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 Speer, Robert E. 1867-1947 
 
 The stuff of manhood 
 
THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
By ROBERT E. SPEER 
 
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 Tie Merrick Lectures for igib-lj. Delivered mc the Ohiq . t . ^ 
 
 fVeileyan Uni'versity, Delaware, OAio, ^pril As, J^IJ <v ln^i>j 
 
 The Stuff of Manho 
 
 ^^mki 8i>^ 
 
 SOME NEEDED NOTES IN 
 AMERICAN CHARACTER 
 
 By 
 ROBERT E. SPEER 
 
 New York Chicago Toronto 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 London and Edinburgh 
 
Copyright, 1917, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
 Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. 
 London : 2 1 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street 
 
The Merrick Lectures 
 
 BY the gift of the late Rev. Frederick 
 Merrick, M. D., D. D.. LL. D., for fifty- 
 one years a member of the Faculty, and 
 for thirteen of those years President of Ohio 
 Wesleyan University, a fund was established 
 providing an annual income for the purpose of 
 securing lectures within the general field of 
 Experimental and Practical Religion. The fol- 
 lowing courses have previously been given on 
 this foundation : 
 
 Daniel Curry, D. D. — " Christian Education." 
 
 President James McCosh, D. D., LL. D. — 
 " Tests of the Various Kinds of Truth." 
 
 Bishop Randolph S. Foster, D. D., LL. D. — 
 " The Philosophy of Christian Experience." 
 
 Professor James Stalker, D. D. — "The Preacher 
 and His Models." 
 
 John W. Buder, D. D. — " Mission Work in 
 Mexico." 
 
 Professor George Adam Smith, D. D., LL. D. 
 — " Christ in the Old Testament." 
 
 Bishop James W. Bashford, Ph. D., D. D., 
 LL. D. — " The Science of Religion." 
 
 James M. Buckley, D. D., LL. D.— " The Nat- 
 ural and Spiritual Orders and Their Relations." 
 
 5 
 
6 THE MERRICK LECTURES 
 
 John R. Mott, M. A., F. R. G. S.— " The 
 Pastor and Modern Missions." 
 
 Bishop Elijah E. Hoss, D. D., LL. D. ; Professor 
 Doremus A. Hayes, Ph. D., S. T. D., LL. D. ; 
 Charles E. Jefferson, D. D., LL. D, ; Bishop 
 William F. McDowell, D. D., LL. D. ; President 
 Edwin H. Hughes, D. D.— " The New Age and 
 Its Creed." 
 
 Robert E. Speer, M. A.—" The Marks of a 
 Man, or The Essentials of Christian Character," 
 
 Rev. Charles Stelzle, Miss Jane Addams, Com- 
 missioner of Labor Charles P. Neill, Ph. D., Pro- 
 fessor Graham Taylor, and Rev. George P. 
 Eckman, D. D. — " The Social Application of 
 Religion." 
 
 Rev. George Jackson, M. A. — " Some Old Tes- 
 tament Problems." 
 
 Professor Walter Rauschenbusch, D. D. — 
 •' Christianizing the Social Order." 
 
 Professor G. A. Johnston Ross, M. A. — " One 
 Avenue of Faith." 
 
Introduction 
 
 THE moral elements of individual char- 
 acter are inevitably social. And the 
 social obligation immensely strengthens 
 the sanctions which enjoin them. When a man 
 " has trained himself," to use the words of Lord 
 Morley in dealing with Voltaire's religion, " to 
 look upon every wrong in thought, every duty 
 omitted from act, each infringement of the inner 
 spiritual law which humanity is constantly per- 
 fecting for its own guidance and advantage 
 . . . as an ungrateful infection, weakening 
 and corrupting the future of his brothers," he 
 views each struggle within his own soul against 
 evil and each firm aspiration after purity not as 
 a mere incident in his own spiritual biography 
 but as a fight for social good and for the per- 
 fecting of the nation and of humanity. And the 
 struggle for social good and the perfecting of 
 human life is fundamentally a struggle for the 
 triumph of ideals in personal wills. God can 
 take hold of men only in man. He revealed 
 Himself and wrought redemption less by a social 
 process than by a personal incarnation. And the 
 only way of which we know to uplift the life of the 
 nation and to fit it for its mission and its ministry 
 
 7 
 
8 INTRODUCTION 
 
 is to reform our own and other men's characters, 
 and ourselves to be what manner of man among 
 men we would have the nation be among na- 
 tions. It is of some of the elements of character 
 of which men stand specially in need to-day that 
 we are to speak in these lectures. What is good 
 in our lives as individuals and in our life as a na- 
 tion is not in need of discussion here. And there 
 is no nobility in analyzing and deriding our 
 weaknesses. Our purpose is to urge our keeping 
 if we have not lost them, and our regaining if we 
 feel them slipping from us, some of the elemental 
 moral qualities and spiritual resources which are 
 vital to the capacity for duty and to the living of 
 a full and efficient life. 
 
 It has seemed best, on the whole, to preserve 
 in the printed volume the free colloquialism of 
 the lectures as they were delivered. 
 
 R. E. S. 
 
 New York, 
 
Contents 
 
 I Discipline AND Austerity . . .11 
 
 II. The Conservation and Release of 
 
 Moral Resources .... 50 
 
 III. An Unfrightened Hope ... 8$ 
 
 IV. The Joy OF the Minority . . .118 
 V. The Life Invisible . , • ,160 
 
LECTURE I 
 DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY 
 
 WHETHER there should be compulsory- 
 military training in America is a ques- 
 tion which some people will answer 
 yes or no according to their general theories and 
 others according to their observation of the actual 
 effects of such training on moral character. But 
 whatever our views may be on this familiar ques- 
 tion, whether we regard military service as ethic- 
 ally helpful in its influence or as morally injuri- 
 ous, we cannot difier as to the need in our na- 
 tional character of those qualities of self-control, 
 of quick and unquestioning obedience to duty, 
 of joyful contempt of hardship, and of zest in 
 difficult and arduous undertakings which, rightly 
 or wrongly, we consider soldierly, which we at- 
 tribute in such rich measure to our forefathers, 
 and which the moral exigencies of our national 
 task to-day as peremptorily demand. To put 
 these primary and elemental needs as sharply as 
 possible, let us call them discipline and austerity. 
 Our American character needs more of both. 
 
 I do not know a better starting point than is 
 found in one of those vivid modern touches upon 
 
 11 
 
12 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 which we constantly come in the Old Testament. 
 This one is in the account of the closing year of 
 King David's life. The story seems ancient and 
 far away until we suddenly read : " His father 
 had not displeased him at any time saying, Why 
 hast thou done so ? " If we were to translate the 
 words more directly into the language of our 
 own day, we should say, " His father had always 
 let him do exactly as he pleased." The reference 
 is to David and his son Adonijah, and to the want 
 of discipline by which the father had ruined his 
 boy. 
 
 It is not hard to reconstruct the story. David 
 was busy about his cares as king, and his heart 
 was indulgent towards his children. Adonijah 
 seems to have been his youngest son, and the 
 father let him have his way, never reining him 
 up or checking him by asking why he had done 
 thus or so. David pursued, in other words, the 
 modern theory of child training : that the one 
 principle by which children should be educated 
 is the principle of letting what is naturally in 
 them come out ; that they must not be crossed 
 or frustrated, or have any external discipline or 
 control laid upon their lives. This is, of course, 
 the extreme of it, but in some form we hear the 
 theory and see it applied all about us every day. 
 
 And it is a modern theory of self-education, 
 also. We are told that life should be left free to 
 follow its native impulses ; that it should not be 
 
DISCII^LINE AND AUSTERITY 13 
 
 thwarted and intimidated by the conventions and 
 prohibitions of society ; that men and women 
 should consult their own hearts and then should 
 move out quite freely in obedience to their 
 promptings ; that their lives and the lives of their 
 children should not be twisted or deflected by the 
 imposition of any external authority or command. 
 
 Well, that was the way Adonijah was brought 
 up. His father was rich. The boy had his own 
 establishment, his own horses, his own retinue of 
 attendants, and round about him, as about any 
 oriental king's son, there would be the usual 
 crowd of flatterers and sycophants. There was 
 no will or desire that he had not the means to 
 gratify, and his father let him have his way. 
 
 Further, he was the younger brother of Ab- 
 salom, and the ancient record says that they 
 were handsome and popular boys. They had a 
 way that carried along those who came in touch 
 with them, and as the king's sons, and the lead- 
 ing young men of the city, we have no difBculty 
 in understanding the atmosphere in which they 
 lived and the conditions within which they grew. 
 
 It must be confessed that this was the easy 
 way of going about the matter. It is far easier 
 to let a child have its own way than to endeavour 
 by wisdom and patience and strength, to study 
 and decide what is best for the child and without 
 hurting the child's will, to guide it into the better 
 way. It was far less care to David to let Absa- 
 
14 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 lorn and Adonijah go than it would have been 
 to take these high-strung sons of his in hand and 
 endeavour to break them to discipline and truth, 
 and to send them out into life real men of 
 power. It was much easier never to call them 
 and to say, " Boys, why did you do this ? '* 
 Much easier never to lay any authority or guid- 
 ance upon them from without, much easier, es- 
 pecially for a man like David. He had grown 
 up on a farm, with all the hardship and frugality 
 of farm life, with no privileges as a lad, and now 
 that he was the king of his nation, he was able 
 to do anything whatever for his sons. It was 
 difficult to refuse them the things he had never 
 had. Easily and indulgently — for he was a man 
 of kindly heart all his days — he found it simpler 
 not to lay hard restraints upon his boys when he 
 could give them their own way. 
 
 And, of course, this is the easier way of self- 
 education too. For a man to love himself so 
 much that he never thinks of his neighbours, to 
 blind his eyes so completely to consequences 
 that he can live for the passing moment, — this is 
 a very easy philosophy, and the man or the 
 woman who is able to practice it will seem, for a 
 while, to live in the sunshine, a fine butterfly, 
 smooth-going life. All this is easier than to say, 
 not, What is my impulse ? but, What ought I ? 
 not, What do I like? but, What is best for all 
 the world ? not, What is the easy way ? but, 
 
DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY 15 
 
 What is the hard way over which the feet go 
 that carry the burdens of mankind, that bear the 
 load of the world ? 
 
 But, though it is the easy way for a while, there 
 comes a time when it is no longer the easy way. 
 When in his little room above the gate the old 
 king bowed his gray head in his hands and with 
 breaking heart sobbed out : *' O my son Absa- 
 lom ! my son, my son Absalom I would God I 
 had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my 
 son 1 " — it was no longer the easy way. When 
 Adonijah rose up in insurrection against his old 
 father as he lay on his dying bed, gathering his 
 little company of sycophants around him and 
 setting himself up in his father's place, then it 
 was no longer the easy way that the old man 
 had pursued. 
 
 And to-day still, fathers and mothers who for 
 a little while thought the easy way was never to 
 ask their children why they had done so, but to 
 let them go their own way with no imposition of 
 outward authority or control, find after a while 
 that tne easy way has turned bitterly hard. I 
 have a friend, a leading merchant in one of our 
 large cities. Some time ago another friend was 
 visiting him, and as they walked down the street 
 together, suddenly a large car whizzed around 
 the corner, full of young people, among them 
 the merchant's son. This was the middle of the 
 forenoon and the boy was supposed to be at work 
 
16 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 in his father's establishment. The father turned 
 to his friend and said : '* I wish I knew how I 
 could hold my boy in." But my friend under- 
 stood why he could not. He knew that only 
 two or three years before the son had been re- 
 warded for passing examinations at college, 
 examinations that it ought to have been taken 
 for granted that he would pass. But his father 
 thought he should be rewarded for passing them, 
 and he bought a car and sent it up to him at col- 
 lege. Now he wonders why this son does not 
 know how to bind himself to arduous duty. 
 
 And in our own lives the easy education does not 
 go easily all the way. There comes a time when, 
 having always indulged ourselves, we can't break 
 the habit ; when, never having taken our lives in 
 our hands and reined them to the great minis- 
 tries of mankind, we discover that we cannot. 
 We find that we obey our caprices ; follow any 
 impulse ; cannot stick to any task ; do not know 
 a principle when we see it ; have no iron or steel 
 anywhere in our character ; are the riffraff of the 
 world that the worthy men and women have to 
 bear along as they go. In Mr. Kipling's inele- 
 gant lines : 
 
 " We was rotten 'fore we started — ^we was never 
 
 Aiscxplined ; 
 We made it out a favour if an order was obeyed ; 
 Yes, every little drummer 'ad 'is rights and wrongs 
 
 to mind, 
 So we had to pay for teachin' — an' we paid ! " 
 
DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY 17 
 
 Now I suggest that we put all this positively 
 to ourselves, for every one of us knows that we 
 are treading near some of the moral realities of 
 weakness and need in our day and nation. 
 Why should restraint, obedience, the authority 
 of duty and God be let into our lives? In order 
 that out of all these things self-control may 
 come. And why should there be this submis- 
 sion and control of our lives by duty, and truth 
 and God ? Well, the reasons are obvious, the 
 moment we begin to think about them. 
 
 There is the indisputable fact that the strongest 
 and best men and women we know are men and 
 women who were trained in this school, who 
 some time during their life, and the earlier the 
 better, passed under the discipline and influ- 
 ence of that chastening spoken about in the 
 twelfth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
 without which we are not children of a clean 
 God. All around us are these men and women, 
 fathers and mothers, who indulge their sons 
 and daughters, who never confront them with 
 moral principle and obligation and duty, and 
 then lament because their children do not seem 
 to have the old iron grasp of duty, the old rigid 
 love of truth and righteousness. Well, it is all 
 very simple. It is because those fathers and 
 mothers are denying to their children the very 
 education that made themselves what they are. 
 The men and women, who will not run away 
 
18 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 from any task, who stand steadfast in the truth, 
 upon whose every word we can rest our whole 
 soul, grew out of a certain discipline, a certain 
 education, and it was the kind that Adonijah did 
 not have. And all men and women who want 
 to be masters of their lives and to have strength 
 to lay beneath the work of the world must ask 
 God that such discipline may be given to them. 
 
 Not alone is this the only kind of training 
 that can produce this kind of character, but un- 
 less a man learns control from without, he will 
 never learn self-control. Unless he passes under 
 the discipline of a wiser and stronger hand at the 
 beginning, he will never come to the time of de- 
 liberate and moral self-discipline, which alone is 
 character. For this only is character, — the bind- 
 ing of life beneath the firm sovereignty of the 
 principle that is the heart of God. If nations 
 do not realize this they will pay heavily for their 
 failure. "Make your educational laws strict," 
 said Ruskin, "and your criminal laws may be 
 gentle ; but leave youth its liberty and you will 
 have to dig dungeons for age." 
 
 And it is this that gives freedom. There is 
 no freedom outside of character. Liberty, as 
 Montesquieu says, is not freedom to do just as 
 we please. Liberty is the ability to do as we 
 ought. And the freedom that we need is not 
 the freedom of caprice and whim and listening to 
 our impulses. It is the freedom that enables our 
 
DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY 19 
 
 eyes clearly to see what right is, and then em- 
 powers us to do it. Symonds put it in his verse : 
 
 '* Soul, rule thyself. On passion, deed, desire, 
 Lay thou the law of thy deliberate will. 
 Stand at thy chosen post, faith's sentinel. 
 Learn to endure. Thine the reward 
 Of those who make living light their Lord. 
 Clad with celestial steel these stand secure, 
 Masters, not slaves." 
 
 And if such self-control goes as far even as the 
 self-extinction of that voluntarily accepted Cross, 
 on the green hill outside Jerusalem, even so it 
 will bring victory at the last, because it has 
 brought one long succession of victories over 
 self all the days. I cut this fugitive bit of verse 
 from a newspaper the other day : 
 
 " Pausing a moment ere the day was done. 
 While yet the earth was scintillant with light, 
 I backward glanced. From valley, plain and height, 
 At intervals, where my life path had run. 
 Rose cross on cross : and nailed upon each one 
 Was my dead self. And yet that gruesome sight 
 Lent sudden splendour to the falHng night. 
 Showing the conquests that my soul had won. 
 
 *' Up to the rising stars I looked and cried. 
 There is no death ! For year on year reborn, 
 I wake to larger life, to joy more great. 
 So many times have I been crucified, 
 So often seen the resurrection morn, 
 I go triumphant, though new Calvaries wait." 
 
 And this freedom and victory are waiting only 
 for those lives that have been broken beneath 
 
20 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 the cross of an absolute restraint of God, and 
 have so mastered themselves under God's name 
 by the help of Christ that control has been given 
 over in trust into their own hands. 
 
 And we all know that power is to be won here 
 in this school where men are trained both to feel 
 and to wield dominion. There is no power in 
 the world that is not power cabined, power held 
 in some way. Loose power is imperceptible and 
 utterly useless. The only power we know is 
 power walled in, shut down, confined and beat- 
 ing against its barriers and its walls. We know 
 this in the athletic life of our colleges to-day. 
 No athletic trainer in any college ever followed 
 David's method with Adonijah. The trainer is 
 there to say : " Why did you do it that way ? " 
 " Why did you not do it this way ? You have 
 no right to waste your energy in that way. You 
 must do it so." There is one scene in Quo Vadis 
 that redeems much else in the book. It is the 
 scene in the Coliseum, when the giant Gothic 
 slave is shown saving the life of his mistress, 
 whom he loved. The great bull has come out 
 with the girl's form tied to his horns, and there 
 is dead silence as the bull stands angrily facing 
 the man. You remember the picture. As Ursus 
 lays one hand on each horn of the auroch the 
 struggle begins. There is not a sound. The 
 great multitude watches the man's muscles rise 
 and harden and the sweat come out and drop 
 
DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY 21 
 
 from every pore. They see his feet sinking 
 down in the arena, until the sand is above his 
 ankles. Suddenly the great head of the bull be- 
 gins to twist under that awful strength. Then 
 the neck breaks and the giant lifts the limp form 
 from the beast's neck and stands with the burden 
 in his hands before the Emperor. One likes to 
 read such a picture of power secured by self- 
 discipline. Do we want to go out limp and 
 beaten and ineffective in our lives against the 
 great mass of work in the world that waits to be 
 done ? Or do we want to go in the strength of 
 Him Who, having bent beneath His Father's 
 will, was able to carry on the Cross the whole 
 burden of human sin ? 
 
 And we must learn in this school the things 
 we value and desire most : purity and delicacy 
 and refinement of character, for they cannot be 
 acquired elsewhere. So much social standing 
 nowadays is uttered in terms of self-assertion and 
 indulgence and the ability to have any whim or 
 caprice gratified. This sort of self-assertion, this 
 caprice, is regarded by many of us as the highest 
 mark of social authority, whereas we know it 
 is precisely the opposite, that it is self-restraint 
 and self-control and self-surrender that mark the 
 finest lives. 
 
 There is a beautiful story in the life of Goldwin 
 Smith that illustrates what I mean. In the early 
 sixties, when he was one of the keenest liberal 
 
32 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 minds of England, he was associated with Cob- 
 den and Bright in the Manchester School. Again 
 and again he found himself the mark of the 
 bitterest criticism from Disraeli. Later Goldwin 
 Smith, resigning his professorship at Oxford, came 
 to Canada. At that time Disraeli's novel, " Lo- 
 thair," appeared in which he attacked Smith — of 
 course, without using his name — as a social 
 parasite. It stung Smith to the depths of his 
 soul, but as it was an anonymous book there 
 was nothing he could do but sit down and write 
 this note personally to Disraeli : 
 
 ** You well know that if you had ventured openly to 
 accuse me of any social baseness, you would have had to 
 answer for your words ; but when sheltering yourself under 
 the literary forms of a work of fiction, you seek to traduce 
 with impunity the social character of a poUtical opponent, 
 your expressions can touch no man's honour — they are the 
 stingless insults of a coward." 
 
 That was all he did. And yet, at that very 
 moment, Goldwin Smith had in his possession 
 letters of Disraeli, with which he could have 
 crushed him. Openly in Parliament Disraeli 
 had said that he had never asked Peel for any 
 position. But among Peel's papers which had 
 been placed in his hands Smith had a letter in 
 which Disraeli had abjectly begged Peel to give 
 him office. All that Smith needed to do was to 
 publish Disraeli's own letter to Peel and it would 
 
DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY 23 
 
 have ruined Disraeli's careen But to Goldwin 
 Smith that was not a noble thing to do. Peel's 
 correspondence had not been given to him to 
 use in self-defense, or for any personal justifica- 
 tion of his own, and he repressed that letter until 
 Disraeli was dead. Then, years after, all of Peel's 
 correspondence was published and the whole 
 world knew what a gentleman Goldwin Smith 
 had been. Our modern ideals of what constitutes 
 high social and national standing and character 
 say : " Fight fire with fire. Dishonour releases 
 honour from itself. He struck you foul ; strike 
 him so in return." But the man who had learned 
 self-restraint in the school of God's loyalty and 
 truth, who understood that power is ours, not to 
 use for self-seeking, but for the good of men and 
 for God's honour, would not stoop to any such 
 disloyalty and shame. 
 
 Once more. Whose judgment is of any value ? 
 Who would have thought of going to Adonijah 
 and asking his opinion on anything whatsoever? 
 He did not know right from wrong. He never 
 thought over the issues of right or wrong. 
 What would I like to do ? What does passion 
 bid me do ? What is my whim or caprice for to- 
 night ? — that was as far as Adonijah had ever 
 thought. No man would ever go to him, as no 
 men will ever come to you and me if we have 
 not been trained in the school of moral discrimi- 
 nation, if we have not looked on ethical principle 
 
24 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 and duty in deciding the question whether each 
 thing- is really right for us and for the whole 
 world. If we are to be men and women to whom 
 people will come for comfort and strength and 
 guidance, to whom our own children can come 
 with assurance that they will get the truth, we 
 must be men and women who now place our- 
 selves beneath the firm discipline of God. 
 
 We see all this put simply in two great things. 
 We see it in our Lord's constant appeal, while 
 here in the world, for men and women of fiber 
 and discipline. One came to Him and said : 
 "Lord, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" 
 And Jesus, looking upon him, loved him and 
 said : " I would not think of counselling anything 
 hard. You must not sacrifice anything. It is 
 all very easy. The Father above is a Father of 
 great tenderness and compassion. He would 
 not lay a straw's weight upon any child of His. 
 Go ; live according to your desires and by the 
 natural impulses of your heart, and for that you 
 shall have treasure in heaven." Oh, no ; He did 
 not say that. He said : " Go, sell all that thou 
 hast, and come and follow me. Except ye love 
 less than duty your father and mother and brother 
 and sister, yea, and your own life also, ye cannot 
 enter the kingdom of God." 
 
 We see it, too, in God's way with men as He 
 laid down His great laws at the beginning, when 
 His people were but as a race of little children. 
 
DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY 25 
 
 Why did He not say to them : " This ye may do. 
 The world is sweet and fair. This ye may do, 
 and all shall be easy to you " ? Why, on the 
 other hand, did He speak to them in the 
 stern admonitions of the Decalogue : " Thou 
 shalt. Thou shalt not " ? God never hesitates 
 to lay His great denials upon mankind and at 
 last to stifle us beneath the restraint of death that 
 He may issue us forth through that restraint into 
 the infinite liberties of the life immortal. 
 
 Now do not brush all this away to-day, or any 
 day, light-heartedly, as it can be so easily brushed 
 away. *' Oh, don't shadow our lives," you will 
 say, "with your denials and your prohibitions 
 and your restraints. Leave life free and sweet 
 as the summer air and the flowers of the field " — 
 that last how long? No, my friends, it were well 
 for us that we should learn this lesson, and learn 
 it now, ere the time comes when the silver cord 
 is loosed and the wheel is broken at the cistern and 
 the grinders cease and the long shadows fall. 
 You remember a tragic incident in New York a 
 few years ago — I do not need to recall the details 
 of it — when two young lives made shipwreck of 
 themselves just because they thought that im- 
 pulse and caprice were the free voices that they 
 might obey. When it was all over, and the two 
 lives had drawn the veil of night across their 
 short-lived evil joy, one of the papers published 
 a letter which the girl had written to a friend : 
 
26 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 " My friend," she wrote, " you and I and Fred, young, 
 heedless, cynical, living in this reckless town of New York, 
 may laugh sometimes at the old things like law and re- 
 ligion, when they say, ' Thou shalt not.' We may think 
 that phrase was written for old fogies, and we may sneer 
 at ' the wages of sin is death ' ; but, my friend, there 
 comes to us some time knowledge that the law and religion 
 are right. What they say we shall not do, we cannot do 
 without suffering. Fred and I have learned that. The 
 wages of sin is death." 
 
 It is worse than death ; for what was Hell in 
 that great vision that John saw ? Why, nothing 
 but the removal of all restraint. " He which is 
 filthy, let him be filthy still." He is unclean, let 
 him be unclean. He is unholy, let him be un- 
 holy. Take all the restraints away. That is 
 Hell. 
 
 Away from the dark gates that open thither 
 may another voice call us here to-day, the clear, 
 strong, summoning voice of Him Who said of 
 Himself : " I came not to do mine own will, but 
 the will of him that sent me, I do always those 
 things that please my Father," and Who in the 
 garden of Gethsemane, when the anguish was 
 almost greater than He could bear, yet found rest 
 when He prayed, " Father, not my will, but thine 
 be done " ; that out of the willfulness and capri- 
 ciousness and the whim and mood of our little 
 self-indulgent lives we may pass into the great, 
 strong, steadfast, sovereign will that waits for us ; 
 
DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY 27 
 
 that we may stand fast and be strong in the 
 strength and chastening of God ! 
 
 Now I have put it — this matter of our need of 
 discipHne — in the most personal and individual 
 way, but it is our great national and corporate 
 need. The body of a nation can only exist 
 through the ordered discipline of its members 
 and the spirit of a nation like the spirit of a man 
 needs to be cleansed of all the lusts of willfulness 
 and self-indulgence. The spirit of our American 
 nation needs such cleansing. Mr. Kipling has 
 drawn us his picture of it : 
 
 ** Through many roads, by me possessed, 
 He shambles forth in cosmic guise ; 
 He is the Jester and the Jest, 
 And he the Text himself applies. 
 
 *' His easy unswept hearth he lends 
 From Labrador to Guadaloupe ; 
 Till, elbowed out by sloven friends, 
 He camps, at sufferance, on the stoop. 
 
 " Calm-eyed he scoffs at sword and crown, 
 Or panic-blinded stabs and slays : 
 Blatant he bids the world bow down, 
 Or cringing begs a crust of praise ; 
 
 *' Or, sombre-drunk, at mine and mart, 
 He dubs his dreary brethren Kings. 
 His hands are black with blood — his heart 
 Leaps, as a babe's, at little things. 
 
 " But, through the shift of mood and mood, 
 Mine ancient humour saves him whole — 
 The cynic devil in his blood 
 
 That bids him mock his hurrying soul ; 
 
28 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 *' That bids him flout the Law he makes, 
 That bids him make the Law he flouts, 
 Till, dazed by many doubts, he wakes 
 
 The drumming guns that — have no doubts ; 
 
 " That checks him foolish-hot and fond, 
 That chuckles through his deepest ire, 
 That gilds the slough of his despond 
 But dims the goal of his desire ; 
 
 " Inopportune, shrill-accented, 
 The acrid Asiatic mirth 
 That leaves him, careless 'mid his dead, 
 The scandal of the elder earth." 
 
 Doubtless we do not like this picture. We call 
 it a libel or a caricature. Let it be so. Draw 
 your own picture. If there is any truth or faith- 
 fulness in it, if it is not blind with national vanity 
 and self-deceit, it will still be a revelation of 
 national need of discipline and of self-empire. 
 
 And how can such discipline and self-empire 
 be won ? Well, it will not be won on any ground 
 of prudential expediency or practical self-interest. 
 It is well for men and nations to discern their 
 moral shortcomings and to realize their need of 
 a new character. But there are no automatic 
 processes of community salvation. The disci- 
 plined nation comes in only one way — by the 
 answers of individuals to the austere call of the 
 one Person who can remake character and mould 
 the stuff of manhood and nationality. The aus- 
 tere call 1 This is the nation's need and it is 
 the fundamental summons and the central note 
 
DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY 29 
 
 of Christianity. " Then said Jesus unto his dis- 
 ciples, If any man will come after me, let him 
 deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow 
 me." 
 
 The appeal of Christ was always addressed to 
 the sacrificial and the heroic. In every call 
 which He issued to men there is this unmis- 
 takable note of austerity. He never smooths 
 things over for the sake of pleasing people or of 
 winning followers. There were times when He 
 seemed almost needlessly to draw in these re- 
 pelling aspects of discipleship, and to make the 
 conditions of following Him unnecessarily hard. 
 It is related that it came to pass that, as they 
 went in the way, a certain man said unto Him, 
 " Lord, I will follow thee whithersoever thou 
 goest." And Jesus said unto him, " Foxes have 
 holes, and birds of the air have nests ; but the 
 Son of man hath not where to lay his head." 
 And He said unto another, " Follow me." But 
 he said, " Lord, suffer me first to go and bury 
 my father." Jesus said unto him, " Let the dead 
 bury their dead; but go thou and preach the 
 ■kingdom of God." And another also said, 
 " Lord, I will follow thee ; but let me first go bid 
 them farewell which are at home at my house." 
 And Jesus said unto him, " No man, having put 
 his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit 
 for the kingdom of God." 
 
 Christ never concealed His own judgments 
 
30 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 and convictions as to life's values in these mat- 
 ters, and spoke with the greatest scorn of all in- 
 dulgence and softness of life. " What went ye 
 out for to see ? " He asked the people, regarding 
 John. "A man clothed in soft raiment? Be- 
 hold, they that wear soft clothing are in king's 
 houses." He was looking after men of iron and 
 of austerity. " If any man will come after me, 
 let him deny himself, and take up his cross and 
 follow me." 
 
 The beautiful thing is that this appeal of 
 Christ's was not futile. Instead of repelling 
 men it drew them. He actually obtained the 
 men whom He was hunting for, not by offering 
 them worldly inducements, not by making such 
 appeals as anybody but Christ would have made, 
 but by addressing the sacrificial spirit in them, 
 and making an appeal to their latent capacity 
 for heroism. There is a wonderful tribute in 
 Jesus' method to those characteristics in human 
 nature which have never been destroyed, which 
 can answer to the highest motives, which do not 
 need to be bought by any low compensations, 
 but which spring into full life when appealed to 
 on the most heroic and unselfish plane. We 
 know how, in consequence, this exultation in 
 difficulties, this love of hardship, this scorn of 
 ease became the characteristic note of early 
 Christianity. In the best summary description 
 which Saint Paul gives of Christian character 
 
DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY 31 
 
 and manhood, in the twelfth chapter of Romans 
 we find him speaking of " rejoicing in hope ; pa- 
 tient in tribulation." And when he comes to 
 write his conception of the character of the 
 happy warrior, we find him setting this in the 
 foreground, " Endure hardship, as a good sol- 
 dier of Jesus Christ." The praise of the New 
 Testament is never given to those who have 
 lived in luxurious, indulgent ease. It is for that 
 little company of men and women who have 
 loved the difficult tasks, and who with joy trod 
 the rough ways that transcend the stars. Every 
 one of the great New Testament leaders is a 
 man who exalts for us this same love of moral 
 hardship, this same scorn of indulgence and 
 smooth ease, and this same virtue of steadfast- 
 ness, "And not only so," says Paul, "but we 
 glory in tribulations also : knowing that tribula- 
 tion worketh stedfastness ; and stedfastness, ex- 
 perience ; and experience, hope." And Peter 
 writes, " Yea, and for this very cause adding on 
 your part all diligence, in your faith supply vir- 
 tue ; and in your virtue knowledge ; and in your 
 knowledge self-control ; and in your self-control 
 stedfastness ; and in your stedfastness godliness." 
 James joins in, " My brethren, count it all joy 
 when ye fall into divers temptations ; knowing 
 this, that the trying of your faith worketh pa- 
 tience." And you remember the description 
 which John gives of himself in Revelation as 
 
32 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 " your brother and partaker with you in the 
 tribulation and kingdom and stedfastness which 
 are in Jesus." 
 
 Now, we ask ourselves the question why our 
 Lord poured out all this scorn on what the world 
 counts the desirable condition and atmosphere 
 of life, why the New Testament has no patience 
 with self-seeking, indulgence, contentment, or 
 ease as the standard of a human life, why it 
 speaks contemptuously of smooth ease of every 
 kind, and exalts, instead, the austere life, the life 
 of strength, and of self-discipline, why our Lord 
 said to men when He came to call them into the 
 best thing there was in the world, " If any man 
 will come after me, let him deny himself, and 
 take up his cross daily, and follow after me." 
 
 Well, one reason why the whole New Testa- 
 ment pours out such contempt upon the smooth 
 life and exalts hardness, is because only hardness 
 can make a great soul, and the end of the Gos- 
 pel, the end of life, was the growing of souls. 
 The words of Socrates, understood in the social 
 sense which he intended and not selfishly, con- 
 tain the central end. " For I do nothing," said 
 he, "but go about persuading you all, old and 
 young alike, not to take thought for your per- 
 sons or your properties, but first and chiefly to 
 care about the greatest improvement of the soul." 
 It is true, in a sense, that we are here for the 
 work we can do, but it is also true, in a yet 
 
DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY 33 
 
 deeper sense, that we are here to become the 
 best workmen that we can become, and that the 
 work we do has a large measure of its value in 
 its reflex power of making us capable of doing 
 better work. Evidently this is not the real work- 
 shop where God needs His best men and women. 
 When He has perfected His workmen and work- 
 women and recognizes that they are prepared to 
 do their best work, does He make use of them 
 here ? Never. He takes them elsewhere, where 
 evidently the real work is to be done. Every- 
 thing we see in this world would seem to indi- 
 cate that it is only the preparatory school, a place 
 where men and women are equipped for the real 
 thing, that the career that is to abide lies else- 
 where than here. The purpose of these days is 
 to make us ready for the work God has for us to 
 do in a larger sphere than this, where we pass 
 on, as Chinese Gordon told Mr. Huxley, to have 
 a larger government given to us to administer. 
 God pours out His contempt on smoothness of 
 life because it cannot make greatness of soul, 
 and greatness of soul is one object of our being 
 here. 
 
 The Christian ideal despised, also, this smooth- 
 ness which seems to many of us the most desir- 
 able thing that life has for us, because there is 
 such little knowledge given with it. At best it 
 can only play on the very surface of life. We 
 know no more than springs out of the deep ex- 
 
34 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 perience through which we pass. You remem- 
 ber the lines of Father Tabb : 
 
 «« < Where wast thou, Httle song, 
 That hast delayed so long 
 To come to me ? ' 
 * Mute ill the mind of God 
 Till where thy feet had trod 
 I followed thee.' " 
 
 It is only where we have gone that we know 
 the way ; it is only the experience in life that 
 we have passed through that gives us our true 
 knowledge of life, because the end of life is its 
 relationships, and wealth of life depends on the 
 breadth of true knowledge and the riches of true 
 relationship. Smoothness of life is simply dead- 
 ening because it keeps us out of what is real life. 
 
 And Christianity derided smoothness of life, 
 and scorned it, because it separates us from 
 fellowship with the noble and suffering life of 
 God. You know the long controversy in the- 
 ology as to whether the idea of suffering is com- 
 patible with the idea of a perfect God. There 
 have been some theologians who insist it could 
 not be possible that God should suffer. If He 
 could suffer, He could not be God.. Well, I 
 suppose all of us here are prepared without one 
 moment of hesitation to range ourselves on the 
 other side, and to say that if God cannot suffer 
 He cannot be our God. He could not be a 
 father if He did not suffer. Christ could not 
 
DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY 35 
 
 have been the revelation of Him if He is not a suf- 
 fering God ; for " He was the man of sorrows, 
 and acquainted with grief." What He laid bare 
 was a heart of love sharing the anguish of others ; 
 for we have not a Father who cannot be touched 
 with the feeling of our infirmities, — We can say 
 that of Him because of what we know of Him 
 who revealed Him, — We have not a Father who 
 cannot be touched with the feeling of our infir- 
 mities, no impassive God sitting where " no 
 sound of human sorrow mounts to mar His 
 sacred everlasting calm," but a Father who pities 
 His children, who enters into their life, and who 
 loves them with all His soul. We can have no 
 knowledge of that God, no fellowship with His 
 life, if what we are living is the smooth, easy, 
 indulgent life, everything bought for us by 
 others, nothing done by us for others, no blood 
 of sacrifice colouring our life red with the glow 
 of God and His incarnate Son. The New Testa- 
 ment despises the smooth life that makes it im- 
 possible for men and women to have any part in 
 the deepest life of their Father. 
 
 And the New Testament scorns the smooth, 
 indulgent life because it cannot connect men and 
 women with the real springs of strength and of 
 power. No strong man was ever made against 
 no resistance. We develop no physical power 
 by putting forth no physical effort. All the 
 strength of life we have we get by pushing 
 
36 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 against opposition. We acquire power as we 
 draw it out of deep experience and effort. And 
 the new Christian ideal made no place for indul- 
 gence and ease because these things leave men 
 and women weak, with no strength either them- 
 selves to bear or to achieve for others. It is as 
 Mrs. King puts it in Ugo Bassi's " Sermon in 
 the Hospital " : 
 
 ** The Vine from every living limb bleeds wine; 
 Is it the poorer for the spirit shed ? 
 The drunkard and the wanton drink thereof; 
 Are they the richer for that gift's excess ? 
 Measure thy life by loss instead of gain ; 
 Not by the wine drunk, but the wine poured forth 
 For love's strength standeth in love's sacrifice ; 
 And whoso suffers most hath most to give. 
 
 God said to Man and Woman, ' By thy sweat, 
 And by thy travail, thou shalt conquer earth,' 
 Not, by thy ease or pleasure : — and no good 
 Or glory of this life but comes by pain. 
 How poor were earth if all its martrydoms. 
 If all its struggling sighs of sacrifice 
 Were swept away, and all were satiate-smooth, 
 If this were such a heaven of soul and sense 
 As some have dreamed of; — and we human still. 
 Nay, we were fashioned not for perfect peace 
 In this world, howsoever in the next : 
 And what we win and hold is through some strife." 
 
 And it was because our Lord knew this that He 
 set over against men's wills the strait door of the 
 kingdom of life. He did not betray the trust 
 that had been given to Him. He did not say, 
 
DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY 87 
 
 " Come, I will make life easy for you." He did 
 not say, " Come, let us indulge ourselves to 
 heart's content." He said, "If any man will 
 come after me, let him leave all that behind, let 
 him deny himself, and let him take up his cross 
 daily, and let him come after me." 
 
 Now, I know what many of us will be saying 
 of all this. We will be saying, " God did not 
 bring us into the world with any cross. All our 
 life long has been a sheltered life. None of this 
 hardness of which you speak has ever come to 
 us. Maybe our fathers and mothers knew it 
 before us, but they have shielded us from its 
 pressure. Are we to go back to crudeness and 
 asceticism for the good of our souls ? Are we 
 who have no cross deliberately to take our 
 smooth Hves and roughen them ? " Yes, that is 
 precisely what I am saying. Those of us who 
 were not born with a cross must find one, those 
 whose lives have been smooth are deliberately to 
 find ways of roughening them, so that we may 
 know a life of power and fellowship with the 
 suffering God, and can go out to real work, and 
 be prepared for that greater life and greater 
 service which await us elsewhere than here. 
 
 We shall not have any great difficulty in obey- 
 ing this call of Christ to roughen our lives. 
 There are many crosses in the world too heavy 
 for the men and women who are trying to carry 
 them. We can go out and find one of these 
 
38 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 crosses and help to bear it. They are not far 
 away. Here is a dipping from the New York 
 
 Sun : 
 
 "A comely young Hungarian woman with a three- 
 months- old baby in her arms dropped to the sidewalk at 
 Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street late yesterday after- 
 noon and lay half conscious. An ambulance surgeon who 
 came said the woman was starving and that her baby had 
 bronchitis. 
 
 ' ' The woman recovered enough to tell the surgeon that 
 she was Mrs. Mary Scheinn, twenty years old, and that her 
 husband had died recently. She had been living with a 
 friend at 97 Seigel Street, Brooklyn, she said, but this 
 woman also was very poor and expected to be evicted to- 
 day, so Mrs. Scheinn had walked to New York to try to 
 get her sick child into a hospital. She tramped from 
 hospital to hospital, and everywhere they refused to take 
 the child, she said. But she kept up the quest until she 
 gave out. She had had nothing to eat since yesterday and 
 little then. 
 
 " The ambulance took the woman and child to Bellevue 
 Hospital. Both are in a rather serious condition." 
 
 Being young and comely, doubtless, if she had 
 not had the baby, some pimp or other American 
 citizen, for a consideration within her power, 
 might have helped her, but being innocent and 
 carrying a baby there she stood until she fell 
 down, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Four- 
 teenth Street, in the heart of the city, a woman 
 carrying a baby and a cross that were too heavy 
 for her. There were millions of Christian people 
 
DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY 39 
 
 round about her. Thousands of us never knew 
 what a cross was and we let the woman with her 
 child in her arms fall down under the weight of 
 hers. This world is black with the shadows of 
 crosses. If we have none of our own, in the 
 name of the great Cross, let us borrow one. 
 
 Here is a note from a girl. She is one of 
 thousands and the note is real. I had been 
 speaking in one of the New York churches and 
 the next day came a letter from her asking me, 
 if I really believed what I had said, to answer 
 some questions for her. I wrote in reply and 
 this was part of her answer : " The great trouble 
 with me is that I have to fight continually 
 against despondency. Life to me is a series of 
 sorrows and troubles, that accumulate and grow 
 larger, and just when I am at the point of giving 
 up altogether some little word or act deters me. 
 ... I know I would be happy if I were, as you 
 say, truly trustful towards God, but God to me 
 seems very far off and rather mythical. Your let- 
 ter, also the fact that you wrote, was a help to me. 
 The part that perhaps appealed to me most was 
 the idea that God and God's love are longing 
 for us. It is very fine to feel that when one is 
 always lonesome." I learned more of her story 
 but it is not for telling here. It was a cross too 
 heavy for her which she was trying to bear. 
 Women who knew her lifted its weight for her, 
 taking it over upon themselves. 
 
4:0 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 And not only by taking up crosses, of which 
 the world is full, can we roughen our lives. 
 Many of us can do it by simply cutting ofl[ some 
 of our waste and extravagance. There are many 
 of us who never ask before we spend money, 
 " How can I get the greatest return from this 
 money ? " We waste it like water, while Bel- 
 gium, Serbia, Poland and Armenia call. It is 
 said that there are thirty million people in India 
 who have only one meal a day, and who never 
 know what it is to have enough to eat. Some 
 of them say that if they could have enough to 
 eat for just two days, they would be willing to 
 lie down and die content. Again and again, 
 hundreds of thousands of people in China have 
 been the victims of famine, while we were throw- 
 ing wealth away. We can roughen life a bit by 
 denying ourselves, by abridging expenditure 
 and devoting the money to human need and 
 to some of the services the world is dying for. 
 
 Students often reject the ethical and economic 
 arguments against gambling. These arguments 
 are valid but it is very hard to get a clutch for 
 them on many minds. You can point out how 
 dishonourable and essentially immoral it is for a 
 man to have money which he did not earn, for 
 which he gave no equivalent, which came to 
 him as no expression of friendship or by no 
 legitimate inheritance. All this is clear to the 
 healthy and manly moral sense. But the gambler 
 
DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY 41 
 
 does not have such a sense. I have often won- 
 dered that the case is not more frequently put 
 from the other side, from the side of the wrong 
 of spending money in gambling. When a man 
 has won on a bet the moral question is lulled 
 but when he has lost there is a chastened mood 
 which can be invited to reflect. What moral 
 warrant did he have for throwing his money 
 away? What does he have to show for it? 
 A million hungry hands were outstretched to 
 him, a world of want and suffering called 
 towards him over land and sea ? And he threw 
 his money away — got nothing for it, did nothing 
 with it. In a world like ours, there are parched 
 lips waiting for drink ; there are hungry mouths 
 in need of bread : — do we have any right to waste 
 in indulgence in a world like this ? Men should 
 scrutinize every dollar that passes through their 
 hands and ask, "What is the very best thing 
 that I can do with this ? " 
 
 And frugality, self-imposed for the sake of 
 service, will come back to us in rich reward in 
 character and power. Horace Bushnell drew a 
 noble picture of the fruitage of true parsimony 
 in his address at the Litchfield County Centennial 
 in 1851, on "The Age of Homespun" : 
 
 " It was also a great point, in this homespun 
 mode of life, that it imparted exactly what many 
 speak of only with contempt, a closely girded 
 habit of economy. Harnessed, all together, into 
 
42 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 the producing process, young and old, male and 
 female, from the boy that rode the plow-horse, 
 to the grandmother knitting under her spectacles, 
 they had no conception of squandering lightly 
 what they all had been at work, thread by thread, 
 and grain by grain, to produce. They knew too 
 exactly what everything cost, even small things, 
 not to husband them carefully. Men of patri- 
 mony in the great world, therefore, noticing 
 their small way in trade, or expenditure, are 
 ready, as we often see, to charge them with 
 meanness — simply because they knew things 
 only in the small ; or, what is not far different, 
 because they were too simple and rustic to have 
 any conception of the big operations by which 
 other men are wont to get their money without 
 earning it, and lavish the more freely because it 
 was not earned. Still, this knowing life only in 
 the small, it will be found, is really anything but 
 meanness. 
 
 " Probably enough the man who is heard 
 threshing in his barn of a winter evening, by the 
 light of a lantern, (I knew such an example) will 
 be seen driving his team next day, the coldest 
 day of the year, through the deep snow to a 
 distant wood-lot to draw a load for a present to 
 his minister. So the housewife that higgles for 
 a half hour with the merchant over some small 
 trade is yet one that will keep watch, not un- 
 likely, when the schoolmaster, boarding round 
 
DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY 43 
 
 the district, comes to some hard quarter, and 
 commence asking him to dinner, then to tea, 
 then to stay over night, and Hterally boarding 
 him, till the hard quarter is passed. Who now, 
 in the great world of money, will do, not to say 
 the same, as much, proportionally as much, in 
 any of the pure hospitalities of life ? 
 
 " Besides, what sufficiently disproves any real 
 meanness, it will be found that children brought 
 up, in this way, to know things in the small — 
 what they cost and what is their value — have, in 
 just that fact, one of the best securities of char- 
 acter and most certain elements of power and 
 success in life ; because they expect to get on by 
 small advances followed up and saved by others, 
 not by sudden leaps of fortune that despise the 
 slow but surer methods of industry and merit. 
 When the hard, wiry-looking patriarch of home- 
 spun, for example, sets off for Hartford, or Bridge- 
 port, to exchange the little surplus of his year's 
 production, carrying his provision with him and 
 the fodder for his team, and taking his boy along 
 to show him the great world, you may laugh at 
 the simplicity, or pity, if you will, the sordid look 
 of the picture ; but, five or ten years hence, this 
 boy will probably enough be found in college, 
 digging out the cent's worths of his father's 
 money in hard study ; and some twenty years 
 later he will be returning, in his honours, as the 
 celebrated Judge, or Governor, or Senator and 
 
M THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 public orator, from some one of the great states 
 of the republic, to bless the sight once more of 
 that venerated pair who shaped his beginnings, 
 and planted the small seeds of his future success. 
 Small seeds, you may have thought, of mean- 
 ness ; but now they have grown up and blos- 
 somed into a large-minded life, a generous public 
 devotion, and a free benevolence to mankind. 
 
 " And just here, I am persuaded, is the secret, 
 in no small degree, of the very peculiar success 
 that has distinguished the sons of Connecticut, 
 and, not least, those of Litchfield County, in 
 their migration to other states. It is because 
 they have gone out in the wise economy of a 
 simple, homespun training, expecting to get on 
 in the world by merit and patience, and by a 
 careful husbanding of small advances ; secured 
 in their virtue by just that which makes their 
 perseverance successful. For the men who see 
 the great in the small, and go on to build the 
 great by small increments, and so form a char- 
 acter of integrity before God and men, as solid 
 and massive as the outward successes they con- 
 quer. The great men who think to be great in 
 general, having yet nothing great in particular, 
 are a much more windy affair." 
 
 Every one ought to roughen life by friendships 
 that will bring into it those influences which are 
 not naturally in our daily associations and will 
 carry us into contact with men and women who 
 
DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY 45 
 
 struggle harder than we do. A few such friend- 
 ships will help to keep life from petrification and 
 to make us aware that the world is under a cross, 
 and that our hearts must be as open to all its 
 needs as the heart of the Father of human life is 
 open always. 
 
 And we can help to roughen our lives in the 
 very sense in which Christ meant them to be 
 roughened if we will resist the steadily increasing 
 tendency of our day to multiply ways in which 
 we are released from doing things for ourselves. 
 There are none of us who do not have a hundred 
 things done for us that our fathers and mothers 
 had to do for themselves. Litde by little, we are 
 ridding ourselves of the responsibility of doing 
 any service for ourselves whatsoever. There is 
 immense gain in this. It gives freedom for larger 
 living but it can go too far, and it would be a 
 great thing if we resolved at periods that we 
 would not let anybody else do for us what we 
 could do for ourselves. There was a day, per- 
 haps, when men needed the other rule, when it 
 was a great deal better to get other people to do 
 things for us than to do them ourselves, but the 
 time has come when the world needs to reverse 
 that principle. What the world wants is not 
 organizers, but deorganizers, men and women 
 who will increase the number of personal services 
 and activities, and who will bring something 
 frugal, simple and elementary back into life to 
 
4:6 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 deliver us from the false heaven of ease and self- 
 indulgence, which is as bad as any other kind of 
 hell. Christ came to save us from that. 
 
 There is one other way in which we can an- 
 swer this call, and can deliver ourselves from the 
 curse of smooth living. Around about us on 
 every side there are causes waiting for what men 
 and women can do for them. I do not mean 
 crosses in any great, general, organized sense, in 
 which we send our five, our twenty-five or our 
 hundred dollars to some society and think we 
 have, in that way, carried all the cross that Christ 
 means to have us carry. We cannot fulfill Christ's 
 command by paying an organization to carry a 
 cross for us. All the work they do must be done, 
 and it must be supported. Millions of dollars 
 that are not being given now ought to be given. 
 But what Christ is waiting for also and what we 
 have got to do if we are to have the satisfaction 
 of the enduring life is to find each of us for him- 
 self some true cross of personal service. There 
 are men and women around us who are waiting 
 for some touch of sympathy, some kindness, 
 some unflinching word of ours to them that shall 
 mean the awakening of their own discouraged or 
 sleeping souls, that they may come out to live. 
 " If any man will come after me, let him deny 
 himself, and take up his cross and follow me." 
 
 One of the saddest things in the world to-day 
 is the principle under which those are living who 
 
DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY 47 
 
 are unwilling to bear these crosses and to bring 
 home into their lives the wholesome spiritual 
 stimulus that this roughening of life alone can 
 give to them. We have reacted too far from 
 the old monastic idea. Men speak with scorn 
 now of those men and women who went away 
 into monasteries and convents, despising the joys 
 of the world for the sake of their souls. But 
 these men and women were infinitely better than 
 the great multitudes who go out into the world 
 to-day, despising their souls for the sake of the 
 joys of the world. If a man or woman wants to 
 do any despising it is better to despise the world 
 than the soul. It were well for us to go back a 
 little to the spirit of the mediaeval time. When 
 that spirit was pure and good the world's richest 
 service flowed out from it. 
 
 The glory of life for us consists in finding the 
 rough, the morally austere things in life and then 
 fearlessly and unhesitatingly doing them. There 
 is no splendour in the easy indulgent way. The 
 splendour lies in finding the hard thing to be 
 achieved and revelling in it. 
 
 Many years ago I clipped this story from the 
 editorials of what was then our ablest news- 
 paper : 
 
 " A young Briton named Felix Oswald became 
 interested a while ago in the geology of Turkish 
 Armenia. He made long journeys through that 
 country and finally came home with an important 
 
48 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 amount of valuable new material. It was not 
 matter, however, that would find favour in the 
 eyes of the general publisher and Mr. Oswald 
 had to undertake its publication himself. He 
 had the type set at the lowest rates in a small 
 town. There were 516 pages of print and the 
 author undertook the large task of doing the 
 printing himself. He hired a hand press and 
 after weeks of hard work he had produced loi 
 copies of the book. Feeling certain that this 
 edition would fill the demand he went about the 
 next large job, which was the hand colouring of 
 all his maps and profiles. Then the copies were 
 bound and the book was out. 
 
 " Leading geologists say that the work is one 
 of the best of its kind. The small edition is ex- 
 hausted and the book will not be reprinted. The 
 editor of Peterma7in' s Mitteilungen, believing 
 that a wide circle of geologists would be glad to 
 have the important results of Oswald's investiga- 
 tions, has just printed in his periodical an ex- 
 tended resume of them together with some of 
 the maps. The University of London has 
 crowned the work with its approval by con- 
 ferring the degree of Doctor of Science upon the 
 author. Oswald has certainly earned the con- 
 gratulations of all who admire the qualities of 
 courage, perseverance and intelligent devotion 
 to a special task." 
 
 A man does not have to go to Armenia to find 
 
DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY 49 
 
 the hard thing to do, although there are harder 
 and nobler tasks waiting there to-day than 
 Oswald undertook, tasks that are crosses in the 
 divinest sense, scarred with sorrow and grief. 
 And perhaps there are some among us here now 
 who are bearing crosses and finding them be- 
 yond their strength. But they are not to be 
 mourned over. They were not of our making, 
 were they ? If they were of our making, per- 
 haps there is some penitence to be felt, some 
 restitution to be made. If they were not of our 
 making, we may be sure that they were built 
 just for our shoulder, that One who knew us 
 made them that we might carry them, and be- 
 come under them what we could never become 
 without them. And if we have no such cross, 
 out from our smooth and easy living, our cozy 
 shelters in which we have been kept and are kept 
 now. One is calling us to come whose ancient 
 word we hear to-day: "I came not to send 
 peace, but a sword. Whosoever would be my 
 disciple must love nothing as much as me, and 
 must be willing to rise up and follow me." For 
 men and women who will do this in the full and 
 joyous spirit of Francis of Assisi but in the forms 
 suitable to our modern life the summons of God 
 and the world is clear. 
 
LECTURE II 
 
 THE CONSERVATION AND RELEASE 
 OF MORAL RESOURCES 
 
 ONE of our most familiar national ideas 
 during recent years has been the con- 
 servation of our natural resources, our 
 mines, our forests, our water power, the agri- 
 cultural capacities of our soil. It would have 
 been a good thing if this idea had occurred to 
 us fifty years earlier. But it is an idea which 
 always comes late to a young nation. So long 
 as the population is sparse and the supply of 
 good land unlimited and it is an easy thing to 
 pick up a living from the surface of the ground, 
 perhaps it is too much to expect that any people 
 would be careful and frugal. But when the 
 population has increased and begins to press 
 against the means of subsistence, when the good 
 public lands are exhausted and a mere living be- 
 comes harder for the masses of the people to 
 secure, then any nation awakens to wisdom and 
 turns from recklessness and prodigality. 
 
 And, doubtless, the idea would have occurred 
 to us a full generation earlier if it had not been 
 for the terrible education of our Civil War. 
 There is a great deal to be set down on the 
 
 50 
 
MORAL RESOURCES 51 
 
 good side of the account of the Civil War. It 
 took the putty of our national character and 
 burned it into stone. It ran steel fibres through 
 our national life. And it brought us for the first 
 time to a sense of national unity. But alas there 
 is a great deal also on the ledger's other page. 
 For war is not conservation, it is destruction. It 
 educates any people not in frugality but in waste- 
 fulness. Military supplies must be bought at once 
 at any cost. Everything is thrown away with a 
 negligent and wasteful hand. And so long as 
 any people is pouring out its best possession, 
 the precious life-blood of its sons, like water on 
 the battle-field, you cannot expect it to be saving 
 and careful in its material possessions. 
 
 The days of waste that followed the Civil War 
 are gone forever. The nation has begun now to 
 count carefully the amount of its available wealth. 
 We have seen calculations of how many millions 
 of feet of lumber we have standing in our forests 
 and how many millions of tons of coal we have 
 still hid away in our treasure houses under- 
 ground. And far and wide over the nation now 
 we are learning to husband the resources we 
 have left, mindful of our children who are to 
 come after us. 
 
 And it is a good thing that the nation in con- 
 serving her resources realizes that there is some- 
 thing more important than a careful husbanding 
 of her mere material wealth. The vital resources 
 
52 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 of any people are of more significance to her 
 than clods of coal, or timber on her hillsides. 
 Of what use would it be to conserve the material 
 resources of any nation if we conserve them only 
 for a deteriorating racial stock ? The nation has 
 come to realize that the men and women who 
 compose it are its largest wealth, and that this 
 treasure must be guarded more sacredly than 
 our mines, our forests, or our water power. We 
 have seen, accordingly, a whole new body of 
 legislation growing up, that would have made 
 our fathers stand aghast, fixing the conditions of 
 employment, the age of employees, the sanitary 
 condition of homes and mills, the hours of work 
 and the care of women. The expenditure of im- 
 mense sums for the protection of the life and 
 health of factory labourers is now readily recog- 
 nized even by " soul-less corporations," which 
 formerly fought against all such outlay, as money 
 well invested. In all the nation to-day we 
 realize that there is a more precious wealth than 
 our material wealth. I saw an interesting illus- 
 tration of this new frame of mind a little while 
 ago in a statement issued by some leading men 
 in Tennessee dealing with the excessive death 
 rate among the negroes of the South. They 
 pointed out that among nine millions of white 
 people the death rate is 160,000, and that among 
 the nine millions of the negroes the death rate is 
 266,000. In other words, among the negroes, 
 
MORAL RESOURCES 53 
 
 106,000 more people die every year than among 
 a corresponding number of tlie whites of our 
 country. In the negro, these men argued, the 
 South had an invaluable asset, a better type of 
 labour on the whole, with all its drawbacks, than 
 any other section of the nation possessed, more 
 docile, more faithful, less troublesome, and the 
 South could not afford to lose this labour which 
 it needed for developing its wealth. These men 
 estimated the economic value of each one of 
 these lives at $350 a year, and the period of that 
 economic value at ten years, so that each one of 
 these wasted lives was a loss of $3,500 to the 
 South, or $371,000,000 each year, one million 
 dollars a day, and they argued that the South 
 could not afford such a waste. The South, they 
 held, must see that the death rate among the 
 negro is reduced to the same proportions as the 
 death rate among the white people, in order that 
 such an enormous economic loss might be averted. 
 We are realizing all over the nation now that a 
 man is a very costly product. You can breed an 
 animal in a few months for the market, but it 
 takes twenty years to grow a man, and no na- 
 tion can afford to throw away such costly prod- 
 ucts as men and women. These are its most 
 priceless wealth. If it expects to conserve its 
 treasures and to be prepared for the services of 
 the days to come, it is bound to guard this wealth 
 more sacredly than any other. And American 
 
54 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 capital and industry have come to see this 
 clearly. Here is one typical utterance by a 
 leading engineer at a meeting of the Immigra- 
 tion Committee of the Chamber of Commerce of 
 the United States : 
 
 "Industrial Americanization is a part of the prevalent 
 present-day movement towards the humanizing of industry. 
 It aims to make what is commonly called * welfare work ' 
 not an exercise of the individual employer's ' paternalism,' 
 but a legitimate kind of business organization everywhere. 
 There are now innumerable kinds of ' welfare work.' One 
 employer does it from the point of view of ' good busi- 
 ness ' ; another on the ' big brothers ' theory. One man 
 confines himself to playgrounds, another to safety appli- 
 ances. In one firm it is under the employment manager; 
 in another under a Y. M. C. A. director ; and in a 
 number of other firms it is classified in as many different 
 ways. 
 
 " There is no agreement among American employers as 
 to where the organization of the human side of industry 
 really belongs. And there are absolutely no standards for 
 it. What we need to do is to extend scientific methods to 
 the human phases of industrial organization, and thus give 
 * welfare work ' a definite place and definite standards. 
 The engineer as the ' consulting mind ' of industry must 
 be the leader in this work. It is he who determines the 
 site of the plant and its construction. Inside the plant 
 again, the engineer has much to do with efficiency methods. 
 No efficiency methods that are unrelated to the men in the 
 plant can prosper permanently." 
 
 But there is another sort of resource and na- 
 tional treasure greater by far than these, which 
 
MORAL RESOURCES 55 
 
 most of the nations are passing by. I mean the 
 latent and undeveloped capacities for ministry 
 and achievement which lie dormant inside hu- 
 man life. Every life is a reservoir of unawakened 
 possibilities. There is no one of us that is more 
 than a fraction of the man he should be. There 
 is not one who is not falling short by a wide 
 margin of the ideals that he ought to attain, not 
 one who is making the contribution to the nation 
 or building the share in the Kingdom of God that 
 God and mankind alike have a right to expect 
 of him. Not long before his death, an article 
 contributed by Prof. William James, of Harvard, 
 appeared in the American Magazine, entitled 
 " The Powers of Man," in which Professor James 
 argued that mankind is living on a very small 
 fraction of its vitality, and that there are buried 
 underground strata of possibilities and of power 
 which are never tapped except in times of great 
 emergency. For a little time then a man draws 
 on these reserves, and then seals the strata over 
 again and falls back on the surface levels once 
 more. For illustration he spoke of the familiar 
 phenomenon of the second wind. Every boy 
 can remember such experiences. There came a 
 time in the game when he was " all in." He had 
 done his best and drawn on his last available 
 power. Suddenly it was as though something 
 broke. A partition wall fell in. Unsuspected 
 reserves were released. The second wind came 
 
66 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 and reservoirs of power that had been withheld 
 came unexpectedly into play and he did better 
 than he had done before, what he had never been 
 able to do before. That is an absolute truth of ex- 
 perience all through life. In our great crises, any 
 one of many forces may unlock these energies 
 and let them loose. And the present needed ap- 
 peal of the world is to men and women that they 
 should not be content to draw upon these reser- 
 voirs in crises alone. The tragic crises come be- 
 cause these powers are not drawn forth and used. 
 The great wealth of the nations and of the world 
 that needs now to be unsealed is just this wealth 
 of moral capacity lying latent and dormant 
 within. 
 
 What I have been saying is certainly true in 
 the realm of our physical energies. I remember 
 a story of John Lawrence, who went out to India 
 a raw, uninfluential Irish boy in the service of 
 the East India Company, resolved to do his work 
 well and make himself a name. Very early in 
 his career he was assigned to the coUectorship of 
 the Jullundur Doab, on what was then the frontier 
 of India. He made himself perfectly at home 
 among his people, entering into their life, mas- 
 tering their vernaculars, learning their secrets, 
 until at last men came to think of " Jans Larens " 
 as a demi-god with powers beyond the knowledge 
 of common men. One day as he was sitting in 
 his house a messenger came in from one of his 
 
MORAL RESOURCES 57 
 
 districts and reported that a village was burning 
 down and begged him to come. He hurried out 
 to the village. When he arrived he asked the 
 headmen if they had all the people out of the 
 houses and was told that all had been brought 
 out except one old woman who refused to come. 
 He went to the house where the woman lived 
 and looked in. There she sat on a bag of grain. 
 Lawrence entreated her to come out but she re- 
 fused, explaining that this bag of grain was all 
 her earthly wealth. If she came out she would 
 starve ; she would rather stay and be burned. 
 When Lawrence found his commands and en- 
 treaties unavailing, he rushed in, with the embers 
 from the burning roof falling on his shoulders, 
 stooped over and picked up the bag of grain, 
 and left the burning building, the old woman fol- 
 lowing obediently behind. The next day as he 
 was sitting in his house it flashed on his mind 
 that the bag of grain had been exceedingly heavy 
 and he rode out curiously to the village again to 
 see how much he had lifted. He had no difficulty 
 in finding the old woman and her bag of grain. 
 He stooped over to lift it but could not budge it 
 from the ground. But the day before he had 
 budged it. He had picked it up and carried it. 
 The power to do it was lying latent in him all 
 the while. All he needed was just the piercing 
 call or inspiration adequate to release the buried 
 energy. 
 
68 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 And the world is full of evidences that what is 
 true physically is true morally. In every man 
 lies the power with the grace and help of God to 
 meet his great crisis and in every woman the 
 power to bear the agony and pain of her great 
 hour. Only a few years ago, when the Titanic 
 went down and some men who had walked as dogs 
 at the heel of their passions suddenly became mas- 
 ters of themselves and laughing stood at atten- 
 tion to death as they waited on the deck, we all 
 wondered what it was that gave these men who 
 had been slaves their sudden moral mastery. 
 That mastery was within all the time. It did not 
 come out of the frame of the Titanic. It did not 
 come out of the iceberg. It was lying buried all 
 the while only waiting the hour and the Voice 
 that was to summon it to come forth. 
 
 Among the nations to-day this is the needed 
 truth as it is the needed truth here in our own 
 lives. There are boys here to-day who have been 
 yielding to temptation, to whom God would give 
 energies to withstand their enemy. In the na- 
 tion there are even now capacities to conquer all 
 the evils with which the nation abounds. Some 
 day our children will look back and ask why we 
 have allowed immorality to dominate the moral 
 life of the land and why in the world we have en- 
 dured the saloon so long. These things will be 
 cleaned away some day and men will wonder 
 then what their mothers and fathers were about 
 
MORAL RESOURCES 59 
 
 that they surrendered where that happier genera- 
 tion will not surrender but will achieve. The 
 needed capacities are buried of God in life, but 
 we are not willing to believe that they are there 
 or to have faith in Him to energize them. 
 
 Let me put the truth in yet a different way. 
 
 Last spring, just after Holy Week, I received 
 a very interesting letter from a friend who is one 
 of the best known and best loved judges in our 
 country. It was written on the Saturday be- 
 tween Good Friday and Easter Day, and he 
 said in it that he was pursuing the practice 
 which he had pursued for many years, of trying 
 in the interval between Good Friday and Easter 
 morning to eliminate Jesus Christ entirely from 
 his thought of life and of the world in order that 
 he might thus bring home to his own mind and 
 conscience more deeply the significance of Jesus, 
 and he said he could hardly wait for Easter 
 morning to come to escape from the oppressive 
 gloom and depression in which his spirit was as 
 a result of his enforced practice. And he begged 
 me, as one of his friends, to try this between the 
 next Good Friday and Easter Day and to see 
 what the experience would mean. 
 
 Oddly enough my own thoughts that same 
 day on which my friend was writing this letter 
 were exactly the opposite of his. He was think- 
 ing of Jesus Christ as extinguished, he was 
 thinking of all that He had come to be and to 
 
60 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 do as gone, and he was trying to bring home to 
 his own heart what this utter loss of Christ would 
 mean. I was meditating, on the other hand, on 
 that Saturday morning, on just the contrary idea. 
 On Good Friday, the day before this Saturday, 
 there had been a great Personahty ; now that 
 PersonaHty must be somewhere still. Person- 
 ality does not die. The next day, on Easter 
 morning, there was to be a great outburst of en- 
 ergy. That energy must be somewhere now. 
 It will not be created to-morrow morning. It 
 must be somewhere to-day waiting to come 
 forth to-morrow. Where is it ? And then I sud- 
 denly realized that it was all there, that all that 
 was to break loose Easter morning was shut up 
 inside that grave, that all the energies that were 
 to peal across the world on the new day were 
 there asleep in that tomb that Saturday. All 
 the great love and power that had been had not 
 been annihilated. It was there somewhere, only 
 out of sight for a little while. And the great 
 truth urged itself that all the dormant energies 
 of life, all the enshrouded and enfolded powers 
 are here now and always just as truly as they 
 will be to-morrow when they awake, though for 
 the hour they lie latent and unused. 
 
 Then I began to see, as one's thought ran 
 easily on, that that Saturday between Good 
 Friday and Easter Day was in reality a sort of 
 symbol of the whole of history. For history, as 
 
MORAL RESOURCES 61 
 
 we look back upon it, is full of these repressions 
 and these emergences, and then perhaps repres- 
 sions again, of great impulses and outbursts of 
 energy and of power. Now and then they are 
 for good, as when the Reformation broke across 
 men's minds, shattering their shackles, opening 
 old prison doors, allowing the enslaved human 
 spirit to come out and breathe the air of free- 
 dom. But why had it not come before ? All 
 the great energies of God that burst forth in it 
 must have been here even before that hour. 
 And why did they have to subside afterwards ? 
 They all were still ? Why might they not have 
 gone beating their way onward and not have 
 ceased so soon ? 
 
 Then also great explosions of evil come. We 
 look out across the world to-day and see all these 
 dogs of war unleashed. But these dogs of war 
 were not born the year before last. They had 
 been here all the time, only they were chained 
 and held in leash. Why were they not kept 
 chained and in leash ? Why were they allowed 
 to break loose and go wild across the world in 
 their havoc and devastation ? We know per- 
 fectly well that after a few months they are go- 
 ing to be chained again, and the great recon- 
 structive processes will begin to make the world 
 anew. But why do these reconstructive forces 
 have to wait? They will not exist any more 
 truly then than they do to-day. Why not re- 
 
62 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 lease them to-day to go out and do their creative 
 work in the world now ? Why not on Saturday 
 let loose that which is to burst with creative free- 
 dom on the world on Easter morning ? 
 
 And 1 saw that this was a symbol not of his- 
 tory only but also of human life, that every hu- 
 man life is just the mystery of the infolding of 
 latent capacities that are there wrapped up, the 
 infolding of great ends of which no man can 
 foretell. That is why, I suppose, a man feels 
 such awe every time he holds a very little child 
 in his arms. He does not know what it is that 
 he has in his arms, what it is that will some day 
 come bursting forth from that little child. That 
 must have been Mary's thrill in those early days 
 when she held her little one, knowing dimly and 
 far away, if not clearly, that she held in her arms 
 the mighty Redeemer of men. " When I see a 
 child," said Pasteur, " he inspires me with two 
 feelings : tenderness for what he is now, respect 
 for what he may become hereafter." Of per- 
 sonal life it is as true as of history. Vast latent 
 possibilities for good may come breaking forth. 
 Now and then they do, in some truth-loving, 
 unfearing, plain-speaking, God-obeying Martin 
 Luther. Or they may issue in some tranquil, 
 patient, loving-hearted, steady-spirited, immov- 
 able Lincoln. Goodness comes leaping forth, 
 and oftentimes we are tempted to think the sur- 
 roundings, the circumstances, produced it. They 
 
MORAL RESOURCES 63 
 
 produced none of it. They gave it its opportu- 
 nity and its chance, but it was all somewhere all 
 the time and it might not have come forth if 
 something inside had not released the spring of 
 our will to God's will and let those great energies 
 of good come pulsing out to do their work. 
 
 And the same thing is true of the inwrought 
 and enshrouded capacities for ill. Jesus Christ 
 laid off His limitations as well as His activities 
 that Saturday in the grave ; and He left His limi- 
 tations there when He came out. Out of such 
 Saturday graves in man's character it may be 
 only the limitations that emerge. Out of many 
 a man's life it is the dog that ought to be chained 
 that is allowed to roam free, while all the possi- 
 bilities for good and sacrifice and ministry are 
 still-born inside. And sometimes, thank God, 
 men discover all this latent ill within and lay on 
 it the restraining and throttling hand. As godly 
 old John Newton said when one day he saw a 
 criminal being led by, " There, but for the grace 
 of God, goes John Newton." He knew that 
 everything that had escaped in that brother of 
 his lay latent in himself, and he thanked God 
 that a hand had been laid on all those inner ca- 
 pacities for evil and wreckage and that that hand 
 held them in check and let only the good and 
 the true and the pure go free. 
 
 There is something infinitely hopeful and en- 
 couraging in the principle of that Saturday in 
 
64 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 our Lord's last week for every man and woman 
 of us, as we think of life's work and what we are 
 trying to get done in the world. So many times 
 a thing seems all vain. The teacher tried to 
 breed in the boy whom he taught a hate of lies 
 and a love of the truth, and he wrought with 
 tears and blood at his task, and the boy went 
 out from him and it seemed to him to have been 
 futile, this that he had done for him. We put 
 ourselves out in this or that effort of service in 
 the hope of achieving this or that great end. 
 Every little while it seems to us to have been all 
 fruitless. But wait. It is only Saturday. Easter 
 morning is going to break and the seed that was 
 sown in the ground in darkness and obscurity 
 will come forth then. The life that was let go 
 for a little while, all that we did not see and 
 therefore thought had run sheer to waste, we 
 shall discover then will come pulsating back. 
 " No effort is wasted," said Pasteur. 
 
 It is a great joy of life to believe this, that 
 what Isaiah said is true through all the ages, by 
 the very principle of the life of God, that no 
 word of His will come back to Him vain or be 
 void, that it will accomplish the thing He pleases 
 and prosper in the errand whereon He sent it. 
 I received a letter the other day from a friend, 
 the Rev. Adolphus Pieters, who is a missionary 
 in Japan. He had for very many years been en- 
 gaged in an interesting work. He published 
 
MORAL RESOURCES 66 
 
 advertisements of Christianity in the Japanese 
 papers, and then occasionally printed a brief at- 
 tractive account of what Christianity was, with 
 the hope of arousing the curiosity of Japanese 
 readers. At the end he would add that if any 
 one were interested he might correspond with 
 him. As a result of this work he came into cor- 
 respondence with hundreds of men. In this 
 recent letter he writes : *' The total number of 
 people who applied to us for tracts last year was 
 959, making the total from February, 1914, when 
 the work began, to December 31, 1915, 3,590. 
 There have been seven baptisms since my 
 previous letter, and the total number to date is 
 forty-five. Number Forty-Five is a most in- 
 structive case of the Lord's blessing resting 
 upon what was, humanly speaking, a complete 
 failure. The young man in question is a bright 
 young student in the Normal School at this 
 place, who was baptized a week ago last Sun- 
 day, after coming to my house off and on for 
 two years, and getting a good deal of instruc- 
 tion. I did not reckon him among the results 
 of the newspaper work, but after he was bap- 
 tized he told me that he originally got interested 
 in the Gospel when he was attending the pri- 
 mary school in his home town. Among his 
 teachers was one named Okabe Katsumi, who 
 had seen our advertisements and secured some 
 tracts, among which were copies of the Gospels. 
 
66 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 He did not care for them himself, and had given 
 them to this boy, who was deeply impressed. 
 In the course of time the boy graduated from 
 school and went to Gita to attend the Normal, and 
 he did so with the resolution already formed to 
 look up the man who advertised in the papers and 
 learn from him more about the Christian religion. 
 
 " When I heard that, I looked up the card in- 
 dex, and found among the * dead ' cards one for 
 Okabe Katsumi. It was number 444, and he 
 had applied for tracts in the spring of 19 12, but 
 in August he wrote that he had found something 
 in our tracts that he did not like, and so had 
 made up his mind to have nothing more to do 
 with Christianity. So his card was marked in 
 red ink, 'Closed August 12, 1913,' and filed 
 away among the ' dead ' ones — a complete fail- 
 ure, so tar as any one could see. But it wasn't 
 a failure. God knew better. Gn the fifth of 
 March, 19 16, a young man made public confes- 
 sion of his faith and was baptized as a sequel to 
 that application of Gkabe Katsumi in 19 12. 
 
 " Such things sometimes make me look with 
 something like awe upon my card index. What 
 is going on beneath the surface ? How is God 
 working in the hearts of the ' failures,' or, if not 
 in their hearts, through them in the hearts of 
 others ? It is one more proof that * the founda- 
 tion of God standeth sure, having this seal, The 
 Lord knoweth them that are his.' " 
 
MORAL RESOURCES 67 
 
 Looking back across the years it could be seen 
 that bread sown upon the waters returned again. 
 Absolutely no energy goes to waste in this 
 world, — no moral energy, no spiritual energy, 
 any more than physical energy. All that is re- 
 leased goes about its work. Let us thank God, 
 that there that Saturday morning in the dark of 
 the grave all that broke free the next day was^ 
 and was not dead beyond the resurrection of life. 
 
 And the assurance that a man simply cannot 
 do anything in vain is not only a word of great 
 courage to us in the work that we are trying to 
 do in the world, it is a word of hope and courage 
 to us also in our own personal life and struggle 
 for character. All the energy we need to ac- 
 complish anything that ought to be accomplished 
 in us is in our reach. " All power," said Christ, 
 " is given to me in heaven and in earth. I stand 
 within at the centre of your life. Draw on me. 
 Go out in the faith of that and do whatever your 
 work is in the world. I have the energy that 
 you need." All the energy that we require for 
 any task in life or out of life is there, by token 
 and assurance of the closed grave and resurrec- 
 tion, in Christ, waiting to be drawn upon by any 
 man who wants to make use of it. 
 
 And all this is not the exaltation of human will, 
 the setting up of a man's own resolution and high 
 purpose. It is precisely the opposite of that, it 
 is saying to a man : " There do not lie in the 
 
68 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 boastful surface of your life the power and the 
 resources that you need. Retire upon God. 
 You must get behind into the unplumbed depths 
 where Christ waits. You must go back of the 
 Easter morning in the grave, the unopened 
 womb of the grave, to find it there. All of it is 
 there in the now Risen Christ Who that Saturday 
 morning awaited resurrection." This is simply 
 making faith a living, acting reality by which a 
 man works ; so that he arises in the morning 
 and can say : " O God, I have in Thee in me all 
 the energy and strength that I shall need this 
 day. No temptation can come to me to-day that 
 I have not got the power in Thee, that I never 
 have used yet, to draw upon, that will enable me 
 to meet and conquer. No work will come to me 
 to-day that is too much for me, no matter how 
 exacting or unprecedented in my experience. 
 There is power in Thee for me for this work that 
 is come to me to do." 
 
 That Saturday morning, more vividly than any 
 other day that brings back the triumph and pain 
 and glory of Easter to us, makes a man assured 
 that all the energies he needs are near by, that in 
 God's own presence there are all the powers he 
 wants, awaiting release by God's grace for all the 
 necessities of his life. And if we could not be- 
 lieve this about the world we are living in to-day, 
 surely a man could not go on living in it. If we 
 had to surrender to the present order and temper 
 
MORAL RESOUKCES 69 
 
 of the world what would be left to uphold us ? It 
 is because we know it is Saturday night in hu- 
 man history that we can live through it. 
 
 We know that as in individuals so in all the 
 races of mankind, God has planted these great 
 dormant energies and powers. For scores and 
 scores of years the Chinese had despaired of their 
 power to throw oR the opium curse. They knew 
 it was sapping the very vitality of their land, and 
 yet they wondered whether the day would ever 
 come when they would have power enough to 
 break those hateful chains that had been forged 
 upon them, and get back their freedom. Twenty 
 years ago, as we went to and fro in China, the 
 most striking odour in the Chinese streets was the 
 pungent stench of smoking opium. One could 
 scarcely go into a Chinese city or walk in a Chi- 
 nese highway without seeing the wretched ship- 
 wrecks who were the products of that vice. 
 Poppy fields bloomed red over the Empire, and 
 the race had almost come to despair. And what 
 do we find to-day? There is scarcely a great 
 poppy field in the Republic, scarcely a fume of 
 opium that you can smell on the public street 
 in any Chinese city. The bonfires flared across 
 the land as they burned up the signs of the old 
 bondage. A great race arose in power and in a 
 massive moral upheaval shook itself free. God 
 had planted the energies there that needed only 
 the touch of a living faith in Him, a new assur- 
 
YO THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 ance of the freedom of man to do His will, and 
 in this matter the whole nation came out of its 
 bondage into its liberty. 
 
 For generations men wondered whether slaves 
 could ever be set free. We almost feared in our 
 land here that slavery was a permanent institu- 
 tion. But there came a time at last when from 
 the wrist of every American slave the chains fell 
 away. It might have been generations before ; 
 it might not have been until generations after ; 
 only in that time appointed the moral energies 
 awoke and came forth, and Saturday burst into 
 Easter Day for the negro bondmen of America. 
 
 Precisely the same principle holds with regard 
 to the things that we fight to-day. It holds with 
 regard to the war on war. Some day we shall 
 slay it. The kingdom of heaven, said Jesus, is 
 among you. Well, let it loose. The kingdom 
 of heaven will have no war in it ; the kingdom 
 of heaven will have no brothers cutting one 
 another's throats in it ; the kingdom of heaven 
 will have in it no vice and lust dragging its slimy 
 trail across men's hearths and hearts. If the 
 kingdom of heaven is within, why not set it free, 
 that we may live in it as well as have it buried 
 inside of us ! The world that we are living in is 
 calling us to go back to that principle of Satur- 
 day morning and to believe that all we need to 
 do the will of God is made available for us by 
 God's grace now, if we will but obey. 
 
MORAL RESOURCES 71 
 
 And if some men say that all this is only to 
 put in other words the theory of development, of 
 historic evolution, why, what of it ? Of course it 
 is, but what is development except the drawing 
 out of what has been folded in ? What is evolu- 
 tion except the letting loose of what the mind of 
 God Himself at the beginning had planted with- 
 in, — when in the Lamb slain from the foundation 
 of the world He poured the blood of Christ into 
 humanity in order that humanity might be rein- 
 forced with the adequate energies to enable it to 
 accomplish the thing that was God's first dream 
 for it? Of course it is, and that is precisely the 
 ground of Christ's constant appeal. "Come 
 unto me," He said to men, believing that they 
 could. " Unless you hear My call and follow Me, 
 you cannot be My disciple." What meaning 
 was there to His summons unless the power to 
 respond was there in answer to His call ? "I 
 stand at the door of your inner being," said He, 
 " and knock. I am there waiting." 
 
 And so to us to-day, just as clearly as in those 
 days, His voice speaks: "Come out of your 
 tomb, out of your chains, out of your narrowness, 
 out of your limitations, out of your despairs, out 
 of your dejections, out of your failures, — come 
 out of them. The power of the endless life is 
 here for you, if only by faith and love you will 
 lay hold of it to-day." Is that not, after all, the 
 great central message and the fundamental prin- 
 
r2 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 ciple of Christ's Gospel to us, which He symbol- 
 ized and illustrated in the shadow of the Satur- 
 day before the Easter victory ? It is in one of 
 the old hymns : 
 
 *' Low in the grave He lay — 
 Jesus, my Saviour ! 
 Waiting the coming day — 
 Jesus, my Lord ! 
 Death cannot keep his prey — 
 Jesus, my Saviour ! 
 He tore the bars away — 
 Jesus, my Lord ! 
 Up from the grave He arose. 
 With a mighty triumph o'er His foes ; 
 He arose a victor from the dark domain. 
 And He lives forever with His saints to 
 
 reign : 
 He arose ! He arose ! Hallelujah ! Christ 
 
 arose ! " 
 
 And He arose once on Easter morning that on 
 the Saturday before and on every day, every one 
 of us might also rise out of the old, low, selfish, 
 defeated life into the life through which are beat- 
 ing the victorious energies and the sufficient 
 strength of God. Shall it be so with us ? 
 
 '* Rigid I lie in a winding sheet, 
 
 Which mine own hands did weave. 
 And my narrow cell is myself — myself, 
 Which yet I may not cleave. 
 
 " And yet in the dawn of the early mom, 
 
 A clear voice seems to say, 
 ' I am the Lord of the final word. 
 And ye may not say Me nay. 
 
MORAL RESOURCES 73 
 
 " * Unloose your hands that your brother's need 
 May ever find them free. 
 Unbind your feet from their winding sheet ; 
 Henceforth they walk with Me.' 
 
 ** And lo ! I hear ! I am blind no more ! 
 I am no longer dumb ! 
 Out from the doom of a self-wrought tomb, 
 Pulsate with Ufe, I come." 
 
 Yes, I may come if I will, by His life Who will 
 live again in me. 
 
 But the trouble is men do not believe this. 
 They do not believe in any latent capacities 
 adequate to the great task of life. They accept 
 the principle of surrender and incompetence. 
 They have nothing for God and God can make 
 no use of them. And I imagine that it is such 
 unbelief, such misgiving as to whether after all 
 we have any possibilities for God in us, the 
 undervaluation of God's need of us and power to 
 make and use us, that lead many of us to live 
 the futile, unfruitful, negative lives which we do 
 live. Men do not think their lives worth very 
 much. They do not deny that there are great men 
 and that great work is to be done in the world, but 
 they think that God requires only those, that He 
 builds His kingdom on a few outstanding figures, 
 that the common men can look after themselves, 
 and that they are not indispensable to God. If we 
 are to prevent this waste, and if we are to secure 
 the life without which God is impotent to build 
 
74 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 His kingdom in the world, we must somehow 
 bring home to men the recognition of the great 
 truth that God cannot get along without every 
 man and all of that man, and that every human 
 life and all its buried powers are essential to God. 
 One of the great purposes of our Lord's com- 
 ing here to earth was that He might show men 
 the value of a man's life in the plan and thought 
 of God. Even the most sacred and time- 
 honoured institution our Lord weighed over 
 against one man and found him outweighing 
 the institution. What was His own example 
 but the illustration of the immeasurable value 
 of man ? He did not come to teach the useless- 
 ness of human life, but its pricelessness. He did 
 this by becoming a man Himself. And this 
 principle of God's need of men and their latent 
 possibilities is not mere theological theory. It 
 is the hard historic fact that God has ever needed 
 men and waited for them and for what they were 
 the men to do for Him. Look at the great 
 inventions, discoveries, achievements. What is 
 the whole lesson of the Incarnation but that there 
 are things that God Himself will not do except 
 as He uses man ? God Himself, we must say 
 reverently, was communicable and a Saviour 
 only as man. And His call to-day as it has been 
 all through the years is for men who will believe 
 that the thing God wants done can be done by 
 Him through them. The Western Hemisphere 
 
MORAL RESOURCES Y5 
 
 was here before ever Columbus drew aside the 
 veil and broadened the horizon of mankind. 
 These great energies which drive the modern 
 world were here from the beginning. We did 
 not invent any of them. There is not an ounce 
 of power in the world to-day that was not here 
 when the world began. All that man has done 
 has been simply to discover existing secrets. 
 He has created no power. He has only found 
 out what God has put here for him to find out. 
 It took man a long time to discover this. But 
 God waited for him. And God needs these find- 
 ing men now as much as He has needed them at 
 any time. He needs such men now to break 
 open what is still concealed. The past has not 
 exhausted all the heroisms, has not accomplished 
 all the tasks. There are greater ones yet for the 
 days that are, if God can only find His men. 
 
 Think how greatly God needs men to-day just 
 to bring need and supply together in the world. 
 You remember the incident in the life of our 
 Lord as He came by the Pool of Bethesda where 
 the sick lay, and spoke to one poor man lying on 
 his pallet. 
 
 " Are you going in ? " said He. 
 
 ** No," said the man. " I have no friend who 
 will help me in and others get the benefit before 
 I can come near." 
 
 There was the good, waiting to be gained, and 
 here was the man, but he had no man to stand 
 
Y6 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 for him between the need and the supply. A 
 few years ago a great famine raged just back 
 from the coast of China. There were millions of 
 Chinese families who were in want and hundreds 
 of thousands died of starvation because there was 
 not bread enough to feed them. Little children 
 lay crying at the breasts of dead mothers by the 
 roadsides. At that very hour the wheat was 
 piled up at railroad stations in Argentina as high 
 as church spires. There was grain enough to 
 feed the starving millions in China. Here was 
 the supply and there was the need, but where 
 were the men ? God had not men enough on 
 whom to float the supply across to meet the 
 need. What is true of outward need is true of 
 inward need as well. There is never a want 
 where there is not an adequate supply. No little 
 child on this earth need go hungry because God 
 has not put enough in this world to feed it. No 
 human heart need go starved because there is 
 not enough love to meet its wants. There is all 
 the food and all the love that humanity needs. 
 But there are lacking the men who for God will 
 bring the supply to the demand. The human 
 need in the world can be met by the supply only 
 through men who will fill up the gap. God can 
 do it only as men lend themselves to Him. That 
 is why, through all the years, the call of God 
 has been for volunteers. For every unique, ex- 
 ternal, individual call that has been given to men, 
 
MORAL RESOURCES T7 
 
 you can find a million calls that have been just 
 the answer of men to the great call of God for 
 volunteers. And God surely values the volun- 
 teer above the conscript. Isaiah did not wait 
 for any special coercive call. " Also 1 heard the 
 voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, 
 and who will go for us ? Then said I, Here am 
 I ; send me." That call was enough to cover 
 him, and he answered it. There is so much work 
 to be done that God cannot go marching through 
 the world looking for individuals, performing new 
 miracles by which each individual is to be 
 thaumaturgically led up to his particular work. 
 God's general way has been to picture before the 
 eyes of His sons the work to be done and to 
 wait for their hearts to leap in response, as 
 Isaiah's leaped : " Lord, let me have a share in 
 this work ' Here am I ; send me.' " 
 
 Men are indispensable to God to put meaning 
 into the words in which He tries to tell His mes- 
 sage to men. Words have no meaning of their 
 own. Words mean only as much as one man 
 puts into them, or another man takes out of 
 them. The meaning of the word does not come 
 from the word ; it comes from some life in which 
 the word gets incarnated, or from some other life 
 which interprets the word. What would the word 
 " friend " signify to a man who had never had 
 one? What does "tenderness" mean to one 
 who has never seen a mother and her child ? Or 
 
78 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 what is " patriotism " to one who has never seen 
 or felt the contagion ? You remember what the 
 eunuch said when Phihp met him in the chariot 
 reading the prophet Esaias. " Understandest 
 thou what thou read est ? " Philip asked. And he 
 replied, " How can I, except some man should 
 guide me ? " Things mean nothing to men until 
 they are shown to them. Men go to China or 
 Japan and preach the Gospel. How is it done ? 
 Why, they take words that have old meanings and 
 fill them with new and different meanings by liv- 
 ing new ideas in deeds before the people. In our 
 colleges this year what meaning will honour, 
 truth and friendship have, except as these words 
 derive their meaning from the object lessons 
 in some men's lives ? There are places where 
 honour means dishonour ; where purity means 
 impurity ; where truth means falsehood. These 
 noble words are confused with their very oppo- 
 sites because no man has incarnated their right 
 meaning in his life. That was one reason why 
 the incarnation was necessary nineteen hundred 
 years ago. There was no adequate religious or 
 spiritual vocabulary and never could have been 
 otherwise. If God had not come in the flesh, 
 men would not have had the ideas that we use 
 to describe God's coming in the flesh. To-day, 
 as then, God is dependent upon men in whom 
 He can put meaning into His message to the 
 world. 
 
MORAL RESOURCES 79 
 
 Men are indispensable in enabling God to get 
 His other men. He gives men guidance for their 
 lives. But how ? 1 appeal to your own hearts. 
 How do we get the guidance of our lives ? There 
 are many who are sure of having divine guid- 
 ance in their lives, surer of that than they are of 
 any material thing, and yet, as we look back 
 upon this supernatural guidance, we realize that 
 it has all been mediated through men. We can 
 name man after man who did for our lives, in 
 smaller measure, just what that man of Mace- 
 donia did for Paul. We get our guidance 
 through men. Saint Paul got his through a 
 man. Through what man was it ? Sir William 
 Ramsay has no doubt whatever that the man 
 whom Saint Paul saw in his dreams was none 
 other than his friend Luke. A real man and a 
 friend, and no ghost figure, was the man of 
 Macedonia through whom God gave Paul his 
 great missionary call. 
 
 It would be easy to recall the lives of great 
 missionaries and point out how they received 
 their divine guidance through other men — not 
 even through a dream, far less through some 
 miraculous vision, but through a brother man 
 who came to talk with them, reasoned with 
 them, and showed them the best way in which a 
 man could use his life. Men are indispensable 
 to God in order to guide other men into the 
 work which God has for them to do. And one 
 
80 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 reason why there is such an awful waste of life 
 to-day, why so many men, going out of the col- 
 leges, miss the highest work of their lives, is 
 simply because there are not enough other men 
 who recognize that they are indispensable to 
 God in order that, through them, God may guide 
 men to their highest and most efBcient places. 
 
 Men are indispensable to God in bringing 
 men to Jesus Christ. As men were brought to 
 Christ by other men in the beginning, so has 
 it been during all the succeeding years. The 
 angels are willing to do what they can, but none 
 of us have had any visible object lessons of what 
 they do. Men have been brought to Christ 
 always by other men. Imperfect lives are to 
 be brought up to the Perfect Life, and to do this 
 service Christ uses common men, just such as 
 we are. That is what Paul conceived as the 
 glory of his life, that he had the privilege of 
 being the bond — -no other beings in the universe 
 being able to take that place — between men who 
 had not found Christ and Christ hunting for His 
 own. 
 
 Then God requires men now as He never re- 
 quired them in all the days gone by to bear 
 testimony to the Deity of Jesus Christ. We 
 know how little value our Lord attached to any 
 accrediting evidences that did not come right out 
 of pure, human personality. He discredited the 
 advantages of bringing back Abraham from the 
 
MORAL RESOURCES 81 
 
 dead, for example, to bear testimony to the truth. 
 If men were not willing to accept adequate moral 
 evidence, valid human testimony, they would not 
 believe by miracle. He said. That is why He 
 was so pleased with the confession of Simon 
 Peter. " Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona ; for 
 flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, 
 but my Father which is in heaven." It rejoiced 
 Him to get such testimony from a man who, in 
 turn, had drawn it out of his own experience of 
 God. There is no greater need in the world to- 
 day than for a great body of men who know 
 Christ to be God more surely than they know 
 themselves to be men, and are able to go out 
 and testify to what Christ can do with a definite- 
 ness and certainty greater than that of any other 
 testimony they can bear, who can say what John 
 said, *' That which we have seen and heard de- 
 clare we unto you." If there ever was a day 
 when God was calling men to a great under- 
 taking, He is calling them now to be His wit' 
 nesses, unimpeachable, unflinching, to the unique 
 personality, to the supreme divine character and 
 power of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ. 
 
 And it is not only for great men that God is 
 calling to do these indispensable tasks for Him. 
 He wants the great men, no doubt, but He wants, 
 more than that, the great mass of the common 
 men. After all, the great man is only one man, 
 and every little man counts just as many as one 
 
82 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 great man. Since God has to have all, one little 
 man is as indispensable to the all as one great 
 man can be. And until He has all, He cannot 
 do what He purposes to do. It is only when we 
 all come " unto the measure of the stature of the 
 fullness of Christ " that any one of us can come. 
 It is only when we *• comprehend with all saints, 
 what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and 
 height " of the love of Christ, that any one of us 
 can comprehend it. It is only when we all re- 
 flect as in a mirror the character of Christ that 
 any one of us shall be " changed . . . from 
 glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord." 
 And the little men, as a matter of fact, are doing 
 as much as the great. The night that Gough 
 stood alone, with all hope gone, a drunkard in 
 the gutter, an almost forgotten man laid his hand 
 on his shoulder and said, " Man, there is a better 
 life than this for you." The name of that man is 
 remembered by a few, but forgotten by the mul- 
 titudes who will never forget the name of John B. 
 Gough, or cease to feel the glow of the fires 
 which he kindled to blaze until the Judgment 
 Day. Even a little man may fill such an indis- 
 pensable place as that of helping God lay hold 
 of a great man who will be one of the unmistak- 
 able forces of God. 
 
 And it is not only every man that is indispen- 
 sable to God, but also every bit of every man. 
 We cannot take some sections of our lives and 
 
MORAL RESOURCES 88 
 
 eliminate them as though they were not indis- 
 pensable to God. There can be no schism be- 
 tween a man's public and his private life. His 
 hands and what he does with them, his imagin- 
 ings and where they go when he is alone by 
 himself without any coercing, these are just as 
 much indispensable to God as a man's public 
 worship or any of his activities in the open min- 
 istry of Christ's kingdom. It is every bit of the 
 man — body, soul, and spirit — that is indispen- 
 sable to God. 
 
 And if we are indispensable to God, we may 
 be very sure that we are indispensable to the 
 world also. If God needs us, the world needs 
 us even more. It is waiting for the rising up of 
 men who know that God needs them, and who 
 hand themselves over completely to His uses. 
 "The mightiest of civilizing agencies are per- 
 sons," said Dr. Fairbairn, "and the mightiest 
 civilizing persons are Christian men." Those 
 men are doing most for the world who are do- 
 ing most to make men aware of how necessary 
 they are to God, and who are going up and down 
 the lands allying men's lives to the eternal life 
 and power of God. This is the greatest of all 
 works — getting God His men. I heard Dr. J. 
 Campbell Gibson tell the Chamber of Commerce 
 in Glasgow of a visit which he made to a temple 
 which had been turned into a modern school in 
 inland China. Over the gate of the school were 
 
84 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 these words in Chinese : " If you are planting for 
 ten years, plant trees ; if you are planting for a 
 hundred years, plant men." Men are God's 
 great interest and want. 
 
 What an opportunity this opens for every man 
 of us ! We have thought of our lives as little, 
 insignificant, trivial, of no consequence. There 
 is One walking in the midst of us Who was 
 speaking to Ezekiel. " I am hunting for a man," 
 He is saying, " I am hunting for a man," and it 
 is open to every one of us to rise up and say, 
 " Lord, I am that man you are hunting for. 
 Seek no further. Here am I. Have me for 
 your man." Is that the answer that He is get- 
 ting from us ? 
 
LECTURE III 
 AN UNFRIGHTENED HOPE 
 
 IF we were asked what we considered to be 
 the supremest motive in Hfe, the motive 
 which does actually exercise the largest con- 
 trol over human conduct, what would our answer 
 be? A generation ago men would have an- 
 swered glibly enough : " The desire for happi- 
 ness." That was then supposed to be the one 
 commanding motive of mankind. But it was 
 not long before the answer seemed unsatisfac- 
 tory and indefinite, because what brings happi- 
 ness to one man brings misery to another, or 
 what a man thinks will delight him in the end 
 disappoints and such experiences issue in con- 
 fusion. It was ethically indiscriminate also. 
 The same motive covered moral contradictions, 
 and men wanted some more consistent answer 
 to the question. Nowadays those who look de- 
 spondently at life often say in reply : " Avarice, 
 — the desire for wealth." Or, those who look a 
 little more deeply say it is not money, but the 
 power that money represents that men desire, 
 and that their real motive is to acquire sources of 
 influence and control. Some who look at life 
 more hopefully are likely to reply : " Love or 
 
 85 
 
86 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 friendship." That is the thesis of one of the 
 noblest books of our generation, written by the 
 late Dr. Henry Clay Trumbull, entitled " Friend- 
 ship, the Master Passion." Doctor Trumbull 
 told me once that when he first began the work 
 on this theme he spoke about it to his friend 
 Charles Dudley Warner, who said : " Trumbull, 
 you cannot prove that thesis." After the book 
 was done, Doctor Trumbull took the book to 
 him and asked if he would read it. He read it, 
 gave it back, saying : " Well, Trumbull, you 
 have shown that it is true, after all." And that 
 is a lovely view to take of life : that the motive 
 that lies deeper than any other, and that really 
 in the actual conduct of men and women is the 
 most controlling, is the motive of unselfish friend- 
 ship, of love. 
 
 But what would you say if instead of any one 
 of these three or other answers that may suggest 
 themselves, some one were to reply : " Not a bit 
 of it. The motive that really controls human 
 life, that does actually and not theoretically play 
 the largest part in determining the conduct of 
 men and women, \%—fear.^^ And before we pass 
 that contention by it may be worth our while to 
 look at it and ask whether, or how far, it is true. 
 
 Take it in the matter of dress, for example. 
 Does not fear play a large part there, — either the 
 fear of being unlike everybody else, or the fear 
 of being too much like everybody else ? In 
 
AN UNFRIGHTENED HOPE 87 
 
 every land, more even in civilized lands than in 
 uncivilized, the element of fear enters into the 
 small external characteristics of our daily living. 
 
 And in the matter of opinion. We speak of 
 public opinion as though it were a free and stable 
 and trustworthy thing. But the public opinion of 
 one generation contradicts the public opinion of 
 another generation. The public opinion of one 
 section of the land denies the public opinion of 
 another section, in the same way in which two 
 sections of society in one community think in 
 opposite ways. Why ? Not because all the in- 
 dividuals of these particular generations, or 
 sections, or portions of the community really and 
 independently have thought the thing out for 
 themselves, but because, held under the atmos- 
 pheric constraint of fear, they are unwilling to 
 break away from what is determined for them by 
 the opinions in the midst of which they live. 
 There is a good deal of pacifist opinion and a 
 great deal more of militarist which is not free 
 and personal at all, but simply herd intimida- 
 tion. And a great deal of race prejudice and inter- 
 national suspicion is nothing but the miasma 
 arising from cowardice or that bullying selfish- 
 ness which is essentially cowardly. 
 
 And a great deal of religion is of the same 
 character. The predominant element in many 
 of the non-Christian religions is fear. It is so in 
 all of the earlier or animistic religions, where 
 
88 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 men live in constant terror of the spirits that 
 haunt the air or the world, and where a large 
 element of their worship is shaped by that 
 dominant principle of their religion, the dread of 
 the unseen and the unexperienced. Even among 
 us is there not a great deal, both of religious 
 orthodoxy and of religious heresy, that is only 
 the child of fear ? There is a coercion of sound 
 doctrine and there is a coercion of false doctrine, 
 and a great many men and women belong to 
 their school of religious opinion simply because 
 they are afraid to break away from the com- 
 panionship in which they have always been or 
 to disagree with the associations which condition 
 them. 
 
 Much religious conduct, too, springs only from 
 the fear of one's environment. One of the 
 saddest things which one meets in going out 
 across the world is the great multitude, especially 
 of young men, who, when they have left Chris- 
 tian lands and the environment and support of 
 Christian surroundings, have simply collapsed in 
 all their religious conviction and character. Asia 
 is strewn from one end of it to the other with the 
 wrecks of men who, while they were at home, 
 supposedly were men of religious character and 
 conviction, but who showed when they went 
 away from home that it was not a matter of their 
 own real selves at all. It was just a matter of 
 their timid servility and acceptance of the condi- 
 
AN UNFRIGHTENED HOPE 89 
 
 tions imposed upon them from without, so that 
 once they were away from home and free to do 
 as they pleased and had no longer the help and 
 uplift of their surroundings, their environmental 
 religion collapsed and they went in an entirely 
 different way. 
 
 And I think if only we would go deep enough 
 in our own lives, and be honest enough with our- 
 selves to gain a clear insight into our motives and 
 impulses, we would discover how large a part 
 fear has played in us, — fear, of course, in all the 
 wide range of its aspects, that shades off on the 
 one side into arrant cowardice and on the other 
 side into a mere hesitancy of character and 
 timidity, but fear nevertheless. Some of us are 
 even now cloaking the things that lie deepest in 
 our hearts, because we are afraid to give ex- 
 pression to them. We go into communities, 
 into circles, into conditions where what has been 
 natural and real to us is unnatural and abnormal, 
 and we hide our colours and conceal our prin- 
 ciples. And we do things we ought not to do 
 or we do not do the thing we know we ought to 
 do simply because of fear. 
 
 I had an experience a little while ago when 
 this diagnosis was confirmed to me. In a visit to 
 one of our colleges, among the boys who came 
 around to talk quietly was one whom I knew as 
 one of the leading men in the life of the institu- 
 tion. He played on the eleven ; he was presi- 
 
90 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 dent of his class. He was very timid about talk- 
 ing lest somebody should overhear, but when as- 
 sured that we had the whole house to ourselves 
 he took a letter out of his pocket and handed it 
 to me. 
 
 He said : " Mr. Speer, I wish you would read 
 this." 
 
 I looked at it and saw that it was written in a 
 girl's handwriting, and said : " No, tell me about 
 it." 
 
 " No," he said, " please read it. It will tell 
 you a great deal better than I can." 
 
 So I opened his letter and began to read, sub- 
 stantially as follows : 
 
 " Dear : 
 
 " I know all about your life at College, and 
 
 I want to tell you what I think about you. You and I 
 have known one another all our lives, and we have been 
 good friends ; but I think you are a coward and I think 
 that I ought to tell you so." 
 
 I closed his letter and handed it back to him. 
 His lips were quivering and his eyes were moist 
 as he said : 
 
 " You can believe that when I got that letter it 
 cut me all up, and the worst of it is that what 
 she says is true." 
 
 His father was a minister ; his mother was of 
 the salt of the earth. He had grown up under 
 the best influences of a clean and wholesome 
 
AN UNFRIGHTENED HOPE 91 
 
 Christian home, and he had slipped those strings. 
 He had thought that it was manly to surrender to 
 the current ideals of the college ; that in cutting 
 loose from the influence of his home he was doing 
 a brave and courageous thing. But the girl knew 
 he was doing it because he was a coward and 
 she had the courage to tell him so. And he had 
 come to see it in that light for himself. In his 
 college fraternity and in his own class, men were 
 praising him because he had broken from the old 
 enslavements of home and was living his own life 
 like a man. But he knew that he was nothing 
 but a coward, who 
 
 " Held that hope was all a lie 
 And faith a form of bigotry 
 
 And love a snare that caught him. 
 Then thought to comfort human tears 
 With sundry ill-considered sneers 
 
 At things his mother taught him." 
 
 And he had thought he was doing it because he 
 was courageous, whereas the real motive was 
 that of fear. He was a coward, without courage 
 enough to fly his own flag unflinchingly, to be 
 and do the thing which in his heart, in the very 
 fibres of his being, flesh of his mother's flesh, he 
 knew was the thing he should be and do. 
 
 And if we would really look into our live^ we 
 should discover that fear plays a far larger part 
 with us than we ever dreamed. Men and women 
 lie. Why ? Simply because they are afraid of 
 
93 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 telling" the truth and taking the consequences. 
 Nine out of every ten falsehoods — perhaps ninety- 
 nine out of every hundred — are the spawn of 
 fear. And the same thing is true of sin, and of 
 no small measure of unbelief, as well as of no 
 small measure of pretended belief. 
 
 Our great need is the discovering of something 
 that will cast fear out of our lives, that will en- 
 able us to walk unafraid in the open sunlight of 
 His pathway Who bade men to be afraid of 
 nothing. Think how greatly we need this eman- 
 cipation from fear in the simple matter of loyalty 
 to principle. There is so much of expediency 
 and compromise and adaptation among us, so 
 great reluctance to ruffle the smooth convention- 
 alities of life, whereas what the world needs is 
 men and women who can see right principle as 
 principle, unconfused and undistorted, and then 
 who, unafraid, will abide in that right principle. 
 
 How greatly, too, this is needed in the plain, 
 commonplace matter of duty-doing I All around 
 us much simple work waits to be done by men 
 and women who, first of all, can see it, and then 
 have the courage to do it. The obscure tasks 
 that, after all, are the really great and worthy 
 ones, how few there are to do them ! There is a 
 fine passage in Morley's essay on Rousseau in 
 which he describes what real history is, and how 
 much we make of history that really is not his- 
 tory at all, but simply the spectacular doings of 
 
AN UNFRIGHTENED HOPE 93 
 
 men who for the time being were deemed great 
 and who usually were engaged in war, whereas 
 the great bulk of Hfe was not the life of warfare 
 at all. It was the life of peace, — of the quiet 
 agricultural people, of the tradespeople, of the 
 homes, which is not written up in any history at 
 all, — that was the real history of the world. The 
 men and the women who were doing earth's work 
 were not those who went out to battle or on great 
 expeditions, but those who, day by day, heroic- 
 ally, unflinchingly, and without fear of oblivion, 
 did the real business of the world. There are 
 some familiar lines of Lowell's in " Under the 
 Old Elm " that put the principle for us : 
 
 ** The longer on this earth we live 
 
 And weigh the various qualities of men, 
 
 Seeing how most are fugitive, 
 
 Or fitful gifts, at best, of now and then. 
 
 Wind-wavered, corpse-lights, daughters of the fen, 
 
 The more we feel the high stern -featured beauty 
 
 Of plain devotedness to duty, steadfast and still. 
 
 Not fed with mortal praise, 
 
 But finding amplest recompense 
 
 For life's ungarlanded expense 
 
 In work done squarely and unwasted days." 
 
 And take this matter of Christian service that 
 lies before the thought of every earnest young 
 life. Why are so many of us going to be, in the 
 cities and homes from which we came, the same 
 useless driftwood that we have been? Why? 
 Simply because of our want of courage to face 
 
94 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 the work that needs to be done there, and to un- 
 dertake that work without fear that we cannot do 
 it, without fear that God will desert us in attempt- 
 ing to do it, without fear of the irregularity and 
 uniqueness of our being seen engaged in it. 
 Throughout the world Christ waits for men and 
 women to-day, as He waited for them — and so 
 often in vain — while He was here on earth. 
 Who will hear His call now ? " Lay aside your 
 fear and trust Me to be with you and to enable 
 you to do the thing. Come and take up My task 
 after Me." 
 
 Some of us would dread to go out to live 
 among the Chinese or Mohammedan peoples, so 
 far away. But we would not dread going out to 
 live in the legation, nor would we dread it much 
 if we were to be employed in some great com- 
 mercial enterprise. Yet the geography would 
 be precisely the same, and our dangers and 
 friendlessness would be far greater. But we would 
 not fear all that, because others would think it 
 natural and appropriate for us. But this other 
 thing — the missionary call — would be so excep- 
 tional, so unusual, so fantastic, even fanatical, 
 that we would fear to do any such dreadful thing 1 
 But which life of us is worth mentioning in the 
 same breath with the life of God's Son Who came 
 into a carpenter's home in a wretched little Jew- 
 ish village amid an outcast race, in a bare re- 
 mote corner of the earth, and lived there among 
 
AN UNFRIGHTENED HOPE 95 
 
 peasant folk and farmers, pent up in the chamel 
 house of humanity, and Who was willing to count 
 His equality with God not a prize jealously to be 
 retained, Who emptied Himself and took on Him 
 the form of a servant and became obedient unto 
 death, even the death of the Cross ? The con- 
 trast between our life, with all its privileges, to- 
 day and the most squalid African village is in- 
 visible over against the contrast between what 
 Christ laid down and what Christ took up for the 
 love He bore us and His world. 
 
 And we need greatly this fearlessness in our 
 confession of Him, — that, without concealing 
 Whom we follow and Whose servants we are, we 
 should go out now, openly to avow our disciple- 
 ship and the vow we have taken of loyalty to 
 our Lord Jesus Christ 1 Think how many be- 
 trayals of Him there have been, and how much 
 of putting afresh to shame the Son of God and 
 crucifying Him anew by men and women who 
 had said they were going to follow Him faith- 
 fully, just as Simon said he was resolved to do 
 on that very night in which before the cock crew 
 he denied his Lord. Shall we not go out into the 
 coming days with something in us that casts out 
 this fear? 
 
 We look with longing and admiration upon 
 such deliverance from fear when we find it in 
 other lives. I was in Edinburgh during the 
 South African war, just after the battle of Mae- 
 
96 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 gersfontein, and was staying in the house of 
 friends. There was one little boy in the family 
 named after Prof. Henry Drummond. I had 
 been in the library all the afternoon, the very 
 room in which Sir James Simpson discovered 
 chloroform, and then had gone into the drawing- 
 room for afternoon tea. The boy and his gov- 
 erness were the only other members of the house- 
 hold who came down. He and I fell to talking 
 about the war. I asked him : *' What do you 
 think about the war in South Africa ? " 
 
 " Well," he said, " I did not think much about 
 it at the beginning ; I did not think about it much 
 until a friend of mine was killed." 
 
 "Yes," I said, " who was the friend ?" 
 
 " General Wauchope." 
 
 He was, as you know, the commander of the 
 Black Watch, and the Black Watch had been 
 recruited from Edinburgh. The boy told rne 
 about the regiment and its fate, and shortly after 
 his story was filled up by an Oxford man who 
 had been in Edinburgh when the tidings of the 
 battle came. He said every shop was closed, 
 and along the streets little knots of men were 
 gathered, and you could see the sobbing of 
 strong men everywhere. There was scarcely a 
 great family in Edinburgh that had not been 
 touched. And yet, at the same time, all through 
 the city there was a subdued sense of moral 
 elevation, as though something had lifted the 
 
AN UNFRIGHTENED HOPE 9l 
 
 character and temper of the city. They sor- 
 rowed in what had gone out from them ; but 
 they rejoiced in the way that it had gone. That 
 regiment had been organized as a Scotch kirk. 
 The chaplain was the minister of the kirk. The 
 officers constituted the kirk's session. I believe 
 almost every man in the regiment was a member 
 of the kirk, and I was told that as they went 
 down through the streets of Cork to embark for 
 South Africa, although not under orders or re- 
 ' straint, the men walked with arms on one an- 
 other's shoulders, singing : 
 
 " I'm not ashamed to own my Lord, 
 Or to defend His cause. 
 Maintain the honour of His Word, 
 The glory of His laws." 
 
 And when they were disembarked at Cape 
 Town and were taking their train to go to the 
 front, they went on board singing the old Gospel 
 soldier's hymn : 
 
 " When the roll is called up yonder, 
 I'll be there." 
 
 They were sent right up and almost at once 
 into that fateful battle. General Wauchope knew 
 somebody had blundered, and he said to the 
 men : " Men, do not blame me for this." And 
 without any fear they went into the ending 
 from which no soldier such as they would draw 
 back, unafraid of anything that might come to 
 
08 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 them because unashamed to own their Lord and 
 unfearing to follow Him. 
 
 Of such as those are we to be ? Or will 
 temptation intimidate us, and the tone of the 
 conversation of the men and women with whom 
 we mingle pull us down and cause us to fold our 
 colours up and lay them away, as the man did 
 whom the sneer of a serving maid caused to 
 deny the Lord Who was dying for him ? 
 
 Where are we to find that which will drive out 
 this fear? ** Perfect love casteth out fear. . . . 
 He that feareth is not made perfect in love." 
 From how many of our hearts to-day will the 
 perfect love of Him Whom we call Master and 
 Lord expel all fear? Let it be so now. Not 
 years afterwards, when other things shall have 
 palled upon us, years that shall have brought 
 their dulling influence with them, but now, in all 
 the full strength and richness and glory and 
 eagerness of our lives, let us admit the perfect 
 love that shall cast out fear and send us out the 
 kind of men and women Christ would have us 
 be, to join the great company of men and women 
 and girls and boys who, unfearing, 
 
 <'.... climbed the steep ascent of Heaven, 
 Through peril, toil and pain. 
 O God, to us may grace be given 
 To follow in their train ! " 
 
 Christian character needs this conquest of fear 
 and it needs the love which is one of the deep 
 
AN UNFKIGHTENED HOPE 99 
 
 springs of such conquest. It needs also in our 
 day an immensely more practical use of the 
 principle of hope, a principle almost totally 
 neglected in theology and made nothing of in 
 our codes of conduct or in our creeds. Paul had 
 a far deeper insight into the human heart and a 
 vasdy richer grasp on life. "Now abideth faith, 
 hope, love, these three," said he. 
 
 Paul rendered a large service when he con- 
 densed the central ideals and principles of Chris- 
 tianity in this way. The human mind is very 
 fond of formulas. If it had not been for some 
 authoritative, simplifying word like this, we 
 might have gone on to construct all sorts of 
 prescriptions like the threes and sixes and tens 
 and fifteens with which we are so familiar in 
 Buddhism. And yet the service which Paul 
 rendered is not without its dangers, for men are 
 prone to simplify further and to see whether the 
 three cannot be reduced to one, or to arrange 
 the order and proportions of the three, or to con- 
 tend alone for that which some one of them 
 signifies at the expense of the other two. Paul's 
 own words should have saved us from such folly, 
 for he said quite clearly that one of these three 
 was the greatest, " And now abideth faith, hope, 
 love, these three ; and the greatest of these is 
 love." And yet his own doctrine elsewhere has 
 been used to correct and to counteract his ex- 
 pressed judgment here, and through the years 
 
100 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 we have had our theologies constructed in dis- 
 regard of the domination of that one of these 
 three principles which Saint Paul exalts. It has 
 been in terms of faith, and faith given a very- 
 definitive construction, that our theological 
 thinking with regard to Christianity has been 
 chiefly done. Little by little however the pro- 
 portions have changed, and now love, as one of 
 the three great fundamental principles of Chris- 
 tianity, is coming to its own, not as a principle 
 of action only but as a regulative principle also 
 of our thought. 
 
 But it is a strange thing that no one has ever 
 arisen, apparently, to say of hope what the intel- 
 lect of the Church, over against Paul's judgment, 
 has been prepared to say of faith. He declared 
 that of these three, love is the greatest. The 
 current opinion of Christian thought through the 
 Christian centuries has contended that faith was 
 the greatest. What would men say if some one 
 should arise now to restore the proportions, who 
 would make bold to declare, *' Now abideth faith, 
 hope, and love ; and the greatest of these is 
 hope"? Surely the day will come some time 
 when hope will come to its own, when the 
 Christian heart and mind will no longer be con- 
 tent to construe its interpretation of Christianity 
 in terms either of love or of faith, or of love and 
 faith together, but will insist that these three 
 abide — faith and love and hope. 
 
AN UNFRIGHTENED HOPE 101 
 
 And when a man stops for a moment to think, 
 to disengage himself from the unscrutinized con- 
 ventions, he begins to realize immediately that 
 he has no faith and love unless he makes larger 
 room for hope in his thinking and feeling than 
 has been allowed to us. For there cannot be 
 any faith detached from hope. You can con- 
 ceive of faith in three different ways. You may 
 think of it in its primary form, in its primary 
 form in the New Testament at least, as personal 
 trust, as the confidence that exists between two 
 personal spirits. But even so, can you think of 
 it without hope? If I have no hope of seeing 
 Him in Whom I trust, of consulting with Him, or 
 serving Him, of entering into a deeper and en- 
 larged fellowship with Him, will not my personal 
 trust soon empty itself of reality ? Or, secondly, 
 you may think of faith as the writer of the Epistle 
 to the Hebrews does, as the " substance of things 
 hoped for " ; in which without any flinching, he 
 binds faith up with hope in terms that cannot be 
 severed. And, thirdly, if you go on to the rest 
 of his definition, " the substance of things hoped 
 for, the evidence of things not seen," still faith is 
 undetachable from hope ; for, as Paul says in 
 another passage, " We are saved by hope : but 
 hope that is seen is not hope : for what a man 
 seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope 
 for that we see not, then do we with patience 
 wait for it." And you cannot detach love from 
 
102 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 hope or have anything that is real in the expe- 
 rience of love unless it inevitably leads a man on 
 into those things that clearly were in Paul's mind 
 when he spoke not of faith and love only but 
 also of hope. I ask any man's heart if it is pos- 
 sible to divorce hope from love. I suppose in 
 one sense it may be, and that you can speak of 
 a hopeless love. Henry Martyn's heroic and 
 tragic life was the unfolding of a hopeless love. 
 But how different that is from love that is under- 
 shot with hope. One looks towards evening to 
 see the children waiting as he comes home. The 
 workman lives in the hope of all that is there of 
 joy and confidence and perfect trust inside his 
 home. Love would be a sorry thing to-day if it 
 were stripped of the hopes that give it its sweet- 
 ness and its joy. 
 
 And it is not only faith and love that root 
 themselves inseparably in hope, and that lose 
 their fragrance and meaning if they do not con- 
 tinue to draw both out of hope, but regarding 
 almost everything else that is dearest and most 
 precious to us in life, does it not spring from this 
 same great treasury ? In one of the chapters of 
 the Epistle to the Romans we find Paul again 
 and again, in his efforts to bring his message out 
 to those to whom he writes, describing God in 
 different terms of speech. He begins by speak- 
 ing of Him as the God of comfort, the God of 
 patience, and then he goes on to speak of Him 
 
AN UNFRIGHTENED HOPE 103 
 
 as the God of hope. " Now the God of hope fill 
 you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye 
 may abound in hope." And then he closes by 
 speaking of the God of peace who is to order all 
 hearts. Quite evidently in his thought these 
 things all run together, as again he writes : " Be 
 ye sober. Walk as children of light. Put on 
 the breastplate of faith and love, and for an 
 helmet the hope of salvation." Joy and glad- 
 ness and confidence and trust and hope,— all are 
 rooted each in the other in his own mind and 
 experience. The best that we have got in life 
 springs from the fountains of hope. 
 
 We do not wonder, accordingly, that the old 
 religious experience and the richer Christian ex- 
 perience, when it came, conceived and spoke of 
 God as the God of love and the God of hope. 
 They never spoke of Him as the God of faith. 
 The old Hebrew idea of Him was as the ground- 
 rock of their hope. "O hope of Israel," was 
 their cry. The lovely thing is that that burst 
 from the lips of the man who mourned for his 
 nation : " O the hope of Israel, the saviour thereof 
 in time of trouble." " Hope thou in God : for I 
 shall yet praise him, who is the health of my 
 countenance, and my God." God Himself when 
 He comes to let Himself be richly known to men 
 makes on them the impression of a great and 
 joyous and glad and eager and boundless hope. 
 And when we turn away from such clews as 
 
104 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 these and look right into the face of life to ask 
 what the powers and services and functionings 
 of hope in the actual life of man and in the life 
 of the world are, we realize that all this exultant 
 hope has its deep grounding in the actual living 
 needs of men. It is by hope — the New Testa- 
 ment is unequivocal about it, and our own expe- 
 rience answers to that word — it is by hope that 
 we are saved. Not in one passage in the New 
 Testament can you find the declaration that we 
 are saved by faith. We are saved " by grace 
 through faith," but Paul is flat-footed in his dec- 
 laration that we are saved by hope. And the 
 moment a man looks life square in the face he 
 sees why it should be so. Were it not for hope 
 there could not be any saving that were worth a 
 man's while. There might be a clearing up of 
 the past ; we might secure something like a clean 
 conscience ; but there could not be any confi- 
 dence, any ease, any rest, as over against the 
 tragic problem of life, if a man could not look 
 out into the future — which is really the thing he 
 now has to deal with — with boundless hope. 
 Salvation is just that thing. It is not cleaning 
 up our lives from the point of view of the past, 
 just for the sake of cleaning up our lives ; but it 
 is the hope that for the sake of our future God 
 is going to live in us a saving life. 
 
 All this is true whether we think of salvation 
 as it comes penetrating our lives and dealing 
 
AN UNFRIGHTENED HOPE 105 
 
 with such problems as in shame and self-distrust 
 we think of in our hours of recollection and peni- 
 tence, or whether we think of it as something 
 reaching out into the expanding experience of 
 the future. Either way, salvation is a matter of 
 hope. There is a lovely touch in one of Paul's 
 epistles where he says : " Having therefore these 
 promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves 
 from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfect- 
 ing holiness in the fear of God." What do you 
 think of that motive ? He does not say, " See- 
 ing that our sin is so black and abhorrent as it 
 is, seeing that the past is so shameful and un- 
 worthy as it is, let us cleanse ourselves." " My 
 brothers," he said, " seeing we have such prom- 
 ises "—that is, " that the hope is so bright, that 
 there is no ground for despair, that we can be- 
 lieve victory can actually be achieved by us, 
 seeing that we have these hopes, let us cleanse 
 ourselves in growing holiness." 
 
 And then when those first Christian men came 
 to look not only at this present purging of life 
 which should leave it rich and fragrant and 
 glorious but out upon the wide ranges of the un- 
 tried and the unforeseeable, they still construed 
 salvation in terms of hope. " Now are we the 
 sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we 
 shall be : but we know that, when he shall ap- 
 pear, we shall be like him ; for we shall see him 
 as he is. And he that hath this hope in him 
 
106 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 purifieth himself, even as he is pure." It is so 
 because there is in front of us the dear voice 
 calling, the voice that says to every one of us : 
 " Man, let that old past go now. It is done and 
 gone beyond recall. Come out with Me. There 
 is a new road for your feet and Mine, a new tale 
 that is to be unfolded now, a new story, the con- 
 tradiction of the old. Let the past go now, and 
 come and walk with Me in the limitless hope of 
 the new ways." 
 
 And it is not only by hope, as a simple down- 
 right matter of fact, that men are saved and held 
 fast to the Saviour ; it is by hope also that men 
 are nerved and empowered. In the hour of 
 darkness, it is what lights all the darkness and 
 makes it possible for men to bear. "Yes," we 
 say to ourselves in the hour of pain, " I know ; 
 but I can stand it, for after this comes something 
 that is different from this." That is what the 
 honest doctor says to us when he deals with us. 
 " Now hold steady for a moment. I am going 
 to cut and it will hurt dreadfully. But just wait. 
 Beyond the pain lies freedom from pain." And 
 we say, "Yes, doctor, cut. I can stand it." In 
 a moment the anguish is over. We endure in 
 that hope. Has it not always been so ? For a 
 little while the mother bears her anguish and her 
 pain for the joy and hope that a child is born 
 into the world. For a little while Jesus bore the 
 loneliness and the anguish of His grief and the 
 
AN UNFRIGHTENED HOPE 107 
 
 shadow and the pain and the disgrace of His 
 Cross, because, looking over it, He saw the glory 
 that awaited Him and the world, and He en- 
 dured all this, this anguish of the Cross, for the 
 joy that was set beyond. " Therefore," says 
 Paul, " we rejoice in tribulation, in being flailed, 
 in being pressed down as grapes in the wine- 
 press, in being put through discipline and strain, 
 we rejoice in all that, because we know that 
 tribulation worketh steadfastness, steadfastness 
 experience, and experience hope, and hope 
 maketh not ashamed." 
 
 And you know the paradox, and the glory of 
 it, is that the darker you make the shadows the 
 more triumphantly hope laughs in the midst of 
 them. The more difficult you make the night, 
 the more hopeful and enticing is the sure confi- 
 dence of the dawn that is not far away. Our 
 word, " Cheer up ! The worst is yet to come," 
 is as deep a Christian word as was ever yet 
 spoken. Be glad, because darker things lie just 
 ahead and then light beyond. Thank God that 
 you are counted worthy for tribulations like 
 these ; for these are what wash white a man's 
 robes and make him fit to walk after the Lamb 
 whithersoever He goes, in company with the 
 men whose lips have never known a lie. 
 
 All this is put finely for us in " The Ballad of 
 the White Horse," the best piece of work Ches- 
 terton has done. They were as dark days as 
 
108 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 ever had been in English history. Tide after 
 tide of invasion from Norse and Dane had come 
 pouring in. Again and again Alfred had called 
 his men and gone out and fought, and each 
 time in vain. Now, as he sits on his little island 
 in the Thames among the reeds, the news comes 
 to him that the Danes are on their way for a 
 fresh invasion of his land. He kneels in prayer 
 and asks the Virgin Mother whether he ought to 
 go out yet once more. Again and again, he 
 tells her, he has gone out in hope, and each time 
 in the confidence that victory would be his, and 
 each time he has come back defeated, his men 
 killed, and his people to sink lower after 
 each despair than the time before. And yet, 
 as he prays to her he says that if she wull give 
 him one word of assurance, he will go again. 
 But only this, as she stands by his side, will she 
 say, 
 
 *' I tell you naught for your comfort. 
 Yea, naught for your desire, 
 Save that the sky grows darker yet, 
 And the sea rises higher." 
 
 And there that day among the reeds under the 
 promise only that the night was going to be 
 blacker than he had ever known, that storms 
 fiercer than he had ever breasted were coming, 
 Alfred rises up to do what he had never done 
 under the old assurance of easy victory. 
 
AN UNFRIGHTENED HOPE 109 
 
 *• Up over windy wastes and up 
 Went Alfred over the shaws, 
 Shaken of the joy of giants, 
 The joy without a cause." 
 
 And as his men saw him coming, they thought 
 it was with the old vain word of a sure victory, 
 and they were about to tell him in advance that 
 if he came with such a message they would fol- 
 low him no more. But not now was Alfred's 
 word the easy word. No, but — 
 
 " This is the word of Mary, 
 
 The word of the world's desire ; 
 ' No more of comfort shall you get 
 Save that the sky grows darker yet, 
 And the sea rises higher.' " 
 
 And in front of that darkening sky and that ris- 
 ing sea his men rose up to go with him, and this 
 time, from the darkest night they had ever known, 
 came the bright morning of their lasting victory. 
 Thank God, we are not called out on any soft 
 errand under the incitement of bright choices, 
 but challenged by great difficulties, black nights 
 and rising storms, to work in the hope of that 
 which is invisible and which lies beyond. It is 
 by hope, and hope that lies behind impenetrable 
 clouds, that men are nerved and empowered. It 
 is because the world is so black and dark to-day 
 that we walk out into it smiling in its face, know- 
 ing that behind all this the morning the more 
 
110 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 surely waits, the morning in which the men be- 
 lieve who have faith and love and hope. 
 
 And it is by hope that our comforts are drawn 
 down into our lives when the darkest of all 
 days come, and everything is quiet about the 
 house and the litde feet that had run to and fro 
 are still. We say, " Yes, a litde while and then 
 those angel faces will smile, that I have loved 
 and lost and love." What would we do in those 
 hours if it were not for the sure hope ? Saint 
 Paul lays his own heart open to all his friends in 
 one of his episdes : " But I would not have you 
 to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which 
 are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others 
 which have no hope. For if we believe that 
 Jesus died and rose again, even so them also 
 which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. 
 For this we say unto you by the word of the 
 Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto 
 the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them 
 which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall 
 descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice 
 of the archangel, and with the trump of God : 
 and the dead in Christ shall rise first : then we 
 which are alive and remain shall be caught up 
 together with them in the clouds, to meet the 
 Lord in the air : and so shall we ever be with 
 the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with 
 these words." 
 
 And as for us who are in the full flush and 
 
AN UNFRIGHTENED HOPE 111 
 
 possession of all that we have, it is by hope that 
 we draw our comfort for our struggle. As 
 against the background of our defeats and fail- 
 ures, we say to our own hearts: "Well, wait, 
 just wait; my time will come. No matter how 
 much of this there has been, some day my hope 
 will be fulfilled. It is sure that something else 
 than this there will yet be." William Henry 
 Green became the outstanding Hebrew scholar 
 in America. He was plucked when he entered 
 college in Latin and Greek. At Lafayette Col- 
 lege for months and months he found himself 
 beaten on the very batde-field where he stood at 
 last the first man in the land. At Lexington, 
 Virginia, several years ago, I went to the grave 
 of General Lee in the chancel of the chapel of 
 his college and then I went out to the grave of 
 Stonewall Jackson on that little hill. One of his 
 townsmen was telling me the story of Jackson 
 and how by hope he wrested triumph out of his 
 uttermost failure. He had been teaching in the 
 military academy, and had just been about to 
 give up his work because he had no gift of dis- 
 cipline. He could not maintain order in his own 
 classroom, my friend said, and was about to sur- 
 render his career as a teacher, because he thought 
 he was incapable there. Then the war broke out, 
 and within twelve months Stonewall Jackson was 
 the most famous disciplinarian on earth. On the 
 very field where the man's failure had been most 
 
112 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 clear, there he achieved his richest and greatest 
 victory, by hope. And so we comfort our hearts 
 here to-day. " Yes," we say to memories of 
 which we are reminded in our searching hours, 
 " the evil and unworthy imaginings and desires 
 cling to us still, but it will not be forever. Some 
 day, no matter how often I have failed, if I live 
 in hope, it will come to me, the clean thing that 
 the Lord said should be mine." 
 
 And last of all, there is nothing adequate for 
 us in the way of actually moulding men and do- 
 ing that with life which we were set here to do 
 unless we can go to the work in the spirit in 
 which our Lord and Saint Paul entered it If I 
 have no hope for another man, I cannot awaken 
 any hope in him for himself. Unless I believe in 
 him, how can he believe? The glory of Christ 
 was that, though He knew just what was in man, 
 and saw all the weaknesses and the slavery and 
 the impurity and the unwholesomeness, though 
 He saw all this in man. He shut His eyes to it 
 deliberately and believed in the better capacities 
 and possibilities that were there and that He by 
 His grace and His power could plant and nurture 
 and bring out until all that old baseness that had 
 been the man was not the man any more, and all 
 this new purity that had not been the man was 
 the man, and Simon was turned at last out of his 
 putty into rock and stone, 
 
 I do not know whether the apostles were con- 
 
AN UNFRIGHTENED HOPE 113 
 
 scious or not of what was happening to them. 
 Maybe they did not appreciate their Master, but 
 one likes to think that they must have done so, 
 and that often they would go off by themselves 
 and one would say : " Andrew, is He not just 
 great? Did you ever meet any one like that 
 before ? Did you see what He did this morning ? 
 He just shut His eyes completely to that mean- 
 ness that He saw in me, and that I saw the 
 moment I let it out, too, and He pretended that 
 He never saw it at all, and He believed in me 
 when He knew and I knew there was nothing 
 there to believe in. Is He not wonderful ? He 
 will make a man of me yet." And to this day 
 He is still doing just what He was doing then. 
 In this place now He is doing just that thing. He 
 is shutting His eyes to what we do not want Him 
 to see and opening them to what only He can see 
 in us. And His law must be our law. 
 
 I can put it in a little story that a friend of some 
 of us, George Truett, told to a little group some 
 years ago in a western city. " I am fond," he 
 said, " of recalling the first soul it was ever given 
 me to win to Jesus. I was a lad barely grown 
 and a teacher in the mountains of Carolina. One 
 morning, as we were ready for prayers in the 
 chapel, there hobbled down the aisle to the front 
 seat a boy of about sixteen years old. He was an 
 eager, lonely-looking lad. I read the Scriptures 
 and prayed and then sent the teachers to their 
 
114 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 classes. But my little cripple lad stayed. I sup- 
 posed that he was a beggar. And I said to my- 
 self, ' Surely this boy deserves alms. His condi- 
 tion betokens his need.' So I went to him at 
 recess and said, ' My lad, what do you want ? ' 
 He looked me eagerly in the face and said : ' Mr. 
 Truett, I want to go to school. Oh, sir, I want 
 to be somebody in the world. I will always be 
 a cripple. The doctors have told me that, but,' 
 he said, ' I want to be somebody.' 
 
 " He had won me. He told me of their 
 poverty, and that was taken care of. I watched 
 that lad for weeks and weeks. How bright his 
 mind was ! How eager he was to know ! One 
 day I called him into my office and said to 
 him : ' My boy, I want you to tell me something 
 more about yourself.' He told me how, a few 
 months before, his father had been killed in the 
 great cotton mill where he worked, and the few 
 dollars he had saved up were soon gone. They 
 tried to do their best in the county where they 
 were, but found it difficult ; so his mother said 
 one day : ' Let us move to the next county, 
 where they do not know us. Perhaps we can do 
 better where we are not known.' So they moved 
 and now he had come into my school. He said, 
 * I want to help mother, and I want to be some- 
 body in the world ; so I made my appeal to you 
 to come to your school.' It was time in a mo- 
 ment for the bell to ring for books. I laid my. 
 
AN UNFRIGHTENED HOPE 115 
 
 hand on the head of the little fellow and said to 
 him : * Jim, I am for you, my boy. I believe in 
 you thoroughly, and I want you to know that I 
 love you, my boy.' And when I said that last 
 word, the little pinched face looked up into my 
 face almost in a lightning flash, and he said : 
 • Mr. Truett, did you say you loved me ? Did 
 you say that ? ' I said, * I said that, Jim.' And 
 then with a great sob he said : ' I did not know 
 anybody loved me but mother and the two little 
 girls. Mr. Truett, if you love me, I am going to 
 be a man yet, by the help of God.' And when 
 a few Friday nights afterwards I was leading the 
 boys in their chapel meeting, as was the custom, 
 I heard the boy's crutches over in the corner. 
 There Jim sat, in a chair away from the other 
 boys to protect his leg. And a little later he got 
 up, sobbing and laughing at the same time, and 
 said, ' Mr. Truett, I have found the Saviour, and 
 that time you told me you loved me started me 
 towards Him.' " And then our friend added, 
 " Brothers, working men in the shops and 
 everywhere are dying for love. Your grammar 
 may be broken, your plans may be imperfect, 
 your machinery may be crude, your organization 
 may be rough ; but if you love men and pour 
 your hearts out to them honestly and directly, 
 there will be a response that will fill your hearts 
 with joy and heaven with praises." 
 
 And the need and functions of hope should be 
 
116 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 viewed in no narrow personal way. We want 
 to-day men who have a large and courageous 
 faith in God for the nation and the world. Of 
 recent years a mood of pessimism has spread 
 through America. In one sense it represents a 
 wholesome reaction from the spirit of braggadocio 
 and spreadeagleism of an earlier day. So far 
 it is wholesome. We need to be sobered and 
 made modest and quiet in our national spirit. 
 But it is a bad thing when a nation loses the zest 
 of a great consciousness and a brave patriotism, 
 and thinks meanly of what God can do with it. 
 Our nation needs now not a timid and fearful 
 sense of its impotence and incapacity, but a 
 realization that, whatever its difficulties and de- 
 fects, God has a mission for us which only we 
 can fulfill for Him. For this mission those men 
 must be the nation's soul of hope and expecta- 
 tion who know that our greatest duty and service 
 lie ahead of us and are waiting to be grasped by 
 men whose hearts face the untried without fear. 
 
 And now shall we have this hope that nothing 
 can slay ? Do we want it ? Well, it is so near 
 to us that we do not need to reach out after it. 
 You know where it is, " Christ in you, the hope 
 of glory." " The Lord Jesus Christ," as Saint 
 Paul says in the opening words of his first 
 Epistle to Timothy, "The Lord Jesus Christ, 
 our hope." This hope is not something that we 
 work up out of the fragments of moral ideals 
 
AN UNFRIGHTENED HOPE 117 
 
 that we find lying around in our lives or our 
 nation. Jesus Christ is the hope for a man and 
 a people. If we want it, why not now take Him ? 
 Genuinely, I mean, in a deep, living, religious 
 way, take Him in His fullness of life ? God and 
 the nation want the men who are filled with His 
 courage and hope : 
 
 " God's trumpet wakes the slumbering world, 
 Now each man to his post. 
 The red cross banner is unfurl'd, 
 Who joins the glorious host ? Who joins the glorious 
 
 host? 
 He who in fealty to the truth 
 And counting all the cost 
 Doth consecrate his gen'rous youth, 
 He joins the noble host ! He joins the noble host ! 
 
 " He who, no anger on his tongue 
 Nor any idle boast. 
 
 Bears steadfast witness 'gainst the wrong, 
 He joins the sacred host ! He joins the sacred host ! 
 He who with calm, undaunted will 
 Ne'er counts the battle lost 
 But though defeated battles still, 
 He joins the faithful host 1 He joins the faithful 
 host! 
 
 " He who is ready for the cross, 
 The cause despised loves most, 
 And shows not pain or shame or loss, 
 He joins the martyr host ! He joins the martyr 
 
 host! 
 God's trumpet wakes the slumbering world. 
 Now each man to his post. 
 The red cross banner is unfurled. 
 We join the glorious host ! We join the glorious 
 
 host!" 
 
LECTURE IV 
 THE JOY OF THE MINORITY 
 
 THERE are two forms of disloyalty. One 
 is flinching, the other is compromise. 
 Of course, the compromiser will never 
 allow that he is disloyal. He is a practical man 
 who realizes that theories and ideals have to be 
 adapted to a practical world, and he gives up a 
 part, and as unimportant a part as possible, in 
 order that he may gain the rest. He feels him- 
 self quite capable of judging how much to give 
 up and what part may rightly be given up. He 
 will simply abate the unreason of a God who de- 
 mands all righteousness, and to Whom the whole 
 truth is truth. Let us set up against such men 
 the uncompromising principle of the duty of non- 
 compromise. It is a principle from which the 
 wisest and best of men are sometimes won away 
 in the supposed interest of the great ends which 
 they seek, and for which they feel that they may 
 rightly sacrifice subordinate issues. There is 
 what some regard as a striking incident of this 
 character in the life of that uncompromising 
 man, Saint Paul. It is an exciting and instruct- 
 
 1X8 
 
THE JOY OF THE MINORITY 119 
 
 ive story. This is the way it is told in the 
 twenty-first chapter of Acts (vs. 1 7-30) : 
 
 " And when we were come to Jerusalem, the brethren 
 received us gladly. And the day following Paul went in 
 with us unto James ; and all the elders were present. And 
 when he had saluted them, he rehearsed one by one the 
 things which God had wrought among the Gentiles through 
 his ministry. And they, when they heard it, glorified 
 God ; and they said unto him, Thou seest, brother, how 
 many thousands there are among the Jews of them that 
 have believed ; and they are all zealous for the law : and 
 they have been informed concerning thee, that thou teach- 
 est all the Jews who are among the Gentiles to forsake 
 Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children, 
 neither to walk after the customs. What is it therefore ? 
 they will certainly hear that thou art come. Do there- 
 fore this that we say to thee : We have four men that 
 have a vow on them ; these take, and purify thyself with 
 them, and be at charges for them, that they may shave 
 their heads : and all shall know that there is no truth in 
 the things whereof they have been informed concerning 
 thee ; but that thou thyself also walkest orderly, keeping 
 the law. But as touching the Gentiles that have believed, 
 we wrote, giving judgment that they should keep them- 
 selves from things sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and 
 from what is strangled, and from fornication. Then Paul 
 took the men, and the next day purifying himself with 
 them went into the temple, declaring the fulfillment of the 
 days of purification, until the offering was offered for every 
 one of them. 
 
 " And when the seven days were almost completed, the 
 Jews from Asia, when they saw him in the temple, stirred 
 up all the multitude and laid hands on him, crying out, 
 
120 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 Men of Israel, help : This is the man that teacheth all 
 men everywhere against the people, and the law, and this 
 place ; and moreover he brought Greeks also into the 
 temple, and hath defiled this holy place. For they had 
 before seen with him in the city Trophimus the Ephesian, 
 whom they supposed that Paul had brought into the temple. 
 And all the city was moved, and the people ran together ; 
 and they laid hold on Paul, and dragged him out of the 
 temple: and straightway the doors were shut." 
 
 And that was the disastrous end of this con- 
 scientious experiment. Paul never tried another 
 like it. Perhaps there is a construction of the 
 story which forbids the idea that it was compro- 
 mise but it suffices at any rate to raise the whole 
 question of the wisdom of compromise as a prin- 
 ciple of action. It is the one incident in Paul's 
 Hfe where he might be thought even for a mo- 
 ment to have embarked on that course. Wher- 
 ever else we see him, he is a man of firm and 
 unflinching principles, who made no concealment 
 of what he believed, and did not try to adjust 
 his convictions and practices to other convictions 
 and practices that were at variance with them. 
 
 In the second chapter of Galatians, you will 
 remember, Paul is telling of a visit he made to 
 Jerusalem some time before with Barnabas and 
 Titus, in which they went up to consider these 
 very questions. Some of the brethren in Jeru- 
 salem had endeavoured to persuade Paul to have 
 Titus, who was a Gentile, circumcised, and Paul 
 
THE JOY OF THE MINORITY 121 
 
 says, " To whom we gave place ... no, not 
 for an hour." And then he tells of the time when 
 Peter came to Antioch and he withstood him to 
 his face because he had been a trimmer and 
 compromiser ; for Peter, acting on the generous 
 impulse of his own heart as to what was right, 
 had indeed bravely eaten with the converted 
 Gentiles, but when some men came down from 
 Jerusalem who were close to James, he withdrew 
 himself from the Gentiles, fearing, no doubt, that 
 it might injure him in Jerusalem. 
 
 Paul does not say anything in any letter about 
 this particular incident in Jerusalem, in which, 
 for the one time in his life, he was overpersuaded 
 by his friends and put in a position where he 
 was very much misunderstood, and where he 
 appeared to be compromising the great prin- 
 ciples in which he earnestly believed. We know 
 what the far-reaching consequences were. A 
 great deal of trouble was brought into his life by 
 this act. It was out of it that all those succeed- 
 ing events came which took him at last to Rome 
 to be tried before Caesar. Some may say that 
 these results were good. Undoubtedly God led 
 Paul's course on, but we may believe that God 
 might have had even greater things for him to 
 do if only he had in this incident pursued his 
 customary course. 
 
 But we want to go far beyond the question as 
 to whether the consequences may ever appear to 
 
122 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 justify acts of compromise. A course of action 
 is right or wrong, not according to the conse- 
 quences, but according to its conformity or un- 
 conformity to the character of God. And the 
 point now raised is whether it is ever right for us 
 to compromise our own firm convictions of truth 
 and principle. 
 
 Now, the world tells us that such compromise 
 is to-day absolutely unavoidable. Men and 
 women, we are assured, cannot get along in a 
 world like this without adaptations. If it is 
 meant by this only that we are often obliged to 
 adapt ourselves to that with which we do not 
 agree, why, of course, we have to assent, because 
 we are in a world of give and take of which we 
 have to be a part, and it is necessary for us to 
 live our life and do our work in this world. 
 Here in many of our communities, for example, 
 the saloons flourish. There is not one of us here 
 in this audience who believes that it is wise that 
 the saloon should exist under the protection of 
 the government, but we have to live in a land 
 where the principle with which we disagree pre- 
 vails, and the only way we can escape is to go to 
 some other land, and we would only find there 
 some other principle with which we could not 
 agree. We cannot live at all unless we are will- 
 ing to adjust ourselves to an actual world. 
 "Compromise" when used as the principle of 
 such adjustment means simply that we must of 
 
THE JOY OF THE MINORITY 123 
 
 necessity find room for ourselves among the 
 crossing strands of life. "All government," 
 says Burke, " indeed every human benefit and 
 enjoyment, every vital and every prudent act, is 
 founded on compromise and barter." " It can- 
 not be too emphatically asserted," says Spencer, 
 " that this policy of compromise alike in insti- 
 tution, in action and in belief which especially 
 characterizes English life is a policy essential to 
 a society going through the transition caused 
 by continuous growth and development." And 
 Emerson remarks, " Almost all people descend 
 to meet. All association must be a compromise, 
 and, what is worst, the very flower and aroma 
 of the flower of each of the beautiful natures dis- 
 appears as they approach each other." 
 
 If it is meant by compromise that we have to 
 live under conditions with which we do not agree 
 and to which we must adjust ourselves, why, of 
 course, we must assent to that — it is perfectly 
 obvious ; but we do not need to live under those 
 conditions assenting to them. We can bear our 
 testimony against whatever we morally disap- 
 prove. We can assert our conviction by word 
 or by the silent protest of life that those condi- 
 tions are not right, and so to live in the midst of 
 conditions in which we do not believe, but from 
 which we cannot escape, is not compromise. It 
 is compromise when we surrender our principles 
 50 that others do not understand what those 
 
124 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 principles are, or when we hold back something 
 that is vital, or cover over deceptively or mis- 
 leadingly something essential. When we take 
 before men a position that is inconsistent with 
 the position that in our hearts we are taking be- 
 fore God, that is compromise, and that is wrong. 
 Regarding the truth in which we believe, the 
 principles by which we know life ought to be 
 lived, regarding these things there cannot be 
 compromise, in our lives or in the Christian 
 Church. 
 
 There is a noble essay by Mr. John Morley, as 
 he once was, on this subject of compromise, its 
 nature and Jimits, of which Scott Holland says 
 in "Lux Mundi" that "no one can read that 
 book without being either the better or the worse 
 for it." In it Morley takes up three different 
 spheres of life. First, the formation of opinion ; 
 second, the expression of opinion when it is called 
 out from us ; and, third, the propagation of 
 opinion ; and then he pursues this line of argu- 
 ment : In the matter of the formation of opinion 
 there cannot be any compromise at all. Every 
 one of us is bound to hunt for the truth, no 
 matter what the truth may be, and when we 
 have found it, to give our lives absolutely to it. 
 In the realm of the expression of opinion, nobody 
 has any right to deceive any one regarding his 
 principles and convictions when they are called 
 forth. But in the third place, he admits room 
 
THE JOY OF THE MINORITY 125 
 
 for compromise when it comes to the aggressive 
 propagation of our convictions. He says that 
 every man is not bound to propagate what he 
 believes, and he takes for example his own 
 case, — that of a man who does not believe in 
 the Bible, who has abandoned the old religious 
 views of his people, but who does not regard it 
 as his duty aggressively to propagate his dis- 
 sentient convictions. 
 
 In his own words his thesis is this : 
 
 " In the positive endeavour to realize an opinion, to 
 convert a theory into practice, it may be, and very often 
 is, highly expedient to defer to the prejudices of the ma- 
 jority, to move very slowly, to bow to the conditions of 
 the status quo, to practice the very utmost sobriety, self- 
 restraint, and conciliatoriness. The mere expression of 
 opinion, in the next place, the avowal of dissent from re- 
 ceived notions, the refusal to conform to language which 
 implies the acceptance of such notions — this rests on a 
 diiferent footing. Here the reasons for respecting the 
 wishes and sentiments of the majority are far less strong, 
 though, as we shall presently see, such reasons certainly ex- 
 ist, and will weigh with all well-considering men. Finally, 
 in the formation of an opinion as to the abstract prefer- 
 ableness of one course of action over another, or as to the 
 truth or falsehood or right significance of a proposition, 
 the fact that the majority of one's contemporaries lean in 
 the other direction is naught, and no more than dust in the 
 balance. In making up our minds as to what would be 
 the wisest line of policy if it were practicable, we have 
 nothing to do with the circumstance that it is not practi- 
 
126 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 cable. And in settling with ourselves whether propositions 
 purporting to state matters of fact are true or not, we have 
 to consider how far they are conformable to the evidence. 
 We have nothing to do with the comfort and solace which 
 they would be likely to bring to others or ourselves, if they 
 were taken as true." 
 
 Now, we cannot but be rather grateful that 
 men, who if they spoke would have to oppose 
 Christianity, take this view and remain silent, 
 and yet that is not our principle. Believing in 
 Christianity, we believe that it would be wrong 
 and unworthy compromise to conceal it and to 
 refrain from propagating it. Mr, Morley pre- 
 fixed to his essay Whately's saying, " It makes 
 all the difference in the world whether we put 
 truth in the first place or in the second place," 
 We hold to another word of Whately's also : " If 
 our religion is false, we must change it. If it is 
 true, we must propagate it." Notice that Morley 
 is speaking not of his doubts, but of his convic- 
 tions. There is no obligation of a propaganda 
 of insecurity. There is an obligation to propa- 
 gate positive truth. It must, of course, be the 
 truth that I believe. When I am asked what I 
 believe I must, of course, tell the truth. But we 
 believe something far more than that. The re- 
 ligious truth that one believes he must give his 
 life to propagate throughout the world, and it 
 would not make any difference if he were the 
 only man in the world who held that truth, it 
 
THE JOY OF THE MINORITY 127 
 
 would still be his duty, if he believed it was the 
 truth and the great and necessary truth of life, to 
 go out single-handed to defend and propagate it. 
 Athanasius is regarded as an impracticable and 
 troublesome type but the progress of the world 
 is often lifted forward a sheer and discernible 
 stage by such uncompromisingness. 
 
 Let us set forth some of the reasons why we 
 may believe that there dare not be, in our Chris- 
 tian life and our Christian service, any compro- 
 mise whatever, either in our searching for the 
 truth, in our utterance of the truth, or in our 
 aggressive and active propagation of the truth 
 throughout the world. This is to put the matter, 
 of course, very broadly and sweepingly. There 
 is a great deal to be said for some of Morley's 
 nice discriminations. But actual life is a very 
 rough and imperative and elemental thing. The 
 difficulty of acting on any body of wary and 
 wavery casuistical principles is enormous. The 
 really workable principle of actual living must 
 be very simple and uncomplicated and direct. 
 The only safe ethical law is " No lie," no lie 
 whatever or under any justification. So also, 
 however crude and blunt the rule may be, " No 
 compromise" is the only practicable right rule. 
 Mr. Morley closed his essay with such a. plain 
 word : " It is better to bear the burden of im- 
 practicableness, than to stifle conviction and to 
 pare away principle until it becomes mere hoi- 
 
128 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 lowness and triviality." And in the beginning he 
 wrote: " Our day of small calculations and petty 
 utilities must first pass away ; our vision of the 
 true expediencies must reach further and deeper ; 
 our resolution to search for the highest verities, 
 to give up all and follow them, must first become 
 the supreme part of ourselves." The loss by 
 compromise to ourselves and others is certain, 
 while its gain is uncertain and problematical. 
 
 In the first place, one believes this because 
 compromise makes no contribution to the settle- 
 ment of the real issue over truth. It is true that 
 all the boundaries between truth and error are 
 not clear and sharply drawn lines. Often there 
 is a gray and misty region between. And much 
 truth is only slowly and gradually won. But the 
 ideal of truth is clearer than the sun and as pure 
 as the character of God. And we have a far 
 richer chance of winning it and all that it brings 
 with it, if we both think and live it uncompro- 
 misingly. " The political spirit," says Mr. Morley 
 in noble words, " is the great force in throwing 
 love of truth and accurate reasoning into a sec- 
 ondary place. The evil does not stop here. This 
 achievement has indirectly countenanced the 
 postponement of intellectual methods, and the 
 diminution of the sense of intellectual responsi- 
 bility, by a school that is anything rather than 
 political. Theology has borrowed, and coloured 
 for her own use, the principles which were first 
 
THE JOY OF THE MINORITY l29 
 
 brought into vogue in politics. If in the one 
 field it is the fashion to consider convenience 
 first and truth second, in the other there is a cor- 
 responding fashion of placing truth second and 
 emotional comfort first. If there are some who 
 compromise their real opinions, or the chance of 
 reaching truth, for the sake of gain, there are far 
 more who shrink from giving their intelligence 
 free play, for the sake of keeping undisturbed 
 certain luxurious spiritual sensibilities. . . . 
 
 " The intelligence is not free in the presence 
 of a mortal fear lest its conclusions should trouble 
 soft tranquillity of spirit. There is always hope 
 of a man so long as he dwells in the region of 
 the direct categorical proposition and the un- 
 ambiguous term ; so long as he does not deny 
 the rightly drawn conclusions after accepting the 
 major and minor premises. This may seem a 
 scanty virtue and very easy grace. Yet experi- 
 ence shows it to be too hard of attainment for 
 those who tamper with disinterestedness of con- 
 viction, for the sake of luxuriating in the softness 
 of spiritual transport without interruption from a 
 syllogism. It is true that there are now and 
 then in life as in history noble and fair natures, 
 that by the silent teaching and unconscious ex- 
 ample of their inborn purity, star-like constancy, 
 and great devotion, do carry the world about 
 them to further heights of living than can be at- 
 tained by ratiocination. But these, the blame- 
 
130 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 less and loved saints of the earth, rise too rarely 
 on our dull horizons to make a rule for the world. 
 The law of things is that they who tamper with 
 veracity, from whatever motive, are tampering 
 with the vital force of human progress. Our 
 comfort and the delight of the religious imagina- 
 tion are no better than forms of self-indulgence, 
 when they are secured at the cost of that love of 
 truth on which, more than on anything else, the 
 increase of light and happiness among men must 
 depend. We have to fight and do lifelong bat- 
 tle against the forces of darkness, and anything 
 that turns the edge of reason blunts the surest 
 and most potent of our weapons." We do not 
 believe in compromising, because it makes no 
 contribution to the larger discerning of truth or 
 the triumphing of that truth over error. 
 
 In the second place, we do not believe in it 
 because it creates a great many more difficulties 
 than it removes. Now, Paul was invited to this 
 compromising course in Jerusalem by his mis- 
 guided friends because they thought it would 
 avoid trouble. They wanted to set Paul right 
 with the Jewish Christians in the city, and maybe 
 with the Jews who were not Christians ; they 
 wanted to remove an impression which they 
 thought prevailed regarding Paul's attitude 
 towards the Mosaic customs in the Gentile 
 world. 
 
 Now, as a matter of fact, the principle of that 
 
THE JOY OF THE MINORITY 131 
 
 impression was true, for although, as Dr. Mc- 
 Giffert says, Paul 
 
 "recognized the legitimacy of Jewish Christianity, and 
 the right of Peter and other apostles to preach to the Jews 
 the Gospel of circumcision, and though there is no evi- 
 dence that he ever undertook to lead the Jews as a people 
 to cease observing their ancestral law, he had certainly 
 been in the habit of insisting that his Jewish converts 
 should associate on equal terms with their Gentile breth- 
 ren, and that they should not allow their law to act in any 
 way as a barrier to the freest and most intimate association 
 with them. But this, of course, meant, in so far, their 
 violation of the law's commands. It is certain also that 
 Paul had preached for years the doctrine that not the Gen- 
 tile Christian alone but the Jewish Christian as well is ab- 
 solutely free from all obligation to keep the law of Moses, 
 and though such teaching might not always result in a dis- 
 regard of that law by his Jewish converts, it must have a 
 tendency to produce that effect and doubtless did in many 
 cases. It is clear therefore tliat both accusations had much 
 truth in them, and it is difficult to suppose that Paul can 
 have deliberately attempted in Jerusalem to prove them 
 wholly false. 
 
 ♦* And yet, though as an honourable man and a man of 
 principle he can hardly have undertaken to demonstrate 
 that there was no truth in the reports which were circu- 
 lated concerning him, it may well be that he tried to show 
 that they were not wholly true. It was evidently assumed 
 by those who accused him of • teaching all the Jews which 
 are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not 
 to circumcise their children, neither to walk after the cus- 
 toms,' that he hated the Jewish law and that he was doing 
 all that lay in his power to destroy it ; that he believed 
 
132 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 and that he taught everywhere that its observance was un- 
 der any and all circumstances a positive sin. But this 
 assumption was not true. Paul was certainly not hostile 
 to the law in any such sense. He believed that it had no 
 binding authority over a Christian, and he opposed with 
 all his might the idea that its observance had any value as 
 a means of salvation, or that it contributed in any way to 
 the believer's righteousness or growth in grace ; but he 
 held no such view of the law as made its observance neces- 
 sarily sinful, and rendered it impossible for him ever to 
 observe it himself in any respect. And it was not at all 
 unnatural that he should desire to convince the Christians 
 of Jerusalem of the fact ; especially when he had come 
 thither with the express purpose of conciliating them and 
 winning their favour for himself and for his Gentile con- 
 verts. He would have been very foolish under these cir- 
 cumstances to allow such a false impression touching his 
 attitude towards the law to go uncontradicted." * 
 
 This is a satisfactory defense if one were needed 
 of Paul's course, but no one would question his 
 motive. That was right enough and he evidently 
 acted in all good conscience, but the procedure, 
 instead of getting him out of his trouble, got him 
 into worse trouble. It always does that. I do not 
 believe any man was ever permanently helped 
 by compromise. Every man who has begun to 
 play with it has been drawn into worse diffi- 
 culties and troubles, or has gone down, perhaps 
 without conscious difficulty but with real moral 
 loss, to a lower level of life. For one thing, 
 
 » " The Apostolic Age," p. 341. 
 
THE JOY OF THE MINORITY 133 
 
 compromise blurs the line of cleavage between 
 truth and error, and that is exacdy what no one 
 of us can afford to have done. We do not want 
 the lines of distinction between what is true and 
 what is false slurred over for us. We want them 
 sharpened so that we shall make as litde mistake 
 as possible as to where they lie. Furthermore 
 compromise gets us into more difficulty than it 
 removes, because it throws together things that 
 are not congruous or reconcilable. This is its 
 very nature. It brings into one bed things that 
 cannot sleep together, into one union things 
 that cannot be tied. And it postpones real set- 
 dements in the interest of spurious arrange- 
 ments, sacrificing some 
 
 ** greater good for the less, on no more creditable ground 
 than that the less is nearer. It is better to wait, and to 
 defer the reahzation of our ideas until we can realize them 
 fully, than to defraud the future by truncating them, if 
 truncate them we must, in order to secure a partial triumph 
 for them in the immediate present. . . . What is the 
 sense, and what is the morality, of postponing the wider 
 utility to the narrower ? Nothing is so sure to impoverish 
 an epoch, to deprive conduct of nobleness, and character 
 of elevation." 
 
 These are Mr. Morley's closing words. This is 
 the second reason why we believe there can be 
 no room for compromise in our Christian life or 
 service. 
 
 In the third place, it encourages evil by mak- 
 
134 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 ing it think that having got so much it can get 
 the rest, and so it prolongs the life of evil. That 
 is exactly what compromise did in the old days 
 of slavery. Every one of those early com- 
 promises prolonged the life of evil which at last 
 the nation had to pour out its blood to destroy. 
 That is what compromise always does. It per- 
 suades evil that, after all, maybe evil can win the 
 victory, that having gotten so much from us it 
 can get the rest if only it will be patient, and we 
 simply increase the courage of our foe in pro- 
 portion as we make any compromise with him 
 instead of standing up face to face against him 
 from the very beginning. And so it destroys the 
 power and might of right causes by mixing in 
 the taint of wrong. You do not make a good 
 man better by putting a dash of bad in him. 
 You do not make a good cause stronger by let- 
 ting the evil come in ; you only weaken its 
 strength and power. Compromise plays into 
 the hands of the very evil which we are here to 
 overcome and destroy. 
 
 In the fourth place, compromise breaks down 
 the strength of rigid consistency, and by letting 
 in one qualification prepares the way for others. 
 That is the reason why it is so much harder for 
 a man to be a moderate drinker than to be a 
 total abstainer. As was said of Samuel Johnson, 
 " He could practice abstinence but not temper- 
 ance." When a man has made up his mind that 
 
THE JOY OF THE MINORITY 135 
 
 he will never do a thing, it is a great deal easier 
 for him to refuse to do it in any given instance 
 than if he has made up his mind that he will do 
 it moderately, because he never knows when he 
 ceases to be moderate. There is a sharp line 
 between moderate drinking and total abstinence. 
 That boundary line no one can ever mistake, 
 but the boundary line between intemperance and 
 moderation is not located anywhere. There is 
 no definite border between those two countries. 
 As a matter of fact, every man starts in by being 
 a moderate drinker. He never intended to be- 
 come anything else but a moderate drinker when 
 he began. But there is a boundary line so clear 
 that a blind man can see it between yes and no, 
 between not doing a thing at all and doing that 
 thing only moderately. We believe in the prin- 
 ciple of absolutely no compromise in moral habit 
 and principle, and we believe in the same prin- 
 ciple in our clear and evangelical convictions re- 
 garding the Christian faith. 
 
 In the fifth place, we ought to shun all such 
 compromise because it undermines our confidence 
 in men, and the solid unity of their cooperative 
 action. We know where truth is, but we never 
 know where calculating compromise may be. In 
 the language of the deaf and dumb this is the 
 sign for truth — a straight line right away from 
 your mouth — for the simple reason that between 
 two points there is only one straight line, but 
 
136 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 there may be many crooked lines. The truth is 
 always a single thing, but the error, — no man 
 knows what it may be. No compromise makes 
 possible unity of accord by giving people one 
 standard on which they can rely, and by supply- 
 ing confidence in the stability of men and their 
 convictions. But we cannot follow the com- 
 promising man, for as soon as he gets out of our 
 sight we do not know where he will be. 
 
 It is the man who makes no compromise, who 
 stands fast by truth, that we know we can locate. 
 It was that which gave Stonewall Jackson his 
 huge power as a leader of men in the Civil War. 
 He was a man of the most unflinching Christian 
 convictions. He was one who never moved the 
 breadth of a hair from his loyalty to his Lord or 
 to truth as he saw truth in the presence of his 
 Lord. Colonel Henderson draws for us a rich 
 picture of the great soldier's character and it is 
 full of genial and kindly touches, but it is faithful 
 also in its account of the man's rigid and inflex- 
 ible righteousness. 
 
 " Jackson's religion entered into every action of his life. 
 No duty, however trivial, was begun without asking a 
 blessing, or ended without returning thanks. * He had 
 long cultivated,' he said, * the habit of connecting the most 
 trivial and customary acts of life with a silent prayer.' He 
 took the Bible as his guide, and it is possible that his lit- 
 eral interpretation of its precepts caused many to regard 
 him as a fanatic. His observance of the Sabbalh wag 
 
THE JOY OF THE MINORITY 137 
 
 hardly in accordance with ordinary usage. He never read 
 a letter on that day, nor posted one ; he believed that the 
 Government in carrying the mails was violating a divine 
 law, and he considered the suppression of such traffic one 
 of the most important duties of the legislature. Such 
 opinions were uncommon, even among the Presbyterians, 
 and his rigid respect for truth served to strengthen the im- 
 pression that he was morbidly scrupulous. If he uninten- 
 tionally made a misstatement — even about some trifling 
 matter — as soon as he discovered his mistake he would lose 
 no time and spare no trouble in hastening to correct it, 
 ' Why, in the name of reason,' he was asked, * do you walk 
 a mile in the rain for a perfectly unimportant thing ? * 
 * Simply because I have discovered that it was a misstate- 
 ment, w.nd I could not sleep comfortably unless I put it 
 right.' 
 
 " He had occasion to censure a cadet who had given, as 
 Jackson believed, the wrong solution of a problem. On 
 thinking the matter over at home, he found that the pupil 
 was right and the teacher wrong. It was late at night and 
 in the depth of winter, but he immediately started off to 
 the Institute, some distance from his quarters, and sent for 
 the cadet. The delinquent, answering with much trepida- 
 tion the untimely summons, found himself to his astonish- 
 ment the recipient of a frank apology. Jackson's scruples 
 carried him even further. Persons who interlarded their 
 conversation with the unmeaning phrase * you know ' were 
 often astonished by the blunt interruption that he did not 
 know ; and when he was entreated at parties or receptions 
 to break through his dietary rules, and for courtesy's sake 
 to seem to accept some delicacy, he would always refuse 
 with the reply that he had 'no genius for seeming.' But 
 if he carried his conscientiousness to extremes, if he laid 
 
138 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 down stringent rules for his own governance, he neither set 
 himself up for a model nor did he attempt to force his con- 
 victions upon others. He was always tolerant ; he knew 
 his own faults, and his own temptations, and if he could 
 say nothing good of a man he would not speak of him at 
 all. But he was by no means disposed to overlook con- 
 duct of which he disapproved, and undue leniency was a 
 weakness to which he never yielded. If he once lost con- 
 fidence or discovered deception on the part of one he 
 trusted, he withdrew himself as far as possible from any 
 further dealings with him ; and whether with the cadets or 
 with his brother-officers, if an offense had been committed of 
 which he was called upon to take notice, he was absolutely 
 inflexible. Punishment or report inevitably followed. No 
 excuses, no personal feelings, no appeals to the suffering 
 which might be brought upon the innocent, were permitted 
 to interfere with the execution of his duty." 
 
 " As exact as the multiplication table," some one 
 said of him, " and as full of things military as an 
 arsenal." Those of us who are looking for the 
 secret of Christian influence over others may be 
 sure that we will find it here. Men are not going 
 to follow the shifting man. They will follow the 
 man who makes no compromise, who has his firm 
 convictions and who stands by those convictions, 
 no matter what the cost of his loyalty may be. 
 Recent American politics are rather eloquent and 
 convincing on this point. 
 
 In the sixth place, compromise in principle 
 substitutes reliance upon majorities for reliance 
 upon the truth, and the majorities never have 
 
THE JOY OF THE MINOKITY 139 
 
 been right and we may doubt whether, until our 
 Lord Jesus Christ comes again, they ever will be 
 right. God never has relied upon the majority. 
 He never has waited to do His worlc until it was 
 ready to side with Him. In all ages God has 
 done His work by the few. In Old Testament 
 times He did it by the few. The one principle 
 prevailed always — not by might, nor by power. 
 It was ever only " the Sword of the Lord and of 
 Gideon." When our Lord came He did His work 
 with the few. Through all the ages God has 
 been working so, and we simply depart from His 
 whole method in history when by compromise 
 we try to get the force of the majority on our 
 side. The force of the majority does not amount 
 to anything in comparison with the force of truth. 
 "The history of success," says Mr. Morley, "as 
 we can never too often repeat to ourselves, is the 
 history of minorities." And we do not believe 
 in compromise because it substitutes our reliance 
 upon the majority for our reliance upon the truth 
 of God, and upon the strength of God to enable 
 the few with the truth to triumph against the 
 error of the crowd. This passes for foolish ideal- 
 ism and some of our most popular political lead- 
 ers and reformers have poured scorn upon the 
 idealists and dreamers, who are not to be num- 
 bered among the practical men. 
 
 "One would like to ask them what purpose is served by 
 an ideal, if it is not to make a guide for practice and a 
 
140 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 landmark in dealing with the real. A man's loftiest and 
 most ideal notions must be of a singularly ethereal and, 
 shall we not say, senseless kind, if he can never see how 
 to take a single step that may tend in the slightest degree 
 towards making them more real. If an ideal has no point 
 of contact with what exists, it is probably not much more 
 than the vapid outcome of intellectual or spiritual self-in- 
 dulgence. If it has such a point of contact, then there is 
 sure to be something which a man can do towards the ful- 
 fillment of his hopes. He cannot substitute a new national 
 religion for the old, but he can at least do something to 
 prevent people from supposing that the adherents of the old 
 are more numerous than they really are, and something to 
 show them that good ideas are not all exhausted by the 
 ancient forms. He cannot transform a monarchy into a 
 republic, but he can make sure that one citizen at least 
 shall aim at republican virtues, and abstain from the de- 
 basing complaisance of the crowd." ' 
 
 And we might add, " he cannot instantly make 
 truth the life of the nation, but he can be loyal to 
 its commandments. He cannot make political 
 leaders honest and patriotic, but he can refuse to 
 profit by their dishonesty or to regard them as 
 honest men if they will but wear his badge and 
 seek their own ends by promoting his. He can 
 form his own ideals of honour and glory and live 
 by them whatever way others may go." 
 
 In the seventh place, compromise increases in 
 peril as we draw near the highest. If you take 
 a man who is down on the lower levels, com- 
 
 * Morley, " Compromise," p. 226. 
 
THE JOY OF THE MINORITY 141 
 
 promise does not mean as much to him as it 
 does to men who have been climbing up. The 
 nearer we come to Christ and the highest truth, 
 the more perilous does compromise become. As 
 Edward Thring said : " In proportion to excel- 
 lence, compromise is impossible. A single leak 
 sinks a great ship, a raft that is all leaks floats." 
 That is just the deep lesson that men and women 
 need to learn ; that the higher and cleaner and 
 more morally lofty or exacting the life, the more 
 perilous compromise becomes to it. One has 
 heard Christian men say sometimes that they 
 thought they were safe in doing what this or 
 that man, not as strong or experienced or ma- 
 ture, could do. It is a great mistake. The clearer 
 and stronger a man's life, the more careful must 
 the man be, the more solicitous, the more anx- 
 ious, lest thinking he stands he falls. One of 
 the greatest things about the life of Paul was the 
 humility and self-distrust in which he walked, 
 fearing lest when he had preached to others he 
 himself might be a castaway. We have to learn 
 that here lies power and duty, and that the 
 cleaner Christ makes any human life, the more 
 careful must that life be to keep all its habits 
 pure and unsullied, and its convictions of truth 
 unflinching and firm. 
 
 It was this principle that made our friend, 
 S. H. Hadley, and that makes so many men 
 who have escaped from the slavery of drink, go 
 
142 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 to extremes in cutting off physical indulgences. 
 Mr. Hadley not only dropped once and forever 
 the use of alcohol, but he stopped tobacco too, 
 and he tried to get every drunkard whom he was 
 seeking to save to discontinue the use of nico- 
 tine. He held that men should be clean every 
 whit and his strong conviction was that while he 
 would not for a moment class such indulgences 
 together, nevertheless the man who wanted to 
 be free from the one would find his deliverance 
 far easier if he sloughed off the other also. It is 
 safer and easier to be thoroughgoing and indis- 
 criminate, if you will, than to be always calculat- 
 ing how great risks can be safely run. 
 
 And, lastly, we believe in no compromise be- 
 cause the truth is bound to prevail, and it will 
 triumph the soonest when it is least hampered 
 and tied up with error or with qualification. 
 One might stop here to make a defense on this 
 ground of the fanatics and devotees, but it 
 is enough to say that the truth is going to pre- 
 vail because it is God's truth, and hell and all 
 hell's power in the world cannot stand against it. 
 What is the use in delaying the day of that tri- 
 umph by compromising with error ? The right 
 will prevail all the faster if we make no com- 
 promise with error, if we go out and preach 
 unflinchingly and courageously with no com- 
 promise, with no surrender or economy or adap- 
 tations, the hard, plain truth of God as we see 
 
THE JOY OF THE MINORITY 143 
 
 it. If what we think is truth is really error, it 
 will be the sooner beaten down for being made 
 to stand up for itself. But if it is indeed the 
 truth we know it will prevail the more in the 
 world as we keep it free from all connection with 
 anything that will weaken or becloud it. 
 
 I know how much danger there is in such an 
 attitude as this if we take it up towards the truth 
 that we hold. It lies in our human nature to go 
 to violence or extremes with everything. Martin 
 Luther used to say that human nature is like a 
 drunken man trying to ride a horse, you prop 
 him up on one side and he topples over on the 
 other. It is that way with us. We try to be 
 firm and we become hard-hearted. We pride 
 ourselves on uncompromising loyalty to the 
 truth and we lack the tenderness and sympathy. 
 Moreover, as Bushnell said in his essay on 
 " Christian Comprehensiveness " : 
 
 ** It is the common infirmity of mere human reformers 
 that, when they rise up to cast out an error, it is generally 
 not till they have kindled their passions against it. If they 
 begin with reason, they are commonly moved, in the last 
 degree, by their animosities instead of reason. And as 
 animosities are blind, they, of course, see nothing to re- 
 spect, nothing to spare. The question whether possibly 
 there may not be some truth or good in the error assailed, 
 which is needed to qualify and save the equilibrium of 
 their own opposing truth, is not once entertained. Hence 
 it is that men, in expelling one error, are perpetually 
 
144 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 thrusting themselves into another, as if unwilling or un- 
 able to hold more than half the truth at once." 
 
 And yet these dangers are lesser dangers than 
 the danger of surrendering the truth. And we 
 can be guarded from them by the great and un- 
 selfish love that guarded Paul. The man who 
 loves others more than he loves himself, who 
 holds human lives sacred and free from invasion, 
 who is seeking not his own glory, but the glory 
 of God and the good of men, is in little danger 
 from an absolutely uncompromising loyalty to 
 the truth. 
 
 And if ever men have any doubts or misgivings 
 regarding this, or if the time of discouragements 
 and fears comes to them, and they look with long- 
 ing to the multitudes who act together, while 
 they think of themselves as just a few, bearing 
 testimony for the truth against error and sin, they 
 may encourage themselves with Mr. Matthew 
 Arnold's doctrine of the remnant, or better yet, 
 by remembering the great Solitary, Jesus Christ. 
 How lonesomely He walked His way ; seeing 
 what no other soul was seeing ; standing alone 
 for the great truth which He uttered, and at last 
 meeting death upon the cross alone ; one of His 
 disciples having betrayed Him, another having 
 three times denied that he ever knew Him, and 
 all the others having left Him and gone away ! 
 And yet as we look back, we see that lonely cross 
 ruling the whole world, and that forsaken figure 
 
THE JOY OF THE MINORITY 145 
 
 men are clothing now with the crown of everlast- 
 ing light, and His name is above every name. 
 All that we are asked to do is simply to follow in 
 His train, to take up the truth which He opened, 
 and for that truth to be willing to live, and, 
 which is far easier, if need be, to die. Our lives 
 are ours for this one thing, that through them, 
 without compromise with error or with sin, God 
 may bear testimony to Himself, and whether He 
 does that through many years or through few, 
 through peaceful personal service or through 
 storm and tragedy, is of no consequence. The 
 one thing that is of consequence is that we should 
 know and be true to God. 
 
 But there is a better way to set forth and com- 
 mend this principle as a law of life than by argu- 
 ing it in these general terms. Let the principle 
 put on flesh and live before us in a man : 
 
 " And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the so- 
 journers of Gilead, said unto Ahab, As the Lord, 
 the God of Israel, liveth, before whom I stand, 
 there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but 
 according to my word." 
 
 The old man who spoke these words was one 
 of the four great characters of the Old Testa- 
 ment. He and Moses and Samuel and David 
 stood apart in the thought of the Hebrew people. 
 Indeed, there was a sense in which he and Moses 
 were in a class by themselves. The appearance 
 of those two with our Lord on the Mountain of 
 
146 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 Transfiguration was only an illustration of the 
 place which they held in the imagination of 
 Israel. 
 
 These were the first words he spoke as he 
 bursts on our view. What lay behind them we 
 can only surmise. He was a Tishbite, one " of 
 the sojourners of Gilead," dwelling beyond the 
 Jordan, a man brought up in the desert. There 
 on the level sands, with the eye of God looking 
 down upon him, he had come to a deep feeling 
 of the soul's lonely stand before God, and con- 
 vinced of God and the righteousness of God he 
 came over the Jordan to speak his message and 
 do his work in the organized national life of his 
 people. He was a clean-limbed, frugal-lived 
 man, who gathered up his skirts about him, 
 we are told, and ran straight away sixteen miles 
 before the chariot of Ahab, from Carmel to the 
 entering in of Jezreel ; a calm, quiet, courageous, 
 firm-principled man ; bred so in the desert with 
 God. 
 
 We do not have any very elaborate story of 
 his life. He appears on the stage and then he 
 vanishes. There are long periods of time cover- 
 ing years when he disappears entirely from the 
 record. We can condense what we know about 
 his life into six brief chapters, between each two 
 of which there is an interval, in some cases, a 
 long interval of time. 
 
 He appears first of all in connection with the 
 
THE JOY OF THE MINORITY 147 
 
 great drought which he prophesied and which 
 lasted for the three years he had foretold. We 
 see him by the little brook Cherith, fed of the 
 ravens, until through the long cessation of the 
 rain the brook itself disappeared. Then we see 
 him in the house of the widow of Sarepta, feed- 
 ing with her on her little supply of meal, and in 
 her hour of depthless sorrow raising her son 
 from death to life. And then, in the second 
 chapter, he breaks forth once more upon the 
 national stage. Ahab and Obadiah, his chief 
 maiip had sought for him up and down the 
 land, having divided the country between them, 
 partly that they might seek water for their fast 
 diminishing herds, partly that they might meet 
 again and punish this troubler of Israel. At 
 last, on one of the highways, the man of God 
 appeared to the prime minister and told him that 
 he had no fear to meet the king and would do 
 so if he would carry word to Ahab. True to his 
 word, he met the king, confronted him with his 
 disloyalty to Jehovah, and challenged him to 
 produce the prophets of Baal for the great test 
 on Mount Carmel ; and then, after his triumph, 
 Elijah again disappears. 
 
 In the third chapter we have the only account 
 of the man's inner life. If it were not for that 
 chapter with its story of his subjective struggle, 
 Elijah would be no example for us men of this 
 day. In all the other chapters of the story he 
 
148 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 appears absolutely undaunted, unafraid of the 
 face of man, clearly convinced of what God 
 would have him do, and absolutely fearless in 
 the doing of it. But here we are shown the man in 
 his own inward wavering, in doubt in some meas- 
 ure about the reality or power of his mission, 
 afraid to carry forward that which he had set out 
 to do with such daring spirit ; and in the wilder- 
 ness alone, first beneath the juniper tree and then 
 on Mount Horeb, Elijah had to face again his 
 life and settle himself once more in that faith in 
 the living God which had brought him out of the 
 desert. And God stood out and spoke to him, 
 and Elijah rose up on his feet once more a man 
 unafraid to resume his mission. God bade him 
 return and anoint a new king over Syria and a 
 new king over Israel, and to go to Abel-meholah 
 and find his own successor, the young man Elisha, 
 plowing behind his oxen. And the prophet went 
 out from his hour of discouragement to find at 
 once the young man who was to take up his 
 work after him and to be an even mightier 
 prophet than he. 
 
 Then for a long time Elijah disappears again, 
 only to reappear when he confronts Ahab once 
 more, in Naboth's vineyard, shows him how little 
 he fears him, and pronounces upon him the 
 judgment of Jehovah. Then he vanishes from 
 the stage for three years at least of solitary 
 meditation in the wilderness, vanishes so long 
 
THE JOY OF THE MINORITY 149 
 
 that the common people apparently forgot him, 
 so that when one day he met a little party of the 
 servants of the new king Ahaziah on the high- 
 way bound to Ekron to consult Baal-zebub, they 
 did not know who the prophet was and brought 
 back his message to the king, able only to say 
 of him that he was a hairy man, with a leather 
 girdle about his loins. But the king well knew 
 that the Tishbite had broken once more upon 
 the stage of the nation's life, and he bowed be- 
 neath the judgments of God that the man from 
 Gilead denounced. 
 
 Then in the concluding chapter we see Elijah 
 and his young man coming down from Gilgal 
 to Bethel and then to Jericho and then back to 
 the wilderness out of which he had come, that 
 from his own deserts where he had come to 
 know God he might go back to God again. And 
 there in the chariot of fire the man who was 
 himself *' the chariots of Israel, and the horsemen 
 thereof," went up to the Lord God of Israel, 
 Who was alive, to meet Him before Whom he 
 had always stood. 
 
 One does not wonder that the old man im- 
 pressed as he did the imagination of his people, 
 and that when centuries later John the Baptist 
 emerged upon the stage challenging the atten- 
 tion of the nation, almost the first question ad- 
 dressed to him was, " Art thou Elijah ? " 
 
 And we have the secret of Elijah's life given 
 
150 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 to us in these words with which he is introduced 
 to us, " As the Lord God of Israel liveth, before 
 whom I stand." Out there in the barrenness of 
 the desert beyond the Jordan, Elijah had come 
 to believe in a God Who was alive, and before 
 Whom he lived his life. The deserts have never 
 bred polytheism. The great polytheistic systems 
 have sprung from the lush jungles of the tropics. 
 The great monotheisms have been born in the 
 deserts. And out on the lonely sands beyond 
 the Jordan, beyond the hills and amid the great 
 level places where there was no one but God, 
 Elijah came to know that He was and to know 
 that his life stood in Him. 
 
 This was the principle of the man's life — the 
 consuming conviction of a living God and of the 
 commission of His uncompromising service. In- 
 deed we are not sure that we know Elijah's 
 name. It is possible that the name by which we 
 think we know him is only a pseudonym — Elijah, 
 " My God is Jehovah." It may be that from the 
 very repetition of this phrase to which he was 
 addicted, "The Lord God of Israel, before 
 whom I stand," men came at last to call him by 
 the opening note of his message, " the man of 
 the living God." 
 
 Now what that message meant to Elijah was 
 just this : that the Lord God was no dead force, 
 no unknown cause of things, that the Lord God 
 was alive, and that a man was to have dealings 
 
THE JOY OF THE MINORITY 151 
 
 with Him ; that a man's life was not his own 
 personal and irresponsible experiment, but a 
 work to be done in front of God ; and that a man 
 must reckon in all his thoughts, in all his ways, 
 with One Who lives, and go out and do his work 
 in the world in the consciousness of his relation- 
 ship and his subjection to an active, working, 
 personal God Who would stand by him in the 
 fire, would uphold him before kings, and carry 
 him through to the end of each of his appointed 
 tasks. If there is one thing that we need to get 
 clearly fixed in our own lives it is the matter of 
 our attitude towards this infinite and unseen God 
 Who is alive. 
 
 This faith in a God Who is alive, before 
 Whose face a man is to live his life, is no mere 
 theory. You cannot find any conviction that 
 will more really mould and transform all our 
 conduct and put uncompromising stiffness in it 
 than the conviction that we are living our lives 
 thus before the eyes of a God Who observes. 
 In the life of Thring of Uppingham we are told 
 of an incident that pleased him greatly. It is a 
 story that came to him regarding a little group 
 of boys who were spending the summer in 
 France. A visitor saw these English schoolboys 
 and overheard their conversation as to what they 
 should do on Sunday. Some of the boys were 
 proposing a certain course of action, and all 
 seemed to agree until one fellow spoke up and 
 
153 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 said : "No, I do not agree. I will not do it." And 
 when the other lads urged him to come along, 
 he still insisted that he would not. They asked 
 him his reasons. He said : " Well, Thring would 
 not like it, and what Thring would not like I do 
 not intend to do." "Well, but Thring isn't 
 here," they said ; " he's back at Uppingham." 
 " I do not care," said the boy ; " Thring would 
 not like it." He believed that he was living in 
 a real sense — I mean in the most real sense of 
 all, in the life of his personal will — before the 
 standards of his master, and by those standards 
 as in the light of his master's countenance he in- 
 sisted that he would uncompromisingly live. 
 Before the eyes of God a man will beware how 
 he lives his life. If he knows that this life of his 
 can find no darkness where he can hide himself 
 from God, if he knows that all of his days are to 
 be spent before His face, that all his deeds are to 
 be done beneath the gaze of God, assuredly 
 that will govern and control a man's decisions 
 about his practical ways. The consciousness of 
 a living God will give direction to a man's moral 
 life. 
 
 And it will not only give direction. There is 
 many a man among us who knows that the con- 
 sciousness of a God Who is alive not only gives 
 determination and direction to his ways, but puts 
 a new power and inspiration in them. 
 
 A friend in New York tells a lovely story 
 
THE JOY OF THE MINORITY 153 
 
 about a boy in one of the great English schools. 
 He was an only child, and his mother died when 
 he was but a little fellow. Between him and his 
 father there grew up relations of the most deli- 
 cate and sensitive intimacy. The father was 
 blind, so that the little boy had to be his father's 
 eyes, and until the day came when the lad had 
 to go away to school there was scarcely an hour 
 when the two were separated. But at last the 
 time came and the boy went. He became the 
 best athlete in his school. One spring, just be- 
 fore the final game in which the boy was to bowl 
 for his own school, tidings came that his father 
 was seriously ill and he must come home. The 
 news sent the whole school into lamentation, for 
 they were afraid that he might not recover and 
 that if he did not the boy could not play in the 
 concluding and critical game. And indeed, as 
 it turned out, the father died. The day before 
 the game was to be played the boy came back 
 to school, and, to the amazement of all, let it be 
 known that he intended to play. The next day 
 he took his place and played as he had never 
 played in his life before. When at last the game 
 was over and the school had won its triumph, 
 one of the masters came to the boy and ex- 
 pressed to him the delighted surprise of the 
 school at what he had done and their amaze- 
 ment both that he had played at all and at the 
 way he had played. "Why," said the boy, 
 
154 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 "didn't you understand? I wouldn't have 
 missed it for anything. That was the first game 
 my father ever saw me play." Beneath the con- 
 sciousness that for the first time his father's eyes 
 were open and watching him the boy had dis- 
 covered capacities of power that he hardly knew 
 he possessed before. Beneath the eye of our 
 Father, Who is looking upon the game that we 
 are playing, where is the man that cannot play 
 a better game, who cannot draw on the reser- 
 voirs of power untouched before, who cannot 
 come out and do his work in the world and live 
 his life with larger inspiration and strength, with 
 more dominion and sovereignty, because he is 
 living it before a God Who is alive ? To such 
 a man will compromise not seem a filial insult 
 impossible except by a base degradation of the 
 soul? 
 
 And not only did Elijah's principle determine 
 his conduct and pour inspiration into it ; it was 
 this principle of a God Who is alive that made 
 him absolutely fearless. He was not only un- 
 afraid of physical harm, but he had none of that 
 subtler fear that every man knows — the fear that 
 he himself will fail, the fear that he cannot carry 
 himself safely through. What you and I are 
 afraid of is not the things that are without ; our 
 enemy is inside. Treachery within the walls is 
 all that we need to dread, and our deepest fear 
 is of our own failure. That was the great thing 
 
THE JOY OF THE MINORITY 155 
 
 in Elijah's life, that he dared to stand on Mount 
 Carmel, before all that crowd of priests, confident 
 and fearless. He knew he would prevail, that he 
 had not promised in vain that God would an- 
 swer. The man who knows that he is living his 
 life before a God Who is alive and doing his 
 work in the name of a God Who is alive is not 
 afraid either of what men can do to him or of the 
 failure that he may make himself. 
 
 There is a story in the life of Dr. Schauffler 
 that illustrates how to-day too men can rise into 
 just such fearlessness. The missionaries were 
 being bothered a great deal in Constantinople 
 by Russian machinations against the Protestant 
 missions in the empire, and Dr. Schauffler went 
 to see the Russian ambassador. " 1 might as 
 well tell you now, Mr. Schauffler," said the am- 
 bassador, " that the Emperor of Russia, who is 
 my master, will never allow Protestantism to set 
 its foot in Turkey." The old missionary looked 
 at him for a moment and then replied : " Your 
 Excellency, the kingdom of Christ, who is my 
 Master, w 11 never ask the Emperor of all the 
 Russias where it may set its foot." And he 
 went on \ 'ith his mission unintimidated by any 
 agencies working in the dark against him, be- 
 cause he was confident that the living God 
 Whose work he was doing would achieve for 
 him His own victory. 
 
 And we see in this story of Elijah another 
 
 _/ 
 
156 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 thing that this great conviction will do for a 
 man : it will make a troubler of him. " Art thou 
 he," said Ahab when he met Elijah in the midst 
 of the great famine, " art thou he that troubleth 
 Israel ? " " No," said Elijah ; " thou art he who 
 troubles Israel." And yet they were both troub- 
 ling Israel, the one with the iniquities into which 
 he was leading the people, the other because the 
 principle of the living God dominating his life 
 drove him as a great moral force against the 
 evils of his time. A man cannot live in a col- 
 lege or university with a faith that God is living 
 and that he himself is living in front of God, and 
 be quiet before the moral iniquities and evils he 
 will find. It is not enough for a man to say, " I 
 will simply be myself, live my own clean life, and 
 let my silent influence count." If his silent in- 
 fluence does not count, no other influence of his 
 will count. But the silence is not enough. A 
 little while ago I copied from one of the letters 
 of Mandel Creighton, late Bishop of London, 
 written to his boys who were away at school, 
 this bit of advice. " You will see, then," he 
 writes to one son, who had just been made a 
 monitor in his school, " you will see, then, that 
 the chief influence of a monitor is in his example. 
 But this is the point on which I have seen many 
 people deceive themselves. They trust to what 
 they call the force of silent example. That is 
 most pernicious. If you content yourself with 
 
THE JOY OF THE MINORITY 157 
 
 merely keeping school rules and doing what is 
 right yourself and keeping out of the way of any 
 fellows who you know are doing wrong, or if 
 you stand by and listen to them saying what 
 they ought not, without reproof, you are doing 
 wrong. No, that won't do. It is part of the es- 
 sence of good to fight against evil. You must 
 set your face strongly against all that is bad, and 
 must put down not only all that you find in the 
 course of your walk, but you must go out of 
 your walk to find it in order to put it down." 
 
 There has been much complaint these last 
 years because in high places in this land there 
 have been men who were troublers of the nation. 
 The great need of the nation has been men who 
 were prepared to make trouble in order that, 
 at last, righteousness might come. Things that 
 have thought themselves secure will be shaken ; 
 long vested interests that have believed them- 
 selves to be sacred will have their sanctity scruti- 
 nized ; and men will come at last into their rights 
 and their righteousness, if we are prepared, fol- 
 lowing the old Tishbite, to live our lives before 
 the God Who is alive. 
 
 And this same principle brings peace and 
 quiet and tranquillity to men. Elijah shook 
 once, we know, but only once. Every time we 
 see him on the public stage, no matter whom he 
 is confronting — Jezebel, Ahab, Obadiah, Ahaziah 
 — he is standing with confident soul, quiet and 
 
158 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 still. We can be sure that if on that day at 
 Mount Carmel we could have first mingled with 
 those four hundred and fifty priests of Baal who 
 knew that their day of doom had come, and then 
 have gone over and stood by the side of the old 
 man, we should have found the old man the most 
 quiet and placid person on the mountainside 
 and his heart beat the calmest. And we may be 
 sure that we can go in the same tranquillity and 
 calm and steadfastness in which the old Tishbite 
 lived, if we will believe as deeply as he did in a 
 Lord God Who is alive, and will live our lives 
 before His face with as little compromise and 
 fear. 
 
 And it is a great conviction like this of Elijah's 
 that steadies men in the hour of their trial and 
 that when they fall redeems them again. The 
 old prophet fell down. He ran from a woman's 
 threats, and beneath the juniper tree and then on 
 Horeb, he shook and was afraid. But God, Who 
 was alive before, was alive still, and He came to 
 Mount Horeb, where the man lay in his spiritual 
 petulance and fear, and He was not in the great 
 wind, and He was not in the great earthquake, 
 and He was not in the great fire, but at last in 
 the still small voice of life He spoke to Elijah, 
 and Elijah rose up on his feet once more and 
 went out to complete his work in unfaltering 
 triumph. 
 
 It works that way still. There is a letter of 
 
THE JOY OF THE MINORITY 159 
 
 Abraham Lincoln, the original of which is pre- 
 served in the state capitol at Albany. It is a let- 
 ter Lincoln wrote granting a pardon to a deserter. 
 
 Executive Mansion, 
 
 Washington, October 4, 1864. 
 Upon condition that Roswell Mclntyre of Company E, 
 Sixth Regiment of New York Cavalry, returns to his regi- 
 ment and faithfully serves out his term, making up for lost 
 time, or until otherwise lawfully discharged, he is fully 
 pardoned for any supposed desertion heretofore committed ; 
 and this paper is his pass to go to his regiment. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln. 
 
 On the side of it is indorsed : " Quartermas- 
 ter's Office, New York City, October 22, 1864. 
 Transportation furnished to Baltimore, Mary- 
 land. H. Brownson " ; and at the bottom in a 
 different hand is this indorsement : " Taken from 
 the body of R. Mclntyre at the Battle of Five 
 Forks, Virginia, 1865." So he went back and 
 died like a man, with his pardon on his person. 
 And to-day, to the coward and the deserter and 
 the traitor, the man who has compromised and 
 the man who has run away, the same Lord God 
 Who set Elijah on his feet is speaking, and He 
 is able to send him back to be faithful, even unto 
 death. Thanks be to a God Who does not com- 
 promise and Who is still alive. 
 
LECTURE V 
 THE LIFE INVISIBLE 
 
 IT is interesting to note two contrary tenden- 
 cies in tiie current appraisal of spiritual 
 values in America. On the one hand there 
 is what has been called, not altogether happily, 
 the tendency of ethical materialism. In its best 
 form it is simply a demand for reality, the re- 
 newal of the old words, " By their fruits ye 
 shall know them." " Show me thy faith by thy 
 works." In its less worthy forms it is the effort 
 to eliminate spiritual expression and formal re- 
 ligion from areas of life where these have been 
 most familiar. Illustrations in extreme forms 
 abound. 
 
 We are told now that in charity love has 
 1 othing to do with the matter, that the intro- 
 duction of religious sentiment is only mischie- 
 vous and misleading, that the issue is one purely 
 of proper economic principle and organization. 
 It is a question of employment for the unem- 
 ployed, or of calculating accurately the amount 
 of need, counting the hungry mouths and fixing 
 the quantity of bread, and then determining 
 scientifically how much of the bread the hungry 
 should earn, and how much society through 
 
 160 
 
THE LIFE INVISIBLE 161 
 
 appropriate and unsentimental machinery should 
 supply. 
 
 In medical philanthropy the new idea is that 
 ideas have nothing to do with it. The good 
 Samaritan, we are told, did not give the wounded 
 man a tract or say anything to him about the 
 religious views or motives of his benefactor. He 
 was satisfied to heal his skin and stop at that. 
 Let the chaplains depart from the hospitals. 
 
 And so also in social service. The legitimate 
 work is to improve the culinary methods of the 
 neighbourhood, to provide innocent games and 
 sports, to secure more adequate food supplies for 
 living bodies and to assist in the burial of dead 
 ones ; but Christ must not be mentioned, and re- 
 ligious issues must not be raised. 
 
 These are extreme illustrations, but they are 
 perfectly familiar, and the tendency they repre- 
 sent is indisputable. In this view our Lord, of 
 course, was far astray when He talked to His 
 disciples by Jacob's well about having meat to 
 eat which they knew not. " Meat 1 " say our 
 modern ethical materialists. *' Meat is meat — 
 beef or bread. It is not a metaphor. Meat that 
 is a metaphor is a mockery." Well, it would be 
 if it were offered for food to a hungry man, but 
 it is not a mockery to the man who would go 
 hungry to feed the hungry. And the whole 
 modern question is not between those who 
 would give real meat to the hungry and those 
 
162 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 who would give only metaphorical meat. It is be- 
 tween those who want to deal with people's skins 
 only and those who mean to deal both with their 
 skins and with their souls, between those who 
 conceive of man as mainly belly and back and 
 those to whom our real life is the life invisible. 
 
 It is a very curious phenomenon, this exclusion 
 of Christian ideas from the very area which they 
 created. For all this charity and philanthropy 
 and social service were produced by the ideas of 
 Christianity. And now the fruit says to the vine 
 and to the inward life, " I have no need of thee." 
 Of course not all the fruit says this. Some of it 
 only says, " Vine and inward life, there is a preju- 
 dice against you. You would do well to conceal 
 yourself. I will pretend to be the real thing." 
 But some of the fruit has gone further. " I am 
 the real thing," it says. " I know more than 
 James. Faith must not only show works : works 
 are faith. There is no need of metaphysics or 
 creeds. Deeds are religion. The only wealth 
 is tangible wealth, things handled, works seen, 
 bread out of the ground, not down from heaven. 
 Meat that the disciples could not see is too 
 pallid for this earth. Man is his skin and the 
 bag which it contains, and religion must under- 
 stand this." 
 
 At the same time that this suicidal tendency is 
 operating in the field of man's highest values 
 seeking to destroy his standards and to discredit 
 
THE LIFE INVISIBLE 163 
 
 the title-deeds of all his greatest treasures, a pre- 
 cisely contrary tendency is acting in commerce 
 and politics, in the field of man's lower values. 
 While men are busy on the one hand in the effort 
 to materialize the spiritual wealth which Christi- 
 anity has produced, other men are seeking with 
 a new earnestness to spiritualize our material 
 wealth. As education, science, philanthropy, 
 surrenders the spiritual vision and ideal, trade 
 and politics clutch after it. Never before in the 
 history of the world has there been such an effort 
 as there is to-day to idealize nationalism, to build 
 up spiritual conceptions behind the State, to 
 make racial feeling a religion. If some men 
 think that religious values and spiritual ideas 
 and so-called " metaphysical " notions can be 
 spared from charity and social service, other 
 men are striving with all their might to secure 
 all this rejected mass of vitality and power for 
 patriotism and the national life. 
 
 And the same spiritualizing and idealizing 
 tendency is even more evident in commerce and 
 finance. Wealth becomes less and less material. 
 In primitive times riches consisted in flocks and 
 herds and land and in actual gold and silver 
 bullion or coins which their owner put in a crock 
 and buried in his house. Now wealth consists 
 in credit and securities, in figures written on a 
 ledger in a bank, or in scraps of paper in a tin 
 box. The world's work is done with little visible 
 
164 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 wealth. Our new banking system is meant for 
 this very purpose, to provide immaterial instru- 
 mentalities. Millions of dollars are transported 
 invisibly. By a cable message or a message 
 through the air untold wealth that was in London 
 can be made to appear in New York. And all 
 these intangible forms of wealth are exceeded in 
 the judgment of the late Mr. J. P. Morgan by the 
 credit of character, something still more " meta- 
 physical." The spiritualization of the material 
 keeps pace on one side with the materialization 
 of the spiritual on the other. 
 
 However clear or foggy our ideas on these 
 issues may be now, viewing them as present 
 issues, we cannot fail to see sharply the indis- 
 putable facts of the past. Looking backward 
 we simply do not discern and cannot remember 
 the visible and outward values or possessors of 
 values at all. Where is the actual material 
 wealth of earlier days, the flocks, the gold and 
 silver, the palaces ? The amazing thing is that 
 it is all gone. The gold and silver which Rome 
 gathered from the world, which went home to 
 Spain in the days of the Conquistadores, where is 
 it all now ? Where are those who boasted it and 
 built their fame or power on it ? Shelley tells us 
 in his sonnet, '* Ozymandias," 
 
 ** I met a traveller from an antique land 
 
 Who said, ' Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 
 Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand 
 
THE LIFE INVISIBLE 165 
 
 Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown 
 And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command 
 Tell that its sculptor well those passions read 
 Which yet survive, stamped on those lifeless things, 
 The hand that mocked them and th« heart that fed : 
 And on the pedestal these words appear : 
 •• My name is Ozymandias, king of kings, 
 Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair ! '* 
 Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 
 Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, 
 The lone and level sands stretch far away.' " 
 
 And what befell Ozymandias' image has befallen 
 almost all the works of the ancients' hands. A 
 few of their temples remain, and the arches of 
 their viaducts and some of the images of their 
 public worship and of their national ideals. But 
 their wealth and the treasure houses which they 
 kept it in and the palaces of their pleasure and 
 the cities of their pride are gone. I never 
 felt more keenly the tragedy and the truth of 
 this utter transitoriness and insecurity of all na- 
 tional glory than looking over the massive ruins 
 of the palace of the Chosroes kings at Kasr-i- 
 Shirin. All of Browning's "Love Among the 
 Ruins" seemed to be there in mute evidence 
 before one's eyes : 
 
 ** Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles 
 
 Miles and miles 
 On the solitary pastures where our sheep 
 
 Half-asleep 
 Tinkle homeward through the twilight, stray or stop 
 
 As they crop — 
 
166 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 Was the site once of a city great and gay, 
 
 (So they say) 
 Of our country's very capital, its prince 
 
 Ages since 
 Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far 
 
 Peace or war. 
 
 ** Now, — the country does not even boast a tree. 
 
 As you see, 
 To distinguish slopes of verdure, certain rills 
 
 From the hills 
 Intersect and give a name to, (else they run 
 
 Into one,) 
 Where the domed and daring palace shot its spires 
 
 Up like fires 
 O'er the hundred-gated circuit of a wall 
 
 Bounding all. 
 Made of marble, men might march on nor be pressed, 
 
 Twelve abreast. 
 
 ** And such plenty and perfection, see, of grass 
 
 Never was ! 
 Such a carpet as, this summer-time, o'erspreads 
 
 And embeds 
 Every vestige of the city, guessed alone, 
 
 Stock or stone — 
 Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe 
 
 Long ago ; 
 Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame 
 
 Struck them tame ; 
 And that glory and that shame alike, the gold 
 
 Bought and sold. 
 
 " Now, — the single little turret that remains 
 
 On the plains, 
 By the caper overrooted, by the gourd 
 
 Overscored, 
 While the patching houseleek's head of blossom winks 
 
 Through the chinks — 
 Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time 
 
 Sprang sublime. 
 
THE LIFE INVISIBLE 167 
 
 And a burning ring, all round, the chariots traced 
 
 As they raced, 
 And the monarch and his minions and his dames 
 
 Viewed the games." 
 
 All this is gone. The only wealth of the past 
 which has survived is such as Christ referred to. 
 " I have meat to eat that ye know not of." The 
 ideas and the literature which enshrined them 
 alone remain. Not the manuscripts. They are 
 gone, as though God would show in the most 
 vivid way His scorn of the visible and earth's 
 " real." Not one original page of Plato exists. 
 But Plato's mind is here still. The kings are 
 gone. But Isaiah and Jeremiah, the men of the 
 inward resources, spokesmen and ministers of the 
 invisible life, abide. 
 
 «' The tumult and the shouting dies 
 The captains and the kings depart 
 Still stands Thine against sacrifice 
 A humble and a contrite heart." 
 
 And the issue is clear enough when we look at 
 it concretely to-day and contrast the men who 
 have the inward resources with those who have 
 not, the movements which are fed from deep 
 ideal springs with those which deal skin-deep 
 only with humanity. In one of our American 
 cities the president of a large institution was 
 shelved in the prime of life by younger and less 
 conservative men who acquired control of the 
 business. They treated the older man well, gave 
 
168 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 him the nominal headship with his former salary, 
 but really transferred all the power to other men. 
 It was the chance of a lifetime for the older man. 
 He had his strength and his time for any service 
 or ministry or pleasure he might choose. But 
 the only meat which he had to eat was the man- 
 agement of the business, and accordingly he 
 starved to death in a fine home and with a large 
 salary. All that the bag of his body needed he 
 had, but man cannot live by bread alone with- 
 out a word from God. The Tinker of Bedford 
 Jail heard the key turn in the lock behind him. 
 And did he famish alone ? He opened the gate 
 of his house within and out they came — Christian 
 and Great-Heart and Hopeful and Evangelist 
 and Mercy and Dare-to-Die — and the loneliness 
 of John Bunyan's cell became the greatest society 
 on earth, and the immortals who marched out of 
 the wealth of his soul are the companions of 
 millions who could not name one human being 
 who was Bunyan's contemporary. The rich men 
 who have transmitted real wealth have been the 
 lovers, the dreamers, the servers who ate bread 
 at God's hands and who knew and taught men 
 that the life is more than meat and the body than 
 raiment. "She was not daily bread," wrote her 
 niece of Emily Dickinson. " She was star dust." 
 This above all was characteristic of Christ. Part 
 of our Lord's preeminence of nature and of 
 achievement was the untold wealth of His inward 
 
THE LIFE INVISIBLE 169 
 
 resources. No philanthropist or social worker 
 ever lived who was His equal in all that our eth- 
 ical materialists admire and praise. But behind 
 all this and as explaining all this He had meat to 
 eat that men knew not, thoughts of God, ideas of 
 origin and destiny, of whence He came and 
 whither He was going, fellowship, purposes, a 
 spiritual program. His wealth was an inward, a 
 communicable and eternal treasure. It nourished 
 Him and was for all men. 
 
 " I have meat to eat," said He. " Who brought 
 it to Him ? " asked they. " A primrose by the 
 river's brim a yellow primrose" was to them; 
 and it was nothing more. Meat was meat, mut- 
 ton or beef to His disciples. But to Him the 
 primrose was a volume of revelation. Meat was 
 very life of God within His soul. Language to 
 Christ was windows into the wealth of the eterni- 
 ties and the infinites. To men it was words. 
 His discernment of latent values in men made 
 Him a rich man wherever He found a fellow. 
 He had cargoes of redeemable character afloat on 
 the wide waters of mankind, and these He was 
 forever drawing home. Men brought Him a sin- 
 ner, flotsam of Galilee ; and Jesus saw Himself 
 rich with the latent life of Peter of Pentecost, 
 victor of the gates of hell. The stained hand of 
 the Samaritan concubine became under His faith 
 purified to bear the chalice of the life of God. 
 He had more wealth latent in human character 
 
170 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 than Croesus ever dreamed of. His universalism, 
 also, made Him rich with all the wealth of hu- 
 manity. All around Him men choked and died 
 in the stifling air of racial exclusion and preju- 
 dice. He lived in the whole free world. Think- 
 ing in terms of all mankind and all the ages 
 makes the thinker rich beyond all the dreams of 
 any racial avarice or national pride. 
 
 But above all His meat was simply this : to 
 walk with God, to do the will of God and to ac- 
 complish His work. His life was in God's will, 
 His strength in God's companionship. He lived 
 powerfully among men because He dwelt deeply 
 in God. His wealth was not herds and gold, nor 
 bonds and credits, nor deeds ; but the power to 
 do deeds in the might and pity of God. 
 
 And the inward resources of Christ which are 
 true wealth are accessible also to us ; and not ac- 
 cessible only, but indispensable. We need not 
 set much store by what the world calls wealth. 
 Its one worthy use is as capital for human service ; 
 and Christ who had none of it here still did and 
 inspired more service than all the world's capital 
 has performed. Louis Pasteur was living on a 
 salary of a few hundred francs. All that he did 
 was to examine with a microscope things infin- 
 itesimally small and to reflect upon them, and 
 then in his laboratory to write down and send 
 forth some new ideas. The practical men derided 
 his " pure science," — a mere student of theories, 
 
THE LIFE INVISIBLE lYl 
 
 spinner of silk dreams thinner than the filaments 
 of the silkworms of southern France. But Pas- 
 teur's thoughts were the richest source of wealth 
 in France. " Pasteur's discoveries alone," said 
 Huxley, '* would suffice to cover the war indem- 
 nity paid by France to Germany in 1870." ^ 
 True wealth is inward resources, the love of 
 God's world, of truth and holy thoughts, friend- 
 ship with the living and the dead, the possession 
 of the Son of God and His words which are spirit 
 and life, and of His Spirit " whom the world can- 
 not receive ; for it beholdeth Him not, neither 
 knoweth Him ; ye know Him ; for He abideth 
 with you, and shall be in you." 
 
 And all this wealth may be ours without going 
 anywhere for it. No man brought it to Him. 
 " I have meat," He said. So He calls us to be 
 rich. We do not need to go anywhere for it. 
 No man needs to bring it to us. It is here. It 
 is Himself — the Bread of Life. Can we also say, 
 *• I have it — meat to eat, of the world unknown, 
 within my soul, within my soul " ? 
 
 To be able to say that is our great American 
 need. I will not say that it is a greater need 
 now than it has ever been because we have 
 deteriorated and need to recover the element of 
 spiritual idealism in our national character. We 
 have not deteriorated. Doubtless we have lost 
 many things that it would have been well for us 
 
 1 Vallery-Radot, " Life of Pasteur," popular edition, p. 374. 
 
172 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 to have kept, and have kept much that it would 
 have been better to lose. But we have gained 
 in our perception of the higher values and we 
 seek them more and not less than ever before. 
 We are far from being what we ought to be, but 
 the past was farther, and we only think otherwise 
 because we clothe the past in mists of idealiza- 
 tion. That very error is proof of our deeper 
 spiritual discerning. Evils are challenged now 
 which passed uncondemned a half generation 
 ago. But though we have gained, we need to 
 gain more, and what we need to gain is not 
 something aesthetic or intellectual only, not 
 broader philosophies or wider social programs, 
 not anything external or merely ethical, but 
 something biological and dynamic. We need 
 the push and power of what One and One only 
 offers. "The thief cometh not," said Christ, 
 " but that he may steal, and kill, and destroy : 
 I came that they may have life, and may have it 
 abundantly." 
 
 Not long before his death, as all remember, 
 the late Mr. Morgan was summoned to testify 
 before a congressional committee which was 
 seeking to locate the seat of the money power. 
 The object of those examining Mr. Morgan was 
 to bring out the extent of his own influence and 
 control, and to show, if possible, that in the 
 hands of a few men was concentrated the real 
 domination of the financial life of America. The 
 
THE LIFE INVISIBLE 173 
 
 popular impression, after the examination was 
 over, was that Mr. Morgan's modest disavowals 
 were justified by all the testimony, and that there 
 was no one person, or any group of individuals, 
 in this country who possessed so much power as 
 was supposed to reside in the hands of a little 
 company of men. 
 
 Now, at the best, there was no question of 
 creating or producing anything. Nobody 
 thought of asking Mr. Morgan whether he could 
 create a grain of wheat, or heal a disease, or 
 bring into existence anything that was not al- 
 ready here. The main question was how much 
 of something that was here already was he, or 
 any other man, able to control. As one read 
 the testimony, the one dominant impression it 
 made on his mind was how small and weak and 
 ineffectual even the strongest human life was, 
 and how little was the effect that it could pro- 
 duce in what it was able to do in behalf of 
 others. 
 
 How weak does even the strongest personality 
 appear when contrasted with One Who can say 
 such words as these 1 have just quoted ! Sup- 
 pose some great man now living were to say to 
 us : •* Come unto me, all ye that labour and are 
 heavy laden, and I will give you rest. If any 
 man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. I 
 am come that they may have life, and may have 
 it abundantly," how startled we should be ! But 
 
174 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 we have become familiar with the claim on the 
 lips of Christ and do not realize what we are 
 really confronted with in that single great Per- 
 sonality standing among men and offering to 
 meet the ultimate human need, to give us the 
 deepest, richest, most priceless thing in the 
 world, which no one of us can give another. 
 " I am come that ye may have life, and that ye 
 may have it abundantly." 
 
 And notice that here is not a claim only. 
 There is a strange and startling contrast. " The 
 thief cometh to steal, and to kill, and to destroy : 
 I am come that ye may have life." On the one 
 side is our Lord. Him we know. But who is 
 this thief on the other side who has come, not to 
 give life, but to reduce it, contract it, dilute it — 
 destroy it altogether? Well, we know well 
 enough that sin is such a thief, that wherever 
 sin is allowed to come into our lives it abridges 
 those lives, draws in the walls of their expansion, 
 cuts down and impoverishes their joys. And 
 there are many things short of sin, less coarse 
 and evil, which, nevertheless, draw in the bound- 
 aries of life, narrow and stifle it, and do the work 
 of the thief who came to kill, and to destroy, and 
 to steal. Over against all these He stands Who 
 said : "I came to give life, to give it abun- 
 dandy." 
 
 Now we know very well what men and women 
 say when you bring them this offer of Christ's 
 
THE LIFE INVISIBLE 175 
 
 about His life. " Oh," they say, " it all depends 
 upon what you mean by life. I have my own 
 idea of life. The life I am living is rich and 
 satisfying to me, and I am not drawn to this life 
 that your tepid religion offers me in exchange." 
 But are those who answer so fully satisfied ? Are 
 they really satisfied at all with any part of their 
 life except such of it as consists of the kind of 
 life that Jesus Christ our Lord Himself came to 
 bring, with which alone the hearts of men can be 
 content ? 
 
 What do we mean when we speak of life that 
 really satisfies us ? I asked some boys a little 
 while ago what they meant when they spoke 
 about life, real life that would satisfy men. Four 
 were boys at the Hill School, Pottstown, Pa. 
 They sat down and collaborated for a while as 
 to what real life meant to them, and when they 
 got through it came to this : Purity, integrity, 
 the principle of Christian service, unselfishness, 
 and the desire to be perfect. I asked another 
 man at Princeton what life meant to him, real 
 life. He was one of the best athletes in the col- 
 lege, and this was the answer he gave : Humility, 
 charitableness, bravery, strength of conviction, 
 honesty, sincerity, truthfulness and the power to 
 forgive. I asked a man at Yale what he thought 
 life was. He was the most popular man in the 
 senior class at that time. This was what he 
 wrote down : " Service after the manner of Jesus, 
 
176 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 honesty carried all the way through, sympathy, 
 capacity for work, patience in holding to prin- 
 ciple, as well as fidelity in actual duty." 
 
 Now if we were to define life better than these 
 boys, and yet in the way they were feeling after, 
 not in any concrete expressions, but in its central 
 principle, we should borrow the words which 
 Professor Drummond borrowed from Herbert 
 Spencer. Spencer said that the perfect corre- 
 spondence of any organism with its environment 
 would be perfect life. Professor Drummond 
 modified this by adding just one word : the per- 
 fect correspondence of any organism with a per- 
 fect environment would be perfect life. Or, to 
 put it as it is stated in one of our best diction- 
 aries : life is that state in any animal or plant in 
 which its different functions are all occupied in 
 active healthy expression. Now that is just 
 what those boys were feeling after. Life is the 
 free and fearless completion of ourselves. Life 
 is our utter unfolding in the direction of that of 
 which we are capable. Life is the pushing out 
 of the rim of our world into the great and bound- 
 less riches of God. Life is the opening up of 
 the gates of our prison house that we may go 
 after Him Whose word to men was : " If ye 
 abide in my word, then are ye truly my dis- 
 ciples; and ye shall know the truth, and the 
 truth shall make you free." Life is what Jesus 
 Christ came to give, for His mission was this : 
 
THE LIFE INVISIBLE 1Y7 
 
 " The thief came to steal, and to kill, and to des- 
 troy. I am come that they may have life, and 
 may have it abundantly." 
 
 One great purpose of the Incarnation was to 
 show what we are in our deepest being in the 
 purpose of God, and what we are capable of. Our 
 Lord did not come to parade before men the ex- 
 ceptional life to which they could never attain. 
 He came, as He Himself said, to show them 
 what it had been His Father's will that they 
 should all be. "As my Father hath sent me, 
 even so send I you." " I go unto my Father, 
 and your Father ; and to my God, and your 
 God." What Jesus Christ was in the fullness of 
 His unlimited life was the revealing of what God 
 has in His will for every one of us. The ampli- 
 tudes that we see in Him, the subsidence of all 
 the petty boundaries, the unhampered outgoing 
 of His free spirit in the area of His Father, God, 
 — all that is just a picture of what God meant the 
 life of each one of us to be. That is why they 
 called Him the Son of Man, because He was the 
 picture of what God had meant that His son, 
 man, might be. 
 
 And Christ came, not only to show the possi- 
 bilities of such being, of what men could do and 
 what they could be made, but to be Himself that 
 expression of power in them competent to eflect 
 such a result, the tide of the boundless life flow- 
 ing through all the channels that they could ofler 
 
178 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 to Him. He came to be in mankind the deep, 
 flowing stream of a new life. One regrets to 
 find in some churches to-day in the repetition of 
 the Apostles' Creed the omission of the sentence: 
 " He descended into hell." There is no word in 
 the Creed which expresses more fully the utter- 
 most reach of the purpose of our Lord and the 
 scope and boundlessness of His love. Down 
 even into hell He went in the utterance of His 
 love for mankind. How much this means ! But 
 to say no more, it means this, that deep into the 
 dark of our human life He came, that there, be- 
 low all sight, below all thought. He might release 
 the vital streams that have been flowing from the 
 fountain of Calvary ever since, and which have 
 no other fountain. 
 
 We know what would happen in our bodies, 
 to put it simply, if some great artery that fed our 
 life were tied. Atrophy and palsy would creep 
 at once over our unnourished frames. Precisely 
 the same thing is true in the deeper life of our 
 souls, if the arteries, those channels through 
 which Christ would pour His energy and 
 strength and power, are tied. To put the same 
 thing still more simply : Suppose the Mississippi 
 River instead of running into the Gulf ran out 
 of the Gulf deep into the land. Suppose all of 
 the rivers poured into the land instead of into 
 the seas. As a matter of fact, that is in one 
 sense what they do. We have got long past 
 
THE LIFE INVISIBLE 179 
 
 looking at rivers as drains for the land. We 
 know that they are arteries through which the 
 life-blood of the seas flows upon the land by 
 way of the skies. And suppose there were no 
 Mississippi River. Suppose it were stopped at 
 the gate. What a chill and death would fall 
 upon the land ! And how often that life of Christ 
 which comes up to the gates of men's lives is 
 stifled, the stream that would pour in kept out, 
 the power that would control and remake blocked 
 at the door through which it would enter. " The 
 thief is come," He says, " and you let him in, to 
 kill, and to steal, and to destroy ; I am come, 
 and you keep Me out. And I am come that 
 you may have life, and that you may have it in 
 all the abundance of God." 
 
 And we know that this life of Christ is real and 
 abundant life because it fulfills the tests of life. 
 It is a life of fullness in all its correspondences 
 and relationships. It completes life to the utter- 
 most of its possibilities, setting it in all those ties 
 with that which is outside of it, which constitute 
 life. For, after all, there is no separable life. 
 All the life that we know is relationship. Our 
 Lord defined it in such terms in His great 
 prayer : " This is life eternal, that they might 
 know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, 
 whom thou hast sent." Life can only be con- 
 strued in terms of correspondence. 
 
 We know that the life Christ came to give, 
 
180 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 and does give, is the satisfying and real life, 
 because it meets these testings. It gives us this 
 wealth of correspondence of relationship. 
 
 " Oh, the pure delight of a single hour. 
 That before Thy Cross I spend, 
 When I kneel in prayer, and with Thee, ray God, 
 I commune as friend with friend." 
 
 We know that the life Christ brings is complete 
 and full, because it reestablishes the tie and union 
 between ourselves and God, and He becomes to 
 us again our Father and our Friend. We know 
 it, because it is the root of all deep and true and 
 satisfying human relationships. How can there 
 be a real and full union of one man and one 
 woman that is not a union in Christ ? And for 
 the highest friendship and its ideals we find 
 sanction and nourishment best in Him and the 
 groundwork of His life. 
 
 And Christ's is the real and satisfying life, be- 
 cause it is creative and energizing. It is not 
 like the influence of that thief — selfishness, low 
 desire, sin and small ambition — who kills and 
 steals and destroys. But the life that Christ is 
 teems with vitalizing power ; it is strength and 
 energy and new service in men. I have never 
 seen it more beautifully put than in a letter of 
 Stanley to David Livingstone. It was found by 
 Lady Stanley in a little pocketbook which her 
 husband had carried on the expedition for the 
 relief of Livingstone. It was written in lead 
 
THE LIFE INVISIBLE 181 
 
 pencil. It was a copy of the letter that Stanley 
 had written to the great explorer the very day 
 after he left him. It has sometimes been ques- 
 tioned whether Livingstone really made on Stan- 
 ley the impression which Stanley describes in his 
 autobiography. There have been those who said 
 that that picture was but the reading back over 
 the intervening years of a growing hero worship. 
 But here is the letter which Stanley wrote as he 
 came fresh from the old missionary's companion- 
 ship and the inspiration of his personality : 
 
 " My dear Doctor : 
 
 "I have parted from you all too soon; I feel it 
 deeply ; I am entirely conscious of it from being so de- 
 pressed. ... In writing to you, I am not writing to 
 an idea now, but to an embodiment of warm, good fellow- 
 ship, of everything that is noble and right, of sound com- 
 mon sense, of everything practical and right-minded. 
 
 " I have talked with you; your presence is almost pal- 
 pable, though you are absent. . . . 
 
 " It seems as if I had left a community of friends and 
 relations. The utter loneliness of myself, the void that has 
 been created, the pang at parting, the bleak aspect of the 
 future, is the same as 1 have felt before, when parting from 
 dear friends. 
 
 " Why should people be subjected to these partings, 
 with the several sorrows and pangs that surely follow 
 them ? — It is a consolation, however, after tearing myself 
 away, that I am about to do you a service, for then I have 
 not quite parted from you ; you and I are not quite sep- 
 arate. Though I am not present to you bodily, you must 
 
182 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 think of me daily until your caravan arrives. Though you 
 are not before me visibly, I shall think of you constantly, 
 until your least wish has been attended to. In this way 
 the chain of remembrance will not be severed. 
 
 ** 'Not yet,' I say to myself, ' are we apart,' and this to 
 me, dear Doctor, is consoling, believe me. Had I a series 
 of services to perform for you, why then ! we should never 
 have to part. 
 
 " Do not fear then, I beg, to ask, nay, to command, 
 whatever lies in my power. And do not, I beg of you, 
 attribute these professions to interested motives, but accept 
 them, or believe them, in the spirit in which they are 
 made, in that true David Livingstone spirit I have happily 
 become acquainted with." 
 
 And out from that lonely spot in eastern 
 Africa, the younger man came to begin a new 
 career ; all the old aimlessness and shiftlessness 
 and drifting gone forever from his life, to pass 
 on now to lift up the mission which, beneath the 
 dripping eaves of the hut in which he died, David 
 Livingstone laid down. The tide of a new life 
 and a new service was in him. " I came that ye 
 may have life, and that ye may have it abun- 
 dantly." He had seen Christ and felt the con- 
 tagion of the life of Christ in Livingstone, and 
 Christ's word, articulate or inarticulate, had come 
 to live in him. And that life is life in the power 
 and desire to serve. 
 
 This life that Christ came to give is the only 
 real and satisfying life, because it alone endures. 
 We gather at Northfield each summer and always 
 
THE LIFE INVISIBLE 188 
 
 go up to read afresh the brief inscription on Mr. 
 
 Moody's grave on Round Top, " The world pass- 
 
 eth away, and the lust thereof ; but he that doeth 
 
 the will of God abideth forever." We sing the 
 
 same great truth constantly in George Matheson's 
 
 hymn : 
 
 "Hay in dust life's glory dead, 
 And from the ground there blossoms red 
 Life that shall endless be." 
 
 I wrote the other day to a friend about her 
 sister-in-law's death, and this was the last sen- 
 tence of the letter which she wrote in reply : 
 
 '« I do not know if he"— that was her brother—" told 
 
 you how beautiful it was at the last ; how S 's face 
 
 lighted up with such an expression of surprise and adora- 
 tion, with her eyes open to their fullest extent, and then it 
 was all over. Only a glimpse into the life that was not to 
 end could have brought such a look to a human face." 
 
 " And that life," said He Who was the life, " I 
 brought with Me and will give to you." 
 
 Let us lift our hearts to the life that shall end- 
 less be, to the liberty on which there never lay a 
 chain, to the light of the land that hath no need 
 of any sun, because the " Lamb is the light 
 thereof," the land of the new morning and the 
 tearless life. The thief cometh— let him not 
 come in I — only to kill, and to steal, and to des- 
 troy. " I am come, and I stand at the door 
 and ask you now to let Me in, that you may 
 have life abundantly." 
 
184 THE STUFF OF MANHOOD 
 
 As these lectures close I would press all this 
 in the most earnest and personal terms upon 
 each one individually. The processes of social 
 and moral progress in humanity are retarded or 
 broken down because they are not carried on a 
 volume of adequate spiritual life in men. There 
 ought to be a Kingdom of Living Love and 
 Brotherly Will on the earth. And some day 
 there will be, but there is not now and there can- 
 not be until the anemia of man is healed, and it 
 can be healed in only one way — by more life in 
 man, by life abounding in men. The commer- 
 cial and materialistic solution of the world's 
 problem has been fully tried. For a generation 
 it has been preached and practiced as the one 
 saving gospel and out of the depths to which it 
 brought us we begin to turn heavenward again. 
 The day for a new creed has dawned — the old 
 creed of truth and hope and freedom and life, of 
 the wealth and glory of a city unseen as yet, hid 
 in the heavens and only possible on the earth as 
 drawn down by men to whom the invisible things 
 are the surest of all realities and who live and are 
 strong in God. 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
INSPIRATION FOR MEN 
 
 ROBERT W. BOLffELL 
 
 After College— What? 
 
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