The first element in a symmetrical life is _work_.
Three-fourths of our time is probably spent in work. Of course the meaning of it is that our work should be just as religious as our worship, and unless we can work for the glory of G.o.d three-fourths of life remains unsanctified.
The proof that work is religious is that most of Christ"s life was spent in work. During a large part of the first thirty years of His life He worked with the hammer and the plane, making ploughs and yokes and household furniture. Christ"s public ministry occupied only about two and a half years of His earthly life; the great bulk of His time was simply spent in doing common everyday tasks, and ever since then work has had a new meaning.
When Christ came into the world He was revealed to three deputations who went to meet and worship Him. First came the shepherds, or working cla.s.s; second, the wise men, or student cla.s.s; and third, the two old people in the temple, Simeon and Anna; that is to say, Christ is revealed to men at their work, He is revealed to men at their books, and He is revealed to men at their worship. It was the old people who found Christ at their worship, and as we grow older we will spend more time exclusively in worship than we are able to do now. In the mean time we must combine our worship with our work, and we may expect to find Christ at our books and in our common task.
Why should G.o.d have provided that so many hours of every day should be occupied with work? It is because
WORK MAKES MEN.
A university is not merely a place for making scholars, it is a place for making Christians. A farm is not a place for growing corn, it is a place for growing character, and a man has no character except that which is developed by his life and thought. G.o.d"s Spirit does the building through the acts which a man performs from day to day. A student who cons out every word in his Latin and Greek instead of consulting a translation finds that honesty is translated into his character. If he works out his mathematical problems thoroughly, he not only becomes a mathematician, but becomes a thorough man. It is by constant and conscientious attention to daily duties that thoroughness and conscientiousness and honorableness are imbedded in our beings.
Character is
THE MUSIC OF THE SOUL,
and is developed by exercise. Active use of the power entrusted to us is one of the chief means which G.o.d employs for producing the Christian graces. Hence the religion of a student demands that he be true to his work, and that he let his Christianity be shown to his fellow students and to his professors by the integrity and the conscientiousness of his academic life. A man who is not faithful in that which is least will not be faithful in that which is great. I have known men who struggled unsuccessfully for years to pa.s.s their examinations who, when they became Christians, found a new motive for work and thus were able to succeed where previously they had failed. A man"s Christianity comes out as much in his work as in his worship.
Our work is not only to be done thoroughly, but it is to be done honestly. A man is not only to be honorable in his academic relations, but he must be honest with himself and in his att.i.tude toward the truth. Students are not ent.i.tled to dodge difficulties, they must go down to the foundation principles. Perhaps the truths which are dear to us go down deeper even than we think, and we will get more out of them if we dig down for the nuggets than we will if we only pick up those that are on the surface. Other theories may perhaps be found to have false bases; if so, we ought to know it. It is well to take our soundings in every direction to see if there is deep water; if there are shoals we ought to find out where they are. Therefore, when we come to difficulties, let us not jump lightly over them, but let us be honest as seekers after truth.
It may not be necessary for people in general to sift the doctrines of Christianity for themselves, but a student is a man whose business it is to think, to exercise the intellect which G.o.d has given him in finding out the truth. Faith is never opposed to reason, though it is sometimes supposed by Bible teachers that it is; but you will find it is not. Faith is opposed to sight, but not to reason, though it is not limited to reason. In employing his intellect in the search for truth a student is drawing nearer to the Christ who said, "I am the way, the truth and the life." We talk a great deal about Christ as the way and Christ as the life, but there is a side of Christ especially for the student: "I am the truth," and every student ought to be a truth-lover and a truth-seeker for Christ"s sake.
II.
Another element in life, which of course is first in importance, is _G.o.d_.
The Angelus is perhaps the most religious picture painted this century. You cannot look at it and see that young man standing in the field with his hat off, and the girl opposite him with her hands clasped and her head bowed on her breast, without feeling a sense of G.o.d.
Do we carry about with us the thought of G.o.d wherever we go? If not, we have missed the greatest part of life. Do we have a conviction of G.o.d"s abiding presence wherever we are? There is nothing more needed in this generation than a larger and more Scriptural idea of G.o.d. A great American writer has told us that when he was a boy the conception of G.o.d which he got from books and sermons was that of a wise and very strict lawyer. I remember well the awful conception of G.o.d which I had when a boy. I was given an ill.u.s.trated edition of Watts" hymns, in which G.o.d was represented as a great piercing eye in the midst of a great black thunder cloud. The idea which that picture gave to my young imagination was that of G.o.d as a great detective, playing the spy upon my actions, as the hymn says:
"Writing now the story of what little children do."
That was a very mistaken and harmful idea which it has taken me years to obliterate. We think of G.o.d as "up there," or as one who made the world six thousand years ago and then retired. We must learn that He is not confined either to time or s.p.a.ce. G.o.d is not to be thought of as merely back there in time, or up there in s.p.a.ce. If not, where is He? "The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth." The Kingdom of G.o.d is within you, and G.o.d Himself is among men. When are we to exchange the terrible, far-away, absentee G.o.d of our childhood for the everywhere present G.o.d of the Bible? Too many of the old Christian writers seem to have conceived of G.o.d as not much more than the greatest man--a kind of divine emperor. He is infinitely more; He is a spirit, as Jesus said to the woman at the well, and in Him we live and move and have our being. Let us think of G.o.d as Immanuel--G.o.d with us--an ever-present, omnipresent, eternal One. Long, long ago, G.o.d made matter, then He made the flowers and trees and animals, then He made man. Did He stop? Is G.o.d dead? If He lives and acts what is He doing?
He is
MAKING MEN BETTER.
He it is that "worketh in you." The buds of our nature are not all out yet; the sap to make them comes from the G.o.d who made us, from the indwelling Christ. Our bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost, and we must bear this in mind, because the sense of G.o.d is kept up, not by logic, but by experience.
Until she was seven years of age the life of Helen Keller, the Boston girl who was deaf and dumb and blind, was an absolute blank; nothing could go into that mind because the ears and eyes were closed to the outer world. Then by that great process which has been discovered, by which the blind see, and the deaf hear, and the mute speak, that girl"s soul became opened, and they began to put in little bits of knowledge, and bit by bit they began to educate her. They reserved her religious instruction for Phillips Brooks. After some years, when she was twelve years old, they took her to him and he began to talk to her through the young lady who had been the means of opening her senses, and who could communicate with her by the exceedingly delicate process of touch. He began to tell her about G.o.d and what He had done, and how He loved men, and what He is to us. The child listened very intelligently, and finally said:
"Mr. Brooks, I knew all that before, but I didn"t know His name."
How often we have felt something within us impelling us to do something which we would not have conceived of by ourselves, or enabling us to do something which we could not have done alone. "It is G.o.d which worketh in you." This great simple fact
EXPLAINS MANY OF THE MYSTERIES OF LIFE,
and takes away the fear which we would otherwise have in meeting the difficulties which lie before us.
Two Americans who were crossing the Atlantic met on Sunday night to sing hymns in the cabin. As they sang the hymn, "Jesus, Lover of my Soul," one of the Americans heard an exceedingly rich and beautiful voice behind him. He looked around, and although he did not know the face he thought that he recognized the voice. So when the music ceased he turned around and asked the man if he had not been in the Civil war. The man replied that he had been a Confederate soldier. "Were you at such a place on such a night?" asked the first. "Yes," he said, "and a curious thing happened that night; this hymn recalled it to my mind. I was on sentry duty on the edge of a wood. It was a dark night and very cold, and I was a little frightened because the enemy were supposed to be very near at hand. I felt very homesick and miserable, and about midnight, when everything was very still, I was beginning to feel very weary and thought that I would comfort myself by praying and singing a hymn. I remember singing this hymn,
"All my trust on Thee is stayed, All my help from Thee I bring, Cover my defenceless head With the shadow of Thy wing."
After I had sung those words a strange peace came down upon me, and through the long night I remember having felt no more fear."
"Now," said the other man, "listen to my story. I was a Union soldier, and was in the wood that night with a party of scouts. I saw you standing up, although I didn"t see your face, and my men had their rifles focused upon you waiting the word to fire, but when you sang out,
"Cover my defenceless head With the shadow of Thy wing,"
I said, "Boys, put down your rifles, we will go home." I couldn"t kill you after that."
G.o.d was working in each of them, in His own way carrying out His will.
G.o.d keeps his people and guides them and without Him life is but a living death.
III.
The third element in life about which I wish to speak is _love_.
In this picture we notice the delicate sense of companionship, brought out by the young man and the young woman. It matters not whether they are brother and sister, or lover and loved; there you have the idea of friendship, the final ingredient in our life, after the two I have named. If the man or the woman had been standing in that field alone it would have been incomplete.
Love is the divine element in life, because "G.o.d is love." "He that loveth is born of G.o.d," therefore, as some one has said, let us "keep our friendships in repair." Let us cultivate the spirit of friendship, and let the love of Christ develop it into a great love, not only for our friends, but for all humanity. Wherever you go and whatever you do, your work will be a failure unless you have this element in your life.
These three things go far toward forming a well-rounded life. Some of us may not have these ingredients in their right proportion, but if you are lacking in one or the other of them, then pray for it and work for it that your life may be rounded and complete as G.o.d intended it should be.
PAX VOBISc.u.m. (Copyright, James Pott & Co. Used by permission.)
I once heard a sermon by a distinguished preacher upon "Rest." It was full of beautiful thoughts; but when I came to ask myself, "How does he say I can get Rest?" there was no answer. The sermon was sincerely meant to be practical, yet it contained no experience that seemed to me to be tangible, nor any advice that I could grasp--any advice, that is to say, which could help me to find the thing itself as I went about the world.
Yet this omission of what is, after all, the only important problem, was not the fault of the preacher. The whole popular religion is in the twilight here. And when pressed for really working specifics for the experiences with which it deals, it falters, and seems to lose itself in mist.
The want of connection between the great words of religion and every-day life has bewildered and discouraged all of us. Christianity possesses the n.o.blest words in the language; its literature overflows with terms expressive of the greatest and happiest moods which can fill the soul of man. Rest, Joy, Peace, Faith, Love, Light--these words occur with such persistency in hymns and prayers that an observer might think they formed the staple of Christian experience.
But on coming to close quarters with the actual life of most of us, how surely would he be disenchanted. I do not think we ourselves are aware how much our religious life is
MADE UP OF PHRASES;
how much of what we call Christian Experience is only a dialect of the Churches, a mere religious phraseology with almost nothing behind it in what we really feel and know.
To some of us, indeed, the Christian experiences seem further away than when we took the first steps in the Christian life. That life has not opened out as we had hoped. We do not regret our religion, but we are disappointed with it. There are times, perhaps, when wandering notes from a diviner music stray into our spirits; but these experiences come at few and fitful moments. We have no sense of possession in them. When they visit us, it is a surprise. When they leave us, it is without explanation. When we wish their return, we do not know how to secure it.
All which means a religion without solid base, and a poor and flickering life. It means a great bankruptcy in those experiences which give Christianity its personal solace and make it attractive to the world, and a great uncertainty as to any remedy. It is as if we knew everything about health--except the way to get it.
I am quite sure that the difficulty does not lie in the fact that men are not in earnest. This is simply not the fact. All around us Christians are wearing themselves out in trying to be better. The amount of spiritual longing in the world--in the hearts of unnumbered thousands of men and women in whom we should never suspect it; among the wise and thoughtful, among the young and gay, who seldom a.s.suage and never betray their thirst--this is one of the most wonderful and touching facts of life. It is not more heat that is needed, but more light; not more force, but a wiser direction to be given to very real energies already there.