Chapter 3

Here is one of the passages 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 passage 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.

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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 assent 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 illustration 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 God {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 God. 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 God 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 Dyke, 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 passage. 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 passes from obligation to affection, from demand to privilege. And only as he passes 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 God'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-assertion, 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 passions 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 passage. 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 "God be merciful to me, a sinner," comes the promise of the beatitude. The first condition of receiving the gift of God 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.

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XXIII

THE MOURNERS

_Matthew_ v. 4.

Whom does Jesus call the blessed people? How strange it sounds when he answers: "Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted." Blessed, that is to say, are not only the people who, as we say, are in sorrow; but blessed are all the burdened people, the people who are having a hard time, the people who are bearing their crosses, for they are the ones who will learn the deeper comfort of the Gospel. It is the same promise which is repeated later in another place: "Come unto me all ye that are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." This does not mean that mourning is blessed for its own sake, or that the only way to be a Christian is to be sad. It simply calls attention to this fact, that every life is sure to have some hardness, or burden, or cross in it. If you have none, it simply shows that you have not really begun to live. And Jesus says that the farther you go into {61} these deep places of experience, the more you will get out of his religion. There are some phases of life where it makes little difference whether you have any religion or not. But let the water of trouble go over your soul, and then there is just one support which keeps you from going down. Religion, that is to say, is not a thing for holidays and easy times. Its comfort is not discovered until you come to a hard place. The more it is needed, the stronger it is. How strange it is that the people who seem most conscious of their blessings and sustained by a sense of gratitude are, as a rule, people who have been called to mourn. It is not resignation only which they have found; it is light. They have been comforted through their sorrows. Their burden has been made easy and their yoke light.

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XXIV

THE MEEK.

_Matthew_ v. 5.

Whom does Jesus call the blessed people? Again he answers: "Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth." And who are the meek? We think of a meek man as a limp and mild creature who has no capacity to hurt or courage to help. But that is not what the Bible word means. Meekness is not weakness. The Book of Numbers says that Moses was the meekest man that ever lived; but one of the first illustrations of his character was in slaying an Egyptian who insulted his people. The meek man of the Bible is simply what we call the gentle-man--the man without swagger or arrogance, not self-assertive or forthputting, but honorable and considerate. This is the sense in which it has been said of Jesus that he was the first of gentlemen. Now these people, the gracious and generous,--not the self-important and ostentatious,--are, according to Jesus, in the end to rule. {63} They are not to get what we call the prizes of life, the social notoriety and position, but they are to have the leadership of their time and its remembrance when they are gone. Long after showy ambition has its little day and ceases to be, the world will remember the magnanimous and self-effacing leader. He does not have to grasp the prizes of earth; he, as Jesus says, "inherits the earth." It is his by right. The meek, says the thirty-seventh Psalm, shall inherit the earth and shall delight themselves in abundance of peace. The meek escape the quarrelsomeness of ambition. They live in a world of peace and good-will. And when we sing of peace on earth and good-will to men, we are only repeating the beatitude of Jesus: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."

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XXV

THE HUNGER FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS

_Matthew_ v. 6.

Whom does Jesus call the blessed people? "Blessed," he goes on, "are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled." The New Testament repeatedly states this doctrine, which sounds so strangely in our ears. It is the doctrine that a man gets what he asks for--that his real hunger will be filled. We should say that just the opposite of this was true--that life was a continued striving to get things which one fails to get--a hunger which is doomed to stay unsatisfied. But Jesus turns to his followers and says: "Ask, and you shall receive; seek, and you shall find," and in the same spirit turns even to the hypocrites and says again: "They also receive their reward." Conduct, that is to say, fulfils its destiny. What you sow, you reap. The blessing which is sufficiently desired is attained. What you really ask for, you get. The only reason why this does not {65} seem to be true is that we do not realize what the things are which we are asking for and what must be the inevitable answer to our demand. We ask, for instance, for money; and we expect an answer of happiness. But we do not get happiness, we only get money, which is a wholly different thing. We ask for popularity and reputation, and we expect these gifts, when received, to last; but we have asked for something whose very nature is that it does not last. It is like asking for a soap-bubble and expecting to get a billiard-ball. We cannot work for the temporary and get the permanent. If, then, it is true that we are to get what we want, then the secret of happiness is to want the best things and to want them very much. If we hunger and thirst for base things we shall get them. Oh yes, we shall get them; and get the unhappiness which comes of this awful discovery, that as we have hungered so we are filled. And if we are really hungry for righteousness, if we want to be good, as a thirsty man wants water, if, as Jesus says of himself, our meat is to do the will of Him who sends us, then that demand also will be supplied. "He satisfieth the longing soul," {66} says the Psalmist, "and filleth the hungry soul"--not with success, or money, or fame, but with that which the soul was hungry for--"with goodness." The longing soul has sought the best blessing, and it has received the best blessedness.

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XXVI

THE MERCIFUL

_Matthew_ v. 7.

Whom does Jesus call the blessed people? "Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy." This repeats in effect the later words of Jesus: "With what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged." The merciless judgment passed on others recoils upon one's own nature and makes it hard and mean and brutalized. The habit of charitable judgment of others is a source of personal blessedness. It blooms out into composure and hopefulness, into peace and faith. How wonderful these great calm affirmations of Jesus are! They are directly in the face of the most common views of life, and yet they are delivered as simple axioms of experience, as matters of fact, self-evident propositions of the reason. It is not a matter of barter of which Jesus is speaking. He does not say: "If you treat another kindly he will be kind to you. The merciful man will get mercy when he needs it." That {68} would not be the truth. The best of men are often judged most mercilessly. Jesus himself gives his life to acts of mercy, and is pitilessly slain. This beatitude gives, not a promise to pay, but a law of life. To forgive an injury is, according to this law, a blessing to the forgiver himself. The quality of mercy blesses him that gives as well as him that takes. The harsh judge of others grows hard himself, while pity softens the pitier. Thus among the happiest of people are those whose grudges and enmities have been overcome by their own broader view of life. It is as though in the midst of winter the warmer sun were already softening the frost. They are happy, not because others are kinder to them, but because that softer soil permits their own better life to germinate and grow. The merciful has obtained mercy; the blesser has received the blessing.

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XXVII

THE PURE IN HEART

_Matthew_ v. 8.