■•::;ii5?l 
 
 r 
 
 xVJLil/ 1 jcVL^Jvo 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES REYNOLDS BROWN 
 
 UC-NRLF 
 
 B 3 135 EbD 
 
 [-._ 
 
 ; - 
 
j;!^*^!^: »?"'"" 
 
 
Yale Talks 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 by • 
 
 Charles Reynolds Brown 
 
 Dean of the School of Religion 
 Yale University 
 
 New Haven 
 Yale University Press 
 
 London : Humphrey Milford : Oxford University Press 
 
 Mdccccxx 
 
' « « « . « r 
 € • • • .• t I 
 
 • • • « • * 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY 
 YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 First published, 1 9 1 9 
 Second printing, 1920 
 
Foreword 
 
 THESE "Talks" were given in Battell Chapel 
 at Yale University. Some of them were also 
 given at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, 
 Amherst, Williams, Bowdoin, Brown and other 
 colleges. In putting them in book form I have 
 retained the more intimate style of direct address 
 as best preserving the atmosphere of personal 
 conference in which they were first uttered. They 
 are brought together here in the hope that they 
 may be of use to other young men who are making 
 up their minds as to their mode of life and decid- 
 ing upon the purposes which are to rule the great 
 years that lie ahead. 
 
 Chas. R. Brown. 
 Yale University, 
 June i8, 1919. 
 
 463420 
 
CHAPT 
 
 Contents 
 
 ER 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. 
 
 The True Definition of a Man . . 
 
 9 
 
 II. 
 
 The Value of an Empty Purse . 
 
 24 
 
 III. 
 
 The Lure of Goodness . . . . 
 
 39 
 
 IV. 
 
 How Old Are You?" .... 
 
 55 
 
 V. 
 
 The Power of a Resolute Minority . 
 
 71 
 
 VI. 
 
 Unconscious Influence . 
 
 . 84 
 
 VII. 
 
 The Lessons of Failure . 
 
 . 97 
 
 VIII. 
 
 The Men Who Make Excuse . 
 
 112 
 
 IX. 
 
 The Power of Sentiment . 
 
 126 
 
 X. 
 
 The Wounds of Wrongdoing . 
 
 . 141 
 
I 
 
 The True Definition of a Man 
 
 THERE is one question I would like to ask 
 you now that the examinations are over. It 
 is a question every fellow must answer as he 
 makes his way up to his maturity and when he 
 gets his marks they are not made on paper, they 
 are made on him. He may not answer my ques- 
 tion in writing, but he will answer it in the choice 
 he makes of a ruling ambition. How would you 
 define a man? What does it mean to be a man? 
 
 Wlien we look back we find that a great variety 
 of answers has been given to this question. 
 There was a time when everybody said, "Man is 
 a victim." He is "a victim crying in the night and 
 with no language but a cry." He is cursed by the 
 gods, doomed to eat his bread by hard labor in 
 the sweat of his brow. He is at the mercy of all 
 manner of demons and hobgoblins with which the 
 ancients peopled the unseen world. He is a poor 
 worm of the dust, not entitled to hold up his head 
 among these titanic forces which are hostile to 
 him. "Man is a victim," and they said it with a 
 whine. 
 
 We find a curious remnant of that notion in our 
 
" •'''^''- Yale Talks 
 
 own day. Some men are still saying, "Heredity 
 and environment have us bound hand and foot." 
 They insist that there is no such thing as freedom, 
 no power of initiative, no will to choose. Man 
 does not as he chooses, but as he must. We are 
 what we are by the operation of forces which we 
 cannot control. Whatever is had to be, whatever 
 will be will be, whether we like it or not. Gloomy, 
 disheartened determinism is not confined to a few 
 sad-eyed philosophers shut up in a closet — it is 
 sometimes proclaimed from the housetops and 
 preached at the street corners. There are those 
 who still insist that man is a helpless victim. 
 
 But that idea has largely passed for people who 
 are in sound health mentally as well as physically. 
 Man saw a long time ago that he need not be a 
 poor shuddering victim. He saw that he could 
 have dominion over the fish of the sea and the 
 fowl of the air, over the cattle and the creeping 
 things. He saw that he could compel heat and 
 light, gravitation and electricity to minister to 
 his own comfort and progress. He began to make 
 himself at home among these titanic forces. He 
 learned to stand erect and to read. He began to 
 face the world undaunted. And whatever answer 
 we might get from Young America today we may 
 be sure that it would not accept the verdict that 
 man is a victim. 
 
 We come then to a second answer which has 
 more edge on it. How would you define a man? 
 
 10 
 
I — True Definition of a Man 
 
 There was a time when everyone said, "Man is a 
 fighter." He stood in a militant attitude, fighting 
 the common enemies of hunger and cold, disease 
 and death, fighting also the neighboring tribes and 
 making enemies of them. Every man was meas- 
 ured by the length and the strength of his sword. 
 The greatest man in the tribe was the man who 
 could kill the largest number of his enemies 
 without being killed in the process. 
 
 In ancient Israel Saul was made king because 
 he stood head and shoulders above his fellows. 
 He was neither a wise man nor a good man, but he 
 was a big, strapping, successful fighter and they 
 crowned him. In mediaeval Europe the men most 
 honored were the plumed knights and the hel- 
 meted warriors, who went forth with sword and 
 spear to fight their good fights. In Japan the 
 ancient aristocracy, the Samurai, belonged entirely 
 to the military class. War was a trade and the 
 trade held in highest esteem. If we had asked our 
 question then, the answer would have come back 
 with a clash of steel — "Man is a fighter." 
 
 We find also a considerable remnant of that 
 idea in our own day. The ladies have a way of 
 indicating that their gentle hearts are strangely 
 stirred by the sight of marching men in khaki. 
 And men will pay larger sums of money for a 
 briefer period of entertainment to witness a prize 
 fight than for almost any kind of performance 
 which can be named. The most respectable na- 
 
 II 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 tions show a strange satisfaction in their Krupp 
 guns and dreadnoughts. If we should ask our 
 question now, in some quarters the answer would 
 still come back, "Man is a fighter." 
 
 But that mood is passing. The high office of 
 civilization is not to destroy men's lives but to 
 save them and train them in productive effort. 
 The swords will have to be beaten into plough- 
 shares. With the keen competition and the close 
 margins in business, we have no steel to waste. 
 The bright metal of the nation's young manhood 
 must more and more move out along those lines 
 of action which are productive rather than de- 
 structive. 
 
 I say all this in the face of the most terrible war 
 which has ever devastated the earth. Where there 
 were ten men five years ago thinking about "a 
 league of nations," or some other effective method 
 of keeping the peace and good order of the world, 
 now there are a hundred. The thought of making 
 the idea of public justice the determining factor 
 in the life of the race has been taken out of the 
 hands of impossible dreamers and brought upon 
 the map of practical statesmanship. The ideals 
 of the common people have been changing rapidly. 
 When the people of France were asked some ten 
 years ago to express their judgment in a great 
 popular vote as to who was the greatest French- 
 man in history, nine millions of ballots were cast. 
 When the votes were counted, it was found that 
 
 12 
 
I — True Definition of a Man 
 
 the largest number had not been given to Napo- 
 leon, the man of battles, who destroyed the lives 
 of a million men. The largest number had been 
 given to Pasteur, the man of science, who in the 
 quiet work of his laboratory laid the foundations 
 for saving the lives of untold millions. Man is 
 not mainly nor permanently a fighter. 
 
 We come then to a third and more practical 
 answer — "Man is a producer, a money-maker." 
 The greatest man in any group is the man who 
 makes the most, if he makes it honestly. Men 
 go about measuring each other not with yard- 
 sticks, nor by the length of their swords, but with 
 bank notes. Here is a man who is fifty thousand 
 feet high! Here is another man who is one hun- 
 dred thousand feet high. Here is a third man who 
 is a million feet high — he is a millionaire! And 
 here at the side is a poor chap who is decidedly 
 "short." He is no taller than thirty cents. 
 
 The love of money lies at the root of all manner 
 of things good and bad. It stirs up wholesome 
 ambitions and it arouses the meanest desires of 
 the heart. The wish to better one's condition is 
 honest and legitimate, but the spirit of greed 
 becomes responsible for the lowest vices and 
 crimes. 
 
 There are men who believe in what they call 
 "the economic interpretation of history." They 
 insist that history was not shaped by great men 
 nor by great principles, but by the economic con- 
 
 13 
 
Yale Talks 
 ditions under which men found themselves. Men 
 were thrust in this direction or in that by their 
 love of wealth or by their lack of it. They insist 
 that the desire for gain has been the determining 
 principle in human action. 
 
 I can not hold with them, but I confess that 
 there is something about the career of a man who 
 organizes and develops some industry to the point 
 where he accumulates a large fortune which 
 appeals to me strongly. The people who inherit 
 their wealth do not necessarily amount to any- 
 thing — all they had to do was to wait for some- 
 body to die. The men who gamble for their 
 fortunes, whether they do it on the stock exchange 
 or at a green table, are not interesting to me — in 
 order to become rich they made other men poor. 
 But the man who goes out with nothing but his 
 own energy of body and cleverness of brain to 
 a mill or a mine, a farm or a factory, a store or a 
 railroad, and by enlarging the scope of it as a 
 social utility becomes rich, that man appeals to 
 me most strongly. 
 
 And I have noticed that the young man, who 
 talks scornfully about money and money-making 
 as being entirely beneath his notice, is usually in- 
 sincere or looney. Money is a very nice thing, 
 a very necessary thing, and no man of sense 
 speaks scornfully of money. And because the 
 desire for gain does enter so powerfully into 
 human experience, if we should ask our question 
 
 14 
 
I — True Definition of a Man 
 
 about the definition of a man in the market place, 
 the answer might come back from a thousand 
 throats, "Man is a money-maker, and the greatest 
 man here is the man who makes the most, if he 
 makes it honestly." 
 
 But this answer will not stand. It leaves un- 
 provided for great areas of man's nature. We 
 cannot define the nature or measure the success 
 of any man in terms of dollars and cents. "How 
 much is that man worth?" we sometimes ask. 
 Ordinarily we are not thinking of the worth of the 
 man, but merely of the value of the things he 
 happens to own. This can be easily ascertained 
 from Bradstreet or the assessor's book or from 
 his report on income tax. The worth of the man 
 is another question altogether — it turns upon his 
 qualities of mind and heart, upon the amount of 
 good he has done and the character he has won. 
 He may be worth a great deal in addition to the 
 things he owns, or with a vast abundance of things 
 he may not be worth enough to pay for the powder 
 and shot it would require to blow him up. The 
 worth of the man is a question of personality. 
 
 The current ideals are changing here. When 
 I was a boy the names of the richest men in 
 America were names to conjure with; they sent 
 a thrill through any popular audience. The 
 names of the richest men in America today are 
 not always names to conjure with. It all depends 
 upon the measure of public spirit and the quality 
 
 15 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 of personal character in the man. The thought 
 of man as a money-maker does not touch the 
 deeper things of life, and this answer, therefore, 
 will not stand. 
 
 We come then to an answer which would re- 
 ceive more acceptance on a college campus — 
 ''Man is a thinker." The true measure of a man 
 is not to be found in the length of his sword or in 
 the size of his roll of bank notes, but in those 
 curious gray convolutions of the brain which make 
 possible his intellectual life. The man of insight 
 and judgment, of outlook and discrimination! 
 The man of original and creative ability — ^here 
 surely we find man at his best. 
 
 And if the man can not only think but write, 
 then how great he becomes! Here is a man who 
 can sit down without weapons or wealth, with no 
 army at his back, with no powerful organization 
 to give him influence — with nothing but pen, 
 paper and ink! By what he writes he can influ- 
 ence men by the thousand, by the million, it may 
 be! Men of his own land and of all lands, men 
 of his own day and men of generations yet un- 
 born! There is not an hour in the twenty- four 
 when the sun is not shining straight down at high 
 noon somewhere on the plays of Shakespeare and 
 the poems of Dante. There is not a land nor a 
 language where the orations of Moses and Isaiah, 
 the songs of David and the proverbs of Solomon, 
 the letters of Paul and the parables of Jesus, are 
 
 i6 
 
I — True Definition of a Man 
 
 not exercising their influence upon the aspirations 
 and the conduct of men. Great is the man who 
 can think, and think until he has something to say, 
 and then say it in such fashion as to lodge his 
 truth in the life of the race! Surely we find man 
 here at his best! 
 
 We have coined this estimate into proverbs, 
 "Knowledge is power." "The world belongs to 
 the man who knows." "Wisdom is the principal 
 thing. Therefore get wisdom and with all thy 
 getting get understanding." And the names to 
 conjure with today are the names of Plato and 
 Aristotle at one end of the line and Kant and 
 Hegel, Darwin and Huxley, Edison and Metch- 
 nikoff, at the other. These are the men who show 
 human nature at its best, for man is beyond all 
 else a thinker ! 
 
 Now far be it from me to utter one syllable in 
 depreciation of knowledge. This last answer is 
 not an unworthy one, but is an imperfect one. It 
 does not reach that which is fundamental. I have 
 passed in review these four answers, the victim 
 with his whine, the fighter with his sword, the 
 money-maker with his roll of bank notes, and the 
 thinker with his book. In my judgment not one 
 of them is worthy to stand. 
 
 Here in the house of the Lord suppose we ask 
 the Lord Himself how He would define a man. 
 We will appeal from these lower courts to the 
 highest in order to have a Supreme Court decision 
 
 17 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 on this vital question. "O Thou who knowest 
 what was in man and needed not that any should 
 tell Thee, how wouldst Thou define a man?" 
 
 Listen! "Ye know that among the Gentiles the 
 great ones exercise lordship and dominion. It 
 shall not be so among you. If any man would be 
 great among you, let him serve. The greatest of 
 all is the servant of all." 
 
 Man at his best is a servant. He rises as he 
 stoops to serve. He reaches his greatness through 
 his competence and his willingness to serve. This 
 is what the Perfect Man said and this is what the 
 Perfect IVIan did. "He took upon Himself the 
 form of a servant and went about doing good." 
 Wherefore God and the ages have exalted Him 
 until His name is above every name. 
 
 You can see at a glance that we have now 
 reached that which is fundamental. The life of 
 any individual will be measured and estimated in 
 the long run by its utility in serving the more 
 permanent interests of human society. In the 
 great kingdom of moral reality, usefulness is the 
 ultimate standard. Ideally, "Man is a servant." 
 
 What made those two men, born the same year, 
 one on that side of the water, one on this, men so 
 unlike in the whole outward setting of their lives 
 and so essentially in agreement in spirit — what 
 made those two men, William Ewart Gladstone 
 and Abraham Lincoln so highly esteemed and so 
 widely beloved ? 
 
 i8 
 
I — True Definition of a Man 
 
 Gladstone was born to wealth, his home was in 
 a castle. He had a fine social position from the 
 first, every house in England was open to him 
 from Buckingham Palace down. He had all that 
 education could do for a man — he was a graduate 
 of Christ Church College in Oxford University. 
 He enjoyed the benefits of foreign travel. He was 
 one of the handsomest men of his day and 
 thoroughly accustomed to all of the amenities of 
 social life in one of the great capitals of the world. 
 He thrice became Prime Minister of the British 
 Empire and was esteemed great. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln was poor. He was born in a 
 log cabin. He was never allowed to attend school 
 but twelve months in his whole life. He gained 
 his education mainly as he lay upon the floor 
 before an open fire piled with pine knots reading 
 such books as he could command. He was one 
 of the homeliest men who ever walked and he 
 knew little about the conventions of "society." 
 He was never outside of the United States. But 
 he, too, became genuinely great. 
 
 These men were esteemed because they lived 
 and died to serve. However men might agree or 
 disagree with some of the policies of Gladstone, 
 they came to feel that here was a man bent upon 
 laying his splendid abilities upon the altar of ser- 
 vice in the British Empire. And Abraham Lincoln 
 lived in the spirit of that Book which John Hay, 
 his secretary, tells us lay always on his desk, and 
 
 19 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 in which he was accustomed to read every day. 
 The Book says, "Whosoever saveth his life shall 
 lose it, but whosoever loseth his life for My sake 
 shall find it." Lincoln found himself, he found his 
 place in the hearts of his countrymen, and he 
 found his niche in the temple of fame because he 
 lived and died to serve. 
 
 It was so. in the life of the Perfect Man. He 
 took these broken lights of human greatness and 
 set them in their true perspective. He also suf- 
 fered, but not as unwilling victim — He suffered 
 as one who freely sacrificed Himself for others. 
 He, too, was a fighter, but never with the carnal 
 weapons which destroy men's lives. He fought 
 with those spiritual weapons, instruction, persua- 
 sion, moral appeal, the power of right example, 
 which are mighty through God to the pulling down 
 of the strongholds of evil. He was rich in per- 
 sonal endowment and in high privilege, yet for 
 our sakes He became poor that by His poverty 
 He might make many rich. He was a thinker — 
 He could speak as never man spake, and say 
 without fear of contradiction, "I am the Truth." 
 But underneath all else He was a servant. He 
 translated the language of religion into terms of 
 life as "the Word was made flesh and dwelt among 
 us full of grace and truth." He became the Eternal 
 Servant of that larger good which waits upon the 
 spirit of unselfish devotion. 
 
 Let me read you a single leaf from the book of 
 
 20 
 
I — True Definition of a Man 
 
 experience! It is not a newspaper story — it 
 occurred in my own parish while I was a pastor 
 in California. There was a woman, a wife and 
 a mother, who had undergone a capital surgical 
 operation. She did not rally afterward. The loss 
 of blood and the nervous shock brought her to 
 the verge of death. The surgeons after a hasty 
 consultation told her husband that unless some- 
 thins: radical was done at once her life could not 
 be saved; that indeed the only hope lay m the 
 transfusion of blood from some healthy, vigorous 
 body. 
 
 She had three sons, great, strapping fellows in 
 the heyday of their youth. When the facts were 
 made known to them, they offered themselves at 
 once. The surgeon took them apart in the ad- 
 joining room and had them strip that he might 
 hastily decide which one would best serve. If 
 any one of them had allowed his blood to be 
 tainted by some wretched vice, if he had depleted 
 his vitality by some miserable indulgence, he 
 would have been cut off in that high hour from 
 the chance of serving the mother in her time of 
 peril. The surgeon ran them over and found 
 every one of them sound, clean, abundantly alive. 
 They were all fit — any one of them would do. 
 One of them was chosen and the artery of strength 
 was opened and cormected with the veins of 
 weakness. Then the heart of that young man, 
 clean in every sense of the word, pumped out of 
 
 21 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 its own store of life a fresh stock of vitality into 
 that other life which trembled on the brink. The 
 mother's life was saved and restored. She is 
 alive today, rejoicing in the companionship of 
 those three fine sons. 
 
 How splendid that they were in shape to do it! 
 How fine that in the years past they had so lived 
 that when the call came not one of them needed 
 to flinch. All unwittingly for her sake they had 
 lived the life. It is the strongest incentive to 
 righteousness, it is the strongest deterrent from 
 evil that I know — the thought of serving some 
 other life in a time of emergency which may be 
 physical or mental or moral. For her sake, for 
 his sake, "for their sakes, I sanctify myself" and 
 live the life. 
 
 Give me your answer then — How would you 
 define a man? What do you propose to show to 
 the world thirty years from now and say to it, 
 "This is my conception of what it means to be a 
 man." If you show it a victim whining because 
 life has been hard and the luck has been against 
 you, you will be ashamed of yourself every time 
 you look in the glass. If you show it a fighter, 
 beating and bruising your way, injuring others in 
 order to succeed, all of your friends will be 
 ashamed of you. If you show it nothing but a 
 money-maker, feathering your own nest to make 
 it soft and warm, you will deny all the best tradi- 
 tions of this university. If you show it merely a 
 
 22 
 
I — True Definition of a Man 
 
 thinker, who does not carry his insights over into 
 achievements and translate his knowledge into 
 power for service, then still your life will be 
 barren. But if you will say to yourself, "Man is a 
 servant," and allow that thought to rule your life, 
 then you will count one in that sacramental host 
 which is destined to trample evil in the dust and 
 make this earth at last as fair as the sky. 
 
 23 
 
II 
 
 The Value of an Empty Purse 
 
 HERE is a short story about a young man 
 who had been having his fling! He had 
 come into a large fortune early in life, which is 
 always a perilous experience. Where a young 
 fellow earns his money by the sweat of his own 
 brow he usually learns something about the value 
 of money. Where he earns his pleasure by hard 
 work first, he knows something about the real 
 meaning of pleasure. But where all this is thrust 
 into his hand by a piece of generosity which he 
 calls "good fortune" and God calls "misfortune" 
 oftentimes, he is liable to make a mess of it. 
 
 This young fellow had also been living abroad, 
 which is another perilous experience. He had 
 gathered all together and had taken his journey 
 into a far country. The young man in Paris or 
 Vienna with a big bank account or a generous 
 letter of credit is not nearly so well placed as he 
 would be if he were earning his own living plowing 
 corn in South Dakota or working in a factory in 
 Paterson, New Jersey. 
 
 The odds were against him — it would have 
 taken a strong moral nature to have faced that 
 
 24 
 
II — Value of an Empty Purse 
 
 combination of circumstances successfully, and 
 this young fellow had not the necessary stuff in 
 him to do it. He fell down. He wasted his sub- 
 stance in riotous living. He made friends with 
 men who were bad and with women who were 
 worse. He went the pace and it was rapid. He 
 thought he was having the time of his life — in his 
 poor silly little head that was all he knew. But 
 he soon came to the end of his time such as it 
 was^he bumped his way down the cellar stairs 
 until he found himself at the bottom. "He had 
 spent all and he began to be in want." He took 
 out his purse and there was nothing in it — not 
 a sou. And just there "he came to himself." He 
 began for the first time to get his bearings. He 
 saw the value of an empty purse. 
 
 What help did this young man get out of his 
 pocketbook when it was as flat as his own feel- 
 ings? In the first place, he was compelled to cut 
 out a lot of evil indulgences. It costs money to 
 be downright wicked. No man can travel the 
 primrose path unless he has the price. He may 
 have been in the habit of getting drunk, but if he 
 is entirely out of money he will have to live 
 soberly for a while. He may have been indulging 
 in the excitement of gambling, but with an empty 
 purse he will have to call a halt on that form of 
 vice. He may have been making merry with 
 harlots as this fellow had been doing, but without 
 money he cannot go on — their smiles have to be 
 
 25 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 paid for in cash. The way of the transgressor is 
 expensive as well as hard — and it grows harder 
 and more expensive the longer a man travels it. 
 This is God's own good way of reminding the 
 transgressor that he is off the track. 
 
 This young man had to stop because his money 
 was gone — he could not pay for any more dissi- 
 pation. It is an honor to a man when he can walk 
 the streets of the wickedest city on earth with a 
 full purse and turn his back on all the allurements 
 to wrongdoing. He could, but he will not, because 
 he is a man of principle. If, however, a man has 
 not reached that level of moral development he 
 had better have his supplies cut off for a season. 
 If he is unable to carry a full purse and run 
 straight, let him carry an empty one for a time. 
 It was a distinct advantage to this young man to 
 be cut off from further indulgence by his lack of 
 means. "He had spent all and began to be in 
 want" — and at the same time he began to be a 
 man. 
 
 In the second place, his empty purse compelled 
 him to go to work. He had to do it to put bread 
 in his mouth. He was "perishing with hunger and 
 no man gave to him." He, therefore, stood out in 
 the open and said to the world, "Make me a hired 
 servant. From this hour let me pull my own 
 weight in the boat and earn my way man-fashion." 
 
 The sting of want — it is the only thing that is 
 sharp enough to transform many an idler into a 
 
 26 
 
II — Value of an Empty Purse 
 
 worker 1 It takes the hard slap of necessity to 
 change the spender into a producer. You meet 
 droves of people who have fallen into the easy, 
 disgraceful habit of eating their bread by the 
 sweat of other men's brows. They are parasites 
 on the social body, feeding on the vitality of 
 others without producing anything of their own. 
 They are like those fat, lazy, green worms, which 
 crawl around on the trees in the spring filling 
 themselves with food which they did nothing to 
 produce. They have not energy enough to change 
 the green leaves into any decent sort of flesh 
 color. They simply lay their food around their 
 bodies in soft, green wads — you can look at them 
 and tell what they ate last. 
 
 Heaven be praised for hard work! Heaven be 
 praised for the necessity which makes it for most 
 of us not an elective but a required course! We 
 might not take it otherwise — it is so easy to look 
 for snap courses in the world. It is the making 
 of a man; it furnishes the necessary discipline to 
 transform human pulp into manhood with some 
 genuine mental and moral fibre in it. 
 
 Let every soul offer that same prayer — "Make 
 me the hired servant of my own need and of the 
 common good." Wherever men and women are 
 allowed to go on indefinitely, finding the way 
 greased for them by lavish expenditure and gener- 
 ous tips, with no chance to come into contact with 
 the rough side of the board, they are liable to 
 
 27 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 bring up in perdition. "Endure hardness as a 
 good soldier of Jesus Christ," Paul said once to 
 a young man he had in tow. "Study to show thy- 
 self a workman that need not be ashamed." It 
 is in that direction that honor lies. 
 
 It would be a great gain if every young man 
 had to face the world with his coat off; if he were 
 compelled to lay hold on some difficult task with 
 both hands; if he were made to lift on some heavy 
 load until the sweat came; if he were set to think 
 hard upon some problem until he felt the tug of 
 it on his own brain. It is by that process that 
 muscle and gray matter and character are de- 
 veloped. 
 
 It is by meeting some situation which offers a 
 challenge to the best powers a man has and meet- 
 ing it without flinching that he adds cubits to his 
 stature. What under Heaven is life for but just 
 that! And I am afraid that hundreds of us might 
 not do it unless we had to. It is the empty purse, 
 the sting of want, the thrust of necessity which 
 drives many a man out and bids him strive. 
 
 Hear this word of Edison, the great worker as 
 well as the great inventor of our day! "Genius," 
 he says, "may be two per cent inspiration, but it is 
 ninety-eight per cent perspiration," One of his 
 assistants told me that Edison worked for ten 
 years to invent his storage battery, which would 
 harness the forces of the lightning to the homely 
 tasks of earth; and that during that period he was 
 
 28 
 
II — Value of an Empty Purse 
 always in his laboratory at seven-thirty every 
 morning. He had his lunch sent to him in the 
 shop. He went home to dinner, but he usually 
 came back in the evening to have another try at 
 it in the quiet of the night. 
 
 He was there working, often until midnight, 
 while thousands of empty-headed pleasure seekers 
 of whom the world will never hear were dancing 
 up and down the great White Ways of earth with 
 more dollars than sense. He made hundreds of 
 experiments during those years. He built models 
 by the score and then discarded them. But 
 through repeated failure he moved ahead to a 
 splendid success. He invented his storage battery 
 and the whole world is richer for what he did. 
 And he tells us that his highest joy in life has 
 been found in matching his strength and skill 
 against baffling problems and seeing them finally 
 win out. 
 
 In these recent years we have been putting rub- 
 ber tires on pretty much everything and it has 
 not always been an unmixed advantage. We need 
 some of the jolts. It is possible to make life so 
 easy and comfortable as to fail of the best results. 
 With high-priced kindergartens at one end of the 
 educational system making the business of learn- 
 ing a sweet little game and with certain colleges 
 at the other end of the system offering unlimited 
 electives and no very searching requirements, 
 there are young people who may get it into their 
 
 29 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 heads that there is such a thing as "painless edu- 
 cation." Painless education to match the "pain- 
 less dentistry" we sometimes see advertised, 
 chiefly by quacks ! 
 
 There is no such thing — it cannot be done. You 
 cannot be carried to the skies of mental and moral 
 efficiency on flowery beds of ease, it matters not 
 how much money you are prepared to pay for the 
 privilege. There are no parlor cars on the trains 
 which run that way. Somewhere along the road, 
 all along the road, I would say, there must be hard, 
 serious, manly study. The only men who arrive 
 are the men who take the middle of the road with 
 all the dust and discomfort that may involve and 
 put it through. They work out their own salva- 
 tion. And when they get it worked out it is 
 salvation. 
 
 In the county where my father lived for fifty 
 years there was a young man about my own age, 
 who was born to wealth. He had a home filled 
 with comforts and luxuries. His father generously 
 gave him a good education, the advantages of 
 travel and all the other good things which money 
 could buy. In that case the result was that when 
 the young man was forty years old he had failed 
 in his chosen profession, he had added nothing 
 whatever to the moral forces of the community 
 and he was a very indifferent sort of citizen. He 
 was simply one hundred and eighty-five pounds 
 of well-dressed meat. He was bewailing the poor 
 
 30 
 
II — Value of an Empty Purse 
 use he had made of his life to a friend one day. 
 He remarked, "The best thing my father could 
 have done for me when I was twenty years old 
 would have been to have given me a half a dollar 
 and kicked me out into the street." "George," 
 the friend replied, "why did you not take a half a 
 dollar and kick yourself out?" He had not the 
 strength of mind to do it. He had genuine ability 
 and a great deal of personal charm, and I have 
 the feeling that an empty purse might have been 
 the making of him. 
 
 Who was it who said this, "My Father worketh 
 even until now and I work"? His highest concep- 
 tion of God was of a Being who from the first 
 hour when the morning stars sang together down 
 through the countless ages, had been engaged in a 
 ceaseless, tireless, beneficent putting forth of His 
 energy in work. His highest conception of human 
 life was embodied in the action of a Man who took 
 upon Himself the form of a servant, went about 
 doing good and kept it up until He could say, "I 
 have finished the work Thou gavest me to do." 
 The Master worked voluntarily because He was 
 the Perfect, the Typal, the Representative Man, 
 the Son of Man. But however it comes, whether 
 from choice or from necessity, from a high resolve 
 or from the promptings of an empty purse, honor 
 that impulse which sends you forth to your own 
 appointed work. 
 
 In the third place, the young man's empty purse 
 
 31 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 enabled him to see the difference between false 
 friends and true. While he was rich he was im- 
 mensely popular. He had friends galore, as he 
 thought. He was "a good spender," as the foolish 
 phrase runs, and he found plenty of foolish 
 friends, male and female, to help him spend his 
 money. He was courted and flattered on all sides. 
 Ht thought that all those people liked him when 
 as a matter of fact they merely liked his money. 
 
 The moment his money was gone he found that 
 all those false friends were gone, too. "He began 
 to be in want and no man gave to him" — that was 
 the heartbreaking part of it. Among all those fol- 
 lowers who had been drawn about him by his reck- 
 less spending there was not a man nor a woman 
 who cared enough for him to give him a meal. 
 His fat purse had blinded him to their real charac- 
 ters, but now with an empty purse as a field glass 
 he could see them as they were, and he saw them 
 vanishing in the distance as rats leave a sinking 
 ship. 
 
 It is good for us to get down to hardpan now 
 and then, where we are liked or disliked not for 
 what we have, but for what we are. It is good 
 for us to meet men not as the paid servants of 
 our pleasure nor as tradesmen eager for our pat- 
 ronage, but simply man to man. No man's life 
 consists of the abundance nor of the scarcity of 
 the things he possesses. The only friends worth 
 having are those who take us not for what we 
 
 32 
 
II — Value of an Empty Purse 
 
 own, but for what we are. And those real friends 
 are in no wise affected by the ups or downs in our 
 bank accounts. But when a man's purse is empty 
 he knows "who's who" without looking in a big 
 red book. He can distinguish instantly between 
 the false friends and the true. 
 
 In one of Martin Maartens' stories he speaks of 
 the social habits in a certain city which had be- 
 come hopelessly commercialized. If a man was 
 poor they shouted his name at him in harsh tones 
 as if they had been announcing the name of some 
 small station on the railroad. If a man was worth 
 a hundred thousand dollars they addressed him in 
 tones of quiet respect. If he was worth two hun- 
 dred thousand they gave him exactly twice as 
 much deference. If he had a million they lowered 
 their voices almost to a whisper and folded their 
 hands in his presence as they did when they were 
 in church. They did not reverence the man, but 
 they reverenced his money. "They worshipped 
 money," the author says, "because they felt that 
 a man who does not worship money is a socialist, 
 and a socialist is an atheist, and an atheist is a 
 man with no religion." Therefore, because they 
 were religious "after their kind" they worshiped 
 money with a deep and holy reverence. In that 
 city no one knew who his real friends were unless 
 his purse was empty. 
 
 There is a Friend that sticketh closer than a 
 brother, whose feeling for us is in no wise affected 
 
 33 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 by our rating in Bradstreet. He was equally at 
 home with Zaccheus, the richest man in Jericho, 
 and with that blind beggar, who was the poorest 
 man in Jerusalem. And He liked to construe His 
 own relationships in terms of personal friendship. 
 "I have called you friends," He said one day to a 
 group of eager, active, red-blooded, young men. 
 "I have called you friends" — and friends they 
 were, even though their means were small. Many 
 a man flattered and pampered in the days of his 
 prosperity never learns what a friend Jesus Christ 
 can be until the hour strikes when all his pros- 
 perity vanishes. In that hour, not knowing where 
 else to look, he looks up, and sees a Friend. His 
 purse is empty, but his heart is full because he 
 has entered into that personal fellowship with an 
 Eternal Friend, which is ennobling beyond any 
 other influence which enters the human soul. Re- 
 joice in the day of adversity if it enables you to 
 see the difference between false friends and true. 
 In the fourth place, the young man's empty 
 purse gave him a new standard of values. He 
 had been in the habit of purchasing his satisfac- 
 tions with cash. He purchased some of them at 
 the bar and some of them, the story says, in the 
 brothel. He purchased some of them in worthier 
 places, but they all came to him because he had 
 the price. He had fallen into a way of thinking 
 that there was nothing under Heaven or in Heaven 
 which money would not buy. He said to himself, 
 
 34 
 
II — Value of an Empty Purse 
 
 "I am rich and increased with goods and have 
 need of nothing." Then God stripped him of all 
 he had and set him out in the open, a poor, naked, 
 shivering soul with nothing but an empty purse. 
 
 In that very hour "he came to himself." He 
 saw himself as he was in the clear daylight of 
 reahty rather than in the night-light of thoughtless 
 dissipation. He said, "I have sinned — but I will 
 make an about face. I have been wasting my sub- 
 stance as a useless spender, now I will become a 
 producer, the hired servant of the common good. 
 I have been throwing away my chance in this far 
 country. Now I will go back where I belong. I 
 have cut myself off from those relationships which 
 are wholesome and rewarding. Now I will arise 
 and go to my father." And he went, step by step, 
 a long, tedious journey of moral renewal, but 
 every step in the right direction. He went poor 
 in purse, but rich in high resolve and in a new 
 appreciation of those values which are supreme. 
 
 You may, if you choose, allow your empty purse 
 to make you sour — you can stand off looking with 
 envy upon those who possess what you would like 
 to possess and cannot. You may, if you choose, 
 allow your empty purse to make you hard and 
 defiant — you fling out your resentment at a world 
 which has dealt you such a sorry hand with no 
 kings and queens in it. You may, if you choose, 
 allow your empty purse to become so heavy with 
 the sense of disappointment which takes the place 
 
 35 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 of bank notes as to send you through life broken 
 and depressed. All these lines of action are open 
 to you, and mistaken men travel them all. But, 
 if you choose, you may allow that bit of adversity 
 to furnish you the chance to show yourself every 
 inch a man, honored and valued for your personal 
 qualities of mind and heart. In that event your 
 empty purse will give you a new and better stan- 
 dard of values. 
 
 There was a young man once who came to 
 Christ with great possessions. He was a clean- 
 living, serious-minded fellow, who had kept all the 
 commandments from his youth up. The Master 
 looked him over and took his measure. Then He 
 said to him in effect something like this, "There 
 are men who have the necessary moral fibre to be 
 masters of their possessions. There are rich men 
 who enter the Kingdom of Heaven, administering 
 their wealth in harmony with the great Christian 
 ideals. It is not an easy task — it is like putting 
 a camel through the eye of a needle — but by the 
 grace of God it can be done." And where a rich 
 man is thoroughly Christian in all his acts and 
 attitudes he is a kind of masterpiece in God's 
 gallery of good men. "But you," Jesus said to 
 the young ruler, "have not it in you to do that 
 great thing. Your only safety lies in parting with 
 your wealth and in following Me. You need to 
 meet your fellow men and your Maker with an 
 empty purse because your means have blinded you 
 
 36 
 
II — Value of an Empty Purse 
 
 thus far to the deeper things of life." The young 
 man would not meet that hard test — it was a chal- 
 lenge to the best there was in him, but he refused. 
 He turned away sorrowful for he loved money 
 more than he loved manhood. 
 
 How fine, on the other hand, are the moral 
 results of self-sacrifice and discipline! It is good 
 for everyone to learn how to subordinate his own 
 personal comfort and pleasure to some larger 
 interest. In that school the men who have the 
 future in their hands are now being trained. The 
 Head Master of Eton, the famous English boys' 
 school, was at one time a stern, old chap whose 
 name was Keats. One winter morning he met a 
 small boy who was crying. "What's the matter 
 with you?" the Master called out, in his gruff way. 
 "I'm cold," the boy whimpered. "Cold, you must 
 not complain of the cold. This is no girls' school." 
 
 It was a harsh reply, but the sniveling boy had 
 a spark of manhood in him which caught fire. He 
 stopped crying and he never forgot that stern 
 command. Fifteen years later he was riding at 
 the head of his own regiment of Dragoons in 
 India. When the order came to charge on the 
 entrenched Sihks he gathered up his bridle rein, 
 swung himself into the saddle and called out to a 
 brother officer who had also studied at Eton, 
 "Well, as old Keats used to say, 'This is no girls' 
 school!' but here goes!" Then he rode on, to his 
 death, as the event proved, but the charge brought 
 
 37 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 victory that day to the English Army and the ex- 
 tension of the British Empire there beneath the 
 Southern Cross. How splendid are the results of 
 discipline, bravely met and nobly born, in the 
 making of that manhood which is the image of 
 God on earth. 
 
 38 
 
Ill 
 
 The Lure of Goodness 
 
 THERE is a feeling in certain quarters that 
 being good is dull work. There are men 
 who talk as if wickedness would always be found 
 interesting and exciting, where righteousness 
 would be tame and spiritless. When young men 
 speak of going off to some great city to "see life" 
 they usually have in mind something immoral. 
 They think that that sort of thing is "life" and 
 that the decencies are more or less dead. 
 
 The newspapers have helped to create that 
 notion. They give an inordinate amount of space 
 to the vices and crimes of men — it is out of all 
 proportion to the real significance of such action. 
 A man may go straight along about his business 
 for fifty years without ever causing anybody to 
 look around. But if he does something out- 
 rageously wicked he will be in all the papers next 
 morning with headlines and pictures. The news- 
 papers insist that this is "news." They think that 
 everybody will want to read about it. They have 
 the same curious notion that wickedness is inter- 
 esting while goodness is dull. 
 
 Now my own feeling is that all those people are 
 
 39 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 just as crazy as they would be if they went around 
 insisting that two and two make five or fifty. 
 They have not learned to add or to subtract. 
 They cannot even see the figures on the board and 
 tell what they mean. The most fascinating pur- 
 suit in the world is that of being good. The finest 
 form of adventure upon which any man can enter 
 is the quest for goodness and for God in the depths 
 of his own soul. It has not become common 
 enough to rob it of a certain air of romance. If 
 you wish to find the zest and relish of life, do that. 
 "The lure of goodness" is my theme and if I could 
 lift it up so that you would see it as it is it would 
 draw you to it. 
 
 Here in the New Testament was One who made 
 goodness interesting. He began His life in a pic- 
 turesque sort of way. He was born in the manger 
 of a stable, which was an odd place to be born. 
 He grew up in a carpenter's home and in a carpen- 
 ter shop. He never saw the inside of a college, 
 yet somehow He learned to think straight and to 
 speak as never man spake. He had the courage 
 of his convictions because He knew what He was 
 talking about. When He was thirty years old 
 He stood up boldly and said to the men of His 
 day, "I am the Way, walk in it; and the Truth, 
 believe it; and the Life, live it, and it will make 
 you free." Some of the men who heard Him tried 
 it, and they found that it was so. 
 
 He went about turning the various maxims of 
 
 40 
 
Ill — Lure of Goodness 
 
 human conduct end for end. "It hath been said 
 by them of old time, but I say unto you" — some- 
 thing entirely different. And when He did that 
 everyone saw that those principles of righteous- 
 ness fitted into the needs of everyday life as they 
 never had before. He went about turning things 
 upside down, and when He did that people saw 
 that for the first time things were right side up. 
 He was free, brave, original, in His method of 
 being good and when men watched Him live they 
 went away saying, "We never saw it on this 
 fashion." 
 
 He taught not as the scribes who had learned 
 their lesson out of a book but as one having the 
 authority of first-hand knowledge of spiritual 
 things. He clothed His message in the ordinary 
 words of everyday life, "and the common people 
 heard Him gladly." He said that the new prin- 
 ciple of life He had come to introduce into the 
 world was like "salt," it was like "yeast," it was 
 like "mustard seed." He compared it to all man- 
 ner of homely things which had some punch in 
 them. He said in a blunt way, "No man can serve 
 two masters." Men cannot serve God and money 
 at the same time without getting things mixed. 
 He said obedience to the law of God was like 
 building one's house on solid rock, and disobe- 
 dience was like building it on the sand. He said 
 that prayer is as simple and natural as the act 
 of a child asking his father for bread or fish or an 
 
 41 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 egg. And because those fathers in Palestine, 
 faulty though they were, knew how to give good 
 gifts to their children, they felt the force of the 
 claim He made on behalf of prayer to the 
 Heavenly Father. When the common people 
 heard Him talking about goodness after that man- 
 ner they followed Him about in droves as if He 
 had been a circus procession instead of a teacher 
 of religion. They had never heard it on that 
 fashion before and they could not seem to get 
 enough of it. 
 
 He went habitually among the people who 
 needed Him most. He chose publicans and sin- 
 ners for His intimates and made saints of them. 
 He picked up worthless beggars and women of 
 the street and by the sheer contagion of His own 
 life made new people of them. "I came not to 
 call the righteous" — He said this with a smile for 
 He knew that those self-satisfied prigs who were 
 sneering at Him were anything but righteous — "I 
 came not to call the righteous, but sinners to re- 
 pentance." He laid His strong, clean hands on 
 lepers to their amazement for they had not felt 
 the touch of healthy flesh for years; and when 
 He took His hands away the lepers were cleansed. 
 He told a lame man to stand up and walk and 
 there was such a note of authority in His voice 
 that the lame man tried and found to his joy that 
 he could. He opened the eyes of the blind and 
 unstopped the ears of the deaf, causing men to 
 
 42 
 
Ill — Lure of Goodness 
 
 see and to hear what they had never seen nor 
 heard before. He loved men, bad men as often 
 as not, because they needed it rather than because 
 they deserved it. When He died He was not lying 
 in a comfortable bed, he was hanging on a Cross. 
 He was hanging there not bewailing His fate nor 
 denouncing the men who had crucified Him. He 
 was praying for them with a tenderness which 
 ought to have melted a heart of stone — "Father, 
 forgive them; for they know not." And when He 
 went out of this world He was carrying a penitent 
 robber in His arms — "into Paradise," He said. 
 
 Now all that is interesting ! There is not a dull 
 line anywhere in the life of the Perfect, the Typal, 
 the Representative Man, the Son of Man. We 
 print and circulate more copies of the little book 
 containing the story of His life a hundred times 
 over than of any other volume you can name. It 
 came out nineteen hundred years ago and it is 
 still a best seller. We date our calendars from the 
 date of His birth — 1919 we say, for it is just 
 that long since He was born in the manger of the 
 stable. We call the fairest portion of the globe 
 "Christendom" — His part of it. His words have 
 become household words in more homes and in 
 more hearts than those of any other one who ever 
 walked the earth. He has a grip on the thoughts, 
 the hopes and the high resolves of men at this 
 hour which cannot be matched. He is interesting. 
 
 43 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 Lift Him up anywhere until men see Him as He 
 is and He draws them to Him. 
 
 How do you account for it? What is the secret 
 of the interest which attaches to his style of good- 
 ness? I can think of several elements in it which 
 are suggestive. 
 
 In the first place He was perfectly natural. He 
 never posed. He never seemed to be playing a 
 part. He was not being good to be seen of men. 
 He never said to Himself, "Now this is what would 
 be expected of a man in my position." He was 
 what He was without ever seeming to think about 
 how it might look to others — He was not con- 
 cerned about that. 
 
 You know Bernard Shaw says that if you go to 
 a symphony concert you will find many people 
 who are there not because they like classical music 
 but because they know they ought to like it and 
 that it is the proper thing to be seen at the sym- 
 phony, and so they go. In like manner, when you 
 get to Heaven you may find people there who are 
 there not because they have any real taste or 
 fitness for that sort of thing but because they feel 
 that they owe it to their social position to be in 
 Heaven. How mighty are the conventions of 
 society and how dull and tiresome they make thou- 
 sands of people who become slaves to them! " 
 Those people might be interesting if they would 
 only be themselves. 
 
 How simple and natural Jesus was. He lived 
 
 44 
 
Ill — Lure of Goodness 
 
 not as the scribes but as one whose goodness was 
 vital. His life, therefore, was with power. 
 
 He began his public ministry not in the syna- 
 gogue nor at the temple but at a wedding. He 
 wrought His first mighty work there because the 
 people He was interested in were at the wedding. 
 When He turned the water of the occasion into 
 wine the people felt that the best joy of their lives 
 had been kept until that hour. 
 
 He came not like John the Baptist, neither eat- 
 ing nor drinking in an ordinary way but living 
 apart in the desert on locusts and wild honey in 
 an unnatural, ascetic fashion. He came eating 
 and drinking oftentimes with publicans and sin- 
 ners. His table talk changed the lives of hard- 
 headed business men like Zaccheus and Matthew. 
 He was just as much at home with poor men like 
 that beggar in Jerusalem who was born blind. 
 While He was with them it never occurred to them 
 that they were poor. In His presence all hands 
 felt that no man's life consists of the abundance 
 of the things that he can buy. Life is made up 
 of certain qualities of mind and heart and not of 
 the things which men store up in barns or in 
 banks. 
 
 He told His friends that being good was being 
 like the birds and the flowers. ''Consider the 
 ravens," He said, "they neither sow nor reap. 
 They have neither storehouse nor barn, yet God 
 feeds them." The ravens were not made to sow 
 
 45 
 
Yale Talks 
 and reap. They do the things they were made to 
 do. They are true to the law of their being. They 
 function according to their own natures. They 
 live out their ravenhood flying to and fro, keen 
 of eye and swift of wing, seeking their meat from 
 God, and in the great natural order which enfolds 
 them they are fed. 
 
 "Consider the lilies," He said, "they neither toil 
 nor spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was never 
 so well dressed as one of these wild flowers." The 
 lilies were not made to toil and spin. They do 
 the things they were made to do. They are true 
 to the law of their being. They function accord- 
 ing to their own natures. They live out their lily- 
 hood reaching down and claiming all that the soil 
 has for them, looking up to receive all that the 
 sun and the rain and the dew have for them, and 
 so they are clothed with beauty. 
 
 "Do that," Jesus said. Do the things you were 
 made to do. Be true to the law of your being. 
 Function according to your own natures. Live 
 out your manhood and your womanhood. What- 
 soever your hands, your minds and your hearts 
 find to do, do it well. Seek first the Kingdom of 
 God and righteousness — that is what you were 
 made to do. And when you are striving for self- 
 realization along the line of the Divine Purpose 
 for you, intelligently and conscientiously, you, too, 
 will be fed and clothed. You will be fed indeed 
 with the Bread that comes down from above and 
 
 46 
 
Ill — Lure of Goodness 
 
 clothed with that righteousness which is the fine 
 linen of the saints. The Master was always sim- 
 ple and natural in His method of being good. And 
 that was one reason why men found Him interest- 
 ing. 
 
 In the second place, His goodness was abso- 
 lutely spontaneous. He lived at a time when the 
 good people of the world were keen on rules and 
 regulations. They had reduced righteousness to a 
 science, as they believed, and it took a well-posted 
 man to remember all the moves in the game as the 
 Pharisees played it. There were thirty-three dif- 
 ferent ways in which men could break the Sab- 
 bath. There were fifty-seven varieties of mint, 
 anise and cummin, which had to be carefully 
 tithed. They had bound upon the consciences of 
 men burdens grievous to be borne by their insist- 
 ence upon endless details in the art of being good. 
 Religion had become legalism; righteousness was 
 an affair of rules. And the whole system had be- 
 come as dull as a page torn out of a trigonometry. 
 
 Jesus set Himself against that whole method. 
 "Except your righteousness exceeds the righteous- 
 ness of the scribes and Pharisees, except your 
 goodness becomes more interesting and vital than 
 that, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven." 
 A good tree brings forth good fruit naturally, 
 spontaneously, inevitably. It cannot otherwise. 
 It does it just as a bird sings. Therefore, make 
 the tree good and let the fruit come as it will — 
 
 47 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 the fruit will be all right. A good man out of the 
 good treasure of his heart brings forth good deeds. 
 He does it naturally, spontaneously, inevitably. 
 Therefore, make the heart ris;ht and let the con- 
 duct come as it will. Love God with an honest 
 heart, and love your neighbor as well as yourself, 
 and then do as you please. With that sort of 
 heart within, vour own spontaneous action will be 
 right. Love works no ill to anybody; therefore, 
 love is the fulfilment of all law. 
 
 Now that sort of goodness is interesting and 
 worth while. The rule-keeping sort is always dull 
 and weak. The voung man who is alwavs think- 
 ing when he should put his right foot forward and 
 when his left never becomes easv and graceful 
 as a dancer — he can hardly walk across the room 
 without falling over the flowers in the carpet. 
 The young woman who is always tr\'ing to remem- 
 ber Rule 53 or Rule 97 in some ''Guide to De- 
 portment" or "Book of Etiquette," never becomes 
 a lady. She is not gaining that spirit of thought- 
 ful, kindly consideration for others which is the 
 essence of all good breeding. The people whose 
 eyes are forever on rules of conduct graven on 
 tables of stone rather than upon the temper and 
 disposition of the heart never become genuinely 
 good. The ^Master was intent upon a mode of 
 goodness which should be vital. 
 
 WTien we read the story of the Master's life it 
 seems as if He went about thinking up new ways 
 
 48 
 
Ill — Lure of Goodness 
 
 of being good. He was always striking out on 
 lines of His own. If we had not gone so far 
 toward making Him a stained-glass window, or a 
 cold white marble statue, or a narrative in a book 
 which most men seldom read — if we could only 
 see Him as He was, flesh and blood, warm, real, 
 alive, our hearts would leap at the sight of His 
 goodness, as did the hearts of those men in Gali- 
 lee. They were accustomed to the cut-and-dried 
 style of goodness, but when they saw His method 
 they cried out, "This of a truth is that prophet 
 that should come." They saw in Him what the 
 nations had been waiting for during all those 
 centuries. He was simple and natural, genuine 
 and spontaneous, and when that t\'pe of goodness 
 is lifted up in any land it draws men to it. 
 
 You have all read no doubt about the Bishop 
 whose name was "Welcome." His name fitted 
 him — it grew out of him like his hair. WHierever 
 he went he was just that, he was welcome. "WTien 
 he was first made a Bishop he found that the 
 Bishop's palace had in it sixty splendid rooms 
 while the little town hospital across the street had 
 only six. He visited the hospital first. "How 
 many patients have you here?" he said to the 
 head physician. "Twentv-six." "Your beds are 
 crowded and your rooms are poorly ventilated." 
 "Yes, your lordship," replied the doctor, "but 
 what can w^e do — we have no more room." "There 
 is some mistake here," said the Bishop; "they 
 
 49 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 have gotten these houses mixed up. It is per- 
 fectly clear to me that you have my house and I 
 have yours. Restore me my own — your place is 
 across the street." So he had the sick people all 
 moved over into the Bishop's palace with its sixty 
 rooms and he lived for the rest of his days in the 
 little one-story hospital. That interested the 
 people of the Diocese — they had never seen it on 
 that fashion before. 
 
 It was said of him that as long as he had money 
 in his pockets he visited the poor people of his 
 Diocese that he might help them. When his 
 money was all gone he visited the rich to ask 
 them for gifts to help the poor. 
 
 He announced one Sunday that the following 
 week he intended to go up into the mountains to 
 visit some poor shepherds who were keeping their 
 flocks in an out-of-the-way place. The mountains 
 at that time were infested with brigands. 
 
 The Mayor of the town called on him that 
 afternoon to protest against his going. "You 
 would need an escort of soldiers," the Mayor said, 
 "and even then you would imperil their lives as 
 well as your own." 
 
 "For that reason," the Bishop said, "I shall 
 go without an escort." 
 
 "Alone?" 
 
 "Alone." 
 
 "They will rob you." 
 
 "I have nothing." 
 
 50 
 
Ill — Lure of Goodness 
 
 "They will kill you." 
 
 "A harmless old priest passing along muttering 
 his prayers? What good would that do them?" 
 
 "What would you do if you met them?" 
 
 "I would ask them for alms for my poor." 
 
 The Mayor saw that he could not do anything 
 with such a man — he, too, had never seen it on 
 that fashion. The Bishop set out the next morn- 
 ing with one small boy who had offered to go 
 along to show him the way. He found the shep- 
 herds and spent the week with them, telling them 
 about the goodness of God and administering to 
 them the Holy Communion, which they had not 
 received for years. And when he returned he 
 brought with him a large treasure of gold, silver 
 and precious stones which had been sent to him 
 there in the mountains with this message pinned 
 upon it — "To Bishop Welcome from Cravatte." 
 
 Cravatte was the ringleader of the brigands! 
 And when the Bishop was showing his treasure to 
 his curate he said, "To those who are satisfied with 
 little, God sends much." "God," the curate re- 
 plied, "or the devil?" The Bishop looked at him 
 long and searchingly and answered, "God." 
 
 Now that is interesting! Bishop Welcome was 
 like his Master. His life was the light of men. 
 Wherever he went they saw their way about, and 
 in that light they walked toward Heaven. His 
 goodness was not the rule-keeping sort. It was 
 simple and natural, genuine and spontaneous. It 
 
 51 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 was the real thing, and when men saw it they 
 glorified God. 
 
 What a tragedy it is where goodness is carica- 
 tured! Where it is made to seem dull and mean! 
 Where men are honest because honesty is the best 
 policy rather than from any real love of integrity! 
 Where men are clean because they dread the con- 
 sequences of doing what they would really like to 
 do! Where they tell the truth because they are 
 afraid of being found out as liars! Where they 
 do an occasional good deed because it is pleasant 
 to receive the applause of men ! Where men cari- 
 cature goodness in that way they become the 
 enemies of the race. They are guilty of high 
 crimes and misdemeanors against the Kingdom of 
 God. They ought to be shut up somewhere until 
 they learn better. 
 
 And those people whose goodness is thin, 
 meagre and commonplace with never a splendid 
 outburst of real generosity in it, with none of that 
 moral venture which leads men to stake every- 
 thing on loyalty to principle, with none of that 
 uncalculating devotion to an ideal which makes 
 a life winsome — ^how all this becomes a hindrance 
 in the path of goodness! And worse than all, 
 those would-be superior persons who go about 
 thinking about how much better they are than 
 anybody else, the moral prigs and spiritual snobs 
 who stand up and thank God that they are not 
 as other men are! How they injure the cause of 
 
 52 
 
Ill — Lure of Goodness 
 goodness! They make us feel like saying some- 
 thing wicked. 
 
 But goodness seen as it is, goodness where it is 
 simple and natural, genuine and spontaneous, 
 goodness as it burned with a steady flame in the 
 life of Bishop Welcome and shone resplendent in 
 the life of Jesus of Nazareth — goodness like that 
 is the most interesting and winsome thing on 
 earth. It is the wine of life. It is the poetry of 
 human existence. It is human action set to music 
 and singing the same tune the morning stars sang 
 together in that high hour when all the sons of 
 God shouted for joy. 
 
 Now what can we do about it, you and I? 
 What can we do to help to restore goodness to its 
 rightful place of honor and of interest? I know 
 of nothing better than to undertake to show the 
 world some of our very own. The best service 
 anyone can render to the cause of music is not to 
 go about arguing until he is red in the face, trying 
 to convince people that Beethoven and Wagner, 
 Schubert and Brahms, were great composers. 
 That does not accomplish anything. The best 
 service he can render to the cause of music is to 
 learn to play a little of it or to sing a little of it 
 in such a way that people hear and feel the power 
 and beauty of real music. Do it. Do it yourself. 
 It is the only way. 
 
 The same principle applies to this more im- 
 portant interest of goodness. We cannot all learn 
 
 S3 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 to play, we cannot all learn to sing. We could not, 
 if we chose, render the Fifth Symphony or the 
 Overture to Tannhauser in such fashion that 
 the hearts of all who heard would be hushed and 
 awed. 
 
 But we can learn to live, and being good is 
 just that — it is living. It is living out one's real 
 self and not some unworthy caricature. It is 
 living out one's best self and not some poor third- 
 rate substitute. "This do," the Master said, "and 
 thou shalt live." The other mode of life is dying 
 by inches or by yards, as the case may be. What 
 those young men saw in the big city was not 
 "life," it was death. "I am come that you may 
 have life and have it more abundantly." When 
 by the grace of God you are making your own 
 life simple and natural, genuine and spontaneous 
 in its goodness, you will enter into life to go no 
 more out. And when you lift up that sort of 
 goodness it will draw men to* you and it will draw 
 them to Him. 
 
 54 
 
IV 
 How Old Are You? 
 
 WHEN Jacob learned that his son Joseph 
 was still alive he went down to Egypt to 
 visit him. While he was there, Joseph as a mark 
 of respect to his father had him presented at 
 court. And when the old patriarch stood before 
 Pharaoh, ruler of the land of Egypt, the king said 
 to him courteously, "How old art thou?" Jacob 
 answered, "The years of my pilgrimage have been 
 one hundred and thirty, and they have not yet 
 attained unto the years of my fathers in the days 
 of their pilgrimage." It was a gracious answer. 
 It was a polite way of telling Pharaoh that he did 
 not feel like an old man at all, even though he 
 had lived a hundred and thirty years and that he 
 thought he might be good for some years to come. 
 Let me ask you that question — How old are 
 you? It is a personal sort of question. If I 
 should go about pressing it upon people indi- 
 vidually I might not meet with a very hearty 
 response. Men as well as women show some re- 
 luctance about giving the exact figures, especially 
 when the gray hair has begun to show above their 
 ears, 
 
 55 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 But I am not asking how long ago you were 
 born — that would touch only the surface of my 
 question. How much have you lived? — that is 
 the real point of my inquiry! You cannot tell 
 how much a man has lived by looking in the 
 family Bible where the births of the children are 
 recorded. Life is not measured solely by years. 
 You must look at what you find written in the 
 man himself. How much have you seen and heard 
 and felt? How much have you loved and aspired 
 and achieved in the depths of your own soul? 
 How much actual experience of a worthy sort 
 stands recorded opposite your name where the 
 angels of God are writing all the time ? Measure 
 your life in that more intelligent way and tell me 
 what you find! 
 
 The moment you undertake this more accurate 
 appraisement you discover that life has various 
 dimensions. It has length — that we all know and 
 the length of a man's life can be easily stated in 
 years and months and days, as in a funeral notice. 
 But life may also have breadth and height and 
 depth. However it may be in mathematics, there 
 is a fourth dimension in human experience, and 
 we must bear all these dimensions in mind when 
 we undertake to ascertain how much anyone has 
 lived or is likely to live in those years that lie 
 ahead. 
 
 Let me speak first of the length of life. It is 
 not the most important of the four dimensions, 
 
 S6 
 
IV— How Old Are You? 
 
 but it is not to be lightly regarded. A man must 
 have some length of days, to achieve anything of 
 value. The little child that is born today and 
 dies tomorrow does not accomplish anything — it 
 had no time to show its capacity for living. It 
 was only a bud on the tree of life, which never 
 opened into a fragrant blossom, to say nothing of 
 reaching the stage of ripened fruit. It is im- 
 possible to do a day's work in ten minutes or a 
 life-work in ten years. 
 
 And how many long-lived men have done their 
 best work when they were past sixty — some of 
 them when they were past seventy! Gladstone 
 became Prime Minister of the British Empire 
 three times after he was sixty years of age. He 
 added immensely to his fame and to his useful- 
 ness by the ripened service of those later years. 
 William Cullen Bryant wrote his famous transla- 
 tion of the Iliad when he was almost eighty. John 
 Wesley, founder of the largest Protestant denomi- 
 nation in the English-speaking world, lived to be 
 nearly ninety, preaching, writing, traveling, or- 
 ganizing, until within a few weeks of his death; 
 and some of his best work was done in his old age. 
 Lyman Abbott and Washington Gladden in those 
 years which lie in the vicinity of eighty, were 
 preaching with great acceptance to college stu- 
 dents and writing leaders for the papers to influ- 
 ence the thinking of their fellow men, and pointing 
 the way of social and spiritual advance for the 
 
 57 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 nation. "With long life will I satisfy Him and 
 show Him my salvation" — this was the promise 
 made of old to the man who dwelt in the secret 
 place of the Most High. The wise man plans for 
 length of days that with ripened powers he may 
 still bring forth fruit in his old age. 
 
 We may say all this heartily, yet the length of 
 a man's life is only a secondary consideration. 
 The long life is not necessarily an interesting or a 
 useful one. There was Methuselah ! The modern 
 scholars tell us that the names of those long-lived 
 old fellows in the Book of Genesis were probably 
 the names of tribes rather than of individuals. 
 However that may be, Methuselah will serve as 
 an illustration. Here is the record of his career 
 as it stands in Holy Writ, — "And Methuselah 
 begat sons and daughters and he lived nine hun- 
 dred and sixty-nine years and he died." 
 
 That is all that is said about him — apparently 
 that is all there was to say. His life was a life 
 of one dimension; namely, length. "He lived nine 
 hundred and sixty-nine years and he died" — a 
 long, narrow, uneventful, uninteresting life! No 
 breadth of interest worth recording; no depth of 
 conviction to be noted; no height of aspiration to 
 place another worthy ideal in the sky of human 
 desire! Notliing but length — nine hundred and 
 sixty-nine years! 
 
 Suppose he did outlive all his contemporaries! 
 Suppose he lived longer than any other man in 
 
 58 
 
IV— How Old Are You? 
 
 history! Suppose he had lived to this hour — 
 what of it! If he accomplished nothing worthy of 
 being recorded save the fact that he had a family 
 and lived a long time, then the full measure of 
 years allotted him would only add to his disgrace. 
 
 How long did Jesus Christ live when He was 
 here on earth? Not long, speaking after the 
 manner of men. He was only thirty-three when 
 they put Him to death on the cross. Methuselah 
 lived thirty times as long. But how much did 
 Christ live in that brief time? 
 
 He spent thirty of those years in mental pre- 
 paration and spiritual discipline. No wonder the 
 three years of which we know so much were great 
 when we think of those thirty silent years of which 
 we know so little standing behind them! Ten 
 years of preparation for one of public service! 
 Ten days of thought and prayer for one day of 
 healing, redemptive action ! Ten hours of silence 
 for one of speech! How much He packed into 
 those fleeting years of ministry to human need and 
 of contribution to the cause of human betterment! 
 How mighty those three years were in their holy 
 and permanent influence upon the life of the race! 
 His life was short but it was great. When men 
 speak of Him they do not ask, "How long did He 
 live?" but "How much." "In Him was life," life 
 in all its dimensions and to this hour that life is 
 the light of men. The length of any life is the 
 least important fact about it. 
 
 59 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 When we come to the breadth of life how wide 
 is that man you have in mind ? We cannot tell by 
 the use of a tape line. He may not be as broad as 
 a barn door, yet he may serve. If he is a true 
 man he has a certain breadth which must be 
 measured in more vital fashion. What is the 
 range of his interests? How far afield do his 
 sympathies go? How many points of contact has 
 he with the life of his city, his state, his nation? 
 How broadly does he think when he reckons up 
 the forces that make for or against human well- 
 being? How many different forms of stimulus 
 cause him to react? 
 
 Here is a man who prides himself on being a 
 specialist. He emulates the spirit of that German 
 scholar, who having given his entire attention to 
 Greek nouns regretted on his death-bed that he 
 had not specialized more strictly by devoting his 
 whole life to the study of the dative case. This 
 man I have in mind is ignorant of pretty much 
 everything outside his own particular field. In 
 that field of interest he is as bright and as sharp 
 as a cambric needle, and as narrow. His eye will 
 not hold anything larger than the fine thread of 
 his own specialty. He has no taste for music — 
 Beethoven and Wagner simply bore him ; he cares 
 no more for the Fifth Symphony or for the Over- 
 ture to Tannhauser than he does for a last year's 
 bird's nest. He does not care for pictures — ''Why 
 should I tramp wearily through long galleries 
 
 60 
 
IV— How Old Are You? 
 
 wearing out my legs and my eyes," he says, 
 "merely to look at a lot of old saints and Madonnas 
 and angels?" He is not interested in philosophy 
 —Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, Eucken 
 and Bergson are to him simply "dull old chaps 
 who never got their feet on the ground." He has 
 no use for religion — to him "it is all up in the air," 
 vague, uncertain, mysterious. He has narrowed 
 his life to a single line of interest, losing out of it 
 the fine quality of breadth. 
 
 Here is another type, the prosperous, self-made, 
 self-satisfied man! He trots along the narrow 
 tow-path of his own material success as if he had 
 the universe at his feet. He thinks that a man's 
 life does consist in the abundance of the things 
 that he owns, a certain eminent authority to the 
 contrary notwithstanding. He has never allowed 
 his interest to be deflected from his own success 
 by any sympathetic feeling for others. He says, 
 "Charity begins at home," thereby excusing him- 
 self from any participation in the benevolent 
 activities of the day. His charity begins at home 
 and ends there in its own dooryard. He has 
 fenced up his path until it is a narrow, meagre 
 runway. If he were a man of any size he would 
 be unable to squeeze through. He is more to be 
 pitied than poor Methuselah for his own life 
 lacks breadth and he will not be allowed anything 
 like nine hundred and sixty-nine years of it. 
 
 How far those men are from the Kingdom of 
 
 6i 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 God! How far they are from the method of 
 Jesus! His life was broad in its sympathies, wide 
 in the range of its interest. He could sit at meat 
 with Zaccheus, a rich man who had been dis- 
 honest and miserly, until the man of means was 
 moved to say, "Half of my goods I give to the 
 poor, and if I have taken anything from any man 
 wrongfully I restore him fourfold." He could 
 talk with the poor beggar who was born blind 
 until his eyes were opened and the man was say- 
 ing, "Once I was blind. Now I see." He could 
 talk with Nicodemus, a master in Israel, until 
 the man of culture was born anew. He could talk 
 with those fishermen in Galilee until they said, 
 "We never heard it on this fashion before." 
 
 Jesus was an all-round man, the Perfect, the 
 Typal, the Representative Man. He was the Son 
 of Man, the heir of all that is splendidly and eter- 
 nally human. He said to His friends, "Love your 
 neighbors as I have loved you." Love the man 
 next to you. Love the man who needs you. Love 
 the man on the Jericho road, who has been beaten 
 and robbed — help him along to a place of safety 
 and renewal. Let your sympathies leap over the 
 barriers of race, of religious belief, and of social 
 class until you feel your kinship with all hands. 
 
 Break down the walls which shut you off from 
 those other fields of thought and action where 
 your brother men are finding so much to enjoy. 
 Brush away the silly social conventions which 
 
 62 
 
IV— How Old Are You? 
 
 shut you up to an exclusive interest in your own 
 set — all men and women are much alike when we 
 get the feathers off of them! Form the habit of 
 getting the other man's point of view — not always 
 to adopt it, but to understand it. 
 
 If you are an employer make it your business 
 to know what the labor unions and the socialists 
 are talking about, that you may see the problem 
 of industry from their angle of vision. If you 
 are a wage earner seek to understand what diffi- 
 culties the man who is a manufacturer or a mer- 
 chant must face in the development and main- 
 tenance of a business which offers employment to 
 hundreds of people incapable of organizing such 
 a business themselves. This will make you a 
 bigger, a broader, and a better man. You can 
 look more intelligently upon your own things when 
 you have learned to look also on the things of 
 others. 
 
 You may be familiar with the doctrine of rein- 
 carnation as it is taught in some of the ethnic 
 religions. They hold that when a man has fin- 
 ished his earthly course he may come back after 
 death and be born again in this world in some 
 other form. If he was rich when he was here, he 
 may come back a poor man. If he had a fine 
 social position, he may come back as a tramp. If 
 he was an ignorant man working with his hands, 
 he may come back as a college president. If he 
 was an invalid or a cripple, he may come back 
 
 63 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 with abounding physical vigor that he may know 
 the joys and the temptations of that mode of life. 
 By a whole series of reincarnations, twenty of 
 them perhaps, he will at last attain to a fully 
 rounded human experience. He will have taken all 
 the courses, required and elective, in the big uni- 
 versity of experience where the college colors are 
 black and blue because the lessons are learned by 
 hard knocks. 
 
 It is a fanciful idea, — we have no evidence that 
 we were ever here on earth before or that we shall 
 be here again. But it suggests a feeling that 
 everyone has had. Every true man has wished 
 that he might enter more thoroughly and more 
 sympathetically into the lives of his fellows, 
 especially the less fortunate ones. Messmates 
 they are at the board of life, yet how little he 
 knows of the inner motives, the longings, and 
 yearnings of many of them! 
 
 I have wished many a time that I could leave 
 my pulpit and go out and be a teamster or a street- 
 car conductor for six months. I am sure I would 
 come back better able to preach the Gospel of 
 the Son of man to those men in the language in 
 which they were born. I did belong for six 
 years to the Central Labor Council in my city 
 made up of representatives from the various labor 
 unions. I represented the "Ministers Union" and 
 I had a voice and a vote along with the carpenters, 
 bricklayers, stone masons, the printers, plumbers, 
 
 64 
 
TV— How Old Are You? 
 
 the painters and all the rest. It broadened me out 
 until at the end of those six years I felt that an 
 ell had been built on each side of my nature to 
 accommodate the fresh supply of sympathetic 
 interest. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln was only one man among the 
 millions of men in this country in his day. From 
 the hour when he was born in that log cabin in 
 the State of Kentucky until the day he entered 
 the White House, he was compelled to follow a 
 somewhat narrow path. But when he really 
 faced his life-work he was able to enter so sym- 
 pathetically into the feelings of others, northern 
 men and southern men, white men and black men, 
 men who wanted "States Rights" and men who 
 believed in the integrity of the Union, men who 
 were for "peace at any price" and men who faced 
 the stern necessity of Civil War — he entered so 
 sympathetically into their feelings that it seemed 
 as if the whole American people lived and moved 
 and had its being in the heart of that greatest 
 American. "With malice toward none, with 
 charity for all, with firmness in the right as God 
 gave him to see the right," he gathered up all these 
 interests into the arms of his effort to the end that 
 "government of the people, by the people and for 
 the people should not perish from the earth." His 
 life was not long — the assassin's bullet cut it short 
 — but it was exceedingly broad. 
 
 In the parable of the sower some seed fell by 
 
 6s 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 the wayside where the ground was hard and it 
 failed to grow. Some fell among thorns where 
 the soil was overgrown with noxious weeds and 
 it became unfruitful. Some fell where there was 
 no depth of earth and because the soil was thin 
 it withered away. 
 
 The sorry fate of this last bit of seed represents 
 the failure of those lives which are shallow, super- 
 ficial, all on the surface. They receive good im- 
 pressions readily, and just as readily let them go. 
 They live by custom, usage and the easy con- 
 ventions of those who surround them. When 
 they are in Rome they do as the Romans do. 
 When they are in New York they do as Broadway 
 does, even though that may mean a much less 
 wholesome tjq^e of life than the one they put up in 
 their own home towns. They rise or fall with easy 
 unconcern to the moral level of those with whom 
 they find themselves. 
 
 Their lives are thin. They have no depth of 
 conviction rooting down into that which is vital 
 and fundamental. They have no deep, under- 
 lying purposes and principles of action. They 
 have no deep, sweet wells of feeling on which they 
 may draw for wholesome impulse. 
 
 Off the coast of Labrador I have seen huge 
 icebergs towering up three or four hundred feet 
 in the air. I have seen them sailing due south in 
 the teeth of a strong head wind. The gale was 
 blowing from the south thirty, forty, fifty miles 
 
 66 
 
IV— How Old Are You? 
 
 an hour, yet those icebergs sailed on toward the 
 south without ever tacking. They had neither 
 sails nor rudder by which they could tack. The 
 secret of it lay in the fact that seven-eighths of 
 the bulk of an iceberg is under water. The great 
 Labrador current makes strongly toward the 
 south. It gripped the huge bulk of those icebergs 
 and bore them along no matter how the wind 
 might blow at the surface. 
 
 Here is a life which is able to say what Jesus 
 said, "I come not to do my own will but the will 
 of Him who sent me." The man has a sense of 
 mission, of purpose, of deep underlying agree- 
 ment with the will of God. The whole venture 
 and process of his activities are embedded in a 
 moral order. They lie secure in the will and pur- 
 pose of the Almighty. The man has the power 
 which comes from depth. 
 
 You will sometimes hear it said of a man — and 
 it is high praise — "He is always the same." He 
 may be traveling the high road of prosperity with 
 flags flying and bands playing, or he may be 
 walking through the Valley of the Shadow of 
 Defeat. He may be standing in the presence of 
 the rich or he may be in the humbler homes of the 
 poor. He may find himself in an atmosphere 
 charged with religious aspiration or he may be 
 in the company of scoffers. He is never turned 
 aside nor thrown down nor beaten back by any 
 of these varying situations. He is always just the 
 
 67 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 same — a simple genuine God-fearing, man-loving 
 soul. 
 
 How does this man who is "always the same" 
 maintain that fine poise and balance. His life 
 has depth of purpose, of conviction, of feeling. 
 He draws his supplies from the lower levels of his 
 being where a man's real life may be hid with 
 Christ in God. He has the serene strength which 
 comes from depth of life. 
 
 The height of a man's life is not indicated by his 
 present achievements. You cannot determine how 
 tall he is by standing him against the door and 
 measuring the deeds he has done or the actual 
 attainments he has made in personal character. 
 It is not what you have done, it is what you want 
 to do and mean to do that tells the story. It is 
 not what you are at this moment, it is what you 
 want to be and intend to be some day that marks 
 you up or down on the books of the Recording 
 Angel. 
 
 I once heard a young Hindoo say in his broken 
 English, "I am not what I ought to be. I am not 
 what I want to be. But by the grace of God I am 
 not what I was and I mean to be like Him." 
 There you have it! The real height of every 
 man's life must be measured by the upward, out- 
 ward, Godward reach of his own aspiration and 
 resolve. 
 
 Here is a man in the slums! He bears the 
 marks of moral failure written all over him. He 
 
 68 
 
IV— How Old Are You? 
 
 is stained by the coarse sins of the flesh. He has 
 lied until his tongue is twisted; he has been dis- 
 honest so many times that his hand is like a claw. 
 His mind is a cage of unclean beasts and his 
 heart is a den for creeping things. 
 
 "How tall is that man, morally speaking?" you 
 ask. I do not know. I cannot tell until I know 
 what he means to do with himself. If he is 
 actually saying in his heart what a certain moral 
 failure once said in a far country, he may be 
 towering up like a sequoia tree. If he is willing 
 to confess his sins with no whimpering excuses; 
 if he will stand out in the open saying, "I have 
 sinned against Heaven and before men; I am no 
 more worthy to be called a man; but I will arise 
 and go to my Father," and if he is readv to stand 
 up and go, putting evil behind him and putting 
 his trust in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ, then I find in him an earnest and a promise 
 of future growth which give his life the dignity 
 and the height of spiritual worth. Measure every 
 man not by his present achievements but by the 
 upward, outward reach of his aspiration and 
 resolve. 
 
 Give me your answer then before we go! How 
 much have you lived — and what is more to the 
 purpose, how much are you planning to live in 
 those years which lie ahead? What are the 
 measurements according to which you are laying 
 out that spiritual edifice, that building of God, 
 
 69 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 that house not made with hands, eternal in the 
 realm of moral values? 
 
 Bring your materials and lay them on that 
 foundation which has stood the test, for other 
 foundation can no man lay than that which is laid 
 in Jesus Christ. Have in mind these four dimen- 
 sions when you undertake to build. Live so that 
 length of days may be yours if it please God — 
 then you will not drop your task half finished. 
 Open your heart on all sides to the needs and 
 appeals of your fellow men, that your life may 
 have the breadth which comes from a wide range 
 of sympathetic interest. Have that depth of con- 
 viction and purpose which means stability. Then 
 let your hopes reach out among the stars as you 
 strive to wear at last the likeness and image of the 
 Son of God. Live in that mood and after that 
 method, that you may have life abundant, life 
 eternal, life which is life indeed! 
 
 70 
 
V 
 
 The Power of a Resolute Minority 
 
 WHEN the Israelites had escaped from 
 Egypt and had reached the borders of the 
 Promised Land they sent twelve men ahead to 
 reconnoiter. These spies were to bring back a 
 report upon the land the Israelites were sent to 
 conquer. When they returned ten of them said 
 that it could not be done, the difficulties in the 
 way were too great. They counseled a retreat. 
 
 But the other two brought in a minority report. 
 They believed that a splendid victory could be 
 won by an immediate advance along the whole 
 line. It was two against ten, but it turned out 
 that the two had the right of it. Their judgment 
 prevailed and the Israelites went in to conquer 
 that country which they held and ruled for fifteen 
 centuries. And when the victory was won the 
 two men had the joy of knowing that their influ- 
 ence had turned the scale. It suggests the power 
 of a resolute minority. 
 
 The twelve men all saw the same set of facts. 
 This is the way their commission read, "See the 
 land what it is, whether fat or lean, open or 
 wooded. See the people that dwell therein, 
 
 71 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 whether they be few or many, strong or weak, 
 dwelling in tents or dwelling in walled cities." 
 "Get the facts," Moses said, "and bring them to 
 
 me." 
 
 The twelve men all traveled together. They 
 saw the same hills and crossed the same valleys. 
 They saw the same walled cities and the same 
 roving Bedouins in their black tents. They saw 
 the same resources of the country stretching away 
 on every side and the same obstacles to be over- 
 come. It was identically the same situation which 
 met the gaze of all those men. 
 
 Herein their experience is a leaf from the book 
 of life. The world we live in, taking it by and 
 large, is the same gigantic fact for all hands. The 
 physical order which confronts you and me and 
 him is the same big, solid fact for us all. The 
 moral order which enfolds us, whether we like it 
 or not, making the way of the transgressor hard 
 and the way of the righteous the way of peace and 
 honor, is the same unyielding fact for us all. The 
 great God who looks down upon us whether we 
 look up at Him or not is the same Almighty Fact 
 for all hands. And we are sent out, as were the 
 spies, into this complexity of facts and forces to 
 make report upon what we find and to order our 
 lives according to that finding. 
 
 It is altogether right that it should be so. "I 
 go the way of all the earth," Joshua said. He 
 took the middle of the road and accepted his full 
 
 72 
 
V — A Resolute Minority 
 
 share of the common lot. It was the only way he 
 could become the leader and servant of his day 
 and generation. "He was tempted in all points 
 like as we are," was said of a greater than Joshua. 
 He also tasted the human situation, death in- 
 cluded, for every man. In that way He became 
 indeed the Typal, the Representative, the Perfect 
 Man, the Son of man, able also to be the Savior 
 of men. The only men who can "draw the thing 
 as they see it for the God of things as they are" 
 will be found to be the men who travel the main 
 road and face the needs which belong to human 
 experience in the large. The twelve men in this 
 story were faced by the same set of facts and 
 forces challenging them to do their best. 
 
 Ten of the twelve failed to see things in their 
 right perspective. Here is the report they made! 
 "It is a good land, an exceedingly good land. It 
 is a land that flows with milk and honey. This is 
 the fruit of it" — and they pointed to a cluster of 
 grapes so large that to avoid crushing it they had 
 carried it on a staff between two men. "But the 
 people are strong, the children of Anak, the 
 giants are there — we were like grasshoppers in 
 their sight; and their cities are walled up to 
 Heaven." 
 
 These men were scared, and when men are 
 scared their souls shrivel up until they feel no 
 larger than grasshoppers. They were moral 
 cowards and when a coward looks at the difficul- 
 
 73 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 ties in the way they seem to reach up to the very 
 clouds of Heaven. So the ten men brought in an 
 evil report of the land. 
 
 How true to life it all is ! Every man gets as he 
 brings. He sees in any situation what he has eyes 
 to see. It is not so much a question of eyesight 
 as of insight. It is the mind that sees and not the 
 eyes alone. And the reaction which any set of 
 facts produces upon any man is determined in 
 great measure by his own powers of perception 
 and appreciation. 
 
 Here were ten men who saw nothing except that 
 which lay at the surface, and when they made 
 their report they were all astray! When they 
 added up their columns of figures they gave full 
 place to the sons of Anak and the walled cities, 
 but they left out of the account the might of moral 
 purpose and the aid of the Almighty. That ren- 
 dered their trial balance misleading. They had 
 not eyes to see, nor minds to understand, nor 
 hearts to feel the force of certain finer and more 
 subtle forms of energy which were at work that 
 day in the Land of Promise. 
 
 How many people there are who allow them- 
 selves to be driven off the field by purely material 
 considerations! They see the Canaanites and 
 the city walls, but nothing else. You will hear 
 them pitying themselves as the victims of circum- 
 stances. "We are what we are by the operation 
 of certain forces, which we cannot control. 
 
 74 
 
V — A Resolute Minority 
 
 Therefore, it would be better for us to have died 
 in the land of Egypt where we were sure of our 
 flesh pots." And the men who take this view of 
 life go about with their hearts in their boots, feel- 
 ing that they are no better than so many grass- 
 hoppers. 
 
 How many men are frightened out of their 
 principles by some thoughtless majority! "Here 
 is a situation," they say, "where it is ten to two, 
 five to one, against the mode of life to which we 
 were brought up." It must be that the ten have 
 the right of it. It would be foolhardy to fly in the 
 face of such a majority. They seem to forget 
 that moral questions are never settled by a show 
 of hands. They forget that you cannot state the 
 real significance of many a situation in figures. 
 The truth oftentimes is a matter of emphasis, of 
 perspective, of atmosphere, and this cannot be 
 conveyed in a column of figures. And mere sta- 
 tistics can be made to lie, like other things. If 
 figures always dropped dead when they uttered 
 falsehoods as Ananias and Sapphira did, the ten 
 digits would have been buried long ago. There 
 are any number of truths in human life which 
 cannot be set down in rows of figures. 
 
 The men are foolish indeed who allow them- 
 selves to be crushed by the mere weight of num- 
 bers. The timid politician is afraid of a mob 
 because it is big and can howl — he is more afraid 
 of the mob than of his own conscience. The man 
 
 75 
 
Yale Talks 
 in public life is more afraid of some yellow journal 
 which claims the largest circulation and yells in 
 headlines than of the verdict of those people of 
 intelligence and character whose estimates really 
 matter. The college man may be scared out of 
 his own finer mode of life by some thoughtless 
 bunch which indulges in coarse talk, loose con- 
 duct, and low intellectual standards. He is 
 actually afraid to allow his own best self to stand 
 out clear and firm. The boy in preparatory school 
 may find himself in a group where it is ten to two 
 against those principles to which he is most in- 
 clined. Thus numbers make cowards of us all and 
 the pale cast of resolution is sicklied o'er by an 
 array of figures. 
 
 "I was afraid," the man in the parable said, the 
 man who had received but one talent. "I was 
 afraid and I went and hid." If he had received 
 ten talents and had been the most gifted man in 
 the community, he seemed to think that he might 
 not have crawled under the bed when the time 
 came for him to show his colors; but because he 
 was just an ordinary, everyday man with one 
 fairly good-sized talent he had not the necessary 
 moral fibre to be what he was and to do what he 
 could do. "I was afraid and I went and hid" — 
 and thus he lost his talent and his soul. 
 
 There are a few people in the world who are 
 hypocrites because they are trying to appear 
 better than they really are. There are not many 
 
 76 
 
V— A Resolute Minority 
 
 of them — there are scarcely enough of them to 
 leave what the chemist would call "a trace." But 
 there are many weak-kneed souls who are guilty 
 of moral insincerity in not being willing to appear 
 as good as they really are. The boy of sixteen is 
 so afraid of being regarded as a moral prig that 
 he leans over backward and does not appear to be 
 as straight as he really is. The young man at 
 college would sometimes rather be put down as 
 fast or loose in his morals than to be known for 
 the clean, fine, serious qualities of mind and heart 
 which are truly his. In all such cases they are 
 hypocrites, and I have the feeling that the man 
 who is unwilling to be known for the best that is 
 in him does more harm than the man who is trying 
 to appear better than he really is. 
 
 The moral courage of that minority finally 
 carried the day. It was not accomplished without 
 struggle — the two men had a hard fight on their 
 hands. When the ten made their discouraging 
 report the foolish Israelites sat down and wept. 
 "They cried all night," the record says. "Would 
 God we had died in Egypt! Would God we had 
 died in the wilderness!" Would God anything 
 had happened to us rather than that we be com- 
 pelled to face these difficulties! 
 
 And ere long those moral cowards were all 
 dead. They were killed off by the divine con- 
 tempt. They were too anaemic to get through the 
 winter. ^Tt came to pass that the men who 
 
 77 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 brought the evil report of the land died by the 
 plague before the Lord, but Caleb and Joshua 
 lived." The two men who made up the resolute 
 minority lived on to fight their way through to a 
 splendid success and to enjoy their full share of 
 the Land of Promise. 
 
 Here is the report they made! "The land is an 
 exceedingly good land, it flows with milk and 
 honey. It is a land where one may eat bread 
 without scarceness and not lack any good thing, 
 and we are abundantly able to go up and possess 
 it. If the Lord delight in us because of the pur- 
 pose we cherish and the spirit we show. He will 
 give us the land. Let us go up at once and possess 
 it." They, too, had seen the giants, the sons of 
 Anak, but even so they were not ready to put 
 themselves in the grasshopper class. They, too, 
 had seen the walled cities, but those mighty de- 
 fenses in their eyes did not reach quite up to 
 Heaven. In the face of everything they were 
 ready to make an advance. 
 
 They formed a sounder judgment of the situa- 
 tion because they saw more. They saw everything 
 between the ground and the stars, things material 
 and things spiritual. They saw that it was not a 
 mere squabble between a few self-seeking Jews on 
 the one hand and a few tribes of corrupt Ca- 
 naanites on the other. It was the attempt to 
 secure a footing for that Hebrew nation which was 
 destined in its unfolding life to take the right of 
 
 78 
 
V — A Resolute Minority 
 
 the line in spiritual leadership for centuries. 
 What a history lay ahead of those resolute men 
 who brought in the minority report! Our Bible 
 was written by Hebrews. Our Savior was a 
 Hebrew, born in Bethlehem of Judea. Great 
 issues were at stake and those two men of insight 
 recognized something of the moral significance of 
 their action when they called for an immediate 
 advance. 
 
 It was no dare-devil spirit — they were men of 
 faith. They believed in themselves and in their 
 fellows and in God. They saw the red thread of 
 moral purpose running through all human history. 
 They saw the great divine intention underlying 
 and overarching all our earthly activity. And 
 there lies the difference between the ten who fail 
 and the two who win out. The spirit of distrust 
 causes men to shrivel up like grasshoppers while 
 the spirit of faith makes them brave and strong. 
 It was the spirit of faith which enabled Gideon 
 and Barak, Moses and Samuel, David Livingstone 
 and Abraham Lincoln, Lloyd George and Wood- 
 row Wilson to work righteousness, subdue king- 
 doms and put to flight the arm.ies of evil. God 
 be praised for men who believe something — they 
 are the only men who count! 
 
 Here were two men who were not whining 
 about being the victims of circumstances! They 
 had learned to stand erect with all their faculties 
 at attention waiting for the word of command to 
 
 79 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 go ahead. They "looked upward not downward, 
 outward not inward, forward not backward," and 
 were ready to lend a hand. They were masters 
 of their fate, the captains of their souls. They 
 faced the world undaunted. 
 
 "One who never tum'd his back but march 'd breast 
 forward, 
 Never doubted clouds would break, 
 Never dream'd, though right were worsted, wrong 
 
 would triumph, 
 Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
 Sleep to wake." 
 
 Such men in the fifteenth century before Christ, 
 or in the twentieth century after, in Palestine or 
 in Connecticut, are destined through the aid of 
 Him who rules the issue to win the day. 
 
 Two men of the right sort in a store or an office 
 can change the moral atmosphere and raise the 
 tone of conversation to a higher level by allowing 
 the best that is in them to stand revealed. Two 
 men in a college class can change the spirit of 
 that class by the fine quaUty of the principles they 
 display and by the splendor of their ideals. Two 
 boys in any group can put a new face on the whole 
 situation by the genuineness of their own lives. 
 The issue is decided by the power of the resolute 
 minority faced right. 
 
 The victory of this high-minded group is as- 
 sured by their sense of agreement with the will of 
 
 80 
 
V — A Resolute Minority 
 
 God. "There is a divinity that shapes our ends" 
 and when we are striving to shape them ourselves 
 according to His wish, we have the sense of a great 
 reinforcement. When we are working out any- 
 thing worthy to be called salvation, God is work- 
 ing within us to accomplish His good pleasure. 
 When any man is rowing his boat toward the 
 haven where God would have him arrive, he has 
 the wind and the tide with him doubling his effec- 
 tiveness in every stroke he makes. With the sense 
 of that Almighty Aid pledged to his advantage 
 any man can face an adverse majority without 
 flinching. 
 
 Here was Jesus Christ caring not a straw for 
 the mere fact of numbers! He never gained a 
 large following, even though He spake as never 
 man spake. He chose twelve intimates and gave 
 the best part of the last two years of His public 
 ministry to training those men. He lived with 
 them until they were saturated with His ideas 
 and steeped in His spirit. They were branches 
 of the true vine, projections of His own potent 
 life. Then He stood up and pitted them against 
 the full strength of pagan Rome. "Ye shall sit 
 upon twelve thrones," He said, in recognition of 
 their powers of spiritual leadership. They never 
 wore the purple nor had crowns on their heads, 
 but they set in operation a process of spiritual 
 renewal which was nothing less than regal. 
 
 You will find any number of situations where 
 
 8i 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 some hard task has to be done by a small number 
 of men. There are difficult causes to be advanced. 
 There are forlorn hopes worth fighting for to the 
 end that they may become no more forlorn, but 
 the earnest of coming victory. There are fellows 
 made unpopular by some defect of manner or 
 oddity in appearance but with splendid stuff in 
 them, who need friends to aid them in realizing 
 the promise of their lives. All the more honor to 
 those who have eyes to see and are ready to put in 
 their best strength to that end. 
 
 You will recall that story of Sodom. The city 
 had become so foul in its morals that the Judge of 
 all the earth proposed to destroy it, lock, stock 
 and barrel. But it was suggested that perhaps 
 fifty righteous men might be found in it, and that 
 they ought not to be destroyed with the guilty. 
 The Lord said He would spare it if fifty good 
 men could be found there. Then the petitioner, 
 realizing that good men were scarce in Sodom, 
 asked if the requirements might be reduced to 
 forty, and then he suggested thirty, and then 
 twenty, and finally he brought the figures down 
 to ten. 
 
 The Judge of all the earth intent upon doing 
 right assured him that if even ten good men 
 could be found in the place He would spare it 
 for their sake. But even the ten good men were 
 not forthcoming and so Sodom was wiped off the 
 map by fire and brimstone. Ten righteous men 
 
 82 
 
V— A Resolute Minority 
 would have saved Sodom! Ten righteous men 
 placed at strategic points in the community will 
 save any city. It suggests the tremendous sig- 
 nificance of a resolute minority in active agree- 
 ment with the Will of God. 
 
 Where will you stand, then, with the thoughtless 
 majority which may be showing the white feather 
 of moral purpose, or with Caleb and Joshua, men 
 possessed of courage and ready for the great 
 advance? You may be facing at this moment the 
 obligation to live a clear-cut, definite Christian 
 life, but the odds against you, so far as numbers 
 go, are ten to two. What of it! The very diffi- 
 culty of the undertaking offers the more effective 
 challenge to your best powers of mind and heart. 
 Why not stand with the saving remnant which is 
 somewhere to be found in any community! Why 
 not stand with the seven thousand moral reserves 
 who have not bowed the knee to Baal, thereby 
 becoming the hope of the nation! Why not link 
 up your lives with Him who is able to bring us 
 off from any field of effort more than conquerors! 
 Then your way of life will be a steady advance 
 into your appointed share of some splendid land 
 of promise. 
 
 83 
 
VI 
 
 Unconscious Influence 
 
 THERE was a man named Peter in the Early 
 Church who had come to be known as an 
 upright, downright, outright sort of Christian. 
 He had done so many good deeds, he had spoken 
 so many true and timely words, he was so simple, 
 unaffected and genuine in his whole make-up that 
 the people came to believe that his very shadow 
 would do a man good. The humanity of the man 
 I was so warm and real that they invested 
 it with a certain miraculous quality. "So they 
 brought the sick people into the streets that at 
 least Peter's shadow might fall on them as he 
 passed by." 
 
 We are not told that any sick people were 
 actually healed in that way. The record does not 
 say. It was expecting a good deal of a shadow. 
 But the very fact that they did it was a splendid 
 tribute to the quality of the man. They believed 
 in him and they felt that something subtle, mag- 
 netic, redemptive would emanate from liim and 
 reach those sufferers through his very shadow. It 
 was their testimony to the silent, powerful con- 
 tagion of a thoroughly good life. 
 
 84 
 
VI — Unconscious Influence 
 
 It was a form of energy which was entirely 
 personal. It had not been organized into any kind 
 of an institution. It had not been delegated to 
 any sort of committee. I wonder if Peter ever 
 served on a committee. If he escaped all that in 
 his busy life he was in luck. It was just a reflec- 
 tion, a projection, so to speak, of Peter himself 
 stretched out on the grass. It was broad with 
 Peter's breadth. If he had been built on narrow, 
 meagre lines, it would have been narrow and 
 meagre. It was tall or short, according to Peter's 
 own stature. It had in it all the lines and angles 
 of Peter's appearance as faithfully as the sun 
 could reproduce them. To all intents and pur- 
 poses it was Peter himself spread out on the 
 ground where the sick people were lying. 
 
 Now the most potent and lasting sort of influ- 
 ence is just like that. It is not so much what you 
 say; it is not so much what you do — it is what 
 you are that does the business. It is what you 
 are when you are not saying anything or doing 
 anything. It is what you are when no one is 
 looking or listening. It is a certain atmosphere 
 which you create and carry with you which regis- 
 ters its impress upon other lives for good or ill. 
 It is a form of energy as silent and invisible as 
 the power of gravitation — and in the realm of 
 character building as mighty through God to the 
 pulling down of the strongholds of evil. Every 
 man develops and maintains that personal some- 
 
 85 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 thing which goes with him wherever he goes, 
 laying its hand upon every life which comes within 
 the length of his cable-tow. 
 
 The highest thing we know on earth is human 
 personality. It is there that the likeness and 
 image of God emerge. When any man is richly 
 endowed in mind and heart we say of him, "He 
 has a strong personality." "Have dominion," 
 God said at the start to the human factors in His 
 creation. "Have dominion over the fish of the 
 sea and the fowl of the air, over the cattle and the 
 creeping things." He knew that in every field 
 of effort human personality would determine the 
 issue. 
 
 Caesar, Luther, Cromwell, Lincoln, these men 
 made history! They changed the course of 
 human events. They set the pace of progress. 
 They gave shape and content to what had been 
 without form and void. They did it by being 
 what they were. By the vigor of their thought 
 and by the strength of their wills, by the wide 
 range of their interests and by the high quality of 
 their principles they became creative. And that 
 power of personality must be gained and held by 
 each man for himself. It cannot be taught in a 
 correspondence school, nor sent here or there by 
 express. It is right there where the man is and 
 nowhere else. Once gained it can be wielded for 
 good or for ill, according to the moral purpose of 
 the man, as the mightiest force in human affairs. 
 
 86 
 
VI — Unconscious Influence 
 
 We are told that Napoleon in his best days 
 would, on the eve of every great battle, send for 
 his marshals and have them come one by one to his 
 own tent. There in silence he would clasp each 
 man's hand, look into his eyes for a moment and 
 let him go. He had not uttered a word, but it 
 was enough. Every man of them went out ready 
 to do and to dare and to die, if need be, next day 
 for Napoleon. His shadow had fallen upon them, 
 healing them of any lurking remnant of cowardice 
 or any lingering uncertainty touching the victory 
 they were to win. They felt as if they were all 
 Napoleons and that their stars were in the 
 ascendant. 
 
 In business and in politics, in the work of edu- 
 cation and in the work of religion, it is person- 
 ality that counts. And where a given personality 
 is stimulating, wholesome, reliable, it gets results 
 like those which the people of that early day were 
 ready to ascribe to Peter's shadow. 
 
 The finest form of influence is also uncon- 
 scious. Peter was not passing down street that 
 day for the sake of casting a shadow. He had 
 not even noticed that his shadow was there. He 
 was going straight along about his business on 
 some errand of usefulness, and the shadow came 
 of itself. That was the beauty of it in the eyes of 
 those who believed in him. If he had been think- 
 ing about it, if he had been saying to himself, 
 "What a handsome shadow I am casting on the 
 
 87 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 lawn! What a wonderful man I must be to have 
 them carry out the sick and lay them along my 
 path," they would not have done it. 
 
 People never lay their needs along the path of 
 a self-conscious prig as he struts along. The man 
 who poses as if he were forever having his picture 
 taken will have his shadow all to himself — no one 
 will want it. And those silly, affected people who 
 are always thinking about the impression they are 
 making and are trying to appear as something 
 other than what they are become as uninteresting 
 and as useless as last year's birds' nests. It is the 
 unconsciousness of a life that loses all thought of 
 itself in the service it seeks to render which gives 
 it power. 
 
 There are forms of influence which are deliber- 
 ate and intentional. The man means to do it — 
 he is making a business of it. When some one 
 seeks to influence you by instruction or persua- 
 sion, by the force of his argument, or by moral 
 appeal, he is committing influence upon you in the 
 first degree. 
 
 But that is only a small part of a man's influ- 
 ence upon the lives of others, and not the most 
 important part. He accomplishes more when he 
 does it unawares. More people are run over by 
 street cars when they are watching a street car 
 moving in the opposite direction than in any other 
 way. It gets them when they are not looking. 
 People are sensitive about being influenced. They 
 
 88 
 
VI — Unconscious Influence 
 
 are touchy about having anyone do them good, if 
 he says so in advance. Those people who are 
 so frightfully in earnest that they are always 
 getting after you hammer-and-tongs for your 
 soul's good make you feel as if you would like to 
 swear. It is the influence which goes forth from 
 a life unawares which accomplishes the finest re- 
 sult. 
 
 There came to Harvard University a famous 
 preacher who caused the hearts of all who heard 
 him to burn within them as he opened to them the 
 Scriptures. When the service was over a very 
 academic sort of professor undertook to discuss 
 the minister's sermon with him, not very success- 
 fully. "But you preach, of course, to do good," 
 the man said. ''Heavens, no!" the minister re- 
 plied, "God forbid!" His answer might seem 
 strange. But what he meant was this — ^he tried 
 to utter his truth clearly, concisely, cogently. He 
 tried to live it himself so that he might certify to 
 its reality in the depths of his own soul. Then he 
 stood back and let that truth go forth and find 
 lodgment, if it might, in the lives of men to accom- 
 plish there its natural result. And all his listeners 
 had rights and reserves upon which he would not 
 infringe. His method was sound. "Let your light 
 so shine," the IVIaster said, "that men may glorify 
 the Father." Just let it! Be sure that what you 
 have in you is light and not darkness and then it 
 
 89 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 will go forth of itself and men will see their way 
 about. 
 
 We read here in the Old Testament of a man 
 who had been on the mountain top. He had been 
 moving on the highest level of thought and feeling 
 he had ever known. He had been twenty thou- 
 sand feet above the level of the sea where the 
 people of his day were paddling about. He had 
 seen God face to face and those everlasting prin- 
 ciples of right and wrong which underlie all human 
 well-being. And when he came down the moun- 
 tainside from that august experience his face 
 shone so that the people could scarcely look at 
 him. The radiance of his countenance frightened 
 them. "And Moses wist not that his face shone" 
 — that was the secret of it. If he had been think- 
 ing about it, it would not have shone. It is the 
 unconscious radiance of a life which has yielded 
 itself utterly to the will of God and has lost all 
 thought of itself in doing its work, which shows 
 "the light that never was on sea or land." 
 
 "When thou doest thine alms sound not a trum- 
 pet before thee in the streets." When you send a 
 ton of coal to a poor family do not hire a band to 
 go along. The least bit of showy pride in one's 
 generosity robs it of its beauty. Think so little 
 of yourself when you are doing good that your 
 right hand will not know what your left hand is 
 doing. "And when thou prayest, be not as the 
 hypocrites. They love to pray at the corners of 
 
 90 
 
VI — Unconscious Influence 
 
 the streets to be seen of men. Verily they have 
 their reward." They pray to be seen of men and 
 they are seen of men. They get what they prayed 
 for and there is nothing more coming to them. The 
 men. who pray or give or live to be seen of men 
 do it all for small pay. 
 
 One night at the college where I studied a 
 senior was crossing the yard. It was late and he 
 had spent his evening in a wretched debauch. He 
 was feeling spotted and ashamed. As he crossed 
 the campus he looked up and saw the oldest and 
 best beloved member of the faculty sitting at his 
 desk busily writing under the glow of an evening 
 lamp. The young fellow knew that the old man 
 was at work upon something which he believed 
 would be useful to the world. And the contrast 
 between that picture and the way he had spent 
 his own evening smote him to the heart. Then 
 and there he turned over a new, clean leaf and 
 began to write upon it the record of a decent life. 
 The old professor was not sitting there to be 
 looked at; he knew nothing about that young chap 
 out there in the dark; he had been so absorbed 
 in his work that he had forgotten to pull down the 
 shades. It was the simple unconsciousness of his 
 useful action, as it was the simple unconscious- 
 ness of his useful life, which made him a power 
 for good on that campus. 
 
 This finer form of influence is inevitable. When 
 Peter walked out into the sunshine that day tliere 
 
 91 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 was his shadow beside him. He could not get 
 away from it. If he ran, it ran with him; if he 
 slowed down, it still kept step; if he stood stock 
 still, there was his shadow, sticking closer than a 
 brother. He might have said as Luther said when 
 his turn came, "Here I stand casting a certain 
 shadow! God help me, I cannot otherwise!" 
 
 Now influence of the more potent type is just 
 like that. You are always doing it whether you 
 will or not. Men are warmed or chilled, they are 
 lifted or lowered, they are made more responsive 
 to the finer things of life or less, by the steady 
 impact of your own life upon theirs. Whether 
 they get hurt or help is determined by what you 
 are. But something they must get. 
 
 The number of those who deliberately set out to 
 injure their fellows is small. We have to reckon 
 with them as we do with rattlesnakes and hyenas, 
 but fortunately they are scarce. There is a multi- 
 tude which no man can number of people who are 
 steadily injuring others by being as they are. 
 They are making it easier and more natural for 
 others to be narrow and mean, to be selfish and 
 uncharitable, to be unbelieving and irreligious. 
 They are putting the weight of whatever influence 
 they possess in the wrong pan, helping to tip the 
 scales toward a less worthy mode of life. 
 
 Here is a group of college fellows or a congrega- 
 tion of men and women or a whole community of 
 people! The Lord of the Vineyard desires the 
 
 92 
 
VI — Unconscious Influence 
 
 fine fruits of the Spirit from that entire group. 
 The yield of fruit will depend upon the composite 
 and prevailing moral temperature. And every 
 life in the group helps to raise or to lower that 
 temperature. The lives which are gross, sordid, 
 material, breathing the atmosphere of ill will and 
 devoid of aspiration are steadily sending the mer- 
 cury down. The lives possessed by reverence, 
 trust and kindliness are sending the mercury up. 
 The honor of the better result in the yield of spirit- 
 ual fruit in that particular situation belongs to 
 these lives and to the God they serve. 
 
 The Master was passing one day through a 
 crowded street. It was like Broadway at five 
 o'clock in the afternoon. The people were jostling 
 Him on every side and He could scarcely move 
 along. There came up behind Him a poor woman 
 who had been sick for twelve years. She had 
 spent all she had on doctors and was no better. 
 She thought if she could only touch the hem of 
 His garment she would get well. It was a blind 
 sort of faith, the idea that she could be healed on 
 the sly, without His knowing anything about it, 
 by simply touching His clothes. It was blind, 
 but it was real. And because her touch was the 
 touch of faith and because He was robed in help- 
 fulness the woman was made whole. Virtue went 
 forth from Him inevitably at the touch of honest 
 faith. In like manner men are rubbing off some- 
 thing from us in all these chance contacts of life. 
 
 93 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 And it is possible for any life to be so dynamic 
 in its sense of fellowship with God and in its 
 kindly consideration of others that what is rubbed 
 off will do good. We are meant to be branches 
 of the True Vine handing on the help that was in 
 Him. 
 
 It is only now and then that a man has a chance 
 to influence deeply another life by direct effort, 
 but these doors of involuntary communication 
 stand forever open. The traffic in influence be- 
 tween life and life is like the traffic between the 
 lungs of the animal world and the emanations of 
 plant life. We exhale what they inhale. We 
 inhale what they exhale. The carbon dioxide 
 which we give off they take up, and that which 
 they give off is for our good. This explains why 
 it is good for us to get away from crowds of peo- 
 ple into the woods. The same sort of give and 
 take goes on between these lives of ours. The 
 way a man walks down street with a strut or 
 swagger or with the natural gait of a true man; 
 the tone of voice he uses in discussing the weather 
 or the war; the look he wears upon his face, sym- 
 pathetic or otherwise; the very atmosphere he 
 bears with him of kindliness or of selfish indiffer- 
 ence — all these make a life fragrant or repellent. 
 They determine the quality of that impact which 
 everyone makes upon the lives of his fellows. 
 
 Two college men had returned to their Alma 
 Mater to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of 
 
 94 
 
VI — Unconscious Influence 
 
 their graduation. They were going about the 
 town when they saw one of their former profes- 
 sors on the street. He was an old man now and 
 much broken. He was poorly dressed, for his 
 salary had been small. He had never written a 
 great book; he had never made an important 
 scientific discovery; he had never been summoned 
 to Harvard or Yale or Princeton to receive an 
 honorary degree; he had never entered even the 
 suburbs of what men call ''the public eye." He 
 had spent his whole life teaching Greek, which 
 was almost as unpopular then as it is now. "What 
 did you learn from the old chap when you were 
 here?" one of these graduates asked the other, 
 "I learned to be a man," was the quick reply, "and 
 I shall be grateful to him as long as I live." He 
 had probably forgotten all his Greek in forty 
 years, but the imprint of that man's life was still 
 there. Happy the professor, happy the individual 
 anywhere who teaches a boy to be a man and 
 starts him on a career of honor! It is a work 
 accomplished mainly by the unstudied output of 
 a man's soul. 
 
 When the Master was eating the Last Supper 
 with His disciples, He said to them, "I have given 
 you something." And He named it. It was not 
 money — He had no money to speak of. It was 
 not an appointment to high office — it did not lie 
 in His power to set men on the right hand or the 
 left hand of authority, as He was sometimes asked 
 
 95 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 to do. He gave them something of more worth 
 than all that. "I have given you an example," He 
 said, "that ye should do as I have done." 
 
 And when those men looked at Him they knew 
 that He had given them the best gift of all. In 
 Him the word of right living was made flesh and 
 dwelt among them full of grace and truth. The 
 language of religion had been translated into terms 
 of life; and the fact that it had been done became 
 a standing pledge that something like that could 
 be done again by the grace of Gk)d. He made 
 goodness winsome and compelling in its power 
 of appeal, so that wherever He is lifted up He 
 draws men to Him. May grace be given us to 
 make our lives so real and so true that the natural 
 unstudied output of each life shall b^ a power for 
 good! 
 
 96 
 
VII 
 The Lessons of Failure 
 
 HERE was a boatload of men who were cold 
 and hungry and cross, for they had been 
 out all night fishing and had not caught anything. 
 There the Master saw His opportunity. He came 
 to them, not at the moment of some splendid suc- 
 cess, but in the hour of failure. He reaches out 
 His hand to many a life, not when it is on the 
 crest of the wave, but when it is in the trough of 
 the sea and liable to be drowned. Man's extrem- 
 ity is God's opportunity. "When I am weak," the 
 Apostle cried, "then am I made strong" with a 
 finer form of strength. And that is what I want to 
 speak to you about this morning. The Lessons of 
 Failure. 
 
 The men in the boat had been relying on their 
 own strength. They were no tender feet, picking 
 their way daintily around the Sea of Galilee for 
 the first time. They were not amateurs, fishing 
 as a kind of pastime while they were off on a sum- 
 mer vacation. Fishing was their trade; it brought 
 them their bread and butter. They made a busi- 
 ness of it. 
 
 97 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 And they had wintered and summered with that 
 old lake. They had fished it by day and by night 
 and in all weathers. They knew every cove along 
 its shores and every deep hole where the fish might 
 lie. They knew all the best places to fish, for 
 they had tried them out a hundred times. They 
 knew what sort of sky was best for fishing, and 
 from what quarter it was best to have the wind 
 blow. You could not tell them anything about 
 fishing in the Sea of Galilee. 
 
 They were prepared to resent it when this man 
 from Nazareth, which was a small town ten miles 
 back in the country, began to make suggestions 
 to them about fishing. Peter said to him, "We 
 have toiled all night and have taken nothing." 
 What good would it do to "launch out into the 
 deep" and let down their nets again! They were 
 cold, hungry, and cross, as men always are when 
 they have fished all night without results, and 
 they did* not want any advice from any quarter 
 whatsoever. 
 
 How modern it all is! You will hear men today 
 scorning the approach of those finer methods and 
 ideals which come from Nazareth. "Business is 
 business," they say — ^"You cannot mix religion 
 with business." Human nature is selfish, and you 
 cannot change human nature by an Act of Con- 
 gress, or by a few intellectual flourishes. Do unto 
 others as they would like to do unto you, and do 
 it first. If you do not look out for Number One, 
 
 98 
 
yil — Lessons of Failure 
 
 who will? We know all about it; we have fished 
 these waters by day and by night. We have been 
 in business for forty years, and we have fought 
 these labor unions and these uplift people to a 
 finish over and over again. 
 
 These men are dead sure — dead is exactly the 
 right word in that connection — that the Man of 
 Nazareth cannot tell them anything about the 
 way to carry on their business. "Launch out into 
 the deep," indeed — they think that they know 
 more about the deep than He does. 
 
 Some of them will never learn any better until 
 they have attended the school of failure. So long 
 as they win out with their gospel of materialism 
 they will believe that the race is to the swift, the 
 battle to the strong, and victory for the man with 
 the longest purse. They will remain as blind as 
 Peter was that day at Capernaum. Until they 
 have come through some long hard year of effort 
 with empty boats and with empty hearts, they will 
 not be ready to welcome the One from Nazareth, 
 who shows men where to fish and how to live. 
 
 The Sea of Galilee is a small affair — it is only 
 thirteen miles long, and you can see across it 
 from shore to shore. But the sea of life reaches 
 from Pole to Pole and far beyond. Its depth no 
 man knows. And all along the shores of that 
 vaster sea men and women are being beaten. 
 They toil the whole year through and take nothing 
 worthy of their effort. They go forth relying on 
 
 99 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 their own wisdom, but the sea of life proves too 
 much for them. 
 
 There was a man in the Scriptures who was 
 down and out and did not know it. He did not 
 know it because he was well dressed and had just 
 eaten a good dinner. He said in haughty fashion, 
 "I am rich and increased with goods and have 
 need of nothing." Then the Spirit of God turned 
 him inside out and showed him how he looked 
 to those who had eyes to see. He was made to 
 realize that he was "wretched and miserable, blind 
 and naked." And in that hour of moral humilia- 
 tion he was told to buy gold tried in the fire that 
 he might be rich, and the white raiment of a new 
 life that he might be clothed, and to anoint his 
 eyes that he might see. The man who is tempted 
 to settle down in lazy satisfaction with some 
 meagre bit of success needs the sobering influence 
 of failure to enable him to get his bearings. 
 
 In that hour of failure these men in the boat 
 learned to walk by faith. The Master said, 
 "Launch out into the deep and let down your 
 nets." They felt sure that it would be of no use. 
 It was not the time of day to fish — night was the 
 time to fish, and they had fished all night without 
 catching anything. What could they expect in the 
 broad glare of the sun! And they had fished in 
 all the best places in the lake — it would be a 
 waste of effort to try again in that spot to which 
 He was pointing. 
 
 100 
 
VII — Lessons of Failure 
 
 It had everything against it — everything but 
 His word. He asked them to do it, and as much 
 to please Him as anything else they took up the 
 same old net and let it down out of the same 
 old boat into the same old sea where they had 
 failed. And now they caught so many fish that 
 they could scarcely land them — they all but broke 
 their nets. They were taking their first steps in 
 learning to walk by faith. 
 
 We have tried and failed; nevertheless at Thy 
 word we will try again. That is the method 
 whereby the most satisfying successses in life are 
 won. Where the exercise of your own judgment 
 in putting forth your strength has left you with 
 an empty boat and an empty heart, try it again 
 in His way. Launch out and let down your net for 
 a draft of something which you have not found 
 as yet. It is there, and He knows that it is there, 
 and He knows that you need it beyond anything 
 else. And all your shrewd sayings about "Busi- 
 ness is business" will not fill your nets nor fill 
 your life with peace and joy, unless you learn to 
 use your strength at His word. 
 
 The Germans got into all this mess because 
 they knew it all. They brought upon themselves 
 this frightful national disaster; they have lost all 
 chance for any real place in the sun for the next 
 hundred years; they have plunged themselves into 
 a depth of moral contempt in the eyes of the whole 
 world from which they may not emerge for cen- 
 
 lOI 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 turies, because they were so cocksure. No one 
 could tell them anything about "might and effi- 
 ciency," They knew where to fish and how to 
 live. They had "the will to power" and they 
 would promptly fill their boats with the best there 
 was in all the seven seas. 
 
 Now look at the results of their philosophy of 
 life. They have toiled for thirty years in prepara- 
 tion for "The Day," and they find themselves 
 with empty boats or with no boats at all, with an 
 empty treasury and an empty soul. And their 
 sorest need today is not for men or for money, 
 for munitions or for mines — it is to learn the mean- 
 ing of this statement, "Not by might nor by power, 
 but by ]\Iy Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts," do 
 men gain their real success. 
 
 You may find yourselves in some situation 
 where it is "experience versus faith." It was so 
 with this boatload of men. When they made their 
 first venture, they were relying upon their own 
 skill and experience as fishermen, upon their 
 knowledge of the sea, and upon the strength of 
 their right arms. They were as confident as the 
 Kaiser was in 19 14, yet they came back with an 
 empty boat. 
 
 When they made their second venture, they had 
 nothing but the sense of humility consequent upon 
 their failure and the spirit of obedience to the 
 Master's word — and this time they came back 
 with a boatload of fish. "At Thy word we will!" 
 
 102 
 
VII — Lessons of Failure 
 
 The plain straight act of obedience to His will was 
 of more worth than all their strength and skill. 
 
 "He that heareth these sayings of mine and 
 doeth them, I will liken unto a wise man." Human 
 judgment walks by sight and because its eyes are 
 holden, it brings up many a time in the ditch. 
 The spirit of obedient trust walks by faith, and 
 because it walks with Him it walks with sure 
 tread in the way that goeth upward. 
 
 The Man from Nazareth showed them that day 
 that He knew something about fishing. He knows 
 something about farming and about business. He 
 knows something about politics and about the 
 affairs of nations. His word of counsel and His 
 high command are the best assets to be had in any 
 of these great interests. He knows the sea of life 
 — He has sailed it in all weathers, tempted and 
 tested at all points like as we are. He knows the 
 deep places where the rich values in human experi- 
 ence are to be taken. He knows how to fill men's 
 hearts with that which is life indeed. You can 
 afford to stake your all upon obedience to His 
 high command. 
 
 If you want a fine word to inscribe on the flag 
 which flies from your masthead as you sail the 
 sea of life, take this one — "At Thy word, I will." 
 When you take that line you are not leaning upon 
 your own understanding, you are committing your 
 way unto the Lord that He may direct your paths. 
 You are not depending upon your own unaided 
 
 103 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 strength, you are conscious that underneath and 
 around you are His everlasting arms which will 
 not let you fall. You are saying what the Master 
 said in that hour when the shadow of the Cross 
 was falling upon His pathway and the Roman 
 soldiers were approaching in the dark — "I am 
 not alone, the Father is with me." With that fine 
 purpose in command as you sail out, your ship 
 will not go upon the rocks, nor will it return from 
 its voyage empty. It will come back laden with 
 the precious cargo of a more abundant life. 
 
 These men learned their lesson by trying again 
 at the very place where they had failed. They 
 were not called away from the scene of their 
 defeat to some other lake where the fishing was 
 better. They tried again with the same old net, 
 in the same old boat, and in the same old sea. But 
 they did it now at His word and they did not fail. 
 
 Any boat will do, if you launch it at His com- 
 mand. Any sort of a net will do, if you let it down 
 in the place He indicates. Any hour of the day 
 will be a good time to fish, if He is there co-operat- 
 ing with you. It is not a change of location nor a 
 fresh supply of tackle which most men need for 
 a higher success, but a change of heart. 
 
 The place for any man to get up is where he fell 
 down. There was Zaccheus, the richest man in 
 Jericho. He was little in stature, and little in 
 every other way. His two most glaring faults 
 as we gather from the context were these, he was 
 
 104 
 
VII — Lessons of Failure 
 
 dishonest and he was stingy. These qualities had 
 helped to make him the richest man in town. 
 
 When the Master sat at meat with him, reveal- 
 ing him to himself, Zaccheus saw the door by 
 which salvation must come to his house. "Lord," 
 he said, "if I have taken anything from any man 
 by false accusation, I will restore him fourfold; 
 and the half of my goods I give to the poor." He 
 had been dishonest and stingy and now the first 
 two words he utters as a renewed man are "re- 
 store" and "give." He begins to get up at the very 
 point where he had fallen down. 
 
 We are not surprised when bad men fail and 
 fools go down in defeat. But sometimes good 
 men fail and wise men meet with the sorest kind 
 of disaster. The sea of life has been too much 
 for them and they have toiled for years with noth- 
 ing to show for it. At such a time some of them 
 feel impelled to run away under cover of darkness 
 to some distant spot of earth, and some of them 
 in cowardly fashion take their own lives, and are 
 seen no more on any spot of earth. 
 
 It is a poor use to make of such an experience. 
 It is tragic where men refuse to reap the harvest 
 of a failure bravely met and nobly borne. "The 
 foolish make of their failures graves wherein they 
 bury all their highest hopes. The wise make of 
 their failures ladders whereby they climb toward 
 Heaven." Right here where you met your Water- 
 loo is the place for you to show that "greater is he 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 that ruleth his own spirit than he that taketh a 
 city." 
 
 In the Yale School of Religion we had one year 
 a vigorous young fellow from a far Western state. 
 He was earning his own way, and he was an excel- 
 lent student in every sense of the word. He had 
 an older brother who was in business for himself 
 in a modest way. This brother was unfortunate 
 in some of his ventures, and presently found him- 
 self with two thousand dollars more liabilities 
 than assets, and certain obligations which had to 
 be met without delay. He saw no way out of it, 
 and he wrote to the young theolog that he would 
 have to make an assignment and take refuge in 
 bankruptcy. 
 
 Then our young chap, who was no lath-and- 
 plaster saint, but quartered oak, wrote back, "We 
 will not have any bankrupts in our family — we 
 are not that sort. Turn over all you have to your 
 creditors, and then you assume one thousand dol- 
 lars of that indebtedness and work it off, and I 
 will take care of the other thousand." He wrote 
 shorthand and used a typewriter, and had other 
 strings to his bow. During his middle year in the 
 seminary he supported himself, carried full work 
 with high grades and earned on the side eight 
 hundred dollars of that indebtedness. The fol- 
 lowing year he cleared off the balance, and those 
 two brothers faced the world with their heads up. 
 He was preparing for the work of the Christian 
 
 io6 
 
VII — Lessons of Failure 
 
 ministry, and this was part of his preparation. 
 When he begins to preach his word will be with 
 power and his life will give light to men. 
 
 "Stay in your boat," the Master said to the men 
 who had toiled all night and failed. Stay right 
 there in your boat, but "launch out into the deep." 
 You have been fishing too close to shore. You 
 have been seeking "safety first" rather than obe- 
 dience to His high command. You have been 
 fishing in shoal water catching minnows when you 
 might have been doing business in the great waters 
 of spiritual experience. Launch out again upon 
 the very same lake, but in that deeper water let 
 down your nets. 
 
 Here are students in high school or in college 
 fishing along the edges of a great opportunity! 
 They have a splendid chance, but they are allow- 
 ing it to slip by without utilizing it. All the mental 
 and moral unfolding they are getting might be 
 compared to a small mess of sardines. 
 
 You long to say to them, "Launch out!" Enter 
 more profoundly into the meaning and power of 
 these educational facilities which are at hand! 
 The purpose of education is not to pack a lot of 
 undigested information into a man's head, or to 
 hang a Phi Beta Kappa key on his watch chain, 
 or to write certain letters after his name indicating 
 his degrees. All this is mere frill and ornament. 
 The purpose of education is to make each man 
 more heavily responsible for the welfare of his 
 
 107 
 
Yale Talks 
 own community. It is to develop in each one a 
 sense of personal adequacy to those demands 
 which society has a right to make upon him, and 
 to establish him in the spirit of readiness to make 
 response in terms of useful, competent action. 
 Launch out where the water is over your head, 
 and let your education count for something worth 
 while. 
 
 Here are men and women in mature life, who 
 are conscious of a certain mental poverty! They 
 manage to look over a great deal of print in the 
 course of each week, but you could scarcely say 
 that they have learned to read. When they under- 
 take to apply their minds to the more serious, 
 vital interests of life, they lack insight and grasp. 
 When they think they do not seem to produce any- 
 thing. When they talk there is a certain empti- 
 ness and futility about it all. 
 
 They, too, have been fishing in shoal water. 
 If they would cast overboard the principal part 
 of that cargo of "reading matter" which was never 
 worth printing and is not now worth reading, and 
 launch out into some real concern with the more 
 vital truths, they would be amazed at the result. 
 It was One who spake as never man spake who 
 gave us this challenge: "Thou shalt love the Lord 
 thy God with all thy heart and with all thy mind 
 and with all thy strength. I am the Truth, and 
 ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall 
 make you free." 
 
 io8 
 
VII — Lessons of Failure 
 
 Here are multitudes of men and women who 
 are paddling to and fro in the shoal waters of 
 religious interest! They are not infidels — they 
 have some small measure of religious faith. They 
 are not indifferent to religion — they attend church 
 on pleasant Sundays when nothing better offers. 
 They have a mild desire to be useful in their day 
 and generation, if it does not involve too much 
 inconvenience. Their religious life is not insin- 
 cere, but it is superficial. It has no depth of con- 
 viction; no deep underlying sense of agreement 
 with the will of God; it does not uncover to them 
 the deeper sources of motive and stimulus. They 
 have never tried to think their way through to a 
 clear-cut, definite, religious faith, or to enter into 
 the power of heartfelt worship, or to show a reso- 
 lute effort to make the principles of the Master 
 the guiding principles of their own lives. 
 
 You long to say to them, "Launch out into the 
 deep upon that sea where you have failed. Seek 
 to know what David and Isaiah, what Jesus and 
 Paul had to say about life ! Lay hold upon your 
 full share of that inheritance, undefiled, uncor- 
 ruptible, that f adeth not away, reserved in Heaven 
 for those who are kept by the power of God." 
 
 Religion is not a mere form of words nor a mere 
 set of observances to which we may now and then 
 turn aside, nor a mere supply of small change in 
 kindly acts of service. Religion is life, life abun- 
 
 109 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 dant, life eternal, life without limits in its capacity 
 for advance. 
 
 Twenty odd years ago I was making the trip 
 through Palestine on horseback with a group of 
 friends. We camped one night at Capernaum 
 there on the Sea of Galilee. We had Sea of 
 Galilee fish for breakfast next morning. When 
 the rest of the party started on that day on the 
 road to Damascus, I tarried behind. I had been 
 riding for days in the dust and heat, and the 
 thought of a swim in the cool, clear water of that 
 lake was most attractive. 
 
 I tied my horse to a sycamore tree something 
 like the one Zaccheus used in Jericho. Then I 
 made ready and swam out into the lake. I thought 
 of Peter and James and John fishing in those 
 waters. I thought of the Master as He walked 
 along the beach and called to them in the hour 
 of their discouragement. And it all seemed so 
 near and so real! I swam ashore and dressed, 
 and there in the quiet of that morning hour, with 
 no one near but Him, I knelt down and prayed 
 that I might become a more competent fisher of 
 men. It may not have been the result of that 
 single prayer, but I know that when I returned 
 to my field of labor in this country there was in 
 my ministry a deeper note. 
 
 Here we are, then, setting forth in our little 
 boats upon the sea of hfe! There beneath the 
 surface, hidden from our eyes, are treasures in- 
 
 IIO 
 
VII — Lessons of Failure 
 
 numerable. They are meant for us. It is not His 
 will that any life should remain empty and futile. 
 I care not how many times you may have prayed 
 when it seemed as if the heavens were brass. I 
 care not how many times the burdens of duty 
 laid upon you have been so heavy as to make you 
 stagger. I care not how many times you have 
 been tempted and have failed. There is some- 
 thing better in store for you and for me and for 
 all hands. 
 
 We may have toiled all night, all the year, all 
 through a decade, without taking anything which 
 satisfied our desires. Nevertheless, at His word 
 launch out where the water is deeper and the issues 
 greater and give it another try. If you make your 
 supreme attempt in the spirit of reverent trust 
 toward Him, with a feeling of intelligent good will 
 toward all your fellows, and with an honest desire 
 to gain that which will be best, you will not fail. 
 
 Ill 
 
VIII 
 
 The Men Who Make Excuse 
 
 THERE are two sorts in the world, the men 
 who do things and the men who are always 
 ready with elaborate explanations as to why they 
 did not get the things done. The world frankly 
 prefers the first type — it saves its highest honors 
 for them and steadily puts the other sort into the 
 discard. It is for every one to make up his mind 
 as early as possible with which group he proposes 
 to travel. 
 
 Here is a short story told by the Prince of 
 Story Tellers, who "spake many things in para- 
 bles," showing the folly of attempting to palm off 
 on the world the shoddy of excuses in place of 
 the all-wool of genuine achievement. He was 
 being entertained in the home of plenty and this 
 story was part of His table talk. He had just 
 indicated in a telling way the duty of the strong 
 to the weak. "When thou makest a feast do not 
 always invite your rich neighbors who will natur- 
 ally invite you again." Do not always invite 
 those who already have more than enough to eat — 
 invite the poor who have less. 
 
 The situation at once became somewhat 
 
 112 
 
VIII — Men Who Make Excuse 
 
 strained. The people at that dinner table were 
 not accustomed to such plain talk. There came 
 one of those painful silences which sometimes 
 befall a dinner party when something too real 
 and searching has been said. Then one of those 
 smiling individuals who always carry a good 
 supply of small change and pious platitude came 
 to the relief of his host.. He fiUed up the awkward 
 gap in the conversation by saying, "Blessed is he 
 that shall eat bread in the Kingdom of God." 
 
 No exception can be taken to this statement as 
 a general proposition. But the Master was not 
 accustomed to do business in the shallow waters 
 of platitude. He at once launched out into the 
 deep and let down his net for a draught of some- 
 thing vital. He told them a most unlikely story 
 of a rich man who made a great supper and 
 invited many guests. The invitations were all 
 accepted apparently, but when the time came the 
 guests began to beg off with the most absurd sort 
 of excuses. This is not the way of the world — it 
 is not the way people ordinarily treat invitations 
 to great suppers or to the marriage feast of the 
 king's son. And it was by this improbable picture 
 of human action that Christ sought to show the 
 folly of those who, having the privilege of becom- 
 ing the chosen guests of God, refuse the call. 
 
 The invitation was an act of grace. Any 
 honest invitation is just that. The man who in- 
 vites you to dinner does not have to do it. He 
 
 "3 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 does not expect to get anything in return for it — 
 if he did he would not be exercising the grace of 
 hospitality, he would simply be doing a little 
 business with you. If you should offer at the 
 close of the evening to pay him for your dinner 
 he would be amazed and grieved. His invitation 
 springs from an unselfish interest in your comfort 
 and pleasure. "Come," he says, "for all things 
 are now ready! The fatlings are killed and the 
 dinner is on tiie table." All you have to do is to 
 enter into the full enjoyment of the best that has 
 been prepared for your coming. 
 
 Here the invitation to the supper stands as a 
 symbol of that broad summons of the Father in 
 Heaven. He invites us all at this hour to enter 
 into loving fellowship with Him and enjoy the 
 best that He can provide. Come, for all things 
 are now ready — all things that belong to man's 
 highest estate, to the full realization of his own 
 powers, and to the rendering of that service which 
 will make him an honored and useful member of 
 society. It only needs the personal acceptance 
 and co-operation of each individual. And the 
 acceptance of that invitation through the dedica- 
 tion of one's powers to the highest he sees con- 
 stitutes the very essence of Christian character. 
 When any man does that the Giver of the Feast 
 begins to feed him with the Bread from above and 
 to drink with him His own wine new in the King- 
 dom of God. 
 
 114 
 
VIII— Men Who Make Excuse 
 
 But the men in the story allowed things legiti- 
 mate and praiseworthy to stand in the way of 
 their supreme loyalty. "They all with one con- 
 sent began to make excuse." The first man said, 
 "I have bought a piece of ground, and I must go 
 and see it; I pray thee have me excused." 
 Another said, 'T have bought five yoke of oxen 
 and I must go and prove them! I pray thee have 
 me excused." And a third said, "I have married 
 a wife and therefore I cannot come." 
 
 Now, none of these interests is evil — they are 
 all good. It is highly desirable that men should 
 own land, and that farmers should purchase 
 oxen, and that young men should marry wives 
 and be devoted to them. It was not as if one had 
 said, 'T am planning to go out and get drunk 
 that night — I pray thee have me excused!" Or 
 as if another had said, "I have arranged to rob 
 a bank in the next town that night, therefore I 
 cannot come." Or as if a third had said, "I am 
 purposing to go out and burn the buildings of my 
 rival in business that night; therefore I shall not 
 be there." It was not a series of crimes which 
 led to the moral failure of the men in the story — 
 it was their preoccupation with interests entirely 
 legitimate which crowded out that which was of 
 supreme importance. 
 
 Let me put it in modern terms! Here, in any 
 community you want to name, are people who 
 mean sometime to be noble, high-minded Chris- 
 es 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 tians, only they have not quite gotten around to 
 it as yet. They have been busy with a number of 
 other things, the movies, the newspapers, the 
 games of bridge that have to be played. Now 
 these side issues which I have named are not 
 evil. The movies for the most part are entirely 
 innocent — the only thing to be said against them 
 is that they are so deadly dull as a rule. But when 
 young people fall into the habit of going once 
 every day and sometimes twice a day in order to 
 see all the reels which are brought to town, thus 
 spending a vast amount of time in a cheap and 
 easy form of diversion where all that is required 
 is that one should sit and look, they become a 
 menace to interests more vital. 
 
 It is desirable that everyone should read the 
 newspapers in order to know what is going on; 
 and the great mass of that which is printed is not 
 morally hurtful. But when this lighter form of 
 intellectual effort, which engages only the surface 
 of one's mind, crowds out the reading of books 
 which deal with matters in a more serious and 
 vital way, then the papers become a nuisance. 
 Sometime, somewhere, everyone who has a head 
 on his shoulders and not merely a place to wear 
 his hat ought to learn to think. The hasty skim- 
 ming through a lot of newspapers does not en- 
 courage thinking. And the game at cards as a 
 means of relaxation from a hard day's work has 
 its place. It is a loss where people fall into the 
 
 ii6 
 
VIII— Men Who Make Excuse 
 way of spending all their leisure hours in counting 
 black and red spots. In every such case the less 
 may crowd out the greater. 
 
 Here in the story the good became the enemy of 
 the best. In real life the choice as a rule does not 
 lie between the best and the worst. If a man has 
 sunk to that level where he considers the worst as 
 a possible option, the best is no longer within his 
 reach. Men are constantly choosing between 
 things which are good in their way and that best 
 line of effort which has the right to command 
 one's final allegiance. The boy in school who 
 manages to "pass"— he is not actually sent home 
 in disgrace — and contents himself with that, 
 leaving the higher levels of mental and spiritual 
 efficiency unreached; the mature man who does 
 something which "gets by," as he says— it may 
 hit the doorposts on both sides but it squeezes 
 through; the line of conduct which does not land 
 a man in the police court or in open scandal, but 
 never gains anything worthy to be called char- 
 acter — all these have failed by allowing the good 
 to become the enemy of the best. 
 
 Here in the Bible was a soldier who in the midst 
 of a great battle was set to guard an important 
 prisoner who had been captured. That was his 
 particular business in connection with that 
 battle. But when the king came the prisoner was 
 gone, and all the soldier had to say for himself 
 was this, "As thy servant was busy here and 
 
 117 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 there he was gone." There were a dozen different 
 things which he thought he might do. None of 
 them were evil things — he was not going over to 
 the enemy or showing himself a traitor to his 
 country, but somehow in giving attention to these 
 other interests the supreme thing went undone. 
 As thy servant was busy here and there with a 
 little of this and a little of that, lo! the prisoner 
 he was set to guard escaped. 
 
 The young man in a military camp is there to 
 be trained as a soldier — if he fails in that, he 
 fails. The young man in college is there to gain 
 that mental and moral unfolding which changes a 
 boy into a man — if he fails at that point he fails. 
 The boy in preparatory school is there for that 
 discipline and development which will fit him 
 thoroughly for the harder duties which lie ahead — 
 if he gets by without accomplishing the main 
 purpose of those years he goes down in defeat. 
 
 This was the answer Jesus gave to that pious 
 humbug who uttered his platitude about the 
 blessedness of eating bread in the Kingdom of 
 God. He said to those men who sat at meat with 
 him, "How much do all these truths about religion 
 mean to you? Are you taking your religion 
 seriously? Is it anything more to you than a 
 form of words on your lips or a set of graceful 
 observances to which you may turn aside? Are 
 you willing to make sacrifices in the matter of 
 land and other property interests or in the enjoy- 
 
 ii8 
 
VIII— Men Who Make Excuse 
 
 ment of your home comforts in order to serve 
 God in His Kingdom? Unless you are ready to 
 put first things first and subordinate the lesser 
 interests to the demands of character and service, 
 you are all humbugs." 
 
 The way of advance does not lie through the 
 destruction of those interests but in their con- 
 secration. The man whose life is ample and 
 varied is not asked to destroy his advantages. 
 The one who has five talents of personal ability 
 has five times the capacity for usefulness over 
 the man of one talent whose life is meagre. He 
 had best not throw away four-fifths of his ability 
 in order to put himself on an equality with his 
 less fortunate fellow. He had best devote those 
 talents to the high ends they are meant to serve. 
 
 In the long run the way of renunciation is easier 
 and less creditable than the way of consecration. 
 It is easier for a full-blooded man to starve 
 himself by an ascetic mode of life and thus avoid 
 the coarse sins of the flesh than for him to remain 
 full-blooded, keeping himself fit and bringing all 
 those splendid powers into obedience to the spirit 
 of Christ. The latter, however, is the harder and 
 holier line of action. 
 
 It would be easier for many a rich man to give 
 away all of his money to the poor than to keep it 
 and administer it in a thoroughly Christian way 
 by investing it in enterprises which yield him a 
 livelihood and furnish many other people the same 
 
 119 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 chance to earn their livings in honest employ- 
 ment. The way of use and consecration, however, 
 is a finer way than that of renunciation and 
 destruction. 
 
 Here is a man who builds a factory and con- 
 ducts it in such a way that the smoke which 
 pours from the tall chimney is a black flag of 
 piracy. He is robbing men and women of the 
 better wages they ought to have, and robbing them 
 of their manhood and their womanhood by making 
 the conditions of their toil unjust and inhuman. 
 He may make shoes or guns or steam engines, but 
 he is not making manhood or womanhood for 
 those whose lives are bound up with his own in 
 that enterprise. Here is another man who builds 
 a factory and operates it in such a way that the 
 smoke from the tall chimney is a pillar of cloud 
 by day, guiding all those other lives toward the 
 Land of Promise in the spirit of good will. And 
 this consecration of his means to good ends 
 becomes the harder and holier mode of life. 
 
 "Live then," as William DeWitt Hyde of 
 Bowdoin used to say, "in the active voice rather 
 than in the passive, thinking more of what you 
 can do than of what may happen to you. Live in 
 the indicative mood rather than the subjunctive, 
 concerned with facts as they are rather than as 
 they might be. Live in the present tense, con- 
 centrating upon the duty at hand without regret 
 for the past or worry for the future. Live in the 
 
 120 
 
VIII— Men Who Make Excuse 
 
 singular number, seeking the approval of your 
 own conscience rather than popularity with the 
 many. Live in the first person, criticizing your- 
 self rather than condemning others." And inas- 
 much as you must have some verb to conjugate 
 in your everyday life you can not do better than 
 to take the one we used both in Latin and in 
 English — amo, I love. I live in the spirit of good 
 will toward God and men in the use I make of all 
 these gifts of His grace. 
 
 The man who bought the piece of ground could 
 have postponed his visit to it until the next day — 
 it would have looked all the more beautiful to him 
 had he first discharged his duty by being present 
 at the feast to which he had accepted an invita- 
 tion. The man who went to try his yoke of oxen 
 might have hitched them to his cart and have 
 driven them to the supper — it was before the days 
 of rapid transit. The man who had married a 
 wife might have brought her with him — if she was 
 any kind of a wife the feast would have been all 
 the better for having her there. In every case 
 the natural, wholesome, legitimate interests of 
 anyone's life had best be not cut out nor lopped 
 off, but brought in as part of the total service to 
 the cause of human well-being. 
 
 When these men refused the invitation the 
 opportunity passed. The master of the house, 
 when he received those silly excuses, said to his 
 servant, "Go out into the highways and hedges 
 
 121 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 and bring in the poor, the lame and the blind." 
 They would not be so occupied with their land, 
 their oxen and their home comforts that they 
 would be unwilling to come. "Let my house be 
 filled with guests but none of those men who were 
 bidden shall taste of my supper." The feast 
 went on, but without those men who had refused 
 the call. The door of opportunity opens but it 
 does not stand forever open — when men pass by 
 the door is shut. 
 
 Here in a short poem the author puts these 
 words on the lips of his principal speaker, whom 
 he calls Opportunity. 
 
 " Master of human destinies am I, 
 Both fame and fortune on my footsteps wait, 
 I knock unbidden once at each man's gate. 
 If sleeping wake, if feasting rise 
 Before I turn away. 
 It is the hour of fate." 
 
 The scientific men tell us that in the develop- 
 ment of every unfolding life there comes a time 
 for the marshalling of cells for the building of 
 certain tissues and the forming of certain organs. 
 If the work is not done at that time it can never 
 be done again and done right. If that period 
 passes without the proper development of those 
 organs the life is born imperfect or deformed. In 
 the case of a human life there may come a surgical 
 
 122 
 
VIII— Men Who Make Excuse 
 
 operation to correct so far as may be what grew 
 wrong in the first place. But the organism will 
 never have the strength and symmetry it was 
 meant to have. 
 
 "There is a tide in the affairs of men," morally 
 as well as physically, "which taken at the flood 
 leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of 
 that life is bound in shallows and in miseries." 
 There is a time for the formation of Christian 
 habits of thought, Christian modes of feeling, 
 Christian lines of action. Do it then, for it can 
 never be done so well again. There is a time for 
 the cultivation of that temper and disposition 
 which make for character of the highest sort. 
 Seize your chance with both hands and compel it 
 to yield the best it was set to bring. It is the 
 voice of Scripture and of experience and of God, 
 which says, "Now is the accepted time, now is the 
 day of salvation." Do it now, for tomorrow may 
 be too late. 
 
 In that great day when the Son of man gathers 
 the nations before Him and separates them as a 
 shepherd divides the sheep from the goats, some 
 people will be standing on the right hand. They 
 will be possessed of Christian character. They 
 saw their chance and made the most of it. And 
 they will hear the words, "Come, ye blessed of 
 My Father. Inherit the Kingdom prepared for 
 you from the foundation of the world. Ye did it 
 unto Me." Other men will be standing on the 
 
 123 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 left hand without that Christian character which 
 might have been theirs. They will stand there 
 offering their excuses. "Our parents were so 
 strict with us when we were children that we were 
 turned against religion. We were made to go to 
 church so much in our youth that when we grew 
 up we hated it. We met some church members 
 once who were hypocrites" — as if there were no 
 hypocrites in the world outside of the church 
 where they stand. "If we had understood all the 
 mysteries connected with religion, we might have 
 become Christians" — as if no one could ride on 
 a trolley car until he understood all the mysteries 
 connected with electricity. And in that day 
 neither God nor man will feel much sympathy for 
 those who undertake to make excuses take the 
 place of results. The word to them will be, "De- 
 part, ye did it not to Me." 
 
 When Lord Kitchener was in Egypt one of his 
 subordinates came to him to explain why a cer- 
 tain order given the day before had not been 
 carried out. There were any number of reasons, 
 he said, why the thing could not be done. 
 Kitchener listened for three minutes and then cut 
 him short by saying, "Your reasons are excellent. 
 In fact, I think they are about the best reasons I 
 ever heard. Now go and do it and report to me 
 tomorrow morning that the work is complete." 
 When the sun rose next day the thing was done. 
 He was a man who never excused himself nor 
 
 124 
 
VIII— Men Who Make Excuse 
 
 others and he will go down in history as "Kitch- 
 ener of Khartoum, the man who did things." 
 
 "Be ye, therefore, doers of the Word and not 
 hearers only deceiving yourselves." "Not every- 
 one that saith unto Me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter 
 the Kingdom, but he that doeth the will of My 
 Father who is in Heaven." "Him that over- 
 cometh I will make a pillar in the temple of My 
 God to go no more out. And I will write upon him 
 the nan;e of my God to indicate of what sort of 
 stuff he is and the name of the city of My God 
 to indicate where he is to dwell, and I will write 
 upon him My new name." 
 
 125 
 
IX 
 
 The Power of Sentiment 
 
 HERE was a full-grown man who was home- 
 sick — he was homesick for the joys of his 
 youth! He was a man of affairs who had written 
 the word SUCCESS over against his name in 
 capital letters. He was the king of his country 
 and the greatest king that Israel ever had. But 
 here at the close of a long, hot day he was thirsty 
 and he found himself longing for a drink of water 
 from the old well on his father's farm. "O for a 
 drink of water from the well in Bethlehem by the 
 gate." He had played around that well as a boy. 
 He had drunk from its cool depths on many a 
 sultry afternoon. Now in his maturity he longs 
 for a drink of water which would taste as that 
 water tasted when he was a boy. 
 
 You know the feeling. You may have wished 
 that the coffee this morning would taste as it did 
 when your mother made it. You may have wished 
 that Christmas and the circus and things generally 
 would produce in you once more the old thrills of 
 delight. Now, as a matter of fact, the water and 
 the coffee, Christmas and the circus, have not 
 
 126 
 
IX — Power of Sentiment 
 
 changed except for the better. But you have 
 changed — you and David. The fresh, unjaded 
 appetite of the boy is gone. The keen zest and 
 reHsh for some forms of experience are no longer 
 yours. Your sensibilities have been blunted by 
 the passing years, and that is the reason why a 
 drink of water from the well no longer tastes like 
 the nectar of the gods. 
 
 But David's longing went deeper than the con- 
 tents of a well. The water was only an outward 
 and physical sign of an inward and spiritual 
 satisfaction which he craved. He longed for the 
 innocence and radiant serenity of his unstained 
 youth. He wished that he might find himself 
 again a shepherd boy keeping watch over his 
 flock and singing, "The Lord is my Shepherd, I 
 shall not want." He wished that he could feel 
 again the joy of striking down that Philistine 
 giant with sling and stone and hear again the 
 plaudits of the soldiers. He wished that he could 
 see himself coming up again from the sheepfold 
 to be anointed king of Israel. In those great 
 days his life was all unstained by serious wrong- 
 doing. It was sound and clean — it sang as the 
 birds sing in the trees. 
 
 Now he had sinned grievously against God and 
 man. He had been guilty of murder and adultery. 
 He had a load upon his heart which even the divine 
 mercy had not removed. You can feel the heart- 
 ache in those words which fell from his lips, "O 
 
 127 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 for a drink of experience from the well of boyhood 
 which is by the gate." 
 
 As one of our own poets has it, 
 
 " Break, break, break 
 On the cold gray stones, O sea. 
 And I would that my tongue could utter 
 The thoughts that arise in me. 
 
 " Break, break break 
 At the foot of thy crags, O sea. 
 But the tender grace of a day that is gone 
 Will never come back to me." 
 
 He was homesick. He wished that he could 
 turn back the files of time and live over again 
 those early years. He would certainly avoid the 
 folly and the wickedness which had brought him 
 pain. Half aloud and half to himself, he says, 
 "O for a drink of water from the well in Bethle- 
 hem." Three of his soldiers, mighty men of valor, 
 heard him, and then the rest of the story follows 
 as you all know it. Let me hold it up before you 
 as a picture which sheds light upon the power and 
 value of wholesome sentiment. 
 
 The three mighty men did a brave deed because 
 they loved their king. They stole out that night 
 through the enemy's lines, taking their lives in 
 their hands, for the Philistines would have killed 
 them on the spot had they been discovered. They 
 went on through the enemy's country under 
 cover of darkness until they reached the old well 
 
 128 
 
IX — Power of Sentiment 
 
 in Bethlehem. They drew out of it a jug of water 
 and brought it back by the same perilous route 
 until they delivered it into the hands of the king. 
 They ventured everything on the strength of a 
 sentiment which they cherished toward the ruler 
 of their country. 
 
 It was not a very sensible thing to do when we 
 come to think of it. They might have been killed, 
 and the lives of three good men are worth more 
 than a jug of water from any well on earth. "It 
 showed a lack of common sense," I hear some 
 practical man saying to himself. But man does not 
 live by common sense alone — if he tries to do it 
 he dies in certain areas of his nature. The con- 
 siderations of prudence may point to a certain 
 conclusion as solid and verifiable as the state- 
 ments of the multiplication table and as power- 
 less to move the heart to its higher levels of feel- 
 ing and purpose. The finger of expediency may 
 indicate a certain line of action as clear and plain 
 as the North Star and as coldly remote from 
 human well-being. We are hearts as well as 
 heads. We are hearts even more than we are 
 heads. "Out of the heart are the issues of life," 
 for men and women do mostly those things which 
 they feel like doing. "With the heart man believ- 
 eth unto righteousness," and the man who roots 
 out all sentiment from his life to make more room 
 for the chilly dictates of expediency has made a 
 sorry trade. 
 
 129 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 " The night has a thousand eyes 
 And the day but one; 
 Yet the light of the whole world dies 
 When the sun is gone. 
 
 " The mind has a thousand eyes 
 And the heart but one; 
 But the light of the whole life dies 
 When love is done." 
 
 Keep, therefore, thy heart with all diligence! 
 Keep it filled and charged with tender devotion 
 and joyous enthusiasm, with gracious longings 
 and high resolves, for out of it are the issues of 
 life. 
 
 When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, 
 wise men came from the East. And when they 
 found Him with Mary, His Mother, "they opened 
 their treasures and presented Him gifts, gold, 
 frankincense and myrrh." The gold was all very 
 well — it could be used to purchase something for 
 a family so poor that they were compelled to 
 sleep in a stable. But the frankincense and 
 myrrh had no such practical value. They were 
 the offerings of sentiment and moral imagination. 
 They belonged to the poetry rather than the prose 
 of life. 
 
 And all that has large place in the Christian 
 scheme of things. It ranks with Mary's alabaster 
 box of perfume, which she used to anoint the head 
 and feet of Christ. The commercial instinct of 
 
 130 
 
IX — Power of Sentiment 
 
 a practical man who did not turn out very well 
 was offended on that occasion. He said, "It might 
 have been sold for so much," naming the price, 
 "and the money given to the poor." Yes, it might 
 have been sold, but neither rich nor poor live by 
 cash alone. They live, if they live at all, by all 
 the great words which proceed out of the mouth 
 of God, faith, hope, love, sentiment, devotion, 
 enthusiasm. The Master defended the woman's 
 action — "She hath wrought a beautiful work on 
 Me." The beautiful work as an expression of 
 wholesome sentiment has large place in the de- 
 velopment of character. 
 
 Here in this broad land fifty odd years ago we 
 had a civil war. A million men from the North 
 went down to fight against another million men 
 more or less in the South, And the men from the 
 North fought on until they had won a notable 
 victory. What made them do it? What kept 
 them at it during those four terrible years? It 
 was not a pleasant nor a profitable thing to do, 
 but they left their farms and their factories, their 
 mills and their mines, their homes and their 
 families, and went down South to be shot at. 
 They received "$14 a month and hard-tack," yet 
 they turned their backs on all that they held dear 
 and went down cheerily to hardship and danger, 
 to disease and death. 
 
 It was just a bit of sentiment on their part. 
 They believed in the integrity of this country and 
 
 131 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 they could not bear the thought of having it rent 
 in twain. They loved the flag, which is only a 
 piece of bunting to a man without sentiment, and 
 they were set upon keeping all those stars together 
 in one common field of blue. And moved by these 
 sentiments they fought on under the leadership 
 of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant until 
 the Union was preserved and the slaves were 
 freed. The finest chapters in the moral history of 
 the race have been written by men who moved 
 out in the strong grip of some noble sentiment. 
 
 You may go still further. Here is the final force, 
 the cardinal fact in the moral universe, "God so 
 loved the world that He gave his only begotten 
 Son." He loved the world though it was unworthy 
 of his love. He loved us while we were yet 
 sinners. He loved us not because we deserved it, 
 but because we needed it. His own knowledge 
 told Him that in many instances His love would 
 be spurned. But He loved until He gave. And 
 that unstudied, undeserved affection which a 
 father feels for his children, even though they 
 have been doing wrong, is the driving force be- 
 hind this whole redemptive process which is at 
 last to save men from the guilt and power of their 
 sins. The greatest thing in the world is love and 
 love in the last analysis is a sentiment of intelli- 
 gent good will. 
 
 The three mighty men broke through the host 
 of the Philistines and brought David a drink of 
 
 132 
 
IX — Power of Sentiment 
 
 water from the old well. You could not have 
 hired them to do it. They would not have im- 
 periled their Uves in that fashion for a bit of pay. 
 The choicest things in life are never purchased — 
 a woman's kiss of affection, the fine, uncalculating 
 friendship which one man cherishes for another, 
 the devoted self-sacrifice of a mother, the life- 
 blood of a patriot poured out for his country — 
 these great values in life are never bought and 
 sold as if they were meat and potatoes. They 
 are freely given away by the generous souls who 
 have them to offer. 
 
 We cannot allow our ministry to the poor to 
 become merely practical and utilitarian without 
 degrading it. The poor people are not mere backs 
 and bellies to be clothed and filled. They, too, 
 are minds and hearts. They have sensibilities 
 and aspirations which crave their satisfaction at 
 the hands of kindly intelligent interest. The 
 social worker may read the "Survey" regularly 
 and have at his tongue's end all the latest words 
 of scientific charity, but if he has never sensed 
 the fragrance of Mary's alabaster box he is 
 grossly incompetent for his task. The finer senti- 
 ments which have their place in the lives of rich 
 and poor alike are more precious than rubies or 
 diamonds. 
 
 We have all read "The Charge of the Light 
 Brigade," and some of us declaimed it in the days 
 of our youth. "It is a brave description of a 
 
 133 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 brave ride," as Myron Reed once said. The 
 colonel of the fated regiment at Balaklava re- 
 ceived his order, gathered up his bridle-rein and 
 swung himself into the saddle, saying, "Here goes 
 the last of the Cardigans and thirteen thousand 
 pounds a year ! " When a young man is the eldest 
 son of a lord and has an income of sixty-five thou- 
 sand dollars a year coming to him, he has a good 
 deal to lose. And when he lays it all down for 
 the sake of a forlorn hope simply because it 
 belongs to his military duty, he is a good deal of 
 a soldier. 
 
 "It was magnificent," someone has said, "but 
 it was not war." I am not so sure about that. If 
 we could reckon up all the moral courage, all the 
 devotion to an ideal, and all the public spirit 
 kindled by the action of those six hundred men, 
 it might seem that they had made a royal invest- 
 ment of their lives. "Theirs not to make reply, 
 Theirs not to reason why. Theirs but to do and 
 die, Noble six hundred." On all the higher levels 
 of action, the world is ruled mainly by those senti- 
 ments which rise supreme above the lesser con- 
 siderations. Keep, therefore, thy heart with all 
 diligence for out of it are the issues of life! 
 
 When the three mighty men brought the jug of 
 water to David he would not drink it. Here it 
 was, water from Bethlehem, clear and cold as it 
 was in the days when he saw the bucket come up 
 dripping from the bottom of the well! Here 
 
 134 
 
IX — Power of Sentiment 
 
 were the three men who had brought it standing 
 by to witness his satisfaction, their own faces 
 flushed with the joy of their success and their 
 hearts beating high with the love they bore him. 
 
 But David would not touch a drop of it. It 
 would have choked him. He poured out a cup of 
 it and held it up to the light. It had become in- 
 vested with a new kind of sacredness in his eyes. 
 It had become like the blood-red wine of the 
 Sacrament. It was too precious to be used for 
 any private gratification, even though the gratifi- 
 cation might be as innocent as the slaking of 
 thirst with cold water, "Far be it from me, O 
 Lord! Is not this the lifeblood of those men 
 who went in jeopardy of their lives! " He carried 
 it apart and poured it out in sacramental fashion 
 unto the Lord. 
 
 Here again I hear some practical man scoff! 
 "Why did he not drink it after the three men had 
 taken all that trouble to get it! It would not do 
 the Lord any good to pour it out before Him. 
 He might have given those men the satisfaction of 
 seeing him drink it." 
 
 But there are things which become invested 
 with values which make them too precious to be 
 used for any kind of physical gratification. In 
 that hour the soul of the man rises above all 
 physical needs. His capacity for worship craves 
 its satisfaction in ways which the materialist 
 knows not of. His kinship with the Eternal 
 
 135 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 asserts itself and he is intent upon strengthening 
 that bond which unites his soul with the Soul of 
 the Infinite. 
 
 When General Grant retired from the presi- 
 dency, he made his celebrated tour around the 
 world. He was honored in all lands and was re- 
 ceived by many of the crbwned heads. When he 
 reached Japan he went, naturally, to the city of 
 Nikko, the city of shrines, and the burial place of 
 the two great Japanese heroes,Iyeyasu and lye- 
 mitsu. There at Nikko is the famous red lacquer 
 bridge across the river, upon which no man has 
 ever walked save only the sacred person of the 
 Emperor. 
 
 But as a mark of honor to his American guest 
 and in gratitude for the friendship he had en- 
 joyed, the Emperor gave direction that when 
 General Grant visited Nikko the sacred bridge 
 should be opened and that he should be allowed 
 to walk across. 
 
 Then our great American soldier showed that 
 he, too, had all the fine qualities of an uncrowned 
 king. He expressed his deep sense of apprecia- 
 tion for the honor the Emperor had shown him 
 and declined to cross the bridge, so that the sacred 
 tradition might be kept inviolate. It was only a 
 bit of sentiment on both sides, but nobly con- 
 ceived and nobly expressed it served to strengthen 
 the bond of friendship between that land and ours 
 — a friendship, may it please God, which must 
 
 136 
 
IX — Power of Sentiment 
 never be broken by the careless tongues or wicked 
 hands of thoughtless men! Nations as well as 
 individuals are moved to those lines of action 
 which write the noblest pages of their history by 
 the sentiments which possess the heart. 
 
 How mighty would be the power of moral 
 imagination could we exercise it upon many of 
 the commodities of our daily life! Here is a 
 young man holding in his hand his monthly allow- 
 ance of spending money! He is blind if he thinks 
 that the value of that money can be stated in 
 dollars and cents. Money has in it the potentiali- 
 ties of life or of death. It is an expression of Ufe. 
 Into the creation of that bit of value toiling men 
 and women have put the sweat of brow or of 
 brain. If the young man has eyes to see, he will 
 say to himself, "Is not this the lifeblood of those 
 toilers who gave of their best that this value might 
 be created? Far be it from me to use it care- 
 lessly, ungratefully, wickedly." He would feel 
 that he was drinking in insolent fashion the heart 
 blood of those toilers if he used a dollar of it in 
 unworthy indulgence. 
 
 Here is a woman who rustles into her parlor in 
 all the elegance of her silk and lace! Would God 
 that all such luxury had been made possible by 
 commercial and industrial methods which Jesus 
 Christ would approve. In many cases it is not so. 
 If that woman could see the tired faces and broken 
 bodies of girls working for long hours in factories, 
 
 137 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 in sweat shops or in huge department stores where 
 pay is sometimes kept down that profits may be 
 kept up, she would hate the rustle of her finery. 
 She would say, "Far be it from me, O Lord — is 
 not this the wornout tissues of those other lives 
 that I am wearing for my own pleasure?" She 
 could not rest until she was doing something 
 to bring about better industrial methods and a 
 more equitable distribution of the good things of 
 life. 
 
 Here is a whole family, the children of good 
 fortune, sitting at an open-grate fire in winter. 
 If they could see in that glowing coal the burned- 
 out vitality and stunted growth of underpaid 
 miners who went in jeopardy of their lives that 
 we might have coal brought to us from the bowels 
 of the earth; if they could see the underpaid 
 breaker boys at the mouth of the pit, their hands 
 torn and bleeding as they pick out the slate, and 
 their lungs blackened by the grime and dust, it 
 would be impossible for them to sit there in open 
 indifference to the lot of their less fortunate fel- 
 lows. There would be developed in them a pas- 
 sion for social justice which would not rest until 
 they had done something to change all that. 
 
 Let me apply that same principle to another 
 still more vital interest! What is it that keeps 
 thousands of strong, red-blooded men in all our 
 cities clean and straight? The considerations of 
 prudence are weak when measured against the 
 
 138 
 
IX — Power of Sentiment 
 
 surging passions of youth. The fear of physical 
 contagion or the dread of social disgrace are 
 utterly inadequate to offset the temptations which 
 are offered in every great city. The decent man 
 is kept decent by the fact that he is too chivalrous 
 to find pleasure in the degradation of a woman's 
 life. The banishment of a daughter from her 
 father's house or the wreck of a woman's life, 
 who ought to be a happy wife and mother in her 
 own home is too vile for his countenance. "Far 
 be it from me, O Lord," he cries, "Not a dollar 
 of my money nor an ounce of my strength shall go 
 to the maintenance of a system which year by year 
 sends a multitude of misguided girls down a swift, 
 short, sharp descent into physical and moral hell." 
 Find pleasure in that — it would be like drinking 
 the lifeblood of a fellow mortal, and a woman 
 at that, for one's physical gratification! He 
 scorns it, as every true man must. 
 
 Teach that to your boys as they grow up. 
 Teach it to yourself. The great safeguard of 
 manly honor and of womanly purity is not to be 
 found in statutes nor in policemen. It is not to 
 be found in the frightful charts compiled by medi- 
 cal men nor in the statistics prepared by eugenic 
 societies. It is to be found in the development 
 of that fine spirit of chivalry which David showed 
 three thousand years ago when he refused to slake 
 his thirst on water which represented the lifeblood 
 of a fellow being. The very basis of morality is 
 
 139 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 to be found in that instinctive respect which every 
 right-minded man feels for the personality of 
 another. No man is a good man who lacks that, 
 and every man who has it refuses to purchase 
 his pleasure or his profit at the cost of the degrada- 
 tion of any human soul. 
 
 Here then is my story, and it is a story of the 
 heart. The homesick longing of a king for an- 
 other taste of the innocent joys of his youth! The 
 readiness of three brave men to hazard their lives 
 in order to bring him what he craved because 
 they loved him! The fine unwillingness of that 
 king to use what they brought as being now too 
 costly and sacred to be given to anyone save the 
 Lord! Three bits of that noble sentiment which 
 has power to move the heart to those higher levels 
 of feeling and purpose. 
 
 Out of the heart are the issues of life. There- 
 fore keep your heart in the presence of those 
 things which are true, pure and just, honorable, 
 lovable and reputable. Keep it there until the 
 inevitable reaction comes in finer forms of feeling. 
 Then let those feelings course through your veins 
 like rich red blood and the God of peace shall be 
 with you! 
 
 140 
 
X 
 
 The Wounds of Wrongdoing 
 
 HERE in the Bible we find human nature at 
 its best and at its worst! There is Hght 
 and there is shade and both are needed to give 
 the right effect in pictures and in plays and in 
 Bibles. We see men bearing themselves so nobly 
 upon the stage of action that the Psalmist is 
 moved to say, "Thou hast made man a little lower 
 than the angels." We see men acting so basely 
 that the Apostle is moved to say, "God has given 
 them up to the uncleanness of their hearts and 
 they have changed the truth into a lie." It is all 
 there in the Book because it is all here in us. The 
 Bible holds the mirror up to human nature and 
 shows us every line in her old face. 
 
 Here in a familiar story we find words so full 
 of life that if you should cut into them they would 
 bleed. The words are the words of a king, but 
 the cry is the cry of a father. He was a man 
 first and a king afterward. If all the jeweled 
 crowns of earth had been piled upon his head in 
 that hour they would not have kept back that sob. 
 He had been hard hit and now every syllable he 
 utters is full of pain. "O Absalom, my son, my 
 
 141 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 son! Would God I had died for thee!" If I could 
 take those words and write them upon the mind of 
 every man here as they stand written on that page 
 of Scripture, the hour would be well spent. 
 
 You find there three of the plain, elemental 
 facts in human experience — first, the love of a 
 father for his son. The father's name was David, 
 and he was a king. His son, therefore, was a 
 prince of the realm from his birth. He was a 
 handsome young fellow. "In all Israel there was 
 none so much to be praised for his beauty as 
 Absalom. From the sole of his foot to the crown 
 of his head there was no blemish in him." He 
 was not sent into the world like Richard III, half 
 made up, deformed, unfinished, so that dogs would 
 bark when he limped by. He was a fine-looking 
 young chap. 
 
 He was easy and affable in his manner. "When 
 any man came nigh to do him obeisance, Absalom 
 put forth his hand and took him up and kissed 
 him." In that region where the idea still persisted 
 that a certain divinity doth hedge about a king, 
 this democratic spirit on the part of the young 
 prince was most engaging. 
 
 He loved a good turnout. "He prepared for 
 himself chariots and horses and fifty men to run 
 before him." It was as if a modern young man 
 of the fortunate class should have the use of half- 
 a-dozen high-priced automobiles. "My father 
 can afford it," he might say, "Why shouldn't I?" 
 
 142 
 
X — Wounds of Wrongdoing 
 
 This young man was a prince and he looked the 
 part and acted the part. 
 
 In all this his father loved him as he loved his 
 own soul. The father had been a shepherd boy 
 in his youth. He had led the sheep in green pas- 
 tures and by still waters, driving off the wolves 
 and the bears with sling and stone. But now that 
 he had risen from those lowly surroundings to 
 a place of power and influence, he found a peculiar 
 joy in satisfying the ambitions of his handsome 
 son. His affection for him was so real and so 
 warm that he lived his own life over again with 
 many an added pleasure in the unfolding life of 
 his boy. You could see his eye kindle and hear 
 a new resonance in his voice when he spoke of his 
 son. 
 
 If you want to find any man at his best find 
 him as a father. Take the strong and tender out- 
 goings of his nature in the love he bears for his 
 child. In the love of a man for a woman there is 
 more of the sense of give and take. It is an inter- 
 change of joys between equals in their sweet com- 
 panionship. But in the love of a parent for a 
 child the very unselfishness of that high interest 
 clothes it with an added beauty. And this father 
 whose name was David loved his son Absalom 
 with a beautiful affection which was like the sun 
 shining in its strength. It is against that fair 
 white screen that the darker pictures in this pas- 
 sage are to be shown. 
 
 143 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 In the second place, we find the son's rejection 
 of his father's love. Here was a young man 
 doomed to defeat by the very wealth of his advan- 
 tages! Had he been compelled to make his own 
 way up from some other sheepfold, he might have 
 won out. But he had everything — everything but 
 a soul, and that is something each one must win 
 for himself no matter where he was born. 
 
 He was the son of a king with all the advan- 
 tages and all the perils of high position. He was 
 handsome, and he was courted and flattered until 
 his head was turned clear around so that he looked 
 habitually the wrong way. He was a favorite son 
 and he had been petted until he felt that God had 
 made him a good deal better than the angels. He 
 felt that he was "the whole thing," and when 
 any young man acquires such an aggravated case 
 of enlarged head "on both sides," as we say in 
 pneumonia, nothing but a double portion of divine 
 grace can save him. 
 
 This young prince made up his mind that he 
 would like to be king at once without waiting for 
 the slow process of nature to remove his father 
 from the throne. He organized a rebellion and 
 went about sowing the seeds of discord in his 
 father's kingdom with both hands. He stood at 
 the gates of the city where he would meet the 
 disaffected. When any man had a lawsuit and 
 came to the king for judgment, Absalom would 
 say to him, "Thy matter is good and right, but 
 
 144 
 
X — Wounds of Wrongdoing 
 
 there is no one deputed of the king to hear thee. 
 O, that I were made judge in this land that every 
 man might come to me and I would do him jus- 
 tice." We all know the impatience of disap- 
 pointed litigants. We have read "Bleak House" 
 and we remember "Jarndyce and Jarndyce." The 
 delays of the court are proverbial and in the hearts 
 of those disaffected subjects this false son planted 
 the seeds of rebellion. 
 
 "Thus Absalom stole the hearts of the men of 
 Israel." From start to finish, it was a lying, 
 thievish transaction. His gracious manner clothed 
 a treacherous heart. His showy courtesy was only 
 a polished tool to gain his ends. His apparent 
 interest in those who suffered from the delays of 
 the courts masked his own desire to sit upon the 
 throne at once. 
 
 He knew that all this would cut his father to 
 the quick. It was the sin against love. It was 
 the action of a thoughtless, reckless nature ready 
 to stab to the heart those who held him dear. All 
 sin is just that. The laws of right and wrong 
 are not abstract principles imposed upon us by 
 arbitrary authority. They are the expression of 
 an intelligent good will intent upon our well-being. 
 
 "Honor thy father and thy mother that thy 
 days may be long in the land the Lord thy God 
 giveth thee." This was the word of God from 
 Sinai, and it is the word of every honest heart. 
 The very foundations of the whole moral struc- 
 
 I4S 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 ture are laid in the rightly ordered home. The 
 fidelities and sanctities, the sympathies and sacri- 
 fices of family life are meant to be a finite copy 
 of the infinite, moral order which enfolds us. 
 They are meant to be a perpetual revelation of 
 Him from whom the whole family in Heaven and 
 earth is named. "Honor thy father and thy 
 mother" — it is the first command with promise, 
 and the sons and daughters of men who disregard 
 it, do so at their peril. Here in our story a hand- 
 some young prince who rebelled against the love 
 of his father was doomed. He broke the first 
 command with promise and his days were not long 
 in the land the Lord gave him. 
 
 He moved ahead in black ingratitude, treacher- 
 ously plotting against the authority of the king. 
 In furthering his design he added to all his other 
 evil deeds the uglier sin of religious hypocrisy. 
 He knew the simple, genuine piety of his father's 
 heart. He had thus far given that father small 
 comfort by his own attitude toward religion. He 
 was a godless as well as a thankless son. 
 
 But now he announces to his father that he had 
 made a religious vow which must be paid at 
 Hebron, one of the sacred shrines of the older He- 
 brew faith. The heart of David rejoiced over 
 this sign of an emerging piety in the life of the 
 wayward son. Then, ostensibly to make a devout 
 pilgrimage, but in reality to proclaim his revolu- 
 tion at the place which had once been the capital 
 
 146 
 
X — Wounds of Wrongdoing 
 of the country, Absalom sets out for Hebron. 
 "And thus I clothe my naked villainy in old, odd 
 ends stolen forth from Holy Writ and seem a 
 saint when most I play the devil." 
 
 What a frightful thing it is to borrow the livery 
 of Heaven to serve Satan! When Charles II took 
 the Covenant insincerely, merely to enlist the sup- 
 port of the Scotch, the world condemned him more 
 severely for that than for his open acts of wicked- 
 ness. He was counterfeiting the coin of the realm 
 in spiritual affairs. When the false French king, 
 devoid of religious conviction, received the sacred 
 rites of the Roman Church, saying in cynical 
 fashion, "Paris is surely worth a mass or two," 
 his deed was held in greater abhorrence than were 
 his acts of immorality. The world hates a liar. 
 It demands that every man should be real, whether 
 he is gold or brass. 
 
 Yonder at sacred Hebron this false, rebellious 
 son set up his standards of revolt. He called upon 
 the followers he had won to make their attack 
 upon rightful authority. It came so swiftly that 
 at first it was successful. The king was actually 
 driven from his capital in painful, perilous flight. 
 He suffered this grievous wrong at the hands of 
 the son of his love. 
 
 But the success of that ill-starred movement 
 was short-lived. When the experienced generals 
 and able warriors of the old king were once set 
 in battle array, they speedily proved too much for 
 
 147 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 the raw recruits of the young prince. The rebels 
 were routed and there was a great slaughter of 
 twenty thousand of their men. The cowardly 
 leader of the revolt, intent upon saving himself, 
 abandoned his army and fled for his life upon 
 his own mule into the midst of a thicket. Here 
 the long hair which had been kept in his vanity 
 proved his undoing. His hair caught in the prickly 
 boughs of an overhanging oak. While he was 
 struggling to release himself his mule ran out from 
 under him, leaving him half suspended and help- 
 less. Here the soldiers of the king overtook him 
 and shot him through the heart with three sharp 
 darts, leaving him dead in the midst of the oak. 
 And that was the end of the young man who re- 
 belled against the love of a father. 
 
 We come now to the third scene, the father's 
 grief over the fall of his son. When that fateful 
 day dawned for the battle of the king's army 
 with the forces of revolt, the king himself sat in 
 the gate awaiting news from the field. He had 
 charged his ablest general Joab the day before, 
 "Deal gently with the young man for my sake — 
 deal gently with Absalom." While he sat thus in 
 the gate one of his courtiers with younger, keener 
 eyes saw a man running. When the runner drew 
 near he called out, "All is well! Blessed be the 
 Lord who hath delivered up the men who rose 
 against my lord, the king." 
 
 But the king brushed aside this report of mili- 
 
 148 
 
X — ^Wounds of Wrongdoing 
 
 tary success — "Is the young man safe ?" he cried, 
 "Is Absalom safe?" This runner did not know. 
 Then another man was seen running and when 
 he drew near he called out, "The Lord hath 
 avenged thee this day against all them that rose 
 up against thee." But the king again thrust aside 
 this report of victory — "Is the young man Ab- 
 salom safe?" This messenger had been in the 
 thicket when the end came and he added in quiet 
 tones, "May all the enemies of my lord, the king, 
 who rise up against thee to do thee hurt, be as 
 that young man is! " 
 
 The truth was out. His son was dead, and dead 
 in the hour of his wrongdoing. He had sinned 
 against love. In cruel, treacherous fashion he was 
 showing his contempt for his father's love at the 
 very moment when he was shot through the heart 
 by the darts of Joab. 
 
 The king's son was dead and he was disgraced. 
 Where now in this wide world shall this broken- 
 hearted father look for comfort! This was the 
 sorry return which the handsome young prince 
 had made for all the wealth of affection poured 
 out upon him. "O Absalom, my son, my son," he 
 cried, "would God I had died for thee!" And 
 then "the king went up to his chamber over the 
 gate" — it was a narrow little room. It does not 
 take a very big place for a man to cry in. And 
 the king was there alone with his grief — his own 
 son had broken his heart. 
 
 149 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 How these lives of ours are knit up with all 
 those other lives ! No man liveth unto himself, no 
 man dieth unto himself, no man sinneth unto him- 
 self. We are all bound together in a moral soli- 
 darity from which there is no escape. You 
 thought that sin of yours was all your own affair 
 — that was all you knew about it. You found out 
 to your sorrow that it was not so. It was his 
 affair and hers and His. When you covered your 
 own life with shame, they were all shamed. 
 When you stooped to that which was wrong, they 
 all suffered. They suffered more than you did 
 because they were better and because they loved 
 you more than you loved them, or you would not 
 have done it. The tears which came in their eyes, 
 and the break which came in their voices, and the 
 weight which settled down upon their hearts were 
 all put there by your wrongdoing. 
 
 If fathers and sons alike could exercise in ad- 
 vance a bit of moral imagination touching the 
 effect of their wrongdoing upon each other, it 
 would serve as a mighty deterrent. A rough work- 
 ingman left his home one winter morning in 
 Chicago on his way to the factory. There had 
 been a heavy snowfall the night before. Because 
 the day was cold and the man was not feeling 
 quite up to the mark, he decided that he must 
 have a bracer before he went to his work. He 
 was heading for the rum shop at the next corner. 
 As he plowed his way along through the snow he 
 
 150 
 
X — Wounds of Wrongdoing 
 
 heard a small voice pipe out behind him, "Father, 
 I am coming, too. I am putting my feet in your 
 tracks." 
 
 The man did not go to the saloon that morning 
 when the significance of the situation dawned 
 upon him. He would make no tracks into the 
 door of a rum shop for his boy. And if every 
 son on earth could look ahead and picture to him- 
 self the pain and the loss which his evildoing 
 would bring to the heart of his father, it would 
 give him pause. He would say as one said long 
 ago, "How can I ! How can I smite the fair face 
 of affection with the foul hand of an evil deed?" 
 
 It matters little what form this rebellion against 
 love may take. It may take any one of a thou- 
 sand forms. Here in the story it took the form 
 of a political conspiracy against the rightful 
 authority of the king. It may come in the coarse 
 sins of the flesh, which bring the flush of shame 
 to the faces of parents when their own sons are 
 guilty. It may take the form of arrogance, selfish- 
 ness, cold contempt for the dearest desires and 
 aspirations of those who love us. It may come 
 in a flippant, scornful rejection of those principles 
 of godly living which mean everything to those 
 who hold us dear. In each case the evil is the same 
 — the thoughtless, selfish, godless soul draws his 
 dagger and stabs the heart of affection to the core. 
 In each case it is a sin against love, and I care not 
 where that evildoer may be doing his own bit of 
 
 151 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 iniquity, if he will listen he will hear that old He- 
 brew yonder on the hills of Judea sobbing yet. 
 "O Absalom, my son, would God I had died for 
 thee!" 
 
 We face here one of the cardinal truths of our 
 Christian faith. Why is there a cross on the spire 
 of the church? What does Calvary mean to us? 
 What moral efficacy has that great truth of the 
 atonement? The main force of it all lies here. 
 When the Son of Man suffered at the hands of 
 evil men on Calvary, it was a revelation in time 
 of something which is eternal and universal. It 
 was the supreme manifestation of the eternal 
 heartache and heartbreak in the life of God be- 
 cause of the sins of His children. There is a 
 Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. 
 When any man sins the guilt of it and the pain 
 of it are felt all the way up to the Great White 
 Throne because the man is a child of God, and 
 the God who sits upon that throne is "Our 
 Father." He is wounded by our transgressions. 
 He is bruised by our iniquities. It is by His 
 stripes that we are healed and the chastisement of 
 our peace is upon Him. The cry of the king, "O 
 Absalom, my son," is a human echo of the divine 
 cry which comes to us across the ages. 
 
 Hear this old Hebrew saying what fatherhood 
 has always said in the presence of the evil doing 
 of its children — "O Absalom, my son, how could 
 you?" You notice the term he uses even in that 
 
 152 
 
X — Wounds of Wrongdoing 
 
 hour of pain. He does not say, "Absalom, the 
 traitor, the leader of a political revolt, the dema- 
 gogue who stole the hearts of the people." It was, 
 "Absalom, my son," and that was the tragedy of 
 it. And the father of the prodigal in that classical 
 passage on redemption in harking back to the 
 days of his pain did not say — "That fast young 
 man who wasted his substance in riotous living! 
 That spendthrift who ran through all I gave him 
 and began to be in want." It was none of this — 
 "It is meet that we should make merry, for this 
 my son was lost and is found; he was dead and 
 is alive again." It is "my son" throughout, for 
 there is a love that will not let us go. 
 
 When we turn the reverse side of this shield, 
 how glorious are the lines engraved upon it! 
 Nothing on earth or in Heaven suffers as affection 
 suffers when it is outraged by the objects of its 
 devotion. And nothing on earth or in Heaven 
 can rejoice as affection rejoices when it sees the 
 travail of its soul and is satisfied in the realization 
 of its dearest hopes. 
 
 Have the skies ever heard a lovelier strain of 
 music than the one which broke through when 
 Jesus of Nazareth was baptized in the river Jor- 
 dan? It was God the Father who spoke in that 
 high hour and said, "This is My Beloved Son in 
 whom I am well pleased!" Here was a Son 
 who did always the Will of the Father! Here 
 was a Son who at the end of His life could 
 
 153 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 look up and say, "Father, I have finished the 
 work Thou gavest Me to do." And the satisfac- 
 tion of that Father's heart in that supreme hour 
 over the right life of His Son was enough to set all 
 the angels in the skies to singing. 
 
 I have thought of all this many times in these 
 recent months when the call has come for the 
 young men of our country to don the garb of 
 public service. There were shortsighted indi- 
 viduals who were saying that the sons of good 
 fortune were given over to luxury and self-indulg- 
 ence, that the moral fibre had been eaten out of 
 them. How little they knew! The fine material 
 of moral passion and of national vigor was all 
 there in waiting. When the voice of the President 
 and of a great international necessity rang out 
 saying, "Who will go for us, whom shall we send?" 
 the response came back in that same hour from 
 the best we breed, ''Here am I, send me." 
 
 And when they came to be weighed in the bal- 
 ance, they were not found wanting. They had 
 not laid waste their powers in dissipation and vice. 
 They were able to pass those medical examina- 
 tions which take only the firstlings of the flock. 
 It was the battle of the Lord which was to be 
 fought and they were lined up on the side of moral 
 idealism. 
 
 It has brought anxious days and sleepless hours 
 at night to the hearts of the fathers and mothers 
 who have seen them go. They loved their boys 
 
 154 
 
X — Wounds of Wrongdoing 
 as David loved Absalom and now they saw them 
 going forth into the realm of fire and sword. The 
 parents could only remain behind to wait and 
 watch and pray. 
 
 But how much more terrible it would have been 
 in those grave times had their sons been all unwill- 
 ing or unfit for that high service! How much 
 more grievous had these parents been compelled 
 to see what David saw, the lives of their sons 
 stained with cowardice and treachery! The 
 hearts of those fathers and mothers, heavy with a 
 great anxiety, could still look up to Him who 
 spared not His own Son, but freely delivered Him 
 up for us all. They could gain from Him comfort 
 and courage for their own hour of need. 
 
 And nowhere has this response of young man- 
 hood to the call of duty been more complete or 
 more satisfying than in our colleges. We have 
 seen it here on the Campus at Yale as other men 
 and women have seen it in all the colleges and 
 universities of the land. The spirit of it has been 
 finely expressed in these lines. 
 
 "I saw the spires of Oxford 
 
 As I was passing by, 
 The gray spires of Oxford 
 
 Against a pearl-gray sky. 
 My heart was with the Oxford men 
 
 Who went abroad to die. 
 
 155 
 
Yale Talks 
 
 "The years go fast at Oxford, 
 
 The golden years and gay; 
 The hoary colleges look down 
 
 On careless boys at play; 
 But when the bugles sounded war, 
 
 They put their games away. 
 
 "They left the peaceful river, 
 
 The cricket-field, the quad, 
 The shaven lawns of Oxford, 
 
 To seek a bloody sod — 
 They gave their merry youth away 
 
 For country and for God. 
 
 "God rest you happy, gentlemen, 
 Who laid your good lives down, 
 
 Who took the khaki and the gun 
 Instead of cap and gown. 
 
 God bring you to a fairer place 
 Than even Oxford town." 
 
 And when those young men, who have been 
 striving to do the will of the Father, have fought 
 their good fight and have finished their course 
 and have kept their faith, they will find laid up 
 for them a crown of rejoicing. They will find 
 that they have filled the hearts of their fathers 
 on earth and of their Father in Heaven with a 
 joy unspeakable. 
 
 156 
 
Printed in the United States of America 
 
VB (3(56 
 
 "1 
 463420 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CAUFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
.'iiii 
 
 
 ^^^M 
 
 iiiiiL 
 
 '.i! 
 
 >!,ii.