Chapter 2
And first among these is the reverential or filial habit. This deserves our careful attention, because we sometimes see an affectation of silly and spurious manliness, which thinks it a fine thing to cast it off. This reverential or filial feeling, which is natural to the unspoilt and truthful nature of the child, is preserved in every unspoilt manhood; only with a difference.
It is raised from the unreflective, instinctive trust in a father's guidance or a mother's love to that higher feeling which tells us that, as is the child in a well and wisely ordered home, so is each of us in that great household of our heavenly Father. This spirit of true piety, which uplifts, refines, strengthens, and gives courage to manhood, as nothing else can do, is the natural outcome and successor of a child's trustfulness, as we rise through it to the feeling that we are encompassed by a Divine consciousness, and that our life moves in a holy presence. Or again, we pray that we may not lose that simplicity and freshness of nature which is at once a special charm of childhood, and, wherever it is preserved, the chief blessing of a man's later years.
These qualities and characteristics of our infancy--trust, filial reverence, freshness, simplicity--are not qualities to be left behind, but the natural forecast of that religious spirit which is the highest growth of maturity, and our own safeguard against the hardening and debasing influences of the world and the flesh. And this was the Saviour's meaning when He said, "Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in nowise enter therein." And if there is one thing more than another that constitutes the special curse of any depraved influence acting on young lives, it is that it robs the later life of these childlike qualities which are the gifts of God to bless us in youth and age.
But assuming that we bear all this in mind, and hold fast to these fundamental gifts, and so escape those lower and baser forms of life which we meet all about in the world, spoiling the manhood and embittering the age of so many men, we cannot forget the essential difference between mature years and the years of early growth.
As we grow towards manhood our life necessarily loses its childlike and unreflecting spontaneity in the ferment of thought, desire, and passion, and in the light of experience; and therefore it becomes a matter of no slight importance to estimate the value of that which we hold in our hands to-day, the nature of the web which our conduct is weaving, and the fateful character of any mistake in the purposes, notions, ambitions, or tastes that are, as a matter of fact, fixing the drift and direction of our life. But to do this amidst all the daily temptations of life is not always an easy matter; and it is certain that we shall not do it if we do not fully recognise, while our life is still young and unhampered, the importance of these two very obvious reflections, which, in fact, resolve themselves into one, that our time is essentially short, and that our opportunities are very fugitive.
In one sense, no doubt, there is a long stretch of time before most of you. As yet hope has more to say to you than memory. Some of you will look back on these early days from the distant years of another century. Your life's journey may extend far away over the unexplored future, and may in some cases be a very long one; but, although this is possible, we are not allowed to forget that it is always precarious--unexpected graves are constantly reminding us how short may be the time of any one of us--how the night cometh.
But it is not merely of the literal shortness of our time, or the possible nearness of death, that our Lord's words should set us thinking, when He warns us that the night cometh, and we must work while it is day.
If we measure our life by the things we should accomplish in it, by the character it should attain to, by the purposes that should be bearing fruit in it, and not by mere lapse of time, we soon come to feel how very short it is, and the sense of present duty grows imperative. It is thus that the thoughtful man looks at his life; and he feels that there is no such thing as length of days which he can without blame live carelessly, because in these careless days critical opportunities will have slipped away irrecoverably; he will have drifted in his carelessness past some turning-point which he will not see again, and have missed the so-called chances that come no more.
But even this is only a part of the considerations that make our present life so precious; for this is only the outer aspect of it. What makes our time so critically short, whether we consider its intellectual or its moral and spiritual uses, is that our nature is so very sensitive, so easily marred by misuse, and spoilt irretrievably. The real brevity of the time at your disposal, whether for the training of your mind, or for your growth into the character of good men, consists in this, that deterioration is standing always at the back of any neglect or waste. Deterioration is the inseparable shadow of every form of ignoble life.
"Our acts our angels are, for good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk with us still."
Leave your faculties unused and they become blunted and dulled; leave your higher tastes uncultivated and they die; let your affections feed on anything unworthy and they become debased.
To those who do this it may happen that whilst, so far as years go, they are still in all the freshness of youth, they are already dying that death to all higher capacity which is worse than any decay of our physical organism. Such an early death of higher tastes and faculties, and of hope for the future, is sometimes effected even before schooldays are over. And the mere possibility of such a fate overhanging any of us should stir us like a trumpet-call to take care that we do not surrender our life to any mean influence, and that we are very zealous for all that concerns the safety of the young.
"I send out my child," I can imagine the parent of any one of you having said, "to be trained for manhood; I send him to his school that his intellect may be cultivated, his moral purpose made strong, and that all good and pure tastes may be fostered in him; but it is dreadful to think that instead of this he may, by his life and companionship there, be hardened and debased, or even brutalised; he may become dead to the higher life even before he becomes a man." Seeing, then, that there is this possibility of death even in the midst of life--a possibility, we would fain hope, seldom realised in this school, but still a possibility--shall we not be very careful, men and boys alike, so to do our part in this society, so to shelter the young and strengthen the weak, and to keep the atmosphere of our life a pure atmosphere, that every sensitive soul which comes amongst us may grow up here through a healthy and wholesome boyhood, and go out to the duties and the calling of his life, strong, unselfish, public-spirited, pure-hearted, and courageous--a Christian gentleman.
IV. THE INFLUENCE OF TRADITION.
"Making the word of God of none effect through your traditions: and many such like things ye do."--ST. MARK vii. 13.
Such was our Lord's word to the Pharisees; and if we turn to our own life it is difficult if not impossible for us fully to estimate the influence which traditions exercise upon it.
They are so woven into the web of thought and opinion, and daily habits and practices, that none of us can claim to escape them. Moreover, as any institution or society grows older, this influence of the part which is handed on from one generation to another tends to accumulate; so that the weight of it lies heavier on us in an old place than in a new one, and it is obvious that there is both loss and gain in this.
A good tradition is a great help and support, giving a strength, or firmness, or dignity to our life which it would not otherwise have had.
We often see or feel the value of such a tradition as it acts upon the members of a family, or of a college, or of a regiment, or of a school.
And this influence of a tradition, inasmuch as it has become impersonal, and rooted in the general life, is apt to be very persistent, so that the man who establishes a good tradition anywhere begins a good work, which may go on producing its good results long after he himself is in his grave.
Many of you must have felt the power of such an influence, handed on to you as if it were a part of your inheritance, when thinking of a brother, or father, or other relative or ancestor, who by some distinction of character, or by some inspiring words or some brave or generous act, has left you a good example, which seems somehow to belong to you, and to stir you as with an authoritative call to show yourself worthy of it.
Similarly in a society like this school you can hardly grow up without sometimes being stirred by the tradition of the noble lives that have left their mark upon its history.
So a man's good deeds live after him, and become woven as threads of gold into the traditions of the world.
And we are equally familiar with traditions that are bad, and with their pestilent influence; for we are constantly made to feel how much of the good that men endeavour to do is thwarted, counteracted, or destroyed by influences of this sort, and how weak and imitative souls are entangled in the network of traditional influence as in a spider's web. Tradition, in fact, represents to us the accumulated power of past lives as it acts upon us from the outside, just as what men call heredity represents this same influence in our own blood.
And we have seen that this power may be, and often is, a real advantage and support to our life. We feel also that as the Divine light shines stronger and steadier in human affairs the traditional influence of each generation ought to become more and more helpful to those that follow.
And yet, you observe, the Saviour gives us no encouragement to depend upon those helps that tradition might bring us. On the contrary, His language shows how dangerous He felt the influence of tradition to be. How are we to account for this? His strongest denunciations are reserved for the Pharisaic party; and yet a historian would describe them as in many respects the best elements of Jewish life. They were earnest, patriotic, religious, many of them wise and holy men; but their judgment was held in bondage by the influence of tradition, and in this lies the cardinal defect of their life. They had set up between their souls and the spirit of God a sort of graven image of ritualistic observances, and traditional usages and interpretations. They depended on externals, or what came to them from the past or from the outer world, and their eyes were blinded, and their hearts hardened against every new revelation.
Thus they stand before Christ, blocking His path, the very embodiment of that power which closes the soul against those inspiring and purifying influences that come from direct communion with God. They block the Saviour's path, because this personal communion is just what He represents to us--the direct revelation of the Spirit of God in man. He comes to reveal the Father to each of us, and to make us feel the presence of the Divine creative Spirit in every separate human life; and till we feel this personal illumination we have not realised the manifestation of the Son of God. But the Pharisee with his continual reference to tradition, his multiplication of external observances, and elaborate ritual, his reliance upon usage and external authority, knows little or nothing of the personal illumination by the direct influence of the Spirit of God upon our spirit. Hence this absolute and fundamental contrast between Jesus and the Pharisees. They represent two opposing principles in life. And it is this that gives such intensity to the words He addressed to them: "Ye have made the word of God of none effect through your traditions"; and it is a universal warning--never out of date.
If the spirit of traditional usage and influence holds the citadel of a man's life, the spirit of Christian progress cannot gain an entrance.
That is the lesson which the Saviour presses upon our attention by His denunciation of the Pharisaic usage, habit, and attitude, and it is hardly possible to overestimate the importance of the lesson, because this same spirit of Pharisaic tradition is constantly laying its hand upon every human institution, and it has contributed to every abuse or perversion that has taken possession of the Christian Church.
Our life is, in fact, a continuous struggle between the two principles here represented. Which is to prevail in it, and fix its character-- traditional custom, or personal inspiration? Are we to follow the world with its conventions and laws, or to live in personal communion with God? The tendency of our life will be determined in one direction or the other according as we surrender our will to the rule of traditional notions and usages, the power of the external world, or as we seek for direct illumination of mind, conscience, and spirit at the Divine sources of truth and light.
Here, then, we have a principle to guide us in our relation to the traditions amidst which we live.
We do not expect to get away from them; we never dream of escaping from the influences of the external world, whether of the past or the present; but to move safely among them, we must have learnt and adopted this primal lesson, that no tradition, and no external practice or custom, has any authoritative claim upon us, simply from being established as a tradition or a custom.
And as we stand amidst all the conventions and practices that have come down to us, we should be able to say of every one of them--
"Every good tradition, and every wholesome and beneficent usage, I accept thankfully as part of the inheritance which good, or wise, or brave men have left as their legacy for my use and assistance; but it is my bounden duty to measure them all by the standard of God's unchanging law: by it I will prove them; I will use them or reject them according as they fit or fail in this measurement, and I will not be brought under the power of any of them."
Whether, then, we think of our separate personal life or of our life in its social relationships, we must think of it in this way if we are to be in any real sense followers of Christ. Each of you, as he steps into the world, is not merely an inheritor of certain accumulations of life and tradition, which he should follow as a matter of course. He is not born to tread a certain track of conduct or behaviour because others have trodden it before him, following it without thought like the sheep on the mountain, or like the ants as they travel from one ant-hill to another.
Your estimate of your life should be fundamentally different from this. You are primarily a child of God, illumined by direct communion with the Spirit of God; and your first duty, therefore, whenever and in whatever place or circumstances you may chance to be, is not to follow this or that tradition or usage which may meet you; but to stand up and show that you are God's child, and therefore a judge of all traditions or customs, and not their slave.
This is the revelation which Christ declares to us as the one first requisite of the Christian life. So you see the Christian man's attitude towards all traditions or customs is that of independence; his thought and his judgment are as free in regard to them as if they were newly born. He is, in fact, bound to judge them according to their deserts; and no society can hope to prosper unless this is recognised, so that evil customs may not corrupt the common life. It is the danger of such corruption that makes the Saviour denounce the traditional habit, and summon His followers to live by the rule of close personal communion with God. Thus the life that goes forward and rises to higher and yet higher levels is always a life of new revelations, a life which is being illumined and illumined afresh by those flashes of Divine insight, and strength, and courage, which come to men only as they came to the Lord Himself in the secret communion of prayer and meditation, and through that independence of spirit which arises from the sense of God's presence to guide us and to uphold.
Take your own case. If you are living here simply according to traditional rules, doing this or that because, as you may be told, everybody does it; accepting standards of conduct and rules of practice, because, as you understand, or, as some one undertakes to persuade you, they have always been so accepted, why, then, you are growing up to be one of that never-ending succession of men who are the Pharisees, the opponents of the Christ, in every generation, who live with tame conscience in any sort of company, and perpetuate the bad traditions of the world.
But if you listen to the call of Christ, and have truly learned to feel that the only real man's life is that which you live with the light of God's law shining upon it, then, as a matter of course, you will rise superior to the influence of any tradition or custom, no matter what its authority may seem to be.
And it will indeed be a happy thing for you if you grow up with that God- given strength of character and purpose which can treat all traditions, and all usages, or fashions, or customs as things that should be subordinated, and should not rule us, as things to be used by us if they help us to a better life, but to be flung aside and rejected, if they contradict the voice of God in our hearts.
V. VAIN HOPES.
"And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent. But he said, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead."--ST. LUKE xvi. 30, 31.
It is by no means uncommon for any one who is living a life which does not satisfy his own conscience to console himself with the fancy that if only such and such things were different around him he would be a new man, filled with a new spirit, and exhibiting a new character. But is it so very certain that this would be the case?
Such persons are apt to dream of some goodness or some virtue which under other circumstances they would make their own; and there are, in fact, few conditions more dangerous than that of this class of dreamers, whether among boys or men. To all who may be tempted in this way, our Lord's words in the parable come with a very significant warning: "Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent. But he said, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead."
When insidious and delusive hope would draw us on and beguile us in any sinful way, whispering that God will some day send special gifts and messengers of grace to inspire us with new life, this is his plain answer: "If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead."
And hardly any one can say that he is altogether free from this tendency to lean upon the future with vain hopes, and is in no need of the warning which this text conveys to us.
In serious moments, when the mind is calm, and neither passion nor appetite is stirring, we feel how good a thing it is to have crucified the flesh and to be living close to Christ; but when we are within the fiery circle of trial or temptation, when sinful desires arise, or passions are strong, or solicitations to evil are subtle and enticing, then we are only too ready to catch at any hopes about the vague future. To the unstable and incontinent, to those whose nature is weak while their conscience is not dead, this hope is a dangerous temptation, beguiling them with the suggestion that some day there will open before them an easy path to that virtue or self-denial to which the way is too rough at present. "Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent." By-and-by, they say, as they dream about the future, God will lay His hand upon them; the Holy Spirit will touch their souls with new life; they will receive in some inscrutable way new power, and in the exercise of this power they will cast off the bondage of sin or weakness; but how and by what means this great and necessary change is to be brought about they do not stop to think, and meanwhile they yield to worldly or fleshly appetite, trusting vaguely to an uncertain future for some Divine gift.
If you look into the thoughts and habits of your life, some of you may be compelled to acknowledge that this case is not unfamiliar to you. So men sometimes dally with a temptation, and linger beside it, courting its company, instead of flinging it away from them, as the snare of the devil, because of some secret hope that by-and-by God will place them out of the way of it, or give them some new strength against it, which as yet has not been given. How easy it is for us to entice ourselves in this way out of the narrow path of present duty into the tangled wilderness of a weak and sinful life, from which escape becomes every day more difficult.
And this enticement along the ways of sin being so easy, it may be happening to some of you. You may feel that, judged even by your own standard, which is more likely to be too low than too high, your life is somehow unsatisfactory; your better instincts may be telling you that you were born for something higher, purer, stronger than what you are or have been; and you are cherishing the hope that it will be different with you some day; your circumstances, you think, or your occupation, or your companionship will have changed, and so you fondly imagine that you yourself will be sure to change, as if your soul were just a weathercock that answers to every changing breeze. So perhaps you hope that some habit of self-indulgence or idleness will drop off, or some evil temper be eradicated; and whilst all this vague and mischievous dreaming goes on you yield very likely to some besetting sin, making no serious effort to get away from it now, and you yield all the more because of this misleading hope that some day you will be touched by a supernatural hand, and will rise up to a regenerate life. And yet our reason tells us that all this is the very essence of self-deceit, and that such dreams and hopes are the devil's most subtle temptation. This kind of vain hope is based on a complete misconception of the nature of our conflict with sin, and the way to escape from it. To think thus of spiritual gifts and the growth of the spiritual life, is to follow a very dangerous delusion. It was just such a misunderstanding that is expressed in the hope of Dives about his brethren: "If one went unto them from the dead, they will repent." Their ordinary daily teachings, he seems to say, the voice of Moses and of the prophets, the examples of good men around them, the warnings, the exhortations, these, being so familiar, may not have startled them out of their sin; but if only one were to go to them from the dead, some messenger of strange voice and aspect, who had seen hell, and could paint its horrors, then surely the course of their life would be checked and changed, and their spirit would wake up in them, and they would sin no more. But to all this comes back the stern warning of the Divine answer: "If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead."