Chapter 2

One of the most striking passages in modern literature is the paragraph in Mr. Spencer's First Principles, in which he describes the rhythm of motion. Motion, he says, though it seems to be continuous and steady, is in fact pulsating, undulatory, rhythmic. There is everywhere intermittent action and rest. The flag blown by the breeze floats out in undulations; then the branches oscillate; then the trees begin to sway; everywhere there is action and pause, the rhythm of motion.

The same law holds good of the conduct of life. Its natural method is rhythmic, intermittent, work alternating with rest, activity and receptivity succeeding one another, the rhythm of life. The steady strain, the continuous uniformity of life, is what kills. Work unrelieved by play, and play unrefreshed by work, grow equally stale and dull. Activity without reflection loses its grasp; meditation {19} without action sinks into a dream. Jesus in this passage had been absorbed in the most active and outward-going ministry; and then, as the evening comes, he turns away and goes up into the mountain and is there alone in prayer.

We need to take account of this law of the rhythm of life. Most of the time we are very much absorbed in busy, outward-looking activity, overwhelmed with engagements and hurry and worry; and then in the midst of this active life there stands the chapel with its summons to us to pause and give the reflective life its chance. That is one of the chief offices of religion in this preposterously busy age. Religion gives one at least a chance to stop and let God speak to him. It sends the multitudes away and takes one up into the solitude of the soul's communication with God. One of our Cambridge naturalists told me once of an experiment he had made with a pigeon. The bird had been born in a cage and had never been free; and one day his owner took him out on the porch of the house and flung the bird into the air. To the naturalist's surprise the bird's capacity for flight was perfect. Round and round he flew {20} as if born in the air; but soon his flight grew excited, panting, and his circles grew smaller, until at last he dashed full against his master's breast and fell on the ground. What did it mean? It meant that, though the bird had inherited the instinct for flight, he had not inherited the capacity to stop, and if he had not risked the shock of a sudden halt, he would have panted his little life out in the air. Is not that a parable of many a modern life,--completely endowed with the instinct of action, but without the capacity to stop? Round and round life goes, in its weary circle, until it is almost dying at full speed. Any shock, even some severe experience, is a mercy if it checks this whirl. Sometimes God stops such a soul abruptly by some sharp blow of trouble, and the soul falls in despair at his feet, and then He bends over it and says: "Be still my child; be still, and know that I am God!" until by degrees the despair of trouble is changed into submission and obedience, and the poor, weary, fluttering life is made strong to fly again.

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VIII

"THAT OTHER DISCIPLE"

_John_ xx. 8.

About fifty years ago, one of the most distinguished of New England preachers, Horace Bushnell, preached a very famous sermon on the subject of "Unconscious Influence," taking for his text this verse: "Then went in also that other disciple." The two disciples had come together, as the passage says, to the sepulchre, but that other disciple, though he came first, hesitated to go in, until the impetuous Peter led the way, and "then went in also that other disciple."

There are always these two ways of exerting an influence on another's life, the ways of conscious and unconscious influence. A few persons in a community have the strength of positive leadership. They devise and guide public opinion, and may be fairly described as personal influences. But such real leaders are few. Most of us cannot expect to stand in our community like the centurion of the {22} Gospel and say to one man: Come, and he cometh; and to another: Go, and he goeth; and to a third: Do this, and he doeth it. Most of us must take to ourselves what one of our professors said to a body of students: "Be sure to lend your influence to any good object; but do not lend your influence until you have it." On the other hand, however, there is for all of us an unavoidable kind of influence; the unconscious effect on another's life, made not by him who preaches, or poses, or undertakes to be a missionary, but simply by the man who goes his own way, and so demonstrates that it is the best way for others to follow. That is what Laurence Oliphant once called, "living the life;" the kind of conduct which does not drive, but draws.

Peter might have stood before the sepulchre, and tried all in vain to influence and urge his friend to come in with him, but instead of this he simply enters, and then, without any conscious persuasion on his part, that other disciple enters too. So it is that a man to-day just takes his stand among us in some issue of duty, not dragging in allies to help him, but quietly standing on his own isolated conviction, and some day "that other {23} disciple" just comes and stands by him for the right. Or a man is passing some morning the door of this Chapel, and just slips in and says his prayer, and falls into the habit of worship from which he had of late been falling out, and some day as he sits here, as he supposes, quite out of the circle of his friends, he turns and finds "that other disciple" sitting by his side. Or a man enters just a little way into the power of the religious life, just enough to feel how incomplete is his faith, and how little he can do for any one else, and one day as he gropes his way toward the light he feels a hand reaching out to his, and "that other disciple" gives himself to be guided by the strength which had seemed to its possessor until that moment weakness. Here is the encouragement and the interpretation of many an insignificant and apparently ineffective life. Positive and predetermined influence few of us can boast of possessing, but this unconscious influence not one of us can escape. And indeed, that is the profounder leadership even of the greatest souls. One of the most extraordinary traits in the ministry of Jesus Christ is his undesigned persuasiveness. He does not seem to expect {24} a generally accepted influence. He recognizes that there are whole groups of souls whom he cannot reach. Only they who have ears to hear, he says, can hear him. He just goes his own great way, misinterpreted, persecuted; and at last the world perceives that it is the way to go, and falls into line behind him. When he puts forth his sheep, he goes before them, and they follow him. It is simply the contagion of personality, the magnetism of soul, the spiritual law of attraction, which draws a little soul toward a great soul, as a planet is drawn in its orbit round the sun.

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IX

MORAL TIMIDITY

_John_ xxi. 22.

The trouble with Peter in this passage is the sense of his own incapacity. Jesus comes to him with the great command: "Feed my lambs; feed my sheep;" as though Peter were appointed to take the lead among his followers. And then Peter shrinks back, not because of disinclination, but because of sheer self-distrust. Who is he that he should assume the leadership? He has failed once, perhaps he may fail again. "Lord," he says, "there is John; is not he the man to lead? He never made a mistake as I did. What is he to do?" And then Jesus says: "What is that to thee? The question is not whether you are the best man to do this thing. You are simply called to do it as best you can. If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? Follow thou me."

There is a great deal of this moral timidity in college life. Any man of reasonable {26} modesty sees about him plenty of men better able to be leaders in good service than he is. It seems audacious for him to pose as fit to lead. "There is John," he says, "a far better man than I; what is he to do?" Then the spirit of Jesus again answers: "What is that to thee?" Here is the thing to be done, the stand to be taken, and here are you. Of course, there is much that you cannot do. Of course there are many that might do it better. But the call happens to be to you: "Follow thou me." It is not a call to any exciting or dramatic service. It is simply the demand that one takes his life just as it is, and gives it as he can to the service of Christ. "Feed my sheep, feed my lambs;" give yourself to humble and modest service; live your own life without much anticipation of influence or effectiveness; with all your insufficiency and frequent stumbling, follow thou me; and in that simple following you are showing better than by all eloquence or argument how others ought to go, and you are helping and strengthening us all.

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X

THE HEAVENLY VISION

_Acts_ xxvi. 19.

The great transformation in St. Paul from a persecutor to an apostle of Christianity was a sudden revelation. He saw a heavenly vision and was not disobedient unto it. But this is not the common way of life. It does not often happen that character is transformed and the great decision irrevocably made in an instant. It is not as a rule true that:--

"Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side."

Most lives proceed more evenly, without any such catastrophic change. And yet, it is none the less true that in a very large proportion of lives there come, now and then, in the midst of routine and uniformity, certain flashes of clearer vision, disclosing the aims and ideals of life, as though one should be traveling in a fog along a hillside, and now and then the breeze should sweep the mist away, and the road and its end be clear. {28} Now, loyalty to such a vision is the chief source of strength and satisfaction in a man's life. Sometimes a young man comes to an old one for counsel about his calling in life, and the young man sums up his gifts and capacities and defects. He will be a lawyer because he has a turn for disputation, or an engineer because he is good at figures, or a minister because he likes the higher literature. All such considerations have, of course, their place. But by no such intellectual analysis is the fundamental question met. Many men fail in their lives in spite of great gifts, and many men succeed in spite of great defects. The fundamental question is: "Has this young man had a vision of what he wants to do? Has a great desire disclosed itself to his heart? Has the breeze of God blown away the mists of his confusion and shown him his ideal, very far away perhaps, yet unmistakable and clear?" Then, with all reasonable allowance for gifts and faults, the straighter he heads toward that ideal the happier and the more effective he is likely to be. When he thus follows his heart, he is working along the line of least resistance; and when his little work is done, however meagre {29} and unimportant it may be, he can at least give it back to God, who gave it to him to do, and say: "I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision."

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XI

THE BREAD AND WATER OF LIFE

_John_ vi. 35. _Revelation_ xxii. 17

Here, in the Gospel, the message of Christ is described as the bread of life, and, here, again, in the Book of Revelation, as the water of life. Bread and water--the very plainest, most essential, every-day needs, the forms of nourishment of which we rarely think with gratitude, but which on no day we go without.

A great many people seem to think that religion is a kind of luxury in life, a Sunday delicacy, an educated taste, an unessential food, which one can, at his discretion, take or go without. But to Jesus Christ religion is no such super-imposed accessory; it is simply bread and water, the daily necessity, the fundamental food, the universally essential and normal satisfaction of the natural hunger and the human thirst. Let us, of all things, hold fast to the naturalness, simplicity, and wholesomeness of the religious life. Religion is not a luxury added to the normal life; it is the {31} rational attitude of the soul in its relation to the universe of God. It is not an accident that the central sacrament of the Christian life is the sacrament of daily food and drink. This do, says the Master, so oft as ye eat and drink it, in remembrance of me.

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 God 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 passage, "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 passage 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 snob 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 snob. The gentleman walks his way through the world, anticipating 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 God 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 passes out into the day's life all unchanged. But then, as it sometimes happens through God'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 petition, 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 God," 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 attitude 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 association 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 passions, 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 God, 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 God, 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 passions, 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 passionate 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.