Part 11

Now if we were to define life better than these boys, and yet in the way they were feeling after, not in any concrete expressions, but in its central principle, we should borrow the words which Professor Drummond borrowed from Herbert Spencer. Spencer said that the perfect correspondence of any organism with its environment would be perfect life. Professor Drummond modified this by adding just one word: the perfect correspondence of any organism with a perfect environment would be perfect life. Or, to put it as it is stated in one of our best dictionaries: life is that state in any animal or plant in which its different functions are all occupied in active healthy expression. Now that is just what those boys were feeling after. Life is the free and fearless completion of ourselves. Life is our utter unfolding in the direction of that of which we are capable. Life is the pushing out of the rim of our world into the great and boundless riches of God. Life is the opening up of the gates of our prison house that we may go after Him Whose word to men was: “If ye abide in my word, then are ye truly my disciples; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Life is what Jesus Christ came to give, for His mission was this: “The thief came to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I am come that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.”

One great purpose of the Incarnation was to show what we are in our deepest being in the purpose of God, and what we are capable of. Our Lord did not come to parade before men the exceptional life to which they could never attain. He came, as He Himself said, to show them what it had been His Father’s will that they should all be. “As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you.” “I go unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.” What Jesus Christ was in the fullness of His unlimited life was the revealing of what God has in His will for every one of us. The amplitudes that we see in Him, the subsidence of all the petty boundaries, the unhampered outgoing of His free spirit in the area of His Father, God,――all that is just a picture of what God meant the life of each one of us to be. That is why they called Him the Son of Man, because He was the picture of what God had meant that His son, man, might be.

And Christ came, not only to show the possibilities of such being, of what men could do and what they could be made, but to be Himself that expression of power in them competent to effect such a result, the tide of the boundless life flowing through all the channels that they could offer to Him. He came to be in mankind the deep, flowing stream of a new life. One regrets to find in some churches to-day in the repetition of the Apostles’ Creed the omission of the sentence: “He descended into hell.” There is no word in the Creed which expresses more fully the uttermost reach of the purpose of our Lord and the scope and boundlessness of His love. Down even into hell He went in the utterance of His love for mankind. How much this means! But to say no more, it means this, that deep into the dark of our human life He came, that there, below all sight, below all thought, He might release the vital streams that have been flowing from the fountain of Calvary ever since, and which have no other fountain.

We know what would happen in our bodies, to put it simply, if some great artery that fed our life were tied. Atrophy and palsy would creep at once over our unnourished frames. Precisely the same thing is true in the deeper life of our souls, if the arteries, those channels through which Christ would pour His energy and strength and power, are tied. To put the same thing still more simply: Suppose the Mississippi River instead of running into the Gulf ran out of the Gulf deep into the land. Suppose all of the rivers poured into the land instead of into the seas. As a matter of fact, that is in one sense what they do. We have got long past looking at rivers as drains for the land. We know that they are arteries through which the life-blood of the seas flows upon the land by way of the skies. And suppose there were no Mississippi River. Suppose it were stopped at the gate. What a chill and death would fall upon the land! And how often that life of Christ which comes up to the gates of men’s lives is stifled, the stream that would pour in kept out, the power that would control and remake blocked at the door through which it would enter. “The thief is come,” He says, “and you let him in, to kill, and to steal, and to destroy; I am come, and you keep Me out. And I am come that you may have life, and that you may have it in all the abundance of God.”

And we know that this life of Christ is real and abundant life because it fulfills the tests of life. It is a life of fullness in all its correspondences and relationships. It completes life to the uttermost of its possibilities, setting it in all those ties with that which is outside of it, which constitute life. For, after all, there is no separable life. All the life that we know is relationship. Our Lord defined it in such terms in His great prayer: “This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” Life can only be construed in terms of correspondence.

We know that the life Christ came to give, and does give, is the satisfying and real life, because it meets these testings. It gives us this wealth of correspondence of relationship.

“Oh, the pure delight of a single hour, That before Thy Cross I spend, When I kneel in prayer, and with Thee, my God, I commune as friend with friend.”

We know that the life Christ brings is complete and full, because it reëstablishes the tie and union between ourselves and God, and He becomes to us again our Father and our Friend. We know it, because it is the root of all deep and true and satisfying human relationships. How can there be a real and full union of one man and one woman that is not a union in Christ? And for the highest friendship and its ideals we find sanction and nourishment best in Him and the groundwork of His life.

And Christ’s is the real and satisfying life, because it is creative and energizing. It is not like the influence of that thief――selfishness, low desire, sin and small ambition――who kills and steals and destroys. But the life that Christ is teems with vitalizing power; it is strength and energy and new service in men. I have never seen it more beautifully put than in a letter of Stanley to David Livingstone. It was found by Lady Stanley in a little pocketbook which her husband had carried on the expedition for the relief of Livingstone. It was written in lead pencil. It was a copy of the letter that Stanley had written to the great explorer the very day after he left him. It has sometimes been questioned whether Livingstone really made on Stanley the impression which Stanley describes in his autobiography. There have been those who said that that picture was but the reading back over the intervening years of a growing hero worship. But here is the letter which Stanley wrote as he came fresh from the old missionary’s companionship and the inspiration of his personality:

“MY DEAR DOCTOR:

“I have parted from you all too soon; I feel it deeply; I am entirely conscious of it from being so depressed.... In writing to you, I am not writing to an idea now, but to an embodiment of warm, good fellowship, of everything that is noble and right, of sound common sense, of everything practical and right-minded.

“I have talked with you; your presence is almost palpable, though you are absent....

“It seems as if I had left a community of friends and relations. The utter loneliness of myself, the void that has been created, the pang at parting, the bleak aspect of the future, is the same as I have felt before, when parting from dear friends.

“Why should people be subjected to these partings, with the several sorrows and pangs that surely follow them?――It is a consolation, however, after tearing myself away, that I am about to do you a service, for then I have not quite parted from you; you and I are not quite separate. Though I am not present to you bodily, you must think of me daily until your caravan arrives. Though you are not before me visibly, I shall think of you constantly, until your least wish has been attended to. In this way the chain of remembrance will not be severed.

“‘Not yet,’ I say to myself, ‘are we apart,’ and this to me, dear Doctor, is consoling, believe me. Had I a series of services to perform for you, why then! we should never have to part.

“Do not fear then, I beg, to ask, nay, to command, whatever lies in my power. And do not, I beg of you, attribute these professions to interested motives, but accept them, or believe them, in the spirit in which they are made, in that true David Livingstone spirit I have happily become acquainted with.”

And out from that lonely spot in eastern Africa, the younger man came to begin a new career; all the old aimlessness and shiftlessness and drifting gone forever from his life, to pass on now to lift up the mission which, beneath the dripping eaves of the hut in which he died, David Livingstone laid down. The tide of a new life and a new service was in him. “I came that ye may have life, and that ye may have it abundantly.” He had seen Christ and felt the contagion of the life of Christ in Livingstone, and Christ’s word, articulate or inarticulate, had come to live in him. And that life is life in the power and desire to serve.

This life that Christ came to give is the only real and satisfying life, because it alone endures. We gather at Northfield each summer and always go up to read afresh the brief inscription on Mr. Moody’s grave on Round Top, “The world passeth away, and the lust thereof; but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.” We sing the same great truth constantly in George Matheson’s hymn:

“I lay in dust life’s glory dead, And from the ground there blossoms red Life that shall endless be.”

I wrote the other day to a friend about her sister-in-law’s death, and this was the last sentence of the letter which she wrote in reply:

“I do not know if he”――that was her brother――“told you how beautiful it was at the last; how S――――’s face lighted up with such an expression of surprise and adoration, with her eyes open to their fullest extent, and then it was all over. Only a glimpse into the life that was not to end could have brought such a look to a human face.”

“And that life,” said He Who was the life, “I brought with Me and will give to you.”

Let us lift our hearts to the life that shall endless be, to the liberty on which there never lay a chain, to the light of the land that hath no need of any sun, because the “Lamb is the light thereof,” the land of the new morning and the tearless life. The thief cometh――let him not come in!――only to kill, and to steal, and to destroy. “I am come, and I stand at the door and ask you now to let Me in, that you may have life abundantly.”

As these lectures close I would press all this in the most earnest and personal terms upon each one individually. The processes of social and moral progress in humanity are retarded or broken down because they are not carried on a volume of adequate spiritual life in men. There ought to be a Kingdom of Living Love and Brotherly Will on the earth. And some day there will be, but there is not now and there cannot be until the anemia of man is healed, and it can be healed in only one way――by more life in man, by life abounding in men. The commercial and materialistic solution of the world’s problem has been fully tried. For a generation it has been preached and practiced as the one saving gospel and out of the depths to which it brought us we begin to turn heavenward again. The day for a new creed has dawned――the old creed of truth and hope and freedom and life, of the wealth and glory of a city unseen as yet, hid in the heavens and only possible on the earth as drawn down by men to whom the invisible things are the surest of all realities and who live and are strong in God.

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After College――What?

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