LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 
 PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 
 the Estate of 
 
 Finley DuBois Jenkins 
 
 tr 
 
 
 BV 660 .W4 
 
 
 
 Wishart, Charles Frederick 
 
 
 
 1870-1960. 
 
 
 
 The range finders 
 
 
The 
 
 vA 
 
 Range Finders 
 
 a message to the ministry 
 by/ 
 
 CHARLES FREDERICK WISHART, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 President of The College of Wooster 
 
 With an Introduction by 
 
 EDGAR P. HILL, D.D.,LL.D., 
 
 General Secretary of the 
 Presbyterian General Board of Education 
 
 Philadelphia 
 The Westminster Press 
 
 IQ2I 
 
Copyright, 1921, by 
 F, M. Braselman 
 
To 
 
 My Father 
 WILLIAM WISHART 
 
 Aly Brothers 
 
 WILLIAM IRVINE WISHART 
 
 JOHN ELLIOTT WISHART 
 
 My Grandfather 
 SAMUEL IRVINE 
 
 My •Uncle 
 SAMUEL GLASGOW IRVINE 
 
 My Cousins 
 
 SAMUEL ELLIOTT IRVINE 
 
 WILLIAM WISHART WILLIS 
 
 JOHN MILLER WISHART 
 
 My Nephew 
 WILLIAM LIGGLIT WISHART 
 
 All mitiisters of God herr or beyond the veil 
 
 I dedicate this little volume 
 
Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. The Background .... 13 
 
 II. The Supreme Appeal ... 21 
 
 III. The Supreme Fraternity . 29 
 
 IV. The Gospel of Labor ... 39 
 V. The Range Finders .... 49 
 
 VI. The Inner Chamber ... 57 
 
 VII. Crosses and Compensations . . 67 
 
 VIII. The Trumpet Call .... 81 
 
Introduction 
 
 Think of Isaiah advising lads to decline the 
 prophetic office because of the smallness of the 
 pay! Imagine Paul suggesting that young 
 Timothy give up the work because congregations 
 are unappreciative, or a Spurgeon leaving his 
 pulpit to sell bonds! It is unthinkable. Those 
 men were real prophets of God. They were under 
 divine compulsion. ''Woe is unto me, if I preach 
 not" was the cry of every one of them. They did 
 not belong to a profession with certain standards 
 of dignity to maintain, and with specified remun- 
 eration for service. They were the called of the 
 Lord, who went to the day's task as they began 
 their life work, by seeking the counsel of him who 
 is invisible. 
 
 Preaching is always in danger of becoming petty, 
 for the reason that it is so easy when thinking of 
 reasons and rewards to confuse the adventitious 
 with the essential, to mistake secondary things 
 for things fundamental. To young theological 
 students the sermon seems all important. The 
 
 7 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 discourses of great preachers are analyzed and 
 copied as if when homiletical skill had been at- 
 tained a great preacher would necessarily result, 
 unmindful of the truth so startlingly expressed 
 by Augustus Hare that "In preaching, the thing 
 of least consequence is the sermon." Some 
 regard fitting gestures and a trained voice as 
 prime requisites of success in the pulpit, attach- 
 ing greater importance to a course of instruction 
 in elocution than familiarity with the Word of 
 God or the closet of prayer. No orator, popularly 
 speaking, was that little, weak-eyed Jew of 
 Tarsus. But what a preacher he was! With 
 unerring insight Phillips Brooks was distinguish- 
 ing between the vital and the casual in preaching, 
 when he said: "It is so easy to be a John the 
 Baptist as far as the desert and cameFs hair and 
 locusts and wild honey go. But the devoted heart 
 to speak from and the fiery words to speak are 
 other things." 
 
 A rare privilege is granted when a man of power 
 consents to reveal the sources of his strength. 
 President Wishart, himself so splendid an ex- 
 emplar of his own ideals, gets back to funda- 
 mentals in his explanation of the place of the 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 preacher in modern life. He knows how to speak 
 for God, other preachers delighting to sit at his 
 feet and learn. From a large and varied store- 
 house of information and after a long and valuable 
 experience as preacher, teacher of preachers, and 
 college president, he is qualified to lead his readers 
 to the sources of power. The title of his book, 
 'The Range Finders, '* is a figure of speech that in 
 itself is of far-reaching significance. In the Great 
 War among the choicest, most daring, most 
 patriotic of our brave lads were those who were 
 eager to enlist in the air service. The danger of 
 it only fascinated them the more. The pay was 
 altogether inconsequential. The opportunity to 
 do a big thing for country and humanity was the 
 determining factor. Far up in the sky, apparently 
 apart from the roar of guns and the dash of troops, 
 the range finders are indeed the eyes of the army 
 whose business it is to watch, to locate the 
 enemies' forces and movements, to indicate dis- 
 tances, and report the tides of battle. The 
 preacher is a range finder. In a sense he must 
 detach himself from the conflicts of the mart and 
 halls of legislation. But only in a sense, since he 
 is a vital factor in the fight. It is for him to ob- 
 
10 INTRODUCTION 
 
 serve, to detect the danger spots, to report, and to 
 counsel. No place in the battle plan is more 
 fraught with danger and none is of greater 
 strategic importance. In these days of world- 
 wide peril and bewilderment there is urgent need 
 of more range finders passionately devoted to the 
 Lord's cause, skillful and unafraid. 
 
 Edgar P. Hill 
 
THE BACKGROUND 
 
A mighty fortress is our God 
 A bulwark never failing; 
 Our Helper he amid the flood 
 Of mortal ills prevailing: 
 For still our ancient foe 
 Doth seek to work us woe; 
 His craft and power are great, 
 And, armed with cruel hate, 
 On earth is not his equal. 
 
 Did we in our own strength confide, 
 Our striving would be losing; 
 Were not the right man on our side, 
 The man of God's own choosing: 
 Dost ask who that may be? 
 Christ Jesus, it is he; 
 Lord Sabaoth his name, 
 From age to age the same. 
 And he must win the battle. 
 
 And though this world, with devils filled, 
 
 Should threaten to undo us; 
 
 We will not fear, for God hath willed 
 
 His truth to triumph through us: 
 
 The Prince of darkness grim — 
 
 We tremble not for him; 
 
 His rage we can endure. 
 
 For lo! his doom is sure. 
 
 One little word shall fell him. 
 
 That word above all earthly powers, 
 No thanks to them, abideth; 
 The Spirit and the gifts are ours 
 Through him who with us sideth: 
 Let goods and kindred go. 
 This mortal life also; 
 The body they may kill: 
 God's truth abideth still, 
 His Kingdom is forever. 
 
 Martin Luther 
 
I 
 
 The Background 
 
 "I would be a big man if I would be on the job, 
 Mr. President." So spoke an eager and impor- 
 tunate German butcher from the city of Chicago, 
 whose friends, as ignorant as himself, had per- 
 suaded him to apply for a post in the diplomatic 
 service. The gentle McKinley, always suave and 
 kind, had intimated that the applicant was 
 scarcely ambassador size. But the undaunted 
 seeker after great things replied with these words, 
 which, though they did not secure an office, ex- 
 pressed in homely form a living truth. It takes 
 great tasks to make great men. 
 
 I am persuaded that the one factor which 
 dwarfs a minister more than any other is his 
 failure to realize the breadth and size and sweep 
 of his task. William Carey wrote to a friend con- 
 cerning his son who had taken a diplomatic post, 
 that he had "shriveled up into an ambassador." 
 If a minister has but caught the vision of his great 
 office as an ambassador of the King of kings the 
 
 13 
 
14 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 greatest posts of earthly distinction will seem poor 
 and mean. 
 
 Consider the breadth of his background. See 
 his work over against the sweep of the past. 
 There are those who indict the past wholesale, 
 and find their hope of future progress in complete 
 divorce from it. But we cannot indict the past 
 without at the same time indicting ourselves, 
 because we are the products of the past. If, then, 
 you bring a railing, wholesale accusation against 
 all the thought and thinkers of the days gone by, 
 you have cut the ground from underneath your 
 own position, and have vitiated your own judg- 
 ment by the repudiation of the very sources out 
 of which your own thinking had its beginnings. 
 No, it is worth while for us to get an estimate of 
 the minister's task in the light of the days gone 
 by. 
 
 Look at the heritage of the Christian minister. 
 Scan the family line of the sons of the Spirit. 
 There are those who live on their family line. 
 There are others who try to live up to it. And 
 there are perhaps those who strive to live it 
 down. Every preacher who looks back over his 
 family line in the glorious record of the prophets 
 
THE BACKGROUND 15 
 
 views an inheritance which he dare not live on, 
 which he need not live down, and which, if he 
 could but live up to it, would incomparably 
 broaden the range of his service. 
 
 In the old prophets we find men who did their 
 work with a serene and unconquerable confidence 
 that God was back of them. They were not 
 always great men, nor were they even always men 
 of great faith. But they were men of at least a 
 little faith in the great God. Here was Moses, 
 one of the first great preachers, receiving his 
 commission and shrinking from it, crying "Who 
 am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh?" But 
 God gave him the true angle for every preacher's 
 attitude toward duty when he replied in sub- 
 stance, "Moses, the question is not who you 
 are, but who I am." And then he gave him 
 the warrant of the ineffable name, "I am that 
 I am." 
 
 No matter who Moses was, back of him was 
 the self-existent, the independent, uncaused, first 
 Cause. When Beethoven learned that Napoleon 
 had made himself dictator of France he tore the 
 dedication sheets of his "Eroica Symphony" into 
 fragments, cast them on the ground, stamped 
 
16 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 upon them, and exclaimed, ''Can it be that he, 
 too, is only a common man?" But the old 
 prophets did not dedicate their work to any man. 
 God was their Hero. They spoke of him and for 
 him. Fearless and valiant, they stood up from 
 generation to generation witnessing for God 
 whether men did hear or whether they did 
 forbear. 
 
 So they were called prophets, literally "the 
 mouths of God." And their mission can only be 
 understood against a background of God's definite 
 covenant with a nation and with themselves. 
 So close is the union between Jehovah and his 
 prophets that the messenger not infrequently 
 loses himself in his message and utters God's 
 words in the first person singular — and this quite 
 naively and naturally, as if the personal ego were 
 for the time absorbed in a higher consciousness — 
 his soul becomes the meeting place where God 
 speaks to Israel. Isaiah hears the thrilling call 
 of his God, in the midst of a great national crisis, 
 saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for 
 us?" and, surrendering himself to God, receives his 
 commission by the authority of his master, "Go, 
 and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but under- 
 
THE BACKGROUND 17 
 
 stand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not." 
 Amos, the farmer boy and herdsman and fruit 
 gatherer, says, "Jehovah said unto me, Go, 
 prophesy unto my people Israel." Ezekiel hears 
 that voice, "Son of man, I send thee to the 
 children of Israel." Jeremiah shrinks from his 
 task in terror, shrinks from it like the young 
 Methodist preacher, smitten with stage fright 
 on the occasion of his first sermon before the 
 bishop, so sorely smitten that his tongue clave 
 to the roof of his mouth. It was a rough and 
 ready age, and the bishop was a rough and ready 
 agent. "Young man," he said, "you go ahead 
 and preach or I will give you the worst thrashing 
 you ever had in your life." So the young man 
 preached, and afterwards became a bishop him- 
 self. Jeremiah, frightened in like manner, cried, 
 "Ah, Lord Jehovah! behold, I know not how 
 to speak; for I am a child." But Jehovah said, 
 "Say not, I am a child; for to whomsoever 
 I shall send thee thou shalt go, and whatsoever 
 I shall command thee thou shalt speak. Be not 
 afraid because of them; for I am with thee to 
 deliver thee, saith Jehovah." This was the 
 thrilling consciousness that ran through the whole 
 
18 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 line of the prophets. Little men sometimes, 
 timid men sometimes, but theirs the power of 
 Elijah, ''As Jehovah, the God of Israel, liveth, 
 before whom I stand." Back of them was the 
 great God, and they were never, never, to fear the 
 face of man. 
 
THE SUPREME APPEAL 
 
Pilot, how far from home? 
 
 Not far, not far to-night, 
 
 A flight of spray, a sea-bird's flight, 
 A flight of tossing foam, 
 And then the hghts of home! 
 
 And yet again, how far? 
 
 And seems the way so brief? 
 
 Those lights beyond the roaring reef 
 Were lights of moon and star, 
 Far, far, none knows how far! 
 
 Pilot, how far from home? 
 The great stars pass away 
 Before Him as a flight of spray, 
 
 Moons as a flight of foam! 
 
 I see the lights of home. 
 
 Alfred Noyes 
 
II 
 
 The Supreme Appeal 
 
 Not only had these rugged old sons of the 
 Spirit the consciousness that God was back of 
 them. Their splendid virility and courage were 
 also based upon their conviction of an unlimited 
 future before them. 
 
 It has been noted that in earlier forms the Old 
 Testament was divided into three parts. The 
 first was called the Law, the second the Prophets, 
 and the third the Other Writings; or, to put it 
 more simply, the Writings. This threefold 
 division was in the mind of Jesus when he said to 
 his disciples, ''These are my words which I spake 
 unto you, while I was yet with you, that all 
 things must needs be fulfilled, which are written 
 in the law of Moses, and the prophets, and the 
 psalms, concerning me." Here was the threefold 
 grouping of the early Old Testament. The first 
 contained what we commonly call the Pentateuch. 
 The third contained the poetical writings, and the 
 books commonly called the Chronicles. But the 
 second group, the Books of the Prophets, was 
 
 21 
 
22 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 itself divided into three sections. The first of 
 these was called the Former Prophets, and in- 
 cluded Joshua, Judges, the Books of Samuel, 
 and the Books of the Kings. It is true these four 
 books were historical, but they were history from 
 the point of view of the prophets. That is, they 
 were history not for the sake of narration but for 
 the sake of exhortation, the driving home of great 
 moral lessons. The second group was called the 
 Later Prophets, and included Isaiah, Jeremiah, 
 Ezekiel, and, later on, Daniel. Then there was 
 the third group of twelve books, from Hosea to 
 Malachi, called the Little Prophets — as we say, 
 the Minor Prophets — not, it may be noted, from 
 the smallness of the men, but from the brevity 
 of the books. 
 
 Now it will be observed that, in the first group 
 of prophetic writings, prophecy was really in the 
 form of history. In the later groups it was in the 
 form of sermons. The reason for this fact may 
 be found when we consider that in the earlier 
 history of Israel the prophets were controlling 
 the course of events. They were not writing 
 things. They were doing things. It was not the 
 record of history, but the enacting of history. 
 
THE SUPREME APPEAL 23 
 
 that concerned them. Moses and Samuel were 
 great controllers of public policies. Nathan and 
 Elijah and Elisha at certain times in their careers 
 were almost public dictators. They shaped and 
 molded the events of their time as Athanasius 
 did, as John Calvin did, as John Knox did, as 
 John Witherspoon did. 
 
 But there came a time when the national life 
 swung away from the control of the prophets and 
 when, unable longer to keep the nation true to 
 God and to duty, these men began to write down 
 their sermons. It is said that Mr. Gladstone, in 
 the House of Commons, met a crushing defeat 
 by the overthrow of a reform measure for which 
 he had been laboring. When it seemed as if his 
 grip had gone, when, as the Irishman expressed 
 it, his "future was behind him," the grand old 
 man reared himself in the midst of sneering, 
 taunting, exulting foes, his eyes flashing, his 
 voice trumpet- toned, and thundered out, ''I 
 appeal to time." 
 
 So with these old prophets. When the current 
 went against them, when they could no longer 
 keep Israel true to the pure worship of Jehovah, 
 they appealed to time. They began to write 
 
24 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 down their sermons for the future. And with 
 Hosea and Amos we have the beginnings of 
 written prophecy, of a prophetic writing which 
 consisted not, like the earher hterature, of narra- 
 tive concerning a prophet's action, but rather 
 of messages — in the form of sermons — appeahng 
 to time, confident in the ultimate triumph of 
 right. In a word, written prophecy in the form 
 of sermons began just at the point when the 
 messenger first felt that from an evil present he 
 must look out toward a better future; that like 
 blind Milton in the days of the second Charles, 
 having fallen ''on evil days . . . and evil 
 tongues, in darkness, and with dangers compassed 
 round," he must commit to writing the oracles of 
 God, and hand down to the generations that 
 were to follow the splendor and glory of his own 
 timeless vision. 
 
 So the prophet, who was first only a "forth- 
 teller" for God, became a "foreteller," a seer, a 
 forward-looking evangelist of a kingdom which 
 was yet to come. It has been a commonplace to 
 point out that prophecy does not essentially imply 
 prediction. This is only half of the truth. The 
 grim inhibitions of the present forced him to 
 
THE SUPREME APPEAL 25 
 
 reach out to a better future. At first this future 
 was confined to the present fife. But gradually 
 the force of his own logic and the burning warmth 
 of his instincts swept him out beyond the limits 
 of this life. He began to see that the coming 
 Kingdom, as Kant put it, ''sphered out into 
 eternity." The doctrine of personal immortality, 
 at first a mere glimmer, grows brighter and 
 brighter as we proceed, because the prophets 
 came to realize that their appeal to future time 
 for the vindication of righteousness and punish- 
 ment of evil was in reality an appeal to eternity. 
 They began to see on the eastern sky line of the 
 future the dawnings of the glorious day when 
 Jesus would bring life and immortality to light 
 in his gospel. Confronted by an evil present and 
 by certain death, they felt that instinctive scorn 
 of "victory such as the present gives," which is 
 so finely expressed by Browning's "Grammarian": 
 
 Others mistrust and say, "But time escapes, 
 
 Live now or never!" 
 He said, "What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes! 
 
 Man has Forever." 
 
 They tell us of Thomas Carlyle walking one 
 day with Bishop Wilberforce, and of how he 
 
26 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 suddenly stopped and said with great earnestness, 
 "Bishop, have you a creed?" "Yes, I have," said 
 the bishop, "and I beUeve it very firmly. Only 
 one thing troubles me." "What is that?" said 
 Carlyle. "The slow progress that my creed 
 seems to be making in the world," replied the 
 bishop. "Ah!" rejoined the great Scotsman, 
 "If you have a creed you can afford to wait." 
 
 "Happy he whose inward ear 
 Angel comfortings can hear 
 O'er the rabble's laughter; 
 And, while Hatred's fagots burn, 
 Glimpses through the smoke discern 
 Of the good hereafter." 
 
THE SUPREME FRATERNITY 
 
Have the elder races halted? 
 
 Do they droop and end their lesson, 
 
 wearied, over there beyond the seas? 
 We take up the task eternal, and the 
 
 burden, and the lesson, 
 Pioneers! O pioneers! 
 
 All the past we leave behind; 
 
 We debouch upon a newer, mightier 
 
 world, varied world; 
 Fresh and strong the world we seize, 
 
 world of labor and the march. 
 Pioneers! pioneers! 
 
 We detachments steady throwing, 
 Down the edges, through the passes, 
 
 up the mountains steep, 
 Conquering, holding, daring, venturing, 
 
 as we go, the unknown ways, 
 Pioneers! O pioneers! 
 
 We primeval forests felling, 
 
 We the rivers stemming, vexing we, 
 
 and piercing deep the mines within; 
 We the surface broad surveying, we 
 
 the virgin soil upheaving. 
 Pioneers! pioneers! 
 
 — Walt Whitman 
 
Ill 
 
 The Supreme Fraternity 
 
 We have thus far noted the greatness of our 
 heritage received from men who did their work 
 with a constant sense of a personal and powerful 
 God back of them and an unlimited future before 
 them. There is now a third general remark which 
 should be made concerning them. Living in 
 different times and nations and circumstances, 
 there was a definite, corporate character about 
 the whole line of prophets. They belonged to a 
 great fraternity that had a common creed and a 
 common language. Their sermons were intro- 
 duced by an unvarying formula. Each man used 
 the writings which were his heritage from the 
 older members of the fraternity. Doctor Moulton 
 has pointed out that up to the time of John Milton 
 the highest mark of literary merit was not orig- 
 inality, but the skillful use of the material handed 
 down by other writers. All modern notions of 
 plagiarism are strictly post-Miltonic, as every 
 reader of Elizabethan literature will abundantly 
 
 29 
 
30 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 testify. So these old prophets freely and naively 
 used the writings of those who had gone before. 
 There was even a common method of speech and 
 a dramatic similarity in the illustration and 
 enforcement of truth. Study four wonderful 
 preachers like Amos, Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah, 
 and you find in them the widest possible varia- 
 tions. Country preachers and city preachers; 
 polished masters of rhetoric and crude, wild, 
 exhorters; urbane men of affairs and boorish 
 peasants; varying temperamentally — one leaning 
 toward pessimism, another toward optimism; 
 one stern, another tender; one logical, another 
 emotional; but in spite of these differences they 
 are a blood brotherhood, standing on the ground 
 of the same divine covenant, holding the same 
 creed, appealing to the same motives, laboring 
 for the same objectives; and though generations 
 of time separated their activities, yet the work 
 of one became the heritage of another, and 
 through the whole line we feel the thrill of a 
 glorious, spiritual fraternity. That fraternity 
 was the herald of the democracy and brotherhood 
 of to-day, and its voice is still pleading, trumpet- 
 tongued, against everything that is small and 
 
THE SUPREME FRATERNITY 
 
 mean and base, and for everything that is big 
 and true and fine in modern fife. 
 
 In these days when, possibly by his own fault, 
 more probably by the faulty conditions of modern 
 life, the prophet is set down in some minds as an 
 amiable but nonessential supernumerary, a genial 
 parasite, an ornamental adjunct to life, a "drinker 
 of tea and a ringer of door-bells,'' it means much 
 to him to get back to the virile picture of his 
 forbears, interpreters of God, not fearing the 
 face of man, knights errant of life's highest 
 romance — keeping the soul of the world alive. 
 
 There is much that narrows and belittles the 
 preacher's point of view in these days. Some- 
 times he feels shut up to a life of puttering. 
 Sometimes he is the victim of disillusion in that 
 middle-age reaction which often follows upon 
 the idealisms of youth. ''What a genius I was 
 when I wrote that book!" cried Swift when he 
 looked upon a work of his early manhood. Millais, 
 in the presence of a collection of pictures which 
 he had painted in the splendid glow of his early 
 youth, burst into tears and fled from the room. 
 Sometimes, too, the spiritual guides of men be- 
 come saddened and disillusioned as they look 
 
32 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 back on the splendid ideals of youth and then 
 realize the poor and bare and futile fulfillments 
 of middle age. 
 
 How it braces us to gaze across the generations, 
 stretching like mountain peak beyond mountain 
 peak, and catch the ringing echoes that come 
 from the lips of the spiritual watchmen and 
 warders of the centuries, to feel ourselves a part, 
 if ever so little a part, of the splendid fraternity 
 of men who in every age and time have stood 
 forth to speak for men to God and for God to 
 men! The late Sylvester Home, whose early, 
 lamented death has left an unfillable vacancy in 
 the ranks of the fraternity, has given to his 
 brothers a final message in those burning words 
 of his on ''The Romance of Preaching": ''Who 
 should be proud of their calling if not we? What 
 other history has ever equaled ours? Think of 
 the procession of the preachers! No range of 
 mountains has ever been high enough to stay 
 their progress; no river deep and broad enough to 
 daunt them; no forests dark and dense enough to 
 withstand their advance. No poet has ever sung 
 the epic of their sacrifices. Was ever such a 
 romance? Was ever love exalted to so pure a 
 
THE SUPREME FRATERNITY 33 
 
 passion? Was ever in the human soul so un- 
 quenchable a fire? Silver and gold they had none. 
 They did not seek to win mankind by materialistic 
 gifts. Such as they had they gave. The alms 
 they distributed were faith, hope, love. Wherever 
 they went they trod a pilgrim road and flung 
 forth their faith, often to a skeptical and scornful 
 generation. But what heeded they? They 
 passed onward from frontier to frontier, the 
 legion that never was counted, and, let us add, 
 that never knew defeat. 
 
 "Gradually, before their message, ancient pagan 
 empires tottered, heathen despots bowed the 
 head, in the lands of Goth and Vandal stately 
 cathedrals reared their splendid towers and spires, 
 and the battle music of the Christian crusades 
 rang triumphantly in chiming bells and pealing 
 organs over conquered races. In the recesses of 
 Indian forests, up the dark rivers of Africa and 
 South America that often flowed red, along the 
 frozen coasts of Greenland and Labrador, the 
 pioneer preachers made their pilgrimage. Let 
 every village preacher who climbs into a rude 
 rostrum to give out a text and preach a sermon 
 to a meager handful of somewhat stolid hearers. 
 
34 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 remember to what majestic Fraternity he be- 
 longs, and what romantic traditions he inherits. 
 He, too, is the servant of the Spirit." 
 
 Yes, we are comrades in the fellowship of the 
 Spirit with the great souls whose words and works 
 are the hinges upon which the doors of history 
 have turned. The fellowship of Paul, the swarthy 
 little Christian Jew whose work-gnarled hand 
 shook the world; of Athanasius, the "manikin" 
 giant, the dwarflike, godlike defender of the faith, 
 with his piercing intellect and his glowing heart; 
 of Chrysostom, the golden-mouthed orator, whose 
 mellow tones vibrated in the hearts of men until 
 they roused an answering note from the deepest 
 chords of their nobler natures; of old John Calvin, 
 thundering God's sovereignty and human democ- 
 racy and church union at Geneva; of John Knox 
 as he confronted Queen Mary or pounded the 
 pulpit at Saint Giles, fearing neither the face of 
 the "pleasing gentlewoman" nor the face of a 
 mob; of Luther at Worms; of John Wesley as 
 his brother Charles described him, coming out of 
 a riot "looking like a good soldier of Jesus, his 
 clothes all torn and bloody" ; of John Witherspoon, 
 steadying and upholding his timid fellow country- 
 
THE SUPREME FRATERNITY 35 
 
 men through the revolutionary crisis; of Henry 
 Ward Beecher at Birmingham and Manchester 
 and Liverpool, swinging the decisive opinion of 
 Great Britain's middle class to the American 
 Union at the darkest crisis hour of human destiny 
 in the new world ; yes, if you please, the fellowship 
 of the spirit with men like Cardinal Mercier, the 
 one voice in Belgium which the hand of the 
 oppressor could not silence; of all these we are 
 the heirs and the blood brothers. Comrades of 
 the Christian ministry, dare we be small or 
 cowardly with these at our back? 
 
 ' Was it for mere fools-play, make-believe and mumming, 
 So we battled it like men, not boylike sulked or whined? 
 Each of us heard clang God's 'Come!' and each was coming: 
 Soldiers all, to forward-face, not sneaks to lag behind! 
 
 'How of the field's fortune? That concerned our Leader! 
 Led, we struck our stroke, nor cared for doings left and right; 
 Each as on his sole head, failer or succeeder, 
 Lay the blame or lit the praise; no care for cowards: 
 fight!" 
 
THE GOSPEL OF LABOR 
 
The longer on this earth we live 
 
 And weigh the various qualities of men, 
 
 Seeing how most are fugitive, 
 
 Or fitful gifts, at best, of now and then. 
 
 Wind-wavered corpse-lights, daughters of the fen. 
 
 The more we feel the high stern-featured beauty 
 
 Of plain devotedness to duty. 
 
 Steadfast and still, nor paid with mortal praise, 
 
 But finding amplest recompense 
 
 For life's ungarlanded expense 
 
 In work done squarely and unwasted days. 
 
 — James Russell Lowell 
 
IV 
 
 The Gospel of Labor 
 
 The modern minister needs all the breadth and 
 vigor and healthy mindedness, all the insistence 
 on the practical application of means to ends, 
 all the spirit of give and take, the grim deter- 
 mination to play out the game, the shutting of 
 the teeth to do the thing accounted impossible 
 or to perish in the effort, the shrewd admixture 
 of courage and caution, that make the captain 
 of industry or the successful general. The day 
 has gone by when piety can cloak laziness, when 
 spirituality may camouflage slack and shuffling 
 and flabby inefficiency. During the Civil War a 
 certain company became known as the ''Lazy 
 Squad," and had earned its name. In desperation 
 their captain, endeavoring to shame his men, 
 offered a two days' furlough for rest to all who 
 would volunteer. It is said that fifty-nine men 
 of the sixty accepted the offer by stepping for- 
 ward two paces. When the captain asked the 
 sixtieth man why he too had not volunteered, the 
 
 39 
 
40 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 calm patriot replied, ''I am too lazy." The 
 man who is almost too lazy to be lazy is being 
 eliminated in Christian service as everywhere 
 else. He who enters the ministry for a rest cure 
 is first in need of a mental cure. 
 
 There has been much modern thinking in the 
 direction of what the philosophers call prag- 
 matism. I am not really sure that anyone, in- 
 cluding the pragmatists, knows exactly what it is. 
 It seems to mean that whatever works well is, 
 for that reason, true. It is true for you if it 
 works well for you, and false for me if it works 
 ill for me. True to-day if its practical outworkings 
 are favorable, false to-morrow if the practical 
 effects are disastrous. My own difficulty has 
 been in assuming a standard by which I may 
 judge whether a thing has worked favorably or 
 not. I can understand how the practical out- 
 workings of a belief will test its truth, but not so 
 clearly how the practical outworkings of it are 
 the basis of truth. For unless I have some basis 
 or standard by which to judge I cannot determine 
 how it works. I am left like Archimedes, without 
 a fulcrum for the lever. I am in a state of un- 
 certainty as hopeless as that of the sweet high- 
 
THE GOSPEL OF LABOR 41 
 
 school graduate who wrote the essay, tied up in 
 pink ribbon, on the topic "Whither are we drift- 
 ing, and if so to what extent?'' 
 
 But that is neither here nor there. There is 
 much in pragmatism which is true but not new, 
 as there is possibly something which is new but 
 not true. In the sense that life itself is greater 
 than logic and subjects our theories to practical 
 tests on which in the end our belief in their truth 
 relies: in this sense we are all pragmatists. For 
 two thousand years ago it was said, "Not every 
 one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter 
 into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth 
 the will of my Father who is in heaven." And 
 again it was said, "By their fruits ye shall know 
 them." 
 
 But this tendency of human thinking is a 
 faithful reflection of the temper of our times. 
 We live in an age which is intensely, intolerantly 
 practical. It demands to see the truth at work. 
 The modern man flings out his challenge: "If 
 you have the doctrine let us see what it can do." 
 To the boast of a Glendower, "I can call spirits 
 from the vasty deep," he replies with the skep- 
 ticism of a Hotspur, "Why, so can I, or so can 
 
42 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 any man; but will they come when you do call 
 for them?'' Is the truth we proclaim bringing 
 the results? As the old revolutionary patriot put 
 it, ''Will the Constitution march?" 
 
 And this means work. "Know thy work/' 
 said Carlyle, "and work at it like a very Hercules. 
 One monster there is in all this world, an idle 
 man." This will leave little time or room for 
 fuss and flummery and affectation and ecclesiastical 
 millinery. There was a great gospel preacher in 
 days of old whose personality was so overpower- 
 ing that when a man met him he fell down at his 
 feet to do him reverence. But this preacher said: 
 "Stand up. I myself also am a man." This is 
 our watchword. "I myself also am a man." The 
 preacher is only a man. He must learn to think, 
 not of the claims of the cloth, but of its obligations. 
 The average preacher is perhaps not embar- 
 rassed with undue reverence in this age; but for 
 all that there is a subtle danger that we should 
 allow the responsibility of the shepherd to be 
 displaced by the exactions of the official. Lowell 
 once said that "The minister must constantly 
 be on his guard against the emphasis on the 
 perquisites and prerogatives of his office." 
 
THE GOSPEL OF LABOR 43 
 
 Mightier than Lowell was One who said, "He 
 that is great among you, let him be your minister." 
 There is always this official temptation lurking 
 in the pulpit, with its dangerous development of 
 dogmatism in those who talk without anyone to 
 talk back. This tendency, if not inhibited, brings 
 the preacher at last to that "Sir Oracle" attitude 
 of the Lord Chancellor in the play: 
 
 "The Law is the true embodiment 
 Of everything that's excellent. 
 It has no kind of fault or flaw, 
 
 And I, my lords, embody the Law." 
 
 To this end a heaven-born but humanly culti- 
 vated sense of humor is one of the most essential 
 aids toward a true proportion. It helps us, while 
 we take our tasks seriously, so that we should 
 not take ourselves too seriously. We must also 
 remember that, while truth is objective and 
 authoritative, it is organic and vital rather than 
 mechanical and mathematical. It is to be driven 
 home to men, not by hard dogmatism, but by 
 warm, persuasive appeal to the inner experience 
 of the hearer on the plane of equality and in an 
 atmosphere of brotherhood. There is no better 
 introduction to the heart of the average man in 
 
44 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 the pew than the quite simple expedient of 
 remaining human in the pulpit. It is said that 
 the mother of George the Third used to nag him 
 constantly with the admonition, "George, be a 
 king." It ought to be dinned into the ear of every 
 preacher, present or prospective, "My son, be 
 a man." 
 
 And this means not only to keep within one's 
 limitations, but to measure up to his obhgations. 
 He is only a man, but he must be all of a man. 
 If he is not to overreach, still less is he to fall 
 short. No man living should have greater care 
 in cultivating a fine scorn of all that is belittling 
 or puerile or sordid. Not yet extinct is the brood 
 of false prophets who called forth from Milton 
 the blistering indictment in "Lycidas" of 
 those who 
 
 For their bellies' sake, 
 Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold! 
 Of other care they little reckoning make 
 Than how to scramble at the shearer's feast. 
 And shove away the worthy bidden guest. 
 Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold 
 A sheep-hook, or have learnt aught else the least 
 That to the faithful herdsman's art belongs! 
 
 The mercenary and puttering minister; the 
 stock-selling, promoting minister; the minister 
 
THE GOSPEL OF LABOR 45 
 
 who ''crooks the pregnant hinges of the knee 
 where thrift may follow fawning" is on the whole 
 the most abject caricature of manhood which 
 ever cumbered God's green earth. I pray you, 
 avoid him altogether. 
 
 All this means to know the manhood of hard, 
 unrelenting labor. George William Curtis once 
 wrote, *'An engine of one cat power running all 
 the time is more effective than one of forty horse 
 power standing still." This reminder is pecuHarly 
 needful for the minister, because of all men it is 
 easy for him to lie down on his task. He has 
 no taskmaster but his own conscience and a 
 certain fearful looking-for of the ''deadline." 
 But he must not only be in constant touch with 
 the practical lives of men, he must also be a 
 reader and digester of the great books. The best 
 preacher and the best new book are to be wedded 
 together until death do them part. And some of 
 the best new books are several hundred years old. 
 
 There is, moreover, really no way of reading 
 books except to read them. Notebooks, scrap- 
 books, clippings, filing cabinets, and the like 
 are good servants but bad masters. An eminent 
 writer in the British Weekly indicates an evil 
 
46 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 all too common on this side the Atlantic, namely, 
 a "fat envelope bulging with clippings, while 
 the owner is intellectually poor and lean." There 
 is such a thing as too much routine and too little 
 assimilation. 'It is more important to fill the 
 head and the heart than to fill the filing cabinet.'' 
 The story that goes home is never taken out of a 
 handy encyclopedia of illustrations. May the 
 curse of the master of all good homiletics rest 
 upon the day in which these evil devices were 
 first brought into being. The effective illustration 
 must first ''soak in,'' become part of ourselves, 
 and then flow out "as effortless as woodland nooks 
 send violets up and paint them blue." 
 
 Above all must the preacher be steeped and 
 soaked and saturated in the Bible. For him 
 Walter Scott was right. In the sense of utter 
 preeminence and with no real second, "There 
 is but one book." Still is it true as the couplet 
 ran in days of old: 
 
 "These hath God married, 
 No man can part; 
 Dust on the Bible, 
 Drought in the heart." 
 
THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
I know of a land that knows a Lord 
 
 That is neither brave nor true; 
 
 And I know of a sword, a sword, a sword, 
 
 That can cut a chain in two, 
 
 Its edge is keen, its blade is broad; 
 
 I know of a sword, a sword, a sword, 
 
 That can cut a chain in two. 
 
 I know of a land that is sunk in shame, 
 
 Where true hearts faint and tire; 
 
 And I know of a name, a name, a name. 
 
 That can set the land on fire, 
 
 Its sound is a brand, its letters flame; 
 
 I know of a name, a name, a name, 
 
 That can set the land on fire. 
 
 I know of hearts that hate the wrong, 
 
 Of souls that are brave and true; 
 
 And I know of a song, a song, a song. 
 
 That can break their fetters through. 
 
 Oh you who long and long and long, 
 
 I will give you the song, the song, the song, 
 
 That can break your fetters through. 
 
 — From the Songs of the Sons of Jaffir, 
 translated from the Persian 
 
The Range Finders 
 
 Despite wails to the contrary, I am persuaded 
 that never in the history of the Christian Church 
 did the preacher have as wide an opportunity for 
 public leadership as now. Every man acquainted 
 with the inner facts knows how the Great War 
 drives came back to the Church for their motive 
 power in terms of men and money. There have 
 been attempts to make it appear that ministerial 
 leadership was negligible in the great crisis. Such 
 attempts must be either ignorant or insincere. 
 Without ministerial leadership the war work of 
 the Y. M. C. A. would have been impossible. 
 In large population centers preachers stood out as 
 the leaders around whom was crystallized most of 
 our patriotic and philanthropic service. When one 
 thinks of Jowett and Fosdick and Cadman and 
 Hillis in Greater New York, of President King 
 and McAfee in France, of Stone in Chicago, 
 of Boyd in Portland, of Matthews in Seattle, of 
 Freeman in Pasadena, of Francis in Los Angeles, 
 
 49 
 
50 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 of Alexander in Pittsburgh, of Wood in Wash- 
 ington, and many, many more of equal rank, he 
 is dealing with personalities around whom, more 
 than any single layman that could be named, the 
 patriotic idealism of their respective communities 
 crystallized. The tasks of peace and reconstruc- 
 tion also have the supreme places for the preacher 
 who can fill them. The armor is hanging ready 
 for the man who can put it on. The sword of 
 Ulysses awaits its wielder. The battles of peace 
 and reconstruction are in some respects more 
 complex and even more discouraging than were 
 those physical combats fought out on the sodden 
 fields of Flanders. Without the preacher there 
 would be no hope. Where no vision is, the people 
 perish. And where there is no prophet the vision 
 will perish. 
 
 In the Great War the airmen became the eyes 
 of the army. The observer, ten thousand feet 
 in the air, had a range of vision utterly impossible 
 to the man in the trenches. He saw many miles 
 behind the line and many miles in front of the 
 line. He was able to signal to the man on the 
 ground the effect of his shots, the alignment of 
 the enemy's forces, the location of his own 
 
THE RANGE FINDERS 51 
 
 reserves. The prophet is in like manner the 
 airman, the range finder, of civiUzation's great 
 battle. He looks backward through history, and 
 in the light of that vision peers onward in 
 prophecy; he sees the sweep of events, the broad 
 outlines of the battle, as the man on the street 
 can never see them. In the great moral issues that 
 call for world-wide and time-long statesmanship, 
 it is the preacher, with his sweep of history and 
 prophecy, who should have the range; while the 
 layman, too often dealing only in the light of his 
 own times, is able to see but httle behind him 
 or ahead of him. It is the business of the prophet 
 to give the range to the practical man in the 
 trenches. He will often find this a difficult task. 
 The man on the ground will distrust him. The 
 sky pilot, he complains, is not sufficiently ac- 
 quainted with the making of trenches; he does 
 not keep his feet on the earth; he is ''up in the 
 air"; he is an impractical "dreamer of dreams, 
 who dreams that he is dreaming." Our task of 
 giving the range to the man on the ground is all 
 the more difficult because some ministerial 
 airmen have not appreciated the full meaning of 
 their mission, have underrated the ''prize of 
 
52 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 the high calling of God in Christ," have not 
 trained themselves to see fearlessly and clearly, 
 have indulged in spectacular looping of the loop 
 and other sensational stunts, have "played such 
 tricks before high heaven as make the angels 
 weep." But this must not deter the honest air- 
 man from his task. He is the eyes of the advanc- 
 ing army of civilization, and while he is not to 
 plume himself upon his elevation nor to feel for 
 one moment superior to the man whose duty is 
 the service of the trenches: yet he is, with clear 
 courage and incorruptible fidelity, to report his 
 observations to the great army of laymen who 
 must depend upon him for the long ranges of 
 life and thought. 
 
 Every thinking idealist to-day has come to feel 
 that another world war means the end of civih- 
 zation, and that the only alternative is an or- 
 ganized world. Some alignment of civihzed 
 peoples for the prevention of war is at hand. It 
 is the ideal for which the Church has prayed and 
 dreamed through two thousand years, the pas- 
 sionate dream of her Lord. Was there ever such 
 an opportunity for the Christian minister who 
 lives "above the fog in public duty and in private 
 
THE RANGE FINDERS 53 
 
 thinking" to lead the world toward the better 
 day? It will take courage, for partisanship will 
 growl and snarl ; musty traditionalism will shrink 
 and tremble; narrow selfishness, which must 
 either explain away, apologize for, or stultify 
 Jesus of Nazareth, will thunder against him. 
 But let the preacher, valiant and undaunted, 
 give forth his message as did our "peers, the 
 heroes of old." We must bring the Church to 
 her true position of world leadership in the tasks 
 of peace; she must never again by her praise and 
 prayers drown the wail of the widow and the 
 orphan. She must never again be indifferent to 
 the rights and the wrongs of labor. She must do 
 exact and equal justice between the rich lords of 
 the land and the poor lords only of their hands. 
 She must hold steadily the brotherhood and 
 democracy of Christ over against the hideous 
 red menace of Bolshevism. Nor must she forget 
 the cruel conditions which have sometimes stim- 
 ulated this menace. She must have eyes to see 
 if, as Ruskin has said, ''under her very sanctuary 
 windows she may behold the grass beat level by 
 the drift of human blood." She must by her 
 service to the community show the modern 
 
54 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 priests of Baal that the Lord God of Elijah lives 
 and reigns. As Spurgeon once said, "The God 
 that answereth by orphanages, let him be God." 
 
 There is a story of a certain piazza at Rome 
 where stands the statue of the old emperor, 
 Marcus Aurelius. It comes from the hand of an 
 unknown sculptor, is of very early date, but a 
 most impressive work of art. When the great 
 Michelangelo first came to gaze upon that life- 
 like figure, every line of the horse and the man be- 
 speaking action, energy incarnate, the artist, 
 enraptured, cried out: "Camina! Camina!'' 
 (Go on then! Go on then!) 
 
 The Church of Jesus Christ has the equipment 
 and the resources and the message and the men. 
 In her hand is the only power that can win in the 
 struggle for a better world. It is hers yet to hide, 
 by the crown of universal empire, the scar marks 
 of the crown of thorns. Brethren of the holy 
 ministry, look at her powers and her possibilities, 
 and let us cry to her: ''Go on then! Go on then!" 
 And by God's good grace let us lead her on, a 
 mighty army, ready for the struggle, and 
 supremely confident of victory. 
 
THE INNER CHAMBER 
 
Let no man think that sudden in a minute 
 
 All is accomplished and the work is done; 
 
 Though with thine earliest dawn thou shouldst begin it 
 
 Scarce were it ended in thy setting sun. 
 
 Oh the regret, the struggle and the failing! 
 Oh the days desolate and useless years! 
 Vows in the night, so fierce and unavailing! 
 Stings of my shame and passion of my tears! 
 
 How have I seen in Araby Orion, 
 Seen without seeing, till he set again, 
 Known the night-noise and thunder of the lion, 
 Silence and sounds of the prodigious plain! 
 
 How have I knelt with arms of my aspiring 
 Lifted all night in irresponsive air, 
 Dazed and amazed with overmuch desiring, 
 Blank with the utter agony of prayer! 
 
 Shame on the flame so dying to an ember! 
 Shame on the reed so lightly overset ! 
 Yes, I have seen him, can I not remember? 
 Yes, I have known him, and shall Paul forget? 
 
 — Frederic W. H. Myers 
 
VI 
 The Inner Chamber 
 
 I have thus far been urging the qualities of 
 decision and resolution, of clear, practical action, 
 of broad vision and courage and hard work. I 
 now turn to the inner life of the preacher. Refer- 
 ence has already been made to the necessity of 
 Bible study. There will be no misunderstanding, 
 I am sure, in indicating something even deeper 
 and more vital. It has been pointed out that 
 when Jesus met his first great temptation in the 
 wilderness he fell back upon the written word of 
 God, and conquered. But when he faced his 
 second great temptation, after the feeding of the 
 five thousand, he had learned the divine art of 
 listening to his Father, so that he no longer 
 needed to fall back upon the Scriptures, but went 
 to God direct, and, face to face with him in 
 the night on the mountain side, wrestling in 
 prayer, came away a victor. And when the third 
 great temptation assailed him in Passion Week, 
 when Greece was beckoning to him with her rosy 
 
58 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 fingers — Greece, with her art and literature and 
 poetry, showing to him a pathway of hght, 
 wreathed in flowers, bidding him turn away from 
 the hard and ugly cross — mark you, in that ex- 
 treme moment of temptation, so accustomed was 
 he to direct fellowship with God that he no 
 longer needed even to go to God, for God came 
 to him. At the first cry, ''Save me from this 
 hour . . . glorify thy name," came the divine 
 response, ''I have both glorified it, and will 
 glorify it again." 
 
 We need our daily periods of study of the Word 
 of God, but we need something more. We must 
 learn to go to him and talk face to face, as a man 
 talketh with a friend. And having learned the 
 art of listening to him, having the habit of fellow- 
 ship, then in our times of greatest need and stress 
 the moment we consciously reach out to him, 
 lo, we find him by our side to help us. The inner 
 life of every great preacher has been the fountain- 
 head of his power. "They looked unto him and 
 were radiant." There was a preacher of old con- 
 cerning whom a discerning woman said, "Behold, 
 now I perceive that this is a holy man of God, 
 that passe th by us continually." What a tribute 
 
THE INNER CHAMBER 59 
 
 to the preacher! Akin to it was the wholly in- 
 nocent remark of a little girl who went to the 
 front door and found Phillips Brooks standing 
 there. Going back to her mother she said she 
 did not know who the stranger was, but thought 
 he must be Jesus. 
 
 And this does not mean sanctimoniousness, but 
 sanctity; not cant, but a splendid radiance out 
 of an overflowing, spiritual life within. With the 
 rapidly swinging pendulum of human thought, 
 which always describes the entire arc from extreme 
 to extreme, the time is coming, if it is not already 
 here, when the social and practical and admin- 
 istrative side of ministerial service may grow out of 
 all proportion to the inner sources of it. We are 
 already in danger of undue emphasis on social 
 qualities, on ability as a mixer, on genius for 
 organization, rather than on the djmamic of a 
 life daily in touch with God. Many a man to-day 
 is too much of a promoter to be a prophet. And 
 we dare not forget that Jesus, with a choice of 
 the outer and inner ministry, deliberately chose 
 the latter. In the busiest crisis he systematically 
 withdrew himself for fellowship with his Father. 
 'Tor their sakes I sanctify myself." I quote 
 
60 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 from an editorial published a few years ago in 
 The Century: "The minister has to study, and 
 to pray; he has to lead the worship of his 
 people; he has to preach; he has to go about on 
 errands of mercy to the sick and sorrowful and 
 sinful; in the midst of a generation occupied with 
 things material he has to uphold ideals and repre- 
 sent the essential merits of religion. There are 
 plenty of people to study sociology, and to 
 organize philanthropy; the minister specially 
 demands all his time and thought if he is to save 
 our souls by building up character that shall be 
 buttressed in principle : 
 
 *For he that feeds man serveth few; 
 He serveth all who dares be true.'" 
 
 Moreover, an inner life of prayer and fellowship 
 with God is a minister's sole guaranty against the 
 most tragic fear that when he has preached Christ 
 he, too, may be cast away. It is the path to 
 certainty, and certainty is the path to peace. 
 For the intellect is a blind alley. The surest 
 conclusions of science rest upon assumptions 
 which can never be proved. When we assume 
 that things fall into fixed classes, that law is 
 universal, that the order of nature is uniform, that 
 
THE INNER CHAMBER 61 
 
 the cosmos is rational and truthful and intelligible 
 we are assuming that which faith can supply 
 but reason can never demonstrate. Nay more, 
 when we bank upon the trustworthiness of our 
 own mental processes we are making a very 
 vast assumption indeed; for sanity and insanity, 
 so far as we are able to prove, may be only a 
 matter of majorities. If there were more of the 
 insane than of us who call ourselves sane, they 
 might some day be outside looking in and we 
 inside looking out. In the sense of demonstration 
 science knows nothing of the nature of matter or 
 force, nothing of the origin of motion, nothing 
 of the beginnings of sensation, consciousness, 
 thought, speech, or free will. Says Professor 
 Huxley, ''Man is conscious of his own mind and 
 of certain shadow shapes projected thereon, but 
 outside these limits he cannot travel." Kant 
 said that the human understanding is an island 
 and by its very nature inclosed within unchange- 
 able boundaries. It is the country of truth, but 
 surrounded by a wild and stormy ocean, the 
 special abode of phantoms, where many a bank 
 of ice, soon to melt away, holds out a lying promise 
 of new regions; and while it perpetually deceives 
 
62 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 the seafarer with the faint hope of discoveries it 
 continually entangles him in adventures from 
 which he can never get loose and which he can 
 never bring to any result. 
 
 "Myself when young did eagerly frequent 
 Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument 
 About it and about; but evermore 
 Came out by the same Door where in I went." 
 
 What then? Is there no such thing as certainty 
 and peace? Yes, thank God, there is. Not the 
 certainty of mathematical demonstration, but 
 one infinitely deeper and better, the certainty 
 of life. Science assumes the validity of reason 
 because it must do so in order to think. Faith 
 assumes the validity of the religious instincts 
 because we must do so in order to live. It is a 
 larger thing to live than even to think. None can 
 think without living. Some do live without 
 thinking. Certainty is not produced by the 
 coercion of data from without, but by the adjust- 
 ment of the life within to the life about us. When 
 that adjustment has been normally made, then 
 we know, we realize truth, not by the dull, 
 flickering candle of reason, but by the swift, sure 
 flash of intuition. ''Whereas I was blind, now I 
 
THE INNER CHAMBER 63 
 
 see." Be assured that no system can ever live 
 
 which vetoes the demands of the rehgious nature. 
 
 Be assured that life is a larger thing than logic. 
 
 Be assured that truth is more than facts; that 
 
 truth is facts plus relations, plus environment, 
 
 plus atmosphere; and that the deeper things of 
 
 life can never yield themselves to technical analysis. 
 
 When, as Professor James put it, you reduce 
 
 the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven to the scraping 
 
 of a horse's hairs over the intestines of a cat you 
 
 have a materialistic analysis, but you have missed 
 
 the soul of the truth. The mother knows more of 
 
 life than the sociologist, and the father than the 
 
 philosopher. And still it stands true that except 
 
 we become as little children we cannot enter the 
 
 Kingdom of heaven. Now the impregnable logic 
 
 of the Christian minister is this, that when 
 
 materialism has analyzed our faith and plucked 
 
 it to pieces by rigorous, intellectual process, then 
 
 the demands of life itself compel him to give back 
 
 to us the very things which he tried to destroy. 
 
 As Browning has put it in his ''Christmas Eve": 
 
 When the Critic had done his best, 
 And the pearl of price, at reason's test, 
 Lay dust and ashes levigable 
 On the Profess-or's lecture-table — 
 
64 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 When we looked for the inference and monition 
 That our faith, reduced to such condition, 
 Be swept forwith to its natural dust-hole — 
 He bids us, when we least expect it. 
 Take back our faith — if it be not just whole, 
 
 "Go home and venerate the myth 
 I thus have experimented with — 
 This man, continue to adore him 
 Rather than all who went before him. 
 And all who ever followed after!" 
 
 He who knows that adorable Man will find that 
 as deep answers to deep the hearts of men will 
 leap to his message. He will see once and again 
 the strange, new light on sin-hardened faces. 
 He will hear the fond old faith confessed by 
 repentant lips. He will behold the scoffer rise 
 "smitten across the forehead by that light which 
 falls from out those celestial spaces whence all 
 men come and whither all souls haste." 
 
CROSSES AND COMPENSATIONS 
 
'The Lord had a job for me, but I had so much to do 
 1 said, 'You get somebody else, or wait till I get through.' 
 I don't know how the Lord came out, but he seemed to 
 
 get along — 
 But I felt kind of sneaking like — knowed I'd done God 
 
 wrong — 
 One day I needed the Lord, needed him right away — 
 And he never answered me at all, but I could hear him say — 
 Down in my accusin' heart — 'Nigger, I'se got too much 
 
 to do; 
 You get somebody else, or wait till I get through.' 
 Now when the Lord have a job for me I never tries to shirk 
 I drops what I have on hand and does the good Lord's 
 
 work; 
 And my affairs can run along, or wait till I get through, 
 Nobody else can do the job that God's marked out for you." 
 
VII 
 
 Crosses and Compensations 
 
 By the very terms of his caUing the prophet 
 must needs endure hardness as a good soldier of 
 Jesus Christ. For him sacrifice is not a momen- 
 tary impulse, but a lifelong principle. Through 
 the period of the recent war there were many who 
 experienced the first test of real, altruistic service, 
 and who on a flood tide of emotionalism swung 
 out into passionate self-dedication; but it was 
 only for the moment. Many of these have now, 
 alas, returned to the fleshpots and are gaily joy- 
 riding through orgies of excess and indulgence. 
 But the man who turns his face toward the Chris- 
 tian ministry enters not for a brief, romantic, 
 and passionate self-immolation; rather does he 
 face for his whole life long a deliberate program 
 whose vital principle is to be found in stead- 
 fast self-denial. **A man must live," whined a 
 timeserver to Thomas Carlyle. *'I fail to see the 
 necessity," retorted the gruff Scotch philosopher. 
 The minister must not count his life dear unto 
 himself, but be willing even to sacrifice that 
 
 67 
 
68 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 primal instinct to the spiritual imperatives of 
 his high calling. "Skin for skin, yea, all that a 
 man hath will he give for his life," was the Devil's 
 maxim. But the minister follows a Leader who 
 charged men to take up their cross and follow him, 
 and who counted not his own life dear unto himself. 
 
 And the most difficult thing about it is that 
 this sacrificial principle does not crystallize in 
 one great romantic crisis, but must be manifest 
 through years of routine heroisms amid the little 
 vexations, the "briers that sting and fret," of 
 daily life. He must put his calling ahead of his 
 bodily comfort. Said a great minister of old, 
 writing to his friend, "The cloak that I left at 
 Troas with Carpus, bring when thou comest, and 
 the books, especially the parchments," which 
 last were doubtless the precious pages of the 
 Holy Scripture. And these three items, min- 
 istering in turn to the physical, the intellectual, 
 and the spiritual needs of the man, were in the 
 order of an ascending climax. Another great 
 preacher, Erasmus, wrote in his diary, "When 
 I get some money I will get me some Greek books 
 and then some clothes." 
 
 The modem prophet, moreover, is dealing some- 
 
CROSSES AND COMPENSATIONS 69 
 
 times with men whose ears are deaf and whose 
 hearts are hardened to the great evangel. Foolish 
 men say glibly that the plain preaching of a 
 simple gospel will always draw crowds. It is 
 the utterance of superficial folly. The common 
 people did not always hear Jesus gladly. They 
 crowded to him for a while, but he himself had 
 no illusions. They sought him, he said, not from 
 spiritual motives but from mercenary motives, 
 not because they saw the spiritual sign but be- 
 cause they did eat of the loaves and were filled. 
 And when at the very crisis of his ministry he 
 spoke in plain terms his message of personal 
 salvation through vital union with himself, by 
 faith, the multitude went away from him. Pro- 
 testing, excusing, explaining, each with his 
 separate alibi, they slunk away. Only the little 
 inner group of intimates remained; because, as 
 they confessed in a kind of dazed fashion, they 
 had nowhere else to go. During the last half of 
 his ministry Jesus was not a popular preacher in 
 the attraction of great masses of men, but worked 
 largely at the training of smaller groups in 
 retired places. So, too, his prophets will not 
 necessarily be popular preachers. They deal 
 
70 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 with souls who, as James Russell Lowell once 
 said, have had the thought of God fattened out 
 of them. Sometimes, too, with those who have 
 had the thought of God frozen out of them in 
 these days when the modern man has succeeded 
 in making "science popular, metaphysics in- 
 telligible, and vice respectable." The minister 
 deals also with men and women in whom religion 
 has assumed forms of piosity. He endures the 
 criticisms of the crabbed. He must humor the 
 crotchets of Auntie Doleful. He is thwarted by 
 the narrowness of the ignorant, and the inertia 
 of those who perish for want of vision. Sometimes 
 in his official boards he must meet and deal with 
 the selfishness of the unconverted or the half 
 converted. And once and again he is impelled 
 to cry, in the old metrical translation of David, 
 
 "Alas for me, but I so long 
 Sojourn with Mesech's godless race, 
 And near the tents of Kedar's throng 
 Am forced to make my dwelling place." 
 
 Moreover, he shares with the doctor the pri- 
 vation of having no time that he can call his own. 
 A minister who has never spent all night at the 
 bedside of the dying, and then been compelled 
 
CROSSES AND COMPENSATIONS 71 
 
 in physical weakness and weariness to preach the 
 next day, has really never yet made proof of his 
 high calling. He goes on vacation, and unless 
 he is beyond the reach of the telegraph he may be 
 called at any time back to ministry in the emer- 
 gencies of sickness and death. He works con- 
 stantly at the expense of nerves and brain cells. 
 Those fatuous people who at the close of a service 
 with unpardonable banality assure him that 
 they ''enjoyed his talk," do not realize that, if it 
 was a real message, he was giving them not 
 simply speech, but lifeblood; that if he had opened 
 a vein and let the warm current fall, drop by drop, 
 upon the platform, it would have meant no 
 greater wasting of vital energies. Physical labor 
 means that happy condition where ''good digestion 
 waits on appetite, and health on both." "The 
 sleep of a laboring man is sweet, whether he eat 
 little or much." But the enforced sedentary life 
 of the studious minister, with the constant strain 
 on brain and nerves, brings often the blue devils 
 of dyspepsia and insomnia. He is working con- 
 stantly under a sense of unfinished tasks, of 
 responsibilities unmet, of homes unvisited, and 
 of schedules broken up by emergency calls. 
 
72 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 So it sometimes happens that men break under 
 the strain, or what is worse, that men quit under 
 it. Then appears in the popular magazine the 
 bitter article headed ''Why I Left the Ministry." 
 Usually the man who abandons his high calling 
 for a secular piu-suit has simply quit because he 
 was a quitter. To charge, as Harold Bell Wright, 
 the novelist, and others have charged, that the 
 minister quits because he has no independence 
 of thought or speech, puts the author of such a 
 statement under the disadvantage of standing 
 for a bare and unmitigated falsehood. A minister 
 of tact and courage can be the most independent 
 man in the community. In one of our great 
 cities I have seen the ministers banded together 
 practically to a man in defiant opposition to the 
 ruling political machine, when every other pro- 
 fession was bowing down in the Temple of 
 Rimmon; and when prominent and powerful 
 political controllers occupied positions of influence 
 in their congregations. Of course, if the minister 
 lacks either tact or courage he cannot thus main- 
 tain his independence. There is no license for 
 the man who proves himself to be a lineal de- 
 scendant of the first talking animal mentioned 
 
CROSSES AND COMPENSATIONS 73 
 
 in the Scriptures, who needs not to make a fool 
 of himself because Providence has already done 
 it for him. Some ministers have mistaken their 
 prejudices for their principles, scolding for witness- 
 bearing, vehement denunciations for positive 
 testimony, bluster for courage, and obstinacy 
 for firmness. Even the most tactful and coura- 
 geous of public men will sometimes be involved 
 in storm clouds of misrepresentation. But always 
 he will win in the end if he does but remember, 
 as George Lewes once said, that when the 
 wanderer has lost his path in the storm of 
 dust there is nothing to do but to wait till the 
 stars come out. 
 
 It should be said, moreover, quite frankly and 
 even bluntly, that there is considerable misplaced 
 pathos and unworthy shedding of tears over the 
 hardships of clerical life. The crosses of the 
 preacher after all do not kill him, and the figures 
 will show this. One of the oldest and best of 
 insurance companies in America owes its splendid 
 record to the fact that its patrons are confined 
 to the Christian ministry, and that these prove 
 especially good risks, as the tables of mortality 
 will readily show. Distorted and morbid views 
 
74 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 of ministerial life have been foisted on the public, 
 either unwittingly or deliberately. The writer 
 of popular novels and the moving-picture pro- 
 ducers have been equally guilty. The stage and 
 movie minister, if he be a Protestant, is uniformly 
 caricatured. As a rule the respect paid to the 
 calling by film producers is limited to Roman 
 Catholic priests. It would be humorous, if 
 it were not at the same time tragic, that the 
 man on the street, with perhaps little oppor- 
 tunity of acquaintance in ministerial life, gets 
 his impressions from these faulty and biased 
 sources. 
 
 The minister lives the most balanced possible 
 intellectual life. He realizes as does no other 
 class of men the answer to that fine prayer of 
 Tennyson's, ''Let knowledge grow from more to 
 more, and more of reverence in us dwell." A 
 great preacher and theologian, on his retirement 
 from active service recently, announced two 
 ambitions for the remaining years of his life. First 
 he would go around the world and study every 
 type of people. And then he said he would read 
 throughout the "Encyclopedia Brittanica." What- 
 ever one might think of this program for a happy 
 
CROSSES AND COMPENSATIONS 75 
 
 old age, it indicates the cosmopolitan, the cyclo- 
 pedic character of a minister's interests. Every- 
 thing is grist that comes to his mill. Rightly 
 considered, theology is the one great balancing 
 science which has a place for everything and puts 
 everything in its place. Practically, too, the 
 preacher studies life in all of its phases. The 
 doctor knows his patients only when things have 
 gone wrong. This too is largely true of the lawyer. 
 The minister knows them when they have gone 
 wrong and when they are going rightly, in the 
 crises of joy and the crises of sorrow, in the best 
 moments and the worst, in the storm and in 
 the sunshine, in the valley of decision and on the 
 plains of service. He has the fine fellowship of 
 books. Nearly always the windows of music are 
 open to his soul. He has entree with the cultured 
 minds and homes of his community. 
 
 He has, too, what is perhaps the best environ- 
 ment for his family of any profession. Not an 
 ideal environment, certainly, but more nearly 
 an ideal one than almost any other type of home. 
 It is tragic to upset a popular illusion about the 
 uniform delinquency of the minister's child, but 
 as a matter of fact the saying that the minister's 
 
76 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 boy typically turns out badly is an interesting 
 saying, except that it happens to be a lie. A study 
 of great men for generations would reveal that a 
 larger percentage of our best public leadership 
 comes out of ministerial homes than from any other 
 source. More ministers' sons enter the ministry 
 itself than any other class of men except farmers' 
 sons, and it must be remembered that the farmer 
 outnumbers the minister manyfold. His children 
 are brought up with good books and good music 
 and the example of the intellectual life, with 
 high ideals presented both at church and in 
 the home; and the figures will show that what- 
 ever the average minister will deny himself 
 he will see to it that his child gets an 
 education. In an age of crass and unspeakable 
 selfishness, which has been content to allow the 
 minister's nominal salary to remain at the same 
 figure while the value of the dollar he has received 
 has depreciated eighty-five per cent, he will still 
 see to it that his boy and his girl get to college 
 and have a chance to develop the life possibilities 
 of a soul which only a thorough education can 
 unloose. And yet there are those who have said 
 he is a poor financier. As a rule he can finance 
 
CROSSES AND COMPENSATIONS 77 
 
 more forward-looking enterprises on less resource 
 than any man living. 
 
 There are, too, the unspeakable compensations 
 of his friendships. These grow richer, sweeter, 
 and more satisfying with the passing years. When 
 the little ones that he has baptized grow up to 
 young manhood and womanhood, are guided 
 through conversion crises of adolescence, and 
 inspired through a course of college education 
 and in the choice of their life work, are married by 
 him after a while, and later bring their own little 
 ones for his blessing; when he has watched in the 
 home through the storm and stress of life's great 
 tragedies that have beaten on those he loves, and 
 has helped them through; he knows the deep 
 satisfying secret of a friendship that can really 
 never be known anywhere else, unless it be in 
 the work of the good Christian doctor. Lives 
 are grappled to him by silken ties of love that 
 grip stronger than hooks of steel. His spiritual 
 children rise up to call him blessed. For myself, 
 when I even try to speak of these friendships 
 something chokes within me and I cannot give 
 it utterance. Only, I understand how Browning 
 felt when he sang, 
 
78 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 How should I conceive 
 What a heaven there may be, let it but resemble 
 Earth myself have known; no bliss that's finer, fuller, 
 Only bliss that lasts, they say, and fain would I believe. 
 
 All this is only one phase of the supreme joy 
 that comes to a life of service. Pleasure is not to 
 be gained as we make it our main objective. It 
 is a by-product of unselfish service. Omar, the old 
 Persian poet, whose philosophy of life was that of 
 selfish indulgence, is the most melancholy of 
 great singers. Even his mirth is nothing but a 
 pale smile. But Browning, who bade men forget 
 themselves in service to others, found a joy so 
 great that heaven to him \yas nothing more than 
 the friendships of earth made permanent. I 
 want no better heaven either, than to know that 
 when the scenes of this life fail, my friends shall 
 receive me into everlasting habitations. And I 
 shall know that at his right hand there are 
 pleasures for evermore. 
 
THE TRUMPET CALL 
 
' I believe in human kindness 
 Large among the sons of men, 
 Nobler far in willing blindness 
 Than in censure's keenest ken. 
 I believe in self-denial, 
 In its secret throb of joy, 
 In the love that lives through trial, 
 Dying not, though death destroy. 
 
 * I believe in love renewing 
 All that sin has swept away. 
 Leaven-like its work pursuing 
 Night by night and day by day; 
 In the power of its remolding. 
 In the grace of its reprieve. 
 
 In the glory of beholding 
 Its perfection I believe. 
 
 * I believe in love eternal. 
 Fixed in God's unchanging will, 
 That beneath the deep infernal 
 Hath a depth that's deeper still: 
 In its patience, its endurance 
 To forbear and to retrieve, 
 
 In the large and full assurance 
 Of its triumph I believe." 
 
VIII 
 The Trumpet Call 
 
 The times in which we Hve are desperate. He 
 who is without God would indeed be without 
 hope in this present evil world. The darkest 
 hour of the late war held great physical menace, 
 but never so great a moral menace as the period 
 of slump and degeneration in the spiritual fiber 
 of men which has come as the dreadful aftermath 
 of war. As some one said at Paris during the 
 Peace Conference, "We made a war to end war, 
 now we are making a peace to end peace." Parti- 
 san malice, narrow obstinacy, reaction toward 
 national selfishness, peanut politics, have been 
 witnessed in every allied country. 
 
 Consider the tragedy and menace of Russia. 
 Delivered out of the tyranny of the Romanoffs, she 
 has plunged, first, into the far more degrading 
 tyranny of the proletariat, and then into military 
 dictatorship. Her house, empty, swept, and 
 garnished of the evil spirit of imperial autocracy, 
 has been occupied by the seven worse devils who 
 pillage and murder in the name of Bolshevism. 
 
 81 
 
82 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 Consider Germany, defeated by force of arms, 
 yet unsubdued in spirit, sullenly smothering the 
 rage for revenge which will grimly bide its time 
 awaiting another day. Menaced by the constant 
 danger of royalist and militarist reaction, she 
 has saved herself only by the making of dangerous 
 terms with the most radical elements of her 
 industrial life. How fallen the glory of Martin 
 Luther, of Goethe, of Beethoven! The devasta- 
 tions of war did not visit her borders in the 
 material sense, but the splendid temple of her 
 moral and intellectual and aesthetic glory lies 
 wrecked and ruined. 
 
 In France fierce cross currents of social unrest and 
 rising tides of radicalism give pause to thoughtful 
 men, and make the historian wonder whether the 
 "red, fool fury of the Seine" may some day be re- 
 peated on a larger scale. When we remember that 
 Clemenceau, the Tiger, the saviour of France, 
 whom we, across the Atlantic, counted the idol 
 of his people, has been hissed and hooted by 
 thousands of radicals who packed the streets for 
 blocks, a mass of raging humanity, we think of 
 that other mob which marched to Versailles long 
 years ago clamoring for bread or blood. 
 
THE TRUMPET CALL 83 
 
 Look at Italy, standing to-day on the thin crust 
 of a volcano whose smoldering passions of social 
 revolt threaten possibilities of eruption more 
 terrible than any ever witnessed from her own 
 Vesuvius. 
 
 Japan, with her military group still in the 
 ascendancy, faces the rising tide of social and in- 
 dustrial unrest, and faces, too, the malign hatred of 
 the whole Eastern world, which, rightly or wrongly, 
 looks upon the Island Kingdom as the Prussia of 
 the Orient. More than a century ago Napoleon, 
 speaking of China, said, ''When that sleeping 
 giant wakes let the world beware." And the 
 sleeping giant is waking, roused by the alarm 
 clock of war, rubbing from his slant eyes the dust 
 of centuries and millenniums. But alas, the giant 
 wakes to Western intelligence, to Western in- 
 ventions, to Western fraud and graft and cor- 
 ruption; while the Church, playing at her great 
 task of foreign missions, has not begun to arouse 
 this giant to the spiritual forces which alone have 
 saved Western civilization from utter decay. 
 
 England, adept master at the handling of col- 
 onies — a master trained through certain severe 
 experiences on the American continent nearly 
 
84 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 a century and a half ago — is to-day facing colonial 
 problems ominous with possibilities and well- 
 nigh insoluble in character. In India the constant 
 mutterings of nationalistic and tribal revolt, 
 .and in Egypt a great river of anti-foreign passion 
 broad and deep as the Nile, so complicate the 
 Eastern problem that the empire on which the 
 sun never sets faces the most serious crisis in 
 its world administration. While, coming a little 
 nearer home, we see Lloyd George, like Macbeth 
 of old, standing perplexed, while the three weird 
 sisters, the witches of Racial Hate and Religious 
 Hate and Class Hate, are dancing their devils' 
 dance around that seething, bubbling, Irish stew. 
 
 "Round about the cauldron go; 
 In the poisoned entrails throw. 
 Toad, that under cold stone 
 Days and nights has thirty-one 
 Swelter' d venom sleeping got, 
 Boil thou first i' the charmed pot. 
 Double, double toil and trouble; 
 Fire burn and cauldron bubble." 
 
 Nowhere in all literature is there a more accurate 
 description of the Irish situation. 
 
 There was a great preacher in days of old whose 
 name was Amos. His homiletic method was 
 
THE TRUMPET CALL 85 
 
 that kind of ascending climax which began with 
 nations most remote, drew nearer and nearer his 
 own country, and at last drove his passionate 
 shafts of denunciation into the festering heart 
 of the wrongs in his beloved homeland. God 
 give us an hour of Amos in these tragic times! 
 He would have something to say to Russia and 
 Germany and France and Italy; to Japan and 
 China and England and Ireland; but we would 
 find at the very center of his burning indictment 
 the sins of our own America. The slump, war 
 weariness, and the moral and spiritual shell 
 shock of war's aftermath have reacted on America 
 as well as on Europe. We have lost — to put it 
 in a single grim phrase — God help us! we have 
 lost the moral leadership of an organized world. 
 The brooding ghosts of that fine altruism which 
 swept us through the war to glorious victory must 
 now cry ''Ichabod, . . .the glory is departed." We 
 might have put ourselves at the head of all the 
 idealists the world over in leading the nations 
 toward the better world that is to be. We might 
 have strengthened the hands of the progressive 
 groups in every nation. For the present we have 
 lost that supreme opportunity, through a series 
 
86 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 of tragic mischances, the responsibiUty for which 
 does not rest exclusively at either end of Penn- 
 sylvania Avenue in Washington. Sir Horace 
 Walpole once said, "I could be proud of my 
 country if it were not for my countrymen." No 
 Christian man can say this; because, when it can 
 function normally, experience has shown that the 
 heart of America is sound and true. Certainly, 
 however, one might paraphrase the old English 
 cynic and say, "I could be proud of my country 
 if it were not for some of my countrymen." 
 Unfortunately, too, a humiliating minority in 
 both of our great political organizations has 
 been in a position to take advantage of our cum- 
 brous and complicated peace-making machinery 
 to hinder and thwart the conscience of America, 
 which had highly resolved that "our sacred dead 
 should not die in vain," but that the flowers 
 should bloom over their graves in a new world 
 which should live, not by fear and force, but by 
 faith and friendship. 
 
 But this is no time for futile regrets or unfeeling 
 denunciations. Let the dead past bury its dead, 
 and each man concerned in it prepare to meet 
 his God in the Great Assize. Unto the old lost 
 
THE TRUMPET CALL 87 
 
 opportunity speak the words of the Master in 
 the Garden, ''Sleep on now, and take your rest." 
 But girding ourselves for the struggle that yet 
 confronts us, let us hear his ringing summons, 
 "Arise, let us be going.'' 
 
 Henry van Dyke has somewhere said that the 
 finest line in Tennyson's poems occurs in that 
 dramatic scene where King Arthur bids farewell 
 to his guilty Queen Guinevere, turns his back on 
 the irrevocable past, faces the struggle of the 
 future, and cries, 
 
 "Now must I hence. 
 Through the thick night I hear the trumpet blow." 
 
 The world can yet be saved if men who 
 are kings and priests unto God, turning their 
 backs on the irrevocable past, shall face the 
 great "battle in the west" upon whose issue rests 
 the future of the civilized world. If the things 
 fall for which the preacher stands the world 
 falls with them. If our vision perish, the driving 
 power that moves the world is at a standstill. 
 Many years ago a noted public leader told in 
 my hearing a little story of the old man who kept 
 the farm of Daniel Webster in Massachusetts. 
 
88 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 He had but two articles of creed. The first was 
 this: "I believe in the American Union." The 
 second was this: "I believe in Daniel Webster." 
 These two simple beliefs were the motive power 
 of the man's whole life. They were the central 
 sun around which his whole being revolved. But 
 there came a time when a brilliant young senator 
 from South Carolina, Robert Hayne by name, rose 
 up in the United States Senate and delivered a 
 magnificent oration which seemed to have blotted 
 this sun out in darkness. Critics agreed that this 
 great speech had demolished the theory of the 
 American Union, had demolished Daniel Webster. 
 The address, quoted in the Boston Intelligencer, 
 a weekly paper of that time, came down to the 
 farm. The old man read it and promptly went to 
 bed. There was nothing left to live for, he said, 
 and he did not care to go on. For a week he lay 
 there, refusing to be comforted. With the next 
 week, however, came the succeeding copy of the 
 Boston Intelligencer, containing the now world- 
 famous reply of Webster to Hayne. His son 
 John took the paper up to the old man's bedside. 
 ''Father," said he, "here is Mr. Webster's reply 
 to Mr. Hayne." 'Take it away," was the curt 
 
THE TRUMPET CALL 89 
 
 reply, "not even Daniel could answer that speech." 
 But John, being wise in his generation, left the 
 paper by the bedside. By and by natural curiosity 
 began to work. The old man glanced at the 
 opening sentences of that matchless oration. 
 Catching the tremendous sweep of its ponder- 
 ous movement, the pulse of its white-hot pas- 
 sion, the rugged grip of its iron-bound logic, 
 he read on, shivering with excitement, read it 
 first through tears, and then with fiery eyes of 
 exultation. At last John, eagerly waiting below, 
 heard a giant voice roaring down the stairway, 
 ''John, John, bring up my boots!" And John 
 brought up the boots. The old man rose, dressed 
 himself, put on his boots, and went out once more 
 to do a man's work in a man's world. Why? 
 Because the thing he had lost had been restored 
 to him ; because personal faith and personal loyalty 
 and personal love, belief in the future, belief in 
 the stability of our most sacred ideals, are the 
 factors that put the driving power into all human 
 progress. And it is our great task in these times of 
 doubt and fear and distrust and discontent to 
 bring back to men the faith and loyalty and con- 
 fidence, both in God and the future, which would 
 
90 THE RANGE FINDERS 
 
 impel them to "put on the boots" and to go out 
 as those who are ''neither children nor gods, but 
 men in a world of men." That is the trumpet 
 call to the Christian ministry. 
 
 It is a call not only to men of surpassing talents 
 and commanding intellect, but to those who, \^ith 
 five talents or one, have been near enough to Christ 
 that they have learned to feel deeply and intently, 
 to speak out boldly, to fear nothing but sin, and 
 by the grace of God never to quit. 
 
 Many years ago the \vriter heard a great 
 preacher tell of his experience as a professor in 
 one of our theological seminaries. There came a 
 very witty and brilliant lecturer, with a taste for 
 epigi'ams, who remarked among other things that 
 even God Almighty could not put a four-inch 
 stream through a two-inch pipe. At the close of 
 the lecture a discouraged student came to his 
 teacher and said, ' 'Professor, I am a two-inch 
 pipe all right, and I am afraid that even God 
 Almighty cannot use me." And that wise teacher 
 said: "My boy, it all depends on whether you are 
 talking about water or electricity. If your life is a 
 current of electricity its effect will depend, not 
 on the size of the current, but on its intensity, 
 
THE TRUMPET CALL 91 
 
 not on the amperage, but on the voltage." So 
 this young man, encouraged a little, went out of 
 the seminary to take an obscure country parish 
 which no one else wanted. And for six months 
 he preached, with only a twofold message. Day 
 after day he hammered it home. First: '*We are 
 great sinners." Second: "Christ is a great 
 Saviour." But he hammered it home with such 
 intensity, with such tremendous voltage, that 
 presently people began to say, 'Trobably we are 
 great sinners; and probably, too, Christ is a great 
 Saviour." Soon the whole countryside was roused 
 and swept by a mighty revival, through the 
 ministry of a man who had little amperage, but 
 much voltage; little size, but much intensity. 
 
 The fate of the future hangs upon one supreme 
 question: Shall we get enough men to save the 
 world? They need not be great men. But they 
 must be men burning with the intensity of a 
 supreme passion, uplifted and steadied by a 
 supreme belief in a victorious Lord.