£xhv<xvy of t:he trheolo^icd ^tminary 
 
 PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 The Estate of the 
 Rev, John B. Wiedinger 
 
 BR 123 .A63 1912 
 Andrews, George A. 1870- 
 Efficient religion 
 
1/ 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 GEORGE ARTHUR ANDREWS 
 
EFFICIENT RELlfeaON 
 
 '41 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE ARTHUR ANDREWS 
 
 AUTHOB OB" "what IS ESSENTIAI." 
 
 
 HODDER & STOUGHTON 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
Copyright, 1912, 
 By GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The temper of the present age is utilita- 
 rian. Everybody is looking for results. 
 The question of utility is asked shrewdly by 
 those who seek profit, sometimes cynically 
 by those who indulge excessively in pleas- 
 ures, and of ttimes desperately by those who 
 struggle in the meshes of stressful condi- 
 tions. 
 
 If the religion of Jesus is to maintain 
 and increase its influence with the practical 
 men and women of this century, it must 
 do more than to demonstrate its truth, more 
 than to reveal its beauty, more even than 
 to point with becoming pride to its twenty 
 centuries of successful history; it must show 
 its present helpfulness. 
 
 "What is its use?" "What is it good 
 
 for?" "What can it do?" These are the 
 
 questions which men and women, too, are 
 
 asking to-day. To suggest the answer to 
 
 [5] 
 
PREFACE 
 
 these questions is the object of this Httle 
 book. No effort is herein made to add to 
 the accumulating mass of evidential testi- 
 mony to the helpfulness of Christ's religion. 
 The aim here is to suggest a basis in reason 
 for the acceptance of such testimony. 
 
 Our task is partly that of the sifter. We 
 must seek to winnow the grain of the prac- 
 tically beneficial in the religion of Jesus 
 from the chaif of those beliefs and prac- 
 tices which are pathetically unhelpful. But 
 our task is also that of the moulder, and of 
 the baker. For we are to try to shape the 
 sifted grain into one homogeneous whole 
 and to present it in a form that may, it is 
 hoped, prove wholesome and nutritious to 
 some doubting, careworn, sinful soul, hun- 
 gry for the "Bread of Life." 
 
 [6] 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Chapteb. 
 
 I Profitable Faith . 
 
 II Practicable Love . 
 
 III Prevailing Prayer . 
 
 IV Saving Forgiveness . 
 V Abundant Health . 
 
 VI Sufficient Consolation 
 
 VII Sustaining Strength 
 
 VIII Satisfying Joy . 
 
 IX Attainable Peace . 
 
 X Achieving Power 
 
 Page. 
 11 
 
 27 
 
 43 
 
 57 
 
 77 
 
 93 
 
 111 
 
 127 
 
 141 
 
 159 
 
 [7] 
 
PROFITABLE FAITH 
 
 CHAPTER ONE 
 
" If a brother be naked, and in lack of daily food, and one 
 of you say unto him, *Go in peace, be ye warmed and filled ;' 
 and yet ye give him not the things needful to the body, what 
 doth it profit ? Can faith save him ?" — James 2 : 14-16. 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 PROFITABLE FAITH 
 
 When Henry Van Dyke wrote his true 
 and compelling book, "The Gospel for an 
 Age of Doubt," he spoke to thinkers of 
 the intellectual appeal of the religion of 
 Christ. But the blackest doubt is not the 
 fruit of thought ; it has its genesis in phys- 
 ical conditions and in moral conditions. 
 
 To-day the great multitudes of those 
 who feel no concern for the religion of 
 Jesus are people who never think very 
 deeply upon any subject. They are those 
 who are altogether unfamiliar with the 
 written philosophies of men, some of them 
 even unfamiliar with the deeper truths of 
 the wintten revelation of God's Word. 
 They are not so much thinkers as doers. 
 They are not students, but actors. 
 
 The parts which most of these actors 
 
 [11] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 must play upon the stage of life are very 
 limited. Their relations to the other actors 
 on the stage they do not very clearly un- 
 derstand, and their relation to the Author 
 of the play is wholly uncomprehended. In- 
 deed, they cannot be sure that the play has 
 any Author at all. To these who see the 
 stage only from behind the scenes all is lit- 
 ter and confusion. They stumble through 
 their minor parts when by necessity they 
 must, but they do not know what it is all 
 about; perhaps, indeed, the most of them 
 never even question what it is about. 
 
 Here is the dumb, unspoken unbelief, 
 created not by intellectual questioning, but 
 by untoward circumstances. It is the un- 
 belief not of the profound scholar, but of 
 the uncomprehending child. Yet this stolid, 
 unthinking unbelief presents the most se- 
 rious of all obstacles to the advancement of 
 true Christian faith. 
 
 When a child has reached for the tooth- 
 some sweetmeat and has found his hand re- 
 strained, he is in no mood to be convinced 
 by argument that his father is good. When 
 [12] 
 
PROFITABLE FAITH 
 
 he has touched the bright thing that looked 
 so pretty, and has been burned thereby, 
 one cannot reasonably expect, while his 
 body suffers, that his mind will readily com- 
 prehend the truth of love. 
 
 Just so when men in our present indus- 
 trial system toil and sweat for a competence 
 and find their hands held back, one cannot 
 expect them, in the misery of their poverty, 
 to believe very strongly in a God who loves 
 them. And when other men have touched 
 some sinful thing that seemed attractive, the 
 immediate effect of their consequent suffer- 
 ing will not likely be a resplendent faith in 
 a merciful Providence. 
 
 They do not think the unbelief. They feel 
 it. It has become a part of their experience. 
 They have become habituated to it. Ex- 
 actly as they become accustomed to the in- 
 difference of the prosperous classes and of 
 the moral classes, and to the stringent com- 
 petition of the members of their own class, 
 so they become accustomed to expect no help 
 from any divine power, no help and no 
 mercy. 
 
 [13] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 This is only a partial view of the present 
 day's practical unbelief. By the side of the 
 many toiling, suffering, sinful people who 
 experience an unbelief in God which they 
 never express, we must place all those who, 
 in prosperity, flippantly ignore God; and 
 with both classes, if we would view the sit- 
 uation in its entirety, we must include the 
 multitudes of those who are neither at the 
 top nor at the bottom of the industrial scale, 
 but who are necessarily busy with the affairs 
 of the earth, and who must, or at least do, 
 concentrate all their powers of effort in the 
 struggle for material things. Finally, we 
 must include in this great company of un- 
 thinking mibelievers the thousands of men 
 and women of all classes and conditions 
 Vvhose lives are one continuous cry of bodily 
 anguish, of soul loneliness, or, worse still, 
 one unbroken stupor of sensuous indulgence. 
 
 Are all these people indifferent to Christ's 
 religion because they have been reading 
 Thomas Paine or Robert Ingersoll? Is it 
 because they have discerned certain illogical 
 conclusions in the prevailing systems of 
 [14] 
 
PROFITABLE FAITH 
 
 Christian thought? Have they become es- 
 tranged from rehgion because of the hard 
 fought but now dead issue between rehgion 
 and science? None of these reasons ex- 
 plains their indifference. It is appalhng to 
 think how many men and women there are 
 in this world of God's who do not vitally 
 believe in Him, not because they have 
 thought themselves away from Him, but be- 
 cause they have never felt themselves in 
 Him. 
 
 And the Church for centuries has been 
 offering to these a system of thought, bid- 
 ding them in the name of Saint Augustine 
 or some other saint to believe something, in- 
 stead of telling them in the name of the 
 Master to receive something and to do some- 
 thing. 
 
 If Christian faith be only or principally 
 a system of thought, it can never become 
 efficient in the lives of these who cannot 
 think, or do not think, or will not think. 
 This is a proposition which seems self-evi- 
 dent. To present to these unthinldng toilers 
 and idlers, strugglers and sufferers, any 
 [15] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 theological view of the atonement, is to offer 
 them stones for bread. The attempt to 
 demonstrate to them the love of God by a 
 process of syllogistic reasoning is like the 
 attempt to demonstrate a problem in the dif- 
 ferential calculus to the child who can add 
 two and two only by the aid of his fingers, 
 or to the man who, in the stringency of his 
 struggle for existence, or in the debauchery 
 of his self-indulgence has long ago forgot- 
 ten all the higher mathematics which he ever 
 learned. 
 
 Herein is suggested the cause of the par- 
 tial failure of the Church of Christ to win 
 and to hold the great majority of the breth- 
 ren of Christ. The Church has been prone 
 to make the acceptance of Christ's religion 
 dependent upon thought. It therefore has 
 been powerless to promote the true Chris- 
 tian faith in the lives both of those who in 
 the exigencies of their material conditions 
 cannot think, and of those who in the ab- 
 sorption of their pursuit of material things 
 do not think. 
 
 There are encouraging signs, however, 
 [16] 
 
PROFITABLE FAITH 
 
 that the Church is beginning to rectify its 
 mistake. One of the most encouraging of 
 these signs is the modern interest of the 
 Church in men. The "Men and Religion" 
 movement of this present day, with its em- 
 phasis upon practical Christianity, must be 
 considered as an attempt to rescue the re- 
 ligion of Jesus from the realm of intellectual 
 thought, and to bring it into the realm of 
 efficient action. 
 
 The definition of Christian faith towards 
 which the Church of to-day most happily is 
 tending is just this. Christian faith is 
 simply the faith which inspired the life- 
 work of Christ. It is the consciousness of 
 filial relationship with God, the conscious- 
 ness, therefore, of help from God and of 
 duty towards God. 
 
 This consciousness may be only experi- 
 enced. There may be those who cannot ex- 
 press it in words, those even who may not 
 intelligently apprehend the thing which they 
 feel. The child does not need to apprehend 
 clearly the idea of motherhood in order to 
 be conscious of filial relationship with his 
 
 [17] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 mother. He may not know enough even to 
 understand that the woman who succours 
 him and who cares for him is his mother. 
 Surely there will always be depths in her 
 maternal love which his intellect can never 
 fathom. But when the child goes to his 
 mother for needed nourishment and comfort, 
 and when a little later he goes out to obey 
 that mother in loyalty and in true devotion, 
 he is acting upon his faith in her. His in- 
 ability to reduce the idea of motherhood to 
 an intellectual formula in no way affects 
 either the reality of his faith in her, or its 
 efficiency in his own life. 
 
 We must separate the concept of Chris- 
 tian faith from all attempted theological 
 definitions and intellectual systems, and we 
 must make it something as simple and as 
 efficient as the little child's consciousness of 
 the care of the mother who loves him and 
 whom, therefore, he must obey. We may ad- 
 mit that the intellectual definitions have their 
 value to some people, but Ave must see 
 clearly that if the religion of Jesus is to be 
 of use to the multitudes who need it most, 
 [18] 
 
PROFITABLE FAITH 
 
 it must be based only upon the child-like 
 confidence in Him who nourishes and com- 
 forts and guides. 
 
 This faith, unexpressed in words, it may 
 be inexpressible, unformulated and unsyste- 
 matized, is the faith that is profitable. It 
 will do for the children of the Heavenly 
 Father just what it does for the children 
 of earthly parents, it will send them to 
 Him who they know will nourish and 
 strengthen. It will, therefore, first of all, 
 cause them to grow. In His nourishing 
 care it will bring them out of the feebleness 
 of immaturity into the strength of manhood 
 and womanhood. It will take away the 
 hurt of the pain, and the sting of the dis- 
 appointment. It will make their lives pur- 
 poseful and useful. It will bring them into 
 that kind of a life which Jesus sometimes 
 called the "Hfe abundant" and sometimes 
 the "Hfe eternal," the life of vitality and 
 helpfulness, the hfe whose service is of value 
 now and whose influence never ends. 
 
 We can make this faith profitable to the 
 lives of others, too. We can bring others 
 [19] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 into this faith, to revert to our parallelism, 
 precisely as a child is brought into the con- 
 sciousness of his human parents' nourishing, 
 strengthening, and guiding love. We can 
 do it by ministering to men's present needs. 
 The way is not by words, but by deeds, not 
 so much by instructions and sermons as by 
 sympathy and helpfulness. 
 
 This was Christ's method of bringing men 
 into profitable faith in a Father of love. 
 He fed the hungry. He healed the sick. 
 He comforted the sorrowful. He forgave 
 the sinful. By such a ministry to the ex- 
 isting needs of men. He revealed to them 
 the love of God. He was not content to 
 demonstrate God's love to those who were 
 able and willing to think about it. He acted 
 that love for those who needed to experi- 
 ence it. 
 
 The Church must insist upon Christ's 
 method of promoting faith if it would make 
 that faith profitable. Faith in God can be 
 made an efficient force in the lives of the 
 unhappy and the unsatisfied, the careless 
 idler and the absorbed toiler, the discontented 
 [20] 
 
PROFITABLE FAITH 
 
 struggler for wealth and the disappointed 
 struggler for pleasure, only in this one way, 
 by the Christian's imitation of the method of 
 the Master. 
 
 This man in our community, this neigh- 
 bour of ours, this brother for whom Christ 
 lived and died, is caught and held fast in the 
 grinding wheels of our industrial machinery. 
 He can do only a certain kind of labour, but 
 he is by no means free to labour where he 
 will. He is in bondage on the one hand to 
 the organization of capital, and on the other 
 to the organization of labour. He is, as it 
 were, caught between the whirring wheels 
 of the increasing needs of his family and the 
 increasing cost of everything that his family 
 needs. Now the labouring man is not es- 
 tranged from the efficient religion of Jesus 
 Christ. It is true that labour organizations 
 have sometimes expressed their antagonism 
 to the Church of Christ. But the ideal 
 of the real religion of Jesus was very like 
 the ideal for which these labour unions are 
 striving, the ideal of justice, equity, free- 
 dom, and brotherly love. 
 [21] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 Christian faith can help this labouring 
 man, the efficient faith, efficiently imparted. 
 It is only that empty repetition of meaning- 
 less words, so sarcastically described by the 
 author of the Epistle of James, that has 
 failed to help him. Any man who will give 
 his sympathetic attention to the stressful 
 conditions under which this labouring man 
 must live and toil, any Christian who will 
 try to better those conditions, will help this 
 man into that faith in God which will profit 
 him both in this world and in the world which 
 is to come. Help this man to what he 
 knows he needs, and he will be helped to the 
 satisfaction of the greater need which now 
 he may not realize. 
 
 All about us, too, are the sinners; 
 the brutalized, ostracized, flagrant sinners. 
 These people are not so very unlike the rest 
 of mankind, except that they are unclothed 
 by social customs and unwarmed by social 
 sympathy. It is because of the nakedness 
 of their souls that they give license to their 
 lower passions and appetites. The man who 
 indulges in gross sins is probably not so bad 
 [22] 
 
PROFITABLE FAITH 
 
 in God's sight as the man who deliberately 
 plans to profit from that indulgence. Yet 
 society, and sometimes the very Church of 
 God, has shunned the man who sins and con- 
 doned the man who has enticed him to sin. 
 
 Can faith save both of these men? Yes, 
 the efficient faith, efficiently induced. So 
 long as Christians are content to say to such 
 in mere words, — "be moral," "be respect- 
 able," "believe in Christ and get converted," 
 it will not help them to the life that is lived 
 in God. But when Christians become ready 
 to try to clothe their nakedness with the 
 warmth of their sympathy and their sacri- 
 ficing ministry, when they become ready to 
 do for them and are no longer content to 
 talk at them, then they will help them. 
 
 The faith of professing Christians having 
 become profitable in their own lives will pro- 
 duce the profitable, developing, strengthen- 
 ing faith in the lives of others. 
 
 [28] 
 
PRACTICABLE LOVE 
 
 CHAPTER TWO 
 
"A new commandment I give unto you. That ye love one 
 another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another." 
 —John 13 : 34. 
 
PRACTICABLE LOVE 
 
 When Jesus was teaching' His disciples 
 at Jerusalem, the government of Judea was 
 controlled by the greed of an unscrupulous 
 imperialism, and the religion of Judea had 
 become the hollow form of a heartless and 
 lifeless submission to law. By a systerri of 
 unjust taxation the Roman Governor was 
 robbing the people of their possessions, and 
 by the pretense of religious authority the 
 Jewish Sanhedrin was depriving them of 
 their liberty. No wonder, then, that Christ's 
 commandment to love one another was char- 
 acterized by Him as new. 
 
 But the particular company of men to 
 w^hom this strange command was spoken, 
 though living in an age of political and 
 of religious selfishness, had for nearly 
 three years been in fellowship with the 
 Man of Love. In His presence they 
 had caught occasional glimpses of a re- 
 [27] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 ligion more spiritual than the hteral legaKsm 
 of their countrymen, and ghmpses of a gov- 
 ernment less oppressive than that of their 
 conquerors. They had witnessed their Mas- 
 ter's helpful sympathy for the sick and the 
 unfortunate; they had seen His tender for- 
 giveness of the sinful. More significant still, 
 they had felt His love for themselves, and 
 the love had had its inevitable effect upon the 
 development of their characters. It had 
 changed the "sons of thunder" into teach- 
 able and lovable disciples. It had made the 
 doubting Thomas the loyal friend, who was 
 ready to die with his Master in an apparently 
 foolish and forlorn cause. It had sur- 
 charged the heart of the impetuous Peter so 
 that he could confidently declare himself the 
 unfailing champion, vowing that though he 
 should stand alone, he would yet stand 
 boldly by his Master's side to the very 
 death. 
 
 Yet it must be remembered that there 
 
 were some things that the love of Jesus had 
 
 not accomplished for these men. It had 
 
 made them neither omniscient nor omnipo- 
 
 [28] 
 
PRACTICABLE LOVE 
 
 tent. It had not taken away all the self- 
 seeking from James and John, nor all the 
 doubt from Thomas, nor all the cowardice 
 from Peter. The disciples were still just 
 mortal men with varying characteristics and 
 many human weaknesses. They were still 
 slow of understanding and slow of heart. 
 
 We know that they were slow of under- 
 standing because, in spite of their fellowship 
 with the Man of Love, they had as yet no 
 conception of His religion other than some 
 slight modification of the worship of Je- 
 hovah, through obedience to Mosaic law. 
 We know it, too, because they had as yet im- 
 agined no government other than the tem- 
 poral government of Israel's expected Mes- 
 siah and Deliverer. We know they were 
 slow of heart because they were still selfish 
 enough to desire for themselves the first 
 places of honour and of riches in the new 
 government for which they hoped; because 
 they were weak enough to sleep while Jesus 
 suffered alone in Gethsemane, and because 
 they were craven enough to desert Him 
 when He was taken caj^tive in the garden. 
 [29] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 Evidently, in spite of the years of associa- 
 tion with the love of Jesus, the command- 
 ment enjoining their own love was some- 
 what new even to the disciples. 
 
 Is it still a new commandment in the twen- 
 tieth century? The modern republican 
 form of government has not removed from 
 men all opportunity for self-aggrandize- 
 ment. Political parties now struggle for 
 the supremacy which once by inheritance was 
 enjoyed by emperors, but the party in con- 
 trol still uses its power for its own ends. 
 Under the pretense of government the op- 
 pression of the poor is even now legalized, 
 and it makes little difference whether that 
 oppression be accomplished by unjust tax- 
 ation, or by the tariff-protected, money- 
 bought power of corporations. Who would 
 dare to say that our present age is not pro- 
 ducing politicians who are as thoughtless of 
 the rights of those whom they govern as 
 was the cruel, greedy, and cowardly Roman 
 Pilate? 
 
 And what about the professed religion of 
 this twentieth century? What about the 
 [30] 
 
PRACTICABLE LOVE 
 
 slowness of comprehension and the slowness 
 of heart of those who have behind them, 
 not three years of association with the liv- 
 ing Jesus, it is true, but twenty centuries of 
 the history of the operation of God's love 
 through Christ Jesus our Lord? Have the 
 minds of these modern discij^les completely 
 grasped the truth that Christ's Kingdom is 
 not the kingdom of the worldly prosperity, 
 say of some Church? Have these no desire 
 for the chief places of temporal power and 
 of influence? Are not some of them still 
 sleeping soundly while their brethren and 
 Christ's brethren in agony sweat blood? Are 
 all these free from the just charge of the 
 desertion of Christ's cause when it has 
 become unpopular, and of the denial of 
 Christ's cause w^hen its confession has en- 
 tailed inconvenience and imagined danger? 
 Our religion can no longer be considered 
 as a mere matter of punctilious obedience 
 to ceremonial law. We have reached the 
 time when it has become the proper and 
 conventional thing for religious people to 
 express their love for God and for Christ. 
 [31] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 But just to love God and to adore Christ 
 for His sacrifice is not precisely the import 
 of Christ's new commandment. He said 
 men were to love their fellows. Must this 
 commandment still be denominated as some- 
 thing new and strange? Indeed, so new is 
 this commandment because so very imper- 
 fectly has it been obeyed that many men to- 
 day are declaring that it cannot be obeyed. 
 Twenty centuries of the practice of perfect 
 obedience to that command would have 
 brought the entire world to complete recog- 
 nition of its practicability. But twenty cen- 
 turies of slowness of comprehension and of 
 slowness of heart have brought us, God save 
 the mark, only to the place where thought- 
 ful men are questioning the commandment's 
 practical utility. 
 
 We must ask, then, another question. Is 
 the commandment, which is still new, im- 
 practicable in this twentieth century of ap- 
 parent selfishness? Before we hastily an- 
 swer this question in the affirmative, however, 
 we must be sure that we understand what 
 we mean by the term "love," and we must 
 [32] 
 
PRACTICABLE LOVE 
 
 be equally sure that we are looking in the 
 right direction for the expected results from 
 the practice of love. 
 
 If Christian love were only an emotion 
 of affection, the commandment's universal 
 application w^ould indeed be an impossibil- 
 ity. Affection cannot be practiced by all 
 men with reference to all other men. Men 
 of antipathetic temperaments cannot have 
 an affection for each other any more than 
 an acid can have an affinity for an alkali. 
 If Christ's commandment, to "love one 
 another," means that we are to desire in- 
 timate, lover-like relations with all men, if 
 it means that we are actually to long for 
 the companionship of the dirty and the de- 
 graded, the diseased and the sinful, then, 
 frankly, the command is impossible of ful- 
 filhnent. Human affection is the natural 
 product of human affinities. And afi^nity, 
 a term which unfortunately is sometimes 
 loosely used, the real affinity of human souls 
 is something created by God. It is not some- 
 thing that can be commanded even by God's 
 Son. Even Jesus Himself seems naturally 
 [33] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 and inevitably to have had warmer affec- 
 tion for some people than for others. He 
 seems to have preferred the society of John 
 to that of Judas. He loved JVIary and 
 Martha of the little home in Bethany with 
 a satisfying affection that He could not pos- 
 sibly have felt for the scribes and the Phari- 
 sees and for the publicans and sinners. 
 
 We are forced to conclude, then, that the 
 love commanded by Jesus is not an emotion 
 of affection, but only and always a principle 
 of action. Let us make the definition com- 
 plete and specific. Christian love is the 
 principle of benevolent action. When a 
 man has acknowledged to himself a desire 
 to help others and has converted that desire 
 into a motive of service, he has accepted into 
 his life the love which is the very dynamic 
 of the Christian religion. 
 
 We must seek the fruit of such love not 
 in a man's feelings, but in his deeds. 
 Though he may not naturally care to asso- 
 ciate with the dirty and the degraded, does 
 he try to cleanse and to elevate them? If 
 he tries to help them he is obeying Christ's 
 [34] 
 
PRACTICABLE LOVE 
 
 commandment of love. If he is content to 
 leave them alone in their unfortunate con- 
 ditions, he is not obeying the commandment. 
 The test of the practice of Christian love is 
 just as simple as this. 
 
 It must be observed, too, that there are 
 limitations to the effect of such love upon 
 him who really possesses it and practices it. 
 The possession and practice of Christian 
 love will not make one omniscient and om- 
 nipotent. It will not destroy one's individ- 
 uality, nor will it mould all men according 
 to one fashion. The impetuosity of the 
 Peters will still persist. The questioning 
 minds of the Thomases will still ask, 
 "Why?" and "How?" It may be that some- 
 thing of the desire for personal preferment 
 may remain in the hearts of the sons of 
 Zebedee. 
 
 This limitation, both of the nature and 
 of the fruits of love, indicates that the pos- 
 session of Christian love is not incompatible 
 with the possession of a sturdy selfhood. A 
 Christ-like interest in the betterment of one's 
 fellows is by no means the contradiction of 
 [35] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 a natural, God-commanded interest in one's 
 own betterment. The former interest is not 
 the contradiction of the latter, but its supple- 
 ment. To seek for one's self is the demand 
 of a law of human life. To seek for others 
 is the added demand of a higher law of 
 human life. The equable adjustment of 
 these two God-given commands is alike the 
 problem of the indvidual's life and the prob- 
 lem of the industrial and political life of 
 nations. 
 
 Right here a ray of hope penetrates the 
 dark picture of the world's selfishness. The 
 apparent undue prevalence of self-seeking 
 does not force us to admit that men cannot 
 be actuated by love, nor even that they are 
 not in some measure already actuated by 
 love. The glaring selfishness is observable 
 for the most part only because so many men 
 have not learned how to adjust their clam- 
 ouring love impulses to their insistent 
 self-seeking impulses. Men are not in gen- 
 eral indifferent to their neighbours' welfare, 
 but by the exigencies of modern conditions 
 they are forced to give themselves with ap- 
 [36] 
 
I^IIACTICABLE LOVE 
 
 parent forgetfulness of others to the ad- 
 vancement of then' own welfare. 
 
 How to add the command of Christ de- 
 manding love for others to the command of 
 Xature demanding self -protection and self- 
 advancement, that is the problem which must 
 be solved by those who would make the re- 
 ligion of Jesus of real value to the toiling, 
 struggling, competing men of this busy 
 twentieth century. It is a problem in addi- 
 tion, and not in subtraction. It is not how 
 to make men think less of themselves, but 
 how to make them think more of others. As 
 the Golden Rule by implication expresses it, 
 men are to be taught to treat others not 
 better than they treat themselves, but as well. 
 *'Do unto others as ye would that men 
 should do unto you." This "golden rule" 
 commandment of Jesus is exactly synony- 
 mous with His "love" commandment. To 
 love one another, that is, to desire to help one 
 another, in its operation is just that treat- 
 ment of others which squares with the Gol- 
 den Rule. 
 
 When we thus understand the meaning 
 
 [37] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 and the expected results of Christian love, let 
 us not at all be discouraged by the evidence 
 of the selfishness and greed that surrounds 
 us. For in spite of the apparent selfishness, 
 in spite of much real selfishness, there was 
 never a time before this twentieth century 
 when men were so generally engaged in 
 obeying this new commandment of Christ. 
 In answer to him who declares Christian 
 love to be impracticable, show him the hos- 
 pitals and endowed schools, the public li- 
 braries and the social settlements, the houses 
 of refuge and reform. Tell this man of the 
 renowned philanthropists who, it is true, 
 have become great in self-seeking industry 
 and powerful in the selfish accummulation 
 of wealth, but who are sharing the product 
 of their greatness and their power with 
 others. Tell him, too, of the multitudes of 
 the unknown philanthropists who are also 
 competing with their fellows for their own 
 advancement, but who nevertheless are shar- 
 ing with others the products of their 
 smaller achievements. Remind this cynic 
 that men are working for themselves because 
 [38 ] 
 
PRACTICABLE L0\^ 
 
 they must, but show him how, at the same 
 time, they are working for others because 
 they would. Admit that men are slow of 
 understanding and slow of heart, mortal 
 men all of them, of individual peculiarities 
 and of many human frailties. But make 
 this doubter see that the impulse of obedi- 
 ence to the law of love is inherent within 
 them; and that the fruit of that love is 
 not lacking in their lives, so long as they 
 but try to give to a neighbour in need even 
 the cup of cold water in the spirit of the 
 serving Christ. 
 
 Christian love can be practiced because 
 it is being practiced every day. It must be 
 practiced, because it is a God-commanded 
 law of life. It will be practiced to the bene- 
 fit of all of God's children so long as God is 
 God, for God Himself is love. 
 
 Here, enwrapped in the very nature of 
 God, is the promise of the practical efficiency 
 of every act of love. He who does a loving 
 deed for his neighbour in need, accomplishes 
 three things. He lifts himself nearer to 
 the Father whose child he is. He brings re- 
 [39] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 lief and happiness to his brother who is also 
 God's child. And he helps to induce in his 
 brother's heart the consciousness of the God 
 who cares. 
 
 ** Who gives of himself with his alms feeds three, 
 Himself, his hungering neighbour, and Me." 
 
 [40] 
 
PREVAILING PRAYER 
 
 CHAPTER THREE 
 
"All things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, 
 ye shall receive." — Matthew 21 : 22. 
 
PREVAILING PRAYER 
 
 A Religion without prayer is an anomaly. 
 A prayer without a reasonable assurance of 
 its satisfying answer is an absurdity. The 
 religion of Jesus, to maintain and to increase 
 its influence among men, must not only teach 
 them how to pray ; it must give to them the 
 assurance of the efficacy of their prayers. 
 
 There are current in these modern times 
 two objections to prayer, whose statements 
 must necessarily be in philosophical terms, 
 but whose influence is felt by many people 
 who have never even heard of their philoso- 
 phy. The objections are both based upon 
 the truth of the immutable laws of nature. 
 
 The first objection assumes that nature, 
 in its immutability, is fatalistic. What is, 
 must be. What will be, cannot be avoided. 
 By the operation of the law of gravity, when 
 a man steps out of the top-story window of 
 one of our modern skyscraping buildings, 
 he will fall to the ground. He will fall just 
 [43] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 the same whether his last words be a prayer 
 or a curse. By the operation of the law of 
 the "survival of the fittest," the strong and 
 the industrious will succeed, the weak and 
 the indolent will fail, and both success and 
 failure are apparently independent of men's 
 petitions to God. By the inevitableness of 
 disease and of death the man exposed to 
 contagion is liable to become ill, whether he 
 be a man of prayer or a man of sin; and 
 when his time comes to die, each man, in 
 spite of his piteous pleading, must go out 
 alone upon the unknown journey. Since 
 all men are in the hands of relentless, fatal- 
 istic laws, of what use is prayer? 
 
 The second objection based upon the same 
 truth of nature's laws assumes the benefi- 
 cence of nature and of nature's God. His- 
 tory has demonstrated that seed-time and 
 harvest shall not fail. Experience has 
 proven that the seed planted by the prayer- 
 less man is as productive as that planted by 
 him who consciously communes with the 
 Creator. The broken bone will knit whether 
 the bone belongs to the irreverent sinner or 
 [44] 
 
PREVAILING PRAYER 
 
 to the praying saint. Besides, we have it 
 from the very teaching of the Bible itself 
 that the God manifested in benevolent na- 
 ture is the God of mercy and of love, and 
 that He is no respecter of persons. "He 
 maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on 
 the good, and sendeth rain on the just and 
 on the unjust." Since God will do for men 
 all He can do for them anyway, why should 
 they pray to Him? 
 
 Of this latter familiar objection there is 
 a slight modification induced by a most beau- 
 tiful religious trust. This modification 
 makes prayer to God not only unnecessary, 
 but really unfilial. What human father, it 
 is argued, who really loves his children, needs 
 to be asked to bestow the blessings of his 
 love? Is not the very petition itself a sug- 
 gestion that the child doubts the parental 
 care? Why, then, should a trusting child 
 of God insult his Father's love by petition? 
 Those who call themselves Christians can- 
 not avoid these well-founded objections to 
 prayer. Nor can they evade the objection 
 by the sophistical retort that prayer in its 
 [45] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 essence is not petitionary, but only commun- 
 ional. To tell any man that he can com- 
 mune with God, but that he cannot or should 
 not ask God for the things which he needs 
 and wants, makes the permitted communion 
 most unreal and artificial. If the term 
 "communion with God" has any vital sig- 
 nificance at all, it must include the unre- 
 served outpouring of the human heart into 
 the Heart Divine. Certainly no child can 
 properly be said to be in communion with his 
 human parent if the child's conversation 
 with his parent must be limited to the dis- 
 cussion of the generalities of faith and ado- 
 ration and love. The child must be able to 
 tell his father all that is in his own heart. 
 He must be free to name his specific dis- 
 tresses and his specific desires, and the com- 
 munion is not complete unless the child can 
 expect from his father specific sympathy 
 and specific help. Leave petitionary prayer 
 out of the idea of communion with God 
 and we have no real communion left. 
 
 Here, then, is our dilemma. On the one 
 hand, we Christians of the present day can- 
 [46] 
 
PREVAILING PRAYER 
 
 not deny the truth of the changelessness and 
 the beneficence of nature's laws. Our en- 
 tire lives are lived in bondage to those laws. 
 We are sustained, developed, and matured 
 by their blessings. On the other hand, we 
 Christians must assert the necessity and the 
 efficacy of petitionary prayer, or we shall 
 have no sure foundation for the fabric of our 
 religion. We must therefore meet these 
 objectors to prayer on their own ground. 
 The challenge which they have laid down we 
 must accept. If we are to make the religion 
 of Jesus of real value to these doubters and 
 to multitudes of others who, perhaps, have 
 only felt the doubt which they have never 
 formulated, we must show the profit of 
 prayer not in spite of the immutability of 
 law, but because of it. 
 
 When our task is thus clearly stated, we 
 must admit at once that certain prevalent 
 conceptions of prayer are both untenable 
 and unhelpful. Prayer is not the attempt 
 of the finite will to change the will of God. 
 Perhaps too many of the prayers which are 
 offered, both in public and in private, resem- 
 
 [47] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 ble the petulant teasing of wilful and selfish 
 infants. The expectation that God will make 
 us His special favorites, immune from sor- 
 row and sin and exempt from the punish- 
 ment of sin, simply because we ask Him to 
 do so is as foreign to the true conception of 
 prayer as the selfishness underlying the ex- 
 pectation is foreign to the nature of God. 
 No effort of the finite will can change the 
 Infinite will. No petition of man can ren- 
 der null and void the operation of a single 
 one of God's changeless and beneficent laws. 
 Again, prayer is not a substitute for com- 
 mon sense, nor for purposeful human en- 
 deavour. If we ask God for things which 
 to us seem reasonably in opposition to His 
 will, as it has been revealed to us in nature 
 and by science as well as in religion and by 
 faith, we cannot hope for such prayer to be 
 efficacious. And if we ask God to do for us 
 those things which He has very evidently 
 intended that we should do for ourselves, 
 we shall likewise find our petitions of little 
 avail. Such prayer is based not upon the 
 mutual understanding and the friendship 
 [48] 
 
PREVAILING PRAYER 
 
 contained in the idea of communion, but 
 upon an unsympathetic and unfriendly mis- 
 understanding which makes real communion 
 impossible. 
 
 Prayer is always the communion of man 
 with God. It includes, therefore, that kind 
 of petition which is in accord with man's 
 understanding of God. Its results can be 
 expected only in that kind of helpfulness 
 which is in accordance with God's under- 
 standing of men. The ascending petition 
 is human in its scope, and may therefore be 
 faulty, both in matter and in manner of ex- 
 pression. The resulting answer will be di- 
 vine in its nature, and its helpfulness may 
 therefore be in terms not immediately rec- 
 ognizable by the human petitioner. Thus, 
 when it is said that God sometimes seems to 
 answer men's prayers with a "No" instead 
 of with a "Yes," the truth in the saying is 
 that the divine nature of the helpful answer 
 is not immediately comprehensible to our 
 human understanding. 
 
 We must seek for the value of commun- 
 ion with God exactly as we seek for the 
 [49] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 value of human friendship. Only a child 
 values his friend's love because of the play- 
 things which the friend bestows. A mature 
 person values his friends for deeper and 
 dearer reasons. The true measure of the 
 helpfulness of the friendship lies not in the 
 things which the friend may bestow, but in 
 the influences which communion with the 
 friend engenders. 
 
 So the real value of prayer is to be sought 
 in a certain new efficiency which is created 
 by men's communion with the power of God. 
 We must not think of this new efficiency 
 as something which is granted by God's 
 graciousness alone, but as something which 
 inevitably results from men's conscious and 
 voluntary co-operation with God's power. 
 
 There is really no power of God in all the 
 world which becomes operative in its great- 
 est efficiency without the co-operation of 
 man. The sunshine and the rain may fall 
 upon both the just and the unjust, but they 
 do not accomplish a sufficient harvest until 
 men till the soil and plant the seed. The 
 stream runs merrily through the green 
 [50] 
 
PREVAILING PRAYER 
 
 meadows and the shady woods, and anybody 
 who will may see its beauty and listen to its 
 music, but the stream does not grind the 
 miller's corn without the co-operation of the 
 man at the water wheel. Steam does not 
 bear heavy burdens, carry its millions of 
 passengers, and convey its tons of freight 
 until the steam has become harnessed and 
 controlled by man. Electricity does not 
 perform its varied and helpful ministry to 
 the world without man's assistance. Why, 
 then, should we expect God's spiritual forces 
 of health and strength and trust and love 
 and life to become completely efficient in 
 men's lives without their co-operation with 
 God? 
 
 Here is the argument by analogy. Com- 
 munion with God results in a more efficient 
 operation of God's spiritual forces in men's 
 lives just as co-operation with Him results 
 in the efficiency of His physical forces. 
 And the results in the one case are really 
 as natural as in the other. 
 
 And here is the argument from experi- 
 ence. Whenever men have communed with 
 [51] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 God, when, trying to understand His na- 
 ture of love, they have gone to Him with 
 their needs and with their desires, they have 
 always been helped. That is the universal 
 testimony of men whose word is trustworthy. 
 When such men tell us that by turning a 
 button on the wall of their room they can 
 flood their room with light, we believe them. 
 When they tell us that by putting themselves 
 in touch with the force of God's love by 
 communion they are able to flood their souls 
 with the light of hope and of courage and 
 of new efficiency, we should likewise believe 
 them. In both instances they are accom- 
 plishing the helpful results in union with the 
 power of God. In neither instance would 
 or could the light come without their union 
 with Him. 
 
 Prayer is the human touch upon the divine 
 power. The result of that touch is the divine 
 power made operative and efficient. 
 
 The divine power is always thus made 
 
 operative. This is the conception of prayer 
 
 and of its value which makes its helpfulness 
 
 inevitable, just because of the immutability 
 
 [52] 
 
PREVAILING PRAYER 
 
 of law. The laws of spiritual life are as 
 changeless as are the laws of gravity and of 
 evolution. God's love in the heart is a con- 
 stant force exactly as is His power in na- 
 ture. The man who touches the button must 
 alw^ays receive the light, for the divine power 
 which he is thus utilizing never varies. 
 
 But this conception of prayer, in accord 
 with immutable law and love, suggests that 
 the petitioner must act only and always in 
 harmony with that love. A self-seeking 
 petition is not prayer as it has been here de- 
 fined, for the self-seeking petition is not in 
 harmony with the immutability of love. 
 When a man asks only for those things 
 which shall make life easier for himself, he is 
 asking for the light without the effort of the 
 co-operating touch. He is asking, but not 
 praying. But when the petitioner asks 
 either by word or by thought for those 
 things which shall make his life more use- 
 ful, his friends' lives more useful, the entire 
 family of God's children more in harmony 
 with each other and with their one Father 
 of love, then, so far as we can understand 
 [53] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 the nature and the purposes of God's love, 
 his petition is in harmony with that love. 
 Then his prayer cannot be in vain. It must 
 prevail. He may be mistaken in his estimate 
 of the helpful value of the particular things 
 which he desires. That mistake is the prod- 
 uct of his human immaturity. But only let 
 him be sure that he is unselfish in his peti- 
 tion, and he may ask in faith without waver- 
 ing, assured from the truths of nature as 
 well as from the truths of revelation that 
 the divine power by his co-operation will 
 become efficient, even in ways, it may be, that 
 he cannot quite understand. 
 
 ''Our Father," so Jesus taught His dis- 
 ciples to pray, and the address necessitates 
 on men's part both a filial confidence and a 
 filial obedience. We can tell "Our Father" 
 all our childish distresses and bring to Him 
 all our childish desires, but the communion 
 with "Our Father" will not be real nor will 
 its results be efficacious unless we come to 
 Him in humble consecration, saying, "Thy 
 will be done." 
 
 [54] 
 
SAVING FORGIVENESS 
 
 CHAPTER FOUR 
 
"And he arose and came to his father. But while he was 
 yet afar off, his father saw him, and was moved with compas- 
 sion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. And the 
 son said unto him, ' Father, I have sinned against heaven, and 
 in thy sight ; I am no more worthy to be called thy son.' But 
 the father said to his servants, ' Bring forth quickly the best 
 robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes 
 on his feet ; and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat, 
 and make merry ; for this my son was dead, and is alive again : 
 he was lost, and is found.'" — Luke 15:20-24. 
 
SAVING FORGIVENESS 
 
 The study of comparative religions reveals 
 at least one element which is common to 
 them all. Indeed, by many students this 
 element is thought to be the cause of the 
 very birth of religion. This common and 
 perhaps causal element is due to the con- 
 sciousness of all mankind of the need of 
 what the Christian religion calls forgiveness. 
 It is a consciousness born of the sense of 
 un worthiness ; and the sense of unworthiness 
 in turn has been induced by the conscious- 
 ness of variance from the will and purpose 
 of the Deity. 
 
 In primitive religions the need of forgive- 
 ness found its expression in crude and oft- 
 times horrible forms of propitiatory rites 
 and ceremonies. As civilization advanced, 
 the propitiatory rites became more refined. 
 There was, for instance, the substitution of 
 the sacrifice of the brute animal for the hu- 
 man individual, the slaughter of innocent 
 
 [57] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 lambs and turtledoves, instead of the mur- 
 der of innocent children and of hapless wo- 
 men, but the object of the propitiatory rite 
 remained the same — to appease the wrath of 
 the God who had become estranged by men's 
 sins. 
 
 When civilization had so far advanced 
 that men could no longer think of God as 
 an angry Potentate, but only as a just Sov- 
 ereign, the propitiation by the sacrifice of 
 beasts became, in turn, displaced by the pro- 
 pitiation thought to inliere in the sacrifice 
 of one man once for all. But even after 
 this sacrifice, "once for all," we find men 
 still praying for their restoration into that 
 harmony with God which they felt had been 
 broken by their own wrong doings. 
 
 At this day there are professing Chris- 
 tians who do not believe in the propitiatory 
 value of the death of Jesus, but they all 
 believe in the need of forgiveness. There 
 are those who deny the reality of sin, but 
 they admit the fact of the error of sin; and 
 the need of the restoration of those in error 
 to the mind of God is the same need which 
 [58] 
 
SAVING FORGIVENESS 
 
 most Christians call the need of forgive- 
 ness. 
 
 If we could imagine that the conscious- 
 ness of sin could be universally obliterated 
 from men's minds, we should not thereby 
 imagine the necessary end of all religion; 
 but we should be imagining a modification of 
 rehgion which it is extremely hard for us 
 to understand. This religion of the millen- 
 nium would be so different from any form 
 of religion with which we are now familiar 
 that we should hardly recognize it as re- 
 ligion at all. The harmonious community 
 of all men in the Spirit of God would be in 
 comparison with religion as we know it, like 
 the heaven of our anticipation to the earth 
 of our experience. 
 
 Since in this state of existence we are but 
 struggling upward to God, and in our im- 
 maturity are continually failing in our 
 struggles, there must always be in the re- 
 ligion of this existence the desire for restora- 
 tion into harmony with God. Until the 
 human race becomes fully matured, whether 
 in this world or in any world to come, the 
 [59] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 consciousness of variation from God's will 
 must always be a part of every man's experi- 
 ence, and the need of restoration will always 
 be a causal, or at least a contributory ele- 
 ment in every man's religion. 
 
 It has, indeed, become customary in these 
 modern days for Christian preachers to neg- 
 lect to address their own hearers as sinners. 
 They have fallen into the way of talking to 
 their hearers about the sins of those who 
 never come to Church, and about the gen- 
 eral sins of corporate bodies in society and 
 in industry. Perhaps the Church has come 
 to think of its own members and regular 
 attendants as not like other men — extor- 
 tioners, licentious, and openly corrupt — and 
 to pray to God the Pharisee's prayer of 
 gratitude for this self -righteousness, instead 
 of the publican's prayer of penitence for 
 sin. 
 
 But sin in its essence is not open immor- 
 ality. That is only one of the expressions 
 of sin. Sin is just selfishness. Sin is plac- 
 ing one's own comfort and ease and pleasure 
 above the welfare of others. Sin is the self- 
 [60] 
 
SAVING FORGIVENESS 
 
 ishness of pride, and the selfishness of prej- 
 udice. Sin is the selfishness of narrowness 
 and of bigotry. It is the selfishness of in- 
 difference and of unconcern. It is the self- 
 ishness of neglected duty and of postponed 
 service. Sin is any kind of selfishness that 
 is ever felt or in any manner expressed. 
 
 With this description of sin in our minds, 
 we can but expect all men to admit their 
 own sinfulness. But we do not, therefore, 
 expect that the admission will to-day cause 
 men's faces to blanch and their knees to 
 tremble. Those people who are wont to look 
 back with longing to the days of the anxious 
 seat, and to complain that the present age 
 has no sense of the enormity of sin, are mis- 
 taking the sense of enormity of sin for the 
 fear of the enormity of sin's punishment. 
 That which has brought us to the sense of 
 our guilt is not fear, but love. With Jesus' 
 teachings of the Father, we can no longer 
 go to the anxious seat with pale faces, 
 praying an estranged God to dehver us from 
 eternal punishment. In our consciousness 
 of sin we are only to go back to the waiting, 
 [61] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 watching, loving Father. Our concern is 
 not with the question, can we sinners, by 
 any propitiation, become reconciled to an es- 
 tranged Sovereign? This is our concern — 
 can we sinners be restored to harmony with 
 the Father who loves us? 
 ■ One of the most searching objections to 
 the value of religion is the denial of the 
 possibility of sin's forgiveness. With the 
 truth or falsity of this denial, religion as 
 we know it will perish or live. Our religion 
 must prove itself efficient for sinners or ad- 
 mit its total inefficiency, for it has only con- 
 fessed or unconfessed sinners with whom 
 to deal. 
 
 Here is the line of the familiar argument 
 for the impossibility of forgiveness. The 
 moral order, like the natural order, is im- 
 mutable and inviolable. If it were other- 
 wise, we should have no moral order at all. 
 To believe that the moral order can be vio- 
 lated without disaster is to introduce moral 
 chaos. Disaster must be as inevitable to the 
 sinner as to him who breaks a natural law. 
 The falling body will strike the ground. 
 [62] 
 
SAVING FORGIVENESS 
 
 The falling soul can expect only a similar 
 destination. "The soul that sinneth, it 
 must die." 
 
 We cannot disprove this argument by the 
 mere revolt of our souls against its hope- 
 less conclusion. The common answer, which 
 unfortunately is sometimes made in the very 
 name of religion, that the inevitableness of 
 sin's disaster cannot be true, because all men 
 instinctively shrink from its truth, is simply 
 puerile prattle. Men also shrink from the 
 truth of the inevitableness of nature. When 
 it is the body of an innocent child who by 
 the misstep of ignorance is dashed to the 
 ground, who of us does not revolt at heart 
 from the seemingly harsh inexorableness of 
 nature's law? But in spite of our revolt, 
 nature goes serenely on its determined way. 
 Because we do not any of us really want 
 to die in sin is no valid argument against 
 the inevitableness of that death. 
 
 We can reasonably refute an argument 
 which is solidly based upon fact only by the 
 interposition of other solid facts. Believ- 
 ing as we must in the inviolability of the 
 [63] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 moral order, we cannot reasonably believe in 
 the possibility of forgiveness unless we can 
 show that forgiveness is not a contradiction 
 of that order, but indeed a very part of it. 
 
 This must be the line of our argument of 
 refutation. The moral order is immutable 
 and inviolable. But what is the moral or- 
 der? Is the moral order malevolent or be- 
 nevolent? Is it the product of unintelli- 
 gent and heartless force, or the expression of 
 a thoughtful and loving will? 
 
 When we seek a reply to this fair question, 
 we note that even the natural order is not 
 relentlessly malevolent. A close scrutiny 
 of nature reveals the presence everywhere 
 of healing, remedial agencies. The man 
 who breaks a law of nature does not in- 
 evitably perish. If his violation of nature's 
 law makes him sick, there are remedies in na- 
 ture and power in the God of nature to cure 
 him of his sickness. If his body is wounded 
 by his violation of law, coagulation will stop 
 the flow of the blood from the wound, and 
 by nature's healing process the new skin 
 will be formed. 
 
 [64] 
 
SAVING FORGIVENESS 
 
 By analogy we should expect to find, not 
 outside of the moral order, but within that 
 order itsdf, some provision for the cure of 
 the sinful soul. And when we see every 
 day men, now happy in the assurance of sins 
 forgiven, who were once miserable in unf or- 
 given sin, we ought reasonably to regard this 
 spectacle just as we regard the spectacle of 
 the healthy man who was once sick in body. 
 We ought to regard it as evidence, not that 
 the moral order itself has been abrogated, 
 but that the benevolence of the moral order 
 has been vindicated. Instead of the asser- 
 tion that because of the immutability of the 
 moral order no sin can be forgiven, we must 
 assert that because of the immutability of the 
 benevolence of that order sin can be for- 
 given. Over against the sombre words of 
 the decree of immutable law, "The soul that 
 sinneth, it must die," we then are permitted 
 to read the glowing words of the decree of 
 an equally immutable love, "If we confess 
 our sins. He is faithful and just to forgive 
 us our sins." The moral order, like the 
 natural order, is the expression of the will 
 [65] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 of God, and everywhere we read the truth 
 that God is love. 
 
 But while we find the place for the for- 
 giveness of sin in the changeless moral order 
 and not outside it, we must note that there 
 is a prevalent idea of forgiveness w^hich is 
 wholly untenable. It is the idea that for- 
 giveness means only the remission of the de- 
 served punishment of sin. 
 
 Such an idea is unreasonable from the 
 very argument which makes forgiveness 
 credible. Forgiveness is credible, as has just 
 been indicated, only on the basis of the im- 
 mutability of the benevolence of the moral 
 order. To remit the punishment of sin 
 would be as destructive to the idea of be- 
 nevolence as to the corresponding idea of 
 immutability. If sin did not always end in 
 punishment, the educational force of the 
 moral order would be altogether wanting, 
 and there really can be no conceivable be- 
 nevolence which is not educational. Fire 
 burns ; it always burns ; it always must burn ; 
 not only because nature is changeless, but 
 also because nature is benevolent. There 
 [66] 
 
SAVING FORGIVENESS 
 
 is no other way for a benevolent nature to 
 teach men to keep away from the fire except 
 by the way of the inevitableness of the con- 
 sequence of fire. When men expect God to 
 take away from them all the natural and in- 
 evitable consequences of their wrong doing, 
 they are really expecting Him to act con- 
 trary to His nature of love. This, indeed, 
 would be the introduction into the world of 
 God of moral chaos. 
 
 But this is not the kind of forgiveness 
 which the children of God need. This con- 
 ception of forgiveness is as unhelpful to 
 men as it is unreasonable. No idea has done 
 more harm to the religion of Jesus than this. 
 Embracing this false idea, men have called 
 themselves Christians only because of their 
 fear of punishment. They have minimized 
 the value of Christ's love and sacrifice, "ac- 
 cepting Him" only as the scapegoat upon 
 whom their own sins have been unjustly 
 visited; and they have settled down into a 
 life of ease and content, sometimes to a life 
 of continued sin, indulging the enervating 
 delusion that the "blood of Jesus" has paid 
 [67] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 their ransom price, emancipating them only 
 from the punishment of sin. 
 
 This conception of the forgiveness of sin 
 had its logical development in the sale of in- 
 dulgence to sin. And though "indulgences" 
 are no longer openly purchased, the debili- 
 tating influence of the idea is still present 
 in the lives of those who cling to their dar- 
 ling sins in the hope that by and by, perhaps 
 by means of a hasty deathbed confession, 
 they may find immunity from deserved pun- 
 ishment through reliance upon the sacrifice 
 of Christ. The forgiveness promised by 
 the religion of Jesus will not become a real 
 saving power in men's lives until this false 
 and emasculating idea is completely aban- 
 doned. 
 
 Forgiveness is an act which requires the 
 voluntary co-operation of two persons. 
 There must be both the person who grants 
 and the person who takes. He who has 
 been wronged, must be willing to bestow 
 mercy; he who has done the wrong, must 
 be willing to receive the mercy. It does not 
 follow, therefore, that all sins must be for- 
 [68] 
 
SAVING FORGIVENESS 
 
 given because God has revealed to men His 
 invariable mercy. Before the forgiveness 
 promised in God's love becomes actual, there 
 must be added to the willingness of God a 
 willingness in men. 
 
 The man who does not confess his sins, 
 truly repent of them, and heartily determine 
 to turn away from them, cannot reasonably 
 expect forgiveness, not because these things 
 are arbitrary conditions to God's offer, but 
 simply because they are the only adequate 
 expression of the man's willingness to re- 
 ceive. Confession avails for the sinful soul 
 what the recital of symptoms avails for the 
 diseased body. It is the acknowledgment 
 of the inharmonious condition. Repentance 
 avails to the sinner as a trustful submission 
 to the physician avails to the sick. It is in 
 reality the disavowal of the inharmonious 
 conditions. The determination to turn away 
 from sin avails as does the acceptance of 
 the physician's prescription and the obedi- 
 ence to the physician's orders. It is the 
 attempt to co-operate with the healing and 
 restoring agencies. 
 
 [69] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 Without this co-operation of sinful men 
 with the loving God, in spite of the immuta- 
 ble benevolence of the moral order, which 
 is only another way of saying, in spite of 
 the eternal willingness of God, the sin will 
 remain un forgiven. 
 
 We are ready now for a definition of for- 
 giveness. Forgiveness is the restoration of 
 the sinner into the redemptive, strengthen- 
 ing love of God. It is accomplished by the 
 voluntary co-operation of man with God. 
 Through physical suffering and through 
 mental anguish, through sorrow for the ir- 
 remediable wrong done to one's self and to 
 others, some of the inevitable punishment of 
 sin must persist ; but through the confession 
 and true repentance of the sinner, through 
 his willingness and determination to come 
 back into harmony with the moral order 
 which has been violated, God's eternal will- 
 ingness to grant forgiveness is made opera- 
 tive and the harmony is restored. The res- 
 toration of the harmony through confession 
 and true repentance is as inevitable in the 
 law of God's love as the unpleasant con- 
 [70] 
 
SAVING FORGIVENESS 
 
 sequences of sin are inevitable by the same 
 law. 
 
 Forgiveness, thus defined, must be con- 
 sidered not as a mere possibility. When 
 the necessary conditions are fulfilled, it be- 
 comes an unavoidable certainty. The truth 
 which Jesus taught and lived of the Fatherly 
 care of God, makes it possible for no man 
 to believe other than that his truly repented 
 sin must be forgiven. The "unforgivable 
 sin," sometimes called the sin against the 
 Holy Ghost, must be considered only as the 
 sin of continued impenitence. Whenever 
 any man, however far he may have wan- 
 dered, "comes to himself" and comes back 
 to his Father of love, he will always find 
 the Father waiting to restore to him his lost 
 sonship. Whenever, like the prodigal son 
 in the parable, he is ready to say, "Father, 
 I have sinned, but I want to come back 
 home, and I want to be more worthy," then 
 the kiss of forgiveness will be immediate 
 and the restoration will be complete. 
 
 By whatever motive the sinner may be in- 
 duced to come back into harmony with the 
 
 [71] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 Father's love matters little. The prodigal 
 of the parable seemingly "came to himself" 
 just because his body became weary of the 
 unsatisfying husks. Perhaps his motive 
 was the lowest of all. It may be that the 
 highest motive is the souFs dissatisfaction 
 with the uselessness of the life of sin, due to 
 the soul's awakening to the virile desire to 
 be of some use in the world. But whatever 
 the motive, only let the prodigal go to the 
 Father in penitence, and the Father will 
 forgive, aye, must forgive, for the Father's 
 very nature is changeless love. 
 
 It is true, too, that the restoration will be 
 complete by whatever road the penitent sin- 
 ner may return. He may accept some phil- 
 osophical statement of the truth of Christ's 
 sacrifice for him. Or, without any definite 
 knowledge of the philosophy or of the the- 
 ology of Christ's religion, he may come di- 
 rectly to the Father Himself, led by the hand 
 of some human friend who loves him. Or 
 he may come back to the Father, guided 
 thereto by the echo in his heart of some 
 single word of hope and of encouragement. 
 
 [72] 
 
SAVING FORGIVENESS 
 
 There are many ways to the heart of the 
 Father's love, and no single interpretation 
 of Christ's religion can justly claim a mo- 
 nopoly of those ways. The mercy of God's 
 forgiveness is ready for all those who come 
 by any of the different ways, provided only 
 that they come in penitence, willing to re- 
 ceive the forgiveness which God is ever will- 
 ing to bestow. 
 
 And this is what the forgiveness will al- 
 ways accomplish in any man's life. It will 
 give him new efficiency for helpful service 
 in the world. One could wish that Jesus 
 had carried the story of the prodigal a little 
 farther. We should like to know what hap- 
 pened to that wayward son after his restora- 
 tion to his father's home. Was he never 
 again tempted to go away into new scenes of 
 prodigality? But w^e are left to answer 
 this interesting query only by reference to 
 our own experiences and to the experiences 
 of our friends and acquaintances. From 
 what we know of ourselves and from what 
 we observe in others, we cannot believe that 
 the father's ready forgiveness completely 
 [73] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 eradicated from the son's heart all sinful 
 tendencies. Forgiveness is not the end of 
 salvation, which in its essence is the develop- 
 ment of noble and serviceable character. It 
 is just the beginning of salvation. After 
 the forgiveness there may come new tempta- 
 tions. But the restoration to the lost son- 
 ship in the Father's love gives new powers 
 of resistance. The practical value of it all 
 to any man is just this new power of re- 
 sistance and this new power of helpfulness. 
 It is the reawakening of the heart of the 
 sinner to consciousness of his obhgations, 
 his privileges, and his powers as the son of 
 God. It is the restoration of his sonship. 
 The forgiveness that will save us is the 
 assured forgiveness of the Father's love co- 
 operating with our willingness, enabling us 
 to live not merely in the hope of future bliss 
 in His mercy, but in the practice of a present 
 usefulness in His service. 
 
 [74] 
 
ABUNDANT HEALTH 
 
 CHAPTER FIVE 
 
" He called the twelve together and gave them power and 
 authority over all devils, and to cure diseases. And he sent 
 them forth ... to heal the sick." — Luke 9:1, 2. 
 
ABUNDANT HEALTH 
 
 It is narrated in the Gospels that the im- 
 prisoned John the Baptist, in a moment of 
 doubt, sent two disciples to Jesus who asked 
 Him this direct question, "Art Thou He that 
 should come, or do we look for another?" 
 Jesus did not meet the question with a dog- 
 matic assertion, nor with a metaphysical ar- 
 gument. His answer was couched in the 
 form of a visible demonstration. "In that 
 same hour," the narrative of Luke states, 
 "He cured many of diseases and plagues and 
 evil spirits ; and on many that were blind He 
 bestowed sight." After He had performed 
 this helpful ministry to men's suffering 
 bodies. He turned to the emissaries of the 
 doubting Forerunner and said to them, "Go, 
 tell John what things ye have seen." 
 
 As we proceed with the biography of 
 Jesus, we discover that not only did He 
 Himself claim to demonstrate God's power 
 by healing the sick, but He bade His dis- 
 ciples to do likewise. The inference from 
 
 [77] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 this extension of the healing ministry is quite 
 plain. Jesus did not believe that the power 
 to cure the sick was a peculiar power resi- 
 dent only in Himself, but that it was a 
 power universally practicable by all who 
 should follow His example and become im- 
 bued with His spirit. 
 
 The history of the development of Christ's 
 religion, however, reveals the fact that all 
 of the followers of Jesus appar^^tly have 
 not accepted His view of the inevitable 
 relation between God's power and men's 
 bodies. The professed Christians of the 
 first century, it is true, are reported to have 
 cured diseases, but the twentieth century 
 Christians are accustomed to denominate 
 such powers as "miracles," more or less in- 
 credible and altogether inexplicable. Some 
 of the "saints" of the Middle Ages are also 
 said to have performed "miraculous" cures; 
 and the twentieth century is wont to look 
 upon these reports only as the evidence of 
 the credulity and superstition of an unsci- 
 entific age. So far have we of the pres- 
 ent day divorced ourselves in this particu- 
 [78] 
 
ABUNDANT HEALTH 
 
 lar from Christ's teaching and practice, that 
 when a certain sect of Christians now claims 
 to demonstrate God's power by healing 
 men's bodies, the great majority of Christ's 
 professed followers are moved either to jeers 
 or to bitter denunciation. 
 
 What is the reason for this departure 
 from the practice and the evident thought 
 of Jesus? Here are the commonly offered 
 explanations. 
 
 Christ cured diseases, it is said, not be- 
 cause such cures were an essential part of 
 His ministry, but only because in the age 
 which looked for signs and wonders these 
 miracles were the only way by which He 
 could attract men's attention and win their 
 confidence. This explanation makes the 
 Christian care for the bodies of men only 
 an incidental and temporary manifestation 
 of God's power, a first century means to an 
 end, the end, of course, being the manifesta- 
 tion of God's forgiving love applied to 
 men's souls. 
 
 A second explanation of the cures of 
 Christ and of His immediate disciples sug- 
 
 [79] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 gests that this ministry to men's bodily 
 needs was performed only because there was 
 in Christ's time no adequate scientific treat- 
 ment of diseases, and that cures in Christ's 
 name are no longer possible because now 
 they are unneeded. By the logic of this 
 explanation, the science of medicine is con- 
 ceived as having usurped this particular 
 work of Jesus. Drugs and tonics have ab- 
 rogated the power of His healing word and 
 touch. 
 
 There is truth in both of these explana- 
 tions. Undoubtedly the spectacular and 
 seemingly miraculous method by which 
 Jesus performed His cures was both a de- 
 mand and a product of the age in which He 
 lived. It is also undoubtedly true that had 
 Christ's age possessed our modern, God-in- 
 spired equipments for the treatment of dis- 
 eases, at least the manner of His cures would 
 have been modified. 
 
 But neither of these explanations is quite 
 sufficient. The cures of Jesus were some- 
 thing more than "miracles." They were 
 benefactions. The significant element in 
 [80] 
 
ABUNDANT HEALTH 
 
 His healing ministry was not the incredible 
 wonder, but the pitying love. And science 
 never can abrogate the need of the healing 
 ministry of love. It seems that Jesus loved 
 the whole man — the soul which his body but 
 dimly revealed, and the body which was the 
 soul's medium of development and of ex- 
 pression. The sick man, like the sinful 
 man, was to Jesus out of harmony with 
 God's plan, therefore he was to be pitied 
 and saved. It was Christ's desire and at- 
 tempt to make men "every whit whole." 
 
 If the followers of Jesus have lost any 
 part of that desire, they have lost a part of 
 the Christ-like breadth of S3anpathy. If 
 they have ceased to make the attempt to save 
 any part of the man that needs salvation, 
 they have ceased to perform a part of the 
 Christ-like ministry. To the followers of 
 Him who came to save the whole man to his 
 best estate the sick must still arouse pity, 
 and unless the religion of Jesus can help the 
 sick in body, it will ever have hard work to 
 prove that it can helj) the sick in soul. 
 
 But when we admit that the twentieth 
 [81] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 century disciples of Jesus should, like Christ 
 Himself, demonstrate the power and the 
 love of God by healing the sick, we must 
 not limit these modern disciples to Christ's 
 exact method of healing. We call Christ's 
 cures miraculous because we do not quite 
 understand the manner of their accomplish- 
 ment, and we are prone to limit the use of 
 the term "Christian healing" to similar, un- 
 usual, and apparently inexplicable achieve- 
 ments. Thus we say that a physician cures 
 by science, but that a Christian must cure 
 by "faith." We call the results of the 
 ministry of the country doctor natural, and 
 the results of the ministry of some "faith 
 healer," or "Christian Scientist healer," su- 
 pernatural. But, as a matter of fact, one 
 kind of cure is no more wonderful than 
 another. No cure is explicable except it 
 be attributed to that unknown redemptive 
 power which some people call nature and 
 others God. 
 
 In all cases of cure the necessary condi- 
 tion and the contributory cause is an obedi- 
 ent and reposeful trust. The healer, to 
 [82] 
 
ABUNDANT HEALTH 
 
 whatever school he may belong, who can 
 command such trust, creates the condition 
 under which the redemptive power of God, 
 or nature, accomplishes the beneficent re- 
 sult. And any philosophy or so-called 
 ''Christian Science," or rehgious belief which 
 can induce this essential condition to health, 
 has as much right to the claim of heahng 
 power as has any accredited physician the 
 world has ever known. 
 
 Right here is where the true religion of 
 Jesus Christ makes its claim to the contin- 
 ued power to minister to the bodies of men. 
 The religion of Jesus, when rightly under- 
 stood and truly appropriated into one's hf e, 
 can and does induce this essential condition 
 and cause of health. If a man has truly 
 accepted Christ's religion, he believes that 
 God is his Father, and that his Father doeth 
 all things well. He practices obedience to 
 his Father's will, as made known to him by 
 the discovered laws of hygiene as well as 
 by the revealed laws of love. He therefore 
 lives, or at least the Christian should Kve, 
 in obedient and reposeful trust. This 
 [83] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 causal condition of health in himself he 
 makes operative in the lives of others by the 
 power of his influence. 
 
 It would, indeed, be a sad thing for the 
 world if the health-producing confidence in 
 God were the possession only of those who 
 believe in the teachings of Mrs. Eddy, or of 
 any other modern exponent of a single heal- 
 ing cult. This health-producing confidence 
 is the heritage of all who, through Christ's 
 teachings, have come vitally to trust in the 
 Father's love. And wherever, under the 
 particular name of whatever sect or cult, 
 that trust becomes a reality in the life, its 
 influence upon the health of the body is 
 inevitable. The religion of Jesus still makes 
 and keeps men well, because that religion 
 is based upon the Christ-taught confidence 
 in God. 
 
 This apparent generalization is not an 
 evasion of the issue before us. At first 
 thought it may seem that the Christian who 
 is merely obedient and reposeful in his con- 
 fidence in God falls very short of obedi- 
 ence to Christ's specific command to His dis- 
 [84] 
 
ABUNDANT HEALTH 
 
 ciples to heal the sick. And the somewhat 
 general health-giving atmosphere which such 
 Christians create by their influence may 
 seem very different from the specific cures 
 which the earlier disciples performed, and 
 which certain sects of modern disciples still 
 perform. The apparent difference, how- 
 ever, is due to the fact already noted, that 
 we are wont to limit the operation of the 
 Christian's healing power to the first century 
 methods. But really in the Christian's heal- 
 ing power as well as in Christ's power the 
 significant element is not the miraculous 
 method of the cure, but still just the bene- 
 faction of love. It may be doubted whether 
 the disciples were commanded to perform 
 miracles when they were sent out to heal 
 the sick. They were commanded only to 
 help their fellow-men in their present needs. 
 With unwarranted assumption we have 
 called their obedience to that command mi- 
 raculous, but we must remember that the 
 obedience had been as real and as efficacious, 
 even though we could explain all the details 
 by which the cures were performed. 
 [85] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 It is quite possible that the science of 
 psychology, in its relation to therapeutics, 
 may sometimes reduce the cures of Jesus and 
 of His disciples to natural effects from nat- 
 ural causes. Indeed, the only way we can 
 reasonably believe in the cures which to us 
 now seem miraculous, is to believe that the 
 miraculous element is present only because 
 we do not know enough of the operation of 
 spiritual laws to understand just how the 
 cures were accomplished. But if the happy 
 day comes when the "miracle" shall be ex- 
 plained away, the cure itself will have lost 
 none of its wonder as the evidence of the 
 power of God's pitying, saving love. 
 
 And so if we say concerning the modern 
 power of Christ's religion to cure that the 
 power is becoming, in some degree, expli- 
 cable by the modern understanding of psy- 
 chologic conditions, we do not detract one 
 whit from the truth that it is still God's 
 power of pitying, saving love that performs 
 the cure. When we say that real confidence 
 in God will produce the conditions of obedi- 
 ence and repose essential to health, and that 
 [86] 
 
ABUNDANT HEALTH 
 
 such obedience and repose must have their 
 inevitable influence upon the health of 
 others, we may be talking in the language 
 of modern psychology, but we are none the 
 less talking also the language of the heal- 
 ing power of God. 
 
 We cannot reasonably discredit in toto 
 the claims of the modern "faith healer" and 
 the "Christian Scientist" any more than we 
 can discredit the cures of Jesus and of His 
 early disciples. For what evidence have we 
 that God is limited as to the method of the 
 operation of His healing power? But, on 
 the other hand, we must not limit Christ's 
 healing to any of these particular ways in 
 which cures have been or may be accom- 
 plished. In so far as these methods result 
 in good, in so far are they evidence, not that 
 God's power works in any one exclusive 
 method, but that many methods may accom- 
 plish the necessary condition of health. 
 
 Mrs. Eddy, evidently upon the founda- 
 tion of other thinkers who had preceded 
 her, built up a system of philosophy which 
 she called a science. She said that God was 
 
 [87] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 all and that God was good, and that there- 
 fore nothing that was not good could exist. 
 Disease and sin to her were unreal, the 
 "errors" of "mortal mind." To demonstrate 
 the truth of this philosophy she claimed the 
 power to make sick people well. "Here is 
 a man who once believed he was ill; now he 
 believes he is well. Therefore, the truth of 
 my assertions of the nothingness of dis- 
 ease and of the allness of God has been vin- 
 dicated." That was her argument. But 
 really Mrs. Eddy not only claimed too much 
 from her "demonstration;" there was a cer- 
 tain sense in which she claimed too little. 
 
 This man, who by the acceptance of her 
 interpretation of religion has been brought 
 into buoyant health, has not demonstrated 
 the truth of Mrs. Eddy's philosophy, but he 
 has done much more than that. He has 
 demonstrated the energizing, health-giving 
 power of a simple confidence in God. Once 
 he lived in dread of the omnipresent germs 
 of disease. Now he trusts the omnipresence 
 of the divine love. Once he worried about 
 his work and about his friends, about the 
 [88] 
 
ABUNDANT HEALTH 
 
 possible ill-effects of what happened yester- 
 day, and the probable ill-effects of what he 
 was afraid would happen to-morrow. Now 
 he dwells securely in his trust in the God of 
 love who is the same yesterday, to-day, and 
 forever. Is it any wonder that his health 
 has become energized? Is it in any degree 
 remarkable that his physical powers have be- 
 come strengthened? 
 
 But he who has accepted any other of the 
 many prevailing interpretations of Christ's 
 religion can have the same health-giving 
 trust in the changeless, omnipotent, and om- 
 nipresent God of love. He ought to have 
 it. He must have it, if his Christianity be 
 real. And when he has that trust, what- 
 ever may be his accepted creed or his de- 
 nominational preference, he has all that the 
 professed Christian Scientist has or can 
 have. He has that which can and must en- 
 ergize all his physical powers to the efficient 
 performance of all his required physical 
 labours; for he has that which dispels all 
 disease-producing fear and worry, and that 
 which promotes a health-producing obedi- 
 
 [89] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 ence to the laws of physical well-being. He 
 has been made whole by the religion of 
 Jesus, and if he lives in his confidence in 
 God and inculcates a like confidence in 
 others, he has helped to make them whole. 
 
 It is confidence in God, then, and not con- 
 fidence in any of the interpretations of re- 
 ligion, which creates the abundant health. 
 
 The truth of this assertion of the healing 
 power of confidence in God is reasonably 
 based upon the revealed truth of the Holy 
 Word. It is re-enforced by the conception 
 and practice of Jesus Himself. It is 
 strengthened by the modern discoveries in 
 psychological and religious therapeutics. 
 But the truth of the assertion cannot be 
 proven to any individual except by trial and 
 success. It cannot be disproven except by 
 trial and failure. Try it for yourselves. 
 Live obediently, unafraid, and undisturbed 
 in the confidence that God is love, and see 
 what that confidence will do for you. Live 
 in that confidence and see what, through its 
 influence, you can do for others. 
 
 [90] 
 
SUFFICIENT CONSOLATION 
 CHAPTER SIX 
 
"I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another 
 Comforter, that he may abide with you forever. . . . He shall 
 teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance 
 whatsoever I have said unto you." — John 14: 16, 26. 
 
SUFFICIENT CONSOLATION 
 
 Apparently many people believe that the 
 principal use of religion is to be found in 
 its promised consolation. This mistaken 
 notion is seemingly held not only by the mul- 
 titudes who never think of embracing re- 
 ligion at all except in time of sorrow, but 
 also by many of the very exponents of re- 
 ligion who are wont to present it, dressed, 
 as it were, always in the garb of mourning. 
 Thus preachers of the religion of Jesus have 
 been known to tell the happy youths in their 
 congregations that though they may not feel 
 the need of religion now, when sorrows 
 and troubles come, when they get old and 
 when they must think of death, then they 
 will need religion for consolation and for 
 help. It is, perhaps, only natural that these 
 happy youths, thus instructed, should in- 
 definitely postpone their acceptance of re- 
 ligion, while for the present they continue 
 serenely to amuse themselves as they please 
 [93] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 SO long as the dreaded troubles are delayed. 
 For why should funeral flowers be pur- 
 chased while life is still vigorous? 
 
 Of course, this is an inadequate concep- 
 tion of the value of religion, and doubtless 
 it is not at all the conception held by those 
 whose words and acts seem to imply it. Un- 
 less the religion of Jesus has a universal ap- 
 plication to all phases of human life — to 
 life's joys as well as to its sorrows, to its 
 youthful aspirations as well as to its ageful 
 reminiscences — then we must consider that 
 religion is at best only of temporary value 
 to men, and we must admit that its tempo- 
 rary value is due altogether to the continued 
 presence in the world of the evils of sin and 
 of sorrow and of death, which Jesus came 
 to overcome. For, indeed, Jesus came into 
 the world not merely to console those who 
 were miserable, but to remove the misery 
 that needed consolation. The greater part 
 of His ministry was in vain if His religion 
 is only a consolation for the sorrowful and 
 the dying. 
 
 But on the other hand, while we vehe- 
 [94] 
 
SUFFICIENT CONSOLATION 
 
 mently deny that the only or even the prin- 
 cipal value of religion hes in its consolatory 
 power, we must admit that unless the reli- 
 gion of Jesus can and does console, it be- 
 comes a failure just where its success is most 
 needed. To those who have come to the 
 extremities of hfe, the religion of Jesus 
 must be able to furnish a sufficient consola- 
 tion, or all the other promised blessings of 
 that rehgion will become null and void. 
 
 Consolation is only one of the helps of re- 
 ligion. Like the hfe-preserver thrown to 
 the man who has fallen overboard, it is a 
 help immediately demanded by the exigen- 
 cies of the situation. But if the help be 
 denied to the strugghng, perishing man in 
 the deep waters, the Christian assurance of 
 God's love and God's care will avail only 
 as "sounding brass or a clanging cymbal." 
 
 It may be true that there are some few 
 souls who are never forced to struggle in 
 the deep waters. Possibly there is now and 
 then one who is born into kindly surround- 
 ings, whose youth is carefully guarded, 
 whose maturity is serene, and whose death 
 [95] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 is peaceful and hopeful. If there be such 
 an one, he is the type of what ought to be, 
 and of what would be if all mankind should 
 come into right relations with God and with 
 life; of what will be, we can reasonably 
 hope, when the religion of Jesus shall have 
 reached the maturity of its influence in the 
 inauguration of the millennial age of health 
 and of joy, of trust and of love. 
 
 But meanwhile these types of what ought 
 to be, if they exist at all, are very excep- 
 tional cases. As yet the millennial age has 
 not dawned. Now most people who are 
 normally alive are at some time or other 
 engulfed in the dark waters of sorrow. It 
 may be true in some instances that they have 
 fallen into the water themselves. Their own 
 ignorance, their carelessness, or their sinful- 
 ness may have caused the fall. It some- 
 times seems, however, that some one else has 
 pushed a fellow-man into the water. In- 
 deed, the weak and the incompetent are al- 
 ways being thrown overboard by the strong 
 and the capable, and one cannot readily see 
 how, in this world of competition and in 
 [96] 
 
SUFFICIENT CONSOLATION 
 
 accord with the law of the "survival of the 
 fittest," it can be otherwise. 
 
 But sometimes it really seems as though 
 God Himself had thrown men into the 
 waters of affliction, which are far deeper 
 than the height of their puny human intel- 
 lects. It is true that under the head of "the 
 mysterious Providence," we are all too prone 
 to catalogue many sorrows which are 
 brought upon us either by ourselves or by 
 other human beings. But when we make 
 all due allowances for this common tendency 
 to blame God for what men themselves are 
 responsible, there remains a considerable 
 residue of human sorrow in which the human 
 intellect is unable to trace the hand of man. 
 
 Of all the "mysterious Providences," the 
 most mysterious, perhaps, is the inevitable- 
 ness, but withal the unexpectedness of death. 
 As a general axiom, every man knows that 
 everybody must die, but the normal man is 
 never quite ready specifically to apply the 
 axiom either to himself or to his own loved 
 ones. It is always at an unexpected mo- 
 ment that our dear ones are snatched from 
 [97] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 the arms of our protecting love. And 
 though we well know that the same fate 
 awaits ourselves, the inevitable Angel is still 
 the unexpected Angel when He comes to 
 take us, too, away. Who is it who thrusts 
 us beneath these overwhelming waters of be- 
 reavement and of death? Who, unless it 
 be the God whom we call the God of love, 
 but whose ways we do not, cannot under- 
 stand? 
 
 Now if the basal proposition of the Chris- 
 tian religion be true, that God is love, we 
 must believe that whatever the cause of the 
 sorrow, the cure of the sorrow is certain. 
 If God Himself is responsible for the sor- 
 row. He surely is a God of cruel caprice 
 and not at all a God of love if in some way 
 He does not make the harsh experience a 
 means to a benevolent end. If the deep 
 waters engulf the soul because of the 
 thoughtlessness or selfishness of other men, 
 we have reason to expect that the mere jus- 
 tice of God, to say nothing of His mercy, 
 would not permit the innocent to suffer in- 
 consolably. If we find that the man has 
 [98] 
 
SUFFICIENT CONSOLATION 
 
 been plunged into the deep waters because 
 of his own sinful neglect, even then we can- 
 not beheve that a God who is love could 
 watch his dying struggles and offer no help. 
 If God could conceivably excuse Himself 
 from helping that struggling man with the 
 declaration that the suffering and sorrow 
 are self-inflicted, God's compassion could 
 conceivably become less than man's, for no 
 real man can complacently suffer another 
 to drown, however careless or sinful that 
 other has been. 
 
 We are not, then, forced to diagnose each 
 case of sorrow before we can expect the 
 application of the Christian remedy of con- 
 solation. We cannot say that some sorrows 
 are consolable and that others must be con- 
 sidered as inconsolable. We must boldly 
 declare that in the religion of Jesus there 
 is consolation for all sorrow, whatever its 
 cause, or we must logically admit the re- 
 ligion of Jesus to be a pitiable failure. 
 
 It is necessary here that we understand 
 exactly what is meant by the term "conso- 
 lation," for certain prevalent, mistaken ideas 
 [99] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 of the nature of the consolation of rehgion 
 have brought confusion to many and have 
 plunged some into the darkness of cynical 
 despair. 
 
 There is, first of all, the mistaken idea of 
 the Christian fatalist, who believes that con- 
 solation may be found in an unreasoning 
 and uncomplaining submission to God. 
 "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in 
 Him," replied Job to the friends who sought 
 to comfort him in his distresses. And in 
 spite of Christ's clear revelation of the God 
 of love and compassion, there are many of 
 the professed followers of Christ who at- 
 tempt to find consolation in the religious 
 fatalism of this semi-pagan. This is the 
 black philosophy of fatalism tinged, but not 
 beautified, with the color of religion. Con- 
 sidered as consolation, it is cold and com- 
 fortless. It assumes that God, in His un- 
 knowableness, is an arbitrary, autocratic 
 Sovereign, and that man is at best only the 
 creature of God. 
 
 At the opposite extreme of religious 
 thought we find the mistaken idea that con- 
 [100] 
 
SUFFICIENT CONSOLATION 
 
 solation is to be obtained not in stoical sub- 
 mission, but in insensible forget fulness. 
 "The sorrow that comes to us cannot be 
 helped: therefore we will seek to forget it." 
 Not all of the people who embrace this phi- 
 losophy proceed to "eat, drink, and be 
 merry." Perhaps the most of them just 
 keep on attending to their daily business and 
 performing their daily duties. When the 
 sorrow which they cannot wholly overcome 
 obtrudes itself upon their memories, they 
 plunge all the harder into their absorbing 
 labours. The people of this philosophy 
 who have learned to call themselves Chris- 
 tians, have found in Christianity no sub- 
 stitute for the philosophy, but only a slight 
 modification of its expression. These Chris- 
 tian philosophers say: "Our hope is in toil — 
 not merely for ourselves, but for others. 
 We must seek the f orgetf ulness of our own 
 sorrow in incessant, thought-absorbing serv- 
 ice of others." 
 
 To many Christians this appears to be 
 the very ideal for the sorrowing soul to 
 pursue. Indeed, there is an element of true 
 [101] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 and Christlike greatness in this attempt to 
 assuage grief by a self- forgetful service 
 of others. Nor can anyone who has not 
 tried it deny the efficacy of this method of 
 the treatment of sorrow. 
 
 The contention is here made, however, 
 that the surcease of sorrow, which may be 
 induced by the way of forget fulness, is not 
 really consolation at all. The man who 
 takes to drink may find surcease of sorrow 
 in the exhilaration or the stupefaction of 
 his indulgence. And what more does he 
 obtain who seeks relief in incessant toil, aye, 
 even in unselfish toil for others? 
 
 This proposed remedy is at best a sorry 
 makeshift. It is like the prescri23tion of 
 a drug to heal a painful wound. The 
 drug may cause the pain of the wound to 
 cease, but it unfortunately does not help 
 to heal the wound itself. If the drug- 
 produced insensibility be continued long 
 enough, of course, the wound may become 
 healed by nature. And some people, carry- 
 ing out the analogy, have hoped, by work 
 and service, to continue their insensibility 
 [102] 
 
SUFFICIENT CONSOLATION 
 
 to sorrow until Time shall have had 
 opportunity to heal the wounded heart. 
 But is Time the only healer which the Chris- 
 tian religion has to offer to the distressed 
 and suffering soul? Is there no balm in 
 Gilead that can soothe the pain of the wound 
 by healing the wound itself? Must we al- 
 ways and only try to forget? But really 
 we know it is impossible to forget. It is 
 not only our minds that will not permit the 
 f orgetf ulness ; our hearts forbid it. Our 
 yearning love craves the boon of memory 
 and will brook no denial of the boon, even 
 though the memory be accompanied by bitter 
 anguish. 
 
 We are brought by these considerations 
 to this statement of the truth. Xo consola- 
 tion can suffice the reasoning mind and the 
 loving heart of man which demands even 
 the temporary disuse of any of his God- 
 created faculties. The sufficient consola- 
 tion must be that which satisfies both his 
 mind and his heart. It must bring comfort 
 not by the denial of his reason, but through 
 his reason. It must soothe not by the ob- 
 [103] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 literation of his memory, but by the very 
 use of his memory. 
 
 The offer of consolation through reason 
 and through memory is the offer contained 
 in Christ's promise of the "Comforter." 
 The "Comforter" was to be the Teacher. 
 This is the consolation offered to sorrowing 
 men available through their reason. And 
 the "Comforter" was to "bring to remem- 
 brance all things," whatsoever He had said 
 unto them. This is the consolation offered 
 to sorrowing men available through their 
 memory. 
 
 A great deal of valuable time has been 
 wasted by theologians in their discussion of 
 the nature and of the office of this "Com- 
 forter." But stripped of all its theological 
 terminology and of its mystical significance, 
 Christ's offer to sorrowing men is simply the 
 offer to them of the continuance in sorrow 
 of a reasonable faith and of a dauntless 
 trust. 
 
 Some of the specific things which Jesus 
 had said to His disciples and of which the 
 promised "Comforter" was to remind them 
 [104] 
 
SUFFICIENT CONSOLATION 
 
 were these. He had told them that God 
 cared even for the sparrows, and that they 
 were of more worth in God's sight than 
 many sparrows. He had told them that the 
 Father was more willing to give them bless- 
 ings than they were willing to ask. He 
 had declared that it was not the will of the 
 Father that anj^one should perish. But 
 also He had told them that in this world 
 they should have tribulation. By His own 
 example, more forcibly than He could pos- 
 sibly have shown them by mere words. He 
 had made it quite clear to them that love in 
 a sinful world must suffer, and that obedi- 
 ence to the will of the loving God is not al- 
 ways easy. 
 
 But some of these things, perhaps all of 
 these things, Jesus evidently thought His 
 disciples might forget unless they had a re- 
 minder. Let us repeat. The "Comforter" 
 is the divine reminder to men of the truths 
 spoken and lived by Jesus, the basal truths 
 of faith and of trust. 
 
 In the dark it is not always easy to 
 remember the truths which have been 
 [105] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 learned in the light. When a human 
 father has proven his love for his child 
 by many blessings of which the child is 
 conscious, there may come a time when the 
 blessing is hidden from the child's under- 
 standing. The way, then, is dark to the 
 child. The loving face of the father is 
 temporarily hidden. But in the natural 
 fear of his loneliness let the child hear the 
 voice of his father. It will be the voice of 
 reassurance coming to him in the darkness. 
 It will be the tender reminder of the father's 
 proven love. It will be the sweet assurance 
 that that love cannot fail. 
 
 This is the "Comforter" promised by 
 Jesus to sorrowing souls. The "Comforter" 
 is the voice of God speaking to men in the 
 dark, bidding them to remember His unfail- 
 ing goodness in the past, and reasonably to 
 trust Him now that they cannot see. 
 
 How different this consolation promised 
 by Jesus from the consolation of the per- 
 secuted servant of Jehovah in the poem of 
 Job! Job said, "Though He slay me, yet 
 will I trust in Him." The consoled Chris- 
 [106] 
 
SUFFICIENT CONSOLATION 
 
 tian says, "Because He loves me I know He 
 cannot slay me." "I know in whom I have 
 believed, and am persuaded that He is able 
 to keep that which I have committed unto 
 Him." 
 
 And how different this consolation from 
 the hoped-for consolation of absorption in 
 self-indulgence or even in work and in serv- 
 ice ! The man who tries to deaden his sensi- 
 bility to suffering says, "I must forget." 
 The Christian consoled by the divine re- 
 minder of God's love says, "I need not try 
 to forget, for I can trust." He who tries 
 to deaden his sorrow by forgetfulness, al- 
 ways becomes doubly bereaved. He is be- 
 reaved not only in the present, but he is 
 bereaved of the sweetness of the past. But 
 he who has found consolation in a reasonable 
 trust, finds the sweet and painful memories 
 themselves added inducements to that trust. 
 How can the remembered, precious moments 
 of soul communion eternally cease? How, 
 if God is love? The answer is this. Be- 
 cause God is love, the precious experiences 
 cannot cease, the soul communion cannot 
 [107] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 stoj^. The continuance of the memory of 
 the past is, after all, the promise of the 
 fruitfulness of the hope for the future. 
 He who has blest us cannot really discon- 
 tinue His blessings, for He is changeless 
 love. So though for a moment the way may 
 be dark, reminded by the "Comforter," in 
 reason and in sweet memory we can still 
 trust and hope. 
 
 " I know not where His islands lift 
 Their fronded palms in air, 
 I only know I cannot drift 
 Beyond His love and care." 
 
 [108] 
 
SUSTAINING STRENGTH 
 
 CHAPTER SEVEN 
 
" My grace is sufficient for thee; for my strength is made 
 perfect in weakness." — 2 Corinthians 12: 9. 
 
SUSTAINING STRENGTH 
 
 When "Christian" in Bunyan's immortal 
 allegory started from the City of Destruc- 
 tion, he bore upon his back a heavy burden. 
 At first the purpose of the pilgrim's flight 
 was but to rid himself of the burden which 
 no man in his own city could loosen. The 
 burden remained, however, until, on his way 
 to Mount Zion, he came to the cross and the 
 tomb. There, at the foot of the cross, the 
 burden loosed itself. It rolled into the 
 tomb and was seen no more. 
 
 But by this time the purpose of "Chris- 
 tian's" journey had become more clearly de- 
 fined. The removal of the burden proved 
 to be, after all, not an end in itself, but 
 only a means to an end. It made the pil- 
 grim free not to lie down and rest, but to 
 run forward with increased buoyancy to- 
 ward the Celestial City. 
 
 There are many burdens incident to the 
 busy life of this twentieth century of which 
 John Bunyan made no account. The bur- 
 
 [111] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 dens upon the backs of the Christians, in 
 this age of competition and of conflict, are 
 social in their nature as well as personal. 
 They exist not only because every man is 
 responsible to God, but also because every 
 man is a part of the social order, and be- 
 cause no man, in justice to his friends, his 
 neighbours, his country, and his God, can 
 escape from the City of Destruction just to 
 save his own soul. He must live in the city 
 wherein he was born. He must dwell amid 
 the earthly conditions that surround him, 
 and so long as he remains upon the earth 
 an earthly burden must be bound upon his 
 back. 
 
 But surely this burden with its included 
 social significance can be of no less concern 
 to the God of love than "Christian's" bur- 
 den of the weight only of his own sins. 
 Somewhere on the hard road of ministry 
 that leads to the Mount Zion of the earthly 
 Kingdom of God, somewhere there must 
 still be the place of the cross and the tomb 
 where the burden shall be lightened. 
 
 But where shall the modern Christian find 
 
 [ 112 ] 
 
SUSTAINING STRENGTH 
 
 relief from his burden? Obviously, our an- 
 swer to this question must depend upon our 
 conception of the nature of the desired re- 
 lief. 
 
 There are two ways by which the oppres- 
 siveness of any burden may be lightened. 
 There is the method of subtraction, the de- 
 crease of the load itself; and there is the 
 method of addition, the increase of the 
 strength to bear the load. 
 
 When the former method has been ex- 
 clusively pursued by Christians in the at- 
 tempt only to decrease the weight of the bur- 
 den, it has always ended disastrously. The 
 result of this method is weakness and inef- 
 ficiency. If a child is relieved of all re- 
 sponsibility by his over-indulgent parents, 
 the child will never, in any real sense of the 
 word, become mature. If he is never 
 compelled to fight his own battles against 
 temptation, if he is never obliged to make 
 a choice for himself, if he never knows dis- 
 appointment and grief, and if he is never 
 urged to make the sacrifice of unselfishness, 
 this child indeed finds relief from some of 
 [113] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 the burdens of life, but the cost of the relief 
 by this process of subtraction is the very 
 usefulness of his life. 
 
 Thus it is only at the cost of their useful- 
 ness that men in religion seek to rid them- 
 selves of the burdens of conflicts and of 
 choices and of sacrifices. That period of 
 Christian history which was dominated by 
 Christians' refusal to bear the burdens of a 
 social life with their fellow-men, was a 
 period of personal piety at the expense of 
 social helpfulness. If all Christians, like 
 the monks of the Middle Ages, had sought 
 relief from social burdens by the selfish proc- 
 ess of their entrance into monasteries, no 
 Christian would have grown to maturity of 
 influence and of efliciency, and the world 
 outside the monasteries would constantly 
 have sunk lower into the depths of licen- 
 tiousness and cruelty. 
 
 Let the selfish Christian who seeks only 
 to be rid of his burden be clearly described. 
 He is the one who seeks relief from the ob- 
 ligations of his God-created personality. 
 lie may seek the relief from God Himself. 
 [114] 
 
SUSTAINING STRENGTH 
 
 Perhaps instead of depending upon his own 
 volition he may expect God, by a special 
 revelation, to relieve him of the necessity 
 of choice. It may be that instead of 
 developing his own power of resistance 
 to evil he may expect a miracle of God 
 to furnish him with the requisite power to 
 resist in time of need. It is possible that 
 without the trouble and anxiety and the 
 sacrifice of his own love he may expect God 
 to guide and to guard his relatives and his 
 friends. It is even conceivable that he may 
 be like the "Christian" of Bunyan's imag- 
 ination, so intensely interested in the salva- 
 tion of his own soul that he may expect God 
 to save everybody else without his heart- 
 burdened assistance. This is the man who 
 "casts his burdens upon the Lord" with 
 startling literalness. The inevitable effect 
 of such an unwarranted, literal interpreta- 
 tion of the Scriptural command is his dis- 
 obedience to that other command, "Let every 
 man bear his own burden." And the dis- 
 obedience creates inefficiency and destroys 
 personality. 
 
 [115] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 Or this selfish Christian who seeks only 
 to be rid of his burden of personal and 
 social obligations may be he who tries to 
 find relief from his fellow-men. Some 
 people, for instance, are prone to throw the 
 burden of their own sins upon their an- 
 cestors. They have inherited weaknesses 
 which, they think, relieve them of the bur- 
 den of personal blameworthiness. Or it 
 may be the conditions of society are held re- 
 sponsible for their wrongdoing. Environ- 
 ment has made them bad. Many people, 
 too, are wont to throw the burden of their 
 responsibility for others upon the teacher 
 who trains their children, upon the Church 
 that is supposed to care for the spiritual 
 concerns of their neighbours, upon the 
 preacher, the social reformer, and the phi- 
 lanthropist. "It is the business of other 
 men to promote the welfare of my family 
 and my community," these declare. "I pay 
 others for this work. It is my business only 
 to take care of myself." 
 
 It is sad to admit that even professing 
 Christians are guilty of this attempted eva- 
 [116] 
 
SUSTAINING STRENGTH 
 
 sion of the burden, both of personal and 
 of social responsibility. "They have their 
 reward." There are some of the burdens of 
 a sensitive conscience and of a grieved love 
 which these do not bear. But for this im- 
 munity they pay the tremendous price of a 
 hardened conscience and of a calloused heart. 
 They are rid of the burden only at the ex- 
 pense of their very manhood and woman- 
 hood. And upon all of these who attempt 
 to get rid of the burden of responsibility 
 there falls always the heavier and more op- 
 pressive burden of inefficiency. 
 
 The fact is that in life as we know it there 
 are some burdens that are absolutely neces- 
 sary. All of these necessary and irremov- 
 able burdens are reducible to one general 
 class. They are the burdens of love. Per- 
 haps a complete enumeration of the love- 
 burdens would be impossible. A few sug- 
 gestions, however, will suffice for their rec- 
 ognition. 
 
 The burden of right living is a love-bur- 
 den. In this world all the children of God 
 are burdened with the responsibility for pu- 
 
 [117] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 rity and righteousness, both of thought and 
 of conduct, not because they are in this 
 world to save themselves for another, but be- 
 cause here they must order their own lives in 
 the way that shall best help those whom they 
 love. 
 
 The burden of sorrow for wrongdoing is 
 a love-burden, for wrongdoing is an eva- 
 sion of one of the responsibilities of love. 
 It cannot be possible for the burden of the 
 sorrow for sin to be wholly removed so long 
 as the sinner is blessed by God with the 
 power of memory and with the more divine 
 power of love. It would not be well if the 
 burden could be removed. The cross and 
 the tomb of Christ mean to the Christian 
 not the place where the sorrow of the sin is 
 rolled away, but where the strength to bear 
 even this burden is imparted by the merciful 
 forgiveness of God. 
 
 The burden of the service of others is an 
 irremovable love-burden. And this burden 
 includes all the lesser burdens of grief and 
 of sympathy, of disappointment and of 
 patience. For the wrongs of those we love 
 [118] 
 
SUSTAINING STRENGTH 
 
 we must always grieve. In their sorrows 
 we, too, must sorrow. Because of their 
 failures, we also must be disappointed. 
 With their willfulness we must be patient. 
 It is true for the Christian as well as for 
 Christ Himself that there is the cup of love's 
 sacrifice which cannot pass away, and so for 
 the love-burdened Christian there always 
 will be the agony of Gethsemane and the 
 sacrifice of Calvary. 
 
 But there are many burdens which are 
 absolutely unnecessary. These unnecessary 
 burdens may all be included under the gen- 
 eral head of burdens of fear. 
 
 The burden of the distrust of God's for- 
 giveness is an unnecessary fear-burden. 
 Though the sinful man of God-endowed 
 conscience cannot reasonably hope or really 
 wish to be relieved of the burden of the sor- 
 row for sin, he can and should be relieved 
 of the burden of the fear of sin's conse- 
 quence. The former burden can be borne 
 by him who is strengthened by God; the lat- 
 ter can be removed from him who really 
 trusts in God. 
 
 1 119 ] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 Worry of any kind is an unnecessary fear- 
 burden. Worry is the over-anxiety created 
 by distrust. It is begotten of the fear of 
 what is going to happen to-morrow either 
 to ourselves or to others. This burden men 
 bind upon their own backs, and the weight 
 of this removable and self-inflicted burden 
 is bearing many of the professed followers 
 of the trustful Jesus to the very ground. 
 
 Here in connection with these removable 
 burdens is where we must interpret literally 
 the command to cast our burdens upon the 
 Lord. The command means not that we 
 are to throw away our self-reliance, but just 
 to throw away our fear. We can be rid 
 of all of the self-inflicted fear-burdens by 
 the way of trust. 
 
 From the preceding resume of the difl*er- 
 ent kinds of burdens we deduce this general 
 statement of the burdened condition of all 
 of God's children. They all must bear the 
 God-entrusted burdens of love; none need to 
 bear the added self-inflicted burdens of fear. 
 The strength that can sustain the burdened 
 children of God is the strength that sup- 
 [ 120 ] 
 
SUSTAINING STRENGTH 
 
 ports the love and destroys the fear. 
 Greater love and less fear, these are what 
 we all need. 
 
 The supply of these needs of all men is 
 promised in the religion of Jesus Christ. In 
 the words of the Apostle Paul to the Church 
 at Corinth, the twofold assurance of the 
 Christian religion is concisely stated. "My 
 grace is sufficient for you, for My strength 
 is made perfect in weakness." Sufficient 
 grace! Divine strength! 
 
 His grace is sufficient. The religion of 
 Jesus brings us into filial relations wdth the 
 Father who is gracious. The complete 
 idea of God's graciousness includes not only 
 His mercy and His forgiveness, but His 
 care and His protection. Ever ready is He 
 to forgive our repented sins, and ever watch- 
 ful is He over our best interests and the 
 interests of our friends and loved ones. If 
 we really trust the love of our Father, all our 
 fear-burdens will roll away. At the foot 
 of the cross of Christ's sacrifice, if the cross 
 means to us all that it should, our trust in the 
 Father who so loves us will take away all 
 [121] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 those burdens which we needlessly pile upon 
 ourselves. His grace is sufficient. 
 
 And His strength perfects our weakness. 
 The appeal of Christ's cross is not only an 
 appeal to trust, but an appeal to love. As 
 He has loved us, so we are to love one 
 another. In fellowship with the spirit of 
 His love, the love-burdens will not grow less, 
 but we shall grow stronger. It is only when 
 our love falters that these burdens seem un- 
 bearable. When we take His yoke upon 
 us and learn of Him, we become united with 
 the strength that enables us to bear. His 
 strength makes perfect our weakness. 
 
 But after all, the end of our pilgrimage 
 through life is neither the removal nor the 
 lightening of our burdens. When at the 
 place of the cross, where our trust is re- 
 newed and our strength increased, we see 
 so many of the burdens roll away, and find 
 those remaining so much easier to be borne, 
 then we are to remember that the lessening 
 of the load is but to increase the buoyancy 
 of our onward journey in the path of serv- 
 ice. We have come to interpret the Celes- 
 [122] 
 
SUSTAINING STRENGTH 
 
 tial City as the Kingdom of God upon the 
 earth. We seek, it may be, not so much the 
 heavenly city of bliss as the earthly city of 
 righteousness and of justice and of brotherly 
 love. The way we travel is not the way of 
 mere personal salvation so much as the way 
 of social service. But this way, too, has its 
 Slough of Despond, its Hill Difficulty, its 
 menacing ApoUyon, and its threatening 
 lions by the way. We crave not the 
 ease from our burdens which will enable 
 us to rest in idleness, but that buoyant 
 strength and that lightness of burden which 
 shall enable us to press onward, conquering 
 and to conquer, serving and to serve. 
 
 The grace and the strength offered in the 
 religion of Jesus will not be sufficient ex- 
 cept for those who are determined to use 
 that grace and strength in the continued 
 service of their fellow-men and of God. 
 The place of the cross and the tomb of 
 Christ must be to us all the place of re- 
 newed consecration. 
 
 [123] 
 
SATISFYING JOY 
 
 CHAPTER EIGHT 
 
Your joy no one taketh away from you." — John 16: 22. 
 
SATISFYING JOY 
 
 The right of all men to the pursuit of hap- 
 piness was not granted by the Constitution 
 of the United States. It is a right granted to 
 them by their divine birthright. All that 
 constitutions and laws can do is to seek to 
 protect the right. Exactly as all men in 
 God's world have the right to eat and to 
 sleep, so they have the right to be happy, 
 and for much the same reason. They have 
 the right to eat and to sleep because their 
 physical natures demand sustenance and 
 refreshment. They have the right to be 
 happy because their spiritual natures de- 
 mand sustenance and refreshment. The 
 appetite for happiness is as normal a char- 
 acteristic of the human being as the appetite 
 for food, and both appetites are God- 
 created. 
 
 But it is the tritest of all trite truths that 
 the appetite for happiness is not universally 
 satisfied. There are many of God's children 
 [127] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 who experience very little of the fullness of 
 joy; perhaps there are some who know noth- 
 ing at all of such fullness ; probably there is 
 no one who has ever been completely filled. 
 Here is one of the many apparent contradic- 
 tions between what should be and what is. 
 According to the plan of the Creator, re- 
 vealed in men's inherent appetite for happi- 
 ness, all men should be happy. Because of 
 existing conditions, both within themselves 
 and without themselves, they all fail in the 
 attainment of that right. 
 
 So prevalent, indeed, is the unhappiness, 
 and so inevitable does the unhappiness seem 
 that some pagan thinkers have found the 
 chief end in life to lie not merely in the sub- 
 jugation of all desires, but in the very anni- 
 hilation of them. While even some Chris- 
 tian thinkers, and these not all of mediaeval 
 days, have been able to offer to men only the 
 ex]3ected joy of an anticipated future life 
 to reconcile them to the inexplicable misery 
 of the present life. 
 
 The contention is here made that the sub- 
 stitution of a promised future happiness for 
 [128] 
 
SATISFYING JOY 
 
 a demanded present happiness is a confes- 
 sion of the inefficiency of Christ's religion, 
 and is in fact an evasion of Christian re- 
 sponsibihty. If men cannot find satisfying 
 joy now, they cannot reasonably expect 
 any satisfying joy by and by. If God in 
 this world has been so overcome by any 
 spirit of evil that He cannot here make His 
 children happy, we have no ground for be- 
 lieving that He will be any more powerful 
 in any world to come. If God in this 
 world, which is admittedly His, will not 
 make His children happy now, we cannot 
 credit any greater willingness on His part 
 for the future existence. There cannot be 
 two Gods — one to rule upon the earth, and 
 one to rule in Heaven — and it is high time 
 that Christian people should cease talking 
 and acting as though they believed such an 
 absurdity. 
 
 Is there joy in the religion of Jesus Christ 
 which can satisfy those who have the God- 
 given riglit to the pursuit of happiness in 
 this world as we know it to-day — this world 
 of sorrow and of suffering and of sin? 
 9 [ 129 ] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 That is one of the most persistent questions 
 which concern the efficiency of the Christian 
 religion. Countless multitudes are await- 
 ing the answer, multitudes of the miserable 
 and the disappointed and the disheartened 
 children of God. They stand before us 
 with bent bodies, with careworn faces, their 
 eyes wet with tears or hardened with hope- 
 lessness, and with uplifted, pleading hands 
 they cry, "Give us the joy that no man can 
 take away from us." And what shall be 
 the Christian's answer to these souls plead- 
 ing only for what is theirs by divine birth- 
 right? 
 
 Let the answer to this demand of unhappy 
 souls be spoken in the words of no other 
 than the Master Himself. "Your joy will 
 be full," He said to His disciples, "when 
 my joy is in you." 
 
 His joy! What did Jesus mean? Tra- 
 dition has appropriated the words of the 
 Second Isaiah as descriptive of this Saviour 
 of the world, "A Man of sorrows and ac- 
 quainted with grief." Christian art has 
 painted the Christ with sad, unsmiling face. 
 [130] 
 
SATISFYING JOY 
 
 But Jesus pictured Himself as the Man of 
 Joy. He spoke of that joy as something 
 so real, so abiding, so satisfying that the 
 possession of it by others could be described 
 only as the very fullness of joy. Whence 
 the apparent discrepancy? 
 
 A casual review of the biography of 
 Jesus would seem to indicate that tradition 
 and art had been right in their picture of the 
 Man of Sorrows. We read that He was 
 born of poor parents and that He had not 
 where to lay His head ; that He was tempted 
 in the wilderness and tried in the garden of 
 Gethsemane ; that His body was wearied by 
 His ceaseless ministry, and that His soul 
 was sickened by men's hardness of heart; 
 that He was betrayed by one of His house- 
 hold of disciples, denied with oaths by an- 
 other, and deserted by them all ; that He was 
 made the butt of the cruel horseplay of 
 rough soldiers; that He was crucified in the 
 company of criminals; and that even in the 
 agony of His dying hours His countrymen 
 for whom His loving heart yearned, passed 
 by the foot of the cross, wagging their heads 
 [ 131 ] 
 
EFFICIENT KELIGION 
 
 and reviling Him. Surely if any man was 
 ever acquainted with grief it was this lonely, 
 rejected, crucified Son of Man. 
 
 But delve deeper into the biography of 
 the Saviour. Read between the lines. Find 
 the spirit that sustained Him. Study this 
 life not as it was seen by others, but as it 
 was experienced by Himself. When we 
 try to catch something of the deep, spiritual 
 significance of that life, we read something 
 like this. He was born of good parents who 
 loved Him. He became early conscious of 
 His filial relations with the eternal God. 
 He resisted the temptation in the wilderness 
 and overcame the weakness in Gethsemane. 
 He knew the inner spirit of willingness of 
 those who were weak in the flesh and slow of 
 understanding. He made the maimed to 
 M^alk and the blind to see, and to the sinful 
 He gave hope and courage. He was con- 
 scious of the remorse of Judas, the quick 
 penitence of Peter, and He could hope for 
 the restoration of the faith of those disciples 
 who for a time had distrusted and deserted 
 Him. No mockery of homage could de- 
 [132] 
 
SATISFYING JOY 
 
 stroy within Him the sense of the worthiness 
 of real homage, and the cross on Calvary- 
 was to Him but the place where He could 
 happily say that His work, the faithful 
 performance of God's will, was finished. 
 Surely no man had ever such cause for joy 
 as this Son of God who had overcome temp- 
 tation in Himself, who had served and saved 
 His fellow-men, and who had finished the 
 work God had given Him to do. 
 
 This brief review of the life of the Man 
 for whom joy was a real possession in spite 
 of His acquaintance with grief, suggests to 
 us that the real and lasting joy of life is 
 something independent of all outside con- 
 ditions. 
 
 If we should limit the use of the word 
 "happiness" to its derivative significance, 
 and define the word as the pleasure derived 
 from favourable happenings, then we must 
 admit that the religion of this Man promises 
 happiness to His followers only incidentally. 
 Primarily, Christ's religion cannot be ex- 
 pected to smooth the waters of the troublous 
 sea of hfe. But it does something more 
 [133] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 and better than this. It suppHes the bal- 
 last which enables one to sail serenely- 
 through the troubled seas. 
 
 When we take "joy" from its derivation 
 to signify an exultant leaping forth of the 
 spirit, and when we modify the word with 
 due reference to Christ's own joy by the 
 adjective Christian, we have for our defini- 
 tion of Christian joy the following: Chris- 
 tian joy is the Christlike consciousness of 
 victory over self, of service for others, and 
 of harmony with the will of God. The pos- 
 session of such joy will not make the sea of 
 life all smooth, but it will make all the angry 
 waves surmountable. It will create the hap- 
 piness of external conditions not so much by 
 ameliorating the unfavourable conditions, 
 as by minimizing their untoward influence. 
 
 It is pitiably true that many men, per- 
 haps most men, are pursuing happiness by 
 the futile method of the attempt to smooth 
 the sea. They demand that the conditions 
 shall be made favourable for them. They 
 expect ease and luxury and idleness. The 
 true Christian method of the pursuit of hap- 
 [134] 
 
SATISFYING JOY 
 
 piness is the method of overcoming the 
 roughness of the sea by an increase of bal- 
 last. If the tempestuous waves of sorrow 
 and of disappointment are in danger of 
 overwhelming one, the sure way to decrease 
 their violence is to increase one's own stabil- 
 ity. It is only the small, unballasted craft 
 that feels the high seas and the adverse 
 winds. The great, heavily ballasted ocean 
 liners are unmoved by the sea's roughness. 
 
 The only joy that can really satisfy is 
 this joy of the greatness of personality. 
 The three elements in the attainment of such 
 greatness are the elements of victory over 
 one's self, of service for others, and of obe- 
 dience to God. This is the trinity of joy — 
 the joy of self-mastery, the joy of brotherly 
 love, and the joy of filial obedience. And 
 this is the Christian joy, for this was the 
 joy of Christ. 
 
 If we are forced to admit that only Christ 
 Himself ever perfectly attained the great- 
 ness of personality which alone could make 
 His joy full, we must yet declare that the 
 approach to the fullness of joy is by the one 
 [135] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 way of this Victor's attainment. We must 
 understand that when Jesus expressed His 
 wish that His joy might be in His disciples, 
 He was wishing for them the same kind of 
 a hfe of self-mastery, of service, and of 
 obedience which He Himself had lived. 
 
 So when these multitudes of God's chil- 
 dren, who by the divine right of their in- 
 heritance should be happy, but who are not, 
 come to the Christian teacher with stream- 
 ing eyes and trembling lips, asking for the 
 joy that satisfies, this must be the Christian's 
 answer: "Such joy, dear suffering, disap- 
 pointed friend, you can have if you will 
 seek it in the right direction." Has your 
 unhappiness come as the inevitable result of 
 sinful indulgence? Your joy will be re- 
 stored when with God's promised help you 
 have overcome the temptation and mastered 
 yourself. Has your unhappiness come as 
 the result of selfishness? You will find 
 joy again by the way of the helpful 
 service of love. Are your eyes wet with 
 tears because of disappointment and of 
 bereavement? Ah, here is the promise of 
 [136] 
 
SATISFYING JOY 
 
 the joy that can sustain even in these un- 
 toward and humanly inexphcable conditions. 
 It Hes in trustful obedience to the will of the 
 Father, who knows and who cares. 
 
 But when all is said to the unhappy soul 
 that the Christian can say, there wdll be a 
 remainder of inexplicable and seemingly ir- 
 removable unhappiness, so long as the life 
 of each individual is closely associated with 
 the lives of all other individuals, and so long 
 as there remain in the world some children 
 of God who do not try to overcome their 
 sins and their selfishness, and who are not 
 endeavouring to fulfill in themselves the will 
 of God for them. Vicarious unhappiness! 
 The world seems full of it. Unhappy par- 
 ents, unhappy husbands and wives, unhappy 
 children, unhappy friends, sorrowing, griev- 
 ing, suffering for the sins and selfishness 
 and wilfulness of others. Can the religion 
 of Jesus remove this unhappiness? Only 
 by the way of a Calvary. Like Jesus 
 Christ Himself, no follower of Jesus in this 
 world of ignorance and of selfishness and of 
 sin can expect to be other than "acquainted 
 
 [137] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 with grief." But like Jesus, every Chris- 
 tian who is strong enough to take up his own 
 cross can find, aye, will find, joy in the very 
 suffering of sacrifice. 
 
 Here, then, is the satisfying joy offered 
 to men by fellowship with the spirit of Jesus 
 Christ, the joy of self-mastery, the joy 
 of loving service, the joy of the fullfilment 
 of God's will. That was the joy of Christ. 
 That is the joy of every one who is truly 
 trying to follow Jesus. That can be the 
 joy of all who will fight and serve and obey. 
 
 [138] 
 
ATTAINABLE PEACE 
 
 CHAPTER NINE 
 
" My peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you : not 
 as the world giveth, give I unto you." — John 14 : 27. 
 
ATTAINABLE PEACE 
 
 No THOUGHTFUL student of the life of 
 Jesus can fail to notice the apparent contra- 
 diction of His utterances concerning peace. 
 At one time, quite early in His ministry, He 
 distinctly declares: "I came not to send 
 peace, but a sword. For I am come to set 
 a man at variance against his father, and 
 the daughter against her mother, and the 
 daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; 
 and a man's foes shall be they of his own 
 household." (Matt. 10: 34-36.) But when 
 we turn the pages of the narrative to the 
 very end of His life, we find in the last ad- 
 dress to His disciples the promise of this 
 bequest: "Peace I leave with you, My peace 
 I give unto you. Not as the world giveth, 
 give I unto you." (John 14:25.) 
 
 There are several ways by which we may 
 seek escape from the difficulty of this seem- 
 ing contradiction. We may say, as some 
 [141] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 have said, that the same word is used in its 
 different connections with very different 
 meanings, that the peace which Jesus de- 
 nied to be the result of His ministry is the 
 peace of an outer social harmony, and that 
 the peace which He bequeathed His disciples 
 is the peace of an inner personal repose. 
 History has seemed to substantiate the 
 truth that the religion of Jesus, with its va- 
 rious and sometimes antagonistic interpreta- 
 tions, has not always tended towards social 
 harmony. At the same time, the testimony 
 of the saints of all ages has been to the 
 effect that their faith in Christ has produced 
 a personal and an indwelling peace. Thus 
 Christians who have been cast away by their 
 family, ostracized by their friends, and ex- 
 communicated by the Church, have gone 
 jubilantly to their martyrdom, testifying to 
 the possession of the inner peace. While 
 other Christians, fighting not only against 
 the manifold evil of the world, but quarrel- 
 ing with their very brethren in Christ over 
 matters of theology and speculation, from 
 time to time have paused in their wordy 
 [142] 
 
ATTAINABLE PEACE 
 
 battles and their disgraceful squabbles to 
 speak triumphantly of the peace of God in 
 their own hearts. Perhaps Jesus meant that 
 His religion could bring to men objectively 
 only conflict, and that it could give to them 
 peace only as a subjective experience. 
 
 Or we might seek to reconcile the diverse 
 statements of Jesus, as others have done, by 
 reference to the different times when the 
 statements were uttered. We might inter- 
 pret Him to mean that the beginning of the 
 Christian life is tempestuous, that its con- 
 tinuance in this world of trouble and of sin 
 must be with combat, and that peace can 
 come only at the very end of life as we know 
 it here. There are doubtless many toiling, 
 struggling, troubled Christians who in this 
 conception try to content themselves with 
 the mere hope of a peace that shall be theirs 
 when they are ready to die. 
 
 Each of these explanations, however, de- 
 stroys something of the efficiency of the 
 religion of Jesus. Subjective experiences 
 may be more valuable to their possessor than 
 corresponding objective experiences, but 
 [143] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 they certainly are not of great value to 
 others. It surely is better for a company 
 of men to dwell together in harmony, than 
 it is for each member of a quarreling and 
 disputing company to be possessed of a 
 mere subjective equipoise. And unless the 
 religion of Jesus can stop the objective 
 quarreling, the world, as a whole, will be 
 but slightly impressed by personal testi- 
 monies to subjective peace. 
 
 Again, the efficiency of the religion of 
 Jesus is immeasurably decreased by any and 
 all attempts to postpone the blessings of 
 that religion to some future time. It has 
 been the great source of weakness in Christ's 
 rehgion that for nearly twenty centuries the 
 most of its blessings have been relegated to 
 an eternal future. Really, the present is as 
 much a part of eternity as any future can 
 be. Men are not suddenly changed into 
 immortal beings when they die, or when they 
 are about to die; they were all created im- 
 mortal beings when they were born. The 
 present belongs to God as well as the fu- 
 ture. And unless it can be demonstrated 
 [144] 
 
ATTAINABLE PEACE 
 
 that there is an inevitable disconnection be- 
 tween God's present and God's future, we 
 must necessarily demand a present as well 
 as a future realization of the peaceful con- 
 dition of life with God. We may not rea- 
 sonably demand that the blessing of peace 
 shall be as fully appreciated now as we hope 
 it may be by and by, for the present ap- 
 preciation of the blessing depends upon our 
 mortal limitations. But in so far as we, in 
 our immaturity, are now able to accept the 
 blessings of peace, in so far must we believe 
 that exactly the same kind of peace may be 
 ours with God to-day as can possibly be 
 ours when we come to die, or even after we 
 are dead. The peace of the God who is the 
 God of the living, must be a present peace. 
 The logic of this course of reasoning com- 
 pels the conclusion that the apparent dis- 
 crepancy in Christ's teachings concerning 
 peace is due only to the different degrees of 
 men's acceptance of peace. It was not 
 Christ's fault that the immediate result of 
 the entrance into this world of His evangel 
 should be conflict. The conflict was caused 
 [ 145 ] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 by the unwillingness, or, if one prefers, the 
 inability of men to receive that which He 
 was offering them. There is nothing that 
 makes a company of angry, quarreling men 
 more angry and more quarrelsome still than 
 the unsought and unwelcome attempt to 
 pacify them. Christ's offer of peace has 
 been and always will be an apple of discord 
 to those who do not want peace at His pro- 
 posed terms. 
 
 And by the same token Christ's offer of 
 peace cannot be expected to become com- 
 pulsorily operative in the lives of all men 
 at any particular future time. His peace 
 will become operative in the life of each 
 man when, and only when each man becomes 
 ready to accept the terms of the offer. 
 
 There is, then, no discrepancy in the teach- 
 ings of Jesus concerning the object of His 
 ministry. He came to offer to men the 
 peace of God, subjectively to bring to each 
 man the inner quietude of trust and con- 
 fidence, and objectively to bring them all 
 into harmonious social relations with each 
 other. His offer is as available for this 
 [146] 
 
ATTAINABLE PEACE 
 
 present moment as it can be for any ex- 
 pected future moment. His offer creates 
 discord only when it is rejected. The 
 sword will be sheathed and the differences 
 forgotten when the offer is accepted. 
 
 No one can accuse Jesus of arbitrariness 
 because the bequest of His last will and tes- 
 tament is thus seen to be conditional. Ar- 
 tificial conditions may be imposed by men 
 only in the bequest of artificial property. 
 The testator, for instance, may impose any 
 condition he pleases upon the bestowal of 
 his money and his real estate. These are 
 extraneous things, things which exist apart 
 from the testator's own personality. But 
 there are many things which every man must 
 bequeath to his successors without condition. 
 Something of his own disposition, for ex- 
 ample, he must bequeath to his children ; cer- 
 tain good or evil effects from his life he 
 must leave to his friends and acquaintances. 
 And there are some things which every man 
 may include in his bequests whose ap- 
 propriation is essentially conditioned by 
 the very nature of the things bequeathed. 
 
 [147] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 Thus real success may be bequeathed 
 by a father to his son only on the es^ 
 sential condition of the son's industry and 
 perseverance. So the father's strength of 
 character will become, by inheritance, the 
 possession of the son only as the son imi- 
 tates his father's example in the resistance 
 of temptation and in the practice of self- 
 control. The successful man and the strong 
 man bequeath to their children an incentive 
 to success and to strength, and the example 
 of success and of strength, but the bequests 
 do not and cannot become available unless 
 the incentive empowers imitation. 
 
 The bequest of peace by Jesus must be 
 catalogued in the last mentioned list of be- 
 queathable possessions. The condition of 
 its inheritance is contained in the very nature 
 of the thing bequeathed. It was really only 
 the incentive to peace, and the pathway to 
 peace which Jesus left to His disciples. 
 These were all that He could leave them. 
 The peace itself could not become the full 
 possession of anyone of these disciples ex- 
 cept the inducement of Jesus should lead 
 [148] 
 
ATTAINABLE PEACE 
 
 him to follow his Master on the charted way 
 to peace. 
 
 The essential condition then to the full 
 possession of the peace which was Christ's 
 last bequest, not only to His immediate dis- 
 ciples, but to all His followers, is the Christ- 
 induced imitation of the Christ way of the 
 attainment of peace. Jesus attained peace 
 by the two pathways of trust and love. By 
 trust in God He came into that peace which 
 is the subjective experience of calmness and 
 repose. By love for His fellow-men He 
 came into that peace which is the objective 
 condition of harmony with His fellow-men. 
 When men have been induced by Jesus, both 
 to trust their God and to love their fellows, 
 they have come into the possession of His 
 bequest of peace. 
 
 Only one part of the peace promised by 
 Jesus is subjective. The subjective Chris- 
 tian peace is the repose of trust. Some- 
 times this peace has been mistaken for the 
 rest of cessation of labour and of temp- 
 tation. Such rest, which means the absence 
 of toil and of conflict, is as foreign to 
 [149] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 the religion of Jesus as it is foreign to 
 the idea of the development of manhood 
 and of womanhood. When one turns to 
 the religion of Jesus for relief from any of 
 the developing experiences of life, one will 
 always be disappointed. Religion is not a 
 substitute for human development; it is a 
 means to that development. So instead of 
 the rest of absence from toil and conflict we 
 must expect the personal experience of peace 
 to give us something of more worth, namely, 
 an equanimity in toil and a repose in con- 
 flict. 
 
 The peace of Jesus subjectively con- 
 sidered is the equanimity and the repose 
 which enables one to do efficiently the work 
 of life and to meet victoriously the temp- 
 tations of life. Certainly this peace will 
 make the toil apparently less arduous, and 
 the temptations seemingly less strenuous. 
 The man of mental equipoise can always ac- 
 complish a given task with much less effort 
 than that needed by the irritable, impatient 
 man; and he who meets temptation with an 
 inner repose, in the assurance of God-em- 
 [150] 
 
ATTAINABLE PEACE 
 
 powered victory, must ever, by this sure 
 armour of defence, diminish the force of the 
 temptation. It is a terrible thing for any 
 man to have no vv^ork to do in the world ; and 
 no enemy could wish a man any greater 
 harm than the removal from his life of all 
 temptation. But it is a splendid thing for 
 any man to be able to do his work easily; 
 and the best friend of that man can wish 
 him no greater blessing than the power to 
 resist. The indwelling peace of the religion 
 of Jesus is the bequest to every man from 
 every man's best Friend. This peace creates 
 the ability to perform with comparative ease 
 the hardest tasks. It creates the power to 
 resist the severest temptation. Surely no 
 single equipment for efficient life can be 
 worth more to its possessor than Christian 
 peace in the heart. 
 
 This helpful equipment for life is born 
 of implicit trust in God. It comes to men 
 as the bequest of Jesus because Jesus re- 
 vealed to men God's trustworthiness. He 
 who really like Christ and through Christ 
 comes securely to rely upon his Father's 
 [151] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 love, comes into the peace which enables ef- 
 ficient toil and which empowers victory, the 
 peace, in short, which energizes and ennobles 
 hfe. 
 
 There is a certain sense, however, in 
 which the possession of the inner peace of 
 trust is but a means to an end. The end 
 towards which the efficiency of individuals 
 must contribute is the objective peace of 
 social harmony. "That all may be one," 
 was the way Jesus described the complete, 
 desired end of His ministry. Not just that 
 some men might have the indwelling peace 
 of trust, but that all men might dwell to- 
 gether in the outer peace of harmony. 
 
 It is easy to misunderstand the nature 
 of this outer peace. Social harmony has 
 evidently been thought by some to be syn- 
 onymous with the eradication of all social 
 differences. But in religion and in society, 
 as well as in music, there is a vast difference 
 between the meaning of the words unison 
 and harmony. It would be the worst im- 
 aginable catastrophe to the world if all dif- 
 ferences between individual tastes and be- 
 [152] 
 
ATTAINABLE PEACE 
 
 liefs and practices should be obliterated. A 
 unison of all the members of society would 
 destroy personal ambition and personal re- 
 sponsibility, and society thus would become 
 not a living organism, but an inert, lifeless 
 instrument. The music of humanity must 
 be played upon living personalities, not 
 upon soulless mechanisms. It is a music 
 comparable to the oratorio rendered by hu- 
 man voices, and not to the single note of 
 insensate instruments all attuned to the same 
 pitch. 
 
 The cause of the discord, which is observ- 
 able in society, is not too much individuality, 
 but too little sympathy. Each member or 
 class of society is too prone to ignore the 
 essential relations to other members or 
 classes. Thus industry, which for its best 
 efficiency requires the harmony of capital 
 and labour, is made inefficient by the jang- 
 ling discord of each party's insistence 
 upon just its own rights. So the re- 
 ligious efficiency of the world which re- 
 quires the harmony of different beliefs 
 and practices is made inefficient by the 
 [ 153 ] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 discord of different creeds and different 
 rituals, each struggling vociferously to 
 drown the sound of all the others. 
 
 What the religion of Jesus can do for 
 men is this — not to make them all think and 
 act alike, but to make them all sympathetic 
 and tolerant. It can bring to each indi- 
 vidual the recognition of the worth of all 
 other individuals. It can take away the dis- 
 cord of the insistence of each individual's 
 necessary note and bring all the notes not 
 into unison, but into harmony. 
 
 The way Christ's religion can bring men 
 into this outer peace of harmony is by way 
 of obedience to His love. When men come 
 really to love one another, in any degree 
 like the manner of His love for them, the 
 difference between individuals will be as 
 marked as it is now. The responsibility of 
 each individual for his own part in the ora- 
 torio of humanity will remain the same. 
 There will be no unison of voices singing 
 the same words and the same notes. There 
 will be the different words and the different 
 notes, but the differences by the magic of 
 [154] 
 
ATTAINABLE PEACE 
 
 directing love will be softened into exquis- 
 ite harmony. And the theme of the ora- 
 torio which men will sing in one grand 
 chorus will be, "Peace on earth, good will 
 to men." 
 
 [155] 
 
ACHIEVING POWER 
 
 CHAPTER TEN 
 
"Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, 
 the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than 
 these shall he do." — John 14 : 12. 
 
ACHIEVING POWER 
 
 In Christ's brief parable concerning the 
 merchantman seeking goodly pearls, the 
 great Teacher does not sj)ecify exactly what 
 *'the pearl of great price" represents. He 
 has been generally understood, however, to 
 refer to the inestimable value of personal 
 salvation. This somewhat vague and often 
 misunderstood term is a sufficient descrip- 
 tion of the "pearl" only when we under- 
 stand by the term all that Jesus evidently 
 meant to convey by its use. 
 
 Personal salvation, according to Jesus, 
 is personal development for service. It in- 
 cludes, therefore, all those processes of ed- 
 ucation and of discipline and of exercise 
 which help in the creation of character and 
 of efficiency. The chief value of personal 
 salvation thus defined lies not in what may 
 result to the saved man himself, but in what 
 through his salvation must result to others. 
 [159] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 If this "jewel" be kept hidden in its indi- 
 vidual case it may, indeed, give a certain 
 satisfaction to the owner of a miserly dis- 
 position, but the real value of the "jewel" 
 consists in its power to beautify and to 
 adorn. If the saved man would make his 
 ** jewel" really valuable, he must wear it con- 
 tinually. He must use his "jewel" in such 
 a way as to make himself more attractive 
 to others, more attractive and so more win- 
 some and more serviceable. 
 
 In the discussion of the values of the 
 Christian religion we have come at the very 
 last to the consideration of that value which 
 of them all is the most priceless. We are 
 to think now not of any personal satisfac- 
 tion which may and must come to him who 
 embraces the religion of Jesus, but of the 
 personal power that must be his. Health, 
 forgiveness, strength, joy, consolation, and 
 peace — these are all pearls of value, and 
 it would be worth one's while to try to be a 
 Christian just for these and the like per- 
 sonal satisfactions. But "the pearl of 
 great price" is nothing less than the personal 
 [160] 
 
ACHIEVING POWER 
 
 power of the Christian, which is to be esti- 
 mated not at all in terms of his own satis- 
 faction, but always in terms of his service 
 for others. 
 
 The power of the Christian life is derived 
 from two sources. It comes in part from 
 the energizing of one's own resident but 
 latent forces, and in part from the superhu- 
 man force which is the result of the union 
 of the Christian with the omnipotent power 
 of God. 
 
 In the first place, the Christian religion 
 furnishes the dynamic of latent, unused hu- 
 man forces. Our best method of approach 
 to the understanding of this truth is by way 
 of illustration. 
 
 In the early morning after the terrible 
 disaster which destroyed so gre^t a part of 
 the city of San Francisco, a man was rush- 
 ing frantically about in the vicinity of his 
 devastated home. He was searching among 
 the debris for his missing child. Suddenly 
 he stopped and put his hand to his ear. He 
 had heard a faint cry coming to him from 
 beneath a pile of torn lumber, overthrown 
 [ 161 ] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 bricks, and shattered mortar. A moment 
 later the man was feverishly throwing aside 
 the heavy pieces of refuse, digging down 
 in the direction of the summoning cry for 
 help. Soon he came to a heavy beam. 
 
 "Wait a minute!" sang out an approach- 
 ing officer; "You cannot hft that alone." 
 But the man did not wait. Before the of- 
 ficer could reach him he bent his puny back 
 to the apparently impossible task, and the 
 heavy weight moved. The imprisoned child 
 crawled out to safety. And the man, with 
 his dear one clasped in his arms, sank do\\Ti 
 upon the mass of debris and sobbed his 
 thanksgiving. 
 
 But how could he move the weight that 
 was apparently too heavy for the strength 
 of two ordinary men? The evident answer 
 is this. The love of his child empowered 
 him. 
 
 Consider another illustration. Turn back 
 the pages of the history of the American 
 nation nearly one hundred and fifty years. 
 Look at the picture of the distraught colo- 
 nies waiting for the voice that should arouse 
 [ 162 ] 
 
ACHIEVING POWER 
 
 them to united action in resistance to the 
 oppression of the mother country. The 
 first Congress had already met and had 
 accompHshed nothing. Massachusetts and 
 the other northern colonies were waiting for 
 Virginia to take the lead, and Virginia was 
 waiting for the man who would speak the 
 word to inspire her action. 
 
 It was in St. John's Church, Richmond, 
 at the meeting of the new Virginia Conven- 
 tion, that the word was spoken. There were 
 wealthier men in that Convention than the 
 speaker, men more highly educated than he, 
 men who were destined to play a seemingly 
 more important part in the coming struggle 
 for independence. But when Patrick 
 Henry had finished his impassioned ora- 
 tion, declaring that "An appeal to arms and 
 to the God of hosts is all that is left to 
 us," a human voice had spoken the words 
 which touched with fire the waiting fuse of 
 American patriotism, and the fire did not 
 go out until Cornwallis had surrendered at 
 Yorktown. 
 
 But whence the power in the words of this 
 
 [163] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 comparatively uneducated lawyer? Again 
 the answer is evident. He was empowered 
 by the love of his country. 
 
 These illustrations from the many that 
 might be enumerated, must suffice. They 
 are examples of the power of a selfless de- 
 votion to energize unused and quiescent 
 forces. Most men probably never use more 
 than a fraction of the force which is resi- 
 dent in themselves, because to most there 
 never comes the necessary dynamic to action. 
 So an emergency call always finds a man 
 with more strength than he really knew he 
 possessed. Under the impetus of a sudden 
 and pressing need, the forces of the man — 
 physical, mental, and moral — are apparently 
 wonderfully multiplied. In reality, his 
 forces are not multiplied at all, but his un- 
 used forces are made operative. He is, as 
 we say, "carried out of himself" by the call 
 of some one else's danger or need, and in 
 self-forgetfulness he is able to lift the 
 heavy weight, to speak the inspiring word, 
 to perform the needed service. Unselfish 
 devotion is the dynamic which can call into 
 
 [164] 
 
ACHIEVING POWER 
 
 efficient action every atom of a man's in- 
 herent capability. 
 
 This is the dynamic furnished by the re- 
 ligion of Jesus. The Christian hears the 
 words of his Teacher telHng him that God 
 loves him. He hears Christ declare that 
 God loves all other men, too. He hears God 
 through Jesus, in accents of tenderest pity, 
 calling for the stronger and more fortunate 
 of His children to help those who are weaker 
 and less fortunate. 
 
 Here is a man in need. He is ignorant. 
 He is sick. He is morally incapable. He 
 is wilfully sinful. He is exactly like that 
 child beneath the debris of the San Fran- 
 cisco earthquake. He is incompetent and 
 inefficient, and because of his incompetence 
 and inefficiency, he is in imminent danger. 
 Now, the religion of Jesus declares that 
 every other man is bound to this one man in 
 danger by the ties of relationship in the 
 family of God. God loves that man in 
 danger. So, too, if we have recognized our 
 relationship to God, do we love him. When 
 that truth really grips our hearts, when we 
 [165] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 come to know that it is our brother and 
 God's child who is in this danger, then in 
 self-forgetful love we bend our backs to 
 the task of his salvation, and lo, the devo- 
 tion of our love energizes us and makes us 
 efficient. 
 
 Or here is a M^hole class of people in need. 
 This class is exposed to disease-infected 
 conditions. This other class is the victim of 
 the oppression of iniquitous industrial con- 
 ditions. This third class is enslaved by 
 tyrannous political conditions. Christ's re- 
 ligion teaches that these classes of people, 
 like every individual in every class, belong to 
 the one family of God. God loves these 
 people, and by the same token He hates the 
 untoward conditions which threaten and op- 
 press and enslave them. The love of God 
 is here demanding that the destructive con- 
 ditions shall be removed. The disease germs 
 must be annihilated. Iniquity in industry 
 must be vanquished. Slavery in govern- 
 ment must be abolished. Our brethren, all 
 of them God's children, are waiting inertly 
 for the leader who shall incite them to a 
 [166] 
 
ACHIEVING POWER 
 
 united effort for their own deliverance. 
 Let a man really come to feel this truth and 
 he will open his mouth to speak the protest- 
 ing and defiant words; and lo, his selfless 
 devotion to the cause of the oppressed so 
 empowers his efforts that he becomes en- 
 abled to lead his fellow-men into liberty. 
 Thus are reformers always created, and the 
 religion of Jesus has done very little for any 
 man until it has made him a reformer, until 
 it has aroused in his bosom a Christlike anger 
 against injustice and abuse, until it has en- 
 gendered within him the self -forgetful cour- 
 age of the bold championship of the cause 
 of the oppressed. 
 
 The religion of Jesus fires a man's heart, 
 stiffens his backbone, strengthens his sinews, 
 and empowers his efficiency. Such an one 
 no longer stops to say *'I can't," but with 
 Paul he is always ready to declare that 
 through the dynamic of the spirit of the 
 loving, serving Christ, "I can." 
 
 But there is something more which the re- 
 ligion of Jesus can do for any man. It can 
 give to him the control of a power outside 
 
 [167] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 himself, a power which we can describe with 
 no other word than that of superhuman. 
 
 When Jesus was preparing His disciples 
 for His approaching death, according to the 
 narrative of the Fourth Gospel, He declared 
 that after His departure they would do 
 greater things than He Himself had accom- 
 plished. We are not to understand by the 
 "greater works" that He meant that His 
 disciples were to perform deeds more mirac- 
 ulous than His own. The greatness of even 
 Christ's works did not consist in their mi- 
 raculousness, but in their beneficence. His 
 declaration concerning the "greater works" 
 of the disciples was the promise of the en- 
 largement of His work to the accomplish- 
 ment of a wider beneficence. The disciples' 
 service for the world would be greater than 
 His, not because they could be really greater 
 men than He had been, but because they 
 would have the greater efficiency which His 
 greatness had made possible. 
 
 The scientific achievements of modern 
 times furnish us with many illustrative par- 
 allels to this spiritual truth spoken by Jesus. 
 [168] 
 
ACHIEVING POWER 
 
 We consider only one. Doubtless we all 
 should admit that the original discoverer of 
 the power of steam must be ranked as 
 greater than all succeeding investigators 
 in this line of physical demonstration. But 
 just because of the revelation of this first 
 great man the succeeding men, by the use 
 of the revealed power, have really accom- 
 plished much greater works. We cannot 
 ti-uly say that James Watt made the mod- 
 ern, gigantic, and powerful locomotive, but 
 Watt gave to the world the initial revela- 
 tion which made the locomotive possible. 
 
 Now Jesus stands in the world of moral 
 achievement as does the discoverer and first 
 exponent of physical forces in the world of 
 scientific achievements. Jesus was the re- 
 vealer to men of the power of love. He 
 did not come into the world just to show 
 men what love could do for them, but to 
 demonstrate to them what they could do 
 through love. By His revelation and ex- 
 emplification He gave to men what really 
 proved to be a new moral and spiritual force. 
 By no means did He Himself accomplish 
 
 [169] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 the very last thing which that force could 
 accomplish. He left to others to carry on 
 His work of revelation and exemplification 
 by new methods of application. These 
 others, through the new power which He 
 had revealed and inaugurated were, accord- 
 ing to His program, to do even greater 
 things than He had been able to accomplish 
 — greater in extent, not greater in content, 
 greater in the farther reaching results of a 
 continually widening application of the new 
 power. 
 
 The history of the development of Christ's 
 religion is proving the truth that Christ's 
 astounding promise is becoming fulfilled. 
 Compute, if you will, the "greater works" 
 by the numbers influenced. Peter, on the 
 day of Pentecost, made more converts to 
 the rehgion of Jesus than his Master Him- 
 self had made during all the years of His 
 ministry. And to-day there are preachers 
 and evangelists who are influencing more 
 people than Peter was able to do. The fol- 
 lowers of Jesus, at the time of His death, 
 numbered at most but a few hundred, per- 
 
 1 170 ] 
 
ACHIEVING POWER 
 
 haps not so many as one hundred. To-day 
 we must estimate the followers of Christ 
 with the million as our unit of numeration. 
 
 Or estimate, if you choose, the "greater 
 works" of the followers of Christ by the 
 geographical extent of the out-reach of His 
 religion. Paul carried the gospel into re- 
 gions which Jesus never attempted to visit. 
 And the modern missionary successors of 
 Paul are successfully promulgating Christ's 
 religion in lands wholly unknown to the 
 "Apostle to the Gentiles." The provinces 
 of Judea and of Galilee were the scene of 
 Christ's ministry. The entire world has be- 
 come the scene of the labours of His fol- 
 lowers. 
 
 Or value the "greater works" of Christ's 
 disciples by the increasing variety of the ap- 
 plications of the principles which He incul- 
 cated and exemphfied. Jesus made but 
 little, if any, attempt to apply the moral 
 power of love to social, industrial, and po- 
 litical conditions. He was apparently not 
 interested in the subject of the public edu- 
 cation of the youth, nor in the settlement of 
 
 [ IT'l 1 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 labour disputes, nor in the establishment of a 
 just and righteous government. Even His 
 concern with men's bodies was limited to the 
 cure of isolated cases of sickness and did not 
 extend to any attempt to prevent disease. 
 But the followers of Jesus now are applying 
 His revealed power to all sorts of prob- 
 lems, problems which Jesus Himself seemed 
 not to recognize. By attention to hygiene, 
 they are making absolutely impossible some 
 of the diseases which were in sporadic in- 
 stances only cured by Jesus. By the 
 maintenance of schools and colleges and 
 endowed libraries, the modern disciples 
 of Jesus are preventing many forms 
 of sin which Jesus only occasionally 
 forgave. By the introduction of the 
 principle of brotherhood into industry 
 and into politics, these later followers of 
 Jesus are making impossible the oppression 
 of the poor and the unfortunate, whereas 
 Jesus Himself was content with but one 
 exhibition of the holy wrath of love, when 
 He overthrew the tables of the greedy 
 grafters in the temple of the living God. 
 [172] 
 
ACHIEVING POWER 
 
 Jesus rescued an occasional individual from 
 some of the effects of ignorance and disease 
 and sin. The followers of Jesus are keep- 
 ing whole classes, whole nations, one might 
 almost say the whole world from ignorance 
 and from disease, from crime and from sin- 
 fulness. 
 
 If some of these "greater works," per- 
 haps all of them, are being accomplished to- 
 day by scientific methods which are compre- 
 hensible to the human intellect, their great- 
 ness is not thereby diminished one whit. To 
 help any man in any of his actual needs is 
 great work, however that help may be ac- 
 complished. The "greater works'* prom- 
 ised by Jesus are the applications of His re- 
 vealed moral power of love to more people, 
 to a wider field, and to a greater variety of 
 activities. The "greater works" are pos- 
 sible because of the greatness of Christ's in- 
 itial revelation. That the work, in its ex- 
 tent, must be greater than Christ's, is inevi- 
 table because the power which He revealed 
 was a living, divine power, and therefore its 
 fruits must grow. 
 
 [ 173 ] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 We must not hesitate in our description 
 of this power, revealed in its fullness by 
 Jesus and by Him made available to men. 
 It is a superhuman power. By this we can- 
 not mean that it is a miraculous power, nor 
 even a supernatural power. But it is super- 
 human. It is a power outside and above 
 the man himself, a power greater than any 
 potency which can be energized into his own 
 latent capabilities. 
 
 We have reached the limit of man's unas- 
 sisted power, however disinterested may be 
 his energizing motive, long before we have 
 reached the end of his possible achievements. 
 A man under the stress of an imperative 
 call of love may lift a much greater weight 
 than he could possibly lift without that em- 
 powering incentive. But, after all, he can 
 lift much more by the intelligent use of the 
 steam derrick. When he uses the steam 
 derrick, he is utilizing a power of God which 
 is superhuman. That a man who is en- 
 dowed with the spirit of Jesus should be 
 able to accomplish results utterly impossible 
 to him without Christ's spirit, is no more 
 
 [174] 
 
ACHIEVING POWER 
 
 miraculous or supernatural than that a man, 
 by the use of the steam derrick, can utilize 
 a power superhuman. We must consider 
 the spiritual power of divine love in the 
 world to be as natural as the physical 
 power of what we call natural forces. 
 And we must note that the great results 
 which have been accomplished by men 
 inspired by love are explicable only on 
 the assumption that they have been using 
 love's steam derrick. Their selfless devotion 
 has enabled them to use a power divine. 
 The power of their human endeavour has 
 been multiplied by the power of God's om- 
 nipotence, and lo! the "greater works" have 
 been accomplished. 
 
 Now if this omnipotent, divine power of 
 the love of God, like all other powers of 
 God, be a real and a natural power, it must 
 be reducible to certain definite and com- 
 prehensible laws. There must be a way by 
 which any man can avail himself of this 
 superhuman power just as there is a way 
 by which he can avail himself of the super- 
 human power of steam or of electricity. 
 [175] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 The way marked out by Jesus is the way 
 of fellowship with His ideals. He Himself 
 was the Way, He declared on one occasion 
 — the Way and the Truth and the Life. 
 By this we must understand Him to mean 
 that anyone who would accept His truth 
 and live His life must, by that way, come 
 into possession of His power. 
 
 To be more explicit, to accept the truth 
 in Christ is to accept not merely in an in- 
 tellectual sense, but in an ethical sense the 
 truth of the Fatherhood of God, with all 
 its implications of the brotherhood of men, 
 and of love's compulsion to service. To 
 live Christ's life means the attempt to serve 
 and to save one's fellow-men by self-f orget- 
 fulness and sacrifice. Given a man who 
 will really take this truth of Christ into his 
 life and try to live it, and you have a man 
 who can no more avoid utilizing the super- 
 human, divine power of love, than the man 
 who has come into practical possession of 
 the truths of physics can avoid utilizing 
 superhuman and also divine power when he 
 
 [ 176 ] 
 
ACHIEVING POWER 
 
 controls a steam derrick or when he touches 
 the electric button. 
 
 That superhuman physical power can be 
 used by man is a matter of fact which we 
 observe every day in our lives. That super- 
 human spiritual power can be used by man 
 is not merely a truth to be logically deduced ; 
 this also is a matter of fact. That all men 
 may, if they will, use the power which some 
 men are manifestly using, is a truth which 
 cannot be denied except by the denial of 
 the unity of God and of the inviolability of 
 God's law. 
 
 Achieving power! This is the promise 
 of the Christian religion. And this is the 
 end of the Christian religion, of which the 
 consciousness of filial relation with God is 
 only the beginning. 
 
 The way of progress in Christ's religion 
 is the way of faith in God and love for 
 men. All along the way there will be 
 brought to the traveler the blessings of for- 
 giveness and of health, of consolation and 
 of strength, of joy and of peace. 
 
 [ 177 ] 
 
EFFICIENT RELIGION 
 
 But no Christian can be content with any 
 of these blessings which may come just to 
 himself. The Christian has not come into 
 possession of the great blessing promised 
 by Christ's religion, the "pearl" of price- 
 less value, until in the selfless devotion of 
 his life his whole being becomes energized, 
 until by the inevitableness of the operation 
 of the laws of love he makes use of the 
 very omnipotence of love for the accom- 
 plishment of superhuman achievements, un- 
 til he says, "In Christ's strengthening power 
 I can," and until bj^ the use of that power 
 he achieves. 
 
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