Part 5

But the trouble is men do not believe this. They do not believe in any latent capacities adequate to the great task of life. They accept the principle of surrender and incompetence. They have nothing for God and God can make no use of them. And I imagine that it is such unbelief, such misgiving as to whether after all we have any possibilities for God in us, the undervaluation of God’s need of us and power to make and use us, that lead many of us to live the futile, unfruitful, negative lives which we do live. Men do not think their lives worth very much. They do not deny that there are great men and that great work is to be done in the world, but they think that God requires only those, that He builds His kingdom on a few outstanding figures, that the common men can look after themselves, and that they are not indispensable to God. If we are to prevent this waste, and if we are to secure the life without which God is impotent to build His kingdom in the world, we must somehow bring home to men the recognition of the great truth that God cannot get along without every man and all of that man, and that every human life and all its buried powers are essential to God.

One of the great purposes of our Lord’s coming here to earth was that He might show men the value of a man’s life in the plan and thought of God. Even the most sacred and time-honoured institution our Lord weighed over against one man and found him outweighing the institution. What was His own example but the illustration of the immeasurable value of man? He did not come to teach the uselessness of human life, but its pricelessness. He did this by becoming a man Himself. And this principle of God’s need of men and their latent possibilities is not mere theological theory. It is the hard historic fact that God has ever needed men and waited for them and for what they were the men to do for Him. Look at the great inventions, discoveries, achievements. What is the whole lesson of the Incarnation but that there are things that God Himself will not do except as He uses man? God Himself, we must say reverently, was communicable and a Saviour only as man. And His call to-day as it has been all through the years is for men who will believe that the thing God wants done can be done by Him through them. The Western Hemisphere was here before ever Columbus drew aside the veil and broadened the horizon of mankind. These great energies which drive the modern world were here from the beginning. We did not invent any of them. There is not an ounce of power in the world to-day that was not here when the world began. All that man has done has been simply to discover existing secrets. He has created no power. He has only found out what God has put here for him to find out. It took man a long time to discover this. But God waited for him. And God needs these finding men now as much as He has needed them at any time. He needs such men now to break open what is still concealed. The past has not exhausted all the heroisms, has not accomplished all the tasks. There are greater ones yet for the days that are, if God can only find His men.

Think how greatly God needs men to-day just to bring need and supply together in the world. You remember the incident in the life of our Lord as He came by the Pool of Bethesda where the sick lay, and spoke to one poor man lying on his pallet.

“Are you going in?” said He.

“No,” said the man. “I have no friend who will help me in and others get the benefit before I can come near.”

There was the good, waiting to be gained, and here was the man, but he had no man to stand for him between the need and the supply. A few years ago a great famine raged just back from the coast of China. There were millions of Chinese families who were in want and hundreds of thousands died of starvation because there was not bread enough to feed them. Little children lay crying at the breasts of dead mothers by the roadsides. At that very hour the wheat was piled up at railroad stations in Argentina as high as church spires. There was grain enough to feed the starving millions in China. Here was the supply and there was the need, but where were the men? God had not men enough on whom to float the supply across to meet the need. What is true of outward need is true of inward need as well. There is never a want where there is not an adequate supply. No little child on this earth need go hungry because God has not put enough in this world to feed it. No human heart need go starved because there is not enough love to meet its wants. There is all the food and all the love that humanity needs. But there are lacking the men who for God will bring the supply to the demand. The human need in the world can be met by the supply only through men who will fill up the gap. God can do it only as men lend themselves to Him. That is why, through all the years, the call of God has been for volunteers. For every unique, external, individual call that has been given to men, you can find a million calls that have been just the answer of men to the great call of God for volunteers. And God surely values the volunteer above the conscript. Isaiah did not wait for any special coercive call. “Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me.” That call was enough to cover him, and he answered it. There is so much work to be done that God cannot go marching through the world looking for individuals, performing new miracles by which each individual is to be thaumaturgically led up to his particular work. God’s general way has been to picture before the eyes of His sons the work to be done and to wait for their hearts to leap in response, as Isaiah’s leaped: “Lord, let me have a share in this work ‘Here am I; send me.’”

Men are indispensable to God to put meaning into the words in which He tries to tell His message to men. Words have no meaning of their own. Words mean only as much as one man puts into them, or another man takes out of them. The meaning of the word does not come from the word; it comes from some life in which the word gets incarnated, or from some other life which interprets the word. What would the word “friend” signify to a man who had never had one? What does “tenderness” mean to one who has never seen a mother and her child? Or what is “patriotism” to one who has never seen or felt the contagion? You remember what the eunuch said when Philip met him in the chariot reading the prophet Esaias. “Understandest thou what thou readest?” Philip asked. And he replied, “How can I, except some man should guide me?” Things mean nothing to men until they are shown to them. Men go to China or Japan and preach the Gospel. How is it done? Why, they take words that have old meanings and fill them with new and different meanings by living new ideas in deeds before the people. In our colleges this year what meaning will honour, truth and friendship have, except as these words derive their meaning from the object lessons in some men’s lives? There are places where honour means dishonour; where purity means impurity; where truth means falsehood. These noble words are confused with their very opposites because no man has incarnated their right meaning in his life. That was one reason why the incarnation was necessary nineteen hundred years ago. There was no adequate religious or spiritual vocabulary and never could have been otherwise. If God had not come in the flesh, men would not have had the ideas that we use to describe God’s coming in the flesh. To-day, as then, God is dependent upon men in whom He can put meaning into His message to the world.

Men are indispensable in enabling God to get His other men. He gives men guidance for their lives. But how? I appeal to your own hearts. How do we get the guidance of our lives? There are many who are sure of having divine guidance in their lives, surer of that than they are of any material thing, and yet, as we look back upon this supernatural guidance, we realize that it has all been mediated through men. We can name man after man who did for our lives, in smaller measure, just what that man of Macedonia did for Paul. We get our guidance through men. Saint Paul got his through a man. Through what man was it? Sir William Ramsay has no doubt whatever that the man whom Saint Paul saw in his dreams was none other than his friend Luke. A real man and a friend, and no ghost figure, was the man of Macedonia through whom God gave Paul his great missionary call.

It would be easy to recall the lives of great missionaries and point out how they received their divine guidance through other men――not even through a dream, far less through some miraculous vision, but through a brother man who came to talk with them, reasoned with them, and showed them the best way in which a man could use his life. Men are indispensable to God in order to guide other men into the work which God has for them to do. And one reason why there is such an awful waste of life to-day, why so many men, going out of the colleges, miss the highest work of their lives, is simply because there are not enough other men who recognize that they are indispensable to God in order that, through them, God may guide men to their highest and most efficient places.

Men are indispensable to God in bringing men to Jesus Christ. As men were brought to Christ by other men in the beginning, so has it been during all the succeeding years. The angels are willing to do what they can, but none of us have had any visible object lessons of what they do. Men have been brought to Christ always by other men. Imperfect lives are to be brought up to the Perfect Life, and to do this service Christ uses common men, just such as we are. That is what Paul conceived as the glory of his life, that he had the privilege of being the bond――no other beings in the universe being able to take that place――between men who had not found Christ and Christ hunting for His own.

Then God requires men now as He never required them in all the days gone by to bear testimony to the Deity of Jesus Christ. We know how little value our Lord attached to any accrediting evidences that did not come right out of pure, human personality. He discredited the advantages of bringing back Abraham from the dead, for example, to bear testimony to the truth. If men were not willing to accept adequate moral evidence, valid human testimony, they would not believe by miracle, He said. That is why He was so pleased with the confession of Simon Peter. “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.” It rejoiced Him to get such testimony from a man who, in turn, had drawn it out of his own experience of God. There is no greater need in the world to-day than for a great body of men who know Christ to be God more surely than they know themselves to be men, and are able to go out and testify to what Christ can do with a definiteness and certainty greater than that of any other testimony they can bear, who can say what John said, “That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you.” If there ever was a day when God was calling men to a great undertaking, He is calling them now to be His witnesses, unimpeachable, unflinching, to the unique personality, to the supreme divine character and power of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ.

And it is not only for great men that God is calling to do these indispensable tasks for Him. He wants the great men, no doubt, but He wants, more than that, the great mass of the common men. After all, the great man is only one man, and every little man counts just as many as one great man. Since God has to have all, one little man is as indispensable to the all as one great man can be. And until He has all, He cannot do what He purposes to do. It is only when we _all_ come “unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” that any one of us can come. It is only when we “comprehend with _all_ saints, what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height” of the love of Christ, that any one of us can comprehend it. It is only when we _all_ reflect as in a mirror the character of Christ that any one of us shall be “changed ... from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” And the little men, as a matter of fact, are doing as much as the great. The night that Gough stood alone, with all hope gone, a drunkard in the gutter, an almost forgotten man laid his hand on his shoulder and said, “Man, there is a better life than this for you.” The name of that man is remembered by a few, but forgotten by the multitudes who will never forget the name of John B. Gough, or cease to feel the glow of the fires which he kindled to blaze until the Judgment Day. Even a little man may fill such an indispensable place as that of helping God lay hold of a great man who will be one of the unmistakable forces of God.

And it is not only every man that is indispensable to God, but also every bit of every man. We cannot take some sections of our lives and eliminate them as though they were not indispensable to God. There can be no schism between a man’s public and his private life. His hands and what he does with them, his imaginings and where they go when he is alone by himself without any coercing, these are just as much indispensable to God as a man’s public worship or any of his activities in the open ministry of Christ’s kingdom. It is every bit of the man――body, soul, and spirit――that is indispensable to God.

And if we are indispensable to God, we may be very sure that we are indispensable to the world also. If God needs us, the world needs us even more. It is waiting for the rising up of men who know that God needs them, and who hand themselves over completely to His uses. “The mightiest of civilizing agencies are persons,” said Dr. Fairbairn, “and the mightiest civilizing persons are Christian men.” Those men are doing most for the world who are doing most to make men aware of how necessary they are to God, and who are going up and down the lands allying men’s lives to the eternal life and power of God. This is the greatest of all works――getting God His men. I heard Dr. J. Campbell Gibson tell the Chamber of Commerce in Glasgow of a visit which he made to a temple which had been turned into a modern school in inland China. Over the gate of the school were these words in Chinese: “If you are planting for ten years, plant trees; if you are planting for a hundred years, plant men.” Men are God’s great interest and want.

What an opportunity this opens for every man of us! We have thought of our lives as little, insignificant, trivial, of no consequence. There is One walking in the midst of us Who was speaking to Ezekiel. “I am hunting for a man,” He is saying, “I am hunting for a man,” and it is open to every one of us to rise up and say, “Lord, I am that man you are hunting for. Seek no further. Here am I. Have me for your man.” Is that the answer that He is getting from us?

LECTURE III

AN UNFRIGHTENED HOPE

If we were asked what we considered to be the supremest motive in life, the motive which does actually exercise the largest control over human conduct, what would our answer be? A generation ago men would have answered glibly enough: “The desire for happiness.” That was then supposed to be the one commanding motive of mankind. But it was not long before the answer seemed unsatisfactory and indefinite, because what brings happiness to one man brings misery to another, or what a man thinks will delight him in the end disappoints and such experiences issue in confusion. It was ethically indiscriminate also. The same motive covered moral contradictions, and men wanted some more consistent answer to the question. Nowadays those who look despondently at life often say in reply: “Avarice,――the desire for wealth.” Or, those who look a little more deeply say it is not money, but the power that money represents that men desire, and that their real motive is to acquire sources of influence and control. Some who look at life more hopefully are likely to reply: “Love or friendship.” That is the thesis of one of the noblest books of our generation, written by the late Dr. Henry Clay Trumbull, entitled “Friendship, the Master Passion.” Doctor Trumbull told me once that when he first began the work on this theme he spoke about it to his friend Charles Dudley Warner, who said: “Trumbull, you cannot prove that thesis.” After the book was done, Doctor Trumbull took the book to him and asked if he would read it. He read it, gave it back, saying: “Well, Trumbull, you have shown that it is true, after all.” And that is a lovely view to take of life: that the motive that lies deeper than any other, and that really in the actual conduct of men and women is the most controlling, is the motive of unselfish friendship, of love.

But what would you say if instead of any one of these three or other answers that may suggest themselves, some one were to reply: “Not a bit of it. The motive that really controls human life, that does actually and not theoretically play the largest part in determining the conduct of men and women, is――_fear_.” And before we pass that contention by it may be worth our while to look at it and ask whether, or how far, it is true.

Take it in the matter of dress, for example. Does not fear play a large part there,――either the fear of being unlike everybody else, or the fear of being too much like everybody else? In every land, more even in civilized lands than in uncivilized, the element of fear enters into the small external characteristics of our daily living.

And in the matter of opinion. We speak of public opinion as though it were a free and stable and trustworthy thing. But the public opinion of one generation contradicts the public opinion of another generation. The public opinion of one section of the land denies the public opinion of another section, in the same way in which two sections of society in one community think in opposite ways. Why? Not because all the individuals of these particular generations, or sections, or portions of the community really and independently have thought the thing out for themselves, but because, held under the atmospheric constraint of fear, they are unwilling to break away from what is determined for them by the opinions in the midst of which they live. There is a good deal of pacifist opinion and a great deal more of militarist which is not free and personal at all, but simply herd intimidation. And a great deal of race prejudice and international suspicion is nothing but the miasma arising from cowardice or that bullying selfishness which is essentially cowardly.

And a great deal of religion is of the same character. The predominant element in many of the non-Christian religions is fear. It is so in all of the earlier or animistic religions, where men live in constant terror of the spirits that haunt the air or the world, and where a large element of their worship is shaped by that dominant principle of their religion, the dread of the unseen and the unexperienced. Even among us is there not a great deal, both of religious orthodoxy and of religious heresy, that is only the child of fear? There is a coercion of sound doctrine and there is a coercion of false doctrine, and a great many men and women belong to their school of religious opinion simply because they are afraid to break away from the companionship in which they have always been or to disagree with the associations which condition them.

Much religious conduct, too, springs only from the fear of one’s environment. One of the saddest things which one meets in going out across the world is the great multitude, especially of young men, who, when they have left Christian lands and the environment and support of Christian surroundings, have simply collapsed in all their religious conviction and character. Asia is strewn from one end of it to the other with the wrecks of men who, while they were at home, supposedly were men of religious character and conviction, but who showed when they went away from home that it was not a matter of their own real selves at all. It was just a matter of their timid servility and acceptance of the conditions imposed upon them from without, so that once they were away from home and free to do as they pleased and had no longer the help and uplift of their surroundings, their environmental religion collapsed and they went in an entirely different way.

And I think if only we would go deep enough in our own lives, and be honest enough with ourselves to gain a clear insight into our motives and impulses, we would discover how large a part fear has played in us,――fear, of course, in all the wide range of its aspects, that shades off on the one side into arrant cowardice and on the other side into a mere hesitancy of character and timidity, but fear nevertheless. Some of us are even now cloaking the things that lie deepest in our hearts, because we are afraid to give expression to them. We go into communities, into circles, into conditions where what has been natural and real to us is unnatural and abnormal, and we hide our colours and conceal our principles. And we do things we ought not to do or we do not do the thing we know we ought to do simply because of fear.

I had an experience a little while ago when this diagnosis was confirmed to me. In a visit to one of our colleges, among the boys who came around to talk quietly was one whom I knew as one of the leading men in the life of the institution. He played on the eleven; he was president of his class. He was very timid about talking lest somebody should overhear, but when assured that we had the whole house to ourselves he took a letter out of his pocket and handed it to me.

He said: “Mr. Speer, I wish you would read this.”

I looked at it and saw that it was written in a girl’s handwriting, and said: “No, tell me about it.”

“No,” he said, “please read it. It will tell you a great deal better than I can.”

So I opened his letter and began to read, substantially as follows:

“DEAR ――――:

“I know all about your life at ―――― College, and I want to tell you what I think about you. You and I have known one another all our lives, and we have been good friends; but I think you are a coward and I think that I ought to tell you so.”

I closed his letter and handed it back to him. His lips were quivering and his eyes were moist as he said:

“You can believe that when I got that letter it cut me all up, and the worst of it is that what she says is true.”

His father was a minister; his mother was of the salt of the earth. He had grown up under the best influences of a clean and wholesome Christian home, and he had slipped those strings. He had thought that it was manly to surrender to the current ideals of the college; that in cutting loose from the influence of his home he was doing a brave and courageous thing. But the girl knew he was doing it because he was a coward and she had the courage to tell him so. And he had come to see it in that light for himself. In his college fraternity and in his own class, men were praising him because he had broken from the old enslavements of home and was living his own life like a man. But he knew that he was nothing but a coward, who

“Held that hope was all a lie And faith a form of bigotry And love a snare that caught him. Then thought to comfort human tears With sundry ill-considered sneers At things his mother taught him.”

And he had thought he was doing it because he was courageous, whereas the real motive was that of fear. He was a coward, without courage enough to fly his own flag unflinchingly, to be and do the thing which in his heart, in the very fibres of his being, flesh of his mother’s flesh, he knew was the thing he should be and do.