The Stuff of Manhood: Some Needed Notes in American Character

There are two forms of disloyalty. One is flinching, the other is compromise. Of course, the compromiser will never allow that he is disloyal. He is a practical man who realizes that theories and ideals have to be adapted to a practical world, and he gives up a part, and as unimportant a part as possible, in order that he may gain the rest. He feels himself quite capable of judging how much to give up and what part may rightly be given up. He will simply abate the unreason of a God who demands all righteousness, and to Whom the whole truth is truth. Let us set up against such men the uncompromising principle of the duty of non-compromise. It is a principle from which the wisest and best of men are sometimes won away in the supposed interest of the great ends which they seek, and for which they feel that they may rightly sacrifice subordinate issues. There is what some regard as a striking incident of this character in the life of that uncompromising man, Saint Paul. It is an exciting and instructive story. This is the way it is told in the twenty-first chapter of Acts (vs. 17–30):

And that was the disastrous end of this conscientious experiment. Paul never tried another like it. Perhaps there is a construction of the story which forbids the idea that it was compromise but it suffices at any rate to raise the whole question of the wisdom of compromise as a principle of action. It is the one incident in Paul’s life where he might be thought even for a moment to have embarked on that course. Wherever else we see him, he is a man of firm and unflinching principles, who made no concealment of what he believed, and did not try to adjust his convictions and practices to other convictions and practices that were at variance with them.

In the second chapter of Galatians, you will remember, Paul is telling of a visit he made to Jerusalem some time before with Barnabas and Titus, in which they went up to consider these very questions. Some of the brethren in Jerusalem had endeavoured to persuade Paul to have Titus, who was a Gentile, circumcised, and Paul says, “To whom we gave place ... no, not for an hour.” And then he tells of the time when Peter came to Antioch and he withstood him to his face because he had been a trimmer and compromiser; for Peter, acting on the generous impulse of his own heart as to what was right, had indeed bravely eaten with the converted Gentiles, but when some men came down from Jerusalem who were close to James, he withdrew himself from the Gentiles, fearing, no doubt, that it might injure him in Jerusalem.

Paul does not say anything in any letter about this particular incident in Jerusalem, in which, for the one time in his life, he was overpersuaded by his friends and put in a position where he was very much misunderstood, and where he appeared to be compromising the great principles in which he earnestly believed. We know what the far-reaching consequences were. A great deal of trouble was brought into his life by this act. It was out of it that all those succeeding events came which took him at last to Rome to be tried before Cæsar. Some may say that these results were good. Undoubtedly God led Paul’s course on, but we may believe that God might have had even greater things for him to do if only he had in this incident pursued his customary course.

But we want to go far beyond the question as to whether the consequences may ever appear to justify acts of compromise. A course of action is right or wrong, not according to the consequences, but according to its conformity or unconformity to the character of God. And the point now raised is whether it is ever right for us to compromise our own firm convictions of truth and principle.

Now, the world tells us that such compromise is to-day absolutely unavoidable. Men and women, we are assured, cannot get along in a world like this without adaptations. If it is meant by this only that we are often obliged to adapt ourselves to that with which we do not agree, why, of course, we have to assent, because we are in a world of give and take of which we have to be a part, and it is necessary for us to live our life and do our work in this world. Here in many of our communities, for example, the saloons flourish. There is not one of us here in this audience who believes that it is wise that the saloon should exist under the protection of the government, but we have to live in a land where the principle with which we disagree prevails, and the only way we can escape is to go to some other land, and we would only find there some other principle with which we could not agree. We cannot live at all unless we are willing to adjust ourselves to an actual world. “Compromise” when used as the principle of such adjustment means simply that we must of necessity find room for ourselves among the crossing strands of life. “All government,” says Burke, “indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every vital and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.” “It cannot be too emphatically asserted,” says Spencer, “that this policy of compromise alike in institution, in action and in belief which especially characterizes English life is a policy essential to a society going through the transition caused by continuous growth and development.” And Emerson remarks, “Almost all people descend to meet. All association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other.”

If it is meant by compromise that we have to live under conditions with which we do not agree and to which we must adjust ourselves, why, of course, we must assent to that—it is perfectly obvious; but we do not need to live under those conditions assenting to them. We can bear our testimony against whatever we morally disapprove. We can assert our conviction by word or by the silent protest of life that those conditions are not right, and so to live in the midst of conditions in which we do not believe, but from which we cannot escape, is not compromise. It is compromise when we surrender our principles so that others do not understand what those principles are, or when we hold back something that is vital, or cover over deceptively or misleadingly something essential. When we take before men a position that is inconsistent with the position that in our hearts we are taking before God, that is compromise, and that is wrong. Regarding the truth in which we believe, the principles by which we know life ought to be lived, regarding these things there cannot be compromise, in our lives or in the Christian Church.

There is a noble essay by Mr. John Morley, as he once was, on this subject of compromise, its nature and limits, of which Scott Holland says in “Lux Mundi” that “no one can read that book without being either the better or the worse for it.” In it Morley takes up three different spheres of life. First, the formation of opinion; second, the expression of opinion when it is called out from us; and, third, the propagation of opinion; and then he pursues this line of argument: In the matter of the formation of opinion there cannot be any compromise at all. Every one of us is bound to hunt for the truth, no matter what the truth may be, and when we have found it, to give our lives absolutely to it. In the realm of the expression of opinion, nobody has any right to deceive any one regarding his principles and convictions when they are called forth. But in the third place, he admits room for compromise when it comes to the aggressive propagation of our convictions. He says that every man is not bound to propagate what he believes, and he takes for example his own case,—that of a man who does not believe in the Bible, who has abandoned the old religious views of his people, but who does not regard it as his duty aggressively to propagate his dissentient convictions.

In his own words his thesis is this:

Now, we cannot but be rather grateful that men, who if they spoke would have to oppose Christianity, take this view and remain silent, and yet that is not our principle. Believing in Christianity, we believe that it would be wrong and unworthy compromise to conceal it and to refrain from propagating it. Mr. Morley prefixed to his essay Whately’s saying, “It makes all the difference in the world whether we put truth in the first place or in the second place.” We hold to another word of Whately’s also: “If our religion is false, we must change it. If it is true, we must propagate it.” Notice that Morley is speaking not of his doubts, but of his convictions. There is no obligation of a propaganda of insecurity. There is an obligation to propagate positive truth. It must, of course, be the truth that I believe. When I am asked what I believe I must, of course, tell the truth. But we believe something far more than that. The religious truth that one believes he must give his life to propagate throughout the world, and it would not make any difference if he were the only man in the world who held that truth, it would still be his duty, if he believed it was the truth and the great and necessary truth of life, to go out single-handed to defend and propagate it. Athanasius is regarded as an impracticable and troublesome type but the progress of the world is often lifted forward a sheer and discernible stage by such uncompromisingness.

Let us set forth some of the reasons why we may believe that there dare not be, in our Christian life and our Christian service, any compromise whatever, either in our searching for the truth, in our utterance of the truth, or in our aggressive and active propagation of the truth throughout the world. This is to put the matter, of course, very broadly and sweepingly. There is a great deal to be said for some of Morley’s nice discriminations. But actual life is a very rough and imperative and elemental thing. The difficulty of acting on any body of wary and wavery casuistical principles is enormous. The really workable principle of actual living must be very simple and uncomplicated and direct. The only safe ethical law is “No lie,” no lie whatever or under any justification. So also, however crude and blunt the rule may be, “No compromise” is the only practicable right rule. Mr. Morley closed his essay with such a plain word: “It is better to bear the burden of impracticableness, than to stifle conviction and to pare away principle until it becomes mere hollowness and triviality.” And in the beginning he wrote: “Our day of small calculations and petty utilities must first pass away; our vision of the true expediencies must reach further and deeper; our resolution to search for the highest verities, to give up all and follow them, must first become the supreme part of ourselves.” The loss by compromise to ourselves and others is certain, while its gain is uncertain and problematical.

In the first place, one believes this because compromise makes no contribution to the settlement of the real issue over truth. It is true that all the boundaries between truth and error are not clear and sharply drawn lines. Often there is a gray and misty region between. And much truth is only slowly and gradually won. But the ideal of truth is clearer than the sun and as pure as the character of God. And we have a far richer chance of winning it and all that it brings with it, if we both think and live it uncompromisingly. “The political spirit,” says Mr. Morley in noble words, “is the great force in throwing love of truth and accurate reasoning into a secondary place. The evil does not stop here. This achievement has indirectly countenanced the postponement of intellectual methods, and the diminution of the sense of intellectual responsibility, by a school that is anything rather than political. Theology has borrowed, and coloured for her own use, the principles which were first brought into vogue in politics. If in the one field it is the fashion to consider convenience first and truth second, in the other there is a corresponding fashion of placing truth second and emotional comfort first. If there are some who compromise their real opinions, or the chance of reaching truth, for the sake of gain, there are far more who shrink from giving their intelligence free play, for the sake of keeping undisturbed certain luxurious spiritual sensibilities....

“The intelligence is not free in the presence of a mortal fear lest its conclusions should trouble soft tranquillity of spirit. There is always hope of a man so long as he dwells in the region of the direct categorical proposition and the unambiguous term; so long as he does not deny the rightly drawn conclusions after accepting the major and minor premises. This may seem a scanty virtue and very easy grace. Yet experience shows it to be too hard of attainment for those who tamper with disinterestedness of conviction, for the sake of luxuriating in the softness of spiritual transport without interruption from a syllogism. It is true that there are now and then in life as in history noble and fair natures, that by the silent teaching and unconscious example of their inborn purity, star-like constancy, and great devotion, do carry the world about them to further heights of living than can be attained by ratiocination. But these, the blameless and loved saints of the earth, rise too rarely on our dull horizons to make a rule for the world. The law of things is that they who tamper with veracity, from whatever motive, are tampering with the vital force of human progress. Our comfort and the delight of the religious imagination are no better than forms of self-indulgence, when they are secured at the cost of that love of truth on which, more than on anything else, the increase of light and happiness among men must depend. We have to fight and do lifelong battle against the forces of darkness, and anything that turns the edge of reason blunts the surest and most potent of our weapons.” We do not believe in compromising, because it makes no contribution to the larger discerning of truth or the triumphing of that truth over error.

In the second place, we do not believe in it because it creates a great many more difficulties than it removes. Now, Paul was invited to this compromising course in Jerusalem by his misguided friends because they thought it would avoid trouble. They wanted to set Paul right with the Jewish Christians in the city, and maybe with the Jews who were not Christians; they wanted to remove an impression which they thought prevailed regarding Paul’s attitude towards the Mosaic customs in the Gentile world.

Now, as a matter of fact, the principle of that impression was true, for although, as Dr. McGiffert says, Paul

This is a satisfactory defense if one were needed of Paul’s course, but no one would question his motive. That was right enough and he evidently acted in all good conscience, but the procedure, instead of getting him out of his trouble, got him into worse trouble. It always does that. I do not believe any man was ever permanently helped by compromise. Every man who has begun to play with it has been drawn into worse difficulties and troubles, or has gone down, perhaps without conscious difficulty but with real moral loss, to a lower level of life. For one thing, compromise blurs the line of cleavage between truth and error, and that is exactly what no one of us can afford to have done. We do not want the lines of distinction between what is true and what is false slurred over for us. We want them sharpened so that we shall make as little mistake as possible as to where they lie. Furthermore compromise gets us into more difficulty than it removes, because it throws together things that are not congruous or reconcilable. This is its very nature. It brings into one bed things that cannot sleep together, into one union things that cannot be tied. And it postpones real settlements in the interest of spurious arrangements, sacrificing some

These are Mr. Morley’s closing words. This is the second reason why we believe there can be no room for compromise in our Christian life or service.

In the third place, it encourages evil by making it think that having got so much it can get the rest, and so it prolongs the life of evil. That is exactly what compromise did in the old days of slavery. Every one of those early compromises prolonged the life of evil which at last the nation had to pour out its blood to destroy. That is what compromise always does. It persuades evil that, after all, maybe evil can win the victory, that having gotten so much from us it can get the rest if only it will be patient, and we simply increase the courage of our foe in proportion as we make any compromise with him instead of standing up face to face against him from the very beginning. And so it destroys the power and might of right causes by mixing in the taint of wrong. You do not make a good man better by putting a dash of bad in him. You do not make a good cause stronger by letting the evil come in; you only weaken its strength and power. Compromise plays into the hands of the very evil which we are here to overcome and destroy.

In the fourth place, compromise breaks down the strength of rigid consistency, and by letting in one qualification prepares the way for others. That is the reason why it is so much harder for a man to be a moderate drinker than to be a total abstainer. As was said of Samuel Johnson, “He could practice abstinence but not temperance.” When a man has made up his mind that he will never do a thing, it is a great deal easier for him to refuse to do it in any given instance than if he has made up his mind that he will do it moderately, because he never knows when he ceases to be moderate. There is a sharp line between moderate drinking and total abstinence. That boundary line no one can ever mistake, but the boundary line between intemperance and moderation is not located anywhere. There is no definite border between those two countries. As a matter of fact, every man starts in by being a moderate drinker. He never intended to become anything else but a moderate drinker when he began. But there is a boundary line so clear that a blind man can see it between yes and no, between not doing a thing at all and doing that thing only moderately. We believe in the principle of absolutely no compromise in moral habit and principle, and we believe in the same principle in our clear and evangelical convictions regarding the Christian faith.

In the fifth place, we ought to shun all such compromise because it undermines our confidence in men, and the solid unity of their coöperative action. We know where truth is, but we never know where calculating compromise may be. In the language of the deaf and dumb this is the sign for truth—a straight line right away from your mouth—for the simple reason that between two points there is only one straight line, but there may be many crooked lines. The truth is always a single thing, but the error,—no man knows what it may be. No compromise makes possible unity of accord by giving people one standard on which they can rely, and by supplying confidence in the stability of men and their convictions. But we cannot follow the compromising man, for as soon as he gets out of our sight we do not know where he will be.

It is the man who makes no compromise, who stands fast by truth, that we know we can locate. It was that which gave Stonewall Jackson his huge power as a leader of men in the Civil War. He was a man of the most unflinching Christian convictions. He was one who never moved the breadth of a hair from his loyalty to his Lord or to truth as he saw truth in the presence of his Lord. Colonel Henderson draws for us a rich picture of the great soldier’s character and it is full of genial and kindly touches, but it is faithful also in its account of the man’s rigid and inflexible righteousness.

“As exact as the multiplication table,” some one said of him, “and as full of things military as an arsenal.” Those of us who are looking for the secret of Christian influence over others may be sure that we will find it here. Men are not going to follow the shifting man. They will follow the man who makes no compromise, who has his firm convictions and who stands by those convictions, no matter what the cost of his loyalty may be. Recent American politics are rather eloquent and convincing on this point.

In the sixth place, compromise in principle substitutes reliance upon majorities for reliance upon the truth, and the majorities never have been right and we may doubt whether, until our Lord Jesus Christ comes again, they ever will be right. God never has relied upon the majority. He never has waited to do His work until it was ready to side with Him. In all ages God has done His work by the few. In Old Testament times He did it by the few. The one principle prevailed always—not by might, nor by power. It was ever only “the Sword of the Lord and of Gideon.” When our Lord came He did His work with the few. Through all the ages God has been working so, and we simply depart from His whole method in history when by compromise we try to get the force of the majority on our side. The force of the majority does not amount to anything in comparison with the force of truth. “The history of success,” says Mr. Morley, “as we can never too often repeat to ourselves, is the history of minorities.” And we do not believe in compromise because it substitutes our reliance upon the majority for our reliance upon the truth of God, and upon the strength of God to enable the few with the truth to triumph against the error of the crowd. This passes for foolish idealism and some of our most popular political leaders and reformers have poured scorn upon the idealists and dreamers, who are not to be numbered among the practical men.

And we might add, “he cannot instantly make truth the life of the nation, but he can be loyal to its commandments. He cannot make political leaders honest and patriotic, but he can refuse to profit by their dishonesty or to regard them as honest men if they will but wear his badge and seek their own ends by promoting his. He can form his own ideals of honour and glory and live by them whatever way others may go.”

In the seventh place, compromise increases in peril as we draw near the highest. If you take a man who is down on the lower levels, compromise does not mean as much to him as it does to men who have been climbing up. The nearer we come to Christ and the highest truth, the more perilous does compromise become. As Edward Thring said: “In proportion to excellence, compromise is impossible. A single leak sinks a great ship, a raft that is all leaks floats.” That is just the deep lesson that men and women need to learn; that the higher and cleaner and more morally lofty or exacting the life, the more perilous compromise becomes to it. One has heard Christian men say sometimes that they thought they were safe in doing what this or that man, not as strong or experienced or mature, could do. It is a great mistake. The clearer and stronger a man’s life, the more careful must the man be, the more solicitous, the more anxious, lest thinking he stands he falls. One of the greatest things about the life of Paul was the humility and self-distrust in which he walked, fearing lest when he had preached to others he himself might be a castaway. We have to learn that here lies power and duty, and that the cleaner Christ makes any human life, the more careful must that life be to keep all its habits pure and unsullied, and its convictions of truth unflinching and firm.

It was this principle that made our friend, S. H. Hadley, and that makes so many men who have escaped from the slavery of drink, go to extremes in cutting off physical indulgences. Mr. Hadley not only dropped once and forever the use of alcohol, but he stopped tobacco too, and he tried to get every drunkard whom he was seeking to save to discontinue the use of nicotine. He held that men should be clean every whit and his strong conviction was that while he would not for a moment class such indulgences together, nevertheless the man who wanted to be free from the one would find his deliverance far easier if he sloughed off the other also. It is safer and easier to be thoroughgoing and indiscriminate, if you will, than to be always calculating how great risks can be safely run.

And, lastly, we believe in no compromise because the truth is bound to prevail, and it will triumph the soonest when it is least hampered and tied up with error or with qualification. One might stop here to make a defense on this ground of the fanatics and devotees, but it is enough to say that the truth is going to prevail because it is God’s truth, and hell and all hell’s power in the world cannot stand against it. What is the use in delaying the day of that triumph by compromising with error? The right will prevail all the faster if we make no compromise with error, if we go out and preach unflinchingly and courageously with no compromise, with no surrender or economy or adaptations, the hard, plain truth of God as we see it. If what we think is truth is really error, it will be the sooner beaten down for being made to stand up for itself. But if it is indeed the truth we know it will prevail the more in the world as we keep it free from all connection with anything that will weaken or becloud it.

I know how much danger there is in such an attitude as this if we take it up towards the truth that we hold. It lies in our human nature to go to violence or extremes with everything. Martin Luther used to say that human nature is like a drunken man trying to ride a horse, you prop him up on one side and he topples over on the other. It is that way with us. We try to be firm and we become hard-hearted. We pride ourselves on uncompromising loyalty to the truth and we lack the tenderness and sympathy. Moreover, as Bushnell said in his essay on “Christian Comprehensiveness”:

And yet these dangers are lesser dangers than the danger of surrendering the truth. And we can be guarded from them by the great and unselfish love that guarded Paul. The man who loves others more than he loves himself, who holds human lives sacred and free from invasion, who is seeking not his own glory, but the glory of God and the good of men, is in little danger from an absolutely uncompromising loyalty to the truth.

And if ever men have any doubts or misgivings regarding this, or if the time of discouragements and fears comes to them, and they look with longing to the multitudes who act together, while they think of themselves as just a few, bearing testimony for the truth against error and sin, they may encourage themselves with Mr. Matthew Arnold’s doctrine of the remnant, or better yet, by remembering the great Solitary, Jesus Christ. How lonesomely He walked His way; seeing what no other soul was seeing; standing alone for the great truth which He uttered, and at last meeting death upon the cross alone; one of His disciples having betrayed Him, another having three times denied that he ever knew Him, and all the others having left Him and gone away! And yet as we look back, we see that lonely cross ruling the whole world, and that forsaken figure men are clothing now with the crown of everlasting light, and His name is above every name. All that we are asked to do is simply to follow in His train, to take up the truth which He opened, and for that truth to be willing to live, and, which is far easier, if need be, to die. Our lives are ours for this one thing, that through them, without compromise with error or with sin, God may bear testimony to Himself, and whether He does that through many years or through few, through peaceful personal service or through storm and tragedy, is of no consequence. The one thing that is of consequence is that we should know and be true to God.

But there is a better way to set forth and commend this principle as a law of life than by arguing it in these general terms. Let the principle put on flesh and live before us in a man:

“And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the sojourners of Gilead, said unto Ahab, As the Lord, the God of Israel, liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.”

The old man who spoke these words was one of the four great characters of the Old Testament. He and Moses and Samuel and David stood apart in the thought of the Hebrew people. Indeed, there was a sense in which he and Moses were in a class by themselves. The appearance of those two with our Lord on the Mountain of Transfiguration was only an illustration of the place which they held in the imagination of Israel.

These were the first words he spoke as he bursts on our view. What lay behind them we can only surmise. He was a Tishbite, one “of the sojourners of Gilead,” dwelling beyond the Jordan, a man brought up in the desert. There on the level sands, with the eye of God looking down upon him, he had come to a deep feeling of the soul’s lonely stand before God, and convinced of God and the righteousness of God he came over the Jordan to speak his message and do his work in the organized national life of his people. He was a clean-limbed, frugal-lived man, who gathered up his skirts about him, we are told, and ran straight away sixteen miles before the chariot of Ahab, from Carmel to the entering in of Jezreel; a calm, quiet, courageous, firm-principled man; bred so in the desert with God.

We do not have any very elaborate story of his life. He appears on the stage and then he vanishes. There are long periods of time covering years when he disappears entirely from the record. We can condense what we know about his life into six brief chapters, between each two of which there is an interval, in some cases, a long interval of time.

He appears first of all in connection with the great drought which he prophesied and which lasted for the three years he had foretold. We see him by the little brook Cherith, fed of the ravens, until through the long cessation of the rain the brook itself disappeared. Then we see him in the house of the widow of Sarepta, feeding with her on her little supply of meal, and in her hour of depthless sorrow raising her son from death to life. And then, in the second chapter, he breaks forth once more upon the national stage. Ahab and Obadiah, his chief man, had sought for him up and down the land, having divided the country between them, partly that they might seek water for their fast diminishing herds, partly that they might meet again and punish this troubler of Israel. At last, on one of the highways, the man of God appeared to the prime minister and told him that he had no fear to meet the king and would do so if he would carry word to Ahab. True to his word, he met the king, confronted him with his disloyalty to Jehovah, and challenged him to produce the prophets of Baal for the great test on Mount Carmel; and then, after his triumph, Elijah again disappears.

In the third chapter we have the only account of the man’s inner life. If it were not for that chapter with its story of his subjective struggle, Elijah would be no example for us men of this day. In all the other chapters of the story he appears absolutely undaunted, unafraid of the face of man, clearly convinced of what God would have him do, and absolutely fearless in the doing of it. But here we are shown the man in his own inward wavering, in doubt in some measure about the reality or power of his mission, afraid to carry forward that which he had set out to do with such daring spirit; and in the wilderness alone, first beneath the juniper tree and then on Mount Horeb, Elijah had to face again his life and settle himself once more in that faith in the living God which had brought him out of the desert. And God stood out and spoke to him, and Elijah rose up on his feet once more a man unafraid to resume his mission. God bade him return and anoint a new king over Syria and a new king over Israel, and to go to Abel-meholah and find his own successor, the young man Elisha, plowing behind his oxen. And the prophet went out from his hour of discouragement to find at once the young man who was to take up his work after him and to be an even mightier prophet than he.

Then for a long time Elijah disappears again, only to reappear when he confronts Ahab once more, in Naboth’s vineyard, shows him how little he fears him, and pronounces upon him the judgment of Jehovah. Then he vanishes from the stage for three years at least of solitary meditation in the wilderness, vanishes so long that the common people apparently forgot him, so that when one day he met a little party of the servants of the new king Ahaziah on the highway bound to Ekron to consult Baal-zebub, they did not know who the prophet was and brought back his message to the king, able only to say of him that he was a hairy man, with a leather girdle about his loins. But the king well knew that the Tishbite had broken once more upon the stage of the nation’s life, and he bowed beneath the judgments of God that the man from Gilead denounced.

Then in the concluding chapter we see Elijah and his young man coming down from Gilgal to Bethel and then to Jericho and then back to the wilderness out of which he had come, that from his own deserts where he had come to know God he might go back to God again. And there in the chariot of fire the man who was himself “the chariots of Israel, and the horsemen thereof,” went up to the Lord God of Israel, Who was alive, to meet Him before Whom he had always stood.

One does not wonder that the old man impressed as he did the imagination of his people, and that when centuries later John the Baptist emerged upon the stage challenging the attention of the nation, almost the first question addressed to him was, “Art thou Elijah?”

And we have the secret of Elijah’s life given to us in these words with which he is introduced to us, “As the Lord God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand.” Out there in the barrenness of the desert beyond the Jordan, Elijah had come to believe in a God Who was alive, and before Whom he lived his life. The deserts have never bred polytheism. The great polytheistic systems have sprung from the lush jungles of the tropics. The great monotheisms have been born in the deserts. And out on the lonely sands beyond the Jordan, beyond the hills and amid the great level places where there was no one but God, Elijah came to know that He was and to know that his life stood in Him.

This was the principle of the man’s life—the consuming conviction of a living God and of the commission of His uncompromising service. Indeed we are not sure that we know Elijah’s name. It is possible that the name by which we think we know him is only a pseudonym—Elijah, “My God is Jehovah.” It may be that from the very repetition of this phrase to which he was addicted, “The Lord God of Israel, before whom I stand,” men came at last to call him by the opening note of his message, “the man of the living God.”

Now what that message meant to Elijah was just this: that the Lord God was no dead force, no unknown cause of things, that the Lord God was alive, and that a man was to have dealings with Him; that a man’s life was not his own personal and irresponsible experiment, but a work to be done in front of God; and that a man must reckon in all his thoughts, in all his ways, with One Who lives, and go out and do his work in the world in the consciousness of his relationship and his subjection to an active, working, personal God Who would stand by him in the fire, would uphold him before kings, and carry him through to the end of each of his appointed tasks. If there is one thing that we need to get clearly fixed in our own lives it is the matter of our attitude towards this infinite and unseen God Who is alive.

This faith in a God Who is alive, before Whose face a man is to live his life, is no mere theory. You cannot find any conviction that will more really mould and transform all our conduct and put uncompromising stiffness in it than the conviction that we are living our lives thus before the eyes of a God Who observes. In the life of Thring of Uppingham we are told of an incident that pleased him greatly. It is a story that came to him regarding a little group of boys who were spending the summer in France. A visitor saw these English schoolboys and overheard their conversation as to what they should do on Sunday. Some of the boys were proposing a certain course of action, and all seemed to agree until one fellow spoke up and said: “No, I do not agree. I will not do it.” And when the other lads urged him to come along, he still insisted that he would not. They asked him his reasons. He said: “Well, Thring would not like it, and what Thring would not like I do not intend to do.” “Well, but Thring isn’t here,” they said; “he’s back at Uppingham.” “I do not care,” said the boy; “Thring would not like it.” He believed that he was living in a real sense—I mean in the most real sense of all, in the life of his personal will—before the standards of his master, and by those standards as in the light of his master’s countenance he insisted that he would uncompromisingly live. Before the eyes of God a man will beware how he lives his life. If he knows that this life of his can find no darkness where he can hide himself from God, if he knows that all of his days are to be spent before His face, that all his deeds are to be done beneath the gaze of God, assuredly that will govern and control a man’s decisions about his practical ways. The consciousness of a living God will give direction to a man’s moral life.

And it will not only give direction. There is many a man among us who knows that the consciousness of a God Who is alive not only gives determination and direction to his ways, but puts a new power and inspiration in them.

A friend in New York tells a lovely story about a boy in one of the great English schools. He was an only child, and his mother died when he was but a little fellow. Between him and his father there grew up relations of the most delicate and sensitive intimacy. The father was blind, so that the little boy had to be his father’s eyes, and until the day came when the lad had to go away to school there was scarcely an hour when the two were separated. But at last the time came and the boy went. He became the best athlete in his school. One spring, just before the final game in which the boy was to bowl for his own school, tidings came that his father was seriously ill and he must come home. The news sent the whole school into lamentation, for they were afraid that he might not recover and that if he did not the boy could not play in the concluding and critical game. And indeed, as it turned out, the father died. The day before the game was to be played the boy came back to school, and, to the amazement of all, let it be known that he intended to play. The next day he took his place and played as he had never played in his life before. When at last the game was over and the school had won its triumph, one of the masters came to the boy and expressed to him the delighted surprise of the school at what he had done and their amazement both that he had played at all and at the way he had played. “Why,” said the boy, “didn’t you understand? I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. That was the first game my father ever saw me play.” Beneath the consciousness that for the first time his father’s eyes were open and watching him the boy had discovered capacities of power that he hardly knew he possessed before. Beneath the eye of our Father, Who is looking upon the game that we are playing, where is the man that cannot play a better game, who cannot draw on the reservoirs of power untouched before, who cannot come out and do his work in the world and live his life with larger inspiration and strength, with more dominion and sovereignty, because he is living it before a God Who is alive? To such a man will compromise not seem a filial insult impossible except by a base degradation of the soul?

And not only did Elijah’s principle determine his conduct and pour inspiration into it; it was this principle of a God Who is alive that made him absolutely fearless. He was not only unafraid of physical harm, but he had none of that subtler fear that every man knows—the fear that he himself will fail, the fear that he cannot carry himself safely through. What you and I are afraid of is not the things that are without; our enemy is inside. Treachery within the walls is all that we need to dread, and our deepest fear is of our own failure. That was the great thing in Elijah’s life, that he dared to stand on Mount Carmel, before all that crowd of priests, confident and fearless. He knew he would prevail, that he had not promised in vain that God would answer. The man who knows that he is living his life before a God Who is alive and doing his work in the name of a God Who is alive is not afraid either of what men can do to him or of the failure that he may make himself.

There is a story in the life of Dr. Schauffler that illustrates how to-day too men can rise into just such fearlessness. The missionaries were being bothered a great deal in Constantinople by Russian machinations against the Protestant missions in the empire, and Dr. Schauffler went to see the Russian ambassador. “I might as well tell you now, Mr. Schauffler,” said the ambassador, “that the Emperor of Russia, who is my master, will never allow Protestantism to set its foot in Turkey.” The old missionary looked at him for a moment and then replied: “Your Excellency, the kingdom of Christ, who is my Master, will never ask the Emperor of all the Russias where it may set its foot.” And he went on with his mission unintimidated by any agencies working in the dark against him, because he was confident that the living God Whose work he was doing would achieve for him His own victory.

And we see in this story of Elijah another thing that this great conviction will do for a man: it will make a troubler of him. “Art thou he,” said Ahab when he met Elijah in the midst of the great famine, “art thou he that troubleth Israel?” “No,” said Elijah; “thou art he who troubles Israel.” And yet they were both troubling Israel, the one with the iniquities into which he was leading the people, the other because the principle of the living God dominating his life drove him as a great moral force against the evils of his time. A man cannot live in a college or university with a faith that God is living and that he himself is living in front of God, and be quiet before the moral iniquities and evils he will find. It is not enough for a man to say, “I will simply be myself, live my own clean life, and let my silent influence count.” If his silent influence does not count, no other influence of his will count. But the silence is not enough. A little while ago I copied from one of the letters of Mandel Creighton, late Bishop of London, written to his boys who were away at school, this bit of advice. “You will see, then,” he writes to one son, who had just been made a monitor in his school, “you will see, then, that the chief influence of a monitor is in his example. But this is the point on which I have seen many people deceive themselves. They trust to what they call the force of silent example. That is most pernicious. If you content yourself with merely keeping school rules and doing what is right yourself and keeping out of the way of any fellows who you know are doing wrong, or if you stand by and listen to them saying what they ought not, without reproof, you are doing wrong. No, that won’t do. It is part of the essence of good to fight against evil. You must set your face strongly against all that is bad, and must put down not only all that you find in the course of your walk, but you must go out of your walk to find it in order to put it down.”

There has been much complaint these last years because in high places in this land there have been men who were troublers of the nation. The great need of the nation has been men who were prepared to make trouble in order that, at last, righteousness might come. Things that have thought themselves secure will be shaken; long vested interests that have believed themselves to be sacred will have their sanctity scrutinized; and men will come at last into their rights and their righteousness, if we are prepared, following the old Tishbite, to live our lives before the God Who is alive.

And this same principle brings peace and quiet and tranquillity to men. Elijah shook once, we know, but only once. Every time we see him on the public stage, no matter whom he is confronting—Jezebel, Ahab, Obadiah, Ahaziah—he is standing with confident soul, quiet and still. We can be sure that if on that day at Mount Carmel we could have first mingled with those four hundred and fifty priests of Baal who knew that their day of doom had come, and then have gone over and stood by the side of the old man, we should have found the old man the most quiet and placid person on the mountainside and his heart beat the calmest. And we may be sure that we can go in the same tranquillity and calm and steadfastness in which the old Tishbite lived, if we will believe as deeply as he did in a Lord God Who is alive, and will live our lives before His face with as little compromise and fear.

And it is a great conviction like this of Elijah’s that steadies men in the hour of their trial and that when they fall redeems them again. The old prophet fell down. He ran from a woman’s threats, and beneath the juniper tree and then on Horeb, he shook and was afraid. But God, Who was alive before, was alive still, and He came to Mount Horeb, where the man lay in his spiritual petulance and fear, and He was not in the great wind, and He was not in the great earthquake, and He was not in the great fire, but at last in the still small voice of life He spoke to Elijah, and Elijah rose up on his feet once more and went out to complete his work in unfaltering triumph.

It works that way still. There is a letter of Abraham Lincoln, the original of which is preserved in the state capitol at Albany. It is a letter Lincoln wrote granting a pardon to a deserter.