Earthly discords and how to heal them

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Earthly Discords, and How to
Heal Them

Earthly Discords, and
How to Heal Them

By

Malcolm James McLeod

Author of " Heavenly Harmonies for Earthly Living *'

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Chicago New York Toronto

Fleming H. Revell Company

LONDON AND EDINBURGH
MCMIII

SO-

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PUBLIC L

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TlLOLN FOU.NOAI IONS

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Copyright, 1903

By FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

March

CHICAGO: 63 WASHINGTON STREET
NEW YORK: 158 EIFTH AVENUE
TORONTO: 27 RICHMOND STREET, W.
LONDON : 21 PATERNOSTER SQUARE
EDINBURGH : 30 ST. MARY STREET

TO HER WHO FIRST TAUGHT ME HOW

TO HEAL LIFE'S DISCORDS, AND WHOSE OWN LIFE

IS A HEAVENLY HARMONY —

MY MOTHER

Education, Legislation, Reforma-
tion, Regeneration.

CHAPTER I.

Education, Legislation, Reforma-
tion, Regeneration; or, The Col-
lege, the Congress, the Club, the
Church.

Ours is admittedly an age of denial, but
one truth shines out so bold, so clear, so evi-
dent, that no rash doubter has ever had the
front to challenge it — there is such a thing as
sin, and this world is full of it. When some
one asked Rowland Hill if he believed in a
personal devil, the famous preacher is reported
to have said, with characteristic bluntness,
"A personal devil? Madam, he has branch
establishments here in Somerset!" Foolish
to quarrel with those holy men of old when
they say, "I was born in sin and shapen in
iniquity." "The heart is deceitful above all
things, and desperately wicked. ' '

With the commentator we may quarrel if
v/e feel so affected, but with the text it is, to
say the least, not wise, especially when the
conscience of the race answers to it. The
Bible is an honest book. Never does it flat-
ii

Earthly Discords/*

ter, never does it hold out false hopes of ref-
uge, never raise any vain alarm. It states
the simple facts. From first to last it is a
picture of human weakness, human woe. It
paints all the wrinkles and the blemishes.
Depravity is written on every page — idolatry,
hypocrisy, lust, shame, guilt, tears, blood — and
whether we be pre-millenarians or post, one
thing is certain, the battle is raging, the darkness
is dense, and morning seemeth not yet at hand.
Some there are who waste their precious
hours of thought and labor discussing the ques-
tion how sin entered into the world, how it
came to have so dire and dreadful a dominion.
Never once, let it be noted, does Inspiration
handle that vexed and vexing question. It
occupies just one chapter trying to tell us,
and that chapter is so flexible as to worry defi-
nition; and the other eleven hundred and
eighty-six are concerned with how to get it
out. How to overthrow the ruling dynasty!
Be that, then, the subject of our paper! Not
how did the Evil Spirit enter, how rather may
the Demon be thrust out.

All society is on the march toward a city
called happiness, and to the earnest leaders
12

Education, Legislation, Reformation.

of progress four lines of travel suggest them-
selves. Some there are who would guide us
up along the pathway to the college fountain,
education being their watchword. This is the
favorite approach of the rationalistic school of
thinkers. "Give us better schools, better
academies, better institutions of learning,"
they cry. "Instead of putting off the old
man dress him up and send him away to col-
lege," was the stinging thrust of Dean Swift.
The culture of the heart for holiness can be
had, we are told, in much the same way as
the culture of the taste for the beautiful.
When the wardens of our prisons convey to
us the sad intelligence that the majority of
their inmates can neither read nor write,
"surely indeed, " we exclaim, "ignorance is
the mother of crime!" Furthermore, as the
delicate laws of living have been mastered the
average length of life has grown. With a
more perfect knowledge of the human anatomy
comes a longer lease for the race, and we are
being informed that the same is possible in the
sphere of morals. Let the church discontinue
the sending of missionaries to the Dark Con-
tinent. A railroad after the idea of some
Cecil Rhodes will show larger and better re-

i3

Earthly Discords.

turns. Inform man's intellect and he will
not be slow himself to soon reform his heart.

This is the theory that to-day obtains a
wide and patient hearing at the judgment bar
of many cultured thinkers. And it is not new
nor strange; it has numbered its advocates
indeed ever since the days of the Renaissance.
With the encyclopsedists it was a living ques-
tion. Perhaps no one name is more familiar
along this line of travel than that of Rousseau.
His first literary venture, it will be remem-
bered, was when he undertook to compete for
a prize offered by the Academy of Dijon for
the best dissertation on the subject, ''Whether
the progress of the sciences and of letters
has tended to corrupt or elevate the morals of
mankind," in the which he condemned civili-
zation most severely. The ideas expressed
thirteen years later in his last work, ' ' Emile, ' '
showed no change, and for these he suffered
exile.

"Emile" is really a treatise on education
in the guise of fiction, its teaching being that
civilization brings with it moral decline, that
only as man comes naked from the hand of
nature is he truly happy, in proof of which

H

Education, Legislation, Reformation.

he calls up the great kingdoms of the past,
showing how Athens was morally on a lower
level than Sparta, "how astronomy has been
the source of superstition, ethics of self-
esteem, and how the study of the arts has
given birth to a lazy luxury."

One criticism we feel ever warranted in
pressing against our time is its tendency to
bravado. We so boast about our glorious
age and its achievements! But surely there
can be little doubt that in architecture, sculp-
ture, art, law, government, and philosophy
the scholars and specialists of Greece and
Rome were our masters. Some one notes
how the world to-day has not a single phil-
osopher to compare with Aristotle, not an
orator to rival Demosthenes or Cicero, not a
poet to class with Homer or Virgil, no his-
torian to compete with Tacitus or Herodotus.
Scholars indeed tell us that the world's four
greatest historians are Herodotus, Thucydides,
Tacitus, and Gibbon, of whom but one be-
longs to modern times. Little question that
the tragedies of Sophocles are the most per-
fect in literature; and in the realm of comedy
who disputes the empire of Aristophanes? In

J5

Earthly Discords.

satire Juvenal, in dramatic power Plautus,
reign supreme. Beginning with Solon and
Sappho, who come upon the stage about 600
B. C, and traveling down a stretch of three
hundred years or so along the shores of Pelo-
ponnesus, what a list of worthies one salutes
by the way!

Here are ^Eschylus, ^Eschines, Anacreon,
Aristides, Anaxagoras, Euripides, Epicurus,
Empedocles, Isocrates, Lysias, Lycurgus,
Xenophon, Parmenides, Pindar, Simonides
Pythagoras, Plautus, Socrates, Thales,
Terence, Zeno, Euclid, not forgetting to add
the greatest of them all, Plato, who was born
the year that Pericles died. Now, without
purposing to follow Rousseau in his sweeping
censure, yet the startling fact abides unchal-
lenged, that this golden age of learning was
the most corrupt age that the brave little
peninsula had ever witnessed. Corinth, her
center of art and literature and commerce, was
a very Babylon of iniquity. Likewise Athens!
And Egypt and Rome repeat the same sad,
shameful story. How any honest student of
history can advance education as a cure for
life's ills were passing strange and puzzling
in the light of Egypt and Greece and Rome.
16

Education, Legislation, Reformation.

One of the interesting studies in nature is
her trick of opposites. If her ocean can ter-
rify it can also transport, and for every poet
that writes of her rage another notes her re-
pose. The fires that warm our dwellings
burn down our cities, and the winds that waft
the welcome odors of lake and mountain hesi-
tate not to mow down trees and crops and
temples. Vinegar and sugar are composed
of the same ingredients, yet the one is sweet,
the other sour. The same elements that pro-
duce tea also produce strychnine, and the
plant that furnishes food not infrequently
distils poison. Singular soil! Just as willing
to furnish the drug that deadens as the fruit
that delights, like the noted French criminal,
Marie D'Aubray, who was the nurse and the
anathema of her children. A similar contra-
diction repeats itself in man's career; his vir-
tue being the other side of his vice. Love
let loose becomes lust. As the wheat and
corn of the Kansas prairies fill the granaries
of the nation and also the intoxicating cup
that steals the brain, the honor, and the good
name, just so do eating and drinking often-
times serve the double end of ennobling the
body and debasing it. Even waiting on the
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Earthly Discords.

Lord may close in indolence. For alas! all
things have their use and abuse.

How clearly and unmistakably this dual
outcome may be read in the history of those
drilled in the learning of the schools! As the
fertility of the soil is sometimes its embarrass-
ment, causing the weeds and grasses to crowd
out the rich grain, so the trained mind may
be fertile to invent evil rather than good.
Some years ago a Boston jury was struck
with wonder at the bold oath of a noted
criminal, who declared on the witness-stand
that he had spent five years in a great school
of science studying mechanics, and all for the
sole purpose of breaking into a certain New
England bank. Who of us can read the life
of an Aaron Burr or Benedict Arnold and not
feel that one of the grave dangers threatening
our country's future is educated treachery?
Less than a decade of years ago a man was
convicted in the courts of Philadelphia, whose
life of shame and crime the police admit to
be without a parallel in the records of the
Rogue's Gallery. This evil genius was a col-
lege graduate, a doctor of medicine, and a
post-graduate at Ann Arbor. He could com-
mit a crime so cleverly and cover up his tracks
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Education, Legislation, Reformation.

so dexterously as for years to baffle detection.
He was tried and found guilty of arson,
forgery, bigamy, note-raising, and the death
of more than half a dozen of his fellow-crea-
tures. So accomplished was he in the slaking
of his thirst for bloodshed that he slipped the
authorities of almost every state in the union!
Surely it were not difficult to see how this
man's college diploma but served to sharpen
his weapons, and make him all the more
dangerous a disciple of Bakunin and Proudhon.
For knowledge is power, but a power for
evil as truly as for good. Does not Milton
make Lucifer use his knowledge for nothing
but evil? A man's genius may be a genius
for infamy. The sharper the blade the more
dangerous the dagger. The history of the
world is an open commentary on the fact that
along with the culture of the mind must go
the culture of the conscience. If education
could save the world, then it ought to be true
that the greatest intellects shine for very
beauty of holiness and soul-loveliness. But
alas! how not infrequently our study hastens
us to confess the very converse. Instance
Goethe, who has been called "the most splen-
did specimen of culture ever presented to the

l9

Earthly Discords.

world." Poet was he, geologist, anatomist,
osteologist, florist, philosopher. His inquiries
into the nature of light would have been re-
spectable had he confined himself to this
branch of research alone. He is the apostle
of self-culture. Scarcely any department of
science or letters on which he was not an
authority! But how far short this great name
from our ideal of the true man! How selfish!
How unworthy to woman! How impure the
atmosphere of his study! How lacking
Weimar in the spirit of a true home!

When our missionaries first went to labor
among the Indians of Upper Canada, the
effort was made to coax them to a higher
plane by the culture of the sense of taste.
Homes were built, schools opened, farms fur-
nished. The attempt was essayed to make
them discontented with their habits of living
by an appeal to the aesthetic. But after years
of trial the endeavor failed. The Indian went
back to his wigwam, and raw flesh, and robe
of skin, and tent of twig and bark, and
blanket.

Dr. Edward Everett Hale, writing recently
on the duties of the twentieth century, men-
tioned (i) a four-track railroad from Labrador
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Education, Legislation, Reformation.

to Patagonia; (2) the construction of a similar
road across Europe and Asia, with a branch
line to Odessa; (3) the laying of another great
highway from the Mediterranean to the Cape
of Good Hope in pursuance of Cecil Rhodes's
plan. What a contrast to this are the words
of Cardinal Newman, "The Church would
rather save the soul of one poor, whining beg-
gar of Naples or one poor brigand of Palermo
than cover Italy with railways from Piedmont
to Calabria. ' ' The author of ' ' In His Steps' '
has recently written a magazine article which
some of us cannot help feeling is in close
touch with the truth. He describes the im-
pressions of a visit to his alma mater. He
notes the elegance, the luxury, in contrast to
the simplicity of former years. And he re-
turns with the faith forcing itself upon his
heart that we have not gained in power but in
things, and he fears the future is in danger of
becoming an "educated paganism, a cultured
heathenism, that will lose its sense of spiritual
ideals."

Others there are — and they form a com-
pany quite considerable — whose claim is that
the world to-day needs nothing so much as

21

Earthly Discords.

righteous legislation. These are they who
hope to save society by legal enactment, be-
lieving that an iron railing at the top of the
precipice is better than a line of fully equipped
hospitals at the bottom. They would give us
laws against the liquor traffic; laws against
the gambling hazard, which is more conta-
gious than plague, more infectious than fever;
laws to cleanse our streets against the social
evil; ordinances checking the growing disre-
gard for the Sabbath; and in every line would
make difficult the doing of wrong and easy
the effecting of right.

In the ward better aldermen, in the city
better councilmen, in the state better repre-
sentatives, in the executive a higher type of
Christian citizenship who would see that laws
were first enacted then enforced, for force is
the watchword of this salvation army. If the
criticism be valid, that the penitentiary rarely
turns out penitents, and so becomes misleading
in its inference, just so these champions of
the legislative hall believe in prevention as the
most direct footpath to another golden age.
Love failing to make life more lovely, let law
make it less lawless. This is the cry of the
new democracy; not saved souls so much as
22

Education, Legislation, Reformation.

a wholesome sentiment in which a true Chris-
tian ethic is applied to commerce, politics,
the school, the home, the mine, the farm, the
factory. For it is still true that the million-
aire-sweater lives in a mansion while his
workmen-slaves die in garrets; still true
that female poverty is sometimes compelled
to sell her virtue for bread; still true that
hard-hearted monopoly grinds as never before
the face of toil; still true that abject yet pre-
ventive misery abounds. When we are re-
minded of the fact that during the first six
months of this current year, England has
shipped more opium to China than in any
previous six months since, in 1776, the East
India Company took the commerce of the
deadly drug under its control, and also more
missionaries to fill the gaps made by our
lamented martyrs, and open new strategic
points, we are reminded of that story in
Dante's great epic in which a man in the
lower regions is busy weaving for himself a
long rope of hay with which he means to pur-
chase liberty, but for every strand he finishes,
a herd of oxen hidden behind a wall are eating
up the other end of the juicy hemp with a
joyful and contented relish. Thus does the

23

Earthly Discords.

church weave ropes of salvation for other
appetites to feed and fatten upon.

The trouble with all branches of legislative
reform is that they lessen evil without abolish-
ing it. They minimize, but do not abrogate.
"The law is weak thro' the flesh." It is but
a schoolmaster. As the teacher cannot make
scholars, no more can the law make saints.
The humorist noted that "Going to law for
salvation was like going to hell for justice."
And perhaps the best answer to all theorists
of this school is found in another glance at a
well-known page of history. It is an estab-
lished fact, to which our attention is called by
such names as Hallam, Hume, Green,
Froude, and Lecky, that the early part of the
eighteenth century was the most corrupt
period in the whole sweep of English history.

The leaves of these authors are black and
bloodstained with shocking tales of crime and
cruelty. Never was society so profligate,
never was there such a low tone to public and
private life, never were the clergy so openly
immoral, for Puritanism had toppled over in
a crash followed by a reaction that left the
church cold and lifeless. To so low a plane
indeed had everything fallen that in despair a
24

Education, Legislation, Reformation.

society was formed clamoring for the laws.
It was entitled the "Society for the Promo-
tion of Public Morals. ' ' Lecky tells us that,
"Ina few years one hundred thousand convic-
tions were obtained in London and Westmin-
ster for public debauchery and profanity; the
openly vicious were made to feel the scourge
of the law; a special corps of detectives with
a police force was organized to stem the tide
of murder and license that reigned throughout
the kingdom." But so barren of any whole-
some results were the efforts made, and such
was the disinterestedness of the church, that
the society died off for lack of funds, and on
its grave arose a great spiritual awakening
under Wesley and Whitefield. Sadly indeed
must it be confessed that legislation is no
remedy. In its essence legislation is destruct-
ive. It can restrain but not cure, help but
not heal. This is a blunder the Church has
been making all adown the ages. All forms
of persecution are an attempt to cure the
world by legislation. This was the mistake
of the French Revolution and the Spanish
Inquisition. Under Torquemada, nine thou-
sand men and women were burned at the
stake. But the fruits of the Spirit cannot be

25

Earthly Discords/

developed by any forcing process any more
than the flowers of the hillside can be made
to respond to the noise of the cannon or the
blare of the battleship. These hinder rather
than help. When the air gets warm and
genial then nature will not be slow to deck
herself in all her rich and varied loveliness,
and this comes only with the circling summer.
Just so the winter of persecution has but
served to delay the coming of that good time
when the "lion shall lie down with the lamb,
when there shall be nothing to hurt or to de-
stroy in all God's holy mountain."

Perhaps the most popular preacher of the
age is the reformer; provided, of course, he
comes to do his work through human agency.
Reformers of the Luther type, the Savonarola
type, are not so welcome. The reformer
sent of God is stoned and scourged, but sent
of man he is banqueted and wreathed and
heaped with flatteries. The craze of the
hour is social philanthropy. Even foreign
missions are most acceptable to the average
Christian when it can be shown that they are
working along the lines of culture and the
commercial return. Not that these things
26

Education, Legislation, Reformation.

should discourage us, for their final aim is
admirable. There can be little doubt that
morality would save the world if only it could
be had; so each age asks despairingly the
question, "How can it be had?" In tropical
countries a wood-worm, called the termite,
works its way into furniture and eats up the
inside tissues, converting it into a shell which
collapses to the touch. In the Island of Cuba
the native shows a tree that looks fair and
beautiful to the eye. Giving it a blow with
the axe it topples over, filling the air with a
fine, white powder, the secret being that a
tiny insect eats its way into the fiber and
turns the beautiful tree into a mummy of
bandaged dust. The trouble with all the
many types of human reform is that they take
no account of the enemy that builds his nest
deep down in the inward parts. They are the
old attempt to "improve the music by deco-
rating the pipes, to purify the water by white-
washing the pump. " When Coleridge threw
a bit of thistle down into the air he cried,
"The tendency of this is toward China, but
we know it will never reach there."

And the tendency of many an amendment
suggested to-day is toward goodness, but they
27

Earthly Discords.

lack the dynamic. Surely it is a noble thing
to polish life's externals, to uplift and gladden
the lives of the poor, to cultivate in them a
sense of self-respect, to educate their families
and give them beautiful homes, with art and
taste expressing itself at every turn. But if
the cleavage of the soul from God is left un-
closed, if the sin of yesterday is left unpar-
doned, if the heart remains uncleansed, how
unsatisfying the work! how the real trouble
is left untouched!

Dr. Abbot is fond of saying that there is
a wide difference between a green apple and
the apple with a worm in it. ' ' The one needs
sunshine, the other calls for a knife. ' ' Mor-
tification asks not salve but a surgeon.
Decay must be uprooted. "If thine eye
offend thee pluck it out; thy hand, cut it off. ' '
"The oil comes after the arrow, the bandage
after the wound. ' '

Mr. Sheldon has written for us a story
which he very fittingly names "The Cruci-
fixion of Philip Strong." The hero of the
story is a strong man — strong in name and
nature — a clergyman who starts out to re-
deem his parish and who of course is cruci-
28

Education, Legislation, Reformation.

fied. He takes the burden of its sorrows
upon his heart, its sins upon his soul, and
through very weight of sympathy the life is
crushed out. But this way lies hope. This
must ever be the story of redemption. This
is the gospel of the God-man. "He bare our
sins in his own body on the tree." Interest-
ing that the word bless and the word blood
have the same root. Not until we share our
very life can we be a blessing to our brother.
This it is that constitutes the attractive power
of Calvary.

If Jesus must needs suffer can we hope to
be immune? Nay indeed, not so! The rather
are we "buried with him by baptism into
death; that like as Christ was raised up from
the dead by the glory of the Father, even so
we also should walk in newness of life."

In Kaulbach's famous picture of the refor-
mation Luther is the central figure. He holds
an open Bible in his outstretched hand, while
grouped around are seen the scientists, states-
men, scholars, and thinkers of the age. The
portrait is true to life. To-day the standing
of a people. in the column of culture depends
on its attitude to the Book. Where this Book
has gone and is untrammeled, there the light
29

Earthly Discords.

of Civilization shines, there education is at its
highest, and legislation at its best. The Bible
is the true reformer. Its remedy is deep; its
appeal to the heart; its ultimatum "Ye must
be born again. ' ' In the law library we find
crime discussed, in the treatise on morality we
learn of vice, but when we would acquaint our
lips with the word ' 'sin, ' ' then we must needs
return to the Book. Here we learn the tear-
ful tragedy that sin's home is in the heart-,
that it is an intruder, a usurper; that if we
would have the enemy cast out and crushed,
the strong man must be bound by a stronger,
ejected, and forthwith the temple cleansed.

Some years ago a scientist advanced the
theory that the first living protoplasm from
which have evolved all forms of life on our
earth was carried hither by some falling
meteor on its wild uncertain flight. This
may be reckless science, but in the spiritual
life of man it is the glad evangel of our holy
faith. From without and above — not from
within and below — must come all spiritual
vitality and power. The gospel is not a de-
velopment, not a resultant of human research.
As yet nothing has ever been found in con-
temporaneous literature to correspond to the

3o

Education, Legislation, Reformation.

doctrine of the new birth. An outburst was
it upon the world from without, not an offshoot
from within. In Jesus Christ a new word of
truth came down to us from heaven. Man
did not create it. It was revelation, not evo-
lution. "Jesus Christ is the branch of
prophecy engrafted on the old stock of fallen
humanity. ' '

And so we reach the conclusion of our
study. Education has done much to cheer
the fainting pilgrim on the march; legislation
has leveled the hills not a little and eased the
journey; reformation has made him physically
fitter against the taxings of the some time
steep ascent. Yet show I unto you a more
excellent way, more excellent because more
radical and more complete, "the way taught
not by learning but by unction, not by science
but by conscience." Not education, not
legislation, not reformation, but regeneration
through the blood; not the college, not the
congress, not the club, but the church, which
He hath purchased by His own passion, is
the hope of society and the race.

3i

The Discord of Sin.

CHAPTER II.
The Discord of Sin.

Sin is of course the great controlling dis-
cord of life, one strife but many sounds, one
variance but many voices, disturbing all peace,
destroying all music. For the "whole crea-
tion groaneth and travaileth in pain/' and
because of sin. No secret place has yet been
found where sin is not. The poison pervades
all hearts, pollutes all fellowship. Lingering
long in life's garden one notes how a worm is
seen in every apple, a blight on every berry.
"For alas! sin hath entered into the world and
death by sin. ' '

At the outset it may be well to get a clear
and searching grasp of what sin really is, be-
cause much of the loose and ragged thinking
on the subject to-day is due to vague and slip-
shod definition. We hear much, for instance,
about the spirit of the age. Some there are
who claim that said spirit is commercial, its
tone metallic, and to this they would attribute
all our troubles. Others hold that we are

35

Earthly Discords.

living in a transition period, that is in the act
of shifting its emphasis from eternity back to
time, and this they would push forward as the
source of all our social and spiritual unrest.
These things no doubt are true, but there
seems a deeper truth beneath. We are living
in an age that is losing its sense of the ex-
ceeding sinfulness of sin, an age that argues
for toning down the loud and glaring colors
in which our fathers pictured it, softening its
uglier features, and making attractive the
intruder and enemy of all peace. Sin, alas,
is laughed at.

We write sweet music to the tragic song —
light, flippant airs. This is the pitiful accom-
paniment. Hardly a novel in which it is
not treated as a joke, a witticism, something
ludicrous! We throw a glamour of loveliness
around it, instead of regarding it in its true
and lurid light as the fen which is the foun-
tain of all tears, the well-spring of all woe,
the root of all bitterness and sorrow.

What, then, is sin? What saith the voice
of Revelation? In allegory the inspired
writer causeth it to pass before our eye in the
similitude of a serpent, sly, insidious, veno-

36

The Discord of Sin.

mous, like the fabled monster of Greek
mythology — one life but hydra-headed. The
Apostle John in his first epistle writes, "Who-
soever committeth sin transgresseth also the
law, for sin is the transgression of the law";
or, as the Revised Version more correctly
translates, "for sin is lawlessness." Sin 'is
lawlessness. Let the word be written in let-
ters of fire, lawlessness — missing the mark,
failing to reach the ideal of God's perfect
righteousness. Whether such failure be in-
tentional or no does not matter; this does not
enter into the equation. No exceptions are
noted. Every time we fail to fulfil the divine
ideal set forth for us, it is sin. What a
searching, sweeping, startling thought is this!
How can we make light of it! How can any
redeemed child claim to live a perfect life!
How can we hope for acceptance without His
atoning blood and pardoning grace and daily
cleansing! Surely our very best falls short of
the mark, our very perfection must be failure!
Sin, then, be it established firmly, is not igno-
rance; not even an act; it is a condition — a
condition of lawlessness — a state of insurrec-
tion against the government of the Most High,
an attitude of disobedience to His will. The

37

Earthly Discords.

law says something is permissible and proper
if gained in a certain way. That way is laid
down for us in Revelation and in the nature
of man. But it is so much easier to get it in
another way. Here is the genesis of all sin,
wishing to be one's own master. Desire
gratified by the transgression of — the step-
ping across — the King's law and in a path
forbidden, this is sin. Striving to secure
what may be a perfectly lawful prize but
striving to secure it in an unlawful way; i. e.,
in a way different from the way marked out
at the Court of Heaven; trying to secure it
in our way, the way that suits our will the best;
this is the lawlessness of the human heart;
this is sin in its wide generic sense. "For
we have turned every one to his own way, and
the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity" —
the perverseness literally — "of us all."

The way of the transgressor is rough and
hard and toilsome, and it may give a clearer
outlook if from some upper window we view
the journey in its three successive stages: sin
is selfishness; sin is solitude; sin is suicide.
One road but three sections. Starting out as
selfishness, it runs into solitude and terminates
in suicide.

38

The Discord of Sin.

I. Sin is selfishness. The Westminster
divines defined sin as "any want of conform-
ity unto or transgression of the law of God";
and as the law of God is love, sin in its last
analysis would be any infraction of the law of
love. The drunkard who robs wife and child
of life's first needs for a base gratification and
momentary, is essentially a selfish man. The
thief who reaches out and grasps a brother's
purse confesses himself thereby a base, un-
generous creature. The man who works the
Sabbath and steals from God is surely not
less free from blame. The libertine who
leads aside the daughter of innocence for a
breath's brutal delight is of all things selfish.
The money grubber who crushes his fellow-
man; the proud lord who spurns him; the
society lady of a false and superficial culture
who slights her sister on the street; the
woman who lives for pleasure; and the man
whose God is gold — all are self-centered crea-
tures; all shut their eyes to the interest and
welfare of their neighbor as announced in the
Good Samaritan story. Each transgression
of the Commandments is at heart self-seeking.
Whether the breach be a violation of the first
law of worship, or the last law of covetous-

39

Earthly Discords.

ness, or the Christ-supplement of love and
kindness, self is the spur at the start, self is
the root-trouble.

2. And selfishness results in solitude. Of
necessity the selfish life becomes a lonely life,
because no happy companionship can be with-
out a kindly regard for others.

"No one liveth unto himself and no one
dieth unto himself. ' ' None standeth separate
and apart. Neither in life nor in death are
we alone. We all lean largely, heavily, on our
fellows. He who lives for others will have
friends, but he who lives for himself must not
complain when he finds the world forsaking
him. If a home would be truly happy, hus-
band and wife must needs live for each other.
For the moment each begins to live for self,
that moment there arises misunderstanding,
division, separation, discord. And so the
cleavage widens till each eventually lives alone,
till no longer is there any community of inter-
est or sympathy of spirit, but estrangement
rather and loss of felicity and virtue, for "he
that saveth his life shall lose it, while he that
loseth his life for my sake and the gospel's
the same shall find it."
40

The Discord of Sin.

Solitude, furtnermore, is swift punishment
to the soul's peace. When in the Reign of
Terror prisoners were cast into dungeons,
many went mad through torture from the
aloneness. Not infrequently would they
scream at the bars to passers by. For the
instinct of humanity craves comradeship.
The very cattle go in herds, the fishes in
shoals, the bees in swarms, the quails in
coveys. Nothing is more unnatural than a
hermit. "Hard to spin our own top, to light
our own lethargy," was a fond saying of
Emerson. "A scholar is a candle which
humanity kindles."

We read of Judas that after the supper
was ended and the betrayal foretold "he
went immediately out and it was night."
He went out. Out, note! He went out into
exile, out into solitariness, out to suffer the
evil companionship of his own heart, and the
evangelist adds, with a touch of insight, "it
was night." Alas, 'tis always night when
we go out from friends and fellowship, the
soul's eclipse when it turns deaf ears to the
overtures of ' ' Love that will not let us go, ' '
blackest midnight when our Father veils his
face:

41

Earthly Discords.

"Our midnight is thy smile withdrawn,
Our noontide is thy gracious dawn;
Star of our hope, thy softened light
Cheers the long watches of the night."

Christ Jesus is the Sun of Righteousness,
the Light of the World. When his face is
hidden, how hopeless and dark the night!
For just as surely as "earthquakes develop
cowards and war makes heroes," so surely
does selfishness beget solitude and shadow.

Professor Selby, in the Journal of Forestry,
tells us that when the Lebanon cedar gets a
start in the young forest it crowds out all
other types of sylvan life. No spruce or fir
or hemlock can be found; no fern or flower
or foliage can find welcome; no shrub or stock
or herb or creeper; no maple or chestnut
spread their tints to the autumn tourist or drop
their nuts for the squirrel and the chickaree.
Cedar has the sole monopoly. The bark is
the bark of the cedar, the resin is the resin of
the cedar, the odor is the odor of the cedar.
All is loneliness but for the cedar. How
selfish is our Damascus friend! Just so
does sin crowd out all loveliness from the soul,
and turn life's garden into a waste, into a
sameness, where self becomes the sole in-

42

The Discord of Sin.

habitant, the one tenant of the spiritual
temple.

Perhaps the saddest words that fell from
the Master's lips are in his portrayal of the
final reckoning: "Depart from me." The
words describe departure from truth, depart-
ure from home, from father and mother and
family and friend, departure from the soul's
first love, departure into the far country,
departure into the blackness of darkness for-
ever.

3. And the end of the road is suicide, self-
destruction, for "The wages of sin is death."
Sin is a boomerang; it recoils. Every time
we sin we injure others, but ourselves we
injure the most. Some one has noted that a
handsome face is never seen in jail, thus
denoting that indulgence puts a twist in the
eye and a cloud on the brow and a stumble in
the step and a coarseness into the facial tissue,
and forever mars the beauty of the body.
Selfishness somehow steals a luster from the
life, and one feels that a glory hath passed
away. All sin degrades the body, unnerves
the mind, indurates the conscience, weakens
the will, clouds the reason, dulls the edge of

43

Earthly Discords.

moral discernment, and eventually slays the
soul, for be it repeated over and over, "The
wages of sin is death. ' ' Ever careful are we
to caution our youth on the penalties of sin,
but objectively, socially, financially. We
speak about the poor-house, the hospital, the
asylum, the prison, the cell, the collar, the
shackle. The drunkard we track to his den
of poverty where we pause and listen to the
cries of his hungry children; we point out
his neglected grave; we say, "Mark, my
child, this spot, for though poets have sung
many a sweet strain over the shroud of the
soldier, no poet has ever had the courage to
lay a laurel here." The footstep of the fugi-
tive we follow as it bends over some "Bridge
of Sighs" with its sorrowful reminder, "The
way of the transgressor is hard. ' ' The course
of the sensualist we watch as it presses hard
upon the pest-house. The highway of the
assassin leads us to the prison bars or the
morgue. Till we exclaim at last, ' ' How expen-
sive must all wrong-doing be! Surely it must
be that sobriety alone is profitable, that only
purity pays!" But these things are trivial
compared with the real mischief. This is
only damaging the frame of the picture; this

44

The Discord of Sin.

only concerns the spoiling of the cabinet; it
does not touch the jewelry within. The real
havoc is the rebound. Keep your eye shut
long enough and blindness will follow. Not
less easily darkened, surely, is spiritual vision.
The kick of the rifle is worse than its forward
impulse. "He that sinneth against me, ' ' saith
scripture, "wrongeth his own soul." The
reaction of sin upon the sinner is the real
ravage. The great and fearful loss is the loss
sustained by the immortal nature. Sin sears
the sensitiveness of conscience, hardens the
heart's finest emotions and instincts, stains
the delicate beauty of the affections, puts us
out of touch with spiritual impressions, and
steals from life its glory, its music, its joy.

In our childhood we were thrilled with the
old tale of Jack the Giant Killer. With eyes
wide open we followed him up his long ladder
to the moon and laughed and cried and paled
and trembled, for there he met a giant of
titanic build, whose custom was to gobble up
all foreign intruders. When the giant under-
took to seize Jack, the wily lad laid a trap by
which the giant tumbled headlong earthwards
and was dashed into divers pieces. Thus

45

Earthly Discords.

does the old amusing legend teach a great
moral truth, that all sin is retroactive and
strikes home.

Homer gives his enchantress the power to
change men into swine, but in order to accom-
plish the metamorphosis men must first make
swine of themselves by drunkenness and in-
dulgence. The author of the great immortal
allegory tells us how once in a dream he
thought himself a hare with the hounds in hot
pursuit. So real was the chase that he could
smell the bark of the hemlock and feel the
sting of the briar and the brushwood. Closer
and closer they drew till their hot breath
touched him. And when he awoke on the
summit of a rocky cliff, far, far from the
green wheat fields, it was to find that the
hounds were his sins and he a flying soul.
How true the dream to life! It is the fashion
of sin to run its victim to earth on the top of
some lonely solitude or in the depths of some
dark defile where help is helpless to extend its
human reach. For all sin travels to a city
called Sorrow. Wind and tide, sail and cur-
rent, but hurry the foolish youth to his haven
of tears. Agrippina puts her husband to
death to enthrone her son Nero, and what

46

The Discord of Sin.

does Nero do to hold his throne but put
Agrippina to death. This is sin's never-fail-
ing programme. Benaiah slays the Egyptian
with his own spear. Each thief steals from
himself. Each murderer takes his own life.
"Put a fetter on the foot of a slave," says
Emerson, "and the other end fastens around
your own. ' '

The historian tells us that "when Spain
kindled the fires of the auto de fe and
stretched victims on the rack, those fires
sucked up the blood of her own heart, and
through the mutilating and mangling of other
limbs she herself has never since walked
erect. ' ' For the word of the Lord abideth
forever, and this is the word that is preached
unto us, that self-destruction is sin's shadow,
sin's rebound.

Some years ago there was a little Sunday
school book published, and the pith of the
story was as follows: A father comes home
tired and careworn in the evening from his
day's work. He takes his little boy, kisses
him, plants him on his knee, and begins tell-
ing him a story. The story is made up as
the father goes along, and the little fellow,
getting impatient with its length, looks up into

47

Earthly Discords.

the father's face and says, "Papa, how did it
all turn out in the end?" The father pays no
attention, but goes on absorbed even more
than ever in the tale he is concocting. At
last the little fellow gets so worked up that he
cannot endure it any longer, and so exclaims,
"Papa, I can't wait! Do tell me how did it all
turn out in the end?" Let us then see how
it all turns out in the end. There are two
immortal creations in literature that show sin
and its workings from the angle we are stand-
ing. The one portrays the selfishness and
consequent solitariness of sin; the other tracks
the victim to his natural end and sees the play
out. Dickens's story of Scrooge is a Christ-
mas story. Scrooge is the arch-miser of litera-
ture, the Shylock of romance — hard as steel,
keen as a surgeon's blade, disagreeable in
every way to run up against as a cactus plant.
The grasping greed of the man wrinkled his
face, bent his form, pointed his nose, reddened
his eye, lent a squeak to his voice, and a line
or two to his lean, lanky fingers. No biting
blast bitterer than he, no frost more cruel or
inconsiderate! Even the dogs appeared to
know him, and would cross the street to avoid
the glance of his ugly eye or the crack of his

48

The Discord of Sin.

hard, knotty cane. The story commences on
a clear, cold Christmas eve, and the author
takes us to a cheerless, dingy office, where
Scrooge and his clerk sit shivering counting
shekels. "Merry Christmas, Uncle!" cried
a cheerful voice at the door. "Bah!" said
Scrooge, "Humbug with your Merry Christ-
mas! What's Christmas but a time for paying
bills without money, a time to find yourself
a year older, not an hour richer? If I could
work my will every idiot who goes about with
Merry Christmas on his tongue should be
boiled with his own pudding and buried with
a stake of holly through his heart. To bed-
lam with Christmas man, go home."

In order to make vivid to us the loneliness
of the life the miser lived, the author next
takes us to his humble home, which was a
room in a back alley and up a flight of stairs
over a wine-merchant's cellar. The hall was
dark, for Scrooge loved darkness, being
cheap, so up he stumbles with a dimly lighted
candle in hand, double bolts his door, and sits
down before the grate to prepare his evening
gruel. Suddenly the ghost of his old partner
— seven years dead — appears before him,
Jacob Marley; same face, the very same

49

Earthly Discords.

usual waistcoat tights and boots. The chain
he drew was clasped about his waist and
dangled behind him like a tail. It was made
of cash boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds,
and ponderous purses wrought in steel.

"You are fettered," ventured Scrooge,
trembling all over.

"I wear the chain I forged in life," re-
plied the ghost. "I made it link by link, and
yard by yard. Is its pattern strange to you?"
Scrooge trembled to his toes.

"Perhaps you do not know," continued
the ghost, "that you carry a coil yourself. It
was full as heavy as this seven Christmas eves
ago. You have labored on it since. Its
links are large and lusty to-day. ' '

Dickens never tires telling us that sin is
selfishness, and the solitude of Ebenezer
Scrooge is a perpetual warning from the
leaves of fiction. The awful loneliness of the
man sends a shudder through the reader's
frame. How awfully aloof his life! How
hated by all! How the little children would
run away from him! How even the horses
would turn their heads when he passed by!
True, his course is interrupted, but this great
interpreter of the human heart takes particular

5°

The Discord of Sin.

pains to show us what the end would be un-
less the life is changed; and that scene where
the Spirit of the Future takes the miser to his
death-bed and shows him himself dying, with
not a living creature in the empty house but a
cat, then to the churchyard where was a
lonely, broken down, neglected tombstone,
overrun by weeds and off in a corner by itself
(for even the tombstone was apart), and bear-
ing the single inscription, ' ' Ebenezer Scrooge, ' '
is one of the most thrilling pages in all litera-
ture. The chapter might well be called
"The dying body of a dead soul."

But possibly no one tale in the republic of
letters brings out the truth of our study better
than the strange history of Eugene Aram.
Lord Lytton leads us back to the modest
country home of a great scholar. He gives
us a peep into his life, showing us a calm,
dignified, thoughtful man, in delicate health
apparently, and as before, coveting solitude.
None of the neighbors had more than a
speaking acquaintance with him, for he lived
alone. "What the shell is to the turtle that
his solitude had become to him his protec-
tion, aye his life. " He had the scholar-habit
51

Earthly Discords.

of talking to himself in an absent-minded way,
for he clung to reverie and musing, but in
conversation he was charmingly eloquent.
Though never mingling with his country
yeomen, still it was noted by them that, un-
like Scrooge, he was kind toward the poor,
tender toward the suffering, that not a dumb
animal but appealed to him. When walking
in the garden he would stoop to remove a
snail or worm from his footpath rather than
hurt the humblest life. For years he lived in
his modest cottage on the top of a little knoll
surrounded by tall junipers, seeing no one,
rarely venturing out, reveling in his books;
the passion of his life was to know, to
understand. He lived to learn; he was an
"arch-miser in the wealth of letters." Only
thirty-five years of age, yet he was already a
profound mathematician, an elaborate anti-
quarian, an abstruse philologist. From al-
most every university in Europe there came
to his humble home letters of introduction
from famous men, and few foreign educators
ever visited this part of the country without
seeking an interview with this world-renowned
doctor of the sciences and the schools.

Then chances the strange falling in love of

52

The Discord of Sin.

our hermit-sage with Madeline Lester, the
daughter of the country squire. A charming
child of but eighteen was she, surpassingly
beautiful, and with a like love for study. For
full two years he had lived apart in his quiet
retreat till the spell of Madeline drew him
out. No one knew his ancestry; no one
knew his history. Unsocial the neighbors
called him, yet withal they learned to love
him, for that pale melancholy eye appealed to
them, as the face of some lonely pleading
stranger-child might touch the heart of some
fond mother on the busy boulevard. A few
there were, of course, who doubted. "Free
to confess," said the Squire's butler, "that I
don't quite like this learned man; somethin'
queer 'bout him; can't see 'zactly ter the
bottom; don't 'pear quite so meek and lamb-
like as he seems. You know, Squire, onced
I saw a calm, dead pool, peered down into it,
by little and little my eye got sorter used, saw
somethin' dark at the bottom, stared and
stared and stared — by Jupiter! great big
alligator! Never liked quiet pools since."

But that was only the feeling of the few.
The greater number turned to him in confi-
dence and something kin to pride. For did

53

Earthly Discords.

he not lend dignity to the parish? The name
forsooth became a thing to conjure with.
Travelers were always driven to see the home
of Eugene Aram. When some ambitious
youth journeyed afar to the halls of learning
and heard the familiar name quoted there, it
added a reverence and respect which soon
leaked out in common gossip among the lowly
toilers of the region round. Here he was
called "the great scholar." The humble
laborers of saw, anvil, and furrow touched
their hats in reverence on meeting him. It
was noted, indeed, as a thing worth repeating
when some little bright-eyed lassie returned
from school, and told her mother that she saw
"the great scholar" trudging down the lane,
and that he smiled at her.

So the months of courtship passed, for
both the lovers months of tense and feverish
delight. And now it was the morning of the
bridal day — a beautiful, clear morn in the last
week of October. Alone in his favorite study-
cloister, with his books around him, the scholar-
lover sat and looked out at the landscape that
lay below. Not a leaf stirred in the autumn
foliage. Would that my poor mother were
here, he thought to himself, to see her boy

54

The Discord of Sin.

count the stars of destiny's joy. "I am, I
will, I shall be happy now. Ah memory,
memory, I defy thee." These words were
uttered in a deep, tense tone, and for several
minutes the sole thought of the soliloquist was
love. Glancing at the window he saw a little
group of men hurrying up the lane. Aram
sprang, pale, breathless, lips apart, for the
day had lent special tautness to his nerves.
Below, a hand was heard banging at the door,
and then a voice, " My hand shall seize the
murderer!" He shot a lightning glance
around the room, his brain reeled, his breath
gasped, a mortal sickness passed over his
heart, then drawing up to his full height, he
whispered, "Madeline, dear, it's all over."

'Twere a long and touching tale to tell —
this marring of the marriage day — of how
bound by the links of the law the officers led
the crushed scholar, not to love's altar, but in
lieu thereof to the prison bars; of Madeline's
patience and unswerving faithfulness during
all these months of durance; of how she jour-
neyed daily to his cell and comforted him with
every expression of her love and confidence;
and then the last day of the trial, the final act
in the tragedy. It was the third of August.
55

Earthly Discords.

Almost a year had passed — a year so sad, so
slow. Like her expected bridal day the morn
dawned bright and clear. Madeline rose
early. "See," she exclaimed, "I am going
to wear the dress I was to have been married
in." Her love and loyalty during all these
months of strain had never wavered. She
said, "Though all the world forsake him, yet
will not I." But her face was pale, her form
shrunken, and her bridal gown hung loosely
from her bent form.

And 'twere a tale more terrible even to
tell of his conviction, of Madeline's falling in
a faint from which she never rose, of the
scholar's confession of complicity in murder,
of his taking his own life in the cell on the
morning of the day on which he was to have
been executed. All this were surely thrilling
narrative. But with details we are not much
concerned. What we wish to note is "one
black deed at war with a whole life. " " That
such a crime should be so separate from the
rest of life's career, that it should never have
steeled or roughened his nature, that a char-
acter capable of a deed so black as murder
should still be tender and thoughtful and
unselfish — all this presents a startling para-

56

The Discord of Sin.

dox in human conduct, strange and puzzling. ' '
And the lesson specially worth noting is the
isolation wrought. Sin insulates its victim
and sets apart, cuts off all communion, severs
all sympathy, drives into pitiful and painful
privacy. Even from the world there is es-
trangement. All good fellowship is but out-
ward and seeming. Sin means friendlessness,
forlornness, ostracism, banishment — banish-
ment from God and fellow-man, aye, and from
self. For even with one's own heart is there
lack of communion, since the heart distrusteth
itself and knoweth its own bitterness.

Oh, ye who know little as yet of the wages
of Satan and his enslaving service! You
whose feet have never yet been cut with the
thorns or bruised with the brambles of sin's
rough march! Would you be proof against
the flints and briars of life's perilous pilgrim-
age? Put on the armor of God. "Stand
having thy loins girt about with truth and
having on the breast-plate of righteousness,
and thy feet shod with the preparation of the
gospel of peace. ' ' Take Jesus Christ for thy
leader. Clad in his righteousness alone are
you secure. Anywhere with him you may
safely go. Yea, though thou walkest through

57

Earthly Discords.

the valley he will go with thee. With his
presence you need never know solitude, for
"Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end
of the age. ' ' Living with him you will never
know selfishness, for "I am among you as he
that serveth." And knowing him you will
never know death, for "I am come that you
might have life and that you might have it
more abundantly."

53

The Sad Note of Unbelief.

CHAPTER III.
The Sad Note of Unbelief.

The Apostle to the Gentiles, in a word of
warning to the Corinthian Church, writes:
1 ' For we can do nothing against the truth but
for the truth"; and truly many a sad page of
history would have been left unwritten had
his warning been regarded. How slowly the
mind of man learns that the most obstinate
rejection of a truth were powerless to turn
said truth into a falsehood! The English
queen came to the mirror when all her beauty
was gone; seeing the gray hairs and the
wrinkles, the story goes on to add that she
smashed it into atoms. And full oft, alas,
that foolish scene has been re-enacted since
Elizabeth lost her temper. Truth has had
her warfare and her martyrs. Stoned have
her preachers been, aye scourged, and beaten
with rods — all the way from the little Jew of
Tarsus down to the time of our own big Bos-
ton Abolitionist. Her discoveries have been
hailed with hatred. "History, " says John
Stuart Mill, "fairly teems with instances of
61

Earthly Discords.

truth put down by persecution." Hegel
declares that the great fact of history has been
the struggle for truth. "When I am dead,"
said one of our greatest poets, "lay a sword
upon my coffin, for I was a private in the war
for the liberation of humanity. ' '

It seems to have been one of the hard les-
sons for the world to learn that burying the
head in the sand, ostrich-like, avails not to
avert the danger; that smashing the mirror
will not make one young; that throwing out
the thermometer will not turn January's snow-
drifts into July's waving barley; that putting
green goggles on the oxen will not convert
dry waste desert land into rich, roral pasture;
that standing on the seashore with pitchfork
in hand tempting to keep the tides at bay is
vain and idle venture; that every shift for
fighting facts is baby business, and does not
pay. Let us then hasten to note some of the
truths against which the intellect of humanity
has been in blind and impotent revolt.

I. The Scientific Government of God.

Instance the story of Galileo when he an-
nounced his Copernican theory. In 1616 he
was summoned to Rome, where his doctrines

62

The Sad Note of Unbelief.

were condemned by the pope. In 1633 the
aged scholar was dragged before a church
tribunal and compelled on bended knee to
abjure and hate the heresy. After death his
remains were refused admittance to the family
tomb, and a monument to his memory for-
bidden. Well-known, uncontested facts,
these!

Instance, further, the story of Roger
Bacon! What did this great philosopher do
for the world? Much every way, Chiefly a
long line of discoveries in mechanics and
physics, besides valuable treatises in logic,
mathematics, and moral philosophy. He had
much to do with the telescope, with gun-pow-
der, with spectacles, much with burning glass.
Time fails, indeed, to itemize his long list of
blessings to our human comfort. This it is
that Roger Bacon did for the world. And what
in return did the world do for Roger Bacon?
Burned his books, broke his instruments,
thrust him into prison, treated him with cruelty
passing credence, so much so, indeed, that
worn out and weary, he murmured at the last,
"Would that I had not given myself so much
trouble for the love of truth. ' ' In the inn at
Athens there was no room for Socrates, nor

63

Earthly Discords.

could Florence find any welcome for Dante.
When Anaxagoras announced the sun to be a
ball of fire he was condemned to death for
teaching such heresy. The Peloponnesian
patriarchs could not permit profanity so patent
against their favorite Apollo. At the request
of Pericles, his lifelong friend, the sentence
was commuted to banishment for life. Not
a few are the pages such as these, and alas,
with shame and sorrow must it be confessed,
many of them from sacred history! The way
the church has fought each new prophet sent
of God is dark and dreadful reading. "If
some seer saw a new light on the face of na-
ture he needs must suffer for the vision."
If some teacher would be true to his trust he
must be reviled and persecuted for righteous-
ness' sake; for such has been the story of the
despiteful ages.

And not alone is the church blameworthy,
for even science must plead guilty to a like
charge. Her apostles, too, have insisted on
closing their eyes to the light of fresh discov-
ery. Instance the several theories of heat.
It was as early as 1798 that Sir Humphrey
Davy endeavored to prove the immateriality

64

The Sad Note of Unbelief.

of heat by showing its generation through the
friction of two pieces of ice under an exhausted
receiver; and in 1820, on being elected presi-
dent of the Royal Society to succeed Sir
Joseph Banks, he read a paper claiming heat
to be a mode of motion. But so incredulous
were the scholars that they simply smiled.
In 1804 Sir Benjamin Thompson, better
known as Count Rumford, propounded the
same theory, but the Royal Society was still
skeptical. It is a well-known fact that as late
as 1863 Professor Tyndall gave a course of
lectures on heat as a mode of motion, contest-
ing the old igneous-fluid theory, and for these
he was literally laughed at by the scientific
world. The British Association for the
Advancement of Science in open debate re-
fused to accept it. To-day no scientist any-
where, for a moment, questions it. It was
advanced by Davy and Count Rumford full
half a century previous, but so great is the
popular prejudice against anything new, that
all these years must needs lapse ere it received
the stamp of University approval. Truly,
indeed, no fold is large enough to contain all
the world's prejudice. Foolish and false the
impeachment that all narrowness is in the

65

Earthly Discords.

church! Bigotry climbs over all fences, gets
into all inclosures. The history of the world
has been a story of revolt against the accept-
ance of new truth. Evolution has had a hard
uphill climb of it. Even the law of gravita-
tion was full fifty years fighting its way into
the halls of learning.

The telegraph it took well-nigh as long
to win any considerable favor. Man is a
righting genius; only when he must, will he
surrender. As the ocean greyhound groping
her way along the banks of Newfoundland,
fog-encircled, shoal-encompassed, must needs
move slowly lest icebergs or drifting derelicts
imperil her safety, just so when any new truth
is launched and puts to sea its progress must
at first be slow. Great is the denseness,
many are the half-sunken dangers. And if it
be true that the scientific truth comes slowly
how much more slowly the moral truth!
Marking the former by the speed of the
Olympic runner, the latter would be the pace
of the snail. If it took evolution half a cen-
tury to cleave its way into the class-rooms,
the champions of liberty must not be dis-
couraged at freedom's lazy jog. Though
slow, it is notwithstanding sure. For the
66

The Sad Note of Unbelief.

shackles of slavery are being removed gradu-
ally, first from the hand, then the foot, then
the mind, and soon will come the heart's glad
turn.

God speed the happy hour!

May it not for long be delayed!

With grateful hearts and glad hosannas
would we usher it in.

1 ' For we can do nothing against the truth
but for the truth."

2. The Moral Government of God.

God is righteous. His righteousness rules
the world. His sword is sharpened against
iniquity. He cannot look upon sin but with
abhorrence. This is the theme that trembles
in every tone of Hebrew prophecy. No truce
can ever be 'twixt righteousness and unright-
eousness; i. e., not until the fundamental
axioms of life are different from those we now
accept.

Professor Huxley once said that there may
be worlds in which two and two make five,
and he might have added as logically that
some stellar sphere there may be, in the ages
yet to come, where holiness and iniquity live
together in peace; but not until the nature of

67

Earthly Discords.

things is subverted and contradictions meet
and anarchy is law. If there be a world
where two and two make five, then the "five
is not our five and the two is not our two, ' '
and if some nebular space there be where love
and hatred harmonize, then our definitions
must undergo revolution radical. For God is
love, but his love is just. This is religion's
intuitive axiom, her basal-block. There is an
avenging Holiness, a consuming fire of infinite
Purity and Love. This is the sublime and
awful truth writ large on every page of Inspi-
ration. It is on the first page, it is on the
last; it is in the Old Testament, it is in the
New; it is in the poetry, it is in the prophecy;
in the history, in the allegory; and may we
add, it is in nature as well as grace.

Idle to fight against this truth, and yet
perhaps no doctrine of the church has been
so challenged, and none that men have striven
so to resist. No dogma has been the target
for such stern and stringent criticism; none
we would adventure to believe has been so
perverted, none so maligned. If some smart
skeptic be emboldened to mount the rostrum
and hold up the "mistakes of Moses" to jest
68

The Sad Note of Unbelief.

and ridicule, much of his eloquence is almost
certain to be a tirade against the church's
teaching of punishment for sin.

And let us be free to admit that much of
what he says is true. In attacking the medi-
aeval conception, unbelief has done the cause
of true religion a service; for it was a false
limb, and dead, fastened on to the old trunk
of Christian tradition. Never once did Jesus
preach a woe materialistic such as Dante's.
Mayhap Jonathan Edwards did, but not
Jesus. From his divine lips we have no
single utterance as to the economic workings
of the lost world. Great principles he laid
down, but never once did he detail. A judi-
cial sentence is the bold creation of the
schoolmen. It is the nightmare of the Mid-
dle Ages. Infinite Love has been pictured
with a lurid shadow on the face, but the por-
trayal is unscriptural. And it has worked
harm. It has worked harm because an un-
just shadowing forth of the final reckoning
tends to blunt men's minds to an outline that
is just. The basic teaching of the Master is
that future punishment is a harvest, that the
sinner is self-doomed. Every life has its own
reaping in the economy of grace, just as every
69

Earthly Discords.

field has its own return in the economy of
nature. Jesus was a figurative teacher. He
is the Peerless Painter. He taught in parable
and without a parable spake he not unto them.
He spoke of the place where "The worm
dieth not and the fire is not quenched"; but
this almost certainly refers to the valley with-
out the walls of Jerusalem where the refuse of
the city was burned and its defilement
cleansed. The divine love is so inexorable
that it becomes a fire; but what the character
of the fire is Jesus never told us, and no
authority has been given the church to fill in
the silence with any flights of frightful fancy.

Sin cannot go unpunished, because in the
nature of the case it is suicidal. It carries
within itself the seeds of its own destruction.
Sin cuts a bloody gash in the conscience,
severs its life artery. This is God's moral
government. "The wages of sin is death."

"As well argue with an African tornado
as argue with that. ' ' Punishment follows sin
just as certainly as shadow follows substance,
but as to what the nature of that punishment
will be let us hasten to confess a very imper-
fect knowledge. We have not been acquainted
with that secret, final, awful. Not ours surely
70

The Sad Note of Unbelief.

to intermeddle! "Are there few that be
saved?" Be not over-officious, replied the
Master. "Strive to enter in." What will
become of the sinner? Just what the sinner
lets himself become. "Hear the word of the
Lord, ye rulers of Sodom. Give ear unto the
law of our God, ye people of Gomorrah. Say
to the righteous, it shall be well with him.
Woe to the wicked, it shall be ill with him.
For the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it."

How forcibly doth our own Hawthorne
drive home this truth in "Marble Faun," that
sin quenches the holiest fires in the soul's
inner chambers, turns life's garden into a
waste where death reigns, and where men
have lost the power to love. Once upon a
time, long, long ago, the story goes, there
lived a Tuscan count whose likeness to the
statue of the Faun by Praxiteles lends the
book its name. A happy, spontaneous youth
he, full of fun and frolic, joyous, handsome,
eccentric.

He would run races with himself in the
wood-path. He would leap up to catch the
overhanging bough of an ilex and swinging
his arms alight far forward. He would em-

7i

Earthly Discords.

brace the trunk of a hemlock as a faun might
have clasped the warm grace of a nymph,
then fling himself down on the turf and kiss
the violets and daisies and wood anemones.
This happy youth loved a dark-eyed lassie
whose name was Miriam. Miriam had a
warm, passionate nature, and was possessed of
strange, mysterious powers. She lived in the
depth of the Arcadian wood, the sweet child
of nature. Together they learned to tame
the squirrels and the foxes, and even the
oriole and bobolink would alight on their
shoulders in answer to their mimic warble.
The wild thrush would swing on the twig near
by and pour forth its full-throated roundelay
unbroken by any chirrup of alarm.

But our happy young lover grew jealous
of a rival, and one black Friday in a fit of
frenzy he took this brother's life for the sake
of the dark-eyed lassie whom he loved. Then
he turned to bespeak her as his bride. How
vividly doth the novelist picture his attitude of
mind and heart! How changed the ferns,
the flowers, the foliage! How fear had taken
the place of love! How the very oaks seemed
ready to fall on him! How the winding path-
way seemed full of wriggling lizards and the
72

The Sad Note of Unbelief.

silent forest full of echoes! How the dead
leaves cracked! The hand of our fugitive
lover is hot, the step uncertain, the whole
bearing feverish. The brittle branches lying
athwart his footpath broke as he stepped on
them, and startled the birds from their nests
and the wild beasts from their lairs — for be it
noted that the wild beasts came forth. The
squirrels ran leaping to the tops of the tallest
hemlocks to hide themselves. It seemed as
though the dead body of his late enemy lay
heavy and bleeding across his heart, and all
nature knew the sinful secret.

"What hast thou done?" asked Miriam,
in a horror-stricken whisper, when she saw the
glow of rage still lurid on the murderer's face.

' ' I did what your eyes bade me do, ' ' was
the reply.

Miriam sank back dazed as though struck
by a bullet. "Then we two are guilty," she
whispered; "the deed knots us together for
time and eternity like the coils of a serpent.
Ours is the loathsomeness of a union cemented
in guilt, and our condemned spirits, alas, shut
out of heaven. ' '

Then suddenly the hilltop grew dark, and
the owl and mocking-bird sent forth a dread-
73

Earthly Discords.

ful whoop, and the water trickling from the
rock tasted sour, and for the first time our
hitherto happy youth experienced the real
bitterness of hell — not its fires but its chill,
rather; for the hand became ice; the whole
body shook as with the cold fit of a Roman
fever. Gazing at her beautiful form he
seemed to have felt a strange indifference
steal over his spirit as with overburdened
heart he muttered, "Farewell, Miriam, fare-
well forever."

"We talk of breaking law," says George
Adam Smith, "we cannot break law; we can
only break ourselves against law. But if we
sin against Love we do destroy her; we take
from her the power to redeem and sanctify us.

"I believe in hell because I believe in the
love of God — not in a hell to which God con-
demns men of his good will and pleasure, but
in a hell into which men cast themselves from
the very face of his love in Jesus Christ. The
place has been painted as a place of fire.
But when we contemplate that men come to
it with the holiest fires in their nature
quenched, we shall justly feel that it is rather
a dreary waste of ash and cinder, strewn with
snow — some ribbed and frosted arctic zone,

74

The Sad Note of Unbelief.

silent in death, where there is no life, and no
life because no Love, and no Love because men
in rejecting or abusing her have slain their
own power ever again to feel her presence."
Ah me, "Verily, verily I say unto thee, the
wages of sin is death, ' ' death of honor, death
of reverence, death of conscience, death of
faith, death of hope, death of peace, death of
love.

3. The Revolt against the Spiritual Gov-
ernment of Jesus Christ.

In a book of recent issue we were told of
an old colored preacher — John Jasper by
name — who died last year in Richmond, Vir-
ginia. He had acquired a notoriety quite
considerable, because of a sermon preached
more than a hundred times, in the midst of
which he would declare, with strong and solemn
accent, "The sun do move." The journals
of his native state were wont to make sport of
Jasper's olden-time astronomy, but whatever
his wilfulness in refusing to accept the latest
researches of science, he humbly bowed his
heart to the lordship of Christ Jesus. Accept-
ing His mastery he never once questioned His
ruling, but gladly the rather did he carry

75

Earthly Discords.

every thought into full captivity to His obedi-
ence.

Once a slave to human cruelty, he was
now the happy doulos to the bidding of Incar-
nate Love. And so, clean in character and
consecrated in calling, he was the instrument
in higher hands of leading many a seeking
soul into the secret of His gracious presence.
Foolish to be sure, the attitude that refuses
allegiance to the demonstrated truths of
science, but how infinitely more foolish is the
soul that persistently rebels against the king-
ship of the world's Lord and Saviour.

Calling upon an invalid lady recently I found
her reading a sermon of Campbell Morgan's,
in which was a story that had almost a parallel
in her own life. ' ' Strange, ' ' she began, ' 'but
there's a story here that just suits me ex-
actly." Then opening a locket she said,
"Read this." I took the little case, and
looking very closely, saw printed therein, in
the very smallest excelsior type, Mrs. Elliot's
hymn:

"My God, my Father! while I stray
Far from my home, in life's rough way,
Oh ! teach me from my heart to say,
Thy will be done."

76

The Sad Note of Unbelief.

Then, underneath the hymn were five
dates printed in red ink. "These are the
black-letter, not the red-letter, days of my
life," she added, smiling. "The first is the
date of mother's death, and oh, how I re-
belled, although I was then but a girl in my
teens. The second, three years later, is the
date of father's leaving us — and again I re-
belled. The third is the date of my hus-
band's going, and still I murmured and
struggled and fought. The fourth was the
taking of my only darling, a sweet little fellow
of five, and this time I almost cursed my
heavenly Father, for all my loved ones were
now gone, and I was left alone. All the while
I was not a Christian. In fact, if the truth
were told, I had grown bitter and hard and
sour. I thought God was punishing me. I
see now he was not punishing but educating
me by a spiritual discipline, and I have since
learned to say, 'The Lord gave and the Lord
hath received,' not taken away, but 'received;
'Blessed be the name of the Lord.' Ah,"
she added, with a tremor, "my life, too, seems
made up mostly of rebellions. ' '

"But I want you to look at the last." I
looked; it read "March 3, 1898."

77

The Sad Note of Unbelief.

"That was the day on which I gave my
heart to the Saviour. That was the great
surrender. You notice there are twenty-six
years between the first date and the last —
twenty-six years of fruitless insurrection; took
me six and twenty years to learn to say, 'Thy
will be done.' "

"If thou shouldst call me to resign
What most I prize — it ne'er was mine:
I only yield thee what was thine;
Thy will be done.

"Renew my will from day to day,
Blend it with thine, and take away
All now that makes it hard to say,
Thy will be done."

Have you learned to say that, dear reader?
Is your life largely rebellion? Have you ad-
mitted the Saviour into your life? He stands
at the portal of your heart just now knocking
for entry. He will not force the lock, but
whosoever he be that openeth the door shall
have the Heavenly Visitor for his abiding
guest. Strange, passing strange, that men
will double-bolt and double-bar their soul
dwelling against life's most loving, most last-
ing Friend!

78

The Sad Note of Unbelief.

"Behold a Stranger at the door!
He gently knocks, has knocked before,
Has waited long, is waiting still;
You treat no other friend so ill."

I call you to loyal submission and loving
service. Believe it. that revolt of yours is
idle, and furthermore, it is sin. For all re-
bellion against truth of which the soul is con-
vinced is sin. If you would have peace you
must needs first surrender. Do not put off
yielding till death is at the door. 'Tis willing
captivity the Master asks. Faith has its fet-
ters, but they are glorious; its yoke, but what
an easy yoke; its burden, but how strangely,
blessedly light!

The story is told of Henry Drummond
that on one occasion he remonstrated with a
coachman who had a weakness for drink.
"Suppose your horses ran away," he said,
"and you lost control of them, what would
you do?" The man said he did not know.
"Now, suppose," continued Mr. Drummond,
"that a stronger and more expert reinsman
than you sat by your side, what would you
do?" "I should give him the lines, ' ' was the
ready answer. And doth not the Divine

79

Earthly Discords.

Helper stand by the side of every man whose
temper is violent, whose passions are head-
strong, whose appetite is past control? Verily
indeed He doth. A very present help is He
in trouble. His are overtures of strength
granted to grapple with the present need and
pardon for the past guilt.

His is a hand beckoning us to happiness
and hope and rest. His a voice calling us to
the high levels of purer air and fuller, more
abundant, living.

For the Christian life is the only natural,
normal life — the life of harmony, poise, bal-
ance. 'Tis easier to obey than to disobey.
All disobedience implies a wrench, a jerk, a
strain. Only he who has graduated into the
slavery of unconditional surrender to the
divine will knows the true, glad liberty of
the Christian's walk.

"For he that is called in the Lord, being
a servant, is the Lord's freeman," and stands
fast in that liberty wherewith Christ doth
make his children free.

Some time since it was our sad privilege to
be called in to minister to a dying young
woman. Her husband was a drunkard, and
So

The Sad Note of Unbelief.

who but knows something of what a tale that
intimation tells? Entering the humble home
what marks of misery met the eye! what bare-
ness! what poverty! what signs of waste and
want and woe! Closing the door somewhat
suddenly an echo rang through the narrow
corridor. Surely, the heart kept saying, for
sheer cheerlessness and gloom, after the jail
and prison bar must come the drunkard's
home. Sitting down by the bedside and
greeting the sick one with a smile and a word
of kindness, the remark was ventured, "My
dear woman, tell me your troubles, won't
you?"

"I have no troubles, sir," she answered.

"No troubles?" That seemed a startling
confession. A drunkard's home, and yet no
trouble! Two little tots in the corner, one
four, the other six, shoeless, almost garment-
less, and yet no trouble! No picture on the
wall, no carpet on the floor, no curtain on the
window, no flower on the table, no nurse in
the room, no kind friend near — not even a
physician — and yet no trouble!

"My life was nothing but trouble," she
added, after a little, "until a few weeks ago
I brought everything to Him and yielded."
81

Earthly Discords.

Then, after a short pause, "I was unfortunate
in my marriage life, but — but — but — I loved
him."

Another silence followed; then turning and
looking into my eye with such a hungry look,
"I'm so glad to see you! Haven't seen any-
body since Sunday," it was Thursday, "j
thought I'd like to have you read to me a
psalm and speak a little prayer. My father
was an elder in Horatius Bonar's church in
Scotland, and I get great comfort from some
of his hymns." Then reaching her hand
across for an old ragged, paper-bound hymn-
book, she began to read. "Oh, yes, sir, I
was brought up right. ' '

"1 heard the voice of Jesus say,
'Come unto me and rest;
Lay down, thou weary one, lay down
Thy head upon my breast.'

"I came to Jesus as I was,
Weary and worn and sad;
I found in him a resting-place,
And he has made me glad."

"Do you think you could sing it for me?"

"Well, my dear woman, I am not much

of a singer, but if you wish it, we will try

together, ' ' and so, in that dingy, disconsolate,

The Sad Note of Unbelief.

dying chamber we sung the hymn of hope
immortal:

"I heard the voice of Jesus say,
'I am this dark world's light;
Look unto me, thy morn shall rise,
And all thy day be bright!'
I looked to Jesus and I found
In him my star, my sun;
And in that light of life I'll walk,
Till traveling days are done."

83

The Hiss of the Hypocrite.

CHAPTER IV.
The Hiss of the Hypocrite.

There is a narrow stretch of land running
through the heart of Arcadia called by framers
of isothermal charts the ' ' storm-belt. ' ' Almost
every summer round about the reaping time
a destructive hurricane sweeps through it.
First is felt that palpable hush, prophet of
the coming danger. Gradually the sky
frowns and blackens, while one by one the
birds seek shelter. Soon puffs of wind
whirl dust along the road followed by a few
drops, and forthwith the cannonading. The
rain pelts down in pitiless fury. Trees strain
and groan and overturn. The roar of the tor-
rent, the shriek of the wind, the zigzag line
of the lightning, fill the soul with awe and
dread and wonder. Great limbs are torn from
their trunks and roots from their grip of earth.
Physical nature seems in pain. In a few
hours the tempest passes by and we greet the
sunshine and the birds again.

Once in one of these sudden fits of fury
the little lake by which we rested was lashed

Earthly Discords.

into the ugliest temper. When night closed
in how grateful was our little circle for a roof
and a refuge! Retiring we were rocked to
sleep in the lap of Mother Nature and to the
rhythm of her awful music. Morning came,
and what a change! The sky was clear, the
birds were singing, the little lake lay peaceful
as the grave. It was indeed a grave, a cruel
grave; hardly could one have believed that it
had swallowed up three lives in its fair-faced
treachery. And yet the little lake lay so in-
nocent-appearing. Peaceful as a tired child
it slept, with a smile on its face like unto that
we sometimes see on our little dreaming dar-
lings. The fishes were leaping, the surface
was sparkling, the wavelets were lapping its
shores, and difficult was it to realize that such
a smiling surface could ever be darkened into
such unpitying rage.

A passage there is in the first Evangel of
our faith that has been called the " storm-belt
of the New Testament. ' ' It stretches through
the twenty-third chapter. The Master has
just been discoursing about Love.

"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with
all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all
SS

The Hiss of the Hypocrite.

thy strength and with all thy mind; this is the
first and great commandment." Love!
Then, like a bolt out of the blue comes this
moral lightning, and for five and thirty verses
the storm sweeps by and rages. Demosthe-
nes is the master of the phillipic when he
denounces the Athenians for their sloth and
supineness, but verily there is nothing in the
nine orations of Demosthenes against Philip,
nothing in the fourteen orations of Cicero
against Mark Antony, that can compare for a
moment in severity of tone with Christ's
phillipic in the twenty-third of Matthew.
The diatribe is fearful. Eight times do we
read, "Woe unto you scribes and pharisees,
hypocrites. ' ' Every word burns like a flame,
eats like a canker — "blind guides, devourers,
whited sepulchers, serpents, vipers." The
sky is thick and black and heavy. The
thunder rumbles and peals and cracks hard
by, while one by one the flashing bolts leap
forth with merciless effect. Terrible and
deadly are the blows dealt, while each time
hypocrisy is the target. Never, we are told,
does lightning strike twice in the same place,
but here the rule is broken; every time hy-
pocrisy is the mark. Then the storm passes

Earthly Discords.

by and we catch a beautiful sunset, and peace-
ful; "Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that
killest the prophets and stonest them which
are sent unto thee, how often would I have
gathered thy children together as a hen gath-
ereth her chickens under her wings, but ye
would not. Behold, your house is left unto
you desolate, for I say unto you ye shall not
see me henceforth until ye shall say, Blessed
is he that cometh in the name of the Lord."

What can be the matter with this word
hypocrite? How comes it that in conver-
sation it is whispered soft and low? What
defilement clings thereto? Not always has it
been a tainted word. Once it showed sound
and wholesome. Hypocrites were imperson-
ators on the stage of ancient Greece; tra-
gedians were they, and honorable men. The
literal meaning of the word is one who ques-
tions and answers, hence one who imperson-
ates. Not infrequently even orators were
called hypocrites. Does not Roscius, the
greatest of Roman comic actors, speak of his
pupil Cicero as a hypocrite? Such the usage
of the word for several centuries. But time
soon was when it began to serve a figurative
90

The Hiss of the Hypocrite.

purport; and as playing a part is usually for
deceitful ends, the word fell from its high
commanding altitude, and kept falling, till
to-day it has become a verbal degenerate, no
longer desirable, no longer respectable, ' 'wal-
lowing rather in the slums of human speech. "

How interesting the study of words! How
instructive! The weaknesses and sins of our
poor, frail nature can be traced in the changes
that some classic roots have suffered. Ety-
mologists call our attention to the word "osten-
sible, ' ' which literally means ' ' capable of being
shown, ' ' but the step from showing things to
showing them off remains so short and tempt-
ing that the fatal step was usually taken; the
innocent idiom lost its coyness; now it carries
the suspicion of flaunt and feign. When our
early English writers used the word "counter-
feit" they had an eye to nothing sinister; they
simply meant to "copy or imitate," with no
intent the slightest that said copy should ever
be dishonestly substituted for the original.

Perhaps no word carries more counsel along
the line of moral teaching than our word
"pretend" — at first meaning simple to "lay
claim to anything." Repeatedly do Shake-

9i

Earthly Discords.

speare and Milton use the term in this open,
artless, undesigning sense of laying claim to a
title or heirloom or estate.

"Why shall we fight, if you pretend no
title?" (Henry VI.)

Does not Lord Lytton speak of Leslie pre-
tending to the hand of Violante, meaning
thereby "aspire"? Alas, what a commen-
tary on the cunning of the human heart and
that our pretenses are so largely false, when
we learn that our latest lexicons give as its
primary meaning this soiled, corrupted sense!
So the first has become last, the last first.
How full of instruction each Miiller and
Trench and Wedgwood and Sayce along the
line of words!

Was not a villain in early Roman life
simply one attached to the villa or farm — a
slave, we might say? What a story it tells
again of the character of such creatures that
the original meaning is hidden in the root, the
slave lost in the scoundrel! Verily indeed
the history of words carries many a valued
lesson for the pulpit and the sage. "Ser-
mons in stones, ' ' the poet says, and sermons
many and impressive there are, too, in words.
For words are the vessels that carry the
92

The Hiss of the Hypocrite.

soul's freightage; windows are they that show
the heart's treasures. If the furnishings of
the soul library are degrading, the choice of
words must soon betray the fact. For words
are the chief vehicles in the carriage of
thought.

So, as we rub the dust and grime from
many of our verbal pictures, they come out
into beautiful and suggestive freshness. The
deeper truth, alas, that lies behind this par-
ticular portrait is, that every man is two men.
There is the person as he actually appears on
the surface and the deeper man beneath.
Sometimes the actual man without is better
than the ideal man within. Such was Judas,
and Judas was a hypocrite of the baser type.

Not infrequently, however, what does not
appear is better than what does. So our
study leads us to confess two types of hypo-
crites— those who deceive others and those
who are so far purblind as to deceive them-
selves. One of the teachings of Holy Writ
and one supported by experience is that it is
possible for men to deceive themselves. Full
oft in striving to deceive our fellow-men we
succeed in doing that very thing, and often-
times, alas, in the attempt we fail, fail pite-

93

Earthly Discords.

ously, deceiving no one but ourselves. For
does not the prophet tell us how crafty is this
heart of ours, and over and above how desper-
ately wicked, and does not the psalmist cry
out in words burning with noble glow and
ardor, "Search me, Oh God, and know my
heart; try me and know my thought and see
if there be any wicked way in me and lead me
in the way everlasting. ' '

A little too apt are we to think that the
scribes and pharisees whom our Master so
severely and sternly denounced were openly
wicked and dissolute men. Not so. That
were a serious misreading. No authority
have we to suppose that these men were
guilty of loose and scandalous living. No-
where does our Lord accuse them of unclean-
ness and the flagrant sins. Time and again
indeed he notes their scrupulous conformity
to the letter. These men, be it noted, were
the religious leaders of their time. Men high
up, were they, in the councils of the church.
What our Saviour condemns in them is their
caste spirit, their separateness, pride, outward
fastidiousness, their proselytism, extortion,
long prayers, their solicitousness for the out-

94

The Hiss of the Hypocrite.

side of the cup and platter and indifference to
the weightier matters of the law. Of old the
philosopher tells us of the knave who invented
an untruthful story and narrated it so fre-
quently that after a little he came to believe
the tale as part of his own life history. And
these pharisees kept playing at religion so
much and so long that they grew to mistake
the letter for the spirit, thus warning us surely
of the danger of being over familiar with
sacred things and the consequent snare of
self-deception. For when religion does not
touch the real life it becomes a cloak, and a
cloak worn constantly becomes a habit, and if
the habit of our lives be to cover up our dis-
figurements so that they cannot be seen, we
are in danger of becoming blind to their pres-
ence and being thus self-deceived.

Wonderful book, this Bible! Wonderful
man, this Jesus! One verse in his opening
sermon is a master-stroke. (Matthew vi. i)
''Take heed that ye do not your alms before
men to be seen of them." "To be seen of
them!" Here is the nerve of the mischief.
"To be seen of them." This is the vital
point; thinking what man will say, giving for
the glory of self, praying to the audience,

95

Earthly Discords.

playing to the gallery. Beware of the theatri-
cal is the open warning to an age that loves
the trumpet and the street corner. Learn to
give thine alms in secret; then forget them.
Beware of adding up thy benevolences. Be-
ware of memorandums. Memorize naught
but thy sins and thy mercies. Let not thy
right hand know what thy left hand doeth. ' '
Closet thyself and bar the door. Thy life
look intently at in the dark. Commune with
thy Father in the quiet. Of the incarnate
One the prophet wrote, "He shall not cry
nor lift up nor cause his voice to be heard in
the street. ' ' When he retired for prayer it
was usually to the desert or the mountain-top,
and at midnight or in the early dawn. He
"retired, ' ' note. Be this picture thy pattern!
Retire, heart of mine! How a man conducts
himself in his home, not how he acts in the
market-place, is the true index of character!
How few, alas, can stand these searching
tests of the All-Seeing!

"It is more blessed to give than to re-
ceive," but as some one notes, the giving
that increases its gifts when it learns the
amounts are to be published in next week's
issue of the calendar is infected with the un-

96

The Hiss of the Hypocrite.

righteous virus, and the poison will sooner or
later permeate the life. Verily such benevo-
lence has its reward. The man who excuses
himself from uniting with the church militant
lest his fellow-man label him a hypocrite, is
he not entitled to the ugly epithet already?
For is not the essence of the malady thinking
what man will say? When this truth grips
us, we see how far-reaching is the figure,
reaching down into the inner parts as all
spiritual figures do, and out into the infinite.
Is there not here wide and ample room for
heart-analysis? Are there no strict religion-
ists to-day who think less of telling an untruth
than of indulging in some innocent pleasure?
Are there no professed disciples of the Great
Teacher who fill prominent seats in the syna-
gogue and sing with upturned eyes,

"Take time to be holy,
Speak oft with thy Lord,
Abide in him alway
And lean on his word;
Make friends of God's children,
Help those who are weak,"

and who forthwith go out straightway to
bleed the fatherless and widow for twelve per
cent? Scribes such as these, alas, we must
confess, are with us still, and it is of these

97

Earthly Discords.

men that the Master speaks. They strain at
gnats and swallow camels. They are quib-
blers, dabblers in a divine art, stammerers in
the great speech of heaven. All their works
they do to be seen of men. They shut up the
kingdom of heaven against themselves. The
inwardness of true religion they have not
learned; the searchingness of the blessed life
they have not felt. For "Thou requirest
truth in the inward parts" and "Blessed are
the pure in heart since they shall see God. ' '
Never surely a time when we so needed
these reminders, for ours is an age honey-
combed with guile, gilded with double-dealing.
The fiction of the old travelers was, that be-
fore the crocodile devoured its victim it shed
tears, and men there are to-day who will weep
over the widow's misfortunes then eat up her
substance. The counter is crooked, the law
likewise. The drawing-room has mastered
the secret of being unreal, sometimes, alas,
the church. Who has not felt the temptation
to overcolor and embroider, to transfigure
sin by soothing names, to conceal its deadly
deformity? Carlyle thinks that when we
speak of falsehood we lay our finger on most
of the world's worst maladies, and verily the

98

The Hiss of the Hypocrite.

sage of Craigenputtock may not be so far
astray, since what is sublimer than simple
wholesome truth? What doth society need
more for its ills to-day? Is it not patent that
insincerity is one of life's harshest discords?
In its last analysis hypocrisy is falsehood. It
is the basest of all base metals, and the
"Master of all good workmen" so accounted
it. Very little had He to say concerning
drunkenness and some of the coarser sins.
To the poor woman taken in adultery he whis-
pered, "Neither do I condemn thee, go and
sin no more, ' ' but against all sham and cant
and hollowness how he thundered! How
severe his stricture! How terrible his re-
buke! "If a soul is false in God's presence,
when can we hope for it to be true?"

"Who dares think one thing and another tell
My soul doth loath him as the gates of hell."

Perhaps we cannot do better by way of
illustration than by refreshing our minds with
a little abstract from literature. By consent
unanimous William Shakespeare, Bobbie
Burns, and John Ruskin are children of the
first order of genius. Nothing in the crea-
tions of these cathedral minds looms up so

99

t. ~*L o -^ *± .,:

Earthly Discords.

prominent as their intense and drastic hatred
of sham.

Lord Timon was an old retired Athenian
general whose prowess and military strategy
had delivered Athens from many a besieging
army in the days of her glory. His wealth
was great, his generosity and big-heartedness
unbounded. To him came the poor with
their emptiness, the rich with their flatteries,
and no one ever left his palace-home without
some token of his liberality and favor.
Crowded was his hall continually with a great
flood of visitors who tended their services and
bended the knee to Lord Timon and rained
flatteries in his ears.

In this current stream of fawning hypocrites
were many who brought gifts. For it was
noted that a gift bestowed on the noble lord
always brought one seven to ten times more
valuable in return. One of these sycophants,
Lucius by name, had lately sent to him a gift
of four white horses trapped in silver (hearing
that he had admired them) for the which he
received a jewel in return of many times their
value. Lucullus, another smooth-faced time-
server, learning that Timon had taken a fancy
to his dogs, sent him forthwith a present of a
ioo

The Hiss of the Hypocrite.

brace of greyhounds, which was accepted
with thanks and a return gift made of twenty
times their worth.

Sometimes these human parasites would
make pretense of praise toward some of his
possessions with the hope of thus securing
them, and he, good, honest, simple-hearted
soul, not seeing their artifice, would straight-
way send the thing admired next day with
gracious compliments.

Hearing that a certain gentleman, Ven-
tidius by name, was thrown into prison for a
debt, he at once discharged the debt and
started him in business with a considerable
loan. Scarcely a home in Athens but was
adorned by some evidence of Timon's munifi-
cence! His hall was daily beset with a throng
of sharks — poets, painters, lords and ladies,
merchants, jewelers, tradesmen — and all with
one design, to bleed the noble Lord with flat-
tery and fulsomeness.

"For he outwent the very heart of kindness,
Plutus, the god of gold, was but his steward."

Alas, such generosity could not last.
Time came when all his land was sold or for-
feited, and when all his assets sufficed not
half to pay that which he owed. One day

Earthly Discords.

his steward came in weeping and informed
him of this fact, and that creditors were
clamoring at the door. He bade the kind-
hearted fellow to hold his foolish tears, to
remember that he was rich in noble friends
who had tasted of his bounty:

"Canst thou the conscience lack
To think that I lack friends?"

So, with a confident tone he hasted several
of his servants to Lucius, Lucullus, and
Sempronius, men whose estate had almost
been supported with his purse, men who
could but with difficulty eat a meal without
Timon's silver treading on their lips; and to
Ventidius, whom he had lately released from
prison, and who had just stepped into vast
wealth by the death of a relative.

Lucullus was the first approached. At
first he thought it argued another gift from
Timon and was very cordial, but when he
understood the real import of the visit, his
answer was, ' ' I always knew it would come
to this; I told you so!" concluding by offer-
ing the servant a bribe to go home and tell his
master that Lucullus was not at home.
Lucius was the next addressed: "Yes, I have
been befriended much from our noble lord,

The Hiss of the Hypocrite.

and am much endeared to him; how very un-
fortunate that I should have made that pur-
chase yesterday; commend me bountifully to
your master and tell him that I account it one
of the greatest afflictions that I cannot pleas-
ure such an honorable gentleman." Now,
Timon had been a father to Lucius, had
largely supported his estate, had builded his
fine mansion; aye, Timon' s money had paid
his men their wages and kept him rolling in
comfort.

"This man had spent of Timon's wealth
And now ingratitude makes it worse than stealth."

And a similar response made all his var-
nished friends. All were sorry, or said they
were. The very tongues that hitherto had
praised him for his bounty now censured him
for his folly. Even Ventidius, who had been
redeemed from prison and was now rich, even
he refused a loan of those five talents that
Timon had so generously volunteered in his
distress. Friends! Alas, he had none.
That was the sorrowful discovery. His
princely mansion became his jail, at whose
gate iron-hearted creditors were loudly clamor-
ing with their bills and bonds and mortgages,
each demanding his due, "the which if he
103

Earthly Discords.

should dole out his very blood in drops there
were not drops sufficient to discharge the
debt."

"Alas! what a god is gold
That he is worshiped in a baser temple
Than where swine feed."

And now comes the remarkable part of the

tragedy — a complete transformation in the

noble lord. Hard and sour and bitter did he

become. Athens he forsook forever, shaking

the very dust from off his feet as a testimony

against her ungrateful people. Outside the

walls he turned and cursed his native city.

" Reeking villains! May you live loathed and

long! May the youth of sixteen snatch the

crutch from his old father's hand and with it

beat his brains out! May confusion ever live

among you! May plagues and fevers, leprosy

and cold sciatica, cripple thy senators! May

lust and liberty creep into the marrow of thy

children that they may drown themselves in

riot! Detested town! Timon will to the

woods,

"Where he shall find
The unkindest beast more kinder than mankind."

So he built himself a cave in the forest
where he might never see the face of man.
104

The Hiss of the Hypocrite.

Alone and solitary like the neighboring wild
beast did he live, drinking the cold brook and
breathing the bleak air. Naked he stripped
himself that he might not retain the semblance
even of a man. One day, digging in the
ground, his spade struck something heavy.
He threw it up. It was a pot of gold. Here
was a mass of treasure that would have pur-
chased him friends and flattery again, but so
sick was he of life's duplicity and such a
rooted hatred did he bear his species, that
when a regiment of soldiers passed by he gave
the money to their commander, asking noth-
ing more than that they should go straightway
and level Athens with the ground, burn, slay,
and kill all her people, and make one univer-
sal massacre of the city.

Where the noble lord died, and how, is not
told us. One day a poor soldier, passing by
the sea-beach near his cave, found a tomb on
the verge of the bank, and on it these words:

"Timon is dead who hath outstretched his span;
Some beast read this, there does not live a man."

Dear Reader, the Church of God can stand
much. She rises glorious from the fires of
persecution. The soil of poverty lends luster

io5

Earthly Discords.

to her brow as the barren, sterile hills of Scot-
land add a purple blossom to the heather; but in
the atmosphere of unreality she loses her life.
In traveling we have noticed how at each station
the brakeman takes the hammer and taps the
wheels. If there is any weakness the sharp
ear of the expert soon detects it. The world
to-day is listening closely to the triumph song
of the King's children. Woe unto us if our
lives are not in tune. We may deceive our-
selves; we cannot always deceive our fellow-
men; never can we hope to deceive Him.

1 06

The Noisy Passion for Pelf.

CHAPTER V.
The Noisy Passion for Pelf.

A most artful touch in the rilling in of one
of the parables of the Great Teacher, is that
line in which he speaks of the deceitfulness of
riches. He has just thrown an outline of the
sower upon the canvas, and now he details.

"Some seed fell on good ground, but it
was choked; the cares of this world and the
deceitfulness of riches and the lust of other
things entered in, choked the word, and it
became unfruitful."

The skilfulness of the stroke consists in its
seeming simplicity and the greater truth that
lies, unseen to the outer sense, beneath.
"Riches take to themselves wings and fly
away." False are they, we say, and fickle,
slipping through your fingers much like the
trout the youth catches in the summer stream.
This is the surface glimmer that first arrests
the eye, but this is not the central light; but
a reflected gleam is this. The larger light is
hidden, as always, in the parable. The Mas-
ter meant self-deception; not the effect of our
109

Earthly Discords.

riches upon others, but its effect upon our-
selves. Never do we moralize on the deceit-
fulness of poverty because poverty knows no
deception. Poverty paints; poverty poses;
poverty puts on airs; poverty tempts to pass
itself off for something that it is not, but pov-
erty never disillusions. My poverty may
deceive others; never does it deceive me.
All the while I know the facts, the bare, nude,
negative facts. Poverty shows one up to him-
self, just as he is, just as his friends are, just
as the world is. Poverty is honest, horribly
honest. Poverty tells the truth, the trouble-
some truth, the tormenting truth. Is anything
sadder than proud poverty? Riches throws
a glamour over everything. It lends a strange,
weird witchery to the lake, the landscape, the
cult, the temple, the task, the tool. Moun-
tain and rock, hunger and cold, famine and
fever, have a charm in the Alaskan Eldorado.
When riches comes nothing abides the same.
The life is different, the politics, the philos-
ophy, the religion — all different. The fortu-
nate fellow — or the unfortunate mayhap — sees
things through gold-rimmed, gold-tinted
lenses. Like the stick in the bottom of the
stream, the light is refracted, the stick twisted,
no

The Noisy Passion for Pelf.

There is an optical delusion, a false perspec-
tive. How oft we hear the haughtiest souls
speak of their own unworthiness, thereby
lending us. the impression that they are the
least conscious of the presence of the pride-
poison in their hearts; in this lies its subtlety.
This, likewise, it is that is meant by the
deceitfulness of riches.

The illusive atmosphere of affluence arises
largely from the fact that the desire of the
heart is never gratified. "The eye is not
satisfied with seeing nor is the ear filled with
hearing. " " How much is enough? ' ' the old
proverb runs, and the answer returns, "A
little more than one has. ' ' The great money
miser rarely knows for why he accumulates
his money. Of such little worth is it to him.
"Just as at base-ball," says Ruskin, "you
get more runs. There is no use in the runs,
but to get more of them than other people is
the game." And no use can come of the
money save to have more than neighbor
Jones, to pile it up mountain-high, to erect
thereon an altar graven after the image of the
golden calf, to regularly visit the sacred shrine
and bow the knee with the homage of idolatry.
in

Earthly Discords.

Let us speak an illustration, one we are
meeting day by day in life's dusty pilgrimage.
Here is a young man starting out with the
one dominant aim of making money — twenty
thousand dollars say — we can start at that.
That is the height of his ambition — to be
worth twenty thousand dollars. With that
sum total he would be satisfied, he thinks.
His word would have so much more weight
in politics and on the marts of trade. He
would be so free, so calm, so independent.
So he plods on till in the course of five years'
slavery he is worth that amount. How much?
Twenty thousand dollars. Is he satisfied?
Does he feel that he has enough? Now, that
is just the point worth noting. Herein lies
the "curious deceitfulness of the thing."
Not only is he not satisfied, he is more dis-
satisfied than the day he started. He feels
poorer, astonishingly poorer. His ambition now
is one hundred thousand dollars. He works
harder than ever, morning and evening, night
and day, year in, year out; denies himself of
art, music, poetry, literature, culture, travel,
friends, society, till at last some bright morn-
ing on the Exchange he is marked, "A, B, C,
I, 2, 3, one hundred thousand dollars."

112

The Noisy Passion for Pelf.

And now the second milestone on the
desert journey has been reached. And the
tempting mirage has pushed on with duplicate
pace; like the Olympian runner each succeed-
ing stride is longer. The third landmark
reads a million. But standing on his already
earnings the distance seems not far. Be-
sides, do not all successful men say that the
sterner troubles are at the start? Do not
riches grow like the rolling snowball? Did
not a famous financier once admit that he had
more difficulty in gathering his first little
bundle than all the rest of the mammoth for-
tune? And here I have surely a good start;
one hundred thousand dollars. Why, a sum
of money doubles itself in fifteen years at six
per cent. And so he starts the third stage of
the journey. How tiresome and hot the trail!
Heavy load, growing heavier! Nervousness,
restlessness, sleeplessness, avariciousness;
little time has he for reading, less for wor-
ship, none to study the wondrous development
of his child. Bonds, mortgages, banks, safe
deposits, government securities, gold, silver,
cash, collateral! And so the years roll on,
five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty,
thirty-five, forty, sixty-five years, and worth

ll3

Earthly Discords.

a million — the third milestone of the toilsome
stretch. Once his ambition was twenty thou-
sand; now he has that income every month.
Does he feel rich? Why it is one of the
strangest things in life's wily involvement.
He knows for a surety he cannot live ten
years, but he is more discontented than the
day he went forth on his eager adventure.
The poet tells us of the Greek youth who was
lured by a beautiful maiden into her forest
home. She sang so sweetly and winked so
slyly and tossed her dainty feet so enticingly
— throwing kisses at him all the while from
the tips of her tidy fingers — that for the nonce
he forgot home and loved ones! On and on
and yet on she drew him, over the rocks and
the bog and the brambles, till at the end of
the day his chase was given him and he
clasped in his arms a repulsive old sorceress
with a scowl on her face and a look of envy
in her eye. Such is gold close at hand and
stripped of its glamour! Here surely abides a
startling sermon on the vanity of things earthly.
When we speak the word "satisfaction, " we
are reaching down to the heart's immortal hun-
gering, and "things" were powerless to quiet
that; they make a vacuum, not fill it. "As
114

The Noisy Passion for Pelf.

easy to fill a chest with grace," Phillips
Brooks tells us, "or a vessel with virtue, as a
heart with things. " In Plato's great banquet
food is not even referred to, and in Sir
Thomas More's ideal republic is not gold de-
spised and put to menial uses? How little
these sons of genius cared for the things that
are seen and temporal! Emerson speaks of
a certain judge in Massachusetts who at sixty
proposed to resign, alleging that he perceived
a certain decay in his faculties. Dissuaded
by his friends, he postponed the idea. At
seventy it was hinted to him that possibly it
would be better to retire, but he now replied
that he considered his judgment as robust as
ever. Ah me, herein lies one of the illusions
of nature! This is the deceitfulness of age.
Age like some types of disease hath powers
wonderful of delusion. One of the strange
phases of pulmonary trouble is its hectic flush,
its power to outwit and throw a hopeful mirage
athwart to-morrow's footpath. Not less is
the snare and vanity of abundance. "For he
that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with
silver, and better is a handful with quietness
than both the hands full with travail and sore-
ness of spirit. ' '

ll5

Earthly Discords.

Perhaps the fact that gold and silver tempt
us so with hopes of happiness in an age of
pleasure-seeking is largely the cause of our
strange unrest. What may be the source of
true happiness? A perfect body, Mr. A
says, and becomes an admirer of Hercules;
knowledge, Mr. B answers, and becomes a
student at the shrine of Minerva; doing good,
Mr. C whispers and becomes a disciple of
Him who "came not to be ministered unto
but to minister and to give His life a ransom
for many." But however many the accents,
one strain is clear, distinct, piercing, insistent
— the voice of great possessions. And it
were the height of folly to deny the might
of money, for does it not represent every-
thing that may be purchased? Doth not
a great estate mean a comfortable home,
good books, beautiful pictures, travel, recre-
ation, freedom from faggery? Does it not
furthermore denote the power of helping the
poor, giving to charity, establishing reforms,
founding homes of refuge for the weary and
heavy laden, and thus fulfilling the will of
the Christ? If the old Ionian sage was
right when he said that "Knowledge is
power, " surely the same were true of money;
116

The Noisy Passion for Pelf.

for money is influence, it is distinction, it is
respect.

Such is the voice of the age, and some-
times it is almost worth one's reputation as a
judge of true art to dispute its range and
quality. "Periods there are, indeed," says
W. J. Dawson, "when we have felt like rest-
ing under its spell and acquiescing." Here,
for instance, to draw on personal acquaint-
ance, is an old college friend. Many a happy
hour we spent together, both graduating in
ninety, he a tall, stately, personable figure
with a clean-cut, handsome face and an intel-
lect as clear and keen and bracing as a frosty,
moonlight sleigh-ride in our Canadian winter
home. But he has tubercular leanings. If
only he were a rich man's son he could come
out here to lovely Pasadena and postpone the
inevitable, but since his father is a humble
toiler in life's lowly ranks, he must stay at
home and surrender, for disease wins.

Alas, many a Keats and Mozart and Chat-
terton have not lived out half their days for
lack of the comforts that wealth could have
lent them. Yes, money is mighty! Alto-
gether outside the province of question is that
fact. Money is mighty, but not thereby al-
117

Earthly Discords.

mighty. Some things elude its grasp; the
best things elude its grasp. Everything in
the counting-house it can have, but happily
everything is not to be found in the counting-
house. Reputation it can purchase, but not
character. Patience it can buy, but not
peace; flattery, but not friendship. Carve it
cannot a line of glory on a man's brow, nor
chisel a curve of beauty on a woman's face.
How coarse and cruel Watts' s portrait of
Mammon! How hideous the face, the eye,
the lip! Travelers tell us that as you ap-
proach the city of Constantinople it is a pic-
ture of beauty with its domes and mosques
and minarets, but when the city is studied at
closer range with its dogs and dirt and general
uncleanness, the enchantment vanishes. So
do men find wealth and great possessions. If
distance lends enchantment, nearness removes
the mask and shows the real face. Of old
the sage told us of the steamer sinking in
mid-ocean, and of the voyagers throwing their
diamonds into the deep. Great is the love of
money, but greater is the love of life. ' ' Give
me neither poverty nor riches," cried the
psalmist. Let me live in the temperate zone,
midway between the frosts of winter and the
118

The Noisy Passion for Pelf.

heats of summer, for if the one chills the
nature and sponges it of everything that is
noble, the other lends sorrow and vexing dis-
content.

How unlike the spirit of the hour is the
story of Chinese Gordon! The more we learn
of this remarkable man the more we feel like
saying with Huxley, "the most refreshing
character of the century. ' ' For his services
in China it will be remembered the govern-
ment sought to reward him, but he declined
all honors. Money and titles he scorned; but
a medal inscribed with his name and a record
of his thirty-three engagements was accepted
because it could not well be refused. After
his tragic death, that medal could nowhere be
traced. What a revelation of the great sol-
dier's unselfishness unfolds when we learn
that the medal had been sent to the poor of
Manchester during the famine, with an anony-
mous letter accompanying it, requesting that
the ore be melted down and given to the hun-
gry children in that great city. Then, in his
diary he wrote these words: "The last and
only thing I have in this world that I value, I
have given over to the Lord Jesus Christ.' '
Verily, lowliness is never so lovely as when
119

Earthly Discords.

the crowd is cheering, and humility is never so
beautiful as at the Cross.

Many there be to-day who argue that the
greatest danger of Mammon- worship consists
in its enslaving power. This they claim it is
that Scripture means when it speaks of "the
root of all evil." For riches itself is a bless-
ing, a gift from the good Father, but when
the heart's affection is set thereon, it becomes
a bane, a blight. Money makes a man in a
certain deep, real sense a freeman, the love
thereof makes of him a slave. And the de-
ceitfulness of the danger lies in the fact that
it is done so gradually.

Ary Scheffer pictures Satan leading the
Master to the verge of the cliff and bidding
him to throw himself over among the rocks
and the skulls and the boulders. But the
famous painting is true neither to Scripture
nor to life. For Scripture tells us it was the
pinnacle of the temple to which the Christ was
led, and the teaching of life is that the evil
one leads each innocent youth where the slant
is gentle, the slope easy, and where fragrant
flowers are blooming, not where broken bones
are bleaching. The disciple of Isaak Walton
1 20

The Noisy Passion for Pelf.

noted how Satan always baits his hook with
beauty, how he uses the very finest thread and
makes it water-color. Hans Anderson tells
us of the cloth woven for the king's garment.
"The thread was so fine that it was invis-
ible." The chain of each evil habit is
wound around us day by day. Each day
shows it stronger, thicker, tighter, heavier —
like the fabled thread in the old Greek trag-
edy, the thread sufficed to lift the string, the
string the rope, the rope the chain, the chain
the anchor.

In the epistle to the Hebrews we read,
"Take heed lest there be in any of you an
evil heart of unbelief in departing from the
living God, but exhort one another while it is
called to-day lest any of you be hardened
through the deceitfulness of sin." This is
the like-enslaving power of sin. The Mas-
ter's perpetual warning against the danger of
indulgence is in view of its captivating power.
Many things in life are dangerous to possess
because they tend to possess us — so treacher-
ous their mood, so tenacious their hold, like
the bull-dog bite of which Emerson speaks,
where the head must needs be severed if the
teeth would be loosened. Ruskin tells us of

121

Earthly Discords.

the wreck on the California coast in which
one of the passengers fastened a belt filled
with ore about his waist. Later his body was
found at the bottom of the bay. "Now,"
says the critic, "had he the gold, or had the
gold him?"

Luxury tends to selfishness and coarse-
ness, and the swamping of the higher man-
hood, like the Newfoundland dog that drags
his sinking master ashore, but keeps the head
under water, and so in the act of saving him,
drowns him. It is said that when Mahomet
reached the gate of Damascus and saw the
loveliness of the place, he turned away, say-
ing, ' ' I dare not trust myself in such a garden
of the gods." One of Emerson's ancestors
was in the habit of praying that none of his
posterity might be rich. Agassiz declared he
had no time to waste in making money, for
the great naturalist felt that it was poverty
that toughened soul-fiber and made the true
knight-errant. How awful the description of
the first Rothschild, that he was one of the
most devout worshipers that ever laid a with-
ered soul on the altar of Mammon! When
George William Curtis looked through Mr.
Tidbottom's spectacles he saw the real man.
122

The Noisy Passion for Pelf.

At one creature he looked and saw a ledger, at
another and saw a billiard cue. Alas, what
strange and sorrowful sights would greet our
eyes could we but read as He does who
knoweth all the thoughts and intents of the
hearts! How we should go out in pity and
fellow-feeling toward those who have given
themselves over to idolatry and vanity and
wicked works! When President Van Buren
heard that his son had become engaged to a
lady of affluence, he is said to have remarked,
"Well, poor boy, he is ruined; he will give
up the study of law, for which he has such
talent, and become the least useful of human
beings — a rich man."

Naturalists tell us that tropical birds are
often caught by alighting on strongly scented
trees and becoming stunned and stupefied by
the fragrance, and many a pilgrim to the
better land has stood the hard fare of want
and abasement nobly — aye, and thrived there-
on— only to become a moral weakling in the
garden of luxury. Blessed, indeed, the child
that knoweth how to abound, that "every-
where and in all things is instructed both to
be full and to be hungry, both to abound and
to suffer need."

Earthly Discords.

In his " Thoughts for a young man starting
out in life, ' ' the sage of Antioch notes how-
great wealth tends to become a snare, in that
it makes real munificence difficult, that the
millionaire who gives away half of his princi-
pal no more makes a sacrifice than the man
afflicted with dropsy, and whose tissues hold
a bucketful of the morbid liquid, makes a
sacrifice when he is tapped for a gallon. He
is in a better state after than before. But
how difficult to make that truth vital to the
ambitious hearts of men! Here is a well-
known benefactor who has just given several
millions of dollars toward colleges and differ-
ent charities; but when we ponder the fact
that he dictates the policy of a trust which
paid last year something like forty millions of
dollars in profits, surely the munificent act
loses all of its sacrifice and much of its phil-
anthropy. And what of that great and in-
creasing company who feel no obligation to
give anything, whose sympathies have dried,
to whom giving even a pittance is a real pain?
What of them? Serfs are they, thralls, blind
bondmen. Not a greater slave to his glass is
the drunkard, nor the libertine to his passion.

They remind us of the mouse who got the
124

The Noisy Passion for Pelf.

cheese, but who got it in the trap. Sadly,
indeed, must it be confessed that a consider-
able company pass out and in among us who
are nothing apart from what they possess,
things which they have collected around them-
selves, therein being well compared to the
case-worm, which gathers about itself a coat
of sticks and stones and shells many times its
size, then glues itself to the bottom of the
channel and feeds on spawn-fish. Tearing
apart the outer coating of the larva we are
surprised at its mass; shell after shell comes
0ff_straw and stalks and roots — and when
we reach the grub within, it is the tiniest in-
sect. So with many who intend their lives
on massing money, the raiment is more than
the body, the life more than the meat.

But perhaps the most successful lure in
the chase for mammon is the fact that it
teaches, or at least impresses, that a man's
life does consist in the abundance of the
things which he possesseth. Hardly can
there be any question about that. And there
can be as little question about this either, that
it is not true. A man's life does not consist
in the abundance of the things which he pos-

Earthly Discords.

sesseth, and true success is not mercantile.
A contradiction, but herein lies the strange
treachery of the thing. Riches gives more
clothes, but somehow you are colder; more
bread, but one is strangely hungrier; tantalus-
like you stand chin-deep in water which
recedes whenever you attempt to drink.

It was in the days when Athens was in her
glory that the critic said to the sculptor, "Ah,
you have loaded down your goddess with
ornaments because you could not make her
beautiful," and multitudes there are to-day
who are crowding and weighting their lives
with worldly treasures thinking thereby to
make them happy and attractive. To all
such the old Homeric tale of the sheep on
the verge of the cliff comes with fresh and
forceful freshness. A few yards below there
hung a level shelf covered with verdure.
Thoughtless, it leaped down. Thereunder a
second shelf loomed large and vital. Then
the story tells about a third shelf and a fourth
and a fifth, and then the usual sequel about
hunger, helplessness, and the eagles.

Some months ago the daily press interested
us with an interview that Mr. T. P. O'Con-
nor, the English M. P., had with Mr. Car-
126

The Noisy Passion for Pelf.

negie. "As we drove to the station I was
remarking how I envied him his wealth."
He said, 'I am not to be envied. How can
my wealth help me? I am sixty years old,
and I cannot digest my food. I would give
all my millions if I could have youth and
health. ' Then I shall never forget his next
remark. We had driven some yards in
silence when Mr. Carnegie suddenly turned,
and in hushed voice and with bitterness and
depth of feeling quite indescribable, said, 'If
I could make Faust's bargain I would. I
would gladly sell anything to have my life
over again. '

"And I saw his hand clinch as he spoke."
Surely no lesson needs stressing more in
these feverish days than the pitiful failure of
a life "whose dominant chord is the distract-
ing craze for gold. ' ' The teacher of safe and
healthy living dare not keep silent on this
danger else be false to his trust. It is the
chief jangle in life's music. The vulgar
sway of mammon is at the bottom of nearly
all our jarring and unrest. A man's life does
not consist in the abundance of things which
he possesseth, and the truest seer that ever
read its heart never said so. A man's life
127

Earthly Discords.

consists in the number of noble ideals that
possess him. A man's life consists in the
fulness of his affections, in the depth of his
sympathies, in the strength of his faith, in the
reach of his hope, in the purity of his love.
Will the good Father ask rich men what they
did with their money? Methinks it will be
the first question. May a rich magnate do
as he pleaseth with his possessions? Not
unless he pleaseth to do what is right. No
soul is worthy of a growing fortune who does
not have a correspondingly growing liberality;
but the man whose outlet of benevolence
keeps flowing — fully, freely — that man's
wealth is a blessing to society, it is a blessing
to his fellow-men, and some day he will be
surprised to learn what a blessing he has
made of it to himself.

In the Paris Salon there is a striking pic-
ture— the death of William the Conqueror.
The soul is represented as having just taken
its flight, and the servants who a moment
previous would have leaped to answer his
every nod, are robbing his wardrobe. Under-
neath is written, "William the Conqueror. "
Think of it! Just dead, and his own life-
attendants rummaging for booty! What a
128

The Noisy Passion for Pelf.

victory! "What a failure" rather, would
not the "Master of all good workmen" say!
For the man who does not own a penny, but
who lives daily in the love of whatsoever
things are true and noble and of good report,
who can kneel by his bedside, clasp his wife
and little boy in his arms, then commit them
into the keeping of the All-Seeing, All-Lov-
ing, and sleep as soundly as his curly headed
darling— that man is the true conqueror, the
true millionaire.

The child of a King is he, the heir of the
ages.

129

The Great Falsetto Note in Mod-
ern Society.

CHAPTER VI.

The Great Falsetto Note in Mod-
ern Society.

Along the line of our last chapter all has
not been said.

It is now some four years or more since
we paid our first and only visit to Monte
Carlo, but the impressions then made were so
deep and clear cut that we can easily define
them even now.

By every nature-lover and landscape-critic
the place is admitted to be one of the most
charming spots in Europe. Monaco, the
principality, is situated on the shores of
southern France, not far from the ancient
city of Nice. A promontory only eight miles
square, it yet has a king of its own, who, it
may be worth noting, is absolute monarch and
ruler. The population of the little kingdom
cannot be more than fifteen thousand people,
thus showing it to be both in extent and in-
habitants the smallest state in Europe. The
capital — a little town of four thousand — occu-
pies the summit of a rocky headland that rises

133

Earthly Discords!

two hundred feet or more sheer from the
Mediterranean shore and is surrounded by
ramparts of stone and granite. To the north-
east but just a little loom up the buildings of
the Casino. These are owned by a joint stock
company, and capitalized at something like
five million dollars. Of the buildings them-
selves the first stone was laid in 1858, and
to-day Paris itself can hardly boast of struc-
tures more magnificent.

This, then, is Monte Carlo — goodly, pic-
turesque, pleasing to the eye, and yet, withal,
the world's great gambling sore, the blot on
the fair name of southern France. No-
where possibly in all Europe is there a pros-
pect lovelier; nowhere is there a vision viler.
A garden of glory is it, but a garden likewise
of death. Here the blood of the suicide but
stains the red of the rose to a deeper dye.
Under every leaf there coils a cobra, beneath
every cluster sleeps a corpse. Ruben's pic-
ture of the crucifixion has been criticised
because Golgotha has been painted so attract-
ively that the skull cannot be seen for the
flowers, but in this latest Golgotha skull and
flowers lie side by side. Nothing is done to
hide the deformity. If the heathen conse-

<34

The Great Falsetto Note in Society.

crate shrines to serpents and adorn the croco-
dile with a crown, so here contempt of life is
invested with a glamour and ignoble death with
chivalry. The waters of the great tideless
sea wash the base of the castle; the fragrance
of the lemon groves scents the air far, far
afield; rarely does a cloud hide the sun by
day or the crystal purity of the stars by
night; the strains of the orchestra are never
silent, nor, alas, the wail of the dying.

Aristotle tells us of the Indian princess
sent as a gift to his pupil Alexander the
Great. She was the loveliest creature in all
Illyricum, but having been fed on poisonous
herbs from infancy, her very breath was fatal.
So the very breath of this goodly garden is
death to noble impulse. Here shielded from
the law millions are annually paid in shame-
ful rental. Hither flock thousands of visitors
daily from every corner of the Continent.
Hither hies the college graduate to try his
luck around the tempting table. Here may
be seen on any morning of the year Ameri-
can millionaires, Russian noblemen, London
gentry, Parisian sports, Italian clerks, and
criminals whose features grace, or shall we
not rather say disgrace, the walls of every

*35

Earthly Discords.

"rogues' gallery" in Europe. Here para-
mour and courtezan drink their wines and
rattle their dice and "shoot their gold napo-
leons." Not an evening passes, it hath been
said, but some "poor unfortunate weary of
breath" descends those winding marble stair-
ways, while a pistol-shot forthwith below pro-
claims the sequel and the tragic end. What
a tale that mention tells!

To the earnest youth busy with task and
tool and hearing for the first time of the harm
of the gambling hazard, it must be accounted
as a strange thing that so little disorder is
seen or heard at Monte Carlo and places of
like tone. One hears little shouting, little
profanity, sees nothing obscene, nothing in-
decent. Perchance, indeed, a whole morning
may be passed in the walks and banqueting-
rooms without even the faintest tell-tale of
drink's ravages crossing one's stroll. At the
cost of over one million dollars the stockhold-
ers some years ago erected a cathedral for
religious worship — thus stealing the livery of
heaven surely, and making secure in stone
history's fittest illustration of Satan clothed
as an angel of light. Alas! let no youth
think the way to death bleak and barren and
136

The Great Falsetto Note in Society.

full of startling screams and noisome odors.
Let not the beauteous child of tender years
suppose the footpath dark and lonely and
through passes dangerous and fearful. Truly
indeed "the mountain up which the tempter
takes us is bathed in purple, in its rocks
gleam jewels, while from its crest is seen the
vision of kingdoms. ' ' Facts force us to mark
how the way to death is lighted up with jets
of multi-colored splendor. No hideous skele-
ton shocks the eye, no grating note offends
the nerve, no ravenous beast or dragon
crouches by, to the outward eye nothing un-
clean to startle or disturb. The way to death
is carpeted with velvet and lined with bloom
and brilliancy. The opening pathway for the
hesitating footsteps of the blushing youth
winds through a garden in which the flowers
of the better land are stolen. Bewitching
music charms the ear; tempting fruits tickle
the taste; delicious opiates dull the sense.
If one would learn somewhat of the refine-
ment and seeming innocence of the gambling
habit he need but wend his way to Monte
Carlo. Here decked out in silks and jewelry
may be found ladies and gentlemen of courtly
dress and carriage who would shudder at

137

Earthly Discords.

drunkenness or brutality and many of the
coarser sins. Fruits beautiful to the eye are
they, but within of corruption all compact.
Gaudy creatures of the vilest tastes, like the
Purple-Emperor butterfly, which turns aside
from the sweet juices drawn from the nectary
of the narcissus to feed on putrid animal sub-
stance.

Our wonder grows apace as we linger
around this school of scandal, when we note
the preponderance of young blood loitering
through the grooves, for age is but poorly
represented. Gambling, alas, is a young man's
game, requiring the riot of youth to feed the
flame. There are no old gamblers, it hath
been noted by the seer of olden time. In an
eloquent passage the preacher tells us of the
vessel in mid-ocean that exhausted her coal
supply. First she fed her cargo to the fur-
nace, then the masts and deck-castles, then
the furniture, tables, beds, chairs, then the
timbers and "inside linings of the hull, till
when port was fortunately gained by some
favorable wind, she was naught but a shell.
So doth the fire of this deadly fever burn up
life's precious furnishings till, grown old and
gray at forty, the despondent victim seeks the

133

The Great Falsetto Note in Society.

rest of the revolver or the river. For as luck
has been called the gambler's titular deity, so
suicide is his natural end. No more eloquent
discourse was ever heard than the silent ser-
mon preached by the suicide's graveyard at
Monte Carlo. Thither the anxious pilgrim
wends his way and meets old Gilbert at the
gateway of the lonely spot — Gilbert the
keeper, Gilbert the gravedigger, Gilbert the
atheist — eighty years of age. "Life is a
game of chance," he says. "We cannot
rule over our lives any more than we can rule
over the ball in the roulette. If I am to
suffer I suffer; if I am to be glad I am glad;
when I am to die I die; fate is my God."
Such is the religion of Monte Carlo.

Sometimes troubled and cast down in
soul, when the congregation has scattered and
the lights are out, we review the day's work
and failure and wonder at the little impression
our words have made. In such dark moods
we exclaim, "Verily it must be that the world
is growing worse ! ' ' Then when we note the
madness of man in flinging his life as so much
firewood to the furnace of passion we say,
"Surely some specially commissioned evil
genius is abroad in our age deceiving if it

J39

Earthly Discords.

were possible the very elect. ' ' But these are
not our strong hours, certainly not our best
hours. Ever do we need to be reminded
that no new unknown visitor is sin. Of old
did the prophet say that sin "entered" into
the world, in the which he speaks of the dawn
of time. Idolatry and theft and murder and
violating the Sabbath day were the master
evils under the Pharaohs, and they are the
master evils now. Betting, let us hasten to
note, is not a twentieth-century invention. As
old as profanity is it, old as adultery, old as
thievery. Scholars have striven to trace its
beginnings, but in vain. Lost are they in the
twilight of fable. Does not Ruskin inform
us that in mythology the gods gambled? And
is it not a fact reported for us by all our mis-
sionaries that no savage tribe has yet been
found that has not learned the secrets of the
vicious art? John G. Paton, in his autobiog-
raphy, tells us that in all his travels he has
never met an adult native who was not a pro-
ficient gambler, while as far back as the
1 ' Book of Historical Documents of the Chinese
Race" the practice is mentioned. Verily, a
relic of savage darkness doth it seem to be.
Just here we find much food for dark fore-
140

The Great Falsetto Note in Society.

boding. Our wonder and amaze would not
surprise us so if the evil were confined to-day
to the lower strata of society. The ominous
fact is, that it pervades the whole economy of
our human movement— business life, political
life, social life, alas, church life!— for every-
body indulges, rich and poor, learned and
unlearned, members of the church and mem-
bers of the stock exchange. Even society
will not meet of an afternoon to play a game
of cards without some "seasoning to make it
spicy— a ripple on the social board of trade";
thus contributing the saddest chapter to the
pernicious story, for there can be little doubt
that society to-day is preparing the youth of
our land for a fearful harvest on the morrow.
When, but a few months since, our late la-
mented President lay adying, we took up our
morning daily and saw where more than one
hundred thousand dollars were won and lost
in Chicago on the hour of his death. Surely
there can be no fascination like unto that
which causes sport and play over the life of
those we love. When, for instance, some
years ago we read where a well-known sport-
ing man wagered ten thousand dollars on the
chances of his child's recovery how we were
141

Earthly Discords.

moved! Betting on to-morrow's weather is
bad, but betting on the heart-action of wife
and child and sweet babe nigh unto death,
who can begin to tell the shame, the solid
apathy, of such inhumanity? Is he not right
who calls the sport the "witch-craft of crime"
■ — potent, all-potent, omnipotent?

A noted critic has recently written an essay
in defense of gambling. "Gambling," he
says, "is simply a disguised system of pur-
chase. One buys excitement and excitement
is needful to healthy living." Clearly no
violation of any of the Ten Commandments
but would be vindicated by an outlook so
partial and unfair. Cannot the same be said
of duelling? And what is the bet but the duel
in the realm of mammon? If duelling may
be regarded as murder by mutual arrange-
ment, may not betting be defined as thievery
by each party's consent? Thus is the evil
the denial of all industry just as murder is the
denial of all life-sacredness. For gambling
is the death blow to lawful toil. Each differ-
ent duty, task, and tool becomes tasteless.
Honest work loses its spice and tang and
flavor. Each worthy craft and calling suffers
in proportion as men's minds are fed on ex-
142

The Great Falsetto Note in Society.

citement. This also is how it destroys the
home, for home is the refuge of repose.
Home is God's gift of rest to His tired children.
Home means freedom from life's fitful fever.

Home is the place to unwind and relax the
highly strung instrument of nervous care.
Home means life's little nest of calmness and
soothing quiet for mind and heart, just as
sleep is nature's sweet restorer for the body.
And the ; sorrowful tragedy of the betting
habit is that "home becomes a jail to its vic-
tim. ' ' Love of excitement displaces love of
wife and babe and sweet boy.

This makes clear, furthermore, how it
comes to be the lasting companion of eveiy
other indulgence that poisons the well-springs
of life. Lust is a base debauch, but once
appeased there follows temporary recoil.
How debasing is drink! how demeaning!
how low! But drink at a certain point makes
for nausea and loathing. Drink, for many,
dulls the luster of the eye and rocks into self-
helplessness. But with gambling the fever
never cools, never leaves; like unto a veri-
table furnace does the mind become. Win-
ning or losing it is the same. It may be
doubted, indeed, which is the greater stimu-

H3

Earthly Discords/

lant, success or failure. No point is reached
where the brain is dulled as by some narcotic
and thrown back insensibly. While the fuel
lasts the fire burns and blazes, and alas, in
memory after.

Oh, all ye who love home and church and
boy and girl and fatherland, would you learn
somewhat of the enormity and peril of this
soul-wrecking evil? Hear the warning be-
ware of Jerry MacAuley, who tells us that
in his fifteen years' work in the Bowery, the
professional gamblers he has seen saved could
be counted on his fingers. How low must
human nature be when the Gospel of the
Lord Jesus fails to find it! No indulgence
will so quickly destroy self-respect. None
will so speedily unsettle the mind and wreck
the body and destroy the soul. Does some
innocent child of tender years claim that there
are honest gamblers? In answer let us quote
the sage of Concord, that "fruit is always ripe
before it is rotten. ' ' The testimony of one
of New York City's greatest graduates in this
vile art at any rate should suffice, a man who
confessed to having won sixty thousand dol-
lars in one night of evil debauch. It was
given before the ministerial union of Manhat-
144

The Great Falsetto Note in Society.

tan. Before that venerable body this man
affirmed that in all his wild career he had
never met an honest gambler who played a
perfectly straight game. The evil is essen-
tially dishonest. It is a system of ethics
built on a false conception of ownership.
This is our arch-indictment; wealth is a
sacred trust, not a toy to sport and trifle with.
It destroys the mind; it pollutes the heart; it
inflames the passions; it puts the stigma on
honest industry; it wrecks the home, than
which no impeachment could be graver.
Home is the corner-stone of church and state,
and anything that knocks the underpinning
from underneath this divine altar is wrong
and wicked, and in condemnation thereof
nothing more is needed.

"Dark is the night, how dark! no light! no fire!
Cold on the hearth the last faint sparks expire;
Shivering she watches by the cradle side
For him who pledged her love last year a bride.

"Can he desert me thus? He knows I stay
Night after night in loneliness to pray
Eor his return, and yet he sees no tear —
No! No! It cannot be! He will be here.

"Nestle more closely dear one to my heart!
Thou'rt cold! Thou'rt freezing! But he will not part!
Husband, I die ! Father, it is not he !
O God,'protect my child! The clock strikes three.

H5

Earthly Discorcfs.

"They're gone, they're gone! The glimmering spark
hath fled.
The wife and child are numbered with the dead.
On the cold earth outstretched in solemn rest,
The baby lay frozen on its mother's breast.
The gambler came at last, but all was o'er;
Dead silence reigned around. The clock struck four."

146

The Young Man Out of T

UNE.

CHAPTER VII.
The Young Man Out of Tune.

"The Lord let the house of a beast to the soul of a man,
And the man said, 'Am I your debtor?'
The Lord said, 'No; but keep it as clean as you can
And I will let you a better." — Tennyson.

David king of Israel had four sons — Solo-
mon, Amnon, Adonijah, and Absalom — and
not one of them, if the strange truth must be
confessed, was a credit to his father. In
Solomon we have the curious mingling of wis-
dom and folly; Amnon was guilty of one of
the foulest crimes that can stain the human
heart; Adonijah was a usurper; Absalom a
murderer. A bad child was he, a bad youth,
a bad man, and still his father loved him.
He was very handsome, we are told, and we
are also told that his beautiful head of hair
when cut every year weighed two hundred
shekels; i. e., about thirty ounces. The
story of how he rebelled against his father's
throne and had himself proclaimed king at
Hebron by the people, and of how he then
marched toward Jerusalem with his army to
149

Earthly Discords.

take possession of the capital and the throne,
is an old familiar story; and the Journal of
the Father's hearing of his approach and
fleeing from the city accompanied by his
family and his famous body-guard of six hun-
dred men, and proceeding toward the Jordan,
is likewise well-known and thrilling narrative.
There is perhaps no single day in the whole
record of Jewish history so completely ful-
filled as that which describes this memorable
flight. David is pursued. The two armies
meet in the forest of Ephraim, and then the
battle — and what a battle!

Father forced to fight, or rather to defend
himself, against the son; the son deliberately
turning against the father. Twenty thousand
men are slain. Absalom is defeated. Rid-
ing off the field on horseback, his beautiful
head of hair is knotted in the boughs of a
huge oak and he is dragged from the stirrup
and is hanged. So sharp and graphic is the
record that we can almost see King David
standing at the gate of the city waiting for
tidings of the battle, and as he sees a messen-
ger running toward him with news from the
front, he ^cries out in breathless excitement,
not "Is the battle won?" — he seems not to

The Young Man Out of Tune.

have cared so much for that. He cries out,
the rather, "Is the young man Absalom
safe?" And when the sad story is told the
father weeps, ' ' Oh, my son Absalom ! my son,
my son Absalom! would God I had died for
thee! Oh, Absalom, my son, my son!"

There can be little doubt that the words of
this sorrowful refrain contain more than a
literal meaning. This tale about a wayward
youth was not inserted in the inspired Testa-
ment as mere history. A deeper truth by far
than that does it hold in its ample and far-
reaching content. Forever it must loom as
the lighthouse on the rock, with its red warn-
ing writ in flame of fire, " Beware!' ' In-
tended is it to teach us that there are Absa-
loms to-day who rebel against their father's
God and their mother's God, and wander into
the far country, careless of everything — care-
less of body, careless of soul — and run life's
short but sure career. And it is especially
intended to teach all Christian parents who
profess the name of Christ to take measures
for the safety of their children, else they, too,
be found standing at the door of the home-
stead and crying aloud when it is too late,

l5l

Earthly Discords.

"Oh, my son Absalom! my son, my son
Absalom! would God I had died for thee!
Oh, Absalom! my son, my son!" This
surely is the spiritual burden of the elegy.
How we are reminded of the New Testament
prodigal! May it not well be called the Old
Testament version of the Master's matchless
parable? For both wandered from home and
both partook of the same Circean draught.
Already we noted how sin at heart is lawless-
ness. Here the lawlessness breaks out in
open mutiny, for each listened to the voice of
the tempter as he bade them to insurrect
against a loving father's will. That there are
a few catching melodies that come with pecu-
liar fascination to the ears of young men must
seem so evident as to be scarcely needing
statement. Darwin tells us that but few ani-
mals can be caught twice in the same trap.
Not so our young men! With one or two of
the old songs, alas, Satan keeps enticing our
youth aside, as in the Homeric myth the
Sirens lured the sailors on the rocks and vio-
lated them. But such strains are discords to
the ear trained to spiritual tones. Hearing
the new song of redemption, the siren voice
of the tempter soon loses its charm. That

i52

The Young Man Out of Tune.

man alone is safe who takes the wax of
worldliness from out his ear and tunes his
heart to the heavenly harmonies of our Divine
Orpheus. Then alone is he proof against
the beverage of Circe or the music of the
mermaids. For then doth he hear better
music reverberating daily in his soul, and
sweeter.

I. No young man is safe who plays with
his body. True, the body is only dust, but
what an interesting lump of dust! The eye
a text-book on geometry; the nervous system
a treatise on telegraphy; the joints and mus-
cles a standard work on mechanism! Of old
the philosopher challenged his class to find a
happier location for any one of the twenty-
five principal organs of the human anatomy
than the place in which it is found. We
study the backbone. We note the perfection
of its skill, "firm as a pillar, flexible as a
chain, light in weight, graceful in form. ' ' Six
million nerves and muscles in every square
inch of the human face! Six hundred million
cells in what we call the brain! Strange that
in these days of enlightenment men should
trifle with so delicate a masterpiece! Far

153

Earthly Discords.

aback as history takes us the ancients rever-
enced it, the highest ambition of an Egyptian
being to leave a sufficiency when he died that
it might be embalmed. Surely the youth who
gives to his body other than the very best care
is entitled to any nickname in the lexicon of
folly. For health is the stepping-stone to
happiness, to usefulness. Some Adam Smith
may publish a work upon the "Wealth of
Nations" with never a word in it as to the
health of nations, but this is much as though
one were to write a treatise on jurisprudence
with the Ten Commandments left out, or a
dissertation on music with the octave ignored.
The human body has been called the finished
poem of the Great Author. Neglect of it is
a blot on any curriculum. To keep the soul's
dwelling in good working order, this is the
first duty of the religious man. Pascal's
theory that to be pious one must starve him-
self and be pale no longer obtains. Tall,
sickly, spiritual shadows are not wanted any-
where to-day save in the sanatorium. Im-
agine Ulysses or Hector or the Cyclops an
oarsman in a rotten boat. A kind Provi-
dence surely could not have intended the
drama of life to be — first thirty years health

154

The Young Man Out of Tune.

hunting wealth, second thirty years wealth
hunting health. At one of our commence-
ment exercises last spring a certain class cele-
brated its tenth anniversary. A review of the
decade elicited the sad surprise that fifty-
seven men had graduated in that class, of
whom but ten are now living. Is it unjust to
say that there must be some false note in the
teaching of these scholastic halls? True,
sickness is ofttimes but a reflection on a young
man's prudence, often indeed a tribute to his
life of sacrifice and devotion, yet 'tis also true
that not infrequently also it is a stigma on his
moral character. Seriously and in all con-
science it must be confessed that some of us
hold it as the wickedest foul play that when
we sat at the feet of the wise men, none of
them thought it worth their while to tell us
the part our body was about to play in life's
greater curriculum. As some one notes, we
were told the pathway of the Pleiads and all
about the moons of Jupiter just as though
they were in danger of losing their course,
but of ourselves — who are in danger every
moment of swinging off — never a word. In
blissful blindness were we left to find that out
by tear and tilt and tumble. Whenever a

!55

Earthly Discords.

Southerner is asked as to his health, he re-
plies, "Just tolerable." No youth of pride
and promise can do his best who is "Just
tolerable, ' ' and every young lover of honesty
owes it to the world to do his best. Southey
tells us that the Cid, the national hero of
Spain, had such an overflow of warm, rich
blood that he could lie with a leper and not
contract the disease. Only smallpox and
bullets, 'tis said, kills the Mohawk Indian.
With these compare the forty-seven youths
afore mentioned who within ten years after
graduation died of old age in the thirties.
And let us take to heart the lesson that no
child of immortality can afford to play with
this wondrous temple of wisdom and beauty
and grace. For the gospel of the Lord Jesus
glorifies the body. It is not vile and never
once does the Bible say so. The habitation
is it of the Holy Spirit. It is to be raised
from the dead. It is to be clothed upon with
immortality. Keep it clean.

2. No young man is safe who plays with

his life. For life is something surpassingly

serious, and he who trifles with it and treats

it as an idle game of battledore or bagatelle

■56

The Young Man Out ot Tune,

must some evil day smart for the neglect.
Full oft this assumes the revolting pessimism
of some Khayyam who would make of life
an idle lottery.

"We are no other than a moving row
Of magic shadow-shapes, that come and go
Round with this sun-illumined lantern, held
In midnight by the Master of the Show.

"Impotent pieces of the game he plays
Upon this checker-board of nights and days;
Hither and thither moves, and checks and slays,
And one by one back in the closet lays."

Perhaps our Puritan elders in attempting
to curb the youthfulness of youth made life
grim-visaged and over serious, for in protest-
ing strongly against all Catholic leanings, they
unwittingly glorified a type of penance them-
selves, therein fulfilling the old adage that not
infrequently extremes do meet. Play these
sturdy pilgrims denounced in all its forms;
and in some places still, with sorrow let it be
confessed, their intolerant spirit lags and lin-
gers. Many there be to-day who would cry
down all pastime and diversion; the ethic of
innocent amusement they seem not to regard;
the billiard-table they would blacklist, the
bowling alley, the golf link, the tennis court,

157

Earthly Discords.

the ball game. Each Epworth League and
each Endeavor army they would have dressed
in drab and slowly sauntering down the avenue
to the strains of some funeral march. But
this surely defeats the high end of Christian
rejoicing for which all young hearts plead and
pine. Life's greatest seers and sages have
found time for festival and frolic. Mission-
aries like Coleridge Pattison have distinguished
themselves on the cricket field, and ministers
like Robert Speer have not thought it sacri-
lege to play ball. "Any type of raven reli-
gion is a repelling religion." Youth will
have none of it. Too black its wings to
tempt young hearts to the heavenly flight,
for all are pleasure-seekers; and it should be
the aim, we are constrained to believe, of
each true church to provide wholesome relax-
ations for the fold of her care.

Of old the famous Frenchman remarked,
"Play, but play with the right things; play
with thy limbs not thy life; play not with
powder. Form a purpose, then fix it."
And herein surely lies the victory. Emer-
son, when asked how to make the most of
one's self, replied, "Have one idea." Not
purpose but singleness of purpose is the secret

■53

The Young Man Out of Tune.

of success. "To keep a gun from scattering,
put in a single shot." The apostle adds,
1 ' One thing I do. ' ' Ours is an age of special-
ists. Recently a learned professor passed
from us, regretting that he had not devoted
his whole life to the study of the dative case.
"Science is boring everlasting gimlet holes,"
says Dr. Patton. "Non multa sed multum"
is the college motto. And doth not the
motto seem a wise one? Is it not worth
hanging in every store, every office, every
workshop? Few things more valuable to a
young man in life than the pressure of a pur-
pose! It has a negative value, for it keeps
from drifting, and a drifting boat always drifts
down stream; it hath a positive value, for it
focuses power; and "concentration," said Sir
Isaac Newton, "is the essence of strength."
"The light of the body is the eye; if, there-
fore, thine eye be single, thy whole bodv shall
be full of light; but if thine eye be double,
thy whole body shall be full of darkness."
Light is lineal; darkness is dual. Single men
are singular men; they crash through impedi-
ments with the earnestness of gunpowder.
Ofttimes the boat race is won, not by superior
straining, but by superior steering. Rarely

*59

Earthly Discords-.

does the derelict find an accidental harbor.
" Sheet lightning does little damage; it is the
bolt that kills." "Be a magnetic needle,"
said Carlyle. Look straight ahead. Do not
circle, but steer. Point. A life without a
purpose has been compared to a letter with-
out an address. It is stamped, sealed, and
mailed, but it lacks the element of direction;
it will go to the dead-letter office of defeat.
It mattereth not how much wealth the child
of fortune claims, he has no right to be idle;
no right to play with his life. Idleness is
treason to the King's government.

"No child is born into this world
Whose work is not born with him."

Of late we have been interested in the life
of Cecil Rhodes. He was the son of a clergy-
man. Going to South Africa, a poor boy in
search of health, he became swayed by a
master motive — the painting of the Dark Con-
tinent British red. An empire builder was
he — "a Titan pitching quoits with worlds."
Much of his great career was selfish and un-
worthy, but all must admire his steady passion
for a purpose. Never once did he fritter
away his life; never once trifle his time.

1 60

The Young Man Out of Tune.

3. No young man is safe who plays with
his passions. Not that there is anything un-
worthy in our passions; our passions are God-
given. The passion for food, for drink, for
dress, for praise, for beauty, for truth, for
love. How noble these heart-hungerings!
How excellent! How sterling! Only when
we begin to play with them and run them to
riot do they lose their luster and become base
metal. Fire is a good servant. What bless-
ings it doth bring! What bliss! How it
purifies! How it gladdens! Comfort it lends
to the home, light and cheer to the weary.
But how cruel a master! How merciless its
empire! Water. What greater blessing than
water? What were life without water!
Without water life could not be. Surely,
like bread, Swift might have said, it is the
staff of life; rendering commerce possible,
cleansing our defilements, cooling our over-
heated frame, quenching our overburning
thirst. But water unchained, unchecked, how
ruthless! how relentless! Never perhaps
was the play of passion painted so richly
and highly colored as by Burns, but his own
sad epitaph is the best commentary on the
painting:

161

Earthly Discords.

"Is there a whim-inspired fool,
Owre fast for thought, owre hot for rule,
Owre blate to seek, owre proud to snool,

Let him draw near;
And owre this grassy heap sing dool,

And drap a tear.

"Is there a man whose judgment clear,
Can others teach the course to steer,
Yet runs himself life's mad career

Wild as the wave;
Here pause — and through the starting tear,
Survey this grave."

If ever there was a singer who sang the
songs of the flesh it was the German poet
Heine. But the historian notes how his seven
long years on what he himself called his "mat-
tress grave," his excruciating sufferings, his
softening of the spinal cord, his opium crav-
ing, is the most pathetic illustration of the
after-bite of the serpent and the after-sting of
the adder. Does some one then ask, "What
shall I do with these passions mine?" Keep
them in check. Learn the dignity, the glory,
of self-control. Self-knowledge, self-rever-
ence, self-control, these are the steps to the
citadel of safety.

There is an old saying attributed to Luther,
"We cannot prevent the birds of paradise
flying over our heads, but we can prevent
162

The Young Man Out of Tune.

their nesting in our hair, ' ' to which another
shrewd divine adds, "The colored boy who
looks through the fence at a row of water-
melons cannot stop his mouth from watering,
but he can run." And in running, let us
add, he will find his limbs grow steady and
his heart grow strong.

Quite recently a religious review was tell-
ing us of a man who was sentenced to jail last
winter in a police court in Boston. Dressed
was he like a rowdy, and yet this man was at
one time governor of a Southern state. He
was the only son of wealthy parents. His
father was chief justice of the Supreme Court
of South Carolina. The mother in her girl-
hood was a distinguished beauty. Less than
thirty years ago the man was tall, stately,
kingly, eloquent, wealthy, charming. Going
into the Civil War, he came out with medals.
To-day his picture hangs in the rogue's gal-
lery. On being placed behind the bars, he
used these words: "I am but fifty-eight years
old, but look at me! My hair is white, my
skin is browned and seasoned, my cheeks are
hollowed, my frame is shrunken, my hands
palsied like a man of eighty. Opium and
morphine, the twin curses of my life, were not
163

Earthly Discord's-.

content with undermining my health; they
attacked my mind and my moral nature; they
led me to do things that in my right sense I
abhor as I do murder. They are not mere
drugs to me; they are two grinning, pursuing,
avenging sprites, besetting me at every turn.
It is years since I tasted either, but the work
of destruction they began, all the forces of
nature, disease, and approaching age have
helped to carry on. ' '

Years ago Mr. De Lesseps devised the
idea of cutting a passage through the Isthmus
of Panama. The project failed. To-day
travelers tell us that a trip across the Isthmus
is pathetic; machinery rusting and falling
away; rotting timbers and derricks and every
mechanical contrivance in a state of collapse.
A sense of depression steals over the visitor.
Three hundred millions of money were spent
— but there is no canal. Sights like unto this
there are in life all around us. Such is the
man who lets his passions run riot; the man
who fans his baser feelings into flame; the
man who dulls his brain with some stimulant
or narcotic; the man who makes a lifeless
luggage out of his body. Such the man en-
dowed with a divine nature and immortal
164

The Young Man Out of Tune.

powers who prostitutes this splendid inheri-
tance to coarse and carnal ends. How piti-
ful, how sad!

Walking through the British Museum what
a mutilated collection of vases and statues and
ancient porcelain greets the eye! Here is the
lower part of an Egyptian kneeling figure
with the knee fractured; here is a Greek
fictile vase with one of the handles missing;
here are the remains of a Roman water-wheel;
here is a portion of an Assyrian sculptured
slab, chipped and cracked ; here is an eques-
trian statue of the Emperor Caligula with both
arms gone; here is a statue of Apollo playing
the lyre, but the strings have snapped and the
yoke is wanting; here is a broken bust of
Athene, with head and draperies restored in
plaster; here is the torso of a Triton in high
relief; here the fragment of an acroterion with
various shattered moldings. Alas, what evi-
dences of devastation and waste are here!
Traces of beauty left to tell us that some
Phidiases, some Angelos, some Canovas have
once visited our earth, for beautiful even are
the ruins. Could some stranger from the
better land come to visit us to-day, it hath
been noted what marred models he would

165

Earthly Discords.

see; homes that are hells; codes and ordi-
nances that are infamous. Here is some in-
human husband beating his wife, the marriage
certificate once a symbol of love and liberty
having become a sentence of enslavement and
hate; here is some child possessed of perfidy
assailing his parent; here are men dealing out
to their fellow-men the drug that is deadly
and that turns them into demons; here are
youth maiming their bodies; here hulls of
shattered ships strew the beach of life; here
are fragments in fullness of broken vows,
closets with skeletons therein; immortal souls
redeemed by the blood of Jesus and that are
still precious in his sight, but with a coating
of beastliness upon their one-time beauty.
Here prisons our visitor would see, peniten-
tiaries, hospitals, asylums, and cemeteries for
the dead; sobs he would hear that never cease,
like the endless moaning of the sleepless tide.
Verily our other-world guest might well say,
"What a ruin!" "What a splendid ruin!"
"Surely the Divine Workman himself hath
been here once, and just as surely some
enemy must have entered since to spoil and
undermine his work. ' '

66

The Young Man Out of Tune.

4. No young man is safe who plays with
the world of cfrance. More than once already
have we called attention to this deafening dis-
cord, but it hath peculiar enchantment to the
audience of youth.

Perhaps there is nothing to-day that carries
with it more danger to society than playing
with the world of chance. To-day the heart
of the American nation is burning with lust —
the lust for gold. For money is America's
god. Almost outside the pale of debate is
that statement. The passion for pelf is white-
hot. 'Tis more than a passion, alas! 'Tis
a disease. The American people are money-
drunk. How to make money! how to make
it easily! how to make it quickly! This is
the problem and playing with the world of
chance seems the popular solution. The rage
of the age is to get rich; or rather the rage of
the age is to get very rich. In Zeus the
world hath lost all faith, lost faith in Apollo,
lost faith in Athene, lost faith in Aphrodite,
but never did a people have such faith in any
oracle as the American people have in Mam-
mon to-day, and yet he is the basest god that
dwells on Olympus.

Now, like the sage of old we wage no war
167

Earthly Discords.

against wealth, we defile it with no pollut-
ing breath, but we do wage war against this
vulgar crusade to the altar of wealth. "The
feudalism of the stocks is fully as wicked as
the feudalism of the sword." The pitiful
paragraph is that the poor little hungry
orphan who steals a loaf of bread is a thief,
while the hard-hearted usurer who speculates
on the tears of the little fellow's mother and
sells them at so much a pennyweight is a
shrewd broker on the exchange; which is
false, which is wicked, which is blasphemous,
which indeed at heart is anarchy! One grave
objection to playing with the world of chance,
let us hasten to observe, is, that the greatest
things in life are gotten slowly. The insect
develops one day and dies the next; the
elephant lives almost a century because his
maturity is postponed; the fly is born full
grown in a day; the bird asks weeks before
it learns to risk its wing; few the years be-
tween the colt and the steed's full strength;
but when God calls some Moses or Milton he
starts him on a long crusade. It has been
regarded as a strange fact that boys who gain
honors in college do not as a rule succeed in
life. Youthful wonders but rarely fulfil their
1 63

The Young Man Out of Tune.

early promise. Grant, Sherman, Sheridan,
Webster, Greeley, Beecher, Scott were dull
boys. "Soon ripe, soon rotten" is an old
proverb. How long doth nature ask to make
a diamond? Happy question! Something
like one hundred thousand years. Patience,
the poet says, changes the mulberry-leaf to
satin. "Can't wait" is the voice of the age.
The boy chafes to become a youth, the youth
to become a man, the man frets under his
slow, lagging pace. Society is out hunting
short cuts and big profits ; and yet the great-
est things grow slowly. Instance Tennyson
for seventeen years laboring "In Memoriam."
Think of Webster devoting six and thirty
years to a dictionary, or a Gibbon a full score
of years to his immortal classic. Witness
George Eliot reading one thousand volumes
before she wrote a line of Daniel Deronda.
Verily, each sage and patriot should be patient
since God's century-plants refuse to be
hurried.

While some labor others enter into the
fruits of said labors, and these, after all, are
the labors that last, for the longer the ripen-
ing the richer the harvest and the less liable
to mildew and life's corroding cankers. Mr.
169

Earthly Discords.

Carnegie has quite recently published a book,
entitled, "The Empire of Business." One
paragraph is worth quoting in capitals:
"When I was a telegraph operator we had
no exchanges, and the men who speculated on
the Eastern markets were necessarily known
to the operators. These men were not our
citizens of first repute. They were regarded
with suspicion. I have lived to see nearly all
these speculators ruined men. There is
scarcely an instance of a man who has made
a fortune by speculating and kept it." O all
ye young hearts of earnest but ambitious aim,
whose limitations tend to vex and wound thy
spirits, apt many of you to grow restive under
the slowness of your lowly lots, let this truth
come with comforting and calming sway, that
man is born a long way from home and that
we are saved by hope. Be thine the larger
faith, that if the "Master of all good work-
men" calls thee to serve him as a banker,
that said call comes as a business overture,
but not with the final motive of amassing gain.
Into the banking house he may summon thee
and great may be the gain thereof. If so,
well and good, but to his All-seeing eye no
life fulfils its primal plan that lives for such a
170

The Young Man Out of Tune.

low, unworthy aim as mammon. "He lives
too low who lives below the stars." Man-
hood alone is the true riches, the imperishable
wealth. Make thy choice 'twixt truth and
treachery, 'twixt infidelity and faith. Sign
thy name to no compact for which the whitest
saint in gloryland may not be a voucher.
Learn the value of the invisible, the reality
of the remote. Study to show thyself ap-
proved, a workman that feeleth no shame for
the humble task, the lowly service, the slow
and patient part. Thus shalt thou find the
true treasure, the enduring substance, which
the world must ever fail to give and which no
change can ever take away.

5 . No young man is safe who plays with
his soul.

Esau, for a mess of pottage, sold his birth-
right, and many there be to-day, we fear, who
set no greater value upon their immortal heri-
tage. The glory of man is his spiritual nature.
The horse has been eating grass since the
days of Darius, but he knows no more about
it to-day than he did then, but the horse's
owner has unlocked the lips of every blade
that bursts and every bud that blooms, and
171

Earthly Discords;

made each tell out their secret. The skylark
sings the same note that Ovid and Homer
heard; meanwhile each listening poet has
poured into the heart of the world a flood of
harmony, and still the end is not. "The eye
is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear with
hearing." "Heard strains are sweet, but
those unheard are sweeter." Man is a pil-
grim in search of a city out of sight. The
only satisfying solution to the mystery is the
solution of Holy Writ. What may that solu-
tion be? This: life is the great polytechnic.
The spiritual is the real. "We are building
day by day as the moments pass away, a
temple." We have bodies; we are souls;
these souls are homed in God; never will
they find rest until they reach their native

dwelling.

"Heaven is my fatherland,
Heaven is my home."

"Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home."

And now why should not every young
heart who ponders these pages be a Chris-
tian? Why should he or she not say with the
old divine, "Jesus Christ has no hands or
172

The Young Man Out of Tune.

feet in this world; I will give him mine. He
has no eyes; I will give him mine. He has
no tongue to tell his excellence; I will lend
him mine. He has no heart to love and melt
with pity; here, Lord, mine."

"My life, my love, I give to thee,
Thou Lamb of God who died for me;
Oh, may I ever faithful be,
My Saviour and my God."

Mrs. Ballington Booth tells of a company
of good women whose custom was to go down
every Sabbath afternoon into the Hartford
jail to hold a service of song for the prisoners.
Among these good sisters of charity one day
was a strange lady who had heard of the ser-
vice and had asked permission to accompany
them. One by one the prisoners defiled into
the room and took their seats. The leader
arose and gave out the hymn, "Just as I am
without one plea. ' ' They had just begun the
second stanza when suddenly the visitor
turned pale and fainted. Taken out into the
vestibule she revived and later was brought
to the hotel. On being asked the cause of
the swoon, she replied, "I saw my boy; he
has been away from home for five years, and
we thought he was out West." Some one

173

Earthly Discords.

has opinioned that the widow's son laid under
the turf is the saddest sight in life, but, oh,
not so, not so!

To see a young man play with his body,
play with his life, play with his passions, play
with the world of chance, play with his im-
mortal heritage and trample upon it as a little
and an unworthy thing; to see him turn life's
sweetest strains into a harsh and grating dis-
cord; to see him turn his back on God and
Christ and home and mother and native land
— going down, down, down till at last the
depths are reached; then becoming a danger-
ous outcast so that the law must needs step
in and call for fetters — surely this is the sad-
dest sight in life. Than this can anything be
more comfortless or grievous? This is the
spectacle over which angels weep. This is
the scene that led to David's heartbreak.
This is the picture of a lost soul.

174

Strains True and False in Our
National Anthem.

CHAPTER VIII.

Strains True and False in Our
National Anthem.

A THANKSGIVING RETROSPECT.
This day has been set apart by our worthy
President as a day for public thanksgiving
unto Almighty God for his singularly impres-
sive gifts and unfailing goodness, and perhaps
it may be wise and well to recount a few of
the unnumbered and unnumberable blessings
for which we, and all our fellow-countrymen
here in Christian America, should be deeply
and devoutly grateful. The custom of public
thanksgiving has come down to us from our
good old fathers of pilgrim name. To them
belongs the honor of establishing an observ-
ance that we trust may never lapse. Many
things have happened since the Mayflower
dropped anchor in the ice-bound bay — some
of them for the better, some perhaps for the
worse — but the same Providence that watched
over those sturdy, stout-hearted wanderers
from the time they embarked at Belft Haven
till sixty-three days later they moored their
177

Earthly Discords.*-

little craft of one hundred and eighty tons in
the harbor of Cape Cod, that same Providence
has been watching over us, and leading us,
and blessing us, making our land a land of
milk and honey, and one more nearly fulfill-
ing the ideal of the prophet than any unre-
deemed land that history yet acquaints us
with, when he speaks of ImmanueFs land.
The subject is ample and far-reaching, and
we can do little else than take a brief pilgrim-
age into the country, and stir up the mind
that is pure and open by way of remembrance,
trying all the while to note what a favored
land this is, what a favored people we are,
and how each responsive heart should join the
glad triumphant chorus,

"Praise God from whom all blessings flow;
Praise him all creatures here below;
Praise him above ye, heavenly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost."

I. How wonderful our country! And not
in swollen style do we speak when we say it
is the first country in the world. Other coun-
tries surpass us in churches, cathedrals, ceme-
teries, art galleries, museums, and scenes of
antiquity; but in all that goes to form a part
178

Strains True and False.

of daily living this is the best country of all.
It is the largest; it is the most fertile; it is
the richest. Russia has a vast stretch of ter-
ritory, but Russia's territory ~is less than half
the size of ours. William M. Sloane notes
how every American citizen could be put into
the state of Texas without being as crowded
as the people of England; and Bishop Fallows
claims that if our land were brought under
tillage it would support half a billion people.
Thoughtful indeed ought we to be, that Provi-
dence has pitched our tent for us here in this
great America, with its three million square
miles of territory, with its twenty-six thousand
miles of riverway, with its twelve thousand
miles of indented shore, with its eighty million
people, with its temperate clime and arable
meadow, a land through whose gates famine
never yet hath entered, where peace and
plenty reign so happily, furnishing as we do
not only our own needs, but with the privilege
of contributing as we so largely do to the great
world's needs and the great world's comforts.

2. How gracious our climate! The whole
of India and much of China lies to the south
of us. The tropic of Cancer cuts India in
179

Earthly Discords.

half; the tropic of Capricorn cuts Australia in
half; the Equator being the like dividing line
for Africa. The whole of Asiatic Russia is
north ot our most northerly point, and most
of European Russia. How vast a territory
is Canada, but the greater part of Canada is
uninhabitable! Alaska hugs the North Pole;
South America hugs the Equator. Our lati-
tude stretches from thirty to forty-eight
degrees, the same as Japan. If Dean Swift
could humorously say that most of the
millions of the human race live in climates
torrid or horrid, let us be thankful that our
lot has been thrown so far away from the
realm of eternal ice on the one side and eter-
nal fever on the other. For while we have
famines, they are not Indian famines; fogs
have we, but no London fogs; storms, but no
Russian storms. Thoughtful also, then, for
our climate! To us favored citizens of this
genial southland should these facts specially
appeal. For is not ours the best of the best
— summer and winter, winter and summer,
each the best — a clime truly of tranquil temper,

"Where everlasting spring abides
And never-withering flowers."

1 80

Strains True and False.

3. How unexampled our prosperity! We
are to-day, in a commercial sense, a very Gi-
braltar among the nations. Our national debt
is small, our national sheaf golden; our har-
vest is a poem of praise. The department of
agriculture has been telling us that our crop
of wheat is seven hundred and fifty million
bushels, more than one-fourth of the whole
world's total. Such fruits, such meats, such
minerals, such timber, such harvest from
mountain and meadow, lake and river.
Verily, no thanksgiving table was ever spread
so richly, so generously! No country can
with ours compare; none where the masses
of the people are so well off and so happy.
Ten cents a day good wages in China; twenty
cents a day good wages in Japan; seventy-
five cents a day good wages in Germany; one
dollar a day good wages in England! An
honored missionary who has spent many years
in Pekin, speaking from a public platform
recently, said that he paid his cook one dollar
and seventy-five cents a month and find him-
self. "My carpenter cost me eight cents a
day," he added. "Millions in China," he
further added, "never get enough to eat from
birth till death. No sweeping rhetoric are we
181

Earthly Discords.

guilty of then surely when we claim that the
toilers of head, hand, foot, are better housed
and better fed in America than in any other
country. They have more pleasures, more
comforts, more luxuries. Up to October the
first of this year we have sent to foreign
markets more than nine hundred million dol-
lars' worth of manufactured goods. Our
bank clearings for 1901 exceeded one hun-
dred billion dollars. How magnificent a
nation is ours! What far-stretching terri-
tory! What acreage of wheat-field! What
railroads, mines, and factories! What cities,
towns, and villages! What a seaboard! What
inlets and outlets for the world's commerce!
What institutions of learning! What high
schools and academies! Six thousand and
five in number. What colleges! Four hun-
dred and eighty-four by the roll-call, with ten
thousand teachers and instructors. Surely
these are things for the candid heart to
ponder, for the thoughtful mind to weigh.

4. How advanced our civilization! Emer-
son says that no one has ever attempted a
definition of what civilization is. A nation
that hath no tool, no garment, no alphabet, no
182

Strains True and False.

civil code, no temple,' no art or science, no
commerce, no invention, no agriculture, no
literature, is uncivilized. The ungospeled
Chinaman to-day is the Chinaman of Con-
fucius' s time; the negro is the negro of whom
Herodotus wrote — still kneeling to his fetich;
the Mongolian still worships his dragon; the
Hindu still enslaves his wife; the tattooed
South Sea Islander still feeds on human flesh.
Traveling back in memory one hundred years
what a collection of castaways greets the
mind! These were the days of flint locks
and tallow candles, whale-lamps and home-
spun; the days of Franklin stoves and goose-
quills; the days of bad roads and log cabins,
the ox-cart and the stage-coach; the days of
scythe and sickle, flail and winnowing floor;
these the days of awl and churn and spinning-
wheel. These were the days of bungling
surgery, human slavery, and the Inquisition.
"One hundred years ago," it has been re-
marked, "a man might be taken on Friday,
arraigned on Saturday, preached fire and
brimstone to on Sunday, and found on Tues-
day to be innocent." Our first President
died at Mount Vernon on the banks of the
Potomac. At that time the capital was in
183

Earthly DiscorcTs;

Philadelphia, one hundred miles away. The
sixth congress had just assembled, and a
courier was dispatched. They received the
tidings three days later. The first railroad
time-table read thus, "The locomotive will
leave the depot every morning at eight if the
weather is fair." To-day America alone
operates two hundred and fifty thousand
miles of railroad, more than half the railroad
mileage of the world. The hours of toil are
halved, the hours of recreation doubled. The
average length of life has been pushed forward
ten milestones. New light has abolished
darkness, new tools have abolished drudgery.
The child of the artisan has open pathway
to the college fountain, and what were luxu-
ries but yesterday at the banquet of the rich
are now necessities on the table of the poor.

When New York heard of Waterloo six
weary weeks had lapsed. To-day the conti-
nents are linked by fourteen wires and fourteen
hundred ships, carrying their own engine for
converting salt water into fresh. For that,
notes our Concord sage, is what civilization
after all is, "converting salt water into fresh;
teaching the chimney to burn its own smoke;
teaching the farm to produce its own needs;
184

Strains True and False.

teaching the prison to maintain itself and yield
a revenue"; teaching the anaesthetic to pull
the sting out of the surgeon's knife; teaching
the good-natured waterfall to turn the wheel;
teaching gravity to bring down the ax and
split the wood; teaching the tides to grind our
corn; teaching the elevator to lift it to the
fifteenth story; teaching old Father Neptune
to carry to your noonday table delicacies from
the five continents and the Islands of the sea.
What a glorious age indeed is ours! Deep
should be our gratitude for such an age, such
a fatherland, for our advance in science and
the arts. Does some narrow-minded lover of
discord aim to stir up strife between science
and religion? Vain and idle were the effort.
Never were these one-time warring lovers
better friends. True science and true reli-
gion have no quarrel. In heart they have
always been as one. Never were they march-
ing on so happily as to-day. Joined they
have been in an eternal wedlock. For reli-
gion to-day is the minister of science, and
science is the servant of religion in the inter-
pretation of the hidden workings of the laws
of life.

i85

Earthly Discords*

5. How world-admired our government!
"A government of the people and by the peo-
ple and for the people"; a government that
secures for every loyal citizen life, liberty, and
chance to be happy; a Christian government,
stamped so on our colonization and our coin.
In a passage of polished fervor Cicero tells us
how the words "Civis Romanus sum" gave
panoply, prestige, and power. Right proudly
does the apostle to the Gentiles boast "I am
a Jew of Tarsus, a citizen of no mean city. ' '
Does American citizenship mean less? As
we think of the luster of our national emi-
nence; as we fling our eye far down afield
and watch that long line of worthies who en-
dured contradiction and shame, who waxed
valiant in fight and handed down to us our
glorious heritage of never-dimming deed and
valiant venture — from George Washington to
William McKinley — surely we have a right to
feel a pride as pure and a thrill as chivalrous
as can quicken the pulse of any Jew or any
Roman. A great living historian propound-
ing the question "What has Africa done for
the world?" replies "Apart from Egypt,
nothing. ' ' And pursuing the thought, What,
may we inquire, has Austria done? What has
186

Strains True and False.

Russia done? What Turkey? What Portu-
gal? What single blessing has Asia conferred
upon the race? Mr. Beecher was wont to say
that "saving one little insignificant corner
called Palestine, the whole continent of Asia
might be turned bottom side up into the gulf
of destiny and not one worthy idea would be
lost. ' ' Greece has given to us the principles
of aesthetics. Rome has handed down to us
the laws of government. England stands for
poetry, history, liberty, invention, commerce,
agriculture, jurisprudence, religion. And
what does America represent? Let that
great Englishman speak, Mr. Gladstone.
"America stands for all that is democratic in
the policy of Great Britain, and all that is
Protestant in her religion." It will be re-
membered that in a day of intense public
excitement in New York City the lamented
Garfield stood in the presence of a dense
throng of liberty-loving people, and the first
words he spoke were these, "The Lord
reigneth, let the earth rejoice; let the multi-
tude of isles be glad thereof. Clouds and
darkness are round about him, but justice and
judgment are the habitation of his throne" —
while the multitude bowed their heads in
187

Earthly Discord*.

silence and there was a felt hush. Verily
indeed the heart of the nation is Christian.
So permeated with the principles of our
Divine Master is the spirit of our government
that we should be joyful in temper, hopeful
in tone. "For our God hath not dealt so
with any people; praise to his name."

Perhaps it were not wise to paint every-
thing in colors overhopeful, for many are the
dangers confronting us as a people — dangers
desperate and dark. We love our fatherland
as ardently as the Swiss mountaineer loves
his hilltop or the Scotchman his heather, and
'tis just because we so love it that we are
sometimes alarmed. Are we not all apt to
glory overmuch, for instance, in our spirit of
liberty? "Let not the wise man glory in
his wisdom; let not the mighty man glory in
his might; but let him that glorieth glory
in this, that he understandeth and knoweth
me, that I am the Lord which exerciseth
loving kindness and judgment and righteous-
ness in the earth." Little doubt that no
country enjoys the liberty we do — liberty of
the press, liberty of the pulpit, liberty of
thought, liberty of expression. We are proud
1 83

Strains True and False.

of it — and justly. We prize it as we do no
law or institution. It is the most sacred trust
given to us by God; it is the most important
victory ever fought for by man. "As for
me," said the orator, "give me liberty or
give me death!" But never for an instant let
it be forgotten that most of the crimes of his-
tory have been loaded on to this word "liberty."
No name, perhaps, in our Saxon vernacu-
lar so shamefully abused! In the name of
liberty hath every government been estab-
lished; in the name of liberty czars have been
crowned and tyrants enthroned and presidents
assassinated; in the name of liberty have politi-
cal corruptionists met in solemn conclave and
opened their meetings with prayer; in the
name of liberty some Tammany Hall levies
blackmail and legalizes vice; in the name of
liberty a scandalous journalism cartoons our
worthiest men; in the sacred name of liberty
anarchy has lifted its red flag to the breeze.
Truly with Madame Roland we may well ex-
claim, as on her way to the guillotine she
paused before a statue of Freedom, "Oh,
liberty, what crimes are committed in thy
noble name!" The department of justice
tells us that there have been three thousand

Earthly Discords*.

cases of death by lynching in our country dur-
ing the past twenty years. One hundred and
fifty a year! And all in the name of liberty!
Some time ago the Danish government par-
doned a notorious forger on condition that he
would go to the United States. Statistics
show that seventy-four per cent of the dis-
charged convicts of Ireland have emigrated to
America. And all in the name of liberty!
These men we have welcomed; some we have
lifted to positions of trust who in sooth are
worse than pagans; in comparison therewith
the Chinaman, whom we ostracize, being a
veritable celestial. Many belong to societies
that exist for the destruction of law and
order. Many are anarchists, many nihilists,
and all infidels.

Quite recently the New York police ar-
rested John Most for an article which he
published calling upon his readers to save
humanity by blood and steel and poison.
Said he to his arresters: "All that I have
written was simply in a new guise what has
been printed and reprinted one thousand
times in the last fifty years. ' ' He was right.
"We have been coddling the serpent and now
we are poulticing the sting." It is our proud
190

Strains True and False.

boast that our government is by the people
and for the people, yet 'tis an open saying
that the bosses are more powerful than the
people. We have one million five hundred
thousand tramps; we have one hundred thou-
sand criminals in prison; we have twenty
thousand youth in our reformatories; we have
one hundred thousand paupers. In 1901
there were eight thousand murders of the first
degree. Divorces are increasing three times
as fast as the population. Some one figures
out that if this ratio is kept up till the end of
the twentieth century, separations by death
will be considerably less than separations by
discord. And all, alas, in the holy name of
liberty! Do these s things mean nothing?
Does it mean nothing that we roast alive
every year more human beings than any sav-
age tribe in Senegambia? Does it mean
nothing that the marriage law is less respected
here than in any papal commonwealth since
the time of Charlemagne? Does it mean
nothing that a ruler's life is less safe here in
free America than in Mexico or Samoa or
Erromanga? How many kings of England
have been put to death since the time of
Alfred? These things do surely mean some-
191

Earthly Discords.* *

thing. They mean everything. They mean,
do they not, that we are glorying overmuch
in our spirit of liberty; and if anything should
call us to national penitence and the reading
of the fifty-first psalm, it is facts, grave and
urgent, such as these.

Then the saloon! Full oft an age of lux-
ury resents plain speaking about a flagrant sin,
but earnest men and women have no time to
waste in sewing fig-leaves over the naked
truth. No language can express much less
exaggerate the enormity of this man-defying,
God-defying evil. Drink confounds us, shames
us, laughs at us at every turn. Scarcely a
vice or disease or disorder that morally speak-
ing is not linked with drink! Drink has been
characterized as one billion of capital invested
in a great tyrannous trust for slaying the
youth of America, body, mind, and spirit,
degrading manhood, debasing womanhood,
befouling childhood, absolutely pitiless, abso-
lutely inhuman. Cholera is a mystery of the
air, and visits us every quarter of a century,
but here is a ravage preying upon us daily and
in comparison therewith making our Asiatic
visitor a feeble, hurtless creature. Do we
192

Strains True and False.

realize that three-fourths of all the horrors
that sadden and sicken society are directly
traceable to the tearful traffic? Who can
sum up the crimes and cruelties of war? 'Tis
said that one million men died at the bidding
of Xerxes, another million at the call of Caesar,
and still a third million at the nod of Napo-
leon. Approximately, one hundred battles
were fought in the eighteenth century, and a
celebrated English statesman has given as his
opinion that of these only one was a field of
honor — that on which the United States de-
fended her national life. But here is a death-
struggle that hath no field of honor, no equity,
no conscience, thoroughly wicked, thoroughly
pitiless, thoroughly unscrupulous, thoroughly
un-American. And if there is anything that
makes the sense of injustice stir the breast of
patriotism, it is to see the stars and stripes,
which we familiarly term ''Old Glory," float-
ing from the gable shaft of some saloon. Old
Glory stands for life, liberty, and a chance to
be happy; the saloon expresses death, slavery,
and a chance to be wretched. Only one flag
harmonizes with the dram-shop, the red flag,
and here insooth it usually floats.

J93

Earthly Discord*-.

One jar in the music of our national life
calls for constant and repeated caution.
"Beware of covetousness, ' ' said the Master;
"for a man's life consisteth not in the abun-
dance of the things which he possesseth. "
Scarcely a chapter in which his prophetic eye
does not touch upon the tempting snare!
Covetousness seems the one eager, all-ab-
sorbing hunger of the age. Touch what
part of our common life we may, we are met
on every hand by its insatiable thirst. Go
where we will, talk with whom we will, the
spirit of the age is commercial, the ring of its
conversational tone metallic. When women
in their clubs are discussing the question
"What are the limits of allowable luxury?"
and when the conclusion is reached that there
are no limits, is it not time for the church to
speak, and is it not time for the church to
speak loud? Does there not seem need for
another Luther or Wesley or Savonarola?

No Spartan mother would deign to wear
jewelry on her person, and who but has a
prevailing admiration for the social star to-day
who is simple in her attire, modest in her
appointments? Overdress has been termed
one of the plagues of this opening century.
194

Strains True and False.

If the wife of our honored President can dress
on three hundred dollars a year, why may not
every American mother do the same? If the
tenth commandment still is binding, surely
trying to breed envy in her weaker sister is as
unchristian as cherishing it herself. How
much nobler to tempt soften the rigors of her
dull monotony! How beautiful the greatness
that is great enough to be simple! How
Christ-like the power that does not parade it-
self! That man who wrestles successfully with
the luxury of the age is the true patrician.
The youth who can journey single-eyed along
prosperity's pathway unmoved by its tinsel
glitter is a hero. The maiden who can pass
some Cleopatra in her gorgeousness, yet not
feel the sting of envy is a heroine as truly as
Florence Nightingale. For the days of
knight-errantry are not passed. When we
read of the millions lavished on vain display,
costly feasts, extravagant dress, how we stand
aghast! One hundred million dollars spent
every twelve months for jewelry, and five and
one-half for missions; more than six hundred
men going astray last year as embezzlers, rob-
bing the people of twenty-five million dollars
in the vain effort to keep up expensive homes!

195

Earthly Discords*.

Verily indeed he was not far wrong who called

luxury the spade that has dug the grave of

every empire that has ever perished.

Prosperity is not the throne of greatness,

but its tomb. And if we as a people are

going in for false liberty and indulgence, our

army will not save us, our navy cannot save

us; the old way of Persia and Carthage and

Syria and Rome we must go. Some future

Gibbon will be writing the "decline and fall

of the American empire. " " Better be poorer

and purer." "Manhood is worth more than

moneyhood. ' '

"Far called our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire;
Lo ! all the pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre.
Judge of the nations, spaie us yet,
Lest we forget, forget."

To all young hearts toiling hard over task
and tool in this gracious republic of light and
privilege comes one happy reflection to drown
many a grating note, that ours is a fatherland
of homes. It has been noted that the French
nation have no word for home in their lan-
guage. Home is the salt of society, and
herein lies our hope. Perhaps the best gift
196

Strains True and False.

that two young loving hearts can bequeath to
their country is to build a home. For home
is the corner-stone of church and state. De-
stroy all our churches and less harm would be
done than by destroying our homes. It is
the home that keeps the church alive, and
just so soon as the home dies the church must
die. Home is the cradle of everything great
by every adjustment of the eternal.

We talk of home. We sing its praises.
"Home, sweet home," how fondly do we
love thee! how excellent is thy name in all
the earth! A true home is a little, cosey,
storm-sheltered nook where two lives may
open out into flower and fragrance. Truly
indeed a true home is a little corner of heaven.
Roaming through some of the grand cathe-
drals of the older world, and listening to the
chants and choruses of angel-seeing voices,
how the heart is stirred! how soft and rever-
ent the footsteps! how hallowed seem the
arches! how transfigured the walls and win-
dows! how sacred and spiritual the place!
But the most sacred place is a place called
home. There we recall the sweet faces of
long ago. "How dear to our hearts are the
scenes of our childhood!" Never can we
197

Earthly Discord^:

forget that crackling fireside and the old fam-
ily tryst,

"The cheerfu' supper done; wi' serious face
All round the ingle form a circle wide."

It lingers as a sweet memory-morsel still.

"Mid pleasures and palaces tho' we may roam,
Be it ever so humble there's no place like home."

There is a story told of the king of Sparta.
An ambassador was visiting him, and one day
he inquired, "Where are the walls of Sparta?"

"Did you not see them?" said the king.

"No," said the ambassador, "I have
walked all around but have seen no wall."

"Ah," replied the king, "I must show
you them to-morrow." On the morrow the
king drew up ten thousand trained soldiers,
and sweeping his hand, "these, sir, are the
walls of Sparta."

Amid the conflicts and clashings of our
national troubles ofttimes are we apt to think
that the walls of America are at Annapolis or
West Point. But oh, not so! Not so!

The walls of America are found in her
million homes, where love and truth and
thrift are taught, where the religion of Jesus
the Christ is preached and practiced. Never
have railways made a country great; never
198

Strains True and False.

commerce. Nor has any army or navy or
military prestige ever lifted a nation up the
ladder of luster. Nothing has ever made a
country shine but homes,

"To mak' a happy fireside clime
To weans and wife ;
That's the true pathos sublime
Of human life."

199

Heaven, the Healing Harmony.

CHAPTER IX.
Heaven, the Healing Harmony.

Such are some of life's discords that mar
the music of our earthly living, and the ques-
tion arises in the hearts of all earnest men,
Is there no healing remedy? Is there no
balm in Gilead? is there no physician there?
In an early chapter it was hinted how
little the college avails to give power to
the weak of will, peace to the heavy of heart;
also noted that if the teacher can do little, the
law-giver can do even less; with the final and
compelling claim that some help from above,
some new spiritual birthright, is the only
antidote for life's banes, the only healing for
its hurts, the only balm for its bruises, the
only cure for its pathetic griefs and ills and
pains. So we return to the hymnist. His
we believe the true note who makes heaven
the one controlling harmony. The heavenly
life hath power to bring unison to earth's
most discordant voices:

"Come, ye disconsolate, where'er ye languish,
Come to the mercy-seat, fervently kneel,

203

Earthly Discords.

Here bring your wounded hearts, here tell your
anguish ;
Earth hath no sorrow that heaven cannot heal."

An eminent writer Las recently said that
there are seven lives of Christ. There is a
life by Matthew and Mark and Luke and
John; that is four. There is a prophetic life
in the prophecies of the Old Testament; there
is a post-resurrection life in the Acts of the
Apostles; and the seventh life is to be found
in the Christian's own life; "I live, yet not I
but Christ liveth in me. ' '

This it is to be a Christian; Christ born in
us; Christ dwelling in us; Christ controlling
us; Christ impulsing us; Christ motiving us;
Christ over all and above all and in you all —
yea, Christ all in all. "For me," saith the
apostle, "to live is Christ."

And what doth "living Christ" imply?
This: every life hath its slumbering motive,
its ruling passion, its ultimate design. And
the motive of life is its love. Knowing what
the youth loves we know the youth, and not
until we know that do we understand him
fully. ' ' Tell me what you like, ' ' said Ruskin,
"and I'll tell you what you are." A man is
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Heaven, the Healing Harmony.

not truthful who speaks the truth; he may
be paid for speaking the truth. A man is
truthful who desires to speak the truth. And
the Christianity of Jesus comes not merely to
teach us to do what is right, and to help us to
do it, but that we may delight in doing it.
To tell the truth and to love to tell the truth,
this alone is truthfulness; to lead pure lives
and to love to lead pure lives, this only is
purity ; to do unto others as we would that
others do unto us, and to affect so to live,
this is living by the golden rule. Thus not
deed but desire is the measure of manhood,
the touchstone of tendency, the criterion of
character. "Blessed are they who do hunger
and thirst after righteousness for they shall be
filled."

Musicians have recently given to our word-
motive a new and larger meaning, signifying
by it a theme that recurs frequently in any
great dramatic work. Thus, in order to evoke
the idea of war, peace, pride, pity, the wail
of the wind, the sweep of the storm, the song
of the bird, the play of trickling water, cer-
tain notes and a certain touch are needed.
Handel, in his oratorio "Israel," represents
205

Earthly Discorcfs".

the sun standing still by a long drawn out
tone, and darkness by a sound analogue.
Wagner attempted to make every bar, almost
every note, correspond to a word.

Who that has listened to the Marsellaise
but has felt the somber severity of that great
national strain. In vision one can see the
soldiers trudging along, footsore and weary,
counting the cost, yet willing to fight, and if
need be die, for their country. These and all
such representations are called a "motive,"
because they move all minds alike and draw
all hearts into a common emotion.

In like manner each life hath its motive.
"You can unlock a man's whole being," said
Henry Drummond, "if you watch what words
he uses most"; and full truthfully it may be
said that the youth's whole inner life is alto-
gether unfolded when once we learn the lode-
stones that lure him on.

That brilliant girl, Marie Bashkirtseff,
wrote in her diary these words: "It is the New
Year at the theater, precisely midnight, watch
in hand; I wished my wish in a word; it
leaped to my tongue, intoxicating, thrilling —
Fame." If to-night, dear reader, you were
to do likewise, take out your watch, that is at
206

Heaven, the Healing Harmony.

midnight, and wish the true wish of your heart
in a word, what would that word be? Cross-
ing the bridge at Venice one beautiful even-
ing, Lord Byron tells us how, looking over his
shoulder, he saw a shooting star. It cleaved
its brilliant pathway across the breast of night
and dropped in the distant waters of Tuscany.

"The desire of my heart," says the poet,
"sprang to my lips like a panther; it gripped
me, dazed me — 'Indulgence.' "

Recently a woman of note came to live in
a certain neighborhood in one of our suburban
towns. She was wealthy and built around
herself a wall of exclusiveness, so that it was
no easy matter to approach her. For several
reasons the local clergyman became convinced
that it was his duty to call. Presenting his
passports to the different outer-guards, he at
last succeeded in meeting the lady herself.
Looking at him with affected surprise she
asked, bluntly — cruelly so — "And what was
it you wished to see me for, sir?"

The clerical dignitary was taken somewhat
aback, but replied that he had not come for
himself, that he represented a little church
around the corner, that his people were poor,
that her coachman's children were in the Sab-
207

Earthly Discords*,

bath school, and that he thought he might be
able to interest her enough to help them in
their work. But his visit was received so
coldly that he was obliged to withdraw.

Next morning a line came from our mis-
tress of the mansion, asking him to call at his
own time, that she was very sorry for the way
she had acted. The last sentence in the mis-
sive read as follows: "Hope you will forgive
me for being so selfish; it has dawned upon
me that I must be a very selfish woman. ' '

Now, just as the prompting of the brilliant
Russian artist and authoress was fame, and
that of Lord Byron was indulgence, and that
of our lady of wealth and fashion was selfish-
ness, so the idol of Paul was Christ. At the
shrine of Christ he bended the knee. His
reverent heart turned to Christ as naturally as
the mineral to magnet. "For Paul to live
was Christ"; for him to die was Christ.
"Whether we live we live unto the Lord,
whether we die we die unto the Lord; whether
we live or die, therefore, we are the Lord's. "
Was the apostle's eating and drinking Christ?
Aye, surely, for did he not eat and drink to
his glory? Was his suffering Christ? Verily
208

Heaven, the Healing Harmony.

indeed it was. "From henceforth let no man
trouble me, for I bear in my body the marks
of the Lord Jesus. ' '

Was his creed Christ? "I know whom I
have believed. ' '

Was his love Christ? "I am ready, not to
be bound only, but also to die if need be at
Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus."

Aye, Paul's creed was Christ; his love
was Christ; his ambition was Christ. The
whole passion of the man was to communi-
cate Christ. Christ lived in him, coursed
through his veins, colored his fancy and feel-
ing; Christ spoke by him, wept through him,
suffered in him. "Now I rejoice in my suf-
ferings and fill up that which is behind of the
afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body's
sake which is the Church." The whole de-
sire of the apostle, if need be, was to be a
fool for Christ's sake. "Christ was the
Greenwich from which he counted longitude,
the equator from which he reckoned latitude. "
Just as the merchant brings everything to the
gauge of the dollar, just as the architect
brings everything to the rule of beauty, just
as the writer of pure English brings every-
thing to the form of expression as found in
209

Earthly Discord*.

the great standard authors, just as each Bal-
zac and Scott and Hawthorne and Hugo test
their work by the canons of real life, so the
Christian is one for whom Christ is final
authority and court of last appeal. And it is
all a matter of motive; nay, rather is it all a
matter of supreme motive. For our motives
are many, but the supreme motive is one.

Each life revolves about some central sun.
What is that central sun? For the Christian
it is Christ.

The ancient legend tells us that when
Theseus was about to enter the labyrinth with
drawn sword to destroy the monster, his sister
Ariadne had tied around his ankle a silken
thread and told him that when he felt the
gentle pulling of that thread he would know
that she was thinking of him. Just so is
there a mystic thread linking the saved soul
with its Saviour, a bond of love, of commu-
nion, of sweet and holy fellowship. The life
gravitates to its Lord under the pull of some
hidden working. "I, if I be lifted up from
the earth, will draw all men unto me. ' ' The
Crucified One thus is the magnet of the moral
world — the pole and the dynamic of all holy
endeavor — to whom and from whom are all
210

Heaven, the Healing Harmony.

things, ' ' For all things were created by him
and for him, and he is before all things and
by him all things consist; that in all things he
might have the pre-eminence. ' '

Here, then, is the healing harmony for all
of life's discords — Christ, i. e., living Christ
— not mere profession, but whole-hearted sur-
render and happy-hearted service. For noth-
ing, alas, does the world stand lacking to-day
so much as Jesus Christ enthroned in the
loves and lives of men. Nothing doth soci-
ety need more than a practical Christianity
that hath its roots deep down in the heart of
the forgiven child of grace. For lip worship
is loud and flippant still; surface attachment
is popular; public profession still regarded,
many, alas, making a worldly convenience of
sacred things; but to be a living Christian, to
really live Christ in the overflowing fulness
of that wondrous wealthy word — how rare!
how intermittent! yet how fruitful, how preg-
nant, how eloquent of things fair and excellent!

"I knew a man," says Henry Drummond,
"the author of a well-known orthodox theo-
logical work, which has passed through a dozen
editions and lies on the shelves of all our

Earthly Discords."

libraries. I never knew that man to go to
church nor to give a farthing to charity —
though he was rich — nor give any sensible
sign that he was really living Christ. ' '

Verily, indeed, many there are to-day who
worship a dead Christ, but ours is no dead
Leader; ours is a living Leader. "I am he
that liveth and was dead, and behold I am
alive forevermore. ' '

Our Lord is still with us as ever, and will
be to the end. "Lo, I am with you alway,
even unto the end of the age. ' ' But his work
is thwarted in that he lacks an undivided loy-
alty; he is not appropriated to the full. For
many he is but a partial Saviour. It hath
pleased the King to express himself through
his own. If we revolt we deprive him of the
means of expression. When Christians give
themselves to their Master completely and
receive him in his abundant and abiding ful-
ness and live his life in joyful and complete
surrender, then will be the dawning of the
golden age foretold in his own pattern prayer,
"Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on
earth as it is done in heaven." For when
Christ is lived, sin will be loathed; when
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Heaven, the Healing Harmony.

Christ is lived, self will be lost; when Christ
is lived, all discord will speedily vanish, all
ambition be fulfilled, planning solely for those
things which are seen and temporal will seem
a cheap and empty mockery, laying up treas-
ure on earth will argue a vain and idle inter-
est; when Christ is lived, the world will not
kneel at the shrine of affluence and luxury and
comfort-worship, a silent contempt indeed will
be poured upon the gleam of gold; when
Christ is lived, no time will remain for doubt
or compromise or double-dealing, none for
strife or jealousy or idle talk or vain-glorying
or malice or avarice or hate, none for anxiety
or worry, since living Christ will pull the
sting out of yesterday and the terror out of
to-morrow, causing pardon to pour out lavishly
upon the past and hope to flow freely into the
future; when Christ is lived, no time will re-
main for anything that makes for the wreckage
of this fleshly temple of wonder nor its im-
mortal indwelling tenant, there will be no
such waste as now is seen of splendid human
stuff; when Christ is lived, there will be
ushered in the reign of a great, world-wide,
sympathetic brotherhood, capital and labor
will be no more at variance, wars will cease,
213

Earthly Discords."

and man will not be found trampling his love-
liest gardens into fields of dust; when Christ
is lived, one child born into the world in every
ten will not be destitute, positive want and
chronic misery and squalid horror will not
abound, the millions of abject poor will not
be driven to toil in sweatshops and mines and
factories for sixteen hours a day in a world
where perhaps six hours a day was intended
by the Master Workman as a full day's trib-
ute; when Christ is lived, the traffic in all
forms of trickery and the tearful traffic in
thirst will not be slow in passing, marriage
will not be found with the lines of loveliness
marred and bruised beyond cognition. For
living Christ means loving Christ, loving
as he loved, loving whom he loved, loving
because he loved. "We love him because he
first loved us, " or as the Revised Version
more correctly and more forcefully translates,
"We love because he first loved us." We
love the outcast, the Magdalen, the leper, be-
cause he first loved. We love the unlovely
because he first loved. From the great flame
above we get a little spark for our own fire-
side; our torch is lighted at the sun. So we
fall back on the psalmist, "all our springs are
214

Heaven, the Healing Harmony.

in Thee," all our hope is in Thee, all our

power is from Thee:

"Back of the loaf is the snowy flour,
And back of the flour is the mill;
And back of the mill is the sheaf

And the shower

And the sun,
And the Father's will."

Chateaubriand, who has been called the
greatest master of the French tongue, when
he stood before Niagara one hundred years
ago, and saw twilight fall upon the plunge,
said, "It is not within the power of words to
express the grandeur of this scene. ' '

And even less is it within the power of pen
or picture to tell the glory of that time when
Christ's full reign shall have come, when he
shall have dominion from sea to sea.

"For then indeed the wilderness and soli-
tary place shall be glad and the desert shall
rejoice and blossom as the rose. It shall
blossom abundantly and rejoice even with joy
and singing. The parched ground shall be-
come a pool and the thirsty land springs of
water; in the habitation of dragons, where
each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes.
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return
and come to Zion with songs and everlasting

2I5

Earthly Discords.*'

joy upon their heads; they shall obtain joy
and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall
flee away."

"Joy of the comfortless, light of the straying,
Hope of the penitent, fadeless and pure;
Here speaks the Comforter, tenderly saying —
Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot cure.

"Here see the Bread of Life; see waters flowing
Forth from the throne of God, pure from above;
Come to the feast of love; come, ever knowing
Earth hath no sorrow but heaven can remove."

2l6

PRINTED BY R. R. DONNELLEY
AND SONS COMPANY, AT THE
LAKESIDE PRESS, CHICAGO, ILL.

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THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
REFERENCE DEPARTMENT

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