{143}
Lukexvi. 1-10.
Mammon means money, and the purpose of this parable is to teach Christians their relations to that world of which Mammon is the centre,—the world of business interests and cares. Jesus says that this world is neither very good nor very bad. It is simply unrighteous. It has no specific moral quality about it. He says further that you cannot serve this world of Mammon and serve God also. You must choose. What then can you do in your relation to Mammon? You can do one of three things. You may, first, make an enemy of Mammon; or secondly, make a master of Mammon, or thirdly, make a friend of Mammon. Many people in Christian history have made an enemy of Mammon. They have regarded the world of business as a godless world which should be shunned. They have run away from it to the ascetic, unworldly life. That is the spirit of the whole monastic retreat from the battle of {144} practical life,—a reaction full of the beauty of self-denial, but still a retreat. The battle of life has to go on, and the best troops have run away. On the other hand, a great many persons have made a master of Mammon. They are simply the slaves of money. That is the vulgar materialism of the modern world. But Jesus says that neither of these attitudes towards Mammon is the Christian relation. The Christian is to make a friend of Mammon; to welcome it, and to use it, to discover the good in it and learn its lessons; to mould it into the higher uses of life. Here is a potter working in his clay. It is a coarse material which he uses and his hands grow soiled as he works; but it is not for him to reject it because it is not clean, but for him to work out through it the shapes of beauty which are possible within the limits of the clay. Just such a material is the modern world. It is not very clean and not very beautiful; but the problem of life is to mould out of its uncleanness the shapes of beauty which it contains. To run away from life—that is easy enough; to yield to its evil—that is still easier; but to be in the world and to mould it—that is the {145} real problem of the Christian life. And here is the real test of Christian character. The saints of the past have been for the most part men who fled from the world, but the saint of to-day is the man who can use the world. He is the man of business who amid looseness of standards keeps himself clean. He is the youth in college who without the least retreat from its influences moulds them to good. He is not the runaway from the world of Mammon, nor yet its slave; he makes a friend of Mammon for the service of God.
{146}
Lukexv. 17.
When he came to himself he said: "I will arise and go to my father." This is one of those gospel sentences which contains within itself a whole system of theology, a doctrine of man and of God and of the relation of the one to the other. He came to himself. It was not then himself that had gone away into a far country. It was an unreal, fictitious self. He had been insane, beside himself, and now, as his better life starts up in him, he comes to himself. As his father said of him, he had been dead and was alive again. The renewal of the good self in him was the resurrection of his true personality.
How deep that goes into one's doctrine of human nature! Never believe that the sinning self is the true self. Your real personality is the potential good in you. The moment that good springs into life you have a right to say: "Now I know what I was {147} made for. I have come to life. I have discovered myself." And then there is the religious aspect of this same self-discovery. No sooner does this boy come to himself than he says, "I will arise and go to my father." The religious need follows at once from the self-awakening. Nay, was not the religious need the source of the self-awakening? What was it that brought him to himself but just the homesickness of the child for his father's house? His self-discovery was but the answer of his soul to the continuous love of God. Before he ever came to himself the father was waiting for him. Antecedent to the ethical return was the religious quickening. That is the relation of religion to conduct. You make your resolutions, but it is God that prompts them. Your self-discovery is the drawing of the Father. Your true self is his son. How natural it all is,—an infinite law of love at the heart of the universe—that is the centre of theology; a world that permits moral alienation through the free will of man,—that is the problem of philosophy; he came to himself,—that is the heart of ethics; I will go to my Father,—that is the soul of religion.
{148}
Lukexix. 37-43;Matthewxxi. 17-23.
The ministry of Jesus is as a whole not easy to arrange in any fixed chronology. The order of events seems often to vary in the different gospels, and sometimes these unstudied narratives seem in positive conflict. But as the story draws to its close the paths of narrative begin to converge, and as we approach the last days and enter on the last week the incidents of each day become perfectly distinct, and one can trace the life of Jesus as it moves on from his triumph of Palm Sunday to his tragedy of the cross. As we enter then to-day on the anniversary of the last week of the life of Jesus, the week before Easter Sunday, let us glance at some of the hurrying events. And for today consider the contrast which presents itself between the entrance of Jesus at Jerusalem on Sunday morning, and his return to the city by the same road on this Monday {149} morning of his last week. Yesterday he came over the brow of the Mount of Olives, surrounded by an enthusiastic throng, the centre of their popularity. To-day he comes along the same road, unattended and alone, the crowd slinking away from him, his popularity gone. And how does he bear himself through these shillings of opinion? He simply does not manifest any consciousness of change. He is as undisturbed by neglect as he was yesterday by success. On Sunday, while the people were spreading their branches beneath his feet, he looked across the valley to the city and wept as he looked; and to-day, coming with no popular applause, he enters straight into the city and asserts to its leaders his supreme authority. In the midst of popularity he seems saddened, and in the midst of neglect he seems stirred to a defiant boldness. In short, he is unscathed alike by what seems to be success and what seems to be failure. He goes his way through it all with his eye on that great end which gives him peace amid the throng, and courage amid the solitude.
That is the only way in which one can maintain himself among the shifting currents {150} of popularity. It comes and goes like a tide. The man who tries to lean on it is simply swept by the rising tide into self-conceit, and then stranded by the ebb of that same tide on the flats of despair. Popularity is as fickle as the April winds, and one can trust it as little as he dare trust the New England climate. It is only he who can be wholly self-controlled amid the triumphs of his Palm Sunday who can move on with equal self-control to the bearing of the cross with which that same week may close.
{151}
Lukexx. 19-38.
The Sunday of the last week of Jesus was all triumph, the Monday was all neglect, the Tuesday was all controversy. He returns once more from Bethany to the city, and he finds the opposition at its height. At once he is set upon by two kinds of people and asked two kinds of questions as to his mission and aim. One question was political, or as we now are saying sociological. What did he think about taxation? What was his attitude toward the government? Was he encouraging social revolt? Was he an anarchist or a socialist? The other question was theological. What did he think about the future life? How would marriage be arranged in heaven? Was his theology orthodox? All this must have seemed to Jesus malicious enough, but I think that the deepest impression he had of such questions {152} must have been of their stupidity. How was it possible that after months of public teaching any one could suppose that such problems were in the line of his intention. Here he was, trying to bring spiritual life among his people,—the life of God to the souls of men,—and here were people still trying to find in him a political schemer or a metaphysical theologian.
Yet there are questions of much this nature still being asked of Jesus. Some honest persons are still insisting that Christ's religion is a system of theology, and some are trying to make of it a course in social science, and neither of them seem to notice that the last day of general teaching which was permitted to him on earth was largely devoted to demonstrating that he was neither a social agitator nor a theological professor. Christianity is not a scheme or arrangement, social or theological, like a railway which men might build either to accelerate the business of life or to take one straight to heaven. Christianity provides that which all such mechanism needs. It is a power, like that electric force which makes the equipment of a railway move. A church is a power-house for the {153} development and the transmission of the power that makes things go. Cut off the power, and the theological creeds and social programmes of the day stand there paralyzed or dead. Communicate to them the dynamic of the Christian life, and the power goes singing over all the wires of life and sets its mechanism in motion, as though it sang upon its way: "I am come that these may have my life, and may have it abundantly."
{154}
We have traced from day to day the life of Jesus through the earlier days of its last week, its triumph of Sunday, its solitude of Monday, its controversies of Tuesday. On each of these days Jesus has come over the hill from Bethany into the city, and has returned to the village at night. And now we come to the last day before the Passover and the betrayal; the last chance to meet his enemies and to enforce his cause. What then does Jesus do on this last Wednesday of his life? So far as we know, he does nothing at all. It is a day without record. There is no New Testament passage from which I can read about it. He appears to have stayed at Bethany, perhaps with his friends, perhaps for a part of the day alone. His work was done, and he used this last day for quiet withdrawal.
What self-control and reserve are here! How would one of us have been inclined to conduct himself, if he found himself with just {155} one more day for active service? "One more day," he would have said; "then fill it with the best works and the best words; let me stamp my message on my time; let me fulfil the work which was given me to do." But Jesus has no such lust of finishing. He simply commits his spirit to his Father, and awaits the trial and the cross. And perhaps on that unrecorded day his real agony was met, and his real cross borne. Perhaps as he went up on that hillside, which still overlooks the little village of Bethany, and looked at his past and at his future, the real spiritual conquest was attained; for he comes back again to Jerusalem on Thursday morning, not with the demeanor of a martyr but with the air of a conqueror; and when Pilate asks him if he is a king he answers him: "Thou hast said it."
So it is with many a life. It has its great days,—its Palm Sundays of triumphs, its Good Fridays of cross-bearing, and these seem the epochs of its experience; but when one searches for the sources of its strength, they lie—do they not?—in some unrecorded day, as the sources of an abundant river lie hidden in some nook among the hills.
{156}
Lukexxii. 39-48.
On Thursday morning of his last week Jesus sends two of his friends before him into Jerusalem to prepare the Passover meal, while he does not himself enter the city until the afternoon. There he meets his friends, and after the supper he takes the bread and wine and with entire naturalness asks them, as they eat and drink, to remember him. Then he talks with them and prays with them, and they go out again on the road toward Bethany; and coming to a little garden at the foot of the hill called the Mount of Olives he bids his companions wait while he goes, as his custom was, to pray.
We hear much discussion about prayer and its possibilities,—what we can pray for and what God can do in return, and what is the true answer to prayer. But what a silence comes over all such questionings when one notices that this prayer of Jesus uttered thus {157} in this most solemn hour was not, in the sense of these discussions, answered by his God. It was the moment of the supreme agony of Christ. The falseness of friends, the blindness of his people, the malice of their leaders,—all these things seem more than he can bear. "Let this cup pass from me," he prays, and, behold, his prayer is not accepted, and what he asks is denied, and the cup is to be drunk. And yet in a far deeper sense his, prayer is answered. "Thy will be done," he prays,—not in spite of me, or over me, but through me. Make me, my Father, the instrument of thy will; and so praying he rises with absolute composure and kingly authority, and goes out with his prayer answered to do that will.
What should we pray for? Why, we should pray for what we most deeply want. There is no sincerity in praying for things which are fictitious or abstract or mere theological blessings. Open to God the realities of your heart and seek the blessings which you sincerely desire. But in all prayers desire most to know the will of God toward you, and to do it. Prayer is not offered to deflect God's will to yours, but to adjust your will to His. When a ship's captain is setting out on a {158} voyage he first of all adjusts his compasses, corrects their divergence, and counteracts the influences which draw the needle from the pole. Well, that is prayer. It is the adjustment of the compass of the soul, it is its restoration from deflection, it is the pointing of it to the will of God. And the soul which thus sails forth into the sea of life finds itself—not indeed freed from all storms of the spirit, but at least sure of its direction through them all.
{159}
Johnxviii. 28-38.
The story of Friday in this last week of Jesus begins with this meeting with the Roman governor, and certainly few persons in history would be more surprised than Pilate at the judgment of the world concerning him. If Pilate felt sure of anything it was that he did not commit himself in the case of Jesus. He undertook to be absolutely neutral. See how nicely he poises his judgment. On the one hand he says: "I find no fault in him," and then on the other hand he says: "Take him away and crucify him;" First he washes his hands to show that he is innocent of the blood of this just person, and then he delivers Jesus to the Jews to take him away. It was a fine balancing of a judicial mind, and I suppose he withdrew from the judgment hall saying to himself: "Whatever may happen in this case, at least I am not responsible." But what does history think {160} of this judicial Pilate? It holds him to be a responsible agent in the death of Jesus. He was attempting a neutrality which was impossible. The great wind was blowing across the threshing floor of the nation, and the people were separated into two distinct heaps, and must be counted forever as chaff or as wheat. He that was not with Christ was against him, and Pilate's place, even in spite of himself, was determined as among those who brought Jesus to his cross that afternoon.
I was once talking with a cultivated gentleman who volunteered to tell me his attitude toward religion. He wished me to understand that he was in sympathy with the purposes and the administration of worship. He desired that it should prevail. He welcomed its usefulness in the university. But as for himself it appeared better that he should hold a position of neutrality. His responsibility seemed to him better met by standing neither for religion nor against it, but in a perfectly judicial frame of mind. He did not take account, however, of the fact that this neutrality was impossible; that it was just what Pilate attempted, and just wherein he failed. If he {161} was not to be counted among those who would by their presence encourage worship, then he must be counted among those who by their absence hinder its effect. On one side or other in these great issues of life every man's weight is to be thrown, and the Pilates of to-day—as of that earlier time—in their impossible neutrality are often the most insidious, although most unconscious opponents of a generous cause.
And so to-day on this most solemn anniversary of religious history, while it is, as the passage says of this interview with Pilate, "yet early," let us set before ourselves, the issue just as it is now and just as it was then. This morning demands of any honest-minded man an answer to the question: "On which side do I propose to stand?" It is not a demand for absoluteness of conviction or unwavering loyalty, but it is a summons to recognize that Jesus Christ died on this day largely at the hands of intellectual dilettanteism and indifferentism,—the peculiar and besetting sin of the cultivated and academic life. On which side, then, do I propose to stand; with the cultivated neutral and his skillful {162} questioning: What is truth? or with the prisoner who in this early morning says: "Every one who is of the truth heareth my voice;" with Pilate in his neutrality or with Jesus on his cross?
{163}
Johnxix. 30.
The last word of Jesus as he gives up his spirit is: "It is finished." But was it what could be called a finished life? Was it not, on the contrary, a terribly unfinished life, prematurely cut short, without any visible effect of his work, and with everything left to live for? Surely, if some sympathetic friend of Jesus had been telling of his death, one of the first things he would be tempted to say would be this: "What a fearful pity it was that he died so soon! What a loss it was to us all that he left his life unfinished. Think what might have happened if he could only have lived to sixty and had had thirty years for his ministry instead of three!" And yet, as Jesus said, it was a finished life; for completeness in life is not a thing of quantity, but of quality. What seems to be a fragment may be in reality the most perfect thing on earth. You stand in {164} some museum before a Greek statue, imperfect, mutilated, a fragment of what it was meant to be. And yet, as you look at it, you say: "Here is perfect art. It is absolutely right; the ideal which modern art may imitate, but which it never hopes to attain." Or, what again shall we say of those young men of our civil war, dying at twenty-five at the head of their troops, pouring out all the promise of their life in one splendid instant? Did they then die prematurely? Was not their life a finished life? What more could they ever have done with it? Why do we write their names on our monuments so that our young men may read of these heroes, except that they may say to us that life may be completed, if one will, even at twenty? All of life that is worth living is sometimes offered to a man not in a lifetime, but in a day.
And that is what any man must set before him as the test and the plan of his own life. You cannot say to yourself: "I will live until I am seventy, I will accomplish certain things, and will attain a certain position;" for the greatest and oldest of men when they look back on their lives see in them only a fragment of what they once dreamed that they {165} might do or be. But you can design your life, not according to quantitative completeness, but according to qualitative completeness. It may be long or short, but in either case it may be of the right stuff. It may be carved out of pure marble with an artist's hand, and then, whether the whole of it remains to be a thing of beauty or whether it is broken off, like a fragment of its full design, it is a finished life. You give back your life to God who gave it, perhaps in ripe old age, perhaps, as your Master did, at thirty-three, and you say: "I have accomplished, not what I should like to have done, but what Thou hast given me to do. I have done my best. It is finished. Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit."
{166}
Philippiansiii. 11.
This is certainly a very extraordinary saying of St. Paul—that he hopes to attain unto the resurrection from the dead. We are so apt to think of the resurrection as a remote truth, to be realized in some distant future, when some day we shall die and live again, that the very idea of attaining to such a resurrection now is not easy to grasp. But here we have a resurrection which can be attained any day. "I have not already attained," says St. Paul, "but I press on." It is possible, that is to say, for a man to-day, who seems perfectly healthy, to be dying or dead, and for a man to rise from the dead to-day and attain to the resurrection.
And thus the fundamental question of the Easter season is not: "Do I believe that people when they die shall rise again from the dead?" but it is "Have I risen from the dead {167} myself?" "Am I alive to-day, with any touch of the eternal life?" Mr. Ruskin describes a grim Scythian custom where, when the king died, he was set on his throne at the head of his table, and his vassals, instead of mourning for him, bowed before his corpse and feasted in his presence. That same ghastly scene is sometimes repeated now, and young men think they are sitting at a feast, when they are really sitting at a funeral, and believe themselves to be, as they say, "seeing life," when they are in reality looking upon the death of all that is true and fair. And on the other hand the most beautiful thing which is permitted for any one to see is the resurrection of a human soul from the dead, its deliverance from shame and sin, its passing from death into life. As the father of the prodigal said of his boy, he was dead and is alive again, and in that coming to his true self he attains, as surely as he ever can in any future world, unto the resurrection from the dead.
{168}
Lukexxiii. 20-26.
This Simon, the Cyrenian, was just a plain man, coming into town on his own business, and meeting at the gate this turbulent group surging out toward the place of crucifixion, with the malefactor in their midst. Suddenly Simon finds himself turned about in his own journey, swept back by the crowd with the cross of another man on his shoulder, and the humiliation forced upon him which there seemed no reason for him to bear.
How often that happens in many a life! You are going your own way, carrying your own load, and suddenly you are called on to take up some one else's burden,—a strange cross, a home responsibility, a business duty; and you find yourself turned square round in the road you meant to go. Your plan of life is interrupted by no fault of your own, and you are summoned to bear an undeserved and unexpected cross.
{169}
And yet, how certain it is that this man of Cyrene came to look back on this interruption of his journey as the one thing he would not have missed? When others were remembering the wonderful career of Jesus, how often he must have said: "Yes, but I once had the unapproached privilege of bearing his cross for him. On one golden morning of my life I was permitted to share his suffering. I was called from all my own hopes and plans to take up this burden of another, and I did not let it drop. It seemed a grievous burden, but it has become my crowning joy. I did not know then, but I know now, that my day of humiliation was my day of highest blessedness.
"I think of the CyrenianWho crossed the city-gate,When forth the stream was pouringThat bore thy cruel fate.
* * * *
"I ponder what within himThe thoughts that woke that dayAs his unchosen burdenHe bore that unsought way.
* * * *
"Yet, tempted he as we are!O Lord, was thy cross mine?Am I, like Simon, bearingA burden that is thine?
{170}
"Thou must have looked on Simon;Turn, Lord, and look on meTill I shall see and followAnd bear thy cross for Thee." [1]
[1] Harriet Ware Hall,A Book for Friends, p. 90. (Privately printed.) 1888.
{171}
Matthewiv. 1-11.
All these temptations of Jesus came to him through the very sense of power of which he could not but be aware. Here was this great consciousness of capacity in him to do wonders, to display himself, to get glory. How should he use his gifts? Should it be for himself, for honor, for praise, or should it be for service, for sacrifice, for God? The devil's temptation was that Jesus should take the gifts of which he was conscious and make them serve his own ends of ambition or success. The first great decision in the work of Jesus Christ was the decision of the end to which his powers should be dedicated; the use to which his powers should be put.
The same fundamental decision comes to every young man in his own degree. Here are your gifts and capacities, great or small. What are you to do with them? Are they for glory or for use? Are they for ambition {172} or for service? The sooner that decision is made the better. Some people have never quite done with that temptation of the devil. They go on trying to direct their gifts to the end of reputation, or wealth, or dominion; and they attain that end only to find that it is no end, and that their lives, which should have grown broader and richer, have grown shrunken, and meagre, and unsatisfied. Such a life is like a fish swimming into the labyrinth of a weir. It follows along the line of its vocation until the liberty to return grows less and less; and, at last, in the very element where it seems most free, it is in fact a helpless captive. The man's occupation has become his prison. He is the slave of his own powers. The devil has withered that life with his touch.
And then, on the other hand, you turn to lives which have given themselves to the life of service, and what do you see? You see their capacity enlarged through use, you see small gifts multiplied into great powers. Few things are more remarkable in one's experience of life than to see men who by nature are not extraordinarily endowed achieve the highest success by sheer dedication of their {173} moderate gifts. Their capacities expand through their self-surrender, as leaves unfold under the touch of the sun. They lose themselves and then they find themselves. The devil tempts these men, not with a sense of their greatness, but with their self-distrust; yet he tempts them in vain. Their weakness issues into strength; their temptation develops their power. The angels of God have come and ministered unto them.
{174}
Markxii. 30.
In the great law of love to God and love to man which Jesus repeats as the law of his own teaching, there is one phrase that seems not wholly clear. You can love God with your heart and your soul; you can even increase your strength by love; but how can you love with the mind? Is it not the very quality of a trained mind to be unmoved by love or hate, dispassionate and unemotional? Is not this the scientific spirit, this attitude of criticism, with no prejudice or affection to color its results?
Of course one must answer that there is much truth which can be discovered by a loveless mind. Yet there is, on the other hand, much truth which cannot be discerned without love. There are many secrets of literature, of art, of music, and of the higher traits of character as well, into which you cannot enter unless you give your mind to these things with sympathy and affection and responsiveness; loving them, as Jesus says, with the mind. One {175} of our preachers has lately called attention to the new word in literature which illustrates this attitude of the mind.[1] When people wrote in earlier days of other people and their works they wrote biographies or criticisms or studies, but now we have what are called "appreciations;" the attempt, that is to say, to enter into a character and appreciate its traits or its art, and to love it with the mind. Perhaps that is what this ancient law asks of you in your relation to God, to come not as a critic, but as a lover, to the rational appreciation of the ways of God. Here is the noblest capacity with which human life is endowed. It is a great thing to love God with the heart and soul, to let the emotions of gratitude to Him or of joy in his world run free; but to rise into sympathetic interpretation of his laws, to think God's thoughts after Him, and to be moved by the high emotions which are stirred by exalted ideas,—to love God, that is to say, with the mind,—that, I suppose, is the highest function of human life, and the quality which most endows a man with insight and power.
[1] Rev. Leighton Parks, D. D., in a sermon at the Diocesan Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Boston, May, 1895.
{176}
Genesisiv. 9.
Cain was the first philosophical individualist; the first "laissez-faire" economist. When God asked: "Where is Abel?" Cain answered: "What responsibility have I for him? My business is to take care of myself. Am I my brother's keeper?" But the interesting fact is that Cain had been his brother's keeper though he declined responsibility for him. He refused to be responsible for his brother's life, but he certainly was responsible for his brother's death. He refused to be his brother's keeper, but he was willing to be his brother's slayer. There are plenty of people to-day who are trying to maintain this same impossible theory of social irresponsibility. They affirm that they have no social duty except to mind their own business; but that very denial of responsibility is what makes them among the most responsible agents of social disaster. They deal with their affairs on the principle that they are nobody's {177} keeper, and so they are stirring every day the fires of industrial revolt. We are passing through dark days in the business world, and there are many causes for the trouble, but the deepest cause is Cain's theory of life. "Where is thy brother?" says God to the business man to-day,—"thy brother, the wage-earner, the victim of the cut-down and the lockout?" "Where is thy brother?" says God again to the unscrupulous agitator, bringing distress into many a workman's home for the satisfactions of ambition and power. And to any man who answers: "I know not. Am I my brother's keeper?" the rebuke of God is spoken again: "Cursed art thou! The voice of thy brother crieth against thee from the ground."
{178}
1Corinthiansxii. 31.
The wonderful chapter which follows this verse becomes still more interesting when one considers its connection with the preceding passage. Paul has been looking over the life of his Christian brethren, and he sees in it a great variety of callings. Some of his friends are preachers,—apostles and prophets, as he calls them. Some are teachers, some are doctors, with gifts of healing; some are politicians, with gifts of government. The apostle speaks to them as though he were advising young men as to the choice of their profession, and he says: "Among all these professional opportunities covet the best; take that which most fills out and satisfies your life." But then he turns from these professional capacities and adds: "Be sure that these gifts do not crowd out of your life the higher capacity for sympathy. For you may understand all knowledge and speak with all tongues, and if you have lost thereby {179} the personal, human, sympathetic relation with people which we call love you are not really to be counted as a man. You are nothing more than an instrument of sound, a wind instrument like a trumpet, or a clanging instrument like a cymbal." That is the apostolic warning to the successful professional man,—the warning against the narrowing, self-contented result which sometimes taints even great attainments and professional distinction. Covet the best. Be satisfied with nothing less than the highest professional work of doctor, politician, or teacher. But beware of the imprisoning effect which sometimes comes of this very success in professional life, the atrophy of sensibility, the increasing incapacity for sympathy, for public spirit, for charity,—an incapacity which makes some men of the highest endowments among the least serviceable, least loving, and least loved of a community. "If," says the apostle, "in the gain of professional success you lose the higher gift of love, you are no longer a great man; you are not even to be described as a small man. You are 'nothing.'"
{180}
Johnxvi. 32.
In one of Frederick Robertson's sermons he speaks of the conduct of life as like the conduct of atoms, which have a certain attraction for each other, but at a certain point of approach are repelled and do not touch. There is in every large life a certain central solitude of this kind into which no other soul can enter. Some persons fear this solitude, some rejoice in it, but the use of it is the test of a man's life. A very near friend of Dr. Brooks's once heard of a man who said that he knew Dr. Brooks intimately; and this friend said: "No man ought to say that. Not one of us knew Dr. Brooks intimately. There was a central Holy of Holies in his life, into which none of us ever entered." So it was. And this preservation of an inner privacy for the deeper experiences of life is what proves a soul to be peaceful and strong. Guard your soul's individual life. In the midst of the social world keep a place for the {181} nurture of the isolated life, for the reading and for the thoughts which deal with the interior relations of the single soul to the immanent God.
"Thyself amid the silence clear,The world far off and dim,His presence close, the bright ones near,Thyself alone with Him."
That is what makes a man strong under the tests of life. He is not a parasitic plant deriving its life from some other life; he is rooted deep in the soil of the Eternal. As was said of John Henry Newman, such a man is never less alone than when alone. "He is not alone, because the Father is with him."
{182}
Johniv. 10.
We usually notice in this story the great words of Jesus—perhaps the deepest and richest series of utterances that have ever fallen from human lips. Yet it is almost as striking to notice the attitude of mind in which the woman remained throughout these wonderful scenes. She seems to have been entirely oblivious of the situation, and unaware that anything great was going on.
Jesus speaks to her of the living water, and she thinks it must be some device which shall save her coming with her pitcher to the well. Then Jesus looks on her with infinite pathos and says: "If you only knew the gift of God, and who it is that is now speaking to you!" But she does not know, and shoulders her pitcher and trudges home again, reporting only that she has seen some one who appeared a wonderful fortune-teller, and never dreaming that the greatest words of human history had been spoken to her, and her alone.
{183}
If thou knewest the gift of God!—to have had one's opportunity in one's hands and to have let it slip; to have had the Messiah sitting by you and not to have recognized Him; to have thought it just a commonplace day when the most sacred revelations of God were occurring,—that is about the saddest confession that any one can make. And yet, that is what might happen to any one any day. No one can be sure when the great exigencies of life are likely to occur. He looks forward to great things to be done in some more favoring future, and, behold, the insignificant incidents of to-day are the greater things which he does not discern. He looks forward to the discovery of God in some difficult intellectual achievement, and meantime the daily task is full of revelation, and as he wakes to the morning the new day stands by him and says: "If you only knew the gift of God, and who it is that speaks to you today." And at last perhaps he begins to realize that the ordinary ways of daily life are the channels of God's revelation, and then there
"Comes to soul and senseThe feeling which is evidence
{184}
That very near about us liesThe realm of spiritual mysteries.With smile of trust and folded hands,The passive soul in waiting stands,To feel, as flowers the sun and dew.The one true life its own renew."
{185}
Matthewxxii. 11-14.
Here is a man who has the feast offered to him, but is not clothed to meet it. He is unprepared and is therefore cast out. He does not wear the wedding garment and therefore is not fit for the wedding feast. This seems at first sight harsh treatment; but one soon remembers that it was the custom of an Oriental feast to offer the guest at his entrance a robe fit for the occasion. "Bring forth the best robe," says the father of the prodigal, "and put it on him." This man had had offered to him the opportunity of personal preparation and had refused it. He wanted to share the feast, but he wanted to share it on his own terms. He pressed into the happiness without the personal preparedness which made that happiness possible.
Every man in this way makes his own world. The habit of his life clothes him like a garment, and only he who wears the wedding garment {186} is at home at the wedding feast. The same circumstances are to one man beautiful and to another, at his side, demoralizing. You may have prosperity and it may be a source of happiness, or the same prosperity and it may be a source of peril. You may be at a college and it may be either regenerating to you, or pernicious in its influence, according as you are clothed or unclothed with the right habit of mind. God first asks for your heart and then offers you his world. The wedding feast is for him alone who has accepted the wedding garment.
{187}
1Kingsxix. 1-13.
This is God's word to man's despondency; and when we strip this man's story of its Orientalism, it is really the story of many a discouraged, despondent man of to-day. Elijah has been doing his best, but has come to a point where he is ready to give up. His enemies are too many for him. "Lord," he says, "it is enough. I have had as much as I can bear. I am alone and Baal's prophets are four hundred and fifty men." So he goes away into solitude, and looks about him for some clear sign that God has not deserted him. But nothing happens. The great signs of nature pass before him, the storm, the lightning, and the earthquake, but they only reflect his own stormy mood. The Lord is not in them. Then, within his heart, there speaks that voice which is at once speech and silence, and it says to him: "What doest thou here, Elijah," and behold, the man is convicted. For when he {188} reflects on it he is doing nothing at all. He is sitting under a tree, requesting that he may die. He has fled from his duty and is hiding in a cave. Then the voice says to him: "Get up and go and do your duty. You might sit here forever and get no light on your lot. The problem of life is solved through the work of life. The way out of your despondency is in going straight on with the work now ready to your hand. Answers to great problems are not so likely to come to people in caves, as along the dusty road of duty-doing. Not to the dreamer, but to the doer come the interpretations of life. Elijah, Elijah, what doest thou here?"
{189}
Matthewxxiii. 24.
We are often very much impressed by the difficulties of religious belief. It seems hard to attain any absolute, convinced faith. There are doubts and obscurities which every one feels, and these questionings are often stirred into activity by the mistaken efforts of the defenders of the faith. There is even a special department in theological teaching known as Apologetics, or the defense of faith; as though religion had to be always on the defensive, and as if the easiest attitude of mind, even of the least philosophical, were the attitude of denial. But did you ever consider the alternative position and the difficulties which present themselves when one undertakes absolutely and continuously to deny himself the relations of the religious life? Did you ever fairly face the conception of a logically completed unbelief, a world stripped of its ideals, with no region of spiritual hopes or of worship, a {190} world absolutely without God, a permanently faithless world? What is the difficulty here? The difficulty is that these aspects of life, though they are often hard to maintain, are harder still to abandon. Faith has its perplexities, but no sooner do you eliminate the spiritual world than you are confronted with a series of experiences, emotions, and intimations which are simply inexplicable. That was perhaps partly what Jesus had in mind when he met the Pharisees. "You find it hard to believe in me," he said. "Ah, yes, but is it not still harder altogether to refuse me? You are quite alive to the smaller difficulties of my position, but you seem to be quite unaware of the difficulties of your own position. You busy yourself with straining out the gnat which floats on the surface of your glass, but you do not seem to observe the residuary camel."
So with his splendid satire Jesus turns the critical temper back upon itself. Difficulties enough, God knows, there are in every intellectual position, and intellectual certainty usually means the abnegation of the thinking faculty.
But many persons strain out the little difficulties and swallow the great ones. What is, {191} on the whole, the best working theory of life?—that is the only practical question. Under which view of life do the facts, on the whole, best fall? Especially, what conception of life holds the highest facts, the great irresistible spring-tides, which sometimes rise within the soul, of hope and love and desire? So Browning's Bishop, turning on his critic, says:—
"And now what are we? unbelievers both,Calm and complete, determinately fixedTo-day, to-morrow, and forever, pray?You'll guarantee me that? Not so, I think.In nowise! All we've gained is, that belief,As unbelief before, shakes us by fits,Confounds us like its predecessor. Where'sThe gain? How can we guard our unbelief,Make it bear fruit to us? The problem's here.Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch,A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death,A chorus-ending from Euripides,—And that's enough for fifty hopes and fearsAs old and new at once as nature's self,To rap and knock and enter in our soul,Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring,Round the ancient idol, on his base again,—* * * * * * *What have we gained then by our unbeliefBut a life of doubt diversified by faith,For one of faith diversified by doubt.We called the chessboard white,—we call it black."
{192}
Galatiansiv. 9.
It is very interesting to come so close to a great man as we do in this passage, for the Apostle seems to be discovered here, correcting himself. It is as if he had written one teaching to the Galatians, and then crossed it out and written another. "You know God," he says, "or rather you are known of Him." He is asking himself why the Galatians should in a given case do their duty, and he answers: "Because they know God; they are aware of His purposes and laws, and having this rational understanding of Him they know how to act as His servants." "But no," he goes on to say, "that is not the real impulse of their duty. What holds them to their best is rather the thought that God knows them, that He gives them their duty, and that they obey." It is like the position of a soldier under his commander. The soldier does not expect to know {193} all about the plan of the campaign, but what keeps him to his best is the knowledge that some one knows about it; that the commander overlooks the field; that each little skirmish has its place in the great design. That is what makes the soldier go down again into the smoke and dust of his duty with his timidity converted into faith.
Knowing God,—that is theology; being known of Him,—that is religion. Both theology and religion have their influence on conduct. It is a great thing to know that one knows God. There is power in a rational creed. But, after all, the profoundest impulse for conduct is to know that beneath all your ignorance of God is His knowledge of you; that before you loved Him, He loved you, that antecedent to your response to Him was His invitation to you. Thus it is that a man looks out into each new day and asks: "What is to hold me to-day to my duty?" Well, first of all, everything I may learn ought to help me. It is all God's truth, and, as I get a grasp on truth and stand on its firm ground, my conduct is steadier and assured. But, after all, the deeper safety lies in this other confession, that I am known of God; that I {194} am not merely an explorer, searching for truth, but guided and controlled as ever under the great taskmaster's eye; known of Him, with my ignorance of Him held within His knowledge of me, until the time comes when at last I shall know even as also I am known.
{195}
Johnviii. 32.
"The truth shall make you free;"—that is one of the greatest announcements of a universal principle which even Jesus Christ ever made.
But the Jews began to ask of him: "How can one be a disciple of your truth and yet be free? Is not that discipleship only another name for bondage? We are free already. We are in bondage to no man. Why then should we enter into the servitude of obedience to your truth?" And to this Jesus seems to answer: "That depends upon what it is to be free. It is a question of your definition of liberty. You seem to believe that to be free one must have no authority or leadership or master. But I say unto you that there is no such liberty. You must be the servant of something. You must be under the authority of your law, or your superstition, or your God, or yourself. Freedom on any other terms is not freedom, it is lawlessness. {196} Indeed it may be more like slavery than freedom."
What is a free country? Not a country without law,—a country of the anarchist,—but a country where the law encourages each citizen to be and to do his best. A free country gives every man a chance. It opens life at the top. It invites one's allegiance from the things which enslave to the things which enlarge. And that is the only liberty,—a transfer of allegiance, a higher attachment, which sets free from the lower enslavements of life. Suppose a man is the slave of a sin, how does he get free? He frees himself from his sin by attaching himself to some better interest. Sin is not driven out of one's life; it is crowded out. Suppose a man is the slave of himself, sunk in the self-absorbed and ungenerous life, how does he get free? He gets free by finding an end in life which is larger than himself. He becomes the servant of the truth, and the truth makes him free. Suppose a man asks himself, "What can religion do for me? It does not solve all my problems, or satisfy all my needs. What then does religion do?" Well, first of all, it gives one liberty. It detaches one's life from {197} the things which shut it in, and attaches it to those ideal ends which give enlargement, emancipation, range to life. God speaks to you of duty, of self-control, of power in your prayers, and then you go out into the world again, not as if all were plain before you, but at least with a free heart, and a mind not in bondage to the world of circumstance or of trivial cares. The truth of God, so far as it has been revealed to you, has made you free. You have found the perfect law, the law of liberty.
{198}
Matthewxiii. 1-9.
It takes two things to make a seed grow. One is a good seed, and the other is a good soil. One is what the sower provides, and the other is what the ploughman prepares. God's best seed falls in vain on a rock. Man's best soil is unfruitful till the sower visits it. Now the tilling of the soil of life is what in all its different forms we call culture, and the expansion of God's germinating influence is what we call religion. Some people think that either of these alone is enough to insure a good crop. Some think that culture makes a man fruitful, and some think religion is a spontaneous growth; and some even talk of a conflict between the two. But culture does for a man just what it does for a field. It deepens the soil and makes it ready, and that is all. The merely cultivated man is nothing more than a ploughed field which has not been sown, and when it comes to the proper time of harvest has a most {199} empty and untimely look. And religion alone does not often penetrate into the unprepared life. Sometimes, indeed, it seems to force its way as by a miracle, and take root, as we see a tree or shrub growing as it seems without any soil in which to cling. But in the normal way of life the seed of God falls in vain upon a soil which is not deepened and softened to receive it. It waits for preparedness of nature, for the obedient will, the awakened mind, the receptive heart;—and all these forms of self-discipline are comprehended in any genuine self-culture.
Culture and religion—here they meet in university life. Most of your time is given to culture. What are you doing? You are enriching and spading up the soil of life. That is the test of culture. Is it quickening, deepening, stimulating the mind? Is it opening the imagination and training the will? Then it is true culture and not that spurious cultivation which spreads over life gravel instead of fertilizers. Culture prepares the soil; and then in sacred moments, perhaps in your worship here, perhaps in the solitude of your own experience, or perhaps in the busiest moments of your day, God, the sower, comes, scattering {200} His seeds of suggestion and His minute influences for good over the heart, and what He needs is a receptive mind and an awakened heart; the life of man ready for the life of God, and the descending influences of God finding depth of earth within the life of man.
{201}
Matthewvi. 1-15.
From day to day we gather here and repeat together the Lord's Prayer. One is tempted sometimes to wonder whether in this daily repetition the prayer keeps its freshness and reality. I will not say that even if it becomes a mere form it is useless in our worship. It is something even to have a form so rich in the associations of home and of church, of the prayers of childhood, and the centuries of Christian worship. And yet this prayer is first of all a protest against formalism. "Use not vain repetitions," says Jesus, and then he goes on to give this type of restrained, unswerving, concentrated prayer.
While the prayer, however, is a protest against formalism it is itself extraordinarily beautiful in form. When a clear mind {202} expresses a deep purpose its expression is always orderly, and the petitions of the Lord's Prayer do not unfold their quality until we consider the form in which they are expressed. Look for a moment at the order of these petitions. There are two series of prayers. The first series relate to God, His kingdom, and His will; the second series deal with men, their bread, their trespasses, and their temptations. The Lord's Prayer, that is to say, reverses the common order of petition. Most people turn to God first of all with their own needs. The Lord's Prayer postpones these needs of bread and of forgiveness, and asks first of all for God's kingdom and His will. Thus it is, first of all, an unselfish prayer. When a man comes here and prays the Lord's Prayer, he, first of all, subordinates himself; he postpones his own needs. He subdues his thoughts to the great purposes of God. He prays first for God's kingdom, however it may come, whether through joy and peace or through much trouble and pain; and then, in the light of that supreme and self-subordinating desire for the larger glory, the man goes on to ask for his own bread and the forgiveness of his own sin.
[1] See also, F. D. Maurice,The Lord's Prayer, London, 1861; Robert Eyton,The Lord's Prayer, London, 1892; H. W. Foote,Thy Kingdom Come, Boston, 1891.
{203}
Matthewv. 21-25.
I have said that the Lord's Prayer is by its very form an unselfish prayer. This same mark of it is to be seen in another way by the word with which it begins. It does not pray: "My Father, my bread, my trespasses." It prays throughout for blessings which are "ours." Not my isolated life, but the common life I share is that for which I ask the help of God. Even when a man enters into his inner chamber and shuts the door, and is alone, he still says: "Our Father." He takes up into his solitary prayer the lives which for the moment are bound up in his. He thinks of those he loves and says: "Our Father." He sets himself right with those he does not love, reconciles himself with his brother, and says: "Our Father." He joins himself with the whole great company of those who have said this prayer in all the ages, and have found peace {204} in it, and with that great sense of companionship the solitude of his own experience is banished, and he is compassed about with a cloud of witnesses, living and dead, as he bends alone, and in his half-whispered prayer begins to say: "Our Father."
{205}
Galatiansiii. 26; iv. 6.
The fatherhood of God has become so familiar a phrase that we hardly realize what a revolution of thought it represents. In the whole Old Testament, so the scholars say, God is spoken of but seven times as Father; five times as Father of the Hebrew people, once to David as the father of his son Solomon, and once as a prediction that sometime men would thus pray. And so when Jesus at the beginning of his prayer says: "After this manner pray, Our Father," he is opening the door into a new conception of God's relation to man.
And what is this conception? It is the recognition of kinship. It is the conviction that the spiritual life in man is of the same nature as the spiritual life in God. The child's kinship to the parent involves the natural inheritance of capacity and destiny. "If children," says St. Paul, "then heirs, heirs of God, and {206} joint heirs with Christ." "Because we are sons we cry, Abba, Father." We are not Greek philosophers interpreting the causes of nature or the world of ideas; we are not Hebrew prophets representing a sacred nation; we are children, with the rights and gifts of children, and the assurance of a father's confidence and love. All this great promise the humblest Christian claims when he begins to pray the Lord's Prayer. He says, "I am not a brute, I am not a clod, I am a partaker of the Divine nature; I claim the promise of a child. And that sense of kinship summons me to my best. I pray as my Father's son, and as his son I bear a name which must not be stained.Noblesse oblige. There are some things which I cannot degrade myself to do because my position forbids them. There are some things to which I could not attain of myself, but which are made possible to me as my Father's son. I accept the unearned privilege of my descent; I claim the great inheritance of the kinship of God, and out of my self-distrust and weakness I turn to self-respect and strength, when I pray: 'Our Father.'"
{207}
Exodusxx. 1-7.
I suppose that to many a reader the prayer: "Holy be Thy name," means little more than: "Let me not be profane; help me to keep myself from blasphemy." But it is not likely that Jesus began his prayer with any such elementary desire as this; or that our first prayer need be only a prayer to be kept from irreverence. The name of God to the Hebrews was much more than a title. His name represented all His ways of revelation. The Hebrews did not speak the name of God. It was a word too sacred for utterance. Thus the man who begins the Lord's Prayer in that Hebrew spirit first summons to his thought the things which are the most sacred in the world to him, the thoughts and purposes which stand to him for God; the associations, memories, and ideals which make life holy, and asks that these may lead him into his own prayer. {208} What he says is this: "My Father, and the Father of all other souls, renew within me my most sacred thoughts and all the holy associations which are to me the symbol of Thyself. Give to me a sense of the sanctity of the world. Set me in the right mood of prayer. And as I thus reverently look out on Thy varied ways of revelation and of righteousness, help me to bring my own spirit into this unity with Thyself, to make a part of Thy holy world, and humbly to begin my prayer by hallowing Thy name."
{209}
Lukexvii. 21.
The prayer that the kingdom of God might come had long been familiar to the Hebrews. They had been for centuries dreaming of a time when their tyrants should be overcome and their nation delivered and their God rule. But all this desire was for an outward change. Some day the Romans and their tax-gatherers should be expelled from the land and then the kingdom would come. Jesus repeats the same prayer, but with a new significance in the familiar words. He is not thinking of a Hebrew theocracy, or a Roman defeat; he is thinking of a human, universal, spiritual emancipation. There dawns before his inspired imagination the unparalleled conception of a purified and regenerated people. Never did a modern socialist in his dream of a better outward order surpass this vision of Jesus of a coming kingdom of God.
{210}
But to Jesus the means to that outward transformation were always personal and individual. The golden age, as Mr. Spencer has said, could not be made out of leaden people. The first condition of the outward kingdom must be the kingdom within. The new order must be the product of the new life. That is the doctrine of the social order in the Lord's Prayer.
We too are looking for outward reform in legislation and economics. It is all a part of the movement to the kingdom of God. Yet any outward transformation which is to last proceeds from regenerated lives. The kingdom of God is within before it is without. Do you want a better world? Well, plan for it, and work for it. But, first of all, enter into the inner chamber of your prayer, and say: "Lord, make me a fit instrument of thy kingdom. Purify my heart, that I may purify thy world. I would live for others' sakes, but first of all that great self-sacrifice must be obeyed: 'For their sakes I sanctify myself, Reign thus in me that I may rationally pray: Thy kingdom come!'"
{211}
Lukexxii. 39-46.
The Lord's Prayer begins as a prayer for the great things. It prays for a sanctified world: "Holy be Thy name." It gives form to that great hope: "Thy kingdom come." It deals with the means of that great coming: "Thy will be done." The coming of the kingdom and the hallowing of the name are to happen through the doing of the will.
I suppose that most prayers which ask that God's will may be done are prayers of passive acquiescence and resignation. We are apt to pray "Thy will be done," as though we were saying: "Let it be done in spite of us and even against our wills, and we will try to bear it." But that is not the teaching of the Lord's Prayer. "Thy will be done;"—by whom? By the man that thus prays! He prays to have his part in the accomplishment of God's will, even as Jesus prays in the Garden: "Thy will be done," and then rises and {212} proceeds to do that will. The prayer recognizes the solemn and fundamental truth that the will, even of God Himself, works, in its human relations, through the service of man. Here, for instance, is a social abuse. What is God's will toward it? His will is that man should remove it. Here is a threat of cholera, and people pray that God's will be done. But what is God's will? His will is that the town shall be cleansed. And who are to do His will? Why, the citizens. Typhoid fever and bad drainage are not the will of God. The will of God is that they should be abolished. Social wrongs are not to be endured with resignation. They simply indicate to man what is God's will. And who is to do God's will in these things? We are. The man who enters into his closet and says: "Thy will be done," is asking no mere help to bear the unavoidable; he is asking help to be a participator in the purposes of God, a laborer together with Him, first a discerner and then a doer of his will. "Our Father," he says, "accomplish Thine ends not over me, or in spite of me, but through me,—Thou the power and I the instrument,—Thine to will and mine to do."
{213}
The Lord's Prayer begins with the desire for the great things, the universal needs; a holy world, a kingdom of righteousness, the will of God fulfilled. Then, in the light of these great things it goes on to one's personal needs, and prays, first of all, for the present, then for the past, then for the future. The prayer for the present is this: "Give us our daily bread,"—our bread, that is to say, sufficient for to-day, enough to live on and to work by, just for today. The prayer is limitative. It puts restraint on my desire and limit on my ambition. It does not demand the future. It looks only to this present unexplored and unknown day. "Give us in this day what is necessary for us, fit to sustain us,—strength to do thy will, patience to bring in thy kingdom, grace to hallow thy name."
Into the midst of the restless anticipations of modern life, its living of to-morrow's life in {214} to-day's anxiety, its social disease which has been described as "Americanitis," and which, if it is not arrested, will have to be operated on some day at the risk of the nation's life, there enters every morning in your daily prayer the desire for quiet acceptance of the day's blessings, the dismissal of the care for the morrow, the sense of sufficiency in the bread of to-day:—
"Lord, for to-morrow and its needs I do not pray,Keep me from stain of sin, just for to-day.Let me both diligently work, and duly pray,Let me be kind in word and deed, just for to-day.Let me no wrong or idle word unthinking say,Set thou a seal upon my lips, just for to-day.Let me be slow to do my will, prompt to obey,Help me to sacrifice myself, just for to-day.So for to-morrow and its needs, I do not pray,But help me, keep me, hold me, Lord, just for to-day."
{215}
Lukexii. 1-3.
We come to the petition in the Lord's Prayer which is the easiest to understand and the hardest to pray,—the prayer that we may be forgiven as we forgive. This prayer does not, of course, ask God to measure His goodness by our virtues. We should not dare to ask that God would deal with us just as we have dealt with others. It is the spirit of forgiveness for which we pray. "Give us forgiveness," we ask, "because we come in the spirit of forgiveness." The spirit of forgiveness, that is to say, is the condition and prerequisite of the prayer for forgiveness. If you do not love your brother whom you have seen, how can you truly pray to God whom you have not seen? If a man comes to his prayer with hate in his heart, he makes it impossible for God to forgive him. He is shutting the door which opens into the spirit {216} of prayer. Right-mindedness to man is the first condition of right prayer to God.
The traveler in Egypt sometimes looks out in the early morning and sees an Arab preparing to say his prayers. The man goes down to the river-bank and spreads his little carpet so that he shall look toward Mecca; but before he kneels he crouches on the bank, and cleanses his lips, his tongue, his hands, even his feet, so that he shall bring to his prayer no unclean word or deed. It is as if he first said with the Psalmist: "Wash me thoroughly of my iniquity; purge me of my sin; make me a clean heart; renew in me a right spirit;" and then with a right spirit in him, he bends and rises and bows again in his prayer. The petition for a forgiving spirit prepares one in the same way to say his morning prayer. It cleanses the tongue; it washes the motives; it purifies the thoughts of their uncharitableness; and then, in this spirit of forgiveness even toward those who have wronged him, the Christian is clean enough to ask for the forgiveness of his own sin.
{217}
Jamesi. 12-17.
This passage from the Epistle of James is a commentary on the last petition of the Lord's Prayer. When we pray: "Lead us not into temptation," it is, as James says, not God who tempts, for God tempteth no man. The temptation comes through our misuse of the circumstances which God offers us as our opportunity. We turn these circumstances into temptations.
Every condition of life has these two aspects. It is on the one hand an opportunity, and it is on the other hand a temptation. God gives it as an opportunity and we misuse the opportunity and it becomes our temptation. The rich have their special and great opportunity of generous service for the common good, and yet through that very opportunity comes their special temptation. The poor are saved by their lot from many temptations of self-centred and frivolous luxury, but are much tempted {218} by their poverty itself. The healthy have a great gift of God, but they are tempted by that very gift to recklessness, inconsiderateness and self-injury. The sick receive peculiar blessings of patience and resignation, but are much tempted to selfishness and discontent. The business man is tempted by his very knowledge of the world to the hardness of materialism; the minister is tempted by his very indifference to the world to unsophisticated imprudence. Wherever on earth a man may be he must scrutinize his future, and calculate his powers, and face his problems, and pray: "My God, prevent my vocation from becoming my temptation. Let me not put myself where I shall be tried over much. Save me from the peculiar temptation of my special lot. Deliver me from its evils and lead me not round its temptations, but through them into its opportunity and joy."