And how elementary are the sources of religious confidence! They lie, not in remote or difficult regions of authority, or conformity, or history, but in the witness of daily service, and of commonplace endeavor. "The word is very nigh thee," says the Old Testament. The satisfying revelation of G.o.d reaches you, not in the exceptional, occasional, and dramatic incidents of life, but in the bread and water of life which you eat and drink every day. As one of our most precious American poets, too early silent, has sung of the routine of life:--
"Forenoon, and afternoon, and night!--Forenoon, And afternoon, and night!--Forenoon, and--what?
The empty song repeats itself. No more?
Yea, that is Life: make this forenoon sublime, This afternoon a psalm, this night a prayer, And Time is conquered, and thy crown is won." [1]
[1] E. R. Sill. Poems, p. 27 "Life." Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1888.
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XII
THE RECOIL OF JUDGMENTS
_Matthew_ vii. 1.
When Jesus says "Judge not that ye be not judged," he cannot be forbidding all severity of judgment, for no one could be on occasion more severe, or unsparing, or denunciatory than he. "Woe unto you, hypocrites," he says to some of the respectable church-leaders of his time. "Beware of false prophets," he says in this pa.s.sage, "for they are inwardly ravening wolves." No, Jesus certainly was not a soft-spoken person or one likely to plead for gentle judgments so as to get kindness in return. What he is in fact laying down in this pa.s.sage is a much profounder principle,--the principle of the recoil of judgments. Your judgments of others are in reality the most complete betrayal of yourself. What you think of them is the key to your own soul. Your careless utterances are like the boomerang of some clumsy savage, often missing the mark toward {33} which it is thrown, and returning to smite the man that threw it.
This is a strange reversal of the common notion in which we think of our relation to other lives. We fancy that another life is perfectly interpretable in its motives and aims, but that our own lives are much disguised; whereas the fact is that nothing is more mysterious and baffling than the interior purposes of another soul, and nothing is more self-disclosed and transparent than the nature of a judging life.
One man goes through the world and finds it suspicious, inclined to wrong-doing, full of capacity for evil, and he judges it with his ready gossip of depreciation. He may be in all this reporting what is true, or he may be stating what is untrue; but one truth he is reporting with entire precision,--the fact that he is himself a suspicious and ungenerous man; and this disclosure of his own heart, which, if another hinted at it, he would resent, he is without any disguise making of his own accord. The cynic looks over the world and finds it hopelessly bad, but the one obvious fact is not that the world is all bad, but that the man is a cynic. The sn.o.b looks over the world and finds it hopelessly {34} vulgar, but the fact is not that the world is all vulgar, but that the man is a sn.o.b. The gentleman walks his way through the world, antic.i.p.ating just dealing, believing in his neighbor, expecting responsiveness to honor, considerateness, high-mindedness, and he is often deceived and finds his confidence misplaced, and sometimes discovers ruffians where he thought there were gentlemen; but this at least he has proved,--that he himself is a gentleman. Through his judgment of others he is himself judged, and as he has measured to others, so, in the final judgment of him, made either by G.o.d or men, it shall be measured to him again.
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XIII
THE INCIDENTAL
_Luke_ xvii. 5-15.
"As they went, they were healed." The cure of these sick men was not only remarkable in itself, but still more remarkable because of the way in which it happened. They came to Jesus crying: "Master, have mercy on us," and He sends them to the priest that they might show themselves to him and get his official guarantee that they were no longer lepers.
So they must have expected that the cure, if it was to come at all, would happen either under the hands of Jesus before they started, or under the hands of the high priest after they arrived. But it did not come in either of these ways. As they went, they were cleansed. Not in the moment of Christ"s benediction, nor yet in the moment of ecclesiastical recognition, but just between the two they were healed.
There is something like this very often in any man"s deliverance from his temptations {36} or cares or fears. A man, for instance, sets himself to his intellectual task, but as he studies it is all dark about him, and his mind seems dull and heavy, and no light shines upon his work, and he goes away from it discouraged. But then, by some miracle of the mind"s working, such as each one of us in his own way has experienced, his task gets solved for him, not as he works at it, but as he turns to other things. Suddenly and mysteriously, sometimes between the night"s task and the morning"s waking, his problem clears up before him, and as he goes, his mind is cleansed. So a man goes out into his life of duty-doing. He tries to do right, and he makes mistakes; he does his best, and he fails. But then his life goes on and other duties meet it, and out of his old mistakes comes new success, and out of the discipline of his conscience brought about by his failures comes the power of his conscience, and by degrees--he hardly knows how--his will grows strong. So perhaps it happens that a man some morning kneels down and says his prayer, and then rises and goes out into the world, the same man with the same cares and fears on his shoulder, as though {37} there had been no blessing from his prayer. He pa.s.ses out into the day"s life all unchanged. But then, as it sometimes happens through G.o.d"s grace, as he goes, life seems soberer and plainer, and, by the very prayer he thought unanswered, he is healed. Not in the great hour of his pet.i.tion, but as he trudges along the dusty road of life the cleansing comes to him, and the burden which he prayed might be taken from him, and which seemed to be left to bear, drops unnoticed by the way.
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XIV
LEARNING AND LIFE
_Romans_ xii. 1.
The letters of Paul, varied as they are in their purpose, have one curious likeness. Each goes its way through a tangled argument of doctrinal discussion, and then in almost every case each issues, as it were, into more open ground, with a series of practical maxims for the conduct of life. If you are looking for profound Biblical philosophy, you turn to the first part of Paul"s epistles. If you are looking for rules of moral conduct, you turn to the last part. And between these two sections there is, as a rule, one connecting word. It is the word "therefore." The maxims, that is to say, are the consequences of the philosophy. The theology of Paul is to him an immediate cause of the better conduct of life. "I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord,"--he says to the Ephesians. "If, therefore, there is any comfort in Christ," he says to the Philippians, {39} "I beseech you, therefore, by the mercy of G.o.d," he says to the Romans.
We hear much in these days of the practical perils of the intellectual life; the spiritual risks of education, the infidelity of scholars, as though one who dealt much in the speculations of philosophy would lose the impulse to the devout and generous life; and certainly there are scholars enough whose learning has shrivelled up their souls. But the att.i.tude of Paul toward the general question of the relation of learning to life is this,--that the better philosopher a man is, so much the better Christian he is likely to be; that hard thinking opens naturally into strong doing; that while not all religion is for scholars, there is a scholar"s religion, and while not all sin comes from ignorance, much foolish conduct comes of superficial philosophy.
Let us take courage to-day in this natural a.s.sociation of philosophy and life. The world needs piety, but it needs in our time a new accession of rational piety, or what the apostle calls "reasonable service." The world needs enthusiasm, but it still more urgently needs intelligently directed enthusiasm. Remember that the same man who laid {40} the foundation for the whole history of Christian theology and philosophy was at the same time the most practical of counsellors concerning Christian duty and love. He explores with a free mind the speculative mysteries of religious philosophy, and then, perceiving the bearing of these researches on the conduct of life he proceeds as from a cause to an effect, and writes: "Therefore, my brethren, I beseech you, present yourselves a living sacrifice."
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XV
FILLING LIFE FULL
_Matthew_ v. 17.
The Jews thought that Jesus had come to destroy their teaching and to abandon all their splendid history, though Jesus repeatedly told them that his purpose was not destructive; that he wanted to take all that great past and fill it full of the meaning it was meant to bear; to fulfill, as this famous verse says, their law and prophets. A great many people still think that Jesus comes to destroy. The religious life appears to them a life of giving up things. Renunciation seems the Christian motto. The religious person forsakes his pa.s.sions, denies his tastes, mortifies his body, and then is holy. But Jesus always answers that he comes not to destroy, but to fill full; not to preach the renunciation of capacity, but the consecration of capacity.
Here is your body, with all its vigorous life. It is a part of your religion to fill out your body. It is the temple of G.o.d, to be kept {42} clean for his indwelling. Not the ascetic man, but the athletic man is the physical representative of the Christian life. Here is your mind, with all the intellectual pursuits which engross you here. Many people suppose that the scholar"s life is in antagonism to the interests of religion, as though a university were somehow a bad place for a man"s soul. But religion comes not to destroy the intellectual life. It wants not an empty mind but a full one. The perils of this age come not from scholars, but from smatterers; not from those who know much, but from those who think they "know it all." When our forefathers desired to do something for the service of their G.o.d, one of the first things they regarded as their religious duty was, as you may read yonder on our gate, to found this college. And here, once more, are your pa.s.sions, tempting you to sin. Are you to destroy them, fleeing from them like the hermits from the world? Oh, no! You are not to destroy them, but to direct them to a pa.s.sionate interest in better things. The soul is not saved by having the force taken out of it. It is, as Chalmers said, the expulsive force of a new affection which redeems one from his {43} old sin. How small a thing we make of the religious life; hiding it in a corner of human nature, serving it in a fragment of the week; and here stands Jesus Christ at the centre of all our activities of body and mind and will, and calls for the consecration of the whole of life, for the all-round man, for the fulfilment of capacity. In him, says the scripture, is not emptiness, but fullness of life.
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XVI
TAKING ONE"S SHARE OF HARDSHIPS
2 _Timothy_ ii. 3.
Here is one of the pa.s.sages where the Revised Version brings out more clearly the meaning.[1] The Old Version says: "Endure hardness;" as though it were an appeal to an individual. The Revised Version in the margin says: "Take thy part in suffering hardship;" take, that is to say, your share of the hardship which belongs to the common cause.
"Come in with the rest of us," it means, "in bearing the hard times."
There were plenty of hard times in those days. Paul was a prisoner in Rome; Nero"s persecution was abroad. When the aged Paul, however, writes to the young man whom he affectionately calls his beloved child, he does not say to him: "I hope, my beloved child, that you will find life easier than I have, or that the times will clear up before you have to take the lead." He says, on the contrary: {45} "The times are very hard. Come in with us then and take your share of the hardship."
A great many people in the modern world are trying to look at life in quite an opposite way. They want to make it soft and easy for themselves and for their sons. The problem of life is to get rid of hardness. Education is to be smoothed and simplified. Trouble and care are to be kept away from their beloved children. Young people are to have a good time while they can. The apostle strikes a wholly different note. Writing to a young man of the modern time he would say: "There is a deal of hardship, of poverty, of industrial distress in the world, and I charge you to take your share in it! Are you not old enough to enlist in Christ"s army? At your age, college men twenty-five years ago were brigadier-generals, dying at the head of their troops. Take your place, then, in the modern battle. Be a good soldier, not a shirk or a runaway."
When that extraordinary man,--perhaps the most inspiring leader of men in our generation,--General Armstrong, was first undertaking his work for the negroes in Virginia, he wrote a letter to a friend in the North, {46} saying: "Dear Miss Ludlow: If you care to sail into a good hearty battle, where there is no scratching and pin-sticking, but great guns and heavy shot only used, come here. If you like to lend a hand when a good cause is short-handed, come here." Could any brave man or woman resist a call like that? It was a call to arms, a summons to a good soldier of Jesus Christ. The problem of a soldier is, not to find a soft and easy place in life, with plenty to get and little to do, but "to take his share of hardship," and as the pa.s.sage goes on, "to please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier."
[1] This change of reading is finely commented on by F. Paget, _The Hallowing of Work_, p. 57. Longmans, 1891.