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XVII
CHRISTIAN UNITY
_Ephesians_ iv. 13.
We hear much in these days of Christian unity, and many programmes and platforms and propositions are presented to us, as though religious unity were a thing to be constructed and put together like a building, which should be big enough to hold us all. But in this splendid chapter religious unity is regarded by the apostle, not as a thing which is to be made, but as a thing which is to grow. "There is," he says "one body and one spirit; there is a unity of the faith. But we do not make this unity; we grow up into it as we attain unto a full-grown man; we attain unto it as a boy becomes a man, not by discussing his growth, or by worrying because he is not a man, or by bragging that he is bigger than other boys, but simply by growing up.
Thus, as people grow up into Christ, they grow up into unity. The unity comes not of the a.s.sent of man to certain propositions, but of the ascent of man to {48} the stature of Christ. And so what hinders unity is that we have not got our spiritual growth. It takes a full-grown mind to reach it. It takes a full-grown heart to feel it.
The unity is always waiting at the top. Religious progress is like the ascent of a hill from various sides. Below there is division, obstructive underbrush, perplexity; but as the top is neared there is ever a closer approach of man to man; and at the summit there is the same view for all, and that view is a view all round. The climbers attain to the measure of the stature of Christ, and they attain at the same time to the unity of the faith.
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XVIII
THE PATIENCE OF FAITH
_Mark_ iv. 28.
Jesus here falls back, as he so often does, on the gradualness of nature. Life, he says, is not abrupt and revolutionary in its method; it is gradual and evolutionary: the seed is sown and slowly comes to fruitage; the leaven silently penetrates the lump; the grain grows, first the blade, then the ear, finally the full corn. The best things in the world do not come with a rush. Some things have to be waited for. Faith is patient. And this he says, not only against the nervous hurry of life, which is, as we all know, cursing the American world to-day, but also against the spiritual impatience which is to be observed in every age. The most marked ill.u.s.tration of it to-day is in our dealings with the social movements of the time. It is the impatience of the reformer. He wants to redeem the world all at once.
As Theodore Parker said of the anti-slavery cause: "The trouble seems to be that G.o.d {50} is not in a hurry, and I am." Thus we are beset by panaceas which are to regenerate society in some wholesale, external, mechanical way. When such a reformer not long ago presented some quick solution of the social question, and it was criticised, he answered: "Well, if you do not accept my solution, what is yours?" as though every one must have some immediate cure for the evils of civilization.
But the fact is, that the world is not likely to be saved in any wholesale way. A much wiser observer of the social situation has lately said: "When any one brings forward a complete solution of the Social Question, I move to adjourn." Jesus, let us remember, saved men one at a time. The patience of nature taught him the patience of faith; first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn.
Or, again, we are afflicted in our day by the impatience of the theologian. He wants to know all about G.o.d. It seems somehow a depreciation of theology to admit that there is anything which is not revealed. But the fact is that the wisest feel most the sense of mystery. The only theology which is likely to last is one which admits a large degree of {51} Christian agnosticism. As one of our University preachers once said: "We do not know anything about G.o.d unless we first know that we cannot know Him perfectly." [1] How superb, as against all this impatience of spirit, are the reserve and patience of Christ.
Accept doubts, he says. Bear with incompleteness. Give faith its chance to grow. First the blade, then the ear, and then the harvest.
There are some things which youth can prove, and some which only the experience of maturity can teach, and then there are some mysteries which are perhaps to be made plain to us only in the clearer light of another world.
[1] Henry van d.y.k.e, D. D., _Straight Sermons_, p. 216, Scribners, 1893.
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XIX
THE BOND-SERVANT AND THE SON
_Luke_ xvii. 7-10.
"We are unprofitable servants, we have done that which it was our duty to do." It seems almost as if we must have misread this pa.s.sage. Can one who has done his duty be called an unprofitable servant? Shall one have no credit because he has done what is right? This seems strange indeed. But Jesus in reality is contrasting two ideas of duty,--the duty of a bond-servant and the duty of a son. The duty of a slave is to do what is demanded of him. He accomplishes his stint of work, his round of necessities, his grudging service, and for doing that duty he gets his hire and his day"s work is done. Sometimes we see workmen for the city in the roadway, doing their duty on these terms, and we wonder that men can move so slowly and accomplish so little. They have done their duty, but they are unprofitable servants. Now against this, Jesus sets the Christian thought of duty, which {53} grows out of the Christian thought of sonship. A son who loves his father does not measure his duty by what is demanded of him. No credit is his for obeying orders. He pa.s.ses from obligation to affection, from demand to privilege. And only as he pa.s.ses thus into uncalled-for and spontaneous service does any credit come. There is no credit in a man"s paying his debts, earning his hire, meeting his demands. The business man does not thank his clerk for doing what he is paid for.
What the employer likes to see is that service beyond obligation which means fidelity and loyalty. Do you do your work for wages, for marks, from compulsion? Then, when you lie down at night, you should say: "I have done that which it was my duty to do, and I am ashamed." Do you do your work for love"s sake, for the life of service to which it leads, for generous ambition and hope? Then with all your sense of ineffectiveness and incapacity you may still have that inward peace and joy which permits you to say: "I have done but little of what I dreamed of doing, but I have tried, at any rate, to do it unselfishly and gladly,--not as a bond-servant, but as a son."
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XX
DYING TO LIVE
2 _Corinthians_ iv. 13.
Paul repeatedly described his spiritual experiences under physical figures of speech; and most of all he writes of himself as living over in his spiritual life the incidents of the physical life and death of Jesus. He is crucified with Christ; he is risen with Christ; he bears about in his body the dying of Christ. "Death worketh in us, but life in you." This sounds like exaggerated and rhetorical language. It seems a strange use of words to say that the death of self is the life of the world. But consider how it was with this man Paul. He had been ambitious, sanguine, impetuous, and it had all come to nothing, and worse than nothing. He had been led to persecute the very faith which he had soon found to be G.o.d"s truth. And then he gives up everything.
He throws away every prospect of honor and public respect and social ambition. He simply dies to himself, and gives himself {55} to the service of Christ; and, behold, that death of self is the beginning of life and courage to generation after generation of Christian followers.
The same story might be told of many a man. Just in proportion as self-seeking dies, life begins. A man goes his way in self-a.s.sertion, self-display, the desire to make an impression, and he seems to achieve much. He gets distinction, glory, the prizes of life. But one thing he fails to do; he fails to quicken spiritual life in others. His work is stained by self-consciousness, and becomes incapable of inspiration.
It is life to him, but death to the things that are trusted to him.
Then some day he absolutely forgets himself in his work. He buries himself, as we say, in it. His conceit and ambition die, and then out of the death of self comes the life of the world he serves. That is the paradox of life. Life is reproduced by sacrifice. The life that is lost is the only life that is saved. The dead self is the only life-bearer. Only the man who thus sinks himself in his cause is remembered as its apostle.
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XXI
CARRYING YOUR OWN CROSS
_Mark_ viii. 34.
"If any man will come after me," says Jesus, "let him take up his cross and follow." Notice that it is his own cross. This is a different picture of Christian discipleship from that which is commonly presented. We are used to thinking of people as abandoning their own lives, their pa.s.sions and desires, their own weakness and their own strength, and turning to the one support and safety of the cross of Jesus Christ. We remember that familiar picture of the woman who has been almost overwhelmed in the sea of trouble, and is finally cast up by the waves of life upon the rock where she clings to the cross which is set there as a refuge for her shipwrecked soul. Now, no doubt, that refuge in the cross of Christ has been to many a real experience.
"Other refuge have I none, hangs my helpless soul on thee," has been, no doubt, often a sincere confession. But that is not the {57} state of mind which Jesus is describing in this pa.s.sage. He is thinking, not of some limp and helpless soul clinging to something outside itself, but rather of a masculine, vigorous, rational life, which shoulders its own responsibility and trudges along under it. Jesus says that if a man wants to follow him, he must first of all take up his own burden like a man. He sees, for instance, a young man to-day beset by his own problems and difficulties,--his poverty, his temper, his sin, his timidity, his enemies; and Jesus says to him: "That is your cross, your own cross. Now, do not shirk it, or dodge it, or lie down on it, or turn from it to my cross. First of all, take up your own; let it lie on your shoulder; and then stand up under it like a man and come to me; and as you thus come, not limply and feebly, but with the step--even let it be the staggering step--of a man who is honestly bearing his own load, you will find that your way opens into strength and peace. The yoke you have to carry will grow easier for you to carry, and the burden which you do not desire to shirk will be made light."
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XXII
THE POOR IN SPIRIT
_Matthew_ v. 3.
Whom does Jesus call the blessed people? First of all, he says, they are the "poor in spirit." And who are the poor in spirit? It sometimes seems as if Christians thought that to be poor in spirit one must be poor-spirited--a limp and spiritless creature, without dash, or vigor, or force. But the poor in spirit are not the poor-spirited.
They are simply the teachable, the receptive, the people who want help and are conscious of need. They do not think they "know it all;" they appreciate their own insufficiency. They are open-minded and impressionable. Now Jesus says that the first approach to his blessedness is in this teachable spirit. The hardest people for him to reach were always the self-sufficient people. The Pharisees thought they did not need anything, and so they could not get anything. As any one thinks, then, of his own greatest blessings, the first of them must be {59} this,--that somehow he has been made open-minded to the good.
It may be that the conceit has been, as we say, knocked out of him, and that he has been "taken down." Well! it is better to be taken down than to be still up or "uppish." It is better to have the self-complacency knocked out of you than to have it left in. Humility, as Henry Drummond once said, even when it happens through humiliation, is a blessing. Not to the Pharisee with his "I am not as other men are," but to the publican crying "G.o.d be merciful to me, a sinner,"
comes the promise of the beat.i.tude. The first condition of receiving the gift of G.o.d is to be free from the curse of conceit. The spiritually poor are the first to receive Christ"s blessing. They have at least made themselves accessible to the further blessings which Jesus has to bestow.