,8V
91826
CAVEN LIBRARY
JHOX COLLEGE
FORQNTO
The
Second Mile
HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK
Whosoever shall compel thee to
go wne mile, go with him two
GROSSET & DUNLAP
Publishers :: New York
By arrangement with Association Press
CM LIBRARY
BOX
TORONTO
Copyright, 1908, by
The International Committee of
Young Men s Christian Associations
Printed in the United States of America
The Second Mile
HEN lago says about
Desdemona that " she
holds it a vice in her
goodness not to do more
than is requested," he lays his dis
criminating finger on a trait of char
acter not ordinarily worked up in the
systems of ethics. Nowhere does he
better justify his own comment on
himself, " I am nothing if not criti
cal." And it is precisely this trait of
character on which lago with his dev
ilish ingenuity lighted for his evil pur
pose, that Jesus made the crown of
the moral life. The distinctively
Christian quality is to hold it a vice
in our goodness not to do more than
is requested.
Indeed, when it comes down to do
ing the bare stint of requirement, and
The Second Mile
nothing more, Jesus calls that " un
profitable." When he describes the
servants who, after their day s work
in the field, wait upon their lord at
supper, he takes obvious satisfaction
in the paradox that, though they have
fulfilled their obligations from plow
ing in the morning to serving at night,
they deserve no thanks at all. Lest
his disciples should doubt the appli
cation, he says distinctly and peremp
torily, " Even so ye also, when ye shall
have done all the things that are com
manded you, say, We are unprofit
able servants; we have done that
which it was our duty to do. " Not
until a man s willingness overflows
his obligation, so that what he has
to do is seen as a segment in the cir
cle of what he would be willing to do,
does he become what Jesus would
call profitable nor even what Shake
speare would count worthy a character
like Desdemona.
Now, when the Sermon on the
Mount faces us with those strict and
startling injunctions to give coat and
The Austere Truth
cloak when a coat is wanted, or to
take two blows when one is offered,
or to travel two miles when but one
is compulsory injunctions that are
either stark nonsense or supernally
divine sense we are manifestly deal
ing with a dramatic presentation of
this favorite and characteristic truth
of Jesus, that only an unstinted will
ingness to do more than anyone can
ask makes possible a liberal and Chris
tian character.
To be sure, he stated his truth in an
austere and formidable way. His fig
ures of speech startle us with their
severe requirements, and to those who
first heard them they must have been
bewildering in their difficulty. When
Jesus said, " Whosoever shall compel
thee to go one mile, go with him.
two," a concrete picture rose before
his Jewish audience, a hateful picture
of a Roman soldier, under the sanc
tion of his military law, compelling
a Jew to the defiling business of carry
ing his burden for a mile. To hear
this new Rabbi say that under such
3
The Second Mile
compulsion a Jew should be willing to
go two must have clashed with the
Jewish temper, as it would with the
American. This sounded like gratu
itous surrender of a man s just rights.
This looked like generosity gone to
seed. And any hearer, knowing the
history of that Roman word " an-
gario," whose Aramaic equivalent
Jesus doubtless used when he said
"compel," must have found acquies
cence in Jesus command even more
unreasonable. As though it were the
badge of tyranny, that word had been
handed down by the Persian Empire
to the Greek, and by the Greek to the
Roman, and from the beginning it had
stood for military power to impress
into unwilling service all men or
horses whose help the soldiery de
sired. The word was saturated with
the hatefulness of age-long tyranny.
The unrelenting visages of Persian
satraps, Greek governors, and Roman
generals were conjured up by its
ominous sound, and Jesus injunc
tion to superabundant willingness was
4
Roman Law Unrepealed
made by its use to seem impossibly
difficult.
Nevertheless, the aptitude of the
principle to our experience is obvious
at least in this regard, that while the
old military empires long since have
gone and Roman soldiers no longer
draft into grudging service, compul
sion, as a permanent factor in human
life, remains. Whether we face it
Jesus way or not, we must face it
somehow. We do have our Roman
couriers that light upon us trudging
our chosen path and, whether we will
or no, take us along with them. The
word " must " belongs in our lives as
truly as in any Jew s forced into serv
ice by an imperial messenger.
Young folk, like rollicking colts in
a lush meadow, have preeminently
the sense of freedom, but no colt ever
pranced far without coming to a fence.
One of the signs of dawning matur
ity appears when this first conscious
ness of liberty gives place to per
ception of limitations, to insight into
the compelling power of necessity*
5
The Second Mile
to audience that often hears the mag
isterial words " You must ! " The
body says " Must " ; the demands of
social life say " Must " ; the necessi
ties of business say " Must " ; at every
other milestone we meet a courier to
impress us into service. Like springs,
bubbling up in a first ecstasy of un
fettered freedom, but soon finding that
every brook has its banks, so men out
of the youthful sense of unrestricted
liberty flow into a life-course, held in
on either side by unescapable neces
sities. Sooner or later every man
finds his boundaries, and while poets
may sing their songs of pathos over
the fact, practical people have a more
serious problem: to find out, that is,
how a man ought to face life s com
pulsions, in what attitude of mind and
spirit he should meet the " Must " of
the world. And Jesus said, " Who
soever shall compel thee to go one
mile, go with him two." At first
sight that is about the strangest
prescription for the trouble a man
could well imagine. It proceeds upon
6
A Plant Parable
the homoeopathic principle that "like
things cure like," and would drive
out the poison of a disease by in
jecting more of the same kind. If
you are compelled to go one mile, of
your own free will go two, it says,
and so defeat the malice of the ne
cessity by voluntarily going it one
better.
Indeed, it is clear that if the earth
should say to two plants in a garden,
" You must grow," and if one plant
should accept the bare necessity, and
sullenly grow its stint and no more,
that would be slavish business with
no glory in it. But if its companion
should say : " It is my delight to
grow! Come on, O Earth, with all
your bounty! You say I must grow,
but lo! I am twice as willing as you
are to make me ! " that would be a
free plant, with worth and distinction
in its growing. It is found true at
even a cursory glance that the sting
of compulsion is gone when a man is
twice as willing to act as necessity is
to make him.
7
The Second Mile
Now among all the ways in which
we feel the Roman hand upon our
shoulder, none is more unescapable
than the compulsion of time. This is
the most inevitable of all inevitable
things. Tie what you will to the tail
of the seconds, they are sublimely in
different to your hindrances. If you
watch the passing days closely, you
find a tyrannic oppression in their
noiseless and unceasing march. The
Valley of Ajalon where the sun stands
still and the retreating shadow on
Ahaz s dial have long vanished into
the limbo of the eternally lost. When
in Congress the sergeant moves back
the hands of the government clock,
making an artifice of time to pass the
last bills in, he must do it with a sar
donic grin, for he knows what a futile
fraud he is perpetrating on the sun,
and how the constellations laugh at
him. This slow inevitableness of
time is a small matter indeed to the
youth, but it puts compulsion on a
man not easy to be glad about. So
Jesus said to Peter, " When thou wast
8
Fretful Man
young thou girdedst thyself and
wentest whither thou wouldst, but
when thou shalt be old another shall
gird thee and carry thee where thou
wouldst not."
How men rebel against this un-
evadable fatality ! How they fret over
declining powers, and grudgingly sub
mit to limitation, like free lakes
poured into narrowing canyons and
tumbling upon themselves in fury!
Because men take it so, because they
enter their cramped confines with
such ill grace, they make sorry busi
ness out of age, with never a touch
of Rabbi Ben Ezra s mellow and ra
diant spirit:
" Grow old along with me,
The best is yet to be;
The last of life for which the first
was made ! "
Rabbi Ben Ezra had the spirit of the
second mile. His years were no less
implacable in their compulsion and
his limitations no less carking than is
9
The Second Mile
the lot of other men, but he could see
in both years and limitations
" Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent;
Try thee and turn thee forth
Sufficiently impressed."
And whenever you seek the secret of
this kind of age, you will not fail to
find a man who has gone the second
mile; who has faced time and said,
" O Time, you are a stern fellow,
but you have a godlike power of
beauty in you. You can make souls
deep and rich and fruitful, as you
make old violins musical with the
stored-up melodies of years; as you
make old wine perfect with the ripe
ness of long generations. You say
that I must go this mile with you,
but I am wise enough to look upon
my necessities as though they were
my luxuries, and I will go with you so
willingly that men shall learn from
me to say anew, * The hoary head is a
crown of glory ! " The more one
10
The Elemental Must
considers it, the more it is clear that
when a man must go one mile, the
only spirit that can save his soul from
bitterness is the willingness to go
two.
There is another Roman also, who
levies his draft upon us, and that is
the Roman of work. Underneath
every other practical necessity, is this
elemental " must " of the breadwin
ner: and unless a man has been so
hapless as to receive a legacy, youth s
heaviest handicap, he needs no one to
tell him what an inexorable master
this necessity is. Now this compul
sion, which sooner or later most men
are sure to encounter, may be faced
in one of two ways. If he will, a man
may accept it doggedly and go about
the demanded labor like the Sultan s
Janizaries under the lash. He may
take work as an unfortunately neces
sary part of life, and let himself be
beaten to it by the cat-o -nine-tails in
the hand of Need. He may skimp-
ingly perform the bare requirements
and, hating his taskmaster as a ran-
ii
The Second Mile
corous old Jew hated a Roman cour
ier, may bitterly trudge that one scant
mile, as unwilling as Bryant s " quar
ry-slave at night scourged to his dun
geon." That is one way to face the
necessity of work and thousands of
men with their eyes on the clock are
working that way to-day. Or if he
will, a man may rise to the measure
of Antonio Stradivari, in George El
iot s poem, and say of his humblest
daily tasks what Stradivari said about
his violins:
" 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."
Whenever a man glorifies his work
in that way he has gone the second
mile; he has translated duty into
privilege. He has seen that while
God supplies quarries he never carves
12
My Work My Friend
statues or piles cathedrals save by the
hand of a man; he has perceived that
the earth was not built like Aladdin s
Palace, by magic spells for lazy oc
cupancy, but is an unfinished world
into which men are ushered in time
to bear a part in its completion; and
he has reached the dignity of believ
ing that every honest piece of work
is cooperation with God in building
the universe. Such a man can fol
low the Master s word and can give
glad welcome to the necessity of
work, as it accosts him on the road.
He can say, and mean it too, " O
Work, you are my best friend in dis
guise. God sent you to me. You come
with a stern face, but your heart is
full of strength and courage and good
cheer. You demand that I travel with
you that one hard mile? Then, my
task, doff that scowl, for to the limit
of my strength I am twice as willing
to work as you are to make me."
Work, greeted like that, loses the
frown of compulsion and begins to
smile. When a man works that way
13
The Second Mile
because he thinks it is his Father s
business, feels that it is his meat and
drink to do the will of him that sent
him, wishes there were more hours in
the day than twenty-four, and dreams
of Heaven as a place where a man
can work all the time at his best and
never be tired all the slavery of work
has vanished for such a man and he
and his task, good friends, walk arm
in arm, and will be sorry when the
second mile is done. It looks as
though Jesus were right, after all.
The way to avoid the slavishness of
necessity is of your own accord to be
willing, if possible, to do more than is
demanded. The first mile alone is
drudgery. The glory comes with the
second mile!
Another kind of compulsion faces
every man in some degree the com
pulsion of limiting circumstances and
restricted powers that shut him up to
narrow and obscure activities. There
are more people than perhaps we
think, whose aspirations for preemi
nence have been snuffed to a smoul-
Jail Limits
der. Some aspired to be musicians,
some authors, others teachers, preach
ers, missionaries; they had perhaps
to start with talents equal to their
dreams; but the thwarting circum
stance, the broken health gradually
closed them in and shortly they found
themselves hedged around, with a
stern Roman peremptorily saying,
" You must live your lives here ! "
We all face this one way or another.
If not the external circumstance, it is
that unescapable limitation of our
own individuality, the most vexatious
handicap of all. For a man to accept
himself and start with only one talent,
if God has not given him ten, is dif
ficult business. " Das verdammte
Ich," cried Goethe, and we all know
what he meant.
Some one has compared man to an
actor able to play many roles but re
stricted to one; and any virile man,
facing the fascinating opportunities
of the world s work and feeling the
latent possibility of many accomplish
ments and ministries, knows that the
15
The Second Mile
necessity of choosing one role, or hav
ing it thrust upon him, of playing
that and not another, is no less tyran
nic than a Roman courier to a Jew.
Other compulsions may be more
grievous to a feeble man, but to the
nobler character it is the limitation
of life s possible investment that
presses hardest. He wants the whole
farm and is confident that he could
farm it, but lo ! this small garden plot
with a hedge all around.
Now one solution of the problem
is both popular and easy. He may
raise his little crop of vegetables in
that narrow garden plot and sit down
in bitterness behind his hedge to eat
them. He may look over his meager
boundaries at the bigger farms of
stronger men and envy their more ex
tensive operations. He may take his
spite out by a cynical disparagement
of the whole business of living any
how, or he may wax melodramatic
with Henley and talk about his head
being " bloody but unbowed." He
may even assume the Titanic pose and
16
The Titanic Pose
grandiloquently dare high heaven, de
claiming like Thompson in his " City
of Dreadful Night,"
" I vow
That not for all Thy power, furled or
unfurled,
For all the temples to Thy glory built,
Would I assume the ignominious
guilt
Of having made such men in such a
world ! "
In a word, he may incarnate the one-
mile spirit and grow surly, rebellious
and morose within his narrow hedges.
If, however, that does not seem a
knightly attitude, there appears no
alternative short of Jesus way, who
evidently would have us say about
this same meager plot, " Well, it is
not much to start with, but, O Roman
of Necessity, you need not think that
I am going to do only what you com
mand, merely live here and raise
enough to eat. I am going to make
this little place so beautiful that pas-
17
The Second Mile
sers-by will stop to enjoy it. It is not
large, but fair flowers grow in small
places. You require me to live here,
but I will go twice as far as that. I
will not only live here, but I will make
it worth while living here; and these
very hedges which you say must al
ways bind me in, I will husband until
they are as fragrant as English haw-
thorne or Scotch heather, and people
who cried, What cruel limitations !
shall yet say, What a beautiful
hedge! "
History loves to record the names
of men who conquered the malice of
their fate by this spirit of the second
mile men like the old Greek chosen
in a joke to be town scavenger, who
filled the office with such high service-
ableness that thereafter in all Greece
the office was an honor ; men like blind
Huber becoming the great scientist,
or blind Fawcett becoming Postmas
ter-General of England; men like
Cervantes using an imprisonment to
begin " Don Quixote," or Bunyan
glorifying Bedford Jail with the " Pil-
18
The Most of It
grim s Progress " ; men of the spirit
of those four marines from the Brit
ish ship " Wager " of whom Steven
son tells us, who, compelled to remain
on a desert island because the lifeboat
could hold no more, stood on the shore
and gave three cheers when the boat
pulled off with a " God save the
King ! " for a tiger. These men his
tory delights to honor, for, in the end,
time endorses God s evaluations. And
where in humbler expressions this
same spirit of the second mile is
found, as when the young woman
wrote her friend out of her invalid-
ism, " At first I thought somehow to
make the best of it, but now I am
planning how to make the most of it,"
every man with a heart for chivalry
pays homage. These folk of the more
abundant willingness travel with us
the first hard mile of compulsion, but
they make it beautiful with the sec
ond mile of consecration. That bare
compulsion, taken alone, is grim, but
when we rise to say " I will make
my narrow boundaries a garden of
19
The Second Mile
the Lord where he may walk as he
did in Eden in the cool of the day,"
the cruel necessity glows with a di
vine meaning, and a glory appears in
the limited life the glory of the sec
ond mile.
When we carry this principle out
from the realm of such inevitable ne
cessities as time and work and per
sonal limitation, into the sphere of
moral obligation, its applicability be
comes all the more clear. Some things
are sternly demanded of men by the
regulations of the social life. The for
mal obligations of the marriage cov
enant, for example, can be enforced.
There is an irreducible minimum of
duty which Public Opinion insists on
expecting from wives and husbands,
parents and children. Like some old
Roman, the Social Conscience, some
times speaking with the voice of legal
enactment, comes to every one of us,
and says of the absolutely necessary
duties of family relationship, " You
must do these things."
There are households, moreover,
20
The One-mile Home
where this minimum marks the outer
boundary within which the whole life
of the family moves. They do just as
much as they have to do and no more.
The household is run in the spirit with
which a miser pays taxes. Any over
flow of spontaneous love, any volun
teering of surplus kindliness is un
known. They keep the prohibitions
of the law, and look for a home to
come of it, like Gasparoni, the Italian
bandit who hoped for heaven because
he had never committed murder on
Friday. They are one-mile folk and
they make a one-mile home.
But it is the unnecessary courtesies,
the unexpected presents brought from
the city, the uncalled-for thoughtful-
ness of lovers, the surprises of kind
liness over and above what can be
required this superabundance makes
a real home. Here the difference
lies between a parent and a father;
between progeny and sons; between
a housewife and a mother. Let a
housewife be never so faithful about
her tasks, determined to do them well,
21
The Second Mile
with resolution keeping the home
neat, the children well provided; yet
any man who has had a real mother
knows at once that such description
leaves the glory out. The real mother
did her duties too, but there was
something more a radiance that
glowed through her simple tasks like
a quiet dawn in summer, an ampleness
of love as though she moved in realms
where rules had been forgotten, that
made her human affection liberal like
the love of the Eternal God. Her
ministries could not be so common
place as to let you utterly escape the
secret influence of the fact that with
unsearchable desire she had prayed for
you first. Her spirit was greater than
her deeds and suffused them; and as
you remember her now, you think not
so much of her particular ministries
as of that unwearied willingness to
overpass all boundaries in loving you.
The last thing you can ever forget is
that luminous tenderness which, like
God s sunshine on the just and the
unjust, sought you out in whatsoever
22
Surplus Tenderness
merit or demerit you might be, to find
you as Christ found the world, not
that he might condemn it, but that
the world through him might be saved.
All true mothers live in the spirit of
the second mile.
Like the Word of God brooding
over chaos and making a world of it,
this surplus tenderness creates homes
out of households. There are few
things more pathetic than a one-mile
family, but the crown of all human
relationships and the hope of the coun
try is the two-mile home, where al
ways " the cup runneth over."
What this principle of Jesus does,
then, when applied to our moral life,
is clear. It divides a man s conduct
into two parts, the compulsory and
the voluntary, the things he must do
and the things he chooses to do, the
first mile and the second. It says,
moreover, that only as the voluntary
overspreads and saturates the neces
sary can life cease to be slavery and
come to its full meaning of dignity
and value. There is an essential no-
23
The Second Mile
bility that belongs only to the soul
who can say with Jesus, " No man
taketh my life from me. I lay it down
of myself." Until willingness over
flows obligation, men fight as con
scripts instead of following the flag as
patriots.
Now, with reference to this spirit
of the second mile, men are divided
into well-defined classes, of which the
lowest are clearly those miserable folk
who like Shylock are forever after
their rights. Their attitude toward
men is that of a collector seeking pay
ment on protested bills. They are spe
cialists in the exaction of what is due
them. They interpret duty as a cus
toms officer does to mean not what
he owes men, but what men owe him.
Such men reveal themselves by their
instinctive attitude toward clearly stat
ed moral obligations, such as, "Thou
shalt not bear false witness against
thy neighbor." Facing this command,
some will cry, desiring all their rights,
" Is my neighbor, then, bearing false
witness against me ? " and some will
24
Privilege First
search their souls with the question
of duty, "Am I bearing false witness
against my neighbor?" Rights or
duties, you can interpret any com
mandment either way, and it is the
relative emphasis a man places here
that measures the first stage in his
character building. Not till duty looms
larger than rights is a man truly mor
al. But neither the one nor the
other is the test of Christian char
acter. Christianity begins when the
sense of privilege in service becomes
greater than both rights and duties.
For us to be Christian is to be more
willing to serve a man than he is to
demand it; to go the second mile; to
forgive seventy times seven; to pray
on our Calvaries for the men who put
us there; to act, that is, as no one has
the right to require of us, and to feel
about it all that our meat and drink
are to do the will of him that sent us.
The essential word of Christianity is
love and that means superabundant
willingness to help. A man becomes
really Christian when the sense of joy
25
The Second Mile
in ministry overflows both rights and
duties and submerges them.
And just here is the real worth of
the moral life. So long as Words
worth sings Duty, " Stern Daughter
of the Voice of God," he is but on the
threshold of the matter. It is only
when he rises in his climax to say:
" Yet thou dost wear
The Godhead s most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face:
Flowers laugh before thee on their
beds
And fragrance in thy footing treads,"
only then has he come to the heart
of it. Duty is never worthily done
until it is performed by a man who
loves it so that he would gladly do
more if he could. Some men say of
their duties, "I must"; some men
say, " I ought " ; some men say, " I
want to, let me at it." These are the
three tones of life. One man is the
slave of his necessities; one, the grim
26
Duty and Duty
moralist doing his duty; one, the man
of an abounding sense of privilege in
life, who feels all blessings large with
God s favor, all trials meaningful with
purpose, all duty a glorious preroga
tive. Though the gross output of
moral living may seem in each case
to be the same, these lives are not of
one spiritual family. A duty done
grudgingly and the same duty done
willingly are after all not the same.
All sense of compulsion and of obli
gation is only underground founda
tion for the real temple, whose altar-
song is forever, " I delight in the law
of the Lord."
As the real worth of the moral life
lies in this attitude of more abundant
willingness, so the whole joy of the
moral life lies there too. It is because
of their unwillingness to go the sec
ond mile that men make such desper
ate labor out of going the first. When
Paul finds himself with his hard road
to travel an arduous journey all the
way from the midnight escape at Da
mascus to the headsman s axe at Rome
27
The Second Mile
he does not, like the lesser souls,
spoil it by desiring to go half instead.
" I must " is alien from his spirit ; " I
ought," an occasional but not domi
nant tone ; " Thanks be to God who
counted me worthy, appointing me to
be his minister," that is Paul s over
flowing zeal which took the sting from
the first mile s obligation. If a friend
ask a favor, saying, " I have a right
to demand that as a friend," and you
reply, " Man, stop talking about
rights. I am more willing to make
that sacrifice than you are to ask me,"
by that you have transformed obliga
tion from drudgery to privilege. So
Paul wrote to Philemon, making re
quest of service from him, and said,
"Without thy mind I would do noth
ing, that thy goodness should not be
as of necessity, but of free will " ; and
thereby he suggested the only way
to find joy in duty. The penurious
moralist stingily expending himself
no farther than the law requires, is a
pitifully sad fellow, who has never
learned that it is hard work serving
28
Our Stewardship
as a drafted man in a battle you would
like to avoid, but that it is glorious
business fighting as a volunteer for
a cause you love.
There are a thousand little ways in
which we can put this to the test: If
we have money and are pestered by
requests for its expenditure, what a
cure for impatience to recognize that
it is more to our interest to have our
stewardship rightly accomplished than
it can be to any other man s, so that
even if we cannot give to a particular
cause we can send the petitioner away
with the feeling that we were more
willing to give than he was to ask us!
If we have talents and are worn
threadbare by the continual demands
upon us, what a cure for the require
ment s malice to know that it is more
to our interest to do all the good we
can than it can be to any other man s
and so to meet each request with a
willingness to do even more if we are
able. Any child knows the magic of
this divine remedy if he has ever
dragged his reluctant feet toward the
29
The Second Mile
berry patch under orders to pick two
quarts, and then has solved the prob
lem of his uncomfortable duty by cry
ing, "What fun! I ll surprise the
family by picking four ! " Drudgery
is all redeemed by that.
When a man, however, attempts
this attitude toward all the duties of
his life, tries to make it the solvent
for his moral drudgeries, he finds that
reasonably to be more than willing to
do all he ought to do, so that his vol
unteering outruns the demands of men
upon him, implies a view of life that
taxes the limit of his faith. A man
can say, " I must " in atheism ; he can
say, " I ought " in bare morality ; but
to say " I want to " as though there
were a great privilege in living, as
though it " means intensely and means
good/ as though purpose were there
because the world had been thought
through and willed through and loved
through by a Father, as though des
tinies were ahead in which the mean
ings of all sacrifice would come to
their apocalypse in glory " exceeding
30
Whom I Serve
abundant above all we can ask or
think" that means a religious view
of the world. Only when a man be
lieves that there is a Person to receive
our consecration, whose service is per
fect freedom, and whose love con-
straineth to that noblest motive for all
duty doing, the gratitude of love to
One who loved us first; only then can
he reasonably feel the more abundant
willingness in sacrificial service. If
there is some one able to "keep that
which we commit unto him," so that
nothing is ever wasted, no serviceable
deed, no love, no aspiration, but
" All we have willed or hoped or
dreamed of good shall exist,
Not its semblance, but itself,"
then we can say, "I want to." Only
the man of Christian faith, who sees
the Eternal God mirrored in the char
acter and purposes of Christ can rea
sonably accept the privilege of Chris
tian service. A man can stumble the
first mile almost anyhow, but no man
The Second Mile
can travel the second mile without
God!
Indeed here we enter the very Holy
of Holies of religious living. As the
spirit of the second mile so inevitably
demands the Christian God to make
it reasonable, so the same spirit is the
best interpreter of the life which such
a God inspires. To many people re
ligious living is an affair of negative
prohibitions, and they walk in the
presence of God like an embarrassed
courtier at the salon of Louis XIV,
conscious chiefly of what they must not
do. Their righteousness is exhausted
in what they refrain from. " They
are just as good as trying not to be
bad can make them." Or if a man has
graduated from this idea of God as a
Sinaitic Lawgiver, who spends his odd
moments checking up the accounts of
folk who have transgressed his prohi
bitions, he may still conceive religious
living as a matter of positive rules
and regulations, ceremonial and moral,
whose observance is the whole of
duty. This man is the kind of char-
32
Celestial Credit
acter who stereotypes his courtesy
into a list of memorized rules, who
keeps account of his good deeds and
bad deeds by number and charts them
at night, who figures his hopes of
heaven by the balance of credit on the
celestial ledger, and who so punctil
iously goes his round of the com
mandments that his friends would
offer a hecatomb if only the man
would do a single impulsive and hearty
deed, were it even to be guilty of
spontaneous sin. Whichever way he
goes at it, negatively or positively,
this man is the legalist, living by rule
the man of the one-mile spirit living
the one-mile life.
It was in escaping from this legalism
that Paul said he became a Christian.
No man is really a Christian until he
has escaped it. If a boy, adopted into
a strange home, and unruly in his new
surroundings, should perforce be given
a set of regulations which he must ob
serve, he might become more orderly,
but he would hardly by that alone
become a true son. But if some day
33
The Second Mile
the love of the father or mother should
be persuasively revealed to him, so
that the love that had been there al
ways laid masterful hold on him, and
his love, newly born, should spring
up in answer, flooding his spirit with
its loyalty, and if, knowing the new
life in him, he should take the rules
and tear them up, saying " Because
I love you I will do all these and much
more beside," then a true son would
have been begotten. He would have
been " born again." " If ye love me, ye
WILL keep my commandments," said
Jesus and this statement of inevitable
consequence is summed up in Paul s
sublime word, " Love is the fulfilling
of the law." Apart from love a man
cannot keep so many rules or do so
many deeds as to make himself a
Christian. "If I give all my goods
to feed the poor and have not love,"
said Paul, " it profiteth me nothing ! "
This does not mean the destruction of
the moral law; it means that the
Christian life so far outruns the moral
law, so far overflows commandment
34
Law the Molehill
with compassionate willingness to
serve, that rules of conduct are to its
wide domain what the obligations of
a civil marriage ceremony would be
to the love of Robert Browning and
Elizabeth Barrett. They would keep
the contract as one would walk over
a molehill in climbing a mountain!
Love does all that the commandments
say, and counts that the mere begin
ning. Love is not love until it has
forgotten rules. The Christian s
" royal law " fulfils all lesser laws like
the Atlantic flowing into the Bay of
Fundy when the sky calls to the tide.
Nor does this mean that conduct is
to be left to the unregulated expres
sion of a compassionate heart. A man
may be in spirit truly courteous and
still need instruction in the conven
tions of society. Love in the soul does
not make inevitable a judicious and
intelligent expression. So the old
proverb has it that " the chief business
of the wise is undoing the mistakes
made by the good." It is the prime
thing to be courteous and kindly at
35
The Second Mile
heart, but important, too, to make the
outer symbol truly signify the inner
reality. " What is the use of being
gold, if you look like brass ? " is only
partly true, but that part is of conse
quence. The love of God may be
shed abroad in our hearts and still
through ignorance that love s expres
sion may be indiscreet and mischie
vous. While the primary matter,
therefore, is that the branches abide
in the vine, the trellis of command
ment is a needful device that the fruit
shall have guidance in normal growth.
Nevertheless the trellis alone is so fu
tile, and the training of a live vine so
easy as compared with getting fruit
from a dead one, that the necessity of
the trellis should not blind us to the
main issue which is the vital junction
of the branch and vine. Moral instruc
tion in details of conduct must never
hide the fundamental matter, that there
is no Christianity apart from a love
which goes the second mile. Christ is
witness that there is such a love, God
himself underground in a man s life,
36
Second-mile Society
rising in artesian wells of living water
a love so exhaustless in its willing
ness to serve, that he who knows it un
derstands the safety of St. Augustine s
profound injunction, " Love God and
do as you please ! "
This love that goes the second mile,
however, is more than a solvent for
moral drudgeries in the individual
life. It is distinctly a force of social
revolution. For here is the testing of
this principle in its application to so
ciety: that in the home it is entirely
possible to exercise this superabun
dant willingness to serve; in the neigh
borhood, even, it is possible for a man
to outrun the demands upon him by
the volunteering of his own kindli
ness; but who by any possibility can
live the spirit of the second mile in
the industrial world where the funda
mental principle is
" The good old rule, the simple plan,
That he should get who has the
power,
And he should keep who can."
37
The Second Mile
Your business man will tell you frank
ly that it is hard enough to run an
enterprise successfully and be scrupu
lously honest honest, that is, not ac
cording to the letter of the statutes,
but according to the dictates of a sen
sitive and instructed conscience. But
when it comes to loving, loving in
Jesus sense of being twice as will
ing to help men as they are to ask
you; as willing to give coat and cloak
together as they can be to take your
coat alone; willing to take two blows
if two there must be, rather than give
one; when it comes to overflowing all
sense of duty with spontaneous kind
liness, who does not see that the prin
ciples of Jesus and the principles of a
competitive system where men throt
tle each other for bread come into ab
solute and unavoidable collision?
Even yet many Christians are in
credulous that Christ ever intended
that his principles should control the
business world. The idea they work
on is: Let love control in home, and
school, in church and neighborhood,
38
A World Half-free
but let business be governed by the
rules of battle. Yet is such a division
of the world s life conceivably perma
nent? If the nation could not con
tinue " half slave and half free," can
the world continue so forever? Can a
thoughtful man imagine as the ulti
mate state of society, the Kingdom of
God on earth, a regime where home
and neighborhood life shall be Chris
tianized by the spirit of love and where
the commercial world shall still be
mastered by the spirit of " Every man
for himself"? Surely it is manifest
that Christ will not accept half a world
for his demesne any more than he
will accept half a man; and this is
manifest, too, that before the spirit of
the second mile, which now is possible
in the home, shall come to its full pos
sibility in the realm of business, our
industrial system must be something
other than it is to-day.
To be sure men can go the second
mile always with certain individuals
whom they know and like in business,
but no one can make the spirit of the
39
The Second Mile
second mile his commercial principle,
the underlying postulate of every
business transaction, when the basal
idea of the commercial system is ri
valry for the necessities of life. To
be sure men can always ameliorate
the conditions of the competitive fight
so as to make its appearance more re
spectable; they can always pass laws
to limit the degrees of exploitation
and abolish its worst indecencies.
Just so they smoothed out rough-and-
tumble fighting into the respectabili
ties of the duel, guarded by regula
tions from brutality; but is duelling
any less abhorrent in principle than
thuggery? And is a system where one
man knifes another for food and clothes
any less abhorrent because restricting
laws tone down its more repugnant
features? No one doubts the benefi
cent effect of making individual ap
plication of the spirit of kindliness in
business. But then, that is not the
primary idea of business in a competi
tive system. Mercy may be shown in
war, by one foe to another, and mu-
40
War and Christ
tual courtesy between individuals
upon the firing line is an occurrence
in almost every battle only that is
not what war means. And however
many instances of kindliness between
commercial rivals may relieve the
fearful carnage of our industrial strife,
the truth remains that men, instead
of being in cooperative association to
exploit the riches of the world, are
rather engaged in exploiting one an
other; and that the basal idea of a
war between men for life s necessities
is violently at variance with Christ s
idea of superabundant willingness to
help. What first is needed is the
Christian spirit of cooperation in the
hearts of individuals, but with that
must come the gradual reformation of
social structure that such a spirit may
have freedom of expression. This is
what makes the great truth of Christ
revolutionary if once it be really be
lieved in. Let individuals do their
best at it now, yet only in a common
wealth founded on cooperation can the
second-mile spirit come to its full
41
The Second Mile
social utterance. And here is the
question the twentieth-century Chris
tian must settle whether he really
believes more in the principles of
Christ, or the principles of the present
industrial order. For unless irrecon
cilable enemies can live in the same
house one or the other must go.
Returning now to the individual
application of this master truth of
Jesus there remains at least this one
thing more to say: that not alone do
the moral worth and joy of a man s
life lie in the second mile, but the in
fluence of a man lies there too. Jesus
evidently is speaking here especially
of some man who dislikes us, criti
cizes us, maliciously plans against us
and seeks our hurt. What he says is
that our love for that man should be
so great that we should be more will
ing to serve him than he is to make
us yes, twice as willing; that no
malice of his should ever reduce our
souls to the level of hatred, or spoil
our invincible love that pushes on
through all his wrongs, still willing to
42
The Natural Way
serve him more and win him if w&
can.
There are many ways in which an
unfriendly man can be treated, and
every one has chances to try them
all. " If he hurt me," it is possible
to say, " I shall hurt him worse, un
til, like Jason sowing dragons teeth
and reaping a hostile army, he shall
find his evil to me coming back upon
him as many fold as I can manage
it." That is vindictive vengeance.
Or it may be said, " If he hurt me I
shall, with level measure, return as
much to him, and teach him the mean
ing of the law, * Eye for eye, tooth
for tooth. " This is retribution. Or
it may be said, " If he hurt me I shall
ignore him, and scorning to recognize
his injury, treat him with the con
tempt the moon gives to the dog that
bays it." That is the disdain of hot
resentfulness. Or it may be said, " If
that man hurt me I will serve him
still and try with undiscourageable
love to do him good. Whatever
comes, his hate shall never ruin my
43
The Second Mile
good will. I will take his unfriendli
ness as my opportunity for unrequited
service, and when the first mile of his
unkindness has been traveled I will
be there to say, Man, my master is
Christ and Christ never let any man s
unkindness spoil His love. I am try
ing to follow Him and I am not going
to let your unkindness spoil my love.
You may not be my friend, but I am
yours, and nothing you can ever do
will stop it. " That clearly is the way
Jesus lived, and clearly that is what
he expects of his disciples. To be
sure, there may be limits which love
cannot overpass; but then we may
be certain that none of us has ever
come within reaching distance of
them. Even Christ seems never to
have discovered limits to love in all
his wide horizons.
Now this unconquerable compas
sion is not alone the most profoundly
joyful spirit in which to live. At the
very least it is that. The niggardly
soul who, when he must give a quart
of kindliness measures it out by thim-
44
The Only Hope
blefuls to avoid the possibility of sur
plus and does that only to the inner
circle of his friends, has all the work
and none of the joy of love. But this
spirit of unwearied goodwill, that with
a divine carelessness seeks just and
unjust, is the great lifting power of
the world, the secret not alone of joy
but of spiritual effectiveness.
From the standpoint of the giver it
seems a severe requirement that he
love and serve those who have no
personal claim on him, as Living
stone served Africa, or Paton the New
Hebrides, but from the standpoint of
Africa and the New Hebrides, which
have no right to claim such devotion,
the only hope lies in those souls who,
like Livingstone and Paton, love of
their own free will away over and
above all right of demand. From the
standpoint of the giver it is no easy
matter to love regardless of the recip
ient s moral worth, like Moses praying
God for the apostate people holding
bacchanalian rout about their golden
calf, but from the standpoint of the
45
The Second Mile
people who are unworthy, their only
hope lies in just such souls, baptized
with the spirit of saviorhood, who
understand that " they who are sick
need a physician," and are willing to
help especially the undeserving. And
it is a peculiarly hard saying that a
man should love regardless of the per
sonal attitude of the recipient, whether
it be recognition and gratitude or the
lack of them; but from the standpoint
of the man so far down in spiritual
desolation that he does not even know
enough to be grateful, there is no hope
save in those souls who for the time
will forego gratitude and will serve
on through ingratitude, misunder
standing, persecution even, if thereby
they may be saviors of their fellows.
The men with lifting power have al
ways been men who served regard
less of the right of the recipient to
demand it, regardless of his moral
worth, regardless of his personal in
gratitude who served for only one
reason, the love of saving. Since the
time when the " Lamb was slain be-
46
To Lift Man
fore the foundation of the world," and
the principle of sacrifice was im
bedded in the fabric of the universe,
there has been only one force with
grip and lift enough in it to hoist the
spiritual life of man, and that is the
power Jesus used when he suffered,
" the righteous for the unrighteous
that he might bring us to God."
Now, mystical and unpractical as
these injunctions may seem, as a mat
ter of fact no spiritual achievement
ever yet was wrought without this
unbought and unpaid for generosity
of love. The hope of the world s sal
vation lies in this spirit that, forgiv
ing seventy times seven, keeps at the
main issue which Jesus suggested
when he said, " If thy brother hear
thee, thou hast won thy brother."
Whether in the individual s treatment
of his private foe, or in society s treat
ment of her public enemy, the crimi
nal, any other principle than this is
not only wrong, it is entirely inef
fective. This mercy may sometimes
be stern; it may even t^ke the out-
47
The Second Mile
ward form of punishment on the of
fender. So Beecher said, " A mother
may have all Mount Calvary in her
heart and all Mount Sinai in her hand :
and the child get both." But what
ever may be the outward form that
wisdom determines to be best, the
inner spirit is always of one quality,
the undiscourageable desire to save.
This virtue of overflowing love that
seeks alone the good of all men, is
not too unpractical; it is too prac
tical for this world of ours to under
stand. This kind of love is the only
force that really gets things done.
Without it not even an eddy has ever
been made in the spiritual history of
man. The men who have struck hu
manity s life as the shaft of water
strikes the turbine at Niagara, saying,
" Move," have been men who knew
that " God does not always pay wages
on a Saturday," and so were willing
to serve on through all hostility, to
help the very humanity that cursed
them while they blessed. The roll-
call of the world s spiritual heroes re-
48
All of Saviorhood
veals not a single one-mile man. For
no man ever saved anybody, or served
any great cause, or left any enduring
impress who was not willing to forget
indignities, bear no grudges, and, like
Paul when the Jews had cast him out
of their synagogues, had beaten,
stoned, and all but killed him, say,
"I could wish myself accursed for
my brethren s sake, my kinsmen ac
cording to the flesh. . . . My heart s
desire and prayer to God for Israel
is that they may be saved." The
world s saviors have all, in one way
or another, loved their enemies and
done them good. All of saviorhood
lies in the second mile.
Clearly it is nothing less than this
that Christianity means by love. The
man who in his serving holds perpet
ual inquisition, suspicious that some
how he is being swindled out of love,
and who, with the scrutiny of a de
tective, searches the character of his
fellows for some unworthiness to ex
cuse his neglect, never really loves at
all, as Christianity counts it, whose
49
The Second Mile
God " commended his love toward us
in that while we were yet sinners
Christ died for us." The man who
serves for pay, and like a hireling loves
with his eyes on Saturday noon, won
dering if he will get his love s worth
back again in the appreciation of his
fellows, does not love at all, as Christ
understood it who said, " Love your
enemies, bless them that curse you,
pray for them that despitefully use
you."
This is the note that Jesus struck
when he told his disciples that if
they merely loved those who loved
them or saluted their brethren only,
they were doing what any outcast
Publican would do. It is in the
" exceeding righteousness " alone that
mankind feels the touch of God. It
is the spirit of the second mile that
makes them seek the cause in the
superhuman. To-day in a certain Chi
nese village, a strange deity receives
incense at the pagan shrine. Long
ago there came a Christian mission
ary there, who, before he could make
50
There God Is
clear the Christian doctrine, died.
But it was not before he could make
clear the spirit of his Christian love,
that brought him unasked and unre
warded over seas to carry his good
tidings and his ministry of help.
And so they made him the village
god and burn incense still upon his
altar; for human nature is sure of this,
that vicarious love is nearest deity.
It is the instinct of the heart of man
that where sacrificial love is, there
God is also. There is one spirit whose
divinity no man can deny and that is
the unwearied compassion which in-
defatigably keeps on loving when love
goes unrewarded. Even a Roman
centurion cries, " The Son of God ! "
when a soul can bear the contumely
and the pain of crucifixion and still
pray, " Father forgive them." There
is but one invincible power on earth
and that is the unwearied spirit of the
second mile.
Only, a man must surely believe in
God to have it in the God of Jesus
and of immortality. For underneath
The Second Mile
such sacrificial compassion must lie
the eternal love of God; and ahead of
it must rise a vision radiant, a tri
umphal day, whose songs are even
now in hours of struggle quietly
audible,
" As if some fair city were one voice
Around a king returning from his
wars."
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