The faith that makes faithful

The

FAITH

THAT

MAKES

FAITHFUL

JENKIN
LLOYD
JONES

Class (^ ^

Book '^ 't

ISffiXRIGHT DEPOSm

THE

FAITH THAT MAKES

FAITHFUL

BY

WILLIAM CHANNING GANNETT

AND

JENKIN LLOYD JONES

So nigh is grandeur to our dust.

So near is God to man.
When Duty whispers low. Thou must.

The youth replies, / cmi.

New Edition Printed from the
Thirty-fifth Thousand

1918
The Stratford Company, Publishers

BOSTON

^^,

'5*

Copyright 1918

The STRATFORD CO., Publishers

Boston, Mass.

The Alpine Press, Boston, Mass., U. S. A.

DEC -7 I9i8

©CI.A508451

Bebtcattons;

1886 — To our yoke-fellow, John Calvin Learned,
whose Faithfulness is working Faith in
many.

1894 — Good greeting to him now, in the new light

1918 — To Henry Martin Simmons, beloved com-
rade, also in the light, another laborer in
the old days for the Faith of Faithfulness.

After Thirty-two Years

A word of explanation, perhaps of apology, is due for
this attempt to give new life to an old book, — a plain little
collection of sermons, that and nothing more. All the
chapters did duty in the pulpit before they were caught
by the printing-press. The book was an endeavor to state
the universalities of religion, the maximum of faith with
the minimum of dogma, the perennial conditions of the
blessed life; the simplicity of the gospel of loyalty and
love, which knows not the limitations of creed or race or
space or time. What it was in the beginning it is now; we
have not dared to try revision. Doubtless we should say
many things differently, were we to say them now, but it
does not follow that we should say them better. Any at-
tempt to revise would be like fitting up an old homestead.
When the work is done, it is no longer the old home, but
a different one.

The little book has had a history quite its own. Twice
the plates have been destroyed by fiire, and a third and
last set, nearly worn out, was lost in the changes of a
Chicago printer's shop. This new edition is printed from
a copy bearing on its title-page, "Thirty-fifth Thousand,"
and dated 1907. For many years the Potts publishing
house of New York was wont to purchase the unbound
sheets from the Chicago publishers, bind and publish under
its own imprint, and include in a series of devotional, life-
helping little books. Several thousands were thus circu-
lated. Some of the separate sermons have done extended
duty in tract form. The little book has faced a traveling
public in cheap editions sold at the railroad news-stands in
Great Britain. Oft-times, with a certificate inserted, it has

AFTER THIRTY-TWO YEARS

served to keep the memory of the happy wedding-day. It
has been translated, in whole or in part, into French, Ger-
man, Swedish and Italian. Many the kind messages about
it. We have reason to believe it has found welcome at
the bedside of the sick, in the hands of the weary, in homes
of the poor, on tables of the rich. Believers and non-
believers, orthodox and heterodox. Catholic and Protestant,
Jews, Christians, Mohammedans, and representatives of the
Oriental world, have testified to its helpfulness.

This, of course, is joy to us. More and more it seems
as if things were done through, rather than hy, their human
agents or spokesmen, and our part were chiefly gladness
to be used. If now, in the new dress given it by an Eastern
publisher, the collection is to find a new constituency among
the children of those who responded to its first appeal, its
two authors will again be humbly and deeply grateful.

In 1900, through the good offices of Lady Aberdeen and
Henry Drummond, the writers were parted, and two little
volumes, one entitled "Blessed be Drudgery," and the other,
"Faithfulness," were published by Bryce & Son, Glasgow,
Scotland, with a preface by Lady Aberdeen. By her kind
permission that preface is reproduced here.

J. LI. J.
W. C. G.

SeptembeVy 1918,

And now — October, 1918 — this little book has a new, and a
memorial, value. The first proof of the preface above had passed
under Mr. Jones' eye; but, when the second came, the kind eyes
were closed, and it is left to friends to carry out his intents. In
the thirty-two years that have gone by since the book first appeared
he has taken a leader's part in many high causes; but perhaps
nothing more characteristically shows his heart and mind and will
to do than the thoughts and phrases of his four sermons here re-
produced,— "Faithfulness," "Tenderness," the insight that sees
"Unity" everywhere, and the sense of the "Divine Benediction"
resting on all things. "The Faith that Makes Faithful," — the
words are his own, to be found if one seeks in these pages. In
them his life is summed up — and continues.

W. C. G.

vi

Preface Written by Lady Aberdeen
for the Scotch Edition

To all of us there come times when we are out of heart
with ourselves and with all that goes to make up our lives.
Constant worry, endless toil, perpetual disappointments,
seem then to be our lot; we feel ourselves unable to cope
with the evil without and within, and our belief in the "Love
which walketh in Mystery" becomes weak and faint.

We are, perchance, looking back to times when we dreamt
how we, too, might

"Join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead, who live again
In minds made better by their presence: live
In pulses stirred to generosity.
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self.
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars.
And with their mild persistence urge man^s search
To vaster issues."

And our ideals may seem dead and faded and beyond our
reach. The following chapters will teach us, if even that
be so, how we may "idealize our Real/' how our Drudgery
may become our Blessing, how the Failures, the Burdens,
the Temptations, which we are lamenting, may prove our
best Friends on the upward way.

A magician's wand is put in our hands and, if we will
but consent to use it, we shall see everywhere about us in
that lot which seemed so dark but a little ago, gems and

vii

PREFACE

treasures inestimable which only wait to be ours by our
use of them.

The ennobling influence of powers lying dormant, it may
be, in our friendship; the strength, the endurance, the
self-sacrifice flowing from true love and tenderness and
thought for others; the steadfast loyalty to all that is
highest and holiest which is begotten by faithfulness to
common duty; the peace of God passing all understanding,
which garrisons the hearts and the lives of those who
through life and death cling to the Truth as it is revealed
to them by the Spirit of Christ ; these are the angels shown
to us as hovering about the path which once appeared to
us so full of thorns.

We cannot read this book without feeling that such angels
are not far from every one of our lives, however outwardly
poor and small and narrow these may seem. And we must
therefore rejoice that it is destined to exercise its ministry
of high thought and helpful stimulus on this side of the
Atlantic, as well as on that to which it owes its birth.

IsHBEL Aberdeen".
Bordighera, March, 1890.

viu

HADDO HOUSE
Aberdeen. Scotland

June 24, 1918
Dear Mr. Jones:

Please believe tliat I deeply appreciate your request,
and that nothing would gratify me more than that you
should reprint my little preface to your new edition,
for I feel it an honor and a privilege to be in any way
associated with a book which has had such an in-
fluence, inspiring and comforting so many.

I wrote a preface, or rather a foreword, to each of
the little books as published in Scotland. Please do
with them what you like. Probably you know that it
was Henry Drummond who arranged for the publica-
tion of the edition by Bryce.

We shall look forward to receiving the promised
copy of the book, for which we pray an extended
sphere of usefulness.

Yours very sincerely,

IsHBEL Aberdeen and Temair.

Contents

Pag6

Blessed Be Drudgery. — W. C. G. . . 1

Faithfulness. — J. LI. J 20

"I Had a Friend."— W. C. G 40

Tenderness. — J. LI. J 59

A Cup of Cold Water. — W. C. G. ... 80

The Seamless Robe. — J. LI. J 101

"Wrestling and Blessing. — W. C. G. . . 120

The Divine Benediction. — J. LI. J. . . 143

Blessed Be Drudgery
I

Of every two men probably one man thinks he
is a drudge, and every second woman is sure she is.
Either we are not doing the thing we would like to do
in life ; or, in what we do and like, we find so much to
dislike, that the rut tires, even when the road runs on
the whole a pleasant way. I am going to speak of the
Culture that comes through this very drudgery,

*^ Culture through my drudgery!'' some one is
now thinking: ^*This tread-mill that has worn me
out, this grind I hate, this plod that, as long ago as
I remember it, seemed tiresome, — to this have I owed
* culture'? Keeping house or keeping accounts, tend-
ing babies, teaching primary school, weighing sugar
and salt at a counter, those blue overalls in the
machine shop, — have these anything to do with * cul-
ture'? Culture takes leisure, elegance, wide margins
of time, a pocket-book: drudgery means limitations,
coarseness, crowded hours, chronic worry, old clothes,
black hands, head-aches. Culture implies college:
life allows a daily paper, a monthly magazine, the
circulating library, and two gift-books at Christmas.
Our real and our ideal are not twins, — never were!
I want the books, — but the clothes-basket wants me.
The two children are good, — and so would be two

[1]

BLESSED BE DRUDGERY

hours a day without the children. I crave an out-
door life, — and walk downtown of mornings to perch
on a high stool till supper-time. I love Nature, and
figures are my fate. My taste is books, and I farm it.
My taste is art, and I correct exercises. My taste
is science, and I measure tape. I am young and like
stir: the business jogs on like a stage-coach. Or I
am not young, I am getting gray over my ears, and
like to sit down and be still: but the drive of the
business keeps both tired arms stretched out full
length. I hate this overbidding and this underselling,
this spry, unceasing competition, and would willingly
give up a quarter of my profits to have two hours of
my daylight to myself, — at least I would if, working
just as I do, I did not barely get the children bread
and clothes. I did not choose my calling, but was
dropped into it — by my innocent conceit, or by duty
to the family, or by a parent's foolish pride, or by
our hasty marriage; or a mere accident wedged me
into it. Would I could have my life over again!
Then, whatever I should be, at least I would not be
what I am today!"

Have I spoken truly for any one here? I know
I have. Goes not the grumble thus within the
silent breast of many a person, whose pluck never
lets it escape to words like these, save now and then
on a tired evening to husband or wife ?

There is often truth and justice in the grumble.
Truth and justice both. Still, when the question
rises through the grumble, Can it be that drudgery,

[2]

BLESSED BE DRUDGERY

not to be escaped, gives ''culture"? the true answer
is, — Yes, and culture of the prime elements of life;
of the very fundamentals of all fine manhood and
fine womanhood.

Our prime elements are due to our drudgery, —
I mean that literally; the fundamentals, that under-
lie all fineness, and without which no other culture
worth the winning is even possible. These, for
instance, — and what names are more familiar? Power
of attention; power of industry; promptitude in
beginning work; method and accuracy and despatch
in doing work; perseverance; courage before difficul-
ties ; cheer under straining burdens ; self-control and
self-denial and temperance. These are the prime
qualities; these the fundamentals. We have heard
these names before! When we were small, Mother
had a way of harping on them, and Father joined
in emphatically, and the minister used to refer to
them in church. And this was what our first em-
ployer meant, — only his way of putting the matter
was, ''Look sharp, my boy!" — "Be on time, John!"
— "Stick to it!" Yes, that is just what they all
meant : these are the very qualities which the mothers
tried to tuck into us when they tucked us into bed,
the very qualities which the ministers pack into their
platitudes, and which the nations pack into their
proverbs. And that goes to show that they are the
fundamentals. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are
very handy, but these fundamentals of a man are
handier to have ; worth more ; worth more than Latin

[3]

BLESSED BE DRUDGERY

and Greek and French and German and music and
art-history and painting and wax flowers and travels
in Europe, added together. These last are the deco-
rations of a man or woman: even reading and writ-
ing are but conveniences: those other things are the
indispensahles. They make one's sit-fast strength,
and one's active momentum, whatsoever and where-
soever the lot in life be, — ^be it wealth or poverty,
city or country, library or workshop. Those qualities
make the solid substance of one's self.

And the question I would ask of myself and you
is. How do we get them ? How do they become ours ?
High school and college can give much, but these are
never on their programmes. All the book-processes
that we go to the schools for, and commonly call * ' our
education," give no more than opportunity to win
these indispensables of education. How, then, do
we get them ? "We get them somewhat as the fields and
valleys get their grace. Whence is it that the lines
of river and meadow and hill and lake and shore
conspire to-day to make the landscape beautiful?
Only by long chiselings and steady pressures. Only
by ages of glacier-crush and grind, by scour of floods,
by centuries of storm and sun. These rounded the
hills, and scooped the valley-curves, and mellowed the
soil for meadow-grace. There was little grace in the
operation, had we been there to watch. It was
^'drudgery" all over the land. Mother Nature was
down on her knees doing her early scrubbing- work !

[4]

BLESSED BE DRUDGERY

That was yesterday : to-day, result of scrubbing- work,
we have the laughing landscape.

Now what is true of the earth is true of each man
and woman on the earth. Father and mother and the
ancestors before them have done much to bequeath
those elemental qualities to us ; but that which scrubs
them into us, the clinch which makes them actually
ours, and keeps them ours, and adds to them as the
years go by, — that depends on our own plod, our plod
in the rut, our drill of habit; in one word, depends
upon our ^'drudgery." It is because we have to go,
and go, morning after morning, through rain,
through shine, through tooth-ache, head-ache, heart-
ache to the appointed spot, and do the appointed
work; because, and only because, we have to stick to
that work through the eight or ten hours, long after
rest would be so sweet; because the school-boy's lesson
must be learnt at nine o'clock and learnt without a
slip ; because the accounts on the ledger must square
to a cent; because the goods must tally exactly with
the invoice; because good temper must be kept with
children, customers, neighbors, not seven, but seventy
times seven times; because the besetting sin must be
watched to-day, to-morrow, and the next day; in
short, without much matter what our work be,
whether this or that, it is because, and only because,
of the rut, plod, grind, hum-drum in the work, that
we at last get those self-foundations laid of which I
spoke, — attention, promptness, accuracy, firmness,
patience, self-denial, and the rest. When I think

|5]

BLESSED BE DRUDGERY

over that list and seriously ask myself three questions,
I have to answer each with No: — are there any
qualities in the list which I can afford to spare, to go
without, as mere show-qualities? Not one. Can I get
these self -foundations laid, save by the weight, year
in, year out, of the steady pressures? No, there is
no other way. Is there a single one in the list which
I can not get in some degree by undergoing the
steady drills and pressures? No, not one. Then
beyond all books, beyond all class-work at the school,
beyond all special opportunities of what I call my
*' education, '' it is this drill and pressure of my daily
task that is my great school-master. My daily task,
whatever it be, — that is what mainly educates me.
All other culture is mere luxury compared with what
that gives. That gives the indispensables. Yet fool
that I am, this pressure of my daily task is the very
thing that I so growl at as my '^ drudgery"!

We can add right here this fact, and practically
it is a very important fact to girls and boys as am-
bitious as they ought to be, — the higher our ideals,
the more we need those foundation habits strong.
The street-cleaner can better afford to drink and laze
than he who would make good shoes; and to make
good shoes takes less force of character and brain than
to make cures in the sick-room, or laws in the legis-
lature, or children in the nursery. The man who
makes the head of a pin or the split of a pen all day
long, and the man who must put fresh thought into
his work at every stroke, — which of the two more

|6]

BLESSED BE DEUDGERY

needs the self-control, the method, the accuracy, the
power of attention and concentration? Do you sigh
for books and leisure and wealth? It takes more
* ' concentration ' ' to use books — head-tools — well
than to use hand-tools. It takes more '* self -control' '
to use leisure well than work-days. Compare the Sun-
days and Mondays of your city ; which day, all things
considered, stands for the city's higher life, — the day
on which so many men are lolling, or the day on which
all toil? It takes more knowledge, more integrity,
more justice, to handle riches well than to bear the
healthy pinch of the just-enough.

Do you think that the great and famous escape
drudgery? The native power and temperament, the
outfit and capital at birth, counts for much, but it
convicts us common minds of huge mistake to hear the
uniform testimony of the more successful geniuses
about their genius. ^'Genius is patience," said who?
Sir Isaac Newton. ^'The Prime Minister's secret is
patience," said who? Mr. Pitt, the great Prime
Minister of England. Who, think you, wrote, **My
imagination would never have served me as it has, but
for the habit of commonplace, humble, patient, daily,
toiling, drudging attention"? It was Charles Dick-
ens. Who said, '*The secret of a Wall-street million
is common honesty"? Vanderbilt; and he added as
the recipe for a million (I know somebody would
like to learn it), ''Never use what is not your own,
never buy what you cannot pay for, never sell what
you haven't got." How simple great men's rules are!

17]

BLESSED BE DRUDGERY

How easy it is to be a great man ! Order, diligence,
patience, honesty, — just what you and I must use in
order to put our dollar in the savings-bank, to do our
school-boy sum, to keep the farm thrifty, and the
house clean, and the babies neat. Order, diligence,
patience, honesty! There is wide difference between
men, but truly it lies less in some special gift or oppor-
tunity granted to one and withheld from another,
than in the differing degree in which these common
elements of human power are owned and used. Not
how much talent have I, but how much will to use the
talent that I have, is the main question. Not how
much do I know, but how much do I do with what I
know? To do their great work the great ones need
more of the very same habits which the little ones
need to do their smaller work. Goethe, Spencer,
Agassiz, Jesus, share, not achievements, but condi-
tions of achievement, with you and me. And those
conditions for them, as for us, are largely of the
plod, the drill, the long disciplines of toil. If we
ask such men their secret, they will uniformly tell us

so. ' : '^:nw^

Since we lay the firm substrata of ourselves in
this way, then, and only in this way; and since the
higher we aim, the more, and not the less, we need
these firm substrata, — since this is so, I think we
ought to make up our minds and our mouths to sing
a hallelujah unto Drudgery : Blessed he Drudgery, —
the one thing that we can not spare !

[8]

BLESSED BE DRUDGERY

II

But there is something else to be said. Among
the people who are drudges, there are some who have
given up their dreams of what, when younger, they
used to talk or think about as their * ideals;" and
have grown at last, if not content, resigned to do the
actual work before them. Yes, here it is, — ^before us,
and behind us, and on all sides of us; we cannot
change it; we have accepted it. Still, we have not
given up one dream, — the dream of success in this
work to which we are so clamped. If we can not
win the well-beloved one, then success with the ill-
beloved, — this at least is left to hope for. Success
may make it well-beloved, too, — who knows? Well,
the secret of this Success still lies in the same old
word, *^ drudgery." For drudgery is the doing of
one thing, one thing, one thing, long after it ceases
to be amusing; and it is this ^*one thing I do" that
gathers me together from my chaos, that concentrates
me from possibilities to powers, and turns powers
into achievements. ^ ' One thing I do, " said Paul, and,
apart from what his one thing was, in that phrase he
gave the watchword of salvation. That whole long
string of habits, — attention, method, patience, self-
control, and the others, — can be rolled up and balled,
as it were, in the word ** concentration." We will
halt a moment at the word: —

"I give you the end of a golden string:
Only wind it into a ball, —

[9]

BLESSED BE DRUDGERY

It will lead you in at Heaven's gate,
Built in Jerusalem's wall."

Men may be divided into two classes, — ^those who
have a ^'one thing," and those who have no ^^one
thing,'' to do; those with aim, and those without aim,
in their lives : and practically it turns out that almost
all of the success, and therefore the greater part of
the happiness, go to the first class. The aim in life is
what the back-bone is in the body : without it We are
invertebrate, belong to some lower order of being
not yet man. No wonder that the great question,
therefore, with a young man is, What am I to be?
and that the future looks rather gloomy until the life-
path opens. The lot of many a girl, especially of
many a girl with a rich father, is a tragedy of aim-
lessness. Social standards, and her lack of true
ideals and of real education, have condemned her to
be frittered : from twelve years old she is a cripple to
be pitied, and by thirty she comes to know it. With
the brothers the blame is more their own. The boys
we used to play our school-games with have found
their places; they are winning homes and influence
and money, their natures are growing strong and
shapely, and their days are filling with the happy
sense of accomplishment, — ^while we do not yet know
what we are. We have no meaning on the earth.
Lose us, and the earth has lost nothing; no niche is
empty, no force has ceased to play, for we have got
no aim and therefore we are still — ^nobody. Get your
meaning, first of all! Ask the question until it is

[10]

BLESSED BE DRUDGERY

answered past question, What am I ? What do I
stand for? What name do I bear in the register of
forces ? In our national cemeteries there are rows on
rows of unknown bodies of our soldiers, — men who
did a work and put a meaning to their lives; for
the mother and the townsmen say, **He died in the
war." But the men and women whose lives are aim-
less, reverse their fates. Our bodies are known, and
answer in this world to such or such a name, — ^but as
to our inner selves, with real and awful meaning our
walking bodies might be labeled, '^An unknown man
sleeps here!''

Now since it is concentration that prevents this
tragedy of failure, and since this concentration
always involves drudgery, long, hard, abundant, we
have to own again, I think, that that is even more
than what I called it first, — our chief school-master;
besides that, drudgery is the gray Angel of Success.
The main secret of any success we may hope to rejoice
in, is in that angel's keeping. Look at the leaders in
the profession, the ** solid" men in business, the
master-workmen who begin as poor boys and end by
building a town in which to house their factory-
hands ; they are drudges of the single aim. The man
of science, and to-day more than ever, if he would add
to the world's knowledge, or even get a reputation,
must be, in some one branch at least, a plodding spe-
cialist. The great inventors, Palissy at his pots, Good-
year at his rubber, Elias Howe at his sewing-machine,
tell the secret, — ''One thing I do." The reformer's

[11]

BLESSED BE DRUDGERY

secret is the same. A one-eyed, grim-jawed folk the
reformers are apt to be : one-eyed, grim-jawed, seeing
but the one thing, never letting go, they have to be, to
start a torpid nation. All these men as doers of the
single thing drudge their way to their success. Even
so must we, would we win ours. The foot-loose man is
not the enviable man. A wise man will be his own
necessity and bind himself to a task, if by early
wealth or foolish parents or other lowering circum-
stances he has lost the help of an outward necessity.
Dale Owen in his autobiography told the story of a
foot-loose man, ruined by his happy circumstances.
It was his father's friend, one born to princely
fortune, educated with the best, married happily,
with children growing up around him. All that
health and wealth and leisure and taste could give,
were his. Robert Owen, an incessant worker, once
went to spend a rare rest-moment with him at his
country-seat, one of the great English parks. To the
tired man, who had earned the peace, the quiet days
seemed perfect, and at last he said to his host, **I
have been thinking that, if I ever met a man who had
nothing to desire, you must be he : are you not com-
pletely happy?" The answer came: ^^ Happy! Ah,
Mr. Owen, I committed one fatal error in my youth,
and dearly have I paid for it ! I started in life with-
out an object, almost without an ambition. I said to
myself, *I have all that I see others contending for;
why should I struggle?' I knew not the curse that
lights on those who have never to struggle for any-

[12]

BLESSED BE DRUDGERY

thing. I ought to have created for myself some defi-
nite pursuit, no matter what, so that there would be
something to labor for and to overcome. Then I
might have been happy. ' ' Said Owen to him, ' ' Come
and spend a month with me at Braxfield. You have
a larger share in the mills than any of us partners.
Come and see for yourself what has been done for the
work-people there and for their children; and give
me your aid." *^It is too late," was the reply; ^Hhe
power is gone. Habits are become chains. You can
work and do good; but for me, — in all the profitless
years gone by I seek vainly for something to remem-
ber with pride, or even to dwell on with satisfaction.
I have thrown away a life." — And he had only one
life in this world to lose.

Again then, I say. Let us sing a hallelujah and
make a fresh beatitude: Blessed he Drudgery! It is
the one thing we can not spare.

Ill

This is a hard gospel, is it not? But now there
is a pleasanter word to briefly say. To lay the firm
foundations in ourselves, or even to win success in
life, we must be drudges. But we can be artists, also,
in our daily task. And at that word things brighten.

''Artists," I say, — not artisans. ''The differ-
ence?" This: the artist is he who strives to perfect
his work, — the artisan strives to get through it. The
artist would fain finish, too; but with him it is to
"finish the work God has given me to do!" It is

[13]

BLESSED BE DRUDGERY

not how great a thing we do, but how well we do the
thing we have to, that puts us in the noble brotherhood
of artists. My Real is not my Ideal,- — is that my
complaint? One thing, at least, is in my power: if
I can not realize my Ideal, I can at least idealize my
Real. How ? By trying to be perfect in it. If I am
but a rain-drop in a shower, I will be, at least, a per-
fect drop ; if but a leaf in a whole June, I will be, at
least, a perfect leaf. This poor ''one thing I do," —
instead of repining at its lowness or its hardness, I
will make it glorious by my supreme loyalty to its
demand.

An artist himself shall speak. It was Michael
Angelo who said, ''Nothing makes the soul so pure,
so religious, as the endeavor to create something
perfect; for God is perfection, and whoever strives
for it strives for something that is God-like. True
painting is only an image of God's perfection, — a
shadow of the pencil with which he paints, a melody,
a striving after harmony." The great masters in
music, the great masters in all that we call artistry,
would echo Michael Angelo in this; he speaks the
artist-essence out. But what holds good upon their
grand scale and with those whose names are known,
holds equally good of aU pursuits and all lives. That
true painting is an image of God's perfection must
be true, if he says so; but no more true of painting
than of shoe-making, of Michael Angelo than of John
Pounds, the cobbler, I asked a cobbler once how long
it took to become a good shoe-maker; he answered

[14]

BLESSED BE DRUDGERY

promptly, * ^ Six years, — and then you must travel ! ' '
That cobbler had the artist-soul. I told a friend the
story, and he asked his cobbler the same question:
How long does it take to become a good shoe-maker?
^'All your life, sir." That was still better, — a Michael
Angelo of shoes ! Mr. Maydole, the hammer-maker of
central New York, was an artist : ' * Yes, ' ' said he to
Mr. Parton, ''I have made hammers here for
twenty-eight years." '^Well, then, you ought to be
able to make a pretty good hammer by this time."
*^No sir," was the answer, **I never made a pretty
good hammer. I make the best hammer made in the
United States." Daniel Morell, once president of the
Cambria rail-works in Pittsburg, which employed
seven thousand men, was an artist, and trained
artists. ^'What is the secret of such a development
of business as this?" asked the visitor. *'We have
no secret," was the answer; **we always try to beat
our last batch of rails. That's all the secret we have,
and we don't care who knows it." The Paris book-
binder was an artist, who, when the rare volume of
Corneille, discovered in a book-stall, was brought to
him, and he was asked how long it would take him to
bind it, answered, ^'Oh, sir, you must give me a
year, at least; this needs all my care." Our Ben
Franklin showed the artist, when he began his own
epitaph, ''Benjamin Franklin, printer." And Pro-
fessor Agassiz, when he told the interviewer that
he had ''no time to make money;" and when he
began his will, "I, Louis Agassiz, teacher."

[15]

BLESSED BE DRUDGERY

In one of Murillo's pictures in the Louvre he shows
us the interior of a convent kitchen; but doing the
work there are, not mortals in old dresses, but beau-
tiful white-winged angels. One serenely puts the
kettle on the fire to boil, and one is lifting up a pail
of water with heavenly grace, and one is at the
kitchen-dresser reaching up for plates ; and I believe
there is a little cherub running about and getting in
the way, trying to help. What the old monkish
legend that it represented is, I hardly know. But as
the painter puts it to you on his canvas, all are so
busy, and working with such a will, and so refining
the work as they do it, that somehow you forget that
pans are pans and pots pots, and only think of the
angels, and how very natural and beautiful kitchen-
work is, — just what the angels would do, of course.

It is the angel-aim and standard in an act that
consecrates it. He who aims for perfectness in a
trifle is trying to do that trifle holily. The trier wears
the halo, and therefore the halo grows as quickly
round the brows of peasant as of king. This aspira-
tion to do perfectly, — is it not religion practicalized ?
If we use the name of God, is this not God's presence
becoming actor in us? No need, then, of being
** great" to share that aspiration and that presence.
The smallest roadside pool has its water from heaven,
and its gleam from the sun, and can hold the stars in
its bosom, as well as the great ocean. Even so the
humblest man or woman can live splendidly! That
is the royal truth that we need to believe, — ^you and I

[16]

BLESSED BE DRUDGERY

who have no ' ' mission, ' ' and no great sphere to move
in. The universe is not quite complete without my
work well done. Have you ever read George Eliot's
poem called ' ' Stradivarius ? " Stradivarius was the
famous old violin-maker, whose violins, nearly two
centuries old, are almost worth their weight in gold
to-day. Says Stradivarius in the poem, — •

"If my hand slacked,
I should rob God, — since he is fullest good, —
Leaving a blank instead of violins.
He could not make Antonio Stradivari's violins
Without Antonio."

That is just as true of us as of our greatest
brothers. What, stand with slackened hands and
fallen heart before the littleness of your service!
Too little, is it, to be perfect in it ? Would you, then,
if you were Master, risk a greater treasure in the
hands of such a man ? Oh, there is no man, no woman,
so small that they can not make their life great by
high endeavor; no sick crippled child on its bed that
can not fill a niche of service that way in the world.
This is the beginning of all Gospels, — that the king-
dom of heaven is at hand just where we are. It is
just as near us as our work is, for the gate of heaven
for each soul lies in the endeavor to do that work
perfectly.

But to bend this talk back to the word with
which we started: will this striving for perfection
in the little thing give ''culture''? Have you ever
watched such striving in operation? have you never

[17]

BLESSED BE DRUDGERY

met humble men and women who read little, who
knew little, yet who had a certain fascination as of
fineness lurking about them? Kjiow them, and you
are likely to find them persons who have put so much
thought and honesty and conscientious trying into
their common work,^ — it may be sweeping rooms, or
planing boards, or painting walls, — ^have put their
ideals so long, so constantly, so lovingly into that
common work of theirs, that finally these qualities
have come to permeate not their work only, but so
much of their being, that they are fine-fibred within,
even if on the outside the rough bark clings. With-
out being schooled, they are apt to instinctively detect
a sham, — one test of culture. Without haunting the
drawing-rooms, they are likely to have manners of
quaint grace and graciousness, — another test of cul-
ture. Without the singing-lessons, their tones are apt
to be gentle, — another test of culture. Without
knowing anything about Art, so-called, they know
and love the best in one thing, — are artists in their
own little specialty of work. They make good com-
pany, these men and women,^ — why? Because, not
having been able to realize their Ideal, they have
idealized the Real, and thus in the depths of their
nature have won true '^ culture."

You know all Beatitudes are based on something
hard to do or be. ''Blessed are the meek:'' is it easy
to be meek? ''Blessed are the pure in heart:" is
that so very easy? "Blessed are they who mourn."
"Blessed are they who hunger and thirst — ^who starve

[18]

BLESSED BE DRUDGERY

— after righteousness. ' ' So this new beatitude by its
hardness only falls into line with all the rest. A
third time and heartily I say it,: — ''Blessed be Drudg-
ery ! ' ' For thrice it blesses us : it gives us the funda-
mental qualities of manhood and womanhood; it
gives us success in the thing we have to do; and it
makes us, if we choose, artists, — artists within, what-
ever our outward work may be. Blessed he Drudgery,
— the secret of all Culture !

[19]

Faithfulness

"She hath done what she could.'' — Mark xiv : 8.

And yet how little it was that she did do ! Look
at the two figures in this picture, and mark the con-
trast. On this hand one of the great world-reformers,
the founder of Christianity, is being caught in the
clutches of maddened bigotry. He is spit upon and
threatened by the presumptuous dignitaries of the
land. He is scorned by the scholarly, almost forsaken
by his friends, probably abandoned by his relations,
— save that one who never ceases to cling to the
most forsaken child of earth, t — the mother. The fate
of an evil-doer is bearing down upon him, the inevi-
table agony of the cross is before him, there seems to
be no honorable chance of escape, there is no effort
being made to save him.

On that hand is a poor, weak, unnamed and un-
heralded woman; a woman with little influence and
less means. Her vision is necessarily very limited.
She can poorly understand the questions at issue.
What does she know of the philosophies and the theol-
ogies, the law and the prophets, which engage the
attention of the excited and disputing groups at the
street comers? She can plan no release, she can
frame no defense, she can not speak a word in his
justification. Limited so in time, strength, means, in-
fluence and knowledge, what can she do?

[20]

FAITHFULNESS

She can love him. She can give of her heart's
best affection. She can be true to that inexpressible
attraction, that towering nobility, that she feels. She
knows that the gentle one is hated. She can read
sorrow upon his benign face ; she can discover loneli-
ness in his tender eyes, and she can take his side.
She dares cling to him in the face of derision and
weep for him in defiance to the mocking crowd. She
can with willing hands bring what seems to her to be
the only precious thing in her possession. She can
break the flask that contains what is probably her
own burial ointment upon his head. This she can do,
and how little it seems! She dreams of no future
fame for him or for herself. She knows little of the
poetic significance or symbolic fitness of the act.
Merited seems the contempt of the lookers on. Why
the approving words of Jesus? Why the perpetua-
tion of the story ? Because she gave all she had ; she
said all she knew; she loved with all her heart. Be-
cause she ^^did what she could." Can mind conceive
of higher commendation than this ? Where is the hero
of successful wars, the explorer of unknown countries ;
where is the capitalist who has established commerce,
encouraged industries, founded homes for the needy
or schools for the ignorant; where is the statesman
who has blessed his nation ; the philanthropist who has
lifted burdens from the oppressed; the moralist who
has saved souls from sin, dried up cesspools of human
corruption, lifted the inebriate into sobriety; where
is the prophet of religion who has led souls heaven-

[21]

FAITHFULNESS

ward and touched restless hearts with the peace of
God, that deserves any higher commendation than
this unnamed woman of Bethany ? She did what she
could: none of those could do more. While that
woman's tears fell upon the head of the persecuted,
and her fingers passed through the ringlets of the
brow that was so soon to be pierced by the thorns in
the derisive crown, she was the peer of the noblest
child of God. During that brief moment, at least, the
anointed and the anointer stood on a common level;
they were equal children of the Most High; she did
what she could, and the very Lord from heaven could
do no more.

*^She hath done what she could." This is not
the text but the sermon. There is scarcely need of
expansion. The heart promptly enlarges upon it, ap-
plications rush through the mind, and the conscience
recognizes the text and asks, — How far do we deserve
this enviable commendation that was given to the
Bethany woman ? Are we doing what we can, as she
did, to defend the right and encourage the dutiful?
Are we doing all we can to console the outcast and
the despondent around us? Are we doing what we
can to elevate our lives and to ennoble our calling?
Are we doing, simply, what we can to stem the subtle
tide of corruption, to stay the insidious currents of
dissipation that eddy about us as they did the Beth-
any woman of long ago ? This story comes to us with
its searching questions, measuring our efforts to resist
the flood of grossness, sectarian pride and arrogance

[22]

FAITHFULNESS

that seeks to overwhelm gentleness, tender feeling
and loving thought, here and now in America as then
and there in Judea.

Young men and women, the sermon of the hour
for you is in the words, '^She hath done what she
could.'' Let it preach to you of the work you have
to do in these high and rare years of youth that are
so rapidly gliding by. Do what you can towards
bringing out the noblest possibilities of your nature.
Do what you can to think high thoughts, to love true
things and to do noble deeds. Temptations beset you
like those that have filled hearts as light as yours
with inexpressible sorrow. Are you doing what you
can to make yourself strong to resist them? Before
you, hang the gilded trinkets of fashion, the embroid-
ered banners of selfish lives. Are you doing what you
can to live for higher aims than these ? Your lives are
growing riper, your heads are growing wiser. Are
you doing what you can to balance this with growth of
heart, making the affections as much richer and
warmer; the conscience, God's best gift to man,
brighter and more commanding ? Are you doing what
you can to follow your truest and to do your best?

Mothers, you dream of homes made sacred by holy
influences into which the dwarfing excitements of
superficial life, fashion and sensation, that so en-
danger your children, may not enter; are you doing
all you can to realize this dream?

Fathers, are you doing what you can toward
leaving your children that inestimable heritage, a

[23]

FAITHFULNESS

noble example ; the record of a life of uncompromising
integrity, a sublime devotion to truth, a quiet but
never failing loyalty to conscience?

To all of us, young and old, men and women,
this scene in the house of Simon the leper comes
across the feverish centuries with its quiet sermon,
asking us if we are as faithful to the best impulses
of our natures as this woman was to hers; if we are
doing what we can to testify to the gospel of love and
patience, working with all the power we have to dis-
pel the clouds of superstition that overhang the world ;
doing the little we can to break the fetters of bigotry,
to increase the love and good will of the world; to-
ward making our religion a life and our life in turn
a religion of love and self-sacrifice. Are we breaking
a single flask of precious ointment in disinterested
self-forgetfulness in behalf of any oppressed and in-
jured child of the Eternal Father? Are we simply
striving the best we may to

"Look up and not down,
Look out and not in, ^

Look forward and not back.
And lend a hand?"

Now, as then, the real struggle of life is not for
bread and clothing, but for ideas, for truth and
purity; into this higher struggle this peasant woman
of Bethany entered and did what she could. Are we
doing as much?

Alas! the sad truth is too patent to need state-
ment. Rare are the souls who live on these Bethany

[24]

FAITHFULNESS

heights of consecration and good will. The humili-
ating confession is forced from our lips that none of
us do all that we can for these high things; and the
second question of our sermon presses, — -Why is it
thus? And to this I find two fatal and almost uni-
versal answers, namely:

1. We hardly think it worth while, because what
we can do is so little.

2. We are ashamed to try, for fear people will
laugh at us.

Let us look to these answers. First, then, we
hardly think it pays ; we doubt if anything is accom-
plished. We have so little faith in the efficacy of all
that we can do. This is because we are still in the
bondage of matter. We are still enslaved in the feel-
ing that the material quantity is of more importance
than the spiritual quality of our lives. We forget that
it is not what, but how we do, that determines our
character. The Almighty in his providence does not
ask of us uniform rents for our rights and lives, as
earthly landlords sometimes do. He only asks for the
rightful use of the talents entrusted to us. The taxes
of Heaven are never per capita, but always pro rata.
Not the formal observance of each and all alike, but
every heart's best love, every hand's readiest service.
Not the number of acres you till, but the quality of
your tilling determines the profit of the harvest in
spiritual as in material farming. This standard exacts
no promises, but it accepts no apologies, for there is
no occasion for apology when you have done all you

[25]

FAITHFULNESS

can, and until that is done no apologies are accepted.
*^ Oh, if I were not so poor, had more time, strength or
money ! ' ' Hush ! from the loyal Bethany sister comes
the gentle rebuke, '^She hath done what she could;"
do thou as much and cease your bemoaning. But you
say, ^*I would so like to build a church, to establish a
hospital, to found a home for the afflicted, if I only
could. ' ' Not you, unless out of your present revenue
you have a tear for the unfortunate, a hope in your
heart for him who has no hope for himself, a smile and
a word for the sad and lonely that go about you ; or
should you build a hospital or found a home, they
would scarcely carry a blessing, for within their walls
there would be no aroma of the precious ointment
drawn from the flask of holy sacrifice. It is the fra-
grance of consecrated souls alone that is helpful. This
age is in danger of being cursed with too many so-
called ^* charitable institutions," built with the refuse
of rich men 's pocket-books, the rag ends of selfish for-
tunes; ^^institutions" with no cement stronger than
the mason's mortar to keep the walls together; insti-
tutions in which there is no heat to protect the inmates
from winter's cold save that which comes from a fur-
nace in the cellar, and no cooling balm in summer to
allay the feverish pulse save that found in a physi-
cian's prescription; no religious concentration, no
precious ointment poured by hands willing to do all
they can.

^*If I only had speech and the knowledge ade-
quate, I would so gladly testify to the faith that is in

[26]

FAITHFULNESS

me; I would advocate the precious doctrine, — ^but —
but>~"

Hold! Restrain the impiety of that '*but."
*'She hath done what she could." An advocacy-
more eloquent than speech is possible to you. A kind
heart is a better vindication of your doctrine than
any argument. Deeds go further than words in
justifying your creed. Character, and not logic, is
the credential to be offered at Heaven's gate; con-
duct is higher than confession; being, more funda-
mental than doing. ' ^ She hath done what she could. ' '
There is a potency in this standard greater than in
any of your dogmas; a salvation higher than can be
found in words or forms, however high or noble.

The master voice of Jesus in this sentence pleads
with us to put no skeptical measure upon the power
of a loving soul, the strength of a willing heart. The
power of that Bethany woman is an open secret; the
fame that came unsought is but the world's glad
tribute to the forces it most loves. This standard
always partakes of the inspiration of the Most High.
Friends, we have not faith enough in the far-reaching
power of every soul's best. You recall the dark
days of 1861 to 1865, the time when the nation was
being riddled by traitorous bullets, when acres of
southern soil were being covered by the bleeding sons
of the North. They were days when school-boys were
translated into heroes by the tap of a drum, plough-
men were transformed into field marshals, women
were stirred with more than masculine heroism, as

[27]

FAITHFULNESS

the avenues of war became clogged with their com-
merce of love. How their fingers flew, how the
supplies of lint, bandages and delicacies poured in
from hamlet and country-side ! Then there was none
too weak, too busy or too poor to make a contribution
to that tiding of life that made the atrocities of war
contribute to the gospel of peace, and used the hor-
rors of the battle-field to teach the sweet humanities.

Within the memory of many still living, millions
of human beings were chained in slavery in America.
They were driven to the auction-block like fettered
cattle, the sanctities of home were ruthlessly violated,
the sacred rights of the human soul were trampled
upon, and all this sanctioned by intelligent common-
wealths, and authorized by a powerful government.

What could an unknown printer do; what could
a busy matron distracted by domestic cares, sur-
rounded by a houseful of children, accomplish ? They
could open their hearts and let the woes of their
fellow-beings in, they could imitate the Bethany
woman and do all they could; and this became the
mighty inspiration which gave to our country William
Lloyd Garrison, its greatest moral hero, and ^^ Uncle
Tom's Cabin," its greatest novel and most famous
and prolific book.

Miserable indeed were the prison-pens of Europe
a century ago; barbarous was the treatment of the
vicious; arbitrary, cruel, and oftentimes stupid and
brutal, were the officials into whose custody these
moral invalids were entrusted. A gentle soul housed

[28]

FAITHFULNESS

in a puny body felt all this, but he was untitled, un-
known, was considered a dunce, at school always at the
foot of his class. What could he do? He could do as
much as the Bethany woman did, he did do all he
could, and by doing that he revolutionized the prison
systems of Europe, and wrote the name of John
Howard in letters of light high upon that obelisk
dedicated to earth's immortals and reared in the
heart of humanity.

Paul, studying the prospects of a new gospel,
looked out upon an inhospitable world. Things
looked very unfavorable; the first teacher had met
the fate of a criminal ; mighty Rome stretched far and
near with her religious indifference on the one hand,
and Jewry with its persecuting bigots and jealous
sectarians on the other. Paul himself, with a ' ' thorn
in the flesh," suspected by even the painful minority
to which he belonged, what could he do? He could
climb to that height whereon stood the Bethany
woman, he could break the alabaster box which con-
tained the precious ointment of his life for the
blessed cause, and thus make Christianity possible.
One step still further back. How small were the
chances for success, how unfavorable were the pros-
pects for an humble carpenter's son in the back-
woods of Galilee for doing anything to improve the
morals and purify the religion of the world! What
ridicule and contempt were in store for him; what
disappointment and defeat were inevitable! But he
could do what he could. He anticipated his lowly

[29]

FAITHFULNESS

sister, and out of the fullness of that uncaleulating
consecration came the Parables and the Beatitudes,
the morality of the 'Golden Rule' and the piety of
the Lord's Prayer, the insight by the well and the
triumph on Calvary. Out of that consecration came
the dignity of soul that has led the centuries to mis-
take him for a God, and that divine humility that at
the same time has led the weak and the ignorant to
confidently take his hand as that of an elder brother.
What potency there is in a human soul where all its
energies are called into action and wholly consecrated,
consecrated after the fashion of the Bethany woman,
— **She hath done what she could!"

But let not my illustrations over-reach my
sermon. I would enforce it with no exceptional
achievements, no unparalleled excellency. What if
the approving words of Jesus in my text had fallen
upon ears too dull to remember them, and the in-
spiring story had not been told in remembrance of
the woman of Bethany throughout the whole world?
What if Mother Bickerdyke and her associates of the
Sanitary Commission had been forgotten, and *' Uncle
Tom's Cabin" had been a literary failure? Suppose
Lloyd Garrison had been silenced, and John Howard
had failed to lessen the inhumanity visited upon a
single convict in all Europe ? What if Paul had been
forgotten and the crucifiers of Jesus had succeeded in
putting down the great movement of spirit which he
started; would not these records have been as clear

[30]

FAITHFULNESS

within and above for all that ? Would not God have
filled their souls with the same peace and blessedness ?
In God's sight, at least, would not the service have
been as holy and the triumph as great ? I have cited
but a few illustrations of a law that obtains through-
out the universe. No more assured is science that no
physical impulse ever dies, but goes on in increasing
waves toward the farthest confines of an infinite uni-
verse, than are we that every throb of the spirit for
the best and the truest over-rides all obstacles, dis-
arms all opposition, overcomes contempt, and survives
all death.

"What is excellent,
As God lives, is permanent."

"House and tenant go to ground.
Lost in God, in God-head fomid."

Just as truly as every material picture the light
of sun has ever fallen upon is forever photographed
somewhere upon the tablets of space, so surely is
every kindly smile, that ever lit the faces of any pain-
stricken woman, or calmed the storm in the passionate
heart of man, transformed into a bit of everlasting
light, that makes more radiant some section of the
spiritual universe.

"Gone are they, but I have them in my soul!"
God is not wasteful. He poorly apprehends the
Divine that regards him as balancing his books ac-
cording to some scheme in which the glory or doom
of the mortal is determined by some sacrificial, cere-

[31]

FAITHFULNESS

monial or theological entry; a book-keeping in
which kindly deeds, pleasant smiles and cheerful
words are not entered. The salvation of the Bethany
woman, and the salvation we should most covet, is
the result not of faith, but of faithfulness; not the
acceptance of a saving scheme proffered from with-
out, but loyalty to a saving grace springing from
within; not the acceptance of belief, but the dis-
pensing of kindness. This salvation which comes by
fidelity finds its exemplification not simply or per-
haps chiefly in the muster-rolls of our churches and
those whom our preachers class among the ^ * saved, '^
but among the uncounted millions of sincere souls
that are content to do their daily work faithfully,
carry their nearest duty with patience, and thank-
fully live on in the near loves of dear hearts, though
they

"Leave no memorial but a world made better by their
lives."

This Bethany woman became a saint in the
Church of the Holy Endeavor. She is an apostle
of that gospel that makes religion glorified morality
and morals realized religion; that makes life, and
not doctrine, the test of religious confidence and
fellowship; character the only credential of piety;
honesty the only saviour; justice the ^^ great judg-
ment-seat'' of God, and a loving spirit his atoning
grace. This Bethany woman is a missionary of the
evangel, the good news that helpfulness to one's
neighbor is holiness to the Lord ; that kindness is the

[32]

FAITHFULNESS

best evidence of a prayerful spirit; and that the
graces of Heaven are none other than the moralities
of earth raised to commanding pre-eminence.

This faith that makes faithful enables us to rest
in our humblest endeavor. It is not for him who
sits at this end of yon telegraph line, and with deft
and diligent fingers transmits the message into its
electric veins, to anxiously stop and query whether
it will ever reach its destination, and to wonder who
is to receive and transcribe it upon its arrival. That
is not his business. The management is adequate
to that work. Other minds and hands will attend
to that. It is for him faithfully to transmit. So,
friends, it is not for us to query the efficacy of those
small acts; the saving power of these lowly graces;
the daily, hourly messages of humble faithfulness. It
is only for us to transmit: the Infinite will receive
the dispatches. Like faithful soldiers, it is ^^ours
not to reason why" but to do, and, if need be, die.

The lawyer may not, can not, purify his pro-
fession; but he can be a pure member in it. The
merchant can not stop the iniquitous practices of
trade, but he can be an honest merchant or else go
out of the business. The mother may not be able
to keep down the shallow standards that bewitch her
daughters; but she can pitch the key of her own life
so high that the dignity of her soul will rebuke these
standards and disarm them of their power. The
father may not be able to keep his sons from tempt-
ations, but he can himself desist from the filthy habit,

[33]

FAITHFULNESS

the loose language, the indifferent life, that his ad-
miring child is more likely to copy from him than
from any one else. Our lives can not escape dis-
appointments and weaknesses; but if we could only
have faith in the efficacy of doing all we can, until
faith ripens into faithfulness, there would flow into
our lives a sweetness, a wholesomeness, a strength
and a peace that will ultimately overflow into the
world and into eternity. Studying thus, we shall
find in this brief story the secret of a salvation that
most of the creeds miss.

"What shall I do to be forever known?"

"Thy duty ever."
"This did full many who yet slept unknown."
"Oh, never, never!
Thinkest thou perchance that they remain unknown

Whom thou know^st not?
By angel trumps in Heaven their praise is blown —
Divine their lot."

"What shall I do to gain eternal life?"

"Discharge aright
The simple dues with which each day is rife^

Yea, with thy might.
Ere perfect scheme of action thou devise,

Will Hfe be fled,
While he, who ever acts as conscience cries,
Shall live, though dead."

The second reason why we do not do all we can
is that we are ashamed to try for fear people will
laugh at us. Next to a lack of faith in the efficacy of
what we can do, comes the blighting dread of ex-

[34]

FAITHFULNESS

posing our weakness and our littleness to others.
Sad as it may be, it is yet true that many worthy
souls shrink not only from their simplest, plainest
duties, but their highest, noblest opportunities, from
the mere dread of being laughed at. So they indo-
lently hide themselves behind the screen of what they
** would like'' to do and be rather than royally reveal
what they can do and what they are. How many
people to-day go to churches they do not believe in,
and stand aloof from causes their intellect approves,
because of the ridicule and the social ostracism such
loyalty would bring them! I doubt not the hands
of a dozen women in Bethany ached that morning
to do the very thing this woman did do. But they
did not dare; the disciples or somebody else would
laugh at them, and they were right about it. They
certainly would, and they did.

The woman knows that this or that fashion is
ridiculous; that custom meaningless, or worse, crim-
inal; but others do it. For her to refrain would be
to make herself peculiar. She's afraid of beingi
laughed at. The young man knows that the cigar is
a filthy thing, that the intoxicating glass is a danger-
ous enemy ; yet to set his face against them like flint
would be to *^make himself odd." He does not dare
to do all he can to dispel these curses by refusing
them for himself, for fear of being laughed at. I
dare not push these inquiries into the more internal
things of life, lest I might be unjust. I fear that
the spiritual, intellectual and social servility that

[35]

FAITHFULNESS

might be discovered is something appalling. This
moral cowardice is a practical infidelity more alarm-
ing than all the honest atheism and avowed skepticism
of this or any other age. Moral courage is the great
want of our times, and all times. Not courage to
do the great things, so-called, but to do the greater
things which we call ^ kittle.'' There is always hero-
ism enough to snatch women and children from burn-
ing buildings, or to make a bayonet charge on the
battle-field, whether spiritual or material, but always
too little courage to befriend the forsaken; to do
picket duty for advanced ideas, to stand as lonely
sentinels in the vanguard of progress. More heroic
is the smile that robs the pain of its groan than is
the defiant hurrah of a charging column. More dar-
ing is the breaking of a single flask of ointment by
a shrinking, trembling, despised soul in behalf of
what seems to be a losing cause, than volumes of
wordy rhetoric from arrogant believers. It was not
the presumptuous Pharisee who emptied his fat purse
into the treasury box, but the poor widow who dared
to come after him and dropped in her two mites,
which made a farthing, that stirred the heart of
Jesus ; for she gave out of a quivering life.

"Two mites, two drops, but all her house and land,
Fell from an earnest heart but trembling hand;
The others' wanton wealth foamed high and brave;
The others cast away, she only gave/'

It was not the Chicago Board of Trade that out
of growing fortunes equipped a battery, recruited a

[36]

FAITHFULNESS

regiment, and filled the coffers of the Sanitary Com-
mission, and then drove home to sleep on sumptuous
couches and eat from groaning tables, that did the
brave thing or gave grandly to the war for the Union,
but the mother who kissed her only son on the door-
step and through her tears said, ^'Go, my child, your
country needs you," and then turned around to find
aU the light gone out of her humble home. It is not
the man who gives a hundred thousand dollars to
found an institution, while he has several hundred
thousand more to misuse in selfish ways, that is gen-
erous; but he who gives the half of yesterday's toil,
the half of his night's sleep, foregoes an expected
pleasure, or does the still harder thing, stands up to
be laughed at; he who sides with truth —

"Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 'tis pros-
perous to be just," —

that is true to the standard of the Bethany woman.
Giving is not the throwing away of that which we
never miss, but it is the consecrating to noble uses
that which is very dear to us, that which has cost
us much ; it is the bravely daring to be faithful over
the few things given us. Doing this is what makes
transcendent the courage of the Bethany woman.
Probably she was one of the three women who, a few
days after, stood by the cross, endured the wrong
they could not cure,^ —

"Undaunted by the threatening death,
Or harder circumstance of Hving doom."

[37]

FAITHFULNESS

From the saddened radiance upon their faces
streams a mellow light which reveals the rottenness
of the timbers in that well-painted bridge of ex-
pediency, popularity and prosperity over which our
lives would fain pass. Now, as then, would-be dis-
ciples withdraw from the conflict of truth with wrong ;
absent themselves from the service of the ideas and
the rights they believe in, instead of standing on the
Golgotha grounds where rages the battle of life
against forms, freedom against slavery, honesty
against pretense, candor against equivocation, intelli-
gent reason against conventional creed. These women
bore testimony to the truth in the grandest way it is
possible for human souls to testify, by standing with
it when there is no crowd to lower the standard ; by
voting at a place where the popular standards give
way to the divine ; for surely when is swept the chaflE

"From the Lord's threshing floor,
We see that more than half
The victory is attained, when one or two,
Through the fooFs laughter and the traitor's scorn,
Beside thy sepuleher can abide the mom,
Crucified truth, when thou shalt rise anew."

This Bethany loyalty is the simple requirement
of religion. Not one cent, not one moment, not one
loving impulse, not one thought, not one syllable of
a creed, is expected, but all of this is expected;
nothing less will do. God asks for no more and man
has no right to expect more, but all of this he does

[38]

FAITHFULNESS

expect and no man can evade it. Bring your flasks
of precious ointment, break them, anoint with them
that which is worthy, and there will escape therefrom
a fragrance as pervasive, as lasting, as that which
filled the air of Bethany nineteen hundred years ago ;
for it will be the same flask of consecration broken by
the same hand of courage, yielding the same ointment
of good will, the same spikenard of love, very pre-
cious. Let duty be its own reward; love, its own
justiflcation. *'She hath done what she could!''
This is the fullness of the Christian excellence; it is
the ultimate standard of religion.

[39]

cc

I Had a Friend''

Our Bible is a book of lives. It is a book of
men praying rather than a book of prayer, of men
believing rather than a book of beliefs, of men sin-
ning and repenting and righting themselves rather
than a book of ethics. It is a book, too, of men
lovmg: it is full of faces turned toward faces. As
in the procession-pictures frescoed on rich old walls,
the well-known men and women come trooping
through its pages in twos and threes, or in little
bands of which we recognize the central figure and
take the others to be those unknown friends immor-
talized by just one mention in this book. Adam
always strays with Eve along the foot-paths of our
fancy. Abram walks with Sarah, Rebecca at the
well suggests the Isaac waiting somewhere, and
Rachel's presence pledges Jacob's not far off. Two
brothers and a sister together led Israel out from
Egypt. Here come Ruth and Naomi, and there go
David and Jonathan. Job sits in his ashes forlorn
enough, but not for want of comforters, — we can
hardly see Job for his friends. One whole book in
the Old Testament is a love-song about an eastern
king and one of his dusky brides ; although, to keep
the Bible biblical, our modern chapter-headings call
the Song of Solomon a prophecy of the love of the

[40]

'^I HAD A FRIEND"

Christian Church for Christ. Some persons have
wished the book away, but a wise man said the Bible
would have lacked, had it not held somewhere in its
pages a human love-song. True, the Prophets seem
to wander solitary, — prophets usually do ; yet, though
we seldom see their ancient audience, they doubtless
had one. Minstrels and preachers always presup-
pose the faces of a congregation.

But as we step from Old Testament to New, again
we hear the buzz of little companies. We follow Jesus
in and out of homes ; children cluster about his feet ;
women love him; a dozen men leave net and plough
to bind to his their fortunes, and others go forth by
twos, not ones, to imitate him. ^^ Friend of publi-
cans and sinners" was his title with those who loved
him not. Across the centuries we like and trust him
all the more because he was a man of many friends.
No spot in all the Bible is quite so overcoming as that
garden-scene where the brave, lonely sufferer comes
back, through the darkness under the olive-trees, to
his three chosen hearts, within a stone's throw of
his heart-break, — to find them fast asleep ! Once be-
fore, in that uplifted hour from which far off he
descried Gethsemane, — ^we call it the ^^Transfigura-
tion,"— we read of those same three friends asleep.
The human loneliness of that soul in the garden as
he paused by Peter's side,: — '^You! could you not
watch with me one hour ? " — and turned back into the
darkness, and into God! Then came the kiss with
which another of his twelve betrayed him. No passage

[41]

'^I HAD A FRIEND"

in the Gospels makes him so real a man to us as this ;
no words so appeal to us to stand by and be his
friends.

Jesus gone, we see the other hero of the New
Testament starting off on missionary journeys, — ^but
Barnabas or Mark or Silas or Timothy is with him.
The glowing postscripts of his letters tell how many
hearts loved him. What a comrade he must have
been, — ^the man who dictated the thirteenth of Co-
rinthians! What a hand-grasp in his favorite
phrases — ' ' fellow-lahorevs, " ^ ^ fellow-soldievs, " ^ ' fel-
?(n(;-prisoners ! " We wonder who the men and women
were he names, — *'Luke, the well-beloved physi-
cian," and **Zenas the lawyer," and ''Tryphena and
Tryphosa," and **Stachys, my beloved." Just hear
him send his love to some of these friends: it is the
end of what in solemn phrase we call the Epistle to
the Romans, — what Paul would perhaps have called
^Hhe letter I sent the dear souls in that little church
in Rome":- —

*'I commend unto you Phebe, our sister, that ye
assist her in whatsoever business she hath need of
you" (help that woman!) ''for she hath been a suc-
courer of many, and of myself, too. Greet Priscilla
and Aquila, my helpers in Christ Jesus, who have
for my life laid down their own necks. Greet Mary
who bestowed much labor on us. Salute Andronicus
and Junia, my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners.
Greet Amplias, my beloved in the Lord. Salute Ur-
bane, our helper in Christ, and Stachys, my beloved.

[42]

^^I HAD A FRIEND^'

Salute Tryphena and Tryphosa, who labor in the
Lord, and the beloved Persis, and Rufus chosen in
the Lord, and his mother- — and mine.'' And so on.

**His mother — his and mine,:" no doubt Paul
had a dozen dear old mothers in those seaboard cities
where he came and went. It brings him very near to
us to read such words. Why, if we had lived then
and had been ** radical" Jews like him, and like him
had dared and joyed to speak our faith, and for it
had been brave enough to stand by his side in labors
and in prisons, our names might have slipped into
those letters, and we have been among the dozen or
twenty picked out from all the Marys and Lukes
and Pauls of the Roman Empire to be enshrined in
a Bible postscript, and guessed about eighteen hun-
dred years aft^rward,^ — because Paul had once sent
his love to us in a letter! I would far rather spare
some of the words in which he tells us his thought of
the Christ and the Church than those names that
huddle at his letter-ends. They make the Epistles
real letters, such as we mailed yesterday. They bring
Paul down out of his Bible niche, and forward out
of the magnificent distance of a Bible character, and
make him just **Paul," alive and lovable; a man
to whom our hearts warm still, because his own heart
was so warm that men fell on his neck and kissed
him when he told them they should see his face no
more.

So much for the friendships of the Bible. Now
for our own, as sacred.

[43]

'^I HAD A FRIEND"

It is happiness to have some one '*glad you are
alive." No wonder that poor girls take their lives
when they come to feel that not one face lights up
because they are in the world, or would be shadowed
if they left it. We who have the friends know how
much of all earth's worth to us lies in certain eyes
and faces, certain voices, certain hands. Fifty per-
sons, or perhaps but five, make the wide world popu-
lous for us, and living in it beautiful. The spring-
times and the sunsets, and all things grand and
sweet besides, are at their grandest and their sweetest
when serving as locality and circumstance to love.
The hours of our day are really timed by sounds of
coming feet: if you doubt it, wait till the feet have
ceased to sound along the street and up the stair.
Our week's real Sabbath is the day which brings the
weekly letter. The year's real June and Christmas
come at the rare meeting-times; and the true ^^Year
of the Lord" was the time when certain twos first
met. Let the few hands vanish, the few voices grow
still, and the emptied planet seems a whirling grave-
yard; for it no longer holds the few who wanted us
and whom we wanted. ''Who wanted us,"- — that is
the word to start with : the deepest of all human long-
ings is simply to he wanted.

So Mother Nature has seen to it for the most of us
that, at least upon arrival here, we shall be wanted.
She sends the wee ones into the world so wondrously
attractive that we get more worship then than ever
afterwards, when it might do us harm. We are

[44]

^^I HAD A FRIEND"

prayed for before we come, we are thanked for with
the family's thanksgiving at our advent, a mother's
sense of motherhood and a father's sense of father-
hood have been begotten to prepare self-sacrifices for
us : all this by way of welcome. In one word, we are
^* wanted" in the world when we reach it. *^No en-
trance here except on business, ' ' true ; but the babies
have the business, — ^who so much? Very pitiful are
the young lives for whom these pre-arrangements of
love fail.

But soon our helplessness is past, and what ought
to be the period of our helpfulness has come; and
then is there anything that we can do to make that
title, ** Wanted," sure? Is there any recipe for win-
ning friends? In old Rome young men and maidens
used to drink love-potions and wear charms to eke
out their winsomeness: in this modern time is there
any potion, any charm, for friend-making? The
question is worth asking, for it is no low ambition
to wish to be desired in the world, no low endeavor
to deliberately try to be love-worthy. Wise father
he — ^^the Lord's chore-boy" one called him, — the
sunny-faced old abolitionist, who brought his children
up to know that ^Hhe one thing worth living for is
to love and to be loved." But as to recipes for lova-
bleness, the young soul in its romance laughs to scorn
so kitchen-like a question. And right to laugh the
young soul is; for much in the business passeth
recipe. We speak of ^^ choosing" friends, of ^'making
friends," of *^ keeping" or of *' giving up" friends,

[45]

^'I HAD A FRIEND''

and if such terms were wholly true, the old advice
were good, — In friend-making first consult the gods!
Jesus, it is said, prayed all the night before he chose
his twelve. But the words are not all true; friend-
ship is at most but half made,''— the other half is
born. What we can chiefly ** choose" and **make" is,
not the friend, but opportunity for contact. When
the contact happens, something higher than our will
chooses for us. Fore-ordination then comes in.
*^ Matches are made in heaven," and before the
foundation of the world our friendships are arranged.
^' Thine they were and thou gavest them me," we feel
of those whom we love best ;— borrowing words which,
it is said again, Jesus used of his disciple-friends.
Nothing supernatural in this; but it is so supremely
natural, the secret of it roots so deep in the heart of
Nature, that it passeth understanding. We can not
cross the laws of attraction and repulsion; can only
attract and be attracted, repel and be repelled, ac-
cording to those laws. There is in Nature a great
deal of that phenomenon called ^4ove-at-sight." Who-
ever wrote it truly wrote, —

"Thou shalt know him, when he comes,
Not by any din of drums,
Nor the vantage of his airs;
Neither by his crown,
Nor his gown,
Nor by anything he wears:
He shall only well-known be
By the holy harmony
That his coming makes in thee !"
[46]

''I HAD A FRIEND''

And, on the other hand, there is in Nature that op-
posite experience of which Dr. Fell is the typical
victim :: —

"I do not love thee. Dr. FeU:
The reason why I can not tell,
But this alone I know full well, —
I do not love thee, Dr. FeU."

How often we have seen the poor doctor! How
often we have been the poor doctor! And though
we smile, we ache for him. It is tragedy, — this one-
sidedness of friendship, these unequal gravitations
of love. But what makes gravitation? The men of
science can not tell us. ** Fascination" is soul-gravi-
tation. ^^ Personal magnetism" we sometimes call it,
using another word to hide our ignorance, and mean-
ing the sum of all the mysterious centripetal forces
that lodge in us and all radiations of health and
beauty that go out from us. It lies in the glancing
of the eye, in the flitting of the smile, in the toning of
the voice, in the poise of the figure, in the grace of the
notion. Nearly all have more or less of it ; but some
how enviably the more, and others how lamentably
the less! Some persons make more friends as they
come into the room, or as they walk down the street,
or as they smile their greeting, than others of us
can hope to make with long and solid service.

But grant all this, — still our young lover is but
half-Tight in laughing at a recipe for love. We know
no cause of gravitation, but we can study its laws and
apply it in a thousand forms of civilizing work: and

[47]

^^I HAD A FRIEND"

whatever can be studied in its laws is subject for a
science, wherever laws can be applied is subject for an
art. So is it with soul-gravitation. There is, then,
both a science and an art of Friendship. Besides
that mystic element in it so hard to be accounted for,
so hard to be acquired, there is a moral element in it
which is an open secret, and this can be acquired.
Indeed, so far as it is true that ^^ beauty is the flower-
ing of virtue," that mystic element is moral, too.
Hidden in the ^^ virtue" of the ancestors may lie
the source of all the alien grace, sometimes so visibly
divorced from virtue in the children; and, given
time enough — say, generations, centuries — perhaps
there is no limit to the outward fascination which may
be earned and won. Be that as it may, so sure and
large is this moral element in love that by it one can
go far to ^^make" friends, after all. If we choose
to be, we can be ^^ wanted" in this world. In a deep
and worthy sense old Ovid, he who wrote the poem
on the ''Art of Loving," might be imitated. And
when you write your poem on that subject, you will
without fail put into it one hint, — that friendships
based on the mystic surface-fascinations are the kind
so apt to end in tragedies of waning and of broken
love ; whereas the attractiveness which can be acquired
makes basis for the friendships apt to solidly endure.
We must stop right here a moment; for different
persons mean such different things by ''Friendship."
1 1 The one who uses the sacred word most easily is the
one least likely to know much about the sacred thing.

[48]

^^I HAD A FRIEND''

Some people know every one they speak of so very
well indeed ! ^ ^ Oh yes, an intimate friend of mine, ' '
they say, when you ask if they have ever met A or B.
They have ''met" him. One may well hesitate to
answer Yes even to the common question, ''Do you
know such or such a person ? " " Know him ? I have
seen him six times, I traveled with him half a day,
once I had a long argument with him, he told me
stories of his childhood, and we discovered that four
generations back we would have been first cousins, —
but do I know him ? No. I have an opinion whether
I like him or not, whether he has common sense or
not, perhaps whether I would trust him or not;
but I do not know that man." Much more is it in
place to be modest about claiming him as a friend.
Even speaking carefully, every one has at least
two meanings for our sacred word. Each of us is
ringed about by two circles, both commonly called
"friends." The outer circle is the circle of our
Likers, the inner is the circle of our Lovers. The
main secret of having Likers lies in justice carried to
the point of kindlmess and courtesy. Justice carried
to the point of kindliness and courtesy commands the
good word when people talk of us behind our back ; it
commands the hearty greeting when we ring the bell ;
it commands the true "I'm glad to see you" in the
eyes as well as voice; it commands the excuse in
our behalf when some one dwells upon our faults with
over-emphasis, and with defense when people misin-
terpret or misrepresent us. Now justice carried to the

[49]

''I HAD A FRIEND''

point of courtesy and kindliness is acquirable. The
recipe for making Likers calls for no rare material:
all I need lies right before me and around me in the
opportunities of doing truthful, just, kind things
by those I deal with. The recipe calls for no rare ele-
ment, and the mixing and the making take no one day
in the week. There is baking-day, sweeping-day,
washing-day, but no friend-making-day. It is Mon-
day's, Tuesday's, Wednesday's work, and lasts
through Saturday and Sunday and the twenty-ninth
of February. As one does his business he makes his
Liker. There is no place nor time nor way of making
him save as we go the rounds of common living; for
by the common deeds of the common life we all test
likings. What is more, the recipe never wholly fails.
Try it faithfully and it is sure to bring us Likers. It
is worth repeating to ourselves and emphasizing, — if
we really wish to be, we can be ''wanted" in the
world ; and the ambition to be wanted here is a worthy
one; and the effort to be wanted nurtures in us that
quick courtesy and instinctive kindliness that flower
out from an unfailing justice.

But now to turn from our Likers to our Lovers.
The conditions here are harder, and therefore the cul-
ture gained in meeting the conditions is proportion-
ately higher. Come with me to that inner circle that
only holds the lives knit up with ours by a thousand
crossing ties, and where we say with a yearning and
exultation so different from anything felt in outer

[50]

*'I HAD A FRIEND''

meanings of the word, ^^My friends !^^ And some of
us are thinking of an inmost center where we never
use the plural; are thinking that the truest friend-
ship easts out all but two together and, for the time
at least, crowns him or her alone the friend. We feel
as if we had achieved our life's success in that one
winning, and say with Eobert Browning, —

"I am named and known by that hour^s feat,
There took my station and degree:
So grew my own small life complete
As Nature obtained her best of me, —
One bom to love you!''

Be it so : but even then it is true to say that the
secret is largely a moral secret. Nay, more true of
such love than of any other to say that it is goodness
which attracts. Luckily for some of us, one may love
a poor kind of fellow ; but they love us not in virtue
of our poorness, — it is in spite of it. They love ua
for some real or fancied excellence, some evidence of
truthfulness and rightfulness they think that they
discern in us.

And with that word we reach a high thought
worth a climb, this namely, that to have a true friend \
one must love Truth and Right better than he loves \
that friend. To win a true friend you and I must
love Truth and Right better than that friend, how-
ever dear. This involves another of love's tragedies;
for, by this rule, wherever there is noble friendship
there is always possibility of its waning; although at
the time to believe that waning possible is impossi-

[51]

^^I HAD A FRIEND''

ble. But the relation to be vital must be fresh each
day. If there were not a new demand made by me on
my friend and made upon me by my friend each time
we met, a new demand to be then and there worth
loving, half the charm would be gone. It is the heart
mine, yet mine only by fresh necessity of winning it
by nobleness,- — ^it is my heart his, yet his by an ever
fresh necessity of giving it to him for his worth's sake,
—that makes the deamess so ineffable. In order then
to be ^^ friends" in this high sense, we must ever be
ready to be renounced if we persist in a deliberate
No before a duty, must be ever ready to renounce if
he persists in such a No. It is not that the two must
take the same idea of duty, nor that, when one fails
to do his duty, he falls from all regard ; but that, when
he so fails, he falls as if by fate out of that chosen
place of which we have been speaking. The man is
here, and, as we use the words, a good man still; as
we use the words, is still *'our friend;" perhaps he
even falls into a tenderer place than ever; but it is
the tenderness of pity now, no more a tenderness of
reverence. The short and simple fact is, that our
man, our woman, has vanished : we have lost that ideal
made real which we had been calling * ' friend. ' ' We
cannot, if we would, feel to him as we did before. No
heart-labor can put him where he was before. For
Truth and Right had placed him there, not we, —
they only can replace him. Those moral nature-
forces behind good-will, that generate attraction, must
be again invoked; and a man can only make the old

[52]

^^I HAD A FRIEND"

attraction his again by reclaiming the old honor to
his soul.

"We needs must love tlie highest when we see it, —
Not Lanncelot, nor another/'

though Launcelot be the name of husband or of
brother !

Does it seem strange to say that in this very pos-
sibility of tragedy lies the ennobling power of love?
From the sureness of losing it if undeserved, comes
compulsion to deserve it. We feel that our friend-
ship with John or with Ellen is our highest title or
honor, our patent of nobility, and sit ever in a sense
of glad amaze that we can call such superiority, '*my
friend." There can be no consciously hidden weak-
ness in us and we be safe in their affection. Perfect
love casteth out fear, but only by having revealed
everj^hing that maketh fear. To discover, after a
year's close friendship, a concealed meanness in me,
would, as meanness, degrade me in your eyes, but as
concealed from you it would be treachery. So we
dare not come to the point when the one we love
shall think of us, *'He is a lower kind of man," or
*'She is a lower kind of woman, than I imagined."
If liked as much after that discovery as before, for
such loyalty to us rather than to Right our love for
them would actually grow less. The surprises of
friendship — and how exquisite they are!^ — ought
only to be of unsuspected excellences. But what woe,
when one whom we have wholly trusted reels! If

[53]

^'I HAD A FRIEND''

this embodiment of honor, truth and kindness reels
and falls before our eyes, we have lost more than
friend: for that moment we have lost our vision of
God ! Goodness seems emptiness, and the very planet
jars! We can understand the story told of Pascal,
that once, when Arnauld seemed to prefer peace to
truth, the shock to Pascal was so great that he fainted
away.

Hence there must needs be undimmed sincerity,
and humility even to confession, in every exalting
love. Almost we have to say —

"Have I a lover

Who is noble and free,
I would he were nobler
Than to love meF'

And we know so well the truth of Emerson's other
word, that ''in the last analysis love is only the re-
flection of a man's own worthiness from other men,"
— know that so well that, in a half -fear lest we should
gain under false pretenses the love we crave, we are
impelled to exaggerate our poorness. ''Love me, love
my dog," says the proverb: "Love me, love the dog
in me !" says Friendship. Love me as I am, poor as I
am, know me and yet love me !

Among all ennobling forces, therefore, hardly
any other can be named so strong as an inmost Friend-
ship. As the special culture which the winning of our
Likers gives is that of quick, wide kindliness, the
special culture which the winning of our Lovers gives

[54]

*'I HAD A FRIEND"

is that of purity, sincerity, humility, selfishness, and
the high standard for all honorable qualities: That
says it,: — the high standard for all honorable quali-
ties: to win and hold a friend we are compelled to
keep ourselves at his ideal point, and in turn our love
makes on him the same appeal. Each insists on his
right in the other to an ideal. All around the circle
of our best beloved it is this idealizing that gives to
love its beauty and its pain and its mighty leverage on
character. Its beauty, because that idealizing is the
secret of love's glow. Its pain, because that idealizing
makes the constant peril of love's vanishing. Its lev-
erage to uplift character, because this same idealizing
is a constant challenge between every two, compelling
each to be his best. ^'What is the secret of your
life?" asked Mrs. Browning of Charles Kingsley:
'Hell me, that I may make mine beautiful too." He
replied, '^7 had a friend.^' The reverence this im-
plies borders closely upon worship and the ennoble-
ment that comes of that. What the dying Bunsen
said as he looked up in the eyes of his wife bending
over him, ' ^ In thy face have I seen the Eternal ! " is
the thought of many a heart before its best beloved.
That beloved is our ^^ beautiful enemy," in Emerson's
phrase; our *^dear dread," as some older writer
called him; our outside conscience, a kind of Jesus-
presence before which we fear to do a wrong. What
rare power to awake power in her friends and to set
them as it were in an invisible church, this sentence
attests in Margaret Fuller: '*I have no doubt that

[55]

'^I HAD A FRIEND''

she saw expressions, heard tones, and received
thoughts from her companions, which no one else
ever saw or heard from the same persons." Some-
where in her ^^Middlemarch" George Eliot puts it
well: ^^ There are natures in which, if they love us,
we are conscious of having a sort of baptism and con-
secration; they bind us over to rectitude and purity
by their pure belief about us ; and our sins become the
worst kind of sacrilege, which tears down the invisible
altar of trust. ' '

With Friendship meaning so much, capable of
doing so much, do we lower or rather dignify the
relation of father and mother to the child, of sister
to brother, of husband to wife, when we say, ' ' Those
two are each other's best friend"? In between the
common likings of society and the heart's one-choice
comes that whole choir of family affections. The
father keeps the boy his son by making him, when
young, his friend. As the years run by, the sister
keeps the brother, the brother keeps the sister, in love,
less by the blood-tie than by the words and works and
trusts of friendship. And in the marriage itself the
early love must ripen into close, abiding, inmost
friendship. The happiest marriages take place grad-
ually, and go on deepening all through the life to-
gether. Hardly are they begun when the presents
and congratulations come, and the minister says,
^^ Until death do you two part."

And for the many who can never love the one,
or who, loving, are not loved as the one ; who

[56]

^^I HAD A FRIEND"

"May not make this world a Paradise
By walking it together hand in hand,
With eyes that, meeting, find a double strength," —

for them the great solace, the great elevation, is to
love lovableness, love it in all, — be it to all. This is
really the end of all the single and personal affections ;
this is the end even of wedded love. You may have
skipped that stage, yon may have lost that usual path,
but still may find the hill-top for which that path is.

A friend may have many functions. He comes
as the Brightener into our life, to double joys and
halve our griefs. He comes as the Counsellor, to give
wisdom to our plans. He comes as the Strengthener,
to multiply our opportunities and be hands and feet
for us in our absence. But, above all use like this, he
comes as our Rebuker, to explain our failures and
shame us from our lowness ; as our Purifier, our Up-
lifter, our Ideal, whose life to us is a constant
challenge in our heart, ^^ Friend, come up higher, —
higher along with me, that you and I may be those
true lovers who are nearest to God when nearest to
each other!"

But when such friend as this, — it may be the one
called Father, Husband, Brother, or Mother, Sister,
Wife, or simply, Friend — when such a friend as this
does, as we say, go nearer to God, becoming invisible
to us, it is wonderful to feel Death growing beautiful,
the unseen world becoming real, and God's goodness
seeming good as never before. It is that vanished
one who changes all things so for us, hy adding Ms

[57]

^'I HAD A FRIEND''

goodness to the unseen side of things. Noble friends —
only the noble, probably — have power to leave us
this bequest ; power to bequeath us a sense of God more
real and good, a sense of Deathlessness more sure.
Therefore we can never know the whole of a friend's
blessing until he has died. We speak of circles
'^broken" by death, but a circle is really incomplete
until some of the friends sit in it out of sight.

[58]

Tenderness

"The bruised reed shall he not break." — Isaiah xlii: 3.

Some years ago I clipped the following from a
Chicago daily paper :

A Cincinnati paper says: "In a pottery factory here
there is a workman who had one small invalid child at
home. He wrought at his trade with exemplary fidelity,
being always in the shop with the opening of the day. He
managed, however, to bear each evening to the bedside of
his "wee lad," as he called him, a flower, a bit of ribbon,
or a fragment of crimson glass — indeed, anything that
would lie out on the white counter-pane and give color to
the room. He was a quiet, unsentimental man, but never
went home at night without something that would make the
wan face light up with joy at his return. He never said to
a living soul that he loved that boy so much. Still he went
on patiently loving him, and by and by he moved that whole
shop into positively real but unconscious fellowship with
him. The workmen made curious little jars and cups upon
their wheels, and painted diminutive pictures down their
sides before they stuck them in the corners of the kiln at
burning time. One brought some fruit in the bulge of his
apron, and another engravings in a rude scrap-book. Not
one of them whispered a word, for this solemn thing was
not to be talked about. They put them in the old man's
hat, where he found them; he understood all about it, and,
believe it or not, cynics, as you will, but it is a fact that
the entire pottery, full of men of rather coarse fiber by
nature, grew quiet as the months drifted, becoming gentle
and kind, and some dropped swearing as the weary look on

[59]

TENDERNESS

the patient fellow-worker's face told them beyond mistake
that the inevitable shadow was drawing nearer. Every day
now someone did a piece of work for him and put it on the
sanded plank to dry, so that he could come later and go
earlier. So, when the bell tolled and the little cofl&n came
out of the lonely door, right around the comer, out of sight,
there stood a hundred stalwart workingmen from the pot-
tery with their clean clothes on, most of whom gave a half
day's time for the privilege of taking part in the simple
procession and following to the grave that small burden of
a child which probably not one had ever seen."

I sent the clipping to my friend and fellow-
laborer in Cincinnati, saying that I had great appe-
tite for such things, and that I was always ready to
believe in their possibility, but I did not care to
center my interests upon fictitious incidents while
there were so many real things upon which to place
them. I asked him if there was any way by which
he could verify the essential truthfulness of the
story. In due time I received this reply : —

Dear Jones: — You sent me the enclosed slip a month
ago, asking me to trace its authority, but it was not till
yesterday that I found any convenient way of inquiring
about it. Then by chance I met a reporter named Thomp-
son, who said he wrote it, and that it may be depended
upon.

Yours Truly,

Geo. a. Thayer.

With this assurance I venture to use it as a help
in this study of Tenderness.

Note first the strength that lies behind this story,
[60]

TENDERNESS

the power of that feeling that avoided the debilitating
compliment, suppressed the harrowing word, but ac-
complished the kindly deed. There is that which
passes for tenderness that might better be called
*^ softness." The tremor of nerve and fluttering of
heart, the trembling in the presence of suffering and
turning pale at the sight of pain, is very common,
quite real, perhaps commendable; but lacking
strength it falls short of the grace of tenderness; it
is wanting in moral quality. There is that which
sometimes passes for tenderness that is more physical
than spiritual, more selfish than disinterested. It
springs from untrained nerves, it indicates an un-
disciplined soul, one untried by severity, untempered
by sorrow. Tears in the presence of suffering do not
necessarily reflect that tenderness described in my
text and context, that to which Jesus aspired.

"He shall not cry aloud, nor lift up his voice.
Nor cause it to be heard in the street.
The bruised reed shall he not break,
And the glimmering flax shall he not quench;
He shall send forth law according to truth,
He shall not fail nor become weary
Until he shall have established justice in the earth,
And distant nations shall wait for his law.''

To shrink from another's suffering because it
makes us suffer too is only a refined kind of selfish-
ness. One may ^^not have heart enough to kill a
chicken," as we say, and still be very cruel if this
inability springs from weakness rather than tender-

[61]

TENDERNESS

ness. True tenderness is that which can destroy limb
in order to save life ; when necessary, it can increase
the torture to reduce danger. The tridy tender soul
will gladly endure itself the agony it would not inflict
upon another.

**I could not bear to see him suffer, and so I
came away."

* * I would like to help him, but I cannot stand the
sight of so much wretchedness ! ' '

'^Some people seem to be able to wash dirty
children, to teach ignorant ones, to enjoy their attempt
to enlighten the stupid, to refine the coarse, to en-
noble the wicked, — ^but I cannot do these things ; they
work on my feelings so. They make me so miserable. ' '

These are familiar sayings and they reveal
miserable weakness. Such confessions ought never to
be made except in humility. Such lives need to be
lifted out of cowardice into courage, regenerated out
of helplessness into helpfulness. When tenderness
becomes a virtue, like all virtues it becomes heroic.
When we seek an example of highest sensibility and
truest tenderness, we do not take her whose eyes are
red with weeping over a dead canary bird, or her who
**went to bed downright sick,'' as I once heard a
woman confess, because **Pont," the impudent little
poodle, had his foot pinched by the slamming of the
carriage door ; but we go to the battle-field to find the
woman who carries her water can and bandages
through clotted gore with unblanched cheek. We go
to the hospital and find the true physician, who is

[62]

TENDERNESS

also the kind physician, who dares not endanger
the clearness of his vision with a tear. Indeed, let
those who would excuse themselves from stern and
disagreeable duties on account of the tenderness of
their hearts or the sensibility of their nerves remember
that in life, as in literature, the profession most ac-
customed to suffering has furnished the most
illustrious examples of the tenderness that will not
** break a bruised reed'' except ''thereby the law of
life be established upon the earth." Indeed, the
tenderest soul in history finds one of his most suggest-
ive titles when he is called the ''Good Physician."
One of the tenderest little stories in English literature
is the familiar one of "Rab and His Friends,"
written by John Brown, the good physician of Edin-
burgh. This tells how James Noble, the carrier,
brought one day into the hospital yard on his cart a
woman with

'*A most unforgettable face, pale, lonely, serious, deli-
cate, sweet : — eyes such as one sees only once or twice in
a lifetime, full of sufferng, full also of the overcoming of
it: her mouth firm, patient and contented, which few
mouths ever are. I never saw a more beautiful counte-
nance, or one more subdued to settled quiet.

" 'Maister John, this is the mistress. She has got a
trouble in her breest, Doctor — some kind of an incoming
we are thinking. Will you ta'k a look at it? Ailie, this is
Maister John, the young Doctor, Rab's frien', ye ken. We
often speak aboot you, Doctor.'

"And Solomon, in all his glory, could not have handed
down the Queen of Sheba, at his palace gate, more tenderly
than did James, the Howgate carrier, lift down Ailie his

[63]

TENDERNESS

wife. * * * 'Twas a sad ease. Next day on the bul-
letin board was the notice to the young students, —

An operation today,

J. B., Clerk.

"Up ran the youths, eager to secure good places; in
they crowded, full of interest and talk. Don^t think them
heartless. They are neither better nor worse than you or
I; they get over their professional horror and into their
proper work, — and in them pity as an ^emotion, ending in
itself or at best in tears in a long-drawn breath, lessens,
while pity as a motive is quickened, and gains power and
purpose. It is well for poor human nature that it is so."

From the crowded climes of the Edinburgh
hospital, as thus described by the good physician, to
the dingy walls of the Cincinnati pottery is a great
distance in thought as well as in space; but human
nature has greater reaches than that ; and in the quiet
devotion of those rude workingmen to a pale, emaci-
ated and probably rickety lump of humanity, that
they had never seen, but which lay in the humble bed
of their fellow potter, is an illustration of that high
tenderness that is brave. In both cases the pictures
are very sad, but as the good doctor well says, ^ ' They
are better, much better, than many things that are
not called sad." And they are better because they
give rise to a tenderness that is not craven, a pity
bom not out of undisciplined nerves but out of warm
hearts. This is a tenderness based not on the
physical, which allies us to all animals, but on the
spiritual reality that relates us to God.

[64]

TENDERNESS

Only the brave, then, reach that tenderness that
makes one a servant of the Most High. ^^I have put
my spirit upon him," is the word of the old prophet.
On that account *Hhe bruised reed shall he not break.
He shall not fail or become weary. ' ' We have quite
enough, perhaps a great deal too much, of that emo-
tion that *'ends in itself, or at best in tears and a long-
drawn breath;'' plenty of that tenderness that stops
with the wringing of the hands, that is so susceptible
to good purposes, but is so negligent of good deeds : —
that tenderness that is so anxious that a good thing
may succeed, but is so careful lest the succeeding
drain them of life's petty comforts and small securi-
ties. But we never have enough of that ''pity as a
motive' ' that quickens, gains power and gives pur-
pose in the presence of suffering. This sympathetic
tenderness is one of the most universal needs of the
human soul, because it is felt through all ranks and
conditions. It is the need of the gifted and the ig-
norant, the want of the rich and the poor, the saint
and the sinner.

All this suggests the second element in that ten-
derness that belongs to the servants of the Most High,
that makes ministers of the eternal gospel and protect-
ors of bruised reeds, namely, disinterestedness. The
more unselfish, the more divine is the tenderness.
The most touching thing in this story of the Cincin-
nati potters is not the thoughtfulness of the father, in
whose heart the boy nestled all day long by a divine
necessity. The boy's wan face kept flitting between

[65]

TENDERNESS

the father's eyes and his wheel hour by hour, his
wasted fingers touched the father's fingers more pal-
pably than did the clay he molded. That child was a
part of himself; in loving the '^wee lad" he was but
loving his own, aye himself, and the bits of ribbon,
crimson glass or fragrant buds that he carried home
night after night brought quick and ample return to
the fatherly heart in the shape of the gentle 'Hhank
you," the brighter smile and the more patient light
upon the face. But all these motives were wanting
among his fellow workmen. The dingy potters had
their birds in other nests, and the little jars etched
with their stiffened fingers and the cups shaped with
their simple arts would have been appreciated else-
where. Their lives were not bound up in the crippled
frame of the invalid boy; there was nought of them-
selves on that sick bed ; and yet day by day the fruit
was thought of, night after night the old man's hat
contained the odd collection, — a collection gathered
by a tenderness that was disinterested. Day by day
the old man's labors were lightened, his hours by the
bedside lengthened, through a tenderness that was un-
selfish. Friends, we should guard well our lives in
this direction. Much selfishness lurks in our over-
weening anxiety and our unreasoning solicitude for
our other selves. Our great tenderness for our boy
or our girl not infrequently ensnares us unto great
harshness or most cruel neglect of some other one's
boy and some other one's girl. We become so much
burdened with our obligations to our homes that we

[66]

TENDERNESS

forget the interests and needs of other homes. We
become so jealous of the well-being and, as we say,
future prosperity of our family that we lose that
sensibility to the needs of society without which we
become a burden and a blight. An exclusive tender-
ness often turns out to be a hurting selfishness. That
child is cursed with the affection of which it holds
exclusive monopoly. The homes whose doors do not
swing easily out into the great world soon lose their
homelike qualities. The heart treasures deposited
therein often become non-productive, and curse in-
stead of bless the inmates. The obligations to hus-
band, wife or child that are guarded by a fence so
high that the claims of church, Sunday-school, so-
ciety, state and all the waiting wants of the world are
looked upon as rival claims to be jealously resented,
will sooner or later build the fence so high that it will
keep out many of the gentle influences, the sweet
associations, the divine amenities that make the fire-
side a blessed shelter from the storms of life and the
home a peaceful haven for the aged. I once went
to a man whose wealth was climbing on toward the
millions, with a cause which had legitimate claims
upon his interest because he was a part of humanity ;
his response was : * ^No, not a cent ! It is an excellent
cause. It ought to succeed. But I have a family and
I must provide for them; I am getting old. A man
who does not take care of his own family is worse than
an infidel. I have seen enough of this world to know
that I would prefer to see all my children buried to-

[67]

TENDERNESS

day rather than leave them to the cold charities of the
world/' And as he spoke his voice trembled and
the tears stood in his eyes. I doubted not the sincerity
of that feeling, and I know that the practice of his
life carried out the sentiment. Lavish to wife and
children: in the main selfish towards all the rest of
the world. The tears that stood in his eyes did no
credit to his head, nor to his heart. They were born
out of the sensibilities of selfishness, not out of dis-
interestedness. He failed to see that he was doing
much toward making the world cold and uncharitable,
not only to other children but to his own ; and if the
world of human life were made of such as he was at
that moment, it were better his children were buried
than living in it, even though sheltered by liis thou-
sands. Oh, that over-weening tenderness of the
mother, that guards her daughter from the discipline
and joys of unselfish experiences, is not the tender-
ness that has in it the spirit of God ! Rather is it the
love that, anaconda-like, makes victims of those whom
it embraces.

The father who denies his child the discipline of
that self-reliance that made him strong, turns his
blessings into curses, and the arms that are thrown
around to protect the boy prove instead to be the
paws of a bear that hug him to death : thus it is that
the fortune of the father becomes the misfortune of
the boy. Cruel is that wife who allows her love to
make her husband more self-centered and helpless
after marriage than he was before. Hurtful is the

[68]

TENDERNESS

tenderness of that husband whose very affection
makes a drooping, dependent, clinging, characterless
vine of the woman that God has endowed with a per-
sonality capable of standing by his side equal with
himself before God and man, a co-laborer and fellow-
sufferer, a sharer of his joys and sorrows, joint part-
ner with him in the work of enlarging the boundaries
of life. I doubt the happy outcome of the marriage
that is centered simply in the dream of two made one,
with no tender concern for the world, no hope to
make its woes less and its joys more by means of the
proposed alliance. The young man and woman who
join hands at the marriage altar for the simple pur-
pose of making each other happy are ever in danger
of degenerating into seeking each one his own joys,
and finding at last a large delusion at the bottom of
the marriage cup.

You will not misunderstand me. I revere the
fireside and would fain ennoble and enforce all the
sanctities of the home circle. The touching breadth
of the tenderness of the grimy potters in Cincinnati
illustrates my meaning. Think you that any one of
those hundred clay-soiled and dirty-handed work-
men went home with a more petulant word to his wife,
a less cheerful welcome to his own burly boy, because
he had stayed fifteen minutes after time to shape that
little pitcher for the sick boy; or had taken twenty
minutes of his noon hour to make a few pots to fill
out the old man's stent that he might go home a little
earlier? Think you that any one of those hundred

[69]

TENDERNESS

workmen appreciated his own shanty the less, be-
cause he had tried to make the home of the sick
child more attractive ? Oh, the lessons that sometimes
come to us from the enriched homes of the poor ! We
can but deplore the prosperity that leads men to be
economical even of their tenderness. Let us beware
of that thriftiness that doles out love where it is
needed in abundance. It is the danger of modern
prosperity that it so complicates life, multiplies the
needs of our outward homes, and regulates by con-
ventional necessities every hour of every day, every
ounce of every energy, that it leaves no time or force
for the spontaneous workings of that Christly ten-
derness that redeems the sinner by kindness, and
saves the world by love. Beware of that tenderness
that unconsciously breaks a hundred reeds already
bruised in trying to secure the one favorite reed
from the possibility of ever being bruised. A sym-
pathetic tenderness is the perpetual Pentecost that
makes intelligible the language of each to all, and
this communion of spirit is ever reciprocal. It gives
mutual strength. She who clutched at the hem of the
helper's garment, who bathed with tears the feet of
the friend of man and anointed his head for the
burial, ^'wrought a good work'' not only upon him;
but she found renewal and forgiveness in her own
soul also. Neither giving nor receiving sympathy is
confined to any conventional equality. Jesus found
it with the fishermen, the lowly men and humble
women of Galilee, Samaria and Bethany. He gave it

[70]

TENDERNESS

to and received it from publicans and sinners, here-
tics and strangers. Oh, there is a sensibility yet to
come that will show a pitiful brutality in the flippant
epithets we now toss complacently from our lips, as
though they were the exact phrases of political econ-
omy and social science! The time is coming when
men will be ashamed to classify and divide with stolid
cruelty their own kin ; those to whom they are bound
by a thousand ties, subtle indeed, but strong and in-
evitable as God's law of gravitation. He who talks
of 'Hhe masses," *Hhe dangerous class,'' *'the hope-
less class," 'Hhe abandoned," ''the atheists," ''the
infidels," "the criminals," "the fallen women" and
"the lawless men" in such a way as to leave himself
outside and above them, is a self-made spiritual exile,
wanting that open vision and sensibility of soul that
becomes a conscious child of God. Where the heart
is most human there is the most tenderness ; the high-
er and broader the soul, the greater the contact with
others, — on the more points can it touch all other
souls. With this breadth of life comes a sensibility
worthy,

"One who, spite the wrongs that lacerate
His weary soul, has never learned to hate."

'TVIaister John, I am for none o'yer strange nourse
bodies for Ailie. I'll be a nourse and I'll gang about on
my stockin' soles as canny as a pussie."

said James to the doctor, when his wife had been
helped back to her hospital bed. And so he did,

[71]

TENDERNESS

"and handy and tender and swift and clever as any woman
was that homy-handed little man. Everything she got he
gave her. He seldom slept, and often I saw his small
shrewd eyes out of the darkness fixed upon her.''

This was tenderness in the Poor Ward of the
Edinburgh hospital.

"Not one of them whispered a word, for this solemn
thing was not to be talked about. Yet they put these things
in the old man's hat where he found them. He understood
all about it. Every day some one did a piece of work for
him and put it on the sanded plank to dry, so that he
could come later or go earlier; and when the bell tolled and
the little coffin came out of the door, right around the cor-
ner, out of sight, there stood a hundred stalwart working
men from the pottery, with their clean clothes on, most of
whom gave a half day's work for the privilege of taking
part in the simple procession and following to the grave
that little child which probably not one had ever seen."

This was tenderness in the Cincinnati pottery;

"Whosoever giveth a cup of cold water unto one of

these little ones doeth it unto me."

"Neither do I condemn thee: go, sin no more."
"Which of these three thinkest thou proved a neighbor

to him that fell among the robbers? And the lawyer said:

'He that showed mercy unto him,' and Jesus said : 'Go thou

and do likewise."

This is the tenderness taught by the great Master
of tenderness, the world-inclusive heart of the Naz-
arene. Is this not also the tenderness of the hospital
and the pottery ? Is it not the something that reaches
from James Noble, the Howgate carpenter, up to the
master soul of Jesus, touching human life all the way

[72]

TENDERNESS

from one to the other; illuminating, transfiguring
everything from the potter's wheel in Cincinnati, up
to the cross on Calvary?

This is the tenderness that Isaiah describes, as
the indispensable attribute of the servant of God. It
is not only the delicacy that goes with woman's
fingers, that sends jellies to sick folks, and knows how
to fix the piUow for the fevered head ; it can bear the
sight of suffering ; it is something stalwart, that goes
with manly men as well as with womanly women;
something that has courage and out-go to it. It is a
world-inclusive and life-redeeming power; something
that rebukes complacency, shames indolence, and in-
vests every vocation, all ages, every sex, every home,
with its burden of care for the human reeds that are
being bruised on every hand every day. This divine
tenderness makes every one that partakes of it will-
ing to contribute to the higher life of all. It does not
say to the abiding interests of life, * * I hope you will
succeed," but it says: '*I will help you succeed."
The question of every truly tender soul is not ^'What
can they do?" but ^'What can I do?"

If we have caught any glimpses of this mighty
power to which to-day I give the name ''tenderness,"
that is, love in its helpful moods, kindliness in action,
the affections at work, — not, as the good doctor says,
*'an emotion ending in itself or at best in tears and a
long-drawn breath," but a ^^ motive that quickens,
gives power and purpose," — we see how much need
there is of more tenderness in the world. I have met

[73]

TENDERNESS

somewhere a story of a poor distracted man who used
to travel up and down one of the provinces of Prance,
going from house to house, entering unbidden, wan-
dering from village to village, accosting the men,
women or children whom he met, always with the
same question, — '*I am looking for tenderness, can
you tell me where to find it?" The simple country-
side made light of his innocent wanderings and would
say, ' ' Have you not found it yet ? " * ^ No, ' ' would be
the sad reply: ''and yet I have searched for it every-
where." ''Perhaps you will find it in the garden."
0&. he would hurry. The gardener might refer him
to the stable, and the stable-boy to the next house,
the next house to the next village: so, mournfully,
to the end of life, the poor imbecile, half conscious of
his hopeless search, half realizing the ridicule with
which he was everywhere received, died without find-
ing what he sought.

Some of the earlier languages have but one word
for inspiration and insanity: doubtless such cases as
this helped establish the confusion. How often is
uncommon sense found in the absence of common
sense! and reason broken into bits, like the colored
fragments in the kaleidoscope, sometimes gives won-
derful combinations of beauty. The story of this poor
lunatic hints at a truth most pathetic. How hard it
is to find tenderness! Lives are blighted, fortunes
ruined, homes made barren, high purposes in every
community fall short of fruition, for want of that
tenderness that is courageous and disinterested.

[74]

TENDERNESS

Plenty of kindly passion in the world, perhaps too
much. Not enough of kindly judgment and kindly
will. Plenty of emotion represented by the burden-
some Countess in the home of Amos Barton in George
Eliot's story, who took great pains to perfume the
poor sick wife's handkerchief and to smooth her pil-
low, while she continued to eat the bread needed
by the poor parson's children. Too little of that
motive represented by Mrs. Hackit in the same story,
whose visit to the same vicarage brought the cooked
fowl that was needed to strengthen the sick woman;
or still better the motive of the Reverend Martin
Cleaves, the neighboring minister, who defended the
injured man's good name in his absence, and was by
his side in bereavement; the man who went about
'* without carrying with him the suggestions of an
undertaker." ** Tender motive" is a good phrase; it
suggests force, motion, power; that which can be, if
necessary, divinely cruel; the tenderness of the sur-
geon with his knife; the tenderness of God's un-
swerving law. Let us go in search of that, adding to
the persistency of the lunatic the sanity of the man
of Nazareth, and then we shall find it, or, failing to
find it, we shall realize what Longfellow calls the
divine

"Insanity of noble minds
That never falters or abates.
But labors and endures and waits,
Till all that it foresees it finds,
Or what it cannot find — creates!"

[75]

TENDERNESS

This brings me to my last thought, — the power
of this tenderness. This needs but little amplification,
so well is it exemplified in the story of the Cincinnati
potters.

"The entire pottery, full of men of rather course fiber
by nature, grew quiet as the months drifted, became gentle
and kind, and some dropped swearing as the weary look
on the fellow-worker's face told them without mistake that
the inevitable shadow was drawing nearer."

I do not ask you to believe the whole of this
story, much less idealize it. It is easy to exaggerate
the outward facts. I doubt not the reporter yielded
to this temptation. Yet I believe in its essential truth
because I have so often seen, as you have seen, the
sanctifying power of a kind word, the renovating
force in a tender deed, the enlarging power of a good
thought. The inward truth of this story we are ev( r
prone to understate and underestimate. Father
Taylor was philosophically right when he said in his
stirring way, ''It will never do to send Emerson to
hell, for just as soon as he gets there he will change
the climate, and the tide of immigration will set in
that way." A noble impulse changed into a motive
will silence the clamorous wranglings of selfishness.
A noble man or woman will shed a radiance upon a
ribald crowd, so as to make, for that short space of
time at least, profanity and coarseness impossible.
Do not drop back into a too prevalent sentimentalism
over this matter. Nothing but the courageous self-
abandon of the highest disinterestedness that seeks to
do a kindly thing for the joy it gives to another, that

[76]

TENDERNESS

the world, God's world and our home, may be made
the better thereby, has in it this redeeming power.

Once I lay,: — a helpless, fever-smitten wreck, at
the foot of a great tree just in the rear of a great
battle-line. Now and then a stray minnie ball would
reach my neighborhood, and vagrant shells, wander-
ing far from their intended destination, would burst
in the air high above me. Troops were hurrying by,
orderlies flying hither and thither, and all around me
were the torn and mangled, gathered in a field hos-
pital. I, too weak to be of any use, too wasted even
to cling to life with any tenacity, too sick to be
afraid, lay there, — the most insignificant and helpless
private among the thousands — ^when there fiitted by,
with firm step and gentle face, a prim and dainty
woman. She placed in the hand too weak to
hold it a rosy, luscious apple. ^'You are thirsty,''
she said. *'I will get you a drink." And soon
she came with a spoonful of precious water in
a tin cup. *'It was all I could find," she said. She
went her way. I have all my life, before and after,
been the recipient of tender deeds, but never have I
seen the like of that apple, never water so precious,
nor a woman's hand that carried so much hope and
renewal in a single touch. And thinking of it since,
I suspect that a part^ — the best part — of that act lay
in the fact that it was not for me as an individual,
but for me as one in the files of a great and noble
army. She came to me not because I was a friend, or
a member of any narrow family, but because I was

[77]

TENDERNESS

a brother man, the humble factor in a great move-
ment. She was then and there the exponent of the
divine providence. She was in league with truth, a
messenger of love, a representative of God. I will
believe that the infinite mystery out of which this
Universe has been projected is a loving and lovable
power, if that love finds expression and comes into
consciousness only in that one bosom that defied dan-
ger, lived above the horrors of war, that she might
be helpful to me and others. I will believe in God
and will say ^'Our Father," aye and ''Mother," too,
in my devotions, because the power that evolves such
tenderness blooms at times to fatherly care and
motherly affection in your heart and mine, if no-
where else in all the universe. If there are souls to
whom this world seems a godless realm, who fail
to find divine tokens of love anywhere, you and I are
partly responsible. We have refused the spirit that
invites us to become ' ' those who cause law to go forth
to the nations, not to cry aloud nor lift up the voice
nor cause it to be heard in the streets, ' ' but to so live
that no ''bruised reed be broken" by us and no
"glimmering flax be quenched." In us at least let
that power "send forth law according to truth." In
us at least may it not "fail or become weary until
justice is established in the earth and distant nations
wait for the law." There ought to be divine tender-
ness enough in our lives to convert the most skeptical,
to inspire the most obstinate man to divine service,
and to make robust the will of the most timid woman.

[78]

TENDERNESS

Who will say that the little Cincinnati hunch-back
lived in vain, if in his short and pain-stricken career
he had hallowed the life of his father, chastened the
lives and mellowed the hearts of his fellow laborers,
and touched the potter's wheel with that same sacred
oil of disinterestedness that consecrated the cross on
Calvary, and perchance quickened us into more cour-
age, fresh zeal, and touched us anew with love's piti-
fulness.

Time is flying; each day counts its last oppor-
tunities. Oh! that we may feel now the truth that
came too late to the thriftless vicar, Amos Barton, in
the story, as he stood beside the cold body of his saint-
ed wife: ^^She was gone from him and he could
never show his love for her any more, never make up
for omissions in the past by showing future tender-
ness." Oh, the bitterness of that midnight prostra*
tion upon the grave ! If we do not awake to our
part and responsibility under this law of tenderness,
I believe it will come to us some time. I hope and
pray it may come, for better the pain and the life
that comes therefrom than the insensibility and the
living death involved therein.

''Milly, Milly, dost thou hear me? I didn't love
thee enough — I wasn't tender enough to thee — ^but I
think of it all now. ' '

[79]

A Cup of Cold Water

'* Whosoever shall give one of these little ones a
cup of cold water only .... shall in no wise lose his
reward," said Jesus. There could not well be a
simpler act, a smaller service, than that ; not one you
would sooner do for those whom you do not like, or
sooner ask from those who do not like you. Many a
time, as Jesus walked the roads of Galilee, he must
have stopped at the door of a stone hut or rested by
a village spring and asked for a drink of water, just
as we do in our country tramps. And some mother
turned at the words, caught the look in the earnest
eyes, and set down her child to bring the cup ; or some
man, hailed at his plough across the field, pointed to
the kid-skin bottle under the bush and told the
stranger to help himself. No one would deny it.
Bread may be doubtful, but bubbling fountains, pour-
ing rivers, shining lakes are cups so plentiful that few
ever add to the prayer for bread, **Give us this day
our daily water.'' So this teacher chose a cup of
cold water as his emblem of small service, when he
wanted to say that not the slightest deed that is meant
for good gets lost and goes uncounted. The deed is
appraised by its aim. He who offers the cup to the
disciple as disciple offers it to the teacher, and he who
offers it to the teacher as teacher offers it to him who

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A CUP OF COLD WATER

sends the teacher ; and God takes notice, and the giver
shall in no wise lose reward. So said Jesus; and he
spoke the thought again in his ^* Judgment" parable.
Thrown out of concrete into broad impersonal phrase,
the thought is that the smallest kindness to the hum-
blest creature belongs to the great economy that we
call Providence ; that then and there the laws of moral
cause and effect begin to act; so that, some way or
other, full recompense for that small deed is sure.

It is a mighty faith ! It is one of the words that
show how deep-natured Jesus was, how keen his spir-
itual insight. Not a sparrow falls without the Father,
not a hair eludes his census, not a drink of water is
forgotten. You and I echo the words; can you and
I echo the faith ? But not of the faith, nor of the law
of recompense that holds good a drink of water, will
we think just now, — only of the Cup-Offerings them-
selves, that is, of little acts of thoughtfulness for one
another.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that two-
thirds of all that makes it '^beautiful to be alive" con-
sists in cup-offerings of water. Not an hour of life's
journey but is rendered easier by their freshening or
harder by their absence. Why? Because most of us
are burden-bearers of one sort or another; because
to most of us a large part of the journey is a dull
and trivial trudge; because there is much dust
upon the road, and — not so many bad places as prob-
ably we think — yet many common-places: and it is

[81]

A CUP OF COLD WATER

load and dust and stretches of the common-place that
make one thirsty. If the feeling on our shoulders
were of wings instead of load; if on Mondays, ^*in
some good cause not our own/' we were marching
singing to a battle, and on Saturdays were coming
back victorious, then the greetings on the way would
make less difference to us. But as it is, we crave the
roadside recognitions which give praise for the good
deed attempted, pity for the hard luck and the fall, a
hand-lift now and then to ease the burden's chafe, and
now and then a word of sympathy in the step-step-
stepping that takes us through the dust. And this is
all that most of us can wait to give ; for we too are here
on business. You can not step my journey for me,
can not carry me on your back, can not do me any
great service ; but it makes a world of difference to me
whether I do my part in the world with, or without,
these little helps which fellow-travelers can exchange.
*'I am busy, Johnnie, and can't help it," said the
father writing away, when the little fellow hurt his
finger. ^^Yes, you could, — you might have said,
' Oh ! ' " sobbed Johnnie. There 's a Johnnie in tears
inside of all of us upon occasions. The old Quaker
was right: '^I expect to pass through this life but
once. If there is any kindness or any good thing I
can do to my fellow-beings, let me do it now. I shall
pass this way but once."

"An arm of aid to the weak,
A friendly hand to the friendless.
Kind words, so short to speak,

[82]

A CUP OF COLD WATER

But whose echo is endless, —
The world is wide, these things are small.
They may be nothing, but they are ally'

**A cup of cold water only." One must not
forget, when handing it, that the cup is one thing,
the water quite another. Tin dipper or silver goblet
is all one, provided we are thirsty and the water
good. So the cup I speak of need be no shining deed
of service, need be no deed at all; it is far oftener
only a word, or the tone in a word, or the smile with
a word. That word or tone or smile is the cup, — and
what is the water? Your heart's sympathy. The
fact that you are thinking a kind thought of me —
you, of me — is the refreshment. That is what sends
me on the road with the coolness felt along the veins.
Of course, then, face and manner more than hands
reach out the cup to me. The brusque manner of one
friend, his tin cup, may be many times more welcome
than the smooth manner — silver-plated goblet — of
another: it holds purer sympathy. The nod with a
gleam in the eyes and a wrinkle around them may-
mean a deal more of heart's greeting than another's
lifted hat. A ^^Good morning!" may be tendered so
respectfully, — and you drop it at the next step as
you drop a boy's hand-bill on the street, hardly con-
scious you have held it ; or it may come tossed to you,
but with something in the face behind the toss that
really makes the next few moments of the morning
good. I can do you a great favor in such a w^ay that
you shall half hate me and my favor : you can accept

[83]

A CUP OF COLD WATER

from me a favor in such wise that I shall feel as
though I had been crowned!

Therefore there are many fine cups passed about
that hold no water at all, or very little; cups really
made for bric-a-brac, not service ; empty goblets of
fashion and etiquette ; stage-tumblers which we actors
hand about momentously, — but with no possibility
of spilling. Three common kinds of courtesy can
make small claim to be ^^cups of cold water." First
and worst is the politeness deliberately adopted to
serve self-interest ; politeness by which we try to climb
into people's esteem, intent upon their hen-roosts. In
such courtesy it is, of course, we ourselves who drink
the water, while going through all the motions of the
Good Samaritan. Next and more innocent comes the
conventional hat-and-glove and call-and-card polite-
ness, so much more common east than west, and in
Europe than America; whose absence, like a mis-
placed accent, betrays the untrained American
abroad. This is the realm of Etiquette, and Fashion
queens it here. Many of the customs she imposes are
harmless enough, though staling much the freshness
of one's manners; but many are dwarf -lies which
taint the manner, until at last no sympathy that we
can offer has the natural sparkle of sincerity. A
third kind of courtesy, better far than this, yet with
little staying power to quench thirst, is the off-hand
geniality easy to those whose faces light up readily,
whose hands go quickly out, whose voices have a hail-
fellow-well-met ring for every one; a geniality that

[84]

A CUP OF COLD WATER

carries little thoughtfulness, little delicacy, little rev-
erence, and no self-sacrifice; the manner, without
the heart, of sympathy. It is soon understood. Of
this sort we see more in America than in England,
more west than east.

And, in justice, let us say of this last kind that
it is good as far as it goes. It is easy to slander the
politeness of the surface. Even that second kind has
use as a preventive force. It is like the one policeman
in the village, — only one, but he diffuses an immense
protection! It watches between neighbors, arresting
little invasions of each other's comfort which, if not
arrested, would so harass good fellowship. Some one
has well said, '^Politeness is like an air-cushion;
there's nothing in it, but it eases the joints wonder-
fully." So call this politeness of the surface good,
only not good for much. It carries small guarantee
that the cup of water will be offered to the little
ones, and still less that it will be offered when one-
self is thirsty.

But it is those 'kittle ones" that give Jesus' say-
ing its point. ''Whoso shall give one of these little
ones a cup:" that takes the real sympathy, the real
self-forgetting. And where three or four are gath-
ered together in any relation of life whatever, there
is almost sure to be a "little one" with reference to
the others, ^ — one not so bright as they, not so win-
some, not so able to hold his own. When but two
meet, one is apt to be a little, the other a big one.

[85]

A CUP OF COLD WATER

And though to change the circumstances of the meet-
ing is quite possibly to exchange the sizes, so that the
little one becomes the big and the big one little, yet
that again shows that two equals seldom meet. We
can hardly talk together five minutes on any subject
touching life without finding it fall in our way to
say something that may hurt and something that
may help or please; and those whom all like best
largely win their love by this one secret, — uniformly
they avoid the hurt and achieve the kindness, either
being possible.

For instance, in company, — Boys, dance with
some of those girls who have been sitting on the
sofa ! Do it as a cup-offering of cold water, — for
no more selfish reason. But then you do not know
what grace it will give you in their eyes and in the
eyes of all who enjoy true gentle-manliness. I knew
one rare in character and mind and popularity, who
lingers doubly heroed in the memory of friends:
they said of Lowell, ' ^ He died in the war, — and he
danced with the girls whom the others did not dance
with. ' ' And Girls, when you are dissecting the
young men in the party's after-talk, and some leave
very little of one who is rather stupid, stand up for
him like an unseen sister, if you know him to be pure
and manly! If you belong to the surgeon class of
women, that fact probably comes out in your manner
to himself, for you are one who is apt to miss the
opportunity of giving the cup of water. Did you
ever read what happened to get published under the

£86]

A CUP OF COLD WATER

title of '^A Nice Girl's Rules," — rules made by a
certain girl for herself, when she went into company ?
they were five : ' ' To give away more than I spend on
myself. To do all I can for every one at home first,
before I go to walk or to parties. At a ball to make
one forlorn girl happy and introduce her to some
pleasant gentleman, — and to do this at every party.
To draw other people out, without trying to shine
myself. As soon as I feel that I am talking or acting
in such a way that I should hesitate from shame to
pray at that moment, to leave the room."

Again, with the old, the conservative, the fixed,
there is constant opportunity to render service by the
mere tone of the voice and the deference of the ad-
dress. Don't they know they are old? Don't they
often feel the fact of their conservatism helplessly,
and therefore far more painfully than any one with
whom it chances to interfere? Don't they suspect
over-well that life is on the wane, and that the yellow
leaf shows in their talk as they know it is showing
in their face ? More than that of any other class, per-
haps, thevr appeal to the young, the strong, the
capable, is for that courtly delicacy of attention which
is shown, not in any richness of the cup, but in the
way the cup is offered to the lips.

Be a knight, be a lady, of the New Chivalry!
Our words mount high, — from courtesy to courtli-
ness, from courtliness to chivalry. The essence of
chivalry is to look out for the little ones. We often
talk of it as if it were a reverence due peculiarly to

[87]

A CUP OF COLD WATER

woman; and some fear that, should women enjoy
political equality with men, chivalry would disappear.
It would rather grow than disappear, even if that
were all it meant, — ^ reverence of man for woman;
for it is a deepening reverence, deeper far than the
mediaBval sentiment, that underlies and prompts our
modern movement in behalf of woman's rights, — and
that which begins in a deepening feeling is not
likely to endanger the expression of the feeling. But
chivalry means far more than reverence of man for
woman. It means reverence of strength for weak-
ness, wheresoever found. Men often need more of it
from a woman than they can possibly give to her.
Chivalry is that in me to which every one whom I
have power to injure can appeal, in virtue of that
fact, with the unspoken plea, ''You must use your
power to bless!" Wherever a child can be helped,
wherever a stranger can be guided, or a friend who
is shy be set at ease, wherever a weak brother can be
saved from falling and its shame, wherever an old
man's step can be made easy, wherever a servant's
position can be dignified in his eyes, — is the chance
for chivalry to show itself. I do not recognize a dif-
ferent feeling in the one case from that which moves
me in the other. The white-haired man, the tired
errand boy, the servant-girl with the heavy burden,
make the same kind of demand upon me; and all of
them make more demand than the lady whose very
silk will make people enough look out for her. They
all challenge my chivalry, that is, my sense, not of

[88]

A CUP OF COLD WATER

generosity, but of obligation to help, just because I
can give the help and here is one who needs it.
Noblesse oblige!

And because we already see the Kingdom come
in rare souls here and there, we may look forward to
the time when chivalry shall have in common par-
lance this broadened meaning; when to the employee
in the store, to the poor in the shanty, to the servant
in the kitchen, one will feel more honor bound to
be thoughtfully attentive, so far as rights and feel-
ings are concerned, than to any others in the circle
of our friends. To be rough to social superiors may
show something of the fool, but to be rough to infer-
iors certainly shows in us something of the savage
and the brute. ^'Whoever gives these little ones the
cup," we read. The littler the one, the more imper-
ious will become the impulse to offer it, the more im-
possible it will be to be untender. Selfishness will
have to be kept for equals, if for any. At present it is
usually the other way. The lady often wears her pa-
tience with her ribbons in the parlor, and her impa-
tience with her apron in the basement; and at the
house-door, in the shop, and in the court-room, the
poor man is apt to have the fact of poverty stamped
into him by those who to equals are urbane and to
superiors right worshipful. And yet it takes so little
to make us in humbler station or of humbler powers
bless those who are above us, — so little to make those
poorer than ourselves in any way bless us ! Not mon-
ey, not gifts, but the simple evidence of respect for the

[89]

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station and those in it, of fellow-sympathy in their
wants and their anxieties, of appreciation of their
difScnlties — a pleasant, cheerful, equalizing word —
will be a very Jesus-cup of cold water to many a
rough-faced man and slovenly dressed woman in the
forlorn districts of our city. When happiness can
be manufactured so cheaply, and sells so high, and
is always wanted in the market, it seems a pity that
more of us do not set up in the business. Listen to
this story from Tourgueneff's ''Poems in Prose:''

' ' I was walking in the street, : — a beggar stopped
me, a frail old man. His tearful eyes, blue lips,
rough rags, disgusting sores — oh, how horribly pov-
erty had disfigured the unhappy creature! He
stretched out to me his red, swollen, filthy hand; he
groaned and whimpered for alms. I felt in all my
pockets. No purse, watch or handkerchief did I find.
I had left them all at home. The beggar waited,
and his outstretched hand twitched and trembled
slightly. Embarrassed and confused, I seized his
dirty hand and pressed it: 'Don't be vexed with me,
brother! I have nothing with me, brother.' The
beggar raised his blood-shot eyes to mine, his blue
lips smiled, and he returned the pressure of my
chilled fingers. 'Never mind, brother,' stammered
he ; ' thank you for this, — this too was a gift,
brother.' — I felt that I, too, had received a gift
from my brother."

Even our dumb animals appeal for "chiv-
alry." They, too, are persons; they are "members"

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of our household. ''Treat a cow as if she were a
lady/' is the inscription over the barn-door of one
of our great Wisconsin dairymen. ^^My dog,'' ^^my
horse," I say; but that dog belongs first to himself
before he belongs to me: even his body does, and
his soul is all his own. ' ' Show me a bill of sale from
the Almighty!" said the Vermont judge to the slave-
hunter claiming his ''property." Our creature's due
is something behind mercy, — justice. It has rights.
To become the "owner" of an animal is to enter into
a contract with a fellow-creature, a very "little one,"
' — and at once the Golden Rule and the laws of ethics
begin to apply. And surely the census of these "lit-
tle ones" will soon include the birds. Millions of
them have been slain each year of late simply to
deck our sister's hat! But the mother-heart of Eng-
land and America is at letst beginning to remember
that every soft breast, every shining wing, worn on
a hat means that some tiny mother or father-heart,
tiny, but capable of loving much and toiling for its
brood, has been pierced through just to set the dec-
oration there. And this in the nineteenth century
of the Christ-love ! Will you not join that Total Ab-
stinence society whose pledge for women is, "No
mere ornament of mine shall cost a life;" whose
pledge for men is, "No mere sport of mine shall cost
a life, ^ — no death shall make my holiday?"

And now what shall we say of these cup-offer-
ings in the Home ? That they are of more importance

[91]

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there for true house-furnishing than either money or
good taste or both combined. What are they there
at home? Pleasant smiles; gentle tones; cheery
greetings; tempers sweet under a headache or a bus-
iness-care or the children's noise; the ready bubbling-
over of thoughtf ulness for one another ; — and habits
of smiling, greeting, forbearing, thinking, in these
ways. It is these things above all else which make a
home '^a building of God, a house not made with
hands;'' these that we hear in the song of *'Home,
Sweet Home." Into a five hundred dollar shanty
put strangers who begin to practise the habit of an-
ticipative thoughtfulness for each other, and we have
a ^'home." Put husband, wife and the three chil-
dren into a fifty thousand dollar house, and let them
avoid this interchange of gentleness, and we have
only family-barracks.

Perhaps the best single test of a man lies in the
answer to the question. What is he where he is most
at home? If there, where he is most familiar and
in power, considerateness lessens and tenderness
evaporates and talk grows masterful, as if he had
more rights than his wife, then the heart is shallow
and the character is thin. At home one should be
his best, his most graceful, most agreeable, — and
more so ten years after marriage than ten days after.
The same, of course, with her. Yet strange to think
how many persons save their indifference for this one
place that should be all tenderness; how many take
pains with their courtQsy and geniality abroad, but

[92]

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at home glide into the habit of letting geniality be
taken for granted instead of being granted. That
tells in the course of years; for the cold moods, the
silent ways, the seeming-harmless banterings, are
the ways and moods that increase with the years.
By and by, when the children are growing up and
growing away from us, and we are growing old and
would like kind words and looks a little more our-
selves, we shall wish for our own sake and for theirs
that we had done differently.

Men often think, ^^They love us and we know
it; we love them and they know it." Nay, but it
is not enough to have the love and do the duty in
silence. We live not by bread alone, but by every
word that proceedeth out of the mouth of those we
love. Out of the mouth, : — it is the spoken love that
feeds. It is the kindness offered that furnishes the
house. Even we men who push it coldly away want
to have it offered somehow, sometime, by the wife,
the sister, the children; now and then we want it
visible. The presence of those children in the rooms
is a constant importunity for the outspoken, not the
silent, sort of love. Children bare of kisses seem as
cold as children bare of clothes. We have seen chil-
dren who evidently did not know how to kiss their
fathers, — they went about it, when they had to, so
shyly and awkwardly, — and were forgetting how to
kiss their mothers. And as for women, it is a
woman who writes, and all who have a mother or a
sister know how truly she writes, — **Men, you to

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whom a woman's heart is entrusted, can you heed
this simple prayer, 'Love me, and tell me so some-
times^?^' Nathaniel Bowditch, author of the famous
*' Navigator,'' added to his fame by formulating this
law in the science of married life: '^ Whenever she
came into my presence, I tried to express to her out-
wardly something of the pleasure that it always gave
me." A navigator, that, worth trusting! On the
other hand, there are homes whose atmosphere sug-
gests that the man has never told the woman that
he loved her — but once, and that then he was exag-
gerating. The loneliness of sisters unbrothered of
their brothers ! The loneliness of wives unhusbanded
of their husbands, — who go back to the store, the
club, the lodge-room, night after night, and scarcely
see their children to get acquainted with them save
on a Sunday afternoon! Yes, and sometimes the
loneliness of men! What half -tragedies, in homes
we know, our thought falls on at these words ! Homes
that began as fresh and bright with love as ours,
with as rich promise of joy, with as daring a trust
that the years would bring new sweetness and carry
none away, — now, homes where the sweetness comes
like the warm days in November, and the heart-
numbness stays and grows like the cold. The lonely
ones can hardly tell you why themselves; but you
and I perhaps could tell them why. One writes, '^I
have known a wife who, though she nursed his chil-
dren, and took care of his household, and sat down
with him to three daily meals, was glad to learn her

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husband's plans and purposes through a third per-
son, to whom he had spoken more freely about the
things of deepest concern than he could ever speak
to her. The inexpressible pain caused by with-held
confidence, the pressure and nightmare of a dumb,
repressed life, soon did its work in changing her
fresh and buoyant youth to gray-haired, premature
age.'' Have you never seen a death, or at least a
wasting sickness, like that which Helen Hunt called
*^ Found Frozen"?

"She died, as many travelers have died
Overtaken on an Alpine road by night,
Numbed and bewildered by the falling snow;
Striving, in spite of failing pulse and limbs
Which faltered and grew feeble at each step.
To toil up the icy steep and bear,
Patient and faithful to the last, the load
Which in the sunny mom seemed light.

And yet
'Twas in the place she called her home, she died!
And they who love her, with the all of love
Their wintry natures had to give, stood by
And wept some tears, and wrote above her grave
Some common record which they thought was true :
But I who loved her first, and last, and best, — I knew /'^

Nor is it enough to have moods of affectionate
expression. That would be like trusting for our
water to an intermittent spring: the thirst will come
when the water is not there. The habit of love-ways
is the need. In many a home neuralgia or dyspepsia
or the business-worry makes the weather within as
changeable as it is without in a New England spring :

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sometimes a morning greeting all around that seems
like a chorus to one's prayer, and then a table-talk
of sympathy that sends one bravely out to his work,
and one cheerily about her house, and the children
brightly off to school, each with a sense that the best
time in the day will be the time which brings them all
once more together, — sometimes so, and sometimes
a depot-breakfast, where no eye meets eye, and you
hear yourself eat, and the stillness is broken by dish-
jogglings and criticisms on what is in the dishes, or
what ought to be and isn't, and then a scurry off
like boys let loose from school.

How is it with ourselves? Bach one had better
ask himself the question in the quiet, now and then.
Are our homes more tender than they were a year
ago, or has love grown dimmer in them? Are we
closer to each other's hearts, or more wrapt up in
silent selves? Do we spring more readily for those
who call us by the home-names, or do the old sounds
make eyes a little colder turn to look? Are the year's
best festivals the anniversaries of the home-love, —
the meeting-day, the engagement-day, the marriage-
day, the birth-days and the death-days? It is not
bread you chiefly owe your family. Father. It is
not mended clothes, Mother. It is not errands done
and lessons learnt. Children, that make your part.
It is the way in which the part, whatever it be, is
done that makes the part. The time comes when we
would almost give our right hand, could we recall
some harsh word, some indifferent, cutting manner,

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some needless, selfish opposition. Happy we, if the
one gone out from our homes into the unseen Home
has left us no such ache to bring the bitter tears!
' * Too late ! Too late to love him as we might, and let
him know it!'' ^^Too late to let her know that we
knew she was sweet!" Among all ^'might-have-
beens'' does the wide world hold another one so sad?
There is only one way to make that sad thought die,
'— and that way is to clear untenderness utterly from
heart and from the manner toward the others who
still make home **home" to us; to re-double thought-
fulness for them, and try to fill up the measure of
the missed love there. When, at last, the tenderness
of our bettered service is blossoming evenly, un-
failingly, on the root of that old sad memory, per-
haps we can feel self-forgiven and at peace.

One question more. Is it easy, after all, to offer
simple ''cups of cold water"? This analysis makes
us feel that unadulterated cold water may be a rarer
liquid than we thought; and that if one offers it to
"little ones," offers it habitually, offers it when
thirsty himself, and seeks opportunities to offer it,
the spring must lie not on the surface but in the
depths of character. More than most other signs
such cup-offering tells of a nature sweet and sound
at center. It is comparatively easy under duty's
lead to brace the will and go forward, dreading but
unflinching, to some large self-sacrifice; but harder
far, through sickness as in health, through tire as

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well as rest, through the anxieties as through the
quiets of life, to be sure to lift a mere cup of water
to even a brother's lips. If you are sure to do this
for any body as for a brother, you are glorious !

So hard sometimes are these small deeds that
there are cup-offerings of history and legend that
have grown proverbial as types of self-forgetting.
You remember the old Bible story about David's
three heroes who brake the ranks of the Philistines
to bring their thirsty king a cup of water, and what,
when he received the draught, he did with it to honor
them and God ; and that widow who gave the hungry
prophet her last handful of meal, — and there was
famine in that land. You may have read of the
Mohammedan who lived in a city built amid a wide
hot plain, and who made a wayside booth a few miles
out on the highway, and daily went and filled a vase
of water there for fainting travelers as they ap-
proached,— and once it saved a life. And of Sir
Philip Sidney all have heard, — how he, the wounded
General, paused with his hand half -lifted to his lips,
and gave his draught away to the private soldier,
wounded worse, — the ''little one.'' Brother-souls
to Sir Philip were the soldier in our own war, who,
burning with thirst from a wound in the mouth, re-
fused to touch the canteen, lest the blood from his
torn lips should spoil the water for the wounded com-
rades lying near; and that French soldier, who
begged the surgeon to keep his ether bottle for men
hurt worse than he, and stifled his own groan with

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his bloody handkerchief. Are such acts rare? No
doubt: yet think not that they happen by the ones
and twos. Probably no battle-field but in its red dew
blossoms with these acts of brotherhood, — of angel-
hood.

But when such things happen on any of the
battle-fields of life, believe not, either, that the deeds
begin upon those battle-fields, that they are the first
heroism of their doers. Only souls wonted to sweet-
ness and self-forgetting brim over with it at such
hours. The little thing that makes a moment great
is never all done at the moment. True — and what a
prophecy it is for human nature ! — true, the average
man, in health, will sometimes on an instant rise to
the death-height of self -forgetting ; for a stranger's
sake will leap into the sea to save, will leap before
the rushing engine. But in his agony does a man
reach even to the cup's height for another, unless
the years behind have made him ready for his in-
stant? Such little acts as Sidney's and our soldier's,
therefore, live as the ideals of service, and set the
standard of cup-bearing. They set the standard
where Jesus would have set it; — where he did set
it when in his own agony he prayed, ^* Father,
let this cup pass from me, — yet not my will, but
thine be done ! ' ' They uplift us to the understanding
of his thought that whoso does these things to *' little
ones" does them unto God.

And then the great thought comes full circle:
we see that we can only do a deed to God by doing

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that deed for him, — only by offering ours as the
hands with which it shall be done. Our human love
for one another, and all our human help, is not less
his for being ours. *^ God's tender mercy" is the
name in heaven for what we call on earth — ^ ' a drink
of water." Many dear things of his providence he
hands to his little ones hy each other. Sometimes,
how can he reach them else? And, sometimes, whom
can he use to reach them but just you and me?

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The Seamless Robe

"Now the coat was without seam, woven from the top
throughout/' — John xix : 23.

The unquestioned tendency of all science is to-
ward Unity. With every advance in knowledge some
apparent disorder becomes orderly ; the disjointed be-
comes jointed. No matter how exceptional a fact may
appear, when closely studied and mastered it quietly
takes its place as a link in the endless chain of law;
it becomes at once the effect of some antecedent cause,
and the cause of some subsequent effect.

Professor Tyndall, in a presidential address to the
British Association some years ago, said that the most
important discovery of the nineteenth century was that
known as the '^Correlation and Conservation of
Force." This principle, so startling when first an-
nounced, is now a matter of interesting but familiar
demonstration to our public school children. Heat,
light, electricity, chemical action, etc., instead of being
distinct properties inherent in the matter that reveals
them, are but varying modes of motion, differing
phases of the undefined reality which science calls
force. These manifestations, which a hundred years
ago were supposed to be not only different but antag-
onistic elements in nature, are now made to play
hide-and-seek with one another under the hand of the
experimenter. They change their guise as often and

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as promptly as the fabled gods of Greece. One of the
first discoverers in this direction was our own Benja-
min Thompson. He was born in Massachusetts in
1753 and sailed for Europe just before the Revolu-
tionary War, and there became so eminent in science
that he was titled. He took his new name from the
New England village in which he taught at the age of
seventeen, and is known in history as Count Rumford.
While inspecting the boring of cannon in the Munich
arsenal, he discovered that the increasing heat in the
brass came not from some latent quality released by
pressure, as was the common opinion, but that it was
the transformation of the force applied to the drill.
To state it in its most simple form, the heat came not
from the brass, but from the horse that furnished the
power. The muscular energy of the horse was changed
into the motion of the drill, and this in turn became
the heat of the brass. The same transformation takes
place when the hands are warmed by vigorous rubbing.
The sudden application of the brake to the rolling car
wheel is changed into heat and oftentimes into light.
You feed the tack machine, that cuts off six hundred
tacks a minute, with a strip of cold iron, but if you
pick up one of the tacks, made in the wink of an eye,
it will burn you. The heated steam moves the piston.
In the calcium light we have heat converted into light.
In photography light becomes chemical action. The
electric light that enables the diver to study ghastly
scenes in the cabins of sunken ships ; the bar of iron
that is charged with magnetism, when it is encircled

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THE SEAMLESS EOBE

with an electric current; the chemical affinity that
precipitates the metallic solution upon the printer's
form immersed in the copper bath, thus making the
electrotype plates from which our books are printed,
— are a few illustrations of the thousand ways in
which this principle is utilized in the amenities and
humanities of the industrial arts.

More sublime are the exemplifications of this
principle in the great changes that take place in the
laboratory of nature. Gravitation precipitates cos-
mic matter into our planetary center. It becomes the
heat and light of the sun. These are reconverted into
the power that lifts the clouds out of the ocean, con-
denses them on mountain sides, distils them again
upon meadow and woodland. Under the guise of the
laws of vegetation forests are reared to be again bur-
ied, condensed and preserved in the coal-beds of the
world. Gloomy bank-vaults are these in which are
deposited the accumulated sunbeams of millenniums.
Through the oven and the loaf these again become the
human muscle and brain, the highest flowering of
which is the poet's rhapsody and the lover's ecstasy.
Through the cornfield the sun finds its way into the
horse that strains the collar, and the hand of the
man that holds the guiding rein.

The earlier nature-worshipers were poorly agreed
in their devotions ; some worshiped the stars, more the
sun, some revered the lightning, whilst still others
were awed into fear or touched with reverence by
meteoric stone, tree, flower, bird or beast. Now, there

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was meaning in their devotion, but little sense in
their quarreling. It was the same divine mystery
that consecrated each shrine ; the same divinity made
holy each altar ; it was the same God, masking in all
these ever shifting forms. In all their mumblings we
read rude phrases of the universal ritual; the soul
of man joining in the worship that will never be out-
grown; a worship inspired by, and directed to, the
reality which Herbert Spencer calls ' ' the cause which
transcends our knowledge and conception, in assert-
ing which we assert an unconditional reality without
beginning and without end."

The history of religion as well as that of science
proves that however ignorance, superstition and big-
otry, may tug away at different sections of nature's
robe, it, like the coat of Jesus, is ' ' woven from the top
throughout without seam."

See how this law of unity weaves all human ex-
perience into one seamless robe. The older school-
books taught confidently of five senses, seeing, smel-
ling, hearing, tasting, feeling; but the newer science
resolves these five back into one and says they are
all phases of the one sense, touch. When the waves
of the unknown something are gathered upon the
retina of the eye, the optic nerve reports the touch.
When they strike more heavily and slowly the drum
of the ear, the auditory nerve feels and reports the
touch. Smell is the touch of the nostril, and taste
the touch of the mouth. Language is the primal in-
spiration. Even the bad grammar of the children

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THE SEAMLESS ROBE

frequently contains a subtle philosophy, and so we
find that the intuition of speech anticipated the latest
physiology, when it led us to confound the adjectives
of sensation, as when we speak of ^^ sweet sounds,"
^^soft pictures," ^^ smooth colors, ^^ rough smell" and
^^hard flavors," or as when the Scotchman says, ''I
feel a smell."

Turning from body to mind, the true conception
of soul leads us to distrust the so-called science of
phrenology, that pigeon-holes man's brains like a
modern postoffice. The bumps and lines within which
certain faculties are supposed to act represent at best
but a small side of the truth. Soul, like body, has
an unquestioned unity. Strengthen it anywhere, and
you contribute to the vitality of the whole. The solv-
ing of a mathematical problem clears my brain for
sermon writing. The musical power of the composer
is heightened if he spend a part of his time in the
laboratory. Doctor Holmes wrote better for his ex-
perience in the dissecting-room. Nature must not be
limited, as Wordsworth reminds us,

"Not only in the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air;

but in the mind of man there is

A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.''

The Conservation and Correlation of Force is a
spiritual as well as a material truth. There is an
essential unity of the moralities, an identity of the

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virtues. The excellencies are correlated. Like the
physical phenomena, light, heat and electricity, cour-
age, truthfulness and humility play the one into the
other. Says Bartol, '^We speak of cardinal virtues,
but every virtue is cardinal." We talk too flippantly
about *^ essentials" in morals. There are no unim-
portant things in conduct, no '^non-essential" duties.
In ethics as in phrenology we sacrifice truth to clear-
ness when we tabulate our virtues, and speak of hon-
esty, generosity, temperance, industry, as if it were
possible to realize one without realizing all. The
honest man has a keen sense of the value of a minute.
The prompt man is industrious, the industrious man
is never dissolute, the man that is never late at an
engagement is pretty well along toward sainthood ; he
will pay his debts; and he will not be afraid to die
when the time comes.

All the virtues are correlated. True valor on the
battle-field bespeaks a man that is tender to woman
and gentle to children. Given an absorbing enthus-
iasm in any direction, be it the perfection of a mach-
ine, the cataloguing of fishes, the accumulating of
honorable wealth, or the advancement of an idea, and
you have a moral force that is translatable into all
the virtues; a persistent energy that will overreach
the boundaries of one life; like the induction that
flashes the message of one telephone wire on to
another, it is a virtue that will jump from soul to
soul, will pass from home to home, from generation
to generation.

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THE SEAMLESS ROBE

Some years ago I was invited to call upon a
young man in one of our western towns, whose body
was already made transparent by the ravages of con-
sumption. His voice was nearly all gone, he could
speak only in a whisper. He sat propped up in his
chair, working diligently at a catalogue of the insects
of Colorado, the study of which he had made while
an invalid exile. He was anxious to complete his task
before the final orders came that would muster him
out of this earth service. He had no time for fore-
boding or regret ; there were no shadows in the room,
it was filled with a light that streamed from his earn-
est eyes. And as I looked more closely I found that
he was scarcely more than a boy; yet he had made
himself an authority on the insects of at least three
of our Western States. On his table were letters from
men eminent in science in Europe and America, anx-
ious to profit by the observations of this young man
who was dying in a Western town. Soon after my
visit the papers announced the death of the young
scientist; they talked of a *^ career cut short," and
''lost to the world," ''disappointment" and so on, but,
sad as early death is, there was far more joy than sor-
row in his translation, more life than death in it all.
What began in a boyish love of butterflies, grew, in
twenty-five or six years, — what a short life ! — into
a virtue that was transformed into the inquisitiveness
of a thousand children in the neighboring schools ; it
molded the better ambition of his city; it laid the
foundations of an academy of science, which is one of

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THE SEAMLESS ROBE

the most creditable and best known of the kind in the
west. The grave had no victory over such a life, and
death had no sting to J. Duncan Putnam, the young
and lamented scientist of Davenport, Iowa, who so
early found a place among the

"choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end in self.
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars
And with their mild persistence urge man's search
To vaster issues. ******

* * This is Hfe to come,
Which martyred men have made more glorious
For us who strive to follow.''

If Professor Tyndall is right in speaking of this
principle of ' ^ Conservation and Correlation of Force"
as the most important scientific discovery of his cen-
tury, is not the spiritual application of it quite as
important to religion and morals? It is important
because —

It simplifies the problem of living.

It multiplies the encouragements of life.

Let us attend to these separately. Many of the
anxieties of conscience cease when we fully realize
that doing good work anywhere for anything is weav-
ing the seamless robe of character. Cumbersome codes
of Egyptian laws and ancient customs were condensed

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into the Ten Commandments. Jesus reduced these ten
into the one commandment of love. Rabbi Hillel, who
was perchance an old man when Jesus was a babe,
when asked by a disciple if he could state the whole
law while standing on one foot, said, ''Yes, thou shalt
love thy neighbor as thyself.'' A pupil asked Confu-
cius if the whole law of virtue could be stated in one
word; he promptly replied, ''Reciprocity!" — The
golden rule in five syllables stated three hundred and
fifty years before it was pronounced by the persuasive
lips of the Nazarene ! Under this law of unity, prob-
lems of salvation and patriotism are identical. One's
duty to self, home and race are inseparable. Be a good
workman and you are a good citizen. Be a good citi-
zen and you are fitting yourself for heaven. "Be
just before you are generous," is a favorite maxim
with business men; but like many another shrewd
Yankee saying it contains a large fallacy. Cease
tearing the seamless robe. There is no generosity
that is not grounded in justice, and certainly you can-
not be just without being generous. The theologians
have had a hard time of it in trying to reconcile in-
finite justice with infinite love. In their trouble they
missed the correlation ; no more intimately wedded are
light and heat in the economy of the universe than
are justice and love.

"All of God is in every particle of matter,"
said the old philosopher. So all of goodness is in
every duty. "Let thy whole strength go to each."
Believe in the lesson of the Seamless Robe, and re-

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THE SEAMLESS ROBE

ligion becomes to you a city like ancient Thebes with
an hundred gates, through any one of which you
may enter. ''All roads lead to Eome," was the old
saying. The same may be said of heaven, if only the
road be such as duty travels upon.

''How shall I be saved?" Not by creed or
vicarious rite, but by doing well your simplest duty,
attending to the nearest call. Rubenstein used to
say, "I make my prayers at the piano." Agassiz
dedicated ' ' Penikese ' ' to the study of nature by bow-
ing his head in wordless prayer. The books say that
Angelo's face grew radiant as the marble chips flew
from his chisel. Each of the three divisions of
Dante's immortal poem ends with the word "stars."
Through the agonies of thought and the frenzy of
poetic imagination did he win the celestial vision.
These stories are illustrations of high piety, because
any virtue is linked to all the virtues, and every
excellency is a part of the great excellent.

I have already anticipated the second point.
This simplicity brings cheer. This linking of the
virtues encourages us. We are glad to take the task
Providence places upon our doorstep this morning.
Science interprets the gospel, — the good news of
Jesus. It says to the astronomer, "Watch your
stars ; " — to the farmer, ' ' Hold steady your plough ; ' '
— to the blacksmith, "Believe in your forge;" — to
the house wife, "Glorify your needle, look well to
your oven and attend to the babies. ' ' To one and all
it says, "Pour generously the water of your life

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into any or all of these runlets and they will combine
into brooks; the brooks will find the river, and the
rivers all flow oceanward. Inasmuch as ye did it
unto one of the least of these, ye have done it unto
me."

In Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-One the north
sent her boys to the battle front on the southern
fields, where many of them, pressed by danger, won
the apotheosis of character. Some time afterward it
sent down another lot of men in the name of Chris-
tianity, to scatter tracts, to pray for and superintend
the religious interests of these boys. Some of these
latter men were the callow fledglings of the divinity
school, — wanting in the courage to stand where
brave men in those days should stand, if higher duties
did not prevent. I have seen cowards with shame-
less impudence undertake to teach heroes religion;
nerveless drones talking piety to those who every day
carried their lives in their hands for an idea. There
was more saving virtue and heavenly grace in the
self-control that kept vigilant the tired boy on his
midnight watch, than in a carload of this poorer
kind of Christian Commission men that flocked to the

"Field that was farthest from danger,"

with their haversacks crammed with the publications
of the American Tract Society. The sentinel was
developing a virtue that stopped not with the sur-
render of Robert E. Lee. It went on to conquer the
prairies of Kansas and Dakota, and to touch with

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intelligence the wild canyons of the Rocky Mountains.
The valor of the field appeared again in generous
forbearance toward a fallen foe. The mothers that
kept back the tears that might discourage, the girls
who wrote the tear-stained pages full of laughter that
the camp might be less irksome, were unintention-
ally making contributions to the centennial glories
that came later.

Slowly but surely is this doctrine of the Seam-
less Robe investing consciously all sections of society.
Some years ago I heard this doctrine quaintly but
forcibly urged in the legislature of Indiana. An ap-
propriation toward building a belt railway around the
Capital city was under discussion. A representative
from one of the rural counties of the state, some-
what noted for its oratory, had the floor. After con-
sidering the commercial importance of the scheme,
waxing warm he met the argument of the opposition
that it was a local interest, consequently not a matter
for state patronage, as follows:

"Gentlemen, I represent Jackson County, a great way
from the city of Indianapolis, but I support this 'yer bill,
for I maintain that it makes no difference whether you live
on the waist-band or way down in the pocket, it all goes the
same to the strength and glory of the pantaloons, you can't
holp Indianopolis without holping Jackson County: it all
goes to the holp of the great state of Indianer, the third
agrieult'rul state in the Union."

Judging from the current discussions in relig-
ious conferences, I suspect that there is many an ac-
complished Doctor of Divinity in this country who

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THE SEAMLESS ROBE

fails to see as clearly or state as tersely the doctrine
of the Seamless Eobe that invests humanity, as this
legislator. Be honest, then, be loyal; above all be
sensible and loving, for these contribute to the glory
of earth and the peace of heaven.

Let us study the other side of this law of morals.
The vices of life are interchangeable, as well as its
virtues; sins are transmittable as well as graces.
Moral bluntness in one thing dulls the conscience in
all directions. One perversity renders the soul cal-
lous to many evils. The vices are all of a family, : —
children of the same parentage. Every sin in the cal-
endar is a ,burning jet of vicious gas, flowing through
under-ground channels from the same retort which
supplies the baneful fluid that burns in other and
distant jets. Here as elsewhere it is dangerous busi-
ness to classify. Nature is slow to recognize lines.
We must remember that all vice is vicious and that
every sin is sinful. Let us talk plainly. When I
speak of the sins of dishonesty and theft, hearers are
thoughtful; but if at the same time I speak of the
sins of tardiness, procrastination and loafing, they
smile and think I have made a ^'good point;" — as
if these were not vices more nearly related than elec-
tricity and magnetism; as if he who goes through
life tardily does not go through life dishonestly. He
robs his fellow-beings of the most valuable commodity
God entrusts to his care, — time ; so valuable is time
that God gives but a moment of it at once, and never

[113]

THE SEAMLESS ROBE

gives that moment but once in all eternity. Again,
when I talk of harlotry, women hang their heads
in thoughtful shame, but when I speak of extrava-
gance in dress, a vulgar love of display, a wicked
sacrifice to fashion, a desire to merit the social rank
in which character does not form the chief test, people
smile and think the preacher is riding his hobby, —
although it is a matter of scientific demonstration
that these latter vices are being daily transmuted
into the former as directly as motion is converted
into heat or the solar ray into vital energy. That
the habitual use of intoxicants is a sin against the
physical and social economies of life is generally ad-
mitted in these days; but when, backed by the most
deliberate science, it is urged that the habitual use
of tobacco is a sin against the body and society, even
women smile as though it were ^'another hit;" and
if I undertake to seriously apply the simplest prin-
ciples of morality to the affairs of the oven and the
kettle, to apply the commonplaces of physiological
science established beyond a doubt, as any intelligent
physician will tell you, the smile becomes a laugh.
We are shocked and alarmed when the laws against
careless use of gunpowder are violated and lives and
property endangered thereby, but wives introduce into
their drawing-rooms, mothers carry on their side-
boards, even churches make sacramental uses of that
which carries greater social dangers, and which is a
thousand times more destructive of life and property
than gunpowder and all it kindred explosives.

[114]

THE SEAMLESS EOBE

All this proves that we do not yet adequately
understand the sermon of the Seamless Robe. We do
not sufSeiently realize the correlation of the vices
and the conservation of evil. We need more clear
thinking. A stronger intellectual grasp of this law
alone will bring finer moral sensibilities. People
trifle only with what they consider trivial. These
things mentioned disconnectedly may be trifling, but
the connection is certain, God is persistent and omni-
present. Science is more successful than religion in
enforcing this lesson of the Seamless Robe. The Rip
Van Winkle *^we won't-count-this-once'' cannot ease
the enlightened conscience; every ''once'' is counted
by nature's detective. Every violence is recorded;
every shock to love bargains for hate somewhere.

It requires a scientific test less delicate to demon-
strate the inevitable connection between domestic ex-
travagance and forgery, bad cookery and inebriety,
than is necessary to prove the relations between elec-
tric currents and the circulation of the blood.

I have said that the virtues of war were trans-
mitted into the graces of peace, but the dissipations
of camp were also perpetuated. The old demon of
slavery changed its name and reappeared in political
corruption ; it mounted the stump and dealt in parti-
san swagger, in the venom of party hatred and sec-
tional prejudice. The jay-hawking of the march
ripened into plunder of public funds for private
ends, the shameless appropriation of national domain
to personal gains.

THE SEAMLESS EOBE

"Out of evil, evil flourishes,
Out of tyranny, tyranny buds."

He who suppresses his conscience just a little,
enough to take the road of expediency into the citadel
of success, has taken the left-hand road that leads
direct to all the miseries. The woman who expects
to atone for a flippant word by subsequent grace, has
been flirting with all the disgraces. *^Take home one
of Satan ^s relations, and the whole family will fol-
low, ' ' is an old proverb that fits into the new science.
When the correlation of moral forces is better under-
stood, we shall have fewer gluttons preaching temper-
ance ; fewer dyspeptics urging moderation ; fewer gos-
sips insisting on charity, less bigotry mistaken for
piety, and fear of hell will be less often taken for
religion.

The boldest synthesis is yet to be made. The
final thing to be said is that in the spiritual life there
are not two seamless robes, but one. I may have
seemed to assume a line where no line finally remains :
not only are the virtues correlated, and the vices in-
terchangeable, but the vices and the virtues are in-
vested with the same seamless robe. There is a law
for lawlessness. Sin is no abnormal cloud thrown in
between man and God by some regnant devil. What
is it, then? Now it is weakness, deficiency of force;
it is darkness, the absence of light; it is cold, the
absence of heat. Again, it is misdirected energy: it
is fire on the house-top, and not on the hearth; it is

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THE SEAMLESS ROBE

the river overflowing its banks; it is undisciplined
power. ^^Good in the making," says Emerson.
*^That rough movement toward the good which we
call evil," is Leigh Hunt's phrase. The forces that
tend even to sin are sacred forces. Shall we not
heroically labor for the control of the horse upon
which we are to ride into strength and glory? Wel-
come the awful rapids. Welcome the Thousand Isles
and the terrible dangers therefrom. Give me that
tremendous responsibility which compels me to steer
so near disaster that I may thereby sail the St.
Lawrence of life, and find at last the vastness of the
ocean. We will seek not to imprison, but to liberate
energy. We will not try to grow our oak in a flower-
pot, but will plant our acorn in the middle of the
field. Religion has no more use for a broken spirit
than a general has for a jaded horse. Better a sin-
ning Saul of Tarsus than a sinless Nicodemus. Bet-
ter a wayward Loyola than a submissive Simon Sty-
lites, as the sequel of their lives proves. Better a
fiery France than a quiescent Spain. Not too much
pride, but too little; not too much freedom, but too
little; not too much love of life and the good it con-
tains have we, but too little. By directing, not sup-
pressing, the forces within us, shall we realize and
apply the gospel of the Seamless Robe.

^^The Seamless Robe!" — ever suggestive in its
symbolism, first, of the inclusive spirit of the Master
who wore it ; less mindful of its value than the Roman
soldiers. The sects have torn the Christian unity that

[117]

THE SEAMLESS ROBE

ought to be based upon his words and life. Again,
it symbolizes the still larger unity of Universal Reli-
gion,— that golden cord that binds all humanity
^^ Around the feet of God," of which Christianity is
but one strand, albeit the best, because it is the ten-
derest, the strongest because it is the most silken.
This robe may symbolize the continuous existence,
the endless life, a robe woven from the threads of time
and eternity. This time let it stay with us, as a sym-
bol of the highest truth, the inclusive unity, the uni-
verse, the universality of law, the indivisible and
eternal God. Blessed be science for its enforcement
of this lesson. Above the voice of prophets do we
hear its tones saying: ,

"Whosoever shall break the least of these command-
ments and teach men to do so, shall be called least in the
Kingdom of Heaven; but he that is faithful in that which
is least, is faithful in that which is much."

Realizing this, duty becomes the Seamless Robe.
It becomes the unbroken and imperishable will of
God, and life is given us to weave this coat without
seam by filling all our days with faithfulness, and
our years with loyalty.

"All service ranks the same with God.
If now, as formerly, he trod
Paradise, His presence fills
Our earth.

*******

Say not 'a small event!' why small?
Costs it more pain that this ye call

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THE SEAI^ILESS ROBE

A ^great event' should come to pass,
Than that? Untwine me from the mass
Of deeds which make up life, one deed
Power shall fall short in, or exceed!"

[119]

Wrestling and Blessing

A fossil lies before me on the table where I write,
— a little trilobite, that serves now for a paper-
weight. There he lies just as he stopped in his last
crawl or swim some million years ago, the body half-
bent, the stony eyes still staring! One can not help
wondering what stopped him, how it happened, and
what else had happened in that far-off life when
those black rings were snpple and the eyes saw. I
wish I knew his story. You have the Venus of Milo,
perhaps, on the bracket in your parlor, — that proud
marble beauty, whose mystery her keepers in the
Louvre have in these latter years been trying to guess
anew. It would be pleasant if we had some record
how she came under ^Hhat little Melian farm,'' from
whose furrows she was unburied, so blurred with
stain and maimed and aged, but able still to make
men mute with delight. We wish we knew who felt
the first delight of her, when she was young; who
gave her early praise; in whose workshop she grew
to such majesty of form.

Somewhat so is it with the old legends in our
Bible. We wish we knew how, when, where, by
whom, they came into existence. There are a hundred
of them, some beautiful, some uncouth, some villain-
ous in look. Now they lie fossilized in myths, — mys-

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WRESTLING AND BLESSING

terious fragments, like old statues. Once they were
living and moving; once they were coming into be-
ing as beliefs. These stories have had a life-history
in men's minds and hearts. Take the Jacob story
(Gen. xxxii. 24-31), where Jacob wrestles through
the lonely night with the angel. To trace its origin
we should have to go back to very ancient times,
when men were on right familiar terms with Deity,
and when the Hebrews still had many gods, and
Jehovah, not yet the One, was but the Arch-Power
who helped their tribe. What the beginning of this
special story may have been, probably no one will
ever tell except in guesses. Possibly a dim, mis-
shaped tradition of some actual event lies hidden in
it. Perhaps, like similar Scandinavian stories of the
giants challenging the god Thor, it had a long pre-
existent saga-life from mouth to mouth, before it
reached a record. Its origin may have been an early
bard's attempt to account for the people's name of
*' Israel," '^Prince with God," by fathering it on a
brave deed of some ancestor. But whatever its source,
to trace it we would have to leave the mental climate
of to-day, and, turning back, re-enter an atmosphere
where the faith of the people crystallized itself in
legends of the supernatural as naturally as the Jan-
uary mist deposits itself in snow-flakes.

Such legends rise in many ways. We find their
relics strewing the beginnings of all literatures, em-
bedded in all old faiths. And this Bible of ours
would be the rock without the fossils, would be that

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WRESTLING AND BLESSING

Melian farm without the statue, if it did not hold
these things. The trilobite is no sacred beetle to us;
but I regard mine with some awe, — it is so much
older than I ! We do not worship the Venus ; but she
is a joy forever in America as in old Greece. Let us
use old Bibles in the same way, bringing that kind
of reverence, and none other, that each thing in them
deserves from to-day. Let their beautiful things be
beautiful, let their wicked things be wicked, let the
curious things be curious, and the true things, the
grand things, be true and grand. The book is but the
rock or the farm; what lies in it gives the worth.
And, as a whole, the worth of this, our Bible, is very
great. Much besides the fossils and the fragments
lies therein. Even they, when they no longer are
believed as fact, serve still as poetry, supplying hints
and emblems for the spiritual experience, — as with
the very example cited, the wrestling that brought
blessing. What exhales and vanishes as Scripture
floats far and wide as hymn, — like that other Jacob
story now sung in the ^^ Nearer, my God, to thee.''
What falls from belief as story of Jacob or of Jesus,
begins to fill a still higher, wider place to us as his-
tory of the human mind in some old attitude of
worship.

The gist of our Jacob legend is simply this:
Jacob wrestles through the lonely night with a
strange, strong Power, that maims him; but, instead
of yielding, he clings and wrestles on, and will not let
go wrestling, until he has extorted a blessing from his

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WEBSTLING AND BLESSING

hurter. And when, in turn, he asks the stranger's
name, no name is given him; but Jacob guesses it is
his God, and calls that night's struggling-place,
''God's Face." And he limps off in the morning
lame in his thigh, but a crowned victor; and for his
prowess wins a new name, '^ Israel," or '* Prince
with God."

Here we have something very fine, — a meaning
universal, and fresh as yesterday's struggle with our
own life's difficulty. The teaching is that Wrestling
is the condition of Blessing, — that the long, deter-
mined clinch brings coronation, and makes a new man
of us, — maimed, perhaps, but still a nobler and
stronger man than before the struggle.

A most aged doctrine ? Yes : all the old religions
ring with it. Most common-place? True: the ele-
ments of heroism are very common-place. Those short
two worded sentences from Paul (2 Cor. vi. 4-10; iv.
8, 9, 16-18), that sound like leaping bugle-calls from
one in the front, are just it,: — this aged doctrine
about struggle. Half the chapters of Epictetus are
battle-music on this one theme. But because each one
has to find out for himself how true the doctrine is,
and has to find it out a great many times before the
faith becomes as much a part of him as it is good to
have it, let us draw it out and say it over once again.

How do we treat our difficulties? That is the
question that has no second. It stands all by itself in
its importance. The answer to it gives our destiny.
How do we treat our difficulties? Do we take their

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WRESTLING AND BLESSING

maiming only, or do we win their blessing too? The
question that has no second.

Di&Gulties, not difficulty. They are many, and
of different kinds, although their hurt in essence is
the same, and their gift in essence is the same.

1. First of all rises up that difficulty known as
the Inherited Burden, You probably have one. A
dull brain perhaps, or some weak organ in your body,
or the outlaw passion in your temperament, the brute
in the family blood that ought to have been tamed
by the grandfathers. We will not complain ; but who
would not have made himself a little brighter, had
his opinion been asked at the right time ? How many
of us, forty years old, but have ached in the same spot
where our mothers ached, and because they did, and
been able from that ache to predict afar off which of
the wheels of life will perhaps stop first and stop
all the rest? And who can help sometimes charging
the hardness of his life-struggle, or his failure in the
struggle, to those two persons in the world whom he
loves dearest?

We will not complain, I say; but it is getting
easier every day to complain weakly of this burden
and yield to it in miserable self-surrender, because
we are just finding out, by the help of the doctors
and physiologists and the new philosophy of organic
nature, how much we may in perfect honesty attri-
bute to it. The old dogma said that we inherited
our sin, and that all our woe was brought into the
world with that garden-sin in Eden ; and this dogma

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WRESTLING AND BLESSING

was a dim hint of the great fact recognized by our
evolution doctrine of today. But, after aU, that gar-
dener was so far away that we could not practically
reach him to lay our personal responsibility off upon
his shoulders. To-day we are learning to see right in
our homes our Adam and our Eve, who have actually
inlaid our body, mind and tastes with their bequests !
And as this knowledge grows, weak hearts are likely
enough to abate their trying, because (they say to
themselves), ^^He and she are to blame, not I.''
And one effect of our evolution theory may be to
make more cowards and renegades in life.

Weak hearts and renegades, indeed! As if the
knowledge did not teach this rather, : — that, if the
responsibility be less, the fate is even stronger than
we thought, and needs the stouter wrestle; and this,
too, — that, if in one way the responsibility be less,
it is greatening in two other ways. Knowing the ten-
dencies received from father and mother, we know the
special dangers that are threatening in our natures,
and therefore, what we mainly have to guard against.
Again, to-day we knowingly, no longer unknowingly
transmit our influence to our children, — and men and
women awake to suffering they inflict are doubly hol-
den for it. This new emphasis upon inheritance, truly
understood, is both comforting and spurring. Com-
forting, for to those who mourn over-much at what
they see in their little ones, thinking it all their per-
sonal bequest, it says: ^*You are responsible only for
the half or the quarter part of this : for the whole an-

[125]

WRESTLING AND BLESSING

cestry has been counted into you, and through you
reaches yours." A comfort that, when, after all our
trying, our boy turns out badly, or our daughter dies
young after suffering six years. And the new knowl-
edge spurs, because it says to parents, ^^For part of
your children's birth-fate you are responsible, since by
patient energy your dull brain can be a little quick-
ened, your blood can purify itself, your body can
make its weak places somewhat stronger, and, above
all, your unbalanced temperament can be controlled
and trained and much ennobled; and if you make
these self-improvements firmly yours, they may be
largely handed on to them/' That we are not fit to
have our children, unless we have trained ourselves
beforehand for their birth, is what our new evolu-
tion doctrine says to us; and thereby it will grad-
ually become a great uplifting and salvation to the
race.

The earnest wrestler, knowing all this, will never
wholly surrender to the poorness of his brain or his
body or his temperament. Not to poorness of the
brain: for that dull head that we inherit may go
with days that shall leave us perfect in self-respect,
although dull-headed. No sight is more impressive
than that of humble self-respecting workers, boys or
girls, or men or women, who, day in, day out, do
their duty in the quiet stations where small talent
hides them, respresenting the Moral Law incarnate in
their little corners. Not to the poorness of one's
body: what sight more beautiful than the patience,

[126]

WRESTLING AND BLESSING

the self-forgetfulness, the wide and eager pity for
others' trouble, which suffering sometimes generates
in the life-long sufferer who bears her weakness great-
ly, although in other ways her service has to be the
service of those who cannot even ** stand,'' but have
to lie, ^^and wait"? Who has not known or heard of
some mighty invalid who found sphere and mission-
field on a sick bed?

Not even to the poorness of one's temperament
will the earnest wrestler yield. There is one example
in the world more touching and inspiring even than
these last. It is that of a man wrestling hard with
his inherited burden when it takes the form of a
Besetting Sin, — which is very apt to be that brute
in the family blood. But even if it be a devil of his
own wanton raising, we watch him, we cheer him,
we tell him we know all about it, and that he is doing
nobly, and helping us in our struggle; we pity him,
if he falls; we reverence him as holy, if he wins.
Let such a straggler know that we know he is the
hardest fighter of us all. And if he wins, his be-
setting temptation actually turns into his guardian
angel, and blesses him through life. Our besetting
sin may become our guardian angel — let us dare to
say it ! Let us thank God that we can say it ! This
sin that has sent me weary-hearted to bed, and des-
perate in heart to morning work, that has made my
plans miscarry until I am a coward, that cuts me
off from prayer, that robs the sky of blueness, and
the earth of spring-time, and the air of freshness, —

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WRESTLING AND BLESSING

and human faces of friendliness, — this blasting sin
that has made my bed in hell for me so long, — this
can he conquered, I do not say annihilated, but —
better than that — conquered, captured, and trans-
figured into a friend: so that I at last shall say, ^^My
temptation has become my strength ! for to the very
fight with it I owe my force." We can treat it as the
old Romans treated the Barbarians on their frontiers,
— turn the border-ruffians within ourselves into
border-guards.

Am I speaking too confidently? But men have
done this very thing, and why not you and I ? Who
has not his besetting sin to be tranfigured thus?
But it will take the firmest will we have, the clearest
aim, the steadiest purpose. It must be for the most
part a lonely Jacob-struggle. The night will cer-
tainly seem long. And yet, in our clinch, the day
may dawn before we think it, and we shall have
won the benediction and earned the name of ^ ^ Israel, ' '
** Prince with God,'' and learned that even besetting
temptation may be '^ God's Face," — but that wrest-
ling, and wrestling only, is the condition of such bless-
ing.

2. These are forms of that main difficulty called
the ^^ Inherited Burden." There are others close
akin, called by the general name -^Hard Lot.''
' ' Hard Lot, ' ^- — again the very name is a challenge to
our sleeping powers. The hard lot called Poverty,
Ignorance, Narrow Conditions, Accidents, is wait-
ing to give us, after the struggle, Temperance^ Dili-

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WRESTLING AND BLESSING

gence, Fortitude, Concentration. But after the
struggle; that is, as we wrestle with those condi-
tions, these elemental powers are waked in us and
slowly trained, and at last are left ours, — our in-
struments by which to carve out life's success and
happiness.

A boy in the town has no chance for education
like the boys of richer fathers in the neighborhood,
— no college, or high school even; or the yearning
for education has come after the school-days are
over. Will that boy, like Theodore Parker, the
farmer's son in Lexington, turn the pasture huckle-
berries into a Latin Dictionary? or like Chambers,
the great Edinburgh publisher, will he learn his
French and science in the lonely attic, after the
fourteen hours ' work at the shop are done ? Will he,
like Professor Tyndall, rise every morning, for fif-
teen years, and be at his books by five o'clock? A
girl in the town seeks for a ' ' one-thing-to-do ' ' to save
herself from a frittered life. Harder yet it is for
her than for the boy, for social custom is against
her. Will she be daring, and not only daring but
persistent? The history of achievement is usually
the history of self-made men and self-made women;
and almost invariably it is the history of tasks, —
if not imposed by the hard lot of circumstance, then
self-imposed. The story of genius even, so far as
it can be told at all, is the story of persistent indus-
try in the face of obstacles ; and some of the standard
geniuses give us their word for it that genius is lit-

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WRESTLING AND BLESSING

tie more than industry. A woman like '^George
Eliof laughs at the idea of writing her novels by
inspiration. ^^ Genius," President Dwight used to
tell the boys at Yale, '^is the power of making ef-
forts/'

A man sees some great wrong in the land. No
money, no friends, little culture, are his. He hesi-
tates, knowing not what to do; but the wrong is
there; it burns in him till somehow he finds a voice
to cry against it. At first only a faint sound heard
by a few who ridicule, and by one or two who say,
^'Amen.'' And from that beginning, through the ridi-
cule and violence, '^in necessities and distresses, in
labors and watchings and fastings,'' he goes on, ^'as
sorrowful, yet always rejoicing, as poor, yet making
many rich, as having nothing, yet possessing all
things," till men are persuaded and confounded, and
the wrong is trampled down, and the victory is his !
Such things have been done within our knowledge.
The two men who started the anti-slavery movement
in this land were a deaf saddler and a journeyman
printer, both of them poor in everything but daunt-
less purpose. At Philadelphia, a few years ago, a
band of gray-headed men met to look back fifty years
and talk over their morning battle-fields in that
great cause accomplished. What a lesson of faith
those Abolitionists have taught the nation, — faith
that a relentless wrestler can win blessings from the
Hard Lot and the Untoward Circumstance!

3. A third well-known fighter waits in the dark
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WRESTLING AND BLESSING

to throw us: he bears the name Ov.r Failures, How
well ke know him ! What a prince of disheartenment
he is! What arguments he has to prove to us that
trying is no more of any use ! He is our arch-devil.
And he, too, and because arch-devil, will be our arch-
angel, if we will have it so, — the one who warns and
guides and saves. Half, two-thirds, of our best ex-
perience in life is his gift.

Look out along any path of life at the state-
liest figures walking in it. They are, most of them,
figures of men that have failed more than once. Yes,
any path. *'It is very well," said Fox, the great
English orator, 'Wery well for a young man to dis-
tinguish himself by a brilliant first speech. He may
go on, or he may be satisfied. Show me a young
man who has not succeeded at first, and has yet gone
on and I will back him/' Every one has heard of
Disraeli sitting down writhing under the shouts of
laughter with which his dandy first speech was re-
ceived in Parliament. *^I have begun several times
many things, and have succeeded in them at last,''
he said ; ^ ' I will sit down now, but the time will come
when you will hear me.'' And it did come to even a
dandy, who could ' ' begin many times. ' ' When John
Quincy Adam's Diary was published not very long
ago, it was strange to find him, as a young man,
lamenting his absolutely inability to speak extem-
pore. An ineradicable difficulty, constitutional, he
thinks, — and he died known as ''the old man elo-
quent." These happen, all of them, to be the words

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WRESTLING AND BLESSING

of orators; but success in all lines of life is reached,
or not reached — ^is lost — ^by exactly the same prin-
ciple. Whatever the high aim be, ^'strait is the gate
and narrow the way" which leads to success in it.
The great chemist thanked God that he was not a
skilful manipulator, because his failures had led him
to his best discoveries. The famous sculptor, after
finishing a great work, went about sad: **What is the
matter r' asked his friend. ^'Because for once I
have satisfied my ideal, and have nothing left to
work toward. ' ' He wanted to fail just a little ! Said
a successful architect of the young men in his of-
fice, who kept on copying his designs, ^'Why do they
do the things they can do? why don^t they do the
things they can^tf Miss Alcott wrote and burnt,
and burnt and wrote, until at last her ^^ Little Men
and Women'' came out of the fire. By the failure
in art, by the failure in science, by the failure in
business, by the failure in character, if we wrestle
on, we win salvation. But all depends upon that if.
Our failures pave the road to ruin or success. *'We
can rise by stepping-stones of our dead selves to
higher things," or those dead selves can be the
stones of stumbling over which we trip to our de-
struction.

4. Again, have we ever known what it is to
wrestle with Wrong done to us, — wrong so bitter,
perhaps, that the thought brings shadows on the
face and seems to be a drop of poison in the heart?
And have we learnt from it, as many have, what

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WRESTLING AND BLESSING

Paul's ^* Charity" chapter means; what inward
sweetness forgiveness has; how we can almost bless
our injnrer for the good he has done us in thus
teaching us to know our weakness and in calling out
our better nature to conquer our poorer? *'It is
royal to do well and hear oneself evil spoken of,"
said an old sage. Royal, — but blessed to be able to
have that feeling toward the evil speaker, which is
not contempt, and is not pride, and is not wholly
pity even, but real and living friendliness welling
up through our wound toward him by whom the
wound was made.

5. Have you never wrestled with Religious
Doubts? Sometimes not the bottom of our knowl-
edge only, but the very bottom of our faith in goodr
ness, seems to give out. Perhaps some fearful tragedy
has happened. Death or pain on its mighty scale
has stalked abroad; or some great sin is triumphant,
and the dishonest man, the mean man, the selfish
man is exalted, while goodness has to hide its head;
and it seems as if it were madness to talk about the
Eternal Righteousness. Perhaps our own life's dis-
appointments have soured our hearts and blurred
our eyes, till the brightest scene of pleasantness can
wear November grays, and we say, ' ' It is always win-
ter, and never spring, to us." Perhaps dear old
ideas, around which our gratitude and reverence
have twined, are in decay, as new light breaks in
from undreamed-of realms of thought,: — from an
evolution theory, upsetting and resetting all our his-

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WRESTLING AND BLESSING

tory of providence; from a theory of mechanism in
mind and morals, which seems at first glance to
turn ourselves into physical automata, and to dim
all hope of a life beyond the body; from a vision of
Law, Law, Law, till we see no room in the universe
for a Lawgiver, no place in our experience for sing-
ing songs and looking gladly upward. And if, hav-
ing felt these doubts, you have wrestled with them,
not bidding them go, not letting them go, but hold-
ing on to them, and thinking deeper, reading farther,
looking more patiently and less dogmatically, — above
all, living more purely and unselfishly, — ^have you
not found the chaos turning at least by patches into
cosmos, as the brown fields of April take on their
green? Have you not caught, here and there, a
vision, which for the moment made the old peace
come again? Have you not found that life, the
greater bringer of mysteries, was somehow also the
great solver of mysteries? If not you, many a man
has thus ^^ beaten his music out" from the solid ar-
guments of despair; has known what it is to pass
from drifting doubts, not into certainties, but into
Trust that has to be spelled with capitals, if printed ;
Trust that can tell its meaning best not by any expla-
nation, but by cheer and serenity, and a feeling as
of awed triumph in life and in death!

6. Once more. Death: have you ever wrestled
with the death-sorrow till you know its inner sweet-
ness? sweetness greater than all, I would almost say.
The loss is loss. We say, perhaps, ^'It is their gain,"

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WEESTLING AND BLESSING

and wish to be willing ; but we are not willing. Our
hurt gets no relief. The days go by, and the empti-
ness is as empty, and the silence as silent, and the
ache as relentless in its pain. What shall we do?
Our friends look on, and wish that they could help
us. And they know that help will come, because to
their own wrestling it once came. They know that
the heart of this pain is joy indeed. And if you ask
how it came about in distress so very sore as yours,
their differing words will probably amount to this,
— that such pain can be stilled in one way only, and
that is, by being more actively unselfed, by doing
more for others right through one's sadness, by try-
ing hard to do simply right. It takes a wrestle, yes ;
but they will assure us it is an inward fact, whose
chemistry they do not pretend to understand, that
helpfulness and duty done at such a time deepen and
sweeten into something within ourselves that almost
seems a new experience from its exceeding peace. It
is not time making us ' ' forget, ' ' — nay, just the oppo-
site : we know that somehow this new peace is vitally
connected with that pain; and, at last, we come to
think of them and feel them together. Later, we be-
gin to call it peace, and forget that it was pain. And,
by and by, the hour in memory which is our linger-
ing-place for quiet, happy thoughts is the very one
which is lighted by a dead friend's face. It is our
heaven-spot; and, like the fair city of the
Apocalypse, it hath no need of sun, for the glory of
that face doth lighten it. Perhaps, as life goes by,

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WRESTLING AND BLESSING

there will be more than one of these green pastures
with still waters, in our inner life. And then we shall
find out that each death-sorrow is unique. From a
brother's or a father's loss one can but dimly under-
stand, I suppose, a mother's feeling when her child
has vanished. Each death is so unique because each
life and love has been unique. No two deaths there-
fore, will bless us just alike, and we can still name
our new strength or our new trust from the separate
love: it still is ''Katie's" gift, or it is ''Father's"
gift. And thus the very highest and deepest and
holiest of our experience in some way wear the like-
ness of those friends that we have lost.

It is only another instance of the correlation of
Pain with Gain — through struggle; the correlation
of difficulty with exaltation — through w'restling:
through the struggle, through the wrestle, through
our will facing the hard thing, clinching it, never
letting go, until we feel the gladness crowning us.
We speak of the "ministry" of sin, of suffering, of
disappointment, of sorrow, and speak truly; but none
of these "ministers," not one, until they have been
mastered. First our mastery, then their ministry.
We say, ' ' The Lord hath chastened us : " yes, but by
summoning us to a wrestle in which it is our part
never to let go! It is not the mere difficulty that
exalts. None of these six or seven things that I
have spoken of, neither the Inheritance, nor the
Temptation, nor the Hard Lot, nor the Failure, nor
the Injury, nor the Doubt, nor the Death, suffices by

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WRESTLING AND BLESSING

itself to crown us. They may just as likely crush or
warp or embitter us. They do crush very many ; and
if they do not crush or embitter you or me, it is be-
cause we have used our wills against them. They
only give the opportunity, and we decide whether it
be the opportunity for bondage and maiming, or for
the blessing and the new name, ''Israel." All de-
pends on us.

On us, — but only, after all, as all things which
we do depend on us. On us, because the Powers
which are not ourselves work jointly with us. Not
what we can not do only, — as making roses, earth-
quakes, solar systems, — but all that we can do also,
— breathing, eating, thinking, — confesses that Power.
And as in every heart-beat the universal forces of
chemistry come into play, as in every footstep the
universal force of gravitation lays hold of us to keep
us poised, as in every common sight and sound the
universal force of light and the universal laws of
undulation are invoked, as in all ways physical we
only live and move and have our being iq virtue of
that which is not we, — so is it with these still more
secret, not less real, experiences. Surely, not less
real are these inward correlations, this moral chem-
istry, by which, at the working of a man's will, pain
is changed iato patience and pity and cheer, tempta-
tion into safeguard, bitter into sweet feelings, weak-
ness into strength, and sorrow into happier peace, at
last. Are these facts one whit less real than the
facts of the body's growth? A thousand hours of

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WRESTLING AND BLESSING

struggle in every year attest the facts for each one
separately. Here, also, as in the body's breathing
and digestion, a Great Life joins on to our little life,
maintaining it. It is we and the Not- We with us.
Call it by what name we will, we depend, and can
depend, on an Infinite Helpfulness in all our trying.
The success we seek may fail for many reasons ; but
I feel sure that Eternal Powers adopt every right
endeavor; or rather, that every right endeavor plays
into Eternal Powers of Right, and is thereby fur-
thered toward that success which will really most
bless you or me, the trier. If angels do not rejoice
over us repenting and bear us up, as the Bible says,
it is because the very Present Help that bears us up
has a greater name than *^ angel,'' and is nearer than
the heavens. No, not on us alone does all depend, —
because — ^because we never are alone ! I suspect that,
followed to its deepest source, our faith in the Good-
ness of the universe will be found breaking out from
some such private experience, solitary in each one,
but sure to come to each one that will have it, — that
inward blessing follows pain and struggle.

But it helps our faith to trace in others also
this — law of transfiguration, shall I call it? And if
we wish such help, whom shall we look at? Two
classes. First, the '* self-made men," as they are
styled, because from hard material they have forged
their own success. They are our models of courage
and persistence, of diligence and fortitude and tem-
perance, of force and concentration. By these signs

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WEESTLING AND BLESSING

they have conquered. We all recognize their vic-
tory, and gladly do them reverence. Their epitaphs
might read, ^' These men by wrestling accomplished
all they undertook."

But more reverently yet I look upon another
class, — the men who have tried as faithfully and
from the hard material have 7iot won great success,
so far as we can see; the women who have worked,
and in working have never dreamed of gaining spe-
cial victory. Perhaps they lacked some needful
element of force; but, quite possibly, all they lacked
is a little selfishness. The world knows little of
them. They count among the common lives, possibly
even among the failures. Emphatically, these do
not accomplish all they undertake. Only the few
who are nearest know of their striving, and how truly
the striving has crowned their brows. They them-
selves are not aware of coronation. They themselves
only know that they have tried from day to day, and
never seemed to do the day's whole duty, and that
life has brought many hard problems, — but that
now the problems are getting solved, and that it is
quite possible to be happy, and yet have failed.
They are humble usually, with an air of wistfulness
in their eyes and in their talk, as of men who have
been comforted by aspiration, not attainment. They
have learnt to hope that

"All instincts immature,
All purposes unsure,
All I can never be,

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WRESTLING AND BLESSING

All men ignore in me, —
This I am worth to God."

They have learned to hope that. They have
learned that they will never do great things. Still,
if any hard thing is to be done, specially any burden
to be borne, you will find them already there at
work when you have made up your mind to go. They
are great common-helpers. They think they know
nothing, and truly they are not geniuses ; yet bright
people in straits have a habit of coming to them for
advice. Not rich, yet men and women whose practi-
cal aid in trouble is counted on without the asking.
They are rare friends, because their minds are so
rich with life's experience, their hearts so sweet with
it. They speak the fitting word to us in our self-
building, because there was once a scaffolding, long
since taken down, by which they built that same
part in themselves, and they remember all about the
difficulty. They are better than a poem by Brown-
ing, or even that letter of Paul or the chapter in
Epictetus, because in them we meet the hero-force
itself in brave original.

I passed a woman in the street one day, and
passed on, for she did not see me. But why not
speak? I thought, so back I turned, and, besides
the greeting, she dropped on me four sentences such
as we go to Emerson to read, — made me for the time
four thoughts richer in three minutes. They were
life distilled in words, — her life distilled; though
she told me then and there that she ^^died" long be-

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WRESTLING AND BLESSING

fore, — she seemed to herself in latter years to do and
be so little. Perhaps she had died, and I saw her
immortality; for only the wings were wanting on
the old shoulders. She had been a humble struggler ;
and, as I saw her, she seemed to wear a crown and
the name, '* Israel.''

I will sum it up. Here is all my sermon, and
in another woman's words. She calls her poem,
''Treasures."

^'Let me count my treasures,
All my soul holds dear,
Given me by dark spirits
Whom I used to fear.

Through long days of anguish

And sad nights did Pain
Forge my shield Endurance,

Bright and free from stain.

Doubt in misty caverns,

Mid dark horrors, sought,
Till my peerless jewel
* Faith to me she brought.

Sorrow, that I wearied

Should remain so long.
Wreathed my starry glory.

The bright crown of Song.

Strife, that racked my spirit

Without hope or rest.
Left the blooming flower

Patience on my breast.

Suffering, that I dreaded,
Ignorant of her charms,

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WRESTLING AND BLESSING

Laid the fair child Pity,
Smiling in my arms.

So I count my treasures,
Stored in days long past;

And I thank the Givers,
Whom I know at last!"

[142j

The Divine Benedidion

"And the peace of God, which passeth all understand-
ing, shall guard your hearts and your thoughts in Christ
Jesus." — Philippians iv: 7.

Our Bible is a turbulent book. The Old Testa-
ment is a sea in which the waves roll high. Even
in its calmer conditions, the white caps are ever in
view. Mid the din of earthly battles the turmoil of
the spirit appears, restless longings of the heart,
quenchless fires of hope and shame, the unceasing
antagonisms of thoughts. Not less but more turbu-
lent is the New Testament, because the contest has
carried the flag inward, the line of battle is formed
on spiritual rather than on material fields.

And yet the great Bible word is peace ; over and
over again do we come upon it ; peace is the prophetic
dream and almost the universal promise. According
to Young's Concordance, the word occurs some one
hundred and seventy-five times in the Old Testa-
ment and eighty-nine times in the New, forty-two
of which occur in the letters of the first great soldier
of the cross, the hunted, homeless and apparently-
friendless Paul. Although Jesus said, *^I come not
to bring peace but a sword,'' yet he went to his
martyr death leaving behind him the serene promise,
^* Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you."

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THE DIVINE BENEDICTION

All this leads up to the text, which suggests the
Divine Benediction, ^Hhe peace of God, which
passeth all understanding.'' We touch here the
great paradox of religion. All lives, like, those re-
flected in the Bible, are cast upon stormy seas.
Stormy have been the centuries. Feverish are our
years. Anxious are our days. How restless the
heart of man ! what distrustful days it spends, ending
in sleepless nights! and yet, peace is the hunger
of the human heart; it is the pathetic cry of the
soul. Surely ^^how beautiful on the mountains are
the feet of them that publish peace!" Now and
then the spirit is permitted to receive the divine
benediction; and these moments of realization give
assurance that our wants are reasonable, and that the
hunger may be satisfied. Peace is the endowment
of religion; the peace strains of the Bible ever carry
with them the religious refrain. Jesus and Paul,
knowing peace, knew something that politics, society
and money can not give.

The text suggests the first thing to be said con-
cerning the peace of religion, the peace that is of
God — viz.: ^^It passeth understanding." It is
something deeper than knowledge, it is not com-
passed by our reason. The most helpful view Chicago
can offer is that indefinite line of vision far out in
the lake where the water meets the sky. The finest
line in every landscape is the horizon line. On the
border land of thought lie the reverences. Where
our petty certainties end, there our holy worship

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THE DIVINE BENEDICTION

begins. The child trusts father or mother, because
in them it discovers a power it cannot understand;
it rests upon that reserve force it can not imitate or
measure. When man or woman discovers in the
other unexpected forces, a fervor unmeasured, a
power of endurance unexpected, then love finds a di-
vine resting place. The love that is trustworthy, that
has the divine quality of lasting, is the love that rests
on the foundation ^' which passeth understanding.''
To call for explanations or to try to measure, with the
clumsy tools the brain affords, profoundest verities
of any moment in our lives is to pass out of the
peace of God into the pitiful turmoils of men. The
man loves the woman with a pure love when he finds
in her a power he can not understand. The woman
loves the man with a peaceful love when it rests on
forces that are beyond her measurement. We swim
buoyantly in the sea in which, if we try to touch
bottom, we shall be drowned. Music, art, com-
panionship, owe their power to that which eludes
analysis, ''which passeth understanding." The sim-
plest pleasures have a circumference too wide to be
circumscribed by our compasses; the color of the
violet, the perfume of the rose, the flavor of the
strawberry, bring a joy beyond our measuring and
give a peace that transcends our reason, not because
it is unreasonable, but because it springs from the
same source as that from which reason comes. How
much more does the peace-giving power of truth-
seeking, right-doing, and loving envelop our under-

[145]

THE DIVINE BENEDICTION

standing; it encloses it, and consequently can not be
encompassed by it. When the lonely heart awakens
to a sense of fellowship and its isolation is enveloped
with kindred spirits; when finiteness melts into in-
finitude; when weakness feels the embrace of a love
that is omnipotent; when ignorance bows before
infinite verities, and knowledge grows large enough
to find its measureless ignorance; then that knowl-
edge is changed into the wisdom that is '' better than
riches," the ^' peace that passeth understanding."
The love that needs proving is not the love that
brings peace. The God that is understood, that can
be held in your terms and handled in my words, has
little peace-producing power; he is not God at all,
as the jargon of the creeds, the quarrels of the sects,
and the restlessness of the theologians amply prove.
Who has not felt the truth of James Martineau's
words when he said:

"Those who tell me too much about God ; who speak as
if they knew his motive and his plan in everything, who are
never at a loss to name the reason of every structure and
show the tender mercy of every event; who praise the clev-
erness of the Eternal economy, and patronize it as a mas-
terpiece of forensic ingenuity; who carry themselves
through the solemn glades of Providence with the springy
steps and jaunty air of a familiar; do but drive me by the
very definiteness of their assurance into an indefinite agony
of doubt and impel me to cry, 'Ask of me less, and I shall
give you all.' "

In all this I mean no disrespect to the inquirer.
There is no irreverence in thoughtf ulness ; I re-
member with Tennyson that ^Hhere is more faith in

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THE DIVINE BENEDICTION

honest doubt than in half the creeds." There is a
wide difference between the reverence that is touched
into life-mellowing power on the horizon line of
knowledge ; that is rooted in the subsoil of being, the
unexplored depths of experience; and that nervous
clutch of timid souls that grasp at a faith that con-
flicts with knowledge. I would not shut the eyes in
the temple lest in looking they discover blemishes in
the altar. This is superstition; that is religion. The
bigot is afraid to think; the true devotee of the nine-
teenth centry is most afraid of thoughtlessness. Not
he who distrusts the methods of reason, but he who
follows every line of investigation, finds at last all
lines melt into transcendent beauty, fade into the
hallowed mystery that is pervaded with the peace of
God. Not a sense of emptiness but of fullness re-
wards the investigator. The ^^ peace that passeth
understanding'' rests on the infinity of reality over
there, not on the finiteness of our ignorance, which
stops here.

"When doors great and small,
Nine and ninety flew ope at our touch,
Should the hundredth appall?

* * * ♦ *

"I but open my eyes, and perfection, no more and no less.
In the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is seen God
In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the
clod.

And thus looking within and around me, I ever renew
(With that stoop of the soul which in bending upraises it
too)

[147]

THE DIVINE BENEDICTION

The submission of man's nothing-perfect to God's all-com-
plete,
As by each new obeisance in spirit I climb to his feet."

Let us think more intently of these horizon
lines that *^pass our understanding/' which yield
first a beauty and then the peace of God. Thus
thinking, the world hangs together better, the uni-
verse comes out, breaks upon the soul and claims it
as its own. Short lines reveal the antagonisms of
things, the friction of ideas, the contradiction of
experiences. Long lines show things in their rela-
tions; antagonisms blend into harmonies, and the
friction becomes the result of blessed movement, the
great wheels that move in the mechanism of Divine
order. *^The world is not all in pieces, but all to-
gether," says Bartol. I believe in science, but peace
is the gift of religion; because the method of the
first is analytic, it pulls apart, it dismembers, it is in
search of differences. Eeligion — not theology, but
religion — is synthetic; it puts together, it rests in
the Infinite Unity. The words holiness and whole-
ness are related. Peace comes when we take things
in the large. It is well to know that oxygen and
hydrogen are the component parts of water, but when
our thirst is slaked, when we plunge and swim in
glad freedom, these elements blend in unquestioned
unity. Blessed be science, her work is most religious,
but it is not religion. We need the solvents in the
laboratory to test our ores, to find our metals. Let
the botanist destroy the one flower that he may bet-

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THE DIVINE BENEDICTION

ter understand the beauty of its countless companions
in the field. Let the students have now and then a
body to dissect, that the living tenement of the soul
may be better understood and appreciated. But do
not forget in any of these cases that ^'man puts
asunder what God joins together." Division is in the
thought, union is in the fact. Go in search of God
with your microscope, seek him with your telescope,
and you are pretty sure to miss him. Hold your
love, human or divine, at arm's length. Try to test it
with your little probes, and the chances are that you
will kill it altogether ; you will not find it, not because
it is so small, but because it is so great. Your tools
are the clumsy things. ^^ Canst thou by searching
find out God?" asks the old sage. No, because he is
in the search. My friend M. J. Savage sings this
truth in these exquisite lines:

"Oh, where is the Seaf the fishes cried,
As they swam the crystal clearness through,

"WeVe heard from of old of the ocean's tide,
And we long to look on the waters blue,
The wise ones speak of the infinite sea.
Oh, who can tell us if such there be?"

The lark flew up in the morning bright.
And sung and balanced on sunny wings;
And this was its song: "I see the light,
I look o'er a world of beautiful things;
But, flying and singing everywhere.
In vain I have searched to find the air."

Herbert Spencer has called his system of phil-
osophy ''synthetic." John Fiske, his ablest inter-

[149]

THE DIVINE BENEDICTION

preter, calls his work '^ Cosmic Philosophy." These
very titles prophesy great religious outcome. They
will eventually lead us not only in the '^ways of
wisdom" but into the ^^ paths of peace." The old
theologies were analytic; based on them the the-
ologians' work is still to divide; they are trying to
separate goats from sheep, heretic from Christian,
theist from atheist. This is dreary business; it
brings such small returns. The peace of God comes
not on these lines. Discordant notes become har-
monious in the distance, the hard and cruel things
to-day prove to be parts of a blessed providence ten
years from to-day. That which is a puzzle in the
life of the individual becomes a principle in the his-
tory of the race ; the blackest pages of local history are
the illuminating spots in the story of humanity.
The impassioned faith of the apostle, '^Our light
affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us
a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory,"
is the simple lesson of the scientific student of history.
Do these long lines lead us to the peace of God?
I may not know why the road is rugged, but if it
leads to the delectable mountains I will cheerfully
climb, rocks and brambles notwithstanding. If it be
true that

"By the thorn road, and none other, is the mount of vision
won,"

I am for the mount, all the same. If it be true,
''No cross, no crown," we seek the crown notwith-

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THE DIVINE BENEDICTION

standing. When I am immersed in my little troubles,
and my heart is weak with loneliness, it does help
to think how blessed have been the great troubles
of the world, how wilderness wanderings have led
to Canaan. Seven years of privations and war pre-
ceded the first century of a republic whose material
growth is paralleled by its increasing hospitality to
thought. Four years of awful battle, four millions
of emancipated slaves. How little did the Continen-
tal soldier know of the republic! How short-sighted
were the men of vision even during the last war!
Let us not begrudge tears if they fall on soul gar-
dens that bloom more beautifully for the watering.
Welcome trouble, welcome loneliness, and the inex-
pressible pain it brings, if thereby somewhere, some
time, and to somebody it brings in some fuller
measure ^'the peace of God that passeth under-
standing. ' '

I have yet touched but one end of this great
truth. We must never forget the near end of the
long line that leads to ^Hhe peace of God." The
Greek word translated ^^ peace" in my text, means
also unity, concord. This leaves large responsibility
at the small end of things. Nay, the great end of
things for you and me is the end at which we stand.
We must put ourselves in line. The horizon glories
array themselves only to the eyes that are turned
that way. Our lives are fragments of the perfect
whole; if we invert or pervert them we mar the
whole pattern. Our to-days and to-morrows are

[151]

THE DIVINE BENEDICTION

segments of eternity. As long as we think of our-
selves as objects of some special spite, as neglected
children, the unfortunate victims of bad luck, or even
that we are tortured in some special way for mere
discipline's sake, the ''peace of Grod" is not for us;
but when we realize that we are linked to Jupiter,
that the pulse in my wrist is a part of that rhythm
that causes the tides of the Atlantic to ebb and flow,
that the earthquake at Charleston was the working
of the same force that lifted the AUeghanies and
folded the geologic layers of the Rocky Mountains,
then shall we be prepared to enter into ''the peace
that passeth understanding;" then our human loves
become a part of the Divine love. When we know
that our life is engirdled with law, fortitude will
change grief into resignation and defeat into tri-
umph. If you would help a soul bear its present
sorrow, introduce it to a greater one. Put your
small grievances into their proper perspective, and
they cease to be grievances, because you have re-
moved the stumbling block. It is not the province
of religion to explain the ways of God to man, it is
not for me to apologize for the universe ; it is for us
to recognize the facts. As we discover these, religion
helps us either to bear or to change them. Would
you know the peace of God, realize that you are a
part of that infinite majesty, strive to catch now and
then a note of the heavenly melody, chant a stray
chord of the infinite harmony, remember that every-
thing beautiful springs from a beauty that is be-

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THE DIVINE BENEDICTION

hind it, every strong will rises from a strength un-
derneath, and all your loves are fed from the
fountains of infinite love. And for yourself you
may mar the beautiful or reflect it, you can either
enter into the strength or become its victim, know
the love or thwart it. We are impatient only when
we forget the infinite patience, we are petulant when
we turn away from the unresting and unhasting
stars that move in their unimpassioned orbits in
darkest nights. We are discouraged when we fail
to keep step with the solemn tramp of the genera-
tion. The wrong judgments of men hurt us not if
we remember that the balances of God are justly
poised. No thought of ours is insignificant if we
reverently cradle it in the thought of God. No plan
of ours will be abandoned if we are sure it is a part
of the infinite plan. We have a will of our own only
when we believe it to be God's will also.

A friend wrote me the other day from the heart of
the Adirondacks, sitting on the grave of John Brown :

^*It is hard to put it all together- — the human part
of it into the setting; — to think that from this cranny in
the wilderness, a man not unlike all the farmers around
went out and did the deed which begun and half won the
war, and, that deed done, was brought back here, is lying
there uner the sweet-briers on the mound, with his name
forever safe among the *mad men' of history, the heroes
and the nation shapers. Here they come, another party
just driven up from somewhere out in Sanity to see the
grave, — two of them were not born when John Brown
did it — nine hundred and forty of them so far this year. ' '

[153]

THE DIVINE BENEDICTION

Thus it is that a man's small plans reach out into
futurity, when they spring out of angel purposes;
thus it is a mortal man casts an immortal shadow.

^^The great deed ne'er grows small," and every
kind word, helpful smile, and guileless kiss, are great
deeds, and they always will make for ''the peace that
passeth understanding," such as my friend found
when the sunset glows rested upon the lowly grave
in the valley of North Elba, rimmed round by the
great mountains.

Poetry is not rhymed fancy but the higher truth,
the truth within the facts, the thought that is not
reached by thinking, the sensibility out of which
sense springs. Thus the poet is ever the truest in-
terpreter of religion. He who sees the matchless
harmony, the measureless power, and infinite delicacy
all around him, sees God, but he who feels himself
intricately dovetailed into all this, who realizes that
man is the most intimate child of all the forces of
God that play around us, knows '*the peace of God
that passeth all understanding."

"Such a starved bank of moss

Till, that May-mom,
Blue ran the flash across:
Violets were born!

"Sky — what a scowl of cloud

Till, near and far,
Ray on ray split the shroud:
Splendid, a star!

"World — how it walled about
Life with disgrace,

[154]

THE DIVINE BENEDICTION

Till God's own smile came out:
That was thy face!"

The beauty of the violet, the glory of the soli-
tary star, lead up to the fullness of the divine ten-
derness revealed in a woman's face, and this leads
us inward to seek the sources of ^Hhe peace that
passeth understanding/' The power that taught the
bird to build its nest, that surveyed the streets in
the ant-village, guides us.

"He is eyes for all who is eyes for the mole."
Restless, weak, sinful man is more than bee or bird.
That progressive teacher that instructed the wood-
pecker to excavate a home in the rotten tree ripened
in man his reason. The granite palace and the pub-
lic library are diviner mysteries than the pine tree,
as the state house is a more towering manifestation
of the invisible God than the Rocky Mountains.

"Knowest thou what wove yon woodbird's nest
Of leaves and feathers from her breast?
Or how the fish outbuilt her shell,
Painting with mom each annual cell?
Or how the sacred pine-tree adds
To her old leaves new myriads?
Such and so grew these holy piles,
Whilst love and terror laid the tiles.
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon,
As the best gem upon her zone."

The best of all this is that life enlarges and deep-
ens mostly through experience, not through the lore
of books, but by the discipline of life. God writes
his name upon the hearts of men with his own tools.

[155]

THE DIVINE BENEDICTION

As the rivulet scoops out the valley and molds the
hill-side and carves the mountain face, so the stream
of time sculptures the soul into grace and smooths
the human heart into tenderness.

One beautiful morning when the train stopped
at Falls View to give the passengers a touch of that
mighty majesty in nature, the Falls of Niagara, I
helped out an old lady, who, on her way from Nova
Scotia, was taking her first railroad ride in the
eighty-third year of her life. She was coming west,
as she cheerfully said, to die in the home of her son,
who lived at Sandwich, Illinois. He was the only
one left of the eight she had reared to manhood and
womanhood. The passengers, as is their custom, soon
fell into clusters on the brink of the precipice. There
were young women just from school, who were
profuse with their superlatives, '^most splendid,"
'^magnificent," '^ awful!" There were young men
who jumped, clapped their hands, threw up their
caps and hurrahed. The middle aged were awed into
more reverential manners, and made their comments
to one another in subdued undertones. I watched
and waited to see what powers of interpretation
eighty-three toilful and tearful years had given to
this simple soul, the venerable grandmother, the
mother of seven buried children. Aye, in vain do
we attempt to fathom the meaning of these words,
''seven buried children!" She stood silent and mo-
tionless. I watched the furrowed face, but no gleam
of emotion came to the surface. At last the bell rang,

[156]

THE DIVINE BENEDICTION

and as she turned she said, with traces of tears in her
voice, but none in her eyes — I think tears do not
readily reach the surface in the eighties — ^^ Mister,
what a deal of troubled waters is there!" and that
was all. Ah, the seething, tumbling, unceasing roar
of that outward Niagara must have started again the
memories of the still greater Niagara of life, unseen
to outward eye, unknown to all the rest of the world,
but to her tempestuous with its grief. In its stream
rebellious passions boiled; clamorous wants and
misty longings had channeled their chasms in her
heart, and more than once deafened her ears to all
other sounds.

Well hast thou interpreted, venerable grand-
mother! Sublime is the immobility secured through
the knowledge of a still greater cataract! Yes,
there is a *^deal of troubled waters'' at Niagara, but
you know of another river —

"whose waters were a torrent
Sweeping through your Ufe amain."

Farther down, the waters cease their troubling;
eddies, whirlpools, fretting isles and jutting rocks
are all passed, and even the troubled Niagara finds
peace at last in the bosom of the great ocean. Poised
and purified it rests in the arms of infinite law,

"And still it moves, a broadening flood;
And fresher, fuller grows
A sense as if the sea were near,
Toward which the river flows.

[157]

THE DIVINE BENEDICTION

"G thou, who art the secret source
That rises in each soul,
Thou art the Ocean, too, — thy charm,
That ever deepening roll!"

So in lowliest lives we find foundations for *Hhe
peace that passeth all understanding.'' In life,
in its meanest estate, besmirched with passion, dis-
traught with misplaced confidences, weakened with
unrequited loves, back of the beggarly rags of in-
ebriety, we may overhear the groans of the imprison-
ened spirit: we may detect the blush long since
retreated from the face, still haunting with its
redemptive glow some of the inner recesses of heart
and brain; so we who have already been taught that
there is that which has high uses for lowly things,
which conserves the beautiful in coarsest elements,
come back to that ''peace that passeth understand-
ing," and believe that

"warm
Beneath the veriest ash, there hides a spark of soul.
Which, quickened by love's breath, may yet pervade the

whole
O' the gray, and, free again, be fire."

Then, in common with the noblest prophets of
all religion, we shall have a growing faith in the
possibilities of human nature, a deep confidence that
underneath all sin there lies the God-like essence in
man; and in the face of all the horrid facts of the
police-court and the prison, the wretched abuse of
human confidence, the brutal staining of human
innocence, we will believe that

[158]

THE DIVINE BENEDICTION

"a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;
That what began best can't end worst,
Nor what God blessed once prove accurst."

Yes, the faithful dog that asks for our sympa-
thetic pat upon its head, the child that nestles in
your lap, the man whose arm lovingly sustains you,
the woman whose lips are graciously tendered you to
kiss, — these little threads of celestial origin weave
for us heavenly garments, and our dear, earthly
loves become celestial by-ways beyond our under-
standing. God's own love comes to us through the
lowliest door, and the arms of the Eternal embrace
us in the babe's clasp.

Still we climb, and still the divine benedic-
tion salutes us, embosoms us. If science ever melts
into a sense of infinite reality, if highest intelli-
gence kneels in devout confession of ignorance, if the
shyest human love knows no boundaries between it
and the love of God, how surely will the high en-
deavor of conscience land us at the feet of Omnipo-
tence, and give us ''the peace of God that passeth
all understanding"! Follow duty, if you would know
the Christ-like calm in the presence of wrong ; follow
duty if you would change resentment into patience,
resistance into forgiveness. Duty is the great moun-
tain road to God. ''When we cease to long for per-
fection, corruption sure and speedy leads from life
to death," says William Morris. He who does not
turn a willing ear to the voice of conscience will soon

[159]

THE DIVINE BENEDICTION

miss the divine on every hand. Music, poetry, paint-
ing, sculpture, science, one after the other will
silently close their doors in the face of him who does
not seek the right. The ''peace of God'' shines most
visibly on the brow of the brave. See it when
Abraham Lincoln strikes the schackles from off human
limbs. See it make noble the great Gladstone as he
stands up in the face of centuries of wrong to plead
for the right of those who fail to exact it for them-
selves. Do your duty, else no knowledge, beauty or
love will ever lead you to the peace of God. He
who says, ' ' 1 may not be great ; I may miss all peace,
but I will be true,'' stands at the altar from which
the divine benediction is ever pronounced.

Lastly. Following the quest for the divine bene-
diction, even what the blessed old book calls the
''last enemy" turns out to be no enemy after all, but
a friend. Chastened lives are better than merry
ones ; earnest souls are more needed than happy ones.
Somehow beyond my understanding I am sure that
peace is the reward of that chastened life. I love this
earth and the life rooted therein, its sunshine and
its flowers, its dear terrestrial loves and its high ter-
restrial duties, and it is tragic to sever these ties.
But on the horizon line I feel sure that the tragedy
melts into tenderness, that on the death-heights there
lies repose, and even on battle days there is peace
beyond the clouds. The tears we shed at the grave
may drop on celestial fields and may help grow the

[ 160 ]

THE DIVINE BENEDICTION

grain we fain would garner here. What we must
leave undone here may be the better done there.

"On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven the perfect
round.''

Once, when I had tried to say something like
this in a sermon, a listener came to me with a grate-
ful but disappointed face, saying: ^'I believe it's
true, all true, but how is one to feel it? I can not
see it ; what can I do to see it ? " I could only reply :
^*We can only catch glimpses of it now and here.
Only on rare truth-seeing and truth-telling moments
will the apparently conflicting lines combine in the
higher unity.'' My listener's solicitations reminded
me of that one day that was given me to taste Alpine
delights, one little day out of a life-time into which
the anticipations and dreams of years gone were
to be compressed, and out of which the recollections
of years were to be drawn. Of course I was out of
bed long before day-light, because I had but one day
to do that for which the complacent sleepers around
me had weeks and months. I began the day by going
in search of that mighty work of Thorwaldsen, the
most impressive product of the chisel I have ever seen
or expect to see. I traced its lines on the solid rock
in the first gray of early dawn, and then hastened to
catch the first boat on Lake Lucerne that was to leave
me at Waggis, for I was to make the top of Rigi by
the right of climbing. I disdained an elevated rail-
way. It was a cold, foggy, threatening morning.

[161]

THE DIVINE BENEDICTION

The captain shook his head as he tried to tell me in
broken English that Eigi had not unveiled its glory
for five days. I began the ascent expecting to be
contented with the fatigue of the climb, though no
view were given me. I had the fog, and, part of the
way, the rain all to myself; bits of near ruggedness
tantalized and detained me, but no distant glories,
no mountain vistas, were possible.

I could hear the tinkling of cow-bells in deep
chasms below me into which I could not look, and
occasionally the call of goat-herds came from the
heights above me where I could not see. Near sur-
prises constantly delighted me ; here and there I was
helped and touched inexpressibly by the wayside
shrines erected for the encouragement of the herders
who sought the uplands for their pasturage, long be-
fore those heights were sought for their beauty. In
those foggy, enveloped fastnesses I was as good a
Catholic as any one. The crude art, the rustic image
of Mary, the weather-eaten crucifix were bathed in
reverence, redolent with a piety that was as much
mine as of those who reared them centuries ago,
and who to-day claim exclusive monopoly of the
symbolism. After a while I got a glass of goat's
milk and a piece of black bread from a mountaineer,
in lieu of the breakfast I did not stop to eat; and
still I climbed. The fog was so dense at times that
I could scarcely see the slender trail a few yards
ahead of me. Two hours and a half, three hours,
and still no break in the clouds. The dampness had

[162]

THE DIVINE BENEDICTION

reached through my clothing, the spirit was growing
chilly as well as the body. I heard voices above me.
They were talking English ; they were coming toward
me; they were descending, cross and disappointed;
they advised me to turn around and go down with
them. They laughed at my persistence in keeping
on, for had they not been up there two days and two
nights, and was it not darker this morning than it
had been at all ? But this was my one day. I would
make an Alpine summit, though no vision was
granted. Another half hour of fog and the mist
relented a little. Again I could hear voices away
above me; I was approaching one of the inns on the
way. Suddenly I came upon a very little boy crying
piteously. His herd of a dozen goats with distended
udders would not be driven up the hill to be milked.
While he was driving or pulling one a few yards up-
ward, another in search of a neglected tuft of grass
would with her nimble feet descend the crag up which
he had driven her with so much labor. I tried to
speak a kind word to him, but my English made him
cry all the harder, and when I tried my German on
him he screamed, and, to tell the truth, his crying
made me think that our feelings were very much
alike. I wanted to cry from sheer loneliness and
disappointment. Fortunately my English frightened
the goats as well as the boy. Not feeling good for
anything else, I was glad to become goat-herd, and
so I drove them right royally, while the small boy
followed ungraciously a long way behind, as if still

[163]

THE DIVINE BENEDICTION

suspicious of the sanity of one who could not talk
better than I could. A warmer glow came into the
atmosphere, things assumed more definite outline, the
little mountain station was revealing itself above me.
Panting and out of breath, I sat down to rest on a
big rock. After a few moments I turned to look for
the boy; when, lo! there they stood all before me,
about me, above me, the entire system of the Bernese
Alps — Pilatus, the Wetterhorn, the Glarnisch — a
hundred and twenty miles of them, like a line of
white-hooded nuns kneeling at prayer, and —

"O'er night's brim day boiled at last,
Boiled pure gold o'er the cloud-cup's brim,
Where spirting and suppressed it lay.

* * * * * m

Forth one wavelet, then another, curled.
Till the whole sunrise, not to be suppressed,
Rose-reddened, and its seething breast
Flickered in bounds, grew gold, then overflowed
the world."

Such is the answer I would make to the friend
who asks to be shown the unity that over-arches all
our discord, who begs for the revelation which would
bring the ''peace that passeth all understanding."
Life is a short day's climbing; mists and rain en-
velop us. Often we toil up expecting small returns,
doubting at times the existence of mountain ranges,
content at last to become humble herders of a few
goats, perchance. Then suddenly the simple task is
overtaken with a glad surprise. A halt, an unex-

[164]

THE DIVINE BENEDICTION

pected turn, and a revelation breaks upon us, and
then our years stand around draped in white, capped
with Alpine splendors, and the whiteness of their
peaks is not miracle or dogma, not creed, sect or text,
not the hope of heaven or the fear of hell, not a devil
overcome or a distant God reconciled by the vicarious
flow of a Savior's blood; but the celestial common-
places of earthly duties and human privileges; a
mother's love, a father's manly care, the love of
home and children, the heart ties, soft as silk but
strong as iron, that either bind us to God, or mangle
and cripple us, as we heed or defy them. These bring
us the ^* peace of God which passeth all understand-
ing," and, to complete the thought of the text gar-
rison our hearts and our thoughts in the ideal, the
Christ Jesus of the soul.

[165]

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