Part 9

It was this principle that made our friend, S. H. Hadley, and that makes so many men who have escaped from the slavery of drink, go to extremes in cutting off physical indulgences. Mr. Hadley not only dropped once and forever the use of alcohol, but he stopped tobacco too, and he tried to get every drunkard whom he was seeking to save to discontinue the use of nicotine. He held that men should be clean every whit and his strong conviction was that while he would not for a moment class such indulgences together, nevertheless the man who wanted to be free from the one would find his deliverance far easier if he sloughed off the other also. It is safer and easier to be thoroughgoing and indiscriminate, if you will, than to be always calculating how great risks can be safely run.

And, lastly, we believe in no compromise because the truth is bound to prevail, and it will triumph the soonest when it is least hampered and tied up with error or with qualification. One might stop here to make a defense on this ground of the fanatics and devotees, but it is enough to say that the truth is going to prevail because it is God’s truth, and hell and all hell’s power in the world cannot stand against it. What is the use in delaying the day of that triumph by compromising with error? The right will prevail all the faster if we make no compromise with error, if we go out and preach unflinchingly and courageously with no compromise, with no surrender or economy or adaptations, the hard, plain truth of God as we see it. If what we think is truth is really error, it will be the sooner beaten down for being made to stand up for itself. But if it is indeed the truth we know it will prevail the more in the world as we keep it free from all connection with anything that will weaken or becloud it.

I know how much danger there is in such an attitude as this if we take it up towards the truth that we hold. It lies in our human nature to go to violence or extremes with everything. Martin Luther used to say that human nature is like a drunken man trying to ride a horse, you prop him up on one side and he topples over on the other. It is that way with us. We try to be firm and we become hard-hearted. We pride ourselves on uncompromising loyalty to the truth and we lack the tenderness and sympathy. Moreover, as Bushnell said in his essay on “Christian Comprehensiveness”:

“It is the common infirmity of mere human reformers that, when they rise up to cast out an error, it is generally not till they have kindled their passions against it. If they begin with reason, they are commonly moved, in the last degree, by their animosities instead of reason. And as animosities are blind, they, of course, see nothing to respect, nothing to spare. The question whether possibly there may not be some truth or good in the error assailed, which is needed to qualify and save the equilibrium of their own opposing truth, is not once entertained. Hence it is that men, in expelling one error, are perpetually thrusting themselves into another, as if unwilling or unable to hold more than half the truth at once.”

And yet these dangers are lesser dangers than the danger of surrendering the truth. And we can be guarded from them by the great and unselfish love that guarded Paul. The man who loves others more than he loves himself, who holds human lives sacred and free from invasion, who is seeking not his own glory, but the glory of God and the good of men, is in little danger from an absolutely uncompromising loyalty to the truth.

And if ever men have any doubts or misgivings regarding this, or if the time of discouragements and fears comes to them, and they look with longing to the multitudes who act together, while they think of themselves as just a few, bearing testimony for the truth against error and sin, they may encourage themselves with Mr. Matthew Arnold’s doctrine of the remnant, or better yet, by remembering the great Solitary, Jesus Christ. How lonesomely He walked His way; seeing what no other soul was seeing; standing alone for the great truth which He uttered, and at last meeting death upon the cross alone; one of His disciples having betrayed Him, another having three times denied that he ever knew Him, and all the others having left Him and gone away! And yet as we look back, we see that lonely cross ruling the whole world, and that forsaken figure men are clothing now with the crown of everlasting light, and His name is above every name. All that we are asked to do is simply to follow in His train, to take up the truth which He opened, and for that truth to be willing to live, and, which is far easier, if need be, to die. Our lives are ours for this one thing, that through them, without compromise with error or with sin, God may bear testimony to Himself, and whether He does that through many years or through few, through peaceful personal service or through storm and tragedy, is of no consequence. The one thing that is of consequence is that we should know and be true to God.

But there is a better way to set forth and commend this principle as a law of life than by arguing it in these general terms. Let the principle put on flesh and live before us in a man:

“And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the sojourners of Gilead, said unto Ahab, As the Lord, the God of Israel, liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.”

The old man who spoke these words was one of the four great characters of the Old Testament. He and Moses and Samuel and David stood apart in the thought of the Hebrew people. Indeed, there was a sense in which he and Moses were in a class by themselves. The appearance of those two with our Lord on the Mountain of Transfiguration was only an illustration of the place which they held in the imagination of Israel.

These were the first words he spoke as he bursts on our view. What lay behind them we can only surmise. He was a Tishbite, one “of the sojourners of Gilead,” dwelling beyond the Jordan, a man brought up in the desert. There on the level sands, with the eye of God looking down upon him, he had come to a deep feeling of the soul’s lonely stand before God, and convinced of God and the righteousness of God he came over the Jordan to speak his message and do his work in the organized national life of his people. He was a clean-limbed, frugal-lived man, who gathered up his skirts about him, we are told, and ran straight away sixteen miles before the chariot of Ahab, from Carmel to the entering in of Jezreel; a calm, quiet, courageous, firm-principled man; bred so in the desert with God.

We do not have any very elaborate story of his life. He appears on the stage and then he vanishes. There are long periods of time covering years when he disappears entirely from the record. We can condense what we know about his life into six brief chapters, between each two of which there is an interval, in some cases, a long interval of time.

He appears first of all in connection with the great drought which he prophesied and which lasted for the three years he had foretold. We see him by the little brook Cherith, fed of the ravens, until through the long cessation of the rain the brook itself disappeared. Then we see him in the house of the widow of Sarepta, feeding with her on her little supply of meal, and in her hour of depthless sorrow raising her son from death to life. And then, in the second chapter, he breaks forth once more upon the national stage. Ahab and Obadiah, his chief man, had sought for him up and down the land, having divided the country between them, partly that they might seek water for their fast diminishing herds, partly that they might meet again and punish this troubler of Israel. At last, on one of the highways, the man of God appeared to the prime minister and told him that he had no fear to meet the king and would do so if he would carry word to Ahab. True to his word, he met the king, confronted him with his disloyalty to Jehovah, and challenged him to produce the prophets of Baal for the great test on Mount Carmel; and then, after his triumph, Elijah again disappears.

In the third chapter we have the only account of the man’s inner life. If it were not for that chapter with its story of his subjective struggle, Elijah would be no example for us men of this day. In all the other chapters of the story he appears absolutely undaunted, unafraid of the face of man, clearly convinced of what God would have him do, and absolutely fearless in the doing of it. But here we are shown the man in his own inward wavering, in doubt in some measure about the reality or power of his mission, afraid to carry forward that which he had set out to do with such daring spirit; and in the wilderness alone, first beneath the juniper tree and then on Mount Horeb, Elijah had to face again his life and settle himself once more in that faith in the living God which had brought him out of the desert. And God stood out and spoke to him, and Elijah rose up on his feet once more a man unafraid to resume his mission. God bade him return and anoint a new king over Syria and a new king over Israel, and to go to Abel-meholah and find his own successor, the young man Elisha, plowing behind his oxen. And the prophet went out from his hour of discouragement to find at once the young man who was to take up his work after him and to be an even mightier prophet than he.

Then for a long time Elijah disappears again, only to reappear when he confronts Ahab once more, in Naboth’s vineyard, shows him how little he fears him, and pronounces upon him the judgment of Jehovah. Then he vanishes from the stage for three years at least of solitary meditation in the wilderness, vanishes so long that the common people apparently forgot him, so that when one day he met a little party of the servants of the new king Ahaziah on the highway bound to Ekron to consult Baal-zebub, they did not know who the prophet was and brought back his message to the king, able only to say of him that he was a hairy man, with a leather girdle about his loins. But the king well knew that the Tishbite had broken once more upon the stage of the nation’s life, and he bowed beneath the judgments of God that the man from Gilead denounced.

Then in the concluding chapter we see Elijah and his young man coming down from Gilgal to Bethel and then to Jericho and then back to the wilderness out of which he had come, that from his own deserts where he had come to know God he might go back to God again. And there in the chariot of fire the man who was himself “the chariots of Israel, and the horsemen thereof,” went up to the Lord God of Israel, Who was alive, to meet Him before Whom he had always stood.

One does not wonder that the old man impressed as he did the imagination of his people, and that when centuries later John the Baptist emerged upon the stage challenging the attention of the nation, almost the first question addressed to him was, “Art thou Elijah?”

And we have the secret of Elijah’s life given to us in these words with which he is introduced to us, “As the LORD God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand.” Out there in the barrenness of the desert beyond the Jordan, Elijah had come to believe in a God Who was alive, and before Whom he lived his life. The deserts have never bred polytheism. The great polytheistic systems have sprung from the lush jungles of the tropics. The great monotheisms have been born in the deserts. And out on the lonely sands beyond the Jordan, beyond the hills and amid the great level places where there was no one but God, Elijah came to know that He was and to know that his life stood in Him.

This was the principle of the man’s life――the consuming conviction of a living God and of the commission of His uncompromising service. Indeed we are not sure that we know Elijah’s name. It is possible that the name by which we think we know him is only a pseudonym――Elijah, “My God is Jehovah.” It may be that from the very repetition of this phrase to which he was addicted, “The LORD God of Israel, before whom I stand,” men came at last to call him by the opening note of his message, “the man of the living God.”

Now what that message meant to Elijah was just this: that the Lord God was no dead force, no unknown cause of things, that the Lord God was alive, and that a man was to have dealings with Him; that a man’s life was not his own personal and irresponsible experiment, but a work to be done in front of God; and that a man must reckon in all his thoughts, in all his ways, with One Who lives, and go out and do his work in the world in the consciousness of his relationship and his subjection to an active, working, personal God Who would stand by him in the fire, would uphold him before kings, and carry him through to the end of each of his appointed tasks. If there is one thing that we need to get clearly fixed in our own lives it is the matter of our attitude towards this infinite and unseen God Who is alive.

This faith in a God Who is alive, before Whose face a man is to live his life, is no mere theory. You cannot find any conviction that will more really mould and transform all our conduct and put uncompromising stiffness in it than the conviction that we are living our lives thus before the eyes of a God Who observes. In the life of Thring of Uppingham we are told of an incident that pleased him greatly. It is a story that came to him regarding a little group of boys who were spending the summer in France. A visitor saw these English schoolboys and overheard their conversation as to what they should do on Sunday. Some of the boys were proposing a certain course of action, and all seemed to agree until one fellow spoke up and said: “No, I do not agree. I will not do it.” And when the other lads urged him to come along, he still insisted that he would not. They asked him his reasons. He said: “Well, Thring would not like it, and what Thring would not like I do not intend to do.” “Well, but Thring isn’t here,” they said; “he’s back at Uppingham.” “I do not care,” said the boy; “Thring would not like it.” He believed that he was living in a real sense――I mean in the most real sense of all, in the life of his personal will――before the standards of his master, and by those standards as in the light of his master’s countenance he insisted that he would uncompromisingly live. Before the eyes of God a man will beware how he lives his life. If he knows that this life of his can find no darkness where he can hide himself from God, if he knows that all of his days are to be spent before His face, that all his deeds are to be done beneath the gaze of God, assuredly that will govern and control a man’s decisions about his practical ways. The consciousness of a living God will give direction to a man’s moral life.

And it will not only give direction. There is many a man among us who knows that the consciousness of a God Who is alive not only gives determination and direction to his ways, but puts a new power and inspiration in them.

A friend in New York tells a lovely story about a boy in one of the great English schools. He was an only child, and his mother died when he was but a little fellow. Between him and his father there grew up relations of the most delicate and sensitive intimacy. The father was blind, so that the little boy had to be his father’s eyes, and until the day came when the lad had to go away to school there was scarcely an hour when the two were separated. But at last the time came and the boy went. He became the best athlete in his school. One spring, just before the final game in which the boy was to bowl for his own school, tidings came that his father was seriously ill and he must come home. The news sent the whole school into lamentation, for they were afraid that he might not recover and that if he did not the boy could not play in the concluding and critical game. And indeed, as it turned out, the father died. The day before the game was to be played the boy came back to school, and, to the amazement of all, let it be known that he intended to play. The next day he took his place and played as he had never played in his life before. When at last the game was over and the school had won its triumph, one of the masters came to the boy and expressed to him the delighted surprise of the school at what he had done and their amazement both that he had played at all and at the way he had played. “Why,” said the boy, “didn’t you understand? I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. That was the first game my father ever saw me play.” Beneath the consciousness that for the first time his father’s eyes were open and watching him the boy had discovered capacities of power that he hardly knew he possessed before. Beneath the eye of our Father, Who is looking upon the game that we are playing, where is the man that cannot play a better game, who cannot draw on the reservoirs of power untouched before, who cannot come out and do his work in the world and live his life with larger inspiration and strength, with more dominion and sovereignty, because he is living it before a God Who is alive? To such a man will compromise not seem a filial insult impossible except by a base degradation of the soul?

And not only did Elijah’s principle determine his conduct and pour inspiration into it; it was this principle of a God Who is alive that made him absolutely fearless. He was not only unafraid of physical harm, but he had none of that subtler fear that every man knows――the fear that he himself will fail, the fear that he cannot carry himself safely through. What you and I are afraid of is not the things that are without; our enemy is inside. Treachery within the walls is all that we need to dread, and our deepest fear is of our own failure. That was the great thing in Elijah’s life, that he dared to stand on Mount Carmel, before all that crowd of priests, confident and fearless. He knew he would prevail, that he had not promised in vain that God would answer. The man who knows that he is living his life before a God Who is alive and doing his work in the name of a God Who is alive is not afraid either of what men can do to him or of the failure that he may make himself.

There is a story in the life of Dr. Schauffler that illustrates how to-day too men can rise into just such fearlessness. The missionaries were being bothered a great deal in Constantinople by Russian machinations against the Protestant missions in the empire, and Dr. Schauffler went to see the Russian ambassador. “I might as well tell you now, Mr. Schauffler,” said the ambassador, “that the Emperor of Russia, who is my master, will never allow Protestantism to set its foot in Turkey.” The old missionary looked at him for a moment and then replied: “Your Excellency, the kingdom of Christ, who is my Master, will never ask the Emperor of all the Russias where it may set its foot.” And he went on with his mission unintimidated by any agencies working in the dark against him, because he was confident that the living God Whose work he was doing would achieve for him His own victory.

And we see in this story of Elijah another thing that this great conviction will do for a man: it will make a troubler of him. “Art thou he,” said Ahab when he met Elijah in the midst of the great famine, “art thou he that troubleth Israel?” “No,” said Elijah; “thou art he who troubles Israel.” And yet they were both troubling Israel, the one with the iniquities into which he was leading the people, the other because the principle of the living God dominating his life drove him as a great moral force against the evils of his time. A man cannot live in a college or university with a faith that God is living and that he himself is living in front of God, and be quiet before the moral iniquities and evils he will find. It is not enough for a man to say, “I will simply be myself, live my own clean life, and let my silent influence count.” If his silent influence does not count, no other influence of his will count. But the silence is not enough. A little while ago I copied from one of the letters of Mandel Creighton, late Bishop of London, written to his boys who were away at school, this bit of advice. “You will see, then,” he writes to one son, who had just been made a monitor in his school, “you will see, then, that the chief influence of a monitor is in his example. But this is the point on which I have seen many people deceive themselves. They trust to what they call the force of silent example. That is most pernicious. If you content yourself with merely keeping school rules and doing what is right yourself and keeping out of the way of any fellows who you know are doing wrong, or if you stand by and listen to them saying what they ought not, without reproof, you are doing wrong. No, that won’t do. It is part of the essence of good to fight against evil. You must set your face strongly against all that is bad, and must put down not only all that you find in the course of your walk, but you must go out of your walk to find it in order to put it down.”

There has been much complaint these last years because in high places in this land there have been men who were troublers of the nation. The great need of the nation has been men who were prepared to make trouble in order that, at last, righteousness might come. Things that have thought themselves secure will be shaken; long vested interests that have believed themselves to be sacred will have their sanctity scrutinized; and men will come at last into their rights and their righteousness, if we are prepared, following the old Tishbite, to live our lives before the God Who is alive.

And this same principle brings peace and quiet and tranquillity to men. Elijah shook once, we know, but only once. Every time we see him on the public stage, no matter whom he is confronting――Jezebel, Ahab, Obadiah, Ahaziah――he is standing with confident soul, quiet and still. We can be sure that if on that day at Mount Carmel we could have first mingled with those four hundred and fifty priests of Baal who knew that their day of doom had come, and then have gone over and stood by the side of the old man, we should have found the old man the most quiet and placid person on the mountainside and his heart beat the calmest. And we may be sure that we can go in the same tranquillity and calm and steadfastness in which the old Tishbite lived, if we will believe as deeply as he did in a Lord God Who is alive, and will live our lives before His face with as little compromise and fear.

And it is a great conviction like this of Elijah’s that steadies men in the hour of their trial and that when they fall redeems them again. The old prophet fell down. He ran from a woman’s threats, and beneath the juniper tree and then on Horeb, he shook and was afraid. But God, Who was alive before, was alive still, and He came to Mount Horeb, where the man lay in his spiritual petulance and fear, and He was not in the great wind, and He was not in the great earthquake, and He was not in the great fire, but at last in the still small voice of life He spoke to Elijah, and Elijah rose up on his feet once more and went out to complete his work in unfaltering triumph.

It works that way still. There is a letter of Abraham Lincoln, the original of which is preserved in the state capitol at Albany. It is a letter Lincoln wrote granting a pardon to a deserter.

EXECUTIVE MANSION, WASHINGTON, October 4, 1864.