IRLF 
 
 SB M3 D3D 
 
Juniata Bible Lectures 
 
 A SERIES OF TWELVE LECTURES, MOSTLY ON THE 
 BOOK OF RUTH, DELIVERED TO THE STU- 
 DENTS OF THE BIBLE SESSION OF 
 JUNIATA COLLEGE, HUNTINGDON, 
 PA., FEBRUARY, 1897 
 
 Martin G. Brumbaugh, A. M., Ph. D. 
 
 ;/ 
 
 President of Juniata College, and Professor of Pedagogy, University 
 of Pennsylvania 
 
AVIL PRINTING Co., 
 
 3941-43-45 MARKET STREET, 
 
 PHILADELPHIA. 
 
To 
 The Church of the Brethren, 
 
 and 
 
 Juniata College, 
 the Church and School I love 
 
 235136 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 The publication of this volume is due to the forethought 
 of my dear Brother, Elder J. B. Brumbaugh. 
 
 When it was arranged that I should deliver a course of 
 lectures for the fourth consecutive year at the Bible Session 
 of Juniata College., he employed, unknown to me, a stenogra- 
 pher to report the lectures. 
 
 This volume is the result. In justice, it should be under- 
 stood that these lectures were given without preparation. In 
 the midst of multiplied duties, and often after an all-night 
 trip from Philadelphia, they were spoken with such haste 
 and unpreparedness as to divest them of all literary merit. 
 The lessons they convey are, for the most part, clearly 
 expressed. Any attempt to recast the language would mani- 
 festly rob them of the peculiar style characteristic of their 
 author in impromptu address. 
 
 They come to you just as they fell upon the ears of the 
 large and attentive class of students that crowded into the 
 sacred little chapel of Juniata during the early days of Feb- 
 ruary, 1897. Primarily, they are intended for the ministers 
 of our own Brotherhood. Argument is pushed and thought 
 developed only far enough to awaken thought and inspire 
 discourse. Incidentally, any thoughtful reader, concerned 
 in the plain, simple truth that clusters about a noble life, 
 and desires to live more consecratedly, will find, it is hoped, 
 inspiration and direction. 
 
 That the Brotherhood may know something of the char- 
 acter of the Bible work done at Juniata, and that it may be 
 the means, under God's direction, of doing some little good, 
 this volume is prayerfully given to the public. 
 
 M. G. B. 
 
 Philadelphia, May 12, 1897. 
 
 (5) 
 
A SERIES OF 
 
 Lectures on the Book of Ruth; 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 In taking up this work, I am a bit puzzled to know what is 
 the most profitable thing to do. For two years we have had 
 the Book of Psalms. Before that we studied the Book of 
 Job. I have concluded to take up the Book of Ruth. You 
 will find it in the Old Testament. It is a short book, of but 
 four chapters and eighty-four verses: So simple in its char- 
 acter and beautiful in its story that a child might commit it 
 to memory; and all of us, I think, ought to be sufficiently 
 familiar with it to be able to tell in substance the story of 
 the life of this marvelous woman of Moab; the beautiful, 
 simple story of the life of Ruth. 
 
 There are but few characters mentioned in this book, and 
 all of them are interesting Boaz, Elimelech, Ruth, Orpah, 
 Naomi; but you could not call it the book of Boaz, nor the 
 book of Naomi, nor the book of Elimelech and preserve the 
 remarkable interest of the story; for all the other characters 
 and incidents in the book centre around and are subordinate 
 to the peculiar interest and moral lessons growing out of the 
 simple life of Ruth, the Moabitess. The book is well named, 
 "The Book of Ruth." 
 
 A word as to its organization. The first chapter of the 
 book may be called a recital of the troubles of the righteous. 
 It brings to us, I think, what we often learn, that the troubles 
 of the righteous are by no means few. And then the chap- 
 
 (7) 
 
8 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 ters beginning with the second and ending with the last, 
 show how God delivers the righteous from all their troubles. 
 
 Here you have the two sides of a picture: First the 
 dark side, second the bright side; first the sorrows, second 
 God's restoring hand. Looking at the book in that way will 
 give you a basis for its study. If you want to see how the life 
 of this simple family went into eclipse as the result of their 
 sins and their wilfullness, read the first chapter. If you want 
 to see what God can do for a person even when he is down in 
 this world, read this history from the second chapter to the 
 end. The character of the book is peculiar. It is what, if 
 we were to classify it as a piece of literature, we should call a 
 pastoral. It deals with rustic life, with simple life, with 
 uneventful life. It has nothing of the spirit of the city, 
 nothing of kings and courtiers, nothing of forms and ceremo- 
 nies. It is the simple recital of the simple life of a rustic 
 people. For that reason it appeals especially to people who 
 have been brought up in the country, people who love rural 
 scenes and rural incidents. It seems to me the spirit of the 
 book, as I read it over, more and more focuses itself around 
 this one thought. It makes sacred the commonplace things/ 
 of life. You and I have come to believe that the sanctuary 
 is the most sacred place in the world, and that is true. We 
 have somehow inherited the old Jewish notion that the sanc- 
 tuary is the only sacred place in the world; that scenes in the 
 kitchen, in the shop, on the farm, on the hillside following 
 the sheep scenes everywhere in the ordinary places of life 
 are not sacred; that God does not bother with us save when 
 we get down on our knees in church. We do believe that 
 God is everywhere, and that he looks after us, but somehow 
 or other we have gotten the notion that in order to serve him 
 we have to go into a church and sing or pray. The Book of 
 Euth is to set us right on this matter. 
 
 The Book of Euth is to teach us that there is no place in 
 our lives or no scene in our lives that is too common to 
 merit the recognition of God. The faithful care of God is 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 9 
 
 manifest in all that we do. It comes to us with peculiar 
 force, as we study this book, that the most commonplace 
 things of life are the things that reach to the very throne of 
 Heaven. There is a fine example here for young women o 
 unselfish virtue, of absolute purity in time of great distress| 
 in the faithful reward that came to this marvelous woman 
 because she steadfastly did the thing that was right. There 
 is also a hint here of a truth that we ought always to keep 
 before us, that God knows the private affairs of our lives. He) 
 could look down into the simple heart of Ruth and know| 
 jhatjt was pure. He could see every movement and impulse 
 of her soul. He knew that it was clean altogether. So clean 
 that he could lead her into such close relationship with him- 
 self that she became one of the ancestors of the blessed 
 Christ. Then you have here also the picture of God's atti- 
 tude toward widows and fatherless people in this world. The 
 mother and two daughters were left fatherless and husband- 
 less. God takes charge of these women, and God deals with 
 them even better than they could have dealt for themselves, 
 if they had continued in the original relation in the family. 
 There is another lesson here that is rather peculiar. We have 
 come to the notion, I think, lately, that to evangelize the 
 world we should send missionaries out from the best places 
 into the dark places. We have done that; all Christian churches 
 are doing it that is, the light of the church has gone out 
 into the darkness of heathendom, and has illumined the world 
 where before there was the darkness of doubt and skepti- 
 cism, superstition and idolatry, and all that. And we have 
 come to believe this to be a necessary thing. But here is a 
 lesson in the Book of Ruth the very reverse of that. Here 
 you have Bethlehem in the land of promise, the place where 
 God had established his people, and where he had shed the 
 light of his revelation and the instructions of his divine 
 prophets before his people; but in spite of all that, this Jew- 
 ish land had gone into darkness under the Judges. And God 
 raised Ruth out of the land of Moab and brought her into the 
 
10 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 land of Judea to spread the light of God among his own 
 people. This would find a parallel if a man should grow up 
 in India or Ethiopia and come to America to preach the 
 gospel of Jesus Christ to us, who think we have it, but who 
 need to be re-enlightened. It is just the reversal of the mod- 
 ern missionary spirit. God brings a woman from a heathen J 
 land to his own chosen people to show what genuine Chris-| 
 tianity and godliness and purity are. So a heathen woman p 
 brings the gospel of God into the land of promise. This is a" 
 real anomaly and a remarkable condition of things. When 
 the United States forgets so much the spirit of God that men 
 and women from heathen lands shall have to come among us 
 and teach us what the churches are for, and tell us the lan- 
 guage of Heaven that we have forgotten, then I think, 
 indeed, it will be a distressful time in the history of the 
 world. And God would certainly bring upon us then, as he 
 did bring upon this people here, some dire calamity to teach 
 us that in his judgment and in his providence we have a 
 right to suffer for our own apostasy. 
 
 There is another peculiar thing in the life of Euth. How 
 many of you know the story of Euth? How many of you 
 know that she was really the great-great-grandmother of 
 David, and that she came right into the royal line? I don't 
 know anything more wonderful than that. This story of 
 Euth is a flash-light on the ancestry of David. How many 
 of you know anything about your grandfather? Do you 
 know his name? How many of you know the given name of 
 your great-grandfather on your father's side? How far back 
 can you go? Five generations? How many of you can go- 
 back six? How many of you can go back twelve? That is r 
 you go back along the line, and somewhere you get into 
 absolute darkness, and you cannot go any further. Would 
 not you give something this afternoon if I could come in 
 here and say, "I have just found a paper that is the history 
 of your great-grandfather twenty generations ago, that tells 
 what kind of a man he was?" Would you not sit up straight 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 11 
 
 and listen intently, and want to know what kind of a man he 
 was? It would be a flash-light into your ancestry. Some- 
 how I have more and more come to feel that if I could look 
 down the line of men and women that have stood before 
 you between you and heaven, I could understand a little bet- 
 ter some of the things that you are and some of the things 
 that you do. But such a thing is impossible after five or 
 six generations. Here comes this woman and does acts of 
 such significance that they are recorded in the word of God. 
 It is a light on the ancestry of David, and on the ancestry of 
 Christ. And it is to me a source of great comfort to know 
 that men like David and Solomon and Jesse and the Christ 
 himself were born of noble parents; that they had in their 
 blood the spirit and power of women like Euth. That is a 
 comforting thought to me. 
 
 It brings two thoughts to me: How grateful we ought to 
 be that we have good jmrents and good ancestry. The grati- 
 tude of children to a good father and a good mother is never 
 to be measured. It is never to be thought of slightingly. 
 It is never to be forgotten in the measuring and estimating 
 of your fellows. 
 
 It brings to us again, on the other side, this thought 
 the tremendous significance of fatherhood and motherhood 
 in this world. What are you going to transmit to your chil- 
 dren? What are you going to send down to the generations 
 to come? 
 
 Are you going to give them impulses pure as that of Euth, 
 that made David and made possible the Christ, or are you 
 going to transmit to the third and fourth generation felons 
 for the prisons and convicts for the penitentiaries? What is 
 to be your gift to posterity? What a significant fact it is 
 that when you die all your influence is not buried with you. 
 Your influence sweeps on into children's children, and 
 moulds nations, and transforms the world, and makes his- 
 tory, and counts for good and for righteousness, or against 
 God and against righteousness forever. You don't live to 
 
12 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 yourself alone; you live for all those that are to come after 
 you in the countless ages of God. You ought to live so 
 to-day that you bequeath to those that come after you the 
 best things. Euth probably was not aware of the fact that 
 her quiet, simple life was to make her a queen of Heaven 
 among all people. But the fact that she lived purer and 
 sweeter and cleaner than anybody else made her pre-emi- 
 nently such a one as God should choose, God, who knows 
 how to pick. We may not find the queens; God always does. 
 No virtue is lost. I think this throws a side-light on the 
 character of the ancestry of noble people. The marriage of 
 Euth and Boaz is probably purely symbolical, to be inter- 
 preted as a type of the mystical union of the church and 
 Christ himself; and this whole Book of Euth is a type of how 
 God brings in the whole world of the Gentiles and makes 
 them the property of Christ, producing the mystical union of 
 God and the Lamb. It is not going too far to say that the 
 Book of Euth is the Gentile's hope in the Old Testament, 
 just as the Letters of Paul are the Gentile's justification in 
 the New. 
 
 You will find nowhere, from Genesis to the end of the 
 First Testament, anything so well suited to justify the claim 
 that God from the beginning meant the gentile world to 
 share in the promise of heaven as this Book of Euth. Again, 
 there is the thought here as to the author of this book. No- 
 body knows who wrote it. It was many years ago printed in 
 the Jewish rabbinical writings along with the Book of 
 Samuel. At another time it formed the concluding chapters 
 of the Book of Judges. And some authorities have consid- 
 ered Samuel as the author of it. But that is exceedingly 
 problematical. It is wiser to say that you don't know who 
 wrote it, and you will be safe there, at any rate. It was 
 written after David's birth, for David is mentioned in it. 
 It was written after Saul's crowning, for the crowning of 
 Saul is mentioned in it. It was written in a time of peace, 
 and therefore perhaps before David became king. It was 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 13 
 
 evidently written before the birth of Solomon, since Solomon 
 does not figure in the genealogy at the close of it. Where do 
 you suppose this man that wrote this Book of Ruth, in the 
 time of David, under the reign of Saul, and before the birth 
 of Solomon, in a time of peace, got the material for this mar- 
 velous story. Now, there is no doubt in my mind that it had 
 been a fleeting image of beauty in the traditions of this peo- 
 ple for a thousand years one of those legends that after 
 a while blossoms into language and becomes the description 
 of the sentiment of many people. Where do you suppose 
 the people got the stories of Homer? He never made them. 
 They were stories told for generations in the camp and by 
 the fireside. Where did Sir Walter Scott get all the legends 
 he has woven into prose and poetry? They were the folk- 
 lore of the Scottish people, singing with her birds, roaring 
 with her mighty ocean, until Sir Walter Scott came under 
 their influence and crystallized them into verse and into lan- 
 guage forever. So, I take it, that whoever wrote this Book 
 of Ruth was directed to this beautiful legend that floated 
 in the hearts of the people for ages and ages, until every- 
 body came to accept it as one of the stories that was typical 
 of Jewish home life, and then it was selected, by God's direc- 
 tion, to become a part of the inspired revelation. God trans- 
 forms this rustic scene into a holy narrative, and makes it 
 sacred forever. 
 
 Let us turn to the first chapter and see how it reads. 
 Chapter one, verse one: "Now it came to pass in the days 
 when the Judges ruled, that there was a famine in the land. 
 And a certain man of Bethlehem Judah went to sojourn in 
 the country of Moab, he, and his wife, and his two sons." 
 "It came to pass" that is a peculiar Hebraic way of saying 
 things. Notice the peculiar vagueness of that expression. 
 "It came to pass." Who made it come to pass? Does it 
 begin, "And the king brought to pass these things?" Does 
 it say, "And in the ccmrse of time the people brought to pass 
 these things?" No. It is a peculiar Hebraic statement,. 
 
14 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 common to the Hebrew people, by which they expressed the 
 power at work among them from above, the power which 
 they called in their theology Jehovah. It came to pass with- 
 out any human help, even ajgainst human purpose and 
 human power. "It came to pass." If you go out and see a 
 great avalanche rushing down the mountain, and put your 
 shoulder against it, what would happen? Do you think the 
 avalanche would stop? ISTo, you would simply go sliding 
 along with it. It would go on whether you pushed or pulled. 
 What matters that to the mighty power that is moving that 
 tremendous, monumental mass down the mountain side! 
 You don't figure in the process at all. It comes to pass. "It 
 came to pass." That is all we know about it an admission 
 from the first of what I should always like my pupils in 
 school to remember, that there is a power above human exi- 
 gencies that does bring things to pass. 
 
 Here, then, we have a starting-place in this beginning of 
 sorrows. This first chapter is a chapter of sorrows. First 
 you have the famine. Does it not say that there was a fam- 
 ine? Who brought the famine? Did the men vote for it? 
 Did the people decide to have a famine? Or did they decide 
 not to have one? What would have been the difference? Is 
 not the famine like the mighty rushing avalanche down the 
 mountain? It is one of the things that came to pass. Who 
 brought the black scourge into Bombay; and who is going to 
 stop it? Who brought the plague into the city of London 
 in 1665, whereby a hundred thousand lives were sacrificed, 
 and the streets heaped with dead bodies too numerous for 
 the hands of the living to cover with soil? The black 
 death came to pass. 
 
 Well, we can rejoice here in the thought that there is a 
 wiser power, as well as a mightier power, directing the forces 
 that work over us and through us, and that, while we may 
 plan, God, after all, operates. That, then, is the thought. 
 Here was a punishment that was sent upon these people. 
 This famine was a direct visitation on the part of God. They 
 
BOOK OF KUTH. 15 
 
 had sinned, and the famine was sent as a direct mark of God's 
 disfavor. A famine was looked upon among the Jews as an 
 especially unfavorable omen, as a mark of God's intense dis- 
 pleasure. Turn in your books to Leviticus, 26th chapter 
 and 19th verse. Let us see what you have there. "And I 
 will break the pride of your power; and I will make your 
 heaven as iron and your earth as brass." There it is, God's 
 own statement. He will send this and that and the other 
 thing to torment them ordinarily, but when they were very 
 bad, then the famine. So that when the famine came, it was 
 simply the language of God speaking out to them that they 
 were very wicked. And the strange irony of the thing is 
 that the famine was in Bethlehem. Do you know what 
 Bethlehem means the etymology of the word? "The house 
 of bread." And in the house of bread, no bread; and over in 
 Moab, the land of the heathen, to the east of the lake, in the 
 rugged gullies of the mountain, lifted high almost to the 
 sky, there was plenty. Strange irony. The beautiful valley 
 of David, that was named the land of bread, breadless; and 
 in the mountain gullies to the east, where only the heathen 
 went to live, there was plenty and abundance. You can 
 build a house in the valley, and drive your poorer neighbor 
 to the hillside. But God can blight your luxury, and he can 
 bless the poor soil on the hill-farm of your neighbor, and 
 make it a pleasant habitation and a source of fatness and 
 delight to him. You can plan for the better things, and 
 plan the poorer things for your neighbor, but God can reverse 
 your plans, and turn the better into worse and the worse into 
 better. 
 
 What do you think a man in Bethlehem would say when 
 he saw a Moabite come into that city? He would say: "That 
 is a poor country, your farm; hard living out there; why 
 don't you come here and live in a land of fat? Look at 
 Bethlehem; look at our magnificent plains, our splendid 
 vineyards, our abundant harvest. How much better off we 
 are!" Do you know what a city boy thinks of a country 
 
16 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 boy when he comes into the city with a red handkerchief 
 around his neck? He thinks: "I am living better than you 
 are," and he looks at him with disgust. God can make the 
 country boy the ruler of the nation and the city boy a toiler 
 in the penitentiary. God can send the country boy to preach 
 his gospel in the city and win it to Christ, when the city is 
 too weak and impotent to raise its own voice and its own 
 influence against its own crimes. And if it were not for the 
 steady stream of country boys who stand in the pulpit and 
 in the busy places of trade and mercantile pursuits to make 
 sweet the life of the city, I would not like to write, even in 
 my fancy, the doom of a city growing up on its own self- 
 centred sins. It is the leaven of the broader life from with- 
 out, streaming into the city, that sweetens it and makes it 
 wholesome. And little Moab, that was not much of a coun- 
 try in comparison with proud and haughty Judea, becomes 
 a source of food and life to this proud people when the hand 
 of God settles upon them in judgment and His winds cease 
 to blow and the refreshing rains to fall. Don't point your 
 finger at other people with the feeling that you are better 
 than they are. You don't know what to-morrow morning 
 is going to be. You had better be glad that it is no worse 
 with you, and let other people alone. You never know what 
 is going to be the outcome of to-morrow. Here, then, is 
 another thought. Why should this famine have been sent? 
 For the simple reason that every child of God needs disci- 
 pline. When we get stiff-necked and stubborn and resolute 
 in our rebellion, and hostile in our attitude, and indifferent 
 in our devotions, and independent in our spirit, then God 
 must come with the tremendous discipline of famine and 
 fire and sword, and scourge us to bring us again into decent 
 relations to himself. 
 
 Now, Elimelech made a great mistake. Not that it is my 
 province to criticise anybody, but I only say what I think. 
 He ran away from God's visitation. He thought he would 
 run over there for bread. What did he get for it? He got a 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 17 
 
 grave in Moab. That is all he got. Here was a man in 
 Bethlehem, with a home, with a wife and with children, and 
 the famine comes on, and he runs away from his home and 
 goes over into Moab that he may have bread takes his wife 
 and children along. And, sure enough, they get the bread. 
 But what else did he get over there? Look at the multi- 
 plied sorrows of that family. He went to his grave. His 
 old wife went begging back in poverty and hunger to her 
 own people; his two boys were buried; and one widow 
 turned indifferently away from her mother-in-law. And 
 Ruth is the only one in the whole lot, and she purely because 
 of her beautiful life, that comes out of the scourge of Elim- 
 elech's flight with anything like credit to herself, with any- 
 thing like glory to God. It is an awful thing. I want to 
 talk to you a little about this thing of picking up and run- 
 ning away from God's judgments. You think you cannot 
 get on well where you are. The farm is going down, the old 
 horse has got the spavin, the roof leaks, did not get many 
 acres out last fall, and what was out only raised briars in- 
 stead of wheat. What am I going to do? "I am going to 
 borrow enough money to go out West and become rich. I 
 will go out to Dakota or some other place and build a new 
 home/' What are you doing? Think about that before you 
 do it. Here is a truth that ought to be impressed upon 
 the minds of our people, that the fixedness of a race meas- 
 ures its development in civilization; that it is the roving 
 propensities of people that mark their barbaric condition. 
 Show me a people that flit and are migratory, that give up 
 Pennsylvania for Dakota, Ohio for Kansas, Kansas for 
 Louisiana, who move about just because they can, and I will 
 show you a people that need civilizing. They have gone 
 back; they have not learned that a primal duty of every 
 man in this world is. to settle, to stand for something in the 
 community, to live for the glory of God in the place where 
 God puts him. Quit this running off. I have no objection 
 to people building up Dakota, but I confess to a sort of 
 
18 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 hesitation about seeing our people as a church flitting out 
 to the borders of civilization, twenty or thirty of them mov- 
 ing out to a strange community, away from the church, 
 away from divine worship, away from home, away from 
 friendship, out on the borders. I say it is a risky business. 
 It complexes, if I may make a new term, the work of the 
 church many-fold in this country. 
 
 I often think of the Quakers. What made them a power 
 in the history of this nation? They came over here and 
 squatted, and sat on the same soil, and they have hatched 
 out of that the highest state of fertility, the highest kind 
 of home life. They remained right there by the hearth- 
 stones of their ancestors. You don't find them flitting out 
 to the borders of civilization, away from church and people, 
 trying to make six cents more than they could have made at 
 home. They have learned not to sacrifice the fruits of their 
 toil, the contentment and ease and culture of their lives, for 
 a few pennies more than they get if they hold to these 
 things. They have learned to live above many follies, and 
 have approximated at least the dignified attitude of a spir- 
 itual community. 
 
 I want you young people to think about that you are 
 going to buy land after a while. And if you are not careful 
 you will give up a thing that has ninety-nine elements of 
 good in it because it has one element of bad. You will go 
 hunting eternally for a thing that has not one element of 
 bad in it, and finally settle down to a thing that has about 
 sixty elements of good and forty of bad in it, like Elime- 
 lech in Moab. You will run away from school because the 
 hash is not mixed right. Everything else is good, but that 
 one thing does not suit you. You will run away from your 
 home because your father wants you to farm another year 
 and you do not want to. Although everything else is there, 
 home and church and father and mother, you will run away 
 out West. And you girls chafe and fret in your home life, 
 and want it better. Nearly every man and woman in this 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 19 
 
 world feels that they would like to better their condition. 
 They would like to get into a better job than they have. 
 We want better things. My good friends, did you ever stop 
 to think that, perhaps, discontent with the position you now 
 hold is God's hand upon you, disciplining you into power 
 in that place? When you leave a place and give up a posi- 
 tion and take to a new one, do it because you have outgrown 
 it, because you are master of the thing you have given up, 
 and not because you have failed in it. Outgrow it; don't 
 let it outgrow you. I don't know just how much I ought to 
 talk about this, nor to what extent one can charge this upon 
 poor old Elimelech; but he did get up from his home land 
 and run after bread. And I have known scores of other 
 people that have done just so. And he found a grave in a 
 heathen land. And what you will find, and what these 
 other people will find, I do not know. But I question the 
 wisdom and the value of this everlasting running around 
 after new things. 
 
20 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 LECTUEE II. 
 
 In the study of this first chapter I want to impress upon 
 you one or two things that seem to he involved in the first 
 verse. The last thought that we considered was the spirit 
 of discontent that seems to take hold of us, and that drives 
 .us from time to time into such a state of mind that we are 
 willing to make almost any sacrifice of present conditions 
 in the hope that by doing that we will better our conditions. 
 So we pack up and move and shift and run around. I want 
 to impress again this one thought upon what a little turn 
 we make such decisions. It was simply an objection on the 
 part of Adam to one prohibition in Eden that drove him out 
 of: the presence of God. The man had ten thousand things 
 that were right and pleasing and satisfactory, but just be- 
 cause he could not have ten thousand and one things, he 
 objected, and out he went. What would you call that sort 
 of game if children were to play it? You would say it is 
 childish or foolish. And yet we play the child when we are 
 older than children. And we go out into the land of Moab 
 when we might have stayed in the land of promise. The 
 narrow way is not always attractive to us. The hard test 
 that Jesus put to the inquirer, "Sell all that thou hast and 
 follow me," makes living in the narrow way hard for some 
 people. And so they refuse to do that, and they go out into 
 the fields of Moab, where everything looks abundantly fair, 
 and they forget that the land of fairness may be to them a 
 land of death, and the land of famine abandoned may be, 
 indeed, to them a land of fatness and of promise. 
 
 We have in the second verse a picture of the exodus of 
 the family; the family changes its place of abode. The hus- 
 band goes, and the wife and the two children. Now, it 
 speaks something for the character of Elimelech that he 
 could take his whole family with him when he decided to 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 21 
 
 change. It showed that there was a recognition in the fam- 
 ily of the father's will. And so the father, deciding to make, 
 the change of location, takes with him, apparently without 
 protest, the entire household. The whole family goes. It 
 is a pretty picture for one to stop and contemplate - a 
 united family. The wife says, "If you go I will go with 
 you; you know better than I; I will go along," submitting; 
 not setting up an arbitrary will against the judgment of the 
 father. The boys submit as boys do not always do, and 
 decide to cast in their lot with their father even in his 
 changed position. So out they go. And the fact that they 
 all went, it seems to me, is a matter that places upon the 
 father a tremendous responsibility. For now he must an- 
 swer for his own change of position and for the effect of that 
 upon the wife and upon the children. We forget sometimes, 
 when we make a change, that we are really choosing, not 
 only our own future, but a future for others as well. We 
 must never shrink from the thought nor refuse to face the 
 responsibility for the effect of that change upon others who 
 are obliged to change with us. That must always be taken 
 into account and considered as one of the essential responsi- 
 bilities that rest upon the acting spirit and responsible head 
 in any move. They start for Moab. 
 
 What a journey it must have been, eastward by Jerusalem, 
 and down over the plain and across the valley of the Jordan 
 and over into the land of Moab! I think it would have been 
 an interesting thing to have followed that family in that 
 exodus; to have studied the mixed emotions of the four per- 
 sons who constituted the family in their exodus. How the 
 father must have felt, how the mother must have felt, how 
 the sons must have felt, in surrendering the home and home 
 associations and the land of their God, and going out into 
 a strange land, into a heathen land, and simply for the one 
 purpose of winning with greater ease bread for the table, 
 comfort for the body. That decision to go influenced the 
 whole after-life of each of the four of them. There was 
 
22 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 no taking back or reconsidering after the choice was made. 
 And every one of the family suffered by reason of the deci- 
 sion of the one. Every one was affected by the choice of 
 the one, and all had to share in the burden of responsibility 
 that rested primarily upon the father who determined to go. 
 After a false step like this for I think we may take it that 
 God intends to teach that the movement outward from the 
 land of promise was distinctly a false step in the life of this 
 family God's mercy still followed them, but followed tem- 
 pered with vengeance, and punishment was measured out 
 upon the family for this act. There is comfort in the fact that 
 God will descend even into the land of Moab and hear our 
 calls for help, and watch over us there, and answer our 
 prayers. If we earnestly call to him even in heathen places 
 and places of sin, he has promised to be with us always. 
 They are therefore to be looked at in the light of wanderers 
 from God. And in that respect they simply typify the com- 
 mon experience of thousands of us. We go from the 
 righteous training of the home, from the prayer-meeting 
 where, as children, we were carried by loving parents, from 
 the church service where we were trained to sit and listen, 
 out into the world, away from the family altar, away from 
 the prayer-meeting, away from the services of the public 
 sanctuary, wanderers from God. Many of us who sit here 
 this afternoon are not half as devoted to the services of the 
 church as we were when we were children. We have gone 
 out. We have lost something of the early life that came 
 from the training of godly ancestors. We are in Moab; and 
 we must suffer for our wanderings, just as they suffered for 
 their wanderings. People do come back sometimes. Some- 
 times empty, as did the Prodigal, sometimes in bitterness, 
 as did Naomi, and sometimes they never return, as in the 
 case of Elimelech and his two sons. For you must bear in 
 mind that of the four who went out, only one returned, and 
 she in such absolute sorrow that she was anxious for her 
 name to be changed, and so changed that her neighbors, 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 23 
 
 wondering,, said, "Is this Naomi?" Here was the hand of 
 God touching this family and breaking it into shreds, and 
 sending a shattered fragment back in sorrow and distress 
 to start over again the long series of struggles to build up a 
 home and a righteous career. 
 
 The first thing I want to call your attention to specifi- 
 cally is in the third verse the first break in the family 
 circle. They all got over into the land of Moab. And their 
 experience there at the first must have been satisfactory. 
 They went for bread; they got it. The third verse reveals 
 the first tragedy in the family, the first breach in the family 
 circle. And for the first time in the history of the little 
 family, when they sat down in the evening-time, after the 
 toil of the day, there was a vacant chair by the fireside. 
 Father is gone! They had buried him in a strange land, 
 among heathen people, under the shadow of heathen gods. 
 I don't know of anything, after all, more tragic than to 
 think of the sad end of a man like Elimelech, a man of 
 influence and honor and power in his own place, going out 
 to Moab and dying there. He is buried alone, and is for- 
 gotten both at home and abroad. And that is the tragic end 
 of his bad choice, in the moment when God's hand in the 
 famine was laid upon his home place for his own good, for 
 the reproving of the sins of the community, and for their 
 return to righteousness and God. Take an old tree, and lift 
 it as carefully as you please, and transplant it as carefully 
 as you can, and it will die ninety-nine times out of a hun- 
 dred. Take one of those beautiful maples at the College 
 gate, and haul it down and plant it in front of the Court 
 House, and the chances against its growing are exceed- 
 ingly great, and the chances for its life are exceedingly 
 small. It is a hard thing to transplant an old man from 
 one place to another and expect him to flourish in the new 
 condition. If you have a father who has lived for fifty 
 years on the farm, it would be almost criminal for you, his 
 child, to drag his gray hairs and bent form from the scenes 
 
24 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 of his life into the town, simply because it suits you better 
 to take care of him there than it does out on the farm. 
 Think about this. If there is anything in the world that 
 you ought to do for your father, it is to make him com- 
 fortable; and one of the things that you can do for your 
 mother is to make her comfortable in the place where her 
 heart grew and her life nourished, and where all her affec- 
 tions are centred. I never like to see a young couple start- 
 ing out into life, and choosing a career, dragging their par- 
 ents out with them into the new career. How the old folks 
 must suffer in silence because of such a change as that!: 
 Don't do that sort of thing. One of the duties of a child is 
 to honor his father and mother; one of the ways of honoring 
 them is to make them comfortable in the place where they; 
 can find comfort. It was a hard thing for the old man when 
 he went over there and died. He could not stand the trans- 
 planting. 
 
 He did not go there to die. He went there for bread; but 
 he got the very thing he did not expect to get. Bringing to 
 our minds the lesson of the uncertainty that invests every 
 life uncertainty as to its circumstances, uncertainty as to 
 its character, uncertainty as to its continuance. We cannot 
 escape these uncertainties, we cannot prevent them. You 
 will not do in this world, in spite of all your planning, the 
 things that you intended to do. You will not live the kind 
 of life that you have resolved to live. You will not live the 
 number of days that you would like to live. This uncer- 
 tainty faces all of us. There is nothing in this world that 
 gives one more cause for thought than the way his life is 
 ordered, as opposed to the way he would order it. Take, 
 your pencil, and in your memory go back two years, and 
 draw how you had planned to live the past two years draw- 
 a line along to show how it was to be, and then draw another 
 line to show how you did live. How different it has been! 
 Bid you ever think of that? Did you think about how 
 absolutely unlike the way you intended things to be they 
 
BOOK OP RUTH. 25 
 
 really are? Who knows? That comes to me with increas- 
 ing force as I learn from day to day of the career of the 
 boys and girls that used to be at Juniata College here with 
 me. Let us go back fifteen years; there were a lot of people 
 in the school. I can remember nearly all of them. And 
 not one of those living to-day has had anything like the 
 kind of an experience that he contemplated or wished for. 
 It has been so different! In some cases so much worse, in 
 some cases so much better, than they had occasion to expect, 
 that nobody in this world has a right to say that he cani 
 order for a single day of his existence the purpose of his 
 life. "Man's goings are of the Lord; how can a man then, 
 understand his own way?" God disposes of our careers,, 
 and our lives are not what we would have them to be,i 
 And here we have but a type of every life's disappointment. 
 Going for one thing, receiving another; studying for five 
 years in school to become a teacher, and never teaching; 
 planning for ten years to become a physician, and never 
 practicing the profession; praying for five years to become 
 a missionary, and never becoming one; fighting for five 
 years against the spirit of God, and joining the church at 
 the end; boasting of our smartness and infidelity for a min- 
 ute, and joining the church at the end of our boast. You 
 know nothing whatever of the ordering of your life. And 
 what a blessing it is that God providentially keeps from us 
 anything like an adequate knowledge of what life is going 
 to be for us for the years to come! I think if a flash-light, 
 could reveal the experiences that are before me for a year 
 to come, that it would cause us to give up in despair and 
 die of a broken heart to-day. 
 
 You don't know what you have to face; neither did this 
 woman, neither did this man, neither does any one know, 
 what God's providence has in store with reference to the 
 future, any more than we did know what it was with refer- 
 ence to our past. How little we know of life, how less we 
 know of death, and how infinitely less we know of destiny 
 
26 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 after death. We know that Elimelech lived. We have 
 learned of the kind of life he lived. We only know that he 
 died. What became of him after death? Who knows? The 
 Bible is silent. Man lives and man dies, and we bury him. 
 The future state who knows the next page in his history? 
 Who knows? God only knows that. "If a man die, shall 
 he live again?" How little we know about our own destiny, 
 about the events which shall enter into our own lives in the 
 years to come. It is said that an old Indian chief down in 
 the southern part of the United States ran away with his 
 tribe from a fire that swept across the prairie, until he came 
 to a river, where he planted his staff and said, in his lan- 
 guage, "Alabama/' which means "here we may rest." But 
 he had scarcely put up his tepee and swung his hammock 
 in his wigwam, until hostile Indians came, and the place 
 which he had chosen for rest became the place of his own 
 murder and the annihilation of his tribe. You cannot enter 
 a place and say, "Here I am secure." Fleeing from one fate, 
 you face another running out of Bethlehem to get away 
 from the famine, and entering into Moab to find death. So 
 experience runs in the history of every life. 
 
 Then take this thought, which I think every man who 
 undertakes to plan a home ought to keep in mind how 
 long are you going to live? Write down on a piece of paper 
 now how long you are sure you are going to live. How long 
 did you write? How many could write twenty years? How 
 many could write twenty minutes in absolute certainty? 
 Here is the thought. Before you establish a home and take 
 a wife and children into any place in this world, don't you 
 think that you ought to consider the possibility that death 
 may take you away in a moment, and leave your wife and 
 children helpless there in the place you have chosen? A 
 man ought to choose such a place as would be at least decent 
 and fitting for those of his family who survive him. And 
 yet I doubt if a single man ever planned a home with that 
 thought prominently in view. He thinks about the condi- 
 
BOOK OP RUTH. 27 
 
 tion of the land, the nearness of the market, the price of 
 wheat, and maybe, if he has a little common sense about 
 him, he thinks about the readiness of access to the school 
 and the church; but he does not give a thought to what 
 might happen to his wife and children if he were suddenly 
 called away, leaving them in the place he has chosen. 
 Notice the gradual process by which this woman was be- 
 reaved. First she lost her husband. Then she had her boys 
 to comfort her. Then she lost her boys. Then she had her 
 daughters-in-law to comfort her. Then she lost one of them, 
 and had the increasing love and devotion of the other to 
 comfort her. Suppose that Naomi had lost husband and 
 sons and daughter-in-law at one stroke. It would have been 
 a tremendous affliction. It was bad as it was. It was infi- 
 nitely better that God ordered a sequence of time in her 
 afflictions. He laid upon her the hand of affliction, but also 
 extended to her the hand of comfort in each trial she had 
 to face. 
 
 She had hardly gotten up from mourning for her hus- 
 band until the wedding-bells sounded in her home. Look 
 at the fourth verse from the shroud to the wedding-gar- 
 ment! There was a wedding out there in Moab soon after 
 the funeral. How soon after you don't know. But it was 
 not long. Notice how it comes right after. Elimelech dies 
 and is buried. Then what? The boys get married. That is 
 the history of all human experience. After you are dead 
 you will not be missed half as much as you think. Those 
 that love you will bury you out of sight to-day, and go on 
 to plan for their own comfort and future to-morrow. The 
 boys were no worse than a multitude of others. They bury 
 their father in sadness and pain to-day, and to-morrow 
 marry and plan for the future. 
 
 What is the use of our worrying and fussing and 
 arrogating to ourselves important thoughts, and feeling 
 that we are indispensable? We drop out, and the next 
 day the marriage-bells ring. Our life is a memory that 
 
28 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 scarcely affects the life that moves on from, day to 
 day. These marriages were natural, marriages made in 
 the land where people live. Ninety per cent of the people 
 that get married in this world get married for geograph-r 
 ical reasons. You will marry for geographical reasons. 
 That is, you get to know a little circle near you, and 
 the geography of convenience and nearness determines 
 your choice. How few people break away from that. Take 
 your family into Moab, and you can put it down as a fact 
 that in Moab they will marry. Move out into Colorado, take 
 your young children along, and you will have a family there, 
 sons-in-law and daughters-in-law. Jewish boys, sons of Elim- 
 elech, marry the daughters of Moab, Orpah and Euth. Was 
 it right that these boys should marry heathen wives, against 
 the express command in the Old Testament law that this 
 should not be done? I have neither time nor inclination 
 to enter into any discussion of the Tightness of that. But I 
 have time to say that it is exceedingly inexpedient. You 
 may marry outside of your own church affiliations, but it is 
 a risky thing to do. I don't know how that affects you, and 
 I don't care. But this word of advice on that question: If 
 you want to live happily, you had better belong to one 
 church, all of you that live in one family. It will save a 
 great many family jars and a lot of broken and bruised feel- 
 ings. Here is a young man that says, "I will marry a young 
 girl, and then I will convert her over to my own faith; she 
 will be all right afterward." Ninety times out of a hundred 
 that works the other way. Instead of you bringing her in, 
 she will take you out. She may be the weaker vessel, but 
 she is often the stronger power. 
 
 Again, I think it is a tremendous risk for any young girl 
 to marry a man outside of the church, in the hope that, 
 because you marry him, he will join the church. In the 
 first place, he will not do it; and in the second place, he 
 ought not to do it. He ought not to join the church for 
 your sake, but for Christ's sake. And if he will not do it 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 29 
 
 before for a right and a proper purpose, you can set it down 
 'that he will not do it afterward. What shall I say of those 
 foolish young people who marry sots and idiots, in the hope 
 of reforming them? You had better pick a good husband; 
 because, if you get the best, you won't have a better one than 
 you deserve if you are good yourself. Here it turned out 
 well. Orpah was a good wife. Ruth was a noble woman. 
 But in the majority of cases these things are risky. And it 
 pays in the end, for the comfort of your life and your value 
 as a Christian man in this world, to make your marriage 
 associations along the line of your church affiliations. This 
 is, moreover, a debt that you owe to the church. 
 
 The second bereavement came quickly. The young men 
 die as their father died. Here you have a strangely sad, per- 
 haps an unusual, experience three widows in one house- \ 
 hold, without a friend or provider. We ought to be most 
 careful about making those unions that are never going to 
 be broken. I suppose young people mostly think about the 
 union of marriage as the great thing in life. It may end 
 suddenly. It may end disastrously in the survival of a life 
 that is worse than death. But you can form an affiliation 
 in your youth that will never end association in the church 
 with Jesus Christ, who will be with you always. 
 
 The awakening comes after this tremendous affliction. 
 The old widow, with her two daughters-in-law dependent 
 upon her for guidance, awakens and recognizes her peculiar 
 condition. She makes her resolve in the sixth verse, a 
 resolve upon which she acted. What was the reason for this 
 act of hers? She had heard from home. It was not in a \ 
 telegraph message nor in a telephone message. But, as 
 was common in those days, travelers moving to and fro, after 
 weeks and months, brought the news from foreign or remote 
 countries. I suppose that old Naomi had been asking year 
 after year, as the dusty traveler had wandered into Moab 
 from Bethlehem, "How is it at Bethlehem?" and every time 
 she got the answer, "Famine, famine still." At the end of 
 
I 
 
 30 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 ten years, a messenger comes with the news that there is 
 plenty again in Bethlehem. Because she can find bread 
 there, the old associations and the old influences that had 
 slumbered for years reassert themselves, and she says, "I 
 will return to Bethlehem." In the seventh verse the pil- 
 grimage home begins. From this time Euth leaps to the 
 front as the great character in the family tragedy. Naomi 
 drops into the background as a mere shadow; Euth stands 
 out as the great character of the book. They start together 
 on the homeward journey. And the significant fact that I 
 want to call your attention to in connection with the home- 
 ward journey is this that conditions at home may change at 
 any time, and call us without a moment's warning on the 
 homeward journey. When are you going to go home to your 
 parents? You don't know. The telephone or the tele- 
 graphic flash may call, and you must go home on the 
 next train. Conditions have changed there; there is sick- 
 ness there, or perchance there is death. You are called 
 home! You never know just when you will be halted in 
 your career and suddenly called home called home to your 
 religious self, called home to your God. They start down 
 the road. 
 
 Here we have, in this beginning of the journey set forth 
 in the eighth verse, the first test of affection between these 
 women. Here for the first time Naomi opens her mouth 
 and speaks. Naomi first x of all thinks of others instead of 
 herself, and manifests here on the highway the generous 
 spirit that typifies the character of her great descendant, 
 the Lord Jesus Christ, the spirit of unselfish devotion to 
 others, the spirit that made her think of the good of others 
 even to her own discomfort. If I were a painter, and had 
 power with canvas and brush and colors, I would paint the 
 road out from Moab, with the light falling to the west, and 
 these three women girded for the journey, and I would try 
 to read aright their faces, the different emotions that I 
 think played upon them as they started. Here was Naomi, 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 31 
 
 probably a rag in her hand, containing in a little tied 
 up bundle everything that she owned in this world, 
 for she was excessively poor. There were Orpah and 
 Euth young, sad, but resolute. And what would you 
 put into the faces of these three women to show forth 
 the character of each, and make it unlike the others, and 
 tell the story that the future chapters of this wonderful 
 story of Euth portrays the story of the fading resolution of 
 Orpah, the story of the rising resolution of Euth, the story 
 of the steadfast Christian resignation of the old mother? I 
 would want that picture before I would want "The Ange- 
 lus" or "The Gleaners" or the "Breaking of Home Ties." I 
 would want that as a painting in which Naomi would typify 
 the returning soul to the home of God, leading heathen ones 
 with her by the power of love. What a scene; what a paint- 
 ing! What a travel that was as they set out on their jour- 
 ney for Bethlehem and for bread! Then you have, as they 
 start, the voice of Naomi pronouncing a benediction and a 
 valediction upon these two daughters-in-law. Will you turn, 
 if you please, and read it in concert? 
 
 "And Naomi said unto her two daughters in law, Go, 
 return each to her mother's house: the Lord deal kindly 
 with you, as ye have dealt with the dead and with me. The 
 Lord grant you that ye may find rest, each of you in the 
 house of her husband. Then she kissed them; and they 
 lifted up their voice, and wept." That is a tender utter- 
 ance: she prays to God that they may find rest each in the 
 house of her husband. And then there was a good-bye in 
 the last line. How was that? I want you to think of the 
 simple gift of that old mother-in-law. She could not give 
 them money, she could not give them property, she could 
 not give them any gift as they went back. She could only 
 give them a kiss. It was not much, but everything that her 
 old soul could give. She was as poor as Peter, when he was 
 , entering into the temple, and was asked an alms, and said, 
 "Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I 
 
32 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 thee." She gave them the only thing that she had a bless- 
 ing from a tender, loving heart. This she gave to them, 
 forgetful of her own self and her own sufferings as she 
 would have to trudge alone to her abandoned home and her 
 own unhappy place. 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 33 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 In the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth verses is the sec- 
 ond test of the devotion of these women. They both stood 
 the first trial. Now Naomi gives them a second -a delicate 
 hint that if they follow her to her country and away from 
 Moab, their country, they will find no comfort there what- 
 ever. She can't give to them sons that will be husbands to 
 them. Neither can they hope to marry into families of any 
 respectability under the Mosaic law, since they are heathen. 
 There was no hope of comfort, only the prospect of sitting 
 in distress, and dying in broken-heartedness. She bids them 
 go back: "Return to your own land and be content there, 
 for in my land there is no prospect for you whatever/' 
 Really, here is a crisis. In making the decision here between 
 going and returning, it is really a choice between going 
 back to Moab and returning to the old heathen gods, or 
 going over into Bethlehem and accepting the true God. It 
 means what god they should choose, what religion they 
 should espouse, what shall be their whole after life. Orpah 
 evidently understood that this was a choice of great signifi- 
 cance to all her future, because you will notice that she 
 returned, or went back to her gods. She did not go back to 
 her home; she went back to choose the religion that had 
 dominated her early life. Ruth gave up the worship of 
 Shemosh, and went over to worship the God of Israel, the 
 God of revelation. The crisis then came on this second 
 test. "Choose your religion; if you come with me you will 
 have to change your religion." That was substantially the 
 statement given out by the old mother-in-law. In that crisis 
 Orpah fails to stand the test. Ruth, on the other hand, 
 chose wisely. She stood the test. 
 
 The final separation is one that bases itself .upon a re- 
 ligious choice. I know of nothing in this world that ought 
 
34 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 to determine the separation of friends except religion. 
 There is nothing that I know of that is sincerer, higher, 
 more enduring than friendship between people, the affection 
 of families for each other, the devotion of kinsmen to each 
 other. Nothing should break that tie of blood and kinship 
 excepting a difference of religion. There is nothing above 
 the family tie except the church tie. A man is called a hero 
 when he gives up his life and his home for his country. 
 And he is also heroic when he adheres to his family and 
 gives up his life for that. And he is more than heroic when 
 he gives up everything for the sake of religion, as did Ruth 
 here in this instance. Orpah, then, in this separation, be- 
 comes the type of the mere professor of religion the per- 
 son that follows in prosperity, but has no enduring basis 
 for following, so that when the test comes she falls away. 
 In the hour of trial, in the hour of adversity, in the hour 
 when the outlook is by no means promising, then Orpah 
 lacked stability of character and strength of purpose to 
 choose aright. Just as you, when tempted by sin, give up 
 your profession of following, and lapse back into idolatry 
 and irreligion and inactivity. Ruth is a type of the Chris- 
 tian man or woman whose affection is deeper than that of 
 mere lip-service, and whose life is genuine a real Christian 
 life. Notice the difference. Orpah could follow just as well 
 as Ruth under ordinary circumstances; but in the crisis of 
 life Ruth triumphs, Orpah fails. It is no use to compare 
 these two characters, because they are so absolutely dissim- 
 ilar. And yet up to the moment of choice they were both 
 alike. Both had husbands. Both had buried their hus- 
 bands. Both clave to their mother-in-law. Both followed 
 her partly on the way back to Bethlehem. So far there was 
 no difference between the genuine lover of religion and the 
 mere professor. But when the trial came, there was all the 
 difference in the world. You and I may walk arm in arm 
 for ten years. So far as the casual observer may see, there 
 is no difference between us. Both have the same aims. We 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 35 
 
 follow the same pursuits. We are practically the same. 
 People speak of us as friends and as having common im- 
 pulses and common tendencies and common ends. But wait; 
 after a while there comes a trial, and one of us fails. Then 
 it is revealed to the world that the ten years of seeming 
 union were in reality ten years in which our livs were grow- 
 ing wider and wider apart. And in the end absolute separa- 
 tion occurs. There is no comparison to be drawn between 
 the life of Ruth and the life of Orpah. On the surface they 
 seem alike; really, they were as remote as the north is from 
 the south, the east from the west. Orpah is like a great many 
 of you. You get up on Sunday morning and wash your 
 faces and comb your hair and put on your clean clothes and 
 go to church. And on Monday morning you forget that you 
 have been to church on Sunday, and never think of church 
 until the next Sunday comes. You are formal Christians. 
 You have no interest in the wof of Christ. You are very 
 willing to be a Christian on Sunday, when it is a natural 
 and easy thing to be a Christian when it is the accepted 
 thing. But Ruth is the type of the woman and of the Chris- 
 tian who steadfastly remembers that the worship of Sunday 
 should be reflected in the life of Monday; who really is more 
 of a Christian on Monday than she was on Sunday, because 
 she lives in quiet on Monday, without observation, that 
 which she could not live without observation on Sunday; 
 who rejoices more in the hour of trial, because then she can 
 live closer to God, than in the hour of prosperity, when the 
 burden is shared by others. There is all the difference in 
 the world between these women. I would not give a fig for 
 the one; heaven has not enough of wealth for the other. 
 You can be an Orpah in your merely professional attitudes 
 of life, or you can be a Ruth in the more genuine aspects of 
 life. In the one case you are not worth the bread you eat 
 to-day; in the other, there is not enough bread in the world 
 to compensate you for your living. It is the difference 
 between the woman that returned and the woman that clave 
 
 
36 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 unto her mother-in-law. If I were to put it to a vote, there 
 is no mean slave on earth that would not vote to select Ruth 
 and leave Orpah, in the test. Nobody would think of com- 
 paring the women. No artist on earth would ever paint 
 them with similar faces; no man on earth would think of 
 them with equal feelings. And yet I want you to under- 
 stand that there was not much difference between what they 
 did. They probably cooked equally well, kept house equally 
 well. But the one was true, the other was not true. And 
 that is the difference between heaven and hell when you come 
 to measure it in its extremity. What evidently you need to 
 understand here, the thing that is to be kept standing 
 before your mind and mine, is that Ruth's character is the 
 one that ought to fructify and enrich all Christian char- 
 acters. We don't want Christians for Sunday and demons 
 for Monday. We want Christians that will go with Christ 
 to the cross. Did you ever think how easy it must have been 
 to be a follower of Christ on the Sunday before His cruci- 
 fixion, when He rode into the city with the palm wreaths 
 around Him, with the followers shouting Hosanna to the 
 King, and with the children strewing flowers in His way, and 
 with the whole multitude evidently believing that here at 
 last the Christ was coming to establish His kingdom upon 
 earth? It was an easy thing then to shout and be a follower 
 of Christ. To be a follower of Christ that day meant, as 
 far as they could see, immediate recognition in some great 
 high place in the power that was to be, in the kingdom that 
 was to come. But just wait until Friday of that week. 
 Where were all these followers and shouters when Friday 
 came, and the blackness of heaven settled down upon the 
 earth like a pall, and the cross went up, and the Christ was 
 crucified? Where were they then? The Orpahs had gone 
 back; but the Ruths were at the cross, as true in the hour of 
 adversity as in the hour of prosperity. The real followers of 
 Christ followed Him to the cross, and shared with Him in 
 the crucifixion outrage, shared with Him in the struggles of 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 37 
 
 death, and loved Him when they had absolutely no hope of 
 any reward for their love. Is .there any difference between 
 the shouter on Sunday and the worshiper on Friday? The 
 one Orpah could be; the other took a Ruth. I don't know 
 which you are. 
 
 You will never be anything like Ruth in this world, when 
 the hour of trial conies, unless you do what Ruth evidently 
 had done, unless you school your life by years of training 
 into the attitude of standing the test when the test comes. 
 People are not heroes in a flash. You don't do these things 
 in a second. Ruth lived up to this crisis in her life by long 
 years of consecrated devotion. And this was the legitimate 
 fruiting, the necessary outgrowth, the natural culmination 
 of the real things of her life, the inner impulses that had 
 fed her soul, and strengthened it for weeks and for months 
 and for years. Orpah, on the other hand, had lived an idle, 
 thoughtless, unconsecrated life. In the test she had no 
 reserve power. Don't look into my face and tell me it is a 
 matter of luck that the one happened to choose one way and 
 the other happened to choose the other way. It was the 
 culmination of years of different living. The one had been 
 living piously, the other had not; the one had been living 
 nobly, the other had not; the one had been living heroically, 
 the other had not. When the crisis came, the one was noble, 
 the one was heroic, because her life had been moulded into 
 that. You are going to be great some time. Two or three 
 of you want to be great. If so, prepare for it now. You 
 must live for it in the inner circles of your soul. You must 
 sit and think, you must kneel and pray, you must walk and 
 muse, you must lie down and meditate; and then, in the 
 strength of all that, your soul will rise up in a moment of 
 emergency and smite to the right and to the left, and you 
 will triumph gloriously. But you can't do it if you have not 
 schooled your life for that sort of thing. Ruths are not 
 made in a day. 
 
 The final test, the great test, the real test, which was a 
 
38 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 hard one for Ruth, you will find in the sixteenth verse. It 
 made it all the harder for Kuth to make a choice because of 
 the example of Orpah. How would you feel if you were 
 going somewhere with somebody, and he were to say: "I am 
 not going any farther. That is the limit of my going. 
 Good-bye?" As that one would turn, would it not be a 
 strong string pulling at you to turn likewise? Suppose two 
 or three of you were going out here some night to steal 
 apples from Mr. Fouse's orchard. I merely say "suppose." 
 And one of the boys, with just a little more manliness than 
 the rest, would say: "I am not going there. I am going 
 back." It would be a strong string pulling at your con- 
 sciences, a persuasive voice calling to you to go back also. 
 There is a piece of ice on the river, thin and cracked. And 
 you say, "Come ahead; let's go over this." But some one 
 else says, "No, I am not going into danger." Then you too 
 would hesitate, would you not? But Ruth did not hesitate. 
 She went right ahead, ready for the thing she had resolved 
 to do, regardless of the example of Orpah. That proves the 
 strength of soul in the woman. 
 
 Half of you are living as you are because of other people. 
 There is no self-centred purpose in you. You are like a flock 
 of sheep; one runs through the gap, and you all follow. You 
 are like a flock of birds on the wing; one flies, and the others 
 fly. The number of persons with independent lives and 
 independent motives is exceeding small. If all of your 
 companions were to drop out of the game, you too would 
 stop playing. You have no backbone. You have not the 
 first elements of Ruth's character. You are in the church, 
 perhaps. If every man and woman in the church were to 
 leave it, you would go with them. You would not stand 
 up like Ruth for what you thought was right. You have a 
 multiplicity of judgment; you have no originality. Ruth 
 set out here against the advice of her mother-in-law and 
 the example of her sister-in-law; and she did the thing that 
 was right. That makes her heroic. I don't care where you 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 39 
 
 find that kind of person, it is the power to stand right up 
 and say and do the thing you believe to be right that makes 
 heroes. That is the stuff God needs in you and me to build 
 us into anything like decent lives. That lacking, it is frail 
 material on which to build anything. Who is a back-slider; 
 what kind of Christians are these that slide into religion 
 to-day and slide out of it to-morrow? Who are they? They 
 are people without any individuality; who, when others 
 shout with them, shout for the right, but when the world 
 blows against them, they keep quiet and slink into corners; 
 who have no power to bear adversity, nor strength of pur- 
 pose to accomplish anything. You may come here to school 
 to get an education, but you have no strength of purpose. 
 You will not sit down and think for a year; you have not 
 the patience, you have not the grit to do that. You are a 
 coward. Some of you won't stay two years; some of you 
 won't stay three. Somewhere along the line is the measure 
 of your value to yourself. When do you give up? What 
 makes a bulldog absolutely indispensable to his owner? His 
 value is determined by his unrelenting grip. He takes hold 
 and stays there. That is a quality in human nature that 
 counts. If you want to master your books, if you want to 
 become a mathematician or anything else in this world, you 
 must take hold and stick. That is the sum of it. It is mak- 
 ing up your mind that you are going to do one thing, and 
 then sticking to that purpose. I had a friend; he did not 
 live far from where I am standing. He was in nine or ten 
 businesses every year that is, in his mind. He would 
 teach one day, and then he would take a notion that he 
 ought to have a shoe store. He would look into that for a 
 week, and then he would think of studying medicine. When 
 that was over, he would think probably that the gun business 
 was the one for him. What he wanted was to become a mas- 
 ter of shooting-irons, and own a store in which he could sell 
 revolvers and shotguns. What was the matter with him? 
 Simply this: he lacked continuity of purpose. He could 
 
40 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 not stick to anything. When I was a boy, I used to see, 
 when I went down to the river in the winter, little bunches 
 of weeds rolled up like a ball. They would get on the ice, 
 and the wind would come, and you could see them go whirl- 
 ing here and there. Did you ever see them? Like crazy 
 idiots they would go, worse than Zigzag Ike on a holiday. 
 No purpose at all in their wanderings. Simply the victims 
 of the whim that carried them. We laugh at the weeds. 
 There are many of us that are living as erratic lives as the 
 weeds driven by the wind. And if the weed could scratch 
 its path upon the Tee, and tell its wanderings, and you could 
 scratch your path and tell yours, yours would be worse than 
 the weed's. An absolute determination to do the duty she 
 had to perform is what made Ruth glorious. That is why- 
 she did not return. That is why she clave unto her mother- 
 in-law, and triumphed in these three tests in spite of Orpah's 
 example. 
 
 If I had time, I would tell you not to be influenced very 
 much by other people. It does not pay. I mean by that, 
 when you are prompted to do right, when you are put to the 
 test, and the temptation comes from others who are not as 
 conscientious as you are, who are not as anxious to do right 
 as you are, and who are willing to live below what your 
 conscience teaches you you ought to be, pay very little atten- 
 tion to those people. Live on in your devotion to God. 
 
 "Here," says Ruth, "I will register something before hea- 
 ven and before you, Naomi, that will settle this whole mat- 
 ter." Turn in your Books to the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 verses, to show what seems to me to be the most sublime 
 utterance in the whole Book of Ruth. I know of nothing 
 more beautiful than this sentiment of Ruth's. It is Ruth at 
 her best. It is her graduation day. She has taken her long 
 course of affliction and trial, and now she comes up here 
 and gives expression to her life purpose. How many of you 
 know the words can repeat them from memory? I think 
 that, next to the Lord's Prayer and the fen Command- 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 41 
 
 ments, and perhaps the 23d Psalm, I know of nothing more 
 worthy to be committed to memory than these words of Ruth. 
 Notice several things in connection with her statement. 
 It is a resolution made in early life. Ruth was still a young 
 woman. She is spoken of as a damsel by Boaz; a widow, but 
 still young; probably not out of her twenties. Some of the 
 commentators agree in their belief that Ruth was about 
 twenty-four or twenty-five years of age when she did this. 
 It is recorded of Beza, a churchman of medieval times, that 
 he blessed God, first, for the gift of the Lord Jesus Christ; 
 second, that he was converted to the religion of Christ at 
 the age of sixteen. He wanted it young in life. I like the 
 spirit that induces you in early life to make up your mind 
 that you are going to do something, that you are going to 
 be something, that you are going to live for something. I 
 measure the value of your life in the future by the kind of 
 thing you choose to adhere to. I have a right to do that. 
 Here, then, you have an early choice. It was made in youth. 
 A choice for life, a choice for death. She says, "I will live 
 with you, and die with you, and be buried with you." It was 
 a choice for God and a choice for eternity. Notice the pecu- 
 liar form of that choice. When you return to your rooms I 
 want you to read that over and over, again and again, and 
 notice this: Ruth did not say to Naomi, "I am going to give 
 up my country and my kindred and my husband's grave 
 and my whole past experience; I am going to give up this 
 and that, and that, and that." Ruth never thought about 
 what she was giving up; what she did think about was the 
 things she was taking up. "Thy people shall be my people, 
 thy God shall be my God." You can find nowhere a better 
 idea of the proper attitude of the young convert to the 
 religion of Christ than that which is characteristic of this 
 choice of Ruth. She was not thinking of what she was giv- 
 ing up; she was thinking of the supremer gain in what she 
 was taking up. There are a great many foolish people in 
 this world who think of the sacrifices. Ruth thought of the 
 
42 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 glory of joining in with the people of Naomi, the God of 
 Naomi. She did not care much for the things she was giv- 
 ing up; she cared infinitely more for the things she was 
 taking up. You are not really ready to join the church and 
 do right until you can see in a Christian life an added gain 
 over the life outside when you can see that it is not a gain 
 you are giving up, but a gain you are taking up. It is a 
 gain to do right, not a loss. As long as we regard it as a loss, 
 we have not the right idea of religion. You must give up 
 your friends and your horse and your bicycle and your every- 
 thing. What mustn't you give up? Add them up in your 
 head got to give up this and that. It seems to me that God 
 must get weary sometimes looking over the list of foolish 
 things that people conceive they have to give up before they 
 can join the church. What can you gain? Look to that. 
 What did Euth gain? She gained a new people, new friends, 
 a new God, a new religion a tremendous gain in her life. 
 There are compensations in the religion of Christ. If you 
 were to sit down and think as long and as hard about the 
 things that you can gain by joining the church as you do 
 about the things you will lose by joining the church, you 
 would come into the church sooner, come into it better, 
 and be more contented when you are in it. That was what 
 Ruth did. That is what makes her speech beautiful. It 
 would have infinitely marred Ruth's choice and Ruth's life 
 if she had said, "I am going to leave my life and my religion 
 and join yours." That is not the way to put things. 
 
 The choice was, first of all, an affectionate one. It was 
 born of her absolute love for the old woman. I think that a 
 great many folks like old people. I think old people are liked 
 for two reasons: first, because they are expected to die soon, 
 and folks think they have to give them a great deal of affec- 
 tion very quickly, or they won't live long enough to get 
 much. It is a sort of feeling that they will have to hurry the 
 process on as fast as possible. Then, some old people are 
 loved for what they are expected to leave, and for nothing 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 43 
 
 else. The number of old people who are sincerely loved, gen- 
 uinely loved, earnestly loved, as Ruth loved Naomi, is not as 
 great as we sometimes suppose. Ruth, you see, had no out- 
 look here. Naomi could not give her a farm, nor family 
 standing, nor prestige of any sort. All she could give Ruth 
 was poverty and an old woman's benediction. But that was 
 enough for Ruth, because she loved Naomi. So I say, in the 
 first place, it was an affectionate choice. 
 
 In the second place, it was an entire choice. It was a giv- 
 ing up of absolutely all that she had. It was obeying the 
 injunction which her own descendant afterward gave to the 
 young man: "Sell all thou hast and give to the poor." In 
 the third place, it was an humble choice. She chose an hum- 
 ble place in life. In that way, I think, exemplifying or typi- 
 fying the character of Lazarus later on. She chose the poor 
 things first, that she might have the better things later on. 
 My father always taught me, when a boy, to eat the poorest 
 apples first, and keep the best ones for the last. That was his 
 notion, and it was right. Lazarus had his better things in 
 Abraham's bosom; the rich man had his better time here. 
 Ruth was like Lazarus; she chose for the future, and made an 
 humble choice for the present. Then it was a determined choice. 
 There was no wavering about it; like Paul's, "This one thing 
 I do." In the next place, it was an instant choice that is, 
 when the moment came that the choice had to be made, she 
 made it; exemplifying another character of the New Testa- 
 ment scriptures, of whom it was written, "They arose and fol- 
 lowed him." Did they say, "We will go home, and come 
 to-morrow and report to you"? That is the way we do 
 things. We are asked to do right, and we say, "I will think 
 about it." Somebody asks you to join the church, and you 
 say, "I will think about it." When Christ went along by the 
 sea and saw people fishing, and said, "Follow me," did they 
 say, "Wait until next week; wait until we have sold our fish 
 and fixed our families comfortably, and then we will come"? 
 No, "They arose and followed him." Ruth did the same- 
 thing. She did not wait; it was an instant choice. 
 
44 LECTURES OK THE 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 In the eighteenth verse of the first chapter, after Ruth 
 made her heroic statement, Naomi "Saw that she was stead- 
 fastly minded." I desire to bring that thought of the 
 text vividly hefore you as the keynote of the woman's char- 
 acter. She was steadfastly minded. And when Naomi saw 
 tnat, it ended all controversy. There was nothing more to 
 be said, no further importuning to go back. When she 
 heard Ruth make the statement that you find recorded in 
 the seventeenth verse, there could be, of course, no debate 
 beyond that. There was a determination, a resolution, a fixed- 
 ness there that admitted of no debate or argument. Just as 
 long as you are not sure of your ground, not positive of your 
 position, not clear in the controversy, you are going to waver 
 and shift and hesitate, doubt and be defeated. But here 
 was a woman that won from the beginning, because she never 
 changed her position. She had some sand, some grit about 
 her; something of the quality that makes valiant people; the 
 steadfastness which too many people lack nowadays, as they 
 did even in the days of Ruth. 
 
 "We come, in the next place, to a study of the journey 
 homeward to Bethlehem. "So they went until they came to 
 Bethlehem." How do you suppose Naomi felt coming back 
 home? She had been away ten years. She says herself she 
 went out full, she came back empty. An old woman now; 
 not a thing in the world; poor; not even known of her neigh- 
 bors; so changed, they look at her in surprise and say, "Is this 
 Naomi?" Can you imagine something of the feeling that 
 you would have, if you were to go out from your home in lux- 
 ury, in comfort, stay away for ten years in a strange land, 
 and come back poor, bowed down with losses, alone in the 
 world? I suppose there never was a sadder home-coming 
 than the home-coming of old Naomi. The one thing that 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 45 
 
 made it tolerable was the devotion of the daughter-in-law, 
 Ruth. How do you suppose it must have been to Ruth her- 
 self? Every step of that journey to Bethlehem took her more 
 and more and more into uncertainty and into doubt. Ruth 
 was literally walking in the densest doubt that a human soul 
 could enter. She had given up everything; she could look 
 forward to nothing. And she walked right into that maze of 
 uncertainty with the one simple thought that she was going 
 to stick by Naomi, no matter what comes. She did not know 
 what was to be met, she did not know what to expect. She 
 had no revelation of anything except that she would be true 
 to her vow. What do you suppose they talked about on 
 their journey to Bethlehem? There never was any further 
 reference to going back. It was now a companionship for 
 life. That was settled. The past is over; now they begin to 
 speak of the future, the little prospect of a hut, a cabin, a 
 few rooms, a chance to beg, the hope that somebody's char- 
 ity would be exercised, an earnest desire on their part to live, 
 an absolute determination to stick by each other, evidently a 
 protestation on the part of the old one that she would be in 
 the way, evidently an earnest beseeching on the part of the 
 other that she should not talk so. And so, the one with en- 
 couragement, the other with discouragement, they wander 
 along hand in hand, crying, no doubt, half the journey; 
 lying down at night under the stars, as Jacob did, and wait- 
 ing for the morning light to push onward. For this journey 
 was by no means a short one, and by women afoot by no 
 means an easy one to accomplish. At last they come to the 
 city of Bethlehem, and find the city alive with astonishment. 
 Some of them say in surprise, "Is this Naomi?" Some of 
 them say in condemnation, "Is this Naomi?" as if they would 
 pronounce upon her a denunciation for having abandoned 
 her people ten years before, and run away from the dispensa- 
 tion of Providence. Others would say in contempt, "Is this 
 Naomi?" And still others would say in compassion and pity, 
 what you would perhaps have said had you been there, "Is 
 
46 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 this Naomi; poor thing, is this what she has come to?" How- 
 ever different the point you choose to consider the exclama- 
 tion from, it showed supreme surprise upon the part of the in- 
 habitants of Bethlehem. They could not realize the marvelous 
 change! Do you remember how Eip Van Winkle came home 
 .after twenty years asleep? Nobody knew him; he was in 
 doubt whether he knew himself. You cannot imagine how 
 your own soul would feel if it were to go out for ten years and 
 come back changed as Naomi was changed. You don't know 
 how lonely you would feel; you don't know how much aston- 
 ishment you would produce. "Is this Naomi?" Think about 
 that. Eemember what she said: "Don't call me Naomi." 
 i/That was a word in the Hebrew that meant "favor," "beauti- 
 ful," "prosperous." She had no favor; she had lost her 
 beauty; she had lost her prosperity. She says, "Call me 
 bitter, call me Mara, for the Lord hath dealt heavily with 
 e." 
 
 She had had a hard life. When you get so low in this life 
 in the depths of sadness that you are willing to forget your 
 name and give up everything that designates your past, 
 when you do not want even to be reminded of it in the sound 
 of the voice, you are to be most supremely pitied. "Do not 
 call me by my old name any more! Let not even the sound of 
 the voice suggest the past, that now no longer is. Call me 
 bitter, for such I am. It has gone badly with my life." How 
 many of us ten years from now think about this; you don't 
 realize it now will sit down somewhere and say, "Call me 
 bitter; I have had ten years that did not go well?" Some of 
 you will do that just as sure as you are sitting here. I do 
 not like to say it, but I know it is so. Some of you, ten years 
 from this moment, will be sorry that you lived the ten 
 years, as old Naomi was sorry that she had lived. In the 
 battle it is going to go against you, and you will want to for- 
 get that you ever lived. I don't know whether there is one 
 here that might surrender so far his higher judgment, and 
 higher sense of what is right, as to be willing to forfeit life 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 47 
 
 rather than to live on in the bitterness that may come; but 
 it may be so. 
 
 A friend of mine this afternoon, up in my room, one of 
 my boys, said he did not know, until he traveled this past 
 year, how many people live as they do. I said to him what I 
 say to you now you don't know what it is to be well-born 
 and have a good home. You are infinitely blessed above 
 eighty per cent of the human race in the very fact that you 
 have a good father and a good mother and a good home. 
 When these are gone, it is a tremendous loss to any soul. 
 Poor Naomi! That is what you would call her. But you 
 would not speak of it to represent the loss of her property. 
 Not poor Naomi in that sense, but poor Naomi because of 
 your heart's being touched with sympathy for the abject mis- 
 ery that has come upon her life, the dark clouds that have 
 settled down tight over it, without a star or a sun to brighten 
 it, and the only warmth stealing out to her lonely heart 
 the devotion of her daughter-in-law; only that, no more. 
 When you get so far in this world from where you now are 
 that you will have but one friend, you will be an object of 
 pity and commiseration, whoever you are. Well, it was home 
 again to Naomi, bitter as it was. It was coming home to 
 start the world anew, to begin it all over again. The only 
 thing left for her was to start, right in the dust, to build 
 again a new life and a new prospect in the world. They 
 went in by night. I don't think- she would have had it in 
 her heart to enter the town in daylight. If the lonely woman 
 -ever had a wish in that long first night, as she sat alone in 
 Bethlehem and thought of the days that were, thought of 
 the grave of her husband in Moab, thought of the graves of 
 her two children in Moab, thought of her abandoned daugh- 
 ter-in-law, thought of the one that sat by her side, it was, "I 
 wish I could live it over again! If I only were back at the 
 beginning! If I could only do it over, and do it differ- 
 ently!" 
 
 It is so easy to see our mistakes after we have made them. 
 
48 LECTUKES ON THE 
 
 It takes the wisdom of God to anticipate them and avoid 
 them. It brings to my mind an old story I used to read 
 when I was a boy, of a man who wrote like this: "It was 
 New Year's night. An aged man was standing at the win- 
 dow looking out into the darkness. The snow was falling;: 
 the wind was blowing. He saw before him his own life 
 stretching like a great path down through the ages, through 
 the years. And he saw, as he walked down the path, where 
 the road parted. He had chosen the one road, and had refused 
 to take the other. He had gone down that road year after 
 year. It was the wrong road. It had taken him to the bar- 
 room and the gambling-den. It had taken him to poverty 
 and to disgrace, to all manner of crime. And in his old age 
 it had brought him to the border of the grave. As he stood 
 looking out into the night, he said: "Oh, Youth, return! Oh, 
 give me back my early days! Put me once more at the forks 
 of the road, that I may choose the other instead of the one 
 that I have trod/ " That would be the wish of any heart. 
 Some of you are now saying to yourselves, young as you are,, 
 that if you had it to live over, you would live life better. But 
 it is very doubtful whether you would. Is there any use of 
 grieving about what you have done? The thing to do is to 
 get right now to start like Naomi and Euth to build up on 
 the present conditions. Forget the past. Make the most of 
 the future. No use to sit and grieve about what has gone. 
 The thing to do is to change and begin anew. "So they 
 came home in barley time/' That was lucky, to come home 
 when there was something to eat. It was peculiarly a lucky 
 thing in that country, because in barley time the poor had 
 exceptional opportunities. Do you know anything about 
 the laws of the Jews concerning gleaning? I will read to- 
 you a little from the Bible. It is a book that you don't read 
 more than you might. It would pay you to read it more 
 frequently, especially the five books of Moses. They are the 
 basis of the whole development of the Word of Truth. 
 "And when you reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 49 
 
 not wholly reap the corners of thy field, neither shalt thou 
 gather the gleanings of thy harvest. And thou shalt not 
 glean thy vineyard, neither shalt thou gather every grape 
 of thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and 
 stranger. I am the Lord your God." Lev. xix. 9-10. You 
 are not to pick up what you drop that is gleanings. You 
 understand what gleanings are bits of grain that fall from 
 the hand of the sickler, and that are prohibited from being 
 gathered. They are for the people that come after. What 
 grapes fall to the ground, or what you miss in the first pick- 
 ing, you shall not reach for again. There is an express pro- 
 vision made in the Book for the poor. "When thou cuttest 
 down thine harvest in thy field, and hast forgot a sheaf in the 
 field, thou shalt not go again to fetch it: it shall be for the 
 stranger, for the fatherless and for the widow: that the 
 Lord thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hands. 
 When thou beatest thine olive tree, thou shalt not go over the 
 boughs again: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless 
 and for the widow. When thou gatherest the grapes of thy 
 vineyard, thou shalt not glean it afterward: it shall be for the 
 stranger, for the fatherless and for the widow. And thou 
 shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of 
 Egypt: therefore I command thee to do this thing." Deut. 
 xxiv. 19-22. Why should these things be left? "For thou shalt 
 remember," etc. This is the Mosaic law on poverty and 
 gleanings in the field. Evidently God's design in making 
 such a provision is that those that are poor shall mingle 
 with the others in society, and that they should have a chance> 
 to gather by their own effort sufficient to nourish their 
 bodies. That is God's way of dealing with them. I often 
 wonder what God would say if he were to carve out a new 
 revelation and a new statement of his feeling concerning our 
 modern method of dealing with poverty. We tie the hands 
 of the poor. We incarcerate them in almshouses, pen them 
 away from society, and make them dependent. God in 
 his law made the poor independent. He appointed a 
 
50 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 way by which they could honestly earn food for their 
 bodies. We gather our own gleanings, and pay it in 
 taxes lo shut our paupers from the sight of the people. The 
 tax money which we gather from our gleanings barely gives 
 to the poor half the sustenance that they would win for 
 themselves, were we to leave in our fields the gleanings which 
 we are obliged now to gather to pay our taxes. Naturally, 
 therefore, this conclusion would come turn the poor out, 
 stop paying taxes, and leave the gleanings as God intended 
 from the beginning. We could not do it now, because there 
 would be a lot of salaried officers that would lose a job! But 
 God never provided for that class at all; he did provide for 
 the poor. We provide for salaried men, and whatever is left 
 we give to the poor, and our sympathy with it. But sym- 
 thy does not clothe and feed the hungry. It seems to me 
 tat we need to think along these lines. 
 Note two or three things that grow out of the home-com- 
 ing of Naomi. An intense love for home and an intense 
 anchorage to the home scenes is an important thing in life. 
 She came home. Of course the changed condition was tre- 
 mendous. It is said of the Swiss soldiery that when they go 
 off to fight in Spain or Italy they cannot bear to hear the 
 "Banz des Vaehes," the song that calls the cows down into 
 the valley, because that song makes them heartsick for home, 
 and in the night, after that song is sung in the camp, they 
 will either desert or die. Oh, the power of song! How 
 many of you have ever read of the tremendous influence that 
 Jennie Lind exercised over that immense audience in Castle 
 Garden, in New York? She sang so delightfully that they 
 encored her, and then she sang "Home, Sweet Home." What 
 was it that came to their hearts? The appeal for the home 
 place, the love of home in the hearts of those people. And 
 when she afterward repeated that splendid performance down 
 in Washington, Daniel Webster, sitting in the audience, rose 
 to his feet, overcome by the power of the song, and sang 
 with her. She sang to him, and he sang to her. For more 
 
BOOK OF RUTH, 51 
 
 than twenty minutes each endeavored to outsing the other. 
 Marvelous revelation of the power that song has to bring 
 up to the mind the devotion to home! Some of you are 
 away from home now, and you are looking forward to the 
 time when you will be able to go home; and how glad the 
 home folks will be to see you! The home feeling is power- 
 fully strong in us. Any one is to be pitied that has to go 
 home and find everything so changed that there is no joy or 
 comfort in the home-coming. On the other hand, one can 
 afford to think of going home if he knows that the song of 
 welcome will ring out. This makes me think of the songs 
 that shall ring out from the throne of heaven when the ran- 
 somed souls of men and women shall have their eternal home- 
 coming. We are all out now in the land of Moab, wandering 
 around, strangers, foreigners. We often sing, "I am but a 
 stranger here; heaven is my home." We had better make 
 such use of this strange country, and live so in it that when 
 we come home it will be with songs and rejoicing both in the 
 heavenly home and in our hearts. 
 
 Turn to the second chapter. When they came back, what 
 were the circumstances under which they found Boaz? "And 
 Xaomi. had a kinsman of her husband, a mighty man of 
 wealth, of the family of Elimelech; and his name was Boaz." 
 In this second chapter we have the claim of the weak upon 
 the strong the relation, in other words, between the rich 
 and the poor. I want to impress upon you the fact that Boaz 
 was a good man, although he was rich. If you have listened 
 to the talk in this country during the past six months, if you 
 have heard the specious arguments of demagogues, you nat- 
 urally inhibit the idea that every man that has a dollar in his 
 pocket is a rascal, and every man that has no money in his 
 pocket is a gentleman. We have talked ourselves into the 
 notion that wealth goes with wrong, and poverty with right. 
 A more false and more dastardly notion than that could not 
 be incorporated into the thought of a people. The richest 
 man in the state may be the best man, and the poorest man 
 
62 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 may be the worst man. To denounce one class because of 
 their wealth, and to laud another class because of their pov- 
 erty is wrong. Eightness and wrongness are not based upon 
 the amount of money one possesses. It is based upon one's 
 life and the use one makes of the means at his command. 
 Here was Boaz, a mighty man; and he was a good man. He 
 was just as good as the best in Bethlehem, and, I have no 
 doubt, a great deal better than some people who, since the 
 days of Elimelech and Boaz, have gone around traducing 
 and maligning men because they have property. Boaz prob- 
 ably inherited his property, as, under the laws of the Jews, 
 he had a right to do. And he probably increased his prop- 
 erty; because he was an earnest man, an honest man, a hard- 
 working man. He went out to the harvest field. He did not 
 ride around in a carriage. He did not go to the fashionable 
 resorts, nor lie down in idleness. He went out into the har- 
 vest field and asked that the spirit of God might come upon 
 his workers. He was not ashamed to work. Perhaps he 
 was the greatest man in Bethlehem. But his money had not 
 interfered with his goodness. We want, somehow, to build 
 up in this country a different notion. We do not want to 
 malign the men with money and praise the men with pov- 
 erty. We want to speak kindly of the man who does kindly 
 things, and we want to denounce the man that speaks 
 unkindly of anybody without cause. 
 
 In this country to-day, this whole wrangling, warring 
 strife that goes on between riches and poverty is built upon 
 the suggestion that everybody that has money is bad and 
 everybody that has none is good. The fact is there is good- 
 ness and badness in every class. Some of the men that have 
 not a cent in the world are in jail, and others of them, no 
 doubt, ought to be. Some of the men that can show a dollar 
 ought to be in jail; some of them ought never to go there. 
 Some of them are good and some of them are bad. You will 
 find worthy men in every walk of life, and you will find 
 unworthy men. True enough, the Bible says that increasing 
 
BOOK OP RUTH. 53 
 
 temptation comes with increasing riches, and that it is hard 
 for a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven. But he 
 can get there. That is what I want you to understand. Take 
 an institution like this college; it is absolutely dependent 
 upon the charity of Christian men and women of means 
 that is, its life in the future depends upon their giving a 
 sustaining and a helping hand. It is my good fortune every 
 now and then to sit and talk with a man who can write his 
 check for millions of dollars. And he is just as modest, just 
 as good, just as gentlemanly, just as righteous in the light 
 of things as he understands them as any man I know. His 
 money has not injured him in the least; it has only increased 
 his power to do good. And his money has done good in a 
 dozen ways that I know of, and in dozens of ways that no 
 man knows of that God alone has any record of. 
 
 Let us learn that a man like Boaz, who knows what it ia 
 to earn money and use it in righteous purposes, is the kind 
 of a man that we can afford to emulate. I shall not cut 
 from my acquaintance any young man who begins to earn 
 money, if he knows how to use it for the good of the com- 
 munity and for the purposes of God. If he hoard it, then 
 his money is his curse, and he is a curse to his money. But 
 if he use it in the endowment of charitable and educational 
 institutions, in the alleviation of misery and in a life of sac- 
 rifice and devotion, God can consecrate his money and make 
 it a multiplied power for good in the world. He was a 
 mighty man, Boaz. And here beside him in the night was 
 a young beggar. Will he use his money for God's poor? In 
 the morning she turned to her mother-in-law and said, "Shall 
 I go out and glean?" That was a hard question to ask. 
 Suppose you were to go out of here this evening, and you 
 had not a cent in the world, no food, no place to sleep 
 to-night, and you would come to me at the door and say, 
 "Shall I go out now and beg?" It would be pretty hard for 
 you to say, and harder still to do, would it not? Ruth comes 
 in the morning twilight and says to old Naomi, "Shall I go 
 
54 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 and glean?" What did it mean to Ruth? It meant to take 
 advantage of the pauper laws of the old Jewish dispensation 
 to go out and take that which God had set aside for the 
 orphans, the fatherless and the widow and the stranger. To 
 go out and glean meant to openly confess the fact that she 
 was a beggar. That was the introduction of Ruth among 
 the people of Naomi, into the religion of Naomi. She 
 begged the first day that she was in Bethlehem. What did 
 the old woman say when the question was asked, "Shall I 
 go and beg?" It must have wrung her old heart with the 
 deepest agony that she had yet felt, when she had to bow 
 her head and think of her own hunger and the hunger of her 
 daughter-in-law. It must have been a tremendous trial for 
 her to say, "Go, my daughter." How beautifully the spirit 
 of Ruth shows out in that question. She would not even 
 beg, and put the stigma of begging upon Naomi without 
 Naomi's consent. 
 
 "Go, my daughter," was necessary; and out goes this young 
 woman a self-appointed and branded beggar, to glean in 
 the fields of him in whose sight she might find favor that 
 is, where she might get a chance to glean. "And she went 
 and came, and gleaned in the field after the reapers; and her 
 hap was to light on a part of the field belonging unto Boaz." 
 "And her hap was." They did not have fences. There 
 were dozens of sicklers and dozens of gleaners. "And her 
 hap was" to go into the part of the plain where the men 
 and damsels of Boaz were working. It says, "Her hap was." 
 Do you think it was an accident? Do you think it was a 
 mere blundering chance? It is the same word Jesus Christ 
 uses in the parable of the Good Samaritan. It happened 
 that a man went down that way. But what we call chance 
 and luck is just a part of God's universal plan. What we 
 woul^ call "her hap" was God's will. She went into that 
 fielk Because God intended that her sweet, pure spirit should 
 go to the place where it might be glorified. She went there, 
 and she met Boaz, and gained the exaltation of her life. It 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 55 
 
 was the hardest thing in her life to go into the field without 
 knowing a soul, to begin to glean and beg. Do you suppose 
 ishe cried? In answer to that question I think of the poem 
 of Keats, "To the Nightingale": 
 
 "Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird, 
 No hungry generations tread thee down. 
 The voice I hear this passing night was heard 
 In ancient days by emperor and clown. 
 Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path 
 Through the sad heart of Ruth when sick for home, 
 She stood in tears amid the 'alien corn.' '' 
 
 I think that was a climax in her life. She could not have 
 gotten lower in any way in this world. And out of that God 
 exalted her step by step. We shall leave her there. Let us 
 -study Ruth in the harvest field of Boaz. 
 
 "The fragrant sheaves of the wheat 
 
 Made the air above them sweet; 
 
 Sweeter and more divine 
 
 Was the scent of the scattered grain, 
 
 That the reaper's hand let fall 
 
 To be gathered again 
 
 By the hand of the gleaner; 
 
 Sweetest, divinest of all 
 
 Was the humble deed of thine, 
 
 And the meekness of thy demeanor. 
 
 She stood breast-high amid the corn, 
 
 Clasped by the golden light of morn, 
 
 Like the sweetheart of the sun, 
 
 Who many a glowing kiss had won. 
 
 On her cheeks an autumn flush 
 
 Deeply ripened such a blush 
 
 In the midst of brown was born, 
 
 Like red poppies grown with corn. 
 
56 LECTURES ON THE. 
 
 Thus she stood amid the stocks, 
 Praising God with sweetest looks. 
 'Sure/ I said, 'Heaven did not mean 
 Where I reap thou should'st but glean; 
 Lay thy sheaf adown and come, 
 Share my harvest and my home/ " 
 
BOOK OF KUTH. 57 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 'Her hap was" to light upon the fields that were owned 
 by Boaz. To glean would be attended with a great deal of 
 uncertainty as to whose field she would get into. Here in 
 one piece of ground, unfenced, were thirty or forty sets of 
 gleaners and thirty or forty sets of reapers. It happened that 
 she fell in with those that were working in the fields of Boaz. 
 The chance was about thirty to one against her doing it. 
 God sent her into the field of Boaz. Although the Book 
 says "It was her hap," it was God's will. The things we 
 call happenings in this world are the things in which God 
 shows His wisdom and moulds our lives. Upon what little 
 things the destiny of a human life depends! You came here 
 to school. What sent you to school? Perhaps some turn or 
 accident somewhere in the home organization. You have 
 received in the school an entirely new outlook upon life. It 
 may be that you form acquaintances here that result in the 
 forming of an entirely different career. Sometimes the 
 dropping of a word by a minister, or a teacher, or a friend, 
 changes the whole life of the person to whom the word is 
 spoken. There are in this room now, sitting here, people 
 who can testify that they absolutely have changed their lives 
 because some time in their career somebody said something 
 that influenced them. The mere accident of Ruth's going 
 into the field of Boaz, instead of any other field of the many 
 around, determined the whole force and circumstance of her 
 future life. I take the position that God could not let cir- 
 cumstances as tremendous as those that hung upon this to be 
 brought about by mere chance. He intended it. She went into 
 that field under divine guidance and divine knowledge. If 
 your life has been changed by a mere accident, as you call it, 
 I would like to impress upon you that God was behind the 
 accident. 
 
58 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 In other words, it is probably wise to say that there is no 
 chance; that the word luck should not be in the language; 
 that things do not happen; that when we make these con- 
 fessions they are but indications of our weakness and inabil- 
 ity to see that what we have and where we are is but what 
 God has intended, and which in his wisdom he has not seen fit 
 to reveal to us. So we will read here for "her hap/' God's 
 design was that she should go into the field where Boaz was. 
 "The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord: and he 
 delighteth in his way." Psl. xxxvii. 23, That looks as if 
 it were true that Euth went out there with her steps ordered 
 of the Lord. 
 
 You have a picture in the fourth verse, continuing through 
 the fifth to the seventh verse a most delightful picture of 
 country life out in the harvest field. What is more charming 
 than a harvest scene? What more beautiful than to see the 
 bending grain ripe for the harvest; the busy gleaners fol- 
 lowing after; the master coming down to his field to see how 
 the work is coming on? You have here in this little pastoral 
 Book of Kuth one of the most charming views of rustic 
 home life you will find anywhere in the Sacred Word or in 
 profane literature. It brings to my mind hundreds of scenes 
 that I saw in southern Europe young men and women har- 
 vesting in the fields, the harvest bowing before the sicklers. 
 You don't see those things here nowadays, with our modern 
 patent machinery by which we gather things up and rush 
 them into market. But in those Old World scenes we have 
 pictures of rural content that we have lost in our modern 
 society. What was the relation existing between Boaz and 
 his workers? You will find that the relation was most cor- 
 dial. He was on speaking terms with the men who worked 
 for him. He loved them, and they loved him. They worked 
 for him not alone for the money, but they worked for him 
 because of the devotion they felt toward the master. They 
 were not merely wage-earners, time-servers, but they were 
 devoted attaches of the great man in his toil; they loved 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 59 
 
 him. I wonder how many people to-day work in that spirit. 
 Go down to the factories and shops, the foundries, forges and 
 rolling-mills, the multiplied industrial establishments of this 
 country. Take my word for it that three-fourths of the men 
 that come in there as overseers are hated by three-fourths 
 of the men that work under them. There has grown up 
 between the master and the workingman a feeling of antag- 
 onism, which leads the master to feel that the workman is 
 doing the least that he can do to earn his money, and a feel- 
 ing on the part of the workman that the master is making 
 him do the most that he can exact of him for the money. 
 The one wants to do the least, and the other wants him to 
 do the most. There is a feeling of hatred engendered, and 
 men strike, and there results this persistent war and friction 
 between capital and labor. This is really lying to-day at 
 the foundation of all our political disturbances. The money 
 question, the economic question, everything that has agi- 
 tated the people in the last presidential campaign, bases 
 itself upon the fact that a spirit of distrust and hatred has 
 grown up in this country between the different classes in it. 
 Nothing in this wide world in the way of legislation will 
 effectually and permanently improve that. Mark what I 
 say: you must get back of all law, for you can't drive me to 
 respect you any more than I can compel you to respect me. 
 There Trust be a regeneration of the hearts of the capitalists 
 and the laborers in this country. And I confess to you that 
 I don't know of anything in all the world that would relieve 
 the industrial outlook of this country as rapidly as the 
 change of heart that would come from the genuine conver- 
 sion of every man that works and every man who oversees 
 work. The religion of Jesus Christ would break down that 
 antagonism. Do you know of anything else that would? 
 Laws won't do it. You cannot persuade men to drop their 
 petty jealousies and effect a reconciliation. These conditions 
 are deep-seated. They are in the souls of men. You don't 
 know until you go out into the working districts and come 
 
60 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 in contact with, laborers who are discontented, and converse 
 with manufacturers who are likewise discontented, what a 
 tremendous gap there is between man and man. And yet 
 these very men will pretend to sit in church, the workman 
 and the employer, and worship the same God. That can't 
 be, and foster anything like a religious life. In other words, 
 what I want to impress upon you is this: the friction that 
 has grown up in our industrial life has made impossible any- 
 thing like the rapid growth of Christianity. That is, you 
 can lay at the hands of the industrial classes this solemn 
 indictment, that the feeling of strife between them has 
 made impossible anything like the quick evangelization of 
 the world. When you go out and talk about war between 
 labor and capital, and stir up strife, and array the classes 
 against each other, you are really arraying influences against 
 each other that make impossible the spread of Christ's gos- 
 pel. There are many people that don't think about that in 
 politics. They simply shout and yell because they think 
 they will get into office in that way. And the votes they 
 gather around them represent votes and influences that stand 
 over against one another. This feeling of separation makes 
 impossible the growth of the spirit of Christ. How can 
 God's spirit work in a community that stands over against 
 itself and hates each other? Why, if Jesus Christ were to 
 convert one political party, the other would turn persecutor 
 of religion! 
 
 We have allowed our political prejudices and party strife 
 to erect such barriers between us that even Christ's gospel is 
 crucified and limited in its power. It was not so in the 
 fields of Boaz. He came down there; and what did he say? 
 Did he swear at them? Did he look at them in scorn and 
 contempt? Did he say, "Get to work faster, now, or I will 
 cut off your wages"? What did he say? "The Lord be with 
 you." And they answered him, "The Lord bless thee." Here 
 is the point I want to impress upon you in a plain and brief 
 manner, and it seems to me that all of you who are preachers 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 61 
 
 need to preach on this: there is a certain respect and a cer- 
 tain decency that every man owes to those that work for 
 him. And the men that employ ought to take the initiative 
 in showing that respect. We don't have the old master-and- 
 servant feeling in modern society, as Paul speaks of it, as 
 the feeling in olden times portrayed as existing hetween 
 Philemon and Onesimus, master and slave, owner and owned. 
 We have voluntary service from those that work for us. The 
 fact that it is voluntary only imposes upon those that employ 
 more deeply the obligation to treat the employed with respect 
 and consideration. I know a lady down in Philadelphia who 
 has had thirteen servants in six days. One day she had four; 
 one time she kept one for two days. She can't keep them; 
 they come and go in a regular procession. I don't know 
 what the matter is, hut there is something wrong. If we 
 were to get three students one day and lose three the next, 
 and get two more the next day and lose them in a day or 
 two, and so on, it would soon get into the heads of the people- 
 that something was wrong in our school. 
 
 I took my hoy into the Sunday-school last fall down in 
 the city. He was only in the class three minutes, when he 
 came out, and stamped his foot, and said he was not going 
 to stay there. I said, "What is the matter?" He said, "A 
 little boy spit in my face." He was outraged; he would not 
 go back. The conditions in that Sunday-school were such 
 that we could not have harmony until we had removed the 
 spitter. You will find that among employers and servants 
 there is that feeling of friction and distrust. In society 
 to-day every man is striving for the mastery. Whether a 
 man works or employs others to work, the first thing he 
 looks out for is himself. It is a selfish motive that drives 
 him to plan for his own aggrandizement. "How much can 
 I make out of this?" He makes just as much as he can 
 make, and drives those that work for him just as far down as 
 they will go without rebellion. We want the spirit of Christ 
 in the hearts of the men that employ and the men who are- 
 
62 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 employed. We want each to be concerned for the welfare of 
 the other; that each should surrender selfishness to an equi- 
 table adjustment of mutual rights; and that the man who 
 puts his money into business should put it there for the 
 good that he can do, instead of the amount of riches that he 
 can accumulate. 
 
 When the London Company planted the Virginia settle- 
 ment, down on the banks of the James, and founded the 
 first English settlement in America, the London Company 
 was made up of members of the Church of England. They 
 were blessed of the King. And the first voyage that brought 
 men to the settlement at Jamestown was a voyage that had 
 been royally blessed by the Chief Bishop in the city of Lon- 
 don. It was distinctly a religious exodus, for a distinctly 
 religious purpose. And they were not over here two years 
 until they had the notion that their only business was to 
 shoot Indians and find gold. And from 1607 until 1622 
 they went through two massacres and a starving time and 
 continuous misery, because they forgot the Christian purpose 
 of the founding of the colony, and went in like greedy hogs 
 to get as much as they could. They transported yellow clay 
 from Virginia to London in the hope that it was gold; 
 skinned every animal they could shoot down, and sold the 
 skin to get rich. Then a great preacher, John Donne, stood 
 up in St. Paul's, in London, and preached the first mission- 
 ary sermon in the English language, telling those people 
 that in the beginning God did not teach Noah how to build 
 a boat in order that he might enrich himself, but that he 
 might preserve himself; that, indeed, the whole industry of 
 shipbuilding was revealed to man by God, to the end, not that 
 men might send vessels to the remote corners of the earth to 
 bring back riches to themselves, but that they might carry 
 missionaries and Bibles and food to those that were in need 
 in the uttermost parts of the earth; that the value of ship- 
 building was to be measured, not by the riches that flowed 
 back, but by the gospel that flowed out to heathen people. 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 65 
 
 We have lost such notions as that in this everyday life. A 
 man puts his dollar into business because he believes that he 
 can get a dollar and six cents out of it. He does not put his 
 dollar in because he thinks he can honor God in that busi- 
 ness. Yet here we have people going hungry. A woman 
 came to my door the other day with tears in her eyes and 
 said, "Please give me five cents to bury my baby." Hungry 
 and ragged herself, she had a dead child in her home, and 
 no money to bury it. Men who have money will keep it on 
 interest in government bonds at three per cent, because they 
 cannot trust their money to the uncertainties of the market. 
 Why don't you put your hundred dollars in trade? Because 
 you are not certain it is going to return to you with usury. 
 Rather than take the risk of loss, you will hold to what you 
 have, and let the world starve. What we want is a philan- 
 thropy that will make men and women willing to sacrifice 
 their money and labor for the sake of the comfort and cheer 
 they can bring to others. And I don't know which would 
 preach the better missionary sermon, the man that would 
 stand in the pulpit and shout, or the man that would put hia 
 money into business and make others happy. If a man had 
 a hundred dollars in his pocket this morning, and wanted 
 to serve God, I don't know which way he would serve Him 
 better by putting his money into the market, or preaching 
 a sermon in the pulpit. We must change the industrial out- 
 look, and in some way or other produce a better feeling 
 between the masses, before the world will be evangelized. 
 The spirit of Christ is the spirit of harmony and good-will. 
 It cannot prevail in a disturbed industrial society. There 
 is a political aspect of the question that I have not time to 
 comment upon this morning. I want simply to present the 
 religious aspect of the question to you to think about. Boaz 
 came out into his fields and spoke a blessing upon his reap- 
 ers. And they looked up, and said in answer, "God be with 
 you/' This was a salutation that indicated mutual respect, 
 mutual sympathy, mutual good-will. What would not those 
 
64 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 reapers have done for Boaz if he had needed it? What 
 would not he have done for them if they had needed his 
 help? There was a bond between workman and employer, 
 a bond that was deeper than the money bond. Those men 
 were not earning a salary merely; they were working for 
 love. You can ask me to do you a favor; you cannot hire me 
 to do it. The best service I can render you is the service 
 that is not for sale. When you make impossible the render- 
 ing of that better service, and drive men to a mere dollar- 
 and-cent barter, you have immediately robbed men of the 
 common basis upon which they can draw themselves together 
 into strong brotherhood and into righteous relationship. 
 "God bless you," he said; and they said, "God be with you." 
 And he went through the field; and they were happy. Do 
 you suppose they could work any harder, or not, after they 
 did that? Did it make their burden easier or harder? The 
 test of an overseer in any position in life, the test of a 
 preacher over his church, the test of a teacher over his school, 
 the test of a farmer over his workmen, the superintendent 
 over his foundry, is this does his presence lighten the work 
 of those that are employed, or make it more grievous? You 
 are a minister over a church; what is the result? Does it 
 make it easier for every member to be a Christian, or does 
 it make it harder? What is your relation to the men and 
 women that are your flock? You are a teacher. Is it easier 
 for your scholars to learn because you are their teacher, or 
 is it a harder thing? The value of your work as a teacher is 
 measured by this question. You are an overseer. Does your 
 presence in the shop make the work of the men easier? Is 
 your presence a source of help or a source of hindrance? 
 That is a pretty hard question to answer. When I walk into 
 my class-room and visit my pupils, is my presence a disturb- 
 ance or a help? I am valuable in the proportion that I am 
 helpful. I am not valuable if I am a disturbing influence. 
 When you go before the people as a preacher, when you go 
 into their homes, does your preaching and your visiting make 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 65 
 
 easier the life they are trying to live for Jesus Christ? That 
 is what you are in the world for. That is what Boaz was try- 
 ing to do for his servants make their burdens and their 
 work easier. What we need to study, all of us, is this: how 
 can we make it easier for those around us to do right? 
 As we make it easier for them to do right, we make it harder 
 for them to do wrong. There was just such a relationship 
 fostered between these people the spirit of confidence 
 and good-will that made the presence of the master a help 
 and an inspiration to the laborer. 
 
 From the fifth to the seventh verse you have the picture 
 of the stranger at the gate. We often sing that song, "Be- 
 hold the stranger at the door." Boaz in this scene down in 
 the harvest field is typical of the blessed Christ himself. The 
 steward or overseer in the field is the type of the minister in 
 the church. Ruth is the type of the stranger that is brought 
 into the church. Just think of Boaz as the Christ; of the 
 man who answered Boaz, the superintendent or overseer in 
 the field, as the minister or deacon in the church; and of 
 Ruth as the type of the common member who has been 
 brought in out of Moab. Then study these three characters, 
 and you will see just about what your duty is. Boaz comes 
 into the field like the Christ came into this world, breathing 
 good-will and kindness and sympathy upon everything that 
 He touched. What is his first word? A word of kindness 
 to those who were working for him. Next he notices this 
 damsel. "Who is this damsel?" Inquiring about the 
 stranger that came from without, noticing everybody, giving 
 to everybody a word of help and encouragement and good 
 cheer. That was the work of Christ anticipated in the life 
 of Boaz. The overseer answered back promptly to all the 
 questions, and told the whole truth. He knew that Ruth 
 was a stranger, and he gave the whole truth to Boaz when 
 he asked about her. She is here, she is doing thus and so; 
 giving you clearly the fact that the minister stands between 
 Christ and his people, and has a two-fold duty that of tell- 
 
66 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 ing the truth to Christ and of knowing thoroughly every- 
 body that works in Christ's fields. That is your duty. It 
 will be a sad day for us that are preachers if anybody in the 
 years to come shall stand up before the judgment bar and 
 say, "No man cared for my soul,, no man knew me in the 
 world." People come into this chapel and sit down on a 
 Sunday morning, and walk out, and nobody says a word to 
 them. That is wrong. Euth was noticed by the overseer, 
 and also by Boaz himself. You have no idea what a tremen- 
 dous responsibility rests upon the church that does not care 
 to extend a word of welcome and pay attention to visitors 
 that come into it. 
 
 What if God should come to-night and knock at your 
 heart and say to you, "Who has been gleaning in my fields 
 under your oversight? 7 ' and you would have to look up and 
 say, "God, I know not." What a condemnation! What a 
 comment upon the indifference of men who pretend to live 
 for Christ, who are in his field reaping and gathering the 
 harvest, and yet holding out no hand of welcome and no out- 
 look or token to the stranger that comes to glean within the 
 gates! Every time a man or woman comes inside the door 
 of a church for the first time, every Christian present ought 
 to pray to God that that one shall come continuously, and 
 everything that you do ought to point toward that consum- 
 mation. Who brought that person to church? Will you 
 say that it was luck that he happened in Kuth's luck? Or 
 has God set his steps this way? And if we turn our faces 
 away and talk to our friends and neglect the stranger, we 
 simply put up the fences and shut out from Zion those 
 whom God intended to be in. Who is going to answer for 
 it? I know how easy it is, when church is over, to talk to 3 
 few friends whom you like; sometimes to only one, because 
 you like the one; and it is your own personal satisfaction 
 and selfish love that lead you to interfere with the whole cause 
 of Christ. That is wrong. I would like to see more people 
 of our church standing back at the door when the service is 
 
BOOK OP RUTH. 67 
 
 over, saying a kind word to those that have come in. I want 
 you to understand that Jesus Christ did not neglect anybody 
 in the multitude. The very least pauper, the most miser- 
 able outcast that came to Him was seen of Him and helped. 
 He knew no condition beneath His notice. There was no 
 time in His blessed life when He could not turn aside and 
 do good where good was needed. In our own lives, as we 
 come to understand that, to take on more and more of that 
 characteristic of Christ's life, will we come to understand 
 the power that there is in sympathetic ministration to the 
 wants of others. How are we treating the strangers at the \ 
 gate? As Boaz regarded Kuth? Or are we, with cold indif- ) 
 ference, allowing them to come and go, until, disappointed 
 and disgusted and broken-hearted and cold and indifferent, 
 they rise up and curse the church and go out into outer 
 darkness? Boaz had no love for Ruth here, except the 
 desire that he had as a Jew to do a Jew's duty. He was the 
 type of the unselfish Christ doing the thing which he be- 
 lieved he was to do, and doing it with all the sympathy and 
 tact and courtesy that came from a polished and cultured 
 Christian soul. Some people don't talk because they think 
 they don't know how to talk. If your heart is right, God 
 will put the right word upon your lips. You need not 
 worry about your grammar nor your rhetoric, about where 
 your hands are when you talk. If your heart is right, God 
 will shape the language to the hungry one and give the 
 comfort that is needed. I want you to read carefully this 
 Book of Ruth. I want you to think of Boaz as the type of 
 the Christ that was to be, of Ruth as yourself coming into 
 the new relationship in the church. In the light of that you 
 will begin to see something of the grandeur and beauty 
 which springs up here in this marvelous pastoral, this reve- 
 lation of the coming of the Christ, this joyous prophecy of 
 the majestic entrance of the King of kings into his reign 
 of righteousness. 
 
68 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 h LECTURE VI. 
 
 In the second chapter, at the seventh verse, you will find 
 these words: "And she said, I pray you, let me glean and 
 gather after the reapers among the sheaves; so she came and 
 hath continued even from the morning until now, that she 
 tarried a little in the house." Here is the picture of three 
 characters Boaz, the owner of the land; the steward or 
 overseer; and Ruth, the gleaner. And these three, as I said 
 previously, typify Christ, the minister of the gospel, and the 
 man or woman who comes into the church of God. And as 
 these three forces are at work in the church to-day, you 
 will get hy a careful study of the Book of Ruth from the be- 
 ginning to the end, the picture of their right relationship 
 to each other and to the church of Christ. You will see in 
 the character of Boaz the spirit of the Christ and his work 
 in the church. You will see in the attitude of this overseer, 
 in his treatment of Boaz and his treatment of Ruth, the 
 right relation of the minister to Christ on the one side, and 
 his relation to the church on the other. And the character 
 of Ruth will give us a pretty clear idea of how the soul 
 comes out from Moab and enters into the land of promise, 
 comes out of wrong and enters into right, comes out of 
 darkness and enters into light, comes out of the world and 
 enters into Christ's kingdom, a better understanding of our 
 own lives, our relationship to the church, to the ministry of 
 the church, and to the Lord Jesus Christ. Note what fol- 
 lows: "Then said Boaz unto Ruth, Hearest thou not, my 
 daughter? Go not to glean in another field, neither go from 
 hence, but abide here fast by my maidens: Let thine eyes be 
 on the field that they do reap, and go thou after them: have 
 I not charged the young men that they shall not touch 
 thee? and when thou art athirst, go unto the vessels, and 
 drink of that which the young men have drawn." 
 
 Note carefully the conduct or behavior of Ruth. In the 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 69 
 
 first place, she was an industrious girl. The world has no need 
 of any other kind. An idle, worthless, lazy, indolent girl what 
 does she amount to ? The young man who is a shirker, whose 
 motto is, not how much, but how little can I do and get on 
 in this world, is not worthy of a place in this world nor fit 
 to go into any other. In the next place, she was a modest 
 girl. She was not a loud-mouthed, blatant character. In a 
 quiet, modest way she did the work that God had laid upon 
 her, although she did not know that it was the Lord's hand 1 
 was directing her. I speak of her modesty because it seems 'I 
 to me to-day, more and more, that young people need to 
 learn lessons of modesty. And by modesty I mean a spirit 
 of subordination of ourselves to our elders, a right respect 
 to the history of the past as it has been made, a right sur- 
 render to old and established customs and the experience 
 which the revelation of God has put into this world for 
 young men and women to stand by, the history of superior 
 experience and higher knowledge. To set ourselves up above 
 and superior to these things is, to say the least, an exceed- 
 ingly immodest thing. Yet how often young people are apt 
 to need the rebuke that Paul was obliged to utter against 
 those to whom he wrote, "Some of you have not the knowl- 
 edge of God, I say this to your shame." Some of you have 
 ignored the past, your father's advice, your mother's coun- 
 sel, your brother's kindly interest; you have forgotten what 
 your minister taught you, what your teacher said to you; 
 you have set up yourselves as knowing more than all these; 
 you are trying to sow in fields that have been condemned, 
 and where, if you do sow, you will gather only the whirl- 
 wind and destruction. You think you know even more than 
 the wisdom of the past. You go on repeating the follies of 
 yesterday, whereas, if you were to sit down and study the 
 wisdom and experience of the past, you would live better. 
 It takes a modest person to do that, one that is willing to 
 profit by the counsels of others. One of the marks of that 
 great preacher, Brother Quinter, one of the greatest in his 
 
70 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 generation, one of his peculiarities from his boyhood, as re- 
 lated in his biography, is that he enjoyed the company of 
 older men. He did not dictate to them, but in meekness 
 and submission he listened to what the elders of the church 
 had to say, and then tried to profit by it. Thus he rose to 
 a high position in the church long before many others who 
 set aside the traditions of the church and the advice of the 
 elders, and had to learn, after years of bitter experience, that 
 they were wrong. 
 
 The modest spirit of Ruth showed from the time she 
 entered the field of Boaz. She did not have to be knocked 
 down and beaten into sense. She had learned to surrender 
 herself and to be a fit vessel for the Master's use. That is 
 what we all need, more and more, in this world to-day. 
 There are some that get the idea many young people do 
 that they have become smart, smarter than anybody else that 
 ever lived. They go out asserting this superior knowledge, 
 arguing with those older and wiser than themselves, setting 
 themselves up in high places, doing the thing which Christ 
 condemned others for doing, "sitting in Moses' seat." Many 
 of them want to do that. What God needs to-day is a mul- 
 titude of young people in their teens thirteen, fourteen, 
 sixteen, eighteen who are willing to go like Ruth into the 
 fields of Christ and glean for the privilege of being there, 
 that after a while they may be maidens of His and sons of 
 His and adopted into the church itself. Another thing I 
 call your attention to in the character of this wonderful 
 woman, Ruth. She knew how to talk. She had good man- 
 ners. She was courteous. If you read all through this 
 book, you will find no single word that fell from her lips that 
 was immodest or discourteous to anybody. Anybody whose 
 spirit is right and whose heart is sweet is a courteous person. 
 If you affect to be other than your heart is, you are going 
 to be discourteous at some time or other; you can't help it. 
 Here, then, you see that the courtesy of the woman shows 
 that her heart and her life were right in the sight of God. 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 71 
 
 I call your attention, young girls, to the place where 
 found Kuth. You know, if you have read on to the end of 
 this, he married her. Boaz found Kuth in the harvest field 
 at work the best place under the sun to find a woman. 
 More than that, Euth found Boaz down in his own field, 
 looking after his own business working. That is the best 
 place to find a husband, a wife. Now, a few things to beware 
 of. In the first place, beware of a woman who is a gadder. 
 Do you know what a gadder is? A woman that runs around 
 and talks more than she knows; and who spreads a flame of 
 gossip through the community; and sets the church on fire 
 with maliciousness; and destroys the power of God's king- 
 dom and the possibility of his righteousness in the earth. 
 Young men are not worth anything who gad or gossip. You 
 know we always have in this school what we call the tail end 
 of the procession. We organize our school and we start you 
 all in alike. In the course of two weeks some of our students 
 stand close to the faculty and government of the school. 
 They stand up high in the procession. They are the stu- 
 dents who, by their inherent worth, have won the respect of 
 the institution. Then it gradually moves downward, until 
 somebody is at the other end of the line. Beware of those 
 that stand low down in the procession. It does not matter 
 what procession it is. It is infinitely better for you to marry 
 some one who is first class in something than seventh class 
 in something else. You had better live with a first-class 
 farmer than a fifth-class preacher. You have the authority 
 of the Bible for that. Every man ought to excel in some- 
 thing, stand well in something. It is on the basis of our 
 best things that our affiliations ought to be made, for then 
 we are held strongest to our best. Beware of a slothful 
 woman. That is a polite word for laziness. Euth was an 
 industrious woman. Beware of a lazy person. Think of a 
 woman in a home who is lazy, who allows the cobwebs to 
 grow on the ceiling, the dust to multiply on the dishes 
 carelessness, sloth, ignorance and filth fostered by her in the 
 
72 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 home. What sooner drives a man to drink and distraction 
 than that! If I could walk up through your rooms this 
 afternoon, as I have done in the past, and see how you live, 
 I could write on your door my judgment of the kind of home 
 you will have. Beware of sloth. Never think you can marry 
 and live with a young man who has been lazy for a year, but 
 who is going to get to work and work hard for you just be- 
 cause he is yours. That is the worst mistake on earth. If he is 
 too lazy to work to get you, he will be lazier still to work 
 for you when he gets you. The man who is not zealous to 
 get into the kingdom of heaven, who is too lazy to go to 
 church, too lazy to pray, too lazy to gather his family around 
 him in the morning for prayers, too lazy to open his Bible 
 and explain it to his children, too lazy to go to the Sunday- 
 school, too lazy to think about the missionary cause, too 
 lazy to read the church paper when it comes into his home, 
 is not working hard enough to win heaven. 
 
 Another thing beware of. Beware of a sloppy companion. 
 I don't know how Ruth was dressed, but if I were to picture 
 her down there in the field in her poverty, in her rags, I 
 would paint her with a neatness that was the index of the 
 life that she was living, and that showed in her whole man- 
 ner and expression. Beware of any young person in this 
 world who speaks against his own parents. I sat one day in 
 a street-car. It was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where you 
 would expect better things. In the car was a professor in 
 Harvard University, talking to a young woman. I could not 
 avoid hearing the conversation. And as this professor was a 
 prospective tutor of mine, my curiosity was aroused to study 
 him. I listened to what he was saying. Among other things, 
 his conversation drifted to his home. He said: "I had good, 
 honest parents. My mother was an honest woman. My 
 father was gentlemanly enough, as such things go. But, 
 you know, they were not the kind of people you would care 
 to meet." I never went into his class. Beware of those that 
 speak slightingly of the mother that nursed them through 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 7& 
 
 sickness and pain and distress; of the father who provided for 
 them when they were little and helpless. Beware of the 
 ingratitude that is stamped upon every expression of disre- 
 spect to father and mother. I do not mean by this that you 
 should be clannish and disguise the truth. There may be 
 things in your family line that you are not specially proud 
 of. Keep your mouth shut about them. I don't mean that 
 you shall go out and lie about them and praise them inordi- 
 nately. I simply ask that you speak respectfully of them 
 when you do speak; and when you have not that kind of 
 thing to say, to remain silent. I don't know what kind of a 
 father Ruth had out in heathen Moab, nor the kind of a 
 mother that bore her in that heathen land. But they cer- 
 tainly had something of the spirit of righteousness in them 
 afar off, for they taught their daughter good sense. In spite 
 of all this affliction upon her, she never uttered a word of 
 reproach or rebuke against anybody. She simply felt; but 
 she spoke nothing. Silence is golden sometimes. Consider 
 the charity and devotion of a young man to his home. I 
 would not live with anybody, nor would I have anything to 
 do with anybody, that had not enough respect for his ances- 
 tors to keep that in mind. 
 
 There is another characteristic of her. Beware of any- 
 body that hates to do home work. You know, nowadays, it 
 is stylish for women to be doctors and lawyers and school 
 teachers and members of Twentieth Century Clubs and edi- 
 tors of magazines that teach other people how to do things. 
 In fact, a sort of notion prevails that women ought to do- 
 anything but the thing they ought to do. When you select 
 one for life, you had better choose one that knows how to- 
 run a home, whether she knows how to run a newspaper or 
 not. You had better live with one that understands the 
 routine of a day's living in the house than one that knows 
 how to make a stump speech on questionable politics. She 
 may not be so brilliant with her tongue, but she will be infi- 
 nitely more helpful in her life. Think about these things. 
 
74 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 Some of you will get caught with outward show. It is gen- 
 uine worth that counts. Many a young man does foolish and 
 inconsiderate things because he is not fair even to himself. 
 If you would write down on a piece of paper the attributes 
 in life that you love, that you could live with, that you could 
 ask God's blessing upon, they would not at all fit the person 
 you like best. What is the matter here? You are not true 
 to your better self. You are caught in the mazes of some 
 trick. Now, here was Euth, at work in the wheat field, 
 gathering up the sickled grain, doing the routine of manual 
 service, wearing in her act the badge of beggary, and doing 
 it all with a grace, with a submission, with a devotion that 
 made her famous throughout the land, and won for her as 
 husband the best man in Bethlehem, and one of the best in 
 the world, no doubt, in that day. 
 
 How did he care for her? In the first place, he did not 
 deprive her of the respect that was hers because she was a 
 toiler. That is, he honored her in her work. He did not say, 
 "Why, Ruth, I am astonished to see you down here at that 
 kind of thing. Get out of here and go up to the house. I 
 will give you a better place." He finds her in an honest 
 place, where she had a right to be under the laws of God. 
 He recognizes that right, and simply tries to make easy her 
 work in that place. Do you remember when Christ came 
 and found men fishing, and called out to them from the 
 shore, "What have you got?" They said nothing; they had 
 been fishing without Him. And he said, "Cast your net on 
 the other side." Why didn't He say, "If you have not caught 
 anything, quit fishing, and we will go into the lumber busi- 
 ness or something else in which we can make some money"? 
 Stick to your fishing, and with His help it will pay. Cast 
 your net on the other side; but cast you net. 
 
 God does not call people out of their places in life into 
 others. He simply glorifies them in the place where they 
 are. If you are a farmer, you will farm all the better be- 
 cause you have joined the church of Jesus Christ. You 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 75 
 
 don't have to quit farming because you have joined the 
 church. If you are anything that is right a fisherman, a 
 gleaner, a workman of any sort whatever, anywhere, you 
 can exalt that place by taking the grace of God into your 
 heart and living a Christian life in that place. God does not 
 transform us from place to place, but he transforms our life 
 that it may glorify the place where he finds us, teaching us 
 to be content with the thing we are doing, if we are doing it 
 as well as we can. Here Boaz found her, a simple, modest, 
 honest, courteous woman, gleaning. He said: "Glean on. I 
 will make it easier for you to do the work." 
 
 In the second place, his concern was genuine. It was not 
 affected politeness. He did not say one thing and mean 
 another, as the half of us do when we talk to each other. 
 It was a genuine concern, a sincere concern. It was the 
 kind of sincerity that an honest man always displays when 
 he comes into touch with honest people no gloss, no veneer, 
 no varnish, just the truth. He tells her frankly what he has 
 learned. Again his concern was thorough. He was not con- 
 cerned in her age alone, nor in the color of her eyes, as an 
 idle curiosity. He was concerned in her life. What is the 
 use of our tripping around among each other trying to find 
 out little eccentricities of character? Why don't we know 
 each other's lives? When we ask questions, why don't we 
 get to the heart of the matter? A man comes into church, 
 and you go to him and say, "I am glad you came to church 
 to-night." That is all right in its way. But it is so out- 
 sidish, so far from the central thing that you might have 
 said, so remote from the touch of life with which Christ 
 would have spoken. Here is a good question for you to ask 
 when you meet a man who comes into church or into your 
 life companionship. Ask this question of yourself: How 
 would Christ meet that person if he were in my place? 
 And, knowing how He would do, do that way yourself. It 
 was a thorough concern, as well as a genuine one. It was a 
 helpful concern; it was a protective concern. 
 
76 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 It was what shall I say? I know no word to characterize 
 it. It was a provisional concern that is, he provided for 
 her. He made her rewards greater than she could have made 
 them herself. She gleaned more because Boaz was helping 
 than she could have gleaned alone. He enriched her. And 
 she gleaned how much? "It was about an ephah of barley." 
 She gleaned as much as she could carry; loaded down away 
 beyond the ordinary gleanings because Boaz made it easier 
 for her to glean, provided for her in her gleaning. There is 
 a lesson here. The spirit of all things is the spirit of giving, 
 not of withholding. To store up is an anomaly in Nature; 
 it is unusual, it is a remarkable thing. To give is to be like 
 Nature, to give is to be like God. He gave her more than 
 she could gather of herself, typifying, it seems to me, in a 
 most remarkable way, a remarkable fact of life. When you 
 come in touch with my life, you have one solemn duty to 
 make it richer than it could have been without you. When 
 I come in touch with yours, I have one solemn duty to 
 make it better than it could have been without me. To 
 make it worse is sin. To leave it untouched is impossible. 
 To make it better is to do what Christ did. Boaz was a type 
 of the Christ because he enriched her life. Even in tem- 
 porary things she was the gainer by his aid and co-opera- 
 tion, teaching us, if we had time to press the thought to a 
 conclusion, that the best partnerships of life are those in 
 which Christ is a party; that the greatest gains in this world 
 come when we work with God, and not against Him. 
 
 Verse ten points out a grateful heart. Here again her 
 deep and touching humility shows itself in the words: "Why 
 have I found grace in thine eyes, * * * seeing I am a 
 stranger?" She had been favored, and she did not do what 
 some girls would do if favors were shown to them from a 
 sincere heart walk away and never return thanks. She 
 showed the gratitude of her heart for the favor that she 
 received. I saw a woman come into a street-car the other 
 day. A man got up and offered his seat to her. She sat 
 
BOOK OF KUTH. 77 
 
 down and took it just as a pig would take an ear of corn 
 from a man. Ruth, from Moab, the land of the heathen, 
 would not do that. She "fell on her face" and expressed 
 the gratitude of her heart to her benefactor. You can 
 afford always to stand in the place of help long enough to 
 thank the helper. The old Greeks could tarry long enough 
 to build their triumphal monuments on the fields where 
 victory came to them. We stop on the field of conquest to 
 build monuments of triumph and express our gratitude and 
 praise. As you come down the Eiver Rhine and enter the 
 first narrows almost opposite the Mouse Tower, on the bor- 
 ders of France, but on German soil, is that magnificent 
 Denkmal, the great national monument that commemorates 
 the triumphs of the armies under Bismarck and Frederick 
 in 1870. It stands on the very outposts of the German 
 Empire. It was placed where they were helped in their con- 
 quest put up as a token of their gratitude. When a Ger- 
 man comes down the Rhine, his hat goes off and tears fill 
 his eyes, and he sings "The Watch on the Rhine. " He has 
 the patriotic gratitude of hearts that recognize the place 
 where they have been helped. Some of us have been helped 
 of God in the church; we have been restored from sickness, 
 we have been made prosperous; we have been saved from 
 great temptation and sin; we have been delivered time and 
 time again by God's interposition; and we have not one sin- 
 gle Ebenezer up, not one. That is the most ungrateful thing 
 that I can think of. 
 
 There is in the Old Testament this ringing question: "Will 
 a man rob God?" Of course you will answer, No. But I 
 ask you this afternoon, if God has helped you here and you 
 have never blessed him for it, "Will a man rob God?" Has 
 not a man robbed God? You can say to yourselves that if 
 you have given a man a dollar, and he comes and hands it 
 back, there is no special reason why you should thank him 
 for the return of the dollar. You come into my room and 
 say, "I would like to borrow your book." You keep it a week 
 
78 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 or two and bring it back, and say to me, "I am much 
 obliged." We have come to feel that when we have done a 
 favor, and the favor flows back to us, we owe no thanks for 
 it. The man who gets a favor thanks, but the man who did 
 the favor does not thank. But you can't hide behind such 
 an argument as that. You have never done anything for 
 God worth speaking about; He has done everything for you.. 
 He has sent His Son into the world for you. What have you 
 done for Him in comparison? He sends His Holy Spirit to 
 quicken your hearts and lead you to holiness; He gives you 
 all that ; He keeps pressing it upon you. We are all open to. 
 the charge of base ingratitude. We are not grateful. Some 
 of you will go down in a few minutes to the table and bow 
 your heads, and not even thank God for the food you eaL 
 You will think about some foolish thing instead. You will 
 go into prayer-meeting and kneel because you have to, out of 
 respect to your associates; out of respect to God you do 
 nothing. Some of you go to church and take part in the 
 services because it is expected, simply because you want to* 
 conform to what is naturally expected of you. You don't 
 think of the duty you owe to God in singing a hymn, in 
 uttering a prayer, in praying for the preacher, in listening 
 to the sermon, in speaking to the visitor and stranger in the 
 church. This is how you can express your gratitude to God. 
 If He has ever blessed you, give a glass of cold water to a 
 pauper. If He has ever blessed you, give in His name a 
 blessing of your own to those that need it; for "When you 
 have done it to the least of these, you have done it unto me." 
 He will write it down in the book the right way. What is 
 the lesson? Let us all try to glorify Him more and more. A 
 heart of gratitude, a grateful heart, is a great heart, a large 
 heart, an enlarging heart, a heart fuller and fuller of love 
 and gratitude to God. 
 
BOOK OF KUTH. 79 
 
 LECTUKE VII. 
 
 If, in your school life, the teacher has given you help, 
 has been an aid to you in making more of your life than you 
 could have made of it without aid, you owe that teacher 
 your gratitude, and ought to express it. It is a type of how 
 all your life ought to be ordered. It seems to me that life, 
 after all, when it is rightly lived, is but a series of expres- 
 sions of gratitude. If we come to look at it aright, we don't 
 live an hour in which we cannot be helped by somebody in 
 some way. A man's life ought to be a constant thanksgiv- 
 ing. We ought to do what the Bible commands, "Pray with- 
 out ceasing, giving thanks always." Whoever does not do that 
 is a miserly, ungrateful whelp. He has closed up the foun- 
 tains of his gratitude. He has lived in this world without 
 knowing what it is to live aright. He is false to God, and he 
 can never grow. Over in Marblehead, Massachusetts, an old 
 sailor, drunk, staggered into a church and heard a sermon. 
 The sermon sobered him. The prayer service at the close 
 of the sermon converted him. He went out of that a con- 
 verted man, anxious to join the church and do right. On 
 his way home he got to thinking about this: "Tough old 
 soul that I am, I went down there drunk to have a good 
 time, and here I am converted. Who did all this for me? 
 How changed I am! Why, my God did this for me; it is the 
 gift of the Lord Jesus Christ. Just think of what he has 
 done for me to-night! He shall never hear the last of it." 
 That is the right spirit; never going to let Him hear the last 
 of it. As long as he lived he was going to keep saying his 
 thanksgiving for that converting power in his life. If some 
 of you had been converted, you would have hung your head 
 and slunk away like a dummy. You would never have given 
 thanks in the church, nor in the prayer-meeting; never spo- 
 ken anything to any one about it. 
 
-80 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 I read the other day of an old man in a little town, who 
 went down to the post office. A little girl was giving out the 
 letters. They had been having a big revival in the town, and 
 she was very much interested in it. The old man went over 
 to the fire to warm himself, and inquired for his mail. The 
 little girl brought the conversation around to the subject of 
 the revival service. She said, among other things, "Several 
 of us have been wishing in our hearts that you would be con- 
 verted and join the church." And he said, "Why, Miss, I 
 have been a member of the church for forty years." She 
 said: "I beg your pardon. I would not have spoken like that, 
 but I never saw you in Sunday-school; I never saw you in the 
 prayer-meeting; I never saw you take any active part in the 
 church; I did not know you were a church member." The 
 old man went home and called his wife to him and said: 
 "Mam, I guess I have not been much of a Christian. My 
 name has been on the church records, but down in the post 
 office they did not know I was a member of the church. 
 There is something wrong here. We have got to go to church 
 more, and do more when we are there." I wonder whether 
 the world is not full of people who never let it be known that 
 they are members of the church. They keep a tight lid down 
 on that fact, with a sealed rim, for fear it would break out 
 some time and somebody make the discovery. What does 
 the Bible say about that? "Let your light shine." You must 
 not stick it under a bushel, hide it away. 
 
 Again, don't refuse help when it is offered to you. That 
 is a species of self-pride. You get the idea that you are 
 pretty strong, you are pretty able, a pretty good fellow, you 
 can go it alone. A man comes along; he offers you a kind- 
 ness. No, you don't need it; you are going to get along; you 
 don't want any help. Strike that kind of a keynote of abso- 
 lute independence, and you soon run against a snag. You 
 must learn early in life that we are all dependent; none of 
 us are independent. To know how to receive help is as im- 
 portant as to know how to give help. Not to receive help i8 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 81 
 
 to be tremendously narrow and handicapped in the work of 
 life. Every man around you can help you if you are willing 
 to be helped. Every person in the community can strengthen 
 you if you feel the need of help. Think of the candor of this 
 woman. Her consciousness of need, her absolute surrender 
 to every feeling of reserve, led her to speak right out from 
 the heart the feeling that prompted her. "Then she fell on 
 her face, and bowed herself to the ground, and said unto 
 him, Why have I found grace in thine eyes, that thou 
 shouldst take knowledge of me, seeing I am a stranger?" We 
 are not always as direct and plain and specific as we ought to 
 be. Ruth sets a good example here for us all to tell the 
 truth in plain language, right to the point; to be just as spe- 
 cific as we can be in everything we do in preaching, teach- 
 ing, talking, in everything. There is a great deal of time 
 wasted in this world in glittering generalities. It seems to 
 me that the candor of Ruth, indicative as it is of a pure 
 heart, is a type of the kind of thing we ought to be in the 
 Christian life in the church. We ought to be honest, open, 
 frank and candid with everybody. Say just what you ought 
 to say, and do what you say. 
 
 What was Ruth grateful for? I suppose there are some of 
 you around here who would say, "If I could gain all that 
 Ruth did, I would be grateful too; but I don't get much." 
 Ruth, out there in the fields of Boaz, obtained a beggar's 
 portion, no more. She got just what a man did here the 
 other day. He came and knocked at the door and asked for 
 something to eat, and my neighbor's wife gave him some- 
 thing to eat. He got just what a beggar gets. That is all 
 Ruth got. She went out there to get a beggar's portion; she 
 received only that, and was grateful for it. There is not one 
 of you that has not that much, that has not more than Ruth 
 received. There is not one of you that has been as grateful. 
 In comparison with her you are not to be considered. Your 
 ingratitude, your lack of appreciation has made it impossible 
 . for God to do with you and for you what he did with Ruth 
 
82 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 and for Ruth. You put yourself out of the line, and God 
 cannot use you until you get your heart softened and your 
 whole spirit aroused and your whole will bent on doing 
 something that is right, doing all of it that you can. In the 
 course of this conversation, if you will notice as the story 
 goes on, Boaz answers Ruth and approves her course. You can- 
 not keep a fact very well hid. Ruth could slip out there in the 
 morning into the wheat field and glean, and slip back into the 
 house at night undiscovered. She could keep quiet and stay 
 in during the evening. But in spite of all that, the kind of a 
 life she was living out there in Bethlehem, the kind of devo- 
 tion that she was showing to her old mother-in-law, the kind 
 of absolute trust in the new God she had come to worship, 
 had gone up as a memorial, not only to heaven, but out as a 
 memorial among men. Boaz knew of it: "And Boaz answered 
 and said unto her, It hath fully been shewed me, all that 
 thou hast done unto thy mother in law since the death of 
 thine husband; and how thou hast left thy father and thy 
 mother, and the land of thy nativity, and art come unto a 
 people which thou knewest not heretofore." You can't hide 
 these things. Here is the trouble: so many of us are so 
 anxious to have known the good we are doing that we don't 
 get enough done to amount to anything. You need not 
 mind putting it in the newspaper or telling it abroad that 
 you gave a turkey to the orphans' home or a bushel of coal to 
 a sick neighbor. Just do these things, and don't boast of it. 
 After a while you will be doing enough of them that the 
 newspapers and the world and heaven shall ring with the 
 knowledge of it. You can't keep it back. But if you try to 
 get it noised abroad and have it boasted about, you will 
 waste all your time on that time that ought to have been 
 given to the doing of good things. And you will appear in 
 the light of the world as the hypocrite that you are. Ruth 
 never bothered interviewers, never tried to make herself pop- 
 ular. She simply attended to business. There is nothing 
 great in what she did. She had the most subordinate place 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 83 
 
 that I can conceive in the whole Jewish order of the family, 
 the support of an old mother-in-law in poverty. But she did 
 that so well that the fame of it went out all over the country. 
 Some of you want a reputation after a while. You want 
 to be known as preachers, as teachers, as mathematicians; 
 you want to be known as this and that. If you want to have 
 such a reputation, the best procedure in the world is to do 
 the thing you want to be with all your might. If you want 
 to be a mathematician, figure, cipher away, day and night. 
 And when you become a good mathematician the world will 
 learn of it. If you want to be a good teacher, study the 
 laws of teaching, the laws that govern the growth of the 
 child's mind and spirit; and as you come to know these 
 things, and become expert in your knowledge, you can teach; 
 and the world will find it out. Some of you want to be good 
 musicians and play on the piano. That is a laudable ambi- 
 tion. I wish you all could play. But you fritter and waste 
 more time away in talking about what you do than it would 
 require to do the thing. The tendency of human life is to 
 dissipate energy. You hang around for sympathy, saying, 
 "How I would like to do this!" You need somebody to say, 
 4( Why don't you do it?" You want comfort and support. 
 Your duty is to do the thing unaided and with all your 
 might. Hoe your own row in the potato patch. Do your 
 own work, and do it with such simple devotion to the work 
 itself that God will see your devotion in that and make it a 
 memorial to you and glorify your name later on. A noble 
 life is always found out. If you do good for no reward, you 
 get a reward; if you do good for a reward, you seldom get it, 
 and never deserve it. "When you trust in God as Euth did, 
 there will be great compensation. Your rewards will always 
 be as great, and greater, than you can conceive them to be. 
 I like, above all things in this part of the narrative, "The 
 Lord recompense thy work, and a full reward be given thee 
 of the Lord God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come 
 to trust." 
 
84 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 "Under whose wings thou art come to trust." I would like 
 if every member of this class could take that closing part of 
 the prayer of Boaz, the benediction that he pronounces upon 
 the life of this simple maiden, and think it out for himself. 
 "Under whose wings thou art come to trust!" He simply 
 asks for the blessing of God upon her, a blessing from the 
 power in whom she had come to trust. That means so much 
 when you consider its full significance. Here in God she 
 had a place of refuge. She had a place of shelter under his 
 wings. There was shelter for her soul. There was refuge 
 for her weary spirit. Here was the tender, mature and cul- 
 tured sympathy of a father's soul for this poor orphan girl. 
 What could be more beautiful than the figure of the 
 Almighty's sheltering wing over this orphan beggar! She 
 had no home of her own; she had no one to care for her; 
 she was absolutely alone and lonely. In her loneliness and 
 aloneness she comes to find shelter and refuge under the 
 wings of Almighty God. She is not disappointed any more 
 than you will be disappointed if you come to trust in the 
 same protection. Sheltered under His wings, protected by 
 His love, sheltered from everything by the interposition of 
 His divine power! God does protect us. Blessed assurance! 
 "Under whose wings thou art come to trust." Let us learn 
 how we come to trust under his wings. We might be under 
 God's wings, restless as a chicken is restless under the 
 mother's wing. We might be under His wing, fearful, 
 fretful, murmuring, unsatisfied, discontented, chafing and 
 fussing. We might not be at ease, not at rest. There 
 are a great many people to-day who are in exactly that con- 
 dition. Let us come to trust under his wings. And when we 
 come to the point of trust, past all other states of mind, 
 states of discontent and restlessness and fearfulness and mur- 
 muring, when we have come to the point that we can nestle 
 down under the wing of God and trust, then we shall be 
 under His wing resting; we shall be under it fearless; we 
 shall be under it contented. When you are under God's wing 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 85 
 
 without fear, without any desire to escape from there, filled 
 with the desire to stay there, when you are under God's pro- 
 tection and want to stay there, then your life is capable of 
 infinite power and infinite good. 
 
 In this connection think of old Job, a character that I am 
 very fond of. You remember that when he crept under 
 God's wing and felt strong there, and above all felt at home 
 under God's wing, when the storm came and drove his cattle 
 asunder and killed them, and the winds came and blew the 
 house down over the heads of his children and his sons were 
 killed, what did he do? He could go on praising God. With- 
 out His protection he would have gone wild. But he sat 
 under God's wing through all trials, saying, "The Lord giv- 
 eth and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the 
 Lord/' When you can get your life keyed up to the point 
 where you can feel that under God's protection every loss 
 that comes to you is a thing for which you can bless God; 
 when you can surrender everything that is precious to you in 
 hie and still hold on to God; then your soul is anchored to 
 the right spot. When the loss of a house, or the loss of a 
 cow, or a farm, or anything, breaks you away from your 
 moorings to God, you simply love those things more than 
 you love God. That was not the way with old Job. His 
 religion meant more to him than his children, so he could 
 lose his children and stick to his religion. His religion 
 meant more to him than his property. He could see that 
 go, and sit down in beggary and rags and be content, because 
 his religion was above his herds and flocks, and above the 
 children of his youth. I fear very much that some of you 
 are not very well anchored. There are certain things you 
 could lose, of course. You could lose your pocketbook and 
 not fret much; you could still go to prayer-meeting and 
 pray. And yet I don't know about that. It might depend 
 upon how much money you had in it! How much of your 
 money could you lose and still be undisturbed in your 
 religious devotion? I was talking the other day to a good 
 
86 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 friend of mine, who is a prominent man in the eastern part 
 of the state in school affairs. He lost his property about two 
 years ago. He was sold out by the sheriff. He said to me: 
 "I want to tell you that I have been a member of the church 
 for twenty-five years; but when I saw my goods go, I don't 
 want to say what I did, but you know sometimes a body 
 begins to doubt the providence of God." "Yes," I said, "I 
 know how that is." He said: "I was just in that fix; I felt 
 as if things were not right, after all. Of course I knew it 
 was not right to do that, but I was doing it all the same." 
 There he was, just tottering, his goods and his God about 
 equally balanced, his love for each about equally strong. 
 When one went, he was not sure that he could hold the 
 other. Here is the test for all of us. If we come to trust in 
 God more than we come to trust in other things, then we 
 can lose the other things and still hold on to God, "under 
 whose wings we have come to trust." Let us come to trust. 
 Don't get half-way to trust. Don't get a half-trust in your 
 life, a half -faith, a half -expectation, a half -certainty. Come 
 right up to the full measure of all the trust will give to you. 
 "What are you doing to get that? You must surrender your 
 whole self, give up everything everything that you are, 
 everything that you think you are, everything that you want 
 to be. You can't trust under God's wings and be sheltered 
 there unless you are full of God entirely unselfish in your 
 outlook and purposes. I remember Christ's promise; I will 
 paraphrase it for you: "Come unto me all ye that labor and 
 are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Come unto me 
 all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will put you 
 under this wing of protection, I will take your burdens from 
 you, I will take your heavy sins from you, I will give you 
 what you need, I will give you rest. But to do so, you must 
 come unto me, all the way unto me, not half-way. Let us 
 come to trust under His wings. 
 
 Ruth expresses her gratitude for this ministry of love that 
 was showered upon her, in the thirteenth verse. I want to 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 87 
 
 impress upon all of you the value of a word of gratitude 
 timely uttered, the value of a grateful word. Sometimes you 
 feel as if you ought to say something to somebody who had 
 done some kindness to you as if you ought to say to the 
 pastor: "That was a good sermon; it did me good; I thank 
 you for it." "That was a good meeting we had together." 
 But you don't say it; you walk out with the mean, miserly 
 feeling that you have not done your duty. I don't want 
 anybody to come to me and lie to me, and say, "You did 
 well," when I did not. I don't care for that; but in the touch 
 of life, when you are helped you ought to say "Thank you." 
 There ought to be that feeling of confidence and mutual 
 respect for one another that prompts one to say, with full 
 heart, "Thank you." And when you learn to be a grateful 
 church and a grateful people, you will be more like Christ. 
 In one of Mr. Moody's great meetings in Sheffield, England, 
 a woman came into his church an hour before the service 
 with a baby in her arms. The very fact that she came early 
 showed her interest. She wanted to get a good seat. She eat 
 down about the middle of the church. Mr. Moody came in 
 and noticed this woman. The baby was crying, as babies 
 will in church. Just wait until you are a preacher. I would 
 like you to be a preacher for five minutes when a baby is 
 yelling at the top of his voice, that you might learn how 
 trying it is to preach under such circumstances. Here was 
 Mr. Moody before this great congregation. He felt the bur- 
 den of souls and the responsibility of the meeting upon him. 
 And between him and that congregation of dying sinners was 
 this crying baby. Some of the people looked at the woman. 
 She was trying to quiet the baby, of course; but the more 
 she tried to quiet it, the more it cried. Some of the people 
 looked at her as if to say: "Why don't you take it away? Get 
 out of this," as I have often seen people look at a woman 
 with a crying baby. If I were in church with a child, and 
 were to be so looked at, I would take it out, and unless I 
 were very strongly centred in my religious convictions, I 
 
88 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 would never go back to that church again. Finally the 
 woman started to go out, but Mr. Moody said: "Will some- 
 body kindly tell that woman to come back and take her 
 place and not worry if the baby does cry? My voice is strong, 
 and by the grace of God I can preach as loud as that baby 
 can cry." The mother was comforted; she came back, and 
 the baby went to sleep. And the message of God was 
 preached from that pulpit with power. That woman's heart 
 was touched, and when Mr. Moody said, "All that want the 
 prayers of God's people, please stand up," she stood up. 
 When he said, "Those that desire to learn more about the 
 way of salvation will please tarry after the meeting is over 
 and meet me in the little back room yonder," the woman got 
 up and started for the little room. And a large man back 
 in the congregation, who had not had a baby in his arms for 
 fifty years, perhaps, came up and said to this woman, "Let 
 me hold your baby while you go into the room yonder." He 
 was a royal knight! He took that strange woman's baby in 
 his arms and toted it up and down the aisles of the church, 
 and she went into that little side room and wrestled with 
 God until she received the gift of the Holy Spirit. You are 
 not grateful enough. You are not on the outlook for a 
 chance to say a kind word when a kind word ought to be 
 said. We turn our backs to one another and walk on the 
 other side, and the world seems cold and hard and selfish and 
 unyielding. Perhaps the reason for it is, we have been cold 
 and selfish and unyielding ourselves in our contact with 
 others. 
 
 You generally find the world just. It will usually give 
 back to you about what you give to it. Here was a woman 
 who gave expression to her gratitude. She realized that Boaz 
 had been good to her, and she did not hesitate to express her 
 thanks; though some girls would have said it was not modest 
 of her to say, "Let me find favour in thy sight, my lord." 
 Well, it was an expression of her honest heart, sweeping 
 outward toward her benefactor. Boaz comes and does the 
 
BOOK OF KUTH. 89 
 
 thing this woman needs; he helps her; so the Lord Jesus 
 Christ comes into your life and mine to help it. What we 
 need is to be more grateful, and to express more freely our 
 gratitude. Ruth's heart opened like a flower that had been 
 kept in the shade, and now for the first time in years had 
 received the warm light of the sun of helpfulness. Her life 
 opened to take on new hopes as it unfolded under the influ- 
 ence of this unexpected kindness. She exalted him just as 
 we exalt our great benefactors. You know how we exalt 
 Columbus. Why do we do that? How did he get into his- 
 tory? Why do we speak about him and have his anniversa- 
 ries? He was a benefactor. He did something that helped 
 you, and now you are trying to pay back your gratitude. 
 We build our monuments to George Washington. What is 
 it for? He was our benefactor. That is, he did in advance 
 for us what we now endeavor in return to pay to him by 
 building monuments and holding anniversary days and recit- 
 ing his name in schools. That is the spirit of gratitude in a 
 practical form. Washington shall live as long as our nation 
 lives, in memory of the benefits he bestowed upon our nation. 
 It is so with any great man. Napoleon, as much as he was 
 maligned and abused, as much as he oppressed others, was 
 sincerely loved by his soldiers. The spirit of devotion that 
 characterized the grenadiers that marched under Napoleon 
 typifies in some measure the devotion that ought to be felt 
 in our following of Christ. There was a little German poem 
 recited once in this church. It told the story of Napoleon's 
 army retreating from Moscow. Two grenadiers were cap- 
 tured and thrown into prison. After being imprisoned for 
 months in Russia, they found their way out of jail and 
 across the border into Germany. When they got as far as 
 Germany on their way home to join the forces of the Em- 
 peror, they were told that Napoleon had been arrested and 
 taken in exile to the little island of Elba, and was there a 
 prisoner for life; that he had been banished from the French 
 nation. Then these soldiers who had fought with him and 
 
90 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 had fought for him began to discuss their future. And one 
 said to the other: "Why should I go back to France, to flow- 
 ery, sunny France, when the Emperor is gone the Em- 
 peror, the Emperor! You go back; you have wife and chil- 
 dren three; go, minister to them. I shall lie down here on 
 the Rhine and die for my Emperor the Emperor." The 
 other replied: "What care I for wife, what care I for chil- 
 dren; take my life here on the Rhine, and bury me with my 
 sword in my hand, the badge of the Cross of Honor on my 
 breast, and when my Emperor rides over my grave, I shall 
 rise from this tomb with my sword in my hand to fight for 
 my Emperor the Emperor!" This is the devotion of an 
 absolute follower to a leader whom he loves. It mirrors, it 
 seems to me, something of the devotion that men and women 
 need more and more for the meek and lowly King and 
 Leader of us all, the Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 You are not willing to lie down with your sword in your 
 hand; you are not willing to stand girded for the fray; you 
 are not willing to die for your King. The test of real dis- 
 cipleship is the test that Christ himself put upon us when 
 he gave his life for us. Over in Denmark some years ago 
 they were building a little church, and about forty feet from 
 the ground a workman slipped and fell to the pavement 
 below. It looked like instant death. But a flock of sheep 
 were going past at the time. The workman fell on the flock 
 of sheep and crushed a little lamb to death, but saved his 
 own life. Up there from where he fell they carved on the 
 side of that church a picture of the little lamb that had 
 given its life for him, as a memorial of the sacrifice. The 
 Lord Jesus Christ was crushed by the weight of your sins, 
 crushed down to death. And you have not exalted him as 
 they exalted this little lamb of Denmark because it saved 
 the life of a workman. Let us hold him up as a leader, as 
 an exalted King. Let us worship him and follow him with a 
 feeling of gratitude and devotion, with an honest heart 
 genuinely devoted to Christ. 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 91 
 
 LECTUKE VIII. 
 
 You will find recorded in the fourteenth verse: "And Boaz 
 said unto her, At meal time come thou hither, and eat of the 
 bread, and dip thy morsel in the vinegar. And she sat beside 
 the reapers: and he reached her parched corn, and she did 
 eat, and was sufficed, and left." Let us think a little about 
 the mid-day meal down there in the harvest field. It is 
 interesting to know that these men who worked honestly 
 through the morning hours had their meals served to them 
 at the place where they were. The question of food was sub- 
 ordinate to the question of industry. The place of labor was 
 the place of nourishment. Everything else had to be tribu- 
 tary to the one thing, the place of labor. They did not 
 abandon the field and go off to the town and waste an 
 immense amount of the day's labor and of their own energy 
 in gaining sustenance at noon-time. They sat down and 
 ate, and were sufficed, and left returned again to the field 
 to work. If we take this harvest field as the field of God, 
 for such it was to Ruth; and if we take Ruth as a type of all 
 of us, for such she was; we have a lesson before us. There 
 are times in the life of each of us when mea!4ime comes, 
 when the time of recuperation comes, the time of restora- 
 tion, the time for strengthening for additional labors. These 
 men could not work on throughout the day. The limit of 
 endurance had been reached. Nourishment and replenish- 
 ing of their energies was necessary. The preacher of the 
 word of God will run out in the course of time if he does not 
 keep attending to the meal-times of his life. Some of you 
 have not enough in you to feed anybody; you don't "meal- 
 time" often enough. You miss opportunities in the public 
 sanctuary to feed yourself that you may feed others. You 
 miss opportunities in the prayer-meeting, in the Sabbath- 
 
92 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 school, for that sort of thing. You miss the opportunity that 
 is in the Bible Session of the college for that sort of thing. 
 These are the meal-times of the Christian. These are the 
 times that you sit down to strengthen yourself for addi- 
 tional toil and work in God's field. To miss these is to go 
 out weak for all the work of your lives. No man, who has 
 sincerely resolved to work for Jesus Christ, can afford to 
 miss the means of strengthening himself for that work. He 
 can't afford to turn his back upon any time when he can 
 be strengthened for that work. The church service, the 
 prayer-meeting service, the Bible Session, these are the 
 means that God has provided for filling your soul with the 
 food of heaven, in the strength of which you are to with- 
 stand temptation and sin, and to work for God for many 
 days. Without that strength you will break down under 
 temptation and be ineffective in the field. Some people say, 
 "I cannot afford to go up to the Bible term for three weeks; 
 my potatoes will freeze in the cellar, my horse will not be 
 fed as well by the man who will attend to him as I would 
 feed him myself." But you forget. If you don't come, you 
 are going to starve your soul, and are not going to feed prop- 
 erly your congregation. Let your potatoes freeze. Let your 
 horse be neglected for a time. Attend to the souls of God's 
 children. We don't understand these things right some- 
 times. These are our meal-times. To miss these is to im- 
 poverish our souls. I do wonder how lean some of us are, how 
 flabby we are, how weak we are. ISTo wonder the world and 
 God himself get discouraged at the work we do. We are so 
 weak we cannot strike a solid blow for Jesus Christ. We 
 have not prayed enough, we have not pondered enough, we 
 have not strength enough to do the work. It is one of my 
 notions that a man had better sit for forty years and think 
 and prepare just to strike one good square blow for Christ, 
 than to scatter his energies over forty years and do little or 
 nothing for Him. 
 
 I believe in thorough preparation, I believe in absolute 
 
BOOK OP RUTH. 93 
 
 skill. I believe in the perfecting of yourself for the work of 
 Christ. I cannot conceive of anything in this world that 
 needs the best energies of a man as much as the work of 
 Christ needs it. Let us try to brijag men and women as near 
 to that standard as we can. There is a man in your congre- 
 gation you think can preach. He shows evidences of spir- 
 itual growth. Send him to school where he can get the best 
 spiritual strength and food, so that he can come back to you 
 in ten years and strike a blow in that community for Christ 
 that will send sin reeling to its death and sinners rejoicing 
 to the cross. You will have sacrificed your time and money 
 to send him to school. But the joy of standing where he 
 knocks sin dead, and rejoicing with him over the conquest, 
 is ample compensation. You do not loan a dollar to a young 
 man to go to school for fear you will not get the dollar back. 
 To lend a dollar to a young man to go to a Christian school 
 is redeeming the world for Christ. We need young men in 
 the ministry who can preach with spirit, with power. We 
 need them right here in Huntingdon, out at New Enterprise, 
 down in Virginia, over in New York, we need them over the 
 entire Brotherhood young men filled with the spirit of 
 Christ, the holy spirit of God, and who are educated until 
 they can preach with power. We need them. And mark 
 my words, unless we rear them in our colleges, we won't have 
 them. The school of the church is the nursery in which this 
 is done. It is the meal-place for the strengthening of men 
 for the work of God. To keep them out is* to impov- 
 erish God's field and let it go unworked, unredeemed. One 
 cannot help holding up his hands and praying to Heaven, 
 saying, "How long, Lord, how long!" There is another 
 meal-time for you and for me the sacred ordinances of the 
 church of Jesus Christ. These are the feasting-times of the 
 Christian man and the Christian woman. What is the sig- 
 nificance of the ceremonies in the church, of the ceremonies 
 that are precious to life, excepting that they are the times 
 when the soul is fattened before God? Why do we com- 
 
94 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 memorate the shed blood and broken body of the Lord Jesus 
 Christ in the communion service? Why do we commemorate 
 his humility in the ordinance of feet-washing? Why do we 
 have the salutation of the holy kiss? Why do we have the 
 things that we have in the church of God? They are the 
 feasts of the soul. To miss these is to impoverish the soul. 
 To miss the communion service, to be out of the church 
 when the church feasts are held, is to miss a season of 
 strength for the soul. You can't afford to go hungry, to go 
 lean, to go emaciated, to go impoverished, to go weakened, 
 staggering down through God's work, when you could walk 
 strong and strengthened by attending upon his ordinances 
 and participating in them. 
 
 I suppose there were a dozen or more out there in the 
 field, quite a number of workers. You know he gave his 
 orders to the reapers to drop handfuls and help Ruth all they 
 could. Who got the most strength from that meal there at 
 noon-time in the field of Boaz? I don't mean who ate the 
 most food; that is no measure of getting the most out of it. 
 I mean to whom did that noon-day meal mean the most? It 
 meant the most to the one that had worked the hardest. If 
 Ruth had cuddled up under a tree out there in Boaz' field, 
 and slept until dinner-time, and when she heard the dinner- 
 bell ring had gone down, she would have been ashamed of 
 herself. She would have had no appetite. She would not 
 have enjoyed her meal. If you want to enjoy the ordinances 
 of God, work for Him. Get hungry, then you will enjoy the 
 meal. If you don't work for Him, you will never get hungry 
 enough to know how to enjoy His feasts. Some of you have 
 not a very vivid religious experience. It is not meaning 
 much to you. You are not doing enough to have it mean 
 much to you. Go out and minister to the poor. Go out and 
 make sacrifices for His cause. Build more churches. Help 
 on His kingdom in more energetic ways. Get hungry from 
 hard work, and the Lord God will feed you and do you good. 
 The Prayer-Meeting, the Church Service, the Bible Class, 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 95 
 
 the Bible Session, the Ordinances in the Church of the Lord 
 Jesus Christ the Ceremony of Feet- Washing, Holy Bap- 
 tism, the Holy Kiss, the Communion Emblems these mean 
 most to those that do most. You can measure your spiritual 
 power by the joy that these things bring to you. If a man 
 comes to church and sleeps through the meal-time, he is not 
 hungry from toil in God's harvest. He has not worked hard 
 enough for Christ to enjoy religious refreshing. 
 
 Those people were out busily engaged, and then came in 
 to the meal. They had a right to their meal. Paul declares, 
 in substance, if you don't work, you ought not to eat. If you 
 are too lazy to earn bread, you have no right to eat it. I 
 wonder whether that might apply in the church of God? 
 If you don't work hard enough to enjoy the communion of 
 God, what right have you to partake of the communion of 
 God? If you don't work hard enough for the emblems of the 
 church to mean something to you, what right have you to 
 be called a member of the church? If you won't work, why 
 should you eat? That is the lesson of the corn field. Ruth 
 sat with the workers, and enjoyed the meal because she her- 
 self was a worker. There was a bounteous provision made for 
 Ruth^-a provision above her expectations. Her very dili- 
 gence won favors to herself. Boaz went out of his way to 
 do more than the law exacted of him, much more than was 
 the usual custom, because of the diligence of this woman. 
 She won these favors because she deserved them. He gives 
 to her bountifully. I cannot help admiring the beautiful 
 spirit of the man that sent around to his reapers the word, 
 "Let her glean even among the sheaves, and reproach her 
 not." Let a handful slip from your hands for her. Don't 
 do it so that she will see you do it, but do it as if by accident. 
 
 Give to the poor, but give to them in such a way that they 
 do not realize that you are making the attempt to give to 
 them. Give to them bountifully. Better than all that, give 
 it to them without reproach. Don't put upon the poor with 
 the gift you give to them the stigma of poverty. Don't say, 
 
96 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 "Here is a dollar, but why don't you work so you won't have 
 to beg?" Don't say to the poverty-stricken soul when it 
 comes to (the kingdom and asks for the bread of heaven, 
 "Here is the bread, but why did you not join the church 
 long ago?" Don't heap upon the hungry soul upbraidings 
 for what might have been. That is not the spirit of Christ, 
 nor of Boaz, nor of righteousness. Here is the hungry soul; 
 feed it, give to it without upbraiding. How does Christ do? 
 "He giveth to all men liberally" and then scolds them? 
 Does he? Bead on "and upbraideth not." Don't forget 
 the word "Not" in there. It is put at the end for the sake 
 of emphasis. Christ knew how to give. May He help us to 
 learn! Some men never see an emphatic word unless it is at 
 the end. "He giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth 
 not." 
 
 I would like to see a Christian church that would know 
 how to treat penitents, heaping upon them the riches of 
 heaven, rejoicing with them in their conversion, sitting with 
 them in heavenly places, singing the songs of heaven with 
 them, but never once pointing the finger of reproach toward 
 them and saying, or even thinking: "You are not as good as 
 I am. You have not been in the church as long as I have. 
 You are not as spiritual as you ought to be." Grod is the 
 Judge; you are the encourager. Let us understand that. 
 Boaz said to his young men: "Drop handfuls and help her 
 along. Do not upbraid her. Do not reproach her. Do not 
 scold her. Fill her soul with encouragement, that she may 
 'toil on, for to toil is honorable." In everything that Boaz did 
 here he figured the Lord Jesus Christ. When a man comes 
 into the church of Christ, how bountifully he is treated; 
 how beyond the measure of his own expectation! How un- 
 expectedly God cares for him, and the Spirit helps him! 
 How without reproach the Lord Jesus Christ receives us 
 back! I wonder whether Jesus, when He went out there to 
 the mountain, with bleeding feet, in the darkness, after the 
 lost sheep, and found it, spanked it for running away. Did 
 

 BOOK OF RUTH. 97 
 
 He take it home and pen it up in a barren field, to teach it 
 that it did not pay to run away? What did he do with it? 
 He carried it home on his shoulder, comforted it in his 
 bosom. The spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ is the spirit of 
 encouragement and helpfulness, not of rebuke and criticism. 
 What we need is more charity for the sheep that are out; 
 more love to drive us out to get them; more consideration for 
 them when they come home. How long did Ruth work? 
 She had her dinner; she had gathered a goodly amount. Did 
 she then go home and rest? Some people do. When they 
 get half through their work, they say, "Well, I guess I will 
 rest this afternoon." There are people that won't work 
 unless they must people in the church that won't pray 
 unless they must. If the preacher calls upon them, they will 
 pray; but they won't do it if they can avoid it. Nobody 
 made Ruth work until evening. But she goes right out and 
 continues to work. "She did eat, and was sufficed, and left/' 
 "And when she was risen up to glean" not to go home, but 
 to glean, to go on with her work she set a noble example 
 for all of us. If you are in a place where you are doing well, 
 stick to it; glean until evening. "So she gleaned in the 
 field until even." She kept right at it, teaching the impor- 
 tance of getting a place in this world where you can work, 
 and then sticking to that, persevering in the thing that is 
 right, working in the place where you are doing well. Unsta- 
 bleness in business, shifting from one job to another, changing 
 from one occupation to another, is not to be commended in 
 anybody. Unstableness in place, not willing to preach here 
 because there is a higher salary offered there; this is the 
 wrong way of making up one's mind to work for Christ. 
 If you are in a place where you feel you are doing well, if 
 you are bringing souls to Christ, stick to it until evening! 
 If you are not doing anything in the field, if your ministry is 
 not blessed, if you are not gathering any sheaves for Christ 
 in the place where you are, don't you think you had better 
 change your field? I don't believe in changing; I believe in 
 
98 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 a permanent ministry. Yet there are times, it seems to me, 
 when, if a man's usefulness is proved to be circumscribed in 
 one place, he had better go to another place. I may fail in 
 Huntingdon and succeed in Everett. I may not be adapted 
 to do good in one place, yet be well fitted for success in 
 another. I have not a universal power to adapt myself to 
 success in all places. I shall try to find a place where I can 
 work. It is a man's conscientious duty to study himself until 
 he knows his limits; to find a place where he is likely to 
 succeed. 
 
 How many people in the church are unstable! They don't 
 stick to it until evening. They are all the time wanting some- 
 thing new. They don't like the order of the services. Why 
 not have it some other way? I don't know what they would 
 have if they had it their way. The spirit of discontent 
 with the order of things is abroad in the church. They 
 would like to have a change. And then, there is the 
 preacher; he stands the same all the time; why don't he 
 change around? He has a habit of putting his hand up to 
 his forehead; why don't he put it to the back of his head, to 
 rest himself? He has preached so many times; why don't he 
 go away and let us get something new? I have heard that; 
 haven't you? The preacher has worked hard for half a year 
 to do good in the congregation; he happens to use the same 
 illustration in the sermon that he used six months ago; and 
 somebody, probably the meanest man in the church, who 
 has not paid six cents to the support of the gospel in a year, 
 raises a howl because the preacher has not been studying 
 enough, uses his old stuff over. I want you to understand 
 that to preach for years to the same people is a hard thing 
 to do. If you don't believe it, just write out two sermons, 
 and try to have the one contain nothing that is in the other. 
 Why should sermons be so different? There is but one thing 
 to preach Jesus Christ and him crucified. And if they are 
 wholly unlike, there is a probability that they are all wrong. 
 What the world needs is one lesson the sacrifice of Christ 
 
BOOK OP RUTH. 99 
 
 for the redemption of the world from sin. What is it that 
 Paul said he preached? Christ crucified. That was enough. 
 Wiho has ever found any fault with Paul's limitations, with 
 his reputation as a preacher? The thing that troubles me is 
 that you are not Christian enough to understand that the 
 voice of the minister is the voice of Christ. You are criti- 
 cising the man because his diction is not good or his rhet- 
 oric faulty. You come to a debating society instead of a 
 church service! Enter the church service with a critical 
 mind, and you can find fault with any preacher that ever 
 stood before you. You can kill his sermon and the power of 
 his work in the congregation. You ought to come in and 
 pray to God to help you to enjoy that service. Get yourself 
 right, and the preacher will warm right up to you every time. 
 I can tell just as soon as I get into a congregation whether I 
 have struck a frost or a warming time. I know just as well 
 as I know my name the kind of a crowd I have to talk to 
 three minutes after I come in. I know when I have to talk 
 to a crowd whom I have to pound into sensibility and a 
 proper state of feeling, and when I am speaking to Christians 
 who are hungry for the word of God. I have preached for 
 thirty minutes before I could say a word of gospel. I had to 
 preach down coldness and indifference and meanness. And 
 in some audiences that is hard work. I had rather preach 
 Jesus Christ for a month than to preach the devil out of a 
 congregation for twenty minutes. It is a more respectable 
 business, and a much easier thing to do. Try more and more 
 to impress upon our people the necessity of coming to a pre- 
 pared church service with a preparedness of heart for God's 
 service. 
 
 She stuck to the work, she abode in the place of duty, she 
 toiled until the time for rest came. The time for rest will 
 come. Labor has its boundaries just as clearly defined as 
 rest's boundaries. Some people do not understand that the 
 time of rest is not a time of waste. They feel that they 
 ought not to rest, because to rest is to waste. That is a mis- 
 
100 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 take. If you want to preach well in the evening, don't you 
 know that the less you eat for supper, and the more you are 
 alone for two or three hours before you preach, the better 
 for your congregation and for Christ? Have you not found 
 that out? The preacher who wants to do good work in the 
 pulpit, wants to honor God by preaching a sermon of power, 
 needs to be alone with God, alone with his thoughts, quietly 
 resting and thinking. "While I mused the fire burned." If 
 that is a good thing for the preacher, how would it work 
 with the membership? If I could preach to a people who 
 would sit down and meditate for an hour before coming into 
 the sanctuary, I believe I could preach with power. The 
 congregation would exalt me into a powerful preacher in 
 spite of my own lethargy. I would be ashamed to preach any 
 less thing than the congregation would expect. The spirit of 
 God would stir me to meet the expectations of that people. 
 We need more communion with God, more meditation, more 
 pondering upon the word of truth, to the end that we may 
 come into the service and into the work of God strengthened. 
 .Repose measures strength. This woman saved all her energy 
 for her work. She did not waste it in fussing about. Many 
 people fret half their energy away. I suppose that is natu- 
 ral. They get nervous and excited. Their life is fretted 
 away in concern. They have a fear they will not do well. I 
 confess to you that I don't remember the time when my 
 knees were shaky before a crowd. The remedy for that, my 
 brother, is an absolute surety in your own mind of the thing 
 you are going to do, the confidence that is born of the knowl- 
 edge of the thing required of you. If you are fearful and 
 worried about your power to speak, pray to God far more 
 strength. After a while you will get so full of the spirit 
 that you can't keep quiet. Then you can preach and tremble 
 .not at all. What is the trouble? We are self-conscious. 
 The first thing we need when we get up for Christ is f orget- 
 fulness of self, keen remembrance of Christ Jesus and His 
 message to a dying world. 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 101 
 
 LECTURE IX. 
 
 What Ruth had beaten out, her gleanings for the day, she 
 took into the city. "And her mother in law saw that she 
 had gleaned; and she brought forth, and gave to her that 
 she had reserved after she was sufficed." I call your atten- 
 tion to the home-coming of Ruth in the evening after her 
 day's toil. The most beautiful picture that one can paint of 
 rustic life is the evening scene as the twilight hour is creep- 
 ing on. The mother is busy in the house with the evening 
 meal. The shadows are lengthening along the lane. 
 
 "In the poplar tree about the spring, 
 The katydid begins to sing." 
 
 The little children's necks are craning from the door to 
 see the first sign of the returning father. When they see 
 him, they give a shout and rush down the path to welcome 
 him home. They gather at the frugal table, and it is a 
 feast. It may be the simplest food in the world, but all the 
 hearts that are there love each other. Read the "Cotter's 
 Saturday Night," by Burns. The very charm of Grey's 
 "Elegy" is the portrayal of simple rustic life. And the sad- 
 ness of the "Elegy" is owing to the fact that these scenes are 
 
 lost to these people forever: 
 
 \ 
 
 - 
 
 *Mt ' 
 
 "For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, 
 Or busy housewife ply her evening care; 
 No children run to lisp their sire's return, 
 Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share." 
 
 Read Goldsmith's "Traveler." You won't find anywhere in 
 all his journey a place that was so sweet as the little place 
 up in the Swiss mountains, when in the evening hour the 
 
102 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 housewife put her clean plates upon the clean board and set 
 her frugal meal, and gathered her children and her loved 
 ones about her. I have no sympathy nor respect for the 
 young man that does not love the evening hours in the home. 
 I am tired of this feeling that young fellows have, that as 
 soon as they get supper and their clean clothes, they have to 
 run to town and spend the evening in a saloon, or at the 
 store, or at the blacksmith shop, or at the club meeting, or at 
 some other place where the devil is nearer than he can be at 
 home. Euth went home after her day's work was over. And 
 that is your place and mine. You have no business running 
 around at night, getting into questionable associations. 
 Show me the young fellow who loves his home in the even- 
 ing, and I will show you one who will make an honorable 
 home for himself in the years to come. Show me the man 
 who runs around in the evening, and I will show you a 
 young scamp who is not fit to have a home. If you have a 
 good home in this world, you ought to thank G-od for it; and 
 you ought to make it a home, not simply a boarding-house, 
 a place to rest when you are worn out with the surfeits of 
 pleasure and the questionable joys that come from running 
 a/bout. Euth came home in the evening! She came home 
 happy, because she had done an honest day's toil. She came 
 to the only place in the world where there was real rest for 
 her spirit in the home, by the side of her old mother-in- 
 law, whom she loved, where she could sit down and talk and 
 rest and prepare for the night. 
 
 She was a frugal woman. Wastefulness is a sin. Just as 
 much a sin as idleness. There is no difference between the 
 man who is too lazy to work and the man who works and 
 earns money and then squanders it on useless things. She 
 worked out in the field, and carried the result of her toil 
 home. She did not work and spend it in the saloon or on 
 other questionable things. You have no business in this 
 world to be anything but frugal. A spendthrift and an idler 
 are alike an abomination in the sight of the Lord, and a 
 
BOOK OF KUTH. 103 
 
 curse to the parents who brought them into the world. I 
 don't mean by that that you have to be stingy. I have no 
 sympathy for the man who holds a penny until the eagle 
 screams. The best thing about Euth's economy was that she 
 was frugal when she was unexpectedly prosperous. Any- 
 body can be frugal when he must be. You can save when 
 you must save. It is hard to be frugal when you have fifty 
 dollars in your pocket and no immediate demand upon you 
 for it. It takes a righteous man then to keep his hand from 
 dissipating his money. Before you spend the fifty dollars 
 that you have no immediate call upon you for, stop and 
 think. You say, "I earned this money; all right,! can do what 
 I please with it." No, you can't. You have no more right to 
 do that than you have to strike me on the nose. You can burn 
 it if you will, but you have no right to burn it. That fifty 
 dollars represents potentially a vast amount of good in this 
 world. A missionary visited one day a prison away in a for- 
 eign country, where lepers and others who were down with 
 incurable diseases were chained to dying and dead prisoners, 
 so that they had to live by the side of death. They were 
 given no food. They died by slow starvation. The mis- 
 sionary saw all this misery, and went out, saying, "God help 
 me to see my duty here," and he went and hired a mule and 
 loaded it down with loaves of bread until its back bent under 
 the burden, and he carried it to the door of the prison, and 
 with two soldiers he took it in and saw that every leper and 
 every starving soul in that prison had bread. He might have 
 spent that money for a bottle of whiskey. Had he any 
 right to do it? You get a false notion when you have money 
 given to you. You feel, "Well, now, I will do what I please 
 with this; I am going to have a good time. Father sent me 
 this down as a little extra spending-money, mother slipped 
 this into the envelope without saying anything to father, as 
 a little extra present. I will 'blow it in/ " Look out! That 
 is a dangerous feeling in any young person. Before you 
 spend your money, remember you have a right to stop and 
 
104 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 ask yourself the question, What does this money represent 
 potentially? What are its possibilities in this world? How 
 many souls will it bring to Christ? How many hungry peo- 
 ple will it feed? How many people will it educate and make 
 powerful to do good work in the world? Before you can 
 solve the question of spending that money, you have to solve 
 all these other questions that depend upon it. Men ought to 
 know this, and women ought to know this. Women often 
 have little sense about money matters. They don't know 
 now hard it is to earn it. They are not as careful in standing 
 by husband and father in caring for it as they ought to be. 
 Girls are constantly saying, "Give me more, give me more." 
 You don't know what burdens you lay upon the hard- 
 worked father that gives it to you. When you can give up 
 a thing easier than your father can give it to you, you have 
 no business to ask him for it, I don't care what it is. 
 
 I did not always realize that. My notion of the thing was 
 that the more I got from father, the better for me. It is not 
 BO. I did not stop to think about the days of toil and the 
 nights of worry that it cost my father to earn it. I only 
 thought its possession meant so much ice cream, and this, and 
 that, and the other thing; and away it went. Let us under- 
 stand that the sacred honor of the home is back of the money 
 that we spend. More than that, the sacred toil of mother- 
 hood and fatherhood is back of it. You have no business 
 to be a spendthrift. A man that lives fast not only dissi- 
 pates himself, but is a disgrace to his father and his mother, 
 and a rioter in a community that is pledged for order and 
 peace. Spend your evenings at home, and you will not learn 
 these habits. They don't sell beer there. There is no billiard 
 table there. There is no theatre show there, with its ques- 
 tionable attachments. Stay beside your old mother in the 
 evenings, and teach your younger brothers to do the same. 
 Spend the evenings with your old father; stand by them 
 just as long as you can. It ought not to be a burden; it is 
 your solemn duty. If you can't sit by them in the evening, 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 105 
 
 make those evening hours just as rosy as you can from a dis- 
 tance by dropping a word, of kindness in a nice letter as often 
 as you can. You will come to know later on, when you no 
 longer have these auxiliaries to a good life, how much they 
 meant to you. You little realized the power of mother's and 
 father's love. All of you who were at the World's Fair (and 
 those of you who were not there have read about it since) 
 were probably impressed more with one thing there than 
 with anything else a little painting by Thomas Hovenden, 
 of Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, down in Montgomery 
 county. He painted a canvas and sold it to Mr. Harrison, the 
 Provost of the University of Pennsylvania. The subject of 
 the painting is "Breaking Home Ties." There is the old 
 grandmother knitting in the corner of the simple room, 
 cheap paper on the walls and no carpet on the floor, a plain 
 old pine table, an old clock. There is a cat curled up before 
 the hearth, asleep. There is a little toddling baby by the 
 side of the old grandmother. Out at the door, with his back 
 turned, is the father, with his pants in his boots and his 
 whip in his hand, ready to haul the boy to .the town and 
 start him off from home. There is the sister at the door, 
 ready to say the last good-bye. And there is the big tall 
 boy, standing saying good-bye to his mother, with his hand 
 laid in hers. She has hers laid over his, and she looks up in 
 her boy's face and is saying good-bye to him. That good-bye 
 meant much to that mother. That picture touched a chord 
 in every heart. Women stood before it and cried. I tell 
 you, the hardest thing in this world, if you are a genuine 
 man or woman, is to give up your home ties. 
 
 As long as a boy has a genuine home-sickness in his soul 
 for his father and mother, there is an element in him that is 
 able to save him, some time, from ruin. When that is gone, 
 I know not what there is next for that boy. He is in the 
 whirlpool that will suck him down to hell. I know no hand 
 save the hand of Almighty God that can snatch him out of 
 the churning maelstrom of despair. Ruth spent her evening 
 
106 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 at home. There would be fewer boys on the other side of the 
 river in the Reformatory if they had spent their evenings 
 where Ruth did. There would be fewer ropes stretched with 
 murderers in this country if there were more people spend- 
 ing their evenings at home. There would be more seekers of 
 religion on their bended knees in this country to-day if 
 every boy spent his evenings at home. There would be 
 purer religion, more devoted Christians, more of everything 
 that is righteous, less of everything that is unrighteous, in 
 this world, if the boys and girls would stay at home at night 
 instead of running, God only knows where, and doing what 
 no tongue can tell. The evening came, and she went home, 
 carrying the toil of the day in her weary body, carrying the 
 reward of her toil on her bended shoulders, and sat down 
 there with her old mother-in-law. Preachers, I want you to 
 go back to your congregations to tell your people the duty 
 of making the home a centre of interest. Now, there is an- 
 other side to this. I have talked pretty straight to these 
 young people. I have no apology for that. Now I want to 
 make a plea on the other side. 
 
 Some of you will have homes after a while. Some of you 
 in front here have them now. Why, in the name of grace, 
 don't you make the home so that a boy can stay in it; not 
 only so that he can, but so that he will want to? Why don't 
 you make a home for your boy, instead of a boarding-house? 
 Some of you have a boy. Just as soon as he is big enough 
 to make a noise, he is in the way in the home. He is told to 
 keep quiet. As soon as he is big enough not to be afraid of 
 ghosts, he is pushed up into the garret to sleep. He is given 
 an old bed and an old dingy room. He has no place under 
 the sun that is his save a miserable comer. His soul revolts. 
 He breaks out from that. He goes forth. Then you sit in 
 the gloom of the night and mournfully sing, "Where is my 
 wandering boy to-night, where is my wandering boy 
 to-night?" Why did you not sing before that, What can I 
 do to keep my boy from wandering in the night? And you 
 
BOOK OF KUTH. 107 
 
 would not have a song of woe over a wandering boy to-night. 
 We have not much sense in this country nowadays as to the 
 right relation of the home to our children. Why, it is an awful 
 thing to drive a boy away from 'his home, to turn him loose 
 without an anchorage in this world. I would sacrifice a horse, 
 a farm, before I would sacrifice a boy. Did you ever buy a 
 book for him in your life? Did you ever hang a picture in 
 his room? Did you ever do anything for him except scold 
 him when he is bad, and dig at him continually to be better? 
 Now, I can't speak from personal experience about this. I 
 am glad to say that I always had a good home. I was not 
 driven out of my home; but I know boys that were. Let us 
 learn to make a boy love his home more .than he loves any- 
 thing else on earth. And when he comes to marry, I want 
 the deepest sorrow of ; his marriage-day to be the thought 
 that he is giving up his mother and his home. I want him to 
 feel that above everything else. God pity the fatherless, the 
 motherless, the homeless soul! 
 
 Out there on the farm your father brought you up; and 
 before your father, your grandfather brought your father up. 
 For four generations they are asleep in the family graveyard. 
 There lies your great-grandfather; he died eighty years ago. 
 There is his name on the tombstone, cut in German. There 
 is his son, your grandfather; he died sixty years ago. There 
 is his name cut in the stone in English. And there is your 
 father's name; he died ten years ago. There they are, all 
 asleep. Do you know, before I would pull up stakes and 
 leave that sacred city of the dead, and abandon those tomb- 
 stones, I would think a long time. I would not pull up 
 stakes from such a centre of anchorage as that unless I had 
 a pretty secure thought in my soul that I could do better 
 away than I could do there. I am sure I would not do in a 
 moment of foolishness what many boys are doing pack my 
 trunk and run out West and take my chances. Ruth came 
 home in the evening. That is the place for you and me. If 
 you have a good home, make it a better home. If you have 
 
108 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 not a good (home, pray that it may become a good home to 
 your soul. A good home is a good place to spend the even- 
 ing of a well-spent day. I like the unity of the home; the 
 holding on to the home power, the home ties, the home influ- 
 ence, just as long as it is possible to hold them. 
 
 A good home is a great stimulus to purity. I mean by a 
 good home, a home where everybody is free in the evening 
 to tell everything they did in the whole day. You are not fit 
 to go home unless you are able to tell what you did the whole 
 day. If you can go home and talk as Euth did, over the 
 whole day's performance, and tell it all without reserve, if 
 you have lived clean all day, so that you can bring your life 
 before the hearthstone in the evening and tell it in the light 
 of the blazing fire, you are an honor to the home. Every con- 
 fession at the hearthstone of infinitely more value than the 
 confessional is a tie that strengthens the soul and counts 
 for purity in the life. If you tell your old mother everything 
 you do, you are not likely to do anything very bad. If you 
 tell your father everything you did in the past month, you 
 are a boy that is doing about right. I would take such a 
 fellow into my bank, and I would not watch him with spec- 
 tacles to see what he was doing. When you have to come 
 home in the evening and the one question in your \mind is, 
 How can I keep mother from finding out what has been 
 going on; how can I conceal it from father? there is some- 
 thing wrong there that is going to kill the home. It is going 
 to destroy you; there is no question about it. 
 
 Notice the effect of all this upon Naomi. You remember, 
 at the close of the first chapter, when the neighbors said, "Is 
 this Naomi?" she said, "Don't call me that any more; call me 
 Mara." Now she forgets all that, and for the first time the 
 bitterness begins to melt out of her life, and she begins to 
 feel that she has a home. Here is somebody to sit with her, 
 to converse with her, to build into her life and to receive 
 from her life. And so again she is Naomi, and her soul is 
 filled with gratitude, and her heart is touched, and she is 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. 109 
 
 strengthened. She turns and puts a question to Ruth that I 
 want you to ponder. As Ruth oame in the door, Naomi said, 
 "Where hast thou gleaned to-day?" I want you to ask your- 
 selves that question every evening when you come home, 
 "Where have I gleaned to-day?" It contains in it so much 
 of the searching power of the gospel of Christ that I don't 
 know any better text in the whole Book of Ruth for your 
 soul. "Where hast thou gleaned to-day?" The old mother's 
 question is a searching question. It measures the deep con- 
 cern of the mother-in-law. Where is your boy to-night? If 
 you had asked, as Naomi did, every evening as your boy came 
 home, and had been patient enough to listen to his day's 
 routine, you would not have to ask that question to-night. 
 When he came home and wanted to tell you, you perhaps 
 said, "I don't want to be bothered; I am busy now." And 
 when he got out of the way of telling, and came home and 
 had nothing to say, you tempted him into secrecy by say- 
 ing, "Where have you been to-day?" That is not the way 
 ivaomi asked the question. It was an inquiry of deep con- 
 cern. There was no reproof, no sting, no cutting sarcasm. 
 Yet I take it that half the boys 'that come home in the even- 
 ing are met with the question, "What have you been doing 
 now?" I have no language for that kind of thing. Try it 
 on yourself some time and see how you like it. 
 
 "Where hast thou gleaned to-day? Come and tell me about 
 it all. I am interested in you, Ruth. I have thought of you 
 #11 day. At the noontime, when I sat here hungry, without 
 food, I knelt down and asked God to bless you, that you 
 might 'bring home enough to feed us both at this evening 
 hour. I wondered where you were; with what success you 
 were gleaning. I wondered in whose field you were gleaning. 
 I wondered how it went with you. I have been following you 
 with my prayers, my sympathies, my thoughts, all this day. 
 Tell me about it." And then Ruth sits down and tells the 
 tory of the day and lays (the foundation of the mutual con- 
 fidence out of which sprang a new home in Bethlehem, a 
 
110 LECTURES ON THE 
 
 home of such tremendous strength that the Lord Jesus Christ 
 sprang out of it, and had to call Euth among His ancestors. 
 Again I call your attention to the question. It measures the 
 steadfastness of the gleaner. As long as she could tell every 
 evening when she came home what she did during the day, 
 it was a sign of her continuity in action and consistency in 
 purpose. Then, again, I am going to ask you a question, a 
 pointed question Where have you been to-day? That ques- 
 tion must be answered by you now. I don't mean where has 
 your body been. I mean, Where has your spirit been? 
 Where have your affections been? Where have your inter- 
 ests been? Where have you been to-day? Would you like ta 
 stand up and tell all the places you have thought about, all 
 the things you have thought about, all the round of your 
 life's concern since the sun rose this morning? Where have 
 you been to-day? What have you thought? What have you 
 lived? What has your soul fed upon? What have you 
 gleaned? 
 
 Again, I call your attention to this thought the word 
 "where." It asks for a geographical answer. A man ought 
 to answer for the place he is in. What right has a man to be 
 in jail, or in any other place, unless he can give a reason for 
 his place. Where have you been? Where are you? I often 
 think of that tramp that Joseph Walton met down on the 
 pike near Coatesville. He was one of those whereless, wan- 
 dering sort of fellows. Joseph said to him, "Where are you ?" 
 He said, "I don't know." "Where did you come from?" He 
 said, "I don't know." "Where are you going?" "I don't 
 know." "What are you doing?" He said, "I am just fol- 
 lowing those telegraph wires; I reckon I will get some place, 
 some time." When Joseph Walton told that story in church, 
 some time afterward, a woman got up and said: "If I had 
 been that tramp, I would have answered that question an- 
 oiiher way. In answer to the question 'where am I?' I would 
 have said, 1 thank God I am in a Christian church where I 
 can speak for Christ.' In answer to the question "where did 
 
BOOK OF RUTH. Ill 
 
 I come from?' I would say, 'I 'thank God I came from a Chris- 
 tian home where I had a righteous training and a good father 
 and a good mother/ In answer to the question 'where am I 
 going ?' I would answer, 'I hope to be able by the influence 
 of my home and my church to get to heaven. Pray for me 
 that I may be faithful/ >: There was a "where" in that life 
 that centred in something and made it a power. Where are 
 you to-night? 
 
 Notice the other side of the question, "Where hast thou 
 gleaned to-day?" A man must remember that he has to 
 answer for the time that he uses. He must remember that 
 opportunity measures possibility, and possibility measures 
 responsibility. So far as in you lies, do good to all men; not 
 half-way, but to the full limit of your energy. Don't let any- 
 thing interfere with that. "Where hast thou gleaned 
 to-day?" The last thought in the text that I want to im- 
 press upon you is the fact that we are all gleaners. We are 
 beggars in God's field, without a right to do anything except 
 in so far as His mercy and love make it possible for us to do 
 anything. Gleaning in God's fields! Let us be grateful to 
 Him who gives us the right. I bless God that He has sent 
 into that field our Redeemer, our Kinsman, who, like Boaz 
 to Ruth, redeemed her into the royal line. Just so Jesus 
 Christ comes into the field of the world and redeems every 
 child of God, and makes him near of kin to Him, and through 
 Him an heir to eternal glory. Thank God that He can 
 redeem you from beggary and make you a child of the 
 Kingdom. 
 
112 LECTURES ON 
 
 Lectures on St. John's Gospel* 
 
 LECTURE X. 
 
 We have four views of Christ's ministry: Matthew's, 
 Mark's, Luke's and John's. When one really wants to read 
 for his own comfort and enlightenment, not simply the facts 
 of the life of Christ, but the life itself, he turns to the Gospel 
 of St. John. How many of you read John more than you do 
 any other gospel? It is not like the others. It deals with 
 the same things. John was a peculiar man; he lived so near 
 to Christ. He was called the Beloved Disciple, the one whom 
 Jesus loved. He nestled up close to Him. His life seemed to 
 be thoroughly steeped with the spirit of the Master. He got 
 hold of things, he heard things, he saw things, he realized 
 things that 'the ordinary writer and the ordinary witnesses 
 did not see and did not hear and did not understand. John, 
 as you know, was the younger brother of James. They were 
 both called by Christ Himself to be His followers; called 
 from, if one may judge from incidental things, a fairly well- 
 to-do family. The father had servants in his house, and 
 Salome, the mother, is one of the women who, on a certain 
 occasion, made very important contributions to the comfort 
 of Christ. They were not a poor family, and the mother was 
 expressly noted for her piety. She had brought up this 
 young man in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. He 
 was peculiarly prepared from youth to become a power in 
 the work when he espoused it. You know, perhaps, and per- 
 haps you don't, that after the crucifixion John remained at 
 Jerusalem and did what he was commanded to do of Christ 
 take care of his mother until she died, probably about the 
 
ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL. 113 
 
 year 59. Then 'he went into Asia Minor, preaching, carrying 
 on the work of Paul, established a number of churches, 
 and made his headquarters for the most part at the city of 
 Ephesus. It was here he met with persecution. It was from 
 here that Nero banished him to the island of Patmos. That 
 was John's opportunity. There he dreamed the marvelous 
 Book of E/evelation, looked up into -the City of God. He 
 came back to Jerusalem in his old days, and died about the 
 year 100, and aged about an hundred years. Such, in brief, 
 is the life of the man. Note what he says about Christ. Look 
 at the way he begins this marvelous gospel. It is unique. 
 Read the first three words of Genesis, and then the first three 
 words of this Book of John. How do they differ? They are 
 alike. That is not true of any other books of the whole Bible. 
 Here is a man who does know the place to start the narrative 
 of Christ. He starts where the whole thing starts, with God 
 in the beginning. It is a rather significant statement, it 
 seems to me, to get this additional light on the Book of 
 Genesis. There we read that in the 'beginning God created 
 the heavens and the earth. Here we read that there was 
 somebody with Him when He did it. In the beginning was 
 what? The Word. Alone? With God. That gives a vast 
 amount of comfort to start with, that God was not alone 
 when He stood out there to create things. There was the 
 Word by his side; there were the holy angels to minister to 
 Him, to obey His calls, to do His purpose. And somehow it 
 makes warm with interest, it makes glorious with its sur- 
 roundings, the marvelous work of God in creating the world, 
 to know that He was surrounded by creatures of His own 
 soul in that stupendous work. 
 
 "In 16 beginning was the Word, and -the Word was with 
 God." Is there any characteristic set forth of this Word? 
 What about it; how do we know anything of this Word? 
 What does John say about it? "And the Word was God." 
 There we are, round a ring. We thought we had somebody 
 besides God; now we have 'this somebody merged into God. 
 
114 LECTURES ON 
 
 How can we understand that? Who can understand the 
 mystery of the Godhead itself? Who can understand how 
 three can be one, and one can be three? Christ down here in 
 the world talking about the Father; the Father sent me 
 away from Him. I am down here. I pray to the Father. I 
 commune with the Father. I am here from the Father. And 
 He turns around in another place and says, I and the Father 
 are one. It is a mystery; and yet it is not a mystery. Christ 
 and God could be one just in proportion as they thought 
 alike, just in proportion as they were alike. If they were 
 identical in thought, in purpose, in feeling, if they were 
 alike, then they were one. It is not harder to see how three 
 can be one than it is to see how three thousand can be one. 
 You remember in your Sunday-school lesson, at Pentecost 
 they were all together in one place with one accord. There 
 was a oneness there. They were all of one mind and one 
 soul. Whose mind? Whose soul? They were all self-centred 
 the day before, and now they are all God-centred and alike. 
 So here you have this thought, that God had companionship 
 from the beginning, and that this companionship was identi- 
 cal with Himself. What, then, shall we say as to the charac- 
 teristic of this marvelous beginning? Look at the fourth 
 verse. Let us begin to study a little of the Kevelation of 'this 
 Word. What does it say? In Him was life. I wish you and 
 I could come to understand the important fact taught all 
 through the book, that God is the great reservoir of life. We 
 talk about Him as the living God, it is true; we think about 
 Him as defeating death. But we somehow have not come to 
 understand that all life was inherent in Him in the begin- 
 ning and returns to Him at the end. Just as much life as 
 you have to-day, and just as much as any soul has, is the 
 gift of God, the expression outward of His divine self to you. 
 In Him was life. This is the Book of Life, as He is. the 
 source of Life. This is the revelation of Life, as He is the 
 beginning of Life. This is the prophecy of Life. This is 
 the consummation of Life. ISTo wonder the Lord Jesus Christ 
 
ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL. 115 
 
 could come into this troublesome world in which men were 
 dropping dead before Him, and death menacing and staring 
 in the face of all, and could stand and say, in the face of 
 death and all, "I am the Life." He knew where He came 
 from; He knew the source of His power; He was the Life be- 
 cause He was God. Take out of Him His Godness, and He 
 is dead. Put again into Him His Godliness, or His Godness, 
 and you put into Him again Life. God could take chunks of 
 clay and mould them into any form He wanted monkey, 
 baboon, tree, or pumpkin. But when He breathed life into 
 :a form, it waa His own image. It was man. 
 
 Life, then, is God's attribute; it is the quality that marks 
 Him as the thing He is. You could no more think of God 
 without -life than you could think of a day without light. 
 That is the central thought that John takes here. God is 
 life, and God's record is the record of life, and God's destiny 
 is the destiny of life. He came as the revealer of life, as the 
 dispenser of life, as the interpreter of life, as the divine bene- 
 factor endowing every soul with larger life, with a larger ele- 
 ment of God. You have here this beautiful thought, which 
 brings to me comfort always that God from the beginning 
 is a God of life, and not of death. For that reason death 
 can never have any prominent place in God's economy. You 
 can lie down and die; but you cannot stay dead if you are 
 God's, for that would be impossible. He is a God of life. If 
 you are alive you will live forevennore, if you get your life 
 from Him. It is a part of you. It must come home to Him 
 when He /wants it. You are just a wandering spirit flitting 
 around in a trackless void. And God's own purpose will 
 draw it back to Him when He needs it. It is only the dead 
 thing that falls out of God's purpose and is lost. 
 
 If you are alive in Christ, which means the spiritual life, 
 the life that Nicodemus could not understand how a man 
 could get, 'but without which Christ told him plainly he 
 could not enter into the Kingdom, then you can never die. 
 In the beginning, then, we have this picture of life. How 
 
116 LECTURES ON 
 
 does this life come to make itself felt with us? In Him was- 
 life. How do we know that life was in Him when He came? 
 Because life is an active principle. We cannot keep it still. 
 When a thing is alive, it will move. That is what proves it 
 to be alive. If you take out of it this motion, prevent it 
 from manifesting or expressing itself in any action, it is not 
 alive. I venture the assertion this afternoon that the mea- 
 sure of life everywhere is its expression in activity. John 
 says, "And the life was the light." It was an illumination. 
 It manifested the fact that here was an active, pulsing, throb- 
 bing, beating life. Touch the life and bid it be still, and the 
 light is gone. But just as long as the life is alive, so long will 
 the light shine. There is no difference between life and light. 
 They are as inseparable as the valley and the hill. You can't 
 have a hill without a valley, nor a valley without a hill. You 
 can't have light without life, nor life without light, nor either 
 without God. God is the life of the world; and because He 
 is the life of the world He is the light of the world; and be- 
 cause He is the light of the world He lighteth every man that 
 cometh into the world. Life breaks into light in the world. 
 The rest of this history John had not time to write. If he 
 had begun where God began with the light, and traced the 
 history of the world to Christ, it would have taken him too 
 long to write it. John is too anxious to get at the thing he 
 wanted to say. So at the end of the fifth verse he simply 
 stops. There is a great lull in the discussion. He practically 
 says: "If you want to know what is between this and what I 
 am going to say next, read what Moses said; read all the 
 books that have been written. They are the great interlude. 
 I have not time to put this down. Here is something I am 
 interested in/' 
 
 Here begins the second part of this marvelous book. What 
 is it about? Look at the sixth verse. A tremendous jump in 
 time here. "There was a man sent from God, whose name 
 was John." What has that to do with all these things he 
 has been talking about, about life and light and God and the 
 
ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL. 117 
 
 Word? Let us see. He could not say this unless he had 
 said the other. The other would mean nothing without this. 
 This would be tame history without that. There was a man. 
 Just a man came. In another place you can read that Mat- 
 thew saw him. He says what kind of man he was, what he 
 ate, how he was dressed speaks of him in a way that would 
 lead me to believe that John came out of the wilderness with 
 fire, and with terror, and with power. He was a manly man, 
 a rugged man, a powerful man. "There was a man sent from 
 God/' How strange this reads from the pen of Matthew. 
 Turn to the Gospel of St. Matthew. These are the genera- 
 tions of Jesus Christ; tries to find Christ away back in the 
 line of Jewish ancestors. Turn to the Book of Mark, and 
 notice how he finds Christ. He goes hunting for Christ 
 in the prophecies of Isaiah. Take Luke, and see how he 
 finds this blessed Christ. He traces Him in the mystery of 
 the temple worship. John knew better than all that. He 
 knew that Christ did not come out of Jewish ancestors; he 
 knew that He did not come out of the prophets; he knew that 
 He did not come out of the temple mysteries; he knew that 
 He came from God, and that any man that had the right to 
 speak for Him must come from the same place. Here is 
 John the forerunner. My friends, you can speak for Christ 
 if you are sent from Him. If you are not, you had better 
 keep still. "There was a man sent from God." He is a power. 
 You can trace your descent downward, or you can trace it 
 upward, just as you please. John found the ancestry of this 
 whole new dispensation around the throne of God. He came 
 from God. Do you remember how the King and Queen of 
 Spain received Columbus when he had visited the New 
 World and had returned? The king 'had parted with his 
 money and the queen with her jewels to send out his boats. 
 They wanted to hear about this New World. So they re- 
 ceived Columbus with marvelous interest, invited him to 
 stand before the royal presence and tell of his unique journey 
 to a new world. Columbus came from America. If a man 
 
118 LECTURES ON 
 
 were to walk in here from India, you would all stretch your 
 necks to look at him. He comes from a place you are inter- 
 ested in. You want to know how it is over there. You are 
 not satisfied until you know something about India. And 
 here is John. I am not surprised that the people listened to 
 him. He came from a place to which the people were look- 
 ing for something. He came from God. What has he to 
 say? Listen to his message. Here is the first voice that 
 speaks out in the New Testament for the Christ that is to be. 
 Notice a peculiar thing. When Moses went down into Egypt, 
 and old Pharaoh looked at him and said, "Where are you 
 from; what did you come for?" do you remember what Moses 
 said? "I Am hath sent me." It certainly terrorized that old 
 Egyptian king, because behind that "I Am" was the scourge 
 that brought Egypt into submission. It was not merely two 
 words, it was the majesty of God in a subject and predicate. 
 That made Moses great. He had a message, a command, a 
 commission from a powerful source. So he led Israel in the 
 name of I Am. And John says here in this gospel that John, 
 the forerunner, came from the same source. That makes 
 him pretty nearly like Moses, does it not? That is not all. 
 For when tihe real Light came, and got into a dispute with 
 the old carping, (hard-hearted Pharisees and Sadducees, 
 when they wrangled with him and drove him into a state- 
 ment of his position, do you remember when they said, 
 "What is 'the use of you talking to us? We are Abraham's 
 children ; we are none of your common rabble ; " He looked at 
 their self-pride and ancestral-proud spirits, and crushed 
 them, when they boasted that they came from Abraham, by 
 saying, "I proceeded forth and came from God." That beats 
 the Abraham record. 
 
 Moses 'Said, "I Am hath sent me." John was a man that 
 came from God. Jesus Christ said, "I proceeded forth and 
 came from God." I don't know about the rest. But I know, 
 if this Divine Word is true, that Moses and John and Christ 
 stood hand in hand around the throne of God and took their 
 
ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL. 119 
 
 orders from the same majestic King. They came with power 
 into this world. We ought to listen to them. "There was a 
 man sent from God, whose name was John/' Some of you 
 people have never been sent; you have never had your com- 
 mission yet. You think you have, but you have been disap- 
 pointed. I want every young man to understand that he 
 ought to have a commission from God to be something in 
 this world. John was a power in the wilderness. He made 
 such a turmoil because he came from God. He had a com- 
 mission, and he stuck to that like old Peter Cooper's glue 
 stuck to a board. He never let go. That made him a power. 
 How many of you could say, if you were to stand up now, 
 that, like John, you came from God? Have } r ou been with 
 Him, and have you a message from Him? Did you ever get 
 down on your knees and ask God to give you a message to 
 deliver to the world? Did you ever get on your knees and 
 say, "God, here I am; send me"? Have you ever put yourself 
 in such a position that a consecrated commission could be 
 given to you a position from which you could go forth to 
 help the world and to honor God ? 
 
 I like old-fashioned names and this exalted commission, 
 i wish there were more Johns like that, and more Marys in 
 this world. What did he come for? "The same/' that is, 
 Joihn, came for something. Any man will if he has a com- 
 mission from God. He is on no foolish errand; he is sent for 
 a purpose. "The same came for a witness." What is a wit- 
 ness? If I come in here and tell you there is something 
 wrong outside, there is trouble going on, two boys are fight- 
 ing, yon say, "Can that be so?" I answer, "Yes; Professor 
 Saylor saw it too," and he says, "Yes, I saw it," he is a wit- 
 ness. He was there. John never could have been a witness 
 for Jesus Christ unless he had been with Jesus Christ and 
 knew what he came for. You can't witness for Christ unless 
 you are from the same country, and know the same things, 
 and can testify to the same experience; unless you have lived 
 like Him, and have some communication with Him. What 
 
120 LECTUBES ON 
 
 can I witness about a miner out in the coal fields around 
 McConnellsville ? I have not been there. I have not seen 
 him. His world and mine are two different worlds. If he 
 were to subpoena me in court to say what he is doing this 
 moment, what would I have to say? I would have to say: "I 
 know nothing. I don't know anything. I am not a witness." 
 John was a power because he could witness to the things he 
 saw. And you can witness just as fully as you have been 
 with Him, and have learned of Him, and know the things 
 that belong to His house. The more a man is with Christ, 
 the better witness he is. The more a man is in communication 
 with the spirit of God, the better his witness of Him in the 
 world. John was a witness. He was not the only witness. 
 God has not been dealing with humanity for six thousand 
 years with only one witness. Moses was a witness for God. 
 Be stood in heathen lands and declared for Him. Solomon 
 was a witness for God. David was a witness for God. I wish 
 I could call them all up Moses and Joshua and Abraham 
 and Isaac and Jacob, the long procession of men and women 
 that have been witnesses for God. An honorable company! 
 A noble record is the record for God in the character of His 
 witnesses. John is in this line; that is all. He was a witness. 
 Paul was a witness. Stephen was a witness; and his witness 
 went up in smoke and prayer to the throne of God. John 
 was a witness when he himself came with dripping head on a 
 silver platter, murdered, his head taken from his body at the 
 request of a cruel, scheming, heartless woman. The writer 
 of this blessed gospel himself was a witness of commanding 
 power when he said, "I saw a new heaven." On the record of 
 his saying it you and I have been living and praying that we 
 too, when the time shall come for us to get out of this rocky 
 prison of difficulty, shall look up into the new City of God as 
 John looked up from Patmos and saw it coming down out 
 of heaven from God. 
 
 The lesson for you is plain enough. Here is the proces- 
 sion from Moses down. Are you in it? Are you a witness? 
 
ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL. 121 
 
 Has God been compelled to give you birth and nurture and 
 mother and father and food and raiment and shelter and 
 education and life, and you outside the line of witnesses for 
 Him! You are an ingrate! All He asks in return for the 
 multitude of blessings that He heaps upon you is that you 
 shall stand in the line with all the holy men of old and say: 
 "I too have been with Him,, and I have learned of Him. He 
 is good. Come and taste of the Word/' John is a witness. 
 Are you? Don't you want to be? Let that question sink 
 deep into your heart; a clean, searching question. Are you 
 a witness for God? 
 
122 LECTURES ON 
 
 LECTUEE XI. 
 
 John, as a witness, was valuable just in proportion as he 
 had the life that he witnessed. John was simply one of that 
 long procession of witnesses to which you ought to be allied, 
 and with which you ought to be associated. John was a 
 peculiar witness. He was not simply a witness, as he himself 
 testifies that he was. His is a modest way of putting it. John 
 was a peculiar witness of Christ's coming. This makes him 
 different from other witnesses of God. Hewas aherald that came 
 before. He was a forerunner. "Prepare ye for the coming of a 
 greater than I." He was a herald on the mountain top. Helooked 
 to the east, and just as soon as he saw the rising light, and 
 while the world was still asleep in the valleys below, still in 
 the darkness, still in the night, still in the gloom, still in 
 doubt, John saw the rising tides of heaven-born light. He 
 stood on the mountain and called to the world, "Behold the 
 Lamb of God." John saw Him first. That gives John a 
 peculiar character as a witness, marks him out as the per- 
 sonal forerunner of our personal Saviour. I think John's 
 vision of Christ's coming must have been to him the greatest 
 source of pleasure of his life; to be selected from the multi- 
 tude as the only man who was to see the Christ before others, 
 and so to come and tell the world that Christ was at hand, 
 that He was even in their midst. That must have been a 
 great joy to him. 
 
 John very clearly testifies what he was not. He says "he 
 was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness to that 
 Light." John never did, I believe, claim to be very much in 
 the world. He did not say he was the Light. He came to 
 bear witness to the Light. Who knows the difference be- 
 tween John and Christ? Who could know? How could 
 any one know the difference? They were both men, both 
 simple in their tastes and life. But infinitely different, be- 
 
ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL. 123 
 
 cause the one was the true Light and the other was the 
 witness to that Light. How would we know the difference 
 between the two if we should meet them? We would simply 
 know the difference by the power that would be manifested 
 in the light that is shed abroad from them. Suppose you 
 were in a dark room all your life, and suddenly a little light 
 were allowed to enter the room, the window-curtain would 
 be drawn aside for the first time, and you would look out 
 and see a star in the sky. You never saw such a thing before. 
 "How beautiful!" you exclaim; "I never saw anything like 
 that in my whole life; what a glorious thing that is!" Then, 
 while you look, suddenly the moon comes into the space that 
 is open to your gaze, and you say, "Why, that is more beau- 
 tiful still; that is a better light than the other, a fairer wit- 
 ness of the light, a larger revelation of the light." But if 
 you stood there until the sun sweeps into view, nobody needs 
 to tell you which is the light. You know. It comes with 
 fluch resplendency of light, with such fullness of light, with 
 such a bathing baptism of light, that the world knows it is 
 the light. It would not take long when you put Christ 
 beside John to know which was Christ and which was John; 
 not any longer than to know the difference between star- 
 light and sunlight. Here was John; he was a power, he was 
 glorious, he was wonderful, he was magnificent. We can only 
 say of Christ, He was sublime from the first! 
 
 I would have liked to have been with God at the beginning 
 of this chapter, "in the beginning"; when it was all night 
 over this world and all worlds; when God started the light 
 across the great plains of His infinite purpose. That was a 
 magnificent sight. Did any of you ever get up in the morn- 
 ing and see the sunlight crown the mountains and flood the 
 valleys? What an enthusiastic, striking, arousing, waken- 
 ing, quickening, enlightening vision it is! But what must it 
 have been when God opened the gates of His own purpose 
 and flooded the universe with light, until it rolled, like an 
 infinite tide of mighty waters over the whole domain of His 
 
124 LECTURES ON 
 
 infinite purpose, and the world was bathed in light, the uni- 
 verse was suffused with light, and God stood revealed in the 
 centre of the mighty, flooding, waving light! God said, "Let 
 there be light." Just as soon as He opened His life to the 
 world and the light flowed out, it was possible for Him to 
 have witnesses just that soon. For every man that will 
 stand in the light can witness of it. Every man that will 
 stand in the light can testify to the light. He can say, "I 
 have seen it, I am in it, 1 know it." And every man that is 
 quickened of God and is born into the light of God is a wit- 
 ness to that light. 
 
 Without the light you cannot witness for God. You can 
 witness for the devil in the darkness. You can witness for 
 hell without any of the revelation of heaven whatever; but 
 you cannot witness for God. And you want to teach the 
 world that. The man outside of the church what can he 
 say for the church? What right has he to speak for the 
 church? The only man that has any authority to speak for 
 God is the man whom God has commissioned. He has been 
 born into the light, and he knows the difference between 
 light and darkness. He can testify to the difference between 
 them from personal knowledge. So God raises up a witness 
 to Himself every time He brings a child into tihe kingdom 
 of God. 
 
 "He came unto His own, and His own received Him not. 
 But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to 
 become the Sons of God." Why, of course you could not 
 stand in the light without being transfigured. When Jesus 
 Christ went up to the mount of transfiguration, God opened 
 His mighty throne and poured out the light that fell upon 
 the world from His countenance, transforming the Christ and 
 glorifying Him. You cannot stand in the light, you cannot 
 stand in the baptism of God's infinite purpose in your life, 
 without being made a son of His. He will purge and purify 
 and cleanse and glorify you. If you are in the light, you 
 are a son of God, and no longer a wayward, wandering scav- 
 enger out upon the dark places of life. 
 
ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL. 125 
 
 Now the dawn comes. Look at the nineteenth verse. This 
 is the record of John. My friends, it is worth something in 
 this world to make a record, no matter what it is. It is worth 
 something to have a record. It was a great credit to John 
 that he had a record. When any asked, "Who is John?" the 
 answer was, "There is his record." Who is Brother Beahm? 
 There is ids record. Who is Brother John Brumbaugh? 
 There is his record. Who was John the Baptist? There is 
 his record. Who is this man John X? I don't know; he has 
 never made a record. What good is he? He is simply a 
 grazer in God's fields; he has never done anything in God's 
 world. What is the very first thing that is put down over 
 against John? Twenty years of God's bounty and no re- 
 sponse; would that be a good thing to write down? If God 
 helped him and blessed him and took care of him for twenty 
 years, delivered him from his enemies, preserved unto him 
 ihis family, restored his children when sick, helped him to 
 educate them, and that man went out cursing and forgetting 
 God, is that a good record? John the Baptist was preaching. 
 I bless God for a man that has a record like that! He was 
 preaching out in the wilderness came bursting right out of 
 the black wilderness of sin and superstition with his mouth 
 open, preaching the truth of heaven. He was preaching; and 
 tne world heard him. Notice how those priests and Levites 
 were stirred up in Jerusalem. They sent a man down to 
 inquire "Who art thou?" John was preaching out in the 
 world's wilderness of sin. So ought we to be preaching, tes- 
 tifying to the thing that we have, certifying to the thing that 
 we have, raising our voice for the power that has been re- 
 vealed unto us. John had stirred up a commotion down 
 by the Jordan. Great crowds went out to hear him 
 there by the Jordan. Great crowds went out to hear him 
 preach. Multitudes followed him. The Levites and the 
 priests were jealous. They sent down to inquire, probably in 
 doubt, "Who art thou?" The first question is the question 
 every preacher must meet in this world. When a man raises 
 
126 LECTURES ow 
 
 his voice and says anything in this world, he must answer 
 the question "Who art thou?" "I come preaching." But 
 what right have you to preach? Who are you, anyhow? It 
 is of infinite importance, of infinite service to the cause, that 
 every preacher of it should know who he is. What manner 
 of man are you? That is a powerful question. And unless 
 a man can answer that, his preaching will be of little value 
 to the world. John knew. "I am the voice of one crying in 
 the wilderness." "I am not the Messiah." He knew what he 
 was not. He knew what he was. There are preachers of God 
 that don't know that. They affect to do and to be able to 
 do things which they cannot do. Every man ought to know 
 his limits. Over the old Delphic Oracle of Greece, Socrates 
 had inscribed this wonderful motto: "Know Thyself." John 
 the Baptist, coming from heaven, from the Word, had learned 
 that important lesson. He could give an account of himself. 
 He knew his limits. A man one day told me, "I am not 
 going to preach revival sermons any more; I am going to be 
 a doctrinal preacher. There are lots of revival preachers; 
 they are common. I want to be a doctrinal preacher, so that 
 I will be of great service called for on special occasions." 
 He did not know his strength. He did not know his weak- 
 ness. He will never be able to preach any doctrine or any 
 other thing until he knows his own limits. 
 
 John knew his limits. Who are you, anyhow? What man- 
 ner of man are you? Where did you get your inspiration 
 from? What is your commission? What do you know? Are 
 you preaching things that have simply become the rumor of 
 the world, or do you know of God? The church ought to 
 know what for. Whrt are you, church? What are you 
 
 in the world for? Some people think a church is simply an 
 organization for political purposes, to control elections and 
 get their friends into office. That is not what it is for. Some 
 people think a church is simply a social organization in which 
 men of congenial spirits get together to help each other on. 
 They desire to hold oyster suppers and have a nice time of 
 
ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL. 127 
 
 an evening once a month, and the church is a convenient 
 -organization through which it is brought about. What is the 
 church for; what is it not for? We ought to come to under- 
 stand that the church is God's expression in the world, God's 
 visible, tangible home in the world. And in the church there 
 ought to be this one thing nothing else the light and the 
 witness of the light. That is all. When they said to John, 
 "Who art thou; art thou Elias?" he might have said: "Yes, I 
 am Elias; I am the fellow you have been looking for; Elijah 
 saw me in a vision. Here I am; put me on a throne, with a 
 crown around my brow." He might have lied as many a 
 man is tempted to lie when he has a chance to be exalted to a 
 high place in this world. When the time comes that you 
 have a chance to rise to a high place in this world because 
 you can deceive somebody, you had better look out. You are 
 subjected to a great temptation just to submit, keep your 
 mouth shut and let the mob push you up. John might have 
 done that; but he said, "No, I am not Elias; I am just a 
 voice in the wilderness; I am searching for the light; I have 
 seen the light, I bear witness to the light, but I am not that 
 light." There is the true manhood, the absolute manliness 
 of the man of God. 
 
 I know nothing in the whole Book of St. John that appeals 
 to me from the manly side with more strength than the posi- 
 tive truthfulness of John in the beginning of this ministry. 
 "I am not that light." "And he confessed and denied not." 
 "I am not the Christ." And they asked him, "Art thou 
 Elias?" and he answered, "I am not." "Art thou that 
 prophet?" And he answered, "No." They said again unto 
 him, "Who art thou?" He said, "I am the voice of one cry- 
 ing in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord, as 
 said the prophet Esaias." He was not the prophet. He was 
 not anything that they thought he was. He was what God had 
 sent him to be. The half of us get started pretty well, but 
 when the people begin questioning us we forget the original 
 mission of life and change over and become the thing that 
 
128 LECTURES ON 
 
 the people want us to be. John denied every question that 
 did not tell his actual personality. What am I? I am what 
 God commissioned me to be, and I won't be anything else, no 
 matter what you do or say. It cost him his head; but it won 
 him God's favor. He did the right thing. 
 
 These people were down there hunting for Elias, as they 
 called him. They had been looking for this man, this vision, 
 this marvelous manifestation that had been certified to from 
 the ages back. They had been hunting him afar off. John 
 said, "There standeth one among you." Many of us make a 
 great mistake about this whole matter of finding Christ and 
 finding the prophet. I think most people, when they shut 
 their eyes and pray, think it is going to take about a day and 
 a half for their words to get up to God. I said to a boy one 
 day, "How far is it to heaven?" He said, "It is away off." 
 I said, "How far off; as far as Philadelphia?" "Yes, sir." 
 " Farther than that ? Is it as far as across the ocean ?" " Yes,, 
 sir." "Is it as far as the moon?" "Yes." "Is it as far as the 
 sun?" "Yes, I guess it is." Where is it? Where is heaven? 
 Who knows? Do any of you know? Go out with a string 
 to measure the distance; how much string will you need? We 
 get a kind of notion that God is away off yonder in the 
 clouds, infinitely beyond the ken of man; that once in a 
 while He opens the door of heaven and looks into the world;, 
 that at another time He shook the word of truth down into^ 
 the world like a ripe apple from the tree of Paradise; and 
 that then He shut up the heavens again and left us strug- 
 gling alone in this world. John was a true preacher of the 
 light because he declared, there is one in your midst. God is in 
 the bread you eat at the breakfast-table. He is in the life you 
 live to-day. He is as much in this chapel as He is in heaven, 
 for He is everywhere present. When I told a boy that, he 
 said; "Yes, that is so. God is right on my lip." And then 
 he said, "If I would just shut my mouth I would have Him 
 in my mouth, wouldn't I?" Well, why not? Don't you 
 remember when Paul went into Athens 'he preached that 
 

 ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL. 129 
 
 God is much nearer than you think, "for in Him we live, and 
 move, and have our being"? He is not away off. John un- 
 derstood that. He said, "There standeth one among you." 
 There is a nearness, there is a warmth of interest, there is a 
 close kinship, there is an intimate relationship, there is a 
 familiar fellowship between Jesus Christ and His children. 
 When you are born into the light you are a son of God; and 
 as sons of God, brothers and sisters; and as such you enter 
 into the most intimate and most sacred communion with 
 Him. People never understand that quite right. In the 
 mediaeval times Crusaders made pilgrimages to the tomb of 
 Christ, a procession of men and boys under the red cross of 
 Christ marching to the east over thousands of miles of diffi- 
 culties and dangers and death, hunting God. You need not 
 worry. The blessed gospel according to St. John reveals 
 right here in its very first chapter the intimacy of the relation 
 of Jesus Christ. You are at home in Him, and He is at home 
 in you. You can live with Christ at home in youtr room, in 
 your heart. If we were to pray nearer than we do, we would 
 be heard better and get more. 
 
 I call your attention again to the peculiar spirit of John to 
 prove that he was near to Christ. When Matthew heard 
 John the Baptist preach, Matthew came and reported, "His 
 fan is in his hand." Do you remember that remarkable 
 expression? That is, Matthew heard the preaching of John 
 the Baptist as a threat to drive men to do right. His fan is 
 in his hand he will thoroughly purge his floor. Then Mark- 
 came and declared, "He will gather his wheat into the gar- 
 ner." And then what? "The tares he will burn with ever- 
 lasting fire." A tremendous thing! John must have preached 
 fire and brimstone. Then Luke came and said, "The axe is 
 laid to the root of the tree." This man John must have been 
 a powerful preacher. There is a threat all through these 
 reports. But when John, the writer of this gospel, heard 
 John the Baptist preach, and came away, and they said, 
 "John, what did he say?" John answered, "Behold the Lamb 
 
130 LECTURES ON 
 
 of God which taketh away the sin of the world." He did not 
 hear John make any threats; he did not care for any threats. 
 He was waiting for the message from heaven. John, coming 
 out of the wilderness, big, bony, uncouth man that he was, 
 would naturally say it the other way. Behold a lion that 
 will eat you all up if you don't behave. But John the Bap- 
 tist got the tiling right. He was close to God. And John 
 the recorder heard the blessed message of this great herald 
 when he said, "Behold the Lamb of God." Look at the gen- 
 tleness, look at the sweetness, look at the comfort, look at 
 the intimacy of the religious spirit here, that brings this right 
 up to our hearts, "Behold the Lamb of God which taketh 
 away the sin of the world." It does not say that He takes 
 away the sinners. If God had wanted to take away the sin- 
 ners of the world, He could have done that very quickly. One 
 blow of His flashing lightning, and they would have been 
 dead. But to take away the sins of the world and to save the 
 sinners took the blood of Christ on Calvary. That was a dif- 
 ferent matter. Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away 
 the sins of the world, that saves the sinners of the world, 
 that gathers them into the fold of righteousness and cleanses 
 them from all uncleanness, that saves them for His name's 
 sake. John was a preacher and a voice; and his voice was for 
 the Lamb of God, the cleanser of the world. He preached 
 the whole day. Note what happened the next morning. John 
 was out there in the wilderness; he had no friends. He was 
 among a crowd of strangers preaching, "Behold the Lamb of 
 God," doing his duty alone, nobody to help him, simply work- 
 ing all day. 
 
 The next morning he began again, and saw something. 
 What did he see? "And the next day he seeth Jesus com- 
 ing." Stand in your place of work, and you won't stand 
 alone very long. Jesus will get very close to you. He will 
 be by your side. He will help you. John could not stand in 
 the wilderness and preach forever alone. The angels of God 
 would have petitioned the Father for leave to come and be 
 
ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL. 131 
 
 his companions. You can't stand in this world and do the 
 will of the Father and be left friendless and comfortless. 
 Did not the angels come and minister to Christ? You are 
 in a place where it is hard for you to do right. You are going 
 iihrough a great temptation and struggle. Stick to it, and 
 to-morrow morning Christ will stand by your side. Some- 
 body is going to come out on your side. Were you ever in a 
 position where you were trying to do what was right, and 
 where at first everybody else was against you? And you sim- 
 ply stood, in the meekness and quietness and gentlemanliness 
 and manliness of your own personality, for what you believed 
 to be right, and after a while somebody was convinced that 
 you were right. Some one came and stood by you. You had 
 companions. Did you ever see this transformation as it is 
 going on all the time in the world? You don't have to stand 
 alone. The next morning he seeth Jesus coming. I want 
 you to understand that what Jesus did for John the Baptist 
 He will do for you. He came, and when He came John knew 
 Him. He knew Jesus just as soon as he saw Him. Some- 
 times our help comes to us and we don't know it. Men get 
 over on our side and we don't know it. We have not observed 
 our position clearly enough to know it. But just as soon as 
 John saw Jesus Christ he knew Him, and said, "Behold the 
 Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world." No 
 misunderstanding about it. "This is He of whom I said, 
 After me cometh a man which is preferred before me: for He 
 was before me." There is the testimony of the witness. Jesus 
 came; John had company. I want to impress upon you the 
 importance of taking the place in this world to which God 
 .sends you; doing your duty as God informs you. When temp- 
 tation comes to you, as it came to John, you will be prepared 
 to face it, not alone, but with all the organized power of God 
 on your side. The church comes out from the world and 
 takes a stand against it. It is unpopular, it is in the minor- 
 ity, but it is right. It can afford to stand right there, just 
 exactly as God wants it to stand, until the world shall melt 
 
132 LECTURES ON ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL. 
 
 and surrender and yield and come to it. You have the assur- 
 ance that the next morning He will come. Just stand and 
 wait and figtht and pray and struggle on; God will make the 
 church triumphant in His own time. Do your part while you 
 have a chance. ["The night cometh wherein no man can 
 work." 
 
A PURPOSEFUL LIFE. 133 
 
 LECTURE XII. 
 
 A PURPOSEFUL LIFE. 
 A Sermon preached in the Chapel of luniata College, April 4, 1897. 
 
 "For I am determined not to know anything'among yon, save Jesus 
 Christ and him orncified." 1 Cor. ii. 2. 
 
 It is the language of Paul addressed to the Brethren at 
 Corinth, in a letter that originated in a peculiar way. Paul 
 had promised to return to the Corinthian church, but was 
 detained in Asia, where, if you will read the beginning of the 
 letter, you will find that he had been beaten and probably 
 imprisoned, and had suffered such hardships, and was sick 
 so long, or, as he himself describes it, "was near to so great 
 death/' that he found it impossible to keep his word with 
 the Brethren in Corinth. Instead of making his second visit 
 on time, and, remembering his promise and the disappoint- 
 ment that would naturally follow, he addresses a letter to 
 them. Instead of going in person to preach and to minister 
 unto them, he sent this loving epistle. 
 
 No doubt the church at Corinth looked for great things 
 when Paul should come back. I will read the first verse of 
 this chapter to show you why I think so: "I, brethren, when 
 I came to you, came not in excellency of speech or of wisdom, 
 declaring unto you the testimony of God." There had gone 
 up to the city of Corinth a marvelous record of this great 
 man, his wonderful scholarship, his splendid powers as a 
 preacher; yet he says, I came not with these gifts. I came 
 not with excellency of speech or of wisdom; I came unto you 
 bearing testimony of God. Then he reports his first purpose: 
 "For I determined not to know anything among you, save 
 Jesus Christ and Him crucified." I like that statement. I 
 like a man who knows what he is about to do, and is not 
 afraid to say it. It is a square, consistent, business statement 
 
134 A PURPOSEFUL LIFE. 
 
 of his purpose. He did not go up to Corinth in doubt, shift- 
 ing, hesitating, adjustable. He went there knowing what 
 he went for. All through Paul's career the keynote of his 
 life is to 'be read and understood from one fact: he lived a 
 purposeful life; he had an aim, and he stuck to it. He had a 
 purpose, and he lived it out. So I speak to you, taking 
 these words of Paul as my text, upon the value of a life with 
 a purpose in it, or upon the value of a purposeful life. 
 
 What does it mean when Paul says, "I determined not to 
 know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and Him cruci- 
 fied"? It would begin to look as if Paul were a specialist. If 
 a man were to come into this room and say, I can talk to you 
 of nothing but botany, or geography, or history, or electric- 
 ity, you would say, " He is a specialist." That is Paul's open 
 confession. "I am a specialist. I come to you not pretend- 
 ing to know or to do everything; I come to you to do one 
 thing what Christ taught me to do through His crucifixion. 
 I determined to know nothing among you, save Jesus Christ 
 and him crucified." The danger in taking a text like this lies 
 in the fact that we get an idea from it that Paul meant to 
 give all his time, every moment of his life, every thought of 
 his life, every act of his life, to this one thing, to the exclu- 
 sion of every other thing. Eeading it in that light, we get 
 a kind of false notion of Paul. Understanding it in that 
 light, a great many men have lived falsely after the manner 
 of Paul. Paul did not mean by this that he would not speak 
 to them about the weather, should he meet them on the 
 street; that he would not enjoy with them the felicities that 
 come from good health; that he would not talk to them about 
 the glories of the sunset,tihe beauty of the architecture of the 
 city, the beautiful sculptures, and the thousand and one 
 things that would pass before his observation and challenge 
 the attention of any man, Paul not excepted. It does not 
 mean that he would shut himself away from all these, as 
 some would have us to understand. For if it did, Paul 
 would have been a fanatic, which he never was. There are 
 
A PURPOSEFUL LIFE. 135 
 
 men who foolishly undertake to do literally wharf; Paul says 
 'here, without understanding the purpose of Paul's language. 
 I heard of a man who sold shoes with the remark, "I sell the 
 best shoes, because I am Christ's agent." Other men follow 
 the same fashion, obliterating all sense of proportion, and 
 fairness, and right; who, indeed, would remove themselves 
 from society and live like the hermit Kelpius, in a cave on 
 the Wissahickon, isolated from all mankind, that he might hear 
 nothing, think nothing, be nothing, but the one thing that he 
 had excluded himself into becoming, in the conviction that he 
 was doing what Paul did. If Paul had done so he could only 
 have gone to Corinth blindfolded, with all his senses sealed 
 up. He was a man whose life was awake to everything going 
 on -about him. He knew when he went into Corinth that a 
 thousand things would demand his attention, a thousand 
 things would demand his time; but upon one thing he had 
 made up his mind: he was going to know one thing there, and 
 make every other thing tributary to that one thing Jesus 
 Christ and Him crucified. 
 
 In other words: "I have a purpose. I shall keep my eyes 
 straight before me. I shall give myself to nothing that will 
 interfere with my one object. I shall go to those things that 
 interest me, but I shall make them all tributary to my one 
 central purpose/' He never stayed away from his religious 
 duties to perform any secular service. He never stayed away 
 from a chance to preach to entertain company in his home. 
 He never sat in his room as a student and studied his Greek 
 or Latin or other lessons when he ought to have been in the 
 church of God. He knew one thing he had to do. He deter- 
 mined to do that and allow no other thing to interfere with 
 it. Some of us have not learned that. I have known stu- 
 dents in this school that have not learned that. I have seen 
 students sitting in their rooms studying or reading a book, 
 pretending to be members of the church, and allowing the 
 prayer-meeting, with its songs and services, to go unheeded 
 and unattended. To kneel down after that sort of neglect 
 
186 A PURPOSEFUL LIFE. 
 
 and pretend to be a child of God is certainly not like Paul, 
 could not be like Paul. If he were a student in this school he 
 would be in every service here. If he never learned his Greek 
 alphabet, he would be in this church. This one thing I do, 
 this one thing I am going to know among you Jesus Christ 
 and Him crucified; whether I know my arithmetic or my 
 geography or not, this I will know. 
 
 Everything else had to adjust itself to his one purpose. He 
 could do anything or everything that did not interfere with 
 the one thing that he had determined to do. Other things 
 were not excluded, they were simply made tributary, subor- 
 dinate to the central purpose that he had determined upon. 
 If there is anything in this world that people need, it is to 
 have in their hearts and lives a dominant thought that shall 
 direct them in everything; that shall make everything yield 
 to it; that shall be one constant, continuous, persistent force 
 controlling them under all circumstances. You need that, as 
 Paul needed it when he went up to Corinth. 
 
 Take a lower point of view. Suppose I should say to you, 
 "I am going to go to Paris to make money. I am going to 
 stay five years. I shall spend my time for five years in Paris, 
 and my sole purpose is to get rich." Then you say, "Are you 
 going to go to the art galleries?" If I answer like Paul, I 
 would say, "That depends." Depends upon what? It de- 
 pends upon whether that would interfere with the thing that 
 I resolved to do. "Are you going to see the statuary in 
 the Luxembourg?" That depends. Depends upon what? 
 Upon whether it will interfere with the thing that takes me 
 to Paris. I go to Paris to make money. I may do these other 
 things if they do not interfere with that. If they do inter- 
 fere, I will not do them. Everything must yield to that. I 
 am going to make money. That was Paul's view. He could 
 ee everything in Corinth that Corinth had to show to a 
 wide-awake, scholarly man, but he would not see them if they 
 interfered with his purpose. A man has a right to do the 
 things in this world that broaden and strengthen and sustain 
 
A PURPOSEFUL LIFE. 137 
 
 and help his life, provided these things do not interfere with 
 his central purpose. What right has a student whose one 
 purpose in school is study to sacrifice his time to things that 
 do not contribute to study? Absolutely none. He ought to 
 enter the school as Paul entered Corinth, saying: I am deter- 
 mined to do one thing among you to study my lessons and 
 study them well. What can I do? Can I practice in the 
 gymnasium? Can I take walks in the open air? That de- 
 pends upon whether they interfere with the thing that I 
 came for. If they do interfere, I will not do them. Can I 
 .afford to be a rowdy in school? That depends. Depends upon 
 what? It depends upon whether I want to be one or not. 
 That is the point in it all. If you have resolved to be a man, 
 to be a woman, it won't pay you to learn by being a rowdy. 
 Should I steal in the community if I had a chance? That 
 depends. If you want to go to jail, to suffer the ignominy 
 of being regarded as a thief in the community, steal. But if 
 you want to be a man, if you want to live the truth, if you 
 want to obey the law, if you want to be or to do any- 
 thing that is decent, then you can't. It depends upon what 
 your central purpose is. 
 
 I honor Paul because he set that standard for me. He had 
 in his mind from the beginning the thing that he was going 
 to do, and he lived his whole life to that end. That is what 
 counts in this world. It does not pay to scatter water all 
 over the pavement in the hope that you will wear the bricks 
 away. But drop one drop after another upon one spot on the 
 brick, and you will drill it to pieces. It is having an aim and 
 a purpose and pressing continuously for that; diligent in 
 business, persistent in business, continuous in purpose, not 
 shifting, not yielding, as many do that makes life glorious. 
 Paul learned that from Christ, Who said, "Seek ye first the 
 kingdom of God and His righteousness," and then all these 
 other petty little things, these unimportant things, these 
 inferior things, shall be added unto you. But what is the use 
 of multiplying these in your life if you have no central pur- 
 
138 A PURPOSEFUL LIFE. 
 
 pose to which they contribute? There is nothing more to 
 be deplored in this world than an aimless life; living without 
 a purpose, shifting, changing from day to day, like a boat on 
 the water without a rudder or a sail or a compass, driven with 
 the winds; as changeable, as variable, as unsteady as the 
 breath of air that sweeps across the water. What is more to 
 be deplored than a life that drifts with its own impulses, its 
 own passions, that has absolutely no central purpose, that 
 eats to-day because appetite calls for food, that drinks to-mor- 
 row because appetite calls for drink, that sins in all forms of 
 indulgence because appetite calls for gratification, that drifts 
 as foolishly as a man who would take his seat in a carriage, 
 throw the reins to the winds, strike the horses a blow, and 
 trust to the dumb animals to take him whither they would! 
 His course would be no more uncertain than yours in life, 
 moved by your own impulses and passions, without a purpose. 
 The great value, in addition to what I have said, in living 
 a life with a purpose lies in the fact that it gives tone, color, 
 character and consistency to the whole life. A great pur- 
 pose, once selected, determines the whole tenor of your life. 
 Note an avaricious man. You can see it in his face. You 
 can see it in the way he handles things, in the way he touches 
 everything. He has the bargain-counter spirit, to give little 
 and take much, written in every lineament of his counte- 
 nance. He is avaricious, and you know it. Note a man who 
 is contemplative, reflective, meditative, thoughtful, and it 
 writes itself upon his countenance, it expresses itself in his 
 footstep, it shows itself in the language he uses, it mirrors 
 itself in his whole life. When you have once selected your 
 life purpose and lived consistently to that, you become like 
 the thing that you have resolved to be. I read, years ago, a 
 legend of an artist in Seville, who was sent out to paint an 
 angel. He walked the streets of Seville week after week to 
 find a face, a human face, that would represent an angel. He 
 studied every one that came, and when he finally obtained his 
 model and began to paint, his heart warmed to his purpose, 
 
A PUBPOSEFUL LIFE 139 
 
 and he wrought with such exceeding zeal that after a while 
 there appeared upon the canvas, line by line, a marvelous 
 face an angel face. He took it to the king for his reward. 
 But to his great surprise, when he presented the picture the 
 king turned it indifferently aside, and looked at the man. 
 "Why/' exclaimed the king, "I do not need to buy that por- 
 trait of an angel; your face is better than the face you 
 painted." He had determined to know an angel so thor- 
 oughly that he became like one in his face. His character, 
 his life, his tone, were all wrought out from his central pur- 
 pose. There is a celebrated artist to-day in Paris who is 
 shunned -on the streets by innocent people. He looks like 
 vice, like the impersonation of sin in its worst form. He 
 studied vice in the dens of infamy, in bawdy-houses, in rum 
 shops, in all its most vicious forms; and he has reveled in that 
 Bort of thing until he is like it. He can never paint it out of 
 his face, nor work it out of his life. When you have settled 
 upon a purpose, that purpose moulds your life, transforms 
 you bodily, spiritually, intellectually, to the thing you desire 
 to be. A good detective, who never saw you before, could 
 come in here, and, when you walked out, tell what business 
 you follow by the way you walk. The shoemaker has a pecu- 
 liarity in his gait, the preacher in his, the artisan in his. 
 When you once have a purpose in life, it is reflected in all 
 you do. A man cannot be a hypocrite to any great extent in 
 this world. Something tells on him always. 
 
 Having selected such a purpose, it ennobles your charac- 
 ter by making it more elevated, by giving to it a higher dig- 
 nity, a higher worth. The man with a purpose is always 
 worth more than the man without a purpose. His purpose 
 may even be low, and yet he is a man that is more to be 
 feared than the purposeless man. The one man in the com- 
 munity that I am afraid of is the man that is persistently, 
 continuously bad. He is a dangerous man in the community. 
 He is hard to reform. How we shake our heads in doubt 
 wiben a man who has been using tobacco for twenty years, or 
 
140 A PURPOSEFUL LIFE. 
 
 using liquor for twenty years, or swearing for twenty years, 
 or lying for twenty years, proposes to quit such practices! 
 It is well-nigh impossible for him to change. Nothing but 
 the grace of God can change influences like that. Our phy- 
 sical nature is natural. We are t(he thing we have been doing. 
 Such a purpose as Paul's ennobles character by giving to it a 
 certain elevation. It breaks up the monotony of life. There 
 is a difference between a level landscape and mountainous 
 scenery. There is greater beauty and sprightliness and life 
 in a mountain country than there is in the level plain. A 
 life that is one changeless monotony is like a spread out 
 table-land. I like a life that breaks up sometimes into Alpine 
 peaks that catch the sun and reflect some of the glories of the 
 heavens. You can't do that, your life will not take on these 
 high phases, it will not shine with resplendent power, unless 
 your purpose elevates it to the place where God is. 
 
 Some of you were baptized the other day. That gladdened 
 my heart. I am grateful for that. I wish it might be said of 
 this school, as of every school, that every student in it who 
 seeks to know, is seeking in the light of the truth of God. I 
 wish it were unanimous. What does it mean to join the 
 church? It is taking upon yourself this same purpose that 
 Paul took when he went up to Corinth. It is resolving to 
 know nothing save Jesus Christ and Him crucified, to have 
 no purpose above that. It is a covenant with God to live 
 faithful until death. It is putting a new purpose into your 
 life, a (higher purpose, a broader purpose, a more noble pur- 
 pose. It is making you unselfish. It is making you more 
 Christlike. When a man joins the church he no longer lives 
 for himself alone. He lives now to the glory of God. He 
 lives to do good. He sees that he can best do what he is to 
 do in the church by doing good to others, by serving instead 
 of being served. He learns that exaltation comes only as 
 humility precedes. It means the adoption of a new ideal, 
 the taking up of a new career. It is infinitely higher than 
 the taking up of any other career. It is a great thing when 
 
A PURPOSEFUL LIFE. 141 
 
 a child begins to go to school at the age of six. He has 
 resolved to know something. He starts to school. He is 
 going to receive a new outlook upon life. It is a great thing 
 when he resolves later on to leave home to go to school or to 
 go into business. It is a matter of great moment in his life. 
 But to enter the church is infinitely higher than anything 
 else that a man can do, since the end that he seeks to accom- 
 plish is infinitely above any other end that he can seek to 
 achieve. If he is concerned about his 'education, about his 
 home life, about his business, about other things that inter- 
 est his life, he ought to be infinitely more concerned about 
 the things that touch his higher life and move to his soul's 
 good. 
 
 When a man takes upon himself tihis ideal purpose there 
 is no disappointment in his life. Little streams take holi- 
 days, larger streams never. Little lives take holidays, larger 
 lives never do. Paul had no holidays. "This one thing I do/' 
 Paul is the persistent and unchanged man. He is not as 
 uncertain as the stream that wanders out from the side of 
 the hill, and in the summer season deserts its channel, and 
 the bare rock and the absence of water meet the thirsty 
 traveler. The little stream may be elsewhere, floating on the 
 breezes, shining in the dewdrops, laughing with the flowers, 
 climbing in the sap of the trees. The wandering life of the 
 little stream may be pleasant and beautiful, but the little 
 stream has deserted its home. And the cattle that walk its 
 banks in search of vegetation and refreshment must go un- 
 satisfied and thirsty. But when you go to Niagara how dif- 
 ferent it is! There is the same unchanged, sweeping, mighty 
 mass of waters. You stand and see it make its awful plunge 
 and say: "In an hour it must all come down. There can be 
 no more water there." But when the hour is over the stream 
 still flows. It flows forever! This is a type of the Pauline 
 spirit; a type of the life that has a purpose, that is resolved 
 to do one thing and do it well, that knows no change, no 
 shifting, no uncertainty. 
 
142 A PURPOSEFUL LIFE. 
 
 A purpose like this makes character and destiny. That 
 is, when a man determines that he shall know Christ and not 
 know some one else, some other power, his life begins to 
 move over toward Christ. His point of view changes. That 
 is what it means to be a Christian. You try to know your- 
 self, you try to know this or that point of view; but when 
 you come into the church you must stand with Christ and 
 know the -world from His point of view. You must know 
 heaven and your duty from the place where Christ was cru- 
 cified. Your abiding tabernacle must be on Golgotha. Again, 
 when a man accepts Christ and Him crucified, there is only 
 one thing left for him to do. He must continuously stand by 
 Christ. He must raise the cross of Christ. He must live for 
 it. He must call others to it. "And as Moses lifted up the 
 serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be 
 lifted up: that whosoever believeth in Him should not per- 
 ish, but have eternal life/' It is your business as a member 
 of the church to stand with the cross up and your voice ring- 
 ing out, "Come and live." 
 
 It may be wise to notice that this purpose has no limita- 
 tions. You may feel that it was all right for Paul to go up 
 to Corinth knowing nothing but Christ and Him crucified, 
 but it would not do for you. That it is all right for preachers 
 who have nothing else to do. But to say that it is not right 
 for you is to limit the power of Christ and to put Him to 
 open shame, to make of none effect the sacrifice that was 
 made for all the world. It is just as much your business and 
 your life as it was Paul's. If you have chosen to stand for 
 the cross of Christ, let me beseech you to do it resolutely, to 
 do it persistently, to do it without any fluctuation in your 
 purpose. Sometimes it is easy to stand, sometimes it is 
 hard. Sometimes you can stand in a great crowd, and 
 that supports wonderfully; sometimes you must stand alone, 
 and that takes courage. But if you have, as Paul had, a cen- 
 tral purpose, you can stand whether alone or with many. You 
 will have to stand continuously for the thing you have es- 
 
A PURPOSEFUL LIFE. 143 
 
 poused, otherwise this espousal will be of no avail to you. 
 it will mean nothing in your life. It 'always seems to me a 
 matter of great comfort, as I look forward to it, to be a mem- 
 ber of the church. I like to think of the time when I shall 
 enjoy the companionship of all those who have been members 
 of the church. There have been members of the church in 
 days past that I want to know. I never saw them in the 
 flesh. I want to see them in the spirit. There are things 
 here that Paul wrote that I do not understand; doubtless I 
 never shall while I live. I should like to talk with Paul about 
 these things. I should like to see him. There are other men 
 whose 'names are closely identified with Christ that I would 
 like to see. I can't do it here; it is absolutely beyond the 
 range of possibility for me unless I do the thing that they 
 did, and make the cross of Christ the central thing in my 
 life, and live for it. Then I shall come with them into 
 Christ's glory, and know them as they know Him. We shall 
 be together. I should like to see John the Baptist, the fore- 
 runner of Christ, the marvelously rugged but marvelously 
 noble man who came to tell the world of the Christ that was 
 to be. I should like to know him. Then I should like to 
 see some of the men who have made the church glorious in 
 the years since, who did not walk hand in hand with Christ 
 over the hills of Judea, but who since that, in faith, have 
 walked close to Him, have labored for Him, have taken upon 
 themselves the Pauline purpose of knowing nothing save 
 Christ and Him crucified. I want to see some of those men. 
 You can name over in your heart those that you knew. It 
 may be your mother. It may be your grandparents. It may 
 be your father. It may be somebody near 'and dear to you, 
 who has lived righteously, who has done his or her part to 
 reveal again the cross of Christ to the world. 
 
 You want to see them. You have a right to see them. 
 But in order to do that you have a duty to perform that of 
 living so that you are worthy of them. "I determined to 
 know nothing amongst you, save Jesus Christ and Him cru- 
 
144 A PURPOSEFUL LIFE. 
 
 cified," that I may teach you aright, that I may induce 
 others to do right with me. When you (read this text, or 
 think it over, don't forget the last word. It does not read, 
 "I determined to know Jesus Christ," but "Jesus Christ and 
 Him crucified/' You must not take that last word out of it, 
 if you want <tihe power of the text. You are not to study Jesus 
 Christ as a wonder that came in miraculous and uncertain 
 ways into the world. You are not to know Jesus Christ as a 
 great socialist that broke down the walls between labor and 
 capital and made all men equal. You are not to know Him 
 as a great philosopher who came to exemplify again some- 
 thing of the glory of the Greek philosophy. That would not 
 be Christ. There is no salvation in Christ save in the cruci- 
 fied Christ; the whole power is in the life that went out for 
 you and for me on the cross. That makes your life and mine 
 a crucified life, if it is to be a redeemed life. That makes us 
 sing, with a wealth of meaning to us: 
 
 "In the cross of Christ I glory, 
 
 Towering o'er the wrecks of time; 
 All the light of sacred story 
 
 Gathers round its head sublime." 
 
 When we come to accept this as the high ideal of our life, 
 and try to live it in our lives, then comes to us the promise 
 of Christ, "Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy 
 laden, and I will give you rest." That is, when a man lives 
 the life of Christ, the crucified Christ, a life of love and of 
 self-surrender, he comes to live a life of rest and of peace. 
 There come to him the same feelings that come into the- 
 heart of a child when the twilight falls, the world of glory is 
 faded, the world of sense is hushed, the world of forms is 
 gone, and the little child steals into its mother's arms, nestles 
 close to her heart, and lives in a world of love and a world of 
 rest. So the child of God in hours of weary waiting and 
 troublous trials hears, "Come unto me all ye that labour and 
 are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." 
 

 
 

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