“Dig deep enough into any man,” St. Augustine said, “and you will find something divine.” We supposed he believed in total depravity, and he does in theory believe in it; but when it is a matter of actual experience, he announces this deep fact which fits perfectly with his other great utterance: “Thou, O God, hast made us for thyself, and we are restless (dissatisfied) until we find ourselves in thee.”
Too long we have assumed that Adam, the failure, is the type of our lives, that he is the normal man, that to err is human, and that one touch, that is, blight, of nature makes all men kin. What Christ has revealed to us is the fact that we always have higher and diviner possibilities in us. He, the overcomer, and not Adam, is the true type, the normal person, giving us at last the pattern of life which is life indeed.
Which is the real self, then? Surely this higher possible self, this one which we discover in our best moments. The Greeks always held that sin was “missing the mark”—that is what the Greek word for sin means—failure to arrive at, to reach, the real end toward which life aims. Sin is defeat. It is loss of the trail. It is undoing. The sinner has not found himself, he has not come to himself. He has missed the real me. He cannot say, “I am.”
If that is a fact, and if the life of spiritual health and attainment is the normal life, we surely ought to do more than is done to help young people to realize it and to assist them to find themselves. We are much more concerned to manufacture things than we are to make persons. We do one very well and we do the other very badly. Kipling’s “The Ship that Found Itself” is a fine account of the care bestowed upon every rivet and screw, every valve and piston. He pictures the ship in the stress and strain of a great storm and each part of the ship from keel to funnel describes what it has to bear and to do in the emergency and how it has been prepared in advance for just this crisis. Nansen was asked how he felt when he found that the Fram was caught in the awful jam of the Arctic ice-floe. “I felt perfectly calm,” he said. “I knew she could stand it. I had watched every stick of timber and every piece of steel that went into her hull. The result was that I could go to sleep and let the ice do its worst.” With even more care we build the airplane. There must be no chance for capricious action. The propeller blades must be made of perfect wood. There must be no defect in any piece of the structure. The gasoline must be tested by all the methods of refinement. The oil must be absolutely pure, free of every suspicion of grit.
But when we turn from ships and airplanes to the provisions for training young persons we are in a different world. The element of chance now bulks very large. We let the youth have pretty free opportunity to begin his malformation before we begin seriously to construct him on right lines. We fail to note what an enormous fact “disposition” is, and we take little pains to form it early and to form it in the best way. We are far too apt to assume that all the fundamentals come by the road of heredity. We overwork this theory as much as earlier theologians overworked their dogma of original sin from poor old Adam.
The fact is that temperament and disposition and the traits of character which most definitely settle destiny are at least as much formed in those early critical years of infancy as they are acquired by the strains of heredity. Education, which is more essential to the greatness of any country than even its manufactures, is one of the most neglected branches of life. We take it as we find it—and lay its failures to Providence as we do deaths from typhoid. It must not always be so. We must be as greatly concerned to form virile character in our boys and girls and to develop in them the capacity for moral and spiritual leadership in this crisis as we are concerned over our coal supply or our industries. There are ways of assisting the higher self to control and dominate the life, ways by which the ideal person can become the real person. Why not consider seriously how to do that?
He that overcomes, the prophet of Patmos says, receives a white stone with a new name written on it, which no man knoweth save he that hath it. It is a symbolism which may mean many things. It seems at least to mean that he who subdues his lower self, holds out in the strain of life, and lives by the highest that he knows, will as a consequence receive a distinct individuality, a clearly defined self, instead of being blurred in with the great level mass—a self with a name of its own. And that self will not be the old familiar self that everybody knows by traits of past achievement and by the old tendencies of habit. It will be the self which only God and the person himself in his deepest and most intimate moments knew was possible—and here at last it is found to be the real self. The man can say, “I am.” He has come to himself.
We ask, at the end, whether it may not be that the world will soon come to itself and discover the way back to some of its missed ideals. Here on a large scale we have the story of a desperate hunger, squandered wealth, lost shoes, lost tunics, and even more precious things gone—a world that has missed its way and is floundering about without sufficient vision or adequate leadership. If it could only come to itself, discover what its true mission is and where its real sources of power and its line of progress lie, it would still find that God and man together can rebuild what man by his blunders has destroyed.
Nobody ever amounts to anything who lives without conflict with obstacles. It seems to be a law of the universe that nothing really good can be got or held by soft, easy means.
The Persians were so impressed with this stern condition of life that they interpreted the universe as the scene of endless warfare between hostile powers of the invisible world. Ormuzd, the god of light, and Ahriman, the god of darkness, were believed to be engaged in a continual Armageddon. There could be no truce in the strife until one or the other should win the victory by the annihilation of his opponent. This Persian dualism has touched all systems of thought and has left its influence upon all the religions of the world. The reasons why it has appealed so powerfully to men of all generations are, of course, that there is so much conflict involved in life and that no achievement of goodness is ever made without a hard battle for it against opposing forces. But if all this opposition and struggle is due to an “enemy,” we certainly ought to love this “enemy,” because it turns out to be the greatest possible blessing to us that we are forced to struggle with difficulties and to wrestle for what we get.
“Count it all joy,” said the Apostle James in substance, writing to his friends of the Dispersion, “when you fall into manifold testings, or trials, knowing that the proving of your faith worketh steadfastness, and let steadfastness have its perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, lacking in nothing.” St. Paul thought once that his “thorn in the flesh” was conferred upon him by Satan and was the malicious messenger of an enemy; but in the slow process of experience he came to see that the painful “thorn” exercised a real ministry in his life, that through his suffering and hardship he got a higher meaning of God’s grace; and he discovered that divine power was thus made perfect through his weakness, so that he learned to love the “enemy” that buffeted him.
The Psalmist who wrote our best loved psalm, the twenty-third, thought at first that God was his Shepherd because he led him in green pastures and beside still waters where there was no struggle and no enemy to fear. But he learned at length that in the dark valleys of the shadow and on the rough jagged hillsides God was no less a good Shepherd than on the level plains and in the lush grass; and he found at last that even “in the presence of enemies” he could be fed with good things and have his table spread. The overflowing cup and the anointed head were not discovered on the lower levels of ease and comfort; they came out of the harder experiences when “enemies” of his peace were busy supplying obstacles and perplexities for him to overcome.
It is no accident that the book of Revelation puts so much stress upon “overcoming.” The world seemed to the prophet on the volcanic island of Patmos essentially a place of strife and conflict—an Armageddon of opposing forces. There are no beatitudes in this book promised to any except “overcomers.”
But the conflict that ends in such results can not be called misfortune, any more than Hercules’ labors through which the legendary hero won his immortality can be pronounced a misfortune for him. Once more, then, the saint who has overcome discovers, at least in retrospect, that there is good ground for loving his “enemies”!
The farmer, in his unceasing struggle with weeds, with parasites, with pests visible and invisible, with blight and rot and uncongenial weather, sometimes feels tempted to blaspheme against the hard conditions under which he labors and to assume that an “enemy” has cursed the ground which he tills and loaded the dice of nature against him. The best cure for his “mood” is to visit the land of the bread-fruit tree, where nature does everything and man does nothing but eat what is gratuitously given him, and to see there the kind of men you get under those kindly skies. The virile fiber of muscle, the strong manly frame, the keen active mind that meets each new “pest” with a successful invention, the spirit of conquest and courage that are revealed in the farmer at his best are no accident. They are the by-product of his battle with conditions, which if they seem to come from an “enemy,” must come from one that ought to be loved for what he accomplishes.
These critics of ours who harshly review the books we write, the addresses we give, the schemes of reform for which we work so strenuously—do they do nothing for us? On the contrary, they force us to go deeper, to write with more care, to reconsider our hasty generalizations, to recast our pet schemes, to revise our crude endeavors. They may speak as “enemies,” and they may show a stern and hostile face; but we do well to love them, for they enable us to find our better self and our deeper powers. The hand may be the horny hand of Esau, but the voice is the kindly voice of Jacob.
All sorts of things “work” for us, then, as St. Paul declared. Not only does love “work,” and faith and grace; but tribulation “works,” and affliction, and the seemingly hostile forces which block and buffet and hamper us. Everything that drives us deeper, that draws us closer to the great resources of life, that puts vigor into our frame and character into our souls, is in the last resort a blessing to us, even though it seems on superficial examination to be the work of an “enemy,” and we shall be wise if we learn to love the “enemies” that give us the chance to overcome and to attain our true destiny. Perhaps the dualism of the universe is not quite as sharp as the old Persians thought. Perhaps, too, the love of God reaches further under than we sometimes suppose. Perhaps in fact all things “work together for good,” and even the enemy forces are helping to achieve the ultimate good that shall be revealed “when God hath made the pile complete.”
If we sprinkle iron filings over a sheet of paper and move a magnet beneath the paper, the filings become active and combine and recombine in a great variety of groupings and regroupings. A beholder who knows nothing of the magnet underneath gazes upon the whole affair with a sense of awe and mystery, though he feels all the time that there must be some explanation of the action and that some hidden power behind is operating as the cause of the groupings and regroupings of the iron particles. Something certainly that we do not see is revealing its presence and its power.
Our everyday experience is full of another series of activities even more mysterious than these movements of the iron. Whenever we open our eyes we see objects and colors confronting us and located in spaces far and near. What brings the object to us? What operates to produce the contact? How does the far-away thing hit our organ of vision? This was to the ancient philosopher a most difficult problem, a real mystery. He made many guesses at a solution, but no guess which he could make satisfied his judgment. Our answer is that an invisible and intangible substance which we call ether—luminiferous ether—fills all space, even the space occupied by visible objects, and that this ether which is capable of amazing vibrations, billions of them a second, is set vibrating at different velocities by different objects. These vibrations bombard the minute rods and cones of the retina at the back of the eye and, presto, we see now one color and now another, now one object and now another. This ether would forever have remained unknown to us had not this marvelous structure of the retina given it a chance to break through and reveal itself. In many other ways, too, this ether breaks through into revelation. It is responsible apparently for all the immensely varied phenomena of electricity, probably, too, of cohesion and gravitation. Here, again, the revelations remained inadequate and without clear interpretation until we succeeded in constructing proper instruments and devices for it to break through into active operation. The dynamo and the other electrical mechanisms which we have invented do not make or create electricity. They merely let it come through, showing itself now as light, now as heat, now again as motive power. But always it was there before, unnoted, merely potential, and yet a vast surrounding ocean of energy there behind, ready to break into active operation when the medium was at hand for it.
Life is another one of those strange mysteries that cannot be explained until we realize that something more than we see is breaking through matter and revealing itself. The living thing is letting through some greater power than itself, something beyond and behind, which is needed to account for what we see moving and acting with invention and purpose. Matter of itself is no explanation of life. The same elemental stuff is very different until it becomes the instrument of something not itself which organizes it, pushes it upward and onward, and reveals itself through it. Something has at length come into view which is more than force and mechanism. Here is intelligent purpose and forward-looking activity and something capable of variation, novelty, and surprise. And when living substance has reached a certain stage of organization, something higher still begins to break through—consciousness appears, and on its higher levels consciousness begins to reveal truth and moral goodness. It is useless to try to explain consciousness—especially truth-bearing consciousness—as a function of the brain, for it cannot be done. That way of explanation no more explains mind than the Ptolemaic theory explains the movements of the heavenly bodies. Once more, something breaks through and reveals itself, as surely as light breaks through a prism and reveals itself in the band of spectral colors. This consciousness of ours, as I have said, is not merely awareness, not only intelligent response; it lays hold of and apprehends, i.e., reveals, truth and goodness. What I think, when I really think, is not just my private “opinion,” or “guess,” or “seeming”; it turns out to have something universal and absolute about it. My multiplication-table is everybody’s multiplication-table. It is true for me and for beyond me. And what is true of my mathematics is also true of other features of my thinking. When I properly organize my experience through rightly formed concepts, I express aspects that are real and true for everybody—I attain to something which can be called truth. The same way in the field of conduct: I can discover not only what is subjectively right, but I can go farther and embody principles which are right not only for me but for every good man. Something more than a petty, tiny, private consciousness is expressing itself through my personality. I am the organ of something more than myself.
Perhaps more wonderful still is the way in which beauty breaks through. It breaks through not only at a few highly organized points, it breaks through almost everywhere. Even the minutest things reveal it as well as do the sublimest things, like the stars. Whatever one sees through the microscope, a bit of mould for example, is charged with beauty. Everything from a dewdrop to Mount Shasta is the bearer of beauty. And yet beauty has no function, no utility. Its value is intrinsic, not extrinsic. It is its own excuse for being. It greases no wheels, it bakes no puddings. It is a gift of sheer grace, a gratuitous largess. It must imply behind things a Spirit that enjoys beauty for its own sake and that floods the world everywhere with it. Wherever it can break through it does break through, and our joy in it shows that we are in some sense kindred to the giver and revealer of it.
Something higher and greater still breaks through and reveals a deeper Reality than any that we see and touch. Love comes through—not everywhere like beauty, but only where rare organization has prepared an organ for it. Some aspects of love appear very widely, are, at least, as universal as truth and moral goodness. But love in its full glory, love in its height of unselfishness and with its passion of self-giving is a rare manifestation. One person—the Galilean—has been a perfect revealing organ of it. In his life it broke through with the same perfect naturalness as the beam of light breaks through the prism of waterdrops and reveals the rainbow. Love that understands, sympathizes, endures, inspires, recreates, and transforms, broke through and revealed itself so impressively that those who see it and feel it are convinced that here at last the real nature of God has come through to us and stands revealed. And St. Paul, who was absolutely convinced of this, went still further. He held, with a faith buttressed in experience, that this same Christ, who had made this demonstration of love, became after his resurrection an invisible presence, a life-giving Spirit who could work and act as a resident power within receptive, responsive, human spirits, and could transform them into a likeness to himself and continue his revelation of love wherever he should find such organs of revelation. If that, or something like it, is true it is a very great truth. It was this that good old William Dell meant when he said: “The believer is the only book in which God himself writes his New Testament.”
There are few texts that have been more dynamic in the history of spiritual religion than the one which forms the keynote of the message of the little book of Habakkuk: “The righteous man lives by faith” (2:4). It became the central feature of St. Paul’s message. It was the epoch-making discovery in Luther’s experience, and it has always been the guiding principle of Protestant Christianity.
The profound significance of the words is often missed because the text is so easily turned into a phrase that is supposed just of itself to work a kind of magic spell, and secondly because the meaning of “faith” is so frequently misinterpreted. When we go back to the original experience out of which the famous text was born we can get fresh light upon the heart of its meaning. The little book begins with a searching analysis of the conditions of the time. With an almost unparalleled boldness the prophet challenges God to explain why the times are so badly out of joint, why the social order is so topsy-turvy, and why injustice is allowed to run a long course unchecked. God seems unconcerned with affairs—the moral pilot appears not to be steering things.
Then comes a moment of mental relief. The prophet hits upon the conclusion, arrived at by other prophets also, that God is about to use the Chaldeans as a divine instrument to chastise the wicked element in the nation, to right the wrongs of the disordered world, and to execute judgment. But as he begins to reflect he becomes more perplexed than ever. How can God, who is good, use such a terrible instrument for moral purposes? This people, which is assumed to be an instrument of moral judgment in a disordered world, is itself unspeakably perverse. It is fierce and wolfish. Its only god is might. It cares only for success. It catches men, like fish, in its great dragnet, and “then he sacrificeth unto his net and burneth incense unto his drag.” How can such a pitiless and insolent people, dominated by pride and love of conquest, be used to work out the ends of righteousness and to act for God who is too pure even to look upon that which is evil and wrong? Here the prophet finds himself suddenly up against the ancient problem of the moral government of the universe and the deep mystery of evil in it. He cannot untangle the snarled threads of his skein. No solution of the mystery lies at hand. He decides to climb up into his “watch-tower” and wait for an answer from God. If it does not come at once, he proposes to stay until it does come—“if it tarry, wait for it; it will surely come.” At length the vision comes, so clear that a man running can read it. It is just this famous discovery of the great text that a man cannot hope to get the world-difficulties all straightened out to suit him, he cannot in some easy superficial way justify the ways of God in the course of history; but, at least, he can live unswervingly and victoriously by his own soul’s insight, the insight of faith that God can be trusted to do the right thing for the universe which he is steering. It is beautifully expressed in a well-known stanza of Whittier’s:
Many things remain unexplained. The mysteries are not all dissipated. But I see enough light to enable me to hold a steady course onward, and I have an inner confidence in God which nothing in the outward world can shatter. This is the message from Habakkuk’s watch-tower: There is a faith which goes so far into the heart of things that a man can live by it and stand all the water-spouts which break upon him.
Josiah Royce once defined faith as an insight of the soul by which one can stand everything that can happen to him, and that is what this text means. You arrive at such a personal assurance of God’s character that you can face any event and not be swept off your feet. If this is so, it means that the most important achievement in a man’s career is the attainment of just this inner vision, the acquisition of an interior spiritual confidence which itself is the victory.
William James used often to close his lecture courses at Harvard with what he called a “Faith-ladder.” Round after round it went up from a mere possibility of hope to an inner conviction strong enough to dominate action. He would begin with some human faith which outstrips evidence and he would say of it: It is at least not absurd, not self-contradictory, and, therefore, it might be true under certain conditions, in some kind of a world which we can conceive. It may be true even in this world and under existing conditions. It is fit to be true; it ought to be true. The soul in its moment of clearest insight feels that it must be true. It shall be true, then, at least for me, for I propose to act upon it, to live by it, to stake my existence on it.
This watch-tower of Habakkuk is a similar faith-ladder. He sees no way to explain why the good suffer, or to account for the catastrophes of history, but at least he has found a faith in God which holds him like adamant: “Although the fig-tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold and there shall be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation.... He will make me to walk upon mine high places.” Faith like that is always contagious. The unshaken soul kindles another soul who believes in his belief, and the torch goes from this man on his watch-tower to St. Paul, and from him on to the great reformer, and then to an unnamed multitude, who through their soul’s insight can stand everything that may happen!
Some time ago I received a letter from a young minister who was about to settle for religious work in a large manufacturing town. He and I were strangers to each other in the flesh but friends through correspondence, and because we were kindred spirits he wrote to me to say: “I have before me the great work of living in the eternal God and in a humanity toiling in factories and shops. Oh, if I could only make the presence of the Eternal real to myself and to my people!” Another minister, laboring in a large suburb of New York City, also a stranger to me except through correspondence, wrote to say that he was glad for every voice which holds up before men the reality of the invisible Church and the idea of the universal priesthood of believers. These letters coming within a week—and they are samples of many similar ones—are signs of the times, and show clearly that thoughtful men all about us are done with the husk of religion and are devoting themselves to the heart of the matter. There is a deep movement under way which touches all denominations and is steadily preparing in our busy, hurrying, materialistic America a true seed of the vital, spiritual religion that will later bear rich blossoms and ripe harvest.
I want for the moment to return to the central desire of the young minister, in the hope that it may inspire some of us, especially some of our young ministers who are facing their new spiritual tasks: “I have before me the great work of living in the eternal God and in a humanity toiling in factories and shops. Oh, if I could only make the presence of the Eternal real to myself and to them!”
It is perhaps a new idea to some that living in the eternal God is “work.” We are so accustomed to the idea that all that is required of us is a passive mind and a waiting spirit that we have never quite realized this truth: No person can live in the eternal God unless he is ready for the most intense activity and for the most strenuous life. Gladstone, in his old age, surprised his readers with his impressive phrase, “the work of worship.” The fact is, no man ever yet found his way into the permanent enjoyment of God along paths of least resistance or by any lazy methods. How many of us have been humiliated to discover, in the silence or in the service, that nothing spiritual was happening within us. Our mind, unbent and passive enough, was like a stagnant pool, or, if not stagnant, was darting its feelers out and following in lazy fashion any line of suggestion which pulled it. Instead of finding ourselves “living in the eternal God” and in the high enjoyment of him, we catch ourselves wondering what the next strike will be, or thinking about the mean and shabby way some one spoke to us an hour ago! There is no use blaming a mind because it wanders—everybody’s mind wanders—but the real achievement is to make it wander in a region which ministers to our spiritual life; and that can be done only by getting supremely interested in the things of the Spirit. That is where the “work” lies; that is where the effort comes in. Attention is always determined by the fundamental interest. What we love supremely we attend to. It gets us, it holds us. One of the colloquial phrases for being in love with a person is “paying attention to” the person. It is a true phrase and goes straight to reality. If we are to discover and enjoy the eternal Presence we must become passionately earnest in spirit and glowing with love for the Highest.
My friend brings two important things together: He proposes to undertake the work of living in the eternal God and in toiling humanity. The two things go together and cannot be safely separated. It is in the actual sharing of life through love and sympathy and sacrifice, in going out of self to feel the problems and difficulties and sufferings of others, that we find and form a life rich in higher interests and centered on matters of eternal value. A man who has traveled through the deeps of life with a fellow man comes to his hour of worship with a mind focused on the Eternal and with a spirit girded for the inward wrestling, without which blessings of the greater sort do not come. And every time such a man finds himself truly at home in the eternal God and fed from within, he can go out, with the strength of ten, to the tasks of toiling humanity. This is one of those spiritual circles which work both ways: He that dwells in God loves, and he that loves finds God, St. John tells us.
It is fine to see a strong man, trained in all his faculties, going to his work with the quiet prayer: “Oh, that I may make the presence of the Eternal real to myself and to my people.” It is a good prayer for all of us.
From the porch of my little summer cottage in Maine I can see, across the beautiful stretch of lake in the foreground, the far-distant Kennebago Mountains in their veil of purple. But we see them only when all the conditions of sky and air are absolutely right. Most of the time they are wrapped in clouds or are lost in a dim haze. Our visitors admire the lake, are charmed with the islands, the picturesque shore and the surrounding hills, but they do not suspect the existence of this added glory beyond the hills. We often tell them of the mountains “just over there,” which come out into full view when the sky clears all the way to the horizon and the wind blows fine from the northwest. They make a casual remark about the sufficiency of what is already in sight, and go their way in satisfied ignorance of the “beyond.”
Next day, perhaps—Oh wonder! The morning dawns with all the conditions favorable for our distant view. The air is altogether right for far visibility. The clouds are swept clean from the western rim, the blue is utterly transparent—and there are the mountains! We wish our skeptical visitors could be with us now. We guess that they would not easily talk of the sufficiency of the near beauty, if they could once see the overtopping glory of these mountains now fully unveiled and revealed. Something like that, I feel sure, is true of God and of other great spiritual realities which are linked with his being. Most of the time we get on with the things that are near at hand; the things we see and handle and are sure of. The world is full of utility and we do well to appreciate what is there waiting to be used. There is always something satisfying about beauty, and nature is very rich and lavish with it. Friendship and love are heavenly gifts, and when these are added to the other good things which the world gives us, it would seem, and it does seem, to many that we ought to be satisfied and not be homesick for the glory which lies beyond the horizon-line of the senses. I cannot help it; my soul will not stay satisfied with this near-at-hand supply. A discontent sweeps over me, an uncontrollable Heimweh—homesickness of soul—surges up within me and I should be compelled to call the whole scheme miserable failure, if the near, visible skyline were the real boundary of all that is.
Sometimes—Oh joy! When the inward weather is just right; when selfish impulse has been hushed; when the clouds and shadows, which sin makes, are swept away and genuine love makes the whole inner atmosphere pure and free from haze, then I know that I find a beyond which before was nowhere in sight and might easily not have been suspected. I cannot decide whether this extended range of sight is due to alterations in myself, or whether it is due to some sudden increase of spiritual visibility in the great reality itself. I only know the fact. Before, I was occupied with things; now, I commune with God and am as sure of him as I am of the mountains beyond my lake, which my skeptical visitor has not yet seen.
There can be no adequate world here for us without at least a faith in the reality beyond the line of what we see with our common eyes. We have times when we cannot live by bread alone, or by our increase of stocks; when we lose our interest in cosmic forces and need something more than the slow justice which history weighs out on its great judgment days. We want to feel a real heart beating somewhere through things; we want to discover through the maze a loving will working out a purpose; we want to know that our costly loyalties, our high endeavors, and our sacrifices which make the quivering flesh palpitate with pain, really matter to Someone and fill up what is behind of his great suffering for love’s sake. We can not get on here with substitutes; we must have the reality itself. Religion is an awful farce if it is only a play-scheme, a cinematograph-show, which makes one believe he is seeing reality when he is, in fact, being fooled with a picture. We must at all costs insist on the real things. It is God we want and not another, the real Face and not a picture.
He is surely there to be seen, like my mountain. Days may pass when we only hope and long and guess. Then the weather comes right, the veil thins away and we see! It is, however, not a rare privilege reserved for a tiny few. It is not a grudged miracle, granted only to saints who have killed out all self. It belongs to the very nature of the soul to see God. It is what makes life really life. It is as normal a function as breathing or digestion. Only one must, of all things, intend to do it!
There will always be in the world a vast number of persons who take the most comfortable form of religion which their generation affords. They are not path-breakers; they have nothing in their nature which pushes them into the fields of discovery—they are satisfied with the religion which has come down to them from the past. They accept what others have won and tested, and are thankful that they are saved the struggle and the fire which are involved in first-hand experience and in fresh discovery.
The prophet, on the contrary, in whatever age he comes, can never take this easy course. He cannot rest contented with the forms of religion which are accepted by others. He cannot enjoy the comforts of the calm and settled faith which those around him inherit and adopt. His soul forever hears the divine call to leave the old mountain and go forward, to conquer new fields, to fight new battles, to restate his faith in words that are fresh and vital, in terms of the deepest life of his time. We used to think—many people still think—that a prophet is a foreteller of future events, a kind of magical and miraculous person who speaks as an oracle and who announces, without knowing how or why, far-off, coming occurrences that are communicated to him. To think thus is to miss the deeper truth of the prophet’s mission. He is primarily a religious patriot, a statesman with a moral and spiritual policy for the nation. He is a person who sees what is involved in the eternal nature of things and therefore what the outcome of a course of life is bound to be. He possesses an unerring eye for curves of righteousness or unrighteousness, as the great artist has for lines of beauty and harmony, or as the great mathematician has for the completing lines of a curve, involved in any given arc of it. He is different from others, not in the fact that he has ecstasies and lives in the realm of miracles, but rather that he has a clearer conviction of God than most men have. He has found him as the center of all reality. He reads and interprets all history in the light of the indubitable fact of God, and he estimates life and deeds in terms of moral and spiritual laws, which are as inflexible as the laws of chemical atoms or of electrical forces. He looks for no capricious results. He sees that this is a universe of moral and spiritual order.
If he is an Amos, he will refuse to fall in line with the easy worshipers of his age, who are satisfied with the old-time religion of “burnt offerings” and “meat offerings” and “peace offerings of fat beasts.” His soul will cry out for a religion which makes a new moral and spiritual man, “makes righteousness run down as a mighty stream,” and sets the worshiper into new social relations with his fellows. If he is an Isaiah, he will refuse “to tramp the temple” with the mass of easy worshipers; he will have his own vision of “the Lord high and lifted up,” with his glory filling not only the temple but the whole earth, and he will dedicate himself to the task of preparing a holy people and a holy city for this God who has been revealed to him as a thrice-holy God. If he is a Jeremiah, he will not accept the view that the traditional religion of Jerusalem is adequate for the crisis of the times. He will insist that true religion must be inwardly experienced; that the law of God must be written in the heart, and that the life of a man must be the living fruit of his faith. He will cry out against the idea that the moral wounds and spiritual sores of the daughter of Jerusalem can be healed with easy salves and cheap panaceas.
The supreme example of this refusal to go along the easy line of contemporary religion is that of One who was more than a prophet. His people prided themselves on being the chosen people of the Lord. The scribal leaders had succeeded in drawing up a complete and perfect catalogue of religious performances. They supplied minute directions for one’s religious duty in every detail, real or imaginary, of daily life, and the world has never seen a more elaborate form of religion than this of the Pharisees. But Christ refused to follow the path of custom; he could not and he would not do the things which the scribes prescribed. He broke a new path for the soul, and called men away from legalism and the dead routine of “performances” to a life of individual faith and service, which involves suffering and self-sacrifice, but which brings the soul into personal relation with the living God.
St. Paul, a Pharisee of the Pharisees, a rabbinical scholar of the first rank, a man rising stage by stage to fame along the path marked out by the traditions of his people, came back from his eventful journey to Damascus to take up the work of a path-breaker and to set himself like a flint against the old-time religion in which he was born and reared. Luther, a devout monk, an ambassador to the papal court, a professor of scholastic theology, discovered that he could not find peace to his soul along the path of the prevailing traditional religion, and he swung, with all the fervor of his powerful nature, into a fresh track which has blessed all ages since. These are some of the supreme leaders, but every age has had its quota of minor prophets, who have heard the call to leave the old mountain and go forward and who have fearlessly entered the perilous and untried path of fresh vision. As we look back and see them in the perspective of their successful mission to the race, we thank God for their bravery and their valiant service, but we are apt to forget the tragedies of their lives.
Nobody can enter a fresh path, or bring a new vision of the meaning of life, or reinterpret old truths—in short, nobody can be a prophet—without arousing the suspicion and, sooner or later, the bitter hatred of those who are the keepers and guardians of the existing forms and traditions, and the path-breaker must expect to see his old friends misunderstand him, turn against him, and reproach him. He must endure the hard experience of being called a destroyer of the very things he is giving his life to build. Christ is, for example, hurried to the cross as a blasphemer, and each prophet, in his degree, has had to hear himself charged with being the very opposite of what he really is in heart and life. To be a prophet at all he must be a sensitive soul, and yet he must live and work in a pitiless rain of misunderstanding and attack. Still more tragic, perhaps, is the necessity which the prophet is under of doing his hard tasks without living to see the triumphant results. He is, naturally, ahead of his time—a path-breaker—and his contemporaries are always slow to discover and to realize what he is doing. Even those who love him and appreciate him only half see his true purpose, and thus he feels alone and solitary, though he may be in the thick of the throng. It is only when he is long dead and the mists have cleared away that he is called a prophet and comes to his true place. While he lived he was sure of only one Friend who completely understood him and approved of his course, and that was his invisible and heavenly Friend. But in spite of the tragedy and the pain and the hard road, the prophet, “seeing him who is invisible,” prefers to all other paths, however easy and popular, the path of his vision and call.
Just when life seems peculiarly crowded with items of complexity and importance, the telephone rings a determined, significant kind of ring. This is evidently no ordinary passing-the-time-of-day affair. I interrupt my weighty concerns and take up the receiver with expectation. I say “Hello!” but there is no answer, no human recognition. The wire hums and buzzes, instruments click far away, plugs are pulled out and pushed in. Little tiny scraps of remote, inane, unintelligible conversation between unknown mortals furnish the only evidence I get that there is any human purpose going forward in this strange world inside the telephone system where I can see nothing happening.
Suddenly a voice which is evidently hunting for me breaks in: “Is this Mr. ——?” “Yes.” “Hold the wire, please.” I am led on with increasing interest and confidence. Somebody somewhere miles away in this invisible world of electrical connections is seeking for me. I forget the multitudinous problems that were besieging me when the telephone first rang, and I listen with suppressed breath and strained muscles. All I get, however, is an immense confusion. There is no coherence or order to anything that reaches me. Faint and far away in some still remoter center than at first I hear clicks and buzzes, vague unmeaning noises, and the dull thud of shifting plugs that connect the lines. Once more a kindly voice breaks in on the confusion, a voice seeking after me from some distant city: “Is this Mr. ——?” “Yes.” “Wait a minute.”
I do wait a minute as patiently as I can. I dimly feel that we are plunging out into yet remoter space, and that I am being connected up with the person who all the time has been seeking me. A low hum of the far-away wire is all I get to repay me for the long wait. I grow impatient. I shout “Hello!” “Is anybody there?” “Do you want me?” Not a word comes back, only endless, empty murmurs of people who have found one another and are talking so far off that the sense is lost in the mere broth of sounds. This dull world inside the telephone seems to be a mad world of noise and confusion but no substance, no real correspondence. I am on the verge of giving the whole business up and of returning to my interrupted tasks, which at least were rational.
Suddenly a voice breaks in, this time a voice I know and recognize. The person who had been seeking me all the time, across these spaces and over this network of interlaced wires, calls me by name, speaks words of insight and intelligence, and gives me a message which moves me deeply and raises the whole tone of my spirit. When finally I “hang up” and return to the things in hand, I have renewed my strength and can work with clearer head and faster pace. The pause has been like a pause in a piece of music. It has been full of significance, and it has helped toward a higher level.
Something like this telephone experience happens in another and very different sphere—a sphere where there are no wires. In the hush and silence, when the conditions are right for it, it often seems as though some one were trying to communicate with us, seeking for actual correspondence with us. We turn from the din and turmoil of busy efforts and listen for the voice. We listen intently and we hear—our own heart beating. We feel the strain of our muscles across the chest. We push back a little deeper and try again. We feel the tension of the skin over the forehead and we note that we are pulling the eyeballs up and inward for more concentrated meditation. All the muscles of the scalp are drawn and we notice them perhaps for the first time. Strange little bits of thought flit across the threshold of the mind. We catch glimpses of dim ideas knocking at the windows for admission to the inner domain where we live. Then, all of a sudden, we succeed in pushing further back. We forget our strained muscles and are unconscious of the corporeal bulk of ourselves. We get in past the flitting thoughts and the procession of ideas contending for entrance. The track seems open for the Someone who is seeking us no less certainly than we are seeking him. If we do not hear our name called, and do not hear distinctly a message in well-known words, we do at least feel that we have found a real Presence and have received fresh vital energy from the creative center of life itself, so that we come back to action, after our pause, restored, refreshed, and “charged” with new force to live by.
Some time ago a long distance call came to my telephone and I went through all the stages of waiting and of confusion and finally heard the clear voice calling me, but I could not get any answer back. I heard perfectly across the five hundred intervening miles, but my correspondent never got a single clear word from me. We found that something was wrong with our transmitter. The connection was good, the line was pervious, the seeking voice was at the other end, but I did not succeed in transmitting what ought to have been said. Here is where most of us fail in this other sphere—this inner wireless sphere—we are poor transmitters. We make the connection, we receive the gift of grace, we are flooded with the incomes of life and power and we freely take, but we do not give. We absorb and accumulate what we can, but we transmit little of all that comes to us. Our radius of out-giving influence is far too small. We need, on the one hand, to listen deeper, to get further in beyond the tensions and the noises, but on the other hand we need to be more radio-active, better transmitters of the grace of God.
A generation ago almost everybody read, at least once, Carlyle’s great book on heroes. He gave us the hero as prophet, as priest, as poet, as king, and he made us realize that these heroes have been the real makers of human society. I should like to add a chapter on another kind of hero, who has, perhaps, not done much to build cities and states and church systems, but who has, almost more than anybody else, shown us the spiritual value of endurance—I mean the hero as invalid.
It is the hardest kind of heroism there is to achieve. Most of us know some man—too often it is oneself—who is a very fair Christian when he is in normal health and absorbed in interesting work, who carries a smooth forehead and easily drops into a good-natured smile, but who becomes “blue” and irritable and a storm center in the family weather as soon as the bodily apparatus is thrown out of gear. Most of us have had a taste of humiliation as we have witnessed our own defeat in the presence of some thorn in the flesh, which stubbornly pricked us, even though we prayed to have it removed and urged the doctor to hurry up and remove it.
What a hero, then, must he be, who, with a weak and broken body, a prey to pain and doomed to die daily, learns how to live in calm faith that God is good and makes his life a center of cheer and sunshine! The heroism of the battlefield and the man-of-war looks cheap and thin compared with this. We could all rally to meet some glorious moment when a trusted leader shouted to us, “Your country expects you to do your duty!” But to drag on through days and nights, through weeks and months, through recurring birthdays, with vital energy low, with sluggish appetite, with none of that ground-swell of superfluous vigor which makes healthy life so good, and still to prove that life is good and to radiate joy and triumph—that is the very flower and perfume of heroism. If we are making up a bead-roll of heroes, let us put at the top the names of those quiet friends of ours who have played the man or revealed the woman through hard periods of invalidism and have exhibited to us the fine glory of a courageous spirit.
One of the hardest and most difficult features to bear is the inability to work at one’s former pace and with the old-time constructive power. The prayer of the Psalmist that his work, the contribution of his life, might be preserved is very touching: “Establish thou the work of our hands upon us, yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.” What can be more tragic than the cry of Othello: “My occupation is gone!” So long as the hand keeps its cunning and the mind remains clear and creative, one can stand physical handicap and pain, but when the working power of mind or body is threatened, then the test of faith and heroism indeed arrives.
A man whose life meant much to me and whose intimacy was very precious to me made me see many years ago how wonderfully this test could be met. He was a great teacher, the head of a distinguished boys’ school. He was experiencing the full measure of success, and his influence over his boys was extraordinary. He realized, as his work went on, that his hearing was becoming dull and was steadily failing. He went to New York and consulted a famous specialist. After making a careful examination the specialist said, with perfect frankness: “Your case is hopeless. Nothing can be done to check the disaster. You are hard of hearing already, but in a very short time you will have no hearing at all.” Without a quaver the teacher said: “Don’t you think, doctor, that I shall hear Gabriel’s trumpet when it blows!” He went back to his school, learned to read lips, reorganized his life, accepted without a murmur his loss of a major sense, and finished his splendid career of work in an undefeated spirit and with a grace and joy which were envied by many persons in possession of all their powers.
All my readers will think of some “star player” in this hard game of patience and endurance, and will have watched with awe and reverence the glorious fight of some of those unrecorded heroes who won but got no valor medal. The only person who ranks higher in the scale of heroism than the hero as invalid is possibly the person who patiently, lovingly nurses and cares for some invalid through years of decline and suffering. Generally, though not always, it is a woman. Not seldom she is called upon to consecrate her life to the task, and often she gives what is much more precious than life itself. We build no monuments to daughters who unmurmuringly forego the joy of married life, who refuse the suit of love in order to be free to ease the closing years of father or mother, grown helpless; but where is there higher consecration or finer heroism? Men sometimes complain that the days of chivalry and heroism are past. On the contrary, they are more truly dawning. As Christianity ripens love grows richer and deeper, and where love appears heroism is always close at hand. Our best heroes are mothers and wives and daughters, fathers and husbands and sons.
During one of the intense persecutions by which an early Roman emperor harried the Christians of the first century, some unknown writer (Harnack thinks It was a woman) wrote an extraordinary little book to hearten those who were undergoing the trial of their faith. I mean, of course, the Epistle to the Hebrews. It is marked by rare genius and by undoubted inspiration. It is full of vital messages and it contains passages of great power. Just before the most loved section of the little book—the account of the faith-heroes—the author, in a passage open to a variety of translations, refers to the fact that those to whom he is writing have suffered, and have suffered joyfully, the spoiling of their possessions, “knowing,” he says, “that you have your own selves for a better possession”—you yourselves are a better possession than any of those goods which you have lost for your faith.
I wonder if the readers fully realized the truth, or if we should to-day realize it had we suffered a similar stripping. We are very slow to take account of that type of stock. We are very keen about our own assets, but we often fail to prize this supreme ownership, the possession of ourselves. There is a story, both sad and amusing, of an insane man who was seen wildly rushing about the house, from room to room, looking in cupboards and clothes-presses, crawling under beds, obviously searching for something. When questioned as to what he was so frantically looking for, he replied, “I am trying to find my self!” It is not as mad as it seems. I am not sure but that we who are not trying to find ourselves are after all more crazy still.
Old Burton, who wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy, well said: