Sji^.Z 
 
 iFrom \\\t Sltbraru uf 
 
 lly? Etbrarg of 
 J^rtncrton Qllf^nlngtral S^^mtnarQ 
 
 BR 50 .E43 1901 
 Eldridge, Gardner S 
 Unto heights heroic 
 
Unto 
 HeigKts Heroic 
 
 (A Biblical Interpretation) 
 By 
 
 V 
 
 Gardner S. Eldridg'e 
 
 New YorKt Eaton CgL Mains 
 Cincinnati I Jenning;s CSL Pye 
 
CopNTig-ht by 
 
 Eaton & mains. 
 
 1901. 
 
TO THE MEMORY OF MY 
 SMOTHER 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction 9 
 
 Literature : 
 
 The Book of Books 23 
 
 The Book of the Meeting 39 
 
 The Book of Life 57 
 
 History : 
 
 The Crossed Hands 71 
 
 The Heart of the Vision 85 
 
 The Kiss of Destiny 99 
 
 Life : 
 
 The Voices in 
 
 The Mission 123 
 
 The Hero 137 
 
 The Christ : 
 
 Literature 153 
 
 History 165 
 
 Life !. 177 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
"Amid all the mysteries by which we are surrounded 
 nothing is more certain than that we are ever in the 
 presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy from which 
 all things proceed." — H. Spencer. 
 
 "As a matter of history, the existence of a quasi- 
 human God has always been a postulate." — John Fiske. 
 
 "He seems to hear a heavenly Friend 
 And through thick veils to apprehend 
 A labor working to an end." — Tennyson. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Having once admitted the principles of the 
 Reformation, it is inevitable that the Bible 
 should become a storm center of controversy. 
 For individualism is in its essence antagonistic 
 to uniformity. It is impossible tO' inclose any 
 number of thinking men within the circle of one 
 idea, unless they abandon their thinking. 
 
 "For every fiery prophet in old times, 
 
 And all the sacred madness of the bard, 
 
 When God made music through them, could but speak 
 
 His music by the framework and the chord." 
 
 Allowance must always be made for ''the 
 framework and the chord." 
 
 But this very difficulty of identical thought 
 and expression is a prime factor in human 
 progress. For the value of controversy is not 
 simply the victory of one party over the other. 
 The main value is in the controversy itself; 
 through it the vision is enlarged. 
 
 The psalmist prayed, ''Open thou mine eyes, 
 9 
 
Introduction 
 
 that I may behold wondrous things out of thy 
 law." This prayer is being answered through 
 the conflict of biblical study. The eyes of man 
 are opening wider and wider upon the book of 
 God. From being a mere storehouse of proof 
 texts open only to the theologian for dogma 
 building, it is rapidly becoming the book of 
 God open to the heart of man for life building. 
 
 I know many people think the book in jeop- 
 ardy — that the foundations of our faith are 
 being undermined. Then possibly we need to 
 lay the foundations deeper. We ought neither 
 to suspect the Bible of insecurity in itself, nor 
 the critics of rendering it so, unless we first 
 make sure that our faith is resting upon the 
 real foundations of the book. 
 
 It is one of the principles of life that we 
 be constantly making our way through the 
 transient toward the permanent; through the 
 relative toward the absolute; through the 
 guesses of man toward the truth of God. The 
 same principle holds in the study of the Bible. 
 A revelation in its essence is not what we find, 
 but what comes to us; what is constantly and 
 increasingly coming; what is revealed, and 
 forever being revealed. The revelation, then, 
 is always larger than our grasp of it. 
 
 10 
 
Introduction 
 
 Now, as a matter of fact the revelation of 
 God to this world — that is, the revealing of 
 God's life to the world through the Bible — is 
 not and cannot be disturbed. Only grant the 
 existence of God, a being from whom all things 
 proceed, a being who is forever expressing him- 
 self through the whole universe, and this won- 
 derful book will easily take its place as the 
 noblest expression he has ever made of himself. 
 
 The controversy, as a rule, does not deal with 
 revelation in this larger sense, but has to do 
 with the material through which it comes. It 
 is engaged in analyzing, in adjusting and read- 
 justing, that material. It deals with the form 
 rather than the spirit. 
 
 Forms are transient, spirit permanent. We 
 are making our way through the one toward 
 the other. The constant passing of forms is 
 the pathos of progress. Why, then, be so hasty 
 in charging the critics with having stolen away 
 our Master because the familiar form has dis- 
 appeared? Lingering at the empty tomb with 
 John a larger truth may dawn, and still linger- 
 ing with the loving Mary the Master himself 
 may speak. 
 
 But all this urging in upon the heart of the 
 book is the urgency of life itself. We cannot 
 
Introduction 
 
 rest in our Scripture searching, for somehow 
 we are impelled by the conviction that life lies 
 in here. As Jesus said of the Jews, ''Ye search 
 the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have 
 eternal life." 
 
 It is but the struggle for life, eternal life, old 
 as our humanity. It is the spirit of man striv- 
 ing into the presence of God : 'Tor this is life 
 eternal, that they might know thee the only true 
 God." There may be much vague groping, 
 and many a wild plunge on the part of our 
 thinking. It may be a strange Faust-like 
 career, yet the urging thirst, the articulate 
 cry, is that of the Pilgrim, "Life, life, eternal 
 Hfe!" 
 
 Every time we have come more closely into 
 the presence of God there has been a breaking 
 up of many time-honored traditions. It was 
 true of the Reformation in reference to the 
 Church. Men cried out against the seeming 
 vandalism. And when the Church emerged it 
 was stripped of many forms that had been 
 sacredly cherished. Yet it was more than ever 
 a living Church. We had not lost, but gained. 
 All was in the interest of the individual ap- 
 proach to God; of a deeper experience; of a 
 stronger spiritual life, a better and mightier 
 
 12 
 
Introduction 
 
 Church. It is the ever-recurring struggle of 
 God and man to come into more spiritual re- 
 lations. It is the passion of communion — of 
 that fellowship which is life itself. 
 
 But the question may be honestly raised as 
 to whether the Bible is really taking on the 
 more vital forms — whether it be coming into 
 shape for the deeper spiritual nourishment of 
 the soul and the larger influencing of the 
 world; whether the eager spirit of man is 
 really turning biblical interpretation into 
 the more available, palatable, and spiritual 
 food of life. 
 
 The chief complaint is that the book is 
 being humanized, that the supernatural is being 
 driven into the background. Well, there is in 
 this universe nothing more supernatural than 
 God, and next to him nothing more supernat- 
 ural than man. Carlyle has made this clear 
 enough. Now, in the age-long struggle of the 
 imperfect personality of man to rise into the 
 perfect personality of God through intercourse 
 and communion, who shall say that in the pres- 
 ence of these personal forces there shall not be 
 experiences and events that shall transcend the 
 natural order? 
 
 But in common with all other phenomena 
 13 
 
Introduction 
 
 these experiences and events are a legitimate 
 subject for critical study. Suppose, then, that 
 some things we once thought supernatural are 
 now shown in the larger vision to be natural, 
 is God any the less the author ? Does it prove 
 that God is no longer the author of an event 
 simply because we have an inkling of how it 
 came to pass ? There is a natural supernatural- 
 ism in which "we live, move, and have our 
 being." The more we cherish it the nobler 
 must life become, God in our life becoming the 
 rule, and not the exception. 
 
 Or suppose the scientific investigator, with 
 the mania of explaining things upon him, carry 
 the process too far, as he certainly does some- 
 times. Suppose he leave no room for an un- 
 known quantity, how long can he maintain such 
 a position? He can no more analyze and ex- 
 plain the life of Moses without the presence of 
 an Infinite and Eternal Person from whom 
 that life proceeds than Herbert Spencer can 
 analyze and explain the universe without the 
 presence of his ''Infinite and Eternal Energy 
 from which all things proceed." 
 
 But if the book is becoming more human is 
 it therefore becoming less divine? There is 
 nothing in the world so much like God as our 
 14 
 
Introduction 
 
 humanity. This the Bible itself teaches. There- 
 fore, the more human the book the more per- 
 fectly will it reveal God. 
 
 Now, what is really taking place in the pres- 
 ent-day interpretation of the Bible ? If we take 
 up the books that are rapidly coming to hand, 
 the books that are to help us into the deeper 
 meaning of God's life in the Bible, what do we 
 find ? Such books as these : The Life and Liter- 
 ature of the Hehrezv People, History and Gov- 
 ernment, Ethics and Religion, The Social Life, 
 The Epic of the Inner Life, Literature of the 
 Old Testament, The Messages of the Prophets, 
 Literary Study of the Bible. 
 
 These are the commentaries of to-day. And 
 what is their significance? Just this, that in 
 place of, or in addition to, the former textual 
 interpretation in the light of our theology, we 
 have historical, ethical, social, religious, poetic, 
 and literary interpretation, in the light of the 
 whole dramatic sweep of human existence. 
 And this is equivalent to saying that it is in the 
 light of that Spirit of God who is the Master 
 of the world's progress. 
 
 Is not this a gain ? Is it not getting beyond 
 the cramped letter into the presence of the 
 thing itself? Is not this passing between the 
 
Introduction 
 
 lines into the very atmosphere of that divine- 
 human communion of which the Bible is a 
 faithful record? Is not this getting hold of 
 that communion at its vital centers, at those 
 points at v^hich its principles must radiate into 
 the multitudinous interests of man ? Suppose, 
 instead of an oracle from the lips of David 
 that gives us a world of trouble, we pass be- 
 yond the letter into the relation that exists 
 between God and the man, how much broader, 
 deeper, surer a standpoint from which to inter- 
 pret the truth at issue. 
 
 In our interpretations, then, we are coming 
 into the universal language of the soul, that 
 utters itself in relations rather than words. 
 And so we are gaining, in the place of a dead, 
 a living language. Books once sealed to us are 
 being unlocked and their present-day value 
 realized. 
 
 The time has come indeed for passing on 
 from the questions of "higher criticism" into a 
 realm yet higher, that may be characterized as 
 ''higher appreciation" — the legitimate sequence 
 of all criticism. We wait the genius to-day. 
 We wait the creative masters — the man who 
 can make the lofty figures, the mighty events, 
 live again with a glory born of the increasing 
 i6 
 
Introduction 
 
 light, and the genius of the man, such as no 
 former interpretation has achieved. 
 
 But the "higher appreciation" of what, of 
 whom ? Why, of God ! Is not this the whole 
 meaning of life, to appreciate God ? Is not this 
 worship, praise, and service? — to appreciate 
 God, to enter more and more into the signifi- 
 cance of his life, deeper and deeper into its 
 meaning. 
 
 And this must come through a revelation; 
 through those things wherein he expresses him- 
 self; through the testimony of ''that which ap- 
 pears." We are thankful to Herbert Spencer 
 that he finds in nature a testimony to the 'In- 
 finite and Eternal Energy." For energy has 
 its place in the life of man. We are still more 
 thankful to John Fiske that he finds in history 
 a testimony to a "Quasi-Human God." For 
 we have a yet deeper need for such a God. 
 
 But we await a better testimony. All nature 
 and all history taken together does not consti- 
 tute a Bible. We need a revelation that will 
 bring God into life in some creative way. For 
 the infinite need of man is not simply life, but a 
 "new life;" not something built or evolved from 
 the past, but from the future. For we are made 
 for progress ; and not only for progress, but we 
 (2) n 
 
Introduction 
 
 have laid upon us the strange heroic task of 
 passing from one world into another — not at 
 death, but now and here: from a world of 
 necessity into a world of freedom; from a nat- 
 ural world into a world of grace — grace of God 
 and grace of man; from a world of things and 
 laws into a world of personalities and relations. 
 There is not only a "struggle for life" and a 
 "struggle for the life of others," but there is a 
 "struggle for the new life," and a "struggle for 
 the nezii life of others." All the meaning of 
 human progress is involved in the last two 
 struggles. Man has laid upon him the super- 
 human task of making himself, of finding the 
 larger, diviner meaning of the soul through 
 some "Divine Hero" of our moral and spiritual 
 nature. And such a Hero the Bible reveals. In 
 the prophecy of Isaiah the name "Hero-God" is 
 employed. But more important than the name 
 is the fact itself throughout the Bible. 
 
 Everywhere throughout this divine-human 
 drama God appears as the Hero-God. Every- 
 where men and events, history, literature, and 
 life, rise into heroic proportions only in his 
 presence. What a book, then, for life ! — for the 
 life of to-day, when the crying need of the hour 
 is the strong, heroic life; when w^e are in such 
 i8 
 
Introduction 
 
 danger of becoming victims of facility and lux- 
 ury; when the heroic task is laid upon us of 
 mastering the old world, that has grown into 
 infinite proportions through the same Hero- 
 God who has proven himself master of Litera- 
 ture, History, and Life throughout the age-long 
 witnessing of the Bible. 
 
 The attempt, then, that follows in these pages 
 is to sketch in a brief, and I fear crude, manner 
 the biblical philosophy of Literature, History, 
 and Life — how all are evolved through the 
 Hero-God; how through this literature he 
 leads toward the higher vent of life; how life it- 
 self is evolved through the meeting of the Hero, 
 and redeemed through the companionship of 
 his revelation; how history finds its progressive 
 principle in him ; how the world moves forward 
 through the personal unfoldment of man 
 through the personal Hero; and how, in its last 
 analysis, the whole destiny of man hinges upon 
 the individual relation of man to the Hero. 
 Thus coming to the individual life, how that 
 life makes its way through the voices to an ex- 
 perience with the personal Hero, finds its mis- 
 sion in his presence, and finally achieves it 
 through the dynamics of God — the divine 
 Hero in his redeeming passion; and how Jesus 
 19 
 
Introduction 
 
 of Nazareth proved himself, and unto this day 
 is proving himself, master of Literature, His- 
 tory, and Life. 
 
 If this outline be true we have another 
 glimpse into the noble vitality of the Bible; into 
 its far-reaching purpose and power; into its 
 unique and unrivaled place in the life of man. 
 Yes, another glimpse into that great fact, that 
 this ancient book has alone kept pace with the 
 progress of man; has never been thrown off 
 the scent; that it has ever held, and still holds, 
 the secret of human development. 
 
 I am conscious of having touched with un- 
 skilled hands themes that far transcend my 
 powers. 
 
 "For more's felt than is perceived, 
 And more's perceived than can be interpreted, 
 And Love strikes higher with his lambent flame 
 Than Art can pile the fagots." 
 
 20 
 
LITERATURE 
 The BooK of BooKs 
 
"No skeptic he who bold essays 
 T' unravel all the mystic maze 
 Of the Creator's mighty plan — 
 A task beyond the powers of man, 
 Who, when his reason fails to soar 
 High as his will, believes no more — 
 No! — calmly through the world he steals, 
 Nor seeks to trace what God conceals, 
 Content with what that God reveals." 
 
 — Tennyson. 
 
 I press God's lamp 
 
 i press <joa s lamp 
 Close to my breast— its splendor, soon or late, 
 Will pierce the gloom."— Br ozvning. 
 
THE BOOK OF BOOKS 
 
 " The words of the wise are as goads, and as nails fastened by the mas- 
 ters of assemblies, which are given from one shepherd. And further, by 
 these, my son, be admonished: of making many boohs there is no end."— 
 Eccles. xii, ii, 12. 
 
 The author of Ecclesiastes discusses the 
 problem of Hfe, and closes the discussion by 
 warning us against the attempt to solve the 
 problem by a book. ''Of making many books 
 there is no end." The last book can never be 
 written, the last word never uttered. 
 
 It is said that Victor Hugo used to walk by 
 the seashore and throw off poetry from his 
 rugged soul in response to old Ocean's mysteri- 
 ous call. Man is ever walking by the shore of 
 an infinite sea, from whose depths voices are 
 calling, and the response is book on book. "Of 
 making many books there is no end." Of 
 course all books are not the product of infinite 
 mystery, but all great books are. They seem 
 like a fruitless labor, a vain attempt to do the 
 impossible. But in reality they have a divine 
 mission, and our author presents that mission 
 in a most striking and picturesque form. "The 
 words of the wise are as goads," with which 
 you spur the flock forward. And "they are like 
 23 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 nails" — or spikes — with which you pitch your 
 tent from night to night. Both are given by the 
 same shepherd. 
 
 We have here a picture of life's progress — a 
 flock spurred on by goads, while each day's ad- 
 vance is held by driving stakes and pitching 
 tents. It is a picture of the two great princi- 
 ples of life, the progressive goad and the con- 
 servative stake, the goad of progress, the spirit 
 of adventure, the promise of life. 
 
 "By a mighty impulse driven, 
 By a voice of mystic strength, 
 
 *Go,' it cries; 'to thee is given 
 Happiness to find at length.' " 
 
 Then there is the conservative stake, the 
 stake driven by our fathers. Around it cluster 
 holy associations, dreams of the night, toils of 
 the day, visions of God. It is sometimes very 
 hard to strike those sacred tents. 
 
 Some books are '^goads," and some are 
 ''stakes;" great books are both goads and 
 stakes, given by the same shepherd. They 
 revere the past while making for the future. 
 'They come not to destroy, but to fulfill." 
 
 The book of Ecclesiastes has served diverse 
 ends. One man, missing entirely its literary 
 genius, culls from it a lot of sparkling texts and 
 24 
 
The Book of Books 
 
 out of them builds strange systems of the- 
 ology. Another one, equally blind to its liter- 
 ary form, characterizes it as the pessimistic 
 wailings of a disappointed voluptuary. As well 
 treat Tennyson's 'Tn Memoriam" in a similar 
 fashion by making it the basis of theology, or 
 casting it aside as the wailings of disappoint- 
 ment. Indeed, we shall best grasp the signifi- 
 cance of Ecclesiastes, perhaps, in the light of 
 this modern poem. 
 
 In the English poem we have a great sorrow- 
 riven soul, keenly sensitive to the thought of 
 his age, its problems and perplexities, its ques- 
 tions, its misgivings, its hopes and fears. 
 At times it sinks almost to the minor key of 
 faith, then rises grandly to the major, and 
 finally emerges in sight of the ''far-off divine 
 event." In the Hebrew poem we have also a 
 great soul, equally sensitive to the thought of 
 his age, to all its puzzling questions, its fasci- 
 nating theories of life, its allurements and am- 
 bitions, its aims and philosophies. At times he 
 is almost engulfed by them, but finally emerges 
 in sight of the whole "duty of man" — the 
 supreme goal. 
 
 The book sparkles with philosophy, poetry, 
 and maxims, but its great value is not in these. 
 25 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 It is in its unseen goal, its ideal. And its power 
 is in its movement, its trend toward that goal. 
 This is the great value of books — not what they 
 say, but what they suggest, where they lead. 
 A book is a fragment struggling for completion. 
 And that "struggle" coupled with the character 
 of the goal is its pith and power. 
 
 Our author seeks life in the world. That 
 world appears to him in three forms : pleasure, 
 wisdom, and affairs — to feel, to know, to pos- 
 sess. He rings the changes on these three forms 
 of life. He seeks life as a votary of pleasure. 
 He plucks the nearest, then the next, and the 
 next as an ox crops grass across a field w4th no 
 thought of what he is or where he is going. 
 The venture is a failure — ''all is vanity." 
 
 Then he seeks life as a votary of knowledge. 
 He adds fact to fact according to certain mod- 
 ern methods. But when he sums up his facts 
 he gets no kind of livable world. The result is 
 chaos, not cosmos. Something more than mere 
 addition enters into the making of a world for 
 man to live in. 
 
 Finally he seeks life as a votary of affairs, 
 
 and adds thing to thing, house to house. He is 
 
 a man with a hoe, a very large hoe — the other 
 
 man with a hoe whose brow grows not 
 
 26 
 
The Book of Books 
 
 more ''slanting," but whose heart grows more 
 pinched and bedwarfed. And again this life- 
 seeker's refrain is, ''Vanity of vanities." 
 
 Now suppose the quest end here. Suppose 
 this complete the book. The result is not life 
 but vanity, simply because an attempt has been 
 made to crowd the whole into a part; all of life 
 into one phase ; man into an idea ; the boundless 
 into boundaries. Houses have been built with 
 great pains and toil and care, one of pleasure, 
 another of business, and another of knowledge, 
 and, behold, not one of them is big enough to 
 hold the man who built it. "Surely this is 
 vanity." This is the folly of the purely realistic 
 book, the book that attempts to give us life by 
 marking its boundaries. 
 
 Life, they say, is made of facts, things, feel- 
 ings, etc. Now let the artistic spirit move upon 
 them, and, behold, we have a book; yes, a book 
 disclosing the artistic glory of its maker, but 
 in it no room for the maker himself. His own 
 soul, unless dead, will beat against its bound- 
 aries; will see the day when its very artistic 
 beauty will pall upon the heart that is crying 
 out for life. It simply does not give the higher 
 vent to life. This is its folly. For real life is 
 just this, that it is forever and forever seeking 
 27 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 the higher vent, the open road of God, the hill 
 country of the soul. And all the facts and feel- 
 ings and things must marshal around and lend 
 themselves to this sublime journey. Indeed, 
 their very life, their power, their glory is born 
 of the soul's touch upon them as she passes on 
 her way. 
 
 Did you never feel the stifling narrowness 
 of the realistic book? All lines are boundaries, 
 things are things, words are words and ^'noth- 
 ing more;" no windows, no glimpses beyond. 
 The darkness brings out no distant stars, the 
 day awakes no great soulful songs. There's 
 nothing to lose, nothing to gain, no hazard of 
 great destinies — dry, dull, dead. Sometimes 
 the dullness is relieved by the backward plunge 
 into our animal nature through the lower vent 
 of life — the senses, passions, and vices of the 
 soul. This is simply the way of death. For if 
 the bugle call of the soul be ''forward" — and 
 who will doubt it? — then ''backward, back- 
 ward," must ever be the death knell. 
 
 But the book is not complete at this point. 
 The author, though realistic, does not belong 
 to the school of realism. In his search he has 
 discovered himself. In looking for an outer 
 world he stumbles upon an inner world. 
 
The Book of Books 
 
 Listen ! *1 have considered the task which God 
 hath given to the sons of men, to exercise them- 
 selves withal. He hath made everything beau- 
 tiful in its season. He hath also put the zijorld 
 into their heart; only they understand not the 
 work of God from beginning to end.'' 
 
 God hath made everything beautiful in its 
 season, and we have considered man's task in 
 seeking out that beautiful in the outer world. 
 But now we come upon the strange and dis- 
 turbing fact that there is an inner w^orld, a 
 heart-world, only we cannot understand it. 
 This heart-world is a mystery waiting to be 
 revealed. 
 
 All through the book there are gleams and 
 flashes and disturbing monitions of this heart- 
 world mingling with the outer world of pleas- 
 ure, affairs, and know^ledge. Yet our author 
 does not project the heart-world as a work of 
 the imagination. Had he done so he would 
 have given us a romance, "a vision from his 
 own heart and not out of the mouth of the 
 Lord." For romance is but the ideal projection 
 of the heart-world. From the realistic shores 
 of sin and sorrow and toil we sail in the good 
 ship Imagination for our Arcady, for the land 
 where everything comes out right; where the 
 29 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 wicked finally cease from troubling. We shall 
 always love the romance, sweet refuge of weary 
 hours. It has its blessed ministry, but life itself 
 does not lie in that direction. What indeed are 
 the great human dreams of immortality but ,the 
 projection over and over again of this heart- 
 world. 
 
 But our author takes still another course. 
 The heart-world is not to be projected, but 
 awaits its own unfolding. The book like a 
 mountain torrent rushes on. Like a man fight- 
 ing his way through the tangled underbrush, it 
 pushes for the open glade. And the light of 
 the opening glade comes first in snatches 
 through the foliage, growing at last into un- 
 broken light in those memorable words, 'This 
 is the end of the matter; all hath been heard: 
 fear God, and keep his commandments; for this 
 is the whole duty of man." 
 
 And this is no mere escape, no making the 
 best of a bad case, but the aim from the begin- 
 ning, the goal enhanced and glorified by the 
 method and way of approach. 
 
 One thing stands out above all others, and 
 
 that is the unabashed strength of the author's 
 
 heart. The heart-world may be a mystery, yet 
 
 a mystery he will never surrender. Uncrushed 
 
 30 
 
The Book of Books 
 
 by the defeats of this world, unallured by the 
 dreams of another, he holds right on in the 
 strength of his soul. And the goal is not a 
 book, but a Being. There is no final book, but 
 there is a final Being. "Fear God, and keep his 
 comandments." This is the "whole duty." 
 Nay, literally read, "the whole of man," the 
 whole story of man. "Rejoice, O young man, 
 in thy youth" — throw open the gates of thy 
 being, give vent to thy nature. Let all that is 
 in thee rise to its utmost. Make the most of 
 thy soul forces, of brain and eye, of heart and 
 hand. "But know that God will bring thee into 
 judgment." All must be marshaled under the 
 divine scrutiny; held to the divine criticism; 
 shaped by the divine thought and judgment. 
 For this and this alone is the w^iole of man. 
 Only this comprehends the whole story of man. 
 This gives the higher vent of life^ — the open 
 road of the soul. 
 
 According, then, to our author life is no mad 
 plunge into this world, no mere dream of an- 
 other, but an heroic unfolding of what is in us, 
 the evolving of the heart-world through God. 
 
 And this is the thought of the Bible itself. 
 In the Epistle to the Hebrews we have a long 
 line of heroes. If we go back to their history 
 31 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 the secret of their heroism is out. They met 
 God, this one at the bush, that one by the brook, 
 and this again under the oak. And it was the 
 Hero-God. Wherever or whenever he appeared 
 it was as the Hero of Hfe, the inner life, the 
 heart-world. Around this meeting has grown 
 the Bible. It is realistic but not realism. No 
 nature-God is ever made the hero. No litera- 
 ture grew about the molten calf. It is idealistic 
 but not idealism. It never swings off into 
 romance; never seeks the dream-world. That 
 tendency drifts of its own accord into the 
 pageantry of the Apocrypha. It is the book 
 of the heart-world evolving through the divine 
 Hero. It is not a dream-world of the imagina- 
 tion, but the real world of revelation, the heart- 
 world, unfolding in the midst of the great 
 world, weaving into its wonderful story hints 
 of nature, intuitions of the soul, and dreams of 
 the world, shaping them all to the higher end — 
 unfolding and unfolding till finally from the 
 matchless heart fell the matchless words, *'Let 
 not your heart be troubled. In my Father's 
 house are many mansions: I go to prepare a 
 place for you." 
 
 Life, then, is not an enfolding of the outer 
 world in terms of pleasure, knowledge, or pos- 
 32 
 
The Book of Books 
 
 sessions, but the unfolding of the heart-world 
 in terms of faith, hope, and love. It is the mas- 
 tery of the outer through the inner. Is not this 
 the best word of modern philosoph}^? Life is 
 not an impression, but an expression. It is 
 something to be given, not gotten. There's a 
 world to be made, not found. The sooner we 
 grasp this thought the better. We are not 
 paupers begging our way through the world, 
 whining when stones are given for bread and 
 serpents for fish. We are princes strewing our 
 pathway with the largess of the soul. It is this 
 heroic role through the Hero-God that leaves 
 all such ancient legends as ''vanity of vanities" 
 far behind. 
 
 It was at this very point that life took on a 
 new meaning to the author; that turned the 
 world from "vanity" into substance. ''Cast thy 
 bread upon the waters." Do you want a better 
 world to live in? Make it better. Cast forth 
 what is in you, and the whole earth and sea and 
 sky shall change its hue. 
 
 "Sow thy seed in the morning, 
 
 And slack not thy hand in the evening. 
 
 And the light shall be sweet to thee." 
 
 Sow, sow thyself. And what goes forth as seed 
 (3) 33 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 and toil will return in a larger, sweeter light; 
 will bless thy last hours with a glorious sunset. 
 
 "When the clouds are full of rain 
 They empty it upon the earth." 
 
 This is the divine order : when things are full 
 they overflow and create a new wealth along 
 their path — trees and grass and flowers. Pour 
 out what is in thee and see if the flowers will 
 not spring up all about thee with their fra- 
 grance and beauty. The great world must 
 come to its best through the heart-world. 
 Think of the infinite resources of this heart- 
 world from imagination to hope, from fancy to 
 faith, from logic to love. The world is not 
 dying for the cattle on a thousand hills, nor for 
 the mountain-locked gold, but for the divine 
 wealth of the soul. 
 
 How apt, therefore, is the exhortation of our 
 author, followed by that strange but beautiful 
 death-song of this very heart-world : ''Remem- 
 ber now thy Creator in the days of thy youth" 
 — while this inner world is at flood-tide of 
 youthful powers, when under the brooding of 
 the divine Hero they shall rise to their noblest; 
 ''Before the sun groweth dark;" before the 
 spring-tide of joy be gone, and the exuberance 
 34 
 
The Book of Books 
 
 of life be lost; before '^the windows be dark- 
 ened, and the doors shall be shut on the 
 streets;" before the world is too much for our 
 craven hearts, and we would shut out all sights 
 and sounds of the noisy world-street; before 
 "the daughters of music be brought low;" be- 
 fore the strong swinging lyric of the soul loses 
 its power to redeem men; before "the silver 
 cord be loosed" — nerve gone, courage flabby, 
 the cords of life too slack to speed the arrow of 
 effort; before "the pitcher be broken," and we 
 can no longer turn and dip life from the pure 
 fountains of God; before the heart- world has 
 fallen into decay, its powers gone, its forces 
 vanished, its future lost — nothing to evolve, 
 nothing to give, nothing to put into the great 
 world with living, creative force. 
 35 
 
LITERATURE 
 THe BooK of tKe Meeting 
 
"The cygnet finds the water ; but the man 
 Is born in ignorance of his element, 
 And feels out blind at first, disorganized 
 By sin i' the blood — his spirit insight dulled 
 And crossed by his sensations. Presently 
 He feels it quicken in the dark sometimes : 
 When mark be reverent, be obedient — 
 For such dumb motions of imperfect life 
 Are oracles of vital Deity." 
 
 — Mrs. Browning. 
 
 "How dared I let expand the force 
 Within me, till some out-soul whose resource 
 It grew for should direct it? Every law 
 Of life, its every fitness, every flaw, 
 Must One determine whose corporeal shape 
 Would be no other than the prime escape 
 And revelation to me of a Will 
 Orblike o'ershrouded and inscrutable 
 Above, save at the point which, I should know, 
 Shone that myself, my powers, might overflow." 
 
 — Browning. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE MEETING 
 
 "And he read in their ears all the words of the book of the covenant 
 which was found in the house of the Lord." — 2 Kings xxiii, 2. 
 
 One of the first thoughts of Hfe is that we 
 have fallen heir to the universe. The blue sky 
 and velvet turf; the daisied fields and mysteri- 
 ous mountains; the song of the brook and the 
 laughter of children ; the quiet of the home and 
 the hum of the market, all wait on us with their 
 ministries. We are heirs of all there is. But 
 another thought follows hard upon this, that 
 the value of the great world's ministry is all 
 dependent upon the character of the inner 
 world, the heart-world. In vain will the dis- 
 tant star beckon to the holden eyes. In vain 
 will nature's harmonies fall upon the discordant 
 soul. And in vain will heroic destinies appeal 
 to the sordid heart. They are indeed minister- 
 ing spirits sent forth to minister, but only 
 to those who are heirs, real heirs, ''heirs of 
 salvation." 
 
 The real burden of life, then, is not in the 
 
 great world about us, but in the little world 
 
 within us. How to work out God's purpose 
 
 there, how to bear the burden of our own 
 
 39 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 divinity, how to achieve our birthright — this is 
 the real burden, and in all the long history of 
 the world but one man ever dared to say, ''My 
 burden is light." And he was the One who 
 kept a lifelong tryst with God, the One in 
 whom heaven and earth met, in whom the 
 divine and human blended. 
 
 This very idea of life, the meeting of the 
 divine and human in man, lies at the heart, is 
 the compelling mystery, of all great literatures. 
 The songs, stories, and dramas of history are 
 the struggle of man to find somewhere on the 
 world's great battlefield the divine Hero of this 
 life we are striving to live, some One who can 
 meet us in life's stress and carry us over into 
 life's victory, descending to our level that he 
 may lift us to his. 
 
 The great classics have failed at this very 
 point. They have failed to effect this meeting. 
 Their aspirations are flung back upon moaning 
 hearts. Their heroes escape to the underworld. 
 Their dramas ])reak down in confusion. 
 
 'Tailing with their weight of cares 
 Upon the great world's ahar stairs 
 That slope through darkness up to God, 
 They stretch lame hands of faith and grope, 
 And gather dust and chaff." 
 
 40 
 
The Book of the Meeting 
 
 It is a daring thought this that lies at the 
 heart of great Hteratures. It is the free spirit 
 of man going forth to meet the free Spirit of 
 God. It is the passion of communion. From 
 one side the human wanderer is groping his 
 way outward. From the other the divine Hero 
 is moving inward. Will they ever meet? All 
 human literatures have wrought on this prob- 
 lem. The classic writer failed because he could 
 never think his way past nature's laws, human 
 conditions, and heredity. 
 
 ''God was trying to speak with him and he was trying to 
 hear, 
 
 But the angry roar of an angry sea 
 
 Had told his soul it was not free ; 
 And his strange imperfect ear 
 Had only caught on the breast of day 
 The strain of a song that was far away." 
 
 Through freedom we make our way to God. 
 But freedom is not a question in thinking, but 
 in living. It is a task not to be thought out 
 through logic, but wrought out through love. 
 Therefore the w^ay to God is no thought jour- 
 ney but a great life journey. The whole man 
 must be in it plunging to depths of penitence 
 and rising to heights of faith. It is a strange, 
 wild, dramatic journey, and it is life from start 
 41 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 to finish. God may not always be within range 
 of man's thought, but he is always within range 
 of his life. 
 
 The book of the meeting, of the coming to- 
 gether of God and man, then, will never be a 
 work of science, nor philosophy, nor theology, 
 nor yet a work of the imagination. It will be a 
 fragment of real life, a segment of human his- 
 tory, stranger than fiction, sublimer than phi- 
 losophy, and more substantial than science. 
 
 Now, in the days of King Josiah such a book 
 was found, buried away in the temple under the 
 dust of years. They called it the book of the 
 covenant, primarily the coming together of God 
 and man. 
 
 The origin of the book carries us back into 
 the depths of history, into a soul's experience. 
 It grew about the life of Moses. Whatever de- 
 velopments may have followed through appre- 
 ciative interpreters of after 3^ears, the core of 
 this scripture is the tryst hour of God and 
 Moses. It is one of the subllmest chapters in 
 all the story of man, flooded with a light that is 
 not of this world. 
 
 Briefly the story runs thus : Moses is born on 
 the banks of the Nile. The mother looks into 
 her child's eyes and reads the promises. But 
 42 
 
The Book of the Meeting 
 
 what avail the promises? For there is the 
 king's decree. Then God plays the pity of a 
 princess over against the king's decree, and the 
 love of a mother over against the king's court, 
 and a vision of the Invisible over against the 
 king's empire. Yes, pity, love, and visions are 
 mightier in this great life battle than decrees, 
 courts, and empires. The product is a young 
 man with the fire mists of a new world within 
 him. A modern writer has said, ''None but 
 yourself shall you meet on the highway of 
 Fate. If Judas go forth to-night it is toward 
 Judas his steps will tend." Then we can never 
 get beyond ourselves. Life rushes round and 
 round in a circle. Where, then, is progress? 
 This is pure fatalism. This is the thought of 
 the Greek tragedy, but not the thought of the 
 Hebrew Bible, not the deepest intuitions of life. 
 Judas may meet no one but himself in the road 
 of fate. But I dare affirm that even in Judas 
 there is not only the constructed man, made 
 thus and so, shaped for fate; but there is also 
 a constructive force, the possibilities of a new 
 man, the fire mists of an unborn life, the germ 
 of a world that might be. If he follow this, he 
 shall meet God and not himself. 
 
 This fire burned in Moses. It was the fire of 
 43 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 creative love, the fire of divine chivalry. He 
 went forth not along the highway of fate, but 
 of freedom. Every blow was a liberty blow 
 for the slave, the brother, the maidens. The 
 bush burned in him before it burned at the foot 
 of Horeb. Sometimes we smother the burning 
 within and never come to the burning without; 
 to the bush that flames, and the voice that 
 speaks — to God, and life's great destiny. 
 
 It was not so much a meeting of thought, of 
 council, as of spirit. Not two souls with a 
 single thought, but two souls with a common 
 burden, a single purpose. It is in our purpose, 
 not our thought, we command our destiny. 
 We may be very poor in thought, but if we are 
 rich in purpose the new world is not far off. 
 Moses had many things to learn, but in one 
 thing his spirit and God's burned to the same 
 end, with redeeming purpose, with creative love 
 for the soul, for the heart-world. We shall 
 never understand the full meaning of that hour, 
 nor any other such hour, when God and man 
 meet in a similar relation, with the same com- 
 mon burden. It is the birth hour of new 
 worlds, new churches, new souls resplendent 
 with divine possibilities. :V11 history has been 
 struggling to utter the meaning of that hour 
 44 
 
The Book of the Meeting 
 
 wheu the cry of the human reached heaven; 
 when the high meaning of Hfe centered in the 
 hands clasped between God and man. 
 
 The real coming together, however, of God 
 and Moses is a process that invites a deeper 
 anatysis. There are two or three suggestive 
 expressions in the story of the meeting. One 
 is the strange name God gave himself — the *T 
 Am." Laying aside all the metaphysical inter- 
 pretations that have ckistered around the name, 
 what is the first practical impression awakened 
 by it? 'T Am." Why, that is the very thing 
 I am not ! That is just the thing I cannot say 
 about myself, yet the very thing I am forever 
 striving for. I want to be. Some scholars 
 make el, the root word for God, to mean goal, 
 the aim or end toward which we strive. No 
 doubt the first practical thought of life is not 
 about our source, but our goal. We are phi- 
 losophers before we ask whence we came. But 
 the moment w^e begin to live we are striving 
 toward something or some one. We know that 
 the great struggle of our humanity is to be — to 
 be more and more. The burden of all history, 
 full of thought, passion, and tragedy is the 
 story of "I want to be.'' Is it not the burden of 
 every boy's life, "I want to be this/' 1 want to 
 45 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 be that," as he pursues the ever vanishing and 
 
 deepening ideals ? 
 
 "God is— 
 Man partly is and wholly hopes to be." 
 
 Now, it is on this wonderful road of "I want 
 to be" God meets us. He never meets us on any 
 other. It is the road strewn w^ith the wreckage 
 of discarded ideals; the road of godly sorrow; 
 every abandoned wreck stained with the tears 
 of repentance; the road of faith, of life's ex- 
 pression, ever new, ever higher, ever holier. 
 
 It was along this road that God met Moses. 
 You can imagine the time when all the world- 
 ideals were flashing before him, when he said, 
 "I want to be a soldier, I want to be a states- 
 man, I want to be a king." One after another 
 they hung before him till through the deepening 
 light of the "Invisible" they finally faded out of 
 sight. 
 
 "There are flashes struck from midnights, 
 There are fire-flames noondays kindle, 
 
 Whereby piled up honors perish, 
 Whereby swollen ambitions dwindle." 
 
 Then I think another set of ideals of a 
 Hebrew character hovered over him when he 
 refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's 
 46 
 
The Book of the Meeting 
 
 daughter, but chose rather to be called the son 
 of a Hebrew daughter. These were moral and 
 spiritual ideals, the higher, diviner thought 
 of life, the higher expression of life, when he 
 was saying, 'T want to be an Abraham, 
 a Jacob, a prince of the house of Israel — yes, 
 a Messiah." 
 
 But what is the full significance of this great 
 Mosaic ambition? What does it mean? We 
 are still at the bush, and God throws upon the 
 man a tremendous task. And from him is 
 wrung the query, ''What am I that you . . . ?" 
 The answer is simply this : ''Moses, when you 
 have taken up the task and carried it to its ful- 
 fillment you will have answered your own ques- 
 tion." God has a very practical w^ay of teach- 
 ing us what we are. The moral stature and 
 spiritual consciousness of life are wrought into 
 us by the work we do — worked in that it may 
 be worked out again, as the sun weaves the 
 dew, air, and earth into the plant that the plant 
 may in turn unfold into the flower. God is 
 always working for the flowering of life. 
 
 He was working for the flowering of Moses 
 
 — the great outer events growing into one 
 
 sublime inner event. And that event was when 
 
 Moses went into Pharaoh's presence, in the 
 
 47 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 name of the people, and said, "God has sent me 
 to tell you to let my son go." 
 
 This is the answer to Moses's question, *'A 
 son of God." John Fiske says, 'The lesson of 
 evolution is that through all these weary ages 
 the human soul has not been cherishing in re- 
 ligion a delusive phantom, but in spite of sun- 
 dry endless groping and stumbling it has been 
 rising to the recognition of its essential kinship 
 with the everlasting God." This great lesson 
 of evolution was long ago forestalled in the 
 story of Moses — first the story, and then the 
 science of the story. ''Sons of God" — that 
 thought has revolutionized the world. Make 
 room for the sons of God. Build the house 
 larger and larger. Let my sons go. 
 
 Out of this new relation must grow great 
 commandments, the principles of the new life. 
 Henceforth man's relation to God is more es- 
 sential than to earth, sea, and air, with their 
 fatalistic laws. 
 
 ''Closer is he than breathing, 
 And nearer than hands and feet.'* 
 
 Never again 
 
 "Shall the angry roar of an angry sea 
 Prove to the soul it is not free." 
 
 48 
 
The Book of the Meeting 
 
 It is said that when Goethe first met Herder 
 his soul was in a ferment. He needed some 
 master, some great personality who should help 
 him to find himself. He found such a one in 
 Herder. Moses found such a one in God. 
 God helped Moses to find himself. The first 
 product of the meeting was a book, the book 
 the great world poets tried to write and could 
 not. It is the book of the covenant, of the 
 meeting. There must always be a book, for the 
 glory of flaming bushes must not be lost. 
 Earth is too poor, and heavenly visions too 
 rare, to let them escape us. x\nd the book 
 will grow into a library of books shaping the 
 world in the interest of this newborn son of 
 God. 
 
 But instead of turning now to the books let 
 us go a little deeper into the Ending process. 
 We are often cautioned against reading too 
 much into our great men. We have a horror of 
 myths. Let us rather fear lest we fail to find 
 the half that is in them, and the world perish 
 for bread. A truly great man will blossom 
 many times, every century. He is God's cen- 
 tury plant. 
 
 In the ordinary fairy story a world made to 
 order is supplied for the hero fitting at every 
 (4) 49 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 point. In the real story of life the hero must 
 make his own world. Real life is more diffi- 
 cult, but more divine. There is nothing of the 
 fairy flavor about the story of Moses. No 
 future cut and dried, made easy and beautiful, 
 stretched before him. He went forth to carve 
 his own future; to make his own world; to find 
 himself through God. 
 
 The supreme fact in his life was God's pres- 
 ence. Then the general fact of God's presence 
 grew into a specific fact in his own experience. 
 He felt 
 
 "A presence that disturbed him with the joy 
 Of elevated thoughts." 
 
 Then the specific fact grew into something 
 more than a fact. Why did God so persistently 
 urge this fact upon Moses ? Why did he press 
 it at every turn ? Why did he repeat it over and 
 over? "Surely I will be with thee." Was it 
 not an education, an informing ? Informing in 
 the true sense — forming within; not of a fact, 
 but of God himself. While great things were 
 transpiring about Moses a greater, diviner 
 thing is taking place in him. It is God forming 
 himself within the man. A God-conscious man 
 IS being born — a man who shall know the pain- 
 50 
 
The Book of the Meeting. 
 
 ful joy of divine thoughts, divine feelings, 
 divine deeds. 
 
 Still the process of self-discovery demands 
 another fact : not only the presence of God, but 
 the presence of the world. The world was with 
 him. Indeed, it was in him — the heritage of 
 the past; the wisdom of Egypt; the blood of 
 princes; the great wild world about him. 
 
 If God be in us the world must also be there; 
 for God always keeps in touch with his world. 
 And it is through the meeting of these two 
 counterforces that we rise to our best, that we 
 discover ourselves. When a small boy attempts 
 for the first time to cross a raging river on a 
 log he is told just to keep his eyes on the log — 
 to let nothing swerve him from that. Slowly, 
 cautiously, the little feet move out. The river 
 rages beneath him ; he sees it, feels it, it sweeps 
 and swirls through his soul. For a moment he 
 is seized with panic between log and river. 
 Then his eye catches the log again and holds it 
 firm. When he steps down on the other side 
 he is a new boy. He is conscious of a strange 
 new^ mastery within him. He is coming to his 
 best, as Browning suggests that Michael stands 
 the calmer and nobler for the writhing of the 
 snake beneath his feet. Your saint who sails 
 51 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 out of sight of earth will never come to his best. 
 Your worldling who lives like a mole out of 
 sight of heaven will never come to his best. It 
 is the man in whom heaven and earth meet, just 
 as Jesus rose to his best when through the calm 
 of heaven he quelled the rage of the world. In 
 his life two worlds met as they must in all true 
 lives. In him the troubled sea of life broke 
 against the infinite shore. His was the life of 
 the breakers, and that was its glory. 
 
 But this thought naturally brings us to an- 
 other. Some one will be shocked at the idea of 
 the world being in us. Why ! is not the idea of 
 life to keep the world out of us ? Yes, that is 
 one; but there is another better one. The world 
 is in our life, but it is there in a strange new 
 way: not as life, but as the material out of 
 which life is made, through which we find life, 
 through which we both discover and reveal our- 
 self; as nature is in the life of the artist, as 
 material for pictures; as thoughts and events 
 are in the life of the poet, as material for 
 poems; as the whole great world was in the life 
 of Jesus Christ, as material for a new world to 
 be born by the travail of his own soul. In this 
 way we rise to our best. Through this we 
 reach the fullness of our power. 
 52 
 
The Book of the Meeting 
 
 Moses appears in several of the books. He is 
 a striking figure moving in and out through 
 the narrative — sometimes calm, sometimes 
 shaken; now dumb with sorrow, now breaking 
 into song; now raging at the people, and now 
 pleading with God; a wonderful man. You 
 would never tire of following such a career. 
 
 But in one book Moses rises to his best; and 
 that is Deuteronomy, the power book of the 
 Pentateuch. There you get the most of Moses 
 — the stretch of soul, the pathos of patience, 
 the sublimity of passion, and the divinity of 
 thought. Through the book resounds the cry 
 of the human, but chastened and tempered by 
 the breath of God it comes to us in such strange 
 heroic eloquence as no other book supplies. 
 
 The book is just throbbing with the man, 
 and the man at his best. Here with eye fixed 
 upon the Eternal Rock he rises into the heroic 
 mastery, of that wild human river that had 
 sometimes swept him away. But there is more 
 than mastery here. Here the world is with 
 him, even in him, lying like a burden upon his 
 soul — the wrecked, shattered, wayward, disap- 
 pointing world. But his soul takes fire of God. 
 The creative impulse swells within him. The 
 old world is a possibility, the material for a new 
 53 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 and nobler world. The muse is there, the 
 divinest muse, the muse of redemption. And 
 this broken, disappointed, sorrow-riven soul 
 lifts the old world into song — a song that to 
 this day falls like the rain and distills like the 
 dew on the seared fields of life. 
 
 I hardly dare approach the silent but un- 
 paralleled eloquence of that last scene when the 
 message came from the mysterious mountain; 
 when he rose in heroic majesty above a broken 
 life, and the unfinished task ; when with eye un- 
 dimmed and step unshaken he went out calmly 
 beyond the vision of man; when the fragment 
 of his own life caught hold of God and was 
 made complete. 
 
 "Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineflfable 
 Name? 
 Builder and Maker thou, of houses not made with 
 hands : 
 What! have fear of change from thee who art ever the 
 same ? 
 Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power 
 expands ? 
 There shall never be one lost good ! 
 
 On the earth the broken arcs, in the heaven the perfect 
 round." 
 
 54 
 
LITERATURE 
 The BooK of Life 
 
"Comrado, I give you my hand ! 
 
 I give you my love more precious than money. 
 
 I give you myself before preaching or law : 
 
 Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with 
 
 me? 
 Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?" 
 
 — Whitman. 
 
 "All things through thee take nobler form, 
 
 And look beyond the earth ; 
 The mill-round of our fate appears 
 
 A sun-path in thy worth. 
 Me, too, thy nobleness has taught 
 
 To master my despair : 
 The fountains of my hidden life 
 
 Are through thy friendship iair." ^Emerson. 
 
THE BOOK OF LIFE 
 
 "And when thou awakest, it shall talk with thee."— Prov. vi, 22. 
 
 There are two kinds of books : the book that 
 instructs, that widens the scope of our knowl- 
 edge, that makes our horizon larger — brings 
 more facts within it. A very important book, 
 it fills our world with material for use. Then 
 there is another book — one that talks with us, 
 speaks to us, hunts us out. It is not so anx- 
 ious to increase our knowledge as to increase 
 us; to draw us out, wake us up, inspire us, 
 move us. The two kinds of books have been 
 called "books of knowledge" and ''books of 
 power." 
 
 The first book is full of facts, only facts. 
 The personal element is avoided that we may 
 get the facts, untouched, untinged, clean-cut, 
 cold, dry. 
 
 The second book has facts, but also some- 
 thing more. The facts are magnetized by the 
 writer. Every word is red-hot with his person- 
 ality. Every thought is tinged with his soul. 
 There is some one in the book, therefore it 
 speaks, holds converse with us, is one of the 
 57 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 immortal companions of life. The fact books 
 die; in the progress of knowledge new facts 
 supersede the old ones. But the personality 
 book lives forever. 
 
 The Bible is such a book — the greatest of all 
 talking books, the holiest and most helpful of 
 all companions. 
 
 The characters of the book speak to us 
 through the facts — Abraham through his oak, 
 Jacob through his well, and David through his 
 city. Oak, well, and city are all touched into 
 eloquence by the men who touched them. And 
 the writers speak to us through its characters — 
 through Saul and Samuel and David. Through 
 them they speak a larger, diviner, more 
 varied language. Through a thousand frag- 
 ments of men they tell the great story of uni- 
 versal man. Then God speaks to us through 
 the writers. They are moved by God and 
 swing out in song and story and prophecy far 
 beyond all boundaries until the story of man 
 becomes the larger story of God and man — yes, 
 of the God-man. For when he came he said, 
 'They are they that testify of me." At the 
 heart of the book, then, is this divine-human 
 Personality who speaks to us in the language of 
 literature. For literature is the language of 
 58 
 
The Book of Life 
 
 personality. It is the unfolding, the overflow, 
 the outburst of the personal yearning toward 
 the personal. 
 
 The Bible comes to us in this personal lan- 
 guage. It has the lyrical speech. 
 
 Sometimes a young man will come to us in 
 trouble. He opens his heart. We listen, we ana- 
 lyze. We can make but little out of the medley, 
 only this : down in his life there is a longing — 
 perhaps not a very strong one, only the smok- 
 ing flax. But it is there hampered, hedged in, 
 and smothered by conditions and circum- 
 stances. 
 
 We might enter into plans, ways, and means 
 with him. But we feel he needs something 
 more, something naked words cannot effect, 
 something to strengthen his heart, something 
 to fan the fire. His future is not in new plans, 
 but in that smoldering fire. He needs inspira- 
 tion — something that can reach and help the 
 longing buried in there among the impossi- 
 bilities. 
 
 We have had such experiences ourselves. We 
 have felt weak, helpless, baflled. We did not 
 want any new philosophy of the way, but just 
 a voice, a friendly voice, a sympathetic voice — 
 something to start the echo in us, to start the 
 59 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 song. We could sing if some one would raise 
 the tune for us. 
 
 Do you see? The ministry of song. It is 
 one of the first ministries of life. There is the 
 cradle song. Do you think its only ministry is 
 to sing the child to sleep? Indeed, its great 
 ministry is to sing the soul awake. 
 
 "Still linger in our noon of time, 
 
 And on our Saxon tongue, 
 The echoes of the home-born hymns 
 
 The Aryan mothers sung. 
 
 "And childhood had its litanies 
 
 In every age and clime; 
 The earliest cradles of the race 
 
 Were rocked to poet's rhyme." 
 
 And there are the songs of manhood, carrying 
 life out and up with a larger, stronger sweep : 
 
 "O our manhood's prime vigor ! No spirit feels waste, 
 Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew un- 
 braced. 
 O, the wild joys of living ! the leaping from rock up to 
 rock." 
 
 Then, too, old age has its songs bearing even 
 across the flood : 
 
 "Twilight and evening bell, 
 
 And after that the dark ! 
 And may there be no sadness of farewell 
 
 When I embark : 
 60 
 
The Book of Life 
 
 ''For though from out our bourn of time and place 
 
 The flood may bear me far, 
 I hope to see my Pilot face to face 
 
 When I have crossed the bar." 
 
 The Bible speaks to us in the language of 
 song. It speaks to the great longing of the 
 soul. It broods over our immortality, to start 
 the echo, to raise the tune in us, to give us 
 heart, to lift us above and carry us beyond, to 
 make us conscious of our immortality, to give 
 us strength, to give us life, whereby we cry, ''I 
 can do all things." 
 
 The power of these old Bible songs is not 
 their angelic, but their divine-human, ring. 
 They reach us at all depths of our humanity 
 and sing us into great heights of our divinity. 
 ''Why art thou cast down, O my soul ? I shall 
 yet praise thee for the help of thy countenance." 
 The very power of this old psalm is the strange 
 meeting of its heights and depths. It is the 
 divine harmony sweeping down upon us 
 through life's discords, lifting the soul from 
 despair to praise. 
 
 And these old Bible songs undertake to sing 
 the multitudinous song of life : its sword songs, 
 well songs, shepherd songs, battle songs, and all 
 its great life songs. 
 
 6i 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 The ministry of song is one of the great 
 ministries. When Isaiah saw the redeemed re- 
 turning with joy upon their heads they were 
 singing — singing their way to Zion. King 
 Arthur's city, they said, was reared to the music 
 of harps. But the great city that hath founda- 
 tions is being built to the lyrics of God. 
 
 "Truth is fair: should we forego it? 
 
 Can we sigh right for a wrong? 
 God himself is the best Poet, 
 
 And the Real is his song." 
 
 If now we return again to our own life, we 
 find the old longing carried a step further. We 
 are not just now thinking of how to surmount 
 this difficulty, but how to reach that goal. It is 
 not wings for the hour for which we are asking, 
 but wings for the whole flight through. Feel- 
 ing has passed on into thought, into ''long, 
 long thoughts/* We are trying to live out 
 something. 
 
 Why do you and I like to read a story ? Is 
 it not because we are trying to live a story and 
 make it come out right? We need something 
 more than a song. We need a story. And the 
 Bible speaks to us in stories; in the language 
 of the Epic — real stories ; stories that take hold 
 of us; that suggest; that lead, and always in 
 62 
 
The Book of Life 
 
 the right direction. They never lead backward 
 into the vile swamp of the senses. They never 
 take fanciful flights into impossibilities. Real- 
 istic they are, plain and simple of speech ; with 
 many a romantic touch, but always leading 
 clearly, strongly, swiftly toward the heights of 
 manhood and womanhood. Call to mind 
 Joseph, Ruth, David, Samuel, or the great 
 tragedies that by contrast lead in the same 
 direction. 
 
 Then all these fragment stories are woven 
 into one whole story. It is more than the story 
 of men, it is the story of man, of the soul. It 
 does not simply appeal to the smaller ambitions 
 of life, it appeals to the supreme ambition. 
 
 From the very first the book suggests that 
 we are God's children; that there is something 
 in us that is like God. But it is only a sugges- 
 tion from God, an ambition in man. The thing 
 itself is not apparent at the start. It is only the 
 fire mists of the soul's great story waiting to be 
 developed through the converse of God and 
 man. 
 
 And the converse is shaped to the speech of 
 
 man; for God always talks with us, not to us. 
 
 This is an offense to some people who think 
 
 God should have spoken, in the world's child- 
 
 63 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 hood, in the language of the full-orbed present- 
 day science. 
 
 God talks with man. He gives and takes. 
 He takes the crudities of one generation, 
 breathes into them the larger, rounder, com- 
 pleter life, and hands them back to the next. 
 
 So God tells the story of the soul. Rather 
 he makes us tell our own story, working out 
 that divine ambition within us, that vague like- 
 ness of God. At length we find ourselves read- 
 ing life in the light of God's own "Son." Then 
 the full meaning of life^veeps over us; the 
 supreme ambition takes form, while life's un- 
 reached possibilities flash upon us in the "Son." 
 "Beloved, now are we the sons of God; and 
 it doth not yet appear what we shall be :" but 
 "we shall be like him; for we shall see him as 
 he is." 
 
 Returning once more to our own life, we are 
 led to ask, Is this story of the soul possible? 
 Can this great story of the ages become an 
 experience in each individual ? 
 
 If the Bible were to follow the ordinary lan- 
 guage of literature we should expect it to speak 
 now in the language of the drama. But at this 
 point the ways part. And very deep and sig- 
 nificant is the parting of the ways. 
 64 
 
The Book of Life 
 
 While we are crying out for strength to live 
 out the great life of the soul, no mere dramatic 
 scene passes before us. The Bible is decidedly 
 dramatic, but the critics say it has no pure 
 drama. In place of it there is the literature of 
 prophecy — the literature of a Presence. Was 
 it the real dead-in-earnest prophetic intuitions 
 of Mrs. Browning that made her say, "I will 
 write no plays" ? In prophecy God speaks face 
 to face. Its language is more than language, 
 it is life. 
 
 In Browning's ''Saul" we have the story of 
 Saul's insanity; and David comes to redeem 
 him from it. First he sings and plays, and Saul 
 wakens slowly, then falls back again. Then he 
 takes up the king's life and stirs his ambition. 
 Slowly the great man rises again, only to fall 
 back. Then the young shepherd abandons song 
 and story and ofifers himself. He'll lay down 
 his owm life for the king. But even this is 
 powerless to redeem him. Finally, in a frenzy 
 of divine despair, he obliterates himself, leaving 
 the Christ standing in his place. "See the 
 Christ stand." 
 
 How like the Bible! — God in his songs; God 
 in the great story of life; then God face to face, 
 his life poured out. 
 
 (5) 65 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 It begins in the garden. The essence of 
 prophecy is not a prediction but a presence. 
 But where there is the presence language will 
 project itself beyond the boundaries. Language 
 will grasp the future because the future itself 
 is present. 
 
 There is the first sin, and God hunting the 
 sinner down^ as he has hunted us down many 
 and many a time in our own experience. He 
 hunts us down; faces us with plain speech. 
 
 These face-to-face talks of God are plain of 
 speech because God is talking to his own. As 
 a boy said the other day, overhearing a conver- 
 sation in which great plainness of speech was 
 used, ''Why, they talk as though they were re- 
 lated." God speaks plainly because we are 
 related to him. He cuts deep because he is 
 ready to pour out his life for us. He is the 
 most ruthless critic of life, and the most appre- 
 ciative, the most sympathetic. He analyzes us, 
 takes us apart, till every part lies naked in his 
 hand condemned or approved in the white light 
 of his judgment. Then in upon the dead, dy- 
 ing, quivering parts he pours his life till they 
 live again, stand erect, radiant with a new life. 
 'The angel of his presence hath redeemed 
 them." We know the power of a presence in 
 66 
 
The Book of Life. 
 
 our own life. A skeptic once said to me, '1 can 
 sweep away the arguments of the philosophers, 
 but not the presence of my mother." 
 
 And the Bible is always growing into a pres- 
 ence, a life, a reality, through the prophets. 
 
 "Aye, and while your common men 
 Lay telegraphs, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine, 
 And dust the flaunting carpets of the world 
 For kings to walk on or our President, 
 The prophet suddenly will catch them up 
 With his voice like a thunder — 'This is soul, 
 This is life, this word is being said in heaven. 
 Here's God down on us I What are you about?' " 
 
 The book is forever growing into a presence; 
 dissolving at times into the great world history, 
 but resolving again into the divine Presence. 
 It is the same face with its assuring light, the 
 same heart w^ith its redeeming blood. In his- 
 toric form once he came. In spiritual redeem- 
 ing presence he forever and forever comes. 
 
 "But warm, sweet, tender, even yet 
 
 A present help is he; 
 And faith has yet its Olivet, 
 
 And love its Galilee. 
 
 "O Lord and Master of us all, 
 
 Whate'er our name or sign. 
 We own thy sway, we hear thy call, 
 
 We test our lives by thine!" 
 
 67 
 
HISTORY 
 The Crossed Hands 
 
"The real and consoling truth is that our free will can 
 modify our original nature. The dark problem of 
 heredity need not oppress us with an eternal burden; 
 and a revolt of our personality can often cast to the 
 winds the tyranny of ancestral traits, and the crippling 
 restraint of outgrown creeds." — Victor Charhonnel. 
 
 "O my God, I will live. But I shall not truly live 
 unless thou makest thyself felt in the involuntary im- 
 pulses of my being. I will live by thee. Be thou God of 
 my will." — Ihid. 
 
 "God is the great companion of man, the loving yet 
 terrible friend of his inmost soul." — John Cotter Mor- 
 rison. 
 
THE CROSSED HANDS 
 
 "And Israel stretched out his right hand, and laid it upon Ephraim's 
 head, who was the younger, and his left hand upon Manasseh's head, 
 guiding his hands wittingly ; for Manasseh was the firstborn. . . . And 
 said, . . . The Angel which redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads." 
 —Gen. xlviii, 14-16. 
 
 "And Jacob called unto his sons, and said, . . . That I may tell you 
 that which shall befall you in the last days."— Gen. xlix, i. 
 
 The story of one man at this point branches 
 into the story of many. It is no longer one 
 colossal figure, like Abraham, but twelve frag- 
 ments of the Abrahamic life, and each frag- 
 ment an individual that will again subdivide, 
 till men have grown to families, and families to 
 tribes, and tribes to nations. This is history. 
 
 Moved by the old Abrahamic faith, fire, am- 
 bition, handed down the royal line, Joseph 
 brings his two sons to be adopted into Jacob's 
 family. The adoption will give them a place in 
 the succession of Israel. 
 
 When the father brings the boys for the 
 blessing he presents, according to the custom, 
 the elder, Manasseh, for the right hand, and the 
 younger, Ephraim, for the left, giving the elder 
 the first place. But the trembling hands of the 
 old seer cross themselves, the right resting 
 upon Ephraim and the left upon Manasseh. 
 And when the father resisted, saying, ''You are 
 71 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 making a mistake," the old man replied, ''Nay, 
 I know, I know." 
 
 The mystery of the crossed hands — the first 
 is last, and the last first. One man designed by 
 birth and training for a chief is superseded by 
 another who has never entered into our calcu- 
 lations. 
 
 What is the mystery of the crossed hands? 
 Why does one man live, and iive, and live 
 through all the centuries, and another perish 
 from the memory of man? Why does the 
 course of life in families, churches, nations, 
 take such strange directions, baffling all proph- 
 ecy and confounding all science ? 
 
 Is there a clear and simple gospel of progress 
 that throws light upon the mystery? This is 
 the burning question of philosophy to-day. 
 Our modern truth-hunters have left the airy 
 realms of abstraction and are plunging elbow- 
 deep into the hard facts of everyday life, trying 
 to break the seven seals, trying to open the 
 book — the great book of history — and win 
 therefrom the secret of God. This is the 
 attempt of our social studies, 
 
 "As with fingers of the blind 
 We are groping here to find 
 What the hieroglyphics mean." 
 
 ^2 
 
The Crossed Hands 
 
 When Kidd takes us with him through the 
 maze of London Hfe we are dazed and baffled. 
 At last he stops before the church, and we are 
 reheved to think the quest ends here. But 
 when he proceeds to give us fifteen different 
 definitions of reHgion we are puzzled again, 
 till at last in his final analysis he brings them 
 down to a supernatural power. But this super- 
 natural power is also the basis of the Bible. 
 Then, instead of following the weary way of 
 the philosopher, let us turn to this old Bible 
 story, dig into its depths, and learn what it has 
 to say about the mystery of the crossed hands. 
 
 Tennyson has said that if we could under- 
 stand a flower, what it is, root and all, and all 
 in all, we should know what God and man are. 
 And if we can go to the bottom of this old Bible 
 story root and all, and all in all, we shall find 
 the gospel of history. 
 
 The first thing we notice in this scene around 
 the dying patriarch is Joseph bringing his sons 
 for Jacob's blessing. There was no doubt a 
 fine chance for the boys in Egypt. Great world 
 opportunities were there. But Joseph turns 
 his back upon them all and leads his two sons 
 over to an old chief without a country, and 
 dying at that. 
 
 73 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 There were no world opportunities here, but 
 there were great divine opportunities. There 
 is a difference. A mere world opportunity 
 offers us the world outside of us, ignoring, and 
 even sometimes ruining the inner world, while 
 a divine opportunity offers us the outer world 
 through the inner world — first the kingdom of 
 God, first the kingdom of manhood, first the 
 life within, its rights to live and evolve. This 
 is man's only divine right — to live — to unfold 
 — to evolve. And faith claims this right. 
 
 This led Joseph to put his sons in the suc- 
 cession of the divine opportunities. He recog- 
 nizes the value of environment. He believes 
 it is worth something to those boys to keep step 
 with such men as Abraham, to get into the 
 heroic swing, to be brought up on the old songs 
 and stories woven out of the heroic past. 
 
 "Faith of our fathers ! Hving still 
 In spite of dungeon, fire, and sword : 
 
 O how our hearts beat high with joy 
 Whene'er we hear that glorious word : 
 
 Faith of our fathers ! holy faith ! 
 
 We will be true to thee till death !" 
 
 It is worth something to them to live imder 
 the inspiration of successive revelations, and 
 put their hand to such a task as had been as- 
 
 74 
 
The Crossed Hands 
 
 signed his people. And he was right: the 
 character of man can never be separated from 
 his environment. Calvinistic creeds and Scot- 
 tish mountains will make rugged men. Arca- 
 dian hills and Grecian thought will carve classic 
 brows. A mountainous home and border war- 
 fare will make Ephraim a warrior. But this 
 alone can never explain the mystery of the 
 crossed hands. For see : Manasseh is the eldest. 
 He is carefully trained with that thought in 
 view. He has the inspiration of birth, the 
 advantage of opportunity. The songs and 
 stories are for him. Every influence is thrown 
 around him to make him a right-hand man, and 
 yet he turns out a left-hand man. And history 
 is ever repeating this story: start men at the 
 right hand, and they come out on the left. 
 Man can never be saved by walling him in with 
 privileges, though every privilege bear the face 
 of an angel. 
 
 It is a remarkable fact that nations have al- 
 ways died not of their disadvantages but of 
 their advantages; for advantages breed caste, 
 and caste is the fatal disease of humanity. It is 
 supposed to be bad on the outside, it is worse 
 inside. Caste of wealth, caste of intellect, caste 
 of blood, caste of religion, all fatal. Israel, 
 75 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 Rome, and Greece all died of caste. They tell 
 us the privileged classes of Europe are con- 
 stantly dying at the top — sustained only by the 
 replenishing again from the bottom. 
 
 This age is making much of the word "en- 
 vironment," and there is much in it, but by no 
 means the full meaning of life. It is not a full 
 gospel. The secret is deeper. Of all the sons 
 of Jacob the disadvantages and hardships of 
 Joseph were the greatest; yet he alone excelled. 
 In any country village it is no uncommon 
 thing for the son of the nabob to go to ruin, 
 reeking in privileges, while the barefoot boy 
 makes his way over the hard and flinty rocks 
 to success. 
 
 Turning again to our story, we find another 
 very interesting feature. Jacob in blessing his 
 sons characterizes them : "Reuben, you are like 
 water — unstable; no one will ever be able to 
 depend upon you." 'Tssachar, you are like an 
 ass — a beast of burden, dull and mundane." 
 "No spark disturbs the clod." "Zebulun, you 
 are a seaman, restless, roving." That is, back 
 of a man's opportunities are his native charac- 
 teristics — heredity. Blood tells. We are the 
 fruit of the ages. We grow on a tree that is 
 not of our planting. We are a house built not 
 76 
 
The Crossed Hands 
 
 by hands, but by the red corpuscles of the 
 centuries. 
 
 ''Humanity," says one, "at all times of its 
 existence is composed far more of the dead than 
 of the living." This is often too true, prac- 
 tically true ; we are more grandfather than self. 
 Our grandfather was left to us, and we have 
 made nothing out of him. 
 
 Grant Allen, in his last book, proposed to 
 save the world by the proper mixing of blood, 
 as you breed horses. If this were possible it 
 might do for the luiborn, if we knew how to 
 mix the blood. But it is certainly hard on the 
 rest of us. We might undertake to save our- 
 selves first-hand. But to do it second-hand is 
 beyond us. 
 
 This old Bible thought, coming to the sur- 
 face in many places — almost a matter of faith 
 as seen in the jealously guarded genealogies — 
 this old thought is the divinest utterance of 
 science. It has almost revolutionized the study 
 of the race. It is valuable in history, nations, 
 families, and men. But it is not the secret of 
 the crossed hands. It is not the gospel of his- 
 tory. Now and then it is put to utter confusion, 
 in the crisscrossing of good and bad, of wise 
 and unwise. 
 
 17 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 "Here and there a cotter's babe is royal-born by right 
 divine ; 
 
 Here and there my lord is lower than his oxen or his 
 swine. 
 
 Chaos, Cosmos ! Cosmos, Chaos ! once again the sicken- 
 ing game." 
 
 Where are the hereditary sons of Grecian 
 genius ? where the blood children of the Roman 
 patrician? where the natural descendants of 
 Abraham ? 
 
 No man can begin with his ancestors. If 
 they are good, he is proud and crawls inside 
 like a hermit crab. If they are bad, then he 
 says, "1 am not to blame." The men in our 
 prisons usually explain themselves by their 
 ancestry. They hide themselves among the 
 dead. The secret of the crossed hands lies 
 deeper. 
 
 Now let us turn once more to the Bible story. 
 Here is a leaf out of Jacob's life : *The Angel 
 which redeemed me from all evil, bless the 
 lads." Deeper than the blessing of environ- 
 ment, deeper than the blessing of inherited 
 tendencies, is the blessing of the Angel. Every 
 true and earnest soul living deeply, strongly, 
 and divinely is conscious that his life is re- 
 deemed by some One, a power not himself. 
 This was Socrates's experience. This is the 
 7B 
 
The Crossed Hands 
 
 experience of every great human figure rising 
 to its conscious destiny. 
 
 We have come, then, to the individual. Give 
 your man his environment, his opportunities, 
 what will he do with them? They are not life, 
 only possibiUties of life. Or give him his in- 
 herited tendencies, the possibilities within him. 
 Still the question remains, What will he do 
 with these ? 
 
 One of Browning's characters is made to 
 take a blot and develop it, shaping its rays, 
 rounding it out, finally into a star. Given, then, 
 the blot we call opportunities without, and tend- 
 encies within, how are we to shape them into 
 a star ? Who is equal to such a task ? Who can 
 take this strange human blot and redeem it into 
 a star ? Who has eyes, eyes to see the divine in 
 the humdrum of the hour? Who knows that 
 these are angels? Are they not the same old 
 wayfarers who have called at our door so many 
 times ? Who can always tell the difference be- 
 tween a tramp and an angel ? And who under- 
 stands the genius of tendencies? Who can 
 grade them? Who has eyes to see them? 
 Who dares say, "This I'll curb, and this I'll 
 cultivate, and this I'll kill"? Who is such a 
 master of tendencies? What will save Abra- 
 79 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 liam with his strange great dream of Hfe from 
 becoming a mere dreamer? What will save 
 Joseph with his ambition from becoming a 
 tyrant? What will save Jacob with his thrift 
 from becoming a miser ? 
 
 One thing, one only; the battle is on from the 
 first — not between Jacob and Esau, but between 
 Jacob and the Angel. And there by the Jabbok 
 the Angel conquered. The fast fist was opened, 
 and the man passed into the prince. As he 
 gradually rose in response to the Angel of life 
 he put his environment under tribute. Indeed, 
 he put himself under tribute. He rose into the 
 mastery of life through the Master of life, the 
 Angel of redemption, the Hero of the soul. 
 
 There is an Angel of redemption, a Master 
 of life, a Hero of the soul, the One with whom 
 you and I have wrestled at our Jabbok. Some- 
 times he seems to stand in our way; he will not 
 let us go over; he holds us back, and we turn 
 upon him with all our force. But when he 
 would leave us, seeming to give way to our 
 wish, then we cry, 'T will not let thee go." 
 
 Ah, this wrestling Angel of life! How he 
 
 works in among the tendencies of the soul, and 
 
 out among the opportunities of life, checking 
 
 this ambition, shaping that aspiration, training 
 
 80 
 
The Crossed Hands 
 
 this desire. He makes the path easy here and 
 hard there, the ascent now slow, now fast. The 
 Angel we fear yet love, cling to yet oppose. 
 Through him we rise into the mastery of life. 
 Through him we command our destiny. This 
 is the secret of the crossed hands. 
 
 In the little seed we plant in the springtime 
 there are three things : First, its inheritance : 
 this is born a rose, that a bluebell, and this a 
 pansy. Second, its environments : earth, air, 
 dew, and sun. Then there is the Angel of life, 
 the mystery that wrestles with the inherited 
 tendencies, not to change but to master them; 
 the mystery that wrestles with sun, dew, air, 
 and earth, not to defeat them, but to master 
 them, bringing forth the pansy, the bluebell, 
 and the rose, each in its order. Just those three 
 things in life — your native qualities and your 
 environment, your characteristics and your 
 surroundings, and the Angel of life bringing 
 them into the divine mastery, making them 
 throb with a newborn life, breathing upon 
 them, shaping and carrying them upward into 
 sons of God. 
 
 Kidd in his suggestive book started from the 
 general thought of a supernatural power. In 
 his last paragraph he said, 'T find a growing 
 (6) 8i 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 sense of reverence in the world." You have, 
 then, taking the book as a whole, this position : 
 the supernatural mystery with our faces toward 
 it. This is the position throughout the Bible — 
 the great mystery and man facing toward it. 
 
 When I was a boy I used to look away upon 
 the mountains. Behind the purple mists I 
 imagined a world of battlefields, of lions, and 
 cities. When I suggested this to another boy 
 he laughed at me. But I lived many happy 
 days out of that mystery. It never worked out 
 as I expected — no cities, no battles, no lions. 
 And one day my world faded away, giving 
 place to another. 
 
 There are many such mysteries out of which 
 we live, mysteries that are the compelling 
 power of great religions and great philosophies. 
 Finally they topple over and fall to pieces. 
 
 Not so this supreme mystery of the Bible, 
 this Angel of life, this Hero of the soul. Out 
 of him men have lived the highest masteries of 
 life; out of him have mastered the past, the 
 present, the future. There has been no fading 
 and falling away of this mystery. It has been 
 growing sublimer and sublimer, more and more 
 real ; unfolding to grander and grander heights. 
 And this is history. 
 
 82 
 
HISTORY 
 The Heart of the Vision 
 
"He is the axis of the star, 
 
 He is the sparkle of the spar, 
 
 He is the heart of every creature. 
 
 He is the meaning of each feature; 
 
 And his mind is the sky, 
 
 Than all it holds more deep, more high." 
 
 — Emerson. 
 
 "Progress is the law of life — man's self is not yet Man ! 
 
 For men begin to pass their nature's bound, 
 
 And find new hopes and cares which fast supplant 
 
 Their proper joys and griefs; and outgrow all 
 
 The narrow creeds of right and wrong, which fade 
 
 Before the unmeasured thirst for good ; while peace 
 
 Rises within them ever more and more." — Browning. 
 
THE HEART OF THE VISION 
 
 "Where there is no vision, the people perish." — Prov, xxix, i8. 
 
 Proverbs are born of the storm and stress of 
 human history. They are the evolution of a 
 people's experience; not the handiwork of 
 thought, but the children of the soul. There is 
 blood in them. 
 
 This proverb is born of Israel's experience 
 and leads into the heart of her history : "Where 
 there is no vision, the people perish." This old 
 Hebrew history is built out of visions; out of 
 what the seers saw. Abraham, Jacob, Moses, 
 and Isaiah were men of visions. They saw, 
 and because they saw they built. The building 
 power is always born of visions. Through 
 them the nerve of heaven is brought to bear 
 upon the facts of earth. 
 
 The old Hebrew world with its life, legisla- 
 tion, and literature was born of visions. The 
 patterns Moses saw in the mount were not like 
 the patterns we mark around. They were 
 visions of truth, glimpses of God and the soul, 
 afterward expressed in candlesticks, draperies, 
 and altars, till the whole temple throbbed with 
 the presence of the living God. 
 85 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 Her poets were seers. They saw beyond. 
 They had such visions of God as threw all 
 nature into his ministry. The heavens declared 
 his glory, the day was full of his speech, and 
 the night shone with his knowledge. The trees 
 of the field clapped their hands and the moun- 
 tains and hills broke forth into singing at his 
 approach. All nature was touched and tinged 
 by the presence of God. 
 
 The prophets were moral and spiritual seers. 
 They saw, saw visions of a new world, a new 
 age, a new man, a God-man. With bleeding 
 hands and breaking heart they built with the 
 rough material at their feet. To them the 
 times, the nation, all history was the great work 
 field of God, and the true mission of man to toil 
 by his side. 
 
 In all this the nation was struggling through 
 her visions into fellowship with God. Seeing 
 beyond is always looking Godward, striving 
 unto his presence. And when there is no vision, 
 when we fail to look beyond, the fellowship is 
 lost and the people perish; for we live by the 
 fellowship of God. 
 
 And there were times when there were no 
 visions. Men saw the temple and the furniture, 
 but nothing beyond. They heard no voices, felt 
 86 
 
The Heart of the Vision 
 
 no great emotions. Temple-treaders, Isaiah 
 called them; not listeners, not worshipers, not 
 seers, but treaders. Good treaders, but souls 
 are not grown in a religious treadmill. It takes 
 visions. Life forever seeks the open sky, the 
 larger range, the fellowship of God. 
 
 And there were times when the singers were 
 dumb; for men saw nothing, heard nothing, 
 felt nothing to sing about. The earth was a 
 plow field for the farmer, a pasture for the 
 shepherd, and a quarry for the builder. Good 
 times for grain and cattle and building, but not 
 for men. It takes visions to make men. You 
 can make no patriots, no true statesmen, no real 
 prophets, without visions. There is always 
 danger when we grow prosperous — when the 
 w^orld about us becomes too thick and gross of 
 tongue to speak the speech of God; when the 
 poets fail us. 
 
 And there were times when the prophets had 
 no visions from the Lord. Knowledge had in- 
 creased, things amassed, the people multiplied. 
 Knowledge and things and people : and people 
 and things and knowledge, how shall they be 
 set to the music of divine progress? What is 
 lacking? The vision, the ideal, the creative 
 force of heaven. Nations are not built from 
 87 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 the bottom up, but from the top down; not up 
 from the rocks, but down from the constitution, 
 the ideal, the vision. There is no art by which 
 men and money and intellect can be shaped into 
 a church. It can only be ''built out of heaven 
 to God." And the lesson of all lessons to be 
 learned is that man can never be built up from 
 the earth, though we command the powers of 
 heredity and the influences of environment. He 
 must be built not toward the God-man, but out 
 of the God-man, inheriting his mastery. Divine 
 progress is not in knowledge and things and 
 people, but in the mastery of the soul. Master 
 souls are always the need of the age — masters 
 of what we know, making every thought throb 
 with the life of God; masters of what we have, 
 winging every dollar with the pinions of love; 
 masters of what we are, waking the cold mar- 
 ble of our humanity into living statues of 
 Christhood. 
 
 But to reach the full meaning of this thought 
 we need to carry our study another step, to ana- 
 lyze the old Hebrew vision. What is the essen- 
 tial feature of the Hebrew vision? Whence 
 its great value? Why do we brush aside the 
 visions of other peoples and hold that these 
 Hebrew visions are the very fountains of life? 
 
The Heart of the Vision 
 
 If we answer that they are supernatural, even 
 this is no final answer. The word must be ex- 
 changed for another greater and more vital, 
 just as supernatural but more practical and 
 powerful. 
 
 If we examine one of these visions we shall 
 find that the essential feature is not the lamp, 
 the ladder, nor the bush. These are more or 
 less indifferent to the essential fact. The essen- 
 tial fact is that a divine Person is talking with 
 a human being. The personal is the real 
 supernatural. 
 
 Personality is the greatest, most real, most 
 practical word yet born into the language of 
 man. The real God must be personal ; for only 
 a person can speak, and a God who cannot 
 speak for himself is no God. 
 
 Sometimes we speak for God and shape him 
 by our definitions. This is the God of our 
 books, and he can take excellent care of our 
 books. But the God who takes care of me must 
 speak for himself, must have no sponsor. He 
 must speak for himself and to me if he mold 
 me into his own likeness. Kipling touches the 
 point w^ith supreme sarcasm. 'Tomlinson" has 
 gone to heaven and they won't have him. He 
 goes to hell and they won't have him there. 
 89 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 He is finally sent back to earth with the 
 grevvsome benediction, "And the God that 
 you took from a printed book be with you, 
 Tomlinson!" 
 
 Also the truly practical God must be per- 
 sonal. There is nothing on earth so practical 
 as personal force. We sometimes say of a man 
 he knows enough, or he is good enough, but he 
 can't do it. He lacks that something we call 
 personal force; that something that makes 
 things go; that something that does all the 
 originating, the creative work in among the 
 things of earth; that something that finds for 
 its largest, highest, holiest field of operation not 
 things but men. When the one perfect Person- 
 ality of all history was here on earth it was 
 found that the supreme art of his life was to 
 reproduce himself in others, to lift men to the 
 level of God. 
 
 Now, at the heart of the Hebrew vision there 
 was a personal God brooding over humanity, 
 as the eagle broods over her young. The eagle 
 broods over, stirs up, and thrusts forth her 
 young that they may become like herself. So 
 God broods over, stirs up, and thrusts out his 
 men that they may become like himself. 
 
 ''We go to prove our soul." A personal God 
 90 
 
The Heart of the Vision 
 
 hovers around the soul as a mother hovers 
 around her child. They tell me that the child 
 reared in an incubator lacks the personal quali- 
 ties and development of the child who has been 
 under the personal care of a mother. Person- 
 ality is born of personality. We love him be- 
 cause he first loved us. The sequence is not of 
 logic but of life. Said a kindergarten teacher 
 who has under her a class of institutional chil- 
 dren : ''O those institutional children ! they are 
 like sticks, so dull, so unresponsive, so meaning- 
 less. I would rather have the dirtiest street 
 child that has been evoked and evolved by a 
 mother's care." 
 
 Personal development is born of a brooding 
 personality. Deeper than the genius of a peo- 
 ple, than all her inherited traits ; deeper than her 
 environment, whether of nature, history, or 
 literature, is the force of a personal God in 
 evoking and evolving personal life in men; 
 drawing them out and up into self-mastery; 
 breathing into them a keener sensitiveness, 
 alive and responsive to every hum.an voice; 
 flooding them with a richness and fullness of 
 life that is forever breaking its boundaries and 
 sweeping into the future wath immortal fore- 
 casts. It is this exhaustless wealth of personal 
 91 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 life that puts the world forever under tribute 
 to man. 
 
 •'All instincts immature, 
 
 All purposes unsure, 
 
 That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's 
 
 amount : 
 Thoughts hardly to be packed 
 Into a narrow act, 
 
 Fancies that broke through language and escaped : 
 All I could never be, 
 All men ignored in me, 
 This was I worth to God." 
 
 Now, let this idea of personality be carried 
 into our life more definitely. It is often, and 
 truly, said that the great proof of the inspira- 
 tion of the Bible is that it inspires. Yet, like 
 most epigrams, the phrase will bear some quali- 
 fication. There are other books that inspire us. 
 They inspire us with great thoughts, with true 
 morals, with artistic fervor. But at the heart 
 of the Bible there is something more than 
 morals, truth, or beauty. There is a divine Per- 
 sonality. The inspiration of the Bible is more 
 than the inspiration of the true, the good, or 
 the beautiful; it is the inspiration of Person- 
 ality. It is more than an inspirational power, 
 it is a redeeming power. It redeems us not 
 simply to the true, the beautiful, and the good; 
 92 
 
The Heart of the Vision 
 
 it redeems us from self -centered individualities 
 into living, loving, God-centered personalities. 
 It transforms us from a whirlpool into a 
 fountain. 
 
 Personality is not only the last word to be 
 said about God, it is the last word to be said 
 about us. ''Be ye therefore perfect, even as 
 your Father which is in heaven is perfect." 
 This is the goal, the perfect person. The goal 
 is not doctrinal but personal. And as we rise 
 more and more toward that supreme goal we 
 shall rise in power. What kind of power ? Per- 
 sonal power. What is the Holy Spirit but the 
 personal force of God? And it is for this we 
 perish. It is this personal force, this Holy 
 Spirit, whereof our nerves are scant. 
 
 Our lives are made up of so many strange, 
 incongruous fragments. We gather ourselves 
 in from the four corners of the world. George 
 M^cDonald's catechism of babyhood is not 
 astray, after all : 
 
 "Where did you come from, baby dear? 
 Out of the everywhere into here. 
 Where did you get those eyes so blue? 
 Out of the sky as I came through." 
 
 So we pick ourselves up along the way. We 
 are not a chip off the old block, as we used to 
 93 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 say. We are chips off a good many blocks. 
 Some are old and some are new; some of the 
 street and some of the schools; some of the 
 market and some of the home. 
 
 And the real problem of life is to achieve per- 
 sonal unity; to find the spiritual bond that will 
 bind all the fragments into one magnificent and 
 masterly whole. Personalize every chip. Make 
 every part throb with personal force. 
 
 There are two movements in life: one the 
 gathering in, the individualizing; the other the 
 sending out, the personalizing. What comes in 
 never goes back the same: what comes in as 
 earth, air, sun, and dew returns in leaf, bud, and 
 blossom. So into our life come the fragments 
 to be sent back again, but never the same. 
 They are to be personalized; tinged by the soul; 
 sent back throbbing with personal force, with 
 the Spirit of God. 
 
 Our life is gathered into the individual to be 
 returned again in the universal, in the gospel 
 for all men. Here is a pansy, gathering itself 
 into certain colors and forms. What does it 
 return ? Not its individuality, not its color, not 
 its form ; but something more common, and yet 
 more precious : beauty and fragrance, a gospel 
 for all men. And here is a young man fresh 
 
 94 
 
The Heart of the Vision 
 
 from the schools with his medal, his diploma, 
 his degree. What can he do with them ? Can 
 he take the medal and pierce it through and 
 through with his personal force till he has 
 personalized it? — transmuted it into coin that 
 enriches the souls of men ? Can he rise to the 
 level of a prince and strew his way with the 
 largess of personal powers ? 
 
 Then what of his diploma, this dusty old 
 parchment! Can he take this document and 
 make it live again, as the genius takes some 
 ancient tale and breathes into it new life^ — 
 weaves his personality through and through it 
 till it throbs with an undying power? Can he 
 take this dry parchment and weave his person- 
 ality through and through it — make it tell the 
 great story of the cross ? 
 
 Then he has been graduated to a certain de- 
 gree. He has been graduated ; now as he steps 
 down into the world what is to be his gradua- 
 ting power, his personal force ? Will he be able 
 to graduate bootblacks, newsboys, and street 
 arabs into manhood ? Will he have the power 
 to graduate the hopeless into hope, the weak 
 into strength, the foolish into wisdom, and the 
 bad into good ? 
 
 What is his personal force? This is the 
 95 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 supreme question of life, that which makes the 
 difference between success and failure. This is 
 the supreme factor in the nation's life, that by 
 which she rises into divine vigor. This is the 
 supreme factor in human history, that by which 
 she climbs the rugged heights of progress. 
 
 The woman of Samaria came to the well a 
 mere drawer of water. She went out from the 
 presence of Christ an exhaustless fountain 
 springing up into everlasting life. It is on the 
 flood tide of personalities that history is lifted 
 through the ages. 
 
 96 
 
HISTORY 
 TKe Hiss of Destiny 
 
 (7) 
 
"Once to every man and nation comes a moment to 
 decide." — Lowell. 
 
 "But the unit of the visit, 
 
 The encounter of the wise — 
 Say what other meter is it 
 
 Than the meeting of the eyes?" 
 
 — Emerson. 
 
 "History is the essence of innumerable biographies." 
 — Carlyle. 
 
THE KISS OF DESTINY 
 
 " Kiss the Son." — Psa. ii, 12. 
 
 This psalm is a temple of history built by the 
 genius of a poet; just such a temple as such a 
 genius could build out of any modern city. 
 
 In the outer court the human is rampant, 
 scheming, jostling, urging, building its splen- 
 did vanities; while in the very midst of the 
 surging crowd, like a seething volcano, human 
 passion chafes against every divine restraint. 
 The wild human cry rises above the uproar of 
 the jostling crowd : *'Let us break their bands 
 asunder." 
 
 Pass through this outer court into the next 
 and the scene is changed. The tumult of the 
 human gives place to the calm of God. There 
 is a throne, there is order, there is life. On the 
 throne is a King, and on his lips an edict : "Ask 
 of me, and I will give you the nations" — God 
 giving the world to his Son. 
 
 In the outer court all is confusion, all is fer- 
 mentation. In the inner court the builders are 
 at work, the structure is growing. 
 
 But there is yet another court, still m.ore in- 
 terior, throbbing with the life and love and 
 99 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 beauty of the Son of God; life's holy of holies, 
 where the whole destiny of man is reduced to 
 one sentence: "Kiss the Son." ''Give your 
 allegiance to him." All life, all history, hangs 
 upon this individual act. 
 
 In the outer court we get such a view as we 
 would get were we to lift the roofs and look 
 down into some modern hells. Indeed, we need 
 not go so deep, for what seems a maddening 
 maze has much human method underneath. 
 
 Suppose we lift the roof from the political 
 wigwam, the senate chamber, and the market 
 place; from the council chamber of kings and 
 theologians and thinkers. We shall find at 
 least no placid lake. True, we are in the pres- 
 ence of thought. The kings are taking council, 
 the people are meditating, but the product is 
 vanity. 
 
 What an amount of thinking, scheming, 
 planning, we do, all the way from kings down 
 to peasants ! What brains we wear out ! What 
 logic we weary in concocting systems that burst 
 like a bubble! If the time we spend in schem- 
 ing vanities were taken from our life what 
 would be left ? 
 
 We work and dig and delve and twist like the 
 old deacon at his "one boss shay" that was to 
 
 100 
 
The Kiss of Destiny 
 
 last forever. For, he said, since things break in 
 the weakest spot, make one part as strong as the 
 other and it never can break. For logic is logic. 
 And behold it went down in a lump, broke like 
 a bubble. 
 
 So men have wrought at many a ''shay" — 
 creeds, doctrines, systems. They have put in 
 their lifeblood, gone to the stake; made them 
 to last forever — eternal, they call them. Yet 
 we won't have them to-day. They are stowed 
 in the lumber room of modern thought. ''Our 
 little systems have their day." 
 
 Still, there is a value in all this vanity build- 
 ing. The blowing of a bubble expands the 
 lungs, and the lungs are worth more than the 
 bubble. And the blowing of intellectual bubbles 
 expands the brain, yes, the soul, and that is the 
 main thing. For men are more than systems. 
 
 There is much in the old man's reply in Alice 
 in Wonderland. When asked how he could 
 manage to eat such hard things considering 
 his age — 
 
 " 'In my youth/ said the father, 
 'I took to the law, 
 And argued each case with my wife, 
 And the muscular strength it gave to my jaw 
 Has lasted the rest of my life.' " 
 lOI 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 The spiritual strength that has come to the 
 soul, the larger man, that is the supreme value. 
 Yet every human system takes us a certain dis- 
 tance. We must have them, though they are 
 not through lines. The only through line is the 
 great living way of God. 
 
 But in this outer court there is another voice 
 not from the council chamber but from the 
 mob : "Let us break their bands." This is the 
 revolt of passions, the vortex of democracy. 
 
 We believe in our democratic creeds, yet it 
 takes much faith to stand the strain. What a 
 seething world lies about us ! What a breaking 
 of cords ! New wine breaking the old bottles, 
 poor wine too. 
 
 ''Laisses faire" is the cry. Forms are broken, 
 boundaries ignored, rights overrun. Things 
 are dissolved in the fervent heat of the times. 
 Life is trying its latent energies with every 
 latest fad. No book, no day, no ancient law is 
 strong enough to hold, curb, control this mod- 
 ern giant of democracy. So it seems, at least. 
 And it would be folly to attempt an immediate 
 special, far-reaching remedy; to say what ought 
 to be done to put the world soberly on its feet; 
 to suggest some coup d'etat. 
 
 We simply look out upon a scene of fer- 
 
 102 
 
The Kiss of Destiny 
 
 mentation. We must take it as it is. But if 
 fermentation be the true word we are most 
 fortunate; for if the world be in a ferment 
 something must be brewing. What is it? 
 What is brewing below the surface? What 
 shall we find in the inner court ? 
 
 This psalm is no mere poem. The author 
 goes deeper than the surface. He commands 
 the X-rays of inspiration and pierces the 
 troubled exterior. He brings us into the pres- 
 ence of a throne. God's throne is out of sight, 
 beneath the people, for he would make every 
 man king. His empire is ruled from the deep 
 and silent heart of things. His courtiers, his 
 couriers, his armies wear an invisible livery. 
 The world has a trumpet voice, God speaks in 
 whispers. Crime cries itself hoarse, goodness 
 works with its mouth shut. The news, the 
 strange, the abnormal, makes much ado speed- 
 ing its telegraphic way through the world. But 
 the good news is dispatched through the invisi- 
 ble telegraphy of God. 
 
 God's builders are out of sight. God's throne 
 is at the heart of the wild world. On it sits his 
 Son, and to him he is slowly giving the nations. 
 "He shall break them like a potter's vessel." 
 The old vessels that held the vanities and pas- 
 103 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 sions of earth, vessels of wrath — these are 
 being broken and shaped again on the wheel of 
 God for truth divine and the passion of the 
 cross. 
 
 But to enter more closely into the divine 
 council. We have seen how our thought struc- 
 tures collapse. This is equally true of all 
 human structures: families, tribes, castes, na- 
 tions. No human art or artifice can save them 
 from the inevitable. 
 
 The decay of the favored classes in all ages is 
 one of the facts of history. And the philosopher 
 who once sought the elixir of life for the indi- 
 vidual is to-day seeking the same elixir for the 
 clan, class, or race. Why those upon whom the 
 greatest advantages have been bestowed should 
 decline is the problem. The best and most com- 
 prehensive answer given is perhaps this : 'That 
 man is made for progress through struggle. 
 When, therefore, the object for which we strive 
 is attained, when the top is reached, when the 
 boundary of social distinction is touched, when 
 we have reached the ranks of the most favored 
 and cease to struggle, then we begin to recede, 
 decay, perish." What, therefore, we need is 
 some condition that will put us under the strain 
 of an immortal strife. 
 
 104 
 
The Kiss of Destiny 
 
 Now, when the Son sets his throne down in 
 the world such a struggle begins, a new strug- 
 gle. Take our own life : we came to him striv- 
 ing to find something, to get something; we 
 found him, when, behold, the struggle is re- 
 versed. Now the effort is to give, to speak, to 
 express. We came to draw water from the 
 well; the struggle was to bring it from the cool, 
 living depths. Now we go out a well in our- 
 self, striving to give — ''a fountain springing up 
 unto everlasting life." We come with the 
 human want, we go forth with the divine 
 fullness. 
 
 Henceforth we are under the law of supply 
 and demand. We hear again and again from 
 the divine-human traveler, ''Give me to drink." 
 This, on every side, is the cry of our eager, 
 restless, wayward humanity, "Give me to 
 drink." This is the cry of the soul, with its 
 myriad wants. Give what? Give all you are, 
 the best you are. Give books, give art, give 
 knowledge, give conditions, give life, give God. 
 The demand is immortal, and so is the supply. 
 The struggle is divine, is altruistic. 
 
 A recent writer has said that all human prog- 
 ress is made by a constant replenishing from a 
 fund of altniistic feeling. This is very true, 
 105 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 but where is the fund deposited? Have we 
 access to the bank ? On this question philoso- 
 phy is vague, but our psalm is definite. "Kiss 
 the Son." Give him your allegiance. History 
 in its last analysis is individual. A world of 
 men, of free moral agents, must always move 
 by units. "Kiss the Son." All the world re- 
 volves around this personal center. Here is the 
 depository of the altruistic feeling by which 
 the world moves. 
 
 Without depreciating questions of national 
 breadth with which the air is always charged — 
 questions great and grave — let us not forget 
 that this one question is world-wide, is uni- 
 versal; that upon it hinges all human progress 
 — this individual relation of man to the supreme 
 Hero of human destiny. 
 
 No clan, class, or nation can ever be saved by 
 a readjustment of social conditions. No meas- 
 uring up to the conventional standards about 
 us is sufficient. The call is to heroism, nothing 
 less. "Not conformed to this world, but trans- 
 formed by the renewing," the divine renewing. 
 
 If, as social students tell us, the aristocracy 
 of Europe, or, indeed, of any other country, 
 be decaying, this, and this alone, is the elixir 
 with which to restore their depleted life. 
 io6 
 
The Kiss of Destiny 
 
 When a man kisses the Son, when there is 
 an interchange of eyes, an interflow of soul, a 
 hero is born. He is stung with a divine am- 
 bition — the ambition to give himself, to pour 
 out his life. The immortal possibility of a 
 personality is open to the world. This is the 
 world's true leadership. 
 
 *'Kiss the Son." This in the present tense. 
 Now is the crisis of life. This is forever true. 
 The greatest mistake of our thinking has al- 
 ways been to put God too far back, leaving the 
 world a sort of cosmic machine grinding out 
 its mechanical career; or else to put God too 
 far forward, leaving the world a sort of chaotic 
 concourse striving in vain to overtake its 
 Maker. 
 
 Missing the present God has always been 
 the failure of life. This was the failure of 
 the Hebrew people. On that memorable day, 
 that looked so like other days, yet was full of 
 God, as he walked in their midst they were 
 still saying, *'God has been here, and he 
 will come again." But they failed, utterly 
 failed, to grasp the great fact of his presence 
 here and now. 
 
 "And the choice went by forever 
 'Twixt the darkness and that light." 
 107 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 Have we not learned from the whole teach- 
 ing of Revelation, now so strongly reaffirmed 
 by science, that we are walking in a world over- 
 flowing with God? that every moment, every 
 hour, every day is flooded with the divine Pres- 
 ence ? and that this is the real "tide which, taken 
 at its flood," leads on to destiny? Therefore, 
 "Kiss the Son." "To-day, if ye will hear his 
 voice." If the heroic call has come awake, arise, 
 go forth, for it is the voice of the divine Hero. 
 1 08 
 
LIFE 
 The Voices 
 
"Like an ^olian harp that wakes 
 
 No certain air, but overtakes 
 
 Far thought with music that it makes : 
 
 "Such seemed the whisper at my side : 
 'What is it thou knowest, sweet voice?' 1 cried, 
 *A hidden hope,' the voice replied, 
 
 "So heavenly-toned, that in that hour 
 From out my sullen heart a power 
 Broke, like the rainbow from the shower, 
 
 "To feel, although no tongue can prove. 
 That every cloud, that spreads above 
 And veileth love, itself is love." 
 
 "A still small voice spake unto me, 
 'Thou art so full of misery, 
 Were it not better not to be?' 
 
 "Then to the still small voice I said: 
 'Let me not cast in endless shade 
 What is so wonderfully made. 
 
 " 'Whatever crazy sorrow saith. 
 
 No life that breathes with human breath 
 
 Has ever truly longed for death. 
 
 'Tis life whereof our nerves are scant — 
 O life, not death, for which we pant ; 
 More life and fuller, that I want.' 
 
 "A second voice was at mine ear, 
 
 A little whimper silver-clear, 
 
 A murmur, 'Be of better cheer.' " 
 
THE VOICES 
 
 '• The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness." — Isa. xl, 3. 
 
 For many years the literary merit as well 
 as spiritual power of these Isaiahan chapters, 
 from the fortieth on, has been steadily growing 
 upon the minds of readers. A quarter of 
 a century ago Matthew Arnold put them into 
 book form, following the authorized text, 
 with a very strongly appreciative preface. 
 Led on by the literary charm, he found 
 his way into the deeper spiritual significance 
 of the scripture. 
 
 It is always the mission of literature to carry 
 a message of life, a message for the heart. This 
 whole scripture is a message from the heart of 
 God to the heart of man. Indeed, the passage 
 generally translated, ''Speak ye comfortably to 
 Jerusalem," is better rendered, "Speak ye to 
 the heart of Jerusalem." 
 
 Science and philosophy have no heart mes- 
 sage. It takes literature to reach the heart. 
 For literature is born of the heart. It utters the 
 unutterable. It is the outburst of personality. 
 When literature adopts the finer, subtler forms 
 of expression it is no affectation, but a serious 
 III 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 attempt to get from one heart to another; to 
 utter the highest, hoHest truth of the soul. 
 
 It is hard to express the deepest things in 
 us. Lyman Beecher used to say, "li I could 
 play all that I hear inside of me I could beat 
 Paganini." And again, ''I am sick because 
 I cannot reveal the feelings of my heart." 
 Great souls speak from compulsion. They 
 speak under pressure of the heart, and from 
 the heart to the heart. 
 
 "When some wild emotion 
 Strikes the ocean 
 Of the poet's soul, ere long 
 From each rocky cave and fastness 
 In its vastness 
 Floats the fragment of a song." 
 
 And this Bible, the literature of God, the out- 
 flow of the divine personality, clad in every 
 possible form, rushes with spiritual power from 
 the heart of God to the heart of man — from 
 heart to heart. Here in these chapters of 
 Isaiah, where the spirit of God burns into a 
 flame of redeeming love, it naturally takes on 
 its noblest literary form. Every art of expres- 
 sion lends itself to the divine purpose. Rhap- 
 sody and drama, poetry and pleading, oratory 
 and argument, blending in spiritual unity and 
 
 112 
 
The Voices 
 
 purpose, press into the heart of man with life — 
 Hfe larger, nobler, diviner. 
 
 There is first the voice scene. Voices are 
 speeding across the desert. Life, real life, that 
 begins where mere existence leaves off, begins 
 with a voice; not a word well defined and 
 elaborated into a creed, but just a voice — some 
 one calling, we hardly know as yet whither. 
 All great lives have heard voices — Moses and 
 Abraham., Samuel and Isaiah, John, Luther, 
 and Mazzini. 
 
 The voice of life may at least be defined thus 
 far : It calls us to be something, or, better, some 
 one; to distinguish or differentiate ourselves; 
 to come out and be separate ; to be more than a 
 conventional automaton; to be ourself; to be 
 something that is I, and not a part of the 
 crowd; to be an individual. This ambition 
 prompts the small boy to show off; to differ- 
 entiate himself from the company; the young 
 fellows to break over conventional boundaries 
 and shock people; and literary geniuses some- 
 times to revolt against the existing order of 
 things. 
 
 There is, however, a true distinction, a true 
 individualizing of life. It is not by doing some- 
 thing eccentric, not by shocking the world, nor 
 (8) ^13 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 by revolting against the existing order; not to 
 be different, but better; not in a new species, 
 but an improvement on the old, carrying life a 
 step further along the main way. "Prepare ye 
 the way of the Lord :" that man away ahead 
 cutting out the brush, picking out the stones, 
 leveling down the mountains, filling up the 
 valleys, turning the wilderness of man into the 
 highway of God. 
 
 This is the true call, the real distinction of 
 life — glorifying the commonplaces. Some 
 books we love, not because the author has done 
 something strange, wild, eccentric, but because 
 he has taken us into some commonplace home 
 of poverty and through the dull light and tear- 
 stained faces has revealed the glory of a human 
 heart lit with the light of God. He glorifies 
 the commonplaces. He is on ahead. This is 
 true distinction, real individuality. 
 
 Moses distinguished himself by going on 
 ahead of his people. Sometimes they did not 
 know where he was. He was quite out of sight. 
 He, too, glorified the commonplaces with those 
 great first principles of life, preparing the way 
 of God. 
 
 Sometimes true distinction becomes degen- 
 erate. A man distinguishes himself, and his 
 
 IT4 
 
The Voices 
 
 grandchildren are content to rest upon his 
 laurels. This is the birth of caste. Spirit gives 
 place to form. Abraham rose far above his age 
 in fellowship with God. But the best his 
 descendants could say for themselves was that 
 they were his children. 
 
 Moses discovered the first principles of life, 
 but how soon they were turned for caste pur- 
 poses into a thousand petty rules ! Every true 
 revival is a passing on into spiritual distinction. 
 Afterward comes the period of rules, religious 
 castes, ecclesiastical machinery. These two 
 phases of life are forever at loggerheads. 
 Throughout the Bible they run counter: life 
 sliding down into caste, petty, narrow, cruel; 
 and life struggling upward, strong, broad, 
 spiritual. 
 
 What a picture of these counter currents we 
 have in Job's life! Around him are his con- 
 ventional ultra-orthodox friends, wiser than 
 the Almighty. They weigh the man in their 
 little scales of human logic as they talk of what 
 ought to be, what must be, and what cannot be. 
 Meantime Job Is struggling, groping, living his 
 way, following the voices beyond all boundaries 
 and conclusions, till out of sight of his friends 
 on the unseen heights of God he finally cries, 
 115 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 "1 know that my Redeemer liveth." This is 
 the outburst of spiritual experience, the shout 
 of victory, the thrill of individual life. 
 
 But life is not under the simple sway of one 
 clear voice. There are many voices — many and 
 discordant. We have to find our way through 
 the voices. One voice is heard calling across 
 the desert to another, saying, "Take up the 
 message and carry, it forward. Cry !" But the 
 other voice calls back, 'What shall I cry? 
 What is the use of crying?" "The grass 
 withereth, the flower fadeth; and the people 
 are grass.*' 
 
 This is the voice of despair. We rush down 
 into the world to the blooming flower. "A 
 thing of beauty is a joy forever." Nay; we 
 pluck it, and, behold, to-morrow it is faded and 
 gone. Such is life. 
 
 "The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, 
 Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows 
 
 brown and sear. 
 Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves 
 
 lie dead; 
 They rustle to the eddying gust and to the rabbit's 
 
 tread." 
 
 The poets are prone to these pessimistic 
 moods. Shelley, Schiller, and Byron have sung 
 this despair. They have answered back to the 
 ii6 
 
The Voices 
 
 voice of hope, "What shall we cry ? — the grass 
 withereth, the flower fadeth." 
 
 We have tried to escape this pessimistic 
 voice in two directions. One has been to 
 plunge into the world. *'Eat, drink, for to- 
 morrow you die." Make the most of the world 
 while it is going, which is not always making 
 the best of it. The other is to turn away from 
 the fading, disappointing world : to lose sight 
 of this world, to despise it; to live in the 
 thought of another world. Both are fruitless 
 and false ways to escape. 
 
 But there is another way. The voice of 
 despair dies out, and another voice takes up the 
 cry. Yes, he repeats, 'The grass withereth, the 
 flower fadeth, but the word of our God shall 
 stand forever." 
 
 There is something that never fades, never 
 
 withers — the word of God. Where is it? Not 
 
 in some other world, but in this. Go back to 
 
 the flower: there is something even in the 
 
 flower that never dies. 
 
 "To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 
 
 The flower may fade, but its message will live 
 forever. 
 
 Men are not doubters, despairers, because 
 117 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 they think deeply, but because they do not think 
 deeply enough. They do not get through to 
 the sap, the heart, where the eternals live and 
 flow. They stop in the foliage, and the foliage 
 withers and dies. The wisest thinking is just 
 the art of connecting the foliage with the per- 
 ennial sap of eternity. 
 
 The word of God is in the flower, yes, in the 
 grass, in all the commonplaces of life, if we can 
 but find it. The sheep gets the best out of the 
 grass by nipping it, but we do not. It is not 
 by ownership, but by fellowship, that we get 
 the best things of life. We must linger around 
 and listen for the word. Not by owning the 
 flowers, but by associating with them. If we 
 have lost faith in men it may be because we 
 have tried to pluck them, possess them, rather 
 than associate with them, listening for the 
 divine message they bring, consciously or un- 
 consciously. It is not necessary to be million- 
 aires, but woe to the man who ceases to be a 
 fellow. 
 
 "All things must die: 
 The stream will cease to flow; 
 The wind will cease to blow ; 
 The clouds will cease to fleet; 
 The heart will cease to beat; 
 For all things must die." 
 ii8 
 
The Voices 
 
 Yet dying, like Christ on Calvary, they leave 
 behind their message from God. You will re- 
 member how ''Blue Bird" was reclaimed from 
 her reckless life to God and his service by a 
 flower thrust into her hand by a woman. It 
 faded, but in dying spoke — spoke to her heart, 
 ''gave thoughts that lie too deep for tears." 
 
 But another voice is now heard, a voice that 
 grows wild with enthusiasm, calling upon Zion 
 to take up the message: "O Jerusalem, that 
 bringest good tidings, lift up thy voice with 
 strength; lift it up, be not afraid; say unto the 
 cities of Judah, Behold your God !" 
 
 "Behold your God!" Here is something 
 even better than the "word." It is God him- 
 self; the gospel of the Presence — richer than all 
 words. There is a gospel of the Presence. 
 
 This man speaks fluently and logically. We 
 listen with admiration, and wonder if it is true. 
 This other man seems a pauper in words, but 
 he comes to us with a presence that convinces 
 at sight. He speaks with authority. This phi- 
 losopher whom we sought In our trouble mud- 
 dled us with his wisdom. This wise man who 
 said almost nothing but seemed to bring our 
 tangle Into the light of his presence sent us out 
 a clearer-headed and stronger-hearted man, 
 119 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 It is the Presence that saves — the real Pres- 
 ence. The Bible is not simply a message from 
 God, but a revelation of God. It takes us into 
 his presence, deeper and deeper. It is not the 
 word simply, clear-cut, cold, lifeless. It is the 
 word while he is yet speaking; his breath, his 
 life, his Spirit is in it. This is the life power 
 of the book. 
 
 We live deeper than flowers, deeper than 
 words — we live in experiences; in the secret 
 places of life beyond the word — deeper, much 
 deeper, where speech removes its shoes for rev- 
 erence and thought hangs furled; where the 
 mother waits, where the father prays, where the 
 young man finds the meaning of his soul and 
 girds himself for life — in the presence of God. 
 
 This is the democracy, this the liberty, this 
 the range of life — that it is rooted in an experi- 
 ence. It is an experience between two persons, 
 God and me. This is life. 
 
 "All I know of a certain star 
 
 Is, it can throw (like an angled spar) 
 
 Now a dart of red, now a dart of blue ; 
 
 Till my friends have said they would fain see, too, 
 
 My star that dartles the red and the blue ! 
 
 Then it stopped like a bird ; like a flower hangs furled : 
 
 They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it. 
 
 What matter to me if their star is a world? 
 
 Mine has opened its soul to me, therefore I love it." 
 
 I20 
 
LIFE 
 TKe Mission 
 
"Life is not an idle ore, 
 But iron dug from central gloom 
 And heated hot with burning fears, 
 And dipped in baths of hissing tears, 
 And battered with the shocks of doom, 
 To shape and use." — Tennyson. 
 
 "Be sure that God 
 Ne'er dooms to waste the strength he deigns impart." 
 
 — Browning. 
 
 "God is the author, men are only the players. These 
 grand pieces which are played upon earth have been 
 composed in heaven." — Bahac. 
 
THE MISSION 
 
 " But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength ; they 
 shall mount up with wings as eagles ; they shall run, and not be weary ; 
 and they shall walk, and not faint." — Isa. xl, 31. 
 
 The voices left us in the presence of God — 
 life an experience. The evolution of this ex- 
 perience into life's mission occupies the suc- 
 ceeding chapters. True, there is an almost per- 
 plexing variety of thought, form, and action 
 flashing from this scripture, yet through it all 
 may be traced the unfolding of one purpose. 
 
 The voices were idealistic; these chapters are 
 realistic. We have passed from the idyllic 
 shepherd scene into the heart of a great city. 
 Getting out of Babylon is the problem; not a 
 problem in history, but in life. There is history 
 in it. Cyrus is matched against Babylon. 
 There is the clash of arms, and the city falls. 
 But, strange to say, there arises above the con- 
 quered city not the form of Cyrus, but of Israel 
 — a new Israel waking and rising slowly to the 
 great purpose of God and the great mission of 
 life. 
 
 It is more than a rescue. We sometimes stop 
 with that idea of salvation, but God never does. 
 Israel was a wreck, but God treats her rather as 
 123 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 a magnificent possibility. This is his treatment 
 of all human wrecks; he never forgets that he is 
 preeminently a builder and maker of men. The 
 brand plucked from the burning never tells the 
 whole story of salvation. Longfellow has a 
 little poem of an artist who, sitting one day by 
 the fire, snatched a brand from the hearth, then 
 finally carved it into a work of art. God 
 plucked Israel from the burning — to carve, to 
 bring out the true life, the divine purpose, the 
 likeness of God, that God through him might 
 "break into glory." And this work, this fine 
 art of God, is what we have in these chapters 
 of Isaiah, wrought out through his presence — 
 the thought of this passage — "They that wait 
 upon the Lord." 
 
 It was an awful change for those people to 
 be taken up from the simple shepherd life and 
 dropped into the heart of the world's civiliza- 
 tion. A boy taken from a country home and 
 dropped into a city realizes for the first time 
 how big the world is, how overwhelming is 
 man — these streets throbbing with commerce, 
 these buildings shutting out the sky, this whir 
 of factories, this babel of voices. Why! God 
 in the country hardly seems equal to man in the 
 city. He feels, like the Israelite, that his ways 
 124 
 
The Mission 
 
 are hidden from the God of the old meeting- 
 house on the hill — that God has lost track of 
 him. 
 
 And we are always passing through this ex- 
 perience. We are being dropped from an age 
 of simplicity into an age of complexity and per- 
 plexity — from the little province into the 
 metropolis; from the hill country into Babylon. 
 Suddenly the world is upon us so big, so ruth- 
 less, so irreverent. Science has pushed the old 
 boundaries in upon the country of God. Com- 
 merce has run her tracks through the ancient 
 sanctuaries. The world is rushing on with 
 such speed that we have no chance to ''possess 
 our souls in patience." We are caught in the 
 whirl of thought, in the torrent of things. We 
 are being made in spite of ourselves — factory- 
 made in the mill of modern civilization. And 
 our soul is oozing from us through hoe and 
 chisel, through pen and pencil, through science, 
 commerce, and art. 
 
 To a people in such straits came the prophet 
 with a message. What was it? Just this: 
 Your world is not too big, but your idea of God 
 is too little. The transcendency of God. You 
 have thought of him as the God of the shepherd 
 land. But let man enlarge his world, let him 
 125 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 widen the circles beyond all former thought; 
 still it is ''God who sitteth upon the last circle." 
 
 Some prophets to-day take us through the al- 
 most unending stages of evolution, to bring us 
 at last face to face w^ith the Almighty sitting 
 upon the ultimate circle. All this great new 
 land is still God's country, not man's. And the 
 length and breadth of it, and the wonderfulness 
 of the exploration, have only given us a nobler 
 idea of God. And from this must be born a 
 nobler idea of man. 
 
 When your heart beats low from too much 
 world, when you need a heavenly tonic, turn to 
 this fortieth chapter of Isaiah. The transcend- 
 ency of God shines through every word : ''Hast 
 thou not known ? hast thou not heard, that the 
 everlasting God^ the Lord, the Creator of the 
 ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is 
 weary? . . . Hegivethpower to the faint; and 
 to them that have no might he increaseth 
 strength. Even the youths shall faint and be 
 weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: 
 but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew 
 their strength; they shall mount up with wings 
 as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and 
 they shall walk, and not faint." 
 
 From the transcendency of God is born the 
 126 
 
The Mission 
 
 transcendency of man. The man who waits 
 upon God is touched and tinged with the su- 
 premacy of God. To him the world is the path- 
 way of the soul — the great highway of God 
 where everything bows to the mastery of man, 
 where everything is hands and feet and wings 
 for the soul. A favorite thought of the 
 prophet, this sovereignty of the soul that waits 
 upon God. The rivers cannot overflow him. 
 For him the trees break into song. At his ap- 
 proach the desert blossoms as a rose, and the 
 stagnant pools are turned into living fountains. 
 
 And even more than this, along this highway 
 of the soul not only does the earth wait upon 
 God's courtier, but the heavens too. This is the 
 thought of the prophet. All along the way the 
 heavens are bursting with songs. There are 
 choirs invisible. Israel sings and the watch- 
 men on the walls sing. 'The heavens are filled" 
 — not with commerce, but with song. 
 
 There is a picture by Breton, a good supple- 
 ment for "The Man with the Hoe." A peasant 
 girl, bareheaded, barefooted, sickle in hand, is 
 going forth to her toil. Suddenly a lark breaks 
 into song above her. She stops, her head 
 thrown back, her lips apart, her face aglow, her 
 eye beaming. For the moment she has forgot- 
 127 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 ten the world, ''all time and toil and care." 
 This is the divine remedy for a material age, 
 for an aggressive world — not the entire aboli- 
 tion of the hoe and the sickle, but more larks 
 above; not less earth, but more sky; songs that 
 inspire, ideals that lift, standards that are 
 divine. ''They that wait upon the Lord shall 
 renew their strength." 
 
 But waiting upon God is more than an inspi- 
 ration; it is a criticism of life. God is the su- 
 preme critic. Life is moral; therefore is always 
 on trial, always at the judgment bar of God. 
 Judgment is not simply a far-off event, it is a 
 process forever going on. And this very 
 thought runs through these chapters. The na- 
 tions are in the court of God, are on trial before 
 him. 
 
 This is the deepest current of history in all 
 ages. It is also the deepest current of life. We 
 live by judgment. The soul through which the 
 judgments of God are not always sweeping is 
 dead. We live by the searching light of God. 
 When you lift a stone in the field the beetles 
 rush to cover, because they love darkness rather 
 than light. So God dispels the moral beetles of 
 the soul by pouring in the light, new light, 
 stronger and whiter. 
 
 128 
 
The Mission 
 
 Every day we are called to stand in some 
 new light. The fatal charge against the Jews 
 was not that they were false to the old light, but 
 that they would not receive the new. This is 
 the soul's fatality, that the new light comes and 
 we refuse the test, the trial. Real life, growing, 
 expanding, is forever passing from judgment 
 hall to judgment hall. 
 
 Then judgment is also in events, the tests of 
 life. His fan is in his hand, and we are in the 
 fan. And as the farmer tosses wheat and chaff 
 into the air to be caught and separated by a 
 blast of wind, so God tosses the soul in the ex- 
 periences of life. Every toss into prominence 
 is a test, a trial. A new wind catches us and 
 there is less chaff. God is looking for the 
 wheat. "Bringing forth judgment unto truth." 
 Not truth in the abstract, not a creed, but truth 
 in the head and heart, in the hands and feet, 
 truth all alive. 
 
 So judgment sweeps through the soul. The 
 selfish thought is doomed. The unholy purpose 
 is condemned. The lust is cast into hell. The 
 idols of earth perish, and the ideals of heaven 
 are born. Babylon falls, and the servant of 
 God rises in her place. 
 
 This is election or selection according to 
 (9) 129 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 quality. We are elected if we pass muster, if 
 we are equal to the trial, if we can stand the 
 test, if we can measure up. But measure up to 
 what? To the purpose of God in us. This is 
 the great appeal of life, the purpose of God 
 sweeping down through the ages. This is the 
 logic of the Bible, this the great theme of Paul, 
 this the awakening thought of our prophet. 
 *7acob, I have called thee." "Israel, I have 
 chosen thee." 'T have taken hold of thee from 
 the ends of the earth," away back in Abraham. 
 
 The modern doctrine of heredity is fore- 
 stalled by the prophet and made to serve a noble 
 end, to lift life into larger meaning. Life is no 
 little circle, no side issue, no spider's web in the 
 corner for purposes of spoil. Life is a succes- 
 sion of princes — that is, if we grasp it as it lies 
 in the purpose of God. We are called to stand 
 in a noble succession. Grasping this thought is 
 life's power, failing it is life's defeat. 
 
 We are heirs if we only knew it. One day In 
 a western village an old Indian was found beg- 
 ging through the streets. Suspended from his 
 neck was a charm; when opened it was found 
 to contain a deed from the government for a 
 large tract of land. So our life holds deeds, 
 legacies, birthrights that we have never 
 130 
 
The Mission 
 
 claimed. We go a begging when we might be 
 princes. We are overwhehned, overrun, 
 swami>ed by the world. We live, yet not we, 
 but the world liveth in us, when, were we to 
 rise to the purpose of God in us, to the purpose 
 of God revealed through the Prince of Life, we 
 should pass from beggardom to princedom. 
 We should then rise to that heroic scripture 
 that brings the world into homage to the soul : 
 ''I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me; and 
 the life I now live, I live by faith in the Son 
 of God." 
 
 But, more definitely, what is the purpose of 
 God in Israel? What is her mission? A 
 strange one, very strange. A mission of light : 
 "Thou shalt be a light to the nations." A mis- 
 sion of words: ''Thou shalt succor the weary 
 with words." A mission of gentleness: "A 
 bruised reed shall he not break." A mission of 
 silence: "He shall not lift up his voice in the 
 street." 
 
 What is all this but the mission of the soul, 
 the soul forces — the mission of what we are to 
 the world, of what we are poured forth in 
 words, deeds, and life? 
 
 But the practical question arises, how to 
 achieve this mission, how to unfold the soul, 
 131 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 how to reveal ourself. This is really the most 
 difficult question in life. We are conscious of 
 something within, but it is a mystery; a vague 
 force pushing and urging, we know not 
 whither. There is no clear-cut scripture of 
 God's purpose within us. 
 
 We are like a boy who feels the life of man- 
 hood within him, restless, vague, impetuous, 
 and he knows not what to do with it. One day 
 on a stagecoach I watched such a boy for half 
 an hour. In that time he ate some bananas, and 
 sat on some peaches; inadvertently wiped his 
 feet on an old gentleman who sat near; swung 
 by a strap over the wheels when we were going 
 down hill ; and finally put on the brake when we 
 were going up. 
 
 How like the vague and restless life of our 
 own soul ! Active, but foolishly and disastrously 
 active. The brakes on uphill, and off downhill. 
 Active, but no definite unfolding of the inner 
 purpose. Rather, a wasting of that purpose; 
 bartering the soul for success, selling thoughts 
 for money, peddling conscience for fame, sur- 
 rendering character for popularity — 'losing 
 the soul to gain the world." 
 
 The severest test of life is, "To thine own 
 self be true." Still the question remains, How ? 
 132 
 
The Mission 
 
 How can I be true to my own soul ? How can 
 I stand by my own wares? How can I have 
 faith in my own powers? And the answer 
 comes again from the passage, 'They that wait 
 upon the Lord." 
 
 The flower unfolds its divine purpose in the 
 presence of the sun, and the soul in the presence 
 of God. 
 
 ''God's plans like lilies pure and white unfold: 
 We must not tear the close-shut leaves apart; 
 Time will reveal the calyxes of gold." 
 
 ^33 
 
LIFE 
 TKe Hero 
 
"Our own best and noblest life, our own greatest 
 heroism, interprets for us God's love." — Abbott. 
 
 "The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think? 
 So the All-great were the All-loving, too — 
 So through the thunder comes a human voice, 
 Saying, 'O heart I made, a heart beats here ! 
 Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself! 
 Thou hast no power, nor mayest conceive of mine, 
 But love I gave thee with myself to love. 
 And thou must love me who have died for thee !' " 
 
 — Browning. 
 
THE HERO 
 
 " Behold, my servant shall prosper."— Isa. Hi, 13. 
 
 "He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied."— Isa. 
 liii, II. 
 
 Our prophet now takes us still deeper into 
 the mysteries of life. In the last chapter we 
 found life unfolding in God's presence — un- 
 folding God's purpose within us, the mission of 
 what we are to the world. 
 
 It was a study of life from the standpoint of 
 man. Now the prophet takes us within the veil 
 — to the standpoint of God, to a revelation of 
 the mysteries of life, to the dynamics of the 
 soul. ''My servant shall prosper." ''He shall 
 see of the travail of his soul, and shall be 
 satisfied." 
 
 Life from God's standpoint is always a mas- 
 tery for higher ends, an incessant travail for 
 new and finer issues. The elements may swirl 
 around a rock and pass on ; but when they touch 
 a living tree they are caught and held and 
 turned to nobler things. Earth, air, and dew 
 return in leaf, bud, and blossom. 
 
 A brook may gather the debris of a hundred 
 cottages and sweep them into an eddy, there to 
 play out their meaningless existence. But a boy 
 137 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 will gather the debris of one cottage, screws, 
 nails, sticks, etc., grasp them, turn upon them 
 the force of his individuality; and return them 
 to the world with a new and higher meaning — 
 a miniature house, barn, or mill. With the boy 
 there is more than a battle with sticks. There 
 is an actual travail of soul to express himself 
 in sticks, screws, and nails. Every power of 
 the soul is taxed — insight, sympathy, will. 
 That little mill with its wabbling wheels could 
 tell a strange and pathetic story of the travail 
 of a boy's soul. 
 
 Or, again, there is that piece of machinery — 
 the product of mature skill — that runs so 
 rhythmically and silently that one might think 
 it made in heaven and dropped into this dis- 
 cordant earth. It, too, has its story deeper than 
 the heart of the mountain, the flame of the 
 forge, or the skill of the workman; a story that 
 leads into the depths of the inventor's soul; 
 into days and nights of poverty and toil, of 
 hardship and disappointment, of weary waiting 
 and hard working; a travail of soul known only 
 to one man and his God, as he wrestles with 
 principles that baffle, with steel that resists, 
 with ideals that elude. 
 
 And that snatch of the poet's song, that 
 138 
 
The Hero 
 
 flutters like an angel into our heart, is no handi- 
 work of technique. It, too, is a child of the 
 soul. 
 
 "Let us, then, be up and doing, 
 With a heart for any fate." 
 
 What depths of life are back of such a sen- 
 tence! What sorrows and heartaches, what 
 vigils and toil, before the poet could write such 
 words. Thrust your rapier into them, as Mrs. 
 Browning suggests, and you will find blood 
 upon it. 
 
 This is the great secret of the masters; this 
 their only divinity; this their only genius. 
 Carlyle says of Shakespeare: "It seems to me 
 a heedless notion, our common one, that he sat 
 like a bird on the bough and sang forth free 
 and offhand. Doubt not he had his own sor- 
 rows. How could a man travel forward from 
 rustic deer-poaching to such tragedy-writing 
 and not fall in with sorrows by the way ?" 
 
 It is by sheer travail of the soul, the age-long 
 travail of the human soul, that all constitutions, 
 inventions, poems, and pictures are born into 
 this world. Indeed, was it not in such travail 
 of the Infinite Soul that the world itself was 
 born ? Is not this the real creative power ? Is 
 it not the genius of God ? 
 139 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 We have too often held the notion that God 
 makes worlds as a boy blows bubbles; that all 
 these precious things of earth and the soul cost 
 him nothing. A most unworthy thought of 
 God. As one has truly said, ''As long as we 
 conceive him as bestowing blessings upon us 
 out of his infinite fullness, but at no real cost to 
 himself, he sinks below the moral heroes of our 
 race." 
 
 If things are true and beautiful and good it 
 is because so much of the Eternal Soul has gone 
 into them; just as the soul of the artist goes 
 into a picture — the only thing that makes it a 
 real picture. The flowers you bring into the 
 sick room are touched into life by the Infinite 
 love. They are expressions of the divine 
 passion, tokens of the divine sympathy and 
 thoughtfulness. If a landscape lifts the soul 
 it is because there is soul in it; for it takes a 
 soul to move a soul. 
 
 When we read, "And the Spirit of God 
 moved upon the face of the waters,*' we are 
 not to think of the waving of a magician's 
 wand, nor the ripple of the waters moved by the 
 winds. Into this creative act goes all that we 
 name personality — thought, feeling, will, all 
 bending and burning toward one creative pas- 
 140 
 
The Hero 
 
 sion, the passion of love, of sacrifice, of giving; 
 a passion that will never stay till it expresses 
 itself in history, till it speaks in blood through 
 the throbbing life of a Man, and of whom it 
 will be most truly said, ''AH things were made 
 by him, and without him was not anything 
 made that was made." And his coming into 
 history will be explained by the fact that ''God 
 so loved the world, that he gave his only begot- 
 ten Son, that whosoever believeth on him 
 should not perish, but have everlasting life." 
 All this is but the sequence of the Infinite trav- 
 ail, of the creative passion making all things 
 new^ — yes, finally new, a new creation in Christ 
 Jesus. 
 
 Now, it is this very thought we find in these 
 most remarkable chapters of Isaiah from the 
 fortieth on — chapters that fairly throb with 
 what has been called the "passion of God." 
 The objective point is the captive people. The 
 voices have carried the message of hope to 
 them. "Behold, God will come with a strong 
 hand." Then he comes. Comes with a strong 
 hand, but a strange one — strange to the com- 
 mon thought of men. You see him coming, 
 you feel his approach in the rising tide of the 
 chapters. 
 
 141 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 "Jehovah as hero goes forth 
 As a man of war stirs up zeal, 
 Shouts the alarm and battle cry 
 Against his foes, proves himself hero." 
 
 But this deliverer going forth is more than 
 a human, he is a divine Hero. His redemption 
 is divine, not human. It is an outpouring of 
 himself, in arguments, in judgments, in awak- 
 ening thoughts, in passionate pleading. In all 
 the burning eloquence of God he pours life into 
 their impoverished veins, thoughts into their 
 stupid minds, and love into their wasted hearts. 
 He pours himself out till the limits of language 
 are reached and a strange silence falls. In the 
 midst of the people a strange figure appears, one 
 so strange that the world is amazed, kings are 
 dumb, and the people aghast. What has not 
 been heard, what has not been said, what can 
 never be said, is here. It is the ultimate ex- 
 pression of the divine passion ; the silent Serv- 
 ant of Jehovah in the midst of his task, in the 
 travail of his soul. 
 
 To the world — to those who have not felt 
 the significance of our own divinity; who have 
 not learned that it is only by the travail of our 
 soul, only by sacrifice, that personal force can 
 reach anything like a creative function, only 
 142 
 
The Hero 
 
 through our Gethsemanes and Calvaries can we 
 make the world flower about us — to the world, 
 I say, he is a strange, bruised, wounded, and 
 disfigured form. But to God he is the prosper- 
 ous servant. ''He shall prosper." More liter- 
 ally, "He has the insight and ability of destiny." 
 
 He sees man at those strange, mysterious 
 depths unpierced by any human eye. He will 
 seek out — trace thought by thought, feeling by 
 feeling, purpose by purpose — the destiny of the 
 soul. He will discover, unearth, redeem the 
 soul from circumstance, fate, and sin. 
 
 What is sin but chaos of soul ? What is sin 
 but stubbornness of heart? What is sin but 
 discord of life ? What is sin but the wayward 
 will? And He, moving upon the face of the 
 wald human waters, in the sublime travail of his 
 soul shall turn chaos into order, stubbornness 
 into obedience, discord into music, and self- 
 will into divine. 
 
 We are brought in the next chapter face to 
 face with the hero at his task. The revelation 
 comes in the form of a human experience. 
 Once more humanity is grappling with the 
 Angel of life, an experience repeated again and 
 again in every soul that wakens to the meaning 
 of life — the same dazed unbelief; "Who has 
 143 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 believed — to whom Is the arm of the Lord re- 
 vealed ?" the same turning away of .the face : 
 'There is no beauty in him;" and the same final 
 awakening to the fact that all beauty and all 
 divinity and all power is in that bruised and 
 wounded form. 
 
 We begin life where the race began by wor- 
 shiping the sun. We believe in the beauty of 
 curves, the divinity of fists, and the heaven of 
 enjoyment. Our idea of the divine power is 
 force multiplied infinitely. We have not yet 
 learned the weakness of mere force. A giant 
 may crush a flower with his heel, but there is 
 no power in his heel to nurse it back to life. 
 That takes soul power. The power that laid 
 the Atlantic cable was not in men, money, or 
 enterprise, but in the soul of Cyrus W. Field. 
 The power that crushed the rebellion was not 
 in the armies and navies, but in the soul of 
 Abraham Lincoln. And God is most and 
 mightiest God when he comes in the forces of 
 the soul — clad not in the whirlwind, earth- 
 quake, or fire, but in a form so bruised and 
 broken that the soul streams through every rift. 
 
 All this we must learn; to this we must 
 awaken: that the dominion, the power, and 
 the glory are within, and that the noblest 
 144 
 
The Hero 
 
 thought of life is to let out these inner splen- 
 dors. One Christmas Day I saw a group of 
 children looking at their presents — pretty 
 things. Ten minutes after they had left their 
 toys — made things — and were in the back yard 
 with broken bits of china making things; weav- 
 ing earth's broken bits in the loom of the soul; 
 touching outer things into life through the 
 glory of the inner. And some day they will 
 touch the broken pottery of life into a larger, 
 diviner glory. And this passing from the outer 
 to the inner glory, from the Sunshine-God to 
 the Hero-God, is the great awakening of life. 
 
 Slowly comes the awakening. Some day in 
 our childhood reading we come upon the little 
 hero, in the person of a boy who has passed 
 from the lowest to the highest; a boy who 
 wrought with his soul, who endured, who 
 toiled, who suffered. And a new kind of tear 
 rolls down our cheek, the first divine tear. The 
 divine ideal is growing upon us. 
 
 How different we felt when the army re- 
 turned from war with faded uniform, tattered 
 banners, and scarred faces from that hour when 
 we cheered them going forth ! There is a divin- 
 ity in the old glory. There is a beauty in the 
 scars that was not in the curves. And in our 
 (lo) 145 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 hearts there is a new thrill, for they bring 
 tidings not of a Sunshine-God but a Hero- 
 God. 
 
 We listen with rapt attention and admiration 
 to Paul in the Sanhedrin, but we feel a new 
 power when the veteran stands before us in 
 silence bearing the marks of the Lord Jesus 
 upon him. It is the glory of God breaking 
 through every scar. 
 
 This is the awaking of life from the sunshine 
 that soothes to the hero that calls — from nature 
 to men, from men to Christ. This is the 
 thought at the heart of this fifty-third chapter 
 of Isaiah. It is the medley of an awakening 
 soul. It is the cry of the human pierced by the 
 presence of God. They are puzzled, they are 
 dazed. He is a mystery. He runs counter to 
 all their thoughts of life. They despise his 
 weakness; they turn their faces from his de- 
 formity. By the canons of religion they take 
 him for a victim of his own sin; he is "smitten 
 of God and afflicted." 
 
 But through all this tumult of the outer — of 
 thought, feeling, and prejudice — the revelation 
 of the inner is bearing down upon their soul. 
 A new thought of God, a new sense of beauty, 
 a new vision of power, is creeping over their 
 146 
 
The Hero 
 
 soul. A new ideal, a new hero of life, is 
 towering above them. This man is no dark 
 mystery, he is the clear revelation of God; no 
 deformity, but the highest and divinest beauty; 
 no victim, but a hero, a master, a servant of 
 God. 
 
 If about him we see the strange, dazed, dis- 
 gusted, and angry human faces; if circum- 
 stances seem to overwhelm him, crush him; if 
 he is silent when we listen for his voice, it is 
 not because he is a victim but a master. Silent ! 
 yes, because he is looking out from the travail 
 of his soul, down into the heart of man, up into 
 the heart of God, and away into the future, 
 satisfied already with his divine mastery. 
 
 The people hear a new voice; deep calls unto 
 deep. It is the hero voice calling them to the 
 heroic life, waking the divine in them. And 
 they tremble upon the verge of a new life. But 
 it is only a trembling at first — a contrition for 
 sin that breaks forth into penitential song. 
 They have seen the divine Hero, but, alas! he 
 is crushed under the weight of their own un- 
 divine life. "He is wounded for our transgres- 
 sions, he is bruised for our iniquities." 
 
 Yet this is the very point where life begins, 
 as John Newton once sang : 
 147 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 "I saw One hanging on a tree, 
 
 In agony and blood, 
 Who fixed his languid eyes on me, 
 
 While at the cross I stood. 
 
 "Never to my latest breath 
 
 Shall I forget that look : 
 He seemed to charge me with his death, 
 
 Though not a word he spoke." 
 
 The same conscience that finally awakes to com- 
 mend the divine Hero condemns me. 
 
 There is a time when a rift occurs in life; 
 when the very ideal that has stirred the noblest 
 in us looms up from another, impossible shore; 
 when we awake to the startling fact that in 
 life there are two worlds, not one : this world 
 of sunshine and clouds below, and that world 
 of moral and spiritual heroism above. This 
 lower is very human, that higher is very divine. 
 And we cannot shake off the conviction — nay, 
 we would not shake off the conviction — that 
 our true life belongs to that higher. But the 
 two worlds drift on with impossible spaces 
 lying between them. 
 
 True, there is an intermingling of light and 
 life between these two. And there is the ascent 
 of man, the upward struggle. Science inter- 
 prets the upward trend, but the trend itself, 
 the life struggle upward, never came through 
 148 
 
The Hero 
 
 science. The deeper meaning of life is not told 
 in ''the ascent of man," but in the descent of 
 God; not in evolution, but in revelation; not 
 from below, but from above — for life is born of 
 ideals, and ideals are always above. 
 
 Between Job and this divine Hero there is an 
 apparent similarity, yet a decided difference. 
 In Job the hero climbs upward through doubt 
 and darkness and suffering into the deeper mys- 
 teries of life. The inevitable falls upon him, 
 and he turns it to the finer issues of his soul. 
 
 But here the Hero of God is not ascend- 
 ing, but descending. He is not a victim, 
 but a master. It is not the inevitable, but a 
 task to which he freely puts his soul. The 
 travail of his soul is not for finer issues in him- 
 self, but in the souls of men. It is the dynamics 
 of God entering into the life of men. And 
 these men, penitent, broken, plastic before him, 
 find the purpose of his life in their own life. 
 ''With his stripes we are healed." "The chas- 
 tisements of our peace are upon him." They 
 reach life through life. Nay, rather, life has 
 come; the rift is crossed from above. The tides 
 of heaven rush through them — a new world has 
 entered and beats against the shores of the old. 
 
 The very potency of God has entered our life. 
 149 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 "He shall see his seed." His seed is in us. 
 He shall find himself in us over and over again. 
 We shall be repeaters — echoes of his life. For 
 him to live will be men, and men and more men, 
 and diviner, till far down the ages one shall 
 cry, ''Beloved, it doth not yet appear what we 
 shall be, but — we shall be like him." 
 
 Through him we shall evolve the purpose of 
 God in us; for "he shall divide the spoil with 
 the strong." As we go forth from our Baby- 
 Ions, in the progress of the world, not at his car 
 shall all the captives be led; not on his shoul- 
 ders shall all the spoils be borne. He shall walk 
 in the midst of an army of strong men, men who 
 are conscious of such a fullness of life that they 
 pour themselves out with a strange prodigality 
 till the desert world blooms like a garden. One 
 shall find the forces of nature playing their 
 strange game about his feet, and shall lift them 
 and make them take part in the larger game of 
 human destiny. Another shall catch the music 
 of the sea upon his sensitive soul and fling it to 
 the world in poetic measure; while yet another, 
 receiving into his heart the deep life of God, on 
 fire with the redeeming passion of the Hero, 
 shall rush earthward, crying, "This, this is the 
 hour for souls." 
 
 150 
 
THE CHRIST 
 Literature 
 
"Oft the ancient forms 
 Will thrill, indeed, in carrying the young blood. 
 The wine skins, now and then a little warped, 
 Will crack even, as the new wine gurgles in: 
 Spare the old bottles ! — spill not the new wine." 
 
 — Mrs. Browning. 
 
 "Then he remembered how that in the dream 
 One told him of the marvel of that stream, 
 Whose waters are a well of youth eterne. 
 And night and day its crystal heart doth yearn 
 To wed its youthhood with the sea's old age ; 
 And faring on that bridal pilgrimage. 
 Its waters past the shining city are rolled. 
 And all the people drink and wax not old." 
 
 — William Watson. 
 
LITERATURE 
 
 " Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets : I am 
 not come to destroy, but to fulfill." — Matt, v, 17. 
 
 The Bible realizes its ideal in history. 
 Other literatures have failed in this respect. 
 Plato spoke of a man that should come with the 
 last word of truth. But that man never came 
 to complete the philosophy of Plato. The artist 
 idealized beauty into a god. But that god never 
 became incarnate and visited the studio of the 
 artist. Confucius bends all his theories tow^ard 
 what he calls ''the superior man." But that 
 man never came to verify the theories of 
 * Confucius. 
 
 But God seems to have entered into a league 
 with the Hebrew Bible that sometime, some- 
 where, the great ideal of that book should be 
 realized in a person. Now, it has been said, 
 and most truly, that ''personality is the Ulti- 
 mate Reality," therefore the Bible reveals the 
 Ultimate Reality; is a complete book. Other 
 books are fragments. They begin with a per- 
 son in local relations and pass on into words, 
 powerless words. This book begins with words, 
 the dreams and aspirations of the centuries, 
 153 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 and passes on into a person, who has universal 
 relations, an almighty and all-loving Person, 
 complete in him. '^I am come not to destroy, 
 but to fulfill." These Old Testament scriptures 
 hold potentially God's great thought of life, and 
 Jesus Christ came to fulfill it. 
 
 There are different vv^ays of treating the past. 
 One is to become its slave. What has been 
 must be. What is v^ritten is written. As a 
 prominent Jesuit has said of his Church, ''Her 
 methods may ebb and flow, her ritual change, 
 her discipline undergo modifications, but her 
 doctrines never." That is, the logic of one cen- 
 tury will fix the boundaries of life for all cen- 
 turies. This w^as the teaching of the scribes in 
 the days of Christ. We are bound by the past 
 — magnificent fetters, golden chains, wrought 
 by Moses, the prophets, and the elders. 
 
 Christ met the old scripture not as a slave, 
 but as a master — the highest form of mastery. 
 He did not destroy — the real master never 
 does; he redeems, he fulfills. He nourished 
 his young life on those old books. You can't 
 nourish your life on a book unless in some de- 
 gree you master it. Sw^allowing a book whole 
 never nourishes a man's life. You must learn 
 how to husk a book to get at the corn. And 
 154 
 
Literature 
 
 you must learn the difference in the vakie of the 
 husk and the corn. 
 
 In these old scriptures there is much of the 
 human husk enfolding the golden kernels of 
 God. Jesus husked them of the letter, the form, 
 the incidental, the detail, down to the living 
 spirit. This gave the scriptures in his hands a 
 living, present-day value and power. He did 
 not appeal to them because they were old, be- 
 cause the elders had approved of them, but 
 because they were a living power, a present- 
 day force, something to command men that 
 very hour. 
 
 And this takes us another step in his mastery 
 of the scriptures. So sure is he that he is in line 
 with the ancient Spirit of God that he dares put 
 himself into the old scriptures, making them 
 speak again with his own living voice: *'Ye 
 have heard how that it hath been said, . . . but 
 I say unto you." Since then those old scrip- 
 tures have throbbed with a new and deeper 
 life. 
 
 Just as some great genius, some Shakespeare, 
 takes a bit of ancient history and makes it live 
 again by putting himself into it — making the 
 characters live, move, and have their being in 
 his life — so Jesus Christ put himself into the 
 155 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 old scriptures till they live, move, and have 
 their being in him. The scribes had been spin- 
 ning them out into details, rituals, commen- 
 taries, creeds. Christ entered them, making 
 them live again with God's great idea of life. 
 Old boundaries of interpretation were broken 
 and expanded. The psalms were set to a larger 
 music. The old epics were made to tell ^ 
 divine story. And prophecy that had been 
 waiting for ages in cheerless expectation felt 
 itself live again with the Spirit of God. There 
 are masters through whom we study the true, 
 the beautiful, and the good. But there is but 
 one supreme Master through whom we must 
 read God's ancient story of life. 
 
 But there is a scripture more ancient than the 
 Hebrew. That is nature. Long before this 
 scripture was written that other scripture was 
 being studied. There were nature stories 
 before there were Bible stories. And how to 
 master the nature stories through the Bible 
 stories was and still is the problem, the great 
 problem in literature. 
 
 There are men who instead of being slaves 
 
 of the past, like the scribes, simply sweep it 
 
 away, crying, ''Away with tradition." They 
 
 think themselves prophets, but they are not; 
 
 156 
 
Literature 
 
 for a real prophet does not destroy, he fulfills. 
 He strikes the flinty rocks of the past, the reser- 
 voirs of God, and they burst forth in living 
 v^aters. 
 
 But the air just now is full of the cry, "Away 
 with the past." Modern literature has been 
 faithfully characterized as a "literature of re- 
 volt.'' "Away with old forms, old creeds, and 
 old teachings; let us get out of the stuffy atmos- 
 phere of tradition." Out where? Into the 
 open road of nature. This is the cry. Back 
 from the ancient scripture to the more ancient 
 scripture. Whitman says, "I see now the secret 
 of making the best men: it is to grow in the 
 open air and eat and sleep with the earth." 
 Then the North American Indians, the Hot- 
 tentots, and the South Sea Islanders ought to 
 be the best men. They live in the open air and 
 eat and sleep with the earth. 
 
 Grow best in the open air! Why that de- 
 pends on what we are. If we are men with the 
 prophecy of divinity within us it seems to me 
 we shall grow best not under the tutelage of 
 nature, but of the Divine Man. 
 
 This thought should decide us on those fine 
 spring mornings when we are debating between 
 the temple of the living Christ and the temple 
 157 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 of nature — whether true life, rich, noble, and 
 strong, lies in the direction of 
 
 "O to be lost in the wind and the sun, 
 To be one with the wind and the stream ! 
 
 With never a care while the waters run, 
 With never a thought in my dream," 
 
 or in the direction of that other uncompromis- 
 ing heroic voice, calling down from the heights 
 of manhood, "Whosoever will come after me, 
 let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and 
 follow me;'* whether we are not more in need 
 of the Hero-God than the Nature-God. 
 
 But nature always leads the thoughtful man 
 another step — from her dreamy soothing songs 
 into her heartless, resistless laws; into fatalism, 
 crushing fatalism. 
 
 Modern literature is ''sicklied o'er with the 
 pale cast of fatalism," is more than half pagan. 
 It has not quite risen to the lofty spirit of the 
 Bible, working out the grand epic of man's free 
 spirit through the ''shades of the prison house" 
 unto the liberty of the sons of God. 
 
 And what we find in literature we find in 
 
 life. The hardest thing to meet is just this 
 
 sentiment of fatalism creeping over the spirit 
 
 of life; referring everything to circumstances, 
 
 158 
 
Literature 
 
 to law, to environment — not daring to stand 
 for our own God-given free spirit. 
 
 When Christ came to carry out, to fulfill, 
 God's thought of life he came to nature. But 
 he approached nature as no man had ever done 
 before. He loved her, but not as her slave, as 
 her master. He must have loved nature, else he 
 never would have seen so much in her. Her 
 birds and brooks, her green hills and mysteri- 
 ous mountains, were the sweet, sympathetic 
 companions of his life. But they never wooed 
 him to their dreamy, listless songs, as they have 
 so many other teachers in that Eastern land. 
 They never bound him in the shackles of their 
 fatalistic laws. No fatalism ever blighted his 
 words. His was the high and holy language of 
 the free and buoyant spirit. 
 
 Other men have sung nature's songs and told 
 nature's stories. But Jesus Christ came with 
 the master spirit and wooed nature to his own 
 story of life. He did not sing her songs, she 
 sang his. He did not tell her stories, she told 
 his. He did not take up the thought of the 
 lily's life, but he made the lily take up the 
 thought of his life. He did not undertake to 
 tell the story of the sparrow's life, but he wove 
 the sparrow into his own great story of life. 
 159 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 He did not lead us back and down into the 
 long, mysterious life-and-death story of the 
 kernel of wheat, but he wove it into his own 
 great life-and-death story. And ever since it 
 has been repeating the story of a life beyond the 
 grave. 
 
 His story of life is larger and diviner than 
 nature's story. Hers is mortal, his immortal. 
 Hers is of bondage, his of freedom. Her story 
 runs backward, his runs forward. Hers is of 
 the earth, earthy, his is of the sons and daugh- 
 ters of God. 
 
 But there is another scripture deeper and 
 older than nature. It is our life, our inmost 
 being. It is deeper and older because the linea- 
 ments of God are in it — the divine possibility; 
 that prophecy in men written before the founda- 
 tions of the world, that Jesus Christ came not to 
 destroy, but to fulfill; that prophecy buried 
 away in the heart of the publican and sinner, 
 a prophecy that Jesus alone could see, could 
 read, could fulfill, and so hovered about the 
 soul ; such a prophecy in us all to be fulfilled, 
 if ever, through Jesus Christ. 
 
 One thing stands in the way of that fulfill- 
 ment — not law, not circumstance, but sin. 
 Some writers tell us sin is only a morbid condi- 
 i6o 
 
Literature 
 
 tion of the conscience induced by tradition ; and 
 some that it is only an imperfection of our 
 nature that we shall in time outgrow. But the 
 deep heart of man has never accepted these defi- 
 nitions of sin. Our deepest intuitions pass be- 
 yond tradition and nature, and lodge the diffi- 
 culty in the will, in the central life. 
 
 But how to manage the will of man is the 
 whole problem of life. And so sin becomes the 
 final objective point of all human effort. It 
 keeps the world busy. If sin could be elim- 
 inated from the world the most of us would be 
 out of work. 
 
 This problem of sin, this conflict with sin, 
 was the principal business of the Hebrew na- 
 tion. All that great structure of sacrifices and 
 ceremonies, of statutes and literatures, of obli- 
 gations and oaths, built up through the cen- 
 turies into a mighty, complex, and elaborate 
 piece of machinery, was all designed to meet the 
 fact of sin. 
 
 Now, that whole great structure stood for 
 life to the Jew, It said. Do this and live. And 
 Jesus came not to destroy, but to fulfill. 
 
 But imagine the shock to the Hebrew world 
 when this man dares to reduce this whole struc- 
 ture, hoary with years, to a simple story of 
 (ii) i6i 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 family life — of a son who goes astray, who 
 comes to himself, who returns home and casts 
 himself into the forgiving arms of a father. 
 
 If simplicity be the highest mark of mastery 
 — and is it not ? — then Jesus Christ must be the 
 Master in literature. He probes the heart of 
 all scriptures and reduces them to a simple story 
 plucked from the family life of man. 
 
 And is this indeed the real story of life? So 
 Jesus Christ tells us; and he puts himself into 
 the story, and that made it real. He did not 
 explain it, but he lived it. His atonement was 
 a life. He lived it. And when he had lived 
 it out to the last red drop of blood, lived it out 
 to the right-hand glory of God, then by faith 
 was the story transferred in terms of a new life 
 to the soul of man. Since then the world's 
 best literature has been struggling to write this 
 story the Master lived, this story of life that 
 lies deeper than tradition or nature, deeper than 
 environment or heredity — the epic of man's 
 free spirit, the story of sin, forgiveness, and 
 sonship. 
 
 162 
 
THE CHRIST 
 History 
 
"For this is Love's nobility — 
 Not to scatter bread and gold, 
 Goods and raiment bought and sold: 
 But to hold fast his simple sense, 
 And speak the speech of innocence. 
 And with hand, and body, and blood, 
 To make his bosom counsel good. 
 For he that feedeth men serveth few; 
 He serves all who dares be true." 
 
 — Emerson. 
 
 "And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that 
 sat on him had a bow ; and a crown was given unto him : 
 and he went forth conquering, and to conquer." — John. 
 
HISTORY 
 
 •'But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread 
 alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. . . . 
 Jesus said unto him. It is written again, Thou shall not tempt the Lord 
 thy God. . . . Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan : for it 
 is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou 
 serve." — Matt, iv, 4, 7, 10. 
 
 There are at least two sides to the tempta- 
 tion of Jesus. First, there was the temptation 
 itself, the testing and proving that he was the 
 Son of God. Then there were the utterances 
 wrung from him in the hour of his trial, the 
 enunciation of those principles through which 
 he achieved his mission. They are quotations 
 from an old scripture, words touched into a 
 new and larger meaning by the lips of Jesus. 
 ''Man shall not live by bread alone," and "thou 
 shalt not tempt God," but ''thou shalt serve 
 him." There is a distinct development of 
 thought here, leading us into the full meaning 
 of the life of Christ as the Master of the world's 
 history. 
 
 Jesus did not make bread, because he came 
 to make men, and men are not made of bread. 
 This thought that man does not live by bread 
 alone grew out of an experience of God's peo- 
 ple. God had been making some men, and he 
 165 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 hadn't used much bread in the process. He 
 had made them not in gardens, but in the 
 desert; not among the vineyards, but under the 
 shadow of somber mountains. They were led 
 not by the wheat fields of the future, but by a 
 fire at night and a cloud by day. He had made 
 them of words, knowledge, visions, command- 
 ments, and discipline, sifting them in through 
 the soul as the sun sifts through the chinks of 
 a cavern till it is all glorious within. 
 
 This is the most ancient lesson of God, that 
 man does not live by bread, but by words — the 
 lesson Abraham had to learn. One day the 
 question of bread arose — he must have bread. 
 Down to Egypt he goes, coins his soul in the 
 mint of iniquity, and buys bread. But he learns 
 the lesson and returns again to his hill country, 
 there to nourish his higher nature, as God 
 whispers through the oak, speaks in the sacri- 
 fice, and looks down through the steady, strong 
 stars. Another day, when he and Lot stood 
 out to divide the land, it was a bread question 
 again. Lot took the bread, the fertile plains; 
 and this time Abraham was content with the 
 rocks, the stars, and God. 
 
 This is the age-long lesson of God. We start 
 with bread, then we must have clothes, and 
 i66 
 
History 
 
 then houses ; but to-morrow we must have finer 
 bread, better clothes, pockets in them, and 
 something to put in the pockets. Every day 
 creates new hungers, and the old is lost in the 
 appeal of the new. 
 
 There is the hunger of the mind for truth, 
 ascending to all heights and descending to all 
 depths. Turning back upon history, digging 
 into self — all questions of bread overrun in this 
 great mind hunger, freezing at the poles, burn- 
 ing at the equator, suffering, toiling, dying for 
 the truth. 
 
 There is another hunger following upon this, 
 the hunger of the conscience for new duties; 
 for no sooner does a new truth possess a man 
 than a new world beckons to him. Paul with 
 the old Pharisaic truth, narrow and keen, cuts 
 a swath of destruction in the name of duty, 
 haling men and women to prison. But when 
 the new truth came, behold, a new duty. He is 
 just as eager now to throw open the prison 
 doors of life, crying, 'The love of Christ con- 
 straineth me." 
 
 And what is this lesson but this : the infinite 
 
 capacity for life in man, the capacity for God; 
 
 ''all the words" that proceed out of the mouth 
 
 of God. And it was this infinite capacity Jesus 
 
 167 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 came to recognize in man. This he insisted 
 upon; this thought shaped his ministry — the 
 infinite capacity of Hfe. Every gospel door 
 opened out. One day at Nazareth he took up 
 the scripture of Isaiah: "Gospel for the poor, 
 deliverance for captives, sight for the blind, 
 liberty for the bruised." Every gateway swing- 
 ing outward and life pouring forth in an ever- 
 swelling stream. 
 
 And one day around this very question of 
 bread he works out again the old thought that 
 man does not live by bread. He had just per- 
 formed the miracle of the loaves. Then from 
 the bread he leads up to words, great living 
 words, and from words to himself, till the 
 crowd melted away and only a few of his fol- 
 lowers were left; then turning to them with 
 "And will ye also go?" while Peter — Peter 
 always bigger inside than out, always with 
 more ideas than he knew what to do with, with 
 more life than he could manage — Peter rose to 
 the occasion, crying, "To whom shall we go? 
 Thou hast the words of eternal life." 
 
 Standing out, then, with this infinite capacity 
 for Hfe, half real, half ideal, the question fol- 
 lows. What shall we do with it? This life, 
 this infinite capacity for life, what direction 
 i68 
 
History 
 
 shall it take? This brings us naturally to the 
 second scripture, and the first thought is to ex- 
 ploit this life, this capacity, for ourself. Climb 
 to the pinnacle and cast thyself down; startle 
 the world; tempt God, test him, develop him, 
 according to thy will. 
 
 But this is to reverse the order of life. 
 'Thou shalt not tempt God." God is not here 
 to be tempted; we are. God is not here to be 
 tested; we are. God is not here to be developed, 
 but we are. We need to be tested, tried, devel- 
 oped, drawn up into God's will, for that is the 
 moralization of life. 
 
 Let no man think the world a machine to be 
 run by him. The world is a school. God is the 
 master, and we are in training for moral ends. 
 It is a graded school, and we pass from grade 
 to grade, through temptation, trials, develop- 
 ment. Every day we break from the little cir- 
 cles into the larger; pass more and more into 
 the orbit of God's will, more and more into the 
 moral quality. 
 
 It is not a self-willed dash from the pinnacle. 
 Manhood is not in such an act. Strength and 
 mastery are not there. It is rather a climbing 
 to the pinnacle, a measuring up and up, till we 
 reach the top; then not to hurl ourselves down, 
 169 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 but to stand, to balance ourself there, accord- 
 ing to the moral structure of the universe. 
 This is mastery, this strength, this service. 
 
 'Tor he that feedeth men serveth few; 
 He serves all who dares be true." 
 
 Our own Lincoln in the last century achieved 
 this. When they rushed upon him demanding 
 his policy, the miracle by which he should save 
 the nation, he remained calm, and for policies 
 gave principles. When they were hurling 
 themselves from their pinnacles in frantic poli- 
 cies of the hour he was searching deeper for the 
 will of God. Groping his way toward the 
 moral trend, he got his feet upon the granite, 
 and there stood when his friends fell like nine- 
 pins about him. But it was no blind fatalism; 
 rather, he had reached the pinnacle of an 
 ethicised soul. He was alive, alert, aquiver 
 with the sensitiveness of God. And when the 
 morning rays of hope at last broke it was the 
 mountain peak of his soul that was first bathed 
 in sunlight. 
 
 The dash from the pinnacle is self-willed. It 
 may project itself in theories, policies, schemes 
 — commercial, social, political, or otherwise. 
 These may be enforced by the stubborn, strenu- 
 ous will, the set teeth, the fixed eye, the clinched 
 170 
 
History 
 
 fist, but the stars fight against us in their course. 
 The ministry of angels does not He along this 
 way. For what is the ministry of angels but 
 the ministry of the higher nature. The 
 thoughts and feelings that weave themselves 
 into the soul that is under the training of God. 
 The manna that nourishes the will that is under 
 the tutelage of the Almighty. The larger views 
 ever flowing in from above, lifting life through 
 the downward currents as a ship is borne up- 
 ward through the locks by the constant inflow^- 
 ing water, till we reach at last the mountain 
 heights of a moral life, illumined of God, and 
 look out upon the world with the eyes of God. 
 
 And this is the scene of the third temptation. 
 We are already in the presence of the third 
 scripture, ^Thou shalt worship God, and him 
 only shalt thou serve." 
 
 There is but one divine service. The tempter 
 proposed that Jesus buy the world, own it. 
 But, quite aside from the morale of the pur- 
 chase, owning the world is not serving God. 
 Owning the Philippines is not serving God. 
 Owning a dollar is not serving God. There is 
 but one divine service. Redeeming things, 
 bringing back the lost values, the divine worth 
 of things — this Is both worship and service. 
 171 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 Gold is lost in the mountains till it is re- 
 deemed, and then it must be redeemed again 
 into the service of God and man; for when we 
 get it we are not sure what to do with it. To- 
 day we make of it the golden calf; to-morrow 
 we fresco the sky, shutting out the sun; the 
 next day we adorn ourselves, and, behold, we 
 are in fetters. By and by we shall get the New 
 Jerusalem idea, that gold is not for gods, nor 
 sky, nor fetters, but for streets, for pavements 
 for the sons of God to walk home on. 
 
 Art is lost in the discords of the world until 
 the redeemers come — the poets, painters, and 
 musicians. And it, too, must be redeemed 
 again ere it come into the service of God and 
 man. For to-day her ministry is mixed, per- 
 verse, perverted, and perverting. It is playing 
 to the pit of sense instead of the heights of the 
 soul. Yet we believe it is slowly working its 
 way into more spiritual hands, hands of the 
 immortal harpers that serve God day and night ; 
 into that service which Tolstoi claims is the 
 real mission of art — the fatherhood of God and 
 the brotherhood of man. 
 
 And science, too, is lost in the labyrinth of 
 the universe and must be redeemed — twice re- 
 deemed : first from nature, and then from doubt 
 172 
 
History 
 
 to faith, from matter to spirit, from the making 
 of bread to the making of man. 
 
 But there is a redemption deeper and more 
 vital, a redemption about which all these play 
 but a secondary part — the redemption of the 
 sons of God from the depths of our humanity. 
 This is the redemption of Jesus; the heart of 
 all redemption. 
 
 There is an ancient scripture to the effect 
 that a fact may be established by two witnesses, 
 and there are two witnesses to the fact that we 
 are the sons of Adam. One is within, the other 
 without. Our environment forever bears wit- 
 ness with our inherited weakness that we are 
 children of the first Adam. But Jesus came to 
 establish another fact, an overwhelming fact, 
 mighty and victorious — that we are the sons of 
 God, sons of the spirit, sons of power, sons of 
 liberty. And this has been established by two 
 witnesses, one within and one above. 'The 
 Spirit of God beareth witness with our spirit 
 that we are the sons of God." This is at 
 once the foundation and goal of the world's 
 progress. 
 
 "What if the overturned altar 
 Lays bare the ancient lie? 
 What if the dreams and legends 
 Of the world's childhood die? 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 "Have ye not his witness 
 
 Within yourselves always, 
 His hand that on the keys of life 
 
 For bliss or bale he lays?" 
 
 The divine current of history, then, accord- 
 ing to the scripture of the temptation and under 
 the mastery of Christ, flows ever toward the 
 development of man's infinite capacity — flows 
 not wantonly and willfully, but is seized and 
 bent, trained and disciplined, unto the will of 
 God and the moralization of the world. 
 
 Nor is this the full significance of the world's 
 progress. The movement is more than moral. 
 It is spiritual. It is redemptive. It is a series 
 of new births, of new worlds redeemed from 
 the old. 
 
 The victory of Christ in the wilderness is the 
 age-long victory of Christ in his world. 
 
 "The world's old; 
 But the old world waits the time to be renewed : 
 Toward which, new hearts in individual growth 
 Must quicken, and increase to multitude 
 In new dynasties of the race of men — 
 Developed whence, shall grow spontaneously 
 New churches, new economies, new laws 
 Admitting freedom, new societies 
 Excluding falsehood. He shall make all new." 
 
 174 
 
THE CHRIST 
 Life 
 
"Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once; 
 And He that might the vantage best have took 
 Found out the remedy." — Shakespeare. 
 
 "And in the lowest beasts are slaying men, 
 And in the second men are slaying beasts, 
 And on the third are warriors, perfect men, 
 And on the fourth are men with growing wings, 
 And over all one Statue." — Tennyson, 
 
LIFE 
 
 " For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free 
 from the law of sin and death." — Rom, viii, 2. 
 
 Every philosophy discusses the freedom of 
 man. The Bible transfers the question from 
 discussion to life. It says if a man is not free 
 he ought to be; for the whole divine purpose, 
 process, and progress of the world is for the 
 emancipation of man. 'Tor the earnest ex- 
 pectation of the creature waiteth for the mani- 
 festation of the sons of God. For the crea- 
 ture was made subject to vanity, not willingly, 
 but by reason of him who hath subjected the 
 same in hope, because the creature itself also 
 shall be delivered from the bondage of cor- 
 ruption into the glorious liberty of the children 
 of God." 
 
 Freedom, then, is not a mere thought, but an 
 experience; and it is this experience, not in the 
 world at large, but in the individual soul, that 
 Paul covers by the words, 'Tor the law of the 
 Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free 
 from the law of sin and death." It is an ex- 
 perience that begins with a struggle. 
 
 The word ''struggle" has reached scientific 
 (12) 177 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 eminence in the world's history. It is conceded 
 that the earth is one great battlefield; that our 
 life has been largely chiseled and shaped in the 
 fierce conflict of human existence. 
 
 Even the most superficial life has its strug- 
 gles. The tramp, so lax and loose and care- 
 free, has his struggles, faint and feeble though 
 they may be. The devotee of society, whose 
 only anxiety is to be recognized, finds even this 
 a struggle, an exposure to the slings and arrows 
 of pique and pride and poverty. 
 
 Now, in all this struggle of life there is a 
 certain divine tendency. The struggle is car- 
 ried in from the surface toward the center; 
 from the battlefield to the council chamber; 
 from the council chamber to the soul of one 
 man. 
 
 Jacob begins his battle with Esau, carries it 
 over to Laban, and finally discovers that the 
 only battle worthy of a man is the battle with 
 himself. Paul began with an external foe, the 
 Christian Church, but found the conflict thrown 
 back upon the battlefield of his own soul — in 
 among the hidden but mighty forces of life's 
 armies that had been gathering through cen- 
 turies of ancestral development. Habits and 
 prejudices, tempers and passions, ideas and 
 178 
 
Life 
 
 ideals, ambitions and aspirations, flesh and 
 spirit, were waging an unending warfare 
 across the field of Hfe. 
 
 This inner struggle seems at first, like the 
 great w^orld struggle, to be a strange, wild med- 
 ley of discordant forces. But Paul finally re- 
 duces them to the law of God and the law of 
 sin; the law of life and the law of death. 
 
 Our main interest, however, centers in the 
 battle itself. We ask. How goes the battle? 
 and Paul reports it against him. The members 
 are warring against the head. Rebellious 
 standards are lifted here and there, the integrity 
 of life is assailed, the empire of the soul is in a 
 state of anarchy. And all this means that the 
 battle is being carried to the death; that this is 
 the disintegration, demoralization, degenera- 
 tion of the soul; that this is hell; that life is 
 being lost, dripping away as a piece of ice melts 
 in the sun; returning to dust as a stone pul- 
 verized in the elements ; decomposing and dying 
 like a flower plucked from the vital stem. The 
 stars are fighting against him in their course. 
 Life's wholeness he cannot achieve. He de- 
 clares, 'To will is present with me; but how to 
 perform that which is good I find not." As 
 though a chemist with all the elements at hand 
 
 1/9 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 were trying to make an acorn. Mix the parts 
 as he will the acorn eludes him. The spiritual 
 band of life he cannot find. 
 
 Now Paul could have made a Pharisee, for 
 he had the prescription; or a Sadducee, for he 
 knew the formula. But this new life lies deeper 
 than all prescriptions and all formulas, or even 
 any heroic struggle of the soul of man, and he 
 breaks down with the cry, ''O wretched man 
 that I am !" — breaking forth, however, the next 
 moment into the exultant cry, "I thank God 
 through Jesus Christ." 
 
 What lies in between this strange despair 
 and w^onderful elation, this death and life ? To 
 answer this question is to find the open secret 
 of life. 
 
 In the making of life, or anything that has 
 life, there are always two factors: first, the 
 analysis of the material, the taking to pieces, 
 and then the constructive genius. This is true 
 whether it be applied to a church, a prayer 
 meeting, a book, a picture, or a human life. 
 
 God does not convert a soul — make a new 
 life — simply by law; for law analyzes, law 
 takes us down by showing us up. But after 
 the law has reduced us to nothing, then comes 
 in the constructive genius of God and makes 
 1 80 
 
Life 
 
 us into something. After the death of the old 
 he gives us the hfe of the new. 
 
 What, then, is this constructive genius of 
 God, this giving Hfe to things? The answer 
 is more simple than we dream; for to make a 
 thing live we have only to give it life; and if zue 
 make it live we must give it our life. Men have 
 lives to give in different directions : this one 
 to colors till they speak ; that one to marble till 
 it throbs; and this again to thought and it 
 breaks into singing. If you want a church to 
 live, to live again, you only need to give it life. 
 Put in the life, and, behold, it is alive. This is 
 the simple fact and the great truth. It is the 
 truth of all truth. When God would make a 
 world live, would give it life, he simply gave it 
 his life. 
 
 This is the supreme fact about God, that he 
 is a spontaneous God; and all the world about 
 us of life and power is throbbing with his spon- 
 taneity. He is a generous God filling the world 
 with the w^ealth of his being; a giving God wdio 
 spares not himself in the giving. And this 
 spontaneous, generous, giving God is the su- 
 preme fact in life. When, in Jesus Christ, he 
 walked through the haunts of our humanity it 
 was only to give, and give, and give again. 
 i8i 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 Can we then in such a presence live a narrow, 
 mean, and sordid Hfe? Is there not a certain 
 divine compulsion upon us — a new command- 
 ment coming not from without but breaking 
 forth from our own heart? This something 
 we have discovered in God : is it not the noblest 
 and best we ever recognized in men ? — this free, 
 frank, unstudied, spontaneous generosity of 
 God ? How does it affect us when we find it in 
 men? If your child obeys, you say that is 
 right, it is what he ought to do. But if of his 
 own free will he works out some generous, self- 
 denying, self-sacrificing deed of kindness, it 
 goes to your heart and you catch him in your 
 arms. Paul said, ''Scarcely for a righteous man 
 will one die : yet peradventure for a good man 
 some would even dare to die." The righteous 
 man whose life runs like a clock is of great 
 service to the community, but no one is going 
 to die for him. But the good man, the gener- 
 ous, self-denying, self-sacrificing, unstudied, 
 spontaneous soul, he will find men to die for 
 him. In his presence souls will leap into heroic 
 grandeur. He is the leader. And what the 
 studied, exacting law could not do God sent his 
 Son — freely, spontaneously, self-denying, self- 
 sacrificing — down through all the mystery of 
 182 
 
Life 
 
 that ministry, down into life, through fate and 
 sorrow, sin and death, till he reached this man 
 Paul in the hell of his despair. And the very 
 coming awakened something in the man, some 
 slumbering divinity of the soul, some redeem- 
 ing grace of being, some remnant of sponta- 
 neous life, something that had never been 
 reached before, something that could have been 
 reached in no other way. And the divinity 
 answers back to the divine, grace to grace, life 
 to life, and his soul breaks heavenward in the 
 cry, "I thank God through Jesus Christ." 
 
 And this man's life, that had been tortuously 
 studied, exacting, and specific in its purpose, 
 suddenly becomes spontaneous, divinely aban- 
 doned, swinging out from a new center with a 
 new and an ennobling power. We find him 
 one moment with a pocket full of documents, 
 charts, plans, and specifications of what he 
 shall do and how he shall do it. The next 
 moment the light flashes upon him, the Christ 
 is before him, and soul rushes forward with 
 the cry, ''Lord, what wilt thou have me to 
 do?" He asks for no specifications, charts, or 
 plans. He is ready to take sealed orders from 
 this Christ, to ''go where he wants him to go, 
 and do w^hat he wants him to do." He has 
 183 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 found the real hero of the soul, and that is 
 enough. He has found the centrality of life. 
 For life is central; indeed, it is just this cen- 
 trality that makes life life at all. All the strug- 
 gle, dismemberment, and oncreeping death and 
 yawning hell was just the losing of the soul's 
 centrality, her unity, her integrity. 
 
 The plant is a living thing, not because so 
 many elements enter into it, but because at the 
 heart stands some central force commanding 
 and swinging the elements with the rhythm of 
 the universe. Nor is life life because so many 
 things enter into it, rich, powerful, and choice, 
 but because there is a central power command- 
 ing the things as they come, shaping them there 
 according to its rhythmic genius, giving to 
 them of its charm, its power, its glory till every 
 element swings with a free hand from the cen- 
 ter; till duty becomes love, and sorrow glory, 
 and death life, and life Christ, and Christ God. 
 The value of things depends upon the divine 
 centrality. 
 
 Then life becomes still more deeply cen- 
 tral. Christ came into the world for the 
 Father. He came in the Father's name; came 
 to do the Father's business; came to make 
 everything spell one word. Fatherhood. What 
 184 
 
Life 
 
 men had called a lily he made spell fatherhood. 
 What men had called a sparrow he made spell 
 fatherhood. What men had called ''fisherman's 
 luck" he made spell fatherhood. He aimed to 
 bring all the discordant forces of earth under 
 the charm of that word; to bring all into one 
 family; to restore the spiritual bond of the 
 world. 
 
 And what he does in the world he also does 
 in the soul, entering it in the name of the 
 Father. He marshals its discordant tempers 
 and traits, inherited and acquired, into one 
 family, making the lion and the lamb lie down 
 together in the soul. He does not convert lion 
 into lamb, nor lamb into lion, but brings all 
 under one higher, restraining power by adding 
 the centripetal force that gives liberty. 
 
 But Christ comes into the soul not only in the 
 Father's name, but with the Father's touch. It 
 is the old creative touch of God, the springtime 
 spirit that makes old things live again; that re- 
 deems that wonderful dream of life through 
 which the old life began the strange struggle 
 for the new. 
 
 In some dark corner of the cellar a bulb 
 awaits the spring planting. The gardener has 
 forgotten it. But the bulb by instinct feels that 
 185 
 
Unto Heights Heroic 
 
 the spring sun is outside and it is making a 
 faint, sickly struggle for life. It is just a 
 yearning, pale and dreamlike, till suddenly the 
 gardener bethinks himself and hastens to bring 
 the bulb and plant it in the earth. Then the 
 sun begins to give its great generous self to the 
 bulb. It gives, and gives, and gives, till the 
 bulb itself begins to give — gives back color, 
 leaf, bud, and blossom. 
 
 So the spirit of life in Christ Jesus streams in 
 upon the soul till the whole being is quickened 
 into life and begins to give, and give, and give. 
 And v^hat was only a strange, wild struggle, 
 a fruitless dream of life, has become a divine 
 reality, the glorious liberty of living. 
 
 'Tell me not, in mournful numbers, 
 'Life is but an empty dream !' 
 
 For the soul is dead that slumbers, 
 And things are not what they seem. 
 
 "Life is real ! Life is earnest ! 
 
 And the grave is not its goal ; 
 Dust thou art, to dust returnest, 
 
 Was not spoken of the soul." 
 i86 
 
liiiiiii 
 
 ' ^^'2 01245 3330