Chapter 2

In any man's life a great deal depends upon outlook. In some ways we recognize this fact. We do not by choice live in a house whose windows front a blank wall. A little patch of green grass, a tree, a peep of sky, or even the traffic of a busy street--anything rather than a blank wall. That is a sound instinct, but it ought to go deeper than it sometimes does. This outlook and aspect question is important when you are building a house, but it is vastly more important when you are building a character. The soul has eyes. The deadliest monotony is that of a dull soul. Life is a poor affair for any man who looks out upon the blind walls of earthly circumstance and necessity, and cannot see from his soul's dwelling-place the pink flush of the dawn that men call hope, and who has no garden where he may grow the blossoms of faith and sweet memory, the fair flowers of holy human trusts and fellowships. Only the divinity of life can deliver us from the monotony of living. 'Mine eyes are ever toward the Lord.' This man has an infinite outlook. It matters not whether he looked out through palace windows or lived in the meanest house in Jerusalem's city. It is the eye that makes the view. This man had a fairer prospect than ever man had who looked seaward from Carmel or across the valleys from the steeps of Libanus. It was his soul that claimed the prospect. From the window of the little house of life he saw the light of God lying on the everlasting hills. That is the real deliverance from the monotony of things. The man who is weary of life is the man who has not seen it. The man who is tied to his desk sometimes thinks everything would be right if only he could travel. But many a man has done the Grand Tour and come back no better contented. You cannot fool your soul with Mont Blanc or even the Himalayas. So many thousand feet, did you say?--but what is that to infinity! The cure for the fretful soul is not to go _round_ the world; it is to get _beyond_ it.

_Mine eyes are ever toward the Lord._ That is the view we want. We gaze contemptuously on the little one-story lodge just inside the park gates, and fail to get a glimpse of the magnificent mansion, with its wealth of adornment and treasure, that lies a mile among the trees. No wonder that men grow discontented or contemptuous when they mistake the porch for the house. If a man would understand himself and discover his resources and put his hand on all life's highest uses, he must look out and up unto his God. Then he comes to know that sunrise and sunset, and the beauty of the earth, and child-life and old age, and duty and sorrow, and all else that life holds, are linked to the larger life of an eternal world.

That is the true foresight. They called him a far-seeing man. How did he get that name? Well, he made a fortune. He managed to make use of the ebb and flow of the market, and never once got stranded. He was shrewd and did some good guessing, and now, forsooth, they say he is 'very far-seeing.' But he has not opened his Bible for years, and the fountains of sympathy are dried up in his soul. He can see as far into the money column as most men, but the financial vista is not very satisfying for those who see it best. The Gospel of St. John is a sealed book to him, and that is in God's handwriting and opens the gates of heaven. Far-seeing? Why, the man is in a tiny cell, and he is going blind. 'Mine eyes are ever toward the Lord.' That is the far-sighted man. He can see an ever larger life opening out before him. He can see the glory of the eternal righteousness beneath his daily duties and the wonder of eternal love in the daily fellowships and fulfilments of the brotherhood. This is measuring life by the heavenly measurement. This is the vision we need day by day and at the end of the days. For interest in some things must wane, and life must become less responsive to all that lies about it, and many an earthly link is broken and many an earthly window is darkened, and the old faces and old ways pass, and the thing the old man cherishes is trodden under foot by the impetuous tread of a new generation, and desire fails. Then it is well with him whose eyes have already caught glimpses of 'the King in His beauty,' and 'the land that is very far off.'

But think for a moment of the present value of the divine outlook upon life. It brings guidance and deliverance. Set side by side the two expressions 'eyes unto the Lord,' and 'feet out of the net.' Life is more than a vision; it is a pilgrimage. We see the far white peaks whereon rests the glory of life, but reaching them is not a matter of eyes, but of feet. Here, maybe, the real problem of godly living presents itself to us. Here our Christian idealism lays a burden on us. It is possible to see distances that would take days to traverse. Even so we can see heights of spiritual possibility that we shall not reach while the light holds good unless we foot it bravely. And it is not an easy journey. There are so many snares set for the pilgrims of faith and hope. There are subtle silken nets woven of soft-spun deceits and filmy threads of sin; and there are coarse strong nets fashioned by the strong hands of passion and evil desire. There are nets of doubt and pain and weakness. But think of the man whose eyes were ever towards the Lord. He came through all right. He always does. He always will. He looked steadily upward to his God. When we get into the net we yield to the natural tendency to look down at our feet. We try to discover how the net is made. We delude ourselves with the idea that if only we take time we shall be able to extricate ourselves; but it always means getting further entangled. It is a waste of time to study the net. Life is ever weaving for us snares too intricate for us to unravel and too strong for us to break. God alone understands how they are made and how they may be broken. He does not take us round the net or over it, but He does not leave us fast by the feet in the midst of it. He always brings a man out on the heavenward side of the earthly difficulty. Look upward and you are bound to go forward.

V.

THE SAFEGUARDED SOUL

The Lord shall keep thee from all evil; He shall keep thy soul.

Ps. cxxi. 7.

One of the great offices of religion is to help men to begin at the beginning. If you wish to straighten out a tangle of string, you know that it is worth your while to look patiently for one of the ends. If you make an aimless dash at it the result is confusion worse confounded, and by-and-by the tangle is thrown down in despair, its worst knots made by the hands that tried in a haphazard way to simplify it. Life is that tangle; and religion, if it does not loosen all the knots and straighten all the twists, at least shows us where the two ends are. They are with God and the soul. God deals with a man's soul. We cannot explain the facts of our experience or the fashion of our circumstance save in as far as we can see these things reflected in our character. The true spiritual philosophy of life begins its inquiry in the soul, and works outward into all the puzzling mass of life's details. And the foundation of such a philosophy is not experience, but faith. It is true that experience often confirms faith, but faith interprets experience. Experience asks more questions than it can answer. It collects more facts than it can explain. It admits of many different constructions being put upon it. It puts us first of all into touch with the problem of life rather than the solution. If the gentle, patient words of the saint are the utterance of one who has suffered, so also are the bitter protests of the disappointed worldling. The fashion of the experience may be the same in each case. It is faith that makes the lesson different. It is a want of faith that makes us expect the lower in life to explain the higher, the outward to shed light upon the inward. We pluck with foolish, aimless fingers at this strange tangle of human life. We judge God's way with us as far as we can see it, and we think we have got to the end of it. We draw our shallow conclusions. Faith teaches us that God's way with us is a longer and a deeper way, and the end of that way is down in the depths of our spirit, hidden in the love of our character. It is not here and now. It is in what we shall be if God have His will with us.

All the true definitions of things are written in the soul. It was here that the Psalmist found his definition of evil. 'The Lord shall keep thee from all evil; He shall keep thy soul.' Then evil is something that threatens the soul. It is not material, but spiritual. It is not in our circumstances themselves, but in their effect upon the inward life. The same outward conditions of life may be good or evil according to their influence on our character. Good and evil are not qualities of things. They have no meaning apart from the soul. The world says that health and wealth are good, and that sickness and poverty are evil. If that were true the line that separates the healthy from the sick, the rich from the poor, would also separate the happy from the miserable. But we find joy and sorrow on both sides of that line. We are drawn to look deeper than this for our definition of good and evil. We have to make the soul the final arbiter amid these conflicting voices. Here we must find the true definition of evil. The first question we ask when we hear of a house having been burnt down is this: 'Was there any loss of life?' All else lies on a vastly lower plane of interest and importance. So must we learn to distinguish between the house of circumstance, or the house of the body, and the soul that dwells in it. The only real loss is the 'loss of life,' the loss of any of these inner things that go to make the soul's strength and treasure. The man who has lost everything except faith and hope has, maybe, lost nothing at all. There are some among the pilgrims of faith to-day who would never have been found there had not God cast upon their shoulders the ragged cloak of poverty; and if you know anything about that band of pilgrims you will know that the man who outstrips his companions is often a man who is lame on both his feet.

O sceptic world, this is the final answer to your scepticism, an answer none the less true because you cannot receive it: _The Lord keepeth the souls of His saints._ Have you not seen men thinning out a great tree, cutting off some of its noblest branches and marring its splendid symmetry? And very likely you have felt it was a great shame to do so. But that work of maiming and spoiling meant light and sunshine and air in a close and darkened room. It meant health to the dwellers in the house over which the tree had cast its shadow. It is much to have tall and stately trees in the garden of life. But by-and-by that great oak of vigour begins to darken the windows of faith, and God lops some of the branches. We call it suffering, but it means more light. Or it may be that those firs of lordly ambition have grown taller than the roof-tree, and God sends forth His storm-wind to lay them low. We call it failure, but it means a better view of the stars. Ah, yes, we are over-anxious about the trees in the garden. God cares most of all that the light of His truth and the warmth of His love and the breath of His Spirit shall reach and fill every room in the house of life.

_He shall keep thy soul._ That is a promise that can fold us in divine comfort and peace, and that can do something towards interpreting for us every coil of difficulty, every hour of pain. But if this is to be so, we must ourselves be true to the view of life the promise gives us. We must think of the soul as God thinks of it. We live in a world where souls are cheap. They are bought and sold day by day. It is strange beyond all understanding that the only thing many a man is not afraid of losing is the one thing that is really worth anything to him--his soul. Sometimes the lusts of the world drag down our heart's desire, and we have to confess with shame to moments in our experience when we have not been at all concerned with what became of our soul so long as the desire of the hour was fulfilled or satisfied. We need to seek day by day that the masterful and abiding desires of our heart may be set upon undying good, and that our aspiration may never fold its wings and rest on anything lower than the highest. This shall not make dreamers of us. It shall stand us in good stead in the thick of the world. The man who gets 'the best of the bargain' is always the man who is most honest; for the most precious thing that a man stands to win or lose in any deal is the cleanness of his soul. The man who gets the best of the argument is always the man who is most truthful; for a quiet conscience is better than a silenced opponent. The man who gets the best of life is the man who keeps the honour of his soul; for Jesus said: 'What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?'

So then, amid the manifold uncertainties of human life and the ever-changing forms and complexions of human experience, one thing is pledged beyond all doubt to every man who seeks the will of God and the promise for the safeguarding of his soul. He may write this at the top of every page in the book of life. He may take it for his light in dark days, his comfort in sad days, his treasure in empty days. He may have it on his lips in the hour of battle and in his heart in the day of disappointment. He may meet his temptations with it, interpret his sufferings with it, build his ideal with it. And it shall come to pass that he shall learn to look with untroubled eyes upon the outward things of life, nor fear the touch of its thousand grasping hands, knowing that his soul is in the hands of One who can keep it safe in all the world's despite, even God Himself.

VI.

A PLEA FOR TEARS

They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, Shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, Bringing his sheaves with him.

Ps. cxxvi. 5, 6.

It is almost impossible to recall the joys and sorrows of life without having some thought of their compensative relation. We set our bright days against our dark days. We weigh our successes against our failures. When the hour through which we are living is whispering a bitter message, we recall the kindlier messages of other hours and say that we have much for which we ought to be thankful. And such a deliberate handling of experience, such a quiet adjustment of memories, is not without its uses. Any view of life that will save a man from whining is worth taking. Any reckoning that will prevent a man from indulging in self-pity--that subtlety of selfishness--is worth making. There is, moreover, something very simple and obvious in this way of thinking and judging. To make one kind of experience deal with another kind, to set the days and the hours in battle array--or shall we say to arrange a tourney where some gaily-caparisoned and well-mounted Yesterday is set to tilt with a black-visored and silent To-day--is a way of dealing with life which seems to have much to commend it. But it has at the best serious limitations, and at the worst it may issue in a tragedy. The wrong knight may be unhorsed. The award may go to him of the black plume. Pitting one experience against another has gone to the making of many a cynic and not a few despairing souls. The compensative interpretation of joy and sorrow may bring an answer of peace to a man's soul, or it may not. But in this matter we are dealing with things in which we cannot afford to risk an equivocal or a despairing answer. We must win in every encounter. It is not an hour's joy, but a life's outlook that is at stake. No hour's fight was ever worth fighting if it was fought for the sake of the hour. The moments are ever challenging the eternal, the swift and busy hours fling their gauntlets at the feet of the ageless things. The real battle of life is never between yesterday and to-day; it is always between to-day and the Forever.

To isolate an experience is to misinterpret it. We may even completely classify experiences, and yet completely misunderstand experience. To understand life at all we must get beyond the incidental and the alternating. Life is not a series of events charged with elements of contrast, contradiction, or surprise. It is a deep, coherent, and unfaltering process. And one feels that it was something more than the chance of the moment that led the singer of old to weave the tears and the rejoicings of men's lives into a figure of speech that stands for unity of process, even the figure of the harvest.

_They that sow in tears shall reap in joy._ The sweep of golden grain is not some arbitrary compensation for the life of the seed cast so lavishly into the ground, and biding the test of darkness and cold. It is the very seed itself fulfilled of all its being. Even so it is with the sorrows of these hearts of ours and the joy unto which God bringeth us. He does not fling us a few glad hours to atone for the hours wherein we have suffered adversity. There is a deep sense in which the joys of life are its ripened sorrows.

_They that sow in tears.... He that goeth forth and weepeth._ These are not the few who have been haunted by apparent failure, or beset with outwardly painful conditions of service. They are not those who have walked in the shadow of a lost leader, or toiled in the grey loneliness of a lost comrade or of a brother proved untrue. For apparent failure, outward difficulty and loneliness, often as we may have to face them, are, after all, only the accidents of Godward toil. And if the bearer of seed for God's great harvest should go forth to find no experience of these things, still, if he is to do any real work in the fields of the Lord, he must go forth weeping. He must sow in tears. Let a man be utterly faithful and sincere, let him open his heart without reserve to the two great claims of the ideal and sympathy, and he shall come to know that he has not found the hidden meaning of daily service, nor learned how he can best perform that service, until he has tasted the sorrow at the heart of it. The tears that are the pledge of harvest are not called to the eyes by ridicule or opposition. They are not the tears of disappointment, vexation, or impotence. They are tears that dim the eyes of them that see visions, and gather in the heart of them that dream dreams. To see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ and the blindness of the world's heart to that glory; to see unveiled the beauty that should be, and, unveiled too, the shame that is; to have a spiritual nature that thrills at the touch of the perfect love and life, and responds to every note of pain borne in upon it from the murmurous trouble of the world,--this is to have inward fitness for the high work of the Kingdom. Yes, and it is the pledge that this work shall be done. There is such a thing as artistic grief. There is the vain and languorous pity of aestheticism. Its robe of sympathy is wrapped about itself and bejewelled with its own tears. And it never goes forth. You never meet it in 'the darkness of the terrible streets.'

_He that goeth forth and weepeth._ It is his tears that cause him to go forth. It is his sorrow that will not let him rest. True pity is a mighty motive. When the real abiding pathos of life has gripped a man's heart, you will find him afield doing the work of the Lord. You will not see his tears. There will be a smile in his eyes and, maybe, a song on his lips. For the sorrow and the joy of service dwell side by side in a man's life. Indeed, they often seem to him to be but one thing. It were a mistake to refer the whole meaning of the words about a man's coming 'again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him' to some far day when the reapers of God shall gather the last great harvest of the world. Through his tears the sower sees the harvest. Through all his life there rings many a sweet prophetic echo of the harvest home.

_He that goeth forth and weepeth._ No man ever wept like that and went not forth, but some go forth who have not wept. And they go forth to certain failure. They mishandle life, and with good intent do harm. But that is not the worst thing to be said about these toilers without tears. It is not that they touch life so unskilfully, but they touch so little of it. It is only through his tears that a man sees what his work is and where it lies. Tearless eyes are purblind. We have yet much to learn about the real needs of the world. So many try very earnestly to deal with situations they have never yet really seen. For the uplifting of men and for the great social task of this our day we need ideas, and enthusiasm, and all sorts of resource; but most of all, and first of all, we need vision. And the man who goes farthest, and sees most, and does most, is 'he that goeth forth and weepeth.'

VII.

DELIVERANCE WITH HONOUR

He shall call upon Me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble: I will deliver him, and honour him. With long life will I satisfy him, And show him My salvation.

Ps. xci. 15, 16.

_He shall call upon Me._ He shall need Me. He shall not be able to live without Me. As the years pass over his head he shall learn that there is one need woven into human life larger and deeper and more abiding than any other need--and that need is God. Thus doth divinity prophesy concerning humanity. Thus doth infinite foresight predict a man's need.

We peer in our purblind fashion into the future and try to anticipate our needs. We fence ourselves in with all sorts of fancied securities, and then we comfort ourselves with the shrewdness and completeness of our forecasting and provision-making. And sometimes it is just folly with a grave face. 'He shall call upon Me.' A man has learned nothing until he has learned that he needs God. And we take a long time over that lesson. It has sometimes to be beaten into us--written in conscience and heart by the finger of pain. How the little storehouse of life has to be almost stripped of its treasures, how our faith in the things of the hour has to be played with and mocked, ere we call upon God in heaven to fill us with abiding treasure and fold us in eternal love.

_He shall call upon Me, and, I will answer him._ But I have called, says one, and He has not answered. I called upon Him when my little child was sick unto death, and, spite my calling, the little white soul fluttered noiselessly into the great beyond. My friend, you call that tiny green mound in the churchyard God's silence. Some day you will call it God's answer. Our prayers are sometimes torn out of our hearts by the pain of the moment. God's answers come forth from the unerring quiet of eternity. 'He shall call upon Me.' 'He shall ask Me to help him, but he does not know how he can be helped. He is hedged about by a thousand limitations of thought. His life is full of distortions. He cannot distinguish between a blessing and a curse. I cannot heed the dictations of his prayers, but I will answer him.' This is the voice of Him to whom the ravelled complexities of men's minds are simplicity itself; who dwells beyond the brief bewilderments and mistaken desirings and false ideals of men's hearts.

Oh these divine answers! How they confuse us! It is their perfection that bewilders us; it is their completeness that carries them beyond our comprehension.

There is the stamp of the local and the temporary on all our asking. The answer that comes is wider than life and longer than time, and fashioned after a completeness whereof we do not even dream.