This sympathetic atmosphere makes great preachers and great men. In return, there flows from a pastor toward his people a love that few can know or understand.
2. His rule is also over spiritual enthusiasm. What is a revival? We confound it with a local excitement, a community-sensation of an hysterical and passing type—with sensational disturbances, falling exercises, shouts, weeping, and the like. A revival is something far different. A revival is an awakening of the community heart and mind. It is a quickening of dead, backsliding, or inattentive souls.
Man as an individual is quite a different person from the same man in a crowd. One is himself alone; the other is himself, plus the influence of the Social Mind. A revival is a social state, in which the social religious enthusiasm is stirred up. It is a lofty form of religion, just as the patriotism which breaks forth in tears and cheers as troops go out to war is a finer type than the mere excitement and fervor of one patriotic man. What would the Queen's Jubilee have been, if but one soldier had marched up and down? A great commemoration! If we grant the reality of national rejoicing in the royal jubilees, commercial rejoicing in business men's processions, university enthusiasm on Commencement Day—shall we not grant the reality of the religious interest and enthusiasm of a great revival, in which whole communities shall be led to a clearer knowledge of spiritual things?
The Crusades were a magnificent revival. The Reformation was a revival. The Salvation Army movement is a revival. But the greatest revival of all times is even now upon us: it is a revival in the scientific circles of the race. Time was when science and religion were supposed to be at odds; to-day the intellectual phalanxes are sweeping Christward with an impetus that is sublime! Thinkers are finding in the large life of religion a motive power for their thought, their growth—a reason for their existence—a forecast of their destiny. We are beginning to realize the dynamic value of Belief. This revival is coming, not with shouts and noise, but with the quiet insistence of new ideas, of new facts—with the still voice of scientific announcement. The atheist is being overcome, not by emotion, but by evidence; the scoffer is being put down by cool logic.
Hence the evangelist of to-day is more than a man who can popularly address a public audience, and by tales and tears arouse a weeping commotion. The evangelist is a man of intellect and prayer, who can preach the gospel to a scientific age, and to a thinking coterie—a coterie of college men and mechanics, of society women and servant-girls, of poets and of mine-diggers, of convicts and of reformers. To-day calls for the utmost intellectual resources of the teacher of the truth, for a great imagination, great style, great sympathy with men, large learning, and unceasing prayer!
3. His rule is over social ideals. He must be a man of social insight. The social spirit is abroad in the world, but it is woefully erratic and misguided. Any one thinks he can be an altruist. Why not? Take a class in a college settlement, make some bibs for a day nursery, give tramps a C.O.S. card, with one's compliments, and attend about six lectures a year on Philanthropy—the lectures very good indeed. One is then a full-fledged altruist,n'est-ce pas?
The philanthropy of to-day has a bewildering iridescence of aspect. Each present impulse is reformatory. Correction, like a centipede, shows a hundred legs and wants to run upon them all. Much of the so-called philanthropy is not well balanced and is run by cranks. Cranks attach themselves to any social movement, as a shaggy gown will gather burrs. It is not all of philanthropy to classify degenerates, titter at ignorance, and to go a-peeping through the slums! We have not yet realized the fulness of redemption. Of what avail is it to save one street-Arab, or one Chinaman, if a million Arabs and Chinamen remain unsaved? Redemption is a race-savior: it seizes not only the individual, but his environment, his friends, and his future state.
The true minister is a reformer. A reformer is one who re-crystallizes the social ideals of man, who breaks up idols and bad customs, and sweeps away abuses. But we must first ask: What is an idol? What is a bad custom? What is an abuse? They are social standards which are out of harmony with true concepts of God, life, and duty. Behind the work of the reformer is the dream of the reformer, the meditation of the mystic, the seer. He must first have in mind a plain, clear conception of what the relation is of man to God, of what man's environment should be, and of what the society of the Kingdom should be. The reformer is one who changes an existing social environment for approximately this ideal environment of his own thought. When he breaks an idol, it is not the idol itself that he everlastingly hates, it is the materialistic concept of the community. What he wishes in place of the idol is a right conception. No man could break up every idol in the Sandwich Islands. But a man went about implanting a spiritual idea of God, and the idols disappeared.
Hence the work of the reformer is deep and heart-searching work. It means constant study of the spiritual needs of the age, continual insight into the material forces which are moulding the age-images, money, conquest, or whatever they may be. He wishes to maintain a spiritual hold on civilization itself, so to transform the ideal within a man, a community, a nation, in regard to custom, observance, belief, that the outer rite shall follow.
To reform is not to rush through the slums, and then preach a sensational sermon about bad places in the slums, of which most people never knew before! To reform is to know something of the conditions which produce the slums—it is not to scatter the slum-people broadcast elsewhere in the town; it is not alone to give them baths, playgrounds, circulating libraries of books and pictures, dancing-parties, and social clubs. To reform the slums is to set up a new ideal of God, and of righteous conduct in the heart of the slum-dwellers. One must know something of the slow processes of social change, of social assimilation, growth, and stability, to have an intellectual perception of the problem, as well as a spiritual one. One does not make an ill-fed child strong by stuffing five pounds of oatmeal down its throat!
The reformer must not only be a man of energy, he must be a man of patience. Great reforms come slowly. As man has advanced, idleness, indolence, brutality, tyranny, drunkenness, cant, and social scorn are gradually being cast out. But behind these simple words lie hid centuries of strife and endeavor, and limitless darkenings of human hope.
To fly against vice is merely to invite enmity and opposition. To present a pure and noble ideal, to breathe forth a holy atmosphere for the soul, are constructive works. The trouble is not, that the ministers preach on social themes—all themes that concern the life of man are social themes. It is that they do piece-work and patch-work of reform, instead of plain, direct upbuilding work in the souls and consciences of men. To preach upon horse-stealing is one thing. The horse-stealer may be impressed, convicted, made penitent, and return the stolen horse. But not until his heart is imbued with a spiritual conception of honesty, as the law of God, will he steal a stray horse no more. Hence the first questions in reform are not: How many groggeries are there in my parish? How many corrupt polls? How many hypocrites on my church-roll? The question is: How is my parish society in enmity to the highest spiritual ideal I know? Many men preach about saloons, when they ought to be preaching about Christ.
The force of this reform-energy is uncomputed. We hear of occasional great reformers, but forget that there has been a prevailing influence extending over the ages, of holy men of God, who have preached and taught and prayed; who have preserved our social institutions of spiritual import, and have been a mighty and continuous force working for righteousness and peace.
Missions are a higher form of politics. To further missions is to further government, international comity, world-peace.
4. His rule is over creed. He is inevitably a teacher of doctrine.
What is doctrine? Doctrine is spiritual truth, formulated in a systematic way. It is also, in church matters, a system of truth which has been believed in, and clung to, by a body of believers constituting some branch of the catholic Church.
It is a noble and serious office to hand down from generation to generation the faith and traditions of the Church of God. But this handing-down must be upright. "You must bind nothing upon your charges," says Jeremy Taylor, "but what God hath bound upon you." Conviction is at the root of the lasting traditions of the Church. Only this—his conviction—can one man really teach another. If he try to speak otherwise, he shall have a lolling and unsteady tongue.
No soul is finally held by the indefinite, or the namby-pamby. It begins to question, Upon what foundation does this phrase, this fine sentiment, rest? It must stand upon a proposition. This proposition rests either upon a scientific fact, or upon that which, for want of a more definite term, we call the religious instinct of man. But a proposition cannot standalone. It is connected with other propositions, arguments, conclusions. Hence a system of logic, of philosophy, of expressed belief, of doctrine, inevitably grows up in a thinking community, a thinking Church.
The statement of an ecclesiastical system of doctrine may not be the absolutely true one, nor the final one. Doctrine changes, even as scientific theories change with fuller information. Doctrine also expands, with the growth of the human spirit and understanding. To-day, in one's library, one has a thousand books. They are shelved and catalogued, for reference, in a special order. But years hence, one's grandson, who inherits these books, may have ten thousand books. The aspect of the library is changed. It is filled with new volumes, and new thought. Shall we give a liberty to a man's library which we refuse to his belief? Must he—and his church—have only his grandfather's ideas, standards, and decrees?
The tenets of a sect are the theological arrangement of belief which for the present seems best; it is the systematic arrangement of facts so far examined, determined, and classified. But no system of theology can be final. Thought is moving on. Experience is progressive. Providence is continually revealing. The race is a creed-builder, as well as a builder of pyramids, cathedrals, and triumphal arches.
The building-up of doctrine is superb. Into doctrine are woven the intellectual beliefs, the emotional experiences, and the spiritual struggles of mankind. Doctrine is an attempt to classify the spiritual problems of the race and to present a theory of redemption which shall be adequate, spiritually progressive, and the exact expression, so far as yet revealed, of the will of God for man. All Christian doctrine is centred about one point: the redemption of the race from sin. Dealing with such great and fundamental themes, each system of doctrine is an intellectual triumph.
Doctrine is an intellectual necessity. Christ is not sporadic, either in history or philosophy. To teach Christ, as the unlettered savage may who has just learned of Christ the Saviour and turns to teach his fellow-savages, might do good or save a soul from death. But in order to command the intellectual respect of the race, there must be another form of teaching yet than this, a teaching which presents Christ in the historic and philosophic setting: the central Figure in a great body of associated spiritual truth; Christ as the fulfilment of prophecy, the means of social adjustment and regeneration; the Finisher of our Faith, and the Source of eternal joy. We must be, not less spiritual Christians, but increasingly intellectual ones, as time rolls on.
Who are the men who have built up doctrine? Men speak as if doctrine were an ecclesiastical toy—to be shaken by priest or prelate, as one shakes a rattle, for noise, for play! A doctrine is not a toy; it is the crystallized belief of earnest, thoughtful, and godly men—belief which has passed into a church tradition, and is now received as an act of faith.
Shall doctrine be taught a child? Yes! To have a specific doctrine clearly in mind does not fetter the young soul, any more than to be taught the apparent facts of geography and history, which may change either in reality or in his own interpretation as his mind matures. A doctrine is a practical and definite thing to work with; in later life to believe, and to approve of, or disbelieve, and disapprove of. If a man wishes to build a house, does it fetter him to know square measure, cubic contents, geometry, mensuration, and mechanical laws? Yet when he builds his house, he builds it in his own individual way; he stamps it with his own personality and ideas. While building it, perchance, he discovers some new relation or geometric law.
Doctrine does not save from hell, but it does save from many a snare that besets the feet of man. It is a steadier of life, a strengthener of hope, a stalwart aid to a practical, devout, and duty-doing life. A catechism is a system of doctrine expressed in its simplest form. Therefore, for the intellectual and moral training of the Church, let us have sound doctrine in the pulpit, and the catechism in the home and Sabbath-school.
It is objected that doctrinal terminology is too hard for a child to understand. Is this not absurd, when the same child can come home from school and talk glibly of a parallelepipedon, a rhombus, rhomboid, polyhedral angle, archipelago, law of primogeniture, the binomial theorem, and of a dicotyledon! He also learns French, German, Latin, Greek, and theargotof the public school!
The theological leader of to-day cannot be a creed-monger: he must be a creed-maker. Side by side with the executive officers who will reorganize the Christian forces, there will stand great creed-makers, giant theologians, firm, logical, scientific, and convincing, who, out of the vast array of new facts brought forth by modern science, will produce new creeds, a new catechism, a new dogmatic series. It is worth while to live in these days—to know the possibility of such monumental constructive work in one's own lifetime. The creed-makers must have a thorough literary training; no mere vocabulary of philosophy will answer. Like the Elizabethan divines, they must rule the living word, which shall echo for a century yet to come.
As the great Ecumenical Council was convened for missionary progress, so the times are now ripe for the assembling of a historic Theological Council, to revise and restate, not one denominational catechism, but the creed of Christendom; to provide a new literary expression of the Christian faith. Together we are working in God's world, and for His kingdom.
If doctrine be the crystallized thought and belief of godly men, what is heresy? What is schism? Who is dictator of doctrine? How far are the limits of authority to be pressed? What are the bounds of ecclesiastical control? of intellectual mandate in the Christian Church?
In the academic world, we do not cast a man out of his mathematical chair because he can also work in astro-physics or in psycho-physics. If he can pursue advanced research in an allied or applied field, it will help him in his regular and prescribed work. We do not cast an English professor out of his chair, because he announces that there are two manuscripts of Layamon'sBrut, and that the text of Beówulf has been many times worked over, before we have received it in its present form. Yet there are accredited professors of English who do not know these facts, and who, if called upon, could neither prove them nor disprove them. They have not worked in the Bodleian, in the British Museum, or in other foreign libraries, on Old English texts and authorities. They think themselves well up in Old English if they can translate the text of Beówulf fairly well, remember its most difficult vocabulary, and can tell a tale or two from theBrut.
Not every man has Europe or Asia in his backyard, nor a lifetime of leisure for research, for special learning, on the moot questions of church-scholarship. Progress consists in each man's doing his best to advance the interests of the kingdom of God in his own special sphere. From others he must take something for granted. The ear of the Church ought always to be open to the sayings of the specialist. A Church should grant liberty of research, of thought, of speech—to a degree.
But whatever may come out of twentieth-century or thirtieth-century combats, one thing remains clear: A Church is an organization, a social body, with a certain doctrine to proclaim, a certain faith to hand down to men. The doctrine is not in all details final—each phase of faith may change. But the organization, to protect its own purity and integrity—however generous in allowing individual research, and the expression of individual ideas—must exert authority over the teachers in her midst, those who are called by her name, who have her children in their charge, and for whose teaching the Church, as a whole, is responsible. There is doubtless a time when the man who is really in advance of his times intellectually must be misunderstood, must be disagreed with, must be cast out. But all truth may await the verdict of time. If he has discovered something new, something true, the centuries will make it plain. There remains a chance—and the Church dare not risk too great a chance—that he is mistaken, impious, presumptuous, or self-deceived. We dare not rush to a new doctrine or spiritual conception, merely because one man, who knows more of a certain kind of learning than we do, has said so. One must be bolstered up by a generation of convinced and believing men, before he can draw a Church after him. No other process is intellectually legitimate. In any other event ecclesiastical anarchy would reign. To maintain the historic position of the Church is a necessity, until that position is proven untrue. So to maintain it is not bigotry, it is not lack of charity; it is merely common-sense.
The question, Where is the line between ecclesiastical integrity and individual freedom? is therefore one which the common-sense of Christendom is left to solve—not to-day, not to-morrow, but gradually, generously, and conscientiously, as the centuries go on.
It is said that a minister is greatly handicapped to-day in all his efforts for two reasons: First, that the times are spiritually lethargic, that men are so engrossed by material aims, indifference, or sin that a pastor can get no hold upon their hearts. Second, that he is bound hand and foot by conditions existing in the organization and personnel of his church, and hence is not free to act.
What would we think of an electrician who would complain that a storm had cast down his network of wires? Of a civil engineer who would lament that the mountain over which he was asked to project a road was steep? Of a doctor who would grieve that hosts of people about him were very ill? Of a statesman who would cry out that horrid folks opposed him? It is the work of the specialist to meet emergencies, and it is his professional pride to triumph over difficult conditions. The harder his task, the more he exults in his power of success.
It is a glorious task that lies before the minister of to-day—to maintain, develop, and uplift the spiritual life of the most wonderful epoch of the world's history; to place upon human souls that vital touch that shall hold their powers subject to eternal influences and aims. The times are not wholly unfavorable: our era, which spurns many ecclesiastical forms, is at heart essentially religious.The World for Christ!How this war-cry of the spirit thrills anew as one realizes how much more there is to win to-day than ever before. The Warrior girds himself and longs eagerly to marshal great, shining, active hosts for God!
It is true that the conditions of work are more trying than they have usually been. A man goes out from the seminary. He has had a good education, followed by perhaps a year or two abroad, and some practical experience in sociological work. He has plans, ideas, ideals, a vigorous and whole-souled personality, a frank and generous heart.
What does he find? He soon discovers that the battle is not always to the strong, the educated, or the well-bred. Too often he is at the mercy of rich men who can scarcely put together a grammatical sentence; of poorer men who are, in church affairs, unscrupulous politicians; of women who carp and gossip; and of all sorts of men and women who desire to rule, criticise, hinder, and distrain. They, too, are the very people who, in the ears of God and of the community, have vowed to love him and to uphold his work! The more intellectual and spiritual he is, the more he is troubled and distressed.
Many churches, too, are in a chronic state of internal war. As for these rising church difficulties—try to put out a burning bunch of fire-crackers with one finger, and you have the sort of task he has in hand. While one point of explosion is being firmly suppressed, other crackers are spitting and going off. Whichever way he turns, and whatever he does, something pops angrily, and a new blaze begins! And this business, incredibly petty as it is, blocks the progress of the Christian faith. Men and women of education and refinement, of a wide outlook and noble thoughts and deeds, are more and more unwilling to place themselves on the church-roll; a minister sometimes finds himself in the anomalous position of having the more cultured, congenial, and philanthropic people of the community quite outside any church organization.
All these things mean, not that a minister must grow discouraged, but that he must set his teeth, and with pluck and endurance rise strong and masterful and say, This shall not be! Let him not listen to the barking and baying: let him hearken to the great primal voices of man and nature. Love lies deeper than discord. The constructive forces of humanity are stronger than the disintegrative. The right attraction binds.
There are some men who by the sheer force of their personality subdue their church difficulties. They hold the captious in awe. By a sort of magnetic persuasion and lively sense of humor they soothe this one and that, win the regard of the outlying community, attach many new members to the organization, and build up, out of discordant and erstwhile discontented elements, a harmonious and active church. This is the man for these martial times! If there are born leaders in every other department of the world's work, men who quietly but firmly assert their authority and supremacy in the tasks in which they hold, by free election or legitimate appointment, a place at the head—it ought to be so in the Church of God! I long to see arise in the ministrya race of iron!
There are other difficulties, seldom spoken of, of which one must write frankly, though with the keenest sympathy, if one is to look deeply into the modern church problem. First: Is a minister's environment favorable to his best personal development? Does he not miss much from the lack of the world's hearty give-and-take? He gets criticism, but not of a just or all-round kind. Small things may be pecked at, trifles may be made mountains of by the disgruntled, but where does he get a clear-sighted, whole-hearted estimate of himself and his work? Who tells him of his real virtues, his real faults? Among all his friends, who is there, man or woman, who is brave enough to be true?
Other men are soon shaken into place. Their personal traits continually undergo a process of chiselling and adjustment. They are told uncomfortable things how quickly! At the club, in the university, in the market, the ploughing-field, the counting-room, they rub up against each other, and no mercy is shown by man to man until primary signs of crudeness are worn off. Let a conceited professor get in a college chair! Watch a hundred students begin their delightful and salutary process of "taking him down" by the sort of mirth in which college boys excel! Their unkindness is not right, but the result is, they never molest a man who is merely eccentric.
Watch a scientific association jump with all fours upon a man who has just read a paper before their body! How unsparingly they analyze and criticise! He has to meet questions, opposition, comments, shafts of wit and envy, jovial teasing and correction. He goes out from the meeting with a keener love of truth and exactness, and a less exalted idea of his own powers. Watch the rivalry and sparring that go on in any business. Men meet men who attack them; they fight and overcome them, or are themselves overcome.
Human friction is not always harmful. A minister should not be hurt or angered by disagreement and discussion. No one's ideas are final. Let him expect to stand in the very midst of a high-strung, spirited, and hard-working generation. Let him be turned out of doors. Let him travel, look, learn, meet men and women, and conquer in the arena of manhood. Then, by means of this undaunted manhood, he may the better guide the fiery enthusiasms of men, inspire their higher ambitions, and comfort them in their bitter human sorrows!
Again, too often a minister is spoiled in his first charge by flattery, polite lies, and gushing women. He is sadly overpraised. A bright young fellow comes from the seminary. He can preach; that is, he can prepare interesting essays, chiefly of a literary sort, which are pleasant to listen to, though, in the nature of things, they can have scarcely a word in them of that deep, life-giving experience and counsel which come from the hearts of men and women who have lived, and know the truth of life. He is told that these sermons are "lovely," "beautiful," "soinspiring," and he believes every word of praise. No one says to him, "When you know more, you will preach better," and his standard of excellence does not advance. This man, who might have become a great preacher, remains, as years go on, alas! an intellectual potterer.
He is also socially made too much of, being one of the very few men available for golf and afternoon teas, suppers, picnics, tennis, charity-bazaars. Other men are frankly too busy for much of these things, except for healthful recreation; and not infrequently one finds stray ministers absolutely the only men at some function to which men have been invited.
A minister is not a parlor-pet. How many a time an energetic man, society-bound, must long to kick over a few afternoon tea-tables, and smash his way out through bric-à-brac and chit-chat to freedom and power!
I should think that a real Man in the ministry would get so very tired of women! They tell him all their complaints and difficulties, from headaches, servants, and unruly children, to their sentimental experiences and their spiritual problems. Men tell him almost nothing. Watch any group of men talking, as the minister comes in. A moment before they were eager, alert, argumentative. Now they are polite or mildly bored. He is not of their world. Some assert that he is not even of their sex! Hence the lips of men are too often sealed to the minister. He must find some way not only to meet them as brother to brother, but he must capture their inmost hearts. The shy confidence of an honorable man once won, his friendship never fails.
The question of a minister's relation to the women of his congregation and the community is not only curious and complex—it is a perpetual comedy. How do other men in public life deal with this problem? They have a genial but indifferent dignity, quite compatible with courtesy and friendly ways. They shoulder responsibility; they do not flirt; they sort out cranks; they flee from simpers; they put down presumption. If married, they laugh heartily with their wives over any letter or episode that is comical or sentimental. If not married, they get out of things the best way they know how, with a sort of plain, manly directness. If a minister would arrogate to himself his free-born privilege of being a thorough-going man, many of his troubles would disappear.
Let him hold himself firmly aloof both from nonsense and from enervating praise. Let him dream of great themes, and work for great things! Let him rely on more quiet friends who watch loyally, hope, encourage, inspire. By and by the scales drop from his eyes; he sees himself, not as one who has already achieved, but as one to whom the radiant gates of life are opening, so that he, too, can one day speak to human souls as the masters have done! He discovers that out of the heart's depths is great work born! This is a memorable day, both for this man and for his church. From that hour he has vision and power.
Another error in ministerial education and outlook is that too often ministers forget that they compete with other men: they are not an isolated class of humanity. Competition underlies the energy and efficiency of the world's work. When men do not consciously compete with others, they inevitably drop behind. What a minister was intended for, was to stand head and shoulders above other men. God seems to have planned the universe in such a way that everywhere the spiritual shall be supreme. He was meant to be a towering leader. Who, in other realms, has excelled Moses, Joshua, Elijah, David, Paul?
But if we consider the responsibilities which are now being laid upon different classes of people, and carried by them, I think that we must acknowledge that the statesman is looming up as the most influential and upbuilding man to-day. He is the one who is adjusting the new world-powers and the new world-relations, over-seeing the development of our country, and planning for its laws and commerce. Close to him comes the physician, who is laying his hand on world-plagues, and is studying the conditions and the forms of disease, with a view to striking disease at its root. The hand of the doctor is laid upon consumption, malaria, yellow fever, diphtheria, typhoid fever, and bubonic plague, and the advance in medical research is marvellous.
The lawyer and the capitalist are together adjusting the industrial relations of the country. We have trusts, syndicates, and corporation-problems handled with a firm intellectual grasp and a wide outlook over human affairs.
The reading of the world is in the hands of editors of enterprise and sagacity. They daily bring wars, statecraft, business plans, political situations, trade openings, scientific discoveries, forms of church-work and philanthropy, accidents, murders, and marriages, to our breakfast-table. The press of to-day has a tremendous scope. When some of the magazines come to hand, one feels that he is in touch with the affairs of the universe and has reading of a cosmic order.
The day-laborer is discovering that to ingenuity, talent, and manliness, the whole world swings open. Carnegie's Thirty Partners, most of whom have come from the working-ranks, demonstrate that a man can rise from the pick, the spade, the foreman's duties, to the control of great industrial interests.
Bankers are thinking out the financial problems—currency, legal tender, the best forms of money and authority; the whole monetary system of the world is under consideration and analysis. The farmer is learning, through chemistry and other forms of science, new ways of making his farm productive, and the educated agriculturist is rising to be an intellectual factor in the development of our country. Everywhere we see Life awakening—a great renaissance!
Has the minister, as a thinker and active force of regeneration, kept pace with this advance? Do many sermons thrill us in this large way? Where does he rank among the world-masters of energy and power?
The ministry is supposed to be a work of saving souls. But if we could know the direct effect of preaching, and the conversions which are really due to preaching, I think we should find them comparatively few. What touched the boy or girl, man or woman, and led him or her to Christ was not the sermon, or pastoral talk, though this one or another may have united with the Church after a special sermon, revival, or personal appeal. It was the memory and influence of a mother's prayers; of early associations; of a teacher, a lover, a friend. The conversion came direct from God—the soul was acted upon by some special moving of the Holy Spirit. Or it was the death of a friend, an illness, an accident, a disappointment, which turned the thoughts to heavenly things. Or it was a book that searched the soul's depths, or some quickening human experience. Is this quite as it should be? Is not professional pride aroused?
Suppose that New York City should suddenly be invaded by the bubonic plague or yellow fever. Would any one be to blame? Certainly! Such an outcry would go up as would echo across the country. Where were the quarantine officers? Where was the port physician? Where were the specialists who attend to sanitation and disinfection?
We say that divorce and Sabbath-breaking are sweeping over our country—gambling, social drinking, and many other ills; a sensational press, a corrupt politics, a materialistic greed.
All the ministers under heaven cannot take sin out of the world, nor uproot sin altogether from the heart of man: the plague conies in at birth. Neither can all the doctors living remove disease, so that no one will get sick or die. But just as the doctor can, by study, by training, by counsel, by practice, and by the direction of wise law-making, protect the health interests of his country or community, so the minister should stand, yet more largely than to-day, as a break-water between the world and the tides of sin! He should not only be able to keep alive in a country an atmosphere of prayer, devotion, and unselfish service—he should, by God's help, make piety the general estate of the land; he should not only be intellectually able to show the great advantage of the upright Christian life, he should straight-way lead all classes into that life; he should be able to lay a hand on the moral maladies of mankind, personal and national, and prescribe effectual remedies; take lame, halt, sinning souls, and by God's grace and Spirit, lift not only individuals, but whole communities, to a more spiritual plane.
This is a Titanic intellectual task, as well as a spiritual one. When a doctor wishes to keep plague out of America, he goes to Asia, to see what plague is! He takes microscopes, instruments, and drugs; he buries himself in a laboratory, and gives his whole mind to the problem, until one day he can come forth and tell how to heal and help. More than this, he risks his life. For every great discovery in medical practice, doctors and nurses have died martyrs to their faithful work.
Moral evil must be studied in an energetic and intellectual way. The variations of humanity from righteousness must be deeply understood. Look at Booker T. Washington, or at Jacob A. Riis! What daring, what indefatigable toil, what insight, patience, and swerveless hope have been put into their task! Edison is said to have spent six months hissing S into his phonograph to make it repeat that letter, and many days he worked seventeen hours a day. Have many ministers ever bent themselves in this way to solve a special moral problem—that of, say, a disobedient child in the congregation? Have they spent six months, hours and hours a day, to make the law of God, the word Obedience, ring in that child's ears? Spiritual guidance is definitely and positively a scientific task. The mastery of one fact may lead to the correlation of a psychic law. When a minister can help a soul to overcome temptation, and a parent to bring up a child, he is in touch with two final human problems. As he gradually enlarges his careful and illuminating work, his church becomes in time a body of spiritually well-educated communicants, thoroughly grounded in doctrinal, ethical, and social ideals, well taught in public and in private duties. It is not self-centred or wholly denominational in spirit, but recognizes itself to be a part of a catholic body of believers, reaches out with friendly coöperation to near-by churches, extends its missionary efforts to other neighborhoods or lands, and partakes of a world-life, a world-love!
Ruling religious thinkers should also, by and by, become leaders of national thought and life. Great public questions should be open to their judgment and appeal; they should be moral arbiters, and spiritual guides in national crises. By a word they should be able to rouse the prayers of the country, and by a word to still widespread anger and uprising. If accredited spiritual leaders cannot help, who can?
There are a few men living who seem to hold, for the whole world, the temporal balance. They control mines and shipping, banks and trade. Who, to-day, holds the spiritual destiny of the world in his hand? I long to see men appear upon whom the eyes of the world shall be fastened, in recognition of their spiritual preeminence, as they are now fastened on these industrial giants.
Rise! Let some man, earnest and endowed, look forward into the future, and with the courage that comes from inborn power, assert himself among the nations! Allay, O World-Evangelist, not only neighborhood disputes, but international dissensions; project a creed that shall be profound and universal; sweep sects together, unite energy and endeavor, baptize with fire, bring repentance, quicken the race-conscience, uplift the World-Hope! Erect and elemental, hold CHRIST before the race!
_Our Father in Heaven,Creator of all,O source of all wisdom,On Thee we would call!Thou only canst teach us,And show us our need,And give to Thy childrenTrue knowledge indeed.
But vain our instruction,And blind we must be,Unless with our learningBe knowledge of Thee.Then pour forth Thy SpiritAnd open our eyes,And fill with the knowledgeThat only makes wise.
From pride and presumption,O Lord, keep us free,And make our hearts humble,And loyal to Thee,That living or dying,In Thee we may rest,And prove to the scornfulThy statutes are best._
If we should be told that at birth a strange and wonderful gift had been bestowed upon us, one such that by means of it, in after life, we could accomplish almost anything we wished, how we should guard it! With what delight we would make it work, to see what it would do! We should never be tired of such a toy, because every day it would reveal new possibilities of power and delight.
Such a gift God has given us in our power to think. What a mysterious and deep-hid gift it is! Nerves and sensations, a few convolutions in the brain, acts of attention and observation, certain reactions following certain stimuli: the result, a world of worlds spread out before us; unlimited intellectual possibilities within our grasp!
What is thinking? Thinking is an attempt to express infinite thoughts, affections, relations, and events, in finite terms. The child strings buttons. The philosopher strings God, angels, devils, brutes, men, and their appurtenances and deeds. Hence no real thought will quite go into words. Out beyond the word hangs the infinite remainder of our idea. The search for a vocabulary is the search for a clearer articulation of ideas.
Thinking is the power to take up life where the race has left off attainment, and to lead the race one step farther on, by a new concept or idea. It is a curious thing, this little turn in the brain, a thought. We cannot see it, or touch it, or handle it. Yet we can give it, one to another, or one man to the race. It has an infinite leverage. One great thought moves millions onward. Plant the wordsteam, and globe-transport changes. Plantelectricity, and a hundred new industries spring up. Plantliberty, tyrants fall. Plantlove, chaotic angers disappear.
If we refuse to learn to think, we refuse to do our share of the world's work. We are like a horse that balks and will not pull. While we sulk the universe is at a standstill.
Spelling and arithmetic, history, etymology, and geography, are not tasks set over school-children by a hard taskmaster, who keeps them from sunshine and out-of-door play. They are catch-words of the universe. They are the implements by which each brain is to be trained to do great work for the one in whom it lives. What every earnest soul asks is not gold, fame, or pleasure. It is: Let me not die till I have brought millions farther on.
We cannot deliberately make thoughts. Thought is like life itself: science has not found a formula which will produce it. But just as marriage produces new lives, though we cannot say how, so study and meditation produce thoughts. Something new appears: a concept which was not with the race before.
The work of sages has been to rule the thinking of the race. They receive the inspired ideas and spend their lives in teaching them to others: in setting up intellectual vibrations throughout the world.
Some day, I hope Sargent will paint a March of Sages, as gloriously as he has painted the panels of the Prophets. Then we shall gaze upon the train of heavy-browed, noble-eyed, wise, gentle-mannered men, who have been the enduring teachers of the race,—thinkers, leaders, seers. Confucius, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, the mediaeval philosophers, the Egyptian, Persian, and Arabian thinkers, Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, Eckhart, William of Occam, Bede, Thomas à Kempis, Francis Bacon, Kant, John Stuart Mill, Spencer,—with what dignity the processional moves down the years! The sum of human knowledge is vast; but how much more vast seem the achievements of each of these men, when we realize how few his years, and how many the obstacles and impediments of his all too short career! There is ever a pathos in the life of the wise.
By thinking, we pass from the gossip of the neighborhood into the conversation of the years. We do not know what Alcibiades said to his man-servant about the care of his clothes, baths, perfumes,—nor what his man-servant retailed to other retainers of the eccentricities and vanities of his master. But we know what Pericles and Plato said to the race. Here is the advantage of a thinking mind—that at any moment one may enter into eternal subjects of thought, and have converse with those who of all times have been the most profound.
Nothing teases the soul like the thought of the unfinished, the imperfect, the incomplete. And yet, when we have thought and planned a really great and abiding work, whether we ever finish it or not—for many things in life may intervene between conception and completion—to have thought of it is to have had in our lives a pleasure that can never die. For one blessed hour or year we have been lifted to the thoughts of God and have entered into the great original Design. Hence it is that the life of the real Thinker, however broken or disturbed, is at heart a life of serenity and joy. What matters a conflagration, a disappointment, to him whose thoughts are set upon the race?
Thinking is a form of vital growth. We all wish for growth. Is there any one who wishes to stay always just where he is to-day? To be always what he is this morning? The tree grows, the flower grows, the ideals of the race grow—shall not I?
We are born to a destiny which has no limit of grandeur save the limit of the thought of God, The wish for growth is the wish to enter into the spiritual ideals of the universe,—to become one with its advancement, one with its decrees.
But do not the secular look upon growth as a sort of chase—a chase for more learning, more money, a bigger business, a higher degree, a better position, a brilliant marriage,—a struggle for wealth, renown, acclaim? These things are not in themselves growth, nor its real index. Growth is not a form of avarice. Growth is a vital state of being. Growth is the assimilation of experience. Growth is development in the line of eternal purpose. Growth is the combination of our souls with the things that are, in such a way as to make a perpetual progress toward the things that are to be.
We lose much because we lose avidity out of our lives, the eagerness to grasp what spiritually belongs to us,—to share the universal enthusiasm, the universal hope. Day by day the world wheels about us—sunset and moonrise, wind, hail, frost, snow, vapor, care, anxiety, temptation, trial, joy, fear. Whatever touches the sense or the soul is something by which, rightly used, we may grow. There is nothing we need fear to take into our lives, if it receives the right assimilation. Each experience is meant to be a vital accession. We narrow our lives and enfeeble our powers when we try to reject any of these things, or unlawfully escape them, or are yet indifferent to them. Prejudice, cowardice, and apathy are death.
Experience is what the race has been through. Each of us has his personal variant of this common life. Thought is the power by which we make it available for our own better living, and the future life of the race.
To the early man, there existed earth, air, water, fire, heat, cold, tempest, and the growth of living things. He lived, ate, fought, but his thoughts were primitive and personal. HaveIhad enough dinner? he asked, not, Is the race fed?
By and by some one arose who began to consider things in the abstract, and to relate them to his neighbor, and formulate conclusions about them. He was the first real Thinker, Then air-philosophy and element-philosophy grew up—beast-worship, animalism, fire-worship, and the rudiments of simple scientific learning, as, for instance, when men found that they could make a tool to cut, a spike to sew.
Since then, what the sage has done is to teach men to see, read, write, think, count, and to work; to love ideals, to love mankind and relate his work to human progress.
Man's first primer was near at hand. When he wished to write, he made a picture with a stick, a stone, on a leaf, or traced his idea in the mud. When he wanted to count, he kept tally on his fingers, or with pebbles from the beach or brook. When he wished to communicate an idea orally, it was with glances, shrugs, gestures, and imitative sounds. Once, in a game of Twenty Questions, this was the question set to guess: Who first used the prehistoric root expressing a verb of action? Who, indeed?
Out of that leaf-writing, and bark-etching, and later rune, have grown the printed writings of mankind. Homer, Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare are the lineal descendants of the man who made holes in a leaf, or lines on a wave-washed sand. Out of the finger-counting have grown up book-keeping, geometry, mathematical astronomy and a knowledge of the higher curves. Out of the prehistoric shrugs and sounds and grimaces we have oral speech—much of it worthless, and not all of it yet wholly intelligible. We are still continually being understood to say what we never meant to say: we are forever putting our private interpretation on the words of other men. Even yet, we are all too stupid. In our dreariest moments does there not come to us sometimes a voice which cries: Up, awake! Cease blinking, and begin to see!
Language is electric. Words have a curious power within themselves. They rain upon the heart with the soft memories of centuries of old associations, or thoughts of love, vigils, and patience. They have a power of suggestion which goes beyond all that we may dream. Just as a man shows in himself traces of a long-dead ancestry, so words have the power to revive emotions of past generations and the experiences of former years. The man of letters, the Thinker, strews a handful of words into the air, breathes a little song. The words spring up and bring forth fruit. Their seed is human progress and a larger life for men. Think, for instance, who first flung the wordfreedominto space!—gravitation, evolution, atom, soul!There is no power like the power of a word: a word likelibertycan dethrone kings.
We get out of a word just what we put into it, plus the individuality of the man who uses it. Some men read into noble words only their own silliness, vulgarity, prejudice, or preconceived ideas. Another man reads with his heart open for new impressions, new insight, new fancies and ideals.
Words have not only their inherent meaning; they have their allied meanings. A word may mean one thing by itself. It may mean quite another thing when another word stands beside it; even marks of punctuation give words a curiously different sound and shade. Literature is a mastery, not only of the moods of men, but of the moods of words. Corot takes a stream, some grass and trees, a flitting patch of sky. By means of a few strokes of his brush, he manages to present that tree, sky, stream, in a way which suggests the pastoral experience of the ages. Where did that misty veil come from? the trembling lights and shadows, the half-heard sounds and silence of the woods, the changing cloud, the dim reflection, the atmosphere of mystery and peace?
So each man goes to the dictionary. He takes a word here, a word there, common words that everybody knows. He puts them together: the result is a presentation of the life of man, and lays hold of his inmost spirit.
"Our birth is but a deep and a forgetting;The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,Hath had elsewhere its settingAnd cometh from afar;Not in entire forgetfulness,And not in utter nakedness,But trailing clouds of glory do we comeFrom God, who is our home!"
To write, the soul chooses, and God stands ever by to help. That is why great work always impresses us as inspired. God did it. It is God who whispers the deathless thought and phrase: the subtler collocations are divine.
Take the wordstar. To the child it means a bright point that glitters and twinkles in the sky, and sets him saying an old nursery rhyme. To the youth or maiden it suggests love, romance, a summer eve, or a frosty walk under the friendly winter sky. To the rhetorician it suggests a figure of speech—the star of hope. To the mariner it suggests guidance and the homeward port. To the astronomer it means the world in which he lives. His life is centred in that star. To the poet it means all these things and many more. For the poet is the one who, in his own heart, holds all the meanings that words hold for the race. Read again the lines just quoted, and think of Wordsworth's outlook on the star!
The dictionary definition of a word can seldom be the real one, nor does it reveal the deeper sense it has. It blazes a path for the understanding, but individual thought must follow. Take the wordstime, friendship, work, play, heroism. It took Carlyle to define Time for us. Emerson has defined Friendship. Let the lights and shadows of the thought of Carlyle and Emerson play upon these words, they are at once removed from mechanical definition, and we dimly perceive that each word is larger than the outreach of the thought of man. Another generation than ours shall define and refine them. In heaven, in some other aeon, we shall find out what they really mean!
Thus knowledge is not permanent. It reels. It proceeds, it changes, it is iridescent with new significance from day to day.
What is true of a word, and what we make of it, is true of every phase of learning. The black-board is not all. Learning is not tied to it, or to any one person, demonstration, interpretation, event, or epoch. No wise man can keep his learning to himself, and yet he cannot, though he teach a thousand years, transmit his deeper learning to another. The atmosphere, the casual information, the spiritual magnetism of a great man, will teach better than the text-books, the lecture courses, and the formal resources of academic halls. Thus Mark Hopkins is in himself a university, given a boy on the other end of the log on which he sits.
It is the relativity of knowledge that dances before the eye, that bewilders, eludes, evades. Group-systems and electives seem like a makeshift for the real thing. We cannot tie a fact to a pupil, because to the tail of the fact is tied history itself. Until a pupil gets a glimpse of that relation, that dependence of which we have just heard, with all that has yet happened in connection with it, he is not yet quite master of his fact. He recites glibly the date of Thermopylae, and does not know that all Greece is trailing behind his desk. When, after subsequent research, he knows something of Greece, he discovers Greece to be dovetailed into Rome and Egypt, and they lay hold upon the plain of Shinar and Eden, and the immemorial, prehistoric years.
Ah, no! We never really know. Every fact recedes from us, as might an ebbing wave, and leaves us stranded upon an unhorizoned beach, more despairing than before. Education does not solve the problems of life—it deepens the mystery. What, then, may the sage know? Are there no sages? And have we all been misinformed?
A sage is one who knows what, in his position of life, is most necessary for him to know. The larger sage, the great Sage, is the one who knows what is necessary for the race to know.
It is a wrong idea of wisdom, that we must necessarily know what some one else knows. Wisdom is single-track for each man. There are in the world those who know how to build aqueducts, and to bakecharlotte russe, and to sew trousers. Aqueducts and tailor work may be alike out of my individual and personal knowledge, yet I may not necessarily be an ignorant man. The primitive hunter stood in the forest. For him to be a hunting-sage, was to know the weather, traps, weapons, the times, and the lairs and ways of beasts. He knew lions and monkeys, the coiled serpent and the serpent that hissed by the ruined wall; the ways of the wolf, the jackal, and the kite; the manners of the bear and the black panther in the jungle-wilds. Kipling is the brother of that early man: he is a forest-sage, and would have held his own in other times.
The sea-sage was the one who could toss upon the swan-road without fear. He knew the strength of oak and ash; the swing of oar, the curve of prow, the dash of wave, and the curling breaker's sweep. He knew the maelstroms and the aegir that swept into northern fiords; the thunder and wind and tempest; the coves, safe harbors and retreats. To-day, the sea-sage rules the fishing-boat, the ocean liner, the coastwise steamers, and the lake-lines of the world.
The fishing-sage knows the ways and haunts of fish. He is wise in the salmon, the perch, the trout, the tarpon, and the muscalonge. He says. To-day the bass will bite on dobsons, but to-morrow we must have frogs.
No sagacity is universal, but the love of sagacity may be. The man who starts out to implant a new way of education has a noble task before him, but is it a final one, or even a more than tolerably practical one? Is there such a thing as a place for Truth at wholesale, even in an academy or college? Can a man receive an education outside of himself? He may be played upon by grammars and by loci-paper, by electrical machines, and parsing tables and Grecian accents, by the names of noted authors and statesmen, and the thrill of historic battles and decisions. He may be placed under a rain of ethical and philosophic ideas, and may be forced to put on a System of Thought, as men put on a mackintosh. But his true education is what he makes of these things. If he hears of Theodoric with a yawn, we say—the college-folk—He must be imbecile. No, not imbecile! he may become a successful toreador, or snake-charmer, which things are out of our line! And a man may be an upright citizen, a good husband, and a sincerely religious man, who has never heard of Francesca, nor Fra Angelico, nor named the name of Botticelli!
The moment we set bounds to wisdom, we find that we have shut something out. Wisdom is the free, active life of a growing and attaching soul. We must not only attach information to ourselves, we must assimilate it. Else we are like a crab which should drag about Descartes, or as an ocean sucker which should hug a copy of Thucydides.
Education is the taking to one's self, so far as one may in a lifetime, all that the race has learned through these six thousand years. Education is not a thing of books alone, or schools; it is a process of intellectual assimilation of what is about us, or what we put about ourselves. At every step we have a choice. This is the real difference between students at the same school or university. One puts away Greek, and the other lays up football and college societies. A third gets all three, being a little more swift and alert. One stows away insubordination—another, order and obedience. One does quiet, original work of reading and research; the other stows away schemes for getting through recitations and examinations. No two students ever come out of the same school, college, or shop with the same education. Their training may have been measurably alike, but the result is immeasurably unlike. Education, in the last analysis, is getting the highest intellectual value out of one's environment and opportunities. There is a cow-boy philosopher, a kitchen-philosopher, as truly as there is a philosopher of the academic halls.
Conduct is thepons asinorumof life. Wise men somehow cross it, though stumblingly, and with tears. Fools, usurers, oppressors, and spendthrifts of life are left gaping and wrangling on the hellward side. Thinkers have always been climbing up on each other's shoulders to look over into the Beyond. What they have seen, they have told. Some men climb so high into the ethereal places of the Ideal, that they do not get down again. They are the impractical men. An impractical man is not necessarily the educated man; he is the man at the top of some intellectual fence, who wishes to come down, but has absent-mindedly forgotten that he has legs. The legs are not absent, but his wit is. So with the impractical man in every sphere. Education has not really removed his common-sense, as some say, his power to connect passing events with their causes, and to act reasonably; but it has set his thought on some other thought for the time being, and the dinner-bell, we will say, does not detach him from his inquiry. His necktie rides up! He goes out into the street without a hat! Let him alone till he proves the worth of what he is about. The practical man, who hears the dinner-bell and prides himself upon this fact, may not hear sounds far-off and clear, that ring in the impractical man's ear, and that may sometime tell him how to make a better dinner-bell, or provide a better dinner—a great social philosophy—for the race!
The really impractical man is not he who reaches out to the intellectual and ideal aspects of life; it is he who lives as if this life were all. There are women who make pets of their clothes, as men make pets of horse or dog. They have just time enough in life to dress themselves up. Looking back over their years, they can only say, I have had clothes! In the same number of years, with no greater advantages or opportunities, other women have become the queenly women of the race. Some women are girt with centuries, instead of gold or gems. Whenever they appear, the event becomes historic; what they do adds new lustre to life.
We are all prodigals. We throw away time and strength, and years, and gold, and then weep that we are ignorant, and embeggared at the last. Who shall teach us wisdom, and in what manner may we be wise?
What say the sages of the vast possibilities of the race? With one voice they say: Be brave! Do not cower, shrink, or whine. Throw out upon the world a free fearlessness of thought and word and deed. Courage, freedom, heroism, faith, exactness, honor, justice, and mercy—these traits have been handed down as the traditional learning of the heart of man.
Another ideal of the race is Law. We have given up a chaos-philosophy—the haphazard continuity of events—a cometary orbit, for the world. There are fixed relations everywhere existent: the succession of cycles is orderly and prearranged.
Another ideal is Progress. We are moving, not toward the bottom, but toward the top of possibility. We reject annihilation, because then there is nothing left. And there must always be something left—progress—a bigger something, a better something. Should annihilation be the truth of things, and all the race mortal, then some day there would be a Last Man. And after the Last Man, what? He would die, and then all that any of the other stars could view of the vast panorama of our earthly generations would be an unburied corpse, with not even a vulture hovering to pick it to freshness in the air!
A Last Man? No. Instead, the seers have shown us a great multitude in a heavenly country, praising God, and singing forth His Name forever. Immortality broods over the great thought of the race. All great minds look upward to it: it is the final consummation of our dreams.
Another ideal is social adjustment, and social service. We must do something for some one, or we cast current sagacity behind the back. People crowd each other to the wall. The weak of communities and nations are too often crushed. Redress is in the air. The longed-for wisdom of to-day shows a kaleidoscopic front, in which are turning the slum-dweller and the millionaire; the white man, the yellow, and the black; the town and the territorial possession. The slave-colony, garbage-laws, magistrates, and murderers are mixed in motley, and there are whirling vacant-lot schemes abroad, potato-patches, wood-yards, organized charity, Wayfarers' Lodges, resounding cries of municipal reform, and various other interests of the wisdom-scale.
Hence, wisdom has not yet been arrived at: we are still on the run. This twentieth century will find new problems, new queries, new cranks, and new dismays!
One thing, however, shines out clear: Wisdom is being recognized as having a moral aspect, and men are looking for a Religion which shall sum up the learning of the sages, the information of the race.
When we look down into the physical universe, the primary thing that we find there is gravitation. When we look into the moral universe, the primary thing that we find there is also gravitation—a sinking to a Lower. This is sin—a contrariness of things—which makes the world an evil place to live in, instead of a good; which wrecks character and states, eats the hearts out of cultures and civilizations, destroys strong races, leaves a stain upon even the youngest child, and which is constantly drawing the race downward, instead of upward.
Sin, sin, sin! Everywhere the fact glares upon us, and cannot be hid, or put away. Sin is not an intellectual toy, for philosophers to play with or define as "a limitation of being." Sin is a reality, for men to feel, recoil from, and of which one must repent.
Sin is energy deliberately misplaced: energy directed against the course of things, the infinite development, the will of God. Sin is corruption, and desolation, and decay. Death broods over the spirit of man, unless a Redeemer come. The unredeemed ages hang over history like a pall. In them there are monumental oppression, cruelties, and crimes. The breath of myriad millions went out in darkness, and there was none to save. A plague swept over all the race.
Hence, even scientifically considered, the final aim of thinking must be, to arrive at some thought which will take hold of this primary fact of sin and uproot it; which will show how the world may be purged of sin.
Slowly but inevitably we are moving to this great Thought. It is summed up in one word: Redemption. The watchword of a century ago was gravitation. It explained the poise of the universe by a great and hitherto undiscovered law. The watchword of yesterday was evolution. It explains progressive change: the mounting-up of life "through spires of form." The forms of the universe are seen in a series which is in the main ascendant, and in which the survivor is supreme. The watchword of to-morrow is Redemption. The Thinker will some day live, who will make that great word Redemption stand out in all its vast majesty and significance. This, I take it, is the work of our new century.
Redemption is the explanation of the existence of man, of his present progress, and his future destiny. It is the great mystery of joy in which the race partakes; the spiritual culmination of all things earthly; the forecast of eternal things yet to be.
Redemption is not a dogma; it is a life. Redemption is a perpetual and ascendant moral growth. It marks a world-balm, a world-change. It is in the spirit of man that it works, and not in his outer condition, or external strivings. It is ultimately to root sin out of the world.
Through stormy sorrows and perpetual desolations comes the race to God. Zion is the Whole of things—the encompassment of space, and time, and endless years,—an environment of immortality and peace.
Virtue leads the race to Joy, and there is no byway to this height. The final aspect of the universe is joy. Joy is elemental—a vast vibration that sweeps through centuries as years! A day in His courts is as a thousand, and a thousand years are as one day, because they thrill with an immortal and imperishable emotion. The seraphim and cherubim, Sandalphon and Azrael, are angels of enduring joy. Joy is the soul's share of the life of God.
Thus when the world has breathed to us the holy name of Christ, it has told us the highest that it knows. The March of Sages is toward a Redeemer! The banner of Wisdom is furled about the Cross!