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The Things That Abide

The Things That Abide

By
Orrin Leslie Elliott

San Francisco

The Murdock Press

1903

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Copyright, 1903

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Prefatory

The reconstruction of religious belief
consequent upon the extraordinary critical
and scientific achievements of the nine-
teenth century is now measurably complete.
If in this process there seemed at first only
losses, it is now evident how little the things
fundamental to religion and the good life
have been disturbed. The losses have been
really gains, in that they have served to
emphasize and deepen the truths that abide.
Yet the old order has yielded but slowly, or
else, and more particularly in our roving,
cosmopolitan West, with a flood-tide which
has carried the younger generation quite
over into paganism. The sudden intel-
lectual awakening which the university
brings intensifies the perils and distresses
of transition. To college students problems
of religious belief and life are either frersh,

4 Prefatory

insistent, and disturbing, or they are
brushed aside as obsolete. The discourses
here brought together have sought to ap-
proach these problems with the frankest
recognition of what science and criticism
have accomplished, yet always with the
endeavor to emphasize the abiding realities
of the spiritual life.

It is proper to add that these discourses
were not worked out in any connected or
progressive series. They have been given
in desultory fashion, at considerable inter-
vals of time, and to shifting university
audiences. In bringing them together it
has seemed best to allow repetitions both
of thought and of language, to remain
substantially as in the original delivery.

0. L. Elliott..

Stanford University, California,
January 1, 1903.

Contents

I. The Things That Abide 9

II. Confession Before Men .... 33

III. Greater and Lesser Miracles . . 57

IV. Tempted of God 79

V. Life Worth Living 99

VI. The Christian Argument .... 121

VII. ''As Little Children" 143

VIII. "Like as a Father" 157

IX. The Life Eternal 171

The Things That Abide

The Things That Abide

"And now abideth faith, hope, love — these
three. ' '

IN the Life of Tennyson it is told how
' ' one day the poet went off by himself
to see an old laborer of ninety, and came
back saying, ' He tells me that he is waiting
for death and is quite ready. What a sin
it would be if anyone were to disturb that
old man's faith!' "

A strange reflection surely! Here was
contented old age — the fruition of a life of
toil and hardship, but lived sincerely, in
kindly relations with fellow man, and sus-
tained by an unfaltering trust in the
Eternal Goodness. How could such a faith
be disturbed? Did Tennyson fear lest the
patience and charity of this good man be
dissipated, lest his honesty and uprightness
be undermined? that there might come to
him the temptation to do a mean and base
act, and that suddenly, in his ninetieth
year, the whole fabric of character built up
through the long discipline of pain and

10 The Things That Abide

struggle and patient continuance in well-
doing might topple to the ground, an
unmitigable ruin? This was not Tenny-
son's thought. Nor was it this other: The
faith of this old man is vain, his God is a
creation of his own fancy, what he believes
is not true; but because it means much to
him, because he is happy in his delusion,
because his day is done, it would be a shame
to let the rough truth break in upon his
peaceful repose. It was not that thought.
There is no doubt about the final note of
Tennyson's song. He w^as not thinking of
anything that would touch one real fact in
that old man's life. He was thinking of
the surging doubt so characteristic of his
time, the resistless beating of the weaves
which had wrested from their moorings
so many peaceful craft. He himself had
faced that storm. He thought of the haunt-
ing uncertainty, the blackness of despair,
the confusion of all the new words and new
voices that fill the world, and the long hard
fight by which faith is won back. Of all
this fierce battle over documents and evi-
dences, of all the recasting of intellectual
beliefs forced upon an unwilling theology,
not one echo had reached this old laborer.
For him there would not be time to find

The Tilings That Abide 11

a way through all this maze. Life and his
philosophy of it, the growth in grace and
the intellectual conceptions which underlay
it, would seem inseparable. In the result-
ing shock the permanent realities upon
which his life had been founded and which
he vocalized in that vivid realization of the
Good Father and his love and care, might
somehow be sw^pt away.

For Tennyson's laborer this seclusion
was fitting; for us there can be no such
happy isolation. There is not a single
intellectual movement of our age that does
not converge, sooner or later, at this point
of the reality back of time and space and
phenomena. There is no doubt that his-
torical criticism has profoundly modified
men's notions regarding the Bible narra-
tive and the whole dogmatic structure of
historic Christianity. There is no doubt
that physics and biology have raised ques-
tions about the unseen world which are
hard to answer. There is no doubt that
great unknown regions hitherto appropri-
ated by Religion, and over which she had
thrown the mantle of that inscrutable
phrase ''the mystery of God," have been
explored by physicist and biologist and
the mystery rolled back. New and start-

12 The Things That Abide

ling questions have been pushed to the
front. How much has the plain word of
Scripture been overlaid by the subtleties
of metaphysical speculation? How much
in the plain word of Scripture itself is
historically true? What accredits the as-
serted communications of the Almighty?
Is there a God other than the play of
energy and the unfolding of life which
physics and biology make known ? Is there
a standard of right and wrong other than
the surviving conventions of the race?
Cannot life be finally cornered in ganglion
cells, and when the brain is dead must
not the individual life go out forever?

God came to most of us out of a Book,
out of a creed, out of Milton's Paradise
Lost, out of a defining process. The Book,
the creed, the church spoke an inerrant
message of authority. They told all the
story of God and man, the glory of crea-
tion, the disobedience, the Fall, the just
wrath of offended Deity, the doom of
humankind, the marvelous Plan of Salva-
tion through the interposition of the Son
of God. Oriental imagery everywhere took
on the garb of occidental legalism. We
could not weigh or question. Whatever
Book or Church said might be elucidated,

The Things That Abide 13

accounted for, shown to be rational, just,
beneficent, by appeal to reason, by analogy
to nature, by interpreting experience. But
nothing could be hinted at as mistaken or
untrue. We could explain, but not chal-
lenge. Has God spoken to man^ Bring
together all Scriptural "Thus-saith-the-
Lord's." Has he interfered in the affairs
of men? What saith the Scripture narra-
tive? And all that the Bible story tells
of him who "worketh all things after the
counsel of his own will" is right and
proper — even though it be the drowning
of the human race, or the hardening of
Pharaoh's heart, or the slaughter of little
children, or the stirring up of the Assyrian
Kings to enslave Israel, or the putting of a
lying spirit in the mouth of Ahab's proph-
ets. "Therefore hath he mercy on whom
he will have mercy, and whom he will he
hardeneth. ' '

By recognizing an ultimate authority in
terms of human documents or institutions
religion became an exact science, and its
practice arbitrary and unquestioning con-
formity. And this unimpeachable author-
ity it is that historic Christianity so long
put in the forefront of its battle line. The
distinction between

14 The Things That Abide

fidel" was thus made sharp and clear.
Honesty, sincerity, purity, — these were
indeed Christian virtues, but in themselves
they did not bring their possessor one whit
nearer the Kingdom of God. Instead of
adorning the character of the ''uncon-
verted" they only made error more dan-
gerous and damnable. The Christian
propagandist came as one dealing with
absolute truth regarding man's lost estate
and the expiatory decrees of Heaven. The
sinner must take into his system an ab-
stract philosophy and then experience its
prescribed metaphysical and psychological
effects. This process was incited and
brought to its conclusion not without acute
psychological penetration; and Christian
living and the highest type of Christian
character came out of the consecration of
the will and the faculties to the lofty ideals
of the New Testament. But that which
seemed so important was the psychological
experience and the intellectual assent.
Only two classes of persons were conceived
of. There were those who confessed their
sins, experienced forgiveness, and were re-
ceived into the visible fold of the Kingdom.
There were the outsiders, unregenerate,
continuing in their sins, and putting off to

The Things That Abide 15

a more convenient season the disagreeable
but generally anticipated duty of getting
a final adjustment with Heaven through its
accredited representatives.

This highly refined metaphysical Chris-
tianity stimulated a not less intellectually
acute skepticism which challenged its logic,
and pointed out the a priori improbability
of its premises, the lack of proof, the im-
morality of acts sanctioned by documents
and institutions, the absence of miracle
from the modern world, the injustice of the
prearranged hell, the tastelessness of the
prearranged heaven. We should not under-
estimate the bearing of this battle upon
the fortunes of the world, nor the service
rendered to mankind by this vigorous re-
assertion of the primacy of the human
reason. Yet it was characteristic of the
old skepticism that it did not work in a
creative mold. It did not offer a more
adequate explanation of the world; it left
the world 's moral leadership where it found
it.

But even while the controversy raged
unabated, the tides of human interest began
to recede, until at last, in our own day, we
have seen the old theology and the old
skepticism hopelessly stranded. There

16 The Things That Abide

came into being, not as a criticism of the-
ology, but as an emergence of a larger and
healthier interest in the material world, a
patient, independent, un trammeled, absorb-
ing study of the world's history. The
center of intellectual interest shifted from
the systematizing of what men must take
upon authority to the search for what they
could find out for themselves. In the rocks,
in river beds, in fossils, in all living or-
ganisms from simplest to complex, in cus-
toms, habits, and laws, was spelled out the
story and the meaning of the world. Of the
tremendous structure reared by modern
science it is not necessary here to speak.
Revolutionary in the domain of its own
subject-matter, the spirit it typifies and the
method it illustrates have become revolu-
tionary in every domain of thought.

This atmosphere of earnest inquiry has
finally brought a pleasant truce to almost
all that was strained and shrill in the old
religious controversies. The quiet, dissolv-
ing force of the genuine spirit of modern
research has been wholly soothing. The
tone and the temper in which the old
dogmatic metaphysics flourished has passed
out of the intellectual life forever. Every-
where the advance-guard of theological

The Things That Abide 17

thinkers has occupied new positions, and
thither the whole army is tending. First
of all, there has been brought about a
candid re-examination of documents and
institutions in the light of historical re-
search and criticism. Little by little there
has been a loosening of frozen creed. A
grim, petrified Book has been resolved into
its original elements of history and poetry,
of prophecy and song. Believers and
doubters have forgotten their differences
in an absorbing inquiry into the meaning
of its historic unfolding, its heights and
depths, its passionate search for and reli-
ance upon the God of Righteousness. The
fundamental questions of God, and duty,
and destiny have been considered anew in
the light of psychology and biology and
sociology and all that has to do with the
associative life of man.

And yet all this has not been accom-
plished without a profound disturbance of
the religious life. This modern attitude is
so new, so revolutionary, that it is apt to
fall upon the youth brought suddenly into
its full blaze with tragic effect. The light
is not tempered to our blinded eyes, and we
see men as trees walking. One by one the old
supports are cut away. With the crumbling

18 The Things That Abide

of dogmatic structures, all the certainty
seems to go out of the religious
life. The God which tradition and author-
ity had imbedded in our intellectual con-
sciousness grows dim and dimmer until
some day we awake to the startling realiza-
tion that he has vanished away. The intel-
lect had postulated a God as the ground
and order of cosmic unity, but the intellect
finally fails to realize him. The appalling
silence of the centuries is too much for
mere intellect. We spell out the history
of a world until it seems complete and all
accounted for and discover no force other
than the all-encompassing energy, no life
that is not finally shut up in a ganglion
cell. Yet religion has somehow stood for
the best things and determined the moral
leadership of the world. And so we find
men clinging to the old formulations for
their allegorical truth and their suggestive
symbolism, and trying to hold on to what
is best in life's ideals, to join with churches
in their practical endeavors for the better-
ment of men, and to bear with the hallu-
cinations of the religious mind for the sake
of the good citizenship which they accom-
pany. But when it comes to that which
the churches put behind all this — the God

The Things That Abide 19

about whom they talk familiarly, his pur-
poses, man's dependence upon him, his love
and care— they will let it pass as a bold and
dizzy use of metaphor which the man of
research, who knows what evidence is, will
prudently abstain from. And though not
much will be said about it. the scientist
often understands the religionist to be deal-
ing in a method and a kind of evidence
which have been discredited and discarded
in every realm of intellectual life.

These negative and materialistic results
of evolutionary science are not uncontested.
Indeed, no phenomenon of our own time is
more marked than the impetus given to
theology by its response to the searching
test of the scientific spirit. This new spirit
in theology, not antagonistic to scientific
truth, yet undaunted by it, essays without
fear the reconstruction of religious belief.
But however confidently we may look to the
final result life fares on. Religion cannot
wait. Unless religion can make its direct
appeal and present its direct evidence to
the human heart it cannot be a moving
power in the lives of men. Theology and
religious belief are concerned with histori-
cal data and with the intellectual inter-
pretation of fact and experience. Religion

20 The Things That Abide

touches the springs of conduct, and in the
flowering of the spiritual life we find the
measure of its reality and value. And so,
when the brain is weary with the task of
finding out what is saved and what is lost
in these intellectual upheavals and logical
reconstructions, we may turn to the things
men live by, to the homes and hearts where
the Christ life is emulated. Aspiration,
anticipation — are not these the characteris-
tic moods of our age? Uprightness, sin-
cerity, purity, tenderness, helpfulness —
are not these its characteristic ideals?
Faith, hope, love — these are imperishable
realities, the gift of Christianity to a world
ready to die. These link man to whatever
is eternal and beyond. These bridge the
chasm between known and unknown.
These do not tell what God is, how he looks,
what is his speech; but they hint of like-
ness, they lead out into the infinite. Be-
lieving life cannot come out of syllogisms —
only out of the living experience. Other
men have agonized and prayed and come
to themselves and seen life in its long
reaches; they have stated and defined and
pointed out. Have we not read their state-
ments 1 Do we not know the end from the
beginning? How close the horizon line

The Things That Abide 21

seems ! How far it will stretch if we really
go forth into the world. Reasoned state-
ments are valuable, and they may point
us rightly on the way ; but they are not the
way. Life has something better for each
of us than a mechanical outfit even of com-
pletest truth. We have been given the
chance to grow, to attain. To start with a
reasoned cosmogony, with a self-assured
metaphysics, and not aware of its limita-
tions and contradictions— how small an
equipment that would be at its best ; what a
meaningless revelation of God in compari-
son with that sight of the invisible which
bursts upon us from the summits of human
experience! The "will of God" can mean
nothing to one who has not felt the travail
of life. The terms of philosophy, of sci-
ence, of theology, are mere terms until
meaning has been worked into them out of
the abundance of human living.

If some one in whom you repose confi-
dence shall say to you: This is an oracle
of God, this is a divine message, listen to
it and obey it and it will bring you life—
you may listen and obey, and if it be an
oracle of God and a divine message, the
life will come. In some such fashion the
message of Jesus has come into the lives of

22 The Things That Abide

multitudes of men aud women. They have
taken the dictum of prophet or priest and
faithfully tried to live it. And though we
boast much of original investigation this is
what we individually must do in a thou-
sand relations of life. We cannot get
firsthand knowledge for ourselves, and we
can and do trust those w^ho are equipped
for this particular task. Only w^e insist,
in religion as elsewhere, that the path of
investigation be not blocked. There must
always remain the open road to verification,
to the removal of incrustations, to the
achievement of more accurate results. But
when all is done it remains true that the
testing of life is the great and final proof.
Intellectual processes can correct experi-
ence, they can give perspective and propor-
tion, but they can never contradict the
truth we have learned by becoming it.

Does not a mother of insight know more
of the nature and development of the child
than any student can find out? Have not
the mothers of the w^orld reached finer
results than any modern investigator not
armed with mother love ? And yet the in-
vestigator will proceed as if the mothers
had never found out anything. He goes
about his task as if no person had ever

The Things That Abide 23

observed a child before. He observes, he
sifts, he verifies, and finally accumulates a
succession of facts from which, with many
qualifications, he draws conclusions. Many
of these conclusions are what the mothers
found out long ago; they could have told
him at the start. But it does not therefore
follow that his labor has been in vain.
Although many of the mother's conclusions
have been verified, some have been dis-
credited. All conclusions have been tested.
The observations of wise mothers have been
separated from those of less wise and less
discriminating mothers. There is now
some solid structure upon which to build.

Yet in the end the psychologist must take
the garnered experiences of motherhood
as the choicest material of his study. And
in considering the deepest experiences of
childhood the insight of the mother is surer
than the labored reasoning of the most
painstaking investigator. It goes deeper
than the reasoner can ever go. In religion,
the flashing insight of the prophet, the
moral penetration of a Jesus of Nazareth,
illumines the unknown as the lamp of pa-
tient, stolid investigation can never do.
Investigation is the great corrector. It
sifts. It enables us to separate the wheat

24 The Things That Abide

from the chaff. Without it we shall as soon
bow the knee to Baal as to God. But the
supreme insight into truth remains with
the prophet.

We do not assert the principle of the
lever on the authority of Archimedes. He
is to be honored as discoverer: we can
verify the principle for ourselves. So we
may honor St. Chrysostom and St. Augus-
tine and the Nicene Council in so far as
their wisdom justifies it. But we cannot
settle some difficulty of our own by appeal-
ing to what they said. The beauty of a
pure life never fades. Its freshness is
perennial. It will never lose its power.
That is because it is the law of the pure
life, its nature, just as it is the nature of
the breeze that comes over yonder moun-
tain.

If St. Chrysostom spoke the deep, abso-
lute truth it can be verified in our own
experience. But we cannot otherwise take
it just because he said it. John Calvin
could see and transfix a thought of God
which shall remain with us forever. But
when he came to build fences to hedge us
around he could use only the material his
age afforded, and poor, perishable material
it proved.

The Things That Abide 25

Nor in Scripture can we be taken captive
just by a rhetorical figure. A Scriptural
''Thus saith the Lord" is authoritative if
it works out divinely in human living — not
because of the formula in which it is cast.
There is a transient speech and there is a
universal speech. Shakespeare lives be-
cause he spoke the universal language of
mankind. It rings true in every age. It
brings its message of power and insight to
every generation. If God has spoken to
man in a peculiar and authoritative way,
and if our Christian Scriptures reflect these
personal communications, how shall we find
out this fact ? Not by looking for a Thus-
saith-the-Lord tag, not by yielding our
opinion to that of some scribe. If here
are the divinest thoughts on record they
will work out most divinely in human
history.

And so, what Jesus says is no better than
what any other teacher says — unless it is
better! Is Christianity really unwilling to
meet this test? Authority has done some-
thing, the thumb-screw has done something,
blind obedience has done something ; but if
Christianity had not met this other test it
would not have lasted half-way down to the
twentieth century. Those who stood near

26 The Things That Abide

to Jesus had their hearts and lives touched
in a way that seldom stirs within our slug-
gish blood; and so they were keyed to
tremendous effort and devotion. Yet we
can speak more confidently than they of the
reality and worth of his message: the
centuries of testing have not gone for
naught. The true apostolic succession is
the succession of human lives touched by
faith and hope and love — keeping green the
tree of divine promise, widening out the
moral life of the world.

But some of you will ask as the days go
by, May we not still keep these abiding
things, and yet see in that which is about
us only the manifestation of eternal energy,
unknowable power ? Can we not trace back
step by step every rock and tree and run-
ning stream, and the mind of man himself,
almost or quite to the primal nebulae, the
world-stuff from which everything is
evolved, and see no God and Father, and
no human mind apart from the bone and
fibre which it inhabits? And if, with Mr.
Huxley, we "cannot see one shadow or tittle
of evidence that the great unknown under-
lying the phenomena of the universe stands
to us in the relation of a Father — loves us
and cares for us as Christianity asserts,"

The Things That Abide 27

shall we not frankly face the fact at what-
ever cost? Yes, yes; let us not have any
make-believe here. And may we not as
frankly recognize the delights of paganism,
the serene and peaceful flow of days when
the long tension of ''seeking after God"
is finally over, when we can surrender our-
selves to the exquisite sensation of feeling
our spiritual faculties dulled by reposeful
inactivity ? If there were no lovelight in a
mother's eyes, if one did not have to stand
by the open grave, if faith and hope and
love had not transfigured human lives, if
Jesus had not lived, who saw life so sanely,
who put eternal life in terms of human life,
who dared and trusted beyond what any
other man had ever dared or trusted ! In
Jesus were gathered up the moral intuitions
of the race. Some things abide as witness
of his sway. Love has fulfilled the law.
Brotherly kindness has expanded the life
of men. The family affections, the homes
where Love presides, the innocence of little
children, the strength of resolute manhood,
the trust of mellowing age, the sense of the
presence of God- — these are and abide, and
these will not let die the spiritual and the
divine within us. We must seek after God
if haply we may feel after him and find

28 The Things That Abide

him, though he be not far from every one
of us.

If every vestige of this magnificent civil-
ization were to be swept away, and every
remembrance of it to perish utterly, it
would all be potentially recoverable in the
unsubduable spirit of man. One by one the
elements would be overcome. Step by step
man would find his way back up the long
staii^ of material progress. And if every
religious institution, every rite and form,
every Bible and every creed were to sink
into the deepest oblivion man vrould find
his God. For God would remain, and the
revelation of Him would only await the up-
ward turning of the human spirit. Faith,
hope, love, — if there were a God these
would be his footprints. So long as these
abide there can be no dimming of the
fundamental religious consciousness.

The oak of a century falls in the storm.
But oak life is not destroyed ; the acorn we
plant to-day has just as much chance, per-
haps more, to reach the century mark.
There is a moral fall in our midst. Some man
meets his great temptation, and yields ; the
moral life goes to pieces. But purity, sin-
cerity, righteousness have not ceased to be
ideals, nor have they become unattainable.

The Things That Abide 29

Out of the framework of the religious life
many things have gone, things on which
true souls leaned and which were precious
to them. To some these losses seem irreme-
diable. It is not really so. The real things
remain, and the soul is not less stirred and
exercised toward its predetermined destiny.
And life when it is sure of itself must
have its grand credo, ' ' I believe in God, the
Father Almighty" — perhaps the loftiest
flight of the human soul. We may not be
as daring ; we can at least be as true. And
devotion to truth will bring a recognition
of the fundamental facts from which that
flight was winged. Some flight will be
taken — the triumphant note of the tri-
umphing life. Up the ladder of the things
that abide, through contact with other lives,
through suffering, through endurance,
through the deep experiences of the day's
work, through faith, through hope, through
love, in the footsteps of Jesus, at last w^e
shall scale the heights and there shall burst
upon us the unspeakable vision. At last
we shall speak it, reverently but with un-
conquerable assurance — my Lord and my
God!

Confession Before Men

Confession Before Men

"Every one therefore vrho shall confess me
before men, him will I also confess before my
Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall
deny me before men, him will I also deny before
my Father which is in heaven."

' ' Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the
least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto

FRANKNESS is the highest characteris-
tic of sincerity. And if to frankness
there be added courage of rare and endur-
ing quality the noblest type of manhood
results. Its directness dissipates the murky
odors of diplomatic fencing as the morning
sun chases away the night-damps. Its
wholesome simplicity has the tonic effect
of ozone. We like to know where to find a
man. If he has opinions we like to know
that he will stand for them, that whether an
ally or opponent he can be counted on and
allowed for with something like mathemati-
cal exactness. The world despises a dough-
face; it applauds to the echo the man who
has the courage of his convictions. When

34 The Things That Abide

a man fails to come out into the open we
can only explain it by the weakness of his
cause or his own pusillanimity. Certainly
we shall put little faith in him who defends
his cause or his convictions only in secret.
What is any man 's loyalty worth if he dare
not avow it ? Are you a democrat, and yet
ashamed to own your creed ? Then you are
not a democrat, and democracy does well
to commit to you neither trust nor respon-
sibility. When the "Round Robin" at-
tempted to break through the red-tape
meshes which confined our soldiers to the
fever-laden trenches of Cuba, and when the
War Department published Colonel Roose-
velt's impetuous appeal from Santiago, the
political wiseacres held up their hands in
horror. A fatal slip for a politcian ! True ;
but whether the people or the politicians
control, whether he is politically rewarded
or humiliated, frank sincerity cannot hurt
a sincere man. To him nothing but insin-
cerity and cowardice can be fatal.

And if this quality of straightforward-
ness is so important in the general relations
of life, how much more vital is it in that
which touches all the inner sanctuaries of
being. What shall be said of the religious
man who hesitates, or is ashamed or afraid

Confession Before Men 35

to confess his faith. Can a man be touched
in a living way, and be ashamed of the
touch ? Can a man be healed, and contain
his joy? Surely confession is the least that
can be asked of him. Surely without this
neither intellectual nor spiritual honesty
can exist.

In view of this instinctive demand for
outspokenness, and of Jesus' ringing in-
sistence, it is not strange that the Church
has laid tremendous emphasis upon the
confessional. Every avenue of expression
has been seized and made to avow the faith.
Through genuflections and crossings,
auricular confession, recitative litanies and
liturgies, family prayers, grace before meat,
prayer-meeting and testimony-meeting,
catechisms, creeds, and sacraments, the
Church has bodied forth its dependence
upon, and its intimate relations with, the
unseen and eternal ruler of the universe.
Particularly in the Non-Conformist and
Puritan environment, the more immediate
background for most of us, all ordinary
expression, conversational and literary,
came to be saturated with the phrases of
Scripture and with the logic of creeds and
catechisms.

That all these expressions are still vital

36 The Things That Abide

and active, that they are still bound up
with the life and activity of the Christian
Church the world over, cannot be gainsaid.
Yet if we look outside the conventional
church circles and communities into the
larger social and intellectual movements of
our time, we cannot but be struck with the
sharp contrast in the present attitude of
men toward all these confessional activities.
We have them all. but how much less stren-
uous the insistence. They are apathetically
employed. Speaking broadly, a strange
reticence has fallen upon the religious life.
The Scriptural flavor has dropped out of
conversation, or strikes us as archaic and
quaint in the speech of the generation that
is passing away. Grace before meat is the
exception, not the rule, among those who
call themselves Christian. Family prayers
are unfamiliar to this generation, being
given over to clergymen and others special-
ly elect. Even prayer itself, as a habit, as
our fathers knew it, seems well on toward
obsolescence. Catechisms are relegated to
our intellectual garrets; creeds are merely
historical documents. And if one misses
baptism, or is absent from the solemn cele-
bration of the Lord's Supper, is this a
source of uneasiness, and does he count

Confession Before Men 37

himself for that reason hardly to escape
damnation 1

There are those who regard this state of
affairs as most alarming. It is a sign that
the religious life is dying out. It marks
a fatal degeneracy, a dangerous encroach-
ment of the worldly life. Any forward
movement must first galvanize these activi-
ties into life. How else can we hope for
Christian growth, or even preservation? If
family prayers and grace before meat are
pushed aside as old-fashioned, if the
prayer-meeting and the public testimony
are a burden, wherein is the Christian life
to have any manifestation? What shall
we say, to young people especially, who
come from homes which honor and cherish
these old things, and whose religious life
at first contact with the larger intellectual
life of the university, is filled with confu-
sion?

In so far as this confusion and this dry-
ing up of the fount of religious expression
indicate a real lapse of ideals, a waning of
noble purpose and high endeavor, we may
well share in this concern. But before we
fall into despair, let us give this modern,
undemonstrative, tongue-tied, non-conform-
ing Christian a hearing. Is it possible that

38 The Things That Abide

these formal modes of confession, handed
down from the past, are no longer the
touchstones of the religious life? Is there
perhaps a reason, not dishonorable, for the
silence and the qualm, for the lack of Bible
phrasing, for the waning of forms, for the
lessening burden of souls which made the
religious man's conversation dwell so per-
sistently upon the concerns of the other
world? Is it possible that if, instead of
mournfully following these dry channels,
we cut down below the surface, we shall
find the strong, deep currents of the re-
ligious life flowing on with undiminished
force ?

And first, is it not true that confession
came to be, in large measure, a stereotyped
thing? That which was originally fluid
and spontaneous became rigid and fixed —
the iteration of certain formulas, the me-
chanical doing of certain things in certain
prescribed ways! Now true religious ex-
pression must be free from compulsion. It
must be spontaneous. It must not be di-
vorced from the real form and habit of life.
Religious expression must be the over-
bubbling of a life that is real and fruitful,
not a galvanic battery charged from with-
out. Confession may be aspiration : if true.

Confession Before Men 39

it will be expressed in modesty of spirit.
Confession may be experience : if profound,
it will not be voluble.

Another reason why these forms of con-
fession have lost their importance is their
unreality as expressions of the religious
life. The type of piety which impressed
itself most strongly upon the religious life
of the larger half of the nineteenth century
was that morbidly acute psycho-theologic
Calvinism which fed the religious emotions
chiefly among tombstones and in contempla-
tion of the eternal infelicity of the wicked.
Not merely that the other world only was
important, but salvation was to be obtained
by confessing to a tortuous and intricate
metaphysics which crucified and smothered
every healthy human emotion. Thus the
worthy author of that once famous tract,
''The Young Cottager," would gather his
class of young girls at the parish house on
Saturday afternoons for instruction in the
catechism and the Scriptures. "I had not
far to look," he says, "for subjects of
warning and exhortation suitable to my
little flock. I could point to the graves and
tell my pupils that, young as they were,
none of them were too young to die; and
that probably more than half of the bodies

40 The Things That Abide

which were buried there were those of chil-
dren. ... I used to remind them that
the hour was 'coming in which all that are
in the grave shall hear his voice, and shall
come forth ; they that have done good unto
the resurrection of life, and they that have
done evil unto the resurrection of damna-
tion.' I often availed myself of these op-
portunities to call to their recollection the
more recent deaths of their own relatives. ' '
And when one of the more susceptible of
these premature saints, little twelve-year-
old Jane, was taken sick, how adroitly this
same hypnotic sanctimoniousness carried
her through all the metaphysical stages of
conversion and hastened her on to the
grave. With what subtle acuteness was her
own self -consciousness aroused and stimu-
lated so that there should be detected and
rooted out any shade of the heresy of natu-
ral expression !

Fortunately this morbid, gloomy idea of
piety has passed away. The religious at-
mosphere, so heavily charged with miasma,
has gradually cleared itself. Thanks to
science, thanks to the Church, thanks to the
renaissance of healthy human emotion, the
religious life has largely regained its
robustness. But the flavor of the old

Confession Before Men 41

lingers in many of our confessional forms.
The notion that the religious person, espe-
cially the clergyman, is apart from life in
its every-day aspect, that laughter and
lightness of touch are inconsistent with the
gravity of religion, is one hard to be rid
of. You will remember in Caleb ^yest,
after the accident, how old Bowles's heart
sank within him as he gazed upon the white
tie of the major, and the suspicion flashed
upon his mind that his visitor might be a
clergyman and liable any moment to drop
down and pray with him. How many of
us, I wonder, recall the uneasy feeling in
the presence of "the minister," whose habit
of miscellaneous praying might at any mo-
ment give him an unfair advantage over
us!

There is no doubt also that men have
confessed to preposterous things. No man
at any time hath seen the Father. Our
knowledge of God does not come through
the physical senses. There is no mathemat-
ical formula which comprehends him.
There is no chemistry which reveals him.
He is not to be weighed in any scales. But
man can see beyond these facts and forces.
Something comes to him out of the stillness.
Imagination, faith, hope, love, point to

42 The Things That Abide

things that transcend sense experience. Yet
men looking with the eyes of the soul deep
into these silent mysteries have not always
been able to report correctly what they have
seen. Their vision has been partial, de-
fective. They have been too indolent, or
too prejudiced, or too ignorant to relate
it properly to the facts of the universe.
And so God has been reported manlike,
whimsical, arbitrary, contradictory. He
has been said to do from impulse that which
was put into the constitution of the uni-
verse. The sinuosities, vagaries, and im-
perfections of humankind have been read
into the divine decrees and pronounced
good, since whatever is of God justifies it-
self.

There is no doubt that the meekness of
''The Young Cottager" is the exact oppo-
site of robustness; that the self-conscious
piety engendered by its false metaphysics
must bring the religious life into disrepute
and under deep suspicion with normal men
and women. Christianity has been en-
gaged, in our generation, in a mighty effort
to shake off these weights. Christianity
has had to demonstrate its genuineness, its
ability to look you in the eye, its power to
separate itself from an unreal metaphysics

Confession Before Men 43

and a maudlin psychology and to appeal
straight out to common sense in the name
of righteousness and true, unselfish living.
It has had to supplant the old selfish, self-
conscious saving of the soul by the larger
concern for individual, social, and national
rectitude; the Miltonic theocracy by the
Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of
Man.

We are not an emotional people. We do
not wear our hearts upon the sleeve. We
are too much in earnest, perhaps, to be
appealed to by the dramatic side of self-
expression. With Anglo-Saxon folk the
deep things of life do not readily find ex-
pression. The vision that comes to us we
may laboriously and perhaps successfully
communicate. But what that infinite and
eternal relation is, how it sweeps in upon
our lives, how it opens to its and we to it,
the fusing of our aspirations, our longings,
our experiences, this can only be worked
out in the quietness and sobriety of the
unselfish life. Prophets and poets some-
times touch these heights and depths, and
we respond to the touch. But it does not
become us to engage in wanton frolic on
this holy ground. The deepest experiences
cannot be shared; they cannot even be

44 The Things That Abide

talked about. If we say much about them,
they may be real, but they are not deep ;
they may stir our emotions and express
themselves in passionate ecstasy or despair,
but they are not our fibre, not bone of bone
and sinew of sinew.

At no point has the readjustment of
Christianity to life been more difficult than
with reference to prayer. Prayer should
be the soul's sincerest expression. Prayer
should be the religious man 's most constant
and intimate habit of mind. Yet in nothing
is the modern religious man more reticent.
Is it because we should not ask God for
trivial things^ Is it because, once for all,
in the constitution of the universe, things
were so ordered that any petition is an
impertinence? These questions miscon-
ceive the whole significance of prayer.
Certainly prayer should not be too familiar.
We do not need to tell God many things
about ourselves or others. Certainly we
must take into account the eternal order of
the universe. But it is not the triviality
of the things asked for, nor the intimacy
assumed, nor the disregard of unchanging
law, that repels : it is the immaturity of the
spiritual sense. Have we not too often re-
versed the Scripture statement and thought

Confession Before Men 45

of God as made in the image of man? To
ask God for what we need is not improper :
it will not offend him. We may even ask
for rain if the soil needs it: he knoweth
that we have need of all these things before
we ask. But the asking is not prayer — not
even when we add "Thy will be done" —
unless the soul has been attuned to the
spirit of prayer; and the spirit of prayer
is that we shall come into union with him,
that we shall see the God-purpose, the
majesty of eternal truth, the beauty of holi-
ness, that we be enfolded in his love as the
flower is enfolded in the sunshine. Then
rain and drought will each be revelations
of God's order in the world, and neither
will disturb our communion with him.

If we are to pray it must be in the dig-
nity of this conception. Let the heart cry
out : to God we may pour forth all the
bitter and the sweet. But we must rise to
our highest thought of God and walk with
him in the heavenly places, not drag him
down to the inconsequential, freakish level
of our own spiritual confusion. AYe some-
times seek the prayers of praying people
as if there were some great virtue in mere
petition piled upon petition. When w^e set
aside days for prayer and ask the whole

46 The Things That Abide

world to join us, is there perchance some
childish reliance upon the mere machinery
of verbal expression, some magic ascribed
to the multiplication of phrases ? Or do we
catch glimpses of what it is to really pray
for some great consummation — to go about
its accomplishment in the spirit of prayer,
consecrated, single-hearted, lifted up by its
nobility ? The words of ourselves or others
may help us to wait on God; in our highest
moods they will often hinder. You remem-
ber Walt Whitman's delicious revery —

"When I heard the learn 'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures were ranged in

columns before me.
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to

add, divide, and measure them.
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he

lectured with much applause in the lecture-
room.
How soon unaccQuntable I became tired and

sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wandered off by

myself.
In the mystical moist night air, and from time

to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars."

Long ago was phrased man's impatience
with the best attempts to touch with words
what the soul sees in the invisible heavens :

'The Lord is in His Holy Temple:
Let all the earth keep silence before Him.

Confession Before Men 47

Jesus took bread and blessed it and gave
it to his disciples. AYhat a world of conten-
tion, and pettiness, and mystery has grown
up out of this simple and beautiful act!
''The tendencies we have towards making
mysteries of God's simplicities," writes
Mrs. Browning, "are as marked and sure
as our missing the actual mystery upon
occasion. God's love is the true mystery,
and the sacraments are only too simple for
us to understand." If we let go the grace
before meat, and if the celebration of the
Lord's Supper loses its meaning, it is
because the simplicity and spontaneousness
are gone. And we need not worry over our
defection if it is somehow bound up with
the resolve that all our lives and acts shall
be in His name, not merely the breaking of
bread and drinking of wine.

There is no doubt that over-protestation,
instead of convincing, leads to suspicion.
If confession were always sincere, if per-
formance never lagged far behind, if the
pledge to stand up on parade days and be
counted on the Lord's side meant unflinch-
ing courage on the field of battle, all would
be well. But what shall we think of a loy-
alty that needs ostentatious proclamation
once a week to besret confidence in its gen-

48 The Things That Abide

uineness? ''The lady doth protest too
much!" Is it not possible that too much
emphasis has been put on the verbal re-
affirmation of loyalty to Christ? In the
ordinary relations of life we do not require
or wish this reiteration. You surprise us
by this unwonted insistence. We would
like to assume that this deeper life has
taken such hold upon you as to become a
part of your very fibre. If your daily walk
spontaneously evidences this no one will
question your loyalty.

Yet one would not speak lightly of
prayer-meeting or testimony-meeting; one
only questions the emphasis given to the
elementary exercise of choosing sides. Let
sides be chosen, of course; then exalt the
opportunity for high counsels, for the help-
ful sharing of mistakes and failures and
triumphs, for the expression of exalted
emotion in worship and praise.

After all, the strain and the stress do not
fall at the point of the prayer-meeting or
the public testimony. In Tom Brown at
Eugby it was a sort of supreme test, the
turning-point in the religious life, whether
the sensitive boy should kneel down at
night and say his prayers before his
thoughtless, jeering comrades. Customs

Confession Before Men 49

change. We are differently brought up.
Our private devotions must be really pri-
vate. AYe do not any longer choose to pray
before windows open toward Jerusalem.
AVe must really enter into our closet and
shut the door. Yet must we face the test
of loyalty no less than Daniel must or Tom
Brown must. Manliness must show its
colors, loyalty must make its confession, no
less to-day than ever. The test that goes to
the very foundation of things comes on the
school-ground, in the class-room, in the
seclusion of your own chamber. Religion
must tell upon character. And it is how
character stands the strain of every-day
life that manifests the real confession or
denial of Jesus Christ. "\Yhether you are
a child of God is not to be shown by nerv-
ing yourself to bear testimony in meeting.
As students, are you honest in your work,
and in your play ? Are the helps you seek
such as give a deeper insight into your task,
or do they enable you to shirk? As men
and women, are you set in the path of un-
pretentious, straight, courageous, clean
living, cherishing the simple, true, unselfish
things? If religion is a synonym for
maudlin sentimentality, if it comes clothed
in metaphysical jargon, if its fruit is self-

50 The Things That Abide

conscious self -righteousness, to go about the
quadrangle inquiring of fellow students
regarding the condition of their souls is
happily to speak an unknown tongue. We
shall never meet another human life with
any real recognition except in the realm
of outspoken reality. Let any who are
puzzled by the mysteries and clashings of
creeds and confessions try the simpler
ground of living true — each day for its
best things.

' ' When black despair beats down my wings,
And heavenly visions fade away —
Lord, let me bend to common things,
The tasks of every day:

''As when th' aurora is denied.

And blinding blizzards round him beat,
The Samoyad stoops, and takes for guide
The moss beneath his feet. ' '

The prayer-meeting, the Scriptural con-
versation, the grace before meat — these
have been the beautiful garments of faith
and hope and love. They are alive with
the tender est experiences of the human
heart. Our fathers thought in terms of
Scripture; perhaps we are thinking too
exclusively in terms of phenomena. Per-
haps some day the encrusted formalism will
drop off and the old garments be made
fitting. At any rate, let us struggle for as

Confession Before Men 51

adequate expression, for something as deep,
and true, and vital. Let our confession be
as real. Are we less earnest, less loyal, less
faithful, less brotherly? If not, we need
not worry at the silences where our fathers
spoke so freely.

And can we then go about our daily liv-
ing saying little about God, and nothing to
Him, and still confess Jesus Christ before
men? This much is certain: If we are
facing life with frank sincerity, if we are
struggling toward faithfulness in duty,
sympathy with brother man, appreciation
of loveliness, we can no more keep God out
of our lives than the bud can refuse to
flower at the bidding of sun and dew. To
believe in the human heart; in little chil-
dren; in the sunshine; in love and its
regenerating touch ; in the life everlastingly
loving and true; in the ministry of truth:
no man can shut God out of his heart who
thus believes. If one does not see that for
this cause Jesus Christ was born, that this
is the revelation of God to us, that on this
highest ground of human aspiration Jesus
has planted his banner, that his life and
his personality have been the rallying-point
for nineteen hundred years for the highest
moral enthusiasm and the highest moral

52 The Things That Abide

purpose of the world — why, it is a pity.
Perhaps the creeds and the catechisms, the
genuflections and the unreal testimonies,
have had their part in obscuring the vision.
At any rate, God can wait, and Jesus can
wait, for the recognition.

The more we study the life of Jesus the
more, I believe, shall we find it the embodi-
ment of this transcendent ideal. Every
impulse that moves us toward manly think-
ing and doing, every breath of sympathy
that v>^afts us into accord with nature and
humanity, every lofty vision that presses
its way into our hearts — all bring us^
whether we will or no, nearer to Jesus
Christ, a herald of good tidings, crucified
in Jerusalem nineteen hundred years ago,
who, being dead, yet liveth. Sometime we
shall not doubt this. Sometime we shall
recognize that he openeth the way. If we
are reverent, single-minded, simple-hearted,
thirsting for righteousness, we are follow-
ers of him. Sometime we shall recognize
and own that leadership — not perhaps with
shoutings and emotional outbursts, cer-
tainly not in the petrified phrases of dead
theologies, but without cant or affectation,
familiarly though not vulgarly, gladly. In
the solemn litanies of the Church, in those

Confession Before Men 53

voicings of deep, universal experience in
Psalmist and poet, in our own words when
words count, in deeds always, we shall join
the great swelling chorus of the ages,
"Glory to God in the highest, and on earth
peace, good will towards men."

Greater and Lesser Miracles

Greater and Lesser Miracles

"... And greater works than these shall he
do."

SOME years ago there was published a
novel which attracted special atten-
tion because of its treatment of certain
phases of religious belief and readjustment.
A young clergyman of the Church of Eng-
land, single-hearted and of winning per-
sonality, established for life in a position
of great usefulness, stakes his Christianity
on the reality of the New Testament
miracles. Overborne by a mind keener
than his own, which had produced a re-
markable book on the History of Testi-
mony, he comes to the startling conclusion
that miracles do not happen. In the
bewilderment of this conviction the whole
foundation of the Christian Church seems
swept away. His ministry and his life of
service are based on falsehood. And so,
after a severe struggle, he leaves the church
in which he has been nurtured, surrenders
his position and Avork, and goes up to Lon-

58 The Things That Abide

don to find, if he can, a new expression for
religion and a new hold on human lives.

For Robert Elsmere this new expression
turns out to be the New Testament with-
out its miracles, and this new hold on
human lives centers in the personality of
Jesus of Nazareth. The power of the story,
we may note in passing, lies in its faithful-
ness to the storm and stress of a transition
which has disturbed other countries per-
haps more deeply than our own, yet a storm
and stress which no one has wholly escaped.
Does its significance for us lie in that His-
tory of Testimony, never written indeed,
but for which modern scholarship has col-
lected so many materials and which seems
so destructive of the time-honored faith?
Or is Robert Elsmere the story of one
caught in the toils of a painful transition,
who died before the conflict was over, and
whose solution is as transitory as the con-
flict itself 1 Would so terrible an engine as
the History of Testimony be content to
destroy merely the miracles of Christianity,
and leave the power and personality of
Jesus untouched?

At any rate, the miracle age has passed
away. Whatever our belief concerning the
miracles that have been, whatever our view

Greater and Lesser Miracles 59

of various exceptional phenomena of pres-
ent occurrence, we are agreed that in all
the ordinary affairs of life miracles do not
enter. And this is not because the rela-
tions of man to the forces about him have
changed, nor that he is less responsive to
these forces. It is that knowledge has
increased, that effects are traced to causes.
The mysterious phenomena with which all
sentient life was once invested have been
reduced to order. Lightning and tempest,
comet and eclipse have taken their places
among law-obeying events. The unknown
is mysterious. The miraculous belongs
to the childhood of the race; and the
illusions of childhood vanish impercept-
ibly and harmlessly in the sunshine of
growing knowledge. The whole great
domain of the miraculous has not shrunk
to present proportions because we labo-
riously disprove its claims. The fairy
tales, the ghosts and goblins, the world of
legendary heroes disappear in the trans-
ition from childhood to manhood. In like
manner the whole legendary history of the
race, with its gods and heroes and mirac-
ulous phenomena, vanishes in the path of
intellectual conquest.

And when we turn back over the history

60 The Things That Abide

of Christianity, there is no one who will
deny that the Church has passed through
this childhood age. As Christianity grew
and spread into more credulous times, and
away from the personality of Jesus, mir-
acles became more and more common as well
as more and more fantastic. They were, as
Lecky observes, a sort of celestial charity
which alleviated the sorrows, healed the dis-
eases, and supplied the wants of the faith-
ful. Demons torturing the saints, angels
ministering to them, sacred relics curing
the sick, images opening and shutting their
eyes — innumerable phenomena like these,
well attested, penetrated every part of
Christendom, without exciting the smallest
astonishment or skepticism. When Europe
emerged from the childhood of the middle
ages all these miraculous phenomena passed
away. The Church, which no longer ex-
perienced them, gradually came to regard
miracles as a necessary part indeed of
God's training of the human race, but
belonging to the childhood age and still to
be expected only among crude and back-
ward peoples. Belief in the miracles that
had been and might still be long remained ;
but even this belief has yielded to the
imperious spirit of the age. For all this

Greater and Lesser Miracles 61

miraculous phenomena the twentieth cen-
tury instinctively seeks and unhesitatingly
accepts the simpler and more natural ex-
planation.

This subsidence of belief, even of inter-
est, in the miraculous is one result of the
marvelous intellectual activity of the
century that has just closed. Most con-
spicuous and most fruitful of all its
achievements has been that study of
natural phenomena, by the method of
science, whereby the whole face of nature
has been changed. Disregarding received
or prevailing theories, yet wasting no time
in disputation, the man of science has felt
himself dealing with fresh and independent
data which when arranged and interpreted
would tell their own unimpeachable story.
Science, speaking in her own proper per-
son, is authoritative. To every branch of
human inquiry the method of science has
brought illumination; and with illumina-
tion has come readjustment. Old concep-
tions have given way. Old mysteries have
vanished. Order and unity have taken the
place of what w^as chaotic and arbitrary.
In the realm of religious belief and theo-
logical affirmation the implications of
science have been received, sometimes with

62 The Things That Abide

joy, in the belief that all truth is one, or
recking not what overturnings may take
place; sometimes with pain and dismay, in
the supposition that the faith once deliv-
ered to the saints includes equally the shell
in which it is encased, or, recognizing that
new wine must be put into new bottles, in
fear lest iconoclasm spill the precious wine
itself.

The miracles of the Church have van-
ished. How is this profound change of
attitude toward the miraculous to affect the
miracle stories of the Bible, and particu-
larly of the New Testament? The counter-
part of many of the Bible stories is found
in the religions and mythologies of other
nations. Is the Bible in a category apart,
or are its stories like the other miracle
stories? May we apply the same rational
tests to the Bible as to the cruder lives of
the saints? If we value faith more than
knowledge, must we draw back, unwilling
to know ; or. going through to the end, shall
Ave have shaken off superstition and the
miraculous and turned our back upon the
faith of the ages? Will knowledge become
all sufficient so that we shall look pityingly
upon the ignorant and the religious ?

Eighteenth- century skepticism, concern-

Greater and Lesser Miracles 63

ing itself with the reasonableness of
miracles, was able to show the improb-
able nature of many miraculous phenom-
ena. But reason made slow headway
against evidence ; and if the senses can ever
be trusted to report anything correctly
many miraculous phenomena were estab-
lished beyond the possibility of overthrow.
At least the eighteenth century could not
successfully contest this evidence; and so,
by a feat of logic, a syllogism was evolved
whereby miracles were declared to be a
priori impossible — hence no examination of
evidence was necessary. With the remark-
able growth of natural science, a concep-
tion of the universe, incompatible with
miracle, came to general acceptance. This
conception was so large, so satisfying,
so harmonizing, so unifying with re-
gard to all the facts of observation
and experience, that men of science
lost not merely belief but all inter-
est in the subject of the miraculous. In the
first elation of triumph scientific dog-
matism affirmed again the impossibility of
miracle and contemptuously bundled all
evidence out of court. Yet when this
theory was applied concretely to a recon-
struction of the life of Jesus, as in the

64 The Things That Abide

attempts of Strauss and Renan, the result
was too grossly improbable. In Robert
Elsmere there is a returning realization
that a priori dicta are unsatisfactory, and
that the question, of particular miracles at
least, is a question of evidence. The History
of Testimony was to subject the evidence
for miracles to a closer scrutiny, and to
demonstrate how unable humankind is to
report correctly and accurately the most
common occurrence, and the overwhelm-
ing probability of error that would attach
to reports of events and phenomena not
understood at the time and not written
down until many years afterward.

Thus far we have been considering
miracles as transcending and controverting
the laws of nature, as events which no
amount of knowledge could explain because
they violate all law. It is this theological
and arbitrary conception of miracle which
explains much of the long controversy and
the tenacity with which the Christian
Church has clung to the miracles of the New
Testament. In the development of theology
the miracles of the New Testament came to
be sharply differentiated from the so-
called miracles of the Church. Miracles
were not to be reorarded as the usual and

Greater and Lesser Miracles 65

ordinary accompaniment of Divine favor.
" They were very rare and exceptional phe-
nomena, the prim.ary object of which was
always to accredit the teacher of some
Divine truth that could not otherwise be
established." They were an essential part
of the Mission of the Son of God. They
were needed to establish his position in the
Godhead. They were proof of his Divinity.
As Son of God, and conscious of his Divine
mission, Jesus had all powers. To deny his
miracle-working power were to deny the
faith outright. To deny miracles were to
impeach the integrity of Jesus, to take God
out of the world. If miracles must go so
must revelation and revealed religion; and
Jesus becomes an impostor.

This whole conception of the nature of
miracle and its place in the Divine Provi-
dence is a refinement of scholastic theology.
It is a conception which could grow up only
as the natural began to be sharply differ-
entiated from the supernatural — the one
under law. the other lawless. It belongs
to an age which believes, to quote the
author of "God in His World," in a sus-
pended judgment and a postponed heaven
— in a God who keeps his place while men
keep theirs. It is the triumph of the mili-

66 The Things That Abide

tant faith of our own time to have restored
belief in the immanence of God: God in
his world, not separated from it. The
other notion came in when the hand of God,
the Divine, was not recognized in ordinary-
things. Men saw God only in the abnormal
and mysterious. But science has steadily
pushed forward its conception of unvary-
ing law; and the whole phenomena of the
universe is again advanced to that height
where God was thought to dwell in unap-
proachable silence, broken only when he
overturned a law he had made.

To Christ's contemporaries the wonder-
working power was the common possession
of all the prophets. Everywhere they rec-
ognized the immediate action of God. The
unusual and extraordinary did not surprise
them; but the key to the use of these
powers was given only to the special ser-
vants and messengers of Jehovah. That
the personality of Jesus was unusual goes
without saying. That his power over
nature, and over men, exceeded that of
those who crowded around, that its expres-
sion was sometimes beyond their power to
understand, is self-evident. Yet if one will
read the New Testament story, having in
mind the ''evidential" character of its

Greater and Lesser Miracles 67

miracles, lie will be surprised at the little
stress laid upon them. These incidental
accompaniments of his daily round of
doing good, these, to his biographers,
natural and spontaneous signs and won-
ders, nowhere are these made to over-
shadow the deeper message he was trying
to impart.

But to the dogmatic age which succeeded
all this had a very different meaning. To
come into the world in defiance of ordinary
physiological laws, to walk upon water, to
reappear after death in the physical body
— these somehow gave an approximate idea
and explanation of one who was trans-
cendent and the Saviour of the world. To
come into the world by miracle — this
seemed to exalt the babe in Bethlehem and
prove his heavenly origin; to us there is
nothing more sacred than motherhood in
the divinely appointed way, and the divine
breathing upon childhood is a ceaseless and
uninterrupted process. To walk upon
water, and to cast out devils — what could
more evidence the Messiahship ? To us they
would only rank Jesus among the sooth-
sayers: even Beelzebub could cast out
devils !

The miracle stories of the New Testa-

68 The Things That Abide

ment are different from the cruder mir-
acles of the church because they are differ-
ent. They belong to a soberer time, to a
simpler life. They are imbedded in deep
earnestness and sincere worship. They are
organic but minor parts of an artless nar-
rative, and no undue emphasis is con-
sciously put upon them. The synoptic
writers were not scientists nor gifted with
great ps^^chological penetration. If some-
thing which the larger truth of our own
age will not permit us to receive is inex-
tricably^ mixed up in the account, we may
still feel that the atmosphere out of which
it comes is permeated with that illumina-
tion we have been so slow to discover — the
harmony and union of the natural and the
supernatural, the immanence of God. The
Gospel narrative has this perfectness: the
spirit is wholly attuned to the divine har-
monies. No extravagantest fancy of
mediaeval art ever filled out the significance
of the birth in Bethlehem. Dogmatic
denial of the Gospel and dogmatic formu-
lation of incarnation are alike in that they
coarsely blot out of the picture all that is
sweet and heavenly. And so we go back to
the simple Gospel story, in its incompar-
able setting, with no concern as to what

Greater and Lesser Miracles 69

History or Testimony may say, for the
spirit and the message are there unchange-
able forevermore.

But when it is assumed that the unusual
and extraordinary in the New Testament
narrative must altogether pass away, that
we must reject everything we cannot under-
stand, we shall not necessarily be con-
vinced. This much must be granted: a
colder age and sterner climate, out of touch
with oriental warmth and imagery, has
laid a wholly wrong emphasis upon the
miracle stories of the Gospels. Belief in
miracle as a contortion, as an assault of
the supernatural upon the natural world,
inevitably fades as the antagonism between
natural and supernatural itself passes
away. Everything is not therefore reduced
to material terms. The dogmatism of a
scientific age is itself giving way. We are
not now so sure that every law has been
found or that all phenomena will yield to
our retorts and crucibles. The appropriate
modesty of science, of asking every phe-
nomenon what it has to tell, is being ex-
hibited once more toward phenomena too
hastily dismissed with contempt. We are
perhaps on the verge of discoveries of per-
manent value in a realm long given over

70 The Things That Abide

to the charlatan and the impostor. The
residuum of truth in the soothsayer's art,
the unexplained marvels of sub-conscious
activity — some unveiling of the unseen may
await the patient unraveling of the future.
Yet when the shock of such possibilities
seems too great for the anchor of faith,
there are some things we dare affirm. Jesus
of Nazareth was no juggler. His powers
over nature and above nature, if such they
were, were not powers of darkness. They
had nothing in common, in spirit or in
source, with the spirit-rapping, or table-
tipping, or sleight-of-hand, of the modern
soothsayer. Jesus had no trick which he
took care not to reveal to his disciples.
What he did was not done in secret or
through incantation. "Whatever he did was
as spontaneous as the sunlight, as fragrant
as the summer dew. Whatever he did was
the spontaneous expression of an intrepid
simplicity. Jesus exhibited proofs of his
Divinity, not in the strangeness and dis-
similarity of his birth, not in thaumatur-
gical feats, not in disregard of the laws of
physics or of growth. These are not of his
nature, and they would not be revelatory of
a God w^ho works by law and by process.
He was unusual and transcendent in his

Greater and Lesser Miracles 71

simplicity and spiritual integrity, in the
directness of his intuitions, in his sym-
pathy, in his Humanity.

The mysteries of darkness, of incanta-
tion, of trance make no open door into the
kingdom of God. I do not say it is im-
possible to find God in such abnormal
searchings. But the open door is other-
where. The revelation which brings hope
and healing and the Kingdom is in sun-
light, in love, in unselfishness, in the daily
doing of a consecrated life. The message
from the eternal world is not to be discov-
ered in the curious writings of uncanny
hands. It speaks in the heart of man, it is
the upspringing of the spirit in deeds of
love and truth, it is the still, small voice
that urges to gentleness, goodness, faith,
meekness, self-control. In our moments of
weakness we agonize for some ocular dem-
onstration of the existence of God, some
audible word from out the heavens. If this
could be we might well doubt if there were
a God. If God could reveal himself thus
there would be no explanation for the cen-
turies of silence. There is one only and
everlasting communication from God to
man — the touch of his nature with ours
There is one only and everlasting God-

72 The Things That Abide

method. It is the sanest man who is near-
est God — not the seventh son of a seventh
son, not the Mahatma, not the overstrained
ascetic, not the skillful manipulator of
thaumaturgical tricks. The pure in heart
see God, and there is no other window into
the invisible heavens.

Puritanism did not leaven the world and
leave its mighty impress upon the Anglo-
Saxon race through its hardness and its
sombreness. These were its shell and per-
haps its necessary environment; but they
were also its limitation. It transformed
Old England and built the New because the
love of God and the simplicity of Christian
living shone through the sombreness and
lay behind the austerity. The faith once
delivered to the saints has not been pre-
served in purity because in your creed or
mine, or any other's, it has been translated
into correct intellectual statement; but, if
at all, because having sown to the spirit we
have reaped of the spirit. The law of grav-
itation would not be shaken though a His-
tory of Testimony should relegate to myth
the story of Newton and the apple; no
more can such a history strike out anything
that is vital in Christianity or in the incom-
parable records in which it is historically
embodied.

Greater and Lesser Miracles 73

Christianity builds on greater works
than miracles. It stands or falls by these
greater deeds : not more astounding myster-
ies, not more startling violations of visible
law; but the greater works of mercy and
peace, the transformation of lives, the
heartening of existence, the redemption of
the world.

Whether in Cana of Galilee Jesus ac-
tually turned water into wine, or whether
John accepted a tradition which from
some striking incident had taken on mirac-
ulous vesture, is a small matter. AVhat is
important is that Matthew, and Mark, and
Luke, and John, and Paul, and the others
were touched by the living fire of illimit-
able love, and were born into newness of
life ; that down through the ages the spark
has run from heart to heart witnessing
anew in multitudes of lives under every
clime and condition the everlasting verities
of the life with God. The greater works
have been done, not alone in Jerusalem,
Ephesus, Miletus. Corinth, Athens, Rome,
but in every land — yea, in our very midst.
Questions of New Testament history are for
scholars and critics; the reality of the
Gospel can be tested here and now.

The outline of the life in Galilee we may

74 The Things That Abide

never be able to fill in. What is history
and what tradition, what is real and what
illusory, are historical questions of extreme
difficulty. But the message of Jesus, and
the immortal love it revealed, can never be
taken away. It is witnessed not merely by
the humble men who preserved the records
of the New Testament, but by every soul
touched by that life from that day to this —
by every martyr, by every sweet singer, by
every humblest disciple. All that God is
we cannot know —

"Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies; —
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,—
little flower— but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is."

Wherever the seed of the Great Sower
has fallen upon good soil there has sprung
up fruit abundantly. There has been much
stony soil — many poor harvests. Nations
and times have seemed impervious to the
good seed. But wherever the soil has been
prepared there has sprung up the gracious
flowers of charity, of sympathy, of self-
forgetfulness — the life of the spirit, the
Kingdom of Heaven.

In deepest sorrow there is no comfort
in the thought of a God who, if he would,

Greater and Lesser Miracles 75

could stretch out his hand and bring down
the mountains upon us. In joyous, fresh
life nothing sanctifies joy but that life with
God, more demonstrable to-day than ever in
book or past experience. The strangeness of
miracle throws no light on the daily duty;
but the promise of the greater works shall
nerve us to confront with unswerving faith
the problems of our own land and time. In
this sign we conquer. The problem of edu-
cation, the stewardship of wealth, how that
brotherhood and not profit and loss shall
be made the basis of the social order — the
outlook may seem dark, the problem repel-
lent. But in the promise of the greater
works we shall go forth with joy and hope,
and upon its efficacy here we may stake the
Gospel and our faith in the Christ who
promised.

To the devout Hebrew God acted directly
in every event of life. The snow and the
rain, the harvest, the drought and famine,
lightning, earthquake, dreams, visions, the
fall of a sparrow — all manifested the per-
vading government of Jehovah. With little
exact knowledge, but exalted imagery, he
clothed those unusual and more mysterious
events with language adequate to express
the might and majesty of the High and
Holy One that inhabiteth eternity.

76 The Things That Abide

To the tradition-fettered and unimagi-
native theologian no act was of God unless
it was mysterious and abnormal — outside
of present or possible human knowledge
and experience.

To us has come back the Hebraic vision,
along with that exact knowledge which
mirrors the unchanging law that reaches
from protoplasm to the love of God in
human lives. And so we take back the
word ''miracle" fraught with a greater and
grander meaning — grander because of our
glimpse of the all-pervading God method;
greater, and still greater to come, because
of the widening centuries of Christian civ-
ilization— the leaven that is transforming
the world.

Tempted of God

Tempted of God

''Count it all joy, my brethren, when ye fall
into manifold temptations; knowing this, that the
trying of your faith worketh patience." . . .

''Let no man say when he is tempted, I am
tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted of
evil, neither tempteth he any man; but every man
is tempted when he is drawn away, of his own
lust, and enticed."

"Say not thou. It is through the Lord that I
fell away; for thou shalt not do the things that
he hateth. Say not thou, It is he that caused me
to err; for he hath no need of a sinful man. The
Lord hateth every abomination; and they that
fear him love it not. He himself made man from
the beginning, and left him in the hand of his
own counsel. If thou wilt, thou shalt keep the
commandments; and to perform faithfulness is of
thine own good pleasure. He hath set fire and
water before thee: thou shalt stretch forth thy
hand unto whichsoever thou wilt. Before man is
life and death; and whichsoever he liketh it shall
be given him. For great is the wisdom of the
Lord ; he is mighty in power, and beholdeth all
things; and his eyes are upon them that fear him;
and he will take knowledge of every work of
man. He hath not commanded any man to be
ungodly; and he hath not given any man license
to sin."

THE problem of evil is the fourth
dimension of speculative philasophy.
What the higher geometry is to the mathe-

80 The Things That Abide

matician, or perpetual motion to the physi-
cist, such is the existence of evil to the
metaphysician. To speculate upon it is
splendid mental gymnastics; it toughens
the intellectual sinews. To place evil in
logical relation to the universe is the task
we are forever attempting. Take one intel-
lectual highway, and the calamities- of life
negative not merely the goodness of God,
but his existence. Take another intellec-
tual highway, and the goodness of God not
merely counteracts, it annihilates, evil.
Take yet another, and life is life because
good and evil are indissolubly joined, and
like Siamese twins the one cannot live with-
out the other.

So far as what we call evil troubles only
the introspective world of the metaphysi-
cian, or is resolved in the heavenly harmonj^
of the mystic, we may be content to let it
rest in these congenial regions of the mind.
But there is another aspect. In the plain
path of daily living evil is a grim reality.
The individual must face it as a fact — evil
propensities in himself, evil tendencies and
results in the world, mal-adjustments which
must be righted at fearful cost. Good and
evil are set before every man, intermingled,
yet eternally at war. How shall one con-

Tempted of God 81

duct one's self in the presence of this unes-
capable fact?

"The end and the beginning vex
His reason, many things perplex,
With motions, checks, and counterchecks.
He knows a baseness in his blood
At such strange war with something good.
He may not do the thing he would. ' '

Is there somewhere a harmony in life, a
height inaccessible to this strange contra-
diction, a character-strength and sound-
ness proof against the contagion of evil
bacilli?

'*Ah, sure within him and without.
Could his dark wisdom find it out.
There must be answer to his doubt"?

Asceticism has answered, Yes; there is
such a harmony. There is a height beyond
the reach of evil. There is immunity from
this contagion. But the world must be
abandoned; otherwise it were an unequal
contest. The world is in deadly enmity to
God. Therefore leave it to its own self-
destruction, and get you apart. On some
high mountain, in some cave, on some tall
pillar, withdrawn from all contact with the
worldly life, face to face with God, in
meditation, in prayers and penitential
tears, in scourgings, you may escape the

82 The Things That Abide

evils without and wear out the evil pro-
pensities within.

This is the sublime protest of the Age
of Faith against an evil-minded world.
Meditation chastens the soul. Prayers and
tears, at infinite pain and cost, sweep and
garnish the house of heroic souls. Alas,
that so seldom any noble, heartsome life
comes in, that there is any fruitage of rich
endeavor. Often we may fear that subtler
and more cunning devils enter in, and that
the last state of many an anchorite is worse
than the first. At the moment when evil
is supposed to be eliminated life sours and
shrivels, and all goodness corrodes in help-
less inactivity.

As a formula for character building
asceticism has passed away forever. An-
other answer is given. The world is very
evil, but there is some good in it. It is not
necessary to withdraw from the world : the
good may be separated from the evil.
Avoiding everything that evil has touched,
one may, in fear and trembling, pick an
uncertain way and gain at last the good.
Worldliness and its deeds must be shunned :
What fellowship hath righteousness with
unrighteousness ? If the good things of life
are pleasant, suspect them. Dancing and

Tempted of God 83

theatre-going and merrymaking are marks
of the worldly life; shun them. Is there
abandonment and enjoyment in mere physi-
cal life and its activities? Hold it down.
Life is short. Eternity overshadows all.
There is barely time to flee from the wrath
to come. And so, little by little, the soul
may be quarantined against the evil that
exists, may live in its mid^t and never
touch it.

This is Puritanism with its worst side
outward — the severe, narrow-minded, un-
lovely aspect of that which, in many ways,
is so fine and strong. But this man apart,
wrapped up in his narrowness, striking his
breast and thanking God after the manner
of the Pharisee, drawing his skirts as he
passes through the street, barricading all
approaches from without the fold — this
man's answer falls upon deaf ears in these
times of ours. The whole spirit of the age
is a protest against it.

There is yet another answer. It is the
Zeit Geist that speaks it. Men are scarcely
any longer interested in the process of sav-
ing their own souls. It is too small a
matter. They want to live. They want to
achieve. The universe is moving forward,
and the thrill of that movement stirs every

84 The Things That Abide

drop of blood. To be a part of it, a part
of the propelling force, a contributing ele-
ment, a unifying center, is more inspiring
than any future heaven. Where the battle
is hottest, where life is intensest, where
temptations are thickest, come sun come
cloud, come life come death, there is the
place toward which every aspiring soul is
impelled. Something is lost in the hot-
house. The storms and struggles also cost,
but they bring us more. The storm may
indeed overturn us; but if by chance we
escape, how much stronger to resist the
next blast. And by and by, by virtue of
storm and stress, through the discipline of
trial, how shall we laugh at the fury of the
whirlwind ! If any good thing shall finally
come to us, it will be because we risked
something for it, because we did not flinch,
because we stood with our comrades.

The ascetic wanders into some lonely
mountain, and troubles us no more save
with those solemn confidences regarding
the perfection he is about to attain. The
other-worldly man remains with us, but
with fearful, hesitating countenance. If
he sees a certain fellow student coming
across the quadrangle he turns the other
way: the fellow student is a "hard case,"

Tempted of God 85

and he will not be seen in his company.
He will have nothing to do with college
politics because bad men have contami-
nated them. He will not lend his support to
any athletic contest, for students bet on the
game; and he must not encourage gam-
bling. He has brought to the University a
soul well saved ; please God he will run no
risk of failing to keep it so.

This man is a cipher in the University.
If he escape being teased to death, he may
indeed avoid some pitfalls. But his life is
colorless, his positive influence nothing.
Not so the robust youth. He may have his
misgivings. He may dread the fiery fur-
nace. Yet he will count it all joy when he
falls into these manifold temptations. If
life is to have any triumph he must win it
in just such conditions. He must demon-
strate the strength of the wholesome life.
If politics are impure he will gird himself
to fight the battle of purity. If athletics
are steeped in gambling he will be all the
more active that a manlier spirit may be
given the preeminence.

Shall we then seek temptation ? Shall we
welcome evil in order that character be
given a chance of forming? Shall we, at
least, be indifferent to the play of good and
evil in the world ?

86 The Things That Abide

This truth of the sifting power of temp-
tation, this joyous feeling with which we go
out to meet it, has come to us in these days
with special force. Are we in danger of
mistaking the nature of evil ! There are not
wanting voices to say that the problem of
evil has at last been solved, that, strictly
speaking, there is no evil. All things have
their place in the economy of nature, and
what we call evil is a working force defi-
nitely building in the evolution of the race.
Perhaps the invading flood of biologization
has submerged the ancient boundaries
between good and evil; perhaps it is only
the pardonable exaggeration with which
we emphasize the truth newly discovered.
At any rate it is maintained that good and
evil are much the same; at least they are
complementary. As for our vices, we could
not spare a single one of them. Were they
gone Nature would be deprived of her
power of punishment. Natural selection
would cease to select, and the universe be
reduced to chaos. ' ' There are no saloons in
Bellevue," states the catalogue of a West-
ern University; "but," it adds reassur-
ingly, ''evil enough to develop moral back-
bone."

When a young man leaves home, fortified

Tempted of God 87

with a fine sense of right, morally braced,
there is small danger that he will fly in
the face of that splendid training, of the
purity of the home life, of the self-control
so well begun. Temptations of these kinds
will come. The weaker men and women
will sometimes fall under them: sad and
pitiful is the wreck! But vigorous, whole-
some lives are not thus undermined. Rather
will they count it all joy when they fall
into these manifold temptations, knowing
that the proof of faith worketh patience.
It is the sifting process, the purifying fire,
the winnowing fan. And the fine nature
will respond. But there is a subtler
danger. In the transition time, when old
intellectual faiths and intellectual stan-
dards are thrown into the melting pot, what
is to keep old moral standards from the
same recasting process ? The old landmarks
fade out, and the barriers seem to disappear
in the subtleties of the new philosophy.
There comes the whisper that what seemed
evil may after all be good. How can we
know unless we taste and test for ourselves ?
To throw off the shackles of custom and
enlarge the boundaries of freedom is a
part of our mission. If we are tempted,
we are tempted of God.

88 The Things That Abide

And there are not wanting those who
stand in the midst of the ethical standards
and safeguards of the world and say:
These things which you love to call funda-
mental distinctions between right and
wrong, which you think are determined by
an eternal and ultimate standard, are in
reality merely the surviving conventions of
the race. They are the standards which
other men have made for themselves. Why
should they be imposed on you ? They have
not always been what they now are. They
are not the same everywhere. What is
right in one land and time is wrong in
another. Why should you be bound to
observe these irrational conventions 1 Shall
you not demand freedom to follow out your
own ethical ideals? The restrictions im-
posed upon you were made for children.
You are grow^n men and women, and must
be trusted to know what is right for your-
selves. All these powers and impulses
which you possess are God-given ; they are
meant for your use and pleasure. Your
friendships call for this indulgence, your
social obligations for that, your appetites
for this other. Shall the conventions of a
fading civilization — old wives' fables —
paralyze your freedom? There is new

Tempted of God 89

light ahead. The spirit of progress beckons
you on. You are tempted of God.

Are there any among us who have heard
these voices 1 Happy if the sharp thrust of
the apostle rouses our numbed senses before
it is too late : ' ' Every man is tempted when
he is drawn away of his own lust, and
enticed. ' '

Why is it that so many fathers and
mothers consign their sons and daughters
to the university with an anxiety that is
almost anguish? They may have doubts
about the modern curriculum, sometimes
they are foolishly afraid of the rationaliz-
ing spirit of intellectual training. These
are mere surface matters. Their concern
is for those subtler influences of college life,
those currents and eddies into which, if the
freshman falls, he is almost surely doomed,
where shamming and cheating seem marks
of intellectual keenness, where dissipation
masks as good fellowship, where moral
lapse is but an incident in taking life as it
comes. If we who are of the University are
inclined to be optimistic it is because we
believe the tonic influences are stronger;
but we cannot be indifferent to the conflict
and the danger.

And the danger is intensified by a per-

90 The Things That Abide

version of that which has been the chief
intellectual distinction of our age — its dis-
interested judgment, the ability it has won
of studying phenomena dispassionately, of
seeing things as they are, of judging unin-
fluenced by emotions, will, and logic which
would bend everything to a predetermined
result. It is this spirit which, making its
way against every kind of obstinate preju-
dice and preconception, has given us the
splendid results of modern science and
modern scholarship. But the dispassionate,
passive attitude with which science prop-
erly endows the observer modern realism
transfers to the actor. The metes and
bounds of the individual life were fixed
generations ago; he is what his ancestors
made him. Environment too is as fateful
as heredity. And so we have exhibited over
and over again the man of weak and im-
potent will, the helpless victim of the fates,
without the power of resistance or recovery
because without the sense of personal ini-
tiative or responsibility, drifting aimlessly
but always down the stream of passion
and self-indulgence. Our sympathy is sup-
posed to be bespoken because of the good
but ineffective emotions indulged in from
time to time, and because the tragedy was

Tempted of God 91

inevitable, his fate determined before his
birth.

This sort of fatalism is offered as a
soporific for an outraged conscience; and
when the conscience is sufficiently drugged
there is doubtless a feeling of melancholy
distinction in regarding one's self as the
plaything of impersonal forces. But while
we acknowledge the tremendous force of
heredity and the determining power of en-
vironment let us reassert the sovereignty
of the will. By God's help, by man's help,
by his own resolute self-assertion, every
man can look his heredity in the face, can
triumph over his environment, can make
some headway up stream if he will. 'If
thou wilt thou shalt keep the command-
ments ; and to perform faithfulness is thine
own good pleasure."

In this our time of mental readjustment
we may question anew the ground of every
ethical sanction. But while we throw these
intellectual standards into the melting-pot
and work out the new molds, we may test
our life by that which is back of every
ethical standard, and which alone can guide
to anything worthier. Does this new free-
dom emphasize privilege rather than oppor-
tunity? Does it whet the appetite for that

92 The Things That Abide

which was forbidden ? Does it urge to sense
gratification'? Does it impel us to wound
any instinct of affection or friendship?
Does it accustom us to a diminished loyalty
to our highest ideal ? Does it put us out of
focus with the purest sentiments that
inspire the world ? Is it freedom to walk in
heavenly places, or to feed among the
swine ?

Freedom is not exemption from codes,
but opportunity to rise above the plane of
codes. If freedom does not mean more
of tenderness, more of sensitiveness, more
of single-heartedness-, more of sunshine, it is
dearly bought. If life becomes more intri-
cate instead of more transparent, it is no
freedom that we should covet. To let go is
sometimes necessary ; but progress is reach-
ing up and grasping hold ; and everything
that has meant good in our life is seed for
the good harvest that may yet be.

In acts, good and evil are relative terms ;
in essence they are eternally opposite.
What is good to one generation or civiliza-
tion may be evil to another. This is not the
test. The cleavage is forever between the
higher and the lower, between the high-
est that is within our reach and that
which is below it. The struggle is on what-

Tempted of God 93

ever the plane of life we have reached.
When our vices are ready to disappear, be
assured we can spare them without loss.
"When the barbarian and the brute dying
within us shall be wholly dead," there will
still be opportunity for character grow^th.
To one man poverty is a winnowing fan;
but there is nothing sacred about poverty
that we should labor to keep it from leav-
ing us. It is not the poverty that makes
the man ; it is the reaction against its bitter
pressure. It is the growth wdthin that
saves. There is no virtue in evil that we
should cherish a certain amount of it in
order to develop moral backbone; there is
virtue in struggle, in resistance, in victory.
Temptation does not make character, and
he who recklessly throws himself in temp-
tation's w^ay may lose all he hath. AYe do
well to fight evil with all our powers;
indeed, we are not half aroused to the need
of action; w^e are all too careless about
exposing ourselves and those we love.
Everything does not work together for
good to those who are but passive specta-
tors in the battle of life. It is the pursuit
of right that gives strength, the never-ceas-
ing effort to climb higher. Keyed to this
purpose one may brave every temptation

94 The Things That Abide

that comes in his way, not like a braggart
or a fool, yet counting it all joy because of
its connection with the pulsing life of the
world. This spirit carries the Salvation
Army soldier through the vilest haunts
untouched by the all-pervading filth. This
armor carries a young man through the
storm and stress of youth, makes him a
tower of strength to all noble purposes,
brings him unscarred through all the temp-
tations that beset his pathway.

To you who are students the gates of life
here swing wide open. For you the time
has come to eat of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil. Into a world of mingled
good and evil, of splendid mountain heights
and abysmal depths, you are to push alone.
Friends may watch and pray, but you must
act. Go out boldly and make your con-
nection with life where its sweep is might-
iest. Be not dismayed that temptations
meet you on every hand: they will prove
your faith. If life is finally to have any
enduring quality, any lasting fibre, any
persisting sweetness, it will have been
achieved in living and struggling, in over-
coming and conquering, through trial,
through temptation, through failure that
has but held us more steadily to our goal.

Tempted of God 95

But if in the heat of conflict you are
tempted to let go any faith, or standard,
or principle that has hitherto wrought good
in the life of the world, look well to that
which offers itself as a substitute. Will
you be truer for it ? AYill the home joys be
sweeter? Will memory's pictures be more
hallowed? If not, it is but a mad delusion
that you are tempted of God. Pray God
the madness pass before some awful chasm
opens in your headlong path.

From a life truly lived order and unity
cannot long be hid. Old creeds, old faiths,
old forms of thought must be fused and
remolded. But every earnest man may
confidently await the reappearing vision:

"One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves."

And Browning has defined for us the
master spirit, type of the warrior, type of
the conqueror:

* * One who never turned his back but marched
breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted,

wrong would triumph.
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake."

Life Worth Living

Life Worth Living

''For whosoever will save his life shall lose it;
and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall
find it."

THIS paradox of Jesus was his answer
to the question "Is life worth liv-
ing t " It is an answer which the world finds
hard to understand. Its unconditional
negative is incomprehensible to the opti-
mism of youth. Even where the sharp
struggle is on it affronts the self-confidence
of those who will gladly risk everything for
the prize which life seems to hold out. And
to those who suft'er shipwreck, who fail in
the fight, for whom at last all these infi-
nite hopes and possibilities shrink to the
narrowest confines of a sordid world, this
''saving of life" by its loss is but the bit-
terest mockery. Even where self-interest
broadens into the interest of humanity the
losing of one's life seems a weak and impo-
tent surrender of that prudence which is
the highest teaching of experience.

This question of the worthfulness of life

284203

100 The Things That Abide

is as old as human existence, yet peren-
nially new to every individual experience.
Only once is the answer unchallenged. In
the morning time, standing face outward
toward the fast-coming day, life is full of
radiant promise. The fair vision of quest
and achievement lures us on, and in it
there is no suspicion of the bitterness
which, in the cloudy afternoon, shall poison
so many despairing hearts. So infinite are
the possibilities, so entrancing the vistas,
that every bit of life seems royally worth
the living.

"The year's at the spring.
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearl 'd;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in His heaven-
All's right with the world."

Happy if one can keep this fine and cour-
ageous optimism to the end of life. But
for one clear untrammeled note like this we
shall hear many despairing voices. Life is
full of storm and stress and disaster. Is
not disaster, after all, the larger chance?
Is life really progressive? Is there some-
thing ultimately worth the fight? Can even
the best-conditioned life, when the year's
no longer at the spring, justify itself? Or

Life Worth Living 101

shall we, even the best favored of us, sink
at last from Browning's high optimism into
the pit of Byronic cynicism?—

''Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen,
Count o 'er thy days from anguish free,
And know, whatever thou hast been,
'T is something better not to be.

Let US look at the material basis of liv-
ing. Here apparently everything has been
prepared for man. All the forces of nature
do his bidding ; all minister to his wants ;
all await his penetrating and inventive
search to render yet greater service. He
has but to command and they obey. How
much was done by the century just closed
to make life more worth the living! What
marvels it uncovered ! What richness was
added to the lives of even the humblest!
What were once the costliest luxuries are
now the commonest necessities. A Nero
could spend a fortune upon a single enter-
tainment—nay, upon a single dish. Yet
there were luxuries on the Fram, in the
icy desolation of Farthest North, that Nero
never dreamed of. San Francisco and
London are actually nearer in all the inter-
changes of life than were London and
Edinburgh a century ago. Steam and elec-
tricity have made all the world neighbors;

102 The Things That Abide

and with what ease and rapidity and cheap-
ness do these neighbors now exchange visits
and return calls. Compare the foul-smell-
ing streets, the impassable roads, the un-
sanitary dwellings, the dim-lighted, footpad
haunted thoroughfares of Shakespeare's
London with the convenient, orderly,
healthful urban conditions of our own not
over-to-be-praised San Francisco. The men
and women who witnessed the beginning of
the nineteenth century traveled only on
horseback or in the stage-coach. They had
never heard of a steamship, a railroad, or
a sewing-machine. The favorite treatment
among all physicians was blood-letting;
anaesthetics and antiseptics were unknown.
Think of the industrial, social, and polit-
ical development of America during these
hundred years. What fabulous mines of
wealth have been uncovered! What cities
have sprung up in a day! What forests
and mountains have been subdued; what
deserts have been reclaimed; what valleys
have been made to yield their hundred
and thousand fold return!

Is life, therefore, at last to be pro-
nounced worth the living? With all the
primitive hardships and inconveniences
removed, with the undoubted richness of

Life Worth Living 103

modern life, has content and happiness
become the common possession or un-
questioned goal of mankind^

First of all, there is the denial of those
who are defeated in this material struggle,
who have fatally blundered or been over-
whelmed by the very conditions of material
progress. What an indictment it is that
the submerged classes can bring against our
favored civilization ! The interest of Look-
ing Backward did not lie in its fantastic
automatons of the twenty-first century, but
in its analysis of the mal-adjustments of
the nineteenth century. All of these won-
derful improvements are real, but they are
not for everybody. To the man who has
nothing the knowledge of what others pos-
sess but heightens his misery. He has more
unsatisfied wants. It is more difficult to
put himself in the line of satisfaction.
Again, our great undertakings, public and
private, reek with corruption. What avails
it to pull down one boss when the condi-
tions of political life promptly raise up
others 1 They are not individuals so much
as types— fungus growths which it is de-
sirable to remove, but whose removal does
not cure the disease. With all our achieve-
ments and all our progress, it is not the

104 The Things That Abide

added conveniences of life so much as the
added uncertainties that impress us. Mul-
titudes in our cities fail to find life worth
living, though not all confess it through
suicide.

But there is a more formidable denial —
the protest of those who are successful.
''If there were given me to choose," said
Lessing, ' ' in the one hand truth and in the
other the search for truth, I should take
the search for truth." This half truth
explains the bitter lament of those whose
search is material success and who attain
in life all they had set before them. While
the quest was on, while youth and health
remained, while there was something to do
and overcome, they found life worth the
living. How stale, flat, and unprofitable
achievement turns out to be !

There are some whose desires do not rise
above the stomach. Life is the gratifica-
tion of the animal desires and instincts; a
riot of the passions in which the strongest
gather up the reins. Such a life is not
without allurement. It may seem to stretch
a rose-strewn path. Music and mirth
sound from its sylvan shades. In the end,
however, self-deception is impossible. Life
is burned out. There is nothing left, and

Life Worth Living 105

the victim needs no one to tell him that
this is so.

But life may be keyed to a higher strain
— self-indulgence replaced by self-control.
A young man confronts life. His capital
is health, a clear brain, and educational
privileges. Absence of money, influential
friends, position, is nothing to him. He is
scarcely aware of any handicap. He will
win all these. Every good thing in life
shall be his for the striving. And so it
may. But suppose life has no larger mean-
ing than this. Suppose these external good
things become the measure of the value of
life, and that to miss them is to fail. In
school our youth will find it prudent to
stand well with his teachers. He will
reason that a brilliant recitation, good man-
ners, a judicious deference to the eccen-
tricities of superiors will stand him in good
stead. He will see the vantage-ground of
office. He will calculate the value of
acquaintance, of patronage, of combination
in attaining his ends. His clear head, his
far-sighted planning, his skill in manipu-
lation, his ability to put other men under
obligation, the power he has of punishing
those who thwart him — all these bring him
undisputed pre-eminence. Out in the world

106 The Things That Abide

this experience, this initial success, give
him a fairly clever idea of how to strike
the chords of larger success. He knows
what individuals can help him, if he only
enlist their attention. He studies how he
can do some service to those who have the
power of helping him, and if he succeeds
he will let it be understood, at the proper
time, that there is a mutual side to such
acquaintanceship .

And he generally succeeds. Barring
some slip or unforeseen loss of balance, he
takes the place in the social, business, or
political world which has been his goal.
And is not this the successful adaptation
of the individual to his environment! Is
not this the ideal which our youth may
fairly hold before them ? Are not these the
winning cards in the world as we know
it — the modern world of hard and direful
competition ! If we move much among our
fellows we shall find this ideal not alto-
gether uncommon. To get what we can, to
keep what we get — is not this quite within
the statute! Not to be a charge upon the
community, not to be a defaulter, not to
violate the rules of the ring — is n 't this
about as high an ideal as the practical man
has use for? The purely self-seeking man.

Life Worth Living 107

if he be really far-sighted from his own
point of view, will reach his goal. Some-
times he will fail; sometimes he will suc-
ceed only at the sacrifice of his own
moderate ideals and the loss of his own
scant self-respect. The pity of it is that
success so often satisfies; that the blood
congeals, and one does not know it; tha;t
when the life becomes hard and unfeeling
and coarse, one does not mind it. "Because
thou sayest, I am rich and increased with
goods, and have need of nothing; and
knowest not that thou art wretched,
and miserable, and poor, and blind, and
naked."

But there is a deeper tragedy in the self-
seeking life. The higher senses are not
completely drugged ; success does not
always satisfy. Even where there is no
outward catastrophe, there is not less evi-
dence that the zest of living has been lost.
AA^at is more pitiable than that groping
for the lost chords of healthy human emo-
tion through heaped-up largesses and
coarse philanthropies? And what is more
hopeless than resurrection from the dead
of the larger human life crucified in the
service of self.

But such a career, it will be said, no

108 The Things That Abide

matter how it turns out, has been short-
sighted and a mistake, even from the side
of self-interest. The higher and more per-
manent rewards have been sacrificed for
the nearer and more obvious ones. Through
some coarseness of nature, or lack of
balance, the real resources of life have
been neglected. Real self-interest, real suc-
cess, is not furthered by self-indulgence,
nor by a disregard of others. Surely
it is now everywhere conceded that the
ethical is in the evolutionary line of sur-
vival, that in the game of life altruism
loads the dice. To really succeed one must
retain the respect of his fellows, and this
demands the cultivation of those social
qualities and those larger relations of life
which make for character, and which pre-
pare the way for enjoyment when the end
is attained.

To go still further: life is pronounced
worth living in so far as pleasure outweighs
pain. And in the ultimate balancing of the
scales the highest pleasures weigh the more.
The highest pleasures are not in the satis-
faction of the cruder and coarser wants —
not in money, not in position, but in intel-
lectual and esthetic enjoyments, in art and
literature, in the refined relations and

Life Worth Living 109

intercourse of life. In these is all there is
in life — all its quantitative value.

Does pleasure outweigh pain'? And is
life therefore worth the living 1 If we
interrogate individual lives we shall find
by this test that some seem worth living,
some not worth living. Taking all human
lives together, in the sum, is the total pleas-
ure greater than the total pain; or, is the
trend of life, the movement we call pro-
gress, such that we may hope to tip the
scales that way?

The way in which attainment lags behind
desire has always profoundly moved the
poet and philosopher, and has given a
pessimistic tinge to almost every philoso-
phy of life. The lowest type of this pes-
simism is that which cries, "Let us eat,
drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we
die." Again, it is held that life as life
necessarily involves misery. It is impossi-
ble to gather the rose without the thorn.
The net result of life is loss; and if man
could live up to his highest wisdom there
would be a final end to all in a sort of
premeditated and deliberate world-wide
suicide. Or again, since all life is sorrow
and pain, the search for pleasure is vain.
The negation of desire, the absolute absence

110 The Things That Abide

of both pleasure and pain, is the summum
honum.

There are many standards and many-
lines of conduct which seem to those who
follow them, for a time at least, to fulfill
all the conditions of a life worth living.
Our problem is not to be solved by a census
of these temporary states of mind. In
spite of the vision of the morning we are
sometimes content with very little. Life
may seem worth the living when it is really
stunted and mean. The little that contents
us blinds us to what, dissatisfied, were the
larger possibility within our reach. The
first foothill fills the measure of our aspira-
tion and outlook, and we never climb the
heights. ^'AYhosoever will save his life
shall lose it." However merry the brief
moment, pessimism stalks in the shadow,
and the inevitable tragedy of unfulfiUment
awaits every self-seeking life.

The point we have reached is this :
Human life motived within itself affords
no basis for pronouncing it worth living.
Does life turn in upon itself? Is there
some standard outside of man by which he
may be tested? Is there something outside
of man, kindred to him. filling his horizon,
in whose service he may lose himself and

Life Worth Living 111

his small ends, yet find himself a conscious
unit in harmony with a progression of
eternal significance 1 Jesus believed in such
a possibility. He preached no gospel of
renunciation, of immolation, or of extinc-
tion. ''I am come," he said, "that they
might have life and that they might have
it more abundantly." "Whosoever will
lose his life shall find it." When the small
seed of disinterestedness is planted in the
human soul there is no limit to the possi-
bilities of growth and destiny.

There is a kind of sleight-of-hand of lan-
guage by which it is made to appear that
the highest ultimate good, or, the highest
good of the universe, or, in still other terms,
the greatest glory of God, is also the high-
est pleasure: therefore pleasure is the
siimmum honum; therefore pleasure or
happiness is to be directly sought, and at-
tainment makes life worth living. It is
easy to lose one's self in a language maze;
it is possible to make these terms mean
anything we please. But our ideals must
be rugged ; any pursuit of happiness which
softens these is an emanation of the self-
seeking life. The higher pleasures are not
despicable; surely life will be richer when
they are more wide-spread. But to say that

112 The Things That Abide

happiness flows from the ideal life is a
different thing from saying that happiness
is the end to be sought. So, too, the real-
ization of one's self, in the highest ethical
meaning of the term, is a noble deduction
from the ideal life. It is the flavor of the
fruit, but it is not the fruit. Life is an
investment of the universe in us. To
respond to the universe, to grow into the
larger image, through the pain, through
the pleasure, in spite of pain, in spite of
pleasure, this is to attain the crown of life.
''I have been compensated in this cause a
million times over," said Garrison of his
anti-slavery struggle. "In the darkest
hour, in the greatest peril, I have felt just
at that moment that it Avas everything to
be in such a cause."

Human life justifies itself by its quality,
its perfume, its essential nature, not by its
accumulations, its felicities, its preponder-
ance of pleasures over pains. The worth
in life is an emanation, a fine and delicately
adjusted temper of mind and soul, the
unconsidered and unconscious outpouring
of an abounding nature. If you analyze
it, it is not there. Introspection blights it.
The scales cannot weigh it. AVhen you
seek to apply the test of self-interest it

Life Worth Living 113

vanishes away. What would remain of
that ineffable perfume of life if we insist
on applying the quantitative tests of mate-
rial treasures, or happiness, or self-realiza-
tion. Man was not made for happiness;
not even for self-realization. These may
be indications along the way. But man was
made for the immortal life. ' ' He that giv-
eth a cup of cold water in the name of a dis-
ciple shall not lose his reward." AVe need
not deny him happiness, self-realization;
but these are not his reward. His reward
is in power, in widened sympathies and
relations. "The profit of every act should
be this, that it was right for us to do it. ' '
If, then, life is to be motived from without
we shall find its gateway in self-sacrifice.
Self-sacrifice is not the end of life— only its
gateway. Jesus did not emphasize the
losing but the finding. Self-sacrifice does
not end in doing everything for others and
allowing them to do nothing for you in
return. Giving implies a responsive rela-
tion. Giving one's life is not indiscrim-
inate charity, nor the conscious going about
to dispense good. Says Thoreau, "If I
knew for a certainty that a man was com-
ing to my house with the conscious design
of doing me good, I should run for my life

114 The Things That Abide

. . . for fear that I should get some of his
good done to me, some of its virus mingled
with my blood. ... I want the flower and
fruit of a man; that some fragrance be
wafted over from him to me, and some ripe-
ness flavor our intercourse. His goodness
must not be a partial and transitory act,
but a constant superfluity which costs him
nothing and of which he is unconscious."
It is easy enough to throw money to a
beggar; a very different thing to give him
one tiny uplift toward a better life. Con-
scious self-sacrifice is giving up instead of
giving out.

''For this is Love's nobility,—
Not to scatter bread and gold,
Goods and raiment bought and sold;
But to hold fast his simple sense.
And speak the speech of innocence,
For he that feeds men serveth few;
He serves all who dares be true."

Some student once figured out that in the
whole United States there was one college
graduate to every three thousand citizens.
As it was near Commencement time, he
wrote a stirring article for the college
paper enlarging upon the mission and
responsibilities of those who were about to
graduate — each to become the leader of
three thousand! The spectacle is indeed

Life Worth Living 115

impressive. Yet there is no disappoint-
ment more bitter than that of the college
graduate who goes forth from alma mater
filled with the idea of leading three thou-
sand, and who expects to be escorted with
banners and trumpets to that commanding
position. No, the college diploma confers
no leadership, and the three thousand citi-
zens are calmly indifferent. "Whosoever
would be chief among you, let him be your
servant. " To be the servant of three thou-
sand— that is something to stir the blood !
And while there may be disappointments
and misfits, the opportunity for service is
sure to come. ' ' Every hand is wanted in the
world that can do a little genuine, sincere
work." If we suppose we can run a news-
paper or preach sermons when the world
is only willing that we shall dig ditches,
we had better accept the wise old world's
rating and see at least that its ditches are
well dug. Plutarch relates that "when
Paedaretus lost his election for one of the
'three hundred,' he went away 'rejoicing
that there were three hundred better men
than himself found in the city. ' ' '

Has some one in mind that proselyting
passion for goodness which strips life of its
leisure, its fun, its social lubricant ? whose

116 The Things That Abide

devotees never unbend, who urge to Puri-
tanic strictness, who talk audaciously of
remodeling the world, who throw away
every good thing to invade the Chinese
empire or the heart of Africa? This is
not self-sacrifice — primarily. This is
youth — glorious, buoyant, believing, cour-
ageous youth ! Poor would the world be
without it. It is often spectacular. It
chooses the remote under the impression
that the remote is most worth while. It
must learn that nothing is quite so hard,
nor quite so important, as to do the little
duty well and faithfully, at home, in the
quiet round of life. Soon enough it will
come to the realization that in a world far
from perfect the most that any one can do
is very little. But not to have the vision
of a regenerated humanity, not to see the
City of God, not to gaze in exalted vision
upon the fair fields and lanes of Utopia,
and when life is young and heartsome and
strong, not to believe that we can make the
world over — that indeed were paralyzing
to the good we might have done.

** There's but one thing to sing about,
And poor's the song that does without;
And many a song would not live long
Were it not for the theme that is never worked
out.''

Life Worth Living 117

Sometimes a state of absolute justice and
absolute freedom appeals to us as the ideal
condition of life. Every man would have
what belonged to him. He would be free
to make the most of himself. He would
have opportunity to measure himself
against his fellows, and in so far as he was
stronger, more far-sighted, more patient,
shrewder, wiser — in short, more adaptable
— he would succeed. Those who were fee-
ble, or shortsighted, or disabled, or dis-
eased, would have their measure of oppor-
tunity, be finally crowded to the outer rim,
and when they could no longer hold on
would drop into well-earned oblivion. In
a sense we have been moving steadily in
this direction. The century just past threw
off many of the shackles which impeded
this freedom of movement. It is not un-
reasonable to suppose that both justice and
freedom may be meted out with larger
liberality. In another sense we are travel-
ing farther and farther from this ideal
every year. Man free, man realizing him-
self, man seeking his own happiness, would
bring us at last to an orderly world, a cold,
insensible, inhuman Paradise. It is broth-
erhood which forbids it. An orderly world
is desirable. Freedom, justice, indepen-

118 The Things That Abide

dence, happiness, self-realization, are desir-
able, nay, let us hope, indispensable. But
take out the helping hand, take out the
love that can go down into the deepest
depths and out to the farthest rim with
healing and rescue, take out the spirit of
supreme self-sacrifice — that a man lay-
down his life for his friends — and life
would be as cheerless as the awful solitudes
of the moon. That which gives life a mean-
ing, that clothes it with beauty and worth-
fulness, that sweetens these common tasks,
is its anchorage in the larger life of the
vast universe. For the individual this is
to lose the strain, the pettiness, the jar and
discord of self-seeking; to find the repose,
the symmetry, the fusion and union with
all that is aspiring in earth or heaven.
One life truly lived, "under the aspect of
eternity," redeems all human life, and in
the hubbub of the day's round, with its
cares, its disappointments, its stragglings,
its triumphs, restores for us faith in the
worthfulness of human life — for the indi-
vidual, for the race, and for the universe.

"God's in his heaven—
All 's right with the world ! ' '

The Christian Argument

The Christian Argument

''For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks
seek after wisdom : But we preach Christ crucified,
unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the
Greeks foolishness; but unto them which are
called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of
God and the wisdom of God."

IT is the fortune of most of us to have
inherited the Puritan conscience. We
may have strayed far in thought and deed,
we may affect the more yielding standards
of this cosmopolitan world ; yet it is not the
same as to those in whose blood the softer
strains have long flowed. That which comes
so easy to many — little deflections from the
strict line of rectitude, different standards
for man and woman, good-natured con-
tempt of Sabbath strictness and week-day
restraint, unabashed levity in the presence
of the deepest experiences of the soul — if
we attain unto these, there is still a wrench
to even the least of those whose blood car-
ries a single Puritan strain. We may cut
loose from every Puritan tradition, we may
yield obedience to what we conceive a larger

122 The Things That Abide

truth, yet we shall do it with a sense of
pain and loss not soon repaired.

The Puritan lived in a darkened age,
when the difference between good and evil
was but faintly discerned. In the Puritan
the saving elements of society gathered
themselves together. Puritanism was hard,
sombre, distrustful of mirth, narrow-mind-
ed. It was also robust. It raised up
rectitude and righteousness as landmarks.
It associated God, conscience, duty with
life. The life was hard-featured, but it
was pursued in sanity and soberness. It
was downright and earnest, and however
the intellect was tripped and tricked the
life was transformed. It is the good for-
tune of our own age, by virtue of this
ancestry and this life, to have inherited a
body of men and women sound and whole-
some in the fundamental sanities of life,
religious in deep and true way^, full of
faith and hope and love. Yet with all this
inheritance, filled with the fire of enthusi-
asm and purpose, we have fallen upon
trying times. The age of faith has given
place to the riotous age of the intellect.
Whether we will or no we are submerged
in an atmosphere of inquiry, of investiga-
tion, of testinoj. The whole boundless uni-

The Christian Argument 123

verse is laid open. The experience, the wis-
dom, the guiding-posts of the past are at
our disposal; but we are expected to make
the universe our own by conquering it
afresh. What fascinating outlooks! No
enthusiasm is so buoyant, none more thrill-
ing, than that pure passion for conquest
which invests the Knight of Scholarship,
whether his quest be merely some intricacy
of grammar or the evolution of a race.
And no matter what religious experiences
life may have hitherto yielded, nor what
fortifications theology may have builded,
it is inevitable that this quest should em-
brace those fundamental questions as to the
sanctions of morality, the meaning of duty,
the nature of religion, the existence of God.
It is not that everything held sacred will
be questioned : that is no new experience.
But with the bewildering rush of new
impressions, new facts, and new points of
view, the ground will seem to give way
beneath the feet. All about you men will
be making new syntheses of human life and
finding no place in them for the emotions
and activities of religion. It would be easy
to exaggerate the pressure of this transition
time, and to magnify its perils. It does not
come to everybody. Some lives unfold as

124 The Things That Abide

the flowers do, gradually, imperceptibly,
perfectly. When young people are sud-
denly struck with grave doubt in the pres-
ence of the fundamental problems of
existence, it were easy to overestimate the
depth and importance of this melancholia.
Some disturbance is incident to growth,
and growing pains, severe though they may
be, need not alarm us. Yet something is
evidently awry when a thoughtful observer,
looking upon our community life, may con-
clude that "the majority of students have
no use for religion."

The intellectual problems of to-day are
not the same as in St. Paul's time. Yet
the analogy is striking. Paul lived in an
age in some respects the most hopeless in
recorded history. The disintegrating influ-
ences of rapacity, lust, self-indulgence, and
malice were v/orking within the mighty
empire of Rome. The sense of a moral
government was fading from the mind of
Greek and Roman alike. Even in Jewry
faith had given place to formality. The
gods no longer concerned the Greek; yet
there were left those who reached out after
the larger life, and in philosophy, in art,
in science were seeking for self-realization
through stoic wisdom. The Jew could not

The Christian Argument 125

so easily throw off his vision of the High
and Holy One; but his religious fervor
was dimmed, and of any new manifestation,
like Christianity, he demanded somxe un-
mistakable sign of that Divine power which
invests the oracles of God. To-day it is
the earnestness of men. the Puritan strain,
which makes problems of God, conscience,
duty. It is a sign of vitality that there
are among us so many Jews, so many
Greeks — the one despairingly demanding
some sign from the unseen world, the other
seeking wisdom.

In childhood we necessarily live upon
authority. Not having wisdom of our own,
we must obey the wisdom of parents, teach-
ers, and rulers. As we grow in knowledge
much of this authority falls away: it is
never wholly shaken off. As members of
families, societies, and states, our will
must yield in varied ways to the larger will.
No man can compass the whole of intel-
lectual knowledge. We can apply certain
tests of reason and comparison, but in the
end, in innumerable cases, we willingly and
safely rest in authority. We have not time
ourselves to study the heavens, but we
may become satisfied of the veracity, in-
telligence, and general accuracy of those

126 The Things That Abide

who do study the heavens and announce its
laws. In religious matters, we inherit the
experiences of the past, and especially the
intellectual formulas in which they were
cast. In some form or other these expe-
riences, together with the intellectual
explanations of them, must be compared
with our own experiences and brought to
the bar of our own reason.

The authority in religion which this
generation • inherited conceived of God as
far removed from the ordinary phenomena
of the world. His existence, his nature,
his decrees, his laws and punishments, his
plan of salvation and the etiquette of
heaven had once for all been duly set forth
by men especially inspired and instructed,
and God himself had retired from that
direct and immediate relation he had once
assumed to his chosen people. Still, by
petition and process, in response to prayer
and service, he could be persuaded to in-
terfere in the affairs of men: using the
earthquake, the pestilence, the lightning to
do his signal bidding, averting all these by
special favor ; striking down the wicked by
special execution, saving the righteous
by special intervention. Spiritual men in
all generations have pierced these walls of

The Christian Argument 127

scholasticism aud strayed into the broad
fields and sunshine beyond. No generation
has so little excuse as our own for being
bound by this mechanical conception of
God; yet not one of us, I suppose, has
wholly escaped the limitations of this point
of view.

At any rate, our modern Jew, come to
college halls, finds all these manifestations
traced to secondary causes: all nature
bound together by the chain of law; back
of earthquake the subterranean disturb-
ance; back of lightning stroke the sur-
charged atmosphere; back of storm and
wind the unmistakable barometric condi-
tions; every manifestation of nature and
physical life the effect of a cause which
itself is but another effect of a still more
primary cause. Back, back this God of
authority goes until dimly, in the far re-
cesses of the beginnings, where science has
not penetrated, he may be allowed to rest
as an unknown First Cause. Is it any won-
der that our Jew, filled with anthropomor-
phic images of God, is disturbed and doubt-
ing. He will not be cheated by a shadow.
If God be driven out of all known phenom-
ena and superseded by this intricate inter-
relation of natural laws, how can it be

128 The Things That Abide

shown that he is within the shadowy be-
yond the originator and controller of it all ?
Give us some sign of his power.

Our Greek, on the other hand, frankly
accepts the situation. He remembers that
the lightning stroke does not turn aside
because the good man is in its track. When
the prayer of faith seems to have saved
some almost shipwrecked crew, he recalls
other tempest-tossed ships which went
down for all their prayers and tears. The
loss of that immortal hope of the ages may
or may not be painful. At any rate, to all
intents and purposes, the universe runs
itself, and has adapted itself out of nothing
or next to nothing. Nevertheless it is a
wonderful adaptation. The birds do not
sing less sweetly because they represent
an original variation from an elemental
sensitiveness. If any man cares to call
this developing principle God, well and
good. But the Greek will free himself from
religious veiling and see things directly in
their simple relations of cause and effect.
He will seek wisdom, the knowledge that
makes wise, the secrets of nature, the new
synthesis of the world. Religion is foolish-
ness, but wisdom may well call for the
highest devotion of man.

The Christian Argument 129

Strange answer that Paul gave to all
that questioning and indifference. Stranger
yet, that Christianity has no other answer
to the not less eager, perhaps more despair-
ing questioning of to-day. To both Jew
and Greek, in the ancient world and now,
with sublime irrelevance, Christianity
preaches Christ crucified, — to them that
are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ
the power of God and the wisdom of God.

For this religion which the despair, or
the self-confidence, of youth imagines it has
no use for, is not a science to explore the
physical world in regions where biology
has been unable to enter ; nor a philosophy
which harmonizes the gathered knowledge
of the world. Undoubtedly religion is in-
timately connected with science and with
philosophy. Undoubtedly it must accom-
modate itself to the language of science
and of philosophy. But Religion is some-
thing different from this. Religion does
not contradict knowledge. It has no an-
swer to that last pitiful question of First
Cause. AVhatever may be tested and tried
by weight or measurement or sense experi-
ence is the field of science. Religion has
no added delicacy of touch which enables
it to take up the weights and measures and

130 The Things That Abide

microscopes of physical science and reach
more accurate results. Nor is it impelled
to this search; for if God was ever any-
where present in the phenomena of life, he
must be always and everywhere present —
"in whom we live and move and have our
being."

Of St. Paul's intellectual greatness and
dialectical skill we have abundant proof.
AVhen he entered the lists to answer direct-
ly and philosophically the materialism of
the Greek and the skepticism of the Jew^
he was no mean debater. To him Christian-
ity satisfied every test of reason. To him,
certainly, it lacked none of those signs for
which the Jew might reasonably inquire.
But Paul could not afford to risk the mes-
sa-ge of Christianity on a philosophical or
theological solution of the problems which
Greek and Jew had raised. Logic has no
power to touch the springs of life, and no
real doubt was ever laid by an appeal to
experiences which have no present continu-
ance. Paul could afford to seem a stum-
bling-block to the Jew and foolishness to
the Greek because he saw Christianity in
far different aspect. It could not be appre-
hended from the point of view of Jew or
Greek, Christianity was something differ-

The Christian Argument 131

ent from that which the Greek had re-
jected, something different from that which
the Jew was seeking to prove. Christian-
ity was a life, a principle of action, a rela-
tion between God and man. If he could
see this life building into the awful serious-
ness of the Jew, working in and moulding
the genuine sincerity and artistic quick-
ness of the Greek, he need not trouble him-
self about their philosophy. The Jew's
question would answer itself. The power
of God would be manifested in his own life.
The Greek need not be diverted from his
noble pursuit of wisdom. His cold and
cheerless search needed but the touch of
faith, the unifying purpose of the larger
life, to reach it up till the Greek himself
should see. in its transfigured light, the
wisdom of God.

Philosophy is only man's explanation of
things. Christian philosophy is only a
Christian man's explanation of things. It
is colored with all the conceptions of the
age which produces it. It is Nicene or anti-
Xicene according to the intellectual hered-
ity, training, and associations of those who
proposed it. It is now^ bedded in Ptolemaic
astronomy, now in Copernican. In the
eighteenth century it will hold to separate

132 The Things That Abide

and special creation; in the nineteenth it
must follow the great evolutionary cleav-
age. The readjustment of philosophy, es-
pecially of religious philosophy, is always
painful. It was so in the sixteenth century,
it will be so in the twentieth. But inevi-
table and painful though it may be, it deals
only with the adventitious. The Gospel
message is the same whether philosophy be
Ptolemaic or Copernican, fiat or evolution-
ary. Christian philosophy is always chan-
ging, and must always change, so long as
anything concerning this world of ours re-
mains to be discovered. But the essence
of Christianity is unchangeable. And so
St. Paul with unerring insight ignores the
doubt of the Jew and the unbelief of the
Greek, and lays down the Christian pro-
gramme. Christianity does not assume to
solve any of the problems which are as old
as human life, except as the unfolding
nature grows into the unity, the harmony,
the beauty of the divine life. The Bible
never anywhere argues the existence of
God; Christianity never anywhere presup-
poses assent to a theology. "Follow me,"
*'Come unto me," "Take up your cross"
— these were Christ's test. What gives
Christianity its vitality, and what makes

The Christian Argument 133

Christian the largest word in the language,
is this fundamental call to life and service.
We do not yield allegiance to Jesus be-
cause of his authoritative manner of speech.
This were to confuse effect with cause. He
spoke with sublime authority because life
had yielded to him its everlasting meaning.
He who searches the Gospels for proof-
texts may find support for almost any sys-
tem. He who sees nothing more in his
Bible than historical data and an ethical
syllabus has missed its import. Jesus' mes-
sage was bound up with his personality —
because the life was the message. He
asserted the sonship. He dared to reach
up and claim the high prerogative of Son
of God. His nature found no repulse, he
stood on this height one with God in pur-
pose and fellowship. What he said seemed
of little account; it never occurred to him
to write it down. He put himself at the
head of no movement. He did not seek the
great centers that from their vantage-
ground his power and influence might be
augmented. What he did was mainly inci-
dental. As he went about he did the god-
like things — the simple deeds of service —
and spoke the discourse of the spirit.
Twelve men became his companions, and

134 The Things That Abide

upon them he poured out the wealth of his
nature. To them he opened the secrets of
life and called them to his height. One
failed him; the others responded in some
fashion to that inspiring touch. Jesus
looked to see the whole world transformed
and human life everywhere made divine
through this power of love and service. In
a way the world has responded. In fair
and generous measure a multitude of lives
have attained the sonship to which Jesus
called them. Yet now, after the lapse of
nearly nineteen hundred years, wiien we
measure any of these against the command-
ing figure of Christ, we do not need any
one to tell us why Jesus occupies a unique
and undisputed place in the world.

Paul preached Christ crucified because
he must turn men's thoughts from phil-
osophy to life. Here was One who shared
our common life in common ways of love
and service. Yet in that life and service
was that which the Jew so despairingly
sought — not some ability to wreck the or-
dinary laws and processes of nature, which
the Jew of Galilee and of Stanford seems
to think would be proof of Divinity; not
some opening of the heavens which should
disclose a superhuman God and angels on

The Christian Argument 135

the other side of the sky; not the subtle-
ties of an ethical philosophy which arrives
by slow gradations at the greatest good of
the greatest number — but that larger unity
and purpose which reaches up to the
Fatherhood of God through the brother-
hood of man. To the Greek who cannot
believe in God because he knows so much,
because he sees that everything which men
call God can be resolved into a manifesta-
tion of force, because the gods are mere
imaginings to account for what cannot be
understood, Paul is content to preach this
foolishness of one who in life and in death
freely gave himself a ransom for many;
not caring what name he might be called,
if love, and penitence, and forgiveness, and
the joy of service bring its regenerating
touch; yet confident that, in the end, it
would spell out, to the Greek himself, the
wisdom and the love of God.

Light and immortality have been brought
to light through the Gospel. Immortality
came to light, not because Jesus died and
then returned from out the grave to resume
the old familiar comradeship. Whatever
that mysterious and uplifting experience
which came to the disciples after Calvary
Jesus did not take up again the daily round

136 The Things That Abide

of life, nor did he discourse of what he had
found beyond the veil. The earthly life
was cut off forever, and no curious word
was spoken of what goes on in that silent
land. Not so could immortality be brought
to light. We cannot live, nor behold the
light of immortality through the record of
any past event. Life is an experience of
our own. We live it or we do not have it.
Immortality came to light in Jesus through
that unerring spiritual instinct, that in-
sight into the eternity of life, which is
shared to us through his winsome and over-
mastering personality. He saw life in its
largest meaning, its inter-relation with the
unending purpose of God. Every relation
of this life had its immortal aspect. He
lived the immortal life, and death could be
only an incident, however profound or sig-
nificant.

'*God giveth and forgiveth without the
asking," just as the rain falls alike upon
the just and the unjust. Yet in a very true
sense there can be no receiving un-
less there is first the asking. Asking is
the consciousness of need, the necessary
quality of receptiveness, the essential con-
dition of receiving. If one does not listen
for the Divine voice he surely will not hear

The Christian Argument 137

it. The penalty for disuse of organ or
power is loss of organ br power. Is the
religious life so unreal that environment is
of no importance? Nay, environment is of
the greatest importance. It is well enough
to feel our independence of services, ordi-
nances, formal modes of worship and fel-
lowship. Yet certain it is that the religious
life, unless it is exercised, attended by ade-
quate expression, has no more guarantee of
continuance than any other attribute.
There are those who find in the high con-
verse of poetry, in quiet communion with
the great thoughts of the ages, in famili-
arity with the intimate retreats and secrets
of nature, in unselfish pursuit of a noble
task, this stimulus to the religious life.
Paltry the lot of any who has not felt these
high ministrations. Christianity can have
no quarrel with any who have walked and
talked with God and called him by some
other name. There are those to whom the
Church seems but the outgrown type of a
higher social order. One hears brave words
about the intellectual necessity of break-
ing away from the church whose creed you
have outrun, of the common honesty of
coming out and showing your colors. When
the great historic Church becomes nothing

138 The Things That Abide

but a form of words, an intellectual
formula, you may well heed this advice.
But w^hat if back of all intellectualisms
there is the stirring and fragrant history
of a great organization charged with the
promulgation of the Kingdom of God and
the uplifting of Humanity — an organiza-
tion whose traditions, whose treasured ex-
periences, whose solemn services and asso-
ciations, whose splendid loyalty, fit it to be
the special guardian and conservor of the
religious life! Millions of men have lived,
and never two of exactly the same mind.
Yet millions have had the same ideals and
have looked toward the same heights. How
have these millions worked together? By
keeping their eyes on the heights. It is no
mark of greatness to isolate one's self so
completely that it is impossible to join
hands with anybody. Occasionally a great
soul is so far in advance as to be shrouded
in sorrowful loneliness. But this is rarely
so. Most solitary souls are so because their
eyes are withdrawn from the heights and
cast upon the imperfections of men and
organizations. They have time to discover
creed differences, and to forget the one-
ness of ideal and outlook. There is joy in
heaven over one sinner that repenteth.

The Christian Argument 139

Who ever heard of exaltation among the
angels over one righteous man turned Pres-
byterian, or Unitarian, or Catholic, or made
over into the semblance of any doctrinal
system ?

''The fruit of the spirit is Love, Joy,
Peace, Long-suffering, Gentleness, Good-
ness, Faith, Meekness, Self-control : against
such there is no law."

"Love is of God; and every one that
loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.
He that loveth not knoweth not God; for
God is Love."

"As Little Children"

''As Little Children"

"Then were there brought unto him little chil-
dren, that he should put his hands on them and
pray: and the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus
said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not,
to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of
heaven. ' '

''And Jesus called a little child unto him, and
set him in the midst of them, and said, Verily i
say unto you, except ye be converted, and become
as little children, ye shall not enter into the king-
dom of heaven."

CHRISTMAS time is children's time.
We who are not children rejoice that
it is so. Every joy in our own life takes
a richer coloring from its reflection in the
happy faces of little children. Even
though we have tasted of the fruit of the
tree of knowledge and found it bitter,
though disappointment has lost us the zest
of life, though ambitions have been
thwarted, still some gladness stirs our
hearts as we let it all go, for the moment,
and enter into that joyous, fresh world
where love and trust abide and where sor-
didness and carking care may not come.
Blessed apotheosis of childhood ! Happy

144 The Things That Abide

giving, and happier sharing ! In the foot-
steps of a little child we may find our way
once more along the briar-grown path of
the affections. Hearts become cold may be
warmed into life, and aspirations stifled in
our strange, grown-up atmosphere, it may
be, shall draw breath again. In the wake
of childhood's spontaneity we shall take
courage to break through conventional
barriers and be in truth "kindly affec-
tioned one to another"; and through such
renewal love and trust shall not wholly
perish from our lives.

But Christmas time is more than chil-
dren's time. It is more than the celebra-
tion of the birth in a manger of one who
came to a throne in the uplifted hearts of
Christendom. It is more than a brief abdi-
cation in favor of children, because the
King was once a child, to turn back again
w^hen the Christmas days are over, into a
world outside of and alien to the child life.
In the Christmas celebration a babe is ex-
alted as a babe, and before the cradle man-
kind finds itself in the presence of a
renewing spirit.

What a stretch from the folded life of
the little child to the weather-beaten struc-
ture of the mature life, from the depen-

''As Little Children" 145

dent trust of childhood to the responsibility
and initiative of manhood, from the ideal
world of the untainted imagination to the
grim reality of the battlefield ! It is a hard
thing to be no longer young; yet youth is
forever longing to become a man. It is the
heights that beckon him on, and with eager-
ness he presses forward to find out, to
know, to invent, to experience in its full-
ness the richness and the splendor of
achievement. Glorious indeed is the human
life divine unfolding toward the light,
keyed to lofty purpose. How the glory
dims when we blindly put away from us
the unapproachable grace of childlikeness !
Ah, that we should so often look out into
the world and into our own hearts and see
the lofty heights obscured ! Somehow the
simplicity and the trust have vanished;
somehow the heart has hardened. So reck-
lessly Ave deal with our wonderful inheri-
tance, so insensibly the strength and beauty
and completeness of the ideal life fade
away, that we will not admit any voli-
tion. It is just a part of our sophistication,
we insist, just the normal price for firm-
ness of texture, wisdom, the necessary
knowledge of good and evil, the substitu-
tion of realities for dreams. The youth of

146 The Things That Abide

promise and high purpose must wake up at
last to a world of jarring interests, rival-
ries, unequal competitions. The things
which expanded his soul and fired his am-
bitions are not the prizes for which men
strive. Their pursuit does not seem to offer
any secure footing in a practical world. In
politics, in business, in social life the ideal
is folded carefully away, and scheming
shrewdness and conformity fix the high-
water mark of practicability.

In religion the faded metaphors are laid
aside. If the religious impulse persists
God is sought through some intellectual-
emotional experience; but when God has
thus been found w^e need to be persistently
told so, lest it should never be guessed
through any effect upon conduct. Or, with
the attainment of erudition, religion is
taken out of the innocent, simple-minded-
ness of the child trust and given over to
daring speculation. Far out beyond the
stars, outside the unsubstantial figments of
time and space, in the ultimate immensities,
the mind tries somehow to grasp a God who
is the Universal Soul of things, the one
only essence, of which we are a part. Or,
in our blind numbness we seek him in some
disordered fancv of an overstrained ner-

^^As Little Children" 147

yoiis system. AVe think to apprehend him
through some abnormal acnteness of the
physical senses, and try to satisfy the dull
longing of an unfed heart by the unex-
plained marvels of sub-conscious activity.

And so we find the problem of God in-
soluble. With all our manifold demonstra-
tions the question, Does God exist? is
constantly recurring. The prayer, "0 God.
if there be a God — save my soul, if I have
a soul," is, after all. about as high as the
unaided intellect ever reaches. The God of
our thought conception — Omnipotent, Om-
nipresent, Omniscient — makes no .speech in
our English tongue, we do not meet him
in the street, nor can we see anything with
these eyes of ours despite our utmost strain-
ing.

"The light that never was on land or
sea" is the constant illumination of child-
hood. Before the veil is lifted we all live
in the giowing land of promise where
everything is fair and beautiful. The light
may fade; but when child life is renewed
in the home something of the old enchant-
ment instinctively returns. For ourselves,
we may aver, the glorious vision has passed
— for us the prose of life, the commonplace,
whether it pass for success or defeat — yet

148 The Things That Abide

ah we have missed, all we meant to become
and once believed we should attain — all this
shall come rushing back upon us as some-
how possible in our children — if only youth
could be kept ! If only we could guard the
children, if only something which is un-
speakably precious be not lost in the pas-
sage over to manhood, the world shall be
transformed. In childhood the whole
world is renewed. Judge any man by
what he is in his home and among children.
Moral degradation has no plainer mark
than a failure to respect the innocence and
the trustfulness of childhood. And there is
no surer sign of the pure heart than in-
stinctive reverence for childhood. Chil-
dren do not come to every home ; but it is
inconceivable that there should be a home
so selfish as not to want child life in it.
' ' To meet eyes which trust us without ques-
tion, to receive caresses which are not
measured by our worthiness but are the
spontaneous fruit of a love which seeks no
proof of our merit, cannot be a light matter
to any man. These are a father's guerdon
and repay many an hour of patient self-
denial. If a man or woman finds the greed
and false effort of his or her world are
infecting the spirit with the lowering in-

^'As Little Children" 149

fluences they exert, God has left no such
restraining power in a sinful world as the
fear to injure a child or lose its love."
Nothing more emphasizes the transitoriness
and artificiality of this set-apart life of
students, in barracks and boarding clubs,
than the absence of the home sanctities and
of the hallowing presence of little children.
What utter loneliness there may be in a
crowd; and what tempting spirits come to
a house thus suddenly swept and gar-
nished! But think you there is no saving
quality in the memory of these things ? He
will not go far wrong in whose heart are
enshrined the pure affections of a home
kept sweet and warm-hearted by the child
life in it.

To childhood we must turn back for the
law of spiritual growth. Ignorance does
not in itself prevent, knowledge does
not in itself help or hinder spiritual
growth : to reach out and take hold ; to put
on; to earn faith by being faithful; to
experience what love is by loving; there
is no other way. To turn from plain,
wholesome living, in the sunshine, just
doing the next duty, just leading the
simple, strenuous life — to turn from this
to abstract ratiocination, or to painful

150 The Things That Abide

groping in the sub-conscious, is to turn
from warmth and light to the dank cellar
where men like plants shall merely spindle
out in fantastic and unsubstantial shapes.
Some strange and marvelous harvest there
may be, the rightful spoil of erudition and
investigation, but not here the meeting-
place of earth and heaven.

To the impatient youth hurrying away
from childhood, to the finally disillusioned
man, the trust of childhood seems a blind
trust, just a shutting of the eyes, the exhi-
bition of unlimited credulity. Nothing
could be farther from the truth. There is
no shutting of the eyes in childhood. The
trust of childhood is the undeceived trust:
''The soft, deep heart of the little child
that, having nothing, asketh for all things,
that hath no care, no distress, no solicitude,
and expecteth only love. ' ' The looking up
and asking is natural. The trust is be-
gotten by nothing but the receiving. All
the sweet trust of childhood may be de-
stroyed by one thoughtless deception. But
so long as the child can say My Father, and
receive the answering confidence, so long as
mother-love beats in true response to child
need, so long does trust remain to mold the
character in all loveliness and excellence.

''As Little Children" 151

Childhood possesses neither knowledge
nor erudition. Childhood can have no
sense of proportion or relation among
the intricate facts of the universe. But
the child-spirit and the child-faith are the
spirit and the faith which preserve the sym-
metry of life in the midst of all the dis-
tractions and disorders of the world.
Forever the relations of the home typify
the relation of man to all that is kindred
to him in the universe of God.

Yet we know that the God and Father of
us all, who is over all, and through all. and
in us all, cannot be limited by time and
space. The ver^ highest attributes of man
— consciousness and personality — can only
faintly symbolize the like possession of
him who is the Sovereign Ruler of the Uni-
verse, Creator and Preserver of Mankind.
And we know there can be no literal truth
in giving him form and locality, and think-
ing of a great room in Heaven, and a
throne, and all of us gathered around it.
Then must we cease to think of God as
Father and we as children to be gathered
sometime into his presence? No; here is
our highest thought of him. Here, by
means of this symbolism, where intellect
and reason stand at bay, we pass through

152 The Things That Abide

to ultimate reality. Just here, in the
simple, trustful attitude of the little child,
just here, by pressing home the deepest
relations of earth, just here, in this sym-
bolism, we find that order and unity and
meaning, that harmony and beauty, that
unutterable love whereby we instinctively
cry Abba, Father! and doubt not of the
response.

What is the strongest characteristic of
the wisest man? Not his craft, not his
logic, not his towering knowledge. It is his
directness, his simplicity, his childlikeness.
0 the men who live behind masks, to whom
diplomacy and duplicity seem so great
weapons, who flatter, and cajole, and con-
trive! How far are they from the real
heart of things, from real strength, from
real wisdom ! And how, after all, the world
loves and appreciates outspokenness!

And so the lesson is and the sweet mes-
sage is, that we can become as little chil-
dren in things of the spirit. Youth can be
renewed in our sluggish blood. The hard-
ened heart may be softened. The zest of
life, the simplicity and trust, these were
not forever lost as we climbed the sordid
years this side the eating of the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil. Except

^^As Little Children" 153

we be converted and become as little chil-
dren? Blessed, thrice blessed, are we that
we can become as little children, that the
tortuous windings may be unwound, that
the simplicities and the trust are real, that
the spiritual life is just this life touched
with illumination, that something that
belongs to childhood may perennially
freshen our days, that in the real things of
life we may never grow old.

And so to this babe in the manger Hu-
manity turns and sees reflected the vision
and the fullness of God. The Christmas
vision is the revelation of permanent truth.
The things eternally truest in our own
lives cannot be less true anjrwhere in the
vast eternity of God. Jesus took little chil-
dren iQ his arms and blessed them and
made them the everlasting type of disciple-
ship. How long a perverse world stumbled
over the plainest of truths ! But childhood
is coming to its own ; its benediction is that
the mood of despairing doubt and home-
lessness shall give place to understanding
trust and the peace of the reunited home
— not less real that it passeth all under-
standing.

ii

Like

as a

Path

er

"Like as a Father"

"Like as a father pitieth Ms children, so the
Lord pitieth them that fear him."

LIFE is our adventure into the un-
known. It is the supreme quest ; and
no travelers' tales which reach us can dull
the keen edge of our own experiences or
discoveries. On this voyaging we can go
but a little w^ay before meeting with contra-
dictions. We shall find joy and sorrow,
pleasure and pain, triumphs and despairs,
heights and depths. In this encounter with
the world of experience we are not mere
inert passengers. It is a real encounter;
and how we take it, how we react upon it,
how we direct it, is of vast importance. If
we were passive spectators, and if the spec-
tacle would be the same whatever our efforts
and conduct, if a blind fate were driving
us toward a predetermined end, there might
be interest in the voyaging and curiosity
about the end,' but there would be no sus-
tained enthusiasm and no giving of thanks.
But if there is a port at which we shall

158 The Things That Abide

arrive by virtue of our own effort and
striving in a world fundamentally good, a
** far-off, divine event, to which the whole
creation moves," then nothing shall sub-
due the courage and the exhilaration
with which we turn to meet whatever be-
fall us.

Is the world fundamentally good, or bad ?
A part of the evidence is our own indi-
vidual experience — what happens to us; a
part is the experience of the race. But
there is no final answer without a synthesis
of that which lies behind time and space
and every outpost of the human mind.
There is no reflecting mind which does not
try to make this synthesis, to construct,
in terms of experience, a symbol of that
ultimate reality which is at the heart
of the universe and which we have called
God.

The line of our own spiritual descent is
through the race which has given to the
world the loftiest conception of God and of
the destiny of man. Yet some of the most
terrible conceptions of God are found in
the Bible. Those which reflect merely a
rudimentary stage of civilization, in which
cunning and cruelty suggest no inconsis-
tency, we need not dwell upon. Even in

'^Like as a Father" 159

them the spiritual genius of the Hebrew
people is not wholly wanting. God is
always the defender of his chosen people.
Against their enemies he will move with
swift and terrible fury. For the chosen
nation there is deliverance and exaltation,
yet through the discipline of trial and
humiliation. Even when the passion for
righteousness has become dominant he is
the great and terrible God, smiting wicked-
ness, tearing down idols, overturning king-
doms with his breath. Prophetic language
is symbolic and figurative. Nevertheless
prophecy is a reflective interpretation of
the world of experience thrown against the
unconquerable ideal of the Hebrew race.

But while the prophets cling to their
great ideal and transmit it unimpaired, the
heritage of all succeeding peoples, the
Hebrew race can grasp it only fitfully and
is again and again overwhelmed by the
insistent contradictions of experience. It
finds a world of warring forces, a world of
bitter contrasts, a world of suffering. The
wicked prosper, the innocent suffer, right-
eousness must stand aside. The days of a
man are "few and full of trouble."

''Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break."

160 The Things That Abide

What kind of a world is this, — the world
of breaking hearts? In a moment, in the
twinkling of an eye, the lightning stroke
may come and leave behind only the long,
long ache of bereavement.

''Why is light given to a man whose way is hid,
And whom God hath hedged in?
I am not at ease, neither am I quiet.
Neither have I rest: but trouble cometh."

Is it a good world which can write such
a commentary on human life 1

From this prison-house of despair the
Hebrew mind could climb to one unassail-
able height. God might be angry or jealous
or unpropitiated ; evil passions and sorrow
might for a time hold sway. But this was
no eternal order: the Vindicator would ap-
pear. Restoration was merely delayed ; the
Chosen People would yet be exalted.
Modern pessimism has sunk into a deeper
despair. There is no Vindicator. Nature
has her genial moods, her lovable aspects.
But she is the stern and unbending law of
sequence; she vindicates only her own
order. The reality outside of man does not
regard man; it is utterly indifferent to
him. Nature is beneficent if we go her
way; within that range we may be light-
hearted and love life and feel it good. But

^'Like as a Father^' 161

if we oppose her she strikes without fear
and without remorse. Nothing interferes
with nature, for there is nothing to inter-
fere with immutable law. God — that is, the
mechanism of the universe — is concerned
with his own affairs. ' ' Nature red in tooth
and claw with ravine," ''the great glad
earth — glad as if no child had ever died"
— this is our outward environment. And if
one flees in terror from this aspect of the
outer world to seek renewal of life in the
commonwealth of hearts, one is met by
the no less terrible isolation of the individ-
ual. We meet and touch in the surface
things, and in the depths of the soul are a
million miles apart. How much there is
we cannot share ! How much there is, both
in our joy and our sorrow, of which the
world neither knows nor cares !

' ' She came to us in storm and snow —
The little one we held so dear —
And all the world was full of woe,

And war and famine plagued the year;
And ships were wrecked, and fields were
drowned.
And thousands died for lack of bread;
In such a troubled time we found

That sweet mouth to be kissed and fed.

' ' But oh, we were a happy pair,

Through all the war and want and woe;
Though not a heart appeared to care,
And no one even seemed to know.

162 The Things That Abide

' * She left us in the blithe increase

Of glowing fruit and ripening corn,
When all the nations were at peace,

And plenty held a brimming horn-
When we at last were well to do,

And life was sweet and earth was gay;
In that glad time of cloudless blue

Our little darling passed away.

**And oh, we were a wretched pair
In all the gladness and the glow;
And not a heart appeared to care.
And no one even seemed to know."

I know there is a philosophical reaction
from the despair which seems to follow the
pessimistic view of the universe. Things
are not so bad after all. There is a
bright side, and one may train himself
to look mainly on that. In the allotted
threescore and ten years much may be
achieved. No matter if it makes no differ-
ence a cycle or a million years hence: we
take life as w^e find it, with a fair chance
at its prizes. Nature may be coaxed and
driven to do our bidding, if only we try
patiently to learn her ways ; the fellowship
and emulation of kindred minds will sus-
tain and cheer us along the toilsome ascent.
There w^ill be pain and pleasure, but in
seventy years we may hope to triumph over
the pain and achieve contentment.

Let us believe indeed that all this is pos-
sible. But is it in this mood that we tune

^'Like as a Father" 163

our Thanksgiving anthem? Because there
is a little bending of the scales in favor of
the brighter side of lifel because in the
twelvemonth past, or in the twelvemonth to
come, our gains have been, or promise to
be, greater than our losses?

It was the triumph of the loftiest spiri-
tual insight of the Hebrew people to resolve
these grim aspects of the universe. To
them God was lawgiver, judge, vindicator.
But their passionate faith in the suprem-
acy of righteousness led them on to the
vision of God as a Father — stern indeed he
was to them, unbending, terribly severe
with disobedience, but kindred and not
alien. He cared for his people. "Like as a
father pitieth his children so the Lord
pitieth them that fear him.'*

In Jesus this feeling of the Fatherhood
of God had a new and marvelous blossom-
ing. What Jesus apprehended amounted
to a discovery of God, a revelation. He
was no inert observer. He saw the sad
contrasts. He felt some of the bitterness.
In the quiet years at the carpenter's bench,
in the lonely days in the desert, he had
his doubts and struggles. But of these no
trace appears when he stands out the great
Teacher of mankind. He adventured his

164 The Things That Abide

life on the principle that it is a good world
— his Father's world. He talked familiarly
about God, and yet he pretended to no
occult knowledge of Him. He had no ways
of knowing Him which you may not have.
If he had been asked to prove the existence
of God he could have offered no better log-
ical demonstration than have hundreds of
others, and probably with no better success
in convincing the unwilling mind. What
he discovered was a synthesis of life which
explained it, which resolved its contradic-
tory elements, which brought order out of
chaos, which enthroned Love in the
heavens. This synthesis was not a theory
spun out in his head. He beheld the lilies
of the field. He saw affection working in
the world. He saw what became of despair
in the crucible of faith and hope and love.
He could see the laughter coming through
the tears. He could see the joy encompass-
ing the sorrow. Love will heal the wounds ;
love will transform the evil. It is so be-
cause it is God's world, and this is His
expression of Himself.

How did Jesus demonstrate this synthe-
sis? Only by living it and giving his life
for it. It will never be demonstrated in
any other way. We who live it so im-

^^Like as a Father" 165

perfectly may see glimpses of what it is in
its perfectness. It is a good world because
human affections are the glow of it. It
is a good world because evil, no matter how
prevalent, is alien: in the scale of values
evil weighs nothing. It is a good world
because character is supreme. No one may
doubt that the spiritual is higher than the
animal, or that unselfishness is more comely
than self-interest. "Never morning wore
to evening, but some heart did break" —
but it is not the broken heart that is sig-
nificant. It is the healing that is signifi-
cant— the healing that goes out from a good
world. ' ' To bind up the broken-hearted ' ' !
0 the mystery of pain — but the greater
mystery of its absorption ! It is not Time
that heals : it is the good world — its warmth
and tenderness, its abundant life that fail-
eth not. To the woman bearing the dead
babe Buddha could only say, ' ' Look around
you and see how many others suffer a like
affliction." But healing comes only as one
enters into the gladness which, after all,
fills the world. It is not cruelty or indiffer-
ence that ''the great, glad earth is glad as
if no child had ever died. " It is the pledge
that after all, and in spite of all, life is
livable and joyous. The sunshine will fall

166 The Things That Abide

upon us till we cannot but heed. When
the first dull feeling of surprise has worn
away we shall rejoice that ' ' the great, glad
earth" could not be changed or swerved
aside by our little griefs. Because it is a
world loving and fine the clouds will melt
away. The good world's elixir is its un-
bounded cheerfulness, the bursting of leaf
and flower, the flooding sunshine, the im-
perturbable calm of loving hearts.

'*I too have come through wintry terrors,— yea,
Through tempest and through cataclysm of soul
Have come, and am delivered. Me the Spring,
Me also, dimly with new life hath touched,
And with regenerate hope, the salt of life;
And I would dedicate these thankful tears
To whatsoever Power beneficent,
Veiled though his countenance, undivulged his

thought.
Hath led me from the haunted darkness forth
Into the gracious air and vernal morn,
And suffers me to know my spirit a note
Of this great chorus, one with bird and stream
And voiceful mountain, — nay, a string, how

jarred
And all but broken! of that lyre of life
Whereon himself, the master harp-player,
Eesolving all its mortal dissonance
To one immortal and most perfect strain.
Harps without pause, building with song the

world. ' '

It is this world of song that we are try-
ing to put into our Thanksgiving this morn-
ing. Shall we do it, for our country, by
picking out her triumphs and not remem-

^'Like as a Father" 167

bering her defeats? for ourselves, by dwell-
ing only on the pleasure and forgetting the
pain? Or shall we rise to some heroic
height and offer thanksgiving for all that
has befallen us, the evil and the good, the
joy and the sorrow ? Rather let us be thank-
ful that joy remaineth : not that there is an
alternation of joy and sorrow, but that joy
is permanent. After pain there cometh
joy — not in alternation, but as the unsup-
pressible reality.

The isolation is only seeming. A world
in which goodness may root and send forth
its undying fragrance, in which the cup
of cold water is always passing, out of
which the barbarian and the brute are
dying, is not a homeless world. It is our
Father 's house. If we do not talk so freely
and frankly about it as Jesus did perhaps
it is because the beautiful symbolism has
been covered over by an unlovely literalism.
It is days like this when we break through
the crust. In the warmth of human aft'ec-
tions, in the joy of that forward look which
lifts us above every contradiction, we may
speak the gratitude of children over whom
bends both the seen and the unseen ''like
as a Father."

The Life Eternal

The Life Eternal

"And a certain ruler asked him, saying, Good
Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?
And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me
good? None is good save one, even God. Thou
knowest the commandments: Do not commit
adultery. Do not kill. Do not steal. Do not bear
false witness. Honor thy father and mother. And
he said, All these things have I observed from my
youth up. And Jesus looking upon him loved him,
and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go
sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor,
and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come,
follow me. But when the young man heard the
saying he went away sorrowful; for he had great
possessions."

THIS young ruler did not come to Jesus
because he lacked anything. His
lines had fallen in pleasant places. He had
great possessions. He kept the command-
ments. There was in his life the thrill of
being looked up to and obeyed; he could
feel that he was meeting, in some adequate
way, the responsibilities and opportunities
that had come to him. Jesus looking upon
him loved him.

There was one thing that troubled him.
This pleasant, satisfying life must come to

172 The Things That Abide

an end. Somewhere Death stood across his
path, the most insistent fact in life. But
beyond death there was the possibility of
continued life — life restored, eternal life.
How could that eternal life be assured 1
Let the conditions be made out, and he
believed himself ready to meet whatever of
tithes, of almsgiving, of fastings and
prayer they might imply. There was no
theological legalism he would not under-
take to satisfy if only there could be assur-
ance of the continued life of unalloyed rich-
ness and promise. Jesus was a ]\Iaster in
Israel. Would he have aught to suggest,
any omitted action to call to mind, which
when performed, w^ould render that future
more certain? "Good Master, what must I
do to inherit eternal life?"

When the answer was given him he
turned away sorrowful. If Jesus spoke
wisely he had put his finger upon some
flaw in this young man's thought of life.
Possibly the young man looked only for an
assurance that he had done all that the law
required, and that his parcel of eternal life
was carefully labeled and laid away to be
called for at heaven's gate. At any rate,
he had not thought of any remodeling of
this life. He was disappointed not to re-

The Life Eternal 173

ceive commendation for his modest self-
abasement, his solicitous care to leave noth-
ing undone. His pride and self-esteem
were hurt by a reply which gave so little
weight to an upright life, to the punctil-
ious attention to every religious command
and convention. What value would there
be to a life continued, made eternal, out of
which had been taken all that rendered it
attractive ? a continuation obtained at such
cost that this present life must be despised,
counted as nothing, given up 1

How completely this interpretation of
Jesus' attitude toward this present world
came to be assumed by historic Christian-
ity; and with what elaboration of detail
and emphasis it has dwelt upon the con-
trast between this life and the life eternal.
As the present life was emptied, as it
seemed to become more worthless, the
future life was exalted. To the theological
generations that succeeded it seemed that
Jesus merely asked this young ruler to give
up the brief, hurtful pleasures of a worldly
life for the sake of everlasting joy and
felicity. Nor was it merely the prize of
eternal life which urged to renunciation.
Existence could not cease. Over against
Heaven was its counterpart Hell. The one

174 The Things That Abide

was to be bargained for; escape from the
other to be purchased. Dangers beset the
Christian on every hand. This world was
the devil's world; the pleasures of this
present life his most dangerous weapons.
Everything of earthly value must be re-
nounced. The life eternal was as different
as possible from this present life. Here
there should be tears, struggles, weariness,
renunciation ; there eternal joy and felicity.
Here was bitterness, defeat, disease, death ;
there sweetness, triumph, untroubled life.
It is not necessary to recall all the ways
in which the imagination of man has played
around this mystery of the life beyond
death. The strange theologies which have
come out of this supposed teaching of Jesus
present us a world busy with the desper-
ateness, the despair, of doomed men. Men
of exalted religious emotion fled from the
natural life of the world as from a pest-
house. In dens and caves, in lonely hermit-
ages, in the rigid seclusion and rigid
discipline of the monastery they sought to
escape an evil world, wear out the despised
and degraded body, and win the prize of
eternal life held out beyond the grave. Men
of philosophic mind, speculating upon the
divine nature, worked into the simple mes-

The Life Eternal 175

sage of Jesus the intricate subtleties of
Greek metaphysics and superimposed upon
Christianity the lifeless legalism of eccle-
siasticism. The intellectual characteristic
of this age of faith was its intimate knowl-
edge of the divine mind. It explained the
cosmogony of Heaven; it codified the
Divine decrees. There was no part of the
plans and purposes of God it did not pro-
fess to understand. Variance enough there
was upon particular points, but no sect or
party would admit that theology was other
than an exact science. And if it did not
presume to so complete a knowledge of the
natural world, yet it turned to revelation
as equally authoritative wherever the word
of Scripture touched upon physical facts.
There was indeed another aspect to this
Age of Faith, and it would be a capital
error not to render homage to the lives and
achievements which honored it and which
have permanently enriched mankind.
There were hair-splitting literalists in
plenty who darkened counsel and fettered
the free human spirit, who shut God away
from man, and barred approach except
through the complicated etiquette of a mon-
archical establishment and in the abject
abasement of a court servitor. There were

176 The Things That Abide

perverted ascetics like St. Simeon Stylites,
relentlessly destroying that which he was
at such pains to preserve. But there were
also men of tender piety and resourceful
courage, heroic spirits like St. Francis of
Assisi, St. Vincent de Paul, and the long
succession of devoted missionaries who
carried the cross and the Christian virtues
into every dark corner of the earth.

But at last, in the fullness of time, man-
kind waked from this imagery of the
charnel house, from prolonged contempla-
tion of a lost world, as from a shuddering
dream. All knowledge had been shut up
in, and all progress barred by, the word of
Scripture and the tradition of philosophy.
The human spirit burst these barriers.
After long wandering among the illimit-
able spaces of speculation the wearied mind
of man came back to a face-to-face ac-
quaintance with the next-to-hand world.
The symbol of reality shifted from
noumena to phenomena. Out of the facts
of every-day life and observation, out of
the remains of the past, there has been
wrought out the story of a world whose
richness, whose teeming life, whose prob-
lems and possibilities engage the eager pur-
suit, the high ambitions, the loyal service

The Life Eternal 177

of the noblest types of men. Reluctantly
at first, but finally and unreservedly reli-
gion has come to share this new method and
spirit and its view of the dignity and the
nobility of human life. It is God's world,
and not the devil's. The unnatural, ex-
aggerated emphasis has been taken off the
life beyond death. The richness, variety,
and fascination of life in the world, and
among the concerns of earth, has been re-
asserted and rediscovered. Trackless
plains and inaccessible mountains have
beckoned to the adventurous spirit and
fanned to white heat the enthusiasm for
knowledge and discovery. Laboratories
and libraries have given absorbing zest to
the quietest of lives. The beautiful in
nature and in art has renewed its appeal
to the esthetic side of life, exalting the
imagination and purifying the emotions.
Wholesome child life has had its renais-
sance. Education and industrial freedom
have brought the possibilities of largeness
and richness of life to every door. All this
religion has accepted, is helping to bring
about, and through it all is working
toward moral betterment. Science and
religion make common cause for the mate-
rial, social, and moral progress of the

178 The Things That Abide

world. To the missionary the medicine-
chest is as indispensable as the Bible.
Problems of civic reform and of labor and
capital are of vital concern not less to reli-
gion than to the State.

But the story is not all told. When the
old sharp contrast between the two worlds
had been destroyed, when something like
the true emphasis had been restored to the
life that now is, when at last religion
would seem to be entering upon its undis-
puted inheritance, suddenly it is found, so
far as a great body of trained and thought-
ful workers is concerned, that the sense of
reality regarding a God and Father and
life beyond death is slipping away.

The conception of a life that goes on
after all that we know of life has fled and
turned to dust came at first only in dim
and vague suggestion. All that could be
grasped of it was shadowy and gloomy, a
thing of dread and not desire. Christian-
ity did not bring this thought into the
world; but it was Christianity that lifted it
out of its gloom and made it a glad cer-
tainty in the lives of unnumbered millions,
that has taken the sting out of death and
robbed the grave of its victory, that has
enabled ordinary human clay — such as we

The Life Eternal 179

are — to face, not merely with courage, but
joyously, weakness, failure, misunderstand-
ing, misfortune, pain, and death, that has
rescued old age from despair and crowned
it with the halo of serene trust. Christian-
ity exaggerated, dogmatic theology grossly
libeled, a fair and beautiful world. The
exaggeration has been corrected. The
world has been redeemed to the uses and
delights of man. Is this enough? Can this
make up in the lives of men for the loss of
that hope which has been of such incon-
ceivable significance in the redemption and
ennobling of human life? AVhat has the
religion of Jesus to say to this recession of
the other w^orld, to this agnostic stoicism
within the limits of human knowledge?
Was there anything in the message of Jesus
which transcends these limits? Did Jesus
carry our meagre knowledge to a higher
degree of certainty? Did he know more of
phenomena than we do? Was there some
special communicating medium whereby
the difficulties of comprehension and un-
derstanding which honestly and inex-
tricably confuse the scientist and meta-
physician were surmounted by him?

The men of earlier centuries talked learn-
edly of God's ways and thoughts. They

180 The Things That Abide

never doubted the possibility of knowing
these things. They were in part revealed
in Scripture, in part deduced by the facul-
ties of the human mind, and reinforced
from time to time by observed supernormal
phenomena. The modern man of scientific
training is not so sure of his knowledge.
He knows some phenomena. He knows of
some force. He knows of some succession
of events which seems sometimes like intel-
ligence and plan. He knows of certain
surviving conventions which men distin-
guish as right and w^rong. What does he
know, what can he know, of any such being
as a God must be 1 How can individual con-
sciousness survive the dissolution of the
brain, and if it may do so, how can he
know it? By revelation and supernormal
phenomena? But who accredits these?
Much that God was formerly said to do is
found to be the regular and ordinary suc-
cession of events. Much must be hazarded
on the outcome of a difficult, perhaps in-
soluble, historical problem. Much that the
man of ecstatic vision has felt as the direct
moving of God upon the soul, a clearer
psychology unhesitatingly pronounces to
be subjective states of human consciousness
brought about in various and diverse ways.

The Life Eternal 181

From the standpoint of one who is building
up his knowledge, step by step, through all
the senses and the logical powers which
have been given him, is it inevitable or
natural that he should postulate God as
the explanation of any yet unassimilated
facts? Does he need any such hypothesis?
Is there any evidence, such as an inquiring
mind may test, of a personal consciousness
persisting beyond the grave? He may be
willing to retain the term God as a con-
venient metaphor to sum up all of force
and mystery there is in the universe : pan-
theism is perhaps more expressive than
materialism. But he wants to be honest
with himself and acknowledge how little
he may predicate of this eternal and omni-
present, but unknowable, energy.

Is this a man of straw? Or have we
touched upon the insistent attitude toward
which, freed from theological shackles, the
quiet thinking of those who deal with
knowledge at first hand has seemed to be
tending? Uncontroversial for the most
part, veiled still in religious imagery, try-
ing to hold on to Christian ethics while
letting theology go, there is nothing yet to
indicate what tremendous bearing the
naked possession of this attitude of mind

182 The Things That Abide

must have upon the fortunes of mankind.
Whatever its bearing, if true, so best, af-
firms the scientific spirit; though it also
denies, with positive emphasis, that human
life is thereby emptied of its nobility, its
high endeavor, its incentive to moral excel-
lence. Birth, growth, maturity, decay,
death — the cycle of all that we know as
existence. These are physical processes —
inevitable, congenial, fulfilling. Growth
and maturity are wide stretches. They
comprehend the play of affection, the spur
of ambition, the joy of comradeship, the
exultant glow of achievement. Even over
temporary unsuccess and failure Hope
seldom fails to spread the purple glow of
future achievement.

"Has man no second life?—
Pitch this one high ! ' '

To this highest height of stoicism, to this
mountain peak of conduct, courageous souls
may climb, and in quietness, if without en-
thusiasm, meet the responsibilities of life,
and face with calmness the inevitable end,
sustained by the modest dream of joining

* ' The choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence."

The Life Eternal 183

Stoicism sits lightly upon youth.

' * * Something in the sense of the morning
Lifts the heart up to the sun.'
In our youth we may be pagan,
God is many, and the One
Great Supreme will wait till evening
When our little day is done:
Something in the sense of morning
Lifts the heart up to the sun ! "

Stoicism is sublime in many of its
aspects. It is courap^eous. It is better
than many an opposing medley. But no
such chill, though grand, conception has
swept the keys of the human heart through
the ages. Another thought has brought
peace in the hour of sore assailment, an-
other faith has given the tenderest types of
the human spirit — the thought and the
faith that death and decay are not of the
spirit.

The message of Jesus was so simple, so
transparent, so straightforw^ard that it was
at once and persistently misunderstood.
Forever the attempt has been to garb it in
the language of mystery. Caught up into
the realm of metaphysical speculation, it
seemed to the theological mind that Jesus
had revealed God through logical processes
and logical relations, and that his physical
senses had apprehended another world and

184 The Things That Abide

the God who presides over it in a way not
open to other men. Whatever be the fate
of our supposed knowledge of spiritual
realities, we may boldly affirm that it does
not stand or fall by these criteria of the
theologians. Jesus knew less of phenom-
ena than you or I. He did not blaze any
new way through metaphysical difficulties ;
he did not even concern himself with these
difficulties. Jesus looked out upon human
life as it went on about him in Galilee and
Jerusalem. He saw the passion and the
tragedy, the heights and depths, the possi-
bilities. Behind it all, the explanation of
all, he named God. The age-long ripening
of Jewish thought had found its fruition
in this conception. But he went beyond
the contradictory notions through which
his race had struggled and by which it was
still beset. By that superlative spiritual
insight which accredits itself, by that
supreme intuition which is the birthright
of the creative spirit, he pierced the mys-
teries of this omnipresent force, this cosmic
order, and beheld the God and Father
which upholds it and the Love which is its
resolving, binding force. Jesus organized
the realities of the life of the spirit. He
saw relations, moral values. He inter-

The Life Eternal 185

preted the spiritual aspect of the world.
The hopes, the aspirations, the longings,
the better self — these were the instruments
of the Divine unfolding, of that Divine
nature which supremely expresses itself in
Love. Through the loving heart, through
the aspiring soul, through obedience to the
highest, the Divine took hold of the human
and lifted it into sonship.

Because Jesus spoke familiarly of God
an obtuse theology imagined he had some
occult knowledge w^e cannot possess. Be-
cause he had no doubt, now or anytime,
here or anyw^here, of the presence of the
living God it was assumed that his assur-
ance must be based on a technical knowl-
edge of existence beyond the grave, that
there had been revealed to him through
supernormal processes a knowledge of that
other world for which the sufficient testi-
mony forever afterward is his recorded
word.

Jesus was sure not because he could see
through the tangle of metaphysics, not
because he could solve the logical diffi-
culties of the problem of knowledge,
not because he could comprehend the
mysteries of ganglion cells or peep
over the rim of an inconceivably distinct

186 The Things That Abide

world. These were not the problems of his
time ; they did not trouble him at all ; they
were not present to his consciousness.
Jesus was a Hebrew teacher. He was born,
and he lived, in an atmosphere surcharged
with the idea of God. He never doubted
that Grod existed. Jesus had the sublime
audacity, characteristic of his race, to
believe that God could speak to men —
directly, revealingly. And behind that
audacity was the supremest spiritual in-
sight the world has ever known. For him
there was needed no unveiling of Flaming
Bush, of AVhirlwind Voice, of Pillar of
Cloud. He did not require for his own
unclouded vision that one had risen from
the dead. For him was

''Earth crammed with Heaven,
And every common bush afire with God."

God the Father the explanation of the
order and symmetry and eternal call to
righteousness; Sonship the explanation of
the aspirations, the hopes, the upward
striving of men; Love the resolving, unit-
ing force. Out into the world Jesus flung
this conception. The mystery of life — all
that lies beyond mediate and immediate
perception, that which explains it, that
which gives it meaning, that which expands

The Life Eternal 187

it — is God; not revealing himself as im-
personal force, unknowable energy, but as
our Father, touching the personal, the
upward-striving, the divine in us. He did
not pretend to any sibylline revelation.
He gave no details of an existence beyond
the grave which transcends finite expe-
rience and imagination. To him life was
in the Father — abiding as the Father
abode. He had sounded the depths of spir-
itual being, and so he spoke with the utmost
confidence; but beyond this he was modest
and not curious.

Jesus did not condemn the young ruler
because he thought too much of this pres-
ent world and not enough of the world to
come. It was this present world that Jesus
wanted to redeem. The tears to be
quenched were here and now. The desert
places to be made to bloom were desert
places in the earth under our feet. The
hope to be put into hopeless lives was for
the men and women bent upon the common
task of living. Jesus opened a way to
transform human lives. He interpreted to
the world a resolving force which should
redeem human life, making it intelligent,
free, strenuous, loving, unfolding, beauti-
ful. Jesus saw the hardness and the cal-

188 The Things That Abide

collating selfishness in the life of the young
ruler, who wanted eternal life only when
this life had failed and ceased to be. Jesus
offered him eternal life here and now — no
affair of diplomatic adjustment between
the individual and God, no paid-up policy
in exchange for few or many pains or pen-
ances here, but a rebirth of the soul, an
ennobled purpose, the ecstasy and the en-
thusiasm of self-forgetting service, the
radiant vision of the pure in heart, the
building up ever toward and into a life of
eternal significance.

In spite of misunderstandings and fail-
ures, in spite of blindness, perversity,
insincerity, weakness, we know that
Jesus did not deceive the world. AYe
know that human life has been and
can be raised to that sonship which he pro-
claimed. AVe know that the peace of God
shall crown him who orders his life after
the pattern of Jesus Christ. We know
that God can be known, and that the
eternal bond of union with him can be
manifest in a human life. "This is life
eternal that they might know thee the
only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou
hast sent."

Yet the question must recur, ''If a man

The Life Eternal 189

die shall he live again" — the same con-
scious personality that inhabited the earth t
"When life is at the full, with a song in the
heart, how dim and far away and im-
personal Death seems. But nearing the
end, or overwhelmed by the swift, blinding
stroke that carries beyond our ken the well-
beloved, how the soul must try to pierce
the veil. If the dead live again the}^ have
passed out of our sight : is there any break-
ing through the incommunicable medium
of mortality ?

Now it is the historical fact that here
and there and at special times this medium
has been broken through, that the God who
is behind it all, and the dead who have
passed through, have found a way to com-
municate in some direct, individual, and
even verbal fashion — it is this asserted fact
on which the faith of Christendom has been
made largely, and at times almost wholly,
to rest. For millions who have passed
away and for other millions who are now
alive this demonstration has quieted and
satisfied the insistent questioning of the
soul. And it may be said without hesita-
tion that the negative criticism at this
point, which brought such doubt and con-
fusion into our modern world, and whose

190 The Things That Abide

effects are so evident in the widely preva-
lent stoicism everywhere about us, has spent
its force. The inquiry now is, not how
much modern science and modern criticism
have destroyed, but how much they have
saved — a fact which presages the dawn of
a new constructive era in the history of
religion. But this new constructive era
will be conditioned, and largely shaped, by
the positive results of modern science and
modern criticism. It will not be content
with those lower forms of evidence which
satisfied the piety of the past. It will ap-
proach the mysteries alike of life and of
death with becoming modesty, and, walled
in by finite limitations, will confess often
its bafflement. It will not be satisfied to
rest its hope of eternal life on obscure his-
torical incidents; nor upon those inner
states which seem psychological rather than
theological mysteries ; nor upon that newer,
persistent evidence of the supernormal
which, even if all is granted that is claimed,
is so meagre, incoherent, and unilluminat-
ive. Toward all these it will keep an open
mind, and it will not believe that the last
word has yet been spoken. But it will turn
to the firmer ground of the immortal qual-
ity which may be and has been put into

The Life Eternal 191

the lives of men and women on the earth,
to the inner witness of the pure heart and
the unselfish life, to the life and the mes-
sage of Jesus. To get and keep that sense
of a God and Father which suffused the
life of Jesus, is to win the immortal height.
The sustaining note of this faith will be
confidence in the spiritual integrity of
Jesus ; and it is through this conviction that
men will reach up to the God who ''so
loved the world that he gave his only-
begotten son that whosoever believeth on
him should not perish but have everlasting
life." In the thought and the plan of
Jesus death made no break. Believing in
him life will be organized on his plan.
Because he lives we shall live also. We
shall not pretend to understand just Avhat
the last great change may mean ; but more
and more as words fail and images become
meaningless we shall come to rest back
upon the simple, tender symbolism of
Jesus.

This eternal life which shall fill the soul !
— the way to it is no new or strange way.
By prayer and service, through the up-
ward striving, one by one men shall win
it — the pure heart, the clear vision, the
joyful assurance.

192 The Things That Abide

* ' What do you think has become of the young and
old men?

And what do you think has become of the women
and children!

They are alive and well somewhere.

The smallest sprout shows there is really no
death,

And if ever there was it led forward life, and
does not wait at the end to arrest it.

And ceas'd the moment life appear 'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one sup-
posed, and luckier."

Out of the theological mind of the past
has come down the feeling that when life
is ebbing from the body the soul also is
sick unto death. As with hurried feet the
physician is summoned so also must the
priest be brought to minister to the soul in
its dire extremity. It will be well indeed,
in that inevitable hour, if our friends may
sit beside us in cheerful ministration. But
at the end of a life well lived the soul is
not sick. Wliether Death come after long
vigils, or in the market place, or in dis-
charge of the humblest duty, the sincere
man faces with fearless calm whatever is
before him. If life is pitched high enough
— as high as Jesus believed it could be —
there will indeed be the sorrow of parting,
but in the forward look Death will seem as
sweet and unobtrusive as sleep to tired
eyes.

The Life Eternal 193

*'Love is and was my King and Lord
And will be, tho' as yet I keep
Within his court on earth, and sleep
Encompass 'd by his faithful guard,

*'And hear at times a sentinel

Who moves about from place to place,
And whispers to the worlds of space,
In the deep night, that all is well."

■lilll