AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM Works By DANIEL A. POLING An ADVENTURE In EVANGELISM The Story of Twice-Born Men on “The Avenue,” $1.50 Learn To Live Straight Talks, $1.50 Nav § 1 1925 An Adventure, 1), gu Evangelism A STORY OF TWICE-BORN MEN ON “THE AVENUE” es By DANIEL A. POLING, Litt.D., LL.D., Co-Minister, Marble Collegiate Church, New York Associate President, The United Society of Christian Endeavour New York CHICAGO Fleming H. Revell Company LoNDON AND EDINBURGH Copyright, McMxxv, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY Printed in the United States of America New York: 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. London: 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street To My Uncle, Daniel Vandersall Poling, A Minister of the Church and A Friend to Man. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https ://archive.org/details/adventureinevangOOpoli Introduction ONGREGATIONAL Evangelism in the Marble C Collegiate Reformed Church of New York City, as described in the following chapters, had in its initiation and development the favoring atmosphere of the ministry of David James Burrell. For nearly thirty-five years Dr. Burrell, the Senior Minister of the Collegiate Church of New York, has poured out his life in a message of unsurpassed evangelical and evangelistic fruitfulness. The writer is particularly indebted to The Christian Endeavor World, The Christian Herald and The Contt- nent for the privilege of using the material contained in four of the chapters of this book, which appeared first in the form of articles in these publications. The Sermon-Addresses, which begin with Chapter V, have in every instance been preached on Sunday evening in the pulpit of the Marble Collegiate Church. They have invariably concluded with the simple Gospel invitation. DRAG: Marble Collegiate Church, New York. y Contents I METHODS OF WORK . “Tur ONE WHo Is ABLE” . THE Cross ABOVE FiFtH AVENUE . . It HAPPENED ON AN ISLAND . STOP SLANDERING YoutH! . II SERMON-ADDRESSES . TuHree Roaps To PowER . THE PHARISEE’s THANKSGIVING . WuHo Enters CANAAN? . Five Facts For Fainine Farts! . A NEw CatTHEDRAL AGE . Doust Your Dousts . THE GENIUS OF THE GOSPEL . On Guarp! . How to Hear . . Is THE WoRLD A SMALL Posen? . WINNING OVER WorrY . WHEN RELIGION SPOILS Acker rs . THE CLIMBER’S PERIL AND SAFETY . WHat A MAN TakEs witH Him 9 13 24 31 37 53 62 70 79 ot tO Pike . 121 133 . 143 AUB . 162 AS | ioe I METHODS OF WORK | ‘ . ve ui oe if Ws), Po Koil y) I “THE ONE WHO IS ABLE” NE evening, about three years before the writ- ing of this book, a man of distinguished ap- pearance presented himself at the altar of the Marble Collegiate Church and was introduced by one of our young men. He had raised his hand in response to the evangelistic invitation. With cynicism in his voice he said: “‘ What can you do for me?” “Nothing,” I replied, ‘“ absolutely nothing, but I can take you to One who will answer your question.” During the week we met twice in the church study. At the close of the second interview the man arose from his knees with a light on his face “ that never was, on _sea or land.” His first words were a question. The question was not intended as a rebuke. It was spoken in apparent surprise, and out of a grateful heart. ‘“* How does it happen,” he asked, “‘ that, because I made a promise, I have been going to church at least once every week, but until last Sunday night I was never invited to come to the foot of the Cross?” That question is still ringing in my ears. } Our simple evangelistic programme is based upon the principle that the supreme business of the Church is leading men and women to Jesus Christ, sustaining and strengthening them in the Christian life, training them for and engaging them in Christian service. Let it be mentioned in passing—mentioned, I say, since there is no time for an extended statement—that this 13 14 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM evangelistic emphasis is blood-brother to a programme of social service. As I write, one of the most effective social survey and settlement workers in New York City is a brilliant individual who, one year ago, stood at the close of a Sunday evening service to express a desire to become personally acquainted with Jesus Christ. An average of seven hundred business-girls and women pass through our parlors every Tuesday for luncheon together and a series of fifteen-minute inspi- rational and religious addresses. ‘There are self-help classes of various kinds, special lectures and social gatherings. But to build the new world we must have first new world builders. If our modern civilisation is learning anything today, surely it is learning that redemption is more than an intellectual interpretation, sin more than a name, the Atonement more than a theory, and Jesus, as the Christ, more than a myth. No NEW WORLD CAN THERE BE WITHOUT NEW WORLD BUILDERS, AND ONLY Jesus CHRIST CAN MAKE NEW CREATURES OUT OF MEN. But it is the very simple story of a very small begin- ning in congregational evangelism on Fifth Avenue that I am writing about. I do not hesitate to tell the story, for it is a very modest story as to results, and one that may be told without the presumption that might attach to more distinguished achievements. For a period of five years, now, it has been our in- variable custom, at the close of the Sunday evening service, to extend an evangelistic invitation. With one exception, through this period, there have been definite responses to every such invitation. The number has varied from three to above thirty. The invitation itself is based upon three assumptions: (1) That in “THE ONE WHO IS ABLE” 15 every congregation there are men and women who need and desire God. (2) That God’s Spirit is always active. (3) That the least we should do is to make it possible for those who need Him to meet “ the One who is able.”’ The method is simple. Following the sermon, whatever its theme, a member of the choir sings a Gospel hymn. The audience is requested to bow in prayer and the announcement is made that if there are those present who have burdens of any sort for which they would seek Christ’s strength, or sin from which they would ask His release, they make themselves known by standing or by lifting their hands. All such are assured that they will be remem- bered in the closing prayer preceding the Benediction. Never more than three minutes is consumed in making and completing the invitation. The principle involved is what may be termed “ the line of least resistance.” It has been written that “ God is hard,” and certainly Christianity is not made more attractive by stripping it of stern qualities and manly virtues. “The Son of God goes forth to war, A kingly crown to gain,” is forever the recruiting challenge of the Church of Jesus Christ. Why, then, this so-called “ line of least resistance ” programme in evangelism? It is true that such a policy makes it quite possible for a “ hardened sinner ” to raise his hand beside a saintly woman who, in her sorrow, prays for comfort. And I have seen a profligate make his first appeal for mercy behind a weeping widow’s gown of bereavement. But Nicodemus, who came to Jesus in the night, under cover of the darkness, was not rebuffed. The 16 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM Master Teacher who is our leader both in preaching and in practice, made it easy, very easy, for timid people to take their first steps toward Him. Often He went with them before He called them to Him. He braved the criticism of churchmen and rulers when He sat at the table of Zacchzeus. We constantly find Him adapting His words to the circumstances, the social environment, the intellectual level of inquirers. Nico- demus was the only man to whom He said, ‘‘ Ye must be born again.” Yes, Nicodemus was the only one to whom He said it, though no one ever fully finds Him who does not enter into the experience. To Peter and others like him, He said simply, ‘‘ Follow Me.”’ Mas- terful in its simplicity is the way of Jesus with men, and we make no mistake in following Him. The plans for a “ follow-through,” though unob- trusive, have been measurably effective. Forty “posts ” for personal workers have been designated. Each personal worker occupies his “ post” at every service, or supplies a substitute. The personal work- ers’ group, made up generally of Christian Endeavour- ers, has a chairman and a secretary, and meets for con- sultation and prayer following the mid-week service. Always those who stand or raise their hands are cor- dially greeted, following the Benediction, and invited to meet one of the ministers or any other member of the staff. As a rule, and the rule is seldom if ever de- parted from, a personal worker does nothing more than extend this perfectly natural invitation. This policy enables us to use effectually many naturally timid young people. It also avoids the disaster of embar- rassing those who do not wish to be questioned or conversed with personally. Very recently, one of our less experienced personal workers introduced to me a “THE ONE WHO IS ABLE” 17 former war officer of the American Expeditionary Force, who had raised his hand in the closing period of the service. The young worker, who would have felt himself quite unable to hold any sort of conver- sation with the gentleman, in a perfectly natural and easy Manner gave me an opportunity to have a con- ference with him. One out of three such invitations brings a favorable response. Interviews are arranged to suit the con- venience of the individual. In every instance an earnest effort is made to follow the case through to a decision. The Marble Collegiate Church is a ‘“‘ down-town ”’ church with all the peculiar and baffling ‘‘ down-town ” problems. A comparatively small number of those who lift their hands or stand in these services unite with the local church. They come from all sections of the coun-. try and world, and many of them are related by cor- respondence to churches in other cities. Even so, ninety-one have been received into the fellowship of the Marble Collegiate Church congregation during the recent ten-months’ period. Also, it should not be overlooked that the invitation extended is a general one and that the problems entered into are not con- fined to those individuals who are seeking Christ as Lord and Saviour. During the recent eight months more than three hun- dred and fifty have responded to the invitation by standing or raising their hands. Through one period of the winter an old-fashioned ‘‘ Sing ” was conducted in the parlors of the church following the close of the evening service. People stood and sang familiar hymns while the ministers and their associates moved about informally. The attend- 18 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM ance ran from one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty. There was never an address and the Bene- diction was pronounced absolutely on time! We shall certainly use the plan again. During the six weeks preceding Easter, on what is called ‘‘ Marble Collegiate Family Night,” a class for our personal workers, or a special Bible Class is con- ducted. Each personal worker signs a simple declara- tion of purpose and keeps a card, a duplicate of which is in the hands of the pastor. On this card are entered the names of those in whom the personal worker is especially interested and for whom daily definite prayers are offered. How entirely apart from the personality and mes- sage of the minister the value of this evangelistic invi- tation may be, we have seen demonstrated repeatedly. On one occasion, following a citizenship address to a special audience, the temptation was strong to depart from the customary practice. However, the invitation was extended. More than thirty responded. Would the writer follow this plan in his Sunday morning services? Yes. The nature of the invitation fits it naturally into any programme. It contributes to the life and spirit of a morning as well as of an evening service, and the time involved eliminates the last possible objection. For some time the writer has made it his rule to close every sermon, anywhere, with an invitation of this sort,—Lenten lecture, Y. M. C. A. meeting, mass-meeting, noonday-talk to working girls, —and why not? Who knows when there may be some- one present needing an immediate opportunity to get into touch with the Great Friend and Physician. In- deed, we find that under circumstances of every sort and in every circumstance of public Christian assem- “THE ONE WHO IS ABLE” 19 blage, there are men and women who need to meet without delay “ the One who is able.” THE OUTDOOR PULPIT Beginning two years ago with a series of talks by a missionary expert in street-speaking, we instituted an open-air pulpit at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-ninth Street,—at the noon hour one of the most congested corners in New York City. These meetings were held daily, Saturdays and Sundays ex- cepted. On Sunday evening, preceding the regular service, the minister spoke out-of-doors for ten min- utes. The Young People’s Society adjourning early gave the nucleus of a congregation and supplied the singing. Beginning in May of last year the plan was perfected and the programme enlarged. An attractive platform was built in the arch of the doorway facing the street and avenue. In co-operation with the Greater New York Federation of Churches, services were conducted daily until November 1st. Brief ser- mons were preached by thirty-five of the ministers of New York, representing all denominations. As a rule, the same speaker appeared for an entire week. Leading soloists of the Marble Collegiate Church, and other prominent vocalists, sang Gospel hymns, and a talented trumpeter played. Speakers and musicians wore the academic gown. We found that the use of the gown at once distinguished these services in a city of many street meetings and gave to their message a touch of impressiveness and a note of power. During the first six months of the outdoor meetings, more than thirty thousand people were in attendance, in addition to those who moved to and fro on the street, and more than eight thousand copies of 20 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM the Scriptures, in Yiddish, Italian and English, were given to those who asked for them,—a daily average of more than sixty. The announcement was always made that the little books were available, but a care- less general distribution was avoided. The message of the outdoor pulpit is constructive, evangelical, patriotic and non-controversial. From the lips of New York’s outstanding preachers and most talented musicians, the good news of Jesus is told daily to an increasing number of people. As was said in the opening service of the campaign, “If with our message here we shall send a careless Hebrew to his synagogue, an indifferent Catholic to his cathedral, or a neglectful Protestant to his church, and if we shall make better citizens, we shall be glad. We shall trust the Spirit of God to complete and perfect the work we have begun.” From the Sunday evening services, as well as from the outdoor meetings—although, of course, there are more definite results to tabulate from the former— come many stories that belong to yet another volume of Twice-Born Men. When one contemplates the vast and growing, the appalling spiritual problems of New York City, so small a thing as we are doing does not warrant a pre- tentious setting. But it is my earnest hope that all churches shall on every possible occasion open the way for those in need to meet ‘‘ the One who is able,” and I feel, too, that the very modesty of our success, with the simplicity of its plan, will be an encouragement to others. Let this chapter close with two living illustrations! At the close of a Sunday service, some two years ago, among those who were introduced to the minister “THE ONE WHO IS ABLE” 21 by the personal workers, was a young man who did not give his name. He stated positively that he did not desire an interview, said that he had been attend- ing the services for three months, that several times he had raised his hand for prayer but had always refused to wait for the introduction at the close,—now he merely wished me to know that he felt the need of being remembered in a special way. Two weeks later this young man came forward again and asked for an interview. We met on the next afternoon. I told him, as is my custom, that he need give me no information concerning himself, that I was entirely at his com- mand, but that, of course, my ability to help him would be largely determined by his willingness to trust me. He did not give me his name. Two weeks later we met again, and now the story was told! He had been in the flying service during the War, under another flag than ours; was shot down and terribly burned. Scars cover his body. As a result, very largely of physical and nervous demoral- isation, the after-War period was for him a virtual Inferno. His family is a leading family; his father a distinguished citizen of his own country. The boy came into the great “light,” was soundly changed. Until removing from New York he remained one of our most faithful attendants. One Christmas Sunday evening I found myself standing face to face with his father and mother, and only those who have lived to experience such an hour can know what the meeting meant to us all. “‘ TAKE A CHANCE! ” “Take a chance!” a young profligate said, as, through bleary, boyish eyes he looked at me. The 22 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM Sunday evening service had closed only a few minutes before. Perhaps a dozen men and women had stood to request an interest in the closing prayer. One of the officials of the church had brought to me a young man soaked to the skin—the night was a downpour— and brazenly drunk. He wanted money, and his story was utterly impossible. He told me that he was a son of wealthy Southern parents; that he had gotten into trouble in New York City and lost his money; that his baggage was being held at a prominent hotel for an unpaid bill, and, finally, that a representative of his family would meet him at the Waldorf Astoria on Tuesday afternoon and “ fix things up.” He needed fifteen dollars to meet his immediate necessities and would repay me—“ sure! ” I knew that he was lying, and my friend had started him for the side entrance when he blurted out, ‘‘ Take a chance! ” What it was that prompted me to give that miserable boy another look I do not know (per- haps the omnipotence of a mother’s prayer), but I did look at him again. A New York preacher is deceived so often, and by those who tell much more ingenious stories than this lad had told, that the disgust with which the official of the church received my request to advance him fifteen dollars and charge the same to my personal account, was entirely warranted. The young fellow went squashing out, half-sobered by my parting word. “ Pll take a chance,” I said, “as wild a chance as any gambler ever took for gold. I'll take the chance but, oh, boy, for the sake of many another needy fellow who will come to this church for help, as well as for your own, make good—play the man! ” Let me be perfectly frank: not every story that “THE ONE WHO IS ABLE” 23 begins as this one does, ends in a return and a remit- tance. But the boy from the South came back, came back clean and polished, came back with fifteen dollars and to take me to the Waldorf Astoria, where I met a gracious Southern lady, who stood there in the stead of the boy’s invalid mother, to thank the old Fifth Avenue Church that had gambled with the sin of the City for the soul of her son,—gambled and won. II THE CROSS ABOVE FIFTH AVENUE HE entire programme of the Marble Collegiate year is planned with congregational evangelism in mind. Perhaps a hurried review of a few special features and incidents will give at least an im- pression of the ‘‘ atmosphere ” which we seek to create. One winter afternoon as I approached the church, my eye was caught and held by a great net banner, swung across the Avenue between the tower and the high office-building opposite. The banner itself had been there for some time and the invitation it carried to participate in some philanthropic project had been read by hundreds of thousands of people. But it came now to me with an altogether different message. We were nearing the Lenten season. Why not an Easter banner over Fifth Avenue? The suggestion received the hearty commendation of the officials of the church, but it was thought that it would be difficult, if not im- possible, to secure the consent of the city officials. However, the Church Master made formal application to the responsible officers and a favorable reply was recelved almost at once,—another indication of the fact that we should never be sure that anything is impossible. The banner itself was a huge affair, with great crosses on either side of the flaming legend, ‘“ He is Risen! ” At the bottom of the net which carried the words and the symbol of the Christian faith, was an 24 « THE CROSS ABOVE FIFTH AVENUE 25 announcement of the Lenten programme of the church. For two weeks before Easter this Resurrection declar- ation challenged the mighty city. The attention of hundreds of thousands of people was attracted by it and vast numbers must have felt the sublime lift of the message. Perhaps of all the communications which came to the church as the result of this “‘ experiment ” —for such it was—a visit from a venerable Wall Street broker was the most significant and impressive. He called at the minister’s study and, speaking with un- usual emotion, said, “‘I was on top of the ’bus this morning, riding up from Washington Square, when I saw your banner in the distance and thought that it was a Red Cross flag. When we came near enough to read the words, I had a shock. I was a smalltown boy, sir—went to the old Methodist Church in the arms of my mother, before I could walk. I’ve been anything but a churchman, though, for the past forty years. That banner must have been a magic carpet—it took me back home.” The conclusion of the interview has become an experience sacred to two men. ‘Far more than a publicity feature of a Lenten plan, the slogan, “‘ He is Risen! ” and the crosses flanking it, became to the church. More and more we are recognising the fact that the single elements of a plan must be thought of and thought out as part of a con- nected whole. To change and mix the figure, the ban- ner was one link in the chain that encircled and bound together the church year. INTERDENOMINATIONAL CO-OPERATION A vital feature of the educational and spiritual life of the church is the series of lectures conducted each fall in co-operation with the Greater New York Feder- 26 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM ation of Churches. These lectures are delivered in the afternoon, on the first five days of the week, over a period of from two to four weeks. Such outstanding scholars of the Church as Dr. G. Campbell Morgan and President-Emeritus Francis L. Patten, of Prince- ton University and Princeton Theological Seminary, have been the speakers. Again New York has been a surprise! Magnifi- cent audiences gather daily during the week, and on Sundays the large auditorium of the church has been overflowed. The messages invariably have been evangelistic and non-controversial. By “ non- controversial ” I mean that they have been unfailingly constructive. Always, too, they have made easier the regular Sunday and Wednesday invitations of the minister. They have also brought the local church into closer fellowship with the great sisterhood of churches in the Metropolitan district and have enabled her to have a part in the larger ministry of Christ which no individual church and no one denomination can ever adequately care for alone. The districting of the City of New York by the Greater New York Federation of Churches, which has brought together pastors who, in a measure at least, face similar problems and opportunities because of their residence and ministry in the same communities, has had a direct and helpful effect upon all our activities. Dr. Morgan’s subjects for one thirty-days’ cam- paign were: CHRIST AND THE CurRE OF SOULS or The Methods of Jésus with Indwiduals. Introductory © His Knowledge of Man and Men THE CROSS ABOVE FIFTH AVENUE 27 His Method with the Cautious: ANDREW. His Method with the Elemental: SIMON. His Method with the Unimpressive: PHILIP. His Method with the Guileless: NATHANAEL. His Method with the Gracious: His Moruer. His Method with the Intellectual: NICODEMUS. His Method with the Disillusioned: THE WoMAN oF SAMARIA. His Method with the Derelict: THE IMPOTENT MaN. His Method with the Condemned: THE SINNING WoMAN. His Method with the Corrupt: HErRop. His Method with the Irresponsible: Mary oF Mac- | DALA. His Method with the Lost: ZACCHAEUS, His Method with the Cumbered: MartTHa, His Method with the Disciple: Mary oF BETHANY. His Method with the Sceptic: THOMAS. His Method with the Politician: PILATE. His Method with the Abandoned: Tue Dyince THIEF. His Method with the Zealot: SAUL OF TARSUS. Conclusion— Whosoever : You. MARBLE COLLEGIATE HOME EVENINGS For six weeks immediately preceding and including Holy Week, the plan for Wednesday evenings has for several years been as follows: At six o’clock the “ Family ” meets for supper and an hour of informal good fellowship, enjoyed by all who are able to attend. At seven o’clock the “ Family ” breaks up into groups for Bible Study, Mission Study, and direction in personal work. There is also a Catechetical class for the children. 28 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM At eight o’clock the ‘‘ Family ” reunites for the regu- lar mid-week service. This closing hour is opened with an old-fashioned song, prayer and praise service. The minister in charge conducts a Question Box. Questions handed to him in writing are answered pub- licly or, should the question asked prove unsuitable for consideration in the service itself, the questioner is invariably given the privilege of a personal interview. A solo is followed by a twenty-minute address. The service is unfailingly concluded with a special prayer for those present who have a need for which they have requested special help. Following the mid-week hour, the personal workers frequently meet for conference and discussion. Quite aside from any immediate results which may be achieved by these Wednesday evening activities, an atmosphere of friendliness has been promoted and the evangelistic message has been given an emphasis, indi- rect but exceedingly important. It may not be amiss to suggest again that Atmosphere is always an impor- tant factor in Evangelism. The Wednesday evening subjects for one five- months’ period were: Sinking Ships and Shores of Safety. Open Gates to Greatness. Does It Matter What You Believe? “Lead, Kindly Light.” The Faith of President Coolidge.* Sorrow’s Way to the Summit.* Heaven’s Conservation Policy.* A Midnight Conversation.* Preparatory Service.* A Morning Walk in the Resurrection Garden.* * Subjects during Lent. THE CROSS ABOVE FIFTH AVENUE 29 Enter God. The Shepherd of the Hills. What Does Jesus Christ Mean to You? Hiding Out. New Life in Great Thoughts. The Moral Quitter. Kingdom Building with the King. ‘The Bow in the Clouds. The Man Who Gave More Than a Cup of Water. What Shall My Vacation Be? THE SUMMER CAMP Continuing the theme of ‘‘ Atmosphere,” the Marble Collegiate Summer Camp for Girls has become, with no unnatural effort and with an utter absence of mechanical stimulation, another great opportunity. Under the leadership of a resourceful and consecrated young woman, a beautiful summer home for girls has been established and equipped, on Schroon Lake, in the Adirondacks. In July and August young women come and spend their days and nights in a great bungalow, set among the pines, in spacious grounds, | where every physical comfort and mental need has been anticipated. Here bodies relax, minds are re- freshed and spirits are restored. Beginning with the first summer, the return of the girls to New York has always brought new life to the clubs and societies of the church and new members to the congregation. Social to Save is the title of a rather ancient book, but it makes a very good motto for a modern programme. THE SUNDAY EVENING INVITATION After the sermon address, “ Who Enters Canaan? ” 30 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM which appears on page 70 of this volume, the follow- ing invitation was extended. A similar invitation in- variably closes the evening service: (A Stenographic Report) ‘‘ The sermon was con- cluded with a brief prayer and then the Gospel hymn, ‘I Need Thee, Every Hour,” was sung as a solo. Dr. Poling at once came forward and said: ‘Will you all bow your heads? ” “Tf there are any here who have burdens too great for them to bear alone—grief, business difficulties, family cares, or that greatest of all burdens, sin—we are eager to help you. Stand, or lift your hand, and you will be remembered in this brief prayer before the Benediction.”——“ God bless you, sir,—God bless you—and you—and you. God bless each one of you. I will be glad, so glad, to meet you here at the close of the service.” Another brief interval, then the following prayer and Benediction: ‘“‘Our Father, we have prayed for all tonight, and now we pray especially for these. Thou knowest each one and Thou art able to do for each one beyond all our asking and all our thinking. Bestow the needed blessing; grant the needed grace; supply the lack. If it be sin, make the cry of the sinner honest and com- plete; if it be sorrow, Thou art the Comforter; if it be sickness, Thou art always passing by. O, generous, unfailing Father, let none of these go from this place unsatisfied or incomplete. We know what Thou hast done; we know what Thou canst do; we know Thou canst not fail. ‘* And now may the grace of God Who hath called us into His eternal glory by Christ Jesus our Lord, be with you and abide forever. Amen.” IIT IT HAPPENED ON AN ISLAND HE young people are vitally a part of the evan- gelistic plans of the Marble Collegiate Church. This chapter seeks to visualise their activities in connection with one department of the programme. The scene of our story is located on Manhattan Island in the chapel of what is believed by many to be the oldest Protestant Church in North America. The evening is Sunday; the occasion is the weekly religious service of a Christian Endeavour Society that has an unbroken history of thirty-three years. One hundred and six young people were present—to be sure, a few are older than that—young people from all walks of life and from all quarters of New York. There are Columbia University students, music stu- dents, business women, clerks, traveling salesmen, at least one attorney, and a Y. M. C. A. Secretary or two. The leader is a young woman who makes an original presentation of the topic, “The Dangers of Trifling | with Life.’ She draws her illustrations from the city that weeps and laughs about her. At the right of the leader sits the President, who is the responsible head of an important department in a large store; also, he sings in an important choir. He has opened the meet- ing on time and now “ follows through” with the leader. A blackboard stands at the leader’s left. One of the young artists of the Society has sketched a picture that has the double merit of being both artistic 31 32 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM and illuminating. When the opportunity is given, the response from the floor is prompt and spirited. The singing carries the full swing of youth. A special solo contributes materially to the programme. Promptly at ten minutes before eight Mizpah is repeated and prac- tically all the Endeavourers “ transfer ” to the church auditorium. Here twenty or more of them are among the personal workers, assigned to special “‘ posts.” All make their eonibinen to the life of the aie? service. For ten minutes preceding the Christian Endeavour service just described, a number of the Endeavourers have been in prayer for the success of the meeting. Between six and seven o’clock there has been a social hour, when tea has been served, and the young men and women have gathered together about tables in the church parlour. Some of those present have traveled thirty miles to keep the appointment. The regular socials throughout the winter and picnics in the sum- mer are delightful affairs. More recently this Society has been divided. A Senior Society was organised from among those above thirty years of age who still desire the opportunities of an expressional meeting. More than thirty were enrolled as active members. It has been discovered that while the young people may have been deterred in some instances by those older and more mature, quite as frequently those older and more mature have remained away through fear of depriving the more youthful Endeavourers of their full opportunity. Now four Societies meet in this old down-town church every Sunday evening. The Juniors come at five o’clock; the Intermediates gather at five-thirty and the Young People’s and Senior Societies con- IT HAPPENED ON AN ISLAND 33 vene in different auditoriums at the same hour—seven o’clock. The activities of the District and State Unions and the denominational programme are supported, under the leadership of special committees. The societies secure the subscriptions for denominational publica- tions and furnish visitors for the Every Member can- vass. In one of the Near East Golden Rule Sunday Campaigns it led the societies of the country in its contributions. Invariably it has large delegations, and often the “largest” delegation, at rallies and con- ferences. Its Sunday evening meetings for more than thirty years have never been discontinued for the summer vacation. The senior minister, Dr. David James Burrell, who has served the congregation since 1891, declares that his pastorate, a pastorate of re- markable achievement, would have been difficult indeed, if not impossible, without Christian En- deavour, and the co-minister supports the declaration. There are some who labour under the impression that to make Christian Endeavour (and, of course, the principle applies to every other Young People’s organisation with the same general aims and plans) meet present day needs, it is necessary to depart from the spirit and plan of the Society as a denominational and inter-denominational movement. The intimation is that somehow the movement itself is responsible for a local society that does not appeal to young men and young women. Frequently the subject, ‘‘ What is the matter with Christian Endeavour? ” is raised and discussed,—and a good subject it is. Later, the regular Christian En- deavour topics may be abandoned because they ‘presuppose a personal experience which they (the \ 34 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM Endeavourers) do not have.” New topics may be prepared, among others the following: “ A Single or Double Standard,” ‘‘ Things That Help and Hinder Our Town,” ‘ Prohibition,” “ Shall We Label Our- selves Christians or Not?” What is the result? New life and vigour, of course. Perhaps the Society gets out of the “clipping rut’ and there is a “clash of mind on mind ”’; “ convictions which are original and not borrowed ” follow. A new pledge, a new kind of topic and a new leadership, make a new Society. Plan- ning Sunday evenings once a month, with a musical programme and light refreshments, becomes popular. The group method of leadership, which is always new to those who have not used it, and which should be tried by many others, is seized upon as an innovation. But positively everything that such a Society does to break away from the formalism that crushed out its incentive and vital life, Christian Endeavour Societies have been and are doing. All of these ideas and plans, with hundreds of others, have arisen out of the experi- ence of the organisation given its beginning in the Williston Church, of Portland, Maine, by Francis BR. Clark. The writer has had nothing to do with the selection of Christian Endeavour topics, but, looking over the regular topics for the current year and comparing them with the “special” topics selected by several societies for their own use, he finds no new ground covered by the latter. He does discover that the widely representative character of the Topic Com- mittee of the Interdenominational Young People’s Commissions, which represents the Epworth League, the Baptist Young People’s Union and Luther League, as well as the Christian Endeavour, has IT HAPPENED ON AN ISLAND 35 naturally achieved a series much more adaptable to the needs and characteristics—denominational and geographical—of our whole country and of the world. Of course, in every instance an individual young people’s society that is wide awake, does exactly what these other organisations have done,—adapts subjects to the needs of the particular community and church. As to the pledge, there has never been a time when a local church has not been encouraged to select the “covenant ” or “ declaration” it finds best suited to its own needs. It is true that the vast majority of the societies have found a measure of strength in uniform- ity, but many a pastor has written the ‘“ pledge” or “object ” his young people have finally selected. As a minister, and before that, as a Christian En- deavour Secretary and as a Christian Endeavourer in a college society, the writer has found Christian En- deavour adaptable; not only adaptable, but quickly responsive to the challenge of the new or unusual con- dition. We have Christian Endeavour in our church today, because it meets the need, meets the local need, meets the interdenominational need, meets—and meets magnificently—the world need, that need which waits on the finer and larger unity, without which the Chris- tian Church is so often shamed before her task. We are a down-town church, but our Intermediate Chris- tian Endeavour Society and our Junior Christian Endeavour Society, though small, are flourishing. Two of our Intermediates are preparing for the min- istry and one of our Endeavourers is now in a Theo- logical Seminary. In every instance the Christian Endeavour activities of the church correlate with the work of the clubs for women and girls and boys and with the classes in the Sunday School. They make for 56 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM fulness of life and genuineness of social and spiritual expression. The President of the Official Board of our church received his training in a Christian Endeavour Society; another of the four elders was a former active Endeav- ourer, and one of the most influential members of the congregation has been President of the New York State Christian Endeavour Union. He was the Executive Chairman of the New York World’s Convention Com- mittee. The Church has such a lively appreciation of the interdenominational values of the organisation that the United Society of Christian Endeavour receives a contribution from its budget. The writer has no hesitation in referring to these things, for Christian Endeavour began in his church before he was old enough to join a Junior Society. That which he writes about he is in no sense re- sponsible for. Christian Endeavour is a tool, not an automatic machine. It may be used or abused. It may be mis- understood and abandoned, but many have found it, over a period of more than two generations, a tre- mendously effective instrument,—the most effective among many offered to the Church and her leadership, for bringing young people to Jesus Christ, for strength- ening and developing them in the Christian life, and for training them in the service of the Kingdom. IV STOP SLANDERING YOUTH! that the evangelistic programme described here, though not at all limited to them, is very vitally for, and with young people. Perhaps a frank, however incomplete, facing of the ‘ problem of youth” will not be amiss. “TY would not be the father of children today. I would not assume any responsibility for bringing new lives into the world. I am afraid to be a father.” The speaker was a well-to-do, cultured Christian gen- tleman, and the husband in a childless home. He isa coward, of course—but what are the facts? If we are to believe much of our current literature, youth is almost unbelievably irresponsible and sophisti- cated, and, by all formerly-held standards, morally unrestrained. Current fiction is full of youthful heroes who talk like continental physiologists, and radiant heroines who are competent to give post-graduate courses to their nurses and mothers. A brilliant novel- ist, in a frank interview, declares that, “the average middle-class young folks are doing the things that used to be confined to millionaires.”” And one may add that what was formerly available to only those who had the checkbook and accompanying opportunities of the mil- lionaire, may now be procured at greatly reduced prices by any man’s son. Main Street and Broadway run into each other. 37 Prrtacinee chapters have emphasised the fact 38 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM The Ford and the Rolls-Royce travel the same high- way. Skirts are as long or as short in Kalamazoo as they are in Manhattan. Fashion plates reach the Pacific within thirty-one hours after they are released on Fifth Avenue, and the radio is troubled as little by static in San Francisco as it is in Boston. What are the facts? Well, bobbed hair is one of them. Sermons are being preached with headdress and hair style as a theme. The cigarette is another fact. The medical director of the Life Extension Institute is authority for the statement that young women are particularly affected by the cigarette; that their death rate between the ages of 17 and 32 is considerably higher than that of their brothers; that if they do not stop smoking they will seriously impair the phys- ical efficiency of the race. The modern dance and juvenile bootlegging are yet other facts. The latest official report on dance halls and cabarets for New York City is enough to make parents run in terror to the desert. | Youth is accused of being common today; of wear- ing his sentiments loudly; of playing his juvenile game of love with a certain brazen affrontery. A great friend of adolescence asks, ‘‘ Were not young people richer, happier, when their associations were under an embarrassed restraint, when holding hands was not commonplace, and when a kiss was an event; when conversation did not have to be shocking to be interest- ing,’ and, one might add, when love stories were a suc- cess without being cluttered up with the paraphernalia of a maternity clinic? Certainly the times in which we live are full of men- ace for civilisation because of the perils surrounding and claiming youth. I wonder whether this may be STOP SLANDERING YOUTH! 39 the chief peril—that ‘‘ young people are apt to think themselves wise enough, just as drunken men think themselves sober enough.” But these that have been mentioned are not all the facts. All young people are not common—emphat- cally no—comparatively few are. I have seen dancing in hotel dining-rooms that made me feel like doing physical violence to some dancers, but with all the hotels and dance halls and cabarets of New York crowded, comparatively few of the young people of even this city are found there, and of these few, com- paratively few, are vicious. As a father, I have a per- fectly legitimate case against the evil picture on our screen, the evil play on our stage, the evil book and magazine on our news-stand. These things are poison in the spring of our home and social life. They pollute our soul. They foul us from within. They should be stopped. They should be destroyed. But youth has a wealth of fineness and courage that not even socially cultivated filth can cover. Normal youth has deep centers of resistance, hidden sources of power, and above this pestilential scum of screen and stage and social excess, our young men and our young women still see visions! It is my candid opinion that we get more—vastly more—from youth than we deserve; that the good holdings are far beyond the investment we make. Never did any civilisation have a soil as rich as ours in which to plant the seeds of religion, morality and patriotism. Never has any nation known a braver field in which to sow the promise of her destiny. Stop slandering youth! For all the bankers who are defaulters, there are thousands who remain faithful and honest. 40 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM For all the husbands and for all the wives who break the vow of marriage there is a great company of virtu- ous fathers and mothers. For all the preachers who betray their trust, there are thousands who hold inviolate their vows. For all the young people who sell their birthright of health and chastity, there are hundreds of thousands who hold fast their virtue and their faith. Many others there are who, swept from their feet by a sudden tide of temptation, struggle back again to gain at last the guarded heights. All honor to them. By those of us who are older, let it be remembered that when we find ourselves out of sympathy with the young, then is our work in this world done. Bulwer Lytton once said: “ Every street has two sides. When two men shake hands and part, watch which of the two takes the sunny side. He will be the younger man of the two.” Watch the man who takes the sunny side of faith and hope, of sympathy and understanding, as he walks the crowded, maddening way of youth. He will be in all things the younger man. The facts concerning youth are many and highly involved, but one stands out above all the, others. Youth ts today more sinned against than sinning. “We criticise their hair, their skin, their shoes, their skirts and their manners. I suppose that when we were young, to hear some of us talk, we were gentle angels sitting around on horsehair sofas with piously folded hands! ” declares a wise Bishop. ‘“ We forget banged hair. We forget balloon skirts and bell sleeves that crowded quiet citizens into the street and blocked the entrances of public buildings. We look upon Yes, We Have No Bananas as a sign of degeneracy, but who was it—what generation, if you please,—that sang STOP SLANDERING YOUTH! 41 “Pharaoh's daughter on the bank, Little Moses in the pool; She fished him out with a telephone pole, And sent him off to school?” As between taking incidents of the Bible and making hilarious songs out of them, some of us prefer the Yes, We Have No Bananas of our children.” The writer has seen more than 20,000 young men and women in religious conferences and conventions within recent months. A finer, cleaner, more normal lot of young men and women no generation has ever produced. In my twenty years of experience with young people, an experience that has taken me into every state and province of North America, I have never faced such numbers of sterling youth. They are the most responsive people in the world. They answer more quickly to the invitations of high ideals and they respond more generously to the challenge of service and sacrifice than any other group. I have found them more sympathetic toward others and less sophisticated. In my work as a minister I have never known them to fail when appealed to on the plane of sincerity and honor. Years ago a young lad made himself generally ob- noxious to the officials and members of my congrega- tion. He capped the climax by shooting liquid snuff into the mid-week service room. We sounded more like a hay fever clinic than a prayer meeting, and hastily adjourned. Although the case was not com- plete, and the evidence entirely circumstantial, a coun- cil of war court-martialed the aforesaid youth—in his absence—and solemnly decided to hand him over to 42 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM the authorities for a trip to the Boys’ Reformatory. I asked for a chance with him first. My long-suffering officials generously consented. I met him alone. I accused him of nothing, but told him I was in deep trouble and that he was the only fellow in the world who could help me out. Well, he helped me! There is much more to the story, but its details are unimportant. He helped me out. That boy never again failed in any vital matter of deportment. He is a successful Ohio business man now. Our friendship has been strengthened by the years. It has helped me trust youth! But for the sad, the vicious things no man dare ignore, who are chiefly to blame? In a questionnaire sent to practically all Protestant clergymen, the follow- ing answer to this question was received. First of all, only twenty-five per cent. of those replying believed that young people were worse in this generation than in former generations; seventy-five per cent. declared them to be at least not worse; seventy-eight per cent. of all writers mentioned the bad example and lax dis- cipline of parents as a cause of present day unsatis- factory conditions, and twenty-eight per cent. listed the failure of parents, the moral delinquency of parents at this point, as chiefly, as primarily responsible. All but twenty-eight per cent. gave as the principal reasons for the failure of youth, the indifference and failure of mature men and women to discharge their obligation to youth. It has been said that to neglect youth is the greatest social sin. Then what a colossal failure our generation has been! A recent newspaper caption read, ‘‘ Doctors operate on lad’s head to make better boy of him.” That isn’t where our fathers operated to make better boys of us! The writer has no com- STOP SLANDERING YOUTH! 43 plaint and no regrets, but we twentieth century fathers must face the fact that discipline without example is disaster! Recently one of the great football men of the current university year, in summarising social conditions on the campus of his institution, said, ‘‘ Following the Washington Student Conference on Law Enforcement conducted by ‘ The Committee of One Thousand,’ my college made a ‘rightabout face.’ Student drinking became negligible. The fellow who encouraged it was quickly in disgrace. Fraternity, athletic and class leaders united for a thorough law enforcement pro- gram. But when the alumni came back for Com- mencement and for the social functions preceding Commencement, the campus went drunk again.” What an appalling indictment of the adult! Two young girls from a fashionable finishing school were talking with one of their more mature associates recently. Said one of them: “ Life isn’t worth much. Life isn’t worth living.” ‘The friend, a refined, Chris- tian woman, spoke in eagerness of ideals and visions, but received the startling answer, “ Yes, and our parents were that way once, but they aren’t any more.” A minister called to visit a mother in agony of sus- pense because of the tragedy that had come upon her daughter’s married life. He found a woman who, with her husband, had given her daughter an example of scandal and divorce. A boy of seventeen, who should be fresh and eager, in the full tide of his finest, his wildest ambitions, is sated with the tainted offerings society calls pleasure, withered in his heart and blasé! Who is to blame? Not the boy! Mr. Booth Tarkington asks: ‘“ Will you please tell 44 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM me how a child can respect its parents after it has seen them turkey-trotting? ” And he continues: ‘“ The real blame for the present day wildness of young folks, rests with us—the older generation.”” And he con- cludes: ‘I am inclined to think that when our grand- children, our children’s children come, we may look for an improvement. Then fathers and mothers will begin to say—‘ Let’s don’t have them run the risks and get into the mischief that we did.’ They will have seen the disastrous results of their parents’ loose upbringing and then of their own.” At any rate, the change will come whenever parents become enough disgusted with themselves to set their hearts on working a decided improvement in themselves and in their offspring! And, remember, with adolescence the power of example is irresistible. What do we owe youth? With some difficulty I refrain from writing at length here of those funda- mental home influences the reader would naturally expect a religious leader to stress. Perhaps this very expectation has dulled the message. The writer could not have taken from his life the influence of the family altar and the old family pew in the church, without standing morally feeble, if not helpless, before his | temptations and tasks. The home today without these things, and all the associations that go with them, car- ries an appalling handicap in dealing with its sons and daughters. Now I have written it after all! I repeat—What do we owe youth? First of all— our time. What is Wall Street, or bridge, when com- pared with the baby who reaches out two chubby hands to hold you longer? What are ten operas, or a dozen social afternoons worth, if purchased at the expense of a lonely little girl or a heart-hungry little boy? A little STOP SLANDERING YOUTH! 45 while ago a dainty miss stood cautiously, diffidently at my chamber door and said, ‘“‘ When will you have time to play?”’ Do you remember the frantic father in Channing Pollock’s The Fool, the father who had never known his little girl, and who awoke one morning to find that he never would know her, because she was dead? There was some excuse for that father. The old fourteen-hour day, and the twenty-four hour shift, and seven-day week are wicked things, for they make fathers strangers to their children. But there is an- other menace worse than these—the menace of the twenty-four-hour day; the twenty-four-hour day for fathers and mothers; the twenty-four-hour day that substitutes nurses and butlers for parents, and robs the cradle of the hand that moves the world. We owe youth our comradeship—our understanding comradeship. The father who is not the pal of his son may be a millionaire, but he is a pauper and to be pitied. He may win a fortune, but he has already lost his pearl of great price. Parents must help each other. A mother must not spare herself to help a father to understand and to be understood, and a father must do not less for the mother of his children. Eternal issues are at stake. The weal or the woe of the nations are involved, and the future of the Kingdom of God on earth. Years ago I came to my study from a long journey and discovered that I had been preceded; that my small son had been there ahead of me. He had shoved my books into the recesses of the shelves; he had dis- covered my editorial scissors and had trimmed the edges of my manuscripts; he had written on a wall with vigour, if not with distinction; he had made it a day by overturning my inkwell. His mother found him 46 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM there and promised him that I would find him later. And I did. He was full of words—a baby’s eager, frightened chatter—but I was full of wrath. Some of us still hold that there is ample ground for believing that Solomon was right. I did not spoil my son that day by forgetting my Solomon. But when the storm had somewhat abated, the sobbing fellow told me— made it perfectly plain, though no one else could have understood him—that J was wrong. He knew nothing about physiology, but he did know that I was away and that he was lonely, and so he went to the place where I was generally to be found when at home. He touched my books and thought of me. He stroked my papers and thought of me. He wielded my pen and thought of me. Hungry for me, he sought, not knowing why nor how, unconscious of all the weighty science involved—he sought to identify himself with my task, his father’s task, and I thrashed him for it. Because my comradeship was not as true as his; because I did not understand, I punished him. But let the last word be the most vital one. Give Youth your confidence. They will not betray your confidence and they will begin to have it in themselves. They will begin to have confidence in you! I knew a red-haired village terror who had destroyed the order of a school room, but who was won and changed by being given the responsibility for the peace and deport- ment of a dozen other boys. Give your confidence to youth! Let them know it! Give to them the dignity of that knowledge—and the restraint. In 1861 a staff-officer called a young orderly and entrusted him with a dangerous mission. And when the lad prepared to retire, in response to the final in- structions of his superior, he said, “‘ 7 will do my best, STOP SLANDERING YOUTH! AT Sir.” Like a bugle rang the officer’s reply, “ You will do it,’—-and he did. “The destiny of any nation at any time depends upon the opinions of its young men under twenty-five,” wrote Goethe. Another has said that in youth we learn, and in age we understand. ‘This is the balance that life keeps between the mortal seasons. ‘‘ Old men for counsel, young men for war,” is the other way of saying it. But certainly where there is failure, youth is not more often to blame. It is the writer’s observa- tion that, as a rule, in any engagement, the fighting is better done than the planning. Give Youth your confidence! They have earned it. In all strenuous places of work and thought Youth is in command. In the exceptional places will be found those men and women whose hearts are young, and who still see visions. I saw an engineer run his line across a spur of the Coast mountains. He was captain of the advance guard that blazed the way for the great Pacific Boule- vard which stands now in cement and granite from Canada to Mexico. He was 26 when he completed the assignment. I saw a healthful water supply replace the stagnant, disease-laden pools of Brest, in 1918. An old high school chum of mine had charge of that assignment. I watched twelve thousand men move in toward Toul and on to the first salient taken over by an American Combat Division, in January, 1918—twelve thousand men, did I-say? Twelve thousand men and boys, I should say, and, if years be the criterion, make the record read for all the wars—boys. As I write, I seem to hear a clear voice speaking beside an old haystack near Williams College. A 48 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM clear voice, indeed, for after a century it still may be heard. Far carrying, it rings around the world. Those first student volunteers for modern missions were college lads, under-graduates. And the company whose spiritual challenge they became, whose torch they lighted, is an army of youth, an army, tens of thousands strong; young men and young women who have compassed the earth, laying down the foundation of churches and schools, raising up the walls of hos- pitals, teaching brotherhood, revealing the Galilzean’s way of life, proclaiming the Gospel, bringing to those who sit in darkness the marvelous light and liberty of the Sons of God. The most sublime program ever given to man came from a Teacher of thirty who completed His earthly ministry in three years, and who called as companions and helpers a dozen humble youths, every one of whom was younger than Himself. Some years ago, in fingering through the documents and letters belonging to a woman of whose humble estate I was the administrator, I came upon letters— letters yellow and brittle with age. Written in the stern days of the Civil War, they revealed the tragedy of a divided family. A son had broken his parent’s hearts by espousing the cause of the Union and by championing the freedom of the slave. His dearest sister was writing to him—seeking to change him from his wayward course. Again and again the flame of his ideal leaped up from those silent pages. He spoke of Lincoln—called him the greatest prophet since Isaiah, and the greatest patriot since Washington. Then how grandly he concluded—“ Yes, I can break your hearts, for in breaking yours I break my own, but I cannot sell my soul, not even for your love.” Forever it is true— STOP SLANDERING YOUTH! 49 that Youth takes the best of the past, breaks with the worst, and eternally goes forward. Give Youth your confidence. Trust Youth to act with greater wisdom than his years as with greater promptness than his fears. Trust Youth to be progressive—to be progressive always; but given any fit leadership at all, any reason- able parental example and comradeship, trust Youth to reverence ancient, worthy, holy things. In each generation is made clear, and in no generation more unmistakably clear than in this, the purpose of young women and young men to serve their day and generation at any cost to themselves. To serve with consecration and abandon, but to serve soundly, as those who stand upon the highest places of moral and Spiritual discovery, crying to all the winds that blow— ‘““'We believe! Make way for truth! ” Another name for Youth is Faith. 1+ Deen yak oy Rl a s II SERMON-ADDRESSES ¥ THREE ROADS TO POWER VERY normal man, every normal woman, H, covets power. Not power for power’s sake, but power for what it secures—power because power brings prestige and respect, gives position and assures success. There may be a few who are satisfied with power itself—the mere consciousness of it, the knowledge that it is available. There are some others who deliberately practise its abuse, who exercise it selfishly, viciously, who with forethought employ it to hurt others. But in the large, Society is made up of average men and women who in their thinking associ- ate power with success, and who, desiring success as the supreme end of life, covet power as the sure road to it. I say that average men and women—normal men and women—look upon success as the supreme end of life. Surely this is true. The instinct for victory is the great instinct. Our definitions of success vary; vary widely. Our ideals and standards, our environ- ments, our moral shortcomings, our strength and our weakness,—these all enter into our definitions. But what we conceive to be success, whatever that concep- tion, is the goal upon which our eyes are set and our hearts fixed. To the missionary, success is a tribe evangelised, a dark continent Christianised; to a ban- dit, success is a fruitful robbery completed without a prison sequel, Both missionary and bandit covet 33 54 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM power to achieve. To one man success is a fortune; to another success is pleasure—the joys of this world; to yet another success is fame. And yet some there are who surrender wealth and pleasure and earthly station to embrace a life of self-abnegation, to bury themselves with sacrifice and dangers in physical pov- erty, and all this to find their highest triumph. But it it for success that each man strives, and power to achieve it each man covets. These success standards are not only different, but in each individual each standard is subject to change. The babe shrieks with the delight of accomplishment when for the first time he bangs his rattle on the floor. But, tomorrow, success with him is something more. I well remember when success to me was selling fifteen papers in the morning. The newsboy’s standard for success may enlarge until from rejoicing in an average morning sale, he is satisfied with nothing less than the control and ownership of the publication. The writer is of the opinion that the majority of men and women are not committed in their lives to a selfish, personal success standard. I do not believe that many men and women think of success as some- thing to be achieved at the expense of others, nor do I believe that many deliberately claim success as some- thing for themselves alone. I have faith that average men and women generally think of success as being the victory of what they conceive to be the right, and that in a test they are ready to offer their lives for the right as they know it. But I know, too, that average men and women are not always clear in their own minds as to how success is to. be won. I know that some apparently estimable people practice what you and I hold is a sophistry— THREE ROADS TO POWER 55 namely, “the end justifies the means.” These would insist that a holy cause sanctifies any lie told in its defence, purifies any wrong committed on its behalf. Here we come face to face with three major methods of victory. First, the method of force, the power of violence. Many there are who argue that inevitably the final ap- peal is to physical, material strength; that for nations, armed conflict is forever the end of a dispute, and that for individuals the same principle holds. With these, ruthlessness becomes a religion. They say when the mob gathers: “‘ Use the stick and at once; do not argue, and do not wait.”’ For such, all attempts to reconcile international differences, to adjust racial antipathies, to arbitrate the opposing claims and the economic dis- putes of nations, is a waste of time and a sign of weak- ness. These have no use for disarmament conferences and associations of nations. Weakness is the sin of the weak, and the God-given opportunity of the strong. Apply the principle in the world of public affairs, and we have wars, the raising up of super-powers to brush aside or trample under foot the little countries until at last in some great cataclysm, the balance is restored and the mad race in armaments begins all over again. Or some autocrat usurps the throne, be- heads the influential foes, proclaims himself the heir of Divine right and maintains his seat until the stronger force unseats him. Or men in positions of trust con- spire against those who have raised them from obscur- ity, exploit the public domain and turn to private uses the common treasure. They regard their power, how- ever they may have come by it, as force to be used for personal ends. They look upon the opportunity to increase their own gains as an invitation from Heaven. 56 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM In business, the application of the principle justifies the destruction of competitors by any known sharp practice. The bankruptcy of a rival is cause for sing- ing the Doxology. One of the favourite mottoes of those who go this way is: ‘‘ In trade mercy is a folly. Do unto others as you think others would do unto you, and do it first! ” DoI believe that many men practise this principle? Certainly I donot. I have known only a very limited number who ever did. That the number is increasingly small, I am persuaded. But there ts a temptation here for every man. The Golden Rule is not an easy measurement. In religion the application of the principle of force took in ancient times the form of social and physical persecution, nor did the iron heel and the rack seem to be the exclusive property of any one sect. There were isolated killings, local torture devices, and there were national massacres. New nations with their untortured peoples were saved from spiritual damnation by their conquerors who marched under holy flags, baptising them with water in the name of the Trinity before they decapitated them in the name of the King. In our time the same principle expresses itself in the determined effort on the part of a few to drive out of the church those who do not subscribe to a particular interpretation of Scripture or doctrine, and to coerce men and women into intellectual conformity with cer- tain definitions of spiritual experience. Surely, here, the will and method of Jesus are clear. ‘‘ Let both grow together,” He said, “‘ until the harvest, and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, gather ye first the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn.” And you will recall that Jesus gave as the sufficient reason for such a THREE ROADS TO POWER 57 policy of delay and mildness—“ Lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them.” This first method, the force method, must be dis- avowed by those who set their faces steadfastly toward success, only as it becomes the principle of discipline in the higher law—the infinitely higher law of truth. Truth is the second major method of victory. ‘“ Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” Force becomes a brutal pygmy when measured by the stature and power of truth. Force perishes in its own blood, falls into its own grave of persecution, but truth marches on with the conquered unshackled and fol- lowing loyally in its train. Truth reasons, and has presently a supporting army. Force crushes, and starves eventually in an impover- ished country. The proponents of truth as the supreme method of victory insist that men may be trusted, may always be trusted to accept truth when truth is made clear. But there are some who are equally insistent that truth in a crisis must have force behind it; that talking with an erring friend when you have the ability and opportunity to knock him down and drag him out is feeble and pusillanimous. They are on what they hold as principle against frittering time away in peace councils. A little while ago the President of France, M. Gaston Doumergue, visited his old friends and neighbours in the ancient Huguenot City of Mines, and said to them in an informal way some things about peace and tolerance that may be applied with equal force to both religion and politics. ‘‘ Long experience,” he declared, “has taught me that ideas never gain ground by being either spread or defended with violence. Violence adds nothing to their virtue, where they have any, and it 58 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM serves only to hide their appeal, to prevent their dif- fusion, and even to make them highly objectionable. Ideas which have need of violence to attain diffusion and become accepted, never lead to happiness, liberty or lasting peace, and they never produce a very high or a very human civilisation.” Truth has in herself irresistible tides of life—hidden springs of immortal power. Enemies cannot long hide her, nor can they ever destroy her, but unwise and violent friends have often greatly delayed her. The third major method of success is the method of Jesus. The final, the ultimate method, is neither force nor truth alone. ‘Truth crushed to earth will rise again; but there is an Omnipotence that lifts her and that Omnipotence is love. ‘“‘ Love so amazing—Love so divine.” “Ask not of me what is Love, Ask what is good of God above. Ask of the great sun what is light, Ask what is darkness of the night. Ask sin of what may be forgiven, Ask what ts happiness of Heaven.” “ Love is the river of life in this world,’ Beecher said. “Think not that ye know it who stand at the little tinkling rill_—the first small fountain. Not until you have gone through the rocky gorges and not lost the stream; not until you have traversed the meadow, and the stream has widened and deepened until fleets could ride on its bosom; not until beyond the meadow you have come to the unfathomable ocean and poured your treasures into its depths;—not until then can you know what love is.” All of woman’s tenderness THREE ROADS TO POWER 59 and all of man’s justice, love is, and all of God, for God is love! Have you ever before faced the fact that with these three major methods to choose from—force, truth and love, the Galilzan selected the latter. ‘ All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth,” He declared. Even Satan bore witness to that truth and tempted Jesus accordingly. Omnipotence was his. High priests, blood-hungry. mobs, Roman soldiers and pretors of the Cesars, were all potential pygmies in His hands. But they survived while He accepted the death they imposed, because He suffered them to live. The hands that lifted bread and fish, the will that multiplied fragments of food until a hungry multitude was satisfied, could have raised vast armies with equal ease and promptness. Calvary may have been a Roman holiday by right of Roman arms, but it is the world’s Holy Day because of the omnipotence of the love that changed it from a slave’s cross to a Saviour’s crown. Has it ever occurred to you that with three methods —force, truth and love—to choose from, Jesus selected love because love was the mightiest? He came to rescue a race, to redeem man. Equipped with utter wisdom and utmost power, He surveyed the task, ap- praised His enemies, spent thirty years in preparation for His ordeal, and then made His finish fight, having selected love as the one and only method to save a world. Doing so, He broke with tradition. He caused enemies to laugh with derision, and followers to turn away in disappointment. He surrendered an immedi- ate, tangible crown for a spiritual kingdom beholden only by a few far-eyed dreamers. But He won! He accomplished that whereunto He was sent. He saved 60 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM the world. By the test of results, by the standard of success, His selection is confirmed, His method is vindicated. Herod the adulterer—puppet king by sufferance of imperial power—had his day, but its sun went down into a starless night, and even so, its last rays lingered over a hill of execution where a naked man hung dead upon his cross. Pilate, creature of the mightiest ancient empire ever raised upon spearpoints, invoked force to accomplish his half will and fearing force more than truth, knowing naught of a greater, damned his soul to please his King. Those who search for the kingdoms of wisdom dig among ruins, those who trace the paths of temporal empires follow a way bordered by tombs, but the One whom Herod mocked and Pilate crucified, Calvary’s victim of force, still lives and reigns “ where’er the sun does his successive courses run.” But certainly Jesus did not spurn the way of truth. “My word is truth,” He declared. His wisdom sur- passed that of the wisest. At twelve He was confound- ing the Temple doctors. His words remain. His teachings survive. His social standards and moral ideals, His program for human relationships stand unchallenged today in the last court of humanity’s appeal. Ah, no, Jesus did not spurn, did not ignore the way of truth, but He made truth dynamic. He glorified it—glorified and perfected it with love. He gave it an immortal soul, made it divine, omnipotent. Love was the final method of Jesus because love alone is omnipotent. Both force and truth have their place—force in certain desperate, immediate situ- ations, and truth is royal under all conditions. But love it is that makes force discipline and not reprisal. THREE ROADS TO POWER 61 Love it is that makes wisdom a means and not an end, a minister instead of a master, and love it is that sets truth on fire;—Love of country, love of fellowman, love of those loved dearer yet than life itself, and love of God. Force could inflict taxation without representation as a principle of despotic government, but force could not enforce it for the spirit of ’76 would not consent. Force could deny the early Christian the right to wor- ship in public places and private houses, but force could not keep them from the Catacombs, the bloody sands of the Colosseum and the flaming stake and so the Rome of Nero burned and not the Church of Paul. And today, where Democracy prevails, where Chris- tianity masters, the method of victory is love. President Watson, of the American University at Cairo, wrote, ‘“‘ The only force that will avail to win the Moslem is love. I used to think that the greatest power in the world was truth, but truth alone cannot win the Moslem. ‘There is something mightier than truth, especially for Moslem lands and lives. It is love. If we would win, we must love.” What a restatement of our text. ‘‘ If we would win, we must love.” “ He loved them unto the end.” The method of Jesus was love because of love’s supreme conquering power. For Israel or Greece or Rome, Moslem or Gentile or Jew, love is the supreme con- quering power. Love conquers, too, because love sur- vives. The books of wisdom fade and crumble, accepted truths become outgrown traditions, the spears of power rust and break, but Love lasts! And Love stands alone in being stronger at the end than at the beginning. Who, who, then, will follow in His train? VI THE PHARISEE’S THANKSGIVING y \HE Pharisee’s thanksgiving prayer is the classic of its kind. ‘“ God, I thank Thee that I am not as other men are,” is the perfect expression of deliberate isolation. Deliberate isolation is for an in- dividual, or a nation, the last end of selfishness. Jesus with His perfection of concise style has here com- pressed into twelve words the classical illustration from the Talmud. When Rabbi Nechonina Ben Hakana left his school he was wont to say, “I thank Thee, O Eternal my God, for having given me part with those who attend this school instead of running through the shops. I rise early like them, but it is to study the law, not for futile ends. I take trouble as they do, but I shall be rewarded and they will not. We run alike, but I for the future life, while they will only arrive at the pit of destruction.” We are not inclined to remind ourselves at any length of the disapproval that the Great Master ex- pressed for the Pharisee. But the Pharisee failed in two directions. His gratitude was not only for what he imagined himself to be—it was also for what he was sure the publican was not and could not become. Here is the curse of deliberate isolation. Men so centre in what they have, or think they have, that their concern for the less fortunate is dissipated in pride and selfish- ness. True gratitude is mixed with humility and hu- mility has in it the essence of responsibility. He who 62 THE PHARISEE’S THANKSGIVING 63 is truly thankful for the good gifts he possesses, in- stinctively turns to share them. Have you ever tried to compose a proper prayer for that Pharisee of Scripture? Perhaps it should have been something like this: ‘“ God, I thank Thee that we sinners have Thy mercy in our hands, and that all men may be as we are ’—and should have been offered with the Pharisee’s arm thrown over the shoulder of the publican. Perhaps it is not amiss to remind ourselves on this Thanksgiving Day that as a people we must guard against a Pharisaical Thanksgiving—a national holi- day of self praise. We see the faces of the Near East orphans as those helpless children flash across the screen. We hear the sabre rattle in the far Sudan. We read of breadlines in Manchester and visualise the utter political chaos of China. We look, then, to our own peaceful fields and bursting harvests. We cut our : coupons and count the gains from rising markets. We thank God that the Government at Washington still survives and almost before we know it, we are thanking Him with the implications of the Pharisee that ‘“ we are not as others are.” But in a more vital way America must avoid the snare of isolation, the pride of selfishness. Our people return from Europe and with scarcely a dissenting voice say, ‘‘ Thank God that I am an American,” and “ Breathes there a man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath sasd, This is my own, my native land? Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d, As home his footsteps he hath turn’d From wandering on a foreign strand?” 64 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM Love of country, next to love of God and love of God’s way, is the most beautiful, the most sublime experience of the human soul. Patriotism—true pa- triotism—is an international sentiment, but it begins at home. It has at its heart that profound principle which Jesus recognised when He said: ‘ Go ye into all the world—beginning at Jerusalem.”’ Frankly, I am as-suspicious of the man who boasts of an internationalism that makes no distinctions, as I am of a husband who confesses a love of womankind that does not begin first and remain last with the wife of his covenant, the mother of his children. Thank God that you are an American, then, but God pity us when we thank God that we are not as other people— even these Chinamen, or Italians, or Armenians, or Germans, or French, or Russians, or British. Our national Thanksgiving prayer, in order to pass inspection at the throne of the only monarch who does not tremble for His crown must be: “ Thank God, for man’s common heritage of opportunity. Thank God that in the Divine Purpose all men are created free and equal.” And that prayer must be offered with hands stretched out across the seas. Our national thanks- giving will be the finest experience of our history if we make it the opening number of an international service that concludes with a Congressional World Court Doxology. Less than this will leave us standing peril- ously close to the self-satisfied individual of whom the wisest, kindliest Teacher this world ever knew said: ‘‘ For every one that exalteth himself shall be abased.”’ But always we are chiefly concerned with the per- sonal appeal of Thanksgiving Day. We gather as men and women, as fathers and mothers, sons and daugh- THE PHARISEE’S THANKSGIVING 65 ters. Presently we shall dine as such, and then perhaps —TI wish that all might hope for so happy an event— we shall meet the laughter of our children and the music of our friends in a room where joy and love are the makers of delight. What shall we be thankful for? Of course, for the majority of us some things are at once eliminated. The failure of the Pharisee does not tempt the poor man at the point of wealth. Many of us will not thank God for great temporal possessions because we cannot —we do not have them. There is no virtue in our restraint! Some of us are even willing to admit that a certain wise discrimination in the distribution of riches, has at least relieved us of their temptation. A strong man it is who is master of his treasure—unspoiled, un- selfish, happy in his prosperity. But what shall I thank God for, and avoid the temptation of the Pharisee’s thanksgiving? Ah, I will thank Him for the common things—the common, rich- est things. I will thank Him that I see and hear and talk and walk. I will thank Him for my children—for my home. I will thank Him for my friends and for my work. I will thank Him for my country. I will thank Him for Jesus Christ! Surely here I stand apart from the loud-voiced Pharisee. But yesterday I saw my neighbour turn his face into the sun to feel the glory that he never more would see; and there are those who cannot hear the voices of their loved ones, and there are palsied throats that never will be filled with song, and only half a block away are little feet that hang from lifeless limbs. I stood today, stood with the thrill of life in my limbs and hands and with the never ceasing trumpet of this city in my ears and watched the sunlight play upon New Jersey bat- 66 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM tlements of steel and stone. I cried, ‘‘ Thank God I feel, I see, I hear, I understand! ” And then I thought of those others in the shadow and the silence and my gratitude was not the less because I turned to count my other blessings. My children came, came in the flesh to greet me and their mother stood beside me. I saw them in their health and joy. I felt them in my deepest soul and memory brought the loved ones from far climes. We spread our board for all. I breathed a silent prayer of gratitude that had no sigh of vain regret. But in my neighbour’s house the servants spoke in whispers and moved softly by a guarded room where flowers wreathed a placid brow. I thank God today for all the gifts, for gifts they are—I have not earned them. But this full-toned Pharisee has made me search for something common to us all. I have my work and you have yours—the toil that commands us, the ministry that glorifies an ex- istence into a life. Thank God for work today! But tramping down the streets of our social order are men and women with hands and minds and hearts empty of tasks—the vast social army of the unemployed, and that equally sad spectacle of lives misfitted or wasted in the economic plan. As more and more I am coming to think of all human relationships in terms of the teachings of One who went about doing good; as in- creasingly I am finding myself challenged by His last and great commandment—“ Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and thy neighbour as thy- self ”—and as the supreme lesson of history, ‘‘ Without me ye can do nothing,” unrolls against the sky of human experience, and as I feel in my heart that love of God which passeth knowledge, I sink upon the altar THE PHARISEE’S THANKSGIVING 67 of our Christian faith to whisper, ‘“ Thank God for Jesus Christ.” Oh, if He were unchained today! If we would but set Him free! Then every woman and every man and every child could lift that prayer as the hymn of the ages—knowing that ignorance and suspicion, selfish- ness, intolerance, lust, and all destroying hatreds would quickly fade from the ways of men. As it is, our grati- - tude must be modulated to the fact that vast areas of our life are still ugly in form and pagan in practice. Thank God for Jesus Christ—our only Saviour. Thank God for Jesus Christ—our only Captain to a better order, and our only hope of glory. But in a world that peels its thin veneer to show again its heart of greed; in a broken war-swept world—a world that after nineteen hundred years still has its heathen lands and heathen institutions in the so-called Christian states—let every man of us who follow in His train, but who follow Him afar, take care that we do not come to prayer beside the Pharisee. What, then, shall be my Thanksgiving prayer? What is the gift possessed by all, the gift to no man denied—the gift offered in its final distribution in equal portions to the least and to the greatest? This gift is life. I thank God for life. Life in the narrow street and high loft room—life in dark cellars growing toward the light. For it is life, and life is growth. Gamins of the street have become princes in the state. Crippled boys have dropped crutches and taken the wings of song. The blind have seen Paradise regained. The bereft have taught others the ministry of their pain, and poverty has been the seedground of greatness. I shall thank God for Life today—for Life belongs to all—to the young man who sees visions and to the 68 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM old man who dreams dreams. For all of life let us be grateful—for the bitter and the sweet, the better and the worse—for life in sickness and in health, in pros- perity and in adversity. Here no Pharisee has ever stood to pray, and here no publican has ever prayed alone. | Thank God for the challenge of life—for its infinite “T must,” for the Divine urge that sends the Alpine daisy through frozen sod to meet the kisses of the sun, or thrusts a black boy up from slavery to be the Moses of his race. Thank God for that immortal declaration of independence of the unconquerable spirit. I have seen it in every circumstance and en- vironment of society. 3 A little while ago I watched it play upon the faces of Czechoslovakians hurrying through Ellis Island. It spoke to me when a Russian immigrant, who had not waited to be naturalised before joining the colours and crossing to France, came to my study—with mustard-scarred lungs and a shrapnel-mangled hand— asking for work, but refusing, absolutely refusing, money. It is the heritage alike of desert and city, of business and of profession. The man of affairs . tumbled from his high business estate by some finan- cial earthquake and struggling back again has it. The widow baking loaves and selling bread to keep her children from an institution has it. It is the unfailing yeast that lifts society from barbarism to civilisation and that raises men from dust to divinity. Thank God for life! Yes, but you say, be true to your principle. Life, too, is at last a losing venture and Life for some is but a living death. No, thank God, no. Life is for all. And life is for all, fulfilment. Those who do not have THE PHARISEE’S THANKSGIVING 69 it, whatever their estate, are those who have not claimed it. This which we call life is but life’s small beginning; the morning of its destiny; the childhood of its immortality. Crutches and blindness and sor- row, disillusionment and defeat, are but incidents. All misfortune and tragedy are as tears that follow laughter into the forgetfulness of infancy. Thank God for life—there is no death! “T tell you they have not died, Thewr hands clasp yours and mine. They are but glorified— They have become divine. They live! They know! They see! They shout with every breath— “Life ts eternity! There is no death!’” VII “WHO ENTERS CANAAN? ” A ee Canaan of our message is not a country hemmed by mountains or laved by seas; not a storehouse of physical provisions to be made the prize of conquest by arms. Our Canaan is a new Kingdom of time, a fair land of promise flowing for us all with the milk and honey of opportunity. Our Canaan is a new year! Who enters! We all enter! all who have lived out the last breath of the old year; the weak with the strong; the: old with the young. Some have scarcely survived the crossing and will hardly reach the first camping site, and they will surely fail before the first walled city falls, while others are so frail with youth that a mother’s eager arms have lifted them across; and the warrior who breasts the ford with scant attention to its obstacles and rushes on to take the frowning stronghold. But all are here. Grey head and black, trembling hand and steady; all are here at the beginning of the new and the ending of the old. Who enters Canaan? You who come with your good purposes and new resolutions. I am sure that many a man declared a few hours ago against certain of his unworthy practices; lifted his hand to high heaven and announced that he renounced them all. And I am as sure that no man among us was able to feel as he opened his eyes this morning that he had no room to improve, no chance to do better. The speaker 70 WHO ENTERS CANAAN? 71 has never yet entered upon a new cycle of time without declaring in a deep and solemn earnest that he would be a truer, a better man. Before this service closes he hopes to see the demonstration of the fact that we are not blind to our shortcomings, nor deaf to a gracious invitation. Who enters Canaan? The lad who remembers the hours he has idled away, the lessons he slighted and the failure he registered at the close of the term. This lad enters the Canaan where he may regain his lost standing by the stern discipline of application and study. I think that it is an open question whether all young people should be given a college education. You noticed, I am sure, that I said “‘ given ” a college education. Certainly no young person should be de- prived of the chance for such an education. But I am constantly facing the fact that many young people are not at all benefited by their experience in the finishing school and university. Too frequently in these days the Fraternity and the Sorority, competitive athletics and constant social diversions, are the majors of the course. I pity any man who goes to any institution of higher learning without the necessity of somehow earn- ing at least a portion of his way. Young people enter- ing this Canaan, to penetrate the deepest cloisters of sound learning and broad, satisfying, ministering cul- ture, you must face the fact that there is no virtue without labor. You must accept the discipline of hard work. And the Church of Jesus Christ has entered Canaan. A new year of privilege is hers. She leaves behind,— she must leave it behind—-a wilderness of controversy and missionary retrenchment. At home and abroad fields have been weakened and even surrendered. 72 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM Mighty debts have all but overwhelmed some of the greater Church Boards, and the numerically smaller denominations have been inclined to congratulate themselves where they have done no worse than mark time. Immeasurable opportunities have been lost. For an hour this week I listened to the searching voice of a man—a young man—who a decade and a half ago threw himself with utter abandon into the heart of China. Today he is the pastor of a great church, the director of a great school, the superin- tendent of a tremendously strategic mission. In his Province he is the friend and counsellor of the Gov- ernor, the directing genius of the Chamber of Com- merce, the saviour of thousands from famine, and the deliverer of the Capital from the horrors of revolu- tionary bombardment. He has entered Canaan, too, but with a heavy heart. With crowded chapels and overflowing class-rooms he has pleaded for necessary funds to buy land for new buildings—not a large amount, but an imperative and minimum sum. He has plead in the name of fellow-Americans who have given their lives to this work and been buried in it. He has pled in the name of the Chinese Christians who are willing from their poverty to contribute half the funds. He has pled in the name of the future indigenous Church of the Orient which his vision sees soon emerging, but he has plead in vain. A terrible thing it is for such a man, with such a burden, to enter this new year. Who is to blame? Not his Board. It cannot spend money it does not have, nor can it longer borrow money for even such vital advanced work. The Church herself must en- compass these walled cities. The whole Church must feel the pulse of rising heathen tides. With a Moslem WHO ENTERS CANAAN? 73 world expanding, but breaking up; with Asia turning away from ancient Gods, but in a flame of bitterness that America has fanned, turning to Lenines rather than to Christ, only a Christian statesmanship of the order of Paul’s, and a missionary generosity equalling that of the early Moravians, will bring us to the con- quest of our Canaan. And what does this Canaan hold for international relationships? Let us pray that it holds valleys of moral fruitfulness more fair than were the physical pastures and orchards that Caleb and Joshua gazed upon;—the economic rehabilitation of Europe; the actual reduction of armaments by agreement among the great Powers, and a determined approach to the readjustment of relations between the world of the white man and the world of the yellow and black. Utterly impossible it is in a brief summary to visual- ise the international land of promise or dark foreboding —as you are Caleb, or a grasshopper—that the new year opens out before us. But whatever it is and holds, we stand upon its nearer Jordan shore, and the first of its walled cities is at hand. Will we turn and flee, or will we crumble the battlements with our marching faith? The year is young and youth is ever eager. But do not forget that the old year was as young in its January, when Sarajevo and its mad stu- dent were less than six months away. Who enters Canaan? Do all enter? Do all enter the real Canaan with its fruitful places and rich re- wards, lying behind walled cities and the twentieth century giants of Anakim? Do all who make the physical crossing from the old year to the new enter Canaan? No! Not all who crossed between the divided waters of the Red Sea, not all who completed 74 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM the forty years of marching through the wilderness, crossed over Jordan. Not all of the hundreds of thou- sands who followed Moses and Aaron from the brick yards of Egypt, who left the flesh-pots of the Nile, came at last to Jericho. Indeed not all—only two! And not all, nor many of the millions who have left the old year behind them will reach the Canaan of the new. Who entered Canaan? Moses did not. With pro- digious labours he led Israel through forty years; years in which he fed and clothed her; years in which he perfected her worship and prepared her for war; years in which he codified the laws of the ancient world, har- monised them with the law of God, and left them with the Levites to be handed down through the courts of the centuries. But Moses did not enter Canaan, for Moses disobeyed, and the price of his disobedience was a grave on Mount Nebo. Disobedience keeps many a man out of Canaan. Those in authority cannot afford to ignore or reject the higher authority. Even a Moses cannot be a law unto himself. Men there are who tremble lest the American com- monwealth of sovereign states shall fail presently be- cause of Democracy’s inability to enforce her own mandates; lest, because of the unwillingness of freemen to respect their own government, free government on the North American continent shall fall of its own weight. I am not one of these. In my mind, there is no doubt concerning the outcome. America will not fail. But the determined struggle to nullify the Eighteenth Amendment, to destroy national Prohibition, which Lloyd George declares to be the greatest social adven- ture ever entered upon by a free people, is a decisive WHO ENTERS CANAAN? 75 struggle, and has entered upon its crucial stages. Vastly more is at stake than the immediate issue in- volved. All safety for person and property; the preser- vation of majority rule with minority safeguards; the future of our courts; the balance of our government; the genius of our national life—these are all at stake. And I say to you that in such a crisis there is room for only one kind of citizen in this land,—the citizen who is for the Constitution and the law! No, Moses did not enter Canaan, nor will the lawless man, the moral pirate, the social bandit, enter the Canaan of the new year. Nor did any of those who lamented the lost flesh pots of Egypt cross the Jordan. Their first thought was for their bellies, and their loudest shout the selfish hunger cry. Their muscles had been hardened in the fields and brick yards, but their physical dependence upon their masters had given them flabby minds and left them moral weaklings. Moses led a race of slaves out of Egypt; slaves who could wander in a wilderness, but who could never take an armed city. Until a new generation could be born and seasoned;—a generation as free as the wilderness which was its first inheritance and as hard as the rock from which came its miracu- lous water supply, that river crossing waited. And so it is forever. Only free men will cross a Jordan. The Canaan of the new year lies too far away and there are too many giants of risk and sacrifice to make the invitation of a modern Caleb attractive to those who have their hands and hearts centered in the flesh pots of their time. They receive the report of fearless spiritual and social trail breakers, as did Israel of old, by lifting up their voices against those who would stir them from their soft and sinful places. 76 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM And no man who feels like a flying beetle in the presence of Anakim will enter Canaan in the new year. Twelve men were sent to spy out the land, and ten came back feeling like grasshoppers. Only Joshua and Caleb returned with their heads up like true sons of the God who had sent them out. It was not that the ten saw the Canaanites as too big—it was that they saw themselves as too small. God pity the man who ignores the moral temptations, the physical risks, the spiritual pitfalls of the year just before us. He will fall an easy victim to the first surprise attack. But God pity the man who cannot feel himself rising to meet each new emergency, growing daily into the stature of a conqueror and companioned constantly by the One who is able to deliver him. “The Lord will bring us into this land and give it us,” cried Joshua and Caleb as they rent their clothes before their terrified companions. ‘The Lord will bring us! ” And, ringing down the ages ever since, their cry has come to hearten men for risk and danger; to fit men for the Jordan crossing. It comes to us today: ‘‘The Lord will bring us into this land and give it us.” But Israel, when she came first to the Jordan, barring two, was a race of moral grasshoppers. Grasshoppers have ruined many a harvest, but they have never yet taken a Canaan. Have you ever felt troubled because God sent Israel back into the wilderness for forty years; kept an entire generation out of the promised land, and buried Moses in banishment? Frankly, I have. And, just as frankly, I would be troubled now were it not for one fact: a very considerable fact, the fact that God did not send Israel back and did not keep any man out! Israel sent herself back; sent herself back in spite of WHO ENTERS CANAAN? 77 the mighty appeal of the two unafraid scouts. Moses kept himself out, kept himself out in spite of his power with God and his own unsurpassed wisdom. And I promise you that there is no influence on earth or under it that can keep you out of Canaan save yourself. You are, or may be, in this matter the absolute master of your fate. God wills now as He did then, that His people go forward. God stands now as he stood then, to captain their salvation; to level the cities of sin; to overthrow the strongholds of doubt; to destroy the giants, and to give us their heritage. If we go back to the wilderness, if we refuse the Jordan, if we resign Canaan, ours Is the decision and responsibility for it. Before us, not behind us, is all that we have hur- riedly contemplated together—the Canaan of the new year, personal achievement in character, a life dedi- cated to a program of a clean body, a pure mind and a prophetic soul; a fellowship with men, women and little children, generous and unselfish, and a society purged of exploiters of every sort, with governments of the people, administered in full justice to all and confirmed and supported by all. Before us lies a new Canaan of world associations and unities; a Canaan with its armed citadels overthrown and its giants of suspicion and jealousy destroyed. Ah, but you say: ““ What a dream! How utterly im- possible; how wild and futile! ” Yes, wild and futile, indeed, when we think of that brotherhood of man which Jesus envisioned on the Mount of Olives more than nineteen hundred years ago, and of which Tenny- son sang again with radiant song in Locksley Hall. But dreams come true when dreamers move with God to their fulfillment. Men there are, Calebs and Josh- uas, who lure us to the great adventure. Men there 78 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM are who point out the Jordan crossing. Men there are who laugh at giants and who cry—“ Let us go up at once and possess it, for we are well able to overcome it—and the Lord will bring us into the land and give it us—a land flowing in milk and honey.” Tonight in our hearts, as Moses on Mount Nebo beheld Canaan from afar, we may possess our “ promised land.” VIII “FIVE FACTS FOR FAILING FAITH” EBSTER gives us a definition of fact, “ any- thing strictly true—a reality. Also some- times applied to even general and abstract truth.”’ Our subject implies that there is such a thing as faith, implies at once the fact of faith, which no man will deny; and also implies that faith may fail. Faith in God, faith in man, faith in one’s self, faith in faith itself may fail. A greater tragedy cannot be imagined than the fail- ure of faith. No other failure is absolute. Men rise from business crashes to achieve even greater success than they knew before financial calamity overtook them. One plan proven faulty results in another being tried, which succeeds. Nations pass from triumph to bondage, but emerge at last from slavery to reach positions of political distinction far beyond their pre- vious stations. Truth crushed to earth will rise again upon the hands of faith. But when faith fails, the captain of industry surrenders, acknowledges himself beaten, retires from the field. When faith fails, there is no other plan. When faith fails, nations go not into temporary eclipse, but perish. When faith fails, truth, sore beset, sinks in her wounds without defenders, and the soul puts out his own eyes. © Faith is defined as a “ firm conviction of the truth.” Theologically, faith is the assent of the mind to the truth of what God has revealed; a hearty reliance upon 79 80 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM God and His promise of salvation through Jesus Christ. When faith fails here, death becomes a haunting terror, and life remains not worth the living. “ Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” is Paul’s sublime definition. ‘“ Substance of things hoped for ’”’—an inspired paradox. Faith and substance; mind and matter; spirit and material. And we have found it to be a fact again and again demon- strated, that without faith substance fails and the material disappears. Does our subject also imply that the times in which we live are times of failing faith? For many they are. Within the week I have talked with a woman who bears high recommendations from institutions in a foreign country. Particularly competent she has been when entrusted with children. But, as the result of an acci- dent, she no longer has the old confidence with which she once went about her profession. When she is in- vited, even urged, to fill the position she has been fully trained to fill, and in which she has had wide experi- ence on two continents, she trembles from head to foot, and becomes practically helpless. At the moment she is working as a domestic under hard circumstances when in her own field there are many unfilled positions. Lacking faith in herself, the substance of her learning, the material of her training, avail little. And often mental, and even physical, misfortune are responsible for a spiritual collapse that leaves a once imperial life shorn of its authority. “‘ He can, because he thinks he can ’”—is tremendously true. Years ago a young attorney came to the minister of a great city parish and said, “‘ Doctor, I have lost my faith. Can you help me? More than anything else I need it now. I have already a measure of success, and FIVE FACTS FOR FAILING FAITH! 81 the future is full of promise, but I have lost my faith. I lost it somewhere here among the books and ques- tions of men and universities. I must have it again, or all will be lost. Can you help me?” And again and again the story of the young attorney is being duplicated in this highly organised, hurrying, ques- tioning day. Young people are particularly involved. The ad- vanced study once entered upon by a limited number, now engages practically all youth, or influences them through popular, however superficial, magazine and periodical discussion. Sharp distinctions are made between conservative and radical thinkers in all groups of society. These distinctions, which actually involve only minor matters, are lifted into the prominence of major events. Young people are bewildered by the involved and acrimonious debates of their elders. What to mature minds may be little more than an in- tellectual diversion, becomes to minds less mature cause for doubt and sometimes the invitation to denial. Youth is naturally the age of faith. When youth becomes cynical, the event has a particularly tragic significance. The world needs today what another has called the “‘unreasoning enthusiasm of youthful devotees ”’; needs this ardour and abandon to sweep away the sus- picion and cruelty and denial of the years. Let us, then, we who hold the high places of scholarship and moral authority, think not so much of ourselves and those with whom we match our theories—rather less of ourselves and of these—and more of our sons and daughters. One evening I found myself face to face with a young collegian, the president of his class, and an 82 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM officer of the college Y. M. C. A. He was terribly un- settled. A distinguished leader of religious thought had challenged his sense of fair play, had, as he keenly felt, insulted his intelligence. He came to me saying, “Tf that man is right, then I am not a Christian.” Almost he was ready to renounce his faith. The wrong attitude on my part would have completed a moral catastrophe, but God gave me the answer for the question of his soul, and again and again with others in a similar crisis that experience has enabled me to be measurably helpful. ‘‘ Whether you are a Christian or not depends upon no man but yourself; yourself, sir, yourself with Jesus Christ,” I said to him. ‘‘ The man may be right, or the man may be wrong. You should worry about him. Jesus said—' Come, follow me. Iam the way, the truth and the life,’ and as for knowing whether you are in that way or not, Paul’s standard has never been surpassed. ‘ The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance—against these there is no law.’ Remember this,” I said, ‘‘ with that high command of Jesus—‘ Love thy neighbour as thyself.’ ” The Christian life is not a matter of definition—right or wrong; intellectual affirmation—right or wrong; Scriptural interpretation right or wrong. The Chris- tian life is an experience in, with and through Jesus Christ. Give youth a reasonable chance, a sympa- thetic opportunity—give youth your confidence, and youth will emerge from the fog of uncertainty and superficiality, the twilight of doubt—aye—and the darkness of denial that we, youth’s elders, are too often responsible for. There was a time in my life when, had a man said FIVE FACTS FOR FAILING FAITH! 83 to me of those principles which are now supreme in my soul, those articles of Christian faith which are now dearer to me than life itseli—when, had any man said to me—“ These you must believe,’ 1 would have re- plied—‘* Then I am not a Christian.” It was the Isaiah spirit of “ Let us reason together ”—it was the “Come and see” invitation of Jesus Himself that brought me through the darkness into the marvelous light and liberty of sonship. This, then, is the background for the message of the hour, and for all who find faith failing there are five restoring facts. First, the fact of man. Whatever man is, he is. Today, the temptation is strong to exalt him; to see him through the eyes of a worshipper; to see him at his best—the conqueror of continents, the master of the ocean and of pestilence, and the shaper of racial destinies. But it is not this view of man that strength- ens my faith particularly. It is rather man the hope- lessly inadequate, man the fallen creature of the God- like race. One of the first discoveries made by the infant is the discovery of human limitations. Your baby is forever reaching for something just beyond him and howling at the top of his lungs with chagrin and disappointment over his failure. There are many pictures of man—in some he rides at the head of victorious armies, or stands upon fron- tiers of physical and scientific discovery; in others he riots with the strength of youth, plays with love and beauty, courts the muses, lolls upon couches of volup- tuous ease. There are pictures of sin, and there are pictures of sacrifice, truth and error, pictures of shame and glory, but the picture truer than any other is this picture of his babyhood, where his arms are too short 84 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM to bring him to his heart’s desire. There are times, sir, when this fact of man’s inadequacy drives one nearly mad. Your dearest treasure lies with breath halif- throttled in his throat and turns appealing eyes upon your burning, anguished face; or your son comes with the fresh terror of some disgrace to plead for relief from the shame; or debt closes slowly in upon you, grinds away your freshness, leaves you flimsy and threadbare like the old coat on the broken man; or disease strikes you down and you feel its remorseless, wasting progress. I stood one afternoon, in the spring of 1913, and, watching the rising waters of the Scioto River eat through the embankments that held it from the homes of West Columbus, I saw steel rails snap like pencils of slate, and a bulwark thrown up to last a century, filter and disappear like sand. ‘Then houses crumpled like cardboard, and spread out like thick cream upon the waters, while men and women and children bobbed about in the maelstrom like fishermen’s corks; nor could we save them. And yet, the final checking up after that experience revealed a rising tide of faith. As the people buried their dead, and sought for their silt-covered property lines, they turned their eyes out- ward and upward, and their voices lifted again the cry—‘‘ My help cometh from Thee,” “ Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth.” Always in such times of man’s inadequacy, faith strengthens. Faith strengthens in such a time because of the tre- mendous fact that companions man’s inadequacy—the fact of God—God, who is adequate. When all other qualities and attributes of God have been considered, the adequacy of God might well be selected as all i) FIVE FACTS FOR FAILING FAITH! 85 inclusive, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent—ade- quate! Adequate for man, the inadequate. We reach out to take possession of life’s dearest prize, and find ourselves still with the shortened arms of childhood. We stand by and watch the floods of adversity sweep over the things of our heart’s desire. We feel the creeping palsy of the years, the withering blight of adversity and, in our extremity, we cry— “Whither shall we flee?” and in our extremity lies God’s opportunity. He answers, ‘‘ My grace is suf- ficient for you.”—‘‘ Come unto Me.” He knows, and knowing, understands. He is present and ready to help. He is able and He places Himself at our dis- posal. Our God is sufficient. Yes, ah, yes, I hear you say, but God is your as- sumption, not necessarily a fact. Not necessarily a fact? Let us see. Above the great concourse of the Grand Central Station, in New York City, is a tiny engine and several obsolete coaches, forerunners of our twentieth century giant Moguls of the rails. What does that tiny engine prove? Many things, to be sure, but chiefly this—the fact of an engine maker. The fact of an engine maker who knew the genius of his creation, who was its master—who was sufficient. The most sublime fact of human life is the fact of personality; the fact of you. Yow, not your eyes and hands and voice, but you. That which we miss when you are gone—gone though for a little, while we still may touch your hands and caress your face. Reason leads me to God. Behind every visible manifestation is a cause, and at the beginning Is “ First Cause.” Now, First Cause would satisfy me were I dealing alone with continents and oceans, stars and planets— aye, and bleating flocks and the winged creatures of 86 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM the air. But you baffle me until reason rises to another level and I see “in the beginning God.” God, who is the greater. God, who is the Creator, to be sure, but. God, who must be Personality. Personality omnis- cient, omnipresent, omnipotent. These are facts for failing faith. The fact of man— man, the inadequate; and the fact of God—God, the adequate. A third fact for failing faith is the fact of Death. Death which Horace declared is ‘“‘ the ultimate bound- ary of human matters”; death, which comes equally to us all and which makes us all equal when it comes: “The Prince who kept the world in awe, The Judge whose dictate fixed the law; The rich, the poor, the great, the small, Are levelled; death confounds them all,” There is no arguing against the fact of death—for “all that tread the globe are but a handful to the tribes that slumber in its bosom; take the wings of the morning and the Barcan desert pierce; or lose thy- self in the continuous woods where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sounds save its own dashings—yet the dead are there, and millions in those solitudes, since first the flight of years began, have laid them down in their last sleep.” And now on Long Island the man who wrote those exquisite lines sleeps with the millions of “ death’s solitude.” But what is death? One has written: °*Tis slumber to the weary, °Tis rest to the forlorn, *Tts shelter to the dreary; "Tis peace amid the storm, FIVE FACTS FOR FAILING FAITH! 87 *Tts the entrance to our home, °*Tts the passage to that God Who bids His children come When this weary course 1s trod. Yes, such is death. But no poetic passage can remove the natural antipathy that the normal man has for death. It is quite unnatural to welcome death. The philosophy that cultivates an attitude of welcome is neither human nor Christian. God created man to live and not to die, and God’s will for us all is that we should live well and long—as long as we can and as well as we can by His grace. But with so personal and so appalling a fact as death, appalling, I mean, by mere human and nat- ural conceptions, with so appalling a fact as death, con- stantly crowding up to us—what is there in this fact that strengthens failing faith? The first instinct of a human being under attack is to defend himself. He looks for a weapon, or a means of protection. Eventually he plans a campaign of defence. Man regards death as his greatest natural enemy, and fights against him with every resource of his mind and will. And yet, after all the aeons of time that have elapsed since God set the forces of life in motion, man has discovered only one way to con- quer death. Not by the waters of a magic spring; not by the curative powers of a mysterious drug; not at last by the husbandry of strength, the conserving of physical resources, but by loving beyond it, do we conquer death. Because man instinctively loves be- yond death, irresistibly loves beyond death, death strengthens faith. Let stark and naked arms lift a darling baby from 88 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM its cradle and weeping eyes lift instinctively to the un- failing hills whence cometh their strength. Strike down the strong man in his prime and his friends find their consolation in—‘‘ I am the resurrection and the life ’—invade the sacred precincts of a home; break up with unexpected blow the happy family; leave tears for laughter there, and above the weeping you will hear the song of rapture: ‘“ Glad I am to know the crossing. In the sullen tide between, hither banks that fade and tarnish and the fields of living green.” ‘Tear a brother from the side of a self-styled infidel, and the unbeliever will turn from blatant denial to cry—“ But in the night of death, hope sees a star, and, listening love can hear the rustle of a wing.” Faith baffled becomes faith strengthened. It is in death, in the stern, cold, unre- lenting fact of it, that I have seen the fires of hope rekindled and felt again the immortal flame that shin- eth more and more unto the perfect day! Death Strengthens faith because instinctively, irresistably, omnipotently, we love beyond it. And with this fact of death walks hand in hand the fact of life—as twin sisters dark and fair they move together through the souls of men. Without opportunity for a doubt life is a fact. “What Life Is ” has been the subject for many a wise debate and learned dissertation, and will continue thus to serve so long as life itself shall survive. But the fact of life is at the very beginning of wisdom. Why, then, do men question—“‘ What is Life?” Why? Because no man has yet satisfactorily answered the question. Because no man has ever explained life. Because no man knows what life is. Reason has yet to solve life’s riddle. Science has yet to explain life’s reason. Not until you are able to reduce God to the FIVE FACTS FOR FAILING FAITH! 89 component parts of a laboratory demonstration will this problem be completed. Perhaps it has never oc- curred to you that life which we cannot explain, but which unmistakably is, we must accept by faith. In- evitably life, until you deliberately, finally deny it— until you destroy it, strengthens faith. And what is it about life, particularly, that strength- ens faith? The beauty of it? Verdant, flowered, well watered, singing nature—green in the spring time, radiant in summer, flaming in autumn and frozen in winter? But no beauty of nature is permanent. In- deed no attribute of life save one is permanent. Beauty, strength, joy, ambition—all pass, and passing, leave behind their disappointment, their disillusion- ment, their question—What is life? But one attribute of life does not change; does not pass; does not fail— Life’s resurrection—Life’s rebirth. From acorn to tree, and back again and on forever with God forever at the beginning is the way of the worlds! I have said that reason has yet to solve life’s riddle, but it is the logic of events that leads even a savage to chant songs of immortality. The desert blossoms and dies to flower again with another springtime; the humble worm sleeps through a season and then awakens in colours that match the rainbow—am I not more than these? The fact of life strengthens faith—Life which is forever renewing itself; Life which we have now and which is but as an infant’s span to that glorious immor- tality our faith lays confident hold upon. The fact of man. The fact of God. The fact of death. The fact of life—four facts for failing faith. What is the fifth fact that strengthens failing faith? Why, faith! Faith strengthens failing faith—faith that struggles with itself, but struggling, grows. Faith 90 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM that staggers like a drunken man, but staggering, stag- gers on. Faith that doubts. Faith that questions. Faith that cries in mighty travail, sweating drops of blood. “I believe, help thou mine unbelief.” Faith is an instinct, but it is also an exercise. Its origin is divine, but even divinity must serve to survive. Do you say, ‘‘ But I cannot believe.”’ You may say it, and you may believe it, but-you are mistaken. Reverse the order! Shift from negative to positive. Rise in the morning declaring your faith and not your doubt, praying Paul’s omnipotent prayer and shouting to all the winds that blow, “‘ I believe! ” If you do, I pledge you my word, I give you the word of God that you will find faith mightier than denial. God, Man, Death, Life, Faith—these five! And the five are one!. They issue in a life conquering death and in man at last hid forever with Christ in God. IX A NEW CATHEDRAL AGE HE Temple of Solomon, that most glorious of the ancient works of man, ushered in the first Cathedral Age. To it the nations came bearing gifts and chanting praises. Prophetic of the Bethle- hem Manger and the advent of the Prince of Peace, it waited for the passing of King David, the mighty warrior, to be builded by his son, Solomon, the man of wisdom. The second Cathedral Age still shares with us its sublime monuments. For the tourist the cathedral is still the centre of Europe. While in its day it was the seat of the people’s life, in our time it remains as the most articulate expression of the period it dominated. - But one may question whether cathedral building now would be justified,—whether the vast and exquis- ite monuments of the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, if raised upon the central hills of our modern cities would capture the imagination as in those more primi- tive and less exacting times. It is, however, increasingly apparent that somehow the Christian Church must do again what she once did with the cathedral; that some- how with her message she must lay hold upon the vital life of her generation—capture it as completely as she did with Milan, Cologne, Rheims and Westminster. When one visits Rome, be he Christian or Pagan, he sees first St. Peter’s. At Seville he must cross the threshold of a church or have no story to tell when he 91 92 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM returns from his journey. Even Paris, with her Opera and the life of her cafés, has in first place for the ex- pectant foreigner Notre Dame and the Madeleine. It is not the Tower in London, nor the Houses of Parlia- ment, but the Christian temple, which holds the bones and the trophies of Britain’s glories. Certainly this principle does not hold for New York. Even the glorious new. St. John’s will not supplant the Woolworth Tower, the subways, Wall Street, Fifth Avenue, Broadway and Times Square, as peculiarly expressive of Manhattan. But does not the Church today have a message as peculiar and commanding, as that of the Cathedral Age? And may it not be expressed as impressively, indeed as sublimely, for the eye and soul as it was then? May we not hope that there will come a time when travelers visiting New York and Chicago, and every other modern city of the world, will see the Christian Church and study her institutions and pro- gramme, or return whence they came as foolish as any tourist who should journey to Agra and miss the Taj Mahal? Should not the Christian Church in modern life be as inevitable as her cathedrals were in the Middle Ages? The answer is not simple, nor is it to be expected that all who are interested will agree upon it. The writer suggests that there is only one basis for ap- proaching this matter with fair hope of reaching an agreement,—the Service basis. As I write, I feel the movement of traffic about one of New York’s busiest corners. Here rest in solid granite the foundations of one of America’s most venerable churches. About the iron fences that enclose the lofty tower surges a mighty multitude. A NEW CATHEDRAL AGE 93 This multitude presents to me an appalling fact—the fact that the crowd does not know that we exist. The marble walls rise as chastely as they did seventy years ago. The great bell booms as it boomed above the heads of draft rioters in Sixty-three. The organ peals, the preacher proclaims, and the faithful gather, but the multitude out there, speaking more languages than ever troubled the builders of Babel, does not know that anything is happening.. Better were it for Christ’s Kingdom if again the mob despised and reviled! What are we going to do about it? Should any- thing be done? Or, should we withdraw and allow the little figures on the stage of life to change? Or, recon- ciled, should we go on ministering to the relatively few? The problem is the problem of the whole Church. In it is the gravest challenge that the Christian re- ligion has ever known. ‘The lions of Nero and the burning torches of the Appian Way helped make Rome a Christian state. But this indifference, this indiffer- ence which is a rising tide, will sweep from us the stronghold we have held since Constantine, if we do not find a way to rise above it. Is the Service basis our way to triumph? Chicago has now a religious edifice that boasts the highest pinnacle in the city. Its tower is a spire sur- mounted by across. It is a cathedral of another sort. The impression it has made upon the country, the publicity as well as service value it has established for religious architecture, at least suggest that to watch its future closely will be worth our while. Certainly now no man, certainly no tourist, will visit this railroad metropolis of the United States without going to see a church. New York has at least the promise of a similar 94 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM experiment. It is proposed to make the Broadway Temple upon Washington Heights the highest structure in the city. The architect, with great daring, if pre- liminary drawings which I have seen may be trusted, has combined the appeal to the spiritual with the service necessities of a twentieth century social work- shop. There will be no lost space—sewing rooms, class halls, dormitories and gymnasiums, will be given atten- tion along with chapels, organs and auditoriums. All will be brought together to achieve a symmetrical whole. Some day I believe that a supreme modern cathedral dream will rise into a reality of marble and steel in the very heart of New York City. Then every inquirer who enters the ‘‘ Narrows ” with the question, ‘““What is the genius of America? ” will receive the answer: “ The Christian Church.” If Christianity is what we profess; if Christianity is what we believe; if the programme of this Jesus-way of life is the only complete, the only adequate pro- gramme for modern times; if He is our God and our only Saviour, should not the house of His Gospel be the first edifice in every city? Should there not be a new Cathedral Age? The Service principle followed through will make every room of these new cathedrals, every article of equipment, every member of the staff, pass the test and meet the requirements of the Service basis. A little while ago I visited a religious institutional centre in a great city. Passing, with the minister, through the main auditorium, I heard terrifying sounds issuing from the pipe-organ, and saw a young woman seated at the console. Noticing my amazement, my guide said: ‘She is a young student who is too poor to secure practice privileges on any other instrument. A NEW CATHEDRAL AGE 95 We place our organ at her disposal.” ‘ But,” I ex- claimed, ‘‘ she will ruin it! ” ‘‘ No,” he replied, “‘ she has!” And that was the story of the entire establish- ment. Everything there was in it to be ruined in service. There were no carpets to protect from toilers’ heavy shoes; no pews to be reserved from odoriferous foreigners. The place was a Service institution. Let me say here that a Service programme to be serviceable must be reasonable and intelligent, of course. For instance, to ask people who do not care for garlic to sit in close rooms, church auditoriums or otherwise with those who do, is unreasonable. An intelligent Service programme builds churches and maintains activities in deference to racial characteris- tics and group qualities, not because we are better than others are but because others are as good as we are. One evening a group of religious leaders sat as guests of a distinguished Japanese, in the Nippon Club, and unanimously pledged themselves to campaign for a Japanese Christian institution in New York. This is the spirit of the Service basis. And the spirit of the Service basis is the spirit of adaptability. Not far from the institutional church already referred to, stands a venerable edifice that once housed numerous activities and a prosperous congrega- tion. But the life of the community has completely changed. Names from Central and Southern Europe are written over the German names that formerly ap- peared. The once crowded edifice is now practically deserted; a few still gather to renew old memories, review earlier traditions and lament the present. These must move out within the year. Unwilling to accept the facts of their surroundings, refusing to adapt _themselves to their new opportunities, they have been 96 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM denied further missionary contributions by their de- nomination. No longer able to remain a self-support- ing church, they lack the vision to reach out after a new career. This service test makes inevitable a re-survey of every city parish—a survey not in terms of a local organisation, or even of a denomination, but a survey planned and executed by a united church, to secure first a complete community record of needs—phys- ical, intellectual, social, moral and spiritual. For in- stance, it would seem that an Open-Air Pulpit at the particular crowded corner I have written about, where perhaps ninety per cent. of the thousands who linger during the noon hours are Jews, to preach the second coming of Jesus Christ would be a wasteful, a futile thing. Whatever the opinion, the theological view- point of the minister may be, these people do not even know that Jesus ever came. Are we not, in much of our activity, off-shooting the mark as far as this? There is reason for saying to this noonday multitude, and for saying it with all the skill of the finest outdoor speaker—for saying it always in the name of Christ and to His glory—“ Neglectful Catholic, go back to your Cathedral; indifferent Jew, return to your Syna- gogue; forgetful Protestant, remember your Church; unaroused Citizen, pay the price of your freedom as your fathers once did—register and vote. Observe the law!” There is reason for such a message, delivered in the expectation that then the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, will complete the good work thus begun. In- deed, we have in actual experience the demonstration of the fact that He does. The new Cathedral Age will study the needs and become familiar with the conditions of men; it will A NEW CATHEDRAL AGE 97 listen for the voice of the people and come forth with an answer for the question of the searching though spiritually indifferent multitude. In a congested, foreign-speaking district of the city, four years ago the entire programme of the church was changed. What I have called the Service basis was first carefully considered and then accepted. Today forty thousand people of all races and faiths and con- ditions are directly ministered to by a Health Centre that still carries the name that was formerly associ- ated with only a fragment of what was actually the programme of Jesus when in the flesh, “‘ He went about doing good.” There are day-nurseries and kinder- gartens, dental, eye and maternity clinics, and a score of other equally important activities. Three thousand one hundred and sixty-five families are on the lists of the visiting nurses. Here the children come with twisted limbs and incipient rickets. From this friendly, healing-place they go out to summer-farms. In four years the annual budget has grown from nothing to one hundred thousand dollars; and from a beginning in a basement room to a day-and-night programme, housed in a four-story building but over- flowing into the church-tower. That tower, always ornamental, has become useful. The Service basis does not eliminate the evangelical, evangelistic message. It does give it added power. It brings it to the ears of a multitude that were indiffer- ent. It pushes back the horizon of religious oppor- tunity until fields that were in the fog are now clearly defined and stand revealed as white unto the Christian harvest. This Service basis covers the whole. Inevi- tably it contemplates body, mind and soul. Inevitably it includes both the individual and the social order. 98 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM Inevitably it accepts as the challenge of Christ’s King- dom the building of a new world through the raising up and empowering of new world builders. | In this Service basis, the Church must place first Leadership and prepheay She deals preeminently in moral and spiritual values. In practical affairs that join their issues where Moses said, “‘ Thou shalt not! ” and Jesus declared “ ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” she cannot afford to remain silent and those who are her voice should be ashamed to speak last. If Jesus Christ is for man and for his society, the only sufficient Saviour; if civilisation’s ultimatum is Christ or chaos, then Christ’s Church should in moral matters lead the State. -Shall there be a new Cathedral Age? We have the answer. There may be. The world needs it. The Church has within herself the materials out of which to build it and Jesus Christ has waited too long already. ‘““T am come that ye might have Life, and that ye might have it more abundantly ”—‘ That ye might have it to the full,” He said, and all the world is crying with the early Greeks, “‘ Sirs, we would see Jesus.” Let us raise His house again upon the central place of the cities. Let us fill man’s eye and soul with it once more. Let us make its message the supreme min- istry of human life. But, after all has been said and done, this new Cathedral Age will not stand in the “ loop ” district of Chicago and upon Washington Heights. It will rise not in walls of steel and facades of stone. It must rise first of all in the minds of the people, in the souls of children and women and men. I have a fragment from an oaken beam that for six hundred and thirty-four years spanned the nave of A NEW CATHEDRAL AGE 99 Christ Church in Hull-on-Humber. Beveled and worn by dry decay and the ravages of worms, it is a beauti- ful replica of a Gothic tower. To me the most inter- esting thing about it is the round hole, burned perhaps, through which workmen passed the wooden pin that held it fast. Ah, that workman! And behind him the master builders, and behind them the architects and behind the architects the Spirit that moved upon the face of the waters and separated the day from the night! And as it was in the beginning, so is it now and ever shall be. The first Cathedral Age was born in the soul of Israel. ‘The second came forth from the travail of Rome to lift its spires and domes like banners of prom- ise above the Dark Ages. The new Cathedral Age must catch up again the infinite longing of man; must articulate once more his age-old cry, ‘“‘ Light! Light!— More Light! ”; must temple his aspirations in a minis- try to body and soul as inclusive and complete as that of Jesus who fed the hungry and healed the sick and saved the sinner and raised the dead. Ah, and I have felt a more stately Cathedral than that of Cologne; a more sublime edifice than that of Milan. In a simple though beautiful room it towered above the human wreckage of the Bowery. It was the spirit of John Hallimond. Before me as I spoke lay his slight, familiar form—immaculate and beautiful in death. Strong men, sin spawned but born again, wept for love of him; thanked God because of him and testi- fied that in his quarter of a century of ministry as Superintendent of the Bowery Mission, he had wrought a change on that wicked thoroughfare almost as great as Jonah wrought in ancient Nineveh. I seemed to see the crowded room enlarge to welcome back the 100 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM thousands he had seen redeemed,—off-scourings of society, scum of the earth they had been, but now beautiful in grace and perfect in purity. And in that revelation of the love which passeth knowledge, I heard the echo of far-born voices that said, “‘ Behold, the Kingdom of God is within you. Ye—yYe are the temple of God.” xX DOUBT YOUR DOUBTS \ A | HEN the hand came out of the darkness that clung to the high arches of the royal banquet- ing room, in ancient Babylon, and wrote upon the wall before the horrified eyes. of Belshazzar and his drunken guests, a stark, mad fear of the un- known gripped the blasphemous monarch’s heart. “What is it? What does it mean? ” was his frenzied cry. ‘‘ Give me the interpretation, oh! men of wisdom, and with you I will divide my kingdom.” Eventually it was the queen mother who reminded the king of the wise Hebrew who in other times had served his royal masters faithfully. Daniel it was who unfolded the mystery. _ This is not a historical sketch. Our concern is with doubt, the doubt that makes cowards of us all—for it is doubt that feeds the fiercest fears of man. We, with Belshazzar, would have our doubts dissolved. We who find ourselves slyly prompted to doubt our friends, stealthily encouraged to question the motives of our associates, brazenly challenged to resign our confidence in good, and in God, are interested, more than casually interested, in the drunken monarch’s search for one to dissolve his doubts. Suspense is often worse than reality. The hardest thing is. to wait—not knowing. ‘Am I to live, or am I to die? ” queries Belshazzar. “For what shall I prepare? ” When his doubts were at last dissolved, and he knew the worst, he rewarded 101 102 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM the one who understood the language of the herald of his doom. Yes, doubt, however severe the hurt of knowledge may be, is worse than knowledge. “ Tell me the worst’’—how often does this groping world hear that cry of anguish. “Our doubts are traitors, and make us Lose the good we oft might win By fearing to attempt.” And another has said—‘‘ Known mischiefs have their cure, but doubts have none.”’ No man, no woman, may hope to entirely escape this subtle curse—we all must feel at one time or another the chill terror that roused the reveller of the lesson from his cups. “Life's sunmest hours are not without The shadow of some lingering doubt. Amid its highest joys will steal Supplies of evil yet to feel— Its warmest love ts blent with fears, Its confidence a trembling one; Its smile—the harbinger of tears, lis hope—the change of April’s sun!” This generation is being challenged by doubt as no other generation in modern times. Perhaps, because this generation has more sinister realities to create doubts. The world is not a well ordered place at the present writing. Society is not a victorious institution. There are responsible leaders in politics and in religion who would not be surprised to find another prophetic Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin written high upon the wall of human destiny. Are we perhaps even now being weighed and found wanting as were Nineveh and Babylonia and Greece and Rome? DOUBT YOUR DOUBTS 103 But there is little productive value in such contem- plations. Let the lesson have its more immediate and personal application. We, you and I, are being encour- aged to doubt, are being asked to doubt. The age is one in which personal doubt is even glorified. Old principles in human relationship, old standards in moral government, old doctrines in religion, in Chris- tian faith, are being thrown into the crucible of the laboratory. Nothing seems finally written for the average mind; nowhere is the record closed. There isino =O. B.D??? The intellectual atmosphere of the day is often un- healthy. Our psychology is too frequently destructive and our philosophy superficial, if not immoral. My quarrel with seminaries and colleges where faith is so often made a jester’s bauble is not that denial, direct and brazen, is given a voice, but that a question is written after every great spiritual affirmation. My chief concern is not with leaders of thought who have a positive No for my opinion, a positive No which may be as constructive as a positive Yes. My chief concern is with those who give cry to all their uncertainties, who drag the moral experiments that should at least be confined to the laboratory, into the open classroom and public forum; who, with a certain scholarly distinction, publish all that they do not believe, and who seem with malicious delight to underdig the foundations of Church and State. Do I hear someone say: “ But we must be intel- lectually honest.” Certainly, and that I will be. But I am not intellectually honest when, doubting my be- liefs, I become a night crier of my doubts. Common honesty dictates silence while I go about the solemn business of confirming my faith or establishing its un- 104 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM soundness—honesty with myself, and more especially honesty with others, who may be influenced against truth by some uncertainty of mine which in the light of later evidence and conviction may be entirely re- moved. To the man who calls to me—* Doubt your beliefs,’ I answer—‘ Assuredly no.” First I will doubt my doubts. As for you—‘ Believe your be- liefs.” To you all I. say it—‘‘ Believe your beliefs, your beliefs that have sweetened your bitter, illumined your way, lightened your burden, assuaged your sor- row, and given to your soul the ardent hope and glori- ous expectancy of immortality.” What have the great beliefs of our Christian religion done for us and for the world? Lay down the test here. Judge each tree of our faith by its fruits. The Virgin Birth has given to the world a new order of manhood, a new conception of womanhood, and in- creased the tender touch of Jesus upon the suffering heart of the common people. Much of modern the- ology tells me to doubt the Virgin Birth. My answer is “‘ Doubt that doubt.” Change the order. Give faith at least the first chance. Seek first the confirmations and not the denials. A vast number there are who do not realise that the reasoned arguments outside of Holy Writ favoring the Virgin Birth would fill a vast library, and have won the acknowledgment of states- men and scholarly intellectuals, as well as of mystics and devotees. In the light of learning, and in the face of nineteen hundred years of human experience with the divine as revealed in Jesus Christ I say as to the Virgin Birth, begin right; begin by doubting your doubt. And the Atonement. I hear a man say: ‘“ How can Christ’s death save us? ” and I reply, “‘ How else may DOUBT YOUR DOUBTS 105 we be saved; who else can save us? I cannot save myself. I cannot forgive myself. My sins remain un- covered and the agony of my remorse finds no surcease. What can wash away my sin—nothing but the blood of Jesus.” Doubt my belief in that—No. I will doubt my doubt. Have I not seen that belief turn the drunk- ard’s feet from the gutter, lift the fallen woman from the hell of shame, burn out an ancient hatred, and destroy a mountain feud? Have I not felt within my own soul the unspeakable mysteries of that grace? I will believe my belief! I will doubt my doubt! To the teacher, to the preacher, to the layman who publishes his immature spiritual conclusion, his incom- plete laboratory experiment, so as to destroy ancient good,—who declares his unprofitable doubts so as to undermine beliefs that have saved men from their sins and advanced society toward moral health and Chris- tian brotherhood, I say—Stop, thief! and to us all, “Doubt your Doubts. Believe your Beliefs! ” Some time since a widely known leader of religious thought, in a defense of those who are committed to a policy of question raising with regard to long held and time honoured evangelical beliefs referred to a certain building operation going forward in New York City at the time, as aptly illustrating the situation in the Prot- estant Church. He said that to make way for a mod- ern office and apartment building, the fine old residence with its high ceiling, artistic mantles and walnut wood work must come down; that the day of the ancient house was past; that the present must be served. And so he concluded that the day of many ancient theo- logical declarations and venerable Christian beliefs had closed. There was an element of truth in what the gentleman said. Jesus Christ spoke the language of 106 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM his generation, and was called a heretic because of his “ modernism.” And Christianity is less than Christ- like when it lacks the initiative and courage, the adapt- ability and faith, to meet the new duties new occasions teach; when it fails to grip and hold as Jesus did, its present age. But let us study the illustration and its application more closely. The ancient, beautiful house came down, but not a venerable stone was disturbed until the master builder had in his hands the complete plans for the new edifice, until he held the drawings to their last detail, of the larger and more profitable structure. Simple wisdom and honesty demand that this house of our evangelical faith be undermined at no point, re- placed in no stone of its building, until we have in hand the demonstrated better part. The structure of our Faith has stood, sheltering and protecting a vast multi- tude of all conditions of people since Calvary laid down its foundations and raised up its roof tree. By its altars men have been made strong to live and brave to die. Here little children have felt the tender touch of Society’s growing sense of responsibility, and woman- hood has come into her own; here grief has found the only final comfort, death the only destroyer, and the sinner his only Saviour. Let the wrecker keep hands off until he comes with the completed drawings and the approved plans from the Divine Architect for some- thing better and more divine. My doubts, my wrest- ling with doubt, my intellectual and spiritual labora- tory work, belong to my study and my closet. The cry of the world is ‘‘ Sir, we would see Jesus.” ‘‘ We would hear from you, as the ambassador of God, that which you both know and have experienced.”’ Someone has said that science has put everything DOUBT YOUR DOUBTS 107 into questions, and that literature distils them to make an atmosphere. In other words, science raises doubt. The emphasis of religion is frankly otherwise. The emphasis of Christianity is upon faith. And in prac- tice we all, in all our activities and processes, must walk by faith. Even science walks by faith. Science believes that there is a cure for leprosy, and in spite of centuries of laboratory failure, still believes. Some day this faith of science will be rewarded. Science believed that lightning could be harnessed to bear bur- dens and draw loads, and now this celestial mystery, still unfathomed, has become our slave. Any great truth of Christian experience is doubtable. No profound Christian experience can be given a laboratory demonstration. And yet are these experi- ences less real because they do not carry the endorse- ment of the chemist’s sign? Put mother love into your test tube, if you can! The very way in which our life begins raises ques- tions, and questions are the children of doubt. We come into the world knowing nothing, having all to learn. It is inevitable that we should suffer disillusion- ment as well as experience enlightenment. Eventually we are tempted to doubt all and to make of uncertainty our normal state of mind. Accept the admonition of our subject. Make the practice of its psychology your daily programme until it becomes a subconscious exer- cise, the intuition with which you look out upon all of life. “‘ Doubt your doubts.” But now the practical question. How is doubt dis- solved? No one can dissolve doubt for you. Daniel could interpret the handwriting on the wall, but after all Daniel could not lift the moral fear from the soul of the Bacchanalian King. Nor is doubt dissolved by 108 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM inquiry and research. Darwin went to the ends of the earth and to the bottom of scientific learning without reaching the end of his doubt. Doubt is dissolved not alone by the intellectual apprehension and comprehen- sion of truth, but by the individual trial and applica- tion of truth, by leaning upon truth, by living truth. It is very simple, but, even so, very difficult. It is as simple as this—‘‘ Whereas I was blind, now I see.” And yet difficult, I say. Asa child I was thrown down by a great wave and half strangled in the briny water of the Pacific Ocean. My father rescued me. Scream- ing at the top of my water-logged lungs, I was carried back to the beach. I can still hear my father say— “You are all right, don’t be afraid.” But still I screamed. With the sturdy evidence of my safety in my father’s arms which had lifted me up and borne me out, I still doubted. Doubt your doubts—for they are often as childish and foolish as were mine. What would happen if, in the daily average of our lives, we were not to adventure our faith instead of our fears? Were we to delay starting from our homes for our offices until with mathematical certainty we could guarantee our safe arrival, we should never arrive, for we would never start. I know of a gentleman and his wife who determined to anticipate every possible emergency of a round the world trip. They went to the hospital and enjoyed appendicitis operations while in perfect health, to avoid the possibility of a sudden seizure while in mid-Africa or some other unsanitary and unsterilized quarters of the globe! The oper- ations were successful, but did not make the patients immune to smallpox, which they contracted in Singa- pore. Believe your beliefs when they are ennobling; when they build morals, when they make you happy, DOUBT YOUR DOUBTS 109 efficient and courageous. Doubt your doubts till the last. Our moral, as well as our mental, integrity is in- volved in this principle, for—‘‘ As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Doubt begins by being a mental or spiritual attitude, but if it persists and prevails, it issues in the habits and practices of the life. When I say regularly, and in good faith, “I will doubt every doubt of good in another; I will not be blind, but I will not try to see that which does not exist; nor will I by a feeble, intellectual attitude dissipate my faith in the ennobling, in the wholesome,” I may not automatically and at once remove all my doubt, all my dark forebod- ings, but I shall put them on the defensive, and in nine cases out of ten I will start them on the way to oblivion. Ah! more than this, such an attitude toward doubt places us at once where we may without shame and in perfect confidence use the prayer God answers first— ‘““T believe, help thou mine unbelief.” To doubt doubt is to become unafraid of doubt! The young male of the buffalo herd was on his way to triumph when he began to doubt the power of his ancient master. The victim of a debasing appetite turns his face toward moral triumph when, from doubt- ing his own will power and God’s saving grace, he begins to doubt that doubt. Another has said “‘ Never try to conquer doubt ahead of time, or never try to force your mind to believe, to drive it to accept new and undemonstrable truths.”” To do this is like trying to fall asleep, or labouring to be happy. Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs, but neither exercise your mind to find doubts to doubt, nor drive your reason to uncover new beliefs to believe. Let us illustrate the principle: A person tells you an 110 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM evil story about someone you have trusted, an under- cover story—gossip of sinister import. Cultivate a mental reflex that answers—‘I doubt it.” One evening in the lobby of a Washington hotel a gentle- man of loose speech told a vicious tale about the then President of the United States. He wound up his lurid recital with the question that never anticipates an answer—‘ Now, what do you think of that?” A friend of mine, whose instincts of fair-play had been outraged, stood shoulder to shoulder with the verbose traducer, and said with an unmistakable implication, ‘““ What do I think of that? Why, I think that’s a lie!” But let us not make it a practice to go out of our way to hear doubt carrying scandal in order that we may exercise our anti-doubt reflex. There is no profit, and no beauty, no reward of holiness in spending our days with our theological fists up looking for a fight; shouting to the world in tones of rancour and com- bativeness, “I believe this or that, and as for you, challenge it on peril of having me smash at your Orthodoxy.” Rather let us cultivate the habit of rising in the morning with a great “‘ I believe ” trumpeting in our souls; let us greet each new occasion with the mind and faith of the never-to-be-forgotten hour when first the peace of Christ filled our souls. Yes, doubt your doubts. But what of their burning, unanswered questions? Honest questions, too. Ques- tions uninvited that rise out of the body of our suffer- ing, the mind of our ignorance, the heart of our grief, and that we come upon in our quest of truth. What about these? Certainly we must face them without evasion, unafraid. The only man who has no reason to fear the deepest, the most appalling question, is the Christian. Let us face every question as searchers who DOUBT YOUR DOUBTS 111 follow One who said, ‘“ Ye shall know the truth, and © the truth shall make you free! ”’ Horace Bushnell wrote that one of the greatest tal- ents in religious discovery is finding how to hang up questions and let them hang without being at all anx- ious about them. Then while we go on about our business of living and loving and serving, doubting our doubts and believing our beliefs, in God’s way and time —-and in ample time—the mystery will be revealed, the insoluble will come to us solved. Ah! and it will not hurt us, nor hurt the truth to have some few questions left to be carried on when we go hence. The unfold- ing revelation of truth and its practice will engage us through the eternities. Here are the things hid with Christ in God; here are the great discoveries of our immortality. All doubt that this shall be our lot, I te forever doubt! XI THE GENIUS OF THE GOSPEL HE sixth verse of the third chapter of First Corinthians is the perfect expression of the genius of the Gospel of Jesus the Christ. “TI have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.”’ We have here every man to his own, with each man’s personality functioning one hundred per cent. and with God, who is finally responsible, in full command. It is the genius of the Gospel that it does not standardise personality—that it releases person- ality. Paul remains Paul, Apollos remains Apollos, one continues to plant, the other continues to water, but each has now a Commander-in-chief who leads him to his own particular sphere of service and, at last, to his supreme height of achievement. Who was the more important—Paul or Apollos? What a futile question! Which is more important, the left wheel of a vehicle or the right—one’s upper teeth or lower? We should get along only with difficulty without either! And what a gift it is in men and women to recognise their peculiar limitations as well as their particular talents. Paul knew that his gift was pre-eminently in his ability to lay foundations, to begin churches, and he knew also, that Apollos’ eloquence, with his deep insight into the meaning of the Scriptures—all enriched by Alexandrian cul- ture—was pre-eminently fitted to build upon those foundations, to strengthen the faith of wavering 112 THE GENIUS OF THE GOSPEL 113 Christians and to inspire the early churches to go forward. Much of the failure and more of the half-success of life, results from the inability or unwillingness of peo- ple to understand and accept themselves at their face value. There are so many Pauls trying to water and so often Apollos makes a mess of the planting. Have you ever been invited to inspect some monstrosity on canvas, over which some admiring friend or relative of the eager artist, whose hand may have been designed to guide a plow or till a field, but never to paint one, waits for you to break into rapture? I recall such an occasion when having stood speechless and chagrined for a minute that seemed like an hour, I at last cried: “How could he do it? ”’—and escaped. Afterwards I learned that my remark was a treasured tribute. _ There are worthy things in this world for us all to do, but no man can do all things worthily—even Paul could not. The secret of success here is in knowing your name. If your name is Apollos, do not make the mistake of responding when Paul is called. You will be needed, imperatively needed, but later—after the planting. Paul, who had so great a place, certainly could not take the place of God, nor could he supersede Apollos in the sphere of an inspired and inspiring instructor and leader of wavering Christians. There are times when one’s admirers tempt a man to think otherwise, but the truth, “ Every man to his own,” is written often and large across the pages of history. Conceit is more frequently a liability than an asset and over- praise is a hindrance—not a help. There is a blind devotion to one’s own fancied quali- ties that often becomes as extreme and ridiculous as 114 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM the super-loyalty of some well-meaning, misguided friends. ‘‘ Let the cobbler stick to his last,” when not misapplied is a wise saying for every generation. ‘‘ Every man to his own ” well expresses the genius of the Gospel. Speaking of two famous New York ministers a decade ago, a college president who had been asked the question, “‘ Which of the two is the greater preacher? ” replied, ““ You cannot answer the question. I hear one and he comforts me—restores my peace of mind and soul. I leave his church saying—he is the greater. And then I hear the other and he chal- lenges me, girds me for the battle of life. I leave his church saying—he is the greater.” One to comfort and another to challenge and God to give the increase! Of course, without God to give the increase, the rest would not greatly matter. The application of the principle of our text to busi- ness and trade has brought about the efficiency standard. Even big business finds it worth while to distinguish between Paul and Apollos and to recognise each. Tradition has it that Paul was a short, stooped man, while Apollos was tall and cast in lines of grace and beauty. In Henry Ford’s automobile institution, Paul and Apollos would be given entirely different assignments. I have watched that amazing continuous belt from which the cars are assembled as it travels on and on. Perhaps you have watched it as I have. You remember the tall man who, standing erect adjusted the steering wheel and the short man who, with the minimum of bending, tightened the hubs and. the knuckles. ‘‘ Every man to his own! ” Moses to lead and Aaron to talk! Paul to plant and Apollos to water. Witness the demonstration of this principle in the home—the father carrying the heavier physical load— THE GENIUS OF THE GOSPEL 115 unless he is an Indian of certain tribes, or worse! —and the mother entering the more intimate places of service that few fathers ever see, but both ministering to- gether—supplementing, strengthening each other; building together the structure of love neither alone could rear. Now Paul and Apollos, who were so different, had certain things in common and so were able to work together toward a common goal. The two men in the Ford plant had as their objective another Ford which could not be achieved with the assignment of either man unfinished. The father and mother dream their dreams of their daughters’ happiness and their sons’ success. Their dream, I say and theirs—not hers nor his it is. And so Paul and Apollos had something in common—two things in common—the Kingdom of Jesus Christ and their dedication, their consecration to it. Because of their consecration, the utter abandon of their devotion, the flaming completeness of their loyalty, God gave the increase to their joint labours. And to such consecration God will always give the increase. Upon such a surrender of life and talent He will always bestow His finishing power. This genius of the Gospel accounts for the humble and simple who become mighty and for the mighty who become mightier. Let a boy of the Massachusetts farm, uncouth and without an education, consecrate himself to the passion of Jesus and God transforms him as completely as he transformed Saul of Tarsus. Dwight L. Moody emerged from physical and mental poverty to become one of the greatest figures in the Christian Church. His evangelistic message still rings through the world and a quarter of a century after. his death the unique educational institutions he founded 116 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM remain as his living monument. And it was this same Gospel, swelling in mighty spiritual harmonies through the esthetic soul of Wesley, who carried with him the finest scholarship traditions of Oxford—Wesley, an- other Apollos, that set the dead formalism of the eighteenth century singing “I know that my Re- deemer lives.” Give to God the consecration of the life, the dedica- tion of the all—however humble or however exalted, and He will surely supply the increase. Withhold the consecration, deny the dedication and Saul is lost somewhere on the road to Damascus while Apollos remains a scholarly nonentity in Alexandria. The Gospel needs you and only you to redeem the world. You—your voice, your influence—your money. Yes, but more, You—that ultimate personality that makes you different; that makes Paul Paul, Apollos Apollos, and you you. It is the genius of the Gospel that you need become no other man or no other woman to plant with Paul, to water with Apollos, to evangelise with Moody, to sing with Wesley, or to serve some- where else in the place your talent, your personality fit you for as they fit you for no other where. All the tasks of the world are to be done and to do them will require all kinds of people. In the genius of the Gospel the only man who cannot is the man who will not. Apollos is the Scriptural example of learning conse- crated and alive with spiritual enthusiasm. The idea is abroad that scholarship is always unbelieving, or at least vigourously sceptical—that great thinkers are great doubters. The conclusion must be based upon a very superficial survey of life and history. The Gospel of Jesus Christ has in every generation laid hold upon learned men. Apollos is an example, but he THE GENIUS OF THE GOSPEL 117 is not an exceptional or isolated case. Both he and Paul were mighty men of wisdom and invariably they were heard with as much consideration by the Literatti of their day as by the uneducated rabble. It is the exception to the rule when the Intellectual denies. He is more often a mystic than not. Even Darwin, as he went deeper into the field of his theory, found himself swinging more and more back to his early faith. One of the greatest surgeons of our time, Dr. Howard Kelly, of Johns Hopkins—there is no greater name in the medical world—superintends a Rescue Mission and joins in the Creed we ourselves repeat. Presi- dent Harper, of the University of Chicago, one of the fathers of our modern university system, died with his hand in the hand of his friend, Frank Gunsaulaus, whispering “ Now I lay me down to sleep.” It is a little wisdom that makes for conceit—more wisdom increases the measure of humility. We need never fear knowledge—that which is mistaken for knowledge often does great damage. Emerson, refer- ring to the elusive character of wisdom, said—and who of American scholars was more genuinely wise?— “‘ Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom who, being put into certain company or other favourable conditions, become wise for a short time as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.” True wisdom, as in the case of Apollos, always lays down the Service test. A worker of the Christian Church died after twenty-five years of ministry in one of New York’s famous rescue missions. At his funeral the statement was made that his training and ability would have given him success in any popular pulpit. He deliberately went to the slums, buried himself 118 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM among his social and intellectual inferiors, because he believed that God had for him there a peculiar oppor- tunity. He followed in the footsteps of that other intellectual who removed from the classical halls of Alexandria to the humble shops of Ephesus. Wisdom has always the ability to adapt itself to conditions. Apollos, who was at home with the aristocracy of the intellect, was equally at home with tent-makers and weavers of linen. He was happier, I am sure, because among them he found his life work. It is this Service principle that lifts inferiors to wisdom’s higher plane. Apollos threw off nothing of his own culture when he deserted the atmosphere of the university, but using everything he had mastered, he drew others upward from their low estate. What you use you cannot lose—it is in idleness that wisdom decays. Wisdom must advance or be overtaken by tradition and superstition—it must serve or perish. Apollos had the wisdom that grows in grace. He began his spiritual life at the baptism of John, but went gloriously on into the fuller knowledge of an intimate personal experience with Jesus Christ. A striking illustration of wisdom’s adaptability came to me in a most unexpected place. By the ruins of a prehistoric city on a desert of the Southwest, I found a trader who had never attended a public school or any other beyond the grammar-grades, but who had an unusually fine library and who was versed in archeology. He knew intimately the Toltec and the Aztec theories, and had made a personal study of all the ruins for miles about. On his shelves were im- plements and weapons of the Stone Age and he was following closely the daily story from Carter’s excava- tions in the Valley of the Kings. I was not satisfied THE GENIUS OF THE GOSPEL 119 until I learned his secret. For seven years a Fellow of the London Society of Archeology had spent his summers in that region. The trader had sold him supplies, had talked and tramped with him. And that man of scholarly distinction, far from despising the lesser mind, complimented it by opening his own rich store of learning to its eager emptiness. The trader received a seven years’ post graduate course in arche- ology that any student of that science might well envy, and the scientist from London became as completely at home in the desert as in his class room and club, because he had true wisdom. Learning had made him wise and he made his learning serve—serve unselfishly. From London to the desert—from Alexandria to Ephe- sus—is the way of wisdom and in the genius of the Gospel that way is still open to every man. Yes, in the genius of the Gospel there is a message and opportunity for every person—for Paul and for Apollos, for Moody and Wesley, for the Rescue Mis- sion worker, for the great educator, for the far- journeying scientist and for us all. The Gospel will lay hold upon and use any man who wills that it should. Adapting itself to his personality and powers, it will use him, it will possess him, it will minister through him. And beyond all this it is the genius of the Gospel that where no faultless sword is available, or where the blue steel fails, it snatches up a broken blade and triumphs. It has been well said that Christianity is exclusive. Exclusive it is, but not as the American government is exclusive, and must be in its present immigration pol- icy. In Christianity the exclusion act is the choice of the individual. ‘‘ Whosoever will may come” is the great enabling declaration of Jesus Christ. Only those 120 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM who will not, cannot. ‘ Whosoever will may come ”— all peoples, and all conditions,—come without preju- dice to racial characteristics, come without offense to the personality of the least or poorest—-Come—come —to the exaltation and fulfilment of every worthy attribute of body, mind and soul. “*Whosoever will’—the promise is secure; “Whosoever will’—forever must endure; “Whosoever will’—tis life for evermore— “Whosoever will’ may come.” XII ON GUARD! NE of the great verses of Holy Writ which () implies, at once, that there is something of value to be protected and that there are dan- gers or enemies to be guarded against runs thus: “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.” Some things have no value, or value only under certain conditions. It is not necessary to throw guards about the sands of the Sahara desert, but the writer is acquainted with a family the foundation of whose fortune was laid in a vast sandhill of Long Island. The salt water of the Atlantic has no night watchman and needs none, but fresh water to a ship- wrecked company afloat upon its mighty bosom becomes more precious than diamonds. Always, as values increase, dangers to them increase and their guards must be multiplied. Before the War I rode across the continent many times, but never saw a soldier at a single bridgehead. During the War every vital river span was under the gleaming eye of the searchlight by night and during the day was held constantly in the scarcely less penetrating gaze of the military patrol. Some things there are that have universal value— value that does not change with circumstances, that does not vary with the seasons, that is the same in any location. Sand is sand in the Sahara and dollars in 121 122 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM New York. Fresh water is free to the roving Indian and priceless to a famished crew in mid-ocean. But my heart is worth no more to me here than it is in Africa, but quite as much in my youth as in my age, for not for an hour anywhere could I live without it. Apply this lesson of universal value to Society. What does it mean to you, to me—to us? Some things there are in society, some values that are universal— free speech, education, safety for life and property and all that may be properly included in the word freedom. These things are as important to the poor man as to the rich man—they are as priceless on the Pacific Coast as on the Atlantic. And exceedingly important it is for us all to remember that these things, which in their intrinsic worth and universal character belong to all, cannot be denied by one group to any other group without setting in motion the infallible processes of the law of compensation. Eventually the group denying to others universal values finds itself denied. I once heard a wise man say, who had been criticised in the British House of Commons because he insisted that war objectors be allowed to speak on in Hyde Park: “I don’t care particularly about thes protec- tion and I hate what they say, but I do care particu- larly about my protection when J say what I believe.” The French Revolution, with its attendant horrors, illustrates fully this principle. For generations roy- alty recognised the right, though it may seldom have exercised it, of riding down the common people and eventually we find the proverbial worm turning and riding down royalty. A more recent, and even more terrible, illustration is Russia. On the other hand William Penn recognised the fact that even a naked Indian had as complete a claim on justice as a beruffled ON GUARD! 128 King and while other Crown colonies suffered massacre and famine, the Quakers flourished and were safe. Some things there are in society, some values that are universal—that belong to all. These universal values, society is responsible for conserving and protecting. We are listening to a great deal of wild talk again about “ blue laws ’”—and the efforts being made in Legislatures to strengthen the bulwarks about the American Sabbath are receiving the customary newspaper strictures and misrepresen- tations in our press. But when we no longer rise to be counted for the seventh day of worship and rest, the thing we call American Democracy will be riding hard toward political and spiritual Bolshevism. The American Sabbath belongs to us all! It has had an immeasurable part in making us what we are as a people. He who weakens it, whatever his motive, weakens the State. He who fails by sound and reason- able practice to observe and defend it, denies his birthright. And more and more I am coming to feel that Chris- tians must have a greater sense of obligation for pro- moting the essential unity of their faith. The prayer of Jesus that we all might be one, was no idle utter- ance; it is one of those universal spiritual gifts to man. The words flowed in a stream of molten agony from His lips. Too little have we ever done to fulfill them. The spectacle of distress we present today before a uniting and increasingly insolent pagan world is an indictment and a warning. Not by any mere effort to bring denominations into one ecclesiastical government —an effort that often results in yet more offensive divisions—can we meet the crisis. But, if we would hold our outposts, strengthen our strongholds and 124 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM move forward to complete our heaven-given assignment making of the kingdoms of the earth the kingdom of our Lord and His Christ, we must perfect in Christen- dom a spiritual unity that will make the words: “ Like a mighty army moves the Church of God,” more than a poet’s fancy and a marching-song. The notable Washington missionary conference, the splendid federated efforts in our own and other cities; the uniting of the churches in the American Bible Society and in similar agencies, to maintain the world wide supremacy of the Holy Scriptures; the Sunday School and Christian Endeavour and Y. M. C. A. movements and hundreds of others, are prophecies of a great and triumphant day. Each individual has immediate responsibility for “ keeping,” for protecting certain things of value. His land and his property appear first, though these are not the most important by any means. But they may be seen with the naked eye and, after all, the individual who professes to despise material values seldom has an intelligent regard for spiritual. I have observed that the farmer who keeps his fence corners clean and has a frank pride in good crops, makes a better trustee, or deacon, or elder, than the ploughman who leaves his implement to rust in the weather. The worth in anything should be regarded by the person who possesses it, and for any individual to neglect the powers that lie latent within him to lift him to a higher temporal estate is a sin of omission. But there are more intimate values that as an indi- vidual I am charged with keeping safely,—my body, my mind, my character. How peculiarly mine they are —my body, my mind, my character. How often the man who highly regards many lesser matters neglects ON GUARD! 125 or ignores them. Jesus had a tremendously high re- gard for the body—He knew that some day His would be a torch uplifted to the world. He said of yours and of mine, “ It is the temple of the Holy Ghost.” “ He who steals my purse steals trash; but he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him and makes me poor indeed.” And yet there are many people who keep their gold in strong boxes and their securities in vaults of steel and cement but who trust their good name, which may have come down to them by a long line of sacrifice and high service, to moral adventurers and the companionship of social parasites. Character should never be treated as a hot-house plant, but it is equally fatal to leave it without atten- tion in a weed-infested field. ‘“‘ The greatest thing in the world is man, and the greatest thing in man is mind,” I heard a lecturer say in my undergraduate days. But to see the trash that a multitude crowd into their minds causes one to seriously question whether the rank and file of us really believe it. ‘‘ Guard well thy thought—our thoughts are heard in Heaven,” said a wise man—and what a commotion would occur in any audience were our thoughts to be heard by our fellows! But it is eternally true that “Were I so tall to reach the pole, Or grasp the ocean with my span, I must be measured by my soul— The mind’s the standard of the man!” Yes, these are the greater values of life! These are the treasures that cannot be replaced! Here we must stand fast and let no enemy pass. And these are 126 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM the things that have their centre and home in the heart —the heart out of which the Proverb maker declares are the issues of life. Our children, our loved ones, our friends, take their stand with these sacred matters. They may be seen and heard and felt as any temporal possessions. They have their identity in form and matter, but chiefly they are spiritual in their contacts with us. All our relation- ships with them centre in that divinity which is called personality. Nor is it necessary to do more than re- mind you that the moral catastrophe upon which a son may come is as a deadly thrust through the heart of the father, even as a son’s triumph is his parents’ rich- est reward. Guard your children as you would guard your own life then—for your life they are. Aye, and guard them with your life is the law of heaven. “ Keep them from evil,’ was the prayer of Jesus for His dis- ciples. “ Keep them from evil” by clean example, by resolute discipline, by inspiring confidence. ‘‘ Keep them from the evil” and ‘“ make them fit to live” is the well nigh omnipotent supplication of fathers and mothers who trust in God and are doing their part! The location of a guard is a very important matter. Bridge patrols were not stationed in the center of a span, though their eyes were over its entire length. They were always located at the approaches. If you would keep your heart with all diligence, you must guard its entrances,—eyes and ears and all the senses. You can never give your heart immunity from the evil things of this hectic hour by challenging your eyes with neurotic pictures; your ears with Freudian conversa- tion and your mind with superficial, morally juvenile, sex literature. Guards must be placed at the exits, too! Idle gossip, easy half-slander, jealousy and littleness in ON GUARD! 127 dealing with your friends—these are destroying ene- mies that when they leave the heart behind, leave only aching ruin there. The heart is, always, either a garden or a graveyard. Everything allowed to enter undergoes the subtle pro- cesses of change. The values increase or decrease. We become daily better or worse. A mighty grief enters—shall it remain to harden and blight, or as a ministry of pain? A cruel deception thrusts itself within the guard—shall it be allowed to die, or nour- ished, shall it live and burn? For each one of us it is to say. Whether our lives are happy or sad, suspi- cious or victorious is very largely a matter of our own choice and election. Ours it is to name that which shall survive and flourish and that which shall be for- gotten and die. We tend a garden or keep a tomb. Ours it is, [ say—We tend and we keep. But always we may have “ God with us.” His seat is in the heart and His throne “ He will keep in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Him! ” Long ago a college lad began praying “‘ O God, keep me clean.” Years passed and he came to testify that his prayer, which was the expression of his deep desire, though often sudden passions may have swept him with gales of temptation, kept God continuously at his call. He declares that to feel the Divine strength at hand when he needed that arm of power, became inevitable —that when he met a moral foe, he was never alone! “Out of the heart are the issues of life.” ‘This is the reason for our supreme care, this is the reason we guard the heart with all diligence,—out of it are the issues of life. Not out of the head are the issues of life—not out of the head—but out of the heart. The most searching question is not, “ Is thy head right with 128 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM God? ” but “ Is thy heart right with God? ” The great concern of Jesus Christ was not for the body, nor for the mind of man, but for the seat and centre of his life —the heart. He fed the hungry with fish and bread; He complimented even as He dwarfed the most schol- arly intellects of His day, but it was for the immortal soul of the humblest as well as the highest, that he poured out his life to the uttermost. Again and again history finds the head in full retreat when the heart takes command and wins a great vic- tory. It was the heart of Leonidas and of his three hundred immortal Spartans that held Thermopyle. His head counted a million enemies, numbered ten thousand chariots, and measured a sure disaster, but his heart cried only for the safety of Sparta, and he died with his heart in full command, a true son of the Lion. It was the heart of Isabella that equipped a fleet for Columbus, and it was the heart of that intrepid mariner that sailed her fleet from the Gates of Hercules to San Salvador. The head of Jesus Christ hid the wisest mind that ever measured matters, human and divine, but it was His heart that broke to save the world and through that breach came for us the issues of life. No great task has ever been accomplished anywhere in the world without an inspired leadership and an enthused, soul-challenged and commanded following. Cold logic could have demonstrated the injustice and unwisdom of the Stamp Act. The minds of Washing- ton and Franklin and the Adamses were completely en- gaged with the minds of all those others who together made the period of our American Revolution an age of intellectual giants, before resentment issued in battle and battle in final victory. But it was the heart of the ON GUARD! 129 ragged Continental and not the head that fought from the Cambridge Elm to Yorktown. It was the heart of Patrick Henry and not the head that cried: ‘‘ Give me liberty or give me death,” and swept the old Do- minion to the side of Massachusetts. It was the heart, in spite of the head, that sent George Washington away from his riches to accept the command of the Conti- nental armies. The Declaration of Independence is the supreme document of freedom’s heart. Nothing short of the heart appeal can ever call up in men the highest, the noblest sentiments. Tell me that ten thousand children starve in China and ten thousand is a problem for my mind, but the face of a single famished child is a picture for my innermost being. We weep and give and sacrifice not because we have counted ten thousand, but because we have felt the anguish of one of the least of Christ’s little ones. Do you remember the war emotions of seven or eight years ago? What organ of your being was in command of you when you kissed your son good-bye? Up from America’s heart marched four million men and boys and never shall a post-war cynicism and shallowness blind me to that fact. As the years pass the words and message of Lincoln take on an added lustre from the immortality of their truth and beauty. And who does not say that their supreme enduring quality is the genius of their all- embracing sacrificial love! Out of the heart, out of the heart and from nowhere else, issues Lincoln’s glowing, deathless glory. Always man’s greatest intelligence is the intelligence of his heart. He knows vastly more of reality by faith than he does by arithmetic. Heart wisdom is his near- 130 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM est approach to omniscience and there are times when with both women and men this knowledge becomes an intuition that reaches well within the veil. Where are your richest treasures? Not in the bank, —but let me again say, do not despise those. I would have no person offer even a half-excuse for the riot of waste and the lack of thrift so often distinguishing our modern life. But where are your richest treasures? Thank God they are in the heart. I stood beside a man who looked tenderly and long into the now quiet face of a beautiful and brilliant woman. Her pen had written books; her mind had graced and directed im- portant assemblies; her life had been an open record of helpfulness in a great city, but I heard the man by my side say: “‘ I do not remember your books and your honours today; I only remember that once your arms were about my neck, that once your lips pressed mine. I only remember that you were my mother! ”—-Where are your richest treasures! Ah, guard the heart with all diligence, for there lies your imperishable fortune. Fail to guard the heart, and life no longer issues. Neglect that gate, and death sweeps by. One of the great settlement workers of the past generation, ad- dressing the first Life Extension Institute held in America, said ‘‘ Watch your heart.’ He went on to tell us that in youthful ignorance he had laid the basis for physical trouble that would inevitably send him to an early grave. His prophecy was vindicated by his death in New Orleans two weeks later. ‘‘ Watch your heart ”—for out of it are the physical issues of life. Some of us who weep to see a horse drawing an over- load, constantly throw down impossible burdens upon our faithful, but always human vital organ. Guard the heart of America. That task unfinished, ON GUARD! 131 so bravely begun by those who gave their last full measure of devotion, will never reach completion, and Lincoln’s dream and prophecy will fail, unless we who have come after, guard the gate and keep the sacred things of freedom. Let not one free institution be sur- rendered or weakened. A free press and a free speech, and a free school, a free Church and a free State, and always Liberty with law, these stand at the centre of the innermost being of our national life. He who strikes at all, or one, strikes into the vitals of American democracy. But there is a matter yet more vital than these— more vital than physical existence is to a man, more vital than any national destiny—the life and immor- tality of the soul. “The stars shall fade away, the sun himself Grow dim with age and Nature sink in years; But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, Unhurt amidst the war of elements, The wrecks of matter and the crash of worlds.” Here lies something more precious than mere phys- ical existence—more priceless than any national des- tiny. The Greece of Homer is a fable, the Egypt of the Ptolemies a shrunken mummy, the Rome of the Cesars a crumbling Coliseum, and ages yet unborn may one day look upon the faded banners of Britain and read the tradition that was once America, but Paul lives! Lincoln lives! Jesus Christ lives, and His kingdom shall not pass away. Keep your heart for you shall live for ever! Guard it from the sinister foes of avarice and lust and spir- itual neglect. Hold fast the gate that opens to your 132 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM soul. Let only truth pass there. And you will need a stronger hand and will than yours to bar the way. To stand alone is to fall. But I know the One whose mighty rebuff Will scorn the mightiest crown; I know the One who 1s mighty enough To cast the mightiest down:— And tender ts He, and waiting for thee. AIT HOW TO HEAR kinds of hearers who may be separated into two general classes—those who hear, but do not hold; and those who both hear and hold, because they hear and heed. The three hearers of the first group are the way- side hearer, the shallow hearer, and the thorn-choked hearer. The figure of the wayside is a vivid one. In our lesson we see a hard worn, much traveled highway; a thoroughfare for everything and for all. Nothing good and nothing bad is excluded from either the traffic or the sowing. And always the good seed is trodden down by evil. Then while crushed and help- less, before, with the irresistible life of truth, it has had a chance to spring up again, it is carried en- tirely away. | The world is full of wayside hearers; superficial listeners who catch a bit of truth as in a daze or dream; who retain never more than a hazy recollec- tion of what they have heard; whose memory of good is faint and futile. ‘Their ears and minds are con- gested highways, and always the finer things are being crowded into the ditch by some high powered, brutal selfishness or sensualism. ‘They hear everything—in a way. No thought has feet too hallowed to go track- ing through their minds. The tiny portion of that 133 A hee Parable of the Sower is a picture of four 134 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM which is worth while and wholesome has no chance of being understood because it is given no attention. And the world has as many shallow hearers today. They gladly hear, even with exuberant enthusiasm; gladly, but not deeply. Their quickly formed impres- sions spring up over night like sudden tropical plants. But in that first rush of growth they exhaust their shallow soil and wither with the sun. These are the changeable people who, swept by every wave of doc- trine, are never long on any foundation. To them religion is a sort of three-ring circus, and they are as forever unsettled as a child trying to watch all the rings at once. Temporarily they may look like per- manent partners, substantial builders in the Church, but a slight affront, a trivial grievance, a tiny injury, real or fancied, is as the scorching wind to a shallow flower. Many of them are stirred intellectually or emotion- ally, but never more profoundly. They go to a re- ligious service to be entertained, or to enjoy a literary banquet. However, the important matter for us is not to enumerate and analyse these shallow hearers. We ourselves have little room, I imagine, to employ the tactics of the Pharisee. The important matter for us is to observe that the shallow hearer of the truth does not survive its tests. He is like the beautiful tree with only surface-roots. He goes down before the first wild storm of temptation or adversity. He falls as falls the willow in an autumn gale. There are people who, like plants, promise much in appearance, but render little in a real test. Others there are who have no social comeliness and few intellectual attainments, but whose character stands like a rock in a weary land. Particularly pathetic is the thorn-choked hearer. HOW TO HEAR 135 His mind is as rich and deep as the black loam of new cleared land. He is stirred by profound emotions. He has sound principles and high ideals. He loves the good and beautiful. He hates the wrong. Ah! but he is busy and harassed and crowded. His mind is essen- tially all right, but preoccupied—already filled. The finest field in the fairest valley sown to thorns and weeds, and then planted with corn, will never produce corn. And the mind of a generous, brilliant man given over to the cares of this world, or the deceitfulness of riches and the lust of other things, will never return a harvest of Christian peace and power. The deceitfulness of riches! They promise comfort, happiness and honour. More often they return dis- tress, bitterness and shame. They are constantly tempting men and women, tempting men and women to make them an end in themselves, when they are only good for the good they support. Inevitably they carry with them the menace of selfishness and suspicion and the tyranny of things. They cannot buy Heaven. They cannot buy health. They cannot buy happiness. It is when given their proper planting, their right pro- portion of place and attention, that they are a blessing and not a curse. It is the deceitfulness of riches, the abuse of wealth, the misuse of power, that chokes to its death the good in any man. Cares of this world and the lusts of other things! An invalid mother with her daughter and two grand- children moved into a country house. The husband and son-in-law were much away. Seventeen servants were thought to be essential to the comfort of the es- tablishment. The house with its paltry twenty rooms was hopelessly small. No wonder the mother was an invalid and small wonder that the children could never 186 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM be gotten off to school on time. The garden there may have a thousand priceless blooms, but it is a hopeless tangle of weeds. | New York has given her music-lovers and enter- tainment-seekers a notable series of operatic and literary triumphs since the war. Never were clean, wholesome plays more numerous and never were they more notable in their merit. But New York today is also a veritable cesspool for theatrical filth. There are few foul suggestions for eye and ear that do not stalk naked in the name of art across our stage, or smirk from the pages of our magazines and books. The lewdness of the old frontier was at least honest—ours is a lie. Lusts of other things! Small wonder that the harvest is husks for much of our twentieth century society. But let us stop slandering youth! It is my candid opinion that we get more from our youth than we deserve; that the good returns are far beyond the investment we make. Never did any civilisation have a soil as rich as ours in which to plant the seeds of religion, patriotism and morality. Never has any na- tion known as brave a field in which to sow the promise of her destiny. But church and school and state must awake and unite to turn back these lusts of other things or we shall have a Sahara instead of an Eden. Nor let us beguile ourselves with the fancy that the menace here is confined to the so-called upper stratum of society. In this class of thorn-choked hearers, who- ever Jesus may in His time have found there, we dis- cover now the poor as often as the rich, the farmer’s boy almost as frequently as the millionaire’s son. A Ford may not travel as swiftly as a Rolls-Royce, but it goes as far. Theatrical obscenity is just about as avail- able for Main Street as for Broadway, and the radio, HOW TO HEAR 137 for good or evil, knows no favourites. The lust of other things is an universal menace. For all of us there are the thorns of doubt and the rank weeds of supercilious, superficial philosophy. We doubt our country. We doubt our friends. We doubt our faith. We doubt God himself, and, doubt- ing Him, doubt all. You cannot grow morality, you cannot cultivate sound character in doubt-infested soil. You may raise up a pallid generation of self lovers. You may achieve a society of so-called free social units, but you will, if this planting goes on and its harvest prevails, wreck both Church and State. Ah! but our hope is this second class of hearers. Our hope, and it is a living hope, is in those who both hear and hold because they hear and heed. Jesus named them—‘ Those who bring forth fruits.” “Take heed what ye hear ” is the injunction of the lesson, and the difference between those who hear and do not heed, and those who hear and heed, is the dif- ference between barrenness and fruitfulness, the differ- ence between defeat and victory. ‘“‘ Take heed what ye hear! ” Be careful what you hear! Do not turn your mind into a three-ring circus! Have a self- respecting intellect! Keep slander, mean gossip, and backbiting out. Of a certain prominent publicist I heard this story: A popular teller of tales—tales good, bad and indiffer- ent-—found himself with a group of men in a private dining room of a distinguished Fifth Avenue club. With an unmistakable inflection he said, beginning an eagerly awaited recital, ‘‘ I see that there are no ladies present,” to which the publicist in question, with a smile, replied, but with an inflection also unmistakable, “No ladies, only gentlemen.” Did I hear someone 138 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM say, ‘‘ But I can’t help what I hear”? Oh, yes, you can, and you do! Prepare to hear. Read the author’s book before listening to his lecture; secure the libretto before at- tending the opera; familiarise yourself with the history of the country before visiting its capitol, and, by reflection and introspection, seek to bring yourself into harmony and spiritual oneness with those master- pieces from the ages- which the hand of time has dropped upon your knees. Take time to hear. So much of our hearing today is but half hearing, and half hearing is in vital matters worse than no hearing. We get our information on the run. The concluding words which are the final direction are missed. A gentleman spent a futile hour awaiting an important dinner conference at the wrong hotel because he failed to read the final paragraph of a letter. That neglected paragraph told of a change in the place of meeting. He had soup at one address, and nuts at another, but missed the substantial fare that came between. Hear with a purpose. Those of you who go to church with something definite in mind; those of you who go expectantly, resolving in advance to secure something helpful, invariably lift your heads after the benediction with rewarded minds and thankful hearts. Recently a member of this church said, ‘‘ You hit me terribly hard tonight, and I did enjoy it! ” And the preacher replied, ‘‘ Well, they were glancing blows, for they hit me first! ” Hear with a purpose. You may be disappointed in the sermon, but the music will never fail you, and always you may hear the voice of God and feel His spirit. HOW TO HEAR 139 “Take heed what ye hear!” And now cut off the first word. Drop the ‘“ take” and we have the heart of the whole matter. ‘“‘ Heed what ye hear!” Obey! Govern your life accordingly. The proof of your hearing is your acting. The promise of a tree may be its buds, blossoms and leaves, but its vindication is its fruit. I can hear my father’s penetrating voice calling up the attic stairs—‘ Daniel, get up! ”—not once, but often, and then a little later and much more impres- sively—“ Daniel, are you up?” That first signal was not the crucial matter. With me it was never suffi- cient. I would invariably fall asleep again, and very likely insist that I had not been called at all. On last Columbus Day, for the first time in my life, unless the tragedy may have happened in the night while I slept, I rode upon a train that destroyed a human life. It was at a crossing with an alarm bell in full cry; a crossing over an absolutely straight and unobstructed stretch of track. We do not know, for the poor fellow never spoke, but surely he must have heard. “ Heed what ye hear! ” A splendid youth stands before Jesus. He has the presence and the trappings of a ruler. His face is clean, his eye is honest, and his voice rings eager and true—‘‘ Good Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ And the One who spoke as never man spoke, replied, “‘ Go; sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor.” Does he hear? Yes, face to face they stand, close together. Yes, he hears. ‘ Go; sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor.” What is the answer? Silence for nineteen hundred years. The rich young ruler’s failure was not in his ears, but in his heart. He had ears to hear, but lacked the will to heed. 140 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbour as thyself,’ the Great Teacher had said to this youth of the ruling class, and proudly the well-favoured lad had replied that so he had done. He had heard and intellectually he had assented from his earliest age of responsibility, but when the test of action was laid down, the demonstra- tion of sacrifice required, he did not heed. ‘“ Thou shalt love the Lord thy-God with all thy heart, and thy neighbour as thyself.””’ And what is our answer? Too often the strike, the lock-out, the race-riot and inter- national misunderstandings that are a menace to world peace. ‘‘ Heed what ye hear! ” “Heed what ye hear! ” “ Thou shalt not kill,” I hear him say—nor will I ever believe that Jesus meant that to apply to individuals and not to states; that He condemned private murder and remained silent on collective killings! ‘‘ Thou shalt not kill!” For nineteen hundred years the sons of men have heard the thunder of that word; for nineteen hundred years the Christmas chimes have rung the anthem that the Bethlehem angels sang. For nineteen hundred years the Christian Church has bowed before His manger and His cross and called Him ‘ Prince of Peace” as well as ‘Lord of lords.” Ah, but ‘‘ Heed what ye hear,’ and the answer is new battleships, and fresh levies, poison gas more nearly perfect, and weapons of destruction yet more deadly. ‘‘ Heed what ye hear ’”—and what is the answer? Armies marching to and fro, Clang of steel and crash of blow, ‘ Brother laying brother low— Still His blood cries from the ground HOW TO HEAR 141 From Golgotha’s reeling mound, For the world’s great open wound. “Thou shalt not kill!” What is the answer? And the answer is that if the Church of Jesus Christ would follow in His train, she must heed as well as hear; she must in these stupendous moral matters lead the State. } Out of this chaos of denial a supreme principle emerges. It finds its perfect expression in the words of the Roman-born Jewish tentmaker. ‘“ The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ, our Lord.” The wages of sin is death. Let no man doubt it, and God pity the nation that denies it. God pity that nation, for not even God can save her. The wages of sin is death, and the grinning skeletons of Nineveh and Tyre need not a voice to confirm it. The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life. Heed what ye hear! Heed, for obedience to law is liberty, and God’s word is final law. Abraham heard; heard in the morning mists of society’s first dawn; heard that voice which, having heard, he never more would leave behind. ‘ Get thee out of thy country and from thy kindred and from thy father’s house unto a land that I will show thee.” Abraham heard to heed, and westward the course of empire began to take its way. Westward religion. began its journey to find the city which hath founda- tions whose maker and builder is God. Moses heard; heard the voice in the desert; could not mistake it, for it had a tongue of flame and was living fire. And Moses heard to heed. Out of Egypt he led Israel. Through the Red Sea and the wilder- 142 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM ness he guided her. Beyond the Jordan he saw the ground where Jehovah Himself would plant His seed and multiply His race. Paul heard; heard the cry from Macedonia—‘* Come over and help us,” and Paul heard to heed. Over he came and with him came to earth’s last frontier the mercy and the power of the Cross. And Jesus Himself was subject to this sovereign principle. Jesus, who_was with the Father from the beginning, who knew perfectly the divine mind, Jesus heard. He understood the will of Heaven. In Him it became articulate when He cried, “ And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.” But thus to hear and to know was not enough. In the deep darkness and darker mystery of lonely Geth- semane, God’s Son must, as the humblest man of us, accept the cup and Cross of obedience. Above the olive trees, as Roman soldiers come with spears and torches, and drowsy friends start up to beat them back, I seem to catch the echo of the words He spoke in happier times beside blue Galilee. “ Heed what ye hear.’ He heeds! Out He goes to climb the world’s highest hill, to bear the world’s deepest wound; to set this world’s brightest signal fire. To hear and to heed is to triumph. There is no cross without a crown. Obedience to law is liberty, and God’s law is omnipotent love. ‘‘ For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” XIV IS THE WORLD A SMALL PLACE? ROM God there is no escape. In all places and HR all experiences, whether we welcome Him or otherwise, He is present. ‘‘ In sorrow He’s my comfort, in trouble He’s my stay,” sang our mothers, nor does He avoid the wedding-feast, the council-room, and the mart of trade. Conscience is His favourite vehicle. It is the testimony of many people seeking seclusion and loneliness that always they were closely companioned and no man has ever succeeded in finding a place remote enough to hide his crime. Recently a defaulter, recognised in a Brazilian jungle-town, ex- claimed: ‘“‘ The world is too small! ” Keams Canyon lies nearly a hundred miles north of the beaten path, the old Santa Fé trail, now the road- bed of a great trans-continenta! railway system. It was the favourite Western gateway of Kit Carson, and cuts through the heart of the Navaho land. In the centre of it the Government has established an Indian school. One day I drew up in front of the agent’s office and requested a permit to visit the Hopi villages on the “ First Mesa.” The gentleman who granted my request was a young man from New York whose par- ents are decorators with offices on Lexington Avenue, and whose brother-in-law is assistant manager of one of our largest hotels. Later in that evening, as I felt my way through the darkness, the lights of the car swung over a steep rim and down upon an automobile 143 144 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM stalled in a tremendous dry-wash. Offering my ser- vices to the marooned passengers I found two young women, artists from Holland, courageously, if a little foolishly, penetrating the Indian country without a guide. Still later I dined with the trader at Jedito—Ante- lope Springs—by the side of an ancient ruin which scientists declare to have been the site of a flourishing city when the Pyramids were laid down. I found in the wife of the trader a Christian Endeavourer from Indiana. Yes, the world does seem to be a small place. God, we cannot escape. The great and searching presence is never away; no trail is long enough to dis- tance Him; no spot so hidden that He cannot find us. Indeed, He is ever with us, a benediction or an indictment. But it is almost equally a fact that in the twentieth century we cannot escape each other. Recently a friend of the writer said: “‘ Well, I shall change my summer location, for quiet and seclusion I must have, and the automobile has brought me as close to my friends as my winter quarters used to be.” ‘There is a demand now for passage somewhere, anywhere on ships without a radio. A little while ago I came two hundred and thirty miles from a railroad, across mountains and deserts, into a forest of one million eight hundred thou- sand acres; roughly surveyed one hundred miles long by sixty miles wide, and almost completely isolated, where in moving forward twenty-six miles with my companions I counted two hundred and sixty-nine deer, where in two days of hunting I found eleven “kills ” of mountain lion and watched two beautiful bob cats in a pine tree above a fawn they had slain. Trails end surely! But the camp radio, only slightly IS THE WORLD A SMALL PLACE? 145 disturbed by static, gave us the scores of the interna- tional polo games, a bed-time story, and some insuffer- able jazz! One may travel for miles in the Sahara without meeting a living creature unless he has carried him as a tiny and unwelcome passenger from the last Arab camp and then he has come up with his partner’s cousin, or his chauffeur’s brother, at the evening oasis! By trails of travel ever shortening, on land and over water and through air, we have brought the far and near together. Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days has become a very slow book. It takes a trip to Mars, or a voyage to the moon, to stir the imagination of the present generation. The only time we Americans fail to realise the fact of the earth’s smallness is when we talk about our iso- lation—our remoteness. There may be arguments for national aloofness, but we are addle-headed and foolish when we use physical isolation and geographical re- moteness as one of them. The United States is hours nearer any explosion in Europe now than she was when the crazy student did his killing in 1914—Even then we were too close to keep clear. The only question for us to decide—and God knows we need all our wisdom and courage along with divine assistance to reach the decision, is: ‘“‘ How shall we co-operate with the rest of the world for the best inter- ests of us all?’ Manifestly we should not expect to dictate any plan arbitrarily nor to predicate our final action upon the unconditional acceptance by others of our own proposition. Internationalism remains an adventure—but an adventure of faith and not of fear. An adventure, but in a time when not to SE iS to invite irretrievable disaster. 146 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM This is a small world because always all of us are close to experiences that are common to us all. We are always close to sorrow. Always all of us are close to sorrow—our own or others. “ There is no flock, however watched and tended, But one dead lamb 4s there. There is no household, howsoe’er defended, But has one vacant chatr.” Always, we are close to pain. An old man staggered down my car, stooped and cringing. He was on his way to Rochester. A dread word on his lips—and dread, deep dread, was in his eyes. Pain is always sitting next to us, even when we ourselves are for the moment free. I think that among the heroes of all time are those who have born suffering without despair- ing—who have made out of pain a ministry. IT have a neighbour who built his great house above the Hudson and the Palisades where he could watch the sunlight play upon them. Then suddenly his lamp flickered and went out. Now I see him standing with his face uplifted in the glory that he never more shall see, but there is no wail upon his lips. He has the glory in his soul. It is not how much you suffer, but how. A very courtly and distinguished gentleman who has been a great religious leader, a college president, and who is now at the head of one of the most powerful banks in America, has a knee stiff and solid. But the gentleman is so unusual in his character and disposi- tion that no one ever retains a memory of his physical handicap. I had known him by reputation and through mutual friends for years before I ever saw him. No one had ever told me nor had I known that IS THE WORLD A SMALL PLACE? 147 he was lame. Suffering may make you either miser- able or a minister. Pain may serve you ill, or well. Some of the great benefactors of man have been great and constant sufferers. Some of the finest works of genius has been accomplished by those who dipped their pens in their own blood. It is never what a man feels that makes or breaks him, but how he feels and how he acts about it. The world is small because we are always close to danger. Death hurries by every corner of Manhattan and lurks in every subway. Physical danger is always near. After a wedding one evening I stepped, with a little group, into Fifth Avenue. Out of Thirty-third Street a man came running, head down and revolver in his hand. Close behind him leaped a dismounted, mounted officer—his automatic menacingly ready for action; then another officer, and finally the inevitable crowd in full cry. The fugitive avoided a legal killing by surrendering just across from our church. He had staged a hold-up at the rear entrance of the McAlpin Hotel. Some of us were fortunate to escape more than a thrill! No, it is unnecessary to climb Mount Ever- est, or to go in search of some Arctic island to find danger. I have just spent weeks in the West—in those remote places once referred to as “wild and woolly ”—but without seeing a single side-arm! Moral danger, too, is always near us,—the tempta- tions that lead us to lower our standards and play with our faith. The suggestion that we have been good long enough and that now is the time to trade the coin of old-fashioned wholesomeness for the quick change of the devil. Grave, great risks are here—always with us. The risk every one of us runs of sacrificing first, the best for the better, then the better for the good, 148 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM and finally the good for worse. A small world it is. On one corner a church and behind it a dive. In one market the purest milk, the freshest vegetables, the cleanest meats—in another food fit for no human stomach. We deceive ourselves when we think that we can make ourselves immune to these dangers, that we who seem more fortunate than others, dare ignore them. The “richest little-boy in the world,” guarded by nurses and surrounded by grooms and servants, went laughing down the drive of his father’s Washington home one day into the path of a great truck to sudden death. Nurses and servants who had not saved him carried in his lifeless body. Atlanta, Georgia, a few years ago was swept by a smallpox epidemic that had its origin in the squalid negro hovels of the city. But it did its saddest work, wrought its fiercest ruin, in the homes of the ‘‘ better families.” The world is a small place, for always one is near loneliness. Recently I heard a woman say, “O, if I don’t get away from this desert, from this maddening silence, I shall scream.’ We more often think of lone- liness in association with wide spaces, empty of cities and hungry for people. Stories of trappers in the North woods, shipwrecked crews on uncharted islands, are the ones usually set to music, weird and low. But it is my conviction that there is more real loneliness in any great city than in any wilderness that today re- mains unexplored. I have seen loneliness in New York —seen it in the lap of luxury and wealth, as well as in the room of the poor—that beggars description and surpasses any tale of desert isolation that was ever screened. This same loneliness has in it one of the greatest of IS THE WORLD A SMALL PLACE? 149 all great battles for the lad who comes fresh and eager from the farm, and for the girl who leaves her home village, ambitious to write her way to fame and for- tune. His Satanic majesty’s favourite weapon in these crowded tenements and ever-multiplying apartments is loneliness. The Church can do few things that are of more far-reaching importance to the future of New York, the American home and the American nation, than to receive, welcome, and companion these youth- ful new arrivals. But not only the transient and new arrival is lonely in New York. One of the oldest mem- bers of our congregation went to her reward during the Summer months. She bore an honoured name—the name of an old family. The last time that I visited her she said: ‘“‘ Relatives and friends are nearly all gone. Now no one comes and I cannot go. I am very lonely.” But there is another side to the universal picture. This is a small world because we are all always so close to joy and success. Children are singing about us, houses are rising, smiling brides are putting on their finery. The strong are building better than we dreamed for them. The good things of life are being shared. At our very doors the determination of faith is making a path out of squalour and ignorance toward comfort and achievement. And are we not always at the door of opportunity? The chance to be needs only the will to achieve, to become a fact. The sight of favoured ones should not strike us blind to others unfavoured and handicapped who, refusing to despair, have claimed the opportunity no one else could see for them—those who have exalted their life by living it courageously and well. The crip- pled grandson of a friend of mine was, in merit and by personal popularity, elected president of his class and 150 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM editor of the high school paper. At Long Beach, in California, I saw a legless, handless man writing beau- tiful visiting cards. Opportunity is close to us. The opportunity to do something generous and fine for an- other, to send cheer into the home of anxiety and want, to encourage ambitious youth, to put the training and experience of ripe years at the disposal of those who have not lived so long and who do not know as much; the opportunity to use your own good fortune, to draw upon your own abundant store for those who have come upon a special need and who may face defeat. What a small world this is, and what a glad world for those who pass through it with open eyes and heart. We are always close to deliverance, to freedom, to something better. Let us remark again that this is a small world because always we are close to God in it. He is never far from any man. There are times when we are more conscious of His presence and some there are who so practice His presence as to know constantly His com- forting, inspiring, strengthening companionship. But always and everywhere, He is near. Whatever man’s circumstance, when called upon God will answer him. It is not necessary to wait for the daybreak of some holy dawn, or to go to some distant shrine to demon- strate this fact. He spoke to Moses as, engaged in business, Moses watched the flocks of Jethro. He spoke to the lad Samuel, in the quiet watches of the night, in a voice still and small. ‘ Surely this is the gate of Heaven; surely God is here,” the awe-stricken disciples whispered on the Mount of Transfiguration. And they were right. But He was no less present when soldiers drove the nails of agony and shame into the Cross through His ministering hands, Always God is IS THE WORLD A SMALL PLACE? 151 “here,” and here for no other purpose than to save and heal and bless. I say that one need not go far nor cry loudly to find God. The Psalmist tells us that He is present to make the record when a sparrow falls and of how much more importance you are than a sparrow. I have found God in the church—in the study of the minister, in the par- lours and in the chapel, in the great marble tower and in this spacious chamber where His music swells in worship and praise, where the word of His Gospel is spoken and where men and women and children bow before His altar. Aye, and I have found Him in the crowded and many-tongued avenues, along the con- gested waterfront, in the cathedral-like buildings and the parks that lift their trees like supplicating hands to the sky out of which comes their sunshine and their water of life. I love this vast, this overwhelming place. I do not think that I should be long happy, now that I have come to know her, far from her. Everywhere in her I find God—in her toil and in her haste, in her cities within the City, larger they are than their old world counterparts; in her poverty and undernourishment and sin; in her mad abandon to pleasure; in her indus- trial strife and her social cruelty—everywhere I find God ministering by the hands of men and women; serving in great philanthropies and Christian missions; healing in hospitals and health centers; educating in schools and colleges—making the way of the street safer and easier for little children and swinging back the doors of brotherhood to usher in Christ’s new era of the soul. Let this mysterious assurance of God’s presence be our final word. If, in the message of the hour, you 152 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM have come to feel the fact of Him, I shall know that you have caught a vision of your better self and are going out with a divine urge to make a better life. It was my good fortune to come to Zion National monument in the marvelous canyon of the Virgin River in Utah, one night when there was a full moon. The moonlight on those colossal crags and pinnacles pro- duced an effect more magical than any dream of Arabian Nights. It was as though phantom ships of many shapes came sailing out upon a vast, celestial, silver sea. Standing before the majestic and illumined silence of El Gobernador, I waited for some one to voice the sentiment that I had no words to express. It was the driver of our party who spoke first, and no master of English, no genius of poetic form could have said more—‘‘ It makes a fellow want to watch his step,” he said. “ Jt makes a fellow want to watch his step.” God was there! XV WINNING OVER WORRY RISTOTLE was of the opinion that man has a A special emotion which causes him to fret and worry when he witnesses unearned prosperity. Certainly even the best nature’s manifest at times this spirit, nor should any of us be asked to rejoice in the rewards that come to certain workers of iniquity. But the emotion should be controlled, and so far as giving it any of our valuable time is concerned, it is properly dismissed with the observation that justice, however slow, is exacting and that God is an unfail- ing Judge. But the admonition: “ Fret not thyself because of evil doers,” had a much wider implication than a mere reference to a proper attitude to be assumed toward ““workers of iniquity.” Here is an admonishment against worry itself. An admonishment timely and imperative, for where is a more devastating curse and a weakness more prevalent? “It is not work that kills men, itis worry. Work is healthy; you can seldom put more upon a man than he can bear. Worry is rust upon the blade. It is not the revolution that destroys the machinery, it is the friction.” ‘Thus spoke Henry Ward Beecher, nor did he say half enough. A curse it is! A blight upon the one whose breast chambers it and upon all who love him. And who of us entirely escapes it? How it has set us all busy providing against future disturbances that never materialise. 153 154 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM How many have laid up treasures against the rainy day they never lived to see? How many have sacrificed present peace of mind for anticipated disasters in busi- ness, home and government which the unfolding years have not revealed? How many have made life a burden for themselves and their friends miserable by labouring today under the dreadful happenings of tomorrow, when to live today well is the only task God has ever given us? A certain bishop kept an entire ship’s company in mental turmoil while the vessel went zig-zagging through the torpedo zone during the late War, by see- ing a periscope in every white cap and an enemy rocket in every shooting star. He was sure that his wife and children would never see him again! Eventually, every person on board was convinced that no one else ever wanted to! What a worrier Thomas Carlyle is said to have been! When he lived in London, a _ neighbour’s chickens gave him great annoyance. The male mem- ber of the flock was, as always is the case with such fellows, particularly unfortunate in his hours of vocal exercise. Carlyle remonstrated with the proprietor of the bird, who insisted that the rooster seldom crowed more than three or four times in a night, to which the crabbed old Scot replied, ‘‘ That may be, but if you only knew what I suffer waiting for him! ” And what we all do suffer waiting, waiting for trouble, sorrow, disaster. What men do suffer waiting for him. Easy enough for me to laugh at Carlyle’s annoying rooster, or the good bishop’s terror of the submarines, but what about my bird of worry? My submarine of terror? What a terrible bird or boat he is! WINNING OVER WORRY 155 We are all in this same demoralizing trouble; let us seek to help each other. Very quaintly Edgar Guest tells a pathetic, well-nigh unusual story in one of his poems: “T saw a troubled man today, A stranger's face whtch plainly told, Some anxious care had come his way, It looked so drawn and old. * * X* * * “And though he would not know my name Or guess that I was there, I bothered with him just the same And made for him a prayer. “God help him to be strong, said I, God help him to be true, In this his hour of doubt, be nigh, And bring lim safely through.” What is the cause of worry? There are many causes, though the greatest of worries come without cause—that is, a cause that may be defined. Imagina- tion feeds worry. -Vain imaginings stuff them up and blow them out until they bob about us like sinister red balloons ever threatening to explode and deafen or smother us. It was Shakespeare who said, ‘‘ Nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.” But many worries may be traced to their source, for they do have a basis in fact. Of course the final foun- tain of worry is always fear—fear, age-old and coming out of the primal woe. Fear, devil-eyed, sneering up from the pit—fear, fear of the unknown. And God knows that we have enough to stir us to anxiety, to give us concern; to goad us into worry—and God pity 156 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM us, so frequently we turn to the Church and her min- istry in vain! Some causes of worry are physical. A sudden pain clutches your heart, obstructs the great thrust of that vital muscle—how you wait for that pain to come again! Or, your bank account steadily dwindles and no call to work comes—and you begin to count your dollars and then your smaller change. You must eat— and more important to you, those dependent upon you must eat. Ten thousand anxieties there are jostling each other about every day that have their centre in a loaf of bread, or a pair of shoes, or a ton of coal, or an apartment fit to live in. Let no man say that here are matters to be lightly regarded and carelessly dismissed. As for the rest of us, matters that so intimately relate themselves to our fellows belong to us who are more fortunate and Heaven shame us when our hearts be- come hard and closed! There is an honest, a divine concern for others that gives us no rest, no sleep until we have done all possible to relieve our brother’s phys- ical or his spiritual necessity. Have you ever been hungry, hungry for food? Have you ever been homeless—with no place to put your head down upon a pillow of sleep when the night came? Have you ever closed your uncovered, frost-bitten fingers about ‘a snow shovel and in a thin coat, facing a rising storm of rain and sleet, with a falling tempera- ture, tried to win food for yourself and for your chil- dren? God break my heart some day, if need be— smash it into small pieces—but God forbid that any disillusionment, or selfishness, or weakness should ever close it! And children are a source of worry. What a terror the cough of croup sends into the heart of a mother— WINNING OVER WORRY 157 what an anguish the long unexplained absence brings. But darker still the nights when sons and daughters turn their feet to forbidden paths and unlock the inner chambers of their souls to sinister guests. Again: scientists tell us that overstrain, physical as well as mental, is a mighty encouragement to wrong— that the man who drives himself at his desk or in his office, who refuses to concede the demands of his body and soul for relaxation and refreshment, becomes a nervous and haunted host to fears of every sort, an irritable and churlish attendant on disaster. But the most fruitful source for worry is not sick- ness, nor fear of poverty, nor physical weakness nor anxiety for others. Sin makes worry faster than all things else. The man who is living a wrong life, a life that does not square with his intellectual and moral standard, a life that violates the ideals he once held, a live that covers things double and ugly—that man worries! His face in repose will show it, nor will his laughter ever be loud enough to drown completely the still small voice of an accusing conscience. Sin makes worry—sin, gaunt and crude, that smears a ruddy stain across a murderer’s hand, or leaves upon a seducer’s soul forever the memory of the virtue he made the plaything of his lust and the outcast of his vice. Such sin is paid for—paid for in the haunted look of the fugitive from justice who hears in every footfall the tread of an avenger and who sees in every honest face the verdict, “‘ Thou art the man!” Sometimes I won- der which of two sinners, the vicious and brutal one, or the other who carries along with him the refinements of culture and the enrichments of art while he indulges in practices from which he goes back to the sacred teachings of his childhood and the precious memories 158 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM of his father and mother, with a soul ashamed,— which one of these sinners worries the most? ‘There are times when we ought to be ashamed not to be worried! An appalling symptom of the times in which we live is the worry, unnatural and fatal of little children. Among the children in some localities of continental Europe the suicide rate is said to be as high as among adults. Boys and girls scarcely out of their babyhood are found in despair. Hunger, undernourishment and all the hideous pre-natal influences of the war are now uniting to make moral monstrosities out of those who should be care-free and happy. Even here, in the great American cities, child life and the more advanced period of adolescence has taken on the abnormalities of pleasure which consort with vice. The sensitive na- tures of our immature sons and daughters are fed until they are sated with excitement and noise; they suffer from a moral overstrain that leaves them blasé and un- aroused in the presence of all that should make youth shout with joy and join with zest. Boys now become muscularly soft without ever having been physically hard and morally they harden without knowing the blessedness of childhood’s normal genuineness and sympathy. I have heard with disgust that was only exceeded by my grief, the story of schoolboys who refused to go out for basketball because it was too rough, or be- cause its practice hours interfered with afternoon hotel teas. These same lads had heard every loud cabaret joke on Broadway and are adepts along with the adult members of their families in defying the Constitution of the United States. Of course they have nothing to live for! Their future is behind them! WINNING OVER WORRY 159 Somehow, the Church must in sweetness and light, but with courage and correction, minister in ways of largeness to the sons and daughters of the nation and with particular attention to the great and madly living cities. Here is a challenge we cannot evade. We need also to give attention to our educational programme. A good many tears have been shed over the handicaps suffered by the children of the pioneer wilderness who lacked the advantages of well- equipped classrooms, and who spent so meagre a time in school. But sometimes one finds the scholars of our generation who are in many ways so much more gener- ously treated, even more generously abused. Vividly remember the dainty little miss who by every claim of justice and hard work should have led her class, but to whom examinations were a chamber of nervous hor- rors and who never failed to become physically and mentally demoralised in the crucial hours at the end of each term. Wisely, with determination, as God-fearing child-loving Christian men and women we need to go after setting our educational, recreational and social house in order. But since we all are bound to have worries, what are we going to do about them? Beecher’s answer is hard to improve upon: “ Don’t dandle your worries on your knee, spank them and put them to bed.” Assume an aggressive attitude, take the offensive against worry, and always that means first of all cleaning out the ‘““machine-gun nests” of the adversary! Locate his fire! Where does his fire come from? Imagination, weariness, or loose living, questionable practices, evil associations and bad habits? Are you doing your level best to merit relief from anxiety or are you a moral loafer? Sometimes I think that a moral loafer is more 160 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM to be despised than a moral leper. Clean up, if you want worry to clear out! There is no other way. And remember God helps those who help themselves. You cannot win with worry. Are you anxious to win? Eager to reach the heights in your profession or your calling? You cannot win with worry—not the kind that you are yourself responsible for. And as God is true, I say to you tonight that if you keep faith, do your part, play the man, He will come out to you across the wildest sea of anxiety that ever blew a gale of fear and lift you as He lifted drowning Peter. How win over worry? I might say much and say infinitely less than these words which I find in an old Book my mother gave me: “ Trust in the Lord and do good,” or as it appears elsewhere in the same Book: “Rest in the Lord and wait patiently ”—and that rest in the Lord means literally ‘‘ Be careless in the Lord ” —hbe carefree, have no concern. One day a father was carrying his little girl high upon his shoulder. Her cheeks were blooming, her eyes dancing, her hair blow- ing, and her laughter singing like the water of a brook- let upon the pebbles of its course. ‘‘ Careful, careful,” playfully called out an observant visitor with mock caution, and the little one shouted down: “ Jse not afraid. He’s my Daddy!” Isaiah writes, “I will trust and not be afraid”; and no less a philosopher than Henry James wrote: “ The sovereign balm for worry ts religion.” We will not be afraid, we will not wotry, God is our Father. The caption of the leading article in one of our most popular magazines for the current month some time ago was “ The Happiest Person I Ever Knew.” It is from the pen of one of our most brilliant novelists. He writes of a great humorist, a great financier and WINNING OVER WORRY 161 philanthropist, and another, a rich and influential man. He goes to the ends of the earth and then comes back to a log cabin of a Kentucky “ poor white,” to find his happiest person. “How could you keep yourself happy through these hard years? ” he asks the totter- ing woman wearing a shining face after years of child- bearing, years of poverty, years of hardship, and she replies: “‘ How could I help it, mister, with the love of God in my heart and the children to love and work for?” Love, work, faith—these are the words. Love, work, faith! Trust in the Lord and do good! XVI WHEN RELIGION SPOILS MORALITY OT all who bear the name and outward forms and practices of Christianity meet with Christ’s approval. ‘There are some who wear the fine trappings of the Church, and stand in its places of trust, who will be repudiated in the final reckoning— repudiated, too, in the face of ardent protestations, and in spite of impressive achievements. ‘‘ Did we not prophesy, did we not prophesy, and in Thy Name? ” will be the reproachful plea, and there shall come the searching answer—‘ Yes, but prophecy without love is nothing.” ‘“ But did we not in Thy Name cast out devils? ” ‘“‘ Yes, and so did Judas.” ‘‘ Did we not do mighty works, many mighty works—all in Thy Name?” “ You did, but even though you had all faith so that you could have removed mountains, ye had not love—it profited you nothing.” God is not mocked, nor 1s He deceived. He has His standards, His unmistakable and clearly spoken conditions, and ‘““he knoweth them that are his.” There is a great and grave distinction between re- ligion—mere religion—and Christianity. There are many religions in the world—some bad, others good. Christianity, which is the way and life of Jesus Christ, we find, by the test of experience and the record of history, to be supreme among religions. Religion is invariably man’s quest for God; its instinct, its im- pulse is universal. All men are religious—the cannibal 162 WHEN RELIGION SPOILS MORALITY 1638 who eats his victim and shares his gruesome feast with his priest; the atheist who makes his shrine from his denials, no less than the martyr who feeds the fire for his faith. Yes, religion is a universal impulse and instinct and invariably it is man’s quest for God. But Christianity is finding God. Nay, more: Christianity is finding God through, and in Jesus Christ. Practically, Christianity is a system both of faith and practice. It is hearing and doing; it is confession and expression. And it is more. Christianity is hear- ing and doing, but doing according to law—it is obedi- ence and the rule for its act is invariably a spiritual measurement, Whatever else abides, charity and love are first. My hands may be full, but, if my heart be empty my final examination is failure. It was not the widow’s mite that won the Master’s commendation; it was the widow’s spirit. The rich man’s failure was not in the thickness of his purse, but in the thinness of his soul. The religion that spoils morality is not Christianity, for the essence of morality is the spirit of a sermon preached upon a “ mount” and its dynamic is Jesus Christ. The religion that spoils morality is the religion that in any time cloaks its true purpose with an act of benevolence. It is the religion that with an ulterior motive, a sinister design, dispenses its benefactions— it is the open hand, the friendly voice, with the closed and evil heart. I have heard it in a squalid mill-town preaching the beauties of resignation and self-sacrifice to under-paid, poorly-housed labourers, not to make them happier and better, but to make a strike more remote. The religion that spoils morality is the re- ligion proclaiming much and practicing little—talking 164 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM loudly and doing lewdly. A brilliant English novelist wrote books that were a model of social decorum, that breathed the atmosphere of the mid-Victorian period in which she reigned in the world of letters, but her manner of life was for years a direct contradiction of the marriage standards she glorified. She was re- ligious. She made even her sin a form of worship, but her religion was a convenience—it excused and encour- aged her manner of life—it spoiled morality. Religion has been in every age and with every race “good form.” It is always socially becoming. But the religion that merely builds a head rest for an Easter bonnet as well as the one that sets a grinning human skull upon the head of a naked, dancing savage is not Christianity. Marching down the broad aisle of a Fifth Avenue church, or writhing under the torrid skies of Africa, it spoils morality. Can you imagine Jesus turning away from the poor wreck of a man who has fallen under the power of some evil habit, who is crying out in the agony of remorse and repentance? Can you imagine Him turning away from such a social outcast, while he receives in the drawing-room of his favour the hardened sinner, the longtime reprobate whose only claim to distinction is the name his an- cestors achieved and the money he inherited? Here religion spoils morality. It takes more than a “May- flower ” pedigree and a family Bible that came over in the ‘‘ Half-Moon ” to make a man a member in full standing of the Church of God. David James Burrell once said, “‘ Some people die leaning up against their family trees,” and that holds morally and spiritually as well as physically. The woman taken in adultery was thrown upon the hard sand in front of Jesus by the ruling religion of WHEN RELIGION SPOILS MORALITY 1685 her day. The law of Moses would have given her a blanket of stones for her bed of death, but Jesus lifted her up and sent her away, repentant and forgiven— sent her away with two freedoms! King Herod in his adultery bought the silence of the priests, cut off the head of the wilderness prophet who condemned him, ruled his world with bloody hands under the walls of a temple, but the judgment of this same Jesus left him at last stripped and condemned. A sacred stone stands upon the sun-baked floor of a desert mesa. Far below the fields of over-ripened maze wait for harvesters who dance about that altar of their superstition in revolting antics of their ancient faith. They grapple with snakes; they fling them- selves down with incantations; they turn to sate their lust; they violate childhood in some of their baser festivals; they leave the fruits of their season’s labour to rot upon its roots; they impoverish themselves in body and soul—all in the name of religion, all in their search, their mad search, for God. There religion spoils morality. A beautiful Ohio grove has been fitted with tents. There is a central eating-place and a great tabernacle for public meetings. Leaders have come from all sec- tions of the continent and from far places of the world. Presently the night is made hideous with noises that for volume and vividness could scarcely be surpassed by the exercises of a primitive jungle-worship. Men and women, young and old, loose themselves in a frenzy that leads some beyond their last controls of will and reason. Designing persons join with innocent devotees; gibberish that could be heard nowhere else than in asylums for the insane is given the name of the Pentecostal outpouring that set cloven tongues of fire 166 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM upon the heads of those who waited in the upper rooms of Jerusalem; homes are broken up; children are con- ceived and born out of wedlock; churches are divided; Christianity herself is for the moment compromised. All of this is religion, of sorts, but a religion that spoils morality. The Incas who murdered virgins in their sun- worship were religious. The Spaniards who murdered the Incas in their inquisitorial quests were religious. The Roman Church selling indulgences, offering to sanctify theft, adultery and murder for a price, was acting in the name of religion. The cathedral builders, who mixed their foundations with the blood of serfs and raised their walls with enforced labour, were . esthetically and often sublimely religious. The man who, today, crosses himself as he tosses a penny to the beggar who grovels on the entrance stones at Cologne, and who passes presently from the confes- sional to the office where he plans yet larger social sin, is religious. But the religion of these, of all of these, spoils morality. And—-remember—no dole given to the poor, no charity dispensed to unfortunate victims, no prophetic utterance, no mighty work of individual faith or public benefaction, will ever make one of those who knew the truth and refused its larger free- dom immune to the “ Depart from me, I know you not ’’ of Jesus Christ. Two great temptations face us—face us all, today. First, the temptation to shallow religious thinking; to thinking which makes no distinction between religion and Christianity; to thinking which so mixes candles and robes and beads and sermons and poor boxes and church attendance, with the allegiance of the soul to God and the commitment of the life to His service, that WHEN RELIGION SPOILS MORALITY 167 these come to stand, the outward for the inward, the less important, however worthy, for the absolutely vital. Men who are most exacting in their business standards, who would not countenance for an instant | a financial defalcation, pass over lightly their vow of church membership and the breaking of their covenant with Christ to “ love the Lord with all their heart, and their neighbour as themselves.”’ It would be a mistake to say that they are not religious. They are, but as Christians their thinking is shallow and their practice is a contradiction. | We face a second great temptation today—the temptation of falling into the error of satisfying our- selves with feeling, of becoming complacent because of Christian emotions that have no issue in deeds. We are hearers of the word. We even weep under its burn- ing message, or we rejoice in its anticipated triumph of righteousness—then powder our nose, or compose our countenance and with the feeling of war-weary veter- ans fall into the sleep that we fancy is the repose of the just. But a fancy and nothing more it is. Worse off we are for all our emotional dissipation—worse off than we were before. Feeling a little, we have de- luded ourselves in the belief that we have done a lot. Religious we are, to be sure, but not Christ-like, for to be like Christ we must be “doers of the word also.” Nero wept and blubbered in maudlin grief while he belaboured his fiddle with a thick thumb and bemoaned in doggerel verse the city he had given to the torch! On the other hand, I know a young woman who attended a Christian Endeavour Convention and was deeply moved by an address that described the failure of many a local church because of the inability of the 168 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM pastor and the officials to find persons willing to give leadership to the children of junior age. Suddenly the conviction came to her as she thought of her own com- munity and church, that she was the responsible party; that she held the key to the situation; that, instead of stopping with her first emotional concern, or returning to try to find a leader, she should go back and offer herself. She followed her conviction. She con- quered this temptation we are talking about and entered timidly, but with growing confidence and power, upon a career that really changed the life of youth in her village and gave her finally a message for a great state. What are we doing today about our grey-haired covenant to end war? Will we confine our efforts to shedding tears at memorial services and feeling intense indignation when we read a stirring article or listen to an eloquent sermon arraigning armed conflict? Is this our anti-war programme and nothing more? Unless we are relating ourselves by petition and vote and the dedication of our every influence to the sane cam- paigns for a World Court, disarmament by agreement, and that association of nations which will offer the world a working plan instead of a mad play with ever suspicious chance, we are far from the standards set by Jesus for His followers. Tempted, we are to fall into silence and inactivity between the two extremes— the one of pacifism and non-resistance and the other of untaught and unlearning militarism. With unmistakable emphasis Jesus declares that we prove our title to the Kingdom, that we win our way with Him—by obedience. Not by prophesying, not by the casting out devils, not by doing mighty deeds, not by these alone, but by obedience. Not by knowing WHEN RELIGION SPOILS MORALITY 169 nor by doing, but by knowing and by doing in obedi- ence to His command and spirit. A signboard points out the road it never travels. A preacher may declare with an eloquence that sways the multitude a truth he has never experienced. Even a traitor uses the uni- form and the language of a patriot. So is it with all who say “ Lord, Lord ”—and stop. There is a practical lesson for us all here, particu- larly for those of us who have life’s larger portion—so far as human eyes may see—before us. While travel- ing in the St. Gaudens and Winston Churchill country of New England, I inquired, at a wayside house, the distance to a certain village. ‘‘ Just over yon hill, sir,” the old lady said, “ but I’ve never seen it.” She knew the way,—that I proved a little later—but she had never taken it. She was only a signboard when she might have been more. The old master turns to his young pupil and inspires her with the commenda- tion: “ A glorious organ God has given you. But you must work! ” he also cries. ‘“‘ Beyond are the heights, but you must climb and the way is hard and steep and long.” And within her soul the young girl feels the surge of mysterious latent powers; finds the confirma- tion of the teacher’s prophecy—bui the hill! Beyond is triumph, adulation, glory, but the hill! The world never hears the voice that God imprisoned in her soul, for hard work to release. She never reached the great beyond because she never climbed the hill. When America’s brilliant Olympic team sailed for France to meet the finest athletes of the world, I seemed to see again the most versatile runner I ever knew. I believe that he was, by the physical endow- ments of nature, one of the fastest humans that ever drew on a sprinter’s “ spikes.” The winners of two 170 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM Olympiads felt in the “ century ” and in the hurdles the sting of his dust as training days lengthened toward the great ordeal. He knew the way! He had match- less potential powers, but “ Just over yon hill,” I hear the old woman saying again, “ Just over yon hill, I’ve never seen it.”” He might have left his name upon the record books of the world, but he remained a guide- post that lesser athletes followed who went on ahead to attain great glory. - Young man, young woman, in the first flush of your ambition, or facing one of these great temptations we have been talking about; beginning, just beginning perhaps that course in spiritual sophistry which New York opens so many classes to; half persuaded to take a fling at something which with a fair promise and holy name spoils morality—remember the formula! Faith and works with obedience! Accept no spurious substitute! And—climb the hill! Finally: the religion that spoils morality does not survive the test of time—does not last. Each gener- ation sees the fault in the cathedral-builders more clearly than tourists see now the cracks in Westminster Abbey. The jungle-worship of a thousand years stag- gers where it does not fall, before the educational and medical programme of a century of Christian missions. The Inca Temple of the Sun is a ruin. Cortez and his contemporaries with their baptism into death are buried deeper than any pirate’s lost treasure. Today no Pope would sell an indulgence for an empire. But Christ lives! Christianity increases! In the innermost chamber of the individual life God is by the sure, however slow progress of His regener- ating truth, perfecting a people to serve Him, fash- ioning man into His spiritual likeness. In all of WHEN RELIGION SPOILS MORALITY 171 organised society, coming daily into closer grips with civilisation’s refinements of selfishness and cruelty, He is creating the better world: He is building toward that new era—the era of the soul. XVII THE CLIMBER’S PERIL AND SAFETY ELF-CONFIDENCE is a very great danger. S True preparation, for an individual and for church is not in boastfulness, but in watchful- ness; not in pride of fancied prowess, but in simple piety and prayer. With a small company of friends I once climbed Mount Hood in the Oregon Cascades. I am still measuring some of the lessons learned that day and few of them fail to give emphasis to the sound admoni- tion, “‘ Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall.” All men and women are climbers, that is to say, they should be climbers; and they are, unless they are clingers. Something is radically wrong with the per- son who is satisfied to remain in a status quo, with the lad who has no desire to get beyond the reach of his father’s protecting arm, or the girl who has no desire to get beyond the sound of her mother’s dear voice. There is a divine beauty in the face of the young woman who, in sublime ignorance of the dangers before her, turns eagerly from her home-village to New York; a veritable glory from the new heaven and the new earth transfigures the countenance of the youth who, blissfully unaware of the disillusionments in front of him, whistles through the homestead-gate to go a-wooing Destiny. To these I especially address my- self, and I would begin by repeating once more the 172 THE CLIMBER’S PERIL AND SAFETY 173 great words of Paul: ‘Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall.” First of all, my young friend, if you are going to climb a mountain, select a real one. Do not waste your time and strength on less than the highest though you will discover that there are many intervening ridges to be conquered before you reach your crowning peak. Name as that peak nothing less than the first monarch of the range! For years I watched, through my father’s window, the lights and shadows play upon the white head of that monarch of western mountains—Mount Hood. Always I longed to plant my feet upon its topmost pin- nacle; but my ambition went unrealised until a son was old enough to scramble up its last ascent—just ahead of me. There were lesser peaks that I could have negotiated, lesser peaks much nearer and no doubt the prospect would have been worth while, but the lure of the greater took away all zest for the lesser. Perhaps one may need to be cautioned against despising the lesser. Certainly the hills have exquisite rewards of their own, that make even a mountain envious, but “ hitch your wagon to a star ”’ is just an- other way of saying: ‘“‘ When you set out to climb a mountain, select a real one; make your goal the highest.” Now that we have begun our climb, first, what are our perils and then what are our safeties? An En- glishman with his guide beginning the last stretch of a famous Alpine ascent, remarked, “ The way to the top seems open to all,” and the answer was, ‘“‘ Yes, anyone can go out to go up, but not all who go out, get up; and not all who get up, get back! ” And not all who reach New York, young people, get up and not all get back! 174 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM One difficulty with some who climb a mountain for the first time is that they place their confidence in strength that, while it has never failed them before, has never before met the mountain’s test. In our party the only man who collapsed on the last and stiffest five hundred feet of the climb was, muscularly, possibly the strongest man of the group. Cramps seized him and he fainted, and collapsed under the rope against the anchor man. If you are bound for the heights, you will need more stamina than you have ever yet called upon. Not every .400 batter in the bush league makes good in the majors, by any means. Over-confidence is a handicap anywhere—in the valley as well as on the mountain; in New York as well as in the small village. “Hey, look at me!” called an impetuous fellow who, against insistent admonitions from two guides, had pressed out to the extreme point of an ice-ledge that half-arched a Swiss crevasse. His friends looked, but anxiety turned quickly to horror as the place where he stood broke from its precarious hold upon the mountain and he went hurtling to death in an un- plumbed chasm. ‘“‘ Hey, look at me! ” was Peter’s cry, when he swore that though all others deserted he would remain true to his Lord. But the high priest’s fowl had not crowed thrice before he had gone plunging into the abyss of denial and shame. “Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall.” Another has said that “ danger comes soonest when it is despised.”” Mountain guides fear the reckless members of a party far more than they do the timid. Young people, this city is no safe footing for anyone THE CLIMBER’S PERIL AND SAFETY 175 who walks carelessly, and, hear me! If you have come thus far without a guide, remember the heavier grades are in front—the steeper ascents, the more fear- some dangers. Don’t go on alone! Did I say, young people? But what I said is no less a true word for all others. Don’t go on without a guide. On Mount Hood that day we found our supreme test in the last five hundred feet of the eight miles. Failure there would have meant complete defeat. A distinguished European minister who was to ad- dress a great audience in the then but recently com- pleted Wisconsin State Capitol building, had been seated in a huge speaker’s chair, which had not been securely anchored to the floor. As he arose to address his audience, the chair toppled over, carrying him with it. Wildly his feet churned the air and helplessly he struggled until friends came to his rescue. His first words were particularly apropos. To the delight of his youthful hearers he declared: “‘ Let him that think- eth he standeth, take heed lest he fall.””’ Then, with just a slight pause, he concluded: ‘“‘ The foundation of the Lord standeth sure.” In climbing a mountain, there is the sudden peril of the high wind; the uncertainty of the updraft. That day on Mount Hood I found a dead grasshopper at an elevation of ten thousand feet and on the descent a hapless robin went screaming by in terror, an un- willing victim of the storm that had carried it from the protecting trees of the valley below. For us all there are sudden gusts of passion and appetite, or wild gales of disaster that carry us off our feet. New York has many more dangerous corners than the point of the historic “ Flatiron” Building. One Sunday evening a man whose name was once a proud 176 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM one in this city, reeled into our church and against my study door just ten minutes before I must be in the pulpit. An ancient sin, a grey-haired appetite, caught him in the whirl of its updraft when his busi- ness tumbled into ruins. Then there is the peril of looking. During my mountain-climb, and as I lay in the lee of a great rock that half-sheltered me, watching the men on the rope below, I had no knowledge of what was just behind me. But when I turned and rounded the last ledge grasping firmly the securely anchored guide-rope, I discovered that my feet had been hanging over a sheer drop of three thousand feet. I closed my eyes, stopped thinking, and plunged on! Peril in looking! Peril in thinking! Peril in stopping! Straight ahead in that last ordeal on the mountain; straight ahead without looking down; straight ahead through the full fury of the storm, or rapidly numbing hands will loose their hold, blood will congeal, and always freezing men must fall! And here is a call to us all. Do not tarry in the slippery places of sin; do not look into these moral abysses that are deeper and more fearsome than the northern precipice of Mount Hood. Straight ahead, then, by God’s eternal grace, towards the heights as when dreams were as sweet as the new-mown hay of our father’s meadows, when your ambitions were as true as your mother’s prayer! Perhaps the greatest peril in mountain-climbing is the peril already indicated,—but not directly declared, —the peril of despising danger. “ He only is safe from danger who is on guard when he is safe.” A brave man never despises danger. Someone has said that ‘danger frightens a timid person before it happens; a THE CLIMBER’S PERIL AND SAFETY 177 coward while it happens, and a hero after it happens.” But the guide who, knowing that even a shrill cry may start an avalanche, again and again whispers a warn- ing to the careless fellow behind him is not the coward of the party. I once saw a French brigadier-general who waited with his orderly in General Pershing’s outer office in Chaumont, leap with an excited exclamation from his chair when a hand-grenade of the offensive variety tumbled from a table. He knew what potential power for disaster that grenade held beneath its checkered, ribbed steel. Don’t laugh at moral risks, young man, and don’t take them alone. There are worse avalanches here- abouts than ever buried an Alpine village. A climber’s safety is so closely associated with his danger that some things are both perils and protec- tions; both enemies and friends. The winds that scream about the upflung portions of the earth are not unmitigated evils—they sweep the narrow ledges of the loose granite that rolls treacherously beneath the climber’s feet, and on the steeper portions of the glacier they keep the ice-pack free of the light snow that is ever a great menace. Mountains are all in a slow but continuous process of disintegration and those who take their way upon them stand in slippery places. The mighty winds keep one alert, at attention; every step is against pressure; there is no time to relax; no temptation to let down, until the shelter- house on the summit is reached. Ah! and a glorious thing it is to triumph over opposition, to win against the wind! Dr. Burrell once said, ‘‘ Let me take heaven with the wind in my face.” Let me take heaven with the wind in my face! 178 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM And there is safety in the night. We began the second and last four miles of our climb of Mount Hood at three o’clock in the morning—under the stars and moon. The trail was hard as granite at that hour. Even on the highest mountain at midday, surface ice and snow melts just enough to make treacherous foot- ing. Always other ways there are that to an inexperi- enced eye are better than the one the guide is holding to, but on a great mountain the wrong trail may have only a step to go to reach disaster. ‘‘ There is a way that seemeth good to a man, but the end thereof is death.” aye Had we not begun our climb in the night, we should have missed the sunrise on the mountain. Are not the songs that linger longest those that “ came upon the midnight clear? ”—-when weary heads are tossed by pain and anguished hearts by grief’s dark mystery are holden, “ He giveth songs in the night.” And just as there is safety in facing danger, in meeting head-on the winds of risk, just as there are times when coasting vessels put out to meet a storm, head off-shore to find sea-room, so there are other occa- sions when mountain climbers must turn back or be overcome, and when ships, to avert disaster, must turn and run before the tempest. Braver and more re- sourceful men never started for a summit than have twice been baffled by Mount Everest. They could have persisted and died, as well as failed of their objective. ‘‘ But he who fights and runs away, may live to fight another day.” In the supreme conflicts with temptation, there are moments when the only safety is in flight. He is a moral coward who does not, when the circumstance demands, turn and run from evil. Joseph, who es- eo “ ee SC Se ee ee THE CLIMBER’S PERIL AND SAFETY 179 caped precipitously from his master’s house, was braver than Samson who lingered in the brothel of a heathen city. In any case, in a circumstance of either sort, whether the climb be moral or physical, the climber must have determination—the unyielding purpose, the will to do. My friend, of whom I shall write again here, who remained at the snow-line, had it just as truly as my other friend who, when the final test came and he was dizzy and sick and half-blind, pressed on, stag- gered forward, crawled inch by inch up the great rope. “You were beaten to earth? Well, what of that? Come up with a smiling face. It’s nothing against you to fall down flat; To lie there,—that’s desgrace.” In other words—with a single exception—the climber’s safety is in no one else so supremely as in himself. He makes or breaks the application of every sound mountain rule. In his willingness to respond promptly to the instructions of the guide lies security for himself and for the entire party. If he runs “ yel- low’ in a crisis, if he fails of a fighting spirit, the whole plan of campaign must be revised and fre- quently the ascent must be abandoned. The rarest fruits of Persian gardens adorn the table of those who have not even soiled their evening clothes to procure them, but the summit of a mountain never comes to any man who does not take it for himself. Destiny is not a word—it is a work. | I said that, with a single exception, the climber’s safety is in himself supremely. The exception is the guide. I may have the stamina of a Marathon runner; 180 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM the strength of a Hercules; the heart of a Coeur-de- Lion, and the native genius of a lad born in the Alps, but if I take the trail to the heights alone, I walk with death—my trip is a gamble, a fool’s risk and not an honest adventure. Take a guide in your climb to the heights. Ah! take the guide in your climb to the heights! Are you climb- ing alone, struggling upward on life’s storm-swept trail—battling sin and pain and doubt and grief? Are you fighting forward inch by inch or losing ground,— alone? Take the guide,—the Guide who says: “I will guide you into all truth—I am the Way.” If it be true that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, it is equally true that a climbing party is only as strong as its frailest member. Many a moun- tain adventure has come to disaster because of one weakling, or one man who for the moment was under his physical par. In our Mount Hood group was one of the writer’s lifelong friends who, also, had waited for years to satisfy his boyhood ambition to scale the last pinnacle of Mount Hood. Long experienced in mountain work, on intimate terms with every detail of the west’s great out-of-doors, he was inexpressibly chagrined when a sudden seizure, accentuated perhaps by mountain-sickness, left him staggering in his tracks. He reached the snow-line cabin weak and haggard; the few hours before the morning starting time at three o’clock brought him only partial relief. As we shiv- ered about the fire in the high darkness, he startled us into quick protests by quietly announcing that he would not attempt to go farther—that he would remain at the cabin and wait our return. And that was what he did. Rather than run the risk of spoiling the great experience for others, rather than put his weakness as THE CLIMBER’S PERIL AND SAFETY § 18] a handicap upon his friends, he accepted one of the great disappointments of his life,—did a harder thing than any other man did upon the storm-swept peak that day. When we came plunging down across the great snow-fields that afternoon, he had a comforting fire going and we found our soaked and frozen clothing of the night before, dry and warm. No man of us doubted who had climbed the high mountain. There are times when it is much easier to go than it is to stay—always the hardest thing is ‘“ just to wait.” Unselfishness is the finest virtue. As I think of that whole experience now, two things make it worth while. The satisfaction of achievement and the glory of the vision—the inexpressible thrill that came when we stood upon that storm-swept sum- mit and the exaltation that was akin to rapture with which through sudden windows in the madly driven clouds we looked down upon the world. Below us were the glaciers and the shelving, sliding granite; the crater with its smoke and fumes; the dizzy stretches of blinding snow; the fighting climb that we had taken, yard by yard, then foot by foot, then inch by inch; the appalling precipice, the vast abyss. Be- hind us were those moments when we had all but failed —when the rising storm had sent us to our faces and all but to defeat. But we had reached our goal! Ours was the satisfaction of achievement and the joy of triumph. Ah! you have known it, too,—in school, in sport, in business, in friendship, in love, in self-renunciations for God, for country, for fallen man. This it was that made us kings in our souls as we stood upon the hoary head of Mount Hood and this it was that made my friend no less a king, who stood beside the fire below the clouds. 182 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM Then the vision that grew as dawn came on apace— the sun like a galleon of gold rising out of the east and cleaving the earlier clouds, which were as the spray of a sapphire sea. The deep blues and purples below taking fire and the emerald hills sifted through flame. The white peaks far to the south like enchanted isles in a billowing ocean twixt heaven and earth. The river-ways like trails of silver for the spirit feet of the mountains and the lakes with the mists rising from them like steaming cups of the gods. Then darkness again; the great curtain rolled down by the storm, the battle with sleet, the grips with the wind, the supreme test—and then the break of new day, with the glory unutterable of the sun riding high above the clouds that heaved now and raged like a passionate beast at our feet. And you who have never stood upon a mountain summit have known the exultation of enraptured vision, for you have seen the night of sin shot through by the Sun of righteousness; you have waited where the dawn approached through a vale of tears and you have climbed the rocky steeps through winds that blew disaster, to greet the resurrection morning that takes its glory from the face of a Risen Lord. XVITI WHAT A MAN TAKES WITH HIM a man may take with him, when he passes from this life—moves from time into eternity—he does not take earthly treasures or physical possessions. He leaves behind his houses and lands; his cattle and ships; his gold and his bonds. Naked he comes and naked he goes. ‘ There is no pocket in a shroud.” The ancient Egyptian left chariots and furniture, robes and food and the insignia of authority in the tomb of his king. But six thousand years after he closed the door, we find them where he left them. The Indian swung his dead above the desert or buried them in the crevice of the precipice or beneath rocks. He provisioned them for a long journey and armed them to meet the enemies of the way. But where bodies have ages since returned to the dust, we gather the bows and arrows that were never used. No, when we answer the last summons, we drop our tools, never to lift them again; leave our strong-boxes, never to open them more and embark upon a journey that calls for neither food nor drink. This unescapable fact leads man to one of two con- clusions: “ Take thine ease: eat, drink and be merry,”’ or “A man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things ‘which he possesseth.”” Of one who came to the former conclusion, a wiser than you or [I said, “Thou fool.” fa ese is no denying the fact that whatever else 183 184 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM But it must be granted that a great multitude prac- tice the principle upon which a certain rich man pur- posed spending the remainder of his earthly life. They say: “ We are going to be a long time dead, let us lose no time now in enjoying the things the grave forever separates us from. Let joy be unrestrained and selfish- ness master and appetite king.” The trouble with the decision is that it is a deceiver, for man can never be satisfied with things. Satisfac- tion never comes with the mere gratification of the sensual and the physical. Things have their place and a large place it is indeed in the programme of human existence, but always food and drink and their physical synonyms should be the means to a greater and hap- pier end; always they must be supplemented and com- pleted, to create healthy bodies and souls. Unaided, they dissipate the very satisfaction they promise. The rich man to whom we have referred, with his eyes full of his riches and his mind crowded with plans for greater barns, addressed his soul like a feudal bene- factor, and said, “‘ Soul, take thine ease.” But not even kis soul could obey. Already he had robbed his soul to pay his carpenters and builders. Soul, take thine ease! But a troubled bed he took, instead. Rest and peace have never yet been purchased. They must first be earned and then they come as the priceless gifts of God. Few men if any have ever earned them while devoting their energies to harvest- ing their own crops and building store-houses to care for some selfish increase. No man has ever come upon them while taking a whirl with dissipation to keep ahead of the grave. Don’t be the slave of things! Few of you will ever be tempted by the more brutish and sensual things, WHAT A MAN TAKES WITH HIM 185 perhaps. But there are few if any of us who live in those serene places that are above the call of houses and lands. Don’t be the slave of things! The rich man’s moral decay was evidenced by the way in which he talked about his stable and gloated over his fields. There is nothing in the lesson to indicate that he gave his poor neighbour a single thought. To the contrary, he was counting on a long rest with no hurry calls of mercy to disturb his enjoyment. Had he been increas- ing his storage room with famine-stricken Egypt in mind and had he been rejoicing in his increase because of what the surplus would mean to the hungry Samari- tans, the strictures that follow his valedictory would not have been spoken. | “There is nothing on earth that looks good, that is so dangerous for a man, or a nation, to handle, as quick, easy, big money. If it does not get you, the chances are that it will get your son. It is greater and finer heroism to dare to be poor in America than It is to charge earthinks.” Thus saith “ The Wall Street Journal! ” The late William James recognised the same menace and came to feel that it was again time to take a vow of poverty, like unto the vow of Francis of Assisi. | Again and again we hear it said, that the poor are more generous as a class than the rich, and Jesus in- directly suggested as much in the parable of the widow and her mite. Perhaps the poor are as a class more general gener- ous because their own physical needs are so constantly apparent. Also when a need is supplied its very supply is a suggestion to gratitude. There can be no true generosity without feeling, and because the “rich” man had all of his own physical needs supplied and had 186 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM been completely engrossed in his efforts to supply them, he had completely forgotten his less fortunate brethren. Perhaps he was unfortunate in that he lacked the re- minder his poor neighbour was never without. It takes a truly big individual to be both rich and righteous. Most of us are not nearly big enough and some of us have difficulty to be as righteous as we ought to be, even though we are unhandicapped by houses and lands. The testimony of a very dear friend of mine who is very rich, whose possessions would make him an inter- nationalist, had his great and generous heart not already done so, is this: ‘“‘ The only way to be both happy and rich is to look upon what you have, with the eyes of a steward and to live as a distributor for God.” What does a man take with him? Only what he has given. “TI reckon him greater than any man That ever drew sword in war; I reckon him greater than king or khan, Braver and better by far. “And wisest in this whole wide land Of hoarding till bent and gray:— For all you can hold in your cold, dead hand Is what you have given away.” Let no one of us delude himself. We are all tempted and at times desperately tempted to fall into the error of the rich man and some of us with far less excuse than he had. We must all fight against covetousness; against falling into a wrong attitude toward physical _things and sensual. Don’t be the slave of things! Be WHAT A MAN TAKES WITH HIM 187 the master. And Deker it was who said, “ When all other sins are old in us and go about on crutches, cov- etousness does but then lie in her cradle! ” Let us begin to practice generosity now. ‘“ Those who do not give until they die,’ said Bishop Hall, “show that they would not then if they could have kept it any longer!” But let us give time as well as money. The rich man of the famous parable was a miser with his hours as well as with his money. He planned to squander both upon himself. The majority of us will not be greatly affected by any great appeal for funds—we could not be. Our exchequers are de- pleted or rather they were never full and have been ever small. But we are as crowded for time as the millionaire is crowded with funds. It is as hard for us to give a minute to the church as it is for a miser to give a mite. Begin practicing generosity now! Young people, draw away resolutely from the suggestion that you are too busy to give a portion of your week and regularly, to some service that relates you to God’s great ministry of making a brighter, a better, a kindlier, a happier, a more considerate world. What is the remedy for the astigmatism that makes a person blind to the only road that leads to ease of soul and happiness? What is the remedy that. will cure those who have the disease that was the sudden death of the man of the parable? The only sovereign remedy that I know is to give Jesus Christ the pre- eminence in our hearts and the service of others the first place in our lives. ‘‘ Then shall we undervalue all temporal things in comparison with Him.” But what does a man take with him? And just as there is no denying the fact that he does not take 188 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM earthly treasures and physical possessions so it 1s un- questionably the fact that anything he does take is of the quality and essence of his own immortal soul. That which he takes is as that which goes and not a single hair of his physical head, nor the tiniest portion of his fleshly being may ever pass from the grim cham- ber to which they bear his human form. Only the soul may pass—‘ that vital spark of heavenly flame.” Thus is a single soul richer than all worlds. “Our thoughts are boundless, though our lsmbs are frail; Our soul immortal, though our limbs decay; Though darkened is this poor Isfe by a veil Of suffering, dying matter; we shall play In truth’s eternal sunbeams:” Another has said that “life is but the soul’s nur- sery.” Then the supreme business of society, of school and government as well as of the church is certainly the training not of bodies and of minds, but of souls,— souls that never die. Souls that even as the sprout of an acorn is bent by the hindrances of its environment, or strengthened by rich soil and favouring winds, may take its eternal direction from the surroundings of its childhood and the training of its youth. True wealth is soul wealth and to these riches we all may aspire. As to its measurement, I have found the test of the wise man who said, ‘“‘ The wealth of a soul is measured by how much it can feel and its poverty by how little,’ a very good one. One danger is that we shall become spiritually numb, so great are the human tragedies about us, so appalling, so colossal the physical and spiritual pain. ~ ) WHAT A MAN TAKES WITH HIM 189 The morning when the little city of my youth was stricken as with a personal grief because one little boy had been swept to his death among the old pilings of the swimming-hole, seems infinitely far away. Now ten thousand little boys may lie with their sisters under the weeping skies of far Japan and children of the Adriatic may wait in terror lest the guns again shall speak their death. How much do we feel? How much have we given? But what does a man take with him? There is that which does not remain here when eyes lose their lustre, hands their strength and speech its melody. With rare beauty and understanding Barry Cornwall wrote, ‘Where are Shakespeare’s imagination, Bacon’s learn- ing, old Galileo’s dream? Where is the sweet fancy of Sidney, the airy spirit of Fletcher, and Milton’s thought severe? Methinks such things should not die and dissipate when a brick of Egypt will last three thousand years.” It is the wealth of soul, the treasures of the spirit that need ‘“‘ no pocket in a shroud,” which go with man. Nor can we be placated with things however much we may need them; however vital they may be when made to serve and not allowed to enslave. A little while ago a strong man died—a man who had been a worker in wood and a genius in the homely virtues of the Christian fireside. Late in life financial disaster had overtaken him and the toil of years of sacrifice turned back to the beginning. But his spirit had remained unbroken as his head, now snowy white, had remained unbowed. He had gone on steadfastly to the quiet end. I walked with his son among the trees of his planting, in the lawn he had kept with assiduous care and found no tree missing—he had left 190 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM them all. We came to the barn, took the lock from the door he had swung and stood before the great chest of tools he had used with the genius of his craftsman- ship. As the son held them in his hands one by one and lifted again ere we turned away the shining ham- mer his father’s hand had closed upon, not one was missing. We came to the house of deep, though quiet mourn- ing. In every room were the masterpieces of his skill, —the mantels and the chests, the cases filled with books, the hardwood floors—cunningly devised in col- oured woods—and so closely joined that they looked like stone mosaics from some Moorish palace in old Spain. In the attic, stored away, were children’s toys, —his heart was ever young. None of these were gone! In the closets hung his garments and on the stand his Bible lay with his glasses by. But he had left them all! He was gone. What had he taken with hime He who was no longer peering out from beneath those bushy brows or smiling up from the now so strangely placid face? He was not there—he was gone. What had he taken with hime And I had my answer to the question in the faces of the people even before the preacher spoke. What had he taken with him? ‘This man who left behind his tools and all the treasures of his hands? He had taken love and friendship, esteem and truth,— every fine sentiment of his generous heart had been gathered up when his last journey began and not one unselfish thought had been forgotten. He went com- panioned by the tender recollections of the children who had ridden high upon his knees, and whose baby fingers had been tangled in his beard. He walked forth without a smudge of shame. He swept across WHAT A MAN TAKES WITH HIM 191 the portal of his humble home arrayed in honour and clothed with peace. These are the things that last! These treasures of the heart; these riches of the soul—these are the gifts against which the gate of Death will never close. “°Tis true; *tis certain; man though dead retains Part of himself ;—the immortal mind remains.” THE END s } "i ny wiTip gi