Chapter 8

Revenge says, "I will make it worse for you than you have made it for me." Sentimentalism says: "Let the poor victim of circumstances go; send him a rosewater spray and an embroidered text and he won't do it again." But love, she of the clear eye and the steady hold, takes him by the hand in silence, lifts him up, and leads him, perhaps by paths of pain, to his better self. Love puts his sins behind her back and teaches him to face her way. Love lets the wrong teach its own lesson, bear its own fruit. And in her labour for him she forgets her own pain and loss caused by his offense.

The best way to forgive a burglar would not be to let him out of jail, but to teach him the laws of property, to train him in the self-respect that would lead to industry, to make him a brother and a fellow worker among men instead of an outcast and a social parasite. The test of any forgiveness is its helpfulness, the manner in which it wipes out the enmity of the victim and turns the guilty into better ways.

Many say, I can forgive, but I cannot forget. No one asks you to forget; but you cannot fully forgive unless you will forego the feeling of enmity and the desire for revenge. You cannot make any one forget that which he has once known; but you can substitute helpfulness for hatred and restoration for revenge. True love simply discounts the past as a ground for present action; it refuses to determine its personal bearing and deeds in to-day by the other's ill deeds of yesterday.

All we are asked to do is to forgive as we are forgiven. Our hope is that when we have fallen our friends will not lose their faith in us nor entirely forsake us, that they will give us another chance; not that they will shield us from the fruitage of our follies and our falseness, but that they will not shut us off forever from their faces.

So far from forgiveness being the weakness of the thoughtless, it is the helpfulness of the strong and the wise. To forgive a man will not mean to escape from the trouble of securing his punishment; it will not mean the weak complaisance of indolent tolerance. It will mean thought for his weakness, taking up his burden, doing the brother's part for him, the endeavour to do for him what we would like to have the Father of us all do for us all.

XIV

Men and Mammon

_Riches and Righteousness_ _Religion and Business_ _The Moral End of Money-Making_

_Better a sweet failure than a sour success._

_An itching palm causes a crook in the fingers._

_Many a moral squint comes from a money monocle._

_The fortunate people are those who believe they are._

_We are always building bridges for things with wings._

_The best way to wipe out a friendship is to sponge on it._

_Many a man thinks he is pious when he is only petrified._

_A little plain honesty is worth untold professional holiness._

_The religion that runs to fever usually evens up with chills._

_Nothing is easier than being benevolent with other people's money._

XIV

RICHES AND RIGHTEOUSNESS

Let no man take it, that the statement on the inaccessibility of heaven to the rich involves the opposite, how easily shall they that have nothing enter in. The people who have lived pulseless lives are apt to point to their poverty as the proof of their piety. But righteousness is neither a matter of riches nor of rags. The great Teacher glorifies neither. The qualifications for citizenship in His kingdom strike deeper than that.

His words have nothing to do with the bitter envy of the demagogue who denounces those who have earned that for which he would not labour. He measures men not by that they have but by that they are. He looks through both the fine linen and the tattered rags to the man. Money interests Him only as it affects character. The question of riches and poverty is not a matter of housing and eating, but what a man does for himself and his world with that which he has.

Riches of themselves do not bar a man from heaven; but they full often eat into his heart, become of absorbing interest, and so effectually and forever blind the inner vision to the best things. It is not that heaven has shut its gates, but that the love of money, the selfishness, born of cupidity, has paralyzed those spiritual senses by which he might have found his way therein.

The possession of wealth is not a sin; to some it has come almost without effort, even against their wills; but it does constitute one of the most severe tests that can be set before a soul. It increases the difficulties of the right life, because it enlarges so greatly the responsibilities. The greater the wealth the greater the trust laid upon a man as the steward of the produce of the earth.

The principle holds of all possessions; all are tests of character. A man can love gold just as ardently when he has but a grain as when he has possessions beyond computation. A single dollar, laid on the heart, can shut out the light of heaven as effectually as can a million. The relation between riches and righteousness is not determined by the balance in the bank, but by the balance that a man succeeds in maintaining in his heart between his own interests and the trusteeship which possession places upon him.

Money makes men as well as unmakes them. The burdens, the tests, the responsibilities it entails, the temptations it presents, all form part of life's great lesson. Out of the struggle between self and the service we owe the world, out of the keen fighting against covetousness, and the battle against the debasing tendencies of the love for gold and the greed for gain arise the giants--or fall the lost souls.

The rich young ruler came to Jesus and faced his test; the demand that he should sell all and give to the poor simply put his heart on trial; it set before him the great choices; it decided as to the things which he held first. To him the possession of things was more than the possibilities of using them in service; before the great test he fell.

It is just as easy and often fully as dangerous to set your heart on the gold you haven't got as it is to fall into the snare of the miser. Everything depends on the place you give to riches in your life. One man seeks them as a prize to be won and enjoyed for his own gratification, his own glory and fame; another seeks them only as larger avenues to usefulness, and to him riches come as tools, as servants, as possibilities of making his life count for more.

Some men die with their houses full of tools unused; they have made the fatal mistake of setting their hearts on the tools instead of on the work. Others come to their accounting possessing as many tools, but all of them shining from hard use, and counting as their treasures not the tools but the things produced, the good accomplished. Wealth is for work and the work is for the making of the man. They enter the kingdom who are kingly, whether they learned the royal lesson and acquired the heavenly character through the school of poverty or that of riches.

RELIGION AND BUSINESS

The question, can a man be a Christian and succeed in business, though old, is still asked every day. There are yet a great many who regard religion and business as conflicting pursuits, and they attempt a compromise by the clear-cut division of time into business hours and church time. Others are answering this question in the negative. "Look at me," they say. "I have always been pious and honest, and therefore I have failed to make money or achieve success; religion does not pay."

If the question means, can a man take out his backbone and succeed in business, there need be no hesitancy as to the answer. If becoming a Christian means the elimination of all virility from the character, the substitution of soft soap and sawder for strength and diligence, religion cannot be regarded as a help in business. There are too many people who think that sloth is a sign of spirituality and that you cannot be a saint unless you have softening of the brain.

But it is simply whether you can keep your whole life, in the market or out, up to the level of a certain ideal, whether you can be honest, true, fair-minded, unselfish, merciful, and kind and at the same time do the work and meet the exigencies of modern commercial and industrial strife. It is whether you can measure steadily towards heaven's ideal while mastering earth's daily duties.

The question is either a reproach to religion or to business. It is assumed by many, with especial conviction by those who know business only by reputation, that it demands the sacrifice constantly of honour, truth, mercy, and every other virtue. The man who thinks that he is pious because he is pulseless, draws a fancy picture of red-blooded men fighting, intriguing, slaying, like demons new from the pit; and that, he thinks, is modern business.

Strife is everywhere. If religion means sequestration from temptation we need to pray to be delivered from it. There is as much danger of a man's losing his character, selling his soul, in the church as in the market. The temptation to the merchant to misrepresent his goods for a larger profit is not greater than that which comes to the minister to magnify his abilities for an increase in fame.

Things honourable are the same everywhere; they are written deep within us, and by them church and mart both are judged. Every man knows that the chief business of life, whether through commerce, toil, study, recreation, or worship, is to develop the best life, to make of himself a true, full grown man, who shall render to this world a full man's service.

Business is a more effective school of character than any other we have. If some of the standards of that school have been unworthy--and who shall say they have not?--it is our duty to revise them, to make them higher; not to abolish the school, not to stay away from it because it is imperfect, but to make it fit to serve its true purpose.

Business always will be immoral as long as it is an end in itself. The product is greater than the machine, the making of character greater than the mechanism by which we make a living. The serious danger comes when a man begins to lay his soul on the counter, when he reverses the course in this school of character and makes the end serve the means, when he sacrifices honour, truth, and the soul that business may succeed.

Only failure lies that way. No business ever became permanently great by making its people small. Success here is to be measured by the soul. No matter what a man may be doing he must keep himself above his task. The work must serve the worker.

The question is whether we are serving business or it is serving us. If a man lives for his wage he will sacrifice everything to get it, but if he works that he may find life, then he will ever refuse to lose the things of which life is made in the pursuit of success. He knows he does not have to make money, but he does have to make manhood. That is the end both of religion and of business.

THE MORAL END OF MONEY-MAKING

There are those who talk of money and business as though these were necessarily and intrinsically evil. It is often supposed that capacity for goodness is established by incapacity for business, while those to whom poverty seems inevitable find consolation in regarding it as evidence of piety.

Large numbers of otherwise sensible people feel that there is some unavoidable conflict between the ideal and the real, between what they call the sacred and the secular, between the things they would like to do and to be and the things they actually have to do as part of their daily affairs and duties.

Probably the greater number try to meet the difficulty by dividing their lives and interest into separate parts. They say, business is business; religion is another thing altogether; I will work hard and honestly at my business and look forward to the comforts and pleasures of religion and ideal things.

So it happens that there are those who feel that to speak of religion on a week-day reveals a lack of the sense of the fitness of things, while other good people are quite sure that it is a wholly irreverent thing to speak of business on a Sunday. We tend to dwell alternately in two sets of apartments, the practical and the pious.

Even where there are no such sharp lines through the life we feel that manufacture and the market, money-making, and trading tend to blunt the finer sensibilities and act as a hindrance to the realization of our ideals, while, on the other hand, we are sure that the life of ideals is unfitted for business.

The result of this separation and apparent antagonism is that we cannot develop our lives symmetrically; we are torn by conflicting purposes; we fail to see any ideal ends in business or to find any practical values in religion. Religion without business tends to dreamy, purposeless moral enervation; business without ideal ends and aims to grossness and materialism.

We need to spiritualize all our acts, our whole lives, our business, our work, our pleasures, by giving them moral intent and value, so as to unify the sacred and the secular, the utilitarian, and the ideal by making each serve the other.

It does not make so much difference whether a man is engaged in money-making or in writing poems and picturing the fair dreams of better things; the question is this, is the money-making for the sake of the money or for some high and worthy end? What is the motive that impels either the dealer in dollars or the dealer in dreams?

Our ideals, visions, aspirations, and our religion become most damaging if they fail to find expression in conduct and work; lacking the practical, they result in a character that is satisfied with contemplating the good instead of realizing it. The man who sinks his soul in dollars may personally be no worse than he who allows it to atrophy while he dreams.

Here in religion are the dynamic and the motives that bear men on and buoy them up to do the toil, bear the burdens, stand in the fight of daily living; here are the visions that lift our eyes from the desk and the machine, from profits and discounts, and help us to see the worthy prizes of life.

No man could become a saint by separating himself from this world's turmoil and reading his Bible alone; neither can any man find strength and stability for life's business and battle, find satisfaction in its service and rewards, unless he sees through its dollars and its dirt the moral ends of all this world's work.

This noisy mill of daily living may be the greatest blessing we know; it is the opportunity for the expression of our highest ideals, for the translation of religion into terms of daily living; it is the place where character is molded by its stress, its calls to the strong will, and its manifold opportunities for the service of all mankind by each man in his place.

XV

The Every-Day Heaven

_The Beauty of Holiness_ _The Gladness of Goodness_ _The True Paradise_

_Self shrinks the soul._

_The keen eye needs the kindly heart._

_There's no argument equal to a happy smile._

_Imaginary evils have more than imaginary effects._

_You never find truth by losing the temper._

_Menial work may be noblest service._

_They who live off the flock are never willing to die for it._

_The life that would be fruitful seeks showers as well as sunshine._

_Kindness makes all kin._

_All we get from heaven we owe to earth._

_Pain is a small price to pay for the joy of sacrifice._

_He who gives on feeling generally begrudges in fact._

_Every loss met by love leads to gain._

_The long look within ourselves will cure us of a lot of impatience with other folks._

_The last person to enter heaven will be the one whose religion has all been in the first person singular._

_We often talk a good deal about the salvation of souls in order to escape service for the salvation of society._

_Much that is called orthodoxy is scepticism at heart, fear to examine the foundations lest there are none._

XV

THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS

Religion ought to be the most natural, desirable, and attractive thing to man, for it simply stands for the development of the best in us, the coming into the full and rich heritage that is ours as spiritual beings, and the realization of our highest possibilities of character and service. He who ignores religion is cutting himself off from the best and most beautiful possibilities in his life.

Some have talked of the necessity of making religion attractive. It does not have to be made attractive; there is nothing more desirable than the peace, the power, and prosperity of the real life which it confers. It is the imitation, the false and prejudiced presentation of religion that men endeavour to dress up attractively. In that they never succeed, for cramping the soul and twisting the intellect ever are opposed by the best in us.

From the caricature of religion we turn with loathing. Mummeries and mockeries, fads and forms leave us empty and impatient. The heart of man goes out to things fair, lovely, joyous, and uplifting, and they who find no God in the elaborate sermon or the service in the church somehow are thrilled with the feeling of the divine and inspiring in the woods and field and mountains.

All things good, all things attractive and lovely, uplifting and sublime have but one source. They touch our hearts because they come from the heart of all being; they reach our spirits because they are spiritual. Deep calls unto deep when the divine in man answers to the divine in the world without, in human affections, in noble aspirations, and in glorious deeds.

Too long have we believed that only the unpleasant, the gloomy, and repellent could be right or religious. There is a type of conscience that determines action by the rule that if a thing is pleasant or beautiful it must be sinful and wrong. To such souls it is a sin to be sunny in disposition, to delight in the Father's fair world, with its glowing riches and bounty dropping daily from His hand.

It would be safer to say that sin must be somewhere lurking wherever there is deformity, pain, or discord--that, as a common phrase has it, the bleak and barren is the evidence of that which is forsaken of God. Things desolate are not divine. Religion is not repression but development into a fullness and beauty far beyond our dreams.

It is a good thing to see the divine in all things fair and lovely; to take them as evidences that the love that once pronounced this world good in its primeval glory still is working, still is seeking to enrich our lives and lead them out in fullness of joy. Why should not we, like the poets and preachers of ancient Israel, taste again of the gladness of living.

Character may need for its full development the storms and wintry blasts of life, but it needs just as truly and just as much the sunshine, the days when the heart goes out and joins in the song of nature, when something leaps within us at the gladness of being alive, and we drink in of the infinite love that is over all.

Just as the sun seems to call the flowers out of the dark earth and draw out their beauty, calls forth the buds and brings the blossom into perfect fruit, so there is a spirit of divine life in our world calling us out to the best, seeking to woo us to the things beautiful. Man needs not to repress his life, but to learn to respond to every worthy impulse, every high hope, to find the life beautiful.

The beauty of holiness is the beauty of character. It is the adjustment of life to nature and neighbour and heaven so that strength and harmony ensue, so that duty becomes a delight, labour a song of praise, and out of life's burden and battle the beauties of godliness, of love, and tenderness, joy and gratitude begin to bloom.

Lay hold on everything good and true, on all things glad and elevating; cherish every fair thought and aspiration; learn to see the essentially religious in whatever lifts up life, in whatever helps humanity, and so make life rich in heavenly treasure and glowing with the glory of other worlds.

THE GLADNESS OF GOODNESS

Life's poverty is due, not to what we have had and lost, not to what has been withheld or taken from us, but to the good which we might have had which we carelessly have passed by. No others despoil us as we despoil ourselves by our blindness and indifference to the wealth of our own lives and the beauty ever close at hand.

We who scurry over land and sea, who dig, and toil, and fret to find happiness, come back at last to learn that the sweet-faced guest has been waiting close by our door all the time.

He perishes in the pitiless snows who, blind to the good and the glory in every valley and hillside, heeds only the impulse to climb and find the good in some remote height. Ambition and pride lift ever new peaks ahead only to mock him when at last, worn, spent, and empty in heart, he falls by the way.

The old theology talked much of a heaven far away, to be attained in the remote future; the new theology often seems inclined to ignore any heaven, but what the hearts of men need is the sense of the heaven that is all about them, the God who ever is near, and the blessedness even now attainable.

Some live in the past, complacently contemplating the glories that once were theirs or their ancestors'; some live in the future, dreaming of felicities yet to be; but they are wise only who live to the full in the present, who catch the richness and beauty, all the wealth that the passing hour or the present opportunity may have.

He is truly godly who sees God in all things, in the affairs of this day, in the faces of living men, in the flowers and fields, who sees all the divine wonder and beauty of life, and not he who sees the Most High only in some legendary past or in a strange, imaginary future.

No man becomes strong by reminiscence of his breakfast or dreaming of his next meal alone; each portion of time must have its own fitting food. The soul of man never can find its fullness through either history or prophecy; it needs the sense of the spiritual in this living, pulsating, matter-of-fact present.

This world is slovenly, sinful, and evil because so many of us are content with the past or the future, with myth or with imagination, and fail to demand the development of the good that is our heritage to-day. The better day comes not by dreams, but by each man doing the best he can and securing all the good he can for his own day.

We need to give up the plan of saving the world by the piety of postponed pleasures and to find the fullness of life in the present, to get below the surface of things and discover life's real riches, to interpret this daily toil and struggle, and all this world of ours, in terms of the divine and infinite.

How much it would mean to our lives if we might learn, instead of sighing for the impossible, to get all the sweetness and joy that is in the things we have, how rich we would find the common lot to be, how many things that now seem dreary and empty would bloom into new beauty. In a child's smile, a wild flower's fragrance, a glint of sunlight, things possible to all, we would find joys unspeakable and full of glory.

This does not mean dull content with things as they are; it does mean the development of the faculties of appreciation, the growth of the life in power to see, the development of vision. It means the transformation of the dull earth with the glory of the ideal.

Some day, when we look back over our lives, how keen will be our regret as we realize what we have missed, how we have spurned the substance of life's lasting treasures, human loves, friendships, every-day beauties, and happiness, while chasing the shadows of imaginary joys.

THE TRUE PARADISE