Transcriber’s Note: The cover image was created from the title page by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

THE STUFF OF MANHOOD

By ROBERT E. SPEER

The Merrick Lectures for 1916–17. Delivered at the Ohio
Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio, April 1–5, 1917

The Stuff of Manhood

SOME NEEDED NOTES IN
AMERICAN CHARACTER

By
ROBERT E. SPEER

New York Chicago Toronto
Fleming H. Revell Company
London and Edinburgh

Copyright, 1917, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave.
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street

The Merrick Lectures

By the gift of the late Rev. Frederick Merrick, M. D., D. D., LL. D., for fifty-one years a member of the Faculty, and for thirteen of those years President of Ohio Wesleyan University, a fund was established providing an annual income for the purpose of securing lectures within the general field of Experimental and Practical Religion. The following courses have previously been given on this foundation:

Daniel Curry, D. D.—“Christian Education.”

President James McCosh, D. D., LL. D.—“Tests of the Various Kinds of Truth.”

Bishop Randolph S. Foster, D. D., LL. D.—“The Philosophy of Christian Experience.”

Professor James Stalker, D. D.—“The Preacher and His Models.”

John W. Butler, D. D.—“Mission Work in Mexico.”

Professor George Adam Smith, D. D., LL. D.—“Christ in the Old Testament.”

Bishop James W. Bashford, Ph. D., D. D., LL. D.—“The Science of Religion.”

James M. Buckley, D. D., LL. D.—“The Natural and Spiritual Orders and Their Relations.”

John R. Mott, M. A., F. R. G. S.—“The Pastor and Modern Missions.”

Bishop Elijah E. Hoss, D. D., LL. D.; Professor Doremus A. Hayes, Ph. D., S. T. D., LL. D.; Charles E. Jefferson, D. D., LL. D.; Bishop William F. McDowell, D. D., LL. D.; President Edwin H. Hughes, D. D.—“The New Age and Its Creed.”

Robert E. Speer, M. A.—“The Marks of a Man, or The Essentials of Christian Character.”

Rev. Charles Stelzle, Miss Jane Addams, Commissioner of Labor Charles P. Neill, Ph. D., Professor Graham Taylor, and Rev. George P. Eckman, D. D.—“The Social Application of Religion.”

Rev. George Jackson, M. A.—“Some Old Testament Problems.”

Professor Walter Rauschenbusch, D. D.—“Christianizing the Social Order.”

Professor G. A. Johnston Ross, M. A.—“One Avenue of Faith.”

Introduction

The moral elements of individual character are inevitably social. And the social obligation immensely strengthens the sanctions which enjoin them. When a man “has trained himself,” to use the words of Lord Morley in dealing with Voltaire’s religion, “to look upon every wrong in thought, every duty omitted from act, each infringement of the inner spiritual law which humanity is constantly perfecting for its own guidance and advantage ... as an ungrateful infection, weakening and corrupting the future of his brothers,” he views each struggle within his own soul against evil and each firm aspiration after purity not as a mere incident in his own spiritual biography but as a fight for social good and for the perfecting of the nation and of humanity. And the struggle for social good and the perfecting of human life is fundamentally a struggle for the triumph of ideals in personal wills. God can take hold of men only in man. He revealed Himself and wrought redemption less by a social process than by a personal incarnation. And the only way of which we know to uplift the life of the nation and to fit it for its mission and its ministry is to reform our own and other men’s characters, and ourselves to be what manner of man among men we would have the nation be among nations. It is of some of the elements of character of which men stand specially in need to-day that we are to speak in these lectures. What is good in our lives as individuals and in our life as a nation is not in need of discussion here. And there is no nobility in analyzing and deriding our weaknesses. Our purpose is to urge our keeping if we have not lost them, and our regaining if we feel them slipping from us, some of the elemental moral qualities and spiritual resources which are vital to the capacity for duty and to the living of a full and efficient life.

It has seemed best, on the whole, to preserve in the printed volume the free colloquialism of the lectures as they were delivered.

R. E. S.

New York.

Contents

LECTURE I
DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY

Whether there should be compulsory military training in America is a question which some people will answer yes or no according to their general theories and others according to their observation of the actual effects of such training on moral character. But whatever our views may be on this familiar question, whether we regard military service as ethically helpful in its influence or as morally injurious, we cannot differ as to the need in our national character of those qualities of self-control, of quick and unquestioning obedience to duty, of joyful contempt of hardship, and of zest in difficult and arduous undertakings which, rightly or wrongly, we consider soldierly, which we attribute in such rich measure to our forefathers, and which the moral exigencies of our national task to-day as peremptorily demand. To put these primary and elemental needs as sharply as possible, let us call them discipline and austerity. Our American character needs more of both.

I do not know a better starting point than is found in one of those vivid modern touches upon which we constantly come in the Old Testament. This one is in the account of the closing year of King David’s life. The story seems ancient and far away until we suddenly read: “His father had not displeased him at any time saying, Why hast thou done so?” If we were to translate the words more directly into the language of our own day, we should say, “His father had always let him do exactly as he pleased.” The reference is to David and his son Adonijah, and to the want of discipline by which the father had ruined his boy.

It is not hard to reconstruct the story. David was busy about his cares as king, and his heart was indulgent towards his children. Adonijah seems to have been his youngest son, and the father let him have his way, never reining him up or checking him by asking why he had done thus or so. David pursued, in other words, the modern theory of child training: that the one principle by which children should be educated is the principle of letting what is naturally in them come out; that they must not be crossed or frustrated, or have any external discipline or control laid upon their lives. This is, of course, the extreme of it, but in some form we hear the theory and see it applied all about us every day.

And it is a modern theory of self-education, also. We are told that life should be left free to follow its native impulses; that it should not be thwarted and intimidated by the conventions and prohibitions of society; that men and women should consult their own hearts and then should move out quite freely in obedience to their promptings; that their lives and the lives of their children should not be twisted or deflected by the imposition of any external authority or command.

Well, that was the way Adonijah was brought up. His father was rich. The boy had his own establishment, his own horses, his own retinue of attendants, and round about him, as about any oriental king’s son, there would be the usual crowd of flatterers and sycophants. There was no will or desire that he had not the means to gratify, and his father let him have his way.

Further, he was the younger brother of Absalom, and the ancient record says that they were handsome and popular boys. They had a way that carried along those who came in touch with them, and as the king’s sons, and the leading young men of the city, we have no difficulty in understanding the atmosphere in which they lived and the conditions within which they grew.

It must be confessed that this was the easy way of going about the matter. It is far easier to let a child have its own way than to endeavour by wisdom and patience and strength, to study and decide what is best for the child and without hurting the child’s will, to guide it into the better way. It was far less care to David to let Absalom and Adonijah go than it would have been to take these high-strung sons of his in hand and endeavour to break them to discipline and truth, and to send them out into life real men of power. It was much easier never to call them and to say, “Boys, why did you do this?” Much easier never to lay any authority or guidance upon them from without, much easier, especially for a man like David. He had grown up on a farm, with all the hardship and frugality of farm life, with no privileges as a lad, and now that he was the king of his nation, he was able to do anything whatever for his sons. It was difficult to refuse them the things he had never had. Easily and indulgently—for he was a man of kindly heart all his days—he found it simpler not to lay hard restraints upon his boys when he could give them their own way.

And, of course, this is the easier way of self-education too. For a man to love himself so much that he never thinks of his neighbours, to blind his eyes so completely to consequences that he can live for the passing moment,—this is a very easy philosophy, and the man or the woman who is able to practice it will seem, for a while, to live in the sunshine, a fine butterfly, smooth-going life. All this is easier than to say, not, What is my impulse? but, What ought I? not, What do I like? but, What is best for all the world? not, What is the easy way? but, What is the hard way over which the feet go that carry the burdens of mankind, that bear the load of the world?

But, though it is the easy way for a while, there comes a time when it is no longer the easy way. When in his little room above the gate the old king bowed his gray head in his hands and with breaking heart sobbed out: “O my son Absalom! my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”—it was no longer the easy way. When Adonijah rose up in insurrection against his old father as he lay on his dying bed, gathering his little company of sycophants around him and setting himself up in his father’s place, then it was no longer the easy way that the old man had pursued.

And to-day still, fathers and mothers who for a little while thought the easy way was never to ask their children why they had done so, but to let them go their own way with no imposition of outward authority or control, find after a while that the easy way has turned bitterly hard. I have a friend, a leading merchant in one of our large cities. Some time ago another friend was visiting him, and as they walked down the street together, suddenly a large car whizzed around the corner, full of young people, among them the merchant’s son. This was the middle of the forenoon and the boy was supposed to be at work in his father’s establishment. The father turned to his friend and said: “I wish I knew how I could hold my boy in.” But my friend understood why he could not. He knew that only two or three years before the son had been rewarded for passing examinations at college, examinations that it ought to have been taken for granted that he would pass. But his father thought he should be rewarded for passing them, and he bought a car and sent it up to him at college. Now he wonders why this son does not know how to bind himself to arduous duty.

And in our own lives the easy education does not go easily all the way. There comes a time when, having always indulged ourselves, we can’t break the habit; when, never having taken our lives in our hands and reined them to the great ministries of mankind, we discover that we cannot. We find that we obey our caprices; follow any impulse; cannot stick to any task; do not know a principle when we see it; have no iron or steel anywhere in our character; are the riffraff of the world that the worthy men and women have to bear along as they go. In Mr. Kipling’s inelegant lines:

“We was rotten ’fore we started—we was never disciplined;

We made it out a favour if an order was obeyed;

Yes, every little drummer ’ad ’is rights and wrongs to mind,

So we had to pay for teachin’—an’ we paid!”

Now I suggest that we put all this positively to ourselves, for every one of us knows that we are treading near some of the moral realities of weakness and need in our day and nation. Why should restraint, obedience, the authority of duty and God be let into our lives? In order that out of all these things self-control may come. And why should there be this submission and control of our lives by duty, and truth and God? Well, the reasons are obvious, the moment we begin to think about them.

There is the indisputable fact that the strongest and best men and women we know are men and women who were trained in this school, who some time during their life, and the earlier the better, passed under the discipline and influence of that chastening spoken about in the twelfth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, without which we are not children of a clean God. All around us are these men and women, fathers and mothers, who indulge their sons and daughters, who never confront them with moral principle and obligation and duty, and then lament because their children do not seem to have the old iron grasp of duty, the old rigid love of truth and righteousness. Well, it is all very simple. It is because those fathers and mothers are denying to their children the very education that made themselves what they are. The men and women, who will not run away from any task, who stand steadfast in the truth, upon whose every word we can rest our whole soul, grew out of a certain discipline, a certain education, and it was the kind that Adonijah did not have. And all men and women who want to be masters of their lives and to have strength to lay beneath the work of the world must ask God that such discipline may be given to them.

Not alone is this the only kind of training that can produce this kind of character, but unless a man learns control from without, he will never learn self-control. Unless he passes under the discipline of a wiser and stronger hand at the beginning, he will never come to the time of deliberate and moral self-discipline, which alone is character. For this only is character,—the binding of life beneath the firm sovereignty of the principle that is the heart of God. If nations do not realize this they will pay heavily for their failure. “Make your educational laws strict,” said Ruskin, “and your criminal laws may be gentle; but leave youth its liberty and you will have to dig dungeons for age.”

And it is this that gives freedom. There is no freedom outside of character. Liberty, as Montesquieu says, is not freedom to do just as we please. Liberty is the ability to do as we ought. And the freedom that we need is not the freedom of caprice and whim and listening to our impulses. It is the freedom that enables our eyes clearly to see what right is, and then empowers us to do it. Symonds put it in his verse:

“Soul, rule thyself. On passion, deed, desire,

Lay thou the law of thy deliberate will.

Stand at thy chosen post, faith’s sentinel.

Learn to endure. Thine the reward

Of those who make living light their Lord.

Clad with celestial steel these stand secure,

Masters, not slaves.”

And if such self-control goes as far even as the self-extinction of that voluntarily accepted Cross, on the green hill outside Jerusalem, even so it will bring victory at the last, because it has brought one long succession of victories over self all the days. I cut this fugitive bit of verse from a newspaper the other day:

“Pausing a moment ere the day was done,

While yet the earth was scintillant with light,

I backward glanced. From valley, plain and height,

At intervals, where my life path had run,

Rose cross on cross: and nailed upon each one

Was my dead self. And yet that gruesome sight

Lent sudden splendour to the falling night.

Showing the conquests that my soul had won.

“Up to the rising stars I looked and cried,

There is no death! For year on year reborn,

I wake to larger life, to joy more great.

So many times have I been crucified,

So often seen the resurrection morn,

I go triumphant, though new Calvaries wait.”

And this freedom and victory are waiting only for those lives that have been broken beneath the cross of an absolute restraint of God, and have so mastered themselves under God’s name by the help of Christ that control has been given over in trust into their own hands.

And we all know that power is to be won here in this school where men are trained both to feel and to wield dominion. There is no power in the world that is not power cabined, power held in some way. Loose power is imperceptible and utterly useless. The only power we know is power walled in, shut down, confined and beating against its barriers and its walls. We know this in the athletic life of our colleges to-day. No athletic trainer in any college ever followed David’s method with Adonijah. The trainer is there to say: “Why did you do it that way?” “Why did you not do it this way? You have no right to waste your energy in that way. You must do it so.” There is one scene in Quo Vadis that redeems much else in the book. It is the scene in the Coliseum, when the giant Gothic slave is shown saving the life of his mistress, whom he loved. The great bull has come out with the girl’s form tied to his horns, and there is dead silence as the bull stands angrily facing the man. You remember the picture. As Ursus lays one hand on each horn of the auroch the struggle begins. There is not a sound. The great multitude watches the man’s muscles rise and harden and the sweat come out and drop from every pore. They see his feet sinking down in the arena, until the sand is above his ankles. Suddenly the great head of the bull begins to twist under that awful strength. Then the neck breaks and the giant lifts the limp form from the beast’s neck and stands with the burden in his hands before the Emperor. One likes to read such a picture of power secured by self-discipline. Do we want to go out limp and beaten and ineffective in our lives against the great mass of work in the world that waits to be done? Or do we want to go in the strength of Him Who, having bent beneath His Father’s will, was able to carry on the Cross the whole burden of human sin?

And we must learn in this school the things we value and desire most: purity and delicacy and refinement of character, for they cannot be acquired elsewhere. So much social standing nowadays is uttered in terms of self-assertion and indulgence and the ability to have any whim or caprice gratified. This sort of self-assertion, this caprice, is regarded by many of us as the highest mark of social authority, whereas we know it is precisely the opposite, that it is self-restraint and self-control and self-surrender that mark the finest lives.

There is a beautiful story in the life of Goldwin Smith that illustrates what I mean. In the early sixties, when he was one of the keenest liberal minds of England, he was associated with Cobden and Bright in the Manchester School. Again and again he found himself the mark of the bitterest criticism from Disraeli. Later Goldwin Smith, resigning his professorship at Oxford, came to Canada. At that time Disraeli’s novel, “Lothair,” appeared in which he attacked Smith—of course, without using his name—as a social parasite. It stung Smith to the depths of his soul, but as it was an anonymous book there was nothing he could do but sit down and write this note personally to Disraeli:

“You well know that if you had ventured openly to accuse me of any social baseness, you would have had to answer for your words; but when sheltering yourself under the literary forms of a work of fiction, you seek to traduce with impunity the social character of a political opponent, your expressions can touch no man’s honour—they are the stingless insults of a coward.”

That was all he did. And yet, at that very moment, Goldwin Smith had in his possession letters of Disraeli, with which he could have crushed him. Openly in Parliament Disraeli had said that he had never asked Peel for any position. But among Peel’s papers which had been placed in his hands Smith had a letter in which Disraeli had abjectly begged Peel to give him office. All that Smith needed to do was to publish Disraeli’s own letter to Peel and it would have ruined Disraeli’s career. But to Goldwin Smith that was not a noble thing to do. Peel’s correspondence had not been given to him to use in self-defense, or for any personal justification of his own, and he repressed that letter until Disraeli was dead. Then, years after, all of Peel’s correspondence was published and the whole world knew what a gentleman Goldwin Smith had been. Our modern ideals of what constitutes high social and national standing and character say: “Fight fire with fire. Dishonour releases honour from itself. He struck you foul; strike him so in return.” But the man who had learned self-restraint in the school of God’s loyalty and truth, who understood that power is ours, not to use for self-seeking, but for the good of men and for God’s honour, would not stoop to any such disloyalty and shame.

Once more. Whose judgment is of any value? Who would have thought of going to Adonijah and asking his opinion on anything whatsoever? He did not know right from wrong. He never thought over the issues of right or wrong. What would I like to do? What does passion bid me do? What is my whim or caprice for to-night?—that was as far as Adonijah had ever thought. No man would ever go to him, as no men will ever come to you and me if we have not been trained in the school of moral discrimination, if we have not looked on ethical principle and duty in deciding the question whether each thing is really right for us and for the whole world. If we are to be men and women to whom people will come for comfort and strength and guidance, to whom our own children can come with assurance that they will get the truth, we must be men and women who now place ourselves beneath the firm discipline of God.

We see all this put simply in two great things. We see it in our Lord’s constant appeal, while here in the world, for men and women of fiber and discipline. One came to Him and said: “Lord, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus, looking upon him, loved him and said: “I would not think of counselling anything hard. You must not sacrifice anything. It is all very easy. The Father above is a Father of great tenderness and compassion. He would not lay a straw’s weight upon any child of His. Go; live according to your desires and by the natural impulses of your heart, and for that you shall have treasure in heaven.” Oh, no; He did not say that. He said: “Go, sell all that thou hast, and come and follow me. Except ye love less than duty your father and mother and brother and sister, yea, and your own life also, ye cannot enter the kingdom of God.”

We see it, too, in God’s way with men as He laid down His great laws at the beginning, when His people were but as a race of little children. Why did He not say to them: “This ye may do. The world is sweet and fair. This ye may do, and all shall be easy to you”? Why, on the other hand, did He speak to them in the stern admonitions of the Decalogue: “Thou shalt. Thou shalt not”? God never hesitates to lay His great denials upon mankind and at last to stifle us beneath the restraint of death that He may issue us forth through that restraint into the infinite liberties of the life immortal.

Now do not brush all this away to-day, or any day, light-heartedly, as it can be so easily brushed away. “Oh, don’t shadow our lives,” you will say, “with your denials and your prohibitions and your restraints. Leave life free and sweet as the summer air and the flowers of the field”—that last how long? No, my friends, it were well for us that we should learn this lesson, and learn it now, ere the time comes when the silver cord is loosed and the wheel is broken at the cistern and the grinders cease and the long shadows fall. You remember a tragic incident in New York a few years ago—I do not need to recall the details of it—when two young lives made shipwreck of themselves just because they thought that impulse and caprice were the free voices that they might obey. When it was all over, and the two lives had drawn the veil of night across their short-lived evil joy, one of the papers published a letter which the girl had written to a friend:

“My friend,” she wrote, “you and I and Fred, young, heedless, cynical, living in this reckless town of New York, may laugh sometimes at the old things like law and religion, when they say, ‘Thou shalt not.’ We may think that phrase was written for old fogies, and we may sneer at ‘the wages of sin is death’; but, my friend, there comes to us some time knowledge that the law and religion are right. What they say we shall not do, we cannot do without suffering. Fred and I have learned that. The wages of sin is death.”

It is worse than death; for what was Hell in that great vision that John saw? Why, nothing but the removal of all restraint. “He which is filthy, let him be filthy still.” He is unclean, let him be unclean. He is unholy, let him be unholy. Take all the restraints away. That is Hell.

Away from the dark gates that open thither may another voice call us here to-day, the clear, strong, summoning voice of Him Who said of Himself: “I came not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me. I do always those things that please my Father,” and Who in the garden of Gethsemane, when the anguish was almost greater than He could bear, yet found rest when He prayed, “Father, not my will, but thine be done”; that out of the willfulness and capriciousness and the whim and mood of our little self-indulgent lives we may pass into the great, strong, steadfast, sovereign will that waits for us; that we may stand fast and be strong in the strength and chastening of God!

Now I have put it—this matter of our need of discipline—in the most personal and individual way, but it is our great national and corporate need. The body of a nation can only exist through the ordered discipline of its members and the spirit of a nation like the spirit of a man needs to be cleansed of all the lusts of willfulness and self-indulgence. The spirit of our American nation needs such cleansing. Mr. Kipling has drawn us his picture of it:

“Through many roads, by me possessed,

He shambles forth in cosmic guise;

He is the Jester and the Jest,

And he the Text himself applies.

“His easy unswept hearth he lends

From Labrador to Guadaloupe;

Till, elbowed out by sloven friends,

He camps, at sufferance, on the stoop.

“Calm-eyed he scoffs at sword and crown,

Or panic-blinded stabs and slays:

Blatant he bids the world bow down,

Or cringing begs a crust of praise;

“Or, sombre-drunk, at mine and mart,

He dubs his dreary brethren Kings.

His hands are black with blood—his heart

Leaps, as a babe’s, at little things.

“But, through the shift of mood and mood,

Mine ancient humour saves him whole—

The cynic devil in his blood

That bids him mock his hurrying soul;

“That bids him flout the Law he makes,

That bids him make the Law he flouts,

Till, dazed by many doubts, he wakes

The drumming guns that—have no doubts;

“That checks him foolish-hot and fond,

That chuckles through his deepest ire,

That gilds the slough of his despond

But dims the goal of his desire;

“Inopportune, shrill-accented,

The acrid Asiatic mirth

That leaves him, careless ’mid his dead,

The scandal of the elder earth.”

Doubtless we do not like this picture. We call it a libel or a caricature. Let it be so. Draw your own picture. If there is any truth or faithfulness in it, if it is not blind with national vanity and self-deceit, it will still be a revelation of national need of discipline and of self-empire.

And how can such discipline and self-empire be won? Well, it will not be won on any ground of prudential expediency or practical self-interest. It is well for men and nations to discern their moral shortcomings and to realize their need of a new character. But there are no automatic processes of community salvation. The disciplined nation comes in only one way—by the answers of individuals to the austere call of the one Person who can remake character and mould the stuff of manhood and nationality. The austere call! This is the nation’s need and it is the fundamental summons and the central note of Christianity. “Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.”

The appeal of Christ was always addressed to the sacrificial and the heroic. In every call which He issued to men there is this unmistakable note of austerity. He never smooths things over for the sake of pleasing people or of winning followers. There were times when He seemed almost needlessly to draw in these repelling aspects of discipleship, and to make the conditions of following Him unnecessarily hard. It is related that it came to pass that, as they went in the way, a certain man said unto Him, “Lord, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest.” And Jesus said unto him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.” And He said unto another, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father.” Jesus said unto him, “Let the dead bury their dead; but go thou and preach the kingdom of God.” And another also said, “Lord, I will follow thee; but let me first go bid them farewell which are at home at my house.” And Jesus said unto him, “No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Christ never concealed His own judgments and convictions as to life’s values in these matters, and spoke with the greatest scorn of all indulgence and softness of life. “What went ye out for to see?” He asked the people, regarding John. “A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, they that wear soft clothing are in king’s houses.” He was looking after men of iron and of austerity. “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.”

The beautiful thing is that this appeal of Christ’s was not futile. Instead of repelling men it drew them. He actually obtained the men whom He was hunting for, not by offering them worldly inducements, not by making such appeals as anybody but Christ would have made, but by addressing the sacrificial spirit in them, and making an appeal to their latent capacity for heroism. There is a wonderful tribute in Jesus’ method to those characteristics in human nature which have never been destroyed, which can answer to the highest motives, which do not need to be bought by any low compensations, but which spring into full life when appealed to on the most heroic and unselfish plane. We know how, in consequence, this exultation in difficulties, this love of hardship, this scorn of ease became the characteristic note of early Christianity. In the best summary description which Saint Paul gives of Christian character and manhood, in the twelfth chapter of Romans we find him speaking of “rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation.” And when he comes to write his conception of the character of the happy warrior, we find him setting this in the foreground, “Endure hardship, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.” The praise of the New Testament is never given to those who have lived in luxurious, indulgent ease. It is for that little company of men and women who have loved the difficult tasks, and who with joy trod the rough ways that transcend the stars. Every one of the great New Testament leaders is a man who exalts for us this same love of moral hardship, this same scorn of indulgence and smooth ease, and this same virtue of steadfastness, “And not only so,” says Paul, “but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh stedfastness; and stedfastness, experience; and experience, hope.” And Peter writes, “Yea, and for this very cause adding on your part all diligence, in your faith supply virtue; and in your virtue knowledge; and in your knowledge self-control; and in your self-control stedfastness; and in your stedfastness godliness.” James joins in, “My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience.” And you remember the description which John gives of himself in Revelation as “your brother and partaker with you in the tribulation and kingdom and stedfastness which are in Jesus.”

Now, we ask ourselves the question why our Lord poured out all this scorn on what the world counts the desirable condition and atmosphere of life, why the New Testament has no patience with self-seeking, indulgence, contentment, or ease as the standard of a human life, why it speaks contemptuously of smooth ease of every kind, and exalts, instead, the austere life, the life of strength, and of self-discipline, why our Lord said to men when He came to call them into the best thing there was in the world, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow after me.”

Well, one reason why the whole New Testament pours out such contempt upon the smooth life and exalts hardness, is because only hardness can make a great soul, and the end of the Gospel, the end of life, was the growing of souls. The words of Socrates, understood in the social sense which he intended and not selfishly, contain the central end. “For I do nothing,” said he, “but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul.” It is true, in a sense, that we are here for the work we can do, but it is also true, in a yet deeper sense, that we are here to become the best workmen that we can become, and that the work we do has a large measure of its value in its reflex power of making us capable of doing better work. Evidently this is not the real workshop where God needs His best men and women. When He has perfected His workmen and workwomen and recognizes that they are prepared to do their best work, does He make use of them here? Never. He takes them elsewhere, where evidently the real work is to be done. Everything we see in this world would seem to indicate that it is only the preparatory school, a place where men and women are equipped for the real thing, that the career that is to abide lies elsewhere than here. The purpose of these days is to make us ready for the work God has for us to do in a larger sphere than this, where we pass on, as Chinese Gordon told Mr. Huxley, to have a larger government given to us to administer. God pours out His contempt on smoothness of life because it cannot make greatness of soul, and greatness of soul is one object of our being here.

The Christian ideal despised, also, this smoothness which seems to many of us the most desirable thing that life has for us, because there is such little knowledge given with it. At best it can only play on the very surface of life. We know no more than springs out of the deep experience through which we pass. You remember the lines of Father Tabb:

“‘Where wast thou, little song,

That hast delayed so long

To come to me?’

‘Mute in the mind of God

Till where thy feet had trod

I followed thee.’”

It is only where we have gone that we know the way; it is only the experience in life that we have passed through that gives us our true knowledge of life, because the end of life is its relationships, and wealth of life depends on the breadth of true knowledge and the riches of true relationship. Smoothness of life is simply deadening because it keeps us out of what is real life.

And Christianity derided smoothness of life, and scorned it, because it separates us from fellowship with the noble and suffering life of God. You know the long controversy in theology as to whether the idea of suffering is compatible with the idea of a perfect God. There have been some theologians who insist it could not be possible that God should suffer. If He could suffer, He could not be God. Well, I suppose all of us here are prepared without one moment of hesitation to range ourselves on the other side, and to say that if God cannot suffer He cannot be our God. He could not be a father if He did not suffer. Christ could not have been the revelation of Him if He is not a suffering God; for “He was the man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” What He laid bare was a heart of love sharing the anguish of others; for we have not a Father who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities,—We can say that of Him because of what we know of Him who revealed Him,—We have not a Father who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, no impassive God sitting where “no sound of human sorrow mounts to mar His sacred everlasting calm,” but a Father who pities His children, who enters into their life, and who loves them with all His soul. We can have no knowledge of that God, no fellowship with His life, if what we are living is the smooth, easy, indulgent life, everything bought for us by others, nothing done by us for others, no blood of sacrifice colouring our life red with the glow of God and His incarnate Son. The New Testament despises the smooth life that makes it impossible for men and women to have any part in the deepest life of their Father.

And the New Testament scorns the smooth, indulgent life because it cannot connect men and women with the real springs of strength and of power. No strong man was ever made against no resistance. We develop no physical power by putting forth no physical effort. All the strength of life we have we get by pushing against opposition. We acquire power as we draw it out of deep experience and effort. And the new Christian ideal made no place for indulgence and ease because these things leave men and women weak, with no strength either themselves to bear or to achieve for others. It is as Mrs. King puts it in Ugo Bassi’s “Sermon in the Hospital”:

“The Vine from every living limb bleeds wine;

Is it the poorer for the spirit shed?

The drunkard and the wanton drink thereof;

Are they the richer for that gift’s excess?

Measure thy life by loss instead of gain;

Not by the wine drunk, but the wine poured forth

For love’s strength standeth in love’s sacrifice;

And whoso suffers most hath most to give.

God said to Man and Woman, ‘By thy sweat,

And by thy travail, thou shalt conquer earth,’

Not, by thy ease or pleasure:—and no good

Or glory of this life but comes by pain.

How poor were earth if all its martrydoms,

If all its struggling sighs of sacrifice

Were swept away, and all were satiate-smooth,

If this were such a heaven of soul and sense

As some have dreamed of;—and we human still.

Nay, we were fashioned not for perfect peace

In this world, howsoever in the next:

And what we win and hold is through some strife.”

And it was because our Lord knew this that He set over against men’s wills the strait door of the kingdom of life. He did not betray the trust that had been given to Him. He did not say, “Come, I will make life easy for you.” He did not say, “Come, let us indulge ourselves to heart’s content.” He said, “If any man will come after me, let him leave all that behind, let him deny himself, and let him take up his cross daily, and let him come after me.”

Now, I know what many of us will be saying of all this. We will be saying, “God did not bring us into the world with any cross. All our life long has been a sheltered life. None of this hardness of which you speak has ever come to us. Maybe our fathers and mothers knew it before us, but they have shielded us from its pressure. Are we to go back to crudeness and asceticism for the good of our souls? Are we who have no cross deliberately to take our smooth lives and roughen them?” Yes, that is precisely what I am saying. Those of us who were not born with a cross must find one, those whose lives have been smooth are deliberately to find ways of roughening them, so that we may know a life of power and fellowship with the suffering God, and can go out to real work, and be prepared for that greater life and greater service which await us elsewhere than here.

We shall not have any great difficulty in obeying this call of Christ to roughen our lives. There are many crosses in the world too heavy for the men and women who are trying to carry them. We can go out and find one of these crosses and help to bear it. They are not far away. Here is a clipping from the New York Sun:

“A comely young Hungarian woman with a three-months-old baby in her arms dropped to the sidewalk at Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street late yesterday afternoon and lay half conscious. An ambulance surgeon who came said the woman was starving and that her baby had bronchitis.

“The woman recovered enough to tell the surgeon that she was Mrs. Mary Scheinn, twenty years old, and that her husband had died recently. She had been living with a friend at 97 Seigel Street, Brooklyn, she said, but this woman also was very poor and expected to be evicted to-day, so Mrs. Scheinn had walked to New York to try to get her sick child into a hospital. She tramped from hospital to hospital, and everywhere they refused to take the child, she said. But she kept up the quest until she gave out. She had had nothing to eat since yesterday and little then.

“The ambulance took the woman and child to Bellevue Hospital. Both are in a rather serious condition.”

Being young and comely, doubtless, if she had not had the baby, some pimp or other American citizen, for a consideration within her power, might have helped her, but being innocent and carrying a baby there she stood until she fell down, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, in the heart of the city, a woman carrying a baby and a cross that were too heavy for her. There were millions of Christian people round about her. Thousands of us never knew what a cross was and we let the woman with her child in her arms fall down under the weight of hers. This world is black with the shadows of crosses. If we have none of our own, in the name of the great Cross, let us borrow one.

Here is a note from a girl. She is one of thousands and the note is real. I had been speaking in one of the New York churches and the next day came a letter from her asking me, if I really believed what I had said, to answer some questions for her. I wrote in reply and this was part of her answer: “The great trouble with me is that I have to fight continually against despondency. Life to me is a series of sorrows and troubles, that accumulate and grow larger, and just when I am at the point of giving up altogether some little word or act deters me.... I know I would be happy if I were, as you say, truly trustful towards God, but God to me seems very far off and rather mythical. Your letter, also the fact that you wrote, was a help to me. The part that perhaps appealed to me most was the idea that God and God’s love are longing for us. It is very fine to feel that when one is always lonesome.” I learned more of her story but it is not for telling here. It was a cross too heavy for her which she was trying to bear. Women who knew her lifted its weight for her, taking it over upon themselves.

And not only by taking up crosses, of which the world is full, can we roughen our lives. Many of us can do it by simply cutting off some of our waste and extravagance. There are many of us who never ask before we spend money, “How can I get the greatest return from this money?” We waste it like water, while Belgium, Serbia, Poland and Armenia call. It is said that there are thirty million people in India who have only one meal a day, and who never know what it is to have enough to eat. Some of them say that if they could have enough to eat for just two days, they would be willing to lie down and die content. Again and again, hundreds of thousands of people in China have been the victims of famine, while we were throwing wealth away. We can roughen life a bit by denying ourselves, by abridging expenditure and devoting the money to human need and to some of the services the world is dying for.

Students often reject the ethical and economic arguments against gambling. These arguments are valid but it is very hard to get a clutch for them on many minds. You can point out how dishonourable and essentially immoral it is for a man to have money which he did not earn, for which he gave no equivalent, which came to him as no expression of friendship or by no legitimate inheritance. All this is clear to the healthy and manly moral sense. But the gambler does not have such a sense. I have often wondered that the case is not more frequently put from the other side, from the side of the wrong of spending money in gambling. When a man has won on a bet the moral question is lulled but when he has lost there is a chastened mood which can be invited to reflect. What moral warrant did he have for throwing his money away? What does he have to show for it? A million hungry hands were outstretched to him, a world of want and suffering called towards him over land and sea? And he threw his money away—got nothing for it, did nothing with it. In a world like ours, there are parched lips waiting for drink; there are hungry mouths in need of bread:—do we have any right to waste in indulgence in a world like this? Men should scrutinize every dollar that passes through their hands and ask, “What is the very best thing that I can do with this?”

And frugality, self-imposed for the sake of service, will come back to us in rich reward in character and power. Horace Bushnell drew a noble picture of the fruitage of true parsimony in his address at the Litchfield County Centennial in 1851, on “The Age of Homespun”:

“It was also a great point, in this homespun mode of life, that it imparted exactly what many speak of only with contempt, a closely girded habit of economy. Harnessed, all together, into the producing process, young and old, male and female, from the boy that rode the plow-horse, to the grandmother knitting under her spectacles, they had no conception of squandering lightly what they all had been at work, thread by thread, and grain by grain, to produce. They knew too exactly what everything cost, even small things, not to husband them carefully. Men of patrimony in the great world, therefore, noticing their small way in trade, or expenditure, are ready, as we often see, to charge them with meanness—simply because they knew things only in the small; or, what is not far different, because they were too simple and rustic to have any conception of the big operations by which other men are wont to get their money without earning it, and lavish the more freely because it was not earned. Still, this knowing life only in the small, it will be found, is really anything but meanness.

“Probably enough the man who is heard threshing in his barn of a winter evening, by the light of a lantern, (I knew such an example) will be seen driving his team next day, the coldest day of the year, through the deep snow to a distant wood-lot to draw a load for a present to his minister. So the housewife that higgles for a half hour with the merchant over some small trade is yet one that will keep watch, not unlikely, when the schoolmaster, boarding round the district, comes to some hard quarter, and commence asking him to dinner, then to tea, then to stay over night, and literally boarding him, till the hard quarter is passed. Who now, in the great world of money, will do, not to say the same, as much, proportionally as much, in any of the pure hospitalities of life?

“Besides, what sufficiently disproves any real meanness, it will be found that children brought up, in this way, to know things in the small—what they cost and what is their value—have, in just that fact, one of the best securities of character and most certain elements of power and success in life; because they expect to get on by small advances followed up and saved by others, not by sudden leaps of fortune that despise the slow but surer methods of industry and merit. When the hard, wiry-looking patriarch of homespun, for example, sets off for Hartford, or Bridgeport, to exchange the little surplus of his year’s production, carrying his provision with him and the fodder for his team, and taking his boy along to show him the great world, you may laugh at the simplicity, or pity, if you will, the sordid look of the picture; but, five or ten years hence, this boy will probably enough be found in college, digging out the cent’s worths of his father’s money in hard study; and some twenty years later he will be returning, in his honours, as the celebrated Judge, or Governor, or Senator and public orator, from some one of the great states of the republic, to bless the sight once more of that venerated pair who shaped his beginnings, and planted the small seeds of his future success. Small seeds, you may have thought, of meanness; but now they have grown up and blossomed into a large-minded life, a generous public devotion, and a free benevolence to mankind.

“And just here, I am persuaded, is the secret, in no small degree, of the very peculiar success that has distinguished the sons of Connecticut, and, not least, those of Litchfield County, in their migration to other states. It is because they have gone out in the wise economy of a simple, homespun training, expecting to get on in the world by merit and patience, and by a careful husbanding of small advances; secured in their virtue by just that which makes their perseverance successful. For the men who see the great in the small, and go on to build the great by small increments, and so form a character of integrity before God and men, as solid and massive as the outward successes they conquer. The great men who think to be great in general, having yet nothing great in particular, are a much more windy affair.”

Every one ought to roughen life by friendships that will bring into it those influences which are not naturally in our daily associations and will carry us into contact with men and women who struggle harder than we do. A few such friendships will help to keep life from petrification and to make us aware that the world is under a cross, and that our hearts must be as open to all its needs as the heart of the Father of human life is open always.

And we can help to roughen our lives in the very sense in which Christ meant them to be roughened if we will resist the steadily increasing tendency of our day to multiply ways in which we are released from doing things for ourselves. There are none of us who do not have a hundred things done for us that our fathers and mothers had to do for themselves. Little by little, we are ridding ourselves of the responsibility of doing any service for ourselves whatsoever. There is immense gain in this. It gives freedom for larger living but it can go too far, and it would be a great thing if we resolved at periods that we would not let anybody else do for us what we could do for ourselves. There was a day, perhaps, when men needed the other rule, when it was a great deal better to get other people to do things for us than to do them ourselves, but the time has come when the world needs to reverse that principle. What the world wants is not organizers, but deorganizers, men and women who will increase the number of personal services and activities, and who will bring something frugal, simple and elementary back into life to deliver us from the false heaven of ease and self-indulgence, which is as bad as any other kind of hell. Christ came to save us from that.

There is one other way in which we can answer this call, and can deliver ourselves from the curse of smooth living. Around about us on every side there are causes waiting for what men and women can do for them. I do not mean crosses in any great, general, organized sense, in which we send our five, our twenty-five or our hundred dollars to some society and think we have, in that way, carried all the cross that Christ means to have us carry. We cannot fulfill Christ’s command by paying an organization to carry a cross for us. All the work they do must be done, and it must be supported. Millions of dollars that are not being given now ought to be given. But what Christ is waiting for also and what we have got to do if we are to have the satisfaction of the enduring life is to find each of us for himself some true cross of personal service. There are men and women around us who are waiting for some touch of sympathy, some kindness, some unflinching word of ours to them that shall mean the awakening of their own discouraged or sleeping souls, that they may come out to live. “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.”

One of the saddest things in the world to-day is the principle under which those are living who are unwilling to bear these crosses and to bring home into their lives the wholesome spiritual stimulus that this roughening of life alone can give to them. We have reacted too far from the old monastic idea. Men speak with scorn now of those men and women who went away into monasteries and convents, despising the joys of the world for the sake of their souls. But these men and women were infinitely better than the great multitudes who go out into the world to-day, despising their souls for the sake of the joys of the world. If a man or woman wants to do any despising it is better to despise the world than the soul. It were well for us to go back a little to the spirit of the mediæval time. When that spirit was pure and good the world’s richest service flowed out from it.

The glory of life for us consists in finding the rough, the morally austere things in life and then fearlessly and unhesitatingly doing them. There is no splendour in the easy indulgent way. The splendour lies in finding the hard thing to be achieved and revelling in it.

Many years ago I clipped this story from the editorials of what was then our ablest newspaper:

“A young Briton named Felix Oswald became interested a while ago in the geology of Turkish Armenia. He made long journeys through that country and finally came home with an important amount of valuable new material. It was not matter, however, that would find favour in the eyes of the general publisher and Mr. Oswald had to undertake its publication himself. He had the type set at the lowest rates in a small town. There were 516 pages of print and the author undertook the large task of doing the printing himself. He hired a hand press and after weeks of hard work he had produced 101 copies of the book. Feeling certain that this edition would fill the demand he went about the next large job, which was the hand colouring of all his maps and profiles. Then the copies were bound and the book was out.

“Leading geologists say that the work is one of the best of its kind. The small edition is exhausted and the book will not be reprinted. The editor of Petermann’s Mitteilungen, believing that a wide circle of geologists would be glad to have the important results of Oswald’s investigations, has just printed in his periodical an extended résumé of them together with some of the maps. The University of London has crowned the work with its approval by conferring the degree of Doctor of Science upon the author. Oswald has certainly earned the congratulations of all who admire the qualities of courage, perseverance and intelligent devotion to a special task.”

A man does not have to go to Armenia to find the hard thing to do, although there are harder and nobler tasks waiting there to-day than Oswald undertook, tasks that are crosses in the divinest sense, scarred with sorrow and grief. And perhaps there are some among us here now who are bearing crosses and finding them beyond their strength. But they are not to be mourned over. They were not of our making, were they? If they were of our making, perhaps there is some penitence to be felt, some restitution to be made. If they were not of our making, we may be sure that they were built just for our shoulder, that One who knew us made them that we might carry them, and become under them what we could never become without them. And if we have no such cross, out from our smooth and easy living, our cozy shelters in which we have been kept and are kept now, One is calling us to come whose ancient word we hear to-day: “I came not to send peace, but a sword. Whosoever would be my disciple must love nothing as much as me, and must be willing to rise up and follow me.” For men and women who will do this in the full and joyous spirit of Francis of Assisi but in the forms suitable to our modern life the summons of God and the world is clear.

LECTURE II
THE CONSERVATION AND RELEASE OF MORAL RESOURCES

One of our most familiar national ideas during recent years has been the conservation of our natural resources, our mines, our forests, our water power, the agricultural capacities of our soil. It would have been a good thing if this idea had occurred to us fifty years earlier. But it is an idea which always comes late to a young nation. So long as the population is sparse and the supply of good land unlimited and it is an easy thing to pick up a living from the surface of the ground, perhaps it is too much to expect that any people would be careful and frugal. But when the population has increased and begins to press against the means of subsistence, when the good public lands are exhausted and a mere living becomes harder for the masses of the people to secure, then any nation awakens to wisdom and turns from recklessness and prodigality.

And, doubtless, the idea would have occurred to us a full generation earlier if it had not been for the terrible education of our Civil War. There is a great deal to be set down on the good side of the account of the Civil War. It took the putty of our national character and burned it into stone. It ran steel fibres through our national life. And it brought us for the first time to a sense of national unity. But alas there is a great deal also on the ledger’s other page. For war is not conservation, it is destruction. It educates any people not in frugality but in wastefulness. Military supplies must be bought at once at any cost. Everything is thrown away with a negligent and wasteful hand. And so long as any people is pouring out its best possession, the precious life-blood of its sons, like water on the battle-field, you cannot expect it to be saving and careful in its material possessions.

The days of waste that followed the Civil War are gone forever. The nation has begun now to count carefully the amount of its available wealth. We have seen calculations of how many millions of feet of lumber we have standing in our forests and how many millions of tons of coal we have still hid away in our treasure houses underground. And far and wide over the nation now we are learning to husband the resources we have left, mindful of our children who are to come after us.

And it is a good thing that the nation in conserving her resources realizes that there is something more important than a careful husbanding of her mere material wealth. The vital resources of any people are of more significance to her than clods of coal, or timber on her hillsides. Of what use would it be to conserve the material resources of any nation if we conserve them only for a deteriorating racial stock? The nation has come to realize that the men and women who compose it are its largest wealth, and that this treasure must be guarded more sacredly than our mines, our forests, or our water power. We have seen, accordingly, a whole new body of legislation growing up, that would have made our fathers stand aghast, fixing the conditions of employment, the age of employees, the sanitary condition of homes and mills, the hours of work and the care of women. The expenditure of immense sums for the protection of the life and health of factory labourers is now readily recognized even by “soul-less corporations,” which formerly fought against all such outlay, as money well invested. In all the nation to-day we realize that there is a more precious wealth than our material wealth. I saw an interesting illustration of this new frame of mind a little while ago in a statement issued by some leading men in Tennessee dealing with the excessive death rate among the negroes of the South. They pointed out that among nine millions of white people the death rate is 160,000, and that among the nine millions of the negroes the death rate is 266,000. In other words, among the negroes, 106,000 more people die every year than among a corresponding number of the whites of our country. In the negro, these men argued, the South had an invaluable asset, a better type of labour on the whole, with all its drawbacks, than any other section of the nation possessed, more docile, more faithful, less troublesome, and the South could not afford to lose this labour which it needed for developing its wealth. These men estimated the economic value of each one of these lives at $350 a year, and the period of that economic value at ten years, so that each one of these wasted lives was a loss of $3,500 to the South, or $371,000,000 each year, one million dollars a day, and they argued that the South could not afford such a waste. The South, they held, must see that the death rate among the negro is reduced to the same proportions as the death rate among the white people, in order that such an enormous economic loss might be averted. We are realizing all over the nation now that a man is a very costly product. You can breed an animal in a few months for the market, but it takes twenty years to grow a man, and no nation can afford to throw away such costly products as men and women. These are its most priceless wealth. If it expects to conserve its treasures and to be prepared for the services of the days to come, it is bound to guard this wealth more sacredly than any other. And American capital and industry have come to see this clearly. Here is one typical utterance by a leading engineer at a meeting of the Immigration Committee of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States:

“Industrial Americanization is a part of the prevalent present-day movement towards the humanizing of industry. It aims to make what is commonly called ‘welfare work’ not an exercise of the individual employer’s ‘paternalism,’ but a legitimate kind of business organization everywhere. There are now innumerable kinds of ‘welfare work.’ One employer does it from the point of view of ‘good business’; another on the ‘big brothers’ theory. One man confines himself to playgrounds, another to safety appliances. In one firm it is under the employment manager; in another under a Y. M. C. A. director; and in a number of other firms it is classified in as many different ways.

“There is no agreement among American employers as to where the organization of the human side of industry really belongs. And there are absolutely no standards for it. What we need to do is to extend scientific methods to the human phases of industrial organization, and thus give ‘welfare work’ a definite place and definite standards. The engineer as the ‘consulting mind’ of industry must be the leader in this work. It is he who determines the site of the plant and its construction. Inside the plant again, the engineer has much to do with efficiency methods. No efficiency methods that are unrelated to the men in the plant can prosper permanently.”

But there is another sort of resource and national treasure greater by far than these, which most of the nations are passing by. I mean the latent and undeveloped capacities for ministry and achievement which lie dormant inside human life. Every life is a reservoir of unawakened possibilities. There is no one of us that is more than a fraction of the man he should be. There is not one who is not falling short by a wide margin of the ideals that he ought to attain, not one who is making the contribution to the nation or building the share in the Kingdom of God that God and mankind alike have a right to expect of him. Not long before his death, an article contributed by Prof. William James, of Harvard, appeared in the American Magazine, entitled “The Powers of Man,” in which Professor James argued that mankind is living on a very small fraction of its vitality, and that there are buried underground strata of possibilities and of power which are never tapped except in times of great emergency. For a little time then a man draws on these reserves, and then seals the strata over again and falls back on the surface levels once more. For illustration he spoke of the familiar phenomenon of the second wind. Every boy can remember such experiences. There came a time in the game when he was “all in.” He had done his best and drawn on his last available power. Suddenly it was as though something broke. A partition wall fell in. Unsuspected reserves were released. The second wind came and reservoirs of power that had been withheld came unexpectedly into play and he did better than he had done before, what he had never been able to do before. That is an absolute truth of experience all through life. In our great crises, any one of many forces may unlock these energies and let them loose. And the present needed appeal of the world is to men and women that they should not be content to draw upon these reservoirs in crises alone. The tragic crises come because these powers are not drawn forth and used. The great wealth of the nations and of the world that needs now to be unsealed is just this wealth of moral capacity lying latent and dormant within.

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

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

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

Let me put the truth in yet a different way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Low in the grave He lay—

Jesus, my Saviour!

Waiting the coming day—

Jesus, my Lord!

Death cannot keep his prey—

Jesus, my Saviour!

He tore the bars away—

Jesus, my Lord!

Up from the grave He arose,

With a mighty triumph o’er His foes;

He arose a victor from the dark domain,

And He lives forever with His saints to reign:

He arose! He arose! Hallelujah! Christ arose!”

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

“Rigid I lie in a winding sheet,

Which mine own hands did weave,

And my narrow cell is myself—myself,

Which yet I may not cleave.

“And yet in the dawn of the early morn,

A clear voice seems to say,

‘I am the Lord of the final word,

And ye may not say Me nay.

“‘Unloose your hands that your brother’s need

May ever find them free.

Unbind your feet from their winding sheet;

Henceforth they walk with Me.’

“And lo! I hear! I am blind no more!

I am no longer dumb!

Out from the doom of a self-wrought tomb,

Pulsate with life, I come.”

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

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