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PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY
PRESENTED BY

Professor F. Vf. Loetscher

BV 4310 .C33

Campbell, R. J. 1867-1956

The choice of the highest

THE CHOICE
THE HIGHEST

City Temple Talks to Young Men

y

BY

R. J. CAMPBELL

New York Chicago Toronto

Fleming H. Revell Company

London and Edinburgh

Copyright, 1904, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 63 Washington Street
Toronto: 27 Richmond Street, W.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 30 St. Mary Street

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. The Choice of the Highest

II. The Day of Decision

III. Spiritual Manhood

IV. The Two Sons, The Two Destinies

V. Other-Worldliness

VI. Ambition, True and False

VII. Moral Response to Spiritual Vision

VIII. The Struggle with Temptation

IX. The Two Sides of Temptation
X.' The Larger Forgiveness .
XI. The Sheltering Manhood .

PAGE

9

29

45
65
85
105
125
145
163
183
199

I

THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us
from the burning fiery furnace; and He will deliver
us. . . . But if not. — Dan. Hi. 77, j8.

THESE words represent the g-rand
challenge of the human heart against
evil fate. This book was worth the
writing if only because of the thrilling lesson it
conveys to us in the testimony of the three
Hebrew children in the presence of death. It
matters little how we regard the story, whether
as history or as allegory, or partly one and
partly the other, so long as we learn this par-
ticular lesson. A good deal of time, I think,
has been wasted in discussions about the au-
thenticity of the Book of Daniel, and as to
whether this particular dramatic narrative is
actual and literal truth. Personally, I may say
frankly I am inclined to believe that it is not,
but it has been true in human experience many
a time for all that, and is in essence true to-
day. That is why it finds a place in Holy Writ.
9

10 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

The grandest victories of conscience have been
those which have been gained not only in de-
fiance of odds, but in contempt of reward.
Those who believe in the naturalistic origin
of conscience forget that its greatest achieve-
ments have not been in line with, but in de-
fiance of popular sentiment. They have been
the victories of minorities rather than of ma-
jorities. Yet no such sacrifice has ever failed
or can fail. The three Hebrew children are a
figure of the moral heroes of the world. They
were not careful to answer the tyrant as they
stood in the presence of death. They did
not debate what ought to be done in mat-
ters of conscience. It is often said that in
questions of conduct first thoughts are best.
" We are not careful to answer thee in this
matter. Our God whom we serve is able to
deliver us, and He will deliver us out of thine
hand; but if not, we will not serve thy gods,
nor worship the golden image which thou hast
set up."

" But if not." They went to the burning
fiery furnace, from the furnace they were res-
cued, and the dramatic narrative, I think,
reaches its highest altitude in the vision that
was granted to the king. " Did we not cast
three men bound into the fiery furnace? Lbl

THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST 11

I see four men walking loose in the midst of
the fire, and the form of the fourth is like unto
the Son of God."

I have only two things to say to you arising
out of this text. The first is that the supreme
spiritual need of the hour is a strenuous mo-
rality, and the second is there is no morality
worthy of the name that is not bom in con-
flict.

There is a good deal of spiritual unrest in
the present time, and spiritual needs are being
voiced overtly and tacitly on every hand. You
may think it strange that I say the supreme
spiritual need of the hour is a strenuous mo-
rality. What has morality got to do with spirit-
uality? Everything. There is no spiritual
truth which has not a moral bearing and places
the man who receives it under a moral obliga-
tion. It is a cheap spirituality that makes no
demand upon conscience. I do not wish to
identify morality with spirituality, but I de-
clare they can never be separated. To-day we
are confronted with two seemingly contrasted
attitudes of the modern mind towards Christi-
anity. First we see before us an admiration
for the ethical value of Christianity, for the
character of its Founder, for the ideal which He
set up, but along with this there comes a very

12 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

considerable and widespread distrust of its dog-
mas. You cannot improve on Christ — I do not
suppose you have ever thought of doing so — as
your ideal for all that is good in human charac-
ter. You are willing to pay Him homage now,
but you are not quite sure of everything we say
about Him, as to Who He is, and what He
does, and what view of His personality we
ought to take. Has it ever arrested your at-
tention and struck you as strange that God has
left many an apparently open question, many
things that may be debated, and upon which
even good men may differ, even such an im-
portant one as what we are to say about the
person of Christ, and yet He has left us in no
doubt whatever as to the ethical value of the
Christ? None of you dare to say at this mo-
ment, or would dream of saying that Christ
led you wrong in the Beatitudes, or led you
wrong by the example He gave, for the mes-
sage of Christ was Himself as well as His
word, and the impression made to-day upon
human hearts by the personality of Christ is
that which gives sanction to the word. We feel
the Christ, His grandeur. His purity, His holi-
ness, we bow down before Him as our moral
ideal. God has, I repeat, left us in some doubt
concerning Who He is, but He has left us in

THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST 13

no doubt concerning the duty of obedience to
what He is.

Now, I take it — at least I trust it is so — that
I have carried with me every man so far. Lest
any of you mistake for a moment where I
stand, let me say this : Christ is my only hope
for time and for eternity. As Mr. Gladstone
called Him, " the one central hope for our
poor wayward race." When I get to the other
side of death " I hope to meet my Pilot face
to face," and I do not expect to think less of
Christ then than I think of Him now, and I
think my conscience can never place Him too
high. He is worthy not only of imitation, but
of the fullest homage that a man's heart can
render. Christ stands highest, Christ stands
first, Christ is my God.

But about that I am not concerned to dispute
at this moment. I think Christ is not con-
cerned so much as to what we say about Who
He is, but He is very greatly concerned as to
the obedience we render unto Him. Here I
venture to read some words written by a recent
biographer. He says : '* One cause of the
present decline from old beliefs is a spiritual
debility, a lack of the power to take energetic
hold of beliefs even when the reason has no
fault to find with them." Is not that true of a

14 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

great many of you? "Nothing could be im-
agined more likely to counteract that nerveless
condition than an energetic attitude to human
life. Those who gladly and enthusiastically
lay hold upon the ideal are the likeliest to at-
tain to a faith which deals robustly with that
which is beyond life." I agree so thoroughly
with that biographer that I have chosen the
text which is before us. God requires from us
not merely saying, not merely professing, but
doing, and it is doing that leads to spiritual
certainty. " He that doeth the will of My
Father which is in heaven, he shall know of
the teaching, whether it be of God or whether
I speak of Myself."

There is a need to-day of warmth of devo-
tion and moral enthusiasm about the highest
things, which, after all, lie close to us every
day. Poverty in these things leads to pessi-
mism. Every spiritual truth makes this moral
demand. The best way for you young men to
find the truth about Christ, about God, about
Heaven, is to be good. The good and the true
are ultimately one. Do one good action and
the universe speaks back to you its "Well
done." Test that truth for yourself in the very
next opportunity that you have of doing some-
thing for your neighbour in the name of God.

THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST 15

Is it not Lady Henry Somerset who some-
where tells how she was walking in her garden
and a voice seemed to speak to her heart, say-
ing, " Act as though I were, and thou shalt
know I am " ? That experience is not by any
means isolated. It has saved many a man from
doubt and despondency. One example which is
often quoted in these days, and whose influence
is greater than it was in his lifetime, is that of
Robertson, of Brighton. Some young men
may be interested in hearing of the crisis in
Robertson's life, when his faith became fixed.
Like many other men, there came a time when
he doubted nearly everything he had been taught
in the name of religion. In 1846, during a
visit to Germany, he writes home to a friend
in some such terms as the following : " Of
one thing I am certain, and it cannot be taken
away from me. I have got as far as this —
moral goodness and moral beauty are realities
lying at the root of and beneath all forms of
religious expression. They are no dream, and
they are no mere utilitarian conventions. That
suspicion was an agony to me once, but it is
passing away now. Again and again I de-
spaired of the reality of goodness, but in all
that struggle I am thankful to say the bewilder-
ment never told upon my conduct. In the

16 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

thickest darkness I tried to keep my eyes on

nobleness and goodness."

Arthur Hallam, Tennyson's and Gladstone's
friend at Oxford, passed through a similar
spiritual crisis and solved it in the same fashion
by moral faithfulness. You know the words in
that monumental poem, " In Memoriam/' in
which Tennyson describes his way out :

•' He fought his doubts and gather'd strength,
He would not make his judgment blind,
He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them: thus he came at length

•• To find a stronger faith his own;

And power was with him in the night,
Which makes the darkness and the light,
And dwells not in the light alone."

Men and brethren, every one of you bows
before a moral ideal written in his heart. You
may prove unfaithful to it, but if you faithfully
obey it, it will lead you into light. Whoever or
whatever wrought that ideal within you is
your God, and your God makes His demands
upon you not simply sometimes and here and
there, but all the time, and everywhere. The
greatest need, I repeat, of the present day is
the need of a strenuous form of morality. Make
men who are not afraid of rendering homage to
conscience, and you will make that type of char-

THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST 17

acter which Christ Himself dehghts to honour.
For a revival is coming. Some people say, and
I am sometimes tempted to think, that it has
already come. If it is coming, it will be a re-
vival of homage to conscience. The highest
will take care of itself. Christ is the highest,
and men are bound to bow down before Him,
" that in all things He might have the pre-
eminence."

But to go to my second point, there is no
goodness worth having which is not born in
conflict. The poet I have just quoted says man
is as

"... iron dug from central gloom,
And heated hot with burning fears.
And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
And batter'd with the shocks of doom
To shape and use."

Make a distinction between the morally beau-
tiful and the morally sublime. I trust you have
all read Edmund Burke's essay on the " Sub-
lime and Beautiful." You will remember that
he declares one ingredient of the sublime to be
a feeling akin to fear, fear in the presence of
an unknown, dread of an experience that may
come. Now, young men, the morally beautiful
may contain nothing at all of that particular
ingredient. The morally sublime goes to the

18 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

making of character, and in the long run it can-
not be opposed to the morally beautiful. Now
in this congregation there may be a little child
not understanding three words of what I am
saying. You cannot but feel that that little
child is perhaps in some ways superior to your-
self, morally beautiful. There is nothing more
winsome than the innocence of childhood. Is
childhood ideal? No, but childlikeness is.
You will go from the morally beautiful
through the morally sublime back to the child
spirit. Begin with childlikeness, if you would
come to the character of Christ. If you go
through the morally sublime, you must be pre-
pared to meet Apollyon in the Valley of Hu-
miliation and the demons in the darkness of
the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Simplic-
ity, naturalness, transparency of character, ab-
sence of arrogance, are characteristic of the
child. It is remarkable, but splendid, to think
that within these are the very things which the
world is coming to demand from manhood.
Test it yourself. If in place of simplicity we
read duplicity, if in place of naturalness we
read hypocrisy, if in place of transparency of
character we read the modern pose which will
give the impression that a man is better than
he really is, if in place of the absence of arro-

THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST 19

gance we notice the presence of the domineer-
ing pretence so characteristic of one form of
character which is doing so much evil to-day,
surely we are obeying our highest instincts
when we say, " These things should make
way for purity of heart, for meekness of dis-
position, for all that is characteristic of the
child."

Examine your own virtue and see if you
have obtained these qualities. That is not
virtue which is easily won. The false accent
of religiosity to-day says much about humility
where humility is not, and a man may come to
that dangerous condition when, as has been
truly said, he is proud of his own humility.
Doing merely what one wants to is no great
virtue in the sight of God. There are some
people here to-night, it may be, who not so
long ago would rather have been in the drink-
ing saloon. Why are not you there to-night?
Because it has ceased to appeal. You do not
want to go. Near you sits a man who never
did want to go, and if the old temptation should
come over you you might, for a moment, be
disposed to think, and perhaps he, too, might
be moved to think he is better than you in the
sight of God. But he is not. You are winning
your freedom by conflict, and the greatest mon-

W THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

ument of free, unmerited Divine grace in this
place at this moment is not you, but the man
who has never been tempted to the far country
and to feeding upon husks. There is an old
prayer which says, "Lord, be merciful unto
the tempted. Lord, be merciful unto
the fallen. The good have more to praise
Thee for in that they have never been tempted
and have not fallen."

We are every day confronted with the choice
between the higher and the lower, the golden
image or the fiery furnace. Sometimes a
grand crisis comes in life. We have to choose
between God and Mammon, conscience or a
momentary gain. In such crises we seem left
to ourselves, but we never really are left to
ourselves. In the darkest hour there stands by
our side that unknown Friend. Most of us
want God to rescue us before the crisis comes.
He very seldom does that, but He rescues usion
the other side of the strenuous activity by
which character is beaten out, gained, and
won.

I remember during my voyage to South Af-
rica, when we were sailing up the east coast, we
came to a port — East London — of which you
may have heard. To obtain entrance to the
harbour it was necessary for us, in little groups

THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST 21

and in flat-bottomed boats, to cross the bar.
Some shrank from the ordeal. I felt a shrink-
ing myself. As we were tossed at the entrance
of the harbour, one felt one would rather have
gone back and left East London alone. But it
is remarkable that when we passed over to the
other side, though we could not see why it was
so, it was like an inland lake. Here is a figure
of our moral opportunity. When God calls us
to a crisis, God brings us to a conflict. It is as
though there was a bar to cross, and on the
other side, and only on the other side, is the
still water and safety. God does not give His
rescues upon this side. It is an evil agency that
would keep a man back from that by which his
manhood is won. Here is opportunity in the
great crises of life — to venture on for the
right, and to leave the future to God.

In Brighton at one time when I was preach-
ing somewhat in this strain, I made the ac-
quaintance of a man who told me a story, bear-
ing a considerable amount of pathos, of his
own early life. He said he could remember the
time when his father was dismissed from a sit-
uation for daring to tell the truth. The chil-
dren could not understand what the choice was
which led him to take that decision. They
could not understand the merits of the decision.

22 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

He could remember his mother cutting the last
crust of the loaf and shedding tears as she did
so, and when they asked her why she cried she
told them the story of the father's heroism.
They did not understand, they could not enter
into it. " But now," said my informant, " do
I need to tell you that my father's example and
my father's character have saved me in many a
similar dark hour? " His heroism was won at
a greater cost than that of any of us, for he
had to suffer by seeing his children suffer.

Supposing, then, that there is some man
listening to me who is face to face with the
burning fiery furnace, I would say to him,
Make this humble man your ideal. Be not care-
ful about your answer. First thoughts are
best in cases like this. Play the man. " Our
God is able to deliver " you from the burning
fiery furnace — but if not, why, what if not?
Then do not bow down. Leave the future to
Him, and if He vindicate not His own He is
not the God of the heroes of the ages past ; and
yet we know He must be ever the same.

On yonder wall there is a medallion on
which you cannot look too often — that of the
poor tinker of Bedford, John Bunyan. His
name is a household word in this land of ours
to-day because he suffered for the highest. He

THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST 23

went to prison rather than yield his faith,
rather than give up his practice of proclaiming
the good news of Jesus Christ. You remember
his words, pathetically eloquent, to his little
blind girl, who came to him for the evening
blessing: " Poor child! " he said, as he took
the food from her hand and gave her the laces
to sell to make a living; " poor child, how hard
it is like to go with thee in this world ! Thou
must be beaten, must beg, must suffer cold and
want and nakedness, and yet I cannot endure
that even the wind should blow upon thee."

*' Our God is able to deliver, but if not "

Even love must be the sword which pierces
the heart.

Some of you are, even to-day perhaps,
tempted to compromise with the ideal. Watch
what you are doing. You are perilling some-
thing higher than you know, driving from
you, it may be, God's great opportunity.

*' Better to stem with heart and hand
The roaring tide of life, than lie
Unmindful on its flowery strand
Of God's occasions, drifting by.
Better with naked nerve to bear
The needles of this goading air,
Than in the lap of sensual ease forget
The godlike power to do,
The godlike aim to know."

24 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

Faithfulness is always vindicated. There is a
wondrous grandeur in moral victory. The
Jesuit said, in '' John Inglesant," that well-
known psychological study of the progress of
a somewhat too self-conscious soul, It matters
comparatively little in this world to what cause
or party you attach yourself, so you feel it to
be good, but when you have given yourself to
cause or party, be faithful and true. Yes. That
is what God requires — your very best. Never
left alone in the conflict ! Though you come to
the furnace, beside you walks a form like unto
the Son of God. If it were otherwise, God's
world would be wrongly made. No man who
has ever tested the worth of righteousness has
had cause to regret his choice. We are not
asked for loud profession. We are not asked
for dramatic debate or screaming witness to
what we believe to be the highest. We are
asked to live it. And to live on the lowest rung
of the ladder of truth faithfully and well is
bound by and by to lead to the top.

My brother, listen to the call of inflexible
good. Dare to trust it and obey. Your life is
different from mine, different from everybody
else's. You have to settle your own questions
in your own corner. As you have to die alone
so in some respects you have to live alone.

THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST 25

Sympathy may help to brace you, but there is
a grandeur in soHtude, — moral solitude, — and
great choices remain.

Stand up and look fate in the face. God is
able to deliver you from every agony, from
every pang that accompanies the choice of the
highest. But if not — if not — do you hear it?
God is able to deliver you from the fiery fur-
nace to-morrow, beforehand you need not go
to it. But if not — what, then, will you do?

II

THE DAY OF DECISION

II

THE DAY OF DECISION

Choose you this day whom ye will serve.— Josh,
xxiv. IS,

THIS is a sentence often quoted as the
text of an evangelical appeal, and
perhaps on that very account some of
those who hear it may be inclined to discount
its force. It is employed not seldom by persons
who have perhaps no very vivid idea of its his-
toric associations. Its force is all the greater
when we endeavour to recall what those asso-
ciations were.

Here is an old warrior, captain of the hosts
of Israel. His toils are nearly over. He feels
upon him the chilly hand of death. He calls
around him his mighty men, the elders of
Israel, their sages, their judges, their officers,
their men of war. This is the way he talks to
them. Pointing with his aged hand north,
south, east, west, he says : " Behold this fair
land of yours. I conquered it for you with a
strong hand. You followed me on many a
29

so THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

stricken field. Have I ever failed you ? Have
I ever done aught that was unworthy of
Israel? Well, now, look back. See the way
that you have come. Recognise the leading
hand of God. Your fathers served other gods,
and in this new land to which you have come,
other gods are worshipped, too. But our God,
yours and mine, to Whom we prayed in the
wilderness, and Who hath given us the victory,
Who hath led us hitherto, to Him be all the
glory and all homage due. Not with your
sword nor with your bow, but by the mighty
hand of God, has this new opportunity been
given to you. You are the chosen people.
Choose therefore this day whom ye will serve
in days to come.'*

Now I am aware that Israel's view of the
nature of the God of Whom Joshua spoke was
not quite ours. Let us look that matter quietly
in the face. It was not so lofty. The God of
Israel was a grim deity, — as Joshua describes
Him in the context of this chapter, a jealous
God, — although we know better now, because
some one bearing the very name of Joshua —
for Jesus is that name — came and told us
about a Father who loves and cares. But if
Israel had never witnessed for the God they
thought they knew, we should never have been

THE DAY OF DECISION 31

here to worship the God that Jesus gave. I
want you young men to understand that before
we go any further. It was Israel's faithful
witness, or the witness of Israel's faithful few,
to a God of righteousness, however austere
their conception of that God may have been, a
God of righteousness, that has made possible
your Christian God of love.

Consider, then, how momentous was the
choice that was made at the instance of Joshua
on that historic day. For if Israel had chosen
the god of the Amorites or the god of any of
the surrounding people, the world would have
gone wrong. You have small conception of the
filthiness, of the barbarity and the cruelty of
the worship of the Semitic peoples who were
all around the little nation of Israel. As Lu-
cretius, the pagan poet, has well put it —

'Gainst all things good and beautiful
'Tis oft religion doth the foulest treason.

Israel saved us from the degradation of the
religious ideal. Its moral uniqueness, the
spiritual loftiness of the worship of Jehovah,
have prepared the way for the Christianity of
Christ. So you see what a far-reaching effect
the decision of Israel had in response to the

32 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

call of Joshua, " Choose you this day whom
ye will serve."

With these historic associations in our
minds, let us regard the exhortation as ad-
dressed to ourselves. My purpose is to make
you hear the words of this old warrior as
though they were spoken to London and to
you. You cannot overrate their importance,
and you cannot get away from their appeal.
There are some choices that must be made, and
you may make them by refusing to make them.
You may choose the wrong by closing your
eyes to the right, by postponing the day of de-
cision. And all I have to do is to try to make
you see, as plainly as I know how, the issues be-
fore you and the importance of the decision I
urge you to make.

Have you ever read John Foster's essay on
decision of character? Probably most of you
have not. John Foster was read by your
fathers and grandfathers, but this generation
appears to be forgetting about him. If you
have not read that essay, get it out from some
library and read it forthwith. In one para-
graph he urges the following consideration,
which I do not quote to you, I only cite it
from memory. In effect it is this: There are
many men to-day drifting into a destiny.

THE DAY OF DECISION 33

There are many others talking about being
fated to do this, foreordained to do that, their
destiny appointed, and so on. Doth not clear
vision of opportunity and duty — doth not clear
vision constitute destiny? Do you not hold
your to-morrow in your own hands ? You see
the right — choose it or choose it not. Speak no
more about the destiny appointed ; you make or
unmake your own.

That prophet of God might come along and
speak to the young manhood of to-day, for just
as his appeal was true when it was to your
fathers, that teaching is true when applied to
you. I do not assume that you are all prodi-
gals. Many an evangelist goes a little wrong
by talking in that way. You are nothing of
the sort. Perhaps the majority of the young
fellows and young women who listen to me are
in the main disposed to live as good a life as
they know. The trouble is that they have never
traced out and committed themselves wholly to
the ideal of the best life. They are doing what
John Foster would call drifting into a destiny.
You are of unformed character. Many of you
are easy-going and without purpose in life.
You are aimless, and yet you are just entering
your promised land, and God looks very kindly
upon your future. If I could get inside your

34 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHESTl

heart and brain, and hear with you and feel
with you and understand what your ideals are,
I do not think I could have much more S)mi-
pathy than I have now. Is it not true that you
think of Hfe as golden, full of promise? Per-
haps you have found yourself in a hard place,
your living is not easy to get, the immediate
future does not look rosy, but you can sleep at
night because you are young and full of hope.
There will be a better day by and by, so you
assure yourself, or, without assuring yourself,
feel it must be so.

You are not wrong. That instinct is God's
gift to you, and what is more, it is yours to use
it right, and make that instinct to become
achievement. I went to-day to see some one
who, in the course of conversation, happened to
say — and he is a man with full and rich experi-
ence of life — " I wish you preachers would
make a little plainer to the young of your con-
gregation the importance of being clear on the
threshold of manhood and womanhood about
the things that matter most." " But," he went
on to say, " you pulpit teachers teach such dif-
ferent things. You contradict one another.
Men are not quite sure about your meaning."
Now, I do not agree with my friend, and I
want you to see under this statement the same

THE DAY OF DECISION 35

fallacy I made him see under it. Preachers do
not speak different things about the things that
matter most. No teacher sent from God really
misses the mark, and what is more the people
to whom he is sent know perfectly well when
he hits the mark, and every sermon preached
in this metropolis, every one, — Roman Catholic,
Anglican, Jew, and Christian, — will contain
something that comes right from the mind and
heart of God, and is intended for the mind and
heart of man. Different things we do not say,
different things about the great truths concern-
ing high living, right thinking, right doing.
Beloved, my own life, like yours, is built upon
two or three truths, and any man who has two
or three main truths in his life, and for which
he would give his life if necessary, is pretty
safe to be taught of God concerning the things
that lie beyond. We carry within us the God-
given faculty for recognising the truth that
helps us upward, and though my aspect of
truth may not be precisely yours, we start
from the same base, and we take our stand
upon the same eternal facts which, worked out
in every-day experience, ever ring true. Ex-
ternals matter little; modes of statement may
differ, but truth is one as God is one.

Now here are three principles on which I

36 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

am building my life. The first is this: The
universe is organised for righteousness.
Granted it does not look like it, granted that
men lose sight of it sometimes (they would
not cheat and lie and thieve if they did not) ;
but it is so, and it is not only conventional and
orthodox preachers who think so. There are
people who teach with the pen as well as the
tongue, and all men who have stood upon the
everlasting hills and caught the glint of God's
golden morning have urged that truth upon
their fellows in the valley:

" Because right is right, to follow right
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence."

The second is this : Life does not end at the

grave.

•' Life is real, life is earnest.

And the grave is not our goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul."

I have never outgrown that simple hymn of my
youth.

Here is the third: The highest is the true,
and the highest I know is Jesus.

I can Imagine somebody saying, " We might
with a little difficulty agree to your first prop-
osition, but the other two — are not you too
dogmatic? Are you sure that life does not

THE DAY OF DECISION S7

end at the tomb? Are you sure that the high-
est is the true ? How do you know ? " My
answer is, How do you know anything? The
most elementary fact with which you are deal-
ing on the Stock Exchange to-morrow and in
the merchant's office on Cheapside begins in a
paradox and ends in one. The curious part of
it is that men hesitate so much to build their
life upon a truth which is no more a paradox
than the lower truth in which they are living
their life every day.

" How do you know that Jesus is the high-
est ? " Show me a higher, and I will dethrone
Him. I am prepared to worship the Christ
that stands beyond Jesus if you can make me
see Him, but I have never seen Him and you
never will. Oh, the folly of standing hesitat-
ing, non-committal, half-contemptuous in the
presence of the King of kings, and Lord of
lords. If Christ is not Master of the universe
and Lord of life and Lord of death, who is?
I only know one who is worthy, and that is
the Lamb that was slain.

The first sermon I ever heard Dr. Parker
preach contained a figure which I pass on to
you, pungently powerful in this regard.
" How men do trifle with truth," he said,
" standing on the outside of it, when they

38 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

might be living on the inside." " As I came
down to the service this morning I might have
seen," he continued, *' a man standing outside
the station, spelhng the name of the railway,
and parsing every word, The — Metropolitan —
Railway — T — H — E — and so on. By the
time he got to the end of the title I had my
third-class ticket, and was five miles down the
hne."

I see you smiling. Will you change your
smile into sacred and solemn assent? That
figure is as a voice from the tomb. Verily, we
do trifle with the truth, and stand hesitating,
non-committal, selfishly aloof from the out-
side, when we ought to be living in grand and
noble daring on the inside. '' Choose you this
day whom ye will serve." The Lord who has
kept me hitherto will keep me to the end. I
know my faith in Him is worth my while be-
cause it works. If I had to-morrow to begin
again I would begin again with Christ. " I
know that my Redeemer liveth," liveth to vin-
dicate everything that is noble, liveth as the
Master behind all mystery, the God Who un-
derstands the human heart, in that He Himself
hath lived the human life. Jesus is the expla-
nation of all that baffles, the Name in which to
live, the end to which we go.

THE DAY OF DECISION 39

Oh, yes, somebody will say, this experience
will work for a corner of life. I could under-
stand your religious man talking- in this style,
but you see we have not time, we are so busy
getting a footing in the world. Now make no
mistake about the matter. The principle is for
the whole of life. There is no departmentalis-
ing, life is not lived in compartments. Re-
ligion is not for Sunday, or, if so, less for that
day than for any other day. If you are a man
of business, take your religion into your busi-
ness. Do more than that, take care that your
business is the expression of your religion.

Moreover, the decision to stand for and with
God will affect every corner of your thinking,
every iota of your action. You cannot give
Christ one detail of your life, and retain all
the rest. He is entitled to the whole, and the
whole He will have. Jesus is worth your best.
He has been tried for nineteen hundred years,
and is not found wanting. Do not make the
mistake of finding out too late that He was
worth your choosing, and that you have wasted
your days. " Choose you this day whom ye
will serve." Let the result of your decision be
this^ — " We will serve the Lord."

I remember taking a holiday in Devonshire
some years ago, and coming to a spot near

40 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

Westward Ho ! where two roads branched off
a picturesque Devonshire lane. The one
seemed precipitous and less inviting than the
other. The latter led downward for a time,
but, as we thought, led more directly to the
place where we wanted to go. Said our guide,
who left us at the top of the pass, " Choose
the higher road, it is the surer." We stood de-
bating with each other, when we came to the
parting of the ways, which way really was the
better. Said some, " The guide never told us
the higher path ; he could not, it was nonsense.
Don't you see for yourself this road which
leads down must cut off the whole of the un-
welcome hill ? Just go that way, we shall save
no end of time, and spare ourselves no end of
weariness." Well, we took the lower way.
Down and down we went, splashing through
mud, regretting at every step that we had not
taken the higher road, and by and by we came
out upon the way that we must ascend to get
back to the road that we should have taken at
first. We saw we had wasted our time, that
the weariness was to be incurred on the lower
road and not on the higher, and we will take
care, if ever any friends of ours have to walk
that road again, they shall not make the mis-
take of choosing the one that we chose. The

THE DAY OF DECISION 41

lower road was the longer, it was the harder,
it was the steeper, it was wearisome, it was
disappointing. The higher road was the
shorter, it was the grander, it was the sweeter.

In life we often choose the lower road — it
seems so easy. By compromising with the
ideal, we seem as if we can come out to what
we want so much more safely. It is never safe
to compromise. It is never worthy to take the
lower road. What may hang upon this mo-
ment I do not know. If the preacher could be
silenced, and every life of tragic failure in this
Church could rise up and testify, there would be
no doubt as to the choice that would be made
by those who are hesitating. If every saint of
God, every pure-minded man or woman who
had lived a life with Christ could rise and tell
what the Lord has meant to them, there would
not be much room for hesitation left in the
breast of the audience. It is only one who can
speak, and I speak for the Master, and just re-
peat the old warrior's words, " Choose you this
day whom ye will serve." For if you knew
what is at stake, you would never stand for a
moment halting between two opinions. "If
the Lord be God, follow Him."

It is so possible to go wrong by choosing the
easy, by choosing the lower, or refusing to

42 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

choose at all. Let no man hesitate for a mo-
ment in the presence of the ideal of the Christ,
Who is the highest you have ever seen. Take
that road, cost what it may. Trust the Lord,
however dark the way, for the Christ in Whom
Christians believe has never failed His own
and never will. Let that Christ be your Leader
and your Captain and your Guide.

To close with the words with which I began,
to every young brother however badly and un-
convincingly and feebly I have put the truth,
forget everything except the One before Whom
you stand. Entering upon your promised land,
make the right choice in your day of decision,
*' Choose you this day whom ye will serve,'*
and " Goodness and mercy shall follow you all
the days of your life."

Ill

SPIRITUAL MANHOOD

Ill

SPIRITUAL MANHOOD

And he said unto me. Son of man, stand upon thy
feet, and I will speak unto thee. — Ezek, it. j.

EZEKIEL'S vision was probably subjec-
tive. But such experiences have come
to many of the good and the great
among God's august and honoured servants in
the world, and there is some similarity between
them, in that the best and wisest of mankind,
when once they have realised with intensity the
presence of God, the ineffable, unapproachable
holiness, have felt themselves shamed and hu-
miliated. It is only those who are sunk in evil
who can speak lightly and easily about the
purity of the Holy One. Ezekiel was broken
down, shamed, humiliated, as he saw the
holiness of the Lord as it came to him in vision,
and the sinfulness which he exhibited in con-
trast to it. As he lay prostrate before the Su-
pernal Being, the voice that spake within him
said, " Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I
will speak unto thee."
45

46 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

The sinner's first impulse is to prostrate him-
self. Repentance always begins within — '' God
be merciful to me, a sinner " — but it should
not end there. From the Cross we go on-
wards and rise upward, and the first effect of a
radical change of heart and life is that man-
hood begins to show itself. Ezekiel is not the
only one who has seen such a vision, and
whose whole life has been changed in conse-
quence. Like his experience is that of Isaiah :
" Woe is me, for I am undone : for mine eyes
have seen the King, the Lord of hosts." Like
St. Paul, erstwhile persecutor, ruthless and ar-
rogant, but now — " Who art thou, Lord ? "
" I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest." How
those words were burned into the memory of
St. Paul we see from his tender pastoral letters
written afterwards to those whom he would
persuade from the wrath to come and to the
love of the Christ. In Christian history, in not
a few instances, such a spiritual crisis has been
the antecedent of a marvellous life-work. One
could name not simply one, but many of the
heroes of God who have begun in humiliation
and ended in power. Self-abasement is often
the way to manhood. God speaks to the peni-
tent the word of encouragement and strength;
the new spirit is breathed into him who is low

SPIRITUAL MANHOOD 47

before the Lord. " Son of man, stand upon
thy feet, and I will speak unto thee."

We have here a spiritual message for the
present day, especially for the younger genera-
tion. Spiritual manhood is the thing we most
want to see, and the thing we most require in
this England of ours. I am impressed by many
things in the life of my younger brethren in
London which no thoughtful observer can af-
ford to pass by. One of them is the compara-
tive absence of what I may call the serious view
of life ; or we may phrase it otherwise, thus :
Is it not that the young men of to-day, speaking
broadly, fail to take either themselves or their
destiny or life as a whole seriously? There is
a danger of an opposite kind, that we take
ourselves too seriously. Morbid introspection
is bad for any character. I do not ask any
young man to think of himself and to study
himself until he has fashioned in himself some-
what of the ideal character which in his best
moments he can see. In making such a char-
acter it were better to look away from yourself.
But, on the other hand, there are so few who are
prepared to take themselves with sufficient
seriousness to begin the process at all. In the
metropolis are men of ambition and no am-
bition; those who are unscrupulous as to their

48 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

methods of getting a living and winning a place
in life, without any spiritual touch in their
character, without any spiritual aspiration
which can be detected by another, and those
whose flabby character — worse, perhaps, than
those who are unscrupulous concerning their
methods of carving a road in life — never
achieves anything at all. Such men are not
only robbing God, but robbing themselves.
" He that sinneth against Me wrongeth his
own soul.''

If I ask you, "What are you living for?"
how many of you would be ready with an answer
of which you need not be ashamed? We sel-
dom pause to take stock of ourselves as we
should, and without danger of morbidness that
should often be done. How much have you
counted for? Is the world better because you
are in it? Do you ever think concerning your
responsibility? Have you made any prepara-
tion for the larger life of which this is only
the portal ? Well is it if you are ready with the
answer : " My ideal is a noble one ; let God
once speak to me, and I will obey." But that is
not, as a rule, the ideal of the manhood of our
time ; we fall short in this particular, that God
is usually left out of account when we are tak-
ing stock of destiny. It was not always so in

SPIRITUAL MANHOOD 49

the history of the world, and particularly of
our country. There have been great and grand
men — God send them again ! — who have helped
to shape our history and made us the liberty-
loving nation that we are, because they were
ready with an answer when the time of ques-
tioning came. Cromwell wrestled with God
day and night in a time of spiritual crisis, until
he came clear out upon the side of deep moral
conviction. God humbled him, and then raised
him, and in answer to the question " What are
you living for?" that man, amongst others in
that stirring time, could have answered, " The
will and the purpose of the most holy God."

Around the walls of the City Temple are
the names of worthies of a past day, and we
have added that of " Joseph Parker." Those
who knew him best and longest will admit,
whatever may be said concerning his peculi-
arities or eccentricities, now that he is gone,
and we can take a true perspective of his life,
that it was strenuously lived. Had it been
lived for its own sake alone, its record would
have been other than it was. To the very end
that servant of God wore his harness. Yet I
have heard him say that in the earlier part of
his Christian life he sometimes felt he was un-
worthy to serve the God Who had given him the

50 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

commission. To think that he was in the ser-
vice of the Holy One abased and humiliated
him as it did Ezekiel, but, in response to the
heavenly vision, when he had obeyed the call
and taken up his life-work, what a man his
faith made him!

The old Puritanism had a message to its
age. It has been the fashion in some quarters
to insult and deride Puritanism, but it made
the most massive, morally strongest type of
character the world has ever known. It was
grim, unlovely in some of its aspects, rugged,
stem, sometimes merciless. Because their
power of moral indigna-tion was so great, the
Ironsides could be ruthless on the battlefield.
Perhaps our spiritual forefathers had not a
very great sense of humour. Sometimes I
think we have too much. But such men as
these made the religious life of England a dif-
ferent thing from what, in some of our moods,
we are tempted to think it has become. There
was a grandeur and massiveness of character
about these old Puritans, formed by the convic-
tion that they were servants of God, chosen,
called, and sent. In every case the experience
of the Puritan seems to have begun in weak-
ness toward God, and ended in strength toward
man. " Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and

SPIRITUAL MANHOOD 51

I will speak unto thee," would have been the
message of Baxter, Howe, Bunyan, Knox.
The last name reminds me of what the Regent
Morton said of the great Scottish reformer as
he lay in death : " There lies one who never
feared the face of man " — no, so much feared
he the face of God. But yesterday there
was one who seemed to echo the same tone.
Chalmers, of New Guinea, went out to his
work, to possible failure and actual martyr-
dom— went forth with the same feeling in his
heart, and almost the same words upon his lips.
God made him the man he was by humbling
him to the dust at the beginning of his spiritual
career. Chalmers knew not only how to live,
but how to die; he took life seriously, not for
himself, but for God. He might have heard
the ring of the commission to Ezekiel, '' Son of
man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto
thee."

Young men, do you not feel, as you stand
face to face with a spiritual fact of this kind,
that, however old, it has a present-day signifi-
cance, and an individual one, too ? If we have
failed in having a high purpose in life, a noble
aim, an ideal of which we need not be ashamed,
shall we not begin where those great ones of
old begun — by entering into relationship with

52 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

God, heart to heart, soul to soul, humbling our-
selves in the dust before the Most High, that
His holy hand may lift us up? There is no
spiritual manhood worthy of the name apart
from the inspiration of God. Spiritual man-
hood is Christ-informed character, and the
Christ-informed conscience is the guide of life.
So many are ashamed of being called Chris-
tians, afraid of taking a stand, the non-com-
mittal attitude is the favourite one. There is
some penalty for such spiritual cowardice, and
perhaps it may come home to you before this
life is done. What you call manhood is often
a base and false ideal. Yet what matters it
what our fellows say? What matters it how
we cheat ourselves as to the meaning of suc-
cess and the worth of the goal at which we
spend our time in aiming? If God be absent
from a life, that life is barren and poor. God-
saturated men are wanted in the present day
as much as ever they were in the history of our
land.

It is not only the lack of seriousness that one
sees in young men to-day ; there is what I may
call a new and dangerous hedonism abroad.
One of the most insidious temptations of the
hour, sapping the very foundations of man-
hood, is the craving for pleasure. The rein is

SPIRITUAL MANHOOD 53

given to passion. By hedonism I mean living
for gratification and apologising for what are
by courtesy called the weaknesses of human
nature. How often we hear such philosophy as,
" It is to be expected that young men will sow
their wild oats. There is a period for that, and
we cannot be too hard upon human nature. If
a man does not break out in one place, he will
in another. If he does not live for the flesh, as
some of the best-hearted fellows are doing to-
day, why, then, you must expect a withered,
dried-up, cynical schemer who in some other
way will take his toll of life." It is a lie ! The
ideal of manhood suggested by such a philoso-'
phy as that is a false one. There is no need for
any man to live the life of the beast. If you
don't control your senses, your senses will con-
trol you. It is perfectly certain that the man
who is content to gratify that which links him
to the lower creation instead of to the higher,
is laying up for himself a harvest of remorse.
God forbid that any man, however unwilling to
label himself with the name of Christian, or
any other, should be led away in the belief that
it is right to live for that which is bestial, and
that, with the hot blood pouring through his
veins, he cannot be master of his own thoughts,
let alone his deeds. Character is being built

54 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

every hour, not only by what you do, but by
what you think. Live for the highest, not the
lowest. " Son of man, stand upon thy feet,
and hear the speech of God."

Do not speak lightly concerning those sacred
things which God has entrusted to our keeping,
particularly womanhood. Not many hours
since I heard a slighting, insulting, unworthy
remark made by a young man concerning the
sex to which his mother belongs. Never allow
such a word to pass unrebuked in your pres-
ence. Never think that it matters little, or
that it is becoming and proper to the sex of
which you are a member. That is not man-
hood; it is moral negation. The ideals which
are made for you by the voice of the beast are
not those which in your best and most solemn
moments you know you ought to conform to.
God has not left you without a witness, and
you need no preacher to tell you this. Stand
upon your feet; be master of the body. He
that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap
corruption; he that soweth to the spirit shall
of the spirit reap eternal life.

There is a duty of self-formation. You are
making yourself every day and every hour in
the unseen. Did you ever think of that?
Psychologists tell us that we know very little

SPIRITUAL MANHOOD 55

about our own being; consciousness is but a
tiny corner of that vast entity which is summed
up in the personahty of any one man. But
the unconscious part of us is that in which char-
acter resides; we are continually putting into
the unseen being lying below our conscious
self, yet our very own soul, and by and by,
after the great change that we call death, when
we live more than ever, what we are will stand
out in the lurid light of the eternal world of
truth.

" The tissues of the life to be

We weave with colours all our own,
And in the field of destiny
We reap as we have sown."

Make no mistake as to the result of our
action and the ideals for which we live.
We are controlled by them ; if we do not aspire
to the higher, we are mastered by the lower.
There is a judgment which ever proceeds, and
so certainly as the Christ is neglected, ignored,
so certainly are we thrusting Him from us in
the unseen, and shall want Him when we need
Him most. Let no man ever make light of the
judgment. There must be a judgment. We
know sometimes, by the moral indignation that
wells up in ourselves at sight of a deed of
wrong, what would be the just condemnation

56 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

passed upon us for opportunities let slip and
mismanaged. There is a character that the
world cannot see in every one of you, perhaps
unknown to yourself. It is seen now in the un-
seen, and by and by you shall see it as it is,
when the secrets of all hearts are revealed. Per-
haps some good things may come to light then,
as well as bad ones. John Wesley used to say
that he expected three surprises in heaven —
(i)to see some men there that he never ex-
pected to see; (2) not to see some whom he
did expect to see; (3) greatest wonder of all,
to find that he was there himself. John Wes-
ley's eschatology would not be mine, but his
vivid sense of judgment to come is mine. We
ought never to trifle with the facts of life, and
we cannot speak too solemnly and seriously
upon that which awaits us when the veil of
time and sense is no more; when we see our-
selves as we are; when the vision is not only
open to our minds, but the influence thereof to
our hearts. But God can see even now what
has been hidden beneath the veil of pretence.
We are building, building all the time for
God's great judgment-day.

We cannot afford to trifle with what is com-
monly called faith. How many young fellows
will make any new resolution, or take any new

SPIRITUAL MANHOOD 57

stand, because of what the preacher says ? Yet,
young fellows, I mean every word. Faith is
real to me. I will tell you what I mean by
faith. I don't think faith is the subscription of
belief to a proposition; that is only the husk
of it. A man may have a most elaborate
scheme of beliefs, and be a bad man all the same.
You may say, " I believe that Jesus Christ was
the Son of God." That is well and good in its
place ; " the devils also believe, and tremble."
But supposing you get no further than this:
" I hope that Jesus is the Master of the un-
seen, and I am going to live for Him with all
my might and main, the sweetest, purest, high-
est, embodying all I know or need to know of
God," that hope has become faith. Faith is
life adjusted to the highest we can see. When
you go back to your business life, mark out for
yourself what you believe to be the highest that
God has shown you; then be sure God has
spoken to you. He is calling you to manhood,
and the voice that speaks across the centuries
to you is the voice that spoke in Galilee nine-
teen hundred years ago. *' Oh, no ! " Oh, yes !
If Jesus is not speaking, who is it? Can we
go as far as this : If it is not Christ, it ought
to be ? Surely heaven is not cheating us. You
can build upon that proposition, unprovable by

58 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

intellect, but verified by experience. Try it.
Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and the Christ
shall speak with thee.

There are many at the present time whose
doubts are pressed to the front and excused,
and finally end in a balancing of judgment,
which leaves Christ as a sort of pleader at the
bar; and there is another counsel upon the
other side, and you, the wise, self-poised, self-
contained judge, are waiting for the final ver-
dict to be pronounced by you by and by. It
will be the Christ that will pronounce that
verdict, not you. Perhaps He is pronouncing
it now. There are some doubts of which a
man ought to be ashamed. I never mind very
much what a young fellow says to me as to
his doubts about the fundamentals of our faith,
if his life is strenuous, real, earnest, noble,
girded up to the best that he knows; I can
leave him alone, he will come all right; ex-
perience will put him on the track to the
holiest. Most men that are worth their salt
have be^n by wondering if the foundations
are sure. But I never like to see a young fel-
low brushing them aside contemptuously, as if
they did not matter.

*' There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds."

SPIRITUAL ]\1ANH00D 59

Do not allow your doubts to gather hazy
clouds around your head and keep them there.
Face them ; master them one way or the other ;
take the best you can see, and live for it, stand
square up to it ; you will find that God has not
left you to yourself. To live manfully for
that which you already know to be true en-
larges the border of your spiritual experi-
ence.

One word about the moral struggle of the
man who has but a feeble faith. Many of you
feel that my stricture upon the careless life
missed the point as applied to you. You say:
" I don't want to give rein to the lower ; if I
could I would live for the higher; but oh! the
power of the unclean ! how easily I am borne
down! It is not that I distrust, I would lay
hold of the Christ or anybody else, if I only
could get up. That seems so impossible. I am
not master of myself. Am I responsible for
the falls of which I seem to have been guilty? "
You are not responsible for the battle — that is
God's doing — but no man needs to lie under
Apollyon ; God never meant that. A young fel-
low is in a dangerous way who begins to excuse
himself for moral defeat. There is deliverance
for each and all. Do not dwell in the atmos-
phere of the miasma; stand up, and commit

60 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

yourself to the highest, and then see whether
God keeps His share of the bargain.

Dr. Campbell Morgan told me at Northfield
of an instance of the kind. A poor man came
to him after a service on Round Top, where
the body of Mr. Moody lies, and said, " Do you
believe that when you are tempted, and say,
* Get thee behind me, Satan,' the victory is
won?" Dr. Morgan, after a moment, said,
"No; I do not." "Then," said his interloc-
utor, " you stop preaching Christ and deliver-
ance from sin ; for I have a temptation. I don't
want to live with it; I don't want to be de-
feated ; I would do the best I knew if I had the
power, but I have not. If I can't say, * Get
thee behind me,' and be sure of victory, what
am I to do? " Dr. Morgan said, " Do you be-
lieve that Christ said it, and won?" "Yes;
I believe He is the only One who could ever say
it, and win." " Then you go, and in the name
of Christ, say, * Get thee behind me, Satan,*
when your hour of torture comes, and see
which gets the victory." " The next morn-
ing," says Dr. Morgan, " as I drove up I met
this man standing in the middle of the path-
way in front of me. He looked at me with
radiant face, standing square on his two feet,
and said, * Man, it works ! ' " He had found

SPIRITUAL MANHOOD 61

the Christ a present dehverer, as well as an
abstract Saviour; something for everyday life,
as well as for the pulpit; and his new-found
faith in the Master was one for practical use.
Stand square up to the spiritual fact, fight the
battle in the name of the Crucified, and see
whether the promise is not kept. The voice of
God is heard as you speak, " Get thee behind
me." The victory is won. Son of man, do not
lie down before the enemy; stand upon thy
feet that the Christ may speak with thee.

IV

THE TWO SONS, THE TWO
DESTINIES

IV

THE TWO SONS, THE TWO
DESTINIES

And he said unto hwt, Son, thou art ever with me,
and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we
should make 77ierry and be glad : for this thy brother
was dead and is alive again ; and was lost and is
found. — Luke xv. 31, 32.

NO doubt you have heard the parable
of the Prodigal Son expounded, not
once only, but many times. It has
been a familar evangelical subject, not only
with preachers of this generation, but almost of
any, and it has been treated in a variety of
ways. But I have little doubt that for the most
part you have been accustomed to hear the
prodigal made a rather interesting person, and
the elder brother not so. Our pity has been re-
served for the unfortunate individual who re-
turned from the far country, and we have
been accustomed to regard the elder brother as
a figure brought before us only to be dismissed
again with ignominy, as a sort of villain of
the piece. Well, now, if we may reverently
65

66 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

search the circumstances, and make inquiry
into what our Lord's intention was, judging
by these circumstances, I do not think you and
I can come to that conclusion again. Christ
was far too wise and knew too much about the
facts of hfe to put a premium upon the sowing
of wild oats, or to make things as right again
as if they had never been wrong once the prodi-
gal had come back to the father's house; and
He was too wise and too kind and just to sug-
gest anything sinister about the figure of the
elder brother, who is represented as having
behaved in all things precisely as a son
should.

Now I think it is probable that I have before
me both types, and I want to speak a faithful
word to you both, without, I trust, deviating
in any important degree from our Lord's
meaning and intent when He first told this
story.

Let. us speak first of the younger brother.
" A certain man had two sons : And the
younger of them said to his father, Father,
give me the portion of goods that falleth to
me. And he divided unto them his living.
And not many days after, the younger son
gathered all together, and took his journey
into a far country, and there wasted his sub-

TWO SONS, TWO DESTINIES 67

stance in riotous living." The father allowed
the son to have his full fling. He left him to
himself till he came to himself. God always
does just that. If you want to go wrong, you
shall go wrong. It sometimes seems as if God
helped us to go, not that He ever does. But
the facility is there, and if a man is determined
to waste his God-given powers he cannot es-
cape. " God is not mocked ; whatsoever a man
soweth that shall he also reap." But the pur-
pose of the sad harvest is not a vindictive one.
God's punishments are chastisements. Left to
himself the prodigal is till he comes to himself.
The full consequences of sin are not easy to
bear. ** The way of transgressors is hard."
Sometimes it seems as if life were not or-
ganised upon that principle. " The wicked
flourish like a green bay tree." They do not
all do so, and you may learn from those who
have their hell in this life that the ways of
God, though past finding out, are inexorably
just. Penalty waits upon wrongdoing. But
now we are told, and this story is meant to
enforce it, that there is no last moment with
God, no shutting of the door of mercy. And
whether you dififer from me or not, I cannot
say but that I feel at heart as if the meaning
of penitential pain, and it has no other mean-

68 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

ing, is that the soul may be brought to itself
and back to its Maker.

Now as to the figure of the elder brother.
Some prodigals, I think, know pretty well that
all that I have said up to this point is true.
Now as to the elder brother. Is there such a
being? Our theology is apt to become singu-
larly confused on this point. At one moment
we preachers seem to urge that we are all
prodigals, every single man of us. At another
time we seem to urge that some of us who are
Pharisees, who never have been in the far
country ourselves, are hard upon the poor crea-
tures who have. Well, now, both cannot be
true. The truth is that there are some of you
have never been in the far country. Though it
may be that you are not perfect characters by
any means, you can afford to be thankful to
God that you have been kept in the conscious-
ness of His presence from your youth up.
Pious fathers, praying mothers, have nour-
ished and trained the character you have, and
made the atmosphere in which it grows. Be
thankful, for these are facts. And the great
majority, perhaps — I know not — of this con-
gregation is not just as the crowd of abandoned
ones that will parade Piccadilly to-night seek-
ing to destroy manhood and womanhood, and

TWO SONS, TWO DESTINIES 69

we may as well recognise the fact. With all
your faults and all your mistakes that have
sprung from selfishness, there are some of you
who have never wanted to quit the side of God.
You have, as it were, been in the Father's
house. Perhaps the greatest miracle in the
Church to-night is not the recovered prodigal,
but the elder brother who has never gone far
astray.

Well, when our Lord introduced the figure
of the elder brother, do you think He intended
him to be reprobated? Let us look a little
more closely at the narrative. Jesus spoke
these words in Galilee, at the time when He
was very popular with respectable people. Cu-
riosity had been excited on the part of those
who never went to the synagogue at all, and
they thought they would like to hear this
strange teacher who came out upon the road-
side, and when they flocked to the courtyard of
the house of the publican that day to listen,
they were astonished at the tenderness and
winsomeness of His doctrine of the Divine
Father's love. But amongst them, and still
more surprised, on the outskirts of the crowd
stood the scandalised Pharisees. '* This Man
is associating with publicans and sinners. Can
we hear Him in patience any longer? " So, at

70 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

the close of the discourse in which He had
talked of the lost sheep and the lost piece of
silver and the return of the prodigal, the
Master said something to those round about the
door. He said, '' There were two sons, you
know. Be thankful, all you people who have
never known what it was to be a publican or a
sinner in the conventional sense of the term.
Come and help. I have never been a sinner
myself, but I was baptised as a sinner. * Thus
it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.*
Come down that you may lift up." Saviour-
hood always shows itself so.

And perhaps, as I said before, there was one
convert after the sermon that day, that par-
ticular part of it, and that is the man who
wrote this story down. Luke, the beloved
physician, was himself a Pharisee, and he
caught the spirit of the Master, though he
had never been in the far country. There was
no one in the whole band of them that was
more sympathetic to the erring and fallen than
sweet St. Luke.

Look into the narrative itself. " The elder
son was angry and would not go in." Would
you have gone in? Did it seem fair? Turn
to human nature and read out of that chapter,
and we do not see that it was very unnatural

TWO SONS, TWO DESTINIES 71

and very unreasonable that the elder brother
should have remonstrated when he heard that
the fatted calf had been killed and the best
robe brought out. The father went out and
entreated him, but the son said, " Lo, these
many years do I serve thee and never at any
time transgressed I thy commandments, yet
thou never gavest me so much as a kid that
I might make merry with my friends. But
when this thy son is come, who hath devoured
thy living with harlots, thou hast killed for
him the fatted calf." The father did not deny
this. He was no dependent in the house of
his elder son, but was giving orders still,
though he had divided unto them his living.
Instead of replying by a word of reproach
and saying, " You owe everything to me," he
said, " It is true. Son, thou art ever with me,
and all that is mine is thine." Remarkable
vindication of the character of the man who
spoke !

Still further, there is a very sweet touch
here that you may miss if you do not know the
language from which this chapter was trans-
lated. It Is the use of the word son, which oc-
curs twice in the course of a few verses, and
though it appears in English to be the same
word, it is not so. The one means the heir.

72 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

the inheritor of the substance, the name, the
repute of the father, and the other simply
means child, child of the heart's affection.
" When this thy heir was come, who hath al-
ready devoured thy living with harlots — ^he is
inheritor again." The father replies, " My
child, thou art ever with me, thou child of my
heart's best love, and all that is mine is thine.
We have been together, you and I, all these
years, never had any misunderstanding, of one
spirit are we and of one substance too. My
child (not simply my heir), is it not fitting that
we should keep together now? This my son,
thy brother, was dead and is alive again, and
was lost and is found."

Our Lord introduces the figure by saying he
was angry and would not come in. But mark,
the chapter closes with this suggestive appeal,
that the last word is the father's and not the
elder brother's. We are not told that he did
not go in after this. The truth is that Christ
stopped speaking here, and waited to see what
the Pharisees at the door would do, and one
of them came in, and his name was Luke, and
he stood alongside Matthew, who had been in
the far country, the elder brother and the
younger brother, the child and the son —
brothers both.

TWO SONS, TWO DESTINIES 73

Now I think you will see what our Lord was
trying to do. He was telling- us this, that
sonship at its best implies brotherhood, and
that again implies saviourhood. God has two
ways of training His children, the way of love
and the way of pain, and good and bad alike,
we have to pass through both. Our love to
those of us who are trying to do right, sooner
or later spells pain, and our sin, to those who
are going wrong, does just the same thing, but
there is a whole world of difference between the
two pains. I am trying to bring that home to-
night. If we will not learn by God's love it is
often that we have to learn by God's pain, and
it has cost God pain to teach. It has cost God
pain to win the sinner by his pain — that in a
nutshell is the gospel.

Of course, pain is not always punishment, as
I have already hinted, and I wish, in keeping
true to the gospel to-night, to throw upon you
the principle I am now seeking to declare, — the
two sonships, the two destinies, both the ob-
jects of love, both suffering pain, but wide as
the world apart in the way they come to this
common discipline.

Now in all probability I could from amongst
those who are listening to me illustrate in full
my theme, just as Christ could to the audiences

74 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

He addressed. There is no book that I know
of half so interesting as the book of human
nature. There are tragedies in this church,
there are comedies too. There are stern, hard
lives which are yet noble, there are trifling,
silly, butterfly lives which are selfish, and it
may be that there are the hopeless lives of
those who were once selfish to the last degree
in taking their own wilful way, and are now
paying for it. Not so very far apart, perhaps,
as seemed at first, are the experiences borne by
these. Even the Captain of our salvation had
Himself to learn by suffering, and saint and
sinner alike must do the same. There is no
man equal to expounding the problem of pain.
I think we can feel a meaning, though we can-
not demonstrate one. It is this, that " whom
He loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every
son whom He receiveth." Nobleness is born
in the furnace of pain, and, speaking generally,
and keeping away from particulars, I think
that is the inevitable purpose of pain.

Some of you feel that this is indeed a ter-
rible world. Do you not see that the Christ
never shrank from the experience which, per-
haps, seemed so utterly unreasonable and mys-
terious to you ? As gold must be tried by fire,
so the heart must be tried by pain. Here, for

TWO SONS, TWO DESTINIES 75

instance, are family misfortunes that have to
be borne in common. Amongst this congre-
gation is a once light-hearted lad or girl, now
a sad-hearted, sour-visaged man or woman.
The difference has been caused by the gather-
ing clouds over the rough places on the road of
life; one thing heaped upon another, one sad
day followed by a succession of such, until now
a plaintive note has come into the life, and you
are sometimes inclined to ask wearily, but al-
most indignantly, '' Why does God cause me to
walk along this path and to bear this burden ? "
It is not to you that I am primarily speaking
to-night. I only have to say this and pass on —
you are not the first that went that way.

'* Christ leads us through no darker room
Than He went through before."

It makes very little difference, after all, what
your lot in life may be. It makes a very great
difference how you face it, how you take it,
how you go through it. " Be a hero in the
strife."

Yet again, there is the pain that follows
sin, which is deserved by the sinner, and borne
by somebody else as well. I have heard of a
suffering wife who has had to bear the conse-
quences of the sin of a weak husband. They

76 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

have shared them together, but the larger
share has been hers. There is not one of this
kind in the world only, but one hundred thou-
sand, in this land of ours it may be, who have
to chant this particular song of agony. See
how that man comes staggering home at night
to a house comfortless because he has made it
so, to a wife whose love and loyalty he ought
to have forfeited long ago, but has not, and
see how she bears — and he is not capable of
it — the burden that he alone has brought.
Which of these two would you be? They are
both suffering, because the remorse of the
weak man is real enough when he comes to
himself. Oh, this problem of moral weakness !
I know a wife who has gone out in a morning
from the apartment her husband's habits had
reduced them to, and walked the streets all
day for fear the landlady should discover that
she had nothing to eat, and that her husband
was the cause of her hunger. I have heard of
a father — nay, I know him — who one day with
awful sorrow said to me when I inquired about
his son, " He is dead, thank God ! Don't men-
tion him to his mother if you happen to see
her." " Why? " " Because we gave up hop-
ing that we could get him right. We only got
him home at last when he was helpless, and in-

TWO SONS, TWO DESTINIES 77

stead of recovering to go into the far country
again, he died. Let us thank God it is no
worse than that." Here was suffering, a home
tragedy. The boy who was dying could not
have died indifferent. He knew that his
father's grey hairs meant something, he knew
of the sorrow of his mother's heart. It must
have been a terrible pang in his own. They
all three suffered, they all came through the
same experience, but by what different ways!
There are many here who have passed through
like experiences, doubtless. Which would you
sooner be, the sufferer by another's fault, the
sufferer who suffers because he loves, or the
sufferer who causes pain by his selfishness and
by his sin? Because some of you are to be
remembered in the less worthy category.
There are young fellows here of whom home
cannot be very proud. In your better moments
you are sorry, — ah, more than sorry, almost
heartbroken, — as you think what you have done
to those who deserved the best of you, and how
often and how grievously you have broken
your promise. You have tried to shield, it may
be, your guilty secret from those at home who
would trouble to hear it, to whom it would
cause anguish of spirit to know it, but it has
got to them — the world always finds ways and

78 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

means to do as much mischief-making as it
can. Oh, prodigal, selfish, delirious in your
moments of self-indulgence, why do you do it?
Life might treat you hardly, anyhow, but I
would rather have their pain than yours.
You are in the far country, feeding upon
husks ; the father, the mother, the brother, the
friend sorrowing in consequence! They are
sharers in the pain of God, they are of the com-
pany of redeemers, and if ever you are saved
at all you will be saved by this mediating love
of theirs — this love which is, after all, only
the love of God. They are sharers in the
Cross of Christ, filling up the measure which is
behind. Thus redemption comes to the world.

I think I can hear the Christ speaking to
some of the heartbroken whose lives have been
noble : " Child, fellow- worker, thou art ever
with Me, and all that is Mine is thine." Oh,
it is a call to bear a cross of this kind, and,
sinner, if you only knew it, it is a merciful
love that you bear your cross, too, and it is
waiting for you if you have not already begun
to bear it.

Now to the prodigal I would say this^ — Be
thankful if you have anybody in the world to
care for you at all. Be worthy of that love,
and never shirk, and never try to shirk in un-

TWO SONS, TWO DESTINIES 79

manly fashion, the consequences of your own.
ill-doing. Of one thing I am perfectly sure,
that the safe road is the honest road, the brave
and the true. If you have done wrong, go
straight round and do right. Penitence shows
itself there, not in puling, piping cries that God
will let you off the consequences and somebody
else bear something instead. No. It is a sure
and certain thing that you never can save
either yourself or others whom you have made
to suffer from the experiences they have to
bear, you have to bear, the chastisements of
love.

To those nobler ones of whom the elder
brother is a type, rightly applied, I would say
this — ^pray to be faithful to your trust. Why
hath God given you to stand in the relation
that you do — husband, wife, brother, friend,
child — why? Because you are His trustee. It
is no accident that you are where you are, and
bound by invisible but infrangible bonds, you
do not belong to yourself alone. Love is vo-
cation. It means the highest joy, it means pain
too. Go through with it. You can see, per-
haps, through the eyes of love what no one
else can but the sinner to whom you were sent,
and that is why you suffer. The other day,
while I was waiting at the railway station, my

80 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

eye fell on the face of a man whose character
I thought was a little evident from the expres-
sion that he habitually wore, or seemed habit-
ually to wear. I was not attracted by him,
perhaps no one else would have been at first
sight. But I saw a child, or rather a young
girl, go up to that forbidding man and fling
her arms around his neck. And then I knew
that a vision had been granted unto her which
was hidden from my dull eyes. I had not love
to teach me what good there was in that (per-
haps) prodigal.

" No soul can ever clearly see

Another's highest, noblest part.

Save through the sweet philosophy

And loving vp-isdom of a heart.

*' I see the feet that fain would climb,
You but the steps that turn astray;
I see the soul, unharmed, sublime,
You but the garment and the clay.

•* You see the mortal, weak, misled,
Dwarfed ever by the earthly clod;
I see how manhood perfected
May reach the stature of a God."

This is the meaning of this peerless teaching
of our Master concerning the chastisements of
love. The prodigal suffers that peradventure
he may yet ** reach the stature of a God," and
when he comes to his home he does not come

TWO SONS, TWO DESTINIES 81

back to the undivided love, unto things as
they v^ere. No, they must suffer together —
father, brother, son.

And it is something to know that he v^ho is
v^ilHng to suffer for his brother's sake has an
experience which knits him to the Christ.
God's work never fails. Soul-agony spells a
victory any time, anywhere, whether you can
discover that result or no.

" Life is ever lord of death
And love can never lose its own."

There is a grand home-coming. You do not
see it all here. We only get a glimpse of that
fair future, sublime and holy. We must be
with God in that hour of solemn triumph.
Well, then, we must be with God now. The
Spirit of Christ is abroad in the world to-day.
For all the unselfish ones who for no interest
of their own are willing to suffer, God be
praised. The elder-brother spirit is saving the
world. To be partners with Jesus is the grand-
est vocation on earth. You will want nothing
save to know that love has conquered when
your full reward comes home. " He shall see
of the travail of His soul and shall be satis-
fied." Like Him be faithful, be true, do not
shirk your trusteeship. Go the road the Master

82 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

has marked out, never flinching, never falter-
ing. That is the road of safety and of Hght
and triumph.

Oh, that we might all, at the grand day of
ingathering, but see the Master bend His gaze
on the faithful and say, " My child, it was
worth it all, child of My heart. Thou hast
ever been with Me, and all that is Mine is thine.
Let us rejoice together now, for this thy
brother was dead and is alive again, and was
lost, and is found."

V
OTHER-WORLDLINESS

V
OTHER-WORLDLINESS

Set your affection on things above, not on things on
the earth.— Col. Hi. 2.

THIS is an echo of our Master's own
words, given in the sixth chapter of
St. Matthew's Gospel, as well as
slightly modified in St. Luke—'' Lay not up for
yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth
and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break
through and steal: but lay up for yourselves
treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor
rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not
break through nor steal." I say our text is an
echo, almost an adaptation and an application
of these beautiful sentences of the Master Him-
self, which no one ever grows tired of hearing.
But it is something more. The context tells
us what that something more is. " If then ye
be risen with Christ, seek those things which
are above, where Christ is. For ye died, and
your life is hid with Christ in God."

In other words, the Apostle is setting us to
85

86 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

live up to a great spiritual fact — a fact which
those who heard Christ speak did not under-
stand. Now he assumes them to understand.
Christ the Conqueror is passed into the un-
seen, Christ the Captain, the Saviour, the Al-
mighty Friend. Seek the things that are
above, where Christ is, and seek them through
this Christ to Whom by faith ye are joined,
" for ye died, and your life is hid with Christ
in God."

Sometimes these wor-ds and others like them
have been held to justify a form of other- world-
liness which is not helpful nor admirable.
There is hardly a text in Scripture which can-
not be misconstrued and made to justify the
light which is darkness. Quot homines, tot
sententicB — -sO' many men, so many opinions.
And almost every doctrine that has been
preached in the name of Christianity, however
vicious and shortlived, has been justified in
some fashion from Scripture.

There has been a form of other-worldliness,
perhaps it still exists, which is absolutely mis-
chievous, and which has been justified from
passages like this; it has taken the form de-
scribed by Milton in that well-known phrase,
" a fugitive and cloistered virtue.'' There is
the absolutely selfish man who, in quest of the

OTHER-WORLDLINESS 87

salvation of his own poor, petty soul, shuts out
all consideration for his brother's needs.
There is the man who cares not how the world
goes so long as he is not made to suffer any in-
convenience, and there are people of such sen-
sitive and fine feeling, so called, that they can-
not bear that there should be any jarring note
in the music of their lives, or wail from the
suffering world without. That is not the
other-worldliness, you may be perfectly cer-
tain, of which St. Paul speaks. For this man,
a prisoner of Jesus Christ, suffering stripes and
bonds for His sake, toiling with his own hands
that he might be free to carry the gospel where
he chose, this man, who was a missionary at a
time when Christianity had been heard of only
to be scorned, lived no easy life. When he said,
" Seek those things which are above," he did
not mean, " be indifferent to the things which
are below."

We are told in one breath in Holy Scripture,
" Love not the world, neither the things of the
world," and in another, " God so loved the
world that He gave His only begotten Son, that
whosoever believeth in Him should not perish,
but have everlasting life." What are we to
understand by the meaning of the word
" world " as it is employed in these two

88 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

phrases? It is the same word, but its signifi-
cance is not the same. In the former sense it
stands for the sum-total of all those things,
ends, pursuits which seek their gratification
here, and must have it here or nowhere. One
word will do for all the lot, and we put
down " world." And what is more, people
anywhere now understand full well what you
mean if you speak of a man of the world ; you
mean a man whose aims are not high, a man
who is living for that which gratifies and
pleases just now, not a man whose aims are set
on things nobly above the pursuits of the mo-
ment and the conventions of the hour. In the
other sense the word " world '' stands for the
sum-total of poor humanity. God so loved
these creatures of His, children of His heart,
that God came for them to suffer and to die.
If you keep these two things clear in your
mind, you will understand a little of the light
which is thrown upon the duty of this-worldli-
ness by the consecration that we give to
motives which are other-worldly. The poet
Southey phrases it very beautifully for us, in
lines which doubtless you know as well as I do.

•• They sin who tell us love can die;
With life all other passions fly,
All others are but vanity.

OTHER-WORLDLINESS 89

In heaven ambition cannot dwell,

Nor avarice in the vaults of hell.

Earthly, these passions of the earth,

They perish where they had their birth.

But love is indestructible,

Its holy flame for ever burneth;

From heaven it came, to heaven retumeth.

Too oft on earth a troubled guest,

At times deceived, at times oppressed,

It here is tried and purified,

Then hath in heaven its perfect rest.

It soweth here with toil and care,

But the harvest-time of love is there."

Has any man ever made a mistake in pur-
suing to its noblest the ideal of love? Right-
eousness itself is incomplete except it find its
highest and final expression in love. You can
do it here. Is it worldly ? It is impossible for
a man to seek a " fugitive and cloistered vir-
tue " whose life is given to the service of the
highest, and whose character reveals itself in
love. It may be this-worldly, but it is other-
worldly too. " The harvest-time of love is
there."

I think you and I can now see pretty plainly
what the Apostle means by our text, *' Set your
affection on things above, not on things on the
earth." It means set your affection on things
that are worthy to live, not on things that are
doomed to die. And affection is only another

90 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

word for mind, which is given in the margin —
thought, purpose, desire, aspiration. " Set
your affection on things above, not on things
on the earth." In all your work, in all your
ways, set your purpose, your mind, your
thought upon that which is worthy of heaven.
For though it be but a tenant of earth for the
time being, that is where you will find it.
" The harvest-time is there."

It is not always easy to maintain this up-
ward gaze. You know that life is not easy for
any man, but it is always possible to live, in
the strength of God, the life of heaven amid
the things of earth. None of us would ever
dream of claiming to be perfect. I think the
nearer we are to the ideal of Christ, as a rule,
the less we care to claim it — I mean the less we
care to claim that we are standing near. We
are all trying — perhaps I ought to qualify even
the last sentence. There may be some one in
the church who is not trying, but most men, I
think, when they are tested, are conscious that
their deepest desire, after all, though it never
reaches the surface in actual achievement, is to
be good. Some of the most serious moral fail-
ures are men who, if they could by some magi-
cian's wand be changed into characters of
moral worth, would choose quickly the highest.

OTHER-WOHLDLINESS 91

I will proceed on that assumption, that we
want to get up. Therefore, I repeat that it is
possible for every single soul among you, — try-
ing, struggling, aspiring, — it is possible for you
to live a life that is worthy of heaven amid
these claims of earth. You will never do it
alone. You will be in for some sorry and hu-
miliating failures if you do not seek in the
right place for the strength so to live. Lay
hold upon the risen Christ. " If then ye be
risen with Christ, seek the things which are
above, where Christ standeth." Be worthy of
that for which you do aspire, and by Him you
shall reach it. No man is ever defeated until
he gives up trying. The only overthrow that
you have to dread is when your will turns
round and marches downward. Until that
point is reached, you are not living for this
world. You are living for the service of this
world in the spirit of Christ Who has over-
come it.

Now this is a far better thing to say than to
say that you are living simply in the hope of
heaven, the conventional heaven, the golden
streets and the jasper gates. I do not mind
if there are no such things save in figure.
Heaven, I take it, is that state of perfect good-
ness which God is preparing for them that love

92 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

Him, and without it there is no heaven. And
heaven as God sees it for us, the heaven that is
to be, is where goodness and gladness shall kiss
each other. The highest heaven, the heaven
which Christ means, is the heaven of the re-
deemed, purified in the blood of the Lamb,
spotless before the throne of God, pure as He
is pure. The only heaven which is worth any
man's while is that sort. What would young
men think if they were to hear one of their
own number saying to them, " I am hoping to
go to heaven." They would laugh if he said
he avoided this and chose that, and clung to
this, perhaps, and declined the other in the
hope that by and by he would win through and
enjoy his heaven. I am afraid they would
despise it, because the nearer a man comes to
that ideal the less he talks about the merely ob-
jective side of it. He speaks of the inner. The
man that you would respect is the man who is
busy living the character that need not be
shamed when it stands before the great white
throne, the man who never lies, the man who
never cheats, the man who masters the beast
that we all carry within us, the man who
knows the heaven of nobleness, though it costs
him something to reach it down here. The
vindication is sure. It requires faith, and it

OTHER-WORLDLINESS 93

requires courage to live so. The man is a fool
who thinks he can do it by himself. But it is
always possible. " Seek the things that are
above, where Christ is." Let the Christ lift
you up. Set your affection on things that are
worthy of Him, not on things that, as the
fashion of this world, are passing away. Yet,
brethren, I expect heaven. I expect a heaven
about which we sing in our hymns, and I am
not ashamed to say so. I expect to see you in
the company of the redeemed. I expect this
ideal that is told almost at the close *oi the
Holy Book, " I heard a great voice out of
heaven, saying. Behold, the tabernacle of God
is with men, and He will dwell with them,
and they shall be His people, and God Himself
shall be with them, and be their God. And
God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes ;
and there shall be no more death, neither sor-
row, nor crying, neither shall there be any
more pain: for the former things are passed
away."

I take it no man, however strong he may be,
however self-sufficient in character, who knows
life as it is now, and the battle you have to
fight day by day, would speak of that as an
unworthy ideal. But if it ever comes, my
friend, do you know how it will come ? " To

94 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

him that overcometh will I give to sit down
with Me in My throne, even as I also overcame
and am set down with My Father in His
throne."

The joy of heaven is the joy of the con-
queror. The noblest joy is that in which pain
is latent, swallowed up. Do you see what I
mean? The joy that has never known pain,
even though the pain is swallowed up, is some-
thing short. If you could break up every ray
of light in this church to-night, these white
rays which make it possible for us to see each
other's faces, you would find all the colours of
the spectrum. There is the blood-red ray there.
You cannot see it, but it is there, swallowed up.
That white light would not be the light it is
but for that blood-red ray. I remember once
going into a town in the Potteries and to a spe-
cial business house there, where they were pro-
ducing works of art, vases and such like. They
were paying high salaries to the people who
paint certain designs in various colours upon
these vases one by one. Then they were placed
in a furnace, and when they came out again I
found that the colour, which I could have
wiped off with my hand before it went into the
furnace, was now part of the structure, a thing
of beauty and a joy for ever. So God is fash-

OTHER-WOHLDLINESS 95

ioning you and me. If there is any light which
has ever been thrown upon the meaning and
purpose of pain, it is just this — we are here
that the pain which God imposes upon us, and
by which He trains us, may command our re-
sponse to the highest, and he is worthy of
heaven who wins through, and even from the
midst of his furnace keeps his gaze upon that
which is above.

A few days ago I had to go to a sculptor,
but I had very little time to spare, and before
I arrived the sculptor had prepared a sort of
model of one's self from what he had seen in
the pictures that were given him. He had
prepared, as I thought with wonderful skill
and even genius, the little model of what he
meant by and by as the presentment of the
person he was seeing. I learned a lesson from
what I saw there. He had some failures be-
fore he had his success. He had crushed up
the clay more than once, and now I saw that he
was making, as it were, an idea, a soul, an
image, a presentment of something real and
living that he had never seen. Do you know
what you are doing? You are building in the
likeness of Christ, if so be that you have never
taken your eye from that which is above.
Every one of you is not yet that man that

96 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

shall be, but God sees the man. Set your af-
fection on things above, press toward the mark
of the high calling. God has not done with
you, and there will be nO' failure. The Christ
that is to be, you are being fashioned into the
likeness of such. God will take you there, if you
do not fail Him on the way. You and I are
soldiers of the cross, we are pilgrims on the
heavenly way, I want you to believe. With all
my might I would impress this upon you. It
is possible, however heavy the odds may be, it
is possible for you to be builded in the likeness
of Christ. " Beloved, now are we the sons of
God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall
be, but we know that when He shall appear
v/e shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as
He is."

Now I have just a few words in application.
The first is to those who are struggling, for
every man has to meet sooner or later tempta-
tion, the very presence of which may be a
horror to him. Some of the young fellows
who have come into this house of prayer to-
night came up in the hope, it may be, that some-
thing would be said to help in this awful battle
with Apollyon in the Valley of Humiliation. I
do not like to go too near to the dark things of
life, but I think I know where your worst bat-

OTHER-WORLBLINESS 97

ties are, and what brings them. I know some
of you dread taking upon yourselves the name
and profession of Christian, not only because it
has been conventionally associated with a
spirit of pietistic weakness, but also because
you will not play the hypocrite, and you think
until the beast is slain you will claim no kin-
ship with Jesus. Well, you are wrong. You
are doing foolishly in fighting your battle by
yourself, and in thinking that the Christ re-
quires perfection. No, you are in the sculp-
tor's room, and he is busy with the clay.

You make a sorry mistake if your eye is
fixed upon the temptation and not on Him.
vVe go badly wrong by staring at the enemy
•nstead of at the Saviour. You are tugging
dway, as it were, from the presence of the
evil thing, but you have not got your gaze on
the ideal above. The way of safety is not to
think too much about the enemy, not too much
reckon with him, but think as much as ever
you can about the Saviour. I used to be a
C)7'clist, and not a very good one, and I can re-
member so well one's amateurish days, when
one was seeking proficiency on that dangerous
wheel. Sure enough if one tried to avoid a
stone in the pathway, or a ditch upon the road-
side, one went for that stone or that ditch.

98 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

The way not to do so was to look where you
sought to go, and somehow the wheel went
there. Young men, do not dwell in the region
of the morbid, do not think too much of the
shadows of life, do not get into the charnel-
house of morbid experience, do not dwell with
the enemy. It is no cowardice to turn your
back upon him sometimes; that is the way to
show your faith. Set your gaze higher, on
the ideal of the Saviour.

I am speaking to others here who know how
fierce the battle is with one's self. You make
your own universe, so to speak. No one has
ever wrought you overmuch harm. It just
depends what sort of a man you carry within,
how the world looks to you. Well, oftentimes
the battle with one's self is best won by for-
getting one's self, looking away to the great
humanity with its needs, its struggles, its fail-
ures, and its victories. The man whose eyes
are always turned inward is in a dangerous
condition. Get a pure, unselfish purpose. It
matters not very much what it is.

The best other- worldliness is to do your best
to purify this world. You are setting your af-
fection on things above when you say to your-
self, " I am going to try what I can do to make
the world a little better than I found it," and

OTHER-WORLDLINESS 99

by and by morbid imaginings will disappear,
and you will be saved from that sad form of
self-consciousness in which a man is always
chronicling his own successes or his own de-
feats. Look out, look up. The world is wide,
and the Christ is the Saviour of us all. Give
yourself to such service as He would have you
render unto your needier fellows. The world
is divided into strugglers and helpers. You
and I are sometimes in one class and sometimes
in the other. The struggler is the better for
his struggle, and the helper for the helping.
Go up both together to the ideal which has set
you both to work.

I would like to speak one word of comfort
unto some who do not need to be told that this
world is only the beginning, and not the end of
things, for their interest in it, it may be, is not
very great since God took away from them the
nearest and the best. It used to be easier for
you to seek the things that are above because
of that wise friend, that beloved husband, wife,
mother, or father upon whom you could lean,
and to whom you could look. God becomes in-
carnate in good men, and the Saviourhood of
Christ is read through the character of those
who have been fashioned by it. It is not wrong
to say so. Now how does it look ?

100 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

" Seems the earth so poor and vast,
All our life-joy overcast ? "

Well now, instead of dwelling upon the sor-
row and the separation and the tomb and the
grizzly figure of death, set it yonder!

It will pass, this time of yours, this heart
sorrow, this wringing agony. You can only
feel as you do because God is busy making you,
and every blow of His chisel brings the ideal a
little nearer. Set your affection on that ideal,
and never, even in your blackest hour, take
your gaze away.

To some of you earth's bereavements — ^be-
reavements because of the conduct of the living
— are worse than the bereavements of death.
Here is a man whose whole life has been
changed by the injury done to him through the
conduct, the selfish conduct of another. You
are brooding over it, you are lying down beside
it, as it were, or rather it is on the top, and that
injury has been magnified a thousand times
since it was first inflicted upon you. You have
allowed it to master your judgment and your
conscience and your feeling and now your soul.
Have you not done wrong? Have you not
made a mistake? There was another way.
Why did you not lift far above that injury
your faith in the Crucified ? " Father, forgive

OTHER-WORLDLINESS 101

them, for they know not what they do " that

is where Christ stands. '' Set your affection
on things above, where Christ is." " For ye
are dead, and your Hfe is hid with Christ in
God." You do not need to be angry with any
man who has ever done you harm ; you do not
need to be, if you could see that man as he
really is and as he really feels, and not as he
seems. All injuries in God's economy recoil
upon him that inflicts them. " It must needs
be that offences come, but woe unto that man
by whom they come." But you are conquered
by a wrong the moment the thought of venge-
ance arises in your soul. Do not go down
underneath these blows of wickedness, rise up
looking clearly in the face of the Master. " Set
your affection on things above."

I would like to make to-morrow different for
some of you if I could. We are just a company
of brethren talking together about life and the
thing we make it. We do not know very much
about each other, and before the week is out
some of us will be hard upon the others. Let
us try the better way. I would like to send
you out to your work in the morning, back to
your home circle to-night, filled with a high
hope and a noble courage. I would like to
breathe into you the spirit of Christ, which is

102 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

the spirit of His great servant who wrote these
words. I would Hke to make you as Paul was.
It is possible! It is possible! If he lived that
life, you can and I can. Shall I tell you what to
do? Go on, go up, keep true, trust as simply
as ever you can in the living Lord, and He
will never fail you nor let you down. " They
that wait upon the Lord shall renew their
strength; they shall mount up with wings as
eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they
shall walk and not faint."

VI
AMBITION, TRUE AND FALSE

VI
AMBITION, TRUE AND FALSE

Seekest thou gnat things for thyself? Seek them
not.—Jer. xlv. J".

IT is related of the late Charles Haddon
Spurgeon that at the commencement of
his ministry, when he was beginning to
feel conscious of the wonderful powers with
which God had endowed him — like most young
people, I suppose, for he was but a boy, or
little more than a boy at the time — he was
one day walking across a common and seemed
to hear, as it were, a voice speaking to his in-
nermost consciousness in the terms of my text,
*' Seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek
them not." Mr. Spurgeon accepted the text
which flashed into his mind as a Divine message
and monition, and from that moment made a
fuller consecration of himself, his life, his op-
portunity, his power to the service of the living
God. We know the result, and looking back
upon it we know it, much better, I venture to
think, than he did even on the day of his
105

106 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

death, but not better than he knows it now.
He chose the good part, which was not taken
from him. He set his affections on things
above, not on things of the earth.

Now, all that was best worth his while, all
that was as the reward of his seeking, and his
noble method of living has come to him. We
will agree that he chose rightly in the day that
he obeyed the Divine monition which is our
text. Yet remember what it cost him. Mr.
Spurgeon was not what we ordinarily call a
liberally educated man, and because of certain
peculiarities in his methods, and in his manner
of setting forth truth, he was exposed to perse-
cution even on the part of well-meaning people.
And because he was a prophet, and a faithful
servant of God at that, and never blinked the
truth, however unwelcome it might be to his
hearers, he suffered contumely, and his work
was attended by every circumstance of ridi-
cule and contempt. At the outset of his minis-
try, I think he was almost invariably misunder-
stood except by the few — for they were com-
paratively few, after all — that gathered round
him. But the time came, and now is, when
England saw the value of that man, knew
and loved him for his personal worth, and
there is scarcely anybody, I should imagine, on

AMBITION, TRUE AND FALSE 107

the globe to-day who has heard his name but
would give him credit for sincerity and un-
selfishness all his life through, from the first
day of his public service for the Master unto
the last. We know him now. Well, brethren,
there was the secret, after all — he chose an
interest higher than his own, and he chose a
Master higher and worthier than the world.

Now, in the thought that some young fel-
lows listening to me may be standing at the
parting of the ways, which go to the making
or unmaking of destiny, I have chosen this
text, which meant so much to Mr. Spurgeon,
and have read it in your hearing in the hope
that it may be a Divine message to your soul.
Mr. Spurgeon deliberately renounced worldly
ambition. That is what I want you to do. But
do not make any mistake and think that I mean
you to renounce ambition in the truer sense,
because Mr. Spurgeon certainly did not. I
want you to see what is the difference between
ambition false and ambition true and to en-
deavour, if I can, to clear away some confusion
of thought which clings around this particular
subject.

What is ambition, as commonly understood ?
You will gather it, I think, from such familiar
phrases as " that last infirmity of noble minds,"

108 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

or *' by this sin fell the angels." Ambition, as
commonly understood, might be so expressed,
and you have a fairly clear idea in your minds,
I am sure, at this moment of what such ambi-
tion is, and it stands condemned.

It takes many forms. If one wished to sug-
gest a name or a life in which ambition had
freest and most unrestricted reign, I think we
should name Napoleon. He is the classical, out-
standing instance ; not that, I am quite sure, he
is any more guilty than thousands of persons
before him and since. But in Napoleon ambi-
tion, insatiate and unconcealed, had undis-
puted sway. He waded to his throne, as has
been said, through the blood and tears of mil-
lions. He allowed no scruple of affection to
stand in his way if he wished to add one more
jewel to his crown. And after all, what did it
amount to ? We know him now. I think many
even of his contemporaries knew him then : the
French, who suffered because of his military
ambition, as much as the rest of Europe, knew
him as a man who had sold his soul, as it were,
that he might gratify his lust for power. I
never care to be too hard on a conventional
type of a particular failing for fear one should
happen to be wrong, but Mr. Gladstone said of
Napoleon that perhaps he had the mightiest in-

AMBITION, TRUE AND FALSE 109

tellect that was ever packed into a human skull.
Judged by the facts as they appear to us, that
intellect was prostituted. It never was exalted
as it might have been, and, as I believe sin-
cerely, God meant it to be.

Another instance, however, that I may give
you, and of a different kind of ambition, more
sordid perhaps, was that of Jay Gould, the
American millionaire. I know nothing of the
private life of this man except that I remember
to have heard somewhere that he was not un-
kindly at home, but when he died a howl of
execration from ten thousand throats followed
him to his grave. It was the curses of the men
whom he had ruined. He was a strong man,
he knew what he wanted and he got it, but he
got it by riding rough-shod over broken hearts.
He made his pile, he gratified his ambition —
what was it worth?

Yet another type is Cecil Rhodes. Here,
again, I speak somewhat diffidently, because
very different opinions obtain in regard to the
worth and work of Cecil Rhodes. But this
is my view of his life. He had a great idea
as to the position and place of England in the
world. More than that, he believed in the
mission of the Anglo-Saxon race. But he was
not too scrupulous in his attempts to realise his

110 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

ideal, if we may judge by the facts as they
appeared to us. He would have done almost
anything to have swept out of his way an
obstacle to the ideal with which he was ob-
sessed. It was a form of ambition not so des-
picable as Napoleon's, because it was less self-
centred, but I venture to think it was material-
istic and mistaken, and now that the great man
has gone there are thousands upon thousands
of us who, looking upon his career, pronounce
those saddest words of tongue or pen, the sad-
dest of all, " it might have been." Cecil Rhodes
was a great empire builder, we are told. He
might have been more than that. He sought
great things, and he saw himself associated
with them. Do you feel, you young men, that
his is the highest ideal and the type to which
you would like to conform your character ? I
trust to be able to show before I close that it
was not.

It is true that the general good may ac-
company such self-seeking as I have tried to
illustrate here. A great historian, not long
dead, has said, " The best work in the world,
perhaps, is being done by men who are scrupu-
lous as to aim but unscrupulous as to means,
yet who in their very self-seeking manage to
benefit the human race." Well, true, but if

AMBITION, TRUE AND FALSE 111

the self-seeking were out of account, would not
the benefit to the human race be incalculably
greater? The busy man whom we call a
faddist often does considerable mischief by
what he is pleased to call his conscience, but
his mischief is on nothing like so great a scale
as that of an unscrupulous man who, in search
of what he thinks to be a justifiable ideal, makes
one mistake. We all agree in condemning self-
seeking if it is blatant self-seeking that makes
great mistakes, but we are not so hard in our
condemnation of self-seeking if it is done in a
corner. We assume in most people a selfish
motive. Perhaps we are right in a good many
instances, but we are not right all the time.
You men of the world know perfectly well how
you weigh each other up. You see a good
thing done for which a man is receiving an
amount of public credit, and you promptly ask,
" What is his aim ? What axe has he to
grind?" You can scarcely bring yourself to
believe in disinterestedness, because, so far as
you have been able to see, people who were ap-
parently disinterested, really had some ulterior
motive that would not bear the light.

You know among your associates, for ex-
ample— in the business house, it may be — the
difference between the man of modest ambi-

112 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

tion and the man of scheming unscrupulous-
ness. You prefer the former, but you seldom
beheve that he has no axe to grind of his own.
In most cases you are right, but beware of
general statements. You need some qualifica-
tion, and a general statement like that inevi-
tably leads to cynicism.

I think the chief danger of to-day is not that
men are too ambitions, but that they serve the
wrong form of ambition. There are men in
your business — perhaps a good many of those
who are here present could be included in the
category, who are at fault not because they
have too much ambition, but because they have
not enough of the right sort. I was struck, and
painfully so, on my visit to America, with the
contrast between the ideals of the young Ameri-
can and the ideals of the young Englishman.
As far as I was able to read them, there a man
expects to get on and usually does it.

Success is not always unworthy by any
means, and even if it is, it is no more unworthy
than the selfish negation of ambition that one
sometimes sees among our own youth. The
man who will not work, the man who will not
aspire — and there are plenty of them in our
country — the man who never wishes to be any
better or more useful, or to live his life more

AMBITION, TRUE AND FALSE 113

completely than now, is of no benefit to society,
and his selfishness is as real as the selfishness
of any Napoleon or Jay Gould of them all.

You owe something to God, you owe some-
thing to men. There is not one among you who
is an isolated unit. The man who thinks he
is making no great claim upon society and
stands in nobody's way, and refuses to do his
best, is entitled to no credit for renouncing
ambition. God has given him a talent to use,
and he is not using it, and on the great day
that talent will be required of him again with
usury.

Carlyle puts more clearly than I can the
distinction between the true ambition and the
false. Nothing I say will be equal to it in
force and point. '' Let me say that there are
two kinds of ambition, one wholly blameable,
the other laudable and Inevitable. . . . The
selfish wish to shine over others, let it be
accounted altogether poor and miserable."
" Seekest thou great things for thyself ? Seek
them not.'' This is most true. " And yet I
say," continues Carlyle, " there Is an Irrepress-
ible tendency In every man to develop himself
according to the magnitude which nature has
made him of, to speak out and to act out what
nature has laid in him. This is proper, fit, In-

114 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST,

evitable ; nay, it is duty, the duty of duties. For
man the meaning of Hfe here on earth might
be defined as consisting in this — to unfold your-
self, to work what thing you have the faculty
for. It is a necessity for every human being,
the first law of our existence."

I am going to try and spiritualise even fur-
ther, if I can, that wonderful principle set forth
by Carlyle. True ambition is to live out what
is in you for the sake of Him who gave you
life. It is a wonderful, it is even an awful,
thought that God Himself finds fulfilment
through what you are. God's work is being
done, God's thoughts and purposes are being
realised by these apparently commonplace men
and women that I see around me, and every one
of you is the embodiment of the Divine.
Would you shrink and shrivel that Divine
which God has given you? It is to be mani-
fested not only for your own sake, nor chiefly
so, but for the sake of Him who gave it and
for the sake of mankind. I want to warn you
against misusing God's great gift, your own
soul. The first that you will ever be asked for
in the great day of revelation will be your own.
There never was any one like you in the world
before, and there never will be again. You are
a unique product in the universe, and there are

AMBITION, TRUE AND FALSE 115

unmeasured possibilities before every man here.
Each of us, all of us are citizens of eternity.

The other day in a sculptor's studio I heard
some words of wisdom from a man who has
time to stand and think while he is at work.
One very shrewd observation he passed upon
life was this. He said there are two kinds of
men. There is the man in whom the Divine
life is manifesting itself, the man who loves
his work and lives for it, the man who does
his best to read it out; and there is the hewer
of wood and the drawer of water, whose hat
goes on the moment the clock strikes five and
he is out of the shop. There is all the differ-
ence in the world between these two — the man
who cares to do something well, and the man
who does not care to submit to anything like
sacrifice or pain, cost what it may to other
people. He was right about that. The true
ambition is that of a man who is not afraid to
endure, not afraid to sacrifice, not afraid to
spend his soul, for in giving he is gaining, and
he shall have more abundantly.

Now, young men, I want to warn you before
I go on against possible disappointment even
in your endeavour to live up to your ideal. It
may be that while I have been speaking in these
terms to you some old and wise man in this as-

116 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

sembly may have been thinking to himself,
" That preacher will change his tone in a few
years when he knows how sadly life can disil-
lusion and can trample upon our ideals." Oh,
the tragedies of life, the hopes blighted, the old
men who are just doing their day's work in
patience that expects no more! There are
crowds of them here, who began life as you
young fellows are doing, expecting great things
and believing that there were great things for
them to do, but now, as the evening of life ap-
proaches, they know that they have not realised
their hopes, that the world would not let them,
that the twilight-time is sad.

You are only saying what has been said be-
fore. That poor, unhappy genius, Percy
Bysshe Shelley, saw a little further than the dis-
appointment when he told us in so many words
that it is never possible for the soul to live
itself out completely here. How should it be?
Because here is not the close of our destiny.
It will take all eternity for you to live out what
God has put in.

•' We have passed age's icy caves,
And manhood's dark and tossing waves,

And youth's smooth ocean, smiling to betray ;
Beyond the glassy gulfs we flee
Of shadow-peopledj infancy,
Through death and birth, to a diviner day."

AMBITION, TRUE AND FALSE 117

Never think that you are going to live out
all, but I think you will save yourself from
disappointment and pessimism if you will only
say, " It is possible for me to get on the right
track now and be living out in time that which
I shall live out better when eternity comes." It
is possible for you to give a whole-hearted, un-
selfish allegiance to a great ideal, and that not
for your own sake. There is a Divine idea
pervading the visible universe, the spirit of
truth and beauty and good. We are called to
service, every one of us is called to reveal and
express that Divine idea in some fashion. For
us it is embodied in Jesus Christ. I cannot but
halt there. The Christ contains for me all that
humanity is able to aspire to or understand, the
great Divine idea. The life that is given to
Christ is well invested. It has produced the
best results in the history of human character.
What a man was Paul! The world was his
oyster when he was a young man, and he might
have opened it with his genius, and who knows
where that brilliant Jew might have stopped if
he had entered the service of the Caesars ? But
the Christ crossed his path, and this ambitious,
zealous, burning soul changed to something
else, Saul the persecutor became Paul the
apostle, lived a suffering life and died an ob-

118 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

scure death in a Roman prison; and this was
his verdict when the evening came — '' I have
fought the good fight, I have finished my
course, I have kept the faith. ... I am now
ready to be offered." Paul knew that his hfe
was hid with Christ in God. He knew that this
is the shadow-time, the other side is the reahty.
He chose on the day of the heavenly vision, and
the Master's comment on the choice is this^ —
" I will show him how great things he must
suffer for My name's sake."

Young men, I strongly urge you, the mag-
nificent young life that I see. 'around me, to
choose the life wherein you can throw your best
energies for God. Have a purpose therein. Do
not fear to give back to Him the life He has
placed in your keeping. Beware of seeming to
•drift into a destiny. Let your choice be ra-
tional, let it be strong, let it be pure. I care not
what vocation you have chosen so long as you
be faithful to that which you have chosen. By
and by you shall do greater things than these.
In time be faithful to the little that you can do,
that in eternity you may do the more for God.
Believe that you have a vocation, a vocation for
God. You will not live out all that is within
you here. You cannot. But if you live only
for yourself here you will be a wretched man.

AMBITION, TRUE AND FALSE 119

Give the best to God ; I would not care to join
the ranks of the disappointed people who have
tried for their own sake, and their own sake
alone, and have miserably failed by their very
success.

" If there be good in that I wrought,

Thy hand declared it, Master, Thine;
Where I have failed to meet Thy thought,
I know through Thee the blame is mine.

'"One stone the more swings to her place
In that dread temple of Thy worth;
It is enough that through Thy grace
1 saw naught common on Thy earth."

What can you do to bless the world, to live
that fuller life? You must consecrate your
powers to that which is higher than self. It
can be done, it has been done marvellously by
very ordinary men.

We have all read that psychological novel
" John Inglesant," with its too self-conscious
hero. One character drawn therein, that of a
Jesuit who for a time is spiritual adviser to
John Inglesant, seems to me to be a remark-
able one. I know not whether such a Jesuit
ever existed, but you know this, the Jesuits by
their system of training manage to squeeze out
of every man upon whom they get their grip
any thought of living for his own self-interest.
He becomes the bond-slave of the society. They

120 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

have great strength from the fact that they can
thus obsess a man, as it were, de-self him, and
make him work for the great organisation.
Here is the Jesuit's verdict to John Inglesant
upon his own Hfe, an exhortation for his pupil :
Choose your side or your lot; when you have
chosen it, be true to it all the way. It matters
comparatively little what a man chooses as his
course of action provided it be a worthy one
and his conscience tells him so, but when he
has chosen, no looking back. Go straight on,
be faithful to the uttermost, cost what it may.
A grand and a glorious ideal for the twentieth
century, as well as for the seventeenth! We
know how possible it is for a young woman to
give her whole life and thought and interest,
counting not the cost, for the sake of the man
whom she loves. We men are not apt to be so
unselfish. We know it is possible, again, for
an old man or an old woman to re-live life in the
career of a child. It is pathetically beautiful to
witness the way in which this is done around us
every day. The old live again unselfishly in
the life of the young. Could not the young try
it as unselfishly in the life of the world ? How
shall I serve my God if I serve not my kind?
And there is a Divine principle within us which
urges us to do our best to make the world better

AMBITION, TRUE AND FALSE 121

than we found it. I have often been struck
with the fact that very ordinary people, who
make very small profession of religion, some-
how will do this at some part of their career,
in some one of their interests. They feel they
must even at a cost do a little to make the
world gladder and to make the world good.
Remember the utterance of the Bishop in Vic-
tor Hugo's " Les Miserables." As the convict
stands at the door of the house, proclaiming
what he was by his dress and his demeanour,
thus spoke the servant of God — " This house is
not my house, it is the house of Jesus Christ.
This door does not demand of him who enters
it whether he has a name, but whether he has a
grief."

Oh, I feel that if our bodies were made the
temples of the Christ as the Bishop's house
was made the tabernacle of his Lord; if our
interests, our opportunities were consecrated to
Him, oh, what a difference, majestic, far-reach-
ing, redemptive it would make to the world to-
morrow! And, if I could, I would like to fill
every young soul with that divine ideal. What
can we do, you and I, to bless the world ? Just
what these noble ones in times past have done,
the Pauls and the Luthers and the Wesleys, —
not worldly ambition, but the consecrating of

122 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

evarything they possessed to their Lord and the
counting all but loss if they might win Him.
Let us do the same as these. " Seekest thou
great things for thyself? Seek them not."
Seekest thou great things for God? Go on.
Live out all that God has given you as His
trustee. Seekest thou joy and blessedness and
victory and power in the highest sense of these
words ? Would you come to the full stature of
your manhood ? Then " seek first the kingdom
of God and His righteousness, and all these
things shall be added unto you."

VII

MORAL RESPONSE TO SPIRIT-
UAL VISION

VII

MORAL RESPONSE TO SPIRIT-
UAL VISION

/ was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision.^
Acts XXV i. ig.

THE incident described in the twenty-
sixth chapter of the Acts of the Apos-
tles brings us into direct connection
with a dramatic moment in the world's history.
Probably few of those whose names are re-
corded here as having been concerned with this
episode, if any of them, ever dreamed that it
would be spoken of again, much less be known
to millions upon millions of people, and do
something to change the history of the world.
But so it was. I have often thought that there
could be no much better subject for a painter
than the appearance of St. Paul before Agrippa.
Which was the real king in that assembly, the
poor, undersized, hunch-backed man in chains
on the floor, or the monarch upon the exalted
seat with the governor at his side ? The world
has made up its mind now as to which was the
125

126 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

majestic figure. It was that of the austere,
lonely, meek-hearted prophet. So convincing,
so eloquent, was his simple testimony as to the
change that had passed over his life, and the
reason for it, that the young king said, and I
believe said in all sincerity, " Almost thou per-
suadest me to be a Christian.'^

Now, mind you, the word Christian then had
not the conventional meaning it has now. Far
from it. The word Christian was a term of
reproach. It was the title borne by an obscure
and persecuted sect, and this Paul, this gentle-
man, this educated Pharisee, this man of the
established religion, had made himself an ou4:-
cast and a by-word for the sake of this new
thing. Here he stands face to face with the
king and the Roman governor, and tells them in
the hearing of an unsympathetic crowd the
reason of the change of faith and for his new
course of life; and when by the simple testi-
mony, all-powerful because so sincere and so
simple, he wrings from the king himself the
generous compliment, or something more than
compliment, the wistful testimony, " Almost
thou persuadest me to be a Christian,'' his reply
15 equally generous and nobler far — " I would
that not only thou, but also all these who hear
me this day, were almost and altogether such

RESPONSE TO SPIRITUAL VISION Ul

as I am, except these bonds." Paul knew the
value of his profession. He had seen some-
thing, he knew things in their true proportions,
he acted in consequence. " I was not diso-
bedient unto the heavenly vision."

My intention, I may as well state at the out-
set, is to make an appeal, if I can, in the name
of the same principle and of the same great
Master Who had changed Paul's life. In a
word, I am going to try what I can do as an
evangelist, and if one's purpose is thus con-
fessed at the outset, I trust you will hear with
sympathy what I have to advance.

It is not often that men are convinced of sin
or brought face to face with God in any star-
tling or dramatic fashion such as is recorded
here. There are a few such in history, but only
a few. St. Augustine, for instance, after a
youth spent in debauchery, and as the result of
his mother's prayers, changed his life. The
immediate occasion requires some explanation,
and I do not know that any has ever been forth-
coming. The saint that was to be, great
thinker and mighty force in the world for
Christ — none greater unless it be Paul himself
— was walking in his garden, when it seemed
as though he heard a voice from heaven saying,
" Take and read, take and read." And what

128 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

he took and what he read was simply the story

of Jesus of Nazareth, and through that Pauhne

experience Augustine came from darkness into

Hght, from bestial sensuality into the purity of

the saints of God.

Another and different experience — perhaps

not so very different — was that of St. Francis

of Assisi. You are familiar with the vision

that he saw on the heights above his home in

the night-watches, which changed the careless,

pleasure-loving, though brave-hearted, humble

youth to the great saint of God and teacher of

truth that he afterwards became. He saw, and

was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision.

In humbler circumstances and in modern times

men have seen or men have heard visions and

voices without or within themselves calling

them to the service of God, like that Moravian

missionary whose experience has been put into

these words :

" I hear a voice you cannot hear
Which bids me not to stay ;
I see a hand you cannot see
Which beckons me away."

But mostly such experiences as these, when
they have come, have been experiences calling
men to exceptional service, and they are few
and far between. No man ever received one

RESPONSE TO SPIRITUAL VISION 129

such experience as a special privilege, to con-
vince him of this truth or of that. He received
it as a call to great and to arduous service.
And such it was to St. Paul. " I will show
him how great things he must suffer for My
name's sake."

But more frequently there is no outward
vision at all. Hardly any of us can remember
anything very startling the first time that we
were inclined to decision for God, and there
are not a few in this place to-night who feel
that Christ is the centre and circumference of
their lives. You came, but not through any-
thing startling, and not through an3rthing dra-
matic. It is of the essence of moral change
that it should be in the midst of normal condi-
tions. If your life is changed without signifi-
cance to the world that lies without, I mean
without any obvious significance to the larger
world that lies without, it is all but imperative
that it should have been changed by solemnly
and quietly facing the ordinary facts of ordi-
nary life. God will not visit you with His
lightnings, God will not come to you in some
amazing supernatural fashion. He will come
to you, it may be, in the *' still small voice,"
and not through '* the earthquake, wind, and
fire."

130 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

Sometimes I have heard young people, yes,
and older people, too, ask a question of this
kind — " Why does God not show us plainly
what is the truth about everlasting life ? Here
we are left to puzzle and stumble without
knowing for certain just what things are and
how they are. This man teaches that aspect of
truth, and yonder man another, but how are
we to know just what is the truth? Why are
we not more plainly shown ? "

Well, I will tell you, and I think you will
agree with me, the answer is irrefutable. It is
because there is no room for doubt upon the
things that are imperative on heart and con-
science. Conduct, to be truly heroic, must be
lived in the midst of mystery. If you knew as
certainly as two and two make four that it would
always pay you to do right, there would be
no cost in the right and no nobleness to be won.
God has left a good many things in doubt, but
there is one thing He has left us in no doubt
about at all, and that is, if you will permit the
truism, that it is right to do right, it is wrong
to do wrong. He has given us each a highest
to see, and to follow the highest leads us into
ever-expanding vision of truth. John Henry
Newman wrote at the great crisis in his own
life:

RESPONSE TO SPIRITUAL VISION 131

" Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me."

No, we need not look for the abnormal, nor is
it right that we should, in our spiritual crises,
but there is no man here who has not seen
some heavenly vision. Notwithstanding" all
that I have said, that vision is peculiarly your
own, as much so as was St. Paul's on the road
to Damascus. The question is, what response
you have made to your vision. For instance,
there are hundreds, it may be we get into
thousands, of people here, who have or have
had such tender and winsome associations
round about them in their early life that they
will never forget them, they will never belittle
them, and they will see increasingly more and
more of beauty and grandeur therein. A man
brought up in a good home, with a childhood
round about which there was an atmosphere of
tenderness and truth, and humble but real af-
fection— you have gone a long way since then,
it may be, and you have taken a wild way, but
as you look back, man of the world though you
may be, you see with increasing susceptibility
and increasing readiness to acknowledge that
fact, that there was a beauty you did not see
at the time in that home of your childhood's
days. You never saw how noble nor how

132 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

grand was your father's life, it may be, nor
how sweet and how winsome were your
mother's prayers. At the time you failed to
see these things, but as years roll on you see
them more and more. You were surrounded
by wonderful things. There is no novel half
so rich in descriptive experience as could be
written out of the lives of the ordinary people
here. I find that times and again when one
comes to know people one is addressing. You
never knew, it may be, what your home was
until you left it, you never knew what the
goodness of a loved one was till he was gone.
It may be you played the traitor to it all ; some
of you indeed — and this is an increasing per-
plexity to me the older I get — have treated the
nearest and the dearest and the ones to whom
you owed the most in such a fashion that to
your worst enemy you could not have been
more cruel. You know what I mean. A man
may love his own and yet break their hearts.
A man may be obtuse and blind to the gracious
and wonderful and radiantly beautiful heavenly
things that to him are only commonplace when
he is in their midst. You may have repaid with
pain and agony the love and affection that was
showered upon you. If so, you do not need any
preacher to hurt you by reminding you of it.

RESPONSE TO SPIRITUAL VISION 133

A member of the family of the late John
Bright once gave me a poem which I was told
was a favourite with the great statesman
and man of the people. I can only remember
a few lines of it, but these were the most im-
portant of the whole. It was the sad song
of a husband who had not seen what God had
given him in the noble wife until she was gone,
and thus he sighs :

" My burden then I did not see
Dropped from my shoulder, borne by thee." ^

The last lines of all,

'• The hand of death gave rest to thee, t

And, wondrous thing, gave sight to me. " Vs

Yet the point of what I am telling you is this
— he might have seen before. If God would
only give us to see more plainly the beautiful
things that are to be seen when we are face to
face with them ! But we are disobedient often
and often to the heavenly vision.

There is another thing I would like to say ;
I think it is of more importance still. There
are many of us who do not see the value of in-
nocence. Here I speak no word of rebuke, but
a word of warning. The people to whom I
address myself are the young. Experience is
always dearly bought. Ask these grey-headed

134 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

men. Yet in youth the vision of nobleness is
there, plain to see. It is only that you will not
let your eyes rest upon it long enough. There
is a fascination about the forbidden fruit. Be-
lieve me, there are sights that some of these
young people, brought up in good homes and
hitherto having lived good lives, had better
never see. I know you are always wanting to
see them. Better let them alone. Seeing life,
as they call it, is often a synonym for seeing
hell. You may drink the cup of pleasure to the
dregs, and then find that you have another to
quaff, the cup of remorse, and I know of no
antidote to that. After a recent sermon I re-
ceived a letter which contained this sentence :
*' If some one had talked to me when I was a
youth as plainly, as faithfully, as unmistakably
as you spoke to your young men, I would be a
different man to-day and have a different
record and a gladder heart." Well now, I am
speaking again, this time a word of warning.
Have no foul and festering secrets in your life,
no dark, ugly corners that will not bear the
light. See what is beautiful, see it now, and
never turn your gaze away.

For God has given you that vision. It is
Divine, as much as Augustine's that came in
the garden after his evil life had been lived.

RESPONSE TO SPIRITUAL VISION 135

You need not have the regrets that the great
saint had. God need not snatch you from the
burning fiery furnace of self-contempt and self-
despair. Do not go into it. A heavenly vision
has been granted — be true to it.

You remember, some of you, the publication
some years ago of a remarkable psychological
novel, " The Silence of Dean Maitland." The
central character of that story is a refined,
clever Church of England clergyman, rising
to be a high dignitary in his own communion.
But in his youth, first through vanity, and
then through something darker, he came to be
a seducer and a murderer — ugly words, he
dare not face them himself. His excuse al-
ways to himself was this, " You know I never
meant it." Of course he did not. No sinner
ever does mean the consequences, he only
means the sin. He never was punished so
far as this world was concerned, no, not in
the dramatic finale, but he carried within his
bosom all the long years of his guilty life a
serpent that gnawed at his vitals. Who would
have changed places with this man for all his
position and all his success ? " Keep inno-
cency " he once preached, in the best sermon he
ever uttered. " Keep innocency. Only so shall
a man have peace at the last."

136 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

And I tell you in the name of God that there
is no position that you will ever obtain in this
world that can compensate you for a guilty con-
science. Keep to what you have now. Keep
clean, keep good. It is a simple word, but it is
a right one. Keep as near to the Christ as ever
a good father or a wise mother took you. Keep
your eyes fixed upon the vision that God has
given you. Otherwise, on the other side of
sin you have a discovery to make, a discovery
that everybody makes, that no sin is worth the
price that is paid for it. We have before now
in each other's company called up the figure of
Queen Guinevere, Tennyson's creation, true to
the life, and her wail of self-reproach as the
king, her husband, left her. And Arthur, you
know, is the prototype of Christ, Tennyson's
Christ. Said the guilty queen :

" It was my duty to have loved the highest:
It surely was my profit, had I known:
It would have been my pleasure, had I seen.
We needs must love the highest when we see it.
Not Lancelot, nor another."

There is the vision I have set before you
now. The highest you have seen. God sends
it. No man can make excuse that he has not
seen it. The Christ of Galilee, of Calvary, of
Glory is ever one and the same, and this is

RESPONSE TO SPIRITUAL VISION 137

the Being who changed Paul's hfe, and to
that Christ I call you. This is the heavenly
vision. " Where there is no vision the people
perish." Behold, this same Jesus — a won-
drous thought, but I am convinced it is true,
that the Jesus Who spoke to Paul on the high-
way to Damascus is speaking in this great as-
sembly to-night, to you and me, to all and to
each. Sometimes, when we really get hold of
that thought it becomes awful, as well as
blessed, in its majesty and its power. See the
Christ, His goodness. His beauty, His love,
His cross^ — that is what Paul saw, and he was
not disobedient to the heavenly vision; and as
a dear old saint who lived in a corner once de-
clared, " I had rather be in hell with the Christ
than in heaven with His murderers." And so
would you. I am certain that the cry of every
heart would be, if it came to close quarters be-
tween Christ and the personification of evil,
" Worthy is the Lamb that was slain," even if
He had remained slain. Better a Christ that
was defeated than a Pilate that won. But then
the Christ was not defeated, and Pilate lost,
and to the Paul that stood before Agrippa the
person of Christ was the Master that day, and
the Conqueror over death and hell.

You and I are called to participate in a

138 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

victory like this. We see quite plainly what is
at stake. We are to choose between the Christ
and the powers of darkness. Think of what
the Christ means to the world and shall mean.
There is a great deal of cant talked about His
followers to-day. I would warn you against
it when you come face to face with the vision
of Christ. There is a cant of this world as
well as a cant of religion, and plenty of it.

It is not my custom to make any reply, or
even any reference, to aspersions on myself and
my work. One has something else to do.
But it happened only yesterday that my eyes
fell for the first time on one criticism that
has been directed against myself and the City
Temple, and the occasion was that I was asked
to review a book by a friend of mine, Mr.
Frank Ballard. I found that Mr. Ballard was
replying, on my behalf, to something that had
been said by the editor of a certain paper
against religion in general and this Church in
particular. Why they should ever take the
trouble to reply to the criticisms, the puerili-
ties, that are directed against Christianity and
against the followers of the risen Lord I do
not know. But if anybody can do It well, it
is Mr. Ballard. Here is the criticism : " Seven
thousand pounds spent in making grand a

RESPONSE TO SPIRITUAL VISION 139

place where people meet to sing and pray,
while a woman's soul can be bought outside
the door for a few shillings." That was cant,
you know, pure cant. I will tell you what
cant is. Cant is the profession of a belief and
practice to which the life is not conformed. If \
that is made by a religious man, he is a hypo- ^
crite, he is guilty of cant. If it is made by a
man of the world, he is equally guilty of just
the same thing. Mr. Ballard's reply was
crushing: "Admitted. If a woman's soul is
sold outside the City Temple for a few shil-
lings, the purchaser is not a worshipper." Our
business here is to fight that traffic. We may
not be doing much we ought, perhaps some of
us take it too lightly and too easily, but at any
rate we are trying to do something, and as Mr.
Ballard said in two lines more, " What are the
critics of the Churches and of the followers of
Christ doing in their place to stem the torrent of
evil? Nothing but talk, nothing but talk."
And, young men, my whole purpose in putting
that circumstance before you now is to make
you see with perfect clearness the choice be-
tween the higher and the lower. You will be
tempted to-morrow mornings when somebody
chooses to rail against what you have heard
to-night, to join in with them and say, " Look

\

140 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

at the practices of these so-called Christians."
Do you not see what you are doing? In the
very moment that you condemn the practice,
you exalt the Christ, for you tell us what we
ought to be, which is the same thing as telling
us what Christ is.

No more cant. You and I are face to face
with Christ. You may be a man of the world
and I may be a Christian, and we may both
talk cant. But there is the vision. No one
can pull Him down from His eminence, " Jesus
Christ, the same yesterday and to-day and for
ever." Not all the righteous influences of the
world, put together, can come anywhere near to
what the Christ has writ upon the hearts and
lives of men. There is the vision, the vision
Paul saw and gave his life for. I want yours
for it. You see the truth, rise to it. Trust
your own highest, for that too is Christ and
the Spirit of God witnessing within you.
" No," you say, " I cannot see, it is not true,
I cannot be sure of the Christ." Well, I will
tell you what I would do if I were you — I
would trust that in you by which you see Him
now,

" Can time undo what once was true ?"

It made a hero out of an austere Pharisee. He

RESPONSE TO SPIRITUAL VISION 141

was not disobedient unto the call of the Cruci-
fied. There is something here in every man by
which he sees a higher than he will ever live
up to in this world. Let me illustrate what I
mean. Mr. Hawkins has shut up his organ
now. You cannot hear a note. Do you know
what music is? It is a Divine message that
comes simply through the vibration of air
waves. Only that, and there is some music in
either end of the scale that you cannot hear,
your ear will not take it. But where the ear
leaves off, something else begins. Do you
know what note that flower is singing? I can-
not hear, but I can see. I see the sound of
that daisy, I hear the music of that daffodil
with my eye.

Now, young men, you can hear no heavenly
music. We are shut in, and we are shut down
to the range of common things, though heaven
perhaps lies about us. But I can see the Christ
who makes heaven, and having seen Him, fol-
low to the end. Suppose the worst, if you like.
Suppose the Christ crumbling to dust in Gali-
lee, suppose the tomb to be the end not only of
His gospel, but of you and me. Supposing
that, it were better for you, once having seen
the Highest, to stay there and keep true to it,
better to be deluded with Christ than wise with

14^ THE CHOICE OP THE HIGHEST

His detractors. Be true to the best you can
see, and better will come for you. ** Be not
disobedient unto the heavenly vision."

♦' Whoso hath felt the Spirit of the Highest,
Cannot confound nor doubt Him, nor deny;
Yea, with one voice, O world, though thou deniest,
Stand thou on that side, for on this am I."

VIII

THE STRUGGLE WITH TEMP-
TATION

VIII

THE STRUGGLE WITH TEMP-
TATION

Blessed is the man that endureth temptation.— James
i. 12,

THIS is a strange chapter. The whole
book is remarkable. Luther called it
an epistle of straw, but I think he had
the wrong perspective. This chapter abounds
in sayings which contradict each other if we
measure them by the rules of barren, inade-
quate logic. Some things are higher than
logic; most truths that are worth enunciating
contain some element of paradox. This chap-
ter contains paradoxes and even antinomies.
Particularly is that the case with the part of it
immediately concerned with our subject. Com-
pare : '' My brethren, count it all joy when ye
fall into divers temptations " with " Every man
is tempted when he is drawn away of his own
lust, and enticed." " Blessed is the man that
endureth temptation, for when he is tried " —
that is, when he is approved — '' he shall receive
145

146 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

a crown of life." Read along with that: " Let
no man say, when he is tempted, I am tempted
of God; for God cannot be tempted with evil,
neither tempteth He any man." If these sen-
tences do not contradict each other as they
stand, apparently they come very near to it.

St. James did not write at random, and the
explanation is to be found in this fact. In
this chapter " temptation " is used to express
two allied but distinct ideas. The original
means trial, sorrow, discipline, pain; anything
is temptation by which you are compelled to
suffer. It would be useless to say that such
temptation is not sent of God; we know that it
is. " Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly
upward." There is no manhood without
struggle. Even when we are passive, and are
being wrought upon, rather than ourselves
reacting upon life, pain is God's instrument
employed by Him, the instrument of His de-
liberate choice, for the making of manhood.
In that sense we are tempted of God, and the
apostle does not mean to suggest anything
else. It is of this kind of temptation he speaks
when he says : " Count it all joy when ye fall
into divers temptations," trials, disciplines,
pains, " knowing this, that the trying of your
faith worketh patience. But let patience have

STRUGGLE WITH TEMPTATION 147

her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and
entire, wanting nothing."

The second meaning, however, is that with
which the word is more commonly associated
in the EngHsh tongue. By temptation is popu-
larly understood solicitation towards evil, a
drawing downwards. In that sense it never
can be true that God tempts men. But is it
not true that God makes the crisis in which our
choice of the higher is possible only at the
risk of our falling into the lower? What is
sin but following the lower in the presence of
the higher, doing that which is easy in opposi-
tion to that which is right? There is a moral
test involved in every crisis in which we de-
liberately choose the higher. The lower stands
before you too; it is possible for you to give
your adherence to the lower, but God is not
tempting you downward. He is calling you
upward, and every crisis in which you are
called upon to choose the higher in the presence
of the lower is God's opportunity for you, and
it is His summons to your manhood — come up
higher.

We are all the time in the region of such
temptation; no matter how strong we seem to
be, we have to struggle with the lower self
and with the assaults which reach that lower

148 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

self from without. The citadel of our being is
never impregnable. There is an enemy inside
who, if not watched, would unbar the door.
Every man has his own weaknesses and is aware
of them, though he may not like to be told
of them, and each is in danger of moral over-
throw. There is a crisis in every lot, perhaps
in every day : " Let him that thinketh he
standeth take heed lest he fall." What over-
whelming surprises we sometimes get when
some one of our friends suddenly goes wrong,
or an acquaintance to whom we have been ac-
customed to look up falsifies the opinion of
his circle, and appears to have been living a
hypocritical life. The latter does not neces-
sarily follow. It may simply mean that the
enemy from inside has unbarred the door ; and
in one weak place the man was vulnerable and
was overthrown. If we are wise every one
of us will say, without calling names to the
man who has gone down, " But for the grace
of God there go I."

Let us survey some of the commoner forms
of temptation to which you and I have been ex-
posed, or probably will be. I place in the fore-
ground those peculiar to youth and hot blood.
The less these are dwelt upon in public perhaps
the better, but they ought never to be entirely

STRUGGLE WITH TEMPTATION 149

ignored. It must seem to young- men, who are
trying to live a right Hfe and keep their
thought and actions pure, that the sexual in-
stincts are far too strong; the angel and the
beast are very near together. What a humilia-
tion it is that you have to fight a battle with
the flesh at all ; but saints and heroes the wide
world over, and all history through, have had
that same battle to fight. It is a most arresting
fact that oftentimes the finest temperaments,
those belonging to the highest order of genius,
have been subjected to that particular conflict,
and there is a danger in it through the very
loss of self-respect which is involved in failure.
There is no deadlier temptation than that which
comes in the wake of the battle with the flesh
that has been lost. There are many things to
discourage a man in entering upon a conflict
with the flesh. One is that he knows perfectly
well that a victory gained to-day secures him
no immunity to-morrow. The tone of the so-
ciety in which you move does so much to make
the conflict worse, and many young fellows, I
verily believe, are held back from a public pro-
fession of Christ by the thought that they have
this conflict in secret, and they do not like to
take any profession upon them which would
seem even to themselves to involve something

150 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

that looks like hypocrisy. You are never to
blame merely for being tempted; you may be
to blame for going where temptation is, for
giving harbourage to evil suggestions, for
dwelling in thought upon that which is im-
pure. But the mere fact of temptation you are
not responsible for, and this is why the apos-
tolic writer says, " Blessed are you in that you
are able to meet and endure temptation, if you
come off victor."

Let us survey some other forms of tempta-
tion not of this specific kind, and yet allied to
it in that they are incidental to our social life.
There is the temptation of the wine-cup. Is
anything more deadly to our national well-
being than that? Again, I may mention haz-
ards of the gaming-table, of which we are
hearing so much just now. I have heard it
said that England is corrupt at two ends, the
highest and the lowest grades of society. I
am not well informed enough to say whether
that is entirely true; but I know that right-
thinking people, serious-minded men, are
afraid for their country's future because of
those twin demons, drink and gambling.
This triad — drink, gambling, immorality — lie
very close together, and walk hand-in-hand.
Besides these, there is the lowering of moral

STRUGGLE WITH TEMPTATION 151

tone that sometimes comes as the effect of the
company you keep. It is a remarkable fact
that the general tone of a certain company
may fall below the habitual level of any man
in it. It seems as though we descend to meet.
We are ashamed of seeming at our best in the
presence of our fellows, and, in our shrinking
from Pharisaism, we go to an unworthy
extreme. Then there is the craving for new
pleasure, and one sinister feature of our modern
civilisation is the countless opportunities it pro-
vides for self-indulgence. It is not always
easy to say just where the harm comes in ; per-
haps this is the point : anything which is in
danger of acquiring the mastery over our man-
hood is an enemy to be wrestled with. It does
not matter much what it is, any idea which
tends to create a monopoly of your interests
and pursuits is an enemy. Watch! If it be
love of money, be careful. If for money's own
sake you are willing to do more than for al-
most anything else, and if your thoughts are
employed in planning so to do, beware ! you are
in danger, simply because you cannot hold
loosely that which in itself is not wrong. Any
idea, I care not much what it is, if it is a par-
ticular form of pleasure, watch it, take care that
you are master ; for so soon as an ignoble idea

152 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

acquires dominance in a man's mind his char-
acter begins to suffer. Oftentimes, when social
pleasures upset character, we are grieved that
it is not the cold-hearted and calculating who
go under, but the jolly good fellows, as they
are called. But jolly good fellows can do much
mischief to themselves and to others. By his
very weakness the man who is easily led is a
menace to the circle in which he moves.

There is an order of temptation incidental
to your vocation. The more earnest you are
about your business or profession, the greater
becomes your liability to this special form of
temptation; the pursuit grips you, holds you
tight. The dangerous point in many careers is
not early manhood, but middle life. When a
man has outlived his illusions, generous senti-
ments, early love, when ambition begins to take
the place of sentimental affection, then is the
dangerous time. Then a man wants to fight the
world with the world's weapons, to take short
cuts to success. The craze to be rich is re-
sponsible for many temptations. Take the
" Liberator " crash. Some of you may be feel-
ing very bitter about the change in 3^our for-
tunes that took place as the result of that over-
whelming catastrophe; but I am credibly in-
formed by financial men that those who were

STRUGGLE WITH TEMPTATION 153

punished in connection with that disaster were
not common swindlers, and never intended to
be. What they did intend was a magnificent
coup, the shuffling of figures, the stretching out
of the hand to do a big thing, and do it quickly.
The attempt failed; in other cases it has suc-
ceeded. We send one man to gaol for financial
jugglery, we put up a statue to another. As a
matter of fact, we are all in danger of this par-
ticular form of temptation. Life becomes
more strenuous as you get to know more about
it, as you measure your strength against the
world. There is a subtle, insidious, most dan-
gerous form of temptation, to achieve success
quickly by some dodge or device, instead of
replying upon the strenuous, manly qualities
with which we are all endowed. Blessed is
the man who can pass that danger-point suc-
cessfully, keeping his manhood intact and
pure.

Some may be saying. This is all true, you
are pointing out what we have already been
thinking; but what do you recommend us to
do ? I ask you, in the first place, to remember
that it is not a bad but a good thing that you
have to meet temptation, and that you have to
meet it every day. It is your manhood's op-
portunity. You are not solicited to evil by Al-

154 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

mighty God, but by the very presentation of
the choice, as I have already said, God is call-
ing you to ascend. Remember also that every
evil desire is the perversion of a good one, and
the good is present all the time and every time
with the evil. You never were asked yet to do
a thing that you knew to be wrong, but that at
the same moment the good was making itself
heard too; and it just depends upon which
choice you make what kind of manhood you
grow. Let no man say when he is tempted, I
am tempted downwards by the will of God.
When you are tempted, say, I am summoned
upward by the love of God. It is ours to
destroy the evil by choosing the good, to fight
the lower by rising to the higher.

Now to return to the solicitation of the first
kind of temptation I mentioned — that asso-
ciated with lust or sensuality. Are you aware,
young men, that the very fire and energy which
tends to your ruin in this respect is the mark
of your manhood? Be thankful to God for
the impulses which would destroy you if you
give them rein; for they will carry you up-
ward if you are master of them, instead of them
master of you. Your manhood is worth very
little unless you dO' feel this fire and energy
burning within you; it is your source of

STRUGGLE WITH TEMPTATION 155

power, it is Divine if divinely used; fling it
upon the highest things and trust to the God
Who gave you this instinct to keep you from
degrading it.

" Thus Nature gives us (let it check our pride)
The virtue nearest to our vice allied."

There is nothing which more beautifully and
grandly expands personality than an unselfish
love, the love of one man for one woman. So
many disqualify themselves for it by giving
rein to lust, and yet lust is only perverted
love. The whole world is larger, more glo-
rious, to the man who keeps that instinct pure.
Instead of making a frontal attack upon sen-
sual temptation, fling the manhood and the
power that is its endowment upon the highest ;
look right away from yourself up to the ideal,
to that God Who has given you your manhood
in order that He may make it all divine.

To the man who feels himself to be in
danger in mid-life, because of his worldly in-
terests and success, I would say, You ought
never to expect failure. You are God's trus-
tee, take care to hold loosely that which God
has given you, for by and by that will be
gone; but your manhood will remain. Meas-
ure all your daily activities in their spiritual

156 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

equivalents. Do not deem it a bad thing that
you have to make choice between the lower
and the higher; do not be cast down if you do
feel the force of a temptation sometimes to in-
crease your success by illegitimate means.
Every time such a suggestion comes God is
suggesting a higher choice: make the higher,
and make it in company with Him. There is
nothing in business life that need degrade a
man. I can think of no worthier pursuit than
that of the man who in industrial forms is
trying to serve the community for the com-
munity's good. If only he keep watch and
ward upon his manhood, the greatest asset of
all that he affords the community is the gift of
himself.

Lastly, I would have you remember that
temptation has two deadly allies — self-con-
sciousness and fear. A self-centred morality
is unhealthy. So many of us in our battle with
temptation — perhaps this is more feminine than
masculine — turn our eyes inward; we think,
and perhaps say. This is my battle, and I only
can win this; this is my victory, and we are
only trying to draw away from the enemy and
escape the grip of his cruel claw. Whereas, in-
stead of talking about " my " battle and " my ''
victory, we might speak about God's battle and

STRUGGLE WITH TEMPTATION 157

God's victory in us, and instead of drawing
away from the foe, look up to the highest and
say, I must attain it. Instead of making your
struggle negative, make it positive; instead of
dwelling upon the power of the temptation,
dwell upon the goal that God intends us to
make. The struggle is worthless if it is for
your sake alone, and the power of the adver-
sary is increased the more you think upon that
power. The antidote to such self-consciousness
in moral struggle is to look away from self
to God; indeed, sometimes the ideal that you
are called upon to serve is more clearly seen
in the darkness than in the light. We take
things very calmly and dispassionately when
the sun is shining, and sometimes we deceive
ourselves into thinking that we are better men
than we are, simply because there is no battle
to fight for the time being. But in the dark
time, when there is a struggle, we see far more
clearly what it is that God intends us to do.
Just because we are tempted away from it the
ideal becomes more distinct. I remember hear-
ing of a diamond district in Africa where the
diamond shone only in the night. It was seen
by many people, particularly by one man ; but
it never could be found in the day. As it
shone straight across the ravine, on one side

158 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

of which this man stood, he determined that
he would aim at the point in the darkness. He
fired his shot, and the next day he found the
diamond bearing the mark of the rifle. He
could not see it in the day, he saw it distinctly
in the night. We often have to fire our shot
in the darkness; most clearly then can we see
the ideal when we are most in danger of losing
it. But do not fail to aim, for, so certainly as
you serve in the dark the highest that God has
made you capable of seeing, so certainly shall
you have the fruits of your struggle when the
sunshine comes again. We are inclined to
dwell too much upon our own particular
struggle, and, so certainly as we do, fear be-
comes the enemy and adds intensely to tempta-
tion. I do not know anything more deadly in
moral struggle than the presence of the grim
spectre of fear. Could you abandon fear, you
have already won your victory. The antidote
to fear is faith. Believe it is the will of God
that you should not be a failure, do not har-
bour the thought of defeat for an instant, trust
your concerns to Him, the tides of God will
float you. Every man is in possession of im-
mense resources of unused spiritual power.
The Eternal is already within you, and no man
is weak who has hold of the arm of God. Re-

STRUGGLE WITH TEMPTATION 159

main calm and trust to Him. The universe is
so made that the righteous man is vindicated in
the long- run. Here is a ship lying upon the
beach; watch the fishermen trying to launch
her. It cannot be done, the ocean has ebbed.
What do those who have charge of the ship
do — quit it? That would be a foolish pro-
ceeding, for the tide is coming in. Stay on
the ship and be still, the problem is not really
yours. Perhaps in the night, while you sleep
at your -post, the tides will come and lift your
barque away. God's tides will float any man
who commits himself to them in sincerity and
simple-hearted trust.

We are never left to struggle by ourselves.
We talk as if we were in a lonely place and
there were no God, no power unseen, no
Eternal that the prayer of faith could reach.
It is not so; present in the conflict is One like
unto ourselves, touched with the feeling of
our infirmities, and in that He Himself hath
suffered, being tempted. He is able to succour
them that are tempted.

It is related that during one of Napoleon's
campaigns the French army was stricken with
fever, and there was very great danger that it
would be decimated, not by the enemy, but by
the plague. In spite of all the protestations

160 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

of his generals, the Emperor walked through
the camp, where the sick were laid in rows,
touching one man here, speaking to another
man there, letting his eagle eye fall upon an-
other yonder. The effect was electrical. Sick
men leaped from their beds, calling, " The Em-
peror ! " Napoleon's courage, far more than
anything else could have done, and the sense
of his presence, saved the army from the most
deadly enemy, not the plague, but the fear
which had infected the soldiers. We are not
alone in our struggle. Jesus Imperator, hold-
ing the keys of death and hell. Master of the
universe. King of kings, and Lord of lords, is
here. We must not think of Christ as in a
far-distant heaven, looking upon the struggles
of earth, but present in the midst of them. Our
Emperor is walking through the ranks.

*' The healing of His seamless dress

Is by our beds of pain;
We touch Him in life's throng and press,

And we are whole again.
O Lord and Master of us all,

Whate'er our name or sign,
We own Thy sway, we hear Thy call,

We test our lives by Thine."

IX

THE TWO SIDES OF TEMPTA-
TION

IX

THE TWO SIDES OF TEMPTA-
TION

Blessed is the man thai endureth temptation ; for
when he is tried he shall receive the crown of life,
which the Lord hath promised to them that love Him.

Let no man say when he is te??ipted, I am tempted of
God; for God cannot be te77ipted with evil, neither
tempteth He any man.— fames i. 12, ij.

HERE again is this puzzling antithetic
statement, all the more perplexing
when we read the context. Let me
once more remind you of it. The second verse
of this chapter says, " My brethren, count it all
joy when ye fall into divers temptation." The
second verse of our text says, " Let no man
when he is tempted say, I am tempted of God."
" Count it all joy when ye fall into divers temp-
tations." Yet ** Every man is drawn away by
his own lusts, and enticed," not tempted of
God.

When we take the text itself, without going
to the context at all, we see from the apostle's
reference that of deliberate and set purpose he
163

164 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

puts these two sides of temptation before us,
one in which he says it is a glorious thing, with
a reward at the other side of it, that a man
should fight and overcome temptation ; and yet
at the same time he bids us beware. He sets it
down in writing, close to his former statement,
that no man is entitled to say when he is
tempted, " I am tempted of God." But here is
the point, and the explanation — '^ For God can-
not be tempted of evil." And we might insert
one little word and illumine the whole verse,
the word " so " — neither so tempteth He any
man. And by adding a little to the context we
may throw a little more light on it, if I may
amplify — " For every man is tempted evilly
when he is drawn away with his own lusts and
enticed — God never so tempteth any man."
Now sum it up. Every temptation may be a
call upward on the part of God, or it may be a
solicitation downwards. The former is a sum-
mons to prove our spiritual manhood, it is no
solicitation to evil; and the latter the fruit of
the evil resident in every man and which may
be appealed to and assailed by the evil from
without.

It is solicitation downward to which we
usually give the name of temptation ; but temp-
tation has two sides — God's summons upward,

TWO SIDES OF TEMPTATION 165

which is necessary for any man who would be
a good man, to fight his battle and to win his
victory, and there is never any need for him
to fail in the contest that God gives — God sum-
mons us only upwards. Bu4:, on the other
hand, there is a side of temptation, and it may
be sought by a man himself, in which is a
distinct solicitation downward, with which God
has nothing to do, a man's evil nature or a
man's evil environment, or both together, and
the result of his own wilfulness may lead him
to disaster.

My purpose in once more setting before you
this almost paradoxical text is this — I want to
help some, if possible, who are struggling with
temptation, in one or more of its many forms,
and who, perhaps, think themselves to be in
greater danger than they are.

For some years past I have conducted in a
weekly paper a column of correspondence on
moral and intellectual questions — a correspond-
ence which is largely taken advantage of by
young people. It has taught me a good deal,
and if one wanted to illustrate almost any ser-
mon, no matter what, one has only to go to
one's correspondence for that particular week.
This week, oddly enough, I gathered a few
questions relating to practically the same prob-

166 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

lem, and amongst them was one from four
young men, who have written a letter between
them and signed it, regarding a form of temp-
tation about which I must say something.
Nearly every man in this building knows some-
thing about it. It is very far from being a
savoury subject, and it is one I would much
rather avoid, but it is not one's duty to shirk
unpleasant subjects. It seems to me that there
are more ways than one of handling an ob-
jectionable theme. The question was put to
me something like this — " We are four Chris-
tian friends. We know each other very closely
and help each other in Christian work. But
lately, in an hour of confidence, we have con-
fessed to each other our chief besetment, and,
to put it frankly, it is sensual sin. We are hu-
miliated by it. We feel that, if we could, we
would get free of it entirely. We would serve
God in pure, clean, manly lives. But it seems
to us as though the battle to which we are ex-
posed is somewhat unfair. It is too fierce, and
the odds against us are too strong. Can you
tell us what to do ? "

I do not suppose there is one young man —
at any rate there are very few — who does not
know something about this insidious, baneful,
humiliating fact. I admit the fierceness of the

TWO SIDES OF TEMPTATION 167

conflict to which you are exposed by the
strength of your passions, and shall I say by
your youth? It avails little for me to tell you
that by and by you will wonder that you ever
feared the temptation so much as you fear it
now. But I want to tell you also that to assert
that there is any need for a man to commit
sensual sin is a lie. Just believe that what I
tell you is true ; there is no need for you to fall.
You will go into certain company where you
will be told that all men fail in this particular
fashion. It is untrue ! You may be told also
that it would be impossible for you to fight
your battle to a finish. That is equally false.
You are not to blame for the presence of temp-
tation, but I think you are to blame, often, for
the ways in which you attempt to face it. Re-
gard me as a brother of yours, as it were,
speaking on a level with you, quietly, and as
delicately as I know how. I want to warn you
against taking either too lightly or too seriously
this infirmity, this propensity of the flesh. It is
a loathsome subject, but the manhood of the
nation, the moral fibre of our race, is imperilled
just now by not a few things, and this is one of
them. It is a trite saying that Rome, that vast
empire that comprised the civilised world, fell
from within, not through the attacks of our

168 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

ancestors from without (fierce, tmtutored,
clean-living barbarians), but through the vices
of her manhood and womanhood within.
Now it is true to-day that in Eni^land we are
in danger from just that kind of loose prac-
tice and the flabby kind of hedonism which
describes this kind of sin as either inevitable
or as of little importance. It is true, on the
contrary, that the well-being and the future of
our great Empire, of which we are all proud,
and the very existence of which gives a
certain moral value to every man in this
place, is imperilled by this particular kind of
sin.

Now, let me tell you how to meet it. In
the first place, I want you manly young fellows
not to be morbid in the presence of it, not to be
afraid of it, not to allow your thoughts to be
occupied too much with it. Above all, shun
the company of and dismiss the friend who
insists on directing your attention to it. He
is no friend, and that company is bad. A
friend of mine a few days ago, speaking to me
about this enormous problem, said, " I have
two sons now on the threshold of manhood. I
know what they have to meet. I know the
perils that lurk in their path and the snares
that are set for them. So, being a Christian

TWO SIDES OF TEMPTATION 169

man, as well as, I trust, an affectionate and
loyal father, I have taken these two boys into
my confidence and I have told them all about
the matter. I have bidden them be aware that
almost every man whom they admire and re-
spect has had his battle to fight with the flesh."
You see, young men are apt to jump at the con-
clusion that every noble character in history
or in the life of to-day has been in some mys-
terious fashion immune from the desires of
the flesh. It is not true! But I will tell you
what is true. That good father knew, when
he talked to his boys, what the truth is, that
such men as these refuse to live in the pesti-
lential atmosphere, the noisome surrounding
of carnal temptation. On the contrary, they
set their thoughts on the highest point of hu-
man aspiration. There is God within you, and
there is a devil, too. There is manhood at its
best if you will only trust it, and there is the
beast. You are approached from two sides.
You are summoned heavenward by the very
fact that you have a conflict at all. That is
the way to make a man of you. You have to
fight and you have to win, and you are being
drawn downward by that with which in the
flesh you are most closely allied, the creatures
that crawl, and God asks you, and heaven ex-

170 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

pects you, to fight your battle in the strength
Divine, and to come out conqueror. I want you
not to be overwhelmed with humiliation at the
presence of such temptation. It is not the pres-
ence of the temptation that is wrong in you ; it is
becoming its victim. More than that — I would
like you to understand that the best way to
fight it is not to make a frontal attack. It
is by looking away from it, fixing your gaze on
something worthy of your best efforts and
energies. What is that? Surely it is the
Christ, the Christ and all Christ-made men, the
Christ in His moral ideal, the Christ in all that
that winsome name stands for. Here is the
beauty of this method to which I recommend
you — the Christ Himself is the very means of
your victory. If I could only get men, not only
in this particular conflict, but in every other, to
understand and to realise and to believe that
the Divine within them is stronger than the
earthly, they would win every time.

It is not true that you are left to yourself.
It is not true that you need to go under. It
is true that you have to fight, but it is also
true that you are called to trust. To trust the
best means victory before the battle is fought.
" Blessed is the man that endureth temptation,
for when he is tried he shall receive the crown

TWO SIDES OF TEMPTATION 171

of life which the Lord hath promised to them
that love Him."

I would like to ask you now to permit me
to pass to another aspect of this subject, on
which one feels impelled to speak, but which
is not so objectionable. It is allied to what I
have just been saying-, and is all the more
dangerous because it comes to us in the garb
of something noble. I have been struck of
late with the number of people, men and
women, who have come to me for advice on
subjects of this kind. Two people work to-
gether, a young man and a young woman,
helping each other in Christian service either
in the place of business or in the Church.
They establish what they call Platonic friend-
ship. They never can become husband and
wife. But by and by they begin to speak of
the high regard in which they hold each other,
how much of Christ the one can discern in the
other and so on. They speak of love, but
they speak of it, they think, in terms that are
highest. Then the question arises — Is this re-
lationship equivocal and dangerous, or is it
not? There is something fascinating in it, so
mysteriously and sweetly romantic oftentimes.
But there is nothing, I think, more deadly in
the whole range of life and of experience. It

m THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

has wrecked many a career and will do it
again. And if you are in any such situation,
let me tell you what to do — Get at once, with-
out further dallying or consideration, out of
equivocal relationships which must result in
moral mischief and may result in disaster and
in ruin. You remember Lancelot's testimony
in the " Idylls of the King," when he stood
face to face with the friend he was injuring :

" In me lived a sin
So strange, of such a kind, that all of pure,
Noble, and knightly in me climbed and clung
Round that one sin, until the wholesome flower
And poisonous grew together, each as each
Not to be plucked asunder."

You remember, too, the reply of the King :

" Nay — but thou errest, Lancelot; never yet
Could all of true and noble in knight and man
Twine round one sin, whatever it might be.
With such a closeness, but apart there grew
Some root of knighthood and pure nobleness;
Whereto see thou, that it may bear its flower."

I would say to every one of you who is in
that entanglement or danger, the very highest
in you lies very close to the lowest. Keep
right away from the region of temptation.
The apostle saw deeply into human nature
when he put so close together this Godlike
side of the conflict and this earthward side.

TWO SIDES OF TEMPTATION 17S

" Blessed is the man that endureth." Blessed
is the man who knows, when he is face to
face with temptation, what its real name is
and gets the victory. This may take many
forms; temptation nearly always comes with
a lie on its face and bids us call sin by a wrong
name. Be faithful with yourself, no matter
what the temptation may happen to be. The
other side of every sin is sorrow and remorse.
Reckon with Christ, not after sin is committed,
but before, and test every question by His
name and Spirit. It is no use for a man to
say, " I did not know, and the conflict be-
came too much for me." We always know
enough before sin is committed to be able to
say, " This is wrong." The highest courage
oftentimes is to turn and flee.

Now, brethren, I have done with that. I
have spoken as a matter of simple duty, and
it is probable in doing so I have done as much
service to my Master as by anything I have
ever said before. If you knew life as some
fathers and mothers know it, you would feel
that it was your duty to sustain, by every
means in your power, by prayer and by ex-
ample, and if necessary by testimony, every
effort to stem this particular torrent of evil.
But it is one thing to do that, It is another

174 THE CHOICE OP THE HIGHEST

thing to be always talking about it, and I am
strongly of opinion that some well-meaning
people to-day do more harm than good by
thrusting upon the attention of the young al-
ways and everywhere questions of that kind.
Far better to make an atmosphere in which it
is difficult for the temptation to live. Seeing
that it is there, do not let us be afraid of calling
it by its name and invoking the power of
Christ to deal with it.

Now I want to go on to speak of another
form of temptation which I know is also
deadly, but which is far removed from what I
have been describing. This, too, has two sides.
All this time you will observe that I have been
speaking to people who stay more or less in the
presence of sin when they ought to get out of
it. Now I want to speak of some of God's
people who, whether they will or not, as it
were, are thrust into the presence of a sorrow
which contains within itself a temptation. For
instance, among those who have written to me
there was the wife of a man who is now, it
seems, in a lunatic asylum, but who was once
a prosperous man of business, a brave-hearted,
righteous man, who did all the good he could
within his particular sphere. Ruin came, she
does not say how. The family has been scat-

TWO SIDES OF TEMPTATION 175

tered, the husband, as you see, is almost worse
than dead, and she asks of her minister, and
myself, this difficult question, " Can I keep my
Christianity? Is not trust in God meaning-
less? Have you a word of comfort?" — Now
it is very probable that there are people in this
church who have passed through tragedies as
great, or nearly as great as this. Some of you
are in the midst of them now. Far be it from
me, who have not your life to live and do not
know your trouble as you know it, to talk
lightly or dogmatically and with much assur-
ance as to what you ought to do ; but in God's
Word I think I see something about you and
your life. Temptation, as St. James uses the
word, has two meanings, or rather one mean-
ing which in English has become two words.
In this very chapter and in others the word
" trial " is the same as the word that is given
as " temptation " — trial, sorrow, calamity,
tragedy, pain, and suffering of all kinds, what-
ever it may be. Do you not see, then, what
the apostle means, that in all sorrow there
is a subtle temptation? You may be a worse
man for having been caused to pass through
pain, or you may be a better one — which shall
it be? Remember, God summons no man to
failure. We do not ask that the way shall

176 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

be made pleasant to us, but what we ask is
this, that we shall never prove unworthy of
that high calling unto which we are called.
So I would say, however fierce the blast, how-
ever stern the trouble to which God has called
you, look up, look over, there is another side
and a dawning of the morning.

Now to illustrate what I mean, I will show
you how it has been done. Let me tell you of
yet another letter, written by a man who asked
me a question quite remote from this one, and
in so doing placed his experience before me
thus : " Some years ago," he said, " God took
from me, one after the other, and all near to-
gether, all my four children, and I remember
the Gethsemane of that experience as acutely
as though it were yesterday. When one boy
lay dead in one room I had to go with cheer-
ful, smiling face into the next one, because the
doctor told me I must give no shock to my
suffering little one there, and with a cheerful
demeanour and without reference to the
shadow of death on the other side of the wall
I had to tell him all I could to make him glad
and to keep him hopeful. Oh," he added,
*' there never was anything more grimly dread-
ful, surely, in the world! " I agree; it is true;
but that man kept his faith. He kept it right

TWO SIDES OF TEMPTATION 177

through that terrible time. He is as sure of
God to-day as he was then, and he says his
children are safe in the arms of Jesus. I know
it may seem to a man without faith a most un-
real and foolish thing that he should speak so,
but he does speak so. He thinks he knows a
little more now what wrung the Saviour's
heart than he did before. It was his time of
trial and the trial contained a temptation, and
God called him upward by it, and he obeyed,
and he stands on a spiritual plane where he
never stood before. " Blessed is the man that
endureth temptation, for when he is tried
he shall receive the crown of life, which
the Lord hath promised to them that love
Him."

There may be some one here who will speak
to me in these terms : ** There are seasons
when I cannot pray, when it seems as though
the power to pray leaves me, when to utter
one single sentence to God seems a thing with-
out soul and without meaning. Do you know
what that is, to feel that you cannot pray?"
Well, that is a very stern time, a testing time.
Mind what you do. That is just the time
when you must pray. There will be no such
feeling as rewards you at other times, but that
prayer has gone heavenwards, be sure, and it

178 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

will come back laden with blessed results.
Gk)d knows the worth of such a prayer, wrung
from a heart in agony. Do not turn your face
from the light. Your only safety is in stand-
ing by the best, in holding on. Victory waits
upon your expectation thereof. God can give
you that victory every time.

Such a period and such an experience just
bring you to this. You see how little strength
there is in you, how little your resolutions
mean, how small is your own moral resource.
It is all of God. If there is any good in you
whatever, it is all of God; we can praise His
holy Name that there is enough there. My
friend Mr. Jowett was preaching on Wednes-
day morning in my hearing at Newcastle, and
in his sermon told an experience of his early
days when he was a minister in Newcastle.
He said there sat near the pulpit an old man
who used to repeat the Lord's Prayer along
with the minister, in tones which were dis-
tinctly audible to the man in the pulpit. When
Mr. Jowett reached the ascription, " Thine is
the kingdom, and the power, and the glory," at
the utterance of the word " Power " the old
man used to say quietly, " Hallelujah, halle-
lujah." " He never said it anywhere else,"
declared Mr. Jowett, " only there. I saw what

TWO SIDES OF TEMPTATION 179

he meant — * Thine is the power,' always, every-
where."

Oh, you struggHng men and women, lay
hold, lay hold ! " For we have not an high
priest that cannot be touched with the feeling
of our infirmities, but one that hath been
tempted in all points like as we are, yet without
sin." It is not by imitating Him only that I
win, it is by laying hold of Him. Blessed is
the man that can hold on to the Christ. And
I think I hear Him say, " To him that over-
cometh will I give to sit down with Me in My
throne, even as I also overcame and am set
down with My Father in His throne."

X
THE LARGER FORGIVENESS

THE LARGER FORGIVENESS

The father said, Bring forth the best robe, and put
it on him. — Luke xv. 22.

THE circumstances under which these
words came to be spoken by our dear
Lord are worth a few moments' con-
sideration. If we are to beheve a great New
Testament scholar, it is probable that the three
parables contained in the fifteenth chapter of
St. Luke were a sermon spoken by Him Who
spake as never man spake, in the courtyard of
the house of Matthew the publican, and to a
very composite audience. Our Master had just
finished His ministry to the synagogue-going
people, and, being anxious to take the same
message to the vast number of outsiders who
then and now were to be found in multitudes,
he asked Matthew the publican to make a place
for Him and bid all his own class there too.
And there came publicans and sinners, as we
read in- the beginning of the chapter, all the
social outcasts, all the people who had done
183

184 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

with religion and to whom rehgion had no
more to say. Probably they were crowded
into that courtyard very much as you are
crowded in here, and at the door were the
astonished Pharisees, to whom He had been
talking up to now. Turning to the Master's
immediate followers, they said, in words ex-
pressive of their surprise, " This man receiveth
sinners, and eateth with them."

Then our Lord began to speak ; the words of
His text are probably preserved by Matthew,
the sermon by Luke. The text was, " Come
unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy
laden, and I will give you rest." The publican,
who had been looking for this very thing so
long, remembered that peerless sentence and
wrote it down, and the only place in literature
where you will find it is in St. Matthew's
Gospel. But it was the beloved physician, the
Pharisee, who remembered the parable, with
the figure of the elder brother who would not
come in. Was Luke with the people round the
door? The parable stops abruptly at the
father's word, " Let us make merry and be
glad, thy brother was lost and is found," and
we are not told any more that the elder brother
did not come in. Luke came in, and he lived
to write the chapter, and with that Pharisee the

THE LARGER FORGIVENESS 185

publican came in and wrote the text. And with
Matthew and Luke the Magdalen came in, and
the new life was begun. Our Lord's converts
from that day, who shall number? Shall we
ever know until the Great Day? Many a soul
has been won by this winsome story of the
prodigal since that day.

The pith and the marrow of it are in the
sentence that we have taken as our text, " The
father said. Bring forth the best robe, and
put it on him." The fallen sinner is offered a
place before the throne. The blackest of trans-
gressors is offered the righteousness of the Son
of God. That robe of righteousness, that gar-
ment of salvation, is given to all who in
penitence seek it. The offer is so simple, so
purely unconditional, that man has found it
hard to believe. *' The best robe " — not the
second best — " bring that forth and put it on
him."

Now, the question which has been addressed
to me so often, and which from this text I try
to answer to-night, is this : " How far does
God's forgiveness go ? How much can Christ's
salvation do? Are there not some problems
too great for Him, some knots that nothing
but death can cut? Is the Master really
master? Are not the consequences of some

186 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

people's sins too tragic, too terrible for any
Gospel to meet?"

Now, here am I with the Master's words,
" The best robe." There is nothing too in-
tractable in human history for the Gospel of
Christ to meet; there is nothing too terrible
for the great Redeemer Who has made a way
for us into the holiest, and the laceration of
His own heart was the price He had to pay.
There is no corner in the " far country " too
remote for the Shepherd to find His sheep, and
there is no prodigal in this place who is deemed
an outcast for ever from the Father's home
and the Father's heart.

And yet you would remind me that the facts
of life seem to tell against this winsome theory.
Well, I will go with you some way. It does
not do to sprinkle the road of life with rose-
water. We sin not with impunity — you must
have found that out. There are some people
who talk very lightly about the wages of sin.
Let no person in this church even think it at
this moment, for perhaps next to you in the
pew is a man who knows from bitter experi-
ence that the way of transgressors is hard.
And as I have said before, if there were no
preaching and no gospel, and if we could sup-
pose the world without a Christ, the problem

THE LARGER FORGIVENESS 187

would still be there in all its poignancy. Men
want to know how to escape the dread conse-
quences of their own evil.

Take, for example, this man who has sinned
against his constitution. Need you go further?
Nature knows no reversal of her decrees.
She is inexorable, and his trembling, palsied
limbs are the evidence of the life he has led.
'' He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh
reap corruption."

There is that man who has flung away his
social opportunity. If you could read his
history and go back with him to the days of
early manhood, before he trifled with delicate
things and violated his conscience, and injured
his fellows, you would wonder why his life
should ever have come to be what it is now.
Judas meant well when he joined the Twelve,
and the Master knew it, but his besetting sin
of covetousness was his ruin, and has landed
him in everlasting infamy.

Some of you meant well at twenty years of
age. You are ruined at thirty or forty, and
you know what it is to put behind you all
that once you counted good. Are you tempted
to say, " My punishment is greater than I can
bear"? There is a man as big a sinner as
you ; he has done things that would damn him

188 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

if the world knew it, but it does not know.
You feel it is hard that you should be down
and he should be up; but do not make any
mistake, his time is coming all right. God
makes no mistakes. You think to yourself, in
sadness perhaps, but in penitence I trust :

" The tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me."

But I have sterner problems yet. There are
men here held back from the Highest who are
accustomed to sneer at religion. There may
be a good reason for it down in the depths of
your heart — it is not confessed — it is this, they
feel they cannot come to the Cross of Christ
and leave outside in the world the wrecks that
they have made, the lives that they have
blighted, the suffering they have caused.

Here is a man, for instance, who has ruined
a woman some time in past years. You are
sitting in the pew now, listening. Where is
shef If you could just get back twenty years
and see what you see to-day, if you could only
put right what you put wrong, if you could
only restore innocency to that life, would you
not do it, you poor, unhappy wretch? But
while I offer you salvation you think, " Am
I a slinking, snivelling cur? Am I coming to

THE LARGER FORGIVENESS 189

any Cross of Christ while the shame and ruin
of a fellow-creature are working out their
dread result? "

Here is another. Here is a man whose evil
life has been visited upon his children. When
we call, *' Come to the Cross ! " he thinks of
the cross that is already borne by an innocent
little one, and the loathsome disease from
which that child suffers is an unceasing scourge
to him. Will penitence put it right ?

And, lastly, it may be there is that man with
a foul and loathsome secret in his life. If your
wife knew what you are, it would destroy her
peace for ever. She might come to hate you —
oh, no! she would not! That is not woman's
way. But you dare not tell ; yet impossible for
you for ever, so would you think, is a life of
purity and a life of goodness. You would feel
like a hypocrite. Atonement? No; you must
say, or you do say :

" The moving finger writes; and having writ
Moves on; nor all your piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line.
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it."

Brethren, I think I have stated the facts
pretty fairly. That is life, the life about which
you read in the newspapers and the popular
novel — the life that in far more enthralling

190 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

terms, if you could only read them, is written
here.

Now, what have I to set over against this?
*' Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be
as white as snow. Though they be red like
crimson, they shall be as wool." For " God so
loved the world that He gave His only-begotten
Son that whosoever believeth on Him should
not perish, but have everlasting life." And
this gospel, this mystery, this unfathomable
atonement covers not only your life but your
record, and God's goodness can track out all
the way that you have gone. The past is not
yours, the future is.

Will you think for a moment perfectly
clearly upon this subject — sin and the conse-
quences thereof, and the sequences to eternity ?
Remember if there were no consequences at all
— the inwardness of the transgression of the
moral law is not hidden from the sinner nor
from God. Our Master spoke of those who
committed adultery in their hearts. They have
no woundings to bring home, but sin is sin
against God. You have bruised the Face of
Christ by your sins of thought, as well as of
deed. Sin against God is the first thing to
think about, and such sin, repented of, can be
dealt with by the Eternal Father. Dismiss

THE LARGER FORGIVENESS 191

consequences from your mind. Think of the
sin. Lay down the burden of guilt at the
Cross. God cannot deny Himself. There is
forgiveness there.

" Just as I am, without one plea,
But that Thy Blood was shed for me,
And that Thou bidst me come to Thee,
O Lamb of God, I come ! "

And we must all come. You wish you were
as good a man as somebody of your acquaint-
ance. Do you know that when he wins
through into heaven it will be the robe of
Christ's righteousness he shall wear, and it
will be the same colour as yours? "What
are these that are arrayed in white robes, and
whence came they? These are they that came
out of great tribulation, and have washed their
robes and made them white in the Blood of the
Lamb." Oh, it is all of Jesus, and you owe
more than you know.

♦• When this passing world is done,
When has sunk yon glaring sun,
When we stand with Christ on high
Looking o'er life's history,
Then, Lord, shall I fully know,
Not till then, how much we owe."

Just this fact I want you to get into your
rnind — God forgives without reserve, conse-

192 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

quences or no consequences. It is the sin you
repent of, not the consequences.

Now for them. Well, brethren, God can
remit them all if he chooses, every one of
them. He can make that poor paralytic whose
evil life has destroyed his manhood to be as
a little child again if He choose — if He choose
— and, brethren, sometimes God has swept
away every trace of a man's wrong-doing, and
you see no more of it in this life, and there are
some here who know what I mean by that.
Supposing you got in this life what you de-
serve. There are some miracles — men who
have gone to the very edge of the precipice, and
not gone over, men who have been brought
back from the " far country," and they have
had over again something of the portion of
goods they wasted in riotous living. And there
are others who have not, and you still speak as
if God was implacable and had excepted you
from grace. He has not. I want you to think
that punishment ceases to be punishment when
penitence finds itself at the Cross. The curse
is transformed; it is now the cross, and every
son of God bears one. There are some of you
who would, if you could, get back and stand
at the beginning of life's journey again, and
not bring the wreck and the ruin that you have

THE LARGER FORGIVENESS 19S

brought into your own life and other people's.
God will not let you stand there; but this He
does — He will lift you by the pain He leaves,
and if you had not had this cross which you
feel you have deserved, you would have had
another, for " whom He loveth, He chasten-
eth, and scourgeth every son whom He re-
ceiveth."

There is no cross so likely to keep a man
humble as that which will remind him of the
life he once lived and the rescue God has made.
Even the suffering of your little child may
go far to do that. " What of the child? " you
say. Well, it is a good thing even for the
child that you would lay down your life to
spare the little one a pang which is the result
of your wrongdoing. If there is any good in
you it will come out then, and as for the child,
why, the same as for you and me and all man-
kind, vicarious suffering is the law of the
higher life — it is God's doing, and not man's.

You remember in Kingsley's poem the
martyr who, to save her husband from torture
and from death, recanted, and denied the
Christ. The rebuke of the martyr brought her
back to the Cross again, and she says — or
Charles Kingsley makes her say — " I saw there
was but one right thing in the world to do, and

194 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

I must do it." Sometimes for the highest you
have had to sacrifice your dearest. There are
times when you feel it were better they should
be afflicted than righteousness should be com-
promised. A thousand times this comes in
life; it is of God that men suffer for other
men's sins. Be it so ; it brings us to Calvary
and to the fellowship of the Crucified. All
Christ's conquests have been made so. Peter
denied his Lord to escape something, and when
he came back to his Lord he went cheerfully
forth to the very thing he had lied to escape.
Peter died upon the cross — tradition says
head downward. Did he ever think of the
moment in Pilate's hall when he denied the
Master who was standing at the whipping-
post? Did he ever think of the moment of
deepest repentance when he went out and wept
bitterly? Did it matter? He faced the worst;
it mattered nothing to him then, so that he
had the love of his Lord.

Sinners, play the man! Nothing matters
much to you but losing the love of God. Be
like Peter — face the cross, take it up! Know
this — God never meant you to be a lost soul,
and every man who wills to live the righteous
life shall have his chance. What of the great
Apostle of the Gentiles, the least of all the

THE LARGER FORGIVENESS 195

apostles, he says, not meet to be called an
apostle because he persecuted the Church of
God — remember what that means? Paul tore
the father from his child and the husband from
his wife, he broke up families, he sent sorrow
and ruin and death into the midst thereof, in
the name of religion; and then he came to
preach Christ himself ! If Paul could only have
stood on the other side of the stoning of Ste-
phen, and never had part therein, he would
have been glad, I trow. And yet he came to
Christ, and he lived to say, " I have fought the
good fight; I have kept the faith; I am ready
to be offered."

When we have stood with Peter and Paul
at the Cross of Christ, and looked back, we
feel that the Saviourhood of the Master is
great enough for all things — that which hath
been, that which is; that the best robe which
was for the Apostle of the Gentiles is meant
even for you and for me, though we have
sinned grievously against God and against
each other. And you will never help any fel-
low-creature by remaining in sin. Would you
save your brother whom you tried to ruin?
You had better come to the Cross yourself.
Would you undo the mischief you have done?
You had better pay over your record into the

196 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

hands of Christ. You will never atone, you
will never undo ; God will. Would you redeem
the time, would you stand with the " multitude
whom no man can number " around the throne
of God in heaven, and would you see there
some whose lives are dearer to you than your
own, yet to whom you have caused both sorrow
and shame? Then rise and come to the
Father !

Beloved, I feel tempted to do to-night what
I have never done in this church or in any
other, and that is to ask the men of guilty
lives to confess before the whole multitude of
God's people in this place that they begin again
at the place where forgiveness has been cove-
nanted— the Cross of Christ. Say in silence
what I think I must not ask you to utter openly,
" God be merciful to me a sinner! "

Come home! There is joy in the presence
of the angels of God.

XI
THE SHELTERING MANHOOD

XI
THE SHELTERING MANHOOD

A man shall be as a hiding-place from the wind
and . . . the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. —
Isa. xxxii. a

DR. GEORGE ADAM SMITH, who is
perhaps the first Hving authority on
the exegesis of Isaiah, tells us that the
first eight verses of this chapter belong to what
we may call the prophet's escapes, by which he
means a period of special inspiration greater
than the prophet himself knew, a moment of
unencumbered vision, a long forelook, a glo-
rious anticipation of a better than he had
ever known. Every prophet has such escapes,
such periods of special and exalted insight, and
they are always greater than the prophet him-
self is aware of. Compare with this chapter,
for instance, the eighth of Romans, where St.
Paul seems to be carried away upon a stream
of spiritual imagery and marvellous eloquence
to describe a greater than he could ever hope
to see himself upon this side of death. We are
199

200 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

straining our eyes to-day towards St. Paul's
vision and we know more than he could realise,
but he saw substantially the same vision as
Isaiah saw, a greater than either prophet knew.
The prophet, speaking to his own time, is like
a lark twittering upon the ground or singing
upon a branch. The prophet speaking for all
time is like the same bird singing in high
heaven.

Read our text, then, in the light of this
scholar's description of it, and see if it does
not fire our imagination too. " There is a
time coming," the prophet said, " a time com-
ing when a man shall be as a hiding-place from
the wind and a covert from the tempest, as
rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of
a great rock in a weary land." Again I say I
can hardly think Isaiah knew all that was con-
tained in the beautiful utterance of this match-
less imagery.

Now, what does it mean? No prophet ever
overstates his case, although he may not know
in fulness the meaning of that which he has
seen and tried to express. Here is just a mo-
ment of Divine enthusiasm. Isaiah is speaking
to decadent Israel. He is expostulating with
its debased manhood, he is foretelling calami-
ties that are to come upon his native land. But

THE SHELTERING MANHOOD 201

he sees beyond the moment, and beyond the
trouble, to a more glorious day, and, in mak-
ing an appeal for a higher manhood, he passes
from request into declaration, and says, in
effect, '* I see it, there is a man who is to be
a hiding-place from the wind and the shadow
of a great rock in a weary land.'*

Every one of you would say at once this
vision was really and only fulfilled in Jesus
Christ. But you would be prepared to say
along with me, the prophet did not know
about any Christ when he spoke. He did not
foresee what we now, looking back, can plainly
see. But if Isaiah had lived and had taken his
place alongside of the little group that heard
Jesus speak on the hillsides of Galilee, and sat
at His feet in the upper room, what do you sup-
pose he would say ? " Here is a man, a man
Divine for whom our hearts have been yearn-
ing, here is He who has brought us God, here
is One at the same time strong and gentle, in
Whom all humankind can rest, the shadow of
a great rock in a weary land." What Isaiah
would have said you and I can say. All this
is true and reaches its highest fulfilment in our
Saviour Christ.

Examine the figure a little more closely.
The prophet, as you see, has the desert in

THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

mind, and every Oriental knows what that
means perhaps better than we who live in this
fruitful country can ever realise. He is think-
ing of the scorching wind which, in the hotter
months of the year, sweeps like a desolation
over the desert. He sees in imagination a
weary company of pilgrims threading their way
through it, the glaring sun beating upon them,
the hot breath of fiery flame threatening to de-
stroy them, and then he sees a mighty rock ris-
ing in the midst of the desert, and the pilgrims
nestling beneath its shade. Then breaks out his
figure in the richness of its imagery: a man
should be like this rock in the desert, a hiding-
place from the fury of the tempest : the shadow
of a great rock in a weary land.

Speaking broadly, I say no one would deny
that Jesus has been just such to the world that
lies behind us. Many and many a thousand
have found rest in His great name.

** It woke our wondering childhood
To muse on things above,
It drew our harder manhood
With cords of mighty love."

Oh, how many have been able to say (we
do not say why, we simply note the fact it
has been so) that Jesus Christ has been to
them the fulfilment of ail their highest aspira-

THE SHELTERING MANHOOD 203

tions. He has been to them the goal of all
noblest hope. Jesus has been as " a hiding-
place from the wind and the shadow of a great
rock in a weary land."

•• Beneath the cross of Jesus

I fain would take my stand,
The shadow of a mighty rock

Within a weary land,
A home within the wilderness,

A rest upon the way,
From the burning of the noontide heat

And the burden of the day."

Just exercise your not too vivid Anglo-
Saxon imagination for one moment and think,
as you look back on the line of history, how
many people in nineteen centuries have had
this experience and sung this song. The
prophet never saw further than the truth, and
the truth was greater than the prophet. Christ
Jesus has been to humanity, and is still, the
Rock of Ages.

But it is in no merely general sense that I
would employ these words. Jesus Christ is
more than of general interest for us, and I
mean every man when I say " us." The words
of Isaiah are true just this moment, and I will
try to show you in what sense they are true for
our day and for you and for me.

Many questions are asked concerning the

^04 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

person of our blessed Lord. To-day nearly all
religious controversy seems to centre about
His sacred head. And I know quite well that
many a young fellow must be perplexed to
know what to think concerning Him about
Whom all men in our day and generation and
beloved country must think. We have to take
account of Christ, whether we will or no. Now
then, listen to this question. One young fel-
low comes to me and says, " I am bewildered
to know just where the humanity of Christ
leaves off and His divinity begins. It is such
a perplexing question as to be all but impass-
able. I feel that one fails in the presence of it.
Can you give me any satisfaction ? '^ Another
comes and says, " You preach a supernatural
Christ. I suppose that is the Christ of the gos-
pel, but I feel, having to fight the battles that I
must fight, and meet the temptations that I
must meet, that a purely human Jesus would
be of much more help to me, a man, a con-
queror, yet one of like passions with myself."
I am speaking now what I do know when I say
some feel that a purely human Christ, victor
over temptation and over sorrow and over
wrong, noble, unselfish, and pure, would be a
greater help to them than the ecclesiastical
Christ who is too often presented.

THE SHELTERING MANHOOD W5

Well then, listen to me. Precisely the Christ
of whom you are in search is the Christ of
the gospel. Do not talk any more nonsense
about the point where humanity leaves off and
divinity begins, or divinity leaves off and hu-
manity begins. Christ is all human — ^human
all the time. Divine all the time. He is your
brother, He is also more than that. He is your
God. There is nothing in Christ that is foreign
to what you and I aspire to know in our God.
And yet Christ is as completely human as you.
Pardon me, I have even understated my case.
He is more human than you are. The only
Man whom the world has ever seen is your
Christ and mine, human as you. Your hu-
manity will only come to its own when it
aspires to His and is represented in it. Re-
member, there is no dividing line between the
deity and the humanity of our blessed Lord.
He is both, and both are one. The Christ of
the gospel is just your Christ, the Christ you
are seeking, the Christ you need. " A man
shall be as a hiding-place from the wind, the
shadow of a great rock in a weary land."

This Divine Man has intercepted on the
desert of history the scorching breath of sin
for many a penitent, this Divine Man is " the
shadow of a great rock " to many thousands

206 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

in wo rid- weariness, this Divine Man at this
hour is fulfilHng this same great function, this
dual function. Brother and Redeemer He.

•• And lo, from sin and grief and shame,
I hide me, Jesus, in Thy name."

Faith in Christ is a fact — a fact that can never
be ignored by one who would know human
nature. It has made and still makes " a shel-
ter in the time of storm." You cannot surely
read the New Testament without gathering
from it the impression, or something of the
impression, that the simple man felt as he first
drew near to Jesus. Men with similar prob-
lems to yours and mine have felt Him to be
not only gracious but strong. They felt the
spell of his personality, felt His disinterested-
ness. His unearthly nobleness, and it was this
Jesus, this personal Jesus, about Whom men
did not frame any theories beyond this, that
they knew He was the expression of God. It
was this human Jesus Whom now we worship
as the Jesus Divine. A deathless trust in that
ever-loving Christ is the wisest investment of
your life.

Now, to go one step further, your manhood
and mine is to be shaped by the manhood of
Christ if we would really solve the riddle of

THE SHELTERING MANHOOD 207

life and fulfil the purpose for which we were
created. The true manhood is the manhood
which is the product of the spirit of Christ.
It is but seldom that you and I ever meet a
manhood under which the weak can shelter.
I remember being profoundly impressed some
years ago when a dear friend of mine, Dr.
Horton, of Hampstead, was celebrating the
twenty-first anniversary of his ministry.
There came amongst the speakers, in addi-
tion to myself, an Oxford friend of Dr.
Horton, who made a public confession some-
thing like this. It can do no harm to state it,
for he said it himself in the presence of the
great throng.

" There are many of us," said this scholar
and gentleman, " who have lost our way amid
the great religious problems of life, though
we have never, I trust, forsaken the Christian
ideal of living. To such men as we are, men
with no clear vision upon the promise of life,
this ministry of this man has been as ' the
shadow of a great rock in a weary land.* "

I felt that it was true of my friend, must be
true of such a life as his, so unselfish, so de-
vout, so Christ-like. But what made that man-
hood? We know. Only one thing, only one
influence, and that a living one. Mind you,

WS THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

it was the Christ to Whom I am calling you,
that Christ Whom Isaiah dimly foreknew, the
Christ Whom at this very moment you and I
are facing, some in unfaith, some in wistful
yearning, some in blissful trust. The living-
Christ made my friend's manhood " the
shadow of a great rock in a weary land."

Consider how seldom it is possible to say,
even in the twentieth century, that any ordi-
nary character is as " the shadow of a great
rock in a weary land." How few the Christ
is permitted to shape, and oh, how many might
be shaped by that Master hand, if they would.
On the contrary, the manhood that we know
may be strong or it may be weak, but it is
not Divine. You have met only yesterday,
perhaps, a man who could break you, you feel
he could, by the strength of his will, the rug-
gedness and indomitableness of his selfish de-
sire. We know these men in business. Strong,
are they not, strong for evil, sometimes not
knowing it, sometimes altogether indifferent
to it, sometimes deliberately setting about it,
the strong, strong men. You would not call
them noble. You feel sometimes that this Is a
bad world for the weak. You cannot afford to
be weak, for, oddly enough, just such a man
as I have described is the man who gets on

THE SHELTERING MANHOOD 209

easiest. Men let him alone, they are afraid
of him. He is like the rock upon which a ship
might be dashed in a storm and be broken up,
but not the rock under which a man can shelter
and the weary find rest. You may have found
that to your cost. Compare it with the man-
hood of Christ. No, leave it a moment, I will
come back, I will show you how the Christ
would deal with such strength as that. You
have seen the beasts of the field, it may be,
turning on one of their number which has
fallen sick ; they destroy it — a figure of human
life. We trample down the weak. Let it be
understood, let it be even suspected that a man
can be assailed, can be overthrown, and woe
betide him. In your business house, young
man, let it be suspected that you can be
squeezed — permit the word — into the mould
of another man's will, and squeezed you will
be. Let it be understood that you are ready to
take the side of the strong, and upon that side
you will be compelled to go, whether you wish
it or whether you do not. Let it be under-
stood that you are liable to defeat, that your
principles are not strong enough to upbear
you, and you will have tenfold the more bat-
tles to fight than the man who has fought
his battle once for all, and against whom it is

210 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

hopeless for the evil man to fight. What shall
I say about a remedy, a hope, for the man
who feels himself to be weak and finds him-
self on the battlefield exposed against that
which is strong? I will show you. I have
just now promised to do so. Have you ever
seen a man, a real man, against whose char-
acter no reproach could be hurled, who was
guilty of no petty vanity, no sinful pride, no
vainglory, no self-seeking? — ^he is rather a
rara avis, I know^ — may I bring in my friend's
name — one like the minister of Hampstead?
" The shadow of a great rock in a weary land.'*
Bring all your battalions and try what you
can do with such a man.

Let the world's strong man do his worst, I
know a stronger, and he is the spiritual man,
the manhood in which weakness can shelter,
the manhood that is formed in the spirit and
in the image of our blessed Lord, the manhood,
indeed, which is enthroned in the universe,
overlooked and sustained by the manhood of
Jesus Christ. I have met such men, and in
very obscure walks of life, too, and I have seen
evil broken upon them. They have been rocks
like battlements, against which sin has hurled
itself in vain. Belief in Christ involves such
manhood, a manhood that does not trample

THE SHELTERING MANHOOD 211

upon the weak, but a manhood that shelters it,
a manhood that beheves in humanity and will
sacrifice to save it.

I remember when I was in Italy a sight that
moved my English sympathies very much. It
was during the visit of President Loubet to
Rome. In the procession, a military proces-
sion, with dazzling uniforms and military gew-
gaws, I saw one carriage containing a group of
grizzled veterans wearing red shirts. It
flashed upon me at once that these old fellows
must have been the followers of Garibaldi, so
with English audacity I went up and stopped
the carriage and asked them whether it were
so. The old men were pleased. They asked
me what countryman I was, which was not
just obvious at the moment, and I told them.
" Ah," said one of them, " in that trying hour
England was the friend of Garibaldi." Eng-
land was. Why? Because he was a man.
Victor Emmanuel was seated upon the throne
of a united Italy, almost against his will, by a
m^an who knew how to do and dare. While
politicians were scheming and plotting and
hesitating. Garibaldi landed and trusted the
patriotism of his countrymen. These old men
told me they had followed him in all his cam-
paigns, had marched with him to victory, had

212 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

seen Emmanuel crowned first king of modern
Italy. He was only king; their hero, almost
their god, was Garibaldi. The utterance of
his name, the wearing of his uniform, was to
them an incentive to higher manhood, and they
looked men indeed.

Young fellows, I thought about the days
when Garibaldi had fought a battle single-
handed, and such men as these came over to
his side. You have heard, profiably, about
the city in middle Italy which surrendered
without a blow, although its walls had been
manned against him by the Italian soldiers.
They were told to fire on Garibaldi if he and
his redshirts should assault it, and they stood to
their guns all day long waiting for the assault
of the patriot army, prepared to obey orders, no
doubt. Toward evening they saw upon the
horizon a cloud of dust rising. The word was
passed, " It is coming, the army of Garibaldi."
The guns were primed and directed upon the
spot against which the supposed assault would
be made, but no assault came. The cloud of
dust grew no bigger. It came nearer, and the
Italian mercenaries saw that there was only a
carriage drawn by a single horse, and in it
sat a single man. And as it came near the
gates of the Italian town they saw the man rise

THE SHELTERING MANHOOD 213

upon his feet and stand with folded arms, fac-
ing the town that expected the attack. They
had not expected an attack hke that. A shout
broke forth and passed round the walls, *' Gari-
baldi, Garibaldi himself and alone ! " They
knew it was no use resisting such a man as he.
They could fire if they liked, but if they did
they murdered Italy. So the gates were flung
open with cheering and weeping ; they took the
patriot to their hearts. What did it? you say.
A manhood — yes, a manhood with a record.
That man dared in person for his country's
sake, that man had dared many deaths, that
man had put everything on the altar of his
country's good, and they saw it in his scarred
hands and weather-beaten face, and they could
not resist the manhood that hitherto had been
uncrowned, the manhood that now was in their
midst. Almost any other man than Garibaldi
might have risen against those walls, and they
would not have fallen.

I see here a figure, yes, a not unsuitable
figure, of my Master's record, too. Christ is in
heaven, it is true. But once He was on earth
in the flesh; He is on earth in the spirit now.
But when men saw Him some of them jeered
and hooted Him. Some of them added to
His agony on Calvary, some of them repu-

214 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

diated Him out of selfish hate, but some of
them loved Him better than life. They could
not ignore Him. Wherever Jesus v^^ent they
felt there was a man, and that manhood con-
quered when it died. The Cross of Christ it
was that gave the victory. Like Garibaldi,
Jesus has been moving since against the citadel
of a selfish world, and human hearts have been
flung open to Him one by one. But it was be-
cause of the crown of thorns and the pierced
side, it was because of the sufifering manhood
that now we are responding to the glorified
manhood which rules from heaven. That is
the manhood that is making such manhood as
I have been describing to you, " a hiding-place
from the wind and the shadow of a great rock
in a weary land.''

The sentiment of brotherhood is abroad to-
day. Do not believe in any brotherhood which
is not founded upon the manhood of Jesus
Christ. There are other types of manhood
abroad. You know what I mean. There is
the literature of the cynic, the cynic rebuking
sin, the most ghastly spectacle of our time.
There is the literature morally destructive in
tendency, which would break down all the
fabric of historic Christianity, and would
trample upon everything associated with the

THE SHELTERING MANHOOD 215

name of Jesus. I warn you solemnly against
it. Judge ye which is the higher manhood, the
manhood of the cynic, which refuses to believe
in a better day for poor humanity ; the manhood
of the cynic, who repudiates nobleness in any
and every form, or the manhood inspired by
loyalty to Jesus Christ. I want you to be
Christ's men, and I do not think that one should
always plead in vain. Some of these days I ex-
pect to see this fair young manhood, all un-
formed as yet, stand boldly forth for Jesus
Christ. But I would not have you come out to
make an empty profession. It means the living
of a life ; belief in Jesus Christ means that man-
hood will be tested indeed. You go out to be
His ministers in every department where God
has called you and sent you to serve. You
go at your own cost, you go at great risk, you
fight His battles, in His name you do it for
love's sake, and have no hope of reward ex-
cept the Master's " Well done " by and by. But
humanity is longing, sighing, praying. Men are
calling for a higher manhood, the manhood of
Jesus. Oh, show it to them, I beseech you.

" 'Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for ! my flesh
that I seek
In the Godhead ! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it
shall be

216 THE CHOICE OF THE HIGHEST

A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like

to me
Thou Shalt love and be loved by, forever ! A Hand

like this hand
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee ! See

the Christ stand ! "

If a man sets himself to change for the better
any situation, any atmosphere in which he has
to live and to labour, he can do it — he can do
it, and I will tell you why. It is because he
knows what he means, and the man who knows
what he wants and is willing to give himself
for it, is pretty sure to get it. It is also because
he knows he is right. No strength of evil can
contend against the man who knows clearly
what is right and is determined to serve it.

But there are enormous differences nowa-
days between the men whom God is summon-
ing to high service. One rises, another sinks.
Why? It is just faith, the presence or the
absence of faith in the ideal manhood. Try
what faith can do, you who listen to me to-
night— faith in the sheltering manhood of Jesus
Christ. It will make you such as God has
called you to be. Believe it, I entreat you.

** O Lord and Master of us all,
Whate'er our name or sign,
We own Thy sway, we hear Thy call,
We test our lives by Thine."

THE SHELTERING MANHOOD 217

Henry Drummond was fond of telling a story
of a university student who set himself to save
another man. He knew the odds were against
him, but he did it, and the man is living to-day
as a monument of his self-sacrificing work. It
meant being laughed at for his pains, it meant
sitting up at nights and watching for his
drunken friend. It meant testifying for him in
open court even in the presence of those who
once believed in him, but he conquered. It was
worth his while. One kind of manhood was
pitted against another, and the stronger con-
quered because the more Divine.

Oh, young men, you might be such. Yours
can either be the manhood that leans or the
manhood that stands; the manhood that is
pitied or the manhood that has some pity to
spare for others. Which shall it be? The
manhood of Christ, that, that and nothing less.
" A man shall be as a hiding-place from the
wind and the shadow of a great rock in a
weary land.''

THE END

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