Part 10

Upon condition that Roswell McIntyre of Company E, Sixth Regiment of New York Cavalry, returns to his regiment and faithfully serves out his term, making up for lost time, or until otherwise lawfully discharged, he is fully pardoned for any supposed desertion heretofore committed; and this paper is his pass to go to his regiment.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

On the side of it is indorsed: “Quartermaster’s Office, New York City, October 22, 1864. Transportation furnished to Baltimore, Maryland. H. Brownson”; and at the bottom in a different hand is this indorsement: “Taken from the body of R. McIntyre at the Battle of Five Forks, Virginia, 1865.” So he went back and died like a man, with his pardon on his person. And to-day, to the coward and the deserter and the traitor, the man who has compromised and the man who has run away, the same Lord God Who set Elijah on his feet is speaking, and He is able to send him back to be faithful, even unto death. Thanks be to a God Who does not compromise and Who is still alive.

LECTURE V

THE LIFE INVISIBLE

It is interesting to note two contrary tendencies in the current appraisal of spiritual values in America. On the one hand there is what has been called, not altogether happily, the tendency of ethical materialism. In its best form it is simply a demand for reality, the renewal of the old words, “By their fruits ye shall know them.” “Show me thy faith by thy works.” In its less worthy forms it is the effort to eliminate spiritual expression and formal religion from areas of life where these have been most familiar. Illustrations in extreme forms abound.

We are told now that in charity love has nothing to do with the matter, that the introduction of religious sentiment is only mischievous and misleading, that the issue is one purely of proper economic principle and organization. It is a question of employment for the unemployed, or of calculating accurately the amount of need, counting the hungry mouths and fixing the quantity of bread, and then determining scientifically how much of the bread the hungry should earn, and how much society through appropriate and unsentimental machinery should supply.

In medical philanthropy the new idea is that ideas have nothing to do with it. The good Samaritan, we are told, did not give the wounded man a tract or say anything to him about the religious views or motives of his benefactor. He was satisfied to heal his skin and stop at that. Let the chaplains depart from the hospitals.

And so also in social service. The legitimate work is to improve the culinary methods of the neighbourhood, to provide innocent games and sports, to secure more adequate food supplies for living bodies and to assist in the burial of dead ones; but Christ must not be mentioned, and religious issues must not be raised.

These are extreme illustrations, but they are perfectly familiar, and the tendency they represent is indisputable. In this view our Lord, of course, was far astray when He talked to His disciples by Jacob’s well about having meat to eat which they knew not. “Meat!” say our modern ethical materialists. “Meat is meat――beef or bread. It is not a metaphor. Meat that is a metaphor is a mockery.” Well, it would be if it were offered for food to a hungry man, but it is not a mockery to the man who would go hungry to feed the hungry. And the whole modern question is not between those who would give real meat to the hungry and those who would give only metaphorical meat. It is between those who want to deal with people’s skins only and those who mean to deal both with their skins and with their souls, between those who conceive of man as mainly belly and back and those to whom our real life is the life invisible.

It is a very curious phenomenon, this exclusion of Christian ideas from the very area which they created. For all this charity and philanthropy and social service were produced by the ideas of Christianity. And now the fruit says to the vine and to the inward life, “I have no need of thee.” Of course not all the fruit says this. Some of it only says, “Vine and inward life, there is a prejudice against you. You would do well to conceal yourself. I will pretend to be the real thing.” But some of the fruit has gone further. “I am the real thing,” it says. “I know more than James. Faith must not only show works: works are faith. There is no need of metaphysics or creeds. Deeds are religion. The only wealth is tangible wealth, things handled, works seen, bread out of the ground, not down from heaven. Meat that the disciples could not see is too pallid for this earth. Man is his skin and the bag which it contains, and religion must understand this.”

At the same time that this suicidal tendency is operating in the field of man’s highest values seeking to destroy his standards and to discredit the title-deeds of all his greatest treasures, a precisely contrary tendency is acting in commerce and politics, in the field of man’s lower values. While men are busy on the one hand in the effort to materialize the spiritual wealth which Christianity has produced, other men are seeking with a new earnestness to spiritualize our material wealth. As education, science, philanthropy, surrenders the spiritual vision and ideal, trade and politics clutch after it. Never before in the history of the world has there been such an effort as there is to-day to idealize nationalism, to build up spiritual conceptions behind the State, to make racial feeling a religion. If some men think that religious values and spiritual ideas and so-called “metaphysical” notions can be spared from charity and social service, other men are striving with all their might to secure all this rejected mass of vitality and power for patriotism and the national life.

And the same spiritualizing and idealizing tendency is even more evident in commerce and finance. Wealth becomes less and less material. In primitive times riches consisted in flocks and herds and land and in actual gold and silver bullion or coins which their owner put in a crock and buried in his house. Now wealth consists in credit and securities, in figures written on a ledger in a bank, or in scraps of paper in a tin box. The world’s work is done with little visible wealth. Our new banking system is meant for this very purpose, to provide immaterial instrumentalities. Millions of dollars are transported invisibly. By a cable message or a message through the air untold wealth that was in London can be made to appear in New York. And all these intangible forms of wealth are exceeded in the judgment of the late Mr. J. P. Morgan by the credit of character, something still more “metaphysical.” The spiritualization of the material keeps pace on one side with the materialization of the spiritual on the other.

However clear or foggy our ideas on these issues may be now, viewing them as present issues, we cannot fail to see sharply the indisputable facts of the past. Looking backward we simply do not discern and cannot remember the visible and outward values or possessors of values at all. Where is the actual material wealth of earlier days, the flocks, the gold and silver, the palaces? The amazing thing is that it is all gone. The gold and silver which Rome gathered from the world, which went home to Spain in the days of the Conquistadores, where is it all now? Where are those who boasted it and built their fame or power on it? Shelley tells us in his sonnet, “Ozymandias,”

“I met a traveller from an antique land Who said, ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on those lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings, Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.’”

And what befell Ozymandias’ image has befallen almost all the works of the ancients’ hands. A few of their temples remain, and the arches of their viaducts and some of the images of their public worship and of their national ideals. But their wealth and the treasure houses which they kept it in and the palaces of their pleasure and the cities of their pride are gone. I never felt more keenly the tragedy and the truth of this utter transitoriness and insecurity of all national glory than looking over the massive ruins of the palace of the Chosroes kings at Kasr-i-Shirin. All of Browning’s “Love Among the Ruins” seemed to be there in mute evidence before one’s eyes:

“Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles Miles and miles On the solitary pastures where our sheep Half-asleep Tinkle homeward through the twilight, stray or stop As they crop―― Was the site once of a city great and gay, (So they say) Of our country’s very capital, its prince Ages since Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far Peace or war.

“Now,――the country does not even boast a tree, As you see, To distinguish slopes of verdure, certain rills From the hills Intersect and give a name to, (else they run Into one,) Where the domed and daring palace shot its spires Up like fires O’er the hundred-gated circuit of a wall Bounding all, Made of marble, men might march on nor be pressed, Twelve abreast.

“And such plenty and perfection, see, of grass Never was! Such a carpet as, this summer-time, o’erspreads And embeds Every vestige of the city, guessed alone, Stock or stone―― Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe Long ago; Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame Struck them tame; And that glory and that shame alike, the gold Bought and sold.

“Now,――the single little turret that remains On the plains, By the caper overrooted, by the gourd Overscored, While the patching houseleek’s head of blossom winks Through the chinks―― Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time Sprang sublime. And a burning ring, all round, the chariots traced As they raced, And the monarch and his minions and his dames Viewed the games.”

All this is gone. The only wealth of the past which has survived is such as Christ referred to. “I have meat to eat that ye know not of.” The ideas and the literature which enshrined them alone remain. Not the manuscripts. They are gone, as though God would show in the most vivid way His scorn of the visible and earth’s “real.” Not one original page of Plato exists. But Plato’s mind is here still. The kings are gone. But Isaiah and Jeremiah, the men of the inward resources, spokesmen and ministers of the invisible life, abide.

“The tumult and the shouting dies The captains and the kings depart Still stands Thine against sacrifice A humble and a contrite heart.”

And the issue is clear enough when we look at it concretely to-day and contrast the men who have the inward resources with those who have not, the movements which are fed from deep ideal springs with those which deal skin-deep only with humanity. In one of our American cities the president of a large institution was shelved in the prime of life by younger and less conservative men who acquired control of the business. They treated the older man well, gave him the nominal headship with his former salary, but really transferred all the power to other men. It was the chance of a lifetime for the older man. He had his strength and his time for any service or ministry or pleasure he might choose. But the only meat which he had to eat was the management of the business, and accordingly he starved to death in a fine home and with a large salary. All that the bag of his body needed he had, but man cannot live by bread alone without a word from God. The Tinker of Bedford Jail heard the key turn in the lock behind him. And did he famish alone? He opened the gate of his house within and out they came――Christian and Great-Heart and Hopeful and Evangelist and Mercy and Dare-to-Die――and the loneliness of John Bunyan’s cell became the greatest society on earth, and the immortals who marched out of the wealth of his soul are the companions of millions who could not name one human being who was Bunyan’s contemporary. The rich men who have transmitted real wealth have been the lovers, the dreamers, the servers who ate bread at God’s hands and who knew and taught men that the life is more than meat and the body than raiment. “She was not daily bread,” wrote her niece of Emily Dickinson. “She was star dust.”

This above all was characteristic of Christ. Part of our Lord’s preëminence of nature and of achievement was the untold wealth of His inward resources. No philanthropist or social worker ever lived who was His equal in all that our ethical materialists admire and praise. But behind all this and as explaining all this He had meat to eat that men knew not, thoughts of God, ideas of origin and destiny, of whence He came and whither He was going, fellowship, purposes, a spiritual program. His wealth was an inward, a communicable and eternal treasure. It nourished Him and was for all men.

“I have meat to eat,” said He. “Who brought it to Him?” asked they. “A primrose by the river’s brim a yellow primrose” was to them; and it was nothing more. Meat was meat, mutton or beef to His disciples. But to Him the primrose was a volume of revelation. Meat was very life of God within His soul. Language to Christ was windows into the wealth of the eternities and the infinites. To men it was words. His discernment of latent values in men made Him a rich man wherever He found a fellow. He had cargoes of redeemable character afloat on the wide waters of mankind, and these He was forever drawing home. Men brought Him a sinner, flotsam of Galilee; and Jesus saw Himself rich with the latent life of Peter of Pentecost, victor of the gates of hell. The stained hand of the Samaritan concubine became under His faith purified to bear the chalice of the life of God. He had more wealth latent in human character than Crœsus ever dreamed of. His universalism, also, made Him rich with all the wealth of humanity. All around Him men choked and died in the stifling air of racial exclusion and prejudice. He lived in the whole free world. Thinking in terms of all mankind and all the ages makes the thinker rich beyond all the dreams of any racial avarice or national pride.

But above all His meat was simply this: to walk with God, to do the will of God and to accomplish His work. His life was in God’s will, His strength in God’s companionship. He lived powerfully among men because He dwelt deeply in God. His wealth was not herds and gold, nor bonds and credits, nor deeds; but the power to do deeds in the might and pity of God.

And the inward resources of Christ which are true wealth are accessible also to us; and not accessible only, but indispensable. We need not set much store by what the world calls wealth. Its one worthy use is as capital for human service; and Christ who had none of it here still did and inspired more service than all the world’s capital has performed. Louis Pasteur was living on a salary of a few hundred francs. All that he did was to examine with a microscope things infinitesimally small and to reflect upon them, and then in his laboratory to write down and send forth some new ideas. The practical men derided his “pure science,”――a mere student of theories, spinner of silk dreams thinner than the filaments of the silkworms of southern France. But Pasteur’s thoughts were the richest source of wealth in France. “Pasteur’s discoveries alone,” said Huxley, “would suffice to cover the war indemnity paid by France to Germany in 1870.”[3] True wealth is inward resources, the love of God’s world, of truth and holy thoughts, friendship with the living and the dead, the possession of the Son of God and His words which are spirit and life, and of His Spirit “whom the world cannot receive; for it beholdeth Him not, neither knoweth Him; ye know Him; for He abideth with you, and shall be in you.”

[3] Vallery-Radot, “Life of Pasteur,” popular edition, p. 374.

And all this wealth may be ours without going anywhere for it. No man brought it to Him. “I have meat,” He said. So He calls us to be rich. We do not need to go anywhere for it. No man needs to bring it to us. It is here. It is Himself――the Bread of Life. Can we also say, “I have it――meat to eat, of the world unknown, within my soul, within my soul”?

To be able to say that is our great American need. I will not say that it is a greater need now than it has ever been because we have deteriorated and need to recover the element of spiritual idealism in our national character. We have not deteriorated. Doubtless we have lost many things that it would have been well for us to have kept, and have kept much that it would have been better to lose. But we have gained in our perception of the higher values and we seek them more and not less than ever before. We are far from being what we ought to be, but the past was farther, and we only think otherwise because we clothe the past in mists of idealization. That very error is proof of our deeper spiritual discerning. Evils are challenged now which passed uncondemned a half generation ago. But though we have gained, we need to gain more, and what we need to gain is not something æsthetic or intellectual only, not broader philosophies or wider social programs, not anything external or merely ethical, but something biological and dynamic. We need the push and power of what One and One only offers. “The thief cometh not,” said Christ, “but that he may steal, and kill, and destroy: I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.”

Not long before his death, as all remember, the late Mr. Morgan was summoned to testify before a congressional committee which was seeking to locate the seat of the money power. The object of those examining Mr. Morgan was to bring out the extent of his own influence and control, and to show, if possible, that in the hands of a few men was concentrated the real domination of the financial life of America. The popular impression, after the examination was over, was that Mr. Morgan’s modest disavowals were justified by all the testimony, and that there was no one person, or any group of individuals, in this country who possessed so much power as was supposed to reside in the hands of a little company of men.

Now, at the best, there was no question of creating or producing anything. Nobody thought of asking Mr. Morgan whether he could create a grain of wheat, or heal a disease, or bring into existence anything that was not already here. The main question was how much of something that was here already was he, or any other man, able to control. As one read the testimony, the one dominant impression it made on his mind was how small and weak and ineffectual even the strongest human life was, and how little was the effect that it could produce in what it was able to do in behalf of others.

How weak does even the strongest personality appear when contrasted with One Who can say such words as these I have just quoted! Suppose some great man now living were to say to us: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. I am come that they may have life, and may have it abundantly,” how startled we should be! But we have become familiar with the claim on the lips of Christ and do not realize what we are really confronted with in that single great Personality standing among men and offering to meet the ultimate human need, to give us the deepest, richest, most priceless thing in the world, which no one of us can give another. “I am come that ye may have life, and that ye may have it abundantly.”

And notice that here is not a claim only. There is a strange and startling contrast. “The thief cometh to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that ye may have life.” On the one side is our Lord. Him we know. But who is this thief on the other side who has come, not to give life, but to reduce it, contract it, dilute it――destroy it altogether? Well, we know well enough that sin is such a thief, that wherever sin is allowed to come into our lives it abridges those lives, draws in the walls of their expansion, cuts down and impoverishes their joys. And there are many things short of sin, less coarse and evil, which, nevertheless, draw in the boundaries of life, narrow and stifle it, and do the work of the thief who came to kill, and to destroy, and to steal. Over against all these He stands Who said: “I came to give life, to give it abundantly.”

Now we know very well what men and women say when you bring them this offer of Christ’s about His life. “Oh,” they say, “it all depends upon what you mean by life. I have my own idea of life. The life I am living is rich and satisfying to me, and I am not drawn to this life that your tepid religion offers me in exchange.” But are those who answer so fully satisfied? Are they really satisfied at all with any part of their life except such of it as consists of the kind of life that Jesus Christ our Lord Himself came to bring, with which alone the hearts of men can be content?

What do we mean when we speak of life that really satisfies us? I asked some boys a little while ago what they meant when they spoke about life, real life that would satisfy men. Four were boys at the Hill School, Pottstown, Pa. They sat down and collaborated for a while as to what real life meant to them, and when they got through it came to this: Purity, integrity, the principle of Christian service, unselfishness, and the desire to be perfect. I asked another man at Princeton what life meant to him, real life. He was one of the best athletes in the college, and this was the answer he gave: Humility, charitableness, bravery, strength of conviction, honesty, sincerity, truthfulness and the power to forgive. I asked a man at Yale what he thought life was. He was the most popular man in the senior class at that time. This was what he wrote down: “Service after the manner of Jesus, honesty carried all the way through, sympathy, capacity for work, patience in holding to principle, as well as fidelity in actual duty.”