yee onet enero ty eter BX 9178 .C66R4_ Covert, William Chalmers, 1864- 1942. Religion in the heart, and Other addresses \ LJ lw Cok Pr ory Meu ar i wea fale i he Ls Rema Seine Digitized by the Internet Archive In 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/religioninheartoO0cove ‘Religion In the Heart AND OTHER ADDRESSES WILLIAM CHALMERS COVERT, D.D. General Secretary, Board of Christian Education of Presbyterian Church in the U.S. A. New York Chicago Fleming H. Revell Company London and Edinburgh Copyright, MCMXXvVI, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY New York: 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. London: 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street I trust it will be agreeable to my many loyal hearers in the parish of the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, where for nearly a score of years life was a rare bit of mutual fellowship and happiness, if here I dedicate this volume of sermons to them. They deserve a worthier recognition at my hands for that long period of affectionate toleration and inspiring co-operation. But they can have nothing out of my life from all those years in which more of my inner- most self was released than these messages originally prepared and delivered to meet thew stimulating spiritual hunger. tees if ' ME Rate ‘Mes Fer * ete ‘hs fly a Z . y eet de mi nd Foreword rf lease of a pulpit message should afford a well-nigh complete revealing of an 3 honest man’s mind and heart. Particu- d it be the case when his themes traverse the unchanging fields where lie the heart’s major spiritual needs and carry him into the realms of those great spiritual realities he seeks for the solace of those who hear. These addresses that follow will belie me if, among other things, they do not reveal the joy that has pervaded the process of their preparation and delivery. No joys inci- dent to a career of Christian work are comparable to the satisfying emotions born of the privileges of a Christian pulpit. This is true where there are no inhibitions of fear or doubt, restraining liberty and undermining confidence. When through a long preaching contact familiarity breeds equanimity and spiritual rest, then the soul of a preacher ought not only to find itself but to unfold new powers and claim new and sweeter joys with every hour. The utterance from a pulpit that is passionless and sicklied ‘with indifference cannot have been born in joy and can waken only joyless conse- quences. The crowded program of parish and 5 6 FOREWORD community life in a great city may not muffle the voice but is likely to touch the intellect with a deadening effect, unless a man courageously does battle on behalf of a quiet hour and a relentless régime of mental and spiritual feeding. These messages bear in their form and content the marks of the ruthless and decimating demands of those prior claims of human need that lie in the clam- orous and suffering life of a city. But if, withal, there be here and there breaking forth a gleam of that joy which lives below every spoken word, the obvious inadequacies of the treatment of great subjects here discussed perhaps will be passed without comment. We CoG: Philadelphia, Pa. VIII. aE: Contents . RELIGION IN THE HEART . Proverbs 4:23; Romans 5:5 . THE Man Jesus Curis? . I Timothy 2:5 . THe Crty Revelation 21:16 . PLtus AND MINUs . Matthew 6:33; 25:28 . COMRADES OF THE SHINING PLATEAU. Mark 9:2-7, 17-18 . SPRINGTIME IN THE T'WENTY-THIRD PsALM . Psalm 23 . A RADIATING PERSONALITY Matthew 5:14 PERFECT PEACE .. : Isaiah 26:3; John 14:27; Phin brane Yi vg . Man’s MIND Matthew 22:37; een 8: ro; I ape as 3 . IMMORTALITY . II Timothy 1:10 . MarTHA AND MARY Luke 10:38-40 PRAYER II Kings 19: yy II 23 37 55 65 77 87 . 103 Ai 3 423 hp . 141 8 CONTENTS ALLE: OUR CHEDREN ) Oly Wino hier vwkh ail? aiken ae Acts 2:39; Mark 10:16 ALVUCRAUN (ON THE (GRASS ony. Pe oan as ee a eee Psalm 72:6 Mi DEGRA WRT, WITT, yen one Ne ie eo Luke 13:34 OVE Gop ‘in Firs WoRLD)) 20S) nee an ee Genesis I: I RELIGION IN THE HEART “ She set a rose to blossom in her hair The day fatth died— ‘How glad, said she, ‘and free, at last I go, And life is wide, But through long nights she stared into the dark And knew she lied.” —FANNY LEA. “The happiest heart that ever beat Was in some quiet breast That found the common daylight sweet And left to Heaven the rest.” —Joun VANCE CHENEY. “ But I cannot stay God from His ploughing, I, the lord of the field While I stand waiting Hts shoulders loom upon me from the mist, He has gone past me, down the furrow, shouting and singing (I had said, it shall rest for a season, The larks had built in the grass. . . He will not let my field lie fallow.” —Karr, WILson BAKER. I RELIGION IN THE HEART “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.”—PROVERBS 4: 23. “The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.”’—ROMANS 5: 5. ~PHRISTIANITY answers, as no other 92 faith, the age-old and tormenting ques- ‘2H tions with which life challenges the in- ~——-& tellect. It answers the question as to the origin of all things. It locates a centre of moral authority in the universe. It covers all human ex- perience and destiny with a loving superintendence and sets up a personal and paternal relationship between man and the Creator of all things. It is at these high points of human anxiety that the Christian religion satisfies the mind. But religion certainly must be something else besides a satisfying intellectual acquisition. If it be simply a satisfaction resident in the mind, taking up unshaking positions in the intellect, standing on foundations of perfectly good logic, nothing more, then its appeal to the whole human race, high and low, wise and otherwise, is a failure. If it be a thing of mind exclusively, then it must 11 12 RELIGION IN THE HEART be set down as another beautiful, philosophical cult among the thousands. It may explain the universe, but that is not enough. It may work out a theo- logical system that meets successfully the meta- physical requisites and the logical necessities, but to heart-sick, sin-burdened, hopeless men and women, these achievements are not enough. Does our Christian religion function in the realm of human feeling in a sane and satisfying way? We live more largely in our feelings than in any other realm. If there be no realization of religion possible in the realm of our emotions, nor any grip of its reality on our feelings, nor any tangible un- doubted reaction from it in what we call the heart- life, then the Christian religion is doomed to dry up and die in the cold, high levels of the human intellect. Behind us, like the skeletons of lost caravans in the freezing heights of Tibet, lie re- ligions and cults that insisted on ministering to the world of sorrow and sin exclusively through the mind. Their devotees starved to death on maxims and epigrams. ‘They despised as dangerous and deceitful the feelings and all emotional reactions of religion and insisted that what men needed was intellectual light upon life and its problems. These old philosophers soon parted company with a needy race they could not help. On the other hand, the old mystics swept men to the other extreme. To them God and truth were incomprehensible, the revelations of God in Christ Jesus defied the grasp RELIGION IN THE HEART 13 of mind. Therefore, religion must forego the sanc- tions of the intellect. They insisted that ignorance was the mother of devotion. They rose as a living protest against a dead intellectual Church. They saw the Church with her metaphysics and philos- ophy and theology cold and corrupt. Men were wise and learned, but morally dead and religiously inert and helpless. Men believed with their brains but denied what they believed by lives that were cold and fruitless. Thus arose the various groups of mystics. They lighted the fires in the heart. They sought to warm into life again the religion of Jesus that had chilled and died in the intellectual conclusions of ecclesi- astical debates. Their pendulum swung too far. They gave no countenance to the mind, holding that it killed the spirit and choked the life of the soul with its definitions, arguments and syllogisms. So they cast it forth from the temple and turned exclusively for their interpretation and understand- ing of religion to the heart, where they believed the Spirit of God spoke directly and in a way to be felt and understood. This theory of religion landed these holy men into trouble. Feelings broke from the moorings of common sense and orderly living, and swept them from things sane and sound in human experience. They found high mountain peaks of spiritual exaltation and lived in the glori- ous sunlight of lofty altitudes of spirituality, but they allowed the poor miserable world to suffer and 14 RELIGION IN THE HEART die, unaided. Religion became for them a per- sonal, exclusive, subjective, spiritual luxury. It made for a holy selfishness which expressed itself in superb acts of self-abnegation! It repelled the ordinary man by its unhealthy spiritual reactions. So Mysticism passed. Has the Christian religion something in it that makes it a practical, recognizable thing in my daily experience? Is it something not only that I can believe but can also feel at work in my heart and life? If evil things move my emotions and thrill in my blood, may I not justly expect some opposite corresponding effect of the good? You may. It would appear that about seven-eighths of our re- ligion lies in the always troubled and restless sea of feelings where most of our spiritual needs have their origin. It is remarkable with what little amount of thinking we may get on, if we have the assurances of a personal experience of our religion in this vast, needy realm of human feeling. This is not to deprecate the vital place thinking has in our faith, but to show what a satisfying supplement to our thinking faith provides. Among the things good men yearn for as they face life and its alterations of experiences are: equanimity, happiness, moral enthusiasm. Now, will the Christian faith provide that even- mindedness which enables a man to hold his way and keep his spirit in wise restraint no matter what outward conditions may be? Can a man get a RELIGION IN THE HEART 15 rigid steadfastness of character and a persistency in the ongoing of his moral conduct by taking into his life the things of the Christian religion? One feels this to be vital to his dignity as a man. He cannot reconcile a restive and disturbed state of mind with any kind of solidity of character or worthwhile career. Men want an anchorage that holds and while holding makes them conscious of its unyielding grip upon the things beneath, assur- ing them that they are safe and at rest, blow winds, roll seas, beat billows, come what will. We do not wish to be told that these disturbing things about us do not exist, but are simply claims of error and must be denied and dismissed before any equanim- ity can come. This is asking too much of our common sense and honest sensibilities. We know that needles prick, and teeth ache, and fever burns, and a thousand hurts born out of the physical basis of our life stand ready to torment us. When through the channels of our real nerves we take joys and pleasurable feelings, we must not deny the reality of those same nerves when ill and hurt they report to our sensoriums the opposite experi- ences. No one respects an equanimity that is born of blindness to the facts of life. A faith that is open-eyed to sickness and sorrow and death is the only faith that can bring me serenity and steadfastness. Men want a Saviour who will look into the peril of the black, stormy night as a reality and say to the waves, “ Be still, 16 RELIGION IN THE HEART for the Son of God commands,” and to His dis- ciple, “‘ Be calm, for the Son of God is your com- panion.” He had the living realities of life in mind when He said, ‘‘ Come unto me all ye that know the reality of labour and are heavy laden with actual burdens your sensibilities are aware of and I will give you rest.” He does just this. We wish to be happy. It is not the main object of living, but we crave it. We have a right to it. Joy puts such a radiant atmosphere over all life that it becomes a poor, cramped, meagre thing if there be in it no real happiness. Happiness seems to release the intellectual and physical powers and give them a scope and a sense of amplitude that otherwise they never know. Happy people succeed. They achieue They are our best workers, our conspicuous salesmen, our most striking leaders, our best teachers. It is the radiant countenance and the cheerful spirit that gets farthest into your office when you are busy. It is the cheer-giving man that engages you longest when you are burdened with a big schedule. You want your children taught by happy teachers. You want happy foremen to organize happiness in your factory. You want happiness at your meals and joy in your dinner company. ‘The sermon or anthem that overflows with spiritual happiness touches and helps. Sidney Smith, in his lectures n “ Benevolent Affections,” well said, ““ Mankind is always happier for having been happy. So that RELIGION IN THE HEART 17 if you make a man happy now, you make him happy twenty years hence by the memory of it.” This is not some superficial grace, nor some popular affectation. It is not something born of a complacent, good nature. Every genuine smile, every radiant countenance is a triumph of the love of God in the heart. The thing that beams in the face first works like a sweet magic fire in the heart and there kindles the light that glows later upon the face. The doctrine of God’s care over us, and the teaching of Jesus concerning our relation to Him and to our fellows, work to make men happy and to give birth to good cheer. It is un-Christian to frown and pour out gloom upon people. It is a denial of the faith we confess. It is re-enacting again the tragic denial of Peter though under different guise. In the quest for happiness today, people, old and young, are going far astray. They are missing the mark in thinking happiness is born of things. Things they get. Things they do, things they see. Things! The physical accessories of happiness are negli- gible. Dancing—a thing of physical enjoyment— is taking the time, the energy, the modesty, the mentality of young people in the quest for happi- ness. It is at present an obsession, the like of which the generation has never known. It has been reported that the twelve largest public dance halls of Chicago gather each week an average of 90,000 young people, while nightly in five hundred 18 RELIGION IN THE HEART other halls many other thousands gather! They seek joy. The extreme and indelicate forms of dancing not only at degrading dance halls, but in select parties at clubs and hotels by our own young people, do not bring happiness and are wholly un- pardonable. The jazz music born of the jungle, sensuous and seductive, is spoiling the purity and beauty of our young people and bidding for pas- sions that stain. These are among the false lures that call when men are looking for happiness. Only as we plant the seeds of real joy in our hearts, by taking Christ’s principle into our life, will real happiness come. Moral earnestness, a most satisfying accompani- ment of the Christian life, is the mainspring of un- selfish service. Men need a reservoir of spiritual power to keep their Christian program steady in the face of obstacles without and temperamental dissuasion within. This is a supreme heart element without which no program of philanthropy or religion can long survive. The commanding reso- lution to say and do, making thereby a definite commitment, often comes amidst the aroused earnestness of a season of revived spiritual inter- est. Men often respond to a call that comes with profound emotional experience. The emotional experience gave positive and compelling power to the will in the hour of choice. New resolutions were easy and a new program of work seemed most feasible. In the glow of that fresh impulse RELIGION IN THE HEART 19 for service, every cross seemed sweet and all bur- dens a joy. But in the long, hard way that followed, the ecstasy of that early moment of decision subsided. The romance and thrill of the spiritual adventure died. There is something drab and tedious about the routine of the day’s work in the church or mission, people are not co-operative in their spirit. New ideas and visions are duly accepted by them as commonplace. Obstacles are frequent and the strain is heavy. Ere long courage weakens, joy in the task subsides and interest lags. ‘The moral pressure relaxes and the program that once ap- pealed no longer inspires. The explanation is obvious. The man’s moral enthusiasm is waning. The dynamic centre of the man’s life has lost its power. What churches and philanthropies and welfare organizations need in the long hard years of test- ing is not money, not organization, not leaders, but that spiritual fervour born of the unselfish ought- ness that lives only where Christ’s Cross stands. This alone guarantees moral fervour in the lives of men. This drives men on over difficulties and discour- agements and holds them steadily to the task, come what will! It is faith in God that generates ade- quate power! It holds the loyalty of men to the life-long program of the cross. That which glowed in Christ’s heart as He pressed on toward the hill 20 RELIGION IN THE HEART and kept His face steadfast toward the holy but hostile city, must burn in us today lest we grow weary in well doing and faint by the way. As Adoniram Judson sings: In spite of sorrow, loss and pain, Our course be onward still, We sow on Burmah’s plain, We reap on Zion’s hill. II THE MAN JESUS CHRIST “Give us a virile Christ for these rough days! You painters, sculptors, show the warrior bold, And you who turn mere words to gleaming gold, Too long your lips have sounded in the pratse Of patience and humility. Our ways Have parted from the quietude of old; We need a man of strength with us to hold The very breach of Death without amaze. Did He not scourge from temple courts the thieves? And make the arch-fiend’s self again to fall? And blast the fig tree that was only leaves? And still the raging tumult of the sea? Did He not bear the greatest pain of all, Silent, upon the Cross on Calvary?” —Rex Bounpy. “O man of mine own people, I alone Among these alien ones can see thy face, I who have felt the kinship of thy race Burn in me, as I sit. where they intone Thy praises,—those who, striving to make known A God for sacrifice, have missed the grace Of Thy sweet human meaning in its place, Thou who art of our blood-bond and our own,” —FLORENCE FRANK, Il THE MAN JESUS CHRIST “ For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.’—I T1IMoTHY 2: 5. Ga\SSVKE seek a new path across a very old # field. Let us make a cross-section of v4 “aex manhood, hoping to reveal the mascu- YAN line elements that make men what they are, and then look at Christ in the light of these elements. It ought to be true that the greatest masculine Figure of all time was so genuinely and obviously masculine in His traits and general dis- position that men have been drawn to Him by the attraction of the purely human elements that He shares with them and which they see in Him, before they recognize the superhuman elements of His character. Here is a striking feature in per- suasive and convincing evangelism. We recognize that the Jesus of history has been feminized. The feminization, as we have it, is easily explained. Jesus incarnates, perfectly, as in no other character, the qualities of tenderness and gentleness and refinement which find their finest human expression in women. The artists, in soft- ening the lines of His face in order to portray these 23 24 THE MAN JESUS CHRIST lovely traits, made His features predominantly feminine. Then, unfortunately, too, the notion has coloured men’s thinking that goodness and purity, gentle- ness and virtue, were not consistent with strength and a full quota of red-blooded, masculine quali- ties. So we have been compelled to re-humanize and re-masculinize Jesus after the painters and artists and the emotionalists have discussed Him— but always with the same result. He is “the man Christ Jesus.” Taking man just as we have him, what are his distinct masculine ingredients? You assay com- posite minerals with a blowpipe, but we have no laboratory apparatus to help in analyzing man! He is so disguised and masked that we do not see what is before us when we look. That part that has to do with bulk or his dimensions in space is the small and unimportant part of this thing at which we look. The shrewdest and most pene- trating inquirer that has ever tried to tell us what he really saw when he looked at this “ invisible object ” has given it up and presented us with an extravagant eulogy instead of an analytical for- mula. Shakespeare puts into the mouth of the depressed, but wonderful Hamlet what may be re- garded as the sum total of his conclusions concern- ing man, when he prompts him to say: “ What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty!—in form and moving how ex- THE MAN JESUS CHRIST 25 press and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god!. The paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? ” And, whether it be the unanswered question of this greatest knower of men in modern literature, or the satirical observations in the thirty-eighth chapter of Job, or the fiery denunciations of St. Paul in the first chapter of Romans, these wise men who speak seem to have arrived at almost the same conclusion, viz.: that man is an interesting, but insoluble problem. But in spite of this deadlock of the analysts and students in regard to man, there are clearly dis- coverable, easily distinguishable, native masculine elements in man that answer well the purpose we cherish. Something differentiates him from the other great department of the human race, long before you come to talk about his anatomical structure or his physiological functioning. He is something more than a biological product. Masculinity is something more than anatomy. It is a soul prop- erty before it is a sex-aspect. Somewhere along the mysterious pathway in the progress of the unborn, perhaps, before anatomy had issued its decree of individual destiny for the life-germ, God breathed into that potential unit, about to be ushered into immortality through the gateway of humanity, cer- tain elements—we later learned to call masculine. 26 THE MAN JESUS CHRIST They were like chemical ingredients received into the blood stream at the fountain head, producing definite and permanent results. They are ele- mental and fixed in the tissue of life itself. When the masculinizing processes begin we do not know; but begin where they may and end where they may, they shape thoughts, determine traits, give char- acter to will power and quality to judgment, weav- ing a distinctive fibre into the whole warp and woof of life. Masculinity is a spiritual portion long before it is a biological distinction. Men, as men, bring certain elements of heart life and distinctive mental endowments, certain emotional qualities into the great total experience of the race, without which life should be meagre and ineffective. It is not difficult to show that these innate mas- culine qualities, when spiritualized, are the very qualities that Jesus puts premium on, in the calling of men into His service as disciples. And no man Is giving proper release to the inborn and unique qualities with which he is endowed and which make him different from the other great hemisphere of humanity, until he has put these masculine facul- ties upon the altar of a dedicated life. The present period in the religious life of the world is ripe for the mobilizing of these masculine qualities in Christian service. We shall not see the armies of God go through the lines of opposition in our strange, new, modern life and take strongholds of evil and garrison them with the good until men THE MAN JESUS CHRIST 27 everywhere let God have His way in their lives, fully commandeering these distinctively masculine traits. When men in the church of America will permit these strong, masculine elements of their soul’s life to be harnessed to the goals of Jesus, then Pentecostal power will fall and fill the Church and all life with spiritual blessings. When men will permit these unique qualities of manhood to be sanctified and energized by the passion for service that brought Christ’s own blessed masculinity to its perfect fruitage, the Church of Christ, as His agent, will transform the world. Until our men wake to the moral meanings to the race of their solemn sex inheritance preserved in these forceful elements of masculine nature and measure with good conscience the obligation thereby imposed for leadership and service in society, we are not to bring our land with its mil- lions of men and women into fellowship with our Lord. What are some of the masculine features of Jesus? Jesus showed a distinct mark of masculinity in what we may call His race hunger. There is a passive race hunger in women. It is aggressive and dominant in man. He was the farthest removed from an ascetic or misanthrope of any in His gener- ation. He was the greatest individual, but not an individualist. He was gregarious. He loved the crowds. He was at home in vast, surging com- panies. He commanded them. People satisfied 28 THE MAN JESUS CHRIST His human cravings and appealed to His innate sense of race. This made Him a cosmopolitan. He preached a Gospel that was adapted to vast social units. His Gospel of the people, for the people, put Him in the vanguard of a new type of civilization in which great groups of men best real- ize as groups their highest welfare. It was the norm of the world’s democracy. It wiped out petty geographical distinctions. It obliterated castes of colour and social differences and compelled a racial oneness unheard of in the story of men. The human source of much of that vast world outlook, that vision toward humanity that made of this provincial Palestine Jew a world citizen and benefactor, and the one supreme Saviour of human society of all ages locates in this racial hunger as a supreme masculine quality! This God-given trait, imbedded in the sex-character of man, sup- plied human qualifications for the divine altruism and unselfishness of Jesus that made Him glad to sacrifice everything for the sin-cursed race. This racial hunger that went with His masculinity enabled Him to thrust His redeeming truth into the unhappy human social relations of life. He met days of toil, He walked the highways misunder- stood and despised, He forwent the joys and bless- ings of home and friends, He climbed the steepest hill the world ever saw and He died to crown a program of racial love that appalled His enemies and drew a world to Him. THE MAN JESUS CHRIST 29 Men must sanctify and direct that innate sense of responsibility for the race that lives in their sex qualities. We must seize that holy purpose of Jesus to leave nothing undone necessary to bring all men of every race into vital relations with God. We must do everything in our power to give men His viewpoint of the race as a subject of redemp- tion and impart to others His feeling for all men outside the pale of truth. This can be done when men, aS men, give adequate and God-ward expres- sion to their strong, masculine impulses. These yearnings of the heart toward the race must push men to the farthest horizon of human need. It is a spiritualized masculine urge to which Christian men must respond! There was an unmistakable aggressiveness about Jesus that belongs to men. It was a masculine mark that put Him fully and completely into the class of red-blooded, genuine manhood. He quali- fied on this point early. In fact, at twelve years of age, He began to break His own intellectual and spiritual pathway with a surprising freedom. It was an unprecedented line of conduct for a boy and wrought havoc with parental notions. But an unshackled Man of God was forming a life pro- gram. If we associate Jesus and His life with a soft, feeble, self-assertion that evades issues be- cause they make men uncomfortable, or with a character that preferred to talk in harmless gener- alities rather than direct and definite assertions 30 THE MAN JESUS CHRIST that thrust like spear points into the enemies’ complacency, we are greatly mistaken. Jesus was a force, a vigorous, vital fact, a personality that won, a leader who led, a man who moved, a current that no one could turn. Roger Babson, who has set up a pulpit in every clearing-house and Board of Trade, in a commer- cial letter says: ‘‘ It makes me impatient to have people refer to Jesus as a ‘poor, wandering car- penter’s son.’ If you have any doubt as to Jesus’ ability to make money, if He had so desired, just read the story of His taking money from the fish’s mouth, the story of His multiplying the loaves of bread so as to feed five thousand, the story of His turning water into wine, or the story of His calling His disciples to cast their net on the other side of the ship. Any man who could so impress the people regarding material things could have be- come a great leader in finance, industry or politics. If Jesus were poor in worldly goods, it was not because He could not make a business success. Jesus recognized the fact that when one gets enough to eat and wear and a place to live, things then lose their value. He realized that the endur- ing pleasures of life come only from a development of man’s spiritual nature. For this reason, I am interested in presenting religion as a tangible asset for the man of affairs.” If there are men who have not hitherto given themselves to Christ’s cause, under the pre- THE MAN JESUS CHRIST 31 judgment that there was something in it so ef- feminate as to make it non-compelling, let them once more face the full-length portrait of Jesus in the setting of the New Testament records. They have not seen Him. He is the most self-assertive personality the world ever saw. But His self- assertion never exceeded His ability or willing- ness to pay the price of the position He dared to assume. And it led Him sweating His very life- blood through the Garden of Gethsemane, and to the triumphant death on the Cross! Looking at this aggressive Man moving on toward duty, we are ready to respond to those familiar lines of Richard Watson Gilder: “Tf Jesus Christ is a man— And only a man—I say That of all mankind I cleave to Him, And to Him will I cleave alway.” We have a right to claim dogged persistency as a distinctly masculine quality. Not that there is not in women stability and adamantine character, but that men, by all that goes to make up the weight, bulk and momentum of their character, are noted for “ carrying on” with a stubborn, un- yielding front. There was nothing more conspic- uous in the make-up of Jesus than His persistency. His gentle face was rigid with iron purpose. No opposition ever turned His purpose. His own family lost heart, His fellow churchmen lost pa- 32 THE MAN JESUS CHRIST tience, His disciples lost courage, His cause lost followers, His message lost weight and prestige, but on and on He went! Plotters plotted and unwise friends made sad mistakes, false friends wrought treachery, national leaders scorned His words, but on He went. There is a positive element of moral courage in His kind of persistency. There is the push of an indomitable moral motive, the call of an unreached vision that keeps Him moving on and on over impossible conditions. Beyond the horror and sickening memory of the carnage at Verdun, there is ever to be remembered the glory of a spectacle in which persistency gilded the sunset clouds of life for five hundred thousand patriots that went to death in defense of France. There is a moral impressiveness in that persistency that persisted for others that moves us to tears as we think of Verdun and the Argonne Forest, where 750,000 of our own soldiers pushed on and on! Stubbornness may be hateful when behind it lie selfish purposes, but when transfigured by a spirit of love and self-abnegation, stubbornness becomes a sanctified passion without which the Kingdom lags. I hold that this special quality has been most completely exemplified in men and that Jesus puts premium on it. He had the iron of it in His own blood. He set His face and nothing turned it. Men must feel the call of such a personality. Men must feel the power in their lives, today, of this compelling trait of Jesus. Life for some men THE MAN JESUS CHRIST 33 lacks ongoing persistency. They have lost a native masculine trait. They are not moving on. They shift positions; they make no Godward advance. Out of a soul that never wavered, from a heart that never quailed, Jesus calls to His brother-man, and says: “ Use all the masculine gifts I share with you; sanctify and harness your persistency to un- selfish aims, leave this indefinite non-committal living and dedicate, without reservation, your whole, indomitable self to God and man! ” There is another masculine trait in Jesus that we may call a tearless tenderness. I mean a quick sensitiveness before need, that chooses, rather, to organize a program of assistance, than to shed tears or talk sweetly about the situation. It is a com- bination of self-restraint and fine duplicity. Men will not cry. The masculine reserve that seeks to divert attention from any incipient outbreak of emotion, by the well-known devices of coughing, or the use of the handkerchief, is back of the trait I seek to describe. Dry-eyed without, but a boil- ing ocean of tears within, is the situation that men are familiar with. Can you think of Jesus looking at a group of blind men on the street whose sightless eyeballs are lifted toward Him and not feel a tide of tenderness sweep over Him? How near to tears He must have been when the polluted beggars stood afar off and cried: ‘‘ Jesus, have mercy on me.” What must the Greatheart of the race have felt as He looked 34 THE MAN JESUS CHRIST at polluted womanhood and at the outcast lepers? His was a restrained and tearless tenderness that went at once to work! He wept, according to record, but once. Every tear a lense magnifying His human qualities. He worked incessantly to give expression to those unshed tears—just like a man. | What a wonderful example to follow! How compelling His personality and how irresistible His love! Every man to whom His Gospel has come ought to respond to this masculine program of Jesus. He was a man, He lived with men and He died for man! II THE CITY “The place where the Cross of Christ was planted was a strategic point. The Lord Jesus Christ set us this example when He bade His disciples begin at the metropolis.” ; “Calm soul of all things be it mine! To feel amidst the city’s jar, That there abides a peace of things Man did not make and cannot mar.” —MatTrHuEew ARNOLD. “The word of God came unto me, Sitting alone among the multitudes; And my blind eyes were touched with light And there was laid upon my lips a flame of fire.” —HELEN KELLER. “Soldiers of Christ For battle grow keen. Heaven-sent winds Haunt alley and lane. Singing of life In town meadows green After the toil And battle and pain.” —VACHEL LINDSAY. III THE CITY “And the city lieth foursquare, and the length ts as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal.” —REVELATION 21: 16. ext) absorbed was John in the life and <5) character and possibilities of the city, S&S) \@ so familiar with its dominant aspects, . “2 architecturally and otherwise, that when he dreamed of heaven it took on the features of a glorified earthly city with foundations of jas- per, walls of amethyst and gates of pearl. There never was more sin nor more human sorrow in the world than was concentrated in the cities of John’s day. But the intuitions of this old city-lover re- vealed to him the spiritual possibilities wrapped up in a great, populous city so clearly that in spite of all the things that marred its beauty, the city prefigured for him heaven itself. This required a keen perception and an ability to discriminate between things as they appear and things as they are to be. With this vision of John in mind let us empha- 37 38 THE CITY size the creative and inspiring character of a great city, noting how its foundations are laid and safe- guarded. Then, I hope, the case having been stated, everyone will be able to locate his personal responsibility in the matter of organizing and main- taining the forces that can and will make the modern city a redemptive agency in the social, economic and spiritual world. We should talk more about the creative and inspiring character of a great city. The honest, constructive critic of the social order is always un- popular, but his is an important task. Any man who allows a false pride in his city to blind his eyes to sordid facts or to dull his soul to the shocking phases of a city’s life, or to convince him that be- cause there is external beauty and prosperity there can be no internal corruption and no deadly evil working in the life of that city, is a false friend and his leadership in public life is a menace. The time has come when intelligent, forward- looking men and women who are working and praying for better things, should recognize the creative and redemptive influences touching human life and character as they live and move in a great city. We have never been quite balanced in our judgment on this point. We have incessantly be- moaned the dark, discouraging phases of city life. Many writers, when discussing the moral life of our American cities, have considered the fittest descriptive at their disposal the historic synonym THE CITY 39 for total civic depravity,—“ Sodom.” A reference being to a civic situation so utterly hopeless that it had to be cured by fire and brimstone. There were not even ten godly men, according to the divine census, in the rotten town who were available for any kind of spiritual leadership when the crisis came. The soul of Sodom was dead. It fell to a moral ruin which brought on its physical destruc- tion. Walking over its site, one sees, today, bleak desolation and a wilderness of death. But Sodom is not the word to be used to describe our modern city. Social writers, trying to arouse indifferent people, call the city a “ festering sore on the body politic.” They mean to say it is a loathsome, dangerous thing, a symptom of a sick body. An eruption that taints and annoys. Re- formers have called the city the plague spot of our democracy, holding that in the city, as in a hot-bed, are bred all the political and economic heresies and all the wild theories of the social and political order. They have the statistics to prove that in the city crime is nourished, anarchy is sheltered and everything that disintegrates and destroys has its home. Of course, every known phase of human depravity, in all its lurid forms, flourishes in the dark purlieus of the city. Every vagary that the restless mind and bitter heart of man devises is here. We shall, of course, take this for granted; why not take something else for granted? Nothing is more depressing to the spirit of young 4.0 THE CITY leadership waiting to be called to service, than these utterly hopeless, one-sided, and inadequate conceptions of city life. We may never be able to take Sodom from the front page. No one would desire to minimize the fact of sin and moral degen- eracy, crime and lawlessness that mar the peace and joy of the great groups of our fellow-men liv- ing together in the modern city. After twenty years of intimate experience in the heart of a great American city, I bear testimony to the fact that there is another and a really glorious side. Only in the atmosphere of hope and assurance based on the facts that cheer and on figures that encourage and on good men and movements as sacrificially they serve in a great city’s higher life, can we build a platform of redemptive principle and call to its promotion a leadership that will make John’s dream of the holy city come true. ‘There was enough spiritual indifference in the city to make Jesus weep as He approached it, but we know as well that in that city He found the human elements out of which He organized Pentecost and a spiritual movement that transformed the face of human society and wrote a new chapter in human his- tory. These things must be proclaimed on the housetop by honest men while the cynic, the social pessimist and the bitter radical are filling the air with their gloomy pictures of modern city life. There are certain conclusions about the city that we all accept. They compel our appreciation of THE CITY 41 the city as a great, unescapable human factor. We must figure definitely on the city as an ally if we plan to save the world. First: The city is an economic necessity. Cen- tralization of human life began as an economic and protective measure. Men found they could live better and more safely by living closer together. With all our intricate and complex ways of modern living and doing business, the city becomes more and more an economic necessity. We more and more need segregation in groups to get things done. It is well-nigh true that when you put people together their potential is in proportion to their numbers. Nature puts our nerves into compact, knotty ganglia, a magnificent instance of co- operation in the mass, out of which she develops the force with which she drives our physical ma- chinery. The cities are the nerve ganglia of mod- ern civilization. In spite of the airplane, the radio, the swift and easy contacts, the wiping out of space, the economical necessity of the city, as such, grows more apparent. For trade and commerce, for collecting and distributing what we eat or wear, for buying and selling, the city as we have it is a necessity. It always has been, it always will be. No matter what the idealist with easy formulas for human helping may say. The city is an economic necessity. Second: The city is a social privilege. Its lure to lonely country boys and girls we all can under- 42 THE CITY stand. It brings them to the city in endless pro- cessions. ‘They see its lights and love its vast moving crowds. They feel the touch of its gay life as it goes by in the limousines or is visible through windows of aristocratic hotels and clubs. Human contacts-are at close range. There are congenial groups available. There are privileges made possible in the great social co-operation of a city that become the goals for which thousands strive. There are doors of welcome that every- where swing wide to people in a city, opening into magic corridors where people talk and play and sing and paint and dance and taste the joys of social contact. On every hand are efforts to satisfy a deep, insatiable human craving. This is not an expression of anything regrettable or degraded in human life, but the revelation of a divine gift of fellowship and a love of brotherhood on which we must be wise enough to build the holy city. We must not let the social instincts of man that have pulled the city together pull the city apart, but be the means of lifting it. Third: The city is an intellectual stimulus. It releases forces into life to which men respond and, responding, find their intellectual experiences en- riched and expanded. When the street-car men went from the task of driving the old horse-cars to the cable-cars, they took perforce an intellectual step up. Then when the clumsy cable gave way before the majestic power of electricity, the old THE CITY 43 horse-car driver became a fellow craftsman with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison. They added to the circumference of their brains another intellectual ring. In a thousand ways unseen, in- audible, compelling, persistent, the city and its life is working to stimulate the intellectual life of her people long before we began to talk of its schools and colleges and art galleries and orchestras and lit- erary clubs. It is an irresistible intellectual tonic. Fourth: The city is a breath-taking communal achievement. It does things in a communal way that rival the accomplishments of empires. When a city feels the urge of a civic ideal she has a co- operative power at her disposal that makes mir- acles easy. The unparalleled wonder in the realm of civic improvements in a modern city is the de- velopment of the Lake Front under the Chicago Plan Commission. This gigantic enterprise in com- munity co-operation on behalf of beauty, health and happiness typifies the possibilities in communal co-operation in all directions, when honest leader- ship led by ideals and backed by an intelligent and generous popular support, takes its place in a great city. These are features of city life that compel our admiration and advise us of potential things. There are in the city great dormant gifts, fine ca- pacities, splendid resources that all our men and women moving on higher levels of leadership must seek to capitalize for God and the general good. 44 THE CITY American people are apt to capitalize all of these inspiring city factors for mere money-making or selfish living. They do not see and understand the spiritual potential of these things that are inherent in the life of a great city. These things quicken civic pride and at the same time dull our con- sciences. True civic greatness goes with power and enthusiasm in nourishing those substantial and abiding realities of life for which all money-making really exists. We recall that the foundations of John’s Holy City were four-square. A city’s greatness cannot be built on her market triumphs, nor on her manu- facturing output, nor on her industrial, mercantile or transportation supremacy. ‘These things may make a city big, but they cannot make it great. Contractors who build skyscrapers must put foun- dations under them capable of bearing the weight of mighty towers. They know better than to trust to surface sands. They drive their caissons to the limestone strata far below and pour in the cement that makes in forty hours what would take nature forty million years to duplicate! Then with their footings on the everlasting rocks, they go sky- ward with confidence, setting lines of architectural beauty that charm the world. They lift towers and domes and columns and arches competent to re- ceive splendid doorways, mullioned windows and corridors of marble. The invisible essential things without which there would be nothing, are the hid- THE CITY 45 den footings far below, where on the primal rock of God’s creation, stability and strength are guar- anteed. What footings can we locate for the noble city of tomorrow? First: A competent unselfish leadership in public affairs. Two qualifying words standing here to- gether will solve the civic problems of America so far as they can be solved in a wor!d where a total solution is never to be expected. When a city will train up, in her homes and schools, a generation of competent and unselfish leaders who will go to civic life and service as they go to the army or the navy or the post-office or the diplomatic service, in order to give as potential citizens their best to the service of the city, then effective government will be pos- sible. Two things have ruined municipal govern- ment in America: incompetency and selfish greed. The record of failure in our city governments, in our otherwise wonderful nation, brings a blush to our cheeks. Men who are accustomed to great re- sponsibilities in business, citizens whose motives are high and whose characters are above reproach, have, through the years, steadily refused to accept leadership in the politics of our American cities. They have turned from the duty and left it to men who: traded on it as a business and who prostituted for gain the sacred privileges of public office. Until good men and women in the precincts, wards and districts of our cities become so sensitive to their patriotic obligations that they will rise up to take 46 THE CITY their share in leadership and pay the price in service, we may expect to find disreputable ward heelers and grafting individuals marring the gov- ernment and ruining the ideals of civic life and character. The times demand on behalf of the better life of the city the willing, competent, lead- ership of good men. The second footing for the foundation of a great city is a rising level of upright public opinion, as expressed in a clean, honest press. The reading masses are aS sensitive as mercury. The headlines of a morning or evening paper colour the feelings, affect the temper and shape the program of a whole city. What people read today in the daily press is a more influential factor than anything that touches a city’s life. A column of news can be so written as to poison the life of a city, irrespective of the character of the news. A paper can let loose ugly feelings in a crowd more effectively than any soap- box orator. It can throw out a false alarm and start a mental panic with ten lines of nonpareil that a column of editorial matter cannot correct. The city papers, today, are the greatest intellectual apparatus for reaching the mind and moving the motives of the masses that civilization has. The papers can kill or cure. They can set up or tear down. No city is safe unless it knows that this marvellous fountain of information and influence is organized to pour forth waters that are sweet and clean. This does THE CITY 47 not mean that censorship should tamper with news matter, nor that the columns of the newspaper should be closed against news that shock the sensi- bilities and taint the memory of the public. It would be moral suicide for a city to repress the horrible or cover up the sickening tragedies that warn men of the fatalities of sin. But no city is safe unless it feels sure that those who own great city dailies are above the bribe of money or false, cheap popularity. A city is fortunate if it has papers that are dominated by high ideals and clean purposes. A city is thrice blessed if its papers are willing to take leadership in all active measures that seek to solidify the moral foundations of the community. There are such great dailies and such newspaper proprietors. I know an owner of a dozen great American dailies. He represents always positive and courageous newspaper leadership in every public issue where moral principles are involved. He considers the New Testament good copy. He is not afraid to spread a sermon on his editorial page. Back of all that is written the public knows there are fixed moral standards that shape all policies and govern all the utterances of his papers. There is no help in building the foundations of a great city from newspapers that are cynical toward all good. Those that burlesque all moral reforms and encourage every kind of lawlessness by inviting disobedience of particular laws are a menace to 48 THE CITY good order. No class of men have more solemn responsibility resting upon them in the matter of making a city than our newspaper owners and editors. They can be the very corner-stones of stability and progress or they can be the fatal in- fluences that undermine and disintegrate the very fabric of a city’s true greatness. Third: The third footing for the foundations of a great city is to be found in the existence of a creative group of institutions founded by the people and for the people in the service of altru- ism, philanthropy and art. These, in fact, are the effects and not the cause of greatness. ‘There must be a certain richness in the soil of a city’s life before these things can spring up. I have sat on a hospital board for many years with busy, burdened city men. When I think of the four hundred and seventy-five broken in body lying at this moment in the clean, white beds of a great hospital made possible by the gifts of gener- ous people, when I think of one hundred other hos- pitals and dispensaries in the same city with an army of physicians, surgeons and nurses, when I think of homes for our incurables where death, like a ball and chain, is tied to every guest, when I go into the homes for aged people, when I hear the cry of motherless children in the memorial orphan- ages and listen to happy voices singing Christmas carols in the blue-smocked crowd of little children in the homes for the friendless, and when I know THE CITY 49 that these are typical institutions of which there are many glorifying the unselfish and generous life of city men and women—then I know there is a subsoil of love out of which true civic greatness may grow. When these flowers of deep human iove have bloomed so generously in the life of a city, we are not surprised to know that other things are happening that are sure passports to civic greatness. One is not surprised to learn that when, years ago, the dream of Theodore Thomas for a great symphony orchestra was about to dissolve through financial difficulties that 8,850 people came for- ward with contributions and made the Chicago Symphony Orchestra one of the permanent insti- tutions in the higher life of that city. Art Galleries are a flower native to the soil of civic unselfishness. What a glory rests upon the names of founders and benefactors of those serving institutions that are lifting rich and poor out of the drab monotony of today into a world of beauty and spiritual reality cheering them on their way. In the unfolding pur- poses of human service there is a sure pathway leading on to genuine civic greatness. There is a fourth footing for the foundation of greatness of a city. A genuine, vital church life well sustained, pouring into the total life of the city a steady stream of spiritual power and holding high amidst the stress of commercial life the ideals of Jesus, is a supreme requisite for permanent great- 50 THE CITY ness of any city. I am above prejudice in my opin- ion on this subject. This is not the voice of sectarianism. This is not saying that the Kingdom of God includes only and exclusively members of the Church. It is not a claim that all moral mo- tives originate in and all moral goals issue from the Church. It is to say that no group of people can achieve permanent greatness unless there be kept fresh and outflowing, like perennial streams that gladden the land, these fountains of spirituality called churches. There is nothing in human soci- ety doing the work they do. There is nothing pre- pared in spirit and program to do the work they do. Humanity, with all its sins and sorrows, with its moral defects and delinquencies, waits for the heal- ing and help of its gentle hands. Men find here the kind of help they get nowhere else. I have been at the bedside of too many dying men in the great city and heard the last whispered prayer of too many pilgrims of the night, as they set forth to the land of eternal day, to have anyone tell me there is a satisfying substitute for the Church of Christ and its message of hope and immortality. Fra- ternity is a glorious virtue and life would be gloomy without it, but it has not a remedy in itself for the sore conscience, no cleansing prescription for the taint in a soul, no balm of healing for the broken heart. Civic virtues die when churches die. Morals and ethics pass when religious centres let the fire THE CITY 51 on their altars grow cold. Patriotism lives in men’s hearts close by religion. Good order comes from our keeping the house of God in order. What a responsibility for making a city great! It rests here and now upon church people. Some citizens of the city have turned their backs upon the Church. This, they cannot afford to do; they have broken faith with Him who wept over the city, and they pay no heed to His Church! Then they won- der why their high school boys and girls go wrong? Why young men take money that does not belong to them? Why lawless people flaunt the constitu- tion of the United States? Unless citizens of the city do their part to keep fresh and outflowing these God-given fountains of religion, our democ- racy is doomed. We must build the moral char- acter of the generation in order to build the city and the state and the nation on lines that are noble and great and with a character that will abide. There is something in the city that calls to the best in us and we must respond. We hear that something above the din and clamour of its markets. | “Where cross the crowded ways of life, Where sound the cries of race and clan, Above the noise of selfish strife We hear Thy voice, O Son of Man.” ar 4 Named ee, | yo IV PLUS AND MINUS “Ts thy cruse of comfort fatling? Rise and share it with another; And through all the years of famine It shall serve thee and thy brother. “For the heart grows rich in giving— All tts wealth 1s living gain; Seeds which mildew in the garner, Scattered, fill with gold the plain.” —SELECTED. “The holy Supper is kept, indeed, In whatso we share with another’s need: Not what we give, but what we share, For the gift without the giver is bare; Who gives himself with his alms feeds three; Himself, his hungering neighbour and Me.” —LOowELL. IV PLUS AND MINUS “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His right- eousness; and all these things shall be added. unto you. ’—MATTHEW 6: 33. “Take, therefore, the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents.’—MAatTTHEW 25: 28. WRHE help of two algebraic signs is here cry is, being invoked! It will be necessary to 4 re take them entirely out of the realm of Kis) b= mathematics, where they belong, and to use them as parables in the realm of spiritual things. Most men are more at home discussing the spiritual side of mathematical things than with the mystifying, perplexing side that always baffled them in the classroom. The spiritual uses of the plus and minus signs need comment. We need but little algebra to understand the special significance of these signs when set before figures. It makes all the difference in the world as to the part a figure plays in a group of figures whether or not it has before it the plus or the minus sign! If it be a plus sign, you have an accumu- lator at work in the group, a constructive, building 55 56 PLUS AND MINUS influence. You have something working for an aggregate by adding numerical quantities. It isa signal for tying things together and merging differ- ent and differing quantities into bigger and better unities. The minus sign is as obvious and as effective in getting _results as the plus, but how different the results! Set the minus sign before a figure and disintegration and diminution start at once. Things begin to dissolve and disappear wherever that figure with its minus prefix appears. Turn loose in the society of figures a numeral with the minus sign prefixed and the cutting down and taking away process starts that whole group toward nothing. ‘The minus sign, when its work is done, has reduced everything it touches. It takes away just as effectively as the plus can add. There are certain moral equivalents to the plus and minus signs working in our lives. There are principles that affect our lives and characters as plus and minus affect the figures in the algebraic formula. Ascertain what is the co-efficient sign before a figure and you will know whether it is going to build up or tear down. And nothing will alter or obscure or nullify the mathematical in- fluence of that numeral as long as it lives and wears the sign. Bury it deep as you will in a vast ava- lanche of figures whose totals are breath-taking and in it all and under it all is the “ plussing ” or “‘ minusing.”’ Every man or woman in that great group-life we PLUS AND MINUS 57 call human society wears a plus or a minus sign. They exhibit the character, work the results, exert the influence in society of these algebraic prefixes. God bless and strengthen the influence of the man who isa plus! Who touches life with constructive power and going everywhere always adds to and never takes away. God save us from the disinte- grating work of minus men who, like the sign, take away and tear down, who reduce and destroy. Is there in our spiritual life a moral equivalent to the plus sign? “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things shall be added” (Matt. 6: 33). Here is the plus principle in daily living. With the kingdom of God in the heart, the plus process begins in life. When the kingdom of God within is recognized, men achieve the quality of life that brings to bear on all things and everybody, the plus influences! They become constructive factors in the social order—organizing, unifying, building. With their dominant purpose in being and doing, shaped by the principles of the kingdom, men be- come to human society what the plus sign is in the algebraic formula. The text suggests that it is the man with a pas- sion for the kingdom of God and God’s right and just way of living, that becomes the supplementing prefix in human society. This is not the first mean- ing of the text of the Great Teacher. He was telling men how to find rest and equanimity. But 58 PLUS AND MINUS the other lesson is plainly there! Men that get the vision of a better world, seeing what Jesus saw, and earnestly go toward His goals with something of the yearning of His heart and indomitable pur- pose, are always the constructive, upbuilding, in- spiring factors in the world. They add. They make for totals and a great oneness. They work toward unity and solidarity. Their goal is brother- hood. Whether their influence be limited to a church or a community or a nation or a world, the plus effect of their living is the same. In the plus principle we find the thing for which we are look- ing. We need people who can hold things together and make their lives and their personalities con- structive and saving influences. Joshua B. Garrett taught Greek in Hanover Col- lege for more than sixty years. He loved Greek and knew it as one knows his mother tongue. He loved the classroom and the art of teaching. But above all he was one of the few men of my youth that I felt thought supremely of the kingdom of God and His righteousness. He became a plus in every boy’s life for the sixty years he taught. Hun- dreds of men all over the world in useful occupa- tions testify today to the upbuilding and solidifying influences that were set to work in their lives through the life of this beloved teacher of Greek who was a passionate lover of the kingdom of God and its righteousness. Frances Willard was a plus power that has PLUS AND MINUS 59 wrought, for forty years, in American society and around the world. She has done more to change the moral tastes of people and set into life temper- ance ideals than perhaps any other personality. She had a passion for the kingdom of God; it took her outside of the comforts of her church and the home and into the purlieus of sin and set against her the virulent opposition of wicked men. The same was true of Booker T. Washington, and Dr. Packard of Persia, and scores of other men and women in our own country and across the world who are today seeking supremely the kingdom of God! Loving God and His kingdom, supremely seeking it by every impulse and program possible, you become a plus influence in life. God will add to your joy and peace while you add to the peace and power of others. But what about making unfavourable use of the minus sign? Is this innocent sign a symbol of moral weakness? ‘There is a moral equivalent of the minus sign that opposes the moral equivalent of the plus sign. “ Take, therefore, the talent from him” (Matt. Ries ys The minus principle in the moral world is the thing that subtracts and diminishes. It is exhibited at work in the parable of the talents from which the second text is taken! The plus men in the parable were honoured with public plaudits. They added to the trust funds in hand by faithfulness aa 60 PLUS AND MINUS and judicious investment. ‘The selfish inert man who thought so much of his own comfort and ease that he chose to take no chance, was a minus sign in the day of reckoning. He always has been and always will be! Selfishness is the moral equivalent to the minus sign in any man’s life! Do you know one single monument selfishness has ever erected? A selfish man, wherever he is, whatever he does, like the figure with a minus prefix in a welter of figures, is slowly at work undermining the founda- tion of society. He always works on the minus side, subtracting and taking away! What is the matter with so many of the peace diplomats and conference leaders that sit at world councils? What is the matter with the little na- tions of Eastern Europe? Many a leader at these so-called peace tables is branded with the minus sign on his heart. The futile deliberations and the economic and political calamities that have fol- lowed these conferences are due to the baleful in- fluence of that minus sign working in the lives of selfish nations. They seek to take away and not to build up. They wish to get but not to give. And if their greed be not modified by a mutuality born of a sense of interdependence they will break into fragments the solidarity of Europe. What has been the matter with certain men in business who have lost their place of leadership in business and their standing in society? Selfishness placed the minus sign before their lives and in the PLUS AND MINUS 61 working of the program of the minus sign, self- destruction followed! Pity those prosperous men whose lives have crumpled up and failed because they did the bidding of the wrong sign! In this problem of the signs at work in human life, is there any solution? Yes! Jesus reversed the minus sign and made it an active plus sign. He changed its whole content, character, and practical consequence. He stopped its subtracting power and started it adding. He took the facts of human experience and contra- dicted all the laws of mathematics when He said, “ He that saveth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for my sake and the gospel, shall find it’? (Matt. 16:25). Thus the minus sign may become a plus. The selfish heart, a subtracting and diminishing influence, becomes a plus power when it is pos- sessed by that unselfishness that took Christ through life, sacrificing, deducting, foregoing for others, coming in a supreme act of self-abnegation to the Cross. Greed dies in men’s life when once and truly they see that Cross and know its mean- ing! Our minus lives may be changed and glori- fied into the plus! There is to be no saving of the world, no stability of the social order, no progress in government, no prosperity in business till we can drive out the minus influences of greed and selfish- ness that pervert and unspiritualize men’s lives and destroy that unity and solidarity of life by 62 PLUS AND MINUS which alone progress is to be found. Jesus was the world’s supreme plus sign. Unknowing men that never saw anything they could call gain outside of their ledgers or beyond their thrones or above their armies, thought Him and His plan all minus. They scorned His teaching, ridiculed His ideals and crucified Him on a cross, and said, “‘ the plus abides with spears and crowns and golden palaces.” But all their empires fell apart and their military power melted away. The names of their great ones are simply symbols of presumption and futility and bitter disillusionment, while His Name is the Name above every name. When His love fills our hearts, then are altered the subtracting and belittling things that work to hurt and hinder the world. Then we know the thing that brings joy and power into life and the thing that enriches and sustains. We need in everything the proper prefix to our living that our character in all things may be constructive and upbuilding. V COMRADES OF THE SHINING PLATEAU “O Master, let me walk with thee In lowly paths of service free; Tell me thy secret, help me bear The strain of toil, the fret of care. * * * * Teach me thy patience! Still with thee In closer, dearer company; In work that keeps faith sweet and strong, In trust that triumphs over wrong.” —WASHINGTON GLADDEN. “What happy secret fountain, Fair shade or mountain, Whose undiscovered virgin glory Boasts it this day, though not in story. Was then thy dwelling? Did some cloud Fix’d to a tent, descend and shroud My distrest Lord? Or did a star, Beckoned by Thee, though high and far, In sparkling smiles haste gladly down To lodge light and increase her own? My dear, dear God! I do not know What lodged thee then, nor where, nor how: But I am sure thou now dost come Oft to a narrow homely room, Where thou, too, hast but the least part, My God, I mean my sinful heart.” —HeEnry VAUGHAN, V COMRADES OF THE SHINING PLATEAU “And after six days, Jesus taketh with him Peter, and James, and John, and leadeth them up into an high moun- tain apart by themselves; and he was transfigured before them. . . . And there was a cloud that overshadowed them: and a voice came out of the cloud, saying, This is my beloved Son: hear him.’—Mark 9: 2-7. “ And one of the multitude answered and said, Master, I have brought unto thee my son, which hath a dumb spirit; and wheresoever he taketh him, he teareth him: and he foameth, and gnasheth with his teeth, and pineth away: and I spake to thy disciples that they should cast him out; and they could not.”—Mark 9: 17-18. AERE is a story in two parts. The first VEN | part has to do with a glorious spiritual ) experience on the mountain-top. The ¢ 44a7 49 second part has to do with the sad failure of men to make proper use of that spiritual experience for the use of needy suffering fellows in the valley. The first part reveals the privileges that belong to discipleship when it detaches itself from earthly things and enters into divine com- radeship with Jesus. The second part reveals the deficient understanding and ineffective faith that make for the failure of those who have been on the mountain-top. The first part shows how this drab, 65 66 COMRADES OF THE SHINING PLATEAU everyday living of ours may be saturated with spi- ritual joys and divine contentment when its fellow- ship is on the supreme levels and with heavenly company. The second part shows how the ecstasy and spiritual exaltation of the mountain-top may ooze and fail of practical help in the presence of emergencies when human forgetfulness and selfish spirit have done their work. Let us first go to the mountain-top. Here all is radiant and full of peace and joy. The “ mountain- top’? is a metaphorical phrase for happy spiritual experience; for the glad, deep reactions of religion in the heart. We think of the mountain-top as a level on which certain glorious realities of our religious life are set in the clearest possible atmos- phere. Here the visibility is fine. Spiritual reali- ties are so vivid that they are indisputable and reassuring as we see them in the clear, brilliant air of the lofty altitude. Looking toward the great things of God and the spirit life we say with new emphasis, “‘ Now I see! I know! I feel! I am convinced! My doubts are gone! My faith is tuned again and religion seems definite and worth- while! ” All this is true because we are on the clear, high levels. We have risen above the fogs of the low-lying valleys. It must be acknowledged that there are some realities of religion that Christ’s own disciples do not see because of the machinery and the appa- ratus, the programs and organization technique COMRADES OF THE SHINING PLATEAU 67 they insist on taking into the mountain-top. They are anxious to be efficient. They so earnestly de- sire to see the good expand that they clutter up the mountain-top with headquarters’ paraphernalia. There are so many practical outfits and so much general equipment and agency material for doing things that we obscure the transfigured faces of our Lord and His heavenly companions and drown the voices of the mountain-top conferees by our machinery. We are so busy and noisy, hurrying about and giving orders as to the little transitory human booths that must, in our opinion, be set up, that the great voice of God Himself, with a mes- sage that would melt the world into oneness in Him, falls dead upon our ears. Look athwart that shining plateau at this mo- ment. At this high level spiritual vision is clear. All anxiety as to machinery is for the moment profane and futile. One must here detach himself from the buzzing order of the day. Closing one’s ears to controversies and debate, let us take the rewards of the glorious sunlit quietude of the mountain-top. What is it that there is visible? Jesus! His face aglow with a divine light that is the badge of His ineffable divinity. Divine per- sonality overlays those human features with such a glory as eyes have never seen. What a sight for timid, half-believing disciples! What an unveiling of infinite purposes! What do we need to see more truly than this shining face? We have nearly lost 68 COMRADES OF THE SHINING PLATEAU sight of Jesus in the trappings of the organizations we have set up to do Him honour. We have had our gaze turned from the simple, glorious character of Jesus toward definitions and descriptions and deductions about Jesus. We have argued and philosophized and_ exhorted, when what we need is simply to look directly and uninterruptedly at Jesus. “No fable old, nor mythic lore, Nor dream of bards and seers, No dead fact stranded on the shore Of the oblivious years. “ But warm, sweet, tender, even yet A present help is He: And faith has still its Olivet, And love its Galilee.” Spiritual companionship! Something a chilly world does not afford. Many people are lonely for spiritual companionship but do not know what the trouble is. They purposely distract their minds by all kinds of activities. The pain of unrest spoils their good purposes, and the heart knows no rest. The fellowship on the mountain-top is the supreme corrective for worldly loneliness and for that rest- lessness that disturbs our jaded souls. On that mountain-top there proceeded a conversation that dealt with the eternal purposes of God and their human connections in time. The vocabulary and whole personal intercourse of those heavenly con- COMRADES OF THE SHINING PLATEAU 69 versationalists was saturated with spirituality and divine grace and a great tidal wave of peace from the undisturbed sea of eternity rolled over that mountain-top. When we talk of fleeting, trivial, earthly things exclusively, preventing the consider- ation of great themes of God and the serious pur- poses of immortal living, a loneliness like some spiritual blight falls upon us. We need mountain- top comradeship and conversation to keep us glad and going Godward in our thoughts and life work. Confirmation of faith as an active process was being realized on that mountain-top. Those human comrades of the shining plateau took doubts and spiritual deficits with them into this interview. They were slow in concluding about the great features of Christ’s character and mission. He did not altogether look the part of the Messianic hero they had pictured. He made small pretensions. His ideal was in opposition to an imperialistic res- toration of David’s throne. His chief intimacies were with common ordinary people and He met violent hostilities from the rich and great. ‘These seekers after truth who are to lead the cause of Christ need confirmation of their faith. They need convictions that are rooted. They want certitude laid on foundations of faith that cannot be shaken by the storms that are coming. They must be rock-ribbed and ironbound lest they wreck the faith about to be delivered to them for the Church of the centuries! 70 COMRADES OF THE SHINING PLATEAU It was the spiritual experience of the mountain- top they were waiting for. Nothing renews the footings of faith under men in a world of doubt and uncertainty like finding the levels where vision is clear and the voice of God is audible. Alone with Him in the shining clouds of heavenly fellowship, where the conversations run on great themes and where the comrades are men of the ages and the glow of spirituality falls over all like the golden cloud that covers God’s throne—this is the mountain-top seclusion weary men need. Abide - there for a season, and when you walk down there will be arguments written in your heart against which the gates of hell cannot prevail. We need these mountain-top experiences that stamp indel- ible impressions upon our souls. We need them more than intellectual arguments or coercive exhor- tations that convince but do not convert nor hold us when the sound of earnest speaking has died away. On the mountain with Jesus and a spiritual com- panionship and a great voice of reassurance and confirmation, is where discipleship gets its power. Here is where, and this is how, the intellect is set on fire, the soul is charged with pentecostal energy till it becomes as a spiritual dynamo thrilling every- thing that makes contact with it. Congregations and church officers should take to the shining plateau. They have much to do, but all haste, waste and hurry is a halting and hindering of God’s work if there be not first a very definite dwelling COMRADES OF THE SHINING PLATEAU 71 on the mountain-top with its divine companions and conversation. It is to be regretted that there is a second part to the picture. These mountain-top disciples must go down. Some rare souls seem not to realize this. They live on the high levels of spiritual peace and joy. They let nothing interfere with their pro- longed rest in the Lord! They love to sit at His feet. They love the sunshine of His face and linger in it, come what will, call what may. Rudyard Kipling has such disciples in mind when he draws a contrast between the sons of Mary and of Martha. “And the Sons of Mary smile and are bless¢d— they know the angels are on their side. They know in them is the Grace confessed, and for them are the Mercies multiplied, They sit at the Feet—they hear the Word—they see how truly the Promise runs; They have cast their burden upon the Lord, and —the Lord He lays it on Martha’s Sons!” The disciples of the shining plateau went down. There was at the foot of the mountain a distressed father with a sick child waiting to be helped. The transcendent scenes have shifted—this is life. The incident seems so disturbing in contrast with the lovely quietude of the mount. Why does the father make a public matter of his family affliction? Why bring a note of melancholy and discord into the harmony of the beautiful comradeship, the memory of which is yet fresh and sweet? Does not he know 72 COMRADES OF THE SHINING PLATEAU that they have been talking with heavenly visitors? And more, that they have just come from a season of religious exaltation in which the voice of God spoke wonderful things? It seems like selfishness on the part of this insistent father to press the claims of his suffering epileptic boy upon the atten- tion of spiritually-minded men who are so thrilled, so near to God, so exalted in their experience! But the tragic feature of the story is that these disciples seem to have left behind the power that blessed them on the mountain-top. They are not spiritually able to meet the emergency, though they seem to have the disposition. Here is a tragic breakdown in a logical sequence. What is the worth of a mountain-top experience if there be no transmission to the vales below? ‘The thing we found on the high levels must be brought down into daily life, where people work and wait and want. The supreme test of the genuineness of our religion 1s not on the mountain-top but in the val- ley. Will that glorious thing that thrilled us in the quiet mountain, where we saw and felt the presence of God and heard His voice, work down here where children are sick, parents anxious and evil things are always in sight? This is where it does work. Men who have really seen the transfigured face of Jesus are the ones who make it work. Those who know the company of heavenly men and have heard the voice of God are those who insist on working it. We have been asked to come up into the moun- COMRADES OF THE SHINING PLATEAU 73 tain that we may know the peace, Joy and power that fellowship there makes possible. Now, we are asked to come down to this sin-sick and disturbed world with its acute needs. We are to bring with us all the sweetness and joy and spiritual power that the high and quiet levels made possible. Let us carry in our hearts, like a conquering memory, what we saw and heard and felt, and allow nothing to spoil our peace nor mar the taste of that fellow- ship. Let us save to our hearts for the stress and struggle of the valley all these precious experiences born of the upper altitudes. Let us keep this wonderful power that fills men’s souls and thrills their lives through long years of hardship and service. It was the memories of the mountain-top that sent Blanche Wilson Stead a martyr missionary on the plains of Persia through the long labours and painful years of sacrificial service for the Kurds and mountain barbarians she so loved. Her face lighted with a smile of joy even amidst the privations of her missionary life and even as she breathed her last breath, because she was sharing her ‘‘ mountain-top ” joys with her poor Persian people. It was the memory of the mountain-top of his spiritual experiences in Christ which he found with Henry Drummond that took Dr. Grenfell from a city practice with preferments and honours awaiting him, and sent him to the sordid lives, sick bodies and burdened souls of Labrador folks. It was the things he saw and felt 74 COMRADES OF THE SHINING PLATEAU on the quiet upper levels of his faith that sent David Livingstone, the pathmaker, through the im- possible jungle of Africa with his message of hope to the most helpless race of the world. It is the unforgettable memory of these experiences of the heart that has sent hundreds of young men and women to the uttermost parts of the earth as light- bearers in the darkness. We keep that which comes in seasons of sweet fellowship with Him only by seeking to share it with others. Our power lies in the hills—from it we draw. Down here is where our duty calls and to it we respond. VI SPRINGTIME IN THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM “ Not a brooklet floweth Onward to the sea, Not a sunbeam gloweth On its bosom free, Not a seed unfoldeth To the glorious air, But our Father holdeth It within His care. “Not a floweret fadeth, Not a star grows dim, Not a cloud o’ershadeth But ’tis marked by Him. Dream not that thy gladness God doth fail to see; Think not in thy sadness He forgetieth thee. “ Power eternal resteth In His changeless hand; Love immorial hasteth Swift at His command. Faith can firmly trust Him In the darkest hour, For the keys she holdeth To His love and power.” —SELECTED. VI SPRINGTIME IN THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anoint- est my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for- ever.’—PSALM 23. % the autumn nor the parchedness of summer in this Psalm. They are not features of the calendar nor items of the landscape that this Psalm knows anything about. The colours here painted are natural and living because they are painted by an artist who knew the sheen and the shape and the sweet odours of the original. He gathered the beauty from the spring-green hillsides and grass-crowned ridges of his native land and 77 78 SPRINGTIME wrote them into his Psalms. He walked by the rare but quiet pools under the brow of the hills and felt the spell of rest and calm. The refreshing breath of the morning, out of the dew-drenched valleys, poured out upon him and modified the burning heat of the noon sun that was scorching the earth. These things he saw and felt as he wrote his Psalm. - Inimitable touches of beauty with exquisite vistas opening into the charms of nature exposed in these wonderful Psalms have been lost to us because we sought here always and only the vocab- ulary of devotion to which we are accustomed. We are apt to think God must be approached in a cer- tain, stereotyped way and that one devotional path- way to Him must be the same for us all. Before we are aware of it we are often using certain lifeless and encrusted forms of speech, out of which, so far as we are concerned, vitality and personal meaning have gone. We become matter-of-fact at the Throne of Grace, our petitions falling into sacred formalities which custom has approved, whether or not they release for us a single heart-hunger or kindle a satisfying emotion or present a single re- quest that deeply we yearn for. At no place in the varied and precious spiritual experiences of God’s people is there such a high call for the imagination as in the hours of prayer. When men pray they walk into the realms of golden mystery where indefinable realities lie large and SPRINGTIME 79 sure all about them. Men, therefore, must carry with them into this tremulous atmosphere, into this twilight of their praying times, the glowing light and the outreaching hand of a sanctified imagina- tion. We make a mistake, seriously and spiritually hurtful, not so to do. The imagination of an ori- ental Psalmist kneeling in prayer, made the dull, gray things of the outer world beautiful and signifi- cant. They breathed forth upon him a spiritual air. God lived within him in a heaven-given com- panionship. The mystic gates of a vital faith stood wide when the Psalmist prayed. Through them he walked, seeing invisible things, rejoicing in a spiri- tual loveliness that others did not see and hearing voices that others failed to hear. In the Twenty-third Psalm the inspired and praying man gives his imagination large liberty. He thinks of himself as a sheep with all the ordi- nary characteristics of a sheep, viz.: a sense of dependence, a yearning for leadership, a love of green grass, a joy in the nearness of still waters and the tranquillity that abides in the seasons of rest in the pastures. But the imagining of this praying moment would strike us as being gross and low if all it did was to portray the Psalmist to himself as a sheep. Thinking up to this point and then stop- ping, provides no stimulating, spiritual reaction. The nobler levels of imagination of this praying Psalmist are reached when he imagines God a shepherd. 80 SPRINGTIME | This was a daring leap of the inspired imagina- tion due to the moving of God’s spirit upon the Psalmist. It was an epoch-making revelation. The world was waiting for a better, truer interpre- tation of God. Here was the culminating peak in his thought of God’s love and care of His people. What a shepherd did for his flocks on the hills of Judza in the winter nights and in the grazing sea- son, when grass was scarce and water rare, and in the hours of peril when robbers hovered near or wolves howled in the shadows, what he, a shepherd, did under these various circumstances for his flock; that God, in His spiritual oversight, did for him. Kneeling to pray and looking up into the Syrian sky strewn with white stars that lay like his own sheep in some vast field of the night, the Psalmist saw God shepherding him. A great flood of tender- ness poured out from God’s own heart when the Psalmist let his imagination picture Almighty God, maker of heaven and earth, as his shepherd. Interpreting God in the terms of the shepherd, the praying man’s imagination, like the doorkeeper of the soul that it is, opened and let in the whole field of shepherding activity. Herein he found a new and comforting understanding of God. It was a revealing moment that illumined the theology of the praying writer. For a man to have arrived at such a conception of God was a transcendent spiri- tual experience. At the heart of this praying affir- mation is the idea that God is a shepherd rather SPRINGTIME 81 than an imperial despot. In His shepherding care He is a safe guide, a bountiful provider and de- pendable keeper, capable of doing in love and in gentleness what the shepherd on the plains does for his sheep. It is the springtime atmosphere of this Psalm that is claiming our attention. The chief mark of the springtime everywhere is the “ green pastures ” that lay so fair and sweet in the holy imagination of this praying man. God, even then, was leading him through their beauty and verdure, and his soul burst into song in the lines of this immortal hymn of spiritual rest and satisfaction—‘* The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” It is the “ green pas- tures ” that always suggest God’s shepherding care. This is the preéminence of every springtime. A green pasture is no ordinary sight. It leads the reverential man Godward. Look at it, coming again out of the brown deadness of the winter. It is the same glad surprise. The same fresh, unex- pected but ever longed-for miracle. The landscape slowly warms under the meagre sun. Weary of winter, we look across the grey bleakness of the hills and wonder when the life we know is hidden there, will rise again and fling its beauty over the harsh wounds left by the snow and ice. The blue- bird, like an electric spark, darts here and there, advising impatient men and women of the reason- ableness of their expectancy as to grass. Other omens of spring-life are in the air. Then a warm 82 SPRINGTIME shower, a day of unbroken sunshine and a strange, thin veil of green comes upon the earth. Thin as some gauzy mist, it fails to obscure the dull colours of winter, but when other days and steadier warmth follow then deeper shades of green are spread on hill slopes and through the tree-tops and men begin to forget that winter ever was. Then the fields awake and the whole face of the world changes. The tide of grass, for which we have waited, sweeps over the land like some vast sea of verdant beauty. “‘ God is here again,” we say. Yet He is no more here in the green grass than in the cold, dead soil of the frozen field. But the green, growing grass kin- dles our imagination and gives to God’s power and love a reality that we fail to appreciate in the mys- tery of winter’s deadness. Spring visualizes God in action before us in a spectacle whose meaning and power we feel. He talks more plainly through the living grass than the dead earth. We are more alive to His whispering and open larger capacities and perceptions in the green pastures than in the snowy widths of wintertime. The late Madison Cawein had a soul attuned to all the beauties of the world; he expressed the feelings of every nature lover when he said: “ There is no rhyme that is half so sweet As the song of the wind in the rippling wheat; There is no meter that’s half so fine As the lilt of the brook under rock and vine; SPRINGTIME 83 And the loveliest lyric I ever heard Was the wildwood strain of a forest bird. If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach My heart their beautiful parts of speech, And the natural art that they say these with, My soul would sing of beauty and myth In a rhyme and meter that none before Have sung in their love, or dreamed in their lore, And the world would be richer, one poet the more.” The serenity of a life was also suggested to the Psalmist by ‘‘ green pastures.” He lies down amidst vernal beauty and his heart is at rest. He finds a balm of healing for his irritated and per- plexed soul as he lies down in the green grass. The healing virtue is not in the grass, beguiling as it may be, with all its beauty. There is no medicine for helping his hurt spirit in the chemistry of the grass. The medicinal help for his soul comes from his finding that God has not only made the grass and laid on its colours and spread it tapestry-wise over all the hills, but He has made it for the resting-place of His children. Where grass is, God’s presence and power are, and peace must live in the hearts of His children. The shepherding of God does not explain the grass. That belongs to His achievements as a Cre- ator. The shepherding goes with the Psalmist’s lying down in the grass with a sense of peace com- ing into his heart through a feeling of God’s love and nearness to him, as the pasture’s grass, like a book of a thousand leaves, voices it to him. 84 SPRINGTIME Every blade sings of God’s care. Every green pathway athwart the hills and fields leads to His heart, every valley of verdure tells that He has walked that way, the rich growing meadows where cattle feed bespeak Him, the highly-coloured mar- gins of streams trace His handiwork. Mountain- sides, rolling plains, trackless prairies, all speak of God’s goodness and care. Whether it be the tiny blade fighting for air and sun in the foul shades in the unfertile soil of some slum alley or the green growth of vast pasture lands of the west, grass tells the same story of the Great Shepherd’s shepherding. The message of eternal springtime in this Psalm, so familiar as to seem threadbare, should speak a new lesson of peace and spiritual serenity. Look- ing at the green earth, through the atmosphere of this interpreting Psalm, a new joy in the Shep- herd’s provision for His sheep takes hold of the heart. Men should grow less self-assertive and less materialistic in their souls as the springs come and go. Walking under the Shepherd’s care one always finds the eternally green pasture-land, and, calmed by His voice, the weary lie down and are at peace. VII A RADIATING PERSONALITY “Not in robes of purple splendour, nor in silken sofiness shod, But in raiment worn with travel came their God, And the people knew His presence by the heart that ceased to sigh, When the glory of the Lord was passing by. “For He healed the sick at even, and He cured the lepers sore, And sinful men and women sinned no more, And the world grew mirthful-hearted and forgot its misery When the glory of the Lord was passing by.” —W. J. Dawson. “TI do not see how we can make sense of Christ's words and believe them true, unless we have, at least vaguely, in our minds, the permeable structure by which I picture our love in its relation to God, a structure such that love freely given to any of the children of men must, at the same time, pass through him to his Maker. Unless the whole structure of divine and human love 1s thus permeable, I cannot understand how our human love and our worship, our love of nature and of country, of work, of play and of God can mingle and reinforce each other as they do. Furthermore, unless we think of our own personality in such relation to Infinite Person- ality as I have hinted, I do not see how any sociable human being can bear, without intolerable humiliation, the volume of affection and gratitude that is poured upon him. In practice one explains it, one makes it sweet and sane, only by passing 1t on.”—RicHuarp C, Casor, M.D. Vil A RADIATING PERSONALITY “Ve are the light of the world.”—MAatTHEw 5: 14. i¢ ysTiE metallurgists and chemists of the ee oti ry WaeR present day all agree that among the ONG baffling metals of the earth none is i Ys» more baffling than radium. One need ie neither a metallurgist nor a chemist to know enough of this miracle-working metal to make illus- trative use of it in attempting to answer a very important question. The question is, ‘“‘ what con- stitutes the active elements in that most radi- ating thing the world ever saw, viz.: human personality? ” Little by little, great physicists like Becquerel, Rutherford, Schmidt, and notably Madame Curie, discovered a strange new form of energy they called radioactivity. It belongs to certain metals like uranium, thorium, actinium, and specially to radium. Of this power-filled group of metals, radium is the king. A profound secret of nature till 1895. Radium pours forth a stream of phosphorescent energy so potent and complex that it immediately breaks successively into eight other different kinds 87 88 A RADIATING PERSONALITY of energies. Each emanation of energy that breaks forth is more powerful than the original emanation out of which it came. For instance, the Gamma Ray, which is the third stream to break off, is one hundred thousand times more powerful than the ray out of which it comes. Out of a ton of pitchblende, a rock from the Colorado mountains, we get just about enough radium to hold on the point of a needle. Yet so active and eager is this dynamic metal that this load on the needle-point pours forth, as in a tiny Niagara, sixty-two million phosphorescent particles every second of its existence. And so rich in power is this energetic, light-bearing, heat-making radium that it is practically inexhaustible in its radiating power. Its light seems never to go out, its power never to slacken, its radiation never to halt. Of course, every spark that radiates does represent the wreckage of some particle of matter or the com- bustion of some infinitesimal globule of gas, yet after that tiny bit of radium on the point of a needle has been pouring forth its fiery ardour for three hundred years, its mass will have been re- duced but one-half and the power of the remnant will remain unabated! It will go on for thirteen hundred more years radiating its starry brightness, coating other bodies with light, clothing other bits of matter with power, healing diseased tissue and pouring its benign heat waves into the cold and cheerless earth! Such energy the world hitherto A RADIATING PERSONALITY 89 had never heard of! Such power is beyond the dreams of imagination! This is radium! Because radium liberates into life such exhaust- less streams of energy and touches with phosphor- escence and power everything that comes into the zone of its contact, this metal serves as an illustra- tion of that radiating, dynamic thing we call human personality. Here is a helpful analogy that we may keep in mind while talking about those things that make personality radiant and pervasive. When Jesus said to His disciples, ‘“‘ Let your light so shine,” He had in mind the active energy that lives in, and pours forth from, a moral character. He had in mind the spiritual influences that radiate into life with as much reality as do the phosphor- escent stars of radium, touching with their con- tagious light and power all about them. We shall take for granted one or two things. First, that personality which cannot be defined with classroom accuracy is simply the sum total of everything that a man is, fused into oneness and charged with a spiritual radioactivity that pours forth ceaselessly. Personality is something that we recognize long before we can analyze or define. It is the total qualities and traits of the whole man unified and spiritualized and pouring forth a cur- rent of spiritual power that is just as real and dyna- mic in its touch as the green fire of radium. Personality is an atmospheric thing that comes from within. Personality is not brains, nor golden 90 A RADIATING PERSONALITY eloquence, nor geniality, nor willpower, nor fine features, nor good manners, nor harmless disposi- tion, nor vast stores of knowledge, nor rigid per- sonal discipline, it is not any one of these things, nor all of them combined. These qualities might be in the possession of an individual and yet that individual lack the something needed to fuse them together and thus release into life that spiritualized energy which corresponds to the radioactivity that pours forth from radium like a shower of golden stars. It is not what we add to the exterior that makes personality. It is not what we gather from without and store away within that makes person- ality. It is that which we have within, unified under the heat of our own experience, organized under the control of our own wisdom and directed by the pressure of unselfish considerations, that be- comes dynamic and contagious with that winsome power that all men recognize. Homely men have it, unbeautiful women have it, eccentric people have it. Unlettered people have it. What is this active element in personality that seems not conditioned by external things? ‘That is the question to be answered. Everybody wants to locate that particular thing that guarantees a radiating personality. Business men want it. Salesmen on the street want it. Teachers want it. Society women want it. Leaders in every realm of life are asking what that contagious and quickening element is, A RADIATING PERSONALITY 91 that makes personality vital and power-giving. What is it? The vitalizing, animating thing in human person- ality is enthusiasm. This, in itself, needs to be ex- plained and its cause assigned. Enthusiasm has more to do with human personality in making it effective than any other thing. Enthusiasm is a keen delight in what you are, in what you say, in what you do, and in what comes to you in life. En- thusiasm is a deep joy in living, that fills your words with power, lights your face with smiles and makes the touch of your personality a thrilling ex- perience. There are business men dead at their desks, preachers dead in the pulpit. Women dead in their households. Scholars dead in school. Not literally physically dead, but living so completely without spirit or joy or vigour in their lives that they quicken and arouse no one they touch any more than those who have ceased to live. They are dead! Personality is suppressed! Its energy is throttled. Its current is grounded! There may be physical equipment and mental gifts and accesso- ries of various sorts, the very things out of which personality could make a masterpiece of high- powered human character, but that eager, alert, re- sponsive something that ought to leap forth and touch you and compel you is passive, inert, dead. Oh, the dried, empty wells of enthusiasm! Here is the explanation of the pathetic story of how men and women have become dead and withered and 92 A RADIATING PERSONALITY utterly useless in life. There is a reason. The world wants joy and ardour, wants happiness and hope in those whom it is asked to follow. The rea- son leaders are uncrowned and dethroned and men of power lose their sceptres is because they ceased to take life joyously. ‘They ceased to greet its changes and responsibilities and problems with en- thusiasm. They die in heart life. They should listen to Browning when he says in “ Rabbi Ben Baza “Then welcome each rebuff That turns each smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! Be our joys three-parts pain! Strive, and hold cheap the strain; Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!” Now, in order to keep full the springs of enthusi- asm and thus keep the power of personality at its maximum, let the following suggestions be kept in mind: Where does this spiritual radium get its glow? How is the wonderful phosphorescence of the heart born and how is this spiritual fire in the soul re- plenished out from inexhaustible supplies? Can we be assured of a continuous stream of this fine energy and winsome power from within? That is the question. Here is the answer: Lay into a man’s soul certain great, unchanging facts that become a part of his spiritual makeup A RADIATING PERSONALITY — 98 and put his life into the grip of certain great con- ceptions of truth and duty and you’ve started the phosphorescence and power. ‘There are certain great convictions that kindle the central fires in men. ‘They cause personality to overflow. They Start spiritual radiation. It was the presence of big, gripping ideas in his heart that set Lincoln’s soul on fire. It was the heat and glow of the deep things in D. L. Moody’s heart that started a spiritual conflagration in his life and eventually throughout the world. It was the moral passion, born of great principles wrought into his soul, that made Theodore Roosevelt the powerful personality that he was. All radiation is born of inward heat. Here are certain truths that put the fires under personality: A right view of your moral responsibility in the world. A proper outlook on life. A true estimate of man. A keen sense of the reality of the spiritual life. There is no spiritual radiation where these power-giving ideas are wanting. Life takes on great meaning for any man when he recognizes his place in relation to God and the moral order. He arises at once far above the level of the creation to which he physically belongs and becomes a sharer with God in traits of character and in moral responsibility. Let any man deny his moral responsibility in this world or the next and 94 A RADIATING PERSONALITY refuse to accept any responsibility for his decisions and character, and you have a dangerous moral anarchist in the realm of human living and con- duct. He is a disquieting factor in any of life’s relations. A man out of harmony with the moral order and going it alone on lines of his own selfish determination is like a planet that has jumped its orbit. It has become a wild, lawless, perilous thing. Disaster is certain and soon. Men never glow with any kind of moral power if they fail to find and acknowledge definitely their place in the world of right living and clearly accept responsibility in the matter of moral conduct. If a man sees behind every decent municipal ordinance, every fair legislative statute, every con- stitutional amendment, every code of right living, the holy sanction that comes from its relation to a supreme moral order, he has a new enthusiasm and a stronger purpose in living up to the last letter of every law of the realm. Lawless men are godless men. They set themselves against the universe. They see no roots to these laws setting deep in the soil of infinite rightness. It is our personal relation to God and our responsibility to Him as the seat and centre of moral order that puts joy and fire and persistency into our purposes to meet the de- mands of righteousness. This works to put a radi- ant glow into our personality. You co-operate with every police department in the world and reinforce the efforts of every law and order league in ex- A RADIATING PERSONALITY 95 istence when you persuade men to find their place and take their responsibility in the moral order. Let a man get out from under a sense of moral re- sponsibility, let life free itself from all inward coercion, feel no moral urge, no sense of account- ability, and a man’s motive power in the direction of all good is gone. He may be a bandit or a burg- lar. He has no chart, no compass, no port. He is a dangerous derelict on the sea of life! To feed the moral fires in the soul you must get a right notion of your place in the moral order. A proper outlook on life makes for spiritual radiation, for sustained enthusiasm is personality. Tell me how a man looks at life and I can tell you what his personality and character mean to his generation. It depends on the way you look at life and what you see when you do look, whether your personality is a spiritual blight that withers and depresses all it touches, or whether it thrills men with hopes of better and nobler things. The trouble with the political leaders of Russia’s revo- lution was that they looked out on life and saw nothing but a struggle for economic equality. Life was but a tragic battle for existence that had to be gone through with. Its supreme achievement was to be reached through a victorious class struggle in which, finally, every man without regard to deserts shared equally with every other man, the food, the clothes, the music, the art that are in the world. Life is at a sad, low level when this view obtains. 96 A RADIATING PERSONALITY Some of our own literary men apparently look on life as a drab, dreary procession of personal experi- ences moving on the lower levels, knowing nothing of sunlit mountain-tops or fruitful plains. If life were nothing more than “ Main Street ” portrays, existence truly would be melancholy and futile. Contrast the personal experience and ideals of life in “‘ Main Street ” with life as revealed in ‘‘ The Americanization of Edward Bok,” or the ‘ Letters of Walter Hines Page,” the “ Life of Florence Nightingale,” or the ‘ Life of Booker T. Washing- ton ”—or the “ Book of Isaiah,” or Paul’s ‘‘ Letter to the Philippians.” The outgoing power in its soul and the range and quality of that power depend upon how you look at life. Lord Tennyson said to the thoughtless, trivial men of his day who were using life for fun and money-making and the getting of power: “Life is not an idle ore; But tron dug from central gloom And heated hot with burning fears, And dipt in baths of hissing tears And battered with the strokes of Doom To shape and use.” Till men feel the urge that our Lord felt when He said, ‘‘ I must work the work of him that sent me while it is day,’”’ and until they set about as did He to make every hour sacred and serious with a great purpose there will be no radiating of the soul, A RADIATING PERSONALITY 97 no spiritual glow falling into life. No moral en- thusiasm that will abide. A true estimate of man keeps the glow within a man’s soul and maintains his enthusiasm. The world has never forgiven Robert Ingersoll and his lesser imitators who quote him, for the dis- paraging remark credited to him that “ the more he saw of men the better he liked dogs.” There was a bitter cynicism and a degraded notion of manhood in the statement that has put an additional taint on the memory of Ingersoll along with the shocking memory of his agnosticism and blasphemy. His views of man as well as his view of God disqualified him for service and leadership. People would not accept his views of man any more than they would his views of God. Old General William Booth saw humanity dwarfed and broken in the slums and vileness of London, yet the estimate of man on which he built his life’s work was noble and inspir- ing. The more he saw of poor, deformed, blighted men the more he loved men! He saw man at his worst but not one syllable of cynicism nor despair ever escaped his lips. Why? Because he saw in men-——no matter how low and disabled—the ability for something better and greater when once the golden ideals of love and life and divine grace took hold of them. When a man sees the potential image of God in the brutal features of a degraded fellow and recognizes the supreme call of brother- hood to undertake in every way, and by whatever 98 A RADIATING PERSONALITY means available, to bring out in something of its true glory the outlines of that divine image, he has underwritten with love and hope an inspiring esti- mate of man. It is what one sees as possible in men who have seen a better vision, and have turned to go toward it, that keeps our views of men right. It is what we see in men like Edward Marsden, the Esquimau of Alaska, in Chief Many Goats the Navajo, in Ding Li Mai of China, or Konamora of Japan, or Papini of Italy, or Billy Sunday of baseball fame—men who spurn the lower and lesser things of life that once engrossed them and give themselves to the higher and holier—that makes every man, without regard to state or station, a glorious possibility of something godlike. This keeps the glow in the soul as we live among men. Here is a secret place where permanent enthusiasm in life and work is born! No man with the right estimate of man will use for his selfish purposes the liberty and personality of his brother. He will safeguard his physical life from long hours of grinding labour. He will re- ward with adequate cempensation his days of toil. He will go to the ends of the earth where, in dark- ened jungles and beneath age-old superstitions, men are intellectually and spiritually bound, and seek to set them free. He will clasp the hand of men of all races and creeds, recognize in them children of one Father and brothers of one blood. A RADIATING PERSONALITY 99 But, finally, we come to the most fundamental feature in making effective personality and main- taining spiritual enthusiasm in a man’s life and work. A man must have a keen sense of the reality of the spiritual life. Getting hold of a well- balanced notion of life as it lies between the ma- terial and spiritual factors in it is a great achieve- ment for any man. It will go a long way toward keeping that man straight and sane and good in all of life. Materialism has become an atmosphere in which we live. It colours all our thinking and doing. We work for material gains in order to live. Bread and meat are prime necessities. A bank ac- count is a great comfort. A day’s wage is a vital necessity. We are close to the earth. We cannot help it. Hunger and sickness and death keep us ever in proximity to material things. It is no won- der that material things hold us and hamper us. One understands how the things of time and sense, of factories and farms, of desk and mill, crowd the spiritual ideals out of men’s lives. Material things are so real and urgent and necessary. But they are not supreme and final and lasting things. They pass with the using. Their urgencies soon cease. Their uses soon fail of importance. They are not finally and forever dominant. Their glories do not abide. Then what? Then comes to those who have looked for it, the reality of invisible things. What eye hath not seen, nor ear heard will then take the supreme and central place in the group of 100 A RADIATING PERSONALITY things with which we deal. Spiritual values live. Virtues never die. Moral traits survive when all earthly pomp and glories pass. “The tumult and the shouting dies; The Captains and the Kings depart: Still stands thine ancient sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! “ Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget!” VIII PERFECT PEACE “Calm me, my God, and keep me calm, Soft resting on Thy breast; Soothe me with holy hymn and psalm, And bid my spirit rest.” —Horatio Bonar. “Tet us put by some hour of every day For holy things!—Whether 1t be when dawn Peers through the window pane, or when the noon Flames like a burnished topaz, in the vault, Or when the thrush pours in the ear of eve Its plaintive melody; some little hour Wherein to hold rapt converse with the soul, From sordidness and self a sanctuary, Swept by the winnowings of unseen wings, And touched by the White Light Ineffable!” —CLINTON SCOLLARD, Vill PERFECT PEACE “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind 1s stayed on thee.’—IsaIAH 26: 3. “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.”—JOHN 14:27. “And the peace of God, which passeth all understand- ing, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.’—PHILIPPIANS 4:7. AN speaking of peace we do not have in ay mind the thing that men arrive at by =I oe laying down arms and signing agree- Sve, ments and protocols. The peace we seek ie nothing to do with disarmanent nor the leaving of the battlefield by opposing troops. It knows nothing of such words as ‘“ evacuation,” “ surrender,’ ‘subjugation,’ “arbitration.”