that is ours as spiritual beings, and the realization of our highest possibilities of character and service. He who ignores religion is cutting himself off from the best and most beautiful possibilities in his life.
Some have talked of the necessity of making religion attractive. It does not have to be made attractive; there is nothing more desirable than the peace, the power, and prosperity of the real life which it confers. It is the imitation, the false and prejudiced presentation of religion that men endeavour to dress up attractively. In that they never succeed, for cramping the soul and twisting the intellect ever are opposed by the best in us.
From the caricature of religion we turn with loathing. Mummeries and mockeries, fads and forms leave us empty and impatient. The heart of man goes out to things fair, lovely, joyous, and uplifting, and they who find no God in the elaborate sermon or the service in the church somehow are thrilled with the feeling of the divine and inspiring in the woods and field and mountains.
All things good, all things attractive and lovely, uplifting and sublime have but one source. They touch our hearts because they come from the heart of all being; they reach our spirits because they are spiritual. Deep calls unto deep when the divine in man answers to the divine in the world without, in human affections, in noble aspirations, and in glorious deeds.
Too long have we believed that only the unpleasant, the gloomy, and repellent could be right or religious. There is a type of conscience that determines action by the rule that if a thing is pleasant or beautiful it must be sinful and wrong. To such souls it is a sin to be sunny in disposition, to delight in the Father's fair world, with its glowing riches and bounty dropping daily from His hand.
It would be safer to say that sin must be somewhere lurking wherever there is deformity, pain, or discord—that, as a common phrase has it, the bleak and barren is the evidence of that which is forsaken of God. Things desolate are not divine. Religion is not repression but development into a fullness and beauty far beyond our dreams.
It is a good thing to see the divine in all things fair and lovely; to take them as evidences that the love that once pronounced this world good in its primeval glory still is working, still is seeking to enrich our lives and lead them out in fullness of joy. Why should not we, like the poets and preachers of ancient Israel, taste again of the gladness of living.
Character may need for its full development the storms and wintry blasts of life, but it needs just as truly and just as much the sunshine, the days when the heart goes out and joins in the song of nature, when something leaps within us at the gladness of being alive, and we drink in of the infinite love that is over all.
Just as the sun seems to call the flowers out of the dark earth and draw out their beauty, calls forth the buds and brings the blossom into perfect fruit, so there is a spirit of divine life in our world calling us out to the best, seeking to woo us to the things beautiful. Man needs not to repress his life, but to learn to respond to every worthy impulse, every high hope, to find the life beautiful.
The beauty of holiness is the beauty of character. It is the adjustment of life to nature and neighbour and heaven so that strength and harmony ensue, so that duty becomes a delight, labour a song of praise, and out of life's burden and battle the beauties of godliness, of love, and tenderness, joy and gratitude begin to bloom.
Lay hold on everything good and true, on all things glad and elevating; cherish every fair thought and aspiration; learn to see the essentially religious in whatever lifts up life, in whatever helps humanity, and so make life rich in heavenly treasure and glowing with the glory of other worlds.
Life's poverty is due, not to what we have had and lost, not to what has been withheld or taken from us, but to the good which we might have had which we carelessly have passed by. No others despoil us as we despoil ourselves by our blindness and indifference to the wealth of our own lives and the beauty ever close at hand.
We who scurry over land and sea, who dig, and toil, and fret to find happiness, come back at last to learn that the sweet-faced guest has been waiting close by our door all the time.
He perishes in the pitiless snows who, blind to the good and the glory in every valley and hillside, heeds only the impulse to climb and find the good in some remote height. Ambition and pride lift ever new peaks ahead only to mock him when at last, worn, spent, and empty in heart, he falls by the way.
The old theology talked much of a heaven far away, to be attained in the remote future; the new theology often seems inclined to ignore any heaven, but what the hearts of men need is the sense of the heaven that is all about them, the God who ever is near, and the blessedness even now attainable.
Some live in the past, complacently contemplating the glories that once were theirs or their ancestors'; some live in the future, dreaming of felicities yet to be; but they are wise only who live to the full in the present, who catch the richness and beauty, all the wealth that the passing hour or the present opportunity may have.
He is truly godly who sees God in all things, in the affairs of this day, in the faces of living men, in the flowers and fields, who sees all the divine wonder and beauty of life, and not he who sees the Most High only in some legendary past or in a strange, imaginary future.
No man becomes strong by reminiscence of his breakfast or dreaming of his next meal alone; each portion of time must have its own fitting food. The soul of man never can find its fullness through either history or prophecy; it needs the sense of the spiritual in this living, pulsating, matter-of-fact present.
This world is slovenly, sinful, and evil because so many of us are content with the past or the future, with myth or with imagination, and fail to demand the development of the good that is our heritage to-day. The better day comes not by dreams, but by each man doing the best he can and securing all the good he can for his own day.
We need to give up the plan of saving the world by the piety of postponed pleasures and to find the fullness of life in the present, to get below the surface of things and discover life's real riches, to interpret this daily toil and struggle, and all this world of ours, in terms of the divine and infinite.
How much it would mean to our lives if we might learn, instead of sighing for the impossible, to get all the sweetness and joy that is in the things we have, how rich we would find the common lot to be, how many things that now seem dreary and empty would bloom into new beauty. In a child's smile, a wild flower's fragrance, a glint of sunlight, things possible to all, we would find joys unspeakable and full of glory.
This does not mean dull content with things as they are; it does mean the development of the faculties of appreciation, the growth of the life in power to see, the development of vision. It means the transformation of the dull earth with the glory of the ideal.
Some day, when we look back over our lives, how keen will be our regret as we realize what we have missed, how we have spurned the substance of life's lasting treasures, human loves, friendships, every-day beauties, and happiness, while chasing the shadows of imaginary joys.