One of our most familiar national ideas during recent years has been the conservation of our natural resources, our mines, our forests, our water power, the agricultural capacities of our soil. It would have been a good thing if this idea had occurred to us fifty years earlier. But it is an idea which always comes late to a young nation. So long as the population is sparse and the supply of good land unlimited and it is an easy thing to pick up a living from the surface of the ground, perhaps it is too much to expect that any people would be careful and frugal. But when the population has increased and begins to press against the means of subsistence, when the good public lands are exhausted and a mere living becomes harder for the masses of the people to secure, then any nation awakens to wisdom and turns from recklessness and prodigality.
And, doubtless, the idea would have occurred to us a full generation earlier if it had not been for the terrible education of our Civil War. There is a great deal to be set down on the good side of the account of the Civil War. It took the putty of our national character and burned it into stone. It ran steel fibres through our national life. And it brought us for the first time to a sense of national unity. But alas there is a great deal also on the ledger’s other page. For war is not conservation, it is destruction. It educates any people not in frugality but in wastefulness. Military supplies must be bought at once at any cost. Everything is thrown away with a negligent and wasteful hand. And so long as any people is pouring out its best possession, the precious life-blood of its sons, like water on the battle-field, you cannot expect it to be saving and careful in its material possessions.
The days of waste that followed the Civil War are gone forever. The nation has begun now to count carefully the amount of its available wealth. We have seen calculations of how many millions of feet of lumber we have standing in our forests and how many millions of tons of coal we have still hid away in our treasure houses underground. And far and wide over the nation now we are learning to husband the resources we have left, mindful of our children who are to come after us.
And it is a good thing that the nation in conserving her resources realizes that there is something more important than a careful husbanding of her mere material wealth. The vital resources of any people are of more significance to her than clods of coal, or timber on her hillsides. Of what use would it be to conserve the material resources of any nation if we conserve them only for a deteriorating racial stock? The nation has come to realize that the men and women who compose it are its largest wealth, and that this treasure must be guarded more sacredly than our mines, our forests, or our water power. We have seen, accordingly, a whole new body of legislation growing up, that would have made our fathers stand aghast, fixing the conditions of employment, the age of employees, the sanitary condition of homes and mills, the hours of work and the care of women. The expenditure of immense sums for the protection of the life and health of factory labourers is now readily recognized even by “soul-less corporations,” which formerly fought against all such outlay, as money well invested. In all the nation to-day we realize that there is a more precious wealth than our material wealth. I saw an interesting illustration of this new frame of mind a little while ago in a statement issued by some leading men in Tennessee dealing with the excessive death rate among the negroes of the South. They pointed out that among nine millions of white people the death rate is 160,000, and that among the nine millions of the negroes the death rate is 266,000. In other words, among the negroes, 106,000 more people die every year than among a corresponding number of the whites of our country. In the negro, these men argued, the South had an invaluable asset, a better type of labour on the whole, with all its drawbacks, than any other section of the nation possessed, more docile, more faithful, less troublesome, and the South could not afford to lose this labour which it needed for developing its wealth. These men estimated the economic value of each one of these lives at $350 a year, and the period of that economic value at ten years, so that each one of these wasted lives was a loss of $3,500 to the South, or $371,000,000 each year, one million dollars a day, and they argued that the South could not afford such a waste. The South, they held, must see that the death rate among the negro is reduced to the same proportions as the death rate among the white people, in order that such an enormous economic loss might be averted. We are realizing all over the nation now that a man is a very costly product. You can breed an animal in a few months for the market, but it takes twenty years to grow a man, and no nation can afford to throw away such costly products as men and women. These are its most priceless wealth. If it expects to conserve its treasures and to be prepared for the services of the days to come, it is bound to guard this wealth more sacredly than any other. And American capital and industry have come to see this clearly. Here is one typical utterance by a leading engineer at a meeting of the Immigration Committee of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States:
“Industrial Americanization is a part of the prevalent present-day movement towards the humanizing of industry. It aims to make what is commonly called ‘welfare work’ not an exercise of the individual employer’s ‘paternalism,’ but a legitimate kind of business organization everywhere. There are now innumerable kinds of ‘welfare work.’ One employer does it from the point of view of ‘good business’; another on the ‘big brothers’ theory. One man confines himself to playgrounds, another to safety appliances. In one firm it is under the employment manager; in another under a Y. M. C. A. director; and in a number of other firms it is classified in as many different ways.
“There is no agreement among American employers as to where the organization of the human side of industry really belongs. And there are absolutely no standards for it. What we need to do is to extend scientific methods to the human phases of industrial organization, and thus give ‘welfare work’ a definite place and definite standards. The engineer as the ‘consulting mind’ of industry must be the leader in this work. It is he who determines the site of the plant and its construction. Inside the plant again, the engineer has much to do with efficiency methods. No efficiency methods that are unrelated to the men in the plant can prosper permanently.”
But there is another sort of resource and national treasure greater by far than these, which most of the nations are passing by. I mean the latent and undeveloped capacities for ministry and achievement which lie dormant inside human life. Every life is a reservoir of unawakened possibilities. There is no one of us that is more than a fraction of the man he should be. There is not one who is not falling short by a wide margin of the ideals that he ought to attain, not one who is making the contribution to the nation or building the share in the Kingdom of God that God and mankind alike have a right to expect of him. Not long before his death, an article contributed by Prof. William James, of Harvard, appeared in the American Magazine, entitled “The Powers of Man,” in which Professor James argued that mankind is living on a very small fraction of its vitality, and that there are buried underground strata of possibilities and of power which are never tapped except in times of great emergency. For a little time then a man draws on these reserves, and then seals the strata over again and falls back on the surface levels once more. For illustration he spoke of the familiar phenomenon of the second wind. Every boy can remember such experiences. There came a time in the game when he was “all in.” He had done his best and drawn on his last available power. Suddenly it was as though something broke. A partition wall fell in. Unsuspected reserves were released. The second wind came and reservoirs of power that had been withheld came unexpectedly into play and he did better than he had done before, what he had never been able to do before. That is an absolute truth of experience all through life. In our great crises, any one of many forces may unlock these energies and let them loose. And the present needed appeal of the world is to men and women that they should not be content to draw upon these reservoirs in crises alone. The tragic crises come because these powers are not drawn forth and used. The great wealth of the nations and of the world that needs now to be unsealed is just this wealth of moral capacity lying latent and dormant within.
What I have been saying is certainly true in the realm of our physical energies. I remember a story of John Lawrence, who went out to India a raw, uninfluential Irish boy in the service of the East India Company, resolved to do his work well and make himself a name. Very early in his career he was assigned to the collectorship of the Jullundur Doab, on what was then the frontier of India. He made himself perfectly at home among his people, entering into their life, mastering their vernaculars, learning their secrets, until at last men came to think of “Jans Larens” as a demi-god with powers beyond the knowledge of common men. One day as he was sitting in his house a messenger came in from one of his districts and reported that a village was burning down and begged him to come. He hurried out to the village. When he arrived he asked the headmen if they had all the people out of the houses and was told that all had been brought out except one old woman who refused to come. He went to the house where the woman lived and looked in. There she sat on a bag of grain. Lawrence entreated her to come out but she refused, explaining that this bag of grain was all her earthly wealth. If she came out she would starve; she would rather stay and be burned. When Lawrence found his commands and entreaties unavailing, he rushed in, with the embers from the burning roof falling on his shoulders, stooped over and picked up the bag of grain, and left the burning building, the old woman following obediently behind. The next day as he was sitting in his house it flashed on his mind that the bag of grain had been exceedingly heavy and he rode out curiously to the village again to see how much he had lifted. He had no difficulty in finding the old woman and her bag of grain. He stooped over to lift it but could not budge it from the ground. But the day before he had budged it. He had picked it up and carried it. The power to do it was lying latent in him all the while. All he needed was just the piercing call or inspiration adequate to release the buried energy.
And the world is full of evidences that what is true physically is true morally. In every man lies the power with the grace and help of God to meet his great crisis and in every woman the power to bear the agony and pain of her great hour. Only a few years ago, when the Titanic went down and some men who had walked as dogs at the heel of their passions suddenly became masters of themselves and laughing stood at attention to death as they waited on the deck, we all wondered what it was that gave these men who had been slaves their sudden moral mastery. That mastery was within all the time. It did not come out of the frame of the Titanic. It did not come out of the iceberg. It was lying buried all the while only waiting the hour and the Voice that was to summon it to come forth.
Among the nations to-day this is the needed truth as it is the needed truth here in our own lives. There are boys here to-day who have been yielding to temptation, to whom God would give energies to withstand their enemy. In the nation there are even now capacities to conquer all the evils with which the nation abounds. Some day our children will look back and ask why we have allowed immorality to dominate the moral life of the land and why in the world we have endured the saloon so long. These things will be cleaned away some day and men will wonder then what their mothers and fathers were about that they surrendered where that happier generation will not surrender but will achieve. The needed capacities are buried of God in life, but we are not willing to believe that they are there or to have faith in Him to energize them.
Let me put the truth in yet a different way.
Last spring, just after Holy Week, I received a very interesting letter from a friend who is one of the best known and best loved judges in our country. It was written on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Day, and he said in it that he was pursuing the practice which he had pursued for many years, of trying in the interval between Good Friday and Easter morning to eliminate Jesus Christ entirely from his thought of life and of the world in order that he might thus bring home to his own mind and conscience more deeply the significance of Jesus, and he said he could hardly wait for Easter morning to come to escape from the oppressive gloom and depression in which his spirit was as a result of his enforced practice. And he begged me, as one of his friends, to try this between the next Good Friday and Easter Day and to see what the experience would mean.
Oddly enough my own thoughts that same day on which my friend was writing this letter were exactly the opposite of his. He was thinking of Jesus Christ as extinguished, he was thinking of all that He had come to be and to do as gone, and he was trying to bring home to his own heart what this utter loss of Christ would mean. I was meditating, on the other hand, on that Saturday morning, on just the contrary idea. On Good Friday, the day before this Saturday, there had been a great Personality; now that Personality must be somewhere still. Personality does not die. The next day, on Easter morning, there was to be a great outburst of energy. That energy must be somewhere now. It will not be created to-morrow morning. It must be somewhere to-day waiting to come forth to-morrow. Where is it? And then I suddenly realized that it was all there, that all that was to break loose Easter morning was shut up inside that grave, that all the energies that were to peal across the world on the new day were there asleep in that tomb that Saturday. All the great love and power that had been had not been annihilated. It was there somewhere, only out of sight for a little while. And the great truth urged itself that all the dormant energies of life, all the enshrouded and enfolded powers are here now and always just as truly as they will be to-morrow when they awake, though for the hour they lie latent and unused.
Then I began to see, as one’s thought ran easily on, that that Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Day was in reality a sort of symbol of the whole of history. For history, as we look back upon it, is full of these repressions and these emergences, and then perhaps repressions again, of great impulses and outbursts of energy and of power. Now and then they are for good, as when the Reformation broke across men’s minds, shattering their shackles, opening old prison doors, allowing the enslaved human spirit to come out and breathe the air of freedom. But why had it not come before? All the great energies of God that burst forth in it must have been here even before that hour. And why did they have to subside afterwards? They all were still? Why might they not have gone beating their way onward and not have ceased so soon?
Then also great explosions of evil come. We look out across the world to-day and see all these dogs of war unleashed. But these dogs of war were not born the year before last. They had been here all the time, only they were chained and held in leash. Why were they not kept chained and in leash? Why were they allowed to break loose and go wild across the world in their havoc and devastation? We know perfectly well that after a few months they are going to be chained again, and the great reconstructive processes will begin to make the world anew. But why do these reconstructive forces have to wait? They will not exist any more truly then than they do to-day. Why not release them to-day to go out and do their creative work in the world now? Why not on Saturday let loose that which is to burst with creative freedom on the world on Easter morning?
And I saw that this was a symbol not of history only but also of human life, that every human life is just the mystery of the infolding of latent capacities that are there wrapped up, the infolding of great ends of which no man can foretell. That is why, I suppose, a man feels such awe every time he holds a very little child in his arms. He does not know what it is that he has in his arms, what it is that will some day come bursting forth from that little child. That must have been Mary’s thrill in those early days when she held her little one, knowing dimly and far away, if not clearly, that she held in her arms the mighty Redeemer of men. “When I see a child,” said Pasteur, “he inspires me with two feelings: tenderness for what he is now, respect for what he may become hereafter.” Of personal life it is as true as of history. Vast latent possibilities for good may come breaking forth. Now and then they do, in some truth-loving, unfearing, plain-speaking, God-obeying Martin Luther. Or they may issue in some tranquil, patient, loving-hearted, steady-spirited, immovable Lincoln. Goodness comes leaping forth, and oftentimes we are tempted to think the surroundings, the circumstances, produced it. They produced none of it. They gave it its opportunity and its chance, but it was all somewhere all the time and it might not have come forth if something inside had not released the spring of our will to God’s will and let those great energies of good come pulsing out to do their work.
And the same thing is true of the inwrought and enshrouded capacities for ill. Jesus Christ laid off His limitations as well as His activities that Saturday in the grave; and He left His limitations there when He came out. Out of such Saturday graves in man’s character it may be only the limitations that emerge. Out of many a man’s life it is the dog that ought to be chained that is allowed to roam free, while all the possibilities for good and sacrifice and ministry are still-born inside. And sometimes, thank God, men discover all this latent ill within and lay on it the restraining and throttling hand. As godly old John Newton said when one day he saw a criminal being led by, “There, but for the grace of God, goes John Newton.” He knew that everything that had escaped in that brother of his lay latent in himself, and he thanked God that a hand had been laid on all those inner capacities for evil and wreckage and that that hand held them in check and let only the good and the true and the pure go free.
There is something infinitely hopeful and encouraging in the principle of that Saturday in our Lord’s last week for every man and woman of us, as we think of life’s work and what we are trying to get done in the world. So many times a thing seems all vain. The teacher tried to breed in the boy whom he taught a hate of lies and a love of the truth, and he wrought with tears and blood at his task, and the boy went out from him and it seemed to him to have been futile, this that he had done for him. We put ourselves out in this or that effort of service in the hope of achieving this or that great end. Every little while it seems to us to have been all fruitless. But wait. It is only Saturday. Easter morning is going to break and the seed that was sown in the ground in darkness and obscurity will come forth then. The life that was let go for a little while, all that we did not see and therefore thought had run sheer to waste, we shall discover then will come pulsating back. “No effort is wasted,” said Pasteur.
It is a great joy of life to believe this, that what Isaiah said is true through all the ages, by the very principle of the life of God, that no word of His will come back to Him vain or be void, that it will accomplish the thing He pleases and prosper in the errand whereon He sent it. I received a letter the other day from a friend, the Rev. Adolphus Pieters, who is a missionary in Japan. He had for very many years been engaged in an interesting work. He published advertisements of Christianity in the Japanese papers, and then occasionally printed a brief attractive account of what Christianity was, with the hope of arousing the curiosity of Japanese readers. At the end he would add that if any one were interested he might correspond with him. As a result of this work he came into correspondence with hundreds of men. In this recent letter he writes: “The total number of people who applied to us for tracts last year was 959, making the total from February, 1914, when the work began, to December 31, 1915, 3,590. There have been seven baptisms since my previous letter, and the total number to date is forty-five. Number Forty-Five is a most instructive case of the Lord’s blessing resting upon what was, humanly speaking, a complete failure. The young man in question is a bright young student in the Normal School at this place, who was baptized a week ago last Sunday, after coming to my house off and on for two years, and getting a good deal of instruction. I did not reckon him among the results of the newspaper work, but after he was baptized he told me that he originally got interested in the Gospel when he was attending the primary school in his home town. Among his teachers was one named Okabe Katsumi, who had seen our advertisements and secured some tracts, among which were copies of the Gospels. He did not care for them himself, and had given them to this boy, who was deeply impressed. In the course of time the boy graduated from school and went to Oita to attend the Normal, and he did so with the resolution already formed to look up the man who advertised in the papers and learn from him more about the Christian religion.
“When I heard that, I looked up the card index, and found among the 4 ‘dead’ cards one for Okabe Katsumi. It was number 444, and he had applied for tracts in the spring of 1912, but in August he wrote that he had found something in our tracts that he did not like, and so had made up his mind to have nothing more to do with Christianity. So his card was marked in red ink, ‘Closed August 12, 1913,’ and filed away among the ‘dead’ ones—a complete failure, so far as any one could see. But it wasn’t a failure. God knew better. On the fifth of March, 1916, a young man made public confession of his faith and was baptized as a sequel to that application of Okabe Katsumi in 1912.
“Such things sometimes make me look with something like awe upon my card index. What is going on beneath the surface? How is God working in the hearts of the ‘failures,’ or, if not in their hearts, through them in the hearts of others? It is one more proof that ‘the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his.’”
Looking back across the years it could be seen that bread sown upon the waters returned again. Absolutely no energy goes to waste in this world,—no moral energy, no spiritual energy, any more than physical energy. All that is released goes about its work. Let us thank God, that there that Saturday morning in the dark of the grave all that broke free the next day was, and was not dead beyond the resurrection of life.
And the assurance that a man simply cannot do anything in vain is not only a word of great courage to us in the work that we are trying to do in the world, it is a word of hope and courage to us also in our own personal life and struggle for character. All the energy we need to accomplish anything that ought to be accomplished in us is in our reach. “All power,” said Christ, “is given to me in heaven and in earth. I stand within at the centre of your life. Draw on me. Go out in the faith of that and do whatever your work is in the world. I have the energy that you need.” All the energy that we require for any task in life or out of life is there, by token and assurance of the closed grave and resurrection, in Christ, waiting to be drawn upon by any man who wants to make use of it.
And all this is not the exaltation of human will, the setting up of a man’s own resolution and high purpose. It is precisely the opposite of that. It is saying to a man: “There do not lie in the boastful surface of your life the power and the resources that you need. Retire upon God. You must get behind into the unplumbed depths where Christ waits. You must go back of the Easter morning in the grave, the unopened womb of the grave, to find it there. All of it is there in the now Risen Christ Who that Saturday morning awaited resurrection.” This is simply making faith a living, acting reality by which a man works; so that he arises in the morning and can say: “O God, I have in Thee in me all the energy and strength that I shall need this day. No temptation can come to me to-day that I have not got the power in Thee, that I never have used yet, to draw upon, that will enable me to meet and conquer. No work will come to me to-day that is too much for me, no matter how exacting or unprecedented in my experience. There is power in Thee for me for this work that is come to me to do.”
That Saturday morning, more vividly than any other day that brings back the triumph and pain and glory of Easter to us, makes a man assured that all the energies he needs are near by, that in God’s own presence there are all the powers he wants, awaiting release by God’s grace for all the necessities of his life. And if we could not believe this about the world we are living in to-day, surely a man could not go on living in it. If we had to surrender to the present order and temper of the world what would be left to uphold us? It is because we know it is Saturday night in human history that we can live through it.
We know that as in individuals so in all the races of mankind, God has planted these great dormant energies and powers. For scores and scores of years the Chinese had despaired of their power to throw off the opium curse. They knew it was sapping the very vitality of their land, and yet they wondered whether the day would ever come when they would have power enough to break those hateful chains that had been forged upon them, and get back their freedom. Twenty years ago, as we went to and fro in China, the most striking odour in the Chinese streets was the pungent stench of smoking opium. One could scarcely go into a Chinese city or walk in a Chinese highway without seeing the wretched shipwrecks who were the products of that vice. Poppy fields bloomed red over the Empire, and the race had almost come to despair. And what do we find to-day? There is scarcely a great poppy field in the Republic, scarcely a fume of opium that you can smell on the public street in any Chinese city. The bonfires flared across the land as they burned up the signs of the old bondage. A great race arose in power and in a massive moral upheaval shook itself free. God had planted the energies there that needed only the touch of a living faith in Him, a new assurance of the freedom of man to do His will, and in this matter the whole nation came out of its bondage into its liberty.
For generations men wondered whether slaves could ever be set free. We almost feared in our land here that slavery was a permanent institution. But there came a time at last when from the wrist of every American slave the chains fell away. It might have been generations before; it might not have been until generations after; only in that time appointed the moral energies awoke and came forth, and Saturday burst into Easter Day for the negro bondmen of America.
Precisely the same principle holds with regard to the things that we fight to-day. It holds with regard to the war on war. Some day we shall slay it. The kingdom of heaven, said Jesus, is among you. Well, let it loose. The kingdom of heaven will have no war in it; the kingdom of heaven will have no brothers cutting one another’s throats in it; the kingdom of heaven will have in it no vice and lust dragging its slimy trail across men’s hearths and hearts. If the kingdom of heaven is within, why not set it free, that we may live in it as well as have it buried inside of us! The world that we are living in is calling us to go back to that principle of Saturday morning and to believe that all we need to do the will of God is made available for us by God’s grace now, if we will but obey.
And if some men say that all this is only to put in other words the theory of development, of historic evolution, why, what of it? Of course it is, but what is development except the drawing out of what has been folded in? What is evolution except the letting loose of what the mind of God Himself at the beginning had planted within,—when in the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world He poured the blood of Christ into humanity in order that humanity might be reinforced with the adequate energies to enable it to accomplish the thing that was God’s first dream for it? Of course it is, and that is precisely the ground of Christ’s constant appeal. “Come unto me,” He said to men, believing that they could. “Unless you hear My call and follow Me, you cannot be My disciple.” What meaning was there to His summons unless the power to respond was there in answer to His call? “I stand at the door of your inner being,” said He, “and knock. I am there waiting.”
And so to us to-day, just as clearly as in those days, His voice speaks: “Come out of your tomb, out of your chains, out of your narrowness, out of your limitations, out of your despairs, out of your dejections, out of your failures,—come out of them. The power of the endless life is here for you, if only by faith and love you will lay hold of it to-day.” Is that not, after all, the great central message and the fundamental principle of Christ’s Gospel to us, which He symbolized and illustrated in the shadow of the Saturday before the Easter victory? It is in one of the old hymns:
And He arose once on Easter morning that on the Saturday before and on every day, every one of us might also rise out of the old, low, selfish, defeated life into the life through which are beating the victorious energies and the sufficient strength of God. Shall it be so with us?
Yes, I may come if I will, by His life Who will live again in me.
But the trouble is men do not believe this. They do not believe in any latent capacities adequate to the great task of life. They accept the principle of surrender and incompetence. They have nothing for God and God can make no use of them. And I imagine that it is such unbelief, such misgiving as to whether after all we have any possibilities for God in us, the undervaluation of God’s need of us and power to make and use us, that lead many of us to live the futile, unfruitful, negative lives which we do live. Men do not think their lives worth very much. They do not deny that there are great men and that great work is to be done in the world, but they think that God requires only those, that He builds His kingdom on a few outstanding figures, that the common men can look after themselves, and that they are not indispensable to God. If we are to prevent this waste, and if we are to secure the life without which God is impotent to build His kingdom in the world, we must somehow bring home to men the recognition of the great truth that God cannot get along without every man and all of that man, and that every human life and all its buried powers are essential to God.
One of the great purposes of our Lord’s coming here to earth was that He might show men the value of a man’s life in the plan and thought of God. Even the most sacred and time-honoured institution our Lord weighed over against one man and found him outweighing the institution. What was His own example but the illustration of the immeasurable value of man? He did not come to teach the uselessness of human life, but its pricelessness. He did this by becoming a man Himself. And this principle of God’s need of men and their latent possibilities is not mere theological theory. It is the hard historic fact that God has ever needed men and waited for them and for what they were the men to do for Him. Look at the great inventions, discoveries, achievements. What is the whole lesson of the Incarnation but that there are things that God Himself will not do except as He uses man? God Himself, we must say reverently, was communicable and a Saviour only as man. And His call to-day as it has been all through the years is for men who will believe that the thing God wants done can be done by Him through them. The Western Hemisphere was here before ever Columbus drew aside the veil and broadened the horizon of mankind. These great energies which drive the modern world were here from the beginning. We did not invent any of them. There is not an ounce of power in the world to-day that was not here when the world began. All that man has done has been simply to discover existing secrets. He has created no power. He has only found out what God has put here for him to find out. It took man a long time to discover this. But God waited for him. And God needs these finding men now as much as He has needed them at any time. He needs such men now to break open what is still concealed. The past has not exhausted all the heroisms, has not accomplished all the tasks. There are greater ones yet for the days that are, if God can only find His men.
Think how greatly God needs men to-day just to bring need and supply together in the world. You remember the incident in the life of our Lord as He came by the Pool of Bethesda where the sick lay, and spoke to one poor man lying on his pallet.
“Are you going in?” said He.
“No,” said the man. “I have no friend who will help me in and others get the benefit before I can come near.”
There was the good, waiting to be gained, and here was the man, but he had no man to stand for him between the need and the supply. A few years ago a great famine raged just back from the coast of China. There were millions of Chinese families who were in want and hundreds of thousands died of starvation because there was not bread enough to feed them. Little children lay crying at the breasts of dead mothers by the roadsides. At that very hour the wheat was piled up at railroad stations in Argentina as high as church spires. There was grain enough to feed the starving millions in China. Here was the supply and there was the need, but where were the men? God had not men enough on whom to float the supply across to meet the need. What is true of outward need is true of inward need as well. There is never a want where there is not an adequate supply. No little child on this earth need go hungry because God has not put enough in this world to feed it. No human heart need go starved because there is not enough love to meet its wants. There is all the food and all the love that humanity needs. But there are lacking the men who for God will bring the supply to the demand. The human need in the world can be met by the supply only through men who will fill up the gap. God can do it only as men lend themselves to Him. That is why, through all the years, the call of God has been for volunteers. For every unique, external, individual call that has been given to men, you can find a million calls that have been just the answer of men to the great call of God for volunteers. And God surely values the volunteer above the conscript. Isaiah did not wait for any special coercive call. “Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me.” That call was enough to cover him, and he answered it. There is so much work to be done that God cannot go marching through the world looking for individuals, performing new miracles by which each individual is to be thaumaturgically led up to his particular work. God’s general way has been to picture before the eyes of His sons the work to be done and to wait for their hearts to leap in response, as Isaiah’s leaped: “Lord, let me have a share in this work ‘Here am I; send me.’”
Men are indispensable to God to put meaning into the words in which He tries to tell His message to men. Words have no meaning of their own. Words mean only as much as one man puts into them, or another man takes out of them. The meaning of the word does not come from the word; it comes from some life in which the word gets incarnated, or from some other life which interprets the word. What would the word “friend” signify to a man who had never had one? What does “tenderness” mean to one who has never seen a mother and her child? Or what is “patriotism” to one who has never seen or felt the contagion? You remember what the eunuch said when Philip met him in the chariot reading the prophet Esaias. “Understandest thou what thou readest?” Philip asked. And he replied, “How can I, except some man should guide me?” Things mean nothing to men until they are shown to them. Men go to China or Japan and preach the Gospel. How is it done? Why, they take words that have old meanings and fill them with new and different meanings by living new ideas in deeds before the people. In our colleges this year what meaning will honour, truth and friendship have, except as these words derive their meaning from the object lessons in some men’s lives? There are places where honour means dishonour; where purity means impurity; where truth means falsehood. These noble words are confused with their very opposites because no man has incarnated their right meaning in his life. That was one reason why the incarnation was necessary nineteen hundred years ago. There was no adequate religious or spiritual vocabulary and never could have been otherwise. If God had not come in the flesh, men would not have had the ideas that we use to describe God’s coming in the flesh. To-day, as then, God is dependent upon men in whom He can put meaning into His message to the world.
Men are indispensable in enabling God to get His other men. He gives men guidance for their lives. But how? I appeal to your own hearts. How do we get the guidance of our lives? There are many who are sure of having divine guidance in their lives, surer of that than they are of any material thing, and yet, as we look back upon this supernatural guidance, we realize that it has all been mediated through men. We can name man after man who did for our lives, in smaller measure, just what that man of Macedonia did for Paul. We get our guidance through men. Saint Paul got his through a man. Through what man was it? Sir William Ramsay has no doubt whatever that the man whom Saint Paul saw in his dreams was none other than his friend Luke. A real man and a friend, and no ghost figure, was the man of Macedonia through whom God gave Paul his great missionary call.
It would be easy to recall the lives of great missionaries and point out how they received their divine guidance through other men—not even through a dream, far less through some miraculous vision, but through a brother man who came to talk with them, reasoned with them, and showed them the best way in which a man could use his life. Men are indispensable to God in order to guide other men into the work which God has for them to do. And one reason why there is such an awful waste of life to-day, why so many men, going out of the colleges, miss the highest work of their lives, is simply because there are not enough other men who recognize that they are indispensable to God in order that, through them, God may guide men to their highest and most efficient places.
Men are indispensable to God in bringing men to Jesus Christ. As men were brought to Christ by other men in the beginning, so has it been during all the succeeding years. The angels are willing to do what they can, but none of us have had any visible object lessons of what they do. Men have been brought to Christ always by other men. Imperfect lives are to be brought up to the Perfect Life, and to do this service Christ uses common men, just such as we are. That is what Paul conceived as the glory of his life, that he had the privilege of being the bond—no other beings in the universe being able to take that place—between men who had not found Christ and Christ hunting for His own.
Then God requires men now as He never required them in all the days gone by to bear testimony to the Deity of Jesus Christ. We know how little value our Lord attached to any accrediting evidences that did not come right out of pure, human personality. He discredited the advantages of bringing back Abraham from the dead, for example, to bear testimony to the truth. If men were not willing to accept adequate moral evidence, valid human testimony, they would not believe by miracle, He said. That is why He was so pleased with the confession of Simon Peter. “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.” It rejoiced Him to get such testimony from a man who, in turn, had drawn it out of his own experience of God. There is no greater need in the world to-day than for a great body of men who know Christ to be God more surely than they know themselves to be men, and are able to go out and testify to what Christ can do with a definiteness and certainty greater than that of any other testimony they can bear, who can say what John said, “That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you.” If there ever was a day when God was calling men to a great undertaking, He is calling them now to be His witnesses, unimpeachable, unflinching, to the unique personality, to the supreme divine character and power of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ.
And it is not only for great men that God is calling to do these indispensable tasks for Him. He wants the great men, no doubt, but He wants, more than that, the great mass of the common men. After all, the great man is only one man, and every little man counts just as many as one great man. Since God has to have all, one little man is as indispensable to the all as one great man can be. And until He has all, He cannot do what He purposes to do. It is only when we all come “unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” that any one of us can come. It is only when we “comprehend with all saints, what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height” of the love of Christ, that any one of us can comprehend it. It is only when we all reflect as in a mirror the character of Christ that any one of us shall be “changed ... from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” And the little men, as a matter of fact, are doing as much as the great. The night that Gough stood alone, with all hope gone, a drunkard in the gutter, an almost forgotten man laid his hand on his shoulder and said, “Man, there is a better life than this for you.” The name of that man is remembered by a few, but forgotten by the multitudes who will never forget the name of John B. Gough, or cease to feel the glow of the fires which he kindled to blaze until the Judgment Day. Even a little man may fill such an indispensable place as that of helping God lay hold of a great man who will be one of the unmistakable forces of God.
And it is not only every man that is indispensable to God, but also every bit of every man. We cannot take some sections of our lives and eliminate them as though they were not indispensable to God. There can be no schism between a man’s public and his private life. His hands and what he does with them, his imaginings and where they go when he is alone by himself without any coercing, these are just as much indispensable to God as a man’s public worship or any of his activities in the open ministry of Christ’s kingdom. It is every bit of the man—body, soul, and spirit—that is indispensable to God.
And if we are indispensable to God, we may be very sure that we are indispensable to the world also. If God needs us, the world needs us even more. It is waiting for the rising up of men who know that God needs them, and who hand themselves over completely to His uses. “The mightiest of civilizing agencies are persons,” said Dr. Fairbairn, “and the mightiest civilizing persons are Christian men.” Those men are doing most for the world who are doing most to make men aware of how necessary they are to God, and who are going up and down the lands allying men’s lives to the eternal life and power of God. This is the greatest of all works—getting God His men. I heard Dr. J. Campbell Gibson tell the Chamber of Commerce in Glasgow of a visit which he made to a temple which had been turned into a modern school in inland China. Over the gate of the school were these words in Chinese: “If you are planting for ten years, plant trees; if you are planting for a hundred years, plant men.” Men are God’s great interest and want.
What an opportunity this opens for every man of us! We have thought of our lives as little, insignificant, trivial, of no consequence. There is One walking in the midst of us Who was speaking to Ezekiel. “I am hunting for a man,” He is saying, “I am hunting for a man,” and it is open to every one of us to rise up and say, “Lord, I am that man you are hunting for. Seek no further. Here am I. Have me for your man.” Is that the answer that He is getting from us?