BR 85 . W57 1923 Wishart, Charles Frederick, 1870-1960. The God of the unexpected J THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED BY / CHARLES FREDERICK WISHART, D.D., LL.D. PRESIDENT OF THE COLLEGE OF WOOSTER AUTHOR OF “tHE RANGE FINDERS,” ‘ THE UNWELCOME ANGEL,” ETC. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOHN TIMOTHY STONE, D.D., LL.D. PASTOR FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH CHICAGO THE COLLEGE OF WOOSTER PRESS WOOSTER, OHIO COPYRIGHT, I923 BY CHARLES F. WISHART PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CONTENTS INTRODUCTION BY DR. JOHN TIMOTHY STONE . . . vii FOREWORD . ix. I. THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED . 1 II. HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY .... 21 III. PRAYER AND EFFICIENCY . 32 IV. THE FORGOTTEN SECRET OF ZEST . 44 V. HEAVEN IN THE MAKING . 57 VI. TRACKS LEADING BOTH WAYS . 71 VII. THE SONS OF MARY AND THE SONS OF MARTHA. . 91 VIII. PAINTING THE WHITE POST . 104 IX., LIFE’S WIDEST HORIZON . 120 X. THE SONS OF BEATEN OIL . 133 XI. THE BITTER CRY OF THE WAR WEARY .... 149 XII. THE UPWARD CALLING . 164 XIII. THE SERVANT IN THE HOUSE . 177 XIV. THE TRAJECTORY OF EVIL . 192 XV. THE CROSSED HANDS OF BLESSING . 204 # 111 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/godofunexpectedOOwish A WORD OF INTRODUCTION By DR. JOHN TIMOTHY STONE The influence and standing of the American pulpit have suffered because the onrush of activity and the in¬ creasing demands of duty have been too insistent. We are grateful that one gifted with such rare ability as Doctor Wishart has been willing to prepare this volume of sermons. The scope and timeliness of the sub¬ jects considered are significant of the mind and insight of this great preacher. His range of familiarity with the best in literature evi¬ dences his wide reading and ready memory. The aptness of his illustrations is such that one never feels that the picture was bought simply to fill the frame. His wealth of knowledge never burdens the reader, for the selective element controls. The wide vision and wisdom gained through accurate scientific information and philosophic study enhance his thinking and command respect. Not only do these sermons reveal the student and read¬ er, but they evidence as well the man of affairs and the man who knows humanity. As pastor, teacher, and col¬ lege president, Dr. Wishart has had exceptional experi¬ ence with all types and conditions of people. His clear mind, warm heart, and ready hand seem to combine with an originality of treatment in whatever subject he ap¬ proaches. Humor fascinates as well, but never merely for humor’s sake, the error of so many. This is well il- v Vi INTRODUCTION lustrated in his reference to David Hume’s experience with the old lady who helped him from the bog on con¬ dition that he would repeat the Lord’s Prayer. The ser¬ mon on “Prayer and Efficiency” in which this illustra¬ tion occurs is in my judgment one of the most helpful treasures on this subject we have. The practical has also its place in this volume as seen in such sermons as “The Forgotten Secret of Zest.” His analysis of character is disclosed in such searching outline as we find in his portrayal of George Eliot in “The Trajectory of Evil.” But greater even than the sermons is the man back of them. Those who know him will welcome this volume, not only for its inspiring thought and content, but be¬ cause they love the author. As one of those whose very definition of friendship has been deepened by his com¬ panionship, and whose life and work have been enriched by his voice and pen, I welcome with gratitude this volume of sermons. Not long since, as I was walking through a little far- western town, I was greeted familiarly by a young man, a recent graduate of The College of Wooster. After making himself known to me, and introducing his wife and little child, he said, “What a splendid man our Presi¬ dent is !” His face was aglow, his heart in his words. Such is the esteem in which this man of God and leader of men is held by student and friend everywhere, and with such men and their messages the problems of aca¬ demic study and the problems of the modern preacher can and will be met. Faithfully John Timothy Stone Fourth Church Study Chicago, III. FOREWORD The sermons and addresses in this volume are selected from those which have been delivered at various services of The College of Wooster. They are placed before a wider constituency as quite obviously .platform talks, written always with the mental picture of an audience at the back of one's mind. The spoken word and the printed page are media of expression so dissimilar in character that it requires some temerity to shift from the one to the other without radical revision. The venture has been made, however, in the confidence that most readers will understand the self-evident plan and purpose of the orig¬ inal construction. Most public speakers learn to take without too much seriousness the requests to print which often come out of the fervor of a public meeting. All of us understand that these estimates do not represent the reliable and sober second thought. But the present writer is grateful beyond all expression for beautiful circles of friendship in certain churches to which he has ministered, and among the faculty, students, alumni, and friends of the College which he now serves. It was felt that in these circles at least he might be justified in giving to certain messages a more permanent form. Miss Leila A. Compton, Miss Olla Fern Kieffer, and Miss Gretchen R. White have given invaluable service in the tracing and confirming of quotations and poems con¬ tained in this volume. It is unfortunate to have that type vii Vlll FOREWORD of perverse mind to which some old phrase or song clings like a burr, but which seems incapable of recalling the time and location of original contact. A few quotations and poems have proved elusive even to the literary detec¬ tives of the New York Times. We have used “due diligence,” but if any old songs and phrases should by chance be misquoted, the reader is asked to imitate that patience which Mr. Kipling attributed to Homer’s audi¬ tors, who “ ’eard old songs turn up again, but kep’ it quiet — same as you.” Dr. Waldo H. Dunn has shown great kindness in the correction of the proof sheets. The reader should un¬ derstand, in justice to his finished literary craftsman¬ ship, that his supervision has not gone beyond this. Any culpable lapses of taste, style, or statement are charge¬ able to the author alone. Without a formal dedicatory page the writer cannot forbear one personal touch. He would honor himself by linking with this book — the labor of his love — the name of Josephine Long Wishart, who for nearly two decades, as partner and comrade, has shared with him in the toil and tears, the joy and laughter, of service in the Christian Ministry. Charles Frederick Wishart THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED I THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED The crucial question with which all discussion of the supernatural must start is this : “Has God exhausted Himself in the universe, or has He powers in reserve?” Whether dualists or spiritual monists in philosophy, Christian believers all agree that everything that is, natur¬ al or supernatural, rests on the all-embracing will of God. And in this broad sense everything which comes to pass must conform to law, — that is, to God’s will. Nothing can possibly happen without the circle of His volitions. But if God has not exhausted Himself, there may be events which conform to His Will, yet run counter to the ordinary manifestations of that will in the routine of nature. To grasp this thought, you must sharply distinguish the immanence and the transcendence of God. He is im¬ manent in the laws of the universe, and yet He trans¬ cends them. There is more of Him than has been ex¬ pressed in the cosmos. If you do not believe that, then you are a pantheist and heaven alone is to help you, for you have blotted out not only miracles, but morals. The 2 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED moment you lose the transcendence, the moment you con¬ ceive that “God is all and all is God/' that moment per¬ sonal relations vanish, and with them personal responsi¬ bility. Granted the doctrine of transcendence, our definitions begin to emerge. Nature is God’s manifestation in His immanence ; the supernatural, the outflashing of His trans¬ cendence. Horace Bushnell defines “natura” etymologic¬ ally as the future participle of “nascor,” “the about to come to pass,” — that is, the settled routine of cosmic processes. The supernatural, then, would be anything not in the chain of natural cause and effect, or that acts on the chain of cause and effect in nature from without the chain. What then is a miracle? Three definitions are urged. The miracle is wholly a manifestation of God’s trans¬ cendence and without any regard for, or cooperation with, His immanent laws. “It is,” says Charles Hodge, “of such a character that it can be rationally referred to no other cause than the immediate volition of God.” It is “produced or caused by the simple volition of God, with¬ out the intervention of any subordinate cause.” At the opposite extreme are those who define a miracle as lying wholly in the field of God’s immanent manifesta¬ tions. It is to be explained by subtle unexplored laws which yet are contained in the ordinary routine of na¬ ture’s operations. It is in this sense that Whitman sings : “Why ! who makes much of a miracle ? As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles, • • • • To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every cubic inch of space is a miracle, THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED 3 Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same, Every foot of the interior swarms with the same; Every spear of grass — the frames, limbs, organs, of men and women, and all that concerns them, All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles. To me the sea is a continual miracle; The fishes that swim — the rocks — the motion of the waves — the ships, with men in them, What stranger miracles are there?” In this sense the miracle is not outside nature, but in¬ side, only subtly elusive and difficult to understand. For purposes of this discussion we adopt a midway view. For us a miracle does not ignore second causes, but is not limited by them. It is an outflashing of God’s transcendence, but not necessarily immediate. If a man had started west, and having arrived at Chicago found a telegram calling him back to New York, the first view would suddenly transport him from Chicago to New York without a train; the second would suppose in the train itself some subtle, hitherto undiscovered power of reversal by which it turned about and carried the man and itself back to New York. The third view would sup¬ pose that the president of the road intervened, disar¬ ranged the time schedule for the time being, and ordered the engineer to reverse the engine and carry back the man. In the Bible we find special providences, such as the flight of quails ; and subtle unexplainable natural events, such as the drawing together of Peter and Cornelius. These are mysteries, perhaps, not miracles. It is prerequisite to clear thinking in this matter that we make a sharp distinction between a mere mystery and a miracle. The world is full of what we commonly call 4 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED miracles, which are nothing more than the highly mysteri¬ ous, but quite regular and habitual, relations between cause and effect. The subtle but impalpable and un¬ explainable sequences of life all about us are of course the kind of miracle that Walt Whitman was singing about. The common walks of life about us are crowded with these mysteries, though often usage has dulled our vision to their wonder. But a miracle, as the storm center of modern discussion, means more than this. It is a real interference with the ordinary routine procedure. No matter how subtle or mysterious are the relations of cause and effect, they are not miracles if they are normal and habitual. The miracle about which the debate rages is the supernormal and non- habitual. Now it is quite likely that many of the Bible miracles reduce to this first category of mere mysteries. Probably more of them than we realize are to be ex¬ plained by extraordinary psychic powers, or some notable insight into the quite normal, but most subtle and evasive, processes of nature. But while this is quite true, it does not seem to be all the truth. After due allowance is made for those natural powers which lie beyond the average ken, and after fitting discount and deduction for Oriental looseness of narra¬ tive and characteristic vague conceptions of accuracy, there still remains a zone of supernormal manifestation which can be set down only as a real displacement of the normal processes by which God expresses Himself in nature. The only alternative is to impeach the record at its most vital salients. It is really not so difficult to distinguish between the merely mysterious and the essentially miraculous, always THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED 5 granting broadly the reliability of the witnesses. The question is not whether we can conceive how the se¬ quences occur, but whether we can conceive that they could occur regularly and normally. Would it be possible to understand these extraordinary sequences as fitting into the regular processes of nature’s routine? For in¬ stance, the radio is to me a real mystery. I cannot pos¬ sibly understand the method of it; yet I can conceive how the mysterious laws by which it operates can exist normally and continuously without any disturbance of the harmony of nature. But I cannot possibly conceive how we should ever discover the power of bringing the dead back to life, as a mysterious and unexplainable, but none the less normal and habitual and continuous power, belonging to those with insight subtle enough to use it. It seems to me that the regular and continuous existence of such a power would really upset the whole harmony of life as we know it. Nor can I conceive how the power to expand indefinitely a loaf of bread could ever prove a subtle but none the less normal force latent in humanity. It would not take much imagination to perceive how such a power would radically disturb all the balances of life, physical, social, and moral. In fact, we may broadly say that many miracles per¬ formed by Jesus seem to be of such an order and charac¬ ter that they are not only vastly mysterious, but also bona fide interferences with the ordinary routine by which God expresses Himself in the world. I cannot conceive that such powers could ever be discovered to have a normal place in the ordinary operations of human life, no matter what the psychic wonders which the future may unroll before us. Our present day knowledge may throw light 6 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED upon that class of sequences which are only mysterious, but they have really no light to throw upon that class of sequences which are definitely abnormal and non-habit- ual. When Israel crossed the Red Sea we have doubtless only a remarkable special providence ; when the prophet sweetened the brackish water we may have only an ex¬ ceptional insight into certain processes of nature; but when the five thousand were fed, or when the grave gave up its dead, we have a real break in the continuity of nature’s processes, a sequence so unique that we could not suppose it to be of the habitual order of nature with¬ out upsetting the whole structure of ordinary individual and social life. As to the evidence itself, this is, of course, the field for the critical scholar. And yet, possibly not so much his field as we think it is, or as he thinks it is. I have always felt that a sense of proportion, a Spirit-guided imagination, intuitive ability, and a grasp of the moral and psychological background, are of at least as great value in the estimation of this data as is the ability to dis¬ tinguish between uncials and cursives. It is a field too much given up to mere mathematical or historico-critical methods. We must get at these moral and spiritual situ¬ ations with a large rqeasure of intuition. Bergsen points out that critical analysis can show only the elements of any given situation in which it resembles other situations. For the absolutely unique elements we must rely upon intuition, and I suppose in regard to any great miracle, like that of the resurrection of Jesus, there will always be two attitudes, according as men are guided by the merely critical and analytical sense, or by the moral and intuitional sense. The controlling factor in my mind THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED 7 regarding this miracle is the psychological and moral background, both in the character of Jesus and in that of His disciples. I cannot by any possibility construe a theory that satisfies me on the moral and psychological sides and yet sets aside the veritable truth of the miracle. To disbelieve the supernormal here makes the whole moral situation monstrous and inconceivable. It is doubtless true that this way of thinking is partially analytical and partially intuitional. One feels the moral monstrosity of setting aside the miracle as a far more intolerable burden than the strain that comes through believing in a break of physical routine. It is doubtless true that the man whose train of thought has been wholly critical will either never feel this, or else that its grip upon him will be very vague and uncertain. Professor Olin A. Curtis, in his work “The Christian Faith,” has divided the modern opponents of the miracle into three classes. The first of these to which our at¬ tention is to be directed is that class of thinkers to whom the miracle is a sheer impossibility. In the dictum of Spinoza the miracle was set down as “impossible.” Hume and his followers softened the word to “incredible,” but the meaning was substantially the same. The historical evidence for the miracle is ruled out a priori , and the as¬ sertion is freely made that a belief in the miracle is in¬ compatible with intellectual honesty. The reason for this is the postulate of unbroken uni¬ formity in nature. We are told that the inviolate preci¬ sion of natural law is a presumption without which our very thinking itself would have no validity. Thus Hume insisted that no amount of evidence could prove a miracle. He reasoned somewhat like this: “Our 8 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED faith in miracles must rest on historical testimony. His¬ torical testimony is only the testimony of men liable to be deceived. All confidence in such testimony is founded on experience. Experience, however, teaches that hu¬ man testimony is not reliable, whereas our experience that the course of nature is uniform is without exception. It will therefore always be more probable that the witnesses were mistaken than that the course of nature has been violated.” Of course it will be readily seen that Hume’s famous argument really involves a begging of the question. He has assumed the thing to be proven, in his statement that “our experience that the course of nature is uniform is without exception.” If there be any evidence for mir¬ acles, it must be counted in as part of our experience. And if it is so counted in, then our experience of un¬ broken uniformity is not without exception. There is an exception every time anyone has witnessed a miracle or has had an experience which breaks in upon the ordinary course of events. Mr. Chesterton has somewhere said that there are enough such experiences on record to fill the whole British Museum up to the roof. Mr. Hume evidently started by assuming the dictum which at the finish, with flourishing trumpets, he announced as proven. He has told us in his premise that there can be no evidence for miracles, because miracles do not happen, as we all know. Then in his conclusion he has announced gravely that miracles do not happen, as we all know, because there is no evidence. It did not take long for thinkers to perceive that Mr. Hume had made a serious mistake, also, in balancing posi¬ tive and negative testimony against each other on a parity THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED 9 of authority. Thus he assumes that the overwhelming pre¬ sumption must be against miracles, because the over¬ whelmingly large number of people experience the un¬ broken course of nature and do not experience miracles. But he forgot that a million men who did not see a miracle might be of less evidential value than one man who did. An Irishman once haled before the court for stealing a cow said, “Your Honor, I can produce fifty men who did not see me do it.” Even John Stuart Mill, though he modified the position by pointing out both flaws in the argument that I have mentioned, yet felt that it would be impossible to prove a miracle because the weight of average experience would always be against it. But did he not forget that for an exceptional event the real weight must be with the ex¬ ceptional witness? Average experience is always trust¬ worthy for average events, but seldom trustworthy for exceptional events. The exceptional man, given the prop¬ er moral background, must outweigh the average man in the judging of the exceptional event. Professor Huxley was keen enough to see that Hume’s argument proved too much. It not only blocked the miracle, but it blocked anything new or unusual. The weight of testimony would always be against the discovery of the North Pole or the discovery of a new species of plant by Burbank. It therefore blocked evolu¬ tion and could not hold. But while Huxley admitted that there is no “must” in God, and that the question of mir¬ acles was wholly one of sufficient evidence, yet no pos¬ sible evidence would have been by him accounted suf¬ ficient. It would have proven only that the event wit¬ nessed was beyond such natural laws as are now known. 10 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED So far as any proper conception of the miracle is con¬ cerned, it was accounted impossible. For the Christian theist of this day, and in the light of our present conception of God and the universe, the theory that miracles are impossible is scarcely worthy of serious consideration. Why impossible? Because they are a violation of the law of nature ? But can the law of nature compel our God? What is a “law of nature?” Consider it apart from a personality back of it, and a law cannot do anything, never has done anything, and never will do anything. All its potency is in the person which it expresses. If you think a law can do anything without a person back of it, observe, if you please, certain laws on the statute books of some of our commonwealths today. The term “law of nature” is but a meaningless abstrac¬ tion, a phrase used to cover the utter absence of any in¬ telligible thought whatsoever, unless it is used to express the habitual ways in which a person acts. What do we know about laws apart from persons? We do not see laws — we see sequences ; we see one thing following an¬ other regularly, and we assume that it has always been that way and always will be that way; but we cannot demonstrate our assumptions. Day follows night, and night follows day ; seasons move in orderly sequence ; cer¬ tain things which we call “effects” follow certain things which we call “causes ;” but we call them thus only be¬ cause we are more or less gambling that things will keep on acting in the future as we have observed them to act in the past. As Chesterton has observed, “It is no argu¬ ment for unalterable law (as Huxley fancied) that we count on the ordinary course of things. We do not count on it; we bet on it. We risk the remote possibility of a THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED ii miracle as we do that of a poisoned pancake or a world- destroying comet. We leave it out of account, not because it is a miracle, and therefore an impossibility, but be¬ cause it is a miracle, and therefore an exception.” When the late Senator Allison was asked, during a drought, if it would not certainly rain, he replied cau¬ tiously, “It always has heretofore.” If I get up at eight o’clock three hundred and sixty- four days in the year, and on the three hundred and sixty-fifth day get up at six, that would not be impossible — it would be an excep¬ tion. And while my habits, that is, the law of my nature, would greatly predispose me against any such exception, even in this case it would by no means be an impossibility. In other words, when we have caught the idea that a law is nothing more than the habitual way in which a person acts, we realize that the whole question is this : “Can a person be bound by his own habits?” Are the habits larger and stronger than the person, or is the person really larger and stronger than his habits? Let us admit that in the specific case of getting up at six in the morning the habits are almost stronger than the person. Many a poor drunkard finds that his habits have become stronger than his personal will. But he is not normal; he is not free. God is normal and free and personal. The only real and ultimate law is His will grounded in His trans¬ cendent nature. That is the only final test. God has His habitual way of doing things, to be sure. But if even a man can break in on his own habits, is there less freedom in God? Given a proper insight into the real nature of law as the expression of the personal will of God, the idea that miracles are a violation of law reduces to sheer absurdity. 12 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED The only possible violation of law would be that which defied God’s will. The miracle is only a higher and more direct and exceptional manifestation of that will. In fact, the size of a man will be judged by his ability to do the exceptional thing when the occasion demands. God is the Infinite. He is the God of the unexpected. When we understand that all activities of nature rest back on God’s will, we will see at once that the miracle presents no greater essential difficulty than the ordinary course of events. It is just as marvelous, so far as the mystery and difficulty is concerned, for God to turn water into wine in a season as to turn water into wine in a mo¬ ment. There is no difficulty or obstacle in the latter case which is not met and overcome in the former as well. There is no time in God. It looks more difficult to u§ solely because we have been accustomed to seeing the wonder done in a season and have not been accustomed to seeing it done in a moment. Under the workings of the law of habit we continually confuse the unusual and the impossible. We count so definitely on the usual and average experience that the exceptional assumes the aspect of the impossible. The Titanic could not go down. Such a thing had never been known. So sail ahead full speed and dare the icebergs — it was impossible to sink the Ti¬ tanic ! No, not impossible — only unusual — and the un¬ usual happened. Why, we cannot even have a week of rainy days without concluding that dry weather is well- nigh impossible. We do not reason out such a conclu¬ sion, but we feel that way. Indeed, such are the predis¬ positions of habit that we even develop a dislike of the exceptional. It disturbs our calculations. It upsets our wise saws and modern instances. We want the program THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED 13 to go by a fixed routine because it is so much easier to grasp and use as the basis of some beautiful theory. Every Greek student hates the irregular verbs. One would infinitely prefer a language with no such pitfalls in it. How much easier to keep matters straight if there had never been any exceptions ! The college boy echoes with a full heart the cry that Carlyle puts on the lips of the old schoolmen, “May God confound you for your The¬ ory of Irregular Verbs !” Now many routine minds, possessed of a desire to de¬ velop a theory of science which will contain the whole cosmos, dealing for years with the material study of un¬ varying natural sequences, fall into the grip of this same law of habit. It seems to them that any variation or un¬ usual thing in nature would be not only impossible, but immensely undesirable. They dislike it, they hate it with the rabid hatred which mediocrity bears to genius. They hate it just as we used to hate the irregular verbs. It breaks up their settled theories ; it makes impossible that snug arrangement of labeled and classified data so dear to the routine mind. We assumed that the Greek lan¬ guage existed to make grammar easy. They assume that this universe exists to make science easy. When the exception is intimated, the heathen rage and cry, “May God confound you for your Theory of Irregular Verbs !” But we learned at last that grammar was only an incident to the great intellectual and moral and spiritual purpose of the noble Greek tongue. And the routine mind may yet learn that his uniformities and laws and sequences and necessities and orders and tendencies are only an in¬ cident to the great intellectual and moral and spiritual purpose to which the whole creation moves. 14 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED The second class of thinkers to whom Professor Curtis refers are those who regard the miracle not as impossible, but as improbable. It is conceded that the God whose will is the only law could do. the exceptional thing, but would He? These thinkers believe He would not. “No whim in God,” said Theodore Parker, “ — therefore no miracle in nature.” It is inconsistent, they tell us, with the dignity of God as displayed in the unvarying preci¬ sion and majestic accuracy of uniform natural law, to suppose that He would break in upon this splendidly planned and accurately balanced system of law by so much as the variation of a hair’s breadth. Now it may be freely conceded that there is a certain dignity, nay a certain morality even, in the unvarying precision of nature. Wordsworth may have caught something of the morality which had its expression in the splendid mathematics of the sky when he sang : “Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong.” But let us not forget that, while there may be moral dignity in precision and regularity of habit, there may be even greater moral dignity in the breaking in upon that habit, if the moral occasion warrants or demands it. There is a dignity and even a business morality in the routine, let us say, of a great store. We are im¬ pressed with the clock-work regularity with which the building is opened and closed, with the faultless accuracy of the business routine, with the masterly way in which the clerks are marshalled to their places like the trained soldiers of an army. Now the office boy looks up to that routine as something vast and majestic and unbreakable. THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED 15 To him it would seem as though the world were ending if the store did not open and close on schedule time, if the daily routine did not go on its way like the perfectly oiled works of a great clock. But the son of the owner has a different point of view. He sees that the routine is not an end in itself, because he knows the man at the head of that routine, not as a mere driver of a machine, but as a father. And he knows that if he were to become sick and need his father, that father would smash the routine in a thousand pieces if the emergency were important enough. There is a certain dignity and impressiveness in the schedule of a railway system. Also there is morality in it to the traveling public. But there was a time in this country when every train and every streetcar from coast to coast was ten minutes behind time. That was not a stigma on railroading. It was a badge of honor. For McKinley was dead, and as loving hands carried his body to its long rest the railroads stopped their trains in token of respect to his memory. Was the routine dignity of the railroad system injured by the moral dignity which introduced an exception into the routine? The fact is that one very cogent definition of freedom and power in a personality is its ability to do the unaccustomed thing in this way. Now all depends upon whether you consider the uni¬ verse as a machine shop or a home. Is God a great celes¬ tial mechanic, or is He a father? We hold the higher uniformity, they the lower; and the curious paradox is in this, that men who assert this lower mechanical uniformity are willing to violate the higher and moral uniformity. Man has an instinct for immortality, and if that instinct i6 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED were false it would imply a serious break in the great uniform law by which instinct involves corresponding reality. And yet there are many men who would deny this instinct, who will insist upon the lower and mechan¬ ical uniformity of nature’s routine. The uniformity of the higher law has back of it love, and that of the lower law has back of it only mechanics. And the man who will not admit that the routine of nature was ever broken, yet really, in his heart, hungers for something that will break up that routine. He curses the universe because it is so hard and mechanical and unfeeling; and then de¬ liberately shuts his eyes to every evidence which would convince him that the universe is anything else. The whole question reduces to the query as to whether God is a God of love. Surely it is inconceivable that a loveless universe could have evolved a good mother ! And if God is love, then the mechanical dignity of mere natural routine is lost in the splendid higher dignity, the moral majesty, of the love of God manifested in the exception to the routine. If we admire the business man who would break up his routine for his boy ; if we honor the railroad men who put every train in the country behind time; if we love Lincoln when he declared in substance that he would violate the constitution itself to save the Union and free the slave; shall we convict the great God of fickleness, of whims, of inconsistency, when He changes His habits at the dictate of His wonderful love? The supreme miracles of the Bible were always wrought for moral purposes. Jesus was not unique in working miracles. Others have done so. But He was unique in His moral attitude toward His miracles — in His apprecia¬ tion of their meaning and necessity. He never conde- THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED 1 7 scended to the supernatural as a mere wonder-worker. I question whether He even relied on them greatly by way of credential. It is at least true in modern thinking that His moral attitude toward the miracles is far more con¬ vincing to us than the miracles themselves. But when we have caught the message of the Bible, the supremacy of the moral over the physical, when we have realized the supreme meaning of the incarnation — that something is radically wrong with humanity, that a moral crisis of first magnitude faced the race ; then to the eye of the child of God the miracle becomes not an improbability, but rather takes its place as just the thing we should expect. In the crisis, under all the circumstances, we would have suspected this narrative if it did not show us that God was as disturbed about sin as we were, and more so. That the Almighty Father should “sit on His vast and solitary throne, creating worlds to make eternity less burden¬ some to His immense existence and unparticipated soli¬ tude/’ while the race of men He made was struggling in the awful grip of human sin, seems to me to be most grossly improbable. That He should have been stirred even to the point of breaking up His accustomed habits for the time being, seems the most natural and believable thing in the world. And it will become so to most men who come to know God by intimate personal experience. There is still a third class of modern thinkers to which we now turn. They are those who, while admitting that what has gone before is in the main true, yet insist that it is not the message for our age. Grant that miracles are possible, probable, and that the historical evidence, backed by the moral considerations and the psychological demands of the situation, is, in some cases at least, of such char- i8 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED acter as to amount to a demonstration. Still, say these men, miracles are at the best non-strategic. In this age they are a weight rather than a wing to faith. Let us keep them in the background, rely on moral and spiritual considerations, and leave these physical .signs to the cruder age for which they were in reality intended. I apprehend that these thinkers have been caught by a false diagnosis of the real difficulty. Primarily the trouble is not intellectual, but moral. When men come to catch the moral relationship and realize its pre-eminence, the intellectual difficulties vanish. When one has a mir¬ acle in his own heart he is not staggered by a miracle in nature. It would be a great mistake to suppose that by toning down all intellectual difficulties we can make our message more attractive or effective with the modern man. If he comes to know the spiritual change, the intellectual difficulties vanish of themselves. If he does not come to know the spiritual change, all the logical catering and intellectual trimming in the world will not avail one jot or tittle to lead him to the kingdom. Faith grows with the demands upon it. When those demands are attenu¬ ated, it shrivels and dies. “Human things,” says Pascal, “need only to be known, in order to be loved ; but divine things must first be loved, in order to be known.” In regard to the miracle the Roman Catholic Church and the Unitarian Church are antipodal the one to the other. On the one side slavish and superstitious acceptance of the supernatural. On the other, an absolute elimination of it. Let the records of membership show which has the larger grip on men. When the demands of faith become attenuated to the point of Lincoln’s soup made from the shadow of a pigeon THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED 19 that had died of starvation, it may attract an anemic little coterie of dilettantes and intellectual recluses, but for the great mass of men it will have no appeal. Strong be¬ lievers ask for bread, not stones or predigested capsules. It takes great tasks to make great men ; and the faith that overcomes the world does not hedge or cringe, but con¬ fronts the Supreme Mystery like Browning’s Gram¬ marian : “Was it not great? did not he throw on God, (He loves the burthen) — God’s task to make the heavenly period Perfect the earthen? Did not he magnify the mind, show clear Just what it all meant? He would not discount life, as fools do here, Paid by instalment. He ventured neck or nothing — heaven’s success Found, or earth’s failure: ‘Wilt thou trust death or not?’ He answered ‘Yes! Hence with life’s pale lure!’” Nor must it be forgotten that redemption itself is one vast miracle. The person of Christ is an absolute break in the routine of average human nature, utterly inex¬ plicable by any natural sequence of cause and effect either in the field of heredity or that of environment. The history of the Bible has been miraculous. The whole course of redemption is an extraordinary thing. A re¬ ligion without the miraculous is Hamlet sans Hamlet. Conversion itself is the best attested fact of modern life. ,And it is essentially of the miraculous order. “The wind bloweth where it will, and thou hearest the voice thereof, but knowest not whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.” Professor 20 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED William James was the first modern man of science on whom it appears to have dawned that a study of religion meant a study of what went on in the souls of religious men. Harold Begbie, in his really remarkable series of books on conversion, has furnished data which every man who discusses the supernatural is bound to face. I am weary of soul with the cheap assumption that science is all on the side of the red tape minds. No man can be in¬ tellectually honest who dogmatizes on miracles without a frank study of conversion in modern life. And his verdict will be that of Daniel Webster on the change which came into the life of a hardened old sinner, one John Colby, of whom the great statesman spoke to his friend John Taylor. “Well, John Taylor, miracles happen in these latter days as well as in the days of old.” “What now, Squire?” asked Taylor. “Why,” replied Webster, “John Colby has become a Christian. If that is not a miracle, what is?” II HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY The suggestive title of one of Mr. Browning’s poems furnishes the angle from which we are now to view the question of the miracle. “How It Strikes a Contempo¬ rary” is not the formula by which an abstract judgment is to be crystallized, but it does present the exceedingly practical criterion which determines the actual acceptance of an abstraction and its incorporation into concrete and vivid belief. How does the miracle strike the contem¬ porary mind? What of the supernatural today? How does it fare through the shifting and sifting processes of twentieth century thinking? Granted a spiritual uni¬ verse and not a mechanical one, granted a great All- Father who controls physical phenomena for moral ends, a fairly water-tight argument for the miraculous may be constructed. But will it have any real and practical grip on that oft-quoted and awesome court of appeal, so vociferous and dogmatic and yet withal so disturbingly erratic, which we call “the modern mind?” Speaking in general terms the answer to this question might be put in a single sentence. As compared to a generation ago it is now easier to accept the marvelous in¬ cidents of the Bible but harder to assign a definitely mi¬ raculous explanation to them. In Mr. Huxley’s day the tendency of many critics was to assume, as he himself somewhere stated, the alternative that the supernatural 21 22 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED events of the gospel narratives were either genuine mir¬ acles or else that they did not occur at all. We have now come to a time when his successors are far more willing to admit that these events might have occurred, but when along with this admission they would assign for them some unknown natural force as a sufficient explanation. This attitude has arisen as our minds have expanded more and more to the marvels of modern discovery in that zone of mystery where spirit and matter meet. The proph¬ ecy of William James has been realized in that a gener¬ ation which explained the psychical by the physical has been followed by a generation which is tending more and more to explain the physical by the psychical. Thinking which was on a materialistic tack swung sharply over to a new sense of invisible wonders manifest through an utterly unknown medium which for want of a better name has been called the ether. The reduction of matter from atom to electron, from the concept of solidarity to that of energy ; the amazing revelations of the radio ; the deep¬ ening conviction that spirit often masters matter; have all tended toward an easier tolerance of many wonders in the Bible. Sir Conan Doyle, for instance, would read¬ ily accept the detailed narrative concerning the Day of Pentecost if instead of an “outpouring of the Spirit” you talked about “psychical manifestations.” Mental ascendancy over material media is increasingly evident even to that bromidic individual known as the “man on the street.” Whether in the hands of charlatans like Madame Blavatsky and Madame Eddy, or of earnest gen¬ tlemen like the Emmanuel advocates and Monsieur Coue, we are blundering once and again upon mysterious live wires of unknown spiritual force. These occasional con- HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY 23 tacts bring unwonted shocks to those confirmed dogma¬ tists who had rested so comfortably on the old scientific orthodoxy of hard mechanical causation, joe Jefferson, the loved actor, summed up the new attitude toward the things not dreamt of in our mechanistic philosophies. His friend and lifelong companion, Grover Cleveland, with that dogged, persistent, hard-headed practicality of his, utterly refused even to consider the evidence for certain alleged marvelous happenings in the invisible empire of ether. “Tell that, to Jefferson; he’ll believe anything,” said the former President. And Jefferson replied, “Of course I will. The world is full of wonders and another more or less does not surprise me.” Whatever their limitations and failures, the psychic group of investigators have at least jarred the complacent egotism of the old positivists and the contemporary fol¬ lowers of Ernst Haeckel. At a minimum evaluation they have stimulated a new bent of the modern mind toward the unseen world. It is too late in the day to laugh out of court such men as Myers and Hodgden and Crooks and Lodge and Barrett and Flammarion and Maet¬ erlinck and Hyslop and Chesterton and Lang and Tark- ington and Doyle and a host of others with equal scientific, philosophical and literary standing. Let us grant that thus far psychical investigation must receive the Scotch verdict, “Not proven.” I fancy it is the Scotch verdict only because the issues are so tremendous, the inferences so solemn and heart-shattering, that we do not dare rest on evidence which would be fairly conclusive in decisions of lesser moment. Hundreds of men have been hung on evidence inferior to that which science itself has pro¬ duced for some sort of invisible life capable of interest in 24 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED and interference with human affairs. Make all possible allowance for fraud, collusion, and coincidence, still there exists the “unexplainable residuum.” Every year widens the area of data which compels the hypothesis either of actual communication with human spirits across the veil or of psychical phenomena between human spirits operat¬ ing entirely independent of mechanical causation. In either case the results are proving equally fatal to the theory of hard material uniformity. And in many cases the explanation of actual intercourse across the veil would probably be the more natural and unforced hypothesis — if — if only we dared ! The time has come for Christian thinking to see in the honest, reverent psychical investigator a friend and not a foe. Mercenary necromancy has always been a rotten, reeking thing, justly interdicted in the Bible. In modern life it smells to high heaven with the odors of the pit. To practice foul fraud on broken hearts for filthy gain is a wickedness that should put to shame the traitors whom Dante found in the ninth circle of the Inferno. But as we would not have Christianity judged by the frauds and crimes committed in its name, we dare not on an analogous basis condemn the honest and reverent scientific investigator who seeks to confirm in the white light of reason that life immortal to which we cling by faith “amid the encircling gloom” of modern mechanistic thinking. The reverent psychic investigator is like our¬ selves the champion of a spiritual universe. “Les amis de mes amis sont mes amis For myself, I shall waste no blows on any man who makes it easier to believe in a plastic world of spirit rather than a hard world of mech¬ anism, and in a God who is not a Master Mechanic, but HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY 25 a Father, in whose train wait ministering angels, and around whose throne the cherubic host sings everlastingly devout and holy songs. I will risk bad spirits for the as¬ surance that there are good ones. If demons exist, they can harm no one without His consent. But if materialism were the real philosophy of life, then all spirits alike are swallowed up in darkness and despair. As Mr. Hereward Carrington has said in a recent review, “It is curious to note that spiritism merely offers scientific evidence for the existence and reality of a spiritual world — for which all other religions are likewise contending. It is easy enough to see why the materialist should attack spiritualism. It runs counter to his cherished and preconceived views of things ; and rather than give these things up and ac¬ knowledge that he might be wrong he prefers to ignore and deny the facts ! But why religion should pour out the vials of its wrath upon any attempted proof of the very phenomena it is teaching, has always been an unintelligible paradox to the reviewer.” And it may be added that by a curious mental paradox a late noted theologian wrote a book proving that you are not a good Christian if you deny psychic manifestation between the years 1500 B. C. and 100 A. D., and then proving that you are not a good Christian if you admit these manifestations at any other period of the world's history whatsoever! But why confine the miraculous to the historic period of the Bible canon? If the moral occasion is present why not a miracle today? Of course it must be remembered that these reversals of nature's routine have been mani¬ fest only at some extraordinary crisis in the moral history of the race. There were hundreds of years during Bible times when there was no “open vision.” The old idea of 26 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED evolution by slow, gradual and imperceptible progress has given way to the new conception of forward movements by leaps and crises. It now appears characteristic of both natural and moral history that there should be long periods of comparative quiescence followed by some new crisis marked by a fresh outflow of divine energy. These colossal emergencies, when a thousand years are as one day and one day as a thousand years, these extraordinary moral situations are the background of the supernatural. Soldiers tell us about the bitter horror of the front line trenches, and whisper of a White Comrade who appeared to soothe and sustain. Well, perhaps he did. Why not? Heineman, the publisher, gave a dinner to the late lament¬ ed Shackleton before his last fatal voyage to the dread¬ ful South Seas. And in the course of that dinner, before a company of noted guests, this hard-headed practi¬ cal English explorer said, “I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the un¬ named mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me we were four and not three. I said nothing to my companions on that point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, ‘Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.’ ” And perhaps there was a fourth, even as in the burning fiery furnace, so in the bitter arctic desolation. Who shall say? At least who shall deny? Shall we curse this hard universe be¬ cause Shackleton, in his bitter hour of need, was left alone; and then shut our eyes to any possible testimony that he may not have been left alone? Of course such testimony can never be intellectually coercive. The force of its impact upon any investigator will depend largely upon his own inner life, upon his HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY 27 character and his experience. And the testimony which the Bible brings to an invisible spiritual world sometimes breaking through the barriers of sense, will meet accept¬ ance or rejection not by any possible critical evaluation of the testimony, but largely by the subjective attitude of the observer. We have all had certain subnormal mo¬ ments when mechanical negations gripped us and would not let us go. In our better, truer experiences, however, when physical health was normal and the storm and stress passed by, the inner life instinctively but none the less surely reaches out toward spiritual reality, and will not be denied. When the lamp of vitality burns low then the pitiless grasp of physical routine hangs over the soul like a pall. But with restored mental and physical elastic¬ ity the verdict of materialism seems abnormal and wrong and impossible. As Professor James said, when we are normal we must reply to fatalism and pessimism in a single word, “Bosh.” It must be freely admitted, of course, that many wonders in the Bible narrative are not miracles in the strict sense of the definitions which we have proposed in this dis¬ cussion. Yet even though reducible to some form of natural process, it is for the most part a process so sudden and hidden as to be entirely beyond human wisdom and power, unaided by divine intervention. They are, in a word, special providences of so striking a character as to furnish convincing proofs of divine intervention for moral ends. But I would file a caveat against the presumption that because a large area of Bible wonders are non-mirac- ulous in the strict sense of the term, all should be in¬ cluded in the same category. The most dangerous think¬ ing in the world is that which makes a rule estop its ex¬ ceptions. 28 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED Says Mr. Chesterton : “The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is ; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden ; its wildness lies in wait. I give one coarse instance of what I mean. Suppose some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon up the human body; he would at once see that the essential thing about it was that it was duplicate. A man is two men, he on the right exactly resembling him on the left. Having noted that there was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the right and one on the left, he might go farther and still find on each side the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes, twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain. At last he would take it as a law : and then, where he found a heart on one side, would de¬ duce that there was another heart on the other. And just then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong. ... Now, actual insight or inspiration is best tested by whether it guesses these hidden malformations or suprises. If our mathematician from the moon saw the two arms and the two ears, he might deduce the two shoulder-blades and the two halves of the brain, but if he guessed that the man’s heart was in the right place, then I should call him something more than a mathematician. Now, this is exactly the claim which I have since come to propound for Christianity. Not merely that it deduces logical truths, but that when it suddenly becomes illogical, it has found, so to speak, an illogical truth. It not only HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY 29 goes right about things, but it goes wrong, if one may say so, exactly where the things go wrong. Its plan suits the secret irregularities, and expects the unexpected. It is simple about the simple truth; but it is stubborn about the subtle truth. It will admit that a man has two hands, it will not admit the obvious deduction that he has two hearts .... Whenever we feel there is something odd in Christian theology, we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth.” I must therefore protest against the notion that because you have found an easy natural explanation for some Bible wonders you have accounted for them all. There are in the gospels, for instance, roundly speaking, some¬ thing like forty-six events which may be set down as be¬ yond the natural order. The record clearly goes back to the earliest sources of Mark and to the earliest sources of Luke. Attempts to explain away these records upon a natural basis have been pure conjectures. They have not been intellectually honest, but only attempts to read into the narrative something which no plain man would find in it unless he approached it with an a priori prejudice. At least fourteen of these wonders are attested by bodies of men greater or smaller in size. In the brevity of the time which elapsed between the event and the written record, in the character of the witnesses, in their sobriety, and even in their hardness of heart, in the fact that then as now there were critical Sadducees who made these stories run the gauntlet of skepticism from the very be¬ ginning, the testimony crystallizes in a form diametrically opposed to the typical myth. Moreover, these miracles are beautifully consonant with the character of Christ, and in a fine and noble moral 30 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED setting. They are characterized by an almost uncanny self-restraint, most often followed by injunctions of silence. They are never theatrical, never “staged,” but were “surprised” out of the Master by the impulse of His love. The pages of the gospels are crowded with naive, undesigned and indirect reference to these miracles. Four¬ teen times Jesus himself refers to them indirectly. Six times the people refer to them. Four times the priests make reference to them. Fifteen times the evangelists refer to them indirectly. They are a necessity to the explanation of the history of that period. The disciples, overwhelmed in disgrace and shame with the common malefactor’s death of their Lord, are suddenly transformed into unconquerable heroes thrilling with irresistible confidence and joy. A miracle would explain this. Without it we face a hope¬ less enigma. To estimate this evidence we must further consider the sober sincerity of the narrative, utterly im¬ possible either to a forger or a fanatic; the amazing uniqueness of Jesus’ character, as impossible of imagina¬ tion as of imitation ; the history and literature of cen¬ turies past which had related themselves to a great mirac¬ ulous outcome and which would be meaningless if that consummation were false; the later history of the world which the late Senator Cushman K. Davis declared abso¬ lutely demanded a belief in the supreme miracle of the resurrection, or else left the philosophy of the last two thousand years an unexplainable jumble. All these must be evaluated. To some men’s minds they will bulk largely; in others they will seem only mystical moon¬ shine. “The multitude therefore, that stood by, and heard it, said that it had thundered : others said, An angel HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY 31 hath spoken to him.” As two thousand years ago, so to¬ day, materialism will analyze the thunder, and spiritual experience will be tuned to hear the voice. Through it all runs the immense probability that God will reveal Himself in answer to the longings of men. And that probability weighs today as never before. For with all our frivolity and our selfishness and our hardness of heart, men do long for Him in this modern age, and cry, “My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God.” Says Mr. George Bernard Shaw, “The Church has failed infamously, but just at present there are probably more people who feel that in Christ is the only hope of the world than there ever were before in the lifetime of men now living.” And the Christ for whom the world longs is the miraculous Christ, not the pious young Jew, de¬ feated and impotent, whom blind rationalism pictures. If Christ be not risen he is as helpless as all the rest of us. Said the late Franklin K. Lane, that noble-minded states¬ man whose public service embodied Christlike ideals for which he longed pathetically but could never reach in¬ tellectually : “The only miracle that I care about is the resurrection. If we live again, we have reason for living now.” On that great central miracle hang all our social progress and all our hopes of a better civilization. Only the risen Christ can cope with the wrongs and shames of a sunken world. Only the risen Christ can give us cour¬ age to face the unexplored country. “Because I know the spark Of God hath no eclipse, Now Death and I embark And sail into the dark With laughter on our lips.” Ill PRAYER AND EFFICIENCY Text: The supplication of a righteous man availeth much in its working. — James 5:16. The most significant thing about the teachings of Jesus concerning prayer is that He never argued for it, but always assumed it. He never said, “If ye pray,” but rather, “When ye pray.” He never taught that men should pray whether they will or not, but rather that they will pray whether they should or not. He recognized the outreach and the uprush of the soul toward God as an instinct deeper and larger than logic, an instinct so uni¬ versal, so spontaneous, and so compelling that it needed not so much justification as direction. He saw, as Renan put it, that, fundamentally, men are incurably religious, and that no matter how this deep instinct of the human soul may be thwarted, checked, frozen out or fattened out, it can never be entirely destroyed. In sober truth one might paraphrase a favorite epi¬ gram of Mr. Lincoln and say that some men pray always and all men pray some time : or at least that many men pray habitually, most men pray occasionally, and practic¬ ally all men will pray in a pinch. It is related of David Hume that coming home one night he fell into a bog, and entreated an old lady who happened to be passing by to help him out. She had known David all her life, and agreed to assist him upon one condition, namely, that he 32 PRAYER AND EFFICIENCY 33 should say the Lord’s Prayer. The story goes that the celebrated Scotch doubter did repeat the prayer with con¬ siderable unction, whatever may have been the motives back of its use. And there come times in the life of the stoutest atheist, even though he has shouted from the housetops the reckless defiance of Faust, — “Neither scruples nor doubts come now to smite me, Nor hell nor devil can longer affright me,” — when he is impelled by a supreme sense of need and a compelling inner urge to lift his despairing cry to the very God whom he has mocked and flouted. You tell me a man is an atheist, and in reply I ask you, “When?” Do you remember that dramatic passage in Victor Hugo’s story “Ninety-Three,” when the ship was well-nigh wrecked in the storm and the dark by the unloosing of the monster cannon which careened around its deck? And the lieutenant said to the captain, “Chevalier, do you believe in God?” “Yes — no, sometimes.” “During a tempest?” “Yes, and in moments like this.” “God alone can save us from this.” And what the great artist thus depicts, the humblest pastor knows as a fact of commonplace experience. Men who under serene and untroubled skies have vaunted their own self-sufficiency and, in the phrase of Comte, have bowed God from the frontiers of the universe with polite recognition of past favors but as no longer neces¬ sary, come in periods of storm and stress to the place where they must either invite Him back or confront in¬ sanity. “ ‘There is no God,’ the foolish saith, But none, ‘There is no sorrow’; And nature oft the cry of faith, 34 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED In bitter need will borrow. Eyes which the preacher could not school By wayside graves are raised, And lips say, ‘God be pitiful,' Who ne’er said, ‘God be praised !’ ” Now the logic of Jesus is perfectly simple. If this is the great emergency recourse of all men, the business of a wise soul is to become so schooled in its use that when the emergency comes he may know how to get the most out of it. I remember very well how the patient gentleman who taught me to drive an automobile refused to trust me alone in the crowded streets of a great city until I had reached the point where it became instinctive to do the right thing in an emergency. To Jesus, prayer was not a mere pious exercise ; it was an efficient power to be mastered and used. Its mastery required constant practice. Therefore we were to use it habitually. “Pray without ceasing.” While there were social forms of prayer, fundamentally it was an individual communion between the soul and God, and we must therefore ac¬ custom ourselves to privacy in praying. “Enter into thine inner chamber.” It is an infinitely delicate act and must not be distracted. Therefore we must study the art of detachment. “Shut the door behind thee.” Not any material door necessarily. To “shut the door” means developing the capacity to bar out that which might dis¬ tract our communion with God. Witness the despairing cry of Hamlet’s uncle: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below; W ords without thoughts never to heaven go.” Then we are to study concentration in prayer. “Pray to thy Father who is in secret.” The most difficult and yet PRAYER AND EFFICIENCY 35 the most blessed practice imaginable is to develop an abil¬ ity for communion with an invisible friend and helper, learning to say, “whom not having seen ye love.” More¬ over, Jesus at a single stroke clears away much popular fallacy about unanswered prayer, for he promises not so much answer as “recompense.” “Thy Father who seeth in secret shall recompense thee.” Much of our difficulty about unanswered prayer comes through our expectation of an outcome in the exact and concrete terms of our ask¬ ing. What is really promised may not at all be in the exact and concrete terms of the asking, but in a spiritual equivalent, a compensation. Paul prayed that his thorn in the flesh might be removed, and his prayer was answered by recompense. “My grace is sufficient for thee.” This is not to say that prayers are never answered in the con¬ crete terms of the asking. But it is to say that it would be folly to limit our thought of the efficiency of prayer to these concrete answers. They are only the smallest segment of the great results that follow on the trained use of this staggering spiritual power. It brings results exceeding abundantly above all that we are able to ask or even to think. “The supplication of a righteous man availeth much in its working.” And a free paraphrase might still further bring out the full strength of the orig¬ inal — “The prayer of a righteous man is exceedingly powerful in its efficiency.” Well, what does it accomplish ? Let us be concrete and let us be frank. First of all, undoubtedly prayer does something in us. Men of all shades of belief and unbelief have admitted this. Unbelievers have called it self-hypnotism, and to some believers it represents the highest and truest and 36 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED perhaps the only efficient result of prayer. But however we view it, the fact remains certain that the habit of fel¬ lowship with God will bring poise and power into any life. So assured has this become that great physicians have taken scientific account of it in their dealing with patients. It is one of the pearls of truth that one might dig up in that very muddy theological oyster bed which we call Christian Science. Association does beget as¬ similation. We do grow like that which we study, and like those with whom we have fellowship. “We all with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit/' However you account for it, there are men and women who go about among their fellow men with faces shining like that of Moses when he came down from the mountain, and shining for the same reason. But is this all? Have we exhausted the efficiency of a righteous man’s supplication by pointing out the great beautiful truths, which we shall all recognize, of the transformation wrought in his own inner life ? There are many good Christian men and women who believe this is all, or who at least believe that this is sufficient. They think of prayer as the rope which connects the great ocean liner with the little rowboat. The passengers in the rowboat, by pulling on that rope, cannot budge the liner, but can bring themselves nearer to it. Does prayer, in a word, produce anything outside of ourselves which would not otherwise have been there? Let me record my earnest personal conviction that prayer does something for us as well as something in us. I know men have such an idea of the majesty of PRAYER AND EFFICIENCY 37 God and of the uniformity of nature that in these days it is rather repellent to us to suppose that the Almighty should be bothered with trifles, or that nature’s majestic routine should be in any wise influenced by the desires of one of God’s humble children. And we may freely admit the dignity and majesty of that great conception which science has taught us of the uniformity of nature. But ultimately the basis of all such uniformity is in the will of God. And prayer as a real cause bringing real results is no more a violation of cosmic law than the use of any other means to an end. It is only our poor human idea of greatness which impels us to suppose that because God is so great He cannot be concerned by small things. The world of the microscope reveals the same precise intelligence as the world of the telescope. Elec¬ trons swing as accurately as fixed stars. God is in¬ finite in minuteness as well as in vastness. He heeds the sparrow’s fall, and the hairs of our heads are numbered. There was once a very young minister who spoke on prayer at a certain conference of religious workers. And he said, “It would be a very vulgar idea to suppose that a hungry man should pray and then go out to find a leg of mutton hanging by the back door.” Perhaps the vulgarity of that conception of prayer would depend a good deal on how hungry the man was. You will remember how Jesus looked out over a multitude; and that is, as you know, a very “vulgar” sight. The Latin vulgus which gives us our English word has its origin from just that kind of vision. Jesus looked out over that crowd and saw that they were hungry; and he did not think it a trifle, beneath His dignity, to feed them. Mind you, this is not to say that always, or perhaps 38 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED often, do these concrete answers to prayer come. It would be very disastrous to our spiritual lives if concrete answers to prayer became immediate, habitual, and auto¬ matic. We would soon begin to pray on the purely com¬ mercial basis, subject to the sneer of Satan in the drama of Job, “Doth Job serve God for nought?” It would not do to let the morning prayer take the place of the order to the butcher. But on the other hand it would be equally disastrous if no concrete answer ever came to the prayers of God’s people. That would mean despair. And if someone says that in a world of uniformity no concrete answer to prayer could be given without violating the plan of God and the uniformity of nature, I have only to reply that everything will depend upon whether you think of this world as mechanical or spiritual. If it be a mere mechanical uniformity then you are right. But if the supreme power in this universe is the power of mind, then prayer, which is only the unloosing of spiritual energy, takes its place along with any other form of energy. In that light it would be as futile and foolish to deprecate prayer as an interference with the uniformity of law as it would be to deprecate the planting of our crops, the light¬ ing of a fire in the grate, or the unloosing of the electric energy that moves the trolley car or lights the building. Prayer is only a great spiritual cause which we can use, if we will, to produce results. If anyone asks proof of this, let me say in all frankness that there are no final proofs. To an evil and adulterous generation shall no sign be given. For no sign would convince such a generation. There is no compelling and universal argument which will constrain such a man to believe. The great things by which we live, the things PRAYER AND EFFICIENCY 39 which are worth while, are not compulsory in an intel¬ lectual sense. When Professor Tyndall proposed that one ward of a hospital should be prayed for and another should not be prayed for, and science should check up on the results, he was making a proposition utterly in¬ consistent with and abhorrent to the whole spirit of Christianity. This is not a matter of scientific proofs, but of inner experience. Let me only express my per¬ sonal conviction that there are such responses to prayer, so concrete, so definite, that no sane man could possibly attribute them to mere coincidence. xAgain and again it seemed as though the prayer went unanswered ; though there was an answer higher and nobler than we knew. But here and there, standing out sharp and clean-cut, like bold mountain peaks of memory, I see occurrences so definitely related to prayer as a cause, that to break that relationship would be to me as though we denied the re¬ lation between the sowing and the reaping of a crop. “God answers prayer. Sometimes when hearts are weak He gives the very gifts believers seek; But often faith must find a deeper rest, And trust His silence when he does not speak, Since he whose name is Love will do the best : Stars may burn out, nor mountain walls endure, But God is true, His promises are sure To all who seek.” Is this all? Have we even now exhausted the fullness of prayer’s efficiency? Has this great energy of which James speaks reached its ultimate limit? Jesus taught us that there was a farther step. Prayer not only does some¬ thing in us and something for us, but something through tis for others. This is the very background of these words 40 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED of James. It is the efficiency of prayer for concrete re¬ sults in the lives of others which is here urged. Jesus taught us the same great lesson in His story of the mid¬ night visitor coming unexpectedly to the poor man’s home. And that host, made desperate by his own need and by the oriental laws of hospitality, goes up to his rich neigh¬ bor’s, rouses him out of his sleep, and addresses him as “Friend,” saying, “Friend, lend me three loaves: for a friend of mine is come to me from a journey and I have nothing to set before him.” There was Jesus’ picture of what we call intercessory prayer. A man pleading his friendship with his neighbor, and his friendship with a guest, to establish a relation between the two so that his rich neighbor might supply food to his guest. The basis of intercessory prayer must be in the fact that we are friends of God and friends to those for whom we pray. And the conception of our text is that this relationship in prayer for others is the basis of genuine power. It is not simply laying hold on God’s powrer for our friends. It is unloosing a power that God can use for them. When some man comes to you in the midnight of doubt or need or sorrow, and you feel your own helplessness to do any¬ thing for him, Jesus said in substance, “There is supreme power, if you can lay hold of God as your friend, to help your neighbor who is also your friend.” And in this glorious conception of powrer unloosed for the service of others, time and space play little part. If we have learned anything out of phenomena like that of the radio and the amazing revelation of hidden powers in the ether, we have learned enough to estop all doubt that the invisible energy of a human soul in fellowship with God may flash around the world to bring help and uplift PRAYER AND EFFICIENCY 4i to those we love. Staggering to believe, but not more staggering than the marvels of modern science which have become accepted commonplaces of everyday life! Un¬ limited time could be taken in the recounting of instance after instance where our plain common sense would tes¬ tify to a definite relation between intercessory prayer and concrete results that girdled the globe. I shall not do so, because in the last analysis our faith in this power must be founded upon experience and not upon argument. The message will have fulfilled its hoped-for purpose if only we are stimulated to think of prayer, not as a weak and vapid pious exercise, but if rightly used, as a source of contact with the greatest energy known to the human soul — the energy of that soul itself touched and quickened by the divine energy of the Father of spirits. Surely if there are those who look upon prayer as something weak and effeminate, only a little glimpse of history should suffice. Washington at Valley Forge! Abraham Lincoln pacing to and fro through the long night after Chancel- lorsville ! These were great high priests of our national history, who bore our sins and our needs at the throne of Almighty God and who, in the tremendous energy of intercessory prayer, carried us safely through the supreme crises of our history. Chinese Gordon, who never feared the face of man, wrestling in prevailing prayer before his God ! Stonewall Jackson, of whom it was said that God Almighty took him because that mistaken but mighty man of prayer was a real spiritual obstacle in the way of saving the Union ! You remember how the poet soldier of the Confederate Army described Jackson at prayer: 4 2 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED “Silence ! Ground arms ! Kneel all ! Caps off ! Old Massa’s going to pray ! Strangle the fool that dares to scoff ! Attention ! — It’s his way, Appealing from his native sod, In forma pauperis, to God : ‘Lay bare Thine arm ! Stretch forth Thy rod ! Amen!’ — That’s Stonewall’s Way.” We think of General Foch, who every day went into a little chapel for prayer before he began its stern military routine. We call to mind Lord Kitchener, who used to go around the corner every noon and kneel for a few moments in a little church, that there he might find strength to carry the terrible burdens of the World War. They tell us that when the German Army, triumphantly sweeping down toward Paris, was first stopped and rolled back at the Marne, the message announcing their defeat came to the war office when only Lord Kitchener and Lord Roberts were present. The former read the tele¬ gram, and with that usually stern, impassive face working with emotion, he handed it to his colleague; and Lord Roberts said, “I can’t understand this, I can’t account for it.” And Lord Kitchener replied, “Somebody has been praying.” A recent conference of big business men in a Canadian city discussed the problem of power throughout that great country. They are to develop and distribute the unused water power of her magnificent rivers and her majestic falls. For they said, “The demand for power is far in excess of the supply.” So with the Church of God and with our lives. We need great leaders, we need great preachers, we need big finances, we need strong organiza- PRAYER AND EFFICIENCY 43 tion. But over all and above all we need the thing which the disciples sought when in days gone by they came humbly to the Master to say, “Lord, teach us to pray.” The demands upon us call for power far in excess of our present supply. And the power is there. Only we have failed to utilize and develop our resources. Mr. Chauncey Depew in his autobiography relates the story of how lov¬ ing hands bore murdered Lincoln’s body to its final rest¬ ing place. He was on the funeral train as it passed slowly, through the melancholy night, from Albany to Buffalo. Along practically every mile of the track, men, women and children were gathered in all night vigil. And the dead chief was borne through one continuous prayer meeting from the beginning to the end of the journey. Some day our greater Chieftain, not dead but alive for evermore, will move not toward the tomb but toward His World Throne. And He, too, will move stately and victorious, upborne by the love and devotion of the count¬ less hosts who love Him and who have learned to pray. IV. THE FORGOTTEN SECRET OF ZEST Text: Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? — Matthew 5 :13 The tragedy of our modern world is not its lack of en¬ joyments but its lack of enjoyment. Most of us have the raw material of gladness without the spirit or ability to develop the finished product. The irritatingly optimistic Pollyanna irks us by insistence on our being happy at the expense of our intelligence. But many intelligent people insist upon being miserable at the expense of everyone around them. It would be startling and dis¬ heartening if we came to realize how many men and women there are of middle age and beyond, in fairly com¬ fortable circumstances, to whom existence means nothing more than just going on; wondering betimes whether there is much use in going on. A good many years ago I came across a beautiful little waltz, instinct with the joy of living, written by the great Russian, Tschaikowsky. It was the exuberance of the man’s youth and health and strength breaking out into irresistible song. In later years I have known what it was to have the very heart strings torn under the spell of his immortal swan song, the “Pathetic Symphony,’’ called by many the “Suicide Svmphony” because of its intense and morbid sadness. 44 THE FORGOTTEN SECRET OF ZEST 45 And in the second movement I seemed to hear this great musician trying to sing again the jaunty little waltz song of his youth. The same general movement — something of the same melody — but this time the waltz will not go. It is halting, broken, irregular, wild, reckless, elfin-like — in¬ finitely more sad than if he had not tried to be gay. What a symbol of our lives ! Can there be anything more pathetic than the spectacle of a man in whom the joy of living has long since flickered out, trying to sing again the songs of his youth ? We are so often deceived by mere outward appearances. Because this age has made so much of the machinery of enjoyment, we think it must be a joyful age. We forget that men may make much of the machinery of enjoyment in a futile attempt to stimulate an atrophied capacity of soul. If we have the inner joy of living we do not need the machinery. The tragedy of the world is not the ab¬ sence of beauty, of joy, of humor, but the absence of zest to realize them and to respond to them. If we have no living inner joy then we are compelled to increase the outer stimulus. If we have that spontaneous wellspring within, little stimulus is needed. Wordsworth, awakened by the meanest flower that blows, and roused to thoughts that lie too deep for tears ; Smeathem, finding inexhaust¬ ible beauties in his own back yard; Thoreau, thrilling to the animate beauty of the woods ; Tennyson, peering into the lily-studded brook, crying, “What an imagination God has !”, Walt Whitman, brushing shoulders with the com¬ mon life of the common men whom he loved, and rejoic¬ ing to be such an “incredible god” in a world of miracles ; — these had no need of moving picture melodrama, of luxuriant Roman feast, or of sensuous oriental dances, to 4 6 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED galvanize the jaded senses into a forced and pitiful simu¬ lation of pleasure. There never were more varied forms of entertainment than we have today. But these are not evidences of inner enjoyment. They are rather evidences of inner monotony. We must have something fresh in amusements because we have nothing fresh in our inner lives. We must stimulate our appetities since they have grown jaundiced and jaded. Hence the feverish search for new thrills in amuse¬ ment. Certain daring forms of modern dancing, for in¬ stance, by their very names suggestive of animal origin and animal appeal, are constantly changing. Every season some new form of sensual contortion must be de¬ vised, if possible a trifle more risque than the last. This indicates not so much enjoyment as a desperate effort to stimulate outworn sensibilities. Many people exercise their activities in this direction, not so much for the love of the thing itself, as for a temporary means of escape from a life that has grown gray and dreary. It is quite certain that often men who drink do so to escape mo¬ notony, and that drug addicts are seeking in the poppy garden of opiates an artificial zest in living because the natural zest of life has long since gone. Sometimes I seem to see our vast amusement buildings erected as monuments to human ennui and universal world weari¬ ness. The millions of dollars invested in these enterprises are a golden tribute to the blase gods of gloom and mo¬ notony. Babylon, Rome, or Broadway — the story is always the same. And Matthew Arnold told it: THE FORGOTTEN SECRET OF ZEST 47 “On that hard Pagan world disgust And secret loathing fell. Deep weariness and sated lust Made human life a hell. “In his cool hall, with haggard eyes, The Roman noble lay; He drove abroad, in furious guise, Along the Appian Way. “He made a feast, drank fierce and fast, And crown’d his hair with flowers — No easier nor no quicker pass’d The impracticable hours.” And now we are ready for our message: “Ye are the salt of the earth/’ That is Jesus’ wonderful pungent figure by which at a single touch He unfolded a supreme phase of Christian life. What is the business of salt? To furnish zest. Without it the things we eat would be stale and flat. And these men had the salt, the zest of life. They had found it in Christ and in the vision and insight which they had caught from Him. He had given them faith and hope and love. In him they had become little children. And the supreme characteristic of a little child is that very zest of life which we envy but cannot imitate. The imperative formula of the little baby is, “Do it again,” long after the exercise has grown weary to the adult — because the baby has the zest which we have lost. A baby is constantly encoring what seems to us a very dull performance. He wants the same thing over, while we — God help us — grown outworn and weary, are constantly demanding something new. In this sense children are ingrained conservatives. Paul called the Deity “the happy God.” He never grows tired or outworn. He repeats 48 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED Himself but never wearies. Mr. Chesterton has suggested that through endless routine of nature, through the “in¬ tricate and bright device of days and seasons” and cen¬ turies, God is continually saying, “Do it again” — the un¬ wearied Author of Life is ever encoring His own per¬ formance. He looks on His own work and sees that it is very good. The indwelling life of God, then, is the true secret of zest. But these words indicate that men do try to find that secret in ways that are false and illusory. There is a salt that has lost its savor. There is a pitiful imitation of joy which ends in darkness. Nothing but the indwell¬ ing life of God will do the work. All other stimuli are salt that has lost its savor and that is good for nothing but to be cast out and trodden under foot of men. The stimulus that comes from without, from environment, from the trappings and appurtenances of pleasure, ends where that royal experimenter of the Old Testament ended, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” It ends with the melancholy of Hamlet: “I have of late — but where¬ fore I know not — lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises ; and indeed it goes so heavily with my dis¬ position that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.” But when the thrilling life of the happy God abides in a man all ennui vanishes. A new flavor, a salty zest, is found in each commonplace experience. The new man in Christ looks out with fresh eyes on a new world. All THE FORGOTTEN SECRET OF ZEST 49 things are become wonderful to him. When Saint Francis of Assisi had left his wealthy cultured home, had abandoned his aristocratic friends, had said goodbye to the things men call enjoyment, to wine and dancing and roistering and luxuriant feasts ; had gone out without a penny in his pocket, without a roof over his head, or a square foot of land upon the earth that he could call his own ; had gone out as the brother of the poor, a voluntary beggar, to share with his Lord the burden of the cross ; he could ascend to one of his favorite mountain haunts and spend a week there upon those bleak cliffs, absolutely alone, and yet scarcely able to sleep for the thrilling hap¬ piness which overflowed every moment, radiant and splendid, tingling through every fiber of his being. For Christ teaches us to know the world and our fellow men over against a personal background with a spiritual meaning and a joyful outcome. We are not the sport of blind chance, the creatures of hard mechanism. Back of us is a great, wise plan. All about us the currents of a steady progress toward a sublime goal — an increasing purpose running through the ages. And in front of us a destiny of unimaginable splendor and victory. We are characters of a thrilling drama, and the universe is our gorgeous stage setting. Nor is a mere intellectual in¬ terest in life our chief stimulus. We learn to love men and to love the world for the sake of men. This love trans¬ forms and transfigures the earth for the most stolid man who walks upon it. For him the world has new mean¬ ings ; for him nature becomes God’s unfolding, and all about him is the palpitating interest of God’s handiwork. For him the sky is not brass, but blue and tender with the love of God. For him the woods and fields become 50 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED the tracery of a Father’s hand. For him a “livelier iris changes on the burnish’d dove.” For him human life becomes an eternal drama and not the mere working of a chemical formula. For him history is a thrilling romance, wonderful in its beginnings, marvelous in its progress. And as he looks forward he finds a breathless interest in its outcome. No novel reader ever waited with greater eagerness for the denouement of a thrilling plot than the child of God knows as he looks out toward the future and cries, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” Now you can see how Christianity dispenses with some forms of amusement, not so much because it fights them as because it supersedes them. They are dropped as the child drops the kindergarten toys for the pleasures of the older years. We do not need them and we have lost our taste for them. I have played a good many games in my time, and I say to you today in all sincerity that there is absolutely no sport with half so thrilling an interest as the game of great world conquest for Jesus Christ. The only game that keeps you young has an eternal outcome. In all others death, the great umpire, calls the game on account of darkness. The curious thing about it is that pastimes which have no eternal aim make people old when they are young. The fun and zest that come to men in the great game of Christian service make people young when they are old. Men spoke pathetically of poor “old” Matthewson, who, after a long career on the baseball diamond, went staggering on toward the melancholy burdens of age and retirement at thirty-five. A few years ago I stood on the platform with a minister of the gospel and was uplifted while he prayed one of the sweetest, freshest, most childlike prayers I ever heard. It was THE FORGOTTEN SECRET OF ZEST 5i radiant with optimism, glowing with vigor, splendid in courage. The man had just passed his ninety-fifth birth¬ day. Lord Byron as a young man, with wealth and social position and genius and fame, sang: “My days are in the yellow leaf ; The flowers and frnits of Love are gone; The worm, the canker, and the grief Are mine alone !” But here is an old man, sick, imprisoned, ready to die, who can cry : “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith : henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give to me at that day.” Here is the true Christian zest of life. Here is robust, full-throated optimism to which death itself is a negligible incident of a larger life. “Grow old along with me ! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made: Our times are in his hand Who saith, ‘A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid !’ ” Now not only does the Christian have this zest of living, but he gives it. He is the salt of the earth. There is somehow a very foolish idea that the mission of Chris¬ tianity is to make bright things dull. On the contrary, I cannot think of how dull a place this world would have been if Christianity had not come into it. Do you not know, does not everybody know that when Jesus Christ came into this world both Rome and Greece were dying of 52 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED ennui ? But the apostles went out into that blase, weary world like fresh, eager children, thrilling with joy and interest and delight, looking upward and not down, look¬ ing forward and not back ; and with them came a new zest, even to men who were not Christians. Have you ever realized that the problems that interest us most have been raised by Christianity? There is a merry little jest about theology being a dull topic. Now they do not know it, but there are more people interested in theology than in any other subject. The real interest which most men have in life rests on the moral interpretation of it. If there were no questions of right and wrong involved, there would be no particular interest in the late war, for there would be nothing to debate about ; it would all reduce to a mathematical formula as bloodless as a chess game. The interest we have in all problems about women has been put into modern life by Christianity. Our great modern social questions have been given to us by Chris¬ tianity. There are many today not professedly Christian who are turning to social service as a panacea for the weariness and monotony of living, who yet do not realize that Christianity has furnished this zest, has given them the salt of the earth to rescue their lives from utter stale¬ ness. There is another phase to the matter. Salt is more than an agent to give zest. It preserves from decay. It is everywhere and always the enemy of putrefaction. How fitting a symbol of the life of God. It is that mysterious life in the body which arrests the process of decay that would otherwise disintegrate the organism. And it is the life of God in civilization which does the same thing. Sodom could have been saved if it had had enough of the THE FORGOTTEN SECRET OF ZEST 53 vital life of God in it. But what little salt there was had lost its savor, and the doom fell. The great question which all thoughtful men are asking today is whether Christianity has retained enough vital power to save the world from decay and disaster. For whether men believe its doctrines or not, all unite in the confession that if the faith of Christ cannot save the world nothing can. And it preserves because it maintains the enthusiasm, the zeal and zest, for great ideals, with¬ out which the hope of the world is gone. This was the word of Jesus to his Church at Ephesus, “I know thy works, and thy toil and patience .... But I have this against thee, that thou didst leave thy first love.” The Church was ready to die when the zest had gone out. And the most alarming thing about these days in which we live is that a pall of cynicism seems to have settled down on this country after the fine glory of the zeal and en¬ thusiasm which carried us through the war. We have lost our early love, and without it we die. Men and women who profess the name of Christ are the salt of this weary, cynical, blase post-war period in which we live. The phrases of selfish reaction are in the air. “Everybody is getting his, and I will get mine.” Over many a life is written the sinister motto of the old Scotch house of Teviotdale, “Thou shalt want ere I want.” Internationally we bluntly said to the world through our official representative in the great Anglo-Saxon empire across the sea, “We fought for ourselves only; for our¬ selves first, last, and always.” We stand broadly in the councils of the nations as ready to participate far enough to care for our rights, but no farther. Our mission is to recreate the zest for the unselfish ideals without which we 54 THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED would soon be on the road toward the doom of Prussia. Some of us may already have felt the breath of this en¬ ervating world weariness, and must find a more solid basis of happiness than any pursuit of pleasure can bring. The only permanent zest that life can give is in the will yielded to God and the body and mind dedicated to Him. The biggest, best game ever played is before us. Let us play it for Him. If we do this honestly, two things can be promised absolutely. For one thing we shall find for ourselves permanent joy in living. And then we shall bring the saving salt, the true zest of life, to the world about us. Have you forgotten how little Pippa, in Browning’s poem, had caught this secret joy that comes with the indwelling life of God? Poor and ignorant, a mill girl, without prestige or social standing or influence, she went out into the world with a song in her heart: “The year’s at the spring And day’s at the morn; Morning’s at seven; The hillside’s dew-pearled; The lark’s on the wing; The snail’s on the thorn : God’s in His heaven — All’s right with the world !” And that song of the little mill girl “invaded the hall of the sensualist, it smote upon the ears of one who had been betrayed to the life of ignoble ease, it stole upon one who had been entangled in ways of treachery and dis¬ honor,” it pealed in the ears of men and women who, without God and without hope in the world, were going down the easy descent into the abyss. And wherever she went, men and women rose with their faces toward the THE FORGOTTEN SECRET OF ZEST 55 sky, and with new life purpose, started once more toward the celestial city. Something like that I think Jesus must have meant when He said, “Ye are the salt of the earth.” Not a little section of it, but the whole earth. Weary, sin- sick multitudes across the seas are waiting for our hope, our courage, our love. We must give them the incentive that fights battles and wins victories. An eye witness told me the story of that fateful day when it looked as though the Germans would break the allied line at Chateau Thierry. The French soldiers were despondent, despairing. The arrogant Prussian officers had gathered in triumph to see the German army sweep through that gateway, after that on to Paris, roll back the allied lines, crush England, and dictate terms of peace to the world ! Then, in the very hour of despair, men caught the sound of distant music. By and by the gleam of rifles. The little band of Americans was marching to the front, singing as they went : “Over there — over there — Send the word, send the word over there — That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming, The drums rum-tumming everywhere — So prepare, say a pray’r — Send the word, send the word to beware — We’ll be over, we’re coming over, And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there !” And the tide of battle turned. The gateway to Paris was closed. Civilization was saved from the Prussian menace. But once again the world is well-nigh in despair. The enemy is coming in like a flood. Cynicism, selfishness, pessimism, suspicion, hatred — all the hell brood of human passions are threatening the gateways to the city of God. THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED 56 Oh, for the enthusiasm, the glorious morale, of those American lads! Men and women are waiting for our faith, our hope, our courage, our unselfishness, our love. And we must carry it to the lands across the seas. We dare not fold our hands while the world burns. Ring it again, soldiers of the Cross ! “We’ll be over, we’re coming over, And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there.” V. HEAVEN IN THE MAKING Text: And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends by means of the mammon of unrighteousness ; that, when it shall fail, they may receive you into the eternal tabernacles.” — Luke 16 :9 Only a few years ago the air was full of voices which cried that the modern man is no longer interested in personal immortality. Dreams of blessed isles of the just, of golden streets and jeweled gates, were outworn. The day had gone by, they said, when the average listener thrilled to vague and mystical pictures of future beatitude. The practical demands of the living present were the heart of the “New Gospel.” With ceaseless