Part 4

What I have been saying is certainly true in the realm of our physical energies. I remember a story of John Lawrence, who went out to India a raw, uninfluential Irish boy in the service of the East India Company, resolved to do his work well and make himself a name. Very early in his career he was assigned to the collectorship of the Jullundur Doab, on what was then the frontier of India. He made himself perfectly at home among his people, entering into their life, mastering their vernaculars, learning their secrets, until at last men came to think of “Jans Larens” as a demi-god with powers beyond the knowledge of common men. One day as he was sitting in his house a messenger came in from one of his districts and reported that a village was burning down and begged him to come. He hurried out to the village. When he arrived he asked the headmen if they had all the people out of the houses and was told that all had been brought out except one old woman who refused to come. He went to the house where the woman lived and looked in. There she sat on a bag of grain. Lawrence entreated her to come out but she refused, explaining that this bag of grain was all her earthly wealth. If she came out she would starve; she would rather stay and be burned. When Lawrence found his commands and entreaties unavailing, he rushed in, with the embers from the burning roof falling on his shoulders, stooped over and picked up the bag of grain, and left the burning building, the old woman following obediently behind. The next day as he was sitting in his house it flashed on his mind that the bag of grain had been exceedingly heavy and he rode out curiously to the village again to see how much he had lifted. He had no difficulty in finding the old woman and her bag of grain. He stooped over to lift it but could not budge it from the ground. But the day before he had budged it. He had picked it up and carried it. The power to do it was lying latent in him all the while. All he needed was just the piercing call or inspiration adequate to release the buried energy.

And the world is full of evidences that what is true physically is true morally. In every man lies the power with the grace and help of God to meet his great crisis and in every woman the power to bear the agony and pain of her great hour. Only a few years ago, when the _Titanic_ went down and some men who had walked as dogs at the heel of their passions suddenly became masters of themselves and laughing stood at attention to death as they waited on the deck, we all wondered what it was that gave these men who had been slaves their sudden moral mastery. That mastery was within all the time. It did not come out of the frame of the _Titanic_. It did not come out of the iceberg. It was lying buried all the while only waiting the hour and the Voice that was to summon it to come forth.

Among the nations to-day this is the needed truth as it is the needed truth here in our own lives. There are boys here to-day who have been yielding to temptation, to whom God would give energies to withstand their enemy. In the nation there are even now capacities to conquer all the evils with which the nation abounds. Some day our children will look back and ask why we have allowed immorality to dominate the moral life of the land and why in the world we have endured the saloon so long. These things will be cleaned away some day and men will wonder then what their mothers and fathers were about that they surrendered where that happier generation will not surrender but will achieve. The needed capacities are buried of God in life, but we are not willing to believe that they are there or to have faith in Him to energize them.

Let me put the truth in yet a different way.

Last spring, just after Holy Week, I received a very interesting letter from a friend who is one of the best known and best loved judges in our country. It was written on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Day, and he said in it that he was pursuing the practice which he had pursued for many years, of trying in the interval between Good Friday and Easter morning to eliminate Jesus Christ entirely from his thought of life and of the world in order that he might thus bring home to his own mind and conscience more deeply the significance of Jesus, and he said he could hardly wait for Easter morning to come to escape from the oppressive gloom and depression in which his spirit was as a result of his enforced practice. And he begged me, as one of his friends, to try this between the next Good Friday and Easter Day and to see what the experience would mean.

Oddly enough my own thoughts that same day on which my friend was writing this letter were exactly the opposite of his. He was thinking of Jesus Christ as extinguished, he was thinking of all that He had come to be and to do as gone, and he was trying to bring home to his own heart what this utter loss of Christ would mean. I was meditating, on the other hand, on that Saturday morning, on just the contrary idea. On Good Friday, the day before this Saturday, there had been a great Personality; now that Personality must be somewhere still. Personality does not die. The next day, on Easter morning, there was to be a great outburst of energy. That energy must be somewhere now. It will not be created to-morrow morning. It must be somewhere to-day waiting to come forth to-morrow. Where is it? And then I suddenly realized that it was all there, that all that was to break loose Easter morning was shut up inside that grave, that all the energies that were to peal across the world on the new day were there asleep in that tomb that Saturday. All the great love and power that had been had not been annihilated. It was there somewhere, only out of sight for a little while. And the great truth urged itself that all the dormant energies of life, all the enshrouded and enfolded powers are here now and always just as truly as they will be to-morrow when they awake, though for the hour they lie latent and unused.

Then I began to see, as one’s thought ran easily on, that that Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Day was in reality a sort of symbol of the whole of history. For history, as we look back upon it, is full of these repressions and these emergences, and then perhaps repressions again, of great impulses and outbursts of energy and of power. Now and then they are for good, as when the Reformation broke across men’s minds, shattering their shackles, opening old prison doors, allowing the enslaved human spirit to come out and breathe the air of freedom. But why had it not come before? All the great energies of God that burst forth in it must have been here even before that hour. And why did they have to subside afterwards? They all _were_ still? Why might they not have gone beating their way onward and not have ceased so soon?

Then also great explosions of evil come. We look out across the world to-day and see all these dogs of war unleashed. But these dogs of war were not born the year before last. They had been here all the time, only they were chained and held in leash. Why were they not kept chained and in leash? Why were they allowed to break loose and go wild across the world in their havoc and devastation? We know perfectly well that after a few months they are going to be chained again, and the great reconstructive processes will begin to make the world anew. But why do these reconstructive forces have to wait? They will not exist any more truly then than they do to-day. Why not release them to-day to go out and do their creative work in the world now? Why not on Saturday let loose that which is to burst with creative freedom on the world on Easter morning?

And I saw that this was a symbol not of history only but also of human life, that every human life is just the mystery of the infolding of latent capacities that are there wrapped up, the infolding of great ends of which no man can foretell. That is why, I suppose, a man feels such awe every time he holds a very little child in his arms. He does not know what it is that he has in his arms, what it is that will some day come bursting forth from that little child. That must have been Mary’s thrill in those early days when she held her little one, knowing dimly and far away, if not clearly, that she held in her arms the mighty Redeemer of men. “When I see a child,” said Pasteur, “he inspires me with two feelings: tenderness for what he is now, respect for what he may become hereafter.” Of personal life it is as true as of history. Vast latent possibilities for good may come breaking forth. Now and then they do, in some truth-loving, unfearing, plain-speaking, God-obeying Martin Luther. Or they may issue in some tranquil, patient, loving-hearted, steady-spirited, immovable Lincoln. Goodness comes leaping forth, and oftentimes we are tempted to think the surroundings, the circumstances, produced it. They produced none of it. They gave it its opportunity and its chance, but it was all somewhere all the time and it might not have come forth if something inside had not released the spring of our will to God’s will and let those great energies of good come pulsing out to do their work.

And the same thing is true of the inwrought and enshrouded capacities for ill. Jesus Christ laid off His limitations as well as His activities that Saturday in the grave; and He left His limitations there when He came out. Out of such Saturday graves in man’s character it may be only the limitations that emerge. Out of many a man’s life it is the dog that ought to be chained that is allowed to roam free, while all the possibilities for good and sacrifice and ministry are still-born inside. And sometimes, thank God, men discover all this latent ill within and lay on it the restraining and throttling hand. As godly old John Newton said when one day he saw a criminal being led by, “There, but for the grace of God, goes John Newton.” He knew that everything that had escaped in that brother of his lay latent in himself, and he thanked God that a hand had been laid on all those inner capacities for evil and wreckage and that that hand held them in check and let only the good and the true and the pure go free.

There is something infinitely hopeful and encouraging in the principle of that Saturday in our Lord’s last week for every man and woman of us, as we think of life’s work and what we are trying to get done in the world. So many times a thing seems all vain. The teacher tried to breed in the boy whom he taught a hate of lies and a love of the truth, and he wrought with tears and blood at his task, and the boy went out from him and it seemed to him to have been futile, this that he had done for him. We put ourselves out in this or that effort of service in the hope of achieving this or that great end. Every little while it seems to us to have been all fruitless. But wait. It is only Saturday. Easter morning is going to break and the seed that was sown in the ground in darkness and obscurity will come forth then. The life that was let go for a little while, all that we did not see and therefore thought had run sheer to waste, we shall discover then will come pulsating back. “No effort is wasted,” said Pasteur.

It is a great joy of life to believe this, that what Isaiah said is true through all the ages, by the very principle of the life of God, that no word of His will come back to Him vain or be void, that it will accomplish the thing He pleases and prosper in the errand whereon He sent it. I received a letter the other day from a friend, the Rev. Adolphus Pieters, who is a missionary in Japan. He had for very many years been engaged in an interesting work. He published advertisements of Christianity in the Japanese papers, and then occasionally printed a brief attractive account of what Christianity was, with the hope of arousing the curiosity of Japanese readers. At the end he would add that if any one were interested he might correspond with him. As a result of this work he came into correspondence with hundreds of men. In this recent letter he writes: “The total number of people who applied to us for tracts last year was 959, making the total from February, 1914, when the work began, to December 31, 1915, 3,590. There have been seven baptisms since my previous letter, and the total number to date is forty-five. Number Forty-Five is a most instructive case of the Lord’s blessing resting upon what was, humanly speaking, a complete failure. The young man in question is a bright young student in the Normal School at this place, who was baptized a week ago last Sunday, after coming to my house off and on for two years, and getting a good deal of instruction. I did not reckon him among the results of the newspaper work, but after he was baptized he told me that he originally got interested in the Gospel when he was attending the primary school in his home town. Among his teachers was one named Okabe Katsumi, who had seen our advertisements and secured some tracts, among which were copies of the Gospels. He did not care for them himself, and had given them to this boy, who was deeply impressed. In the course of time the boy graduated from school and went to Oita to attend the Normal, and he did so with the resolution already formed to look up the man who advertised in the papers and learn from him more about the Christian religion.

“When I heard that, I looked up the card index, and found among the 4 ‘dead’ cards one for Okabe Katsumi. It was number 444, and he had applied for tracts in the spring of 1912, but in August he wrote that he had found something in our tracts that he did not like, and so had made up his mind to have nothing more to do with Christianity. So his card was marked in red ink, ‘Closed August 12, 1913,’ and filed away among the ‘dead’ ones――a complete failure, so far as any one could see. But it wasn’t a failure. God knew better. On the fifth of March, 1916, a young man made public confession of his faith and was baptized as a sequel to that application of Okabe Katsumi in 1912.

“Such things sometimes make me look with something like awe upon my card index. What is going on beneath the surface? How is God working in the hearts of the ‘failures,’ or, if not in their hearts, through them in the hearts of others? It is one more proof that ‘the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his.’”

Looking back across the years it could be seen that bread sown upon the waters returned again. Absolutely no energy goes to waste in this world,――no moral energy, no spiritual energy, any more than physical energy. All that is released goes about its work. Let us thank God, that there that Saturday morning in the dark of the grave all that broke free the next day _was_, and was not dead beyond the resurrection of life.

And the assurance that a man simply cannot do anything in vain is not only a word of great courage to us in the work that we are trying to do in the world, it is a word of hope and courage to us also in our own personal life and struggle for character. All the energy we need to accomplish anything that ought to be accomplished in us is in our reach. “All power,” said Christ, “is given to me in heaven and in earth. I stand within at the centre of your life. Draw on me. Go out in the faith of that and do whatever your work is in the world. I have the energy that you need.” All the energy that we require for any task in life or out of life is there, by token and assurance of the closed grave and resurrection, in Christ, waiting to be drawn upon by any man who wants to make use of it.

And all this is not the exaltation of human will, the setting up of a man’s own resolution and high purpose. It is precisely the opposite of that. It is saying to a man: “There do not lie in the boastful surface of your life the power and the resources that you need. Retire upon God. You must get behind into the unplumbed depths where Christ waits. You must go back of the Easter morning in the grave, the unopened womb of the grave, to find it there. All of it is there in the now Risen Christ Who that Saturday morning awaited resurrection.” This is simply making faith a living, acting reality by which a man works; so that he arises in the morning and can say: “O God, I have in Thee in me all the energy and strength that I shall need this day. No temptation can come to me to-day that I have not got the power in Thee, that I never have used yet, to draw upon, that will enable me to meet and conquer. No work will come to me to-day that is too much for me, no matter how exacting or unprecedented in my experience. There is power in Thee for me for this work that is come to me to do.”

That Saturday morning, more vividly than any other day that brings back the triumph and pain and glory of Easter to us, makes a man assured that all the energies he needs are near by, that in God’s own presence there are all the powers he wants, awaiting release by God’s grace for all the necessities of his life. And if we could not believe this about the world we are living in to-day, surely a man could not go on living in it. If we had to surrender to the present order and temper of the world what would be left to uphold us? It is because we know it is Saturday night in human history that we can live through it.

We know that as in individuals so in all the races of mankind, God has planted these great dormant energies and powers. For scores and scores of years the Chinese had despaired of their power to throw off the opium curse. They knew it was sapping the very vitality of their land, and yet they wondered whether the day would ever come when they would have power enough to break those hateful chains that had been forged upon them, and get back their freedom. Twenty years ago, as we went to and fro in China, the most striking odour in the Chinese streets was the pungent stench of smoking opium. One could scarcely go into a Chinese city or walk in a Chinese highway without seeing the wretched shipwrecks who were the products of that vice. Poppy fields bloomed red over the Empire, and the race had almost come to despair. And what do we find to-day? There is scarcely a great poppy field in the Republic, scarcely a fume of opium that you can smell on the public street in any Chinese city. The bonfires flared across the land as they burned up the signs of the old bondage. A great race arose in power and in a massive moral upheaval shook itself free. God had planted the energies there that needed only the touch of a living faith in Him, a new assurance of the freedom of man to do His will, and in this matter the whole nation came out of its bondage into its liberty.

For generations men wondered whether slaves could ever be set free. We almost feared in our land here that slavery was a permanent institution. But there came a time at last when from the wrist of every American slave the chains fell away. It might have been generations before; it might not have been until generations after; only in that time appointed the moral energies awoke and came forth, and Saturday burst into Easter Day for the negro bondmen of America.

Precisely the same principle holds with regard to the things that we fight to-day. It holds with regard to the war on war. Some day we shall slay it. The kingdom of heaven, said Jesus, is among you. Well, let it loose. The kingdom of heaven will have no war in it; the kingdom of heaven will have no brothers cutting one another’s throats in it; the kingdom of heaven will have in it no vice and lust dragging its slimy trail across men’s hearths and hearts. If the kingdom of heaven is within, why not set it free, that we may live in it as well as have it buried inside of us! The world that we are living in is calling us to go back to that principle of Saturday morning and to believe that all we need to do the will of God is made available for us by God’s grace now, if we will but obey.

And if some men say that all this is only to put in other words the theory of development, of historic evolution, why, what of it? Of course it is, but what is development except the drawing out of what has been folded in? What is evolution except the letting loose of what the mind of God Himself at the beginning had planted within,――when in the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world He poured the blood of Christ into humanity in order that humanity might be reinforced with the adequate energies to enable it to accomplish the thing that was God’s first dream for it? Of course it is, and that is precisely the ground of Christ’s constant appeal. “Come unto me,” He said to men, believing that they could. “Unless you hear My call and follow Me, you cannot be My disciple.” What meaning was there to His summons unless the power to respond was there in answer to His call? “I stand at the door of your inner being,” said He, “and knock. I am there waiting.”

And so to us to-day, just as clearly as in those days, His voice speaks: “Come out of your tomb, out of your chains, out of your narrowness, out of your limitations, out of your despairs, out of your dejections, out of your failures,――come out of them. The power of the endless life is here for you, if only by faith and love you will lay hold of it to-day.” Is that not, after all, the great central message and the fundamental principle of Christ’s Gospel to us, which He symbolized and illustrated in the shadow of the Saturday before the Easter victory? It is in one of the old hymns:

“Low in the grave He lay―― Jesus, my Saviour! Waiting the coming day―― Jesus, my Lord! Death cannot keep his prey―― Jesus, my Saviour! He tore the bars away―― Jesus, my Lord! Up from the grave He arose, With a mighty triumph o’er His foes; He arose a victor from the dark domain, And He lives forever with His saints to reign: He arose! He arose! Hallelujah! Christ arose!”

And He arose once on Easter morning that on the Saturday before and on every day, every one of us might also rise out of the old, low, selfish, defeated life into the life through which are beating the victorious energies and the sufficient strength of God. Shall it be so with us?

“Rigid I lie in a winding sheet, Which mine own hands did weave, And my narrow cell is myself――myself, Which yet I may not cleave.

“And yet in the dawn of the early morn, A clear voice seems to say, ‘I am the Lord of the final word, And ye may not say Me nay.

“‘Unloose your hands that your brother’s need May ever find them free. Unbind your feet from their winding sheet; Henceforth they walk with Me.’

“And lo! I hear! I am blind no more! I am no longer dumb! Out from the doom of a self-wrought tomb, Pulsate with life, I come.”

Yes, I may come if I will, by His life Who will live again in me.