aa Psheress pratt vd ap eval 4 a eT ARI Mlb iy iene an ¢ a)! AVERY ‘ re - oe EH a >A y, bia Eee a | es : a Where Do You Live? hon Al ( au ; vi is Ab BIL ys " r Tay re eh mh As n My RAMA TORO RSet e Vay 3} Wile isi Ne ule MW), a it 7 PSN FRPP TA a ae 7 ES 4 “ 4 tae itd ie) ath tI i F si ! AR ut ‘4 é We 4 r oh ot) was a sh ray ri re MEN f ou ihe : i Pat. ie We vs t , 4 if i" ” By the same author: Yale Talks What Is Your Name? Ay ene tea ae tas roi Se yet f Yee | aay Where Do You Live? by 7 Charles Reynolds Brown Dean of the Divinity School Yale University Ee HU TIS | t i I i) TJ 7 | New Haven Yale University Press London : Humphrey Milford : Oxford University Press Mdccccexxvill Copyright, 1926, by Yale University Press Printed in the United States of America First published, April, 1926 Second printing, October, 1928 Preface HERE is a feeling in certain quarters that college students in these days are openly irreligious. That verdict seems to me unwarranted. I know something about the prevailing moods on the Campus. I am Pastor of the College Church in Yale and have been a member of the Faculty for the last fifteen years. During that time I have given religious addresses and held conferences in one hundred and thirty-six different colleges and universities. In all these contacts I have had “ears to hear” what the students were saying, in order that I might get their point of view. The young folks are not so orthodox in their beliefs as John Calvin was. They are not so punc- tilious in the outward observances of religion as Lord Chesterfield was. They show little or no interest in the emotional type of evangelism. They frankly regarded the whole attitude of certain religious leaders at Dayton, Tennessee, toward the findings of modern science as highly amusing. If these attitudes of mind and heart stamp one as irreligious, then the young people are thrice guilty. But there are many of us who feel that all that has to do with the outside rather than “the inside of the cup.” It has to do with “the tithing Vil Preface of mint, anise and cummin” rather than with “the weightier matters” of justice, mercy and truth. In their desire for a more competent, workable philosophy of life, in their determination to bring a larger measure of moral idealism into the ordi- nary round and round, in their open scorn for anything hollow or perfunctory in religion, and in the response which tens of thousands of them are making to the great vital truths of our common Christian faith, I find an attitude which is any- thing but irreligious. Their Christian impulse may seek other forms of expression than those which were current when I was a college student, but I am sure that the impulse is there, “in force” as military men would say, and that it is a magnificent reality to be reck- oned with in all the plans we make for the coming of the kingdom of God on earth. The fathers and mothers of many of these young people, as well as the students themselves, have shown a friendly interest in my two former books of this same type, Yale Talks and What Is Your Name? Some of them, like Oliver Twist, have asked for “more.” Here then is another helping! These chapters also are “talks” rather than treatises on religion. I have retained throughout the form of direct address with no attempt at a more finished literary style appropriate to that which is written primarily to be read rather than vill Preface said. They were all given at Yale and some of them also in other colleges. The second one was the Matriculation Address here a year ago and the last one I used last June as the Baccalaureate Address at my own college, the University of Towa. I have counted it the richest privilege of my life to be in touch with this body of young life and if any word here may bring cheer or guidance to anyone striving to live after the method and in the Spirit of Christ, I shall be grateful. CHARLES R. BROWN. Yale University. 1926. CHAPTER I. Where Do You Live? II. Have We Outgrown Fear? . III. The Jericho Road IV. Equipment V. The Challenge of the Unattained . VI. The Failures of Success VII. The Study of Religion . VIII. What Is That to Thee? . IX. The Man and the Machine . X. The Summons of a New Day . Contents 104 135 I Where Do You Live? OU are frequently asked, especially during the Freshman year, “Where do you live?” Some one is trying to locate you. He feels that he might understand your life better if he had you related to some set of facts with which he is already familiar. You name some city, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, as the case may be. You have not an- swered the man’s question. It may be that was all he wanted to know, but his question suggests a great deal more than that. Now as a matter of fact, where do you really live? Two men may reside in the same city and yet live as far apart as the North Pole and the South Pole. Two men may reside on the same street or in the same house and yet have a whole continent between them. It is not a question of geography. You cannot tell where any man lives by looking at the map or in the city directory. You must examine the contents of the man. It isa question of his own dominant interest. In that deeper sense, where do you really live? Where are you at home? Where may I address I Where Do You Liver you and be sure of reaching you? It is a vital question. If every one would stand up and tell us exactly where he lives, it would be more interest- ing and more profitable than any sermon ever preached. You said a moment ago that you lived in Chi- cago. What do you mean by “Chicago”? A place ~ on the map? A collection of buildings there on the west shore of Lake Michigan? That is not “Chi- cago”—that is where you will find Chicago. But Chicago itself is a vast array of human interests, a bewildering complexity of hopes and fears, long- ings and yearnings, aspirations and resolves. There are ten thousand different Chicagos, some of them high and fine, some of them low and mean. In what particular “Chicago” are you at home? Where in all that mass of interest and activity are you rooted, grounded, naturalized, domiciled? You see how this question “Where do you live?” goes down to the root of the matter. It finds every man, aS we say in common phrase, “right where he lives.” It was so when the question was first asked there in my text. John the Baptist saw a majestic figure coming down from the north. He saw Jesus of Nazareth taking his first steps in that service which has changed the moral history of the world. And when he saw him approach, he said in rever- 2 I—One’s Dominant Interest ent tones, ‘‘Behold, the Lamb of God! He is tak- ing away the sin of the world!” “Two of John’s disciples heard him speak and they followed Jesus.” And as they saw in his face the glory of the Eternal, as they heard the accents of power fall from his lips, as they felt a strange, mysterious influence stealing in upon their hearts while they companied with him, they began to wonder where he lived. They wanted to locate him in this whirling complexity of interest. They wanted to relate him in definite fashion to that world of experience which they knew. And they said, “Rabbi, where dwellest thou?” It was the same familiar question—‘‘Where do you live?” Where did the Son of man live? In what part of the world; in how much of the world? In what part of the world and in how much of the world does any man live? The philosophers tell us that each man’s im- pression or perception of the world is the only reality there is in the case for him. The only world that exists for me is the world that I per- sonally can see and hear and feel, the system of reality with which I stand related, to which I make response. There may be ten thousand other worlds, but if they do not enter into my personal consciousness, they do not exist for me. Things only become real to me as they enter into my own immediate experience. i 3 Where Do You Live? When we view it in this light what an endless variety of worlds there are! What different im- pressions are made upon individuals by this sys- tem of reality around us and above us and be- neath us! | The beauty of form and color is not in the blind man’s world—rainbows and sunsets do not exist for him. It is all as though they were not. Melody and harmony are not in the deaf man’s world. He lives in a world of unbroken silence. The overture to Tannhauser or the fifth sym- phony of Beethoven, the songs of the birds and the laughter of little children, have no meaning and no existence for him. They are not in his world. The spiritual values, forces and activities, do not exist for the man who is dead or indifferent to them all. They are not in his world. In every case the presence or the absence of a certain fac- ulty determines the range of reality for that par- ticular man—it determines whether his world shall be large or small, rich in content or meager. What sort of a world do you live in? How much of the world do you live in? It depends not so much upon what is outside of you as upon what is inside of you. What are your powers of perception and appreciation? What is the range of reality to which you stand related? To how many differ- ent forms of stimulus do you make response? At 4 I—One’s Dominant Interest how many points, on how many levels, do you react? This is what determines the real content of each man’s world. Some man may reside, so far as his post-office address is concerned, in the most favored spot on earth and yet live all his days in a place as uninteresting as Jersey City. Let me illustrate in homely fashion! I take my dog with me into the Dresden gallery. He sees all that I see, physically speaking. He probably sees a great deal more, for his eyesight is better than mine: he has never had to succumb to the indig- nity of glasses. But when we come out, after visit- ing every room, the Sistine Madonna is not in the dog’s world. It is in my world. It has been in my world ever since I saw it for the first time thirty years ago. I see it, I feel it, I rejoice in the in- spiration of it even as I stand here. But the dog might live out all his days in the Dresden gallery and never see it. The Sistine Madonna would not enter his world. It is not a question of eyesight but of insight. It is the mind that sees more than the eyes. It is only six feet, more or less, for any of us, from one world to the other. Here we are with our feet on the ground, of the earth, earthy! Here we are dust of its dust and destined to make return! Here we are with our heads among the stars, in a world of vision, aspiration and high resolve! And this world where our minds go is as real as the streets and the lanes where our feet go. In which 5 Where Do You Liver world are you most at home? Where does your mind go when it is free to do not what it must but what it likes? Where does your heart go in its prevailing moods and desires? You have cellars in your homes, stored with coal and provisions, but you do not live down there. You have kitchens where food is prepared, and dining-rooms where it is tastefully served, but you do not live there, I trust. You have “liv- ing-rooms,” as we say, and libraries, with oppor- tunities innumerable for intellectual and social enjoyment, but you cannot live by these alone. Unless you have in your home and in your life “an upper room” facing squarely upon the sky, looking out upon a horizon bounded by nothing nearer than the stars and the being of God, you are not living in the world for which you were intended. Give me then your full address—and by your definition of the world you live in, I shall know the quality of your life. How many different worlds there are for the men we meet in daily life! Here are four men! The first man lives in a stream of commodities. His world is a river of things to be bought and sold. Now it flows this way and now it flows that way, but always in such a way as to turn the wheels of his mill and grind him out a grist of profits. He lives in that stream of commodities as a trout lives in the brook. He eats in it, sleeps 6 I—One’s Dominant Interest in it, dreams in it, works in it, seven days in the week. He is never out of it for an hour, from Monday morning to Sunday night. Talk to him on any other topic than that of trade and you find him as dull as a pine stump. He feels sure that a man’s life does consist in the abundance of the things he can buy, a certain eminent authority to the contrary notwithstanding. And this is the world he lives in: it is the only world he knows. Here is another man who lives in a world of books, ideas, judgments! He is interested in out- looks, insights and discriminations. He knows ten times as much about Plato and Aristotle, who have been dead two thousand years, as he does about Elbert H. Gary, who is very much alive. In his world the quotations and transactions have to do with the truth, and particularly with that form of truth which sets men free from blindness and evil. He strives to keep his credit good by keeping his eye single, that his whole moral nature may be full of light. He feels that “wisdom is the principal thing,” that its value is above rubies; and he strives with all his getting to get understanding. And that is the sort of world he lives in. Here is a third man who lives in a world of dis- trust, suspicion and insinuation! He rejoices in iniquity more than in the truth. He smacks his lips over any fresh bit of it which comes his way. He prides himself on his freedom from all illu- sions and enthusiasms. ‘““They are all devils,” he 7 Where Do You Live? says; “they all have horns and hoofs hidden away under their clothes and conventionalities.” He feels that he is simply a smarter devil than the rest. He says with a sneer, “Every man has his price,” knowing that he has his price. He is cold, cynical, disagreeable, untouched by those gener- ous enthusiasms which fire the hearts of his fel- lows. He lives in that world which Dante saw when he wrote the “Inferno.” This man could write a description of the Inferno himself as accu- rate as a Baedeker. And this world of cynical dis- trust is the only world where he feels at home. Here is another man whose head is full of visions and dreams of better things! He lives in a world where everybody is kind and good, hopeful and helpful. He is all that. He thinks people gen- erally are, as indeed many of them are when he is present. He carries with him an atmosphere which stimulates the best in every life. He carries the atmosphere which Forbes-Robertson carried into the boarding house in Bloomsbury in “The Pass- ing of the Third Floor Back.” It is an atmosphere which has a wholesome effect upon the selfish and the sluggish, encouraging them to be kind and good, hopeful and helpful. This man appraises everything in terms of spiritual value. To him it is all property, real and personal, possessed of worth unspeakable. He has religion, not as a his- tory of something that happened a long time ago, not as a remote theory about things, not as a 8 I—One’s Dominant Interest piece of stately ritual. He has religion as an ex- perience, as a life. He lives in a world where God the Father is above all and in all and through all things. And this is his world. How far apart these four men seem when we look at them! Yet they may all reside in the same town and on the same street. Now and then they may meet for an hour at the baseball game or in the theater or at church. They seem for the mo- ment to have a common interest. But the meeting breaks up and each man goes his way. Each one returns to his own particular world and goes sail- ing along through space like the earth on its orbit. The sky is a roomy place; the sun, the moon and all the stars are there, each one moving on its appointed way without touching any of the rest. The world of human life is a great, wide, roomy place; there is a chance for every conceiv- able type. And each man builds up his own par- ticular planet of being, his own sphere of action, by the relations he sustains, by the values on which he sets his heart, by the forms of action into which he enters. He builds his own planet of life and then moves with it on his own selected orbit through this universe of interest. Where in all that world of infinite variety do you dwell? How much of that world of reality, seen and un- seen, has become real to you? “How can you live in Goshen?” one man said to another, with a note of ill-concealed contempt. 9 Where Do You Liver And then Edgar Frank replied for the man whose domicile had been maligned: “T do not live in Goshen— I eat here, sleep here, work here; I live in Greece, Where Plato taught And Phidias carved And Epictetus wrote. “Think not my life is small Because you see a puny place, I have my books, I have my dreams, A thousand souls have left for me Enchantment that transcends Both time and place. “And so I live in Paradise, Not here.” But let me return again to the original setting of the text. The two men asked Christ where he lived. “Rabbi, where dwellest thou?” Speaking after the manner of men, he did not live in much of a world. He was born in the man- ger of a stable. He was brought up in the home of a carpenter at Nazareth. When I was in Na- zareth some years ago, they showed me the house. It may not have been the identical house—I have no idea that it was—but it was some such humble affair, for his people were poor. When he grew up IO I—One’s Dominant Interest and entered upon his active service going about doing good, there were times when he had no- where to lay his head. He accepted hospitality when it was offered, sometimes by rich men like Zacchaeus, sometimes by the fairly well-to-do, like Mary and Martha, and sometimes by those who were as poor as him- self. When nothing offered, he slept out and ate the raw wheat which his disciples plucked in the fields. When he came to die, he did not die in a bed—he died on a cross and his body was laid in a borrowed tomb. When you study the record of his life, it seems to lack any worthy setting. It was a rough world for him to live in. The foxes had holes and the birds of the air had nests, but the Son of man was without worthy residence. But where did he actually live during all that time? I wish I could tell you. It would make this sermon forever memorable. I could not possibly put it in words. No man could. He who spoke as never man spake could not put it in words. He would not even try. When men undertook to locate him in this complexity of interest and ac- tivity, you remember his reply. He did not name a certain city or town. “Rabbi, where dwellest thou?” Jesus answered, “Come and see.” Come and live in my world! Come and live in it for a day, for an hour, and then you will know! It was the only way they could know. The greatest Il Where Do You Liver things in life cannot be described—they must be seen and felt and experienced at first hand. Jesus did not undertake to describe the world he lived in but he gave us several significant hints. He lived in a world where he could say at any moment, “I am not alone, the Father is with me.” He had unbrokenly the sense of divine com- panionship. He felt that he was allied with the Infinite. He claimed kinship with the Eternal. He might be walking through a crowded street, the people thronging him; he might be asleep in the hinder part of a boat; he might be addressing a multitude from the hillside; he might be alone at prayer on the mountain top. It mattered not—he was not alone; the Father was with him. He had unbrokenly that sense of an exalted fellowship. He lived in a world where he could say, “I come not to do mine own will but the will of him that sent me.’ He had the sense of mission. He did not live by mood or whim. He did not dash aimlessly here or there on any passing impulse. He was building his life finely and steadily into a far-reaching, divine plan. He was shaping his course with reference to a purpose which reached from the hour when the morning stars sang to- gether on to the day when a victorious host shall stand before the throne singing the song of moral achievement. He was making himself at home in those great moral processes which are to bring the I2 I—One’s Dominant Interest city of God, the ideal social order, down out of heaven and set it up in active operation on this common earth. He had a plan, a purpose, a goal, and he steadfastly set his face toward the great fulfillment. “I come not to do mine own will but the will of him that sent me.” He lived in a world where he had the sense of mission. He lived in a world where he could say to all the lives he met, “I am among you as one who serves.” He was ready and able to do good to every life that came within the length of his cable tow. It mattered not whether the life was rich or poor, cultured or simple, sinful or saintly, he was there as one who served. Out among the Gentiles it was not so. There the great ones exercised lord- ship and dominion. But in Christ’s world, if any man would be great he must serve; and the great- est of all must be the servant of all. He once took a towel and girded himself that he might wash the disciples’ feet. He prepared himself for that particular act of service. But the spirit of service he never put on because he never took it off—it was always there, as much a part of him as his own right hand. It was as much a part of his world as the power of gravitation. He took upon himself the form and the spirit of a servant, becoming obedient to the exacting demands of an exalted usefulness. What a world for the Son of man to live in! T3 Where Do You Liver What a world for all the sons of men to live in! Take those three sides of the triangle and think of what they enclose! The sense of divine com- panionship, the sense of mission, and the spirit of service! And this does not exhaust the content of the world where he dwelt. I have only pointed to the sun, the moon and one of the principal stars. If we should undertake to indicate the entire glory of that world which he saw around him in the un- realized capacity of this human nature for spirit- ual advance and in the fullness of that divine help upon which he relied, we should need all the angels in heaven singing at once and all the wise men on earth speaking at once and every created thing become vocal to bring out the full content of that world which Jesus saw. He had nowhere to lay his head, but he lived in a world of surpass- ing beauty and of glory unspeakable. Words fail us in the face of that prospect! It was because he felt himself unable to describe what he saw and felt and enjoyed that Jesus said to his questioners, “(Come and see.” We can easily repeat those three sentences—“The Father is with me; I come to do the will of him who sent me; I am among you as one that serves’—but if we would know the world to which they point we must live in it. We must climb its mountains of spiritual aspiration. We must traverse its valleys of spiritual peace. We must eat the ripe fruit 14 I—One’s Dominant Interest which grows on the tree of life and drink the water which flows clear as crystal from the throne of God. Come and see! Then you will know! Live in the mood and after the method of Christ and you will know where he lived. How much of a world did his most illustrious disciple inhabit? “I am a citizen of no mean city,” Paul said. Did he mean Tarsus? That was where he came from—‘“Saul of Tarsus.” Yes, he meant Tarsus—his own Tarsus. There were as many different cities of Tarsus as there are cities of Chicago. There were thieves and harlots in Tar- sus—Paul was not a citizen of their city. There were mean men in Tarsus, men who were un- kindly and ungodly—Paul was not a citizen of their city. He was a citizen of his own Tarsus, and that city was not mean. His ultimate citizenship, however, was not in Tarsus but in a realm of moral purpose and spirit- ual ideals. “Our citizenship is in heaven.” And that city of moral purpose and spiritual ideals to which he owed his final allegiance is a city which can be set up anywhere, at Tarsus or Ephesus, in Corinth or in Rome, in New York or in Shanghai. It is for every man to build for himself that city to which he gives his final allegiance. He frames it up out of the principles by which he lives, from the values upon which he sets his heart, from the realities to which he stands inti- T5 Where Do You Liver mately related. And when that city is well built it is “no mean city,” it matters not on what spot of earth it may happen to stand. The outward setting of any man’s life is of small moment. When Oliver Goldsmith was so poor that he could scarcely get bread to put in his mouth he had a room below the level of the street. He was taunted with it on one occasion. Some brute said to him, “You lodge in a base- ment.” Instantly came the stinging retort, “Your soul must lodge in a basement.” You cannot tell where a man lodges by watch- ing the outside of him. The body may be born in the manger of a stable. It may issue forth from some provincial town like Tarsus. It may see the day when it can afford no better place of residence than a basement. What of it? The inner life may, in the hour of its strength, stand forth like a king in his king- dom. The inner life may claim and hold its citi- zenship in heaven. The inner life may open its lips and make the whole world its debtor by the sweetness of its song. The question as to what place on the map you hail from does not interest me. I do not care whether you have two rooms in your house or twenty, or twice that. But where do you, as a child of the Eternal, find yourself at home? That ques- tion is fundamental. 16 I—One’s Dominant Interest How splendid it is that it is always possible for us to move! In this outer world it may not be so. You may not like the city you live in or the street you are on or the house you occupy, yet you may be powerless to change it. Your whole environ- ment when you are at home may be distasteful to you, yet you are compelled to settle down and make the best of it. But when we come to the dwelling-place of that inner life, we are all pil- grims and sojourners as our fathers were. We can always move. It may be done right here, without dust or noise. You need not send out for the furniture van. You can do it yourself by your own choice and resolve. If you have an uneasy feeling that the world you have been living in for months, for years it may be, has not the breadth or depth or height suitable for the residence and growth of a soul, then move. Move out! Move up where you belong! Move into a world where the best that is in you can stand up straight because the ceiling is high! Move where you can strike out and not come at once into contact with some restraining wall! Move up where you can breathe your native air as a child of the Eternal. The world where the religious man lives is a large world, yet Christian life is not easy. It is the most difficult life there is, and the most re- warding. There is an upper level of spiritual privi- 17 Where Do You Live? lege which towers above the common grind as the Matterhorn towers above the valley of the Rhone. But to reach it involves a stiff climb. You can do it if you will. No bodily infirmity need detain you here. No long remove from such vantage grounds as are found in the Alps, the Andes and the Sierra need hinder you—the path of spiritual ascent is not far from any one of us. But if you would go aloft, you must go in marching order. Lay aside every weight. Lay aside the sin which doth so easily beset us. Strip off every evil purpose and intent, every shred of spite or bitterness or ill will. Then by your own personal faith, rope yourself in with the Guide and Helper of man’s life, the Lord Jesus, and climb! When once you stand on that higher level breathing the air you were meant to breathe and lifting your eyes to the heights whence cometh help, you can say to every man who asks your residence, “I live in a city that hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” 18 II Have We Outgrown Fear? ET me ask you a certain question which has gained an added interest at the hands of our modern psychology! Have we outgrown fear as a source of motive for right living? Here are two texts, one from the Old Testa- ment and one from the New, suggesting two pos- sible answers! The book of Proverbs says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” The first letter of John says, “Perfect love casteth out fear, because fear hath torment and he that fear- eth is not made perfect in love.’ Both of these ideas have their adherents—which group has the right of it? In the light of Scripture, of common sense, and of experience, what would you say? What place has fear in a healthy moral life? We find those who claim that it has no place at all. They insist that fear is out of date—it belongs with the stagecoach, the spinning wheel, and the tallow candle. Put them in the attic! They have no place in the living-room of modern society. It is bad for children to have the fear of pun- ishment before their eyes. “Spare the rod and 1g Where Do You Live? spoil the child” is regarded as a highly immoral statement. It is bad for students to be subjected to any kind of discipline with the fear of penalty attached—they must be “left free to live their own lives.” It is bad for criminals, in prison or out, to be brought under constraint by the com- pulsion of fear—they must all be “drawn and held by the cords of gentleness and love.” You will find that mental attitude wrought out into a definite philosophy of life by groups of peo- ple who undertake to dismiss fear entirely from their consideration. You find it embodied in cer- tain economic schemes urged upon us for our acceptance—the fear of want and the sharp spur of necessity are to be eliminated. You find it in certain policies suggested for the control of great states. Who’s afraid! What is there to fear when once we become intelligent! Fear is for cave men, not for civilized people with all the appliances of modern science at their elbows. Our attention has been called recently to the utterance of “an eminent political economist and university teacher.” In the year 1912—notice the date—he wrote these assuring words: “To-day we have no fear of war, famine, pestilence, or failing resources. The advance of knowledge has safeguarded men from all those evils.” He wrote that bit of wisdom in 1912—I wonder what he thinks about it now! It turned out that there was some slight ground for the fear of war, famine, 20 II1—Have We Outgrown Fear? pestilence, and failing resources, even with all our twentieth-century knowledge and appliances. This complacent mood has invaded religion. There are many well-meaning people—I hope they are well-meaning—engaged in putting rubber tires on their consciences lest they should get a rude jolt from the Ten Commandments, or some other old-fashioned barrier in the way of happi- ness. They have been drawing the teeth out of religious conviction. They have been soaking the backbone of theological belief in some acid solu- tion to make it soft and pliable. What a lot of sentimental froth we have had from the Ella Wheeler Wilcox school of poets and the Pollyanna Glad-Game group of fiction writers and the foolish religionists who like to say, “There is no reality in sin, sickness, disease, or death. Just hold the thought that everything is lovely and it will be.” We are told in certain quarters to “seek first the kingdom of pleasure,” and when once we are enjoying ourselves clear up to the limit of our powers, then it will be time enough to give some afterthought to such somber matters as duty, obli- gation, self-sacrifice. But in the meantime, ‘“Who’s afraid?’”—there is nothing to fear in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth. , In the second place, however, we find a grow- 21 Where Do You Liver ing number of people who have their doubts about that whole mood. They have looked it over front and back and it does not look good to them. They have weighed it in the balance and found it want- ing. The gospel of pleasure first and brass tacks later seems to them rather flimsy. We are all agreed that perfect love would cast out fear. Perfect love—loving God with all one’s heart and soul, mind and strength, leaving no least bit of room for any competing desire! Lov- ing one’s neighbor in the same thoroughgoing fashion that one loves himself! It represents a very high level of spiritual achievement. How many such people do you know? Speaking for myself, I do not know very many; and I am frank to say that I do not find one such in my own breast. If we had such angels from heaven controlling all the interests of human life, they might live without fear. But for all the rest of us, I wonder if fear does not have a very real place of honor and of use- fulness. For children, who after all are only can- didates as yet for an existence worthy to be called human! For grown-ups, who must “become as little children” if they would enter the kingdom of heaven! For teachers and students, for employers and employees, for neighbors, citizens and people generally! They had all best bear in mind that we are living in the presence of a moral order with a sharp edge on it. They had best bear in mind that 22 II—Have We Outgrown Fear? we shall all be required to give account in some form for the deeds done in the body, whether they be good or bad, to One who knows. And “‘the way of the transgressor is hard.” What men sow they reap, and where the seed is wild oats, the harvest will be something frightful. “Live dangerously,” Nietzsche, the German philosopher, was forever saying to the men of his day. “Live dangerously!” He need not have been so boisterous about it. We all do. We have to—there is nothing else for it. Life is brimful of risk from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same and on through those hours which lead up to midnight—it grows even riskier then. The task of living wisely and usefully, nobly and joyously, is compassed about with danger. If any man sets out to reach his own best estate and to make the net result of his influ- ence an asset rather than a liability to the com- munity, he will have to watch his step. The pace of modern life, on the Campus and off, is swift and the road is full of sharp turns. Here are perils, physical, intellectual, moral! Here are live wires of high voltage; here are poison gases deadly as they can be to all the finer qualities of soul; here are moral precipices the bottom of which no man can see! And on all sides, people whom you know well are being struck down, they are being gassed, they are being hurled into the pit. In the face of all the tragedy 23 Where Do You Live? of common life, any man who goes about saying, ‘“Who’s afraid?” is either a downright fool or he is a rascal. We have had a curious blend of liberal the- ology, loose ethics and shallow knowledge, the effect of which has been the exact opposite of that produced by “Mocha and Java mixed.” It has not kept people awake, it has lulled them to sleep. Marshall Dawson, in his stimulating book, Nzme- teenth Century Evolution and After, brings out that fact. “Twentieth Century Biology,” he says, “has a morality which puts Calvinism in the shade”—it has a keener edge than the old Cal- vinism. “Jonathan Edwards in his famous sermon on ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ pictured the impenitent suspended by a thread over a burning pit. Twentieth Century Biology paints a still more impressive picture.” It shows the physi- cal consequences of wrongdoing. “It points to the animal depths from which we have climbed up— and to which reversion is fearfully easy. Evolu- tion is a reversible process.” It is not a one-way street. The traffic does not all move in cone direc- tion—there is progress and there is also degenera- tion. In place of that slender thread to which men may cling and upon which they may climb, “mod- ern science shows us a strong, elastic band by 24 II—Have We Outgrown Fear? which man is still linked to that animal world from which he has struggled upward; and if he ceases to struggle and to strive for full spiritual freedom he may be snapped back into the abyss. Science and religion unite in saying that security is only for those who set their affections upon the things which are above.” I hope that Dayton, Tennessee, and all the misguided men who think that the doctrine of evolution destroys religion, will read that book. “The way of the transgressor is hard.” Neither the Revised Version nor Higher Criticism has made any change at that point. The Almighty has written that statement across the whole face of human life in a very plain hand. The direful con- sequences which he steadily visits upon the break- ing of his laws furnish a strong hint to bad men that they are off the track. This applies not only to the coarse sins of the flesh, drunkenness and licentiousness, killing and stealing—it applies with equal force to selfishness and greed, to moral indifference and spiritual sloth. The man who is flippant, cynical, selfish in his prevailing moods, is doomed by the very quality of life which those moods produce. He has been “snapped back” already into the methods of the ape, the tiger and the hog. All wrongdoing is dangerous—it destroys manhood. “Behold, therefore, the goodness and the severity of God”—they are the convex and 25 Where Do You Liver the concave sides of the same shield of moral interest in the welfare of mankind. Millions of people from the Atlantic to the Pacific went to see that moving picture called “The Ten Commandments.” I went too—l fol- lowed the crowd. To me, it was a picture, but not in any sense “moving.” Long before they had finished, I was indescribably bored. Like so many of the moving pictures, it became deadly dull. Any one who cannot sit down in the quiet of his own room and read the book of Exodus and picture all that to himself in a way ten times more im- pressive than anything which they have succeeded in getting into their poor films, is lacking in moral imagination. Here was Mt. Sinai in the desert, to those early Israelites the earthly residence of their deity! Here at the foot of the Mount was the ring fence of death which no man dared pass, save only their devoted leader and he only in obedience to a call from on high. There came a frightful storm. Huge black clouds rested upon the top of the Mount as if the Divine Being had come down robed in thick darkness. The flash of the lightning was like a momentary glimpse of that glory which no man could behold steadily and live. The roar of the thunder was like a superhuman Voice. The whole scene was to them a fresh manifestation of the divine. | 26 II—Have We Outgrown Fearr What the Voice said was this, “Have no other gods before me! Honor thy father and thy mother! Thou shalt not kill nor steal nor commit adultery. Thou shalt not bear false witness nor covet anything that is thy neighbor’s.” Life and purity, truth and property, family peace and per- sonal reputation are sacred in God’s eyes. The man who tampers with them by the breaking of those laws does it at his peril. “Live danger- ously!” Mt. Sinai says, because all forms of evil doing are fatal to life at its best. It is dangerous for an individual or a nation or a social order to fall into the easy-going habit of finding its pleasure mainly “in those forms of satisfaction which are material, momentary, and trivial.” It develops a quality of life which will neither stand nor last. “Our God is a consuming fire” and when such chaff and stubble are brought into His presence, they are burned up. Here is the law of life, as definite and unyield- ing as the law of gravitation! “He that heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them, I will liken unto a wise man who built his house upon a rock.” The men who do otherwise are just plain fools. In the streets of any city you will see contrac- tors resolutely digging through fifty feet of dirt and sand, if need be, to set the foundations of their skyscrapers on bed rock. In those same streets you will also see multitudes of people 27 Where Do You Liver building their life structures and those sections of the social order for which they are responsible upon the shifting sand of moods and whims, upon easy-going customs and unproved assumptions. It is a thousand times more dangerous to live after that fashion than it would to set the Woolworth building of New York in a swamp. When the hard tests come—when the rains descend, the winds blow, and the floods beat upon that mode of life —it will go down. Their whole philosophy of life is as flimsy as a house of cards, so far as offering any real support goes. “If drunk with sight of power we loose Wild tongues that have not thee in awe, Such boastings as the Gentiles use Or lesser breeds without the law, Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! “Far-called, the navies melt away, On dune and headland sinks the fire; Lo! all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! “The tumult and the shouting dies, The captains and the kings depart, Still stands thine ancient sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget!” 28 II1—Have We Outgrown Fearr In the third place, the best type of life com- bines a sound regard for the moral order which enfolds us, with a steady reach toward that sense of liberty which belongs to those who live by the spirit. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”—it is not the whole of it, it is only “the beginning,” the A B C’s of that august language in which we are to do business with the Most High. But it is the place where we have to start. The man who would read Shakespeare, Plato and the Sermon on the Mount must first know his letters. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wis- dom and to depart from evil is understanding.” It is not the whole of understanding, for life has further and higher meanings than the mere avoid- ance of evil doing. But the man who has not sense enough to begin with that, will not have sense enough to learn the higher lessons which come later. You are here as Yale men not merely to fill your heads with sound knowledge—you are here also to have your moral natures more fully de- veloped and equipped for worthy action. I hope that no man here is so illiterate as to be unaware of that fact. “Work out your own salvation,” the apostle cried to those men at Philippi, “with fear and trembling.” It is serious business to undertake to put down evil under one’s feet, to walk with sure, 29 Where Do You Liver firm tread in the way of duty, to render the re- quired service to one’s own day and generation. It is a big job—work at it seven days in the week with all the spiritual vigor you can bring into play! That is good ethics; that is sound morality! But that was not all the apostle said to those men at Philippi—that was only the first half of it. In the same breath, before he let his voice fall, he added something still more significant. “Work out your own salvation, for it is God that worketh in you to will and to accomplish his good pleasure.” And that is religion—that is the sure pledge of ultimate success to every one who walks by faith. The man who has “‘the will to believe” coupled with the spirit of trust, feels his own imperfect confidence supported and directed by his sense of fellowship with the Spirit of truth, who shall guide our minds into all truth. The man who has the will to do what he believes to be the divine will, finds his own faltering purpose reinforced by its sense of agreement with the will of God. The man who follows the gleam with fidelity feels sure that he is headed straight for that light in which there is no darkness at all. The man of faith rejoices that God is working within him to crown his moral efforts with success. It is fellowship, co- operation, a concerted movement, all the way through, for we are co-laborers with him who is the Author and Finisher of these imperfect lives of ours. 30 II—Have We Outgrown Fear? It was the Master of all the higher values, One who knew what was in man, his limitations and his endless capacity for growth, who said to a dozen young men like yourselves: “I am the way” —walk in it; ‘‘and the truth’”—believe in it; ‘‘and the life”—live it! By his aid you can—and there is nothing higher—therefore you ought! 31 Eid The Jericho Road ‘“ ™ CERTAIN man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho.” We are not told very much about that man—not even his name. He was just “a certain man” going along quietly, minding his own business, willing to live and let live. Why not! In all that he represents our common humanity. Men generally are doing just that. If we allowed ourselves to be guided in our thinking by the headlines in the newspapers, we might suppose that the majority of men were selling bootleg whiskey and robbing banks and murdering peo- ple. They are not of course—like that traveler on the Jericho road, they too are going straight along about their business with no thought of injuring anybody. When this man made his journey from Jeru- salem to Jericho he encountered three different types of people. In a rough way they represent the people we all meet. First there were the rob- bers, then came the Priest and the Levite, and then the good Samaritan. Look at them—they have something to say! 32 Il i—The Jericho Road First, the robbers! Every man in that group had a certain philosophy of life. It was this— ‘“What’s yours is mine, I’ll take it.” They fell upon that traveler, stripped him of his raiment, wounded him, took all he had and departed, leav- ing him half dead. They believed in the good old rule, the simple plan that he should take who has the power and he should keep who can. They did not use the King James version of the scriptures. Their translation of the Golden Rule read like this—‘“‘Do the other fellow before ever he has a chance to do you.” What’s yours is mine—Hands up!—lI will take it! Now there are a great many different ways of robbing people. Differences of administration but the same evil purpose! Those men on the Jericho road did it in a knock down fight. The bank rob- ber does it at the point of a pistol. The sneak thief does it by slipping his hand into the pocket where you Carry your purse or your watch when you are not looking. The loan shark does it by taking advantage of the necessities of poor people and charging a rate of interest which is thievish. Di- versity of operation, yet it is all stealing! But all those fellows are amateurs—their methods are crude and clumsy. We send them to states prison whenever they are caught. There are finer ways of robbing people. The Jericho road is much longer than those thirty miles which OG Where Do You Liver stretch between Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley. It reaches clear round the globe—it goes every- where. On that road we see a great many men who do not look like robbers—they are well-dressed, re- spectable-looking people like ourselves. But they are making gain by exploiting the weak. They often pay wages which are less than equitable. They work their employees an unreasonable num- ber of hours. They maintain conditions in their mills and their mines which are unsanitary and dangerous. They are sometimes industrial slack- ers who do not give a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay—they waste the time and the material for which their employers have paid and thereby increase the cost of the product for us all. They sometimes profit from lying advertisements. They “nile on all the traffic will bear” regardless, be- cause it means more profit. What do you call that? Are they not robbers too? One man of evil purpose kills another with a gun or a knife in five minutes. Another man kills people in five years with unsanitary tenements, with adulterated food, with unfair labor condi- tions. In either case it is murder in the eyes of Him who knows. It takes life. One man robs people at the point of a gun. Another man robs them by economic methods which are unsocial and unjust. In either case it is stealing. Several years ago a hungry tramp stole 34 I1I—The Jericho Road a ham one night from a freight car on the rail- road. He was caught next day with the ham under his arm and he was sent to prison, as he should have been. It is wrong to steal hams. That same winter a group of men, engaged in high finance, by manipulating the stock stole the railroad. But when they were caught with the railroad under their arms, they were not sent to prison. How about that? How about those men who profit from child labor, trading upon the toil of little people who ought to be at school or playing in the open air? How about those men who fatten upon the labor of women who are striving to make a bare living with their needles! How about those men who see to it that the farmer gets a low price for that which his land produces, yet when you and I come to consume that produce we pay a high price for it? The big, wide margin between goes mainly into the pockets of men who do not pro- duce anything—they trade upon what other men produce. How about those men who manufacture articles which are for sale rather than for use! The articles look well long enough to be sold but the material is poor, the workmanship worse and their utility slight. How about all those people? Would you not call their action robbery? I have read the Bible through a good many times and I am fairly familiar with the dictionary. I know of no other 35 Where Do You Liver word to be applied to it but “stealing.” They are taking what does not belong to them. What’s yours is mine—I’ll take it. That is their philoso- phy of life and a wicked philosophy it is. In the second place this man on the road to Jericho encountered the Priest and the Levite. Here was our common humanity lying at the roadside wounded and helpless! By chance there came along a certain priest. When he saw that bit of human need, he said to himself: “No affair of mine! I did not rob the man. Never robbed anybody in my life! It is his own fault—careless of him to have been traveling alone in this region where brigands lurk among the rocks!” Thus he excused himself from all responsibility in the matter and passed by on the other side. Then a Levite came along. He was not quite so brutally cold and selfish as the Priest. “He came and looked upon” the man. He may have asked his name in case the poor fellow had par- tially regained consciousness. He probably in- quired how many robbers there were and how much of his money they got and if he was suffer- ing much pain from those wounds in his head. Then having gotten all the statistics and having expressed his regret that such things were allowed to happen in this wicked world he too passed by on the other side. Those two men also had their 36 I1I—The Jericho Road philosophy of life—it was this, ‘““What’s mine is my own—I’ll keep it.” They were very respectable men no doubt, like ourselves. They were religious men we know. It was the Priest’s business to preach religion in the temple service just as I am doing now. It was the Levite’s business to sing religion in the temple service. The Levites made up the choir in the Jewish church. It is a thousand pities that the Priest and the Levite were not practicing their religion that day on the Jericho road. It would have immortalized them. Everybody in Christen- dom knows the Good Samaritan, and his action on that occasion has made him more popular than Santa Claus. But the Priest and the Levite have been kicked and cuffed from that day to this. “What’s mine is my own, I’ll keep it,” is not a philosophy of life which makes friends. Yet what a lot of it there is! The Priest and the Levite represent a multitude which no man can number, of all nations and peoples and kin- dreds and tongues. They stand off looking at these bits of human need, thoughtless, careless, selfish as pigs. They are always turning their faces away from human need and passing by on the other side. | When they see a woman left a widow with a bunch of little mouths to be fed, or boys and girls living on oatmeal and crackers in their struggle for an education or good causes of all sorts held oF Where Do You Liver back and crippled for lack of support, these self- centered people never turn a hair. ‘“What’s mine is my own! Worked hard for it! Always paid my own way a hundred cents on the dollar. I am not giving any of it away for the sake of sentiment. I’ll keep it.” They are stingy, forgetting appar- ently what Jesus said about the fate of the stingy. “The Levite came and looked upon” the wounded man—and these people are willing often- times to do that much. They rather enjoy looking at human need—they often feel that they have been doing their duty when they were merely look- ing at it or hearing about it. When they read the Survey regularly and listen to wise lectures on “scientific charity,” when they attend wonderful conferences on “charities and corrections” and hear stirring addresses by social reformers who are ready to reconstruct the whole social order overnight, when they go to see plays like “The Fool” and cry a little, they often think that they must have been making considerable moral prog- ress because they have felt so badly about the need of the world. People whose sympathies are not sufficiently exercised by being brought into contact with the painful realities of life frequently enjoy a little extra rubbing and moral massage. Then they cross over and pass by on the other side. It is frightfully easy for college students to 38 Il I—The Jericho Road become thoroughly selfish. They have so much done for them by those who love them, by those who are paid to minister to their well being and by those who have created splendid endowments for their benefit, that they sometimes feel that they must be the center of the whole solar system and that the sun, moon and stars revolve mainly for their enjoyment. High privileges grow around them so thick and fast that they overlook the obligations which privilege entails. “To whom much is given, of him will much be required!” What high praise was given to those early Christians at Jerusalem! “No man said that any of the things that he possessed were his own.” They were all held in trust. Those men were good stewards of the values under their control and they used them in the spirit of consecration to ends higher than personal advantage. Here is a five dollar bill which I happen to have! Is it my own to do with as I like? I did not steal it—I earned it in my profession. But into the creation of that bit of value before it came into the possession of Yale University to be paid to me for service rendered, there went the labor of some other man’s hand or brain. It is an ex- pression of life; it is stored up life. If I should use it for some evil purpose or in some thought- less piece of self-indulgence, I should be wrong- ing the man who helped to create that bit of value and I should be wronging those interests which 39 Where Do You Live? it might be made to serve. It is not my own to do with as I like. The Priest and the Levite were all astray in their philosophy of life. The world cannot move along with the idea that what is mine is my own,—I will keep it. It is the devil’s philosophy of life. In the third place, this man on the Jericho road had still another experience. “A certain Samaritan as he journeyed came where he was” and when he saw that bit of human need “he was moved with compassion.” He said to himself, “I did not rob the man, but the fact that I am here, sound and well with money in my purse, while he lies there helpless, creates an obligation. I am the only man in sight to do anything about it. It is up to me— it is my job.” He tore off strips from his flowing Oriental garment and bound up the man’s wounds. “He poured in oil and wine,” which the traveler in that country usually carries with him for his lunch. A little oil on the bandages to make them soft and a little wine down the man’s throat to revive him, for he was “half dead”! He got him up “and set him on his own beast.” He was will- ing to get off and walk for a time so that a needier man might ride to a place of safety. He got him to an inn and took care of him and saved his life. He too had his philosophy of life—it was this! ‘“‘What’s mine is ours—we’ll share it.” 40 Il I—The Jericho Road “The man on horseback,” not in the sinister sense in which that phrase is commonly used but in the sense that nearly every man is mounted on some advantages which might be used upon occa- sion to serve a needier life. The Samaritan was mounted that day on a small Syrian donkey such as they use in that country. It was not much of a beast, but he used it to save a man’s life. Most of us are mounted. We may not be riding in a coach and six or in a Pierce Arrow limousine, but we have at least a Syrian donkey or a Ford car under us. We have money in our purses—we haven’t been robbed. We have homes, not all of them on Fifth Avenue or fronting the park, but places of comfort. We have intelligence, not as much perhaps as Solomon or President Eliot of Harvard, but enough to get along. We have some measure of goodness—nothing prancing or showy, but like the Samaritan’s donkey, plain, everyday goodness. And here we are on the Jericho road with human need scattered along every mile of it! What are we going to do about it? Are we ready to accept that third philosophy of life? ‘“What’s mine is ours, to be shared with the less fortunate.” Any healthy man with two hands and two feet can ride his donkey from Jericho clear up to the New Jerusalem without robbing anybody or wounding anybody on the road, simply riding and letting ride. It is as easy as rolling off a log. But that is not the way to inherit eternal life, Jesus 4I Where Do You Live? said to the lawyer whose question called out this familiar parable. The man who rides up to the gate of heaven mounted on his advantages, with- out having used those advantages along the way to aid helpless people to make their way to the gate of heaven, will find that gate shut. It does not open to that sort of an approach. The very essence of eternal life, the whole spirit of the Christian religion, lies in a certain willingness to get down off some advantages which rightfully belong to us in order to set some helpless life upon them that he too may rise. What’s mine is ours! This is the doctrine Paul preached and there is none better. It is acceptable to the Fundamen- talist and also to the Modernist. William Jennings Bryan believed in it and Harry Emerson Fosdick preaches it every Sunday. It is good, sound doc- trine at Dayton, Tennessee, or at Princeton or in Boston. “Have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus. He being in the form of God thought it not a prize to be grasped to be on an equality with God. But he made himself of no reputation, took upon him the form of a servant and was made in the likeness of men. And being found in fashion as a man, he became obedient unto the death of the cross.” He got off and came down that he might give himself for us in that redemptive love and self- sacrifice which would bring us to the Father. 42 I1I—The Jericho Road “Wherefore God hath highly exalted him and hath given him a name which is above every name.” In that hour when “God so loved the world” as to give his only begotten Son, Jesus said, “What is mine is ours, we will share it.” That made him the Savior. It is that philosophy of life which is to save the world. One of our own poets puts it in the mouth of Christ in his “Vision of Sir Launfal.” “Not what we give, but what we share, For the gift without the giver is bare: Who gives himself with his alms feeds three, Himself, his hungering neighbor and me.” What’s mine is ours, we'll share it! If that philosophy of life is carried out along the Jericho road and wrought into the daily round of duty, it will finally lift that whole region up to the style and manners of the New Jerusalem at its best. “When ye pray say, Our’—“Our Father who art in heaven.” That is the way to begin. No man can get his mouth open and utter the first two words of acceptable prayer until he has in his heart that sense of sympathy which bids him say “Our.” Not “my Father” nor “your Father” but “Our Father’’! And when you live, say “our.” It is the only way we can live aright. No man can say that any of the things he possesses are exclusively his own. 43 Where Do You Liver My farms, my barns, my goods, my money, my brains—all these are to be held in trust and to be used with that higher, finer sense of social obliga- tion which prompts a man to say “our.”’ Selfish- ness is sin and sin is the death of all that is best. There is a lovely story here in the Old Testa- ment. It may not be literal and exact history— perhaps it is only a bit of folklore. I would not dogmatize on that point. There was a famine in Syria and the people were dying right and left from starvation. There was a poor widow who had reached the end of her resources—she did not know where the next meal was coming from. She had a little meal at the bottom of her barrel and a little oil in a cruse. She was about to mix it up and bake a little cake for herself and her son and they would eat it; and then she supposed that they would die as others were dying from starva- tion. But that very day there came to her home a prophet of the Lord. He asked her for something to eat. Poor and desperate though she was she shared with him her last morsel of food. The grateful prophet stayed on in her house, and somehow, the story says, so long as she continued to share with him what she had, she continued to find meal in that barrel and oil in that cruse. “She and he and her son did eat from it many days and the barrel of meal wasted not neither did the cruse of oil fail.” 44 I1I—The Jericho Road Call it poetry or call it prose, as you like, there is a great truth there! So long as she said to those who were even more needy than herself, ““‘What’s mine is ours, we’ll share it,” the supplies held out. We have been thinking of these three philoso- phies of life up to this point purely in personal terms. Before we go, let me broaden the scope of their application. We would all agree that no strong nation has the right to say to a weaker nation “What’s yours is mine, I’ll take it.”” When any nation does that by military force it becomes a thief and a robber. Sooner or later it will learn the meaning of that terrible judgment uttered by the Lord. “The wicked shall be turned into hell and all the nations that forget God.” We have seen that very princi- ple worked out in our own day. The way of selfish aggression is hard. We would all agree that no nation has the right to say “What’s mine is my own, I’ll keep it for myself.” How wonderfully, for example, this nation has been blessed. A position of unique ad- vantage between two great oceans! A magnificent array of wide and varied resources! A climate unsurpassed for active industry! A people strong, capable, aspiring, made up from the blending of the more forceful elements in many races! An honorable history affording inspiration to all of us who stand in that goodly succession! We too 45 Where Do You Live? might say what Israel said in the days of her glory, “What nation hath God so nigh unto them, as the Lord our God is unto us in all things that we call upon him for!” We have not been beaten and robbed in the last ten years as great sections of Europe have been by a disaster unspeakable. We have not suf- fered from the devastating influence of war as France and Belgium, Russia and Great Britain, Germany and Austria have suffered. We are not helpless and half-dead. The economists tell us that the wealth of this country at the present time is fifty per cent more than the wealth of Great Britain and France, Germany and Italy all com- bined. Here we are on the Jericho road, strong and rich, joyous and hopeful! What are we going to do about it? Are we going to stand aloof from those intricate, baffling problems in Europe and say, “No affair of ours! We did not bring on the war.” Are we going to say, as I heard a well-known United States Sena- tor, then an aspirant for the Presidency, say in cynical fashion yonder in Carnegie Hall, New York, “Let the people of this country attend strictly to their own business, and let Europe stew in her own juice’’? Are we going to say that? Do we dare, as chil- dren of Him who holds all the nations in the hol- low of his hand, to stand up in His presence and utter any such selfish, heartless, godless word! 46 I{I—The Jericho Road How could this nation whose God is the Lord utter such blasphemy against the divine purpose for all mankind! What then shall we say? I am not wise enough to stand here at the end of a sermon and hand out to you in half a dozen neat formulas all the various steps to be taken in meeting our full share of responsibility for the peace and good order of the world. I am not a statesman. But this I do say—where there is a will there’s a way. And where there is the right sort of will on the part of a great people, the right sort of way can be found. It is for the United States of America to say, ‘‘What is mine is ours, to be shared in that wider sense of international obligation.” That obligation we must accept and that obligation, by the grace of God, we must meet in full. 47 IV Equipment E are drawing near to the end of another year—some of you will soon be going out to face responsibilities more serious than those connected with attending college. The showing you make will depend upon what you take with you. I want to speak to you this morning on “Equipment.” Howard Bement of the Hill School in his little book says that Equipment is divided into three parts. It is made up of “Stamina, scholarship and sympathy.” Here are the same three factors listed _ in a letter written Nineteen Hundred years ago by an old man to a young man. “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” It all comes to the same thing. Stamina is power, scholarship develops a sound mind and sympathy springs from love—love for God as the sum of all that is good and love for men, not be- cause they deserve it always but because they need it. Let me speak to you about these three prime factors in one’s equipment for life. 48 TV—Equipment First, stamina! It is a thing which every healthy man craves. It is a thing which every woman, healthy or unhealthy, adores. It has a physical basis, yet it is something more than mere bulk. You cannot always measure it off in feet and inches or weigh it on the scales. Forceful person- ality comes oftentimes done up in small packages. Lord Roberts of England was only five feet three and he did not make much of a showing on the scales, but he was a man of power. When he en- tered a room, everyone there was conscious at once that somebody had come. When you bump into a man of power, physically, intellectually or morally, you know at once that you are up against something. “Here is stamina,” you say to your- self. Now that sense of power can be cultivated and developed like any other live thing. It grows when conditions are right. It may add cubits to its stature in the course of four years like a tree planted by a river of water. Theodore Roosevelt became one of the most forceful men of his gen- eration, yet he was a puny child—in his early life he was never quite up to the mark physically. He became a man of power by making a business of it as soon as he was old enough to think. He may have had unusual capacity for growth—I think that he had—but his stamina, physical and intel- lectual, political and moral, came by his insistent use of the right means. He did not try to live by 49 Where Do You Liver bread and games alone—he lived by ali the great words which proceed out of the mind of God, food, clothing, shelter, exercise, naturally, also faith, hope, love, courage, aspiration, high re- solve! By these men live and grow in power. The man of stamina as a rule forms the habit of concentration early in life. He does not scatter his energies all over the lot. He focuses his efforts in such a way that wherever he is, he is all there. When he puts his foot down or his mind you feel the man’s whole weight. When he walks down street, he is alert and alive from his hat clear down to the sidewalk. When he reads a book his mind is intent upon taking all that the book has for him. When he is present at a service of worship, his faculties are steadily claiming from it all the meaning and help to be had. It is easier naturally to lounge and dawdle through all of these exercises, but no one ever thinks of look- ing for stamina in loungers. There never was a weak life which could not be strengthened indefinitely by this habit of concen- tration. Find me a man who says, “This one thing I do” and the chances are nine to one that he is doing it right up to the handle and gaining added efficiency for doing the next thing well. Find a man who says, “One thing I know” and the chances are that when he talks about that one thing he will speak as having authority. Find a 50 IV—Equipment man who says, “One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after,” and you may be sure that presently he will be bringing it in. Let any man form the habit of living in that direct and definite manner, with a clear-cut purpose domi- nating his action, and he will be storing up in his own personality that sense of power which we call stamina. I am urging the importance of all this because in the last analysis achievement is largely a ques- tion of stamina. Can Smith stand up to his job as a lawyer or a doctor, as an engineer or a jour- nalist, as a teacher or a preacher, as long as any other man on the street and then just a bit longer for the extra effort needed to give him a certain distinction? —The Duke of Wellington, who won the day at Waterloo, used to say that British sol- diers were no braver than French soldiers but they were brave five minutes longer—and that meant victory. ‘Five minutes longer’”’—how often that tells the story! It is a quality which cannot be purchased at the drugstore for so much a bottle. It cannot be gained in any correspondence course offered at Scranton, Pennsylvania. It is not a windfall which some lucky man picks up in the street. Stamina comes only as men live clean lives, eat good food, enough but not too much of it, drink that which slakes rather than creates thirst, breathe their full share of the outdoor air of which there is enough 51 Where Do You Liver for everybody, sleep a sufficient number of hours, some of them before midnight, and exercise their abilities in some useful employ. That is the route by which stamina arrives. It comes not by magic but by right method. And it is a part of every man’s job to gain his full share of it because it lies at the basis of so much that is best. In the second place, the sound mind, which is one of the marks of scholarship! The sound mind rings true every time—it is not cracked. It does not go to pieces in the face of difficulty—it holds together and overcomes obstacles. It knows al- ways what it is talking about and does not pour out an endless stream of idle words. It has a keen sense of fact and real capacity for drawing con- clusions from those facts which will be found valid. What a splendid asset for any life! Well might the apostle of old regard “the sound mind” as one of the gifts of the good God! It is a much better asset in every way than the thing which some people call “genius.” A bad case of “genius” in early life is almost as fatal as smallpox. There is such a thing. There are men— a few of them in each generation—who have ex- ceptional ability. They are four leaf clovers. But the cows are fed and the field is kept green by the presence in abundance of three leaf clover. The main part of the world’s work is being done these days by men of average build who have been well 52 IV—Equipment trained. Even the men of unmistakable genius usually attribute their success to intelligent and persistent effort. Agassiz used to say to the men at Harvard, “I seem to have formed the habit of observing more closely perhaps than did some of my associates.” “Knowledge is power,” not in the sense of hav- ing a lot of undigested information stored up in one’s head, like all those facts in the Britannica. Knowledge is power only when it becomes the natural furnishing of a sound mind bent upon use- ful achievement. Here is the test! Can the man think clearly and when he thinks produce something with the look and taste of his own mind upon it? Can he see five things at once, sharply distinguishing each one from the others and then organize them into their proper relations? Can he speak by tongue or by pen and actually say something? The sound mind means always insight, discrimination, pro- ductiveness. Now that fine quality like all the others can be cultivated and developed. It grows by the right use of right means. It sometimes adds cubits to its stature in less than a year. Let any man form the habit of seeing straight, of stating accurately what he sees, not some loose approximation of it, of forming judgments in a way that is not silly nor far fetched but just and reasonable! Let him do that and keep on doing it day in and day out, 53 Where Do You Liver week in and week out, just as he keeps on going to bed at night and getting up again the next morning—and he will be headed for a sound mind as surely as the needle points to the pole. “Then only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame; And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame; But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star, Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They Are.” It takes brains in these days to be good in the sense of being good for something. It is not enough to be kind-hearted and to mean well. The ignorant, untrained man, even where he is earnest and honest, may be a positive menace to society. He may be like that hero of Galsworthy’s who was riding madly ahead on a dark night with his face toward the tail of his galloping horse. He is almost sure to ride somebody down before morn- ing and to bring up himself in the ditch. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart” in the desires you cherish “and with all thy mind” in the thoughts you think. Jesus made that duty of thinking straight a part of the first and great commandment. You are here to learn the joy of intellectual fellowship with your Maker 54 IV—Equipment by thinking his thoughts after him and by keep- ing step with him in His wise purposes for the race. In this intricate social order of ours the sound mind is imperative, if you are to gain the best that life has for you, if you are to make your just contribution to the common welfare, and if you are to stand right with Him in the Day of Judgment. In the third place, sympathy, the power to feel for others! Wherever men live with the Lord through worship and obedience, the Lord gives them “the spirit of love,” and love is the essence of character. “Love works no ill to his neighbor, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.” He that loves has passed from death unto life. He is born of God. He that dwells in love as the abiding prin- ciple of his life, dwells in God and God in him, for God is love. This prevailing mood in any man’s heart deter- mines the reaction he gets from the social order which enfolds him. With the same measure he metes it out, it will be measured back to him again. In a western city a physician once told me this story of two lives which had come under his own eye. Two men lived on the same street; they were engaged in the same line of business; they were about the same age. Heredity and environ- ment, so far as one could see, had dealt them hands of about equal value. The result of the 55 Where Do You Live? game turned upon the way each man played his hand. One of the two men was sour, unbelieving, cyni- cal. He was always on the off side, always looking for knots in the log, always knocking something. When anyone said to him “Good morning,” he would reply, “What is it good for!” Unless the weather was perfect and everything had been going his way, he felt that it was not good for much. The other man faced the world with a smile which did not come off in the wash even when the water was hard. When anyone said, “Good morning” to him, he would often reply, “It is good enough for anybody.” Only a straw but it showed which way the wind blew! “And it came to pass,” this physician said, “that the first man died at the age of fifty from a complication of diseases,’ chronic dyspepsia, pernicious anaemia and several other complaints whose names I can neither remember nor pro- nounce. The other man lived to be eighty-six, active, radiant, useful to the last. He fell asleep with a smile on his face which had not faded out when his friends came to lay flowers on his casket. “There was a reason,” a very good reason. You can die without sympathy any time—here and now if you like! No man can live without sym- pathy; and sympathy means love for God and for one’s fellows. 56 IV—Equipment | This fine quality also, like any other live thing, can be cultivated and developed. No man ever has character of the finer sort thrust upon him. No man ever achieves character at a bound. It comes first the blade, then the ear, and then away late in the fall, the full, ripe corn. Where a man main- tains the sense of fellowship and codperation with those unseen, spiritual verities which are eternal, his character develops steadily into the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. “T live,” the apostle cried in one of his highest moods, “I live, yet not I,” as a separate detached bit of the common humanity, “Christ liveth in me.” Christ the hope of glory; Christ the strength of each man’s inner life; Christ who is able to make us at last like him! ‘‘For me to live,” the apostle said, “is Christ.” “I venerate the man whose heart is warm, whose hands are clean, whose teaching and whose life coincident, exhibit lucid proof that he is honest in the sacred cause.” Here as everywhere the man of method has the wind and the tide with him. Some light-hearted, light-headed people seem to think that when we enter the realm of spiritual values we enter a region of magic and hocus pocus. They know that in Mathematics two and two make four every time, but they think that in morals two and two will make five or even fifty with a little judicious coaxing and a few fervent gestures. They have an 57 Where Do You Live? idea that a young fellow may ignore moral values for years, wallowing in the mire of evil indul- gence, and then by some sudden spasm of feeling become instantly as fine and as true as if he had never spent those years in the far country. I have no idea where they got that notion. It is not here in the Bible—this book is filled with sound sense. I have traveled in many lands from east to west and from west to east and I have never seen a place where men did not reap as they sowed. I have rubbed against all sorts and con- ditions of men and they all said that the debits and credits for right living and for wrong living are as definite and exact as the trial balance of a good bank. The law of compensation does not fail at the top. The impulses we cherish soon become habits; habits speedily harden into character; and char- acter determines destiny. Two and two make four all the way up and all the way down. As a man thinketh in his heart, so he becomes—not in an hour nor in a week, but ere long. And the only heart which is safe here or hereafter is a heart possessed by love for God and love for one’s fellow beings. Howard Bement was right—equipment for the serious business of living means stamina, scholar- ship, sympathy. It means power, love and a sound mind. These qualities are not electives—they are required. Any man who lacks these requisites will 58 IT V—Equipment be weighed in the balance and found wanting. He is “not all there” and the world will not be long in telling him so. Why not do something definite and practical about it here and now? So many good impulses are wasted because they do not find expression in concrete form. The good impression comes to its proper fruitage only as it utters itself in whole- some action. When you go back to your room sit down and write out a promissory note. Date it, June 1, 1926. The very dating of it will make you think, 1926— it is just that long since One was born in Bethle- hem of Judea, whose mighty aid we need! Let the note read like this; ‘Six months after date I promise to pay to myself a sounder and a more reliable physique, a better trained and a better stored mind, a kindlier and a more sympa- thetic heart, than I now possess.” Sign it, seal it and deliver it to yourself as an obligation which you have assumed. Then having given your note, make that obli- gation as good as a Liberty bond. Set yourself to the task of meeting it when it falls due. You can if you will. By right thinking and by right action, by cherishing the spirit of good will toward others and the spirit of obedient trust toward God, you can go straight along making those deposits in the bank of your own inner life which will enable you 59 Where Do You Liver at the end of the six months to pay that debt in full. When the time comes you will stand up before the glass and before your Maker, offering your- self and offering Him a sounder body, a clearer mind and a kinder heart. “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love and of a sound mind’”—by these men enter into life to go no more out! 60 V The Challenge of the Unattained HE sorriest figure about town is the man who has caught up with his ideals. He has arrived, as he thinks, and that is the tragedy of it. His present achievements, meager though they may be, are saying to him, “This is where you get off—you are not going any farther.” It is a thousand times better to live in a hut looking up at the castle with wonder and longing, wishing one might live there, than it is to live in the castle itself and have nothing to look up to. One is life, the other is death. Every man needs the steady challenge of something unattained. You are all familiar with the scene where these words stand, ‘“Thou shalt not go over, but I have caused thee to see it!” The figure at the center of that scene was that of an old man with long white hair and beard like Michael Angelo’s statue of him in Rome. He was standing on Mt. Nebo looking out across the Jordan Valley into Pales- tine. He had spent forty of the best years of his life in an effort to bring those Israelites out of the bondage of Egypt into that place of freedom and 61 Where Do You Live? opportunity. He had hoped to enter that land him- self at the head of a marching host. Yet here he was in the desert of Moab, realizing that after all he was not to set foot in the land of promise. He would die in the desert. And the last words he heard before he died were these, “Thou shalt not go over, but I have caused thee to see it.” He had spent his whole life in the pursuit of an unattained ideal. Notice three great truths suggested by that scene! First, his real life began with a social vision! When the awakening came he was a shep- herd in the land of Midian. He was watching his sheep on the slopes of Mount Horeb when he saw a bush burn with a mysterious fire. He heard a voice from that bush which said: “Put off thy shoes! The place where thou standest is holy ground! I am the God of thy fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob.” He was face to face with his Maker. Then the voice added: “I have seen the afilic- tion of my people who are in Egypt. I have heard their cry by reason of their task masters. I know their sorrows. I am come down to deliver them. Come now, I will send thee unto Pharaoh that thou mayst bring them out.” He was called into the service of God primarily by an appeal to his social sympathies. “It was from that hour of vision Moses dated all the heroisms of his life.” 62 V—Challenge of the Unattained Here were thousands of people who were being unfairly used! They were being exploited by those who ground them up for their own pleasure and profit. They were losing all sense of joy and pride in life. “They hearkened not to the voice of aspiration,” the record said, “for anguish of spirit and for cruel bondage.” It was high time that something was done about it. They thought so; the Lord thought so; and he laid it upon the heart of this educated young man, for “Moses was learned in all the learning of the Egyptians,” to do something about it. Social conditions are not fixed and final like the law of gravitation. Men made them—men can unmake them and make them better. It is just a question of having groups of resolute men and women here and there determined that social wrongs shall be righted. When Moses undertook the social betterment of his people, he found it a long, hard row to travel. He had to fight Pharaoh, the representa- tive of reaction, the stand pat, burdensome, ex- ploiting element in the situation. He had to brace up the Israelites themselves for the hard task of gaining their liberty—they were constantly flat- tening out and allowing their wills to go lame when obstacles arose. He had to lead them through a desert of dreary sand and bitter waters —the provisioning of that host and keeping them 63 Where Do You Liver on the march was a job for a Napoleon. He lived day in and day out under the steady challenge of difficulty. | He was held up to it by his sense of the Un- seen. He endured as seeing One who is invisible. Man does not live by bread and meat alone. He does not live by the plain, hard facts of everyday life alone. He lives by all the words which proceed out of the mind of God. He lives by those forces and values outlined in his sky in some hour of vision. He lives by the hope of moral advance, of social betterment, of service rendered to certain vital interests in the community where he is set down. He lives by all those finer impulses which have to do with the reign of righteousness and peace and good will among men. “Other men have,” he says to himself, “and other men can. I will! I will cause my life to stand up and be counted for the coming of the kingdom of God on earth.” The Lord has caused him to see it with his eyes and he goes forth to live by the power of an unattained ideal shining in his sky like a fixed star. In the second place, this man spent forty of the best years of his life in the pursuit of that ideal. His life was not one grand, sweet song, like some fancy little story from the Saturday Evening Post or the movies. He had never been to Holly- 64 V—Challenge of the Unattained wood. He did not begin on the lowest round of the ladder and then make a bee line to the top. That sort of thing is confined mainly to theatrical performances. He marched and countermarched, gaining ground one month and then falling back the next, because the people were fickle and uncertain. He sometimes found himself within striking distance of the goal and then was swept back by forces which were too strong for him. But rain or shine, uphill and downhill, through thick and through thin, he kept at it because he was a man with a purpose. He had the spirit of that business man’s motto, “Consider the postage stamp and be wise! Its usefulness depends upon its ability to stick until it gets there.” You have all read the account of the sailing of the Pilgrims from Holland. They believed in a church without a bishop and a state without a king. They were about to take ship for an un- known shore to realize that dream. They gathered in their little church at Delft Haven to listen to a sermon by their pastor, John Robinson. He was a man “who always marched breast forward,” be- lieving that God still had much more light to fall from his holy word. He always greeted the Un- seen with a cheer. He preached to them that morning from this text: “Get thee out of thy land and from thy kindred unto a land that I will show thee. I will bless thee and thou shall be a 65 Where Do You Live? blessing. I will make of thee a great nation and in thee shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.” The Pilgrims crossed the ocean with that Mes- sianic promise ringing in their ears. They landed on the twenty-first day of December at one of the bleakest spots on the Atlantic coast. They battled through that long winter fighting against famine and disease, against hostile Indians and the New England climate. Before spring came many of them were under the sod. But through it all they were sustained by the vision of something unat- tained. “I will make of thee a great nation and in thee shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.” They too would make of themselves a Messianic people. The man who reads history knows what hap- pened yesterday and the day before. The man who reads the newspapers knows what is happen- ing today—that is, he knows something about it, for fact and fancy, accuracy and inaccuracy min- gle together on the pages of the daily press in a way that would baffle all the higher critics on earth. The man of vision knows what will happen tomorrow and the day after and the third day by the invincible march of the divine purpose which he is set to serve. He is the man who counts. The past is beyond our control—all it can furnish us is a lesson. The present is raw material out of which something can be made if we know how and have the will to 66 V—Challenge of the Unattained do it. The future offers us opportunity unmeas- ured. Here is just one act in the great drama! The nineteenth century was preéminently the age of the atom and the molecule. It witnessed a greater advance in physical science and in the control of the material forces than all the preceding cen- turies put together had witnessed. The Twentieth Century is young yet—it is only a child. It has scarcely learned to walk or to talk. But it bids fair to be the age of the mind and the soul. In that wider and wiser use of mental and spiritual forces for the gaining and maintenance of sound health; in the more accurate measure- ment of that mysterious form of energy known as “the will’; in the better methods for using the power of personality to lift the race to higher levels of thought, feeling and action; in the devis- ing of better systems of nurture and education, which will not leave whole areas of human nature untouched, we can see the finger of God pointing inward, onward and upward. The final forces in human society are the spiritual forces—they decide the issue when the returns are all in; and God is causing us to see it with our eyes. I am fully aware that some men who live mainly from their necks down, pour contempt upon all this. They say, as that cynical, skeptical old chap who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes said 67 Where Do You Live? twenty-five hundred years ago (they too are just about that far behind the times): “all things come alike to all, to the righteous and to the wicked, to him that sacrificeth and to him that sacrificeth not. All go to one place, for all return to dust, so that a man has no preéminence above a beast. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” Noth- ing is worth while! Matter and force are the final lords of life. Heredity and environment have us bound hand and foot. There is no such thing as freedom or the power to choose, or the spirit of initiative! They are materialists and pessimists of the 33d and last degree. Do you want to know what becomes of pessi- mists? It is all here in the Book. Twelve men were sent up from that desert of Moab to spy out the land of promise. Ten of them were pessimists. “It is a good land,” they said when they came back, “a land that flows with milk and honey, but the cities are walled up to heaven and the people are giants. We were like grasshoppers in their sight. We cannot overcome it.” And they urged the Israelites to go back to the fleshpots of Egypt and to die under the heel of that material bondage. Then read on! “And all those men who brought an evil report of the land, died by the plague, but Caleb and Joshua lived.” Caleb and Joshua, the men of vision, the two men out of the twelve who believed that the thing could be done, lived! 68 V—Challenge of the Unattained The pessimists died in the desert of Moab, as they always do, but the men of vision and of pur- pose lived on. “If the Lord delight in us,” they said, “he will give us the land.” In the third place, here was one man who had lived in the service of a great ideal, yet he died without having attained. “I have caused thee to see it, but thou shalt not go over.” Here he was on the last lap of his long journey! His mind went back through the years of struggle. He saw himself again a handsome young fellow with a life of luxury within easy reach as the adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter but refusing it because of his sympathy for the struggling peo- ple. He saw himself again a shepherd watching a bush burn with a mysterious fire and hearing a voice which spoke of social obligation, until he turned aside from a life of security and ease to one of hardship and danger. He saw himself again facing Pharaoh on the banks of the Nile and call- ing upon him to let the oppressed people go, when he knew it might cost him his head. He saw him- selt hated and reviled by the thoughtless Israelites whom he was striving to serve, because they were blind and unbelieving. He saw it all—the long, hard years of struggle, yet here he was doomed to die in the desert! “Thou shalt not go over.” But he was still looking ahead from his moun- tain top of vision over into the land of promise. 69 Where Do You Liver There it was as real as life! There was the Jordan Valley with its green fields and waving palm trees! There were the mountains round about the site of Jerusalem even as the Lord is round about his people! There was Hebron to the south where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were buried as a kind of pledge that their descendants would inherit the land! There were Ebal and Gerizim to the north, twin peaks rising up into a natural amphitheatre for the enacting of a great spiritual drama! There it was, a veritable land of promise! It was no will-o’-the-wisp, no empty dream, which he had been pursuing all those years. It was all there! He might die in the desert without ever setting foot in it, but other men would follow the trail he had blazed and enter into the joy of their Lord. He had seen it with his eyes. Some of you are disturbed at times by visions of that which has never been yours. You want a more complete physical efficiency, not for self- indulgence, but for the better service of those interests which you count supreme. You want a more complete mental unfolding, for you feel stirring within you the capacity for high and seri- ous thought. You want a more perfect companion- ship with those who know you for what you are in a finer congeniality of taste and interest. You want a soul, truer, cleaner, kindlier than this troubled soul of yours which comes up weary and 70 V—Challenge of the Unattained travel-stained from the rough contacts of the week. You hold all that before your mind’s eye and say, ‘““That is what I wanted to be and to do.” Then you contrast it with your actual achieve- ments and you are filled with disappointment. But thank God that you have seen it and wanted it! It is not what a man has done which marks him up or down on the books God keeps. It is what he has wanted to do and has tried to do, even though he failed. Die in the desert if you must, but hold the vision of something beyond and strive for it. On every college campus there is always a cer- tain percentage of young people who never amount to anything, chiefly because they have always had pretty much everything they wanted brought to them on a silver tray. Life is not the ability to sit down and order what you want and have somebody bring it to you. Life is wanting something desperately and going out after it your- self and feeling anxious about it and finally bring- ing it in. If every young chap had to live for a year or two on ten dollars a week and earn it himself, it would transform a lot of lazy parasites into useful members of the social order. Here we are, men and women, citizens of the Republic, holding fast our faith that government of the people, by the people, for the people, is the 71 Where Do You Live? finest form of political organization on earth. What a magnificent ideal! Then look at the politi- cal life of two-thirds of our American cities! How are they governed? How far has society shown itself able to select and place in power those best men, best in personal character, best in judgment, best in civic efficiency, whose right it is to rule! How far are “the powers that be” ordained of God to the high ends of order and justice, to the high ends of honesty, economy and efficiency! The very asking of such a question in many an American city would sound grotesque. We are still in the desert of Moab. Here we are participants in an economic sys- tem, buyers and sellers, producers and consumers, employers and employees! What a high and holy task to be set to furnish food and fuel, clothing and shelter, education and recreation to meet the needs of those created in the likeness and image of God! We are purveyors to the children of the king. We are here to make business a social util- ity, a means of bringing together the resources of earth and the needs of society. We are here to make the commerce of the world a noble section of the spiritual life of the race and not the selfish squabble of hungry animals for the best bones. The spirit of greed, the habit of exploiting others, the readiness of the strong to profit by the weak- ness of the less fortunate, should have no more place in this sacred process of ministering to the 72 V—Challenge of the Unattained necessities of the race than it would have at the altars of religion—it would be economic blas- phemy. Then look at the workaday world as it really is! Alas, we are away out in the desert of Moab! Here we are in the presence of an educational system stretching from the kindergarten to the university! It is there to offer opportunity for an older and wiser generation to bring out of its treasures things new and old, the best it has seen and felt, the best it has thought and known, for the development and maturing of moral person- ality in all these younger candidates for human existence. What a high and holy thing education is when it is construed in terms of life! We think of schools where all the students are eager and as- piring, none of them listless and cynical. We think of schools where all the teachers are competent and interesting—I do not say entertaining, for any clown or clever story teller can be that—com- petent and interesting in their power to enlist the interest of others in the subjects they are set to teach. Then look at the moods and the methods which prevail in great sections of our educational sys- tem! Look at the disappointing output of the sys- tem as measured in terms of the moral values! Charles W. Eliot of Harvard said once: “The failure of our public schools to turn out good citi- 73 Where Do You Live? zens is conspicuous. We shall have to look it squarely in the face.” The coming of the Great War in Central Eu- rope caused those people who lightly believed that science and secular education quite divorced from religion would usher in the millennium to hang their heads. They thought, as someone has suggested, that “it is the Laboratory rather than the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world.” But their scheme did not work—it never will because the task is too great for it. “The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” is the only form of energy in heaven above or on the earth beneath qualified to undertake the spir- itual renewal of mankind. Science is not enough. It was the most scientific and the most highly educated nation on earth which led off in the greatest single disaster the world has ever suffered. We saw the frightful in- adequacy of our present educational methods there revealed like a jagged flash of lightning across the sky. We are still away back in the deserts of Moab! But thank God we have seen it all, as no other generation ever has! We have not gone over. We have not been able to put it across. We know full well the limitations of our present political, indus- trial and educational methods. We have gained, however, a vision of what this 74 V—Challenge of the Unattained highly organized life dominated by intelligence, conscience and the love of God could be made to mean in its ministry to human well-being. Fail- ure has not made us indifferent—it has only served to stimulate us to more resolute action. This wandering in the desert of Moab is prepara- tory to something better. We are sowing that others may reap. We are laying foundations which scarcely show above the ground as yet, on which others will build the city of God. We may or we may not enter in ourselves, but we are determined to live in the vision and. service of a great ideal. 75 Vi The Failures of Success ‘© CERTAIN rich man said to himself, “Thou hast goods laid up for many years. Take thine ease! Eat, drink and be merry.’ But God said to him, “Thou fool.’ ”’ It seemed like a hard thing to say! No man likes to be called a fool—it cuts to the quick. And this man’s friends regarded him as anything but a fool. He was an active, successful business man. He had been making money right and left. His fellow townsmen “pointed with pride” to his achievements. They urged their sons, no doubt, to emulate the example of one who had “put it across.” He was a rich man and he does not seem to have been a bad man. No vices or crimes are laid at his door. There is no hint that he had gotten a penny of his money dishonestly. He did not understand life—that was all. He was altogether astray in his sense of values. He thought that a man’s life consists in the abundance of the things that he owns. Any man who thinks that is defec- tive. So the Lord looked him over east side, west 76 V I—tThe Failures of Success side, all around the block, outside and inside, and told him frankly that he was a fool. Notice the nature of this man’s folly—it was divided into three parts, like all Gaul in ancient times! He measured life in terms of material ac- cumulation. He was intent on making “his pile,” as we say, and when he had finished, that was all it was, a pile of things. He built barns and filled them with things. Then he built bigger barns and filled them with more things. When his buildings were all filled to the eaves, he said to himself, “Take thine ease! Eat, drink, enjoy yourself! You have things enough laid up to last you a thousand years.” Any man who treats life in that fashion is a down- right fool. I hardly ever walk down Fifth Avenue, New York, looking into the store windows, without saying to myself, “How many things there are in the world which I do not want.” All my life I have been what Fifth Avenue would call a poor man, yet I cannot think of a single thing that I really need that I haven’t got. The list of things which I do not own would fill the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but I have all I need for growth, for usefulness, for happiness. What more need any- one ask! Yet I see hundreds of thousands of peo- ple working their heads off and worrying their 77 Where Do You Live? hearts out to increase their holdings of things which they do not need. This man lived altogether in the first person singular—that was as far as he had gotten in his grammar. “My barns,” “my goods,” my chance to have a good time! He had never learned to say ‘Cour.’ Our world—for all these resources were placed here at the call of energy and intelligence for the general welfare of mankind! Our life—all hands are meant to share in its advance! Our Father, yours, mine, everybody’s, for we are all children of the Most High. “When ye pray, say, Our!” When you live say “Our!” No man has learned to live until he has social sympathy and a sense of responsibility for the welfare of others. When this man saw his wealth piling up he said, “What shall I do? I have no room to bestow all my goods.” No room, with all the hunger there was waiting to be fed! No room, with all those struggling peo- ple in the slums of our cities! No room, with all those promising boys and girls needing a friendly lift to get an education! No room, with all those good causes which spell civilization held back for lack of support! The Master was right—he was a thoughtless, heartless fool. The man also forgot that he had only a life — estate in all those things. He said to himself, 78 ViI—tThe Failures of Success “Take thine ease, thou hast goods laid up for many years.” But God said to him, “This night thy soul shall be required of thee—then whose shall those things be?” Not his—he could not take a penny of his wealth with him! And his wealth would be a doubtful legacy for his children if he had not given them any better social vision or any firmer hold of reality than he showed. It was only a life estate at best and a single turn of the wheel made short shrift of his fancied security. He said, “many years,” but the march of events said, “this night” will end it. The hour comes swiftly—it is not far away for any of us—when the one question before the house will be not, ““How much have I,” but “What am 1?” How much peace and worth is there in my personal make-up? How many other lives have been enriched by my influence? How far has the kingdom of God on earth been advanced by my efforts? These straight questions will take prece- dence over all others. The barns and the banks full of things will be like the toys which a child discards when he gains his maturity. The man held all these things in trust, but his heart had never been attuned to the wave lengths of feeling which were being broadcast from all those struggling lives awaiting some friendly action. The air was filled with radio messages of appeal, but this selfish worldling never heard any 79 Where Do You Live? of them. He lived to eat and drink and have a good time—now in one short, dark night his chance to do what he might have done so gener- ously was gone. He found himself at daybreak stripped of his possessions and shivering upon the brink of an eternal world for which he felt himself totally unfit. He had been rich in barns, but for all that he was a fool. The man also left God out of the account. Here he stood with paper and pencil figuring up his assets. So many barns and so many things in each one! So many stocks and bonds and other securi- ties! He set them down in long columns of figures, like a man making his return for the income tax. He owned all that and he called that success. He called it “Success” with a capital “S,” the biggest capital S in the whole font of type. But God, the Author and Giver of every good gift, God, the Helper and Finisher of these incom- plete lives of ours, was not in all his thoughts. “His ground brought forth plentifully,” and his eyes were altogether on the “ground”—he had never learned to look up or to claim his kinship with the Most High. What a tragedy to leave out that which is the crown and glory of human existence! In one of his stories Victor Hugo describes the laughter of a soul at itself. The man had decided to live a care- less, godless life. When he had gained a generous 80 VI—tThe Failures of Success measure of outward success, he looked one day in the glass and saw nothing there but a shrewd, selfish animal. Then he heard his own soul laugh- ing in derision at what he called “success.” It was a bitter, mocking laugh like the laughter of devils over the moral ruin they had brought about. “So is every one,” Jesus said, “who is not rich toward God” when night comes. Life is no mere pile of things. Life is friend- ship! Friendship with the men around us, with men less fortunate whom we can help, with men above us whom it is a high privilege to know! Life is friendship with him who can renew, transform and enrich these lives of ours! And that is exactly what religion is, for religion is just life at its best; and life at its best cannot be lived without the sense of fellowship with him who looks into our eyes and says, “I call you friends.” This man in the story was a fool in that he measured life in terms of material accumulation. He forgot that he had only a life estate at best. He was not the friend of God, for he left God out of the account. If that mode of life is folly, what is wisdom? “Where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding? It cannot be gotten for gold nor weighed out for silver. The sea says, It is not in me, and the deep says, It is not with me. Where then shall wisdom be found? . . . God 81 Where Do You Liver knoweth the place thereof and to every man he saith, Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.” To live a reverent and obedient life, an upright and use- ful life, that is sound sense and there is no sense in any other mode of life. Let every man put first things first and rest his weight where the emphasis is deserved! That is wisdom! We cannot live without him. Life without him is not life, it is the death of that which is highest in human nature. “Whither shall I go from thy presence or flee from thy spirit?” If I ascend up into heaven on the wings of aspiration, He is there. If I make my bed in hell by some wretched form of wrongdoing, He is there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there his hand will lead me and his right hand will hold me. If I say, surely the darkness of a shady life will cover me, even the night shall be light about me. The light and the dark are both alike to him. “In the beginning God,”—and all through these changing lives of ours that same sense of a Divine Presence! For our help and guidance, if we are striving to do his will; for our rebuke and final defeat, if we are headed wrong! “Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.” The main asset in any life is to be found not in the abundance of the things possessed but in 82 V I—The Failures of Success certain qualities of mind and heart. It is to be found in one’s power to respond to great princi- ples and great ideals, to great books, great music, great scenes in nature. It is to be found in the love of family and friends, of country and of God. To do all this and to do it well is to live. And it is nothing less than tragic that millions of people _ face the whole world order which supports them with no other thought than that of making out of it all they can for themselves. It is just as Harry Emerson Fosdick said re- cently: “In the Sixteenth Century, the great con- flict in the world’s life centered in the church—it was the day of the Protestant Reformation. In the Eighteenth Century, the great conflict in the world’s life centered in politics—it was the day for a new birth of democracy in the French and the American Revolutions. In the Twentieth Cen- tury, the great conflict of the world’s life will center in Economics.” We are concerned most of all in bringing the whole industrial order under the rule of moral purpose. We are unwilling to go on building barns and banks and filling barns and banks with things, unless at the same time we are filling all these busy streets with manhood and womanhood of a higher type. History tells us that an excess of money, leisure and pleasure at one end of the social scale, means 83 Where Do You Live? an excess of drudgery and misery at the other end. That is the way the social teeterboard works. Whole families have gone down in moral defeat under the weight of bitter, hopeless, degrading poverty. And whole families have gone down in defeat because of the temptations which great wealth brings. Would anyone say that the morals of Fifth Avenue are any better than the morals of Main Street? The rich people are not all bad and the poor people are not all good—nor would that statement be true the other way round. It is hard to say which class thinks the most about things, those who have them or those who haven’t them yet want them oftentimes more than they want anything else on earth. But whether the things owned are many or few, we cannot have a Christian civilization until we measure success by some better standard than that of material accu- mulation. Life is not made up of things—life is faith and hope and love finding expression in finer conduct. I have been dealing with this short story of a man who did not understand life mainly in terms of personal experience. How directly also it bears upon the life of a nation! Here in this broad land of ours, with resources unparalleled, men have shown themselves amazingly competent in han- dling the materials of human well-being. We have 84 VI—tThe Failures of Success shown ourselves able to build barns and build them bigger, able to fill them with things and fill them faster, than any other set of men on earth. But when we come to the adjustment of human relations in industry, in political action, in com- munity life, we have oftentimes been woefully clumsy. We are rich in materials for self-indul- gence—we are not so well-to-do in those qualities of mind and heart which make a nation rich toward God. Here are great sections of our organized life where men are putting first that which is not first. We cannot build a civilization which will stand or a social order fit to live in on the basis of un- restrained self-interest or the spirit of self-indul- gence. And if this white civilization of ours is not to bring up with a smash, with another smash, which might possibly be the end of it, there must come a finer spirit of consideration for our fellows in the workaday world. There must come also more democratic meth- ods in the control of our great industries. There must come a more equitable distribution of the good things of life between those who toil mainly with their heads and those who toil mainly with their hands. There must come a steadier exalta- tion of the human values at stake in this huge economic process. There must come a wider and a more complete dominance of the mind that was in Christ. And the needed advance along that high 85 Where Do You Liver and hard road of social redemption cannot be made by men who are fools—it can only be made by men who know what life really is. The great historians of the Roman Empire, Gibbon, Mommsen, Ferrero, all agree that the © five main contributing causes which led to the downfall of Rome were these: The prevalence of luxury, which ate out the moral fiber of the more fortunate class and destroyed the simpler Stoic virtues of an earlier day! The frequency of divorce, which undermined the stability of the family, which was Rome’s best contribution to the civilization of that period! Excessive taxation, which discouraged thrift and clogged the wheels of industry! Men said, as they are saying now, “Tf the government is to take it all anyway, what is the use?” The cheapening of citizenship by the importation into the body politic of great num- bers of slaves and of foreigners with lower civic standards! The killing off of great numbers of strong, brave, public-spirited young men in their incessant wars. When these forces had been operating for several generations, Rome’s powers of resistance were lowered to the danger point— when the hard test came she went down with a crash. How far are these forces operating today in our own American life? Four of them at least are very much in evidence. We too have much to 86 VI—tThe Failures of Success | fear from the prevalence of thoughtless, showy luxury and from the frequency of divorce, from the economic effect of excessive taxation and from the lowering of the standards of citizenship. If this Republic is to endure, to advance and to fulfill the high destiny to which we believe it is called of God, there must come here among us a renewed emphasis upon those lines of thought, of feeling and of action which are imperative for maintaining the spiritual forces of society at their full vigor and of the right quality. ‘Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom” for men and for nations—‘“‘and to depart from evil is understand- ing.” Here was One who was not a fool. He under- stood life. He owed almost nothing to the material side of human existence. He was born in a stable, lived the life of a peasant and died upon a cross. Yet somehow he was rich beyond any other who ever walked this common earth. Rich in that sense of inner peace and worth! Rich in human sym- pathy and in kindly action! Rich in faith and hope and love! And the truth he taught, the grace he brought, and the life he gave, have done more to cleanse and ennoble human existence than any other sin- gle influence which can be named. He stands be- fore men today saying as he said of old, “I am come that ye might have life and have it more 87 Where Do You Liver abundantly.” But we can only have it upon his terms—and here are the terms! “If thou wouldst enter into life, keep the commandments!” “If any man would be my disciple” and learn to live, “let him deny himself and take up his cross and fol- low!” 88 Vil The Study of Religion **CNTUDY to show thyself approved unto God.” These words are taken from a letter written by an old man to a young man. The older man was not just setting sail, as so many of you are doing—he was coming into port, for the last time, as the event proved, so far as earthly voyages went. He had already visited all the countries which the younger man had seen and many more besides. He too had felt the urge of hot desire, the bite and sting of temptation as the younger man was feeling them now. He had come straight through the year without missing a single month, spring, summer, autumn, winter. Here away late in December he was summing up his whole phi- losophy of life. He was talking with that young fellow in no supercilious, patronizing fashion, but “man to man,” about the serious business of living. “Endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ,” he said. Submit to all those disciplines which mean added efficiency. Not by dodging dif- ficulties but by overcoming them do men attain. ‘Watch in all things and make full proof of thy 89 Where Do You Liver service’—keep your eyes open and your mind on your job that you may make your life an asset, not a liability, when society strikes a trial balance. © “Stir up the gift of God that is in thee’’—discover and utilize the hidden capacity for something finer than these surface activities which oftentimes are no better than empty gestures. And in order that you may do this with some measure of success, “study to show thyself approved unto God.” Three things he suggests—the habit of study, the power of discrimination,—“rightly dividing the word of truth”—and the divine appraisal of one’s work,—“approved unto God.” Let me speak of them in order. First, the habit of study! I am not here to make a general appeal for the duty and value of honest manly study in those fields where your courses lie. The men who are set to teach those subjects will attend to all that; and if you fail to give heed to their insistence upon hard work, you may find yourself, when the day of reckoning comes in the final examination, on the left-hand side of the great white throne numbered with the goats. All that can safely be left to your instructors. I am here to utter a plain, straight word about the im- portance of studying religion, as one of the great main interests of human life. Religion has to do with those values which are supreme and lasting, the spiritual values, the 90 VII—Study of Religion character values, the quality and direction of a man’s inner life. It has to do with the most exalted and rewarding form of fellowship open to men anywhere, the sense of fellowship between these finite spirits of ours and the Infinite Spirit of Him who is above all. It has to do with the final goal of all our efforts, the establishment upon earth of what we call “the kingdom of heaven,” the rule of the divine spirit in our human affairs. Here are interests beside which the bridging of a river or the sinking of a shaft, the building of a huge department store or the erection of a factory for the manufacture of things, becomes of second- ary importance. Religion deals directly with life, the meaning of it, the full realization of it, the possible destiny of it. In view of the fact that religion has to do with interests so vital one would suppose that men would see instantly that religious questions can- not be settled offhand between the bites of a quick lunch, or while one burns up a cigarette. Alas, no! The men who can settle all the great questions of religion without ever having studied the subject and with only those fragments of breath left over from cooling their broth, are like the sands of the sea for multitude. It might be added, they are like the sands of the sea in other respects. But there they are! They have to be OI Where Do You Live? reckoned with and they are often busily engaged in urging others to join their ranks and to deal with religion in the same superficial manner. Several years ago we had on the Campus at Yale the melancholy spectacle of a young man who wrote for the various college publications with vigor if not always with discretion. The vigor of his style varied inversely according to the square of the measure of his insight. The less he knew the louder he wrote. It was said of him that “the chip on his shoulder had become a perma- nent growth” like a stubborn corn on one’s toe. He dealt frequently with the subject of religion, College Chapel, Christian work in Dwight Hall, the personal faith of students and of faculty mem- bers who regarded themselves as Christians. He told us in one of his deliverances that in these days no man could be regarded as intellectually honest who professed to be a Christian and yet failed to believe in “the Doctrine of the Immacu- late Conception,” as he called it. He had never read enough to know that the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is not a Protestant doctrine, that it has never been held by any branch of the Protestant Church, that it has nothing whatever to do with the manner of the birth of Jesus Christ. It is a Roman Catholic doctrine formulated in 1854 under Pope Pius IX and it has to do entirely with the manner of the birth of Mary. He did not know that, although it 92 V1II—Study of Religion is a mere commonplace to anyone who has ever studied the Christian religion. He then proceeded to tell us that no one could be intellectually sincere and be a member of the Christian church without believing in that doc- trine. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Peter and Paul and all the rest of them here in the New Testament, would have been a good deal surprised to learn that they had been read out of the Chris- tian church by a young man here at Yale because they did not believe in “the doctrine of the Im- maculate Conception,” a doctrine of which no one of them has a word to say and of which appar- ently no one of them had ever heard. Now if this exhibition of religious illiteracy stood alone, it would be pathetic but not perhaps significant. Unfortunately it is just a sample of that sort of dogmatic ignorance frequently dis- played by untaught men who undertake publicly to discredit the claims of religion without even taking the trouble to ascertain the meaning of the terms they use. We have reached that point of intellectual seri- ousness in most fields where the only man who is accorded the right to express an opinion worthy of thoughtful consideration is a man who has studied the subject. We have reached that point in law and in economics, in physics and in chemis- try. If any man should undertake to write articles or to give public addresses on physics or chemis- 93 Where Do You Liver try without having studied the subject, he would be simply making an indecent intellectual expo- sure of himself. When any man undertakes to write articles or to make speeches about religion without having studied the subject, his perform- ances are equally distressing to all those who have any sense of propriety. I am not here making an appeal for this set of religious beliefs or for that, for my own theologi- cal opinions or for some other man’s—I am mak- ing a plea for intellectual honesty, seriousness and thoroughness on the part of college trained men in dealing with religion, which is so vital to personal character and social well-being. No other single force can be named which has entered so widely, so continuously, so powerfully into the renewal of man’s moral nature, into the shaping of his ulti- mate ideals and into the formation of character, as that sense of contact and fellowship between the human and the divine which we call religion. You cannot call anyone educated who has not studied that subject sufficiently to warrant him in having an intelligent opinion. Here you are making up your mind what will be your personal attitude toward religion! Will you be an adherent, an opponent, or merely a man on the fence? Have the mental honesty to earn your right to make an intelligent decision, instead of doing it on hearsay and chit chat! 94 VII—Study of Religion You are deciding, for example, whether you will believe in God or in some other interpretation of the world order where we find ourselves! Look into the basis and implications of that faith as intelligent men hold it! Read such books as Hock- ing’s The Meaning of God in Human Experience, William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, John Fiske’s, Through Nature to God, Borden P. Bowne’s Philosophy of Theism, Douglass C. Mac- Intosh’s The Reasonableness of Christianity! They are all written in popular rather than in technical style. Ascertain how far that faith in God is grounded in reason and reinforced by the experience of thoughtful, aspiring men through long periods of time and over wide areas of reflec- tion. Then you will at least understand the mean- ing of the terms employed and know something as to what can be said for or against that inter- pretation of the world order. You want to adopt a reasonable attitude toward that spiritual exercise called “prayer.” “Is prayer a force or a farce?” It was not a minister of reli- gion, it was Charles W. Eliot, the former presi- dent of Harvard University, a man trained in early life as a chemist, familiar therefore with the scientific method, who said, “Prayer is the trans- cendent act of human intelligence.” He felt that the human mind stands on its highest level of privilege and function when a man prays. How strange it is that thousands of people 95 Where Do You Live? undertake to pass upon the value of prayer with- out even learning the meaning of the term! There are any number of little children running about, aged all the way from five to fifty, uttering their innocent prattle about prayer. They seem to think that it is the act of a skillful beggar undertaking to get something for nothing by making a few appealing gestures or by uttering a few fervent sobs. They think that when a man prays, he must feel that he can manipulate all the forces of earth and sky in his own interest just because he is on his knees. Study the subject before you make bold to say that there is nothing in it! You may be led by study and experience to feel that if a man asks, he will receive, that if he seeks, he will find. Learn something about the methods of that mysterious prayer-force, silent and mysterious like the power of gravitation (in which everyone believes—the nature of which no one understands). Study until you know something as to how that prayer-force operates and works out its beneficent results in human experience. Read Fosdick’s The Meaning of Prayer, a little book which an eminent layman in Boston has told us recently entirely revolutionized his way of thinking and changed the whole quality of his inner life. Read the book called Prayer, by Streeter and others, a group of Oxford profes- sors who make their approach to this subject from 96 VIIi—Study of Religion various angles, historical, psychological, philo- sophical, scientific. Then when you talk about prayer or think about it, or pray yourself, you will not be merely beating and heating the air. You will know what you are talking about and what you are doing. This is my first plea, for that mental honesty, seriousness and thoroughness which we give to other vital interests of human life. Study religion that you may know the truth _ which makes men free. In the second place, the habit of discrimination —“Rightly dividing the word of truth!” You may hear some noisy exhorter saying, “I believe in the whole Bible from cover to cover, every word of it and every syllable, as the infallible word of God.” His language is the language of the pro- moter or the auctioneer, claiming more for his wares than the facts warrant, with the idea that when the inevitable scaling down takes place in the minds of his hearers, they will reach an ap- proximation of the truth. It is a method which must be offensive to Him who said, ‘I am the truth.” Here in the Bible are recorded the words of the devil—they are not the word of God, for, as the Bible itself says, the devil has been a liar from the beginning. Here are the words of bad men who spoke to deceive and in- jure others—their words are not the word of God. Here are the words of good men, but some of 97 Where Do You Liver them lived in a period of immature religious de- velopment. They wrote as they saw and they saw through a glass darkly. We have this whole heavenly treasure of divine truth in earthen ves- sels and the truth often takes shape and color and odor from the vessel which contains it. Now it is the duty of the intelligent man, who has studied his subject, rightly to divide the word of truth. He separates that which is merely local in its meaning and application from that which is universal in its scope. He separates that which is temporary, the best that was felt and known and practiced at that time, from that which is worthy to abide because it is timeless. He separates that which is merely incidental from that which is vital and essential. He rightly divides the word of truth. The Bible is not one solid block of inspired truth in all of its sixty-six books which stretch over a period of more than a thousand years of mental and spiritual development. The Bible is a record of the progressive revelation which God made of Himself through the religious experiences of a people chosen for their spiritual capacity. It is the business of intelligence rightly to divide this word of truth, so that we may see the various portions of it in their true perspective. Near things as near in their bearing and application, remote things as remote! Truths at the center of the picture as vital, things off to one side as 98 VII—Study of Religion merely incidental! When we do that, we shall find here that truth which is “a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path,” making us wise unto salva- tion and furnishing us with motive and guidance for all good work. Here in these writings, which have become classic in the field of character building, are principles and ideals which will outlast the stars— they are final words! “Love one another as I have loved you!” “Ye therefore shall be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.” ‘““May Christ dwell in your hearts by faith until you are filled with all the fulness of God.” These are final words—they leave nothing more to be said or desired! Here are portrayals of moral excellence which have power to command human aspiration at its best and lead it on! Men follow these portrayals and find them flying goals, forever in the lead. Here are conceptions of the divine before which reason and conscience on the highest levels known to us have bowed in glad allegiance for nineteen hundred years and will continue to bow! They do not lie on the surface—fools and wayfaring men, as they hurry by, may miss them altogether; but they are the sure reward of insight, judgment, discrimination. Study until you can rightly divide that word of truth. Let religion be judged as other great interests are judged, “by its power to contribute to the 99 Where Do You Liver well rounded development of joyous existence.” “By their fruits ye shall know.” It was the Mas- ter of all the higher values who proposed this pragmatic test, the test of experience, the test which comes from the ability or the inability of the thing under scrutiny to work out satisfactory results. By this test we judge the claims of music, of art, of literature. We are content that religion should stand or fall by the same test, by its power to contribute to that well-rounded development of human existence. The working power of any be- lief or of any interest must have weight when we come to pass upon its validity. And the only man who can apply that test for himself is the man who has studied his subject with discrimination. Finally, seek the divine appraisal upon your work—‘“Study to show thyself approved unto God.” Here in a council of wise men assembled long ago was one man who had taken his doctor’s de- gree in the law. He was a “Doctor of Laws.” His name was Gamaliel, and he was so just, so reason- able, so broad-minded in his determinations that he was held in high honor by all the people. When he was called upon to pass upon the claims of the Christian religion, of which he was not at that time a personal adherent, his word was this: “Let these men alone! If this counsel be of men, it will 100 VII—Study of Religion come to naught. But if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it, lest haply ye be found fighting against God.” Then he supported his decision, as a good lawyer would, by citing a list of historical precedents. His method was sound. If all these beliefs, aspirations, practices of Christian people in this age and in all the ages past, are mere human devices for satisfying personal whims, then they will pass as all such devices have passed. “The little systems have their day, they have their day and cease to be.” But if these beliefs, aspirations, practices, have behind them and within them the lift and urge of the great moral order which enfolds us as surely and as steadily as the physical order which en- folds us; if these beliefs, aspirations and practices lie within the will and purpose of the Eternal who is above all, then we cannot overthrow them, lest haply we be found fighting against God. When men fight against God, they go down in defeat. And it is your business and mine, by study and by living on the highest levels open to us, to learn how far religion has its sanction in that moral order that we may show ourselves approved unto God. It was one of our leading American preachers who said not long ago: “I cannot believe that the law and order of things fails at the top. I cannot IOI Where Do You Live? believe that while we live in a real world in our physical relationships and in a true world in our mental action, that we live in a lie or a vacuum in the insights and confidences of the soul.” He would have every man study until by his own growth in knowledge, in judgment and in all the profounder experiences of life, he might feel him- self approved unto God. “J appeal to Caesar,” a man once cried, when he was arraigned for taking a certain position in accordance with his own religious convictions. “I appeal to Caesar!” I appeal to the highest! He would carry his case up from those lower provin- cial courts to the highest tribunal in the Roman empire, and get a Supreme Court decision upon its merits. He appealed to Caesar—so do I! So must we all! What does the highest have to say about reli- gion? What does the highest in these natures of ours, the highest in history, Jesus Christ, the high- est in the whole scale of being, have to say touch- ing the habit of worship and the value of prayer, the enthronement of conscience and the exalta- tion of the spirit of service, the locating of our supreme good not in outer things but in inner worth and the feeling of loyalty to the Master? What does the highest have to say on these points? You know full well. When our minds are clearest, when our hearts are purest, when our wills are most firmly set to do His will, then these 102 VII—Study of Religion great spiritual verities become the most real and commanding facts in our whole experience. Study to show thyself approved unto God, for that will bring into your life the sense of peace and of power and of plenty. 103 Vill What Is That to Thee? E find here in the last chapter of the fourth Gospel a boatload of men who had been fishing all night on the Sea of Galilee. They were cold and hungry and cross. The wind blows chill across that lake in early Spring—and this was at Easter time. Men who have been out on the water all night are always hungry. And any man who has fished all night or all day without catching anything—‘“and that night they caught nothing”—is cross. They were cold and hungry and cross. But just at daybreak in the gray, uncertain light, they saw a figure moving yonder on the shore. Presently a voice called out, “Have you caught anything?” As we say, “What luck?” “Have you any meat?” They answered, “No.” Then the voice came again, “Cast your net on the right side of the boat.” They were fishing in the wrong place, fishing out of the wrong side of the boat. Now when they cast their net in obedi- ence to that voice, they made a wonderful catch. They could scarcely draw their net for the multi- tude of fishes. 104 VI1I—tThe Vital and the Trivial The men in that boat had enjoyed similar ex- periences in the months that were gone and in- stantly they linked up that catch of fish with what they had known of Jesus of Nazareth. They looked at one another and said, “It is the Lord.” It was the Lord! He knew where to fish, just as he knew so many other things which have to do with human well-being. And when Peter, the leader of the group, realized that it was the Lord, he could not wait for them to draw their net and land their fish. He jumped overboard and swam ashore to be the first to greet his Lord. Impulsive always—he acted first and thought it over later! When the men in that boat came ashore, draw- ing the net with the fishes, they found a fire of coals with fish broiling and bread toasting for their breakfast. They sat down around that camp- fire to break bread with him who is the Bread of Life. Why has no great artist given us a splendid canvas of “The Last Breakfast”? We have won- derful pictures of “The Last Supper’”—The Last Breakfast also was full of spiritual suggestion. When the seven men had eaten and were smil- ing again, Jesus began to ask them about their feeling for him. “Lovest thou me?” Three times over the answer of Peter came back clear and firm,—‘“Lord, thou knowest that I love thee.” Then Jesus gave them that threefold commission —‘‘Feed my lambs. Feed my sheep. Tend my 105 Where Do You Live? sheep.” He also added a prophetic word touching the hardship in store for Peter. “When thou wert young, thou didst gird thyself and walk whither thou wouldst. When thou art old, others shall gird thee and carry thee whither thou wouldst not. This he said signifying by what death Peter should glorify God.” Now by all the rules of art the scene should end right there! You cannot add anything to it— it has reached a splendid climax! The cold, the hunger and the disappointment of those men re- placed by food and warmth and good cheer! Their fine, frank declaration of love for the Mas- ter and their joy in his presence! The high com- mission for an exalted service and that sure word of prophecy touching the showing they would make in the face of danger! Let the curtain fall— the clock has struck twelve! But no! The men who wrote the Bible were honest men and they drew the thing as they saw it for the God of things as they are. They painted men as they found them, warts, wrinkles, blem- ishes and all. Swift on the heels of that glowing word of Christ came an ill-advised remark from Peter and then a foolish question. Peter asked a great many foolish questions. He did it, the record says, “because he wist not what to say.” There are people who, when they do not know what to say, promptly open their mouths 106 VitI—The Vital and the Trivial and say it. When they do not know what to do, they go right out and do it. Peter was one of them. When he heard what was in store for him, he looked at John and said, ‘Lord, what shall this man do?” What kind of a time will he have! Will his role in the advancing kingdom be any easier than mine? And that was none of Peter’s affair. The Lord looked him straight in the eyes and said: “What is that to thee? Follow thou me.” What will this man do and that man and the man across the aisle? What is the meaning of this item in the great world process and of that and of some other odd bit? How many foolish ques- tions men ask by way of excusing themselves from some exacting obligation! Let me notice some of those questions which the lawyers would call “‘in- competent, irrelevant and immaterial.” First, questions of belief! We have made some headway here. When I spoke at student confer- ences or religious forums thirty years ago and questions were allowed at the close of the address, someone was sure to ask: “Where did Cain get his wife? How did the whale manage to swallow Jonah and keep him down for three days without digesting him? How did those devils pass from the body of the man in Gadara into the bodies of the swine?” I have wasted a lot of breath which would have cooled my porridge replying to such 107 Where Do You Live? queries. We may thank God that those questions for the most part have been buried beyond any hope of a resurrection. But other questions equally trivial have taken their places. How can we reconcile the account of the Creation in the first chapter of Genesis with the facts of science and with our belief in evolu- tion? How can the Bible be the inspired word of God when there are apparently discrepancies in some of its own statements? What about the Vir- gin Birth? What about a personal devil? What about the second coming of Christ? When and how will he come and will we be caught up to meet the Lord in the air? These questions have had a prominent place in the public prints during the last few years. When these inquiries fall upon the ears of thoughtful men, they feel like saying, “What is all that to thee? Follow him!” Bring your own life into obedience to the highest you see and along that line of a clear, firm loyalty to Jesus Christ the really vital problems will be solved. If any man has the will to do what he believes to be his will, he shall know all that he needs to know for life and service. When some of these questions are asked, how strong and fine seems the modest reticence of the men who wrote the Bible! Take that first sentence 108 VilI—The Vital and the Trivial in it—‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” How long ago? When did it all happen? The author was too wise to suggest any date—he did not know, any more than men know today. Some men seeking to be wise beyond their powers have tried to fix the date. Doctor John Lightfoot, vice chancellor of the University of Cambridge in England, one of the most eminent Hebrew scholars in his day, declared that as a result of the most careful and exhaustive study of the Scriptures it had been shown that God created the world in the year 4004 B.c. on the twenty- eighth day of October at nine o’clock in the fore- noon. He had figured it all out as definitely as the statements of a time-table on the railroad. He named October, because he said it was apparent that it occurred in the autumn when apples were ripe, in view of the statements made in the chap- ter which follows about Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit. We smile at his simplicity today just as men one hundred years from now will smile at some of our dogmatism both in religion and in science. When was man created? Six thousand years ago? A million years ago? Ten million years ago, as one scientific man undertook to say recently? What does it matter? What are five or ten mil- lions of years more or less among friends! The 109 Where Do You Liver man who wrote that first verse in the Bible was too wise to enter upon any question of dates. “In the beginning God created man in his own like- ness and image,” the only created being, so far as we know, with capacity for spiritual fellowship with his Maker. There he left it. How did God create the world? By a quick succession of creative acts as a carpenter might build a garage in a couple of days, or by a long, patient process of creative evolution? Again the writer does not say. He has the sense of reserve. His words suggest rather the process. “Let the earth bring forth herbs bearing seed and trees bearing fruit, each after its kind! Let the waters bring forth abundantly moving creatures that have life’! Let them do it—it was to come ap- parently by the operation of certain resident forces in the earth and in the waters themselves. And his thought was that the earliest forms of animal life were the marine forms rather than land animals, which is in agreement with the best we know today. The first chapter of Genesis is a stately poem rather than a scientific document. In the begin- ning, God! Back of all these changing phe- nomena, God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, the Infinite and Eternal Energy from whom all things proceed. The author placed at the center and foundation of the universe, Being, Personality, Intelligent Purpose, a Benign IIo VitI—tThe Vital and the Trivial Will. And into the question of dates and details, he was too wise to enter. What about the Virgin Birth? How did Jesus enter this life of ours? Did he have but one human parent or did he have two, as all the rest of us have? What does it matter? However he came, he was what he was. Whatever the mode of his birth, his impress upon the higher life of the race has been as we all know it. We do not rest our faith in his divinity upon the method of his physical birth but upon his qualities of mind and heart, upon the redemptive energy he has shown in saving men from their sins. Flesh and blood has not revealed it unto us, but the Father who is in heaven, by those inner experiences which the coming of Christ into the life of the world has made possible. When anyone asks me, “What do you say about the Virgin Birth?” I usually reply, “I say just what Paul said.” Then they begin to think! What did Paul say? He did not say anything! In all of his recorded letters and sermons not a syllable about the Vir- gin Birth! He had much to say about the death | and the resurrection of Christ, about the redemp- tion he accomplished, about “Christ in us the hope of glory,” about the fact that he would reign until he had put all enemies under his feet, but Iit Where Do You Live? never a word about the Virgin Birth. I am quite content to stand where Paul stood. And so with those other questions about a per- sonal devil and the second coming of Christ and the nature of hell and all the rest! They have a certain speculative interest for some minds, but what have they to do with life and conduct? Is life any the richer because a man takes one view of them rather than another? In the face of their remoteness from daily duty and in the absence of any conclusive data, we feel like saying: “What js all that to us? Let us follow him and not waste one hour in unprofitable speculation!” In the second place, questions as to personal fortune! In his early life Peter was a fisherman on the Sea of Galilee. He lived a free, glad, out- door life. Now the Master told him that when he was old others would gird him and carry him where he would not want to go. He was destined as a Christian apostle in that rude time to suffer hardship and persecution. Peter saw John standing near by. John was the younger man of the two; John belonged to a family with more means apparently than Peter’s family. Peter wondered whether he would suffer the same hard fate. “Lord, what shall this man do?” Then the voice said: “What is that to thee? Follow me and let that other man answer for himself.” It2 VItI—The Vital and the Trivial I feel a ready sympathy for every young man who finds life difficult. My father was a small farmer in the Middle West. My dear mother did all her own housework until after she was fifty years of age and yet found time and strength to teach her children and to become to each one of us the strongest, the sweetest, the holiest earthly influence we ever knew. We lived modestly, with few of what the world calls pleasures and none of its luxuries. I worked my own way through the university. I never enjoyed any of the benefits of travel in those years—I was twenty-one years old before I had ever seen a city large enough to have street cars. I speak of this merely to indicate my sympathy with all those who have to face difficulty. When a young man is placed in such a situation and looks out upon the lives of those fortunate people who seem to have everything brought to them on a sil- ver tray, he sometimes becomes envious and re- bellious. “Why should they have all that,” he says to himself, “and I be shut up in this narrow round?” Then the voice comes, ‘“‘What is that to thee!” You are not responsible for the circum- stances of your early life. You are only respon- sible for playing well your part with the lines and in the lines which are given you. Here is a man in an orchestra which is about to render the Overture to Tannhdauser. He plays the 113 Where Do You Liver flute. He announces that he will not play his part until he knows whether all those other men are equally competent to play their parts. He will not play until he knows why he has a flute when some other man has the first violin or a cello or a French horn. He sulks in his chair and the Over- ture sweeps on without him, lacking the contribu- tion which the great composer intended him to make. Let him take up his flute and blow into it and play the score as it is laid before him! Therein lies his honor and therein lies the honor of the whole orchestra, each man following the beat and giving of his own best! Here is a young fellow in college! He was brought up in a Christian home. He has seen the whole range of Christian ideals shining in his sky like fixed stars. He believes in the depths of his heart that no other mode of life can compare for one moment with a genuinely Christian life. He knows that it is up to him to show his colors and declare his faith by living as a child of God. But he begins to ask questions. What will these other fellows in my class do? What attitude will this group of intimate friends take toward reli- gion? If I stand out clear and firm for the highest I see, will I have to stand alone? What has all that to do with it! Life is not following the herd, whether the herd happens to be headed right or headed wrong. Life is stand- 114 V I1I—The Vital and the Trivial ing on one’s own two feet, carving for one’s self in the field of duty, ordering one’s own life in harmony with what he believes to be the will of God. That is life—running with the herd is just a feeble caricature. The time comes sooner or later when everyone is compelled to say: “The night is dark and I am far from home, lead thou me on! I do not ask to see the distant scene, one step enough for me— lead thou me on.” The possible action of this other man, the outcome of one’s own fidelity to duty, the final meaning of some of these puzzling experiences—these are not matters of immediate concern. Let each man follow Him who for nine- teen centuries has shown himself competent to lead! We may be sure that the “kindly light” will lead him on “o’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till the night is gone.” In the third place, questions as to the ultimate solution of certain puzzling problems. There came a day when a man said to Jesus, “Lord are there few that be saved?” How many? One in ten? One in a hundred? Or will there be a good working majority of spiritual successes? This man also has his followers. Yonder in the Library of Harvard University you will find a book written two hundred years ago by a learned Oxford professor entitled Moral Reflections Upon the Probable Number of the Elect. He undertook 5 Where Do You Live? to show from Scripture that not one in a hundred thousand, and probably, he added in a footnote, not one in a million, of all those who have lived since the time of Adam, will finally be saved. One in a million! It was a discouraging outlook for the New Jerusalem. It made the city of God seem like a lonesome sort of place compared with that other place with its teeming population. What did Jesus say? He did not burst out after the manner of some with a bit of thoughtless optimism. Why, everybody will be saved—that is, almost everybody, with the exception of some of those rascals yonder in States Prison! He did not, on the other hand, say in gloomy fashion, “Very few; a mere handful,—scarcely one in a million.” None of that! He declined to enter upon any such unprofitable speculation. ‘Lord are there few that be saved?” Jesus answered, “Strive to enter in at the strait gate.” Do your duty as a Christian with fidelity and thoroughness, leaving all those questions to Him who knows. The Judge of all the earth will do right. When men become remote and visionary in dealing with spiritual reality, the Lord calls them down and focuses their attention upon “the small end, the near end of these great problems,” as Brooke Herford once said. Newton discovered the law of gravitation which holds the planets true to their courses by watching an apple fall from the 116 VI{I—tThe Vital and the Trivial tree. James Watt discovered the power of steam by watching the lid of the teakettle rise and fall when the water boiled. Benjamin Franklin learned about electricity as he felt a pricking sensation in his fingers when he held a wet kite string after sending his kite with the steel points aloft during a thunderstorm. Charles Darwin learned about organic evolution and made ready to write the Origin of Species by studying the earthworms and bumblebees in the fields of Kent and in tracing the growth of the lower forms of marine life. If anyone would learn the truth about God and man, about duty, prayer, redemption and the coming of his kingdom, let him take hold of these realities also by the near end, the small end, the end which relates itself at once to his own experi- ence! I have not the slightest idea what the final out- come of all these moral processes which we see at work will be. I have no idea how the final con- summation will be reached or what it will be like when it is reached. How in the world should I know! 3 Here was a private soldier in the trenches in the Great War! He did not feel quite sure as to just how the campaign was going there in the Argonne or on some of the other salients or over on the East Front. He would take it very kindly if Marshal Foch would step out and explain the whole situation to him more fully. He would like 117 Where Do You Liver to know the meaning of all these military ma- noeuvres before he continues any further in the performance of his duty. And if the Marshal does not explain then he stands ready to shake his fist at the Marshal and to refuse to serve. So is every man who looks out with uncertain eyes upon this puzzling world and shakes his fist at his Maker, refusing the call of Christian life until all of his difficulties are cleared up. What is that to thee! Do your duty and leave the rest to him who knows! There is a legend—it is only a legend—that when the early Christians were being persecuted to the death in the City of Rome, Peter was there. When he saw men and women being thrown to the lions or burned alive for their Christian faith, it was too much for him. He ran away to deny his Lord for the fourth time. Just outside the walls of Rome Peter met a man carrying a cross. He did not recognize the man at first and he said to him in Latin, “Quo vadis?” “Where are you going?” The man replied sadly, “I am going to Rome to be crucified again.” Then Peter knew him and again he “wept bitterly.” He turned around and went back to Rome to bear his testimony as a good soldier of Jesus Christ, cost what it might. What shall this man do and that man and some. other man? What is the meaning of this and of 118 VIilI—tThe Vital and the Trivial that and of something else? What is that to thee or to me! Let us follow him into the unknown if need be, making our theological maps as we gol 11g IX The Man and the Machine ¢| Paes was an old Hebrew prophet who saw human life imperiled by machinery. “The wheels within wheels” in his vision, turning this way and that way, represented the machinery of civilization. “The spirit of the living creature within the wheels” represented personality. He was afraid that personality in its finer aspects might go down. in defeat under the crushing weight of the wheels. If he felt that danger in that far-away land and time, what shall we say? How are “the living creatures” faring today in this highly organized, intricate life of ours with its vaster system of wheels? How are the human values getting on in modern industry? How are they getting on in coal mining and in steel making, in the noisy fac- tories and in the sweat shops? Are we in any danger of sacrificing the man to the machine? Every man who has eyes in his head knows that we are. The adjustment of human relations and the safeguarding of personality in industry have not kept pace with the improvement of the machine. Our technique has outstripped our 120 IX—Men and Machines morals. The wheels are better oftentimes than the people are who keep the wheels turning. Life is imperiled by mechanism. It is high time that trained men should be doing more to remedy that situation. It is part of their job in the great years which lie just ahead to introduce into the workaday world a larger measure of moral idealism. Notice these three facts! First, life finds itself and expresses itself by the use of mechanism. The lower forms of life are almost without organiza- tion. The amoeba, for example, is just a bit of protoplasm floating in the water. Its processes of nutrition and reproduction are exceedingly sim- ple. When it wants to eat anything it merely sur- rounds it and absorbs it. When it would repro- duce, it simply breaks off a piece of itself and there you have another amoeba! But as we ascend the scale of being, life be- comes more and more complex. “The organism develops eyes,” as George B. Foster pointed out, “because it needs them.” It cannot live so well without them, because there is light, and there are objects to be seen and studied. When the eyes are faulty, the organism puts on spectacles to see better. It invents the telescope to see farther, and the microscope to see things too minute for the naked eye. It widens the range of its powers by the use of mechanism. I2I Where Do You Live? “The organism develops ears because it needs them.” It cannot live so well without them be- cause there are acoustic vibrations, sounds to be heard, language, music and all the rest. By a fur- ther use of mechanism, it can hear not only what is being said or sung in the same room—it hears what is being said or sung a thousand miles away. I can stand here and talk with a friend in Chicago or in San Francisco and recognize all the familiar tones of his voice. Life advances steadily by the use of mechanism. Take a cross section of the life of a civilized man in meeting his needs! “He begins his day,” as some clever writer once pointed out, “with a sponge from the hand of a South Sea Islander and a linen towel made in Belfast.” He dresses himself in cotton and wool, silk, linen and leather from half a dozen different countries. “He sits down to his breakfast and eats grapefruit handed to him by a Florida negro, has his coffee poured out for him by the natives of Java and his rolls are passed to him by a Minnesota wheat grower.” He is taken to his place of business by the use of steel and coal, gasoline or electricity, provided by a number of far-reaching organizations. The interests of his business may reach out into half the lands of earth and be affected by all the winds that blow between the North Pole and the South Pole. His ordinary life is woven up into a common 122 ITX—Men and Machines fabric with the interests and activities of a million other people. Now there is no escape from all that unless we go back to the cave. We do not want to go back to the cave. This highly organized life which we call “civilization” is like the air we breathe. Man finds himself, expresses himself, enjoys himself, by his use of all this mechanism. Our modern civilization is not handmade, it is machine-made. And on countless fields the machine shows itself superior. The wealthy Hindoo hires a man of low caste to keep the punkah moving above his bed on hot nights so that he can sleep in comfort. The wealthy American turns on an electric fan. The fan is better—the servant may go to sleep and then the punkah stops. Electricity does not go to sleep. We have no desire to go back to those more primitive methods—human life finds itself and makes advance by the use of the machine. In the second place, however, life is sometimes overborne by the machine. When I was a boy growing up on an Iowa farm, the old village shoe- maker made boots with tops on them for my father and me. He would measure our feet, rights and lefts, select his own leather and proceed to make two complete pairs of boots. When we went in ten days later to try them on, if they fitted, as they usually did, he had the joy of seeing us walk off in them and he had the joy of seeing a 123 Where Do You Live? piece of finished work from his own hand and brain. As a result of that method, he was an in- telligent, interesting man. He had ideas, senti- ments, convictions. He discussed everything under the sun with the people who dropped into his shop to talk with him as he worked. How about those tens of thousands of men and women working yonder in the huge shoe shops of Lynn and Brockton, Massachusetts, and of St. Louis, Missouri? Are they equally intelligent and interesting? Each one of them stands there per- forming a single bit of monotonous labor with a machine on twenty thousand pairs of shoes which pass through his hands in the same length of time! How much sense of pride and joy have they in their work! We have cheaper shoes—not always better ones—what about the shoemakers? Are they better or only cheaper? If we were to place the hand-sickle Ruth used when she gleaned after the reapers in the fields of Boaz, beside a modern reaping machine made by the International Harvester Company, it would seem that we had made wonderful progress in these three thousand years. Look at her sickle and then look at the reaper! But if Ruth herself were suddenly to appear among the men and women who make and use the wheels of modern industry, we might not feel so sure of our progress. We have improved on the sickle—have we improved on Ruth? I have the 124 IT X—Men and Machines feeling that Ruth would be able to hold her own with the girls who pour out of the huge factories and department stores. And the final values to be considered, as we all know, are the human values. The tendency of the machine is to make a hard and hateful sort of world. Compare the general happiness of a group of South Sea Islanders in their native haunts with the condition of a lot of factory hands in the crowded sections of Chi- cago, New York, London! The South Sea Is- landers seem to be having the best of it. They seem to be healthier, happier and more nearly fulfilling the purposes of human existence. Shall we go back then to breadfruit and bananas and that primitive mode of life which borders on bar- barism? Every man of us would say, “no.” Then we must go on to something better than this in our treatment of our less fortunate messmates at the board of life. There are silly people at large who have the idea that because we can travel sixty miles an hour on our railroad trains or in our automobiles, we are just ten times as civilized as were those people who traveled six miles an hour by stage- coach or with horse and buggy. And if we can travel two hundred and fifty miles an hour by aeroplane, then we shall be forty times as well off as they were with their slow coaches. That is all they know! They have not sense 125 Where Do You Live? enough to recognize the fact that the speed of the machine is entirely secondary. The main question is this—Where are we going? What will we do when we get there? What will be the total effect of our mode of travel upon human welfare? That is the question before the house rather than the rate of speed! And when we come to appraise our mode of life by that saner standard, we do not feel exactly like throwing up our hats. You can harness a Twenty-Mule team to a load of Borax and they will draw it along. You can harness steam or electricity or gasoline to that same load and that form of energy will draw it along much faster. But the question still remains, Who is going to drive, right purpose or wrong purpose, conscience or a careless disregard for the interests of others? Is all this magnificent energy which we have harnessed to the tasks of modern industry, draw- ing the human race uphill or downhill? By our use of all this machinery are we becoming cleaner, kindlier and more aspiring, or are we in danger of becoming hardened, coarsened, materialized? The question as to the total effect of it all upon human life is far and away more important than the size or the speed of the mules which draw the load. And when we come to look our modern industrial- ism in the face without blinking, we know full well that in many sections of the workaday world 126 I X—Men and Machines the human values do suffer hurt and loss at the hands of the machine. One of the hardest problems in modern indus- try is to keep human life interesting, desirable, worthy, in a highly commercialized system, with- out sacrificing that efficiency upon which all life depends. Can we have efficiency without paying too big a price for it! If the human values are steadily going down in defeat under the pressure of that demand and under the crushing weight of the wheels, then we are paying too big a price for increased production and increased profits. We cannot afford to pay any such price—we have no right to pay it. Human life worthy of the name is more precious than diamonds and rubies, to say nothing of steel and coal and cheaper shoes! We cannot go on after that fashion, as honest men with some decent regard for those fellows whose interests are bound up with our own in that enter- prise. In the third place then, it is the office of intelli- gence and conscience to control the machine in the interests of a worthier mode of life. Modern civili- zation, if it has any right to be here at all, has come that we might have life and that we might have it more abundantly. And that high end can be achieved only by moral purpose and aspiration. Here in my hand I hold a knife made of the finest tempered steel. It has an edge like that of 127 Where Do You Liver a razor. There is no magical quality in the knife itself giving it the power of life or of death—it is only a tool. It may work for human betterment or for human injury—it all depends upon the quality of moral purpose which wields it. In the hands of a surgeon, wise, skillful, conscientious, the knife may readily be used to save life. In the hands of a madman or a criminal it may just as readily be used to destroy life. Now all the material and machinery of modern civilization, all these political devices and all these forms of economic organization, are only tools. They have no magical efficacy in them. They may be made to help or they may be made to hurt—it all depends upon the quality of moral purpose which wields them. And you will agree with me instantly that the main defect in our modern civilization lies in the fact that in our national culture and in our systems of education, in our vocational training and in our industrial methods, we have been giving too much attention to the sharpening of our knives and not enough attention to the securing of those qualities of mind and heart which would wield those knives aright. It was Arthur T. Hadley of Yale, writing as a trained economist, who said not long ago: “The chief object of training is not the gaining of added information or the acquiring of technical skill. It is the development of certain habits, ideals, powers. Habits of self-command, ideals of duty 128 I X—Men and Machines and service, powers of efficient and useful ac- tion!”? We recognize at once the sound sense of his statement. And all that is exactly what the One whom we call “The Master,” said nineteen hundred years ago—‘If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them”—and only then. We cannot live in these days with the teeming population of the world about us, without organi- zation and machinery. The highly organized, machine-using community will undersell and starve out any community which undertakes to maintain that simpler and perhaps more whole- some method of production which prevailed in the time of Ruth. That fine old shoemaker in Iowa would be unable today to compete with Lynn and Brockton. He would speedily go to the wall under the onslaught of the shoemaking machines. But for all that, there is a certain deadliness about it which must be faced and feared—and overcome. Here are the ants, bees and wasps! They have brought this method of organized pro- duction well-nigh to perfection. They are all well- fed, well-housed and their busy life moves along with scarcely a jar. When you look at the bee- hive, you feel moved to say, “How well they do it.” But who wants to be an ant or a bee or a wasp! Who wants to be just another cog in the wheel! Who wants to be just another item in a machine- 129 Where Do You Liver ridden system which sacrifices the man to the thing! We have no right to barter away those spiritual values which make up personality for the sake of increased production and increased profits. The spirit of the living creature cries out against that whole method as economic blas- phemy. The power to think, the spirit of initia- tive, the chance to exercise one’s own will—these are the values which stand supreme! If we sacri- fice them, we do it at our peril. Here in a well-known short story there was a fool who thought that a man’s life consisted in the abundance of the things that he possessed! The more things he owned, the more of a man he was. The cynic, Diogenes, said that a man’s life was to be computed in terms of the things he could do without. Which one was right? Neither one was right! Your own common sense tells you, and your Heavenly Father knoweth, that ye have need of all these things to enrich, to ennoble, to beautify human existence. Food, clothing, shelter; faith, hope, love; knowledge, beauty, affection; courage, aspiration, high resolve! By these men live, for men live by all the great words which proceed out of the mind of God. The things, however, are to be owned and used, they are to be mastered and consecrated by moral purpose—they are not to own and use us. The 130 IX—Men and Machines spirit of the living creature is not to be ground up by the multiplication of wheels for the sake of increased gain. The spirit of man made to wear the image of God is to assert its supremacy on all these fields of effort. In many parts of the world these days, men are eagerly and sometimes angrily discussing the question as to whether or not this white civiliza- tion of ours is a spent force. It all depends! We may be jolly well sure that wheels will not save it. Steam and electricity, submarines and aero- planes will not save it! The enemies of human well-being can use all of these appliances just as readily as the friends of human well-being can use them. The determining factor will be the per- sonal character of the living creature within the wheels. “The field is the world and the good seed” which is to make that field fruitful, “are the chil- dren of the kingdom.” If the trained men, who stand in positions of leadership and of large influ- ence, are men possessed of moral purpose, men with social sympathy, men with spiritual aspira- tion, then there is hope for the future. If, on the other hand, these men are only greedy mouths, each one looking only upon his own things and not upon the things of others, each one looking out for ‘(Number One” on the ground that if he does not nobody will, then the outlook is dark. 131 Where Do You Liver “Men do not gather grapes of thorns nor figs of thistles”—it would be a flat denial of the law of causation. No more do men gather personal character, social well-being, political stability from the spirit of greed and of selfish aggression. The only social order fit to live in, the only social order which will stand, will be one built upon the habit of friendliness and codperation, upon that spirit of consideration for others here outlined in the gospel of Christ. Science improves the wheels—that is all it can do. That is all it attempts to do, and it is not to be blamed for not attempting that which lies be- yond its power. It is the high office of religion to produce a finer type of living creature to direct those wheels. Science teaches men the truths of Chemistry, but, as Roger Babson said recently: “The trained chemist may go out to use his knowledge of Chemistry to secure a pure food supply, a pure milk supply, a pure water supply for his com- munity and thus become a public benefactor. He may go out to use his knowledge of Chemistry to adulterate food and other articles of commerce in order to make gain.” It all depends upon the moral character of the man as to whether his knowledge of Chemistry is an asset or a liability. Science teaches men the principles of the law. But the highly trained lawyer, fully equipped in 132 I X—Men and Machines his mastery of political science, may use his knowledge and skill to further the ends of justice and equity. He may, on the other hand, use his knowledge to enable men to evade the law and to get the best of their fellows by wrong means. It is the part of religion to lay upon the consciences of men those more august sanctions of righteous- ness, those more powerful deterrents from evil, which come from fellowship with the living God, causing them to use their knowledge and their skill for human betterment and not for human exploitation. Here in this highly organized, machine-ridden life of ours, how are all these evils to be reme- died? I do not know. No one knows in advance all the steps to be taken in those vast processes of social redemption. If I did know, and could hand it all out to you here at the end of a sermon in a half dozen neat formulas, I should waken to- morrow morning and find myself famous. But this one thing I do know—it must be done! It must be done, else “all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre.” Industry must be moralized as other great human interests have been moralized. The commerce of the world must be made a splendid section of the spiritual life of the race and not the mere squabble of a lot of hungry animals for the best bones. The spirit of human brotherhood must find effective expression 133 Where Do You Live? in economic terms! Theodore Roosevelt used to say, “This country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a good place for all of us to live in.” ‘When our purposes are right, when our hearts are set upon making human life interesting, de- sirable, worthy for everybody, when the spirit of man is purified and fortified by its sense of fel- lowship with the spirit of the living God, we will be able to find the way. We will learn all the vari- ous steps to be taken in social redemption, as we go. We will make our map of that better world which is to be, on the road. There are some sitting here who will not taste of death until they see that better social order coming with power and great glory. 134 xX The Summons of a New Day HE Day of Judgment is not far away in the future. Every day is Judgment Day. Today is and tomorrow will be. Each day sits in judg- ment upon what was done the day before. “The morning after” brings in its verdict upon the way “the night before” was spent. It separates the sheep from the goats. It sets men on the right hand or the left of high achievement. If it finds a man with strength depleted, nerves disordered, and a dark brown taste in his heart, no further comment is needed. The day shall declare it, test- ing each man’s mode of life of what sort it is. Here in my text was a man on the eve of what proved to be the greatest day of his life. He was destined on the morrow to reach the highest level of thought and feeling he had ever known. In the quiet of the night before he heard a voice say, “Be ready in the morning and come up.” It was the summons of a new day uttered in those hours of preparation which led up to it. Hold that scene before you and let it talk! It has four things to say. 135 Where Do You Live? First, the scene suggests the challenge of a great opportunity. This man was leading a race of slaves out of the bondage of Egypt into the freedom and opportunity of a land of promise. His mind was busy with problems of organization and training. He was thinking about the political and industrial, the educational and social institu- tions which those people would need for their development. Suddenly he saw a mountain, steep and rugged, rising out of the level plain where he stood. Huge black clouds rested upon the top of it as if some visitor from the skies had come down robed in thick darkness. When the storm broke, the flash of the lightning was like a momentary glimpse of that divine glory which no man could see and live. The roar of the thunder was to him like the sound of a superhuman voice. And he heard that voice say, “Be ready in the morning and come up.” He was to climb that mountain the next day and there at the top of it gain such a vision of spiritual reality that he would feel for the rest of his life that he had seen his Maker face to face. He would see those principles of right and wrong which underlie all sound character and social well- being written by the finger of the Almighty on tables of stone. He would be called to write those principles into the life of a race until those He- brews would be competent to take the right of the 136 X—The New Day line in the religious leadership of the world for a thousand years. What a glorious chance to do something that would last! He could think of nothing else that whole evening. “Be ready in the morning,” he heard the voice say. We can imagine how he spent the night before—not in rioting and drunkenness, not in foolish prattle or in weak diversion. He would not have gone to the movies even though he had been at Hollywood instead of at Sinai. He would spend the early hours in thoughtfulness and the later hours in sound, sweet sleep, so that, re- freshed in mind and body, he would be ready when the day dawned to make the ascent. He had the necessary physical vigor to climb that mountain—he was no poor scrap of a man who had thrown away the best of himself in vice. He had that quality of mind which comes from thinking long and hard upon things which are vital. He had that purity of heart without which no man can see the Lord. He was “‘fit,” as the English say—he had no need to flinch. When the sun rose over the eastern hills he went straight to the top of Sinai and wrote his name above every other name in the early history of the Hebrew race. Now let that man’s experience in those hours of high privilege serve as a type! Here you are plodding along, it may be, on the dead level, 137 Where Do You Liver thinking ordinary thoughts and doing common- place things! Suddenly there rises before you some splendid opportunity. You may see it afar off or it may come upon you like a thief in the night. There it is—there is your chance to climb! It is the challenge of a new day calling upon you to use your powers to some high end. Honor and responsibility are there in waiting, if you have the strength and the sense to claim them. Oppor- tunity knocks once, we are told, at each man’s door and then passes on. “There is a tide in the, affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.” It may be only a day’s march from some of those who are sitting here in quiet worship. If you listen you may hear that same divine voice saying to you, “Be ready when the opportunity comes and go up.” In the second place, the approach of maturity utters that same call. The world is a great deal larger than a school yard or a college campus— and ever so much more interesting. The school at its best is a preparation for life rather than life itself. It may well be the best sort of preparation, but life itself is lived mainly off the campus. It is no accident that we call the last day in college “(Commencement Day.” It is intended that now business of a more serious nature is to be 138 X—The New Day undertaken by the Seniors who lay aside their caps and gowns. The demands of mature life be- come a veritable Mount Sinai. The path of ascent in law or in medicine, in teaching or in the minis- try, in the work of the merchant, the manufac- turer, the engineer, is steep and rugged. It is not a place where we can stretch out comfortably on the green grass and pick four-leaved clovers. It is a stiff, hard climb all the way up. In these days none but well set-up men and women can hope to achieve distinction. Bodies clean and sound to furnish the necessary physical basis! Minds well trained and well stored with useful knowledge! Hearts possessed by moral purpose and high resolve! Souls that have gained the vision and the help of God! All these are im- perative. Hard tasks are just ahead. Weaklings will fail. Moral cowards will be put into the discard. Loafers, who were dreaming when they were supposed to be thinking, follow- ing the line of least resistance when they should have been putting up a good fight, will go down like ninepins before a well-placed ball. It is no child’s play to live a real life and to do real work in these days—therefore be ready when maturity calls. We find on every campus young people who “came to college.” They came under their own steam with some definite purposes in command. 139 Where Do You Live? We find others who were “sent to college.” The difference is like that between chalk and cheese. The ones who were sent to college are exposed to an education, but in most cases it does not take— they show themselves immune. The germs of edu- cation never get beneath their skins. The seeds of sound learning sown with a generous hand do not find lodgment in their lazy minds. As George Ade has it, “You can lead a boy to college but you can’t make him think.” Some of them ‘pass;” as our easy phrase has it—they pass, but some- how they never have enough in their hands or in their heads to “make it” and win the game. What a loss to have such opportunities within reach and not grasp them! Here are young people touching elbows with any number of their fellows who are sure to rise into positions of leadership in the years that lie ahead! Here is a body of teachers eager to know those young people more intimately if only they did not shy off and show themselves indifferent! Here is the world of na- ture, more fascinating than any epic poem or book of fiction. Here are all the greatest minds of the past on the shelves of the library waiting to have a word with you if you would only reach up and take them down. Here is Jesus Christ, Lord of the Ages, standing before each life saying: “Be- hold I stand at the door and knock. If anyone will hear my voice and open the door I will come in.” His entrance into any life means character of 140 X—The New Day the highest type and a destiny which will outlast and outshine the stars. Do you wonder that to those who have eyes to see, every bush on the campus burns with a mysterious fire and out of it there comes a voice saying to each passer-by, ‘Make the best use of all these facilities and go up.” How many of you have seen Borglum’s statue of Lincoln at Newark? It stands in a public park and it shows the figure of our greatest American seated. Little children come and climb up on his knees and lean upon his strong arms. One day a Russian immigrant with long hair and alien dress was seen standing before the statue. His little daughter, who had been at school, was explaining to him who Lincoln was, and what he had done. The man listened eagerly as the child told her story in their native tongue. When she finished, he lifted her up until her face was level with that of Lincoln and bade her kiss the great bronze cheek. His own life had been starved and stunted by the hard conditions in the land of his birth. He had never had a chance. But here in this land of opportunity which had exalted to the highest place of honor a man who was born in a log cabin, a man who in his boyhood was privileged to attend school only twelve months all put together, that Russian peasant saw that his child would have her chance. He wanted her to be on good terms I4I Where Do You Live? with the best there was. He wanted her to be in touch with the spirit of Lincoln, the spirit of one who said, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work in which we are engaged.” God grant that the Rus- sian’s silent prayer may find its answer in that child’s life! America spells opportunity for a mul- titude of boys and girls—may they be ready, as they move forward into maturity, to go up. In the third place, we hear that summons in the problems which the war has brought. We are living through one of the great searching crises of human history. For centuries other men will turn back to study the events of the last ten years. They will see the significance of it all more clearly than we do, in the light of that which well may follow. Now that a certain measured victory has been won by physical force, there comes the harder, higher task of winning the victory of the spirit. Will we indeed have peace? Will justice prevail? Will right principles bear rule in industry, in statecraft, in racial contacts? Will this thing which we call civilization show itself civilized? It all depends. Here are problems so vast and so intricate as to all but stagger the mind and conscience of the race! If we are to do our work as well as our forefathers did theirs, we shall have 142 X—The New Day to be stronger, wiser, and better than they were by so much as our tasks are greater. In the face of a world waiting to be rebuilt, how can any man lag back or drag along on some low level of thought and feeling! What right has anyone with hands and feet and a head to shirk! The bare sight of it all might well shame every thoughtless pleasure seeker, every social parasite, every moral dullard into something of heroic action. | Mount Sinai is just ahead, speaking above the roar and crash of these terrible scenes through which the world has just passed, saying to every man of us, “Thou shalt.” In the gray uncertain light of this dawning of a better day the divine voice is saying, “Be ready to take those principles of personal and social well-being which you have seen written across the sky in letters of fire and write them into a better social order.” And for that high task mental and moral preparedness is imperative. When war with Spain threatened in 1898, Ad- miral Dewey was in command of our Asiatic squadron. He had spent fifty years in the service of his country. He had made it the business of his life to be ready. He had gotten his ships together, coaled them, fitted them out with food and muni- tions and had them at Hong Kong the very day that the battleship Maine was blown up in the 143 Where Do You Live? harbor at Havana. He had studied the Philip- pines and the entrance to the harbor of Manila until he knew it as a college boy knows his own campus. When war was declared and the order was cabled to him, “Destroy the Spanish fleet and take Manila,” he went in and did it without the loss of a single ship—without the loss of a man. He was ready. Now “Peace hath her victories no less re- nowned than war.” The solution of these prob- lems in commerce and in government, in educa- tion and in religion, demands a service no less competent and heroic. It cannot be done by rule of thumb, nor by clever guesses, nor by graceful outbursts of feeling. It can only be done by men and women who know what they are about, by men and women who understand the material with which they have to deal, by men and women who have something of the mind of Christ. If industry is to be moralized as other great human interests have been moralized, if educa- tion is to be the training of the spirit no less than the filling of the mind with sound knowledge, if the cause of democracy is not to go down in de- feat, if the nations of the world are to be set together in a great brotherhood of joint endeavor for the common good, then we must have not only gifted leaders here and there—we must have also ranks upon ranks of plain everyday people with the necessary preparedness of mind and heart to 144 X—The New Day do the hard things which will have to be done. Lift up your eyes and look, for the fields are white to the harvest. Listen and you will hear that same voice saying to you, “Be ready in this day of social rebuilding and go up.” It is not over, over there, and it is not over, over here. There is another and a harder struggle still in progress. It is the struggle of the exploited against the exploiters, big and little, personal and corporate. It is the struggle of those who work with hand or brain against those who have fallen into the disgraceful habit of eating their bread by the sweat of other men’s brows. It is the strug- gle for the principle of equality before the law, for a more democratic spirit in the control of the greater industries, for a more equitable distribu- tion of the good things of life, for a steadier exal- tation of the human values which are at stake. In a word, it is the struggle for the establish- ment of the kingdom of God on earth, for the sway and rule of the spirit that was in Christ to replace the spirit of greed, of selfish aggression, of inhumanity, which in these recent years has all but wrecked the white civilization of the race. The outcome of that struggle will depend upon our preparedness to furnish the necessary moral stamina to see it through. There is a great day dawning if we will only have it so—be ready to give the best you have to the highest you see! 145 Where Do You Liver In the fourth place we hear that same summons from a world unseen. How brief it all is at best! “The days of our years are three score years and ten, and if by reason of strength they be four score years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow and it is soon cut off. So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom! Satisfy us early with thy mercy! Establish thou the work of our hands and let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us!” It is a prayer which every thoughtful person feels moved to make even before his sun has passed the meridian. I never undertake to map out the future world into those contrasting sections which men call heaven and hell—I have not the necessary data. I distrust the efforts of all those people who try to measure off the city of God in kilometers—they have not the necessary data either. But I believe in life immortal with all my soul—the reasons for that faith are too many to be stated here. And I feel sure that in the unseen world it will be well with those who have been striving to do what they believe to be the will of God and that it will not be well with those who have chosen some lower line of action. There I leave it. But in the face of such a possibility even—a possibility in the strength of which millions of the wisest and best of men have lived and wrought—what inter- est can be more vital than that of so ordering 146 X—The New Day one’s conduct as to make it a suitable preparation for that longer, larger life to come! It is tomorrow even more than yesterday which makes today what it is—and that is saying a great deal. All the yesterdays have had their part in determining our present status, but all the tomorrows as well have been casting the spell of their influence upon us. And if there be an endless series of tomorrows awaiting us, then how mighty becomes their appeal! How sure of life eternal humanity has been at its best! How sure the perfect, the typal, the representative man, the Son of Man, was! He did not argue nor speculate, he affirmed. He was look- ing into an open grave when he said to a bereaved family, “I am the resurrection and the life—he that believeth in me shall never die.” He was fac- ing arrest and crucifixion which came within an hour, when he said to his frightened disciples: “Let not your heart be troubled. I go to prepare a place for you. Because I live ye shall.’’ He was hanging on a cross, where his own life was fast ebbing away, when he said to a fellow sufferer who had turned to him in penitence, “Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise.” I know of no one whose judgment I would sooner trust in that field of inquiry and of hope than his. Jesus Christ brought life and immortal- ity to light by what he said, by what he did, by 147 Where Do You Liver what he was and is, in the glad experiences of millions of people who have learned through him to live by the power of an endless life. When I was a pastor in California, a brother minister in San Francisco dropped dead one Sun- day morning as he stood before the mirror shav- ing. It had been his custom at such times to lay his Bible open on the dresser beside him and to use those moments for memorizing certain verses of Scripture upon which his eye might rest. His wife heard him fall that morning and when she ran to his room, she noticed that his Bible lay open as usual. When she came back later, she found that he had opened it that day at this very passage in Exodus where my text stands. I wonder if his eyes were resting upon these words as he passed on,—“And the Lord said to Moses, Be ready in the morning and come up to present thyself before me.” He was a real man— “One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed though right were worsted, wrong would triumph: Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake.”’ Look ahead to that greater tomorrow and greet the unseen with a cheer! Always with a cheer! 148 ° 4 0 3 < 0 ——e- > - eA Se a if — ne } ri WT LEN T | | ae!