tl|f SItbrarg of 
 Prinrrtnn Sli^nlogtral g^^mtnaru 
 
 BR 125 .P4 1902 , ^^^^ 
 Peck, George Clarke, 1865- 
 
 mgd 1927. 
 
 " ^^ Ringing questions ' 
 
RINGING 
 QUESTIONS 
 
 George Clarhe PecK 
 
 AutHor of "Bible Tragedies" 
 
 New YorK: Eaton & Mains 
 Cincinnati: Jennings & Pye 
 
Copyright by 
 
 EATON & MAINS, 
 
 1902. 
 
To THE Life Partner 
 
 Who 
 
 Has Helped Me Phrase 
 
 AND 
 
 Answer 
 
 The Questions 
 
 That Ring in My Own Heart 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. The Question of the First Mur- 
 derer : 
 " Am I My Brother's Keeper ? " 7 
 
 II. The Question of an Early Phi- 
 losopher : 
 " If a Man Die, Shall He Live Again ? ". 29 
 
 III. The Question of an Ancient Law- 
 
 yer: 
 " Which is the Great Commandment ? ". 51 
 
 IV. The Question of a Tempted 
 
 Leader: 
 " Why Should I Come Down }" 73 
 
 V. The Question of a Frightened 
 Jailer : 
 " What Must I Do to Be Saved }'" 95 
 
 VI. The Question of a Curious Dis- 
 ciple: 
 " Lord, What Shall this Man Do .>"... . 117 
 
 VIL The Question of Old-fashioned 
 Theology : 
 " Who Did Sin, this Man or His Parents, 
 that He Was Born Blind }" 137 
 
6 Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 VIII. The Question of a Night Visitor : 
 " How Can a Man Be Born when He is 
 Old?" 157 
 
 IX. The Question of an Autocratic 
 Employer : 
 " Is It not Lawful for Me to Do What 
 
 I Will with Mine Own ? " 177 
 
 X. The Question of a Ready Critic : 
 " Why Was not this Ointment Sold for 
 Three Hundred Pence and Given 
 to the Poor ? " 199 
 
 XI. The Question of an Imprisoned 
 Prophet : 
 " Art Thou He that Should Come, or 
 
 Look We for Another ? " 219 
 
 XII. The Question of a Troubled 
 Ruler : 
 " What Shall I Do, Then, with Jesus ? " 241 
 
I 
 
 THE QUESTION OF THE FIRST 
 MURDERER 
 
"There is no other gift that is so worthy of giv- 
 ing as one's own self. . . . The higher you are, 
 the more you owe yourselves to the very lowest 
 and least. ... It is by the medicine of a living soul 
 that dead souls are brought to life. . . . There is 
 nothing so life-giving to souls as other souls 
 warming them. And we owe ourselves to our fel- 
 lowmen. The poorer a man is, the more he needs 
 you ; and the further he is from those states which 
 belong to educated humanity, the stronger is your 
 obligation to make him a brother," — Bcecher. 
 
 *'The quality of mercy is not strained ; 
 
 It droppeth as the gentle dew from heaven 
 
 Upon the place beneath ; it is twice blest : 
 
 It blesseth him that gives and him that takes; 
 
 'Tis mightiest in the mightiest." — Shakespeare. 
 
 "We then that are strong ought to bear the in- 
 firmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves." 
 '—Paul. 
 
''AM I MY BROTHER^S 
 KEEPER?'* 
 
 Modern scientific method has wrought 
 sore havoc with the first book of the 
 Bible. The Mosaic cosmogony has been 
 shown to be untenable. The familiar 
 Adamic narrative has been relegated to 
 the realm of poetry and story. No intelli- 
 gent reader is allowed to believe that the 
 serpent went upright until a curse was 
 pronounced upon it. The identity of 
 Cain's wife, which used to vex the the- 
 ologians so grievously, is to-day declared 
 as unimportant as the color of Pharaoh's 
 horses or the historic basis of Thackeray's 
 novels. Indeed, the whole narrative of 
 Genesis has been stormed with scientific 
 bombs and stabbed by satire; and we ad- 
 herents of the Book are invited forward 
 to view the torn remains. 
 
 There is, doubtless, some damage to 
 lament. But the story is still far from 
 need of burial. It is the livest story in 
 
10 The Question of 
 
 the world. No scientific scheme will ever 
 permanently improve upon or set aside 
 those majestic first words of Mosaic ac- 
 count: "In the beginning God." Adam 
 shorn of his theologic significance and 
 strength is only the more significant and 
 robust figure. The familiar serpent means 
 more as the embodiment of that sneaking 
 power which blights all Edens than it ever 
 could mean in its more ancient setting. 
 Vitality has taken the place of historicity, 
 and these ancient pictures speak to human 
 life with increasing force and thrill. The 
 purpose of the Bible is most obviously 
 moral. Not to make men smart, but to 
 make them 'Vise unto salvation," is its 
 supremest function. Its images, its poet- 
 ry, all have that bearing. In such a view 
 the book of Genesis is immortal; and in 
 such a view I want to study this ancient 
 question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" 
 
 It was in the first instance, as you recall, 
 the question of Cain concerning Abel. 
 Cain had committed an outrageous crime. 
 
The First Murderer 11 
 
 Unable to see his brother's sacrifice more 
 acceptable than his own, overcome by jeal- 
 ousy and hate, he had lifted up a mur- 
 derous hand against that brother. He had 
 taken human life. But as no grave was 
 ever deep enough to cover a great sin, the 
 crime of Cain came out. To use the 
 phraseology of Scripture, a brother's 
 blood kept "crying from the ground." At 
 length came God — sometimes delayed, we 
 feel, but always coming — and whispering 
 in the galleries of a guilty soul, inquired, 
 "Where is . . . thy brother?" 
 
 You know how a single word will burn 
 as with an iron; how a Faradic current 
 will find the diseased spot in a human 
 organism; how a flash of light brings 
 out deformity and stain. So with this 
 searching word from God: "Where is . . . 
 thy brother?" There was not much to 
 say. The pitiless deed was done. Argu- 
 ment would only weaken an already des- 
 perate case. Even as he paused for a re- 
 ply, Cain could hear a familiar voice cry- 
 
12 The Question of 
 
 ing as if from the very earth. And he 
 looked up into the face of Heaven, and 
 defiantly inquired, "Am I my brother's 
 keeper ?" 
 
 O, what a question! Tinged with all 
 meanness and streaked with murder, it 
 has come echoing down through the cen- 
 turies into our hearts. Other questions 
 have been met and honored. A thousand 
 inquiries have been answered and disposed 
 of. But the question of Cain is young 
 with an immortality of selfishness; live 
 and burning as when it fell from his guilty 
 tongue. 
 
 It IS only a few years, comparatively, 
 since well-churched and cultured Bos- 
 tonians were asking why they should lie 
 awake nights over the miseries of the ne- 
 gro at the South. What if backs were 
 torn and hearts were broken — was that a 
 condition to disturb Bostonians? Boston 
 indignantly said "No!" Great men like 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes regretted that the 
 issue had ever been raised. Charles Sum- 
 
The First Murderer 13 
 
 ner had his back well caned for obtruding 
 it upon the people. It took years and 
 years for public sentiment to grow, and to 
 this day there are Bostonians — and others 
 — who wonder if it would not have been 
 better had the question never been asked 
 the slave trade of the South, ''Am I my 
 brother's keeper?" 
 
 We take a good deal of credit to our- 
 selves for our recent war with Spain. And 
 in so far as the Spanish war cloud was 
 the smoke of an indignant righteousness, 
 we are, doubtless, entitled to some praise. 
 But be it remembered that it took a long 
 time to rouse us to our duty. More than 
 thirty years ago Henry Ward Beecher 
 preached a sermon on "Cuba and the 
 Brotherhood of Nations." Nor was his 
 voice alone in protest. Every now and 
 again some flaming soul would flash out 
 the beacon of our duty. But we were so 
 busy making money, and so afraid of in- 
 ternational complications, we preferred to 
 let the Cubans fight out their battle 
 
14 The Question of 
 
 alone. Only within certain territorial lim- 
 itations did we really count ourselves our 
 ^'brother's keeper." 
 
 Some of you will recall the vivid pages 
 in The Honorable Peter Stirling, which 
 describe that hero's campaign for pure 
 milk and fresh air for the poor children 
 of New York City. He had hard work 
 to find supporters. Nobody wanted to go 
 into that sort of a contest. How could 
 ordinary West Siders be expected to care 
 what sort of milk the East Side babies got 
 to drink? Financiers winked at each 
 other behind Stirling's back. Legislative 
 committees turned him down. That he 
 won was not due to any cordiality in his 
 support, but to the persistence with which 
 he thrust his question down New York's 
 unwilling throat: "Am I my brother's 
 keeper?" 
 
 Or if you want the truth spelled out in 
 characters more vivid still, take the work 
 of Jacob Riis. It somehow dawned upon 
 the heart of this imported Dane that 
 
The First Murderer 15 
 
 one half of a great city ought to care "how 
 the other half lives." Forthwith he dedi- 
 cated his days to carrying to other citi- 
 zens the light which had dawned upon 
 him. People read liis books and viewed 
 his pictures. Some few kind tears were 
 shed. A handful of the vilest rookeries 
 and tenements were taken down. The 
 Station Houses got an airing and a par- 
 tial cleaning out. A few outposts of crim- 
 inal indifference and greed were taken. 
 But, according to Mr. Riis, the great con- 
 test lies on ahead, when New York wakes 
 up to the tremendous truth that we are 
 our less fortunate brother's ''keeper." 
 
 I suppose that no subject is more un- 
 popular with the average congregation 
 than that of "Foreign Missions." To 
 name it is to chill the currents of ordinary 
 piety. Few Church members, compara- 
 tively, have any real confidence in the 
 efficiency of missionary dollars. Only as 
 we maintain the economic advantages of 
 Christianizing the Chinaman and Parsee 
 
16 The Question of 
 
 do we rouse certain Christians to sympa- 
 thy at all. ''Is there not enough bright- 
 ening to be done around here without 
 sending men and money to darkest Af- 
 rica?" "Are there not plenty of hungry 
 hearts nearer home than India and Cey- 
 lon?" Ah, friends, it is the spirit which 
 burned in the Copperheads of '6i and 
 among the indifferent friends of Cuban 
 independence; the spirit which makes the 
 work of the Peter Stirlings and Jacob 
 Riises forever bitter ; the spirit which first 
 found expression in the words of an an- 
 tediluvian ancestor, and has cast its cor- 
 rosion into every succeeding age — that 
 same spirit which, reproduced in you and 
 me, prompts us to ask when the Mission- 
 ary Cause is being presented, "Am I my 
 brother's keeper?" 
 
 Let me venture a prediction. Mission- 
 ary movement, in one form or another, 
 is in the air. And it will some day be as 
 sure a badge of immaturity and smallness 
 to have opposed the Missionary Cause, as 
 
The First Murderer 17 
 
 to have withstood the Antislavery move- 
 ment or the humanitarian efforts of our 
 great cities. 
 
 But Cain's question comes even nearer 
 home. We meet it not only on Missionary 
 Sunday and in the issues of great cam- 
 paigns, but on all the crowded thorough- 
 fares of life. Some of you are employers 
 of other men. To-morrow you will go 
 downtown and look into their faces. You 
 pay them wages — good wages, perhaps 
 — for a certain amount of work. And 
 with that exchange of values your in- 
 terest in your employees ends. They are 
 as foreign to your life as the spindles in 
 a factory or the wires on the telephone 
 poles. They may be intemperate, licen- 
 tious, cruel; but so long as they do not 
 drink to excess during business hours, 
 and their excesses do not unfit them for 
 your work, and they do not practice their 
 cruelty upon your horses, you have no 
 particular concern. Indeed, you do not 
 
 want to be bothered with their affairs. 
 2 
 
18 The Question of 
 
 Do you? If I should suggest that you 
 are your employee's ''keeper" to the ex- 
 tent of personal sympathy and pains ; that 
 you ought to be a saving factor in his 
 life; that you owe him somewhat besides 
 his wages at the end of the week, would 
 you not be sure I had better been preach- 
 ing on some theme more strictly theo- 
 logical ? 
 
 I know what it is to be bothered with 
 countless appeals for help. Business men 
 put a notice outside their office door : "AH 
 applicants for charity are referred to the 
 Bureau of Charities and Correction, to 
 which this office contributes." But the 
 minister must keep open door to all peti- 
 tioners. So I think that I can speak in- 
 telligently on this subject at least. De- 
 mands for money, demands for sympathy, 
 demands for time and strength come thick 
 enough some days to bankrupt an ordi- 
 nary man. I sometimes catch myself won- 
 dering why a preacher need be called 
 down from the elaboration of a high and 
 
The First Murderer 19 
 
 holy theme to listen to a dreary complaint 
 of poverty and pain. Like the rest of 
 you, I hate to be interrupted at a good 
 dinner, to look into a hungry face, or to 
 be told of some family that has not a 
 morsel in the house. If I look cross when 
 the thousandth appeal comes in, I do but 
 prove how much akin to ordinary mortals 
 we pastors doubtless are. 
 
 But then recurs this sobering reflection. 
 It is the spirit of Cain that demands to be 
 let alone. Our Master could be interrupt- 
 ed by any cry of distress. No Transfig- 
 uration Mount was so high but He would 
 hurry down its slopes to heal a demoniac 
 boy or feed a hungry throng. He could 
 be approached at Simon's feast by a 
 woman who needed forgiving. And when 
 a sufferer stopped Him on His ministry 
 of love to a ruler's home, and a blind beg- 
 gar turned up his sightless eyes for the 
 burdened Christ to see, He had time to 
 pause and say, "I will. Be thou clean. 
 Go in peace." Dear friends, it is because, 
 
20 The Question of 
 
 after nineteen centuries of Christian doc- 
 trine, we are still so much more like Cain 
 than like Jesus, that we cry in the presence 
 of human suffering and shame, *'Am I 
 my brother's keeper?" 
 
 Or take the sphere of personal influence. 
 How pleasant it would be if our conduct 
 had no bearing on the conduct of our 
 neighbors: if we could drink our mod- 
 erate glass and indulge our pleasant vices 
 and cultivate our particular whims with- 
 out reference to anybody else. What a 
 pity that the "weaker brother" should be 
 always standing around, ready to be of- 
 fended at our "meat!" What right has 
 he to be forever looking to us for an ex- 
 ample, and then falling over our harmless 
 peccadillos into hell? Let the "weaker 
 brother" look out for himself. We can- 
 not be constantly burdened with his im- 
 maturity and folly! If he cannot take 
 our moderate drink without making a sot 
 of himself, that is his account, not ours! 
 If he must make occasion of our infre- 
 
The First Murderer 21 
 
 quent theatre-going to visit all the inde- 
 cent play houses of a great city, he will 
 have to do so, that's all! If he cannot 
 take knowledge of our innocent recrea- 
 tions except to become a vagabond and 
 wanton — so much the worse for his style 
 of manhood! We cannot be our ''broth- 
 er's keeper" to such an exasperating 
 extent. 
 
 To which declaration I will return a 
 moment later. Just now it is enough that 
 I should inquire, whether it is the spirit 
 of Cain or the spirit of Jesus which asks, 
 "Am I my brother's keeper?" Cain's po- 
 sition was orthodox common sense until 
 nineteen centuries ago. The world wagged 
 on in its indifference and cruelty of spirit. 
 The "law of survival," as Darwin called 
 it, was the common law of life. The 
 "weaker brother" had no rights which the 
 community felt bound to respect. He 
 who could not take care of himself must 
 not expect anybody to take care of him. 
 Feebleness must look out for itself. 
 
22 The Question of 
 
 Then, one day there appeared, on Pal- 
 estinian soil, a Man of simple mien and 
 wondrous eyes. He dared to contradict 
 the thought of ages. He declared that 
 Cain was wrong. He enthroned the prin- 
 ciples of helpfulness and kindness. He 
 went about searching for opportunities to 
 breathe on the ''smoking flax" and bind 
 up the "bruised reed." He encouraged 
 all sorts of human weakness and incom- 
 petence to hang upon His strength. He 
 devoted three precious years to the educa- 
 tion of a little band of men, no one of 
 whom, according to our codes, was fit for 
 intimacy with Him. He gave love and 
 confidence and sympathy, until finally, 
 stretched upon a cross. He could only give 
 His life? And it was His message that 
 one caught up and wrote upon the sky. 
 ''We that are strong ought to bear the in- 
 firmities of the weak." "Brethren, if a 
 man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are 
 spiritual, restore him." And then that 
 tremendous utterance : "If meat make my 
 
The First Murderer 23 
 
 brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while 
 the world standeth, lest I make my 
 brother to offend." 
 
 Did you read that sententious bit quoted 
 by Lyman Abbott in the Outlook? ''Is 
 Christianity a failure?" '1 do not know," 
 was the reply, "it has never been tried!" 
 What an affirmation to make at the close 
 of nineteen centuries of Christian history, 
 that Christianity "has never been tried!" 
 Yet what age ever tried it in its integrity ? 
 What generation of men was ever willing 
 to conduct its business and make its laws 
 on the basis of the "Sermon on the 
 Mount?" What one of us has honestly 
 and persistently sought to live by the Mas- 
 ter's rule? For example, this rule of hu- 
 man helpfulness and pity. Cain's ques- 
 tion still has the sting of unkindness and 
 murder in it. Not many of us are willing 
 to ask it of ourselves in the spirit of 
 Mary's son. 
 
 I know, of course, what some of you 
 are thinking. You would speak it out if 
 
24 The Question of 
 
 this were an open meeting. So I will try 
 to phrase it for you. 
 
 Among the most notable commercial 
 failures of recent years is that of the lar- 
 gest cooperative manufacturing establish- 
 ment in the United States. For years its 
 chief owner had tried to treat his em- 
 ployees according to the Golden Rule. He 
 had invited them to his heart, to his home, 
 and to a share in the profits of his busi- 
 ness. He was a shining example of what 
 some of us are hoping may yet be the 
 prevailing tone of trade. But after years 
 of generosity and Gospel principle, he 
 failed! 
 
 In a not distant city live the widow and 
 daughters of a prominent Methodist min- 
 ister. During his life he drew good sal- 
 aries — as such salaries are reckoned. He 
 tried to adopt the Gospel rule. In the 
 most practical of ways he sought to be- 
 come his ^'brother's keeper." To no 
 worthy appeal did he turn an unrespon- 
 sive ear. He gave, and gave, and gave — 
 
The First Murderer 25 
 
 until at his death there was hardly enough 
 money in the bank to bury him. And to- 
 day his family are dependent upon the 
 largess and thoughtfulness of friends. 
 These are samples, you say, of the inepti- 
 tude of the Gospel method. 
 
 A man asked me the other day if he 
 ought to give up his occasional glass of 
 liquor because his neighbor could not take 
 an occasional glass without going fur- 
 ther; if he ought to swear off smoking a 
 cigar now and then, as an inducement to 
 the same forswearing by his friend; if, 
 further, he must give up the use of veal 
 and sparerib to meet the weakness of cer- 
 tain citizens who cannot eat such things. 
 Obviously the principle can be carried to a 
 ridiculous extreme. As well argue that 
 because certain dyspeptics must live on 
 milk and vichy, the rest of us should adopt 
 that kind of diet. 
 
 There must be a margin of common 
 sense in all things, and nowhere more 
 clearly than in the application of Gospel 
 
26 The Question of 
 
 principle. The business man oi whom I 
 spoke a moment since would doubtless 
 have been more intelligently his "broth- 
 er's keeper" if he had kept back part of 
 the divided profits to enlarge his business 
 and thus give the employees a longer ten- 
 ure. And the minister who gave his sal- 
 ary away to feed the poor would have 
 come nearer the Gospel ideal if he had 
 remembered the wife and children depend- 
 ent upon him. As for the other instance, 
 it must always be true that ''one man's 
 meat is another man's poison." 
 
 But in a thousand ways it still remains 
 that I am my "brother's keeper." The 
 world's real progress has all been in that 
 direction. You may register our advance 
 by the growth of the conviction that we 
 owe somewhat to the "weaker brother." 
 The rule of the jungle is "an eye for an 
 eye and a tooth for a tooth." The rule of 
 the Kingdom is to become some "brother's 
 keeper." To my mind the finest utterance 
 that ever fell from the lips of Paul was 
 
The First Murderer 27 
 
 when he declared himself ''debtor" to the 
 man who had never done anything for 
 him. Such was the maxim of Shaftesbury 
 when he turned from Parliamentary Halls 
 to look up some vagabond. It was such 
 a conviction that sent Gladstone to the 
 garret of the fellow who swept his cross- 
 ing. By such a token, only, can we ac- 
 count for the grandeur of Florence Night- 
 ingale and Fox, of Paul and Jesus ! We 
 shall be able to take our own grade by the 
 acceptance of such a code for our life. The 
 labor problem will be solved, the liquor 
 question will be finally disposed of, and 
 the kingdom of kindness will most mar- 
 velously come, when we begin to believe 
 gladly, intelligently, and widely that we 
 are indeed our "brother's keeper." 
 
II 
 
 THE QUESTION OF AN EARLY 
 PHILOSOPHER 
 
"I am rising, I know, toward the sky. The sun- 
 shine is on my head. The earth gives me its gen- 
 erous sap, but Heaven lights me with the reflec- 
 tion of unknown worlds. . . . The nearer I ap- 
 proach the end, the plainer I hear around me the 
 immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite 
 me. . . . When I go down to the grave, I can 
 say, like many others, I have finished my day's 
 work, but I cannot say that I have finished my 
 life. My days will begin again the next morning. 
 The tomb is not a blind alley ; it is a thoroughfare. 
 It closes on the twilight to open on the dawn." — 
 Hugo. 
 
 "The maxim that Nature makes no leaps is far 
 from true. Nature's habit is to make prodigious 
 leaps, but only after long preparation. . . . Slowly 
 grows the eccentricity of the ellipse as you shift 
 its position in the cone, and still the nature of the 
 curve is not essentially varied, when, suddenly, 
 presto ! one more little shift, and the finite ellipse 
 becomes an infinite hyperbola mocking our fee- 
 ble powers of conception as it speeds on its ever- 
 lasting career. Perhaps in our ignorance such 
 analogies may help us to realize the possibility 
 that steadily developing, ephemeral, conscious life 
 may reach a critical point where it suddenly puts 
 on immortality." — Fiske. 
 
 "For we know that if our earthly house of this 
 tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of 
 God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the 
 heavens." — Paul. 
 
''IF A MAN DIE, 
 SHALL HE LIVE AGAIN ?^ 
 
 Job may be pardoned for the cynical 
 tone in which he asked this familiar ques- 
 tion. It is a good deal easier to accept 
 great truths for other people than to hold 
 them to one's own heart. It is one thing 
 tO' believe in justice and Providence and 
 Heaven when the path lies through the 
 daylight; to believe in these same things 
 equally when the sun has set, and even 
 the stars have hid their faces, is quite an- 
 other matter. Creeds change with the 
 barometer. The headlands which rise so 
 clear and bold to-day may not be visible 
 to-morrow. Whether the sky shall be 
 blue or leaden depends upon the direction 
 of the wind. And no devout believer of 
 to-day can say what he will believe next 
 week, next month. 
 
 I fancy that Job would have talked in 
 a very different strain had he been called 
 
 31 
 
32 The Question of 
 
 upon to give his views a few weeks earlier. 
 Then Hfe was robust and prosperity 
 seemed assured. It was easy at such a 
 time to affirm the proper creed. The 
 healthy man feels a sort of immortality 
 within his bones. Success is a prismatic 
 lens which edges all the distant scene with 
 rainbow colorings. Life at its flood goes 
 bounding on as though there could be no 
 ebb. It took affliction and weariness and 
 pain, the loss of health and home and 
 fortune, and finally the dismal ash heap, 
 to wring from Job the despairing ques- 
 tion, *'If a man die, shall he live again?" 
 He was trying to read a chapter in the 
 dark. He was reconstructing his code to 
 fit the more savage facts of life. Caught 
 in the eddy of a maelstrom that seemed to 
 know no pity, he was crying for the shore. 
 But I have selected this question be- 
 cause men are still asking it. It is a burn- 
 ing question for the ages. It lay hot upon 
 the lips of this ancient questioner. It still 
 glows with the earnestness and passion of 
 
An Early Philosopher 33 
 
 countless human hearts. I do not believe 
 there is a single question whose final an- 
 swer would mean so much to men. Tell 
 them they must not ask it — you might as 
 well tell Niagara to stop her onward 
 plunge, or the moon to halt in her path. 
 Tell men the answer does not matter, and 
 they will only look at you with hungry, 
 wondering eyes. Tell them there are 
 enough present things to engross man- 
 kind's attention, and they will carry this 
 question off to a cloistered cell and ask it 
 there. Bishop Foster once declared that 
 he had read every English volume and 
 monograph on immortality. A certain 
 lawyer of fine intelligence and earnest 
 study says he would barter all his pos- 
 sessions for an affirmative answer to the 
 query of Job. His search has been an 
 unremitting one. He has bought all the 
 standard works. He has dipped into an- 
 cient necromancy and modern spiritism. 
 He has attended seances and talked with 
 great theologians. And now, with one 
 
34 The Question of 
 
 foot in the grave, he draws back for a final 
 certification that there is a farther door. 
 
 In the charming letters of Edwin Booth 
 there is one written in 1863, a few weeks 
 after the death of his beautiful young 
 wife: "I lie awake at night and look for 
 her in the darkness. I hold my breath and 
 listen, and sometimes fancy I can hear her 
 speak away in somewhere — in my soul, 
 perhaps; for I know that if it is possible 
 for her to come back, she will come to me 
 some night. She is in Heaven (they say) , 
 and I must live to meet her there. I know 
 all this, at least as well as they know it; 
 but I do need some sign from her, some 
 little breath of wind if nothing more, 
 bringing comforting words from her. I, 
 who have ever laughed at such things, 
 now feel mystified and half believe that 
 such things may be. If Mary should 
 come to me I feel that my soul would be- 
 come purified. I shall no longer have 
 doubts." 
 
 There are times when the devoutest 
 
An Early Philosopher 35 
 
 Christian would give a thousand years of 
 future Paradise for the Paradise of a 
 present word or touch. When standing 
 in the shadows, the words of IngersoU 
 seem none too melancholy : "Life is a nar- 
 row vale between the mountain peaks of 
 two eternities. . . . The skies give back 
 no sound. . . . We cry aloud and the 
 only answer is the echo of our wailing 
 cry." Such were the great infidel's words 
 at his brother's open grave. O, how many 
 anguished hearts, like his, have cried up 
 into the skies and for answer caught only 
 the echo of their own lamentation! In 
 the "narrow vale" how many pilgrims 
 have lost their way! Against those un- 
 yielding peaks how many souls have 
 bruised and broken their wings ! Earth's 
 most fevered search and bitterest agonies 
 are in that ancient phrase : "If a man die, 
 shall he live again?" 
 
 Now, I might as well confess that I do 
 not pretend to have found the sufficient 
 answer. What the wisest minds of all 
 
36 The Question of 
 
 the ages have signally failed to prove, I 
 may not hope to prove. But I do think 
 there is something to be said. In the ab- 
 sence of proof there still may be precious 
 hints. And because I believe they are spe- 
 cially needed to-day, I want to suggest a 
 few of them. The impression prevails 
 that modern science has made havoc of 
 the last article in the Apostles' Creed. 
 Excess of light on many subjects has 
 seemed to throw the question of immor- 
 tality into still deeper shade. Aggressive 
 materialism has shaken too many a faith. 
 And men are finding it harder than ever 
 to believe, even with trembling, that a 
 man lives on after death. 
 
 It ought not to be so. Science has not 
 done half so much damage as she thinks 
 she has. She has mistaken her own bark- 
 ing for the crash of falling walls, and 
 counted the slain before they were fairly 
 hurt. The foundations have not really 
 been disturbed. Men have as good a war- 
 rant for believing in the ''life everlasting" 
 
An Early Philosopher 37 
 
 as they had when David tuned his harp or 
 Stephen fell asleep. 
 
 But I may be most helpful, perhaps, if 
 I take up some of the current objections 
 to immortality as they appeal to men. 
 There is, in the first place, the stock argu- 
 ment of so-called "common sense:" no- 
 body ever comes back. Shakespeare wrote 
 of the "undiscovered country from whose 
 bourn no traveler returns." How do we 
 know that "no traveler returns?" Might 
 we expect to behold him with a naked 
 eye? and hear him with a fleshly ear? If 
 he be spirit, as we suppose, he certainly 
 would have a hard time meeting either of 
 these tests. 
 
 Men tell me they would be wiUing to 
 go the rest of the journey without a mur- 
 mur if they could talk five minutes with 
 some traveler who had passed within the 
 veil. I hear of mothers who promised to 
 come back to guide their children; of 
 wives who left their husbands wiaiting 
 for a word ; of friends who, in the hour of 
 
38 The Question of 
 
 dissolution, pledged their sacred honor to 
 return. Who is to say they have not re- 
 turned according to their promise? Who 
 knows but it Is the vanished mother that 
 sometimes comforts so divinely? Why 
 may it not be the spirit hand of one whom 
 we have 
 
 "Loved long since and lost awhile" 
 
 whose touch upon our hearts turns us 
 away from harm, away from sacrilege? 
 "Are they not all ministering spirits?" 
 
 No thoughtful man would expect to 
 understand the ''Rhapsodie" of Liszt by 
 holding his hand against the sounding- 
 board of the piano on which it was being 
 played. He would scarcely attempt to 
 appraise the value of a diamond or canvas 
 by taste or smell. The higher senses must 
 come into play — the hearing and the see- 
 ing. Let a man be blind and deaf, and 
 the world that is left to him is largely 
 carnal. All music and beauty, all whis- 
 pering winds and flash of star, all bird 
 song and sunset, all thunder and rainbow. 
 
An Early Philosopher 39 
 
 all a mother's endearments and a mother's 
 smiles, together with a thousand other 
 precious things, would be gone. 
 
 Suppose, then, the inhabitant of such a 
 universe should imagine that were all. 
 He would be as near the truth as we are 
 when we assume to pass upon the realities 
 of the spirit world by sight and hearing. 
 Our senses were given to serve us in our 
 contact with the present sensuous world 
 — not to taste the joy of Heaven, or hear 
 the rustle of a wing, or see the faces of 
 the dead. How absurd, then, to base our 
 infidelic creed upon the limitations of our 
 range. That we cannot hear the step of 
 returning feet — what sort of warrant is 
 that for denying that they return ? 
 
 But there is a second objection not al- 
 together dissimilar to the first. It is that 
 the future life is unreal because we can- 
 not conceive it except in terms of space 
 and matter. Of course we cannot con- 
 ceive it; but what is that against its 
 reality ? Not so very long ago everybody 
 
40 The Question of 
 
 believed that the sun swung round the 
 earth. Men's eyes told them so, and they 
 could construct no solar system except 
 upon the basis of what their eyes beheld. 
 But their eyes were wrong, as everybody 
 knows to-day. Our imageries are con- 
 structed out of our personal observations 
 and experiences. We have no creative 
 power except in arrangement and combi- 
 nation. We can conceive nothing beyond 
 our personal register. The centaur, as 
 the ancients pictured him, was not a new 
 creation; he was merely a combination of 
 horse and man. 
 
 The novelist and the historian deal with 
 the same facts and write the same story. 
 The difference is that one sets down his 
 facts in chronological succession and we 
 call the product a history, while the other 
 throws the same facts into the smelting 
 pot of his imagination and we call his 
 work a novel. The angels of mediaeval 
 art were merely sexless human beings of 
 perfect form and grace, with superadded 
 
An Early Philosopher 41 
 
 wings. God was simply a gigantic man 
 of terrible mien and reverberating tread. 
 Imagination is forever limited by the 
 bounds of the universe in which its master 
 moves. That we cannot adequately con- 
 ceive Heaven is not Heaven's fault, but 
 the result of our limitations. John's vi- 
 sion of the New Jerusalem was in fact the 
 vision of an enlarged and perfected Old 
 Jerusalem. He would have done better 
 if he had really been in Heaven ; but, even 
 so, we should not be able to understand 
 his description unless we had been there 
 ourselves. 
 
 We have no power to conceive a disem- 
 bodied spirit; hence, science says, we must 
 refuse to believe such spirits can exist. 
 This is the dictum of Hume and all his 
 followers : ''Believe nothing beyond the 
 range of the understanding." What mon- 
 strous folly! To assume that there can 
 be no existences, no realities, no powers 
 beyond those for which we have the pat- 
 tern in our minds. It took thousands of 
 
42 The Question of 
 
 years for the light of the nearest fixed 
 star to reach our planet. Had there been 
 astronomers in those days they might have 
 denied the existence of the stars. But the 
 beams fell on earth at last. So it may be 
 that the "light of the knowledge of the 
 glory of God" shall yet dawn upon us 
 from darkened corners of His vast uni- 
 verse. But whether or not it dawn while 
 we are watching, let us never be so arro- 
 gant as to assume that the stars we cannot 
 see do not exist. 
 
 Is it anything against the reality and 
 valid uses of the telephone that the Lap- 
 lander denies ? Does the fact that a mere 
 handful of citizens have just conception 
 of Marconi's invention prove anything 
 against it ? "The luminif erous ether com- 
 bines properties which are inconceivable 
 in connection :" is, then, man's clumsiness 
 of understanding to be alleged against the 
 fact? 
 
 Let us be fair. John Fiske says that 
 "there are in all probability vast regions 
 
An Early Philosopher 43 
 
 of existence in every way as real as the 
 regions which we know, yet concerning 
 which we cannot form the rudiment of a 
 conception." In such "vast regions" there 
 is room for immortality. Beyond your 
 ken and mine the soul released from pris- 
 on mr.y ''find the day." Immortality is 
 not the desperate hazard but the rational 
 assumption of earnest, reverent minds. 
 
 Which brings me to a third objection to 
 immortality, as frequently alleged: the 
 difficulty of providing a place for the 
 countless myriads of souls. Dr. James 
 reminds us that ''for our ancestors the 
 world was a small and . . . comparative- 
 ly snug affair" which had been in exist- 
 ence only for a few thousand years. On 
 such a basis it was easy to conceive an 
 adequate abode for all the departed. The- 
 ology, toO', helped by keeping down the 
 number of the elect. Even Christians felt 
 it hardly necessary to provide eternal ac- 
 commodations for the heathen. Whereas, 
 to-day, with the vast lengthening of crea- 
 
44 The Question of 
 
 tive periods and human history, with our 
 wider view and deeper study, we have 
 come to a point at which we really cannot 
 imagine what to do with the teeming 
 millions. And in our bewilderment we 
 would sooner relinquish faith in our own 
 immortal nature than admit the swarms 
 of Hindus, Chinamen, and South Sea 
 Islanders to the same sort of immortality 
 we have been craving for ourselves. It 
 requires too great a stretch of the imag- 
 ination, not to say too great a yielding of 
 our pride, to mentally provide for such a 
 horde. What use can God have for Ma- 
 laysians and Abyssinians ? 
 
 Ah, there's the fallacy. We have small 
 warrant for imposing our mental limita- 
 tions upon the Father of Spirits. Is it 
 not fair to suppose that His plan may in- 
 clude some details that have not occurred 
 to us? He has obvious use for myriads 
 of agents we never suspected until the 
 microscope came. He finds space for 
 countless inhabitants in a single drop of 
 
An Early Philosopher 45 
 
 water. May we not admit, then, that in 
 all the length and breadth of an infinite 
 universe He can make room for the poor 
 groping sons of God we fail to recognize? 
 His heart is still larger than ours. He 
 knows some things that our greatest phi- 
 losophers have not yet guessed. He is 
 even more fertile of expedient than Mar- 
 coni or Edison. Our dilemmas may not 
 be dilemmas to Him, and our impossibles 
 are quite possible to Him. I give Him 
 credit for being divine enough to manage 
 a vast proposition with credit to Himself 
 and with fairness to every creature. 
 
 The last objection I want to name is 
 the very citadel of materialism — "no 
 thought without phosphorus; no thinker 
 without a brain." Modern science de- 
 clares that the inner life of man is purely 
 a function of the gray matter of the brain. 
 The idiot is a human being with an ar- 
 rested brain development. The criminal 
 is commonly a mental degenerate. Every- 
 body knows the result of a violent blow 
 
46 The Question of 
 
 upon the skull. Psychology goes even so 
 far as to locate particular phases of men- 
 tal and emotional activity in special lobes 
 and convolutions. Evidently our sensu- 
 ous life is a function of the brain. Then 
 what warrant is there for supposing the 
 thinker to live on after the brain is ob- 
 viously gone ? If the brain is a harp and 
 life its music, how can we expect music 
 when the harp is hopelessly ruined? 
 
 The soul is not the music but the harper. 
 The brain is only a temporary instrument 
 of expression. Ole Bull was not de- 
 pendent upon a single violin. Violins 
 might all have been broken and he would 
 have built a new one on which to play. 
 Break the harp on which our souls play 
 here and they will not, therefore, have 
 forgotten how to play. I believe that God 
 has diviner harps than those within our 
 skulls ; more musical strings than our net- 
 work of nerves and organs ; and I believe 
 that when He takes the harper away from 
 this poor, oft-disordered instrument, it is 
 
An Early Philosopher 47 
 
 only as when a pupil is promoted from 
 the clavier to the piano — that he may find 
 expression for all the music he has learned. 
 But I have occupied the time in an- 
 swering objections, and there is only a 
 moment left for the more positive argu- 
 ments. Take the fact of man's longing 
 for immortality. An isolated yearning 
 may not be significant. That a baby cries 
 for the moon is poor argument that the 
 moon was intended for baby hands. But 
 if all babies cried for the moon, and con- 
 tinued to cry imperiously year after year, 
 the phenomenon would, at least, be sug- 
 gestive. And when we find men of every 
 age and rank, from fetich worshiper to 
 Victor Hugo, all looking and longing for 
 immortality, I believe the phenomenon 
 amounts to an argument of the strongest 
 kind. Modern science declares that appe- 
 tence and means of gratification are bal- 
 anced. We should hardly have eyes but 
 for an objective universe to behold. John 
 Fiske says that the cat has whiskers be- 
 
48 The Question of 
 
 cause there is an external world against 
 which to brush, and from which to be 
 defended. It is the mother instinct that 
 makes a girl love her dolly: motherhood 
 proves the veraciousness of the instinct. 
 So I believe that the untutored and un- 
 conquerable longing of mankind — wide as 
 the human race — is itself rational ground 
 for the assurance of an immortality to 
 meet the longing. 
 
 Or take another consideration. Unless 
 immortality be true, the creature has an 
 advantage over the Creator. We still 
 play Handel's music, but Handel has 
 passed from sight. Hamlet still lives by 
 the fire of Shakespeare's genius, but 
 Shakespeare himself is dead. *'Is 'In Me- 
 moriam' more than Tennyson? Is St. 
 Paul's Cathedral more than Sir Christo- 
 pher Wren, its architect? Is the leaf to 
 live while the tree dies ? ... If thoughts 
 live the thinker cannot die." Edison is 
 greater than any of his inventions. 
 Beecher is more immortal than any of his 
 
An Early Philosopher 49 
 
 sermons. Jesus is surely diviner than His 
 Gospel. 
 
 Then add to this the fact that a man is, 
 often, most able to live when he comes to 
 die. Hugo once said : ''You say that the 
 soul is nothing but the result of bodily 
 powers. Why, then, is my soul more 
 luminous when bodily powers begin to 
 fail? Winter is on my head, and eternal 
 summer is in my heart. I feel that I have 
 not said a thousandth part of what is in 
 me." Can a man honestly believe God 
 thus wastes material and skill? 
 
 Remember, also, the testimony of Jesus. 
 He said there was a life beyond the tomb. 
 He declared His own resurrection. Was 
 He mistaken ? or untrue ? Then you have 
 the paradox of the purest mind that ever 
 graced our earth — Himself deceived or 
 willfully deceiving. Ah, friends, by all 
 these voices are we driven back to change 
 Job's question into an affirmation, *Tf a 
 man die, he skall live again !" 
 
Ill 
 
 THE QUESTION OF AN ANCIENT 
 LAWYER 
 
"It is especially wicked to take the strong point 
 in ourselves and with it cut against the weak 
 point in our companions." — Beecher. 
 
 "Habits of honesty, habits of prayer, are mere 
 bondages unless they are helping somehow the 
 production of a free, honest, and prayerful char- 
 acter. The only object in bandaging and twisting 
 a man's crooked leg is that some day it may get 
 a free straightness into it which will make it keep 
 its truf shape when it is set free from bandages ; a 
 law of liberty instead of a law of constraint. If 
 that day is never coming, bandaging is mere wan- 
 ton cruelty. Better take the bandages off and let 
 it be crooked, if it is getting no inner straightness, 
 and will be crooked as soon as they are removed." 
 — Brooks. 
 
 "Ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, 
 and have omitted the weightier matters of the 
 law, judgment, mercy, and faith," — Jesus. 
 
'•WHICH IS 
 THE GREAT COMMANDMENT?^' 
 
 The lav;yer's question was, on the face 
 of it, a fair one. He merely asked, appar- 
 ently, the rule of goodness for his life. 
 Confused, it might seem, by the multi- 
 plicity of ecclesiastical requirements, he 
 begged a simplification of the code. He 
 heard that Jesus could answer all manner 
 of inquiries : might there not be some final 
 word for the present case? ''Which is the 
 great commandment in the law?" 
 
 There are questions which enfold with- 
 in themselves the agony of a heart, the 
 movement of a lifelong struggle. Such 
 was the question of the Trappist monk 
 who once had marched beneath Napo- 
 leon's eagles. Upon the Emperor's defeat 
 he had given himself to the monastic life 
 in the order of La Trappe. Not even 
 conversation was permitted him: perpet- 
 
54 The Question of 
 
 ual silence was added to the usual monas- 
 tic vows. Thus passed the dreary years. 
 But just before he died, he looked into the 
 face of the brother who attended him, 
 and pouring the pent-up fever of the years 
 into a single burning word, he whispered, 
 "The Emperor — what became of the 
 Emperor ?" 
 
 I have stood beside men after the 
 sirocco of their adversity had passed, 
 when the very soil beneath their feet 
 seemed parched and lifeless, and heard 
 them moan in an agony of loss, "What is 
 there left?" There is an experience in 
 which the earnest soul cries up out of its 
 doubts and fears toward Him who broods 
 over all continents and seas, "O, that I 
 knew where I might find Him!" I be- 
 lieve that such questions find God's heart. 
 But such was not this lawyer's question. 
 He was merely tempting Christ, and be- 
 cause his question is representative, it 
 may well repay our study. 
 
 Every student of the Bible must have 
 
An Ancient Lawyer 55 
 
 noticed that Jesus answered the real ques- 
 tions of men's hearts, rather than the 
 smart phrases of their Hps. He looked 
 into a questioner's eyes and read the mo- 
 tive behind the spoken word. Which ac- 
 counts for the seeming irrelevance of 
 certain of His replies: He was an- 
 swering the unspoken query. Take, for 
 example, the famous interview with Nic- 
 odemus. Nicodemus had, apparently, 
 only compliments to give. He had come 
 by night to this new Teacher. He was 
 ready for a tilt of words. He had a score 
 of questions already phrased for utter- 
 ance. But when Jesus spoke, it was to 
 give a personal, searching word. I do 
 not believe Nicodemus ever got the an- 
 swer he came ostensibly to secure, but he 
 turned away with an arrow stuck in his 
 soul. 
 
 Or take the case of the young ruler who 
 came inquiring what he should do that he 
 might ''inherit eternal life." For a mo- 
 ment Jesus apparently ignored the ques- 
 
56 The Question of 
 
 tion. "Why callest thou me good?" He 
 said; ''there is none good but God." And 
 then, by the kindest steps, He led the 
 young man back to the answer of the 
 real question which lay in the young 
 man's heart. 
 
 Or take the story of the penny. What 
 guile was in the Herodians' hearts as they 
 asked of Christ so blandly, "Is it lawful 
 to pay tribute to Caesar?" A careless an- 
 swer might have loaded our Christianity 
 with a weight it could never carry. Jesus 
 saw the trick, and asked the questioners 
 for a coin. Then, holding it before them 
 until He could make them dig the grave 
 of their own argument. He exposed their 
 wretched hypocrisy and falsehood. 
 
 Or, again, take that inimitable scene 
 beside the Temple. Before Jesus stood an 
 angry group and a shrinking "scarlet 
 woman." In the shame of her crime they 
 had apprehended her. With brutal hands 
 and many a curse they had dragged her 
 to Him. And now, with a heartless cita- 
 
An Ancient Lawyer 57 
 
 tion of the law, they looked up into the 
 Master's face, demanding, "What sayest 
 thou ?" For answer He stooped and wrote 
 upon the ground. To men as black as she, 
 to men who were themselves the cause of 
 shame such as hers that moment, to men 
 of every age, He had not a word to say 
 until, wearied with their asking, He drew 
 Himself up to a height that seemed to 
 reach the stars, and answered, "He that 
 is without sin among you, let him first cast 
 a stone at her." 
 
 So with the story of the lawyer. Jesus 
 did not answer this legal cross-examiner 
 directly. He refused to honor a dishonest 
 question. He who was all patience with 
 earnest seekers for the truth, however 
 blundering their method, and who took 
 up into His heart men's most audacious 
 queries, had only a rebuke for this an- 
 cient caviler. Not to forbid inquiry, but 
 to clarify men's minds ; not to discourage 
 one honest questioner but to make him 
 honest in his search; not to deny God's 
 
58 The Question of 
 
 face to any seeker, but rather to let that 
 face more luminously appear, Jesus de- 
 clined to say the thing this lawyer came 
 to hear. 
 
 Suppose Jesus had named the "great 
 commandment in the law." Then He 
 would have unnecessarily offended some 
 sincere hearers. None was so considerate 
 of men's traditions as He who, on occa- 
 sions, could show their weakness. To 
 disturb an article of faith is always peril- 
 ous. It is easier to take men's anatomies 
 apart and put them together again than 
 to dissect their creeds without demoraliz- 
 ing the owners. 
 
 Take the vivid picture in the third chap- 
 ter of Genesis. We call it the story of the 
 "fall." What caused the "fall?" Simply 
 the unsettling of a code. Adam and Eve 
 were forbidden to eat the fruit of a cer- 
 tain tree. Obedience, to them, meant one 
 particular thing. The law was summed 
 up in abstention from one indulgence. 
 They were safe, according to the story, so 
 
An Ancient Lawyer 59 
 
 long as they kept that unique command. 
 And the damage was done by a simple 
 undermining of their faith. When the 
 serpent had persuaded them that the com- 
 mandment was not fair, the tragedy began. 
 Banishment was the penalty for souls that 
 doubted the imperative of law. 
 
 It has been so ever since. We take 
 away no man's traditions except at the 
 gravest risk. Moses found that emanci- 
 pated Hebrews were far more troublesome 
 than Hebrews in Pharaoh's brickyards. 
 Luther was often chagrined by the ex- 
 travagance and antinomianism of early 
 Protestants. In grief and shame we 
 Americans have lately proved that an 
 anarchist in America is most dangerous 
 of all. The moment a soul begins to feel 
 a relaxing of the fetters, it wants to throw 
 off all constraint. 
 
 This is what is breaking the hearts of 
 many parents. Their children have come 
 to the age at which they doubt the 
 wisdom of certain traditions. For the 
 
60 The Question of 
 
 first few years a child believes anything 
 that is told him. He never doubts that 
 Santa Claus comes down the chimney. 
 He will hang his head while you look un- 
 der his tongue for evidences of falsehood. 
 He expects the bears to carry him away 
 if he fails of obedience. He looks up to 
 your commandment as the Jews did to the 
 smoking mount. He accepts the code you 
 teach. But the day comes in which he no 
 longer looks for presents down the fire- 
 place. He knows that falsehood leaves no 
 mark beneath the tongue. He no longer 
 fears the bears. Then please God he may 
 not drift from all the moorings of virtue ! 
 For every discarded tradition, a new law 
 must come into view. With every removal 
 of old foundation, a new stone must go 
 into place. Commandments upon the 
 ''tables of the heart" must substitute for 
 outward rules whose catholicity has gone. 
 Here also is the explanation of a cer- 
 tain chapter in the history of the Meth- 
 odist Episcopal Church. As everybody 
 
An Ancient Lawyer 61 
 
 knows, we have a Disciplinary paragraph 
 against amusements. What with the in- 
 judicious devotion of its friends and the 
 sneering comments of its foes, we have 
 not been allowed to forget it. It might 
 almost appear that the chief end and aim 
 of our denomination were to wave a red 
 flag at certain crossings of the way. Few 
 believe that the now celebrated section was 
 inspired, and thousands of loyal Meth- 
 odists wish devoutly it had never seen the 
 day. Then why not be rid of it at once? 
 Ah, "there's the rub." Simply because 
 a majority of our wisest legislators have 
 feared that such action would be misun- 
 derstood. A few years since, when the 
 subject was under discussion at the Gen- 
 eral Conference and the elision seemed 
 likely to be made, the newspapers came 
 out with the announcement that "Meth- 
 odists were about to introduce dancing 
 and card-playing as a means of building 
 up the Church." The fact is that any re- 
 treat from our present position is bound 
 
62 The Question of 
 
 to be misconstrued. The present genera- 
 tion is worldly enough without any direct 
 encouragement from the Church. All 
 that some young folks need is a chance to 
 get the bit between their teeth — they will 
 career ingloriously. Personally, I believe 
 the paragraph to be inoperative; and be- 
 cause inoperative, I would take it out of 
 the way. But I respect the opinion of 
 those churchmen who, in their devotion 
 to this rule, are simply making a stand 
 against the fearful undertow of modern 
 worldliness. 
 
 I see by the papers that the Raines law 
 is likely to be overhauled by this winter's 
 Legislature. God knows it ought to be. 
 It has worked outrageously. It has en- 
 larged the saloon into a house of infamy. 
 It has facilitated the traffic in human 
 souls. It has seen more violations than 
 any previous law. And yet the fact is 
 that the Raines law, with all its technical 
 shortcomings, stands theoretically against 
 the liquor business. It aimed, not to ex- 
 
An Ancient Lawyer 63 
 
 pand, but to curb. It renders certain 
 phases of the trade illegal. It meant to 
 make it harder for a young man to go 
 astray. It sought to guard our Sabbath. 
 And there will be a chorus of protest, from 
 all over the Empire State, at any legisla- 
 tion which looks like letting down the 
 bars. Better, say many, the influence of 
 a poor restrictive law than the absence of 
 all restraint. Letting down the bars is 
 perilous business. Most folks are only 
 grown-up children. 
 
 Or, take the case of modern skepticism. 
 Grant that Ingersoll was right; he did 
 more harm than a thousand preachers can 
 counteract. He encouraged men to loosen 
 their hold on the guard rails of religion. 
 He made them doubt the realities of faith. 
 He helped them sneer at the sanctions of 
 the law. He taught the right of a man 
 to dispose of his own life — and a wave of 
 suicide followed the wake of his lecture 
 craft. Ah, friends, you can never unsettle 
 a man's faith without the gravest peril. 
 
64 The Question of 
 
 Once loosen his grip and the "descent to 
 Avernus" is so "easy/' he may never 
 catch hold again. Better believe some 
 falsehood with the truth than be utterly 
 unbelieving — which is the vastest lie. 
 
 Here is the damage of a little book like 
 The Philistine. Elbert Hubbard writes 
 w^ith a pointed pen. He says some noble 
 things. He rakes the dead leaves fear- 
 lessly. But a "periodical of protest" which 
 would usher in a reign of light by an ex- 
 tinction of the tapers that have beaconed 
 humanity thus far; which holds up to 
 ridicule men's strongest ethical restraints, 
 and takes its fling at the veriest sanctities 
 of common life, is an unsafe guide of 
 thought. Iconoclasm is the meanest busi- 
 ness to which a mortal ever descends. 
 
 I have always been ashamed of that 
 chapter in Church history. Some one 
 says of Oliver Wendell Holmes that he 
 was an iconoclast who "took down men's 
 ideals so gently it seemed an act of wor- 
 ship." But such a hand may be as 
 
An Ancient Lawyer 65 
 
 heartless as any ruffian's, if it takes down 
 and puts nothing in the stead. This is 
 the meanness of infideHty. Let us make 
 sure, then, that we disturb no sanctity 
 until we can substitute a better. Let us 
 leave men their traditions unless we can 
 offer more holy shrines at which to 
 worship. 
 
 But there was a second reason for not 
 naming the "great commandment in the 
 law." Men would have used it unfairly 
 against each other. Suppose Jesus had 
 told the lawyer that the sixth command- 
 ment was the "great commandment in the 
 law:" the lawyer might have gone away 
 to grade every sin by that. He would 
 probably have excused himself for irrev- 
 erence and licentiousness and theft, on 
 the ground that he was keeping the "great 
 commandment." And he would have 
 condemned every citizen who failed to put 
 the sixth commandment first. Anyway, 
 that is just what mankind has always 
 tried to do — to scale all evil by some par- 
 
66 The Question of 
 
 ticular commandment which is rigorously 
 kept. 
 
 Here, for example, is a man who is 
 "long" on virtue and ''short" on kind- 
 ness. • His great commandment is integ- 
 rity of conduct. He can be depended 
 upon to keep his contracts. He would 
 never wittingly defraud a penny. He 
 holds every wanton thought in irons. He 
 guards his honor with unwinking eye. 
 But when you have said this much you 
 have said it all. He is an automaton — 
 and squeaks. He knows nothing about 
 the lubricant of life. He can see no good- 
 ness in the great throbbing heart which 
 sometimes makes a slip. How a man can 
 get drunk or prove unchaste, he cannot 
 understand. He has no gentleness for 
 Magdalens and wantons. 
 
 On the other hand is a man of tender 
 sympathies and brimming heart. He is 
 always running amuck of legal standards. 
 He gives away so much money that he 
 cannot meet his note when it falls due. 
 
An Ancient Lawyer 67 
 
 He is prey to a thousand temptations on 
 the side of his greatest strength. But 
 what does he ci.re so long as he keeps 
 open heart to all appeals. Let him be 
 generous-spirited, and it will not matter 
 even if he does take a glass too much or 
 break his domestic vows. His great com- 
 mandment is liberality. 
 
 These types stand continually apart, 
 misjudging and misjudged, each holding 
 his great commandment over the other's 
 head. Henry Ward Beecher said, in his 
 inimitable way: "Each one of us must 
 have a chimney through which to blow 
 his smoke. Every man has to have some- 
 thing to damn." With the Calvinist it 
 used to be the Arminian, and with the 
 Methodist the Baptist. With the Free- 
 trader it was the Protectionist, and with 
 the Expansionist the "Anti." With the 
 warm-blooded citizen it is the cold-blood, 
 and with the doctrinaire the man of a 
 practical turn. In the Church it has some- 
 times been the ritualist against the evan- 
 
68 The Question of 
 
 gelical, the ascetic against the pleasure 
 lover, the second blessing against the first. 
 Such is the spirit which has filled the 
 world with so great bitterness ; which has 
 sundered churches and parted friends. 
 
 That is a great scene in The Crisis 
 where the Colonel and his lifelong friend 
 agree to separate. A dogma of govern- 
 ment had come between them, and each 
 turned away with breaking heart, simply 
 because his "great commandment" was 
 not the other's. May God forgive us! 
 Who gave us the right to play pope? I 
 have more respect for that venerable one 
 across the sea than for the ten thousand 
 self-constituted popes here at home. Who 
 made any one of us a ''judge and a di- 
 vider" between brethren? Jesus refused 
 that function for Himself, and when a 
 lawyer came to ask it Jesus declined to 
 name the "great commandment." It has 
 never been named, and we thoroughly ex- 
 ceed our function when we attempt to tell 
 men what it is. 
 
An Ancient Lawyer 69 
 
 But I may mention a third unwisdom 
 of doing what the lawyer asked. Times 
 change, and the great excellence of one 
 generation is the pitfall of another. The 
 specific legislation of the present age may 
 not at all meet the requirements of the 
 next. The Methodist Discipline contains 
 a warning against slaveholding. It was a 
 solemn warning some fifty years ago, but 
 it is hardly worth the room it takes in the 
 Discipline of to-day. John Wesley rec- 
 ommended all his preachers to rise at four 
 o'clock in the morning that they might 
 spend the first hour of the day in medita- 
 tion and prayer. The suggestion was un- 
 doubtedly wise for an age in which folks 
 went to bed with the chickens. But had 
 Wesley lived in a day of Welsbach burn- 
 ers and incandescent lamps he might have 
 revised the scheme. 
 
 There was a day of riotous emotion- 
 alism in the Church: to-day we are in 
 greater danger of petrifaction. William 
 of Orange was a patron saint in his gen- 
 
70 The Question of 
 
 eration, but he would have to learn chas- 
 tity before he could expect the same 
 reverence to-day. Even a Cromwell would 
 need amendment in certain particulars if 
 he were to step down into our modern 
 parlors. New conditions demand new 
 laws. The guns of a hundred years ago 
 are obsolete to-day. Each succeeding age 
 must make its own weapons of defense. 
 
 But what was the reply made by Jesus 
 to the lawyer ? 'Thou shalt love the Lord 
 . . . and thy neighbor as thyself ." Refus- 
 ing to single out a special ''great com- 
 mandment," Jesus gave a general law 
 which forever includes all others. De- 
 clining to exalt one virtue at the expense 
 of others, He made the whole fabric sa- 
 cred. There was to be no boasting of 
 man against his neighbor, so far as Jesus 
 could prevent. All lawbreakers were pro- 
 nounced forever one — the miser and prod- 
 igal together, the sensualist and the 
 ascetic, the impure mind and the unkind 
 tongue. There was to be no digging for 
 
An Ancient Lawyer 71 
 
 motes in a neighbor's eye while beams are 
 in our own. 
 
 Let us remember, then, the nature of 
 the law which Christ enjoined: 'Thou 
 shalt love." A man may keep every com- 
 mandment literally and yet dishonor God. 
 There is room between the meshes of the 
 law for a soul to drop into hell. And the 
 transgressor of technical commandments 
 may be a very saint withal. You can no 
 more appraise the quality of manhood by 
 its outward conformity to rule, than you 
 can determine the grade of precious ore by 
 putting it on the scales. Discipleship is 
 not so much a matter of particular sub- 
 missions as of obedience to the spirit of 
 the law. Every life must be lived to God. 
 He is the final judge of every action. And 
 love is the only atmosphere in which a 
 soul can thrive. 
 
IV 
 
 THE QUESTION OF A TEMPTED 
 LEADER 
 
"Beware 
 Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, 
 Bear 't that the opposed may beware of thee. 
 Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice; 
 Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judg- 
 ment. 
 
 This above all : to thine own self be true, 
 And it must follow, as the night the day. 
 Thou can'st not then be false to any man." 
 
 — Shakespeare. 
 
 "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, 
 Or what's heaven for?" — Browning. 
 
 "Till we all come, in the unity of the faith, and 
 of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect 
 man, unto the measure of the stature of the full- 
 ness of Christ." — Paul. 
 
*'WHY SHOULD I COME DOWN?*' 
 
 The story of Nehemiah is alive with 
 dramatic situations and vivid pictures. 
 We get our first glimpse of the man at 
 the time of his reception of bad news con- 
 cerning his native city. Jerusalem lay 
 unwalled, defenseless. Most men would 
 have shed a few cheap tears and congrat- 
 ulated themselves upon their better for- 
 tune. But Nehemiah took his country- 
 men's sorrow upon his heart. He could 
 not forget Jerusalem. Court splendor at 
 Shushan served only to make a back- 
 ground for the distressing picture of his 
 native city. What was he, to be enjoying 
 luxury while his kinsmen were in want? 
 He carried the traces of his heartache 
 even into the presence of the king. Manly 
 grief is always moving. The king's heart 
 was touched, and after the recital of the 
 story a safe conduct to Jerusalem was 
 promised. 
 
 75 
 
76 The Question of 
 
 In due time, accordingly, Nehemiah ar- 
 rived at the holy city and quietly began 
 his work. Followers were plenty when 
 once a leader had stepped forth. The peo- 
 ple needed only a courageous soul to fire 
 their own. Thousands of hands were 
 ready for the task, and, almost before the 
 enemy realized that anything noteworthy 
 was happening, the walls were well under 
 way. Not long, however, could such a 
 work go unchallenged. The usual weap- 
 ons were brought into play. Scorn, ridi- 
 cule, open opposition were successively 
 applied. And when none of these availed 
 to stay the progress of the work, the 
 meanest weapon men ever use was 
 launched. By plausible agreement Nehe- 
 miah was to be led into a trap. Nehemiah 
 saw the danger and sent back a word that 
 must have burned Sanballat's ears : 'T am 
 doing a great work. . . . Why should 
 the work cease while I . . . come down ?" 
 
 And it is with the spirit and signifi- 
 cance of that reply that we are specially 
 
A Tempted Leader 77 
 
 concerned just now. A good many cen- 
 turies have gone since Nehemiah phrased 
 the words. The work to which he re- 
 ferred has long since crumbled into ruin. 
 Not even the heroic leadership of a man 
 like Nehemiah could indefinitely postpone 
 the doom of a time-serving and faithless 
 people. Jerusalem is to-day, what the an- 
 cient prophets declared it would be, a 
 "hissing" and a "heap." But the spirit 
 of such a man is the indefeasible property 
 of the world. It is forever passing into 
 other souls, becoming incarnate in other 
 lives. Great souls have an immortality 
 on earth. Plato influences more millions 
 to-day than he did units in his day. 
 Seneca and Epictetus are continually re- 
 produced. A thousand years from now 
 men will be fusing their manhood at the 
 altar fires of Washington and Lincoln. 
 So, after twenty-three hundred years, Ne- 
 hemiah appeals to and masters us ; a man 
 of courage, conviction, conquest; stand- 
 ing beside us in the interminable struggle 
 
78 The Question of 
 
 of the ages; pointing the path tO' power 
 and peace. The contest is the same to- 
 day it was two thousand years ago. All 
 loyalty and faith are one. And he who 
 triumphed over Sanballat and Geshem in 
 old Jerusalem may speak the heartening 
 word to us who battle still. 
 
 Three lessons, then, I learn from this 
 ancient question. First, that no cause, 
 however holy, escapes antagonism. On 
 the contrary, the higher and holier the end 
 to be attained, the fiercer the struggle to 
 its attainment. I suppose it was so in 
 Nehemiah's creed. He had come from 
 Shushan expecting to be maligned. He 
 knew that no stone would be laid except 
 in the face of open opposition. He count- 
 ed upon the fury of Sanballat and Tobiah. 
 He recognized beforehand what some of 
 us have to learn as a terrible surprise — 
 that no righteous work goes long un- 
 challenged. 
 
 John Fiske has an exquisite passage in 
 which he describes himself as looking out 
 
A Tempted Leader 79 
 
 over a daisied f.eld in early June, wooed 
 by its marvelous voices, hushed by its ten- 
 der spell, reverent before the ever new 
 miracle of life ; but just then remembering 
 the * 'robbery utterly shameless and mur- 
 der utterly cruel" by which all the beauty 
 had come to be. Such is the bewilderment 
 which overtakes many of us as we look 
 out across the world. In earth, in sea (in 
 sky, for aught we know), the same piti- 
 less struggle is going on. No man may 
 cultivate a flower or grace or public spirit, 
 unhindered. Antagonism is the law of 
 creation. 
 
 I remember my anger at my first dis- 
 covery of this law in my garden. I had 
 forgotten all about it in the delight of 
 being the possessor of a little half-acre 
 farm. I did all the things agricultural 
 my neighbors said I should do. I had 
 the soil well plowed and harrowed. I 
 planted and worked over it with all the 
 enthusiasm an amateur puts into his first 
 attempts. I counted beforehand the num- 
 
80 The Question of 
 
 ber of peas and strawberries and potatoes 
 I might expect. But when I found weeds 
 coming up ahead of the precious seed; 
 when there appeared to be one robin, at 
 least, for every strawberry, and a particu- 
 lar bug for every vine; when my apple 
 trees were festooned with worm nests — 
 a parasite and foe for every living thing 
 — my anger knew no bounds. I almost 
 doubted the wisdom of a Creator who 
 could permit such things to be. 
 
 Lift your vision another range and the 
 same aspect appears. Evolution is a 
 synonym for age-long, uninterrupted con- 
 flict. According to the doctrine of *'sur- 
 vival" every living thing has had to fight 
 for its life. The scientist explores a 
 world-wide Waterloo. 'Tn order that 
 some race of moths may attain a certain 
 fantastic contour and marking of their 
 wings untold thousands of moths are 
 doomed to perish prematurely." Fancy 
 what it has cost for the king of the forest 
 to gain his supremacy! 
 
A Tempted Leader 81 
 
 Modern medical discovery is increas- 
 ing the wonder that we Hve at all. What 
 with germs in water and microbes in the 
 air, with subtle poisons in the most com- 
 mon foods and insidious disease on every 
 hand, it is not so much marvel that multi- 
 tudes succumb as that anybody should 
 reach three-score years and ten. A man 
 might drive himself into hypochondria by 
 attempting to count the microscopic foes 
 he must meet and vanquish every day. 
 The ancient Scripture grows more express- 
 ive all the while: ''We are fearfully and 
 wonderfully made." Each human organ- 
 ism is a battleground on which the issues 
 of life and death are fought out by pitiless, 
 opposing armies. 
 
 History is merely another record of the 
 
 same universal combat. It shames me to 
 
 think that every great reform has had to 
 
 fight its way. You cannot name a single 
 
 movement for the dignifying of manhood 
 
 or the sweetening of human life but has 
 
 been stained with crimson. "The sorrows 
 6 
 
82 The Question of~ 
 
 of Messiah" are but perfect type of what 
 every holy leader may expect, in propor- 
 tion as he succeeds. Men talk sometimes 
 about the world's readiness for a sweep- 
 ing reform. The only readiness I find is 
 the readiness of some saviors to die for 
 it. I have turned the pages of my histo- 
 ries in hope of discovering an example of 
 different spirit in the reception of the 
 truth ; but this shameful fact appears, that 
 the world has never had anything better 
 than scorn and hate and torment for its 
 redeemers. Properly speaking, the world 
 did not want emancipation or Protestant- 
 ism or the Gospel of the Son of God. It 
 did not know what to do with Wilber- 
 force or Luther or Jesus but to antago- 
 nize them. It has nothing better for the 
 prophets of our day. He who sets out to 
 bless the world is likely to die of broken 
 heart. He who preaches civic purity or 
 social kindness starts up all the hounds of 
 hell. 
 
 Or bring the truth still nearer home. 
 
A Tempted Leader 83 
 
 The harder a soul tries to be true, the 
 finer the ideal before it, the sterner fight 
 it may expect. We are accustomed to 
 talk as if all a man needed were a strong 
 determination to be good : then he might 
 expect to glide into heaven by a sort of 
 law of celestial gravity. Quite the con- 
 trary is the common experience of man- 
 kind. "The way of the transgressor" is 
 not so obviously "hard" as the way of the 
 Christian disciple. Pilgrim, in Bunyan's 
 story, had a more provoking time than 
 does the ordinary sinner. It seems as if 
 every announcement of moral purpose 
 were a virtual invitation to fresh tempta- 
 tion. A man never realizes how many 
 forms the evil can assume until he under- 
 takes to walk with God. Church member- 
 ship, in so far as it stands for a clean heart 
 and self-renouncing manhood, involves 
 new battlefields. 
 
 A friend was telling me, the other day, 
 of his struggle to keep the faith. He had 
 been a drinking man, but had been con- 
 
84 The Question of 
 
 verted and joined the Church. The news 
 leaked out into the ears of his old cronies. 
 They teased and ridiculed and threatened, 
 and finally, when all other efforts proved 
 unavailing, they attempted to pour whis- 
 ky down his throat. All of which is 
 simply an exaggeration of the battle every 
 man has before him when he sets out to 
 keep himself "unspotted from the world." 
 To pull down some aspiring pilgrim is the 
 consummate joy of hell. We need look 
 for no easy road. Attainment must be 
 worth contest. A life of chastity costs 
 many a crucifixion of the flesh. Honesty 
 is never a garden path. Sobriety is often 
 won by pain. The brow which is most 
 like Jesus' must be proud to wear a crown 
 of thorns. We must "overcome" before 
 we may "sit down." 
 
 But this leads to the second implication 
 of Nehemiah's question: the conscious- 
 ness of high appointment which alone 
 keeps a man from "coming down." Ne- 
 hemiah was safe from the machinations 
 
A Tempted Leader 85 
 
 of his foes according to the strength of his 
 conviction that he was "doing a great 
 work." Had he not been worthily em- 
 ployed he might have made a fateful ap- 
 pointment in the plain. Men naturally 
 seek ease and pleasure. The soul that 
 preferentially selects a husk mattress and 
 hard conditions is commonly a freak. We 
 tend to move in lines of least resistance. 
 And whenever a man does contrariwise, 
 just in so far as he sets himself against 
 the tide, he needs strong justification for 
 his behavior. There is just one reasonable 
 argument to hold men and women to their 
 tasks — the tasks must be worth the doing. 
 Mothers sometimes talk to me about 
 their boys. The boys have time only for 
 fun and mischief. A ring at the door is a 
 signal to drop the book. Diligence is short- 
 lived and half-hearted at the best. Let 
 mother's back be turned and the boys are 
 off to play. And the boys will never do 
 materially better, they will continue to 
 drag on through school forms, until it 
 
86 The Question of 
 
 begins to dawn upon them that a lesson is 
 more important than a game of ball or a 
 saunter through the streets. When that 
 thought takes possession they will have a 
 sufficient answer to the loafers who come 
 knocking at their door: "I am doing a 
 great work. Why should ... I leave it 
 and come down?" 
 
 Men often complain to me that they 
 are not appreciated in their places of em- 
 ployment. They have no prospects, as 
 they say. I think I can put my finger 
 upon the reason. Few employees conceive 
 the importance of their part in the busi- 
 ness. Their heads are full of other things. 
 They can hardly drop work quickly 
 enough when occasion offers. They are 
 constantly planning how they may retain 
 their positions on a trifle less work. In 
 other words, missing the value of that 
 which they are set to do, they are always 
 ready to ''come down." Business firms 
 are looking for men of the Nehemiah 
 stripe — men so impressed with the dignity 
 
A Tempted Leader 87 
 
 of their work they will not think of ''com- 
 ing down." 
 
 Wherever we look the same truth holds 
 — the necessity of strong conviction. No 
 one is safe in the presence of temptation 
 save as he realizes the value of standing 
 firm. I notice that successful men, in pro- 
 portion as they have succeeded, in the de- 
 partments in which they have won suc- 
 cess, have been possessed of the idea that 
 the work would "cease" if they "came 
 down." An eminent business man once 
 said to me that he often had to choose be- 
 tween business and amusement ; that again 
 and again he had declined an invitation to 
 dinner or the theater, simply on the score 
 that he could not afford to take the time 
 and strength from business. 
 
 It was not arrogance that prompted 
 Ericsson to say: "Providence has given 
 me greater abilities for use, within certain 
 limits, than to any other mortal." It was 
 not arrogance : it was the sort of self-ap- 
 preciation a man must have in order to 
 
88 The Question of 
 
 succeed. No voice could call Ericsson 
 from his work so long as he held that con- 
 viction. He was doing too great a work 
 to ''come down." Horace Greeley de- 
 termined in early childhood to become a 
 printer. Books were his delight. He had 
 read the Bible through by the time he was 
 five years old. While he was still a child 
 he was urged by a neighboring blacksmith 
 to come and learn the trade. "No, I'm 
 going to be a printer," was the unequivo- 
 cal response. Nothing could swerve him 
 from that intention : no inducement was 
 great enough, no solicitation sufficiently 
 adroit to make him forget his life choice, 
 and he lived to become the greatest jour- 
 nalist of his day. He could not leave his 
 work to ''come down." 
 
 It is the testimony of his classmates 
 that Wendell Phillips had naturally a ter- 
 rific temper, but that after his conversion 
 they could never provoke him to an ex- 
 plosion. Sometimes they teased him piti- 
 lessly, but he seemed to be always guard- 
 
A Tempted Leader 89 
 
 ing a treasure ; holding a sacred fort. He 
 never, apparently, lost the vision of his 
 ideal. He had dedicated his life to God, 
 and he might have taken up into his lips 
 the vi^ords of Nehemiah : "I am doing a 
 great work. . . . Why should . . . I . . . 
 come down?" How Hke the thing that 
 Jesus said when one reproached Him: 
 ''Wist ye not that I must be about my 
 Father's business?" The world's meat 
 had no power over Him so long as He 
 could truthfully affirm : "My meat is to 
 do the will of Him that sent me." It was 
 His sufficient reply to those who chal- 
 lenged Him : 'T must work the works of 
 Him that sent me. As it was His perfect 
 consolation to be able to say in the shadow 
 of His cross : "I have finished the work 
 which Thou gavest me to do." 
 
 There is no other sane prescription for 
 Christian living. It is only a truism to 
 affirm the worldliness of the Church in 
 the present day. It is only too obvious 
 that most church folks care far more for 
 
90 The Question of 
 
 a theatrical performance than for a reli- 
 gious service; prefer a game of whist to 
 a prayer hour any time; would rather 
 dance together to the strains of the latest 
 two-step than ''sit together in heavenly 
 places in Christ Jesus." No ordinary pas- 
 tor expects his church members to neglect 
 any secular concern in order to attend to 
 the business of the Church. Let them de- 
 vote a small portion of their leisure time 
 to the temporalities of the kingdom and 
 the average pastor is satisfied. With mil- 
 lions of communicants, Church member- 
 ship is only a badge to distinguish them 
 once a week. Such is the modern trend. 
 We are bound to recognize and reckon 
 with it. There is but one rational solu- 
 tion. The reason our people prefer the 
 play to the prayer meeting is that the 
 play meets an admitted need. The reason 
 they shorten their prayers to lengthen 
 their card seasons is that prayer has be- 
 come merely a form. The reason our 
 young people would rather dance than 
 
A Tempted Leader 91 
 
 "wait upon the Lord" is that the spiritual 
 life has become so dim and misty an af- 
 fair. When men tell me they stay home 
 on Sunday to "get a rest," I understand 
 that it is because they rank bodily refresh- 
 ing so far above the renewing of the soul. 
 And the aspect will never change by 
 going into hysterics and writing damna- 
 tory clauses. The present day drift is the 
 legitimate outcome of the present day 
 creed. There will be no turning of the 
 tide except upon the basis of Nehemiah's 
 word. But if men can be brought to rate 
 the eternal above the temporal; if it ever 
 flashes upon them that a lean soul is worse 
 than an emaciated body; if they come to 
 see the relative values of the things of the 
 store and the Kingdom, there will be a 
 new adjustment, and from rededicated 
 hearts will be heard the ringing word : 
 'T am doing a great work. . . . Why 
 should the work cease while I . . . come 
 down?" A great conviction, only, can 
 keep men out of the plain. 
 
92 The Question of 
 
 But what was the work which Nehe- 
 miah considered so great? According to 
 the context it was constructive work. Had 
 he been merely going through motions or 
 marching on dress parade, he could scarce- 
 ly have affirmed, "I am doing a great 
 work." He was building a wall about the 
 beloved city, adding security to many 
 lives, accomplishing the active will of 
 God. Constructive work is always great. 
 This is the truth we must press home 
 upon our school children — that they are 
 building. This is the thought with which 
 we must fire the ambition of clerk and 
 scientist — that they are building. This 
 is the message we must bring to our flag- 
 ging Christian zeal — that we are building 
 — and that when other foundations are 
 destroyed our building shall remain. 
 
 The only work that ever abides is con- 
 structive. To be busy is not enough. 
 Even the ant leaves a hill behind him. 
 The difference between a honey bee and 
 a drone is honey. To be negatively Chris- 
 
A Tempted Leader 93 
 
 tian is not to be Christian at all. But to 
 be positively Christlike, to build some- 
 thing of loyalty into one's own soul, to 
 build helpfulness into the lives of others, 
 to build a ''good foundation against the 
 time to come that we may lay hold on 
 eternal life" is to get the best from two 
 worlds. And such is the kind of devotion 
 concerning which a man is able to say in 
 the presence of all enticement : "I am do- 
 ing a great work. . . . Why should . . . 
 I , . . come down?" 
 
V 
 
 THE QUESTION OF A FRIGHTENED 
 JAILER 
 
"When men ask me, 'What is salvation?' I 
 say, Emancipation from everything that holds 
 men down ; from the bondage of matter ; from the 
 rigor of undeveloped tendencies; from all the in- 
 felicities of the lower nature; . . . from low and 
 degraded forms of affection; from the vast realm 
 of inferiority into which men are born, . . . Sal- 
 vation means to me transformation. It means the 
 fire of the Holy Ghost burning out men's dross. 
 ... It is positive energetic strength. It is man- 
 hood in magnitude. It is the power of God in 
 the human soul. It is new life, new being." — 
 Beecher. 
 
 "Life is immortal; but the method and time of 
 evolution through which it progresses is in our 
 own hands. Each of us is bound to purify his 
 own soul as a temple ; to free it from egotism ; to 
 set before himself, with a religious sense of the 
 importance of the study, the problem of his own 
 life." — Mazzini. 
 
 "I am come that they might have life, and that 
 they might have it more abundantly." — Jesiis. 
 
'^WHAT 
 MUST I DO TO BE SAVED?'* 
 
 There is an attractive local color in the 
 question. It was asked under circum- 
 stances themselves dramatic, suggestive. 
 Paul and Silas had been roughly treated 
 the day before. Interfering with a nefa- 
 rious traffic, they had brought down upon 
 their own heads a storm of fury. The 
 most sensitive spot in a man's whole 
 make-up is, oftentimes, his purse. He will 
 bear any other interference more grace- 
 fully than interference with that. He will 
 submit to a vivisection of his creed and a 
 readjustment of his ideals before he will 
 allow a tampering with the business meth- 
 ods of his career. Thus, when Paul broke 
 up the unholy commerce of certain pan- 
 ders at Philippi, it was to be expected 
 that the losers would rebel. And rebel 
 they did in right heroic fashion. With 
 the regulation Tammany Hall appeal 
 against reformers, they stirred the city 
 
 Y 97 
 
98 The Question of 
 
 into an uproar, and, bearing down upon 
 the magistrates, secured a sentence of 
 lashes and confinement for Paul and Silas. 
 
 Night fell at length with Paul and 
 Silas in the common prison, their backs 
 all bruised and throbbing, their feet in- 
 cased in stocks, and a typical jailer to jeer 
 their plight and guard them from escape. 
 As the hours wore on the place grew quiet. 
 Then hymns and prayers broke on the 
 fetid air. Then an earthquake burst all 
 bolts and shook off all fetters. Then the 
 jailer himself appeared, with livid face 
 and quaking knees, withheld from turning 
 his sword against himself only by Paul's 
 reassuring word. Then the flickering 
 light ; the hurried search ; the strange con- 
 fession — and finally the question with 
 which we have to do : "What must I do to 
 be saved ?" 
 
 Just what the jailer meant it may not 
 be possible to say. I have sometimes fan- 
 cied he had more reference to salvation 
 from civil wrath than from the "wrath of 
 
A Frightened Jailer 99 
 
 the world to come." He can hardly have 
 mounted to any very lofty or spiritual 
 conceptions. Men do not fall asleep car- 
 nal and wake up at midnight, even with 
 the crash of earthquake in their ears, re- 
 fined and holy. 
 
 One great fault with the later study of 
 the Bible is the projection of finer mean- 
 ing which certain phrases have come to 
 enfold, back into the hearts of those who 
 spoke the phrases first. David sang, "The 
 heavens declare the glory of God;" but 
 even David could not guess the full sig- 
 nificance of his words to the reverent as- 
 tronomer of to-day. Solomon uttered a 
 terrific arraignment of the wine glass, 
 but even Solomon with all his wisdom 
 could not feel a resentment so deep and 
 divine as that which blazes in many 
 breasts at the havoc and horror of King 
 Alcohol to-day. Paul wrote of "redeem- 
 ing grace," and John that "God is love;" 
 but, surely, the ages have done little for 
 the enlargement of human hearts and 
 
100 The Question of 
 
 human conceptions if we mean no more 
 by those precious phrases than did the dis- 
 ciples of nineteen centuries ago. 
 
 So with the question of the jailer at 
 Philippi. Nobody knows what was in his 
 heart as he asked what he must do to be 
 saved. Perhaps the image of a "great 
 white throne" and an all-righteous Judge 
 had limned itself before his vision. Per- 
 haps he felt the throb of a power more 
 vital than that of the Roman eagles. He 
 saw for the first time, perhaps, a new 
 realm of privilege and duty. He had 
 caught a glimpse, it may be, of the eternal 
 purposes of human life. All this, and 
 more, may have been in his heart that 
 day. We cannot say. What interests us 
 particularly is this : that the jailer's ques- 
 tion is a universal one to-day; that it has 
 broken away from the localisms and pro- 
 vincialisms of its setting to become the 
 most vital interrogatory in the world; 
 that it means more in earnest souls and 
 on reverent lips to-day than it could by 
 
A Frightened Jailer 101 
 
 any possibility have meant at Philippi 
 nineteen centuries ago. 
 
 Talk about the burning issues of the 
 day ? I say there is not one of them which 
 appeals to so many people. I might hope 
 to interest some of you upon the question 
 of civic good government. Others of 
 you would be glad to discuss the social 
 evils of our time. With others, the ques- 
 tion is what to do with the American 
 saloon; with still others, the treatment of 
 the emancipated negro. Here one is ask- 
 ing the road to riches; there, one, the 
 path to power; yonder, a third, the way 
 to be kind. We are, in short, as variant 
 in our conceptions of the predominant is- 
 sue of life as we are in literary taste or 
 the color of our hair. But this single 
 question asks itself throughout all ages, 
 under every sky, in every human breast: 
 ''What must I do to be saved?" 
 
 Everyone reprobates the custom of 
 throwing children into the Ganges. But 
 does everyone stop to consider why the 
 
102 The Question of 
 
 Hindu mother commits such cruelty? 
 She is a mother. Motherhood must have 
 borne into her own heart somewhat of 
 that strongest affection of earth. Because 
 the child is hers, it must be horror to 
 watch it die. Under other circumstances 
 she would give her own life to save the 
 child's. Who knows the smothered ago- 
 nies beside the Ganges — Rachels lament- 
 ing their children "because they are not," 
 mothers tearing their babes from their 
 bosoms and turning homeward with ach- 
 ing hearts ? Of the terrible paradox there 
 is just one explanation; in the awful 
 crime there is just one exalting truth : 
 Those Hindu mothers are trying to an- 
 swer for themselves a question which lay 
 in their souls before their children were 
 born : ''What must I do to be saved?" 
 
 Travelers tell of the howling dervishes 
 of Arabia ; of the zealots of cave and jun- 
 gle; of fakirs who have held one arm 
 aloft until that member has withered to a 
 stump. These are hideous pictures for 
 
A Frightened Jailer 103 
 
 us to contemplate. Our better spirit re- 
 volts that such things should be. But we 
 are not to imagine them devoid of mean- 
 ing. They are weird, grotesque rephras- 
 ings of a question to which no human 
 heart is stranger : ''What must I do to be 
 saved?" 
 
 Every year there go swarming across 
 the hills and vales toward Mecca vast 
 hosts of pilgrims. Thousands of them 
 will never reach their destination. Other 
 thousands will die on the homeward jour- 
 ney. Yet on they crowd toward Mecca — 
 men dragging their weary bodies mile 
 after mile to wash them in a filthy stream 
 at length, women giving up the sight of 
 home and friends for a glimpse of the 
 Prophet's tomb. A senseless spectacle, we 
 call it. Not so. It is intelligible to any 
 thoughtful student. Any man ought to 
 be able to spell it out in the language of 
 his own experience. Those Mohamme- 
 dans are only obedient to the same im- 
 pulse which drives us hither and yon— 
 
104 The Question of 
 
 that ceaseless, burning question: ''What 
 must I do to be saved?" 
 
 There are a good many explanations, 
 doubtless, of the power of the Roman 
 Catholic Church. With amazing tenacity- 
 she holds her converts. She exacts an 
 obedience which makes us both proud and 
 ashamed. What sums are poured into her 
 coffers every year, while we Protestants 
 go begging, often, to raise enough money 
 to meet the pastor's claim and pay the 
 sexton ! What church edifices she builds 
 out of the earnings of day laborers and 
 domestics, while we, with all our riches, 
 must frequently be content with barns and 
 sheds for public worship! It takes floods 
 and earthquakes to keep the good Catholic 
 from Mass, whereas a cloud in the west 
 no bigger than a man's hand is large 
 enough to keep most Protestants indoors 
 on Sunday. In spite of shocks and Refor- 
 mations and imperial decrees, the Church 
 of Rome wields more power to-day than 
 all the rest of our denominations put to- 
 
A Frightened Jailer 105 
 
 gather. What does it signify? Simply 
 that the Romish Church, more perfectly 
 than any other ecclesiastical establishment 
 on earth, knows how to meet that ageless 
 question of human wayfarers : "What 
 must I do to be saved ?" 
 
 But I want to bring this question still 
 closer home. Never mind, just now, about 
 the Hindus or Mohammedans or Roman 
 Catholics. What about the rest of us? 
 The very same fact holds good. Con- 
 sciously or unconsciously, we spend a 
 good part of our time trying to find out 
 how to be saved. I do not now refer to 
 our relation to the Church, but to the un- 
 churched experiences of life. 
 
 In nearly every city there is a fund 
 called the ''conscience fund." Only re- 
 cently I have seen statistics as to its mag- 
 nitude in Greater New York. Dimes, 
 dollars, sometimes a hundred, occasionally 
 a thousand, come into the city treasury 
 anonymously. From people who failed 
 to pay their taxes — and other thieves; 
 
106 The Question of 
 
 from men who had cheated their friends 
 and could not be content to keep the 
 money ; from perpetrators of unnamed and 
 perhaps unsuspected crimes, as a sort of 
 belated penance, the fund keeps growing. 
 The key is very simple. These unknown 
 givers have been asking themselves the 
 question of the Philippian jailer. They 
 are afraid to live and afraid to die with 
 blood money in their possession. They 
 have not the courage — or the opportunity, 
 perhaps — to restore it openly, so they 
 make shifts with conscience by getting 
 rid of the money as I have said. 
 
 It would be interesting to know the 
 motive springs behind the great benefices 
 and charities of Christendom. Not so 
 much in love for others, as in secret hope 
 of redeeming one's own mistakes, have 
 many of our hospitals and asylums been 
 endowed. I know men who are as surely 
 expecting to buy their way into the King- 
 dom with alms and kindness as the Cath- 
 olic by his penance or the ancient Roman 
 
A Frightened Jailer 107 
 
 with a penny in his dead hand. How 
 many times men have hoped to answer sat- 
 isfactorily the jailer's question with a ton 
 of coal or a Thanksgiving dinner to the 
 poor ! Most benevolence is a sort of pen- 
 ance — with a weather eye on Heaven. 
 And we should sever, I believe, the great 
 nerve of modern benefaction were we to 
 dissociate in men's minds their gracious 
 deeds from their future welfare. 
 
 One of our novelists tells of a sinner 
 who wore a rope around his waist to re- 
 mind him of his wrong. Why to remind 
 him, except that some day he might ex- 
 piate the crime and redeem his own life 
 from destruction? 
 
 Why is it that so many husbands bring 
 home a box of candy or slip an extra 
 allowance into her hand after being un- 
 usually crabbed to the wife? Because they 
 want to wipe out, thereby, the stain of 
 their meanness. ''What shall a man do 
 to be saved" except he make the sort of 
 reparation near at hand? 
 
108 The Question of 
 
 The saddest pilgrims to Woodlawn 
 Cemetery are those who go there, not to 
 remember, but to forget. By devotion 
 they hope to discover the cup of Lethe. In 
 frequent pilgrimages they are looking for 
 forgiveness. What former ugliness of 
 spirit they hope to tread out by oft-re- 
 turning feet! What shame of conduct 
 they long to efface in tears and penitence ! 
 They dare not look up into the face of 
 Heaven until their dreary expiation is 
 complete. 
 
 Or, take the routine and denials of the 
 Christian life. Few would join the 
 Church except to find the pathway to sal- 
 vation. Few would devote their time and 
 dollars to Church activity save as means 
 of establishing their hope. Few would 
 turn to Jesus did He not proclaim Himself 
 the door to holiness and Heaven. It is 
 because He meets the imperious question 
 of hearts of every age, that the world is 
 strewn with His disciples. Thus in 
 heathen rite and religious pilgrimage and 
 
A Frightened Jailer 109 
 
 Christian routine, by tears and agonies 
 and prayers, that ancient question is re- 
 phrased in every land, by countless ques- 
 tioners: ''What must I do to be saved?" 
 
 But what is it to be ''saved?" I wish 
 we could forget our conventional concep- 
 tions. Words become soaked with dog- 
 matic meaning. Religious phrases grow 
 as stark and stale as mummies. Time was 
 when such words and phrases were alive. 
 They walked and talked with men. The 
 trouble is that they have been killed and 
 stufifed by theologians, until most men 
 would as soon think of turning to a mu- 
 seum for song and fragrance as to these 
 specimens of taxidermist's art. 
 
 What is it to be "saved ?" Holland was 
 saved when the waters of the sea were 
 driven back. A ship is saved when the 
 reefs and shoals are past. A house is saved 
 by the streams that put out its flame, or 
 the beams that shore up its walls. A tree 
 is saved by driving the vampires out of 
 its branches and giving it sun and shower. 
 
110 The Question of 
 
 A living organism is saved by restoring 
 the equilibrium of nature, and by prompt- 
 ing the vital organs to do their work. A 
 prodigal is saved by the memory of his 
 mother's face, or by some sweet reminder 
 from home. But a soul is saved, accord- 
 ing to our codes, by a sort of forensic, 
 factitious salvation. 
 
 What havoc we have made of a beauti- 
 ful and vital process ! I remember a dear 
 good brother who never closed his testi- 
 mony in prayer meeting without thanking 
 God for the ^ 'great plan of salvation." 
 Theologians are forever talking about a 
 redemptive ''scheme." Doubtless there is 
 a scheme. God works by plan, in earth 
 and sea and sky. But I believe God's plan 
 is infinitely larger and more vital than we 
 have ever guessed. He has a plan for the 
 stars, but they move in endless variety 
 and pattern. He has a plan for the flow- 
 ers, yet science assures us that no two 
 leaves are identical in fashion. He has a 
 plan for the birds and the seasons, but 
 
A Frightened Jailer 111 
 
 what two birds or seasons were ever quite 
 the same? Perfect flexibiUty, perfect 
 freedom, perfect vitahty is in His plan, 
 until we come to talk of His method of 
 saving men. There we tie Him to a mode, 
 and cripple Him with logic. How many 
 honest souls have been driven away by our 
 mechanical Noah's Ark idea. How^ many 
 aspirations have been choked by making 
 God a Martinet of method. Jesus gave 
 men bread; we have put them off with a 
 ''plan," a ''scheme." 
 
 I cannot see why the saving of a man 
 is so very different in process from the 
 saving of a ship or tree or human body. 
 You recall the day when the Paris lay on 
 the famous Manacles, a threatened wreck. 
 Men are like that. They have missed 
 their reckoning. They have gone ashore. 
 If they lie stranded long enough, they will 
 pound themselves to pieces in the storm. 
 And salvation will mean to them what it 
 meant to the beautiful Paris — an effective 
 push back into native element. One of 
 
112 The Question of 
 
 the sights which always angers me is that 
 of a withering tree. So many of them 
 stood stripped and haggard this summer 
 past. Men are Hke that, too. Among the 
 boughs worms have built their nests. The 
 roots of life are cramped for room. It 
 takes only a few such seasons to ruin a 
 tree or a man. Then any power which 
 banishes the worms and gives the roots a 
 chance to grow is, to that extent, salva- 
 tion. There are times, too, when a heart 
 needs just the treatment accorded a hu- 
 man body. It is tired and sick and dis- 
 tressed. Not dogma, not conventional 
 prescriptions, but freshened life, is what 
 it needs. And that, when it comes, is 
 salvation. 
 
 What is it to be saved? Go back to 
 Palestine and watch the Master. He saved 
 a ruler by entering his house. He saved 
 a Magdalen by reaching forth a forgiving 
 hand. He saved Thomas by bearing with 
 his infirmities and doubts. He saved 
 Peter by being so much kinder than Peter 
 
A Frightened Jailer 113 
 
 deserved. He saved Paul by meeting him 
 upon the Damascus road and opening the 
 persecutor's eyes to see himself. Ah, here 
 is the lesson we are after. Wherever im- 
 mortal spirits are refreshed and sent back 
 to daily duty, wherever minds are healed 
 of their distempers and wantonness, 
 wherever prodigals are recalled from a 
 life of exile and shame to the paths of rec- 
 titude and truth, there, in the measure of 
 its completeness, is salvation. 
 
 But I have not forgotten what was said 
 to the Philippian jailer in answer to his 
 question. ''Believe on the Lord Jesus 
 Christ, and thou shalt be saved." That 
 is the orthodox, eternal answer. But how 
 is one man saved by believing on another? 
 Not, by any means, in the accepted the- 
 ologic sense. There is no such thing as 
 ''imputed righteousness" (even if Paul 
 did talk about it). I do not believe that 
 Jesus' merit was ever yet transferred to 
 the account of another soul. Merit and 
 
 demerit are as untransferable as person- 
 
 8 
 
114 The Question of 
 
 ality. No man is saved by believing that 
 Jesus was good, any more than he is saved 
 by beheving that Napoleon v^as great and 
 Nero a scoundrel. A man may take his 
 brother's place in prison ; he may even die 
 for him, but he cannot transfer to him his 
 own virtue. Had Jesus died a thousand 
 deaths. He could not make us decent apart 
 from our own desires and cooperation. 
 
 Then what is it to "believe unto salva- 
 tion?" I think the answer is not hard to 
 find. Raphael believed in Michael Angelo 
 until the latter's genius bore fruit in the 
 former's brush. Melanchthon believed in 
 Luther until he became fired with the 
 great Reformer's spirit. Boswell believed 
 in Johnson and became his apologist. The 
 army believed in Grant and reproduced 
 his courage. A boy believes in his father 
 and learns to walk with the same gait, 
 and to imitate his vices. And when a 
 man believes in Jesus he simply waits so 
 eagerly before that life, so reverently bows 
 before its masteries and .genius that his 
 
A Frightened Jailer 115 
 
 own life takes on the tone and quality of 
 Jesus'. He has ''believed unto salva- 
 tion," as we say. He is ''transformed by 
 the renewing of his mind." In the fire 
 of his admiration, "old things have passed 
 away." 
 
 There may be various salvations. But 
 the one we need to make us fit to live, fit 
 to serve, and fit to inherit the Kingdom of 
 Heaven, is the one we learn just herei — 
 Christlikeness. 
 
vr 
 
 THE QUESTION OF A CURIOUS 
 DISCIPLE 
 
"Do the duty which lies nearest thee, which thou 
 knowest to be a duty. Thy second duty will al- 
 ready have become clearer." — Carlylc. 
 
 "You have a disagreeable duty to do at twelve 
 o'clock. Do not blacken nine, and ten, and eleven, 
 and all between, with the color of twelve." — 
 MacDonald. 
 
 "Whatever shall appear to be God's will, that 
 will I do." — Lincoln. 
 
 "Ye are my friends if j^e do whatsoever I com- 
 mand you." — Jesus. 
 
*'LORD, 
 WHAT SHALL THIS MAN DO?*' 
 
 Like a shot out of a gun came Peter's 
 question. The episode immediately pre- 
 ceding had been full of stress and tension 
 for him. Three times had Peter been 
 asked to affirm his love for the Man he 
 had denied. Three times had a beautiful 
 obligation been laid upon him. Then, 
 outlined against the morning haze there 
 appeared, under the Master's sketching, 
 the image of a cross with an aged form 
 upon it — the coronation of Peter's service. 
 And following all a plain and unequivocal 
 command; the very same that had sum- 
 moned Peter from his nets three years 
 before, spoken now with a new solemnity 
 of meaning. 
 
 Such might have been the end of the 
 chapter, had John been further away. 
 Peter was not in a talkative mood. It is 
 noteworthy that this most loquacious of 
 the disciples had not uttered a word 
 
 119 
 
120 The Question of 
 
 throughout the interview except in answer 
 to Jesus' questions. For once, at least, he 
 seemed crushed into silence by the weight 
 of awakened thought. He was shut into 
 a sacred oratory, to cry aloud from which 
 would be profane. He had not a misgiv- 
 ing or doubt or protest. God's will was 
 the one thing he wanted henceforth to do, 
 though it conducted to a cross. But turn- 
 ing, perhaps mechanically, his glance fell 
 upon a fellow disciple, and instantly the 
 spell was broken. For a moment again 
 Peter was his characteristic self; inquisi- 
 tive, domineering, tactless. For a mo- 
 ment he forgot all else in his curiosity 
 concerning John, and broke out in this 
 eager question: ''Lord, . . . what shall 
 this man do?" 
 
 I have referred already to the apparent 
 artlessness and spontaneity of Peter's 
 question. It is just the sort of question 
 that most of us would probably have 
 asked, for most of us, like Peter, are curi- 
 osity mongers. There is in human nature 
 
A Curious Disciple 121 
 
 no sharper appetite than that of inquis- 
 itiveness. Multitudes would be deprived 
 of their regular vocation, were there a law 
 against inquiry. The quickest way to se- 
 cure an audience is by appeal to the in- 
 stinct of curiosity. I have seen sick cheeks 
 flush and dull eyes kindle and physical 
 languor disappear, while the invalid can- 
 vassed some other patient's prospects, or 
 pried into an item of current gossip. Peter 
 was of that turn of mind, and, immediate- 
 ly that he had heard his own destiny an- 
 nounced, he begged a word concerning 
 the man whose face just then appeared. 
 It is conceivable, of course, that John had 
 overheard the conversation, or at least 
 that Peter imagined so. Possibly the 
 words were a new and vigorous sprout 
 from an aforetime rivalry. Or, perchance, 
 Peter was only sparring for time. At any 
 rate, his old impetuousness got the as- 
 cendant, and he blurted out, "Lord, . . . 
 what shall this man do?" 
 
 Whatever else the words were as Peter 
 
122 The Question of 
 
 uttered them, they were a piece of gross 
 presumption. Peter had just been mag- 
 nificently forgiven. He had been treated 
 with tenderness beyond his wildest hope. 
 He had been reinstated in his forfeited po- 
 sition. And, as if to assure him that all 
 cowardice was of the past, Jesus had 
 sketched out a scene of perfect heroism, a 
 splendid testimony, which should crown 
 the denier's life. It would seem that even 
 Peter must have respected the sanctity 
 of such a season. But the old impetuous- 
 ness got loose, and Peter became pre- 
 sumptuous. 
 
 How often the "goodness of God" 
 fails to lead to anything better than pre- 
 sumption. Men trample on kindness when 
 they would stand in terror of the law. 
 They use forbearance to strain up to some 
 fresh affront. The other day a dilapidated 
 son of Hagar called at the parsonage for 
 alms. I suppose that if I had shut the 
 door in his face he would have gone away 
 quiescent if not respectful. But some- 
 
A Curious Disciple 123 
 
 thing about his extremity appealed to me, 
 and I met his prayer with help. I gave 
 him what he asked, and more. I added a 
 coat and a shirt. And when I watched 
 for a glad look in his eyes, some grate- 
 ful acknowledgment of a kindness so 
 far beyond his plea, this, would you 
 believe it, is what the ingrate said: 
 "Say, mister, haven't you an overcoat to 
 spare?" 
 
 Housewives assert that the only way to 
 keep domestics docile is to require the 
 strictest routine — no extra days, no spe- 
 cial privileges. And I fear such is too 
 often the fact. Kindness must trickle 
 through a fine sieve, else it may carry a 
 good servant off her feet. Instead of 
 being prompted to greater diligence and 
 care, she accepts the thoughtfulness as an 
 opening to increasing demands. Some 
 friends of mine were telling me recently 
 that they used to let the cook off every 
 Sunday before noon, and pay her train 
 fare to New York, and only insist that 
 
124 The Question of 
 
 she I'eturn to wash the supper dishes. It 
 was only a httle while, however, before 
 she resented all restraint and informed 
 her mistress she would come home when 
 she got ready. 
 
 I am sure I have opened a matter which 
 perplexes many a parent. What a beauti- 
 ful world it would be if no son ever took 
 advantage of his mother's gentleness, or 
 outraged his father's confidence. I see 
 parents bankrupting their very souls to 
 conquer their children by love. Yet here 
 is the brutal fact : rarely does a son or 
 daughter grow best under that regime. 
 Long-suffering is, too often, the quality 
 which gets itself imposed upon. Forgive- 
 ness is abused because it is so free. Love 
 is often worked like a town pump, by 
 careless, unworthy hands. Tenderness 
 makes more dolts than heroes, sometimes. 
 The climax of many a mother's sacrificial 
 life is to be turned out of doors by an un- 
 grateful child. I do but voice the bitter 
 experience of countless heart-broken par- 
 
A Curious Disciple 125 
 
 ents when I affirm that love can be too 
 kind. 
 
 Our commonwealth is smarting beneath 
 the same chagrin. Every generous soul 
 rejoices in the beautiful lenities, the splen- 
 did privileges which constitute our Amer- 
 ican dower. It is glorious to know that 
 under no other government beneath the 
 skies are liberties so rich and opportuni- 
 ties so choice. But what patriot is he who 
 does not also know that our national char- 
 ity is provocative of rankest evils ? Social 
 anarchy, municipal misgovernment, un- 
 conscionable trusts are abuses which grow 
 fastest under the benignant rule of 
 democracy. 
 
 So I get back to the truth of Peter's 
 presumption. Had Jesus dealt with him 
 according to his desert, Peter might never 
 have ventured the impertinence of the 
 text. Had he been compelled to sue for 
 forgiveness, like Henry before the Palace 
 at Canossa, he might have prized it when 
 it came. Because Jesus forgave him, even 
 
126 The Question of 
 
 before he asked, and readmitted him to 
 fellowship, and promised him a certain 
 preeminence of service, Peter used the 
 added grace to do a thing he otherwise 
 might not have dared — to challenge the 
 destiny of John. This is the disposition 
 which often makes us ashamed. Instead 
 of leading us to repentance ''the goodness 
 of God leadeth" to all manner of pre- 
 sumption and violent abandon. Anti- 
 nomianism is the name of a famous chap- 
 ter in church history, in which men used 
 the grace of God to defile themselves with 
 sin. Antinomianism in every age is one 
 result of the boundless compassion of God. 
 Irregularities men would scarcely practice 
 were the Lord to "mark iniquity ;" impie- 
 ties they would not venture if every im- 
 piety were punished ; insolence they would 
 never offer to a pitiless and dreadful 
 heaven, they continually reveal because 
 their God is good. 
 
 Consider certain matters of church dis- 
 cipline. It is the shameful fact that many 
 
A Curious Disciple 127 
 
 church members would be more dutiful 
 and earnest under the old regime. If the 
 ''terrors of the Lord" were still thunder- 
 ously announced, if the pit were kept well 
 in view, if the ''straitness" of the gate and 
 the "narrowness" of the way were still 
 proclaimed, we should be faithful in a 
 hundred particulars, where now we are 
 reckless or slack. We have not been able 
 to bear releasement from our fears. Men 
 get intoxicated with God's goodness. Be- 
 cause he requires so little they offer Him 
 still less. "Where is mother's share?" 
 was asked of a little child who was divid- 
 ing an apple between her friends. "O, 
 mother don't want any," was the reply; 
 ^'mother always goes without." Forgetful 
 of herself, forgotten by her child, such is 
 many a mother's portion. Thus men leave 
 God out of their calculations. His part 
 of their time is the part that must not be 
 claimed. His demand upon their money 
 must not be rigorously pressed. He must 
 stand aside for pleasure, greed, and every- 
 
128 The Question of 
 
 thing of self — so reason men ; and let the 
 tenderest demand of all be most heart- 
 lessly ignored. 
 
 But there was more than presumption 
 in Peter's question ; or, rather, his effront- 
 ery took definite shape. For one thing, he 
 dared to adduce the case of John. You 
 might think Peter would have been con- 
 tent to "work out his own salvation with 
 fear and trembling." And indeed such 
 might have been the case, had not John 
 just then appeared. But the moment Peter 
 caught a glimpse of John he began to in- 
 stitute comparisons. The path which a 
 moment since he would have been glad to 
 tread was less pleasing now unless John 
 must tread it, too. And the cross at the 
 end of the journey needed fresh justifica- 
 tion unless John also was to have a cross. 
 Notwithstanding the lessons and impulses 
 of the hour, Peter stood irresolute and 
 shrinking until John's portion should also 
 be announced. 
 
 What a type of humanity is Peter! 
 
A Curious Disciple 129 
 
 How many beautiful hours have been 
 ruined by comparison and contrast! So 
 few are willing to live their own life and 
 do their own part without reference to 
 others. I have visited homes which might 
 have been royalized, but for the chagrin 
 that some neighbor's home was finer. It 
 is not that lace curtains and velvet car- 
 pets are conservators of bliss, but that 
 scrim and ingrain are, by contrast, so 
 pitifully cheap. There are men who 
 could live like princes on fifteen dollars 
 a week, could they only forget the fellows 
 who spend twenty-five or a hundred a 
 week. I have watched a schoolgirl com- 
 paring her dress with her seatmate's, 
 while discontent spread like a plague upon 
 her face. Half the bitterness of life grows 
 from the prolific root of jealousy. Earth's 
 holiest experiences may be poisoned by a 
 single drop of envy. No heart, no home 
 is safe, after covetousness has entered. 
 
 The trouble is men do not trust them- 
 selves or their allotment. Medicine reck- 
 9 
 
130 The Question of 
 
 ons with the matter of idiosyncrasy. It 
 recognizes that "one man's meat is an- 
 other man's poison." That fact, indeed, 
 makes one of the chief perplexities of the 
 profession. If a given drug had invaria- 
 ble effects the practice of medicine would 
 be comparatively simple. Because opium 
 kills one and cures another, because other 
 remedies sometimes allay and sometimes 
 aggravate the symptoms, the practitioner 
 must be forever on his guard. The best 
 physician is he who makes a study of each 
 case. 
 
 Yet when we come to God we expect 
 Him to dose everyone alike. Forgetful 
 that men differ in their needs, heedless 
 that what appeals to one makes no im- 
 pression upon his neighbor, ignoring the 
 manifest dissimilarities of trait and train- 
 ing, we somehow expect God to serve all 
 men alike. Peter forgot that there was 
 not another like himself in God's vast uni- 
 verse. John was a very different type of 
 man. The blow that would heat one would 
 
A Curious Disciple 131 
 
 crush the other. The hand that could 
 mold one would pass over the other with- 
 out result. Emerson says, "Insist on 
 yourself ; never imitate. That which each 
 can do best, only his Maker can teach him. 
 Every great soul is a unique." And so is 
 every humble soul, so far as aptitudes and 
 training. God shows the wonder of His 
 care by refusing to treat men as a crowd. 
 Every child of Heaven is the special study 
 of the Teacher. No man can change his 
 appointment except by doing violence to 
 the consummate plan of God. To accept 
 one's task without bitterness or censure; 
 to be glad in all the special privileges and 
 prerogatives of John; to face the future 
 with confidence that the "Judge of all the 
 earth" will "do right," is the part of an 
 earnest spirit. 
 
 But there is one thing more about Pe- 
 ter's question we need to notice. It was 
 an unwarranted attempt to ferret out the 
 mysteries of the future. Peter was ready 
 to use his Master as sort of fortune-teller. 
 
132 The Question of 
 
 Dissatisfied with the ghmpse into his own 
 destiny and glory, he wanted to see the 
 horoscope of John: "Lord, . . . what 
 shall this man do?" How inveterate the 
 impulse is. It might be interesting, if not 
 edifying, to know how many of us have 
 consulted palmists and readers of the 
 future. Any glib-tongued rascal, en- 
 dowed with a fair amount of common 
 sense, can be sure of an income if he will 
 simply announce himself a soothsayer, 
 and prey upon men's folly. I have some- 
 times wondered how clairvoyants and 
 fortune-tellers can afford to advertise in 
 high-rate papers. The answer is simple. 
 They can afford it because they have so 
 many high-grade patrons. They appeal 
 to an almost ineradicable instinct, the 
 heart's lusting to know the future. 
 
 How many people are forever looking 
 for a sign! It is said that the great Dr. 
 Johnson was a hopeless victim of this 
 madness. He always put a certain foot 
 foremost over the threshold : if the other 
 
A Curious Disciple 133 
 
 foot got ahead he went back to his room 
 and started downstairs again. They say 
 that the house of Hapsburg is haunted by 
 a raven. Every disaster to the family, 
 according to the tradition, has been fore- 
 tokened by the appearance of the bird. 
 There are few neighborhoods in w^hich a 
 dog may howl at night without sending 
 shudders through every hearer. How quick 
 most hosts would be to send for an extra 
 guest to make fourteen at table. So avid- 
 ious of glimpses of the future are we all. 
 The Bible has never been worse abused, 
 I suppose, than by students who tried to 
 write future histories from its pages. 
 Now and again some exegete comes for- 
 ward with a new interpretation of Daniel's 
 prophecy, or of the Revelation of St. John. 
 Among my earliest recollections is that of 
 certain citizens, closing up their terrestrial 
 affairs, and waiting on the housetops for 
 the Lord "to descend from Heaven with a 
 shout !" — all based upon a hint in Daniel's 
 prophetic weeks. The Bible was never in- 
 
134 The Question of 
 
 tended as a field glass to spy out the secrets 
 of the future. I sometimes wonder that, 
 with all the Adventist and Millenarian 
 chronology which has been read into its 
 pages, the Bible is not as discredited to- 
 day as an exploded work on astronomy 
 or physics. Not one page of Scripture 
 was ever given to glut our curiosity con- 
 cerning events not yet at hand. The 
 Bible is a book for human life. It opens 
 Heaven just far enough to light up the 
 path for pilgrims. It has nothing but 
 confusion and consternation for those who 
 approach it as they would a soothsayer's 
 tent. God has chosen to keep His secrets 
 to himself, and He has no confidants em- 
 powered to impart those secrets for fees 
 to cover expenses. 
 
 Even Jesus barely drew aside the cur- 
 tain. He talked of kindness and purity 
 and truth. He revealed the sort of man- 
 hood which makes Heaven above or be- 
 low. He set human life in the blaze of an 
 open sky. But He said next to nothing 
 
A Curious Disciple 135 
 
 to satisfy men's lustings concerning the 
 future. He warned the disciples against 
 those very persons who should come with 
 a message of exclusive information. He 
 refused to tell names and dates. And 
 when Peter broke into a characteristic 
 question concerning the future years, 
 Jesus answered sternly : "What is that to 
 thee? Follow thou Me." 
 
 This, then, is the golden word, obedi- 
 ence. The first thing that Jesus ever said 
 to Peter was, "Follow Me." And Peter 
 left his nets and followed Him. The last 
 commandment that Jesus gave to Peter, 
 so far as the record shows, was still, "Fol- 
 low Me." And Peter forsook his inquis- 
 itiveness and paltering and followed Jesus. 
 That is the test of life. The triumphs of 
 our age have not been the outcome of 
 mooning, but of obedience. Obedience 
 to the law of color gave the world an 
 "Angelus." Obedience to the law of 
 steam gave the world an engine. Obedi- 
 ence to the law of electricity has given us 
 
136 A Curious Disciple 
 
 the telephone and trolley. Obedience to 
 the law of God has given the world all its 
 saints and all its heroes. The trouble is, 
 we put something before obedience. Like 
 Peter, we are in search of information: 
 mongers of mystery. And like Peter, if 
 we ever find the path to eminence and 
 power it will prove to be the pathway of 
 obedience. Heaven itself is simply the 
 final attainment of the perfectly obedient 
 life. Instead of asking, "Lord, . . . 
 what shall this man do?" we need to ask 
 that other burning question : "Lord, what 
 wilt thou have 7ne to do ?" 
 
VII 
 
 THE QUESTION OF OLD-FASHIONED 
 THEOLOGY 
 
"A world without a contingency or an agony 
 could have no hero and no saint, and enable no 
 Son of Man to discover that he was the Son of 
 God. . . . There is no epic of the certainties; and 
 no lyric without the surprise of sorrow and the 
 sigh of fear. Whatever touches and ennobles us 
 in the lives and in the voices of the past is a di- 
 vine birth from human doubt and pain. Let then 
 the shadows lie, and the perspective of the light 
 still deepen beyond our view ; else, while we walk 
 together, our hearts will never burn within us 
 as we go ; and the darkness, as it falls, will deliver 
 us into no hand that is Divine." — Martineaii. 
 
 " 'Tis the Master who holds the chisel, and day by 
 
 day 
 He is chipping whatever environs the form away; 
 That under His skillful cutting the form may be 
 Wrought silently out to beauty, of such degree 
 Of faultless and full perfection, that angel eyes 
 Shall gaze on the finished product with new sur- 
 prise — 
 That even His matchless patience could grave 
 
 His own 
 Features upon such fractured and stubborn stone." 
 
 — Anon. 
 
 "For it became Him for whom are all things, 
 and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons 
 unto glory, to make the Captain of their salva- 
 tion perfect through sufferings." — Paul. 
 
''WHO DID SIN, 
 
 THIS MAN OR HIS PARENTS, 
 
 THAT HJi WAS BORN BLIND?'' 
 
 But for the presence of Jesus on the 
 scene this ancient question might never 
 have been asked. BUnd men were no 
 rarity in the streets of Jerusalem. Ac- 
 cording to eminent authority, bhndness 
 was a common affliction in Eastern coun-. 
 tries, as indeed is still the case. And the 
 regular procedure with such unfortunates 
 was to station them along the highways, 
 or at the Temple approaches, where their 
 staring, unseeing eyes might become rev- 
 enue producers. From the frequency of 
 New Testament allusion to the blind, it 
 would appear that the disciples could 
 hardly turn into any thoroughfare with- 
 out running upon some such candidate 
 for public pity. So there could scarcely 
 have been anything exceptional in the 
 present instance. Had not their Master 
 paused, the disciples might have hurried 
 
 139 
 
140 The Question of 
 
 past without token of interest. But 
 Jesus' interest awakened theirs, and they 
 stood for a moment looking down into 
 eyes which, though vacant, must have 
 felt the critical stare. 
 
 I suppose they were nettled, too, by 
 the obtrusiveness of suffering upon their 
 Master. They never did quite under- 
 stand why He should be so liable to con- 
 stant interruption. They warmly resent- 
 ed men's interference with His seasons of 
 toil and rest. Remember, they would 
 have sent the little children away without 
 a chance to feel His kind arms; and the 
 multitude without the miraculous bread; 
 and the sick woman without her cure, but 
 for Jesus' restraining word. So here: 
 they were impatient with inopportune de- 
 lay. And their question was in part their 
 protest: ''Master, who did sin, this man 
 or his parents, that he was born blind ?" 
 
 How that spirit repeats itself. We 
 have not yet learned a whole-hearted ten- 
 derness toward human suffering. We 
 
Old-fashioned Theology 141 
 
 have improved somewhat, no doubt. We 
 have learned a good many fine lessons of 
 mutual dependence and help. Our hos- 
 pitals, asylums, and infirmaries of many 
 sorts register our advance from a day in 
 which weakness and incapacity were the 
 objects of nameless crimes. Modern sen- 
 timent would not tolerate for a moment 
 the overbearing and brutishness of former 
 ages. Hospital nurses will work all night 
 trying to keep the breath of life in some 
 tiny foundling whose own mother has 
 left it to die, and which, if it lives, can 
 only become a public ward. The execu- 
 tion of a human hound like Czolgosz must 
 not be attended with any vindictive cruel- 
 ty or horrors. You recall the howl of 
 protest which went up during the progress 
 of the Spanish-American war at the use 
 of explosive bullets. Notwithstanding 
 all which growth of altruistic sentiment 
 throughout the world, it is still hard for 
 the individual to be considerate toward 
 all phases of suffering. Men are still too 
 
142 The Question of 
 
 much Hke the herd in which, when one is 
 down, all the rest turn to and gore him. 
 There is an almost irresistible impulse to 
 kick a dead dog. I have seen a lad take a 
 kitten and dash its life out against a wall 
 — not from any particular malice toward 
 the kitten, but in a general impatience 
 with, and cruelty toward, the weak and 
 helpless. Why did the Duke of Guise 
 stamp his heel into the lifeless features of 
 Admiral Coligny ? As a mark of revenge, 
 in part; but partly, also, from the deeply 
 ingrained instinct to crush the fallen. 
 
 I used to wonder how Torquemada's 
 agents could perform their butchers' 
 work ; how the Parisian mob could dip its 
 pikes in the blood of its aforetime leaders ; 
 how the witch burners of Salem could 
 steel themselves to so fearful a crime. 
 Further acquaintance with human hearts 
 has taken away my wonder. I now know 
 that human nature runs that way; that 
 we take a sort of satanic delight in the 
 discomfiture of others; that we can 
 
Old-fashioned Theology 143 
 
 hardly hold ourselves back from open 
 participation in the process which grinds 
 the beauty out of another soul. 
 
 So I am not particularly surprised at 
 the conduct of these disciples. Perhaps, 
 if they had expressed the full counsel of 
 their hearts, they would have smitten the 
 blind man instead of asking this question 
 concerning him. They were men; and 
 being men, were impatient with suffering. 
 To be annoyed in the presence of human 
 infirmity and blemish is characteristic of 
 the sex. A man stands and scolds, while 
 a woman hurries for the aconite or cam- 
 phor bottle. ''Where did you get that 
 cold?'* or, "What folly have you been up 
 to now?" is a man's first volley in a sick 
 room. How many women will drag 
 themselves downstairs to greet the home- 
 coming husband, rather than see the re- 
 proach in his eyes or hear the injured tone 
 in his voice. Even little children learn to 
 choke down their sobs and conceal their 
 ailments in the presence of the august 
 
144 The Question of 
 
 masters of the home. Most men are worse 
 than a bull in a china shop when they at- 
 tempt to be useful in a sick room. They 
 jar the bed, and spill the medicine, and 
 upset the chairs, primarily because they 
 lack real sympathy with pain. 
 
 So with our attitude toward weakness 
 generally. That spectacle which evokes 
 a woman's best, often shows up a man 
 at his worst. It is the feminine prin- 
 ciple which has borne fruit in the gentler 
 spirit of our age. It is the woman instinct 
 which has founded the hospitals and built 
 the asylums for the blind and crippled. It 
 is the mother heart which has room for all 
 manner of weakness and incompetence. 
 Real sympathy is distinctively feminine, 
 and it is only as we men come to acquire 
 it painfully that we excel in those quali- 
 ties which are the special glory of our 
 age — long-suffering, forgiveness, charity. 
 
 I do not wonder that the ancient mas- 
 ters wrought so much of the feminine 
 face into their portraitures of Christ. His 
 
Old-fashioned Theology 145 
 
 tenderness was such as they had never 
 seen except in their holiest women — their 
 mothers and their wives. A gentle-man 
 was almost a contradiction in terms. They 
 could not imagine one except with a 
 woman's face, and so, as they bent over 
 their canvas, unconsciously the lines of 
 femininity and motherhood came out in 
 their pictures of the Christ. 
 
 Out. then, on these heathenish notions 
 of manhood I The truest manhood is 
 neither coarse nor harsh. He who most 
 nearly reproduces Christ combines all 
 the strength of man with the grace and 
 delicacy of woman. 
 
 But there is somewhat further in this 
 ancient question concerning the blind man. 
 If the disciples were nettled by the pres- 
 ence of suffering, they were also disposed 
 to philosophize about it. It was not so 
 important that a blind man needed sight 
 as that here was a case to discuss. And 
 they could have sat down within earshot 
 
 of the sufferer, and argued his case in all 
 10 
 
146 The Question of 
 
 its bearings — except that Jesus rebuked 
 their cruelty and meanness. There are 
 times when only a shallow soul will pre- 
 sume to argue. In the presence of an- 
 other's agony the kind heart declines to 
 fall to asking questions. 
 
 Job's famous friends were poor enough, 
 God knows. They have always stood for 
 the sort of comforters a man can do well 
 without. They tempted him to all man- 
 ner of impiety and madness. But the fact 
 is that they were by so much more con- 
 siderate than some of our modern com- 
 forters, that for seven days and seven 
 nights they sat with him in the presence 
 of his calamity, without uttering a word. 
 So far as the record shows, not a question 
 passed between them. They had nothing 
 to say, and they discreetly held their 
 peace. Whatever Job may have thought 
 of them in the latter stages of his afflic- 
 tion, he could but be grateful for those 
 first few days of silence. Imagine three 
 of us, sitting in the presence of another's 
 
Old-fashioned Theology 147 
 
 great misfortune, and not discussing the 
 merits of the case. Why, bless your 
 heart ! we would have it all gone over and 
 settled to the satisfaction of the commu- 
 nity before twenty-four hours had passed. 
 I was much impressed with an item in 
 the account of the New York tunnel hor- 
 ror. It seems that, just as we were be- 
 ginning to vent our wrath upon the 
 engine - driver, an inquisitorial process 
 began at the New York Station House. 
 With merciless insistence the officials 
 bore down upon the man. A hundred 
 questions were leveled at his head, when 
 District Attorney Jerome stepped in and 
 said, "Not now; not now; guilty or in- 
 nocent, he cannot be racked with ques- 
 tions to-day ! There will be time enough, 
 later, to get at the facts in the case. 
 Meanwhile the man must be let alone. 
 Whatever his fault, his condition must 
 be respected." And so the dogs were 
 called off. Mr. Jerome may distinguish 
 himself in many noble ways, but I doubt 
 
148 The Question of 
 
 if he will ever be credited with a finer act 
 than that. It was the prompting of a 
 gracious soul in the moment of another 
 soul's eclipse. 
 
 How much philanthropic work is 
 spoiled by over-inquisitiveness. It may 
 be interesting to know a beneficiary's 
 past; it may even be necessary that one 
 should know it; but in a majority of in- 
 stances we do well to keep all questions 
 in the background. Respect the sanctity 
 of another soul — even though its pos- 
 sessor has appealed to you for bread or 
 sympathy. For the present moment it 
 does not matter whether improvidence, or 
 drink, or bestiality was primarily respon- 
 sible for his present degradation and 
 shame. He is down ; that is plain enough. 
 Let him forget it a moment if he can. Do 
 not make him choke with undeserved 
 bread. Never let him feel that your kind- 
 ness is an admission price to the lurid 
 picture gallery of his career. Let him 
 revel in the "rarity of Christian charity," 
 
Old-fashioned Theology 149 
 
 without being made painfully aware of 
 the string that works it. Jesus never used 
 a probe for spectacular or pedagogic pur- 
 poses. He went only far enough to find 
 the sore : then he poured in oil and wine. 
 He gave bread and comfort and pardon 
 without playing inquisitor at all. 
 
 I fancy that hosts of people have been 
 driven away from our denominational 
 altars by endless catechising. It is so 
 easy to fall into that error, and so hard to 
 recognize that one has fallen into it at 
 all. To every earnest life, and to lives 
 that otherwise seem heedless, there come 
 moments of deep disgust, of consciousness 
 of sin, in which the soul longs to draw 
 down over itself the ample mantle of 
 heaven's charity. They may come — these 
 convicting moments — under the pressure 
 of some great sorrow, in the reactions of 
 business life, at Christian altars. But 
 however they come, and where, they are 
 the work of the Spirit Divine, and must 
 not be trifled with. Nothing is more ob- 
 
150 The Question of 
 
 trusive at such an hour than religious 
 chatter. Prying into the process of a 
 heart's repentance is the worst impiety. 
 I have knelt at a Methodist altar, full of 
 contrition for my wrongs, and had all of 
 the contrition knocked out of me by the 
 questions of some well-intentioned, but 
 meddlesome, old lady. I have marked the 
 annoyance on the faces of earnest seekers 
 as some glib examiner came crowding in. 
 ''Let her alone," said Jesus to the ready 
 critics of Mary's spikenard. They were 
 figuring up the cost. They were an- 
 alyzing the motive. They wanted to know 
 why she had not done something else with 
 the money. And they might have driven 
 her away from Christ but for His cor- 
 rective word: "Let her alone . . . she 
 hath done what she could . . . she hath 
 wrought a beautiful work upon me . . . 
 let her alone!" Such is the warning to 
 apply to our ill-timed zeal. To respect 
 the sanctity of a man's audience with 
 God ; to stand back with uncovered brow 
 
Old-fashioned Theology 151 
 
 in the presence o^ another's confession; 
 to keep irreverent hands off the starting 
 of new life, is a prime lesson for Chris- 
 tian workers. 
 
 But what was the question which these 
 disciples asked? We have been studying 
 external characteristics: what was the 
 question itself ? The disciples stood front- 
 ing the problem of pain. Everywhere 
 they turned they met it. On the pallets 
 of the sick, in all poverty and want, traced 
 in human agony and tears, they found it. 
 Shut their eyes and ears to the misery 
 around, there was still the ache in their 
 own bosoms, the arrow in their own flesh. 
 Why need anyone be sick or sad ? If this 
 be God's world, and He be good, why 
 should His children go limping and moan- 
 ing with pain ? In particular ( for the dis- 
 ciples were gazing now into a pair of 
 sightless eyes), why should "this man" 
 be "born blind?" 
 
 But you observe they put something 
 else into their question. They did not 
 
152 The Question of 
 
 ask, merely, why a man should be born 
 blind. They wanted to know whose sin 
 had made him blind. ''Master, who did 
 siUj this man or his parents, that he was 
 born blind ?" That question put an added 
 sting into the fact of pain. Pain was held 
 to be evidence of sin. Steeped in the the- 
 ology of Eastern thought, these ancients 
 could niot look upon suffering without 
 seeming to behold the Divine displeasure. 
 By the horrors of the suffering they meas- 
 ured the enormity of the antecedent sin. 
 How cruel theology has often been. It 
 has supplied the thorn instead of taking 
 the thorn away. In the days of the In- 
 quisition they would take a man from the 
 rack to poke needles into his eyes ; or carry 
 his bleeding form to some fresh torture. 
 If they refreshed him with food and wine 
 it was only that they might prolong his 
 agonies a trifle further. Theology has 
 oftentimes done the same: thrust an ad- 
 ditional needle into flesh already quiver- 
 ing with pain; given to broken limbs an 
 
Old-fashioned Theology 153 
 
 extra tormenting twist. In no depart- 
 ment of human knowledge is a ''little 
 learning" so dangerous a thing as in the- 
 ology. The world has been ''damned" a 
 good many times "to save a syllogism." 
 May God forgive us that we have so often 
 stood over human disappointments and 
 agony, like those poor comforters of old, 
 asking: "Who did sin?" 
 
 Isn't it bad enough to be sick without 
 being incessantly reminded that nobody 
 else is to blame? There is doubtless a 
 vital connection between mince pie and 
 dyspepsia; between nervous strain and 
 nervous breakdown. This is part of the 
 law of the universe. And a famous writer 
 affirms that the day will eventually come 
 in which it will be a disgrace to be sick. 
 That day, however, has not yet dawned, 
 and meantime, to assume that all present 
 physical aches and pains are the results 
 of particular sins, is one of the hugest 
 and crudest falsehoods ever conceived by 
 the mind of man. 
 
154 The Question of 
 
 Have you thought why it is so hard to 
 be patient with other men's miseries? 
 Partly because we cannot get clear of the 
 impression that their wretchedness is a 
 judgment of God. The Pharisees drew 
 aside their skirts from the mendicant and 
 leper, lest they be defiled by his sin. They 
 would have nothing to do with a soul un- 
 der the displeasure of God. Alas! that 
 after nineteen centuries there should be 
 so many Pharisees left ! The spirit which 
 prompts one to draw back from creatures 
 of poverty, and makes him cross the street 
 to avoid an object of pity, is Pharisaism 
 unalloyed. 
 
 So with respect to the crushing be- 
 reavements of human life. I have stood 
 beside parents who had lost their child, 
 and have watched the billows go over 
 them ; but the coldest, most staggering 
 wave of all was the thought that bereave- 
 ment meant punishment. "My God, did 
 I sin like this?" cried a father out of the 
 depth of his distress. "Do you think God 
 
Old-fashioned Theology 155 
 
 took away my baby because I loved it so 
 well?" moaned a broken-hearted mother. 
 May heaven forgive us that we have ever 
 tried to comfort the comfortless with a 
 wicked barb like that. Yet such is pre- 
 cisely the method I have known certain 
 Christians to adopt, and all in the name 
 of Him who said to the disciples of old: 
 ''Neither hath this man sinned nor his 
 parents ; but that the works of God should 
 be made manifest in Him." 
 
 Ah! friends, that latter phrase ought 
 to take the sting out of part of our suffer- 
 ing. I do not understand Jesus to deny 
 the retributions of life. On the contrary, 
 no one ever taught retribution in such 
 terms as He used. But He refused to 
 call all suffering penal. He pointed to a 
 realm in which pain is the precious min- 
 ister of finest loveliness. And then He 
 died of a broken heart, upon a Roman 
 gibbet, to prove that the most sinless life 
 can suffer most of all. I do not assume 
 to unravel the mystery of pain. Not even 
 
156 Old-fashioned Theology 
 
 Jesus ventured to do that. I do not af- 
 firm whether God sends pain, or per- 
 mits pain, or what. I only affirm that He 
 can use pain, as the potter uses fire to 
 bring out the hues of his porcelain; as 
 the mother uses a fall or a cut to enforce 
 an important lesson upon her child. And 
 I affirm further, as a truism of life, that 
 ''it is good" for most of us that we "have 
 been afflicted," else we should never have 
 borne the fairer fruits of the Kingdom of 
 God. 
 
VIII 
 
 THE QUESTION OF A NIGHT 
 VISITOR 
 
"No man can learn what he has not preparation 
 for learning, however near to his eyes is the ob- 
 ject. A chemist may tell his most precious se- 
 crets to a carpenter, and he shall be never the 
 wiser. Our eyes are holden that we cannot see 
 things that stare us in the face, until the hour 
 arrives that the mind is ripened." — Emerson. 
 
 "The difference between the Spiritual man and 
 the Natural i is not a difference of develop- 
 ment, but of generation. It is a distinction of 
 quality, not quantity. A man cannot rise by any 
 natural development from 'morality touched by 
 emotion' to 'morality touched by Life.' " — Drum- 
 mo nd. 
 
 "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and 
 that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." — Paul. 
 
^HOW CAN A MAN BE BORN 
 WHEN HE IS OLD?'' 
 
 What brought Nicodemus to Jesus for 
 this immortal interview, the record fails 
 to say. Curiosity, perhaps. Men have 
 gone around the world merely to gratify 
 that impulse. It needs only that a word 
 be suppressed or a mystery announced, 
 and certain natures are aflame with a zeal 
 which knows no quenching. Or, argu- 
 mentativeness may have supplied the mo- 
 mentum for Nicodemus' visit. There are 
 men who would rather debate than eat. 
 They will discuss anything from the new- 
 est wrinkle in fashion to the question of 
 immortality, not so much from personal 
 interest in the theme as from sheer delight 
 in disputation. So it may have been with 
 this ancient Pharisee : he may have come 
 to Jesus only for the chance to unsheathe 
 his debating sword. Or, again, it may 
 have been the furtive glimpse of a new, 
 
 159 
 
160 The Question of 
 
 bright realm that brought him. It is one 
 evidence of the essential royalty of human 
 nature that men can never again be quite 
 satisfied with mediocrity or meanness in 
 the presence of a higher grace. They are 
 challenged, rebuked, upheaved by the ex- 
 cellence which outruns their present at- 
 tainment. No man can be the same after 
 one earnest look into the kingdom of 
 possibility. And countless souls will 
 follow that lead as miners follow a vein 
 of ore. Such may have been the signifi- 
 cance of Nicodemus' visit — a hunger 
 for spiritual food; the quest of a finer 
 strength. 
 
 But whichever of these conceivable 
 emotions was the dominant one in Nico- 
 demus' case, he came to Jesus. And our 
 Scripture is the expression of his astonish- 
 ment at the answer which Jesus gave to 
 his first inquiry: ^'How can a man be 
 born when he is old ?" 
 
 It has been generally assumed that Nic- 
 odemus dropped his quest ; that he turned 
 
A Night Visitor 161 
 
 away dismayed, if not disgusted. And 
 there are multitudes of men who would 
 heartily approve such conduct. I doubt 
 if there is a doctrine of Jesus which mod- 
 ern men so thoroughl} disbelieve as that 
 which staggered Nicodemus nineteen cen- 
 turies ago. I know just how men roast it 
 over the slow fires of their sarcasm. I 
 have watched them score it with the keen- 
 est infidel blades. I have seen it pilloried 
 and hung in effigy before an admiring 
 crowd. To all of which there is just this 
 to say — and I believe it can be substan- 
 tiated with vital truth — that of all the 
 Master's doctrines none is more self-evi- 
 dent and philosophical than this. There 
 was nothing in it to bewilder Nicodemus 
 or any man of us. Jesus touched the bed- 
 rock of common-sense when He insisted 
 that there is no way into His kingdom 
 except through "a second birth." 
 
 The trouble is we have been frightened 
 by phrases. We have missed great truth 
 
 in metaphor. We have let the theologians 
 11 
 
162 The Question of 
 
 cheat us out of the most beautiful doc- 
 trines of human Hfe. We have mistaken 
 shell for kernel. Are Jesus' utterances 
 deep? Their depth, like that of a crys- 
 talline lake, serves only to bring the bot- 
 tom near. He was the least arbitrary 
 teacher the world has ever known. He did 
 not manufacture; He announced. He 
 told men the things that are eternally 
 true. He built no exclusive walls. He 
 merely pointed out essential limitations. 
 Did He bid the rich man to sell all that 
 he had and give to the poor? it was be- 
 cause no soul can ever be divinely enriched 
 except through a process of disgorgement. 
 Did He assure the Pharisees that publi- 
 cans and harlots should go into the king- 
 dom ahead of them? it was not that He 
 was founding a kingdom of reprobates, 
 but that self-righteousness is forever 
 worse than forgiven sin. So, did He an- 
 nounce to Nicodemus, "Ye must be born 
 again?" it was simply His restatement of 
 the truth that no realm is ever open except 
 
A Night Visitor 163 
 
 to those who have been transformed into 
 its spirit. 
 
 Let me show this if I can. We have an 
 Americanizing process called naturaliza- 
 tion. At the end of a certain number of 
 years the foreigner is admitted to citizen- 
 ship. Doubtless, in the interest of practi- 
 cal politics, the term is often shortened. 
 Thousands come to the expiration of the 
 term as little qualified to take the oath 
 and to receive the ballot as when they 
 first landed upon our shores. But that is 
 not the question for discussion here and 
 now. I am only calling attention to the 
 fact that no immigrant is admitted to our 
 civic life except at the end of a period 
 supposed to make him capable of citizen- 
 ship. He must gain some acquaintance 
 with the principles upon which our gov- 
 ernment is founded, some induction into 
 the mysteries of our democratic faith, 
 some just appreciation of our sanctities 
 and honors, before we count him worthy 
 of becoming a citizen. He must be endued 
 
164 The Question of 
 
 with American spirit before he can sub- 
 scribe himself ''American." In other 
 words, he must be "born the second time," 
 of the genius of democracy, before he can 
 see the kingdom of American privilege 
 and freedom. 
 
 Whatever else the stories of James 
 Lane Allen may reveal, they certainly are 
 a revelation of their author's love of 
 nature. He has that rare insight into 
 the life of wood and field which enables 
 a man to find poetry, significance, com- 
 panionship everywhere. To him the birds 
 were teachers ; the hemp-fields were open 
 books. But admire Mr. Allen's genius as 
 we may, delight in his ecstasy over a 
 flower or a landscape, I am sure that very 
 few of us would have made so much as 
 he did of a Kentucky redbird or the rustle 
 of a tree. Simply because these things 
 are aesthetically discerned. Eyes and ears 
 alone do not qualify a man to be an Agas- 
 siz or Audubon. One might travel from 
 world's end to world's end and find no 
 
A Night Visitor 165 
 
 shrines at which to worship except in 
 chapel or cathedral. It requires a certain 
 delicacy of feeling, a rare finesse of spirit 
 to make one a real worshiper of God in 
 nature. To use the phraseology of Scrip- 
 ture, a man must be "born the second 
 time" into sympathy with nature before 
 he can see the kingdom of birds and 
 flowers. 
 
 When Ole Bull invited his boyhood 
 friend Ericsson to come and hear him play 
 he received only a stern rebuff. What use 
 had the man of monitors and turrets for 
 the master's violin? The crash of ham- 
 mer and scream of lathe were the only 
 music for him. It is impossible to stir 
 certain natures with the power of poetry. 
 As my grandmother used to say of them, 
 they would "rather hear it thunder." Ten- 
 nyson and Browning are worse than tor- 
 ment to them. There are sightseers who 
 race through an art gallery as if they were 
 going to catch a train, with no eye for 
 anything save a dash of striking color, or 
 
166 The Question of 
 
 a specimen of unchaste art. The trouble 
 is they have no faculty for the apprecia- 
 tion of pictures. They are creatures of 
 the market-place, masters of finance and 
 shipping. And we come back to Jesus' 
 word to phrase the explanation. A 
 man must be ''born the second time," 
 of the artistic spirit, before he can see 
 the kingdom of music or poetry or 
 painting. 
 
 It is the record of all reformatory move- 
 ments that their leaders, for a long time, 
 stood alone. The penalty of being a pio- 
 neer is loneliness. Huss had few sympa- 
 thizers while he lived. Wilberforce was 
 cordially hated for his interference with 
 the slave trade. The purifier of municipal 
 politics will often wonder where the lov- 
 ers of righteousness have fled. We must 
 catch the spirit which carries such men 
 beyond the margin of commercial pru- 
 dence, before we can properly appraise 
 their greatness. A man must be ''born 
 the second time," into love for his fellow- 
 
A Night Visitor 167 
 
 beings, before he can see the kingdom of 
 human brotherhood. 
 
 I do not beHeve that any childless 
 woman ever guessed the intensity and 
 self-abandon of a mother's love. There 
 are, to be sure, simulations of maternal 
 kindness. There is a distinctive tender- 
 ness which belongs to woman. I have 
 watched the nurses in children's wards of 
 hospitals until, in my admiration for 
 their zeal, it seemed that no mother-hearts 
 could be more responsive. Yet there is a 
 realm of devotion no childless woman, 
 however queenly, can ever enter. A 
 woman must be "born the second time," 
 into the maternal spirit, before she can 
 see the kingdom of motherhood. 
 
 This, then, is the truth which Jesus 
 seized upon to describe the mode of in- 
 duction into His kingdom. As there is 
 no entrance into the kingdom of citizen- 
 ship, or nature, or art, or philanthropy, 
 or motherhood except through a second 
 birth, so with the kingdom of holiness and 
 
168 The Question of^ 
 
 Heaven. A man must be ''born the second 
 time," ''of water and the Spirit" — by the 
 naturahzation of purity and Christ-Hke- 
 ness — before he can enter the Kingdom 
 of God. Is there anything arbitrary or 
 unreasonable about the method which as- 
 tonished Nicodemus? If you were look- 
 ing for a description of the transforma- 
 tion of a life, could you find a more lumi- 
 nous expression ? 
 
 There is a kingdom of darkness, and 
 there is a kingdom of light. Men are in 
 danger of forgetting this sometimes. 
 There is a disposition to shade off the dif- 
 ferences between light and dark, between 
 good and evil. Modern philosophy for- 
 bids to call human villainies by uncom- 
 fortable names. Greed, sensuality, intem- 
 perance, these are simply the "prosecution 
 of nature's plan for the advancement of 
 the inhabitants of earth." I read the other 
 day that the pauper who brings into the 
 world children he cannot feed is one of 
 society's benefactors, because he thus 
 
A Night Visitor 169 
 
 sharpens the world-wide struggle for ex- 
 istence. Most folks have been brought 
 up to look upon drunkenness as a shame- 
 ful thing, yet a certain writer apostro- 
 phizes it as an agent which is solving the 
 negro problem by killing off the blacks. 
 Take the statement that "adultery may be 
 regarded merely as a new experiment in 
 living!" An English author maintains 
 that the abandoned women of our cities 
 are not the worst, but the "best of the 
 lower classes, who cannot get their true 
 match in the sphere where they were born, 
 and must, by the holiest of instincts . . . 
 seek upward by any means." What a dif- 
 ferent thing must prostitution seem when 
 men have persuaded themselves that it is 
 the result of the holiest instinct, "seeking 
 upward." 
 
 Most men, however, will continue to 
 believe that there is a "great gulf fixed" 
 between impurity and chastity, between 
 falsehood and the truth. Vice is not "vir- 
 tue in the making." Evil is not a phase 
 
170 The Question of 
 
 of good. There is a kingdom of sensu- 
 ality and license, and there is a kingdom 
 of self-control. There is a kingdom of 
 perfidy and dishonor, and there is a king- 
 dom of loyalty and faith. There is a 
 kingdom of avarice and violence, and 
 there is a kingdom of self-sacrifice and 
 peace. There is the kingdom of Satan 
 and there is the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. 
 And a man can no more be a member of 
 both kingdoms than he can be both Egyp- 
 tian and American at once. 
 
 How, then, can one more faithfully 
 describe the change which makes a man 
 a Christian than in the ancient words, 
 ''born again, not of corruptible seed, but 
 of incorruptible?" To leave one's mean- 
 ness for a life of generosity and service; 
 to bring the lower impulses under the 
 mastery of Christ; to forswear the citi- 
 zenship of thieves and wantons for the 
 fellowship and prerogatives of Heaven, 
 this is to be ''born the second time." By 
 no sort of celestial legerdemain, but by 
 the heroic struggle of a soul, with God's 
 
A Night Visitor 171 
 
 grace to ease the struggle, a man comes 
 up out of his poverty and shame and 
 meanness into the discipleship of Jesus. 
 ''Born again," "born from above," "born 
 the second time" — such is the lesson. 
 
 This has been the miracle of countless 
 lives. I call to mind a man v^lio came 
 into a cottage meeting which I was con- 
 ducting. Had I known his record, I think 
 I should have hardly ventured the hope of 
 helping him toward God. He was the 
 profanest man in the village. "Under his 
 tongue was the poison of asps." He was 
 notorious as gambler and debauchee; one 
 of the ugliest customers a man would be 
 likely to meet. God knows why he ever 
 came into that prayer meeting. He scarce- 
 ly lifted his head, except to flash upon me 
 a pair of the brightest and wickedest eyes 
 I have ever seen. And when the quiet 
 hour had passed he slipped out, apparent- 
 ly unbettered, into the night. Some days 
 went by, and then one evening, during 
 the progress of an old-fashioned Watch 
 
172 The Question of 
 
 Night service, his face appeared among 
 the rest. Near midnight he came and 
 knelt ''for the benefit of prayer." There 
 was nothing spectacular about it — just a 
 brother sorry for his sin. He did not 
 groan aloud, or cry for mercy. He gave 
 no outward sign of inward revolution. 
 But I wish you might have seen his face 
 as he arose to join in the closing hymn. 
 It was fairly luminous. He had found 
 the Messiah, and he went forth from that 
 service to tell his old companions the 
 story of his conversion; to live a beauti- 
 ful, consistent life. I saw him last sum- 
 mer, and in his face were "the marks of 
 the Lord Jesus." And they tell me that a 
 whole neighborhood is rich in his conse- 
 crated labors. You may describe the 
 change under many names — reformation, 
 turning over a new leaf, conversion. I 
 know not any term so vividly suggestive 
 as the term our Master used : he had been 
 ''born the second time." 
 
 Take such a case as that of Jerry Mc- 
 
A Night Visitor 173 
 
 Auley. It would be a hard task to ex- 
 plain his transformation according to the 
 principles of evolution. His heredity was 
 bad. His environment was bad. His as- 
 sociates were bad. His life was bad, an 
 insult to public decency, a menace to 
 everything good. A river thief, a drunken 
 vagabond, a hardened jail bird — such was 
 Jerry McAuley when he gave his heart 
 to God. Such was the material upon 
 which the Divine Spirit had to work. But 
 something happened to the outcast ; some- 
 thing not called for in the books, nor yet 
 according to philosophic codes. He be- 
 came a new creation. Out of his old life 
 and into a new, he passed as completely 
 as if he had physically died and been born 
 another man. Our Scripture furnishes 
 the word : he had been "born the second 
 time." He had entered the kingdom of 
 chastity, temperance, and truth by a spir- 
 itual birth. 
 
 But these are only samples. The world 
 is beautiful in just such miracles — mira- 
 
174 The Question of 
 
 cles of inebriates becoming sober, miracles 
 of libertines becoming chaste, miracles of 
 doubters becoming disciples, miracles of 
 selfish lives becoming generous and 
 Christ-like. Could I go through a com- 
 munity and pick out the living exponents 
 of Jesus' doctrine of the second birth, 
 there would be material enough to keep 
 the scoffers guessing for a lifetime. 
 
 But this truth is also a statement of the 
 greatest necessity of human life. All re- 
 formatory work must be based upon, or 
 lead up to, a second birth. The bitterest 
 disappointments of my ministry have been 
 associated with trying to make men live 
 in a realm into which they had never been 
 born. The Icelander will go straight back 
 to his bearskin and blubber from the lux- 
 uries of such a land of ours. Those poor 
 little waifs of New York City streets who, 
 by the grace of our Fresh Air Funds, are 
 sent to breathe God's country air, and 
 w^ander among the wild flowers, are near- 
 ly always ready to return to dusty streets 
 
A Night Visitor 175 
 
 and stifling rooms when the two or three 
 weeks have passed. They have not been 
 ''born" into the sweeter realm. And so I 
 find men turning- away from their gHmpse 
 of the Kingdom, away from its sunshine 
 and freedom and fragrance, to the serf- 
 dom and chill of an unholy life. 
 
 I have clothed beggars and sent them 
 forth into the world with a warm promise 
 of amendment upon their lips, only to find 
 afterward that they had pawned the very 
 garments which made them decent. I 
 have led men into paths of temperance and 
 self-control, only to see them sneaking 
 back to the old, unrighteous ways. I 
 have received men into the Church only 
 to break my heart over their shamelessness 
 and folly. They had never been ''born" 
 into the Kingdom. They were simply 
 aliens upon foreign soil. They had no 
 birthright claim. Most men know what 
 I mean. I would not intimate that they 
 have never tried to mend the old, thread- 
 bare life. They have sworn off, begun 
 
176 A Night Visitor 
 
 anew, reformed, until they were tired and 
 sick of trying. Only God knows the vows 
 which have been registered. Men are not 
 unclean without a protest. They have 
 looked away toward the Kingdom. They 
 have breathed its freshness and touched 
 its treasure. But they have never been 
 born into its safety. And they can never 
 become its citizens without the "second 
 birth." 
 
 This is the message, then, of Nicode- 
 mus' question. There will be marvelous 
 triumphs as the years of the new century 
 go by. We shall enter realms that to-day 
 are dark with mystery. But as the spirit- 
 ual is forever higher than the material; 
 as the sublimest power is not electricity 
 or liquid air, but goodness; as the divinest 
 conquest is the conquest of one's self, we 
 shall never be qualified to see the finest 
 visions, or share the greatest victories, ex- 
 cept by a second birth. "Except a man 
 be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom 
 of God." 
 
IX 
 
 THE QUESTION OF AN AUTOCRATIC 
 EMPLOYER 
 
 12 
 
"There is but one perpendicular in ethics as in 
 physics. . . . Every right is conditioned upon 
 every other right. Nothing is falser than the say- 
 ing that a man has a right to do what he will 
 with his own. He has only a right to do what he 
 ought with his own." — Pike. 
 
 "Not what we give, but what we share; 
 
 For the gift without the giver is bare. 
 
 Who gives himself with his gift, feeds three — 
 
 Himself, his suffering neighbor, and Me." 
 
 — Lowell. 
 
 "Whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his 
 brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of 
 compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of 
 God in him?" — John. 
 
''IS IT NOT LAWFUL 
 
 FOR ME TO DO WHAT I WILL 
 
 WITH MINE OWN?'' 
 
 The complainants in the parable of the 
 vineyard must have accounted their case 
 a strong one. Nothing is so hard to bear 
 as injustice. That which makes frustra- 
 tion and calamity most bitter is the sense 
 of having deserved a better portion. No 
 "slings and arrows" ever cut so deep as 
 those of manifest unfairness. To be de- 
 nied a legitimate fruition, to toil on with- 
 out appreciation, to get less than a worthy 
 wage, turns men into misanthropes and 
 atheists. Such was evidently the mood of 
 these protestants. They had gone into 
 the vineyard at the first call for helpers. 
 They had borne, uncomplainingly per- 
 haps, the "burden and heat" of a toilsome 
 day. They had beheld the later comers 
 with the sort of sinister regard which 
 men commonly extend to those beneath 
 their grade. And they had struggled on, 
 
 179 
 
180 The Question of 
 
 persuaded that the master of the vineyard 
 would award a discriminating wage. 
 Judge, then, their deep chagrin, when 
 each laborer in turn received the same 
 amount : those who had toiled the whole 
 day through and those who had labored 
 but one hour, the same award — according 
 to the wage scale of the day, a penny 
 each. They were indignant on the in- 
 stant, and their wrath poured forth in 
 the hot vials of complaint. 
 
 I do not purpose to rethresh this an- 
 cient straw. What I want to emphasize 
 is the significant query in which the good 
 man of the house justified his strange 
 award: 'Ts it not lawful for me to do 
 what I will with mine own ?" The words 
 have a familiar sound. They are an ex- 
 pression of the frequent mood of men. 
 They are often in the heart of the mod- 
 ern financier. Suppose he does pay one 
 clerk more wages than another — even 
 give the unworthiest servant the highest 
 wage. Suppose he does cut prices until 
 
An Autocratic Employer 181 
 
 a neighboring competitor is forced out of 
 business. Suppose he does take advantage 
 of another's embarrassment to exact an 
 usurious rate, or call in his money when 
 he knows it will work the direst harm. 
 Suppose he does these things, and many 
 more within the letter of the law, whose 
 business is it but his ? Is he not at liberty 
 to do ''what he will with his own?" 
 
 The same plea is often heard in another 
 department of life. One of the most seri- 
 ous arraignments of the modern amuse- 
 ment question is the terrible waste in- 
 volved. What countless hours and ener- 
 gies are spent over euchre and whist! 
 The time now devoted to card tables 
 would develop a race of literary giants. 
 Most people reduce their Church subscrip- 
 tion and curtail their charities before they 
 deny themselves a theater ticket. And 
 there are hosts of young people who are 
 sure they have neither time nor strength 
 to spare until they have attended all the 
 germans and festivities of their particu- 
 
182 The Question of 
 
 lar set. Our generation has gone amuse- 
 ment daft. And when a halt is called; 
 when some earnest soul points out other 
 open doors for strength and money ; when 
 a pastor presses the more sacred claims 
 of life — the poor, the Church, the King- 
 dom — there breaks forth a perfect chorus 
 of dissent. ''What if I do spend more 
 time on cards than on self-improvement? 
 more money on theaters than on human 
 helpfulness ? more zeal in fun than on the 
 heroic purposes of life?" "Is it not law- 
 ful for me to do what I will with mine 
 owoi?" 
 
 The saddest history ever written is the 
 history of buried talents. We scarcely 
 guess the peerless endowments of men — 
 there are so many wasted powers. Only 
 God knows the lights that have gone 
 out under a bushel ; the immortal treasure 
 that has been frittered away; the genius 
 that has been lost. I have heard friends 
 drum on the piano, and have been sure 
 that they might have been interpreting 
 
An Autocratic Employer 183 
 
 the masters of melody had they not 
 thrown away their gift. We had in col- 
 lege a certain professor who used to hear 
 our declamations. There was singular 
 charm in his voice and presence. Rumor 
 said that he was able to carry vast audi- 
 ences off their feet. Yet he never em- 
 ployed his talent except to celebrate some 
 sparkling glass or passing honor. Not 
 one of us was better or more devoted for 
 knowing him. He would not use his gift. 
 It is said that Tissot painted his first reli- 
 gious canvas only a few years ago. He 
 had worked for years before he realized 
 to what holy use he might turn his brush. 
 And I am afraid there are other artists 
 who may never awake to their divinest 
 function; they are painting to sense and 
 passion; making it harder for others to 
 be good ; never guessing the privilege they 
 forfeit. "Is it not lawful for them to do 
 what they will with their own?" 
 
 Consider the truth in a realm more 
 sacred still. How often men abuse the 
 
184 The Question of 
 
 ownership of love and friendship. We 
 ought to be startled, often, at our treat- 
 ment of those we love the most. 
 
 ''Oft for our own, the bitter tone, 
 Though we love our own the best." 
 
 Courtesies for mere acquaintances and 
 cruelty for friends; consideration for 
 those who have no claim upon us and 
 hatefulness for those who deserve all 
 our kindness — this is too often our prac- 
 tice. There would be more happy homes 
 if men remembered that marriage fur- 
 nishes no right to play the boor. I have 
 known men to treat their wives as no hu- 
 man being ought to be permitted to treat a 
 faithful horse. I know children who go 
 starved for the very kindnesses and caresses 
 which some little urchin in the street may 
 receive. And even while I write of it 
 some folks are saying: 'Ts it not lawful 
 for me to do what I will with mine own?" 
 The question begs the answer. Such 
 specious pleading meets a clear and vigor- 
 ous denial. It is only too obvious that 
 
An Autocratic Employer 185 
 
 in many ways a man is restrained from 
 doing as he pleases with his possessions. 
 He holds all property subject to certain 
 restrictions and reservations. He is 
 hedged about with all sorts of limi- 
 tations to his behavior. His liberty is 
 denied by a thousand voices. To abuse 
 is often to forfeit. 
 
 Take the matter from a legal stand- 
 point. Not many generations have gone 
 since the day in which a man might kill 
 his slave and maim his son, because they 
 belonged to him. To-day he cannot even 
 beat his horse without danger from the 
 courts. We have societies to contest one's 
 right to maltreat the humblest dumb 
 beast, and societies to deal with brutal 
 parents. Not even a mother's ownership 
 in her child is complete enough to permit 
 her to starve it. Jail yawns for the father 
 who fancies he can do as he pleases with 
 his offspring. Let a farmer attempt to 
 sow his land with thistles: though his 
 title be undisputed, his hand must quit 
 
186 The Question of 
 
 its task. He has no right to make his 
 own acres a nuisance to his neighbor. 
 He cannot use his own property to the 
 hurt of some one else. 
 
 After the terrible explosion in Tar- 
 rant's chemical works in New York City, 
 a question arose as to the amount of ex- 
 plosives stored in the building. The pro- 
 prietors had evidently assumed the right 
 to do as they pleased in the matter. Why 
 should not a merchant stock his building 
 to suit his purpose? Simply because the 
 law denies to any man the right to en- 
 danger other lives and interests. And the 
 famous drug firm was held liable for 
 heavy damages. 
 
 According to what is known as the law 
 of "eminent domain," an ownership above 
 one's own, if it becomes necessary for a 
 railroad to cross a certain farm, or a 
 dwelling stands in the way of a projected 
 public improvement, the legal owner may 
 object in vain. Men have protested, with 
 oaths and pitchforks, against such usurpa- 
 
An Autocratic Employer 187 
 
 tion. But the protest was merely by-play 
 to State or County. Law assumes the 
 right to take any man's property at any 
 time for certain uses and for a fair con- 
 sideration. All legal tenure has that re- 
 striction, and he who does not like the 
 scheme may move to Labrador or Iceland. 
 Taxes mean the selfsame thing — ^re- 
 stricted ownership. Part of every acre a 
 man owns, and of every dollar he earns, 
 belongs to the government for the main- 
 tenance of public schools; for the mak- 
 ing of improvements; for the salaries of 
 the very men who collect the taxes. He 
 who has no children of his own must 
 help to educate his neighbor's children, 
 and the veriest backwoodsman must help 
 pay for macadam roads and marble court- 
 houses. He cannot do what he will with 
 his own. Not even with respect to his 
 heirs. In some States he cannot sell an 
 acre of land without his wife's consent. 
 He cannot will away the interest of his 
 ungrown children. There are kinship 
 
188 The Question of 
 
 claims with which he is bound to reckon, 
 and if he fails, the State adjusts the mat- 
 ter regardless of his whim. So in a mul- 
 titude of ways this truth is reinforced, 
 that, even from a legal standpoint, a man 
 may not do as he pleases with his own. 
 
 But this truth gathers cogency as it 
 reaches higher realms. There are sanc- 
 tions infinitely weightier than those of 
 common or statute law. Law as ex- 
 pounded by the courts leaves a thousand 
 loopholes to lawlessness. Men may be 
 conscienceless scoundrels without jeop- 
 ardizing their property or their necks. 
 There is latitude enough this side of pris- 
 on for men to damn themselves and ruin 
 their fellows. I suppose that Jay Gould 
 was one of the most monumental robbers 
 of modern times ; yet he lived within the 
 letter of the law. He certainly did not 
 use his hands to pick his associates' pock- 
 ets. He never broke into railroad offices 
 to carry away their assets. He simply 
 made use of the common practices of 
 
An Autocratic Employer 189 
 
 Wall Street, and employed his wealth to 
 drive others to despair. No one will ever 
 know the hearts he broke, the suffering 
 he caused, the homes he wrecked. A 
 whole Street breathed freer when it knew 
 that Jay Gould was dead. Ah, friends, 
 there is something wrong with a business 
 which makes its gains out of others' pri- 
 vation and pain. It is one thing to gain 
 by legitimate increase of value, by honest 
 enterprise. But to use one's means as a 
 knife to let out another's blood, and then 
 to revel in the blood, is the part of hawks 
 and wolves. Some one says that "the 
 first passion in the American world is not 
 to produce more, but to get what some 
 one else has produced." ''Money-making 
 by exchange is virtual robbery, and is 
 only prevented from becoming legal rob- 
 bery by the imperfection of the law." 
 
 Take the common method of inflating 
 or depressing a market. A man buys all 
 the stock he can at panic prices; then 
 booms the stock until everv trader wants 
 
190 The Question of 
 
 it ; then sells it at figures that bear no re- 
 lation to honest values — and leaves the 
 purchaser to discover how great a dupe 
 he is. Such was Jay Gould's method. 
 Such is the ordinary Wall Street method. 
 It is simple appropriation ; making money 
 without producing it; fraudulent transfer 
 from one pocket to another. One must 
 lose for the other to win. Would to God 
 that every such unearned dollar were the 
 true mirror of its source! To see on 
 every coin the record of its former 
 owner's heartache; to trace all the suf- 
 fering w^hich men's sharp practices en- 
 tail; to follow the tragedies of those who 
 went down to enable the winners to rise, 
 might rob commercial plunder of its joy. 
 No man has the right to employ his 
 wealth or skill to defraud his fellows. 
 
 Or, take the bargain craze. I have no 
 notion that any word of mine will upset 
 the bargain counter, or keep our women 
 away from it when the newspapers cry 
 its wares. I only want to call attention 
 
An Autocratic Employer 191 
 
 to the real significance of the proceeding. 
 It is an attempt to clothe one's self and to 
 stock one's household for less than the 
 purchased articles are worth. Granting 
 all that may be said in favor of the pro- 
 priety of getting the largest value for 
 one's money, I still maintain that bargain 
 hunting is shark's business. If a thing is 
 worth a dollar it is good morals to pay a 
 dollar for it. It is not good morals to 
 cheat the tradesman out of his profit, or 
 the manufacturer of his return, or the 
 factory hand of his wage. I do not want 
 the blood stains of piracy or highway 
 robbery on the merchandise I buy. It is 
 never lawful, in the Christian sense, to 
 use one's own to defraud another. 
 
 Just here we touch the labor problem. 
 There is, doubtless, an arrogance of labor. 
 Too many strikes have been conceived in 
 malignancy and born in evil. The walk- 
 ing delegate is often a mischief-maker, 
 earning his salary by making trouble. 
 But the tap root of the misunderstanding 
 
192 The Question of 
 
 between labor and capital is, originally, 
 the insolence of wealth. Employers for- 
 get that privilege carries with it a corre- 
 sponding duty. They assume the right to 
 use their possessions entirely as they 
 please; cutting employees' wages to the 
 last penny the employees will bear ; turn- 
 ing off veterans to make way for younger 
 blood; importing the cheapest labor they 
 can find. A new truth must get hold of 
 men of wealth — the responsibility of 
 riches. It is theirs not to hoard, but to 
 use ; theirs to carry gladness into a multi- 
 tude of homes; theirs to render the load 
 of drudgery less grievous; theirs to bind 
 the employees with hooks of steel. No 
 man who makes a sophism of our 
 Scripture question is fit to be rich and 
 prosperous. 
 
 So of power. Too many folks assume 
 that power means exemption from bur- 
 den. The average politician is after the 
 immunities and emoluments of office. 
 Few remember that power carries with it 
 
An Autocratic Employer 193 
 
 obligation ; that a man must stoop in pro- 
 portion to the height of the eminence on 
 which he stands. You recall what Jesus 
 said when certain of His disciples were 
 clamoring for power : "Ye know that the 
 princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion 
 over them, and they that are great exer- 
 cise authority upon (or, lord it over) 
 them. But it shall not be so among you ; 
 but whosoever will be great among you, 
 let him be your minister; and whosoever 
 will be chief among you, let him be your 
 servant." Our generation is evidently a 
 long reach removed from such concep- 
 tion of the exercise of power. Yet such 
 is the divine — the sane — prescription, and 
 we shall never attain to the true domin- 
 ion of the world until we adopt Christ's 
 method. 
 
 One other realm I want to mention — 
 scholarship. Scholarship has too often 
 been used as a club to beat out the brains 
 of faith. Here was Thomas Paine's mis- 
 take. Nobody denies his gifts ; most people 
 13 
 
194 The Question of 
 
 admit the kindness of his heart. He was 
 never built to be a destroyer of faith. I 
 have often wondered that he was able to 
 feed his own heart on the hard husks of 
 unbelief. But he seemed to feel it his pre- 
 rogative to scatter his poison wherever 
 men would receive. Hence he went up 
 and down the land, snatching the crumbs 
 from hungry hearts, knocking the 
 crutches from trembling faith, burning 
 men's household gods before their very 
 eyes — one of the biggest hearts and most 
 reckless vandals of any age. According 
 to the highest code he had no right to use 
 his doctrine as he pleased. 
 
 Thus we reach the loftiest bearing of 
 our question. I have called to mind that 
 certain uses of one's possessions are not 
 even legal. I have tried, also, to show 
 that usages permissible from legal stand- 
 points are interdicted on moral grounds. 
 Now I want to speak of a realm above 
 both these, a realm in which our truth is 
 spiritually discerned. It is not sufficient 
 
An Autocratic Employer 195 
 
 for a man to keep the law. It will not 
 even do to consult the ethical code. A 
 man must learn the spiritual meaning and 
 purpose of his possessions. There is no 
 absolute ownership among men. We are 
 merely "stewards of the manifold mercies 
 of God." We live on His acres; we man- 
 age His estates; we bank His treasure. 
 Whether our property be land or truth 
 or talent, we hold it by His grace; the 
 title is in Him. 
 
 This is the truth of the familiar parable 
 in which the lord came and reckoned 
 with his servants. There is a reckoning 
 on every investment of God in us. The 
 award is always according to men's em- 
 ployment of God's investment. The high- 
 est purpose of wealth is the enrichment of 
 souls. A Rockefeller ought to be the 
 finest type of man. He who allows his 
 money to shrivel him would better, a 
 thousand times, be poor. Position means 
 opportunity to expand. Talent is like the 
 equipment of a gymnasium ; it must make 
 
196 The Question of 
 
 its owner a stronger man. To have, and 
 not to use for self -improvement, is worse 
 than not to have. 
 
 But possessions have an even higher 
 function than that of self-development. 
 Money will do more than pay wages. 
 Power can work greater miracles than 
 mere offices of duty. Talent has a higher 
 mission than that of display. These gifts 
 are granted to hasten the advent of Mes- 
 siah's kingdom. And every time a man 
 uses his means to bind up broken hearts; 
 wherever a ruler makes his throne the 
 bulwark of truth and kindness; wherever 
 a soul employs its strength to remind men 
 of holiness and Heaven, the ^'Kingdom 
 comes" in grace and beauty. 
 
 "O Lord, I pray 
 
 That for this day 
 I may not swerve 
 
 By foot or hand 
 
 From Thy command, 
 Not to be served, but to serve. 
 
 "This, too, I pray, 
 That for this day 
 
An Autocratic Employer 197 
 
 No love of ease 
 
 Nor pride prevent 
 
 My good intent, 
 Not to be pleased, but to please. 
 
 "And if I may, 
 
 I'd have this day 
 Strength from above 
 
 To set my heart 
 
 In heavenly art, 
 Not to be loved, but to love." 
 
THE aUESTION OF A READY 
 CRITIC 
 
" 'Tis only when they spring to heaven that angels 
 Reveal themselves to you; they sit all day 
 Beside you, and lie down at night beside you 
 Who care not for their presence, muse or sleep, 
 And all at once they leave you and you know 
 them." — Browning. 
 
 "We are full of these superstitions of sense, the 
 worship of magnitude. We call the poet inactive, 
 because he is not a president, a merchant, or a 
 porter. We adore an institution, and do not see 
 that it is founded on a thought which we have. 
 But real action is in silent moments. The epochs 
 of life are not in the visible facts of our choice 
 of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an 
 office and the like, but in a silent thought by the 
 wayside as we walk." — Emerson. 
 
 "The natural man receiveth not the things of the 
 Spirit of God : . . . neither can he know them, 
 because they are spiritually discerned." — Paul. 
 
''WHY WAS NOT THIS OINTMENT SOLD 
 
 FOR THREE HUNDRED PENCE AND 
 
 GIVEN TO THE POOR?^' 
 
 It never occurred to Mary, probably, 
 that her gracious deed would bring down 
 criticism upon her. She had long been 
 waiting for an opportunity to do some- 
 thing for Him who was always doing 
 something for her. But He was so con- 
 stantly busy with ministry to others, there 
 was scarcely an opportunity for others to 
 minister to Him. And, indeed, it seems 
 rarely to have occurred to the disciples 
 that He who filled their days with bene- 
 faction might sometimes be hungry for a 
 tender office toward Himself. It is one 
 penalty of the unselfish life, that it must 
 often go without those gracious requitals, 
 which, if the world could know, would 
 enrich its service. 
 
 The guests were busy at table when 
 
 201 
 
202 The Question of 
 
 Mary slipped into the room. Engrossed 
 as men are wont to be when a tempting 
 repast is before them, none of them no- 
 ticed the quick motions of the woman. 
 They talked on, unconscious of the most 
 tender tribute which was being rendered 
 in their midst, and only as the pervasive 
 perfume filled the room did they look up 
 at all. Then what a picture! There, at 
 the foot of the couch on which the Christ 
 reclined, sat a woman as perfectly unmind- 
 ful of the disciples' presence as they had 
 been of hers; her face aglow, her soul in 
 her eyes, as she wiped the dear feet with 
 her hair. An empty spikenard box near by 
 told the lavishness of the gift. No word, 
 I fancy, was spoken at the first ; there are 
 acts so full of holy sentiment and devo- 
 tion they compel men into silence. Then 
 Judas found his voice : "Why was not this 
 ointment sold for three hundred pence and 
 given to the poor?" Such was the un- 
 blushing question of the financial man of 
 the Apostolic company. 
 
A Ready Critic 203 
 
 Judas evidently thought he was making 
 a good point. This was the Teacher who 
 for three years, nearly, had been incul- 
 cating lessons of practical religion. He 
 had been trying to educate men to the 
 pitch at which they should prove their 
 love by helpfulness and charity ; cut short 
 their formal prayers, sometimes, to answer 
 a cry of need. He had often inveighed 
 against the senseless extravagance and 
 criminal luxuriousness of the day. Yet 
 on the feet of this same Teacher three 
 hundred pennyworth of perfume had just 
 been poured! Judas wondered that his 
 Master could keep still. How many poor 
 the money would have fed. While they 
 were sitting there, enjoying the rich fra- 
 grance, men, women, and little children 
 were going supperless to bed. Surely, 
 Mary would have done her Master more 
 signal honor had she dedicated the same 
 money to suppers and creature comforts 
 for the poor. To express her whole de- 
 votion in a single act of womanly senti- 
 
204 The Question of 
 
 ment; to pour this treasure upon One 
 whom it could not possibly enrich; to 
 spend fifty dollars in a perishing perfume 
 instead of coats and shoes for wretched 
 outcasts, seemed reckless waste. 
 
 So reasoned Judas. And under ordi- 
 nary circumstances his reasoning would 
 have been correct. I have never believed 
 John to be quite fair in his estimate of 
 Judas. Except that Judas had turned out 
 to be a traitor, John would never have 
 stigmatized his conduct on this occasion 
 as that of a thief. Because, later, Judas 
 proved to be a rascal, John conceived that 
 he must have been one when he dared to 
 criticise the ointment. We are constant- 
 ly throwing back upon innocent deeds the 
 lurid light of some later crime. Because 
 Benedict Arnold turned traitor, men have 
 looked for treachery all through his life. 
 Yet I believe there were days when, in the 
 breast of that same Arnold, there beat a 
 patriotism as strong and fine as throbbed 
 in Washington's or Franklin's. The fa- 
 
A Ready Critic 205 
 
 mous Abelard was not, necessarily, a sen- 
 sual man at heart because, after years of 
 monastic devotion, he lapsed from virtue 
 and betrayed the beautiful Heloise. We 
 ought to give men credit for what they 
 seem to be, believing, rather, that in an 
 evil hour they fell from their high estate, 
 than that all their lives they were vaga- 
 bonds and wantons. We have never been 
 just toward Judas. We have condemned 
 him in everything, because he was treach- 
 erous in one. But there was a time when 
 Judas really loved his Master. Days there 
 were in which he, too, saw the heavens 
 opened; moments when under the power 
 of some great passion he, too, could have 
 died for Christ. It is passing credence 
 that Jesus should have selected an inbred 
 ruffian to preach His Gospel for three 
 years. Judas was once as promising a dis- 
 ciple as John or Andrew. And I cannot 
 see any monstrosity in his unfortunate 
 criticism of Mary. It was just like his 
 hard, commercial head ; just the comment 
 
206 The Question of 
 
 to expect from a man who was grasping 
 a new truth. And I notice that in the 
 other account of this same incident all the 
 disciples joined in the protest : "To what 
 purpose was this waste?" 
 
 There was, as I have said, good com- 
 mon sense in Judas' comment. I am grate- 
 ful to live in a day when there is account- 
 ed to be more true religion in bread for 
 hungry children and "Herald Free Ice 
 Funds" than in all high altars and swing- 
 ing censers. Ingersoll might not have 
 been the scoffer that he became if in the 
 early days, when his infidel opinions were 
 forming, he had seen less hunting down 
 of heretics and more Christian helpful- 
 ness and love. It is said of a famous 
 agnostic author that, after listening to 
 a recent sermon on the religion of kind- 
 ness, he turned to one of our bishops and 
 remarked: "If they had preached that 
 kind of Gospel when I was a boy I, too, 
 might have been a preacher." 
 
 Time was when the grandest thing that 
 
A Ready Critic 207 
 
 a man could do for God was to build a 
 temple to Him. I have recently been re- 
 reading a description of Solomon's tem- 
 ple, and I do not wonder that the Roman 
 conqueror paused spellbound when he be- 
 held it. Such marbles as are rarely seen 
 to-day, columns of wondrous size and 
 beauty, gold in the most elaborate pro- 
 fusion, made it a spectacle almost beyond 
 description. But that Jewish temple was 
 characteristic of a day when beggars 
 starved in the streets and cripples went 
 unpitied. To-day we build no such mam- 
 moth piles. We have no cathedrals to 
 compare with those of Milan and Cologne. 
 But our land is dotted over with institu- 
 tions of charity and benefaction. If the 
 churches have decreased in magnificence 
 and grandeur, the hospitals and asylums 
 have multiplied a hundredfold. For men 
 are beginning to believe they may leave 
 some splendid shrines unbuilt, while they 
 pour out their means to bind up broken 
 hearts and relieve the orphans' need. 
 
208 The Question of 
 
 The noblest memorials of Egyptian 
 glory are her vast pyramids. What mass- 
 ive structures they are! We can hardly 
 estimate their cost. They drained the 
 treasure of heathen lands; they wore out 
 generations of human toilers — to form a 
 mausoleum for dead men's bones. There 
 are still some citizens, I suppose, who are 
 elaborately providing for an immortality 
 of memory in bronze and stone. The 
 w^orld will not be able to forget them be- 
 cause it must forever stumble over their 
 monuments and sarcophagi. Notwith- 
 standing which, the sentiment is grow- 
 ing, that a man can afford to lie under a 
 plain pine board, if need be, while the 
 world remembers him in some Christly 
 institution of his endowing; some fund 
 for waifs and sufferers. 
 
 The Church can never repeat the en- 
 thusiasm which preached and fought the 
 Crusades. That marvelous spectacle of 
 whole nations moving toward the Manger 
 shrine and Tomb will never be seen again. 
 
A Ready Critic 209 
 
 But there is a far vaster army of men and 
 women, with no regaUa or pomp about 
 them, who feel that they bring Christ 
 greater honor as they seek out His loved 
 and lost throughout the world. Despite 
 the decay of creeds and churches, there is 
 more good religion in the world than ever. 
 You remember the vehement commander 
 who caused the statue of St. Peter to be 
 pulled down and melted into coin, that 
 St. Peter, like his Master, might go about 
 "doing good." Such is the spirit of our 
 age. Men are learning to translate their 
 worship into blessings for the needy. 
 There is less patience with churchly 
 forms, but more with men and women. 
 There are less long prayers, but more 
 heavenly ministries on earth. There are 
 less devotees to altars, but far more re- 
 productions of the Christ; far more to 
 hear Him say, ''Inasmuch as ye have done 
 it unto one of the least of these my breth- 
 ren, ye have done it unto me." The 
 
 spikenard is being turned into bread. 
 14 
 
210 The Question of 
 
 But this is not the whole story. When 
 Judas attempted to generahze he made a 
 failure. There are certain conditions un- 
 der which it is grander to pour spikenard 
 upon the Master's feet than to feed the 
 poor or help the outcast. Judas carried 
 his utilitarianism too far. There were 
 some beauties he could not measure with 
 his yardstick. There were real values not 
 reducible according to his tables. The 
 rainbow has no commercial rating. Not 
 everyone can appreciate the glory of a 
 sunset. No sane man would think of 
 estimating the worth of an oratorio by 
 holding his hand against the bellows or 
 counting the metal in the pipes. Some 
 things must forever stand above our 
 scales and crucibles. Those three hun- 
 dred pence would have been poorly spent 
 on loaves and coats that day. The trouble 
 with all practicality is that it goes too far. 
 It runs mad, sometimes, as I believe it 
 inclines to do to-day. 
 
 Here they are cutting away the Pal- 
 
A Ready Critic 211 
 
 isades to make paving stones for modern 
 roads. If they keep on cutting, it will not 
 be long before we shall look in vain for 
 those grand old landmarks. In the com- 
 mercial sense, stone in a good roadway 
 is worth more than stone in picturesque- 
 ness. Steamers will make quite as good 
 time to Albany, I suppose, when the Pal- 
 isades are gone! But it has always 
 seemed to me that those stone bulwarks 
 of the river have a value entirely apart 
 from their intrinsic worth in slate and 
 granite. Nobody will ever estimate the 
 satisfaction they have brought to human 
 hearts; for by such things in nature are 
 men made more fit for earth and Heaven. 
 If men shall ever lose the capacity to be 
 moved by the beautiful, it will not make 
 much difference what sort of pavements 
 they then may travel. 
 
 We had in my college days a cadav- 
 erous professor who went among us by the 
 nickname of *'Digamma" — in token of 
 his lifelong devotion to the obsolete Greek 
 
212 The Question of 
 
 letter of that name. Poor, stoop-shoul- 
 dered little man, I can remember how we 
 used to pity him his thankless quest ; and 
 wonder if a generous beefsteak would not 
 do him more good than additional Greek 
 learning. He was in the economic sense 
 a "non-producer." He increased the 
 world's supply of corn and wheat not a 
 single bushel. He did nothing, directly, 
 to maintain the nation's credit. He kept 
 on studying year after year, delving in 
 ponderous tomes and ancient manuscripts, 
 growing leaner all the while, until it 
 seemed that a good healthy breeze would 
 blow him away. But here is the stubborn 
 fact : that, when all the grain produced in 
 his day has been consumed, and the bodies 
 that consumed it have moldered back to 
 dust, his great discoveries in language, 
 the new light he brought to ancient puz- 
 zles, the fine shades of meaning he evoked 
 will be blessing generations as yet 
 unborn. 
 
 Mozart never held a plow or drove a 
 
A Ready Critic 213 
 
 plane. He had to be supported in idle- 
 ness, as some would say, in order to pro- 
 duce his masterpieces. While gunsmiths 
 were forging weapons, and masons were 
 laying stone, he was only writing music. 
 But to-day those ancient muskets are out 
 of service. Most of the walls his con- 
 temporaries built have crumbled. But the 
 sublime harmonies he wrought, unim- 
 paired by passing decades, still thrill and 
 bless the world. I suppose that in one 
 sense Munkacsy might better have been a 
 grocer's clerk or shipbuilder. He mixed 
 his colors and held his brush as though 
 eternities were depending upon his 
 genius ; and died poor at last. But that is 
 not the whole story. I know of at least 
 one man who was led into the Kingdom 
 by Munkacsy's painting — ''Christ before 
 Pilate" — and I doubt not that coming 
 ages will reveal scores of souls made more 
 strong and spiritual by gazing upon even 
 cheap reprints of that wonderful picture. 
 Here is the image of a Man who, ac- 
 
214 The Question of 
 
 cording to the record, ''went about doing 
 good." Wherever He came Wind eyes 
 flew open and withered Hmbs grew strong. 
 He fed the multitudes and eased the suf- 
 ferers. And yet, when all is said, if 
 Christ's special mission was to dole out 
 miraculous bread and heal the lepers, He 
 failed. He left more hungry folk in Gali- 
 lee than He ever attempted to feed. There 
 were more lepers unhealed than He ever 
 healed. Though His path through Pal- 
 estine was like a sunbeam, there were 
 many places on which the sunbeam did 
 not shine. He came from Heaven to do 
 a diviner thing than to fill men's stom- 
 achs and to allay their pains. He came 
 to bring holiness to men; to fill the 
 world's night with prophecies of morn- 
 ing; to make for Heaven by putting 
 Heaven in human hearts. And men may 
 be most like him as they break their ala- 
 baster boxes, sometimes. 
 
 But what is there to take with us from 
 a study of this Scripture? What spe- 
 
A Ready Critic 215 
 
 cial word to recur to-morrow? One rea- 
 son that husbands and wives do not make 
 better work of living together, lies, I be- 
 lieve, just here. Every woman has some- 
 thing of the spirit of the woman who 
 broke the spikenard box. It was pecul- 
 iarly a woman's tribute. And every true 
 woman brings to the man she loves just 
 such an offering. She is glad to take a 
 thousand steps and to meet a thousand 
 demands of wifehood, motherhood. But 
 life means more to her than merely keep- 
 ing a house clean and purveying the kind 
 of food her husband likes. She loves! 
 And we husbands — we let her sew on but- 
 tons and darn our stockings, andT^ear our 
 children; and then, if we keep her sup- 
 plied with pocket money, and put good 
 clothes upon her back, and sometime 
 bring home a diamond ring, we think that 
 is enough. And have, withal, as little ap- 
 preciation of a woman's heart as had this 
 Judas. Some wives would be willing to 
 forego a new spring dress or a pattern 
 
216 The Question of 
 
 hat for Easter if they could receive more 
 spiritual evidences of our love. 
 
 If there is one subject that can be count- 
 ed upon to stir unpleasantly the average 
 man it is the subject of "Foreign Mis- 
 sions." The idea of sending good money 
 after bad heathen ! Are there not enough 
 sinners right here in our ov^n commu- 
 nity? Where is the sense in trying to 
 convert the Hindus, when home streets 
 are thronged with children begging 
 bread? I have every sympathy with the 
 poor heathen here at home. They ought 
 to have the Gospel first. "Beginning at 
 Jerusalem" was the ancient command- 
 ment. But I deny that there are addi- 
 tional sinners here at home because 
 there are fewer in Bombay. I doubt if 
 the thousands we send across the sea have 
 made our own poor poorer. Rum makes 
 a larger figure in the account of poverty 
 than do "Foreign Missions." Meantime, 
 I am debtor to every man whom I can 
 help, whether he lives next door or in 
 
A Ready Critic 217 
 
 China. And until the light of our great 
 civilization breaks clear around the world 
 our debt will not be paid. 
 
 One thought more. There are people 
 who believe in the Church as a sort of 
 social club, or distributing agency for 
 charity. According to their notion the 
 Church's work is done when the strangers 
 have all been welcomed and the poor have 
 all been fed. But there are great crying 
 wants which cannot be met with good-fel- 
 lowship and loaves of bread. There are 
 heart-windows which can never be thrown 
 open by a hearty handshake. There are 
 spiritual enrichments that souls are need- 
 ing. There are beautiful transformations 
 which are to make men fit for Heaven. 
 We are dealing with men immortal, and 
 sometimes the breaking of the spikenard 
 box is more precious than the feeding of 
 the poor. 
 
XI 
 
 THE QUESTION OF AN IMPRISONED 
 PROPHET 
 
"He grieves more than is necessary who grieves 
 before it is necessary." — Seneca. 
 
 "Ah, the endless afterwhiles ! — 
 Leagues on leagues, and miles on miles, 
 In the distance far withdrawn. 
 Stretching on, and on, and on !" — Riley. 
 
 "Unbelief is only a phase of impatience. Let 
 us keep ourselves from mental panic, for that is 
 the close ally of pantheism. In the higher realms 
 of intellectual life and activity it is good for men 
 to remember this benediction pronounced upon 
 those who seek and hope and quietly wait." — 
 Selhy. 
 
 "The kingdom of God cometh not with obser- 
 vation." — Jesus. 
 
''ART THOU HE THAT SHOULD COME, 
 OR LOOK WE FOR ANOTHER ?»^ 
 
 This question from the prison at 
 Machaerus was a veritable heart cry. 
 John's uncompromising mission had end- 
 ed abruptly some few months previous. 
 He was paying the usual penalty for being 
 a prophetic voice. The days went wea- 
 rily, we may believe. Enforced inaction is 
 keenest torture to a temperament such as 
 John's. Used to the freedom of field and 
 forest, untrammeled of spirit as the moun- 
 tain airs that once had played upon his 
 face, a stalwart unconquered soul, it was 
 simply maddening to hear the key turn in 
 the lock. Every prison mess made him 
 freshly hungry for the former ''locusts 
 and wild honey." Even the visits of his 
 few devoted friends served but to accentu- 
 ate his sense of helplessness. He was a 
 caged eagle, wearing his wings against 
 the unpitying bars that shut him in. 
 
222 The Question of 
 
 Nor was the news from the outside 
 world calculated to abate John's fever. 
 History had been making rapidly during 
 the few months of his imprisonment. 
 The Man whom he had announced, and 
 afterward baptized at Jordan, was hardly 
 meeting John's expectations. John had 
 described Him as a mightier spirit than 
 himself, whose "fan would be in His 
 hand," and who would burn the chaff 
 with ''fire unquenchable." Yet, from all 
 accounts, this later Prophet was so far 
 from heroic in His method that Mag- 
 dalens dared to look up into His face, and 
 little children nestled in His arms. John 
 was amazed, bewildered. Had his un- 
 compromising zeal gone all for naught? 
 Finally, when he could bear the agony no 
 longer, he commissioned two of his dis- 
 ciples with the eager inquiry: "Art thou 
 He that should come, or look we for 
 another?" 
 
 For which most rational inquiry John 
 has been subjected to all sorts of criti- 
 
An Imprisoned Prophet 223 
 
 cisms. He has been called peevish, un- 
 generous, skeptical. Clothing Jesus in 
 all the majesty and grace of modern rev- 
 erence, men have wondered how John 
 could so far stultify himself as to phrase 
 this question. Strange that he should not 
 trust the very Personage whom he had 
 heralded. Pitiful to be asking at that 
 late day in his calendar: ^'Art thou He 
 that should come, or look we for 
 another?" 
 
 Somehow I can find no fault with the 
 question. It was both legitimate and sane 
 — phrased with all the eagerness and 
 frankness of the man. Remember he was 
 depressed, dispirited. This was not a 
 question of the sunlight ; it was a question 
 of the night and storm. It was born amid 
 doubts and fears. We must always make 
 allowance, in our estimates of men, for 
 the inevitable sag of human nature. No 
 man can be at his best day after day. No 
 soul should be judged during its eclipse. 
 A certain eminent Presbyterian was 
 
224 The Question of 
 
 asked by his pastor if he "enjoyed 
 the full assurance of salvation?" "Well, 
 I am sure I am saved/' was the reply, 
 ''but I never enjoy anything when the 
 wind is East." There are nervous and 
 physical reactions to which every human 
 being is heir. After strong effort or long 
 suspense they come. And it is no more 
 fair to judge a soul during such seasons 
 of reaction than to take the tone of a 
 Stradivarius violin when the strings are 
 down. 
 
 I have heard of an eminent actress who, 
 after carrying an audience clear off its 
 feet by her magnificent acting, would go 
 to her dressing room and cry like a little 
 child, vowing she would never stand be- 
 fore the footlights again. One of our 
 most successful ministers told me that he 
 could scarcely get out of the church quick- 
 ly enough after the sermon was through 
 — so complete and deadening was his 
 sense of failure. I saw a woman pass 
 through a terrific ordeal of domestic sor- 
 
An Imprisoned Prophet 225 
 
 row without tear or audible cry. For 
 days she carried a stricken household upon 
 her own brave heart. She met all de- 
 mands on strength and nerve power. She 
 seemed to be made of steel. But when 
 the first agony was past and the house- 
 hold resumed its normal routine, she 
 lapsed into such a paroxysm of sobs that 
 it seemed as if she would die. 
 
 William Cowper could never have writ- 
 ten his most famous hymn had he not 
 passed through the torment of great de- 
 pression. It was after one of those terri- 
 ble seasons, in the gloom of which he so 
 completely lost his way that he was at 
 the point of suicide, he wrote : 
 
 "God moves in a mysterious way 
 His wonders to perform." 
 
 Philip Melanchthon was often misunder- 
 stood and sometimes reproached by Lu- 
 ther for the streaks of melancholy to 
 which the former was a victim. As mat- 
 ter of fact, he could no more beat off the 
 
226 The Question of 
 
 depressing seasons than he could prevent 
 the sultriness which often follows a thun- 
 derstorm. It is the part of a high-strung 
 nature to be easily thrown out of key. 
 Elijah under a juniper tree is a true pic- 
 ture of human life. No man can continue 
 to live at high tension. The fire test of 
 Carmel was inevitably followed by the 
 corrosion of human doubt. He who flies 
 highest falls farthest when reaction sets 
 in. Even the Master was no stranger to 
 these moments of transient eclipse. It 
 was in one of them that He cried out in 
 the Garden, "My soul is exceeding sor- 
 rowful." It was human, only, that after 
 comforting the disciples, He should need 
 some one to comfort Him. So there was 
 no unworthiness in the Baptist's cry for a 
 fresh certification of his faith. It was his 
 heart that spoke in this ancient question. 
 He had toiled so earnestly for years that 
 when the reaction came he scarcely knew 
 what to believe. ''Art thou He that should 
 come, or look we for another?" 
 
An Imprisoned Prophet 227 
 
 But there was more than depression in 
 the Baptist's question. Enforced inaction 
 had made him morbid. Out under the 
 open sky, with the sting of the wind on 
 his cheek, John would never have given 
 utterance to this heart cry. He would 
 hardly have doubted the issue of the cam- 
 paign so long as his own powers were 
 still actively engaged. Activity is a sav- 
 ing thing for most folks. Activity would 
 have saved John from this depressing 
 hour. But shut away in prison, his ve- 
 hement hands denied their zealous func- 
 tion, his fearless voice drowned in dun- 
 geon walls, no wonder that he was stag- 
 gered. Dr. Hillis tells of an imprisoned 
 knight who one day heard his own troops 
 go by. They were looking for him, it 
 seemed. Close up to his dungeon they 
 came, only to turn away. His shouts went 
 no further than the wall He could only 
 groan and pray — an enforced idler when 
 the Cause was needing men. Then he 
 began to doubt. He doubted men and 
 
228 The Question of 
 
 God; and died with the chill of unbeHef 
 upon his heart. 
 
 It is when Hfe is forced to feed upon 
 itself that decay begins. Activity, turned 
 inward upon the soul, begets corrosion. 
 There are certain animals, which, denied 
 their native freedom, will gnaw their own 
 bodies. Let their energy be pent up with- 
 in cage or pen, they will spend that energy 
 destroying themselves. So with a human 
 soul. Refused the normal channels of ex- 
 pression, it burrows into itself. The life 
 prisoner goes insane from cumulative 
 ennui. 
 
 Idlers are generally misanthropes. To 
 have nothing to do is the greatest curse of 
 mankind. Dr. Greer says: *T am often 
 asked the question; I am asked it every 
 week, sometimes every day in the week, 
 and sometimes a great many times in a 
 day — How is a young woman to live to- 
 day who has to earn her bread ? It is not 
 always an easy question to answer. But 
 there is another question much harder to 
 
An Imprisoned Prophet 229 
 
 answer — How is a young woman to live 
 to-day who does not have to earn her 
 bread?" How is a young man to Hve in 
 the absence of great ambition and strong 
 activity ? How is anybody to live worthi- 
 ly and well without ceaseless, passionate 
 toil? 
 
 The papers tell of a young man, a 
 Princeton graduate, who was killed by 
 twelve hundred dollars a year — and idle- 
 ness. He had no discoverable bad habits. 
 His associates were good. But at twenty- 
 seven years of age he found himself freed 
 from the blessed necessity of work. He 
 figured it out that he could live comfort- 
 ably on his twelve hundred dollars a year, 
 without turning his hand to active toil. 
 But instead of his living on the money, 
 the money lived on him. ''Doing nothing 
 is killing me," he wrote to a bosom friend. 
 And shortly afterward he finished up the 
 job with his own hand, and died a suicide. 
 The best cure of ennui is action. He 
 whose hands are full of holy duties will 
 
230 The Question of 
 
 have small room in his heart for unholy 
 doubts. It is the seasons of enforced or 
 self-elected idleness that kill men. 
 
 Here, I believe, is the secret of the pes- 
 simism of old age. There is something 
 very pitiful, yet thoroughly philosophical, 
 about the way old folks have of grieving 
 for the "good old times." The "good old 
 times" were the times in which they were 
 active; the times which they helped to 
 make. Old people remember the tingle of 
 former days — days in which it was certain 
 that the procession was going somewhere 
 because they were in the ranks. Never 
 could they doubt the issue of a struggle to 
 which their own strength was committed. 
 By a sort of sublime, sweet egotism to 
 which no earnest soul is stranger, they 
 believed in the thing which they were 
 doing, for this most cogent reason — that 
 they were doing it. Whereas now that 
 hands and feet are sorely disqualified, and 
 they are locked up in the prison of old 
 age, like another John the Baptist they 
 
An Imprisoned Prophet 231 
 
 begin to worry about the ways of the 
 world and to believe that the best days are 
 past. How could it be otherwise ? It has 
 always been so. It will be so with us if 
 we live to be old ; we, too, shall look back 
 upon those days in which we lived and 
 labored as the Golden Age of Man. Pa- 
 tience with those who are living in the 
 past, and resolution to stay in the ranks 
 that we may keep 3^oung longest, is our 
 present duty. 
 
 But John's question involves certain 
 other considerations. It was based, in 
 part, upon a misapprehension of the facts. 
 He had not heard the whole story. Shut 
 away from the busy world in which Christ 
 was moving, he got only scraps of news. 
 It is said that the blind and deaf are near- 
 ly always suspicious. The part of the 
 beauty they cannot appreciate, the part of 
 the narrative they fail to hear makes them 
 skeptical about the rest. All men are more 
 or less like that — mystified by fragments 
 of the story ; confused by glimpses of the 
 
232 The Question of 
 
 truth; cynical concerning the portion of 
 the landscape which lies in shadow. It is 
 natural to distrust the movement whose 
 full sweep we cannot follow. 
 
 Diminished chords are the soul of fine 
 harmony. But a diminished chord, stand- 
 ing alone, is unmusical. Hear it apart 
 from the chord from which it was modu- 
 lated and the chord into which it passes, 
 and it only offends the ear. But let it be 
 struck in its proper musical relations and 
 it is full of richness and power. Here is 
 our trouble, often. Like John shut away 
 in Herod's prison, we cannot hear the full 
 harmony of events outside. Our ear is 
 offended by what we hear. But could we 
 hear the whole, our hearts would be full 
 of song. It is the part we miss which 
 makes us skeptical and sour. 
 
 Here is the philosophy of the old 
 proverb that the "eavesdropper never 
 hears any good of himself." It is not that 
 the good is never spoken, but that the 
 eavesdropper takes his cue from a single 
 
An Imprisoned Prophet 233 
 
 phrase or word. A part of a sentence is 
 often utterly misleading; the same words 
 have totally different constructions. Thus 
 no hearer is qualified to draw conclusions 
 unless he hears all that is said. If he will 
 tarry at the keyhole, he must be there 
 early and stay until the whole interview 
 is through. 
 
 Here also is the reason for the popular 
 distrust of certain great reforms. The 
 multitude see one aspect of the move- 
 ment. They hear only the violent words 
 of some incautious devotee. They are 
 offended by the obvious extravagance and 
 folly. And without waiting to balance the 
 facts they sit in judgment. It is in the 
 political history of the present generation 
 that some of the most vehement opponents 
 of the ''free silver heresy" were themselves 
 once committed to its support. I assume 
 that they were honest formerly and are 
 honest still. Their conduct, then, is sus- 
 ceptible of but one interpretation — they 
 had not formerly viewed the case in all its 
 
234 The Question of 
 
 bearings. So I assert that there are ar- 
 dent Protectionists who would be Free- 
 traders, and Freetraders who would be 
 Protectionists if they understood all the 
 facts ; radicals who would be converted to 
 conservative standards, and vice versa, if 
 all the story were told ; Episcopalians who 
 might be Methodists, and Methodists who 
 might turn into the Episcopal fold, were 
 the whole history of denominationalism 
 at hand. Festus was wrong when he as- 
 sumed that "much learning" would make 
 a man ''mad." It is rather the ''little 
 learning" that drives men into intolerance 
 and fury. 
 
 Here, too, is the root of skepticism in 
 religion. It is because "we know in part, 
 and . . . prophesy in part" that we miss 
 the way. It is because we "see through a 
 glass darkly" that we condemn the color 
 of the skies. The book of nature is mysti- 
 fying because we can spell out only a sen- 
 tence here and there. I have no patience 
 with the doctrine that faith is better than 
 
An Imprisoned Prophet 235 
 
 knowledge. Faith itself must be ground- 
 ed in knowledge. Only as a man plants 
 his feet upon facts can he strain upward 
 in Christian faith. Knowledge is final 
 and best. To ''see face to face," and to 
 ''know even as also I am known," will be 
 Heaven. 
 
 But there is one more lesson for us in 
 the Baptist's question. Part depression, 
 part inaction, part misunderstanding — 
 the question is characteristically some- 
 what more. It is the cry of a soul to 
 know if it has failed. John had put the 
 best years of his life into a preparation of 
 the Messiah's path. Indeed, he had done 
 nothing else. He had been set apart from 
 his birth. He had spared neither peril 
 nor pain. He had staked his all upon the 
 issue. He had toiled with undoubting 
 heart. And now that active service was 
 over, and he lay rotting in a prison, he 
 wanted to know if he had failed. If Mes- 
 siah had not come John's years had been 
 thrown away. A heart's full agony was 
 
236 The Question of 
 
 in the question he sent to Jesus that day. 
 Trembling, prayerful, fearing almost to 
 hear the answer, he asked : "Art thou He 
 that should come, or look we for an- 
 other?" 
 
 There are many such experiences in 
 life. Some day a boy graduates from 
 college. He has been looking forward to 
 that rare moment. For years he has fed 
 his heart upon its joy. Hope has gilded 
 the horizon with brilliant touches. But 
 graduation day comes and passes — not 
 so very different from any other day — 
 and he stands facing a busy, selfish world. 
 Men do not take off their hats to admit 
 him to their markets. Even with his 
 parchment in his hand he still must fight 
 his way. God help him in that moment 
 in which he looks down at his diploma 
 and asks, "Is this it? Is this what I have 
 toiled for so many years?" 
 
 To love and to be loved is the precious 
 dream of young womanhobd. Not scien- 
 tific attainment, or linguistic skill, or po- 
 
An Imprisoned Prophet 237 
 
 litical eminence, but love, is the glory of 
 womanhood. Her best excellence grows 
 out of love. 
 
 " 'Tis woman's whole existence." 
 Whatever else she gives up, no true 
 woman ever gives up the hope of being 
 royally loved. Let the day come and her 
 heart find its mate. Let her be faithfully 
 loved and happily married. Will all her 
 girlhood dreams come true? (They might 
 oftener come true if men were all they 
 ought to be in chivalry and honor.) But 
 hours will come — she will keep them from 
 human sight if she be womanly — hours 
 in which, as she sits gazing at her wed- 
 ding ring or staring into space, her heart 
 will cry : "Is this all of love? Did I hope 
 and yearn for this?" 
 
 Or take the truth in its highest bearing. 
 Some day a man gives his heart to God. 
 Through all the years of wandering and 
 folly he never quite doubted that he should 
 do it, sometime. A mother's prayers 
 have been in his ears again and again. 
 
238 The Question of 
 
 He has never been able to forget alto- 
 gether the home altar and the big family 
 Bible. Skeptical often and cynical some- 
 times, he has nevertheless cherished near 
 his heart the hope of finding God. And 
 now that at length he has foimd Him, he 
 expects the whole world to be changed. 
 He looks to see temptation disappear; all 
 skies to be kind and blue. He has left 
 the old life behind. Yet, as he goes down 
 town next morning, the stores and the 
 folks are the same. God love him as the 
 question comes leaping to his lips: "Is 
 this all it is to be a Christian?" 
 
 How true to human experience to-day 
 are the words of John. How they rephrase 
 themselves in modern hearts. We under- 
 stand his agony by our own. But John 
 got his answer. His faith had not been 
 misplaced. His service had not been 
 wasted. Messiah had truly come. "Go — 
 tell John," was Jesus' word to John's dis- 
 ciples. "Show him again these things 
 which ye do hear and see." "Blessed is 
 
An Imprisoned Prophet 239 
 
 he, whosoever shall not be offended in 
 me." The answer was, evidently, enough. 
 Doubt died in John's heart that day. It 
 will also die out of ours, if we honestly 
 ask and honestly wait for answer. 
 
XII 
 
 THE QUESTION OF A TROUBLED 
 RULER 
 
 16 
 
This, it seems to me, is the form that our reli- 
 gious life is more and more assuming — just a 
 great inert overfuilness. Religion is met, not, as 
 it was a thousand years ago, by a man in mail 
 upon the threshold, with a sword or an ax or a 
 firebrand to kill it out — the brutality of that folly 
 is obsolete; not, as it was a hundred years ago, 
 by a cunning diplomatist in the vestibule with wiry 
 words and smooth-tongued irony to circumvent 
 the newcomer and make even Religion herself 
 faithless and untrue — the cowardice of that folly is 
 dying away ; but nowadays, when the new stranger 
 comes up to the door, the opposition is just the 
 great, impenetrable, passive fullness of the house 
 she tries to enter." — Brooks. 
 
 " 'Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for ! my 
 
 flesh that I seek 
 In the Godhead ! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it 
 
 shall be 
 A face like my face that receives thee ; a Man like 
 
 to me, 
 Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever : a Hand 
 
 like this hand 
 Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! 
 
 See the Christ stand !" 
 
 — Browning. 
 
 "Whatever the surprises of the future may be, 
 nothing will ever surpass the moral grandeur of 
 Jesus as it shines and glows in the canonical Gos- 
 pels." — Renan. 
 
 "God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, 
 made under the law, that He might redeem them 
 that were under the law." — Paul. 
 
''WHAT SHALL I DO, THEN, 
 WITH JESUS?'' 
 
 Pilate's part in this ancient tragedy 
 was, obviously, a most unwilling one. To 
 begin with, he had small sympathy with 
 the internal feuds and furies of the Jews. 
 He looked upon the whole race as com- 
 mon cattle who had passed under the 
 Roman yoke. How far they chafed and 
 gored each other was of no concern to 
 him so long as they wore the yoke and 
 thus served his Roman masters. In the 
 second place, he could but recoil from the 
 obvious meanness of the entire transac- 
 tion. Pilate was a fair man, as Roman 
 governors went; a man of tolerance and 
 kindness. Moreover, he was in Palestine 
 as the administrator of that magnificent 
 legal system on which, as on a broad 
 foundation, our codes and equities were 
 built. He desired no part in a process 
 which, only too evidently, had been con- 
 ceived in malice and born in crime. What- 
 
 243 
 
244 The Question of 
 
 ever local boundaries the Prisoner had 
 transgressed, He certainly was not de- 
 serving of the present cruelty and shame. 
 
 But Pilate was further deterred from 
 participation in the crime by the bearing 
 and beauty of the Prisoner Himself. No 
 such Face had ever looked up into the 
 Roman governor's before. Pilate had 
 seen solidity; such majestic calm and re- 
 pose he had never seen. Men of innocent 
 eyes and beautiful brows had sometimes 
 stood before him. But no such brow and 
 eyes as these. Cross-examination only 
 confirmed the unwillingness of Pilate. 
 There was ''no fault" to find. Just then 
 came the warning message from his wife. 
 Ah, it was Pilate's better self that cried 
 out before the rabble: "What shall I do, 
 then, with Jesus?" 
 
 He, evidently, did everything he could, 
 except the one thing which would have 
 satisfied the heart and conscience of mod- 
 ern Christendom. He openly declared 
 the injustice of the deed. He tried to 
 
A Troubled Ruler 245 
 
 make the Sanhedrin assume the burden of 
 the crime. Then, catching at a techni- 
 cality of local jurisdiction, he sent the 
 Prisoner to Herod. Again and again he 
 appealed to the accusers' sense of justice; 
 even going so far as to invite the popu- 
 lace to take the matter out of the elders' 
 hands by the grace of executive pardon. 
 And when finally, according to John's 
 narration, Pilate caused the unresisting 
 Victim to be scourged, it was not so 
 much in wantonness as in a real compas- 
 sion, that the poor, torn back and an- 
 guished eyes might shame and pacify the 
 people. 
 
 I have an honest pity for this Roman. 
 We have not been quite fair or gener- 
 ous toward Pilate. Church history has 
 piled his name with an obloquy he never 
 quite deserved. He has been judged by 
 our greater light ; condemned by our finer 
 ethics. Under ordinary conditions Pilate 
 would have been a good man. With even 
 the faintest encouragement of his more 
 
246 The Question of 
 
 worthy impulses, he might have won an 
 immortality of praise. He wanted to do 
 well by Jesus. For a time he stood in the 
 breach and held the bloodhounds of Juda- 
 ism at bay. But he made one terrible 
 mistake. Instead of asking his question 
 of his own heart, he asked it of the peo- 
 ple : "What shall I do, then, with Jesus ?" 
 I have selected the question, however, 
 not for its local interest and color, but as 
 a typical question for all the ages. The 
 judgment hall in which Pilate uttered 
 these words, and later washed his hands, 
 cannot be certainly named. The city in 
 which the tragedy occurred has been for 
 ages a ruin. The names of all save a 
 few of the leading actors in the tragedy 
 have passed from the memory of man. 
 We cannot make pilgrimage to Pilate's 
 tomb with tears or curses. Every figure 
 in that tremendous scene has gone — save 
 His who looked up into Pilate's face of 
 old. Renan once said, "Whatever else 
 may be taken from us Christ is left." And 
 
A Troubled Ruler 247 
 
 the question of one man nineteen centu- 
 ries ago has become the burning question 
 of more human hearts than beat on earth 
 when Pilate asked it first. Had he an- 
 swered it aright we might not even have 
 its record; because he failed to answer it 
 with honor we cannot escape its stress 
 and urgency. "What shall I do, then, 
 with Jesus?" 
 
 Have you considered what it means 
 that, after nineteen centuries of change, 
 men still are asking the selfsame question. 
 I submit it as a modern miracle, that, con- 
 sidering all that has been taken from us, 
 "Christ is left." It was the saying of Vol- 
 taire that the Christianity of Jesus could 
 never survive the nineteenth century. 
 About a hundred years ago Thomas 
 Paine wrote at the end of the first part 
 of his Age of Reason: "I have now gone 
 through the Bible as a man would go 
 through a wood with an ax on his shoul- 
 der. Here they lie, and the priests may, 
 if they can, replant them. They may. 
 
248 The Question of 
 
 perhaps, stick them in the ground, but 
 they will never make them grow." Mrs. 
 Southerland Orr, in her life of Robert 
 Browning, says that as Carlyle was one 
 day passing an image of the crucifixion, 
 he looked up at the figure of Christ and 
 slowly muttered : "Ah, poor fellow ; your 
 part is played out!" Diocletian received 
 a monument for "having abolished every- 
 where the superstition of Christ." Only 
 the other day a prominent citizen de- 
 clared concerning the life and doctrine of 
 Jesus : "I tell you, there is nothing in it." 
 Yet the fact is, that this exploded fiction 
 has more hold on the heart of the world 
 than at any previous moment. All the 
 infidelic thrusts and sneers of all the ages 
 have not availed to choke down the ques- 
 tion: "What shall I do, then, with 
 Jesus?" 
 
 Not quite a half century ago Strauss 
 launched his famous "Mythical Theory." 
 According to which theory no such won- 
 derful person as Jesus ever lived except 
 
A Troubled Ruler 249 
 
 in the minds of His apostles. The apos- 
 tles imagined Christ. They materialized 
 Him out of the star dust of their Mes- 
 sianic hopes and training. So imbued 
 had they become with the Old Testament 
 teaching concerning the Messiah that, by 
 and by, they idealized a person to meet 
 their own demands. Thus the Christ of 
 the canonical Gospels was merely an or- 
 dinary man, magnified by men's ador- 
 ing love or commercial scheming into the 
 Eternal Son of God. For a time it was 
 thought that Strauss had dealt Christiani- 
 ty a fatal blow. Theologians went in 
 mourning many days. Unbelief made 
 such a bedlam as had not been heard since 
 the Tower of Babel fell. The world had 
 lost its Christ! 
 
 Yet before a quarter century had passed 
 another scholar penned these words: 
 ''Whatever else may be taken from us 
 Christ is left. It is no use to say that 
 the Christ revealed in the canonical Gos- 
 pels is not histoMcal. Who among His 
 
250 The Question of 
 
 disciples, or among their converts, was 
 capable of inventing, or even of imagin- 
 ing, the life and character revealed in the 
 Gospels?" Thus skeptic has answered 
 skeptic until, to-day, there is hardly an 
 intelligent doubter who denies the his- 
 toricity of Jesus' Hfe and labors. And 
 for the average man the Christ stands 
 forth with greater winsomeness and per- 
 sonal attraction than ever in ages past. 
 
 I know there is a modern irreverence 
 in handling the data and doctrines of 
 Jesus' life on earth. General Lew Wal- 
 lace has thrown some added side lights 
 upon His person; and Marie Corelli has 
 undertaken an explanation of His mira- 
 cles, upon the basis of certain admitted 
 laws of magnetism and hypnotics. Every 
 little while an enthusiastic searcher comes 
 forward with a new Rosetta stone to 
 translate some part of the marvel of Je- 
 sus into the language of common life. 
 Others like Sheldon and Stead have es- 
 sayed to project the historic Christ into 
 
A Troubled Ruler 251 
 
 the streets and problems of our age. 
 Through all of which this fact stands 
 forth, that the Son of Mary, whether or 
 not we pronounce Him Son of God, is 
 the central figure in the world's gaze to- 
 day. Jesus is in the novels and the phi- 
 losophies, in the sociology and in the 
 drama of the age, simply because men 
 cannot speak from human hearts to hu- 
 man hearts and leave him out. And some 
 who ''came to mock have remained to 
 pray." Lew Wallace became a Christian 
 while writing his Ben Hur. Marie 
 Corelli came out of the Catholic Church, 
 but she has found a diviner Christ than 
 the Churches have sometimes preached. 
 Tolstoi turned back from his early infi- 
 delity to find rest for his heart and hope 
 for humanity in Jesus and the "Sermon 
 on the Mount." Intelligent study cannot 
 indefinitely ignore Him. Christ is in our 
 age as He never was in any previous age. 
 
 "The healing of His seamless dress 
 Is by [more] beds of pain," 
 
252 The Question of 
 
 and in more thoroughfares than ever. 
 And the question of Pilate is aHve with 
 the intensity and passion of countless 
 earnest hearts: "What shall I do, then, 
 with Jesus?" 
 
 It is amazing how men always come 
 back to the question they try to dodge. 
 Pilate did not mean to do anything with 
 Jesus. He asked, only, to be excused 
 from rendering a decision. He tried to 
 shove Jesus off into the custody of the 
 Sanhedrin; then, of Herod; and, finally, 
 of the people — anything to be rid of the 
 embarrassment of passing personal sen- 
 tence against Him. But the authority 
 was in Pilate's hands, and the question 
 came home to him for answer. Men may 
 juggle with great issues for a time, but 
 the moment arrives in which great issues 
 assert their claim. I remember how men 
 parried with prison reform in England. 
 It is hardly possible to imagine the hor- 
 rors of English prison life in the 
 eighteenth century. Englishmen had 
 
A Troubled Ruler 253 
 
 been frequently asked what they ought to 
 do with the English convict. But they 
 had generally eased their consciences by 
 referring the whole matter to prison of- 
 ficials and politicians. Finally, however, 
 the question thrust home with such angry 
 vehemence that England felt called upon 
 to answer it herself; and a new era of 
 humanitarianism had dawned. 
 
 I call to mind, also, how averse we were 
 to interfering with child labor in factory 
 and in shop. Everybody knew it was 
 wrong. Every kind heart smarted with 
 a sense of its injustice. But everybody 
 wanted everybody else to attend to it. 
 And the result was that taskmasters con- 
 tinued to drive little children to the task, 
 until one day — please God such righteous 
 spasms may come a little oftener — men 
 took the question up into their hearts and 
 answered it like men. 
 
 Modern business method has less and 
 less sympathy for the weaker member. 
 Trade i? a mill which often grinds the 
 
254 The Question of 
 
 miller as fine as his flour. Count, if you 
 will, the merchants who have been driven 
 out of a comfortable business by the piti- 
 less whip of the 'Trust." Make tally of 
 the salesmen and superintendents, once 
 earning a generous wage, who would be 
 grateful to-day for an income of five hun- 
 dred or a thousand dollars a year. So 
 the crowding process goes on. But the 
 question of responsibility will not down. 
 It keeps crying in the ears of men. And 
 it will continue to cry until we answer it 
 with honor : ''What shall I do, then, with 
 the weaker member?" 
 
 So with respect to any fine talent or 
 gracious opportunity or sacred trust, the 
 question comes ever again: "What shall 
 I do with it?" We cannot be always 
 dodging. Shifted responsibility comes 
 home at last. I recall the story of an in- 
 grate, who in the years of his prosperity 
 turned his own mother from his door; 
 but who found her one morning upon his 
 doorstep, dead. Driven away, she had 
 
A Troubled Ruler 255 
 
 come back to die within sound of his voice. 
 You remember the cry of Ahab when the 
 long-abused prophet came, "Hast thou 
 found me, O, mine enemy?" He who 
 dodges issues feels always hounded. No 
 soul can travel far or fast enough to get 
 away from duty. Sometime in the dark- 
 ness or in the day it will appear. This is 
 God's world, and His agents work cease- 
 lessly to make men do their duty. Soon 
 or late we must render our decision con- 
 cerning every pressing claim. 
 
 So with men's attitude toward Christ. 
 No Herod can ever take Him off their 
 hands. In certain famous murder trials 
 the question of legal jurisdiction has been 
 warmly debated — one county seeking to 
 shift to another the burden of notoriety 
 and expense. There can be no such ques- 
 tion concerning this Prisoner. Jesus is 
 on trial in the court of every heart. With 
 the same look as that which He lifted to 
 the despairing Pilate's face; with the 
 same silent majesty as won that Roman 
 
256 The Question of 
 
 governor's praise; with the same appeal- 
 ing goodness as challenged every noble 
 impulse of His judge's nature, Jesus 
 stands before men to-day. "There is but 
 one question of the day," said Gladstone 
 a few years before his death, "and that 
 is the Gospel." No soul can have a duty 
 ahead of its duty to do something with 
 Jesus. Everything else can afford to wait 
 on that. "What shall I do . . . with 
 Jesus?" 
 
 Men say they have not time. Not time 
 for what? Not time to take one's bear- 
 ings by the star of Bethlehem ? Not time 
 to lubricate the axles before starting on a 
 journey? Not time to be fed with the 
 heart's own bread? Not time to let in 
 the light? Time for everything except 
 that which is most vital and eternal ? For 
 shame! The most fruitful time a man 
 ever spends is the time he spends in get- 
 ting right with Ck)d — answering the ques- 
 tion which Pilate tried to dodge: "What 
 shall I do . . . with Jesus?" 
 
A Troubled Ruler 257 
 
 Before I suggest the answer I want to 
 note one thing more about Pilate's ques- 
 tion — the significance of a single word in 
 its phraseology. "What shall I do, then?" 
 "Then" is resultant. It refers to some- 
 thing already done. In view of what Pi- 
 late had promised concerning Barabbas, 
 what was he to "do with Jesus?" How 
 earnestly Pilate wished the populace had 
 demanded this gracious Prisoner. It was 
 in the hope of such a choice that he had 
 made the offer. He could not believe that 
 those who had seen this Prisoner's life, 
 and fed upon His bounty, would chose 
 Barabbas over Jesus. Yet so they had 
 chosen, and there was utter desperation in 
 Pilate's voice as he asked the immortal 
 question : "What shall I do, f/^m''— after 
 the choice of outlawry in preference to 
 goodness — "What shall I do, then, with 
 Jesus?" Pilate, alas, was not free. He 
 had permitted his own hands to be tied. 
 And he came to the decision concerning 
 Jesus, mortgaged by a previous mistake, 
 17 
 
258 The Question of 
 
 unable to do what his heart was prompt- 
 ing for the Christ. 
 
 How true all this is to life. We spend 
 our "money for that which is not bread," 
 and then go hungry for the bread our 
 money would have brought. We miss 
 the strategic point of opportunity, and 
 then limp through life complaining that 
 we never had half a chance. We mort- 
 gage our hearts, and then are grieved 
 that we cannot give clear title. How 
 many men are poor, not from any nig- 
 gardliness of Heaven, but as the result 
 of their own improvidence and folly. "If 
 I only had the hundreds I wasted when a 
 boy," cries the clerk in Wanamaker's or 
 Marshall Fields'! "If I only had not 
 wasted my privileges and despised my 
 birthright," sighs the might-have-been 
 Edison or Paderewski. "If I only had 
 not soiled my heart with licentiousness 
 and shame," moans the libertine in the 
 presence of holy womanhood. Alas, that 
 men so often cut the roots which would 
 
A Troubled Ruler 259 
 
 bear fruit in after years ! Alas, that they 
 should be forever crippling themselves 
 for future usefulness and conquest! 
 
 Samson chose a v^oman's favor and 
 found himself helpless against the Philis- 
 tines v^hen they came. David chose car- 
 nage and was denied the most sacred priv- 
 ilege of building a temple to his God. 
 Peter chose self-preservation, and had to 
 be refined through a long process of re- 
 pentance before he could feed the flock 
 of Christ. Julius Caesar chose prefer- 
 ment, and died by the hand of the men 
 who might have been his friends. Napo- 
 leon chose empire, and was beaten at 
 Waterloo. Webster chose popularity, 
 and went away from earth with the con- 
 sciousness of having failed. These, all, 
 came to the supreme test, handicapped. 
 
 And so men come to Christ. A previous 
 choice disqualifies them. They stand in 
 the presence of Jesus, wishing, like Pi- 
 late, to do the noble thing, but swept on- 
 ward past their wishes by the stern logic 
 
260 The Question of 
 
 of a former decision. Some lower choice, 
 some choice of wealth or ease or popu- 
 larity, prevents them from making the 
 highest choice of all. The seed divine has 
 to germinate in a soil already choked. 
 What can a man "do with Jesus," so long 
 as he holds allegiance to some other king 
 of life? 
 
 I will tell you what he can do. He can 
 do the thing which the great majority is 
 doing — send Jesus to His cross. Jesus 
 stands for the ideal in human life. And 
 every time a man turns his back upon the 
 ideal of manhood he assists in a fresh 
 crucifixion. No wonder it is so hard to 
 touch certain hearts, "seeing they crucify 
 to themselves the Son of God afresh." 
 Then, there is another thing that the mod- 
 ern Pilate can do with Jesus. He can 
 pass compliments about Him. David 
 Strauss, who labored so diligently for the 
 destruction of Christian faith, admitted 
 that Jesus was "the highest model of re- 
 ligion." The great French agnostic, 
 
A Troubled Ruler 261 
 
 whose Life of Jesus was called a thun- 
 derbolt to Christianity, declared that ''Je- 
 sus will never be surpassed." There are 
 more compliments for Christ to-day than 
 ever. But frozen politeness may barb the 
 most perfect diabolism of spirit. It is no 
 particular virtue to admit the sweetness 
 of the rose or the glory of the stars. 
 "Why call ye me Lord . . . and do not 
 the things which I say?" 
 
 There is one other thing for a man to 
 do with Jesus — which Pilate did not do. 
 He can enthrone Christ as the Master of 
 his life. 
 
 "If Jesus Christ is a man — 
 
 And only a man — I say, 
 That of all mankind I will cleave to Him, 
 
 And to Him will I cleave alway. 
 
 "If Jesus Christ is a God — 
 
 And the only God — I swear, 
 I will follow him, through heaven and hell, 
 
 The earth, the sea, and the air." 
 
Princeton 
 
 lifil 
 
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