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A i ict eal eitaoan iE Pe an M2 Sa A te i a Pay Wn Peg APP ; sare tea! aes Tat 7 hip ql oi a augue Tis ws, } vin: Sal Mae (Pe vey Yak) bata yA Le rata ; \ ah Dy Se SM ie | 1h = MN EP ie A TAO bit 2 oe "Si © a] { hs Tea 2 i H Meas 8 ‘ d P j an hi, AL v5 Aa j F ' \ t nia i ‘ i Lhe ; fh S07 ee eee 4 a wb \ ns 5 r : ¥ tak i ts" ij i Le Ve fonls } i [ arcs t ny wil grt ' l i, ‘, u ve a ik pe } ; i j ‘tS ; e, 7 be J Cc Reman free RLS ENS PA j nha’! 4 q a rig ae f iy , " 7 6 4 oO “ - a tia it al ; i va exten Dae PT Pit i tat * hie » y ‘ 4 . pp { : ‘ i ; ty hh ‘ rel y / a rt ’ ce p con A ji ; . a i wn vig ‘ ‘ a ¥ 45, Ret as Pe ae eh Ns 7_% * ‘ a Ay Mier ik Wee } et RAL ere i ‘0 j ie >) fare 2 ie . i, bu, Te | : 4s x ; ci in ys ' ioe? ne Lear . UrTiewae wires ; Me yy ie . oe; aye a = : a Tay, One Generation to Another By |y HARRIS ELLIOTT KIRK, D.D. Minister, Franklin Street Tred bint urch, Baltimore, Author of “The Consuming Fire,” ete. New Yor CHICAGO — Fleming H. Revell Company LoNDON AND EDINBURGH Copyright, 1924, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY Printed in the United States of America New York: 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. London: 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street To Harris, Louise and Helen, Three Delightful Children. Preface \ N [ITHOUT faith in Jesus Christ, the reading of the Old Testament is most depressing; for it becomes a book without a purpose, and a his- tory without a consummation. What happens to the story without faith in Jesus, the Jews have told us in the frigid legalism of the Pharisee or the artificial writ- ings of apocalyptic dreamers. But if read as a part of the revelation of Jesus Christ it becomes one of the most fascinating books in the world. Is it hazardous to say that from this point of view it is more interesting than the New Testament? In the one we seem to be in a church, silenced by the awful sense of the Divine Presence; but in the other we are out under the stars, in vast open spaces, and with people of like passions with ourselves. It is the book par excellence of the spiritual imagination, the playground of the enfranchised soul. At least I have always found it so, and offer these studies as modest examples of its unfailing and appealing attraction. These addresses for the most part have appeared in the Record of Christian Work, The Biblical Review, and The Christian World Pulpit, of London. For kind permission to reproduce them my thanks are due the editors. I am also under particular obligation to Mr. G. Pinkney Simpson for assistance in preparation of the manuscript. The Manse, Franklin Street Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, Md. 7 ir er be IIT. Contents PART 1 THE MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION . RELIGION IN ‘I'wo WorLDS . ONE GENERATION To ANOTHER THE WITHERED GOURD OR THE Deine WorRLD PART II THE EDUCATION OF MOSES . Tue DISCIPLINE OF THE DESERT . . THE GLoryY IN THE DESERT . . Tur DANGER OF THE DESERT . THE PowER OF THE DESERT . . THE DEATH IN THE DESERT . PART III PROPHETIC STRAINS OF OLD. EXPERIENCES . RELIGION WITH RESERVATIONS . . THE PROPHET AND THE PARASITE . JEREMIAH’s COMPLAINING PLACE . INVESTMENTS IN THE PROMISES OF Gop . THE PropHET OF VISIONS AND DREAMS . Tur HicHEr Ecorism . Tue Captivity oF Jos 9. 13 Ad ee fr) & Wie \ ae UA ana tu 2B Wah Hy A h ' Cos) ey Nee 4, th ie ei RU Ay NT Mahle 4 i | PART I THE MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION I RELIGION IN TWO WORLDS “ Jacob went his way, and the angels of God met him.” —GENEsIs 32: 1. ACOB’S story is easily remembered for two rea- J sons. In the first place his life had been split in two by a great experience. Like Paul, and Augustine and Luther, his career was a contrast be- tween before and after. The Jabbok experience was the outstanding epoch of his life. In the second place the critical phases are associated with places: with Bethel, Haran, the Jabbok, Shechem and Bethel again. Follow him around this circle and you get to know him thoroughly. Jacob’s story is an example of the Divine re-making of a self-made man. As is usual with such men, his greatest misfortunes came from early successes. His first venture was his bargain with Esau. That trans- action revealed two extraordinary capacities. In the first place it taught Jacob that he actually believed in a spiritual and intangible world. He wanted the birth- right because it was a symbol of power in a spiritual domain. He was willing to make sacrifices to obtain it because it assured him compensations in the future. In the second place the ease with which he obtained it revealed his power over men. He enjoyed playing with Esau; and why should he not? That is what E'saus are for. The discovery of these capacities, so early in his 13 14 MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION career, led to a struggle from which he was not released until he was an old and broken man. The conflict was manifest from the beginning. Jacob was not one of those who take up an adventure on impulse, and aban- don it so soon as it becomes difficult; but once to have chosen his objectives he would press towards them with a relentless enthusiasm which nothing could alter. This resolute man never let go of an enterprise, until he obtained what he wanted. Of course he had to leave home, and his mother sent him on a vacation into Haran, and on his way he had his first Bethel experience. There is something para- doxical about this. Here is a man who should have been very much ashamed of himself; at least it would have been becoming to have suffered from insomnia, but instead of worrying about his sins, he falls asleep like an innocent child and dreams of angels! The rea- son is that he was young; and the young can pass from one stage of experience to another without a sense of contradiction. It is only after maturity that men find it impossible. Jacob’s dream indicates that in spite of his misdeeds the spiritual aspect of his character was still in the ascendant. His shameful deception of Esau was incidental. : His stay in Haran, at first intended to be brief, lengthened out into a period of twenty years; during which he showed himself patient, industrious, and obedient. Disappointment did not depress him, even when he had to wait fourteen years for the woman that he loved. He was successful from the outset; every- thing he touched turned into money. He began to get rich, and as his fortune grew, the master passion to ccn- trol this world became dominant. He did not abandon his spiritual ambitions, but deferred their realisation to’ RELIGION IN TWO WORLDS 15 a more convenient season. First he proposes to accu- mulate a competence, and then, richly laden with this world’s goods, he will return to the old land and take up the role of religious leader. As his wealth increased he came to love it, not for its own sake, but as the symbol of power. He devised all kinds of arts and wiles for adding to his income; and appears to have had no misgivings whatever about his future. Take him, all in all, he was a resourceful man with the acquisitive faculty strongly developed. At this point a bit of humour comes into the story. Jacob made a great impression on his father-in-law. Laban was an Old Testament By-Ends. He did not care for religion himself, but he liked to have a reli- gious man in his family. When Jacob expressed a wish to return home, Laban remonstrated after this fashion: “Tarry with me, yet awhile, for I have learned from experience that God blesses everyone who has any dealings with you.” Curiously enough, Laban shrewdly suspected that Jacob was systematically de- frauding him, but for the life of him he could find nothing tangible upon which to base a complaint. When, however, after a particularly mendacious trans- action, Jacob set out on his return, Laban discovered the trick and pursued him, saying, “I have got him now, and I propose to make him rue it.” But Jacob greeted him with such protestations of injured inno- cence that the old fellow was made to feel that he had done something highly indelicate, and after a profuse apology sent him away with his blessing: “ May the Lord watch between thee and me when we are absent one from the other.” Had Jacob lived in our day he would have been a pragmatist, because the pragmatist believes that the. 16 MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION true is the useful. If a lie, for instance, is useful, that is, useful to you, then it is all right. If you are a philosopher there is no harm in it at all, but if you have no philosophy then, of course, you are just an ordinary liar and sinner. Jacob was a pragmatist and Laban soon realised that he was no match for a philosopher. Jacob is the kind of man we get to know in modern business. Had he lived in our day he would have been a captain of industry, a trust magnate; active, if he chose, in politics, but always and everywhere successful. His homecoming fitted in with the insurgent de- mands of his spiritual ambitions. He had reached the place where his problem was not how to make money, but how to use it to the best advamtage. Other inter- ests demanded attention, chiefly the one which although long deferred, had never been forgotten. I mean his spiritual ambitions. He is returning to the old land to assume the role of religious leader; he is going to realise on his first investment and gain control of the spiritual inheritance. He is returning not as a prodigal ready to make compensation for his wrong doing, to do what he can to adjust his differences with Esau. Hay- ing the assurance and arrogance of the self-made man, he betrays no misgivings whatsoever. And this is the - way he reasons: “ Managing birthrights, and control- ling spiritual movements are precisely the same as growing flocks and herds. It ought to be as easy to realise on the spiritual investment, as it has been to manipulate such small people as Esau and Laban.” Worldly success had demonstrated the value of certain principles of action; why then should they not be as useful in one sphere as in another? This is a very popular view today. There are many successful men who imagine that because they can make a tin pan RELIGION IN TWO WORLDS 17 better than their neighbours, they are quite capable of directing a church. Such men as a rule are self-made, half-educated and profoundly ignorant of the problems they seek to solve. We know that these modern Jacobs are mistaken, but we also know that it will take some- thing more than human to make them realise it. This was Jacob’s state of mind. He sees no contra- diction between the spiritual estate he now proposes to manage, and the principles and moral compromises that have led to his success. He is prepared to give liber- ‘ally, shall we say to the causes of religion, but not one penny for restitution. He will not confess that he has wronged his brother. He does not propose to tolerate any criticism of his business methods, or admit any want of capacity for spiritual leadership. If conscience should trouble him, he could silence it by saying: “ Mv present successes have cancelled past obligations.” This immense self-satisfaction enabled him to greet without surprise the escort of angels who met him on the way. Why should not such a man be welcomed by a heavenly reception committee? He did not learn until later that the angels had been sent to bring him to the judgment seat of God. We are here on familiar ground. I recently came upon a book entitled: 4 Memorandum of the Conduct of Umiversities by Business Men, and I could wish that someone would write another entitled A Memorandum of the Conduct of Churches by Business Men. For the greatest single asset of and most formidable hindrance to the organised Church today is the influence of busi- ness men of the Jacob type on the conduct of religious enterprises. These self-made, arrogant, half-educated, successful men who imagine that the only methods needed for the direction of the spiritual estate are those 18 MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION proved profitable in the world of business are doing more than any other influence to retard the progress of religion in these times. ‘They are Jacobs who have had the misfortune to escape a Jabbok experience. Jacob is returning to assume the role of religious director. He is going to reorganise the Church, to put religion on the map, or to borrow the slogan of ecclesi- astical Babbitts to show the ministers how to “ sell religion.” He is going to do many up-to-date things in the land; branch out socially, enter politics, reform morals, adjust differences between God’s people and their heathen neighbours, and generally show everyone how to be successful on strictly modern lines. And had he lived in our day he would have been surrounded with an everlasting clatter of typewriters, filing cabi- nets, dictaphones, adding-machines and all the rest of the mind-distracting devices of modern business. God needs this man, has always needed him. His experience is valuable, not only for what it may become, but just now as a shining example of “ how not to do it.’ But before Jacob can be of any use he must be smashed to bits and remoulded on an entirely different scale. The average man, however, can do nothing with him. You cannot control him by organisation because — he can beat you at it. You cannot argue with him be- cause he is impervious to reason. You cannot frighten him with spiritual reality because he knows nothing about it; neither can you advise him because he will not stand still long enough to know what you are about. The only thing to do is to hand him over to the strong arm of Providence. The angels were there to see to » that, and it is to be regretted that they do not visit us oftener; for the modern Church is full of men who need this sort of discipline. Still, most of them get it in RELIGION IN TWO WORLDS 19 some fashion before they are an out of the “ Roaring Forties.” Go into any gathering of middle-aged business men, for choice a luncheon club, and what do you see? There they are, fat, baldheaded, prosperous and dis- contented ; exploited by clever phrase makers, holding their slender stock of worldly wisdom in pre-digested slogans or what they have of religious belief in shop- worn shibboleths; puzzled as to their terminal facilities and yet vaguely wondering what has happened to their program of life. These men have great capacities, are potentially on the side of religion, but until their intel- lectual outlook is altered by some serious form of spir- itual discipline they are apt to hinder rather than to help the churches they support. What they should pray for is a Jabbok experience. Jacob reaches the Jabbok, which formed a critical stage in his life. The Jabbok was an insignificant little brook; its importance lay in the fact that it was the border line of the Holy Land. He was at the very threshold of his religious career, the stage of his later adventures and exploits.. And as soon as he reached this line this was his thought, “ What are the forces prepared to dispute with me the carrying out of my mission?” They were all reduced to one—Esau. Esau had been over there for twenty years, growing in a fashion as Jacob had grown. He had probably been nourishing his grudge. What about Esau and his dis- position? ‘Was he going to dispute his entrance into the land? If so, how could he make him his friend, or, at any rate, how could he render him harmless? He sent scouts to view the land, and they came back with terror-stricken faces with the news, “ We saw Esau out there with four hundred men.” Four hundred men 20 MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION meant clubs and bludgeons and broken heads, and that was something Jacob did not want to be mixed up in. Now see what Jacob did. He prayed. The man had a gift at prayer. And that prayer of Jacob is one of the greatest bargaining arguments in the Bible. He reminds the Almighty of the women and the children, the little babies. He does not say, “O Lord, I am responsible for exposing these women and children and babies to this man’s anger ’’; but reminds the Lord that He must especially remember that there are children and women and babies in that crowd, and therefore He must take care of them, and poor humble Jacob, who is just nothing but a worm, you know. But all the time the man’s mind is not so much on what God is going to do as what he himself is going to do with Esau. | Then comes his idea. He divides his group into two bands, saying, “If they get hold of one, the other will escape.” Then he sat down and reasoned thus—and this is the way the strong man enjoys manipulating small personalities :—‘‘ Small men like Esau are sus- ceptible to two very powerful temptations : they are vain and they are avaricious. Appeal to a little man’s vanity and avarice, and in most cases you can do anything you want with him’’; which is perfectly true. So what does he do? He picks out of his flocks and herds the choicest types of every animal he has. He divides them up into a number of bands. WHere they are, fat and sleek and well fed; highly favoured and most appealing, they must have been. He puts at the head of each a group of men, and says, “ String yourselves out along the road; keep a sufficient distance between each group so that only one can be seen at a time.”’ At the head of each he places ambassadors, who will come into the RELIGION IN TWO WORLDS 21 presence of Esau, and when Esau says with an excla- mation of surprise, “ What does all this mean?” they are to say, “ These are for my lord Esau from his servant Jacob, who is coming along just behind.” Imagine the scene. Here is Esau with his band of four hundred men. He has been nourishing a grudge against Jacob for twenty years; he is just as poor, tattered and hungry as ever. He has not got along at all. It is the same old shiftless Esau. And there come up over the brow of the hill the droves of cattle. Esau has never seen anything like that in his flocks and herds. He has never had as many cattle in all his life. And he asks, “Where in the world do you come from?” And they reply, “It is for my lord Esau, from his servant Jacob, who is just behind.” And before he can get over the surprise of that, another drove comes over the hill, then another and still an- other. Well, it was not in that sort of human nature to resist such an attack. Jacob never took the trouble to inquire how the thing was going to work. He knew it would work abso- lutely. So what does he do? The first thing as the shadows lengthen into the night, is to send his women and children across the Jabbok into the disputed terri- tory. Then he sits down beside the brook: the night comes and the stars and the mystic charm of the dumb yet speaking silence that only the desert knows. He sits there and enjoys the fruits of victory before the battle is fought. You know the story, that is, the Divine side; but every Divine story has a human side. If God had struggled with Esau until the end of time, Esau never would have known what it meant. He would have mis- taken God for a ghost. But Jacob was a different per- 22 MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION sonality. There was a subtle change taking place in the man’s conception of life, even while he sat trying to enjoy his victory; because of that, he saw what God meant in the struggle. The first thing that happens is this: He had the ex- perience that Isaiah mentions in a beautiful but un- familiar verse, “The twilight that I desired hath been turned into trembling unto me.” ‘There was an Ori- ental, who looked forward through the heat and burden of the day to the twilight hour, when he could go to -the roof of his house and sit in the deepening shadows and be alone and meditate, as we say, the pleasant thoughts. He desired the twilight hour, yet when the hour came it was turned into trembling unto him, because the thoughts were of an unpleasant character. Now that is what happened to Jacob. I can imagine him sitting there watching the stars wheeling in their courses, and thinking of great schemes, and how he was going to grasp this higher and this better thing he had been dreaming of for twenty years, and what it was going to mean to his family; thinking of his social position, the satisfaction of his religious aspirations, the realisation of his earthly ambition. And then gradually there began to bite into his soul the malady — of critical self-reflection ; and he was overcome, for the first time, by a nameless dread of existence. He found himself unsure. He began to doubt his conception of: life. He reasoned: “I have flocks and herds and earthly position, but after all is this the prize of life? These things have no permanence; they are but parts of the phantasmagoria of the world, the changing and shifting scenery of the external; they have no signifi- cance for my inner life. Perhaps, after all, with my scheming and bargaining I have missed the big thing.” CS RELIGION IN TWO WORLDS 23 And then he began to feel self-accusation. He began to feel that somehow or other his whole past was crooked, and that his success was the visible symbol of godlessness, his own unfitness to live. You cannot always say to the soul what the fool in the parable said, “ Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease.” And so it was with Jacob. He could not be content with that feeling. His soul could not eat flocks and herds; it wanted something else. He did not know what, but as he thought of it he began to feel the emptiness and bitterness of success ; and then came self-accusation, the strange inaptitude of this hitherto competent nature. But he said to him- self : “ This is morbid; this is folly. I will shake it off.” You can see him rising, girding up his loins, grasp- ing his staff, and plunging into the brook. Then down - out of the shadow land above him came the great arm of the unseen guardian of the land, and there you see him struggling and fighting. If he had been weak he would have quit right there, but he struggled and strug- gled until the dawn; and then there broke into his con- sciousness a feeling that “This is God. This is the meaning of the birthright. Who would have thought it? That thing I cheated Esau out of. This thing that grips and punches and crushes and breaks and disap- points and shakes me all to bits, this thing is God that has hold of me. Oh, oh! Life, how bitter thou art! How disappointing thou art! Thou art to me a decep- tion anda snare! The birthright! And those angels, those angels that I thought were taking me to my throne, were leading me to the judgment seat of God. What a life it is!” Then came the feeling: “ I will see this thing through to the bitter end. If this is God, I will find out Who 24 MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION He is, what He is, and I will know it to the depths of its meaning.” And he said: “I will not let thee go until thou dost tell me thy name. What is thy nature? What is the nature of my life in relation to thine? ‘I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.’ ”’ It is an unusual lack of insight, I think, to regard that as an illustration of prayer. It is not prayer at all. It is something intensely elementary. It is one of those great struggles of a strong, first-class nature to get at the secret of existence. He would go to the bottom of the thing, and he knew that he could not do it without loss. And when he found himself, having learned the secret by name, falling out of the arms of his antagon- ist, his thigh was broken, and he was a maimed man. for the rest of his life. Now stand for a moment with his family. They had been out all night; and the women had had trying thoughts. They did not know what would happen. “Where is Jacob? Where is the master?” said the servants. And they look down the road, and see this prematurely old man. His beard is-splotched with slime; his garments are dirty and trailing in the dust; his staff 4 is broken, and the man is dragging his leg as if it were paralysed. Can this be Jacob? How I have wished for a Jabbok experience for the splendid, successful men who are running our churches; only unhappily they travel now by airplane over the Jabbok, and ofttimes miss the guardian of the land. | How did this thing influence Jacob’s subsequent life? One would think that a man who had had an experience like that would never have any more struggles, but would go on from glory to glory and from star to star. But that is not the way life works at all. A vision of God never does away with the necessity of struggle to - RELIGION IN TWO WORLDS 25 realise it. And Jacob’s experience was the beginning of a series of struggles more intense, and in some re- spects more disappointing, than anything he had ever had in his life. Jacob said, “I am going to Bethel.” And as he said it he heard God saying the same thing. Now what did he mean by that? It is this: He wanted to visit the haunts of early vision. He wanted to begin his new life in the place where he had first known its sanctities. Cowper confesses this natural longing: “Where is the blessedness I knew When first I saw the Lord?” He started for Bethel, but as he went through Shechem its fertile fields aroused his businesslike capacity, and he said: “Look at these fields. Was there ever anything like this in Haran? How the sheep will grow out here! We need not be in such a great hurry to get to Bethel. We have plenty of time. We will just stop here awhile and graze our flocks and herds.” There you are. The influence of a lifetime habit cannot be suspended by a single religious experi- ence. God does not treat us in that easy way. Now you see the old bargaining Jacob coming to the front temporarily. Jabbok dropped into the background again. They settled down, grazed their herds; and of course they were successful. But there were other things in Shechem and that vicinity that were quite different from anything Jacob had met with. His children were getting to the years where they begin to be interested in the world, and the world begins to take part in their education. And Dinah had a disastrous social experience that involved Jacob in a 26 MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION broken heart and in a bitter struggle with the inhabit- ants of the land. That is one of the bitterest things in modern life. When I see successful men moving heaven and earth to make money, and putting further off into the future their religious responsibility, allowing family worship and private prayer to go out of their homes, and even letting the blessing go; and these handsome, delicately nurtured women moving heaven and earth to give their daughters a social career, and thinking more of that than of their souls’ salvation, dwelling in Shechem in the tents of wickedness, and all the time saying, “ Some of these days we are going to Bethel,” I cannot help. thinking of this bitter truth of life. It is easy to give our vices to our children; we rarely give them our virtues, and we never give them our visions. What did Dinah know about Jabbok, that midnight struggle? Not a thing. And the inexperienced girl got into terrible trouble in Shechem. It led to war and murder and blood and lust. Then Jacob said: ‘‘ Now look here, Rachel, I am going to Bethel by the straightest road. Let us take an inventory of our possessions and see if we cannot lighten our baggage, get rid of a lot of useless impedi- menta and take up our pilgrim life.” And the first thing he discovered was that he had strange gods in his baggage. Those strange gods got over the Jabbok, they got by the vision. There were bags of strange gods, and Jacob did not know it until he made up his mind to go to Bethel, and it had to be the ruin of a daughter to make him realise it. Jacob said: ‘ We will get rid of these strange gods. We will get back to the law and the testimony. We will put our feet on the unshakable certainties we know RELIGION IN TWO WORLDS 27 to be true.” Then he said: “ Put on clean garments. They are the symbols of our changed life.” Some of us do not resemble pilgrims. No man ever went ina parlour car to Bethel, never. There is only one way to go, and that is usually on foot, sometimes on your knees. But he was going to Bethel. I wonder if Jacob was disappointed with his Bethel. We usually are because while we can restore old rela- tions we can never repeat old emotions. This was vividly impressed on my mind by a visit to the scene of my boyhood in the south. I had been taken to an old plantation; and among the slave quarters, still standing, had been built a children’s play house. The chief support of the building was a railroad spike driven into the logs. Upon my return after thirty-five years I wandered over into the old slave quarters. The roof had fallen in, while weeds and grass were growing through the rotting floor. The old faces were gone these many years, but the railroad spike was still there in the log walls. As I looked at it the playhouse of my boyhood seemed to grow out of the walls. I saw the young faces and heard the happy voices again. The old relations were restored, but I could not repeat the old emotions. They were gone for ever. We come to our Bethels, the dear places where first we knew life’s sanctities; sometimes finding God’s message in the tears and misfortunes of our children. We have long lost the power of feeling as once we did in the morning of our pilgrimage, but we can restore the old relations, and learn from bitter experience that life is spiritual. After much wayfaring, God brings us through fire and water to the large place of the soul, and we find our kingdom when we have lost ourselves. II ONE GENERATION TO ANOTHER “ And it came to pass, when they were gone over, that Elijah said unto Elisha, Ask what I shall do for thee, before I be taken from thee. And Elisha said, I pray thee, let a double portion of thy spirst be upon me. And he said, Thou hast asked a hard thing; nevertheless, tf thou see me when I am taken from thee, it shall be so Nee but sf not, it shall not be so.’—II Kines RECENT writer has said that “no one thing ) A in the history of the world has had more effect | than the natural overlapping of the generations._ This fact is so simple that it is hardly ever expressly mentioned, but for the reflective mind it is the very essence of the whole philosophy of life.”’” It is inevi-- . table that an organisation like the Church should be influenced by the tidal forces. of society. A boat is | not unsafe because it rises and falls with the tide, but } only when it drifts. If the Church’s anchor holds, it / may change with social changes without detriment to its influences. In idea it is Divine, but its form is necessarily human. On that account, the important question is: How are we of the present generation to transmit our great inheritance of tradition and belief and custom to coming generations? It is this problem 2 that makes the story of Elijah and Elisha of Sur passttig importance. Elijah was one of those mysterious personalities, 28 ONE GENERATION TO ANOTHER 29 who suddenly appears in an epoch, unheralded and-un- known, with a sense of Divine authority. He was called to save Israel from religious ruin in an age when as a result of Ahab’s marriage with Jezebel, foreign superstitions threatened extinction of the true faith. The nation was divided into three groups. At one extreme were the godly people, at the other the heathen folk, while between them, a large group of waverers halted between two opinions, now for Jehovah, and now for Baal. Elijah was a root-and-branch sort of a man, who said to his generation: “ How long halt ye between two opinions?” and summoned them to the top of Carmel for a decisive test, in which for the moment he was successful. ; Then follows the familiar story of his flight. But it is a mistake to assume that this was due to fear of Jezebel. The true explanation is that the prophet real- ised it would be inexpedient at that time to come to an open collision with the queen; and his flight at the outset was a genuine retreat to victory. He was not running from an angry woman, but going back to Mount Sinai to get a bigger club. He wanted better munitions and more powerful guns, and was going to the central manufactory, that great mountain encircled with fire and smoke where God had once spoken so. decisively to His-people. But he broke down on the way, grew weary of his adventure and desired to sur- render his responsibility. ) The causes of his discouragement are two: his lone- liness and limited conception of Divine activity. When he complained about being left alone with his stupen- dous burden, God reminded him of the presence in Israel of seven thousand who had not bowed the knee to Baal. As a leader it was his business to find out 30 MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION ‘who were on the Lord’s side, and-organise them in such la way as to promote his aims. But he seems never to have thought much about co-operation, nor to have. _ desired the assistance of anybody. He was ina certain — sense self-centered, a man who imagined himself_in- _ dispensable to the Divine purpose, and it was only after his breakdown, that he became aware of his. bitter loneliness. This was increased by his mistaken con- ception of the Divine activity. Elijah believed in a fiat God, who came into the universe in destructive and catastrophic ways. When he remembered the dramatic climax of ‘his prophetical ministry on Mount Carmel, it seemed as if his view were justified; but this terrible reverse, this unexpected anti-climax had seriously dis- turbed his faith. He thought that because he failed, - God had failed. Then the Lord took him under the ~ shadow of the great mountain and opened his mind to a larger conception. God was not in the storm, nor the earthquake, nor the thunder, nor the lightning, but — strangely enough He was in the still, small voice. This voice reminded the discouraged prophet that God had other ways than those of destruction of emphasising His presence in the world. In his French Revolution Carlyle makes some strik- ing comments on history. He says that history is not the record of the doings, but of the misdoings of men. The destructive forces of life are usually the noisy forces, while the constructive forces, the forces that build, are the quiet, modest forces. And history as men usually write it, is very largely a story of war and disaster. If you could take the noise out of the world you would put most newspapers out of business. It is the noisy things as a rule that get themselves into print. But who has ever written an adequate story of ee ee Ne a a ONE GENERATION TO ANOTHER 31 the constructive force of love? Elijah reasoned: God is power, therefore power must destroy that which is unlike itself in spectacular ways. This line of reason- ‘ing seemed to be effective on Carmel, but something happened to it when the prophet faced the wrath of Jezebel. That is why the Almighty revealed the other side of His providence to his lonely and discouraged servant. At the close of the vision, he was told to anoint a certain man as his successor, by which God gently reminds him that his work was over. The reason for the change is this: times change. a men do not always change with them. This is one of the hardest truths to accept. It is often a bitter dis- appointment for a devoted servant to realise that he has outlived his usefulness. But we can see that the times had changed, that Israel needed a_ different kind of leader; for the work to be done now was no longer destructive but constructive. God wanted a man of irenic spirit, of a very different type. By this means God reminded Elijah that there are no indispensable men. The choice fell on a young farmer named Elisha. The young man was greatly impressed with the com- munication of the prophet. Yet there is a touch of humour about the story, for Elijah behaved all through it as much as to say, “ Young man, it is true that God has appointed you to be my successor, but you need not be in such a great hurry to get into my shoes.” On this account the prophet kept him for a considerable time in a state of pupilage and subordination. The contrast in the mission of these men will further bring out the differences in their temperament. ‘The work of Elijah had been dramatic and.episodic. The work of Elisha was constant and commonplace. Elijah, 32°. MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION ‘ if you estimate his mission in terms of activity, prob- -’ably occupied a very small place in the thought and life “of his country. He came and went like a flash of _ ’ lightning; but Elisha lived for fifty years in the most intimate contact with the people. The home of Elijah was in the desert; the home of Elisha in the towns and cities. He was a patron and encourager of education and the organiser, as we would say, of the activities -of the Church. Our interest is in how the great responsibility was transmitted from one man to another. As I have said, Elijah found Elisha in the field and told what he was to do, but for a long time kept him in a state of subor- dination. The hour, however, of the old man’s transla- tion was approaching. During the period of pupilage Elisha proved his constancy by the way, in spite of enormous difficulties, he had persisted in following his master. Elijah was testing the merits of the young man, for if you read the story accurately, you will see that as they moved from village to village Elijah would - turn and say, “ You had better stop here, Elisha, for I am going on yonder a little further.” To this the young man would reply, “ As the Lord liveth, and as thy soul liveth, I will not leave thee.” And every now and then the young man would meet a group of theo- logical students, and they would say: “ Don’t you know that your master is going to be taken away today?” — And to them Elisha would reply: “ Yes, I know it; hold your peace.”” Wherever he met with discourage- ment he persisted in following. During this trying period the old man seems not to have helped him much, or to have told him of what he was expected to do. Finally, however, they reached the critical period, that place in the wilderness where the translation was immi- ONE GENERATION TO ANOTHER 33 nent, and there the old man turned around to his young follower and shot this question at him: “ What do you want, anyhow, young man? What really are you after? Ask it quickly before I am taken from you forever.” I think this was a critical moment in his experience. Such a moment comes to all of us when we are obliged to reveal the quality of our minds in the things we ~ actually ask for. Elisha might have replied: ‘‘ Make ~my_work.easier. You have had a tempestuous career with Ahab and Jezebel. Make my work easier.’”’ Or, he might have said: “ Give me such an endowment of “wisdom as shall enable me to triumph over my. ene- mies.” He might have asked for many things that were useful in themselves, but this is what he said: “Give me a double portion of thy spirit.” The old man looked at him a moment with kindling eyes: “ Aha! you are a pretty keen young man after all. That is a very, very good thing you have asked for, but I am not sure you are worthy of it. You are asking a hard thing, but if you have spiritual insight enough to understand the meaning of my translation, then you shall have it; but if not, you shall not have it.” Presently the great translation took place. And as Elijah looked down from the flaming chariot into the eager face of his disciple, he realised that he fully com- prehended its meaning. He threw down his mantle upon the young man and disappeared. Elisha took it up, smote the waters and went through them, put it about his shoulders, and when he returned to the in- quisitive sons of the prophets, they said, “ The mantle of Elijah has fallen upon Elisha,” and they did him reverence there. 34 MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION This is a great story, superlatively great as an illus- tration of the power of spiritual insight. Elisha was © about to undertake a very commonplace, undramatic sort of task. No opportunities would be afforded him to be so decisive a factor in his time as his predecessor . had been; yet he seemed to feel that this commonplace, réutine Work of construction required a double portion ” of the valiant spirit that his master had had, and it was for this alone that he asked. This brings out two.very important reflections con- cerning the way responsibility may be transmitted from one generation to another. | Perhaps I can make it clear by putting it in the form of questions. First, what is ‘the gift the younger generation should ask from the older generation? And secondly, what is the test.of fitness for having it? If we can answer these ques- tions, we need have no anxiety about the Church of God. What, then, is the gift the younger generation should _ ~ ask of their fathers? I think there is some confusion ) as to the relation of one generation to another. Some errors about this matter seem to follow the human race ~ through the centuries. Take, for example, the popular error that wisdom can be transmitted from one gener- ation to another. This is a very old delusion. The proof of it is the range and extent of what is known ‘as proverbial wisdom. A facetious modern writer once remarked that “ Solomon could not keep the Proverbs, so he wrote them.” And when our fathers talk to us in proverbial strain, they are simply telling us in quot- able ways the things they wish they had done; and we have a right to ask if they could not do them, how in the world can they expect us to do them? We cannot. transmit our wisdom, or our experience to our children. © ee eS ONE GENERATION TO ANOTHER 35 Yet in spite of this much time is wasted in the effort to do it. The old generation comes to the new with words of authority demanding, it would seem at times, a passive and uncritical acceptance of all that the older generation offers. This leads to a two-fold misunder- standing: one concerns BPO of work; the other forms of truth. ' Let us take this case. Sircde Elijah, when Elisha asked him for advice as to how to carry on his work, had said, “ Young man, adopt my method, or you shall not have my blessing. Go back to Samaria, gather the people about you and call down fire from heaven and burn up your enemies; destroy them root and branch.” You can see that this is the very reason why God was withdrawing the older prophet from his labours. God wanted a constructor and builder. He wanted a man of irenic spirit. Or suppose Elijah had said, “ You must take my limited conception of God. God works only by fits and starts. He is in the thunder, He is in the lightning, He is in the earthquakes, He is in the upheavals. His methods are all destructive.” Again you see he would have left the still, small voice entirely out of account, and his servant would have been unable to succeed in a generation that needed an entirely different concep- tion of God. But Elijah was a wise man. He did not offer the young man anything. He simply asked him, “ What do you want?” and made him the judge of the thing, leaving him to draw the inference from his association with himself. Now there is a great deal to be said about methods of work. Every leader of God’s people knows how easily they excite themselves over trifles. Some are 36 MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION ready to dispute over such things as the length or short- ness of a man’s ecclesiastical garments, or quarrel about whether you shall have a prayer before or after the offering, whether you shall stand or sit during the sing- ing. ‘The standard of value for this type of mind is what has once been done must always be done. Such minds are unable to see that times change and methods must change with them. It is a graver matter still when you come to the | forms_of truth, what we are to believe and how we are to believe it. We ought at least to recognise this: that while the truth of: God.in..essence-is the same. through all generations, there must needs be various shades of light thrown on each phase of life in each generation, and the Church would have beggared itself long ago had it discarded what each generation had to give. It is apparent here that the conception of God was growing in Elijah’s time. The old destructive idea was gradually giving way before a more winsome > and constructive idea as symbolised by the still, small voice. It is this necessity of finding forms of truth to meet the needs of each generation that causes so much friction between the old and young. Sometimes we do not know how to recognise the difficulty in the minds of our children. But after all is said and done each one must do his own thinking about religion, and there comes a time in the young life when the necessities of its growth will compel it to stand without the shadow of the father’s influence. Mary learned this lesson from her Son when she found Him in Jerusalem, and said, ‘“‘ Thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing ”; and He replied, ‘‘ Wist ye not I must be about my Father’s business?” Even at the early age of twelve Jesus was standing without ONE GENERATION TO ANOTHER 37 the mother’s shadow and perplexing her loving heart with an attitude that she could not understand. But we may as well recognise it, that one of the great losses of the present-day Church is the loss of control of the active intelligence of the people. Multitudes stray by the doors of our churches and are putting the fertility and vitality of mind which used to go into the comprehension of the Word of God and the true ends of life into activities and forms of expression that have little or no connection with organised religion. Some of the most acute minds that we know rarely go inside of a church, or if they do, they do not expect to be intellectually aroused. The reason perhaps from our side is that we are not teaching the people anything about religion. Might this not mean that the older generation, even with the best intentions, has been unable to market its religious wares? I am pleading for tolerance, sympathy and gener- -osity of mind toward coming generations. We must °” f , change our Elijah spirit. You cannot hand down to a succeeding generation even in undisturbed times the particular way in which you hold your religious con- victions. You must respect each man’s individual rights and let him work out his own salvation, helping him meanwhile all you can with tolerance, patience and sympathy. We cannot transmit our_methods or the fixed ways in which we hold our convictions. What we can do is ~to impart a double portion of our spirit. By spirit I mean an essential, invariable and conscientious way of living, something that controls and gives quality and meaning to a man’s whole experience. A mature fol- lower of Christ always puts an original interpretation on Christ. Find that unifying and connecting element 38 MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION in each detail of a man’s life, and you have discovered the man’s spirit. The thing that Elisha asked for, that which the younger generation should ask of the older generation, was a double portion of the right spirit. May I venture to point out one or two things by way of analysis of what that spirit is? I begin with the human end of it. You find in the men of the older generation an intense and unshakable belief in the primacy of the inner sanctities of life; that is to say, they believe that the object of life is the cultivation of personal holiness. In striking contrast to this mode you have the visible aspect of the modern Church, an aggregation of noisy activities. ‘The Church is full of committeemen and organisers of religious enterprises. They are substituting external activities which deal with the material side of life, for the pursuit of the inner sanctity of character,—that quality which has ever been a distinctive mark of a disciple,—holiness. Our fathers were not like that. They were not as widely informed as modern men are, but they did know and strive after personal holiness which is the fruit of obedience to Christ. The writer to the Hebrews reminds us that without holiness men cannot. see God. The older generation had this original quality in their piety and if you had asked them the source\of it they would have replied that they obtained it through the redemptive and aton- ing mercy of the Lord Jesus Christ. They had no illusions about human perfections.. They were not in love with half-and-half measures of salvation; but they believed, sincerely believed, that they had been cleansed and forgiven by the Lord Jesus Christ, and that He had made the pursuit of holiness the supreme activity of life. As John puts it, “ Every man that hath this hope ONE GENERATION TO ANOTHER 39 in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.” And what is that hope in essence but this—that one shall see and become like Him? Follow this into its re- moter implications and you will see that the pursuit of holiness is inspired by an experimental acquaintance with the redeeming love of Christ. That is why the older generation took such pains to think out its con- ception of religion and to organise its knowledge in the form of stable, unchanging convictions. Now, faith_is sometimes emotion and always an energy. But, inevitably, if it is to be real it must also be a conception of thought. It must be stabilised with ideas, for the ideas that men hold about religion are the hooks of their faith. They are the connecting links of a man’s activities, they are the organised relationships between a man’s words and a man’s promises, and between a man’s promises and his inner desire. Hence the older generation was full of convictions nourished on Holy Scripture. They loved the Bible. They read it because they believed in the Word of God, and they were usually able to give a reason unto them that asked it for the hope that was in them. I think this is the finest and best thing that the world has ever produced. It is upon such convictions that Jesus Christ has founded His Church, and it has been that spirit which has kept alive Christian ideals even unto this day. Some of us who have known the disturbances of our modern world find that one of the potent causes of our present faith is the influence the older generation had over our minds in the/formative periods of our career. It is because we have known good men that we are helped to believe in the authority and desirable- ness of the good life, and when the younger generation, however disturbed intellectually, seriously seeks. a 40 MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION double portion of the spirit of the older generation it will find in that endowment one of the most effective measures of saving itself from impressionism and in- _tellectual instability that often ends in failure. It is discouraging to note the present tendency to substitute an impressionistic life for a conviction life. Some people treat their minds religiously as if they were of no more consequence than waste-baskets. If you could look into them they would be found to be full of scraps, a little here and a little there, but nowhere is there organisation, nowhere is there living connection be- tween their thoughts and their experiences: Some depend on brilliant ministers, others on social relations, while others follow the habits formed in godly homes; but as for having a living conviction about Christ or putting an original interpretation upon Christ, it simply is not there. | That is why I believe that the greatest single need of the present day is a double portion of the spirit of the older generation. We are living in a brilliant and versatile age, more in love with motion than it is inter- - . ested in ends and terminal facilities. The necessity for | character building, for the formation of habits that produce capable, dependable servants of the community and of the Church, is not only a commonplace and familiar business, but it is a terribly slow business. Nothing has more perplexed us in recent years than the ' prevalence among the churches of an idea that you can produce character and form habits by large, spectac- ular, mass-movements. Such enterprises for example as was familiar in this country a few years ago under the name of ‘ The World in Boston,” designed to téach people to believe in foreign missions by a big circus, a kind of fair of three weeks’ duration. Imagine Paul, ONE GENERATION TO ANOTHER 41 or Luther, or David Livingstone trying to interest people in foreign missions in this fashion! We suc- ceeded only in interesting a great many of our young people in the theatrical profession. Perhaps the mod- ern Church has learned something from its folly. Still there are some people like Solomon’s fool, if you put them in a mortar you could not beat the folly out of them. But it seems to me, in view of the fact that nearly all of the novel methods have been tried and found wanting, that we are now about to return to the old undramatic, unspectacular business of character construction through the labourious process of Chris- tian education. How, then, are we going to prove our fitness for this? A great gift cannot be entrusted to men unless you know what they are going to do with it. I think the whole of this fitness is summed up in the words “spiritual receptivity.’ Here, on the one hand, was Elisha and on the other Elijah, caught up immediately into a flaming chariot. The young man saw something more than the translation of a great saint. He saw God in the experience. He also realised the transmis- sion of responsibility when the mantle of the old man touched his young shoulders. He knew that he was ordained and set apart. What is this, then, but recep- tivity, an openness of mind, a sensitiveness of con- sciousness that constrains one to be obedient to the heavenly vision? This has been one of the difficulties of our day. The minds of many are like a dusty, coun- try road. Nothing can grow there because the sensitive surfaces have been destroyed. This want of receptivity and appreciation is nowhere more strikingly illustrated than in the failure of the sons and daughters of godly parents to profit by their religious inheritance. How A2 MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION often we come upon this grim fact of people who are wallowing in the perfumed slime of an esthetic culture while their parents were caught up in the splendour and glow of a consecrated life. To have descended from godly ancsetors and then spend your active life in plan- ning business enterprises, or in moving heaven and earth to obtain a questionable social position, and to be indifferent to the finer adventures of life, is indeed a tragedy far too common in these crowded times. Well, indeed, would it be for us to consider the kind of fathers and mothers we had; to remember before it is too late that we, too, are responsible for transmitting intact that glorious heritage to generations yet unborn. When I think of one place in this country, the fruit of a great Christian life, and of the extraordinary in- fluence that is still exercised by one who was wise enough to receive the responsibility, and that today, although Dwight L. Moody is in glory, his work is going on, and that thousands of souls all over the world have been the beneficiaries of the Northfield influence, I have the utmost confidence in affirming that the su- preme need of this generation is a double portion of the spirit of the generation that has passed. It seems to me that a clear call for personal consecration comes to us from this story. I spent the last month of his life with the late John Sparhawk Jones and for many days we walked the sands of Gloucester and talked about the Church, and in the last conversation I had with him he turned ab- ruptly upon me and said: “ Young man, when I think of the confusion of this time and the perplexity of the Church, I am glad that my race is almost run.” Re- flecting upon this later in the light of his sudden trans- lation, a saying of Herodotus came to me. A king one eo Ee ee a ae ee ONE GENERATION TO ANOTHER 43 day asked an old retainer to do a certain thing, and the retainer replied: “I am too old to move and stir, O King. Let one of the younger men do these things.” That is what the older generation is saying to the younger generation: “Let one of the younger men here do these things.” This is a clear call to all who are ambitious to assist in the transmission of the ancient inheritance from one generation to another. We have the right to choose methods suitable to the time; we are obliged to clothe religion in our own intellectual conceptions, but to make the transfer effective, we must have a double por- tion of the ancestral spirit, in order that those who follow after may say of us as was said in the days of old: “ The mantle of Elijah has fallen upon Elisha.” III THE WITHERED GOURD OR THE DYING WORLD “ And the Lord said, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest tt to grow; which came up in a night, and perished m a night; and should I not have pity on Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and thew left hand ; and also much cattle? ’—Jonau 4: 10-11. HE Book of Jonah is clearly a didactic piece of writing, a tract for the times, in the form of a prophetic parable, and is associated, as is the Book of Job, with an historic character by the name of Jonah. Its purpose was to teach something to the Church of that day about its duty; and the message is contained in three conceptions. 1. It emphasises God’s universal purpose to give salvation to the Gentiles. There is nothing that more strongly appeals to the historic imagination when — guided by faith than to watch the light break succes- sively upon each century as the story of God’s good- ness is unfolded in the Old Testament. One after another the obstacles clear away until the splendour of the Divine purpose to redeem the world breaks upon our minds in full-orbed significance. That is the mean- ing of Jonah’s story. The Book tells us that God ordered a certain man to preach salvation to a great Gentile city. Paul called this a mystery, a divine secret 44 THE WITHERED GOURD 45 revealed only in New Testament times. Still the Old Testament, especially the latter part of it, is full of intimations of this character. 2. The Gentile world, in a more or less conscious way, was susceptible to the reception of the message. The preacher goes to Nineveh, and Nineveh repents and turns to God. This would seem to indicate that the writer was living in an age when Gentile peoples were becoming more and more susceptible to new im- pressions, and, on that account, were offering a fertile field for missionary activities. And anyone that knows something of the effect of Alexander’s conquests and the attitude at that time of Gentile peoples towards religious, moral and philosophic questions, must realise the extraordinary appropriateness of that conception. We might also venture to say that the Book of Jonah was written in part for the benefit of God-fearing Gen- tiles before New Testament times. For the greater part of converts to Christianity, in the time of Christ, came from the class of devout heathen clustering around the Jewish synagogue, who believed profoundly in ethical monotheism. Of such were the Greeks who came to Philip the Apostle, saying, “ Sir, we would see Jesus.” Cornelius, Lydia, the seller of purple, and many other famous and lovable names in the Acts of the Apostles, also belonged to this type. From this point of view the Book of Jonah reaches across the centuries toward the coming of the Lord, with a prom- ise of fulfillment in rich and historic demonstrations of the Divine purpose to save the world 3. The extraordinary unwillingness of the trustees of God’s grace to give salvation to the world. The attitude of Jonah is the attitude of an aristocratic, thoroughly orthodox and highly traditionalised Jew of 46 MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION his time. ‘That, unhappily, is characteristic of the Jew- ish people in all periods of their existence. Their prophets were lonely men, and even in the centuries of extraordinary receptivity in Gentile peoples they were laying the foundations for those unhappy divisions which in our Lord’s time, as Sadduceeism and Phari- saism, did so much to destroy His influence over His own people. This same exclusive tendency developed the unfortunate influence in the early church known as the Judaising movement. Jonah is the father of all narrow-minded, ecclesiastical persons who are unwil- ling to fulfill the responsibility of their charge even though they know beyond any doubt precisely what God wants them to do. I propose, then, to tell his story in four stages: I. Jonah’s Commission and the Reason Why He Was Unwilling to Fulfill It. He was sent to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, the oppressor of God’s people for more than two hundred years, and all the righteous hatred of those ill-used folk was concentrated upon that abhorred and abominable name. What the word “ Ger- many” meant to a Belgian or a Serbian during the Great War, the word “ Nineveh” signified to a devout Jew. This rancorous and righteous indignation, the fear and abhorrence of the mysterious power of evil in the world, were concentrated in that portentous name, and when Nineveh was destroyed, and you can read of it in the prophecy of Nahum, all the hot-hearted wrath of that ancient people was expressed in their joy over its destruction. On the face of it Jonah’s commission was one that an orthodox Jew would have been very glad to carry out. God said: “Go and cry unto Nineveh for its sins are great’; and on the surface the mission was one of THE WITHERED GOURD 47 condemnation. Had Jonah really believed that con- demnation was the Lord’s intention and that he was being sent, not only as the representative of Jehovah, but as the authoritative spokesman of the Jewish Church to tell the hated Gentile city that forty days should elapse and then should come chaos and destruc- tion, he would have fulfilled his mission with extra- ordinary enthusiasm. But he had his doubts when the command came. He said, “I know the disposition of God. His heart is broader than it ought to be. He is far more tenderly concerned about these people than He has a right to be. I suspect that He has ulterior objects in this adventure and I do not like the idea at all.” Then he bethought himself, still influenced by the ancient delusion of a tribal God, “I will slip away quietly and get out of His jurisdiction and avoid the unpleasant task.” But after an adventurous sea voyage he comes back and decides the only safe thing to do is to carry out the commission. Now the thing that bothered the man was that he knew the purposes of God were merciful. Even then, it was beginning to dawn upon the mind of the ortho- dox Jew that God’s heart was wonderfully kind; that the essence of religion was the offer of mercy, not the threat of judgment. He did his best to avoid commit- ting himself to the doubtful position. This was one of the reasons why the Pharisees were unable to understand Jesus; it was also one of the. reasons why the Jewish Christians made so much trouble for Paul on Gentile territory. They did not like the idea of offering salvation unto Gentile peoples in these uncanonical and unecclesiastical ways. Had Jonah been commissioned to go to Nineveh to offer salvation on terms of becoming proselytes to the Jewish 48 MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION religion, it is easy to imagine what a satisfying concep- tion that would have been to Jewish ecclesiastic pride. Picture it to your mind. Here is the proud Gentile king, his courtiers, lords and great captains, his men and women of high position, all coming in solemn pro- cession, in sackcloth and ashes, across the Mesopo- tamian desert, over the very road the people of God had been dragged by their heathen oppressors, to Mount Zion to become proselytes to the Jewish law, with Jonah and his ecclesiastical associates standing at the door of the temple to examine them touching their fit- ness for membership in the Jewish church. It would have been a most delightful thing. But that was not the commission at all. There was nothing said about coming to Jerusalem, nor about becoming proselytes. The Jew was not even mentioned. All his traditions were quietly set aside and he was told to inform the people they were to be saved on terms of repentance alone. | That was the thing that troubled the Jewish Chris- tians in Paul’s day. You know how much trouble they made for him in the beginning of his missionary activ- ity, particularly in the Church at Antioch, where certain nameless disciples preached salvation to Gentiles on simple terms of faith and repentance. You will re-— member how Peter wavered and could not make up his mind if the thing were right or not. And even Cor- nelius was regarded as an exceptional case, and when Peter reported his advent into the Church he was re- minded not to let it happen again lest, haply, worse things befall them. They could not believe that giving salvation on such simple, elementary terms was regular. It was not, as some religious persons say, done decently and in order. That is why Jonah felt so keenly about THE WITHERED GOURD 49 the whole business. Yet he went because, forsooth, he could not do anything else. II. Jonah’s Disappointment with His Success. No matter how the man felt, he did some mighty good preaching in Nineveh, and the whole community from the king down is said to have turned to God. This did not surprise Jonah very much, but it did keenly disap- point him. Jonah is the only preacher on record who » ever made a great success a ground for complaint. We have heard a great deal about the failure of people to become Christians and many are discouraged because of the lack of fruit. But here is a man who brought a whole city to God, and on that account is full of com- plaints. And this is what he says: “ Was not this exactly my thought while I was yet in my own country? I suspected this thing from the very start. I realise that God’s heart is bigger than my heart; but all the same I do not propose to sympathise with this adven- ture.’ And so he became very angry. Jonah’s anger was rooted in jealousy. Compare him a moment with Elijah. Elijah was discouraged and wanted to die because he was jealous on account of God. He was very unhappy because the people did not turn to God. But Jonah is jealous of God. He is jeal- ous of God’s interest in the Gentil.es He feels that God is not true to His first love, and so he is in a very bad and painful frame of mind. The Almighty forces on him the great question: “ Are you willing by personal service to carry the message of salvation to Nineveh? Is your heart right with My heart?” I think Jonah gave a decidedly negative answer. There was ground, as I have indicated, on which such a commission would have been very delightful to Jonah. If it had been a commission, the fulfillment of 50 MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION’ ¥&, which would have satisfied Jewish pride and met Jewish ecclesiastical pretensions, it would have been all right. But this is the point: a man may praise and greatly admire in an ideal form a conception of life, which he is most unwilling to realise in concrete and practical ways. Think of the great speeches on liberty that have been made in all ages by the ruling class, and compare their enthusiasm for liberty with the extraordinary reluctance to give freedom to the very classes whose enfranchisement seemed to stimulate their eloquent faculties to a maximum degree. It is a very difficult thing, indeed, to apply in concrete and practical ways principles that are easily admired and praised so long as they are kept in abstract form. Take the question of the evangelisation of the world, or that of city missions, the bringing in of the foreign population, the carrying of the Gospel to the poor and needy. It is easy to get an aristocratic and well-dressed congregation excited over this matter ; and if its appli-. cation be limited to the contribution of money, or the sending of somebody else among these people, they are _ ready to do it. But if some of these poorly dressed and humble folk happen to get in their pews on Sunday morning, there is usually a great to-do. They seem to feel that there is something wrong with the world when the people begin to come to church, though all the time they are talking about. the freedom of the Gospel, and inviting everybody to come. Jonah was very much in this frame of mind, and there is hardly anything so stubborn; there is hardly any attitude that yields so slowly as one that has transformed its principles into prejudices, and fixed its ingrained and organised selfish- ness upon a religious foundation. There is the story of the old Scotchwoman, a strict THE WITHERED GOURD 51 Sabbatarian, whose minister was being taken to task by her for his seemingly lax interpretation of the Scripture on that, point, and he said: “ But, my good woman, didn’t you know that the Blessed Saviour authorised the disciples to go into the field on the Sabbath Day and pluck corn that they might feed themselves? ” She replied, “ Aye, Dominie, I ken all aboot that, and I never thought any the better of Him for it.” This is the way Jonah reasoned. “God may get these Gentile people into the Church any way He likes, but so far as I am concerned I am going to wash my hands of the whole business.” ‘There are many people in our churches of the same mind. I have known fash- ionable folk leave churches because the poor people were coming in. The odour of the people in the house of God is better than the odour of incense, but it has never been popular. That was the trouble with Jonah. His religious experience, modes of thought, and habits of life, had become so attached to a lot of transitory things that he did not want anybody in his church who could not adjust himself to his particular standard, and for that reason he did not propose to sympathise with this extraordinary missionary adventure. III. Jonah’s Retirement, and the Symbolism of the Gourd. When a man determines to make himself un- comfortable he can generally succeed. Jonah reasoned after this fashion: ‘‘ My ministry is done, I have fin- ished all that the Lord commanded me to do. [I am not at all in sympathy with a plan which I suspected from the beginning. I propose, therefore, to separate myself from the matter and withdraw from the city.” Now why do you suppose he went over and sat on a hill overlooking the town? I think he did it because he 52 MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION hoped the Ninevites would change their minds. ‘This wholesale repentance was a pretty big contract; they might lapse, and if they did, then the Lord. would be compelled to come around to Jonah’s point of view. The man was marking time until he could bring the Almighty’s plan into harmony with his idea of how things ought to work. At any rate, he did not want anybody to have any illusions about his relations to this vast movement. So far as he was concerned, he was through, hence he goes out and sits on a hillside, and the gourd grows up around him. What is the meaning of the gourd? It is a symbol. It is a symbol of creature comforts, because the gourd © served a useful purpose in sheltering the prophet from the heat of the sun, and it also gave him a nice, cool place to sleep. And yet what we get here is an illus- tration of how a man may quickly lose his sense of perspective; how a scheme of values will get itself reversed because of selfishness. Jonah took great dis- content in the salvation of a city a great deal larger than his insignificant hill-town of Jerusalem. It did = not content him at all; it angered him every time he thought of Nineveh. But when he thought of the gourd he took great content in it. Do not let that slip over your minds, but rather let it go straight into your hearts—he took great content in the gourd. What is the gourd but a symbol of all those lesser interests in life, those private hobbies, those curiously camouflaged prejudices that we sometimes call our principles, those obsolete or gradually lessening tradi- tions which we cling to in face of the expanding glory of God’s grace? We lose our interest in the big things, and become intensely absorbed and contented with the gourd. THE WITHERED GOURD 53 Take the Pharisee. The founders of the sect, begin- ning with Ezra, were probably the holiest men in the world at that time, and their attitude during the Macca- bean period is greatly to be commended. They were the first martyrs for faith. A nobler, finer group of believers has never lived on the face of the earth. And yet see what their successors became in the time of our Lord! They were tithing anise, mint and cummin, and neglecting the weightier matters of the law. If you have read Dr. Glover’s little book, The Jesus of His- tory, you will remember his caustic, brilliant comment on the saying of our Lord, they “ strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.’”’ Look at the thing for a moment. Here is your Pharisee busy polishing his cup, polishing away every speck of dust, until it shines so that he can see his likeness in it. And he says to himself: “ My neighbour must understand that I am a very diligent and industrious man and I take the best of care of my silver. I never allow anything that contaminates me or corrupts me or makes me unclean.”’ And then a gnat lights on the rim of the cup. He says: “ This won’t do at all. I have got to do the thing over again, because the gnat has made it ceremonially unclean.” And he works away to get the stain off. Then along comes a camel and he swallows the thing, legs, humps and all, and does not even know it. That is our Saviour’s way of showing how values get reversed and how great things are lost sight of in the little things. So Jonah took great content in the gourd. This is the way of the world. It is very marked, even in great men; all of us lesser folk are often guilty of yielding to the temptation. When we cannot have our way we go out from an institution which we ought with all earnestness be supporting, to sit down and wait 54 MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION for its disappearance or destruction, simply because we are not allowed to run it. In the meantime we take great pleasure in gourds. There are many people, I fear, who are disappointed with the Church. I do not mean unbelievers; I refer to sincere but narrow-minded believers. Narrowness is the first infirmity of an ignoble mind. If you are capable of sustained narrowness, it is the evidence of the smallness of your nature. And yet this is very common in orthodox circles. Sometimes a person comes to the minister and says: “‘ My dear brother, I find it impossible to remain in your church. I do not agree with the behaviour of your official board. I do — not like your methods or organisation. I find the visible Church has lost the approval of God and I propose to leave it.” Now what does he do? He goes over and sits down on some imaginary hill, there he is; and the first thing you know he has got him a sign, and usually there is a lot of Scripture texts on it, but what I always read on the sign is: “ This man is taking great content in the gourd.” The gourd may be the symbol of interests which while they may be of some importance are still of a subordinate nature. If you look into the wallet of any denomination you will find many withered gourds— subordinate truths, overemphasised truths, contentious about things that are no longer vital, things that keep us from being one in spirit, from believing in the sin- cerity of our brethren and from getting help and in- spiration from all the good people in the world—all because of these withered gourds. When you go into your wallet for the bread of life to feed the hungry, what is the trouble with it? It is full of bits of with- ered gourds, and the people do not like it and will not THE WITHERED GOURD | 55 eat it. These things may just be carried along with us, but they are so much impedimenta retarding our prog- ress toward the “ house not made with hands.” IV. Jonah Brought Face to Face with This Tre- mendous and Dramatic Conclusion: Which is more im- portant, the withered gourd or the dying world? One night not long after while Jonah was dreaming pleasantly of a day when Nineveh should backslide, a worm crawled out of the ground and began to gnaw at the root of the gourd, and when the sun came out the gourd began to wither. Jonah’s head got hot and began to ache, and then his heart got hot and he began to get mad, and this is what he said: “I wish I were dead now—more than ever. I am very, very angry.” And the Lord said, “‘ What is the matter, Jonah? ” “TI am angry even unto death.” 66 Why ? 39 Poise of the death You have tieled out to this gourd.” “Indeed!” said the Lord. “And are you to be angry for a gourd, a thing that grew in a night and died in a night, for which you did not labour, and over which even a worm has power; and shall I not have mercy on great Nineveh, this blind, mole-like, struggling city of mine, whose life is linked to My life, and whose heartaches and yearnings I have long understood?” : The writer, you see, was a good literary era Pee He does not close the Book like a tract. One reason people do not read tracts is because there is nothing left to the imagination, there is too much detail in them. The people who write tracts profess to know too much about the things they are describing. The writer of this Book does not tell us what happened to Jonah, but 56 MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION you can at once conclude that if he did not repent he must have been an apostate. “ Shall I not have mercy on great Nineveh, that great shadow-haunted city?” Some of you have seen Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. When you first looked at it you noted the face of the Madonna and Child, and then as your eye wanders over the background it breaks up into its constituent elements and is literally alive with baby faces that are looking at you out of the shadow. And that is the way here. You look at the face of Jonah and at the face of God, and then you see back of them this strange mixture of baby faces and grown faces, these Ninevites, this dying world of God’s. “ Shall I not have mercy on great Nineveh? ” What is the lesson for the modern Church? This Book shows the relation of the life force of God’s grace to the traditional moulds of its expression. Now, Judaism was a mould; the life force was the divine purpose to redeem the world, and anyone who studies the Bible will realise that the force of God must inevi- tably expand as the world becomes accessible to its . influence, so that a time must come when either the traditional moulds must expand with it, or break to pieces and allow the life force to strike out an order for itself and re-establish new traditions. There was no reason, humanly speaking, why Judaism should not have expanded along with it. But this book appears to have been written by a man standing on the frontiers of a new world, looking down the stream of centuries in anticipation of events shortly to come to pass, to show us how, at a critical moment in the history of that people, the ecclesiastical mould had hardened and be- come brittle, and how the life force pressing more and more into the mould broke it asunder and swept with THE WITHERED GOURD 57 torrential force out upon the world creating a new order of tradition for itself. That is the teaching of the Book of Jonah, and that is the meaning of this tremendous contrast. The important thing is the life force of God. ‘The mould must expand with the life force until it is fitted to interpret still further the glory of the Lord. Our Saviour said that God did not put new wine into old bottles. This is the lesson of the Book. The new wine was the wine of this constantly expanding life force. The old bottles were the traditional moulds of Judaism that would not expand with it. It was inevitable, there- fore, that the moulds should break in order that the life force might be free for a larger expansion. And what you see in the Book of Jonah is the life force of Divine grace breaking through the ecclesiastical mould in order that it might reach out and overtake the growing recep- tivity in the heathen world round about. God’s purpose is always the same, but the modes of its manifestation must necessarily change, and we must change with them or break. I offer here in conclusion one or two reflections. Many are troubled and confused today about the status of Protestantism. Protestantism is a mode of expression of the life force of God. It is not very old in the history of the world. We are troubled about it, probably, because we are beginning to feel that it re- flects too conclusively a social system that is gradually but surely yielding to something entirely different. We belong, so far as our forbears are concerned, to an in- dividualistic society. We are rapidly evolving into a collectivist society. Now an individualistic society is one that can bring down from past centuries its tradi- tions and conceptions more or less intact and put them 58 MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION behind the individual in the form of conventions that have the force of Divine law for members of the group. We are able to speak of the God of our fathers. We have our ecclesiastical family trees, and the knowledge that we have descended from a good religious stock is an additional element in the stability of our character. We have a great interest in the past. We still cherish the illusion that the Puritans were the finest type of Protestant, and are still living more or less under the domination of a Puritan conception of morality and practice. But do you realise that one of the merits of an indi- vidualistic society long continuing, is respect for tradi- tion, while a collectivist society, which is the result of an expanding movement and the infiltration of different races, is a society that does not care a rap for tradition? It has no conception of the past, and attempts to begin ‘all things de novo, and if we are to impress the vitality of our message upon the masses in the present day, we must do it by putting emphasis on the life force rather than on the traditional modes of expression that are still current in restricted religious circles. | This crisis which is now brought upon the Modern Church is manifest in the great epochs in which the world has suddenly expanded in new directions. Con- sider the extraordinary enlargement of life when Alex- ander knocked the world to pieces, letting the East and West get together, and all the old traditions and ancient Sanctions were temporarily set aside. Men found themselves floating in a great sea, glad to find a plank here and there that might carry them through to safety. It was in such a time that the practical and almost religious philosophies of Stoicism and Epicureanism were born. It was a time when the Gentile world, THE WITHERED GOURD 59 under the influence of the Greek language and the spread of Greek culture, was brought into violent col- lision in the first place, and then almost into the relation of disciple and master to the Jewish Church itself. It was in that time that the Book of Jonah probably originated. At any rate it was such a time the Book anticipated. It found the Jewish Church unwilling to expand, incapable of understanding the great move- ments confronting it; so when the Lord came He found but a moribund and broken church, still holding obso- lete traditions, instead of possessing a vital faith ready to welcome the fulfilment of the ancient promise and recognise Him as Lord. One reason for the rapid expansion of Christianity in the first and second centuries of our era was the ex- traordinary receptivity of the heathen mind. The preachers of the gospel found little encouragement in Palestine, but so soon as they passed out into the wider domain of Asia Minor and Europe they met with an enthusiastic reception. The Palestinian’ Jew was tra- dition bound, but the Gentile through the political up- heavals and intellectual struggles of his immediate past had been made free. And in this free mental soil the good seed found an eager hospitality. The Reformation was an inevitable effect of the Ren- naisance. The revival of learning, the discovery of America, and the awakening of the scientific spirit greatly expanded man’s conception of the world, and brought him in a receptive mood face to face with great issues. I do not like to speak in superlatives, and whatever may be said, must be discounted somewhat because we are very close to our own period; but as I understand the historic contrast here alluded to, I can see nothing 60 MAKING OF A GREAT TRADITION comparable to these times. We are standing at the place where the traditional conceptions of the past have come in conflict with the extraordinary intellectual and political activity of the present. We are living in an age of efflorescence such as the world has never known. In my Canadian camp on the shore of Lake Huron I have, when the season was late, seen this thing—the swarming of the lake fly. During the day the bush was silent, but so soon as the sun was set, a humming and buzzing would begin all over the forest. It sounded like the coming of a storm. And then slowly but surely there would rise above the edge of the bush great, swarming clouds of lake flies, millions of them. You could hear their humming and buzzing all around you, and yonder across the lake you could see them hovering over the islands, these swarming clouds of lake flies. Whether you looked to the east or the west or the north or the south you saw this fermenting, swarming mass of winged desire seeking some larger mode of self- realisation. This is the world we look upon today. The masses are in a state of profound unrest and con- fusion. You hear the buzzing and the humming of many peoples, like the sound of rushing waters; multi- tudes in the valley of decision, seeking through changes in government larger modes of self-expression. People are turning from obsolete and unworkable traditions, scorning ancient symbols, despising the stabilising in- fluences of an historical and connected knowledge, and endeavouring to begin life de novo and yet with an in- credible hunger for something that will give them con- fidence in the unseen things of life. Here we stand with our all-conquering Christ, Whose power is as demonstrable today as in the first century. We have the Bread of God to feed every hun- THE WITHERED GOURD 61 gry multitude; with ideas to co-ordinate and stabilise their political and economic passions; with conceptions of social order, moral purity and spiritual aspiration which no other religion and no combination of philoso- phies can ever give them. What are we going to do with this power? Are we going to face this concen- trated need with dull and stupid minds, foolishly con- tending about withered gourds; or put our faith in the living power of the Divine Spirit, and with the courage of conviction and the patience of a God-disciplined life, thrust ourselves into this yeasty ferment with the only message that can satisfy the hunger of our day? We have never lived in such terribly searching times. We shall never again live in such a superlatively great time. PART II ‘THE EDUCATION OF MOSES IV THE DISCIPLINE OF THE DESERT “Moses fled from the face of Pharaoh, and dwelt in the land of Midian.’—Exovus 2: 15, OSES’ great career began with a mistake, and in spite of its remoteness, the story of that mistake is strikingly familiar. What it was and what it led to it is our purpose here to tell. Few men have had a more romantic life. He was a child of an enslaved people, who by a singular provi- dential arrangement was brought into the family of the reigning monarch and became the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He grew to manhood amid the luxury and splendour of an Oriental court, and for a long period was willing to take his ease. But there came a time when he grew discontented. He felt that this was not living but mere existence. Idleness displeased him, and he wished for a career. He wanted to live and work and have a share in the big things. He was unhappy and restless because he did not know how to get out of his gilded cage. | And many young Americans are feeling this same discontent. Young people are idealists; in a vague sort of way they desire to share in what is great, noble, unselfish; their discontents are often protests against idleness and ease, a passionate longing for a share in the world’s work. They are like Browning’s Christian. They do not wish to be 65 66 EDUCATION OF MOSES “* * * left in God’s contempt apart, With ghastly smooth life, dead at heart, Tame in earth’s paddock as her preze.” Such a life would be a cruel distortion of destiny. When young people feel the shame of this life, often planned by foolish parents, their discontent increases until they begin to look about them for a way of breaking out of Pharaoh’s court and escaping the paddock life. This was Moses’ feeling—how to escape the paddock life—when he took that momentous walk which led to his temporary undoing. He looked about him that day with open eyes. He had often seen this thing, an Egyptian taskmaster beating a Hebrew slave, and prob- ably had stifled any feelings of sympathy by saying to himself that if slaves will not work they must be pun- ished, else how get the world’s work done? Perhaps he congratulated himself on being fortunate enough to escape being reared as a Hebrew. He was a child of destiny, and known asa prince. But that morning such reflections did not please him. He was looking on that’ sight with other eyes, eyes opened by his discontent. He looked upon his brethren and considered their bur- dens. His brethren? That was a new thought, and for the first time in his life he felt that their burdens were his burdens. What had he ever done to earn his bread ? What had he contributed to the world’s work? Why should he live by the toil of others, and spend his days in idleness while other men, his brothers—bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh—were beaten by taskmas- ters? This was the beginning of responsibility, the moment when he came of age, when he felt himself a full grown man. And this, too, is common in our time. There are few DISCIPLINE OF THE DESERT 67 finer moments in life that that of the beginning of re- sponsibility. At such a time a man forms the deliberate and passionate determination to get out of Pharaoh’s court, to escape at any cost the shame of the paddock life. And it is one of the best indications of the moral health of these times that multitudes of well favoured people are beginning to awake to their responsibility for _ the social and spiritual condition of men. The burden of all, our brethren, is felt to be our burden. Why, after all, should there be idlers and burden bearers under the same social system ? - Moses felt this keenly, and it was an ennobling feel- ing; only he made a serious mistake in going about the business, and that mistake opens up an interesting line of reflection. His mistake was this: He assumed that a sudden birth of social passion automatically equipped him with power for social leadership. He supposed that to feel that a thing ought to be done was the same thing as to have power to accomplish it effectively. This false social system was responsible for two evils: On the one hand it fostered idlers like himself; and on the other hand burden bearers like his brethren. The thing to be done then was to destroy the social system. Here stands the Egyptian taskmaster, the visible sym- bol of the evil thing. Then kill the Egyptian, and the thing is done. By so doing he thinks he will end the _ oppression of his brethren, and gain power to lead them to a better social condition. He just took it for granted that a man without actual knowledge of human nature and with no experience of practical life could in a mo- ment of social enthusiasm acquire leadership in the world’s affairs. It is a common mistake, and he was soon bitterly aware of it. Shortly after this impulsive action he endeavours to 68 EDUCATION OF MOSES interfere in a matter between his brethren, and then learns that he has no power to influence them. ‘ Who made you a judge over us?”’ they asked. Furthermore, his crime is known to Pharaoh. He had not considered this before, but now he realises that he not only lacks power to help his brethren, but that he must leave the country, perhaps forever, and abandon any hope of ever influencing his people. Hence he flees, a broken and discouraged young man, far from the haunts of the world, and loses himself in the heart of the desert of Midian. ; | This, too, is quite familiar. The moral idealism and social passion of this time are profoundly interesting. In some respects we are living in the greatest era of human history. This feeling of responsibility for our brothers under all conditions of existence is one of the finest characteristics of our age. The land is full of adventurers, many of them young, who are but lately escaped from Pharaoh’s court, who still remember the vanity and futility of the paddock life, whose interest in the social problem is profoundly suggestive. For the. first time in their lives they are feeling the invigoration of responsibility. ‘The experience is novel, glorious, heroic. Nothing could tempt them back to the old life. They have definitely broken with their idle past; they despise the paddock and long for the arena. But they usually make the same mistake that Moses made. They confound the birth of social passion with equipment for social leadership. Few wish to follow, to learn, to gain power through discipline; most of them wish to lead. They do not know how to wait. And this is the more impressive because many of these young idealists are full of religious zeal. Like Moses, they are going about the business of solving some of DISCIPLINE OF THE DESERT 69 the most complex problems in an unreflective and passionate way. We all feel the prevailing discontent. It is every- where. People are dissatisfied and restless without knowing why. But the discontent of the time is not that of a decaying and disenchanted aristocracy, but rather that of an adolescent and adventurous democ- racy. Such discontent is usually a sign of progress. But this form of discontent more than any other kind needs discipline. Of itself it lacks balance, caution, and sanity. It lives in passionate feelings rather than in constructive intellectual conceptions; it is fruitful of vast mistake and final futility, unless it is sobered by real knowledge and experience. Young America is no more fit for leadership in this business of world emancipation than was Moses before his desert experience. It is worth while to consider more in detail some of the prevailing misconceptions of the problem before us. The presence of such misconceptions shows the neces- sity of the desert discipline. 1. A misconception of education. We usually act on the supposition that if we tell the people what they ought to do they will do it. Moses thought so. He as- sumed if he told his brethren what they should do they would do it. But had Moses ever stopped to ask whether he knew what ought to be done? Had he ever considered whether he knew what was meant by right? Did he know the temper and problems of his time? Did he understand human nature as it is? What real equipment had he? A profound discontent with an aimless life, and a rather vague feeling of responsibility for others—this and nothing more. He was less fitted to help those Jews than the humblest slave among them, 70 EDUCATION OF MOSES Yet in this restless democracy of ours, where every man is striving for personal significance, the idea seems to prevail that, in a multitude of meetings and campaigns for publicity upon all sorts of subjects, the good thing needed to be done will be done. Year by year, hosts of beardless boys are pouring out of Pharaoh’s court, with the perfume of the paddock life still upon their gar- ments, who are telling the big world what it ought to do to be saved, with never a suspicion of their unfitness and incompetence Need they then be surprised that the world turns upon them and asks: “ Who made you a judge over us?”’ Nothing more painfully illustrates the evil of this misconception than the amazing publicity now given to sex matters, the exploitation of the social evil, the dis- cussion of such subjects in mixed assemblies, and the even more questionable practice of moving picture de- lineations and dramatic performances, the idea being that to expose the evil is to destroy it, that people need only to be told what is right in order to get them to do right. How little such people know of human nature, how poorly acquainted they are with the human prob- lem. No one will deny that a wise treatment of such subjects in the light of real knowledge will do good ; but the haste and utter incompetence of this propaganda, as it is usually carried on, are fruitful of a vast corruption of society. The very worst attempt to suppress vice is to turn it over to undisciplined minds. 2. A misconception of legislation. The stubborn refusal of human nature to do right, when it knows what right is, leads to the idea that it must be helped to right ways by the aid of legislation. The favourite theme of our democracy is freedom. Freedom is what all men wish for, some attain, and few deserve. Free- DISCIPLINE OF THE DESERT 71 dom is not the gift of democracy, but the goal and pos- sible achievement of democracy; and yet how can free- dom better show itself, men think, than in the making of laws; and when the law is supposed to.be an expres- sion of the sovereign will of the people will it not cor- rect all evils and encourage all good things? At any rate we seem to think so. That law is a power in itself is a favourite delusion of democracy, and this delusion has never had more in- fluence than here in America. We act upon the as- sumption that to get a law on the statute books is the same thing as to get it enforced. And what is our favourite method of procedure? First we get the law passed, then we elect a man to enforce the law, then we organise voluntary associations—civic leagues, reform associations, and the like—to force the man we have elected to enforce the law. Then when we are con- vinced that even this is going to fail, we get together in the exercise of our freedom and protest. Then we em- body our protest in another law. And so the amusing process begins where it started. This is movement without progress, the merry-go-round of American legislation. 3. A misconception of the Church. Many are be- ginning to question the efficacy of the legislative pro- gram. ‘They are beginning to suspect that, after all, public sentiment is the power behind the law, and that it will require something more potent than education to develop sentiment in favour of righteousness, and so now society is turning more than in former times to the Church and demanding what it is going to do about the matter. If it be the custodian of the Divine law and the keeper of the conscience why does it not get about the business of setting the world right? Why does it 72 EDUCATION OF MOSES not get down into the ruck of things and kill that brutal Egyptian? This demand is usually made from the wrong point of view. The adventurer is too much in a hurry to ask what the Church is doing and has done about the mat- ter. He is so poorly informed on the real trouble that he can learn little from the fundamental testimony of the Church. He does not know that where there is no vision the people perish ; where there is no abiding faith in authority, man lacks power to arrest the downward tendency of the race. Instead of setting himself to un- derstand that by the Gospel the Church is putting into human nature a new power, he insists that the Church — in its membership and influence align itself with his favourite party, organisation, or movement; it may be some socialistic program, it may be some reform or- ganisation, it may be some wild scheme for bringing to pass an immediate Utopia. And if the Church will not da this, then the Church must go. The question of questions among such poorly in- formed people is an economic rather than a spiritual - question. They seek to change environment rather than regenerate human nature. The demand is, usually lim- ited to a division of the inheritance. Again we hear the words: “ Speak to my brother that he divide the in- heritance with me.” They forget perchance that covet- ousness in the heart may explain the economic situation far better than this superficial diagnosis. People who fall under the evil influence of these mis- conceptions are not confined to outsiders, but such mis- apprehensions are very common among people within the Church. While the Gospel is working with causes stich enthusiasts expend their energies on effects and the study of symptoms. Moses did not realise the religious DISCIPLINE OF THE DESERT 73 aspect of the question he was dealing with. He thought only of a social revolution—kill the Egyptian and the thing is done—forgetting that the real bondage of these people was the bondage of sin, the bondage of ignorance of God. The fatal lack of our time is igno- rance of God. Strip off the veneer of social and religious talk and you will find underneath that the ruling principle of the age is largely one of material values, of disputes about the division of the inheritance. The young adventurer does not know that he is facing a deep and organic spiritual disease and that he is more in need of a sound theology than of a perfect social theory. But Moses’ mistake was not fatal. When he slew the Egyptian he was on the way to the burning bush; but between those two events lay the long years of desert discipline, and that is the outstanding value of the story for our time. We, too, may be on the way to the burn- ing bush, but we shall never understand the vision, nor solve the problem of human betterment until we, like Moses, have experienced the discipline of the desert. George Gissing says: “ More than half a century of existence has taught me that most of the wrong and folly which darken earth is due to those who cannot possess their souls in patience, that most of the good which saves mankind from destruction comes of life that is led in thoughtful stillness.” Ah, yes, and how little do we know how to appreciate the life that is led in “‘ thoughtful stillness.” To us wha live most in the moving mass such a life is one of stag- nation, of seeming idleness; and yet until we can ap- preciate such a life as this, a life of prayer and faith and quiet confidence in God how shall we understand Him who “ shall not strive nor cry, and whose voice is 74 EDUCATION OF MOSES not heard in the streets.” Jesus never liked noise. He did His best work in stillness, in quiet. And He can never work a change in us while our hearts are like a noisy street, full of haste, selfishness, and earthly discontent. Perhaps no man ever seeks the desert. He is usually driven into it; and if our humiliating failures, our pain- ful reactions, our bitter disappointments do nothing else for us, they may become fruitful of great good if they drive us from the glare and glitter and noise of the modern world into the quiet and stillness of the desert. There at any rate we may go apart from the crowd and take a just prospect of things; and perhaps we, too, may light upon a bush that is not consumed, and renew our hope and revive our faith and come back to the haunts of men with a Gospel powerful enough to com- pel the big world to stop—and listen to Ais: V THE GLORY IN THE DESERT “And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt. And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I. And he said, Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest ts holy ground.”—Exopus 3: 3-5. HE end of discipline is illumination. First comes the flight from Egypt, then the long, dull years in Midian, and then,—the burning bush. To read this story aright, we must cease to think of it as a hero tale of long ago, and take it as an example of how a man found his God. To think of it in this way is to discern certain points of contact with our own lives. In the first place, up to this point the life of Moses had been full of ups and downs. Beginning as the reputed son of Pharaoh’s daughter; brought up in the luxury and magnificence of an Oriental court, he had, by virtue of a generous though mistaken action, been driven into the wilderness where he had followed the humble calling of a shep- herd. To descend from the position of a prince to that of an obscure herdman was a great descent. To most men this would seem the end of acareer. All romance, poetry and mystery appeared to have departed from life. The high expectations of youth had not been real- 75 76 EDUCATION OF MOSES ised. All hopes seemed to have ended in that dreary desert experience. In the second place, we who look back on the story can see another feature of immense significance. God was interested in this man’s experience, although for the moment he did not know it. Providence was direct- ing his movements, and this desert experience, this apparent anti-climax was only a transition stage on the way to the fulfillment of a great career. And these two features are common to all of us, although we are apt to stress the first more than the second. To every man who has fully matured, life seems to be made of per- plexities. He is sometimes up, and sometimes down, but mostly down. No matter how high the promise of our youth, eventually we find ourselves in a desert where the right way seems lost. We gradually drop our illusions, abandon our enthusiasms, and put off the stately robes of the prince with which we adorned our early manhood, to clothe ourselves in the common dress of the unromantic toiler. When we allow such thoughts too much influence, we accept ourselves at our lowest valuation. It was this common tendency that led to the invention of the Scotch proverb: “ Born a man and died a grocer.” But even our lives have another aspect, although it may not be clear. We, too, like Moses, are controlled by an overruling providence.