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 The Marks of a Man; 
 
 Or, The Essentials of Christian 
 Character 
 
 BY 
 ROBERT ELLIOTT SPEER, M. A. 
 
 THE MERRICK LECTURES FOR 1906-7 
 
 Delivered at the Ohio Wesleyan University, Dela- 
 ware, O., December 6-10, 1906 
 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO 
 
 LONDON AND EDINBURG
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY 
 JENNINGS AND GKAHAM
 
 THE MEEEICK LECTUEES 
 
 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 Presi- 
 dent of Ohio Wesleyan University, a fund was es- 
 tablished providing an annual income for the pur- 
 pose of securing lectures within the general field of 
 Experimental and Practical Religion. The follow- 
 ing courses have previously been given on this foun- 
 dation : 
 
 Daniel Curry, D. D. "Christian Education." 
 
 President James McCosh, D. D., LL. D. "Testa 
 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." 
 
 3
 
 4 The Merrick Lectures 
 
 James M. Buckley, D. D., LL. D. "The Nat- 
 ural and Spiritual Orders and Their Relations." 
 
 John E. Mott, M. A., F. E. 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."
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 These lectures of Mr. Robert E. Speer make the 
 eleventh course delivered on the Merrick foundation. 
 The lectures of last year, entitled "The New Age and 
 Its Creed," were critical, theological, comprehensive 
 giving a wide view of the character of our age 
 and the needed adaptation of religious thought and 
 work to the changing, or already changed, conditions 
 of the modern world. 
 
 The present course is direct, ethical, practical; 
 a consideration of the fundamental and universal 
 principles that apply to Christian life in all ages. 
 The profound impression produced on the occasion 
 of their delivery by their assertions, their arguments, 
 and the intense personal force with which they are 
 backed, justifies the expectation that a multitude 
 will find in them, as many have already found, a 
 mighty impulse to higher living. 
 
 They present, to quote the words of a resolution 
 presented at their close by leading citizens of the 
 town, "a working-plan of life, set forth with clear- 
 ness, with practicalness, and with convincing passion 
 and power." The ideal of character which they exalt 
 
 5
 
 6 Introduction 
 
 is like some snowy mountain, lofty, pure, and won- 
 derfully beautiful. Because man has something 
 within him of the divine nature, his heart longs to 
 reach the summit which thus breaks upon his vision. 
 The mountain seems (those who have dwelt at the 
 foot of great peaks will understand what this means) 
 to follow even him who wanders far out upon the 
 plains, hovers above him like a speaking friend, and 
 draws him irresistibly to its glorious heights. That 
 the feet can be strengthened for the arduous climb, 
 none will doubt who know the power of Jesus Christ. 
 
 HEBBEET WELCH. 
 Ohio Wesleyan University.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 I PEOPOSE to speak in these lectures of some of 
 the essentials of Christian character, of the marks 
 cf a man. It is of qualities of character that I in- 
 tend to speak, not of how these qualities are to be 
 acquired. And yet I wish to say a word on that 
 point at the outset to avoid any misunderstanding. 
 I assume the Christian position that we are agreed 
 as to the relation of Christ to Christian character. 
 Surely this can be assumed here in this place, and 
 we can go on to ask ourselves whether our Christian 
 character is the kind it ought to be. But if this 
 were not to be assumed, something would need to be 
 said at length in beginning these lectures on a point 
 which is very much obscured in the thinking of our 
 day. 
 
 We are told by many voices that the matter of 
 creed has been overdone, and that the great gospel 
 for our day is not creed but character. It does not 
 matter what men think, it only matters what they 
 are. Now, this is very superficial talk. So men be- 
 lieve in character but not in creed. Well, what kind 
 of character do they believe in ? Character does not 
 define itself or its ideals. The Mohammedan believes 
 
 7
 
 8 Preface 
 
 in character and his man of right character may have 
 four legal wives and divorce them at his own pleas- 
 ure, and as many slave girls and concubines as he 
 wishes, and he can send these away without divorce. 
 Among ourselves one man is satisfied with a charac- 
 ter that allows the defrauding of widows or the ac- 
 ceptance of graft. Another condemns this but ar- 
 ranges for rebates. One student cheats in examina- 
 tions, and another thinks that certain vices are neces- 
 sary and venial. What kind of character does a man 
 believe in ? The moment he begins to answer he for- 
 mulates a creed. 
 
 And just as character can not erect its own stand- 
 ards, it has no self-creative power. I can not lift 
 my body up to the table by my boot-straps, and I can 
 not lift my life by my will into a perfect character. 
 !N T o man ever got out of his will more than he found 
 there. When a man finds that in his will there is no 
 power of a .holy life, how is he to accomplish holi- 
 ness by that will ? Character can neither create its 
 own ideals of perfection nor realize them when once 
 they are given to it. 
 
 And character has no self-corrective power. 
 Character deteriorates, as everything else deterior- 
 ates, unless it is fed from living external springs. 
 The best character is in constant need of checks from 
 without lest it run to excess, and of stimulus from 
 without lest it lag by the way. 
 
 When men say that they believe in character and 
 that "it does not matter what men think, it only mat- 
 ters what men are," we answer that even so much
 
 Preface 9 
 
 truth involves postulates and intellectual necessities 
 which run beyond character. We might, to be sure, 
 answer their folly after its kind. If they think that 
 it does not matter what men think, then what does 
 it matter to us what they think? Why are they so 
 anxious to prove to us that they think right ? 
 
 Of course it matters what men think. What we 
 think about God and man, about duty and truth, 
 above all, what we think about Jesus Christ in 
 whom these problems are focussed for us, these 
 thoughts of ours are the only things that do matter. 
 They are all that interested Christ. The Pharisees 
 were the best people of His day, but their perform- 
 ances did not particularly interest Christ. He 
 wanted to know what they thought. From within, 
 out of the heart sprang the determining stream. And 
 His supreme concern was to get men to think right 
 about Him. That was His great question, "What 
 do you think of ME ?" Our answer to that ques- 
 tion determines character for us. 
 
 I assume that we assent to this, that we know 
 that we can not make ourselves the kind of men we 
 ought to be, and that we believe that Christ must 
 reproduce His own image in us. But what will the 
 lineaments of that image be in us, in contact with 
 the problems of our life and our times? What are 
 the fundamental ethical traits of Christian character 
 for us? That is the question which we are to at- 
 tempt to answer. I shall venture to speak very in- 
 formally and colloquially.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION, - 5 
 
 PREFACE, - 7 
 
 I. TRUTH, - - 13 
 
 II. PURITY, 49 
 
 III. SERVICE, - .-* 83 
 
 IV. FREEDOM, - 123 
 V. PROGRESS AND PATIENCE, ... 155
 
 TRUTH 
 
 No LIE IN CHAKACTEE EVER JUSTIFIABLE
 
 I do not mean to diminish the blame of the injurious 
 and malicious sin, of the selfish and deliberate falsity ; yet 
 it seems to me, that the shortest way to check the darker 
 forms of deceit is to set more scrupulous watch against those 
 which have mingled, unregarded and unchastised, with the 
 current of our life. Do not let us lie at all. Do not think 
 of one falsity as harmless, and another as slight, and another 
 as unintended. Cast them all aside: they may be light and 
 accidental ; but they are an ugly soot from the smoke of the 
 pit, for all that : and it is better that our hearts should be 
 swept clean of them, without over care as to which is 
 largest or blackest. Speaking truth is like writing fair, and 
 comes only by practice ; it is less a matter of will than of 
 habit, and I doubt if any occasion can be trivial which per- 
 mits the practice and formation of such a habit. To speak 
 and act truth with constancy and precision is nearly as diffi- 
 cult, and perhaps as meritorious, as to speak it under 
 intimidation and penalty ; and it is a strange thought how 
 many men there are, as I trust, who would hold to it at the 
 cost of fortune or life, for one who would hold to it at the 
 cost of a little daily trouble. And seeing that of all sin 
 there is, perhaps, none more flatly opposite to the Al- 
 mighty, none more *' wan ting the good of virtue and of being," 
 than this of lying, it is surely a strange insolence to fall into 
 the foulness of it. RUSKIN, " Seven Lamps of Architecture."
 
 TRUTH 
 
 I HAVE spoken of the ethical fundamentals of 
 Christian character, but in reality there is but one, 
 and that is truth. All the others are only outgrowths 
 or applications of the central and bottommost quality 
 of absolute veracity, that is, a veracity which allows 
 no qualification or exception of any kind or under 
 any circumstances. These explanations are necessary 
 because they raise the whole issue. Many people 
 believe in truth who do not 'believe in it at all. They 
 agree that the truth is sacred and that no quality is 
 more vital, but they destroy the moral value of their 
 acknowledgment for purposes of absolute character 
 by allowing exceptions of one kind or another which 
 demolish the inviolateness of the truth and prevent 
 our building it as the unassailable and indestructible 
 rock into the foundation of character. Indeed most 
 people seem to be ready to deny the inviolable sacred- 
 ness of truth. I have been astonished in speaking of 
 the matter in and out of our colleges to discover that 
 the doctrine of the uncompromisable rigidity of the 
 truth is widely repudiated. Men are ready at once 
 to dispute it in support of the contrary view that the 
 claims of the truth are only relative and that often
 
 1 6 The Marks of a Man 
 
 they may be annulled and falsehood substituted in its 
 stead. The principle which is at stake here seems 
 to be vital. There can be no solid and impreg- 
 nable character that does not rest on solid and im- 
 pregnable foundations and there are no such founda- 
 tions if truth can be tampered with and replaced 
 with a lie whenever in the judgment of the liar the 
 circumstances and issues make a lie justifiable. 
 
 My own perception of the fundamental signifi- 
 cance of the problem involved was due to the late Dr. 
 Trumbull. In three books Dr. Trumbull made three 
 great contributions to the thought of our day. His 
 Friendship, the Master Passion is the noblest book 
 we have on love. In The Blood Covenant he 
 opened up a new biological conception of the atone- 
 ment which meets the demand of the modern mind 
 and at the same time does fuller justice to the evan- 
 gelical conviction than the old theories of the atone- 
 ment have done. But of all his score or more of vol- 
 umes he himself would probably have singled out A 
 Lie Never Justifiable as the book which had most 
 of his life blood in it and which set forth his deepest 
 belief in regard to the right principle of Christian 
 character. He hated with all his intense soldier soul 
 all liars and every lie and he held and taught that 
 the vital and fundamental thing is the truth and that 
 nothing can ever justify its surrender or betrayal. I 
 am going to set forth here in part what I learned 
 from him. 
 
 How a man stands on this matter is the central
 
 Truth: No Lie Justifiable 17 
 
 question of character. We do not care greatly for 
 the creed of any man whose conception of truth is 
 so capricious and insecure that he is willing, when 
 the price seems to him sufficient, to betray it. "Will 
 the man lie?", that is the ultimate question. If he 
 will, then what is there about the man that is abso- 
 lutely dependable? Does his philosophy regard the 
 duty of truth telling and truth doing and truth be- 
 ing as a contingent duty, sometimes dissolved by the 
 comfort or profit or greater ease of falsehood of word 
 or act or character If it does, then whence is solid- 
 ity, rigid consistency, without which there can be 
 no highest character, to be derived ? 
 
 To make the issue which I wish to press at the 
 outset as sharp as possible, let us narrow the whole 
 matter of truth in character for the moment to the 
 matter of truth in speech. If we can establish there 
 thte principle that the essential thing is the recogni- 
 tion of the supreme duty of exceptionless truthful- 
 ness and of the unjustifiableness of any lie whatso- 
 ever, and that even where a lie is held to be justifia- 
 ble it is wrong, we shall be in a position to go on to 
 claim that deeds and thoughts and inward parts and 
 all the character must be brought into obedience, 
 without evasion or qualification or hedging of any 
 sort, to the clean and inviolable truth. 
 
 Now the issue is not one of definition. The defi- 
 nitions are important but for our purpose we do not 
 need to go into the question of what constitutes a lie, 
 of what silences or utterances of truth by which 
 
 2
 
 i8 The Marks of a Man 
 
 others deceive themselves are legitimate. All admit 
 that to say to another that which is not true with 
 intent to deceive is a lie. Is such a lie ever right? 
 Is the assent to the principle that such a lie is ever 
 right consistent with the highest character ? 
 
 In all history and in all lands there have been 
 those who answered "No" and "Never" to these ques- 
 tions. Among the Scandinavians it was taught in 
 The Saga of Fridfhjof that a lie even to protect a 
 pure woman's name was ignoble. To that end and 
 to secure his happiness Fridthjof was tempted to lie 
 and scorned to do it. 
 
 " Then echoed from the ring 
 Of crowded warriors, ' Say but nay, say nay! 
 Thy simple word we '11 trust ; we '11 court for thee, 
 Thou, Thorstein's son, art good as any king's. 
 Say nay ! Say nay I And thine is Ingeborg !' 
 ' The happiness,' I answered, ' of my life 
 On one word hangs ; but fear not therefore, Helge, 
 I would not lie to gain the joys of Valhal, 
 Much less the earth's delight.' " 
 
 Among the Egyptians "truth was the main car- 
 dinal virtue" and "falsehood was considered disgrace- 
 ful among them." When the soul appeared in the 
 Hall of Two Truths for final judgment, it must be 
 able to say, "I have not told a falsehood," or fail of 
 acquittal. There were low practices and in conse- 
 quence many liars and apologists for lies among the 
 Greeks, but there were also teachers who saw the 
 truth. "I will not stain speech with a lie" says Pin- 
 dar. "The genuine lie," declared Plato, "is hated
 
 Truth: No Lie Justifiable 19 
 
 by all gods and men." "That man has no fair 
 glory," writes Theognis, "in whose heart dwells a 
 lie or from whose lips it has once issued." Pro- 
 fessor Lamberton, in commenting on the tragedy of 
 Philoctetes by Sophocles, asserts that the plain teach- 
 ing of the tragedy is that ' 'the purposes of heaven are 
 not to be served by a lie." And Aristotle seems to 
 think that the greater the reason for telling a lie the 
 more certain the true man will be not to tell it ; ' 'for 
 the lover of truth," he says, "who is truthful when 
 nothing is at stake, will yet more surely be truthful 
 when there is a stake: for he will [then] shun the 
 lie as shameful, since he shuns it simply because it 
 is a lie." And the heathen peoples with all their 
 lying and justification of lies, have had teachers who 
 saw that they were wrong. The sacred books of Hin- 
 duism explicitly approve, as some Christian theolo- 
 gians have done, of lies when the liar thinks the cir- 
 cumstances warrant, but even among the Hindus 
 there is also a higher conviction. They have a say- 
 ing that "The sin of killing a Brahman is as great as 
 that of killing one hundred cows, and the sin of kill- 
 ing one hundred cows is as great as that of killing 
 a woman, and the sin of killing one hundred women 
 is as great as that of killing a child in the womb, and 
 the sin of killing one hundred children in the womb 
 is as great as that of telling a lie." 
 
 When we turn from this ethnic notion to the doc- 
 trine of the Bible we are left in no doubt as to the 
 shame and sin of all lies. The Old Testament law
 
 20 The Marks of a Man 
 
 was unequivocal. "Thou shalt not bear false witness 
 against thy neighbor." "Keep thee far from a false 
 matter." "Ye shall not steal, neither shall ye deal 
 falsely, nor lie one to another." A lie found no place 
 in the code of the Old Testament gentleman. The 
 Psalms reveal that code. They declare that a gentle- 
 man can have no respect for liars. Three times in 
 the 119th Psalm the writer breaks out intensely "I 
 hate every false way." "I hate and abhor lying." 
 The Proverbs indicate what the popular feeling was. 
 It was a sincere contempt for liars, a high admira- 
 tion for the faithful witness who could not be led to 
 lie, a deep assurance that "a false witness shall not be 
 unpunished and that he that uttereth lies shall per- 
 ish" (Prov. vi, IT, 18; xiv, 5, 25; xix, 5, 9). And 
 in one of the sublimest passages in the book, Agur, 
 the son of Jakeh, prays : 
 
 " Two things have I asked of thee ; 
 Deny me them not before I die : 
 Remove far from me falsehood and lies : 
 Give me'neither poverty nor riches ; 
 Feed me with the food that is needful for me." 
 
 The prophets are fierce in their denunciation 
 of those who have made lies their refuge (Isa. xxviii, 
 15, 17), or trusted in falsehood (Jer. xiii, 25), 
 and they pronounce the flying curse of God against 
 him that lies in the name of God, which would seem 
 to mean against him that tells a "justifiable lie," and 
 the curse of God, they declare, will abide in the liar's 
 house and consume it even to the timber and stone
 
 Truth: No Lie Justifiable 21 
 
 thereof (Zech. v, 1-4). If possible the New Testa- 
 ment is fiercer still. Our Lord denounced the devil 
 as the fountain of lies. "The devil," said he, "was 
 a murderer from the beginning and stood not in the 
 truth, because there is no truth in him. When he 
 speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own; for he is a 
 liar and the father thereof." The one terrible in- 
 ternal tragedy in the early Church was the merciless 
 destruction of two liars. It was evident that with 
 whatever else God would be patient, He would not 
 be patient with lies and would not tolerate them in 
 the Church. Paul would allow no trifling with the 
 truth among the churches which he had founded, and 
 he repeated the ancient injunction with fresh sanc- 
 tions, "Lie not one to another, seeing that you have 
 put off the old man with, his doings." A lie would be a 
 relapse into that old man. "Putting away falsehood 
 speak ye truth each one with his neighbor, for ye 
 are members one of another." Even the gentle John 
 grows intense and stern on lies. "!N"o lie," says he, 
 not excepting our modern "justifiable" ones, "is of 
 the truth." And the Bible ends with some terrible 
 pictures of the exclusion from the city of God of 
 the elements that can not possibly be incorporated 
 into the life of that city. "There shall in no wise 
 enter into it anything unclean, or he that maketh 
 an abomination and a lie. . . . Without are the 
 dogs and the sorcerers and the fornicators and the 
 murderers and the idolaters and every one that lov- 
 eth and maketh a lie."
 
 22 The Marks of a Man 
 
 So the heart of man and the "Word of God agree 
 that truth is always right and a lie is always wrong. 
 But I wish to set the matter forth more fully and 
 to show why a lie is never right and can never be 
 right. If this can be done, we shall then realize viv- 
 idly how indispensable truth is as the foundation of a 
 right character. 
 
 The bottom principle in this matter is that God 
 can not lie and that what God can not do He can not 
 authorize man to do for Him. God can take life. 
 He is doing it every day and because it is not morally 
 inconsistent with His character to do so, men acting 
 by God's will can take life also. But God can not 
 lie. Paul declares unequivocally, "God can not lie," 
 and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews says 
 the same thing, "It is impossible for God to 
 lie" (Heb. i, 2; vi, 18). If God could lie He 
 would cease to be a godlike God to us. We can 
 preserve our conception of Him only by believing 
 Him to be the absolute truth. "Truth is," as Dr. 
 Charles Hodge said, "so to speak, the very sub- 
 stratum of Deity. It is in such a sense the founda- 
 tion of all the moral perfections of God, that without 
 it they can not be conceived of as existing." No lie 
 accordingly can be of God, for God can not lie. All 
 lies are outside of God. Where they came from, the 
 Son of God plainly declared. The father of them all, 
 by what euphemisms they may be cloaked, is the 
 devil. 
 
 And just as a lie is inconsistent with the charac-
 
 Truth: No Lie Justifiable 23 
 
 ter of God, so is it inconsistent with the character 
 of man, for that ought to be an utterance of the char- 
 acter of God. Nothing should be allowed in it ex- 
 cept what is in the plan of God for it, and God who 
 can not lie can not have provided a place for lies in 
 the lives of men. Any man, accordingly, "who vio- 
 lates the truth sins against the very foundations of 
 his moral being. As a false God is no God," says 
 Dr. Hodge, "so a false man is no man ; he can never 
 answer the end of his being. There can lie in him 
 nothing that is stable and trustworthy and good." 
 
 On any other basis than that of absolute truthful- 
 ness the very foundations of human confidence, of 
 man's trust in man, are dissolved. The allowance of 
 the principle of falsehood by the recognition of the 
 justifiableness of any lie, as Dr. Thornwell said, 
 "would obviously be the destruction of all confi- 
 dence." You hold that a lie is sometimes justifiable. 
 How can I know when you think it is ? The circum- 
 stances may be such as to lead me to feel that at 
 whatever cost or pain to you, you owe me the truth 
 and you may think that they are such as to warrant 
 you in lying to me. This transfers the moral founda- 
 tions of society from solid principle to the utterly 
 precarious and unreliable basis of individual caprice, 
 and will often substitute /falsehood springing from 
 cowardice for the solid and unshifting and coura- 
 geous truth. 
 
 And it is not only from human intercourse that 
 the foundations disappear. They are dissolved be-
 
 24 The Marks of a Man 
 
 neath all knowledge of nature. All science rests on 
 the axiom that there is an inviolable and sacred truth 
 and that nature is veracious and will not lie, and 
 that when we have got at the truth we have it and 
 not something that may be equivocated and toyed 
 with: All true scientists are seekers for the truth, 
 who would scorn to deceive and who hold the truth 
 to be absolute and supreme. Mr. Huxley is no model 
 man, but his son describes some characteristics that 
 ought to be felt to be model when he sets forth "that 
 passion for veracity which was perhaps his strongest 
 characteristic, an uncompromising passion for truth 
 in thought, which would admit no particle of self- 
 deception, no assertion beyond what could be veri- 
 fied ; for truth in act, perfect straightforwardness 
 and sincerity, with complete disregard of personal 
 consequences for uttering unpalatable fact. Truth- 
 fulness in his eyes was the cardinal virtue, without 
 which no stable society can exist. . . . The 
 lie from interested motives was only more hateful to 
 him than the lie from self-delusion or foggy think- 
 ing. ... In his mind, no compromise was pos- 
 sible between truth and untruth." Leonard Huxley 
 quotes also in his life of his father an extract from a 
 journal of an acquaintance of his father, who writes 
 of having dined with him at a family party. "Much 
 lively discussion was carried on on the subjects of 
 truth, education, and women's rights. Our hostess," 
 
 says the journal, "Lady - , was, if possible, 
 
 more vehement and paradoxical than her wont, and
 
 Truth: No Lie Justifiable 25 
 
 vigorously maintained that truth was no virtue in 
 itself but must be inculcated for expediency's sake. 
 The opposite view found a champion in Professor 
 Huxley, who described himself as 'almost a fanatic 
 
 for the sake of truth.' Lady suggested that 
 
 truth was often a very selfish virtue and that a man 
 of noble and unselfish character might lie for the 
 sake of a friend, to which some one replied that after 
 a course of this unselfish lying the noble character 
 was pretty sure to deteriorate, while the Professor 
 laughingly suggested that the owner had a good 
 chance of finding himself landed ultimately in 
 Botany Bay. The celebrated instance of John Ingle- 
 sant's perjury for the sake of Charles I. was then 
 brought forward, and it was this which led Professor 
 Huxley to say that in his judgment no one had the 
 right passively to submit to a false accusation, and 
 that 'moral suicide' was as blameworthy as physical 
 suicide. 'He may refuse to commit another, but he 
 ought not to allow himself to be believed worse than 
 he actually is. It is a loss to the world of moral 
 force which can not be afforded.' ' What gave Mr. 
 Huxley his enormous influence was this fanaticism 
 for veracity. There can be no knowledge without it. 
 But the allowance of the legitimacy of untruth is 
 not only fatal to knowledge, it is, as Huxley con- 
 tended, anti-social. It disintegrates association and 
 pollutes the organization of men into societies. This 
 was Paul's view. He forbade falsehood and required 
 absolute truth each man with his neighbor, on what
 
 26 The Marks of a Man 
 
 ground ? Because "we are members one of another." 
 I have argued that any untruth is immoral on per- 
 sonal grounds, but it is also illegitimate for social 
 reasons. "Truthfulness," acknowledges one who yet 
 is misled in this matter, "is owed to society as essen- 
 tial to its integrity. It is the indispensable bond of 
 social life. . . . The liar is rightly regarded as 
 an enemy of mankind. A lie is not an affront against 
 the person to whom it is told, but an offense against 
 humanity." All lies are treason to society. 
 
 And to advance but one other consideration, not 
 only is a lie inconsistent with the character of God 
 and with human integrity, destructive of the founda- 
 tions of human confidence, of all knowledge and of 
 organized society, but we could not conceive of Christ 
 as lying. "How," asks Dr. Dorner, "shall ethics 
 ever be brought to recommend the duty of lying, to 
 recommend evil that good may come ? The test for 
 us is whether we could ever imagine Christ acting in 
 this way." And all noblest men we could not longer 
 deem noble, if we knew that they deemed the duty 
 of truth only a relative duty and felt entitled to de- 
 termine when they might indulge in a lie. The great 
 heroes like Stonewall Jackson and Chinese Gordon 
 made no place for lies or untruth of any sort in their 
 ethical convictions. Jackson's biographer, Colonel 
 Henderson, of the British army, speaks of "his 
 rigid respect for truth," which "seemed to strengthen 
 the impression that he was morbidly scrupulous. If 
 he unintentionally made a misstatement even about
 
 Truth: No Lie Justifiable 27 
 
 some trilling matter as soon as he discovered his 
 mistake, he would lose no time and spare no trouble 
 in hastening to correct it, 'Why in the name of 
 reason,' he was asked, 'do you walk a mile in the 
 rain for a perfectly unimportant thing ?' 'Simply be- 
 cause I have discovered that it was a misstatement, 
 and I could not sleep comfortably unless I put it 
 right.' ' "If you tell the truth," wrote Gordon to 
 his sister, "you have infinite power supporting you ; 
 but if not, you have infinite power against you. The 
 children of kings should be above all deceit, for they 
 have a mighty and a jealous Protector. We go to 
 other gods, Baal, etc., when we lie; we rely on 
 other than God. We may for a time seem to humbug 
 men but not God. It is indeed worldly silliness to 
 be deceitful. . . . O ! be open in all your ways. 
 It is a girdle around your loins, strengthening you 
 in all your wayfarings." It is the fearless and ex- 
 ceptionless veracity of such men which gives them 
 their power. To the men of acknowledged highest 
 character no lie is justifiable. They do not gird their 
 loins with deceit. In their inward parts is truth. 
 
 Now all this would seem to make out an un- 
 answerable case for absolute veracity as the sacred 
 and inviolable principle of character, and yet there 
 are and have always been those who, while of course 
 condemning falsehood and praising truth, yet argue 
 that lies are sometimes justifiable, and thus qualify 
 the value of the one fundamental and determining 
 principle of life by subjecting it to the caprice and
 
 28 The Marks of a Man 
 
 liability of error of individual feeling and judgment. 
 This is to open the possibility of substituting the 
 sinuous for the straight in the government of life. 
 "The more," says Gordon, "we act from principle 
 and not from feelings, the straighter is our course." 
 It is not necessary here to trace the history of the 
 debate over the question of the justifiableness of lies 
 of necessity, so called; that is, lies which it is 
 easier or seems more kind and helpful to tell than 
 the truth, lies where falsehood is regarded by the 
 liar as likely to accomplish more good than the truth. 
 Dr. Trumbull's little book reviews the long discus- 
 sion of the ages. So far as religions are concerned, 
 while followers of all religions may be found on both 
 sides of the question, the Christian religion stands on 
 one side over against the non-Christian religions on 
 the other. Christianity will tolerate no lies at all. 
 Mohammed provided that to women, to save life and 
 in war, lies are permissible, and Krishna, the Hindu 
 , god, in the Mahdbarata, declares that five kinds of 
 lies are sinless, those told in connection with mar- 
 riage, lies for the gratification of lust, lies to save 
 one's life and to protect one's property, and lies for 
 the sake of a Brahmin. Those who believe that some 
 lies are right are in good heathen company and they 
 have a good category of sinless lies already estab- 
 lished to which they can add their further specimens. 
 If any one likes this company, well and good, or 
 rather ill and bad. It is the kind of company which 
 Jesus vigorously denounced as devilish.
 
 Truth: No Lie Justifiable 29 
 
 But let us consider the matter temperately. 
 When do men think that lies are justifiable ? I once 
 asked twenty-five boys a series of questions about a 
 boy's intellectual and moral ideals. Some of the 
 boys were such representative types as are found at 
 the Hill School at Pottstown and the Hotchkiss 
 School at Lakeville. Some were respectable boys of 
 poor homes downtown in New York City. Some 
 were little boys in well-to-do homes in a New Tork 
 suburb. Poor and rich, good and bad boys were in- 
 cluded. Among the questions asked were, "Do you 
 think a lie is ever justifiable ? If so, when ? If not, 
 why not ?" Each boy wrote out his answers alone 
 without suggestion and without the knowledge of the 
 other boys. Ten boys answered the question as to 
 whether a lie was ever warrantable, with a clean 
 "]STo." One shirked the problem and one said, "I 
 do n't know," and thirteen believed that on certain 
 occasions a lie would be justified. The boys who 
 answered in the negative gave such reasons as these : 
 "A lie is never justifiable," said an eighteen-year-old 
 boy, "because when one is told even on a trivial mat- 
 ter or as a joke or jolly, as it is said, it is very likely 
 to lead to worse ones; and we know all great sins 
 begin by some small sin in a passing matter, which 
 grows and grows until it is more than we can con- 
 quer. All things begin from small matters and grad- 
 ually take root until they are so deep that they can 
 not be extracted." "This has troubled me," said an- 
 other, "as I used to think that a lie was justifiable if
 
 30 The Marks of a Man 
 
 it kept pain from those we love. But I see that it is 
 not justifiable, for the discovery of the lie would 
 only bring more sorrow." "No," answered a third 
 clear-souled boy, "because a lie is a lie and morally 
 wrong in whatever way it is looked at." A fourth 
 replied, '-'I think a lie is never justifiable, for as*soon 
 as one tells the slightest lie, if only in fun, it is just 
 so much easier for him to tell another and worse one." 
 "No, under no circumstances," said another, but 
 added the confession, "I often find it hard to live up 
 to my convictions." "I do not think it is ever justi- 
 fiable to lie," another reasoned, "because if you get 
 out of a thing in this world by lying, it is very tem- 
 porarily, and it is a sin to lie and will have to be 
 answered for again to God at the Judgment-day. If 
 you think you can help some one else out of trouble 
 by lying, or will put them in trouble by telling the 
 truth, do n't answer anything or tell the truth and 
 take the consequences ; for the penalty will not be as 
 hard to pay in this world, no matter what it is, as it 
 will be in the next world." I shall cite but one other 
 reply of those averse to lying. It is stated with a 
 boy's candor. "No, a lie is never right, for you are 
 always found out and you almost never feel half as 
 well after it." 
 
 On the other hand, what do the boys say who 
 think that there are circumstances which justify a 
 lie ? The views of boys in this matter will be a fair 
 statement probably of the views of men, with less 
 sophistication and confusion. "A lie is right," says
 
 Truth: No Lie Justifiable 31 
 
 one boy, "only in a case where your life may depend 
 upon it, or the lives of others." "Never," says a 
 second, "unless in a case of life and death where the 
 truth might kill an ill person, and when by telling 
 the opposite [what makes the boy timid about saying 
 frankly a "lie" ?] the shock might be averted and 
 kept until the person gets well." "Although I do n*t 
 believe in the principle that the end justifies the 
 means," says a third, "yet I think there are times 
 when a lie may do a great deal of good. Consider 
 the implied lie or deceit of the good person in Les 
 Miserables, after his guest had stolen his spoons or 
 silver. In such a case a lie, it seems to me, would 
 be all right." "Sometimes," says a fourth, "to 
 shield a friend and undergo the penalty at one's own 
 risk." A fifth looks at the matter in the same way. 
 Unselfishness warrants falsehood, he thinks. "I do 
 not think it is right to lie in behalf of one's self, but 
 I am afraid I should lie if I could save a comrade 
 from severe trouble." A sixth says, "Yes, I do 
 [think a lie justifiable] when if you tell the truth 
 you compromise some one near or dear to you, or a 
 schoolmate." "Yes," says another and explains, "If 
 one person was very sick in a family and another 
 member of the family died, if the sick person should 
 ask if the other had died, I think that any one would 
 be justified in saying, ~No !" The other boys answered : 
 "In war." "Not under ordinary circumstances. If 
 you can save some one else and not commit yourself 
 it is right." This boy believes in unselfish lying
 
 32 The Marks of a Man 
 
 provided it is not too expensive. "If an unharmful lie 
 should save a person's life, it would be proper." 
 "When you do it for some one else, never for your- 
 self." "To save a country." 
 
 It is an interesting fact that the two small boys 
 from poor homes on the west side downtown in New 
 York, were both against lies, one "Because it is not 
 manly," and the other, "Because it is wrong." Their 
 code of manliness and of morals was higher than that 
 of some of their age who lived higher uptown. The 
 elevation of a man's ethical standards is not always 
 the same as the elevation of his social position. 
 
 The answers of these boys cover very well the 
 various circumstances and conditions which appear 
 to some men to warrant an element of unveracity in 
 life. Let us frankly and as dispassionately as possi- 
 ble consider these. But first as to Les Miserables. 
 In speaking there of Sister Simplice as never hav- 
 ing told even a white lie, Victor Hugo quotes a letter 
 from the Abbe Sicard to his deaf mute pupil, Mas- 
 sieu, saying, "Can there be such a thing as a white 
 lie ? An innocent lie ? Lying is the absolute of evil. 
 Lying a little is not possible. The man who lies 
 tells the whole lie. Lying is the face of the fiend and 
 Satan has two names he is called Satan and Lying." 
 Victor Hugo later represents Sister Simplice as lying, 
 but the Abbe Sicard's counsel stands none the less. 
 
 Now when is a lie justifiable, in the view, that is, 
 of those who think that it can ever be ? "To save a 
 life," men and boys reply. "One's own life or the
 
 Truth: No Lie Justifiable 33 
 
 life of another." The martyrs of course thought 
 otherwise. "It is in our power," said Justin Martyr, 
 "when we are examined, to deny that we are Chris- 
 tians, but we would not live by telling a lie." A 
 certain self-confessed liar and legally convicted adul- 
 terer of our day, who wears his hair long and pro- 
 fesses art and conducts a snippet of a periodical, says 
 that the martyrs showed a lack of humor in dying 
 for the truth, when a trivial lie would have saved 
 them. The martyrs, however, looked at both false- 
 hood and adultery from a different point of view 
 from this creature's. There were two things which 
 are yet one, the impurity of a lie and the lie 
 of impurity, which they were entirely ready to pro- 
 test against with the supreme protest of their death. 
 Lying for another's life rather than for one's own 
 differs only in the matter of the element of unselfish- 
 ness which is Introduced. But an unselfish purpose 
 does not remove or replace the lines of moral cleav- 
 age between right and wrong. To forge for a friend 
 is as criminal as to forge for one's self. The Jesuit- 
 ical principle asks no more than the advocates of the 
 unselfish lie grant. But "a lie is not allowable," as 
 Augustine said, "even to save another from injury." 
 And he asks whether if it is right to damn our souls 
 by a lie for the sake of the bodily advantage of 
 others, we are also to be ready to commit adultery 
 and other sins for their good. 
 
 I trust that if any of you have wondered at the 
 line of thought I have been following you will now 
 3
 
 34 The Marks of a Man 
 
 begin to see how fundamental it is. The same princi- 
 ple which lets a single lie into life opens the door to 
 everything. Of course everything will not follow, 
 but anything may follow. There is no logical safe- 
 guard. The only absolute, secure, and rational prin- 
 ciple of a right life is the unqualified truth. 
 
 It may be a hard proposition to face lie or let 
 a friend die, but, as we shall see, the dilemma is 
 purely an imaginary one, and even if it were real, 
 the only right choice is truth at any cost Jeanie 
 Deans had an original, Helen Walker, and Scott 
 erected in his garden a monument to her memory, de- 
 claring "she would not depart a foot's breadth from 
 the path of truth, not even to save her sister's life" 
 but she saved it by other and legitimate sacrifices. 
 Our difficulty here springs from our entirely er- 
 roneous standards of value. We consider life the 
 greatest treasure. But life is not our richest pos- 
 session. Life is not to be held as the one thing for 
 which all else must be sacrificed. Men die for their 
 honor, for their country, why should men not die for 
 the truth ? The truth is more than any man's honor. 
 Nay, rather his only honor is in the truth and the 
 love of it even unto death. We exaggerate the value 
 of life and we exaggerate the horror of death. "I 
 feel so strongly that death is not an evil to man," 
 said Chinese Gordon, "that, if I thought the shooting 
 of any number of slave-dealers would be of avail in 
 stopping the slave-trade, I would shoot them without 
 the least compunction, though if a slave dealer was
 
 Truth: No Lie Justifiable 35 
 
 ill and it was in my power to cure him, I would do my 
 best to do so." But our contemptible theory is that 
 a man must live. The devil held that a man would 
 sacrifice anything for the sake of his life, and the 
 world at times seems to have gone over to the devil's 
 view as ethically correct. He has always regarded 
 a lie as entirely legitimate and sees no reason what- 
 ever why men should not lie for a life's sake. But 
 men do not need to live. A moral code which rests 
 upon this idea for its foundation is rotten, and to 
 surrender the truth which is divine and eternal for 
 the sake of a life, our own or another's, is to choose 
 the devil instead of God and to pollute the springs 
 of the life that is saved at such a cost. There are 
 some contemptuous modern verses on such a view 
 which are not too scornful. 
 
 " A man must live ! " We justify 
 Low shift and trick to treason high, 
 A little vote for a little gold 
 To a whole senate bought and sold, 
 With this self-evident reply. 
 
 But is it so? Pray tell me why 
 Life at such cost you have to buy? 
 
 In what religion were you told 
 
 " A man must live?" 
 There are times when a man must die. 
 
 Imagine for a battle cry 
 From soldiers with a sword to hold, 
 From soldiers with the flag unrolled, 
 
 The coward's whine, this liar's lie, 
 " A man must live I" 
 
 A lie is not justifiable merely to save life.
 
 36 The Marks of a Man 
 
 But it is said, in war surely a lie is justified by 
 the moral conscience of the whole world, and if thus 
 in one case a lie is right, you can not establish a 
 principle of absolute exclusion against the legitimacy 
 of justifiable falsehood. Undoubtedly if one lie is 
 right, many are, and some people, any people who 
 wish to do so, will be able to justify any lie they de- 
 sire to tell. But war does not furnish any warrant 
 for falsehood. No honorable man would lie in war. 
 A flag of truce is most sacred. A parole is held re- 
 ligiously inviolate. Of course flags of truce have been 
 abused by liars and paroles have been broken, but the 
 moral sense of the world abhors such enormities. 
 War introduces standards and moral conceptions of 
 its own, but the one thing which it does not touch is 
 the sacred principle of the truth. Every brave and 
 honorable soldier would scorn to lie or to use false- 
 hood, or to tolerate it in friend or foe. 
 
 The favorite plea in behalf of the justifiable lie, 
 however, is drawn from the work of the nurse and 
 the physician. The doctor is held to be justified in 
 lying to his patient when he thinks that his lie may 
 hasten or procure the patient's recovery. Now in 
 the first place, no life is worth a lie. What is morally 
 wrong, inconsistent with the character of God, and 
 destructive of society and morals, can not be made 
 right by its use even to save life. And in the second 
 place, falsehood is a pathological expedient whose 
 effects are utterly incalculable. Suppose the patient 
 to whom a doctor lies recovers, it is absolutely impos-
 
 Truth: No Lie Justifiable 37 
 
 sible to show that it was due to the lie. Suppose 
 that a patient to whom a doctor tells the truth dies, 
 it is absolutely impossible to show that it was due 
 to the truth. In the third place, the assumption that 
 a lie is ever necessary is purely unwarranted. There 
 are a hundred ways of dealing wisely with patients 
 besides the way of falsehood. And in the fourth 
 place, the one man whom we employ from whom we 
 surely have a right to the truth, is the doctor. If 
 I am about to die, and the doctor knows it, I have 
 a right to know it. I do not want any doctor to lie 
 to me about myself or about my family or about any- 
 thing whatever. He has no right to make himself 
 superior to God and to deny to me that which he 
 knows God is affirming. Of all men, physicians 
 ought to be the supreme lovers and tellers of the 
 truth. And the best ones are. In a recent address 
 to the graduating class from the Moses Taylor Hos- 
 pital School for Nurses in Scranton, Pennsylvania, 
 Dr. Fisher, the superintendent of the Presbyterian 
 Hospital in New York City, took up this question. 
 "Be honest," said he, "with your patients and their 
 friends. Very early in the days of my private prac- 
 tice I learned that as a rule men and women meet 
 the great crises of life with firmness and courage. 
 I have witnessed a wonderful calmness and relief in 
 a family when I had revealed that the end of the 
 dear one was near, when suspense and dread had 
 given place to certainty. This point of truthfulness 
 in the face of a crisis is one where a radical differ-
 
 38 The Marks of a Man 
 
 ence of opinion exists. Said one of my medical ac- 
 quaintances, in substance, 'When I was taking my 
 medical course it was impressed upon me that in most 
 critical cases it was unsafe to let the patient know 
 his real condition, and often unwise to let the friends 
 know it, and that when the physician's judgment so 
 decided, any lie which would satisfy for the time 
 being was preferable to the truth. I accepted this 
 and for five years acted upon it. Then I changed 
 my policy and for fifteen years I have been truthful 
 with my patients, and I have found it in every sense 
 better, safer, wiser.' ... A school boy being 
 asked, 'What is a lie ?' said 'a. lie is an abomination 
 to the Lord and a very present help in time of 
 trouble.' Not bad when we consider that the 'pres- 
 ent' quickly ends while the 'abomination' remains 
 long. . . . Help your patients and the friends 
 to look at all contingencies from a common-sense 
 point of view. Believe in their intelligence and the 
 essential strength of human nature to face truth, and, 
 brought face to face with the vital question, 'Be 
 honest' ' This is the sort of ethics a man wants 
 in his doctor. 
 
 And it is the sort of ethics God wants in 
 every man. The doctor who lies when he thinks 
 it is well to do so has entered a school where his 
 thoughts as to when it is well to lie are likely to re- 
 ceive a considerable development, and the same thing 
 is true of every man. If he finds one reason for one 
 lie, he will find another reason for another and there
 
 Truth: No Lie Justifiable 39 
 
 is no absolute guarantee that he will not be able to 
 find a reason for any lie he has a sufficiently strong 
 motive for telling. And all wrong conduct is just 
 falsehood in act. If falsehood in word is admitted 
 as sometimes warranted, falsehood in act will be also, 
 and if one falsehood in act is justifiable, justification 
 can be found without difficulty for anything, and in 
 consequence the man who adopts this philosophy and 
 who wishes to do so can carry it as far as he will 
 and relax any of the sanctions of morality which he 
 finds irksome. If any lie is right, then there is no 
 iron principle of unyielding rectitude anywhere in 
 life. This I do not believe for an instant. I believe 
 that the solid and abiding foundation, not to be re- 
 moved or played with or modified or compromised 
 or evaded or relaxed in any way whatsoever is the 
 truth, the truth without qualification, open and void 
 of all deceit. 
 
 This is what we are ever looking for in men. We 
 want to find for our uses men who will be true at any 
 cost and who will serve principle, no matter at what 
 personal price. This is so in every sphere. I do 
 not mean that there are not many who are looking 
 for dishonest servants. The corporation which de- 
 sires to evade the statutes without risking prosecu- 
 tion is looking for lawyers who will be clever and 
 unscrupulous enough to show it how it may attain 
 its ends, but the corporation values these men be- 
 cause it believes they will be true to it. If they de- 
 ceived it as the corporation desires them to deceive
 
 40 The Marks of a Man 
 
 others, it would cease to employ them. And just as 
 a bad client may desire a lawyer who will use bad 
 methods but still be true to his employer, so the pub- 
 lic generally approves the lawyer who will be true 
 to everybody and in all things. For a lawyer to lie 
 is bad legal etiquette. It is also bad morals. Lin- 
 coln would never do it. He would not take a bad 
 cause if he knew it, and he would not lie under any 
 circumstances. 
 
 No, there is no trade or profession in which a lie 
 is a legitimate agency. There are, however, three 
 classes of people to whom the defenders of the so- 
 called lie of necessity or justifiable lie urge that the 
 truth is not owed, insane people, children, and crim- 
 inals. "It is lawful to tell a lie to children or to 
 madmen," said Jeremy Taylor, "because they, hav- 
 ing no power of judging, have no right to the truth." 
 This glorious principle might be more widely ap- 
 plied. In the great enlargement of knowledge almost 
 every man now has special command of some depart- 
 ment where others have no such power of judging 
 as* he. Shall he therefore be at liberty to lie to all 
 who are not capable of judging in his sphere? It is 
 a great pity that good Jeremy Taylor did not de- 
 velop his idea. He wrote two famous books on Holy 
 Living and Holy Dying. He might have added 
 a third on Holy Lying, that is, the proper sort of 
 lying, to little children and to the insane. As to 
 the insane, Dr. Kirkbride, long superintendent of 
 the Pennyslvania Hospital for the Insane, declared,
 
 Truth: No Lie Justifiable 41 
 
 "I never think it right to speak anything but the 
 truth." And as to children, if there is one class of 
 people who should be dealt with with a special and 
 solicitously scrupulous regard for the exact truth, it 
 is children. Of all souls in the world, if there may 
 be distinctions imagined where there are none, chil- 
 dren's souls should be guarded from the damning 
 education of lies. But children and the insane do n't 
 know that they are being lied to! That seems to be 
 the plain sense of Jeremy Taylor's idea. On that 
 basis the only required justification of a lie is that 
 it should be a good one and accomplish the end of 
 deceit 
 
 As to criminals, the difficult cases supposed in 
 which the telling of the truth appears so hard and a 
 lie so justifiable are purely imaginary. Not one 
 person out of a hundred thousand ever faces such 
 problems. And those who adopt the right principle 
 of the truth have a right to expect that they will be 
 saved from such terrible situations, as they undoubt- 
 edly will. Some one asked Mr. Moody once what he 
 would do if he were to get into such and such a sit- 
 uation. "Would n't get into it," was his laconic re- 
 ply. When some one says to us, "What would you 
 say if you found yourself in such and such a predica- 
 ment?" we may likewise reply, "God will never let 
 me get into such a position if I honestly obey His 
 will and follow His principles. If He does, I can say 
 nothing if saying anything would make trouble. 
 And anyhow," we may retort, "I am not obliged
 
 42 The Marks of* a Man 
 
 to worry myself over fictitious situations." In the 
 case of every sin we can imagine conditions in which 
 it will seem to be easier and even more justifiable to 
 commit the sin than to practice the opposite virtue. 
 "There is no moral law," says Tolstoy, "concerning 
 which we may not devise a case in which it is diffi- 
 cult to- decide what is moral : to disobey the law or 
 to obey it." But devised or actual difficulties do not 
 justify us in disregarding the law. Truth in charac- 
 ter is the hardest and not the easiest thing in the 
 world, but it is because it is so hard and unyielding 
 that it is the one stuff out of which the foundation of 
 character can be built. 
 
 As a matter of fact, it is the very hardness of 
 truth that leads to lies. Men lie solely because of two 
 things, weakness and cowardice. All sorts of 
 philosophical defenses may be set up around the 
 justifiable lie. The sole reason, when we strip the 
 matter naked, is cowardice. Men lie because they 
 are afraid to tell the truth and take the consequences, 
 or to stand up and say, "It is none of your business ; 
 I will tell you nothing," or more politely, "You must 
 trust me to do what I have to do in the way that 
 seems to me right and best. I will tell you nothing 
 but the truth. Now with that assurance let me work 
 the matter out the best way I can." A lie, as Gor- 
 don pointed out, springs from fear. The liar "fears 
 his fellow more than God, and thinks God is so weak 
 as not to be able to help him, if he did tell the exact 
 fact. It really is unbelief or distrust which induces
 
 Truth: No Lie Justifiable 43 
 
 our lies, either spoken or acted." "A lie," says Ba- 
 con, "fears God and shrinks from man." "If it be 
 well weighed," says Montaigne, "to say that a man 
 lieth is as much as to say that he is brave towards 
 God and a coward towards men." All falsehood in 
 a life is evidence of cowardice. 
 
 And all falsehood is not only fear, it is also folly. 
 "Whatsoever convenience may be thought to lie in 
 falsehood and dissimulation," said Tillotson, "it is 
 soon over, but the inconvenience of it is perpetual 
 because it brings a man under an everlasting jealousy 
 and suspicion so that he is not believed when he 
 speaks the truth nor trusted when perhaps he means 
 honestly." To lie is not to gain but to lose influence. 
 It is also the beginning and not the ending of diffi- 
 culty. The man who tells the truth can forget what 
 he has said and be able to repeat it, simply by telling 
 the truth again, but the man who lies has to remem- 
 ber the particular lie he told, and tell that again. 
 The truth is single and unchanging. Falsehood is 
 duplex and shifting and variable. In the deaf and 
 dumb sign language the sign for the truth is a ges- 
 ture indicating a straight line from the lips; the 
 sign for a lie is the representation of a crooked, wav- 
 ering line. The straight line is one forever. The 
 crooked line may be any one of a million. A school- 
 boy once came to me to ask help in his moral troubles 
 and said that his chief difficulty was the habit of ex- 
 aggeration, which was his mother's habit also. Per- 
 haps she had been a believer in Jeremy Taylor's easy
 
 44 The Marks of a Man 
 
 theory of the propriety of lying to children. "I 
 know it is wrong," said the boy, "and also it is so 
 very inconvenient, for I can't remember how I said 
 the thing the first time, when I have to repeat it." 
 Truth alone can make character consistent and give 
 it rest and peace ; for as South, remarked, "there can 
 be no greater labor than always dissembling, there 
 being so many ways by which a smothered truth is 
 apt to blaze and break out." 
 
 And now may we not regard as settled this first 
 and fundamental principle of Christian character 
 that a lie is always wrong and never to be tol- 
 erated, and that character, whether it be great 
 and conspicuous or not, must at least be all 
 true ? I do not say that those who would allow 
 a lie under what they regard as justifying circum- 
 stances do not love the truth and do not recognize 
 that the truth is essential to character. But I do say 
 that logically their position fails to give us what we 
 require. In building character, we need a founda- 
 tion of solid rock. I believe we have this in the 
 truth, but if the truth is not solid, if it has holes in 
 it and may be broken up by men, then we must find 
 something else that will be solid and unalterable. 
 What else is there ? Nothing else than the truth. To 
 believe that it is holy, to have a fanaticism of devo- 
 tion to it, to love it and do it and live it, this will 
 put power and nerve into the weakest men and make 
 us children of men who will not lie, the sons of God 
 who can not (Isa. Ixiii, 8).
 
 Truth: No Lie Justifiable 45 
 
 I said that even if character is not great it must 
 be true, but the one way that character may be great 
 is to be true. This is true of individuals and it is true, 
 as I pray that this University may deeply and in- 
 creasingly realize, of institutions. As 'Edward Thring 
 said at the opening of the Uppingham Schoolroom 
 in 1863, "Something also I would say to the school 
 on the subject of school greatness. I have observed 
 lately no unnatural desire to claim a position among 
 English schools. Now you can not claim it. It must 
 come. Indeed, we are very far from wishing that 
 the school should come forward on the false ground 
 of mere increase of numbers, which may be increase 
 of shame, for a mob is not an army, or of mere 
 identity with other schools, which is not what has 
 made us what we are. Yet be sure there is the means 
 here of being great. Have you so soon forgotten the 
 motto in your head room: 
 
 " ' Self -reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, 
 These three alone lead life to sovereign power?' 
 
 Yes, power must come and there are two ways 
 for it to come. Most of all, and first, the winning a 
 character for truth and true honor. Most of all, that 
 no lie in word or deed, no shams, no underhand de- 
 ceits shall harbor here, nothing that will not bear 
 the light. Let this be the school character, as I trust 
 it is, and fear not, the school is great. . . . Who 
 shall set a limit to the power that goes forth from 
 here ? . . . Why should the prophecy of the lit-
 
 46 The Marks of a Man 
 
 tie that remains be thought a vain dream, the 
 prophecy that a few years yet onwards, and by God's 
 blessing, when men think of their youth, and talk 
 one with another of truth and honor and steadfast 
 work, the name of the school shall rise readily to 
 their lips, and deeds of patient endurance and a char- 
 acter hardly won for quiet, unassuming trustworthi- 
 ness shall fill with honest pride the hearts of those 
 who then shall be able to say, 'And I, too, was at Up- 
 pingham.' Nothing is too great for the power of the 
 truth ?" Or all this can be put in briefer words as 
 a law of life. It is so put in the motto of the Hill 
 School, one of the most high-minded of our secondary 
 schools ; a motto borrowed from St. Paul and cut in 
 the stone above the chancel in the school chapel, 
 " Whatsoever things are true." That is my whole 
 contention to-night. "Whatsoever things are true," 
 none other.
 
 PURITY 
 
 A PLEA FOE IGNORANCE AND HATEED
 
 Heaven knows, when there are so many abuses, we 
 ought to thank a man who will hunt them out. I will never 
 believe that a man has a real love for the good and beauti- 
 ful, except he attacks the evil and the disgusting the 
 f moment he sees it ! Therefore you must make up your 
 ! mind to see me, with God's help, a hunter out of abuses till 
 j the abuses cease only till then. It is very easy to turn our 
 " eyes away from ugly sights, and so consider ourselves 
 refined. 
 
 As long as your friend, or any other man loves the 
 good, and does it, and hates the evil and flees from it, my 
 Catholic creeds tell me that the Spirit of Jesus, " The 
 Word," is teaching that man. MRS. KINGSLEY, "Letters and 
 Memories of Charles Kingsley."
 
 n 
 PUHITY 
 
 THE first essential of Christian character is truth. 
 The second is purity. I am entirely willing to call 
 it innocence. But whether we call it purity or in- 
 nocence or both, it is simply truth in body, mind, 
 and soul. The pure man is the man of truth in his 
 passions, appetites, habits, and will. Purity be- 
 comes at once, accordingly, in a world like ours a 
 matter of attitude toward evil. 
 
 Now there are four different attitudes which we 
 may take toward evil. The first is indulgence. This 
 is the choice of weakness and sin. A young man is 
 tempted, and he is not strong enough to resist, or he 
 does not want to resist, and he plunges in. It is good 
 to see this clearly. There are no other reasons for 
 the course of indulgence in sin but these, cowardice 
 and badness. Every life that dips into this sink does 
 so through feebleness or viciousness. Sometimes 
 young men excuse themselves for indulgence on the 
 pretext that they want to understand life, and that 
 the only way to understand it is to experience it ; but 
 this is not true. Jesus understood life better than 
 any man who has ever lived, and he lived without 
 spot. Furthermore, life is not the good and evil of 
 4 49
 
 50 The Marks of a Man 
 
 the world mixed up and drunk together. It is the 
 good of the world taken in, and the evil rejected. 
 The very purpose of life is to give us a school in 
 which we shall choose and know good, and spurn and 
 despise evil, and its divine end is holiness and beauty. 
 Indulgence, from whatever motive, has the same ef- 
 fect, namely, to tarnish and defile, and thus to de- 
 stroy the very spirit and end of true living. All sin, 
 when it is full grown, bringeth forth death. 
 
 The second is indifference. "I shall not pay any 
 attention to evil," some one says. "I shall just think 
 about what is good, and be busy with that, leaving 
 evil to itself. I do not need to concern myself with 
 it, and any passion against it is bad, so that I shall 
 do best simply to treat it with indifference." This 
 sounds fine, and philosophical. But the fact is, evil 
 is no simple, unsophisticated thing. There is no 
 wickedness or adroit scheme of deception which is 
 unknown to Satan, and he smiles at the brave talk 
 of indifference. He knows he has within the gates 
 allies whom indifference can not detect or expel, and 
 that they will soon play havoc with the dream of a 
 philosophical neglect of evil. The sin that is in our 
 own souls forbids indifference. Indifference, more- 
 over, is no attitude to take toward a foe who is do- 
 ing such incalculable damage in life. One might as 
 well talk of the manliness of the attitude of those 
 who view with indifference all foreign invasion of 
 their soil and destruction of their liberties, or a de- 
 liberate assault in broad day by bandits upon their
 
 Purity: A Plea for Ignorance 51 
 
 homes, killing their women and torturing their lit- 
 tle children. If evil were honorable, then men might 
 let it alone. But its very nature is treachery and 
 deceit, and all it asks is indifference to enable it to 
 cover its attacks. 
 
 The third is ignorance. Once in Eden, the lovely 
 story tells, there was innocence. Alas, that it was 
 ever lost! But it is lost, and the taste of that for- 
 bidden fruit is now in every mouth. No one has 
 escaped it. The little child begins its life in such 
 apparent spotlessness of innocence, that one almost 
 believes it is without the capacity for evil. But sud- 
 denly, however shielded the little life may have been, 
 those who watch it see to their horror that evil has 
 touched it. The knowledge of wrong has come, per- 
 haps the act of wrong itself, and thenceforward the 
 child is participant in the perpetual conflict. No one 
 can escape the knowledge of evil. Yet, so far as it 
 is possible, ignorance is the right attitude to take 
 toward it. Such ignorance is hot weakness, but 
 power, beauty, joy, freedom. Bitter is the day when 
 the needless knowledge of evil creeps into the soul, 
 and thenceforth there are reticences, blushes of 
 shame, concealments, averted eyes, and the misery 
 of a furtive life. It is better for the soul to be free, 
 to have a stock of knowledge so pure and unsullied 
 that to expose it at noonday in a public place would 
 cause no shame. 
 
 The fourth is indignation. However blessedly 
 great our ignorance of evil may be, it can not be ab-
 
 52 The Marks of a Man 
 
 solute. The evil in our own souls, and the terrible 
 evil of our world, force themselves upon us. Let us 
 receive them with indignation. What right have 
 they here, lurking in our hearts and defiling the 
 earth, filling it with shame and sorrow and anguish ? 
 But first in our own hearts. This is the evil to be 
 scorned and defeated first. Unless this is done, what 
 right have we to flame against the evil in others ? 
 When filled with indignation against the evil of our 
 own hearts, and resolutely warring against it, we may 
 justly go out also against the world's evil, and do our 
 part there to resist the devil and to conquer lies. 
 
 Of these four attitudes the principle of purity 
 selects two which it presses upon men of Christian 
 character and requires of them. I propose to speak 
 of these two and what I have to say in behalf of 
 purity may be frankly described as a plea in behalf 
 of ignorance and a plea in behalf of hatred. 
 
 As to the plea in behalf of ignorance the common 
 notion is that no such plea can be made. The popu- 
 lar proverb declares that knowledge is power. But 
 like many other popular proverbs this one is half a 
 truth and half a lie. Sometimes, surely, knowledge 
 is power, but sometimes, as surely, knowledge is not 
 power, but weakness, or death, or worse than death. 
 Whether knowledge is power or not depends upon 
 what the objects of knowledge are. One might as 
 truly say that all eating is strength as to say that all 
 knowledge is power. Some food breeds disease or 
 weakness or death. So likewise some knowledge is
 
 Purity: A Plea for Ignorance 53 
 
 morally suicidal. Toward such knowledge my con- 
 tention is that ignorance is the only manliness. 
 
 If it were appropriate or necessary to take a text 
 for such a plea in behalf of ignorance, I think I 
 should select from many the available words of Paul 
 in his letter to the Romans : "I would have you wise 
 unto that which is good and simple [i. e., innocent] 
 unto that which is evil." No words could present 
 more clearly the great issue between good and evil 
 and the opposite attitudes which Christian men 
 should take up toward them. 
 
 Now men do not like to be driven to sharp al- 
 ternatives and mutually exclusive choices. They like 
 to gloss over the lines of division so as not to have 
 to make decisive choice. But in this matter they 
 can not escape. In his essay, The Witt to Be- 
 lieve, Professor James arranges the options which 
 are offered to men, the choices between conflicting 
 hypotheses or principles, into three groups. The 
 first group is made up of options which are living or 
 dead. "A living option," says he, "is one in which 
 both hypotheses are live ones. If I say to you, 'Be 
 a theosophist or be a Mohammedan,' it is probably 
 a dead option, because for you neither option is likely 
 to be alive. But if I say 'Be an agnostic or a Chris- 
 tian,' it is otherwise," for you are pretty sure, trained 
 as you are, to be one or the other of these. The sec- 
 ond kind of option is forced or avoidable. If you 
 come to where three roads diverge, it is no forced 
 option which faces you between the left and the
 
 54 The Marks of a Man 
 
 right. You may choose the center road, but if there 
 are only two roads and you have to go on, the option 
 is forced. "If I say to you," says Professor James, 
 " 'Choose between going out with your umbrella or 
 without it,' I do not offer you a genuine option, for 
 it is not forced. You can easily avoid it by not go- 
 ing out at all. . . . But if I say, 'Either accept 
 this truth or go without it,' I put on you a forced 
 option, for there is no standing place outside of the 
 alternative. Every dilemma based on a complete 
 logical disjunction, with no possibility of not choos- 
 ing, is an option of this forced kind." And thirdly, 
 options are trivial or momentous. Some options are 
 living and forced which yet are so petty as to be of 
 no consequence. But other options are momentous. 
 "If I were Dr. Nansen," to use Professor James's 
 illustration, "and proposed to you to join my North 
 Pole expedition, your option would be momentous; 
 for this would probably be your only similar oppor- 
 tunity, and your choice now would either exclude you 
 from the North Pole sort of immortality altogether, 
 or put at least the chance of it into your hands. He 
 who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses 
 the prize as surely as if he tried and failed. Per 
 contra, the option is trivial when the opportunity is 
 not unique, when the stake is insignificant, or when 
 the decision is reversible if it later prove unwise." 
 
 Now the choice between good and evil, that 
 is the choice between attitudes toward evil, is a 
 genuine option. It is a living option. No more
 
 Purity: A Plea for Ignorance 55 
 
 vital problem confronts us. Everything for a 
 man hangs on his choice here. It is a forced 
 option. No man can escape a choice. No choice 
 is itself a choice. "He that is not for Me," said 
 Jesus, "is against Me." Every one either de- 
 liberately or unconsciously is arraying himself and 
 defining a position toward good and evil. And it is 
 a momentous choice, the one great choice of life, af- 
 fecting all our intellectual judgments, our tastes, our 
 friendships, our capacities for unselfishness and for 
 service. 
 
 The alternatives are strictly limited and exclu- 
 sive. Men may try to play with both, but it is a 
 futile game. Our Lord always insisted that at bot- 
 tom every man was ruled by one or the other of two 
 contradictory principles. He allowed for black and 
 white, goats and sheep, no neutral tint, no hybrids. 
 However hard it is for us to slice society in two, 
 Jesus says it will be done at the judgment. There 
 will be two groups, not twenty, and every man is in 
 one or the other of these two groups now. 
 
 Under the Old Testament dispensation, the cere- 
 monial law ran a dividing line right across life and 
 all the activities and nourishments and interests of 
 life. Some it pronounced clean and others unclean. 
 Now between many of the things thus separated 
 there was no real difference whatever. God did not 
 deem some beasts and places and acts, which were 
 differentiated by the law, of unequal moral quality. 
 These were kindergarten days. What all this old
 
 56 The Marks of a Man 
 
 ceremonial was set up for was its moral and educa- 
 tional end. God was endeavoring to create the sense 
 of moral distinction, to lead men to see that there 
 are moral choices which are unavoidable, and moral 
 chasms which are unbridgeable, and to drive them at 
 last to a realization of the eternal contradiction be- 
 tween good and evil and of the necessity of utterly 
 divergent attitudes toward them. 
 
 And this option is momentous not alone in the 
 sense that such infinite issues are involved, but also 
 in the sense that in one moment a man's choico may 
 be fixed forever. With never so much acknowledg- 
 ment of the ceaseless mercy and love of God, and 
 the patient love and wooing of Christ, there is still a 
 determinism of character with which no man dare 
 trifle. We may say that we can turn when we wish 
 to turn, but we are making it certain that we shall 
 not really wish to turn. With many doubtless the 
 determination of their choice is spread out over 
 years. Just as surely with many others one decisive 
 act or leaning: settles the whole matter forever. 
 
 "Once to every man and nation comes the moment to de- 
 cide, 
 
 In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil 
 side ; 
 
 Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the 
 bloom or blight, 
 
 Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the 
 right, 
 
 And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and 
 that light."
 
 Purity: A Plea for Ignorance 57 
 
 When the matter is put this way, of course, every 
 gentleman will say at once, "Why to be sure I choose 
 good. Let me be counted on that side." Very well, 
 what then shall be our attitude toward evil? And 
 here I make my plea first for ignorance. There are 
 philosophers who say that we can search for the truth 
 but can never know that we have found it, and that 
 the search is all that we need. I do not hold to that 
 philosophy; I believe that we can get along both 
 without seeking for and without finding evil. It is 
 enough for us to know that it is, without prying into 
 what it is. Toward evil, man is at his highest when 
 he is innocent and pure, when he has nothing to con- 
 ceal. In protesting against gambling and the shame 
 of possessing money acquired by gambling, Phillips 
 Brooks, in his sermon on The Choice Young Man, 
 protests also against all dark things, the possession 
 of dollars whose history can not be told, the posses- 
 sion of knowledge which the sense of shame conceals. 
 "To keep clear of concealment, to keep clear of the 
 need of concealment, to do nothing which he might 
 not do out on the middle of Boston Common at noon- 
 day, I can not say how more and more that seems 
 to me to be the glory of a young man's life. It is an 
 awful, hour when the first necessity of hiding any- 
 thing conies. The whole life is different thence- 
 forth. When there are questions to" be feared and 
 eyes to be avoided and subjects which must not be 
 touched, then the bloom of life is gone. Put off that 
 day as long as possible. Put it off forever if you
 
 58 The Marks of a Man 
 
 can." ~No money whose history can not be told. 
 IS'o knowledge that can not be shared with all 
 the world. 
 
 I believe in such an attitude of ignorance toward 
 evil, first of all because such ignorance is power. Men 
 often justify the knowledge of evil because it is es- 
 sential to influence, as they say, and they advise 
 young men to become personally informed about evil 
 in order to be able to correct it intelligently. As 
 though no physician were competent to set a broken 
 arm who had not first broken his own ! As though 
 no man could put out a fire in his neighbor's house 
 who had not qualified by committing arson in his 
 own! There is a power possessed by the reformed 
 drunkard but no power of experienced sin is as great 
 as the power of innocence that has triumphed over 
 sin. Who is the greatest and mightiest of men ? Who 
 but the One who knew no sin and whom no personal 
 acquaintance with transgression had stained. And 
 the great picture of power is the scene in the Tem- 
 ple when, with eyes aglow and a whip of small cords 
 in His hands, the Incarnate Innocence drove out of 
 His Father's Temple the hucksters who made it a 
 place of merchandise and a den of thieves. The little 
 child has ever been and is the master of the world. 
 He holds the supreme power in his holy hands. Evil 
 men pause and bow before the might of his inno- 
 cence. It is not the man who has gone down and 
 filled his memory and imagination with the pictures 
 of evil, much less the man who has scarred body and
 
 Purity: A Plea for Ignorance 59 
 
 soul with the deeds of evil, who has the truest secret 
 of strength. It is Sir Galahad : 
 
 " My good blade carves the casques of men, 
 
 My tough lanco thrusteth sure, 
 My strength is as the strength of ten 
 Because my heart is pure. " 
 
 It is not the bad man, nor the good man who was 
 bad, nor the good man who was never bad but who 
 knows about badness, who is the strongest man, but 
 the good man v, r hose heart is clean. 
 
 In the second place such ignorance is mental free- 
 dom. Evil sticks to the mind with a tenacity that 
 is simply devilish. The man who deliberately en- 
 larges his stock of knowledge of evil is passing him- 
 self under slavery. What evil we have to meet in 
 the path of clear duty we may confidently expect 
 God to enable us to meet without harm to our souls. 
 He will surround us with such protection and so im- 
 munize our memories against contagion as to bring 
 us out of such contact with evil unpolluted. But 
 no man can gain the knowledge of evil out of pruri- 
 ent or idle curiosity without bearing the marks of 
 it and feeling forever its tyranny. I knew of a man 
 once who was doctor on a reform-school ship in New 
 York Harbor. There were 300 boys and they knew all 
 evil, some of the officers did not live in their thoughts 
 on a plane very far above the boys. What he heard 
 there, he told me, though it was years before, clung 
 to him so that it was perpetual battle with him to 
 counteract anji annul those memories by pure and
 
 60 The Marks of a Man 
 
 holy thoughts. It had been duty to him on the ship 
 and he was not subdued by what had fastened on 
 him in the way of his duty, but it was duty sur- 
 rounded by devilish difficulties. I knew another 
 man who was urged once to go down and see the 
 seamy side of life in New York. He went. A 
 friend who was a newspaper man showed him what 
 there was to see. I asked him when he came back if 
 it had been a good experience. It had been such an 
 experience, he told me, as he would gladly give a 
 hand to obliterate. But the knowledge was his now 
 and he could not rid himself of it. That is the mis- 
 chief about memory. The harder we try to forget, 
 the more tenaciously does the detested object cling. 
 A man can not will to forget. That is equivalent to 
 willing to remember. There is no supremer folly 
 than to think that we can acquire knowledge and 
 then be as free as we were before. All knowledge 
 binds, and the needless knowledge of evil not only 
 destroys power, it imposes slavery. Mr. Kipling has 
 put it in a song : 
 
 " To the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the 
 
 damned, 
 
 To my brethren in their sorrows over seas, 
 Sings a gentleman of England, cleanly bred, machinely 
 
 crammed, 
 And a trooper of tho Empress, if you please. 
 
 " We have done with Hope and Honor, we are lost to Love 
 
 and Truth, 
 
 We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung, 
 And the measure of our torment is the measure of our 
 
 youth, 
 God help us for we knew the worst too young 1
 
 Purity: A Plea for Ignorance 61 
 
 " Our shame is clean repentance for the crime that brought 
 
 the sentence, 
 
 Our pride it is to know no spur of pride, 
 And the Curse of Eeuben holds us till an alien land en- 
 folds us 
 And we die and none can tell Them where we died. 
 
 " We're poor little lambs who've lost their way, 
 
 Baa, baa, baa ; 
 We're little black sheep who've gone astray, 
 
 Baa-aa-aa ; 
 
 Gentlemen rankers out on the spree, 
 Damned from here to Eternity, 
 God ha' mercy on such as we, 
 Baa! Yah! Bah 1" 
 
 Ignorance is freedom from all this. Men, young 
 or old, do not need to know the worst, or to feel the 
 slavery which the knowledge of the worst brings. 
 And ignorance is not only freedom from slavery. It 
 is freedom for work. When the mind is loaded with 
 evil knowledge it is incapable of activities and serv- 
 ices for which the pure mind is free. And a free 
 mind, as Channing maintained, is the great good of 
 Christianity and the great essential of Christian 
 manhood. "I call that mind free," declared he, 
 "which masters the senses, which protects itself 
 against animal appetites, which contemns pleasure 
 and pain in comparison with its own energy, which 
 penetrates beneath the body and recognizes its own 
 reality and greatness, which passes life not in asking 
 what it shall eat or drink, but in hungering, thirst- 
 ing, and seeking after righteousness. I call that 
 mind free which escapes the bondage of matter,
 
 62 The Marks of a Man 
 
 \vhich instead of stopping at the material universe 
 and making it a prison wall, passes beyond it to the 
 Author, and finds in the radiant signatures which it 
 everywhere bears of the Infinite Spirit, helps to its 
 own spiritual enlargement. ... I call that 
 mind free which through confidence in God and in 
 the power of virtue, has cast off all" fear but that of 
 wrong doing, which no menace or peril can enthrall. 
 . . . Such is the spirit of freedom which Christ 
 came to give. This is the great good of Christianity, 
 nor can we conceive a greater within the gift of 
 God." But this gift is not for the man who subjects 
 his mind to the knowledge of evil. That is the road 
 away from freedom. And the Christian man must 
 be free, aloof from darkness, ready for God's will. 
 
 "A door clanks loose, the gust beats by, 
 
 The chairs stand plain about ; 
 Upon the curving mantle high 
 
 The carved heads stand out. 
 The maids go down to brew and bake, 
 And on the dark stairs make 
 
 A clatter, sudden, shrill 
 Lord, here am I 
 
 Clear of the night and ready for Thy will." 
 
 He who would stand thus, must stand off from evil. 
 Thirdly, I believe in the attitude of ignorance 
 because it alone holds the secret of life's freshness 
 and joy. Men do not believe this. The very reason 
 they go after evil is because of the interest it is sup- 
 posed to give to life. Mere goodness and the simple 
 life and thoughts of goodness they think to be tame
 
 Purity: A Plea for Ignorance 63 
 
 and to need the zest and piquancy to be found alone 
 in the spice of evil. But this is folly. Nothing is 
 more deadly monotonous than evil. It is always the 
 same stale story. In a notable sermon, Dr. W. R. 
 Richards discusses what he calls "the monotony of 
 sin/' and he imagines some ancient Babylonian vis- 
 iting modern New York and being taken about to 
 see the sights. His host shows him the great build- 
 ings and bridges and engineering achievements and 
 the man from the ancient time is filled with wonder 
 and surprise. And then in the evening the New 
 Yorker, who had reserved the exhibition of sin in 
 its most seductive and fascinating guise to crown the 
 day, is non-plussed when the Babylonian yawns and 
 exclaims, "O, there is nothing new here. We had 
 all this in Babylon three thousand years ago." In- 
 deed there is nothing new in sin. Its new forms are 
 simply revivals of old forms. All there is in sin was 
 in the first sin. It has been a story of stale repeti- 
 tion ever since. 
 
 The silly vice of profanity illustrates itKe monot- 
 ony of sin. Men begin to swear as an enrichment 
 of the vocabulary. But nothing so contracts and im- 
 poverishes human speech. After a little while the 
 profane man becomes the slave of a dozen oaths, per- 
 haps of only one or two. All the emotions which his 
 soul feels, all the judgments of his intellect, have to 
 be expressed in those few words. I have a friend who 
 says that he knows a setter dog who has more differ- 
 ent ways of expressing emotions and ideas with his
 
 64 The Marks of a Man 
 
 tail than some men have with all the resources of 
 the English language at their disposal. The knowl- 
 edge of profane speech is the surest way to the loss 
 of freshness and richness of language. 
 
 And there never was a worse devil's lie than the 
 declaration that sin is novel and interesting and viva- 
 cious. All the variety there is in sin is in the first 
 act of sin. The freshness goes then and all the rest 
 is stale and dreary. In a little volume of poems by 
 George Arnold, who was a writer in New York in 
 the Civil War days, are some lines entitled The 
 Lees of Life, which tell wearily enough the tale of 
 the emptiness and insipidity of the knowledge which 
 young men so often think is so invitingly interesting 
 ai>d entertaining. 
 
 "I have had my will, 
 
 Tasted every pleasure, 
 I have drunk my fill 
 
 Of the purple measure, 
 Life has lost its zest, 
 Sorrow is my guest, 
 
 O, the lees are bitter, bitter! 
 Give me rest! 
 
 Love once filled the bowl, 
 Running o'er with blisses, 
 
 Made my very soul 
 Drunk with crimson kisses, 
 
 But I drank it dry, 
 
 Love has passed me by, 
 O, the lees are bitter, bitter I 
 
 Let me die!" 
 
 Because life ought to be rich and ever fresh and 
 new, I believe in ignorance of evil.
 
 Purity: A Plea for Ignorance 65 
 
 And in the fourth place, it is ignorance of evil 
 which gives life its beauty and sweetness. There is 
 a sad beauty in the ruined life which has been re- 
 deemed and which in the memory of its past waste 
 and evil goes softly all the rest of its days, but no re- 
 claimed soul can ever have the beauty which lies as 
 a holy glory over the life of a little spotless child. 
 Would the Temple have been lovelier if it had once 
 been a brothel ? I remember well the words which 
 stood over the pulpit recess in the old Pennsylvania 
 church to which I went as a boy. "Holiness becom- 
 eth Thine House, O Lord, forever;" not fragment- 
 arily. And the temple of God which we are is 
 not made fairer in God's eyes or man's by first pol- 
 luting the walls with evil adornments and then cov- 
 ering them over with holiness. God will take his 
 men broken and defiled if He can not get them other- 
 wise, and He will do the best He can with them by 
 forgiveness and strength, but 
 
 " Yes, Thou forgivest, but with all forgiving 
 Canst not renew mine innocence again." 
 
 Let us seek to keep that innocence, the purity of 
 flesh of the little child, the gracious honesty of whole- 
 ness, uncorroded and unstained. 
 
 And lastly, I argue in behalf of the attitude of 
 ignorance that it furnishes the basis of the best and 
 truest fellowship. Coming down the China Sea 
 some years ago on a coast-trade steamer, I sat at the 
 dinner table in the saloon one evening after every 
 5
 
 66 The Marks of a .Man 
 
 one else had gone up on deck, talking to the chief 
 officer. He pushed his tobacco and whisky bottle and 
 some soda across to me and cordially invited me 
 to share them with him. When I thanked him and 
 declined, he looked up in a frank, cordial way and 
 said, "Now, Mr. Speer, I hope you won't mind my 
 saying so, but I don't feel on an entirely friendly 
 and common basis with a man until he drinks and 
 smokes with me." Well, that is one view, that the 
 roots of human fellowship and of intellectual com- 
 munion run into the stomach. But the fellowship 
 that has no higher sanctions and communities than 
 a common taste for a particular brand of whisky or 
 tobacco rests on very precarious grounds. Human as- 
 sociations ought to be lifted to the highest and holiest 
 planes and men should have higher relationships than 
 those which spring from mere animal desire. The free 
 mind is above them. And men should shrink from 
 the fellowship which resides in the common knowl- 
 edge of evil, the enjoyment of foul stories, the sing- 
 ing of low songs. The story told of Coleridge Patte- 
 son shows how the true man will feel and act. It 
 was at the annual dinner of the cricket eleven and 
 the eight of the boat at Eton. "A custom had arisen 
 among some of the boys of singing offensive songs 
 on this occasion," says his biographer, "and Coley, 
 who as second of the eleven stood in the position of 
 one of the entertainers, gave notice beforehand that 
 he was not going to tolerate anything of the sort. 
 One of the boys, however, began to sing something 
 objectionable. Coley called out, 'If that does not-
 
 Purity: A Plea for Ignorance 67 
 
 stop, I shall leave the room/ and as no notice was 
 taken he actually went away with a few other lads. 
 He afterwards found that, as he said, 'fellows who 
 could not understand such feelings thought him af- 
 fected,' and he felt himself obliged to send word to 
 the captain that unless an apology was made, he 
 should leave the eleven no small sacrifice, consider- 
 ing what cricket was to him; but the gentlemanlike 
 and proper feeling of the better style of boys pre- 
 vailed, and the eleven knew their own interests too 
 well to part with him, so the apology was made, and 
 he retained his position." A somewhat similar and 
 quite familiar story is told of General Grant. In 
 one of the Virginia campaigns he and his staff were 
 gathered one evening in a country farm-house, the 
 officers about the fire and Grant a little removed 
 with his chin on his breast, sitting in silence. The 
 officers were telling stories. Presently one of them 
 said, "I have a very good story to tell," and then to 
 indicate what was coming he added, "I think there 
 are no ladies here." There was an expectant ripple 
 of laughter, in the midst of which General Grant 
 looked up and quietly remarked, "No, but there are 
 gentlemen here." The story was not told. Do we 
 need argument to show us that gentlemen must be of 
 clean hearts, that the less of evil they know the 
 broader is the basis of noble fellowship among them ? 
 It is the pure in heart who are to see God, and it is 
 the pure in heart who are to know what the richest 
 friendship is among men.
 
 68 The Marks of a Man 
 
 It may be that there are some who will assent to 
 all that has been said but who will reply sadly, "Alas, 
 our sorrow is that we know. We wish we were in- 
 nocent again. Is there no hope for us ?" Yes, thank 
 God, there is. Jesus Christ came to this end. If in 
 living faith in Him, the man who is bound under the 
 evil knowledge will go off alone and pray in secret 
 to the Father who heareth, he can find that which 
 he seeks, and that will take place in him which took 
 place in Naaman the Syrian who went down a leper 
 as white as snow and dipped himself seven times in 
 the Jordan and his flesh came upon him again as it 
 had been the flesh of a little child. 
 
 I need not add a word to what I have said, I 
 hope, in further justification of a plea in behalf of 
 that ignorance of evil which is power and freedom 
 and freshness and beauty and the secret of fellowship. 
 And what has been already implied of the deadly 
 effects of too close acqaintance with evil, will war- 
 rant, I believe, my going on to make a further plea 
 in behalf of hatred of evil as an essential of Chris- 
 tian character. It is as easy to find a text for this 
 as for the plea for ignorance. "Be ye angry," says 
 Paul. "There is a time to hate," says the preacher. 
 
 It was said of Arnold of Rugby by his worshiper 
 and biographer, Dean Stanley, that "no one could 
 know him even a little and not be struck by his abso- 
 lute wrestling with evil and, with the feeling of God's 
 help on his side, scorning as well as hating it." 
 Some people have the feeling that this was a heathen
 
 Purity: A Plea for Hatred 69 
 
 strain in Arnold, or that at any rate it was more 
 akin to the religious feeling of the Old Dispensation. 
 There was undoubtedly a great deal of this in the 
 Old Testament. The wrath of Moses at Dathan and 
 Abiram when at his word, in the name of Jehovah, 
 the ground opened and swallowed them up with their 
 families, Samuel hewing Agag to pieces before the 
 Lord in Gilgal, Elijah with the prophets of Baal at 
 the holocaust of Kishon, theser are only a few of the 
 many illustrations of noble anger with which the Old 
 Testament abounds. It is a mistake to suppose that 
 the essential principle of such anger at sin was of 
 the old order and was done away by Christianity. 
 Wrath at sin is part of those eternal Christian prin- 
 ciples which were before the Old Testament and will 
 be after the ISTew. For the Bible presents to us pic- 
 tures not of human wrath only but of the noble anger 
 of God. He is not conceived as passive and emo- 
 tionless, "to whom no sound of human sorrow mounts 
 to mar His sacred everlasting calm." He is a God of 
 divine love of right and divine scorn of wrong. The 
 same evangelist who speaks of God's wonderful and 
 sacrificial love, speaks also of "the winepress of the 
 fierceness of the wrath of Almighty God." And so 
 also in God in Christ we see no tame and neutral 
 heart. He was -the lowly and meek and gentle one. 
 But we read also that "He looked round with anger" 
 on malice and hypocrisy, as any noble, not to say 
 divine soul, must. He Himself declared that He 
 had come not to send peace but a sword. Among
 
 70 The Marks of a Man 
 
 His last great words were words of hate of evil and 
 insincerity (Rev. ii, 6). And the great day of 
 Avrath upon the world is to be the day of the wrath 
 of the Lamb (Rev. vi, 16, 17). 
 
 I think we must allow that Christianity has in 
 it a- place for hatred. And Christianity not only per- 
 mits, it fosters wrath. Love involves hatred. To 
 support the principle of good necessitates antagonism 
 to the principle of evil. Christianity is the greatest 
 love producing power in the world, because it is also 
 the greatest fountain of godly wrath. It was the 
 rich development of both qualities in Christ that 
 gave Him uniqueness. "Thou hast loved righteous- 
 ness and hated iniquity," quotes the writer of the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews, from the 45th Psalm. 
 " Therefore God, thy God, hath anointed Thee with 
 the oil of gladness above Thy fellows." Religion 
 does not suppress our right feelings of love and 
 hatred. It intensifies them. The Christian spirit 
 never asks the Lotus Eater's question, 
 
 " What pleasure can we have to war with evil ?" 
 
 The very end of life is character and service, which 
 require war with evil. The difference between 
 Luther and Erasmus was precisely this. Luther 
 blazed and struck. Erasmus shut down his passion 
 and forebore. "I have always been cautious," said 
 he; "I would rather die than cause a disturbance. 
 . . . When we can do no good we have a right 
 to be silent. A worm like me must not dis-
 
 Purity: A Plea for Hatred 71 
 
 pute with our lawful rulers. . . . We must bear 
 almost anything rather than throw the world into 
 confusion. There are seasons when we must even 
 conceal the truth." But this was not the Christian 
 manhood speaking. There are times when that man- 
 hood rebels righteously against easy-going tolerance 
 and soft indulgence and promiscuous assent, and 
 despises moderatism and moral inaction. "I do not 
 shrink," said Cardinal Newman in his Apologia, 
 of the conditions of his day in England, "I do not 
 shrink from uttering my firm conviction that it would 
 be a gain to the country were it vastly more super- 
 stitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in 
 its religion than at present it shows itself to be." 
 This is not irreligious. It is true religion. 
 
 And Christianity not only allows and fosters 
 hatred. It provides it with definite objects. It pro- 
 vides them first of all in a man's own life and will; 
 and especially that sin which exalts a man's kinship 
 to the beasts, which drags into the open the sacred 
 things and fills the open places with secrets, which de- 
 files life in its holy possibilities; that sin (I do not 
 need to describe it more) which makes it impossible 
 for a man to give what he gets on his wedding-day. 
 This is a hateful thing. It is not a thing to be con- 
 doned as natural and necessary. "All men fall," said 
 a man to me not long ago. That was a coward's lie. 
 This sin of impurity should be despised and detested. 
 Do you mean to tell me that Christianity provides for 
 the comfortable, philosophical tolerance of such an
 
 72 The Marks of a Man 
 
 affront to God and to all women and to Christian 
 manhood ? ~No, God means it to be loathed. And 
 Christianity bids us hate also the sin of ingratitude. 
 The meanest of men is the ingrate. I knew once of 
 a man whose mother was toiling and sacrificing to 
 put him through college. He was aping the ways of 
 the dilettanti, the men of wealth and ease. And he 
 evaded the subject of mothers. One of our best 
 papers published some time ago an editorial on "The 
 Meanest Man I ever Knew." He was the man like 
 my man. Are such qualities to be smiled upon, or 
 good humoredly endured as necessary human foibles ? 
 Kot if we have got the Christian character in us. 
 We will look upon such things with contempt and 
 will express it. And Christianity has always des- 
 pised that most un-Christlike spirit of selfishness 
 which leads a man to shirk his share. These things 
 we are positively to hate, and to hate them first of 
 all in ourselves, where we will find them either in 
 the development or in the capacity. After we have 
 hated them there we can hate them elsewhere, only 
 then. 
 
 " Thou to wax fierce ! In the cause of the Lord ! 
 Anger and zeal and the joy of the brave, 
 Who bade thee to feel, sin's slave?" 
 
 All the things hated by God, the great hater, we, too, 
 are to hate, all evil devising, all false oaths (Zech. 
 viii, IT), all lying (Prov. xiii, 5; Psa. cxix, 104), 
 all vain thoughts (Psa. cxix, 113), but most of all, 
 all uncleanness, which is simply falsehood in the
 
 Purity: A Plea for Hatred 73 
 
 mind and flesh. Jude bids us to hate even the gar- 
 ments spotted so. 
 
 Ignorance is not enough here, for ignorance is 
 impossible. We have the knowledge forced on us 
 daily. We have to hate. "I have seen him," writes 
 one of his friends of Eobertson of Brighton, "grind 
 his teeth and clench his fists when passing a man 
 who he knew was bent on destroying an innocent 
 girl ;" and he himself writes when he was accidentally 
 reminded of an experience of his own, "My blood 
 was at the moment running fire, and I remembered 
 that I had once in my life stood before my fellow 
 creature with words that scathed and blasted, once 
 in my life I felt a terrible might; I knew and re- 
 joiced to know that I was inflicting the sentence of 
 a coward's and a liar's hell." Perhaps some of us 
 have seen similar justifications of the highest Chris- 
 tian wrath. I had a friend in an Eastern university 
 who was a man of singular sweetness of character 
 and of a childlike innocence. Another man in the 
 same fraternity with him deliberately set to work to 
 ruin him and destroy what could never be replaced 
 in him and in several other members of his frater- 
 nity. That is the kind of man and that is the kind 
 of brotherhood for which anything short of wrath is 
 too tame. The Christian character views such things 
 with angry and unconcealed scorn. 
 
 Blessed is it for us that the religion which kindles 
 these hatreds is also able to restrain them. It not 
 only kindles and nourishes our wrath, it also sets
 
 74 The Marks of a Man 
 
 limits to it by forbidding any anger because of per- 
 sonal dislike or of any selfish feeling or offense, by 
 fixing our wrath on principles not persons, and by 
 checking us short of sin. "Be ye angry," says Paul, 
 "and sin not" 
 
 I have read of Joshua Leavitt, one of the found- 
 ers of the New York Independent, that once as he 
 sat in his office he was visited by a man whom he 
 had known for many years but had not seen for a 
 long time, a man who had connected himself with 
 a free-love community in the State of New York and 
 had espoused vices which filled Leavitt with disgust. 
 As he turned about in his chair and saw who his 
 visitor was, Leavitt blazed forth on him. "Sir," 
 shouted he, "I abhor you, I abhor you, I abhor you !" 
 I do not think that there was an un-Christian hatred 
 of a human soul here. There was a great Christian 
 scorn for the diabolical principles which had pos- 
 sessed the soul. It will doubtless sometimes be hard 
 to make any distinction, especially when the bad 
 principles seem to have entirely permeated the soul, 
 but the Christian heart will find a way to love what 
 is to be loved, while at the same time it hates what 
 is to be hated. 
 
 The Christian character needs this wrath against 
 sin for its protection. We can not positively love 
 good, and negatively play with evil or gloss evil over 
 or live as though it were not. I have made my plea 
 for an ignorance of evil as full as possible, but be- 
 yond those limits the right attitude, the only safe at-
 
 Purity: A Plea for Hatred 75 
 
 titude for men, is positive indignation. When bid- 
 den to govern our lives by our admirations rather 
 than our disgusts, we must reply that the strength 
 of our admirations determines the power of our dis- 
 gusts, and that we are just as strong to love good as 
 we are strong to hate evil. We are made for war, 
 and evil is our foe. We end in inanity or tea-party 
 poesy if we are not as vigorous in our opposition to 
 wrong as we are enthusiastic in our devotion to 
 right. It was sadd of Robertson, that he com- 
 bined "hatred and resistance of evil and a rever- 
 ence and effort for purity." There is no safety or 
 protection elsewhere for us. The man is in peril 
 who has no vitriol save rose-water to sprinkle on sin. 
 Evil will eutwit him if he thinks that he can stroke 
 it on the back and make it purr, and too late he will 
 wish that he had played the man with man's worst foe. 
 The very love of the highest demands the scorn 
 of the lowest. We love truth as we hate lies. We 
 rise by tramping something down, 
 
 " By the things that are under our feet, 
 
 By what we have mastered of good and gain, 
 By the pride deposed and the passion slain, 
 By the vanquished ills that we hourly meet. " 
 
 And this is the only way that we ever do rise. If we 
 are too gentle to stamp on anything we shall have 
 to 'forego the glory of any ascent. This is the law of 
 the soul's growth and of all moral victory. "Good" 
 is our weapon, but we are to use it as warriors and 
 to overcome evil with it. We are indeed to draw
 
 76 The Marks of a Man 
 
 nigh to God, but we are to do it by resisting the 
 devil. Always the Scriptural appeal is the appeal 
 of sound sense and of Christian manhood. "Hate 
 the evil and love the good," "Abhor that which is 
 evil, cleave to that which is good." Christian char- 
 acter must be as hot in the one as in the other. 
 
 And a righteous and fierce wrath against evil is 
 not only the protection of the Christian character, 
 it is also a source of power to it. Mr. R. H. Hutton, 
 in one of his essays, remarks concerning Martin 
 Luther, that "he never did anything well until his 
 wrath was excited and then he could do anything 
 well." Christianity is not a girlish thing. Maurice 
 complained that this was the character da Vinci put 
 into the face of John in his fresco of the -Last Sup- 
 per. But John was no weak and insipid character. 
 In early years he earned, with his brother, the name 
 of Boanerges, and both Epistles and Apocalypse 
 show the rich strength of his soul's deep wrath. 
 
 In lukewarmness, in listlessness, in any want of 
 heat there is no power. Strength belongs to the hot- 
 hearted men, the men who make onslaughts, the men 
 who are not afraid to speak out as the Psalmist 
 spoke: 
 
 " Hot indignation hath taken hold upon me, 
 Because of the wicked that forsake Thy law. 
 I hate every false way. 
 I hate them that are of a double mind ; 
 I hate and abhor falsehood. 
 Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? 
 And do I not loathe those that rise up against Thee? 
 I hate them with perfect hatred. "
 
 Purity: A Plea for Hatred 77 
 
 And he who spoke this was not afraid to go on and 
 say with fearless probity of soul : 
 
 " Search me, God, and know my heart: 
 Try me and know my thoughts : 
 And see if there be any wicked way in me, 
 And lead me in the way everlasting." 
 
 These are the words of the strong man contemptuous 
 of evil and ready to pay the price of his contempt. 
 
 This is a long way from boasting, or from that 
 cheap warfare against evil which is vocal alone. 
 Keal hatred runs deep and the quiet man feels it 
 most. A friend told me recently of a meeting with 
 Chinese Gordon. It was at a hotel in Brussels. 
 Gordon was there discussing with the King of Bel- 
 gium the matter of his going out to take charge of 
 the Congo Free State. The history of that State 
 would have been very different if he had gone. In 
 the midst of the negotiations came the call to the 
 Soudan, and he went off to his death. My friend 
 told me that he was a very quiet little man, of de- 
 liberate speech. The whole world knows that he was 
 accustomed to "make good." And Gordon was a man 
 of wrath. He spoke out his scorn without fear and 
 resigned one position, as secretary to Lord Ripon, 
 Viceroy of India, because he felt the incongruous 
 impossibility of tying himself down into the conven- 
 tions of a place that allowed no room for wrath 
 against wrong. He was not accustomed to go armed 
 even in war, but after the capture of Soochow in
 
 78 The Marks of a Man 
 
 the Tai-pdng rebellion, he got a revolver and hunted 
 for Li Hung Chang, who had lied to him and killed 
 men whom Gordon had promised to spare. Happily 
 for the Chinaman, Gordon did not find him. I 
 imagine he was glad afterwards that he did not, but 
 I suspect that he was always glad that he went and 
 hunted for him, that his heart was hot at deception 
 and massacre. 
 
 And now if I seem to any of you to have put the 
 matter with too much heat, may I ask you to think 
 of the reasons we have for hating evil and sin. Think 
 of the homes it has destroyed, of the souls it has 
 damned. Think of the fair, pure lives it has ruined. 
 Think of all the suffering of little children it has 
 caused, of the pain and tears and anguish. Its flags 
 of truce have been only a cover for its treachery. It 
 has poisoned the wells of life. It has spoken pleas- 
 antly only to get near enough to stab fatally in an 
 unsuspecting hour. Look out over your own ac- 
 quaintance and in upon your own life, and when you 
 have recalled the deadly and horrible consequence of 
 the evil you yourselves have seen, tell me whether 
 your hearts are still cool and temperate. God's is 
 not. It is hot with indignation, and it can not stay. 
 Christ's was not. Ablaze with a holy love, ablaze 
 with a holy wrath, the terrible wrath of the angered 
 Lamb, the Son of God, for the sake of men and at 
 the cost of His life, flung Himself upon sin to tear 
 from it its sting. Are you and I to feel toward evil 
 otherwise than these have felt?
 
 Purity: A Plea for Hatred 79 
 
 There is a simple little prayer which the boys 
 in two of our best preparatory schools are taught to 
 say, which may well express the hard but necessary 
 lesson which I have been urging here: "0 God, 
 whom none can love except they hate the thing that 
 is evil, and who wiliest by Thy Son, our Savior, to 
 redeem us from all iniquity, deliver us when we are 
 tempted to look on sin without abhorrence and let the 
 virtue of His passion come between us and the 
 enemy of our souls, through the same Jesus Christ 
 our Lord. Amen." 
 
 The Christian character speaks in this prayer.
 
 SERVICE 
 
 THE LIVING USE OF LIFE
 
 If you care to give your class a word directly from me, 
 say to them that they will find it well, throughout life, 
 never to trouble themselves about what they ought not to 
 do, but about what they ought to do. The condemnation 
 given from the judgment throne most solemnly described 
 is all for the undones and not for the dones. People are 
 perpetually afraid of doing wrong ; but unless they are doing 
 its reverse energetically, they do it all day long, and the 
 degree does not matter. The Commandments are neces- 
 sarily negative, because a new set of positive ones would be 
 needed for every person : while the negatives are constant. 
 RUSKIN, " Arrows of the Chace." 
 
 Major-General Charles George Gordon, C. B. 
 
 who at all times 
 and everywhere gave his strength 
 
 to the weak, 
 
 His substance to the poor, 
 His sympathy to the suffering, 
 
 His heart to God. 
 Inscription in St. Paul's Cathedral.
 
 Ill 
 
 SERVICE 
 
 AN endless debate can be opened over the ques- 
 tion as to whether we do what we do because we are 
 what we are, or are what we are because we do what 
 we do. On the one hand we are told in the trite quo- 
 tation from Emerson, that what we are speaks so loud 
 that what we say can not be heard. On the other 
 hand, we are assured that what we are is a mere by- 
 product of what we do and say. Character and serv- 
 ice are set off one against the other. It is the fault 
 of self-centered culture that it should be so. The 
 men who call character a mere by-product are sim- 
 ply trying to correct the injurious effects of a strong 
 tendency among educated men, to forget the duty of 
 public and private ministry to others and of partici- 
 pation in the humble life and work of the world. 
 When men make their own soul's life the supreme 
 thing, it is necessary to force upon them with what- 
 ever emphasis, the truth that the soul's life is found 
 in its death, and that a man is here not to be minis- 
 tered unto but to minister, and that he had better 
 lose his soul saving his brethren, which happily in a 
 moral universe he can not do, than keep it at his 
 brother's loss. 
 
 83
 
 84 The Marks of a Man 
 
 In Christian manhood there is no conflict be- 
 tween character and service, for service is one of the 
 essentials of character. Service is the man of truth 
 and purity spending himself upon the just uses of 
 life, namely the uplifting of life and the making of 
 men. We have the best ground for regarding this as 
 the supreme service, the real purpose of life. 
 
 When our Lord called His first disciples, He did 
 not promise to make them great or rich or famous, 
 nor did He at the first say anything about making 
 them better or happier men. He simply offered to 
 make them useful. "If you will come after Me," 
 He said, "I will give you influence. You shall catch 
 men." 
 
 There was a noble tribute in Jesus' method to 
 the unselfish capacities of human nature. He evi- 
 dently expected that the men to whom He made this 
 proposition would respond to it, and He got what 
 He expected. There is a great principle of charac- 
 ter and service here. Many men disappoint us be- 
 cause we expect them to. In all work for men the 
 more we count upon from them, the more unselfish- 
 ness they feel we trust them to show, the better re- 
 sults we shall secure from them. In foreign mis- 
 sion work many a native Church is weak and depend- 
 ent and unheroic simply because nothing else has 
 been expected of it. Many a reformed drunkard at 
 home has undone his reformation because he was ex- 
 pected to undo it. And one reason why some men 
 who have committed crime once have gone on and
 
 Service: Living Use of Life 85 
 
 become habitual criminals, is that society has ex- 
 pected that the act would become a habit and has be- 
 haved toward them accordingly. Again and again 
 men did even the impossible under Jesus' encour- 
 agement that they could. And this miracle was not 
 confined to Jesus' day. An excellent recent hand- 
 book on Japan closes appropriately with two lines 
 from Conington's translation of Vergil : 
 
 " These bring success their zeal to fan ; 
 They can because they think they can." 
 
 Our Lord believed that the prospect He held out 
 would draw men, the kind of men He needed and 
 the world needed. He was confident that no other 
 inducements were required. The issue justified His 
 faith. With no offer of money, or honor, or ease, 
 with the frank assurance that instead there would 
 be poverty and shame and peril and death, He still 
 got His men and gave the w r orld its salvation, by 
 the inducement of the opportunity for unselfish per- 
 sonal influence. 
 
 This was Christ's ideal and method for Himself. 
 There were no limitations in God, prescribing the 
 form which the Incarnation should take. Jesus 
 might have been born in any social level or in the 
 way of any natural advantages. He might have 
 come as the son of Csesar, as a man of wealth, or as 
 a master of organization. He rejected all these 
 forms of influence and deliberately subjected him- 
 self to conditions which deprived Him of any method
 
 86 The Marks of a Man 
 
 of action except simple personal influence. This is 
 the last thing we should have descended to in His 
 place. One of the first things we would do in set- 
 ting out to undo all wrong and establish all right- 
 eousness would be to enlist legislation and the forces 
 of government which make legislation operative. We 
 must change the order of society, we maintain. 
 Jesus would have nothing whatever to do with poli- 
 tics. He discouraged every effort to politicalize His 
 mission, and He entirely divorced His method from 
 every suspicion or possibility of political entangle- 
 ment. Next to the conviction that without legisla- 
 tion nothing of a radical or adequate character can 
 be done, is our modern axiom that money is indis- 
 pensable. We speculate on the power of wealth to 
 produce moral and spiritual reforms. We make 
 plans for the extension of the Kingdom of God, 
 which need only wealth behind them to revolutionize 
 the world. With wealth, we say, unconsciously alter- 
 ing a great saying of Christ's, nothing is impossible. 
 Indeed the logic of our attitude often would drive us 
 to complete the parody: "With God it is impossible, 
 but not with money; for with money all things are 
 possible." Jesus never spoke thus. Such ideas 
 never entered His thought. Money in any capacity, 
 least of all as a method of influence, was of no inter- 
 est to Him. His references to it are usually con- 
 temptuous. The idea of using gold to alter char- 
 acter and to make dead men live, would have seemed 
 pitiful to Him. As for organization, which is the
 
 Service: Living Use of Life 87 
 
 third great reliance of our day, that, too, He treated 
 with a silent indifference. Our great generals and 
 engineers and merchants and statesmen to-day are 
 the organizers, the men who arrange men and class- 
 ify them and fix their grades and orders and swing 
 them as a mechanism. Jesus, however, was not a 
 mechanic in this sense. He had earned his bread by 
 a trade, but religion was not a trade to Him. He 
 was not a drill-master nor a manipulator of men. 
 When His disciples urged Him. to set up some sort 
 of organization and assign them their place in it, He 
 refused, and He died at last without having done 
 anything whatever to assure the permanence of His 
 movement by organization. 
 
 Now legislation and wealth and organization are 
 all legitimate and noble agencies for the accomplish- 
 ment of right ends. Men act with propriety when 
 they seek to subordinate these forces to the ends of 
 the Kingdom of God. All I urge here, however, is 
 that Jesus did not do so. He was neither a political 
 nor a financial figure. He just went about in a sim- 
 ple fashion, talking to people, telling them His ideas, 
 giving help here and there in a tender, sympathetic 
 way, doing good generously but by no means indis- 
 criminately, laying out His life upon any responsive 
 life He could find, "catching men," to use His own 
 expression, and catching them not in multitudes or 
 by great orations, but in quiet individual ways ; and 
 then He died and that was the end of it. Was that 
 the end of it ? Indeed that was only the beginning
 
 88 The Marks of a Man 
 
 of it. We see now that what was going on so quietly 
 and unostentatiously there in a secluded corner of 
 the Roman Empire, was the greatest upheaving 
 movement of all history. 
 
 And this ideal of personal service, of influence 
 by life, of the silent ministry to men by contact and 
 love and helpfulness, which was the method of Jesus. 
 He commended to others. He sought to teach it to 
 His disciples. His aim was to impart to them His 
 secret, not in any external or mechanical way, but by 
 putting His own life and spirit into them. He longed 
 to see a society established whose members should 
 be one in as vital a sense as the branches of the vine 
 are one, with all the members serving one another 
 and serving the world. And this ideal of service by 
 life and of life to the end of life, is what I mean by 
 service as an essential of Christian character, the 
 use of life as a free personal force for the molding 
 of other lives. 
 
 It is objected to this as a principle and 
 method of life that it is so nebulous and intangi- 
 ble. Building bridges, preparing briefs, performing 
 operations, are all rational and effective activities, 
 but simply befriending a man, or teaching him the 
 truth or winning him to God and to duty, this is so 
 indefinite and invisible that many men decline to 
 evaporate their lives in such ways. Even when this 
 objection is not consciously put it is often uncon- 
 sciously felt, and men turn nowadays away from the 
 sort of service Christ worked with, to something less
 
 Service: Living Use of Life 89 
 
 nebulous and obscure. It is worth while considering 
 carefully this attitude of mind as we meet it, the 
 disinclination to the immaterial and the inconspicu- 
 ous, the depreciation of the service and services most 
 exalted by Christ. 
 
 We meet the idea in the objection sometimes 
 made to a great man, that he was of obscure origin, 
 as though that were a sort of disproof of his great- 
 ness, or if not that, yet an unimportant background 
 against which his successful life stands out as the 
 truly significant life of the man ; whereas, as a mat- 
 ter of fact, probably what the world calls the man's 
 greatness is something that simply followed as a per- 
 functory corollary on the man's real greatness, 
 which the world never knew anything about, but 
 which characterized the obscure and the inconspicu- 
 ous years. 
 
 We sometimes hear the same sort of criticism 
 made against great movements. I have heard Chris- 
 tianity objected to on the ground that it rests- on such 
 obscure beginnings, and we are told that we should 
 be wiser than to lay the foundations of a world-em- 
 bracing faith like Christianity on such precarious 
 origins, origins so little noted by the world at the 
 time, and regarding which we have such very slender 
 historical testimony even now. This objection 
 against one great movement, however, is an objection 
 against all history; against all unrecorded history, 
 which is made up of a great mass of unnoticed 
 things ; and against most recorded history, the larger
 
 90 The Marks of a Man 
 
 part of which has to do with what was obscure and 
 inconspicuous, and only at last flared out into some- 
 thing spectacular and great. 
 
 And this objection against history is an objection 
 against life, for life itself is the most inconspicuous 
 and obscure and unnoticed thing in the world. It is 
 the one thing that nobody ever yet got hold of. No 
 microscope ever caught it ; no surgeon ever had knife 
 sharp enough to cut to it ; no biologist ever found it, 
 nor has any chemist ever separated it; and no eye 
 ever looked upon it; and it works in perfect quiet- 
 ness, so that nobody every heard it. And yet we all 
 know that the most powerful thing in this world, the 
 only thing after all that amounts to anything, is this 
 same obscure, inconspicuous, undiscoverable life. It 
 seems to me that thoughts like these ought to sug- 
 gest to us the great principle, that perhaps after all 
 the things that we call big and important do not 
 amount to so much, and that possibly the greatest 
 things in the world are the inconspicuous and the 
 obscure and the unnoticed things, alike in the his- 
 tory of the world, in the forces that mold it, and in 
 the making up of the characters of individual men. 
 
 Assuredly, as we look back over the past, the 
 great forces that have molded it have been the incon- 
 spicuous and unnoticed forces. There is a fine pas- 
 sage in one of Cardinal Newman's Parochial Ser- 
 mons on The World's Great Benefactors, in which 
 he begins by speaking of our ignorance of most of 
 the really great men :
 
 Service: Living Use of Life 91 
 
 " Our lesson is this: that those men are not necessarily 
 the most useful men in the generation, not the most favored 
 by God, who_make the most noise in the world^ and who I 
 seem to be principafs in the great changes and events re- 
 corded in history ; on the contrary, that even when we are 
 able to point to a certain number of men as the real instru- 
 ments of any great blessings vouchsafed to mankind, our rel- 
 ative estimate of them, one with another, is very often er- 
 roneous ; so that, on the whole, if we could trace truly the 
 hand of God in human affairs, and pursue His bounty as 
 displayed in the world, to its original sources, we must un- 
 learn our admiration of the powerful and distinguished, our 
 reliance on the opinion of society, our respect for the de- 
 cisions of the learned or the multitude, and turn our eyes 
 to private life, watching in all we read or witness for the 
 true signs of God's presence, the graces of personal holiness 
 manifested in His elect ; which, weak as they may seem to 
 mankind, are mighty through God, and have an influence 
 upon the course of His providence, and bring about great 
 events in the world at large, when the wisdom and strength 
 of the natural man are of no avail." 
 
 And then he goes on to ask who it was that first 
 domesticated the animals that now serve man alike 
 for burden and for food, who it was that first culti- 
 vated the great articles of food at their beginning, 
 and who were the great inventors of most of those 
 benefits which are helpful to the world, and the dis- 
 coverers of most of those remedies which have re- 
 lieved men in their times of sickness and disease. 
 
 Now and then we know the name of some man 
 who has been boastful enough to attach his name to 
 his achievement, but as a matter of fact most of the 
 great achievements of the world are untagged. We 
 say of this or that great discoverer, "He was the first
 
 92 The Marks of a Man 
 
 man to look on those lakes." Perhaps so, or perhaps 
 he was the first man who published it. Long before 
 ever that man looked on the lakes other men had 
 been there who took out their pay in the joy of hav- 
 ing done the thing. Or we say about this man, "He 
 made this great discovery," but long before he made 
 it some other man had thought of it, had worked 
 over it in his way, and simply failed to claim the 
 world's praise for what he had done. You remem- 
 ber how Kipling puts the spirit in The Pioneer: 
 
 "Well I know who'll take the credit, 
 All the clever chaps that followed ; 
 Came a dozen men together, 
 Never knew my desert fears ; 
 Tracked me by the camps I'd quitted, 
 Used the water holes I'd hollowed. 
 They '11 go back and do the talking ; 
 They'll be called the pioneers." 
 
 But all the while the real pioneer had done his work 
 and done it, like a man, in the dark 
 
 And you can think of the service of the world on 
 a higher level than this. Who was the first man who 
 ever said "truth" or "virtue" or "manliness" or 
 "'courage" or "self-sacrifice ?" There must have been 
 a time when no man heard those words. Who was 
 the man who coined them, and, more than that, first 
 thought those thoughts? There must have been a 
 time when first in all human thinking a man dreamed 
 the great dream of patriotism, or heroic self-sacrifice, 
 or began to think about truth and virtue and faith. 
 Who was that man ? We look back over the history
 
 Service: Living Use of Life 93 
 
 of the world, and \ve can see, even with our short 
 sight, that the biggest things that have been done in 
 the world were done in inconspicuousness and ob- 
 scurity, by men who were satisfied to do the thing; 
 may be by great masses of men, each one of whom 
 contributed just a little bit ; and that, after all, the 
 mighty forces that have made the world are not the 
 boasted, the conspicuous forces, but the forces that 
 have worked in obscurity and in silence. 
 
 What I am coming to is just the great principle 
 that perhaps that is true still which has been true 
 of all the past as we look back over it. Perhaps to- 
 day the great forces that are molding the world are 
 not the noisy and the turbulent forces, not the news- 
 papers, not the diplomats, not the governors, far less 
 the thunders of the cannon, but the silent, the incon- 
 spicuous, the unobserved forces. 
 
 One of our most popular statesmen, speaking a 
 little while ago on the deck of an American battle- 
 ship, said that there was no class of the American 
 population which he admired so much, about which 
 he felt so much enthusiasm, as the enlisted men in 
 the army and navy of the United States. But 
 why ? They are doing their work so far as they are 
 fulfilling their duty, but after all, the soldier does 
 his best work for the world, not because he is a sol- 
 dier, but because he is still a man, and the noblest 
 work he does is the work he does, not as a soldier, 
 but as a common man. And the great movements in 
 the world, the forces that are really shaping the na-
 
 94 The Marks of a Man 
 
 tions and determining the whole "future of the world, 
 are not the forces that are making the tumult or the 
 disturbance, but the forces that are doing their work 
 in silence of power. Last winter Mr. John G. Mil- 
 burn, one of the leading lawyers of 3sTew York City, 
 was speaking at a meeting of the Williams Alumni 
 Association regarding the comparative ineffective- 
 ness of the sort of work that public men were doing 
 in the world. He spoke especially of the futility of 
 legislation, of the 'fact that most of the statute books 
 are graveyards of acts that might as well never have 
 been passed at all, and said that these things 
 amounted to almost absolutely nothing in really 
 shaping the world. The great work of the world 
 was done by mothers in the homes, teaching little 
 children; by school teachers in obscure country dis- 
 tricts, shaping the ideals of honor and truth of little 
 boys and girls ; the great work of the world was that 
 done by the moral forces content to work in silence 
 and obscurity. 
 
 Very little thought about history ought to show 
 us the fallacy of our ordinary thinking in this mat- 
 ter. We look back, for example, to those days just 
 before the Reformation, when the whole world had 
 its eyes taken up with the gilt pageantry of history, 
 and when men were watching the coronation of great 
 emperors or the enthroning of great popes. What was 
 the great, the real event that was happening ? Away 
 back in an obscure German village, a miner's wife 
 was bringing forth her firstborn son. The birth of
 
 Service: Living Use of Life 95 
 
 that little German boy, and the influence of that 
 mother's hand on his life and character, as in the 
 humble miner's home at Eisleben she taught him. 
 to despise lies with all his will, and to love purity 
 and honor and justice, that was the great work 
 that marked that mighty century. Out from that 
 obscurity Martin Luther came to change the whole 
 course of history and to shake the world. And it is 
 just so in the world to-day. Some unknown mother, 
 some obscure school teacher, some student working 
 alone with a fellow-student, is doing the great work 
 of this generation in shaping the life or character 
 of the men who are to come out to be the leaders of 
 the people. 
 
 One of the most impressive speeches I ever heard 
 at Northfield was by the late Dean Wayland, of the 
 Yale Law School. He was speaking on Round 
 Top one night of his envy of what he saw and felt 
 at Northfield. He was speaking of his own profes- 
 sion of the law, a profession which he graced and 
 honored, but a profession of which he spoke with a 
 good deal of regret that night, as he measured what 
 he felt to be its possibilities against the mighty pos- 
 sibilities of using a whole life in one of the great 
 moral movements of the world to-day. I remember 
 how Major Robert Stiles, of the Confederate Army, 
 listened to and afterwards took exception to what 
 he said. He was a devout lawyer, and he did not 
 like Dean Wayland's depreciation of their profession. 
 But Dean Wayland stood to his guns, contending that
 
 96 The Marks of a Man 
 
 after all the men that did the world's greatest work 
 were the men who buried their lives supremely in 
 the great moral and spiritual forces that are shaping 
 and transforming the world. These things, the silent 
 activities, the great moral activities, are the forces 
 that dominate and control and give shape to human 
 history. 
 
 If I were not a sort of guerilla preacher, I would 
 go into the regular ministry, because I believe that 
 the ministry of the Church offers to men the finest 
 opportunity open to any man to make his whole life 
 tell in distinctively spiritual service. And if I could 
 not go into the Christian ministry, I think I would 
 be a teacher, because it seems to me that those two 
 professions, with least incumbrance, with least im- 
 pediment, with least secular hindrance, release the 
 whole of a man's moral force upon the moral char- 
 acters of men and women around about him, and 
 give him the opportunity to make his whole self felt- 
 in the way in which a man's life can accomplish 
 most for the good and upbuilding of the world. 
 
 All this ought to bring nearer home to us the 
 great truth of the significance of the inconspicuous 
 and the unobserved. After all, if we would only ex- 
 amine our own lives closely, we should see that it 
 was not the great or the spectacular, the significant 
 or the important thing that had accomplished very 
 much in shaping and giving direction to our lives. 
 Something very little probably determined our choice 
 of college or university. Something very little
 
 Service: Living Use of Life 97 
 
 brought every man of us into the Christian life. 
 Once we begin to examine our lives, we see that prac- 
 tically all the great things of our lives have flowed 
 out of things so small that we have absolutely for- 
 gotten their beginnings. 
 
 Great men have for the most part been shaped 
 and directed by just some such unnoticed and ob- 
 scure thing in their lives. What was it that took 
 James Chalmers, for example, out to the South Seas ? 
 Read his biography and you will find that James 
 Chalmers settled the great question of his life as a 
 boy of twelve in a little Scotch Sunday School. Mr. 
 Mackie,the Sunday School superintendent, read from 
 the United Presbyterian Church Missionary Record 
 a letter from one of their missionaries in the South 
 Sea Islands, and when he had finished the letter he 
 leaned down and looked into the faces of the chil- 
 dren and said, "I wonder if there is a boy here this 
 afternoon who will yet become a missionary." Like 
 an arrow those words went to James Chalmers's 
 heart, though he told no one of his determination. 
 Years of recklessness followed, but he never lost that 
 purpose. And James. Chalmers, the dearest char- 
 acter that Robert Louis Stevenson ever met, was 
 what he was and became what he became, and died 
 the martyr death he died only five or six years ago 
 in the South Seas, because as a lad of twelve that 
 single, obscure, unnoticed influence had gone across 
 his life. What was it that took Coleridge Patteson 
 out to the South Seas ? Perhaps the hand of a godly 
 7
 
 98 The Marks of a Man 
 
 old man laid on the head of the little English boy 
 as he stood in the hall of his father's house. 
 Bishop Selwyn had been preaching in the church of 
 the neighborhood, and Coleridge Patteson, who was 
 present, was so worked up with enthusiasm for that 
 noble, venerable man, with his heroic career, that 
 he wanted to get up and cry, "God bless him !" Be- 
 fore Bishop Selwyn left he said to Patteson's mother, 
 "Won't you give me Coley?" The memory of his 
 words doubtless went out of Judge Patteson's mind, 
 but the sound of that old man's voice never died in 
 Coleridge Patteson's ears, and years afterwards he 
 went out to'his life in the South Seas, partly, at least, 
 because of the touch of that old man's hand on his 
 boyish life in his father's house. And I suspect that 
 if at the end we look back over our lives, we shall 
 see that thing which has determined our career has 
 been some inconspicuous and obscure and unnoticed 
 incident, so inconspicuous, maybe, that it had slipped 
 entirely out of our memory. 
 
 It is on this ground, this high ground, that ap- 
 peal can be made to men to see the divine significance 
 of the trivial things in their lives. "When saw we 
 Thee?" we shall say to Christ at the last. "Me? 
 Why, you saw Me in college, when you talked with 
 that other man and he offered to you the opportunity 
 of your life. You saw Me that day when you stood 
 face to face with that petty temptation and yielded. 
 You have forgotten all about it, but you settled the 
 destiny of your life in that trivial and unobserved
 
 Service: Living Use of Life 99 
 
 moment." You and I are determining our whole 
 careers by things that appear .now of absolutely no 
 consequence. As I look back over my college course, 
 I can see several great turning points in it. One in- 
 vitation especially I recall, that a man gave me in, 
 Belmonico's after a dinner of what we called the 
 Dramatic Association; it is the Princeton Triangle 
 Club now. I look back now at the declination of 
 that invitation as one of the important points in my 
 college career, and I can see that that simple refusal 
 was the determining of a course of action that was 
 to grow into a habit secure. And it will be just so 
 with many of us. A little surrender in a perfectly 
 trivial thing to the lower nature in us is, after all, 
 the whole abdication. Everything flows from that 
 one petty, trivial, unnoticed defeat. I call you to 
 witness that the very judgment-day at last is to turn 
 on absolutely forgotten trivialities. Christ is going 
 to judge men at that day, not by the big things they 
 did, by the things that have got into their biographies, 
 but by things so small that the men can not even 
 remember them themselves. "When sarw we Thee ?" 
 will be their question. "When did we decide this 
 great issue ? We never knew that we were deciding 
 it." And Christ will say: "Just so, it was on that 
 principle that I organized human life, that every de- 
 cision that men made should be the dominant de- 
 cision, a controlling decision, a decision making its 
 contribution to their character forever and their 
 eternal destiny."
 
 ioo The Marks of a Man 
 
 The thought that some of you will think to-night, 
 after you have lain down on your beds and the lights 
 are out, will be the thought that will give shape and 
 determination to all your character and coming ca- 
 reer. It is not the big thing, the conspicuous thing, 
 the noticed thing, that is the really vital and essential 
 thing in our personal lives; it is the little, trivial, 
 inconsequential thing. You remember how Mr. 
 Moody used to put it in his sharp, epigrammatic 
 way. "Men !" he would say, "Character is what a 
 man is in the dark." Yes, character is what a man 
 becomes in the dark, not what a man becomes out on 
 the stage. There is a sense in which it is true, as 
 Tolstoi says, that a man is just a machine, the dis- 
 charge of a loaded gun the trigger of which has been 
 already pulled. That simply happens which it was 
 foredoomed should happen, and it was foredoomed 
 in the petty and the trivial and the inconsequential 
 and the unnoticed things. That is the reason, it 
 seems to me, a man should keep himself clean. Every 
 time we yield to the sensual taste, however innocent 
 it may appear, we are making our contribution to 
 the strength of the lower life in us, and subtracting 
 from the power of that final character which is the 
 complete subjugation of everything sensual and low. 
 Let the judgment that Christ is to pass upon us at 
 the last, warn us against our failure to behold Him 
 in the trivial and the inconsequential. In that day 
 we shall ask Him, "When saw we Thee?" "Saw 
 Me?" He will answer: "When you lied to that man
 
 Service: Living Use of Life 101 
 
 in your class in college, you lied to Me. When you 
 struck that man on the athletic field, and the umpire 
 was not looking, you struck Me. When you cheated 
 that widow and her children as you were practicing 
 your profession, you were cheating Me. In all the 
 dishonesty and the dishonor and the meanness of 
 your life you were affronting Me. When saw you 
 Me? In absolutely every trial and testing of your 
 life you faced Me." This life of ours, what is it 
 except just the story of our attitude to Jesus Christ ? 
 My bearing to every man is my bearing toward 
 Christ. Every hope and thought and act and prac- 
 tice of mine is a judgment for or against Jesus 
 Christ. In the secrecies of our life we are living 
 against Him or for Him, and at the last we shall be 
 judged in proportion as everything we did was a 
 service of or an affront to the Christ whom we served 
 or spurned in the silences of our lives. 
 
 But it is not only a forbidding and terrible truth 
 that we are confronting here. It is also one of the 
 most consoling truths that can come to a man, that 
 conspicuousness, prominence, the eye of the world, 
 are not essential to his doing a man's work. These 
 things cumber a man. Let a man thank God if he 
 is allowed to live his life in oblivion. The more ob- 
 livion, the more inconspicuousness that a man can 
 surround his work with, the more likely that work 
 is to be powerful and efficient in the world ; for the 
 great service of the world is just the perception
 
 102 The Marks of a Man 
 
 of unperceived opportunity, the vision by men 
 of the Christ whom other men do not see, in the 
 chances and opportunities to which other men are 
 blind. As I have studied the life of Chinese Gor- 
 don, it has seemed to me that it must have been this 
 that gave the distinctive zest and glory to his most 
 attractive character. I suppose there was scarcely 
 any man in his time, or perhaps in ours, who more 
 held the worship of the young men of the world than 
 Chinese Gordon. Huxley used to speak of him as 
 one of the two greatest men he ever met, a man of a 
 sort of divine and superhuman unselfishness. What 
 was it that made him great ? I will tell you. There 
 are three monuments to Chinese Gordon. There 
 is the statue that stands in Trafalgar Square, with 
 the poor, sad face turned towards the help that was 
 not to come. There is that magnificent inscription 
 on the stone in St. Paul's that I suppose many of you 
 have read. x\nd then there is one other monument 
 finer still. It is a life figure of Chinese Gordon 
 seated on a dromedary, planted in what will some 
 day be the center of the city of Khartoum. It is 
 now in the great gardens just back of the palace. 
 And in that great statue the face of Gordon is not 
 turned toward the Nile, by which he might have es- 
 caped ; it is not turned toward Egypt, through which 
 help too late was on its way; it is turned, with the 
 face of the dromedary on which he is mounted, out 
 toward the great desert, whose voice he alone heard, 
 whose opportunities he alone saw. That, as !N"ew-
 
 Service: Living Use of Life 103 
 
 bolt puts it in his lines on Gordon, was the real great- 
 ness of the man : 
 
 " For this man was not great by gold or royal state, 
 By sharp sword or knowledge of earth's wonder: 
 But, more than all his race, he saw life face to face, 
 And heard>he still small voice above its thunder." 
 
 Rising from those black throats there in the Sou- 
 dan, Chinese Gordon heard the voice of- Jesus 
 Christ calling. He will stand at last among those 
 who, in giving to the thirsty, gave water to Christ; 
 in giving to the hungry, gave bread to Christ; in 
 grasping the great unselfish opportunities of his life, 
 served Jesus Christ his Lord. 
 
 And so I make my appeal to you young men and 
 women here to-day. Are you going to choose some 
 half-spiritual, some quarter-moral life-calling, when 
 you have before you the possibility of feeding your 
 life with all its powers into the great moral and spirit- 
 ual movements of the world, those movements that are 
 really shaping and transforming the world ? If you 
 have now a chance to identify your life with one of 
 these, are you going to turn away and deafen your 
 ears to the Christ who is calling, and blind your eyes 
 to the Christ who is standing here ? 
 
 And, after all, what do we know about what is 
 prominent and what is inconspicuous ? We say that 
 a thing is notable, but what do we mean by that? 
 We mean that a few millions of people now think it 
 is notable. What about that great crowd of wit- 
 nesses around us who look down upon all that goes
 
 104 The Marks of a Man 
 
 on here in this world of ours ? How vastly they out- 
 number this little company here whose knowledge of 
 the thing, we say, makes it great and notable ! Our 
 Lord has told us that the day will come when the 
 things whispered in the ear will be proclaimed from 
 the housetop, and when the things spoken in the 
 darkness will be blazed abroad in the light. In that 
 hour, the hidden heart that served Jesus Christ, whom 
 it saw in the unadvertised opportunities that came 
 to it, in the inconspicuousness and the oblivion that 
 are essential to the highest moral power, will be 
 shown to be the great and the potent life. Well will 
 it be for us if in that day when we face Christ we 
 can say: "O Lord, I recognized Thee there; T. saw 
 Thee in those opportunities; I was not one of the 
 deceived. When saw I Thee? All through my life 
 I saw Thee, and I laid out my life for Thee." If 
 something should cut our life off short to-night, could 
 we say that? How do we know that something will 
 not cut it off short very soon ? For my part, I would 
 pray for grace so to live that though like the sharp- 
 ness of the sun-setting the end should come, I should 
 be able to say that I had seen Christ here long before 
 I saw Him there. How can we tolerate any other 
 principle ? 
 
 I trust that the line of thought we have been fol- 
 lowing has made it clear that the invisibility of the 
 forms of influence, the use of which constituted the 
 highest forms of service in Jesus' view, does not 
 make those forms of influence unimportant. On the
 
 Service: Living Use of Life 105 
 
 other hand, their invisibility is the sign of their 
 superior power. I heard Professor Peabody in Ap- 
 pleton Chapel, at Harvard, some years ago speaking 
 on the words of our Lord in the Sermon on the 
 Mount, "Ye are the salt of the earth. Ye are the 
 light of the world." And he told of a horseback 
 journey which his friend Professor Thayer and he 
 had taken across Asia Minor down to the Mediterra- 
 nean Sea. For some days they had ridden along 
 through a desolate country, now and then passing 
 through villages which were mere collections of half 
 underground hovels. The children played in rags 
 and filth in the streets. The women fled half clad 
 at the approach of a man, and all was poverty and 
 wretchedness. Then one day they suddenly drew 
 rein in a village of a totally different character. The 
 homes were neat and thrifty ; the children clean and 
 intelligent; the women, neatly dressed, stood un- 
 abashed in their doorways, and a general air of well- 
 being and self-respect prevailed. Professor Peabody 
 said that he and his friend at once noted the differ- 
 ence and exclaimed upon it. On inquiry they learned 
 that this new village was just fifty miles away from 
 the nearest mission station, which had been estab- 
 lished just fifty years, and whose influence had ra- 
 diated out at the rate of about a mile a year, work- 
 ing transformation where it came. But who saw it 
 move across the desert? What hand could have felt 
 it ? It was absolutely nebulous and intangible, that 
 moving influence ; but none the less powerful on that
 
 io6 The Marks of a Man 
 
 account; on that account all the more powerful be- 
 cause irresistible in its progress and in the subtlety 
 and persistence of its action. 
 
 Because service is a moral and spiritual influence, 
 a passing of life sacrificially upon life, it is the great- 
 est and strongest thing in the world. Furthermore, 
 it is within the reach of every one. No quality of 
 Christian character can be essential that is not pos- 
 sible to every man. There are some who think they 
 can do nothing, but the sort of service of which I am 
 speaking is within the reach and duty of all. Gor- 
 don ever dwelt on this. "We are much more im- 
 portant than we have any idea of," he wrote to his 
 sister from the Soudan in 1875. "Nothing is trivial 
 that is unseen ; it is only the material things of life 
 that are of no import." "I am more and more con- 
 vinced," he wrote from the Soudan two years later, 
 "that the actions we see done are but trifles in com- 
 parison with the thoughts that fill us." And from 
 Aden he wrote in 1880, "What we need is a profound 
 faith in God's ruling all things ; it is not the Duke or 
 Lord Beaconsfield, it is He alone who rules. Napo- 
 leon,, in a book lent me by Watson, says 'the smallest 
 trifles produce the greatest results.' ' In a world 
 like ours no one may know the limit of the power he 
 is exerting ; each of us may be sure that in every ex- 
 penditure of time and strength and life to influence 
 others, to "catch men," as Jesus said, we are in the 
 way of effecting vast results. In his essay on Why 
 Do Men Stupefy Themselves? Tolstoi says of
 
 Service: Living Use of Life 107 
 
 Brulof, a celebrated Russian painter, that he "one 
 day corrected a pupil's study. The pupil having 
 glanced at the altered drawing, exclaimed, 'Why, 
 you only touched it a tiny bit, but it is quite another 
 thing!' Brulof replied, 'Art begins where the tiny 
 bit begins.' That saying," says Tolstoi, "is strik- 
 ingly true, not of art alone, but of all life. One may 
 say that true life begins where the tiny bit begins 
 where what seem to us minute and infinitely small 
 alterations take place. True life is not lived where 
 great external changes take place, where people 
 move about, clash, fight, and slay one another ; but it 
 is lived only where these tiny, infinitesimally small 
 changes occur." In other words, each quiet man and 
 woman who is going about using life to help other 
 lives is living the great life and wielding the great 
 power. 
 
 But it is objected to this ideal of life not only 
 that it is nebulous and intangible, but that there is 
 no money in it. And that is a fatal objection in our 
 day. Men need money. Life is more rich and ex- 
 acting. And all things cost more. Not only has the 
 list of necessities immensely expanded, but there are 
 so many new toys, motor cars, and games of many 
 kinds, very good and wholesome in many ways, 
 which eat up money as the parched ground drinks 
 rain. All around us are people with ease and leisure, 
 nice people and kind and high-minded who have time 
 to be nice and cultured and kind because, as a social- 
 ist put it, other people are willing to go without leis-
 
 io8 The Marks of a Man 
 
 ure and to slave. But many of those who are thus 
 slaving are doing it in the hope in time of winning 
 their own wealth. If there is money in the job it 
 is popular; if there is no money in it, the man who 
 takes it must have a dash of the fanatic in him. 
 Well, probably he has. People thought the Savior 
 had in His day and His disciples after Him. There 
 was no money in "catching men" for any of them. 
 One of them made a little out of a transaction over 
 a man, but the amount was small, only thirty silver 
 pieces, and, on second thought, the bargain sickened 
 him so that he made way with himself. None of the 
 others ever made a farthing out of the business. And 
 there is no money in it to-day, but money is not one 
 of the essentials of Christian character, and if any 
 one thinks it is the indispensable thing, I fear he will 
 be disgusted with the view that truth and purity and 
 service are not to be mentioned in the same breath 
 with it. 
 
 Not only is there no money in the pursuit of 
 Christ's ideal of a ministering life, but there are 
 many disappointments in it. Jesus Himself found 
 it so. He came to His own, we are told sadly, and 
 His own received Him not. By truth and by life 
 God had for centuries wrought at the education of 
 Israel, in part to prepare a vocabulary for the Gos- 
 pel, without which it could not be uttered in men's 
 speech, in part to prepare a nucleus of men to re- 
 ceive the new truth and life which were to come in 
 the Gospel. The vocabulary was ready when Jesus
 
 Service: Living Use of Life 109 
 
 came, but the number of men who were prepared to 
 apprehend the new meanings which were now to ex- 
 pand the old terms was disappointingly few. The 
 education of the nation as a whole had failed. Even 
 God seemed to have laid out His life in vain. And 
 Jesus had the same crushing experience throughout. 
 He would heal ten lepers. Only one would repay 
 His priceless service with a word of thanks. Some 
 hearts which He met He coveted for the life that is 
 life, and they failed Him. His own disciples mis- 
 conceived His purposes and were blind alike to His 
 intimations and His plainest teachings. They all 
 abandoned Him at the last and He died a pitiful and 
 shameful death alone. But He never lost faith in 
 His method and ideal, and the results have vindi- 
 cated Him. The man who would follow Christ will 
 indeed have to follow Him. He will pour out his 
 life where the sacrifice seems to be fruitless and His 
 service will often be a suffering, and it will seem to 
 him nothing more. 
 
 And the suffering will spring not only from dis- 
 appointment at the apparently wasted outlay of life, 
 but also from the crushing burden of responsibility. 
 Some one once asked Quintin Hogg, the founder of 
 the Polytechnic Institute in London, who had de- 
 voted a great fortune to that enterprise, how much it 
 cost to build up such an institution. "Not very 
 much," was Mr. Hogg's reply, "simply one man's 
 life blood." That is what all service costs. The 
 redemption of the world cost the Savior's life blood.
 
 no The Marks of a Man 
 
 All Christ-like service must bear the same burden. 
 The men who carry everything easily, to whom life 
 is a sort of jest, who feel the weight of the world's 
 need lightly upon their hearts how can such men 
 serve with the service whose power is paid for in 
 pain ? I do not mean that we are not to serve with 
 pleased hearts and to cream off the hardness of life 
 with playfulness, for I believe we are. That Swede 
 was a Christian man, who was urged by friends to 
 give up the idea of going as a missionary to India 
 because it was so hot there. "Man," he was urged, 
 "it is 120 in the shade." "Veil," said the Swede, 
 in noble contempt, "ve do n't always have to stay in 
 the shade, do ve ?" But this is not the same as evad- 
 ing the responsibility of service; it is scorning the 
 evasion. And we may be sure that if there is to be 
 any real service, the heavy sense of burden, the pres- 
 sure of soul, the consciousness that the price of life 
 is life, must be with the man. It was with Paul and 
 it was what gave him power. 
 
 "Oft when the word is on me to deliver, 
 
 Lifts the illusion and the truth lies bare ; 
 Desert or throng, the city or the river, 
 Melts in a lucid paradise of air. 
 
 " Only like souls I see the folk thereunder 
 
 Bound who should conquer, slaves who should 
 
 be kings, 
 
 Hearing their one hope with an empty wonder, 
 Sadly contented in a show of things. 
 
 " Then with a rush the intolerable craving 
 
 divers throughout me like a trumpet call, 
 O to save these, to perish for their saving, 
 Die for their life, be offered for them all!"
 
 Service: Living Use of Life in 
 
 If there are any who will not suffer for others, 
 then Christ's ideal of life and its use will appeal in 
 vain to them. But such turn aside from all life. 
 
 "For all through life I see a cross, 
 
 Where sons of God yield up their breath ; 
 
 There is no gain except by loss, 
 There is no life except by death ; 
 
 There is no vision except by faith, 
 Nor glory but by bearing shame, 
 Nor justice but by taking blame ; 
 
 And that Eternal Passion saith 
 ' Be emptied of glory and right and name.' " 
 
 I have said before that service is the sacrificial use 
 of life, that is, the divine use. The fact that 
 such service as this is the divinest thing in the world 
 ought in itself to be enough to persuade us to it, but 
 if it is not, what can be said ? 
 
 Well, it can be said that such a common ideal of 
 life and its purpose furnishes the only basis for the 
 richest friendships. In his address at the inaugura- 
 tion of President Gilman, of Johns Hopkins Univer- 
 sity, President Eliot congratulated Dr. Gilman on 
 the association with high-minded and unselfish men, 
 which his profession and new duties would bring to 
 him. "It is a precious privilege," he said, "that in 
 your ordinary work you will have to do only with 
 men of refinement and honor." The nobler the basis 
 of human associations, the richer and more fruitful 
 the relationships between men. And no basis can be 
 nobler than the basis of sacrificial service. Such 
 community of principle makes men one, and gives
 
 H2 The Marks of a Man 
 
 them the sweetest and most enduing of bonds. 
 Among the first disciples common ownership of prop-" 
 erty was a natural and practicable arrangement be- 
 cause that society was so unified by a common devo- 
 tion and purpose. Oneness of principle and ideal is 
 the supreme unifying influence. No one but a Chris- 
 tian who followed Christ wholly in the purpose and 
 method of His serving life could have written our 
 great classic on friendship. And only Christianity 
 holds the hope of a real human brotherhood. 
 
 Such an ideal of life not alone opens up the pos- 
 sibility of the truest human intercourse, but also of 
 that unselfish ministry to others which is the closest 
 bond between souls. "Hearts I have won," says St. 
 Paul in one of our noblest poems: 
 
 " Hearts I have won of sister and of brother 
 Quick on the earth or hidden in the sod, 
 Lo! every heart awaiteth me, another 
 Friend in the blameless family of God." 
 
 What gift can one man give to another, compara- 
 ble with the gift of his own life ? How can men be 
 more closely related than by soul and by that com- 
 munion of soul springing from the impartation of 
 life ? Paul's letters are full of his deep and joyous 
 consciousness of this. He and his converts are one, 
 the sufferings and blessings of each are shared by 
 all ; no sacrifice is too great for any one to make for 
 another; they are one body jointly framed together 
 and compacted by that which each several part sup- 
 plieth. And what was true then was true then be-
 
 Service: Living Use of Life 113 
 
 cause it is always true. The fullest human inter- 
 course is between men who have helped one another 
 to God, or one of whom has led the other to life. 
 
 And this service to which Christ calls his- men is 
 the only use of life which leaves any permanent resi- 
 duum. Nothing else lasts. All use of life upon ma- 
 terial ends alone can not survive the inevitable decay 
 of the materials on which it wrought. There are 
 great and noble material achievements and one can 
 not resist a feeling of envy at those who have wrought 
 them. Take for example the "Peryar project" of 
 South India. The irrigation engineers of the Brit- 
 ish Government diverted a large river which had 
 poured its treasure of water westward into the Arab- 
 ian Sea, so that it ran eastward over a thirsty land 
 and ultimately emptied into the Bay of Bengal on 
 the opposite side of India. Dr. Jones tells of this 
 great work in his admirable book on India, Krishna 
 or Christ, and he adds : "It embraces the second 
 largest dam in the world, a tunnel one and one-fourth 
 miles through the mountain, and many meters of 
 distributing channels. It will irrigate at least 150,- 
 000 acres for rice cultivation, and will feed 400,000 
 people. I live in the heart of the region thus fer- 
 tilized and know the joy of the residents, who also 
 stand astonished before the magic power of the white 
 people who do for them what, they say, even their 
 gods failed to accomplish." Achievements like this 
 are worth while. But after all, how long will they 
 last ? How long will their good effects last ? There 
 8
 
 ii4 The Marks of a Man 
 
 will come a day when all such projects, bridges, tun- 
 nels, material feats of whatsoever kind, will be rolled 
 up as a man rolls up a garment, or a scrap of paper 
 to throw away. But life does not end. Whatever 
 we do in life we do for eternity. All the soul a man 
 lays out on other souls is work done forever. And 
 the material achievements are well enough as con- 
 trivances to pay expenses, but the life of a man can 
 not be in a trade or in any material accomplishments, 
 however great and beneficial. It must be in what he 
 does besides this and back of this to mould life. "My 
 trade," said an anarchist in Chicago with a prophet- 
 soul, "my trade is that of a shoemaker. My calling 
 is a propagandist." Every life should have the spirit 
 of the propagandist in it. That is the spirit of serv- 
 ice by which a life takes its principles, dips them in 
 its heart's blood and then lays them all quivering 
 upon the hearts of other men. Such work abides 
 forever. 
 
 And because it supports the highest friendship 
 and the richest intercourse and lasts forever in its 
 result, this ideal of a serving life is also and accord- 
 ingly the only thing that can really and fully satisfy. 
 Keen and heavy as the disappointments of our Lord's 
 life were, He yet lived and died a satisfying and 
 satisfied life. At the close of it as He looked back 
 He gave expression to His satisfaction. He had ful- 
 filled His mission. He had done His work. He was 
 sustained by the nourishment of the great principle 
 of service by which He lived. That had been His
 
 Service: Living Use of Life 115 
 
 meat and His drink. He was entirely content. "It 
 is finished," was one of His last words. He had sat- 
 isfactorily completed the living of His life. No ex- 
 penditure of life upon things can ever give this satis- 
 faction. 
 
 This satisfaction is denied to no man. Not every 
 man is called to professional Christian service in 
 the ministry or any similar calling, but every man is 
 called to live his life for life whatever his occupa- 
 tion may be. There are many men in professional 
 Christian service who are living the mateiial life. 
 They are engrossed in the formal methods of their 
 work, in the ceremonial of their worship, in their 
 habiliments or performances, and so far as they live 
 in and for these things they are not living by this 
 ideal of service. That is an ideal of life and any 
 man who lives by it lives a Christlike life, no matter 
 what his business or trade. 
 
 And there are no degrees of glory or nobility in 
 the living of this life. One man has no superior 
 honor because his service is more notable or far-reach- 
 ing than another man's. The one essential thing is 
 the full acceptance by the man of the principle. All 
 who accept it with equal sincerity and are ruled by 
 it with equal conscientiousness live witfi equal honor 
 and nobility. "Every one," wrote Gordon to his sis- 
 ter from Joppa in 1883, "is doing work quite as im- 
 portant as any one else, whether on a sick bed or as 
 Viceroy of India ; it is our folly which makes us 
 think otherwise."
 
 n6 The Marks of a Man 
 
 Many of us cause ourselves distress by our mis- 
 conceptions here. We exalt the framework above 
 the inward principle, and think that one man's mis- 
 sion and service are nobler than another man's be- 
 cause the setting of his life is more notable or glor- 
 ious; but God has, of course, His own purpose for 
 each life and man's estimate of the comparative at- 
 tractiveness of different forms is of no relevancy. 
 The one essential thing is to find God's dominant de- 
 sire for us and to subject our lives and all their ways 
 to that. Whether one man or another man is as- 
 signed a particular work is of no consequence. The 
 vital thing is that each man realize that his life is 
 an assignment of God, whatever the assignment may 
 be. So the work is done, the service rendered, what 
 matter is it who has the name and the fame of it, if 
 only we did cleanly the part which God gave us to do ? 
 Our good Christian poet has put it in a Christian 
 way in My Triumph : 
 
 "Let the thick curtain fall; 
 I better know than all 
 How little I have gained, 
 How vast the unattained. 
 
 " Others shall sing the song, 
 Others shall right the wrong, 
 Finish what I begin, 
 And all I fail of win. 
 
 " What matter, I or they? 
 Mine or another's day, 
 So the right word be said 
 And life the sweeter made?
 
 Service: Living Use of Life 117 
 
 " Ring, bells in unreared steeples, 
 The joy of unborn peoples ! 
 Sound, trumpets far off blown, 
 Your triumph is my own !" 
 
 Into this living divinely-appointed service men 
 are meant to pour their lives unwithholdingly. From 
 His boyhood, our Lord went earnestly about His 
 Father's business. In His manhood the zeal of His 
 Father's house consumed Him. His own words 
 best express the spirit in which His duty was done. 
 "I must work the works of Him which sent me while 
 it is day, for the night is coming when no man can 
 work." And His work was the lavish outlay of Him- 
 self upon men. The bread which He gave was His 
 flesh for the life of the world. The water which He 
 gave was His blood for the thirst of the world. With- 
 out stint He poured out Himself and while still a 
 young man fulfilled His work. "I have the lines 
 drawn and the current flowing," said Samuel Bowles 
 once when his friends remonstrated with him and 
 urged him to lay down his work, "and by throwing 
 my weight here now I can count for something. If 
 I made a long break or parenthesis to get strong, I 
 should lose my opportunity. No man is living a 
 life worth living unless he is willing, if need be, to 
 die for somebody or something." Indeed, all true 
 living is a dying, a passing out of a man's life from 
 him daily into the lives of others. It must of neces- 
 sity be an intense thing. The very idea of real serv- 
 ice as a communication of life precludes the idea of 
 tameness and torpor.
 
 n8 The Marks of a Man 
 
 And now I put the question: Is this service a 
 characteristic of our Christian manhood? Are we 
 conceiving of our lives and their use in this great 
 way ? This we may be sure was what life was given 
 to us for us. It was not given for ease or for pleasure. 
 
 " 'Tis not for man to trifle ; life is brief, 
 
 And sin is here. 
 Our age is but the falling of a leaf, 
 
 A dropping tear. 
 
 We have no time to sport away the hours, 
 All must be earnest in a world like ours. 
 
 Not many lives, but only one have we, 
 
 One, only one, 
 How earnest should that one life be, 
 
 That narrow span ; 
 Day after day spent in blessed toil, 
 Hour after hour still bringing in new spoil." 
 
 And we should use life for that for which it was 
 given to us; to serve God and men by its living ex- 
 penditure. Shall we make this our purpose: "I 
 will make the expenditure of my life, not control 
 over other lives, the principle of my work? I will 
 do no harm with my life. I will live it for life, for 
 the enlargement of life, for the eternal glory of life 
 unending, in me and others." This is the Christian 
 ideal which is the will of God for us all. That will 
 is full character. For that will we were made. 
 
 I can not express it more nobly than in good old 
 Professor Simpson's words, as a year ago he laid down 
 his chair in the medical school of the University of 
 Edinburgh and the deanship of the medical faculty,
 
 Service: Living Use of Life 119 
 
 and presented the graduating class of the year 
 for their degrees : "It may chance," said he, "that 
 some July day far down the century, when I have 
 long been in the ether, one or other of you will talk 
 with child or grandchild of the years when the cen- 
 tury was young. Among its unforgotten scenes 
 there will rise before your mind the memory of the 
 day when at last you burst the chrysalis shell of pupil- 
 age to lift free wings into the azure. You will re- 
 call the unusual concurrence of the simultaneous 
 leave-taking of the University by the graduates and 
 their promoter. 'We came away/ you will say to the 
 child, 'a goodly company all together through the 
 gateway that leads to the rosy dawn. He passed out 
 all alone through the door that looks to the sunset 
 and the evening star. He was an old man like me/ 
 I forehear you say, 'not in himself a great man. He 
 had been the friend of great men and came out of a 
 great time in the nineteenth century "when there was 
 niidsea and the mighty things" and it looked to the 
 men of his generation as if old things had passed 
 away and a new world begun. And he told us that 
 the great lesson he had learned on his way through 
 life was the same that the disciple who leaned on 
 Jesus' breast at supper taught to the fathers, the 
 young men, and the little children of his time, when 
 he said, "The world passeth away and the lust 
 thereof, but he that doeth the will of God abideth 
 forever." ' "
 
 FREEDOM 
 
 THE NECESSITY OF A MAEQIN
 
 The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood and ston& 
 'E don't obey no orders unless they is 'is own ; 
 'E keeps 'is side arms awful : 'e leaves 'em all about, 
 An' then comes up the regiment an' pokes the 'eathen out. 
 All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess, 
 All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less, 
 All along of abby-nay, kul, and hazar-jo, 
 Mind you keep your rifle an' yourself jus' so ! 
 
 ' RUDYARD KIPLING, " The 'Eathen" 
 
 He could practice abstinence, but not temperance. 
 BOSWELL, " The Life of Samuel Johnson.
 
 IV 
 
 IN political geography there are two kinds of 
 boundaries, established and unestablished. Between 
 Persia on the north and Russia on the south, for 
 example, the boundary is settled and determined. 
 Everybody knows which is which. But between Per- 
 sia on the west and Turkey on the east the boundary 
 can scarcely be said even yet to be fixed. There is 
 no land there that is no man's land. All that there 
 is belongs either to Persia or Turkey, but regarding 
 parts of it there have been and are now disputes as to 
 whether this strip is Persia's or Turkey's. And the 
 people living in such debated territory may be in 
 doubt as to whether they really live in Persia or 
 Turkey. As a matter of fact, almost all important 
 boundary lines in political geography, especially na- 
 tional boundaries, are now well established. They 
 became so readily and naturally matters of dispute, 
 that by mutual arrangement, by friendly commission, 
 by arbitration, or by war, practically all the great 
 boundaries have been settled. 
 
 But established boundaries themselves are of two 
 kinds, defined and undefined. Between Persia and 
 Russia on the northwest, for example, the boundary 
 
 123
 
 124 The Marks of a Man 
 
 is marked by the Aras River and is evident to every 
 one ; but on the northeast it is not marked at all. It 
 is simply a surveyed line running across a desert 
 country, established, but invisible. Or to take an il- 
 lustration nearer home. Between the State of Ohio 
 and the State of Kentucky the boundary is estab- 
 lished and defined. Any one crossing from one State 
 into the other would know it, if not otherwise, by the 
 fact of his wet feet. But between the State of Ohio 
 and the State of Indiana, while the boundary is 
 equally well established, it is not defined at all to 
 the traveler. Any man might easily pass from one 
 state into the other without knowing that he had 
 crossed the line and without intending to do so at all. 
 
 These characteristics and distinctions in political 
 boundaries can be carried right over into the intel- 
 lectual and moral life. Between mathematical truth 
 and mathematical error, for example, the boundary 
 is absolutely fixed. Any man with the adequate 
 equipment to locate it will have no difficulty in draw- 
 ing the exact line. But between sanity and insanity 
 there is no such established boundary, and with ref- 
 erence to some particular case two equally capable 
 and equally conscientious alienists might differ as to 
 whether the man was actually insane or sane. 
 
 And so likewise in the moral life. Between ab- 
 stinence and temperance, not only in the matter of 
 drink, but in all questions, there is a boundary line 
 both established and defined. No one will ever have 
 any difficulty in perceiving this line. A blind man
 
 Freedom: Necessity of a Margin 125 
 
 can locate it. But between temperance and excess 
 there is no such line at all, and a man may pass from 
 the country of temperance into the country of excess 
 without any intention of doing so, with indeed the 
 firmest purpose to do nothing of the kind. It is the 
 invisibility of its boundaries that makes the moral 
 danger of residence in the land of temperate indul- 
 gence so fearfully greater than the Spartan citizen- 
 ship of total abstinence. Men do not mean to go 
 over from temperance to excess. As a matter of 
 fact I suppose that almost no one ever deliberately 
 goes over the boundary into excess, meaning to do so. 
 He only gets over because the boundary line which 
 he has crossed was unmarked and undetectable. 
 
 !N"ow I suppose that most of the moral boundaries 
 of life are of this tmestablished, or if established, 
 undefined kind. There are, of course, many moral 
 boundaries clearly defined and so unmistakably plain 
 that no one is excusable in transgressing them. The 
 line between pure and impure acts is one of these. 
 As a debater in Parliament once suggested, there can 
 not be such a thing as moderate chastity. The line 
 between truth and falsehood is another. All on one 
 side of such boundary lines is fair and legitimate, 
 and all on the other wrong and unallowable. A man 
 may venture right up to the boundary with no fear 
 of possible error or of danger, because near forbidden 
 ground. The wall or chasm between the two spheres 
 is a reminder of their separation so effective that the 
 man of right will is in no danger of stepping across
 
 126 The Marks of a Man 
 
 unwittingly or negligently. But there are other 
 moral distinctions that are not so clearly denned. 
 Between the open country of what is unquestionably 
 right and the open country of what is unquestion- 
 ably wrong, there is no difficulty in distinguishing; 
 between the heart of the open country of the unques- 
 tionably right and the heart of the open country of 
 the unquestionably wrong there is a difference as of 
 noonday and of midnight, but near the boundary the 
 two shade off into each other. There is either no line 
 at all, or if there is one it is undefined, and we may 
 wander over from one land into the other with no 
 hindrance, with nothing to remind us where we 
 are or whither we are going, and with no purpose of 
 crossing the line at all. 
 
 Most questions of adaptation and expediency are 
 of this character. How far shall we accept the ways 
 of others and adjust ourselves to them in order to ac- 
 quire influence over them and lift them up to our 
 ideals and convictions ? Where is the boundary line 
 between patience and pity toward those who err, and 
 reprobation of their errors? Where is the line be- 
 tween a proper Christian charity, given unstintedly 
 to the needy, and the development of the spirit of 
 self-help and of the duty of bearing one's own bur- 
 dens ? It is, I repeat, in many moral problems just 
 as it is in physical geography. Between two lands 
 there may be a mountain range so bold as to be im- 
 passable, and between two other lands there will be 
 no boundary barrier at all, but only an imaginary
 
 Freedom: Necessity of a Margin 127 
 
 line which only surveyors can discover, running 
 across an intermediate country, uniform and similar 
 on both sides of the line, though the diverse charac- 
 ters of the divided lands may be absolutely clear and 
 distinctive. 
 
 And it is not only in questions of moral expe- 
 diency, it is also in questions of moral principle 
 that we have the two types of boundaries. There are 
 divergences of principle radical and unmistakable. 
 All agree that certain allowable things fall on one 
 side of the line and certain forbidden things on the 
 other. The Ten Commandments are an illustration 
 of one of the great decisive chasms separating true 
 ways from false. There is here no intermediate mar- 
 ginal land of twilight and uncertainty. And Jesus 
 strove to establish as many of these sharp moral dis- 
 tinctions as possible. Many men like to gloss over 
 these distinctions; Jesus never. He dispelled illu- 
 sion and self-confusion and laid bare the essential 
 moral issues of life. He drew as fine and sharp and 
 incisive as possible the separating ethical distinctions. 
 He repeatedly set off in keenest and most discriminat- 
 ing contrast His own standards and spirit with the 
 standards and spirit of the world, and He appealed 
 to men to commit themselves fearlessly and uncom- 
 promisingly to His principles. But Jesus recognized 
 also that there were many questions where it was not 
 and is not easy to perceive the line of boundary or 
 separation, and He dealt patiently with inquiries ad- 
 dressed to Him by those who were perplexed in such
 
 128 The Marks of a Man 
 
 matters. He realized that in practical life most of 
 our problems are not problems of sLarp division be- 
 tween two clearly distinguished courses, one ob- 
 viously right and the other obviously wrong. He 
 knew that the discipline of our life is found in the 
 way we act toward the open and debatable things, in 
 the attitude we take up toward the problems of the 
 unestablished or undefined boundary. 
 
 And here according to His wont, He issued no 
 prescriptive rule. He set forth His view in what 
 might be called the principle of the margin. If there 
 was, as there usually is, a middle marginal land open 
 to debate, Jesus urged that the wise course was to 
 stay far enough over on the safe side to be out of 
 the uncertain fog of the border territory. "Master," 
 asked one, "if my brother sin against me, shall I 
 forgive him ? Shall it be seven times ?" "Seventy 
 times seven," was the reply. Was it not possible for 
 a man to follow Christ and still cling to some rem- 
 nants of his old life ? "If any man will come after 
 Me let him deny himself and take us his cross and 
 follow me." "If thou wouldst be perfect, go, sell all 
 that thou hast and come, follow me." The Lord be- 
 lieved in discipleship whose devotion was unskimped. 
 He believed also in character which took no risks of 
 compromise. "It were better for a man," He urged, 
 "to give up a hand or eye and enter into life maimed 
 or blind, than having two hands or two eyes to miss 
 it." And he twice put His principle in the mat- 
 ter into very vivid and characteristically simple
 
 Freedom: Necessity of a Margin 129 
 
 statements : "If any man will compel thee to go one 
 mile with him, go with him two." "When ye shall 
 have done all those things that are commanded you, 
 say, We are unprofitable servants, we have done 
 that which it was our duty to do." 
 
 Jesus, of course, illustrated His principle in His 
 own life. He did not seek to- see how near the edge 
 He could come. He kept clear of the moral bounda- 
 ries. He lived His life with a margin, out in the 
 open of unmistakable purity and integrity. Paul 
 followed his Master's principles in these matters. 
 He would run no risks of moral trespass. He saw 
 no harm for example in eating meat that had been 
 offered to idols. But others felt conscientious 
 scruples on this point. If, Paul declared, his eating 
 meat was open to the possibility of offending such 
 people, he would stop such indulgence on his part at 
 once, and completely and forever. Some people 
 would have delayed and argued. It is easy to outline 
 their argument. "It is not wrong in itself to do this. 
 My own conscience is clear. What does it matter 
 that another man can not bear what I can. Let him 
 abstain. I can indulge. Furthermore, I can avoid 
 publicity. It will not be known. It is my personal 
 affair. I can do it privately. What harm will 
 it do if it is known and objected to by some? It 
 will soon be forgotten and the chance that it will hurt 
 any one is negligible. Moreover, we need more lib- 
 erty in these things. It is bad to concede to narrow- 
 ness. It is drawing lines too tight to exclude what is 
 9
 
 130 The Marks of a Man 
 
 really innocent. Even if it is an open question, surely 
 there must be a recognition of a belt of debatable 
 land in these questions between the right that is ob- 
 vious and obligatory, and the wrong that is patent and 
 prohibited. In that middle country there must be 
 considerable freedom allowed and each man should be 
 left to decide for himself there, uncoerced by any sup- 
 posed principle obtruded where everything should be 
 a matter of personal liberty." This is the familiar 
 form of reply. Not so, we answer. There is a great 
 principle which obtrudes itself because it is in our 
 moral nature. Paul acted on it in this matter of his 
 personal indulgences. Our Lord pressed it on men 
 and presses it on us. It is the principle of the moral 
 margin, of staying away from the doubtful borders, 
 of keeping open country between ourselves and the 
 possible boundaries. I have spoken of truth, purity, 
 and service as essentials of Christian character. I 
 am going on now to urge that these things are neces- 
 sary with a bonus, and that with reference to the 
 entire life the right principle and the essential prin- 
 ciple is the principle of the moral margin. No other 
 principle will cover life's necessities. 
 
 It will be easy to illustrate the principle in its 
 application to life and then to set forth the solid and 
 convincing reasons for it. 
 
 Consider it first of all in the matter oif duty. 
 There are men and women who seem to think that 
 you can calculate duty to a nicety, and who are will- 
 ing to pay down just exactly the full toll of their
 
 Freedom: Necessity of a Margin 131 
 
 duty, not a fraction over and not a fraction less. But 
 you can not calculate duty in any such nice mathe- 
 matical way, and no worthy life can be lived on the 
 principle of such Shylock calculations, nor any pub- 
 lic duty faithfully done. What would be thought, 
 for example, of a fire company, which when an alarm 
 came in would first try to calculate precisely the na- 
 ture and extent of its duty in the circumstances, 
 which perhaps kept an actuary in the fire-house for 
 the purpose, who would telephone to the scene of the 
 supposed fire to make sure whether there was a fire 
 which it would be the company's duty to attend, or 
 how far it had progressed and the time it would take 
 to reach it, so that the company might know how much 
 longer it could loiter playing dominoes before start- 
 ing, and still arrive before the fire had gone beyond 
 control ?; Rather at the first alarm, every man leaps 
 to his place and his work,' and the effort is to arrive 
 with the widest possible margin between them and 
 the edge of their duty. If there were any way of 
 knowing where fires were going to break out, they 
 would be there in advance of the fire. And tl. 
 principle of the margin of duty applies to perso 
 life. At the outbreak of the war between Rr 
 and Japan, I had among my friends in this country 
 a Japanese theological student in the seminary at 
 Auburn, N. Y. Two or three years ago he came to 
 this country with a letter of introduction from a 
 friend, asking me to aid him to an education. He 
 was a cavalry lieutenant in the second line of the
 
 132 The Marks of a Man 
 
 Japanese reserves, and my friend said lie was one of 
 the best young Japanese he had met There had been 
 in the Hill School at Pottstown, Pa., resident for 
 some years, a young Japanese of the finest Christian 
 character, who had recently died, leaving a blessed and 
 beloved memory, and for the sake of this Tozo Ohno, 
 Professor Meigs generously took Lieutenant Rempei 
 Minami into the school. By his genial unselfishness 
 and his flawless honor and fidelity, Rempei endeared 
 himself to every one, and in two years, after perfect- 
 ing his English there, he went on to Auburn. The war 
 broke out as he was entering. Within a few weeks 
 he came to see me in New York to ask for help to re- 
 turn to Japan, giving his promise, which was as good 
 as gold, that he would repay it. I sent him to Mr. 
 Uchida, the Japanese Consul-general, but he was un- 
 able to promise more to the many Japanese who de- 
 sired to return to fight for their country, than that 
 his government would care for them after they 
 reached Japanese soil. It was not hard, however, to 
 find several men who regarded the contribution of a 
 soldier to the armies of Japan as a good missionary 
 investment, and Rempei started home. I asked 
 him why he was in such a hurry. It would be some 
 time before his line of the reserves would be called 
 out. Yes, he said, he knew that, but he had received 
 letters from his father and from his prospective 
 father-dn-law, who both said that any son of theirs 
 would be on hand not when he was called for, but 
 in advance of his duty. That was exactly to Rempei
 
 Freedom: Necessity of a Margin 133 
 
 .Minami's own mind, and he went to be there with a 
 margin to spare. I heard from him in the depths of 
 the winter from the Manchurian campaign. I was 
 told by a Japanese that he had lost a hand from the 
 rigors of the winter. He fought with Oku's division 
 in the fiercest fighting of the battle of Mukden. I 
 did not know for some time whether he had returned 
 to Japan or was filling a soldier's grave on the plains 
 of Manchuria, but I did know that whether he was 
 living or dead, like the Christian man that he was, 
 he did his duty and something more. This is the 
 law of the Christian character. 
 
 Consider it in the second place in the matter of 
 fidelity and business honesty. There are men and 
 women who think that all that is required of them 
 is to live up to the standards of the community or of 
 the social set in which they move. There is a public 
 morality which is content with the evasion of indict- 
 ment, or, at least, of conviction under the criminal 
 statutes. "There are men," said Mr. Roosevelt in 
 once of his Southern speeches, "who do not divide 
 actions merely into those that are honest and those 
 that are not, but create a third subdivision, that of 
 'law honesty,' of that kind of honesty which con- 
 sists in keeping clear of the penitentiary." Men 
 who think that all that is required of them is to keep 
 within the letter of the law constitute one of the 
 most dangerous classes of our population. And law- 
 yers who sell their brains to show other men how to 
 do wrong things without running the risk of punish-
 
 134 The Marks of a Man 
 
 raent for it are among our most conspicuous national 
 enemies. The laws of the land interpreted as skillful 
 paid counsel of unpatriotic men may get them in- 
 terpreted, are no fit standards for a man. He wants 
 a big margin of decency and righteousness over 
 this, a big margin even over those standards inter- 
 preted in the noblest way. "Law honesty" comes a 
 long margin short of being honesty, plain common 
 honesty. That is "law honesty" with a big margin 
 over. And there are people who think that nothing 
 more is required of men and women in private life 
 than compliance with the common social code. Mr. 
 Kato, when president of the University of Tokyo, is 
 reported to have made a speech in which he said that 
 young men ought to be content with the standards 
 embodied in the laws. There was something gro- 
 tesque, in his view, in a young man's exacting more of 
 himself than this. But in the Christian view it is 
 grotesque to be satisfied with so little. The Chris- 
 tian ideals of fidelity and honesty take society's 
 ideals and double them. 
 
 We live in a day when this Christian principle 
 of the margin of honesty in business relations ought 
 to be driven home into the conscience. There was "an 
 interesting interview with Mr. John W. Gates in the 
 New York Sun for August 16, 1902. Mr. Gates is 
 one of our most conspicuous, some would say one of 
 our most notorious speculators, and he set forth 
 frankly his ethical conceptions: "They talk about 
 suppressing or doing away with gambling. They
 
 Freedom: Necessity of a Margin 135 
 
 might as well try to do away with the wind. Men 
 have always gambled and always will, and if I had 
 my way, I 'd license gambling as saloons are licensed. 
 I 'd do this because I think it 's right Marshall 
 Field once told me that he always tried to be right 
 51 per cent of the time. That same Marshall Field 
 is one of the greatest business men in this country, 
 and, I believe, the third richest man in the world." 
 Xow one may be allowed to doubt whether Mr. Field 
 ever said anything of the kind to Mr. Gates. Mr. 
 Field was an honest man in business ; 100 per cent 
 no more. It is said that he would not go one hair's 
 breadth beyond the line of scrupulously exact obliga- 
 tion, but he would not fall a hair breadth short. He 
 had no margin. When Mr. Gates said he was honest 
 51 per cent of the time, I imagine it was simply a 
 bit of ingenuous autobiography on Mr. Gates's own 
 part, only the popular impression prevails that Mr. 
 Gates sometimes gets the one per cent on the other 
 side of the line. But 51 per cent will not satisfy the 
 Christian ideal. Neither will 100 per cent. The 
 Christian pound is short at sixteen ounces, and no 
 eight-hour day is recognized in the Christian code. 
 I have a friend who is a graduate of Yale and one 
 of the heads now of a great Western banking house. 
 He told me once that on leaving Yale and applying 
 for a job in this house he was accepted as one of the 
 office boys. It was menial drudgery. He left homo 
 at 5.30 in the morning and he got back at 8.30 in 
 the evening. The ordinary labor union would not
 
 136 The Marks of a Man 
 
 stand for such fidelity and industry in its member- 
 ship. My friend worked for a long time in this way, 
 getting to the office ahead of time, staying after 
 hours, and when at last a boy dropped out he went 
 to his superior and said, "You do not need to employ 
 another boy in that boy's place; let me do his work 
 as well as my own." So he kept on until he was do- 
 ing several boys' work. Then they gave him a man's 
 job. He behaved with that as he had behaved with 
 the other, and when he had done for some time the 
 work of a number of men, he went up into the firm. 
 The boys with no margin of faithfulness stayed 
 where they were. I know one business office where 
 the stenographers are graded and their pay deter- 
 mined by their grade. The classification states that 
 the stenographers shall go up from one class into 
 the higher when they do not run by the clock, when 
 they begin of their own accord before nine in the 
 morning and wait, if the work requires, of their own 
 accord after five in the afternoon. "There are sev- 
 eral classes of young men/' said Mr. Carnegie in an 
 address before a graduating class in New York City. 
 "There are those who do not do all their duty ; there 
 are those who profess to do their duty, and there is 
 a third class far better than the other two, that do 
 their duty and a little more. . . . ]STo one can 
 cheat a young man out of success in life. You young 
 lads have begun well. Keep on. Do n't bother about 
 the future. Do your duty and a little more, and the 
 future will take care of itself." God will care for 
 the man who cares enough for Him to seek a right-
 
 Freedom: Necessity of a Margin 137 
 
 eousness with a margin; not a righteousness of 
 Scribe, Pharisee, or Sadducee, ancient or modern. 
 
 Consider in the third place this principle of mar- 
 gin in questions of moral habit and social practice. 
 I mean such things as social deception, as the ob- 
 servance or lack of observance of the Lord's-day, the 
 lighter forms of drinking and the petty kinds of 
 gambling that are held to be innocent of harm. 
 Those of you who are clever can easily make addi- 
 tions to this list. I could do so myself, but I am 
 afraid of diverting attention from the principle. 
 IXow there are some who would say up and down 
 that these things are wrong. That is what the Puri- 
 tan temper would say about them, and for my part 
 I believe in the Puritan temper. But I waive all 
 that now. All that I will say is that regarding these 
 things all Christians admit that there is at least room 
 for difference of opinion, and that it may be open to 
 dispute as to whether Christians should do them or 
 not. I ask no more than this admission. My point 
 is that what is open to dispute is not open to indul- 
 gence. If the thing is questionable, it is unquestion- 
 ably wrong to the man who believes in being right 
 with a margin to spare. For Christians are not peo- 
 ple who are trying to see how close to the debatable 
 line they can live without going over indisputably to 
 the wrong side. They are children of the day, who 
 live in the open sunlight, and who are happy only 
 when they have a comfortable margin between them- 
 selves and all that is open to doubt.
 
 138 The Marks of a Man 
 
 And men perceive the value of a margin in their 
 personal habits, who do not regard the matter from 
 the point of view of Christian freedom. At one of 
 the annual dinners of the Periodical Publishers' As- 
 sociation, I sat next to the proprietor of one of our 
 best known magazines. On the other side of him sat 
 a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and 
 beyond him other men of like prominence and in- 
 fluence with these two. During the dinner, I noticed 
 that only one man in the row on our side of the table 
 was drinking. I called the magazine publisher's at- 
 tention to the fact and asked him if he did not think 
 it unusual. "No," he said, "I do not think it is. 
 Our life is at too high a tension now. When every- 
 thing may hang upon a sudden decision at an unex- 
 pected moment, a man can 't afford to take any 
 chances." He needs his margin of safety. 
 
 There are some virtues which are possible only 
 in an extreme form, a form which puts the margin 
 of a world between them and their opposite vices; 
 the chastity of men and women, the sanctity of the 
 home, the honest administration of public and private 
 trust, personal probity of character. These are them- 
 selves only when carried to excess and protected by 
 an immeasurable margin from evil and lapse. 
 
 And fourthly, to pick out but one more form of 
 illustration, consider the principle of the margin 
 in the matter of character. There are men and 
 women who carry a character reserve, and there are 
 men and women who carry none. Visiting one of
 
 Freedom: Necessity of a Margin 139 
 
 our great New England preparatory schools not long 
 ago, I walked out with the head of the school, after 
 the morning service in the school chapel, into the 
 beautiful surrounding country. As we walked along 
 he was describing in answer to questions, the head of 
 another school. "Yes," he said, "he is a strong and 
 useful man, but he has no adequate reserves. When 
 he has spoken or done his w r ork, you feel that he is 
 all paid out and has no hidden power still to draw 
 
 upon. There is Mr. , however," he went on, 
 
 "who does his work with the same impact and power, 
 but even after he has fired his last shot you know that 
 he has another shot in his locker still. He carries 
 immense reserves." This is the explanation of the 
 difference we often feel but can not describe between 
 men. It is also the secret of power. Power is in 
 proportion to the width of the margin between a 
 man's character reserve and the exactions of his task. 
 
 This will suffice in the way of illustration, to 
 make clear our Lord's principle of the necessity of 
 the margin in Christian character. His view was 
 that a man is a man when he is a man plus, that a 
 life is a life when there is something to spare, that 
 duty is done only when it is more than done. It is 
 essential to Christian manhood, in other words, that 
 there should be a safe, wide margin between us and 
 the moral boundaries. 
 
 The reasons for believing that this principle is 
 essential are solid and convincing. 
 
 In the first place, a man can not afford to be
 
 140 The Marks of a Man 
 
 doubted. He can afford to be opposed and disliked 
 and defeated, but he can not afford to be doubted. 
 Any man naturally likes to be liked, and lie is glad to 
 have other men share his convictions with him. But 
 he can forego popularity and the acceptance of his 
 views. He can not, however, bear being distrusted. 
 For men to reject his judgment is one thing, for them 
 to deny his sincerity and good faith and moral can- 
 dor is another. And the only way to be sure of such 
 faith in one's probity and genuineness is to deserve 
 it by an indisputable life, a life so far from the 
 boundaries that no one will ever think of it as capa- 
 ble of transgressing them. If, on the other hand, a 
 man lives so near the boundaries that a night is long 
 enough for him to get over and back without being 
 seen, there will come times when men will suspect 
 that he has been over while they slept. But the man 
 whose constant, life is so remote from the line that 
 one night's journey would not carry him across is 
 secure from suspicion. Men may hate him but they 
 can not distrust him. And men are not likely to hate 
 the man of such irreproachable honor. They are the 
 more likely, trusting his unassailable goodness, to 
 want him for a friend. 
 
 A generation ago the ideal college man in this 
 country was young William Earl Dodge. He was 
 the third to bear that honored name. Earl he was 
 called, and he bore in his character the nobility of 
 his name. He was a great athlete, a man of charm 
 and power. His wealth gave him the ability to help 
 others, and he used it in the highest and the humblest
 
 Freedom: Necessity of a Margin 141 
 
 Christian spirit. And he passed away just on the 
 threshold of his life as he entered business in New 
 York City. When the news of his death reached 
 Princeton, where he had been graduated in 18Y9, 
 Dean Murray took occasion in a sermon in Marquand 
 Chapel to point out how he at least had always lived 
 with his margins wide and had held men's love be- 
 cause they trusted him. "He came among us," said 
 the preacher, "bearing an honored name. He has 
 left that name unsullied. . . . His scorn of 
 what was low and bad, which like a shield struck 
 from him every low and insidious temptation, lifted 
 him into a position of moral supremacy. And yet 
 his whole nature was so thoroughly full of kindli- 
 ness, that he was the man trusted by his compeers, 
 as few were in college, with the general confidence. 
 . . . His Christian character hung on no peril- 
 ous edge of doubtful practices. He confessed his 
 Savior before men. So throughout his college career, 
 he walked with God and left behind him when he 
 went from us, the blessed memory of a good and 
 Christian name." "His Christian conduct hung on 
 no perilous edge of doubtful practices." Of how 
 many students could that be said ? Are there no 
 professed Christian men and women among them 
 whose conduct has hung over that edge, who have 
 even deliberately gone clear over into the forbidden 
 land ? What wonder that the world sneers at our 
 Christian protestations and distrusts our Christian 
 character if our lives lose their margin of security!
 
 142 The Marks of a Man 
 
 In the second place, the man is always dependa- 
 ble who is so with a margin, and no other man. 
 It is the man with the margin of whom you know 
 where he is and how much of him is there. Over 
 the boundaries the mists often hang; even when the 
 line is defined the fogs are over it and men who loiter 
 too near it are lost sight of. Human nature is weak, 
 too, and can not bear too much, and it is dangerous 
 to let it play too near to peril. The utterly and en- 
 tirely dependable life will stay out and keep itself 
 clear. And the stronger and truer it is the more 
 careful it will be to do this. Men often act on the 
 contrary principle. They argue that they are capable 
 and sagacious and can endure what weaker men can- 
 not. They resent the idea that because they are 
 strong or their calling is worthy, they should guard 
 themselves the more rigorously and deny themselves 
 what weaker men allow. Men in the ministry, for 
 example, often complain because they are expected 
 to be better than other men. Well, they ought not to 
 be better than other men ought to be, .but they ought 
 to be better than other men are. And the better they 
 really are, not as ministers but as men, the better 
 any men really are, the more and not the less neces- 
 sary it is that they should widen their margins. "In 
 proportion to excellence," said Thring, "compromise 
 is impossible. A single leak sinks a great ship.' A 
 raft that is all leaks, floats." A bad man can still 
 get along in his class with a margin so narrow that 
 it would be fatal to the good man in his class. One
 
 Freedom: Necessity of a Margin 143 
 
 of the notorious characters in New York for some 
 years has been a lawyer named H . Brib- 
 ery and perjury were ordinary tools with him in the 
 operation of his trade of blinding justice and pro- 
 tecting crime and vice. Now suppose H 
 
 should tell another lie. What effect would it have ? 
 None at all. It would not affect his character. It 
 could not mar his reputation. What is another hole 
 in a derelict ? But suppose Mr. Cleveland should tell 
 a lie. Now a lie is a lie. Its moral quality of bad- 
 ness is the same, no matter who tells it. But if Mr. 
 Cleveland should be found to be a liar, what a collapse 
 of confidence in men, of respect for good reputation 
 there would be? Why? Because men expect a 
 wider margin of the good man. He must stay fur- 
 ther away from evil. Compromise is bad for any 
 man; the better the man, the worse it is. To the 
 Christian character it is intolerable. "Give me air 
 and room," pleads the Christian spirit, "keep me off 
 by a margin of peace from the bad lands and the 
 lands that abut on them." 
 
 In the third place the moral margin is necessary 
 as a preparation for emergency. The emergencies are 
 inevitable. Students and young men often think that 
 they are fighting the real battle of life and that this 
 once over the later years will be tranquil and free. 
 The younger years are the determinative years, when 
 habit is fixd and principle established, but every 
 year will bring its own necessities, and as the years 
 pass new emergencies come upon us. Woe to the
 
 H4 The Marks of a Man 
 
 men and women who have made no preparation for 
 them, the foolish virgins who have taken no oil and 
 who, with unlit lamp and ungirt loin, await the new 
 trial with no reserves. Everywhere except in the 
 moral life men are wiser than this. The banks carry 
 their surplus and reserve accounts. The business 
 man watches with untiring prevision to be ready for 
 the storm. The nation makes ready in p^ace for 
 the time of war. Men made no end of fun of Mr. 
 Koosevelt because when Assistant Secretary of the 
 Eavy before the war with Spain, he kept the type- 
 writers forever pounding in his office. But he was 
 simply doing his part to widen the margin of our na- 
 tional preparation for that impending conflict. When 
 the Spanish ships were examined after the battle 
 of Santiago, it was discovered that the Spaniards had 
 made no adequate preparation at all. The ships were 
 full of inflammable material, and the water pipes for 
 extinguishing fires had so rusted in their connections 
 as to be useless. On the American ships before ever 
 war had begun, the carpenters cut out every inch of 
 wood work and all that could burn. All water pipes 
 were in perfect order. We were ready and the war 
 was settled before ever a gun had been fired, because 
 our margin of preparation for emergencies was wider 
 than Spain's. 
 
 In mechanics we are familiar with this principle 
 of a margin of safety to provide against emergencies, 
 and we take the greatest pains to have the mar- 
 gin as sure and wide as possible. At Columbia Uni-
 
 Freedom: Necessity of a Margin 145 
 
 versity there is an interesting little building whose 
 sole purpose is to test that margin in the case of al- 
 leged fire-proof flooring materials. The floor to be 
 tested is built into this building as a roof. "Under 
 it is built a fierce fire, averaging 1700 Fahrenheit, 
 sometimes reaching 2000. This is kept up for four 
 hours, while delicate instruments measure the heat 
 of the floor and its sagging under a load of pig iron, 
 150 pounds to the square foot. Then water is turned 
 on the whole, and after the floor has cooled, a weight 
 of 600 pounds to the square foot is placed upon it. 
 If it stands this tremendous test, the floor system is 
 approved. Several have already stood it. Now no 
 floor, in actual use, would meet such enormous heat, 
 so long continued, or be placed under such terrific 
 strain. Why is the test made so severe? Because 
 when human life is at stake, no 'margin of safety' 
 is too great." Suppose it should be discovered 
 that the Brooklyn Bridge will bear only one 
 pound weight more than is to be put upon it to-day. 
 The bridge is perfectly safe, but the instant this dis- 
 covery was made the bridge would be shut up at each 
 end. All traffic would be instantly stopped. Why? 
 The bridge is safe. Yes, but the margin is too nar- 
 row 1 . There is no preparation for emergency, for 
 unforeseeable strain. This is the way men act for the 
 protection of human bodies. Shall they be less care- 
 ful, more reckless, blind to essential principles of 
 life, in their care for human souls ? Does not the soul 
 need its margin of safety as well as the body ? 
 10
 
 146 The Marks of a Man 
 
 A man who has worked and lived for many years 
 down town in New York City told me that one night 
 about one o'clock he was coming home along the de- 
 serted streets when he met a police officer of his ac- 
 quaintance. They walked along together and my 
 friend unthinkingly walked in close to the stoops of 
 the houses and the dark area-ways beneath them. As 
 soon as he noticed it, the police officer turned to him 
 
 and said, "You ought not to do that, Mr. H ; 
 
 you ought to know better than to walk in there at 
 night. Come out and walk along the curb with me. 
 Do n't you know that it is just in those dark area- 
 ways that men lurk to jump out on you ? Walk here 
 along the curb and keep a space between you and 
 those places. There are two advantages in this. In 
 the first place you have time to get ready for your as- 
 sailant, and in the second place you have a chance 
 to sound an alarm." And yet there are men who will 
 deliberately walk along the moral cellar-ways of life, 
 and women who will maintain acquaintances and as- 
 sociations which leave them no margin of safety for 
 preparation or alarm. I urge, therefore, in behalf 
 of our soul's highest safety and for its foreguarding 
 for the time of peril, the principle of the liberal dis- 
 tance from the line. 
 
 And fourthly, the moral margin is necessary if 
 we would be free to live a real life at all. We are 
 delivered by it from a host of entanglements and en- 
 cumbrances. In the matter of amusements there are 
 people with no margin, who are so overlaid and bound
 
 Freedom: Necessity of a Margin 147 
 
 down that they have neither wit nor strength left for 
 real living. There are many issues and problems 
 which throng the border lines of life. Whoever lives 
 on the border lines will be beset by these issues and 
 problems, and a good part of his life will be made up 
 of his dealings with them. Take it in the matter of 
 drinking, for example. How many drinks he can 
 allow himself is no problem to the man who takes 
 none. To the moderate drinker it may become the 
 one mind-consuming question. At a dinner not long 
 ago, I saw a capable young lawyer employed in just 
 this way. He was a moderate drinker and as many 
 moderate drinkers do, he had drunk immoderately. 
 Each time the waiter came behind him to fill his 
 glasses, he argued the question with himself, could 
 he take any more ? It would have been ludicrous if 
 it had not been so pathetic. About him men were 
 talking together rationally of questions of reality. 
 All his strength was consumed by the problem of the 
 border. Was he too far over or not ? The sane man 
 will rid himself of all such issues at once by living 
 wholly aloof from the lines where they arise. Men 
 need all their mind and strength for loving God and 
 doing man's work in the world. They can not afford 
 to waste it in the needless and pitiful debates of the 
 midlands. 
 
 When I was a boy I lived in the mountains of 
 Central Pennsylvania, and one of the most exciting 
 sports was deer hunting. It was illegal and unsports- 
 manlike to run deer with dogs, so we drove them
 
 148 The Marks of a Man 
 
 ourselves. After we had put the men on the run- 
 ways the rest of us would portion out the country to 
 be driven over. One man would be given the valley 
 and others the hillsides on either side. The valley 
 meant creeping along through the rhododendron 
 thickets, in the fog of the early morning. Each 
 wanted the hillside, and the higher up the better, 
 where the forest thinned out and there were outlooks 
 across the mountains and an uplook into the great 
 blue skies of God. Life's roads which we tread 
 should all be above the thicket and the fog, free from 
 the snarl and hindrance of the low valley and unim- 
 peded and clear, that we may live freely, which alone 
 is life. We have no time to waste on the needless 
 tangle of moral perplexities which we can escape in 
 an instant by the simple elevation of the plane of 
 life, by the thrust of a margin between the snares and 
 the soul. 
 
 Yet some men deliberately choose to live down 
 among the unnecessary debates. In them, of course, 
 the debate soon dies away, and they grow accustomed 
 to living with stupefied conscience in land debatable, 
 or even undebatably wrong. The free men freely 
 make themselves slaves. But for security and peace, 
 for the freedom that is real and the quiet not bought 
 with a blinded moral vision or a chloroformed spirit- 
 ual sense, men need the margin. With the margin 
 intervening, life is at leisure to be lived in its true 
 fullness. Mr. Moody used to tell, in one of his 
 homely, but effective, illustrations, of an apple tree
 
 Freedom: Necessity of a Margin 149 
 
 which grew on the edge of a Northfield orchard, with 
 a branch hanging over the line across the road. 
 Every man and boy who went by took a shy at that 
 tree. It had more sticks and stones flung at it than 
 all the other trees of the orchard combined. And it 
 is ever so with all border line straddlers. Those poor 
 people in the disputed boundary between Persia and 
 Turkey or between Persia and Afghanistan, are sub- 
 ject to the exactions of both sovereignties and the im- 
 munities of neither. Will a Christian man choose to 
 subject his life to the absurdities and immoralities of 
 such a principle ? The only other is the principle of 
 the margin. 
 
 And now, in conclusion, how are we to embody 
 this principle in our lives? Many of you have al- 
 ready been answering that question. One does not 
 need to look far to see how to apply the law of the 
 margin to character and conduct. It applies itself, 
 if we will give it a chance and will not resist that 
 good government of God which does not locate men 
 on the boundaries. 
 
 In the first place, we can do more than our duty. 
 In one sense, of course, we can not. It is each man's 
 duty to do all that he can do. No man can do more. 
 But, as a matter of fact, duty is usually a matter of 
 options. A good many different things seem opened 
 to a man's free choice, and he takes and does what 
 he will, and they all seem about equally promising 
 and fruitful. Now in all such choices a man can 
 take the easy or he can take the great and hard.
 
 150 The Marks of a Man 
 
 Under the principle of the margin, a man will not 
 evade any duty because it seems great and hard. In 
 the matter of the missionary duty, for example, some 
 men seek for excuses, and give themselves reasons for 
 believing that they are exempt, and are relieved if 
 they succeed in escaping with an untroubled con- 
 science. Other men press in, attempt to brush away 
 the obstacles and are disappointed if they are turned 
 aside to some less exacting and sacrificial service. 
 This is the Christian spirit. Christian men and 
 women do not try to see how wide a margin they can 
 insert between themselves and sacrifice, but how 
 widely they can protect themselves from the possi- 
 bility of self-indulgence. They covet earnestly the 
 privilege of heroic duty. 
 
 As Christian men and women how are we doing 
 our daily work ? Are we doing it as Christ did His, 
 pressed down, good measure, running over, with a 
 margin, or skimped and niggardly, hugging the edge 
 of the task ? It is an essential of Christian character 
 that its product should surpass the product of any 
 other type of character. It should beat all other 
 character by a margin, and in nothing more than in 
 the square and surplus fulfilling of the homespun 
 duties of daily toil. 
 
 It is this surplus, this margin, which in social 
 relationship constitutes grace and refinement Cour- 
 tesy is just the width of the margin between the edge 
 of mere decency and our social ways. The larger 
 the surplus of love over simple decent manners, the
 
 Freedom: Necessity of a Margin 151 
 
 finer the grace. And it is this surplus of duty-doing 
 over common performance that constitutes true power 
 and influence. 
 
 We can have no difficulty in seeing the applica- 
 tion of the principle in our work, and it is equally 
 clear in our personal moral problems. We are to 
 keep clear of all that is questionable. We are to do 
 better than men require of us. "So society demands 
 so much of you, does it ?" says Jesus. "Well, double 
 its demands. Exact twice as much of yourself." Men 
 are not meant to be satisfied with the demands of the 
 standards of their environment, their Church, their 
 age. All the progress of the world has been due to 
 men who were discontented, who required more of 
 themselves than the world asked. The great men are 
 the men who insist on putting a margin between 
 themselves and their age with its limitations, who 
 will not contract themselves into the pettiness of 
 their time. Our Lord broke through the bonds of 
 His day, of all days, of death itself. He was Hia 
 own law. And He calls us to follow Him. "Come 
 out from the crowd," is His call. "Be a moral aristo- 
 crat. Join my nobility of the men with the margin 
 beyond the need." Constantly you hear people ask- 
 ing, "What does common opinion think or approve ?" 
 Ixegarding this or that practice they inquire, "Is 
 this practice sanctioned by Christian people ?" What 
 under the sun does it matter what people think or 
 sanction? Well, it matters something. We ought 
 to scorn to demand less of ourselves than the crowd
 
 152 The Marks of a Man 
 
 expects of us. But we ought also to scorn to demand 
 as little. We were meant to transcend the crowds, to 
 live by our own high laws, at a loftier altitude than 
 the conventions of the small. The open life, the high 
 life, the free life, the life with its broad margins of 
 deliverance is the only life for us, the life where 
 
 " My heart is at ease from men . . . 
 And belief overmasters doubt and I know that I know, 
 And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within. " 
 
 This is the life we need to-day in our colleges. 
 A little before a recent visit to one of our great uni- 
 versities, an influential student of the university was 
 in my office and I asked him what needed to be said. 
 
 "Well," he replied, "I think the great need at 
 
 is for men to quit straddling, to get down off the 
 fence, to come out into the clear." And the universal 
 need is for men of robust personal independence, of 
 fearless moral conviction, of contempt for the sheep 
 slavery of the crowd, for men of integrity, purity, 
 and strength, with a margin. 
 
 You will find the ideal in Colonel Henderson's 
 Life of Stonewall Jackson. It is in the account 
 of his cadet days at West Point "Jackson paid no 
 heed," says his biographer, "to the traditionary code 
 of etiquette. His acquaintances were chosen regard- 
 less of standing, as often from the class below him as 
 from his own. And in yet another way, his strength 
 of character was displayed. Towards those who 
 were guilty of dishonorable conduct, he was merciless
 
 Freedom: Necessity of a Margin 153 
 
 almost to vindictiveness. He had his own code of 
 right and wrong, and from one who infringed it he 
 would accept neither apology nor excuse." Perhaps 
 you think this is a little fierce. I think it is, but 
 one great need of our Christian life is for more of 
 this stern and severe and Christlike fierceness. But 
 we can not call vindictiveness ideal and probably 
 Stonewall Jackson, severe though he was, was never 
 really vindictive. But if we want the strength with- 
 out the fierceness, we can find it in the noble lines of 
 Mrs. Kingsley's dedication of her exquisite biography 
 of her husband. 
 
 "To the beloved memory of a Righteous Man 
 Who loved God and truth above all things. 
 A man of untarnished honor 
 Loyal and chivalrous gentle and strong 
 Modest and humble tender and true 
 Pitiful to the weak yearning after the erring 
 Stern to all forms of wrong and oppression, 
 Yet most stern to himself 
 Who being angry, yet sinned not . . . 
 Who lived in the presence of God here, 
 And passing through the grave and gate of death 
 Now liveth unto God for evermore." 
 
 Who follows in his train?
 
 PROGRESS AND PATIENCE 
 
 THE VALUE OF A SENSE OF FAILURE
 
 I do what many dream of all their lives, 
 
 Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do, 
 
 And fail in doing. I could count twenty such 
 
 On twice your fingers, and not leave this town, 
 
 Who strive you don't know how the others strive 
 
 To paint a little thing like that you smeared 
 
 Carelessly passing with your robes afloat, 
 
 Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says, 
 
 (I know his name, no matter) so much less ! 
 
 Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged. 
 
 There burns a truer light of God in them, 
 
 In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain, 
 
 Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt 
 
 This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine- 
 
 Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know> 
 
 Eeach many a time a heaven that's shut to me, 
 
 Enter and take their place there sure enough, 
 
 Though they come back and can not tell the world. 
 
 My works are nearer heaven, but I sit here. 
 
 The sudden blood of these men ! at a word 
 
 Praise them, it boils, or blame them, it boils too. 
 
 I, painting from myself and to myself, 
 
 Know what I do, am unmoved by, men's blame 
 
 Or their praise either. Somebody remarks 
 
 Morello's outline there is wrongly traced, 
 
 His hue mistaken : what of that ? or else, 
 
 Rightly traced and well ordered ; what of that ? 
 
 Speak as they please, what does the mountain care? 
 
 Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, 
 
 Or what's a heaven for ? 
 
 BROWNING, " Andrea Del Sarto."
 
 PROGRESS AND PATIENCE 
 
 CHRISTIAN character is a living thing. Every- 
 thing that is Christian is alive. And the indispensa- 
 ble sign of life is growth. Among the essentials of 
 Christian character, accordingly, we must place the 
 principle of change, of progress into ever larger life. 
 We ought repeatedly to confront ourselves with the 
 inquiry, Am I a better and stronger man than I was ? 
 
 Is this a living question with us? There are 
 some whose consciences are not in the least exercised 
 over it. They are satisfied with what they are, and 
 see no reason why they should be distressed because 
 they are not better, or be anxious to find out how 
 they may become better. Or they are satisfied with 
 wishes to be better, without any real progress each 
 year in actual improvement of character. The first 
 condition of progress toward the highest is a deep 
 sense of the duty of advancement. We must be- 
 lieve that we must become better. That is what the 
 Christian life is, a life of steady progress and growth. 
 We are bidden to move on in it from elementary 
 things, such "first principles," as the writer of the 
 Letter to the Hebrews called them, as repentance
 
 158 The Marks of a Man 
 
 from dead works and faith toward God, and to keep 
 our faces set toward perfection. Each year, accord- 
 ingly, we ought to be asking ourselves : "Am I really 
 better than I was? Have I more self-control, more 
 patience and sympathy ? Do I think more often and 
 more lovingly of God ? Am I more kind and un- 
 selfish and helpful and tender? Do I do my work 
 with more ease and power? Am I quicker to obey 
 God and do the duty He assigns, and more responsive 
 and tractable to His Spirit ?" Are we making prog- 
 ress in these things ? The first condition of doing 
 so is to see that we must. The Pharisee was the 
 best man of his time and the worst, the worst be- 
 cause he was satisfied with not being a better man. 
 The Publican was far inferior in character and use- 
 fulness, but he was a better man in the principle of 
 his life, because he was discontented with himself and 
 longed to be a better man. And the two contrary 
 principles are as common in the Christian Church 
 and out of the Christian Church to-day as they were 
 in and out of the Jewish Church in the time of our 
 Lord. 
 
 The Christian character must recognize the duty 
 of ceaseless change. It must see that the best is an 
 obligation, that the perfection which no man has is 
 the thing which the man must have or die, or must 
 have by dying. The ideal of perfection must claim 
 him irresistibly. For a man not to see this argues 
 some moral defect in him. Christian character is 
 hunger for the highest.
 
 Progress and Patience 159 
 
 "Ah my God, 
 
 What might I not have made of Thy fair world, 
 Had I but loved Thy highest creature here? 
 It was my duty to have loved the highest: 
 It surely was my profit had I known : 
 It would have been my pleasure had I seen. 
 We needs must love the highest when we see it, 
 Not Lancelot, nor another." 
 
 If we reject this claim of the highest or feel it 
 slightly, we shall soon let go the higher, then the 
 high. For nothing carries us from the low to the 
 high but requires us in principle to go on from the 
 high to the highest. 
 
 All strength is a conquering. It is an active 
 power, not a passive possession. It is a rejection of 
 the lower, a resolution of ascent, an arising to the 
 far call of Christ. All great biographies are the 
 lives of the seeking men, the men who are not con- 
 tent, "Make Thou my spirit," is their prayer, as 
 it was Marshall Jewell's, "Make Thou my spirit 
 clear and pure as are the frosty skies." "If I cease 
 becoming better," wrote Cromwell in his Bible, "I 
 shall soon cease to be good." "Not as though I had 
 already attained, either were already perfect:" says 
 Paul, "but I follow after, if that I may apprehend 
 that for which also I am apprehended of Christ 
 Jesus. Brethren, I count not myself to have appre- 
 hended: But this one thing I do, forgetting those 
 things which are behind, and reaching forth unto 
 those things which are before^ I press toward the 
 mark for the prize of the high calling of God in
 
 160 The Marks of a Man 
 
 Christ Jesus. Let us therefore, as many as be per- 
 fect, be thus minded : and if in any thing ye be other- 
 wise minded, God shall reveal even this unto you." 
 The very passage of time shows us the necessity of 
 change, the transitoriness of things. If we do not 
 move, God grips us in the sweep of his days and 
 moves us. We are living souls, never twice the same, 
 incapable of permanence. Our only choice is not as 
 to whether we will change, but in what direction, into 
 whose likeness. The soul's whole life is in progress, 
 in the eternal search, the quest of the Grail. 
 
 " Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song, 
 
 Paid with a voice flying by to be lost in an endless sea 
 Glory of virtue to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong, 
 Nay but she aimed not at glory, no lover of glory she: 
 Give her the glory of going on and still to be. 
 
 " The wages of sin is death ; if the wages of virtue be dust 
 Would she have heart to endure for the life of the 
 
 worm and the fly? 
 
 She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just, 
 To rest in a golden grove or to bask in a summer sky ; 
 Give her the wages of going on and not to die." 
 
 This "going on" is the life of the soul. It is the 
 essential thing in Christian character, which is not a 
 possession of finished qualities, but a stern self-gov- 
 ernment under the will of God to the end of the 
 widest service and an unending attainment. 
 
 We must believe that we ought to set out on this 
 great journey, and we must believe also that we are 
 able for it Unless we can, and unless we believe 
 that we can, how unworthy and unfaithful we are!
 
 Progress and Patience 161 
 
 Samuel Daniel put this emphatically in his Epistle 
 to the Countess of Cumberland, in lines twice quoted 
 in Coleridge's Aids to Reflection: 
 
 " Unless above himself he can 
 Erect himself, how poor a thing is man I" 
 
 What we ought we are able for. If the task is 
 infinite and endless, we shall be given infinite and 
 endless strength for it. I knew a three-year-old girl 
 who undertook to move a table which taxed all her 
 strength. After a long struggle, her mother said to 
 her discouragingly, "Baby, you can't move that table. 
 It 's as big as you are." "Yes, I can," was the un- 
 discouraged reply of the little girl, "I 'm as big aa 
 it is." Some men think their tasks are as big as they 
 are. Other men realize that they are as big as their 
 tasks. We can as Christian men. Nothing is set for 
 jus that we can not do by the grace of God. Even 
 when we have no past successes to rely upon, when 
 our ground of complaint is that we have so often 
 failed and dropped back, that we may not hope to 
 succeed and advance, we still can and must believe 
 that we can. There are many reasons why we should 
 still cherish such a great hope, but the one sufficient 
 reason is that we are not making ourselves better. 
 If we grow better it is simply because we have yielded ! 
 ourselves to the grace and goodness of God. There 
 is a new life within us, and that new life can and 
 will work out the glorious end which God purposes 
 for us. On an athletic team in one of our great 
 ii
 
 1 62 The Marks of a Man 
 
 universities, some years ago, was a student whom all 
 his fellows loved, and whose character, steadily de* 
 veloping in power and beauty, found its secret in his 
 favorite Bible verse, which he read personally, "Be- 
 ing confident of this very thing, that he who began 
 a good work in me will perfect it until the day of 
 Jesus Christ." That is the one sure reason we have 
 for our hope of becoming truly better. And it is a 
 help on the way, to accept by faith the fact of the 
 new life within. 
 
 This, then, in the third place, is a real and prac- 
 tical help. We shall not go on our way toward the 
 highest unless we trust the indwelling Spirit of God 
 to do His part, that part of which Paul was speak- 
 ing when he said: "It is no longer I that live, but 
 Christ liveth in me : and that life which I now live in 
 the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son 
 of God." On the one side it looks natural enough. 
 It is just as when we eat and breathe and exercise 
 in the physical life. These processes are so natural 
 that they conceal from us the miracle of life which 
 depends upon them for its sustenance. And so in our 
 higher life we fulfill as we may the conditions set 
 before us, and it seems quite simple ; but in reality, 
 back of all that we do, God is doing the real work, 
 ever moving supernaturally upon us and fashioning 
 us into the likeness He hopes some day to see in us. 
 God wants us to reach the highest, and is doing His 
 best in us and with us to this end. 
 
 The fourth essential, then, is that we co-operate
 
 Progress and Patience 163 
 
 with. God in this, and throw our wills toward God 
 and all pure and upper things. Perhaps our Christ 
 tian life began with a great surrender ; but whether it 
 did or not, it is to consist of an experience of con- 
 stant surrender to the highest. In our reading we 
 ought to cut out of our lives all that hinders or holds 
 us down, and read only what helps and uplifts. In 
 our thinking we ought to bar out, if we can, or drive 
 out if we can not bar out, all unworthy and lower 
 thoughts, and think only on whatsoever things are 
 true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, and of good re- 
 port. In our conversation we ought to avoid what 
 is silly and degrading, and speak of the truth_ which 
 exalts and inspires. There are habits in the higher 
 life as well as in the lower, and we grow best toward 
 God when our souls have contracted the habits which 
 promote growth of spiritual character. We shall 
 make no headway toward the highest without Bible 
 study and prayer. 
 
 And fifth, we must be obedient to our heavenly 
 vision and to all simple duty. What light we see, 
 we must follow. We must not be afraid to make 
 changes in our lives. To-day is the time to do it. 
 When we realize that a change should be made, we 
 should make it without delay. Cutting out some- 
 thing that is wrong is a good beginning. Let us scru- 
 tinize our lives now. Perhaps we have some habit 
 that should be exterminated. Begin with it at once. 
 The first chance we have to do some hard thing we 
 ought to seize. We rise step by step. And the per-
 
 1 64 The Marks of a Man 
 
 ception of an evil to be rooted out of our lives or a 
 new and hard duty to be done, is a revelation of a 
 new step awaiting us, to be taken fearlessly, as one 
 step onward and upward to our goal. 
 
 Sixth, we must be watchful, to see what it is that 
 we are doing, and what it is that is waiting to be 
 done. Much bad behavior is due to indifference, to 
 a want of attention. The evil things get done be- 
 cause they manage to elude notice. We ought not to 
 take the morality of our conduct for granted. It 
 ought to be examined and mercilessly judged by right 
 standards. To this end we ought to be measuring 
 ourselves by Christ, and asking ourselves : "Is this 
 course of conduct which I have followed the highest 
 after all ? Ought I not to be less contented with my- 
 self ? *Wherein, judged by Christ, ought I to be bet- 
 ter than I am?" In the matter of our amusements 
 are we sure there could be no advancement of taste 
 and practice, that would lift them nearer to the 
 purity of Christ? 
 
 Once more, we ought to have some true friends 
 with whom we can talk freely, who will not hesitate 
 to criticise us, showing us our failings and mistakes. 
 Even if we have no such human friends, we have our 
 Lord, to whom we can go with everything, and who 
 will faithfully search us if we will let him, and ex- 
 pose us to ourselves. 
 
 EThe exposure of a man to himself by Jesus Christ 
 far safer than the man's own introspection. The 
 earnest Christian man is often his own worst tor-\
 
 Progress and Patience 165 
 
 turer. I can not illustrate the peril of such torture 
 as contrasted with Christ's exposure, better than by 
 quoting a letter received not long ago from a student 
 in one of our Eastern universities. "I have decided 
 to write to you only after long hesitation. I have 
 felt for a long time that perhaps you could solve the 
 intricate problem of my life and put me on the right 
 track. Perhaps you noticed this quotation from John 
 Kelman in the Northfield calendar: 
 
 ' Many people have got hold of arguments that seem 
 to them entirely sufficient, and yet they can not swing them- 
 selves clear of uncertainty, and come into a faith that will 
 satisfy their souls. Many seem to lack power to believe, as 
 if they had been mesmerized into a paralytic way of think- 
 ing, as if some inertia had come over them, an evil breath 
 in which they could not speak their hearts out, and as if 
 they were living in bondage to a great fear.' 
 
 It states my position better than I could ever 
 do ; but right there, with aggravating incompleteness, 
 the quotation ends. We are not told where the fault, 
 the inconsistency is, and I want to ask you, if you 
 will, to point some sure path out of the bewilderment 
 in which those people Mr. Kelman writes about (of 
 whom I fear I am one) are lost. A man who is 
 hypnotized has not the power to shake off the hyp- 
 nosis, nor even to appeal to the hypnotizer for re- 
 lease. Where does the salvation of the morally hyp- 
 notized lie? I don't want vague general answers, 
 but definite, practicable counsel from your own ex- 
 perience. I come of a good old orthodox family in
 
 1 66 The Marks of a Man 
 
 England. I inherit a dislike for all the modern 
 'stumbling blocks/ dancing, the Sunday newspaper, 
 smoking, etc., though my twentieth century reason 
 tells me they are sane and legitimate pleasures. I 
 go to Korthfield summer after summer, in July and 
 August, hear all the speakers and believe all they say, 
 and resolve to inculcate their ideals in my daily life. 
 Then I descend from mountain top to valley, and 
 while the mental machinery of belief, so to speak, re- 
 mains, the engine has stopped pumping, the heart has 
 gone clean out of it. I realize then that where I 
 thought I at last had 'got religion,' I was only in a 
 transitory state of fervid emotion, that stimulated my 
 imagination while it never touched the vague, death- 
 less germ of doubt down underneath all, the doubt 
 that tells me I may awaken to-morrow and find that 
 the whole business of religion was a grand world- 
 fiction, a chimera born of the necessity of the soul 
 to worship and revere. Very likely you are smiling 
 at my childishness. Perhaps you think I am writing 
 for effect, or am rather boastfully seeking to show 
 that I, like many great men of the past, am a doubter. 
 But from the bottom of my soul I despise the doubt- 
 ing, questioning, faithless man. I have a wistful 
 admiration for men like old Sir Thomas Browne, 
 who longed for yet greater mystery and uncertainty 
 in the universe, that he might transcend it gloriously 
 with his unconquered faith. I admire the same qual- 
 ity in my own friends, in - , whose life breathes 
 the very spirit and purpose of the Christ, in - ,
 
 Progress and Patience 167 
 
 who last year puzzled with me over many of these 
 questions, but who has now left me far, far behind. 
 "But it seems as though I had been somehow left 
 out of it all, for I can not bring Christ into my own 
 life, much as I feel the need of Him there at every 
 point and juncture. You will probably tell me to 
 pray, but I have prayed and prayed till the prayers 
 died on my lips for shame of my hypocrisy. Here I 
 was alone in the room, a loneliness I could feel and 
 know, talking idiotically off into space. It was, as 
 you said last summer, like going up against a stone 
 wall, but I have not found developing in me that 
 subtle, super-sense of things unseen, that you said 
 would follow upon continued prayer. I decided long 
 since to be a minister, would be a missionary if my 
 heart were not so weak I could never pass an exam- 
 ination, *but what a spectacle of a hypocrite I will 
 be, preaching from the pulpit platitudes and general- 
 ities and Biblical exegeses, when in my heart of 
 hearts I know all the time that my life is not in- 
 formed and transformed by the Spirit of Christ. I 
 see how that wonderful influence has worked marvel- 
 ously down the ages in the world's history. I recog- 
 nize its power in lifting the moral lepers and pariahs, 
 the MeAuleys and the Hadleys, to a new and re- 
 deemed life. I see that only through Christ can come 
 enduring peace and joy, deliverance from the hell 
 of unrest and uncertainty that my life since its (this 
 may seem incredible, but it is true) seventh year, 
 has been. One trouble with me is that in a way Paul
 
 1 68 The Marks of a Man 
 
 never dreamed of, I am 'all things to all men.' I 
 am dangerously responsive to the personality and 
 belief of the person I chance to be with. There seem 
 to be elements of my complex character that corre- 
 spond to the individuality of each man I chance to 
 be with. In the presence of a strong Christian, all 
 my readiness of belief gets into action, my better 
 nature is summoned to the surface, I yearn with him 
 to see the world saved for Christ. But if, an hour 
 later, I am talking with an agnostic, I have to admit 
 that after all, we know nothing, that the curtain of 
 death is stretched before the world, and no one 
 knows what lies beyond, men can only speculate and 
 believe and hope, and scarce two men believe alike; 
 that not a dozen men of my acquaintance really take 
 their religion very seriously and are burning "with 
 zeal to save their 'lost' friends from everlasting dam- 
 nation, but are rather content in living an average, 
 well-meaning life, and exerting no effort to rescue the 
 perishing. If Christ's promises are living realities, 
 why does n't his transmuting power take hold and 
 work powerfully on all men who try to accept him, 
 and not on a few isolated ones here and there ? Why 
 are n't more of us among the mighty men, since grace 
 is abounding and full and free to all ? Why are 
 not all Christians 'regenerated' whatever that proc- 
 ess involves ? I have only begun to speak out what 
 is in my heart, and has long been yearning to utter 
 itself, and I know I have n't made my position clear, 
 but I seem to have no position. I believe everything
 
 Progress and Patience 169 
 
 and nothing. My life is a paradox that I contemplate 
 with hopeless wonder, and I wonder if I am doomed 
 to this always. Forgive the egotism of this letter, 
 and do n't please think one word is not sincere, or 
 that I would have burdened you with all this raving 
 if it were not that I could not keep it back, and there 
 is always the hope that I may find what I have been 
 honestly, but futilely, seeking for all my life the 
 boundless peace of Christ. Do n't answer if you are 
 too busy. I shall understand." 
 
 I sent him in reply eight suggestions as to how 
 a conscientious but unsatisfied man may find free- 
 dom and peace of heart: 
 
 " 1. Think about Jesus Christ and not about yourself. 
 
 2. Do the sort of things for other people that you would 
 do if you loved them. 
 
 3. I)., not evi r talk of yourself or boast <M- ~f-k praise 
 or pity. Remember the rules of Archbishop TJensbif: ' Not 
 to call attention to crowded work or petty fatigues or trivial 
 experiences. To heal wounds which in times past my cruel 
 and careless hands have made. To seek no favor, no com- 
 passion ; to deserve, not ask for tenderness. Not to feel any 
 uneasiness when my advice or opinion is not asked, or is set 
 aside.' 
 
 4. Do with absolute faithfulness every duty. 
 
 5. Rejoice at all the good you see in others and all the 
 honors they achieve, and admire all that is admirable in all 
 things. 
 
 6. Counteract all beginnings of evil, whether of thought 
 or of act, by some positive thought or deed of good. 
 
 7. Do not do evil, thus avoiding remorse, and will to love, 
 thus winning peace. 
 
 8. Do not be impatient. Go on coveting the best and 
 highest, but remember that time is necessary for all things
 
 1 70 The Marks of a Man 
 
 to separate us from all past failure and shame and to bring 
 us to the goal, and remember that it will be unconsciously, 
 probably, that we shall draw nearer to it. 
 
 ' One prayed in vain to paint the vision blest, 
 Which shone upon his heart by night and day. 
 But homely duties in his dwelling pressed, 
 And hungry hearts that would not turn away, 
 And cares that still his eager hands bade stay. 
 The canvas never knew the pictured Face, 
 But year by year, while yet the vision shone, 
 An angel near him, wondering, bent to trace 
 On his own life the Master's image grown 
 And unto men made known.' " 
 
 But the lesson of patience is hard to learn. Men 
 realize that progress is necessary and to be secured 
 only by struggle. They struggle, accordingly, but 
 they soon make failure. Then they are prone to lose 
 heart and to think that there is no place for them in 
 the company of those who succeed. But there is no 
 line of division cutting men into two classes, those 
 who succeed and those who fail. We may sometimes 
 say that some men succeed better than others, or, 
 speaking more accurately, some do not fail quite as 
 badly as others ; but we know perfectly well that all 
 these men belong to the same class, that in which 
 Paul says he is standing when he declares, "I count 
 not myself yet to have apprehended." All fail. Men 
 are not differentiated by failures but they are di- 
 vided into three very distinct and clearly marked 
 groups, determined by the attitude which they take 
 toward their unattainment and their failure. 
 
 There are, first of all, the men who deny that they
 
 Progress and Patience 171 
 
 have failed, and who are quite satisfied with what 
 they regard as their success. There are, second, the 
 men who admit that they have failed, and who are 
 disheartened by it, and purpose to relinquish the 
 struggle; and there are, third, the men who admit 
 that they have failed and have not attained, but who 
 take from their own consciousness of unattainment 
 fresh courage and resolution as to the future. 
 
 All of us know representatives of these three 
 groups. We are acquainted with the man who is per- 
 fectly contented with what he has succeeded in do- 
 ing. I knew a man once who could drive a golf ball 
 further than any other living man, who could sing 
 better than any other man, who could play polo and 
 cast a fly better, who could make a better recitation 
 in physics than any other man, who could drop more 
 goals, and from a more distant line, than any one 
 else. As a matter of fact, he never did any of these 
 things, but there was always some perfectly valid 
 reason for it. He was just a little off his game, or 
 he was out of practice a trifle, or he was not really 
 trying, or he was having mercy on the other man, 
 who would feel badly if he was beaten. The conse- 
 quence was that he never accomplished any of the 
 things that he was entirely satisfied that he could 
 accomplish if he wanted to. There are many men 
 with this constitutional self-content, who have never 
 understood what it was to be dissatisfied with their 
 lives. Sometimes we are disposed to envy them. But 
 we are wrong. The child who is born into poverty,
 
 172 The Marks of a Man 
 
 but with the blessing of a great sense of personal 
 need, is vastly less to be pitied than the man *who is 
 born into an affluent and comfortable home, but with 
 no sense of personal unattainment or incomplete- 
 ness of life. We meet men constantly who belong to 
 this first class, out of a certain sheer optimism or a 
 blind ignorance of what life and its ideals really are ; 
 but for the most part, men fall into this class be- 
 cause they make the supreme and common mistake 
 of identifying their ideals with their attainments. 
 Whatever they succeed in doing, that is all that could 
 be expected of them. If they manage to hit off some- 
 thing, that is their future ideal. Or they look around 
 at the men about them, and they take up the average 
 notion of morality, the average notion of character, 
 the average notion of discipline in will, and they 
 make these average attainments of men the ideals of 
 their lives. 
 
 Is there one of us unfamiliar with this type and 
 temper of human character? We see it often in 
 preachers. Here is a preacher who never preaches 
 a sermon with which he is not satisfied. He comes 
 down from the pulpit and expects the people to tell 
 him what a fine achievement it was, and goes home 
 in bubbling self-congratulation over what he did. 
 You can usually discriminate that man from this 
 other man who never succeeds in doing the thing that 
 he wants to do, who never speaks without feeling 
 shame and contrition for the imperfection of his 
 work. And the simple difference between them is
 
 Progress and Patience 173 
 
 that the first man is judging his life by his attain- 
 ments as his ideals, and the second is ruling his life 
 by the ideals that he has not yet gained, and to 
 which he hopes, through whatever struggle or agony 
 of soul, some day to come. 
 
 There are great religions that separate them- 
 selves from one another precisely at this point. When 
 Wu Ting Fang was in this country, he often remarked 
 on this as the fundamental distinction between 
 Christianity and Confucianism. To his mind it was 
 an advantage in Confucianism, that it set before men 
 the practicable thing, that its ideals were human at- 
 tainments, while Christianity had made, as he 
 deemed it, the stupendous blunder of setting before 
 men as the thing that was required of them an im- 
 practicable ideal. Mr. Wu Ting Fang saw with his 
 customary acuteness, though his moral judgment on 
 the matter differed from ours, the real essential dis- 
 tinction between the Christian view and every other 
 view in the world. Our view challenges us to rule 
 our lives, not by the things that can be easily done, 
 but by the things that we are not yet able to do ; to 
 judge our lives not by our best attainments, but by 
 the dreams of what some day we may hope to attain ; 
 and the crime of Christianity is not to fail, but to 
 aim low, or not to aim at all. 
 
 All of us meet also those who belong to the 
 second class, made up of the men who admit that 
 they have failed and who are discouraged by it. As 
 a matter of fact, no man always does his best. He
 
 174 The Marks of a Man 
 
 may think that he does at times, but he knows in his 
 best hours that he never has succeeded in doing so. 
 Again and again he falls short Never can he say, 
 looking back over any given time, or at any effort, 
 "I have done the best of which I am capable." We 
 often console ourselves by saying that we have. That 
 was what "Manny" Holabird used to say. When 
 the game was over and his team whipped, "Well, fel- 
 lows," he would say, "we did our best anyhow." 
 Nobody knew better than "Manny" that they had not 
 done their best, but that was his way of cheering 
 men up to try it over and to see if the next time they 
 could not come a little nearer to doing their best 
 than they had done the time before. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the best man never does his 
 best. That was the agony of the life of Paul; he 
 never realized his ideals. He "looked back over his 
 life, and always saw something that he had not suc- 
 ceeded in doing. He had seen something in the 
 seventh heaven that he could not speak to men ; there 
 was always something in his ideal for his work that 
 he could not fully realize in the performance. Again 
 and again he flings his grammar aside, in his attempt 
 to get at some great truth that he is feeling for, and 
 can not put so that men to whom he speaks will take 
 hold of the great thing that has flashed with the bril- 
 liancy of the sunlight before his own mind, but can 
 not be crowded into speech. It must have been the 
 perpetual pain of the life of Paul that he never did 
 his best.
 
 Progress and Patience 175 
 
 We never do our best. If at any given moment in 
 our lives we have thought that we have done so, the 
 very act of doing our best has discovered to us that 
 we were mistaken. It is like a man climbing hills. 
 He sees a steep hill in front of him, and says, "Now 
 when I reach the top of that, my climb will be done ;" 
 and, lo ! the top of that hill shows him a higher one 
 just beyond that was hidden to his view before ; and 
 he climbs that second one, and, lo ! beyond it reaches 
 range after range that the second hill had hid from 
 sight. The very act of a man's once doing his best is 
 the creation of a whole brood of new ideals for him ; 
 henceforth he dreams in larger dreams. The fact 
 of that one victory has given him the possibility of 
 conceiving greater victories yet for his life, and he 
 lives forever as he lives truly in the knowledge that 
 he never will do his best. 
 
 In the face of these facts, some say, "Well, if a 
 man can not hope always to do his best, and if the 
 truer man he is the less he can hope ever to do his 
 best, what is the use in trying at all ? Is there any 
 peace in ever climbing up the climbing wave ?" 
 There are hundreds of men whom we know, some 
 of them here in our own breasts, within the range of 
 our personal life, who, as they have confronted the 
 inevitable unattainment of a true life, are discour- 
 aged by it, and are disposed to abandon the whole 
 effort to attain. I have two objections to make to 
 that course in myself and in other men. 
 
 In the first place, it is not manlike for a man
 
 1 76 The Marks of a Man 
 
 to give up the struggle simply because lie knows that 
 iii certain particular crises his enemies will be too 
 much for him. We would scorn to belong to an ath- 
 letic team which would never challenge anybody 
 whom it could not whip. One of the most exhilarat- 
 ing experiences I ever had was in a meeting in a 
 Western college several years ago, when the football 
 team had been unmercifully thrashed for about two 
 months and had just about lost its heart and was dis- 
 posed to cancel the rest of its games. The college 
 had only about three hundred students, a third of 
 whom were young women, and of the men a good 
 proportion were little boys in the academy. This 
 reduced the number of available men to eighty or 
 ninety; and they were playing against big. State Uni- 
 versities which had a thousand or more men to choose 
 from. I did not wonder that they were tempted to 
 be a little discouraged. A college meeting was called 
 to consider the matter, and this was the way it was 
 put: "Now, fellows, this is just the whole core of the 
 thing : We can not expect to develop here out of sixty 
 or seventy men the kind of teams that can be devel- 
 oped up at or over in ; we have not 
 
 the material to do it with ; arid if we propose to run 
 ourselves on the principle that we will play only 
 when we can win victories over our opponents, we 
 might just as well go out of this business altogether. 
 Eut if we will go into this thing with the full under- 
 standing that the best victories men can win, are the 
 victories they win over themselves, we can get a repu-
 
 Progress and Patience 177 
 
 tation out here in the West, maybe not for winning 
 games over others, but for being the gamest set of 
 men to be found out here. If we will stop this busi- 
 ness of depending on the enthusiasm of the throats, 
 and rely a little bit more on the enthusiasm of the 
 square jaw, we can do here the thing that we can do, 
 which is all that can be expected of us." As he spoke 
 the iron came back into their blood, and the true 
 spirit of a man re-awoke in those students, as they 
 realized that life was given us not that in it we might 
 win victory over our foes, but that in it we should 
 win victory over ourselves. 
 
 You may remember the incident, in one of Zack's 
 1 orkshire stories, of the Yorkshire man who got sick 
 of his life and went out one moonlight night, and 
 rigged up his gun in the woods, and put the muzzle 
 of it against his head, and was about to push the trig- 
 ger with his toe, when something stirred in his heart. 
 He looked up and saw the moonlight filtering down 
 through the leaves, and he kicked his gun into the 
 thicket, and drawled : "Naw, I '11 not do it. There 's 
 zummat in me aside the dog. I '11 live game and zee 
 it through ;" and he went back to live his life game 
 and see it through. Howsoever many the difficulties 
 that assail me as I dream my dreams and try to real- 
 ize them in my life, I am no man if I will not live 
 game and see it through. 
 
 I object to surrender, in the second place, because 
 it is not Christlike. What difficulties Jesus Christ 
 had to contend against in making Himself what He 
 
 12
 
 178 The Marks of a Man 
 
 wanted to be, we can not say ; what conflict went on in 
 Him before that divine life subdued the human life 
 in which it was encased. The temptation gives us 
 some strange and mysterious insight into it, but no 
 man of us can ever fathom the depth of its meaning. 
 But we can understand something of what Christ 
 wrestled with in His outside circumstances. Wtat 
 He was attempting to do, and the odds that rose up 
 against Him and met Him, would have made a mere 
 man sure that the thing could not be done. He 
 dreamed His dream of a Christian Church, of the 
 tine type of character it was to beget, of everything 
 it was to do in the world, and he had eleven or twelve 
 heavy, clod-born men out of a little obscure prov- 
 ince of the Roman Empire with whom to begin, with 
 whom to lay the foundations, or in whom to plant the 
 finest conceptions that ever broke on the soul of man. 
 Did Jesus Christ say, "I shall never get My dream 
 accomplished in these men ?" Did He say, "I shall 
 never get this great fellowship to which I strive, set 
 up here in this heavy, sin-clogged world?" Never! 
 Be dreamed His dream and He lived for it without 
 dismay, and we are neither like Him nor like our best 
 selves if, standing face to face with failure, the real- 
 ity of which we must admit, we say, "Well, let us 
 give it up and stop." 
 
 That was not the attitude of Paul, who stands 
 forth as a representative of the men who admit 
 that they have failed, who realize that they have 
 not attained their ideals, but who find in that con-
 
 Progress and Patience 179 
 
 seiousness a great exhilaration and joy. "Brethren," 
 he says, "I count not myself yet to have appre- 
 hended." I do not see there any wail or lamenta- 
 tion. It seems to me there is the undertone of a great 
 gladness in Paul's words, as though he said: "I am 
 thankful I have not worked my way through to the 
 other side of God. I am thankful I have not reached 
 beyond my ideals, so that instead of shining as stars 
 in my skies they are dust beneath my feet. Breth- 
 ren, I count not myself yet to have apprehended. 
 This one thing I do, forgetting the unattainments 
 and the failures that are behind, and stretching forth 
 unto the possibilities that are before, I press on 
 toward the mark for the prize of the upward calling 
 of God in Christ Jesus." 
 
 He realized that the very joy and paradox of life 
 lie in the delight that we find in our consciousness of 
 our unattainment of the best. I do not say that there 
 is virtue in failure, but there is virtue and power in 
 discovering that you have failed. There is no glory 
 in not having attained, but there is a glory in being 
 conscious that we have not attained, and that there 
 is something better and more splendid yet before life 
 to be reached. And it is a far greater thing to fail 
 in attempting a great thing than it is to succeed in 
 attempting some small and pitiful thing. It is so in 
 truth. It is better, as Dr. Parkhurst said once, for 
 a man to be overwhelmed by a great truth than to 
 overwhelm a small truth. It is more satisfying to a 
 man to be unable to take in all of some noble divine
 
 i8o The Marks of a Man 
 
 thought and stand baffled before it, than to be wholly 
 able to take in some petty, microscopic fact and feel 
 that he is sovereign of that little fact. Surely it is 
 a greater thing to fail a bit in trying to take in God 
 than to succeed in dissecting a bug. In India there 
 are hundreds of men who write after their names, 
 "Failed B. A.," "Failed M. A." That means that 
 they tried for the degree of bachelor or master of arts 
 and did not get it. To be sure they are not as well 
 satisfied as if they could drop the "Failed," but they 
 are far better satisfied than the man who can not 
 even say, "I tried for it." They go out into the world 
 conscious at least that they were counted worthy to 
 make the effort to succeed, and that they made that 
 effort 
 
 " For thence, a paradox 
 Which comforts while it mocks, 
 Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail : 
 What I aspired to be, 
 And was not, comforts me." 
 
 Even if I did not succeed yesterday in keeping 
 every evil thought out of my mind, I am glad I tried ; 
 and if I did not succeed this morning in seeing all 
 the vision for which my heart hungered, I am glad 
 at least that I knelt down and sought after it. We 
 have begun to enter into the real delight and joy of 
 our living only when we realize that the best of life 
 is that part that is yet to be, what we have not yet at- 
 tained, what, once we have attained it, God in His 
 goodness will make us discontented with, and set us
 
 Progress and Patience 181 
 
 on after the yet better things. "I count not myself 
 yet to have apprehended; I press on" and note 
 Paul's words, "I press on toward the mark;" not 
 "of the prize of the high calling," but "of the up- 
 ward calling," as the Greek says. It is a progressive 
 word. The mark never stands still. Paul knew per- 
 fectly well that when he had arrived, the goal would 
 not be there ; it would have moved on a little distance. 
 The upward calling of God in Christ Jesus will not 
 end until we come out on the other side of eternity. 
 When will that be? We condemn ourselves to the 
 life of utter despair and hopelessness, and shut our- 
 selves out of the true joy and exhilaration of living, 
 if we can not say with Paul, "We have not yet at- 
 tained, but we follow after." Indeed it is this con- 
 sciousness of imperfectness that in Paul's view con- 
 stitutes perfect-mindedness. "I have not attained," 
 he says; "as many of you as are perfect be like- 
 minded." 
 
 This sense of unattainment is necessary, to save a 
 man's ideals for him. A little while ago we received 
 a letter in our office from a man out on the Pacific 
 Coast. He was offering himself for missionary serv- 
 ice, and this is actually what he wrote : 
 
 " I have entirely consecrated my life to the Savior's 
 work, by denying myself, and taking up my cross and doing 
 whatsoever He wants me to do. My spiritual gifts consist 
 of the Grace of God, the precious one of His eternal pres- 
 ence in my heart, mind, soul, and body. Being baptized 
 fully and completely with the Holy Spirit, the Holy Ghost, 
 and Comforter, I have also received power of speech and
 
 1 82 The Marks of a Man 
 
 utterance, with clear enunciation. I am prepared with it, 
 and the sustaining power of the omnipotent, omniscient, 
 and omnipresent, pure and holy Jehovah, to do His good 
 will wherever I go. My intellectual abilities consist of a 
 higher English collegiate education. Am a graduate of the 
 oldest dental college in the world. This knowledge I could 
 use successfully in the relief and cure of pain, when in the 
 work. My physical health is good and strong, and can en- 
 dure hardship cheerfully. Being patient under trials and 
 difficulties, I believe I am ordained and consecrated by God 
 and His H<?ly Son to be set apart for His Holy work. I feel 
 that I am fully qualified to enter the work you may require 
 of me." 
 
 Now "what can you do for a man like that \ Is 
 there any hope left for such a man, whose ideals have 
 sunk clear down into the tarn of his own plain and 
 commonplace life \ He sees no dreams who measures 
 his life in this way. The only way in which we can 
 keep our ideals alive is to believe that they have not 
 yet been attained, and that they wait for us beyond 
 the sunset until we come to them, when they will 
 wait for us in the evening glow of the sunset just 
 beyond. 
 
 As the sense of unattainment is necessary in 
 order to save our ideals ; it is necessary in order 
 to save our characters also. Read through the 
 life of Paul, and I think you will find that 
 one great human secret of his influence was 
 this sense of lowliness, of modest right perspective. 
 He never for a moment slips over into that realm 
 where self-boasting would rob him of his influence 
 with men. "Brothers," he says, "I count not myself
 
 Progress and Patience 183 
 
 to have apprehended." One purpose of that letter 
 was to discover to the Philippians some defects in 
 their own lives. Read it from that point of view, and 
 you can see the tact with which Paul attempts to show 
 the self-satisfied people in the church how far they 
 were from having any grounds for such self-satisfac- 
 tion ; and in the middle of his statement he puts this 
 tactful declaration about hdmself. "You need not 
 think," he says, "that I am judging you by any dif- 
 ferent standards from those by which I judge my- 
 self. I am no perfect man. I have not attained yet,!t- 
 
 Many Christians refrain from doing personal 
 work because they think it would make them seem 
 like Pharisees* "We are no better," they declare, 
 "than the men we try to reach, and if we went to 
 them and said, 'Xow, my friend, won't you come to 
 Christ?' they would look at us and say: 'Yon are 
 not any better than I am. Why are you talking to 
 me in this way f ' Paul never fell into any such 
 error of personal perspective as that. He did not 
 say to men: "I have succeeded where you have 
 failed. Come and be like me." He said : "O men, 
 we have all failed together. I do not count myself to 
 have apprehended any more than you have ; but this 
 is the thing that I am doing ; can you not do it, too ? \ 
 Can't you see that it is the only worthy thing to do ? \ 
 Forgetting the failures that are behind, I stretch 
 forward to the things that are before." 
 
 It is this same sense of unattainment that is 
 necessary to center a man on God. That man who
 
 1 84 The Marks of a Man 
 
 thinks he can do everything perfectly has no need of 
 God in his life. He is his own little god. But it is 
 when the man has realized how incomplete, unfash- 
 ioned, ragged, and rough his life is, that he is flung 
 back to rest on God. You know the lines in Martin 
 Luther's great hymn, in which he says that if we 
 did "in our own strength confide, our struggling 
 would be losing." It is because we have "the right 
 Man on our side, the Man of God's own choosing," 
 and lean on His strength by the very sense of our un- 
 attainment, that we do the impossible thing. That is 
 the principle that Joseph Mazzini puts in a profound 
 saying of his in one of hiis essays, "The morrow of 
 victory is more perilous than its eve." Our need is 
 greatest when our sense of need is least. We realize 
 this when any great conspicuous struggle of life is 
 over, -and we slip out into the old life again. We 
 find that then, far more than in the supposed critical 
 hour, we need the help of God and must lean on Him. 
 The very peril of the hour that comes after victory 
 is this : that in that hour men take the achievement 
 of the victory as the ideal of their life, and rest upon 
 themselves instead of upon God, on whom the man in 
 the hour of his own conscious insufficiency and fail- 
 ure can not fail to lean. We see all this in the life 
 of Jesus Christ. Why is it that again and again 
 after the great crises of His life He goes off to pray ? 
 Because He knows that in those hours the temptation 
 comes to man to lean down on what he has done, to 
 make his past accomplishment the level of his future
 
 Progress and Patience 185 
 
 effort, instead of being aware that now yet greater 
 things are needed in his life and greater heights are 
 to be climbed, and that he must center his life yet 
 more deeply upon God. 
 
 We feel and enlarge our powers only against the 
 resistance that breeds the sense of unattaimnent in 
 us. It is only as I know that I have faced one of 
 the limitations of my life, that the strength awakens 
 to overcome it. The charges of failure in our lives, 
 and now and then the consciousness of having failed, 
 are God's best blessings to us, His challenge to us to 
 move up to a new level of life. You remember the 
 way this truth is flung at us in Rabbi Ben Ezra: 
 
 " Then, welcome each rebuff 
 
 That turns earth's smoothness rough, 
 Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go ! 
 
 Be our joy three-parts pain ! 
 
 Strive, and hold cheap the strain; 
 Learn, nor account the pang: dare, never grudge 
 
 the throe!" 
 
 We should sink down into the life of the beast 
 if it were not for the sting that now and then whips 
 life into a new examination of itself, and challenges 
 life to the larger and better achievements that are 
 set before it in the metaphor of the cross. 
 
 The men who have made the great successes are 
 often the men who had to fail a long time and be pa- 
 tient before at last success came. Eleven years ago 
 there died at Tunbridge Wells a nearly forgotten old 
 man, who was as good an illustration as any, of this
 
 1 86 The Marks of a Man 
 
 great class. "Sir Rowland Macdonald Stephenson," 
 as the London Spectator of November 30, 1895, told 
 his story, "had every reason as a young man to ex- 
 pect a large fortune and a political career, when a 
 great family disaster compelled him to devote him- 
 self to active work. He had some knowledge, not a 
 great deal, of civil engineering, and after serving 
 for some time as secretary to an association for pro- 
 moting steam communication with the East, he went 
 to India, resolved to commence there a great system 
 of railway enterprise. He besieged the officials, pub- 
 lished pamphlets, wrote articles, collected engineer- 
 ing reports, and worried every one in power, until at 
 last he found a statesman in Lord Dalhousie, who 
 could understand the breadth of has plans. Backed 
 by the whole force of the mighty Viceroy, whose con- 
 quest of the Punjab had made him absolute even 
 over Anglo-Indian opinion, he returned to England, 
 interested great capitalists in the cause, converted or 
 coerced the Court of Directors, who were, we believe, 
 afraid of the power which might accrete to a great 
 'Railway Interest' in India, and was appointed man- 
 aging director of the East India Railway, the first 
 and most important of the great lines. He returned 
 to Calcutta, and there, with feeble health, no 'knowl- 
 edge of the country' in the ordinary sense he knew 
 as little as Clive of any native language he sat for 
 years, rarely stirring out of has office, driving with 
 the energy of five men the vast concern. There were 
 difficulties with the Government, difficulties with the
 
 Progress and Patience 187 
 
 native landlords, difficulties with the contractors, and 
 twice, at least, any other man would have returned 
 deadbeat; but Macdonald Stephenson never lost 
 heart, or patience, or temper with any obstacle. As 
 we have said, he knew little of enginearing as ah art; 
 he wrote with a certain difficulty, in a queer snippety 
 way; and he was a little intolerant of fools; but he 
 had always a plan, always a man, and always, when 
 dealing with officials, an infinity of persuasiveness. 
 He became the very soul of the undertaking; every 
 engineer under him and he had one man of genius 
 and many able men knew he could rely upon sup- 
 port ; and, however great the difficulties, he demanded 
 that the work should get on; that nobody should 
 talk of impossibilities; that impracticable rivers 
 should be bridged; that non-existent labor should be 
 imported ; that the indispensable class of minor con- 
 tractors who did not exist, and could not be imported, 
 should be created out of the ground (such a lot these 
 latter were at first ! declasse natives, shiftless Eura- 
 sians, drinking Europeans, broken nondescripts of 
 all sorts, but all efficient slave-drivers, who gradually 
 learned their work and got weeded out by degrees). 
 Of course, with such a steam-motor behind, and Mr. 
 Trumbull, the chief engineer, to do any impossible 
 work, the road rolled on until at last it reached Delhi, 
 and Sir Macdonald Stephenson returned home to be 
 the guiding spirit of the Railway Board. He thought 
 his work had only begun, for the dream of his life 
 was not to found an Indian Railway system, but to
 
 1 88 The Marks of a Man 
 
 beat De Lesseps on his own ground and open a direct 
 railway line from Calais to India ; and with this ob- 
 ject he interviewed, and as a rule conquered, nearly 
 every statesman in Europe, including some very diffi- 
 cult Pashas ; but the time was not ripe. There were 
 international jealousies without end; capitalists 
 shook their heads, and asked for impossible guar- 
 antees; and at last, we fancy, the energy of the ir- 
 repressible advocate of 'opening up' began to fail 
 him. He possessed vitality, which carried him on to 
 eighty-seven, and a passion for music that helped him 
 to throw off all business cares ; but he had sat twenty 
 years in a steamy Calcutta office, doing work equal 
 to that of a great Government, and it told on him in 
 the end. He had begun rather late in life, too, for 
 tropical work ; he had made no fortune beyond a con- 
 siderable life-annuity voted to him by his grateful 
 company, and though he never abandoned his great 
 project, and to the end of his active life kept up a 
 brisk correspondence about it, he died of old age, 
 without disease or pain, with his dream unfulfilled." 
 But his work in India was a dream fulfilled and ful- 
 filled after failure. 
 
 It is by failure that God sifts us out. Paul 
 meant to embody something of this idea in his con- 
 ception of the uses of tribulation. The word which 
 he uses for tribulation is derived from the word OXifiw, 
 to press, as grapes. The Vulgate uses the Latin 
 word from which our word "tribulation" is derived. 
 "Tribulation" was the act of separation of grain
 
 Progress and Patience 189 
 
 from the husk, and the metaphor was caught up by 
 some Christian writer, as Paul had used the meta- 
 phor of pressing the grapes, to indicate the separa- 
 tion of men by tribulations, threshings, or pressings ; 
 "of whatever in them was light, trivial, and poor, 
 from the solid and the true," as George Wither wrote 
 in the seventeenth century : 
 
 " Till from the straw the flail the corn doth beat, 
 Until the chaff be purged from the wheat, 
 Yea till the mill the grain in pieces tear, 
 The richness of the flour will scarce appear. 
 So, till men's persons great affliction touch, 
 If worth be found, their worth is not so much, 
 Because like wheat in straw, they have not yet 
 That value which in threshing they may get. 
 For till the bruising flails of God's corrections 
 Have threshed out of us our vain affections ; 
 Till those corruptions which do misbecome us 
 Are by Thy sacred Spirit winnowed from us ; 
 Until from us the straw of worldly treasures, 
 Till all the dusty chaff of empty pleasures, 
 Yea, till His flail upon us He doth lay, 
 To thresh the husk of this our flesh away ; 
 And leave the soul uncovered ; nay, yet more, 
 Till God shall make our very spirit poor, 
 We shall not up to highest wealth aspire : 
 But then we shall ; and that is my desire." 
 
 And so also Michael Angelo : 
 
 " As when, O Lady mine, with chiseled touch 
 The stone, unhewn and cold, 
 Becomes the living mold, 
 
 The more the marble wastes, the more the statue grows ; 
 So if the working of my soul be such
 
 190 The Marks of a Man 
 
 That good is but evolved by Time's dread blows, 
 The vile shell day by day 
 Falls like superfluous flesh away. 
 
 1 take whatever bonds my spirit knows : 
 
 And Reason, Virtue, Power, within me lay." 
 
 And God accounts what we tried, not what we 
 succeed in. He measures life not by its attainments 
 but by its ideals and the way it strove for them. This 
 too, is in Rabbi Ben Ezra: 
 
 "But all, the world's coarse thumb 
 And finger failed to plumb, 
 So passed in making up the main account ; 
 All instinct immature, 
 All purposes unsure, 
 
 That weighed not as his work, yet swelled 
 the man's amount : 
 
 " Thoughts hardly to be packed 
 Into a narrow act, 
 Fancies that broke through language and 
 
 escaped ; 
 
 All I could never be, 
 All, men ignored in me, 
 This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the 
 
 the pitcher shaped." 
 
 There is a world of comfort here for the man 
 whose battle no one knows, whose defeat men see, but 
 not the fierce conflict within, which issued in defeat. 
 But God saw it all and He measures the man not by 
 jvhat he did but by what he tried to .do. 
 
 I think it was the consciousness of his unattain- 
 ment that gave to the life of Paul its splendid repose 
 and reserve power. Of all the follies and the f rivoli-
 
 Progress and Patience 191 
 
 ties that ever dawned on the thought of man, it seems 
 to me perfectionism is about the worst. How any 
 man can twist his exegesis of the Scriptures, can 
 twist his knowledge of human life around to such 
 a point of view, passes my comprehension. Paul 
 never for a moment let any such thought enter his 
 mind. As he looks back over his life, it is this con- 
 sciousness of incompleteness that gives it that solid 
 reticence of power that all of us feel there. He re- 
 members the day when he put Stephen to death, and 
 it hangs about his life every hour, barring him 
 against the lightnesses and frivolities that- come into 
 the soul of the man who has no conscious back shad- 
 ows of failure in his life. I suppose Paul never lost 
 from his memory that vision of Stephen's face. Fred- 
 erick "W. H. Myers speaks of it in his study of Paul's 
 inner soul, suggesting that he had ever in his mind 
 those faces of the men and women whom he sought 
 and slew. 
 
 " Ah ! when we mingle in the heavenly places, 
 How will I weep to Stephen and to you." 
 
 And in his new life the consciousness of continued 
 unattainment was making him the man he was. He 
 fought a great battle with sin. When he would do 
 good, evil was present with him. He was conscious 
 that he had not yet attained, and it made him an in- 
 finitely stronger and more powerful man. 
 
 "Ay, and for me there shot from the beginning 
 
 Pulses of passion broken with my breath ; 
 O, thou poor soul, enwrapped in such a sinning, 
 Bound in the shameful body of thy death !
 
 192 The Marks of a Man 
 
 " Well, let me sin, but not with my consenting, 
 
 Well, let me die, but willing to be whole ; 
 Never, O Christ, so stay me from relenting, 
 Shall there be truce betwixt my flesh and soul." 
 
 I think it was out of the agony and the pathos of 
 his consciously defective devotion, that the greatest 
 spiritual power of the Apostle Paul was born. 
 
 And lastly, it is this very sense of unattainment 
 that is itself the prediction that some day we shall 
 attain. The law of habit is a priceless comfort to a 
 man. Though he seems to be failing, the real effort 
 to succeed, repeated and repeated and repeated, is 
 hardening into the stuff of character for him, and 
 some day he will wake to find he has won where he 
 had always lost. "We are spinning our own fates, 
 good or evil, and never to be undone," says Professor 
 James in his Psychology. "Every smallest stroke of 
 virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. The 
 drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, ex- 
 cuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, 'I 
 won't count this time !' Well ! he may not count it, 
 and a kind Heaven may not count it ; but it is being 
 counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells 
 and fibers the molecules are counting it, registering 
 and storing it up to be used against him when the 
 next temptation comes. Nothing we ever do is, in 
 strict scientific literalness, wiped out. Of course 
 this has its good side as well as its bad one. As we 
 become permanent drunkards by so many separate 
 drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and au-
 
 Progress and Patience 193 
 
 tborities and experts in the practical and scientific 
 spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work. 
 Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of 
 his education, whatever the line of it may he. If he 
 keep faithfully busy each hour of the working day, 
 he may safely leave the final result to itself. He can 
 with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine 
 morning to find himself one of the competent ones 
 of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have 
 singled out. Silently between all the details of his 
 business, the power of judging in all that class of 
 matter will have built itself up within him as a pos- 
 session that will never pass away. Young people 
 should know this truth in advance. The ignorance 
 of it has probably engendered more discouragement 
 and faint-heartedness in youths embarking on ardu- 
 ous careers, than all other causes put together." ^ i 
 
 It may take a long time to acquire as a habit the 
 realization of our higher ideals, but the time of ac- 
 quisition will come to him who waits for it. The 
 very possession of the ideal and the sense of its un- 
 attainment are guarantees of this. A man says to 
 me there is no God, and I go off alone, and my heart 
 says, "O my Father," and I hear His voice, "O my 
 child," and I know that that hunger and the indu- 
 bitable, though inaudible, response to it, are the as- 
 surance that what has been said to me is false. I 
 dream my dream of the life that may be, and of the 
 thing that can be done, and men say it is just a vision 
 of my own thought and that no one ever has realized 
 '3
 
 194 The Marks of a Man 
 
 it or ever can, but the fact that it lingers in my heart 
 is the assurance that some day I shall see it face to 
 face. The fact that we stretch after it with yearn- 
 ing proves to each man of us that the thing we have 
 not is the thing that some day we shall have. The 
 dream would not be there if some day, far away 
 where the tints of evening lie, we shall not at last 
 accomplish it and possess it as our own. 
 
 In the very hour when we realize most keenly 
 how wide the chasm is that separates us from it, 
 when our hearts rise up in strongest revolt against 
 being numbered with those who have failed, and 
 when yet despair tempts us to believe that the future 
 will hold nothing better for us than the past, that is 
 rhe very hour when the victory that opens the door 
 to a new life is about to be won. You remem- 
 ber the scene in the sixth chapter of the prophecy 
 of Isaiah. It was when the prophet had fallen 
 down in the temple on his face, his mouth in 
 his hand, and his hand in the dust, conscious that 
 his life was rottenness, and evil, and wreck, when 
 he cried out of his knowledge of his failure, "I am a 
 man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a 
 people of unclean lips," then, in the very hour 
 when he saw most clearly of all the hours of his life 
 how far short he had come, he heard the great voice. 
 "Man, let Me touch thy lips; this is the hour of a 
 new life to thee. Stand upon thy feet." And as out 
 of the very depths of his consciousness of unattain- 
 ment and flaw, Isaiah rose, he heard that alluring
 
 Progress and Patience 195 
 
 voice, the most enticing voice that ever speaks to 
 man, more alluring and more enticing because it 
 expects always that the man will know that it is for 
 him though his name be not named, "Whom shall I 
 send, and who will go for us ?" and the man who 
 knows that he has failed cries out of the very depths 
 of his failure, and in the hour of it, "Here am I, 
 Lord, send me." 
 
 If you and I will look out over our lives and will 
 enter into Paul's spirit as he looked out over his life, 
 with all its fine achievement, so much finer than any 
 achievement of ours, and will say each of us: "My 
 life, too> has fallen short; I have not yet appre- 
 hended : but this one thing I do, forgetting my last 
 year, wherever and whatever it may have been, for- 
 getting that, forgetting the last fortnight, forgetting 
 everything that is behind, and stretching, as the race- 
 horse strains himself in his course, unto the things 
 that are before, I press on toward the mark for the 
 prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus," 
 then we may be sure that some day we shall arrive. 
 And what wall it matter then that our path was 
 strewn with failure and shortcomings, if only we 
 stand secure in our victory at last ? 
 
 " Safe home, safe home in port, 
 
 Rent cordage, shattered deck, 
 Torn sail, provisions short, 
 And only not a wreck, 
 But they may smile upon the shore 
 Who tell their voyage perils o'er.
 
 196 The Marks of a Man 
 
 " The prize, the prize secure 
 
 The athlete nearly fell. 
 Bare all he could endure, 
 
 And bare not always well, 
 But he may smile at trials gone, 
 Who lays the victor's garland on." 
 
 And yet that is not the right note. There is a 
 Christian salvage of character such as this, but we 
 are thinking of higher things, of a really victorious 
 life, a life whose failures are failures of attainment, 
 not of transgression, which has been, when it closes, 
 the life of a conquerer and more, triumphant, 
 with a margin. "For we," says Paul, "are more than 
 conquerers through Christ who loved us," So can 
 we also be. 
 
 But "through Christ." As I close these lectures 
 I would return to the truth which I pressed at the 
 beginning. Jesus Christ is the only right ideal of 
 character. He is also the only creator of right char- 
 acter. If we would be the men we ought, we must 
 lay ourselves under His molding hand to be shaped 
 and remade by Him. "If you will come to me," He 
 is saying still to men, "I will take you and I will 
 make you what you ought to be, what you can not 
 otherwise become." We may put the matter in new 
 theological phrases if we wish, but the old evangel- 
 ical realities are still true. By Christ alone can life 
 be delivered of its sin, from all the guilt and burden 
 of it, felt deepest in proportion as men rise highest 
 in the essentials of Christian character. In Christ 
 alone can men find the new wills, the transformed
 
 Progress and Patience 197 
 
 minds, the altered affections without which no new 
 manhood can be. You can not depersonalize the ad- 
 jective "Christian." It gets all its meaning from 
 the historic Christ. He and not His message, not 
 His Kingdom, not His Spirit, is the living fountain 
 of the Christian faith and the Christian character. 
 "Whoever would be a man must learn his lesson and 
 acquire his strength from THE MAST CHEIST JESUS.
 
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