Chapter 5

A crown of life! There is no discovery of experience more important in a man's life than the discovery of its legitimate rewards. A man undertakes to do the best he can with his powers and capacities, and inquires some day for the natural reward of his fidelity. Shall he have gratitude, or recognition, or praise? Any one of these things may come {94} to him, but any one of them, or all of them, may elude him; and all sooner or later show themselves to be accidents of his experience, and not its natural and essential issue. Then he discovers that there is but one legitimate reward of life, and that is increase of life, more of power and capacity and vitality and effectiveness. What is the reward of learning one's lessons? Marks, or praise, or distinction, may come of this, or they may not. The legitimate reward is simply the power to learn other lessons. The expenditure of force has increased the supply of force; the use of capacity has developed capacity. What is the reward of taking physical exercise? It is not athletic prizes, or athletic glory; it is strength. You have sought strength, and you get strength. The crown of athletic life is increase of athletic vitality. What is the reward of keeping your temper? It is the increased power of self-control. What is the reward of doing your duty as well as you can? It is the ability to do your duty better. Out of the duty faithfully done opens the way to meet the larger duty. You have been faithful over a few things, and you become the ruler over many things.

{95}

And what is the crown of the whole of life lived faithfully here? It is not a crown of gold or gems in another life; it is simply more life; a broader use of power, a healthier capacity, a larger usefulness. You are faithful unto death, through the misapprehensions and imperfections and absence of appreciation or gratitude in this preparatory world, and then there is offered to you inevitably and legitimately the crown of a larger, more serviceable, more effective life.

{96}

XXXIX

THE HIDDEN MANNA AND THE WHITE STONE

_Revelation_ ii. 12-17.

Both of these are Jewish symbols. One refers to that food which, as Moses commanded, was kept in the sanctuary and eaten by the priest alone; the other apparently refers to a sacred stone worn by the priest, with an inscription on it known only to him. Both symbols mean to teach that the Christian believer has an immediate and personal intimacy with God. There is no sacerdotal intermediation for him. He can go straight to the altar and take of the sacred bread. He wears on his own breast the mark of God's communication. It is the doctrine of the universal priesthood of believers; the highest promise to a faithful church. But on this white stone, the message says, there is a name written which no man knoweth save he that receiveth it. How quickly that goes home to many a faithful life. Hidden from all that can be read by {97} others is the writing which one bears upon his own breast, legible only to himself and to his God. Think how hardly and carelessly people try to judge one's life, to read its characteristics of strength or weakness. Think how we all thus deal in hasty judgment, stamping our neighbors as jovial or moody, generous or selfish, as kind or stern, as sinner or saint; while all the time, deeper than any interpretation of ours can reach, there is the central sanctuary of the man's own soul, where is worn against his breast the real title which to his own consciousness he bears, and which may quite contradict all external judgments. What is written on that interior life? What is that name you bear which no man knoweth save you;--that life of yourself which is hidden with Christ in God? That is the most solemn question which any man can ask himself as he bends to say his silent prayer.

Is it just your own name, the badge of selfishness; or is it some vow of irresponsibility,--Am I my brother's keeper?--or is it just a sheer blank white stone, marking a life without intention or character at all? Or is there perhaps written there the pure {98} demand to be of use?--"For their sakes I sanctify myself;"--or is there written on your heart the name of God, or of his Christ, so that this interior maxim reads: "I live, yet not I, but Christ that liveth in me"?

{99}

XL

THE MORNING STAR

_Revelation_ ii. 18-28.

The morning star is the symbol of promise, the sign that the dawn is not far away. Thyatira was a little place, with a weak church, with small hopes and great discouragements, much troubled by the work of a false prophetess, tempted by "the deep things of Satan," as the message says, and yet to it the promise is committed, that it shall have authority over the nations, and receive "the morning star." It was the same great promise that had been already given to the early Christians: "Fear not, little flock, for it is my Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." It was the same amazing optimism which made Jesus look about him, as he stood with a dozen humble followers, and say: "Lift up your eyes and look at the fields, they are white already to my harvest."

There is certainly passing over the world in our day a great wave of intellectual and {100} spiritual discouragement and despondency. What with philosophical pessimism and social agitations and literary decadence and political corruption and moral looseness, a great many persons are beginning to feel that the end of the century is an end of faith, and are not able to discern in the darkness of the time any morning star. As one distinguished author has said: "This is not a time of the eclipse of faith, but a time of the collapse of faith." It was much the same in the times of Thyatira. There was the same luxury and self-indulgence in the Roman world, the same social restlessness, the same intellectual despondency. Now, who is it that can view these perturbations of the world with a tranquil and rational hope? I answer, that it is only he who views his own time in the light of the eternal purposes of God. The religious man is bound to be an optimist, not with the foolish optimism which blinks the facts of life; but with the sober optimism which believes that--

"Step by step, since time began, We see the steady gain of man."

It may be dark as pitch in the world of speculative thought, but religion discerns the {101} morning star. It believes in its own time. It believes that somehow "good will be the final goal of ill." Even in the perplexities and disasters of its own experience it is not overwhelmed. It is cast down, but not destroyed. It is saved by hope. It lifts its eyes and beholds through the clouds the gleam of the morning star.

{102}

XLI

LIVING AS DEAD

_Revelation_ iii. 1.

Was there ever a message of sterner irony than this to the Church of Sardis: "Thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead"! We may suppose that it was a church of apparent prosperity, with all the machinery of church life, its ritual, and officers, and committees, all in working order; and yet, when one got at the heart of it, there was no vitality. It was a dead church. It could show--as the passage says--no works fulfilled before God. It was like a tree which seems all vigorous, but which, when one thrusts into the heart of it, proves to be pervaded by dry-rot. There are plenty of such churches still,--churches which have a name that they are living, but are dead. They are counted in the denominational year-book; they go through the motions of life; but where is their quickening, communicating, vitalizing power? What are they but mechanical, formal, institutional things, and how sudden sometimes, like {103} the falling of a dead tree, is the collapse of a dead church!

There is the same story to tell of some people. They have a name that they are living, but they are practically dead. For what is it, according to the New Testament, which makes one live, and when is it that one comes to die? "To be carnally minded," answers St. Paul, "is death, and to be spiritually minded is life." "He that heareth my sayings," answers Jesus, "hath passed from death into life." What a wonderful word is that! It is not a promise that the true Christian shall some day, when his body dies, pass into an eternal life. It is an announcement that when one enters into the spirit of Christ he passes, now, in this present world, from all that can be fairly called death, into all that can be rationally called life. Under this New Testament definition, then, a man may suppose himself to be alive and healthy, when he is really sick, dying, dead. A man may perhaps, as he says, see life, while he may be really seeing nothing but death. Or a man may be, as we say, dying, and be, in the New Testament sense, full of an abundant and transfiguring life.

{104}

And so it becomes an entirely practical question, which one may ask himself any morning, "Am I alive to-day, or am I dead? Is it only that I have the name of living, a sort of directory-existence, a page in the college records, a place in the list of my class, while in fact there is dry-rot in my soul? Or is there any movement of the life of God in me, of quickening and refreshing life, of generous activity and transmissive vitality? Then death is swallowed up in victory, and I am partaking even in this present world of the life that does not die."

{105}

XLII

THE OPEN DOOR

_Revelation_ iii. 8.

A few years ago, at the first service of the college year, one of our preachers took for his text this message to the church at Philadelphia: "Behold, I have set before thee an open door;" and it has always seemed to me to represent with precision the spirit of our worship here. We have abandoned the principle of compulsion. We do not force young men of twenty to come here and say their prayers. We simply set before them an open door. The privilege of worship is permitted to them from day to day, and religion stands among us, not as a part of college discipline, but as the supreme privilege of a manly human soul. Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely. Indeed, this same text represents the spirit of our whole university life. What we call the elective system is a method of invitation and persuasion. It multiplies opportunities. It does not compel the allegiance of the indifferent. He that is lazy, let him be lazy still. {106} The university sets before the mind of youth its open door.

And this, indeed, is what one asks of life. What should a free state in this modern world guarantee to all its citizens? Not that equality of condition for which many in our days plead, the dead level of insured and effortless comfort, but equality of opportunity, a free and fair chance for every man to be and to do his best. That land is best governed where the door of opportunity stands wide open to the humblest of its citizens, so that no man can shut it.

And what is the relation of religion to the life of man, if it be not of this same enlarging and emancipating kind? Here we are, all shut in by our routine of business and study and preoccupation, and religion simply opens the door outward from this narrowness of life into a larger and a purer world. It is as if you were bending some evening over your books in the exhausted air of your little room, and as if you should rise from your task, and pass out into the night, and the open door should deliver you from your weariness and your self-absorption, as you stood in the serene companionship of the infinite heavens and the myriad of stars.

{107}

XLIII

BEHOLD, I STAND AT THE DOOR AND KNOCK

_Revelation_ iii. 20.

To the church at Philadelphia it was promised that the door should be opened; but here was a church at Laodicea which had deliberately shut its door on the higher life. It was a church that was neither cold nor hot, a lukewarm, indifferent, spiritless people, and to such a people, willfully barring out the revelations of God, comes the Christ in this wonderful figure, standing at the door like a weary traveller, asking to be let in. Such a picture just reverses the common view which one is apt to take of the religious life. We commonly think of truth as hiding itself within its closed door and of ourselves as trying to get in to it. We speak of finding Christ, or proving God, or getting religion, as if all these things were mysteries to be explored, hidden behind doors which must be unlocked; as if, in the relation between man and God, man did all the searching, and God was a hidden God.

{108}

But the fundamental fact of the religious life is this,--that the power and love of God are seeking man; that before we love Him, He loves us; that before we know Him, He knows us; that antecedent to our recognition of Him must be our receptivity of Him. Coleridge said that he believed in the Bible because it found him. It is for the same reason that man believes in God. God finds him. It is not the sheep which go looking for the shepherd, it is the shepherd who finds the sheep, and when they hear his voice, they follow him.

This is not contrary to nature. The same principle is to be noticed in regard to all truth. Take, for instance, any scientific discovery of a physical force, like that which we call the force of electricity. There is nothing new about this wonderful power. It has always been about us, playing through the sky, and inviting the mind of man. Then, some day, a few men open their minds to the significance of this force, and appreciate how it may be applied to the common uses of life. That is what we call a discovery; it is the opening of the door of the mind; and one of the most impressive things about science to-day is to {109} consider how many other secrets of the universe are at this moment knocking at our doors, and waiting to be let in; and to perceive how senseless and unreceptive we must seem to an omniscient mind, when so much truth, standing near us, is beaten back from our closed minds and wills. It is the same with religious truth. Here are our lives, shut in, limited, self-absorbed; and here are the messages of God, knocking at our door; and between the two only one barrier, the barrier of our own wills. Religious education is simply the opening of the door of the heart. A Christian discipleship is simply that alertness and receptivity which hears the knocking and welcomes the Spirit which says: "If any man will but open the door, I will come in to him, and sup with him, and he with me."

{110}

XLIV

HE THAT OVERCOMETH

_Revelation_ xxi. 7.

In each one of these letters to the churches there is repeated like a refrain, a sort of _motif_ which announces the character of all,--this final phrase: "He that overcometh." He is to receive the promise, he is to inherit these things, he is to be the stone in the temple of God. The reward and blessing are to be not for the shirks or runaways or easy-going of the world, but for those who, taking life just as it is with all its hardness, overcome it. It is the manly summons from the soft theory of life to the principle which one may call that of progress through overcoming resistance.

A great many lives are spoiled by the soft theory of life. They expect to get out of life a comfort which is not in it to give. They go about looking, so to speak, for a "soft course" in the curriculum of life, hoping to enroll in it and be free from trouble. They ask of their religion that it shall make life easy and safe and clear. But the trouble is {111} that the elective pamphlet of life does not announce a single soft course. The people who try thus to live are simply courting disaster and despair. Some day, perhaps in some tragic moment, every man has to learn that life is not an easy thing, but that it is at times fearfully and solemnly hard. Nothing is more plainly written on the facts of life than this,--that life was meant to be hard. Trouble and disaster, and the inevitable blows of experience, are absolutely certain to teach this truth sooner or later, and the sooner one learns it the better for his soul. And if life was not meant to be easy, what was it meant for? It was meant to be overcome. It stands before one like the friction of the world of nature, which is always seeming to retard one's motion, but which makes really the only condition under which we move at all. If there is to be any motion through life, then it must be by overcoming its friction. If life was meant just to stand still, then it might stagnate in a soft place; but life was meant to move, and the only way of motion is by overcoming friction, and the hardness of the world becomes the very condition of spiritual progress. What we call the rub of life is {112} then what makes living possible. What we call the burdens of life are the discipline of its power. Not to him who meets no resistance, nor to him whose shoulder is chafed by no cross, but to him who overcometh is the promise given that God will be his God, and that he shall be God's son.

{113}

XLV

THE PRODIGALITY OF PROVIDENCE

_Matthew_ xiii. 1-9.

I wish to dwell for several mornings on this parable of the sower, and for to-day I call attention to the air of prodigality which pervades this story. There seems to be an immense amount of seed wasted. Some of it falls on the roadway; some of it is snatched away by the birds; some of it is caught among the bushes. Yet the sower proceeds in no niggardly fashion. He strides away across the field scattering the seed broadcast, far beyond the border where he expects a crop, for he knows that, though much shall be wasted, whatever seed may fall on good ground will have miraculous increase. There may be prodigality of waste, but there shall be prodigality of reproduction. If but one seed in thirty takes root in good soil it may produce thirty or sixty or a hundred fold.

Such is the prodigality of Providence. And it comes close to many experiences, and {114} interprets many perplexities of life. A man goes his way through life scattering his efforts, distributing his energy, doing his work as broadly and generously as he can, and some day he notices what a very large proportion of all that he does comes to nothing. Much of the soil where he sows seems hard and barren, and he might as well be trying to raise wheat on a stone pavement. It seems to be simply effort thrown away. But then some other day this man makes this other discovery,--that some very slight effort or endeavor or sacrifice or word has been infinitely more fruitful than he could have dreamed. It was an insignificant thing which he did, but it happened to fall at the right time in the right place, and he is almost startled at its productiveness.

And so he takes his lesson from the prodigality of Providence. Of course it will happen that the great proportion of his efforts will come to nothing. Of course he is to be misjudged and ineffective and barren of results; but if only one word in a hundred falls in the right soil, if only one effort in a hundred touches the right soul, the hundred-fold fruitage brings with it ample {115} compensation. Thus he strides cheerfully over the fields of life with the broad swing of an unthrifty mind, expecting that much of his seed will fall among the thorns and rocks, but with faith that the harvest--even if he is not himself permitted to reap it--is yet made safe through his fidelity to that prodigal Providence which miraculously multiplies the little he can do, and makes it bear fruit, sometimes a hundredfold.

{116}

XLVI

THE HARD LIFE

_Matthew_ xiii. 1-9.

Let us look still further at this parable of the sower. There are described in it various kinds of lives on which God's influences fall, and fall in vain. The first of these is the hard life,--hard, like a road, so that the seed lies there as if fallen on a pavement, and gets no root, and the pigeons come and pick it up. We usually think of the hard life as if it were a life of sin. We speak of a hardened sinner, of a hard man, as of persons whom good influences cannot penetrate. But the hard soil of the parable is not that of sin. It is that of a roadway, hardened simply by the passing to and fro. It is the hardening effect of habit. Sometimes, the passage says, your life gets so worn by the coming and going of your daily routine, that you become impenetrable to the subtle suggestions of God, as if your life were paved. Some people are thus hardened even to good. They lose capacity for impressions. {117} Some people are even gospel-hardened. They have heard so much talk about religion that it runs off the pavement of their lives into the gutter. Thus the first demand of the sower is for receptivity, for openness of mind, for responsiveness. Give God a chance, says the parable. His seed gets no fair opportunity in a life which is like a trafficking high-road. Keep the soil of life soft, its sympathy tender, its imagination free, or else you lose the elementary quality of receptiveness, and all the influences of God may be scattered over you in vain.

{118}

XLVII

THE THIN LIFE

_Matthew_ xiii. 1-9.

The first thing which hinders God's seed from taking root is, as we have seen, hardness,--the life which is trodden down like a road; an impenetrability of nature, which is not a trait of sinners only, but of many privileged souls. The second sort of unfruitful soil is just the opposite of this. It is not the unreceptive, but the impulsively receptive life. It is not too hard, or too soft, but it is too thin. It is a superficial soil which has no depth of earth, and so with joy it receives the word; but the seed has no depth of earth and quickly withers away. This sort of soil receives quickly and as quickly lets go. It is like that unstable man of whom St. James writes and who is like the wave of the sea, driven with the wind and tossed. We see the wave come flashing up out of the general level, catching the sunshine as it leaps and crowned with its spray, and then we look again for it, and where is {119} it? It has sunk again into the undistinguishable level of the sea.

Thus the parable turns to this instability and says: "It is bad to be hard, but it is bad also to be thin." When tribulation or persecution arises, something more than impulsiveness is needed to give a root to life. How strongly and serenely Newman writes of this:--

"Prune thou thy words, the thoughts control That o'er thee swell and throng; They will condense within thy soul And turn to purpose strong. But he who lets his feelings run In soft luxurious flow, Faints when hard service must be done, And shrinks at every blow."

{120}

XLVIII

THE CROWDED LIFE

_Matthew_ xiii. 1-9.