PLN, Kaan OF PRIITGES fee: i: ; Beal 17 082 a BR 125 Mains, 1930. Life's ae a 7 a at ex - ¥ M2 + (- et a i Sees ee Bree ae apln AD bares to, ‘eal Oy ‘ : a 48 ¥ Chis aM $ Oe fal rh ia ri % vt , 50 * S 4 = OTHER BOOKS BY DOCTOR MAINS RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE—Its Evidential Value FRANCIS ASBURY CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE JAMES MONROE BUCKLEY UNITED STATES CITIZENSHIP PREMILLENNIALISM RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE SOME MORAL REASONS FOR BELIEF IN THE GODHOOD OF JESUS MODERN THOUGHT AND TRADITIONAL FAITH eae Lite’s Westward « Windows “— Md By 4 George Preston Mains The Abingdon Press New York Cincinnati oe ne Copyright, 1925, by GEORGE PRESTON MAINS All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian Printed in the United States of America TO FRIENDS I LOVE EV’RYWHERE: MANY ARE HERE; MORE ARE THERE. \ vignn a ie is as ") a mi) me ¢ ae . if ay ae bare CONTENTS L PAGE RORBWORD Db. cote s oil AS Cease ie Adin as Goes e 9 Lirr’s WESTWARD WINDOWS............6--: 15 SSA MITR TA 1h Ve A Cia ee Seatac ans Come ele ed 61 Ways oF Least RESISTANCE................ 88 Tur SOVEREIGN HEREDITY.................. 123 A Srupy IN INSPIRATION ...........00ee000- 138 ee at ie tH ey .'y, mg AGA LL ee Rigi a mca mui 4 s I i f Ge , 4 WE a AL Ne hae ¥ 4 u Ae. 4 3) ‘ FOREWORD I HAVE grouped the papers of this volume under a common titl—Lire’s Westwarp Winpows. This title, that of the first essay, would seem fitting for the reason that these essays—with a single exception, and this one, in the meantime, having been revised and rewritten—have been composed since the eightieth anniversary of my birth. They are thus products of my latest thinking. The essay on Shamgar has in a way an ante- cedent history. In my early ministry, I preached a sermon on Shamgar which on sev- eral camp-meeting occasions especially was received with marked enthusiasm. The plan of this sermon was very elemental. I have never regarded it as having literary merit. Due, as I must think, to its illustrations coupled with a youthful fervor of delivery, it seemed to command a responsive popular hearing. In some way, the traditions of this sermon have followed me, and I have been recently requested by friends| to reproduce it in an essay. The lessons of the original sermon, now found in yellow notes, are chiefly pre- served in the essay. While I must think these 9 10 FOREWORD lessons in themselves wholesome, I cannot hope that, clothed in my more mature thought, they can strike the popular ear as when deliv- ered in my boyhood days. The two essays “Shamgar” and “Ways of Least Resistance,” lie on the surface of the world’s work-a-day life. They aim, in a serious spirit, to give some hints of the costs which must be paid by all who in life’s moral scheme would win for themselves character and worthy success. In the belief that there await true honor and high destiny for every clean-blooded and aspiring young life, for all who are willing to pay an honest cost for success, these papers are written in the hope that here and there some young readers may gain from them stimulus and reenforcement for a victorious facing of life’s duties and conflicts. | The paper on “Heredity,” a subject espe- cially of recent wide scientific interest, and whose demands upon life are one with the unyielding claims of the moral law itself, is prompted from not a little reading into this field of investigation. In this* essay I do not write as a scientist but simply as a lay- man much interested in the scientific treat- ment of the subject. In the interests of the democracy of learning, and to further healthy FOREWORD 11 reactions of scientific truth upon popular thought, conduct, and character, I deem it no impropriety that now and then at least a lay mind should voice its own reactions to such moral lessons of nature as the apostles of science are continuously and in ever- enlarging measure contributing to the sum of popular knowledge. As the day has long since gone by when by ecclesiastical decree laymen are excluded from reading and dis- cussing for themselves the sacred Scriptures, so no more are the vital lessons of nature the cloistered possession of the laboratory. Science can have supreme value only as it ministers to the needs of the larger human life. It can, therefore, be no impertinence if occasionally a lay mind shall undertake to radio to its own larger circle something of the vital lessons which the ordained masters of science are teaching. The remaining papers—“Life’s Westward Windows” and “A Study In Inspiration’”’—are an attempt to deal, in a very fragmentary way, of course, with the impact upon my own thought of great intellectual movements which in my own day have commanded wide interest and acceptance in the world of scholarship. These two essays attempt no dogmatic finality. : They do not even ask from their readers agree- 12 FOREWORD ment with their stated impressions and con- victions. They are simply chapters in a mental biography. In an entirely irenical, and certainly reverent mood, I have under- taken frankly to mirror my reactions to certain questions which have come to the fore in circles of the most competent and _ serious modern thinking. I claim no novelty and no originality for the views as set forth. I have mapped no new trails through the great spaces of thought. It has been my privilege to follow admiringly, sometimes wonderingly, in pathways already made luminous by epoch- making minds. I have occasionally had the privilege of lodging in the same camp, and of listening in, where the mighty have been in council. I have also lived long enough to have discovered a sympathetic and widening agree- ment on the part of many revered and scholarly Christian teachers with such views as these essays suggest. I do not for a moment assume that these essays utter any all-round finality of thought concerning the questions discussed. We live in a growing universe, a universe ever lifting itself away from our view into measureless immensities. Recent science has immeasurably widened our knowledge of nature, both in its microscopic and telescopic dimensions. But if FOREWORD 13 this is true in the physical, in the lesser cre- ation, who shall give any forecast of the com- ing expansions of thought and knowledge in the roomier and enduring spiritual universe? The questions with which the essays now considered chiefly deal belong to a transcendent and ever-expanding world of thought. Of one thing I am confidently certain, namely, that the philosophical generalizations, and the scholarly reconstructions of history and of literature, which have come to so pro- nounced place in modern investigations, and to which these essays make so constant ref- erence, so far from unsettling or disturbing my Christian faith have brought great quick- ening and widening to my religious outlook. They neither dim nor confuse my religious creed. In lesser things there has been expansion of concept and perception, in some cases necessitating abandonment of not-vital views; but in the light of largest and most sane thought, as I apprehend it, the vital, the funda- mental questions of the Christian faith are emerging to immeasurable enlargement. The conceptions of God and Christ in creation and redemption are vastly enhanced upon illuminated thought. Man, the divineness of his destiny; Immortality, opening upon human vision vistas of infinite truth and blessedness 14 FOREWORD —these are all framed for faith in the settings of measureless wonderment. Viewing it all, as I ean only most limitedly do, I can only exclaim with St. Paul: “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!” And so, looking out upon the narrowing margins that separate me from a nearing and mysterious hereafter, with a confidence un- faltering, I trust Jesus Christ to guide me safely across any dark spaces to the gateways of the Larger Life. . My earthly sun is far down in the West, My mortal years are nearing their goal; But a vision true of the Land that is best Inspires a fearless calm in my soul. I LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS BeuievE me: I know. There is no hour more choice than when, sitting against the background of all the day, one looks into a golden sunset. All other hours may have their charm and value, but the skies never wear a more brilliant glory than at the closing hour of day. Lingering as I do in these days by Life’s Westward Windows, I do not easily escape the reminiscent mood. Memories of the long years throng back upon my thought. By a secret telegraphy it is suggested to me that a long and active life may have at least treas- ured some values worth the giving to those who may come after. So, not, I hope, with- out some balanced sense of fitness for my younger fellow travelers, I am prompted to record, for whatever they may be worth, from the unwritten archives of memory, some phases of my own mental history. The paper follow- ing is intended in no sense to be a biography of deeds, but, rather, to voice a series of reflec- tions upon the creative causes and processes 15 16 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS which have entered into my own mental evolution. I And first I cannot too gratefully emphasize the moral values of my human birthright. I was born and reared in a quiet but godly home. My earliest memories are associated with my mother’s prayers, with her faithful instructions in Bible story and lessons; with a family altar where the reading of the Serip- tures and prayer were a daily nurture to my growing life. My general neighborhood sur- roundings were not always of- inspiring and helpful type. Many of my schoolmates came from irreligious homes: homes not creative of spiritual ideals. There was circuit preaching in the country schoolhouse, and there I at- tended a primitive rural Sunday school. Look- ing back through the years, I now see that it was the religion of my boyhood home that idealized my youth, that saved me from drifting into a commonplace and unaspiring life. In my boyhood home I experienced com- fort, but not physical luxuries. My early life was signally destitute of a thousand and one diversions which now make alluring appeal to youth. My parental home was a school of character. It was rich in domestic affection, alert in solicitude for my moral welfare, strong LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 17 in the upstaying power of religious faith. I count this as the most decisively formative and controlling period of my moral history. I early decided for myself the Christian life. There was awakened, I do not know how, a longing desire for an education. This desire was confronted by many obstacles, by serious discouragements, some of them arising from adverse advice from my good circuit-riding pastors. This controlling desire, however, never deserted me. It carried me steadily on unto my final graduation from Wesleyan University. It is needless to say that my history, so far as it has moral worth, puts a supreme emphasis upon both the duty and value of religious training in the home. Not many parents can bestow upon children the patrimony of material wealth. But all parents can, if they will, bestow upon their children an infinitely more precious heritage—a sweet and consistent religious example and nurture. Every child born in a Christian land is im- peratively and supremely entitled to this heritage. Failure at this point is the most tragic failure in parental responsibility. It is the most precious heritage. possible to parental bequeathment. 18 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS iT On the fiftieth anniversary of Victoria’s reign, Tennyson, dedicating a poem to a “Queen, as true to womanhood as Queenhood, Glorying in the glories of her people, Sorrowing with the sorrows of the lowest,” characterized the period of her half-century rule as “Fifty years of ever-broadening Commerce! Fifty years of ever-brightening Science! Fifty years of ever-widening Empire!” This was a worthy tribute to a great queen and to a great age in British history. It has fallen to me to live through most years of, and many succeeding, the Victorian reign. In many respects these years cover the most remarkable period in the world’s history. | As no other, this period has been fruitful of great inventions. The electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the palace steamship, the auto- mobile, ocean cables, wireless telegraphy, the telephone, the phonograph, astronomical photog- raphy, spectrum analysis, electric lighting, gas ranges, the sewing machine, the typewriter, innumerable inventions promotive of agri- cultural efficiency, unnumbered appliances for the technical and malleable arts, and just now LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 19 what would seem a crowning miracle of invention, the triumph of aerial navigation, as also that other marvelous achievement, the application of radio-activity to the instantane- ous transmission of speech and thought, en- abling millions of people sitting at their own firesides simultaneously to hear voices from the ends of the earth—all these, and, indeed, about every invention serving life’s practical needs, are the products of the period now considered. In the scientific control of nature no human age can be compared with this period. The demonstrated knowledge of nature is at least a hundredfold beyond that of any preceding equal length of time. The heavens to infinite and unimaginable distances are reporting their very substances to our telescopes and spectra. Nature on a descending scale down to infinite minuteness, a minuteness forever unseen by the unaided eye, and forever unimaginable to unscientific mind, is revealing its marvelous life and forms to microscopic vision. The sciences themselves, many of them born within this period, are multiplying in classification, from general division to subdivisions, each new department summoning to its work the investi- gating specialist. Im the ever-widening realm of science each day reports some new dis- covery, and it may be a discovery radically 20 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS revolutionary of preceding theories, but all contributory to real knowledge. Beyond all present attainments our imag- ination is baffled when we reflect that science is as yet only in the prophetic morning of its achievements. It will push its inquisitorial advance until universal nature shall yield its last secrets, and pay its infinite tribute to human welfare. Science has already beyond measure enriched human thought, banished from whole realms the errors of ignorance, exorcised hoary superstitions, and has literally annihilated the specters, ghosts, and hob-. goblins of the former traditional mind. It has conquered dreaded diseases, mitigated the hor- rors of physical suffering, made surgery a skilled and beneficent art, given to medicine an ever-enlarging knowledge of diseases and their remedies, and transformed the very pest- holes of nature into regions of healthy and happy habitation. And this science shall pursue its widening and sifting search until finally all the dominions of nature shall join in its coronation triumphs. It is a chief agency of Providence for subduing and colonizing the earth, for making it a fit physical habitation for the sons of God. It is tragically and unspeakably true that evil men for evil pur- poses have subsidized the genius of science for LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 21 the creation of inventions most destructive of civilization. But science itself will finally cure this. The time will come when war and its kindred traffies of evil shall be driven from the earth, when science shall assert its luminous sway over a peaceful world. II In the financial, mercantile, and industrial worlds the period of my life has been one of enormous transitions. In finance, through a monopoly of nature’s resources, national sub- . sidies to transportation enterprises, the cre- ation of vast corporate combinations, the aggregate material wealth of the age has grown to fabulous proportions. With this growth the world of merchandise on land and sea has kept even pace. Industrial proprietor- ship has passed from the democracy of small owners to the oligarchic corporation. The vast steel products, typical of highest corporate sway, are now ground out in the mills of the Titans. To these industries immense armies of labor, including men, women, and children, march daily to their monotonous tasks. These are the world’s wage-earners. This situation, intrenched on the one side in tremendous capitalistic strength, and, on the other side insistently protested against by 22 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS organized labor, has created one of the most disturbing warfares of human history—the so- called warfare between capital and_ labor. To the disinterested observer it would seem that these two great forces are natural part- ners, that in a spirit of all mutual good will they ought to be federated together in a common amity and zeal of production. This irrational warfare has mangled the peace of civilization, has wrought untold ruin to indus- try, and a far worse moral ruin to society by its unethical standards of character and con- duct, by its breedings of dishonesties and hatreds, by its tragic destruction of human comfort. There are many prophetic signs of a better day to come—but at present the war still goes on. IV To what distance has civilization traveled from the jungle! To say nothing of lesser international broils, there have been waged in my lifetime no less than twelve destructive wars within the limits of what we call civil- ization. If nature can be thought red in “tooth and claw,’ what shall we think of human nature itself? Within these years civilization (!) has expended for the creation of destructive armaments sums sufficient for LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 23 the planting and endowing of a great univer- sity in every state on the globe, for the giving to every municipality schools for the common enlightenment, for the adequate establishment in all lands of eleemosynary institutions, and for the strong founding of a Christian mission on every square mile of the globe—all this with liberal margins to spare! The last of the great wars, most destructive of all, was conducted in a spirit of malevolent ingenuity that would seem to outtax even the genius of Milton’s Satan. Our cherished optimism must not be blind to the fact that even civ- ilization itself seems menaced with annihila- tion. There seems indeed little room for optimism save as we can believe that above the destructive clash and the bewildering clouds of the present there stands the throne of a righteous and omnipotent Ruler of the world. O for the day when Righteousness and Peace shall kiss each other, and when the bells of human harmony shall be heard ring- ing around the whole earth! yi The picture is not all dark. This same period has witnessed the upgrowth of unprece- dented philanthropies, the founding and endow- ment of numerous institutions for popular 24 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS enlightenment, an omnipresent press, the fruit- ful producer of great books, magazines, and the instant reporter of the world’s daily his- tory for all the homes of civilization. Christian churches and institutions have greatly multi- plied, and, in this period far beyond any other equal space of time, the agencies for a world- propagation of Christianity itself have been manifoldly created. Beneficent reforms, and on the widest scale, have been enacted. Insti- tutions of slavery have been driven from civilization. The Eighteenth Amendment has been added to the American Constitution. Notwithstanding all that is dark and atrocious in the world, there is indeed a growing “red of the dawn,” and “Prophet eyes may catch a glory Slowly gaining on the shade.” VI The creative thought of the period considered has been as fruitful and various as springtime growth. One of the most epoch-making move- ments in all the history of thought was the coming in of the Evolutionary Philosophy. On this topic I must be permitted to linger for a little. While claiming for myself no authority in science, my lay reading into this subject has wrought deep impressions upon LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS) 25 my thought, impressions which, if not quite convictions, are closely akin thereto. The evolutionary concept is not new to thought. It is as ancient as Grecian philosophy. But in all justice, to Charles Darwin must be accorded the rank of chief modern apostle and ex- pounder of the evolutionary principle. Darwin was a very great man, doubtless the world’s most epoch-making thinker of the nineteenth century. Whatever oppositions have been aimed against his philosophy by small minds —and these have been many—England had the sane sense to bury him among her im- mortals in Westminster Abbey. Of course it need not be said that the term “Darwinism” is far from an exact synonym of the present-day “Evolutionary Philosophy.” Since Darwin’s revolutionizing book, The Origin of Species, was published three quarters of a century have been given to the study of evolution by the expert scientists of the world. The scope of the subject has been immeas- urably widened, and it has received myriad applications beyond anything of which Darwin originally dreamed. The principle itself may safely be said to be held, with negligible excep- tions, in the universal convictions of the scientific world. It must also be conceded, I think, that not only among Christian scholars, 296 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS but among leading scientists themselves, there is the widely growing conviction that a con- trolling theistic purpose lies behind evolution. Evolution is the revelation and expression of God’s creative processes in the universe. The history of thought carries many mourn- ful chapters picturing the conflicts of ignorance as against enlightenment. All progressive movements of truth have encountered such conflict. The history of theology—treally the most significant of the sciences, the one to which all other knowledge with the progress of the ages will pay increasing tribute—is full of the crudities of limited, often bigoted, thought founded on baseless obsessions and most inadequate knowledge. The brunt of such criticism must not be borne by theolo- gians alone. Many enthusiasts, masquerading in the name of science, have proven them- selves just as impeachably narrow-visioned and bigoted as was ever true of any class of theo- logians. It must be admitted, however, that among religionists many have decried evolution whose knowledge has in no wise fitted them for appreciating its real character and scope. The misfortune is that this sort of mind has contributed largely to popular misconceptions and ill-judgments concerning evolution itself. The type of mind which refused to look into LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 27 Galileo’s telescope would be ludicrously out of place in denouncing the solar spectrum. I frankly confess that the evolutionary philosophy, as now expounded in scientific thought, makes strong appeal to my credence, and, among others, for the following reasons: 1. First, its universal acceptance by expert scientific mind. At this point, lest my position should be misconceived, I pause to emphasize the immeasurable values of the intellectual inheritance which the present has received from the past. It is only the pedantry of provincial conceit and of near-sighted vision which prompts to a berating of the treasures of truth and knowledge which have descended to us from the experiences and acquisitions of former generations. It is also true that the governing thought of the common mind is far more traditional than a creation of the present day. The common mind so pays tribute to the thought and customs of the past as to make exceedingly difficult the acceptance of new and revisionary knowledge by the masses of man- kind. But it must be equally emphasized that no new knowledge is ever destructive of proven truth which has come to us from the past, and of such proven truth the world has great wealth. It is not less true, however, that acquired 298 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS knowledge grows from more to more. Growing discovery of truth is ever lifting thought to higher altitudes and to widening landscapes of vision. The pace of such discovery was never so rapid, the acquired knowledge of nature never so rich and bewildering, as to-day. But this rush of new knowledge forces vast revisions of traditional opinions in many fields of thought —revisions of opinion, let it be noted, and never the destruction of real truth, however anciently known. The new knowledge also widens the horizons of man’s thinking, and furnishes valid bases for new philosophies and for appropriation by the human mind of vast new provinces of truth, all necessitating ever- enlarging coordinations of thought. The fields of discovery are always first entered by the advance guard of thought, by the exploring pioneers of truth. And it is a necessity of the common mind, if it is to have any valuable knowledge of the new territories discovered, that it accept and trust the reports of these pioneer explorers. In all practical relations we accept and trust the testimony of experience in matters not originally known, much less discovered, by ourselves. Rela- tively, very few Americans have visited London. But the testimony of multitudes who have been there is so absolutely convincing that no LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 29 one can doubt the existence of London. In most of life’s exigencies and perplexities we are absolutely dependent for safe guidance upon expert knowledge, knowledge which we do not possess for ourselves. We have a habit of relying upon and trusting such knowledge. If our business interests are confronted by legal uncertainties, we counsel with an expert lawyer. If we are physically ill, we seek and trust the skilled physician. So it is mere common sense that the thousands of expert students of nature in observatory and labora- tery should be trustfully accepted as our teachers concerning nature and her methods. If there exists for us any reliable guidance to a knowledge of the natural world about us, then certainly this knowledge must be fur- nished by these expert students of nature. They report to us that a new universe but recently unknown has literally come within the ken of their vision. Modern science has constituted a supreme court of authority for the interpretation of nature’s laws. If the judges on this bench do not know nature, then it would seem futile to seek for such knowledge elsewhere. But the master-minds of this court, without a dissenting voice, have declared the validity of the evolutionary prin- ciple. For my own part, I am unwilling to > 380 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS enter an unknowing protest against the absolute invincibility of this verdict. I must believe that the body of science is as implicitly to be trusted in its own sphere as are my trusted teachers in other departments of thought and discovery. 2. Asa concept, the Evolutionary Philosophy wondrously magnifies and glorifies God’s cre- ative and providential processes in the universe. The old teleology furnished vivid and eloquent testimony for the existence of God from evident design in nature. This science was called Natural Theology. To many minds, at first view, the Evolutionary Philosophy seemed quite destructive of any teleological evidence for even the existence of God. But this has given place to a vastly larger teleological view of nature. Evolution witnesses to us that from dateless beginnings, through unmeasured crea- tive eons, there has run one unbroken purposive process, the finality of which was the emergence of intellectual, moral, and creative personality— MAN. The scene of creation can no longer be confined to narrow historic limits. We now traverse an infinite universe whose unfolding has required something like an eternity of time, and all its creative processes, so far as we can measure, were directed to and subordinated to one end—the production of moral personality. LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS _ 31 Against such a background let there appear as standing together the creative God and the worshiping human spirit, and we behold the most wondrous consummation of creative de- sign which the known universe has thus far yielded. . 3. The Evolutionary Philosophy is morally and immeasurably prophetic. On the plane of higher and enduring values it is not a destruc- tive force. While unfit species and outgrown products fall into discard and oblivion along its path, it suffers nothing of permanent worth to be lost. The Epistle to the Hebrews pic- tures God as shaking not the earth only but also heaven, causing all things not enduring, all things transiently constructed, to be re- moved, to perish, that those things which cannot be shaken may be seen to remain. Evolution, on the widest scale, is a fulfillment of this prediction. The undying facts of the moral universe—God, Righteousness, Justice, Eternity, the Human Soul, with its unmeas- ured potentialities, its exhaustless capacities for knowledge, its infinite hunger which only a God can satisfy, Immortality, Love, the un- quenchable Moral Sense, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful—to all these and their kin evolution pays full tribute, and stands sleep- lessly on guard in their service. 32 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS Concerning the deep spiritual experience and needs of human life—sin, guilt, a redeeming Saviour, pardon, conscious reconciliation with God, spiritual inspirations in the soul, divine reenforcement for life as against all assaults of evil—while concerning these moral deeps of life, evolution in itself may seem to have no very distinct or clear utterance, yet its spaciousness gives to them all ample shelter. Even for the human body, the earthly and finally perishable residence of the immortal spirit, evolution seems to be working an ever and improving tenure of health and comfort. If, now, from these fundamental bases we turn our vision to the future, we have no measuring rod, no optics, by which to estimate uplifts of destiny to which evolution shall bring our humanity. The infinities of knowl- edge have only begun to be explored by the human mind. God’s processes both in the material and spiritual universe are as yet only elementarily understood. God’s nature itself— for which the soul has such inborn affinities, to which it has such exhaustless capacity for assimilation—is known only as the first touch of dawn as compared with the full noonday which is to come. Evolution awaits God’s ages, and God’s inworking genius, for the ful- fillment and perfection of its mission. And all LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS — 33 this only faintly points to a few guide-marks along the march of God’s fulfillment of himself in the future exaltations of his human chil- dren. The Divine estimate of man’s supreme im- portance and worth appears in the fact that the crowning end of all the eonic and dateless creative processes is seen in the production of a moral personality. God’s purpose and dealing with man are not to be construed as a transac- tion occurring between the morning and eve- ning of any earthly day. God took a long section of eternity in preparation for man’s coming. He can afford to, and he will if he so elect, take still unmeasured time for the future schooling and development of his moral sons. “But if twenty million of summers are stored in the sunlight, still ; ; We are far from the noon of man; there is time for the race to grow.” 4. In this roomy view of evolution there is space not only for a most prophetic outlook upon man’s future, but as well for a most kindly consideration of what may be conceived as intellectual and moral limitations in our fellow men. Most of the acid conflicts which engender cleavage and bitterness between men 34 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS and men, between parties and parties, are the outgrowth of different points of observation as occupied by opposing parties in the conflict. While it is true that all men are more or less fragmentary thinkers, it is equally true that some men, and groups of men, on the path- way of their mental and moral evolution have advanced farther in knowledge and moral vision than have other men and other groups. There are multitudes of men who are belated in their - mental and moral march. These retarded groups, however, should neither be spurned nor intolerantly judged by those who have ad- vanced to higher and more luminous territories of thought and character. Two shaping and vital factors in evolution are heredity and environment. Of the two, while both are indispensable, environment is the more revisional. No organic life can long survive without a fitting habitat. The fish cannot live out of water. The eagle could not survive in the sea. Most organic life be- low man has little or no genius for a prompt construction of new environments. Changes in climate, lack of food supply, or escape from enemies have forced emigration of many lower orders to new conditions in which gradually they have taken on new adaptations to foreign surroundings. This process, however, is usually LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS — 35 attended by extinction of the migrant. It is a working law of nature that life, in order to self-perpetuation, must harmonize with its environment. Now, what is true of organic life is just as true of thought concepts. No theory or hy- pothesis can long survive outside of a mental environment fitted to its own quality. A distinctive hall-mark of man’s creative per- sonality, a quality that separates him by impassable gulfs from all lower orders of life, is that he has the genius for creating his own environments. He modifies surrounding nature, gives new combination to its laws, and makes himself in the material world a citizen of hitherto uncreated realms. But his most wonderful creations are those of his thought- world. From the day when he began to be a thinker, man has been busy in constructing systems of philosophy, of mythology, of theol- ogy, of poetry, of science. While giving un- stinted justice to the systems of past thought, yet most of them, owing to the limited knowl- edge and lack of vision of the ages which pro- duced them, were but imperfect embodiments of the truth. In the meantime new discoveries of truth have come in. Knowledge has widened, and discerning minds have been forced either to abrogate or to make large revisions in the 36 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS older thinking. The general fact, however, is that the new enlightenment is known and accepted only by the advanced discoverers and thinkers. It results that, in general, among rational beings there are two classes—the pro- gressives and the traditionalists in thought. Traditionalists are always in the majority. There is a wide inertia in intellectual beliefs. The many, without much consideration of or anxiety about the matter, are smugly content — to walk in paths of thought and custom trodden by their forebears. On the path of history there are two—and more—groups of thinkers: the scouts of discovery who are ever pioneering paths to new knowledge and wider thought; the stand-patters who are content to dwell in the static camps of conservation and tradition. The one is constantly reconstructing and ex- tending the frontiers of thought; the other is hedged within the environments of tradition, and often with a backward look. These two types of mind do not coalesce—they do not dwell in the same mental world. But all this is far from saying that God’s good people may not be dwellers in either camp. Scientific knowledge is not coextensive with nor inclusive of the conditions of saint- liness. In the breadth of God’s redemptive administration there is opulent room for the LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 37 humble and unlearned, for those who know little or nothing about the historic and scien- tific ranges of knowledge, to be themselves the possessors of white-souled Christian char- acters. One may be scientifically, even stub- bornly, wrong in much of his intellectual beliefs, who yet at his moral center carries a martyrlike integrity of saving faith. This concession, of course, is infinitely far in pur- pose from discounting or cheapening the high values of correct beliefs. Accurate and full knowledge, in so far as it may be attained, is of measurelessly greater value than precious pearls. In the light of basic and vital values, the controversy just now so conspicuously rife as between “Fundamentalist”? and “Modernist” Christians would appear to carry in itself much that is unseemly, intolerant, and dam- aging in spirit. It seems a pitiable diversion from and a discreditable neutralizing of ideal Christian unity and service now so pressingly needed for the universal world. It may possi- bly result that, at what would seem the cost of a big price, there may come a larger world- harmony of Christian thought. ‘The decisive fact is that these two schools are differently thought-environed. Each of these schools contains many high-minded and sweet-minded 88 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS Christians. Both may be credited as holding large measures of truth. Each may be in error at many points. But obviously, in broad and vital soundness, they cannot both be creedally right. In the measure in which either ignores the demonstrated findings of scientific investigation; adheres to superseded constructions of ancient prophecy, holds to a static universe, teaches that God’s self-revela- tion to man is complete and forever closed— by so much would this school of thought be in fatal conflict with the mightily growing philosophical and scientific convictions of the age. It is not, however, to be wondered at that this type of mind as thus indicated is numerically large. As has already been said, the average mind is traditional. It is not expert in history, and it is largely uninformed in philosophical and scientific thought. It dwells im a thought environment that has come down from an unscientific age, an environ- ment stubbornly resistant especially against the approaches of new concepts in religious thought. ‘This mass mind is greatly subject to emotional sway by eloquent, though ignor- ant, denunciations of any better intellectual or knowledge world than that into which itself was born. Its faith is shaped by an inherited intellectual environment, an environment which LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS — 39 will persist until the merciless publicity of demonstrated truth, the Thor hammers of better thinking, shall break down the environ- ment itself. In the meantime we are living in an age of vastly growing knowledge, an age in which the most expert scholarship is carrying a searchlight into all the highways and byways of history, an age in which from a thousand observatories and laboratories there come in upon us the daily heraldings of new discoveries in the immensities above us and from the microcosms at our feet. The inquiring mind of this age, as in no age preceding, is urged by a passionate love of truth, all truth so far as it may be gained in earth or sky or sea, and nothing but the truth. One outcome is certain. Whatever may be the truth or error in any present system of thought, in a world where discovery travels on the wings of elec- tricity, where nature, as never before, is yield- ing its inner secrets, where devout and expert minds can rest only in the seats of ascertained knowledge—in such a world as this false philosophies, and theories untrue to fact, how- ever hedged in by traditional environment, cannot finally stand against the focused intelli- gence of mankind. That this irresistible inquisition for dis- 40 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS covery of all ascertainable truth will just as certainly uproot the errors of religious as well as of scientific thought is only to state an obvious truism. For the religion of the future this fact is most crucial. Traditional limita- tions of religious truth will yield with stubborn slowness. For a long, long time to come there will be belated groups, whole provinces of them, on the pathways of religious knowledge and progress. ‘The world is now training a generation of young minds which will soon take direction of its affairs. In all its higher schools this young generation will be trained to face frankly all demonstrated truth. This generation will acquire a habit and appetite for truth alone as none of its predecessors. The age is closing when unfounded credulity can hold place in any department of thought. The church which in the near or far future shall win the world to Christ must, from high nave to lowest level, in pulpit, choir, and altar, in cloister, aisle, and pew, be lighted with the light of God’s own truth alone. Vil There has come up within my own age another great intellectual movement which has effected grave, and, it must be said, disturb- ing, revisions of time-honored beliefs. This is LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 41 the scientific development of the historical and literary construction of the Bible. If accurate and conclusive knowledge of any historic thought-movement must be rated as of high value, then within this classification, there is no result entitled to higher valuation than the constructive products of modern scholarship toward a commanding knowledge of the genesis and development of the biblical literature. It may be decisively said that the literature of the Bible, taken in its entirety, and for all its history, was never so perfectly known in scholarship as now. This beneficent result has come about chiefly through a reverent but fearless application by scholarship of the inductive philosophy to biblical literature. The method, instead of sitting apart and forming a prior, academic theories of what the Bible ought to be, has been to interrogate the Bible directly concerning what it has to say for itself as to its own origins, growth, and mission, To this end there have been concentrated upon biblical history and literature the searchlights of the world’s most scholarly and mature constructive criticism. There has been a per- sistent, perhaps prevalent, tendency in con- servative thought to give the Bible such high rating in sanctity as to make it a sin to approach it by processes of human criticism. To such 42 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS a sentiment, it seems to me, a sufficient response is that the Bible, as other ancient products, has come down to us as a body of literature. This literature has been mediated to us through human minds and by human processes. Its availability as a medium of information, how- ever sacred such information may be in itself, has come to us from man-made printing presses. It is a literature which has a human history. It is designed to appeal to our human intelli- gence. Within these limits nothing would seem more legitimate than for scholarship to attempt the most perfect knowledge possible of all the human features of the Bible. If it is necessary to have any rational understand- ing of the Bible at all, then the more perfect this understanding the more valuable is our possession of the Scriptures themselves. To believe less than this is puerile. There can be no rational process with a more valid moral vindication than for reverent scholarship to seek all possible knowledge of the biblical literature. The most perfect human knowledge of the vestures of truth can never work any damage to truth itself. It is the function, and only legitimate func- tion, of criticism to recover, so far as is hu- manly possible, to us the exact texts, the order of their production, the dates and LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS = 43 environments of the biblical literatures, sources and the combinations of their material, their numerous and varied revisions, the meanings and purposes of their records. Such a function in the end can only produce a clearer discern- ment of and a more intelligent and reverent adherence to whatever there is of divine revelation and sacred truth in the Bible itself. The science of biblical criticism is, like all other sciences, progressive. In its advancing path it is constantly yielding, and will continue to yield, new measures of valuable knowledge. The Sacred Scriptures, the more they are investigated, like the sidereal heavens, are found increasingly crowded with revelations of the Infinite. Christian life and creed are not synonymous terms. Spiritual life in the soul comes alone from moral harmony with God. Creed is a product of intellect. Its validity must be based upon knowledge. But knowledge is ever growing, hence creeds are ever subject to revision in the light of larger knowledge. There are many realms of knowledge upon which it is impossible for the intelligent man of to-day to think upon certain subjects just as his father thought before him. Loyalty, however, to our own mental constitutions, God-given, compels our intellectual allegiance 44 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS to the truth as best we are now able to under- stand it.! “Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.” “The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfills himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.” Vill The supreme question centers in Jesus Christ—in the meaning of his person and mission. No other character has been so much studied, so much discussed, as Jesus. This fact has been greatly emphasized within the period of my own life. When I first be- came a really interested student of the Gos- pels, the ground swell, phenomenal in itself, of scholarly interest as awakened by Strauss’ Infe of Christ had not yet subsided. Baur’s indefatigable and acute studies of Gospel sources were still of living interest. Renan’s Life of Christ, written in the spirit of a romance, attained most wide publicity. Then came in order Ecce Homo and Ecce Deus, each com- manding a wide study. Lux Mundt, a series 1 The subject of this section is rich and alluring in both fact and suggestion; but to pursue it in detail would take us too far afield for the purpose of this essay.—G, P. M. LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 45 of papers written by brilliant Oxford scholars, duly appeared. After these I name as a few from the many studies of Christ, lives or discussions by Edersheim, Geikie, Farrar, Fair- bairn, Sanday, Forsythe, Denney, and finally Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historic Jesus. I have read and studied all of these books. I carry in myself neither desire nor conceit of ability to discount the value of these works. Most of them are really great—all of them of high order. They have brought to me a rich fund of information and inspiration. But still I have more than ever the feeling that anything like an adequate life of Christ never has been, and never will be, humanly written. Mature study of the four evangelists has increasingly impressed me that these very men, some of them intimately companioned with Christ as his chosen disciples, in preparing their records, were dealing with a Character that im- - measurably transcended their understanding. I may confess that at my present age I am not so much a dogmatic theologian as in my earlier ministry. Then my theology was quite architectural. It was constructed pretty much from patterns selected from manufac- tured systems. I treat with no slighting pen this early situation. I was as serious then as I am now. But standing, as I do now, on the 46 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS summit of the years, my perspective is far wider and different, and, I must think, corre- spondingly more valuable. The boundaries of my thought, like the Copernican as compared with the Ptolemaic astronomy, have been pushed far out into the spaces. | It seems quite probable that Saint Paul intellectually was never fully emancipated from some of his earlier rabbinical views. Be this as it may, I can have no doubt that he had at least large inspirational glimpses of the cosmic meaning of Christ when he declared that God “raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality and power, and might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come, and hath put all things under his feet.”” Or, again, when he says: “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in the earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: and he is before all things, and by him all things consist.” The deistic philosophy, much in vogue in a preceding century, gave to God a classification little better than that of a mere mechanician LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS = 47 in the universe. This philosophy is now out- worn and bankrupt. There can be no doubt that the trend of best thought is setting toward a spiritual interpretation of the universe. The philosophy of divine immanence in crea- tion coupled with the concept of divine tran- scendence above all physical phenomena, is being increasingly installed in thought. So far as physical phenomena are concerned, they are but the outer robe of the spiritual creation and the indwelling life of nature. Doctor Jack’s little but widely read book, The Living Universe, is but a modern testimony to this growing belief. The fact, however, of chief significance in a world of both growing spiritual concepts and of scientific knowledge is that Christ more and more emerges not only as a Being of historic but of cosmic centrality. The cross of Golgotha, of measureless significance in itself, is but a visible scene in the moral drama of the universe and of eternity. The history and meanings of the incarnation are too deep to be humanly fathomed. Christ is too large a subject for human measurement. He belongs to the Infinite. While we may apprehend enough of his mission for the meeting of all our spiritual needs, his transcendent significance will remain forever unmeasured by finite thought. 48 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS Christ, both in history and theology, has been mostly dealt with in sections fragmentary to his wholeness. In one era he has been extolled as Deity; in another he has been limited to the mere genus homo. We must ascribe to Christ a complete humanity. If his being did not include all that belongs to normal human nature, then by so much will men be unable to find in him a satisfying Saviour, a perfect Exemplar and _ sufficient Helper in the trialsome turmoil and tempta- tions of human life. Failure here would mark the defeat of Christ’s incarnate mission. Hu- man nature, if it is ever to be uplifted and transformed into a divine realization, needs imperatively to have the way to such realiza- tion pioneered by some exceptional and fault- less Leader who himself has traversed all the distances of human life, has been smitten with its temptations, tested by its trials, confronted by its obstacles, borne the burden of its toils, has yielded to no evil, has at no point failed of duty, who has perfectly exem- plified both the needs and the value of sacri- ficial service for mankind, who has surmounted all heights of difficulty and who at the end of his human life, without a single backward step or lapse from an ideal rectitude, is able to place his own white hands in the hands of LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS $49 God, who will hail and crown him as the triumphant Captain of human salvation. It is as little as can be said that Jesus Christ alone, of all historic characters, supremely, perfectly meets these measureless needs of human nature. Much has been both said and written, for instance, in assumption of Christ’s limitations of knowledge as necessitated by his human nature. Such limitations are unhesitatingly implied and accepted in the Gospel narratives. He was born a human infant. It is distinctly declared that he grew in stature and in wis- dom. His environments were provincial, his teaching, such as came to him, traditional. There is no evidence that he was widely versed in world history or that he was familiar with the facts of modern science. In matters of ordinary and nonmoral knowledge he was a citizen of his day and of his province. He distinctly disclaimed for himself a knowledge of some future events. These limitations were such as would properly belong to his function as a perfect Exemplar of human life and character. Frankly, this is one of the ques- tions that cannot be faced without involving mystery too deep for our solution. Mystery, however, in itself is no abrogation of fact. The question itself is probably made difficult 50 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS more from our own limited discernments than from any other cause. The question of Christ’s possible limitations of knowledge is not, and cannot be, more mysterious than are many other phases of his known mentality. Christ was never once betrayed into moral error of thought. The absolute clarity of his moral vision never once failed him either when his foes sought to put his conscience in dilemma or ‘when he was in the presence of evil tempta- tion. The chief wonder is that any human life should prove itself so morally infallible, so all-commanding in moral and_ spiritual realms. The ages have passed, and in the meantime great philosophies have emerged and disappeared, great institutions have arisen and perished, great civilizations have come and gone; but in this twentieth century away from Christ he stands incomparably the moral and spiritual Leader of mankind. Enlightened thought is attracted to him as never before. He arrests and holds the most serious thought of this enlightened age as the one peerless paragon of human perfection. He walks the earth as the one perfect Man. All possible moral progress can never transcend him. The ideal future of humanity must itself be shaped and perfected after the standards of his own character and thought. LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 51 Thus far, however inadequate our appre- hension of the Subject, we have sought chiefly to indicate at least a few features of Christ’s peerless human excellence. If we were to conclude here, this picture at best would be utterly one-sided. The surpassing wonder and glory of Jesus Christ inhere in his divine relationships. Before the worlds were made he dwelt in the bosom of the eternal Father. The guarantee of Christ’s adequate power to become the Redeemer and Saviour of our world lies back of all human history. The incarnation was not a conception born as an after-thought. From eternity it was a fore- east of God’s purpose of self-revelation to a coming humanity. Whatever its remedial relations to human sin and guilt—and these re- lations cannot be overemphasized—the incarna- tion was preordained as a very chief method of God’s own self-revelation to man.. It was a supreme translation of God himself in terms of man’s moral, spiritual, and affectional apprehen- sion. It was not less the imaging forth of God’s own ideal as to man’s moral kinship with him- self. In Christ’s primal relations to God, the Father, we must find the largest and deepest meaning of Christ himself. Without attempt to give mental construction to the mode of these relations, Christ stands in transcendent rela- 52 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS tions to both God and man. He not only presents in himself the highest ideal of man, but. he has given to man the most inspiring, the most satisfying conceptions of God that have ever come into human thought. The Being that could thus put God’s picture into the human heart must himself be something more than man. No merely human genius could ever have created this picture. Much less could any man have put such a portrait of God into human thought -» to hold mankind in an ever-increasing captiv- ity with the passage of the centuries. Christ has furnished a picture of God which only a godlike Artist could have produced. In such a relation I cannot think of Christ as merely a Man. He is as certainly divine as human. If asked for a psychological explanation of the facts, I can do no better than to answer in the words of Saint Paul, when in a kind of mystic rapture, he declared: “Yea, and with- out controversy great is the mystery, the profundity of Divine truth, in our religion: he was revealed in flesh; he was vindicated by the Spirit; he was seen by the angels; he ‘was proclaimed among the heathen; he was believed on throughout the world; he was taken up into glory.” If evolution, as seems probable, shall be finally accepted as God’s creative method in LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS _ 53 the universe, Christ will still be found central to it all: he will insoul evolution itself with a divine immanence. If God works by evolu- tionary processes, the chief end—not in a chronological but in a spiritually creative sense —toward which he works must be moral, not the physically organic. Under any hypothesis, the chief product of evolution must be moral personality. However invisible to us the divid- ing lines, evolution makes place for decisive upward departures. There are gradations all the way from the mineral to the most ele- mental organic structures, and thence still upward to mental intelligence and to moral personality. Organic evolution develops under environment, and its perfect final product can be looked for only at the teleological end of the process. Different from products on lesser planes, moral personality is evolved only in response to the stimuli of ideals and inspirations which originate in a morally creative Source. In God’s fullness of time the period dawned when man became susceptible to moral training and spiritual transformation under the inspiration and urge of moral ideals. It was then when God, under the forms of types and shadows, and through prophetic voices and _ historic leadings, entered upon the moral schooling of mankind. At a riper stage of the prepara- 54 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS tion God gave the fuller and imperatively needed revelation of himself in the incarnation. He hath spoken to us in the person of his Son. Whatever may be Christ’s genetic relations to the evolutionary process, he is the embodiment of its highest purpose. Evolution in its final outcome is the working out of a divine union between God and man. Christ is the chief Actor, the one creative Force, inthe working out of this cosmic climax. The deepest moral need of humanity was for a_ visible revelation not only of God, but a revelation also of its own possible final spiritual status and destiny as contemplated in God’s purposes. The incarnation fully meets this need. Christ was made flesh and dwelt among men, that they might not only look upon the Father’s glory, but as well that they might see the glory, and feel the inspirations, of their own possibilities as the coming sons of God. Christ is the Creator of evolution, not its product. If he were the product, he could only appear at the end of the process. He appears midway in the scene, that by his example and teaching he may accelerate the moral and spiritual evolution of the race.! ‘This general thought is very forcibly developed in Dr. J. Y. Simpson’s recent great book, Man and the Attainment of Immortality. LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS _ 55 Whether this evolutionary conception will be found finally to harmonize with Christ’s in- finite divine mission I, of course, do not know. I can only feel that it is a conception that awakens great largeness of view. It immeas- urably widens the horizons of man’s vision concerning the meaning of Christ for the moral universe. It seems a view that opens vistas of infinite wonderment upon God’s aims and processes in creation. It gives to Christ a significance immeasurably beyond that of any mere historic episode in human biography. It seems a view harmonizing with Saint Paul’s ascription to One whom God raised from the dead, and whom he has set at his own right hand, far above all hierarchies, authorities, powers, and dominion, to whom are given all titles greater than can be bestowed either in this world or in the world to come, under whose feet God has put everything and made him to be the Head of the church, which is his Body, a body filled by Him who fills everything everywhere. And such are some of the impressions of Christ’s ever-unfolding and ever-incomprehen- sible character which abide with me in life’s late afternoon. I am unable to think of Christ as anything less than God’s Deific Son, as the one only Redeemer and Saviour of mankind, 56 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS as the one central Figure who shall attract to himself the song and worship of all coming ages. I am unable to think that Christ’s completeness can ever be expressed in terms of formal creed. He infinitely transcends the possibilities of such measurement. I find myself rather in sympathy with Gilder’s “Song of a Heathen.”’ “If Christ Jesus is a man,— And only a man, I say That of all mankind I cleave to Him, And to Him will I cleave alway. “If Jesus Christ is a god,— And the only God,—I swear I will follow Him through heaven and hell, The earth, the sea, and the air!” IX The question of immortality is both racial and timeless. Christ as pictured in the New Testament and the immortality of sainthood are inseparably coupled together. We cannot believe in one without believing in the other. If Christ is central to the dateless cosmic processes, if the production of a divine man- hood is the final end toward which these processes have been directed, then the belief in immortality is rational, a necessitated belief. LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS _ 57 Christ taught immortality. He believed in its reality. He lived it. He exemplified it in his history. The claims for immortality need not be argued. This is not to say that the subject is not fraught with mystery. But mysteries insoluble close around human life on every side. We are forced to acknowledge the mysteries, and yet we live. The major premise of Christianity, a premise that the thought of the ages has not been able to wear down, posits a heavenly immortality for at least all men who are spiritually united to Christ. Grant the premise, and the argument is ended. I have traversed somewhat the gloomy wastes of a negative philosophy as related to this great question. To a mind of Christian tempers, it can but be regarded as a melan- choly phenomenon that in this day so many bright intellects seem to receive no inspiration for life from a belief in immortality. And yet the thought of final extinction would seem to be a normal repulsion to all healthy minds. Professor Huxley, writing to an illustrious friend, as if speaking from a deep instinct in his own being, said: “It is a curious thing that I find my dislike to the thought of extinction increasing as I get older. It flashes across me at all sorts of times with a sort of horror that 58 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS in 1900 I shall probably know no more than I did in 1800. I had rather be in hell.” “The wish that of the living whole, No life shall fail beyond the grave, Derives it not from what we have, The likest God within the soul? “My own dim life shall teach me this, That life shall live for evermore, Else earth is darkness at the core, And dust and ashes all that 1s.” There is abroad, however, a materialistic philosophy of doom more abhorrent than prison glooms. In his essay “A Free Man’s Worship” Bertrand Russell, a brilliant artist of the materialistic school, has drawn a picture both fateful and horrible. I know the scorn and belittlement in which I might be rated by thinkers who sympathize with Bertrand Russell. But still I ask, Is not Mr. Russell’s philosophy, as applied to the entire universe and to eternity, both most provincial and inconclusive? Granted that his logic if his premise were all-inclusive is not overdrawn, yet is he not dealing with the mere perishable scaffolding of the moral universe? Mr. Russell probably does not believe that the material universe is the construction of a creative God. ff he does not, he begs wholesale a premise which cannot be granted. No amount of dis- LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS _ 59 cussion would ever bring him and, for illus- tration, Dr. L. P. Jacks together. But it would by no means follow that the stars in their courses are fighting Russell’s battles. If, as we have assumed, the final purpose of the universe is moral, then God who has been at such cost to prepare this temporary board- ing school of earth for the training of his sons, will, when their day of graduation comes, be prepared to welcome them to more spiritual and enduring habitations for their future careers. If, as Mr. Russell seems to believe, the physical universe is nothing more than a huge machine which in some unaccountable way has been wound up for a temporary run- ning, but which is now hopelessly running down, then his philosophy is entirely fitting to his premises. But it is still the privilege of the man of faith to believe in a God who will not mock in such fateful and heartless way the top voices, the high prophetic pledges, of his own universe. It is our privilege, at least, to believe that Mr. Russell’s philosophy is false, that it is founded upon a blind premise. It makes the universe irrational. It loses sight altogether of mightiest creative forces— the moral and the spiritual. Even, for the sake of illustration, if my own life-long trust is false, if my faith is vain, I shall in the end 60 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS fare no worse than Mr. Russell. If, on the other hand, my Christian hopes are well based, I shall come to a godlike and imperish- able heritage of which his philosophy can have no vision. The setting sun of day builds its crimson portals on western horizons, leaving behind all shadows of the night, only to carry new morn- ings to far-hidden lands. And so, as I sit by the Westward Windows, I am not unmindful that soon I must pass the sunset gates. I face this certainty unafraid and in the con- fident faith that in a near and endless morning, the night forever gone, I shall see “ .. Those angel faces smile, Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.” il SHAMGAR Tue book of Judges is a gallery of heroes preserved to us from a far day. Its colors, untouched by the fades of time, are as vivid as though put upon yesterday’s canvas. It is a creation of primitive artists who wrought with unrestrained imaginations, and yet true to the heroic fancies and wonder-loving in- stincts of a prescientific age. These artists made free use of myth and legend without slightest thought or fear of damage which might befall their structures from the edged tools of a later criticism. There are resistless fascination and charm in the morning creations of history. These creations are art rather than science. They find original expression in poetry which was race-inspired long before the exactions of logic or scientific demonstrations came in to vex the free imagination of prim- itive genius. I In the list of Israel’s early Judges appears the name Shamgar. This name is found 61 62 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS really only in a single passage, a passage standing at the end of a chapter, and which might be easily overlooked. Yet this single verse tells us all we know of a whole period of Israelitish history. It is really thus a type of all history. The term “history,” at best, is but a synonym for samples, a type of the fragmentary. The real, the inclusive history of mankind is one forever unwritten. Such history as we have is too often occupied with men and events chiefly noted as instruments and events destructive of the higher interests of mankind. Cain is known from history’s earliest day as the slayer of his brother. The record of the great captain of Israel, Joshua, is marked by an unbroken trail of exterminating warfare. The old Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian empires built up their great power and prosperity by predatory ravages .and on the shoulders of enslaved masses. ‘The bar- barous and dehumanizing lessons of these ancient peoples were little improved upon in the more recent records of Greece, forever immortal in intellectual renown, and of Rome, the military and legal ruler of the world. Whatever of indirect benefits may have accrued to mankind from the wars of Cesar and Napoleon, they themselves were wholesale assassins of men and of nations. I do not SHAMGAR 63 forget, of course, that history has paid its tributes to the conspicuous benefactors of the race. But if we review the Jong drama of the centuries, it becomes only too apparent that the despots and destroyers have received more historic attention than have the real bene- factors of mankind. We live in the age of an omniscient press, a press whose function it is to furnish our very homes day by day with the passing history of the world. I have too large a view of the tremendous educational possibilities, of the unmeasured influence, and of the grave responsibilities attending its functions to speak with unguarded condemnation, or in any tone of unjust disparagement, against the press. Large sections of its activity are devoted to highest and best ends. In its daily issues there are many fine instances which are clean and constructive in policy. But in all candor and justice, the query may be seriously and thoughtfully raised whether the news-purveying press is not itself most gravely responsible for the promotion of the very evils which it so diligently exploits. We are just now passing through an era when the quiet of community life is disturbed, when the moral sense of all well-disposed citizens is subjected to con- tinuous shock by the daily reports of youthful 64 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS depravity and criminality. There is something sinister, deadly, frightful in the _ situation. And yet criminality, and of the most revolting order, is conspicuously exploited in the daily press. The efforts of detective forces to trail and arrest criminals are by the sleepless activ- ities of sensational reporters themselves antic- ipated and published so that the criminal hiding from justice is himself constantly notified and forewarned of efforts looking to his arrest. It would seem only the part of a decent inter- est in the common safety and welfare of the general community for the newspapers rigidly to refrain from such practical partnership in aid of criminals. But this is not the worst feature of the ease. Crime is not only conspicuously but artistically exploited in the daily press. Our present society seems infested with “moral idiots,’ with a certain dangerous contingent of youthful criminal life. However it comes about, or whatever its sourees, in the criminal classes there is a shocking prevalence of youth- ful adventurers. . Many, perhaps most, of these are persons of a perverted moral sense. Desperate exploits in crime are their ideals of heroism. To do a dastardly piece of ban- ditry, or even to commit murder, and to “get away with it,” is their ideal of supreme smart- SHAMGAR 65 ness. As measured by any sane or enduring standards of morality, such persons are not only fools but they are a standing menace against the common safety. But there is nothing which so much feeds and encourages their false and criminal vanity as to see their deeds widely exploited in the daily press. They lurk around the hiding places of their criminality vaunting themselves that they are members of a modern knighthood of chivalry. In deference to the best moral traditions of society, if on no other grounds, the newspaper press ought to be a minister of most unequiv- ocal and stern condemnation against crime anywhere and by whomsoever committed. The common plea that it is the function of the press to furnish the news of whatever character on the ground that the people clamor for it all, is a plea morally vicious. The press that proceeds practically on this premise is a press that is creative of and morally pandering to a depraved taste among men. If the yielding to this standard and policy is a matter of money-making, then this is simply an announcement that one of the very most potent agencies in civilization for the intel- lectual and moral education of society, for the lifting of right standards of character, is itself under a mercenary mortgage to Mam- 66 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS mon. There is a wide, I am sure a growing but unorganized, discontent among right- minded people with many newspapers in relation to their methods in crime publicity. There are multitudes of readers who subscribe to the daily press who are compelled to do so for the obtaining of world news, market reports, and for other intimate interests, infor- mation of which is not easily accessible to them from other sources, who nevertheless habitually experience a sense of palled weari- ness and disgust with the slush that daily comes into their homes and offices. Such people make up the finest constituencies among newspaper readers. The truth is that while domestic slanders, divorces, occasional downfalls of men who have borne reputations for excellent character, and all sorts of sordid crime are conspicuously exploited in the news columns, the great steady ongoing society is made up of good men and women, of loyal homes, where children are trained in good ideals—homes whose life is the abiding pledge of social and moral rectitude, the up-staying support of the social and moral civilization itself. But the life of all this latter kind moves on in such normal health, with such harmony and quietude, with such integrity of moral habit, as to awaken for itself no sensational SHAMGAR 67 or morbid interest. It would certainly seem that some measure of respectful consideration is due to this constituency. In the meantime large sections of the daily press are conspicu- ously exploiting the abnormal life of society with little or no apparent emphasis upon the life of that far larger community which is giving moral health and security to the world. Recorded history, in the very nature of the case, can take only exceptional note of the individual. The masses of mankind from the beginning until now have, generation by gen- eration, gone down behind the horizons and to forgetfulness just as certainly as though they were only so many pebbles cast into midocean. History perpetuates itself in pa- thetic disregard of human ambitions. Many have their little day of display upon the stage, their dreams of achievement, only after a little to disappear and to be forgotten. Even the inscriptions on our tombstones are soon so illegible as to lose all significance for pos- terity. There is melancholy truthfulness in the fancy of the old art custodian who while guarding his pictures had seen generations pass until he came to feel that pictures were the reality, while men were but shadows. But here, in this far away day, we still read the name—Shamgar. All the people of his 68 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS period lie forgotten, unepitaphed, unknown, under the dust and unawaking sleep of the ages. The critics do not know quite what to do with Shamgar. His accredited deed taxes their credence. Some of them think he was an alien in Israel. They are not certain whether he fought the Philistines or the Ishmaelites. Fortunately, for our present purposes, we are at liberty to part company with the critics. Whether Shamgar was a real or legendary character, the lessons of the record are time- less, and such as to apply to human life in every age. II Shamgar appears as the type of a humble life which rises to great achievement. He was not primarily a warrior. He does not appear really to have been a public character. He was a farmer. He first appears to us as plow- ing in the field with oxen. The life-giving earth fed his strength, the native oxygen vitalized his blood. The day and night heav- ens, daylight and starlight, forest, lake, and landscape, bird-song and flowers—all nature with its constant play and complexity of life was his training school. The farmer lives near to nature’s heart. He has always been a prolific source of society’s most creative and SHAMGAR 69 fruitful life. His sons have been builders of cities, the founders and directors of great enterprises, leaders in the learned professions, foremost pioneers in scientific discovery. These men often carry in themselves unsuspected resources which are summoned into requisition only by emergencies. This was true of Shamgar. A critical and perilous public emer- gency arose, and with it there came a call for prompt and heroic action on the part of Shamgar. He proved himself athletic, brave, and resourceful. Like another Cincinnatus, a Roman, also a farmer, Shamgar went forth from the fields to fight and to win the battles of his tribe. He proved himself equal to the crisis of the hour, and his name is enrolled among the liberators of mankind. A most inspiring lesson of history is seen in its countless list of men who have risen from humble sources to creative and con- spicuous leadership in all the walks of human progress. In the human family genius is monopolized by no levels of caste or of special privilege. Like Melchizedek, it has no family pedigree—it being frequently without known father or mother. Robert Burns was a poetic genius of the first rank, yet he sprang from an obscure and unpedigreed stock. The Creator, who hides a wealth of gold and precious jewels 70 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS in the depths of earth and sea, has also invested largely the finer potentialities of genius and of service with the lowly and unpedigreed of mankind. Abraham, of whose antecedents we know next to nothing, was practically exiled from his native land and guided into what was to him a distant and unknown country, that there he might become the founder of a new dynasty of faith in the earth. His name, after the lapse of forty centuries, is a world household word. He is known in history as the “Friend of God,’ the “Father of the Faithful.” The sublimest heroisms and the noblest martyrs of truth in all subsequent generations would seem to have sprung from the intellectual and moral lineage of which he was the founder. Martin Luther was the son of a coal miner. But he was born with a spark of unquench- able greatness in his soul. Through condi- tions of forbiding poverty he worked his way through the university, and early made himself a leader in German scholarship. By dint of long-continued and most diligent study of the Scriptures, and through painful travail of soul, he finally emancipated himself in both thought and conscience from the construc- tions and tyranny of the traditional faith in SHAMGAR 71 which he was born. In his new-found freedom he stepped forth from his cloistered life like one heaven-ordained for the inauguration of a new age. Like a very Jove he hurled the lightnings of truth against the hoary errors of Roman tradition and despotism, shattering them beyond the possibilities of reinstatement in intelligent thought. He opened a new era of intellectual and moral freedom for man- kind. It is impossible to overstate the mag- nitude and significance of his mission. He changed the intellectual and moral currents of history. John Wesley was the son of a godly but quaint old English rector. Epworth Parish, his birthplace, was one of the most forbidding and least remunerative in the Church of England. It “had but recently been redeemed from the fens, and at its borders, near the sluggish streams, was still little better than a swamp, sodden and malarious.” Its inhab- itants generally were of a low order both in intelligence and morals, predominantly vulgar and irreligious. They harassed the godly rector in ways that were brutal, burning his crops, hocking his cattle, and finally burning down his rectory. But in that same parish, in a heroic service of thirty-eight continuous years, he lived down prejudices and hatreds, 72 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS and largely won the confidence and respect of the community. But, with a large family, this long life in the Epworth rectory was a continuous struggle with poverty. It was in such an environment that John Wesley was born. He has now been dead a century and a quarter of years. But he has a secure historic place as the founder of a spiritual empire, including actual communicants and an affiliated following, of not less than forty million souls—an empire which in present growth, in material endowments, and in ex- pansive plans for world-conquest, was never so vigorous, never so prophetic as now. The ages testify to the power of genius to rise superior to the handicaps of humble birth and of poverty. The demonstrations of this truth are nowhere more pronounced than in the fields of literature. The discouragements of the literary life have often been emphasized by successful authors themselves. Southey, writing to a candidate for the profession, said: “Woe be to the youthful poet who sets out upon his pilgrimage to the temple of fame with nothing but hope for his viaticum! There is the Slough of Despond, and the Hill of Difficulty, and the Valley of the Shadow of Death upon the way.” Coleridge advised young writers thus: “Never pursue literature SHAMGAR 73 as a trade.” Washington Irving, early one of the most successful of American authors, dwelling upon “the seductive but treacherous paths of literature,” adds: “There is no life more precarious in its profits and more falla- cious in its enjoyments than that of an author.” “Paradise Lost’’ holds a secure place as the foremost epic in English letters. To its pro- duction Milton gave many years of incessant reflection and toil. Into it he poured un- stintedly the wealth of his prodigious learning. He, at its inception, aimed to produce no ordinary work. It was to be in his own thought an “adventurous song, that with no middle flight intends to soar above the AZonian Mount, while it pursues things unattempted yet in prose or rime.” In aid for this work he invoked the Spirit of all inspiration thus: “What in me is dark illumine, what is low raise and support; that to the height of this great argument, I may assert eternal Prov- idence and justify the ways of God to man.” When the genius of this finished work first burst forth, it was hailed, in comparison with all other works, “as an eagle’ whose “cloud- less thunder’ had “bolted on” the world. This immortal epic was sold to the printer, Simmons, for five pounds down involving all copyrights and royalties forever, when an 3 74 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS edition of thirteen hundred copies had been sold; and with the further promise of two more five pounds each when two more like editions had been marketed. Dante, “the greatest genius between the Augustan and Elizabethan ages,” wrote his timeless epics while in banishment and in want. Shakespeare began life as a wool-carder. Sam- uel Johnson, in early life, was in such penury that a “garret was a luxury to him.” Oliver Goldsmith was both poor and improvident. He said to a friend: “Oh, gods! gods! here in a garret, writing for bread, and expecting to be dunned for a milk-score!’ Erasmus, the foremost classical scholar of the sixteenth century, as a youth was poor and ragged, but he had an insuppressible taste for learning. He said, “As soon as I get any money I will buy first Greek books, and then clothes.” Schiller was a poor boy, often in distress, wanting both friends and bread; but he reso- lutely followed the gleam of his genius, and ranks forever with the immortals. Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, said of himself: “T have been fed more by miracles than Elijah when the ravens were his purveyors. ...I have seen the rough side of the world as well as the smooth, and have in less than half a year tasted the difference between the closet of a SHAMGAR 15 king and the dungeon of Newgate.” Fielding was poor and financially reckless, yet enor- mously diligent. He tells us that he wrote “Tom Jones with an ache and a pain to every sentence.” Genius has often lighted the cells of dun-: geons. Saint Paul wrote some of his most heartening epistles, and John Bunyan his immortal Pilgrum, within prison walls. Madame Guyon sang her sweetest songs while a prisoner in the Bastile. The fires of genius which God has kindled in elect souls can neither be extinguished by adversity nor quenched in the prisons of injustice. Vulgar power may physically imprison genius but cannot quench its lights. The Prince of Verona decided the exile of Dante. He one day asked Dante to account for the fact that in the household of princes the court-fool was in greater favor than the philosopher. Dante’s bold, but rash reply was: “Similarity of mind is all over the world the source of friendship.” The “‘Prince of Verona” can hardly be dragged from historic oblivion. The name of Dante, both intellectually and morally, shines a star of the first magnitude in the galaxies of genius. Til 1. Shamgar stands for the-high values of 76 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS a courageous and consecrated individuality. As by a blast of thunder he, quietly pursuing his plow, was suddenly awakened to a sense of impending peril. A powerful and relentless foe was at his very gates. Immediate action of some kind must be taken. A self-calculating prudence might have prompted instant flight. Many would have taken this course. But Shamgar was a patriot. He thought of his tribal province, of its homes, of its liberties. To resist the enemy was indeed a desperate resolve. It might—it probably would—mean death to him. But the foe unresisted meant ruthless demolition of his province, cruel enslavement for its people, nameless desecra- tion of its domestic altars. Shamgar was of that heroic mold to whom death in defeat would be far preferable to life in slavery. He promptly rallied his fellow yeomen, and, for liberty or death, faced the enemy. Daunt- less courage as against obstacles most appalling has been the decisive temper of the most brilliant achievers. Missionary Ridge was fortressed with bat- teries and bristled with bayonets. At the battle of Chattanooga it was not even in General Grant’s purpose to attack these heights. But the impetuous advance of Sheridan’s division would brook no delay. Without SHAMGAR 77 orders, and facing destructive shot and shell, this army climbed the dizzy slopes, hurled itself against the foe, and soon the flag of the Union floated from the crests of Missionary Ridge. It is not on militant battlefields, nor still on mountain heights, that the real heroism of the race is mostly displayed. Moral hero- ism is a chief characteristic of human life on all dutiful planes of conduct, and in every generation. The volume of moral heroism on the common planes of human conduct is the great unwritten volume of the world. 2. Shamgar’s campaign was characterized by instant promptness of action. This was not the least secret of his success. His enemies assumed that they were stealing a silent and undiscovered march upon the land, and they expected an easy conquest. He took the aggressive, surprised his enemies, wrought a panic in their camp, and scattered them as a wolf might a flock of sheep. Napoleon said: “At Arcola I won the battle with twenty-five horsemen. I seized a moment of lassitude, gave every man a trumpet, and gained the day with this handful. Two armies are two bodies which meet and endeavor to frighten each other: a moment of panic occurs, and that moment must be turned to advan- 78 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS tage.” Again, he declared: “Every moment lost gives an opportunity for misfortune: I beat the Austrians because they never knew the value of time; while they dawdled I over- threw them.” 8. Shamgar’s achievement illustrates the value of making the most of one’s individu- ality. At first thought it might be reasoned that a West Point training would have been of special value to him. For modern warfare this inference would, on general principles, be correct. But the methods and weapons of modern warfare were, of course, utterly un- known to Shamgar and to his age. The weapons of the foe which he was to meet were of primitive and rude type. In any event, no technical training can ever be made to counterbalance native bravery and inventive resourcefulness. Shamgar had both. He sim- ply used what he had in hand, the implement with which he had a trained familiarity. The ox-goad consisted of a long spearlike handle with a steel point at one end for prodding the oxen, and at the other end a shovel-blade for cleaving the soil from his plowshare. This would seem the simplest kind of armor, really an absurd outfit for aggressive conflict with a determined foe. But behind that simple weapon there was an arm of brawn, a heart SHAMGAR 79 of flame, and a determination undaunted by mortal fear. A spirit thus equipped is a miracle-worker. There is some trait of power, some strategy of success in every man, which does not belong to his neighbor. Emerson has said: “Insist on yourself: never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which each man can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.” And again: “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages.” God often signalizes sublimest missions by magnifying the humblest instruments. ‘““What is that in thine hand?” It was but a plain old staff that Moses had long carried as a sheep-herder in the plains. But the simplest thing in one’s hand when coupled with a great commission from God may be made to symbolize the presence of a miracle-working power. When the bullying giant paraded himself daily before the camp of Israel, roaring his © terrible defiance, Saul had not one soldier 80 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS ready to meet the challenge to personal com- bat. David, the shepherd lad, a fair-haired boy, had come to the camp to bring food for his older brothers. It was this lad who stood ready to meet the Philistine’s challenge. He was not a soldier. He had never trained in military armor. He could not use the armor of the king. He must fight, if at all, by his own methods. Back in the shepherd’s fields with long practice he became expert in the use of the simple sling and stone. This weapon he could use like a wizard. The giant greeted him with disdain, and _ threat- ened to cast his body to the vultures. But David having picked a pebble from the dry brook-bed buried that pebble in the giant’s brain, and the braggart bit the dust. The only use that David had for a sword was to take Goliath’s own sword for the cutting off of dead Goliath’s head. In the very nature of things the real genius must be exceptional. Not every man can originate the unusual and brilliant move. It would seem desirable, for instance, that cul- ture should be universal. This may come at some time in the long evolution of the race. But, even so, the great majorities would do their work in quiet and inconspicuous form. The world’s work would be vastly better done SHAMGAR 81 than it is now done. Culture, even then, would bring its own rewards in the common exaltation of intelligence and character. But whatever the general intelligence, the big bulk of the world’s work will always be wrought on the plains, not on the summits. However exceptional and enviable the gifts of genius, the secret of true character will be an unwaver- ing fidelity to duty in one’s own sphere, how- ever humble that may be. The military cadet might covet for himself the genius of a Napoleon. But in all the centuries the Napoleons have been confined to a group of less than a dozen. The sculptor and painter might each aspire to become the greatest in his art. But a Phidias and a Raphael are the overtopping products of whole civilizations. The singer might dream of com- posing a song-ritual which might remain an enduring charm through the ages. But Israel produced only one preeminent psalm-singer, and Methodism with all its hosts has given birth to but one Charles Wesley. The preacher might covet for himself the fame of an Edwards, a Summerfield, or a Beecher. But such men are produced not more than one in a century. God’s approvals rest not distinctively with geniuses nor with the mighty, but always with inner motives of action whether among earth’s 82 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS great or lowly. Above all the wealth of the ages Christ has distinguished forever the poor widow who cast all her living into the treasury. Among the wide varieties of individuality there are some eccentric qualities. But in God’s world workshop there is place for every kind of workman. Ehud was a left-handed Benjamite, but he delivered Israel. A standing marvel of nature is in God’s infinite varieties. The botanist finds no two leaves of the forest exactly alike. Canary birds seem much the same. But closely exam- ine .a thousand of them, and each, as distin- guished from all others, will show a special quality of song, of disposition, and appearance. As among the myriads of human beings there are no two faces precisely alike, so there are no duplicate gifts in individuality. And this points to one of the gravest facts in all human life. The ideal world, foretold by prophets and poets, will never come till all men loyally do their work. Individuality means that each has a place to fill which no other mortal can occupy. If I fail to fill my place, however humble in itself, there will remain at least one corner in the garden uncultivated, one opportunity forever lost. The perfect struc- ture of civilization and of God’s kingdom in the earth awaits the touch somewhere of every SHAMGAR 83 workman’s hand. No man has a right to despise his gift. It is a false standard and a degenerative impulse which decides any man to do less than his duty. A tragic pathos in the parable of the talents is that the man who received but the one talent went and buried it in the field. No prophet can fore- cast the possible fruitage of any single gift conscientiously used. It is an easy and com- mon temptation to judge of life’s values by what are thought great and not small achieve- ments. Christ reverses this method. When he would picture a man’s fitness for large trusts, he says, “He that is faithful in little is faithful also in that which is much.” No man can be trusted in large things who is faithless in small things. God’s order for promoting men is based on their fidelity and efficiency in the lesser places. Said Charles Wesley, “Brother John, if the Lord would give me wings, I’d fly.” Said John, “Brother Charles, if the Lord should tell me to fly, I’d fly, and leave him to find the wings.” John was right. Be faithful where you are. Do well your present work. Leave the rest with God. IV A final lesson: The man of courageous and consecrated individuality is likely to succeed. 84 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS Shamgar delivered Israel. The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. In days of the Civil War the Con- federate ram Albemarle, moored in the Roanoke River, was a perpetual terror to the armored fleets of Admiral Porter in the sounds of North Carolina. With her low decks and sloping walls of steel, this ram would steal from her moorings and drive the fleet as a wolf a flock of sheep. The heaviest missiles glanced from her sides without effect. How to deal with this monster was a baffling ques- tion. It was then that William B. Cushing, a young lieutenant, blonde as a girl, volun- teered to undertake the destruction of this ram. His plan was simple. He would con- struct a small launch on the fore of which he would project a boom itself headed with a highly charged torpedo, which at the critical instant he could discharge against its objective. It seemed to staid naval officers a desperate, if nota crazy, undertaking. But he was promised, if successful, promotion in rank and a liberal financial award. His plan was to steal up the river at night, and from the shore opposite from the ram’s moorings to drive straight across and, running his boom under the ram’s water-line, to explode his torpedo under her bottom. Just before reaching the ram he was SHAMGAR 85 discovered, and a battery-fire disabled his launch. Bidding his men save themselves as best they might, taking advantage of his momentum he exploded his torpedo, and the ram was sunk, he himself swimming diag- onally across the river, where he lay hid for all the next day in the tall growths on the bank. The next night, with but a piece of board in his hand, in a little log dugout he paddled himself down the river to the Sound, where he was rescued, and car- ried to the fleet amid the thunders of a great cheer. Cushing was face to face with a tremendous and baffling emergency. His success seemed little less than miraculous. It was a brilliant achievement in human daring. It is due, however, to emphasize that the real heroisms of life are seldom played on the spectacular stage. Duty on any plane of activity is an arena for the truest heroism. Good mothers especially are the saviours of society. These, far more than the “Great captains with their guns and drums” are makers of the true civilization. Motherhood is the divinest function of the human world. Its sphere often seems humble and obscure, its tasks ordinary, its mission hidden from the sources of fame. But in 86 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS God’s moral world no duty is small, no task insignificant. “The humblest deed if duly wrought In unison with God’s great thought,” may be both magnified and glorified in a rich yield of immortal values. Susanna Wesley, queenly in both her intel- ligence and refinements, a woman who could have graced a throne, would seem to have merited a better station than as a humble rector’s wife in a poor, rude, and out-of-the way English country parish. It ought not to seem in itself exceptional, nor other than the normal thing, that she found time to give specific religious Instruction to each of her numerous children. She would take a half- hour one evening in each week to give little “Jackie” special religious teaching and a mother’s prayer. She did the same thing for little “Charlie.” This does not seem so great a thing, nor so wonderful, for a mother to have done. But who shall undertake to measure the possible moral outcome of this mother-work? This humble rector’s wife, in a hidden corner of the world, was, at their most susceptible and receptive periods, the chief trainer of what were to become the fore- most evangelist and ecclesiastical statesman SHAMGAR 87 and the greatest psalmist of the Protestant ages—John and Charles Wesley. This seems eternally true, whatever its plane of action, that a dutiful life is a morally creative life. Matthew Arnold never wrote a nobler or a truer sentiment than when, fifteen years after his father’s death, he dedicated “Rugby Hall’ as a eulogy to the moral great- ness and abiding influence of Thomas Arnold. Tit WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE In nature the nonintelligent factors, as unre- lated to instinct or intellect, are mostly in charge of gravitation. The rock, loosed by rain and frost from its perch on the crag, ean only fall to lower levels. Gravitation carries the waters of the river ever downward, and along courses of least resistance. The river does not move in straight lines. It never ascends the mountains. Its pathway is always on the downgrades. All vital forces seem to assert a kind of defiance against gravitation. The Giant Sequoias of California, springing originally from a tiny seed, have pushed their growths skyward until their topmost branches salute the sun. Their vitality challenges the ravages of both storm and decay. They live on through the centuries, asserting themselves as the most ancient monarchs of the vegetable creation. The eagle rears its young on the topmost crags and sports its wing on the skirts of upper tempests. When we come to study man, we are face to face with a new classification in the world 88 WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 89 of organic life. His possibilities range over widely contrasted destinies. Physically, he may become an athletic paragon or a weakling; intellectually, a constructive genius or an ignoramus; morally, he may become godlike or devilish. He is a moral personality, rational, self-conscious, self-directive, the responsible maker of his own character and final place in a moral universe. He stands now between two infinities—eternal life or its eternal loss. If he wins the one, he must walk an ever- ascending, and often difficult, pathway. He must deny degenerate ease, injurious appetite, self-indulgence, low ambition. The prizes set before him are no less than imperishable character and a moral kingdom. He must conquer all forces, surmount all obstacles that dispute his progress toward these prizes. While all such study must of necessity be fragmentary, it is the purpose of this paper to take some survey of conditions through which man must school himself for his high- est achievements and destiny. I Temptation, evil in itself, if resisted, over- come, may be made to minister to athletic character. The human breast is the world’s most crucial battlefield. The individual con- 90 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS sciousness is the arena of conflict for the most antipodal forces. It is never a neutral ground. The strategy of evil may assume most allur- ing guise. It may say of forbidden fruit: “Eat of it, it will make you wise as the gods.” But death lurks at the core. The moral realm alone is the one in which are sheltered life’s supreme values. This realm is held only at the price of supreme loyalties; it admits. of no compromises. It is assaulted on every side by evil forces: perverted appetites, the false lures of unethical ambitions, the lust of con- scienceless power, the tyranny of corrupting fashions, plausible appeals for the lowering of standards and the bribing of conscience— these all, and all their kin, are in constant conspiracy against the moral fortresses of the soul. An inclusive epitome of the quality and subtilties of evil temptations is set forth in the life of the superlative Teacher. At a time when in the solitudes there were dawning upon his consciousness the immense magnitude and solemnities of his mission, when there was tiding in upon him a sense of his own tran- scendent power over nature, when his physical forces were on the borders of exhaustion and he was therefore most susceptible to the approaches of the tempter—at such a time he was approached by the most plausible WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 91 temptations that could be framed by the arch- genius of evil. Physically famished, it was suggested that he satisfy his hunger by turning the stones into bread. The suggestion was plausible to the very point of legitimacy. But, No. He was in the world to do God’s will, to be himself subject to nature’s laws, to share the human lot, to prove himself in conduct a faultless example for mankind. He could not capitalize his divine power for selfish ends. He was facing the most prodigious task of history. It would seem all-important that he take the promptest measures to draw to him- self the popular attention, to excite the gen- eral wonder, to win to himself the widest fol- lowing of the people. Why not make some magical display of his power? The appeal to human credulity is always a central tempta- tion to the seeker for popular power. It is always the method of the impostor. But again, No. Christ’s mission was moral, as wide in its diameters as God’s purposes, as enduring in meaning and results as destiny. It was a mission so divinely ideal as absolutely to admit of no cheapening alloy. It was but a momentary suggestion. Christ instantly discerned the very core of its quality and spurned it from his thought. 92 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS Christ was here to establish a world-kingdom. A world-kingdom! The very dream of world- dominion has haunted the breasts of the most imperial geniuses. This prize has seemed the most covetable to be set before human am- bition. And its appeal was pressed upon the thought of Christ. His final purpose was spiritual. But would not some kind of tem- poral sovereignty of the world be an advan- tageous foundation on which to build the final spiritual empire? To deal righteously with this temptation required the clearest moral discernment, the most heroic loyalty to duty. It only required a single bending of the knee to the devil, a single gesture of wor- ship, and the kingdoms of the world were his! It is but the price which has been paid by many seekers of world-power. But still, No. This price accepted would have meant the utter perversion and defeat of Christ’s supreme mission for mankind. He flung it from his presence with the force of a thunderbolt. The tempter was vanquished. Christ was physically spent; but he was Moral Victor for all the human ages, and in his extremity God’s angels came and minis- tered unto him. And this is an enduring type of the moral life for all men. The magnitude of Christ’s moral conflict no other man will WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE — 93 ever be called upon fully to encounter. But it perpetually symbolizes the kind of tempta- tions common to human life, furnishes the motives for overcoming evil, and pictures the joys and strength of victory for the over- comers. Evil temptations overcome beget divine strength of soul, the intellectual and moral ascents give an ever-widening vision, high attainments give introduction to life’s loftiest fellowships, supreme and abiding joys come in ever-increasing measure to those whose feet loyally pursue the sacrificial pathways of love, of duty, and of righteousness. God has so constituted the moral universe about us that it always ministers adequate help to the morally loyal. But God’s ministering angels serve banquets only to moral victors. II Poverty, in itself, is not promotive of success. That poverty which means undernourishment of the body, ill heated and ill ventilated abodes, squalid environments, submerged and hopeless community life—all this is little less than fatal exclusion from life’s best. The measure of such poverty in the human world is appalling. Great Britain, a ruler of the world and queen of the seas, stands in the front rank of civilization. It is a land of 94 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS historic universities, fruitful producer of great literatures, arts, and sciences. In her world- famed necropolis are the monumental me- morials of many of the world’s most illus- trious names. London, the financial capital of commerce, is the most historic, well-nigh the most populous, of all modern cities. It, however, both excites our wonder and chills our admiration to reflect that in 1913, the year preceding the World War, nearly thirty per cent of the inhabitants of London were living on a plane of under-physical nourishment and in squalid conditions gen- erally. And what was true of London was approximately true of other British cities. While exact information concerning present conditions is not available, it is morally certain that the postwar situation is much worse than that reported in 1913. It adds to the gloom of the picture to reflect that the victims of the situation are largely little children, and children of older age who ought to be in the schools. In the textile industries fifty-six per cent of those employed are under fifteen years of age, while all under twenty years amount to nearly ninety per cent of the whole. This situation places little less than a fatal embargo upon life. To beget children under such con- ditions is to introduce them to a world of WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE = 95 drab skies, a world destitute of floral bloom and of bird-song, a world estranged from the inspirations of literature and art, to doom them to exclusion from the ennobling ideals and companionships of the world’s best life. Such an inheritance is in itself a dark and withering blight upon what otherwise might develop into finest realizations of character. It is impossible to estimate to what measure such conditions are the fruitful parents of crime. They rob childhood of the discipline and development of the schools. Their insuf- ficient wage brings physical inanition to the homes of multitudes of workers. They make purely physical needs the most insistent and clamorous voices of life. These conditions are at once the cause and the victim of a dark- ened moral vision, of woeful ignorance, of a loafing vagrancy, and of desperate criminality. To thoughtfully face the effect of such poverty upon the larger civilizat on is nothing less than alarming. The conditions are a menace to democracy. Massed poverty and massed ignorance are closely allied. In our own America we have a vast contingent of life on low levels of intelligence, and yet a contingent endowed with the sufirages of citizenship. This mass dwells perpetually on the borders of physical want. It suffers from 96 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS perennial discontents. It has little rationa, apprehension of nature’s inexorable laws oj, supply and demand. It has a sort of massed belief that the politicians can direct the admin- istration of these laws. These masses gamble on the chances that any change of adminis- tration may result to their material advantage. And so, in whole armies, they are the easy victims of the political pretender. Communism, socialism, rule by the proletariat—these are but synonyms of fads, the slogans, througk © which intriguing politica! leaders build up their followings, always from base appeals, some- times dangerous, from the ranks of undis- cerning ignorance. The conditions and problems of destitute poverty cannot be lightly ignored. They lie ~ like dynamite under the very structures of , civilization. They insuppressibly urge the im- perative need of wide and upward revision: 7 in the world of social and industrial life. 7 Wa have tarried longer than I could wish were ~ needful in the cellar dwelling places of extreme ~ poverty. But I am _ profoundly impressed that the attention of privileged men anc women in society cannot be too often or toc urgently summoned to thoughtful and sym- pathetic consideration to the crying needs of this underlife. The darkest facts must be. > hae WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 97 looked frankly in the face and duly measured before bright and saving lights can be thrown upon these desperate situations. There is a far other and larger world that is often mislabeled as a “world of poverty.” In the unalterable nature of things, most of the world’s inhabitants must toil for a liveli- hood. Only the relative few can be classed as rich in material goods. These are often the objects of envy, but, as measured on the plane of real life and of highest values, this envy is seen as generally misplaced. While material wealth would seem to furnish a vantage ground for intellectual and material success, the historic fact is that the sons of the poor rise to fame in greater relative num- bers than do the sons of the rich. Given energy, vision, and ambition, no material hindrances can keep down the aspiring soul. Such souls cut their pathways past all obsta- cles, up all difficult grades, until finally they win the heights. Atsop, Terence, and Epic- tetus, all of classic fame, were in early life slaves. D’Alembert, author, and academician, was picked up an illegitimate foundling on the streets of Paris. As soon as he was able to reflect on his true situation, he said: “I have no name, but with God’s help I will make a name.” Columbus was a weaver’s 98 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS son, and in his youth was a cabin boy in a Genoese coasting vessel. Cervantes, as a common foot soldier in the army of Castile was captured by an Algerian corsair, and car- ried into a pitiable slavery. He became the immortal author of Don Quixote. Keats, whose poetry is like a bird-song in English literature, was born in a stable. Oliver Cromwell, ‘in some respects the greatest of English rulers, was the son of a malt-brewer. Lord Clyde, who crushed the Sepoy rebellion, in turn a peer of England, was the son of a carpenter. His life motto, always carried with him, was: “By means of patience, common sense, and time, impossibilities become possible.” John Bunyan, whose Pilgrim’s Progress has been translated into the chief languages of the world, and which itself was composed in a jail, was a tinker. William Carey, who trans- lated the Bible for three hundred millions of the people of India, was a cobbler. Cardinal Woolsey, prime minister under Henry VIII, was the son of a butcher. Cicero, when asked for his lineage, replied: “I commence an ancestry.”’ Kepler, supreme among the world’s astronomers, “the great legislator of the heav- ens,” was the son of a poor innkeeper. Napoleon, when a poor student, was quar- tered in the home of a barber., ‘His room was WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE = 99 well-nigh bare of furniture, containing the humblest couch, a rude chair, and a plain pine table. The barber’s wife frequently invited him to share in little social events by which she sought to relieve the monotony of her boarders’ lives. These invitations he always declined. He was solely intent upon the pursuit of his studies. Years after, when leading an army to one of his greatest vic- tories, passing through the barber’s village, he made a call upon his old boarding mistress. She said, “You were the lad who refused all my parties, and never made yourself sociable with your fellow boarders.” *“Ah,”’ said he, “Madame, if I had done in those days as you would have wished, I would not now be leading a great army to a great battlefield.” When this same Napoleon started upon his Italian campaign he was but twenty-six years of age. Taunted upon his youth, his reply was, “I will be old or dead in a year.” In less than a year this youthful commander had led his army over the Alps, had laid Italy at his feet, and had transferred three hundred masterpieces of Italian art to the galleries of Paris, and was marching his triumphant army toward the gates of Vienna. Abraham Lincoln historically holds a secure 100 LIFE’*S WESTWARD WINDOWS place among the greatest of immortals. He was born in a floorless cabin in Kentucky; at twelve years of age he was a motherless and barefoot boy among the wilds of Indiana; later he was the steerer of a flatboat on the Mississippi and a rail-splitter in Illinois. He never went to college, but he studied his Bible, Shakespeare, and his lawbooks at night after days of toil in the light of a pine-knot fire. This kind of illustration might be indef- initely multiplied. It would almost appear that the soil of poverty has been the most fruitful producer of genius. But genius is an indomitable toiler. It reaches its coronation only by strenuous ascent over difficult path- ways. Beethoven, “the great magician of harmony,” was incurably deaf. Disraeli, when a young member, was hissed down in the ‘House of Commons. He said: “I have begun many times many things, and have succeeded in them at last. I shall sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear me.” Disraeli persevered until he became leader of the Commons, chancellor of the exchequer, and premier of England, and the whole world listened to him. } Christ was no Teacher of easy ways. He urged a gospel of striving. There was no deceit in his counsels. He warned all men WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 101 that the gate to eternal life is “exceedingly narrow, and that the price of entering in is that of ceaseless and athletic moral effort. He is the supreme Exemplar of his own teach- ings. His path of duty led him through pov- erty, persecution, betrayal, and ended only at the cross. The Revelator, seeing a great company of elect saints standing near the throne, asked, “And who are these?” The angel guide said to him: “These are they who have come up through great tribulation, who have washed their robes, and have made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” “They climbed the steep ascent of heaven Through peril, toil, and pain.” iil The term “character” in its original uses was a synonym for enduring qualities. It suggests the work of the engraver’s chisel on the rock. It is in itself a wrought permanence which neither time, nor storm, nor changing customs can obliterate. With the growth of thought the term has been exalted and reserved for expressing the more decisive human qual- ities—the native and acquired qualities of the human soul. In its final and shaping result character for the most part is what the indi- vidual makes of and for himself. Inhering in 102 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS the very law of development, desire and thought from their most plastic beginnings prompt to action. Action often repeated begets habit —but habit reveals the psychological strata of the soul’s growth, upward or downward. There are good habits and bad habits. But the characters resulting from these habits » respectively are, in final goal, as widely sun- dered as the zenith and nadir of moral destiny. These statements are no outworn truisms. The moral universe affirms them. The united and timeless voice of the Hebrew prophets has reuttered them to the ages. Jesus, and all the transcendent souls of the race, have put upon them imperative emphasis. History pro- nounces its final eulogies only upon men who have stood heroically, unswervingly, morally foursquare to their age. There is a moral instinct implanted in the human constitution which prompts all men in the final court to pronounce unbribable ap- proval of truth and right as against all interests and all comers. The most valuable asset of all society is in men of clear vision, of unswerv- ing moral loyalties, men whose daily lives in presence of all their fellows are a living demon- stration of the value of unsullied ideals and of noble conduct. Very anciently a wise seer discerned that “A good name is rather to be WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 103 chosen than great riches.” This saying has proven sane for all ages: it has never been revised downward by the moral judgment of mankind. Luther said, “The prosperity of a country depends, not on the abundance of its revenues, nor on the strength of its forti- fications, nor on the beauty of its public buildings; but it consists in the number of its cultivated citizens, in its men of education, enlightenment, and character; here are to be found its true interests, its chief strength, its real power.” Emerson said: “Character is moral order seen through the medium of an individual nature.... Men of character are the conscience of the society to which they belong.” But the price of character is that of eternal and vigilant diligence. The moral oppor- tunities of life may be likened to a rich garden site. Its ideal development calls for the land- scaper’s skill. Its soil must be enriched and sown with the choicest seeds. Every noxious and alien growth must be plucked up. It calls for assiduous cultivation of all that is best, most fitting and beautiful for its entire inclosure. It admits of no neglect, no sham- ming. The way of least resistance for the garedner is simply to neglect his garden. But, if so, he shall have finally only a growth of 104 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS weeds and brambles. And so the price of ideal character is that of eternal watchfulness, of unceasing self-culture. The way of “least resistance” in character is simply to surrender oneself to the gravitations of appetite, of selfish desire, and of indolent ease. But this is always a downward way, and its inevitable goal is moral bankruptcy. IV _ An old classical proverb declares, “The gods sell ali things at a fair price.” It might be stated as a corollary fact that the gods are never cheated. Nature is an exact and an exacting banker. Her vaults are richly stored with native wealth. But she keeps accurate books. If she carries large debtors, she exacts from them ample collaterals. Her grain and fruit fields before they can be made to yield food for the world’s hunger must first be denuded of forests and rocks, must be rescued from swamp and morass, deeply plowed, fertilized, sown with precious seeds, and culti- vated to the very day of plucking and reaping. The precious stones that adorn the diadems of royalty, the finer metals that serve as the basis of mercantile exchange, must be hunted from the depths of earth. The less refined metals that enter into all technical inventions, WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 105 that are so indispensable to all the mechanical appliances of civilization—these all must be laboriously, often perilously, mined from their hiding places in far-down rock and _ strata. Nature does not make compromises. with debtors. If at times and places she seems gratuitously generous with gifts needed for human sustenance, this means, as a rule, an inferior development of human character, as if nature herself would say to all the world that wherever she enables men to live with- out toil, such gifts are always at the expense of the nobler and more sterling qualities of human character. Nature’s universal method of making character is by strenuous processes. She insists that all values which enter into life must be strictly paid for. There is no evading this law. It applies clear around the circle of all worthy achieve- ment. Reduced to its last analysis, character is the one bedrock on which must rest all superstructures of worthy success. But char- acter itself is the greatest and most difficult creation of the individual. High scholarship means the toilsome and skilled discipline of the schools. The fine creations of painter and poet come only after repeated and unsatis- fying effort, only after long brooding at the fountain-sources of the most perfect beauty of 106 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS art and refinement of expression. The artisan of highest skill can become such, not by any mercenary sale of his wares, but because his enthusiasms go out to his work, because in heart and soul he is wedded to ideals of excel- lence in achievement. | There is neither mental nor geographical short-cut to character; none to the attainment of worthy values. Life’s failures come largely from lack of moral stamina. One of the most conspicuous of historical allegories lends full confirmation to this view. The geographical distance from Egypt to Canaan was not far. If Israel had been morally equipped for smash- ing opposition by the way, the journey could have been made in a few days. But not God even, except by working an irrational, and therefore impossible, miracle, could meet the emergencies of the road by the instant trans- formation of cravens into battle-winning heroes. Israel was lacking in moral discipline, in patri- otic ideals, in trained endurance for the inev- itable fatigues and conflicts of the advance, and was therefore incapable of being marched in the direct and shortest route to the Prom- ised Land. Moses, peerless statesman and organizer, could do nothing else with this people but to lead them forward by the long detour of wilderness and desert. Even so, WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 107 this generation was a herd and not a civiliza- tion. Its very bones were left to whiten on the desert sands. This historic story carries its unchanging lessons for all intellectual and moral life. Fitness must precede achievement. Masterful skill on every plane of creative life comes only from patient discipline and practice. An imperative lesson which should be insistently impressed upon the thought of young life is the necessity of patient preparation, of ade- quate schooling, for the activities and respon- sibilities of mature life. The young are caught with the outlying glamour of apparent success and are often neglectful of the kind of train- ing needed to give them steady step and poise along the difficult path of realization. The advantages of school are lightly passed, or cut short, in the feverish desire to take places in business or professional life. This attempted short-cut in preparation has handicapped the after-life of many a boy and girl, and has doomed them to places of ordinary achieve- ment. But it remains true that this early misdirection and loss can never be compen- sated for when the opportunities of youth are gone. Mistakes at the beginning are often subjects of regretful reflection in the long after- years. The great lawyer could truthfully say 108 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS to the young aspirant for the profession, “My young friend, remember, there is always room at the top.” But the trail to the top is always dificult and toilsome. The summit is never reached without the climb. The crowned | victors of history, the heroic achievers of the race, are usually men of careworn brows and of toilworn feet, men who have made them- selves lean, athletic, invincible by the over- coming of difficulties, men who are strangers to indolence and who have little or no taste for the dissipating frivolities of idle and aimless living. V The goal of great purpose stands on the far side of sacrificial toils and testful endeavor, often on the other side of spaces which can be crossed only at the price of conflict and battle. Real test of character is seen in the will and capacity for final endurance. Failure lies in stopping midway of purpose. Finished suc- cess lies only at the end. Faithfulness unto death is the condition of the Christian win- ning of a crown of life. The deathless heroes of history were fighters to the end. A story is told of an English and a French general who were comparing notes concerning the merits of their respective armies. The one lauded WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 109 the French soldier as the most dashing and brave in all the world. The Englishman agreed with him, but said, “The peculiarity of the British Johnnie is that he is brave just a half-hour longer than any other soldier.” Wellington at Waterloo said to his lieutenants, “Gentlemen, this is dreadful pounding; but all depends on which army can stand it the longer.” It was this spirit that characterized General Grant when before Petersburg and Richmond he said, ““We will fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”’ Heroism of endurance to the end has in- spired the abiding eulogies of history, has monumented the grounds of the world’s noblest achievements. Dante in Florence, like a | Hebrew prophet, urged moral reform upon the Italian people. The ecclesiastical authorities arrested and banished him. But while he ate the bread and drank the waters of exile, the stars of heaven still shone upon him. He was offered restoration to citizenship and high ecclesiastical awards if he would return to Florence, but on condition that he would acknowledge and recant his criminality against the state. He replied, “If by this way only can I return to Florence, then Florence shall never again be entered by me.” He wrote his immortal epics and died in banishment. 110 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS Just recently the world has celebrated the six hundredth anniversary of his death. In a later century Nicolo Lombardi, the foremost architect of his time, designed for Dante’s tomb the floral relief and the bust, a design © of highest artistic excellence. This tomb is to-day one of the moral shrines of the world at which “poet and statesman, warriors and nobles, journey that they may pay homage to the man who six centuries ago in his works and in his life stood for upright resolve, moral courage, and integrity of character.”’ John Wesley began his evangelical career visited with scorn and ostracism from the authorities of the very church in which he was born and reared. In his inspired mission he faced popular mobs and mocking opposi- tion; but he rode horseback on his ceaseless journeyings, until at eighty-eight years of age he died the most loved and honored man of England, having achieved the most signal evangelical triumphs since the apostolic age. Francis Asbury, ““The Prophet of the Long Road,” forded unbridged rivers, threaded path- less forests, encountered nameless privations, perils, and toils, in his mission of laymg the foundations in America of a Christian republic. Undaunted by any and all obstacles, unre- laxing under the frequent pressure of physical WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 111 weariness and weakness, a homeless wanderer, he pushed on in his marvelous journeyings until old age and a literally worn-out body were met by the release of death. To-day his memorial as the foremost Christian apostle of America, and a great builder of its civiliza- tion, stands conspicuously in bronze in the capital of the nation. Paul, the converted little Jew of Tarsus, moved incessantly on his mission to the Gen- tile world personally to meet with prodigious and indescribable privations, perils, persecu- tions, and sufferings, and finally martyrdom. He stands to-day historically a well-nigh peer- less moral hero. His inspiring and uplifting influence upon human life and thought has widened and grown with the centuries, and is at present a force immeasurable. After his triumphant testimony that he had kept the faith, and had fought life’s moral battle to a finish, he was led forth from a Roman dungeon and beheaded on the Appian Way. Supposing that when he was stoned and left for dead outside the gates of Lystra he had lost his courage; that when he was scourged and im- prisoned at Philippi he had said, “I will no more name the name of Christ’; that when he was in the Mamertine dungeon at Rome he had petitioned to Nero for his liberty at 112 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS the price of renouncing his apostolic mission —in such case the world would not now even know of his name. No! He kept his faith invincibly to the end. Beyond the dark and — damp of the dungeon, beyond the gleam of the executioner’s sword, he beheld the victor’s crown. We cannot enter this zone of thought with- out reminder of the Supreme Example. Jesus Christ came into this world to fulfill the one transcendent mission of history. No imagina- tion can picture the disaster which would have resulted from his failure. Duty—duty loyally performed—was for him supreme, a_ word written upon the stars and on the very dust at his feet. He early foresaw the tragedy of his way, and there were times when it weighed with extreme oppressiveness upon his human heart. But unswervingly, unfalteringly, he pursued his appointed path, until finally upon a cross he uttered the expiring cry, “It is finished.” It is not enough that the young begin responsible life with high ideals, large am- bitions, and noble purposes. The untried troops enlisted for the war, clad in new and clean uniforms, their weapons polished and bright, marching with buoyant step and enthu- siastic purpose—these attract our vision and WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 1138 awaken expectation. But their soldierly qual- ity, their enduring courage, their staying power, remain to be tested on the battlefield, The grilling tests of life await all young candi- dates for success. It is a glory of young life that it is inspired with visions of achievement, that its enthusiasms run high. It enters the arena with undaunted confidence. All this is needed. Without these stimulations the young would stand nerveless and defeated at the very beginning of life’s conflicts. But the young are inexperienced. They are but apprentices in life’s school. Their discern- ment and judgment of qualities remain to be developed in the stern training school of expe- rience. They are hot-blooded, temptible, and adventurous. They cannot escape the peril of mistakes. Their high ideals, ambitions, their very integrity, will be assaulted by unanticipated forces. Their spiritual loyalties need to be rock-sure. Unless they have acquired a judgment and a love for high values—the good, the true, and the beautiful —they are in jeopardy of moral failure in early career. And, alas, how many of them fail! There is much said about the wreckage of the young. Their failures are strewn all along the social coasts. The facts are mournful, depressing, tragic. But the story of failure is 114 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS by no means confined to'the young. Moral tragedies that shock and hurt whole commun- ities are perhaps more often reported in the sudden downfall of men and women of mature and later life. These later periods are pecu- liarly exposed to evil temptation. They are life’s burden-bearing periods, periods when men fight for bread to keep the wolf from the doors of the domestic households, when serious responsibilities multiply. They are, for many, periods of drastic competition, of disastrous business ventures. If a business man in middle life loses his footing, he, in most cases, faces a bankrupt and dreary future. But material failure is far from the worst. The tragedies of moral downfall in mature life are among the most shocking and depressing chapters in social history. The storms beat most heavily upon human life at its most vital periods. The truth is, as Carlyle long ago declared, that the Maker has not planned to make life easy for his human children. Life may have its playful instincts, its playful hours, its playhouses—all legitimate—but, in the long run, life is no play-day. From its first responsible morning to its end it is a stern school of character. The prizes of char- acter are not to be laid as pawns upon the gambling table. They are to be supremely WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 115 sought, studiously planned for, toiled for, and when won are to be guarded and reenforced at every pass of life to its very end. ““Heaven is not reached by a single bound; But we build the ladder by which we rise From the lowly earth to the vaulted skies, And we mount to its summit round by round. “We rise by the things that are under our feet; By what we have mastered of good and gain; By the pride deposed and the passion slain, And the vanquished ills that we hourly meet.” VI The insistent and imperative question will be urged, and rightfully: “Where shall the individual find his training school for his best achievement in personal character?” Life itself is a moral opportunity. It is God’s chief capitalization to each individual. Every man is a responsible steward for the uses he shall make of this endowment. One’s daily vocation is a school both of opportunity and of character. A man nowhere meets with more challenging or subtle tests of moral strength, no- where with more decisive opportunities for self- discipline, than in his own life workshop. Ifa man does not demonstrate a fine integrity here, then he need not be expected to show this in any other relation. This law applies to all normal callings, from the highest to the lowliest. If 116 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS one attends church on Sunday, and in appear- ance devoutly lays his offerings upon the altars of worship, and then on Monday goes — into the exchange to compromise with con- science for the swelling of unethical fortunes, his Sunday worship is a hollow mockery. He himself is no better than one who would steal “the livery of the court of Heaven to serve the devil in.” The humblest toiler is to be measured by the same test. The time was when the stand- ards of the craftsman were synonymous with the finest creative skill. The enduring monu- ments of this ideal appear in the miracles of art wrought in stone and bronze. There is a suspicion wide abroad that these standards have been sadly departed from and degraded in much of the ideal and practice of modern labor. In so far as this suspicion is true, it represents nothing less than a tragedy of civilization. The demand for “high wages, short hours, and a limited output” is utterly vicious. The laborer who deliberately shams or limits his work is playing in the role of his own soul’s enemy. He not only wrongs his employer by exacting a maximum wage for dishonest and insufficient work, but he is certainly bankrupting his own integrity. It is a thing of least importance that he cheat WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 117 his employer. He is for himself committing moral suicide. If he is dishonest as a work- man, he can be relied upon for personal honor in no other relations. The brand of his moral spuriousness will reveal itself in every rela- tion in life—in the home, in society, in citizen- ship. He goes through life with averted moral vision; he does not look Truth in the face. This is not to say one word against the legitimacy of the labor union. In a world where capitalistic greed has undertaken to treat labor as a mercantile commodity, to reduce men to the level of machinery—in such a world labor has a divine right of revolt, of organized protest. But the legislation of the labor union should be based on righteous- ness and justice. The union that undertakes to level the highest skill to the lowest grades of ability, that demands an output of product far below the capacity of the worker, that countenances an inferior quality of product, and at the same time exacts a high wage for poor service—such a union, whatever its power, is a school of moral deterioration, a debaucher of morals. The matter of character is not a question of social or business rank. In all ranks and grades of social or business life it is a ques- tion of personal integrity, of loyalty to duty, 118 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS of true alignment with the right, the true, and the good. High place and exceptional — achievement may seem admirable and even enviable in themselves. But the inevitable allotments of life assign most people to rela- tively common rank and work in the social and industrial worlds. If genius were universal, it would not be exceptional. Mr. Lincoln said, ““The Lord must be fond of the common people, he has made so many of them.” The real field for heroic character is with the masses and on the common planes of life. And here in abounding measure it is really to be found. The victorious general is signal- ized and lauded in popular praise; but there is focused on him an honor which really belongs to the rank and file of his army. With firm forward tread, with an unwavering endurance which still fights on when the dead and the dying lie thick on the field, the massed sol- diers, dying but never retreating, march breast forward until the foe is driven from their front. *Storm’d at with shot and shell, Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die.” Were it not for the quiet, heroic, staying power of the common soldier, no starred gen- WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 119 eral would ever ride from the battlefield laureled in victory. The true domestic loyalties of the home is a common glory of the common life. With all the menaces of divorce and of domestic infi- delity so notoriously aired in the vulgar press, the average home is so guarded in affection, in loyalty, in true virtue as still to remain the most invincible institution in civilization. There is something passingly admirable in the quiet and heroic spirit in which the common laborer goes forth to his daily toil, and toils and toils patiently on while strength endures, for the sake of winning shelter, bread, and raiment for his family. And equal praise be- longs to the wives and mothers of the poor. Women beyond numbers, insouled with native refinement, live within a scanty income, without luxuries, clad in humble garb, give themselves to incessant toil by daylight and lamplight for the sake of keeping clean homes, for the right training of childhood, always breathing a brave and inspiring spirit upon husband and household. Indeed, notwithstanding all the vicious and demoralizing ideals which assault organized labor, the vast majority of workers are hero- ically loyal to duty. The humble and isolated man stationed in the light-towers on dark and stormy coasts, never permits his lights 120 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS to grow dim. One may ticket himself through on a palace express train from New York to Los Angeles. This act, whether consciously so or not, is an act of faith; it is a tribute of confidence in the trustworthiness of human nature. Stationed on this long distance are thousands of humble and humbly paid men whose sole duty it is to watch the switches. Any one of them neglectful of his simple duty might precipitate a tragedy which would cost a hundred lives. But not one in a thousand in a thousand days and nights of all these unheralded men either neglects or forgets his duty, and the privileged passengers of the palace train ride the continent in safety. And how many domestic servants are there in whose life there would seem so little sun- shine, whose lot is commonly counted as one of monotony and essential drudgery, yet who are as loyal to their employers as life itself! If we have any correct picture at all for estimating God’s measurement of merit, that picture emphasizes the spirit in which one does his work rather than the size or the fame of the work itself. He that is faithful in little will be faithful also in much. In Christ’s picture of final awards, involving the destinies of eternity, he emphasizes the deeds and motives of which men in this life have taken WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 121 little notice. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto me.” Men are given to hero worship, worship of spectacular actors on the stage. God looks upon life’s inner motives. He immortalizes the worth of the widow’s mite. Among the chief things which Christ’s per- sonal history emphasizes is the moral possi- bilities of the commonplace. His parents were unknown peasants of a despised province. He was born in a stable. He spent the first thirty years of his life as a toiler in a rude carpenter shop. He never held political office, never led an army, never saw a university. But he went forth from this humble back- ground to be the Founder of spiritual empire, to place himself upon the moral throne of history. The ages have fled. Great thrones and empires have fallen. New continents have been discovered, now thronged with mighty civilizations. Marvels of nature-controlling inventions have been evolved. Sciences which have made man master of earth, and air, and sea, and which have furnished to mankind new patterns of thought, have been born. But Jesus Christ historically is transcendently the moral Teacher and Master of the ages. His spiritual empire is the mightiest force in the world. He is famed as not all other his- 122 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS toric characters. The present broken and troubled world is looking to him as not to all other deliverers. The prophecy of his ultimate triumph was never so bright, never so buoyant as to-day. Christ will continue increasingly to reign until he has put all enemies under his feet, until all peoples of all realms, of every kindred and tribe of earth shall acclaim him as President of presidents, as Ruler of rulers. O Man! Wheresoe’er thy place, See thou do well thy work, Nor slightest duty shirk; Ne’er from the Truth depart. In ev’ry task take heart: Thou doest all before God’s face. Forces that gird the soul with might Themselves are surely wrought In molds of loyal thought; In the doing of deeds That relieve human needs: So shalt thou walk in noonday light. If thou with loyal will pursue To the close of the day, To the end of the way, Living, as in God’s sight, Alone for Truth and Right: Then God will guide thy journey through. Thy course of life will soon be run. The passing seasons fly, With them thou soon must die; Then ends earth’s toil and grief, Life’s mortal day is brief: Thy deathless crown will soon be won. IV THE SOVEREIGN HEREDITY MopeErRN science carries a white searchlight into every department of nature from astron- omy to psychology. It has pushed the fron- tiers of the universe outward into infinite and unimaginable distances; traced the creative processes back through countless eons to dateless beginnings. The magnitudes and mar- vels of the material universe would seem to dwarf man into insignificance. But this is a fallacious impulse. The created universe is a measureless immensity, peopled throughout with countless myriads of microscopic wonders. But in it all, there is nothing intellectually and morally great but—MAN. “This that we see—this casual glimpse within The seething pit of space; these million stars And worlds in making, these are naught but matter; These are but the dust of our feet; And we who gaze forth fearless on the sight Find not one equal, facing from the vast Our sentient selves. Not one, sole, lonely star In all that infinite glitter and deep light Can make one conscious movement: all are slaves To law material, immutable.” 123 124 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS “In these souls of ours triumphant dwells Some segment of the large Creative Power— A thing beyond the things of sight and sense: A strength to think, a force to conquer force. One are we with the ever-living One.” There can be no study so important, no science so useful, as that which yields the most perfect knowledge of man himself. Yet it is comparatively but yesterday since biological science came to a clear discovery and demon- stration of the fateful and grave sway of hered- ity in the transmission of human life. Man’s source and continuance are conditioned upon two distinct cell-types—the germ cell, the genetic source of a new human personality, and carrying in itself with a kind of infallible validity the habits and characters of ancestral lines; the other, the body cell whose function chiefly is, to contribute to the physical life of its carrier. The germ cell is aristocratic, occupying its own exclusive departments in the system, and having no other function but to carry in itself the potency of a new life, and to be the fateful transmitter to that life of the qualities of an ancestral past. We have here a fact more wonderful in itself than any dream in the classic mythologies. Its lessons are as grave as those of Sinai. They hold in them- selves the fate of civilizations. THE SOVEREIGN HEREDITY 125 In any attempt at distinctive appraisement of these lessons, due place must always be given to the real effects of environment in situations. Indeed, room must be given for the interplay upon the whole process of that mysterious force which shelters itself under the evolu- tionary principle. Wrapped up within bio- logical processes there is an operative cause, or causes, which, by the introduction of variable factors, works either toward the perfecting or deterioration of results otherwise to be expected. The otherwise inflexible law of heredity is by this interaction subject to gradual modifications toward betterment or degeneracy of ends. Life is played upon by many forces, but in the long run the dom- inant influences will store and report them- selves in the genetic cells. This subject is now being discussed in whole volumes by expert minds. It is exceedingly fruitful of suggestion. Within the limits of their paper little more can be done than simply to call attention to a few of its grave lessons. A lesson of momentous significance is, that the germ cell lodges with the coming child basic qualities of temperament and character which may ever after largely, perhaps effect- ually, baffle all efforts of parental or cultural 126 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS nurture. The ancestral qualities which hered- ity carries to the unborn child may lend them- selves either in cooperation with, or in granitic resistance against, all after attempts toward the cultural shaping of character. And this is one of the gravest revelations of science. II Ideal heredity is a firm ally of physical righteousness. Its fundamental premise is a sound body as the home of a sane mind. Con- science in its universal and uncompromising attitude of approval or disapproval of accepted right or wrong is no more surely a factor in man’s moral constitution than does the urge for sound physical health inhere in the ideal heredity. The possibility of projecting improve- ment into the hereditary line—a_ possibility which I think must be conceded—may be both a call and an encouragement to would-be parents. As the quality of a stream flowing from a distant source may be modified by the incoming of a new estuary, so immediate parentage must make its own distinctive con- tribution to the heredity of offspring. Every new mating for the foundation of a coming family must contribute some distinctive quality to the hereditary trend. While the chief emphasis of this fact calls for wise selections in THE SOVEREIGN HEREDITY 127 marriage, yet it is also a serious call to parents to exercise most studious care as to the kind of prenatal contribution they may mutually give to their offspring. Modern humane ideals have given birth to much of both teaching and practice with the aim of preserving the lives of infants born of a frail or defective physical heredity. Vast study has been given to sanitation, nutrition, and to skilled nursing as conditions for securing life and health for such children. All this is as it should be. Standards less than this would be akin to barbarism. Still, nevertheless, nature is on the side of the strong-born. All working laws, so far as known, seem to have exceptions. Now and then a child of mutually frail parents lives to old age. But this is the marked exception. Most babies born from weakly parents, though through scientific nursing preserved to full growth, die in early life, and this in the ratio of five to one as com- pared with those born of a strong and long- lived parentage. Physical heredity as a con- dition of health and long life is many times over more decisive than all medical and san- itary arts in the absence of such conditions. Ideal heredity is closely akin to ideal right- eousness of character. It belongs to the same family as the morality of Sinai. It is 128 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS immensely prohibitory. It demands clean blood. It imperatively calls for individual exemption from all “‘filthiness of flesh and spirit,” freedom from evil appetites, from impure imaginations, from indulgence in for- bidden and lawless passions, from everything which may defile the spirit or vitiate the springs of physical health. If this is Puri- tanic, then the ideal heredity is a Puritan of the Puritans. It promises long life, full-tided health and happiness only to those who keep its commandments. In trumpet-tones it de- clares that such alone can be the fit progenitors of an ideal race. iil Ideal heredity keeps company with and lends creative support to high intelligence. It is perhaps too early to define in a. strict scientific sense the exact and causal relations between heredity and intelligence. But de- cided demonstrations show that the governing trends of a good heredity are always promotive of a clear understanding. A too-common fal- lacy is that keen intellect is likely to be asso- ciated with unscrupulous character. This is about on a par with that other too-common but low-bred lie that the sons of preachers are likely to turn out bad. A law, and not its THE SOVEREIGN HEREDITY 129 exceptions, is the fact to be emphasized in human affairs. Albert Edward Wiggam gives high rank to heredity in preachers’ families. Referring to the “Hall of Fame,” to which every candidate for its honors undergoes a most judicial scrutiny, he reminds us that of the first fifty-one admitted to the acknowledged rank of genius, ten of them, twenty per cent, were the sons and daughters of preachers. As there is only about one preacher to every five hundred people, thus the son or daughter of a preacher stands from twenty-five to fifty times the chance of becoming a great leader as a son or daughter selected at random from the general community. Tennyson, Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, and Richard Watson Gilder were all sons of preachers. Professor Frederick Adams Woods, a fore- most authority on heredity, has, among other notable investigations, made a searching study of the effects of heredity upon the royal families of Europe. Royal families, as a matter of prudential policy, have long pursued the cus- tom of intermarrying in selective circles. In flippant democratic thought it has been much the fashion to depreciate royalty as prevail- ingly degenerate morally and of mediocre mentality. Here too a knowledge of facts thoroughly disproves the premise. 130 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS Wood’s investigations range through a period of five centuries and are confined to fourteen families. It is a significant thing that from a limited number of eight hundred persons of royal breed there were developed as many as one in forty to whom united history assigns real genius. These superlative intellects sprang from royal blood in the proportion of one from every forty. The significance of this showing somewhat appears when it is remembered that for the past five centuries in all Europe aside from royal blood there has not been produced probably more than one high-rank genius, or person who has put upon history the enduring impress of transcendent intel- lect, to every million of all the people. A good and high heredity means a good and high quality of brains. Brains, as a matter of manifest destiny, will control the social and national life of mankind. Brains plus mor- ality will create the beneficent and abiding civilizations of the future. IV Heredity imperatively urges eugenic mar- riage. This is an urge that lays hold upon the very foundations of human destiny. This does not mean that eugenic marriage is to be decided by the decrees of states or by acts of THE SOVEREIGN HEREDITY 131 Legislatures. It must come about, if at all, from the widest dissemination of scientific intelligence concerning the fateful and unes- capable laws of human transmission. All men are in the currents of destiny. Each receives into himself as an antenatal inheritance qual- ities, good or bad, which may be traced back as potential forces of character over long ancestral lines. If a woman of queenly genius weds herself to a man of inferior quality, she thereby forfeits her right to anticipate in her children a reproduction of her own brilliant qualities. She has mingled her own repro- ductive endowments with degenerate clay. If insanity, epilepsy, the taint of impure sexualism, tubercular susceptibility, or any one of many other deteriorative qualities, inhere in the direct or collateral lines of ancestral blood, then, for all contemplating marriage, these should be conditions for searching scru- tiny, and should be sanely measured in the light of their potential consequences. The seeds of these ills are sure to be borne down in the currents of heredity, and they carry only the menace of disaster to posterity. If struc- tural weaknesses of mind or body characterize an ancestral group, these conditions cannot be safely ignored. Weak and _ short-lived children come from the mating of defective 132 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS parents. Vigorous and long-lived children come from a clean-blooded and robust stock. What- ever men and women sow, that inevitably must they also reap. A_ stupid parentage never produces brilliant offspring. A bad pedigree does not produce a good breed. A hereditary defect in one or both parents is perilously liable to reproduce itself in their posterity. If men and women of disparate physical or mental force marry, the law is, that their children will average on a plane of descent toward the less endowed personality. V The fate of democracies is vitally bound up in heredity. The American republic was founded by men of a sifted intellectual and moral stock—men of most knowing, of finest moral type, and of most liberty-loving purpose, to which the civilizations of Western Europe had given birth. Their experiment in govern- ment was a marked departure both in form and spirit from all systems of the past. It was a momentous adventure in history. It was judged by the Old World as a visionary move- ment, doomed to short life. The statesmen of Europe viewed it with a sense of mingled scorn and derision. It was, however, a movement worthy of prophetic genius. For nearly a THE SOVEREIGN HEREDITY 133 century and a half of years, from small begin- nings, this republic has advanced until to-day it stands unchallenged the mightiest among nations. The guarantee of its perpetuity, however, does not inhere in the wealth of its material resources. As was clearly foreseen and emphasized by the founders, the security of a republic is conditioned fundamentally and vitally upon a high intelligence, morality, and patriotism inhering with its sovereign citizenship. A democracy has no guarantee of secure life in the absence of these qualities. Whatever hopes we may cherish for the future of the nation—and these hopes would appear to be many—it would still be fatuous to shut our eyes to existing menaces against our national life. And of all menaces there is none more formidable than that of a poor heredity which has come into our national life-blood. Our most populous city in 1920 reported a population above ten years of age of 4,522,689, of whom 281,12] were totally illiterate. Of the native white population, numbering more than half of the total, there were reported in all but 6,552 illiterates, thus showing that a vast preponderance of illiteracy in our most populous city inheres with its foreign importa- tions of citizenship. 134 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS At about the period of the founding of the republic, in the entire State of Massachusetts there was scarcely a child above ten years of age who could not both read and write. In 1920, this old State—the State of great col- . leges—with a population of 3,161,769 above ten years of age reported illiterates to the number of 146,607. Here also the great pre- ponderance of illiterates was with the foreign- born. In the entire nation of 82,739,315 persons above ten years of age, the number of illiterates reaches the astounding mass of nearly 5,000,000! Yet a great majority of all this mass is either now, or soon to be, in possession of the badge of sovereign citizenship! There is some skepticism as to the reliability of intelligence tests as applied to enlisted men in the recent war. With a considerable allow- ance, however, for an over-induction from these methods they present very grave prob- lems of citizenship. They indicate that a large percentage of our present population is lacking in capacity to master any close proc- esses of reason, and that a very much larger number still will never rise to any broad and clear appreciation of the meaning and obliga- tions of their citizenship. They grimly teach that from the great body of our suffrage there THE SOVEREIGN HEREDITY 135 is only a minor proportion who have at once the clear-headed and constructive capacity for a safe partnership in conducting the vital affairs of the nation. Manifestly, citizenship in a democracy should come from the best heredities; its propagation should come controllingly from the most fit. Facts would seem to indicate that the univer- sity bred men of America are not even repro- ducing their own numbers in posterity. As a whole, the descendants of the founders of the republic—the direct heirs of our best national traditions—are raising increasingly small fam- ilies. The highest intelligence of the nation is reproducing itself in a diminishing ratio of numbers. This on the side of our most cul- tured and competent citizenship. As com- pared with this trend, the illiterate and the mentally mediocre are reproducing themselves in the ratio of about three to one. The logic of the situation is oppressively obvious. If more children are born of an inferior heredity than are produced from an intelligent and patriotic parentage, then this in itself measured is the prophecy of nothing less than a sure and fatal undermining of American democracy. In this brief discussion I have made no attempt to assay the factors of safety for our national future. I believe that such factors 186 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS both potently and potentially exist. But I am profoundly impressed that no single danger more seriously confronts the republic than that which inheres in a majority citizenship itself sprung from an inferior mental and moral heredity. VI I could not wish in this essay to contribute any sense of pessimistic hopelessness to those whose heredity may handicap them in life’s race. We are not here primarily to fight the battles of our wicked or misdirected ancestors. Each, by exercise of his best judgment, and by wise selective mating if at all, is under bonds to make the most possible of his own life. The mentally deficient should not be permitted to mate, much less propagate their own kind. Persons inheriting structural physical weak- ness or pronounced susceptibility to heredi- tary diseases should certainly not mate with persons like exposed. If persons insist upon marrying in known disregard of these con- ditions, Dean Inge, an eminent student in this field, goes so far as to insist that such should be restrained by the state. Every young man, every young woman, a candidate for marriage, should intelligently insist upon mating only with a person of known healthy physical THE SOVEREIGN HEREDITY 137 antecedents. Further, it should be the aspi- ration of every person of both sexes to mate as far as possible with those of high endowment. If this ideal were studiously adhered to, the light of a redemptive heredity would soon rest upon civilization. On this whole momentously grave question science has pronounced a new revelation. The law of a better race, physically, mentally, morally, has come clearly in possession of human knowledge. It is a supreme obligation of civilization to translate this law with all its sanctions into the popular thought. All per- sons who are to be the progenitors of the race ought to be intelligently concerned about the sacred laws of human heredity and absolutely observant of those laws. Ideal heredity, for its ultimate ends, speaks with the authority of moral law. In its final purpose, by its own processes, and within its own field, it is a department of God’s redemp- tive gospel. God has ordained a harmonious partnership between Christianity and Science, and their voices unite in the prophecy of a perfected humanity which shall yet citizen the earth. V A STUDY IN INSPIRATION Tue question of the varying functions of inspiration is one quite different from the fact of inspiration itself. It may be emphasized that the chief field of imspiration is in the sphere of religion, as relating to man’s spir- itual, moral, and ethical nature. It is in this field certainly that a distinctive divine illu- mination must be of highest value and necessity to man. But God’s relations to the race are certainly vastly extended beyond what are ordinarily embraced in the terms of our spiritual vocab- ulary. God deals with entire world interests. He relates himself to man’s intellectual life, to the processes of history and of civilization, in ways that far transcend our mental measure- ments. The quality of inspiration, while of most diversified application, would seem as certainly requisite, and not less worthy of a divine activity, for the illumination of thought processes, for the development of learning, of invention, of poetry, of art, of government, and for all the advances of civilization—just 138 A STUDY IN INSPIRATION — 139 as certainly a necessity for the growing life of the race as in the more distinctively spiritual relations. It would be a narrow view which would limit God’s inspirations to our measurements * of purely spiritual concepts. This view would be widely out of harmony with the entire trend of Old Testament teaching. The great prophets were inspired statesmen as well as spiritual teachers. Moses, when closeted alone with God on Sinai, was voluminously instructed in the architecture of the tabernacle. Ezekiel claimed direct inspiration, but a large part of his message relates to an elaborate picture of what he anticipates as the coming Temple. This picture remained a dream, never coming to historic materialization. Special men were inspired as workers in art. This is the record: “And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, See, I have called by name Bezaleel the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah: And I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, to devise cunning works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, and in cutting of stones, to set them, and in carving of timber, to work in all manner of workmanship. And I, be- hold, I have given with him Aholiab, the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan; and in the hearts of all that are wise-hearted I have put wisdom, that they may make all I have commanded thee.” 140 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS Joshua was inspired and equipped as a man of war. Othniel, Ehud, Shamgar, Gideon, and others were divinely ordained as the warlike deliverers and judges of Israel. Samson’s - morals, certainly as measured by Christian standards, were quite unideal; but the “Spirit of the Lord began to move him at times in the camp of Dan,” and he also delivered Israel. Balaam, a foreign soothsayer, is accred- ited with genuine prophetic inspirations. Cyrus, the most powerful pagan king of the ancient East, is employed as God’s agent and messenger in the interests of Israel, and he is designated as the “friend” and the “‘anointed”’ of Jehovah. In our English version of the Bible the word “Imspiration”’ only twice appears—once in the Old and once in the New Testament. In Job, Elihu says, “There is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding.””’ He seems to say, “A dis- tinctive thing in man is the spirit or faculty of potential intelligence; but intelligence itself must come from an inbreathing by a Divine Source.” If this statement is philosophically valid, then it may have widest range of appli- cation to the awakening of intelligent expres- sion. It may be that in a far wider measure than has been generally conceded or even A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 141 conceived, inspiration in all fields has a common source. Of course discriminations of quality are to be made, while at the same time recog- nition must be given to the wide range and diversity of functions served by inspiration itself. There is perhaps in no single work in English dress a more scholarly, authoritative, and exhaustive treatment of the subject of inspira- tion than that given by the late Professor William Sanday in his famous Bampton Lec- tures. He freely admits that the Oriental, Greek, and Roman nations were just as cer- tainly sharers in God’s providence and in- spirations as were the people of Bible lands. It is not claimed that such inspirations took on the same form or impressed the same lessons as those specifically emphasized in the biblical message. But they were a part of divine illumination for the race. The science of comparative religions, which has come to wide and rich expression in our own day, very luminously confirms this view. A review of brilliant intellectual achieve- ments may well impress us that a factor of inspiration is the one thing which chiefly accounts for the achievements themselves. The genealogy of genius is obscure. ‘The supreme prophets, poets, artists, statesmen, 142 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS warriors, capitalists, scientists, philosophers, saints—most of these have come upon the world like the flash of meteors in the night. - Yet these are the men who have discovered and appropriated nearly all the new provinces which have enriched civilization itself. Inspi- ration, in any valuable creative form, never comes to negligent and listless souls. It gives itself only to worshipers who bring costly devotion to its shrine. The prophets of Israel were rapt brooders over the serious problems and destinies of their times. And so with all the great discoverers of the race. In the mind of Columbus was the long-cherished dream of new lands and of potential empires lying behind far Western seas. Dante in his habit of brooding over the problems of human destiny neglected properly to nourish his own body. But his is the superlative epic of Catholic history. Milton was the uni- versal scholar of his age. He gave his very soul to “Paradise Lost” before it took final form. High inspiration comes to the comparatively few. A flash of illumination may give to one man in a single hour a wider vision than will come to another man in a life-time. Emerson quotes Jacob Behmen as saying concerning one of his inspirational experiences: “In one A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 143 quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been many years together at an uni- versity.” Inspiration is not a quality to be purchased by the coins of merchandise. Its sources are not found in the palaces of kings, nor in the marts of mercantile adventure. Lowell says: “‘No doubt inspiration, like money, is a very handy thing to have, and if I should ever see an advertisement of any shop where it could be bought, even at second hand, I would lay in a stock of it forthwith.” Neither heredity, wealth, good clothes, or fine man- ners can pay hostages for inspiration. Neither kings nor the elect chosen of democracy can bestow it. It is best accounted for as a gift from God. In moments of ecstatic rapture the poet is lifted far above his ordinary self. It is as though an afflatus coming from beyond the stars has fallen upon him. In such moods all great poets feel their kinship with Deborah and the ancient psalm-singers. Music, cer- tainly of the highest order, falls upon the soul like the melody of celestial harps. Robert Browning, one of the most discerning seers of the modern age, himself a musician, did not hesitate to express belief that the music of Beethoven was a direct inspiration from God. Inspiration is not only the mood of excep- 144 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS tional men, but even with them its presence is not always felt. The very oracles are some- times silent. The Hebrew Prophets had their . periods of inspirational dearth. The poet Herrick writes: “Tis not every day that I Fitted am to prophesy; No, but when the spirit fills The fantastic panicles, Full of fire, then I write As the Godhead doth indite. Thus enraged, my lines are hurled, Like Sibyl’s through the world: Look how next the holy fire Either slakes, or doth retire; So the fancy cools,—till when That brave spirit comes again.” The earth in its orbit sometimes passes through night-zones when the heavens are aflame with flying meteors. But this is not a con- stant phenomenon. So inspiration does not dwell in unbroken stay even with genius. But when its currents are flowing at full tide, this is an hour of a thousand. This is to dwell on Olympus. It gives the vision of new and divine creations peopling all spaces. I What is the thing to be chiefly emphasized in all this? Is it not the evidence it all gives A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 145 of God’s continuous and unbroken processes in the world for the intellectual and moral up- lifting of the race? In our age we are coming to feel with increasing conviction that Chris- tianity as an end does not exhaust itself either in individual experience or individual interests. As with an inspired new emphasis we are coming to see that God’s kingdom in the earth involves a divine organization of society, of industry, of trade, and of commerce—the subsidizing of all forces which may be made to contribute to the larger welfare and moral uplifting of mankind. God is utilizing all agencies of enlightenment for the advancement of his purposes in the world. It is, moreover, obvious that there can be no ideal rule in the world which does not seek as a vital end the physical betterment of the race. There can be no ideal and effective rule among men which does not finally involve physical sanity and righteousness. This is, in last resort, a chief significance of science. Whatever other mission science may have—and no limit can be placed upon its power to advance enlight- enment and to increase knowledge—it will have a foremost ministry in promoting man’s physical welfare. It will in what are now undiscovered ways, banish disease, create well-ventilated and sanitary homes for the poor, and lay under PA A . , ry 146 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS tribute invention and industrial prosperity for the wider distribution of human comforts. A fact to be kept always at the front is that in every department where the vision of man . has been clarified, where there have come large new ministries to life, where the spirit of prophecy has stimulated the race to new nobilities and urged it to enlarged possessions —the discoverer, the initiator, in every case has been the illuminated man. Newton was of transcendent mind, but the great law with which his name has stood for centuries came to him as in a flash of inspiration. The Copernican astronomy was born in the dreams of a monk. The laws of planetary motion, after years of incredible toil, burst upon the vision of Kepler in a moment that filled him with a very frenzy of soul. And so there has been no great triumph of mind, no great achievement in invention, no epochal dis- covery in science, no brilliant generalization in philosophy, no superlative creation in poetry, no immortal oratorios, no highest oratory, no most masterful preaching, except through minds made luminous with a light not seen on land or sea. God has never permitted his prophets to perish from the earth. Augustine, Luther, and Wesley are the true successors of the great . A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 147 biblical masters. Lincoln, not less certainly than Moses, was a race-emancipator and statesman—God’s man. There is to-day a multiplying race of prophets in the earth— true successors of the Isaiahs and Jeremiahs. The Careys, the Morrisons, the Livingstones, and the Thoburns are the lineal successors of the great missionary apostle to the Gentile world. If, now, it should be suggested that, in parity with this reasoning, there have been men of evil inspirations, this is not to be denied. It is the tragedy of history that some men have always perverted God’s best gifts. This may apply as certainly to inspira- tion as to other of God’s endowments. Not- withstanding the perversion of the good by evil minds, we may still remember that God exercises a wonderful sovereignty in controlling the designs of evil men for the clearer vindica- tion of his own purposes. Most vicious onslaughts against truth have served . to summon to new investigations and to tri- umphant defenses. In great historic conflicts, truth has generally made steady advances, while error has been driven into retreat. God can confuse the counsels of his enemies, and force the mightiest to be the servants of his providence. He pursued the persecuting Saul 148 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS of Tarsus until he transformed him into a flaming apostle of the truth. While no per- verted gifts are good in themselves they have often challenged and awakened the victories — of righteousness. II The philosophy, or, if preferred, the theology, of inspiration as applied to the Bible has had a varied history. While no one theory of biblical inspiration has ever met with uni- versal acceptance in the church, many vary- ing views, here and there and at different times, have been held by diverse groups of believers. The central and vital thing is the fact of divine inspiration itself. If in the universe there is such a God as Christian theism demands, then one does not have to travel far to reach a rational view of divine inspiration. It is a vital claim of Christian thought that God and man are linked together in the indissoluble partnership of a common nature. Man’s chief distinction is that he is an intellectual, moral, and spiritual person- ality, and that as such he holds close kinship with God himself. God is the infinite. Man is the child, but a child with limitless possi- bilities of development, a child with an infinite outlook. A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 149 That which we familiarly term “revelation” is at bottom an appropriation, an appro- priation which ever keeps pace with man’s growing enlightenment, by the human mind and spirit from treasures of moral and _phil- osophical truth which with God are an infinite possession. The greatest fact in human knowl- edge is that of the mental and moral corre- spondence between God and man. It was Calvin who said, “Man can only know himself through his knowledge of God, and can only know God through the knowledge of him- self.” However wide our quest in historic fields, the fact which shall more and more be in evidence, and which must come to increasing emphasis, is the universality of man’s religious nature. It must stand as of axiomatic force that, correspondent to man’s universal religiousness, there must be a Divinity who shall be able to respond to the deepest religious needs. The Christian Scriptures proceed on _ the assumption that God is a Father to the entire human race, and that in Jesus Christ he has provided a perfect Teacher and Guide for all his human children. It can seem nothing less than a rational conclusion that, taking human nature as we know it, and God as thus won- derfully set forth, that God himself is under 150 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS both a measureless prompting and obligation to so illuminate the minds of men as to make them capable of receiving the revelations of | his character and purpose. The terms “revelation” and “‘inspiration” while not synonymous are correlative. Rev- elation is the unfoldment of fact or truth. Inspiration is the vision of discernment, the capacity for seeing and interpreting such unfoldment. There can be no revelation without inspiration. Revelation in the absence of inspiration would be of no more avail than to present for his judgment the solar spectrum to a blind man. God has made man inspira- tional, the fruitful seer and interpreter of universal truth. The record of revelation is richly written upon all of God’s handiwork in creation; but inspired human mind is the one translator and interpreter of this record. When, however, we inquire for a distinctive revelation adapted to man’s uttermost and irrepressible spiritual needs, we can by no other means reach such satisfying answer as comes to us through the channels of Hebrew history. A supreme moral need of the world is met only in the kind of revelation recorded in the Bible. It should, however, still be emphasized that if God chose one nation as the special agent of his manifestation to all A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 151 mankind, then toward all mankind aside from this special nation he must also in some form have been dealing in ways preparatory to the universal acceptance of this revelation. IIT In a study like this, one is tempted to tarry in reverent review of the rich and exhaust- less moral inspirations which the Bible has yielded to the heart and thought of the race, inspirations which have pervaded and uplifted entire civilizations. I can only pause to give a few illustrious individual testimonies. Dr. W. Robertson Smith says: “If I am asked why I receive the Scripture as the Word of God, and as the only perfect rule of faith and life, I answer with all the Fathers of the Protestant Church: Because the Bible is the only record of the redeeming love of God, because in the Bible alone I find God draw- ing near to man in Jesus Christ, and declar- ing to us in him his will for our salvation. And this record I know to be true by the witness of his Spirit, whereby I am assured that none other than God himself is able to speak such words to my soul.” Dr. William Sanday, recently deceased, but historically one of the most eminent of Eng- lish biblical scholars, says: “There is im- 152 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS pressed upon the writings which make up the Bible a breadth and variety, an intensity and purity of religious life, that are without parallel in any other literature in the world. That is the fact which we seek to express in the doc- trine of inspiration. We know no other explanation for it than a special action of the Spirit of God.” Professor James Orr, a preeminent scholar, and one of the last of the great traditionalists in biblical teaching, in his final and valuable book on Revelation and Inspiration, says: “In the last resort, the proof of the inspiration of the Bible—not indeed in every particular, but in its essential message—is to be found in the life-giving effects which that message has produced, wherever its word of truth has gone. This is the truth in the argument for inspiration based on the witness of the Holy Spirit. The Bible has the qualities claimed for it as an inspired book. ‘These qualities, on the other hand, nothing but inspiration could impart. It leads to God and to Christ; it gives light on the deepest problems of life, death, and eternity; it discovers the way of deliverance from sin; it makes men new crea- tures; it furnishes the man of God completely for every good work. That it possesses these qualities history and experience through all the A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 153 centuries have attested; its saving, sanctify- ing, and civilizing effects among all races of men in the world attest it still. The word of God is a pure word. It is a true and tried word; a word never found wanting by those who rest themselves upon it. The Bible that embraces this word will retain its distinction as the Book of Inspiration till the end of time.” IV There is space but for few of the peculiar views which have been held in and out of ecclesiastical thought concerning the character and processes of inspiration. ) Plato classes inspiration as one of the four forms of madness. He says: “No man, when in his wits, attains prophetic truth and inspira- tions; but when he receives the inspired word, either his intelligence is enthralled in sleep, or he is demented by some distemper or pos- session.” This view, however eminent its source, displaces the sane human reason from any creative copartnership in the processes of in- spiration. It has been taught that Adam in Eden was given the Hebrew text even to the vowel points. It is historically clear, however, that the Hebrew vowel points were not invented 154 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS until comparatively late in the Christian era. As for Adam’s knowledge of Hebrew! An old tradition had wide prevalence that - during the Exile the books of Moses were lost, and that they were restored by Ezra through the Holy Ghost. Among the Alexandrian Jews it was traditionally believed that the Seventy who translated the Old Testament into Greek, each working separately from the others, were so directed that each produced a translation identical with that of every other man. When we consider the numerous variations and even mistranslations of the Septuagint from the original Hebrew, it indeed seems singular that the Spirit did not more accurately direct the minds of these translators. But the great Augustine gets past this difficulty by declar- ing that the numerous deviations from the original appearing in the Septuagint were divinely superintended in order to adapt the Scriptures to the heathen mind. In the light of claims for a strictly verbal inspiration of the Scriptures the usage of the early church would seem singular, even unac- countable. We not only know that the Sep- tuagint as a translation of the original Hebrew is very faulty, but it also contains several sections which do not appear in the Hebrew Bible. Yet, with all this, the Septuagint ae ee en A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 155 was the Bible practically in use by the New Testament writers. The lack of knowledge prevailing through the Christian centuries as to the Greek sources of the New Testament presents a suggestive chapter as to the character of biblical inspira- tion. Down to the very close of the nine- teenth century the Greek of the New Testa- ment was looked upon as representing a distinct department of Greek letters. Lin- guistically and grammatically tested, it clearly presents a quite distinct type from anything appearing in the classical standards. The real fact is that New Testament Greek is not properly a literary language at all, and hence has not persisted in any Greek literatures, aside practically from the New Testament, which have come down to us. The advocates of “mechanical inspiration” have, in some cases, sought to make much of this seeming peculiarity in support of their view. They have argued that it is both fitting and provi- dential that the revelation of the New Testa- ment should be clothed in a _ language distinctly employed by the Holy Ghost, a language free from the contamination and profanation of contact with that which has been employed in secular writing. Acknowl- edgments, however, are due to such eminent 156 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS specialists as Adolf Deissmann, J. Hope Moul- ton, and others for demonstrating the fact that New Testament Greek, so far from being an isolated and unique language, is simply the common language of the people, the ordinary vernacular Greek spoken in the Greco-Roman divisions of the empire at the period of New Testament writings. The sand-dunes of Egypt have absolutely yielded indubitable proof of this fact. This is really a discovery of our own generation, but it utterly displaces many of the dogmatic spec- ulations which have been rife in ecclesiastical history. We are familiar with the decree of the Council of Trent, meeting in 1546, pronounc- ing “anathema” against all who do not accept as “sacred and canonical” the Scriptures as set forth in the “Old Vulgate Latin Edition.” It is well known that the Latin text so highly extolled by this Council was an exceedingly defective rendering of both the Hebrew and the Greek sections of the Bible. Yet this was the authorized Bible of the Roman Church in the sixteenth century. Concerning this notorious action by the Council of Trent, Bishop Westcott is authority for saying: ‘“This fatal decree, in which the Council, harassed by the fear of’ lay criticism and grammarians, A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 157 gave a new aspect to the whole question of the canon, was ratified by fifty-three prelates, among whom there was not one German, not one scholar distinguished for historical learn- ing, not one who was fitted by special study of the subject in which the truth could only be determined by the voice of antiquity.”’ V Modern application of the inductive philos- ophy to ancient literatures, the Bible included, has not only thrown a flood of light upon the history and genius of these literatures themselves, but with widening knowledge it has begotten new convictions with reference to the origins and evolution of these literatures. The Bible, whatever else it is, is a body of literature. As such it can claim no exemption from the processes of historic and _ literary criticism. It springs from human backgrounds and has a human history. It is a legitimate function in relation to the Bible, as to all other literatures, to make most inquisitorial search as to every phase through which this literature has come to us. And this, in the recent generation especially, is a process through which all that can be known of the Bible has been subjected to microscopic search. This process, it must be admitted, has been revolu- 158 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS tionary of many traditional views. But it would be a most gratuitous and false judg- ment to assume that the process has been destructive of real biblical values. The Bible has been permitted, as never before in its history, to speak purely for itself. Stripped of a priori constructions, of whim- sical glosses, of false dogmatisms, of traditional bias, of priestly dictation—the Bible standing alone on its intrinsic merits and character is seen more than ever to be the peerless record of a supreme divine movement in human history. While it is a human record, yet it is a record mediated for the most part by divinely illuminated men. This process yields a view which neither obscures nor displaces the fact of divine inspiration as connected with the Bible record. It classifies the channels of inspiration as chiefly two: history and indi- vidual illumination. God’s moral and spir- itual revealment to men is a historic process of which the Bible is a record, but not the cause. The history of the Israelitish nation is to the period of the Advent, and for that period, the most perfect historic disclosure of God’s moral purposes for the race. But the Bible is as well a gallery of elect but divinely inspired men, men of distinctive illumination, men divinely raised up and A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 159 ordained to be the signal moral and spiritual guides of mankind. Strip from both the Old and the New Testaments the records and incidents of such men, and you will have largely denuded them of their very glory and charm. The inspired man, be he prophet or poet, is alone the utterer of the divinest voice in history. It would be too much, indeed irrational, to assume that a human mind, however illu- minated, could give a perfect expression to a divine experience. And this limitation we must apply to the entire biblical record. The features that mar the moral perfections of the Old Testament are such as belong to the limitations of the very people through whom God sought to make his chief revelations to _ the world. God’s beginnings with Israel found its people upon a very low intellectual and moral plane. They were both ignorant and barbarous. They came from a superstitious and idolatrous stock. It required a long schooling to impress this people with any really worthy conceptions of God himself. In their grossness they attributed to Jehovah their own low ideals and motives. They were idolatrous in habit, a habit which the stern discipline of centuries narrowly overcame. If one may conceive of God as encountering 160 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS difficult opposition in the execution of his own moral purposes, then his effort to ideally - moralize and spiritualize the Hebrew race would seem to rank among his most trying tasks. The fact of man’s inability to perfectly translate highest spiritual facts into human expression as certainly appears in the records of the New Testament as in the Old. The chosen disciples were companioned with Christ in close intimacy for the space of three years, more or less—an ineffable companionship. Yet no one can discerningly read the records of the four Gospels and escape the impression that these disciples themselves were dealing with a Character who was always immeas- urably above their mental grasp. It would be simply to juggle with one’s own sanity to assume, as many have done, that all parts of the Old Testament are equally inspired or equally profitable for ethical in- struction. There are in this literature records of gross immorality, of low ethical standards, of barbarous cruelties, the very attributions to God himself of unworthy motives. In reading the Old Testament with the inquiry before us as to whether we are to accept for our moral guidance its teachings and its incidents, there is no saner and no better method than A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 161 to test the quality of these teachings in the white light of Christ’s own character and pre- cepts. Anything found in the Old Testament which cannot stand the challenge of Christ’s own standards, may be safely rated as not binding upon either Christian conduct or belief. If, then, the question should be raised, “‘Why the Old Testament at all?” the answer may well be twofold: First, it must be frankly admitted that much of this record came from sources more reflecting imperfect human ideals than any real thought of the Divine Mind; second, as a matter of education and of his- tory, we need the Old Testament just as it is to furnish truthfully and vividly the dark backgrounds against which God wrought in his mission of moral and spiritual self-revelation to the race. The Old Testament is not only a record of divine revelation to humanity; it is also a portrayal of a most limited and defec- tive human nature. All this prompts to a frank and just recog- nition of the very humanness of the Bible itself. An overclaim for which accredited Christian teachers must be held largely respon- sible is in making the Bible throughout a sole seat and source of inspiration. A book at best can be no more than a record. Inspira- tion is a process which can take place only 162 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS in an intelligent soul. God as the Creator and Father of the human spirit has endowed - that spirit with aptitude for knowing himself. He has made this spirit sensitive to his own touch, responsive to the impressions of his own nature and perfections. ‘The Bible, at its most luminous heights, is but an accom- modative attempt to portray through letters to the human understanding, to fuse into the human moral feeling, mountain-height expe- riences had in hours when in great and seeing souls there have arisen transfiguring visions. The experiences alone made the records possi- ble. But the experiences themselves transcend all gifts of translation into human language. Indeed, the most perfect language of man is in itself far inadequate for the reproduction of the soul’s highest inspirations. But, just as the diamond holds in itself the buried sunlight of ages, so these biblical records are luminous and inspirational with the divinest experiences of the human soul. VI The distinctive and controlling mission of the Bible is religious, spiritual. It is a book that relates men directly to God. It is neither a textbook nor a treatise of science, but a A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 163 book which in its historic and literary char- acter can be best understood only as scien- tifically treated. The spirit and passion of science are truth-loving. True science in its own sphere can content itself with nothing short of demonstrated truth. In the very nature of its quest science is often forced to revise its own working hypotheses, but it is ever in search of demonstrated results, and when these are reached it can suffer no defeats. The Bible has suffered enormously from a priorz constructions. Such constructions have often come into direct conflict with scientific demon- strations. A dogmatic misconception of the Bible, based on processes which have been unable to stand against the scrutiny of reason, has been the source of much unfor- tunate and discreditable controversy with and many humiliating theological defeats from scientific authorities. The champions of unsci- entific dogma by their impertinent attacks upon and sullen retreats from the assured demonstrations of science, have furnished one of the most humiliating chapters in theological discussion. Happily, to the credit of modern scholarship, and for the advancement of sane faith, the Bible is now more and more receiv- ing an interpretation which does not array it in conflict with scientific fact. 164 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS VII Tf what thus far said is true to fact, it fol- lows that the Bible is not inerrant. Critical scientific study has yielded a demonstration in which all biblical scholarship of acknowl- edged standing now concurs, namely, that in its literary, historic, and scientific features the Bible is neither inerrant nor infallible. For the first fifteen centuries of the Christian era the Greek Septuagint was the only Old Testa- ment in practical use by the Eastern Church, while after the fourth century the Latin Vulgate was well-nigh exclusively in use in the Western, or Roman Church. It is now well known that both of these versions were exceedingly defective translations of the orig- inal languages. So far as original manuscripts of both the Old and New Testaments are concerned, there is not one of them to-day known to be in existence. Erasmus, in the Reformation period, gave to the church a Greek New Testament which was in principal use for nearly or quite three full centuries. But he was unable for his needs to find a single Greek manuscript covering the entire New Testament. He translated as well as he could, but really into poor Greek, a part of the Apocalypse from the Latin Vulgate. He was able to command for his task only A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 165 eight manuscripts, most of them fragmentary, all of them late. He did not have access to any of the four great manuscripts since recov- ered as belonging to the fourth and fifth centuries. Since the days of Erasmus, there has been a great recovery of New Testament manu- scripts, now probably numbering but little, if any, less than twenty-five hundred (some would place the number much higher), and these are being constantly added unto. When Westcott and Hort, within living memory, after twenty-eight years of concerted toil, produced their Greek New Testament, they found from manuscripts, all of which they faithfully examined, no less than one hundred and fifty thousand variations in these products. At best, we can form but slight estimate of the prodigious task which confronted these scholars. For purposes of our present thought the foregoing histories are but illustrative. For many entirely decisive reasons, which can- not be here considered, the conception of an infallible and inerrant Scripture has been practically abandoned by the entire world of competent and accredited biblical scholarship. All this, however, is immeasurably far from saying that there is not in the Bible, just as we have it, a supreme record of God’s self- 166 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS revelation to mankind. The Bible will always remain the peerless religious classic in the world’s literature. Whatever imperfections in themselves existing manuscripts may reveal, it is doubtless true that owing to prodigious critical researches, and of a devout and rev- erent order, the Christian world is now pos- sessed of the nearest approach to the original Scriptures that has ever thus far been possible . in human history. There is no subject of knowledge on which more exhaustive and competent labor has been bestowed than in the effort of a multitude of scholars to repro- duce from all sources the original expression and intent of our sacred Scriptures. From this combined and distributed labor immeas- urably fruitful and valuable results have come, placing in the reach of every interested Bible reader the most trustworthy records attainable of the original records of divine revelation. VIitl There can be no inclusive and appreciative study of the Scriptures which does not reveal the progressive development of inspiration. A living universe must be a progressing uni- verse. The knowledge and life of yesterday cannot fill the demands of to-day. Browning scans future vistas when he says: “Progress A STUDY IN INSPIRATION _ 167 is the law of life.’ Man is not man as yet.” And so, our own Holmes, studying the empty but pearly seashell by the shore, the cast-off home of the growing nautilus which had passed out to a better habitation, saw in it the par- able of a growing life, and he sang: “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea. No more poor and gloomy view could be taken of God’s world than that it is merely a static thing. This would make the universe itself of no more worth than a huge fossil. And this would be even a more blasting caricature upon human life itself. If man is an intel- lectual being; if knowledge grows from more to more; if he is a moral being, made in God’s image, endowed of Divine purpose with possi- bilities of an endless Godward growth, then he is indeed a pilgrim of the Infinite. He must be forever pitching his tents on new camping grounds of intellectual and moral advancement. The development of inspiration in the Scrip- tures moves in harmony with this law of 168 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS progression. We must find ourselves in agree- ment with Canon James Maurice Wilson when he says: “The final stage of the evolution of the soul must be something other than a magnified present. It is premature to put a limit to our ideals. ‘This was the mistake of the Jewish teachers. But Christ showed, and Saint Paul saw, a higher truth; and He taught us that what his contemporaries held dearest was but a parenthesis in the long evolution of man, the goal of which we cannot yet define. Such parentheses are not the end. “The end is not yet.’ ” If we could come to the Bible without crippling prepossessions, we would have no difficulty in understanding that God’s rev- elation of himself has been conditioned and limited by the moral astigmatisms and the undeveloped spiritual faculties of mankind. The Spirit of God has undoubtedly wrought with the men of all nations. But even in the most religious of nations, Israel, the process of spiritual development would seem to have been so slow and obstructed as to have well- nigh tested the Infinite patience. But, even so, in the process of time there was developed among the distinctive thinkers of this race a monotheistic conception so pure, so lofty, so majestic, so commanding and inspirational, as A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 169 justly for all time to rank these thinkers as the supreme moral teachers of the ages. IX It is but a corollary of what has been said to assert that inspiration is a continuous and universal process in history. Inspiration repre- sents the continued life and activities of the Spirit in the world. If it were not for the vitalizing function of inspiration there could be no living church. Humanly speaking, it might sometimes almost appear that the diverse creeds and practices of the Christian Church could mean little less than mutual antagonism and self-destruction. It has often been said, and perhaps truly, that the internal dissen- sions of the church have been a far greater menace against its life than the combined attacks of all outward foes. But, as _his- torically shown, however unfortunate these internal disharmonies, it still remains true that the spiritual vitalities of the church have always been vastly surviving as against all its internal symptomatic ailments. The church is made up of limited human beings, the in- heritors of diverse temperaments and habits, men often of limited intellectual vision and of eccentric prejudices; these and kindred limitations inevitably inhering in average hu- 170 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS man nature are enough to account for the introduction of unnumbered unideal things in the life of the church. But despite all this it graciously appears that no branch of the chureh universal is entirely destitute of spir- itual inspirations. The same is true of the Christian Scriptures. The letter of the New Testament is not the Spirit. At best it is but the channel along which the living spiritual message is conveyed. Tt is no more the Spirit than are the banks of a river the river itself. It is the inspiring Spirit in the continuous life of the church that gives to the New Testament its voice of continuous spiritual authority. Without the continuous presence in the church of the inspiring Spirit the New Testament would long since have disappeared as a dead fragment from literary history. It is the mission of inspiration to give an ever-widening vision to the church, ever- enlarging boundaries of thought to the mean- ing and scope of Christianity itself. It is the function of present-day inspired seers to ascribe a rightful dominance of Christianity over well- nigh innumerable spheres which seemed to lie hidden behind the horizons of early Christian writers. Christianity, to most discerning vision, is more and more seen as the one divinely A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 171 regal, as the one all-subordinating, realm of the universe. Christ did not deal with sys- tems. He uttered no word in condemnation of slavery; he did not lay down a system of economics; he uttered no specific for the government of corporate capital or the labor union; he announced no law for the equitable division of natural wealth, for the housing of the aged, the sick and the unfortunate. He spoke no word concerning woman suffrage. All this is but to say that our present world faces innumerable problems the solution of which requires application of highest ethical principles, and yet questions on which Christ gave no specific utterance. Christ in himself is inexhaustible. He awaits the needs of a given age before he manifests himself for those needs. It is thus impossible that any one age shall fully comprehend, or exhaust, his poten- tialities. The problems of coming civilizations may be greatly multiplied as compared with those of the present, but there can come no time, no social or moral exigency, for which Christ in some new manifestation shall not prove himself Master. Christ in all the future ages must ever remain the Emanuel, God with men. The Spirit of Truth is ever opening upon human vision new fields of knowledge. This 172 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS is as true in moral and spiritual as in physical and intellectual realms. It is the task of the Christian seer and teacher of to-day to coor- dinate all truth, whether scientific or phil- osophical, into harmonious relations with Christian thought. It is thus inevitable that the perspective of Christian thinking will call for a constantly enlarging and hence, in ~ minor relations certainly, a changing order of rational and spiritual perception. The king- dom of Christ will always be in need of Spirit- inspired and Spirit-guided teachers. Finally, I content myself with the state- ment, the conviction, that the church will never come to a dogmatic and adequate definition of Divine Inspiration. One might as well undertake to count the sands upon the seashore, or take a numbering of the spring-time growths, as to endeavor to crib and confine within the limits of human def- inition the processes of Divine Inspiration. If, as Mrs. Browning has said, “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God,” then, if man’s insight were such that he could paint the very globe with wings, still he must ever live within the receding horizons of God’s greater thought. All this, however, does not mean that fu- ture spiritual teaching by the church is to A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 173 be of a chaotic or unregulative sort. The Spirit-inspired teacher, tantamount to inspired prophet and apostle, will always be in com- mission as interpreter and guide of the King- dom. We must distinctively emphasize, how- ever, that not every one who assumes—and it may be intensely assumes—the role of spiritual teacher, is therefore a safe leader of the church. There are people of most intense convictions, of zealous activities, even of fiery conscien- tiousness, who, as measured by the standards of a “sound mind,” of “sound words,” and of “sound doctrine’—phrases emphatically em- ployed in Saint Paul’s writings—are utterly unbalanced persons. The navigation of an ocean steamship might as wisely be com- mitted to a captain and crew of insane sailors as to commit the direction of the church to men of sincere but fanatical faith. There are zealous and conscientious men in the church who, if their voices were to be accepted as final authority, would pervert the best religious teaching into something no better than so much theological absurdity. Such teachers have been in evidence in all ages of the church. They were disturbers of the ancient prophets. ‘They were more trouble- some to Saint Paul than even his thorn in the flesh. The historic creeds were largely evolved 174 LIFES WESTWARD WINDOWS for the purpose of steadying and protecting the church against such erratic teaching. It is to be expected that here and there will arise unbalanced enthusiasts, unsafe visionaries, mis- guided and misguiding teachers. The consensus of sane and_ illuminated Christian mind must ever be the chief reliance of the church for a rational interpretation of the fact and methods of inspiration. The human rational spirit is the sole organ through which God manifests himself to the world. In the aggregate of Spirit-illumined mind in the church there will always be found a saving and practically infallible sanity of thought. The great body of prophetical Christian knowl- edge and conviction will ever move within the lines of rational and defensible truth. The Spirit of Truth himself, ever working in the rational thought of believing men, will always yield a sufficient and only safeguard of Christian doctrine. This is not to say that in minor matters there may not always exist differing constructions. But more and more with advancing and clearing Christian thought there will prevail the sane rule, “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials. liberty; in all things, charity.” This, through all coming ages, will prove the one infallibility of the Christian Church. It will mean a church com- A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 175 posed of a universal priesthood of believers, so Spirit-guided through all panoramic changes of thought, across all new territories of discovery, as to make itself intellectually alert and pro- gressive, safe and sane in its faith, world-con- quering in its spirit. ens Re i j tap j ’ ‘ hoe 4 of *) ij wilt DATE DUE GAYLORD PRINTED IN U.S.A. >a Peat We FP Se week.)F es LF FOS ere A | — mt es OF ST re rer orers | Cae rn rr rt ere gg me eg Pt ertepe bane bibl de ne goer e gh been eee ren nee sopeemacnne poet aE IO Rest EneS Ly EP ASL IE TED WP USRSRILIGIO Le Lae bebe eeNee IE TkSEFEREEOERSLOT tOte ae eee erent parar ane pbearoees gig hara phe pipe ng ieeateh oe OP Aes CE RO ad he rk S Snes 0-07 WS Sk FEST W Not IP WTS E : ne SAR IE IE RONEN SSS EEP MALE DE SE OWE MSE Te AEE : aehes etna phpigntaeoresgias apa’ aaa {peer Nae se WP AENOURE TE SEERSE NG Hees oe armen ee eNLaLE IE SEMEN G ET MTUSRIEIE ISAS TOSSES MT Naees IO UANSTTL IE IE tees > — as ——— Scat POT Be We NSTEeY , ie Nene pee ae 4 A eg gee sty ie. jee — ore Se ee oe rr em ne ate en new inne eegeneeeeee rst ~ - nsdn eg A gUAUS SD eek Ba adap appeerenainaabuatnermnernareene miemei a SET IE TEESE TOURED renee enn ep ger geen tne ce ee OE oe ee rr San ee enw en a pet ar em rg ~ * = : = oid pasate aeepesmamenncnacnsensone tiene onaeeien ae Sa eae ESTRUS RSENS SESS wen ae ~ : cares : - — ; prrendt wersregerr o " es a mr At GN SAE gc ol IG pewter ener Sort remeron nrnrende rinse cwimarmor rere) ° nal ne ee i-iitetinentaen aden Goager sc peoyeorerts Jeatitensenientubeedaees = aabasyeres _— - sass so Taek ~ in ~ (Pate eee rrr err et et ere, en rae reste rey ane reTT ea ay ees epereay henna ae y Py eeees tee eater eee ees aon apnennneaeeraarmsnitone eas oo