LECTURE IDISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY

Whether there should be compulsory military training in America is a question which some people will answer yes or no according to their general theories and others according to their observation of the actual effects of such training on moral character. But whatever our views may be on this familiar question, whether we regard military service as ethically helpful in its influence or as morally injurious, we cannot differ as to the need in our national character of those qualities of self-control, of quick and unquestioning obedience to duty, of joyful contempt of hardship, and of zest in difficult and arduous undertakings which, rightly or wrongly, we consider soldierly, which we attribute in such rich measure to our forefathers, and which the moral exigencies of our national task to-day as peremptorily demand. To put these primary and elemental needs as sharply as possible, let us call them discipline and austerity. Our American character needs more of both.

I do not know a better starting point than is found in one of those vivid modern touches uponwhich we constantly come in the Old Testament. This one is in the account of the closing year of King David’s life. The story seems ancient and far away until we suddenly read: “His father had not displeased him at any time saying, Why hast thou done so?” If we were to translate the words more directly into the language of our own day, we should say, “His father had always let him do exactly as he pleased.” The reference is to David and his son Adonijah, and to the want of discipline by which the father had ruined his boy.

It is not hard to reconstruct the story. David was busy about his cares as king, and his heart was indulgent towards his children. Adonijah seems to have been his youngest son, and the father let him have his way, never reining him up or checking him by asking why he had done thus or so. David pursued, in other words, the modern theory of child training: that the one principle by which children should be educated is the principle of letting what is naturally in them come out; that they must not be crossed or frustrated, or have any external discipline or control laid upon their lives. This is, of course, the extreme of it, but in some form we hear the theory and see it applied all about us every day.

And it is a modern theory of self-education, also. We are told that life should be left free to follow its native impulses; that it should not bethwarted and intimidated by the conventions and prohibitions of society; that men and women should consult their own hearts and then should move out quite freely in obedience to their promptings; that their lives and the lives of their children should not be twisted or deflected by the imposition of any external authority or command.

Well, that was the way Adonijah was brought up. His father was rich. The boy had his own establishment, his own horses, his own retinue of attendants, and round about him, as about any oriental king’s son, there would be the usual crowd of flatterers and sycophants. There was no will or desire that he had not the means to gratify, and his father let him have his way.

Further, he was the younger brother of Absalom, and the ancient record says that they were handsome and popular boys. They had a way that carried along those who came in touch with them, and as the king’s sons, and the leading young men of the city, we have no difficulty in understanding the atmosphere in which they lived and the conditions within which they grew.

It must be confessed that this was the easy way of going about the matter. It is far easier to let a child have its own way than to endeavour by wisdom and patience and strength, to study and decide what is best for the child and without hurting the child’s will, to guide it into the better way. It was far less care to David to let Absalomand Adonijah go than it would have been to take these high-strung sons of his in hand and endeavour to break them to discipline and truth, and to send them out into life real men of power. It was much easier never to call them and to say, “Boys, why did you do this?” Much easier never to lay any authority or guidance upon them from without, much easier, especially for a man like David. He had grown up on a farm, with all the hardship and frugality of farm life, with no privileges as a lad, and now that he was the king of his nation, he was able to do anything whatever for his sons. It was difficult to refuse them the things he had never had. Easily and indulgently—for he was a man of kindly heart all his days—he found it simpler not to lay hard restraints upon his boys when he could give them their own way.

And, of course, this is the easier way of self-education too. For a man to love himself so much that he never thinks of his neighbours, to blind his eyes so completely to consequences that he can live for the passing moment,—this is a very easy philosophy, and the man or the woman who is able to practice it will seem, for a while, to live in the sunshine, a fine butterfly, smooth-going life. All this is easier than to say, not, What is my impulse? but, What ought I? not, What do I like? but, What is best for all the world? not, What is the easy way? but,What is the hard way over which the feet go that carry the burdens of mankind, that bear the load of the world?

But, though it is the easy way for a while, there comes a time when it is no longer the easy way. When in his little room above the gate the old king bowed his gray head in his hands and with breaking heart sobbed out: “O my son Absalom! my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”—it was no longer the easy way. When Adonijah rose up in insurrection against his old father as he lay on his dying bed, gathering his little company of sycophants around him and setting himself up in his father’s place, then it was no longer the easy way that the old man had pursued.

And to-day still, fathers and mothers who for a little while thought the easy way was never to ask their children why they had done so, but to let them go their own way with no imposition of outward authority or control, find after a while that the easy way has turned bitterly hard. I have a friend, a leading merchant in one of our large cities. Some time ago another friend was visiting him, and as they walked down the street together, suddenly a large car whizzed around the corner, full of young people, among them the merchant’s son. This was the middle of the forenoon and the boy was supposed to be at workin his father’s establishment. The father turned to his friend and said: “I wish I knew how I could hold my boy in.” But my friend understood why he could not. He knew that only two or three years before the son had been rewarded for passing examinations at college, examinations that it ought to have been taken for granted that he would pass. But his father thought he should be rewarded for passing them, and he bought a car and sent it up to him at college. Now he wonders why this son does not know how to bind himself to arduous duty.

And in our own lives the easy education does not go easily all the way. There comes a time when, having always indulged ourselves, we can’t break the habit; when, never having taken our lives in our hands and reined them to the great ministries of mankind, we discover that we cannot. We find that we obey our caprices; follow any impulse; cannot stick to any task; do not know a principle when we see it; have no iron or steel anywhere in our character; are the riffraff of the world that the worthy men and women have to bear along as they go. In Mr. Kipling’s inelegant lines:

“We was rotten ’fore we started—we was never disciplined;We made it out a favour if an order was obeyed;Yes, every little drummer ’ad ’is rights and wrongs to mind,So we had to pay for teachin’—an’ we paid!”

“We was rotten ’fore we started—we was never disciplined;

We made it out a favour if an order was obeyed;

Yes, every little drummer ’ad ’is rights and wrongs to mind,

So we had to pay for teachin’—an’ we paid!”

Now I suggest that we put all this positively to ourselves, for every one of us knows that we are treading near some of the moral realities of weakness and need in our day and nation. Why should restraint, obedience, the authority of duty and God be let into our lives? In order that out of all these things self-control may come. And why should there be this submission and control of our lives by duty, and truth and God? Well, the reasons are obvious, the moment we begin to think about them.

There is the indisputable fact that the strongest and best men and women we know are men and women who were trained in this school, who some time during their life, and the earlier the better, passed under the discipline and influence of that chastening spoken about in the twelfth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, without which we are not children of a clean God. All around us are these men and women, fathers and mothers, who indulge their sons and daughters, who never confront them with moral principle and obligation and duty, and then lament because their children do not seem to have the old iron grasp of duty, the old rigid love of truth and righteousness. Well, it is all very simple. It is because those fathers and mothers are denying to their children the very education that made themselves what they are. The men and women, who will not run awayfrom any task, who stand steadfast in the truth, upon whose every word we can rest our whole soul, grew out of a certain discipline, a certain education, and it was the kind that Adonijah did not have. And all men and women who want to be masters of their lives and to have strength to lay beneath the work of the world must ask God that such discipline may be given to them.

Not alone is this the only kind of training that can produce this kind of character, but unless a man learns control from without, he will never learn self-control. Unless he passes under the discipline of a wiser and stronger hand at the beginning, he will never come to the time of deliberate and moral self-discipline, which alone is character. For this only is character,—the binding of life beneath the firm sovereignty of the principle that is the heart of God. If nations do not realize this they will pay heavily for their failure. “Make your educational laws strict,” said Ruskin, “and your criminal laws may be gentle; but leave youth its liberty and you will have to dig dungeons for age.”

And it is this that gives freedom. There is no freedom outside of character. Liberty, as Montesquieu says, is not freedom to do just as we please. Liberty is the ability to do as we ought. And the freedom that we need is not the freedom of caprice and whim and listening to our impulses. It is the freedom that enables oureyes clearly to see what right is, and then empowers us to do it. Symonds put it in his verse:

“Soul, rule thyself. On passion, deed, desire,Lay thou the law of thy deliberate will.Stand at thy chosen post, faith’s sentinel.Learn to endure. Thine the rewardOf those who make living light their Lord.Clad with celestial steel these stand secure,Masters, not slaves.”

“Soul, rule thyself. On passion, deed, desire,

Lay thou the law of thy deliberate will.

Stand at thy chosen post, faith’s sentinel.

Learn to endure. Thine the reward

Of those who make living light their Lord.

Clad with celestial steel these stand secure,

Masters, not slaves.”

And if such self-control goes as far even as the self-extinction of that voluntarily accepted Cross, on the green hill outside Jerusalem, even so it will bring victory at the last, because it has brought one long succession of victories over self all the days. I cut this fugitive bit of verse from a newspaper the other day:

“Pausing a moment ere the day was done,While yet the earth was scintillant with light,I backward glanced. From valley, plain and height,At intervals, where my life path had run,Rose cross on cross: and nailed upon each oneWas my dead self. And yet that gruesome sightLent sudden splendour to the falling night.Showing the conquests that my soul had won.“Up to the rising stars I looked and cried,There is no death! For year on year reborn,I wake to larger life, to joy more great.So many times have I been crucified,So often seen the resurrection morn,I go triumphant, though new Calvaries wait.”

“Pausing a moment ere the day was done,

While yet the earth was scintillant with light,

I backward glanced. From valley, plain and height,

At intervals, where my life path had run,

Rose cross on cross: and nailed upon each one

Was my dead self. And yet that gruesome sight

Lent sudden splendour to the falling night.

Showing the conquests that my soul had won.

“Up to the rising stars I looked and cried,There is no death! For year on year reborn,I wake to larger life, to joy more great.So many times have I been crucified,So often seen the resurrection morn,I go triumphant, though new Calvaries wait.”

“Up to the rising stars I looked and cried,

There is no death! For year on year reborn,

I wake to larger life, to joy more great.

So many times have I been crucified,

So often seen the resurrection morn,

I go triumphant, though new Calvaries wait.”

And this freedom and victory are waiting only for those lives that have been broken beneaththe cross of an absolute restraint of God, and have so mastered themselves under God’s name by the help of Christ that control has been given over in trust into their own hands.

And we all know that power is to be won here in this school where men are trained both to feel and to wield dominion. There is no power in the world that is not power cabined, power held in some way. Loose power is imperceptible and utterly useless. The only power we know is power walled in, shut down, confined and beating against its barriers and its walls. We know this in the athletic life of our colleges to-day. No athletic trainer in any college ever followed David’s method with Adonijah. The trainer is there to say: “Why did you do it that way?” “Why did you not do it this way? You have no right to waste your energy in that way. You must do it so.” There is one scene inQuo Vadisthat redeems much else in the book. It is the scene in the Coliseum, when the giant Gothic slave is shown saving the life of his mistress, whom he loved. The great bull has come out with the girl’s form tied to his horns, and there is dead silence as the bull stands angrily facing the man. You remember the picture. As Ursus lays one hand on each horn of the auroch the struggle begins. There is not a sound. The great multitude watches the man’s muscles rise and harden and the sweat come out and dropfrom every pore. They see his feet sinking down in the arena, until the sand is above his ankles. Suddenly the great head of the bull begins to twist under that awful strength. Then the neck breaks and the giant lifts the limp form from the beast’s neck and stands with the burden in his hands before the Emperor. One likes to read such a picture of power secured by self-discipline. Do we want to go out limp and beaten and ineffective in our lives against the great mass of work in the world that waits to be done? Or do we want to go in the strength of Him Who, having bent beneath His Father’s will, was able to carry on the Cross the whole burden of human sin?

And we must learn in this school the things we value and desire most: purity and delicacy and refinement of character, for they cannot be acquired elsewhere. So much social standing nowadays is uttered in terms of self-assertion and indulgence and the ability to have any whim or caprice gratified. This sort of self-assertion, this caprice, is regarded by many of us as the highest mark of social authority, whereas we know it is precisely the opposite, that it is self-restraint and self-control and self-surrender that mark the finest lives.

There is a beautiful story in the life of Goldwin Smith that illustrates what I mean. In the early sixties, when he was one of the keenest liberalminds of England, he was associated with Cobden and Bright in the Manchester School. Again and again he found himself the mark of the bitterest criticism from Disraeli. Later Goldwin Smith, resigning his professorship at Oxford, came to Canada. At that time Disraeli’s novel, “Lothair,” appeared in which he attacked Smith—of course, without using his name—as a social parasite. It stung Smith to the depths of his soul, but as it was an anonymous book there was nothing he could do but sit down and write this note personally to Disraeli:

“You well know that if you had ventured openly to accuse me of any social baseness, you would have had to answer for your words; but when sheltering yourself under the literary forms of a work of fiction, you seek to traduce with impunity the social character of a political opponent, your expressions can touch no man’s honour—they are the stingless insults of a coward.”

That was all he did. And yet, at that very moment, Goldwin Smith had in his possession letters of Disraeli, with which he could have crushed him. Openly in Parliament Disraeli had said that he had never asked Peel for any position. But among Peel’s papers which had been placed in his hands Smith had a letter in which Disraeli had abjectly begged Peel to give him office. All that Smith needed to do was to publish Disraeli’s own letter to Peel and it wouldhave ruined Disraeli’s career. But to Goldwin Smith that was not a noble thing to do. Peel’s correspondence had not been given to him to use in self-defense, or for any personal justification of his own, and he repressed that letter until Disraeli was dead. Then, years after, all of Peel’s correspondence was published and the whole world knew what a gentleman Goldwin Smith had been. Our modern ideals of what constitutes high social and national standing and character say: “Fight fire with fire. Dishonour releases honour from itself. He struck you foul; strike him so in return.” But the man who had learned self-restraint in the school of God’s loyalty and truth, who understood that power is ours, not to use for self-seeking, but for the good of men and for God’s honour, would not stoop to any such disloyalty and shame.

Once more. Whose judgment is of any value? Who would have thought of going to Adonijah and asking his opinion on anything whatsoever? He did not know right from wrong. He never thought over the issues of right or wrong. What would I like to do? What does passion bid me do? What is my whim or caprice for to-night?—that was as far as Adonijah had ever thought. No man would ever go to him, as no men will ever come to you and me if we have not been trained in the school of moral discrimination, if we have not looked on ethical principleand duty in deciding the question whether each thing is really right for us and for the whole world. If we are to be men and women to whom people will come for comfort and strength and guidance, to whom our own children can come with assurance that they will get the truth, we must be men and women who now place ourselves beneath the firm discipline of God.

We see all this put simply in two great things. We see it in our Lord’s constant appeal, while here in the world, for men and women of fiber and discipline. One came to Him and said: “Lord, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus, looking upon him, loved him and said: “I would not think of counselling anything hard. You must not sacrifice anything. It is all very easy. The Father above is a Father of great tenderness and compassion. He would not lay a straw’s weight upon any child of His. Go; live according to your desires and by the natural impulses of your heart, and for that you shall have treasure in heaven.” Oh, no; He did not say that. He said: “Go, sell all that thou hast, and come and follow me. Except ye love less than duty your father and mother and brother and sister, yea, and your own life also, ye cannot enter the kingdom of God.”

We see it, too, in God’s way with men as He laid down His great laws at the beginning, when His people were but as a race of little children.Why did He not say to them: “This ye may do. The world is sweet and fair. This ye may do, and all shall be easy to you”? Why, on the other hand, did He speak to them in the stern admonitions of the Decalogue: “Thou shalt. Thou shalt not”? God never hesitates to lay His great denials upon mankind and at last to stifle us beneath the restraint of death that He may issue us forth through that restraint into the infinite liberties of the life immortal.

Now do not brush all this away to-day, or any day, light-heartedly, as it can be so easily brushed away. “Oh, don’t shadow our lives,” you will say, “with your denials and your prohibitions and your restraints. Leave life free and sweet as the summer air and the flowers of the field”—that last how long? No, my friends, it were well for us that we should learn this lesson, and learn it now, ere the time comes when the silver cord is loosed and the wheel is broken at the cistern and the grinders cease and the long shadows fall. You remember a tragic incident in New York a few years ago—I do not need to recall the details of it—when two young lives made shipwreck of themselves just because they thought that impulse and caprice were the free voices that they might obey. When it was all over, and the two lives had drawn the veil of night across their short-lived evil joy, one of the papers published a letter which the girl had written to a friend:

“My friend,” she wrote, “you and I and Fred, young, heedless, cynical, living in this reckless town of New York, may laugh sometimes at the old things like law and religion, when they say, ‘Thou shalt not.’ We may think that phrase was written for old fogies, and we may sneer at ‘the wages of sin is death’; but, my friend, there comes to us some time knowledge that the law and religion are right. What they say we shall not do, we cannot do without suffering. Fred and I have learned that. The wages of sin is death.”

It is worse than death; for what was Hell in that great vision that John saw? Why, nothing but the removal of all restraint. “He which is filthy, let him be filthy still.” He is unclean, let him be unclean. He is unholy, let him be unholy. Take all the restraints away. That is Hell.

Away from the dark gates that open thither may another voice call us here to-day, the clear, strong, summoning voice of Him Who said of Himself: “I came not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me. I do always those things that please my Father,” and Who in the garden of Gethsemane, when the anguish was almost greater than He could bear, yet found rest when He prayed, “Father, not my will, but thine be done”; that out of the willfulness and capriciousness and the whim and mood of our little self-indulgent lives we may pass into the great, strong, steadfast, sovereign will that waits for us;that we may stand fast and be strong in the strength and chastening of God!

Now I have put it—this matter of our need of discipline—in the most personal and individual way, but it is our great national and corporate need. The body of a nation can only exist through the ordered discipline of its members and the spirit of a nation like the spirit of a man needs to be cleansed of all the lusts of willfulness and self-indulgence. The spirit of our American nation needs such cleansing. Mr. Kipling has drawn us his picture of it:

“Through many roads, by me possessed,He shambles forth in cosmic guise;He is the Jester and the Jest,And he the Text himself applies.“His easy unswept hearth he lendsFrom Labrador to Guadaloupe;Till, elbowed out by sloven friends,He camps, at sufferance, on the stoop.“Calm-eyed he scoffs at sword and crown,Or panic-blinded stabs and slays:Blatant he bids the world bow down,Or cringing begs a crust of praise;“Or, sombre-drunk, at mine and mart,He dubs his dreary brethren Kings.His hands are black with blood—his heartLeaps, as a babe’s, at little things.“But, through the shift of mood and mood,Mine ancient humour saves him whole—The cynic devil in his bloodThat bids him mock his hurrying soul;“That bids him flout the Law he makes,That bids him make the Law he flouts,Till, dazed by many doubts, he wakesThe drumming guns that—have no doubts;“That checks him foolish-hot and fond,That chuckles through his deepest ire,That gilds the slough of his despondBut dims the goal of his desire;“Inopportune, shrill-accented,The acrid Asiatic mirthThat leaves him, careless ’mid his dead,The scandal of the elder earth.”

“Through many roads, by me possessed,He shambles forth in cosmic guise;He is the Jester and the Jest,And he the Text himself applies.

“Through many roads, by me possessed,

He shambles forth in cosmic guise;

He is the Jester and the Jest,

And he the Text himself applies.

“His easy unswept hearth he lendsFrom Labrador to Guadaloupe;Till, elbowed out by sloven friends,He camps, at sufferance, on the stoop.

“His easy unswept hearth he lends

From Labrador to Guadaloupe;

Till, elbowed out by sloven friends,

He camps, at sufferance, on the stoop.

“Calm-eyed he scoffs at sword and crown,Or panic-blinded stabs and slays:Blatant he bids the world bow down,Or cringing begs a crust of praise;

“Calm-eyed he scoffs at sword and crown,

Or panic-blinded stabs and slays:

Blatant he bids the world bow down,

Or cringing begs a crust of praise;

“Or, sombre-drunk, at mine and mart,He dubs his dreary brethren Kings.His hands are black with blood—his heartLeaps, as a babe’s, at little things.

“Or, sombre-drunk, at mine and mart,

He dubs his dreary brethren Kings.

His hands are black with blood—his heart

Leaps, as a babe’s, at little things.

“But, through the shift of mood and mood,Mine ancient humour saves him whole—The cynic devil in his bloodThat bids him mock his hurrying soul;

“But, through the shift of mood and mood,

Mine ancient humour saves him whole—

The cynic devil in his blood

That bids him mock his hurrying soul;

“That bids him flout the Law he makes,That bids him make the Law he flouts,Till, dazed by many doubts, he wakesThe drumming guns that—have no doubts;

“That bids him flout the Law he makes,

That bids him make the Law he flouts,

Till, dazed by many doubts, he wakes

The drumming guns that—have no doubts;

“That checks him foolish-hot and fond,That chuckles through his deepest ire,That gilds the slough of his despondBut dims the goal of his desire;

“That checks him foolish-hot and fond,

That chuckles through his deepest ire,

That gilds the slough of his despond

But dims the goal of his desire;

“Inopportune, shrill-accented,The acrid Asiatic mirthThat leaves him, careless ’mid his dead,The scandal of the elder earth.”

“Inopportune, shrill-accented,

The acrid Asiatic mirth

That leaves him, careless ’mid his dead,

The scandal of the elder earth.”

Doubtless we do not like this picture. We call it a libel or a caricature. Let it be so. Draw your own picture. If there is any truth or faithfulness in it, if it is not blind with national vanity and self-deceit, it will still be a revelation of national need of discipline and of self-empire.

And how can such discipline and self-empire be won? Well, it will not be won on any ground of prudential expediency or practical self-interest. It is well for men and nations to discern their moral shortcomings and to realize their need of a new character. But there are no automatic processes of community salvation. The disciplined nation comes in only one way—by the answers of individuals to the austere call of the one Person who can remake character and mould the stuff of manhood and nationality. The austere call! This is the nation’s need and it is the fundamental summons and the central noteof Christianity. “Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.”

The appeal of Christ was always addressed to the sacrificial and the heroic. In every call which He issued to men there is this unmistakable note of austerity. He never smooths things over for the sake of pleasing people or of winning followers. There were times when He seemed almost needlessly to draw in these repelling aspects of discipleship, and to make the conditions of following Him unnecessarily hard. It is related that it came to pass that, as they went in the way, a certain man said unto Him, “Lord, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest.” And Jesus said unto him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.” And He said unto another, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father.” Jesus said unto him, “Let the dead bury their dead; but go thou and preach the kingdom of God.” And another also said, “Lord, I will follow thee; but let me first go bid them farewell which are at home at my house.” And Jesus said unto him, “No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Christ never concealed His own judgmentsand convictions as to life’s values in these matters, and spoke with the greatest scorn of all indulgence and softness of life. “What went ye out for to see?” He asked the people, regarding John. “A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, they that wear soft clothing are in king’s houses.” He was looking after men of iron and of austerity. “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.”

The beautiful thing is that this appeal of Christ’s was not futile. Instead of repelling men it drew them. He actually obtained the men whom He was hunting for, not by offering them worldly inducements, not by making such appeals as anybody but Christ would have made, but by addressing the sacrificial spirit in them, and making an appeal to their latent capacity for heroism. There is a wonderful tribute in Jesus’ method to those characteristics in human nature which have never been destroyed, which can answer to the highest motives, which do not need to be bought by any low compensations, but which spring into full life when appealed to on the most heroic and unselfish plane. We know how, in consequence, this exultation in difficulties, this love of hardship, this scorn of ease became the characteristic note of early Christianity. In the best summary description which Saint Paul gives of Christian characterand manhood, in the twelfth chapter of Romans we find him speaking of “rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation.” And when he comes to write his conception of the character of the happy warrior, we find him setting this in the foreground, “Endure hardship, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.” The praise of the New Testament is never given to those who have lived in luxurious, indulgent ease. It is for that little company of men and women who have loved the difficult tasks, and who with joy trod the rough ways that transcend the stars. Every one of the great New Testament leaders is a man who exalts for us this same love of moral hardship, this same scorn of indulgence and smooth ease, and this same virtue of steadfastness, “And not only so,” says Paul, “but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh stedfastness; and stedfastness, experience; and experience, hope.” And Peter writes, “Yea, and for this very cause adding on your part all diligence, in your faith supply virtue; and in your virtue knowledge; and in your knowledge self-control; and in your self-control stedfastness; and in your stedfastness godliness.” James joins in, “My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience.” And you remember the description which John gives of himself in Revelation as“your brother and partaker with you in the tribulation and kingdom and stedfastness which are in Jesus.”

Now, we ask ourselves the question why our Lord poured out all this scorn on what the world counts the desirable condition and atmosphere of life, why the New Testament has no patience with self-seeking, indulgence, contentment, or ease as the standard of a human life, why it speaks contemptuously of smooth ease of every kind, and exalts, instead, the austere life, the life of strength, and of self-discipline, why our Lord said to men when He came to call them into the best thing there was in the world, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow after me.”

Well, one reason why the whole New Testament pours out such contempt upon the smooth life and exalts hardness, is because only hardness can make a great soul, and the end of the Gospel, the end of life, was the growing of souls. The words of Socrates, understood in the social sense which he intended and not selfishly, contain the central end. “For I do nothing,” said he, “but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul.” It is true, in a sense, that we are here for the work we can do, but it is also true, in a yetdeeper sense, that we are here to become the best workmen that we can become, and that the work we do has a large measure of its value in its reflex power of making us capable of doing better work. Evidently this is not the real workshop where God needs His best men and women. When He has perfected His workmen and workwomen and recognizes that they are prepared to do their best work, does He make use of them here? Never. He takes them elsewhere, where evidently the real work is to be done. Everything we see in this world would seem to indicate that it is only the preparatory school, a place where men and women are equipped for the real thing, that the career that is to abide lies elsewhere than here. The purpose of these days is to make us ready for the work God has for us to do in a larger sphere than this, where we pass on, as Chinese Gordon told Mr. Huxley, to have a larger government given to us to administer. God pours out His contempt on smoothness of life because it cannot make greatness of soul, and greatness of soul is one object of our being here.

The Christian ideal despised, also, this smoothness which seems to many of us the most desirable thing that life has for us, because there is such little knowledge given with it. At best it can only play on the very surface of life. We know no more than springs out of the deep experiencethrough which we pass. You remember the lines of Father Tabb:

“‘Where wast thou, little song,That hast delayed so longTo come to me?’‘Mute in the mind of GodTill where thy feet had trodI followed thee.’”

“‘Where wast thou, little song,

That hast delayed so long

To come to me?’

‘Mute in the mind of God

Till where thy feet had trod

I followed thee.’”

It is only where we have gone that we know the way; it is only the experience in life that we have passed through that gives us our true knowledge of life, because the end of life is its relationships, and wealth of life depends on the breadth of true knowledge and the riches of true relationship. Smoothness of life is simply deadening because it keeps us out of what is real life.

And Christianity derided smoothness of life, and scorned it, because it separates us from fellowship with the noble and suffering life of God. You know the long controversy in theology as to whether the idea of suffering is compatible with the idea of a perfect God. There have been some theologians who insist it could not be possible that God should suffer. If He could suffer, He could not be God. Well, I suppose all of us here are prepared without one moment of hesitation to range ourselves on the other side, and to say that if God cannot suffer He cannot be our God. He could not be a father if He did not suffer. Christ could nothave been the revelation of Him if He is not a suffering God; for “He was the man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” What He laid bare was a heart of love sharing the anguish of others; for we have not a Father who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities,—We can say that of Him because of what we know of Him who revealed Him,—We have not a Father who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, no impassive God sitting where “no sound of human sorrow mounts to mar His sacred everlasting calm,” but a Father who pities His children, who enters into their life, and who loves them with all His soul. We can have no knowledge of that God, no fellowship with His life, if what we are living is the smooth, easy, indulgent life, everything bought for us by others, nothing done by us for others, no blood of sacrifice colouring our life red with the glow of God and His incarnate Son. The New Testament despises the smooth life that makes it impossible for men and women to have any part in the deepest life of their Father.

And the New Testament scorns the smooth, indulgent life because it cannot connect men and women with the real springs of strength and of power. No strong man was ever made against no resistance. We develop no physical power by putting forth no physical effort. All the strength of life we have we get by pushingagainst opposition. We acquire power as we draw it out of deep experience and effort. And the new Christian ideal made no place for indulgence and ease because these things leave men and women weak, with no strength either themselves to bear or to achieve for others. It is as Mrs. King puts it in Ugo Bassi’s “Sermon in the Hospital”:

“The Vine from every living limb bleeds wine;Is it the poorer for the spirit shed?The drunkard and the wanton drink thereof;Are they the richer for that gift’s excess?Measure thy life by loss instead of gain;Not by the wine drunk, but the wine poured forthFor love’s strength standeth in love’s sacrifice;And whoso suffers most hath most to give.God said to Man and Woman, ‘By thy sweat,And by thy travail, thou shalt conquer earth,’Not, by thy ease or pleasure:—and no goodOr glory of this life but comes by pain.How poor were earth if all its martrydoms,If all its struggling sighs of sacrificeWere swept away, and all were satiate-smooth,If this were such a heaven of soul and senseAs some have dreamed of;—and we human still.Nay, we were fashioned not for perfect peaceIn this world, howsoever in the next:And what we win and hold is through some strife.”

“The Vine from every living limb bleeds wine;

Is it the poorer for the spirit shed?

The drunkard and the wanton drink thereof;

Are they the richer for that gift’s excess?

Measure thy life by loss instead of gain;

Not by the wine drunk, but the wine poured forth

For love’s strength standeth in love’s sacrifice;

And whoso suffers most hath most to give.

God said to Man and Woman, ‘By thy sweat,And by thy travail, thou shalt conquer earth,’Not, by thy ease or pleasure:—and no goodOr glory of this life but comes by pain.How poor were earth if all its martrydoms,If all its struggling sighs of sacrificeWere swept away, and all were satiate-smooth,If this were such a heaven of soul and senseAs some have dreamed of;—and we human still.Nay, we were fashioned not for perfect peaceIn this world, howsoever in the next:And what we win and hold is through some strife.”

God said to Man and Woman, ‘By thy sweat,

And by thy travail, thou shalt conquer earth,’

Not, by thy ease or pleasure:—and no good

Or glory of this life but comes by pain.

How poor were earth if all its martrydoms,

If all its struggling sighs of sacrifice

Were swept away, and all were satiate-smooth,

If this were such a heaven of soul and sense

As some have dreamed of;—and we human still.

Nay, we were fashioned not for perfect peace

In this world, howsoever in the next:

And what we win and hold is through some strife.”

And it was because our Lord knew this that He set over against men’s wills the strait door of the kingdom of life. He did not betray the trust that had been given to Him. He did not say,“Come, I will make life easy for you.” He did not say, “Come, let us indulge ourselves to heart’s content.” He said, “If any man will come after me, let him leave all that behind, let him deny himself, and let him take up his cross daily, and let him come after me.”

Now, I know what many of us will be saying of all this. We will be saying, “God did not bring us into the world with any cross. All our life long has been a sheltered life. None of this hardness of which you speak has ever come to us. Maybe our fathers and mothers knew it before us, but they have shielded us from its pressure. Are we to go back to crudeness and asceticism for the good of our souls? Are we who have no cross deliberately to take our smooth lives and roughen them?” Yes, that is precisely what I am saying. Those of us who were not born with a cross must find one, those whose lives have been smooth are deliberately to find ways of roughening them, so that we may know a life of power and fellowship with the suffering God, and can go out to real work, and be prepared for that greater life and greater service which await us elsewhere than here.

We shall not have any great difficulty in obeying this call of Christ to roughen our lives. There are many crosses in the world too heavy for the men and women who are trying to carry them. We can go out and find one of thesecrosses and help to bear it. They are not far away. Here is a clipping from the New YorkSun:

“A comely young Hungarian woman with a three-months-old baby in her arms dropped to the sidewalk at Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street late yesterday afternoon and lay half conscious. An ambulance surgeon who came said the woman was starving and that her baby had bronchitis.“The woman recovered enough to tell the surgeon that she was Mrs. Mary Scheinn, twenty years old, and that her husband had died recently. She had been living with a friend at 97 Seigel Street, Brooklyn, she said, but this woman also was very poor and expected to be evicted to-day, so Mrs. Scheinn had walked to New York to try to get her sick child into a hospital. She tramped from hospital to hospital, and everywhere they refused to take the child, she said. But she kept up the quest until she gave out. She had had nothing to eat since yesterday and little then.“The ambulance took the woman and child to Bellevue Hospital. Both are in a rather serious condition.”

“The woman recovered enough to tell the surgeon that she was Mrs. Mary Scheinn, twenty years old, and that her husband had died recently. She had been living with a friend at 97 Seigel Street, Brooklyn, she said, but this woman also was very poor and expected to be evicted to-day, so Mrs. Scheinn had walked to New York to try to get her sick child into a hospital. She tramped from hospital to hospital, and everywhere they refused to take the child, she said. But she kept up the quest until she gave out. She had had nothing to eat since yesterday and little then.

“The ambulance took the woman and child to Bellevue Hospital. Both are in a rather serious condition.”

Being young and comely, doubtless, if she had not had the baby, some pimp or other American citizen, for a consideration within her power, might have helped her, but being innocent and carrying a baby there she stood until she fell down, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, in the heart of the city, a woman carrying a baby and a cross that were too heavy for her. There were millions of Christian peopleround about her. Thousands of us never knew what a cross was and we let the woman with her child in her arms fall down under the weight of hers. This world is black with the shadows of crosses. If we have none of our own, in the name of the great Cross, let us borrow one.

Here is a note from a girl. She is one of thousands and the note is real. I had been speaking in one of the New York churches and the next day came a letter from her asking me, if I really believed what I had said, to answer some questions for her. I wrote in reply and this was part of her answer: “The great trouble with me is that I have to fight continually against despondency. Life to me is a series of sorrows and troubles, that accumulate and grow larger, and just when I am at the point of giving up altogether some little word or act deters me.... I know I would be happy if I were, as you say, truly trustful towards God, but God to me seems very far off and rather mythical. Your letter, also the fact that you wrote, was a help to me. The part that perhaps appealed to me most was the idea that God and God’s love are longing for us. It is very fine to feel that when one is always lonesome.” I learned more of her story but it is not for telling here. It was a cross too heavy for her which she was trying to bear. Women who knew her lifted its weight for her, taking it over upon themselves.

And not only by taking up crosses, of which the world is full, can we roughen our lives. Many of us can do it by simply cutting off some of our waste and extravagance. There are many of us who never ask before we spend money, “How can I get the greatest return from this money?” We waste it like water, while Belgium, Serbia, Poland and Armenia call. It is said that there are thirty million people in India who have only one meal a day, and who never know what it is to have enough to eat. Some of them say that if they could have enough to eat for just two days, they would be willing to lie down and die content. Again and again, hundreds of thousands of people in China have been the victims of famine, while we were throwing wealth away. We can roughen life a bit by denying ourselves, by abridging expenditure and devoting the money to human need and to some of the services the world is dying for.

Students often reject the ethical and economic arguments against gambling. These arguments are valid but it is very hard to get a clutch for them on many minds. You can point out how dishonourable and essentially immoral it is for a man to have money which he did not earn, for which he gave no equivalent, which came to him as no expression of friendship or by no legitimate inheritance. All this is clear to the healthy and manly moral sense. But the gamblerdoes not have such a sense. I have often wondered that the case is not more frequently put from the other side, from the side of the wrong of spending money in gambling. When a man has won on a bet the moral question is lulled but when he has lost there is a chastened mood which can be invited to reflect. What moral warrant did he have for throwing his money away? What does he have to show for it? A million hungry hands were outstretched to him, a world of want and suffering called towards him over land and sea? And he threw his money away—got nothing for it, did nothing with it. In a world like ours, there are parched lips waiting for drink; there are hungry mouths in need of bread:—do we have any right to waste in indulgence in a world like this? Men should scrutinize every dollar that passes through their hands and ask, “What is the very best thing that I can do with this?”

And frugality, self-imposed for the sake of service, will come back to us in rich reward in character and power. Horace Bushnell drew a noble picture of the fruitage of true parsimony in his address at the Litchfield County Centennial in 1851, on “The Age of Homespun”:

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