BV 4310 .M2 
 
 1922 
 
 
 McDowell, William 
 
 Fraser, 
 
 1858-1937. 
 
 
 
 This mind. 
 
 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 GOOD MINISTERS OF JESUS CHRIST 
 
 A MAN'S RELIGION 
 
arfte iHenbcntjaa lecturesf, Cigbtf) Series 
 Belibereb at BcJ^autD l^niljersitp 
 
 THIS MIND 
 
 WILLIAM FRASER McDOWELL 
 
 One of the Bishops of the 
 Methodist Episcopal Church 
 
 'Have this mind in you, which was also 
 in Christ Jesus" 
 
 THE METHODIST BO(JK CONCERN 
 NEW YORK CINCINNATI 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 The Mendenhall Lectures of DePauw Univer- 
 sity, to which this series of addresses belongs, 
 was founded by the Reverend Marmaduke H. 
 Mendenhall, D.D., of the North Indiana Confer- 
 ence of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The 
 object of the donor was to found a perpetual lec- 
 tureship which would bring to the University as 
 lecturers "persons of high and wide repute, of 
 broad and varied scholarship, who firmly adhere 
 to the evangelical system of Christian faith. The 
 selection of lecturers may be made from the world 
 of Christian scholarship, without regard to de- 
 nominational divisions. Each course of lectures 
 is to be published in book form by an eminent 
 publishing house and sold at cost to the faculty 
 and students of the university." 
 
 Lectures thus far published under this founda- 
 tion : 
 
 1913, The Bible and Life, Edwin Holt 
 Hughes. 
 
 1914, The Literary Primacy of the Bible, 
 George Peck Eckman. 
 
 1917, Understanding the Scriptures, Francis 
 John McConnell. 
 
 1918, Religion and War, William H. P. Faunce. 
 
 7 
 
8 FOREWORD 
 
 1919, Some Aspects of International Christian- 
 ity, John Kelman. 
 
 1920, What Must the Church Do to Be Saved? 
 Ernest Fremont Tittle. 
 
 1921, Social Rebuilders, Charles Reynolds 
 Brown. 
 
 1922, This Mind, William Eraser McDowell. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The Mendenhall Lectures for 1922 at DePauw 
 University were prepared and spoken with 
 the desire that they might really assist members 
 of the student body in making their decisions for 
 lifework and service in the world to which they 
 are so rapidly coming. The lectures are not a 
 plea for youth to enter the ministry or mission 
 field, though such a discussion would have 
 pleased the lecturer. He desired in this course 
 to state as clearly as he could some of those prin- 
 ciples which should govern young people facing 
 their life decisions and lifework no matter what 
 their particular calling is to be. For it seems to 
 thoughtful students of our age that a new conse- 
 cration of life in all occupations, a new testing 
 of life in all callings by the principles of Jesus 
 Christ, and a new reference of life to his mind or 
 attitude toward it are imperatively called for, if 
 individual life itself or the human world is to be 
 saved. This will explain the method, the treat- 
 ment and the spirit of the lectures. 
 
 It is hoped that the printed volume may be 
 useful to young people in the supremely critical 
 and important period when they are deciding 
 what they will do with their lives. If it helps 
 
 9 
 
10 PREFACE 
 
 them to make their decisions in the light of Jesus' 
 life, to have in themselves toward their lives 
 the mind that was in him toward his life, the 
 author will be content. He will have no doubt 
 or fear as to the outcome. It is hoped that the 
 small volume may be useful also to pastors and 
 teachers, to the advisors of youth in Student Con- 
 ferences, Young People's Institutes, Student 
 Volunteer meetings, colleges, high schools, 
 churches, Sunday schools, and elsewhere where 
 young people are seeking advice and counsel on 
 this vital subject. 
 
 It is especially hoped by the lecturer that the 
 volume may assist and guide parents in their 
 relation to their children's decisions. Here is 
 a real difficulty. Many parents are actually 
 standing in the way of their children's decision 
 according to the mind of Christ. Real parental 
 interest and right are carried often far beyond 
 their proper limit into the realm of the life de- 
 cisions of their children. Many students, known 
 to me, have been prevented from the acceptance 
 of what has seemed a clear call of the Master 
 because their parents have had other plans for 
 them. We older people are quite likely to think 
 that our right to control life covers not only our 
 own lives, but the lives of our children and grand- 
 children. .It is my conviction after years of 
 observation that the principles here stated should 
 
PKEFACE 11 
 
 govern parents in their attitude to their chil- 
 dren's lifework, just as truly as they should 
 govern the attitude of the young people them- 
 selves. It is a serious thing for parents to set 
 their own wills and preferences in opposition to 
 the evident will of God for their children's lives. 
 Those parents who have run with the will of 
 God and the highest desires of their children in 
 their response to it have had the largest joy in 
 the outcome. If the Master wants the son or 
 daughter of any parents reading these lines, for 
 any service anywhere in the world, let the Master 
 have his wonderful way. His wish is the suffi- 
 cient motive and reason. 
 
 It would have been a pleasure to add a lec- 
 ture showing from the actual lives of other men 
 and women how they have responded to the 
 Master's wish. Maybe in some future time such 
 an addition may be made, either in this book 
 or outside of it. How did Frederick W. Robert- 
 son, Phillips Brooks, Henry Drummond, James 
 Chalmers, Alice Freeman Palmer, William H. 
 Baldwin, Dr. William T. Grenfell, and others 
 come to the decisions that led them into the 
 lives they led and the work they did? How did 
 Jesus Christ get his chance in such lives? 
 Through what perplexities, over what difflculties 
 and oppositions, under what influences did these 
 and others reach that final determination that 
 
12 PREFACE 
 
 led to such commanding results in their lives? 
 Maybe it is just as well that no attempt is made 
 here to show the experience of individuals. May- 
 be it is better that in colleges, schools, confer- 
 ences, institutes and other groups young men 
 and women should by their own reading kindle 
 their lives at the fire of these other lives. Of 
 this I am certain, that the youth of this day 
 and succeeding days will not come to their true 
 place of life or service in the world except as 
 they walk in the spirit and light of those im- 
 mortal souls who have struck step and kept step 
 with the Master of all good life and work. 
 
 I am under great obligation to my dear 
 friends, the Reverends James C. Baker, William 
 J. Davidson, John R. Edwards, Victor G. Mills, 
 and Oscar T. Olson, for reading the manuscripts 
 before the lectures were presented at DePauw, 
 and for making many most valuable criticisms 
 and suggestions. 
 
 And my gratitude to the faculty and students 
 of DePauw and the people of Greencastle for 
 their cordiality and kindness during the three 
 days when the lectures were being spoken is 
 deep and lasting. Above all I am grateful for 
 the enlarged satisfaction that this new study of 
 the manifold life of Jesus has brought. His 
 meaning for life is an evergrowing wonder and 
 splendor. What it may grow to when it has full 
 
PREFACE 13 
 
 opportunity in human life does not yet appear. 
 What human life and service may become when 
 Jesus Christ is perfectly formed in them, or 
 when they have put on Christ, we may see in some 
 new revelation of life even in our day. Perhaps 
 that is our next great spiritual adventure and 
 achievement. The fellowship of Jesus in life 
 decision and life service, the sharing of his prin- 
 ciples and purposes, the identification of per- 
 sonal life with him, and the merging of it into his 
 seem to me to be youth's supreme advantage and 
 privilege. 
 
THIS MIND TOWARD LIFE'S 
 DECISIONS— I 
 
 One of our minor pleasures, in certain moods, 
 is the cheerful business of putting together pic- 
 ture-puzzles. The exercise calls into activity 
 several powers, such as the sense of shape and 
 color, patience and imagination, and the ability 
 to visualize a cosmos in the presence of a chaos. 
 One of the happy, less irksome ways of teaching 
 geography follows the picture-puzzle method. 
 Of course the whole thing, whether used for 
 diversion or instruction, has some real limita- 
 tions. The only thing you can do is to restore 
 the pieces to their original place in the map or 
 the picture. If the process comes out at all, it 
 comes out the same way every time. Always "as 
 it Avas in the beginning" so it "is now" and so 
 it "ever shall be, world without end." The pro- 
 cess is not at all creative. It leaves no place for 
 freedom, originality, or initiative. Indiana al- 
 ways goes into the same place, between Ohio and 
 Illinois, and there is no place for Texas and New 
 York except their own place. 
 
 Some years ago the world blew up, and the 
 15 
 
16 THIS MIND 
 
 pieces came down in a heap ; pieces of every size, 
 shape, and color; ragged, torn pieces; soiled, 
 marred pieces, with lots of pieces utterly miss- 
 ing. And all over our world men are trying to 
 put them together, either as they were or in some 
 new adjustment. Putting a picture-puzzle to- 
 gether is a game or a recreation, remaking a 
 sawed-up map an academic activity. But the 
 w^orld business is wholly serious. Worlds have 
 no business blowing up like this. You can spill 
 a puzzle or a map and cheerfully go to work to 
 put it together again; but if the world is going 
 to behave like this with any frequency, life can 
 never be cheerful again, no matter how brave it 
 may be. 
 
 This process of reconstruction is at present 
 all absorbing. If the word had not existed, we 
 must have invented it as we did others. For 
 all our principal people, either in groups or in- 
 dividually, promptly set out on the business of 
 reconstruction, some of them vocally, some of 
 them really. And all the old groups appeared 
 again. Thoroughgoing conservatives tried to put 
 the pieces together as they had been before, to 
 make as little change as possible. It has not been 
 a very encouraging period for a crass conserva- 
 tive. Some frankly do not even care to try to re- 
 place the pieces in their original places or rela- 
 tions. They prefer a brand-new combination with 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 17 
 
 a lot of the old stuff left out altogether, either to 
 be burned or junked. Some of these are just 
 plain radicals rejoicing in the opportunity for 
 overthrow and destruction. Some are true be- 
 lievers soberly looking for a new Avorld. They 
 see the rough and ragged edges in some of the 
 old relations, the rotten, sham materials in some 
 of the old fabrics, but they are not downhearted. 
 They know that the process will take time, that 
 it must be as thorough as the new birth, for men 
 and nations, that it will test men even more 
 severely than did the swift and stormy years of 
 the war, and yet they bear into it with ^'hearts 
 courageous." They lack wisdom, but they re- 
 joice in the unrebuking promise to those who 
 ask for wisdom they mean to use. 
 
 And the lines of the rebuilders run into one 
 another. This is no task for one man or one 
 group. Life's interests and departments inter- 
 penetrate. The economic policies of the world 
 do bear upon its religious and intellectual life. 
 The forms of government are related to the faith, 
 the education, the economic condition, and the 
 character of the people. We cannot rebuild the 
 modern Nehemiah's wall if we disregard any gate 
 of it or regard any part of it as unimportant. 
 
 These lines also run into other realms and 
 regions of life. I suppose God's relation to the 
 world is at least a threefold relation. It is 
 
18 THIS MIND 
 
 creative or constructive, it is educational or 
 evolutionary, and it is reconstructive or redemp- 
 tive. Only the half gods concern themselves with 
 part of a god's occupation. We are probably in 
 the third act of the divine drama. In the first 
 act the human soul appears as the climax of crea- 
 tion. And it was so good that the morning stars 
 sang over it. In the second act Jesus appeared 
 as the climax of revelation. And that was so 
 good that the angels sang their song of glory. 
 In the third act the kingdom of heaven, the new 
 heaven, the new earth, a redeemed humanity, a 
 redeemed world will appear. And that will be 
 so good that the host that no man can number 
 will break out in the new song never yet heard. 
 (See Cairns' Reasonableness of the Christian 
 Faith.) 
 
 In this third act we are now. We are in it 
 with the Master of all life and destiny. In a 
 very peculiar sense the youth of to-day, and 
 particularly the college youth of to-day, are in 
 it with Him. For the issue of all this world 
 movement, this quest of man and God for a new 
 world, will humanly depend upon the men and 
 women who will make, shape and determine 
 the next quarter of a century. They are the 
 makers of to-morrow. 
 
 This is a long, perhaps a blind, introduction 
 to what I mean to try to say. Maybe the dis- 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 19 
 
 cussion will not equal the theme. I do not flatter 
 myself with pride or deceive myself with false 
 hope. Really I shall be content to stand here by 
 the fountain gate and make so loud an outcry 
 that the builders of the wall will put this gate in 
 order and in place. 
 
 Now no one of us chooses the time of his com- 
 ing into the world. We are born and live our 
 lives in the world as it is when we live. We may 
 fret and complain because we were not allowed 
 to live at some other period, under other condi- 
 tions, but fretting and complaining are not very 
 noble attitudes. We can go through a perioci 
 like our own, saying with Hamlet : 
 
 'The world is out of joint, 
 Oh cursed spite, that ever I was born 
 To set it right.'' 
 
 But Hamlet is not the most useful character in 
 literature or history. I do not commend his 
 attitude to you. A man carrying a personal 
 grievance like that cannot carry much else. His- 
 tory is full of finer figures. It would be inter- 
 esting to study a lot of them. Indeed, I see no 
 way of properly getting into our age unless w^e 
 know how the best men and women of other ages 
 got into theirs. For in a very real sense every one 
 of us is born in the fullness of time. Some ful- 
 fill the purpose for which they are born when and 
 
;20 THIS MIND 
 
 where they are, and these become world bene- 
 factors. Others fail, some for one reason, some 
 for another, and these become the world's failures 
 or tragedies. The teacher of history has about 
 the best chance there is to reveal to youth the 
 meaning and value of personality. He can show 
 to men and women having only one life each the 
 importance of placing that life according to right 
 principles, in the right spirit, and in the right 
 place. He can show the real meaning of life deci- 
 sions, which are not primarily decisions to be 
 preachers, or teachers, or doctors or lawyers. 
 Which of these one will be is really the secondary 
 question of life, the question one is not prepared 
 to answer until the earlier, more fundamental 
 one has been settled. The teacher of history, 
 who at his best is really the teacher of life, can 
 show the necessity of reaching these primary 
 decisions in the light of the best examples. Does 
 he know anyone who has really shown what a 
 man may be, what a man may try, what a man 
 may do? If so, he has in his hand a wisdom, a 
 truth valuable beyond rubies or any other 
 precious thing, for examples are ever better than 
 rules in this holy game of life. The rules, the 
 principles at last come from the persons who 
 have done it or who have failed. If any man has 
 truly served his generation, he is the real gleam. 
 After him, follow him. More than once in these 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 21 
 
 purely personal studies one sentence written by 
 one man of another is likely to break out : ^^In 
 bim was life, and the life was the light of men." 
 
 And that sentence introduces us to another 
 fundamental principle, the principle that we 
 must follow the best person there is, that there 
 is no first-class product based on a second-class 
 model. I think I must bear down on this in view 
 of what I mean to try to say before we are 
 through. For many years it has been my high 
 privilege to speak to America's youth. Not so 
 many years remain as have gone. Before the 
 end of the years is reached I must as often and 
 as clearly as possible bear and reaffirm my testi- 
 mony. This is it : If I knew one who faced his 
 age and all ages in better spirit, greater wisdom, 
 or truer devotion than Jesus showed, I would 
 commend and follow him. If I knew any better 
 plan for a personal life than Jesus' plan, I would 
 commend and adopt it. If I knew any better 
 basis for life decisions than Jesus' basis for his 
 own life decision, I would commend it and rest 
 my life on it. If I knew a better outcome in any 
 life than the outcome seen in Jesus' life, I would 
 try to go the way that reached it. 
 
 I have passed through many forms of personal 
 question in my life. Some of them have ceased 
 to be important, some of them remain un- 
 answered. But I quote Robert 'Browning's words 
 
22 THIS MIND 
 
 to-day, and answer them affirmatively without a 
 quiver or a hesitation : 
 
 "What think ye of Christ, friend, when all's done and 
 said? 
 Like you this Christianity or not? 
 It may be false, but would you have it true? 
 Has it your vote to be so if it can ?" 
 
 Jesus Christ has my vote, and he has it whether 
 he gets any other votes or not. Maybe no one 
 else will vote for him, but I will not condition my 
 vote on the amount of popular support he gets. 
 I w^ill not say I will be one of ten. I vote for 
 him, not because others are going to do it, but 
 solely because he deserves an unscratched ballot 
 from me. He is the best that has appeared, the 
 best that does appear. He gets me. I go along 
 with him. After all the years you simply cannot 
 think of anyone else. No one else is in his class. 
 And there must be no half-heartedness or divi- 
 sion in our loyalty to him. Dragging along after 
 a half god is a desperately wearisome business. 
 Partial allegiance to a perfect god is almost the 
 last thing in futility and dreariness. Nothing 
 but thoroughness can save us here. Half carry- 
 ing, half dragging the yoke of fellowship will 
 chafe and gall. Casual, shallow, trivial, reserved 
 obedience will not answer. You can go the whole 
 length with him and live, live royally, live exult- 
 ingiy and victoriously, but if you only partially 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 23 
 
 enthrone Mm, or if you crown him with mental 
 reservations, you will not get far. 
 
 I am not trying to make this appear easy. One 
 of the saddest things in our time is the easy, 
 jaunty air of these shallow loyalties and obedi- 
 ences. Anything that goes to the depths is toler- 
 ably certain to hurt. The ease and flippancy of 
 halfway reliance upon and halfway loyalty to 
 the half gods have got us into our present trouble. 
 There is only one way out. Life decisions made 
 lightly, as one should choose a cravat or order a 
 meal, may be easily made. You can get great 
 numbers of decisions at meetings of a certain 
 sort and under a certain kind of appeal. But you 
 do not get the men and women who will finally 
 count for Christ unless these life decisions are 
 made face to face with Christ and the makers 
 know what it cost for him to make his own life 
 decisions. 
 
 Many forms of question have arisen and passed 
 in my lifetime. Some of them disturbed the 
 churches very much. I think my chief concern 
 to-day is that the makers of to-morrow shall take 
 Jesus Christ seriously as an authority and ex- 
 ample, and that they shall firmly believe that the 
 principles of Jesus can be applied, must be 
 applied to themselves and other men and women. 
 Can his principles for his own life be used by 
 John Smith, freshman or senior? They could 
 
24 THIS MIND 
 
 be used by Jesus. No others seem possible as 
 you look at him. You cannot get a life like his 
 on any other basis. Maybe the glory that will 
 come to your generation will be the genuine 
 discovery by thousands of college men and 
 women that the principles of that other life are 
 the only principles for their lives. Pretty much 
 everything else has been tried first and last. Let 
 us in all heartiness try this. 
 
 Of course this is not a gay, jaunty business. 
 It is not putting together a picture-puzzle for 
 an hour's diversion. It is, at last, putting to- 
 gether in proper place and proper relation the 
 forces of eternal life. Seeing the best person do 
 it with his own life is better than being in at 
 the creation of a planet or a dozen planets. 
 Really I would rather understand the working 
 of Jesus' mind, know his attitude, his disposi- 
 tion concerning his own life in the world than 
 anything else in the realm of knowledge. ( I am 
 using the familiar translation, being familiar, of 
 course, with Weymouth's : "Let the same disposi- 
 tion be in you" — and Moffat's "Treat one another 
 with the same spirit as you experience in Christ 
 Jesus" — and the Twentieth Century New Testa- 
 ment: "Let the Spirit of Christ Jesus be yours.") 
 
 And now let us look naturally and steadily at 
 some of those essential principles upon which 
 Jesus proceeded in his life decisions. Let us 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 25 
 
 look at him as we would at John Wesley or 
 Phillips Brooks or Abraham Lincoln if we were 
 trying to find out how they decided what to do 
 with their lives. Only let us remember that in 
 the case of Jesus a perfect result was reached. 
 We must, therefore, be extra careful to find the 
 way by which he reached it. This is a real study 
 in biography, undertaken by serious people who 
 earnestly want to know how to make a life, and 
 who go, wisely, to the one person who made the 
 outstanding success of history in that important 
 matter. This is not a study as to why one should 
 be a preacher, or a lawyer, or a missionary, or 
 a teacher, or an editor, but a study of some of 
 the principles upon which the Supreme Person 
 of time based his life. Making a life on those 
 principles is surely the primary, fundamental 
 thing. The other questions will answer them- 
 selves if we find the answer to this one. 
 
 First: I think the ultimate basis upon which 
 his life decision was made and on which it was 
 worked out in his life was his sense of God. I 
 wish I could say this as it really ought to be 
 said. I never coveted more earnestly the high- 
 est gifts of religious and personal speech. I do 
 not want to speak theologically, or conventional- 
 ly, or to say anything that may even sound like 
 an outworn shibboleth. If any half dozen intelli- 
 gent persons were to be asked to name the out- 
 
26 THIS MIND 
 
 standing fact in the consciousness of Jesus con- 
 cerning- his life nearly a half dozen different 
 answers would be received. One would promptly 
 answer that the deepest thing in his life was his 
 idea and spirit of service and sacrifice; another 
 that it was his power over human and natural 
 forces as seen in the wonders he performed; 
 another that it was his wisdom as seen in his un- 
 paralleled teaching; another that it was the 
 Kingdom of which he was ever speaking, for 
 which he w^as ever striving. And all these 
 answers would be tolerably true. These things 
 and many others are so real, so fundamental in 
 his life that his life does really seem in large 
 measure to rest on them. Still, they do not seem 
 to go quite to the rock bottom. The real basis 
 seems to be that he was, in Browning's words, 
 "very sure of God." One must use a familiar 
 word and at once many i)ersons knowing that 
 word will think it is used in the sense in which 
 they commonly use it. We must try, therefore, 
 even with the familiar term to convey a deeper, 
 more personal, perhaps unfamiliar meaning. Us- 
 ing negatives is not a very fruitful process in 
 interpretation, but I will use one or two never- 
 theless. Saying that God was the basis of his 
 life is not the same as saying that Jesus firmly 
 believed in God, though of course he did. It is 
 not the same as saying that he genuinely knew 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 27 
 
 God, though of course he did. It is not the same 
 as saying that he had either a creed or experience 
 of which God was the center and basis, though 
 he did have both. One may never rid himself 
 of presuppositions in such matters as this, but 
 one must never allow the presuppositions he 
 brings to such a study to cloud or prevent an 
 original, fresh, fundamental vision if it can be 
 had. Maybe our next great discovery in personal 
 religion, and, if so, for personal life, will be the 
 discovery of the real, personal meaning of God 
 in the life of Jesus. We need not speak as 
 mystics nor with spiritual extravagance, but we 
 surely never have got to the real bottom of the 
 meaning, the fact, the place of God in the life of 
 Jesus. His consciousness of God has been called 
 "the greatest spiritual fact that has ever emerged 
 in the long story of the human race" (Robertson, 
 Spiritual Pilgrimage of Jesus, p. 13 ) . And yet 
 the church has made a doctrine of God's nature 
 and character, a definition of God where Jesus 
 never did make one. And the church has too 
 largely missed the personal meaning of God in 
 Jesus' own life ; failed to emphasize and set out 
 for other young men the relation between the 
 life decisions of Jesus, the lifework of Jesus, and 
 his sense of God, his consciousness of God, his 
 constant treatment of God as the very basis of it 
 all. 
 
28 THIS MIND 
 
 This determined his decisions, his activities, 
 his purposes, his spirit and everything else that 
 went to make him what we see him to be. This 
 gave depth, transparency and steadiness to his 
 life. This furnished a foundation for other prin- 
 ciples of decision and activity as we shall shortly 
 see. Thomas Arnold complained of the Rugby 
 boys that ^'God was not in all their thoughts,'^ 
 meaning that God was not in their thoughts at 
 all. One has only to say that to see at once that 
 Jesus had no thoughts at all about his life that 
 God was not in. 
 
 One of the sermons much and deservedly much 
 referred to a generation or two ago was Horace 
 Bushnell's famous sermon on the subject, "Every 
 Man's Life a Plan of God." It gave to many 
 hundreds of men a sober sense that life was 
 sacred, that God had a personal interest in what 
 it should be, that it made a difference to God him- 
 self whether a man, any man, accepted God's 
 plan for his life or made one for himself leaving 
 God out of consideration as he made it. Many a 
 man with no purpose of doing Avrong makes his 
 own plans and either presents them to God for 
 his blessing or goes through life leaving God 
 wholly to one side. But even Bushnell's mighty 
 topic does not quite say what needs to be said. 
 God does not make a plan for a life like Jesus 
 Christ's and hand it to him to adopt and work 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 29 
 
 out. God is not a life-plan maker like that. Nor 
 is God the divine helper of persons who make 
 their own plans. He is the abiding personal 
 basis upon which true men and women make 
 their life plans, life decisions and life endeavors. 
 One most careful student writes : ^^It is surely 
 fair to begin where Jesus began : and Jesus be- 
 gan with God" (Hutton, The Proposal of Jesus, 
 p. 64). And another as though foreseeing our 
 need for such a word says : "The object of Jesus 
 was to induce men to base all life on God" 
 (Glover, Jesus of History ^^ p. 113). But we are 
 always failing to see that Jesus had a faith and 
 a practice of his own. His object was to induce 
 men to base all life on God, and his method was 
 to base all his own life on that supreme person. 
 His teachings for other men lie firmly in his 
 beliefs and principles for himself. And I know 
 no way for you to start right in making your life 
 decisions except the way of Jesus; no way to 
 reach a right decision for your life if you leave 
 God out of it or give him a secondary place in 
 it. There is no way to avoid the "fuss and fret," 
 the distraction, shallowness, and selfishness that 
 mar our decisions and spoil our lives except 
 Jesus' way. We, like him, must rest our lives 
 upon God, identify our lives with God, make his 
 business our business, his house our house, and 
 
 ^Association Press, New York, Publishers. 
 
30 THIS MIND 
 
 do it joyfully even as Jesus did. He evidently 
 thought it the best thing for him to base his life 
 upon God. The outcome fully justifies that act. 
 By doing it he tried to teach and induce the rest 
 of us so to do it. This is the way the best life 
 on earth was reached and maintained. Until a 
 better life has been reached on some other basis 
 let us follow this one. 
 
 Second: Even before we are done with the 
 discussion of this basic principle of Jesus' life 
 decision, another principle emerges both from it 
 and with it. The New Testament is a relentless 
 book. Once give it a grip on you and it carries 
 you irresistibly to all the implications and con- 
 clusions involved. Christianity is not a religion 
 of electives, in which you can choose the things 
 you like and ignore the others. Men have always 
 been trying to keep or get right relations with 
 God as though that were the essence and whole of 
 religion. And many men making their life deci- 
 sions have piously said: "I will do what God 
 wants me to do/' as though that true and pious 
 principle covered the whole case. Jesus never 
 got into that personal and religious fog. He 
 did not try to solve the personal or the religious 
 problem by any false methods. He boldly, con- 
 sistently, and thoroughly went the whole length 
 to which his supreme avowals carried him. He 
 never hedged on his faith in God, for example, 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 31 
 
 because that faith would surely lead him to a 
 faith in men and a service for men, absolutely 
 new in the world. 
 
 So the principle of life decision based upon 
 the fact of God's place in his life is matched by 
 the principle of man's deepest need for his life. 
 He had God ; men needed God. His life was full 
 of God ; men were out of joint with Him. Jesus 
 sees their need and responds to it, without hesita- 
 tion, because this is the inexorable logic of his 
 own sense and vision of God. What saved his life 
 from destruction must be taken by him to men 
 already destroyed and being destroyed for lack 
 of it. No matter where this carries him, he must 
 go where it leads. He cannot take up half the 
 burden of human need and retain to the full the 
 consciousness of God in his own life. He cannot 
 keep on using the words "fellowship," "commun- 
 ion" and "oneness" unless he perfectly identifies 
 himself, in a perfect and loving service, with all 
 that wretched humanity that is catalogued by all 
 the disagreeable terms like "leper," "prodigal," 
 "harlot," "thief," and "sinner." It was not a 
 vague, rhetorical enthusiasm for an idealized 
 humanity that moved him. It w^as not the fire of 
 a reformer that burned in him. He was not set 
 on writing a thesis on the social conditions of 
 the Jews or any other group. He never made a 
 chart or issued a questionnaire. He was not a 
 
32 THIS MIND 
 
 ^'parlor" social worker. He was as conscious of 
 men as of God. His contacts with people, indi- 
 vidual people, were as direct and immediate as 
 his contacts with God. He could not live with- 
 out God. By the same token he could not live 
 without Peter and other men. Our language 
 breaks down in the attempt to put this relation of 
 himself id men's deepest needs, this absolute 
 identification of himself with men on the basis 
 of their need. It was not the same as saying, "I 
 am one of you, one with you, in your character, 
 in your spiritual infirmity, your moral sickness.-^ 
 Any one might have said that and no cure or 
 relief have followed. He was for men, for men 
 w^ho were not what they ought to be, for them 
 that they might become what they ought to be. 
 What was the good of such relation to God as 
 he sustained if men were to go on in prison, in 
 ignorance, in hunger, in moral wreck, in spiritual 
 helplessness, just as before? This is man's actual 
 state but not his right state. And no principle 
 of life decision that does not propose to cure, 
 change, remove all that, is like Jesus' principle. 
 The world of men did not know it, does not 
 know it to-day, but Jesus proposed as a lifework 
 to touch every man at the point of his deepest 
 needs. His world, like ours, was ready to deal 
 with secondary needs, like restoring the King- 
 dom, like giving people physical health, physical 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 33 
 
 comfort, and material welfare. You will be 
 tempted to make your life decisions on some form 
 of 'this basis. It looks more immediate and 
 direct than the other. But in dealing with men 
 he went clear to the bottom of the eternal strug- 
 gle between the partial and the complete, between 
 the secondary and the primary, between the 
 superficial and the thorough treatment of our 
 human need. The struggle is still on, on in all 
 lands, all religions and all classes. I want 
 the youth of my day, the youth of Christ's church 
 to stand with him in his attitude to men and his 
 proposed service to men. There is no other right 
 place to stand. 
 
 The human world is wrong in the soul, the 
 heart, the character of it. It is not simply un- 
 developed or misguided or belated. It dresses well 
 and it dresses poorly, its manners are refined and 
 its manners are vulgar, but neither a change of 
 clothes or manners will reach the real need. I 
 am purposely making this as hard and as high 
 as I can. That is the way Jesus did. He did not 
 reach his life decision for his life on the basis 
 of a partial faith in God or a minor operation 
 on humanity. It is enough to set all the college 
 yells in Christendom going at their best for the 
 college youth of Christendom to see a person like 
 Jesus who unhesitatingly gave himself to the 
 making over of a humanity that is morally wrong, 
 
34 THIS MIND 
 
 morally hopeless without him and morally help- 
 less apart from him. I have simply got to go 
 with a person who has a spirit like that. If any- 
 thing like that is going on in the world, under 
 such a leader, I simply must be in it with him. 
 
 Third: We have spoken of two fundamental 
 realities that must be reckoned with by any one 
 making his own life decision, deciding what mind 
 shall be in him. These realities are God the 
 Author, the Father, the Redeemer of life; and 
 humanity the expression, the embodiment, the 
 climax and interest of life itself. There is a 
 third reality which must belong to each of the 
 others, though it may stand somehow between 
 them. That third reality is a human personality, 
 a man, a woman. Through this third reality God 
 reaches the second with help and light and power. 
 Through it the second is guided on the way to 
 God, on the way of life with God. It is this 
 third reality, this man, this woman that makes 
 life decisions, whose life decisions are so impor- 
 tant. And by a perfectly natural law the person 
 reaching the decision must have absolute regard 
 for his own highest self in the doing of it. This 
 pillar must not sag if the structure is to be per- 
 fect. Always a person, like Jesus, must make his 
 decisions at the highest level of what he is, and 
 in the light of what he may become as he works 
 it all out with God in and for humanitv. There 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 35 
 
 is something to be saved besides humanity. The 
 saviours of humanity must themselves be saved 
 and not lost in their task. 
 
 Now, I know the talk that is current on this 
 theme. We easily laugh at Emerson's picture 
 of the wagon and the star. We talk wisely about 
 keeping our feet on the ground and our wagon 
 on the well-paved road. Ordinary good sense is 
 much praised by us in these days of mistaken 
 democracy, the democracy of leveling down, the 
 democracy of the common average. A very 
 prevalent skepticism is that which doubts and 
 distrusts our best judgment, our highest ideals. 
 We call some men visionaries as though they who 
 have no vision were superior beings. A college 
 student, only one, I am glad to say, out of thou- 
 sands, once said to me, ''No one reaches his deci- 
 sions on this level." The answer is that Jesus 
 did. The world would have perished if he or 
 some one had not. The world is blessed and 
 enriched with a new chance whenever one does. 
 
 You can open the story at any one of several 
 places which will readily occur to you, but every 
 time you see him you see that he is holding fast 
 to the highest, is saying that what is best must 
 be chosen, that he must not let down either in 
 making his choice or in fulfilling it. The great 
 names of Jewish history were familiar to him — 
 Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, and the rest. 
 
36 THIS MIND 
 
 He must not drop below them. He must go far 
 beyond them. That is what any youth owes to 
 the noblest figures in his own nation's history or 
 in the world's history. A nation is already far 
 gone toward death when its youth has only a 
 historic interest in the Washingtons, the Lin- 
 colns, and the Roosevelts whose lives it does not 
 expect to fulfill and surpass. 
 
 Jesus knew the history of that race from which 
 he had sprung, that forward-looking people with 
 the expectation of its seers and prophets ever 
 reaching toward golden days. He knew the wist- 
 ful spirit in which they had died without seeing 
 what they looked for. And his whole bearing 
 is as of one who said : "By God's grace it shall be 
 seen. There will be one person who will keep the 
 faith, who will follow the gleam.'' He knew the 
 sustaining, inspiring ideals of the old men who 
 dreamed dreams and the young men who saw 
 visions ; he knew the long, sad way of redeeming 
 a race, a race blind and dumb and willful. He 
 had the awful knowledge of mankind that makes 
 other men prudent and sensible, that destroys 
 what they call their illusions as to the outcome 
 for mankind, x^nd with a high heart he bore into 
 it, "never doubting clouds would break." When 
 a cross threw its dreadful shadow across the path 
 in front of him he cried out with joy that it was 
 worth a cross. When shame drew near to depress 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 37 
 
 and blacken him, he despised it and trampled on 
 it, seeing that he was on his way to bring many 
 sons to glory. 
 
 When, therefore, anyone says that it cannot 
 be done like this, the answer is that Jesus did 
 it like this. If anyone says that it is not being 
 done like that this year, that young men and 
 women are not using that pattern this year, the 
 answer is that we can make this a new year of 
 the Lord by adopting this pattern again and mak- 
 ing it universal. 
 
 Do I make myself clear? Our life decisions 
 must be made when we are at our best, the best 
 we are, the best we may be; when we are doing 
 the straightest, best, clearest thinking; when the 
 highest influences are running at full tide in our 
 lives; when there is the least of selfishness and 
 fear and doubt in us, and the most of love, 
 courage, and faith. All our ambitions, all our 
 decisions must come from life's highest levels, or 
 life itself drops to the dust. There is no blunder 
 that exceeds the blunder of reaching decisions 
 on a low level. There is no unbelief more deadly 
 than unbelief in and distrust of life's best hours, 
 best examples, best visions. Trust the highest 
 outside of yourself, trust the noblest within your- 
 self. Thus, and thus only, can the three funda- 
 mental realities be kept alive in your life — God, 
 humanity, and your own soul. 
 
38 THIS MIND 
 
 I do not pretend that all this can be seen or 
 felt in its fullness at life's beginning. The full 
 and complete appreciation of life's deepest expe- 
 riences requires the ripening influence of years 
 and use. Forty years ago I think I could have 
 told another person of my own age what my 
 call to the ministry meant. I could use the words 
 to such a person to-day. But the call itself is 
 not what it was. It was fine and inspiring then, 
 when life and the world were young. The light 
 of a dawning day was on it, like the radiance of 
 a perfect love in its beginning. For some men, in 
 some men, the high call to high service dwindles 
 and shrivels as the sun rises on it. Life offers 
 few things sadder than such a sight. For a man 
 to live on in a calling from which the glory has 
 gone or a relation from which the love has gone 
 is just plain perdition. But to go forward in 
 a calling or a relation which shines more and 
 more is to hear the trumpets of victory above 
 life's din and drudgery. To see your life expand- 
 ing and enlarging as it advances in years is to 
 walk on the eternal heights with the great and 
 good, is really to know the life that is life indeed. 
 
 And I do not know, nor care greatly, into what 
 particular form of life these principles, faith- 
 fully applied, will lead you. The principles are 
 the thing. A call is not limited to one form of 
 service. The call is to life on this basis. If vou 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 39 
 
 are not called on these principles and in this 
 spirit to the thing you propose or desire to do, 
 keep out of that thing. When the people at one 
 time found that Jesus and his disciples were not 
 at a certain place the people went right away 
 from that place. The people were wise. A life 
 decision made, as Jesus' decision was made, with 
 God as its basis, with truest service to humanity 
 as its expression through life long or short, with 
 one's own personality always at its best, may 
 lead into one calling or another, but it can never 
 lead 3^ou astray. This is the way Jesus decided. 
 His life is based upon these principles. His life 
 is the answer to their worth and wisdom, his life 
 the proof that they can be worked even in this 
 perplexed world. No one else has done it better, 
 no one else has done it so well. He waits for 
 a generation or score of men and women to stand 
 up with him on these principles. What think 
 you? Has he your vote? Will you stand on this 
 level with him or on some other without him? 
 He has my vote. I will go with him wherever 
 he goes. 
 
II 
 
 THIS MIND TOWARD LIFE'S 
 DECISIONS— II 
 
 When I read the list of topics for this short 
 course of studies one day to a discerning friend 
 he asked at once if there should not be one study 
 on ^'This Mind Toward Life's Spirit." The sug- 
 gestion was arresting and pertinent, but after 
 carefully weighing it the conclusion was reached 
 that life's spirit is not a thing that one can dis- 
 cuss apart, either in the life of Jesus or the life 
 of any modern man. In both, the spirit flings 
 itself across, throws itself into, and imposes it- 
 self upon everything else — the decisions them- 
 selves, the principles on which they are based, 
 the objects, the methods, the relations, the 
 strength, and the tests of life. You cannot dis- 
 cuss the spirit of a man in one chapter and then 
 study the rest of him. The spirit of him runs 
 clear through it all. It makes him or breaks 
 him. And it makes or breaks him clear through 
 the whole scale. 
 
 Yet no one of these studies can go forward 
 without a constant, though not necessarily fully 
 expressed, assumption as to the spirit lying back 
 
 40 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 41 
 
 of and filling the whole subject. If we miss, or 
 if we do not care for the spirit of Christ, the 
 spirit in which he did everything and said every- 
 thing; if we neglect or disregard the spirit in 
 which we make and carry forward our life pur- 
 poses, there will be nothing much in his life or 
 ours that will be worth while. So while this 
 does not appear as a special subject, the theme of 
 one lecture by itself, it ought to and I trust will 
 penetrate and warm them all. 
 
 A few years ago the author of a widely read 
 book used this sentence : "One of the weaknesses 
 of the church to-day is — put bluntly — that Chris- 
 tians are not making enough of Jesus Christ" 
 ( Glover, The Jesus of History, p. 4 ) . That sen- 
 tence meets the prompt and emphatic approval 
 of two groups that do not approve one another 
 at all. The highly conservative group, always 
 sure of its own entire orthodoxy just because it 
 is conservative, sanctions the statement with 
 many affirmations about Christ and much asser- 
 tion of its own doctrine and view of him. The 
 other group, weary of reactionary conservatism, 
 accepts this statement as fully covering its own 
 view, that it is Christ, and not doctrines about 
 Christ, that must be emphasized. And before we 
 know it, the doctrinal debate is on, the phrases 
 are filling the air, shibboleths are being shouted, 
 and men are being classified and tested by their 
 
42 THIS MIND 
 
 acceptance or rejection of certain definitions of 
 Christ, while he himself is compelled to stand to 
 one side or look elsewhere for disciples and 
 friends. But the truth is that the phrases "deity 
 of Jesus Christ/' the "mastery of Jesus Christ," 
 the "supremacy of Jesus Christ," and kindred 
 words are the poorest shibboleths in the world. 
 They cannot be made into doctrinal shibboleths 
 without destroying something deep and precious 
 in them. And the personal thing lying in and 
 under them cannot be lost out of any human life 
 without unutterable loss. We must really "make 
 enough of Jesus Christ" if we are to get out of 
 the present ruck and up to the heights. And 
 making enough of him requires that we see how 
 he made so nluch of himself, and go into his 
 life with him as he went into it and through it 
 himself. 
 
 We are thinking all the time of life decisions, 
 not as formal acts in our lives or in his, but as 
 the essential determination of what one is to do 
 and be. Two or three things stand out in Jesus' 
 life as the gateways through which he went to 
 the fulfillment of his life's purpose, the accom- 
 plishment of the objects to which his life was 
 dedicated. He went into it, first, for example, 
 through the gateway of perfect personal freedom. 
 Many young people have expressed the opinion 
 that Jesus never was up against a problem like 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 43 
 
 theirs, that his course was marked out for him, 
 that there was nothing else for him to do, noth- 
 ing else he could do. Indeed, I think there is a 
 very widespread idea that, while the life of Jesus 
 was perfectly admirable, it was so exceptional 
 in all its conditions and features as to put it 
 entirely off the level of other personal lives. 
 Such statements as BushnelFs, that "the char- 
 acter of Jesus forbids his possible classification 
 with men," such terms as "the uniqueness of 
 Jesus' character," lend themselves to creating 
 this impression. In other words, we have some- 
 times seemed to save the doctrine of the deity of 
 Christ, which is a true doctrine, by sacrificing 
 the reality of his life as at all like our own in 
 essence and condition. And, of course, also we 
 do infinite violence to the very deepest principle 
 in Jesus' life when we do thus exalt a doctrine 
 about him to a place above his own personal 
 meaning for men or above himself. The doctrine 
 or phrase must never conceal or obscure the per- 
 son, or put him farther away. 
 
 Why are we so afraid of the idea of freedom as 
 applied to him when we are so insistent upon it 
 for ourselves? If freedom is the good thing we 
 really believe it to be, why should it not be 
 granted without reserve to the very best person 
 there is? Why sacrifice his meaning for life by 
 an academic devotion to his meaning for the- 
 
44 THIS MIND 
 
 ology? The doctrine of the deity of Christ has 
 its chief value not for the creeds, but for the men 
 and women in colleges and elsewhere, the men 
 and women face to face with their own lives. 
 And they cannot rest their argument and demand 
 for freedom on an abstraction. The final argu- 
 ment for freedom is a genuinely free person mak- 
 ing right use of his freedom. The final assurance 
 of freedom in ordering one's life is that Jesus 
 was free in ordering his. 
 
 Open the record at two or three significant 
 places and see how free he was and how his free- 
 dom reaches into modern life wherever high- 
 minded men and women are desiring to live on 
 high levels. Hear him say, "I do always what is 
 pleasing to Him." Now, no one can imagine 
 those words spoken as though he were under 
 even a divine compulsion that destroyed his own 
 freedom in the matter. Every one of us feels that 
 this was real freedom in him and is possible 
 freedom for us. We perfectly know the differ- 
 ence between the parental authority that kills 
 liberty and the parental attitude that creates 
 and secures it. Or take the very familiar words, 
 "I am the way, the truth, the life." Suppose we 
 read into these words certain additions : ''I am 
 the way, but you cannot walk in it. I am the 
 truth, but you cannot understand it. I am the 
 life, but you cannot live it." That violates all 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 45 
 
 our sense of the spirit of Jesus, and reverses our 
 
 entire idea of his relation to us. You cannot 
 
 really imagine him saying that. And if he had 
 
 said it, you would simply be compelled to be done 
 
 with him. The only addition that those w^ords 
 
 will fairly bear without breaking their harmony 
 
 with his whole life would be something like this : 
 
 *'I am the way; walk in it with me. I am the 
 
 truth ; be free in it as I am. I am the life ; live it 
 
 with me." No matter how poor and inadequate 
 
 your response to that note, you know it is the 
 
 note to which you ought to respond. Or take that 
 
 other word, as deep and significant a statement 
 
 as Jesus ever made about the freedom of his 
 
 own life: ^^I have the power to lay it down. I 
 
 have the power to take it again. No man taketh 
 
 it from me. I lay it down for the sheep." You 
 
 have the instant feeling that here speaks a free 
 
 spirit, here speaks a man as a man ought to speak 
 
 about his life. A person who can truly say this 
 
 is 
 
 "The Master of his fate, 
 The Captain of his soul." 
 
 Quite toward the end he spoke again in words 
 that we may paraphrase into modern speech: 
 "Do you think I have to submit to this, that I am 
 carried forward by superior forces, that I am a 
 slave to these conditions? I could call for help 
 
46 THIS MIND 
 
 and get a dozen legions of angels. They would 
 rush to my relief. My life will not be taken. 
 I shall give it. I know what I am doing. I am 
 free with the freedom that enables a man to make 
 the grand disposal of his life.'^ Like that we all 
 have to feel. Neither fate nor predestination, 
 neither circumstance nor condition can destroy 
 that freedom without destroying the man him- 
 self. A man's life decisions at last must be 
 made in freedom, or they are not decisions at 
 all. We must go through that gateway as Jesus 
 did. 
 
 Second: So also our decisions must be made 
 with single-heartedness, which is an absolutely 
 essential quality in their making. In the genera- 
 tion just before this, in the weariness due to the 
 complexities that had grown up in modern civili- 
 zation and threatened to smother life and char- 
 acter, certain prophets, one in particular, widely 
 proclaimed the gospel of the simple life. It was 
 a word greatly needing to be spoken and widely 
 quoted when spoken. The favorite text was, "The 
 simplicity which is in Christ.^' But the popular 
 mind largely missed the real meaning of both the 
 text and the idea. It straightway went to cutting 
 things out of life, diminishing its contents, and 
 actually impoverishing life itself. You do not 
 gain anything by reducing life to its lowest terms. 
 You can make it empty and barren, shallow and 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 47 
 
 meager, but that is not the simple life at all. 
 Professor Peabody has described it in admirable 
 terms which I quote: ''Simplicity means single- 
 ness, directness, straightforwardness, deliverance 
 from the tortuous and the complex." The text 
 should read: ''The singleheartedness which is to- 
 ward Christ." That was his bearing toward his 
 own work. He had no division of interest. It is 
 hard to tangle or defeat a person like this. The 
 eye being single still guarantees that the body 
 shall be full of light. Savonarola said to his 
 accusers, "My secrets have been few because my 
 purposes have been great.'' Ambassador Jusse- 
 rand said that George Washington was tl^e "con- 
 vinced partisan of the straight line." And that 
 is the only way into truth or perfect service. I 
 used to hear a sentence like this : "Straight is the 
 line of duty, curved is the line of beauty." The 
 inference always seemed to be that the line of 
 duty was ugly. But when a man makes such a 
 line with his life, as Jesus did, it looks radiantly 
 beautiful in this curved and winding world. 
 
 It is very easy to wreck life by decisions w hich 
 really divide life. You cannot serve two masters, 
 even two good ones. You cannot have two coun- 
 tries, two flags, two contending loyalties. Con- 
 secration to money-making wdth benevolence as 
 a by-product usually ends in benevolence getting 
 the short end both of the consecration and the 
 
48 THIS MIND 
 
 product. We are a queer lot, we men and women 
 are. We might as well take ourselves as we are 
 instead of trying to idealize ourselves. And the 
 plain fact is that a complete lifetime of Christ- 
 like singleheartedness toward our task is not 
 easy. And yet when we see it in him it looks like 
 the only thing for him or for us. 
 
 Third : There is a third gateway into the con- 
 sideration of life's decisions and that is the gate- 
 way of moral integrity. Far deeper than any 
 question of the particular thing you are going 
 to do in the world is the question of the kind of 
 person you mean to be while doing it. Every 
 man tapes the double problem of his task and his 
 character, his work and his personality. Neither 
 can be taken for granted, though unhappily both 
 often are. Put in another form this problem 
 would be. Does a life decision look toward and 
 promise ever-improving and expanding service, 
 the constant doing of better work right down 
 to the end of the day, and at the same time does 
 it make possible the preservation and develop- 
 ment of personality in its integrity and moral 
 soundness? I am not introducing here an im- 
 aginary difflculty, though it is a difficulty that is 
 more apparent to a man of sixty than it is to one 
 of twenty. At the earlier age there is a kind of 
 golden glow over life and its occupations. At 
 that age we are crusaders and dreamers. Every- 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 49 
 
 thing seems possible to us. No matter what we 
 are planning to be^ we fully intend to climb our 
 hill of the Lord with clean hands and pure hearts. 
 We do not propose to lift up our souls unto 
 vanity or to swear deceitfully. We have no 
 doubts either as to the wisdom or as to the possi- 
 bility of our course. 
 
 The world would be in sad case if youth did 
 not have this spirit, if this current of high pur- 
 pose and expectation were not constantly refresh- 
 ing the stream that tends to grow muddy and 
 heavy, to lose the sparkle and transparency of its 
 earlier stages. But it would not be in harmony 
 with life's facts if I did not forewarn you of the 
 sure coming of moral difficulties that will 
 threaten both life and character; the coming of 
 days when you will be tempted to doubt even the 
 possibility of preserving your moral integrity in 
 your calling, in the world as it is ; the sure com- 
 ing of suggestions of such compromise of prin- 
 ciple as Avill rot the tree of your life at its root 
 and its heart. I am not speaking of the ordinary 
 vulgar temptations to do wrong, the temptations 
 to lie, to cheat, to take unfair advantage, or the 
 gross temptations to lust or evil habits. These 
 are bad enough, and in our day, the day of the 
 moral backwash that follows the war, they are all 
 too prevalent and common. The moral sag, the 
 easy talk of changed standards, and the winking 
 
50 THIS MIND 
 
 at unlovely practices make a new moral situation 
 that must profoundly affect all our work for a 
 better world. But I am speaking of that far 
 deeper, deadlier conviction which declares that 
 the spirit and principles of Jesus cannot be ap- 
 plied and practiced in modern life at all ; that we 
 have to take the world as it is, and that there is 
 no use in attempting the impossible. Millions of 
 men who are good men as men go, who do not at 
 all mean to be bad men, who would scorn to tell 
 a lie or steal a dollar, are living and think they 
 are compelled to live in a sort of moral compro- 
 mise which weakens their soul's vigor and in- 
 tegrity. They would not dream of calling black 
 white or white black, but in the heart of them 
 they suspect that a mixed gray life is about the 
 best that can be done. They would scorn to 
 make immoral decisions, knowing them to be 
 such, but they do make vital and fundamental 
 decisions that cut the nerve of real morality and 
 strike at the root of the soul's life. They quote, 
 usually with a smile to indicate that they see 
 its weakness, the advice of the ancient moralist 
 who exhorted his disciples to "walk the straight 
 and narrow path between right and wrong.-' 
 Nevertheless, as practical men they regard the 
 advice as rather reasonable though not very 
 ideal. It sounds so sensible to talk of middle-of- 
 the-road morality. It would not be fair not to 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 51 
 
 tell you that this doubt exists and is widespread, 
 not among the worst men, but among many men 
 who wish it otherwise, the doubt as to the pos- 
 sibility of the perfectly white life in a lot of the 
 occupations into which you ought to go, into 
 which you desire to go, occupations having a 
 really useful and essential place in the world in 
 which you are to live. The doubt is not always 
 formulated or expressed, but it exists. The 
 world is full of Herods and John the Baptists, 
 and contains lots of people who think the wise 
 and safe course for life lies somewhere between 
 the two. This attitude is supposed to be very 
 judicious and full of plain common sense. And 
 plain common sense as it exists among men is 
 morally a pretty poor thing. It is morality re- 
 duced to an ordinary working basis, "not too 
 good for human nature's dailij food." It takes 
 great pride in shunning "counsels of perfection. '^ 
 If you make your life decisions on this moral 
 basis or try to live your life on this basis, you 
 are simply laying the foundations for moral in- 
 competence, wreck and inefficiency. Xo skill will 
 enable you to steer straight through a compro- 
 mise moral channel. Here, above all places, you 
 will find that you cannot serve two masters. 
 Nothing can be done with or by a morally divided 
 soul, a soul without truth in its inward parts. 
 God has lost a thousand chances in human his- 
 
52 THIS MIND 
 
 tory by reason of men who have tried to obey both 
 God and men, to serve both God and mammon, to 
 be straight and "sensible" at the same time. He 
 really has only had one first-class, one perfect 
 moral chance in that one soul, straight, sensi- 
 tive and true in a generation as crooked and per- 
 verse as our own, the soul that never accommo- 
 dated his ideals to his surroundings. An old 
 man, wise and saintly, beautiful in life and char- 
 acter, told generation after generation of stu- 
 dents in a. certain college this fundamental 
 thing: "It is always right to do right. It is 
 never right to do wrong." But that deep rule 
 applies not primarily to the particular cases 
 that arise in daily life. It applies especially in 
 the making of the fundamental life decisions 
 which will largely determine the problems that 
 will arise day by day. Many a man is wrecked 
 in the particular crisis because he has no general, 
 controlling principle to guide and steady him. 
 Silas Marner is one of the most perfect short 
 stories in any literature. In it, blazing out of a 
 man's bitter experience, is a sentence that shines 
 like a ray of light from the throne of light: 
 "Nothing is ever worth doing wrong for." 
 
 This thing is all mixed up with our estimate 
 of values and w^hat is worth while. And worldly 
 wisdom is very sure of itself, so sure that it con- 
 fidently advises youth when life's issues are at 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 53 
 
 stake, when youth is making its life decisions. 
 And the worldly wisdom that is tainted with 
 moral doubt, doubt as to the possibility of a 
 moral life, twisted with the spirit of moral com- 
 promise, is blistered to death by one red-hot ex- 
 pression spoken by the Master of life, the one 
 person who knew what is possible in life. He 
 had tried and had not let down, had not given 
 up, had not compromised at any point. He kept 
 his soul as intact as his seamless robe. He knew 
 what could be done because he had done it. And 
 he said in never-to-be-forgotten message of speech 
 and life : There is nothing worth giving your soul 
 to get. There are dozens of things worth giving 
 your lives for, but nothing in any world worth 
 giving your soul for. And that principle stands 
 here where you are making your life decisions. 
 It is the unchangeable basis of the big decision. 
 In it all lesser choices must be made as life goes 
 on. 
 
 In my youth I used to hear some very dreary 
 and misleading preaching on the unpardonable 
 sin. It proceeded upon a wholly false distinction 
 between the second and third Persons in the 
 Holy Trinity and left the impression that you 
 could sin against the second Person and be for- 
 given, but that sinning against the third Person 
 was a much more serious matter, that he was not 
 so easy, that he was much more sensitive to 
 
54 THIS MIXD 
 
 injury and wrong; or that the forgiving God 
 would not stand for any sin against the third 
 Person, however far he would go in case of the 
 second. And he did go very far. Now, all that 
 seems very far from any ethical reality or from 
 having any meaning for actual life. Surely, the 
 one teacher who kept closest to reality never was 
 guilty of such a purely theoretical, metaphysical 
 muddle as that. Any really honest person can 
 see the real meaning of this if he tries. It is 
 Jesus' way of saying that the deliberate reversal 
 of the eternal moral order, the making morally 
 black morally white, the making moral wrong 
 moral right in choice and practice, in judgment 
 and action, the violation of the very spirit of 
 truth, righteousness, and holiness is beyond for- 
 giveness ; that there is no basis of forgiveness for 
 such a course in any of the righteous God's 
 worlds anywhere. That was the awful thing in 
 the German scholars' defense of the German 
 war, that they gave their moral approval and 
 sanction to the utterly immoral course of their 
 country. 
 
 I do not say nor feel called to say how far you 
 can go in trying the patience, the kindness, the 
 grace of Jesus Christ, and succeed with it. He 
 is so patient that men ought to be ashamed to try 
 his patience. I do say that you cannot, in your 
 life decisions or your life practices and attitudes. 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 55 
 
 flout the spirit of right, the spirit of holiness, and 
 get away with it at all, in this world or any other. 
 The ethical basis of your decisions will not bear 
 trifling or stand violation. 
 
 As I was on my w^ay recently to an Eastern 
 university where I am privileged to preach each 
 year, I chanced to find the president of the uni- 
 versity on the train. We talked freely of many 
 things as we went on for a few hours together. 
 He is not a clergyman, nor a religious extremist, 
 but as we talked he urged me to preach on my 
 next visit to the university on this ethical basis 
 of life at the time when it is taking shape in 
 young life. He said in substance: ^'Our young 
 men are confused, not as to what moral standards 
 there are, but as to whether there are any that 
 bind them. They are divided in their minds as 
 to the possibility of a right world. They are not 
 sure that the wages of sin is so severe as death. 
 They regard most of the talk about it as psy- 
 chologically wrong. They have no keen sense of 
 God and his relation to the world. They are not 
 at all convinced that the men or the nations 
 who go too far, who get presumptuous, will soon 
 or late come straight up against him and his 
 throne in the world.^' Much more he said, all 
 to the same purpose. In making life decisions 
 you must hold clearly the everlasting difference 
 between right and wrong. And you must enter 
 
56 THIS MIND 
 
 life through the proper gate. There is no other 
 way. 
 
 Finally, for to-day, as you make your decision 
 you must go through the gateway of unity. Of 
 course, I do not mean unity of the churches. 
 That is another and very interesting subject. 
 Here we are considering personal unity. The 
 moral distractions and divisions of the world are 
 very real, but internal confusion is just as real. 
 Jesus made his way through the world's tangled 
 paths not because those paths were clear and 
 simple but because his own eye was single. The 
 ways of his day were as perplexing and confused 
 as the ways of ours. His contemporaries easily 
 lost their way, but he kept his. We are not con- 
 scious, as we study his life, of any of those ruin- 
 ous contradictions so easily manifest in the lives 
 of other men. I am as far as anybody from wish- 
 ing to advise the impossible. The weaknesses of 
 human nature are as evident to me as to anyone. 
 The words of Saint Paul, that had a far nobler 
 application in his case, I sadly make my own : "I 
 bear about the marks'' of human imperfection, 
 but it is not a thing to boast of or to take in a 
 flippant spirit. The life of Jesus in ways which 
 surely are practical and imitable looks a lot bet- 
 ter than the lives which w^e so easily take for 
 granted as being the best we can expect. I do 
 not believe they are the best we have a right to 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 57 
 
 expect. Maybe your generation will make an 
 offering of personal unity, unity of character;, 
 that no previous generation has made. If it 
 does, the world will go forward as it has not done 
 in any period since Jesus Christ ascended. May- 
 be out of this group will come one, ten, fifty, 
 a hundred men and women who will close the 
 chasms that other lives have shown. Anyhow, a 
 genuine life decision for character and for occu- 
 pation must take account of the unity of life, 
 and it must take that account when life is young, 
 or it cannot do it to the best purpose. 
 
 You will hardly need to be told that the term 
 "unity" while single in itself is not an entirely 
 simple term. It represents the outcome of many 
 and even diverse elements. Life's unity can be 
 broken and destroyed in many ways, by the 
 absence or the maladjustment of many elements. 
 Or it can be broken at one or many places and its 
 perfection prevented or destroyed. But in mak^ 
 ing your life decision you must have in mind all 
 the main features that go to make this perfect 
 integrity of life. If your decision to enter a 
 special calling is going to make impossible for 
 you any of these fundamental unities, doubt that 
 decision, turn away from that calling. For ex- 
 ample, men go into certain occupations knowing 
 that in them there will be, perhaps must be, a 
 lifelong warfare between their private convic- 
 
58 THIS MIND 
 
 tions and their public beliefs, a life that will 
 compel them to act against their personal sense 
 of what is right. Men have invented a philosophy 
 to justify this ethical anomaly, knowing all the 
 time that in the moral universe of God, in the 
 world in which Jesus lives, the thing simply can- 
 not be justified. You will be conforming to the 
 usages of your ancestors and the practices of the 
 world if you accept and follow that world-old 
 philosophy, but you will be straight up against 
 this word, this true, sound word, in so doing: 
 "Do not follow the customs of the present age, 
 but be transformed by the entire renewal of your 
 minds so that you may learn by experience what 
 God's will is — that will which is good and beau- 
 tiful and perfect." You can take one philosophy 
 and secure life's unity as Jesus did. You can 
 take the other and miss it as the present age and 
 past ages have done. This, again, is a thing to 
 be adopted as a controlling principle governing 
 individual crises and not simply to be put into 
 operation on occasion as an exceptional exercise 
 of virtue. You never wonder what Jesus will do 
 in a given case. You know the rule of his life. 
 
 So too you must observe and apply the prin- 
 ciple of unity in your life decision where that 
 principle cuts across other practices that de- 
 stroy life's integrity and oneness. It is not 
 necessary to discuss them at length. They are 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 59 
 
 too often regarded simply as inconsistencies, as 
 evidences of common human imperfection. At 
 their worst we call them hypocrisies. But we 
 would be wiser if we saw how deep their roots 
 run and how they are related to the essential 
 and vital integrity of personality and character. 
 It is not a light and insignificant thing that there 
 is such a gap between what men know and what 
 they do, between what they are and what they 
 say. And it is very far from being a trifling 
 thing when any man knows that his inner life is 
 so nearly all wrong and in such contradiction to 
 his outward life. Jesus was working on a pro- 
 found knowledge of human nature when he 
 talked so much and so plainly about the thoughts 
 of men as distinguished from their conduct; 
 about the murderers who only wish they 
 could kill; the people who think with 
 bitterness and anger and speak buttered, honeyed 
 words which they do not mean; the mental 
 adulterers who keep their minds full of pictures 
 that stain and defile the very stuff of the mind, 
 until the mind itself becomes darkened and in- 
 capable of straight, clear thinking. You say that 
 this fact in life has nothing to do with one's 
 particular occupation, but has wholly to do with 
 one's character in any calling, which is largely 
 true. There are no callings in which one is auto- 
 matically protected against these internal con- 
 
60 THIS MIND 
 
 tradictions, none in which internal unity is 
 secured without personal effort. Some are bet- 
 ter than others. In some the weight of influences 
 goes one way and in some it goes the other. I 
 am saying all this that I may urge you not to 
 make your decisions in ignorance or disregard 
 of the need for this unity, or with a funda- 
 mentally false attitude toward it, but that you 
 may be urged to shun the callings that make 
 internal unity virtually impossible; to choose 
 the calling which calls for the deepest consis- 
 tency of life and character; to commit yourself 
 without reserve to the principle of unity in your 
 life; and to make a world, as far as you can, 
 which shall have in it ever larger numbers who 
 have won freedom from the destructive internal 
 strife all too well known among men. If you say 
 this cannot be done, there is an easy and plain 
 answer: Jesus did it. His life was not torn 
 with internal moral contradictions. He was not 
 prevented from making his perfect impression 
 or doing his full work by any breaks between his 
 internal life and its external impression. He 
 perplexed people at times, but they were people 
 so used to moral compromises and accommoda- 
 tions that they could not understand a perfectly 
 transparent life like his. We need not claim to 
 be wiser or better than were the men around 
 him, but such has been his influence in the cen- 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 61 
 
 turies that whatever our own lives, he looks like 
 the only real thing to us when we are thinking 
 straight and are at our best. This mind that was 
 in him looks like the mind that should be in us. 
 
 The men of my generation read, when they 
 were young, Tom Broicu'S School Days. Thou- 
 sands of them remember the words of the author 
 about the teaching of Arnold, words which gave 
 a new outlook to many a boy when as jet the 
 day was in its morning. 
 
 "He certainly did teach us — thank God for 
 it — that we could not cut our life into slices and 
 say, 'In this slice your actions are indifferent, 
 and you need not trouble your heads about them 
 one way or another ; but in this slice, mind what 
 you are about, for they are important.' A pretty 
 muddle we should have been in had we done so. 
 He taught us that in this wonderful world no 
 boy or man can tell which of his actions is in- 
 different and which not; that by a thoughtless 
 w^ord or look we may lead astray a brother for 
 whom Christ died. He taught us that life is a 
 whole, made up of actions and thoughts and 
 longings, great and small, noble and ignoble; 
 therefore the only true wisdom for man or boy 
 is to bring the whole life into obedience to Him 
 whose world we live in and who has purchased 
 us with his blood; and that whether we eat or 
 drink, or whatsoever we do, we are to do all in 
 
G2 THIS MIND 
 
 his name and to his glory; in such teaching, 
 faithfully, as it seems to me, following that of 
 Paul of Tarsus, who was in the habit of meaning 
 what he said, and who laid down this standard 
 for every man and boy in his time. I think it 
 lies w^ith those who say that such teaching will 
 not do for us now to show why a teacher in the 
 nineteenth century is to preach a lower standard 
 than one in the first.'- 
 
 In this teaching Arnold not only followed 
 Saint Paul, but followed particularly that greater 
 Teacher, Saint Paul's Master. Until some one 
 can show some better way, surely this is the 
 true way to follow. 
 
 There is another form of unity that must have 
 a word before we close. It runs straight into the 
 business of life decisions and runs on into life 
 itself. For our decisions are not for the moment, 
 but for the ages, not for the decision's sake, but 
 for the life's sake. There are two ways of look- 
 ing at life. You can take the short view or the 
 long view. You can do what has been called 
 ^'short-range thinking" or you can do long-range 
 thinking, but by only one way can you secure and 
 preserve the vital, essential unity between the 
 first of life and the last of it, or the unity that 
 runs like a living, expanding stream through the 
 ripening years. Life decisions cannot be changed 
 every few years in their fundamental principles, 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 63 
 
 even though life's occupations may change their 
 form. Any change in the form of one's life 
 must be made in obedience to the deep and abid- 
 ing principles that control the whole life, or the 
 unity of life is wholly broken. I have purposely 
 refrained from advising you to enter any partic- 
 ular calling such as preaching, teaching, medi- 
 cine, or law, though even in the particular matter 
 I advise with all my heart that you decide at 
 the beginning for the thing you would like to 
 do, the thing you ought to do, the thing the world 
 will most need to have you do, through the long 
 years that lie ahead of you, the half century 
 that will be God's gift to many of you. Begin 
 with the life you want to carry through, the one 
 you can carry through. Certain occupations 
 are only temporary. They are young men's tasks. 
 If you choose one of them, do it on such a basis 
 that you can change without wreck. You must 
 be able to go in the same direction. Not so 
 clearly more than forty years ago as now, but 
 clearly even then, it seemed to me that the thing 
 I would be wanting to do through the day and 
 when the evening came was to preach the glorious 
 gospel of the blessed God. It so looked then. It 
 especially so looked in those golden days when 
 we were hearing Phillips Brooks. More than 
 ever it looks so now. But to other men, class- 
 mates and contemporaries, other callings stood 
 
64 THIS MIND 
 
 up like angels of light and called. And honor- 
 ably, happily, usefully, they have walked with 
 those other callings through '^the long, long trail 
 that still keeps winding down through years.'' 
 You must reckon with the vision of the years 
 rather than the vision of the hour. 
 
 But I am anxious with unconcealed concern 
 not about your particular decision, but about the 
 general control of your life until the eternal 
 morning breaks. I want you now to give life the 
 tone, the direction, the spirit, the basis, the 
 governing purpose and aim it should carry until 
 the earthly end of it. Thus you can escape the 
 tragedy of a life that breaks in the middle, a life 
 that finds it has gone wrong up to its noon, and 
 then must turn around and painfully try to re- 
 trace steps already taken, or to make as much as 
 possible out of what time is left. Biography has 
 many pathetic, pitiful chapters, chapters which 
 record failure and calamity, chapters which 
 record the misuse of high and commanding abili- 
 ties, and those which tell the stories of Lucifers 
 fallen from heaven, but there is nothing in biog- 
 raphy sadder than the stories of men whose lives 
 have had the wrong direction, the wrong tone, 
 the wrong spirit through the length of it, or the 
 story of men in the afternoon of life trying to 
 atone for its morning. 
 
 Many names could be mentioned as warnings. 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 65 
 
 I prefer to turn your minds as we conclude our 
 study for to-day to the one perfect example of 
 how it has been done, and how it should be done. 
 Elsewhere and in many ways I have spoken of 
 features of Jesus' life as both events and prin- 
 ciples. Here as truly as anywhere that law of 
 interpretation holds. What he did was an event. 
 The event in his life was also a principle for the 
 wide reach of human life through the years. He 
 walks beside modern boys of twelve, in temples, 
 in schoolyards and in homes, saying, '^We must be 
 about our Father's business." He goes into every 
 college chapel and every student conference and 
 says to the men and women: ^^The spirit of the 
 Lord is upon us, upon you and me, for he has 
 anointed us to give humanity a new chance." He 
 walks beside men and women, in many occupa- 
 tions, in all lands, as one of them, saying: ''We 
 must work the works of Him that sent us and 
 finish his work, you and I. The day is long and 
 the work hard, but we have put our hands to the 
 plow, to make a new furrow straight across the 
 world. We will not look back, will we?" He 
 stands in the night beside missionaries, and mis- 
 sionaries to be, beside those toilers among people 
 the world does not care for, those the supercilious 
 call outcasts, and he says to those friends of his : 
 ''There are other sheep, not of the official fold; 
 w^e must get them and bring them, you and L 
 
66 THIS MIND 
 
 They are very foolish some of them, even for 
 sheep, and some of them are out in the moun- 
 tains. The night is very dark and the storm is 
 very severe, but we do not flinch, do we, nor care 
 how dark is the night that we must pass through, 
 or how deep the waters we must cross. They will 
 not know what it cost us to get them. That does 
 not matter. We must not lose them. Come on." 
 And they come on. And ever and again as we go 
 on with him, governed by his principles, sharing 
 his life, controlled by his spirit, we hear a voice 
 at the river side or on the mountain top saying, 
 ^^This is my son,-' and we look at him, and he 
 looks back at us with the words, ''He means both 
 of us.-' Then we go on again, always with our 
 faces set the same way, and one day we modestly 
 say to the Father of us all, ''I have finished what 
 you gave me to do," and he replies: "That will 
 answer. Come on up. The Great Companion is 
 just inside." 
 
 ''Let this mind be in us which was also in 
 Christ Jesus." 
 
Ill 
 
 THIS MIND TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 
 
 A VERY careful student of current English life 
 declares that ^'one of the most pestiferous, devas- 
 tating delusions that has ever taken captive the 
 human mind is now rampant in the British Isles. 
 It is that nothing matters very much." 
 
 "The lightning glares and reddens 
 Across the skies ; 
 It seems but sunset 
 
 To those sleeping eyes." 
 
 This blase attitude is not wholly unknown among 
 us. It is rather easily explained as the normal 
 reaction from the days when we were over- 
 wrought. But whoever takes this attitude just 
 now is guilty of ''short-range thinking." Indiffer- 
 ence to life's long objects in a day of universal 
 rebuilding is a crime against personality, against 
 the present and future of mankind, against that 
 one Person whose concerns were never more 
 acute than at this hour in the world's develop- 
 ment. Yet when one, even partially aware of 
 Jesus' interest in the world, speaks to youth with 
 an extra warmth or passion he is likely not to 
 be understood. And some will wonder why he 
 
 67 
 
68 THIS MIND 
 
 is so earnest, and others regard him as over- 
 wrought and overheated. Men easily responded 
 to the most intense speech four and five years 
 ago, but now the cooling process has reached 
 down to the very depths. I cannot think, how- 
 ever, that the cooling process or the indifferent 
 spirit has got hold of Jesus. To him surely 
 things matter very much. 
 
 And we must stand with him as we make up 
 our minds, which is another, older way of saying 
 as we make our life decisions as to life's objects. 
 There are no other principles and there is no 
 other personal presence than his in this supreme 
 hour. Fortunately, he belongs to no particular 
 calling. He was the perfect preacher, but was 
 not a clergyman, the greatest teacher, but not a 
 professor, the perfect physician, but not a doctor. 
 He belongs equally to men in all good occupa- 
 tions. And as you stand beside him the whole 
 idea of a special call to certain forms of life 
 seems not quite so sure as it used to. He seems 
 interested in whatever men can do or be. Time 
 was when the idea of a special call to the minis- 
 try or missionary service pretty nearly seemed to 
 exhaust God's interest in men's lifework, as 
 though he had to do with men going into those 
 callings and went in with them, but if men and 
 women went into any other callings they went on 
 their own responsibility, without his having any- 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 69 
 
 thing- special to do with it. And that had an- 
 other element, namely, that only certain men and 
 women, those who were planning to do these 
 things, were at all obliged to refer their decisions 
 to or test the objects of their lives by the high 
 principles and character of Jesus ; that men look- 
 ing toward the ministry had to, but men look- 
 ing toward law did not need to. You can see 
 where this leads when once it is stated. Of 
 course it was a part of that wretched old divi- 
 sion between the sacred and the secular, which 
 perhaps ought not to be too severely criticized. 
 It was something, after all, to have rescued one 
 or two occupations and small parts of life from 
 the total, universal secularizing process. Against 
 it have come two reactions, one that all callings 
 are equally secular, the other that all are equally 
 holy. The true reaction is that those occupations 
 and callings are holy which men and women 
 enter and live in on the principles and in the 
 fellowship of Jesus. That extends the area of 
 the sacred until it covers a lot of things like 
 Sam Higginbotham-s farms and the work of 
 thousands besides. The sacred area in any true 
 view of it is not hard to get into by one making 
 a life decision. It takes an act of force and 
 violence to get out of it when one is deciding 
 what he really sets before him as a life object. It 
 surrounds us like light and atmosphere which 
 
70 THIS MIND 
 
 we must see and breathe unless we plunge into 
 something else. 
 
 Many young people of college age feel a kind 
 of break between their own lives and the life 
 of Jesus due to the absence of any full record 
 of what he was doing when he was their age. He 
 appears in a significant way when he is a boy of 
 twelve, then disappears almost completely until 
 he is thirty. All that lies between is left by both 
 literature and art to silence and imagination. 
 There is only that one wonderful sentence : '^He 
 grew in wisdom and stature." The boy was be- 
 coming a man. The college man naturally feels 
 that he is beyond the experience and feeling of 
 the boy of twelve. By precisely the same token 
 he feels that he has not quite reached the de- 
 velopment of this full-bearded man of thirty who 
 comes to be baptized. Our college man expects 
 that at thirty he will be in full tide in his early 
 career and not just then publicly entering it. He 
 is eight years older than the Boy in the temple 
 and ten years younger than the Man at the 
 Jordan. Of course, if the Gospels had chiefly a 
 biographical interest in Jesus, this gap would 
 be fatal. We would not care for a life of Phillips 
 Brooks that said nothing at all of his Harvard 
 years. 
 
 Art has followed the example of literature. 
 The stuff in the Apocryphal Gospels has not 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 71 
 
 given encouragement to go beyond the real Gos- 
 pels. So that in art there is almost nothing 
 after Hofmann's beautiful picture of ^'Jesus and 
 the Doctors/' until the bearded man appears in 
 his full activity, in the serious business of his 
 life. There is, to be sure, one picture of the 
 youth standing in the door of the carpenter shop 
 with outstretched arms, his shadow making the 
 figure of a cross behind him. But for the men 
 and women of college age there are no details of 
 the life of Jesus at the same age that are at all 
 definite. 
 
 Is the loss a dead and irreparable loss? I can- 
 not quite think so. The silent, growing years are 
 not so unknown as we may think. We are per- 
 haps as well off in the materials for understand- 
 ing his personality as if we had more details. We 
 might easily get lost in the details. After all, 
 it is the adult life of a person that has meaning 
 for us. The Harvard days of Brooks, the Cam- 
 bridge days of Charles Kingsley, and the Yale 
 years of Bushnell interest us because of what 
 those men became. And we interpret their per- 
 sonalities in the light of the years that followed 
 thirty. It is fascinating for youth, youth that 
 has passed childhood and not yet reached full 
 manhood or womanhood, to imagine what was 
 going on in the mind and life of Jesus and to 
 compare it as they think it out with what is 
 
72 THIS MIND 
 
 going on in themselves. I suspect that it is more 
 possible for each of us to relate ourselves to 
 him than it would be if we had the details that 
 are lacking. We saw him go into the silent years, 
 the years that would carry him through our col- 
 lege period; we heard him use the words, "I 
 must be about my Father's business," as he passed 
 into the quiet and work and growth at Nazareth. 
 We see him come out at thirty, making his public 
 confession and consecration of himself in the bap- 
 tism. We see that his face, a man's face now, is 
 set in the same direction that it held when a boy ; 
 his clear eyes are looking the same way they 
 did look; his words sound almost as if he had 
 begun with the sentence: ''As I was saying, I 
 must be about my Father's business." And our 
 hearts, our eighteen-year-old hearts, our twenty- 
 year-old hearts, are thrilled with the feeling, 
 the assurance that he kept a straight path be- 
 tween boyhood's simple faith and manhood's full 
 consecration; that his feet did not get tangled 
 in the tortuous paths of youth where so many of 
 us lose the way; that for him there will be no 
 bitter years in which he will remember how he 
 forgot what he had been and what he was going 
 to be; that he will have nothing to undo or ex- 
 plain; that he is ready when the hour strikes to 
 go forward into his life program. Blessed is 
 that youth, that college youth who makes the 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 73 
 
 straight way in this company in this fashion 
 between the simple early years and the vital years 
 of the perfect labor to which they go. Blessed 
 also that youth who, having got confused, sees 
 in the light of Jesus' face the way back into the 
 path that does not need and will never need to 
 change direction. Maybe we shall see again 
 how direct is the line for the boy in the grades, 
 through high school and college, and all other 
 preparation to the objects of life. Maybe the 
 mind that was in him in this matter will be in 
 others. It is the hope of a new and better world. 
 When one begins to study the objects of Jesus 
 as they affected his life decision and must affect 
 ours, if we are to share his life and objects, one 
 is at once impressed with the wealth of what he 
 proposed to do. A half dozen or more capital 
 sentences can be found, all apparently on the 
 same level of significance, all equally descriptive 
 of his mission. I preached my own first little ser- 
 mon more than forty years ago from the text 
 "The Son of man is come to seek and to save that 
 which is lost," and the subject of the sermon was 
 "The Mission of Jesus.'^ But that same subject 
 could have been based upon other texts just as 
 clearly as upon that one. For example: "I am 
 come that they might have life.'' Or the ringing 
 declaration to Pilate: "To this end was I born, 
 and for this purpose I came into the world, to 
 
74 THIS MIND 
 
 bear witness to the truth/' You see that no one 
 sentence of his fully covers what he proposed to 
 do. One takes the first of those sentences just 
 quoted and becomes an evan<^elist, another takes 
 the second and becomes a general benefactor, an- 
 other takes the third and becomes a Christian 
 teacher. We make a great mistake in our ever- 
 lasting efforts to summarize everything. The 
 objects of the largest, most truly first-class lives 
 do not admit of the nutshell treatment. The 
 really abundant life does not readily lend itself 
 to characterization by epigram. Those persons, 
 those churches, those states which can define 
 their whole object or even their supreme object 
 in a single sentence are not worth most to the 
 world. They have the keenest edge, but the keen 
 edge is a narrow edge, and life's highest quality 
 is neither keenness nor narrowness. A creed 
 with a single doctrine, like a platform with a 
 single plank, is very appealing to single-track 
 minds, but neither makes adequate answer to 
 life's manifold needs, though they are often 
 accompanied by a zeal in their behalf that is not 
 given to richer creeds and better platforms. But 
 if there is any one lesson in religious history, 
 it is that "the whole stress of religion should 
 never be laid upon one part of it." The glorious 
 gospel of the blessed God is as rich as the nature 
 of God himself and ample for every real neces- 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 75 
 
 sity of all human life. Let us, therefore, gladly 
 abandon the effort to state life's objects in an 
 epigram or rest their whole weight on a single 
 sentence. 
 
 I suspect that at this point w^e meet a prin- 
 ciple that is not usually recognized in connection 
 with life decisions. I do not remember ever to 
 have seen it discussed and I certainly have never 
 treated it myself even through years of speaking 
 on this subject. And I am rather ashamed to 
 have overlooked what really seems like some- 
 thing altogether worth while and what may pos- 
 sibly be a commonplace to the minds of other 
 men. The principle is that there is a real and 
 profound difference between the decision for a 
 particular occupation and the determination of 
 life's large objects which must be worked out in 
 every true occupation. We are disposed to be 
 satisfied with what is really the minor decision, 
 whereas the really great concern lies far beyond 
 it. The particular calling or occupation is im- 
 portant as any instrument with which a man 
 does his work is important, but the occupation 
 is at its best only the agency, the means, the 
 instrument with which a man carries out in the 
 world the large or small, the high or low, the 
 good or bad, the holy or unholy objects and pur- 
 poses of his life. Everything depends upon what 
 those controlling purposes are. They reach 
 
76 THIS MIND 
 
 through all the activities and through all the 
 years of any man's life. 
 
 Because this matter is so significant it will be 
 worth our while to go into it somewhat further. 
 Let us suppose that any student here believes 
 himself to be called to the ministry, called by all 
 those forces that lie in every true call, called 
 as certainly by God himself as Saint Paul was 
 called to be an apostle. And let us suppose that 
 such student, perhajjs against his own will, in 
 utter change of all the plans he had made and 
 prefers, with genuine distrust of himself as he 
 faces what he regards as a calling far above 
 him, at last obeys this call in the spirit of obe- 
 dience and consecration that links him with 
 prophet and apostle. He sees the heavenly vision 
 and will not be disobedient to it. It makes the 
 heart beat fast to witness that event in any 
 youth's life, especially if one remembers a like 
 event in his own. Eeally it is no wonder that it 
 makes such a deep impression upon the youth 
 himself and upon his friends. It stands toward 
 his lifework as conversion does toward the Chris- 
 tian life that follows. Going through that won- 
 derful gate of call or conversion is so glorious 
 an experience that it often seems to be the climax 
 and high point both of ministry and Christian 
 life. Men go on through life telling the story 
 of their "call" or their conversion, ever telling 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS TT 
 
 it as their experience. They repeat all the stir- 
 ring details, the time, the place, the conditions. 
 They go through the gate over and over again, 
 or warm themselves year after year in the fire 
 through which they came into ministry or Chris- 
 tian life. Dramatically converted men go 
 through life telling the dramatic story of their 
 conversion, often as though this which should 
 be the beginning of a Christian life were the 
 whole of it. And dramatically called preachers 
 never weary themselves reciting the thrilling 
 story of their call, a call which grows in the tell- 
 ing as good stories always do, as though the call 
 to the ministry constituted the ministry itself. 
 All this has been both a strength and a weakness 
 in the lives of many in our own and other 
 churches, a strength in the clearness and power 
 of conversion and call, a weakness in the ever- 
 lasting failure to place that experience as only 
 the entrance to an ever-enriching life and an ever- 
 deepening service in the ministry. For, after all 
 is said, the real question for any best youth is 
 not whether he is called to the ministry or 
 whether he obeys that call ; the real question is 
 what he proposes to do, to live for, to labor for^ 
 to die for in that ministry. What does he set 
 before him as its objects through the years of his 
 youth, his manhood, and his age? What are the 
 objects which he must win or fail, which he must 
 
78 THIS MIND 
 
 try to achieve or die? What rich, living truth 
 will he use and use to set men free? What will 
 he do to recover lost sheep or recall lost sons? 
 What Christlike ministry of consolation will he 
 show toward the world of awful sorrow that 
 breaks the hearts of men? What steadying, guid- 
 ing, encouraging, inspiring relation will he sus- 
 tain to childhood and youth even in its trying 
 years? What course will he take through the 
 tangled moral evils of the town he lives in, and 
 the world of his day? In a word, again, what 
 will be the objects of his ministry — the objects 
 that lift him in his youth, that call him like a 
 trumpet in the heat of life's noon, that make his 
 sky to shine as he goes toward life's evening? 
 What are the objects that he will set before him 
 as that other Minister did, with such clearness 
 that he can endure the cross, the cross of all the 
 things a town can do to him, and despise the 
 shame, the shame of poverty and opposition and 
 even defeat, as long as his objects are like his 
 Master's? Do you see? The objects justify the 
 call, the objects sanctify the decision. Really 
 nothing else does. 
 
 I pass by missions and teaching and medicine 
 because, in a sense, they are easy. The relation 
 between the decision to enter any of them, and 
 the objects that fairly inhere in each of them, any 
 one can see. Let us assume that this is clear, 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 79 
 
 and go on to consider two or three other callings 
 which are not thought to be so easy, which are 
 not thought or spoken of as '^callings" at all. And 
 yet many of you will go into one or the other 
 of them. Must you in so doing leave all conse- 
 cration behind? Must you in so doing separate 
 yourself in spirit from your fellow student who 
 heads toward ministry or missionary service? 
 Must you turn your back upon the gleam which 
 they follow? Must you be disobedient to the vi- 
 sion which they obey ? Worst of all, must you miss 
 the companionship which they have? Are you 
 barred from saying, ^'Master, I will go along 
 with you wherever you go"? Does the life 
 journey with him lead only to the pulpit or the 
 foreign field? The scribe said he would go with 
 the Master. Was the rich young ruler prevented 
 by anything except his selfishness from saying it 
 with equal loyalty? 
 
 Let us look, then, at what we call business. 
 Let that term have its largest meaning. Let it 
 include all that great big enterprise that engages 
 and occupies such multitudes of great big men; 
 that enterprise that runs into economics, com- 
 merce, industry, comfort, welfare, and activity 
 that make up such a tremendous portion of the 
 life of the w^orld. Many of you will make your 
 life decision for business. We need not try to 
 conceal that fact from ourselves. Must we say 
 
80 THIS MIND 
 
 to all those who do make that decision that they 
 can have no fellowship with the Great Compan- 
 ion in their occupation? Has the door to busi- 
 ness written over it those utterly despairing 
 words, "All hope abandon, ye who enter here''? 
 Must one facing that way face entirely away 
 from all spiritual ideals, all those principles 
 that we have been considering, those principles 
 that seemed necessary if we would save our 
 souls? Or does our distinction between life deci- 
 sions and life objects come to our relief at this 
 point? Let us see. 
 
 We need be under no illusions as to the spirit 
 of business, take it by and large. Neither big 
 business nor small business is conducted with 
 primary reference to the law of love. We need 
 not charge it with dishonesty at all, but we do 
 it no injustice in declaring that the governing 
 law, the ruling principle of trade in all its forms 
 is the law of gain and the principle of profits. 
 The fruit of the spirit of modern business is 
 assuredly not "love, joy, peace, patience, kind- 
 ness, benevolence, good faith, meekness, self- 
 restraint." The business world, the men of busi- 
 ness themselves being the judges, is not a friend 
 of grace, to help anyone on to God. The spirit of 
 business is not the spirit of Christ as business 
 goes on in the present age. It never has been 
 in any age. No one can read the Gospels with- 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 81 
 
 out feeling his own intense anxiety for people 
 who get involved in the struggle for wealth, or 
 even the absorption in material things at all. 
 Words that would be denounced as extreme if 
 spoken by any country pastor were spoken over 
 and over again by him, seriously, thoughtfully, 
 faithfully. He does not say that men in business 
 cannot be good men, but he evidently thinks that 
 special grace is needed for all such men. 
 
 And I think you will find all too many men 
 who think they cannot succeed in the various 
 kinds of business if they apply the principles of 
 Jesus to their business and who fix up some sort 
 of compromise that will enable them to do as well 
 as they can. They want to be Christians, they 
 do not want to be cranks, so they become worldly- 
 wise and avoid being righteous overmuch. Also 
 you will hear a lot of men announcing their life 
 decisions with business in view of these words : 
 "God w^ants some men to make money for him, 
 and I think I can be one of them." For forty 
 years and more I have been hearing college men 
 say that, and have been watching the outcome of 
 it in scores and hundreds of lives. It is not a 
 very encouraging experience. In the long run 
 the emphasis has mostly shifted, and men have 
 made "money" in capitals, "for God" in small 
 type. They get the bulk of the money they make, 
 leaving for God only diminishing returns. Some- 
 
82 THIS MIND 
 
 times they drug their souls by quoting Jacob 
 and talking of the tithe that is the Lord's, as if 
 the rest, the most, belonged to them. Probably 
 the worst bookkeeping in the world is the book- 
 keeping with God on the part of men who set 
 out to make money for him. I am not mincing 
 words or putting this on an easy basis for you. 
 You will go into business, lots of you, and I am 
 trying to tell you how the Master looks on what 
 it involves, knowing full well that when the com- 
 mercial spirit gets controlling hold of any man 
 in ministry or anywhere else it ruins him in the 
 soul of him. 
 
 Is the case then absolutely hopeless, as it looks 
 to be? I do not think so. I cannot let the vast 
 majority of men go into an occupation without 
 trying to show them how they can do it and 
 yet keep step with the Master of all life. We 
 must have recourse here to the deep distinction 
 between our occupations and our objects. If 
 the object is to make money, the man is gone. 
 If the object is simply to make an ever better 
 living, better as judged merely by physical and 
 un-Christlike tests, then the man is gone. If 
 the object works out so that God always gets the 
 small end, then the thing is wrong. But if in 
 the everlasting struggle between the spirit of 
 the age and the spirit of the Master the latter 
 always w^ins; if God does always get the long 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 8^ 
 
 end both of the life and its outcome ; if this stand- 
 ard counts for more and more and the stand- 
 ards of the world for less and less ; if the objects 
 of Christ control with ever-growing power your 
 own objects ; if mammon is ever your servant and 
 Christ ever your Master; if you grow ever more 
 certain that it is far easier to make your way 
 against a crooked generation than it is to mock 
 or deceive a perfectly straightforward God, thea 
 you can go into business with hope, courage, and 
 a high heart. Only you must resolve to do it 
 this way even though you are the only one. In 
 this you cannot condition what you do upon! 
 whether others will do it this way. That would 
 be easy. But you must do it this way even if 
 no man stands with you. For then, and then only, 
 will Jesus Christ stand by you. If you go into 
 business as a vocation you must go in with the 
 mind that was in him toward the objects of your 
 business life. The one tragic overwhelming 
 failure and bankruptcy in that calling is the 
 failure to have his mind, and the bankruptcy 
 which follows. For that bankruptcy is moral 
 and personal. If it is impossible to do business 
 successfully on Christ's principles, it is even 
 more impossible to live successfully on any other 
 principles than his. 
 
 Or take the editorial calling. Many of you 
 look ahead to some sort of relation to the periodi- 
 
84 THIS MIND 
 
 cal press. Some hope to write for magazines or 
 to edit one of them. Some plan to be correspond- 
 ents, reporters, and finally editors of daily news- 
 papers. Hardly any occupation open to Christian 
 scholars offers finer opportunity for Christian 
 service than the occupation of a Christian writer. 
 Never did the printed page, especially the daily 
 or magazine page, reach so far. Never was it 
 more important to have journalism in all its 
 reaches and ranges sanctified by consecration 
 and purpose, made in the deepest sense a calling 
 rather than a profession or occupation. And it 
 has never been harder than it will be in your 
 lifetime, the time when you are working out your 
 life decisions in life service, to make a calling of 
 it. Journalism of all sorts has been incrusted, as 
 other professions have been, by the spirit of com- 
 mercialism and conformity. Men write what will 
 sell, what editors and readers will buy. Men 
 print what they think the public w^ants. Or 
 journalism reflects and photographs life and thus 
 creates more of the thing it portrays. It is repor- 
 torial rather than creative and constructive. 
 Here, then, is an opportunity which can only be 
 hinted at, not described in these brief limits. 
 Some of you have been called by journalism. 
 You cannot fulfill your calling by taking your 
 keynote from the counting room, the party plat- 
 form, or the sentiment round about you. You 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 85 
 
 cannot be a minister of Christ in that high call- 
 ing unless you bring the mind of Christ to that 
 calling. It was important beyond words that the 
 writers of the Old and New Testaments should 
 have been moved, guided, helped by the Holy 
 Spirit. They had such inspiration for their writ- 
 ing as they needed to interpret the mind, the 
 purpose, the ways and the love of God to the 
 world. What they wrote remains the world's 
 most precious and useful literature. I have more 
 than once tried to prove that they were truly 
 inspired by the Holy Spirit. I have been deeply 
 interested in the inspiration of the prophets, 
 evangelists, and apostles. But to-day I am also 
 greatly concerned about what Henry Drummond 
 called ^'the contemporary activities of the Holy 
 Spirit" among modern men and women who 
 write. Will you, facing that career, face it in 
 this light? Will you set before yourself a crea- 
 tive, constructive journalistic ideal and life, or 
 will you simply content yourself with being a 
 reflector, photographer or reporter of the life 
 about you? Your answer will determine whether 
 journalism is to be an occupation or a calling 
 in your hands. What has been done by such 
 inspired Scripture or writing as we have leads 
 me to long that a whole generation of writing 
 men and women may write what may in our 
 modern life be profitable for teaching, "for re- 
 
86 THIS MIND 
 
 proof, for correction, for instruction in righteous- 
 ness.'' On this basis journalism will come back 
 to its own and to its throne, and journalists will 
 take their place as the called of God for a service 
 no one else can perform. 
 
 One other occupation that is regarded as diffi- 
 cult when a Christian student is making his life 
 decision is the profession of a lawyer. After an 
 address to the Student Conference at Lake 
 Geneva last summer, one of the best of the men 
 on the grounds expressed real regret that no 
 word had been said by me to help the sincere, 
 earnest men who were there looking toward law 
 as a lifework. He pointed out that they are 
 earnest men, men who want to serve Christ in 
 their lives, men who want to do it in the legal pro- 
 fession, but are partly made to feel that in that 
 profession they cannot. After what he said I 
 too regretted my omissions, though that is more 
 common with me than with my audiences. 
 
 I need not raise again the questions that were 
 raised in introducing the paragraphs on business 
 as a calling, though many of them and many 
 more would apply here. They are taken for 
 granted as confronting us now as they did then. 
 And in addition there are some rather discourag- 
 ing words about lawyers in a very significant 
 place. In the New Testament the lawyer does 
 not appear to very good advantage. And in the 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 87 
 
 common opinion of the profession itself and that 
 of the world concerning the profession it is not 
 regarded as one of the eminently Christian pro- 
 fessions as such, though mam^ eminent Chris- 
 tians adorn and honor the profession by their 
 membership in it. The real question, however, 
 is not whether a man can be a successful lawyer 
 and still be a Christian. That question is 
 answered by the lives and characters of many 
 men who have shown that this can be done. The 
 real question for men at the age when they are 
 seriously making their life decisions is whether 
 they can make their decision with the consecra- 
 tion that marks the Master and on the principles 
 upon which he based his own life. They want 
 to become lawyers, and they do not want to 
 break with Jesus. (Of course, this applies to 
 those to whom it applies, and not at all to those 
 who do not care for him, who make all their 
 plans without reference to him.) Can they make 
 this decision at the altar, or w^hen they are 
 remembering Jesus Christ in the holy commun- 
 ion, or w^hen they are looking him in the face, 
 or facing a lifetime which may be spent with or 
 without him? Of course, if they cannot, then 
 there is but one thing to dp. They must turn 
 their backs upon the profession they desire for 
 the sake of their loyalty to the Master whom they 
 adore. 
 
88 THIS MIND 
 
 But here I think we must have recourse to 
 three considerations. First: The law is not all 
 on the same level. There are kinds of lawyers 
 that no decent, earnest man can be. There are 
 low conceptions of the profession and low prac- 
 tices in it which cannot be chosen by any youth 
 who looks ahead to a noble life. On the other 
 hand, there are lofty, holy ideals of the profes- 
 sion sacredly held and honored by sincere men, 
 who in their calling and by their calling preserve 
 their own integrity unsullied, like the spotless 
 ermine, and through the years hold society to 
 obedience to law, to respect for truth and confi- 
 dence in justice. Men of this sort stand before 
 the youth of every college as examples of the 
 better way. 
 
 Second: The distinction between life's deci- 
 sions and life's objects holds here, holds here 
 perhaps in a special measure. The deeper ques- 
 tion of one's final purpose must be answered. 
 Does that purpose walk in even step with the 
 purpose of the good and great of all the ages? 
 Does it go steadily, unswervingly, at any cost 
 toward making on this earth, among men and 
 nations a true republic or kingdom of law, of 
 justice, of righteousness, of truth and fairness 
 between men, of freedom from oppression and 
 legalized wrong, of security for the weak, the 
 safety of society and the only liberty there is, 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 89 
 
 liberty under law? If the decision to go into 
 law cannot bear these tests as to its objects, it 
 cannot be made in Christ's name. And that is 
 final. No man can deliberately head toward the 
 low, mean practices of the law and do it in 
 Christ's name or on his abiding principles. 
 
 Third : I am including in the words ''law as a 
 profession" all that large and valuable public 
 service which really can only be fully and per- 
 fectly performed by the aid of men of legal 
 training. And I declare my conviction that men 
 wdth the right legal training and the right spirit 
 with it, men who are not slaves to legal petti- 
 ness and technical formalities, men who share 
 Christ's objects in the world and have his devo- 
 tion to those objects, have an opportunity for 
 Christian service to-day that such men have not 
 had in any Christian century. They have the 
 chance to redeem the profession from the work 
 and reputation of their forebears in the New 
 Testament. In that day a certain lawyer tried 
 to trap Jesus Christ and to puzzle him by ques- 
 tions. In this day the right sort of lawyer has 
 a glorious chance to help Jesus Christ make 
 straight the legal paths in which men and nations 
 can walk, as they go not toward a League of 
 Nations, but toward the Kingdom which is love, 
 joy, and truth, the Kingdom of holiness on this 
 poor old earth of ours. If you are going in like 
 
90 THIS MIND 
 
 this, with this object governing and controlling 
 you, you may look just ahead or just at your 
 side for the figure with the seamless robe and 
 sandaled feet. And if you see him, strike step 
 with him and go on. 
 
 One day a group of bishops called upon the 
 President of the United States, as their prede- 
 cessors had done for more than a century, to 
 assure the President of their loyalty to him and 
 prayers for him. One of them — now in the skies 
 — read a brief address in which he referred to 
 himself and his colleagues as ministers of reli- 
 gion ordained to establish righteousness, peace, 
 and goodness among men. He had barely fin- 
 ished when the President, with eyes gleaming 
 behind his glasses, teeth flashing in the light 
 that shone into his face, with high, cracking voice 
 almost furiously said: "I also am a minister of 
 religion. I too have taken the vows of a holy 
 service in the world. I also have been ordained 
 to establish righteousness and truth, and to- make 
 a better world for humanity. God help me. I 
 will keep my vow and fulfill my ministry among 
 men." 
 
 One other day, not long ago, one of those same 
 bishops sat in the gallery of a noble building in 
 the nation's capital and saw the Secretary of 
 State surrounded by men of the great nations 
 working on the problem of a world without war, 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 91 
 
 working with all their human skill, all their legal 
 training, and that Secretary at least with all his 
 Christian consecration. And as that bishop 
 watched those men and thought of the world 
 meaning of their task, thought of the Master's 
 interest in what they were doing, the ordaining 
 mood came upon him as at an Annual Confer- 
 ence when men are set apart for the ministry. 
 He wanted to lay hands upon the heads of them 
 and say : '^The Lord pour upon thee the Holy 
 Spirit for the office and work of an international 
 statesman now committed unto thee by the 
 authority of Christ. And be thou a faithful dis- 
 penser of the truth of God and the ordinances 
 of peace and righteousness in the name of the 
 Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." 
 
 Are you prepared to be ordained to such 
 objects as you make your life decision, with the 
 law as your choice? If you are, go ahead. If 
 not, do not go any farther that way. 
 
 Finally, the objects of a man's life must be seen 
 in the light of three or four steady flames. 
 Already we have seen that the purposes of a 
 rich, full life are too large to be stated in a 
 single sentence or seen in a single act. Skeleton 
 keys do not work in this kind of personality. 
 You see what a man is going to be, or when his 
 life is fully under way you see what his objects 
 are, or when it is over you get the full picture 
 
92 THIS MIND 
 
 of what it was, not in the light of one verbal 
 flash, however brilliant. If it is really w^orth 
 understanding, it must be studied in its total im- 
 pression, the impression inevitably made by four 
 or five features. For example, attention has 
 already been called to three or four sentences, 
 each one sounding like a statement of the mission 
 of Jesus. As between those sentences taken by 
 themselves, apart from everything else, one might 
 readily get confused as to the real object of the 
 Master. You have to unite them, relate them to 
 one another, and to all the rest of his sayings in 
 order to get their full meaning. And, indeed, 
 that just about says what I am trying to say. 
 You get your final, complete knowledge of any 
 real man's objects from his total output of seri- 
 ous utterance, from first to last. The impression 
 of Jesus' objects is not so clear and sharp as if he 
 had said just one specific, single thing. Small 
 minds will not get so much out of it, so much 
 that is handy for debate or for use as shibboleths ; 
 it will not be so easy to get a catchy sentence 
 upon which to build a catchy career or a petty 
 denomination, as if they could seize a single 
 sentence and ignore all the rest. But you men 
 and women ought to thank your God that you can 
 escape this narrowing, dwarfing conception, and 
 see the objects of Jesus in the sum total of what 
 he said. It is not so sharp and definite, not so 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 93 
 
 mathematically precise, but it has a personal 
 wealth and fullness, a glory of abundance and a 
 splendor of universality and an appeal to the 
 largest life in it that make two things forever 
 sure. These words, these total words, are spirit 
 and life. And these words shall not pass away. 
 They will, as Dean Stanley said, pass into litera- 
 ture and into life, but they will not pass away. 
 
 You get the same impression in the same way 
 by a study of what he did. He never created the 
 impression that what he was saying or doing at 
 any given moment was unimportant and might 
 be ignored. And he never created the impression 
 that the individual thing was the only thing 
 he was interested in. Yet here, again, superficial 
 minds can easily mislead themselves by the par- 
 tial view and lay the whole stress of his activity 
 upon a single act. And if you press that far 
 enough, you can base your own mission upon 
 washing men's feet, or walking on the water, or 
 riding on a young donkey, or cursing barren fig 
 trees, or driving evil spirits into pigs. Every one 
 of these things Jesus did. But any man would 
 be a foolish man who should seize any one of 
 them or any other single act of his life as though 
 it fully expressed the object of his life. Here, 
 as in the case of his utterance, you have to inter- 
 pret the objects of his life by the grand total of 
 his activity, the full output of his deeds. What 
 
94 THIS MIND 
 
 he did through his whole wonderful life — the 
 miracles he performed, the common good he went 
 about doing, the countless deeds of mercy, kind- 
 ness, usefulness, and righteousness, recorded 
 only in part — shows what he meant to do, w^hat 
 the objects of his life were. There are words of 
 his that you can hardly read if you think of 
 them in this light. In the very greatest night of 
 history you hear him saying to his Father these 
 two sentences : "The truths which thou didst 
 teach me, I have taught them." "I have done 
 perfectly the work thou didst give me to do." 
 In speech and deed, in total speech and total 
 deed, he revealed and worked out the objects of 
 his life. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone had religion as the very basis 
 of his life. He wanted to enter the ministry. 
 He did go to Parliament. But the mere choice of 
 a profession could make no difference in the 
 ground tone of his thought and life (Russell, 
 Life of Gladstone). 
 
 You see it also in Jesus' total plan for all the 
 large variety of people that he touched, labored 
 for, worked Avith and worked upon. This rela- 
 tion to people as bearing upon life's decisions 
 and revealing life's objects is so full of meaning 
 that it must be made the subject of an entire 
 study before we have done. At the risk of antici- 
 pating now and repeating later, let me say that 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 95 
 
 here again the test does not lie in what he did or 
 proposed to do with one person any more than 
 it did in one truth or one deed. His relation to 
 Peter was not the only relation he sustained any 
 more than the new birth was the only truth he 
 taught or healing lepers the only thing he did. 
 In making his life decision and in making yours, 
 the total relation to humanity is the vital thing. 
 The object of life is tested by what one proposes 
 to do through his whole life for mankind as a 
 whole. All personal life must get its benefit. 
 
 The object of life as affecting and illuminating 
 life decisions can be seen also in what one earn- 
 estly, steadily, and passionately prays for. 
 Hardly anything more clearly reveals a man's 
 real purposes than the temper and tone of his 
 prayers. It is amazing to observe that uncon- 
 sciously, perhaps unintentionally, prayers are 
 usually selfish. You can pretty nearly tell what 
 a person is or is going to be by hearing, particu- 
 larly by overhearing, what he most earnestly asks 
 God to do. For real prayer is much more than 
 simply a pious wish piously uttered. At its best 
 it is a man's highest and deepest desire laid down 
 before the Almighty, all-wise, all-understanding 
 God. It is a real desire put up to the Person who 
 may grant it or bring it to pass. I doubt if any 
 more critically important words were ever 
 spoken to men than these : "Ask what you will.'^ 
 
9C THIS MIND 
 
 If you had one wish, one wish for all the world 
 to know, one wish for God to grant, not a secret 
 wish known only to your own soul, not a wish 
 to end in being wished, but one wish as the full 
 desire of your life, one wish to be realized in the 
 world, one wish to have your name attached to 
 through the centuries, what would it be? Do 
 not answer in a hurry. Do not be superficial and 
 trifling about it. Keep steady while you look it 
 over and look it through. This is not an imagi- 
 nary or hypothetical suggestion. You have one 
 such wish. Whatever it is determines the real 
 object of your life and the real meaning of your 
 life decision. He had such a wish. You have it. 
 It takes many forms and reaches into many 
 areas, but the thing you genuinely ask God for 
 is the thing that in the long run you want done 
 in your life. 
 
 Of course all this finds chief expression in 
 what a man lives for and, if he has the oppor- 
 tunity, dies for. The objects of his life, the 
 objects which govern his life decisions, really 
 determine all the ends he aims at. For them he 
 spends his days and nights. For them he toils 
 and suffers and sacrifices. For them at last he 
 cheerfully lays life down and counts the end 
 worth the price. And it is good that in the world 
 where you are to spend your years there are so 
 many things worth living for and worth dying 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 97 
 
 for. Not everything that men do will bear so 
 much weight as the w^eight of a life and a death. 
 A lot of things are not worth any such price, but 
 if you have come thus far on the principles we 
 have had before us, and especially in the company 
 of that other Person, you will not care for those 
 unworthy things now. He is worthy ; the objects 
 of his life and death justify w^hat he gave for 
 them. There is a glorious chance to complete 
 his work, even to make up what w^as lacking in 
 his sufferings. He is still in it as in the days 
 long gone. I know nothing better for you men 
 and women than to get into it with him for life 
 or for death. 
 
IV 
 
 THIS MIND TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF 
 LIFE 
 
 It surely is not necessary to say again that a 
 life decision is only the beginning of a lifework. 
 David Livingstone used to say, ^'The end of the 
 exploration is the beginning of the enterprise/' 
 which we may paraphrase to read, ^'The end of 
 the decision is the beginning of everything." 
 You make the decision some day in a swift, vital 
 hour, but you do not have it over with in an hour. 
 The years pack themselves into the moments and 
 the years make the moments immortal. 
 
 "Heard are the voices, 
 Heard are the sages, 
 The worlds and the ages. 
 Choose well ; your choice is 
 Brief and vet endless." 
 
 Because of the long reach of a life decision, be- 
 cause it must be tested by the logic and expe- 
 rience of the years rather than the logic and 
 emotion of the hours, it is necessary at this 
 point to utter two serious cautions. First, do 
 not go into a calling for life that will wear out 
 
 98 
 
TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 99 
 
 in a few years. Your calling ought to last your 
 lifetime. It is a pitiful thing to grow tired of 
 your vocation while the day is yet young, to 
 "catch up with your horizon" before you have 
 reached the middle of your journey. Second, 
 do not go into a great calling on a small motive, 
 or a narrow basis. Especially do not, for small 
 reasons, just drift into any high occupation for 
 the purpose of trying it to see how you will like 
 it. Men who try the ministry to see whether they 
 will like it usually end by trying the churches 
 more sorely. Men who try teaching or medicine 
 or law saying: "If I do not like it, I will try 
 something else," are trials themselves from the 
 start. They are off the center. Making life deci- 
 sions on the basis of personal liking or disliking 
 is one of the worst sorts of egotism. Life deci- 
 sions should never be made on an egocentric 
 basis. 
 
 Life decisions should be made on such prin- 
 ciples and for such reasons as will secure a sense 
 of strength and steadiness, as will take the fret 
 and uncertainty out of a man. He need not 
 have the sense of personal strength — that would 
 be vanity. He must have the sense of strength 
 of calling — that is power. You may well be 
 modest and distrustful of yourself, but restless- 
 ness in and doubt of your calling are utterly de- 
 structive of power in it. You may, like Saint 
 
100 THIS MIND 
 
 Paul, feel that you have your treasure in an 
 earthly vessel, but being in this service, and 
 mindful of the mercy shown you in putting you 
 in, you must not be a coward and you must ^'not 
 lose heart in it.'' And as you draw near the end 
 of a life on this level, even though you may be 
 battered and wounded, showing loss of limb and 
 many signs of battle, you will cry out with 
 Roosevelt the strenuous, ''It has been a bully 
 fight," or with Saint Paul the aged, in language 
 more dignified but in the same spirit: ''I have 
 fought in a good fight. I have gone through the 
 glorious contest." 
 
 Our duty to-day, in addition to all that has 
 gone before, is to find or lay the foundation for 
 such strength and steadiness, something that 
 will throw 
 
 ''God's greatness round onr incompleteness, 
 Eound our restlessness his rest." 
 
 1. In order to have a permanent and sustain- 
 ing sense of strength in what you are doing, you 
 must have an undoubted and abiding sense of 
 its human value and necessity. 
 
 There is a real difference between human neces- 
 sity and human advantage. Men are easily con- 
 fused between the thing that looks desirable and 
 the thing that appears to be necessary. They 
 are confused in this regard concerning Jesus 
 
TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 101 
 
 himself. To some very devout thinkers he 
 appears only as an advantage, the very 
 best among many who are excellent. They 
 think it would be distinctly good if he 
 were everywhere approved and his rule 
 universally accepted. But, surely, this does not 
 adequately interpret his own idea of his own call- 
 ing. Such a ministry, such a service as his could 
 not have come to pass, could not have been en- 
 dured, could not have been carried on steadily if 
 he had not felt it all the while to be a human 
 necessity. It would have broken down, just as 
 many earnest lives do break down, if it had 
 rested on the foundation of simple human benefit 
 or advantage. One can see a half dozen places 
 where only the sense of human necessity carried 
 Jesus through. He could not have paid so big 
 a price, or have endured what he did endure, 
 simply for something that was desirable. Hut- 
 ton has some profoundly significant sentences 
 in one of his studies: ''I have little hope of any 
 passionate and cordial return to Christ except 
 out of a returning sense of necessity. Deep 
 calleth unto deep. Religion when it ceases to be 
 felt as necessary begins to chafe. It is the utter 
 necessity of faith which flings us on the breast 
 of God." Many times since our return from 
 India, China, and Japan, men have asked seri- 
 ously whether the people of those countries are 
 
102 THIS MIND 
 
 not getting along pretty well with the religions 
 they have. The question always disturbs me. 
 It seems to indicate that Jesus Christ is not a 
 necessity to certain parts of the world; that 
 maybe there is some other way than his or some 
 other name than his; that his objects are only 
 admirable — perhaps most admirable — among 
 other good men's good objects, but that neither 
 Jesus nor his program is a necessity. Wher- 
 ever that impression exists it weakens Chris- 
 tianity to the point of destroying its power, and 
 leaves us helpless before lijfe's deep, real needs. 
 Indeed, it only puts a soothing ointment into our 
 hands and not a real cure. 
 
 This same effect is produced when one comes to 
 feel that he might as well do something else, that 
 what he is doing is not essential to anybody, and 
 that it is not essential that he should be doing- 
 it. He can go on through life as millions have 
 done and are doing. Life will have no more 
 meaning for him than it has for other millions. 
 He will be neither prophet, priest, nor Messiah. 
 His life will never strike the deepest note or show 
 the sacramental quality. Obstacles will easily 
 turn him aside. He will not go forward with his 
 face set toward Jerusalem at any cost. A reduc- 
 tion of salary, a small criticism, a petty opposi- 
 tion will make him fling the whole thing to the 
 winds. Or, what is just as bad, he will abandon 
 
TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 103 
 
 his primary passion in his calling and give him- 
 self to secondary and immediate plans, to giving 
 people what they want. And he will talk of 
 democracy and the voice of the people, of re- 
 sponding to popular demands and appeals. If 
 Nineveh does not want him or appeal to him, he 
 will try Tarshish. The voice that sent him, the 
 necessity that was laid upon him, will grow dim 
 in his ears and light upon his conscience. He 
 will easily turn to the Gentiles, discbunt his 
 mission, abandon his early consecration, and for 
 the rest of his life talk the language of prudence 
 and pessimism. What is far worse, he will show 
 a weak will, a weak personality, and a weak hold 
 upon his calling. Nothing but an abiding sense 
 of the necessity of his calling will sustain him in 
 strength as he goes forward in it. For good 
 reasons, like loss of health, one may in special 
 cases be compelled to change the form of the life 
 in which he fulfills his life decision, but if he 
 changes the spirit and purpose of it, or lets down 
 the passion of his devotion to it, ''then dies the 
 man in him." A broken voice may force you to 
 quit preaching, but if you quit because you have 
 lost your vision, lost heart in the ministry, lost 
 the sense of God's necessity to human life, the 
 Lord have mercy on your own soul. For Jesus 
 Christ is not a temporary answer to a temporary 
 need, he is the permanent answer to the eternal. 
 
104 THIS MIND 
 
 unceasing necessity to which there is no other 
 answer. 
 
 2. In order to have a permanent and sustain- 
 ing sense of strength in your calling you must 
 have an abiding and unquestioning conscious- 
 ness of its absolute altruism and unselfishness. 
 Nothing will more surely undo a good and sincere 
 man in his lifework than the feeling that there 
 is a selfish element in him or in it. Of course, 
 there are people, plenty of them — too many of 
 them — w^ho make no pretense of unselfishness. 
 They are in things, often in the best things, with 
 a jaunty air and a blase attitude toward selfish- 
 ness, as though it were of small concern. But 
 these are the people who stay in things while 
 they are going well or while there is some advan- 
 tage to themselves in staying in. They do not 
 get anywhere near the center where Jesus moved 
 and. was strong. They wear a cross, but they do 
 it for symbolic and decorative reasons. They 
 do not at all get into Saint PauFs deep words 
 about being crucified with Christ. Indeed, they 
 resent any pressing of this idea as extreme and 
 fanatical. They are devotees of the reasonable 
 and moderate. But in this business of unselfish- 
 ness there is no such thing as the moderate and 
 reasonable. That way cannot be fitted into the 
 way of Jesus. He did not live his life on the com- 
 mon basis of sharing half and half. He certainly 
 
TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 105 
 
 did not adopt Jacob's standard which seems so 
 wonderfully liberal to so many people. I met 
 a man one day who was fairly bursting with 
 spiritual pride and a sense of unselfishness be- 
 cause he had that year given ten thousand dollars 
 for Christian work of various sorts and had only 
 kept ninety thousand for himself! He was an 
 entirely sensible and practical person from his 
 point of view and from the conventional point of 
 view. Of course, his universe never gets dis- 
 turbed. He keeps it steady. And, of course also, 
 his universe never gets ahead. It just goes round 
 and round until some time, his time or some 
 other, there is a crash. For there is no way to 
 preserve the steadiness of life year in and year 
 out, from one generation to another, except 
 Jesus' way of perfect unselfishness. You may 
 not think him practical, but his practice is the 
 only one that works. His basis is the only one 
 that keeps a person steady and strong in the face 
 of all sorts of experiences. The things that 
 happen to men do not differ so much as the things 
 that happen in men. The only persons who are 
 steady in an earthquake are the people who are 
 not thinking of its effect on themselves. The 
 Master of the absolutely unselfish life is the only 
 one who can be calm when the boat is tossing. 
 Thousands of men have ruined themselves and 
 their callings by becoming anxious about their 
 
106 THIS MIND 
 
 own fortunes in their callings. They have lost 
 their power to do the highest good, they have 
 become fussed and troubled because they have 
 come to look for the personal advantages that 
 they think belong to doing good. Churches often 
 go a long way toward ruining their altruism by 
 their anxiety over the question of the credit they 
 get for being benevolent. You may depend upon 
 it, the selfish life is never a strong and steady 
 one. Selfishness permanently disturbs the bal- 
 ance, and upsets the equilibrium of the spirit. 
 If you are making your life decision with the idea 
 that you will make some bread for the multitudes 
 and some for yourself, that you will save your- 
 self and as many others as you can, that you 
 will do all the good you can and get all the 
 rewards and advantages out of it that can be 
 made to coma your way, you are laying up for 
 yourself a life of restlessness, discontent and un- 
 steadiness. You will be weak in your spirit 
 and in your calling, weak where weakness is 
 fatal, in the center and soul of your very being. 
 You can walk that way if you want to, but you 
 cannot look for the fellowship of the Great Com- 
 panion who never wanted anything for himself. 
 "I used to wonder at the cross,'' wrote an Ameri- 
 can soldier, ''but not now. I think Jesus was a 
 lucky man to have a chance to die for a great 
 cause." There is no other way to tranquillity. 
 
TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 107 
 
 3. You can get and preserve this sense of 
 strength by making sure that your life and life 
 purposes are in line with the best ideals, pur- 
 poses, visions, and dreams of the best men and 
 women through the centuries. 
 
 The world is not beginning with you, even 
 though you may think so or may wonder how 
 it has got along at all without you. The stream 
 of history has been running a tolerably long 
 time. You are about to get into it either to row 
 or to drift. My first anxiety is that you shall 
 have a fair general understanding of it, and my 
 second that you shall have a right relation to 
 it. We are not starting the world all new. Some 
 people think it would be well if we could smash 
 the existing order and begin all over again. 
 Of course this cannot be done, and such experi- 
 ments as the French Revolution and other 
 efforts do not greatly encourage the idea of doing 
 it. In the effort to get a fair general under- 
 standing you will quickly see that history has 
 not all been bad nor all been good. This stream 
 that you enter is not absolutely pure nor per- 
 fectly polluted. It might be worse, it might well 
 be much better. Your ancestors were men and 
 women of many faults and many virtues. They 
 were about as wise and about as foolish as their 
 descendants. From them you can learn many 
 things to do, and likewise many things to avoid. 
 
108 THIS MIND 
 
 "The Faith of our fathers" of which we rev- 
 erently sing had many superb and shining quali- 
 ties and a lot of errors and crude superstitions. 
 "The oldtime religion" was good in those blessed 
 respects in which it was good, but it evidently 
 was not good enough to make our fathers per- 
 fect or to save the world through which they 
 passed. That a thing is old does not prove it 
 to be either true or good. Its age may only prove 
 it to be tough and enduring. 
 
 Nevertheless, into this mixed inheritance we 
 come, and come inevitably. There is no other 
 way to get into our world except through this 
 flowing human stream. We cannot ignore it or 
 go round it. Suppose, then, ignoring further 
 figures of speech, we look squarely at our atti- 
 tude to the life we come into and the history we 
 inherit. If we come in as most of our fathers 
 have done, we shall be as restless as they were 
 and as weak as we see them to have been. If we 
 enter the life of our day as Jesus entered the life 
 of his, we may be strong as he was strong, by 
 allying ourselves with only the best and highest 
 forces and ideals out of the past and refusing to 
 conform to or perpetuate the things that ought 
 to perish. The stream of history will grow worse 
 and worse or better and better, according to 
 what is poured into it by all its tributaries, 
 which tributaries for this generation you are. 
 
TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 109 
 
 If the faith of our children is to be any better 
 than the faith of our fathers, if the new-time 
 religion is to be any better than the imperfect 
 old-time religion, it will be because you put your 
 lives for to-day and to-morrow in with the best 
 and against the worst ; because you and the next 
 generation and the ones after that forever ^'work 
 upward, working out the beast'' in human life. 
 Steadiness and strength, wholesomeness and free- 
 dom, are obtained by improvement, by alliance 
 with the ideals and forces that are excellent. 
 And this comes by purpose, by resolution, by 
 steady determination to have it so. Do not be 
 fooled. The world does not grow better simply 
 because it grows older. 
 
 In my youth the township where I lived was 
 divided for road-mending and road-making pur- 
 poses into districts over which men called super- 
 visors were placed. Some of them were utterly 
 incompetent, some utterly indifferent, some 
 wholly traditional. The roads that were good 
 enough for the fathers and pioneers were good 
 enough for them. Some of them had an idea of 
 better roads for better vehicles and better days. 
 But not one of them made a road fit for a modern 
 automobile, and not one made an all-the-year- 
 round road. You are to join the historic fellow- 
 ship of road-makers for the King. Some of them 
 have done their work badly. The King's high- 
 
110 THIS MIND 
 
 way as made by them was hardly fit for the 
 King's chariot. They filled no valleys and leveled 
 no hills. When the King struck the roads made 
 by them his progress was either stopped or 
 slowed down. The story as told in history is 
 not encouraging or cheerful. Christianity is 
 not half as far along to-day as it ought to be or 
 as it could have been. If this is as fast as it is 
 going to go, it will never overtake or lead civili- 
 zation. Some of the road-makers made good 
 stretches of road, and the King made swift prog- 
 ress over them, only to strike the rough, unfit, 
 impassable stretches made by other men as they 
 always had been made. You do not get the 
 sustaining sense of strength by working with 
 that group. In your life time, even in mine yet, 
 the highways for the Lord must be made so per- 
 fect, by men and women working with the best 
 ideals and best people of the centuries, that the 
 King's progress in a single generation shall ex- 
 ceed anything he has reached in the whole Chris- 
 tian era. These highways must run across con- 
 tinents, run between nations and races, so that 
 the way of the Lord in the world shall be smooth. 
 If you can help to make such a way for him, you 
 will save your own life from destruction on the 
 rough, jolting ways over which your fathers 
 w^ent. 
 
 4. You can get and preserve this necessary 
 
TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 111 
 
 sense of strength and steadiness in your life by 
 making sure that you are working with the will 
 of God and not against it. 
 
 Another phase of this was mentioned in an 
 earlier lecture, but the subject naturally comes 
 back again at this point. We are likely to be 
 overborne just now by what many people think 
 to be fundamental democracy, namely, running 
 always with the majority, or ^'It always pays to 
 shout with the crowd," or ''The voice of the peo- 
 ple is the voice of God." Of course, this is 
 not democracy at all. Over and over the ma- 
 jority is wrong and its voice is against God. We 
 do not get our highest ideals from the multitude 
 or have them confirmed by popular vote. Israel's 
 "saving remnant" was much nearer right than 
 Israel's blundering multitude. When the crowd 
 yelled for Barabbas, the place of real strength 
 and steadiness was where Jesus stood almost 
 alone. The star that stays where it ought to stay, 
 no matter how the waves toss or the ship turns, 
 is worth much more than its weight in gold. 
 The will of God is not tossed about by the gusts 
 of passion and self-interest that often put wrong 
 on the throne. We agreed that we must work 
 in harmony with the best men and women, with 
 the best ideals of the centuries. Well, we must 
 go further than that for the strength that will 
 not fail even if we must climb some new Calvary 
 
112 THIS MIND 
 
 as part of the day's work. We must not go into 
 our lifework on a short view or a narrow one, 
 on a dim vision or a confused one. If we are 
 going in to be strong and steady, we must be 
 very sure that we are in harmony with God's 
 will, God's purposes, God's plans for the world 
 in which we live. 
 
 We have inherited a miserable idea that the 
 will of God is to be suffered or endured, that it 
 is hard and grinding, that it finds its chief ex- 
 pression in afflictions, personal trials, and dis- 
 agreeable duties, especially forcing choice youth 
 into unattractive occupations. I think in my 
 youth I always heard the will of God spoken of 
 in a tone of resignation or conscious martyrdom 
 or with a snivel. Shouting Methodists were 
 plenty, but I never heard any of them shouting 
 over the will of God as a thing to be done. They 
 were always shouting over some experience of 
 the love of God which was to be enjoyed. But 
 the will of God for them came nowhere near the 
 region of religious enjoyment. If they got any 
 pleasure out of it, it was in spite of the will of 
 God. It remained for me to discover in later years 
 a different note in the matchless life. "I do 
 always those things that please him.'' Wher- 
 ever, whenever, whatever he wants, I am for it, 
 for it is the best thing going. It is as if Jesus 
 heard God always saying, "Come, let us do this 
 
TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 113 
 
 or that, let us go here or there,'' and had replied 
 with an emphasis Roosevelt never touched with 
 his favorite word, ^'I delight to do thy will, for 
 there is nothing better." Even in Gethsemane 
 he said, not with a sob or an appeal for pity, but 
 with a shout and a tone of victory: ^^His will, 
 his glorious will, his beautiful will for the world 
 and for me, be done, done no matter where it 
 leads. Rise, let us be going, before Calvary gets 
 away without my having the chance to climb it 
 with a cross." 
 
 Jesus had a lot of enthusiasms, but his enthu- 
 siasm for the will of God in the world and in his 
 own life amounted almost to an obsession. It 
 was not a vague enthusiasm for humanity or for 
 an abstract principle or a good cause. He 
 reveled and gloried and, if he had done such 
 things, he would have rioted in the will of God. 
 And in Jesus' relation to God's will you must 
 get to it. In him you must see what it is and 
 ought to be for you. We too vaguely take the 
 will of God into account or do it only as a kind 
 of final throw of pious submission. Jesus lived 
 in it. It was his strength, his steadiness, his 
 peace, his everlasting rapture. 
 
 It must be interpreted in the light of such 
 questions as these: What does God propose in 
 the world? What kind of a world is he really 
 trying to make? What is he trying to do, what 
 
114 THIS MIND 
 
 he been trying to do for men and races? 
 What is he trying to teach people and trying to 
 get them to be and do? If he had his way, if 
 his will were done, what would happen? What 
 kind of a world would it be if the will of God 
 should be done in it? How would we be living 
 in this year 1922 in the United States, in Europe, 
 in Africa, and Asia and the rest of the world if 
 the will of God as Jesus knew it had been done 
 for the last score of years or were being done 
 now? What would be happening to the poor, 
 the rich, the ignorant, the educated, the weak, 
 the strong, the Negro, the Jew, the Chinaman, 
 the Russian, the German, the Englishman, the 
 American, if the will of God were to be done? I 
 am for it. I cannot see anything else with any 
 great promise in it, cannot see anything else 
 worth tying up fifty years of endeavor to. This 
 holds the future. If we are going any way that 
 is worth going, this is the only way to go. There 
 are no other standards worth conforming to. 
 This is not a party ideal nor a partial one. 
 Will the Pharisees and the Sadducees and all 
 their modern successors, and all others who 
 divide the body of Christ, please step aside or 
 step into line. The youth of the w^orld, the 
 youth of the colleges are proposing, God bless 
 them, proposing with a shout, to make a new 
 fellowship, a fellowship with Jesus, the fellow- 
 
TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 115 
 
 ship of those who love and do the will of God. 
 It will be fair as the moon, bright as the sun, and 
 terrible as an army with banners. This is the 
 really going concern in the world to-day. Are 
 you in it? God is the great endeavorer, trying 
 in a thousand ways, all of them good. Are you 
 with him? He has the only plan that looks as 
 though it would work. Are you going into it, 
 or only partly in, or wholly into some other? 
 If 3^ou want to know the will of God, if you want 
 to love it, if you earnestly want it to be done, 
 get into it in faith, fellowship, endeavor, and 
 enthusiasm with Jesus, who knew what it was 
 and what it would do, and who conformed his 
 life to it. 
 
 5. You will get and maintain the sense of 
 strength and steadiness in your life and its pur- 
 poses through the abiding conviction, based upon 
 wisdom, that your life plans, if worked out, 
 would work well. 
 
 There is such a thing as Christian pragmatism, 
 the trial of a philosophy or plan by the simple 
 test, "Does it work?" By this test your plans 
 must be judged, by it the purposes of Jesus him- 
 self are judged. In his case we are making a 
 fundamental blunder through getting our tenses 
 and moods confused. There has been a lot of 
 foolish speculation over the question : "Would 
 his plans have worked well if they had been tried 
 
116 THIS MIND 
 
 through?" The implications in the question are 
 that he belongs to the past and that the fair trial 
 of his purposes is no longer possible. Nothing 
 could be further from the fact. He and his plans 
 hold the present and the future. At this hour 
 there is really no other who is even claiming to 
 have a world plan. But the real question here 
 is whether your life decisions lead you to a life 
 program that will also surely work clear through 
 for world advantage. Human life and society 
 are far too precious to be experimented on by 
 theorists and charlatans who do not know how 
 their experiments will turn out. And your lives 
 are too valuable to have them destroyed by the 
 fever of uncertainty and wonder as to their out- 
 come. Your generation ought to do something 
 far better than just to leave the world as you 
 found it or even a little better. The slow pro- 
 gress of past generations is too slow. We have 
 made inventions and material improvements for 
 life faster than we have made moral gains. This 
 generation that is now young ought to change 
 that. You will have the same sense of weakness 
 and unsteadiness that your fathers have had if 
 you bring no higher tests to your lives than they 
 brought to theirs. As Thomas Arnold put it, 
 ^'We must be superior to our fathers or we shall 
 be monstrously inferior to them." Old heads are 
 weary, but we are persuaded better things of you 
 
TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 117 
 
 than of ourselves. When we were young we 
 quoted the words of Lowell, then living as we 
 were, with Civil War and slavery echoes in our 
 souls : 
 
 "Once to every man and nation comes the moment 
 to decide, 
 
 In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good 
 or evil side; 
 
 Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each 
 the bloom or blight, 
 
 Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep 
 upon the right, 
 
 And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that dark- 
 ness and that light." 
 
 But the choice does not go by forever even 
 though it goes by for one group or one genera- 
 tion. "Every day is a fresh beginning" in a very 
 real sense. "Every morn is the world made new'' 
 in a very true way. And the new choices come 
 and keep on coming until or unless we have 
 sinned away the day of grace of new opportuni- 
 ties. 
 
 I fear sometimes that God may have grown 
 discouraged with my generation as a whole, 
 though it has done some glorious things; that 
 he may be saying, sorrowfully : "I cannot expect 
 much more from that crowd. They have grown 
 spiritually conservative and cautious and have 
 lost the spirit of adventure. Maybe the best that 
 can now be expected of them is that they shall 
 
118 THIS MIND 
 
 not stand in the way of youth while youth girds 
 up its loins and ties its shoes to run as heralds 
 to prepare the way for the King who comes." 
 For it is Jesus or nobody, as the thing looks to- 
 day. And, really, also he has to depend upon 
 the youth of America and Britain, the youth of 
 Asia and Europe, the youth of Africa and the 
 islands of all the seas to give him a new real 
 chance again in the w^orld. Are you with him? 
 Can he count on you? Has he your vote? Do 
 your decisions match up with his plans in this 
 sure fashion? 
 
 We are fairly worn out, but he is not worn at 
 all. He is neither exhausted with weariness nor 
 pumped out to emptiness. Suppose, then, the 
 youth of to-day should enthusiastically go after 
 him, loyally go with him, go the whole length 
 as their elders have not done, should give him 
 their word and stand by it as he stood by his, 
 what would happen? 
 
 Jesus must depend on the men and women his 
 own age and younger for certain things older 
 people cannot give him. Jesus was twelve when 
 he made the doctors marvel at him as at a 
 prodigy. He was thirty w^hen he began his 
 ministry. But then men of fifty and sixty find 
 it a bit hard to give themselves absolutely and 
 unreservedly to the leadership of a man of thirty, 
 especially if his way looks a bit revolutionary to 
 
TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 119 
 
 them. Men of that age get in the middle of the 
 road, they are afraid to violate the speed limit, 
 they talk about the fathers and the old order 
 and caution their age not to go too fast. It was 
 so in Jesus' day ; it is so to-day. College men on 
 both sides of the sea will listen to men of my age 
 respectfully because of our age, but they will 
 not leap to our message as they did when Henry 
 Drummond at about thirty years of age went 
 from college to college with the breath of the 
 morning on him, calling men to follow that 
 Other One who was the same age as himself. I 
 think I can understand the elders and members 
 of the Sanhedrin who did not understand Jesus, 
 but I cannot understand how the youth of his 
 day, or the youth of any day, fellows like that 
 rich young ruler, failed to see his meaning for 
 them and their value to him, and let their chance 
 go by. 
 
 For example, there was a day when he knew 
 and explained how to save the world. He had 
 thought it clear through. He knew the truth, 
 the power, the way. He saw the end from the 
 beginning. His plans would have saved the 
 Jewish nation for its real uses, the uses that have 
 been utterly perverted and hopelessly degraded 
 in the world. He knew the way to save the Gen- 
 tile world that had no special relation to him. 
 The men of his day, the elders and the youth, 
 
120 THIS MIND 
 
 balked and failed him. They took a referendum 
 and put him to death. And the so-called Chris- 
 tian centuries followed, centuries that are 
 covered with blood, centuries that have come to 
 a culmination before our eyes in a moral and 
 spiritual world welter. The history of it all is 
 not very comfortable reading. 
 
 He knows now how to save the modern Jewish 
 race, the race whose history is both tragic and 
 glorious, whose condition is both pitiful and 
 powerful. The way to its salvation lies not in 
 Zionism, nor the return to Palestine, nor in the 
 observance of the ceremonies of Moses, nor in the 
 ancient and wonderful law. The old Jew came 
 over those paths, to the turning point where he 
 went in the wrong direction. The old Jew is 
 still trying the old way, and it does not work. 
 The young Jew of this day has again the chance 
 of the young Jew of Jesus' day, to go with him 
 instead of with the Sanhedrin. He is young. 
 He appeals to youth. The young ruler of to-day, 
 ruler of Jewish opinion, can do better than his 
 ancient ancestor did. The other one walked 
 away from the only Saviour of the race and the 
 world. The one now living in New York, in 
 London, in Jerusalem can go with Jesus and 
 maybe swing this generation and the next toward 
 their salvation. There is no other way. Their 
 life decisions reach into the very fate of the 
 
TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 121 
 
 Jewish people in the world. They are not merely 
 personal. They are racial. 
 
 He knows how to save China and Japan and 
 India. The official classes, the military parties, 
 the hereditary rulers, the hardened conservatives 
 do not see it. They think there is either no way 
 at all or some other way. Their conservatism, 
 their alliance with property and with power and 
 their lack of adventure make them impossible. 
 Maybe they can keep Jesus out and block the 
 way for the only plan that will work well. The 
 hope of those countries for to-day and to-morrow 
 lies not in the young political revolutionists who 
 will grab power into their own hands. For those 
 countries, as for ours, it is Jesus or chaos. And 
 the youth of the universities and colleges, the 
 men and the women who have studied in America 
 and Britain, the youth who are the makers of 
 to-morrow can make China, Japan, and India 
 Christian. Nobody else will do it. No one else 
 has the courage, the vision, the abandon, the free- 
 dom, the time, the contact with the future, the 
 forward look. They can harden as their fathers 
 have done into guardians of property and tradi- 
 tion. If they do, the present order will continue 
 until a new earthquake breaks up the world. 
 They can lead their nations as they will, but only 
 by going Jesus' way with him can they lead their 
 nations out. Need I go on? Have you been 
 
122 THIS MIND 
 
 thinking only or chiefly of young Jew or young 
 Oriental and not chiefly of young American? 
 Your life decisions run into something far beyond 
 what you are going to be or do. They run into 
 the redemption of the nations, into a new history 
 in which Jesus may have his perfect way and 
 the world its final salvation. And you can go 
 into your life work with steady step if these are 
 the principles upon which you walk. And you 
 can go through life without petty fuss and fret 
 if these principles are allowed to give strength 
 and steadiness to you. You will not escape 
 obstacle, opposition, or hatred, any more than 
 that Other One did. But these principles will 
 keep your lives from being broken or weakened 
 from within, and the rest is victory. 
 
THIS MIND TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 
 
 In the last analysis all vital questions are per- 
 sonal. All life decisions run both soon and late, 
 first and last, into personal relations. They have 
 their final and deepest meaning in their personal 
 contacts and outcome. Causes have no real 
 meaning other than their personal meaning. 
 War is not an abstract matter, but an intensely 
 personal one, involving the very lives of both sol- 
 diers and civilians, involving them both in mis- 
 fortune. Poverty is not a vague, abstract, im- 
 personal condition, to be understood by a study 
 of charts, or cured by an aphorism. Poverty is 
 tragically personal and has to do with the food, 
 the clothing, the homes, the health, the education, 
 the happiness, and even the faith of men and 
 women and children. Temperance is not a cause 
 in its actual and appealing essence. It is a 
 purely human issue running so deep into the lives 
 of human beings that it bleeds wherever and 
 whenever you cut into it. The so-called social 
 question is at last a strictly personal and human 
 question. The era just gone has been in special 
 degree the era of the social emphasis. Possibly 
 
 123 
 
124 THIS MIND 
 
 the period in which the college men and women 
 of to-day will live their lives and do their 
 work may continue to be such an era. But the 
 social question has absorbed many good people 
 merely as a question, has led to the proclamation 
 of many very noble social theories and principles, 
 without reaching any very notable change in 
 personal relations which is really the center, the 
 crux of the whole problem. The social principles 
 and teachings of Jesus have been profoundly 
 studied and ably expounded by many earnest 
 men and women. The literature of this subject 
 was never so abundant or so excellent as now. 
 But your life decision must go much deeper than 
 simply the acceptance of these admirable social 
 theories so finely set forth in our time. The life 
 decisions of Jesus ran straight into personal 
 relations, his relations with persons. And these 
 relations were immediate, direct, and wholly his 
 own. He was not an armchair friend of 
 humanity in the abstract, not a philosopher spec- 
 ulating about humanity. He had personal con- 
 cern for and personal contact with all sorts of 
 persons. That was where his life purpose and 
 decision led him and kept him. He never allowed 
 himself to get at even one remove from these 
 personal interests. 
 
 You will find a marked tendency in the world 
 and even in your own lives pretty soon for men 
 
TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 125 
 
 and women to become absorbed in organization. 
 It may be a church, or a Christian Association, 
 or a missionary society, or some other great con- 
 cern. These and like organizations have to be 
 administered. There is no other way. But woe 
 betide the men and women whose life calling 
 makes them at last only organizers and adminis- 
 trators of institutions, however necessary and 
 useful. The organization grows in their lives, 
 and the individual, human spirit withers, and 
 humanity as existent in individuals has lost one 
 more chance. 
 
 First: My first point, then, for to-day is that 
 every calling must be thought of and interpreted 
 in the light of its meaning for personality. Every 
 calling is a human calling or it is no calling at 
 all. Many of the callings that lay hold of men 
 and women have got clear away from their real 
 center and need to be brought back to it. In 
 other words, the very first thing to do with more 
 than one of the large forms of human activity 
 is to humanize it. There is an everlasting tend- 
 ency from which no occupation escapes to become 
 dehumanized or professionalized. When that 
 tendency reaches its natural outcome the result 
 is beyond w^ords. For a merely professional 
 interest in men and w^omen, or in your calling 
 itself, is both unprofessional and inhuman. 
 Therefore I emphasize this point of the necessity 
 
126 THIS MIND 
 
 of the human spirit as fundamental, no matter 
 what you are going to do. If you are not going 
 to organize your life around its human purpose, 
 test it by its human quality and outcome, then 
 your life decision goes straight away from and 
 even straight into conflict with the mind of 
 Christ. Teachers are not primarily teachers of 
 subjects, primary, secondary, or advanced. If 
 one regards himself as a teacher of a subject, he 
 will become that deadly bane of the school, a 
 teacher more concerned about his subject than 
 about his students. He will develop intellectual 
 pride because he knows things, which will become 
 intellectual dryness, because things are all he 
 knows, and end in intellectual sterility because 
 personal interest is lacking. It is the pupil and 
 the human interest that lie in his life, that save 
 the teacher from the evil tendencies of his own 
 calling. Physicians are not, in the soul of them, 
 men and women who practice medicine. Not 
 such a physician was William MacLure, the coun- 
 try Doctor of the Old School. He and all true 
 physicians are devoted, soul and body, to their 
 human, suffering patients. A doctor ought to be 
 so human that the death of a patient would just 
 about send him to bed for sheer grief over the 
 loss of a life. It would not be fair for me to give 
 the impression that the ministry is exempt from 
 this tendency. It is not exempt. A score of influ- 
 
TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 127 
 
 ences tend to harden and deliumanize it. Some of 
 these influences are not bad in themselves. Take 
 the minister's interest in his doctrines, his truth, 
 his studies. They cannot have a subordinate or 
 minor place in his life. He must study. He 
 ought to study harder than any other man in the 
 world. He must master doctrines and follow 
 truth to its last reach. But his fundamental 
 passion, the passion that saves him from aloof- 
 ness, out-of-touchness, and even from intellectual 
 death at last, is the human passion for the men 
 and women of all ages and kinds to whom God 
 has sent him. All his truth is for them. All his 
 doctrines are in their behalf. He must study 
 "daily, nightly and eternally,^' not because he is 
 a student, but because he is a minister to people. 
 He has no abstract interest, as a minister, in 
 abstract truth. His lot in life has been cast in 
 the one most passionately human occupation in 
 the hands of men. 
 
 I am trying to say that in your life decisions 
 you must hold firmly to the human interest and 
 personal values, as dominant and controlling. 
 Everything must bend to them and conform to 
 them. Some of you will not be teachers or 
 physicians or ministers. Some of you will be 
 merchants, bankers, engineers, or farmers, and 
 you will go in, as like as not, on a false basis. 
 You want to regard these as "callings," "call- 
 
128 THIS MIND 
 
 ings" in the Christian sense, and you will find, 
 after you get into them, that the ideals that rule 
 them are mainly material and commercial and 
 not Christian at all. You will hear enough about 
 ^'business principles" to break your spirit. And 
 you will be told whenever you bring a new note 
 into things, that ^'business is business." You 
 will hear about efficiency until you will fairly 
 hate it. You will not be dishonest or unfair. 
 You will not break the laws of the land, most 
 of which relate to property directly and only a 
 few to human interest as an immediate concern, 
 but you will have the fight of your life to keep the 
 human note, the human interest, the human pas- 
 sion, dominant enough to warrant you in regard- 
 ing these occupations as being anywhere near 
 ^'callings" according to the mind of Christ. No 
 calling that you will go into is free from this 
 tendency. There is an old scripture, full of 
 meaning when read with proper emphasis, that 
 bears directly upon this point. A prophet was 
 ordered to guard a man, under severe penalty 
 for failure. And the prophet let him get away, 
 saying weakly to the king, "As thy servant was 
 busy here and there, the man escaped." That 
 is the long, sad, human story. The servants of 
 Ood are busy here and there, rushing to and fro, 
 fussing over things, and men escape. Sometimes 
 it is the man in the care of the prophet, some- 
 
TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 129 
 
 times it is the man in the prophet himself, but 
 whenever it happens, a new chapter in misfor- 
 tune is written. 
 
 And you will early discover that you find it 
 easier to have and maintain an indirect human 
 interest than an immediate one. It is easier to 
 have and to preach noble sentiments concerning 
 people than it is to maintain noble practices and 
 attitudes among them. It is easier to frame, 
 harmonize, and hold a lot of principles than to 
 get along with a lot of very concrete persons. 
 Many people fool themselves into believing that 
 they are real human beings because they quote 
 with approval certain sentimental verse, or weep 
 over pathetic play or novel, or send checks to 
 charity organizations. There ought to be a 
 course in all schools, from grades through uni- 
 versities, on how to be a human being. 
 
 We are thinking, all the while, of life decisions 
 and just now are emphasizing the fundamental 
 truth that all our decisions and the lives that 
 follow them must be intensely, deeply, constantly 
 human. And we cannot help thinking how that 
 other young Person made his decisions in the 
 light of his human relations. Nor can we help 
 thinking of the life that followed. The memory 
 and vision of that set our pulses to hammering. 
 He did the thing we want to do. He proved 
 that it can be done. The organization, the insti- 
 
130 THIS MIND 
 
 tiition never ineriisted or overbore him. Having 
 loved his own, not a very lovely or lovable lot, 
 he loved them clear through to the end. He did 
 it. It can therefore be done. Really, I would 
 know that it could be done because it is so good, 
 so necessary, so inevitable if humanity is to come 
 to anything. But to have seen it is enough to 
 set us shouting. Since it has been done by the 
 living Christ, it can be done with the living 
 Christ. An English writer the other day pointed 
 out the difference between memories that are 
 fading and examples that are compelling. Then 
 he added : ^'We march to the dying music of great 
 traditions. There is no captain of civilization at 
 the head of our ranks." But as the Lord liveth 
 and as my soul liveth, I declare my conviction 
 that we have an example that is compelling, 
 that we march to stirring music of high adven- 
 ture, with the Great White Captain at our head. 
 This is a going concern. Jesus is a. forward-going 
 Person. He holds the future. He was the light 
 on this real problem, and in Browning's words, 
 ^^The light that did burn will burn.'' 
 
 Second : But this very talk of humanizing our 
 decisions and our callings leads us farther. It 
 does not end here. History and experience teach 
 us many things, nothing more surely than this, 
 that you cannot humanize your decision nor 
 your life service except by Christianizing the 
 
TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 131 
 
 decision and forever striving to Christianize the 
 order, the group, the activity that you go into. 
 You may decide to be a Christian teacher, a 
 Christian lawyer, a Christian farmer, banker, 
 engineer, editor, or a Christian doctor. Thou- 
 sands of others have done that. We have had 
 and we do have Christian men and women in 
 every calling named. We have no better indi- 
 vidual Christians than many who can be found in 
 those occupations. But that does not cover the 
 case. A life decision simply to be a Christian 
 farmer will leave the whole farming question just 
 w^here it is as far as you are concerned. A friend 
 writes me these serious w ords : "I hope you will 
 help the chap who is going into business, or 
 engineering, or farming, etc., to see that he must 
 organize his business, his engineering, his farm- 
 ing around a Christian purpose. So often he 
 thinks he can count one of these types of work a 
 ^calling,' yet when he gets out into it the ^Chris- 
 tian' technique of it all is so uncharted that he 
 does not know how to work it out and the vision 
 fades. I wonder how a Grenfell would work out 
 his medical. Christian vision in London or New 
 York, or just what Sam Higginbotham would 
 call Christian farming in McLean or Champaign 
 County. . . . What I am trying to say is 
 that the business man, farmer, engineer, banker, 
 lawyer, etc., who thinks that providing support, 
 
132 THIS MIND 
 
 personal and financial, for the church and other 
 ideal causes is the way he is to function as a 
 Christian, the way he is to fulfill the life decision 
 made at Lake Geneva or elsewhere, needs to see 
 that within the calling he has been chosen by, 
 there is a Christianizing process needed at his 
 hands." The old order will remain and not give 
 place to the new until this happens. We can 
 see where the present practice has brought us. 
 It has not introduced or established the mind of 
 Christ in these occupations. This same friend 
 adds: '^It is not ^old diplomats' only who are 
 ruining the world, but 'old engineers,' 'old 
 bankers,' 'old farmers,' etc. They are living their 
 lives according to the standards of their occupa- 
 tions, but they must be made to see and feel the 
 chance for Christianizing their social order, their 
 particular occupational order." The life deci- 
 sion to be a farmer in Dakota or Alberta is not 
 a life decision according to the mind of Christ if 
 it simply looks toward better crops of grain and 
 a personal Christian life. It is only a true life 
 decision according to his mind when it gives 
 itself, positively, persistently, affectionately, un- 
 wearyingly to Christianizing the farming order 
 in Dakota and Alberta. Here is a chance for 
 pioneers, a chance wide as the occupations of 
 men and women, a chance that Jesus would leap 
 to, a chance that would go far tow^ard saving the 
 
TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 133 
 
 world. It is the only way to make a ^^calling" 
 out of an occupation. 
 
 The brilliant young layman who edits The 
 Century declares that he could name twenty 
 American business men who could bring peace 
 into the industrial w^orld if with consecration 
 and sacrifice they would set themselves to find- 
 ing and making the way out. And if that does 
 not constitute a Christian calling, it would be 
 hard to find one. If the twenty men of to-day 
 do not do it, twenty men of to-morrow must. For 
 this is the human problem, the Christian problem 
 that lies in that area of life. Of course, w^e never 
 shall get through as long as we think this is only 
 a question of shorter hours and larger wages, or 
 longer hours, lower wages, and larger dividends. 
 And this problem, like most others, can only be 
 met by the men who are within it. External 
 evangelism can never be anything but partial 
 and imperfect. The humanizing and Christian- 
 izing of the order of farmers, engineers, bankers, 
 and the like lies at last in the hands of farmers, 
 engineers, and bankers. You can go into any 
 one of these. You may prosper according to the 
 ordinary standards in any of them. But if you 
 are proposing, as you ought, to grow through a 
 consecrating life decision into one of them, you 
 must look for and make a new order before your 
 sun sets at the end of your day. 
 
134 THIS MIND 
 
 Third: My third point on this subject must 
 relate to the sense of human values which men 
 carry into their life decisions. I would not need 
 to argue the value of a million dollars. Every- 
 body sees or thinks he sees how desirable such a 
 sum would be. That is a standard with which w^e 
 are all familiar. If a man looks particularly well 
 or feels so, he is playfully told or playfully says 
 that he looks or feels ^'like a million dollars." 
 If, on the other hand, he is low in his mind, he 
 feels '^like thirty cents." These easy, flippant 
 sentences assume that human life and conditions 
 can be measured by these standards. And it is 
 hard even in a democracy for us to hold a level 
 sense of human values. Our theories as stated 
 in the Declaration of Independence rather break 
 down in the presence of individuals to whom the 
 Declaration does not seem to apply. We are con- 
 fused between the truth, which we feel must be a 
 real truth in the noble sentence, and the apparent 
 worth of certain individuals. Our poetry con- 
 cerning the value of a man we feel must be true. 
 There is no other way to live than upon such 
 theories as the poet sings. He cannot sing on any 
 other key. But practically we find it hard to 
 make the splendid verse fit certain squalid 
 humanity that we know. We do not want to sur- 
 render our ideals or our lofty principles, and we 
 do not want to deceive ourselves as to the actual 
 
TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 135 
 
 facts of human life, the apparent values of men 
 and women. This is one of those disturbing 
 anomalies that life is so full of. No one wants 
 to make a life decision to give his life unre- 
 servedly to human service if human life is not 
 worth such a consecration. More than one 
 radiant spirit has been broken by the hard facts 
 of human life. The loss of the sense of life's 
 infinite value cuts the nerve of sacrificial devo- 
 tion. When one comes to his lifework with an 
 idealized humanity in his mind and finds that 
 he has to work with and work for a materialized, 
 commercialized, or even a brutalized humanity, 
 his very first temptation in his discouragement is 
 to doubt the worth-whileness of his consecration, 
 or to compromise by hunting some more promis- 
 ing materials. When the Jews to whom he hope- 
 fully goes ruthlessly trample on his high pur- 
 poses and break him on the hard wheel of in- 
 difference and opposition, he is sorely tempted 
 to pick up what consecration he has left and go 
 off to some Gentiles somewhere who from a 
 distance look more promising. I know what lies 
 ahead of you. But I know also what that Other 
 One found in his path. And in this matter, as in 
 all the rest, I want that the mind that was in him 
 and continued to be in him shall also be in you. 
 The hard facts of human life struck him fully 
 as hard as they will ever strike you. They killed 
 
136 THIS MIND 
 
 him, at last, as far as such a person can be killed 
 by such forces. If ever a person could be justi- 
 fied in quitting, Jesus was so justified. But it 
 never seems to have occurred to him to give up. 
 As I read his story, the story of what he ran 
 up against with the people he worked with, I 
 have two w^onders in my mind : I wonder how he 
 held on in the face of the actual, evident human 
 facts, and I wonder at what particular point 
 my own spirit would have broken and led me to 
 quit. Then I get down on my knees and thank 
 God that he did not lose heart even when Peter 
 played the fool or Judas the traitor or when the 
 others w^ere so dull. And on my knees in grati- 
 tude, I pray that this mind may also be in me, 
 and in you, and all the rest of us. He evidently 
 saw under the surface, the ugly surface, the 
 immediate meaning of personality, the universal 
 meaning of personalit}^, and the eternal meaning 
 of personality, and because of what he saw, could 
 say the finest words ever spoken as to life serv- 
 ice : ''For their sakes I sanctify myself, that they 
 may be sanctified in the truth." For their sakes 
 — they are worth it; I make myself fit and offer 
 myself up — that is my life service ; that they may 
 be made fit and may enter the royal fellowship 
 of service in the truth — that is the end, and it 
 is worth while. He kept his pronouns perfectly 
 straight — as severe a test as any man or w^oman 
 
TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 137 
 
 ever meets. But here is where you get your true 
 idea of the worth of human life. You do not 
 get it from the philosophers or poets. You get 
 it in seeing what Jesus proposed to do for men, 
 what he thought they were worth. The price 
 mark on them is his image, or if you choose to 
 say it, his cross. They are worth that. And if 
 they are worth that to him, they are worth it 
 to us. If he decided his lifework and lived his 
 life on this theory as to the worth of men, I see 
 no other theory for any one of us. The mind that 
 is in us must be the mind that was in him. He 
 was the only real expert judge of the worth of a 
 man. Neither the pessimist nor the optimist, the 
 rhapsodist nor the specialist can take a place 
 with him. 
 
 One of my young minister friends read these 
 lectures before they were spoken. Among other 
 things he writes these words which I gladly add 
 to my own pages : ^'I wonder w^hether you have 
 sufficiently stressed the fact of Christ's faith in 
 man. The mind of Jesus is a miracle to me. No 
 other mind that has dreamed under our human 
 sky had so long a flight of thought, so clear a 
 vision of reality. Nothing is more awe-inspiring 
 than his faith in the kingdom of God as a prac- 
 tical program and policy for the world. And 
 that kingdom he declared should be built out of 
 the familiar and lovable things of every day. 
 
138 THIS MIND 
 
 If any one had a right to be a cynic or a pessi- 
 mist, it was Jesus. Nevertheless, after receiv- 
 ing hate as the reward of love, he believed in man 
 right uj) to the cross. Do we not need to go at 
 least that far before our doubts are to be taken 
 as valid?'' 
 
 Fourth : My fourth point in this connection is 
 that Jesus interpreted his life decision and life- 
 work on the basis of an equal interest in people 
 w^ho themselves were very different from one 
 another. Some of his own sayings seem to mean 
 the other thing. His emphasis upon his mission 
 to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, upon his 
 calling of sinners, not righteous, to repentance; 
 his zeal for the lost sheep, the lost coin, and 
 the prodigal son, lend color to this special inter- 
 pretation. But a study of his life as a whole 
 corrects our partial views and saves us from 
 making narrow and partial relationships. He 
 sought each individual on the basis of that indi- 
 viduaFs need and capacity. He did not propose 
 to go blindly after all individuals as though they 
 were all alike. Some were lepers, some were 
 harlots, some were publicans, some rich rulers, 
 some unfortunate, some prosperous, some weak, 
 some strong. What the historic prayer describes 
 as "all classes and conditions of men" were in his 
 full view. His work was for each according to 
 his need, his call was from each according to his 
 
TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 139 
 
 ability, but Ms interest was uniform. He played 
 no favorites. There are many whose life goes 
 wrong here. Seeing clearly what a given group 
 or class needs, moved by the condition of those 
 who are unfortunate either by reason of sick- 
 ness or poverty, they fling their lives into serv- 
 ice for the single class, sometimes almost with 
 bitterness toward other classes. I know men, 
 for instance, who have no gospel at all except 
 for the group which they have chosen as their 
 own. And, as a rule, this prevents their having 
 any true gospel of Christ even for their own 
 group. No matter what group they choose they 
 get into a false attitude to it through their 
 failure to take Jesus' attitude to all other groups. 
 There is a specialization that leads inevitably 
 to falsity of view. A recent writer has pointed 
 out that "the constant contemplation of maps 
 colored red undoubtedly leads to failure to 
 appreciate the other colors of the palette." And 
 Mr. Balfour has remarked upon "the difficulty 
 of finding any enthusiast who will tell the simple 
 truth." He does not mean to tell an untruth, 
 but he neither sees life steady nor sees it whole, 
 whereas it was exactly the strength of Jesus that 
 he did see it steady and see it whole. Your work 
 may be with a. particular group, class, or race, 
 but your work will not be at its best if you for- 
 get that your group, your class, your race, is an 
 
140 THIS MIND 
 
 integral and essential part of mankind as a 
 whole; and that at other points, with other 
 groups, other races, other classes, other men and 
 women like yourselves are lifting and lighting 
 toward that 
 
 "One far off divine event 
 Toward which the ichole creation moves." 
 
 There is not a piece of human life on the planet 
 that is not worth any best man's best efforts, 
 and there is not a piece anywhere that is going 
 to be helped or saved by being hated or scorned 
 or held in bitterness or indifference. 
 
 Fifth : My fifth point is that this mind toward 
 other persons finds its real expression in friend- 
 ship. You may begin by being patrons of and 
 workers with a given group, but this cannot be 
 the end of your relation if your life service is 
 to go according to the mind of Christ. You may 
 give people money, you may give them work, 
 you may give them justice, you may give them 
 comfort, you may give them education, you may 
 give them art and music, and even religion of a 
 sort, but if you do not give them friendship, 
 your work among them remains professional and 
 formal and incomplete. This may not be the 
 basis upon which it begins. Friendship is not 
 the product of simple resolution, even of good 
 resolution. Your work may begin on the basis 
 
TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 141 
 
 of interest and duty, but somewhere along the 
 line the fine flower of genuine friendship must 
 break into bloom, or there is something wrong. 
 The future has nothing better to offer you than 
 this precious relation. It had nothing better to 
 offer Jesus himself. There are many episodes 
 in his life which thrill and grip us. There is 
 none over which I linger more gladly than I do 
 over the moment when he said to his small 
 crowd : ''Henceforth I call you friends." Do not 
 miss the whole meaning of the story by your 
 interest in one phase of it. What it meant to the 
 men who heard it is almost beyond our conce^D- 
 tion. I wonder often what would have happened, 
 what I would have done, if I had been one of the 
 men to whom he said that. You may be sure there 
 would have been a storm or some overwhelming 
 demonstration in the face of such a statement. 
 But the feelings of the men is only part of the 
 story. Think of Jesus' own feeling as he finally 
 uttered that noble, that infinitel}^ personal word. 
 He had been their Teacher, their Saviour, their 
 Physician, their Leader, their Master. They had 
 been his disciples, his converts, his patients, his 
 followers, his servants. And that is a great deal. 
 But if that is all he gets, it is not enough. It 
 is not enough for any one, for any man, for Jesus 
 or for God himself. Somewhere in that path of 
 teaching, of saving, of leading, friendship must 
 
142 THIS MIND 
 
 come out to crown it all or they have all missed 
 the perfect result. Life service in the school, in 
 the j)ulpit, in medicine, in politics, in missions, 
 in business, in farming; life service for Jesus, life 
 service for any of us must come at last to this. 
 There are many glad hours in the life of a teacher 
 or a preacher or a physician. The mental 
 awakening of a student, the spiritual expansion 
 of a convert, the renewed health of a patient — 
 these are rew^ards beyond all computation. But 
 when teacher or preacher or physician discovers 
 that friendship has come out of service he knows 
 the high rapture that Jesus knew when he ran 
 up that flag and w^aved it in the face of the world. 
 Some day the w^orld will find out the meaning of 
 religion as friendship, its meaning for God and 
 men, and when the world finds that out, the 
 light of a new morning will be in the sky and in 
 the hearts of men. 
 
 Sixth : Finally, this mind toward other persons 
 works out and will especially work out in the 
 life time of those now young, into those large 
 areas that we call race relations in the Avorld 
 near and far. The youth of to-day are making 
 their life decisions at a time w^hen world relation- 
 ships are out in the front. I think I decided to 
 enter the ministry forty years ago without even 
 thinking that my ministry would have anything 
 except a local significance or mean anything 
 
TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 143 
 
 much except to the congregations and towns to 
 which it might lead me. It did not occur to me 
 that I would have or would need anything except 
 an academic, long-range, missionary attitude to- 
 ward the Chinese, the Japanese, or the Negroes. 
 Such an attitude would be almost impossible to- 
 day. One might expect to-day that all his life he 
 would teach or preach or farm in Indiana, but 
 in making such a decision he would be conscious 
 that, no matter where he taught or preached or 
 farmed, he Avould be in vital contact with race 
 problems, class problems, national relationships 
 and world relationships. Whether one chooses 
 it or not, the race question, for example, crowds 
 into his school room or his church or trips him 
 in the furrow that he is trying to plow. Even 
 our self-centered, isolated country, that never in- 
 tended such a thing at all, has got caught in the 
 world-welter and is all mixed up not with simple 
 reds, whites, and blues, but with blacks, browns, 
 and yellows. And the men who are working 
 over problems of international economics, inter- 
 national disarmament, new boundaries and new 
 maps, whether they fully realize it or not are 
 really in this human race-welter that cannot be 
 escaped. Now, it is no part of this study to go 
 into the race or international problem. What 
 we are thinking of lies earlier than that. We are 
 thinking of that mind toward other persons that 
 
144 THIS MIND 
 
 in our life purpose and life decision we are going 
 to carry into and through our lives. For we 
 shall not be able to help a bit unless we have the 
 right mind on these questions. 
 
 Elsewhere, speaking for my colleagues, I have 
 made statements some of which in substance are 
 repeated here. (See Bishops' Address to the 
 General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal 
 Church for 1920.) The world is not a white 
 man's world, the Christian Church is not a white 
 man's church. The races of the world have been 
 thrown together by the World War as never be- 
 fore. It is now necessary to make right human 
 relations or the next war will be a race conflict 
 that will destroy civilization. And we must not 
 wait as we did about the World War until the 
 crash comes and then rush in to save what we 
 can out of the wreck. The generation in which 
 the college men and women of to-day will do their 
 work must do better than any other generation 
 has done, better than all generations have done, 
 or the world is likely to do worse. The gospel 
 of catastrophe has utterly failed. The gospel of 
 construction must be tried or the world will be 
 ruined. 
 
 You must, therefore, bring to this issue a 
 mind free from race prejudice, race narrowness, 
 race snobbishness, and race hatred. That will 
 be more than your fathers and mothers did, but 
 
TOWARD OTHER PERSONS U5 
 
 if jou only do as well as they have done, you will 
 do much worse than they did. Men are still 
 talking of superior races and inferior races, rul- 
 ing races and subject races, races born to conquer 
 and races born to be conquered. And for the 
 life of me I cannot see that the mind of Christ 
 runs that wa}'. Xor can I see that any life 
 decision made on that basis and worked out in 
 that spirit could possibly be a Christian decision 
 or work out a Christian result. The application 
 of the mind of Christ is not easy, will not be 
 easy, but it is ten times as easy in the long run 
 — and, I think, in the short run — as the applica- 
 tion of any other mind to this question. And we 
 cannot have his mind toward ourselves and to- 
 Avard the people we like and admire, unless we 
 also have it toward all the people whose blood 
 is red. You cannot do crooked thinking here and 
 come out straight. And there is only one road 
 to the kingdom of peace in this world or the next, 
 and that is a straight road. We must make our 
 life decision with the determination to have the 
 mind of Christ clear through this and all other 
 human problems. This is the big one, so big 
 that no previous generation has even half way 
 solved it; so big that very eminent men have 
 declared that it could not be solved. Are you 
 going to sit by the fire warming yourself feeling 
 that there is something too big for you? Are 
 
146 THIS MIND 
 
 you going to go on, half trying or not trying at 
 all, doubting, despairing, talking like a pessimist, 
 hoping that somehow the crash will not come in 
 your time? Are you going to go into your life 
 endeavor with a philosophy that has always 
 failed, the philosophy of ''lesser breeds without 
 the law," inferior castes, and "white man's 
 burdens"? Do you read history to any good 
 purpose at all? If so, you must see that Judaism 
 broke down — as every kind of Judaism always 
 does — because it was not human clear through. 
 It wrecked itself as such philosophy always does, 
 no matter whether it bears one name or another, 
 whether it talks Hebrew, or Japanese, or German 
 or English, whether it has black hair or white 
 hair, or no hair, because it could not carry the 
 weight of its own degrading sense of its own 
 superiority and special privilege. No race, no 
 nation, no person can carry that weight along 
 with its natural burden of duty. 
 
 We have got to have the mind of Christ clear 
 through this problem and clear round the world. 
 "We cannot get right relations between races 
 out of wrong conceptions of races or wrong 
 spirit toward them." We cannot save the mind 
 of Christ for anything unless we use it and apply 
 it to everything. Did you read this bit of 
 verse that President King quotes in one of 
 his books? — 
 
TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 147 
 
 "Proue in the road he lay, 
 Wounded and sore bested ; 
 Priests, Levites passed that way, 
 And turned aside the head. 
 They were not hardened men 
 
 In human service slack : 
 His need was great : but then 
 
 His face, you see, was black." 
 
 You feel at once that this is not according to the 
 mind of Christ, and that no one can be a true 
 priest to humanity if he has this mind toward 
 any part of humanity. For, you see, the world 
 in which your life decisions will work out in life 
 service is a world of many colors and races. 
 Some of them are clearly less attractive than 
 others. It is easy to make perfectly true criti- 
 cisms of some of them. It is all too easy not 
 to like them, all too easy not to believe much 
 in them, all too easy to be acutely conscious of 
 their defects and faults. But for 3^ou and all 
 other college men and women to-day the supreme 
 question is not whether some of those unlovely 
 races have the mind of Christ but Avhether in your 
 life decision and life endeavor you have and will 
 have it. Your relation to this many-colored 
 world is to be like his, a sacrificial, redemptive 
 relation. Like him even in the presence of the 
 least attractive group you must keep your pro- 
 nouns straight and declare as he did, "For their 
 sakes, that they may come to their own, I offer 
 
148 THIS MIND 
 
 myself.'' Of course, this is ideal, but unless 
 ideals are to perish in the world, we must pre- 
 serve them. Christianity has never been fully 
 tried in its bearing upon race and class relations. 
 It remains for us to try it, not with doubt and 
 fear, certainly not partially, but wholly and 
 perfectly. This is the next, the immediate adven- 
 ture of the Church of Christ. The issue between 
 the races will be fought out or, in this mind, 
 worked out. If it is left to be fought out, there 
 will be nothing left of the civilization achieved 
 by the centuries. If it is worked out as it can 
 be, the kingdom of Christ may be established in 
 the earth before your sun goes down. It is a 
 glorious thing to be alive now and to be young. 
 Foolish men say that the idealism with which 
 we went into the war is all gone. Other foolish 
 men even call those ideals iridescent dreams and 
 call upon men now to get down to practical com- 
 mon sense. Visions are in the discard in many 
 circles. But from all the battlefields where our 
 dead lie buried comes the cry, as Alfred Noyes 
 said : "It was for visions that we fell.'' I repeat 
 here words spoken elsewhere : 
 
 "Shall we not now be 'swift of soul and jubilant 
 of feet' to make a world without a race war, not 
 in some far future when we are dead, but now? 
 The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Let us repent 
 therefore of race pride, race prejudice, and race 
 
TOWxVRD OTHER PERSONS U9 
 
 bitterness; repent in America, repent in Asia, 
 repent in Africa, repent in Europe. The king- 
 dom of heaven is at hand. This is our gospel. 
 We will not lose heart in it. Blood is thicker 
 than water, and the human family is of one blood. 
 We will labor everywhere to make a unity of 
 spirit in the races of the whole world. 
 
 ^'The final impact of races and nations upon 
 one another has not yet come. Thoughtful men 
 everywhere are dreading and even fearing it. 
 If that impact is to be military, then let us brace 
 ourselves to wind up the world shortly by war. 
 If it is to be commercial, then let us resign our- 
 selves to a vulgar and debasing reign of material- 
 ism and wealth, with the sun of the Spirit gone 
 down in the lives of men. If the impact is to be 
 economic, then let us surrender our evangel of 
 love and redemption, and join the new crusade 
 for economic regeneration and supremacy." 
 
 What is the deep, final meaning of the presence 
 of Chinese, Japanese, and other students in such 
 numbers in American colleges? What is the 
 real meaning of the Rhodes Scholarships at Ox- 
 ford University? What is the actual significance 
 of such movements as the World Student Federa- 
 tion? Let us not allow a supreme and manifest 
 providence go by without our seeing it. The 
 undergraduates of to-day and the graduates of 
 yesterday will be leading the nations to-morrow. 
 
150 THIS MIND 
 
 Men and women who have studied together, 
 played together, and prayed together on a hun- 
 dred campuses, or who are now doing all that can 
 make a world brotherhood of understanding, a 
 w^orld brotherhood of power, a world fellowship 
 of service and consecration of such strength as 
 with the living Christ can create a new outlook, 
 a new motive, a new character among men. If 
 the students of to-day in all these lands and from 
 all these lands maintain such contact with Jesus 
 Christ that they get his passion for the ideal, his 
 passion for perfection, his passion for sacrifice 
 and altruism, his passion for humanity as a 
 whole; if these students of to-day get for all 
 men the mind that was in him toward all men, 
 the kingdom of heaven will come farther in their 
 life time than it has in all the Christian centuries. 
 College men and women from all these lands 
 and in all these lands are making their life deci- 
 sions to-day in the presence of the possible 
 answer to Christ's prayer for the Kingdom's 
 coming while their decisions are working out 
 with him in life. 
 
 For twenty years in a Southern newspaper 
 every Saturday this notice is said to have 
 appeared, heading the regular list of church 
 services. The announcement never varies : 
 
 "On Sunday morning at his church, and on 
 Sunday afternoon at the chain gang, the Rev- 
 
TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 151 
 
 erend Charles Jaggers will preach from his usual 
 text." 
 
 The announcement is always the same, and 
 the text always the same: ^'Let this mind be in 
 you which was also in Christ Jesus." 
 
 Let me gather up what I have tried to say : 
 
 All vital questions are, at last, personal. 
 
 Every calling must be tested by its meaning for 
 personality. 
 
 All our life decisions and life purposes must 
 be intensely human. 
 
 You cannot humanize your decision and work 
 it out except by a sustained and Christlike effort 
 to Christianize the order in which your calling 
 places you. 
 
 This must be done and can be done by the 
 men and women within a given order. 
 
 You must carry into your decision and work 
 Christ's sense of human values. 
 
 Your decision must work out as Jesus' did on 
 the basis of an equal interest in people who differ 
 greatly from one another, and must find its real 
 expression in the religion of friendship. 
 
 And your decisions to-day have a w^orld mean- 
 ing. 
 
 You must, therefore, bring to your life deci- 
 sions the mind of Christ as to races and nations, 
 their character and their relations. Once more 
 Jesus is saying, "Repent, change your attitudes, 
 
152 THIS MIND 
 
 the kingdom of a new and better order is at 
 hand/' The youth in college to-day will have a 
 chance to make a new earth such as no other 
 youth have had since that other one ascended. 
 This is the gleam. After it, follow it. 
 
VI 
 
 THIS MIND TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL 
 TESTS 
 
 When an early and very able letter-writer 
 wrote to some early Thessalonians, a tribe not 
 yet wholly extinct, he said some things that bear 
 directly to-day upon our study. Seeing that they 
 were liable to look at everything from the purely 
 practical, material viewpoint, he said to them : 
 ''Do not extinguish the fire of the Spirit. Let it 
 burn steadily." Seeing that they were liable to 
 think themselves at the beginning of an era, and 
 no longer to need the voices and counsels of the 
 past, the teaching of the ages, or the prophetic 
 element in life, he wrote : "Despise not prophesy- 
 ings. Do not get proud and think the past can 
 teach you nothing. And do not let the prophetic 
 note die among you." Seeing that they were 
 likely to apply false tests, unreal and purely aca- 
 demic tests to their new experiences, their new in- 
 spirations, their new teachings, he said to them : 
 'Trove all these things by bringing them to the 
 test of life. Then hold fast to the things that 
 are actually found good for life." 
 
 153 
 
154 THIS MIND 
 
 In these sentences Saint Paul forces us up to 
 essential tests and literally cuts the ground from 
 under scores of philosophies and theories. Bring 
 everything to the severe, living test of reality, the 
 reality of the years, the reality that an immortal 
 personality has the right to demand. No matter 
 about the tests of novelty or of interest, or even 
 of formal logic. The test of life is the supreme 
 and final test. Is it good to live by? Bring 
 everything to that. Then hold fast to what is 
 found to be good for life. No matter what other 
 values a vision or a teaching, a philosoph}^ or a 
 theology may have, if it is not good for life, it 
 does not possess the final, highest good. I once 
 read a statement from John Ruskin to this effect, 
 not pretending that it is an exact quotation : 
 "If the ghost that is in you leaves your tongue 
 the tongue of a liar, your hand the hand of a 
 juggler, and your heart the heart of a cheat, then 
 be assured it is no holy ghost.'' In other words, 
 our life decisions must meet all these real vital 
 tests. In view of the manifest immorality of 
 certain religions as seen in their practices, I do 
 not see how an honest youth can ever make a 
 decision to enter their service. They are not good 
 for life. That makes them impossible. Your 
 life decision must bear the test of life or you are 
 ruined even as you make it. 
 
 We cannot determine things like this wholly 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 155 
 
 by hard common sense. When a man says that 
 he speaks as a plain business man, he usually 
 means that as modestly as possible he is really 
 saying the last word on the subject. And that 
 might be true in purely business matters. But 
 it is not likely to be true at all in regions where 
 spiritual insight, spiritual vision, and a sense 
 of personal, ethical values count for a good deal 
 more than commercial accuracy. 
 
 We are inclined also to complicate our life 
 decisions by giving undue and unfruitful atten- 
 tion to unreal and hypothetical questions that 
 really do not bear upon the matter. A plain man 
 was once a candidate for appointment under 
 the civil service rules as a night watchman in 
 a government building. One of the examination 
 questions was : "How far is the sun from the 
 earth?" The man replied, "I do not know, but 
 I think it is not near enough to prevent me from 
 filling this job of night watchman if I can get it." 
 A good many questions are interesting but do 
 not bear very directly on the question of your 
 lifework. For example, there is the question of 
 the age of the world, the length of time it took 
 to make it, and how it was made, whether in 
 longer or shorter time. One would really like 
 to know the answer, and in making up a final 
 philosophy of the universe, one is likely to come 
 to some conclusion that will fit in with the rest 
 
156 THIS MIND 
 
 of his views, but such questions are not su- 
 premely important unless we are going to make 
 worlds as a life occupation. A first-class teacher 
 ought not to be wrecked over questions with 
 which he is actually not going to be much con- 
 cerned. No man ought to allow himself to be 
 kept out of the kingdom of high opportunity be- 
 cause of a speculative interest in a kingdom with 
 which he has no real doings. Those decisions are 
 most genuine and wise which meet and answer 
 the largest number of life's vital questions, even 
 though for the time they leave a lot of others 
 untouched. And that person is most useful to 
 us who gives us in his own life actual personal 
 light on the largest number of these real ques- 
 tions which must be answered if any life is to 
 be strong, rich, and steady. 
 
 For a moment, then, let us leave to our argu- 
 ing ancestors all these questions about the age of 
 the world, the method of creation, the origin of 
 evil, which are important in their place, but not 
 in this place, while we face our own life decisions 
 on another basis, on our own basis. Life is going 
 to be hard enough without dragging into it any- 
 thing that does not belong there. We do not 
 want it to be complicated with any artificial, 
 unreal, or largely imaginary issues. We w^ant a 
 right relation to the past, but we want also a 
 working relation to the present and future. We 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 157 
 
 recognize two principles, the principle of con- 
 tinuity and the principle of progress. Neither 
 shall dominate us. We will hold on to what the 
 centuries have shown to be good for life. We 
 will go forward to a larger, ampler life than 
 the centuries have reached. We will be respect- 
 ful, but we will not be slaves. Above all, in the 
 presence of that Other One, who was at Nazareth 
 that day when he was at the opening of his 
 career, we will be real, we will be obedient to the 
 highest, and we will be whole-hearted as he was. 
 Our fathers never seemed to know quite how to 
 make the most of him. They worshiped him, but 
 never seemed quite sure that a workaday world 
 could be run on his lines. We are going to try 
 it on his basis. We are going the whole length 
 with him, on his lines, with his truth, on his 
 methods. We have seen too many centuries 
 mixed with compromise in vital matters. We 
 would like to see one unhesitatingly going his 
 way with him. The dangerous heresies of past 
 and present do not seem to us what they seem to 
 be and to have been to so many. To us the most 
 dangerous, the most fatal heresy is the doubt as 
 to whether a modern young man or woman can 
 absolutely go Jesus' way with him, can make him 
 the rule of life decision and life service. We are 
 about to make our life decisions and offer our- 
 selves to the Lord of our dav- Let us do it in 
 
158 THIS MIND 
 
 obedience to these convictions and submit our 
 purpose to these tests among others : 
 
 1. Can you in this life you propose, at the 
 beginning and to the end, hold steady with the 
 highest ideals? Practical men say it cannot be 
 done. Moral idealism and personal integrity 
 say that it must be done. Life is not worth the 
 struggle unless one can maintain ''truth in his 
 inward parts/' and carry his flag aloft as he 
 crosses the world's market place. If we have 
 to compromise at this point, we might just as 
 well give up and let the deluge of compromise 
 and low ideals sweep over us. John Stuart 
 Mill, no fanatic surely, declared there was noth- 
 ing better than "so to live that Christ would 
 approve our life." And the practical man, look- 
 ing at things as they are, familiar with the long, 
 sad centuries of surrendered ideals and compro- 
 mised principles, using what he calls his com- 
 mon sense, says it cannot be done. He says the 
 fires of original passion cannot be kept burning, 
 that slackness will get into the blood, and moral 
 enthusiasm will die in the heart. That is the 
 answer of the practical man who has lived 
 through the dull, gray years until the glow has 
 gone off from life. And if I had nothing else 
 than that to say to you, I would not say that. 
 That is no gospel to the youth of any age. The 
 good news for youth is that the kingdom of the 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 159 
 
 best life is at hand, that it is going to walk 
 around on campus and street. Jesus is the 
 answer to that question about maintaining ideals. 
 I trust him and his opinion more than I do 
 the man on the street. Jesus did it. He is the 
 answer. He tried it and it worked. His opinion 
 is worth its full face value. 
 
 2. Can you in this life you propose hold fast 
 to a life of truth even though it involves your 
 own life and the life of and loss of your friends? 
 We easily get this confused with the question of 
 intellectual freedom which is so precious in it- 
 self and so often utterly abused. The right to 
 search freely for truth w^herever it can be found, 
 the right to hold the truth and to speak it in 
 love whenever it is found must be held at all 
 cost. But many men exhaust their interest in 
 truth in the fascinating search for it, while 
 others take their supreme joy in the display or 
 proclamation of the truth they think they have 
 found, especially if they think no one else has 
 found it, sometimes without any care for human 
 consequences. Of course you know how far from 
 the real life of truth this is. Truth is a thing 
 to be discovered, not at all forgetting that a 
 good deal of it has already been discovered; 
 always a thing to be believed in one's heart and 
 held there with joy; always a thing to be thought 
 in one's mind and to be made the law of one's 
 
160 THIS MIND 
 
 thinking; always a thing to be done and to be 
 made the law of one's living. The woe that falls 
 upon those who know the truth and do it not 
 is a deserved woe. The desire for freedom is 
 not always the same as the truthful attitude of 
 mind, the acceptance of truth for life and its 
 guidance on life's way. Nor is love of truth in 
 one direction always accompanied by love of 
 truth in all directions. For your purposes, to- 
 day, knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus is 
 the supreme thing. Truth as it is in the rocks, 
 truth as it is in the plant, truth as it is in the 
 philosophy, are all on the way, and only on the 
 way, to truth as it is in the personality. And the 
 compromising, prudent man on the street doubts 
 the possibility of holding fast in a man's life to 
 the truth. It leads so far, it costs so much, it 
 so involves one's friends, and, if carried to full 
 length, it causes their defection. This is a prac- 
 tical world, he says, and one must neither 
 attempt nor expect too much. Does not the 
 Bible itself tell us not to be righteous over- 
 much? Well, the answer to the whole question 
 of living by the truth is that Jesus did it. He 
 did not bluster nor pose, nor make himself a 
 martyr to freedom of thinking, nor set himself 
 up as superior, but the law of truth was in his 
 life, the word of truth always on his lips. He 
 bore witness to the truth in all that he said, 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 161 
 
 all that he did, all that he was, and at last all 
 that he suffered. He did everything with truth 
 except doubt it, abandon it, compromise it, lower 
 it, or weaken it. He is the answer to the whole 
 question. When you are making a life decision 
 there is no answer except the personal one. 
 Until some better attitude to truth can be found 
 than Jesus' life gives us, let us go with him. 
 
 3. In making and pursuing a life decision can 
 a man keep his faith in doing good, his enthu- 
 siasm for doing good, in the face of actual defec- 
 tions and genuine failures, right at the heart of 
 his endeavor? 
 
 Nothing is much harder than this. Some day, 
 after years of patient, self-denying labor for 
 some group, they may all turn away and leave 
 you. Or after long effort you will apparently 
 have nothing to show for what you have done. 
 You may try to lift some lowly people, to teach 
 a backw^ard race, to reform a criminal group, or 
 to uplift a degraded community. You may think 
 you are making at least a measure of success out 
 of it, and awaken some morning with the sicken- 
 ing discovery that the w^hole thing has to be done 
 all over again, and the more sickening doubt 
 w^hether it can be done at all, whether the effort 
 is worth while. This is the fate and experience 
 of men who try. Just when you think you have 
 got people free from the world's pollutions, they 
 
162 THIS MIND 
 
 get entangled and overpowered again, and their 
 last state is worse than the first. They see the 
 way of righteousness and then turn back. The 
 biblical figure of the dog and the hog is not very 
 nice but wholly accurate. And when one of your 
 converts or pupils falls away and goes clear 
 back to the old ways, you are liable to touch zero 
 in your enthusiasm and to use foolish words, 
 saying that a dog is always a dog anyhow, and it 
 is no use to try to do anything. And maybe 
 you will say it about people — black people, red 
 people, yellow people; people who speak some 
 other tongue than your own; people whom you 
 have carried until your back has almost broken. 
 When that bitter hour comes it will have many 
 elements of bitterness, but no other quite so 
 bitter as the feeling that your whole life pur- 
 pose, was a blunder. You will say about the 
 saddest words men ever speak in this world of 
 ours : "What is the use of trying?'' 
 
 Now, it is wonderful to see how far that ques- 
 tion went toward answer in Jesus' own expe- 
 rience. He met it, met it as tragically as any one 
 of you ever will. He lost the rich young man, 
 w^ho flinched and failed when he had the chance 
 to back Jesus with everything he had. Many of 
 the disciples turned back to their old lives. His 
 own people rejected him. They failed to grasp 
 his teaching, they missed the point of his real 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 163 
 
 mission, they utterly misunderstood him. Tested 
 by our conventional standards, his immediate, 
 visible success was not very great. I can easily 
 imagine his heaviness of heart as he faced his 
 experiences. And I can easily see where a 
 weaker spirit would have broken and let the 
 whole enterprise go. But I really count that a 
 superficial view of Jesus. He had the deeper, 
 finer insight, the insight that gave him steadi- 
 ness, that must give us steadiness. The final 
 test is not the winning but the trying, though 
 winning is desirable. The highest success is not 
 receiving the palm but running the straight race. 
 The thing Jesus did was worth doing even though 
 no one followed him. The things he said were 
 worth sa;y*ing even though no one believed them. 
 His cross was worth carrying even though he had 
 to carry it alone. It is better to have tried like 
 this and failed than never to have tried. That 
 is the only real failure. And if you are going 
 into a lifework where you will require manifest 
 success all the time to keep up your heart and 
 spirit in it, then be assured it is no highest life- 
 work. 
 
 I said a moment ago that I could easily im- 
 agine his heaviness of heart, hear the break in 
 his voice, could easily see where a weaker spirit 
 would have let go. If that were all I could see, 
 it Avould make me ashamed of my own insight 
 
164 THIS MIND 
 
 into his life. The real vision here is of that 
 true person never wavering as to the worth of his 
 work, never losing heart in it even when it 
 apparently went badly, knowing that it was 
 worth doing in itself, knowing that his words 
 were worth saying, no matter about the popular 
 vote. He wanted success, longed for followers, 
 rejoiced in believers. He wept when Jerusalem 
 refused his offers. He wept but did not waver or 
 grow bitter. It hurt when he lost disciples. It 
 hurt but did not sour or harden his spirit, or 
 cause him to throw away his ideals in service. 
 He kept his faith in doing good, his enthusiasm 
 for doing good, in the face of losses and defec- 
 tions. It can be done. He is the answer to 
 your question. Years hence when in China or 
 Chicago, in Terre Haute or Illinois, in ministry, 
 medicine, law or farming, your simple faith in 
 doing good is threatened, look back at the story 
 of that Other One, who never lost that faith, 
 and hold on even when all the tides seem running 
 out. It can be done. He is the answer to that 
 question. He is the proof and the example. 
 What essential difference does our success or 
 failure make to us? We may not enter the land 
 of promise, as Moses did not. But we can lead 
 the people in the right direction all our lives, 
 always from bondage, always toward freedom. 
 We can fight all the time in the good fight. We 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 165 
 
 can give our lives all the while to the high human 
 enterprise. He did it. We can do it. If we do 
 this as he did, we can keep our heads in the face 
 either of a crowd's applause or a crowd's dis- 
 approval. 
 
 4. Will your life decision and the life service 
 that follows it give youth its highest chance for 
 character and service in the world? Youth is 
 not wholly a matter of years. There are some 
 really young people who are past fifty. They are 
 not the ones who are always asserting their 
 youth. And there are some very old people who 
 are under thirty. The same distinction is true 
 concerning the modern man. He is not modern 
 just because he says so or just because he is alive 
 to-day. Yet, in the main, youth does in large 
 degree have reference to years, even though it is 
 chiefly a thing of spirit and bearing. The work 
 of making a new world must be largely done if 
 done at all by the men and women now under 
 thirty. If Jesus Christ does not get his chance 
 with them, he will get no better chance than he 
 has had through the centuries with the people 
 who have got the world into its present mess. 
 
 Now, you cannot help much if you just accept 
 the first good job that comes along. One day 
 they offered Jesus the job of being king. The 
 short view which so many take would have led 
 him to take it. Probably all the familiar, cus- 
 
166 THIS MIND 
 
 tomary, specious arguments were used to induce 
 him to accept. He was doubtless told that this 
 would be a wonderful chance to render a real 
 service; that somebody had to be king and he 
 could prevent some bad man from getting the 
 place ; that such opportunities did not come often 
 to men of his age, and would not likely come 
 again to him. He was probably told how many 
 Messiahs a prosperous king could support and 
 maintain. You know or will know the whole 
 list of plausible reasons for doing something else 
 than the thing you ought to do. You will be 
 swept off your feet unless you are in Jesus' 
 spirit. When he saw the thing coming, the thing 
 that was good in itself, but bad for him, the 
 thing that would have side-tracked his real life 
 purpose, he withdrew from the crowd, that crowd 
 that turns men's heads so easily. He went out 
 to the low mountain, where no doubt he prayed 
 it all over again and came back to go on with 
 his own work. 
 
 Nor can you help much if you simply bring 
 youth's usual spirit to your life decision and pur- 
 pose. In youth ambition is usually the compel- 
 ling force, success the goal of effort. Let us 
 change that in one generation. Phillips Brooks 
 asked every Harvard man to give the world 
 the gift of yet one more regenerated human life. 
 What shall we ask and receive from DePauw to- 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 167 
 
 day? Shall we look for less than one more life 
 determining itself and its work according to the 
 mind of Christ? An old teacher said, "Let us 
 learn to think according to Christianity." Let 
 us learn to think according to Christ. Away 
 back in an earlier address I referred to Emer- 
 son's advice about wagons and stars. A new and 
 real interpretation of that old sentence has just 
 appeared. The man who easily quotes it usually 
 thinks it means ''aim high/' but what it really 
 does mean must be something like this : Tie your 
 life to the highest powers. ''Go where the gods 
 are going. Take the direction of all good men." 
 Hitch your personal life to the noblest and best. 
 Swing into the current with Jesus at its head, 
 the current of that human power that keeps indi- 
 vidual wagons actually going and carrying their 
 load. One day an educated youth looked at 
 Jesus and said, "Master, I will go along with 
 you." He had hitched his wagon to the right 
 star. Everything else that youth has hitched up 
 with has failed. Half gods, semi-Christianity, 
 partial Christianity, have all proved unequal to 
 the demand made by youth's real wagons. If 
 you are to get anywhere, tie your lives to Jesus 
 so tight that you will get the whole upward pull, 
 the whole onward pull of his life through this 
 rough world. Your ancestors have tried every- 
 thing else. A few have tried this. Maybe we 
 
168 THIS MIND 
 
 can see one generation going with him in its 
 choices, its purposes, and its objects. If we do 
 see this, we shall see some other things that we 
 are not looking for. Things will begin in a new 
 way to work together for good to those who do 
 this. Those who have responded to his purpose 
 will find that they have his aid and interest in 
 their purposes. 
 
 Something more is called for from youth than 
 revolt and revolution against the old order, what 
 Sir Philip Gibbs calls "the old Gang.'' The 
 world is sufflciently upset now. A new world is 
 needed, not a new and greater chaos and ruin. 
 Here are these precious materials lying in such 
 disorder about us. Here are false principles 
 enthroned, true principles inverted, good and bad 
 principles, good and bad people, all mixed up. 
 It is an awful mess and superficially I do not 
 wonder at any attitude that men take. Super- 
 ficially, I say, I do not wonder. But the super- 
 ficial view is not the sound one. You do not 
 get the true view until you get the mind of Christ 
 about the world and the power of youth. If 
 it were not for him and his view of this present 
 world near and far, I fear I could be a wild revo- 
 lutionist, a hopeless pessimist, or an out-and-out 
 materialist. Maybe not. Maybe just the hope 
 of there being such a Person somewhere, some 
 time would hold me. For his is the saving view 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 169 
 
 of a world that is hopeless without him. Indeed, 
 if we had to come to our life purpose without 
 him, there would be no gospel of cheer, only a 
 sullen appeal to do your best in an utterly 
 gloomy situation. A striking little poem 
 appeared in a recent Harper's Magazine entitled 
 "Voyages,'^ by Ruth Comfort Mitchell Young: 
 
 "A tired old doctor died to-day and a baby boy was 
 
 born — 
 A little new soul that was pink and frail and a 
 
 soul that was gray and worn, 
 And — halfway here and halfway there — 
 On a white high hill of shining air. 
 They met and passed and paused to speak in the 
 
 flushed and hearty dawn. 
 
 "The man looked down at the soft, small thing with 
 
 wise and weary eyes, 
 And the little chap stared back at him with 
 
 startled, scared surmise : 
 And then he shook his downy head — 
 ^I think I won't be born,' he said. 
 'You are too gray and sad I' He shrank from the 
 
 pathway down the skies. 
 
 "But the tired old doctor roused once more at the 
 
 battlecry of birth, 
 And there was memory in his look of grief and toil 
 
 and mirth. 
 'Go on!' he said. 'It's good — and bad: 
 It's hard ! Go on! It's ow^s, my lad !' 
 He stood and urged him out of sight, down to the 
 
 waiting earth." 
 
 I think a thoughtful person in college this year 
 
170 THIS MIND 
 
 looking out at the world ahead of him at the 
 weary old men breaking down under its load 
 might say with the child, ^'J think I won't be 
 born." But not if he sees and hears that tired 
 old doctor, who may perhaps be the Great Physi- 
 cian who has had enough to make his soul gray 
 and worn. If the new graduate hears him crying 
 out: 
 
 "Go on, it's good — and bad, 
 It's hard! Go on! It's ourSy my lad!" 
 
 I think the new graduate can strike into the 
 waiting years with a shout. He may even see 
 that this is a fine hour in human history, w^hen 
 real men and women can begin to make a new 
 to-morrow. For that is at once the privilege and 
 the duty of youth. If youth simply lines up 
 with the old forces, and ranges itself on differ- 
 ent sides of the ruinous, selfish old groups; if 
 it gives itself over to the perpetuation of the old 
 industrialism, old militarism, old divisions and 
 castes; if it comes in to renew the old strife or 
 to find a great adventure in a new war, then 
 youth will destroy civilization instead of saving 
 it. Sir Philip Gibbs writes : 
 
 ^'The youth of the new world that is coming 
 need have no fear that peace will rob it of 
 romance and adventure. The building of that 
 new world upon the ruins of the old, the reshap- 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 171 
 
 ing of social relations between classes and 
 nations; the pursuit of spiritual truth and 
 beauty, the killing of cruel and evil powers ; the 
 conquest of disease, the resurrection of art and 
 poetry and lovely handicrafts, the calling back 
 of song and laughter to human life, the joy of 
 flight made safe from death, the prolongation of 
 human life by new discoveries of science; and 
 the reconciling of life and death by faith re- 
 established in the soul of the world — will be 
 adventure enough to last, let us say, a thousand 
 years from now. 
 
 ^'That is the chance of youth, standing now 
 at the open door, wondering what there is to 
 do and which way to take to meet the future. 
 God I If I had youth again, I should like that 
 good adventure, and take the chance."^ 
 
 You cannot be cynical or reactionary and 
 redeem the world. If you do not bring better 
 thinking, better ideals, better moral powers to 
 the age than it now has, you will not save it 
 from ruin. Old men are trying in old ways to 
 solve old problems that have defied the old solu- 
 tions. Councils and cabinets too largely 
 governed by old traditions, ruled by the old 
 spirit, councils and cabinets without vision, with- 
 out faith, without insight into life are trying 
 to fix up a world full of hate and greed and 
 
 1 More that Must be Told. 
 
172 THIS MIND 
 
 suspicion, a world full of race pride, race pre- 
 judice, and race ambition, so that it will run on 
 a while longer before the grand smash. Youth 
 is called again as it was by the Master, to make 
 a new earth wherein righteousness will dwell. 
 Nothing else is worth doing. This is the great 
 adventure. I envy you the forty years that lie 
 ahead of you^ unless you strike step with the 
 false leaders and join the wrong crowd. 
 
 Have you read these lines showing the differ- 
 ence between the sodden old order and the sensi- 
 tive new? 
 
 "They sit at home and they dream and dally, 
 
 Raking the embers of long-dead years — 
 But ye go down to the haunted Valley, 
 
 Light-hearted pioneers. 
 They have forgotten they ever were young. 
 
 They hear your songs as an unknown tongue. . . 
 But the Flame of God through your spirit stirs. 
 
 Adventurers — O Adventurers !" 
 
 But England needs no new lands or seas. 
 America needs no new continents or islands for 
 her adventurers. And for British youth and 
 American youth there is an adventure that Drake 
 and Raleigh never dreamed of, an adventure that 
 only men like Livingstone and Carey, Coleridge 
 Patteson and Hannington, on one side the sea, 
 men like Thoburn' and Bashford on our side of 
 the sea, saw. And as youth sets sail to make 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 173 
 
 a new mind, a new heart, a new conscience, a 
 new affection, a new relation in the whole world, 
 one like unto the Son of man goes with them, 
 at their head, and the new day dawns as they 
 move. 
 
 5. Your life decision and the life service that 
 follows it must relate you vitally and strongly 
 to those beliefs that make a victorious life. 
 
 One of my wise friends wanted me to make 
 an entire lecture on this subject. He feels keenly, 
 as all thoughtful persons do, the student diffi- 
 culty with his creed. And it would be a fine 
 w^ork to help clear that difficulty out of the way. 
 Nevertheless I am choosing not to try it. There 
 are several reasons. That subject ought to make 
 an entire volume and not simpl}^ one chapter 
 in a volume. Making an entire chapter out of 
 it in this discussion would create a wrong im- 
 pression because of the disproportionate space 
 given it. And I fear, if an entire chapter should 
 be given to it, that I might be tempted to make 
 a creed for you ! And it would be all wrong for 
 me to assume that you must believe at your age 
 all the things I believe at mine, or that we should 
 believe even the same things exactly alike. Be- 
 liefs are so related to experience that the same 
 words do not mean the same things as expe- 
 rience ripens and deepens. For example, all my 
 life I have repeated the words "I believe in God 
 
174 THIS MIND 
 
 the Father Almighty'^ — and do still repeat them, 
 but they mean immeasurably more than they did 
 in my youth, and I cannot see what wealth they 
 will finally come to have. 
 
 These are days when many people are having 
 trouble with their creeds, when many are pro- 
 posing to throw all creeds overboard and go 
 ahead without them. This does not seem either 
 wise or possible. There is a better way. Maybe 
 we can find it. Suppose we start with three or 
 four general statements, some of them negative 
 in form. First : Beliefs cannot be made to order, 
 just once for all. They will grow and expand 
 as life goes on. Second: True and "productive 
 beliefs'- are positive and not negative. A man 
 does not get far simply on the basis of the things 
 he does not believe. Third : Practically, beliefs 
 are not all equally important or useful, not all 
 equally used in one's life. There is a working 
 faith, and, for most people, a set of beliefs which 
 are largely kept on deposit rather than in circu- 
 lation, beliefs that are not used at all. Fourth : 
 Do not think you must abandon essential faith 
 because on some point you feel you must differ 
 from your fathers. They were not infallible any 
 more than you are. You need not attribute in- 
 fallibility, therefore, either to their convictions 
 or your own. Especially do not regard your 
 views as infallible just because they differ from 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 175 
 
 your father's. Fifth : Get hold of the business of 
 believing at the end of privilege instead of the 
 end of duty. I do not mind confessing to you 
 that I spent bitter, rebellious years, in early life, 
 over the feeling that the Christian doctrines, the 
 beliefs of the church, were being forced on me as 
 a duty. It did not matter whether they were 
 true or false, partly true or partly false. That 
 was not the real difficulty. It was youth's feel- 
 ing of rebellion against being compelled and 
 not free. I used to wish that scared sheriff of 
 Philippi had not asked what he must do to be 
 saved. All that has, however, been gone for 
 many happy years. There came a day when 
 belief as a privilege came above the horizon, 
 when the duty of it took its proper place, and 
 the freedom to believe came to the front. That 
 day emancipation came for myself and for many 
 besides. For from that high hour when the sun 
 of privilege began to shine in the sky of belief, 
 I have tried to tell college men and women how 
 rich they are in the things they are permitted to 
 believe. Donald Hankey, the English college 
 man, who lived so nobly and died so bravely, 
 cried out, 'True religion is betting one's life 
 that there is a God." Or as an English bishop 
 has just said, "It is staking our lives that the 
 w^orld is God's and that God has made himself 
 known to us in Jesus Christ." It is enough to 
 
176 THIS Mi:XD 
 
 make even old blood run fast to know that youth 
 has a chance to bet its life on a certainty like 
 that. One night to a small company of men a 
 bit older than you, Jesus said, ''He that hath 
 seen me hath seen Him." And every time that 
 personal statement gets loose in a chapel full 
 of students, the cheer leader ought to call for 
 all the cheers there are because youth has a 
 chance to begin its life believing in a God who is 
 like Jesus Christ. Mr. Studdert Kennedy re- 
 cently spoke these pungent w^ords: ''We have 
 really changed our God. We have ceased bow- 
 ing down before a crowned Person sitting on a 
 throne surrounded by peaceful, singing angels. 
 There is no such Person. He is dead — killed 
 long ago. The God we worship is the God still 
 suffering over the sorrows of humanity, the God 
 with tears in his heart for the sorrows of this 
 w^orld — the God who is like Jesus Christ." It 
 is not surprising that when belief comes at you 
 the wrong-end foremost it arouses opposition and 
 makes itself look difficult. But when it comes 
 right-end foremost it is the finest thing on this 
 planet, for it gives men and women a power 
 for service, a strength for life that they cannot 
 afford to miss. Beliefs may be weights to drag 
 you down, to fetter, to impede, or they may be 
 Avings to lift, to sustain, to carry you forward. 
 If I had nothing to say to you except a stern 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 177 
 
 word about the hard duty of belief I would not 
 be saying that, but because I can proclaim the 
 glad, free, high privilege of belief it is a joy to 
 speak. 
 
 This seems to be the way Jesus got into his 
 beliefs, not simply the things he taught other men 
 to believe, but the things upon which he rested 
 his own imperial life. It never looks like an 
 enforced and unwelcome duty to him, but always 
 like a sort of rapture as he faced his real life 
 and supreme endeavor. He, like you, faced his 
 life decision and lifework, and bore into the 
 waiting years like a strong man into battle, be- 
 cause he believed as he did. He has transformed 
 belief from duty to privilege. He knows what 
 it is worth. He exults in it. I do not lay down 
 a body of statements to-day and tell you that 
 you must believe them. I ask you to look at 
 that other supreme Believer and go the whole 
 length of faith with him as a royal privilege. 
 
 I cannot go very far with certain creed-makers 
 of past centuries, but I can go the whole length 
 of Jesus' belief with him. He gets into it and 
 gets hold of it the right way. He gets hold of 
 the things that seem worth while, that seem to 
 bear directly on the problem of living and work- 
 ing. He never seems to regard his faith as a 
 weight or a perplexity or a burden to him. There 
 are places where he almost acts as if he were 
 
178 THIS MIND 
 
 about to shout over the way his belief carries 
 him through a task which would be impossible 
 but for his faith. Things do not all look equally 
 important to him. He refuses to get side-tracked 
 by unessential questions. He keeps on the 
 main line all the time. He does not stop to 
 examine his faith. He uses it. He has the kind 
 that enables him to keep full steam ahead while 
 he does his essential work. Into it with him! 
 You do not know yet what it is worth to you to 
 be able to believe certain things. Face to face 
 with the task of making a new humanity, think 
 how fine it is to be strong in this : ^'I believe in 
 God, the Father Almighty.'' Face to face with 
 the task of teaching the world the words of 
 eternal life, think of this : "I believe in the words 
 of Jesus." Face to face with the world's im- 
 purity, its bitter hate, its cruel selfishness, think 
 how rich you are in such belief as this : "I believe 
 in the clean heart; I believe in the service of 
 love; I believe in the unworldly life." Face to 
 face with the world's moral confusion, its low 
 and broken ethical ideals, the practices that 
 ruin life, think of your strength for your re- 
 demptive toil in any field because you can say, 
 "I believe in the beatitudes and in the new life 
 for man." This is not hard duty. This is life's 
 exalted privilege. That way,, with Jesus, I want 
 you to look at your beliefs. Believe him, believe 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 179 
 
 with him, go the whole length of faith with 
 him. There will be mysteries, there will be per- 
 plexities and difficulties, but this way with him 
 leads to assurance, to power, and to victory. 
 Your creed may begin by being brief and simple, 
 but this way with him leads to riches of belief 
 that cannot now be told. Only be very sure that 
 as you face your life decision and lifework your 
 beliefs are vital because they are personal. If 
 you are making your contact with belief through 
 Jesus Christ, there can be no uncertain outcome. 
 
 ''Not what, but tchom I do believe, 
 
 That, in my darkest hour of need, 
 
 Hath comfort that no mortal creed 
 To mortal man may give — 
 Not what, but wliom! 
 
 For Christ is more than all the creeds. 
 
 And his full life of gentle deeds 
 Shall all the creeds outlive. 
 Not what I do believe, but ivhom! 
 
 WJio walks beside me in the gloom? 
 
 Who shares the burden wearisome? 
 
 Who all the dim way doth illume, 
 
 And bid me look beyond the tomb 
 The larger life to live? 
 Not what I do believe, but whom! 
 Not what, but ivhoniF^ 
 
 Howard Bliss gave his life to being a mis- 
 sionary in Syria. Evidently he had to deal with 
 the young Syrian on a very direct and immediate 
 basis. This was his last word to his generation 
 
180 THIS MIND 
 
 through the Atlantic Monthly a few months 
 ago: 
 
 "Does Christ save you from your sin ? 
 Call Him Saviour! 
 
 "Does He free you from the slavery of your pas- 
 sions? 
 Call Him Redeemer! 
 
 "Does He teach you as no one else has taught you? 
 Call Him Teacher! 
 
 "Does He mold and master your life? 
 Call Him Master! 
 
 "Does He shine upon the pathway that is dark to 
 you? 
 Call Him Guide ! 
 
 ^'Does He reveal God to vou? 
 Call Him the Son of God ! 
 
 "Does He reveal Man? 
 Call Him the Son of Man !" 
 
 "Or, in following Him, are your lips silent in your 
 incapacity to define Him and His influence 
 upon you? 
 Call Him by no name, but follow Him !" 
 
 Finally: Will your life decision and the life- 
 work that follows it enable, and even compel you, 
 to make "full, perfect, and sufficient" response 
 to the everlasting pressure of God's life upon 
 your own? The deepest fact in all personal life 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 181 
 
 is the direct and constant action of God upon 
 it. We do not thrust ourselves unasked upon 
 him. Long before any of us answered he was 
 calling. Some of us do not hear him clearly 
 because we keep too far aw^ay, or because our 
 ears are dull, or because too many other sounds 
 distract our hearing. But no passion of re- 
 sponse that the best of us will ever make will 
 come anywhere near equaling the passion of his 
 call to us. We do not set the current of service 
 and devotion running. We do not create all 
 these high principles and try to force them upon 
 him as though he had not thought of 
 them. Jesus is not the living definition of the 
 devotion we have created and offered to God. 
 He is the passionate expression in personal life 
 of God's owm devotion to human life. God 
 offered Jesus to us. He is God's eternal call to 
 us, God's call to ever^^ one of us. 
 
 Even Jesus felt that. "My Father worketh, 
 and I work." God is the chief Adventurer, the 
 supreme Burden-Bearer, the most self-sacrificing 
 Person in his universe. He knows that you can- 
 not do any great work in the world, or give 
 any great idea to the world, unless you give your- 
 self to it. Nor can he. The cause consumes him 
 as it must consume 3^ou. He does not drive men 
 where he does not go. He calls them to go with 
 him. He goes across No Man's Land and over 
 
182 THIS MIND 
 
 the top with his comrades. I have tried to out- 
 line the principles upon which your life decisions 
 should be made, but all the while I have had in 
 my mind that "man has no end which is not also 
 God's''; that "all the great flaming enthusiasms 
 of history have been born of God'^; that "the 
 best of all is God is with us." I have not been 
 trying to create a philosophy for the guidance of 
 youth. If these addresses should be read by any 
 numbers of the young men and women in 
 America's colleges, I should not want them to 
 find here only or chiefly my views as to their 
 lives. I am trying to find Jesus' way into his 
 own life under the direct, steady, unhindered 
 pressure of God upon his life. That is the only 
 philosophy by which I am willing to have the 
 youth of to-day guided in its supreme decision. 
 I have tried to discover Jesus' response to God's 
 will on one hand and the world's need on the 
 other. And in his spirit, after his manner, I 
 want modern youth to make its response with 
 its life. His response led him to absolute devo- 
 tion, to white and shining unselfishness, to 
 Calvary and its cross at last. And you can think 
 as hard as you wish, can look squarely at all the 
 other lives of history, but you cannot think of 
 another life equal to this. He had one life to 
 live, one death to die. He lived and died as such 
 a person ought to have done. The world of our 
 
TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 183 
 
 clay, like the world of his earthly day, is very 
 weary and very needy; weary of everything else, 
 needy of him. Our day is still his day. It is in 
 our hands to make it his day as no other day 
 has ever been. I am not saying or caring much 
 whether you shall do it in one calling or an- 
 other, but, looking at Jesus Christ as he stands 
 related to our world to-day, looking at the whole 
 world and its need of him, in these breaking- 
 years; looking at you with the future in your 
 hearts and with life in your hands, I wait as 
 he waits to hear again the words spoken by a 
 young scholar long, long ago: ^'Master, I will 
 go with you wherever you go.'' 
 
 This is life's fine adventure. Let us take it 
 with him. "Rise, let us be going." 
 
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