Part 3

When one possesses this conception of life that crowds a vast eternity within the compass of a single individual life, no toil can ever become drudgery. Every deed has divine significance. The most ordinary task will be performed carefully, knowing that it must stand the scrutiny and criticisms of the passing centuries. We labor then with the various elements of life, as the artists of Venice toil with their priceless mosaics, willing to spend a lifetime of painstaking endeavor in forming a single feature of a saint, knowing that long after they themselves have ceased to toil the wisdom of untold centuries shall review their efforts to either praise or blame. Hitherto we have despised the commonplace things that fell to our hands, while we busied ourselves searching for some great thing worthy of our effort, with the result that nothing has been accomplished; now we find, that that only is truly great which is commonplace. Divine opportunities are everywhere. In the low-browed man upon the street we see the possibility of an ennobled and redeemed humanity. In the waif, crying from hunger, we see the center of world-wide and eternal destinies. Words are winged messengers, so we learn to study them with care, and speak them with the precision with which a musician strikes his chords. Divine destinies are depending upon the perfection with which we toil, adding a charm to every endeavor that never fades with weariness. There can be no drudgery to him who has a perspective eternity long.

This conception of life which Paul gives us will carry us unharmed through all the misfortunes of life. It is impossible for us to escape sorrow. By rigid economy we may save our money only to have it stolen by a deceitful friend; we may build a home, only to find it purchased and occupied by another; loved ones, more precious than our own lives, have been lured from our side by the hand of death. These hours are naturally dark and of tortuous length, and if it were not for the fact that we have learned to think in terms of eternity, we would die of a broken heart. But we do not die; we pass through them with triumphant tread. The soul sobs but does not bleed; the heart hurts but does not break. We are not living for this world alone; our horizon has been widened because we have been lifted to a higher level; we can now see two worlds; our faith sweeps onward as far as God can think. The earthly home for which we planned and toiled has passed into the hands of another, but we rejoice in the knowledge that we have a home, not made with toiling, blistered hands of earth, but one eternal in the heavens. Our loved ones no longer greet us at the table or occupy their accustomed places in the family circle, but we have not lost them forever. They have simply passed from time into eternity, and because we also are the children of eternity, they are still our own, and we shall see them once again. Thank God for the transforming power that comes into every human life when, by divine aid, one crowds eternal significance into his days, and works, not for himself, but for “the ages to come.”

Paul’s view of life enables us to find perfect satisfaction in working with the frailties of time in building that which is immortal in character and service. Possessed with such a purpose, the spider’s web becomes a cable, dust becomes slabs of marble, and seconds becomes decades. There is nothing more fragile than a word, spoken in stammering weakness, but with a trembling desire to be of service, yet out of one word fitly spoken may be created an influence that sweeps heaven and earth. A faltering word of Christian testimony was spoken by a godly man made weak by an unconquerable embarrassment, but his utterance proved mighty. Lodging in the heart of Charles Spurgeon, it started him on his wonderful career that is yet shaking all Christendom. The smile of the face is far more delicate than the frailest blossom that opens its soft petals in obedience to the caressing influence of the sun, for its existence is but for the fraction of a second; yet one kindly, love-illumined look has been the force that has lifted multitudes of mortals out of despondency and uselessness, and made them the creators of mighty moral and religious forces. It was a smile that saved John G. Wooley for the cause of temperance. A smile, and a word, and the gift of a handkerchief were all that Frances E. Willard used to redeem one of the most notorious characters of Chicago, and make her one of God’s ministers of light among the fallen.

When one learns to live with the light of eternity flooding his pathway there is not an event in life so small and insignificant that he cannot employ it to create, and afterward use it, to sustain eternal influences. There is joy now in living for Christ, but let us live, not for that joy alone, but that, in the ages to come, we may show the exceeding riches of God’s grace. Let them, through us, behold what the grace of God can do to save, to keep, to empower, and to make immortal such sin-smitten ones as we have been. This is the secret for making toil pleasant, sorrows helpless, and the humblest effort an enterprise of such character as crowds earth with richer meaning, and fills the heavens with new-found joys. Show them that the greatest of all known forces is a Christ-filled life.

VII

THE UNLOCKED DOOR OF TRUTH

History has proven that the power of the “All Highest” War Lord is as weak as a baby’s arm compared with the power of the humblest individual who has entered into and taken possession of some great truth. A thousand lords and ladies were gathered within the Babylonian palace which was ablaze with light and filled with music. All hail to King Belshazzar! His praises were upon every lip. All honor to the royal family that had lifted the hanging gardens above the low-lying plains, who had swung gates of bronze and planned the mightiest city in the world. Every lip praised and every heart feared the power of the daring king. But when the finger of God wrote a message of fire upon the palace walls it was no longer Belshazzar who was ruler. The fate of king and lord and ladies was in the hand of Daniel. He alone of that great throng had seen and entered into the truth of temperance and self-control. Such was the sustaining power of that possessed truth that when the man-made king trembled, and a nation crumbled into oblivion, he alone stood unmoved and triumphant amid the wreck and chaos.

Before the throne of ecclesiastical autocracy the rulers of the nations bowed in weakness and everlasting shame. The autocracy of superstition is the most merciless and deadly known, but when the power of Rome was at the zenith of her unscrupulous reign, Martin Luther, a common man with uncommon sense, discovered and entered into the great truth that “the just shall live by faith.” Entering into that truth, he found a power before which the claims of the Pope became insignificant, and by his boldness, brought religious liberty to the people, thus gaining universal love and immortality.

Mary was Queen of England, and with that overzeal of religious bigotry, was ruling with unquestioned power and severity. Hugh Latimer was only a humble preacher, one of the least of the queen’s subjects, living among the poor, but beside him, Queen Mary sinks into everlasting contempt. The robes of fire wrapped his body in their golden folds, hiding him forever from the sight of man, but the world has not forgotten him. His dust knows no burial place, but because he lived in the sheltering tabernacle of a great truth he will live forever in the hearts of those who love religious tolerance, while the dust of Mary crumbles in the gruesome vault at Westminster Abbey, with no lip to sing her praises to the passing generations. Royal or ecclesiastical power is nothing compared with the enduring authority of a common man who has found, and entered into, and wholly and completely lives a great eternal truth of God.

Truth incarnate in human life is almighty, but truth in the abstract is as helpless as is the dust of the Egyptian highways, which witnessed the world’s mightiest pageants, but which are unable to tell the story of mighty armies, royal cavalcades, and kingly processions that once tramped upon them. Truth has always existed. However conceited a religious leader may be, no one ever dared to presume himself the creator of a truth. Long before the world had settled upon its foundations, and the constellations of stars, like chandeliers, swayed and swung their pendants of light, all truth beat and throbbed within the heart of the Almighty. Throughout the beauty of verdant slope, crested wave, and starlit sky, these words of encouragement have ever rung: “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” The truths of civilization have been in existence since creation, yet in every century heathenism has flourished. The truth about human freedom has always been, yet Rameses sat upon a throne and drove the Hebrews to their task, beating their backs with knotted thongs and murdering their children; the barons lived in palatial palaces fed in luxury, while serfs toiled for harvests which they could never gather, and starving, dared not plead for a morsel of the food their toil provided; the Sultan of Turkey reveled in orgies, flagrant and disgusting, while humble Armenians were torn asunder, their bleeding bodies fed to swine, their wives and children tortured beyond belief, while no civilized nation dared lift its hand in protest. Truth, in itself, is not omnipotent. To be of value, truth must be entered into and possessed.

Every truth has a door. To ignorance the door is barred and bolted. To thoughtlessness, the door remains unseen. Only to the eye trained with prayer, faith in God, and love for man, is given the vision of these bright portals, and the possession of the key by which he can unlock the door and enter into and enjoy the truth, which the world has long known by heart, but which had never enveloped, sheltered, and controlled their lives. If he has the courage to use the key and open the door and enter in, he shall not only feel the saving power of God, but he shall leave an open way through which all men may pass to greater power. If he refuses to unlock the door, and, like the learned ones of whom Christ spoke, carries away the key, entering not in themselves and hindering those who would enter, he becomes an exile, without home through time and eternity.

That we may more clearly comprehend this truth let us consider a chapter of American history. Hayne had finished his classic and convincing speech. With gracious charm he had proclaimed the doctrine of union without liberty, a nation of free people, half slave. The rapt attention and tribute of silent applause from the audience told how critical the situation had become. Opposed to him was Daniel Webster, America’s favorite child of genius, whose face was as classic as a Greek god’s, and whose commanding bearing won battles like a general. He was a scholar of the strong New England type, searching for the key to unlock the truth that the nation needed, and make it of easy access to the people. He saw that there could be no union without universal freedom. Hour after hour he proclaimed the truth, making the mightiest speech the nation had ever heard, swaying his audience back to the realm of clear thinking. Finally, with one sentence, “Union and liberty, now and forever, one and inseparable,” he revealed to an awakened nation that he had found the key that would unlock the door of truth that the hour needed. But in his hour of triumph, dazzled by the possibility of becoming President, he refused to use the key. To gain the solid South he uttered his fateful speech for compromise. The North held its breath in expectancy while New England sobbed like one bereft of his favorite child. He who had the key refused to enter in himself and hindered those who would have entered.

But New England had another son of genius who, on the eventful night that Webster, with trembling fingers, tried, and failed, to pick up the key that he had thrown away, left Faneuil Hall with blazing, burning thoughts. He too had found the way, but was unknown and untried. Again he was in Faneuil Hall sitting beside James Russell Lowell, listening to the mad mouthings of men, who, for the money involved, were endeavoring to rechristen Wrong and call it Right. He had waited weary weeks, but now he was unable to keep back his flaming indignation. Rising, he began to speak. On the very platform where Webster had fallen he began to plead the right of human liberty. New England was thrilled with hope. Here at last was a man who not only saw the truth but was determined to enter into it. With the confidence of a prophet he used the key, unlocked the door and showed a nation the way it ought to go.

Truth must become incarnate in man and man must be incarnate in truth. Every Christian man will testify to this. In childhood you committed scripture which had little meaning to your childish mind. It was not until in the after years when sorrow came, and grief blinded the eye, and pain wounded the heart, that the clear, sweet voice of memory began to repeat these verses, and what had been meaningless in childhood became great, wholesome, sheltering, protecting truths, in which you found all the consolations of God.

It is a wonderful hour when the soul enters into and takes possession of God’s great truth, becomes the master of all its stored up power, and begins to use it in the service of love. It is a wonderful experience and need never be delayed, for the door is easy to find. Years ago earth was blessed by the coming of One who worked hard at the carpenter trade, and in the school of toil and prayer, found the way that scholars had overlooked. Standing before kings and earthly potentates he said: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” His spirit is the way for men to live, the door through which they pass into all truth, the life of fullest spiritual development. Christ is the open way to every truth. Through him men attain the proper point of view, and, learning to obey the Father as did he, begin to live the life triumphant.

VIII

WEAVING SUNBEAMS

Nature is always busy weaving sunbeams, and not one of them, like a knotted thread, is cast from her loom. The waves cast their crystal spray upon the sands to waste away, but not so with the sun as he lavishly casts his beams broadcast o’er the earth. Not one of them goes upon a fruitless errand, and not one of them fails to reach its intended goal. It is not that the sun is wise in directing its energy, but because the earth is ready to utilize, with untiring fidelity, the gift of sunlight.

How abundantly the sunbeams come! The arched sky is an upturned basket, out of which God is pouring his wealth of sunlight upon a thirsty, needy planet. These rays of light fall everywhere, because they are needed everywhere. Upon arctic snow and desert sand and undiscovered ocean waves they fall as readily as upon the forests of Brittany or the vineyards of France. They place their gleaming coronets upon the crystal brows of the Alps. They dance and flash their jewels, as they hold carnival in the Northern Lights. Even after the sun is set they peer at us through the parted clouds and leap at us from their hiding places in the moon. They fall in the most inaccessible places, yet none of them are ever wasted. As the parched earth drinks raindrops, so the old world absorbs sunbeams. Swifter and more powerful than the leaping waters of a cataract are they poured upon the earth--a Niagara, world-wide and sun-high, with never-ceasing floods of light that bathe each portion of the globe. They are not piled in heaps; they do not swish and whirl, cutting a gorge through solid rock, or form a whirlpool to menace humanity, but the earth absorbs them all, however rapidly they come, and places them in her mysterious loom. Here, in the depths, beyond our sight, the sunbeams are woven into invisible cords that hold the needles of all the compasses to the north that no traveler need be lost in the forest, and no ship perish in the sea. Here, in the depths, the sunbeams are woven into mighty cables of electric power that man picks up with the fingers of the dynamo and compels to lift his burdens, pull his trains, propel his ships, and serve him in a thousand ways. Here, in the depths, is woven that mysterious power that carries the wireless message through the rocks of the mountains and the channels of the sea, and wraps the earth in a diaphanous garb that makes the wireless telephone a possibility.

The world we see is but woven sunbeams. The forests of oak are the sunbeams of yesterday, wrought into gnarled and knotted fingers to grasp the sunbeams of to-day and wind them on a myriad unseen shuttles. Soon they shall appear woven in the texture of notched leaf and carved chalice of the acorn’s cup. The sunbeams falling upon the tangled branches of the hillside vineyard, are woven into buds, and leaves, and clinging tendrils, and afterward into the rich cluster of luscious grapes. The sunbeams fall upon the buried seed and are woven into an emerald lever with which the clod is lifted, into sturdy leaves that are chemical laboratories where crude sap is changed into milk, into heads of golden wheat with which to feed a thoughtless, hungry world. Sunbeams are woven into corn and oats, into apples and peaches, into nuts and berries. Falling along the railroad grade, they are woven into violets; falling in the swamps, they are woven into buttercups; falling in the thicket, they are woven into the silken folds of the wild-rose petal.

As nature weaves the sunbeam and not the shadow so man ought to develop his power of utilizing happiness and joy. The sunshine of life ought not to be thrown away like confetti and ribbon papers on a gala day. Thoughtlessly our youths and maidens dance and sing in giddy, senseless manner, throwing away sunbeams as though their lives were only bits of colored glass through which the light of joy and happiness should pass. Having no looms with which to weave their sunbeams into that which would adorn their souls with garments of ever-growing life, they soon become old and haggard, lifeless and dead, a burned-out planet like the moon, unable to appreciate the sunlight that never fails to fall. Much of the difference between men is due to the ability of one and the inability of the other to make the passing joys of life become a permanent, abiding element of his life.

There is no life without sufficient sunlight to weave a gracious personality. Wholesomeness of character is not the result of partiality on God’s part, neither is hideous irritability of disposition occasioned by God’s neglect of one of his children. The difference between wholesomeness and unwholesomeness of character is that of the right and wrong use of the blessings which God bestows upon all alike. He who casts his sunbeams away will find old age desert and lifeless, while he who weaves them all into a pleasing personality, will always experience the joy of a more abundant life. A smile is softer than a silken fiber and wears far longer. Its colors never fade, nor pass out of style. Woven into a robe of genuine cheerfulness the soul possesses rich adornment. These are the individuals whom children love, men seek to honor, and all the world respects. A king’s robe is commonplace compared with the attractive vesture of a healthy, cheerful disposition which anyone may weave out of sunbeams, with which God crowds even the most secluded, humble lives.

This occupation is also the secret of sound and vigorous influence. All men possess the power of influence, but even when one has the best intentions he may wield a harmful, baleful influence because of an irritable and complaining disposition. A petulant temper and irascible disposition are the thunder that curds much of the milk of human kindness, and an application of alum will not tend to sweeten the curd. With a sharp tongue one may be driven to hard labor, but the wounds he carries in his heart will prevent him from performing a perfect task. Scolding and fault-finding have driven multitudes into iniquity. It is difficult to drive bees, but one can lure them any distance with a field of blooming clover. By forgetting to weave sunbeams into wholesome character one not only loses the joy of being cheerful but fails in one of the supreme objectives of life--that of wielding intelligently a helpful, healthy, and enduring influence.

The secret of achievement may also be described as weaving sunbeams. In a victorious life the blessings of God take permanent place in the work of hand and brain. Such a life is a loom which receives only that he may produce, the quality of the production depending upon the care and patience with which he works, indifference producing mediocrity, carefulness leading to perfection. What the world calls genius is simply the mastery of the gracious art of weaving sunbeams into polished sentences, enduring thoughts, embroidered tapestry, living poem, inspiring painting, and graceful statue. The way out of mediocrity is to weave one’s personal blessings into world-wide benefits.

Here also is found the way to overcome life’s obstacles. A frown never wins a battle. It was a singing army that crossed the sea and helped win the World War. Amid the dangers, hardships, and privations our soldiers gathered sunbeams, and with a cheerfulness never before witnessed upon a field of battle did their full part. Trenches, barbed-wire entanglement, and treacherous pitfall are nothing to one who weaves his sunbeams into song. Thus all difficulties fade away and vanish.

These statements are only another way of saying that one should weave God into every fiber of life. The sun is always emblematic of the Father, and he who weaves sunbeams will know and love God. This is no idle saying, nor a bit of rhetoric, but a soul-saving truth. It is the sun that banishes the shadows; it is God who enables us to overcome our temptations, pain and sorrow. The more we utilize his revelations the brighter the pathway, until at last we shall stand in his presence and have no more need of the sun, for we have him. “They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them into living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe all tears from their eyes.” Weaving sunbeams in a world of shadows, we prepare ourselves for the unshadowed land where God is the everlasting Light. There, without sin or suffering, we shall know God.

IX

THE PATHWAY OF A NOBLE PURPOSE

As the sleepless eye thirsts for the dawn, and the troubled child hungers for the sound of its mother’s voice, so each growing soul seeks a coveted goal the attaining of which, to him, means success. As boys, to be boys, must dream their dreams of strife and conflict upon a battle’s front, and girls, to be girls, must dream their milder dreams of love, so coming maturity demands of each aspiring soul that he linger long upon the visions of strife that lead to success. It is well to seek for great things, for each success that enters the golden portals of our lives brings many chariots filled with golden gifts. Returning to his home, the Roman victor was honored with a triumph in which, on golden plate and velvet spread, the trophies and spoils of conquest were displayed. In this way the ambitious Roman youth learned that success is always attended by a great procession of rich rewards. The one who conquers feels more than the soul-thrill of victory. Like Samson, he finds the unexpected reward of a carcass filled with honey awaiting his hungry lips.