BUKRIS A. JENKINS 
 
 ! 
 
 Hi!!
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 THE MAN IN THE STREET 
 AND RELIGION
 
 The Man in the Street 
 and Religion 
 
 BY 
 BURRIS A. JENKINS 
 
 NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 LONDON AND EDINBURGH
 
 Copyright, 1917, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago: 17 N. Wabash Ave. 
 Toronto : 25 Richmond St., W. 
 London: 21 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street
 
 1884177 
 
 n
 
 PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 THE author makes no attempt, in this 
 little book, to be systematically theo 
 logical. He has no such purpose, even 
 if he had the needful ability. He has made 
 only the attempt to state what he believes to 
 be some of the prevailing popular conceptions 
 of religious truth, in a popular manner; to 
 trace some of the implications and results; and 
 to indicate what seem to him to be the lines 
 upon which these popular beliefs are likely to 
 grow and should be encouraged to grow. 
 
 The " modern instances " set forth by way 
 of illustration, unless otherwise stated, were 
 either shared in by the author or came under 
 his personal observation. 
 
 Years ago in a small class in English com 
 position at Harvard University, a " daily 
 theme " of the present writer s was under 
 going dissection at the hands of the late Prof. 
 A. S. Hill, of rhetorical memory. At last the 
 critic tartly observed : 
 
 " This narrative would do very well, if it had 
 the ring of truth. It does not make the im 
 pression that the incident ever took place." 
 
 " But, Professor," triumphantly replied the 
 7
 
 8 PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 young student, " it is true. I was there and 
 saw it all." 
 
 " That may well be," snapped the old gen 
 tleman ; " but you must make it sound true." 
 
 The student was stung by the splendor of 
 a sudden thought and a new one ; and ever since 
 that day he has lived in mortal terror of tell 
 ing something that did not sound true. He 
 has, therefore, thought it necessary to add this 
 word of asseveration, lest at any time he may 
 have been lacking in verisimilitude. 
 
 For one or two of the outlines of chapters 
 the author may be indebted to conversations 
 held many years ago with a pioneer preacher 
 in the West, Alexander Proctor. He is glad 
 to acknowledge this and many other intel 
 lectual obligations to this wise old man. 
 
 B. A. J. 
 
 KANSAS CITY, Mo.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I. HE ALSO Is A CHILD OF GOD ; sup 
 porting the Proposition that the 
 Man in the Street is Religious . 1 1 
 
 II. FALLOW-LAND; maintaining that 
 there are Unexplored Depths in 
 the Average Man .... 26 
 
 III. SOME ONE TO COME; setting forth 
 
 the Idea that Man must Look 
 outside Himself for Help . . 46 
 
 IV. THE CHARMING RABBI; or Jesus 
 
 Christ as a Prophet for the Mind 
 
 of Man 69 
 
 V. THE UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL ; 
 or Jesus Christ as a Priest for 
 the Heart ..... 94 
 
 VI. THE KINGDOM WITH UNSEEN 
 BOUNDARIES; or Jesus Christ as 
 a King of the Will . . .120 
 
 VII. WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? And 
 what will Ye do with the Man 
 called Jesus? 150 
 
 VIII. THE CHARMED LIFE; or the Rela 
 tion of Man to the Laws of the 
 
 World 182 
 
 9
 
 10 CONTENTS 
 
 IX. How ARE THE SCRIPTURES IN 
 SPIRED ? or the Place of the Bible 
 in the Thought of the Average 
 Man 203 
 
 X. THE POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE; 
 
 or the Future Destiny of Man . 225
 
 HE ALSO IS A CHILD OF GOD 
 
 TIME was when men were urged to 
 " get religion." The assumption was 
 that it was a commodity to be obtained, 
 a will-o -the-wisp, the pot of gold at the end 
 of some rainbow, to be pursued and, if possible, 
 captured. We are at last dimly discerning that 
 men have got religion already. They do not 
 need to get it. They only need to develop it. 
 
 Religion is not an extraneous article, a gem, 
 a talisman, an amulet, a rare exotic, a philoso 
 pher s stone, to be sought high and low, far 
 and near, and painfully added to the spiritual 
 furniture or treasure-house. The pearl of 
 greatest price is not religion, but the King 
 dom of God ; and if the Kingdom of God means 
 anything, it means the progressive dominion of 
 the Father in the " Dark Chamber," in the soul 
 of His child. To purchase this, one may well 
 sell his all. 
 
 To look upon the seething mass of men in 
 the city streets, or on the countryside, the navvy 
 in the ditch or on the right-of-way, the chauf- 
 11
 
 12 HE ALSO IS A CHILD OF GOD 
 
 feur and the engine-man, the plumber and the 
 plutocrat, the man with the hoe and the man 
 with the quirt, the clerk and the architect, the 
 child of the silver spoon and the child of the 
 rookery, and to declare that all alike are re 
 ligious, naturally religious, seems a daring 
 stand to take. But that is the precise position 
 to which we are beginning to come. The man 
 in the street, the common man, Walt Whit 
 man s average man, the composite made up of 
 the myriads, the sum of all sorts and condi 
 tions, he, the wonderful, the acme of all the 
 great Creator s work so far as we can see, 
 despite " the sin wherewith the face of man is 
 blackened," he also is a son of God; he has 
 religion. 
 
 He may not believe it; he may stoutly deny 
 it ; but he is simply unaware. " I religious ? " 
 he may say. " You are mistaken, man. I do 
 not go to church. I have not seen the inside of 
 a church in twenty years. I don t believe in it. 
 I believe in getting what I can out of life, its 
 goods, its pleasures. I live for the day. Let 
 the future take care of itself." Pressed fur 
 ther, he may declare: " If I have any religion, 
 it is humanity. My lodge is my religion. 
 Do as you would be done by ; that is my re 
 ligion." If it is brought to his attention that 
 even these, after all, are religion, he will shake
 
 HE ALSO IS A CHILD OF GOD 13 
 
 his head solemnly and earnestly, saying : " I am 
 not a religious man. My neighbor Brown, my 
 neighbor Jones, they are naturally religious. 
 They go to church, they pass the plate, they 
 lead the singing, they like to pray in meeting. 
 I am not like that. No, I am an irreligious 
 man. I am not sure I believe in anything." 
 
 His very solemnity is earnest of his sub 
 stratum of religion. He is only ill-informed 
 as to what religion is; thinks it is a matter of 
 vocal sound, of plate-passing, church building, 
 nail-driving, " church-work," busy-ness. He is 
 unaware of the deep vibrations in his own soul 
 answering the notes of the voice of God, deep 
 calling unto deep. He is unconsciously utter 
 ing the only heresy there is, the denial of his 
 own sonship to God; for to deny that one is 
 religious is to deny that God is one s Father, 
 and to assert that He blundered in making one, 
 that He is no God. 
 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, " There 
 are one-story intellects, two-story intellects, and 
 three-story intellects with skylights." Ay, but 
 there are none but three-story souls, and all of 
 them open to the light of God. Their sky 
 lights may be blurred and blackened, soot- 
 covered and frosted; the stairways may be 
 clogged, rickety, and vile ; but every glass may 
 be cleared, every step mended, and the light
 
 14 HE ALSO IS A CHILD OF GOD 
 
 that never was on sea or land flood every nook 
 and cranny of them all. 
 
 Those inarticulate stirrings of the soul, deep 
 and almost insensate rumblings in cavernous 
 depths, that answer to the moods of nature, to 
 music, to the mysteries in humanity its hero 
 isms, its criminalities these are index, are they 
 not, to the God-kinship, possibly rudimentary, 
 arrested in development, smothered and 
 choked, but indubitably existent in the un 
 marked galleries of man s mammoth cave. 
 
 " Like tides on a crescent sea-beach, 
 
 When the moon is new and thin, 
 Into our hearts high yearnings 
 
 Come welling and surging in, 
 In from the mystic ocean 
 
 Whose rim no foot has trod, 
 Some of us call it longing, 
 
 And others call it God." 
 
 Let us test the man in the street and see if 
 these things indeed be so. 
 
 He is playing, on an afternoon of early 
 spring, over an oak-and-elm-lined golf-course. 
 He is distinctly a man of the world, a corpora 
 tion lawyer, one would say offhand a material 
 ist. Suddenly on the edge of number three 
 green he stops, stands as in a dream, his stick 
 listlessly held in hand, his ball forgotten, his 
 eyes seeking the green fastnesses of the great
 
 overhanging oak. His absorbed and eager op 
 ponent putts alone. At last the latter looks 
 up and asks, " What is it? " 
 
 " Oh, nothing," comes the answer, " Only 
 the first mocking-bird I ve heard this year." 
 
 Then the two trudge on under a radiant 
 canopy of song ; and the man of the world bears 
 the imprint of the music through the afternoon. 
 Whose voice has been speaking to his breast? 
 Not the bird s alone. 
 
 A sailorman is standing his midnight watch 
 in the waist of a little brigantine in the south 
 Pacific. The moon floods with light the still, 
 phosphorescent waters, scarcely stirred with a 
 breath of wind ; and the Southern Cross hangs 
 yonder on the rim of the world. A sleepless 
 passenger moves out for a breath of air, and 
 pauses to listen as he hears the lonely sailor s 
 softly hummed song : 
 
 "Jesus, lover of my soul, 
 Let me to Thy bosom fly" 
 
 The sailor s hymn! Beecher said he would 
 rather have written it than to have sat on all 
 the thrones of all the kingdoms of this world. 
 This sailor heard it from some Salvation Army 
 squad, in some seaman s mission, or in some 
 far-away rural Sunday school of childhood; 
 there may be no grain of religion in his me-
 
 16 HE ALSO IS A CHILD OF GOD 
 
 chanical singing. Well, move foiAvard, passen 
 ger, and talk with him an hour on the deck of 
 the little sail-ship, in midocean, in the midnight. 
 Just give him rein, let him speak out. God is 
 holding soft and dim converse in the heart of a 
 rough man. 
 
 A young student stands at the side of a 
 mogul-engine on a trans-continental railway. 
 He begs the engine-man for a ride in the cab. 
 " I know it s contrary to rules, but I promise 
 not to talk." 
 
 A moment s scrutiny through great steel- 
 rimmed spectacles from a pair of piercing eyes, 
 set under the black, beetling brows of a great 
 head, on the massive shoulders of six-feet- 
 three; then, 
 
 " All right. Climb in." 
 
 Away over the great divide ; across the alkali 
 desert ; glimmering water off miles to the right ; 
 a violated promise, and " What lake is that, 
 Cap?" "No lake at all. Mirage!" hurled 
 backward over a shoulder through the cab- 
 window. Then, hour after hour, fifty miles to 
 the hour, through sage and mesquite and 
 chaparral, past the Sink of the Humboldt, past 
 the twilight, into the night. 
 
 At a watering-tank, the young man swings 
 down. 
 
 " Much obliged, and good-night ; " and, as
 
 HE ALSO IS A CHILD OF GOD 17 
 
 he starts back to the Pullman, to his surprise 
 the engine-man reaches out a great hand and 
 grips his own and holds it. They had never 
 seen each other before that day; knew nothing 
 of each other. Finally, after another long 
 piercing look downward from the great black 
 eyes, the engine-man says : 
 
 " Pray for us, will you ? " 
 
 " Certainly. Are you a religious man ? " 
 
 " No. Once was. Not any more. Good 
 night." 
 
 They never met again; but the lad never 
 forgot that face. He would know it in a thou 
 sand, over twenty years after. It was the face 
 of a child of God, roughened and seamed and 
 scarred, a child that needed his Father and he 
 knew it. Please God, he has found Him. 
 
 One more picture. It is a sportsmen s camp 
 in Oklahoma, by a stream, under great trees, 
 deep in a thicket through which a path is cut 
 to the camp-fire and the tent. The night is clear 
 and still; stars are all over the sky; it is crisp 
 and cold. Far off to the southeast a pack of 
 hounds is opening, and far off to the northeast 
 another is answering. Horn is calling to horn, 
 as the two packs converge to the rendezvous at 
 the camp. One of the hunters strolls out 
 through the thicket-path and sees what he sup 
 poses to be bolls of cotton on the stems, lying
 
 18 HE ALSO IS A CHILD OF GOD 
 
 scattered about the underbrush. But next 
 morning his Oklahoma friend calls to him, 
 saying : 
 
 " Come here, see ! The strangest thing, and 
 the most beautiful thing you ever saw! " 
 
 Those apparent cotton-bolls were frost flow 
 ers woven around the stem of a peculiar weed 
 only this one kind of weed and no other 
 by the ringers of the King of carvers. What 
 ever the scientific explanation, whether due to 
 the exuding sap, the exhalations of the plant, 
 there they were, the lilies of the frost, the 
 roses of the night, large as American Beauties, 
 and pure white as the snow. 
 
 The Oklahoma man - was no church-man. 
 He had ridden in when the strip was opened 
 and had fought then, as he fights now, for his 
 stake. But he was in a visible ecstasy over the 
 frost-artistry. He could talk of nothing else 
 for an hour. Whether he thought of the hum 
 ble, broken, defaced lives that were like this 
 weed, around which the Great Artist weaves 
 the flowers of His subtle, delicate beauty, who 
 shall say? But the stirring of the soul was 
 clear to the observer; the ecstasy was enough, 
 in the kindly eyes and the honest face, to teach 
 the kinship between the Artist and His off 
 spring. God s weaving had been not in vain. 
 
 But why multiply instances ? They are pat-
 
 HE ALSO IS A CHILD OF GOD 19 
 
 ent everywhere to him who will look and see. 
 The field is white to harvest. The seed of 
 God is thick in the soil of men. The answer 
 is universal to His natural, His holy laws. 
 
 It is not merely to him who in the love of 
 nature holds communion with her visible forms 
 that she speaks a various language; but it is 
 also to the rough plainsman who rides alone 
 the fences of a short-grass ranche, to the yokel 
 on the thankless rocky hills of a New England 
 or an Ozark farm, to the milkman leaving his 
 early bottles on the steps under a rising sun, to 
 the negro sluicing down those steps of a sum 
 mer morning. To all of these come, now and 
 again, perhaps dimly perceived, perhaps not 
 perceived at all, the voices of earth, air, and 
 sky, as really as came the voices of the stars 
 to those nomadic peoples on the Syrian plain 
 who manifested so evident a genius for re 
 ligion. 
 
 It is not merely to the Italian or the German, 
 nurtured in homes of music, that harmonies 
 come with nameless emotions, sounding the 
 deep places of the soul, and render restless as 
 by an angel s troubling the waters of the inner 
 pools. It may be but the response of a bar 
 barous heart to a tom-tom, a semi-savage to a 
 brazen cymbal, a negro to a banjo, or a Swede 
 farm hand to a wheezing accordion, but it is
 
 20 HE ALSO IS A CHILD OF GOD 
 
 none the less a response. It is deep calling unto 
 deep. Very rudimentary may be these intima 
 tions of religion, but they are there. 
 
 It is not merely to the learned in history that 
 the knowledge of the movements of the tribes 
 and nations, the rise and decline of kingdoms, 
 dynasties, empires, comes with a certain awe; 
 but also to the common man come moments 
 when the clash of arms, the wreck of ocean 
 greyhounds, the storms of unreasoning hate 
 that rage between nations divided by a narrow 
 frith, strike him dumb with wonder and awe. 
 Kings and governments, power and pageantry, 
 daze and drug him ; the crowd-psychology that 
 he does not fathom sweeps him along; he 
 thrills instantly to the heroic; he answers an 
 grily to the dastardly; his spine crinkles and 
 crawls under the spell of a national anthem or 
 marching song, while tears of which he is 
 ashamed spring in his eyes. Altogether he is 
 a wonderful instrument, of many strings and 
 subtleties, vibrating, constantly vibrating in 
 under- and over-tones, to the tremendous dia 
 pason of his Father s playing on the great 
 pipes of the world. 
 
 Be blest with large contacts with common 
 men, all kinds of men, and, though you will 
 find them often mean, often hard, often cruel, 
 reckless, dangerous, eaten up with self, yet
 
 HE ALSO IS A CHILD OF GOD 21 
 
 you will on occasion, at some moment of un 
 conscious strain and test, find them gentle, 
 kind, responsive, blunderingly emotional, even 
 awkwardly sentimental. The rougher and the 
 harder they ordinarily are, the kinder and the 
 more discerning and even delicate they some 
 times become. It is not contact with men that 
 destroys faith in men. It is isolation, physical 
 or spiritual, that makes the misanthrope. 
 
 Some three thousand years ago, well-nigh in 
 the infancy of the race, a daring, dashing, 
 blood-stained outlaw who held toward the or 
 dered governments of men some such position 
 as a modern Mexican bandit was hemmed in 
 by his enemies in a narrow plain. One night, 
 in a fit of homesickness, he gave audible ex 
 pression to a yearning for his boyhood home, 
 and a drink from the spring where he had 
 watched his father s sheep. Three of his re 
 tainers, taking their lives in their hands, stole 
 through the hostile lines, ran through the night, 
 and by morning returned with a cruse of water 
 from the well of Bethlehem. David took it in 
 his hand, looked deep into the eyes of his de 
 voted followers, then, saying: 
 
 " How can I drink the blood of my mighty 
 men? " he poured the water on the ground as 
 a libation to his God. 
 
 An act of sentiment this, of sentiment pure
 
 22 HE ALSO IS A CHILD OF GOD 
 
 and simple. You would scarcely expect to find 
 it in a man of such type? That is precisely 
 where to expect it. They are the kind of men 
 capable of the " Shepherd Psalm " or the 
 " Song of the Open Road." Men upon the 
 seven seas or the seven hills or the seven 
 plains, lumberjacks, seamen, farm hands, ma 
 chinists and their helpers, gamblers on change, 
 bartenders, sometimes even wealthy men, and 
 almost always negroes, have in their hearts 
 some corner, small or large, where dwells a 
 great love or longing, a protective instinct or 
 deep generosity, an ideal or an image wor 
 shipped, for which, if need were, they would 
 sell their lives. Indeed, no man is much good 
 who would not die for something or somebody. 
 
 Here is a modern example of the same heroic 
 sentiment, the same spirit of devoted friend 
 ship: 
 
 Three young men, boyhood friends of the 
 author, started in 1898 for the Klondyke with 
 the gold seekers. Their outfit was the best that 
 money could buy, fifteen hundred pounds to the 
 man. They were young lads about town in a 
 Western city, of excellent families, well taught, 
 well mothered and well fathered. They had 
 some of the old frontier blood in their veins. 
 
 The youngest of the three Shelley was his 
 name was the best known to the present
 
 HE ALSO IS A CHILD OF GOD 23 
 
 writer. He was not what you might call a 
 religious lad. That is, he seldom appeared in 
 Sunday schools ; and he had doubtless not been 
 in a prayer meeting since carried there in his 
 mother s arms. But that same mother put a 
 little Testament into his kit, saying : 
 
 " Shelley, when you get among those ice- 
 mountains, you must not forget God." 
 
 Shelley smiled indulgently, and kissed his 
 mother good-bye. 
 
 The going was easy enough by rail and 
 water. But when they struck the terrors of 
 the Skagway Trail, and especially when they 
 came, after days and days of the utmost hard 
 ship and peril, to the Chilkoot Pass, where 
 men sat down and whimpered like children, 
 alternately cursed and prayed, died by scores 
 and were tumbled over icy precipices out of the 
 way, then it was that Shelley got out his little 
 Testament. Every night he it was, this lad of 
 all others, who, gathering his companions to 
 gether in the tent, or round the fire, said: 
 
 " Boys, we must not forget God." He read 
 to them. He even prayed aloud with them and 
 for them, and they were grateful. 
 
 At Chilkoot Pass an avalanche had buried 
 teams of dogs and many men. For two days 
 these boys worked with others to rescue any 
 smothering survivors and to clear the trail. On
 
 24 HE ALSO IS A CHILD OF GOD 
 
 the third Shelley was seized with meningitis, 
 fatal to so many of those adventurers, and died. 
 
 One of the lads stayed with the stuff to sell 
 it; and the other, wrapping the frozen body of 
 his friend in canvas, started with it back to 
 civilization. Eight days and nights, over al 
 most impassable trails of ice and snow, most of 
 the time with the dead body upon his shoulders, 
 he fought his way back to open water, and so 
 home to Shelley s mother. 
 
 Most men, in those days, were left where 
 they fell. In Cuba they were buried; in the 
 Klondyke they were not. But here was one 
 man brought back to his mother because he 
 had a friend. Many heroic deeds were per 
 formed in those years of the closing century 
 by young American lads, in the lead-laden 
 breeze of Guantanamo, in the thick sad swamps 
 of Luzon, among the ice-mountains of the Far 
 North; but there was no more heroic deed 
 among them all than that of Paschal Parker 
 who, for friendship s sake, bore home upon his 
 shoulders, all alone, the dead body of Shelley 
 Gill. 
 
 No matter if a man has defaced the image 
 of his parenthood, wilfully and rebelliously 
 defaced it; that image is there. If he examine 
 himself he will find it. Said Monsieur Made 
 leine, Mayor of M.-sur-M., to a company of
 
 HE ALSO IS A CHILD OF GOD 25 
 
 farmers, "Remember this; there are no bad 
 plants and no bad men. There are only bad 
 cultivators." An old man, a most prominent 
 man in American national life, whose name if 
 mentioned would be instantly recognized, who 
 for many years shaped the opinions and led the 
 battles of one of the great political parties; a 
 man who had " gone all the paces," and still 
 was going them; who, so far as anybody 
 seemed to know, feared neither God nor man 
 nor devil, was in dire distress. Such family 
 troubles as few men have to bear were his. 
 Degenerate sons of a stalwart father were his 
 sons. Iron worse than the iron of death had 
 pierced his soul. He stood like a Spartan under 
 it all. Said his friend the pastor: 
 
 " How is it that you can bear such sorrow 
 as you do, so bravely ? " 
 
 " Because, sir," answered the veteran, " I am 
 a religious man." 
 
 And then he confided what few knew, that 
 he was a member of a little church, far away 
 in the State of his birth, where his mother and 
 his father slept ; and he had been a member all 
 these years. Whatever his life had been, what 
 ever the disobedience of sonship, however 
 marred the heavenly visage, his philosophy was 
 Christian; deep down he was a religious man; 
 he also was a child of God and knew it.
 
 II 
 
 FALLOW-LAND 
 
 WHAT the man in the street needs, then, 
 is not to get religion, but to develop 
 the religion he already has. He can 
 never be well-born until he is fully born. Much 
 of him that has a right to be full-born remains 
 abortive. So he never completely lives. Just 
 as nature abhors a vacuum, so does your prac 
 tical hard-headed American abhor unutilized 
 raw material. If he is once convinced that 
 such material exists within himself, he will be 
 come anxious to conserve, exploit, increase it. 
 A small party of people was swinging, at 
 sunset, on a flat freight-car, with engine at 
 tached, through the Grand Canon of the Ar 
 kansas. It was a gorgeous ride no less an 
 adjective is adequate. There was the boiling, 
 tumbling river; there were the massed pines 
 to the timber line; and above were the cliffs 
 of red, yellow, and brown sandstone, illumined 
 by the long vermilion rays of the setting sun 
 twenty-seven hundred feet of precipice on 
 either side, half a mile of sheer grandeur. 
 26
 
 FALLOW-LAND 27 
 
 While all present upon that swaying car were 
 uttering whispered, awe-struck comments, one 
 stolid business man from Buffalo sat silent. 
 Some one nudged him and asked his opinion 
 of the scene. 
 
 " I was just thinking," he observed, " what 
 an extravagant waste of raw material! " 
 
 Whether these prosaic words were uttered to 
 veil an inner tumult, who shall say? But ap 
 parently, at least, the man from Buffalo was 
 thinking only of brownstone fronts, of fac 
 tories and tall smokestacks, into which these 
 wondrous cliffs might have been built. At 
 least, he was anxious that nothing should lie 
 around loose and unutilized. Would he not 
 be equally distressed, if once he were shown 
 that there were crags of grandeur in his soul 
 that never had been lighted up for human 
 beholder, let alone had never been built into 
 structures for human use? 
 
 An old singer at his devotions, well-nigh in 
 the prehistoric centuries, once called upon his 
 soul, and all that was within him, to bless the 
 Lord, and His holy name. It gives one a thrill 
 to listen to him, for it is a refreshing thing, 
 in a world of half-heartedness, to find now and 
 then a man who calls upon all that is within 
 him to sing the song, to do the task, to lead the 
 life that is given him. So much of the work of
 
 28 FALLOW-LAND 
 
 the world, and the singing of the world, is 
 lackadaisical, half-souled, that it is a genuine 
 joy when we meet, when we come into touch 
 with, or when we listen to one who throws all 
 his being into the message of his life. 
 
 Herein lies the difference between great 
 singers and ordinary mediocre singers, that the 
 former sing with what we call " soul," " tem 
 perament," "spirit"; and herein lies the dif 
 ference between the great work of the world 
 and the cheap, ordinary work of the world, 
 that those who do the former cast into it all 
 that they have of heart, of will, of spirit, and 
 of power. 
 
 There are capabilities, there are powers, 
 there are possibilities in all of us of which we 
 seldom dream capacities, depths, that we sel 
 dom reach and sound. There is much of un 
 developed raw material; much of fallow 
 ground into which plowshare never yet has 
 struck; much of rich, deep soil; and living, 
 springing waters, into which the drill never yet 
 has pierced; much latent force and capability, 
 which have never been called into play. 
 
 Even physically it is true that few of us 
 realize of what we are capable until put to 
 the proof. We can endure far more, accom 
 plish far more than any of us believe until we 
 try. Physicians tell us that we are, most of us
 
 FALLOW-LAND 29 
 
 at least, seventy-five per cent, stronger than we 
 think we are. Here is a lad, let us say, who 
 weighs one hundred and twenty pounds thin, 
 spindling whom any able-bodied boy in the 
 community can throw with one hand tied be 
 hind him. But put that little fellow into the 
 hands of the expert trainer at school or col 
 lege, and there is no one in the State, perhaps 
 the nation, who can touch him for a hundred 
 yards, two-forty, or a mile. 
 
 Or here is a great clumsy, hulking fellow 
 who, if he only knew it, might get the best of 
 Mr. Fitzsimmons, Mr. Jeffries, or whoever is 
 the latest champion. The lines of the poet 
 might be paraphrased to read: 
 
 Full many a brute of deepest dye, I ween, 
 The dark, unfathom d streets and alleys bear. 
 
 Full many a pugilist is born to spar unseen, 
 And waste his muscle on the country air. 
 
 Others of us might gain honor, perform 
 services, and bear responsibilities, if only once 
 we could find out what we are good for, and 
 come to believe in ourselves. 
 
 Somewhere on a New England farm, or an 
 Arizona ranche, at this hour, is a woman sing 
 ing, singing to the accompaniment of her pots 
 and pans, singing to the delectation of one lone 
 man in the barn lot or the sheep pasture and it
 
 30 FALLOW-LAND 
 
 is something to sing for the delight of one 
 lone man! But if the woman only knew of 
 the bird locked up in her throat, and, under 
 guidance, could set it free, she might sing for 
 the emotional and spiritual uplift of hundreds 
 and even thousands. Skeptical though we be, 
 there are mute, inglorious Miltons; there are 
 gems of purest ray serene in the dark un- 
 fathom d caves of ocean ; there are great men 
 tal, artistic, spiritual, religious forces that lie 
 dormant, undeveloped, dead, in many souls 
 that need but self -consciousness to set them 
 free, and but a little encouragement to send 
 them vibrant and operative into the world. 
 
 The great teachers of the race realize this 
 fact, and that is why they are the great teach 
 ers. They look upon common men and women 
 as divine possibilities that lie sleeping, as yet 
 unawakened; and they do not for a moment 
 dream that they put anything into humanity 
 these great teachers they simply lead out what 
 is already within them. So Garfield was able 
 to say that Mark Hopkins at one end of a log 
 and a student at the other, constituted a uni 
 versity. That great genius, Mark Hopkins, 
 never put any power into a student s head or 
 heart he simply developed what was already 
 lying sleeping within; he so poured his own 
 soul into the task, with a great joy he so threw
 
 FALLOW-LAND 31 
 
 himself into the purpose, that the student could 
 not but respond. The young lad s own inner 
 nature was drawn out of him " educated," as 
 we say, in the strict etymological sense of the 
 word. 
 
 One of the greatest modern teachers in 
 America was the late Dr. William R. Harper. 
 At Yale, twenty years ago, you could have 
 heard the echoes of his teaching amongst the 
 students who were still in the institution. They 
 said that that great, strong, powerful, enthu 
 siastic spirit would lift men up out of them 
 selves, and in spite of themselves, though he 
 had the driest subject that any man was ever 
 called upon to teach to a company of his fel 
 lows the Hebrew language. He would put 
 upon the board a few of those ugly, scrawly 
 characters, and then he would point to them, 
 and say, " Look at those, gentlemen ! Aren t 
 they beautiful ! Aren t they beautiful ! " They 
 would lean over in their seats, and they would 
 work for him four hours out of the twenty- 
 four, until all the other professors in the in 
 stitution were jealous of the amount of time 
 that Harper took. And he did not give those 
 men anything he simply educated those men 
 drew out of them the latent capacities and 
 powers that were already in the humblest and 
 slowest of them.
 
 32 FALLOW-LAND 
 
 Thus also Jesus of Nazareth, the greatest 
 teacher of them all, recognizing the latent ca 
 pacities in men, had only to come into their 
 presence, and with His great throbbing, mag 
 netic soul, touch them at a remote corner or 
 boundary line, and He could quicken them into 
 new life; they responded to Him, in spite of 
 themselves; and what lay dormant and unex 
 plored within them was immediately opened up 
 to the light. 
 
 He comes into the home of Zaccheus, and 
 His mere presence is stimulating enough for 
 that hard, cold, practical, greedy man of the 
 world to cry out, " Master, from this time 
 forth I give half my goods to feed the poor; 
 and if I have wrongfully exacted of any man, 
 I will restore him fourfold ! " 
 
 He has only to come into contact with the 
 woman of Samaria, and speak with her for a 
 short time, until she runs enthusiastically into 
 the city and calls all her friends, and says : 
 ".Come, see a man that told me all things that 
 ever I did ! Is not this the Christ ? " 
 
 He has only to hold a few moments conver 
 sation with the polished, refined Pharisee, and 
 he instills into Nicodemus a desire to be born 
 again, made over, the lower vast riches of his 
 unexplored nature expanded and brought out 
 to the light.
 
 FALLOW-LAND 33 
 
 The military geniuses, the great command 
 ers, statesmen, and politicians are those who, 
 somehow, by a subtle magic of personality, are 
 able to draw men out of themselves to use, 
 action, toil, and sacrifice. The Napoleons for 
 whom men die with cheers and songs are not 
 those who put anything into men they do not 
 already possess, but call out of men in tangible 
 response what those men already have within. 
 Mark Twain, with a consummate knowledge of 
 the human heart, makes the standard-bearer of 
 Joan of Arc a great hulking overgrown, lub 
 berly peasant, cowardly to a degree, afraid of 
 the mere clash of steel on steel. But when Joan 
 is near, that pigeon-livered peasant becomes a 
 charging lion. He will follow her anywhere, 
 everywhere. 
 
 The Lord s voice came to Gideon poor little 
 weak and cowardly Gideon, threshing out a 
 handful of wheat behind the winepress to hide 
 it from the Midianites the Lord s voice came, 
 saying, " Come forth, Gideon, thou mighty man 
 of valor." 
 
 " There s some mistake here," said Gideon. 
 " You can t mean me, Lord. I am the least of 
 my house. My house is the least of my tribe. 
 My tribe is the least of the nation. Send by 
 some strong man s hand. Case of mistaken 
 identity."
 
 34. FALLOW-LAND 
 
 The Lord s voice said, " Come forth, Gideon, 
 thou mighty man of valor." 
 
 And forth came the little craven to the con 
 quest of his country s tyrants. It is a good 
 name for a band of American travelling men 
 " The Gideons." 
 
 No man knows what a hero he is until he is 
 called forth and tried; and it is to the high, 
 heroic call that the common man responds 
 when he will not respond to a less noble note. 
 Witness the response of all the men of Eu 
 rope to what they feel is the call of Country. 
 When the call of self-interest in Socialism 
 failed to hold men ; when the call of the Church 
 to personal, individual salvation failed to reach 
 men ; when Socialism and the Church both had 
 crumbled and fallen, there came the high call to 
 self-sacrifice, the call not to shorter hours and 
 easier tasks, not to pearl gates and gold 
 streets, but the call to the muddy trench, the 
 long march, the blackened face and bleeding 
 hands and feet, aye, and the call to death 
 and men answered to the high call, " Here ! " 
 
 The great statesmen, moreover, have been 
 those who believed in the power and capacity 
 of common people and have dared to trust it. 
 Washington and Lincoln are outstanding 
 names in our history and are revered around 
 the world because, with their ears to the
 
 FALLOW-LAND 35 
 
 ground, they heard the heartbeat of the great 
 common people, responded to it, vocalized it, 
 put it into action and into statute; because 
 they believed in the power and the capacity 
 of the ordinary common man. 
 
 Now, the greatest desire, no doubt, of al 
 most all men, is the fullest personal develop 
 ment, the utilization of all the force and ail 
 the capacity that they possess. The first ques 
 tion of the catechism reads, " What is the chief 
 end of man?" The answer is, "To glorify 
 God and enjoy Him forever." We cannot in 
 terpret that answer to mean that the chief end 
 of man is to tell God how great He is, though 
 that is worth while ; to sing praises constantly 
 to His name, though that also is worth while; 
 but we must feel that this phrase, " To glorify 
 God," means what Jesus meant when He said, 
 " Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear 
 much fruit, so shall ye be my disciples." The 
 way in which we can best praise God and 
 glorify Him best, is to bear most fruit, and so 
 be the disciples of the Christ. In other words, 
 it is our glory, and it is our best means of 
 glorifying God, to develop all the powers and 
 capacities that we possess until they become 
 valuable and working in the world ; to see that 
 all the sap that is in one s nature comes out 
 ward into bud and blossom and fruit ; to make
 
 36 FALLOW-LAND 
 
 the most of one s self, and the finest of one s 
 self; and, changing the figure, to polish and re 
 fine one s own personality, until it shines with 
 all the glory that it was intended to shine with, 
 when it was made to reflect the glory of the 
 Lord, from glory unto glory. 
 
 Out in the Rocky Mountains there is a little 
 lake the surface of which is scarcely ever 
 fanned by passing breezes, so is it sheltered by 
 crag and cliff and mountain top. Still as glass, 
 it mirrors back the overhanging pine and 
 hemlock, and the yellow and green and blue 
 of the sandstone rocks. It seems a very shal 
 low little lake you can see the bottom of it 
 at any place, you think, in the clear, crystal 
 depths. You think you can reach down and 
 pick up pebbles all over the basin that holds 
 that water; but to the bottom of that little lake 
 plummet line never yet has gone ! Is that not a 
 picture of the human soul? So deep and so 
 profound that nobody ever yet has stirred its 
 depths ! 
 
 " But," says the man in the street, " that is 
 not a picture of my soul. I am shallow, as that 
 lake appeared to be. You can pick up the 
 stones over the depths of my nature anywhere. 
 I am not naturally religious, and I am not deep 
 and profound. I am very ordinary and very 
 shallow." That is the only heresy in life.
 
 FALLOW-LAND 37 
 
 Not to believe in one s self, one s kinship to 
 God, and one s inherent and yet unfolded and 
 undeveloped capacities, that is not to believe 
 in God who made us. 
 
 " Well, if there are capacities and powers 
 in me yet unsounded and undeveloped, I should 
 like to know how to reach them how to un 
 fold them how to expand them." 
 
 Life does this for us. There are two means 
 at least by which we may develop the un 
 sounded depths of our natures, or two kinds 
 of means. These are voluntary and involun 
 tary. Whether we will or no, the inevitable 
 experiences of life deepen and enrich the soil 
 of our souls. To go up against life, which for 
 no one is smooth and even and easy, against 
 the hardnesses and obstinacies of life, the diffi 
 culties, the perplexities, the trials and the suf 
 ferings of life, is to expand our capacities, to 
 toughen our sinews, to develop our souls! 
 
 And here we have at least a glimpse into the 
 purposes of the Creator in putting so much of 
 hardness and of suffering into the world. We 
 cannot see His ultimate purpose, but we can at 
 least see the immediate result. Hardness 
 creates men and women. It makes them bet 
 ter, stronger, more heroic, than they ever could 
 be without it. Once, when I was lying upon a 
 bed of intense pain, a friend of mine came,
 
 38 FALLOW-LAND 
 
 and standing by my side, took my hand and 
 said, " Sometimes we do not look up until we 
 are flat on our backs ! " I never have forgotten 
 that word. I never could forget it. Some 
 times God has to send the iron down, down, 
 down, deep into our souls before the strata are 
 pierced where the living waters are. 
 
 It is in the exquisite agonies of life that oft- 
 times we slough off the mortal, material exist 
 ence and look up into the sky, into the face of 
 God, even as He scourges us, and cry out, 
 " Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him ! " 
 It is a brave word of Browning s : 
 
 " Then welcome each rebuff that turns earth s smooth 
 ness rough ; 
 
 That bids nor sit nor stand, but Go ! 
 Be our joys three parts pain, strive, and hold cheap 
 
 the strain; 
 
 Learn, nor account the pang! Dare, never grudge 
 the throe!" 
 
 Sometimes over the sodded mound, and 
 under the weeping willow, under the suffering 
 and the loss against which one s soul rebels, and 
 yet which is inevitable and irreparable, the 
 soil of our hearts is mellowed, deepened, soft 
 ened. The rain of tribulation fructifies the fig 
 tree that otherwise might be cursed! 
 
 And then, sometimes, on the other hand, in 
 the greatest joys, men s inherent latent powers
 
 FALLOW-LAND 39 
 
 are called into play. Phillips Brooks is right, is 
 he not, when he says that in our highest mo 
 ments, whether of sorrow or of joy, we natu 
 rally and inevitably call upon our God. In 
 moments of stress and grief, we cry out in 
 voluntarily, " God help me ! " In moments 
 of relief, we cry, "Thank God!" Perfectly 
 natural is it that our souls should come up to 
 Him in times of greatest exaltation. We have 
 seen men humbled by great good fortune, men 
 made hungry and thirsty for righteousness, 
 through prosperity. To be sure, that is rare. 
 For the most part prosperity hardens a man, or 
 a nation adversity softens and refines. But 
 there are those who have found in their very 
 good fortune, and their joy, the presence of 
 God, and the feeling and the sense of God. 
 
 Once again, involuntarily, the latent heroism 
 and capacity of man is oftentimes brought 
 out by his very sinfulness. We shall have 
 to tread carefully here, but it is undoubtedly 
 true that many a man has been brought nearer 
 to God by his sins, by his failures, by his 
 attempts to realize the absurd for, after all, 
 that is what sin is by his desire to do the 
 thing that, in the nature of things, cannot be 
 done ; by his striving to get satisfaction through 
 that which, in the nature of things, cannot and 
 does not satisfy. You have seen a man galvan-
 
 40 FALLOW-LAND 
 
 ized broad awake by the shock of the thing 
 he has done, and reclaimed, made over, liber 
 ated, set free even through his own slavery. 
 
 " The bird with a broken pinion never soars 
 so high again," was the old evangelistic song 
 that we used to sing. If that were true, where 
 would be our John B. Coughs ? Where would 
 be our General Booths? Where would be our 
 Dwight L. Moodys? Where would be our St. 
 Augustines? OurDantes? Birds with broken 
 pinions, every one of them. There is hope for 
 any man, no matter what he has done, or how 
 he has fallen; and he can fly just as high! 
 Now, that is not saying that it is a good thing 
 to sow wild oats. That is not saying, " Let us 
 do sin, that grace may abound." God forbid! 
 But it is saying that sin, itself, sometimes elec 
 trifies a man awake, and brings him to him 
 self. 
 
 Jesus would not have put it into His parable 
 if it had not been true. The lost son, the 
 prodigal, says Jesus, so significantly, " when he 
 came to himself, said, I will arise, and go unto 
 my father." " When he came to himself ! " 
 His best self. His real self. His profoundest 
 self. His undeveloped self. When, at last, he 
 called upon all that was within him, then he 
 said, " I will arise and go home to my father." 
 The implication of the Master is here very
 
 FALLOW-LAND 41 
 
 plain that a man s real self is his better self. 
 When, therefore, he is not at his best, he is 
 not himself. He is, as we say, beside himself, 
 as if a blow on the head, or strong liquor, or 
 drugs, had made him temporarily some one 
 else; as if his real inner self had been taken 
 out of him, out of his mouth or the top of his 
 head, even as many people imagine the soul 
 at death comes out of the body, and the inner 
 self stood beside the outer, or apparent self. 
 Then, later, in our colloquial language we say, 
 he " comes to." That is, he comes to con 
 sciousness, comes to himself. So the lost son 
 came to himself, and said, " I will go to my 
 father." In the same fashion, when the man 
 in the street " comes to," comes to himself, is 
 " at himself," he arises also and says, " I will 
 go to my Father." 
 
 But there are certain things that voluntarily 
 we may do, and experiences that we may 
 undergo, which will develop, refine, unfold us, 
 increase the fruitage of the trees of our lives. 
 First, our association, our comradeships, the 
 character of the people with whom we have to 
 do. Is there anybody in your acquaintance 
 who, by his very presence, brings out the best 
 that is within you? Anybody before whom 
 you want to be at your best? Anybody with 
 whom, in spite of yourself, you are at your
 
 42 FALLOW-LAND 
 
 best; whose personality quickens mind, heart 
 will; tunes, intensifies? If there is such, lock 
 him to your bosom with bands of steel. Never 
 let him go. Follow him about, day in, day out. 
 Take up your boarding-house across the street 
 from him. Never let him out of your sight if 
 you can help it. Make him your own. 
 
 " But," says one, " I have no such friend. 
 The nature of my environment is such, or the 
 natural reserve of my own character is such, 
 that I have no such friend. I cannot find him, 
 and if I found him I could not make use of 
 him." 
 
 Ruskin tells us that there are certain kings 
 and princes waiting to associate with us, all 
 the time, if we care to come into their com 
 pany. They are gathering dust upon our 
 shelves, and yet are ready to give us the best 
 and the finest that is in their nature not the 
 ordinary table-talk, or made-conversation of 
 the day kings and princes of the soul, waiting 
 to speak to us ! Seek them out, and avoid the 
 lesser lights. Above all, there is the King of 
 Kings, the Lord of Lords, the Prince of 
 Princes, the chief est among ten thousand, the 
 One altogether lovely, who is ready to be a 
 friend to every friendless man or any man. 
 That same great Teacher and leader of men 
 that could understand the secrets of men s
 
 FALLOW-LAND 43 
 
 hearts, and draw them out to their best self- 
 expression He is ready to stand beside every 
 one of us, to take each one of us by the hand, 
 and talk to us even as He talked to those two 
 on the way to Emmaus, whose hearts burned 
 within them by the way. 
 
 " But," objects the common man, " that is 
 mystical, unreal. Jesus died two thousand 
 years ago. I don t see how I can make a 
 friend and a companion of Him." Jesus Christ 
 is alive in the world today, more really than 
 He was two thousand years ago! Do we not 
 know that a man can live long, long after his 
 apparent death ? Is not Washington alive, and 
 William of Orange, and Garibaldi, and Oliver 
 Cromwell, and a host of other great souls? 
 Is not, then, the Son of Man and Son of God 
 alive, increasingly alive, almightily alive in the 
 world today? There never was nor is any 
 body quite so much in evidence as He ! He is 
 here, ready to associate with all sorts and con 
 ditions of men, to be a friend, to be a comrade, 
 to be a saviour, to be a redeemer, to anybody 
 that will meet Him half-the-way. That com 
 panionship is open to all ! If we do not feel and 
 see His presence in our world, our civilization, 
 our ethics, our art, our literature, our common 
 est thoughts and aspirations, we are blind in 
 deed ! Social life and business life all take their
 
 44 FALLOW-LAND 
 
 finest ideals and best attitudes from Him. He 
 is not dead. He is alive. 
 
 Meditation upon Him that this busy age 
 seems to have lost, the moments before the 
 fire, in the deep silence of the woods or the 
 fields, the moments when we withdraw from 
 the touch of humanity and turn our eyes up 
 ward, consciously and voluntarily, to God 
 meditation which Ian Maclaren calls one of the 
 lost arts will deepen the soil of our souls. Be 
 alone. You have the right to be alone. The 
 world has no license to invade your privacy 
 twenty-four hours out of the day. Be alone, 
 and think upon God. 
 
 Then pray. Our age needs, as no other age 
 has ever needed, to follow the example of the 
 bewildered, hesitating, half -crazed Hamlet, 
 when he said, " As for me, look you, I ll go 
 pray." You see, here are the old, old exercises 
 that humanity has found necessary to the ex 
 pansion and development and the training of 
 its powers. Prayer to God unceasing prayer 
 to God. Consciousness of His presence not 
 petitions to Him, but association with Him, 
 talks with Him, on the streets, in the shops, in 
 the stores, in the home, in the busy social 
 circle, that is what we need. Everywhere 
 conscious of and talking to God, we shall 
 deepen the soil of our souls. One of the sages
 
 FALLOW-LAND 45 
 
 and saints of our Middle West used often to 
 say, " I sit here under the trees, on the grass, 
 and talk to God ; while He talks to me ! " He 
 seldom said " I pray," but we knew, as every 
 body who really was acquainted with him 
 knew, that it was so; that is real prayer. 
 
 " That I might develop all that is within me ! 
 That I might realize the end of man, to glorify 
 God, and enjoy Him forever! That the un 
 explored, unclaimed, arid lands of my soul 
 might be conserved and utilized, and given back 
 to Him who made them ! " 
 
 There is the instinctive thirst of humanity. 
 And it is the thirst that can be adequately 
 quenched in Christ, and Christ alone. Ho, 
 every man in the street and on the road, come 
 ye to the waters and drink!
 
 Ill 
 
 SOME ONE TO COME 
 
 EVERY man must have his Messiah. In 
 some form or other, at some time or 
 other, every man in the cities of the 
 world, in streets narrow and dark like the 
 byways of Damascus or Algiers, on broad 
 boulevards like those of Paris or Chicago, 
 every man on the plains, pampas, or 
 steppes, every man in the mines, factories, or 
 fields, every white man, black man, or brown 
 man, must have his Christ of God, a power not 
 himself to help him. He looks for some one to 
 come to him. In the nature of things he feels 
 he has the right to look for such a one. The 
 universe, blind and grinding though it be, owes 
 him a Messiah. 
 
 Now he thinks his Messiah is come, and now 
 he looks for another. Now he welcomes the 
 coming one in a Buddha or a Mohammed and 
 rests his soul upon the stalwart shoulder; and 
 now his faith is shaken, his Messiah fails as 
 Buddha is failing in Japan today, and the man 
 in the street cries out for some one else to 
 46
 
 SOME ONE TO COME 47 
 
 come or he dies, ere he dies. Now it is the 
 Christian who declares that Messiah has ar 
 rived ; now it is the Jew who insists that Mes 
 siah is yet to come. But for every soul of us 
 He is either here or coming. 
 
 No man can live his life alone, nor die his 
 death alone. It is not good that man should 
 live alone. Strong, stalwart souls there are 
 who, in the pride of their independence, insist 
 that they will stand alone. 
 
 " It matters not how strait the gate, 
 
 How charged with punishments the scroll; 
 I am the master of my fate, 
 I am the captain of my soul ! " 
 
 That is the strain in which they venture to 
 front life, its storms, its pains, its deaths. But 
 stoicism has been tried and abandoned by the 
 human race. There is no sense among men 
 more universal than the sense of dependence. 
 We need a Father. We need each other. We 
 need Messiah. 
 
 Man is a gregarious animal, and needs his 
 fellow-man. Few men can keep their sanity in 
 solitary confinement. Sheep herders, on our 
 Western plains, weeks and months alone, to 
 use the language of the West, often " go loco " 
 that is, lose their mental balance and even 
 become insane. Men must reach out beyond
 
 48 SOME ONE TO COME 
 
 themselves and touch others, or they die of 
 loneliness and fear. 
 
 The simple-hearted, kindly natured negro 
 most clearly shows this trait. Negroes congre 
 gate in their settlements like bees about a hive. 
 They sit up to the small hours only to talk and 
 be together, though they know they must arise 
 at daylight and doze over their tasks next day. 
 I once heard a negro preacher by the baptismal 
 pond, at Lexington, Kentucky, close a prayer 
 for he was considered " very powerful in 
 prayer " with these eloquent and profound, 
 though simple words : " At las , O Lord, when 
 Thou, hast served Thy righteous purposes with 
 us here on dis earth, take us home to dat land 
 where it is all Howdy, and no Good 
 bye ! " Give it a rising inflection, that last 
 word. 
 
 Nor is it the simple-minded alone, but also 
 the more sophisticated, who lean upon one an 
 other. Business is built upon association and 
 trust. Men consult each other, stand together, 
 or they fall. No man lives his business life 
 alone, or carries his business responsibilities by 
 himself. 
 
 Many years ago in a frontier town of the 
 West, now become a great city, lived a hardy 
 pioneer who was commonly called " Laughing 
 Andy." Yet I never heard him laugh aloud. No
 
 SOME ONE TO COME 49 
 
 doubt his sobriquet was due to the smile he al 
 ways wore, not one of these political smiles, 
 these made-to-order smiles, these superficial 
 smiles, but the smile that is still to be seen on 
 the portrait in his son s home, the smile that 
 would not come off even as he lay in his coffin. 
 He was tall and gaunt and stoop-shouldered, 
 like Lincoln and the race of the blazed trails. 
 He wore a full, reddish-gray beard in his later 
 years, and the birds would come fearlessly and, 
 alighting on his shoulder, pluck out a hair or 
 two with which to line their nests a rather 
 painful process to him, that must have been, but 
 he would only stand and smile. Squirrels 
 would eat from his hand; little furry things 
 were not afraid of him; horses and cattle fol 
 lowed him about. There are men like that, 
 now and then. 
 
 This " Laughing Andy " men would come 
 to him to settle their business disputes. Bitter 
 enemies they would enter his store. They 
 would find him lying full length on his counter ; 
 for he had an aphorism like this : " Never stand 
 up when you can sit down; never sit up when 
 you can lie down." Lazy? No, not an ounce 
 of laziness in his six-foot-one, two hundred 
 and ten pounds of lean body. He would lie 
 there, and let them tell their tale of woe and 
 bitterness and hate ; then he would look at them
 
 50 SOME ONE TO COME 
 
 out of his big gray eyes, be reminded Lincoln- 
 like of an anecdote, talk for an hour, maybe, 
 for he never hurried, over old times and far 
 away places; and then when spring had come 
 and the ice grown mushy, he would gently push 
 his boat out into the midstream of their affairs, 
 compose their differences, adjust their claims, 
 cheat the courts out of a case, shake hands with 
 both, and permit each to shake hands with the 
 other in his presence, and laugh kindly at them 
 as they went their way, wiser, but no sadder 
 men. He worked no miracles; he hypnotized 
 nobody ; he simply served as some one to come, 
 in an hour of need, to his friends in the street. 
 Every man sees the day when some one from 
 outside must put a hand into his affairs. They 
 are too much for him alone. Dependence is a 
 trait of the strongest. 
 
 There was a strong soul once imprisoned. 
 He was a man who had come from God, and 
 his name was John. He came baptizing folk 
 in a river ; his home was the desert ; his cloth 
 ing, haircloth ; his food, locusts and wild honey. 
 He had dared to beard a king, and defy the il 
 legal consort of a king. Now he was deserted 
 by the multitude and even by most of his close 
 friends. He languished alone in Herod s sad 
 dungeon of Machserus. Then, to assuage the 
 doubts and yearnings of his soul, he sent two
 
 SOME ONE TO COME 51 
 
 of his followers who yet remained beside him 
 to ask of Jesus, " Art Thou He that should 
 come, or do we look for another ? " 
 
 To him there was no other possibility. One 
 of the two alternatives must be true. Either 
 Jesus was the one to come, or else another must 
 come. He was in the case of the Japanese and 
 many another who have lost faith in their tradi 
 tional Messiah. If Buddha is not the one, if 
 Confucius is not the one, if Jesus is not the 
 one, then we must look for another. How is 
 it that John has lost his faith? He is im 
 prisoned, deserted, alone, he that once saw so 
 clearly. He, at the setting of the sun one day, 
 had pointed the finger of certitude at Jesus, 
 saying, " Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh 
 away the sin of the world ! " His own sun 
 was near the setting. Soon the old eagle was 
 to be caged; he was to beat his wings help 
 lessly against the bars of fate and circum 
 stance ; the film was to grow over his eyes ; and 
 he was to cry aloud in his anguish : " Is it really 
 He that should come ? Was I mistaken ? Must 
 we take refuge again in the hope deferred that 
 maketh the heart sick? Is there some one 
 else for whom we must wait ? " 
 
 Take away a man s Messiah, false or true, 
 and he must look, wait, hope; some one must 
 come. This is as true of a Japanese as of a
 
 52 SOME ONE TO COME 
 
 Jew, of a modern as of an ancient, of a white 
 man as of a brown or yellow one. No matter 
 what the outside, what the environment, what 
 the age, the average man is the same the world 
 over. Under the turban and the robe, under 
 the Scotch cheviot and black evening suit, beat 
 the same hearts, work the same brain-convolu 
 tions, well up the same yearnings and longings, 
 desires, hopes, and fears. If our Messiah be 
 not risen, we Christian men must look for an 
 other. There is no getting along in this chaos 
 without one. There is, there must be, then, 
 some one to come. 
 
 Let us look first at the conditions in Israel. 
 The important thing about this question of 
 John s is that it shows us so clearly the atti 
 tude of the Baptist, the spokesman of the 
 Hebrew people. The whole of that nation had 
 long been looking for some one to come, and 
 now if this was not he, then they must con 
 tinue to look. If the prophets had never writ 
 ten a word about the Messiah; if Isaiah and 
 his wonderful fifty-third chapter had never 
 come as a message to the downtrodden and 
 broken and dissevered people of Israel, they 
 would still have looked for some one to come. 
 Every nation does in its moments of distress; 
 and all through the thought of Israel, like a 
 golden and scarlet thread woven into some dull
 
 SOME ONE TO COME 53 
 
 fabric, was the expectation of this coming one 
 to restore the pristine glories of David and 
 Solomon. 
 
 No doubt, at this very time when John came 
 preaching in the wilderness and when later he 
 was put behind Herod s prison bars, the fisher 
 men of the Lake of Galilee, and the peasantry 
 all about that beautiful inland sea, were bound 
 together in secret compact, with arms stored, 
 with preparations made against that day .when 
 some one should come ; and who knows but 
 that the favored leader of this peasant soldiery 
 was he who afterwards became the rock apostle 
 of the twelve, Simon Peter? No doubt the 
 shepherds of the Judean plains were in like 
 fashion sworn under a great oath with muni 
 tions prepared, waiting with eyes to the east 
 for the dawn to arise when some one should 
 come and grasp the sword and lead them 
 against their hereditary foes. And who knows 
 but that the emblem which formed their stand 
 ard was the Star of Bethlehem that their 
 fathers had seen in the east? No doubt the 
 young sons of the princely houses of Jerusalem, 
 in the same way, were banded together in 
 secret understanding, while in the basements of 
 the palaces on Zion and Moriah were the 
 swords and the spears and the armor for the 
 coming day. And who knows but that some
 
 54 SOME ONE TO COME 
 
 young John Mark was the chosen leader of 
 those aristocratic regiments? 
 
 Fanciful, all this, you say, imaginative ? If 
 you will turn to the books that were bound into 
 your father s and your mother s Bible, that are 
 not bound in our Bibles of today, you will 
 find clearly pictured all of these combinations 
 that I have been trying to rehearse. The 
 Apocryphal and the Apocalyptic literature, dat 
 ing from the century or so just preceding the 
 coming of Christ, is shot through with this ex 
 pectation, with this preparation, with this firm 
 underlying faith of this broken and bleeding 
 and yearniqg people of the hills that some one 
 should come and save them and restore them. 
 Furthermore, the people in the narratives of 
 the Gospel show clearly in their conversations 
 with Jesus and His followers this expectation. 
 Some one must come. 
 
 It is just as natural as the rising of the sun 
 after darkness, that people in moments of their 
 depression should look for a deliverer, a con 
 queror, to come and lead them out into the 
 light. Rome, in her decadence, when her 
 hitherto invincible legions were beaten and 
 broken, when her boundaries were steadily 
 pushed in ; and when, especially from the north, 
 Goth and Hun and Vandal were bearing down 
 upon the Eternal City itself, Rome said,
 
 SOME ONE TO COME 55 
 
 "Just wait; Nero will come back! " Nero of 
 all others ! fratricide and matricide, yet never 
 theless an able soldier and a great emperor, 
 " Nero will come back and lead the cohorts of 
 Rome and will build the Eternal City once 
 again upon her seven hills and guard again her 
 world- wide roads." They were just as confi 
 dent that the empire would be saved as that the 
 sun shone upon the Italian shores. 
 
 In our own country, in our Southland, when 
 the armies of the Confederacy were beaten and 
 fleeing before the armies of the North, when 
 our farms and plantations were burned and still 
 smoking, when the ragged regiments were los 
 ing by hundreds the flower of Southern youth, 
 we kept saying to ourselves, " Never mind, just 
 wait until Lee comes, wait until Jackson comes, 
 and all will be well ; some one will yet come and 
 save the falling cause." 
 
 The North American Indian, hemmed in 
 upon his narrow reservations, with all the ro 
 mance and the glory gone out of the happy 
 hunting-ground, in his broken days still has 
 his messiah dances, counting upon somebody to 
 come to win back the fields and the rivers and 
 the forests for him once more and to restore 
 the old tribal glories. The heart has no escape 
 from this longing some one must come. 
 
 What is true nationally is also true of our
 
 56 SOME ONE TO COME 
 
 individual lives. Do you not remember that 
 dark night when you wrestled with some prob 
 lem so grave that you could not handle it 
 alone, do you not remember in the long 
 hours how you said, "If only somebody would 
 come and share this with me, and solve this for 
 me " ? Or do you remember when you tossed 
 upon a bed of inexpressible pain, or worse yet, 
 when some one that you loved better than your 
 own life was turning from side to side, fevered 
 and uneasy, and you said, " Oh, will he never 
 come ? " as you listened for the wheels upon 
 the gravel or the jangling of the sleigh bells 
 along the country road " Will he never 
 come ? " We need a power not ourselves, we 
 need a hand stronger than ours; somebody 
 must reach out to us in the catastrophes, in 
 the perplexities, in the defeats and disasters of 
 life; some hand there must be, some one must 
 come. We cannot lead our lives and fight our 
 fights and win our battles for ourselves. In 
 herent is this expectation in the human 
 soul. 
 
 Now what is the answer that Jesus sends 
 back by these two disciples ? " Go and tell 
 John what ye have seen and heard, how that 
 the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the 
 deaf hear, the lepers are cleansed, the dead are 
 raised up, and the poor have the gospel
 
 SOME ONE TO COME 57 
 
 preached to them." There was proof enough 
 for John and for his followers. There was 
 satisfaction in these events for the people of 
 that time. To our present age this answer 
 must be reinterpreted; a different strain must 
 be given, out of the words of Christ Himself, 
 and out of the life of Christ, to this reason 
 ing, scientific age in which we live. 
 
 Let us, then, take this question of John the 
 Baptist and ponder its two possible alterna 
 tives, and answer, if we may, from the life and 
 the work and the teachings of our Master, 
 that question for this present age. For just as 
 John asked it then, so are strong men asking 
 it today, just as the disciples of John came 
 eagerly to know in that time if Jesus were the 
 one that should come or if they should look 
 for somebody else, so today business men and 
 merchants, working men and travelling men 
 are asking that same question : " Is he the 
 one? If not, then I must look for another." 
 
 Jesus said the blind see and the deaf hear. 
 And so they do today. Jesus opens the eyes 
 of men s minds, unstops the ears of men s 
 souls that they may see the light, that they 
 may grasp the truth ; for these are things that 
 men must have, light and truth. They are 
 more important far than the light of the sun. 
 Jesus must either bring these things, or men
 
 58 SOME ONE TO COME 
 
 must turn to another. There must be satis 
 faction for the mind of man in any religion 
 that is presented to him, otherwise he will 
 turn elsewhere and find the satisfaction that 
 his mind must have. We are convinced, as 
 perhaps no other age has ever been convinced, 
 that the world is constructed upon the prin 
 ciples of law and order. We see evidences of 
 Mind back of creation. We see the adaptation 
 to natural conditions of the leaf upon the tree, 
 of the roots that strike down into the ground. 
 We see Mind in the fossiliferous inscriptions 
 on the rocks ; we see Mind in the coal deposits 
 and the natural-gas deposits, in the oil, in the 
 waters, the cataracts, the mountains of stone; 
 a great Mind has been working in the con 
 struction of the world. And the mind of man, 
 made in the image of that great Mind, thirsts 
 after contact with Him and can never be con 
 tent unless it is in some way in touch with the 
 Infinite. Man s mind, allied to the Infinite 
 Mind, has the right to truth. It must have the 
 truth, and it perishes without the truth. Mes 
 siah must first of all bring it the truth. 
 
 Knowledge is one of the things for which 
 humanity thirsts, and he who is to represent 
 humanity must come with knowledge in his 
 hand, or else humanity must look somewhere 
 else. Man wants to know. He will pay more
 
 SOME ONE TO COME 59 
 
 for knowledge than he will for any other com 
 modity upon the market. Man will, without 
 hesitation, face frozen death at the North Pole. 
 Why? To bring back sperm oil, pelts, ivory? 
 No. But to make a map of the district, to 
 know whether it is a frozen field of ice or an 
 open sea, just to know that he has reached 
 the Pole, just to know. In like manner, man 
 will face the flaming sword of African fever- 
 smitten districts, crossing marshes, ascending 
 rivers to their sources, exploring jungles, 
 breathing malaria, miasma, and typhoid; and 
 will sell his life upon the banks of great inland 
 lakes. Why? In order that he may open up 
 for commerce? No. Commerce will follow 
 upon his footsteps, true; but not for that pri 
 marily. In order that he may make a map, 
 in order that he may trace the rivers upon it 
 and diagram the lakes and the seas; in order 
 that he may bring back specimens of the flora 
 and the fauna, just that he may know. So, 
 too, man goes down in his diving-bell, letting 
 down the fishhooks of his interrogation, and 
 bringing up the secrets of the dark, un fathomed 
 caves of ocean. Why? For pearls? For 
 sponges? For riches? They follow in his 
 train, but primarily just that he may know; 
 that he may see what that little black thing is 
 that wriggles through the water, may grasp
 
 60 SOME ONE TO COME 
 
 it and save it and stamp it for ever and a day 
 upon the books of human knowledge. So men 
 pore over the secrets of dusty tomes, volume 
 after volume, under the midnight oil, growing 
 thin and wan, pale and parchment-hued. 
 Why? That they may write books? Become 
 famous? Lecture and grow rich? No, a 
 thousand times no. But that their minds, 
 which crave the food of the infinite, may know. 
 Knowledge is not the most valuable thing in 
 the world, but it is one of the most valuable; 
 and the Messiah must satisfy these cravings 
 of the mind of man. 
 
 Now, does Jesus? If He does not, I must 
 turn elsewhere to find somebody that will sat 
 isfy me. I must go to Socrates ; I must go to 
 Epictetus; I must go to Mohammed; I must 
 go to Buddha; I must find a mind that can 
 content this restless mind of mine. I have a 
 right to ask of the Messiah that He satisfy me. 
 Does He? Jesus spake as man never spake, 
 with a calm certainty and confidence ; grappled 
 with the riddles of existence, tore them apart, 
 opened them up, spread them out, and solved 
 them for the .minds of men. Who has told 
 me of my God except Jesus who said, " Our 
 Father who art in Heaven " ? Who has told 
 me of my fellow-man and how I am related to 
 him except Jesus who said, " You are brothers
 
 SOME ONE TO COME 61 
 
 one to another, neighbors all ; love your neigh 
 bors " ? Who has told me of my destiny when 
 I have shuffled off this mortal coil, when this 
 poor decayed flesh has gone back to dust 
 whence it came ? Who has told me except 
 Jesus : " Because I live ye shall live also. Let 
 not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God 
 believe also in me"? I hear no other voice; I 
 listen intently, but from the voiceless lips of 
 the unreplying dead there comes no word, save 
 only the word of Christ who brought life and 
 immortality to light in His gospel. He satis 
 fies me. He teaches me that I am a reasoning 
 and reasonable being. He treats me as if I 
 were such, appeals to me as if I were such, 
 satisfies me because I am such. He is prophet 
 to the mind of man. 
 
 But we see more than mind in this world. 
 There is evidence of heart in nature just as 
 there is of mind. Scientists tell us that noth 
 ing is still in all the universe ; that every mole 
 cule, every atom, is in constant vibration and 
 never at rest. This solid desk, the cornerstone 
 of this building, is not static; but every par 
 ticle is in constant quivering motion, throbbing 
 and beating, answering to the great heart that 
 is back of all. The tides rise and fall. The 
 little waves wash and pass. The leaves upon 
 the trees are not still; but vibrate, throb, beat
 
 62 SOME ONE TO COME 
 
 back and forth, in answer to the zephyrs that 
 flow from the heart of the Eternal. 
 
 Now, we all realize that that is a sort of 
 poetry mingled with science, and yet it is not 
 altogether fanciful. In man himself there is 
 evidence of heart, of emotion; and that desire 
 for contact with the Eternal heart that beats 
 back of the world, is one inextinguishable de 
 sire of the human soul. The heart that is back 
 of all must beat in unison with my heart. 
 There is a kinship between Him and me; and 
 the hidden or lost tie must be found in the 
 one who would come to satisfy and supply the 
 souls of men. Does Jesus answer here ? 
 
 The profoundest desire of the human heart 
 is for satisfaction from its sense of guilt, which 
 is the oldest consciousness of all humanity. 
 From the Garden of Eden, or from the cave 
 where the cave men dwelt, just as you prefer, 
 down to the present day, the universal con 
 sciousness is the consciousness of sin, of fall, 
 of frailty, of failure to live up to one s own 
 expectations and ideals. Does Jesus answer 
 here ? How man has striven to solve the prob 
 lem of his guilt! What does Jesus say to 
 him? He comes to that paralytic beside the 
 waters of Bethesda, to the man who was pay 
 ing the penalty of his own sin, and says to him, 
 " Thy sins be forgiven thee ; arise, take up thy
 
 SOME ONE TO COME 63 
 
 bed and walk." He says to the poor woman in 
 the temple, " Has no man condemned thee? " 
 " No man, Lord." " Neither do I condemn 
 thee; go and sin no more." 
 
 It is so that the Messiah must speak: 
 " Thy sins be forgiven thee." Did Socrates 
 ever speak so ? Did Seneca ever talk so ? Did 
 Mohammed, did Buddha? Is there any other 
 voice that has rung through the world, " Thy 
 sins be forgiven thee " ? That is the way our 
 Master must speak to us, else we must look 
 for another. We hear no other voice saying 
 to the dead in trespasses and sins, saying to the 
 leprous in shame and crime, " Thy sins be for 
 given thee." He has solved the problem. He 
 is the priest for ever after the order of Mel- 
 chizedek, mysterious, profound, incomprehen 
 sible; and since Jesus came, we need no other 
 priest to do our praying for us. We need no 
 other priest to stand between God and us to get 
 our absolution for us. Through Him we do 
 our own praying, boldly yet humbly, at the 
 throne of grace. Through Him we get our 
 own absolution, our own forgiveness directly 
 from the throne of God. He is not only 
 the prophet, then, for the mind, the teacher 
 who is to lead us aright; but He is the priest 
 to satisfy the emotion, the heart, the soul. 
 
 Once again, He said, most wonderful of all,
 
 64 SOME ONE TO COME 
 
 " The poor have the gospel preached unto 
 them." There is a proof of His Messiahship. 
 Here was one who took into consideration all 
 sorts and conditions of men. Here was one 
 who talked to the intellectual Greeks, to the 
 rich Pharisees and publicans like Nicodemus 
 and Zaccheus; and here was one who con 
 sidered the poor, the Arab in his filth, the 
 Bedouin in his black tent upon the desert, the 
 toiler behind the little crooked stick of a plow, 
 the dweller in the mud hut of the hills of 
 Syria, all have the gospel preached to them. 
 So we find the universal Lordship of a King 
 who considers all His subjects and reigns in 
 the hearts and minds of all kinds of people, 
 who satisfies not only the intellectual c.nd the 
 emotional, but the volitional life of men and 
 women, who governs as a King of Kindliness. 
 The wills of men no less than the minds 
 and hearts must be satisfied. We say in this 
 Western world, in our republic, that every man 
 is a king, that we have no king, that none rules 
 over us but ourselves. But all the time we are 
 bowing our wills to kingly men. All the time 
 we are subjecting our volitional life to out 
 side influences and dictation. If it were not 
 so, our republic in all its freedom and with all 
 its possibilities, would be crushed and broken 
 into a thousand atoms. Wills must be con-
 
 SOME ONE TO COME 65 
 
 trolled. Yonder belted and helmeted man with 
 the mace, that stands at the corner of your 
 Broadway, or of your State Street, or of your 
 Tremont Street, is perhaps no stronger, even 
 physically, than hundreds of men who pass that 
 way every day; yet there must be a guiding 
 will in that maelstrom of traffic, there must 
 be a man of authority to say to this car come, 
 and it comes, and to this one pause, and it 
 stops. Why is it that the seats in an auditorium 
 are all turned in one direction? It is not be 
 cause the man who stands there as chairman 
 or speaker is any better or more able, even in 
 tellectually, than hundreds of others who are in 
 the great convention hall; but it is because 
 every assembly must be guided and controlled ; 
 there must be a will to which voluntarily the 
 wills of other men yield, otherwise there can be 
 no order. In like fashion, every great com 
 pany of men and women, whether it is mob or 
 nation, is ready to subject its will to any one 
 who arises and says, " Follow me ; I can lead 
 you; I will lead you." How quickly a mob 
 flows after a strong man, goes wherever he 
 directs it; how quickly it is silenced and 
 stopped by one man who dares stand up and 
 say, " I know what should be done ; follow 
 me"! 
 
 James A. Garfield spoke but a single word
 
 66 SOME ONE TO COME 
 
 to the mob of surging thousands in New York 
 the night of Lincoln s assassination, and they 
 went back pacified to their homes. He said, 
 " God reigns and the government at Washing 
 ton still lives." Henry Ward Beecher stood 
 before the packed and hostile audiences of 
 England listening calmly to their jeers and cat 
 calls and uproar, facing even their missiles, 
 and their firearms, calm and unafraid, waiting 
 for his moment of mastery which always 
 came. The strong man holds the mob in his 
 palm. 
 
 The man who can, the man who is able, is 
 the king of men, crowned or uncrowned. He 
 is the canning one, in the German phrase, the 
 Koenig, the King. Here comes this man, Jesus 
 of Nazareth, this peasant who stands amongst 
 the mob of Jerusalem, of the world, wild and 
 ungovernable as they are, and says to them: 
 " Adopt this system of laws ? Write these 
 statutes on your books ? Organize this army " ? 
 Not at all. He says, " Follow me." This is 
 His great message to the world. " Follow 
 me. I am able; I can lead you; I can save 
 you." 
 
 "Thou seem st human and divine, 
 The highest, holiest manhood, Thou ; 
 Our wills are ours, we know not how, 
 Our wills are ours to make them Thine."
 
 SOME ONE TO COME 67 
 
 He has reigned and increasingly reigned 
 ever since, even to this day. 
 
 Thus He answers the cry of the soul of man 
 in all its needs and capacities. He answers 
 as prophet to the mind; He answers as priest 
 to the heart ; He answers as king to the will, 
 prophet, priest, and king. 
 
 "All hail the power of Jesus name, 
 Let angels prostrate fall, 
 Bring forth the royal diadem, 
 And crown Him, crown Him, crown Him Lord 
 of all." 
 
 We need not look elsewhere. We call the 
 roll of all the heroes and the sages and the 
 saints and the priests among the sons of earth, 
 and there is no answer from any of them to the 
 cry of our souls except the answer that Jesus 
 gives to mind and heart and will. " Seek for 
 your master," said Phillips Brooks; " never be 
 content until you find Him who, by His wis 
 dom, power, and love, has the right to rule 
 over you, and then give yourself to Him com 
 pletely." 
 
 A man was on trial for his life; the verdict 
 had not yet been rendered; it was early in the 
 gray dawn after a night of storm and stress; 
 the prisoner stood there at the convergence of 
 the power of two great nations, deserted and 
 alone, with no attorney to stand in his behalf.
 
 68 SOME ONE TO COME 
 
 His face you can almost see it now was 
 ashy pale ; wan and emaciated his figure ; drops 
 of blood trickled upon his brow where they had 
 mocked him with a crown of thorns; lashes 
 were evident upon his back where they had 
 laid upon him the scourge of ignominy; but 
 never was human figure more dignified, more 
 superb than when he stood before the con 
 centrated power of Rome and of Israel. Pilate 
 was awed as he looked upon him, and Pilate, 
 the practical, the bullet-headed, the iron- 
 handed, said to him : " A king? They say that 
 Thou art a king?" 
 
 The Master made answer : " Thou sayest it. 
 I am a king; for this cause came I into the 
 world, to bear witness to the truth. But my 
 kingdom is not of this world, else would my 
 servants fight. I am a king." So He was 
 and so He is, every inch a king, the king of the 
 souls of men.
 
 IV 
 THE CHARMING RABBI 
 
 IN order to be still better assured whether 
 the Master of Nazareth answers the needs 
 of the Common Man, it may be worth 
 while to estimate Him in the three aspects al 
 ready outlined, of Teacher, Priest, and Prince. 
 
 We must all of us learn from teachers. 
 From the time when we lisped our first les 
 sons at our mothers knees, through the 
 primary schools, secondary schools, colleges 
 and universities, even out into the ways of 
 business, on the farms, in the mines, forests, or 
 homes, we are shortsighted indeed, if we do 
 not tread in the paths marked out for us by 
 those who have gone before. Even if we 
 should dare to explore our own independent 
 way, without guidance or help, experience her 
 self comes in at the last as the sternest and 
 most inexorable of pedagogues. 
 
 Measured, then, by the tests we ordinarily 
 make for teachers, how does the Nazarene 
 fare? If we should systematize these tests, in 
 all probability they would be about like this :
 
 70 THE CHARMING RABBI 
 
 Has the Teacher a message? Has He 
 knowledge of the human mind ? Can He make 
 the subtle contact between the two, the mes 
 sage and the mind? 
 
 It were folly to follow a teacher who knew 
 nothing to teach; the blind leading the blind. 
 But many teachers know a great deal, without 
 having ability to impart what they know. 
 They lack insight, it may be, into the mind of 
 the learner; they are unable to take his point 
 of view; and so they cannot help him in that 
 process which students of the mind call apper 
 ception the passage from the known to the 
 unknown. Further yet, there are conceivably 
 those who know much, and in this knowledge 
 include knowledge of humanity, who yet, from 
 lack of a delicate unknown quantity which 
 we call personality, magnetism, are unable to 
 connect up the two nodes, that of the message 
 and the mind. 
 
 By this triple test, Jesus records the high 
 est possible registration. He had a message; 
 He knew men ; He knew the methods of presen 
 tation. The trefoil of the teacher s power, the 
 open sesame to the soul were in His easy pos 
 session : knowledge of a message, men, and 
 methods. Methods is rather too mechanical 
 a term by which to express this wonderful, 
 intangible, spiritual way of approach to the
 
 THE CHARMING RABBI 71 
 
 inner recesses of the soul; but it is a word in 
 common use among teachers, in whose lan 
 guage for a moment we are trying to think. 
 
 He knew men, and needed not that any 
 should tell Him what was in man. He looked 
 into the faces of fishermen, and, more adroitly 
 than Satan, sifted them as wheat. He ate and 
 drank with publicans and men of the world, 
 and they became His fast friends. He talked 
 with women who had histories, saw the play 
 and interplay of motive, read the seared, sob 
 bing, dried-up hearts, and redeemed them. He 
 drew to him, by His knowledge of them, His 
 charm for them, His love for them, men of 
 high attainments as well as laboring-men. Siae 
 by side at His manger-cradle knelt shepherds 
 and wise men; side by side in His audiences 
 and in His following, went men of high con 
 dition and of low. When He began His teach 
 ing, He beautifully chose to go first to fisher 
 men, shepherds, tillers of the soil; but 
 Nicodemus, and certain Greeks, and who 
 knows but the great Gamaliel himself, came to 
 Him. 
 
 He knew the methods of approach by which 
 to gain entrance at all doors. Was it a pol 
 ished Pharisee who came to engage Him in 
 debate? He wasted no time on rudiments, on 
 alphabets, on mint, anise, or cummin. He
 
 72 THE CHARMING RABBI 
 
 looked the man between the eyes and said, 
 " You must be born again." He began on a 
 high plane and conducted the whole interview 
 there. Was it a poor drab by the well-curb of 
 Samaria? He quickly silenced her bantering 
 tongue and routed her crude wiles with a 
 thrust into the suppuration of her life. Was 
 it a group of uncandid opponents who came 
 to impale Him on the horns of their dilemma? 
 He turned the dilemma into an antithesis, an 
 epigram, that will stick in the minds of men 
 while time lasts : " Render unto Caesar the 
 things that are Caesar s, and unto God the 
 things that are God s." 
 
 Now, however, let us turn to the message. 
 Let us ask the old question, " What think ye 
 of Christ, His word ? " Perhaps our first an 
 swer may aptly come from some of the men 
 in the street who heard Him. A set of officers 
 from the temple guard, minions of the chief 
 priest, were sent one time to arrest Him. They 
 came back, thumbs in mouths and answered, 
 " Never man so spake ! " 
 
 A strange answer for commissioned officers, 
 sent forth to arrest a malefactor. If the chief 
 of police of a modern city, or the sheriff of a 
 county, should swear in a posse of deputies 
 and send them out to arrest some criminal, 
 and those deputies should come back and say,
 
 THE CHARMING RABBI 73 
 
 " No man ever talked like this man ; we never 
 heard any man speak like this man," we should 
 all agree that it was a strange answer for com 
 missioned officers of the law sent out to ar 
 rest a man. 
 
 No doubt these men had followed Jesus 
 about for several days, listening to His words, 
 trying to take Him in His talk, to find ground 
 upon which to witness against Him. You can 
 see them now as, on the outskirts of the crowd, 
 their dark, Oriental eyes overhung by their 
 dark, Oriental brows, they listen half list 
 lessly to what Jesus is saying. Suddenly some 
 such utterance as this strikes their ear : " I am 
 the bread of life." " I am the water of life." 
 " I am the Way and the Truth and the Life. 
 No man cometh unto the Father but by me." 
 " Come unto me, all ye that labor and are 
 heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Their 
 brows lift, their eyes open, they listen more in 
 tently; unconsciously they edge their way in 
 through the crowd ; until by and by, in the very 
 front rank of His hearers, with eyes wide 
 open, and ears wide open, and mouths wide 
 open, they are hanging upon His utterances. 
 Then the crowd breaks up. These men 
 mechanically betake themselves back to the 
 palace of the high priest, having forgotten 
 their errand; and when at last they are con-
 
 74 THE CHARMING RABBI 
 
 fronted with the stern question, " Why have 
 ye not brought Him? ", they had not thought 
 what answer to make, and they just blurt 
 out the first word that comes to mind, " Never 
 man spake like this man. We never heard any 
 body talk like this man." A strange answer, 
 indeed, from commissioned officers sent out to 
 arrest a blasphemer. 
 
 But strange as this answer is, it is the same 
 that ever has been made by all who, in the his 
 tory of the world since the time of Jesus, have 
 gone forth to arrest the progress of the Christ. 
 Many a man in the strength of his mighty 
 mind has said : " I will stop Him ; I will arrest 
 Him; I will put an end to this delusion of 
 Christianity ; give me time. When my book is 
 written, when my system is complete, when my 
 word is spoken, and my work is done, then 
 no longer will men listen to this Jesus." But 
 after the work has been accomplished, after 
 the book is written and the word spoken, these 
 men, all of them without exception, have come 
 back saying, " Never man spake like this man." 
 
 There was Strauss in Germany who wrote 
 his Leben Jesu, the Life of Jesus, to prove that 
 the Master was a myth, an idea, an ideal, beau 
 tiful but legendary, Strauss closes his volume 
 with a tribute of the highest respect to the 
 very conception of such a life as that of Christ.
 
 THE CHARMING RABBI 75 
 
 When he yields the idea, he yields all ; for the 
 man capable of the idea, the ideal of a life like 
 that of Jesus, must have been the Christ Him 
 self; no other could have conceived it. In 
 France, Renan, with his Vie de Jesu, his Life 
 of Jesus, beautiful, poetical, paying high 
 tribute to the aesthetic attractiveness of the 
 great teacher, the " Charming Rabbi," closes 
 his volume with these words : " Whatever 
 miracle the future may bring forth, Jesus of 
 Nazareth will never be surpassed." And John 
 Stuart Mill, in England, with much the same 
 attitude as these other two, has somewhere 
 declared that humanity has made no mistake 
 in lighting upon Jesus of Nazareth as the acme 
 of mankind. Those are great men speaking, 
 men whose minds command respect and whose 
 work has been epoch-making in the world. 
 Each one of them comes back with the same 
 answer as these officers, " Never man spake like 
 this man." Whatever else they may say, this 
 is the universal verdict of truly great men who 
 have examined the life of Jesus. 
 
 A yet more modern voice comes, and Ru 
 dolph Eucken, writing in the last few years 
 upon the subject " Can We Still Be Chris 
 tians ? " declares that it is a startling fact that 
 the scholarly minds, the great minds amongst 
 men in all Christian history, striving to get
 
 76 THE CHARMING RABBI 
 
 along on other than Christian ground, have 
 almost without exception been compelled to 
 acknowledge that they cannot succeed ; we can 
 not live without Jesus, once having known 
 Him. 
 
 Now, what was there about the teaching of 
 Jesus that it thus lays hold upon the minds of 
 men, so that when once they have heard it they 
 never can forget it ? What is there about His 
 words that, like grappling hooks, fasten in the 
 mind and never can be shaken out? It is not 
 that He was a great literary artist, though He 
 was. It is not ornamentation and decoration 
 of speech, for there was with Him no striving 
 after effect, no " sewing on of purple-patches," 
 no " painting in of cypress-trees," in His can 
 vas. He was a plain, blunt man that simply 
 spoke right on; in words of wondrous beauty, 
 to be sure, whose literary and poetical value 
 has rarely been equalled, and never surpassed, 
 by any great teacher of ethical truth; but the 
 secret lies not in literary charm. 
 
 Neither was it any striving after originality, 
 after the new and the strange and the unusual. 
 In this age of ours the man must have a very 
 unusual message if he is to catch the public 
 ear. Something original that nobody else has 
 ever spoken, something Bernard Shawesque, 
 is necessary to catch the attention and reach
 
 THE CHARMING RABBI 77 
 
 the ears of men. We will not read this morn 
 ing s paper ; we must have this evening s paper ; 
 and not the three-o clock edition, nor the four- 
 o clock edition, nor the five-o clock edition, but 
 the extra hot from the press and still damp 
 with the printer s ink. And the novels that we 
 read, they must be fearfully and wonderfully 
 made if they do not pall upon the taste of this 
 blase age. We need not think we have a 
 monopoly of the desire for the new, the 
 strange, the unusual. When Jesus came, there 
 were men who gathered together for nothing 
 else but to hear or tell some new and strange 
 thing. Now, Jesus does not pander to this 
 taste for the abnormal and the new. He does 
 not hesitate to take old truths and recoin them 
 and use them over again for the good of men. 
 He does not hesitate to borrow from the 
 Prophets, from Moses, from the Pentateuch. 
 Confucius, they say, spoke the Golden Rule 
 five centuries before Jesus uttered it. Con 
 fucius said, " Do not unto others what ye 
 would not that others should do unto you." 
 Jesus turned it about and made it positive 
 and said, " Do unto others as you would that 
 others should do unto you." You say there is 
 no difference between the two; one is simply 
 negative and the other positive. Yes, but that 
 is all the difference in the world; the differ-
 
 78 THE CHARMING RABBI 
 
 ence between the negative Orient under its 
 banyan tree and within its age-old walls, and 
 the positive, active Occident, the difference 
 between the East and the West. So with Jesus, 
 truth, wherever He finds it, and whenever He 
 finds it, becomes grist for His mill, becomes 
 ore for His mint. He takes it and stamps it 
 with His own inimitable coinage and sends it 
 out current legal tender in the world. 
 
 So it is the truth and the character of the 
 truth that He uttered; it is the fact that He 
 spake as man never spake before and has never 
 spoken since; it is this that makes Him all- 
 powerful in the minds of men, so that whether 
 they will or no, whenever they come into the 
 presence of His teaching they bow and must 
 bow; they cannot forget; they cannot let go 
 of it. 
 
 It would be manifestly impossible in the few 
 short pages at our command to make any 
 thing like an adequate resume of the teaching 
 of Jesus; so varied is it, so widely applicable 
 to the life of men. It is like a many-peaked 
 mountain range. But it is possible to glance 
 over the great snow-crowned summits of the 
 group, even as it is possible to look over the 
 Alps and see the Jungfrau, the Matterhorn, 
 and Mont Blanc. At a moment s glance two or 
 three of the most valuable of His utterances
 
 THE CHARMING RABBI 79 
 
 capture attention, which have become an ever 
 lasting and inestimable heritage of mankind. 
 
 Let us select three of these, three that have 
 to do with the relations existing among the 
 only three beings that we know anything about 
 in the world: God, myself, and my fellow- 
 man. 
 
 I know that God is. There have been, of 
 course, those who have denied His existence, 
 but they are few. The great multitude of men 
 and women from the beginning of man s con 
 scious life have known that God is. Only the 
 fool hath said in his heart there is no God. The 
 great philosophers and teachers, scholars of 
 all human history, have recognized the exist 
 ence of God ; and it is idle to try to prove that 
 God is. You do not need to prove what men 
 already believe. 
 
 Then I know that I am. There are some 
 philosophers who have tried to teach us that 
 we could not be certain of our own individual 
 existence. But you never can convince a man 
 that he himself is not an entity. Descartes it 
 is, the father of modern philosophy, who bases 
 his whole system on the assertion, " I think, I 
 doubt, therefore I am." 
 
 Then I am conscious of the existence of my 
 neighbor. There have been philosophers and 
 whole nations, at times, who have tried to
 
 80 THE CHARMING RABBI 
 
 convince the world that we could not be cer 
 tain of anything outside of ourselves ; that the 
 world was a delusion. But you cannot con 
 vince me that my neighbor does not exist. I 
 think, therefore I am; and I communicate my 
 thought to him and he grasps it and gives me 
 his thought back from himself; so he thinks, 
 therefore he is. So then, those three beings 
 exist: God, myself, and my neighbor. 
 
 The relations existing among them, that is 
 the all-important thing to us. And what are 
 those relations existing between God and my 
 self, between myself and my neighbor, and 
 between man and God? Those are the ques 
 tions which strike to the very root of man s 
 life. And the answer to those questions is the 
 answer for which man has been craving 
 through all the millenniums of his existence. 
 
 When Jesus came He found men perplexed 
 with regard to the relation of God and man. 
 They knew that there was a God, but they 
 did not know what kin He was to them. They 
 looked out upon the world of nature and the 
 world of history, the only inspired book to 
 which most of them had access, and they saw 
 two kinds of gods, or God, in the world : good 
 gods and evil gods, beneficent gods and de 
 structive gods. In the spring of the year, 
 they saw the trees and shrubs and fields bring-
 
 THE CHARMING RABBI 81 
 
 ing forth bud and blossom and ultimately fruit, 
 to bless and feed the world; and they said, 
 " Here is a good God, a kindly God that brings 
 these gifts to men." Then they saw the mil 
 dew, or the blight, or the storm, or the un 
 timely frost cut down and blast and blacken 
 that leafage and that fruitage; and they said, 
 " Here is an evil, a destroying god in the 
 world." And they could not understand. 
 They looked out over the sea, that beautiful 
 Mediterranean that was the ocean of the time, 
 and they saw it smooth and wind-swept, bear 
 ing the ships on to their desired haven with 
 their riches, blessing and benefiting mankind; 
 and they said, " Here are the footsteps of the 
 good God." Then they saw that same sea toss 
 ing mountain high, dashing ships to the bot 
 tom, and they said, " Here is an evil, a destroy 
 ing god, that is working against that good and 
 kindly god " ; and they were perplexed. They 
 saw the mountains, bringing forth gold and 
 silver and precious stones, to adorn and to 
 enrich humanity; then they saw those same 
 mountains belching forth fire and smoke and 
 lava and burying whole cities. They said, 
 " Here is a warfare going on between a benefi 
 cent or good God and a destructive or evil 
 god." Job cries, " When I look before me, I 
 cannot find Him, and when I look behind, I do
 
 82 THE CHARMING RABBI 
 
 not perceive Him." The psalmist who wrote 
 that ninetieth Psalm, standing as close to God 
 as undoubtedly the singer of such a song did 
 stand, cries out in a pathetic perplexity in the 
 two strains woven together : 
 
 " Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling place in 
 all generations. Before the mountains were 
 brought forth, or ever Thou hadst formed the 
 earth and the world, even from everlasting to 
 everlasting, Thou art God ; " the good, the 
 kindly, the beneficent God. " Thou turnest 
 man to destruction ; " there is the evil god. 
 "And sayest (to another generation), Return, 
 ye children of men. For a thousand years in 
 Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, 
 and as a watch in the night ; " the good God, 
 the giver of life. " Thou carriest them away 
 as with a flood ; " the evil god that destroys. 
 " They are as a sleep : in the morning they are 
 like grass which groweth up. In the morning 
 it flourisheth, and groweth up ; " the good, the 
 creative God " In the evening, it is cut down, 
 and withereth, for we are consumed by Thine 
 anger and by Thy wrath are we troubled ; " 
 the destroyer. The Singer was seeking in the 
 darkness, if haply he might find Him, and yet 
 not understanding Him; it was a tragedy, to 
 know that God was and yet not to know what 
 kin He was to man.
 
 THE CHARMING RABBI 83 
 
 Now, what does Jesus say ? " Our Father 
 Who art in heaven ; " "I go unto my Father 
 and to your Father, to my God and your God ; " 
 " Our Father Who art in heaven." Never 
 man spake like that; such calm certitude. 
 The Hindu yonder in the jungles, years before, 
 had sung about Deus Pater, the Father God. 
 The Greek poet had written of Zeus Pater, the 
 Father God, the same name. The Romans had 
 talked of Jupiter, the Father God, the same 
 name; and yet of what unspeakable crimes 
 did they make this so-called Father of men 
 guilty! They had no conception of a Father 
 in heaven, who was a real father to the race. 
 It remained for Jesus Christ of Nazareth to 
 teach us, so that we can never forget it to 
 this hour, the true kinship of God to man. To 
 day, the little child by his bed, or by his 
 mother s knee, and the strong man battling with 
 the waves of life, alike say, " Our Father Who 
 art in heaven." The words are household 
 words now, and on occasion are in everybody s 
 mouth. 
 
 But, after all, how many of us have grasped 
 firmly and profoundly the love of God as a 
 Father of man? A gentleman who had two 
 beautiful little children once said to me : 
 " When these children were very young, I 
 would not dare stand on the ground and reach
 
 84. THE CHARMING RABBI 
 
 up my hands to them at the second story win 
 dow of my home with an invitation to them 
 to come. They would leap right down to me, 
 in an instant." That is fatherhood. That is 
 the loving trust that a child feels for a normal, 
 sincere, and loving father. We speak of the 
 love of motherhood and the beauty of it, and 
 it is the most beautiful thing in the world; 
 but there is something to be said for a father s 
 love as well; a willingness to give and be 
 given, to spend and be spent for the sake of 
 the offspring, a willingness to stand at the 
 threshold, if need be, and die in the guardian 
 ship of them. That is what fatherhood means. 
 Do you suppose if we believed, you and I, pro 
 foundly in the fatherhood of God, that there 
 would be any one of us staying away from 
 Him in the brightness and the glory and the 
 blessing of this relationship? Nothing on earth 
 could keep us from Him, if once we grasped 
 the deep significance of this message of Jesus 
 Christ s. 
 
 Again, when Jesus came He found men per 
 plexed with regard to the relation existing 
 between man and his fellow-man. He found 
 that in that day, to be a Roman was greater 
 than to be king; but to be anything else than 
 a Roman was to be a foreigner, an enemy. 
 The names of the two were synonymous in
 
 THE CHARMING RABBI 85 
 
 Latin, and in many another language besittes. 
 He found that to be a Greek was to be one of 
 the cultivated, one of the refined, one of the 
 teachers, leaders of men; to be anything else 
 than a Greek was to be a barbarian, bearded 
 and savage. He found that to be a Jew was 
 to be one of God s own chosen people; but to 
 be anything else than a Jew was to be a gentile, 
 with an accent and a sneer upon the first syl 
 lable. So it was every nation for itself and the 
 devil take the hindmost; just as it is today. 
 It was each nation armed cap-a-pie against 
 every other nation and Ishmaels all just as it 
 is today. 
 
 Now, what did Jesus say ? He said a certain 
 man went down to Jericho, and fell among 
 thieves that beat him and stripped him and left 
 him by the roadside half dead. Then there 
 came by a priest and there came by a Levite, 
 men sworn under their solemn oaths to be of 
 service and benefit to every Israelite with whom 
 they came into touch. These men, seeing their 
 bloody fellow-countryman lying in the road, 
 gathered their skirts about them, for they were 
 on their way to the temple to worship, and if 
 they had soiled themselves with blood they 
 would have been ceremonially unclean and, for 
 sooth, unable to enter into the church of God 
 and offer worship to the Almighty Father.
 
 86 THE CHARMING RABBI 
 
 There is many a man of that sort in America 
 today. Then there passed a Samaritan. And 
 if there was anybody that a Jew hated with all 
 his soul it was a Samaritan; and if there was 
 anybody a Samaritan loathed from the bottom 
 of his heart it was a Jew. Yet this man it is, 
 of all others, who gets down off his beast and 
 binds up the wounds of the unfortunate, pour 
 ing in oil and wine, and takes him to the inn 
 and pays his reckoning for many days. 
 " Which of them," says Jesus, " is related to 
 the man that fell among thieves ? " They 
 said they were forced to say " I suppose it 
 was he that showed mercy upon him." They 
 could not use the word Samaritan. Then said 
 Jesus : " Go ye and do likewise. You are neigh 
 bors all; you are brothers all." There are no 
 boundary lines between peoples and kindreds 
 and tongues and tribes; there are no narrow 
 friths that cause nations to abhor each other, 
 in the teachings of Jesus Christ; for the 
 brotherhood of man is universal in its scope. 
 That is the message concerning the relation 
 ship of myself to my fellow-man. 
 
 Do we believe that? Two thousand years 
 after it was spoken, ask Europe if it believes. 
 Ask Germany and Austria, England, France, 
 and Russia; ask Belgium if it believes. 
 " Well," comes the reply, " we believe it in
 
 THE CHARMING RABBI 87 
 
 America, anyhow." Winston Churchill said 
 if we believed it, it would be nitroglycerine in 
 modern society ; it would blow the whole fabric 
 to pieces and change it and turn it upside down. 
 Brotherhood ! We have but little conception of 
 brotherhood. We get together in our churches 
 and it is Brother This and Brother That, but 
 if we address a member of a neighboring de 
 nomination, not of our own particular little 
 section of the great church of Christ, it is Mr. 
 This and Mrs. That. See how small is the 
 comprehension of Jesus great idea! 
 
 We go into our lodges, we clasp hands and 
 give the grip, and it is Brother This and 
 Brother That. But we go outside into the 
 market-places and on the stock exchanges and 
 it is Greek meets Greek, diamond cut diamond ; 
 we overreach each other in a horse trade or 
 lumber deal, or perhaps one would better say a 
 motor transaction or a lumber deal. At least 
 such is the case in the lodge to which I belong. 
 How about yours? 
 
 There is no topic upon which a preacher can 
 declaim, quite so popular, as the brotherhood 
 of man. People come up and shake his hand 
 with varied comment : " That was fine. My 
 sentiments exactly. You were in fine form 
 today. I believe every word. Excellent ser 
 mon." Then they go back to their unbrotherly
 
 88 THE CHARMING RABBI 
 
 practices on the morrow. How long, O God, 
 how long! 
 
 Do you suppose if we believed in the brother 
 hood of man, that there would be any armies 
 facing each other across the French boundary 
 line? Do you suppose if we believed in the 
 brotherhood of man, there would be any neces 
 sity of our nation s increasing its armament 
 this year of grace? 
 
 Do you suppose if we believed in the brother 
 hood of man there would be any little ragged 
 newsboys sleeping, this winter, in the old ash 
 barrels and rusty boilers and over the gratings 
 of the printing-press engines for a little 
 warmth? You say that is an overdrawn pic 
 ture, there are no boys in such condition in the 
 United States? You can see them any mid 
 winter night on the Bowery and Broadway, on 
 Tremont Street, State Street, Locust Street, in 
 any of our great cities, little fellows with 
 skin showing through their torn pants, almost 
 barefoot, selling their belated news, while the 
 snow comes down, at eleven and twelve o clock 
 at night. There would be no such thing as a 
 newspaper boy in all America if we believed in 
 the brotherhood of man; unemployed men 
 would be selling the news as they do on the 
 other side of the water; and the boys, every 
 one of them, would be in school under a com-
 
 THE CHARMING RABBI 89 
 
 pulsory education act that compels, if we be 
 lieved in the brotherhood of man. 
 
 Do you suppose, if we believed in the 
 brotherhood of man, that there would be any 
 sweatshops in our great cities under the man 
 agement of Christian business men any great 
 mills that served as prison-houses and slave- 
 grounds for little children? Do you suppose 
 there would be hundreds of employees ground 
 under the heel of greed and piracy, if we be 
 lieved in the brotherhood of man? 
 
 Do you suppose that, if we believed in the 
 brotherhood of man, there would be an army 
 of tramps moving back and forth with the 
 seasons up and down the continent, infesting 
 the right-of-ways and farms, and making the 
 lives of farmers wives miserable? Ah, but 
 you say, " He who will not work, shall not 
 eat." Yes, the old economic law, as old as the 
 laws of the Medes and the Persians and older, 
 will not change. But certain it is that every 
 man who wanted to work would have a fair 
 and square chance to work, which certainly is 
 not the case today, if we believed in the 
 brotherhood of man. But again comes the 
 objection : " These things are governed by 
 economic conditions. You cannot idealize laws 
 of supply and demand. Your dreamers of 
 brotherhood, like Tolstoi, never get anywhere
 
 90 THE CHARMING RABBI 
 
 with their dreams." Let us believe enough in 
 Jesus great doctrine, and we shall get some 
 where fast enough, in regard to supply and 
 demand, opportunities to work, healthful con 
 ditions under which to work, limitations of 
 women s and children s hours of labor, em 
 ployers liability, and even in regard to so huge 
 a task as internationalism. Be assured of this, 
 we shall never accomplish these Herculean re 
 forms without the aid of Jesus, who set forth 
 the law that lies at the base of them. 
 
 Do you suppose, if we thoroughly believed in 
 the brotherhood of man, there would be any 
 dark corner of any dark continent unenlight 
 ened by the message of the gospel of Jesus this 
 good year of His grace, twenty centuries after 
 the glad news was uttered? If we believed in 
 the brotherhood of man we could not go fast 
 enough to tell it to the uttermost parts of the 
 earth. If we believed in the brotherhood of 
 man, would there be any churchless parts of 
 our cities, while the churches move out into 
 the wealthy and the fashionable and the com 
 fortable sections? If we believed it but it is 
 too great for us ! It will take us another nine 
 teen centuries, perhaps, to achieve it, to enter 
 into the A B C s of this great doctrine, to enter 
 into the vestibule of the greatest thing in 
 the world, which is love.
 
 THE CHARMING RABBI 91 
 
 Once more, when Jesus came He found men 
 perplexed with regard to the tie that should 
 bind them back again to God. He found them 
 troubled with the world-old consciousness of 
 their separation from their God. Instinctively 
 they felt, somehow, that they ought to be in 
 touch with Him, that they ought to be at one 
 with Him, but they felt between Him and 
 them a veil hanging, the veil of sin. They saw 
 between Him and them a great yawning gulf, 
 the gulf of sin. And this consciousness of 
 separation between Him and them was the 
 keenest consciousness that they had. 
 
 What did Jesus say to them ? Said He : " I 
 am the Way and the Truth and the Life. No 
 man cometh unto the Father but by me. If ye 
 had known me ye should have known my 
 Father also." Never man spake like this man. 
 Other men had said, not " I am the way back 
 to God"; but they had said, "If you will 
 listen to me, if you will follow my teachings, 
 if you will walk with me in the porches or the 
 groves, if you will adopt my system, if you 
 will learn my philosophy, after twenty, thirty, 
 or forty years of study, I think perhaps I can 
 show you the way of life." But here is a man 
 who did not say, " I will teach you, listen to 
 my words," but who said : " Follow me. I am
 
 92 THE CHARMING RABBI 
 
 the Way and the Truth and the Life." No 
 man ever so spake. 
 
 No doubt there is in every city, certainly in 
 the country round about it, an old homestead 
 that was a little quieter last night than it ought 
 to have been; there is a vacant chair in front 
 of the fireplace, and a vacant chair at the table ; 
 there is a room upstairs quiet, echoing to no 
 footfalls, unoccupied through the night; there 
 is, in that room, no doubt, an old walnut bed 
 stead, an old marble-topped washstand and 
 dresser; there is the counterpane, kept smooth 
 and clean and uncrumpled by a mother s tender 
 hands. Downstairs in front of that fireplace, 
 last night, was an old father whose heart was 
 empty, yearning, void, and breaking ; while out 
 yonder across the Father of Waters, across the 
 prairies, on the ranch, in the lumber camp, in 
 the great city, was a young boy who said : " I 
 will not go back home. My father does not 
 love me any more; and I do not love him any 
 more; and I will not go back home." If only 
 somebody could go to that boy with the truth, 
 could say to him, " Your old father does love 
 you; your father s heart is breaking for you; 
 come back home ; I will be the way home for 
 you to your father s house." Now, what is 
 that but the story of the lost, or prodigal son, 
 the message of our Master ? Nobody else ever
 
 THE CHARMING RABBI 93 
 
 talked like that ; nobody ever struck that chord 
 in human nature ; and it has wended its way to 
 the hearts of men more than any story that 
 ever was told. Why ? Because it is so true to 
 the universal experiences of men. Because we 
 know that you and I are that lost son out on 
 the desert, in the purlieus and slums of the city, 
 refusing to go back home. 
 
 There is the word of life to whom else 
 can we go ? Here is the message of Jesus, who 
 solved for us the problems of existence and 
 completed the great triangle of relations, the 
 links of the endless chain; the Fatherhood of 
 God to man, the brotherhood of man to his 
 fellow-man, and Himself the atoning power 
 that leads us back home again to the Father s 
 house.
 
 V 
 THE UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 
 
 IT is aspiration that saves men. The 
 priestly function of Jesus lies in His power 
 both to create and satisfy longings. He is 
 spoken of as a priest after a mysterious order. 
 The mystery lies in the fact that He has not to 
 do with stole and mitre, with swinging censer, 
 clouded incense, burning candle, shimmering 
 drapery and lights, tolling bells or forms and 
 symbols of any kind ; but He has to do with the 
 untraceable labyrinths of the inner life. It is 
 not in outward sestheticism, however compel 
 ling, that He presides as priest. There is no 
 beauty of this sort that we should desire Him. 
 But it is far beneath all visible architectural 
 or ceremonial effects, in the elemental, ethereal, 
 mystery-laden atmosphere, where the wind 
 breatheth where it listeth, that He stands to 
 minister. 
 
 We used to hear much of " Justification by 
 
 Faith." Martin Luther set a continent free 
 
 with the power of that great phrase. Now it 
 
 has, to the ears of most women and men, an 
 
 94
 
 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 95 
 
 academic, a theological, altogether a rather 
 metallic sound. But justification by faith is 
 a very much simpler thing than, at first blush, 
 it seems. In St. Paul s mind, who was the 
 father of the phrase, it simply means that God 
 takes the will for the deed. We are accounted 
 righteous when we are not righteous, just 
 because we look up to God, wishing that we 
 were righteous. We are children who did not 
 mean to do wrong, but meant to do right. We 
 love our Father and we trust Him, so we come 
 to Him in loving trust saying : " Father, when 
 I do wrong, I do not mean to do it. I do not 
 want to be bad. I want to be good." Then 
 the Father does just as a father would be ex 
 pected to do. He forgives and He takes the 
 aspiration for the fulfilment, the will for the 
 deed. That is justification by faith. 
 
 He is a priest, then, who inspires aspiration, 
 directs aspiration, and satisfies aspiration. He 
 presides at the bed of new birth, by the cradle 
 of the soul, and listens to the first cry of de 
 sire to live. Furthermore, changing to another 
 of His figures, that is the highest priest, who 
 pierces deepest into human hearts, finds the 
 imprisoned springs of desire for life, breaks 
 up the rocky strata, sets free the pure water, 
 brings it to the top, and sends it out into proper
 
 96 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 
 
 channels. He it is who finds for us our own 
 fountains of living water, springing up within 
 us unto everlasting life. 
 
 Humanity needs not fewer desires but more 
 desires and right desires. A social worker 
 among the submerged seeks not only to satisfy 
 wants but to create them. Herein lies the sal 
 vation of the discouraged, slothful, contented 
 pauper. So the priest comes to the dead in 
 trespasses and sins, the opium-smoker of con 
 tent, and shakes him by the shoulder, raises 
 him from his death, saves him to his life. 
 Jesus possesses this priestly, this atoning 
 power. He paid for it a great price ; He paid 
 for it His life. 
 
 This power of the priest is too precious a 
 thing to be easily bought. No man can have 
 it by inheritance, by favor, or by money pur 
 chase. It is obtained only by the shedding of 
 blood. In proportion as one gives himself, in 
 that proportion only shall he get it. Except a 
 grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it 
 abideth alone. The priest must shed his blood, 
 break his heart, die on his cross, be lifted up, 
 before he draw men upward along the slant 
 ing path of the soul. In that Jesus thus gave 
 Himself as no other before Him or since ever 
 gave himself, lies His patent to the High- 
 priesthood, His mysterious majesty in the vast
 
 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 97 
 
 nave of the inner life, His atonement for the 
 sins of the world. 
 
 Men have long since become impatient with 
 academic attempts of schoolmen to solve the 
 mystery of the atonement of Jesus Christ and 
 to put it into hard-and-fast definition. To the 
 man in the street, the idea that God sub 
 stituted Christ for man and visited punishment 
 upon the head of innocence, in place of guilt, 
 is revolting, shocking, abhorrent. It offends 
 the sense of justice. No less does the sugges 
 tion that God paid Jesus as a ransom to the 
 devil, a sop to Cerberus, offend the modern 
 man s sense of commercial ethics. He must 
 first be convinced that there is a devil, outside 
 himself. Nor again does the notion of a scape 
 goat made of Christ for the sake of vindicating 
 the dignity of an outraged law outraged by 
 man and not by Christ fit in with his ideas of 
 legal equity. You cannot content him with 
 such statements. He will either listen to you 
 in doubting silence, or like Gallic will shut 
 his ears and, caring for none of these things, go 
 off quietly to indifferent sleep in the midst of 
 your harangue. 
 
 But if the man of the world today is told 
 that the atonement is a glowing mystery, too 
 deep for human fathoming, let alone for human 
 defining; that it seems to run like a beautiful
 
 98 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 
 
 blood-red warp through the fabric of all law, 
 natural, human, and divine; that Jesus, so far 
 from being an exception, was the most per 
 fect exemplification of this wonderfully diffi 
 cult and intricate law; your average man will 
 sit up and listen, and possibly begin an intel 
 lectual upward slant that in eternity may reach 
 its goal. Perhaps his cogitation on Atonement 
 may lead him along like this: 
 
 All life and all progress in the world is 
 at the expense of sacrifice and death on the 
 part of some one or many. Mere physical 
 existence can only be begun and maintained as 
 the result of a rapid, repeated, widespread 
 death. Not only we, but all creatures rise on 
 stepping-stones of others dead selves to higher 
 things. The whole creation groaneth and tra- 
 vaileth in pain together until now, in giving 
 birth to the next day and the next generation, 
 and the next era. To put it even on the lowest 
 plane, it is not merely certain rudimentary 
 forms of life that make their culminating act 
 the act of reproduction, and with this climax 
 of their careers pass off the stage of the living 
 forever; but even the highest type of life 
 man in giving life to his kind that are to 
 follow him, in nurturing them, guarding them, 
 rearing them, voluntarily embraces decay and 
 death, if gradual, yet no less sure.
 
 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 99 
 
 This sacrifice of life that other life may fol 
 low higher, better life or else the universe is 
 all out of gear is partly involuntary and 
 partly voluntary. The struggle for life has 
 its foil in the struggle for the life of others. 
 The pouring out of blood for the sustenance 
 of the beasts that prey has its opposite motive 
 in the pouring out of their hearts rich tide 
 by the mothers of the race that prays. The 
 awful war of extermination that rages in the 
 thick jungles of the tiniest grass blades as well 
 as in the greatest forests and mountain fast 
 nesses claims not more victims than the altars 
 of voluntary vicarious sacrifice upon which 
 the parents of all men and many creatures 
 willingly and gladly lay down their lives. 
 
 The same principle applies, does it not, in 
 matters higher than mere physical existence? 
 There is no advancement in human thought, 
 no growth of any great telling movement 
 among men except at a cost of life. Advance 
 comes by friction, opposition, battle ; and these 
 waste life. The scholar burns out his life 
 with his midnight oil. The preacher if he be 
 really a preacher dies just so much upon the 
 cross, every time he ascends his pulpit. The 
 statesman if he be one, and not a mere poli 
 tician gives his life for great ideas just as 
 really through his toil as the soldier in his
 
 100 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 
 
 marches and his battles. The man of affairs, 
 that deserts may be watered and conquered, 
 roads built, the earth peopled and prospered, 
 gives his life whatever the motive, either in 
 midnight journeys, or meetings, or wastes it in 
 the confinement of an office that is like a cell. 
 The world of thought grows, develops, but 
 at what a tremendous cost of human life! 
 
 In the same fashion, may it be, is it not true, 
 that in the world of spirit growth comes only 
 in the train of death? That souls may be up 
 lifted, cleansed, exalted, redeemed, some one 
 or many must die. Indeed, we have seen many 
 die in the ages past for just this purpose. A 
 moral vicarious sacrifice needs little illustra 
 tion besides our own memories of a short but 
 heroic history. So far we can understand. 
 But is it not possible that just at this point en 
 ters the larger sacrifice which we cannot under 
 stand a mysterious sacrifice, a death de 
 manded in the very nature of things spiritual, 
 that higher life, eternal life, sin-free life might 
 be the portion of the race ? The necessity for 
 such a sacrifice is no more mysterious, no 
 more awful, than the necessity for the whole 
 sale slaughter and the multitudinous self- 
 immolation that is going on every hour in the 
 world. 
 
 No doubt the next solution of this problem
 
 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 101 
 
 is to be somewhere along this line. But is the 
 solution reached when the analogy of Christ s 
 life and work to that of other great martyrs 
 is traced? We all believe in these days, and 
 perhaps it is safe to say, that Christ died to 
 save man from man, not man from God social 
 redemption ; that Christ died to save man from 
 self, not man from Satan individual redemp 
 tion ; that Christ died to save man from sin, not 
 man from hell immediate redemption; but is 
 it safe to say that the age is to be content with 
 the statement that He died, or for that mat 
 ter, lived, for these ends, only as Huss, Savona 
 rola, Socrates, or Daniel lived and died for 
 man s redemption? 
 
 No, there is something greater here, and 
 more mysterious; greater as the degree of dif 
 ference between Him and them amounted to a 
 difference in kind; more mysterious as the 
 express revelation of God in Him, the hatred 
 of immaculate purity for sin, the suffering of 
 untainted goodness in an atmosphere of taint 
 and stain, all are more or less mysterious to 
 the contaminated vision of sinful men. 
 
 Jesus, in His sacrifice, must meet the crav 
 ing of the heart of man after his God. Men 
 had always felt that somehow, of right, they 
 belonged to God ; they were akin to Him, and 
 knew it. But between Him and them they
 
 102 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 
 
 were conscious of a veil hanging, the veil of 
 their own weaving, the veil of sin. Between 
 Him and them they saw a great gulf fixed, 
 the gulf of their own digging, the gulf of 
 sin. How to rend that veil, to bridge that 
 gulf, was the one great problem and still is 
 to all mankind. The consciousness of sin is 
 the one universal consciousness; and the ques 
 tion of its cure is the one everlasting question 
 in the world. 
 
 Striving to answer that question, men had 
 sacrificed lamb after lamb, bullock after bul 
 lock, hecatomb after hecatomb, till their tem 
 ples had run red with blood, and yet, like Lady 
 Macbeth, crying, " Out damned spot," they 
 had never been able to wash out the foul stain 
 upon their hands. They had a consciousness of 
 their God and their God s hatred of sin, and 
 yet, though they had erected priesthoods to 
 intercede with Him, they had never been able 
 to arrive certainly at a sense of forgiveness, 
 which was, and perhaps still is, the end and aim 
 of all religious service. For one thing, they 
 were uncertain as to the character of their 
 God, and His attitude toward rebellious chil 
 dren. 
 
 Such being the state of affairs, God, seeing 
 it, felt the need of a solution for man of this 
 tragic question, and as a means to this end, of
 
 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 103 
 
 a full revelation to man of His own heart 
 its hatred toward and horror of sin, its love 
 for and pity toward man. So, when the fulness 
 of time had come, when man had reached such 
 maturity as would comprehend, in some meas 
 ure, His self -revelation, the incarnation fol 
 lowed. God chose to reveal His qualities not 
 in a book, not in the words of prophets and 
 teachers, not in a system of theological state 
 ments, not in the works of nature. He had 
 already shadowily revealed Himself in all 
 these ways; and to individual minds, here and 
 there, these revelations had been intelligible. 
 But to the great multitude of men there is but 
 one book legible and comprehensible, and that 
 is man. Everybody could read a man s life, 
 everybody could read a man s face so inter 
 esting, so fascinating is man to humanity. 
 Hence, when God would send His final mes 
 sage to humanity, He must write in this final 
 and universal language of mankind a man. 
 He did so. He said to the world : " This man 
 is Myself. What He is I am. He does al 
 ways the things that please Me. He and I are 
 one. He that hath seen Him hath seen Me." 
 Having thus revealed Himself fully to men, 
 He proceeded to show through this human 
 medium His attitude toward sin. Never in all 
 the world has there been such rebuke of sin as
 
 104 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 
 
 in the mere presence of Jesus Christ upon the 
 earth. Not the broken tables of the law, not 
 the fiery serpents in the wilderness, not the 
 deluge, nor the ashes of Gomorrah, have ever 
 carried the conviction of God s unalterable and 
 inappeasable hostility to guilt as has the quiet, 
 gentle, calm dignity of Jesus sinlessness. The 
 word of God is here heard most convincingly, 
 not in the earthquake, not in the fire and 
 tempest, but in the still, small voice of the in 
 carnate God. His presence, like that of the 
 Holy Spirit, nay, which is identical with that 
 of the Holy Spirit, convicts the world of sin 
 and judgment. 
 
 And yet, along with this message of hatred 
 toward sin, comes the major strain, the domi 
 nant theme, in the symphony of Jesus life, of 
 God s overflowing, inextinguishable love for 
 man the sinner. Individuals heard the strain 
 oh, so clearly the rich young ruler, the 
 woman of Samaria, Zaccheus the publican, 
 Simon Peter, the poor drab in the Temple 
 these and scores besides heard the new note, 
 the song of love and forgiveness, " Neither do 
 I condemn thee, go and sin no more." Here 
 was no consuming fire of wrath, here was no 
 freezing ice of impenetrable sinlessness, lofty, 
 stark, aloof. Here was gentleness, long-suf 
 fering, mercy, love. This was the heart of
 
 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 105 
 
 God. Individuals caught the message, the na 
 tion caught it, and slowly the nations catch it, 
 too. 
 
 But this goodness, this tenderness, this sin- 
 lessness, this embodied mercy, must suffer in 
 the presence of sin fulness. The very word 
 long-suffering shows that we have felt some 
 inkling of the pains of God. We have suffered, 
 too, have we not, in some feeble attempts at a 
 purely moral redemption. We have wrestled in 
 soul with an erring brother in the bonds of sin, 
 with a wilful and headstrong child, with a 
 criminal wretch struggling to be free of the 
 shackles of long habit. We, now and then, 
 have made vicarious atonement, at least in its 
 elements, so far as the simple moral motive 
 extends. But we are not God. We did not 
 make man. We are not responsible for his 
 well-being, his on-going, in short his redemp 
 tion. We, therefore, cannot understand the 
 full agony of creative grief at the moral mal 
 adjustment of the creature. 
 
 "We do not know, we cannot tell, 
 The pains he had to bear." 
 
 If we suffer in the throes of a rebirth for some 
 friend, parishioner, or relative, struggling 
 loose from a wicked past, what must have been 
 the agonies of Gethsemane, and of the hours 
 upon the cross ?
 
 106 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 
 
 Let us not imply that this symapthetic moral 
 passion is all there was to the Atonement. It 
 is about all we can understand, it may be ; but 
 mystery is a legitimate part of religion; and 
 because we cannot understand more than this 
 is no reason why we should affirm that there is 
 no more. Indeed, we cannot understand why 
 there should be pain and passion in mere physi 
 cal birth, in intellectual birth, in moral birth. 
 Why, then, is it a thing incredible that we can 
 not analyze, systematize, theologize plainly, 
 mathematically, dogmatically, this mysterious 
 process of redemption? 
 
 The time has gone by, has it not, when the 
 ologians presume God to scan, when they em 
 ploy with smug certitude the phrases, " scheme 
 of redemption," " plan of salvation," and the 
 like. We have come to feel that the scheme, if 
 there is one, is too stellar in its scope; the 
 plan, if there is one, is too nearly like the 
 Pleiades in proportions for us to outline with 
 a geometrical exactness, in the size of a printed 
 page. 
 
 That " God hath His mysteries of grace, 
 ways that we cannot tell," we firmly believe. 
 That He has thus dealt, in the profundity of 
 His wisdom, with the problem of sin, we have 
 no doubt. That somehow the sufferings of 
 Christ were necessary to accomplish His gi-
 
 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 107 
 
 gantic purpose is altogether in line with the 
 best scientific thought of today. That those 
 sufferings fulfilled something more than the 
 purpose of erecting a beautiful moral ideal of 
 self-forgetfulness, heroism, courage, renuncia 
 tion, is the conviction of this present age and 
 of the best thought of the age just coming on. 
 What that purpose was we can, no doubt, do 
 little more than hint ; but that hint, in harmony 
 with the ascent of man, finds its analogue in 
 the struggle for the life of others which is one 
 of the leading themes in the natural science, so 
 cial science, political science of the time. 
 
 Poets sometimes reach truer conclusions than 
 philosophers, as hearts sometimes are more 
 nearly infallible than heads ; and it is a modern 
 American, the editor of one of our leading 
 magazines, who sings: 
 
 " Subtlest thought shall fail and learning falter, 
 Churches change, forms perish, systems go; 
 But our deep human needs they will not alter; 
 Christ no after age shall e er outgrow. 
 Yea, amen, O changeless one, thou only 
 Art life s guide and spiritual goal, 
 Thou the light across the dark vale only, 
 Thou the eternal haven of the soul." 
 
 So then, it is by the magnetic person of 
 Jesus, together with His atoning love and 
 sacrifice, that man is instigated to aspiration 
 which is the hope of his salvation. The divine
 
 108 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 
 
 thing about man is that he looks up. This 
 differentiates him from the brute. So far as 
 our observation can extend, the creatures all 
 look downward. Perhaps some foolish dog oc 
 casionally may toss his muzzle up to bay the 
 moon, but for the most part he noses about 
 among the gutters and the rabbit-hutches. Oc 
 casionally an eagle may stare at the sun, but 
 generally his gaze is turned downward after 
 his prey. It is only man that stands upright, 
 his " face turned from the clod," looks the 
 sky in the face, looks up to the hills whence 
 cometh his help. It seems to be only man that 
 is capable of aspiration. 
 
 The holiest voices that come to him, more 
 over, are the voices that bid him look up, 
 aspire, be not content with aught he has done 
 or that he is. The voice of the breeze that rus 
 tles in the spring silences of the wide prairie, 
 the voice of the north wind that howls about 
 his home in winter, the still small voice of con 
 science, the great chorus of voices in earth, 
 air, sea, and sky, or in the heavy hum of men, 
 from the voice of the babe or the brook that 
 babbles to the great thunderous voice that 
 comes from between the Cherubim, all bid 
 him look up, aspire, be divinely discontent. 
 
 For what one honestly and earnestly aspires 
 to be, that in some sense he is. Our real selves,
 
 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 109 
 
 thank God, are our better selves. It is St. 
 Paul himself, author of the doctrine of justifi 
 cation by faith, or salvation by aspiration, who 
 reaches the high conclusion that when he falls, 
 " it is no longer I that do it, but sin which 
 dwelleth in me." So far from this idea being 
 a license to him, for continuous sinning, miti 
 gated by fatuous aspiring, it becomes the means 
 of throwing out sin, taking in God, working 
 out his own salvation, for " it is God which 
 worketh in us." His desire for God it is which 
 saves him at the last, God in Jesus Christ. 
 
 Suppose one does fail of his aspirations? 
 Suppose hell is paved with good resolutions 
 broken ? Says rough old Carlyle, " Up with 
 the fragments, ye sluggards, and break the 
 devil s head with them." It is better to have 
 resolved and broken than never to have re 
 solved at all. And it is better to resolve anew 
 than to sink down into discouragement and 
 shiftless moral sloth. Get up and look up. 
 
 So it is a mistake, is it not, to identify re 
 ligion with moral achievement, as so many 
 liberals and ethical culturists of our day have 
 done? Religion is not education in ethical 
 principles, not education of any kind. True 
 religion does not necessarily advance with in 
 tellectual training. " By intellect alone shall 
 no man storm heaven; only the great in heart
 
 110 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 
 
 can do this, the passion-driven and the world- 
 weary." Smug righteousness, or righteous 
 ness that is not smug, is not synonymous with 
 religion. The rebellious and well-nigh un 
 tamable will may go hand in hand with a pro 
 foundly loving heart. Your lad hardest to 
 manage may be the one who loves home, father, 
 mother, friends, better than the exemplary son. 
 Esau is often a greater heart than Jacob. 
 
 Here is where cold, lineally exact, ethical 
 culture has failed to lay hold on the man in 
 the street. He is conscious of imperfection, of 
 crooked lines and marred surfaces in his life 
 and conduct. He struggles, loves, aspires ; but 
 also falls, misses the mark, goes under. He 
 wants a religion of aspiration, of hope for the 
 imperfect, of warmth and love, of nutriment 
 for the hungry and thirsty after righteousness. 
 Sometimes, with all his blemishes, the man of 
 the world so-called man in the street, is pref 
 erable is more profoundly religious, loving 
 God better, than the ethically exact. To teach 
 him that God does not love him and want him 
 unless and until he is good, is to teach the 
 wayward lad that his Mother s heart has grown 
 cold, to pull down his universe about his ears, 
 to send him hopeless out into the wreck of 
 worlds and farther from his Father s home. 
 
 Let us guard, again, this idea of salvation by
 
 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 111 
 
 aspiration from the charge that it in anywise 
 compromises with or condones wrongdoing. 
 We are not to continue in sin that grace may 
 abound. But it does insist that there is hope 
 for the imperfect, there is patience with the 
 weak, there is understanding of the frailties of 
 men, there is recognition of the desire to be 
 good and persevering determination on the part 
 of the Father-Mother God to love the erring 
 son back to the home of the soul. 
 
 Jesus once said : " The light of the body is 
 the eye. If therefore thine eye be single, thy 
 whole body shall be full of light." It is a 
 pathetically beautiful thing that the passage 
 had fascination for George Mattheson, the 
 blind preacher of Edinborough, author of the 
 hymn, " O love that wilt not let me go." Con 
 cerning it, he makes this comment : " Our Lord 
 says that when a man looks at the sunshine 
 it is not only his eye that is affected, his whole 
 body is influenced by the light. His pulse is 
 quickened, his blood is accelerated, his step 
 is lightened, his arm is strengthened, his voice 
 is vivified. Even so Christ says that in the 
 moral world everything depends on what a man 
 looks at his ideal. He says that the great 
 question is, What is that picture of heroism 
 which you have set before your inward eye? 
 He exclaims, in effect : It is no use to lay down
 
 112 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 
 
 rules of morality. What is your model of per 
 fection, your ideal of beauty, your standard of 
 excellence? everything depends on that. 
 
 Jesus the great high priest, who trains men 
 19 the upward vision, here means not that one 
 should have only a single eye, but that his 
 eyes should be single in his vision ; not that one 
 should have but a single idea, but that one 
 should have a single ideal ; not that one should 
 be possessed of one only thought, but that one 
 should have only one dominating and all-con 
 trolling thought and purpose. " The world 
 needs not narrow men, but broad men sharp 
 ened to a point." 
 
 The Master was here talking to a nation of 
 a strangely double vision. The Hebrews had 
 a wonderful genius for religion, but at the 
 same time an eye to the main chance. Jesus 
 said to them, " Ye cannot serve God and Mam 
 mon." They were attempting to look up with 
 one eye and down with the other. Their 
 vision was consequently blurred. It was as if 
 the optic nerve were injured, as if a blow had 
 been delivered on the head, as if strong liquor 
 had made the eyes work at cross purposes and 
 not in unison. No man, then or now, could 
 make a dominant purpose of God and money 
 at the same time. One or the other must be 
 chief. One or the other must be subservient.
 
 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 113 
 
 No man can make God and anything else at 
 the same time his dominant aim, aspiration, 
 vision. Our God is a jealous God, not because 
 He wants or needs aught for Himself; but 
 because of the optic laws of the soul. He is 
 jealous for us to look up where He is, Our 
 Father; for that is health to the eye, salva 
 tion to the soul. 
 
 What one tends to look upon, that he tends 
 to become, for the light of the whole life is 
 the eye. Watch what a man gazes upon most 
 intently, and you can tell what is in the man. 
 Take him into an art museum, and the paint 
 ings or the statues upon which his eye first falls 
 and longest lingers will be index to the life 
 within him. Take him into crowds of men 
 and women and observe whither his eye wan 
 ders and where it fixes, and you will know 
 something of the character of light that is in 
 him. Take him into Old World cities and 
 countries by hovel and palace, river and canal, 
 sphinx and sarcophagus, crowded thorough 
 fare and mountain road, and by watching the 
 bent of his eye you may know the chief in 
 terest of the man. 
 
 There never was a truer story than Haw 
 thorne s tale of the Great Stone Face. What 
 the little lad saw in the craggy countenance, 
 the idealization projected upon the retina of
 
 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 
 
 his soul, that by degrees and through the years 
 the lad, grown to man, became. Devoted hus 
 bands and wives, through the passage of time, 
 and looking upon the same things, grow to look 
 alike. The pictures in the fireplace stamp 
 themselves in duplicate upon their characters. 
 So, the person of Jesus, through long years 
 of contemplation, passes into the form of the 
 beholder, and we are transformed into His 
 image from glory unto glory. " Go and look 
 thou upon the face of Christ," was the best 
 possible comment of one medieval painter upon 
 the Saviour s portrait done by another. Go 
 and look thou on the face of Christ, is the 
 friendliest criticism that one man can make 
 on another s life. 
 
 Nor is the priestly ministry of Jesus limited, 
 nor His atonement completed, in a beautiful 
 ethical ideal for men to follow and even to 
 become. It is more than that. There was and 
 is about Him a spiritual galvanism, as inex 
 plicable as electricity, which crackles and snaps 
 and burns in the life it touches. He had only 
 to say to the fishermen, " Follow me," and they 
 forsook nets and boats, homes and kindred, to 
 follow in His train. He had only to sit for a 
 brief time at the table of a publican, and 
 Zaccheus, that hard, rich, grasping man of the 
 world, kindled into new life, saying: " Master,
 
 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 115 
 
 from this time forth, I give half my goods to 
 feed the poor, and if I have wrongfully exacted 
 of any man, I restore him fourfold." No won 
 der the Master answered to this newborn aspi 
 ration, " This day has salvation come to this 
 house." He had but to hold a few moments of 
 night-talk with the Pharisee, and Nicodemus 
 desires to be born again, and for aught we 
 know he may have been. He has but to speak 
 a few sentences to the woman at the well, who 
 dared not come when other women came at 
 evening to carry water home, and she is re 
 newed, convicted, pardoned, transformed, as 
 she rushes into the city in the eyes of all be 
 holders, crying : " Come, see a man that told 
 me all things that ever I did. Is not this the 
 Christ?" 
 
 It is not needful, moreover, to go so far away 
 in distance or in time, to find those whom con 
 tact with Him has made clean and whole and 
 strong and fine. " Thy sins be forgiven thee," 
 is as powerful a word from His lips as it ever 
 was, and many hear it and are glad and are de 
 livered. Many Gideons upon the railways of 
 our West, many John Marks in our colleges 
 and universities, many laymen who stand hum 
 bly keeping doors in His house and for His 
 sake, many women bearing the dreary drudger 
 ies of office and kitchen and home, millions
 
 116 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 
 
 have been given heart of hope, strength of 
 hand and limb, sight of eye by the mysterious 
 Priest. 
 
 Goethe once cried out : " My soul has feelers 
 and not eyes! O that I could get eyes and 
 look ! " And as he lay a-dying, with his wan 
 ing breath, he whispered, " Mehr licht! Mehr 
 licht!" More light! More light! Whether 
 the casement had grown a glimmering square 
 because of the film of death, or whether it was 
 the windows of the soul he wanted open, we 
 shall never know. But it is all one. Body and 
 soul alike cry out for light. Light we must 
 have the Light of the world, or we perish. 
 
 A dozen years ago or so, there was, on a 
 bit of a branch railway, leading from the 
 mountains to the bluegrass of Kentucky, a 
 blind fiddler who played for the pennies of 
 the passengers. Everybody accustomed to 
 travel on that little " jerk-water " train knew 
 Tom, his red beard, his old cracked violin, his 
 older tunes. A skilful surgeon of Lexington 
 one day said to Tom : 
 
 " If you are willing to try it, I think there is 
 a bare chance I could give you the sight of one 
 eye. I will pay all your hospital expenses and 
 do your operation, if you care to have it done." 
 
 Tom, who had never seen his native moun 
 tains nor the rolling bluegrass, who had never
 
 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 117 
 
 seen his wife and children, eagerly agreed to 
 take the chance. He was placed on the operat 
 ing-table, in a broad blaze of sunlight, his 
 sightless eyes oscillating from side to side. 
 The surgeon with his lancet moved his hand 
 from side to side, in time with the moving eye, 
 then suddenly made a horizontal incision ; then, 
 the difficult oscillation of hand again, and an 
 other swift vertical incision; the four flaps 
 thus made were deftly turned back, and an ob 
 struction, a lens, a filament, a growth no 
 layman can adequately describe was snapped 
 out. Tom cried aloud and quickly closed the 
 eye. 
 
 " Open that eye ! " with an oath, gruffly 
 shouted the surgeon. " Open it, I say ! Open 
 it ! " Tom opened it ; and instantly the heal 
 ing balm with its cotton sponge was put in 
 place and bandaged. 
 
 " Forgive me, Tom," said the good doctor, 
 " I had to speak gruffly ; I had to make you 
 open that eye." 
 
 " All right, Doc ; but what was that hot drop 
 you put in my eye? It burned like fire." 
 
 " No hot drop at all, Tom. That was the 
 light." 
 
 " My God ! " said Tom. " My God ! have I 
 seen the light ? " 
 
 Two weeks in a darkened room, and one
 
 118 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 
 
 morning the surgeon stood by while the nurse 
 removed the bandages. The first object Tom 
 saw was the nurse s face bending above 
 him. 
 
 " Beautiful ! " he murmured. " Wonderful ! 
 What is that?" 
 
 " Put up your hand and see, Tom," said the 
 doctor. 
 
 "Oh," said Tom, abashed, "that s my 
 nurse." 
 
 He would then sit for hours studying the 
 objects in his room. 
 
 " What is that ? looks heavy, and has four 
 pieces running down and two running up," he 
 would murmur; then reaching out his hand 
 " to see," he would exclaim, " Oh, that s a 
 chair! " He would sit by the window looking 
 out at his new world. " What is that moving 
 up the street? Mighty big." Then, hearing 
 the rumble, " Oh, that s a wagon." 
 
 He could hardly wait the allotted time to 
 go home. Then he wrote from his mountain 
 cabin, by the hand of one of his children, 
 saying : 
 
 " I was awful glad to see my family for the 
 first time. My wife is not as pretty as my 
 nurse. I can see that. But she s wonderful 
 pretty to me. She s been mine for so long. 
 And my children may not be as good-looking
 
 UPWARD SLANT OF THE SOUL 119 
 
 as some; but I never seen any on the way up 
 here I d trade off for ary one of them." 
 
 Today, Tom, who learned rapidly, is book 
 keeper for one of the large mining companies 
 in the mountains, happy as a king. 
 
 To one man who, like Tom, has opened his 
 eyes upon the physical world, there are thou 
 sands who, under the loving skill and care 
 of the great Physician and High Priest, have 
 opened the eyes of the soul to behold the un 
 speakable.
 
 VI 
 
 THE KINGDOM WITH UNSEEN 
 BOUNDARIES 
 
 THE cry " The Kingdom of Heaven is 
 at hand ! " was as startling to Jeru 
 salem as " The Revolution is here ! " 
 was to Paris in 1793. The Hebrew people 
 were as ready to unsheath swords, pull up 
 paving-stones, and build barricades in behalf 
 of the new Kingdom, as the French were in 
 behalf of liberty, equality, and fraternity. It 
 was no new word, this word " Kingdom of 
 Heaven." It had long been on the lips of 
 peasant and prophet, herdsmen and statesmen, 
 fishermen and rabbis. It was electric with 
 preparation, dynamic with memories, charged 
 with desperation, longing, hope deferred. 
 
 Jesus adopted it and adapted it to His pur 
 poses. There could be no happier choice of 
 words. To be sure, He meant something far 
 different from what the Jews had meant by it ; 
 He put into it a totally different content from 
 what it had long held ; both its denotation and 
 connotation, in His hands, were so vitally 
 
 120
 
 THE KINGDOM 121 
 
 changed that one would scarcely recognize it 
 as the same old phrase. But the vital energy 
 that it so long held He carried over and di 
 verted to a larger and finer end. With them 
 the words meant a restoration of the throne of 
 David and of Solomon on Zion; with Him, 
 they meant a restoration of the dominance of 
 God in the soul. With them the phrase stood 
 for material wealth, power, conquering armies, 
 onyx palaces, place and pelf and preferment; 
 with Him, it stood for spiritual riches, inward 
 strength, peace toward self and man and God, 
 in cottage and palace both, and the preferment 
 of ministration. 
 
 They say the men of the Western world can 
 not understand the phrase as He used it, any 
 more than the Jew of His time. Your Occi 
 dental democrat is an uncrowned king him 
 self, and is not fond of regal terminology. 
 This may well be; but when one grasps the 
 significance that Jesus puts into the phrase; 
 when one understands that the king is a Father, 
 the Viceroy His son, every subject His child, 
 the people, in the language of Professor Royce, 
 all bound together in a " Beloved Community," 
 the politics love, the chief industry service, the 
 wealth human brotherhood, he begins then to 
 appreciate the fact that this is all intelligible 
 both to the subjects of the Oriental despots,
 
 122 THE KINGDOM 
 
 and to the citizens of Occidental republics. 
 Anybody can understand a Father, even though 
 he be a king. 
 
 Undoubtedly many men do still misunder 
 stand the phrase and the Master s meaning. 
 Even as then, when He had to rebuke His clos 
 est followers for their material conceptions, so 
 He does today. Once when passing through 
 Samaria, the inhabitants of a little village re 
 fused Him entrance because He was to them 
 a heretic. Then two of His disciples, James 
 and John, the Boanerges, sons of thunder, ex 
 claimed, " Master, wilt Thou that we call down 
 fire from on high and burn up these people ? " 
 The Master answered, " Ye know not what 
 spirit ye are of." In like manner do men still 
 do violence to His conceptions. " The King 
 dom of Heaven suffereth violence, and men of 
 violence take it by force." Some of those 
 who apparently stand closest to His person 
 most clearly are those who abuse His meaning. 
 
 To identify the Kingdom with any visible 
 organization, institutional religion itself, the 
 Church; to give it boundaries, ponderable 
 weight, numerable population, measurable 
 wealth and power; to speak of members of the 
 Kingdom, coming into the Kingdom, with ref 
 erence to visible relations with any visible 
 body; all this is to do violence to the King-
 
 THE KINGDOM 123 
 
 dom of God in Jesus conception. These 
 violent ideas, moreover, are always material, 
 always negative, and lead always to despair. 
 
 Mark Twain tells of an old negro in the 
 canebrakes of the South who, for the first time 
 and without knowing what it was, saw a Miss 
 issippi River steamboat plowing up the turgid 
 tide of the river. When the old man beheld 
 the rolling smoke, the flying sparks, the mighty 
 fuss and fume, and heard the ponderous chow- 
 chow and the earth-shaking hoarse siren, he 
 thought this was the Almighty or the adver 
 sary, and plunging deeper into the brake, fell 
 upon his knees, crying: 
 
 " Lord a mercy on dis old niggah ! De 
 Kingdom am a-comin ! " 
 
 There are some men of intelligence just as 
 material in their notions of the Kingdom, just 
 as naive, just as childlike as was this old uncle. 
 When they see sparks and hear a big noise, 
 when they behold crowds assembled and fire 
 works let off, when they possess great build 
 ings, great treasuries, wide " influence," mighty 
 " movements," they cry out, " The Kingdom is 
 advancing ! " Possibly it is ; quite as possibly 
 it is not. 
 
 Jesus said, " You cannot say Lo here and Lo 
 there, for the Kingdom is among you." It 
 has no visible boundary lines. No man can
 
 124 THE KINGDOM 
 
 mark it out, measure its size and progress, 
 count its members. Its lines are waving, curv 
 ing lines, cutting out many whom we think 
 to be in, and cutting in many whom we think 
 to be out. It is among us, unseen, known only 
 by its powerful, wonderful effects upon men 
 and the world; it is within us, as well, and 
 part of each one of us belongs to the bright 
 kingdom and part to the outer darkness. 
 
 How futile, then, are the attempts of men 
 to deal negatively with the kingdom; to stand 
 at the doors of it the non-existent doors and 
 welcome men in, or shut men out. Once the 
 grandees of the Jewish Church stood at the 
 portals of the temple, and halting the heir 
 apparent, said to Him, " By what authority 
 come you hither, do you these things ? " The 
 answer was swift and withering, " Woe unto 
 you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you 
 will neither enter into the Kingdom of God nor 
 will you permit those who are entering, to 
 enter in! " And little grandees of the church 
 still stand, flourishing some petty man-made 
 creedal test, some flaming sword of dogma 
 before the gates of what they think to be the 
 Kingdom, seeking vainly to shut men out, or 
 put men out, from the all-embracing, atmos 
 pheric Love of God. 
 
 It is many years since two young men were
 
 THE KINGDOM 125 
 
 walking under the stars one night at Harvard. 
 One was in the Divinity School and one in the 
 Law School. The former asked the latter if 
 he was a member of any church, and, receiving 
 a negative answer, asked why. 
 
 " Because," said the law student, " I have 
 some doubts about the immortality of the 
 soul." 
 
 His companion did not argue the matter, or 
 attempt to demonstrate the undemonstrable ; 
 but pressed upon the young man that the im 
 portant question was not this, but " What do 
 you think of Christ? " The law student paid 
 his tribute of reverence, affection, even devo 
 tion to the master of men. " That, then, is 
 enough," responded his friend; "you are not 
 far from the Kingdom of God." 
 
 They separated at the end of the session. 
 The lawyer went to his home in the far South, 
 and took honorable place at the bar of his na 
 tive city. Years passed, and desultory let 
 ters between the two. Finally the one friend 
 wrote the other the same old question, " Are 
 you yet a member of any church? " Substan 
 tially, this was the answer: 
 
 " I applied, on returning home, for admission 
 to my ancestral church. The ecclesiastic asked 
 me : Do you believe in God the Father, al 
 mighty maker of heaven and earth? Yes,
 
 126 THE KINGDOM 
 
 And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Sa 
 viour? Yes. In the Holy Spirit of God? 
 Yes. Do you believe in this, in that, in the 
 other ? Yes. Do you believe in the immor 
 tality of the soul? I do not know ! Then 
 said the ecclesiastic of that ancestral church, 
 * You cannot enter here. 
 
 God in Heaven ! And the puny man thought 
 he was shutting that young attorney out of 
 the Kingdom of Heaven ! He thought that lit 
 tle church of his identical with the Kingdom ! 
 No ecclesiastic in earth or hell has the power to 
 keep the loving heart from the heart of God. 
 The immortality of the soul is a vital doctrine ; 
 it is a corollary of belief in God and Christ. 
 Some day the doubt will be swept away, when 
 the lawyer lays a mother, wife, or child under 
 the sod. Meantime any man who is honestly in 
 the Kingdom will do all in his power to sweep 
 that man and his doubts with him into the 
 waiting arms of his Father. Bless God, you 
 cannot shut men out, nor put men out of the 
 Kingdom without frontiers ! 
 
 Such material and negative conceptions lead 
 inevitably to despair. The Kingdom cannot 
 compete in outward magnificence with the 
 great kingdoms of this world. It has no treas 
 uries like the mighty treasuries of insurance 
 societies, of railway and steamship companies,
 
 THE KINGDOM 127 
 
 of steelworks, or the mints of nations. It has, 
 at least on this continent, no buildings com 
 parable to the marble palaces of the vast in 
 dustries of men. The employees of this King 
 dom often look upon these great structures 
 round about them, and comparing them with 
 their own little inelegancies and poverties, are 
 tempted to quit their present service and seek 
 another employer. They must get closer to 
 the King and the heart of His Kingdom if they 
 would see that when all these other buildings 
 and treasuries are cinders and ashes and dust, 
 the Kingdom will still be here ; that others come 
 and go, but of His Kingdom there shall be 
 no end. 
 
 Of course the logical thing for one whose 
 notions are material and negative is to seek 
 another employer. Or, if_ he remains in the 
 service of his present King, feeling all the time 
 that the Kingdom is coterminous with his 
 church or any church or all churches, that it 
 can be bounded on east, west, north or south, 
 that its success is measured by wealth, num 
 bers, power, then there are but two logical 
 courses open to him. He must either take the 
 sword, try to persuade his fellows to do the 
 like, and, organizing into regiments and army 
 corps, go out like Mahomet and conquer men 
 into the Kingdom; or else, sitting down upon
 
 128 THE KINGDOM 
 
 his ashheap with no potsherd of comfort, in 
 his despair, curse God and die. 
 
 But thank God His Kingdom is not nega 
 tive, nor material, but positive and spiritual; 
 and leads not to despair, but to undying hope. 
 If you would know in what the positive char 
 acter of this Spiritual Kingdom consists, you 
 must look upon the King of it when, on a cer 
 tain day, little children were brought to Him, 
 and His cabinet, His council forbade them. 
 The Prince took one of the little two-year-olds 
 upon His knee, and others in His arms, and 
 said, " Suffer them to come unto me, for of 
 such is the Kingdom." We have lost the mean 
 ing of this much misquoted text, because, with 
 our Western perversity and literalism, we have 
 made it the storm centre of a doctrinal con 
 troversy. What a surprise for us now, as for 
 those men then, lies in the words : The twelve 
 men about Him thought that they, themselves, 
 formed the nucleus of the coming Kingdom. 
 They were to be chancellors of the exchequer, 
 ministers of state, to sit on His right and left. 
 Of course it takes men, strong men, self- 
 assertive men to make a Kingdom. While we 
 today, religious leaders, preachers, teachers, 
 workers, officers, trustees and deacons, we 
 think we are the Kingdom. Of course we are! 
 It takes men of prominence and power, of
 
 THE KINGDOM 129 
 
 light and leading, to make a Kingdom. Jesus 
 said : " No. Except ye become as little chil 
 dren, ye cannot enter into the Kingdom." 
 What is it about a child that makes him fit for 
 the beloved community ? 
 
 Docility is the first characteristic of a child. 
 He is open-minded, inquiring, anxious to learn, 
 tireless in asking questions. Manhood, how 
 ever, tends to crystallize, fossilize, at forty. 
 It is only by conscious effort that we can keep 
 the mind open, ready for new truth, after we 
 reach the halfway inn. Some few there are 
 who always grow. Hail to such evergreen 
 minds ! 
 
 Simplicity marks the child. Only the great 
 in earth and heaven are simple. The rest are 
 all convolutions and folds of affectation and 
 ostentation. The great music, great art, great 
 literature, great inventions are so simple that 
 when we look upon them, we say, " Why did 
 nobody ever think of that before? " 
 
 The child is sincere. There is no mingling 
 of whitish wax in the clear honey of his trans 
 parency. It takes souls fit for the Kingdom to 
 be thus pure. Jesus said the pure are blessed, 
 for they shall see God. All the rest of us are 
 courteously insincere, lying, hypocritical. Our 
 love itself is not without dissimulation.
 
 130 THE KINGDOM 
 
 The child is poor. Until he is spoiled by 
 doting parents with presents of toys and skates 
 and bicycles and bonbons and foolish clothes, 
 he is as happy with a rattle or a few shards or 
 pebbles as with gold or gems. His life is inde 
 pendent of the things that he possesses. He 
 does not know the yoke of property and con 
 ventionality. He is poor in spirit, and rich in 
 life. Jesus says those who are like him in this 
 respect are blessed, for theirs is the Kingdom 
 of Heaven. 
 
 The child is loving. He radiates love and 
 craves love. You cannot love your little one 
 too much nor tell him too often that you love 
 him very dearly. The most pathetic thing 
 Martin Luther ever uttered was the statement 
 that his father and mother were too busy and 
 too preoccupied ever to lavish upon him a word 
 of love or a caress, Luther, with his great 
 human, yearning, loving nature. The other 
 day the press dispatches told of a little girl 
 whose clothing caught fire at the open grate. 
 Her father extinguished the flames, but not 
 until the little thing was so burned that she died 
 thirty days later. 
 
 "Why did you not call me sooner?" cried 
 the agonized father, when he had put out the 
 fire. 
 
 " I didn t want mamma to know I had
 
 THE KINGDOM 131 
 
 burned my dress. Don t tell mamma I burned 
 my dress." 
 
 All through her long illness the little thing 
 kept saying, " Mamma, don t scold me." 
 
 Here was a child s pure love, vitiated by 
 grown people s injections of fear. A horse 
 which jerks his head, when you approach him, 
 has been spoiled by some rough hand that does 
 not know and love the dumb brutes. Of course, 
 Jesus was right when He said that children, 
 unspoiled, unafraid, natural, loving, are the 
 stuff out of which the Kingdom of God is 
 made. 
 
 With these principles firmly in mind, all 
 justified by the words of Jesus, let us turn our 
 attention now to the visible church, the repre 
 sentative, at least, of the Kingdom upon earth, 
 by which the Kingdom is so often, rightly or 
 wrongly, judged by the man in the street. 
 What justice is there in his criticisms of it? 
 Can we profit by them? Can we bring him 
 closer to it and into more sympathy with it and 
 understanding of it? 
 
 As we approach this topic, let us first pre 
 pare our minds by reading a few of the words 
 that St. Paul has to say about the institution 
 which he had so much to do with shaping : 
 
 " Christ also loved His church and gave 
 Himself for it, that He might sanctify it, hav-
 
 132 THE KINGDOM 
 
 ing cleansed it by the washing of water with 
 the Word, that He might present the church to 
 Himself a glorious church, not having spot or 
 wrinkle or any such thing, and that it should 
 be holy and without blemish. Eph. v : 25. 
 
 The Church of Jesus Christ was an out 
 growth of both the synagogue system of the 
 Jew and the popular meeting of the Greek. In 
 point of fact, three elements poured them 
 selves into the formation of the early Church 
 the Hebrew genius for religion, the Greek 
 democracy and public spirit, and the Roman 
 sense of order and of law. Jesus did not found 
 a church, dictate an organization, mark out a 
 plan ; neither, for that matter, did the apostles. 
 It would be impossible to trace in the Scrip 
 tures a definite prescribed formula by which 
 a church could be organized. That is clearly 
 seen in the fact that churches built upon totally 
 different lines all claim to find their specifica 
 tions in this book. Indeed, there was no Church 
 at large in the apostolic age, however much we 
 may contend for it in some of our public alter 
 cations. We cannot say that the organization 
 of any church with its board of deacons, or 
 its board of vestrymen, or its board of trustees, 
 or its board of elders, or its bishops, is pro 
 vided for in the Scriptures. 
 
 The Church is a man-made institution.
 
 THE KINGDOM 133 
 
 There is no " thus saith the Lord," by which 
 the Church, as it has developed through the 
 centuries and up to this present hour, can be 
 defined. The world knows this fact, and 
 knowing it, does not hesitate to assail the 
 Church, to criticize it, to find fault with it, to 
 pick flaws in it, to animadvert upon it. All 
 this is helpful to the Church. Criticism, even 
 bitter criticism, is sometimes a saving salt. 
 Anything that is beyond criticism must be di 
 vine and not human, and even the divine is 
 open to estimation and appreciation. 
 
 The world does not with hostility criticize 
 the founder of our faith. You do not hear 
 men speaking against Jesus of Nazareth. The 
 most violent critics of the Church, go where 
 you will in the outskirts of society, where it 
 is not respectable to belong to the Church, or to 
 have anything to do with the Church, in the 
 Socialists hall, in the labor temples or even 
 amongst the denizens of the backwoods or 
 slums, amongst the navvies that toil upon your 
 railways or the longshoremen on your wharves, 
 and you will hear not a single word spoken 
 against the Nazarene. But you will hear the 
 Church torn to pieces. It is well, once in a 
 while, for the Church to face its critics, to 
 hear their word, to weigh it, to take it home 
 and digest it, and if possible profit by it.
 
 134. THE KINGDOM 
 
 Let us, then, attempt to present the indict 
 ment against the Church; next enter a plea in 
 behalf of the Church and then show how the 
 Church could, if it cared to, defend itself, and 
 then if possible carry the war into the enemy s 
 country. 
 
 First of all, what are the criticisms cur 
 rently offered against the Church? Let us be 
 just as candid and frank as we know how to 
 be, just as comprehensive in stating these criti 
 cisms as we can. 
 
 It is claimed that the Church is divided. So 
 it is. There is no one great church. The 
 Catholic Church has its two branches, the 
 Greek and the Roman; and the feeling is bit 
 ter between the two. Protestantism, created 
 in the sixteenth century as an offshoot and 
 protest against the Roman church, is also di 
 vided, and the longer its course is running the 
 more it is becoming divided. So that when 
 the message of the gospel is carried into a 
 foreign land today, the heathen has the right 
 of choosing to become any one of twelve or 
 thirteen different kinds of Methodist, eleven 
 or twelve different kinds of Baptist or Pres 
 byterian, a half-dozen different kinds of an 
 other religious denomination, and so on indefi 
 nitely; so that the poor heathen is perplexed, 
 among one hundred and fifty diverse religious
 
 THE KINGDOM 135 
 
 bodies, to know where to find a resting-place 
 for the sole of his foot. 
 
 Nor need we go so far away from home to 
 find the difficulties and the disasters that beset 
 the divided church. In a little town of five 
 or six hundred inhabitants, you will find four 
 or five spires pointing into the sky. You will 
 find a little congregation of twenty-five or 
 thirty in each one of those little churches, and 
 each congregation pulling and hauling against 
 the other, by name denouncing one another, 
 having a non-resident preacher once a month, 
 or once in two weeks at the best, leading a most 
 precarious existence, when there are scarcely 
 enough people in the village to support one 
 good strong Christian church. And the world 
 looks upon this and says, " This is bad busi 
 ness, it is not sensible, it is not what you would 
 expect of children of a loving God who love 
 each other." Consequently we come up against 
 some great national crisis, some international 
 catastrophe like that which Europe has faced 
 since 1914, and the Church finds itself power 
 less to confront it and to deal with it. The 
 Church has failed in Europe. Christianity has 
 not failed; religion has not failed; but the 
 Church, the institution, has completely failed; 
 and we must admit it. 
 
 Pope Pius of Rome died of a broken heart
 
 136 THE KINGDOM 
 
 because he could not prevent the European 
 war. His heart should not have broken; it 
 was his church that really was broken long ago. 
 Time was when the Pope could draw his line 
 and say to the monarchs of the earth, " Thus 
 far, and no farther shall you go." Time was 
 when he could have stretched the aegis of his 
 protection over Rheims, over Liege, over all 
 of little Belgium, even as Richelieu in his ad 
 vanced age did, over a defenceless maiden, 
 saying : 
 
 " Then wakes the power that in the age of iron 
 Rose to curb the great and lift the low. 
 Mark where she stands ! About her form I draw 
 The awful circle of our solemn church. 
 Set but a foot within that holy ground, 
 And on thy head, yea though it wore a crown, 
 I launch the curse of Rome!" 
 
 But the Church the man-made Church 
 institutional religion, has no such power in 
 Europe or the world today. 
 
 Again, the Church is charged with being 
 undemocratic. They say that the Church gives 
 a special precedence to wealthy men, that it 
 fawns upon the rich, that it will not assail their 
 business crimes or to put it a little more 
 mildly, their business irregularities; that the 
 Church truckles to the well-to-do, welcomes the 
 man in good clothes and pays little or no heed
 
 THE KINGDOM 137 
 
 to the man in threadbare garments; that the 
 Church rents its pews and charges for them 
 as it would for seats in a theatre; that the 
 Church moves away from the downtown sec 
 tions of the city just as rapidly as these sec 
 tions become commercialized and boarding- 
 housed, and gets out into the residence section 
 where the well-to-do and the comfortable are 
 all around it, to support it; that the Church 
 has constantly an eye to the main chance ; that 
 it is no longer democratic. Once again the 
 Church must admit the charge. It has been 
 guilty of all these failures in its application 
 of the brotherhood of man to man. 
 
 Again, the charge is brought that the Church 
 is full of hypocrites, and that is true. There 
 are plenty of men in the Church who are not 
 really Christian men. There are plenty of men 
 in it who are trying to appear better than they 
 really are. The Church is full we need not 
 say full but it is well filled, with men who 
 are keeping other people out of the Church by 
 the character of their lives, and by the knowl 
 edge that other men have of their transactions. 
 
 Still another charge. The Church maintains 
 a worn-out, effete, back-number message. The 
 Church is not preaching an up-to-date gospel, 
 but instead is bolstering qp certain dogmas and 
 utterances of a threadbare past, laying em-
 
 138 THE KINGDOM 
 
 phasis upon the theological conceptions held 
 by our Puritan ancestry, by our old German 
 ancestry, by our old British ancestry, and main 
 taining that they are essential in this modern 
 day. That is true. The Church is doing that. 
 There are cobwebs all over the vaulted ceil 
 ings of the great cathedrals of the world; and 
 cobwebs in the brains of the messengers of 
 Jesus Christ. That is a fact. 
 
 Now, perhaps we have fairly well covered 
 the indictment that is brought against the 
 Church by her critics; and what is the plea 
 that she will bring, when brought to the bar of 
 public opinion; what weighted defence prefer? 
 She will have to plead guilty. She cannot do 
 otherwise if she is candid and honest and fair. 
 She will have to say, " It is true I am divided ; 
 it is true I have been undemocratic; it is true 
 at times I am hypocritical ; it is true that I am 
 maintaining a great many old worn-out articles 
 of faith and practice." We shall have to plead 
 guilty in behalf of the Church. 
 
 But when we have done so, we are able to 
 add that there are certain extenuating circum 
 stances; that men are all more or less hypo 
 crites ; that they are all undemocratic, first and 
 last; that there is not anything that is solidly 
 united; that there is not anybody^ but who 
 maintains cobwebs in his brain and holds on
 
 THE KINGDOM 139 
 
 to old worn-out conceptions. That is not a 
 justification for the Church, mark you. She is 
 faulty and guilty in that she does these things, 
 and everybody who does them is guilty, too. 
 But, at least, there is some extenuation for the 
 Church, and those who live in glass houses 
 cannot fling too many stones at her. 
 
 Goethe was right when he said that the whole 
 history of the Church is one mishmash of 
 error and violence. True, she has slain and 
 ostracized her best men ; she has brought them 
 as heretics to the bar of her judgment and 
 condemned them under inquisitions. True, her 
 vaulted arches have rung with their groans; 
 her tessellated pavements have been blackened 
 with their blood. Yet, when all is said and 
 done, the Church has been the greatest force 
 for righteousness in the history of civiliza 
 tion; with all of her imperfections, in the last 
 two thousand years, she has done more for 
 mankind than any other institution, system of 
 philosophy, movement, or crusade has dared 
 to claim for itself. She is the greatest power 
 for righteousness in the world today. Talk 
 about your courts of law, your palaces of 
 justice, your temples of reform, your benefi 
 cent organizations, your republican congress 
 halls, as the sun rises in the east in the morn 
 ing and courses to his setting in the west at
 
 140 THE KINGDOM 
 
 night, the shadow of the great Church of 
 Christ falls upon all these lesser structures 
 of the world even as that of a great cathedral 
 falls upon townhall, shop, and home, of the 
 village in which it is placed. All these have 
 had their origin, their safeguard, and their 
 hope in her. 
 
 In the third or fourth century, when the 
 Dark Ages began, when religion had crum 
 bled, when empires were falling about men s 
 ears, when hope was gone, when life looked 
 black, she gave enough inspiration to cement 
 and hold together the disintegrated purposes 
 and ideals of mankind ; in the Middle Ages, the 
 ages of chivalry, her light shone through, back 
 and forth, the lame conceptions of life that 
 men held, and she was the only tie that bound 
 together the dissevered members of the human 
 race. And in this present age she has kept 
 alive an ethical ideal which, to say the least, 
 is not at all in keeping with the spirit of purely 
 material times. This much we must allow 
 to her. 
 
 If there were any desire for controversy on 
 the part of the Church, she has weapons with 
 which she might turn against her accusers, and 
 she might say to those who criticize her for 
 being divided : " Are you united ? Is your 
 lodge united? Is your business life united?
 
 THE KINGDOM 141 
 
 Is there harmony of effort in the nation, 
 amongst the men of the same pursuit? You 
 men born kin to each other, are you united? " 
 She might turn to those who accuse her of 
 being undemocratic and ask : " Are you demo 
 cratic? Democracy has suffered in Europe 
 and democracy is in danger in America as well. 
 Democracy always lives in fear of her life. 
 Do you never fawn upon wealth? Do you 
 never seek out the rich man for favors and 
 for opportunities, O you worldling?" She 
 might turn upon those who accuse her of 
 hypocrisy and say : " Is there any hypocrisy 
 outside the church? Are there any men who 
 try to appear better than they are in the judg 
 ment of their neighbors? You men of the 
 world, inveighing against the Church, you who 
 try to give the impression that you are better 
 than some that are in the Church beware, be 
 ware that you too are not the hypocrite ! " 
 
 So, one after another, she might deal with 
 the critics if she cared to, but it is not polemics 
 that she ought to be engaged in. It is not 
 argument, it is not defence. Far the wiser 
 and far the more candid attitude for the Church 
 to assume is to plead guilty to all of these 
 and say : " The Church is human, the Church 
 is fallible, the Church has failed, the Church 
 has broken down at moments of great emer-
 
 142 THE KINGDOM 
 
 gency in the history of the world. Guilty, 
 guilty, guilty ! " 
 
 But let us ask what is offered in place of 
 it? What have you to give, men of the 
 world? Give us something better than the 
 Church. We earnestly desire it. We will 
 adopt it if you but convince us that it is bet 
 ter than the Church. Give us something else 
 than the religion of Jesus Christ. Have you 
 it in your possession? Tell us of it, we beg of 
 you, we crave of you; give it to us. 
 
 No, we shall find that the great company 
 of those who stand outside the Church and as 
 sail it have, for the most part, adopted the 
 religion of naturalism. We are told that a 
 great wave of secularism has been sweeping 
 over the civilized world. Naturalism might 
 be a better word by which to designate it, 
 for, after all, it is a type of religion. Men 
 cannot live without a religion of some kind. 
 That, apparently, is what it is; a movement 
 widespread, evident in the thought of Germany, 
 present in the life of England, widely dis 
 seminated in the United States, a movement 
 that may be called the naturalistic religion, a 
 religion of nature. 
 
 This is the way its votary talks : " My re 
 ligion is man. My religion is goodness to my 
 fellow-man. My religion is fulfilling the
 
 THE KINGDOM 143 
 
 Golden Rule and treating other men as I would 
 have them treat me. My religion is visiting 
 hospitals and taking care of the sick and or 
 phans. My religion is the square deal. My 
 religion is labor, is economic reform. My re 
 ligion is in being kind and urbane, helpful to 
 the world about me." It is precisely what 
 Feuerbach meant when he spoke of the de 
 velopment of his religion, saying, " My re 
 ligion first was God, then it was reason, then 
 it was man," meaning by that, that the world 
 had passed through the stages first of worship 
 of a personal God, then through rationalism 
 and agnosticism, and finally into a naturalistic 
 religion, the religion of the promotion of man. 
 Naturalistic religion says : " Get the best out 
 of your life that is possible foj you to get 
 here and now. I do not care for any religion 
 that does not give me a chance to work, a 
 chance to stand side by side and on equal foot 
 ing with other workers; organize forces for 
 the benefit of and uplifting of man ; selfishness 
 here and now, this world s goods, this world s 
 chance, this world s pleasures, things that I can 
 have now. I don t want to wait. I don t 
 want to put off until a future life. I want the 
 good of life here and now." 
 
 That is the attitude, is it not, of the secular 
 ism, the natural religion of the day. Let us
 
 144. THE KINGDOM 
 
 treat it honestly and kindly and candidly. A 
 great part of this is the spirit of the Christian 
 gospel, after all. Just as we may recognize 
 many of the best things in rationalism, ag 
 nosticism, in any movement in the intellectual 
 world, so may we recognize many of the valu 
 able things in naturalism. But does it reach 
 the depths of life? Does it solve the problem 
 of life? Does it finally give a deep-set satis 
 faction in life? That is what we wish to 
 know. If we can find out that it does, let us 
 adopt it and go along with the rest. Let us 
 see. 
 
 Does material comfort and welfare bring 
 the ultimate satisfaction, the development of 
 the soul, the communion of souls with other 
 souls, the harmony of life with other lives? 
 Does wealth in this world bring spiritual de 
 velopment, love, union? It is not good for 
 man to live alone, and oftentimes we shall find 
 that those who have had the greatest pros 
 perity, the most of material opportunity, con 
 tinuous effort, achievement and pleasure, have 
 at last been constrained to find this world 
 lonely a sterile promontory, stale, flat, and 
 unprofitable. Material welfare often palls; it 
 does not reach the basis of our nature. Man 
 does not live by bread alone. There is some 
 thing deeper and pro founder in us than can
 
 THE KINGDOM 145 
 
 be so satisfied. So, though we may live in the 
 house by the side of the road and be a friend 
 to man, though we may minister to the sick 
 and afflicted, and though we may feed the hun 
 gry and the poor, though we may have op 
 portunity to work, these outward acts do not 
 reach the basis of life. 
 
 It has been pointed out that two great man- 
 made institutions of Europe collapsed in 1914. 
 One was Socialism and one was the Church. 
 Socialism, with eight million brothers of the 
 International, sworn that they would not fight 
 each other, is a ruin, perhaps only temporarily, 
 but none the less a ruin, from roof -tree to 
 foundation stone. The Church, with three 
 hundred millions of brothers, also went down 
 before the shock; and millions of her sons are 
 dead or in the trenches. We have already 
 seen why the Church failed : because she was 
 divided, undemocratic, behind the hour, appeal 
 ing in her message to fear and a selfish desire 
 to save one s own little soul. But why did So 
 cialism fail? Was it not because her ultimate 
 appeal also was selfish, material ? Did she not 
 hold before men s eyes a Paradise of plenty, 
 an Elysium of short hours, high pay, and much 
 leisure? All these things are worth while, 
 valuable in themselves; but they are not the 
 end of life, and the common man, deep down
 
 146 THE KINGDOM 
 
 in his heart, knows it. The Church must learn 
 from Lowell that 
 
 " Heaven s gate is shut to him who comes alone, 
 Save thou a soul and it shall save thine own." 
 
 And Socialism must learn from Jesus Christ 
 that man shall not live by bread alone, but by 
 every word that proceedeth out of the mouth 
 of God. 
 
 Militarism succeeded where both these other 
 institutions failed, because it appealed to the 
 heroic in man. It said to him, no doubt deceiv 
 ing him, but reaching him, " Come out, not to 
 ease and short hours, not to high pay, and 
 equal opportunity, not to personal safety; but 
 to danger, hardship, wounds, imprisonment 
 and death, on behalf of wife, mother, children, 
 native land." To reach men you must reach 
 deep down. 
 
 If the Church is wise, if the movements for 
 reform are wise, they will remember this. 
 They will appeal not to what is selfish and 
 low in him ; but to what is fine and heroic and 
 high. They will call him to a huge task, a 
 high outlook, and a great love. They will 
 call him to a mystic union of himself with other 
 men, and all with God. He is by nature re 
 ligious. He cannot live alone, nor without 
 God. He is not content without touch with
 
 THE KINGDOM 147 
 
 other souls and with the Oversold. Work does 
 not satisfy; opportunity to do tasks and de 
 velop one s capabilities does not reach ; benevo 
 lent organizations do not content. Religious 
 societies, parties, none of these go where re 
 ligion reaches, where the Church of Jesus 
 Christ can appeal. Here we can sing and sing 
 in sincerity : 
 
 " How sweet, how heavenly is the sight, 
 When those who love the Lord, 
 In one another s peace delight, 
 And so fulfil the Word." 
 
 The old-fashioned song is good to this hour. 
 To be sure, there are men in the Church that 
 do not believe profoundly in the Church, nor 
 find the best in the Church. To be sure, we 
 should return to the old conception religious 
 Israel once held that all were not Israel who 
 were of Israel, but that there was within Israel 
 a chosen community, a sacred few, a remnant. 
 So within the Church there is a beloved com 
 munity, those who have nothing else as their 
 high ideal but the spiritual life, nothing else 
 but the love one of another and of humanity, 
 nothing else but the uplift of others into unity 
 and harmony with God. That beloved com 
 munity within the Church is the Church, and 
 it is all-conquering, it is all-powerful, and the 
 gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
 
 148 THE KINGDOM 
 
 This, then, is the reply that the Church must 
 make to the criticism of the day. It must say : 
 " I know that I have failed, I plead guilty to 
 the indictment. I am divided. I am hypocriti 
 cal. I am broken and dissevered. I am un 
 democratic. I am behind the times. I admit 
 it all. But will you show me something human 
 that is not divided, that is democratic, that 
 is thoroughly up to the times, and is without 
 hypocrisy, sincere, square, and candid ? " Fur 
 ther than that, the Christian may add : " Will 
 you give me something that satisfies my soul, 
 that brings me into intimate touch and har 
 mony with men and women of the highest aims 
 and purposes, that furnishes not merely work 
 for my hands to do, not merely service for 
 me to render, but aspiration and love and har 
 mony with the powers within and above? 
 Give me that, for nothing short of that will 
 satisfy this craving, restless, uneasy soul of 
 mine." 
 
 There is a statue on the other side of the 
 water in the church at Copenhagen. Let us 
 go to see it when next we go abroad. It is 
 already familiar to many, from photograph 
 and plaster-cast. It is Thorwaldsen s figure 
 of the Christ. There He stands, the great 
 White Lord, as if He had just come in through 
 the closed doors and stood in the midst, His
 
 THE KINGDOM 149 
 
 hands outstretched as if in blessing and His 
 lips ready softly to breathe, " Peace be to this 
 house ! " 
 
 And let us see, one day, the original of that 
 statue, the great White Lord Himself! Can 
 you not almost see Him now, as He comes in 
 through the closed, or half-closed doors of our 
 selfish hearts, saying to jostling class and class, 
 the warring nations, the jarring creeds, 
 " Peace, peace be to this house ! " 
 
 Even so, come Lord Jesus, and Thy King 
 dom! 
 
 Come into the hearts of men, 
 Pervade, enkindle them, 
 Reach out and over them, 
 
 Son of Man, Thy sway! 
 Kingdom of God, ah when! 
 Into the hearts of men, 
 Peace for the souls of them, 
 
 Come, come, we pray!
 
 VII 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 BUT now a few words more are neces 
 sary concerning the earthly representa 
 tive of this kingdom. Who is this 
 Jesus, this Son of God, Son of Man, head of 
 the visible Church, chief cornerstone? 
 
 Your man in the street is your true mystic. 
 Questions of controversy concern him little. 
 Like Gallio, he is careless of these things. 
 Consciously or subconsciously he is aware of 
 the distinction between fact and truth. He 
 recollects that, as a child, he demanded to know 
 concerning every story told him whether it 
 was a true story, meaning whether it was a 
 fact-story. He is accustomed to the same de 
 mand from his own child. But grown to man s 
 estate, he is far more concerned with the truth 
 of a story than with the fact of a story. He 
 knows that Jean Valjean is truer than any 
 mere fact concerning the galleys of Toulon. 
 He sees the truth in Romola, David Copper- 
 field, Colonel Newcome, Hedda Gabler. He 
 knows that there never was a man in Denmark, 
 
 150
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 151 
 
 let alone a prince at Elsinore, half so true as 
 Hamlet, the melancholy Dane. Your man of 
 the world may think he is anxious to know 
 facts, but in proportion as he is a man and a 
 mystic, he is far more anxious to know truths. 
 
 So, with advancing manhood and increasing 
 distance from the time of the events, he is less 
 and less concerned with the genealogies of 
 Joseph and Mary, with the miracles of water 
 and wine, with the physical healings, with the 
 bare facts of the Gospel narratives; and he is 
 more and more concerned with the Sermon on 
 the Mount, the parables of the Master, the 
 closing chapters of St. John, the spirit of 
 Jesus, the Way, the Truth, the Life, that has 
 passed on into soul after soul and nation after 
 nation. Born of a virgin or born in the course 
 of nature, cradled in a manger or cradled in 
 the arms of the Sphinx, disputing with the doc 
 tors or playing with the children of Nazareth 
 it is all one to the man of today, and all very 
 true, and beautiful. 
 
 The important thing is that Jesus was there 
 and that Jesus is here. The modern man needs 
 not to be assured that Jesus was divine, he 
 needs to be shown that He was human. He 
 has an overwhelming consciousness of the 
 Deity residing in Christ. His natural cry is: 
 " Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O
 
 152 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 Lord." He needs an increasing sense of the 
 humanity in Jesus. He needs to hear the 
 word, " It is I, be not afraid." 
 
 The line of reasoning so long ago set forth 
 by Professor Young in his little book, " The 
 Christ of History," has an overpowering 
 weight for the mind of the average man im 
 pelling him to the conclusion that Jesus is 
 divine. It is the line that the mind follows 
 automatically. It waives all questions of mir 
 acle and inspiration; it leaves these matters 
 undebated and undetermined. It takes the 
 Gospel narratives as substantially correct, in 
 historical detail; considers that such a person 
 as Jesus lived, spoke practically the words 
 ascribed to Him, through a period of about 
 three years, and was martyred. More than 
 this it is not necessary to claim. Less than this 
 it is impossible, without dethroning all con 
 temporary history, to maintain. From such 
 easily accepted ground, the reasoning proceeds 
 about as follows : 
 
 The circumstances of Jesus birth and life 
 utterly fail to account for His achievements 
 and His impression on the world without some 
 mysterious, some inexplicable element in His 
 nature. For example, He was poor, a hand 
 worker. To be sure poverty may be dignified, 
 handwork dignifying; but, to say the least, it
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 153 
 
 is not conducive to intellectual achievement. 
 Some men have lifted themselves upward from 
 handwork to mental eminence, but always with 
 one hand on the loom or plane, and the other 
 on a book. But Jesus had no books, no schools, 
 no universities. " How hath this man learn 
 ing, having never learned ? " 
 
 Again, His youth and the shortness of His 
 career utterly fail to account for the magnitude 
 of His figure in the world. Some world con 
 querors have been young. Some heads of 
 great governments and crusades; but bear in 
 mind that their achievements were purely prac 
 tical in character, at the most political; while 
 Jesus eminence was intellectual, spiritual, re 
 ligious. The great saints and sages and philos 
 ophers have been elderly men before reaching 
 an all-powerful dominion over men. Young 
 men for action, old men for wisdom. Further 
 more, He taught only eighteen months 10 three 
 years, never outside of the little strip of land 
 called Palestine, never wrote a line to leave 
 behind, and lives as no other lives in the minds 
 and hearts of myriads of men. Who was 
 He? 
 
 So the argument might be carried forward 
 until the appeal is made to the testimony of 
 Christ Himself. Surely one who shows so 
 much weight with the world should be given
 
 154 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 some weight with regard to Himself, His own 
 origin, and purpose in the world. He says, 
 "Which one of you convicteth me of sin?" 
 He says : " I and my Father are one. I do al 
 ways those things that please my Father. He 
 that hath seen me hath seen the Father." He 
 accepts the confession of Simon Peter, " Thou 
 art the Christ, the Son of the living God," and 
 the glad exclamation of Thomas, " My Lord 
 and my God ! " 
 
 Could He have been mistaken, deluded, flat 
 tered as the Roman Emperors were flattered, 
 into a belief in His Deity? If so it were a 
 grievous fault! And it would also be incon 
 sistent with the sobriety, balance, poise, of all 
 His sayings and doings. Furthermore, it 
 would be necessary that the idea of the divine 
 revelation of God in human form should first 
 be in the minds of the flatterers before it could 
 be planted in His own. Such an idea was far 
 from their thoughts. They wanted Him for 
 an earthly sovereign, and so thought of Him. 
 To fabricate the notion of the divine Christ of 
 God, one would have to be a religious genius 
 indeed, would have to be the equal of Christ, 
 would have to be the Christ Himself. 
 
 So runs the mind of the common man re 
 garding Jesus. He thinks of Him as the in 
 carnation of God. He believes it reasonable
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 155 
 
 that if there is a God, and he knows there is, 
 He would seek to reveal Himself to His child, 
 man. Just as rapidly as man was able to ap 
 preciate His qualities, so rapidly would the 
 Father unfold Himself to the Son. It is an 
 interesting fact, and a very convenient one 
 upon which to reason, that the life of the race 
 is very much like the life of an individual. 
 The old English dramatist said: 
 
 "All the world s a stage, 
 And all the men and women merely players; 
 They have their exits and their entrance s, 
 And one man in his time plays many parts, 
 His acts being seven ages." 
 
 These seven ages are just as marked in the 
 history of mankind, or seventy ages, for the 
 matter of that, as they are in the individual : 
 the race had its infancy, just as the child. And 
 yet the race has never been in such unconscious 
 condition, so far as we know, that it was not 
 aware of its kinship to its parent its Maker 
 its God. It has felt, always, and in every 
 place, since man became a conscious, respon 
 sible agent, that it was allied to God, to a 
 power not itself, which makes for righteous 
 ness. 
 
 Naturally God, in His dealing with such a 
 race, could not reveal Himself, to the fullest, 
 in its days of infancy; just as the parent deal-
 
 156 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 ing with his child does not reveal himself fully 
 in the days of that little one s infancy. The 
 mother shows the child her love, from the very 
 beginning, and she shows it her authority; but 
 she cannot, until the child reaches the age of 
 responsibility, reveal to it her reason, her per 
 severance, her courage, her knowledge of its 
 capacities and its difficulties a thousand and 
 one things which, with advancing years, she 
 does fully and freely unfold. 
 
 God dealt with the race in just the same 
 way. We find that aboriginal men looked out 
 into the world about them, and saw the same 
 evidences of God that the refined and polished 
 moderns find. They looked upon the moun 
 tains, and they felt that God resided there. If 
 they were plains people, they looked up at the 
 sun and the stars, and worshipped these. If 
 they were an agricultural people, they wor 
 shipped the great river which brought, in its 
 turgid stream, the rich alluvial deposit from 
 far-distant sections, and laid it to fertilize the 
 soil which supported them ; it was natural that 
 Egypt worshipped the Nile. They built their 
 temples to the sun, high up on the mountain 
 tops, where the slanting rays of early morning 
 touched them first, and where the rosy-fingered 
 sunset laid its hand upon them last. God they 
 saw in the light of setting suns, the round
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 157 
 
 ocean, and the living air, the blue sky, and ulti 
 mately they saw Him in the mind of man. 
 
 As time went on, they personified these 
 forces of nature, and made their Gods human 
 in form and appearance, like themselves. So 
 arose the heroes and the demigods of the 
 classic peoples. Men felt kinship between 
 themselves and God, and they cried out, in dim, 
 distant, past ages, to Him : " What is man, 
 that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of 
 man, that Thou visitest him ? Thou hast made 
 him a little lower than God, and hast crowned 
 him with glory and honor." Feeling the di 
 vine spark within them, recognizing the pres 
 ence of divinity in their own lives, they were 
 finding rapidly the truth. 
 
 God was revealing Himself to them in them 
 selves; in the movements of their tribes, and 
 their nations; in the events of their histories. 
 And so we find God still revealed, do we not, 
 in the lives of individual men? Do you ven 
 ture to say that, now and then, one cannot see 
 the reflection of God in the face of a man ? Do 
 you say that there are no reflections of the 
 Eternal in the lives of temporal men and 
 women ? 
 
 David and Jonathan showed something of 
 the divine in their heroic relations one to an 
 other; so did Isaiah and his sons; and so
 
 158 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 Socrates and his pupil Plato, Confucius and 
 Lao-Tsze, Buddha, Zoroaster, Damon and 
 Pythias, Judas Maccabeus. The earth opened 
 in the forum in Rome at one time, so goes the 
 old legend. A great chasm was in the midst 
 between two hills, and it seemed as if the earth 
 would burst wide open and all its people be 
 engulfed. The wise men and the priests said, 
 "If there is some young, strong hero, who 
 dares to plunge into this gulf and give his life 
 for the people, it will close, and all shall be 
 saved." And was it not Marcus Curtius, upon 
 his horse, who leaped without hesitation into 
 the abyss, and gave his life for the salvation 
 of his people? True or false, the story never 
 theless has in it the ring of the divine, an 
 advanced reflection of the atonement in the 
 sacrifice of one for others. 
 
 That sort of thing is modern as well as 
 ancient. A woman wrote to the medical col 
 lege in St. Louis, some time since, that her 
 husband was sick, out of work, her children 
 starving; that a few more days would tell the 
 tale for her and them; and would the medical 
 college give her three hundred dollars for her 
 body? A tactless woman, looking upon a 
 French soldier in the hospital, his face half shot 
 away, murmured audibly, " What a terrible 
 disfigurement!" "No, madam," answered
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 159 
 
 the patient, "a decoration ! " There are flashes 
 of the divine to be seen every day and all 
 around us, like lightning on a dark summer 
 night. 
 
 " A picket frozen on duty, 
 A mother starved for her brood; 
 Socrates drinking the hemlock, 
 And Jesus on the rood; 
 And millions who, humble and nameless, 
 The straight hard pathway trod; 
 Some call it consecration, 
 And others call it God ! " 
 
 It appears, then, the most reasonable thing 
 in the world that, if the Father should set out 
 deliberately to show Himself to man, He would 
 adopt, would He not, for His full and final 
 revelation, the form of a man. This is a book 
 that all men could understand. Not in sacred 
 writings, not in the utterances of prophets, 
 however inspired, was God to be finally re 
 vealed to man; not in the systems of sages and 
 philosophers, however beautiful and profound; 
 not in the wild imaginings of erratic men, first 
 and last, could God be reflected adequately to 
 the minds of men. There are some who could 
 not understand the prophets; some who could 
 not grasp the philosophers ; some who could not 
 follow the intricacies of the magicians of hu 
 man thought and human knowledge ; some who 
 could not read a book; but there are none who
 
 160 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 could not understand a human being, in so far 
 as a human being can show himself and can 
 be read and known. Even a child can read 
 a face. How it will respond to the divine that 
 shines in some countenances, and be attracted, 
 and give itself unreservedly into the arms of 
 even imperfect divinity! 
 
 Therefore humanity cried out for a man, to 
 show God to them ; and in the fulness of time 
 God heard and answered that human cry. 
 There is a beautiful story in Exodus of Moses 
 desire to see God ; but the law was that a man 
 could not look upon God and live; no doubt 
 that was literally true. The race was not old 
 enough, the race was not developed enough to 
 look upon God and to comprehend Him its 
 intellect undoubtedly would break down it 
 would fail utterly to conceive and grasp the 
 picture of God if presented to it. So, we 
 are told, Moses was put into the cleft of a 
 rock. God put His hand over him, and passed 
 by the chasm, allowing Moses to see His re 
 treating form. The story is attractive, because 
 so true with regard to half -developed, half- 
 trained, half-educated peoples. These peoples 
 were not ready yet to see God in the form of 
 man. It took the fulness of the times for the 
 world to be prepared for this vision this 
 revelation.
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 161 
 
 Therefore just at the moment when Israel 
 was about to be crushed and destroyed and 
 scattered all over the world, to create its syna 
 gogues in every nation, with a platform pre 
 pared for the proclamation of this new revela 
 tion of God; just at the moment when the 
 Greek language, the most subtle and the most 
 delicate of all the languages of all time, was 
 scattered far and wide as the language of com 
 merce, of government, of diplomacy; just at 
 the moment when Rome was at her greatest 
 power, when peace was spread like a mantle 
 over the known world ; when the Roman roads 
 rolled like wide, white ribbons from the golden 
 milestone in the forum, protected from end to 
 end by Roman legionaries; when Rome had 
 dethroned her gods; when she was feeling in 
 the dark if haply she might find something to 
 take their place ; at that moment, in the fulness 
 of the time, as we can look back now and 
 plainly see, God sent His Son into the world. 
 This was the answer to the demand of man that 
 he see God in human form the only book that 
 all men, everywhere, could read and under 
 stand. This is the incarnation. 
 
 Now, the common man is not concerned to 
 answer the question: How was Jesus divine, 
 and how was He human? how much divine and 
 how much human? He has no scalpel keen
 
 162 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 enough to dissect Him, no balance delicate 
 enough to weigh Him, no acid-test, no test-tube 
 fine enough to distil and analyze Him. 
 
 The divineness of humanity is not a difficulty 
 in the way of grasping and accepting the 
 divinity of Christ, but, on the contrary, a 
 great aid. Man knows that he has the spark 
 of divine in him. We hear people proclaiming 
 it today as if it were something new and 
 strange. But man has always known it. He 
 knows he was made in the image of God. Yet 
 he recognizes his own failure. He knows that 
 he has marred and scarred that image ; that he 
 has defaced it, and at times well-nigh de- 
 destroyed it. There is nothing he is quite so 
 conscious of as the fact that he has not lived 
 up to his parentage ; that he is the unworthy son 
 of a worthy Father. 
 
 Let man, then, look at one who is not a 
 failure at Jesus Christ of Nazareth, tempted 
 in all points like as we are, yet without sin; 
 perfect, spotless, conscious, all the time, of the 
 unity and harmony between Himself and His 
 Father ; " I do always the things which please 
 my Father ; the Father and I are one ; " with 
 no broken communion between Him and His 
 Father ; with no veil hanging between Him and 
 His Father s face; with no gulf yawning be 
 tween Him and His Father; but with free, con-
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 163 
 
 slant, unbroken communion between Him and 
 His Father, a perfect fellowship and comrade 
 ship! When we look upon that His sinless- 
 ness, and His consciousness that He, and He 
 alone, was sent into the world to redeem and 
 to save perplexed and distracted and lost hu 
 manity; that He was the one to do this crying 
 out : " I am the Way, and the Truth, and the 
 Life : No man cometh unto the Father but by 
 me : Follow thou me : Thy sins be forgiven 
 thee ! " when you look upon that face of 
 Jesus Christ, oh! you marred and broken son 
 of God, what do you say? 
 
 He was divine. He was so much more 
 divine than I am that there is a difference 
 actually in kind between Him and me. 
 The quantitative difference is so great that it 
 amounts to a qualitative difference; and, as I 
 look upon Him, I decrease and He increases. 
 He is the son of God the express revelation 
 of the Father, for, what God is, He is. When 
 I want to learn of God, I look at Him; when 
 I want to pray to God, I think of Him. His 
 face is before me all the time, and He is the 
 only full revelation that humanity has. Of 
 course He is divine! He is God manifest in 
 the flesh. 
 
 No, the man in the street needs little argu 
 ment to convince him that Jesus is divine. He
 
 164 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 needs much to show him that Jesus is human. 
 What should be borne in upon him is not so 
 much the divineness of Christ as the divine- 
 ness of man. What Jesus was, man needs to 
 become. Our religion should be not less 
 Christo-centric, but more Jesus-centric, more 
 man-centric. The incarnation of God in Christ 
 was but the beginning of His revelation. It 
 must be completed in man. 
 
 So, it follows that Jesus must be born again, 
 must come again. God must be revealed again. 
 Continuously and progressively must this beau 
 tiful birth go on within the hearts and lives 
 of men ; for, where a man takes Jesus Christ 
 into him, that man not merely is born again; 
 but Christ lives again. God is revealed again. 
 This is the Second Coming of Christ. This is 
 the Advent. 
 
 We sang, at the Gypsy Smith meetings in 
 America, a few years since, the old Welsh 
 hymn, couched in the oldest phraseology of 
 the oldest orthodoxy : " The Spirit answers 
 with the blood, and tells me I am born of 
 God." Some of us have heard the lilt and 
 swing of those lines and that theme, all through 
 the months that have followed; and, while we 
 have realized all the time that those are old, 
 old words, and old, old conceptions, we have 
 realized increasingly their truth, their value,
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 165 
 
 and their message to the most modern 
 day their perfect harmony with the most sci 
 entific and liberal thinking of the present age. 
 The Spirit of God answers to the sacrifice of 
 Jesus Christ, and re-echoes in my soul, if I am 
 born of God, to tell me that I am His child, a 
 member of His family, a son of God, and joint 
 heir with Jesus Christ. The old conceptions of 
 the Church, handed down through all the cen 
 turies, shall not altogether be swept away. The 
 consciousness that we have had of the divine 
 presence of Jesus, in history, is with us yet, 
 and the confidence that we have in Him. If we 
 take Him into our lives, become one with Him, 
 in harmony with Him, imitate, so far as it is 
 possible for us to do, all His qualities, drinking 
 of the waters of life which He said He gave 
 to us freely, answering the call which He gave 
 to us all, " Come unto me, all ye that labor 
 and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest " 
 if we do these things, Christ is born again 
 within us Christ in you the hope of glory! 
 No, the difficulty is not that men do not think 
 well about Christ. It is that they do not do so 
 well as they think. The vital question to be 
 addressed to them is not, " What think ye of 
 Christ? " but, " What will ye do with the man 
 called Jesus?" Right thinking is important, 
 but it is valueless until coined into life. In
 
 166 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 point of fact, no thought is really ours, no 
 truth can be possessed by us, except as that 
 thought, that truth enters into our lives. Not 
 only spiritual truth, but all truth, must be 
 spiritually discerned. There is no such thing 
 as purely mental truth. It is not the scholar, 
 knowing a lexicon, who knows a language. It 
 is the man into whose life the language has 
 entered. It is not necessarily the owner of a 
 picture-gallery or a park who really owns these 
 things of beauty; but it is the art student or 
 the common man into whose soul the message 
 of the canvas or the hillside has entered and 
 become a part of him, a joy forever, that is 
 the real owner. 
 
 " He that willeth to do my will," said the 
 Master, " shall know of the doctrine ; " and 
 no words more in harmony with the laws of 
 mind and life ever were spoken. It is not the 
 man who knows the letter of Scripture, not the 
 theologian who has mentally grasped the sys 
 tems, but the worshipper who has opened his 
 heart and life to the Master Himself, that shall 
 know the doctrine of Christ. You have known 
 many a man, who they said was " deep in 
 Bible," to use an old phrase, whose heart was 
 as hard and dry and bitter as a peach-stone, 
 who had not learned the alphabet of the Gos 
 pel, had not mastered the rudiments of the
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 167 
 
 thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians. And, 
 vice versa, you may have known many a hum 
 ble wayfarer, though simple, whose soul was 
 steeped in God, and whose eyes were open to 
 the truth of Scripture. 
 
 There was an old hunter and trapper who 
 lived some years since in a canon in the Santa 
 Ynez mountains near Santa Barbara. His 
 name was Bush appropriate to his calling and 
 his environment. His cabin was a dozen miles 
 or so from town. One night, on a rare visit 
 to civilization, he heard the drum-beat of the 
 Salvation Army and followed it. The natural 
 religion within him sprang up and flowered. 
 He wanted, after frequent visits to the bar 
 racks, to volunteer. But the army could not 
 admit him until he gave up his tobacco. He 
 readily rid himself of swearing the only other 
 besetting sin of which the old man was aware; 
 and he struggled manfully to rid himself also 
 of his plug. But in the loneliness of his little 
 mountain home, he would take it out, turn it 
 over in his hands, caress it, and at last sink 
 his teeth into it. 
 
 One day he came down to the little brick 
 ivy-covered church near the seashore. They 
 took him in and baptized him, tobacco and all, 
 in the surf of the Blue Pacific. Every Sunday 
 he was at service; every Wednesday night he
 
 168 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 trudged the twelve miles in to prayer meeting 
 and the twelve miles back. There are those who 
 can remember the broken, stumbling, ungram- 
 matical prayers he made, the passages of 
 Scripture he used to quote, or misquote, for 
 he never got one right. But if ever there was 
 a true follower of the Son of God, it was he. 
 Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings! 
 
 Of course no man can understand the Bible 
 unless he yields himself to God. Of course no 
 man can understand the mystery of Christ un 
 less he yields himself in glad and loving sur 
 render. No man can understand Chaucer, 
 Shakespeare, Goethe, Dante, until he puts him 
 self in harmony with the great singer. No 
 man can appreciate music, a song, a story, or a 
 sermon, except in so far as he surrenders him 
 self to the message and the messenger. This is 
 the law. Says Mr. Kipling: 
 
 " These are the laws of the jungle, 
 And many and mighty are they; 
 But- the head and the hoof of the law, 
 And the haunch and the hump is obey ! " 
 
 That, too, is the law of the jungles of the inner 
 life. 
 
 Now it is possible, no doubt, to obey Christ 
 all by one s self, without comradeship, fellow 
 ship, or church. There were those who fol 
 lowed Him afar off. Perhaps there still are.
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 169 
 
 But this is an extremely difficult thing to do, 
 and there are few that compass it. For it is 
 so easy to lose sight of Him in the distance, at 
 a turning, in the crowds. It is the last thing 
 we should dare to say that no man can be a 
 Christian without joining a church. Doubt 
 less there are many who serve Him without 
 publicly naming His name. But these put a 
 heavy handicap upon themselves, work against 
 great odds, drag their sledge over sand and 
 gravel where they might have snow and easier 
 going. 
 
 The Church has no monopoly on Christ and 
 God, to be sure. The Father s love cannot be 
 cornered. But certain it is that far and away 
 the majority of those who seek to be near Him 
 are in the church. It is good business to go 
 where the most business in our line is being 
 done birds of a feather. That man makes a 
 grave mistake who isolates himself from his 
 fellows of similar bent. No man is strong 
 enough to live alone, and die alone it is not 
 good for man. He needs sympathy, under 
 standing, fellowship in his high aims. He is 
 a gregarious creature. 
 
 This is why, perhaps, sheep are used so often 
 in sacred scripture to signify men. Humanity 
 flocks as sheep do. They both need shepherd 
 ing. They are lost alone. Though they walk
 
 170 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 through the valley of the shadow of death 
 a narrow, rocky gorge down Jericho way, 
 south of Jerusalem they will fear evil unless 
 some one be with them. If they are to find 
 green pastures, they must be led to them. 
 They are imitative, and feed always with heads 
 in the same direction. 
 
 With increasing sophistication there is in 
 creasing independence of spirit; and yet 
 strange as it may seem, by the increasing com 
 plexity of society, there is forced upon its 
 members increasing dependence as well. There 
 is a constantly growing friction between the 
 man and his environment. His freedom can 
 come to him only with his service to society. 
 The phrase of the prayer book is most illumi 
 nating, when, referring to God, it adds : 
 " Whose service is perfect freedom." Our true 
 independence never comes to us except in serv 
 ice, subjection of will, subordination of self. 
 
 How futile, then, become our little declara 
 tions of individual independence! Jesus has 
 put the whole story into the parable of the 
 marriage feast. A certain king prepared sup 
 per for his son, and sent out his invitations. 
 Regrets, for the most part, were returned. 
 One said he had bought a yoke of oxen and 
 must go and prove them, try them. No man 
 who has handled live stock ever buys first and
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 171 
 
 tries afterward. Subterfuge, evidently. An 
 other said he had bought a piece of land and 
 must go and look at it. Bankruptcy awaits 
 the real estate operator who works in such a 
 way. Also subterfuge. The third said, " I 
 have married a wife and therefore cannot 
 come." Most evident subterfuge of all; for 
 what place more appropriate to take a happy 
 bride than to the marriage supper of a prince? 
 Consummate literary artist that He is, Jesus 
 has put not one legitimate reason into the 
 mouths of any who sent regrets. There is a 
 very clear distinction between a reason and an 
 excuse. When you invite a man to dinner and 
 he declines, you know usually very well whether 
 he assigns reason or excuse. 
 
 " Excuses are clothes, which, asked unawares, 
 Good breeding to naked necessity spares." 
 
 Most so-called reasons that men give for not 
 answering openly the call of Christ are only 
 excuses and no reasons at all. They, and the 
 possible answers to them, run like this : 
 
 I don t know enough. Enough what? O, 
 Scripture, doctrine, the rules of the Church. 
 Do you know Christ, love Christ, want to fol 
 low Christ? That is enough. More than this 
 no man has the right to ask of you. Less than 
 this few men in this Christian land possess.
 
 172 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 I know too much. I have read books : Hux 
 ley, Darwin, Herbert Spencer. I know too 
 much to accept your Bible and your Church. 
 But do you know Christ? It is not enough to 
 know all these others, who themselves would 
 be the first to declare their own ignorance. Do 
 you know the beauties and the secrets of love, 
 sacrifice, heroism, death for others? You are 
 not of much account in the world if you know 
 too much to be willing to die for some cause, 
 some one, some ideal. No, you do not know 
 too much but rather too little. 
 
 I am not sure that I believe. Believe what ? 
 Well, the doctrines of the future life, reward, 
 punishment; free-will, f oreordination ; certain 
 of the doctrines of the Church. Could you 
 makes Peter s confession of faith, " I believe 
 that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living 
 God," interpreting it for yourself? Yes, I 
 could do that. Then that is sufficient. It is all 
 the Church has a right to exact of you. It 
 is all that most churches would exact. General 
 Lew Wallace, in his " Prince of India," puts 
 it into the mouth of a monk of the Middle 
 Ages to propound this creed as a basis for the 
 union of Christendom : " I believe that Jesus 
 is the Christ, the Son of the living God." That 
 is not Lew Wallace s creed ; it is not Simon of 
 Bethsaida s creed; it is God Almighty s creed;
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 173 
 
 for Jesus said : " Blessed art them, Simon bar- 
 Jonah, for flesh and blood hath not revealed 
 it unto thee, but my Father who is in heaven." 
 That ought to be enough for any church, 
 enough for any man. 
 
 I do not feel just right about joining a 
 church. Suppose you had a dinner invitation 
 and responded that you did not feel right about 
 coming. Your host would say, " Are you 
 angry with me ? " " No." " Oh, you are 
 ill? " " No." " What then? " " I can t ex 
 plain, but I do not feel right." Is the excuse 
 absurd ? But no, not altogether. The Church 
 may be to blame for giving you the impression 
 that you had to feel some subtle, intangible, 
 mysterious upheaval of the soul that would 
 indicate to you the movings of divine grace 
 whatever that is. But the acceptance of Christ 
 is a thing not of feeling but of will. " He that 
 willeth to do my will." Will you, or will you 
 not? 
 
 I am not good enough. Precisely the reason 
 you need Christ and His Church. He came not 
 to call the righteous. You need sympathy, 
 support, friendship, fellowship, the unity of 
 the body of Christ. 
 
 I am too good. Nobody ever makes that 
 excuse, you say ? It is one of the most frequent 
 of all. It is not put in just those words, but
 
 174 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 it amounts to that in substance. This is the 
 way it is stated: I am better than many of the 
 men in the Church. There are liars, and 
 cheats, hypocrites, and rascals in the Church. 
 I know who they are. I am better than those 
 men. I ll not go into a church where they are. 
 I ll not join a church that has such people in it. 
 
 Listen, friend, to the Master : Two men 
 went up to the temple to pray. One of them, a 
 Pharisee, stood and prayed thus with himself : 
 " God, I thank Thee that- 1 am not as other men 
 are nor as this publican here. I give tithes. 
 I fast. I do not do as some other men I 
 know." The publican lay with his face on the 
 sanded floor of the temple and prayed : " Lord, 
 have mercy upon me a sinner ! " Who was 
 the Pharisee, the hypocrite in this case? Was 
 it not he who pointed the finger at his fellow- 
 man no matter who he was and thanked 
 God that he was not like him? 
 
 And who are you, sir, that dares point the 
 finger of judgment at any fellow-man, no mat 
 ter where nor who he is ! What do you know 
 of the cry of his soul for help in mastering 
 temptations the strength of which you, in your 
 smug self -righteousness, have never known? 
 He is in the Church because he needs and 
 knows he needs help a Power not himself that 
 makes for righteousness. Thou Pharisee,
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 175 
 
 thou hypocrite, thou whited sepulchre, down 
 with that accusing finger, and never let that 
 excuse, that vainglorious, self -laudatory, hypo 
 critical, damnable lie soil your lips again. 
 
 Still unconvinced, the cringing censor justi 
 fies himself thus : " But I do not profess any 
 thing, and he does." 
 
 The follower of Christ professes nothing. 
 He confesses much. He is no " professor of 
 religion." That is a mistaken bit of old phrase 
 ology. He is a confessor. He confesses he is 
 a sinner, which is more than you do. He con 
 fesses Christ is his Saviour. You profess to 
 be your own saviour. He confesses he needs 
 the help of other men and women, you pro 
 fess to be strong enough to stand alone. 
 
 " Ah, but there is a difference," he con 
 tinues. " A man outside the Church may do 
 many things that a man inside the Church may 
 not do." What, pray? and why, pray? Are 
 there two standards of right and wrong, one 
 for churchmen and one for outsiders? Are 
 there two moral laws, one for the Christian 
 and one for the worldling? The position is 
 indefensible, hypocritical, absurd. There is 
 nothing a man has the right to do outside the 
 Church that he has not equal right to do 
 inside. There is nothing that is wrong for a 
 man outside the Church that is not equally
 
 176 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 wrong inside. Both are in the world, are they 
 not ? Both are in society, are they not ? Their 
 obligations are just as great and binding to 
 their fellow-men in one case as the other. 
 Their obligations are just as great and just as 
 binding to themselves and to their God, upon 
 one as upon the other. No man can escape re 
 sponsibility by remaining out of the Church. 
 The Church is designed to help him bear re 
 sponsibility. 
 
 It is time now to concede that there are 
 hypocrites in the Church. Some one has said 
 he hopes the time will never come when there 
 are not, for then there will be nothing in the 
 Church worth imitating. Imitation is the sin- 
 cerest flattery. 
 
 But there are more hypocrites, two to one, 
 outside than inside. There are hypocrites in 
 the lodge; hypocrites in society; hypocrites in 
 business, shoals of them ; hypocrites in politics, 
 oceans of them; hypocrites in universities, in 
 medicine, law, the ministry. The difference is 
 that men inside the Church are trying not to 
 be, and men outside often are not. 
 
 Mack Lucas was a travelling salesman. He 
 was hard-drinking, hard-swearing, hard-deal 
 ing, hard-thinking. He was hard every way. 
 He saw the faults of church- folk and would 
 have none of it or of them. At last a minister,
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 177 
 
 who was also a fellow-man, got under Mack s 
 shell, and after so long a time the hard man 
 softened and confessed his Lord. He was 
 changed, he was humbled. One night, some 
 months after, his friend and pastor met Mack 
 in a darkened back street of their little village, 
 coming from the railway station, toward his 
 home. He was carrying a bundle in both arms 
 on his breast. 
 
 " What have you there, Mack ? " 
 
 "A baby," said Mack, half defiantly, half 
 shamefacedly. " We ve always wanted one, 
 my wife and I. But I reckon I wasn t good 
 enough for God to give us one. Then we made 
 up our minds we d adopt one." 
 
 By the way, adoption is the finest form of 
 charity. 
 
 " So," continued Mack, " I went up to the 
 orphans home at Sedalia and I asked them to 
 give me the puniest, scrawniest, weakest, most 
 good-for-nothing little rat they had in the lot. 
 If they d had a cross-eyed one, or a lame one, 
 that s the one I d have wanted. I m not good 
 enough to have a real healthy, fat, fine one. 
 So they gave me this, and I m taking it home." 
 
 That was thirteen years ago, or thereabouts. 
 The other day I saw, with my friend the pastor, 
 that baby girl, with her high-school braids 
 down her back, her high-school books in her
 
 178 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 hands. She was the daintiest, prettiest, trip- 
 pingest little maiden in the county town. And 
 I shook hands with Mack, the gray upon his 
 temples, the wrinkles upon his face, and the 
 laughter and the light of God in his clean eyes. 
 
 Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. It re 
 mains for the Church of Christ in the world to 
 gather all such into its fold. Nothing less 
 than the concentrated effort of all can win such 
 as these into its arms. 
 
 An old friend of mine in a Middle Western 
 State, gray of beard, but still firm of hand, 
 was talking reminiscently of pioneer days. 
 The frontiersman s blood was still in his veins ; 
 for it was not long after this conversation that 
 he plunged into the wilderness again, in the 
 Rainy River district of Canada. Doubtless he 
 sleeps under its wild, wet, tangled grass today, 
 for he told the story many years ago. Said he : 
 
 " I used to herd sheep for my father, and I 
 came to know them pretty well, and so did he. 
 We were fond of them, too. One night I 
 brought the flock up from the big pasture, to 
 shut them into the little lot for the night. 
 Father stood by the gate and counted them." 
 
 Possibly the old man may have said " named 
 them." We have read, have we not, that 
 " The good shepherd knoweth his own sheep, 
 and calleth them all by name."
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 179 
 
 " When they had all passed in, my father 
 said: 
 
 " There is one sheep missing, son. 
 
 " Then he told me to go down one side of 
 the big pasture, and he would go down the 
 other. We did so ; and we found the one sheep 
 at the far end. It was dark now, and cold. 
 We tried to drive him, but he kept running 
 back to the fence and trying to get through. 
 You can t make much headway driving a sheep. 
 He was too heavy to carry. At last my father 
 said: 
 
 " Come, son. I know what we can do. 
 
 " So back up to the barns and the little lot 
 we went, opened the gates, brought the whole 
 flock out, took them nearly a mile down to 
 the far side of the big pasture ; and we had no 
 trouble then in bringing that one sheep 
 home." 
 
 Perhaps the old man saw the application of 
 his story. If so, he said nothing more. Per 
 haps the Church may one day see the moral 
 contained in it and act upon it. God grant it 
 may be so. 
 
 The pastor of a church in the suburbs of 
 Chicago, Dr. W. S. Abernethy, baptized a 
 certain boy whose name was Norman Patter 
 son. The lad carried newspapers to the min 
 ister s house and neighborhood. One morn-
 
 180 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 ing the minister, rising early, saw the boy go 
 past on the run. It was so the next morning 
 and the next. The preacher determined that 
 next day he would stop the lad and inquire the 
 cause of his haste. To his inquiry, Norman 
 hurled back breathless and unintelligible words. 
 Next day, the minister spread legs and arms 
 across the pavement and brought the runner 
 to a halt. 
 
 " Well," said Norman, " I am running to 
 get myself in training. I believe I can run. I 
 would like to go to Stockholm for the inter 
 national Olympic games, and I m going to try. 
 I believe I can run." 
 
 With the pastor s advice and encouragement, 
 he went to the Chicago Athletic Club and 
 sought out the trainer, Delaney, saying, " I be 
 lieve I can run ; and I would like to try for the 
 team that is going to Stockholm." 
 
 " What have you made the mile in ? " 
 
 " I don t know. I ve never tried ; but I be 
 lieve I can run." 
 
 " Well, haven t you any idea what you can 
 run a mile in? The record is four-fifteen and 
 two-fifths. Percy Taylor, of Cornell, who is 
 to run here next week in the preliminaries, can 
 make four-twenty and holds the Eastern inter 
 collegiate record. Anderson, of Nebraska, 
 who will also run, has made four-eighteen,
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 181 
 
 and holds the Western record. What do you 
 think you can do ? " 
 
 " I don t know. I am sure, though, that I 
 can beat those fellows. I know I can run." 
 
 The next week, the lad, who had never put 
 on a track-suit, went into the preliminaries with 
 those old veterans; and at the first trial, he 
 held his own with both of them, making the 
 mile in four minutes and twenty seconds. At 
 the second trial, when the pace grew hotter, he 
 made it in four, two and four-fifths; and 
 held the world s record for fifteen minutes 
 until a runner in New York clipped off a frac 
 tion more. But Norman Patterson went to 
 Stockholm and wore the Stars and Stripes 
 around his waist because he had got it into 
 his head that he could run. 
 
 No man can tell what is in him until he tries. 
 Be a runner in the race for righteousness ; enter 
 the great Olympian; lay aside every weight, 
 forget the things that are behind, look forward 
 to what is before. Your country needs you; 
 yes and your Christ!
 
 VIII 
 THE CHARMED LIFE 
 
 ON the ground of expediency alone, one 
 does well to put himself, so far as he 
 is able, into harmony with the Power 
 that made the world and rules it. It is not for 
 fear s sake, it is not to save one s soul, it is 
 not to prepare for death; it is rather for the 
 love of the best, it is to save men and the 
 world, it is to prepare for life, to make the 
 most possible of one s self, that we should place 
 our strength and force in the organized 
 trenches with God. 
 
 It is not long since almost every lad in the 
 schools arid colleges, every man in the street, if 
 asked what he wished most to accomplish in 
 the world, would have answered, if he was 
 quite frank and honest : " I want to make a 
 fortune ; I want success ; I am looking for com 
 mercial, professional efficiency." But now the 
 tide has turned, has it not ? Lad and man alike 
 would answer today, for the most part, if they 
 were frank and honest : " I want to make my 
 life count for as much as it will; I want to 
 182
 
 THE CHARMED LIFE 183 
 
 make of myself the best product of a man I 
 can; I want development, efficiency, both for 
 my own good and the good of society. My 
 success will come, not in what I get for my 
 self, but the impress and the uplift I can 
 accomplish." At least, this latter position is 
 fast gaining ground. 
 
 Now what is the test of personal and social 
 efficiency? St. Paul gives us a picture of the 
 fruits of these. He walks through the or 
 chard of life and he tells us that the fruits of 
 the Spirit, evidences of the presence of God 
 in the lives of men, are love, joy, peace, long- 
 suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 
 meekness, temperance. These are the manifes 
 tations of a life rooted and grounded in the 
 soil of the Eternal. By their fruits ye shall 
 know them. Look at these fruits : 
 
 Love is the greatest thing in the world. 
 Love is not a gentle, optimistic, diffusive good 
 will to all. There are those who have never 
 made an enemy never made anything. But 
 love is active, aggressive, positive. Love is 
 the good physician who in emergency sleeps, if 
 he sleeps at all, with one ear open for the tele 
 phone-call of need; love is the soft- footed, firm- 
 handed, cool-headed nurse who ministers at the 
 bed of agony; love is the daring servant of the 
 people and the living God who goes into office
 
 184 THE CHARMED LIFE 
 
 fearing and observing the face of no man, into 
 the court room or the campaign, into the mar 
 ket or the manufactory, into the stockyards or 
 the store, telling the truth, dealing honestly, 
 and looking out for others benefit and not his 
 own alone. Are not the finest lines in Tenny 
 son these two : 
 
 " Love took up the harp of life and smote on all its chords 
 
 with might, 
 
 Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passed in 
 music out of sight." 
 
 Joy and peace, two twin fruits, worthy of a 
 Burbank s best. These come to him who has 
 given the spirit of God free-play within him. 
 " My peace I leave with you, my joy I give 
 unto you," said Jesus. Does this mean that 
 His follower shall not suffer, fail, be defeated, 
 martyred, die ? Ask the twelve. No, it means 
 that no power outside a man s self can destroy 
 his equanimity, his poise, his calm of soul. The 
 Raven of black hopelessness, that sits upon the 
 pallid bust of Pallas in a man s soul, comes 
 never from without but from within. If 
 
 " His eyes have all the seeming 
 Of a demon, that is dreaming; 
 And the lamplight o er him streaming 
 Casts his shadow on the floor; 
 And my soul from out that shadow 
 That lies floating on the floor 
 Shall be lifted nevermore"
 
 THE CHARMED LIFE 185 
 
 then be assured, it is myself and not my fate, 
 my maker, my destiny that are in fault. We 
 were made for joy and peace; and if we may 
 not always have joy, then by the grace of God 
 we may always have peace. 
 
 Long-suffering, a mellow, a rich fruit; rare, 
 and grown under the glass of careful effort and 
 discipline, very graceful and beautifully tinted. 
 
 Kindness, a most luscious and genial variety, 
 indigenous in all climates, increases very 
 rapidly, when once it has taken root; and is 
 far more widely disseminated than most per 
 sons realize. 
 
 Goodness, by no means an insipid, tasteless 
 fruit, but very hardy, enduring frosts and 
 storms, heat and blight. Some think it is 
 negative; that it never gets anywhere nor ac 
 complishes much. People sometimes say of a 
 man, " He s a good man a very good man 
 but he never does much of anything, nor is 
 of much force." It is false. He is not good 
 unless he is good for something. One who 
 really is a very good man, for such a one 
 " peradventure some would even dare to die." 
 
 Faithfulness. This does not mean full of 
 faith, belief, trust. It means full of devotion 
 to duty, the full discharge of obligation to busi 
 ness, to position, to all one s relations. It gets 
 up early and never retires till the day s stint
 
 186 THE CHARMED LIFE 
 
 is all complete. It does its task so well that it 
 could not do that task better. 
 
 Meekness. Surely here is a namby-pamby, 
 milk-and-water, negative fruit, if any. But 
 hardly. Who was the meekest man in the Old 
 Testament? Moses. Look at him smashing 
 the Tables of the Law! See him as Michel 
 angelo conceived him. Rather rugged, is he 
 not? Who was the meekest man in the New 
 Testament? Jesus. Look upon Him duelling 
 with Pharisees and lawyers and defeating them. 
 Look at Him before Pilate He is the most 
 fearless of men. No, meekness is selflessness ; 
 it thinks not of self; that is why it inherits the 
 earth. The man who wants the earth never 
 can get it ; the man who does not want it often 
 does get it. 
 
 Temperance. We limit this word unfortu 
 nately to one only connotation. But there are 
 not only those drunk with wine, but also those 
 drunk with speech, work, play, emotion, nerves, 
 strain, fear, anxiety, ambition, a thousand ex 
 cesses. This fruit is a specific for inebriety; 
 but the course of treatment is long, and must 
 be patiently sustained. 
 
 At the close of this suggestive catalogue of 
 St. Paul s is added the little clause, just as 
 suggestive : " Against such there is no law." 
 Rather odd, is it not? Against such as bear
 
 THE CHARMED LIFE 187 
 
 these fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, long- 
 suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 
 meekness, temperance, against such there is 
 no law! Let us look into this. 
 
 We have all read in the stories of childhood, 
 or in the myths of ancient peoples, the legend 
 of the charmed life. It was supposed that 
 there were some who bore about with them an 
 amulet, some hidden token, or about whom had 
 been woven some secret spell that was a charm 
 against all evil and all danger. Achilles, you 
 remember, could be wounded in but one small 
 portion of his frame. Macbeth thought that he 
 bore a charmed existence. Joan of Arc was 
 considered invincible and invulnerable; no ar 
 row and no catapult could harm her. Colonel 
 George Washington in the French and Indian 
 wars was supposed, by his enemies, to bear a 
 charmed life; for they repeatedly took deadly 
 aim at him, and could never pierce him; so 
 finally they ceased to fire upon him, saying 
 that he could not be slain. 
 
 In these old folklore legends there were sup 
 posed to be certain times and seasons espe 
 cially hallowed when men were safe from bale 
 ful influence of spirit, of devil, of hostile force 
 of any kind. And even so late as Shakespeare 
 we find Marcellus, in " Hamlet," on the plat 
 form at Elsinore, declaring :
 
 188 THE CHARMED LIFE 
 
 " Some say that ever gainst that season comes 
 Wherein our Saviour s birth is celebrated, 
 The bird of dawning singeth all night long; 
 And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad, 
 The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike, 
 No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, 
 So hallowed and so gracious is the time." 
 
 There is truth in this old conception of the 
 charmed life, God s own truth, and it can 
 be put into modern scientific terms ; indeed, St. 
 Paul does so put it in this little clause : Against 
 such as bear the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, 
 peace, long-suffering, and the rest against 
 such there is no law. 
 
 We live in an age of law and consciousness 
 of law. In fact, law has had its fascination 
 for great thinkers in all times, from Aristotle 
 and St. Paul on down to Huxley and Darwin 
 and the scientists of today. But in no age has 
 the consciousness of law been so universal 
 among the common people as it is today. We 
 know that we live under the influence, under 
 the guardianship, of law, surrounded and 
 hedged in and dominated by law. We know 
 there is no escape from it. We know that it is 
 either with us or against us, according to our 
 own attitude. 
 
 Some of us never can forget with what won 
 der and awe, yes, with what terror and dread, 
 we learned for the first time from our big
 
 THE CHARMED LIFE 189 
 
 brothers, who, we supposed, knew everything 
 in the world, that the atmosphere was pressing 
 upon our small frames fifteen pounds to the 
 square inch. Think of it! Fifteen pounds 
 upon every inch of one s little figure. Why was 
 it that we were not crushed ? Why did we not 
 collapse? Why did we not disappear into the 
 ground ? It was a long time before we under 
 stood that the atmosphere was pressing upon 
 all sides alike, inside and outside, above and 
 below, in front and behind; and that it was 
 that steadfast pressure of the air that was for 
 us, and not against us, that enabled us to stand 
 up and walk, to run and play and live. So the 
 existence of law, as at first we become in 
 tensely conscious of it, seems overpowering, 
 awe-inspiring, and terror-striking; but as we 
 grow accustomed to it, we begin to appre 
 ciate and to understand that law is with us, 
 and not against us, so long as we are law- 
 abiding. 
 
 Now, what is the origin of law ? It is in the 
 mind of God. Man never made a law in the 
 history of his being. Man only discovers, finds 
 the law. The law is forever and eternally in 
 the mind and heart of God. Law is God, God 
 is law. We like to say that God is love. Yes, 
 God is the law of love, and no less law for 
 being love. And never for a moment do w$
 
 190 THE CHARMED LIFE 
 
 escape from the presence and the operation of 
 His law. It is with us all the time. 
 
 Man never made, for example, a natural 
 law ; he only discovers it. In his laboratory or 
 in his play with the forces of nature, he dis 
 covers that the same cause operating always 
 in the same way produces the same effect ; and 
 when he observes it a hundred times, or a thou 
 sand times, and there has been no variation 
 from the same sequence of events, he writes it 
 down in a text-book or in his laboratory report 
 and publishes it to the world as a law. He has 
 not made any law. He has simply found out 
 a law. 
 
 The same thing is true with reference to 
 statutory law. Men have observed in the 
 course of centuries and millenniums that under 
 certain circumstances, given certain conditions, 
 men will always act toward each other in cer 
 tain ways, if they act right. Consequently 
 men have come to write down in their statute 
 books that men under certain circumstances, 
 given certain conditions, shall always act so 
 toward each other; and they call it a law. 
 Man has not made the law. He has simply 
 discovered the law of being, of humanity, the 
 law of the moral life. It was Kant, the 
 philosopher, who once declared : " Two things 
 fill me with awe ; the starry heavens above, and
 
 THE CHARMED LIFE 191 
 
 within, the moral law." His discovery and 
 contemplation of these two realms of law, out 
 side and inside of him, impressed his soul with 
 wonder and awe. 
 
 A man, then, who is law-abiding, whether 
 toward nature or toward his fellow-man, need 
 have no terror of the law; he need not be 
 afraid of it. 
 
 One time in a summer cottage the great 
 Thomas Edison was spending his vacation by 
 a certain lake. Every morning from the 
 veranda next door one could look out upon his 
 upper porch and see him sitting there behind 
 the screen of vines, hidden from the passersby 
 going along the boardwalk to and from the 
 water, but easily visible to those upon either 
 side; sitting with his great domed head upon 
 his hands, in meditation, in thought, or in 
 rest. Mentally take off your hat to him every 
 day! Better bare your head before him than 
 before the Tsar of All the Russias, Kaiser 
 Wilhelm of Germany, or even King Albert of 
 little Belgium, because he is a greater potentate, 
 a greater benefactor. 
 
 They say Thomas Edison can stand in his 
 laboratory, his great laboratory, his little 
 laboratory, and there, carefully insulated, can 
 turn loose all round him the force of the elec 
 tric storm. There is the jagged lightning;
 
 192 THE CHARMED LIFE 
 
 there is the roll of thunder; and he, at the 
 center, plays with it in a sense which Ben 
 Franklin never dreamed of, plays with the 
 storm, safe and unharmed, invulnerable, bear 
 ing the charmed life because he knows the 
 law, and puts himself at the point of safety 
 within the law. 
 
 Now, the same thing is true with regard to 
 the moral law. There are eminent jurists, no 
 doubt, without a knowledge of all the laws 
 that are on the statute hooks of their native 
 States. But they are not afraid of the law. 
 Those men, knowing that ignorance of the law 
 excuses no man, either in nature or society, 
 sit in their office chairs or walk the streets 
 serene and comfortable and unafraid. Why? 
 They are ignorant of part of the law but not 
 afraid, because they know that their lives are 
 in harmony with the spirit of the law, and the 
 law is never a terror to good works. But out 
 yonder along the railroad tracks, there some 
 where in the thickets and forests, yonder in 
 the rookeries and slums of the great cities, are 
 men, cringing and afraid, starting at their 
 shadows, uneasy in their sleep and dreams, in 
 terror constantly because they know they have 
 outraged the law. So a man may carry about 
 with him some secret purpose, intent, ambition, 
 cherish some hidden sin within his moral fibre,
 
 THE CHARMED LIFE 193 
 
 which, like a foreign substance in the flesh, like 
 an organism working in the body, creates civil 
 war. Whenever a hostile outside substance 
 cornes into this body of ours, immediately the 
 corpuscles of the blood are sent, like an army, 
 to that point; and there a siege begins. The 
 fight is internecine, it is inexorable, it is un 
 ending, until either the foreign substance is 
 expelled or the patient dies. That is precisely 
 the attitude in which the offender against his 
 own soul stands. The war is on; the foreign 
 substance is there ; and death or freedom must 
 ensue. Either the will must be bowed until 
 it is in harmony with the law, or else the 
 inevitable consequences of the violation of the 
 law must fall. 
 
 There are two or three laws which apply to 
 our inner life, for it is up to that plane that 
 we must lead our thought, which we may 
 well consider. 
 
 There is a law, for example, which St. Paul 
 calls the law of our members. Says he : "I 
 find a law within me, in my body, fighting 
 against the law of my mind, so that what I 
 would do that I cannot, and what I would not 
 that I do." 
 
 We saw this beautifully illustrated some 
 years since at the World s Fair in Chicago. 
 No doubt most of us saw the same group of
 
 194 THE CHARMED LIFE 
 
 statuary; for either in plaster, or in photo 
 graphic reproduction, it was scattered all over 
 the country. Before that group crowds all the 
 while were standing in the course of that ex 
 position. There were two beautiful nude 
 figures wrestling with each other. Their mus 
 cles stood out like bands of steel, the nerves 
 and sinews like whipcords on their breasts. 
 Great beads of perspiration coursed down their 
 faces. One was above and one was beneath. 
 The one above seemed to be pressing the one 
 beneath down into the ground. Underneath 
 was written : " I feel two natures struggling 
 within me." The appeal of that group is uni 
 versal, because we all feel the two natures 
 struggling within us. Identical in outward ap 
 pearance, they both are we ; and which of them 
 is gaining the victory, our spirit or our flesh, 
 is hidden from all but God to know. 
 
 Yet this universal conflict, this unending 
 battle which is going on within each of us, can 
 have no terror for the man whose life is hidden 
 with Christ in God. Whoso brings forth the 
 fruits of the spirit, love, joy, peace, long- 
 suffering, and the rest, against such there is 
 no law. The laws of this frame with all that 
 they would lead us to, with the frailties of it, 
 with its weaknesses, with its constantly degen 
 erating character after we have reached the
 
 THE CHARMED LIFE 195 
 
 meridian of life, with all the care that we ex 
 pend upon it, and the anxiety that it is to us, 
 all the time growing grayer, and shrivelling and 
 withering toward the ground, can have no 
 terror for the man whose soul is stayed on God. 
 For, after all, it is not the things of the flesh, 
 it is not the material elements by which we are 
 surrounded, it is the inward man that supplies 
 the real life of men. If his thoughts be given 
 to his upper nature, if he cultivates within him 
 whatever is true and beautiful and lovely and 
 of good report, man need never fear for the 
 decay nor the failure nor the fall of the frame. 
 
 And once again, there is another and more 
 spiritual law, for when the Christian passes 
 beyond the childhood of his days in Christ, he 
 wrestles little with his members. There is the 
 law of the mind, which says, he who thinks 
 shall doubt. Early in his religious experience, 
 the young Christian becomes conscious of that 
 law. The more he learns the more he realizes 
 that his old and trusted conceptions are open 
 to doubt and to question. If this is an age of 
 law, it is also an age of doubt. Says Henry 
 van Dyke : 
 
 " Its coat of arms is an interrogation point, 
 rampant, above three bishops dormant, and its 
 motto is Query." 
 
 If so, it is a hopeful sign of the times, for the.
 
 196 THE CHARMED LIFE 
 
 man who does not doubt, does not think. The 
 man who has his mind made up on all terres 
 trial and celestial things is the man who has no 
 mind that is worth making up at all. He is fos 
 silized and crystallized. The mind that rests 
 content upon tradition handed down from 
 father and from grandfather, from teacher 
 and from professor, is degenerating toward 
 decay; while every man who for himself ex 
 plores the foundations of his intellectual 
 beliefs, must begin to question and to doubt. 
 
 The present writer one day drove up to a 
 beautiful old Kentucky home, with the owner 
 of it, through a great bluegrass pasture. Off 
 to the right was an Indian mound, nobody 
 knows how old. At the dinner-table that day 
 the following conversation occurred: 
 
 "Have you ever dug into that mound?" 
 This from the guest. 
 
 " No." This, laconically, from the host. 
 
 " It would be very interesting to know what 
 is inside of it. You might find something very 
 rare, very valuable, a contribution to our his 
 torical knowledge. If you did not care for the 
 findings, doubtless the University museum 
 would be very glad of them." 
 
 No word from the host. After a pause, the 
 guest opened fire again: 
 
 " Don t you intend ever to open it ? "
 
 THE CHARMED LIFE 197 
 
 " No." 
 
 " May I ask why not ? " 
 
 " Well, my father didn t open it. His father 
 didn t open it. My great-grandfather didn t 
 open it. And I ain t goin to open it." 
 
 That is Kentucky for you ! And perhaps it 
 is also Puritan Massachusetts, Knickerbocker 
 New York, Cavalier Virginia, and many an 
 other locality that is neither Puritan, nor 
 Knickerbocker, nor Cavalier. 
 
 Prof. William James has said that the trou 
 ble with the American people is that they do 
 not think ; and that what they need is not more 
 faith, more assurance, more certainty, but more 
 doubt, more inquiry, more thought. He quotes 
 the little boy s definition, " Faith is when you 
 believe something that you know ain t so." It 
 is a far greater crime against the God-given 
 mind of man to try to believe something that 
 you are conscious is not true, than it is openly 
 to say, " I do not believe it, I won t believe it." 
 " There lives more faith in honest doubt, be 
 lieve me, than in half the creeds," said Tenny 
 son. And then he sanely adds: 
 
 " Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, 
 And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith ! " 
 
 So it is a hopeful sign when a young person, 
 or an old person for that matter, begins to say,
 
 198 THE CHARMED LIFE 
 
 " I doubt this," " I doubt that," " I want to 
 investigate that." 
 
 This age is an age which does not stop short 
 at the throne of God itself; but asking ques 
 tions of His world, of His sunshine, of His 
 mountains, of His stars, and of His living 
 creatures, comes to the foot of the great white 
 throne itself, and says to God : " What art 
 Thou?" "Who art Thou?" "What am I?" 
 and " Why hast Thou made me? " 
 
 There was one of the disciples who is 
 proverbially called the doubter. After Jesus 
 resurrection he it was who would not believe, 
 until he had put his finger into the print of 
 the nails and thrust his hand into the wound 
 of the spear in His side. And Jesus said to 
 him, " Come, Thomas, reach forth thy finger 
 and thy hand, and be not faithless, but believ 
 ing." He spoke with infinite tenderness and 
 appreciation to Thomas, the skeptic. On a 
 certain occasion, farther back in His life, Jesus 
 had turned His face to go up to the city of 
 Jerusalem, and His disciples said to Him: 
 " Master, if you go up to the city at this time 
 you will pay for it with your life. You know 
 that the Pharisees are lying in wait for you to 
 take you." But He set His face like flint to 
 go to the city of Jerusalem. Then said 
 Thomas, " Come, let us also go with Him,
 
 THE CHARMED LIFE 199 
 
 that we may die with Him." Commend me to 
 that kind of skeptic, the man who does not 
 understand his Lord, the man to whom Jesus 
 Christ is a mystery that he never will solve, 
 and knows he never will solve ; yet who so loves 
 Jesus Christ, that he says, " Come, let me go 
 with him, that I may die with him." Against 
 such there is no law; against a man who puts 
 his hand into the hand of Christ and gives his 
 will to the will of Christ, against him there is 
 no law of doubt that can prevail; His inquiry 
 will but lead him to the light, where he can cry 
 in the clearness and the splendor of his vision, 
 " My Lord and my God ! " He bears the 
 charmed life. 
 
 Then once more, there is the old, old law of 
 sorrow, as old as Job and older. Man that is 
 born of woman is of few days and full of 
 trouble. Man is born to evil as the sparks to 
 fly upward. Is there evil in the city and the 
 Lord hath not done it? Is there any life 
 lived under the blue that has not had its days 
 of grief and distress and pain? Sorrow is the 
 universal heritage of the race. It is a law, 
 just as inexorable as the laws of nature by 
 which we are hedged in and with which we are 
 surrounded. None of us escapes from it. 
 
 Sir Edwin Arnold, in his " Light of Asia," 
 tells how Buddha sleeps in his beautiful palace
 
 200 THE CHARMED LIFE 
 
 while silver-stringed lyres are placed in the 
 windows; so that the soft zephyrs of the night 
 can blow over them and lull to sleep the prince 
 and his consort and household. And this is 
 the message which comes over the silver 
 strings to the ears of the restless, uneasy 
 Buddha : 
 
 "We are the voices of the wandering wind, 
 Which moan for rest, and rest can never find; 
 Lo! as the wind is, so is mortal life: 
 A moan, a sigh, a sob, a ^torm, a strife." 
 
 Into each life some rain must fall, yes, and 
 some hail and some thunderbolts. Lives are 
 riven and torn all round us ; and nobody knows 
 when the lightning may strike him or his. 
 What shall we think and do in the face of this 
 inexorable law ? Make answer that against the 
 life that is hidden with Christ in God, the life 
 that brings forth the fruits of the Spirit, love, 
 joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, 
 faithfulness, meekness, temperance, there is no 
 law of sorrow that can prevail. We know it is 
 true. Over and over again have we seen lives 
 that have been given into His keeping bowed 
 and twisted and torn, as by the electric storm, 
 cleft as by the lightning, and still firm and 
 strong as if rooted into the rock. 
 
 There was a widow in my church in a cer-
 
 THE CHARMED LIFE 201 
 
 tain city, nearly twenty years ago, who had 
 three sons, and she toiled hard to send two of 
 these boys to college, as they wished to prepare 
 for the Christian ministry. They were at home 
 for the summertime, and they went out to 
 bathe in the little stream that flows upon three 
 sides of that inland town. The youngest boy, 
 unable to swim, suddenly got beyond his depth, 
 and cried out for help. The eldest brother 
 plunged in to aid him. Unable to swim, he also 
 began to cry for help. Then the second brother 
 leaped to the aid of the others. All three were 
 struggling in the water. Somehow, the little 
 one managed to scramble out; but the other 
 two, the college boys, were drowned. Her 
 pastor sat with that widow through the long 
 watches of that night as she rocked back and 
 forth in a white and tearless agony. He fol 
 lowed that double procession to the cemetery. 
 And again, as the weeks and months went by, 
 he watched the widow s face, as in her accus 
 tomed place she sat in the sanctuary. Her hair 
 visibly whitened; her face was deeper and 
 deeper lined with the furrows of her irrepa 
 rable loss; and yet it seemed to him as if that 
 face shone like the face of an angel. She is 
 living there yet, and the little fellow is now 
 preaching the gospel of the Son of God. 
 That is but one out of many instances that
 
 202 THE CHARMED LIFE 
 
 come under a pastor s observation in which 
 men and women are shaken by what seems un 
 bearable grief; and yet stand firm. A life that 
 is given in keeping to God, a life the will of 
 which flows in harmony with the will of God 
 you cannot obliterate, you cannot destroy that 
 life, for God made it, and it is eternal. Against 
 such there is no law in God s mind, nor out 
 of God s mind, which is the seat of all law, 
 that can prevail. We cannot know all the law. 
 We know very little about the law of God in 
 nature or in man. We are just beginning to 
 think His thoughts over after Him. We know 
 very little of the statutory law upon the books 
 of the nations and in the usages of men. We 
 know very little of the moral law within us. 
 We are just learning the A B C s of the in 
 variable, unchangeable law that the Hebrews 
 wrote in stone. We know very little about the 
 laws of our members, the laws of our mind, 
 and the laws of the creation. But we do know 
 this, that as sure as God lives He has made no 
 law that is against us, if our wills but flow in 
 harmony with His own. Ignorance of the law 
 may excuse none, but if the man s will be 
 right, the law is with him, and not against 
 him he bears the Charmed Life.
 
 IX 
 
 HOW ARE THE SCRIPTURES IN 
 SPIRED? 
 
 THIS rapid attempt at a resume of the 
 popular thought of our time would 
 not be halfway complete without some 
 attention paid to the place of the Bible in mod 
 ern thought. The average man does not read 
 the book as much as he formerly did ; but never 
 theless he is thinking about it some, is jealous 
 for it. 
 
 We may well long for the old days when our 
 fathers under the shade of the trees, by the 
 furrows at noon, took out their little dog 
 eared Testaments, and snatched a few hasty 
 passages, or by the open fire at night reached 
 down the great old family Bible and read to 
 the household, expounded, and pondered it. 
 We have not their incentive controversy. We 
 should hardly desire the restoration of the lat 
 ter, but we should greatly profit by the return 
 of the Book. The first-best place for the Bible 
 is in the soul, the next in the mind, the next in 
 the pocket. 
 
 203
 
 204 SCRIPTURES INSPIRED 
 
 But this age, so accustomed to ask questions, 
 has been interrogative about the Bible; it has 
 almost if not quite reached its conclusion ; per 
 haps it may be worth while to outline what it 
 has been thinking and still is thinking con 
 cerning this important issue. 
 
 Some twenty-odd years ago in the Boston 
 theater one might have heard Col. Robert Inger- 
 soll, as he stepped to the front of the platform, 
 with that peculiar nervous gesture of his, say, 
 " Since nobody else will tell the truth about 
 the Bible, I m going to tell it ! " when, at that 
 very moment, scarce three miles away, men 
 were living in an institution, giving days and 
 nights years their lives to finding out the 
 truth about the Bible, and telling and publish 
 ing it. He was surrounded with pulpits where 
 ministers, unafraid, were speaking the truth 
 as they saw it, concerning the Bible, and all 
 religious subjects. Colonel Ingersoll was 
 merely taking the results of the then new 
 critical study, and taking them very super 
 ficially, from the institutions of learning, and 
 distorting and twisting them to suit the pur 
 poses which he had in hand. He was no 
 scholar; he was simply an accomplished 
 speaker. 
 
 There is no earthly reason why any one 
 should not tell the truth about the Bible, as
 
 SCRIPTURES INSPIRED 205 
 
 far as he sees it and knows it, with just as 
 much freedom as Colonel Ingersoll or any ma 
 terialist or rationalist whomsoever. We have 
 the utmost liberty to speak the truth without 
 reservation or equivocation, confident in the 
 reception of the truth, as it is given us to see 
 the truth, in the spirit in which it is spoken. 
 The truth is mighty, and will prevail; and no 
 body ever needs to fear the truth. Sometimes 
 it is shadowed and shaded and obscured, but 
 it comes to the light, ultimately; and truth, 
 and truth alone, can triumph. Falsehood al 
 ways dies. 
 
 The word " inspiration " is taken from two 
 Latin words which mean " to breathe into " ; 
 and when we speak of an inspired document, 
 we mean that the breath of divinity has been 
 breathed into it ; just as the breath of God was 
 breathed into the clay, and it became a liv 
 ing soul. Any way you care to put it by 
 evolution or by whatever process man came 
 into being the divine breath was breathed 
 into him and he became a living soul. 
 Now, when the truth is breathed into a book, 
 it becomes " inspired." It is inspired by 
 the inbreathing of the Spirit of God. So 
 much for the etymology and definition of the 
 word. 
 
 Now, in just what fashion are these books
 
 206 SCRIPTURES INSPIRED 
 
 of the Scripture, so-called, breathed into, in 
 spired with the breath of God? 
 
 There have been three answers made to that 
 question. There is, first, the answer that these 
 books were dictated by God; that they are the 
 result of dictation to an amanuensis, or to 
 amanuenses. There is the second answer, that 
 these books are just like any other books, in 
 spired as any other books are inspired, and only 
 so inspired. There is the third answer, that 
 these books are peculiarly inspired, differently 
 from any other books; more intensely; more 
 profoundly; inspired in a degree in which no 
 other books in the world have ever been in 
 spired. Those are the three possible positions 
 that may be assumed with regard to the in 
 spiration of Sacred Scripture. 
 
 First of all, the theory of dictation. It is, 
 that God used men, as channels through whom 
 should flow His words; that these amanuenses 
 wrote down what God put into their hearts to 
 write ; in other words, that God made a revela 
 tion by means of the pens of certain men, or 
 by means of the tongues of certain men, and 
 that revelation has been handed down to us 
 through the centuries, in this written form. 
 The Book of Mormon is supposed so to have 
 been handed down. It was found, we are told, 
 by Joseph Smith, the prophet, hidden away in
 
 SCRIPTURES INSPIRED 207 
 
 the woods, buried in the earth, and printed 
 upon gold leaves. It was dictated, signed, 
 sealed and delivered, once and for all, in the 
 form in which he found it. Such was his 
 conception of the revelation of God, contained 
 in his sacred book. 
 
 How does this idea of the revelation of 
 our Scriptures bear the tests? How did this 
 theory come to arise? Possibly we shall get 
 some answer, through tracing its origin in his 
 tory. The theory is only about four centuries 
 old. It originated in the sixteenth century, in 
 the time of the Reformation. The protestants 
 against the Catholic Church felt that they must 
 have some infallible authority which they could 
 erect over against the infallible authority of 
 the Church and the pope ; consequently, gradu 
 ally, in the development of Protestantism, the 
 Bible was taken as the only possible infallible 
 authority that could be found to oppose the 
 pope and the Church. Martin Luther, him 
 self, did not hold to the theory of the inerrancy 
 of Scripture. He speaks, for instance, of the 
 Epistle of St. James as " an epistle of straw 
 a rope of sand," and he speaks of the Galatian 
 letter, on the other hand, as his " wife," his 
 Katherine von Bora, because he kept it by him 
 night and day. But the reformers, gradually,
 
 208 SCRIPTURES INSPIRED 
 
 since the time of Luther, have erected the 
 Bible to its seat of infallible authority. 
 
 Now, God may have given us the Bible in 
 that way ; but it does not seem entirely reason 
 able to the modern mind that He did. The fact 
 is, it is doubtful if a reader of this page believes 
 in the dictation-theory of the origin of Sacred 
 Scripture. The individual would say : " No, 
 I do not believe it, just in that way. I think 
 the Book is infallible, but not dictated." 
 Where can you draw the line of distinction, 
 then, between the two? If it is infallible, every 
 word of it, every dotting of every " i," and 
 every crossing of every " t," must be infallible. 
 It, then, must be dictated, authorized word by 
 word, letter by letter, from God ; otherwise the 
 theory of infallibility must crumble to the 
 ground. That is the logic of the situation. 
 And then even if men do not agree that they 
 believe in the theory of dictation, they never 
 theless act as if they believed so, when they 
 say : " This and this is true, because I find it in 
 the Bible. So and so is the case, because the 
 Bible says so. I must have a thus-saith-the- 
 Lord, or I will not do this or that. I must 
 have a prescription in the Book, itself, or I 
 will not have an organ in the church. I must 
 find missionary societies spoken of in actual 
 words in the New Testament, or there shall be
 
 SCRIPTURES INSPIRED 209 
 
 no missionary organization in the church. The 
 Bible says nothing about violins, therefore we 
 cannot have a violin obligato played in our 
 choir." You see where the logic of that atti 
 tude brings us. We must have exact specifica 
 tions for everything, if we are going to hold 
 to the theory of infallibility. 
 
 But God does not work in that way, does 
 He? If He had wanted to, no doubt, He 
 could have put His finger down upon the plains 
 of Colorado, and there, instead of the rough 
 and jagged Rocky Mountains, He could have 
 made beautiful, symmetrical pyramids, with 
 steps adapted to the feet of man, or with 
 spiral roadways, adapted to the railroads and 
 the automobiles of man. He could have made 
 those pyramids, just as polished and as regular 
 as the pyramids of Cheops and Kephren. He 
 could have burrowed through them, if He cared 
 to, channels through which the traffic of man 
 could have passed so much more easily than it 
 can pass over those jagged, inaccessible sum 
 mits. If God had cared to, He could have 
 made the water flow uphill, so that it could 
 be delivered in the third stories of our houses, 
 without difficulty and without effort upon our 
 part. But He does not work against His law 
 of gravitation. If God cared to, He could have 
 painted the sky, day and night, with all the
 
 210 SCRIPTURES INSPIRED 
 
 roseate colors with which He painted it at six 
 o clock yesterday afternoon, when He hung the 
 evening star in the west. If He had cared 
 to, what could He not have done? But, in 
 stead of that, He has given us a tough world, a 
 hard world, a rugged and a rocky world, a 
 world dominated by law, with the obstinacy 
 of Nature, and with the apparently futile ef 
 forts of mankind dashing themselves to pieces 
 against the elements of His law. He has 
 chosen that method by which to refine and to 
 polish and to toughen and to develop man ; and, 
 in somewhat the same fashion, perhaps He has 
 put against the mind of man problems to 
 solve, difficulties to unravel, perplexities to en 
 dure, and enemies to conquer. Truth comes 
 only by effort. Truth handed down to us, 
 signed, sealed and delivered, is milk to the 
 babe not food to the man. The childhood of 
 the race and the childhood of the human intel 
 lect may often demand infallible guides; but 
 not so the full-grown race of men. 
 
 The theory of the infallibility of the Sacred 
 Scriptures, the theory of dictation, of the re 
 formers, has been valuable in the world. It 
 has done its work. It has helped to preserve 
 many of the institutions and many of the 
 ideals contained within the Book. In the 
 same fashion, the infallibility of the Church
 
 SCRIPTURES INSPIRED 211 
 
 and of the pope has served a valuable purpose 
 in the world, for it held together, during the 
 Dark Ages, the nucleus of Christianity and the 
 Kingdom of God; -it preserved these selfsame 
 Scriptures; continued, in the mass, the memo 
 rial feast of the Last Supper of Our Lord. 
 Both these infallibilities have had their day, 
 
 " Have had their day, and ceased to be, 
 They are but broken lights of Thee, 
 And Thou, oh Lord, art more than they." 
 
 It is just as evident, upon careful scrutiny of 
 the facts concerning these Scriptures, that God 
 did not follow the pyramidal form of dicta 
 tion, as it is upon careful scrutiny of Nature 
 that God did not give the world to us just 
 simply to ease our paths. 
 
 What are some of these facts? First, then, 
 with regard to the canon. The Scriptures did 
 not exist in the form and number in which we 
 have them now, until the fourth century after 
 Christ. The number of books to be gathered 
 into the Old Testament was not determined 
 until the end of the first Christian century; and 
 the number of books to be gathered into the 
 New was not determined until our Lord had 
 passed from the earth nearly four hundred 
 years. 
 
 In every synagogue-chest was a number of
 
 212 SCRIPTURES INSPIRED 
 
 rolls, each containing one book of the Old 
 Testament. Now one was used, now another. 
 These were of varying value, and uncertain 
 status; and custom gradually set its seal upon 
 the chosen bool^s. Just why a love-poem like 
 the Song of Solomon was included, and a 
 heroic history like that of the Maccabees was 
 left out, is difficult to determine. 
 
 In like manner, in every early Christian 
 church, there was a number of rolls, each a 
 gospel, or an epistle, or an apocalypse. One 
 church possessed one or more gospels, another 
 a different one or different ones; one had cer 
 tain of Paul s epistles, another had others ; one 
 had the letter of St. James, another that of 
 St. Barnabas; one had the revelation of St. 
 John, another that of Enoch. These were not 
 all collected, sifted, and compounded into the 
 present collection until late in the fourth cen 
 tury after Christ. Undoubtedly it is true that, 
 in the case of the Christian Scriptures, the 
 selection was wisely made ; though it is a great 
 pity that at least one of Paul s letters was al 
 lowed to perish. 
 
 Again, the text of the books is still open to 
 considerable question; and doubtless it will 
 never be finally and definitely determined. The 
 inspired, infallible dictated book what is it? 
 The King James Version? Is it the Revised
 
 SCRIPTURES INSPIRED 213 
 
 Version? Is it the Westcott and Hort Greek 
 Testament? Or is it the Tischendorf Greek 
 Testament? Is it Wycliffe s Bible? Tindal s 
 Bible? Luther s Bible? Whose Bible is it 
 that is to be the final, absolute, infallible, 
 dictated authority? There are no manuscripts 
 of the New Testament older than the fourth 
 century after Christ, and which one of the 
 manuscripts for they differ in their readings 
 is to be the final and infallible, dictated 
 manuscript, handed down from God? Is it to 
 be the Codex Sinaiticus, the one that Tischen 
 dorf found in the monastery of Sinai? Or, is 
 it to be the Alexandrian manuscript? Or, is 
 it to be the Vatican manuscript, in the Vatican 
 library? Is it to be one of those three great 
 capital manuscripts ? Or, is it to be one of the 
 one hundred and twenty or so cursive, run 
 ning-hand manuscripts? Which is the final 
 text? Experts cannot tell. The most learned 
 men that have given their lives to this question 
 of the text of the New Testament differ ; their 
 readings do not agree. 
 
 No, that apparently is not God s way of 
 working. He does not seem to work by pyra 
 mids, but mountains. He does not work by 
 geometrical designs. He does not work by up 
 setting laws. He " works in a mysterious way, 
 His wonders to perform." He takes the mind
 
 214. SCRIPTURES INSPIRED 
 
 of man and uses it for all that it is worth to 
 develop the soul of man that is within. 
 
 Now, as to the second idea of inspiration. 
 Men, swinging away from bondage to a con 
 ception like that of the dictated Bible a bond 
 age which, after all, puts a burden upon the 
 soul of man that neither we nor our fathers 
 could bear; a bondage from which he does 
 well who sets us free I say, swinging to the 
 opposite extreme, men say : " Why, the Bible is 
 no more inspired than any other book. It is 
 just like Shakespeare. It is just like Al Koran. 
 It is just like the sayings of Confucius. It is 
 like Goethe. It is like Milton. It is like 
 Dante. It is like Browning. It is inspired, as 
 these great writers are inspired, and only as 
 these great writers are inspired." We may 
 well believe in the inspiration of Shakespeare, 
 in the inspiration of Dante, in the inspira 
 tion of Goethe, and of the Koran, and of 
 Confucius. Shall we say that, when Shake 
 speare tells us " all the world s a stage, 
 and all the men and women merely play 
 ers," he is giving us no truth, handed down 
 to us from God? When Shakespeare pictures 
 for us Hamlet and his hesitancy, holding as 
 it were a mirror up to nature for so many of 
 us, shall we say that there is no truth of God 
 given to us by the great Bard of Avon ? When
 
 SCRIPTURES INSPIRED 215 
 
 Confucius gives us the Golden Rule five cen 
 turies before Jesus uttered it, shall we say that 
 Jesus was inspired when He declared it, and 
 Confucius was not? When the Koran keeps 
 hundreds of millions of Turks and Persians- 
 and Egyptians temperate, drinking no wine, 
 shall we say that the Koran has no inspira 
 tion in it? These books have divine truth in 
 them, messages from God to men. 
 
 There is, however, a double test by which the 
 profundity of inspiration can be sounded : How 
 much truth ? How much needed truth ? Those 
 two questions there is the test of inspira 
 tion, is it not? and the only test, and the final 
 test. 
 
 If it is true, it is of God. Wherever truth 
 is, it comes from God. Whoever finds truth 
 gets it from God, gives it to men, is the herald 
 of God, as the channel through which God s 
 spirit flows. Is it Winchell, with his geolog 
 ical hammer? Does he give truth? Then it 
 comes from God. Is it Darwin, with his bi 
 ological investigations? If he gives truth, it 
 comes from God. Is it the great dramatist, pic 
 turing a Shylock, a Portia, a Macbeth, a King 
 Lear? Does he give truth? It comes from 
 God. Is it Confucius teaching reverence for 
 age, kindliness to parents? It is just as true 
 as the commandment, " Thou shalt honor thy
 
 216 SCRIPTURES INSPIRED 
 
 father and thy mother." Wherever the truth 
 is, it is God s truth; and whencesoever the 
 truth comes, it comes from God ; and the ques 
 tion simply is, What is the quantity of truth? 
 What is the degree of truth ? Thus you test a 
 document as to its inspiration. 
 
 How much truth does Confucius give ? Does 
 he give enough to make a modern civilization ? 
 Does he give enough to make peace? Happi 
 ness? Does he give enough to cleanse the 
 gutters, and to send the streams of clear water, 
 to save and not to destroy the lives of men? 
 Does he give enough, in this scientific age, to 
 eradicate germs, micro-organisms, just as fast 
 as science teaches us to do it? If he gives 
 that truth that practical truth then it is di 
 rectly of God. But we find no documents, 
 anywhere, that give the amount of truth, and 
 needed truth, that we find in these books of 
 Sacred Scripture. Take all the scientists ; take 
 all the religionists; take all the philosophers, 
 the poets, and the litterateurs have they the 
 amount of truth, and the kind of truth, that the 
 soul of man is hungry and thirsty after, con 
 tained in the Sacred Scripture? If so, then 
 they are inspired just as these books are in 
 spired. If not, they are not. 
 
 Now, a rapid survey of these books. There 
 are, in the Old Testament, certain historical
 
 SCRIPTURES INSPIRED 217 
 
 books, giving us a beautiful and naive and 
 highly literary account of creation, that has not 
 been surpassed by Milton, or Dante, or Dar 
 win, or any of the rest; and then there follow 
 a set of laws, adapted to the age, admirably 
 adapted to the age, in which they were given, 
 some six centuries before Christ. Then there 
 comes devotional literature, psalms, Job, and 
 the like, that still have not been surpassed, as 
 the utterances of the soul striving to express 
 itself to God. Then, the sermons and orations 
 of great statesmen like Isaiah, and Jeremiah, 
 Amos, and Hosea, also adapted to the age in 
 which they were spoken, and the difficulties 
 under which the nation was then laboring. 
 
 Then, closing the book of the Old Testa 
 ment, which has been superseded, just as Jesus 
 closed the book in the Synagogue and sat 
 down to talk, and just as He said, over and 
 over, " Ye have heard that it hath been said 
 by them of old time, but, verily I say unto 
 you," here are the first four gospels; and is 
 there any literature in the world that could 
 take the place of them? The Epistles of St. 
 Paul, and the Acts of the Apostles can you 
 find the same amount of truth, and the truth 
 needed, anywhere else in the world, as in these 
 books? If you were placed upon a desert
 
 218 SCRIPTURES INSPIRED 
 
 island, to live the rest of your life as an Alex 
 ander Selkirk, what book would you choose to 
 go with you? Shakespeare? Very precious. 
 We love to turn his pages, before the fire on 
 winter nights, and go with his great characters, 
 stalking across the stage of the world. Would 
 it be Robert Louis Stevenson? appropriate 
 for a desert island. Dante? Beautiful. Would 
 it be Milton with his song " never yet attempted 
 in prose or rhyme " ? Not Milton. Could we 
 live and die with Al Koran? or with the classics 
 of Confucius? or with the songs of Veda? with 
 the Sankhya or Vedanta of India? None of 
 these. If you had to live alone; if you had 
 to die alone; if you had to front the hardness 
 of Nature alone; if you had to fight the rest 
 of the fight of life, unaided and alone; if you 
 had to die in the darkness, you would say, 
 " Give me these four books Matthew, Mark, 
 Luke, and John ! " And if you had to take one 
 of them, perhaps you would take John; and 
 would cling to it as to a life raft in a stormy 
 sea. What other book could you take, for life 
 and death? 
 
 The Bible is not inspired, then, just as 
 Shakespeare. There is not the same sort of 
 inspiration. This leads to the third possible 
 position, and that is, that these books are in 
 spired as other books are, but more so ; that the
 
 SCRIPTURES INSPIRED 219 
 
 difference is so great in degree that it amounts 
 to a difference in kind. 
 
 That is ground upon which our feet can 
 rest, and rest satisfactorily. It gives freedom, 
 and it gives assurance. It gives liberty to think 
 for one s self, and to move for one s self in 
 the world of spirit; and at the same time it 
 gives a rock upon which to stand. 
 
 Let us illustrate it in this way : All men are 
 divine, but Jesus is more divine than any man, 
 or all men. There is not a man so degraded 
 that has not the spark of divinity somewhere 
 in his soul. Underneath the callus of ma 
 terialism, of sordidness, of wickedness, of 
 shame and sinfulness, every man has at least a 
 divine spark. That much, this age firmly be 
 lieves. Sometimes that spark is fanned into a 
 flame, and we see men in whom divinity shines ; 
 men whose lives, whose actions, whose very 
 faces are aflame with the presence of God in 
 their souls. But we see no man so divine as 
 Jesus Christ. He is unique. He is in a class 
 all by himself. He is to us the picture of God, 
 the express revelation of the Father. He is so 
 divine as to be different in kind. We can, 
 then, speak of the divineness of man, but the 
 divinity of Christ. 
 
 Now, in precisely the same way there are, 
 of books that have any truth in them, with a
 
 220 SCRIPTURES INSPIRED 
 
 spark of inspiration, some books that are more 
 inspired than other books. The spark is some 
 times fanned into a rich, beautiful flame, and 
 they glow with the presence of God. But these 
 sacred books these Scriptures are so in 
 spired with such unique truth, and needed 
 truth, and so much truth and needed truth, 
 that their inspiration amounts to a difference in 
 kind. 
 
 Does that satisfy the mind ? Some one says, 
 then, immediately, "If that is the case, how 
 am I going to separate between truth and error 
 in a book which you confess is fallible?" 
 There will be no difficulty about that. We do 
 not go to these books to study astronomy; we 
 do not come here to study geology ; we do not 
 come to these books to study biology. For 
 these we go to scientists, to their laboratories, 
 and the latest pamphlets issued from the labora 
 tories. We come here after a certain kind of 
 truth; not after history, simply, but after the 
 truth that the hungry, thirsty soul needs the 
 truth that makes for righteousness. 
 
 There is no difficulty about the soul recog 
 nizing the truth, and dividing between what is 
 necessary and unnecessary truth, what is valu 
 able and valueless truth. We take, for ex 
 ample, the writings of St. Paul. Does the most 
 conservative modern churchman accept all of
 
 SCRIPTURES INSPIRED 221 
 
 them? Indubitably not. Even the man who 
 claims that the book is infallible, inspired, let 
 ter by letter, word by word, does not take the 
 writings of St. Paul at their face value, and 
 obey them. He lets his wife come to church 
 and sit beside him, without a veil across her 
 face, which St. Paul expressly forbade. He 
 lets his wife go to prayer meeting and stand 
 up and talk in prayer meeting, which St. Paul 
 expressly forbade. He goes and marries him 
 a wife, which St. Paul said was not an expedi 
 ent thing to do. St. Paul was writing for that 
 age. A Christian woman, surrounded by 
 veiled women, who should take away the veil 
 from off her face would have made herself 
 conspicuous and offensive in the community. 
 A Christian woman who should stand up in 
 the meetings of that day and talk would have 
 been an offence to all the heathen and the Jews 
 about her; and St. Paul forbade it. He ex 
 pected the second coming of our Lord so soon, 
 that he thought marriage inexpedient, both for 
 himself and for others. How, again, are we to 
 reconcile the fact that in his early letters Paul 
 urged the churches to prepare for the immedi 
 ate coming of the Lord, and in the later letters, 
 such as first and second Timothy, and Titus, 
 he had given up the expectation of the immedi 
 ate advent?
 
 222 SCRIPTURES INSPIRED 
 
 We should be, if obeying the letter of the 
 New Testament Scriptures, washing each 
 others feet today. It is just as expressly com 
 manded as Christian baptism or the Lord s 
 Supper. One cannot get around it ; for, on that 
 same last night in which he ordained the Lord s 
 Supper, our Saviour took a basin, and girded 
 Himself with a towel, and went from disciple 
 to disciple, and washed their feet; and He said, 
 "If your Lord and Master wash your feet, ye 
 also ought to wash one another s feet." The 
 literalist cannot get away from that. If we 
 are going to fulfil every iota of the commands 
 of our Lord Jesus Christ, let us join the sect 
 which washes feet, and go at it. 
 
 No, the mind can accept the truth, and the 
 needed truth; the mind can divide; the soul 
 of man recognizes the truth when he sees it, 
 and the truth when he needs it. The soul has 
 an infinite right to truth. The soul has a kin 
 ship for the truth. The soul knows the truth 
 when it meets it in the street, in the market, 
 in the home, in the forest, and in the field. 
 They truth and the soul belong together. 
 They rush together as the particles of mercury 
 upon a table run and flow one into the other. 
 The human soul is practically infallible, in its 
 recognition of the truth and the needed truth ; 
 and when you ask the question, " How am I to
 
 SCRIPTURES INSPIRED 223 
 
 draw the line between historical accuracy and 
 inaccuracy? How am I to know whether the 
 genealogy of Matthew is correct, or whether 
 the genealogy of Luke is correct?" you are 
 distrusting your own intellect; you are simply 
 saying to yourself, " I am helpless in the face 
 of apparent contradiction; I don t know what 
 to accept; I don t know what to do." Trust 
 yourself ! Trust your soul ! Trust your mind ! 
 Your mind and soul will recognize the truth 
 needed, and grasp it, and accept it. For other 
 things you need not care. 
 
 What is this truth that our souls need, that 
 we find here, and do not find in Confucius, nor 
 the Koran, nor the Vedantas, nor the Shake- 
 speares, nor the Dantes, nor the Miltons? It 
 is immortality and eternal life, brought to light 
 through Jesus Christ in His gospel ; it is salva 
 tion, redemption from sin and the weight of it 
 and the consciousness of it, that every one of 
 us bears; it is God manifest in the face of 
 Jesus Christ God, for whom the soul thirsts 
 as the hart pants for the water-brooks. It is 
 the love of God, taught by the Christ when 
 in the world. It is the fatherhood of God, 
 that Jesus and nobody else has ever taught. 
 It is the brotherhood of fellow-men, that Jesus 
 and nobody else has ever proclaimed. These 
 are the truths, and the needed truths, that this
 
 224 SCRIPTURES INSPIRED 
 
 book, and this book alone, brings. We can 
 not live, and we cannot die, without it! 
 
 It is a well-worn old story, that Walter 
 Scott, who himself had written so many beau 
 tiful songs and books, when at last his hour 
 came to die, and he knew it, said, " Son, bring 
 me the Book " ; and his son said, " What book, 
 father? Do you mean Homer?" "No." 
 "Do you mean Virgil?" "No." Scott loved 
 to read these ancient classics. " Do you mean 
 Shakespeare? " " No." ""What book, father? " 
 Scott said : " My son, there is only one Book. 
 Bring me The Book The Bible ! " And when 
 he got it, he put his head upon it. He could 
 not read it any more, but he laid his head upon 
 that book, to die. 
 
 It is for us to plant our feet upon that Book, 
 to live, to stand; it is for us to fold it to our 
 hearts to die.
 
 THE POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE 
 
 EVER the phrase "Endless Life" is 
 powerful; it divides humanity into two 
 opposing camps, one yearning for im 
 mortality, one desirous of the sleep that knows 
 no waking. Just as half the globe is bathed 
 in sunlight, and the other half covered with 
 night, so, roughly speaking, does half of the 
 human race desire and expect an endless life, 
 and the other half yearn for and look forward 
 to extinction. In general, the West looks for 
 life and the East hopes for death. And 
 whether 
 
 " East is East and West is West, 
 And never the twain shall meet, 
 Till earth and sky stand presently 
 At God s great judgment seat!" 
 
 is true or false; whether the two shall meet 
 and mingle in this present world or not; cer 
 tain it is that they are very far apart at this 
 hour regarding many things, not the least of 
 which is the question of the future life. There 
 
 225
 
 226 POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE 
 
 is considerable difference of opinion as to just 
 what is the teaching, for example, of Buddha 
 upon this subject; but the statements just made 
 are, nevertheless, fairly safe. 
 
 When St. Paul, on the Areopagus, reached, 
 in his discourse, the expression, " the resur 
 rection from the dead," his auditors would 
 listen no further; they laughed him out of 
 court; his message was snapped off like the 
 thread of fate. So repugnant was the idea of 
 resurrection to a Greek that he could not listen 
 with tolerance to one who set it forth. Buddha 
 taught millions of people that the passage 
 through life after life, in a long chain of 
 bondage to the flesh, might, by persistent virtue, 
 ultimately be terminated by absorption into 
 the infinite and the loss of personal identity. 
 This was the consummation devoutly to be 
 wished. So with many others of the Sacred 
 Teachers of the East. 
 
 On the other hand, for at least two thousand 
 years, the Western World has longed for life, 
 endless life; hoped for life, endless life. It 
 has felt its inability to prove that future ; and 
 at this hour there is no question upon which 
 the ordinary man is more doubtful and hesitant 
 and upon which he is so anxious for knowl 
 edge. In his hour of need, the hope reaches 
 him, and touches and kindles his heart. Mr.
 
 POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE 227 
 
 Ingersoll again, in the finest of the many fine 
 words he uttered, the little one minute speech 
 at his brother s burial in Washington, has this 
 to say : 
 
 " Life is a narrow vale between the cold and 
 barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in 
 vain to look beyond the heights, we cry aloud ; 
 and the only answer is the echo of our wail 
 ing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unre- 
 plying dead, there comes no word. But in the 
 night of death, hope sees a star, and listening 
 love can hear the rustle of a wing." 
 
 When death touched his own home, hope 
 and the star appeared. That hope was planted 
 by Him who spoke as man never spake; and 
 His words once uttered will not down. 
 
 Half the fear of death is due to the law of 
 self-preservation. We are made to save our 
 lives and not to throw them away. If this in 
 stinct were not in us, we should, too often, our 
 quietus make with a bare bodkin. Dr. Reif- 
 snider, the president of St. Paul s College in 
 Tokio, is authority for the statement, quoted in 
 the Associated Press, that five per cent of the 
 Japanese students today are committing sui 
 cide. One college is located near a cataract and 
 one near a crater. Guards are kept constantly 
 about these, and still the young men slip past 
 the military cordon, and throw themselves over
 
 228 POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE 
 
 the one or into the other. Five per cent! 
 Fancy the furore if this should take place in 
 America! Five per cent of the students of a 
 single great State University would be one 
 hundred and fifty to three hundred a year. 
 Five per cent in all America would be possibly 
 ten thousand. Half an army corps of young 
 officers not enlisted men! The president of 
 St. Paul s should be good authority; and he 
 claims that this awful sacrifice of precious life 
 is due to the loss of all religious belief. Even 
 Buddhism would hold out hope enough to pre 
 vent this destruction, but Buddhism is fast 
 losing in Japan. It must be deep hopelessness, 
 indeed, that thus can overcome the inherent, 
 natural dread of death. 
 
 The other half of the fear of death is due 
 to its mystery. " Who would fardels bear, to 
 grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that 
 the dread of something after death, the un 
 discovered country from whose bourne no 
 traveller returns, puzzles the will and makes 
 us rather bear those ills we have, than fly to 
 others that we know not of?" Ignorance is 
 always the mother of fear. 
 
 Yet why dread the mysterious? Birth is 
 equally and beautifully mysterious. Religion 
 is mysterious. Life is mysterious. He would 
 do well who should set us free from that dread
 
 POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE 229 
 
 of death which is due to mystery. Maurice 
 Maeterlinck has a beautiful little essay on the 
 subject in which he reaches the conclusion that 
 pain, distress, uncertainty, all these belong to 
 life not death, and that in itself death can 
 neither be painful, distressing, nor anxious. 
 Nature gives her merciful anaesthetic. . Further 
 he concludes that whatever the future holds, it 
 cannot be bad, it must be good. Charles Froh- 
 man will long be remembered for his last 
 words, spoken on the sinking Lusitania, 
 " Death is life s most beautiful adventure." 
 
 Shall we never reach the time when we shall 
 say good-bye to those who embark upon that 
 adventure, even as friends who assemble at the 
 pier and wave adieus to loved ones going on 
 a pleasant voyage? Tears may flow at the 
 separation, for that we too are not embarking, 
 but mingled with the gentle sadness shall there 
 not be joy for the beloved, sailing away into the 
 sunlit, summer seas? 
 
 And the first five minutes after death ! Can 
 imagination picture it? Is it like the awaken 
 ing from an anaesthetic? One comes tumbling 
 down out of the dark, floating down; out of 
 the dark, into the light ; the glimmering square 
 grows gradually light. Even the gnawing, 
 numbing pain cannot overcome the intoxica 
 tion of growing consciousness and the welcome
 
 230 POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE 
 
 beauty of faces and the world. No, it is hardly 
 like this. There cannot be so much of shock 
 and distress. God shall wipe away all tears. 
 It shall be like the awakening from healthful 
 sleep to happy sunlight. 
 
 But let us be careful not to let our imagina 
 tions run away. Let us ask the common man 
 in the street what he thinks, what he believes; 
 and then let us try to set it down. 
 
 He does not believe in the resurrection of 
 the body. He does not believe in a literal hell 
 of fire and devils. He does not believe in an 
 eternity of punishment for any mortal. So 
 much for the negative. 
 
 He does believe in personal immortality. He 
 does believe in swift and sure reformatory 
 punishment for sin. He does believe in the 
 ultimate prevalence and triumph of righteous 
 ness and the cleansing of the whole universe 
 from all that is evil and wrong. So much for 
 the affirmative. 
 
 That, in a nutshell, is the current, popular 
 belief. It may not be yours, but it is that of 
 your neighbor, if he would speak it out. You 
 have a right to yours. You may differ from 
 him, and you have as good a right to think 
 as you do, as he has to think as he does. Let 
 us compare the ideas. 
 
 First of all, he believes in personal immor-
 
 POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE 231 
 
 tality beyond the grave, not in the survival of 
 the body in the resurrection. Consequently, he 
 is unable to repeat literally that clause in the 
 Apostles Creed, " I believe in the resurrection 
 of the body." It seems scientifically impos 
 sible that this body should survive; and it 
 seems highly undesirable that this body should 
 be saddled upon one and bound round one s 
 spirit through all the reaches of eternity. We 
 should dislike very much to go into the other 
 world with this ailing, this decaying, this 
 crippled frame. We want to go there with 
 what Paul calls a celestial body freed from 
 danger and distress and limitation. So, we 
 believe that the spirit survives, and not this 
 chemical combination. 
 
 Does the man in the street believe, then, in 
 the resurrection of Jesus Christ? Yes, but not 
 in the permanence of the body of Jesus Christ. 
 Now, we do not know very much about His 
 resurrection. We can speculate; and we can 
 read the accounts as they are given. But we 
 do not know what became of that body. It is 
 inconceivable that, after three days chemical 
 change which, according to natural law, we 
 know goes on in the stagnant blood and lymph 
 and tissues of a lifeless form, that body could, 
 without contravention of divine law, be re 
 stored in a moment s time. God does not seem
 
 232 POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE 
 
 to act in that way. That Jesus Christ arose 
 from the dead, the common man is thoroughly 
 convinced; that in some form or other, we 
 know not what, He appeared to His disciples, 
 he firmly believes; that He showed them the 
 nail prints in His hands and the spear wound 
 in His side; but that at the same time He 
 passed through closed doors and appeared sud 
 denly in the midst, these things also he be 
 lieves. That he is alive today, we all know, 
 and for ever more alive.- Yes, the ordinary 
 man believes in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, 
 in the resurrection of you, of himself. But 
 these bodies of ours must return to the dust 
 whence they came,- earth to earth, ashes to 
 ashes, dust to dust. 
 
 It seems also equally inconceivable that the 
 spirit of man should ever be quenched. We 
 know we cannot prove either the one statement, 
 or the other. It is impossible for anybody to 
 prove the immortality of the soul. None of 
 the philosophers and theologians have ever suc 
 ceeded in doing it. They have tried, with all 
 the ingenuity and all the genius at their com 
 mand, and there has been no final demonstra 
 tion, conclusive, like a mathematical theorem 
 fully set forth, of personal immortality. There 
 are certain arguments, certain indications, cer 
 tain intimations, which point the way toward
 
 POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE 233 
 
 that conclusion; but there has been no final 
 proof. 
 
 The universal hope of man has been pointed 
 out as a possible proof of the immortality of 
 the soul; but we have first to take into con 
 sideration, as has already been suggested, that 
 the hope for immortality is far from universal. 
 A large portion of the human race desires noth 
 ing so much as extinction. The whole Hindu 
 world, it is fairly safe to say, is seeking with 
 the most earnest yearning for disappearance, 
 for the grave that knows no waking, for the 
 extinction of all life; and there are at least 
 three hundred millions of those Hindus. No; 
 the hope is not universal, and it has not always 
 been even an idea in the minds of men and 
 women. 
 
 The fact is that the Hebrew Scriptures, for 
 the most part, have nothing to say about im 
 mortality and eternal life. In the Old Testa 
 ment there is only a f oreglimpse here and there, 
 to indicate that the people of Israel has even 
 thought of such a possibility. 
 
 In all the literature of the Greeks, who were 
 the teachers of antiquity, who gave their 
 philosophy, their learning, and their intellectual 
 attitude to Rome, Rome which conquered the 
 Greeks, and then in turn was conquered by 
 them, in all Greek literature there is scarcely
 
 234 POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE 
 
 a word indicating any certitude of hope in 
 immortality. We find Homer in one place put 
 ting it into the mouth of Achilles, in the realm 
 of the departed, to say: 
 
 " Talk not of reigning in this dolorous gloom, 
 Nor think/ he said, vain words can ease my doom. 
 Better by far a weight of woes to bear, 
 And in affliction breathe the vital air, 
 Slave to the meanest hind that begs his bread, 
 Than reign the sceptred monarch of the dead. " 
 
 Poor ghost! A sad outlook for a great 
 King among shades. 
 
 Pindar has a little passage in his odes con 
 cerning the golden islands of the blest. But 
 these were reserved only for the few. For the 
 great multitude of departed Greeks, there was 
 no hope of any existence beyond the grave. 
 
 It is only within the last twenty centuries, or 
 thereabout, that there has been any wide ex 
 pectation of immortality certainly, any deeply 
 grounded hope of immortality or any abiding 
 conviction that, if a man dies, he shall live 
 again. So the argument derived from univer 
 sal hope falls to the ground. 
 
 Modern science, however, helps us with cer 
 tain indications. It has taught us all as chil 
 dren in the public school that nothing that is 
 ever made goes out of existence. We call this, 
 in our text-books, the law of conservation of
 
 POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE 235 
 
 matter and of the conservation of force. Mat 
 ter may change. The wood in this desk may 
 decay ; but the particles of which it is made will 
 still be in existence. You may burn this wood 
 up into smoke, but the particles go into the 
 smoke and into the ashes and into the gases that 
 are given off. Every atom of it is there when 
 the process of disintegration has been com 
 pleted. 
 
 Now, if that is true in the physical world 
 true of matter true of force, of heat, of elec 
 tricity may it not be equally true is it not 
 likely that it is equally true of that mysteri 
 ous, intangible, unknown substance or force 
 which constitutes the soul, the inner life of 
 man? Many men have gradually come to be 
 lieve in the conservation of spirit as well as in 
 the conservation of matter and of force. 
 
 But there is no proof in anything Sir Oliver 
 Lodge has said no proof in the experiments 
 of the psychological laboratories, or the so 
 cieties for psychical research. We cannot 
 prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that, if 
 a man dies, he shall live again; but we believe 
 it. Most of us cannot help but believe it, since 
 Jesus came and taught it. Absorption in ma 
 terialism, a condition steeped in crime and sin, 
 utter despair of one s self and of life, may lead 
 a man to an opposite conviction. But for the
 
 236 POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE 
 
 most part, we believe it, whether we can prove 
 it or not. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said : 
 
 " I am sorry if I have been betrayed into 
 saying anything that requires proof." 
 
 There are certain things in which we believe 
 in spite of ourselves, knowing perfectly well 
 that we cannot demonstrate them. We believe 
 in God, and nobody can prove God. We be 
 lieve in eternal life, and nobody can demon 
 strate it. 
 
 Our ground of belief in immortality is, then, 
 the word of Jesus Christ. We believe in it be 
 cause He told us we might and should. " Ah 
 then," says one, " you are returning to a re 
 ligion of authority. You are subjecting the 
 reason. You are accepting something on mere 
 authority." Not at all. The reason tells us 
 that Jesus knew what He was talking about, 
 while nobody else ever has known anything 
 about this subject. He was so sane, so calm, 
 so sure in His utterance here ; and all else that 
 He ever uttered was also so sane, so calm, so 
 sure; and all has been so amply weighed and 
 tested by two thousand years of experience, 
 that He could not have been mistaken on this, 
 a subject so vital to our peace of mind. 
 
 Now, for the second question, concerning 
 the character of that future life, concerning 
 reward and punishment. The man in the street
 
 POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE . 237 
 
 does not believe in the literal hell the lake of 
 fire, the brimstone, the steel trident, the demon 
 with hoofs and horns and forked tail. At all 
 events, he rarely believes in it for himself, his 
 wife, or his sons. He may think he believes 
 in it for some other man, his wife, or his sons. 
 Let us have no inclination to deal with this 
 matter lightly; but let us be perfectly frank in 
 stating that all that material view is a myth; 
 it is not justified by the Scriptures. If there 
 are people who are aggrieved because we do 
 not believe in a literal hell, we are sorry that 
 they are aggrieved. If we disturb them by our 
 declaration that we do not believe in a personal 
 devil, we are sorry that they cannot get along 
 without the devil; but we do not find these 
 things in our Bible, as we read it and under 
 stand it and interpret it. But we do read of 
 the literal hell in Dante s " Inferno," in Mil 
 ton s " Paradise Lost " ; and unconsciously, 
 whether we have ever read these poems or not, 
 we have woven their imagery into the warp and 
 woof of our English thought, yes, of Euro 
 pean thought, until today we think it is in the 
 Holy Scriptures. There is only a chapter or 
 two in Matthew, toward the close, which can 
 even be bent and twisted to justify such ma 
 terial and literal conceptions of hell Oriental 
 language, easily understood by Orientals, but
 
 238 POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE 
 
 easily misconstrued by hard-headed, literal 
 Westerners. 
 
 It stands to reason that if we do not have 
 this body after a few years, but pass out into a 
 spiritual existence, we cannot be tormented 
 with fire ; we cannot be pulled at with pincers ; 
 we cannot be stretched upon a gridiron. We 
 shall have no nerves and sinews and muscles 
 to be tormented and burned and stretched. A 
 literal hell may play its part in the unfolding, 
 developing life of a child or a childlike race of 
 people ; but it cannot influence or affect mature, 
 sober-minded, thoughtful men and women. A 
 colored preacher last winter, in discussing this 
 subject with the author, said that he had to 
 preach hell to his people. " Why," he said, 
 " if I don t preach hell to my people, you would 
 not have any clothes on your lines or chickens 
 in your coops." So the doctrine may serve 
 its purpose, may " function serviceably " 
 amongst a childlike people; but it is only a 
 hindrance, a shackle about the feet of a full- 
 grown man or nation. 
 
 But for all that, we believe in a hell. For 
 all that, we believe in swift and sure punish 
 ment for sin. We have felt it. We have been 
 in it. We have seen it. The so-called generous 
 sins, the sins of the flesh, the appetites and 
 desires of men when carried to excess, bring
 
 POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE 239 
 
 every one of them its punishment, visibly, 
 clearly, plainly, and invariably. There never 
 was any one of these appetites and desires 
 given to men that was not intended for legiti 
 mate use. There never was any apple in any 
 Garden of Eden or elsewhere in the world, 
 wholesome for food, that was not intended 
 for man to eat; but when he abuses the law, 
 when he steps beyond the bounds of the natural 
 prescription of what is just and right and tem 
 perate, he must pay, and pay at once, and pay 
 the uttermost farthing. 
 
 There is no one, for example, that pays more 
 dearly than a drunkard, who simply abuses the 
 appetite for what God has put here in this world 
 for legitimate use. He pays. Every one of us 
 sees the living hell of it round about us. Even 
 your temperate drinker -he also pays. Men 
 are coming to believe that no one is so well 
 armed in the use of spirits as he is in absti 
 nence. His head is not so clear, his nerves are 
 not so steady, his reliability under pressure and 
 stress is not so great. There are many, many 
 other kinds of intemperance besides this one, 
 and every one of them brings its sure fruitage. 
 
 You see a young man know him well you 
 have passed his house perhaps every day who 
 could not walk a step had not walked a step 
 for years ; crippled beyond all usefulness in the
 
 240 POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE 
 
 world, sinking into the grave before gray hairs 
 had come into his head, because he had sinned 
 excessively sinned. Another young man is 
 brought home in his twenties from a rapid 
 round of excesses and intemperances you 
 could hardly bear to stand by his side, so 
 bloated and repulsive was he; he comes home 
 before he is thirty to die upon his mother s 
 breast. 
 
 " Gene " was a young country lad. The 
 strength of the rocks and the oaks was in his 
 frame. The breadth and the breath of the 
 plains and hills was on his face. He had had 
 charge of his father s estate and affairs, which 
 were not small. He wished to go to college; 
 and he went to a big one. The boys took him 
 in, they showed him all that was to be seen. 
 He had money. He had personal charm. For 
 six months or so things went very merrily. 
 
 Then one day his parents received a letter 
 saying, " Gene is ill ; not very ill, we hope he 
 will be better soon." Then hard on the heels 
 of the letter came a telegram. " Gene is very 
 ill. Come at once." 
 
 They took him South ; they took him West ; 
 they took him everywhere and did everything 
 that money and love could compass. They 
 were told that he had taken deep cold. Ay, he 
 had taken cold and more.
 
 POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE 241 
 
 And today he sleeps under the prairie who 
 ought to be alive and doing a man s work in the 
 world. He paid in full; and more yet, others 
 helped to pay. 
 
 If you had stood by the side of beds where 
 preachers and doctors stand if you had fre 
 quented hospitals as they have done; if you 
 had known the inside life of families as they 
 have, you would never say that they do not 
 know what they are talking about. The way 
 of the transgressor is hard. The road that he 
 treads is thorny and stony, and it leads to 
 death. The soul that sinneth, just in propor 
 tion as it sins, shall die. There never was 
 truer word written in Scripture than this: 
 " The wages of sin is death." 
 
 Let us turn to some of the other kinds of 
 sins. There is the man who worships the 
 golden calf, material success, material ac 
 quisition; or even the man who has that last 
 infirmity of noble minds, the lust for power; 
 have you seen his face, hardened and wrinkled 
 and shrivelled? Yes, now and again you see 
 upon your streets a man whose countenance 
 looks like that of the eagle upon the dollar. 
 We used to talk about the bicycle face, and now 
 we talk about the motor-car face; but worse 
 than these is the money face. The dollar face 
 is indicative of a shrivelled soul. So we might
 
 242 POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE 
 
 follow up any one of the sins of men the 
 extravagances, the excesses, and every one of 
 them brings its penalty its painful penalty. 
 
 There is a disease which they call the harden 
 ing of the eyeball glaucoma is the technical 
 term. It is extremely painful. Sometimes, in 
 twenty- four hours the sight is all gone; and 
 then sometimes, the blindness passes away and 
 the patient is apparently well until another at 
 tack comes; and sometimes the long, slow 
 process of that hardening goes on for sixteen 
 or eighteen or twenty years of exquisite, ex 
 cruciating pain. The hardening of the eye of 
 the soul is just as painful, just as distressing 
 as any lake of fire could ever possibly be. 
 
 These punishments, however, are reforma 
 tory and not retributive. We are coming to 
 believe, in our study of penology, that nobody 
 should be punished through revenge; that 
 criminals should be put, not into prisons, but 
 reformatories; sent to school, taught trades; 
 that there should be no definite sentence, but, 
 so far as possible, an indeterminate one. We 
 are beginning to believe that a man may be 
 transformed under punishment, until he may 
 be restored to his home again and given at 
 last the freedom from crime and from the 
 tendency to crime that has held him down. 
 Now, that principle works out in all our human
 
 POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE 243 
 
 life. A little child is wild and rebellious. 
 Just a few cuts of a keen switch, and how he 
 does melt and how humble he becomes; his 
 rebellion seems to flow out with his tears. 
 Sometimes a man never looks up to God until 
 the lash is laid upon his back. Sometimes a 
 man never thinks, but rushes blindly on in his 
 course of life until his punishment is visited 
 heavily upon his head. How long his reforma 
 tion may take must depend upon him. 
 
 It is very difficult of belief that any indi 
 vidual is punished for an eternity. Punish 
 ment will turn any man even a fool some 
 day, some time; and we cannot believe we 
 cannot find it possible to believe that there 
 has ever been committed any sin or crime great 
 enough to justify a good God in punishing a 
 poor, little, weak mortal for ever and for ever 
 and for ever. We cannot believe that it is 
 possible for a good God so to be foiled, so to 
 be thwarted, so to fail as that any evil whatso 
 ever should exist for ever in opposition to 
 Him. 
 
 This is the way the man in the street reasons. 
 If there is a God, and there is a God, He must 
 be good, and He must be all-powerful; other 
 wise He would not be God. And if He be God 
 and good and all-powerful, His good purposes 
 must prevail, and ultimately all things must
 
 244 POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE 
 
 become good. Otherwise, God is no God. We 
 cannot well reason otherwise. If we do, we 
 shall be running right up against our own sense 
 of justice and right. Truth is eternal, a lie is 
 temporal. Right is eternal, wrong is temporal. 
 Therefore a time must come when all false 
 hood and all wrong shall be done away, and 
 truth and right shall be all in all. Otherwise, 
 there are two equal powers, good and evil, 
 neither of which can conquer the other, and 
 there is no God. 
 
 Some believe that the soul which should in 
 definitely rebel against God in spite of all 
 punishment might compel God, through the 
 working of some law about which we know 
 nothing, to destroy it completely, to wipe it out 
 of existence. There are those who think that 
 that will be the end of the persistently and con 
 sistently wicked annihilation. But such be 
 lief is contrary to the physical law of the con 
 servation of matter and the conservation of 
 force, which law we have tried to carry over 
 into the spiritual world. Nevertheless, if that 
 helps, if it is valuable, use it; for after all 
 truth is generally to be tested by its value, by 
 its workability. 
 
 Let us now turn to the other side of the pic 
 ture, to the question of reward. If there is 
 punishment, and if it flows naturally from the
 
 POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE 245 
 
 violation of law, then there must also be a 
 cofcrse of events which will give to virtue, to 
 courage, to self-control, to determination, and 
 to all the rest of the heroic attributes of men 
 and women their just measure of reward. God 
 begins to reward us does He not? in this 
 life without waiting for the unknown. We are 
 like children at school; we get just as much 
 advancement as we work for and deserve in 
 this life, and then we go on into the endless 
 reaches of eternity, not merely enjoying the 
 reward, but expanding, and developing the vir 
 tues upon which the reward is grounded. 
 Heaven then becomes not a place with jasper 
 walls and golden streets and harps. Heaven 
 becomes a state into which free spirits pass, 
 now and for ever. 
 
 A saintly old man was working in his garden 
 one Saturday, when there came by a neighbor 
 a Seventh-Day Adventist on his way to 
 church. 
 
 " Aren t you afraid you ll not go to heaven 
 working as you are on the Sabbath Day? " said 
 the latter. 
 
 " Not at all," smiled the old man, from 
 among his roses and his grapes. " Not at all. 
 I m in heaven now ! " 
 
 It was a sage reply, and the old man knew 
 all its implication.
 
 246 POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE 
 
 The one truly great quatrain in the " Ru- 
 baiyat " is this : 
 
 " I sent my soul through the invisible, 
 Some letter of that after life to spell; 
 But by and by my soul came back to me, 
 And answered, I myself am Heaven and Hell ! " 
 
 We believe, then, in heaven not a literal 
 heaven any more than a literal hell ; but we be 
 lieve in a spiritual heaven that begins here and 
 continues for ever. We believe in a growth 
 that begins in a poor, feeble way in us here, and 
 through threescore years and ten makes a cer 
 tain amount of progress; and then, through 
 thousand after thousand of years, when we shall 
 be free from the trammels of this flesh, makes 
 additional progress and development on, on, 
 on, upward, always upward toward the light. 
 So we believe in the persistence of personality 
 after death. We shall know each other there. 
 If we persist as personalities we must know 
 those personalities that " we have loved long 
 since and lost awhile " ; and we must see them 
 once again, or we shall be like lost souls upon 
 the marshes and dark lakes. We must see and 
 clasp them once more. We must commune 
 with them, talk with them more freely than we 
 were ever able to talk with them here, hin 
 dered as we are by the flesh and by the limita 
 tions of communication that are ours. When
 
 POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE 247 
 
 spirit with spirit shall meet, hearts shall flow 
 into hearts, communicating without tongue and 
 without speech; and we shall need no eyes to 
 see ; but shall know even as also we have been 
 known. We shall work, aye, we shall have 
 tasks to do. We shall sing, yes, if we feel 
 like it, we shall sing. We shall laugh when 
 we wish to laugh. We shall feel as we always 
 have felt, spiritually, emotionally, profoundly. 
 
 There is truth in the " Last Chanty "of the 
 sailors who were dissatisfied that there was no 
 more sea ; tired of the glassy floors and wind 
 less shore ; and who plead that the Lord would 
 " Take back the golden fiddles and let them 
 beat to open sea." 
 
 So the Lord 
 
 "Called the good sea up to Him, 
 And stablished its boundaries unto all eternity; 
 That such as have no pleasure 
 For to serve the Lord by measure, 
 Might enter into galleons and serve Him on the sea. 
 
 " Sun, wind, and rain shall not fail from off the face 
 
 of it, 
 
 Stinging, ringing spindrift, nor the fulmar flying free; 
 And the ships shall go abroad 
 To the glory of the Lord 
 Who heard the silly sailor-folk and gave them back 
 
 their sea." 
 
 It was a brave epitaph Robert Louis Steven 
 son wrote for himself, which is engraved upon 
 his headstone in far-away Samoa :
 
 248 POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE 
 
 " Under the wide and starry sky, 
 Dig the grave and there let me lie ; 
 Gladly I lived, and gladly die; 
 And I lay me down with a will. 
 
 "And this be the verse you grave for me: 
 Here he lies where he longed to be ; 
 Home is the sailor, home from the sea, 
 The hunter home from the hill. " 
 
 It is the song of a man with a philosophy of 
 life and death sufficient to maintain him in the 
 hardness of the one, and sustain him in the 
 darkness of the other. There was no doubt a 
 strong stream of hereditary Christianity in the 
 philosophy, even though it does not rise to the 
 surface in the poem. 
 
 Not less brave and far more buoyant with 
 hope and faith is the swan-song of the poet- 
 laureate of the Christians, when he was about 
 to cross the bar. Though it was sunset and 
 the time of the evening star, though he heard 
 the bell and the one clear call for him, he prayed 
 that there might be no moaning of the bar 
 when he put out to sea ; for he said : 
 
 " I hope to see my pilot face to face 
 When I have crossed the bar!" 
 
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