THE REVIVAL 
 OF WONDER 
 
 <$> 
 
 Malcolm J. Me Leod 
 
LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 Princeton University Library 
 
 Division _ 
 
 BR 125 .M337 1923 
 McLeod, Malcolm James, b. 
 1867 . 
 
 The revival of wonder, and 
 of bar drPRRAR 
 
THE REVIVAL OF WONDER 
 
By 
 
 Malcolm James McLeod, D. D. 
 
 The Revival of Wonder . . $1.25 
 
 Dr. McLeod utilizes apt illustrations drawn 
 from everyday life—from the fountains of litera¬ 
 ture and from the commonly-shared experiences 
 of humanity. 
 
 “Songs in the Night . . $1.25 
 
 These addresses set forth the comfort of God’s 
 Presence in circumstances of difficulty and sorrow. 
 
 Letters to Edward . . . . $1.00 
 
 “ Chatty, cheery, delightful—they abound in coun¬ 
 sel, reflection, self-revelation.”— Book News. 
 
 The Unsearchable Riches . $1.00 
 
 “ Masterly in conception, profound in interpreta¬ 
 tion, Dr. McLeod is sure of his message.” 
 
 —Christian Intelligencer. 
 
 A Comfortable Faith . . . $1.00 
 
 “ Under Mr. McLeod’s gifted hand the most com¬ 
 monplace religious truth glitters with new fire.” 
 
 — Watchman. 
 
 Heavenly Harmonies for Earthly 
 Living .50c. 
 
 “ Admirable in combining to-day’s scientific 
 
 knowledge with eternal truth.” 
 
 —Editorial in New York American. 
 
’■ 
 
 * 
 
 The Revival of Wonder 
 
 And Other Addresses 
 
 By 
 
 MALCOLM JAMES McLEOD 
 
 Minister of Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas 
 New York City 
 
 Author of “Songs in the Night," "Fragrance of 
 Christian Ideals," “Earthly Discords and 
 How to Mend Them," etc . 
 
 New York Chicago Toronto 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 London and Edinburgh 
 
Copyright, 1923, by 
 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago : 17 North Wabash Ave. 
 London: 21 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street 
 
Contents 
 
 I. 
 
 The Revival of Wonder 
 
 
 9 
 
 II. 
 
 The Funeral of God . 
 
 
 17 
 
 III. 
 
 Ten Times One are Eleven 
 
 
 28 
 
 IV. 
 
 Millionaires 
 
 
 42 
 
 V. 
 
 Saints in Sodom . 
 
 
 52 
 
 VI. 
 
 Conquering Three Worlds 
 
 
 60 
 
 VII. 
 
 Rainbows in the Morning . 
 
 
 72 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Rainbows at Night 
 
 
 80 
 
 IX. 
 
 The Devil of Fear 
 
 
 9i 
 
 X. 
 
 The Religion that Everybody 
 
 
 
 Believes .... 
 
 
 102 
 
 XI. 
 
 At the Shrine of Beauty . 
 
 
 119 
 
 XII. 
 
 Is Our Family Life a Failure ? 
 
 
 133 
 
 XIII. 
 
 Preparedness 
 
 
 M3 
 
 XIV. 
 
 Splitting Hairs . 
 
 
 158 
 
 XV. 
 
 Because I Love America 
 
 
 169 
 
 XVI. 
 
 The Skyscraper and the Home 
 
 
 179 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2019 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 % 
 
 https://archive.org/details/revivalofwonderoOOmcle 
 
I 
 
 THE REVIVAL OF WONDER 
 
 OME four or five years ago 
 there passed away in England 
 a man who was not popularly 
 known, but a man of very great 
 brilliancy in the firmament of 
 letters. He was a poet—a 
 critic and a romanticist. His name was Watts- 
 Dunton. He was also quite a good deal of an 
 artist. His sonnets attracted the attention of 
 Rossetti, with whom he subsequently studied art 
 in Italy. He was a great friend of the poet 
 Swinburne. He wrote a number of books and 
 the last book he published had an interesting 
 title. He called it “The Renascence of Won¬ 
 der. ” He claimed that one of the most hopeful 
 features of our time is that the sense of wonder 
 is reviving. The motto of thirty years ago was 
 “Never wonder / 9 Oscar Wilde told us that 
 there was nothing worth seeing in Switzerland 
 and that he considered the Atlantic tame. It 
 was the “Nil admirari” theory of Horace. But 
 this spirit, says Mr. Watts-Dun ton, is disappear¬ 
 ing. Men are awakening more and more to the 
 wonder of things. Perhaps the most wonderful 
 thing in life is that we do not wonder more. 
 
 9 
 
to 
 
 Ube IRevtval of Member 
 
 One of the certain signs of growing old is that 
 gradually “shades of the prison house close 
 around us” until at length the divine spark 
 ‘ ‘ dies away and fades into the light of common 
 day.” To become blase and vapid and insipid; 
 to be unmoved and unswept and unthrilled by 
 the marks of the marvellous; to allow familiarity 
 to breed not contempt exactly but indifference, is 
 one of the surest signs that youth is leaving us. 
 For one of the charms of childhood is that the 
 child is a wonderer. “All things are big with 
 wonder for the bairn,” the beating of the rain 
 on the window-pane, the crash of the thunder, 
 the flash of the lightning, the whistle of the en¬ 
 gine. How delightful to watch the little fellow 
 at the circus. Not infrequently he is the best 
 part of the show. And how beautiful to see the 
 old man who has held on to this fresh relish of 
 his childhood, and to whom the world with all its 
 marvellous sights is just as exciting to-day as 
 when he was a boy. It is what we call the child 
 heart and the sad fact is that so many of us let it 
 pine away and die. 
 
 “ My heart leaps up when I behold 
 A rainbow in the sky; 
 
 So was it when my life began, 
 
 So is it now I am a man, 
 
 So be it when I shall grow old.” 
 
 For after every learned pantologist has had 
 his say this is a wonderful world. Its beginning 
 is wonderful, its history is wonderful, its finale 
 
Ube 1Re\m>al of Member 
 
 a 
 
 is wonderful. The creatures living on it are 
 wonderful. Its mountains and rivers and trees 
 and flowers are wonderful. Its age is wonder¬ 
 ful. It is all wonderful, amazingly, bewitchingly 
 wonderful. Professor Robinson, of Columbia, in 
 his “Lectures on History’’ last winter told us of 
 paleolithic implements recently discovered, which 
 he reckons were made 150,000 years ago, but this 
 is a mere drop in the demijohn compared with 
 the age of these Manhattan rocks. The astrono¬ 
 mer argues that the world is a hundred million 
 years old; the geologist says five hundred mil¬ 
 lion. Professor Hale, of the Mount Wilson Ob¬ 
 servatory, California, has just written a book 
 which he calls “The New Heavens.” He has a 
 chapter in it called “The Giant Stars.” Speak¬ 
 ing of that new colossus of the skies, Betelgeuse, 
 whose diameter is 215,000,000 miles, one is fairly 
 stunned into silence. It could swallow up, says 
 Dr. Hale, “more than 20,000,000 of our suns.” 
 The nearest fixed star is 25,000,000,000 miles 
 away; the farthest is so remote that it takes 50,- 
 000 years for its light to reach us. These are 
 staggering stretches. 
 
 And this is only half the mystery. For the 
 minute is as amazing as the immeasurable. 
 While Michelson finds his romance in the stars, 
 Sir Oliver Lodge finds his in the test tube. To 
 him the really exciting things are found in the 
 laboratory. Immanuel Kant said there were two 
 
XTbe IReptval ot TOonbet 
 
 n 
 
 things that filled him with awe, the moral law 
 within and the starry heavens above. But if the 
 great German were living to-day would he not 
 add a third to his twosome, the infinitesimal 
 world around him. Because there are three 
 things that ought to fill every reverent man with 
 awe, if he has a faded tattered rag of reverence 
 left—the sky and the soul and the sod. 
 
 Some one has observed that if all the stars 
 were to cease shining to-night and not shine 
 again for a whole year, and then suddenly were 
 to burst out again in all their twinkling glory, 
 there is not an eye that would not be lifted 
 heavenward. Everybody would be purchasing 
 telescopes. That seems to touch the nerve of 
 the matter. It is not knowledge that is the 
 enemy of wonder; it is familiarity. Robert 
 Hichens in one of his stories tells of an artist 
 who was painting a picture of the ocean. He 
 was trying to express the restless wonder of it. 
 So he went down to the beach and rented a 
 room for a few months in order to drink in the 
 message of the mighty deep. Then in order to 
 bring out his idea forcibly he thought it would 
 help if he could find a child in whose eyes the 
 great salt waves reflected surprise. He searched 
 through all the village for one, but in vain. All 
 the little barefooted tots he met were so familiar 
 with the water that the sight was tame to them. 
 At last he came back to an inland town, and one 
 
Qftc 1Re\nv>al of Wonfcer 
 
 *3 
 
 day he ran across a little fellow with a bright, in¬ 
 telligent look, who had never been to the shore. 
 So he purchased a ticket and took him down, 
 just to watch his face when the great sweep of 
 water first burst upon his view. It happened 
 that a storm was raging at the time, and the 
 look of awe on the lad’s face was just what the 
 artist wanted. It was lit up with the glint and 
 the glory of the infinite. He had found his 
 model. It is not knowledge but familiarity that 
 is the enemy of wonder. 
 
 Bishop Coxe in his hymn sings, ‘ 1 We are liv¬ 
 ing, we are dwelling in a grand and awful time. ’ 7 
 And as some one adds, ‘ ‘ Every day seems to get 
 grander and awfuller.” How many impossible 
 things are happening! Horace Greeley would 
 have laughed if you had suggested to him to get 
 his news for the Tribune by wireless. If you 
 had told Napoleon what a big Bertha gun is ca¬ 
 pable of doing he would have looked at you with 
 that familiar far-away stare of his. For a gun 
 to throw a shell five and seventy miles seems to 
 be verging on the ludicrous. It reminds one of 
 the story of the man who went to the zoological 
 gardens and when he saw the rhinoceros, after 
 looking at it a long time, he turned away, saying, 
 4 ‘There ain’t no such beast.” Our President’s 
 picture was recently transmitted by wireless 
 from New York to Paris. A few months ago our 
 battleship Iowa steamed out of Chesapeake Bay 
 
Zhc 1Re\nv>ai of Monger 
 
 J4 
 
 with not a living soul on board. Her throbbing 
 engines, her mighty rudder, and even the fires 
 under her boilers were controlled by radio. The 
 man operating her valves and pulling her levers 
 was miles away on shore. It seems uncanny. 
 She must have looked like the mythical ghost 
 ship of the old Arthurian legend. Truly indeed 
 “we are living in a grand and awful time. 7 ’ 
 
 One strange thing about our Lord is that He 
 so rarely manifested any wonder. We are not 
 told that the starry heavens ever called forth any 
 burst from Him of admiration or emotion. Noth¬ 
 ing is said of any natural phenomena ever hav¬ 
 ing moved Him to rapture or delight. Even on 
 the Mount of Transfiguration it was the disciples, 
 not He, who were dazzled with the glory. I 
 think there are but two occasions in which the 
 Master ever expressed any surprise. We are 
 told of many times in which He awakened sur¬ 
 prise in others, but I can recall only two in¬ 
 stances in which He is expressly said to have 
 manifested the feeling Himself. Once when He 
 was rejected by His own people who would have 
 nothing at all to do with Him, we are told that 
 “He marvelled at their unbelief.’’ And once 
 when an utter stranger, a Roman officer, sent 
 messengers to Him on behalf of his servant who 
 was ill; “Do not trouble to come to me in per¬ 
 son, 77 the man implored, “I am not worthy that 
 thou shouldst come under my roof, but speak the 
 
Ube tRe\?i\>al of TUflonfcer J5 
 
 word only and my servant shall be healed.” 
 Which when Jesus heard He marvelled, so the 
 record informs us, and said, “I have not found 
 so great faith, no not in Israel.” So it would 
 seem that the real wonder to Jesus was the won¬ 
 der of the human soul. 
 
 ‘ ‘ He marvelled at their unbelief. ” How often 
 He must marvel at ours! How often we get 
 fearful and lose our sense of trust! When the 
 storm sweeps down upon us how quickly we lose 
 our nerve and get into a panic! We worry over 
 food and raiment and all the other things, while 
 all the time He is saying to us, “What meaneth 
 all this fear? Behold the fowls of the air.” 
 And why take ye thought for raiment? Con¬ 
 sider the lilies how they manage to get along. So 
 many people are always borrowing trouble as if 
 they did not have a good deal more than enough 
 of their own. “The troubles that trouble me 
 most,” says the old Persian proverb, “are the 
 troubles I never had.” There are people who 
 are dead set against borrowing in any shape or 
 form but they do not hesitate to borrow trouble. 
 I have known men who are so dead opposed to 
 the whole borrowing business that they would 
 not ask you to lend them an umbrella in a down¬ 
 pour, but they will load themselves down with 
 tons and millstones of trouble. I like that story 
 of the man who was fussing over his work. Some 
 one said to him one day, “Say, my good friend, 
 
Ufoe IRepipai ot Monbet 
 
 \6 
 
 who took care of the world before you came into 
 it ? ’ ’ ‘ 1 God, sir, ’ 5 was the answer. ‘‘ And can’t 
 you trust Him to take care of it when you leave 
 it? ” 
 
 In the case of the centurion, however, it was 
 not the man’s unbelief but his belief that called 
 forth the Master’s eulogy. He did not expect it. 
 It was like finding a treasure in the attic. It 
 was like stumbling across a flower in the desert. 
 The man had had no spiritual opportunities. He 
 was just a heathen soldier. No seed had ever 
 been scattered in that soil. And the Master is so 
 pleased and filled with wonder that He says, “I 
 have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel,’’ 
 
 “ Waken, O world, if ye would glimpse the wonder 
 Of God’s great primal plan! 
 
 Open, O ears, if ye would hear the thunder 
 Hurled from the heights to man! 
 
 “ The only death is death in man’s perception; 
 
 The only grave is grave of blinded eyes; 
 
 Creation’s marvel mocks at man’s deception— 
 
 It is man’s mind that from its tomb must rise! 
 
 “How long shall Christ’s high message be rejected? 
 Two thousand years have passed since it was told. 
 Must One again be born and resurrected, 
 
 Ere man shall grasp the secret, ages old? 
 
 “What then, the miracle of Easter day? 
 
 What meant the riven tomb, the hidden Might 
 That conquered Death and rolled the stone away 
 And brought the Master back to mortal sight? 
 
 “ This, that throughout the worlds, one life unbroken, 
 Rushes and flames in an eternal vow. 
 
 Death cannot be, and never has been spoken, 
 
 God and immortal life are here and now” 
 
II 
 
 THE FUNERAL OF GOD 
 
 HOMAS HARDY has a poem 
 entitled ‘ ‘ The Funeral of God, ’ ’ 
 which contains the following 
 stanzas. There are many to¬ 
 day to whom they make a 
 strong, convincing appeal. God 
 to them has ceased to be a living reality. He has 
 largely faded out of their lives. “He can no 
 longer be kept alive.’’ 
 
 “ I saw a slowly stepping train 
 Fined on the brows, scoop-eyed and bent and hoar, 
 Following in files across a twilit plain; 
 
 A strange and mystic form the foremost' bore. 
 
 *£* *2* . .t< 
 
 •V* 
 
 “O man-projected figure, of late 
 Imaged as w T e, thy knell who shall survive? 
 
 Whence came it we were tempted to create 
 One whom we can no longer keep alive? 
 
 * ifc :Jc # # 
 
 “ How sweet it was in years far hied 
 To start the wheels of day with trustful prayer! 
 
 To lie down liegely at the eventide 
 And feel a blest assurance He was there.” 
 
 We have not forgotten the Frenchman who was 
 ready to escort Him to the verge of the cosmos, 
 thank Him for His good graces and politely bow 
 Him out. These critics, of course, do not believe 
 in the future life any more; they do not confess 
 
Ube jfuneral of (Bob 
 
 \z 
 
 to a belief in a resurrection of any kind. When 
 a man is dead he’s dead—dead as the mummy of 
 Rameses. Celestial matters and other-world 
 hopes do not interest them in the least. It’s all 
 apocryphal stuff. They deny any spiritual mean¬ 
 ing whatever to human life. They are the ad¬ 
 vanced school, the rationalists, the modern 
 thought thinkers of our day. They are down¬ 
 right materialists pure and simple. 
 
 Certainly the world is having its own share of 
 troubles just now. Their name is legion. And 
 the causes put forward are legion too; some 
 holding that the root of all our troubles is the 
 age-old military question. That never seems to 
 down. Others that the labour unrest or the 
 financial disturbance or the unemployment con¬ 
 dition or monopoly is the seat of the disorder. 
 Still others, that our plight is due to national 
 jealousies or unwillingness to work or profiteer¬ 
 ing or governmental misrule, or some even to 
 prohibition. The fact being that everybody has 
 his own notion and nobody seems to carry any¬ 
 thing like general consent. 
 
 There is a little company, however, who are 
 always proclaiming that the mischief is deeper 
 down. The pus is not on the surface they insist: 
 it’s in the blood. The disorder is not local; it is 
 organic. The disease is not in the flesh: it is in 
 the soul. John Wesley says there are times when 
 the dentist feels that the trouble is not in the 
 
XTbe jpuneral of (Bob 
 
 19 
 
 teeth but in the nerves. This little group keeps 
 on contending that our ailments are indications 
 not of any toothache or backache or headache, 
 but of a deeper-seated heartache. G. K. Chester¬ 
 ton asks, “What’s wrong with the world?” And 
 the answer he gives is that it is soulless. There 
 is not enough soul in its commerce, in its politics, 
 in its industry, not enough even in its religion. 
 The great need to-day, he urges, is not a renas¬ 
 cence of the intellect but a renascence of the 
 soul. 
 
 “ How sweet it was in years far hied 
 To start the wheels of day with trustful prayer! 
 
 To lie down liegely at the eventide 
 And feel a blest assurance He was there.” 
 
 Let us note in passing one or two of the most 
 threatening symptoms of our time. Can there 
 be any question for one thing that we have fallen 
 on an irreverent age? And when we think 
 about it, is that strange? How can it well help 
 being irreverent if there is nothing to revere? 
 We certainly cannot revere commodities or mer¬ 
 chandise. The Greeks called man anthropos, the 
 upward looking creature. The trouble with ma¬ 
 terialism is it never looks up. But then why 
 should it look up ? There is nothing to look up 
 to. So the materialist looks down and he who 
 looks down soon goes down. One cannot look 
 down and soar. We need no Holy Writ to teach 
 us this. If any one doubts it let him read his 
 
20 
 
 XTbe jfunerai of (3ob 
 
 Adam Bede. Hetty Sorrel first lost her rever¬ 
 ence, then she lost her self-respect, and soon she 
 lost her purity. 
 
 Yes, irreverence is flagrant to-day. Some 
 claim that the age is scientific; some say it is 
 sceptical; some say it is sordid; some say it is 
 vulgar. But if I were asked to describe our age 
 in a word, I should say it is irreverent. I am 
 rather inclined to think that reverence is Amer¬ 
 ica’s lost art. There is nothing sacred any more. 
 There’s no Holy Place in life, certainly no Holy 
 of Holies. We are losing our reverence for all the 
 quondam holy things. We are losing our rever¬ 
 ence for the Bible, for the Sabbath, for the 
 Church, for the laws of our country, for human 
 life, for the tribunals of Justice, for the sacred¬ 
 ness of the moral law, for the Ten Command¬ 
 ments, for the things unseen. We have no rever¬ 
 ence for age. The father is the old man, the 
 mother is the old woman. We have no reverence 
 for wedlock. The marriage altar was once a 
 shrine, but we have made of it a huge auction 
 block on which we sell the very jewels of life. 
 We have no reverence for the Sabbath Day or the 
 Church of God. When Oliver Wendell Holmes 
 was an old man, he wrote to a friend that he had 
 just returned from church, and then he added 
 these words, ‘ ‘ There is a little plant called rever¬ 
 ence in the corner of my soul’s garden and I like 
 to water it once a week.” Dr. Hale once said to 
 
TLftc ^funeral ot (Bob 
 
 21 
 
 Berry of Wolverhampton, “I wonder if there’s 
 any one left any more who really fears God. ’ ’ 
 
 Then is not the age superficial? Are not men 
 and women living largely on the surface of 
 things ? Have we not more faith in the physical 
 than in the intellectual? Is not our reading 
 mostly light and trivial? Think of a book like 
 “Main Street” being a best seller! What a 
 commentary on our intellectual life! Is not ma¬ 
 terialism the great central sun of our firmament ? 
 Is not our one great passion the love of mam¬ 
 mon? Is not the popular attitude something 
 like this: Do not worry about the future, the im¬ 
 portant thing is the present. The important 
 place is earth, not heaven. Heaven is problem¬ 
 atical, earth is actual. The big thing is to suc¬ 
 ceed; the big thing is to get on. Never mind 
 getting up, get on. The important thing is to 
 crowd into the flying moments all the thrills you 
 can. Indeed, there are revolutionaries in our 
 midst who do not hesitate to say that man has 
 been marred by his attention to spiritual things. 
 We are familiar with George Frederick Watts’ 
 great painting, that hideous figure with a crown 
 of gold on his head and his iron foot crushing the 
 youth and his mailed hand squeezing the maiden 
 who is on his knee. Does it not symbolize the 
 disposition and ideals of a large area of human 
 society to-day? 
 
 This is unquestionably a grave impeachment, 
 
22 
 
 Ube jfuneral ot <$ob 
 
 but does anybody question its truth? We are 
 thinking mark of the spirit of a good deal of the 
 thought and tone of our time. There is an itch 
 for the sensational. Nothing seems to appeal to 
 the popular mind unless it is spectacular and 
 exciting. Twenty years ago Mr. Sheldon wrote 
 a book entitled “In His Steps” or What would 
 Jesus do? It was a very popular story: it had 
 an unusual circulation. Something like twenty 
 million copies of the book were broadcasted. 
 And there was nothing really remarkable about 
 it. It was simply an attempt to apply the teach¬ 
 ings of Jesus to modern life. When Mr. Sheldon 
 wrote the book he was a pastor out in Kansas. 
 He is now the editor of the Christian Herald in 
 New York City. Some months ago there was an 
 article from his pen in the Atlantic telling the 
 story of how this book of his was dramatized. 
 The movie man had worked it over into a 
 scenario. But lo and behold, when the film was 
 ready for production Mr. Sheldon noticed that 
 he had incorporated into it the League of Na¬ 
 tions, the Battle of the Somme, the San Francisco 
 earthquake, a bloody fight between two sub¬ 
 marines, some colliding airplanes burning up, 
 etc., etc. “But,” said Mr. Sheldon to the movie 
 man, “what do you mean by this? My story 
 was written five and twenty years ago. There 
 was no League of Nations then. There was no 
 Battle of the Somme then. There were no such 
 
XTbe ffunerai of (Bob 
 
 23 
 
 things as airplanes then.” “Ah, my friend,” 
 was the reply, ‘ ‘ I had to bring your story up to 
 date.” “That’s all right, but my book is dated. 
 There was no wireless in ’96, no radium, no 
 San Francisco earthquake, no Great War.” 
 “You do not understand the film business, my 
 friend. In order to get your story on to Broad¬ 
 way, there must be thrills, there must be action. 
 What better action than a battle? There must 
 be fire and blood, sir. It must go over the top 
 with a hip and a whoop, or it won’t go over 
 at all.” 
 
 And this is the spirit of the hour. People are 
 clamouring to be thrilled. The hair must stand 
 on end. Something must be going on all the 
 time. There must be excitement, palpitation, 
 passion, blood and thunder. A money-making 
 fist fight will bring 90,000 people together in 
 breathless suspense. I notice where one of our 
 great monthly magazines gives a forecast of the 
 articles they purpose to publish this coming year, 
 and this is the way they put it: “ Some of these 
 articles will send the red tide spurting through 
 your veins.” Another magazine owner has di¬ 
 rected that every story in his magazine this year 
 is going to have a red hot sex appeal. “My paper 
 demands hot stuff, ’ ’ writes another reporter. 
 
 One of our modem essayists has drawn a strik¬ 
 ing contrast between the Mayflower and the 
 Mauretania. Three hundred years ago the May - 
 
24 
 
 XTbe ffunerai ot Oob 
 
 flower landed np here at Plymouth. She was 
 a tiny bit of a boat of only 180 tons and hers 
 was a memorable nine weeks 7 voyage. It was 
 memorable in many ways. For one thing, the 
 little sailing ship was a temple of prayer. The 
 passengers sang psalms and hymns and spiritual 
 songs all the way over, from shore to shore. God 
 Himself was one of the passengers on that his¬ 
 toric craft. Three hundred years later another 
 boat made her maiden voyage. She was a great 
 liner. She was huge; she was palatial. She was 
 christened the Mauretania. The Mayflower 
 would go into her smoking room. The first cabin 
 was filled with gamblers and drunkards. A 
 great London daily in describing the trip used 
 these words, “The smoking room w T as a bedlam. 
 Match stands, spittoons, glasses and bottles were 
 flying in all directions. On arrival at New York 
 she was met by detectives and a dozen passengers 
 were escorted to the police court. 77 Dean Inge 
 reminds us how apt we are to think that people 
 who travel thirty miles an hour are ten times as 
 civilized as people who travel only ten. But, 
 alas, not infrequently the truth is the other way. 
 Speed is not always progress. Sometimes, as 
 with the falling airplane, it is decline, disastrous 
 decline. 
 
 Once more; who will question that our age has 
 about it a spirit of unrest ? Is there any one who 
 is not conscious of the fact that society is per- 
 
Zhc jfuneral of <$o£> 
 
 25 
 
 vaded as perhaps never before by forces of un¬ 
 rest? Even in the awful days of the war there 
 was nothing like the social unrest we see around 
 us to-day. We see glimpses of it in the divorce 
 courts. We see it in the craving for luxury, in the 
 industrial discontent. We see it in the easy way 
 that people sell their homes. We see it in the 
 tendency to wander about. People don’t want to 
 stay at home any more. They prefer to be any¬ 
 where but home. Home has lost its sweet allur- 
 ment. We see it in the drift from old moorings. 
 Things that we thought once were stable as the 
 hills are tottering and crumbling. We see it in 
 the worry and the fret and the fever of the 
 times. The normal temperature of the body is 
 98 or thereabout. That indicates health and 
 good circulation and proper functioning, but 
 when the thermometer runs up into three figures, 
 that shows congestion and disturbance and dis¬ 
 ease. And these things are equally true in the 
 social fabric. The heat and fever of our time 
 are a symptom of disease. We seem to be stand¬ 
 ing by the bedside of a sick patient who is suf¬ 
 fering from nervous exhaustion. The whole 
 body seems to be filled with fear and anxiety 
 and temperature and unrest. Everybody seems 
 to be breaking his neck to get more, to increase 
 wages, to reduce work. Every one is grabbing 
 for the physical things. Some one says we are 
 like passengers on a channel steamer, every one 
 
26 
 
 Zhc jfuneral ot <Sot> 
 
 scrambling to get the best seat for a rough cross¬ 
 ing. There is not a night of the year when 
 you cannot find in this great throbbing city tens 
 of thousands sitting around the boards, and try¬ 
 ing by some tickling sensation to get the thrill 
 of what they call life. What does it all mean? 
 It is the denial of the spiritual element in human 
 life. It is the funeral of God. 
 
 And there are many thoughtful thinkers to¬ 
 day who are beginning to feel that the only cure 
 for our enfeebled condition is in getting back to 
 the old landmarks. We must learn to reveal and 
 glorify the divine. God is not dead even if 
 Mr. Hardy thinks He is. That surely was a 
 striking saying of Voltaire’s, “If there were no 
 God the world would need to invent one.” We 
 must change our standards. The old idea of 
 testing success by material reckonings is doomed; 
 it is a glaring swindle. We must find some 
 spiritual theodolites. A great American jurist 
 said not long ago, “America must get back to 
 God or she will go to the devil in fifty years.” 
 Really will it take fifty ? 
 
 There is nothing that is going to rescue our 
 poor world from its present pitiable condition but 
 a spiritual faith. The only hope is a spiritual 
 hope. Force cannot do it. “Painting the map 
 of the world red cannot do it. Nothing will do 
 it but washing the soul of the world white.” 
 Anybody who is not drunk with the wine and 
 
Ube ffuneral of 6ob 
 
 27 
 
 the whisky of worldliness, any one with sober 
 brains, any one who can see clear and 
 straight, must confess that “materialism has 
 made a mess of managing this world.’’ If we 
 cannot mend our ways, certain ruin is ahead. 
 Our civilization that we are always boasting 
 about will go the way of all the rest. Theodore 
 Roosevelt once asked the question, * ‘ Is our civili¬ 
 zation going to endure ? ’ ’ The question is not as 
 simple or indisputable as it seems. Egypt is 
 gone. Assyria is gone. Persia is gone. Baby¬ 
 lon is gone. Greece is gone. Where is haughty 
 Spain? Where is the great Moorish Empire 
 with its architecture and its art? Where is 
 mighty, military Rome? God raised these great 
 nations up and then He cast them down because 
 they failed to do His will. So let us take warn¬ 
 ing. We must away from the rabble of the 
 crowd. The glory of life is not in its garments, 
 or its mansions, or its trophies, or its crowns. 
 Public honours will die away like the roar of 
 the mob. It’s all a bit of empty pageantry. 
 What the world calls success is a good deal like 
 that beautiful mausoleum that a certain million¬ 
 aire built for himself and which now awaits his 
 body lost at sea. Let us look behind the noisy 
 show and see the real solid facts. The very 
 soul of true religion is belief in an invisible 
 order. The glory of life is in the spiritual. 
 The glory of life is in the bosom of God. 
 
% 
 
 m 
 
 TEN TIMES ONE ARE ELEVEN 
 
 HE thought that suggests itself 
 is, Where does our real strength 
 come from? Wherein consists, 
 for instance, the strength of a 
 nation or an army or an in¬ 
 dustrial concern or a govern¬ 
 ment or an institution of any kind? Yes, or an 
 individual? Wherein lies the secret of any in- 
 dividual’s power? Does it lie in himself or does 
 it lie in something outside of himself? 
 
 It is an interesting question because the cry 
 of the age is for Power. As never before, men 
 are coveting power. We are hearing of water 
 power and steam power and electric power, 
 actinic power, X-ray power. Men talk of in¬ 
 tellectual power, pulpit power, magnetic power, 
 spiritual power. Some of our scientists are busy 
 discussing where our heat is going to come from 
 when the forests are all felled and the coal is all 
 mined and the oil peters out. Some of them are 
 working on inventions to tap the earth’s central 
 caloric. Others are trying to perfect a battery 
 device of some kind or other to store up the 
 sun’s tremendous energy. It is all a quest for 
 power. 
 
 28 
 
Uen Unites <®nc Bre Bleven 29 
 
 The most popular word in our language to-day 
 is that word power. Whatever expresses power 
 is good. The successful man is the man who 
 wields power. Men are striving for wealth be¬ 
 cause wealth denotes power. The one supreme 
 failure to-day seems to be lack of power. Weak¬ 
 ness in some places is almost synonymous with 
 wickedness. 
 
 And one of the significant studies in the history 
 of the race is the different conceptions of power 
 that have been held and that are still held. 
 When we ask the question, What is the ruling 
 fact or force in people’s lives, we are met with 
 many answers to that inquiry. Some are telling 
 us Truth is, some Beauty, some Character. Love 
 and hatred and lust and pride and fashion are 
 all advanced, and perhaps a greater company 
 than any are arguing for money. See, they say, 
 what money can do. Money is the one great 
 moving potential to-day. Nothing has the ghost 
 of a chance to-day that hasn’t money behind it. 
 Money controls the markets of the world. It 
 dictates war and peace. Money can shake every 
 parliament on earth with “one whisper of its 
 golden lips.” 
 
 Twenty-five years ago Mr. Gladstone said that 
 no individual ought to be permitted to own a 
 hundred million dollars, that it was too much 
 power to be in the hands of any one man. To¬ 
 day there arc several Americans who are reputed 
 
30 Ucn TTimes ©ne Ere JEleven 
 
 to be worth that sum. And Sir Oliver Lodge 
 recently lecturing to his class and holding in his 
 hand a lump of common clay, said: 4 4 Gentlemen, 
 we are beginning to appreciate the marvellous 
 power of atomic chemistry as seen in the be¬ 
 haviour of radium. Maybe there is enough 
 energy in this handful of clay to lift the British 
 fleet from the North Sea and transport it to the 
 hills behind Manchester. But,” he continued, 
 “I hope this power will not be discovered until 
 we are fit to use it.” 
 
 There can be no doubt that this is one of the 
 great problems just now before the world—the 
 control of Power. There is no danger so great 
 as power in the possession of people who do not 
 know how to use it. It is like putting rifles in 
 the hands of children. We are witnessing this 
 evil on every side. Take for instance, the mat¬ 
 ter of physical weapons. In many quarters, the 
 old faith in the physical still persists. That is 
 the hardest thing to down. The world has al¬ 
 ways had such a simple, childlike trust in that. 
 Maeterlinck has an essay in one of his books 
 along this line. He calls his essay 44 In praise of 
 the fist.” The bull, he says, has horns, the eagle 
 has talons, the crab has claws, the dog has teeth, 
 and as for man he has a fist. These all have 
 been given for protection, for justice, for re¬ 
 venge. And so he goes on to marshal his argu¬ 
 ments in praise of the fist. It is the old story of 
 
Ucn Climes One Hre Bleven z\ 
 
 brute force and brawn and muscle. We all 
 recognize it immediately. 
 
 As long as I can remember, we have been told 
 that self-preservation is the first law of nature, 
 that nature knows no law but the law of selfish¬ 
 ness, that she is “red in tooth and claw,” that 
 only the fit survive—the fit being the strong. 
 The savage of the jungle used his club. That’s 
 how he managed to win respect. And in the in¬ 
 dustrial jungle to-day, if a man would come out 
 on top, he must swing the big stick too. 
 
 But the convincing reply to all this loud talk 
 is that it is not true. The mighty mammoth 
 creatures that were armed and that once ruled 
 the jungle, where are they? Where are the 
 giant mastodons, with tusks twenty feet long, 
 that once roamed across the fields of Siberia? 
 Why, they are extinct. If it were not for some 
 deposit, or some bones in the Triassic rocks, we 
 would not know that such creatures ever existed. 
 Dean Inge in his “Outspoken Essays” says: 
 “Science has condemned to extinction the ma¬ 
 jestic animals of the Saurian era and has care¬ 
 fully preserved the bug, the louse and the bac¬ 
 teria. ’ 9 The pigmies are with us, the giants have 
 gone. 
 
 Where are all the monster marine reptiles— 
 the dinosaur for instance? These ponderous, 
 ungainly monsters were armoured like a dread¬ 
 nought. Surely they managed to survive. But 
 
32 Ucn TEtmes- ©ne Ere ^Eleven 
 
 no! They seem to have been crushed by their 
 very armour. It is the feeble members of the 
 brute world, the ones that know no armour (the 
 horse, the cow, the dog, the sheep, the goat), 
 that have survived. These are the creatures that 
 have weathered the storm. The strong have 
 vanished, the weak are left to tell the tale. 
 
 A few years ago—as late indeed as 1911—Mr. 
 Charles Dawson, the geologist, was telling us of 
 cutting through a gravel bed in the south of 
 England. He was making a scientific observa¬ 
 tion of the different strata of the soil. It was at 
 a place called Pittsdown, not far from Brighton. 
 When he got down ten or twelve feet he came 
 across the fossil remains of a woolly elephant. 
 He was astonished to find there in quiet Sussex, 
 where the wildest animal to-day is the partridge, 
 the bones of this extinct hairy mammoth. 
 
 And this is not all. This victory of weakness 
 is not confined to the brute world. Everywhere 
 the gladiatorial idea is passing. We are gradually 
 rescuing the heroic from the smell of smoke and 
 blood. Some of the weakest creatures are the 
 most tenacious. Mr. Maeterlinck in this same 
 essay cites the ease of the ant. “ You can pile on 
 top of an ant, ’ ’ he says, ‘ ‘ twenty thousand times 
 its own weight and it will still survive.’’ The 
 resistance of the beetle is almost incredible. He 
 seems well-nigh armour proof. 
 
 But these are the facts. Never were the bully 
 
Hen Himes ©ne Bre Eleven 33 
 
 and the burglar and the freebooter so much in 
 disfavour, never had they such little assurance 
 of success as to-day. Even in the vegetable king¬ 
 dom it is not the militant thistle but the meek 
 and modest herbaceous plants, like the pansy and 
 the violet, that seem destined to inherit the earth. 
 
 And turning to the kingdom of the personal. 
 What shall we say of that great army of the deli¬ 
 cate, men like Watt and Kant and Wilber force 
 and Robert Hall, women like Florence Nightin¬ 
 gale and Mrs. Browning. Wordsworth says of 
 Watt: “He was perhaps the most extraordinary 
 man that the country has ever produced. ? 9 But 
 think what a body he had, hardly any body at 
 all, and what little there was seemed to be dis¬ 
 eased. Robert Murray McCheyne was nick¬ 
 named the Skeleton, but this skeleton managed, 
 notwithstanding, to shake Scotland from Caith¬ 
 ness to the Tweed. Wilberforce, the liberator, 
 the statesman, the orator, we know. But how 
 little we know of Wilberforce the hunchback, the 
 man who for twenty years was compelled to take 
 opium to keep himself alive. When he arose to 
 address the House of Commons, one reporter 
 wrote: “He looked like a dwarf that had jumped 
 out of a fairy tale.” There is a great company 
 of these heroes and heroines. Their strength was 
 certainly not in their muscles or their fists. 
 
 Or approaching the matter from another angle. 
 There is a type of men who call themselves prac- 
 
34 Uen Uimes ©ne ate Bleve" 
 
 tical men and who are peculiarly strong on sta¬ 
 tistics. They are always taking a census. They 
 like to go with the crowd. They glory in majori¬ 
 ties. Perhaps there never was a time when peo¬ 
 ple had such an unbounded confidence in con¬ 
 ventions and mass movements as to-day. 
 Matthew Arnold used to say that our most sacred 
 book is the book of Numbers. With many, 
 figures are a perfect fetish. One of our popular 
 expressions is, to keep up with the procession. 
 The old prophet speaks of the man with the 
 measuring line. The man with the measur¬ 
 ing line is always with us. He is an important 
 man in the commercial world; he is an in¬ 
 fluential man in the political world, and 
 often—too often indeed—he cuts quite a swath 
 in the religious world. He measures success 
 by numerals, by majorities, by pluralities. 
 Ten times one are ten he is always telling 
 us. But sometimes ten times one are more 
 than ten. Ten men working together will do 
 more than ten men working separately. Ten 
 times one are ten plus their concerted action. It 
 is the psychology of crowds. We know that peo¬ 
 ple in a crowd are capable of rising to higher 
 heights or sinking to lower depths than any of 
 them would individually. There is always this 
 unseen factor to reckon with, and when the un¬ 
 seen factor is a spiritual one, it makes a formi¬ 
 dable difference. 
 
Zen Zi mes 0ne Hte £le\>en 35 
 
 I think we need to be reminded these days 
 that the great truths that have moved mankind 
 have not owed their triumphs to any numerical 
 preponderance. Victory has not always been on 
 the side of the biggest battalions, Napoleon not¬ 
 withstanding. There is no literature in the 
 world that pays so little regard to majorities as 
 the Bible. There was a time when the whole 
 world believed that the earth was flat. That did 
 not save the delusion. Perhaps the history of 
 the Hebrew people is the strongest proof we 
 have of the impotence of mere numbers. They 
 were surrounded by great races that far out¬ 
 voted them. Indeed, they were only as it were 
 a drop in the bucket. But where are these races 
 to-day? Where is Egypt? Egypt had a popu¬ 
 lation ten times as great as Palestine. Egypt 
 tried to destroy Palestine; so did Assyria. 
 Where is Persia? Persia had a population 
 twenty times as great as Palestine. But Egypt, 
 Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome rose 
 and fell, came and went. And yet this little 
 company of Jews, small and obscure, trampled 
 on in the march, of history, still remains and 
 they are mightier to-day than ever. 
 
 A good many of us, unfortunately, are almost 
 uncomfortable to-day if we find ourselves in the 
 minority. But when we come to think of it, that 
 is not the smallest reason for being discouraged. 
 It is minorities as a rule that have saved the 
 
3 6 Uen XTtmes One Hte Bleven 
 
 world. Time and time again truth has been on 
 the side where the few were lined up. It is the 
 few that have always kept the world sweet. 
 Wilber force was in the minority on the question 
 of slavery. Telemachus was in the minority on 
 the question of gladiatorial displays. I rather 
 think, with the gloomy Dean of St. Paul's, 
 ‘‘there is not the slightest probability that the 
 big crowd will ever be found in front of the 
 narrow gate." I feel confident they will con¬ 
 tinue to be found at the movies or the ball game. 
 I am reminded of the statesman who, when his 
 speech was applauded by the mob, turned to the 
 chairman and whispered, ‘ ‘ Have I said anything 
 very foolish?" And anyway, we have high 
 authority for the words, “Strait is the gate and 
 narrow is the way that leadeth unto life and few 
 there be that find it. ’ 9 
 
 There is still another point of view that is 
 popular. So many seem to think that a move¬ 
 ment has no chance these days unless it has in¬ 
 fluence and prestige behind it. And so their 
 first idea when they are beginning any new ven¬ 
 ture is to get a list of influential names to en¬ 
 dorse their program. They seek as patrons and 
 patronesses the great and the notable. They be¬ 
 siege the seats of the mighty. It is a singular 
 fact that Jesus had no great or commanding 
 name in His cabinet. One wonders sometimes 
 why He did not summon to His side such a man 
 
Zen ZUnes ©ne Eve Eleven 37 
 
 as Nicodemus for instance. But not so; His 
 followers were mostly humble folk. His disciples 
 were nearly all peasants. Jesus never relied on 
 what the world calls greatness. It was the weak 
 things He picked out to do His work. 
 
 All of which leads us to our challenge that 
 ten times one are not always ten. Sometimes 
 ten times one are eleven, sometimes twelve. 
 Sometimes one and one are more than two. It 
 all depends on who or what the ones are. Man’s 
 real strength is never in himself. His strength 
 comes from a higher alliance. It comes from 
 being harnessed to the Unseen. All mathematical 
 equations are reduced to absurdity here. It was 
 Lincoln who said, was it not, ‘ ‘ Find out the way 
 that God is going and go that way.” It is al¬ 
 ways God and Newton, God and Faraday, God 
 and Agassiz. It is not the sword of Gideon, it 
 is 4 ‘the sword of the Lord and of Gideon.” As 
 Amiel in his journal puts it: “Strong as the uni¬ 
 verse or feeble as the worm, according as we rep¬ 
 resent God or only ourselves; as we lean upon 
 the Infinite or stand alone. ’ ’ 
 
 Fifty years ago a great German philosopher 
 by the name of Lotze proved to us that all real 
 power in the world is spiritual power. And no 
 thinker to-day disputes that fact. The great 
 storage plant is a spiritual one and Faith is the 
 key that turns the switch. We speak of the 
 strength of Gibraltar. What makes Gibraltar 
 
38 Zen Zimes ©ne Bre Eleven 
 
 strong? Is it the rock? There is no more 
 strength in Gibraltar’s rock than in any other 
 mammoth rock. The strength of Gibraltar, said 
 a great statesman recently, is in the Empire that 
 owns it and governs it. The strength of Gi¬ 
 braltar is in the English Crown, and the strength 
 of the Christian is in his God. The Good Book 
 says, 4 ‘Be strong,’’ but it adds, “Be strong in 
 the Lord.” 
 
 We are frequently reminded that the word 
 Faith is not once found in the Old Testament. 
 There is but one exception and that is in the 
 book of Deuteronomy, and the word as it is 
 found in that passage does not mean what we 
 mean by it. Well, that is one of those statements, 
 that is true literally and false every other way. 
 For when we come to the letter to the Hebrews 
 we read: “By faith Abel, by faith Enoch, by 
 faith Noah, by faith Abraham, by faith Moses, 
 by faith Gideon, by faith Samson, by faith 
 David.” It seems to be all faith. There doesn’t 
 appear to be anything else but faith. Every¬ 
 thing these grand old worthies did, they seem 
 to have done through faith. 
 
 The founders of our American Republic were 
 men of faith. Every great chapter in our history 
 is a chapter of faith. True our historians do 
 not always see it that way, but if some Jewish 
 Rabbi were writing our history, would it not be 
 something like this: 
 
Uax XTintes One Hre Eleven 39 
 
 By faith Columbus began the great adventure 
 in 1492. 
 
 By faith a little shell of a boat of 180 tons 
 called the Mayflower ventured out on the stormy 
 Atlantic and landed at Cape Cod in November, 
 1620. She had eighty souls on board. They 
 founded a nation, the greatest nation that ever 
 breathed the air of liberty. It was all a great 
 gamble of faith. 
 
 By faith Washington issued his farewell ad¬ 
 dress to the people in 1796. 
 
 By faith Jefferson drafted the Declaration of 
 Independence the same year. 
 
 By faith Lincoln issued his call for 75,000 
 volunteers on April 15th, 1861. 
 
 By faith Marcus Whitman started West with 
 three other missionaries in 1836 and saved Ore¬ 
 gon to the Union—he and his wife having been 
 murdered eleven years later by the Indians. 
 
 By faith Cyrus W. Field organized the At¬ 
 lantic Telegraph in 1856 and succeeded, after 
 two failures, in laying a cable between Ireland 
 and Newfoundland. 
 
 And so on. A Hebrew historian would have seen 
 God in everything. Every chapter would have 
 been a psalm of faith. Because Faith is the 
 bond that links man to God and enables God to 
 work through him. 4 4 This is the victory that 
 overcometh the world even your faith.” 
 
 The trouble with most of us in our religious 
 work is that we do not avail ourselves of the 
 power at our disposal. We pray for the out¬ 
 pouring of a blessing, when what is needed is 
 
40 Uen TTintes ©ne Ere Bieven 
 
 not an outpouring so much as an in-letting. The 
 windows are open. It is our hearts that are 
 shut. The power is at our doors clamouring for 
 admission. As some one puts it, “The block on 
 the line is just outside our own hearts.” There 
 is no obstacle in the perpendicular. The ob¬ 
 stacle is in the horizontal. So many Christians 
 are wrestling with God to come into their lives 
 and give them power, when what they need is to 
 swing wide the doors and receive the power. 
 What use is the wind to push our little craft un¬ 
 less we lift a sail to catch it? Of what use is 
 the eternal fact of gravity unless we remove the 
 barriers? We must comply with the conditions. 
 We must enter into partnership with the eternal 
 forces. We must cooperate. Why is it that on 
 a hot day in summer the higher we ascend in an 
 airplane the colder we get? We are nearing the 
 great source of heat and yet the heat is all the 
 time getting less. It is because heat, like every¬ 
 thing else, needs an atmosphere. And the human 
 element is just as essential as the divine. We 
 are the atmosphere. All power is from above, 
 but we must receive the power and transmit it 
 and diffuse it. The' power is all His. We are 
 nothing at all except in so far as we are used. 
 No man has ever done a great work for God 
 until he was first humbled by the conviction that 
 of himself he could do nothing. “We have to 
 empty the organ pipes of our own poor breaths 
 
Uen Utmes One Hre j£le\>en 4t 
 
 and get them filled with the winds of heaven be¬ 
 fore they will ponr forth music. 5 ’ All the great 
 prophets and apostles and preachers were great 
 and mighty because they felt themselves un¬ 
 worthy and impotent. It was their humility that 
 raised them up. They let God do with them as 
 He pleased and He pleased to make them giants. 
 
 You will recall the story of Charles Kingsley’s 
 “Yeast/’ how Nevgara, the base criminal, ran 
 into the woods in his desperation, and there, 
 lonely, abandoned, heart-sick, conscience-smit¬ 
 ten, hell-tortured, face to face with his foulness 
 and his sin, threw himself down on his knees 
 among the leaves and cried out: “0 God, if you 
 can make anything of a villain like me, I will 
 be Thine.” And then, it will be remembered, 
 how a strange light celestial came into his heart, 
 and when he opened his eyes how the bushes 
 about him burst into flame and colour, and he 
 rose up a new man. *‘ Blessed is the man whose 
 strength is in God.” And the nation too! 
 What is the trouble with our land to-day? Is 
 not our great trouble that we are forgetting 
 God? Sometimes it looks very much as if our 
 Republic was losing its soul. America is worth 
 about two hundred and fifty billion dollars, but 
 what good is that going to be to her if she loses 
 her soul 1 America must get back to God. Cer¬ 
 tainly she must if she is going to save her soul. 
 
IV 
 
 MILLIONAIRES 
 
 HE New Testament seems at 
 first sight to be rough on rich 
 men. But the question always 
 arises, who is the rich man? 
 How much wealth must one 
 command to be labelled rich? 
 There was a time when a person who could sign 
 his check for $100,000 was accounted rich, but 
 he would not be so regarded to-day. In these 
 days of astronomical figures six digits do not 
 make a rich man. One needs at least seven, pos¬ 
 sibly eight, maybe nine. It all depends on who 
 the assessor is. And if the assessor is Jesus we 
 have no means of reckoning just where the 
 boundary lies or when one crosses over. He laid 
 down no lines, no limits. He once said that it 
 was easier for a camel to go through the eye of 
 a needle than for a rich man to enter into His 
 Kingdom, and the saying has puzzled and trou¬ 
 bled many, although I think unnecessarily. Be¬ 
 cause what He really said was not how hardly 
 shall they that have riches but “how hardly shall 
 they that trust in their riches.” It is impossible 
 for a man to enter His Kingdom who trusts in 
 
 42 
 
/BMlifonaires 
 
 43 
 
 his riches. His Kingdom is not entered that way. 
 That ticket is no good, that key does not fit. 
 It is quite as impossible for a camel to go through 
 a needle’s eye as for a rich man who trusts in 
 his riches to enter the Kingdom of the Spirit. 
 
 The Master, let us make clear at the outset, 
 never condemns money as such and He puts no 
 limit on its legitimate accumulation. On these 
 points He was silent. He had nothing to say. 
 He was not a professor of economics; He was a 
 teacher of religion. Wealth to Him was not a 
 question of quantity; it was a touchstone of 
 character, and that purpose can be served as 
 well oftentimes by a small balance as by a great 
 fabulous return. “Where one’s treasure is there 
 will his heart be, ’ ’ be the treasure little or be it 
 large. What Jesus condemns is mammon. All 
 the gold in Wall Street is helpless to harm if it 
 is kept in the right place, but two five-cent bits of 
 nickel will blind the man who places them over 
 his optics. Some one has remarked of dirt that 
 it is clay and earth in the wrong place. When 
 dirt is in the garden it is a most desirable thing: 
 it gives us vegetables, berries, fruits, flowers. 
 But in the kitchen it is extremely objectionable 
 stuff; it is a spring of infection and disease. 
 Mammon is money in the wrong place. Money 
 is a good thing in the hand; it is a pitiably poor 
 thing in the heart. When money gets into the 
 heart it is no longer money; it becomes mammon. 
 
44 
 
 fMMUionaires 
 
 What we are apt to lose sight of, however, is 
 that there are many kinds of riches. Material 
 wealth is not the only wealth. Money magnates 
 are not the only favourites of fortune. Do we 
 not know those who are millionaires intellectually 
 for instance, men of vision and power and genius. 
 Some of them have discovered great cosmic laws, 
 some have formulated great codes, some have 
 written standard works. They are poets, artists, 
 philosophers, inventors, teachers, statesmen. 
 Some are constructive leaders in the affairs of 
 government to-day; some are working away 
 quietly in their laboratories. I am thinking of 
 a great scientist like Mr. Edison or a great 
 philosopher like Bertrand Russell, or a great 
 writer like Mr. Wells or a great naturalist like 
 the late John Burroughs. How brainy these 
 men, and yet is it not true that oftentimes it is 
 their very brains that seem to block the way 
 to any spiritual approach. It is never an easy 
 thing for a great scholar to become a little child. 
 It is a costly surrender to confess that “Not 
 many wise, not many noble are called.’’ Not for 
 a moment would we be severe on these men, or 
 unjust to them, and call their trouble pride, be¬ 
 cause many of them are the very antinome of 
 that. Certainly Mr. Edison is not a proud man. 
 Never have we heard of his ever having boasted 
 of anything he ever did. Instance the case of 
 Darwin. The Church has said many hard things 
 
flDiilionaires 
 
 45 
 
 about Mr. Darwin. And yet to many of us 
 Charles Darwin seems a good deal of a saint. 
 Born in a wealthy home, inheriting a consider¬ 
 able estate, he might have lived a lazy, selfish, 
 useless life. But not so! From the very be¬ 
 ginning he dedicated himself to the discovery of 
 truth and he went about it with the charming 
 humility of a little child, just reporting what he 
 saw or thought he saw. 
 
 But this misses the point. Pride is a very 
 insidious thing, a very subtle thing, especially 
 pride of intellect. Being grounded on reason, it 
 of course flatters the reason. The reason min¬ 
 isters to the vanity and the vanity straightway 
 turns around and compliments the reason. It is 
 a mutual admiration society. Then it is so easy 
 to become absorbed in details and forget unity. 
 As Goethe said, “The constant use of the micro¬ 
 scope interferes with the normal use of the eye.” 
 These men are gifted and they know they are 
 gifted. Their wisdom is worldly wisdom. They 
 have no interest in any truth that the intellect 
 cannot formulate. And this is the peril of much 
 of our intellectual life to-day. 
 
 I think on the other hand of a quiet, beautiful 
 soul like Asa Gray. How profound and deep and 
 wise he was! How from the very first he had 
 read the significance of Darwinism and accepted 
 its general law, and yet to the very last, humble 
 as a little child in his loyalty to the voice of 
 
46 
 
 ^billionaires 
 
 revelation. Or instance a man like Newton! 
 Was there ever a more unassuming student than 
 Sir Isaac Newton ? Did he not compare himself 
 to a lad walking along the shore, stooping down 
 every now and then, and as he put it, “picking 
 a few pebbles from the beach.” Or who that 
 has not been drawn by the simplicity of Faraday. 
 Michael Faraday was never troubled by any 
 conflict between science and religion. How 
 charming that story of the great physicist when 
 he was one night lecturing before an audience 
 of London scientists. After the lecture was con¬ 
 cluded the Prince of Wales arose to propose a 
 vote of thanks. The motion was put and carried 
 and when they looked around for the lecturer he 
 was gone. He had slipped out the back door, and 
 over to the prayer-meeting, to renew his fellow¬ 
 ship with God. 
 
 Then there are the people of great artistic and 
 social gifts, those of unusual personal accomplish¬ 
 ments. Here is a young girl endowed with an 
 exceptional voice, let us suppose. She can de¬ 
 light audiences with her singing. What an en¬ 
 dowment is hers! What a power she wields! Is 
 she not truly a millionaire? Maybe in addition 
 she is a child of culture and position and in¬ 
 fluence, with a beautiful home to which to wel¬ 
 come her friends. She has a gracious presence, 
 a simple charm. What a telling work she could 
 do if she would make the sacrifice and use her 
 
fSMIUonaires 
 
 47 
 
 gifts and her charm, not for her own selfish 
 pleasure, but for the enrichment of the world! 
 Think you it is an easy thing to do? I cannot 
 so regard it. It means surrender and sacrifice 
 and the giving up of many other delightful 
 things that one would like to do. Perhaps it is 
 fully as difficult to make this sacrifice as it was 
 for the young man to whom Jesus said, “Go and 
 sell all your goods and give the proceeds to the 
 poor/ 5 Do you think it was an easy thing for 
 George Herbert, the pride of Cambridge Uni¬ 
 versity, to renounce all his ambitions and devote 
 his life to the Christian ministry? He was in 
 high favour at court and in his position as public 
 orator he wrote all the official letters to the 
 Government. Replying to a friend who sought 
 to dissuade him, he said, “I desire to advance 
 the glory of Him who gave them to me. And I 
 will labour to be like my Master by making hu¬ 
 mility lovely in the eyes of men . 91 
 
 The truth then is more searching and far- 
 reaching than at first seems. 11 How hardly shall 
 they who trust in their riches enter the King¬ 
 dom.’ ’ So stated, it is certainly not difficult to 
 accept. But is it any easier for those who trust 
 in their talents or their titles? Every endow¬ 
 ment is a trust. Is your endowment beauty, 
 young woman? You are truly a millionaire but 
 bear in mind the legacy is a trust. Have you an 
 artistic temperament? That too is a trust. Do 
 
48 
 
 /Billionaires 
 
 you possess any gift of pen or voice or pencil, 
 anything that wins admiration or applause—all 
 these accomplishments are trusts. You are a 
 trustee of these treasures. They are intended as 
 stepping-stones to something higher. We call a 
 wealthy man a man of means, intimating that the 
 man’s wealth is a means to a higher attainment. 
 The standing wonder about strength is its selfish¬ 
 ness. Mazzini was a devout believer in God, but 
 he rejected Christianity on the ground that it 
 taught men to be selfish; it taught them, he 
 claimed, to be so absorbed in their own personal 
 salvation that they neglected their duty on earth. 
 It is a sad misconception but a common one. 
 Strange that power as a rule does not visualize 
 and grasp and evaluate its indebtedness. 
 Think of a great country like America stand¬ 
 ing aloof and folding her hands and saying 
 to a rocking, suffering world, 4 ‘ I dread entangle¬ 
 ments, I cannot interfere.” This is isolation no 
 doubt, but there is grave doubt as to whether it 
 can be called splendid. Our gifts and blessings 
 do not belong to us in fee simple to do as we 
 please with. We are the custodians of these 
 things for the sake of mankind. If you use your 
 privilege selfishly it is quite possible it may pall 
 on you. Indeed quite likely! It is said that 
 there were times when Caruso, the great tenor, 
 longed for obscurity. He was reported once as 
 saying: “Ah, it is a curse, this voice. Caruso is 
 
/HMUionafres 
 
 49 
 
 sick of it long ago—per Bacco! It is a nuisance; 
 one cannot live as one wishes and have an en¬ 
 cumbrance like this. One cannot eat, sleep, 
 drink or be human. The burdens of my gift are 
 greater than the rewards. Often before I go to 
 sleep at night I pray I will awaken with my 
 voice lost forever. But in the morning the voice 
 —my master—is better than ever. ? 9 
 
 Madame Guyon was a strikingly beautiful 
 woman. Wherever she went her wit and charm 
 evoked applause. She acknowledged the power 
 of the world. It was a thorn in her flesh. Then 
 at twenty-two she was stricken with smallpox 
 and all her beauty slipped away. But it was 
 not all loss, for she gained something else and it 
 proved to be something better. She became one 
 of the greatest religious enthusiasts of all time. 
 Her lovely face would no doubt have dazzled the 
 society of Paris for a few years, but it was taken 
 away. And instead of an unusual face we have 
 an unusual life, a life that will shine on and on 
 until the end of time, “a beacon light in that 
 dense mediaeval darkness.” Sir Robert Ball in 
 his lectures says that a man who carries a sack 
 of corn on earth could carry six sacks on the 
 moon. But on a world as large as the sun his 
 watch would weigh about five pounds. That is 
 to say, it is the pull of the planet we are on that 
 makes things heavy. The bigger the planet the 
 greater the pull. And if this world is the im- 
 
50 
 
 /BMUtonatres 
 
 portant prize to ns, then little wonder if it has 
 a mighty pnll. 
 
 Mark Guy Pearse in his memoirs says, ‘‘ There 
 are men who do not care for any asset they can¬ 
 not conveniently cash.” They are gluttons for 
 the dollar. They are so taken up with business 
 that their hearts have become asphalted. They 
 have no room for what they call sentiment. 
 4 ‘The children are troublesome and are sent to 
 the nursery. The birds are noisy and should be 
 shot. And as for the flower garden, they would 
 turn it into a potato patch unless flowers paid 
 better. ’ ’ These people are sharp and shrewd and 
 what the world calls successful. If I wanted 
 advice on finance I would likely go to them. But 
 if I were in trouble I should never dream of 
 turning their way. They have no place in their 
 whole make-up for the spiritual side of things. 
 Think contrariwise of a man like General Booth. 
 It was his custom during the later years of his 
 life to send out birthday greetings. His message 
 at seventy-five was entitled “What I would do 
 with my life if I had to live it over again.” 
 This was the message: “I will tell you what I 
 would do could I go back to the beginning of 
 my career. I would offer it up without a mo¬ 
 ment’s hesitation on the altar of redeeming love. 
 In pursuance of that I would resolve to be some¬ 
 thing that counts in the strife raging around 
 me between good and evil. I would be a man of 
 
/liMIUonaires 
 
 51 
 
 spiritual strength. I would be a man of sacrifice. 
 I would be a man of prayer, I would be a man 
 of holiness. I would have compassion for human 
 suffering. I would be a man of faith. ’ ’ Tell me, 
 was not this man a millionaire? Was he not 
 one of Heaven’s capitalists? And was not his 
 wealth truly anointed? Verily indeed it was. 
 He realized that his business here was not to be 
 ministered unto but to minister and to give his 
 life a sacrifice for many. ‘ ‘ Open my heart, ’ ’ said 
 Browning, ‘ 4 and you will find written inside of it 
 one word—Italy.” 
 
 “My heart is in the coffin here with Caesar,” 
 says Mark Antony. 
 
 “My heart’s in the Highlands,” sings Burns. 
 “My heart is not here.” 
 
 “Where is thine heart?” says Jesus. “It is 
 where thy treasure is.” 
 
 As Joyce Kilmer sings: 
 
 “ Lord, Thou did’st suffer more for me 
 Than all the host's of land and sea. 
 
 So let me render back again 
 This millionth of Thy gift; Amen.” 
 
 / 
 
V 
 
 SAINTS IN SODOM 
 
 R. OLIVER WENDELL 
 HOLMES wrote a story which 
 he called “Elsie Venner.” It 
 is a snake story. The scene of 
 the story is laid in New Eng¬ 
 land, in a little town lying at 
 the foot of a mountain celebrated for its reptiles. 
 Living in the town was a young girl by the name 
 of Elsie Venner. She was a restless child— 
 wild, wayward, capricious. She was very pretty 
 but there was something about her beauty, some¬ 
 thing in her eyes, something in her gliding, curv¬ 
 ing movements that reminded everybody she met 
 of a rattlesnake. She shared too in some of their 
 strange powers. She seemed able to charm them 
 as they charm the birds. She had a good many 
 of their likes and dislikes. The leaves of the 
 white ash affected her just as they do the serpent. 
 As she grew older she began to manifest the most 
 peculiar singularities of taste and temper. 
 Strange stories began to circulate, so that the 
 whole town talked about her, and when she ap¬ 
 peared on the street every one would turn and 
 say, “That’s Elsie Venner.” She would steal 
 
 5 2 
 
Saints in Sofcom 
 
 53 
 
 away from her home in the quiet of the night 
 when all the town was fast asleep and seek out 
 their haunts. She loved to handle and fondle 
 them. In fits of passion she would bite and, the 
 bites were poisonous. The physician always 
 cauterized them as he would the bite of some 
 venomous creature. And the explanation of her 
 strange peculiarities seemed to be that a little 
 while before she was born her mother had been 
 bitten by a crotalus, and had died from the 
 wound immediately after giving birth to her 
 child. So Elsie was born with the poison of the 
 rattler in her blood and with a good deal of the 
 nature of the serpent in her moods. 
 
 We are hearing much to-day again about Mr. 
 Darwin. He is once more in the limelight. To 
 be sure his critics are still many, but the army 
 of his friends keeps steadily growing, and among 
 the better class. Perhaps it is not going too far 
 to say that his book has had more influence on 
 human thought than any other book ever printed, 
 save the Bible. Its broad, general principles are 
 becoming more and more each year the working 
 hypothesis of the scientist, the biologist, the so¬ 
 ciologist, yes, even of the theologian. The fact 
 of evolution is not questioned by most scientists 
 any more: the only doubt they entertain is the 
 method. 
 
 Now two of the fundamental laws of the 
 ‘‘Origin of Species’’ are the law of heredity and 
 
54 
 
 Saints in So&om 
 
 the law of environment. “We are all born with 
 a history in ns. ’ ’ This is one of the corner-stones 
 of evolutionary thought. 4 ‘ Like father like son, ’ ’ 
 we say. “He’s a chip of the old block.” That 
 there is a transmission of features no one doubts. 
 When we meet a Jew or a Chinaman there is no 
 uncertainty in our minds on that score. And 
 not only are features transmitted; tastes and 
 tricks and temperaments are transmitted too. 
 Modem scientists like Galton and Ribot have 
 brought to light many facts revealing what a 
 force heredity is in our lives. 
 
 A force both for evil and for good! Children 
 are what their parents are. A father may pol¬ 
 lute his offspring: a mother may predispose her 
 child. Some people do not believe in predestina¬ 
 tion but this is predestination with revenge. 
 The spring is poisoned at the fountain and the 
 water is never pure, or it is sweetened and so 
 forever fresh. Some months ago a great surgeon 
 told us of operating on a young lad. A blow on 
 the head years before had induced kleptomania. 
 Heredity too may strike the blow that cracks the 
 skull and creates a degenerate. 
 
 And environment likewise is a fact to be 
 reckoned with. Sometimes the slightest impres¬ 
 sion determines the groove. If you scratch a 
 pane of glass with a diamond point the cleavage 
 will follow the line. Buckle goes so far as to 
 say that what we eat decides what we are. A 
 
Saints in Sofcont 
 
 55 
 
 nation is determined by its diet. There are 
 writers to-day who are telling ns that man is a 
 mere feather on the wave. He is swept along by 
 the current. The determining factor is external. 
 Writers like Galsworthy! According to Gals¬ 
 worthy man is helpless against the pressure of 
 his inheritance or his entourage. Nearly all his 
 victims go down before “birth’s invidious bar.” 
 Or if blood doesn’t damn them, climatology does. 
 So readily do they surrender. Here I am writ¬ 
 ing these words. It is a beautiful summer morn¬ 
 ing. The day is warm and I am stretched out 
 under the lilac bushes. Across the way there 
 is a vast estate owned by a millionaire, who has 
 almost ransacked both hemispheres and the 
 islands of the sea for treasures and curiosities to 
 adorn his home and his grounds—antelopes from 
 Africa, vicunas from South America. He took 
 particular pride in a couple of reindeer he 
 brought from Alaska, placing them in a ten-acre 
 enclosure of the richest verdure. But the luxury 
 was too much for them and they died. Poor 
 creatures, they had been rooted out of their 
 native soil. Their national habitat was the cold, 
 frozen peaks of Alaska. 
 
 The beauty about the Christian faith, however, 
 is that it can master these things. Science tells 
 us that we are the inevitable results of all that 
 has gone before, but the fundamental fact of re¬ 
 ligion is that we have a living will within that 
 
56 
 
 Saints in Sofcont 
 
 can change what has gone before. A resolute 
 will is more than a match for the past; it can 
 even shape the future. Africanus was the son 
 of a cannibal chief and yet he grew up to be a 
 great Christian scholar and a bishop of the 
 Church. Heredity does not explain Africanus. 
 Ahaz, one of the worst kings that ever reigned 
 over Judah, was followed by his son Hezekiah, 
 one of the best. There are many of these con¬ 
 tradictions in life. Something like the old foun¬ 
 tain Arethusa in ancient Greece. It ran for I 
 cannot recall how many miles through the salt 
 and bitter sea, all the way from Peloponnesus to 
 Trinacria and then shot up bubbling, cool, sweet 
 drinking water in far-off Ortygia. 
 
 And the same is true of environment. En¬ 
 vironment is a big word but men sometimes make 
 their own environment. The pull of the popular 
 tide is tremendously strong but men have 
 breasted even that. No environment can compel 
 a man to be bad who really wants to be good, nor 
 to be good who is determined to be bad. Luci¬ 
 fer was unhappy in heaven. They could not 
 keep Artemus in hell. The Christian evangel is 
 that the new life in the soul can neutralize any 
 poison and breast any flood. It is an interior 
 energy that can defy taint or tempest. It is a 
 victory over contrary conditions. The promise 
 is always “To him that overcometh. 9 ’ Tropical 
 shrubs will not flourish in the Arctic Circle but 
 
Saints in Sofcom 
 
 57 
 
 Christianity can flourish in any circle. Obadiah 
 kept his conscience clear in the household of 
 Ahab. Daniel preserved his integrity in the 
 court of Babylon, and Nehemiah was true to the 
 faith of his fathers in the palace of the Persian 
 emperor. So many are telling us to-day that 
 American character is being determined by our 
 mountains and lakes and rivers and prairies, by 
 the streets and tenements of our big cities, by the 
 log cabins out on the frontiers. But the facts 
 riddle this theory to fragments. There are 
 scores of things stronger than environment, a 
 high ideal for instance, a steady purpose, a firm 
 conviction, a noble example. Abraham Lincoln 
 has had more to do with the shaping of our 
 Americanism than all the mountains in Arizona 
 or the lakes in the Adirondacks or the tenements 
 in Manhattan, more than all the log cabins in 
 Texas. There were saints, we are told, in 
 Cagsar’s household. And let it not be forgotten 
 who this fellow Cagsar was; he was no less a 
 personage than the infamous Nero. Mrs. Booth 
 lived an apostolic life in Whitechapel. David 
 Livingstone died a spiritual hero in the heart of 
 Africa. High up in the, cold Sierras, far past the 
 timber line, may be seen stunted trees, smaller 
 than currant bushes. Foresters tell us they are 
 at least fifty years old. It is a splendid object 
 lesson of a stubborn fight against storm and vio¬ 
 lence. The brave little shrubs struggle on and 
 
58 
 
 Saints in Sofcom 
 
 wrestle with their handicap. How many thou¬ 
 sands of lives are grappling with their handicap, 
 and grappling successfully, above “the human 
 timber line.” 
 
 “ In the fell clutch of circumstance 
 I have not winced nor cried aloud; 
 
 Beneath the bludgeonings of chance 
 My head is bloody but unbowed.” 
 
 The world is full of wonderful things; the age 
 of miracles is not past. The revival of wonder 
 is not an idle dream. “Greater works than 
 these shall ye do.” And when we stop to think 
 it out, is there any greater wonder than to be a 
 saint in Sodom? The Bible takes us into the 
 slums but it never leaves us there. It always 
 leads us out. It says, When you he in Rome do 
 not do as the Romans do, but try and get the 
 Romans to do as you do. One would suppose 
 that the army was a poor school for morals but 
 some of the choicest souls that ever walked our 
 earth were army men. One might mention Gen¬ 
 eral Gordon, General Howard, General Arm¬ 
 strong, General Havelock, Stonewall Jackson and 
 a long list of like immortals. The stage has al¬ 
 ways been under fire. But even the stage can 
 show her company of the shining faithful. 
 Thayer, the biographer of Beethoven, tells us 
 that one of the greatest of the composer’s sym¬ 
 phonies was constructed out of a simple folk-lore 
 song. He was lying half asleep in a little coun- 
 
Saints in So&om 
 
 59 
 
 try tavern when a simple shepherd lad passed 
 under the windows humming a sentimental 
 ballad. The melody captivated the master. He 
 tossed it about in his dreams all night. He 
 turned it over and over into infinite variations. 
 He incorporated into it strange piercing cries 
 and sweet minor strains. And in the morning 
 the simple ballad came forth one of his most 
 glorious creations—the Pastoral Symphony, one 
 of his nine greatest works. This is the triumph 
 of all art, turning the formless into form, turning 
 the colourless into colour. In the poet’s hands 
 two dogs, two jolly beggars, are “ shaped into 
 measures of magic.” To take hold of the simple 
 things and glorify them—this is art. The trans¬ 
 figuration of the ordinary is the extraordinary. 
 They are telling us to-day that the newest thing 
 in gardening is a process whereby the nature of 
 the soil becomes almost a matter of indifference. 
 Any soil can be made to yield anything. Bur¬ 
 bank makes common sand bear beautiful roses. 
 It is a splendid parable of the truth that the 
 flower of a beautiful character can be grown in 
 any clime, under any sky, out of any soil, by any 
 fallen son of Adam. 
 
VI 
 
 CONQUERING THREE WORLDS 
 
 HERE are several standards by 
 which to judge any conquering 
 career. One is to get a tape 
 line and measure its external 
 dimensions. The length and 
 breadth and height are so and 
 so; so many books written, so many discoveries 
 made, so many battles fought, so many Victoria 
 crosses won, so many degrees conferred, so many 
 millions amassed, so much space in the public 
 press! It is the standard of mundane glory and 
 popular applause. When we visit any of the 
 great capitals of Europe and note the monuments, 
 one is struck with the fact that they are so 
 largely monuments to fighting men; or if not to 
 fighting men, to royalty. And royalty decked 
 out as a rule in helmets and spurs and medals. 
 Even the places of worship, it would seem, are 
 not infrequently burial places for the soldier. 
 St. Paul’s Cathedral is a veritable temple of 
 Mars. London has no monument to John Wes¬ 
 ley, none to General Booth, but London has at 
 least a dozen monuments to the Duke of Welling¬ 
 ton. Here is Sir Hiram Maxim! What a tri- 
 
 6o 
 
Conquering Cbree WovlOs 6 \ 
 
 umphant career was his! Certainly he was an 
 inventive genius if ever there was one. He won 
 medal after medal in the realm of actual achieve¬ 
 ment. He devised a gun called after his name. 
 It is one of the most deadly weapons on the field 
 of battle. It can fire more than six hundred 
 rounds a minute, and with absolute accuracy as 
 far as two miles. Think of the hundreds of thou¬ 
 sands of boys who must have fallen by the Maxim 
 gun alone in the great war. He won fame and 
 fortune. He was knighted by King George. 
 Truly indeed by the laws of cold steel he was 
 one of the conquerors of the world, or rather he 
 was a conqueror of one of the worlds. He con¬ 
 quered the world without. 
 
 But the point is, are these things really con¬ 
 quests! Is the path of war the road to lasting 
 glory? Is it right to call a thing successful 
 simply because it issues in a fabulous income or 
 in the slaughter of the innocents? If so, then 
 some of history’s heroes are crowning failures. 
 Mazzini for instance! So often we tack on the 
 right word to the wrong thing. So often a worth¬ 
 less fellow wears a noble name. Not infrequently 
 what men call success is nothing less than cool 
 and calculating swindle. There was little that 
 the world would cheer in Paul’s career. Judged 
 by every earthly rule it was a foiled and bank¬ 
 rupt thing. From the day that he staggered 
 blind and weak into the streets of Damascus, 
 
62 Conquering Cforee TOorlbs 
 
 down to the last hour of his martyrdom, it was a 
 long story of sickness and hardship and loneli¬ 
 ness and imprisonment and peril. And yet 
 when we come to assess the world within; when 
 we catalogue the inward laurels, the trophies 
 won on the field of character; when we count up 
 the spiritual garlands, the triumphal arches of 
 the inner life; when we register the times that 
 he outmanoeuvred and routed the beast; when we 
 judge the man by this standard it was a life of 
 magnificent and daring mastery. He comes out 
 of the struggle wearing palms. 
 
 There is one expression along this line that the 
 Apostle uses that is worth looking into. It is 
 found in that great, thrilling climax where he is 
 enumerating the enemies we have to face,—tribu¬ 
 lation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, 
 peril, sword. And it will be recalled how he tosses 
 them all aside with the observation that in all 
 these things we are more than conquerors. 
 ‘‘ More than conquerors! ’ ’ How, it may be asked, 
 can one be more than a conqueror? Is that not 
 an impractical ideal, a sort of rhetorical flourish ? 
 Isn’t it a little too ethereal and super-mundane 
 to be true? No, a good many things we are 
 asked to believe are not ethereal enough to be 
 true. The Apostle is not speaking of the world 
 without. He is speaking, remember, of the 
 world within. And there are no limits to the 
 heights to which one can hope to soar in that sky. 
 
Conquering Cbree TKHorlbs 63 
 
 How many a hero has conquered the air, con¬ 
 quered the sea, conquered the mountains, con¬ 
 quered the cold, and then failed to conquer him¬ 
 self. Here is Alexander lying drunk under the 
 table while all around are the empty tankards 
 telling the story of the night’s debauch. He has 
 conquered the world and sighed for more worlds 
 to attack, but when face to face with the greater 
 world, the world within, he was a pitiable sight. 
 No man is a master here till he has learned to 
 master himself. What profit is there in over¬ 
 coming one’s enemy if we leave behind a legacy 
 of hate ? The right way to meet evil is to show 
 forth the opposite of it in one’s own life. If we 
 would conquer pride in men we must be clothed 
 with humility ourselves. If we would lift our 
 friend out of the depths of despair we must let 
 hope shine out of our own eyes. If we would 
 really get the better of our enemy we must love 
 him and do him a kindness. 
 
 This is the glory of men like Abraham Lincoln. 
 It will be remembered when Richmond was taken 
 the military men arranged a great procession. 
 They had planned to march into the captured 
 city with Lincoln heading the parade. “But,” 
 said the President, “how will I look at the head 
 of those troops; that is no place for me.” 
 “Why,” they said, “you are the President, that 
 is the very place for you.” “But,” said the 
 great man, “will it not hurt the feelings of the 
 
64 Gonquerinq TTbree Worlbs 
 
 Southern people to have such a procession ?” 
 They answered, “We must not think of that; we 
 must think of the victory.” “But,” said Mr. 
 Lincoln, “ I do think of that, and if I go to Rich¬ 
 mond I will go in a quiet way: I will go with no 
 banners.” And so the whole program was de¬ 
 feated, and when President Lincoln did go down 
 to Richmond a few days later, he walked up the 
 street alone. And when he spoke to the people, 
 this is what he said: “ I am not here to see what 
 you can do for me, but I am here to see what we 
 can do for you.” 
 
 This has always been one of the crowning evils 
 of war. Disputes are never settled by the sword. 
 The victories won on the battlefields of earth do 
 not bring real peace; they bring hatred and bit¬ 
 terness and revenge. It was General Grant who 
 said he knew nothing sadder than a defeated 
 army, unless it was a victorious army. We have 
 it on good authority that Bismarck just before 
 he died said that if he were to wage another suc¬ 
 cessful war, one of the terms of peace would be 
 that Germany should pay a large indemnity to 
 the losers. We speak sometimes as if peace were 
 simply the cessation of hostilities. But is that so ? 
 Is peace nothing more than the sheathing of the 
 sword? Is it nothing more than a temporary 
 truce, a sort, of modus vivendi enabling nations 
 to patch up their troubles and get along together 
 somehow? Is that all it means? Surely it is 
 
Conquering Cbtee Motlbs 65 
 
 not enough to lay a country in ruins and call the 
 devastation peace! A man was once cheated out 
 of some money by a crook whom he had trusted. 
 He made no effort, however, to punish the fellow 
 and get even. Some one said to him, “ Why not 
 take the matter into the courts?” “Well,” he 
 answered, “it’s this way. If I do that, I will 
 likely win my case, but it will take a long time 
 and it will stir up a lot of bad blood, and I 
 reckon if I go to work I can make up in the mean¬ 
 time what I lost and feel a whole lot better.” 
 Surely that man had found the deeper secret. 
 He was like Lincoln. He had no room in his 
 heart for the memory of a wrong. 
 
 Some one has observed that there are four 
 ways in which to treat a fellow mortal who tries 
 to injure us. One is the way of vindictiveness. 
 It says, Well, if he hits me I will hit him back, 
 only a little harder. The second is the way of 
 retribution; If he hits me I will return the blow 
 and hand him a dose of his own elixir. “An eye 
 for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” The third is 
 the way of injured pride; If he tries to hurt me 
 I will just ignore the matter and treat him with 
 silent contempt. And the fourth is the way of 
 Lincoln; If a man wrongs me I will say to him, 
 “Well, my brother, you evidently do not want to 
 be my friend, but I do want to be yours. ’ 9 
 
 But there is still another world besides the 
 world without and the world within. It is pos- 
 
66 Conquering Cbree Moribs 
 
 sible to have one’s passions under control and yet 
 not be a victor in the Pauline sense. Mr. H. G-. 
 Wells gives us his judgment as to the six greatest 
 men in history. Few of us will agree with him 
 in the selection. It is astonishing, for one thing, 
 is it not, to put Asoka in this hall of fame, a man 
 who massacred his own brothers, and leave out, 
 well Paul, say. But it is interesting to note that 
 with this exception, not one of his heroes is a 
 great king who carved his deeds in bronze, nor a 
 great soldier who wrote them in blood, but five 
 gentle, unselfish souls, who achieved immortality 
 by living and labouring for others—Jesus, 
 Buddha, Aristotle, Bacon, Lincoln. Truly in¬ 
 deed 
 
 “ Conquest comes by fighting 
 More than conquest without fighting.” 
 
 I have always been charmed myself with the 
 life of General Gordon. Gordon is one of my 
 heroes. Although he was a soldier he never car¬ 
 ried a sword. He always led his troops unarmed. 
 He carried nothing but a cane painted white. 
 It was this fearless confidence that so inspired 
 his men. The man was so full of the spiritual 
 that his soldiers stood in awe of him. They said 
 he is not human; he is in league with the world 
 above. It was the man’s absolute goodness that 
 made him mighty. Or take St. Francis: Prob¬ 
 ably the man who has wielded the widest influ- 
 
Conquering Cbree Morlbs 
 
 67 
 
 ence on the world since the days of the Apostles 
 was St. Francis. How did he do it? He was 
 poor, as we know. Poverty was his bride. “He 
 was married to poverty .’’ It will be remem¬ 
 bered that when he started out upon the road to 
 follow the gleam, he surrendered every dollar he 
 had, gave up all his goods, and when his father, 
 who did not approve of his son’s foolish notions, 
 somewhat sternly reminded him that the clothes 
 on his body were not his own, the young man 
 took them off in the market-place and went out 
 into the world naked. Yet St. Francis of Assisi 
 has had more influence on mankind than any 
 Czar or Croesus or Caesar. No millionaire with 
 his untold millions has ever affected the human 
 race as St. Francis has. How did he do it ? He 
 did it by the sheer power of goodness. 
 
 And so it is not always the people who succeed, 
 as we say, who are the conquerors. Contrariwise 
 indeed, it would sometimes seem that the great 
 army of spiritual champions were what the world 
 calls failures. To go down to defeat coura¬ 
 geously, but with the flag of faith held aloft— 
 this is to be a real victor. To smile at pain with 
 the Love Divine near—this is to be a victor. To 
 look death in the face and be able to say: “Come 
 life, come death, come poverty or wealth, come 
 sickness, come health, come what will, what mat¬ 
 ter if only it be the will of God , 9 9 —this is to be 
 a victor. Some one notes that humanity might 
 
68 Conquering Cbree TOorlbs 
 
 have prospered fairly well without its successes, 
 but could never have gotten along without its 
 failures. Because pretty nearly every great 
 blessing we enjoy to-day is built upon a failure. 
 Across the river Tay in Scotland there is a won¬ 
 derful bridge, the longest in the world, but it is 
 laid upon the ruins of a failure. A great 
 engineer, Sir Thomas Bouch, many years before 
 had designed and completed a similar structure, 
 which collapsed one dark night in a gale and 
 carried with it fourscore human beings down to 
 a watery grave, and drove the famous engineer 
 into an asylum, a wreck both in body and mind. 
 Other engineers followed. They learned from 
 Sir Thomas’ mistakes; they improved upon his 
 plans; and their success is due largely to his fail¬ 
 ure. So three cheers to the man who fails. Not 
 infrequently he is the real victor. I am thinking 
 of a room where a lifelong pain is developing a 
 beautiful character. I am thinking of another 
 home where domestic infelicity is being borne 
 with a courage that no soldier boy in Flanders 
 ever excelled. I am picturing a quiet mother 
 growing pinched in face and bent in form be¬ 
 cause of a devil of a husband who is just as ugly 
 and hateful as a man could possibly be. Yes, 
 and further down the street, I am thinking of 
 another kind of a husband, nursing with cheer¬ 
 fulness and tenderness an invalid wife and try¬ 
 ing to make her comfortable and happy. And a 
 
Conquering Cbree Morins 69 
 
 step further there is another home where a 
 widow, with four little mouths to feed, is fighting 
 a battle in the face of the high cost of living that 
 calls for just as much grit and pluck and ginger 
 as any drive on the banks of the Somme. Aren’t 
 these things victories too? 
 
 “ O great is the hero who wins a name, 
 
 But greater many and many a time 
 Some pale-faced fellow who dies in shame, 
 
 And lets God finish the thought sublime.” 
 
 There is a story of a young priest who began 
 his ministry with great enthusiasm. He wished 
 to do good in the spirit of his Master, and that 
 Master was blessing him richly in his work. But 
 one day an old bishop asked him if he felt he 
 could go on just the same, provided he met with 
 failure. And the young priest in the joy of his 
 work said that he could go on no matter what the 
 results might be. Personal rewards were not es¬ 
 sential. Years passed by and the young man 
 met with reverses. His parish was not as re¬ 
 sponsive as once it wms. He saw little or no fruit 
 from his labours, and he lost in a measure the 
 consciousness of the Divine Presence. 
 
 One afternoon when things looked particularly 
 dark, he was thinking of the question the old 
 bishop asked him many years before, and he was 
 feeling very lonely and depressed. He started 
 out for a walk along the shore and came upon a 
 little hut where a poor widow lived. It was 
 
70 Conquering Cforee Morlfcs 
 
 growing dusk, and he noticed a brazier outside in 
 which a bright fire was burning. It was rather 
 cold and she was standing warming herself by 
 the blaze. Stepping up, he ventured “Good 
 evening.” She noticed that he was a priest of 
 the Church, and invited him into her humble 
 dwelling. “I have no fire in the room,” she 
 said, “but if you don’t mind coming into the 
 kitchen, you’ll find it comfortable I think.” 
 “And why do you keep this fire outside?” he 
 asked. To which she answered, and this was her 
 reply: “Do you see those rocks yonder? They 
 are very dangerous. Some years ago my only 
 boy was drowned out there,” pointing to the 
 dashing waves, 4 4 and ever since I have kept this 
 beacon burning as a warning to others. I can¬ 
 not afford two fires, and so I live in the kitchen 
 mostly and keep the one outside alive.” 
 
 The young priest was greatly touched. He 
 went away with a deep and solemn resolve. He 
 saw that he had been selfish. He had been think¬ 
 ing too much of himself and of his own personal 
 appreciation. And he went back determined to 
 keep the fire on the altar burning, even if the fire 
 in his own heart was cold. And it was not long 
 either till the old warmth returned. 
 
 I sing the hymn of the conquered, who fell in the battle 
 of life— 
 
 The hymn of the wounded, the beaten, who died over¬ 
 whelmed in the strife: 
 
Conquering XTbree Morlbs 
 
 
 Not the jubilant song of the victors, for whom the re¬ 
 sounding acclaim 
 
 Of nations was lifted in chorus, whose brows wore the 
 chaplet of fame— 
 
 But the hymn of the low and the humble, the weary, the 
 broken in heart, 
 
 Who strove and who failed, acting bravely a silent and 
 desperate part; 
 
 Whose youth bore no flower on its branches, whose 
 hopes burned in ashes away: 
 
 From whose hands slipped the prize they had grasped 
 at: who stood at the dying of day 
 
 With the work of their life all around them, unpitied, 
 unheeded, alone; 
 
 With death swooping down o’er their failure, and all 
 but their faith overthrown. 
 
 Speak, History, who are life’s victors? unroll thy long 
 annals and say— 
 
 Are they those whom the world called the victors, who 
 won the success of a day? 
 
 The martyrs, or Nero? the Spartans who fell at Ther¬ 
 mopylae’s tryst, 
 
 Or the Persians and Xerxes? his judges, or Socrates? 
 Pilate or Christ? 
 
 W. W. Story, 
 
RAINBOWS IN THE MORNING 
 
 “ Rainbow in the morning. 
 
 Sailors take warning; 
 
 Rainbow at night, 
 
 Sailors’ delight.” 
 
 NE of the striking things about 
 the Master is that His entrance 
 examinations are so stiff. He 
 never paints rainbows in the 
 morning. He saves His rain¬ 
 bows till the evening. The pic¬ 
 ture He sketches in the morning is usually dull 
 and drab. It is a bit uncheering and forbidding. 
 He seems to try purposely to dampen enthusi¬ 
 asm. He says the gate is strait, the way nar¬ 
 row. Never once does He veil in the smallest 
 way the hardships of His calling. He wants no 
 follower on false pretenses. He never lowers 
 His standard, never whittles down His terms. 
 We are not to follow Him because it pays, but 
 because it costs. 
 
 This certainly is not the usual procedure. The 
 world, for instance, never begins by doing busi¬ 
 ness in that way. Here filed away somewhere 
 among my letters is the prospectus of some new 
 stock venture. I think it is an oil well; no, I 
 
 72 
 
IRatnbows in tbe /[Doming 73 
 
 believe it is a gold mine. And the promise is 
 extremely inviting. Some one, by the way, has 
 noted that a gold mine is a hole in the ground 
 owned by a liar. Take the forecast of a Presi¬ 
 dential election. How glowing it is! No mat¬ 
 ter what Daily one reads. Both sides are confi¬ 
 dent of success. I cannot recall any Presidential 
 election where either party admitted defeat the 
 night before. Or instance some gladiatorial en¬ 
 counter. Who ever heard a pessimistic predic¬ 
 tion—well of a prize-fight say? Each side bets 
 on their man. He’s going to win sure. He can¬ 
 not possibly lose. He’s younger and stronger 
 and faster. Or he’s a harder hitter. He has 
 the punch, the reach, the steam, the stuff, the 
 smash, the wallop. This is the lingo we hear: 
 It is the way of the world I say. 
 
 One of the popular appeals in describing the 
 religious life to-day is to picture it as a very 
 simple matter. We have heard so much of the 
 simple Gospel that many are led to think that it 
 is simple in its practical workings and that no 
 great sacrifice is needed. True the cross is there, 
 but largely as an ornament. Or maybe it is 
 wreathed in woodbine. The road is brilliantly 
 lighted. It is a journey of ease and comfort and 
 beautiful outlook along the delectable mountains. 
 
 But when Jesus presents His case He paints 
 the dark side. He speaks of the hardships, the 
 likelihood of failure. It is a struggle, a battle, 
 
74 IRatnbows in tbe /iDorntna 
 
 a martyrdom, a crusade. He seems to be so fear¬ 
 ful of over-colouring things that sometimes it 
 almost looks as if He were leaning the other 
 way. The road is rough, the cross is heavy, the 
 wolves are fierce, the sacrifice is great. It is a 
 battle royal to the end. This conflict is not for 
 simpering dandies: it takes a Theodore Roose¬ 
 velt. The citadel suffers violence and the violent 
 take it by force. In a word, discipleship is a 
 difficult and a daring thing. 
 
 “ If I find Him if I follow, 
 
 What His guerdon here? 
 
 Many a sorrow, many a labour, 
 
 Many a tear.” 
 
 The familiar story of the rich young ruler is 
 one of many illustrations. One is almost startled 
 at the uncompromising attitude taken. Here 
 was a rich young man, clean, wholesome, manly. 
 He had great possessions and to crown all the 
 Master loved him. Surely he must have been a 
 most lovable fellow when it is expressly stated 
 that the Master loved him. Will it not be politic 
 to enlist such an influential recruit? Would it 
 not be tactful to strain matters a bit and make 
 room for such a desirable prize? Think what a 
 sort of Gibraltar his name would be to the new 
 movement. But not so. He is confronted with 
 the most drastic conditions and the young man 
 turned away sorrowful. On another occasion 
 three men heard Him speak, and so moved were 
 
tRainfeows in tbe flDornino 75 
 
 they that they resolved to join His order. To 
 the first He said, “I have not where to lay my 
 head.” To the second He said, 4 ‘Let the dead 
 bury their dead.” To the third, “Never mind 
 saying good-bye to your friends, come and follow 
 me.” 
 
 Yes, the gate to His Kingdom is narrow, but 
 then is not the gate to every kingdom, save the 
 kingdom of darkness, narrow? In the whole 
 wide realm of culture where are the wide gates? 
 The kingdom of learning! What a narrow door 
 it is! And it is never left open. Did not Daniel 
 Webster say, “I have worked more than twelve 
 hours a day for fifty years.” The kingdom of 
 art! Think you that door is wide ? Read the life 
 of Solon Borglum and be disabused. Did not 
 Ruskin say, “To colour well requires your life, 
 it cannot be done cheaper.” The kingdom of 
 letters! Maybe you reckon that door is easy. 
 If so, I would recommend that you read Carlyle’s 
 preface to his “French Revolution,” and ponder 
 this confession, “This has been the perspiration 
 of my very heart.” Where are the kingdoms, I 
 insist, whose gates are wide and free and easy of 
 access? The old Greek apiarist thought to save 
 his bees exertion. So he cut their wings and 
 gathered flowers for them to work upon at home, 
 only to learn that such bees make no honey. 
 Nothing anywhere without agony and strain. 
 Surely if the road to music is lined with thorns 
 
76 
 
 IRainbows in tbe /iDornina 
 
 it cannot be possible that the road to character 
 is carpeted with flowers. 
 
 One of my own favourite heroes is Epictetus. 
 Who does not admire the old man as he says to 
 his tyrant, “You would cripple me, would you? 
 You would break my arm, would you? You 
 would cut out my tongue, would you ? Then cut 
 it out; you cannot touch me .’ 7 Surely what we 
 need is more of this mettle in the Church. There 
 are many who feel that one trouble with the 
 Church to-day is that we are not making the 
 appeal sufficiently heroic. Our religion is too 
 much simply a matter of dull respectable con¬ 
 ventionality. How children love books of adven¬ 
 ture! We are always talking about the moral 
 equivalents of war. What are those moral 
 equivalents? Are there any such equivalents? 
 One reason why war in spite of all its hor¬ 
 rors still survives, is no doubt because the 
 human heart loves a hero. High ideals never 
 seem so high as when men are willing to die for 
 them. Offer a strong, healthy, young chap ease 
 and he will shake his head and turn away. But 
 point out to him a perilous adventure and his 
 imagination is fired. Even the sports that in¬ 
 volve some risk are the popular sports to-day. 
 Perhaps what the Church needs just now more 
 than anything else is persecution. We are not 
 appealing sufficiently to the heroic in men. 
 Christianity has always been popular when it 
 
IRainbows in the flDotning 
 
 77 
 
 has meant that one might be put to death for his 
 faith. What was it made the call of the snow so 
 clear and compelling to Captain Scott? It was 
 the romance of hardship, was it not? Instance 
 the late Sir Ernest Shackleton. He proposed a 
 dash across the Antarctic continent and this is 
 how his proposal was received. Let us quote his 
 own words: “l was deluged with applications. 
 One would have thought that a march over snow 
 and ice for more than two thousand miles was 
 the dizziest climax of human happiness.” And 
 then he goes on to tell us how millionaires and 
 titled lords offered to wash dishes and scrub 
 decks if he would only take them. Naval men 
 volunteered to resign their commissions if they 
 might only be included in the great “ polar 
 party.” The London office of the expedition 
 was fairly mobbed by young lads eager for the 
 adventure. Even schoolboys tried to pass them¬ 
 selves off as older than their years. Why, one’s 
 blood tingles when one reads the full story of 
 the preparations for the start of this daring navi¬ 
 gator. One cannot well help recalling the fa¬ 
 miliar words of Garibaldi: “Soldiers,” said the 
 great captain, “soldiers! What I have to offer 
 you is fatigue, danger, struggle and death; the 
 chill of the cold night in the open air, and heat 
 under the burning sun; no lodges, no munitions, 
 no provisions, but forced marches, dangerous 
 watch-posts, and the continual struggle with the 
 
78 
 
 tRambows in tbe /iBorning 
 
 bayonet against batteries. Those who love free¬ 
 dom and country, follow me.” 
 
 Some months ago a brave fireman lost his life 
 fighting a fire here in our city. The chief of the 
 Fire Department in commenting on his death 
 used these words: 1 ‘ Firemen have been killed in 
 this city before, and firemen are being killed in 
 this city right along. The fact is, fighting fire 
 in New York is a dangerous, hazardous business. 
 Now every man in this department knows that. 
 He knew it before he joined the department. 
 Consequently, when he joined this department 
 his act of bravery was already achieved. Any¬ 
 thing that follows, even death, is just in the 
 line of the day’s work. This man did not go in 
 there intending to die. He went in to put 
 the fire out—and he died and that is all there 
 is to it.” What a splendid description of the 
 Christian life! To be a soldier is always a strenu¬ 
 ous task. And anything that follows is just in 
 line with the day’s work. 
 
 The world paints its rainbows in the morning. 
 It gives its best wine at the start. Eevivals are 
 not needed to secure volunteers for the broad 
 highway. No urging is needed for that unholy 
 crusade. The gate is wide and open and dazzling 
 and alluring. Drunkenness begins in the social 
 hour, the happy comradeship. The clusters are 
 sweet. At first the wine is red, it adds its colour 
 even to the cup. I think it is the simplest and 
 
IRainbows in the /JDorntmj 
 
 79 
 
 sheerest folly to pretend that there are no fasci¬ 
 nations in a voluptuous career. There are many 
 fascinations. There is a wild delight in the mad 
 unbridled swing of human passion. The whole 
 Saturnalia is tremendously fascinating. 
 
 “ The graybeard, Old Wisdom, may boast of his treas¬ 
 ures, 
 
 Give me with gay Folly to live; 
 
 I grant him his calm-blooded, time-settled pleasures, 
 But Folly has raptures to give.” 
 
 Tremendously fascinating, but its fascinations 
 are all in the morning. Toward evening the 
 colours fade; soon they fade away. The draught 
 gets insipid to the taste, then flat, then bitter. 
 And in the end it bites, bites like a serpent and 
 stings like an adder. 
 
vm 
 
 RAINBOWS AT NIGHT 
 
 HERE are three or four pictures 
 flung on the Bible canvas that 
 for sheer emotion stand out in 
 literature unrivalled. One is 
 the beautiful story of Ruth and 
 Naomi. Another is David’s 
 elegy over Absalom. Who can read this immor¬ 
 tal lament for the first time, or for that matter 
 the hundred and first, without his pulse beating 
 faster? Still another is the exposure where 
 Joseph makes himself known to his brethren. 
 But perhaps one of the most genuinely affecting 
 in the whole record is that scene in which the 
 Apostle is bidding good-bye to the elders at 
 Ephesus. The great leader is completing his 
 labours. He is within hail of the end. He is 
 calling them to witness that he has kept back 
 nothing that was profitable. He looks back on 
 his ministry with conscious and confident ap¬ 
 proval, and then glances forward to the hills 
 which his feet were soon to tread. He is not 
 sure just what dark waters he may yet have to 
 cross before he scales those shining peaks. But 
 that matters not; that is not material. He is 
 
 80 
 
IRatnbows at Biabt 
 
 81 
 
 prepared for the worst if the worst is to be his. 
 He reminds one of that seal adopted by one of 
 our Missionary Boards, in which an ox is de¬ 
 picted standing meekly between a plow and an 
 altar, while underneath are the words, “Beady 
 for either.” The Apostle is ready for either. 
 He would like to go and he would like to stay. 
 He cannot decide which is preferable. The only 
 thing that causes him anxiety is that he might 
 be certain of finishing his course with joy, and 
 of going out and up with flying colours. 
 
 There is a story by a living novelist. It is 
 the story of a young Englishman who was start¬ 
 ing out on a political career. He was gifted and 
 clever but lacking in the backbone of a strong 
 conviction. One day he is talking over his plans 
 with his fiancee. She has a higher and a nobler 
 outlook on life than her lover, and in the course 
 of her conversation she drops the remark, “It 
 seems to me that no work is really worth doing 
 at all except the work which has a beautiful rain- 
 bow-dream at its heart/’ This quiet observa¬ 
 tion describes the Apostle exactly. He had a 
 beautiful rainbow-dream in his heart, a dream of 
 splendour. For this dream he sacrificed all 
 things. For this dream he lived and laboured. 
 Nothing else counted; nothing else mattered. 
 And the dream was the joy set before him. The 
 joy of being able to say at the close that he had 
 never flinched, that he had been true to the great 
 
82 
 
 IRainbows at IFUgbt 
 
 passion of his ministry. “For none of these 
 things move me, neither count I my life dear 
 unto me; indeed I set no value at all on my life 
 as compared with the joy of finishing my 
 course. ’ ’ 
 
 To be sure the Apostle does not mean to in¬ 
 timate that he expected to finish his work. Be¬ 
 cause no one ever does that. It matters not how 
 successful the career, unfinished must always be 
 written across its pages. No true man ever at¬ 
 tains to more than a small part of what he aims 
 at. Night always falls before one gets the final 
 touches on. Thorwaldsen began his greatest 
 group but he never finished it. Matthew Henry 
 worked for years on his commentary but he only 
 got as far as the book of Acts. Charles Dickens 
 is busy with Edwin Drood. It was to have been 
 given to the printer in twelve monthly parts, 
 but only six were contributed when the summons 
 came. Henry Buckle writes his great work ‘ ‘ The 
 History of Civilization.” He published the first 
 volume and then goes travelling to gather ma¬ 
 terial for the second. He is seized with fever in 
 the Holy Land and dies at Damascus, talking all 
 the time in his delirium about his almost com¬ 
 pleted monumental work. “Oh, my book, my 
 book. I shall never finish my book.” We draw 
 the plans and specifications and make the blue¬ 
 prints perhaps, and sometimes we see construc¬ 
 tion started, but as a rule some one else steps 
 
tRainbows at IRigbt 83 
 
 in to top off the structure. Moses was not per¬ 
 mitted to enter the promised land. Livingstone 
 died with the great dream of his heart unreal¬ 
 ized, the open sore of the world unhealed. Hud¬ 
 son Taylor only had time to pluck a few jewels 
 from the great shore of human wreckage. Sir 
 Walter Scott was one of the bravest soldiers that 
 ever buckled on armour and the closing chapter 
 of his life is most pathetic. He had been ill but 
 was recovering, and during his convalescence he 
 had marked out for himself a great program. 
 4 4 Take me to my room and fetch the keys of my 
 desk, ’ ’ he said to his daughter one morning. The 
 daughter went into the study and arranged his 
 desk, wheeling him later in his chair to the old 
 familiar spot where Waverley had been written. 
 4 4 Now give me my pen, and leave me here for a 
 little to myself.’ 9 His daughter put the pen into 
 his hand, and he endeavoured to close his fingers 
 on it, but they refused their office. It dropped 
 on the paper. He sank back upon his pillows, 
 silent tears rolling down his cheeks. But com¬ 
 posing himself, by and by, he was taken out of 
 doors, where he dropped into slumber. When 
 he was awakening Laidlaw said to him, 4 4 Sir 
 Walter has had a little repose.” The tears again 
 rushed to his eyes. 44 Friends,” said he, 44 don’t 
 let me expose myself. Get me to bed. That’s 
 the only place.” 
 
 So let us repeat it over and over and keep on 
 
54 
 
 IRatttbows at Wgbt 
 
 repeating: nothing down here is ever finished. 
 It is a world of rudiments and first sketches. 
 Even the world itself is never finished. The 
 rocks, the trees, the caves, the canons, how lack¬ 
 ing they all are in what the artist calls finish. 
 Did you say the mountain is finished ? Why, its 
 very shape is being altered every passing year. 
 Did you say the prairie is finished ? It is not so 
 very long ago that the site of our vast city was 
 a pasture field. Up yonder was a grove of trees, 
 with birds singing in the branches. Then came 
 the axe of the woodman and then the plow of 
 the farmer and the saw of the carpenter and 
 then the cottage and then the store and then the 
 skyscraper. Truly we live in an unfinished 
 world. The old idea that the Creator flung out 
 this mighty cosmos in perfect form and then re¬ 
 tired forever, is dismissed to-day as idle stuff. 
 With a wider knowledge has come a more rea¬ 
 sonable view. The world is never finished; it is 
 in process of evolution. The statement that man 
 was made in the divine likeness is prophecy not 
 history. God made the world and He is toiling 
 still at the task. Some one has said that it 
 would be a good thing if the first verse of Genesis 
 had been separated from the other verses and 
 labelled Chapter I, so leaving enough millions 
 of years between the first verse and the second 
 to satisfy any Fundamentalist or Modernist. 
 As Joaquin Miller says in his poem on Alaska: 
 
IRainbows at iRtgbt 
 
 85 
 
 “ Hear the avalanche hurled 
 Down this unfinished world.” 
 
 But if our work is never finished, our course 
 is. It must be borne in mind that this word 
 finish has two meanings. There is a vast differ¬ 
 ence between perfecting a task and getting to the 
 end of it. Many are getting to the end of the 
 march. To some the roar of the ocean is already 
 distinct. They can hear the sound of the break¬ 
 ers. A great agnostic recently remarked, “This 
 world seems to be a very good place if it would 
 only last.” What a bitter-sweet sort of sen¬ 
 tence that is! “If it would only last!” As rare 
 Samuel Rutherford puts it, ‘ ‘ Build your nest on 
 no tree in this world; the whole forest has been 
 sold over to death.” Death is the merciless 
 mortgagee who eventually forecloses on us all. 
 
 But to get to the end of the long struggle 
 triumphantly! To look back with satisfaction 
 and then forward with hope. To near the 
 goal in the spirit of rejoicing! To see rain¬ 
 bows at night! Rainbows in the morning are 
 beautiful but nothing like rainbows at night. 
 Paul was a happy pilgrim, and his happiness in¬ 
 creased as he neared the goal. His letter to the 
 Philippians, written within sight of the end, is 
 a perfect burst of gladness; in its four short 
 chapters he uses the word joy sixteen times. 
 This is one reason for the charm of George Fred¬ 
 erick Watts. He is a prophet of joy and hope 
 
86 
 
 IRainbows at IRigbt 
 
 in the eventide. The artists usually portray 
 Time as an old man, tired and decrepit and 
 sinking into senility and decay. But in Watts’ 
 great picture, Time is represented as a youth 
 of energy and dash and vigour. His hair is 
 blown back from his face, his eyes are glitter¬ 
 ing with gladness, he has a banner in his hand, 
 and he is looking out across the fields in the 
 morning of life. The picture is characteristic 
 and it is true. Time ought never to be old. 
 Time is young and strong and charged with 
 vitality. 
 
 In his address recently delivered before St. 
 Andrew’s University Sir James Barrie read a 
 letter which he had received from Captain Scott 
 shortly before he died. The letter was written 
 in the Antarctic tent where his body and those 
 of his gallant comrades were latterly found. It 
 begins: “We are pegging out in a very comfort¬ 
 less spot. Hoping this letter may be found and 
 sent to you, I write you a word of farewell. I 
 want you to think well of me and of my end. 
 Good-bye—I am not at all afraid of the end but 
 sad to miss many a simple pleasure which I had 
 planned for the future in our long marches. 
 We are in a desperate state—feet frozen, no 
 fuel and a long way from food, but it would do 
 your heart good to be in our tent, to hear our 
 songs and our cheery conversation. We are very 
 near the end. We did intend to finish ourselves 
 
IRainbows at IRiQbt 
 
 87 
 
 when things proved like this, but we have de¬ 
 cided to die naturally without.” There is at 
 least one immortal sentence in that letter, “ Their 
 songs and cheery conversation.” The story is a 
 great one: it stirs the blood, it gives the spinal 
 chill. But it is not one whit greater than many 
 another. 
 
 Here is Henry Drummond. His was a very 
 notable and a very wonderful career. He was 
 one of the real heroes of the century. He died 
 when he was only forty-six. His story has been 
 given to us by his college classmate and life¬ 
 long friend George Adam Smith. In this tender 
 and touching tribute Sir George shows us what 
 a record of toil and labour and sacrifice it was, 
 how he gave himself unsparingly to the cause of 
 truth and human betterment. Then he relates 
 the lingering years of suffering, how with shat¬ 
 tered nerves and whitened hair he met the in¬ 
 evitable. He knew the end was not far off. He 
 knew his race was nearly run. He was bidding 
 good-bye to a world in which he had played a 
 star part. He was leaving a host of friends who 
 loved him. He suffered excruciating pain, but 
 all through those months of torture he kept his 
 smile and his cheerfulness and his love of fun 
 and his simple trust, and at last passed on into 
 the silence with a Jubilate on his lips. Isn’t that 
 great, too? Really is the Antarctic tale any 
 greater? 
 
88 
 
 IRainbows at Wgbt 
 
 The Apostle himself is our shining example. 
 He wished to die in the harness, with the tide 
 high and full and peaceful. He wished no moan¬ 
 ing of the bar when he put out to sea. One 
 cannot but feel that it is the ideal way to answer 
 the call. For after all, the greatest joy that one 
 can find is the joy that comes from the exercise 
 of our full powers in doing faithful, honest, lov¬ 
 ing work. There is a book called ‘ ‘ Little Ann, ’ ’ 
 and in it there is a story of a miller. All his life 
 long he had been just a miller and his home was 
 close to the dam. When the call came, they 
 stopped the mill lest the noise might disturb 
 him. But in the morning he was restless. He 
 could not speak, but he kept pointing to the dam. 
 They were puzzled to know what he meant, 
 until one of the workmen turned on the flume, 
 and started the great wheel again with its creak¬ 
 ing machinery. Then the old miller turned over 
 and fell asleep. There is a lesson in that for 
 us. The lesson is to find joy in our work, to 
 find the music of life in the mill wheel. The 
 great thing is to sing doing one’s daily task. I 
 recall the story of a soldier boy who was 
 wounded. When they carried him into the hos¬ 
 pital he was whistling a song. The nurse said 
 to him, “ I guess the pain is much better, isn’t 
 it?” “No,” he answered, “but I cannot stand 
 it any other way.” I like to read the life of 
 Cowper. When he was an old man and knew 
 
IRainbows at IFUgbt 
 
 89 
 
 liis time was short, he asked one day to be car¬ 
 ried into his library. There he went from shelf 
 to shelf, taking down some of the old favourite 
 authors and saying good-bye to them. He picked 
 up his Milton and his Addison and his Sophocles 
 and glanced through them, and then putting 
 them back in their places, he whispered, “Good¬ 
 bye, old friends, you have been wise teachers to 
 me . 5 ’ 
 
 A traveller in Japan paused before a worker 
 in ivory and watched him carve an exquisite 
 figure. “Are you not sorry to part with this 
 when it’s finished V 9 he asked. “No, I expect 
 the next will be better / 9 came the answer. 
 George Matheson says that every schoolboy 
 studies his lessons not in the light of the lamp 
 but in the light of the coming holiday. He 
 means that we live by our expectations. 
 
 “ I wish there were some wonderful place 
 Called the Land of Beginning Again, 
 
 Where all our mistakes and all our heartaches, 
 
 And all of our selfish grief, 
 
 Could be dropped like a shabby old coat at the door, 
 And never put on again. 
 
 “I wish we could come on it all unaware, 
 
 Like the hunter who finds a lost trail; 
 
 I wish that the one whom our blindness had done 
 The greatest injustice of all 
 
 Could be at the gates like an old friend that waits 
 For the comrade he’s gladdest to hail. 
 
 “ We could find all the things we intended to do 
 But forgot and remembered—too late: 
 
 Little praises unspoken, little promises broken, 
 
90 IRatnbows at IRigbt 
 
 And all of the thousand and one 
 
 Little duties neglected that might have perfected 
 
 The day for one less fortunate. 
 
 “ It couldn’t be possible not to be kind 
 In the Land of Beginning Again, 
 
 And the ones we misjudged and the ones whom 
 we grudged 
 
 Their moments of victory here 
 
 Would find in the grasp of our loving clasp 
 
 More than penitent lips could explain. 
 
 “For what had been hardest we’d know has been 
 best, 
 
 And what had seemed loss would be gainj^ 
 
 For there isn’t a sting that will not take wing 
 When we’ve freed it and laughed it away; 
 
 And I think that the laughter is most what we’re 
 after, 
 
 In the Land of Beginning Again. 
 
 “ So I wish that there were some wonderful place 
 Called the Land of Beginning Again, 
 
 Where all our mistakes and all our heartaches, 
 
 And all our poor selfish grief 
 
 Could be dropped like a shabby old coat at the door 
 
 And never put on again.” 
 
DC 
 
 THE DEVIL OF FEAR 
 
 HERE is a command in the Old 
 Version of the Good Book that 
 bids us “take no thought for 
 the morrow/ ’ but when we get 
 down to real business it turns 
 out to be a very puzzling piece 
 of advice. Because we see all about us that the 
 people who follow this injunction are nearly al¬ 
 ways no good. They’re triflers, loafers, drones, 
 every one of them. The savage of the South 
 Seas sitting under his banana tree smoking his 
 gagroot may follow this direction, but it cer¬ 
 tainly is not the sign-board for earnest, serious 
 men. No wise husband would advise such a 
 policy, no insurance company would recommend 
 it, no business corporation would act upon it, no 
 statesman would incorporate it into his platform, 
 no chancellor into his budget. No admiral or 
 general would consider it seriously for one little 
 moment in his plan of naval or military strategy. 
 The very glory of our civilization is in taking 
 thought, taking thought for to-morrow, taking 
 thought for all the to-morrows, taking thought 
 for the time when there will be no to-morrow. 
 
 9 1 
 
92 
 
 Ube H>evil of JFear 
 
 Because eternity is timeless and to-morrowless 
 and we are to take ceaseless thought for that. 
 The secret of all successful men belies any such 
 foolish counsel. Think of Bancroft spending six 
 and twenty years on his history. Think of Gib¬ 
 bon putting a full score of years into his 4 ‘De¬ 
 cline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” Witness 
 Titian giving seven long years to his Last Sup¬ 
 per! Or Leonardo toiling for four years on the 
 head of Mona Lisa. Or instance George Eliot 
 reading a thousand volumes before she finished 
 Daniel Deronda. Taking thought has done all 
 these things, taking very strenuous thought, tak¬ 
 ing very laborious thought. The man who takes 
 no thought is not only an idler, he is a down¬ 
 right sinner. Some one has said that the world’s 
 failure to-day is more intellectual than moral, 
 meaning thereby that evil is wrought more by 
 want of thought than by want of heart. 
 Thoughtlessness is one of the classic sins of the 
 age. 
 
 Of course the command is simple as rain on 
 cherry blossoms when we read it right. It means 
 that we are to take no anxious thought, and, as 
 Kipling says, that is another story. “Take no 
 anxious thought for to-morrow.” To-morrow 
 will bring its own anxieties, so do not anticipate 
 them. Sufficient for each day are its own dis¬ 
 tracting cares. Do not overload to-day with the 
 burdens of to-morrow. To-morrow will bring its 
 
Zhc Bevnl of feat 
 
 93 
 
 own weary load. Do you recall the story of the 
 Royal Georgef She was a great battleship but 
 she turned turtle in the harbour at Spithead and 
 went down with her commander and eight hun¬ 
 dred of her crew. And the tragedy was caused 
 by the shifting of her guns. Too much weight 
 was put on her port side, and over went this 
 splendid man-of-war. It is a symbol of many a 
 wreckage in life. Too much weight at one point 
 has toppled over many a noble craft. 
 
 I doubt if there is a sin in the decalogue as 
 common as worry. Some one insists that worry 
 has slain more victims than war; another says 
 more even than disease. We all try to avoid 
 wrinkles on the body, but how many of us have 
 deep ugly creases on our souls. Sometimes I say 
 to my child, “My dear, don’t frown. Every time 
 you frown it leaves behind a little wrinkle.” 
 But we need to be reminded that the soul can 
 frown too. What are some of the things that 
 cause the soul to frown ? 
 
 Well, there is covetousness. Men are covetous. 
 ITow many have the frown of covetousness on 
 their faces! Covetousness is an inordinate desire 
 to obtain and possess things. There is a passion 
 in the most of us to pile up a great mass of 
 worldly stuff, and as a rule the only thing it 
 brings is anxiety. It never brings peace of 
 mind; it almost invariably brings the opposite. 
 It never contributes to the real secret of life. 
 
94 
 
 TEbe Devil of jfeav 
 
 “Take heed and beware of covetousness,’’ says 
 the Master, “for a man’s life consisteth not in 
 the abundance of the things which he possess- 
 eth.” Mr. Hornaday tells us in his recent book 
 “The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals,” 
 that the beavers out here in the park, although 
 they are fed every day and have nothing to fear 
 as far as hunger is concerned, yet the instinct of 
 winter storage is so strong in them that they will 
 take half their food allowance and hide it away 
 in some little corner of their winter habitation. 
 It is a good deal like that with us. We have 
 such a tenacious and deep-seated conviction that 
 it is the things that are material that are the 
 worth-while things; the moral and spiritual 
 values are secondary; the claims of the body 
 stand first. And so it happens that a life based 
 on this belief tends to covetousness and avarice 
 and grasping bodily indulgence. Of course it 
 follows that such a life is the slave of anxiety 
 and solicitude and carping care. “The honey, 
 alas, does not always pay for the sting.” 
 
 It isn’t wrong to take thought, let us insist. 
 The whole point is, what are we to take thought 
 about? Take thought about your work: take 
 thought about your ways: take thought about 
 your good name: take thought about doing your 
 duty. But take no thought about your life. 
 Your life is God’s business. He will attend to 
 that. Take thought about the doing well of your 
 
Ebe Devil of feat 
 
 95 
 
 daily task, about fulfilling the will of your Fa¬ 
 ther. God will feed you and clothe you and 
 protect you. You need have no worry along 
 that line. He will provide. If you doubt that 
 you doubt Him. 
 
 Then there is Fear . How many have made 
 themselves positively ugly with the frown of 
 Fear! And what a really dreadful thing is 
 fear. Tell me what a man fears and I will tell 
 you what he is. Fear is the master enemy of the 
 soul. There is no devil like the devil of Fear. 
 And what multitudes are ruled by this tyrant! 
 Galsworthy in one of his dramas says: 4 4 Perhaps 
 the greater part of the misery of the human race 
 comes not from the actual presence of trouble, 
 but from the dread of it.” What a world this 
 would be if fear were driven out of it! Fear is 
 one of the basest passions of the human soul. 
 The greatest weakness in most lives is fear. 
 When a man is fearful his gift of reasoning is 
 clouded, his nerve is unsteady, his vision is ob¬ 
 scured ; he loses all power of sober and sane and 
 quick decision. Fear, furthermore, predisposes to 
 the very danger we are trying to avoid. The 
 fear of a thing is not infrequently the cause of 
 it. The man who is afraid of catching cold is 
 usually the first man to catch cold. And un¬ 
 fortunately the alarmist is always with us to 
 sound the signal and start the stampede. He is 
 always nosing danger. He is always piling up 
 
96 
 
 XTbe £>e\>U ot JFear 
 
 mountains. He is always anticipating trouble. 
 “The tomato causes cancer, the daffodil spreads 
 influenza, flowers should not be permitted in the 
 sick room. There is peril even in the com¬ 
 munion cup .’ 7 William James says, “If you are 
 walking through a forest and get afraid and start 
 to run, every tree will run after you, but if you 
 stand and hold your ground every tree will be¬ 
 come your friend . 7 7 George Herbert in his fasci¬ 
 nating volume “The Country Parson 77 has the 
 same wdiolesome bit of advice. “If you are go¬ 
 ing through a cemetery , 77 he says, “and think 
 you see a ghost, go right up and speak to it. 
 You will likely find that instead of being a ghost 
 it is nothing but a sheet hung out to dry . 77 Or 
 as a friend of mine learned when he found him¬ 
 self in a similar plight, and boldly turned round 
 and faced the fearful thing, it was nothing but 
 a white cow lying down and ruminating. 
 
 The great trouble with fear is that it destroys 
 calm and sober thinking. When a man fears he 
 is more or less panicky. And when one is pan¬ 
 icky he is almost certain to do something foolish. 
 There is an expression in golf called pressing. 
 It means that the player is trying to force things; 
 he is getting anxious; he is trying for distance. 
 The moment a golfer begins to press it 7 s all up 
 with him. Some one remarks that in all de¬ 
 partments of life we should learn not to press. 
 Pressing is always fatal. It always lands you in 
 
Ufoe of jfear 
 
 97 
 
 a bunker and life’s links are full of bunkers. 
 It puts you in a fluster. It destroys serenity 
 and calm and coordination and timing. 
 
 How pitifully prevalent to-day is fear! Listen 
 to this writer in a recent issue of Herbert’s 
 Journal: “The civilized world at present seems 
 to many of us to be living, as it were, under a 
 cloud. Its dominant mood is that of unhappi¬ 
 ness, depression, unrest. It is obsessed by 
 anxieties and suspicions, uncertain of its hold on 
 life. It has forgotten joy. Like a neurotic, 
 whose sickness has no name, and few definite 
 symptoms beyond general uneasiness and lack 
 of hope, it is incapable of the existence which it 
 feels to be wholesome and complete. Impotent 
 and uncertain of aim, full of conflicts it cannot 
 resolve, society is becoming more and more 
 querulous, less and less reasonable. ’ ’ This writer 
 goes on to argue that it was fear that caused the 
 war. England feared the military expansion 
 of Germany. Germany feared the commercial 
 supremacy of England. And this led on to in¬ 
 creasing and ever increasing armaments, piling 
 up great monuments of destruction and torture. 
 And the same game is still being played. We 
 are hearing once more the same old bluster and 
 brag about military preeminence. We are told 
 it is a necessary insurance. Mark the stark cool¬ 
 ness of the claim. Insurance forsooth. Why in¬ 
 surance? Where does the insurance come in? 
 
98 
 
 Ube 'Devil of ffear 
 
 Certainly not insurance against! For insurance 
 never prevented a fire. Insurance aims to make 
 good the loss, that is all. Insurance never pre¬ 
 vents. Insurance only restores. When one’s 
 house burns down one realizes what a wise thing 
 it was to have it insured. But when a world 
 burns down, who is going to make good that 
 loss? Insurance never prevented fire. Insur¬ 
 ance never prevented anything. 
 
 The same game, I repeat, is still being played. 
 Why must it be? Why must every nation keep 
 on at the same old, mad, imbecile business? It 
 is fear, is it not? Every nation fears its neigh¬ 
 bour as a potential foe. Fear breeds suspicion. 
 Fear sees an enemy in a rival. Fear begets 
 envy, ill-will, hatred, murder. Fear is the fore¬ 
 runner of war. It may camouflage as patriotism, 
 but there’s no patriotism about it. Beal, genuine 
 patriotism is afraid of nothing but injustice and 
 unrighteousness and wrong. It is pure and 
 simple fear. 
 
 Then think of all the distrust there is in our 
 hearts. After all, the great reason for most of 
 our anxiety is because we lack trust. To-day has 
 burdens enough of its own. Why pile to-morrow 
 on its back? Worrying over to-morrow is a 
 heathenish practice. “ After all these things do 
 the heathen seek.” Once upon a time there 
 lived a man and he never knew what care meant, 
 because he lived a life of perfect trust. The 
 
XLbc H)evil of feat 
 
 99 
 
 true man labours for results that he will 
 never see himself. If he felt that to-morrow 
 would fail him, why the very nerve of his spirit 
 would be cut. It is for the future that he lives. 
 Man at his best is a prophet, a seer. He sees 
 that which is invisible. “Be not over-anxious 
 about worldly things.’’ And some have inter¬ 
 preted that as meaning that we are to think so 
 much about heavenly things that the things of 
 earth may be neglected. But this is to entirely 
 miss the point. As long as I am in this world 
 I am to exercise whatever little cunning I may 
 have of hand and brain and industry. I have 
 a family to support and a home to protect. To 
 be lax and loose in doing my work, to be careless 
 about paying my debts, to be slipshod in carry¬ 
 ing on my business, is not to be honouring God. 
 Some one says: “He who does not do his duty in 
 this world will not do his duty in any world.” 
 If a man is not interested in the city in which 
 he lives, in its welfare, in its beauty and cleanli¬ 
 ness, what reason have we to expect that he is 
 going to be greatly interested in the City of 
 God? To shirk one’s privilege as a citizen is a 
 dastardly and ignoble thing. This is not what 
 the Master means at all. To do our full duty on 
 earth is the very best preparation possible for 
 the heavenly life. 
 
 And anyway the simple fact is, we ought to 
 trust because in its last analysis, we have very 
 
too 
 
 Zhe H>e\>U of feat 
 
 little to do with the greatest things in onr lives. 
 The great things have all been decided for us. 
 The age in which I was to live, nobody asked my 
 wishes about that. I should like to have lived 
 in the days of Pericles and Plato. I should 
 like to have walked the streets of Kome in the 
 time of her imposing glory. I would not mind 
 having been a playmate of Shakespeare’s and 
 having fished with him along the banks of the 
 Avon. Who my father or mother was to be, 
 what colour I would select for my skin, I was 
 not asked about any of these things. I was not 
 consulted in regard to my personal appearance. 
 If I had been, no doubt I, as Bernard Shaw 
 says, would have had some improvements to 
 suggest. These things were all settled for us. 
 A friend once expressed surprise to C. P. Hunt¬ 
 ington that he was able to accomplish so much. 
 “You must work very hard,” he remarked. 
 “Not at all,” was the reply, “I work easy.” Is 
 there not a great truth there? The art of life 
 is to find joy in our work and so work easy. If 
 our work becomes hard, it is because there is 
 anxiety and friction. Then work becomes a 
 grind. How smoothly machinery runs when it 
 is oiled! There is no friction like fear; there is 
 no lubricant like trust. Sometimes we are asked 
 the secret of the power of Christian Science. 
 Christian Science has delivered scores of people 
 from their fears. This is the secret. There can 
 
'Sbe 2De\nl of ffear m 
 
 be no doubt of it. Men and women that have 
 worried themselves sick over their health and 
 their fortunes, and their children’s health, and 
 their futures and fortunes, have learned that it 
 is not necessary for any human soul in this world 
 to worry. Christian Science has taught us all a 
 great and precious lesson. If we believe that 
 God is watching over us, why should we fear? 
 He knows the way. He holds the key. He will 
 stand by us to the end. 
 
 “ Motives are seeds 
 From which at times spring deeds 
 Not equal to the soul’s outrcaching hope. 
 Strive for the stars! 
 
 Count not well done but best! 
 
 Then, with brave patience, leave the rest 
 To Him w T ho knows. 
 
 He’ll judge you justly ere the record close.” 
 
X 
 
 THE RELIGION THAT EVERYBODY 
 
 BELIEVES 
 
 HERE is a religion that every¬ 
 body believes and perhaps at 
 first sight it may seem strange 
 to some to say that it is the 
 Christian religion. But this is 
 our challenge. When the 
 Christian religion is rightly stated everybody 
 believes in it. An honest unbeliever is unthink¬ 
 able. Not all are ready to accept the Christian 
 faith but all do accept the Christian religion. 
 Is this possible? Can the one be without the 
 other? Can we have the soul without the body? 
 Well, that question we will not now entertain. 
 To quote the poet again, it is another story. But 
 if religion is a life, then the Christian religion 
 is nothing more nor less than the Christian life, 
 the life as it was lived by Christ Himself. This 
 was simply and splendidly stated one day by 
 Peter. He was talking of Jesus of Nazareth and 
 he put the Man’s biography into one pregnant 
 sentence , 11 He went about doing good . 9 9 Christ*s 
 whole earthly life was spent in doing good, in 
 healing disease, in destroying the works of dark- 
 
 102 
 
IReltaton Ufoat Believes *03 
 
 ness, in striving to repair the broken order. It 
 was His very meat and drink. And it is the task 
 to which He summons every one who calls him¬ 
 self His follower. This is the religion that every¬ 
 body believes. 
 
 There are some things about the Lord Jesus 
 that cannot be doubted, and they cannot be 
 doubted because they are not articles of faith 
 but statements of fact. This is one of them. 
 Some may doubt the inspiration of the Bible; 
 they may question the historical accuracy of the 
 four Evangelists; they may even go to the very 
 extreme and doubt whether such a person as 
 the Man of Nazareth ever lived. But, historical 
 or mythical, they cannot question this, that He 
 is the one great supreme spiritual force on this 
 earth at this present time. 
 
 Every question has two sides, we say, but not 
 this. This question has only one side. Some 
 may find it difficult to credit that He went about 
 doing good nineteen hundred years ago, but they 
 cannot challenge the fact that He is going about 
 doing good to-day. There is no room for con¬ 
 troversy on this point. The influence of Jesus 
 in the world to-day is unmistakable. That is not 
 a question of faith, but of sight; it is a matter 
 of simple observation. His spirit is at work in 
 the world, or if you prefer to call it—His in¬ 
 fluence. And it has grown with the years. Other 
 forces have come and gone, but Jesus abides. 
 
*04 IReUdion Ubat iE\>erpbot>£ JSelteves 
 
 His empire is greater to-day than ever. He is 
 the unquestioned leader to-day of the world’s 
 spiritual troops. 
 
 This, let us insist, is not debatable. We may 
 believe what we please about His birth or His 
 baptism or His divinity or His miracles or His 
 transfiguration or His claims or His death or 
 even His resurrection, but the fact of His spiri¬ 
 tual power and its manifestation in the world is 
 not dependent on any dogma; it is here to be 
 reckoned with, dogma or no dogma. It is a fact 
 that cannot be disputed; it is a challenge that 
 cannot be gainsaid; it is a kingdom that cannot 
 be shaken. 
 
 The really vital point then is this matter of 
 reproducing this imprint of the Man. Jesus 
 went about doing good, and He went about it in 
 very simple ways. He never laboured to do 
 anything great or brilliant. He was not in the 
 least theatrical. His life consisted mostly of 
 numberless little things. It was largely a matter 
 of personal touch and intimate conversations and 
 helpful kindnesses. There was nothing showy 
 or dramatic or pretentious in His public minis¬ 
 try. The only really spectacular triumph He 
 won was on the Mount of Transfiguration, and 
 there were only three with Him at the time. It 
 was a life dedicated to life’s daily common tasks. 
 
 And it is not otherwise with us, at least with 
 most of us. As He was in the world, so are we. 
 
IReilGion TEbat Eversbobp Believes 105 
 
 God may not be calling us to any great eventful 
 exploit, but there’s not one of us, however dis¬ 
 advantaged, that cannot be doing good in a 
 legion of little ways. If God wanted His chil¬ 
 dren to move mountains He would have put some 
 colossal mountain-moving equipment into their 
 hands, and planted them down at the foot of 
 some giant peak and said, “Now go ahead and 
 move it. ’ ’ But He hasn’t done that; the most of 
 us cannot move mountains; the most of us don’t 
 amount to much when it comes to shifting moun¬ 
 tains. Only this reminder: It is the little things 
 in life that are the great things. It is the little 
 things that really count. We read the other day 
 of a great, stalwart tree out in Colorado. It is 
 400 years old. It was a sapling when Columbus 
 landed on San Salvador. It has been struck by 
 lightning fourteen times. It has braved the 
 storms of four centuries. But in the end beetles 
 killed it. It is the little things in life that are the 
 really important things. 
 
 There are many who feel that the supreme call 
 to-day is for a definition of true religion in the 
 language of service. If I were drawing up a 
 catechism I think I should have as the first 
 question, “What is the chief end of man?” 
 And I think my answer would be, “The chief 
 end of man is to glorify God by going about do¬ 
 ing good.” 
 
 “Religion,” as Professor Rauschenbush once 
 
*06 IReltjlon Ubat Bver^bofcs Believes 
 
 put it, “has spent a large part of its time in 
 sacrificing, in praying, in travelling to Mecca 
 and Jerusalem and Rome, in kissing sacred 
 stones, bathing in sacred rivers, climbing sacred 
 stairs, and a thousand other things of like kind .’ 7 
 But the way that Jesus computed religion was in 
 seeing how much good you can do. It is not a 
 book to be read or a system of truth to be dis¬ 
 cussed or a catechism to be memorized; it is not 
 a philosophy to be argued about nor a scientific 
 theory to be proven; it is a life of goodness to 
 be lived. The great majority of people are not 
 interested in scientific books on botany but they 
 will go miles to see a dahlia display. When 
 Burbank assembles his facts and puts them into 
 a beautiful orchid, everybody stands and ad¬ 
 mires; and when we take the great truths of the 
 Christian faith and incorporate them into a 
 beautiful life, even the unbeliever sits up and 
 takes notice. 
 
 Of course the essential thing is to have the 
 Christ-spirit. I do not think it is possible to 
 even feebly repeat the Christ life without having 
 in some measure His mind, His passion, His 
 love. There is a book on roses written by Dean 
 Hole, and the very first sentence in the book is 
 a striking one. This is the sentence: “He who 
 would have beautiful roses in his garden must 
 first have beautiful roses in his heart.’’ Paul 
 says that good works are not acceptable without 
 
IReiigton Qhat JEvc ^Believes W7 
 
 faith. He means by that that the motive of the 
 heart must be taken into account. It is possible 
 to go about doing good for purely selfish reasons. 
 A man may do good simply to gain the esteem 
 of his fellow men. He may do good because it 
 is a wise thing to do from a business standpoint. 
 He may give largely to charity just to get his 
 name into the papers. It is possible to be 
 generous and gracious and yet to have a mind 
 filled with meanness. It is possible to be 
 very religious and yet to have precious little re¬ 
 ligion. So it all comes back to the question, 
 Are we doing good in the spirit of Christ? “If 
 a man have not the spirit of Christ he is none 
 of his.” That is fundamental. Have we the 
 mind of our Master? Have we His Spirit? If 
 we have, we have everything; if we have not, we 
 have nothing. “It takes the spirit of Living¬ 
 stone to do Livingstone’s work.” Though I 
 speak with the tongues of men and of angels and 
 have not the spirit of Christ, I am only elocution¬ 
 izing. Though I bestow all my goods to feed 
 the poor and have not the spirit of Christ, I 
 am only advertising. Though I even give my 
 body to be burned and have not the spirit of 
 Christ it becomes of no possible avail; I’m 
 only a fanatic. If I pay regularly for my pew 
 rent in church, and then some fine morning lose 
 my temper and get cross at the ushers because 
 some poor lonely wayfarer stumbled in and took 
 
*08 IReitoton Ubat Bversbob# Believes 
 
 my seat, I have not the spirit of Christ. If I 
 had I would be overjoyed to welcome a stranger 
 to the place of prayer. A church without His 
 spirit is not a church of Christ. A church that 
 is unbrotherly is not a church of Christ. A 
 church that is cold and snobbish is not a church 
 of Christ. It is only a federation of the Evil 
 One. When it comes to religion some Christians 
 have very cutting tongues and very sharp claws. 
 They love their own denomination but they hate 
 Unitarians. They say very bitter things about 
 Catholicism. They ridicule and make gay sport 
 of Christian Science. But this surely is not the 
 spirit of Christ. The spirit of Christ is a spirit 
 of loving kindness. 4 ‘ By this shall all men know 
 that ye are my disciples if ye have love one to 
 another. 5 ’ 
 
 This is not saying that it does not matter what 
 He taught. It does matter what He taught. But 
 it matters infinitely more how He lived. And 
 He lived in such a way as to teach us that love 
 was the only thing worth living for. If we have 
 love we have everything; if we have not love we 
 have nothing. We speak of the Sabbath Day as 
 holy. We say, “Kemember the Sabbath day 
 to keep it holy.” But what is it makes a day 
 holy? Does shutting up my store and giving my 
 clerks a day off each week—does that make a day 
 holy? Does going to church simply because it is 
 the proper thing to do make a day holy ? Does 
 
IReligion Ubat lEver^bob^ Believes *09 
 
 singing hymns make a day holy ? Does putting 
 on a new suit of clothes and shining my shoes 
 make a day holy? No day is holy unless I fill 
 it with deeds of sincere worship and loving serv¬ 
 ice. Divine service consists in making service 
 divine. An hour on Monday helping some poor 
 fellow-mortal is far holier than any Sunday 
 spent in indolence. “It is the deed that sanc¬ 
 tifies the day, not the day the deed.” And the 
 character of a deed depends upon the spirit in 
 which it is performed. 
 
 There are lots of people, and thousands of 
 them professing Christians, to whom religion is 
 purely a selfish matter. They want its seal and 
 approval in the hour of joy; they crave its peace 
 and comfort in the day of trouble; they desire 
 its consolation, its promise of forgiveness in the 
 time of penitence. They ask too its inspiration 
 and the uplift of its worship, its hymns, its sacra¬ 
 ments, its fellowship. They want its teachings, 
 its instruction, its ideals of heavenly wisdom. 
 And then, and more particularly, when the bell 
 rings and school is out, they want a home to go 
 to—a heavenly home, a “home not made with 
 hands, eternal in the heavens.” In a word, re¬ 
 ligion to them is a selfish consideration. They 
 never link up their church-going with any form 
 of service. “They do not want their comfort¬ 
 able schedule of life disturbed.” The whole 
 matter is a sort of insurance policy for this 
 
no IReiiaion ubat 35eUe\>e$ 
 
 world and the next. They are bargain hunters 
 pure and simple. 
 
 Then on the other hand if some are too selfish 
 to do any definite work, others are too conse¬ 
 quential. They lack the spirit of humility. 
 They always demand a prominent place. They 
 will not serve on any committee unless they are 
 chairman. I have known instances where people 
 were asked to help in some particular task, and 
 when they consented they gave the impression 
 that the cause was receiving a great favour. The 
 Psalmist says, “I am willing to be a doorkeeper 
 in the House of the Lord.” That’s the spirit of 
 Christ—to be even a doorkeeper. 
 
 This then is the religion that everybody be¬ 
 lieves. When our faith is thus stated there are 
 no infidels. Infidelity cannot thrive in this 
 ozone. We spend much time in worship but the 
 important thing is, how does our worship ex¬ 
 press itself? Worship is good but service is 
 better. Does our worship show itself in some 
 definite reform? No earnest person can give any 
 valid excuse for idleness these troubled days. 
 There’s a commission for everybody. We are 
 always hearing the cry of the unemployed but 
 there need be no Christian unemployed. Say 
 not you can do nothing. If we think we can do 
 nothing that is what we will do. Let us have 
 faith to believe we can do something. You say, 
 I read my Bible; I say my prayers; I go to 
 
IReUgion Ubat JEvetpbobg BeUepes tu 
 
 church ; I take communion. So far, good. This 
 is the way to renew our strength and confirm 
 our faith. But when strength is renewed and 
 faith confirmed, what are we going to do with 
 them? “If a man is really good he should be 
 doing some real good.” He that doeth righteous¬ 
 ness is righteous. Many label themselves Chris¬ 
 tians but to-day, unfortunately, that may not 
 mean much. Are we Christians with the 
 apostolic spirit ? Is there a light about us or is it 
 mostly smoke? The noblest question any one 
 can ask himself in this world is this, ‘ 1 What good 
 can I do?” That is a beautiful prayer which 
 the old Huguenots had in their liturgy, “Oh 
 God, grant that this day I may be useful to 
 some one.” There is a story told of Sir Bartle 
 Frere, at one time Governor of the Cape of Good 
 Hope. He was coming to visit a Scotch home. 
 The master sent one of his servants to meet him 
 at the depot. And this is how he was to recog¬ 
 nize him: “When the train comes in just look 
 for a tall gentleman helping somebody.” 
 
 And this is the spirit the age is clamouring 
 for—the spirit of helpfulness and service. And 
 it is the only way to enjoy our corporate life. 
 We only get out of any fellowship what we put 
 into it. If we put nothing in, we will get noth¬ 
 ing out. If we put little in, we will get little 
 out. If we put much in we will get much out. 
 A magnet only keeps its power when given some- 
 
U2 IReltoion Ubat Evergbobs Believes 
 
 thing to do. If you hang a magnet where it 
 cannot touch other pieces of metal it will de¬ 
 teriorate and lose its strength. Even a magnet 
 must expend itself if it would retain its secret. 
 Wine can be bottled up in the cellar and it will 
 get richer all the while. But not so religion. 
 To keep the faith is to daily live it. Like a 
 sword it loses its edge if never used, it rusts if 
 laid aside. Religion is raising one hand up and 
 holding the other out. George Eliot speaks of 
 ‘ c those immortal dead who live again in lives 
 made better by their presence. ’ ’ 
 
 And then how little it takes sometimes to make 
 a weary world sing! Some one observes that the 
 best way to kindle a smile is to smile. Kindness 
 is not a deposit like an oil well which shows signs 
 of petering out. It is an inexhaustible supply. 
 Scientists speak of the conservation of energy, 
 but there is no conservation of goodness. We 
 can add to the treasury every morning. Never 
 a day passes but we can increase the reserve. 
 Stevenson has a little poem: 
 
 ** If I have faltered more or less in my great task of 
 happiness, 
 
 If I have moved among my race and shown no 
 glorious morning face, 
 
 If beams from happy human eyes have moved me 
 not, if morning skies, 
 
 Books, and my food and summer rain knocked on 
 my sullen heart in vain; 
 
 Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take and stab my 
 spirit broad awake.” 
 
IReltGton ITbat Believes uz 
 
 For all the people who sang for ns when the day 
 was dark, for all who helped us when the load 
 was heavy—for all such we say, Hallelujah. 
 
 We are hearing much to-day about evolution 
 and its all sufficiency to solve the mysteries of 
 life. There is no question that evolution ac¬ 
 counts for many things. It interprets the struc¬ 
 ture and growth of the human body; it throws 
 not a little light on the development of the hu¬ 
 man mind; it explains man’s keenness, his cun¬ 
 ning, his cleverness and all those qualities that 
 make for what the world calls success. But there 
 are other things it is powerless to determine. It 
 is helpless for instance to account for the virtues 
 that have no value in the world’s markets; it 
 can make nothing at all of love and kindness and 
 gentleness and the spirit of unselfishness; it has 
 no answer to make to the question, Why should 
 one be willing to die for the sake of his convic¬ 
 tions? The history of the Church, unfortu¬ 
 nately, is largely a history of doctrines. The¬ 
 ologians have wasted gallons of ink writing 
 creeds. Sometimes the hair-splitting definitions 
 are most confusing and bewildering. But what 
 use is any creed if it lacks the spirit of its 
 Archetype? The best test of a book is not who 
 wrote it but has it the breath of the eternal in it. 
 A man may be as orthodox—well, John Wesley 
 says, as the devil—and as unspiritual. He may 
 go through all the forms of religion and mumble 
 
U4 IReUaion Ufoat B\>er£bob£ Believes 
 
 all its paternosters as punctiliously and devoutly 
 as a faithful visitor to the Vatican and still be 
 at heart a stranger to the truth. Religion is not 
 believing that there is only one Isaiah. It is 
 just as religious to believe in two or three or six 
 Isaiahs as to believe in only one. Religion is not 
 a question of Isaiahs at all. Religion is not be¬ 
 lieving that the book of Jonah is historical. It 
 is just as religious to believe that the book is 
 allegorical, and that the idea is to represent 
 Nineveh as swallowing up little Israel, as to be¬ 
 lieve in its verbal veracity. Religion has noth¬ 
 ing to do with these questions. They are ques¬ 
 tions of science, of history, of criticism. Re¬ 
 ligion is to fear God and keep His command¬ 
 ments. Religion is to be kind and merciful and 
 forgiving. Religion is to visit the fatherless and 
 the widows in their affliction. Religion is to 
 love one’s neighbour as oneself. When we stand 
 before the great bar above we are not going to 
 be judged by our creeds but by our kindness. 
 Did we feed the hungry? Did we clothe the 
 naked? Did we go about doing good? Re¬ 
 ligion is a life not a dogma, not a dead tradition; 
 it is a power in the soul, not a formula. 
 
 I recall the story of a printer. He was setting 
 up in type a sermon. And coming across the 
 expression ethical Christianity, he mistook it for 
 ethereal Christianity. Alas there are many such 
 typical blunders. This is not assuming that 
 
IRellaton Ubat Bvervbo&v Believes U5 
 
 there is too much Christianity of the ethereal 
 kind but it is saying that there is not nearly 
 enough of the ethical stamp. Behind the great 
 shaft of Nelson in Trafalgar Square, much more 
 modest but much more important to-day, there 
 is the statue of Edith Cavell. She died with a 
 sentence on her lips which will probably live as 
 long as Lord Nelson’s immortal utterance. Nel¬ 
 son said 4 ‘England expects every man to do his 
 duty” and it was a noble saying. But Miss 
 Cavell said, “I perceive that patriotism is not 
 enough . , . there is something better than 
 patriotism: it is the love of humanity, it is the 
 love of man.” We all know Mark Pattison, that 
 rare and brilliant genius. But how few are fa¬ 
 miliar with the story of his sister—Sister Dora 
 as she was called. Many consider that she did a 
 greater work than her brilliant brother. She was 
 a nurse in one of the English hospitals. And 
 when at night she would lie down to snatch a 
 few hours’ rest and some patient would ring the 
 bell, she would jump up whispering to herself, 
 “The Master is come and calleth for me.” It is 
 thus that the great souls of the world hear the 
 cry of need. 
 
 Charity is a lovely virtue but not the loveliest. 
 Giving money to those in need is good but it is 
 not a distinctly Christian grace. Pliny the 
 Roman orator bestowed great sums of money on 
 the poor, as did also Cyrus and Cicero and Mark 
 
U6 iRelfoion UMt Bversbob# Relieves 
 
 Antony and Julius Caesar. Almost as far back 
 as history goes we have these noble instances of 
 generosity. One of the difficulties with organ¬ 
 ized charity to-day is that it lacks the personal 
 touch and does its work by proxy. It is a splen¬ 
 did thing to give a check but better far to give 
 oneself. The camelia can never be made as pop¬ 
 ular as the rose. It is just as beautiful but it is 
 cold and odourless. Religion asks for a little 
 slice of a man’s time as well as his money. It 
 calls not only for my secretary: it calls for my¬ 
 self, for a little of the warmth of my heart. 
 The whole root of the trouble to-day that sepa¬ 
 rates class from class is lack of sympathy. The 
 rich are often heartless because they do not know 
 what it is to be poor: the strong are often pitiless 
 because they do not know what it is to be weak. 
 This is not belittling the gifts of the generous. 
 That would be a very short-sighted and unscrip- 
 tural thing to do. For are we not told that 
 “God loveth a cheerful giver”? Some one speaks 
 of the romance of money. He means that you 
 can send your dollars flying round the world 
 touching millions of lives, feeding hungry chil¬ 
 dren, healing sick babies, and bringing back 
 glorious dividends of human joy. You can go 
 down here to the bank and cable help to almost 
 any part of the world. Isn’t that romantic? 
 “The greenback in your hand may become one 
 of the green leaves of the tree of life.” Do not 
 
IReliglon Ubat BvetEbofc^ Believes m 
 
 call it filthy. It is not filthy unless we make it 
 filthy. It may be as clean and pure and sweet 
 as the white surplice which the angels wear. 
 Truly indeed money is romantic. And often¬ 
 times it is an acid test. The warning is, * ‘ Freely 
 ye have received, freely give.” Some one has 
 observed that the man who will not give any¬ 
 thing to hospitals deserves some day to be found 
 in one. Only remember again that though I 
 bestow all my goods to feed the poor and lack 
 love for them, I am nothing. 
 
 Mr. A. C. Benson has a book which he calls 
 “The Gate of Death.’ 7 He had had a very se¬ 
 vere fall and for weeks hovered round the bor¬ 
 der line. His life was despaired of and he was 
 given the sacraments of the Church. But he 
 recovered and during his convalescence he began 
 to write down the thoughts he had been having 
 during that critical time. And now I quote: 
 “I did not care for my personal successes. I 
 cared nothing for the little position I had 
 achieved, nothing for the books I had written. 
 I did not even care to think that I had, however 
 feebly, tried to serve the will of God. What I 
 did care about was the thought that I had made 
 a few people happier, that I had done a few kind¬ 
 nesses, that I had won some love.” Well, when 
 we all come to the crisis I wonder what will be 
 the pride of our life? Can any one doubt that 
 it will be much the same? I sometimes think 
 
u a iReUalon Ubat isvcxyboby Believes 
 
 the records of heaven will be most unusual read¬ 
 ing. The brilliant things will be there of course 
 —the dash over the top, the hero on the sinking 
 ship, the martyr at the stake. But so will the 
 cup of cold water and the visit to the sick bed 
 or the smile to the stranger. That gold at the 
 foot of the rainbow is a mirage. It is the gold 
 at our feet that is real. 
 
 “Ragged, uncomely, and old and gray, 
 
 A woman walked in a Northern town, 
 
 And through the crowd as she wound her way 
 One saw her loiter and then stoop down, 
 Putting something away in her old torn gown. 
 
 “ * You are hiding a jewel,’ the watcher said. 
 
 (Ah that was her heart—had the truth been read) 
 ‘ What have you stolen ? ’ he asked again. 
 
 Then the dim eyes filled with a sudden pain. 
 
 And under the flickering light of the gas 
 She showed him her gleaning. ‘ It’s broken glass,’ 
 She said; ‘ I hae lifted it frae the street 
 To be oot o’ the road o’ the bairnies’ feet.* 
 
 “Under the fluttering rags astir 
 That was a royal heart that beat; 
 
 Would that the world had more like her 
 Smoothing the road for its bairnies’ feet.’’ 
 
XI 
 
 AT THE SHRINE OF BEAUTY 
 
 ANY are telling ns that what the 
 world needs to-day is Beauty. 
 There are three types of char¬ 
 acter that are influenced by ap¬ 
 peals that I am going to call 
 spiritual. The scientist is 
 swayed by the love of truth, the artist by the 
 love of beauty and the saint by the love of good¬ 
 ness. These three temperaments are more closely 
 connected than we sometimes are apt to suppose. 
 All are related more or less intimately to the 
 spiritual world. And the spiritual message 
 comes to each in his own special way. The 
 scholar reads his message in the rocks and the 
 stars. The artist reads his in the flower and the 
 sunset and the autumn leaf, in the flight of the 
 bird and the curve of the swan and the note of 
 the meadow-lark, in the imposing cathedral, in 
 the beautiful painting. The message comes to the 
 saint along the avenue of goodness. He reads it 
 in the deed of sacrifice, in the practice of self- 
 denial, in the unselfish task, in the holy apostolic 
 life. 
 
 It is of the second type that we are just now 
 
 119 
 
no Bt tbe Sbtine of Beauty 
 
 thinking and I am going to illustrate it by the 
 life of one of its most distinguished apostles. 
 Walter Pater is the man. Walter Pater was one 
 of those rare elect souls to whom the appeal of 
 beauty was supreme. He devoted his life to one 
 particular branch of artistic work, the art of 
 beautiful expression. At first his interest lay in 
 the realm of metaphysics and philosophy. And 
 indeed at one time he looked forward to taking 
 orders in the Church. But his philosophical ex¬ 
 cursions and his theological ramblings did not 
 take him far. They were halted by the sudden 
 discovery one day of his acute sensitiveness to 
 beauty. And it was in the palace of beauty that 
 he was to be found henceforward permanently 
 and happily at home. 
 
 A word or two first then about the man. He 
 was born in the year 1839 and he died in 1894. 
 His father was a physician who had spent some 
 years in America. But he returned to England 
 early in life and settled near Stepney, not far 
 from London, where in due time Walter was 
 born, and where he grew up in the quietest and 
 sweetest of English homes. Those who have read 
 that little narrative entitled “The Child in the 
 House” will get a charming picture of his boy¬ 
 hood days, for a certain autobiographical thread 
 is without doubt woven into the story. It is not 
 only worth reading for the glimpses of light 
 which it throws on his childhood. It is worth 
 
Ht tbe ©brine of Beauty m 
 
 reading just for its word melody. It is ac- 
 knowledged to be one of the most exquisite pieces 
 of prose in the English language. It is an im¬ 
 aginative study of the psychology of youth. It 
 is largely retrospective. One might call it a 
 beautiful rosary. Like De Quincy, Pater always 
 has a fondness for the backward glance. His 
 memory turns to the past with a sort of wistful 
 swiftness. Here was a child extraordinarily 
 plastic to early impressions, the coolness of dark 
 rooms on hot summer days, the scent of old leather 
 in the library, the winding staircase, the delicate 
 lights and shades of the garden, the white An¬ 
 gora with a dark tail like an ermine’s and a face 
 like a flower, the first bereavement in the family. 
 One notes how deeply he felt as a child this first 
 lesson in mortality. Every room is haunted 
 with echoes. Nature did not appeal to Pater 
 so much as human nature. We see this in his 
 study on Wordsworth. The house, the room, the 
 furniture, the garden, the chest, the cornice, the 
 door, the panel, the fireplace are far more to 
 him than the brook or the lake or the marsh or 
 the hill, because they have had the human touch. 
 
 Before he was twenty he had read all of Rus- 
 kin, and Ruskin’s touch is traceable in all his 
 writings, as is also Newman’s and De Quincy’s. 
 But he lighted his torch undoubtedly at Ruskin’s 
 lamp. Like Amiel and Pascal, lie never married. 
 He wrote few letters and he never kept a diary* 
 
122 Bt tbe ©brine of Beauty 
 
 He seemed to have had no great ambition. He 
 paid but few visits and he made no effort to get 
 acquainted with distinguished people, not even 
 with those who were distinguished in his own 
 line. His life was largely self-contained; it was 
 a life of academic aloofness. He lived apart, a 
 more or less cloistered life, and yet a real citizen 
 of the world. 
 
 It will be recalled how Kant wrote a wonder¬ 
 fully accurate account of the South Sea Island¬ 
 ers although he never set foot outside of 
 Germany, never indeed was more than thirty 
 miles from Konigsberg, his home. And just so 
 Pater at Oxford writes about Greek studies, 
 Greek art, Greek sculpture, their carvings, em¬ 
 broideries, shields, images, marbles, and he writes 
 with marvellous technical erudition and detail, 
 and yet he never set foot on the soil of Greece. 
 And yet with all his temperamental reserve he 
 seems to have been a very companionable man. 
 He was always glad to see people, even those 
 who were strangers. He showed no irritability 
 at an interruption. There were no furtive 
 glances at the clock. He was extremely courte¬ 
 ous. He would agree with you rather than get 
 into an argument. If you expressed an opinion 
 in which he did not concur he would say, “I 
 never thought of it in that light.’’ His whole 
 attitude to society was that of a spectator. He 
 never tempted the interviewer or the advertiser 
 
Bt tbe ©brine of JSeauty m 
 
 or the reporter. And he was not a great scholar, 
 not even a great thinker. Indeed he was not 
 even a great reader, and as he grew older he read 
 less and less. He made no pretense to keep 
 abreast of the literature of the day. Stevenson 
 was all the vogue in his time, their lives overlap, 
 but he once said to a friend: * ‘ I have never read 
 a whole chapter of Stevenson and I have not 
 read a single line of Kipling.’’ Plato and the 
 Bible were his favourite books in his later years. 
 It is worth observing too that he was not a bril¬ 
 liant youth, nor in college had he been a brilliant 
 student. There was no hint of promise in his 
 university career. He appears there as a slow, 
 serious boy. The only person who seemed to 
 appreciate his gifts was Jowett, who said to him 
 one day, “Mr. Pater, I believe you have a mind 
 which will some day come to eminence.” He 
 seems to have written nothing during his under¬ 
 graduate life. He showed no signs of a literary 
 bent. He wrote no poetry as a boy, and so far 
 as we know, very little prose, and what he did 
 write is stiff and dry. So he did not master his 
 rich vocabulary as a voluminous reporter, or 
 through reams of scribbling that only saw the 
 waste-basket. 
 
 We noted how he started out as a philosopher, 
 then as a student of theology. It was a journey 
 to Italy that changed his plans. His first sight 
 of Italian art opened up a new world to him. 
 
*24 Bt tbe Sbrtne of Beauty 
 
 Here he devoted himself to a diligent study of 
 the Italian renaissance, and after reading the 
 life of Winckelman his conversion was complete. 
 Winckelman it will be remembered was a German 
 archaeologist, the son of a poor shoemaker. He 
 too had studied philosophy and theology. When 
 he was in the prime of life, however, he became 
 fascinated with the beauty of Greek art. He 
 joined the Church of Rome and went to Italy 
 where he wrote his great book ‘‘The History of 
 Ancient Art.” His end was tragic. He was 
 murdered by a fellow traveller on the road to 
 Trieste. This was the man who was destined to 
 leave such a profound impression on Pater’s life. 
 He saw in Winckelman his own true prototype. 
 He seemed to be reading the history of his own 
 soul. And his first essay, written in 1866 , was 
 about this great German Hellenist, who by the 
 way it is worth noting had such an influence also 
 on Goethe’s career. Henceforth Pater decided 
 to devote all his energies to the worship of the 
 beautiful. 
 
 He was never a linguist. He visited Italy 
 often. He went there as he said to feed his 
 hunger for beauty but he never took the trouble 
 to even try to speak Italian. He travelled in 
 France a great deal, but his knowledge of French 
 was very limited, barely sufficient to make his 
 wants known. He always spent his vacation at 
 Heidelberg, but he made no effort to speak the 
 
Bt tbe Sbrine ot JSeauts ns 
 
 German tongue. He had no desire, it would 
 seem, to be competent in any modern language 
 except his own. He used to say, ‘‘Between you 
 and me and the gate post, I hate a foreigner.” 
 English was the only tongue that he mastered. 
 And it is a comfort to some of us that he wrote 
 it with such painful difficulty. Composition was 
 a real agony to him. It was like working at a 
 pump when the water, deep down and hard to 
 reach, refuses to flow. He was the most la¬ 
 borious of English writers. As the years went 
 by, however, the effort grew less troublesome and 
 irksome. Near the end he said to Mr. Gosse one 
 day, “Writing is easier than it used to be. If 
 I live long enough I may come in time to really 
 like it.” Like Sainte Beuve he was painstaking 
 and patient and very free in the use of the file. 
 He revised carefully and jealously and con¬ 
 scientiously, and it was from these stippled 
 touches that his work came forth a perfect thing. 
 He has literary mannerisms. He is fond of us¬ 
 ing words in their archaic sense. He is what 
 would be called a scholarly writer. He is hardly 
 ever witty although often humorous, but his hu¬ 
 mour is insidious. “I wish,” he remarked to a 
 friend one day, * ‘ I wish they would not call me 
 a Hedonist; it produces such a bad impression 
 on people who don’t know Greek.” He has 
 favourite words, words like blithe, sordid, mor¬ 
 bid, mortified, repose. He frequently uses the 
 
n6 Bt tbe Sbrine of Beaut# 
 
 expression “no doubt.’ 7 In an argument it 
 served as a sort of courteous retreat. The word 
 * ‘ well’ 7 he often uses in a meditative sense, as 
 for instance, 4 ‘That man reminds me, well, of a 
 steam engine stuck in the mud. 77 He regarded 
 enthusiasm as bad form. He disliked every form 
 of extravagance with a strong temperamental 
 dislike. It jarred him like a false note in music. 
 
 Perhaps his essay on Leonardo is the most 
 brilliant thing he ever did. The versatility of 
 the great painter, his life broken up into so 
 many different channels and all of them deep 
 channels, his absorption in the beautiful, so 
 much so as to be almost unaware of the great 
 upheavals through which his country was pass¬ 
 ing, strongly appealed to Pater. The descriptive 
 passages in the essay are very exquisite. There 
 is a strange magic about them like the smile on 
 the face of Mona Lisa, a severe economy of state¬ 
 ment and yet a subtlety of illustration that mark 
 the perfect craftsman. Instance this familiar 
 passage where he is describing Gioconda. ‘ * Hers 
 is the head upon which all ‘the ends of the world 
 are come 7 and the eyelids are a little weary. It 
 is a beauty wrought out from within upon the 
 flesh, the deposit cell by cell, of strange thoughts 
 and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. 
 Set it for a moment beside one of those white 
 Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, 
 and how would they be troubled by this beauty, 
 
Bt tbe Sbrine ot JSeaut^ J27 
 
 into which the soul with all its maladies has 
 passed! All the thoughts and experiences of the 
 world have etched and moulded there, the ani¬ 
 malism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie 
 of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and 
 imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan 
 world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than 
 the rocks among which she sits; like the vam¬ 
 pire, she has been dead many times, and learned 
 the secrets of the grave/ ’ How magical are 
 these words! 
 
 His religious ideas are expressed most clearly 
 in his later essays, especially the story of Marius, 
 the Epicurean. The story of Marius is a familiar 
 one. It is the story of a strong mind, and a 
 mind with an earnest religious bent, brought to 
 the very door of the Christian faith. He tries 
 every phase of philosophy. He becomes an Epi¬ 
 curean. He tries Stoicism and theism but none 
 of these things give him what his heart is seek¬ 
 ing. In the end he is brought face to face with 
 Christianity. The challenge that it makes is 
 largely an aesthetic one. The part of Christianity 
 that appealed to him was not its conception of 
 love, but its liturgical beauty, its detachment and 
 philosophic composure. There is no sense of 
 personality or fatherhood. He did not seem 
 capable of disentangling religion from its ac¬ 
 cessories. Religion was a beautiful fringe to a 
 useful garment. As the shadow of death begins 
 
J28 Bt tbc Sforine of Beauts 
 
 to fall, however, his faith in an unseen Presence 
 seems to come nearer. His last moments were 
 comforted with the sacrament. And the feeling 
 which the book seems to leave is that if he had 
 lived he would have become an earnest Christian. 
 
 His essay on Pascal was the last thing he 
 wrote. It contains some of his deepest thoughts 
 on the mystery of life. The essay was never 
 finished. Indeed it breaks off in the middle of a 
 sentence. It is his most thoughtful utterance on 
 religious things. And it reveals him as a sceptic, 
 but as an unhappy sceptic, shall I say an 
 unwilling sceptic. His scepticism does not 
 satisfy. It shows that the realm of beauty 
 in which he lived lacked the warmth and 
 the joy his heart craved. Indeed there are 
 some words that do not fit Walter Pater, 
 and Joy is one of them. The nearest ap¬ 
 proach he ever came to that state of bliss is 
 best described by his own word Pleasure. If 
 one were to have asked him what was the chief 
 end of man he would have answered the chief 
 end of man is pleasure, aesthetic pleasure, the 
 pleasure that comes from the pursuit of the 
 beautiful. His whole philosophy of life may be 
 couched in Goethe’s expression, self-culture. 
 Make of lifq an art. Train every faculty to the 
 top notch of acuteness so as to catch each fleet¬ 
 ing glimpse of glory on the wing. Let there 
 be beauty within to answer to all the beauty 
 
Bt tbe Sbrine ot Beauty 
 
 \ 29 
 
 without. In his interpretation of Plato he puts 
 beauty above truth as the goal to be kept in 
 view. And in the religious life, he places the 
 emotions above duty. The chief end of man, he 
 insisted, is not to glorify God, not even to live 
 right. The chief end of man is to appreciate 
 the beautiful and find one’s satisfaction and 
 pleasure in so doing. So truth is made the serv¬ 
 ant of beauty, and goodness the servant of pleas¬ 
 ure. Herein lies the danger. It is surely a poor 
 lookout for Christianity when men sacrifice 
 truth for beauty. The mere worship of the beau¬ 
 tiful is apt to lead to that deadliest cant that 
 art has no connection with morality. No Palace 
 of Art has ever been able to redeem the world. 
 Pompeii was swathed in beauty, but rotten at 
 the core. “When one subordinates beauty to 
 virtue, what is that but the dishonour of the 
 soul ? ’ 9 
 
 In his interpretation of the Bible he was ultra 
 liberal. His attitude toward the supernatural 
 was a good deal like what Sir Edwin Arnold de¬ 
 scribes as “politeness toward possibilities.” 
 Christianity rests on certain assumptions or in¬ 
 tuitions for which there never can be scientific 
 proof. These assumptions may transcend reason 
 but they can never fully satisfy reason. And so 
 in all honest men’s minds there must ever re¬ 
 main the element of doubt. And so his whole 
 philosophy of the Christian Faith is something 
 
J30 Bt tbe Sbrine of Beauts 
 
 like this: we can never be sure that the sacred 
 story is true but neither can we ever be abso¬ 
 lutely sure that the story is false. So we must 
 make allowance for a great possibility, and when 
 we do that, the possibility becomes the most im¬ 
 portant thing in the world. ‘ ‘ Christianity thus 
 becomes not a solution of the world’s mystery, 
 but rather a practical working theory of morals. ’ ’ 
 And a theory that works for one reason and one 
 only, because of its beauty. In a word, he was 
 a moralizing sceptic. And like most moralizing 
 sceptics, he made the attainment of ataraxia, or 
 an untroubled equanimity, very largely the aim 
 of his life. 
 
 Now Walter Pater is a splendid illustration 
 of the serious-minded doubter. His spirit was 
 naturally a doubting one. But his heart was 
 never at rest. There was a love for the twilight 
 in his whole make-up. I think there can be no 
 doubt at all, that at one time he had lost all be¬ 
 lief in the Christian Faith. He uses expressions 
 which take an attitude of definite hostility to 
 revealed religion. “When I knew him first,” 
 says Mr. Gosse, “he was a pagan without any 
 guide but that of personal conscience, but the 
 years brought with them a greater and greater 
 longing.” 
 
 Perhaps it is worth observing that he was a 
 regular church attendant and always occupied 
 his stall both morning and evening. In this like 
 
Bt tbe Sbrtne ot Beauty m 
 
 Gibbon who, though an unbeliever, was a great 
 churchman. He seemed to be happiest in sacred 
 places. He seemed to find his greatest delight 
 in processions and symbols, in the pomp of 
 colour and melody. The mystic Tauler used to 
 draw his cap over his eyes when he went out into 
 the country so that the violets might not with¬ 
 draw him from his inward communion. Pater 
 on the other hand saw God in the violets or 
 rather he saw God in the beauty of the violets. 
 He had little sympathy for those who would 
 smash all the carved work of a Catholic shrine, 
 and substitute therefor a Puritan barn. Jowett 
 said to him one day, “Mr. Pater, you seem to 
 think that religion is all idolatry/ 7 Indeed he 
 was a strong advocate for making the college 
 service compulsory. In chapel he was a familiar 
 figure. And it was always remarked that he 
 always knelt, and remained kneeling, in a pose 
 of the deepest reverence during the entire ad¬ 
 ministration of the Holy Supper. He seemed to 
 find a soothing influence in the service. There 
 are those indeed who think that if he had lived 
 longer he would have taken orders and spent his 
 later days in the odour of the church. But he 
 wavered between Apollo and Christ. Neither 
 had absolute sway in his life. Some one calls 
 him “A pilgrim in the region of faith. 77 I 
 would say rather a pilgrim in the realm of 
 beauty. Beauty was the shrine at which he 
 
132 Bt tbe ©brine of Beauty 
 
 knelt. His whole life was an offering to Venus. 
 But the beauty of Venus is not enough. One 
 thing it lacks. It lacks personality; it lacks in¬ 
 carnate expression; it lacks heart; it lacks soul; 
 it lacks the beauty of holiness because holiness is 
 unreal till it becomes a living manifestation. It 
 lacks a Master; it lacks a Christ; it lacks the 
 note of obedience. 
 
 “ I heard Him call 
 Come follow, that was all. 
 
 My gold grew dim 
 My soul went after Him. 
 
 I rose and followed, that was all. 
 
 Who would not follow if he 
 heard His call?” 
 
IS OUR FAMILY LIFE A FAILURE? 
 
 HRISTIANITY has no finer 
 field of action than the home. 
 If a man is living the right kind 
 of life in his home, he is doing 
 a momentous work; he can do 
 nothing greater; the likelihood 
 is that his walk and behaviour among his fellow 
 men will be blameless. The home is the unit for 
 all definite reform. Perhaps the most far-reach¬ 
 ing work that any two young fluttering hearts 
 can do on this earth is to create a real home. 
 Because home is the soul of the nation. The 
 strength of our Republic is in proportion to the 
 number of its virtuous homes. Nations will not 
 always fight for a principle, but they will always 
 fight for their homes. No sacrifice for it is too 
 great. The home tie is the strongest tie that can 
 bind a people together. Home is the Castle 
 where the husband is King and the wife is Queen. 
 
 John Mills was the first man in North Caro¬ 
 lina to provide for the training of orphan chil¬ 
 dren. He used to say: “I have looked around a 
 good deal over this world, and I have never 
 found anything to make men out of but boys; 
 
 133 
 
*34 Us ©ur ifamii£ %\tc a failure ? 
 
 and I have never found anything to make women 
 out of but girls/ ’ And if I may be allowed to 
 extend that suggestion, I do not think there is 
 anything to build a state out of but homes. You 
 cannot build a state out of navies or armies. 
 Japan is not a Christian nation, but the funda¬ 
 mental fact in the life of Japan is ancestor 
 worship, i. e., reverence for the fathers. They 
 believe their ancestors to be alive and in vital 
 connection with the life of their children. Think 
 what that means. Surely no man would ever do 
 a mean thing if he felt that he had a true parent 
 standing by his side, and looking over his shoul¬ 
 der watching him. 
 
 The trouble with the world to-day is the home. 
 I suppose there is more real sorrow in society 
 just now rising directly from unhappy homes 
 than from any other source. A rough estimate 
 of the number of divorces in our land is about 
 one in ten. We have in round numbers about 
 100,000 yearly. And the old mill keeps grind¬ 
 ing out its bitter grist. We brand Mormonism 
 as an unclean and loathsome thing, but is there 
 really much to choose between the system that 
 permits plural wives all at once, and the system 
 that permits them in tandem fashion? 
 
 What can be done to restore and rehabilitate 
 this crumbling American shrine ? Can anything 
 be done? The home is the basis of our whole 
 national edifice. No doubt about that! The 
 
its Oxw ffantils &ife a jfaiiure? J35 
 
 Spartan mother believed that her mission was to 
 train brave men for the state. She took no in¬ 
 terest in her son unless he was a soldier. That 
 was Plato’s philosophy too, that sons should be 
 raised for the state much as we raise cattle for 
 the market. This was also the Prussian concep¬ 
 tion. But it is not the Christian ideal. There 
 can hardly be any room for debate on the state¬ 
 ment that it was the corruption of the family 
 and the destruction of the home life which led 
 to the fall of the Roman Empire. We have no 
 less an authority for that than Gibbon. And 
 there is no higher than he—not on old Rome. 
 When the home disappears, the Church disap¬ 
 pears, the state disappears, everything funda¬ 
 mental and structural disappears. There are no 
 homes in the heathen world; there never were. 
 It is the Bible that has created the home. And 
 where there is no Bible there are no homes. So 
 that to strengthen the home, to purify it, to en¬ 
 rich it is the noblest work in which the forces of 
 righteousness can engage. 
 
 And this is not an easy task to-day because 
 so much of our literature is outspokenly hostile. 
 Agnosticism and infidelity have spent their ener¬ 
 gies hitherto fighting the Bible and the Church, 
 but to-day they are laying their slimy finger on 
 the home. They are riddling it with poisonous 
 bullets. In a play produced a short time ago, 
 one character counsels another in these words: 
 
*36 IFs ©ur family %itc a failure T 
 
 “ If your country’s laws forbid you change your laws; 
 
 If your family forbids you change your family; 
 
 If your church forbids you change your church; 
 
 If your God forbids you change your God.” 
 
 The glory of the Anglo-Saxon race is her 
 literature. This is true from the days of 
 Chaucer to the days of Tennyson. But to-day 
 our shelves are lined with books (and they are 
 not all foreign books either) that are frankly 
 and openly anti-family. “A large percentage 
 of our modern novels to-day/’ says Wm. Lyon 
 Phelps of Yale, “represent marriage as an in¬ 
 tolerable boredom.” In French fiction, as An¬ 
 drew Lang once remarked, “love comes after 
 marriage punctually enough but it is always love 
 for some one else.” 
 
 Even a writer like Lefcadio Hearn says in his 
 last book: “To-day we know that all social 
 progress, all material strength, all national 
 vigour, intellectual as well as physical, depends 
 essentially upon the family, upon the morality of 
 the household, upon the relations of parents to 
 children. ’ ’ 
 
 In German and Scandinavian, and of late 
 years even in English literature, Christian mar¬ 
 riage is stealthily and insidiously attacked. 
 Here’s Ibsen. He does not hesitate to say that 
 monogamy destroys love. Here’s Nordeau: he 
 straight up and down denounces wedlock. 
 Here’s Bernard Shaw: he says that marriage is 
 
Us ©ur family %itc a failure? J37 
 
 the corner-stone of the system which produces 
 all our social disasters. He advocates “a scien¬ 
 tific breeding of the human race.” His idea is 
 that what the world needs is great men and that 
 great men can never be born of parents who 
 are mated for life. Certainly a most astonish¬ 
 ing deliverance. One is tempted to ask if John 
 Wesley was a great man or David Livingstone 
 or Carlyle or Cromwell or Phillips Brooks or 
 several dozen others one might mention. It 
 might do Mr. Shaw some good to read about the 
 kind of homes such men as these came from. 
 H. G. Wells qualifies his ideas on Free Love by 
 a system of State Eugenics. 
 
 We are hearing a great deal these days about 
 atmosphere. We have become surprisingly in¬ 
 terested in the weather bureau. There are cures 
 for certain diseases which depend almost entirely 
 on climate. About fifty thousand tourists go 
 out every winter to Southern California. They 
 are willing to pay any exorbitant price for the 
 sunshine and the warmth. During the hot sum¬ 
 mer days people fairly flock to the seashore. 
 They are in search of an atmosphere. And the 
 great thing about home is its atmosphere. Every 
 home is an individual thing. It has its own at¬ 
 mosphere. You go into one home and you 
 breathe a sweet incense. Like Tom Moore’s vase 
 it is perfumed by the roses it carries. You can 
 almost feel a sacred presence. The very next 
 
J38 IFs Onx jfamils %\ te a if allure? 
 
 door something entirely different! You detect 
 at once the odour of the street. There is sordid¬ 
 ness and petulance and wrangling. Ill temper 
 sours the air. You sense the turmoil of the 
 market-place. There is in it the chill of winter. 
 
 Do you recall how the mother of a great 
 Chinese philosopher trained her boy ? I refer to 
 Mengsten. Her home was near a s|aughter 
 house and when she noticed that her son was 
 watching with indifference the pain of the ani¬ 
 mals she moved away. Her next home hap¬ 
 pened to be near a graveyard, and no# finding 
 that wholesome, she moved again. Thisps what 
 a pagan mother did. She tried to give fer child 
 the right environment, the right atmosphere. I 
 cannot but feel that the greatest work the Church 
 can do to-day is atmospheric. 
 
 What is needed to-day in our land more than 
 anything else is a holy crusade for the reinforce¬ 
 ment of the family and of the principles on which 
 a true family life is built. I am down on 
 Bolshevism because it is the sworn enemy of the 
 family. Some preachers are emphasizing the 
 social gospel and some the ethicizing of economics 
 and some international peace and some the broth¬ 
 erhood of man. Some are perfect faddists on 
 what they call the Fundamentals. But the one 
 institution in which all these aims can be 
 engendered and fostered is the Christian family. 
 The criminal question to-day we know is largely a 
 
Ifs ©ur JFamilp %\te a jfaiture? *39 
 
 question of the home. Our judges are constantly 
 reminding us of that, that the majority of our 
 criminals are mere boys. Some one has said that 
 the most important bit of news in any morning 
 paper is the column headed ‘ ‘ Births, ’ ’ far more 
 important than the speeches in the Senate. The 
 true riches of the world is in its babies. “Their 
 little veins are the true veins of wealth.” And 
 there are 100,000 of them born every day! 
 Thirty-six million a year. What a transfusion 
 of freshness and renewal to a sick and tired 
 world! 
 
 Every little while we have the question dis¬ 
 cussed, Is marriage a failure? Certainly a dis¬ 
 couraging lot of them are tragic failures. It is 
 claimed that 90% of all the children in our Re¬ 
 form schools are the children of parents who are 
 not living together. Two little boys were play¬ 
 ing together in Newport last summer. One 
 said: “Hello; there goes my new papa.” 
 “Humph,” said the other, “he’s nothing; he was 
 my papa once.” 
 
 Marriage for money is a dead failure. Mar¬ 
 riage in haste is a failure. My own associate 
 told me this winter that he married a couple at 
 8, and at 11 (three hours later) they both re¬ 
 turned saying they felt they had made a mistake 
 and asking if the union could not be annulled. 
 Marriage as a trial trip is a failure. Marriage 
 to be dissolved when “I’m tired of your com- 
 
*40 Ifs ©ur jfamUg %itc a jf allure? 
 
 pany” is a failure. But marriage founded on 
 true love, never. There is nothing sweeter this 
 side of Paradise than two young loving hearts 
 living in a cozy nest they call their home. I sat 
 for years in a simple country church every Sab¬ 
 bath morning, and out of the old-fashioned win¬ 
 dows I would gaze for hours at the leaning 
 tombstones and the old graveyard where the dust 
 of my fathers rested. It is a beautiful spot and 
 sacred. It is more sacred now than ever. But 
 the most sacred place of all is the old home. No 
 great cathedral, no grand scene in nature can 
 ever be what that home was when the world was 
 young—when roses bloomed and cherries ripened 
 and I was a boy. As I look back upon it now 
 it is filled with very fragrant memories. It re¬ 
 minds one of taking a walk into the country 
 these autumn days. One is besieged on every 
 side with gorgeous colour and the tender tribute 
 of the falling leaves. 
 
 In these good old times there was an institu¬ 
 tion called the Family Altar. To-day I much 
 fear—if the truth must be told—it will have to 
 be confessed that this holy shrine has about 
 tumbled into ruins. And it is the greatest blow 
 the Church has yet sustained. Perhaps the 
 cause of true religion has never received a blow 
 as serious; for nothing can take its place in the 
 economy of Christian training—nothing. It has 
 been a veritable nursery of greatness, and the 
 
11s Onv %\fe a failure? m 
 
 loss is simply past computing. The family altar 
 has made preachers; it has made missionaries; it 
 has made strong citizens. A strong navy is not 
 America’s defense. Forts do not defend any 
 more. We are learning that the great siege guns 
 can tear to slivers all the granite and concrete 
 round Gibraltar. The weapons of our warfare 
 are not carnal; they are spiritual. And one of 
 the greatest spiritual weapons we can wield is 
 the weapon of family prayer. Nothing strength¬ 
 ens the home life like it; nothing so sweetens it 
 either. It softens all friction. Hearts that kneel 
 at God’s feet every morning cannot get very far 
 apart during the day. It is the very perfume of 
 the place. It weaves into the fabric of memory 
 silver threads that remain bright and shining 
 forever. There is no better way to bind the heart 
 of a child with chains of gold to the throne above. 
 It is the altar after all that makes the place a 
 sanctuary. Dr. Dale used to say that every 
 Christian church should be an institution to ren¬ 
 der adult conversions needless. That is what 
 every home should be. The Church is ever pray¬ 
 ing for a revival. Let her keep on praying. 
 When it comes it will begin at the hearthstone. 
 
 Some years ago a missionary who had been in 
 China for a quarter of a century returned to 
 America on his first furlough. He landed in 
 San Francisco. The editor of a great daily sent 
 a reporter to interview him after he had been a 
 
J42 ITs Onx Xife a ffaiiure? 
 
 month in the country, lecturing and preaching up 
 and down the Pacific coast. One question asked 
 by the reporter was, What particular changes 
 have you observed in America since you left five 
 and twenty years ago? His answer was, “The 
 greatest change I have noted is that hotel life is 
 taking the place of home life. ’ ’ It is one of the 
 most unhopeful commentaries on our American 
 life. 
 
XIII 
 
 PREPAREDNESS 
 
 OME years ago the word was 
 much in vogue. The country 
 was stirred to a high pitch of 
 fever heat when it was learned 
 how wretchedly prepared we 
 were for a possible call to arms. 
 We were told that we were in danger and must 
 prepare. The word had a sinister sound. It was 
 a bugle cry. It had a warlike note, and in war it 
 is a rule to be ready and to have your “guns 
 pointed toward the enemy.” 
 
 But preparation does not always argue 
 danger. Sometimes we need preparation for our 
 joys full as much as for our sorrows, sometimes 
 more. “Many a Parsifal is able to unhorse his 
 enemy and yet blunders irretrievably when he 
 sees the vision of the Holy Grail. 5 ’ How often it 
 happens that we are prepared to meet the evil 
 when we are not prepared at all to meet the good! 
 It was thus that Jacob was taken by surprise; 
 “Surely Jehovah is in this place and I knew it 
 not.” 
 
 One would not be far wrong in saying that the 
 
 *43 
 
IPreparetmess 
 
 J 44- 
 
 keynote of the Bible is this word prepare. That 
 is what life is; it is a preparation. Our chief 
 business down here is to get ready for something 
 else, something further on. Only the far-off- 
 future phase of the matter has been overworked. 
 There is much in the good Book, to be sure, about 
 preparation for the next life, but there is even 
 more about preparation for this life. It is a 
 cardinal mistake, fathered largely by the old 
 divines, to suppose that great preparation is 
 needed to meet death. There is nothing in death 
 to terrify us. Ten million lads met death 
 in the Great War. They were not afraid. Why 
 should we be? They have taken out of death a 
 good deal of its sting. As Harry Lauder re¬ 
 marked, 4 ‘Why should I be afraid to go where 
 my John went?” We face death but once; we 
 are facing life every day. It is life that is the 
 big thing not death. One does not need to die to 
 experience eternity: we are experiencing eternity 
 now. 
 
 This is the clear concurrent testimony of the 
 Old Testament. All the voices are of one mind 
 on this score. Instance Amos. Amos is the old¬ 
 est of the prophets whose writings have come 
 down to us. He is the first of the so-called minor 
 prophets, minor that is, not in the qualitative 
 but in the quantitative sense. They wrote 
 less than the others; in that sense only are 
 they minors. In this particular prophecy there 
 
Preparedness 
 
 *45 
 
 is no mention of the next world at all. What 
 Amos was concerned about was this world, this 
 present world, this present evil world as Paul 
 labelled it. It is not eternity he is thinking of 
 but time. His message is a “ Tract for the 
 Times.’ ’ 
 
 Take just one of his trumpet blasts, “ Prepare 
 to meet thy God, 0 Israel.” The warning is not 
 spoken to an individual: it is addressed to the 
 nation. “0 Israel,” he repeatedly says. All 
 through the prophecy it is “ Ye people of Israel” 
 or “ye inhabitants of Jerusalem.” It is to the 
 country as a whole that he makes his stirring 
 appeal. The whole land was morally corrupt. 
 The poor were oppressed and the needy were 
 crushed. It was a world packed with every kind 
 of wrong. The wealthy indulged in their drunken 
 orgies stretched on ivory divans, singing their 
 lewd and flashy songs. He saw the merchants 
 using false weights. There was no justice in the 
 land. The poor were exploited, the market-place 
 was filled with trickery. He saw greed rampant 
 on every side. Religion was a gilded sham. 
 Vice was coupled with the worship of Jehovah. 
 Women were attached to the sanctuary. The 
 world that Amos knew was a rotten world, “a 
 world that trampled on the fundamental sancti¬ 
 ties of pity for the dying and respect for the 
 dead. ’ ’ It was cruel to the poor and that, in his 
 mind, was the cardinal iniquity. Their lives 
 
U6 
 
 preparedness 
 
 were bartered for dirty dividends and it stirred 
 bis clean red blood. It is to a land in this 
 scandalous condition that the prophet peals out 
 his blast of warning. Every one of these holy 
 men of old thunders about righteousness but 
 Amos hardly speaks of anything else. His gospel 
 is a great social gospel. God is at the basis of all 
 morality. The prophet’s whole message is a call 
 to a better citizenship. 
 
 Some one has said that the personality of Amos 
 is built of granite, Aberdeen granite. He was a 
 man with a tremendous conscience and it might 
 sometimes appear that his stern, rugged, Puritan 
 nature would make him cold and hard to the 
 tender and the beautiful. But not so! He loved 
 the country, the hills and the brooks and the 
 meadows. He was a simple shepherd lad who 
 had always lived a quiet pastoral life caring for 
 his flocks and his herds. He was a staunch apos¬ 
 tle of the simple life, loving the great silences. 
 In all his utterances there is the breeze of the 
 hills and the freshness of the mountain air. He 
 was not a man of what we to-day call culture. 
 He was not a graduate of any school. He was 
 not a professor in a theological seminary. He 
 was indeed an unlettered man. He did not write 
 the polished language that Isajah wrote. He 
 makes mistakes in grammar and syntax. He had 
 never been trained for the priesthood. He was 
 not even an ordained prophet. ‘ ‘ Then answered 
 
preparedness 
 
 J47 
 
 Amos and said to Amaziah, I am no prophet, 
 neither am I one of the sons of the prophets; I 
 am simply a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore 
 trees. And the Lord took me from following the 
 flock and then he said unto me, go prophesy 
 unto my people Israel.’’ 
 
 And yet the man’s words are quivering with 
 eloquence and fervour and splendid moral dis¬ 
 dain. His little book is rich in imagery and deft 
 turns of expression. If he was not an ordained 
 prophet he most surely was an ordained poet. 
 How many beautiful lines from the lips of this 
 old Hebrew herdsman are familiar to us! He 
 speaks of the earthquake heaving up the land. 
 He notes the basket of summer fruit. He speaks 
 of turning the shadow of death into the morning 
 and of making the day dark with night. “Ye 
 were as a firebrand plucked from the burning” is 
 another of his immortal phrases. Speaking of 
 their public worship, he says, “I hate your 
 feasts, I take no delight in your solemn assem¬ 
 blies. Take away from me the noise of your 
 songs.” One commentator observes that it is 
 somewhat humiliating to think that what we call 
 classical music may be only noise in God’s ears. 
 11 Can two walk together except they be agreed ? ’ ’ 
 is one of his classic questions. Who can doubt 
 that this son of the sheepfold was a genuinely 
 ordained poet? 
 
 Now the world of our day is not altogether un- 
 
J 48 preparedness 
 
 like the world of Amos’ day. We, too, are on 
 the verge of a bran-new social order. “The 
 whole creation is groaning.” For onrs is a 
 tragically wounded world, torn with terrible sor¬ 
 rows and washed with woeful sins. We are 
 tossed about in the storm. There is a movement 
 going on for the bringing in of a better state of 
 things. It is an international movement. Its 
 aim is not merely to alleviate the condition of the 
 poor; it purposes to touch rich and poor. How 
 to drive out all the evils of the old system. To 
 be a citizen of the Kingdom of God does not ab¬ 
 solve us from the duties and obligations of Amer¬ 
 ican citizenship. The state is divine just as 
 truly as the Church. The state exists to train up 
 good citizens. It is God’s will that there should 
 be righteous government and not anarchy. Some 
 think the new program can be established by 
 force. Others argue that force will only bring 
 back all the evils it strives to overthrow. The 
 question is, how to prepare the way for a better 
 society; how to lay the foundation for the build¬ 
 ing of a better world. And there are two voices 
 clamouring to be heard. One says, Improve 
 men’s conditions and you will better their lives. 
 The other replies, Improve their lives and you 
 will better their conditions. But the thought 
 arises, why may not both voices be true? We 
 cannot afford to ignore the social and physical 
 and illiterate condition of the ignorant and down- 
 
preparedness 
 
 U9 
 
 trodden and criminal classes. But if we aim at 
 nothing more than material betterment and si¬ 
 lence the spiritual note, are we going to see ful¬ 
 filled the happy ideal for which we hope and 
 pray? Millions to-day are accepting the teach¬ 
 ing of Karl Marx that men are nothing but ani¬ 
 mals and that the only real pleasures are the 
 pleasures of the flesh. “We must destroy the 
 last vestige of God and religion/ ’ says Marx. 
 The logical result of this philosophy is suicidal; 
 it is suicidal for the individual and for the na¬ 
 tion. Both of Karl Marx’s own daughters, and 
 his son-in-law and disciple, Paul Lafargue, all 
 committed suicide. They advocated it: it was 
 part of their propaganda. Lafargue planned the 
 date and the method of his own death ten years 
 in advance and carried out the program in 1911 
 to the letter. 
 
 And it is suicidal for the nation. It has been 
 tried. It is being tried to-day in Russia. It was 
 tried centuries ago in some of the republics of 
 Greece and in parts of the old Roman Empire. 
 There is a book entitled “ Where Socialism 
 Failed” by Stewart Grahame. It is the story of 
 two brothers who emigrated some years ago from 
 Australia to South America to form a commu¬ 
 nity of Socialists. They took with them a colony 
 of several hundred men with their wives and 
 families. The men were the pick of the working 
 classes of New South Wales. The Paraguay 
 
J50 
 
 preparedness 
 
 Government had transferred to them, free and 
 unincumbered, 600 square miles of fertile land, 
 as well as great herds of cattle and sheep. Para¬ 
 guay, it will be remembered, at one time had 
 been a prosperous country. It was the first 
 country in South America to have a railroad. 
 But the mad ambitions of an autocrat had 
 brought ruin to the land. And the ruling powers 
 felt that if some fresh blood were brought into 
 their country to develop their industries, it might 
 mean the return of better things. So about 400 
 Socialists from New South Wales accepted the 
 tender, and sailed in 1893 to settle in their new 
 Canaan and work out their system of communism 
 on a sort of semi-national scale. They were to 
 be given perfect freedom of government and 
 education and religion. As far as religion was 
 concerned, there was to be none. One of the ar¬ 
 ticles of incorporation of the colony was that the 
 Deity was to be excluded from any participation 
 in its affairs. God was not to be recognized. 
 The sequel to this experiment is a familiar story: 
 it has often been told, how envy and jealousy and 
 hatred crept into the little paradise, how they all 
 got to quarrelling, and how in the end they drove 
 their leader, William Lane, out of the country. 
 Coming back to Australia with a few who had 
 remained faithful, the interesting part of his 
 experience was his conviction that it was not 
 possible to run a society, as long as people are 
 
IPreparefcness 
 
 *5J 
 
 constituted as they are, without some sort of re¬ 
 ligion. Listen to his words, “ Under pure mate¬ 
 rialism with no lofty ideal for a guiding motive, 
 a people will deteriorate; there must be a divine 
 imperative. ’ ’ 
 
 It certainly was an astonishing pronouncement 
 and all the more astonishing that it was the sober 
 conclusion of a personal adventure. Can men be 
 governed without God? Amos did not think 
 they could. And those who have tried the ex¬ 
 periment agree. The heart of the social problem 
 as of every other problem is the human heart. 
 The brotherhood of man is a powerless truth if 
 there be no divine Fatherhood. The salvation of 
 society is not simply an economic question; it is 
 a moral question; it is a spiritual question. 
 
 What then can be done, it will be asked, what 
 can be done to assist in bringing in a new and 
 better order? Can anything be done? Yes in¬ 
 deed, much; several things are possible. We 
 can, for one thing, prepare ourselves. We can 
 keep our own individual name unspotted. There 
 is nothing that a true patriot can leave behind 
 him that can be compared for one little moment 
 to a good name. That is a big part of pure re¬ 
 ligion. The richest contribution that any man 
 can offer to his country is to give to it the right 
 kind of a life. One Savonarola saved wicked 
 Florence. One Aristides lifted Athens higher 
 perceptibly. Ten righteous men would have 
 
*52 
 
 preparedness 
 
 saved Sodom. And what is going to save Amer¬ 
 ica is a glorious company of noble men. Good 
 men are the salt of the earth. Good men are the 
 light of the world. They are the key to the 
 problem. 
 
 Another thing! We can insist that our nation 
 put the emphasis on the simple things. We must 
 needs get back to nature, as Amos did, and learn 
 to drink her milk of joy. We must return to the 
 simple wants of the human heart. So many have 
 lost the sense that the really great things, the en¬ 
 during things, lie in the common gifts that are all 
 about us. The satisfying joys and pleasures are 
 scattered broadcast within the reach of all. 
 
 “How good is man’s life the mere living! how fit to 
 employ 
 
 All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in 
 joy.” 
 
 Perhaps there never was as much extravagance 
 rampant as there is to-day. Never were luxuries 
 in such demand! A prominent foreigner visit¬ 
 ing our country some months ago remarked that 
 the waste in our hotels was cause for pain. The 
 Secretary of the National Jewellers ' Board of 
 Trade said recently, “ We cannot find enough ex¬ 
 pensive stones to fill our orders.” Millions 
 abroad are freezing and starving: they haven't 
 enough clothing to cover their emaciated bodies 
 and protect them from the winter's blast. Half 
 
©repare&ness 
 
 *53 
 
 the babies in Central Europe are hungry. And 
 yet in our land to-day there is a perfect sinful 
 orgy of waste. There is an absorption in pleas¬ 
 ure. The American people are amusement mad, 
 money mad, luxury mad. There is a selfish dis¬ 
 regard of public interest. And it is the sure and 
 certain road to national decay. 
 
 Some years ago a very remarkable will was 
 discovered. It was written by an insane man in 
 a lunatic asylum and was found in his portfolio 
 after his death. The will was first published in 
 Harper’s Weekly, September 3, 1898. It was 
 entitled “My last Will and Testament.” Its au¬ 
 thor, Williston Fish, was a graduate of West 
 Point and later a lawyer in Chicago. It reads as 
 follows: 
 
 “My right to live, being but a life estate, is not 
 at my disposal, but, these things excepted, all else 
 in the world I now proceed to devise and be¬ 
 queath. I give to the good fathers and mothers, 
 in trust for their children, all good little words 
 of praise and encouragement, all quaint pet 
 names and endearments, and I charge the said 
 parents to use them generously, as the needs of 
 the children require. I leave the children for 
 the term of their childhood the flowers, fields, 
 blossoms and woods, with the right to play in 
 them, warning them at the same time against 
 thistles and thorns. I devise to the children the 
 banks, the brooks, and the golden sands beneath 
 the waters thereof, and the white clouds that float 
 over the giant trees ; and I leave to the children. 
 
*54 
 
 preparedness 
 
 long, long days to be merry in, and the night and 
 the moon and the train of the Milky Way to won¬ 
 der at. 
 
 “I devise to the boys jointly all the useful idle 
 fields, all the pleasant waters where one may 
 swim, all the streams where one may fish, or 
 where, when grim winter comes, one may skate, 
 to have and to hold the same for the period of 
 their boyhood. The meadows, with the clover, 
 blossoms, and butterflies thereof; the woods and 
 their appurtenances-—squirrels, birds, echoes, 
 and strange noises; all the distant places which 
 may be visited, together with the adventures 
 there to be found. I give to the said boys each 
 his own place by the fireside at night, with all the 
 pictures that may be seen in the burning wood, 
 to enjoy without let or hindrance and without 
 any incumbrance or care. 
 
 “To lovers I devise their imaginary world, 
 with whatever they may need, as stars, sky, red 
 roses by the wall, the bloom of the hawthorn, the 
 sweet strains of music, and aught else they may 
 desire. To young men I bequeath all boisterous 
 and inspiring sports and rivalry, and I give to 
 them disdain of weakness and undaunted confi¬ 
 dence in their own strength. I give them power 
 to make lasting friendships and prepossessing 
 companions, and to them exclusively I give all 
 merry songs and brave choruses. 
 
 “To those who are no longer children or 
 youths or lovers I leave memory, and bequeath 
 them the volumes of the poems of Burns, Shake¬ 
 speare, and other poets, and to live over their old 
 days again without any tithe or deduction of any 
 kind. 
 
 “To the loved ones with snowy crowns I be- 
 
preparedness 
 
 J55 
 
 queath peace, old age, the love and gratitude of 
 their children, until they fall asleep. ’ ’ 
 
 Some one has observed, “I do not know how 
 mad this man was, but surely our land needs 
 to-day a little of his madness. ’’ 
 
 One thing more is clamouring for expression, 
 and that is, to put the emphasis as a people upon 
 a life of service. A gentleman of leisure re¬ 
 marked recently, evidently without considering 
 what an incriminating confession it was, “Well, 
 if I were to die to-morrow, I Ve had my share of 
 the world’s fun.’’ How poor and mean and piti¬ 
 ful such a life will seem some day! As Bishop 
 Brooks says, “It is not when the ship is fretting 
 against the dock that she learns her true life; it 
 is when the rope that ties her to the pier is let 
 go and she plunges into the channel and points 
 her nose to the great ocean—then it is that she 
 finds her true life.” And it is not when we are 
 hugging the shore of human shelter and living 
 our little landlocked lives that we find our lib¬ 
 erty. We were built for the ocean. The great 
 wide waste of human need is calling us and no 
 man truly finds himself until he hears and 
 obeys that call divine. Our country to-day has 
 many enemies to fight. We have selfish capital¬ 
 ists and violent agitators and heartless profiteers. 
 There are men in our midst, it must be confessed, 
 who do not hesitate to wrap the flag around their 
 
i56 
 
 preparefcness 
 
 selfish bodies and then proceed to rob and plun¬ 
 der the poor just as they did in Amos’ day. 
 These men are highway robbers. They are mak¬ 
 ing more Bolsheviks than any red propaganda 
 from Petrograd. Sometimes we ask ourselves 
 who is the real traitor? According to our Con¬ 
 stitution treason against the United States con¬ 
 sists in levying war against our Government or in 
 giving aid or comfort to the enemy. But are 
 there not other forms of hostility just as damag¬ 
 ing ? A traitor is one who betrays a trust. And 
 isn’t service to our flag these critical days, isn’t 
 that a sacred trust? 
 
 When the Great War was at its height we 
 watched with admiring interest the men who 
 gave their lives and labours to the Government. 
 They went to Washington and worked for a dol¬ 
 lar a year. Some of them toiled in lowly sta¬ 
 tions. They did it out of love for their country. 
 They were men of means and their loyalty and 
 patriotism was as large as their purses. But 
 now that the war is over these men have gone 
 back to make more money and pile up still big¬ 
 ger fortunes. But, man, is not your fortune 
 ample enough? Is it not larger really than you 
 need ? Is it not about as much as you can serenely 
 manage? Why toil and sweat for more? Why 
 not show in peace a little of that splendid sacri¬ 
 fice that you showed in war? There are many 
 who feel that there never would have been a war 
 
IPreparefcness 
 
 *57 
 
 if strong men of influence and gifts had realized 
 their social and political responsibility and ar¬ 
 ticulated it in action. Some one has observed 
 that we were never so magnificent as in war and 
 never so mean as in peace. Why not cut down 
 some of your office work and give the Church a 
 little of your time ? Why not give the hospitals 
 a little of your time ? Why not give your family 
 a little more of your time? Why not give the 
 State a little more of your time? Some years 
 ago when Kossuth was in this country he made a 
 rather striking statement: ‘ ^ If shipwreck should 
 ever befall us as a nation, the rock on which it 
 would split would be our devotion to our private 
 interests at the expense of the Republic . 9 ’ 
 
 ** When all the choric peal shall end, 
 
 That through the fanes hath rung; 
 
 When the long lauds no more ascend 
 From man’s adoring tongue; 
 
 “ When whelmed are altar, priest, and creed; 
 When all the faiths have passed; 
 
 Perhaps, from darkening incense freed, 
 
 God may emerge at last.” 
 
XIV 
 
 SPLITTING HAIRS 
 
 EARLY all the troubles that 
 have afflicted the Church have 
 been questions of splitting 
 hairs. Theologians have been 
 adepts in the art of hair-split¬ 
 ting, and a great army of 
 bigots has followed in their train. In the auto¬ 
 biography of Mark Rutherford there is a very 
 delightful chapter on the Dorcas meetings in his 
 parish. Once a month the wives and daughters 
 drank tea with each other and the evening was 
 devoted to making clothes for the poor. The 
 minister was expected to read to them while they 
 worked. As the work was somewhat secular, it 
 was not considered necessary that the passages 
 selected for reading should be from the Bible, 
 but as the meeting was a church meeting it was 
 felt that they should have a religious flavour, so 
 that books on topics altogether worldly were not 
 regarded as apropos. In fact the readings were 
 usually from the denominational journal. It 
 was perfectly legitimate to read the births and 
 deaths and marriages from this journal, although 
 
 158 
 
Splitting ftmivs 
 
 *59 
 
 it would not have been thought right to read 
 them from the morning newspaper. It was 
 agreed 1 i with a fineness of discrimination which 
 was very remarkable ” that it was quite right 
 to read them in a paper that was “ serious/ ’ 
 On one occasion Mark started the “ Vicar of 
 Wakefield,” but after getting through a chapter 
 the company voted that it would be better if it 
 were discontinued. On another occasion he tried 
 a selection from George Fox’s Journal, but this 
 was objected to also on the ground that ‘ ‘ he did 
 not belong to us.” 
 
 I can well remember how in my own child¬ 
 hood home, cards were tabooed with a stern and 
 holy horror. But we children had another set, 
 in which the king was pictured as a rugged 
 farmer, his buxom wife was the quben; and in¬ 
 stead of spades and hearts and clubs and 
 diamonds there were potatoes and turnips and 
 apples and corn. It was a fine subtle distinction. 
 We played the game in just the same way, only 
 it was the ace of spuds instead of spades. A 
 violin was not permitted around our fireside. 
 It was in those days an instrument of unright¬ 
 eousness. We were allowed the jew’s-harp and 
 the chanter but not the fiddle. Among the story 
 writers only Sir Walter was in paternal favour. 
 Although Burns sat on the table side by side 
 with Bunyan. 
 
 One of the severest criticisms of the Master 
 
160 
 
 Splitting Dairs 
 
 was when He called the scribes and Pharisees to 
 task for magnifying trifles. “ Ye blind guides, 
 ye tithe mint and anise and cummin but ye for¬ 
 get the weightier matters of the law.” They 
 were strangely meticulous about sifting out the 
 small, the picayune, the minute, while in the 
 same breath they gulped down the large, the 
 ponderous, the important. “ You strain out the 
 gnat and you swallow the camel. ’ ’ Think of the 
 way these old scribes treated the Sabbath. Con¬ 
 sider the mountain of petty observances. They 
 knew every letter of the law. They had a thou¬ 
 sand traditions to uphold concerning it. They 
 were idolaters of details. A knot which could 
 be untied with one hand might be untied on the 
 seventh day of the week, but if it required both 
 hands it was unlawful. Two thousand cubits 
 was a Sabbath day’s journey but 2,001 was for¬ 
 bidden. It was a sin to carry a burden, they 
 argued. And when the question arose, how 
 much is a burden? they answered it by saying 
 that a loaf of bread was a burden: two 
 might carry it but not one. It was so written 
 in the Mishna and the Gemara. There were 
 three and thirty different ways in which 
 the holy day could be profaned. There were 
 more than fifty varieties of mint and anise 
 and cummin which had to be carefully tithed. 
 Righteousness was a question of rules and regula¬ 
 tions. It was a matter of etiquette. The trivial 
 
Splitting feairs 
 
 \6\ 
 
 things were the important things. Fasts and 
 feasts and washing cups and platters, and trac¬ 
 ing genealogies to prove the directness of their 
 descent from Abraham—these were the topics 
 that concerned them most. It was much ado 
 about nothing. The whole tragic sophistry is 
 familiar. 
 
 In that little volume by William Lyons Phelps 
 on “ Reading the Bible ” there is a story told 
 of his childhood: “ One day by mere chance I 
 hit upon an expedient that helped me to re¬ 
 member the Bible stories. I was drawing pic¬ 
 tures. My prolonged and unusual silence in the 
 room aroused the interest of my mother: 
 1 What are you doing there? ’ ‘ Drawing pic¬ 
 tures, Mother. 7 ‘ But don’t you know this is 
 Sunday and you must not draw pictures on Sun¬ 
 day.’ Suddenly I remembered the Bible. 
 * But, Mother, it ’ll be all right to draw Bible 
 pictures, won’t it ? ’ She turned the suggestion 
 up and down in her mind and found it good. I 
 therefore set to work and after another period 
 of silence I proudly exhibited to her a soldier 
 armed to the teeth literally, for in addition to 
 gun and pistol he had a large knife in his mouth. 
 
 ‘ Didn’t I tell you not to-’ ‘ But, Mother, 
 
 this is Joab captain of the host of Israel.’ ” 
 And so this interesting Sabbatarian exploit on 
 splitting hairs was evidently closed to the satis¬ 
 faction of both parties. 
 
*62 
 
 Splitting ftmirs 
 
 Consider the sticklers for ceremony and ortho¬ 
 doxy that we have with us to-day. Multitudes 
 are still bound and wound in the cerements of 
 ritualism. The trouble with the Church has 
 always been its formalism. The Pharisees 
 marvelled that Jesus ate without washing His 
 hands. Why, not to wash one’s hands before 
 eating was considered a crime almost as flagrant 
 as murder. But with one master-stroke He 
 swept away this slavery to tradition. And the 
 same is true in the matter of creeds. No better 
 illustration of skillful hair-splitting is to be 
 found anywhere than in almost all our creedal 
 statements. The Council of Nice defined the 
 doctrine of the Trinity. What an astonishing 
 deliverance it is! Whole pages being devoted to 
 the distinction between omoousioi and omoiousioi. 
 And were the members of this historic Council 
 models of virtue? Well, Constantine was one 
 of them, and this same Constantine put his wife 
 to death and also his son. The Westminster 
 divines in their “ Confession ” gave us a long 
 explanatory chapter on foreordination and free 
 will. Has any honest unprejudiced mortal ever 
 understood it ? The coloured preacher said , c ‘ God 
 predestines man to be saved and the Devil pre¬ 
 destines man to be lost and man has the casting 
 vote,” and I rather think he came as near throw¬ 
 ing light on the matter as any of the theologians. 
 True religion is never an occult and mystic thing. 
 
SpittttnG Ibairs 
 
 J63 
 
 Why should our tenets make it such? Why 
 should they be so hopelessly entangled? Why 
 should not a creed illumine a faith rather than 
 obscure it? If we must have credenda, why not 
 insist on making them brief and clear and sim¬ 
 ple. An intricate faith in such a world as ours 
 is self-condemned. 
 
 Sectarianism too is still with us. True it is 
 slowly passing, although there are many yet who 
 would keep the old wounds open. These con¬ 
 tinue to wax eloquent on their own particular 
 communion. As Joseph Parker once put it, 
 “ Episcopalianism and Presbyterianism and 
 Methodism look like solar systems to them/ 7 
 Pastor Thwackum in “ Tom Jones’’ says, 
 “ When I mention religion I mean the Christian 
 religion and not only the Christian religion but 
 the Protestant religion, and not only the Prot¬ 
 estant religion but the Church of England.” 
 The story is an old and troubled one. What an 
 unfortunate chapter it has contributed to the 
 history of the Church! “ I am of Paul and I 
 of Apollos and I of Cephas and I of Christ.” 
 We look over the field to-day and what a lamen¬ 
 table confusion we see. The situation is nothing 
 less than a tragic scandal. If it only made for 
 efficiency it would have an argument for its 
 defense, but it cannot even claim this. Mr. 
 Carroll tells us that we have 150 separate divi¬ 
 sions in our own land. We have groups named 
 
 / 
 
*64 
 
 Splitting toairs 
 
 after some great leader, Lutherans, Calvinists, 
 Wesleyans, Swedenborgians. We have sects dif¬ 
 fering in regard to the Christian ordinances, 
 Mennonites, Friends, Salvationists, Christian 
 Scientists; others in regard to the Second Com¬ 
 ing. Certain bodies of Plymouth Brethren re¬ 
 fused to vote at the recent election because they 
 said the return of our Lord is imminent. 
 “ What matters to this world is not important.” 
 Christ prayed for His followers that they all 
 might be one, and yet we go out to heathen 
 China and take the book that contains this prayer 
 and we preach several dozen different interpreta¬ 
 tions of His teachings. David Swing once re¬ 
 marked in his inimitable way that you can gauge 
 the barbarity of an island by the multiplicity of 
 its tongues. And judged by that standard, how 
 barbarous to these poor Orientals our Christi¬ 
 anity must often seem to be. Denominationalism 
 to-day must surely be the most confusing fact 
 confronting a Chinese seeking light. But the 
 days of the sectarian are numbered. We will 
 keep on a little longer no doubt patching up the 
 old fences, but they are rapidly getting beyond 
 repair. Soon, let us hope, they will be needless 
 palisades. We will then be relegating them as 
 curiosities to some strange museum. “ Then we 
 shall become one flock, one shepherd.” 
 
 Still again there is the question of inspiration. 
 What quibblers we are there! How the Church 
 
Splitting flairs 
 
 165 
 
 has quarrelled over texts! What a slave she has 
 been to the letter! There is not a single heresy 
 that has tormented the Church that has not been 
 caused largely by a too literal interpretation of 
 the letter. We forget that the letter killeth. 
 We seem not to realize that the important thing 
 about the Bible is the blade, not the scabbard. 
 Some are fanatics for verbal dictation. Others 
 have lost their sense of proportion. They would 
 insist that the third chapter of Deuteronomy is 
 as important as the third of John. In answer 
 to a question of Peter as to how many times we 
 should forgive our brother for an offense, the 
 Master said seventy times seven. Seventy times 
 seven is 490. But was this His meaning? Was 
 He speaking arithmetically ? Did He mean that 
 we were to be released from any obligation to be 
 forgiving on the 491st offense? Is the word of 
 truth to be approached with a tape measure? 
 Are we supposed to repudiate our imagination 
 when we read the book? What untold harm 
 the rigid literalist has done! He persists in 
 reading as prose what was never intended for 
 prose. He is always saying, I believe in arith¬ 
 metic. He forgets that there is a difference be¬ 
 tween arithmetic and statistics. He goes on the 
 theory that nothing is true but the problems of 
 mathematics. But how illogical this is! Is not 
 great poetry true? Is not great fiction true? 
 So many imagine that a myth is a lie. And if 
 
166 
 
 Splitting Ibatts 
 
 you were to say to them that there were myths 
 in the Bible they would be horrified. But a 
 myth is not necessarily a lie. What is a myth? 
 A myth is a story that has come down to us from 
 the prehistoric past and it may be just as true 
 as any problem in Euclid. When Plato desired 
 to utter some specially important truth he used 
 the vehicle of the myth. When we are dealing 
 with the myth we do not ask, Is it true but does 
 it convey the truth? 
 
 The Sadducees once came to Jesus hoping to 
 trip Him in His talk. A poor woman, they said, 
 had seven husbands. Now in Heaven which of 
 the seven is going to claim her ? But the Master 
 replied, “ You do err not knowing the Scrip¬ 
 tures, for in Heaven they neither marry nor are 
 given in marriage but are as the angels of God. ’’ 
 And there are many to-day like this poor woman. 
 They love to juggle over curious questions. 
 What would have become of Adam and Eve if 
 they had not eaten the forbidden fruit? Who 
 was Melchizedek’s father? Where did Jesus 
 get the clothes which He wore after the resur¬ 
 rection? How many people will the New Jeru¬ 
 salem hold, according to the dimensions given in 
 the Apocalypse? A man once came to Mr. 
 Moody with a question that he said was disturb¬ 
 ing him: “ What was God doing before He made 
 the world? ” It will be remembered that Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw discusses this question in his book 
 
SpUtttno ibairs 
 
 i67 
 
 “Back to Methuselah.” But to all such idle 
 questions the Bible is impressively silent. 
 
 Consider too the strange conceptions of the 
 Christian life itself. Miss Maude Hoyden told 
 us during her recent visit of a Sunday-school 
 superintendent with whom she was acquainted. 
 The man was the assistant manager of a factory 
 whose business was the manufacture of fetters 
 for slaves in Arabia. He expounds to the chil¬ 
 dren on Sunday the love of Christ, and during 
 the week he spends his time making things that 
 degrade his fellow man. Another factory she 
 spoke about and in the same parish, was a plant 
 for the making of idols for the peoples of heathen 
 lands. And this factory likewise is controlled 
 by Christian capital. What strange and mys¬ 
 terious hair-splitting such people must indulge 
 in to shape their creed to their conduct. We 
 are reminded of John Newton. John Newton 
 wrote many of our beautiful hymns: “ How 
 sweet the name of Jesus sounds; ” 44 Amazing 
 grace how sweet the sound; ” ‘ ‘ Glorious things 
 of thee are spoken; ” “ Safely through another 
 week. ’ 9 But the ugly fact is that for many years 
 after his conversion John Newton did continue 
 to carry on the slave trade. Imagine this great 
 divine writing these words, “ I never knew 
 sweeter or more frequent hours of communion 
 than in my last two slave voyages to Guinea.” 
 It is true that near the end and after he had 
 
Splitting Ibairs 
 
 168 
 
 abandoned the unholy business, he wrote these 
 words: “ I was a wild beast on the west coast 
 of Africa but the Lord caught me and tamed 
 me.” But one wonders what strange tuning he 
 must have indulged in to harmonize the groan¬ 
 ing of the slave with the rapture of the poet. 
 
 The conclusion of the whole matter is that it 
 is high time surely for the Church of God to 
 learn her lesson. She must stop quibbling and 
 cavilling and trifling. The Master was a big 
 man. He did not spend His time on dots, jots, 
 strokes, tittles. His theme was the Kingdom and 
 that is a mountainous conception. He sent His 
 disciples out on a big job. “ Go ye and teach 
 all nations.” The Kingdom touches the whole 
 circumference of human behaviour. It reaches 
 out across national and international frontiers. 
 “ Go into all the world.” The “ uttermost 
 parts ” is our goal. So often we hear the phrase 
 “ the simple Gospel.” No one talks of simple 
 science. Who claims that our Gospel is simple? 
 Contrariwise, it is the most stupendous mystery 
 that ever challenged the intellect and heart of 
 man. The Apostle to the Gentiles called it 
 “ The unsearchable riches; ” “ the wisdom of 
 God in a mystery; ” “ the secret which from 
 the beginning hath been hid.” 
 
XV 
 
 BECAUSE I LOVE AMERICA 
 
 HEN some one once expressed 
 surprise to Mr. Gladstone that 
 he was such a faithful church 
 attendant, his answer was, “ I 
 go to church because I love 
 England.” Was it not a 
 capital rejoinder? Why should not every true 
 American say, I go to church because I love 
 America. Coulson Kernaghan has a little book¬ 
 let entitled “The World Without a Child.” 
 What would happen to our land, he argues, if it 
 ceased to welcome children, if the race should 
 decide to no longer bring children into the 
 world! Mr. Kernaghan, by the way, is fond of 
 picturing hypothetical situations of this kind. 
 Some years ago he published a brochure called 
 “ The child, the wise man and the Devil.” It 
 was an allegorical dream in which the author 
 imagined himself to be transported to Rome, 
 where a great conclave of people was gathered 
 to depose the Christ. They were all agreed that 
 the Man of Galilee was a myth, that He had 
 never lived. And, as he worked it out, it was a 
 rather startling conception—a world without a 
 Christ. 
 
 169 
 
J70 Because H %ovc Hmetica 
 
 It will be remembered bow some fifty years 
 ago the late Professor Henry Rogers published 
 a volume which he called “ The Eclipse of 
 Faith.’’ He imagined that on a certain morn¬ 
 ing the world awoke to find that it had no Bible. 
 Every copy of the Good Book had strangely dis¬ 
 appeared and even every quotation from the 
 sacred page had in some unaccountable way been 
 lost. The very name and memory of the Book 
 were gone. A world without a Bible! If I had 
 the gift of these men, I should like to attempt 
 the vision of a world without a church. What 
 a strange kind of world would it be! Stores, 
 banks, hotels, garages, theatres, operas, dancing 
 halls, asylums, libraries, hospitals, warehouses, 
 factories, but no church. Nothing to suggest 
 man’s immortal nature! Resorts for gaiety and 
 pleasure and recreation and rest, but no resort 
 for the spirit. Restaurants for bread and butter 
 but no restaurant for the soul! A city without 
 a church! A nation without a church! A 
 world without a church! 
 
 There can be little question I think that so far 
 as attendance is concerned, the Church to-day is 
 on the wane. People are not attracted to the 
 hill of Zion as in the days of yore; the simplest 
 explanation perhaps being that they are not 
 interested. The place has lost a good deal of its 
 one time drawing power. As Dr. Cairns tries to 
 show in his survey “ The army and religion,” 
 
Because fl %ovc Bmertca m 
 
 there are three waves of criticism pounding at 
 the church door to-day. First it lacks the spirit 
 of reality, and then it lacks love, and worst of 
 all it lacks life. 
 
 But the criticisms are legion. There is not 
 time to even cite them. Let us look rather at 
 the other side. What has the Church stood for 
 during all the years of our history? What has 
 it meant to the life—say of the American people ? 
 What, to get down to rock bottom, does the con¬ 
 cept itself signify ? What does it symbolize f A 
 church to begin with implies a building. Every 
 building stands for something. Here is a bank. 
 What does a bank represent? A bank repre¬ 
 sents deposits, exchange, stocks, bonds, collateral. 
 Here is a school. That means children, teaching, 
 discipline. Here is a picture gallery. That 
 signifies art, beauty, refinement. Here is a col¬ 
 lege. That denotes culture, research, scholarship. 
 Well, here is a church. Of what is it the symbol ? 
 What does it import? What is its prophecy? 
 What is its message to the soul of man ? 
 
 And certainly the first answer to this question 
 
 is, the holiness of the divine life, and as a cor¬ 
 ollary, the holiness of a good deal of our human 
 life. When we ask what was the central idea 
 of the character of Jehovah as the Jew regarded 
 
 it, the answer unquestionably is holiness. Be¬ 
 yond every other attribute this stood out as 
 the distinctive differential of IsraeFs God—-His 
 
*72 JSecause tf %ox>c Hmerica 
 
 Holiness. Jehovah was the high and holy One 
 that inhabiteth eternity. All the laws of the 
 old economy were based on the fact of the divine 
 holiness. All the rites performed were open 
 bulletins to the people of the awful holiness of 
 the God they worshipped. On the very make of 
 the tabernacle, on its covering, on its furniture, 
 on its altars, was written in letters of burning 
 flame, “ Holiness to the Lord.” Every vessel, 
 every censer, every lamp was declared holy. Be¬ 
 cause God was holy the place was holy, the min¬ 
 ister was holy, the altar was holy, the ark was 
 holy, the oracle was holy—it was a sanctuary. 
 “ Holiness becometh Thy house, 0 Lord of Hosts, 
 forever.” 
 
 We see this in the etymology of the word 
 temple. The word is a suggestive word. It has 
 a rather striking history. It is derived from the 
 Greek root, temno, to cut. What, one might 
 ask, has cutting to do with a temple? Well, 
 a good deal. If one will take the trouble 
 to travel back into the early history of 
 primitive man, one of the first persons he 
 will meet will be a priest. He will perhaps 
 be going out to measure off a part of a 
 field with a tape-line. After measuring it, 
 he takes his pickaxe and loosens the soil. 
 That is to say, he cuts a strip all around, 
 and separates it from the rest and calls 
 it sacred ground; he cuts it off from common 
 
^Because If Slope Bnterica 173 
 
 usage. Then he steps inside the line and begins 
 to build an altar. Gradually an altar rises, but 
 still he calls the place temple—not a building 
 mark; simply the ground cut off, just an open 
 field with an altar on it! In course of time walls 
 rise round about the field to shut out the heat 
 and the damp and the cold, but still the old 
 name is retained—temple—part cut off. To-day 
 temple means building. But it did not origi¬ 
 nally mean a building. Yonder corner is called 
 a temple, not because there is a building on it, 
 but because the ground has been detached and 
 devoted to a holy purpose. 
 
 No doubt some one will call this superstition, 
 but is it superstition to insist that there are 
 some things in life that are sacred? This is the 
 fundamental message of the Church. Jesus never 
 said that all places were sacred or that all things 
 were sacred, but He did say that some places 
 were and that some things were. The home of 
 your childhood is not like every other house to 
 you; the grave of your mother, the scene of your 
 sorrow, the stage of your triumph—these are 
 not common spots. Every true man has his 
 elect nook. Poor is one’s home if there be not 
 some quiet corner in it fronting Jerusalem. I 
 have noticed that the man who begins by saying 
 that all places are sacred usually ends by saying 
 that no place is sacred. Make every day Sunday 
 and soon you will have no Sunday. It is worth 
 
J74 Because If Xoue Bmertca 
 
 remembering that the divinest life in history had 
 special seasons—went to church, read the Scrip¬ 
 tures, retired for prayer, practised the presence 
 of God. 
 
 Dr. Fosdick in one of his books says: “ If a 
 man does not start by feeling that something is 
 sacred he will never feel that anything is sacri¬ 
 legious. That temple on Zion where prayers had 
 been offered and sins had been forgiven and the 
 glory of the Lord had been revealed—that and 
 all things associated with it were in this Jew’s 
 eyes sacred. You may call it very old-fashioned 
 and superstitious thus to think of a piece of 
 ground as holy, but I would rather be that 
 ancient Jew and think a piece of ground holy 
 than be as some modern folks on whose lives we 
 have to look, who seem to think that nothing in 
 life is holy at all. All that is lofty and beauti¬ 
 ful, excellent and august in human life has come 
 from men and women who have been sure that 
 at the heart of life is something that ought never 
 to be violated. If Joseph resists the solicitations 
 of impurity in Egypt it is because he thinks 
 that honour is sacred. If the three hundred at 
 Thermopylae withstand with remarkable courage 
 the onslaught of many foes it is because they 
 think that loyalty is sacred. If John Huss at 
 Constance goes to the stake rather than lie it is 
 because he thinks that truth is sacred. All that 
 is beautiful in human life is associated with the 
 
because IF %ovc Hmerica 175 
 
 consciousness in the hearts of men that there is 
 something here that must not be desecrated. 
 You may go into any country in any generation 
 and you will find religion saying about some¬ 
 thing, “ This is holy.” To be sure, it may be 
 only a painted stick or a hideous idol or an altar 
 running with the blood of sacrifice, but of some¬ 
 thing religion has always said, “ This is holy.” 
 Why is it that we shrink in horror from the type 
 of character now revealed in this recrudescence 
 of banditry in New York City; is not the reason 
 this: that men show us lives in which they do 
 not seem to find anything holy at all? Human 
 life itself is not holy; they take it for a song. 
 Truth is not holy; they lie with ease. Friend¬ 
 ship is not holy; they betray their own without 
 a qualm; nowhere in their lives a spot where 
 they hear a voice, “ The place whereon thou 
 standest—holy ground.” Think what it means 
 to range through the whole expanse of your ex¬ 
 perience and not find a single place before which 
 you stand in reverence, concerning which you 
 think it ought not to be desecrated! There is no 
 lower abyss possible to character than the loss of 
 all sense of sacredness in life.” 
 
 There never was a time in the history of our 
 country when the Church of the living God was 
 such a crying need as to-day, if for no other rea¬ 
 son for this, that, the place is a symbol of saered- 
 ness, a sanctuary, a hallowed spot from which 
 
Mi Because fl Xoue Bmertca 
 
 the message of the Divine holiness is proclaimed. 
 What the world needs to-day as never before is 
 devoutness. We have lost the old prophetic 
 sense of awe. The sin of the age is sacrilege. 
 The trouble with our time is profanity. Vul¬ 
 garity and loudness and godlessness are written 
 large all over our national life. Everywhere 
 there is the worship of the sensual and the sexual. 
 There is disregard of the sacredness of marriage, 
 there is a rejection of Christian principles in 
 business, in politics, in diplomacy, in interna¬ 
 tional statesmanship. If we look at what Emer¬ 
 son calls “ the solid angularity of facts ” we 
 see decadence on every side. Our whole 
 system of education is fast approaching pagan¬ 
 ism. Instance the Press! Most of our news¬ 
 papers, even the best ones, will publish whole 
 pages of sickening details about a murder or a 
 scandal, while they can hardly find half a column 
 of space for a single paragraph concerning the 
 upper heights of really noble thought. A trav¬ 
 eller was telling us recently of returning from 
 Europe on a ship that sailed under the American 
 flag. She belonged to our own government. In 
 the hold of the ship were several hundred bodies 
 of dead soldiers. On Sunday morning a relig¬ 
 ious service was held in the cabin conducted by 
 the captain. “ Hardly was the benediction pro¬ 
 nounced before there was a rush, and the dancing 
 began / 7 The grand draped ocean liner, with 
 
Because IF %ovc Bmerfca \n 
 
 flags half mast, and slowly ploughing her way 
 on her funeral march, echoed to the rattle of 
 brass bands and jazz music. 
 
 “ The cymbals crash and the dancers walk, 
 
 With long silk stockings and arms of chalk, 
 
 Butterfly skirt's and white breasts bare 
 
 And the shadows of dead men watching ’em there.” 
 
 There are many perils confronting our coun¬ 
 try to-day. We have idolatry and superstition 
 and mammon-worship and vulgar luxury and 
 drunkenness and licentiousness and disregard for 
 law and human life. In the midst of these evils 
 “the Church seems terribly circumscribed, hope¬ 
 lessly outnumbered, frequently overpowered, al¬ 
 ways outgeneralled. ’ ’ But the violent perils are 
 not our greatest dangers. The waves that beat 
 against the ship are sometimes not as dangerous 
 as the worms. There are many who feel that our 
 greatest foes are sly, silent, submarine, under 
 water. 
 
 A book has just issued from the press entitled 
 “ Tales of the Jazz Age.” The title is signifi¬ 
 cant. Surely if ever we need to-day some 
 shrines, holy places where we drop the voice and 
 cultivate the softer tones. The hour of worship 
 is a protest against the life that is sordid. In 
 these days of revolution and unrest do we not 
 need some hints of the unseen? The Church 
 stands like a pillar amid the swirling surges of 
 our turbulent American life to bear witness to 
 
J78 because IF %ox>c Bmertca 
 
 the things that are sacred—love, faith, hope, 
 marriage, justice, courage, truth, immortality, 
 prayer. The age is mad. What is going to stem 
 its madness? The aim of the Church is to call 
 us back to soberness and sanity. Has not the 
 time come when every lover of his country should 
 say, “ I go to church because I love America ’ ’ ? 
 
 So many ways to spend one’s money; 
 
 So many courses to eat and drink; 
 
 So many irons in life’s hot furnace; 
 
 So little time to think. 
 
 So many places to go for pleasure; 
 
 Hurrying, rushing at breakneck speed; 
 
 Cabarets, dance-halls, theatres, functions; 
 
 So little time to read. 
 
 So many outings to make on Sundays— 
 
 The national sporting gala-day; 
 
 Golfing, autoing, week-end visiting; 
 
 So little time to pray. 
 
 What of the Church in all this ferment? 
 
 What of our country, its drift, its goal ? 
 
 What speaketh Wisdom to all this madness? 
 
 Husks to the nation’s soul. 
 
XVI 
 
 THE SKYSCRAPER AND THE HOME 
 
 AVING lived for the past ten 
 years in an apartment, and 
 now being happily domiciled in 
 a home, I am writing these 
 words with a strange feeling of 
 ownership! Never during our 
 ten years’ city experience were we able to think 
 of the skyscraper we tenanted as a house. It 
 always impressed us as a sort of public institu¬ 
 tion, and as for thinking of it as a home, that 
 idea was never seriously entertained. We did 
 not live in it. We just stayed in it. Nobody any 
 more thinks of New York as a place to live in; 
 it is a place to go and visit for a few weeks or 
 months, going the rounds of the theatres and 
 music halls; perhaps a place to go and preach 
 to the sinners, maybe just a great wilderness of 
 forests and financiers where one can be found 
 any day from nine in the morning till five in 
 the afternoon hunting game, and then to hurry 
 away from as summarily as possible. 
 
 But now I am no longer an urban; I’m a sub¬ 
 urban. And I live in a house, in a home be it 
 noted, and there are many new experiences. It 
 
 179 
 
m Gfte Skyscraper anb tbe Dome 
 
 is like living one’s life over again. The sensa¬ 
 tion of going up and down-stairs for instance 
 seems strangely unfamiliar. After ten years of 
 flat monotony one almost forgets that there are 
 such things as stairs. Milne in one of his essays 
 tells of moving into his new home and what a 
 fascination the stairs had for him. For a full 
 decade it was “ getting up for breakfast, now it 
 is coming down. ’ 7 A few summers ago when our 
 youngest was labouring hard trying to get the 
 use of his limbs, we took him visiting. And the 
 thing that interested us most during our visit 
 was in observing how the little codger’s greatest 
 delight was in negotiating the stairs. He had 
 never seen stairs before, and they were an un¬ 
 tiring source of interest. Up and down he 
 would pull himself, with the aid of the bannister, 
 from morning to night. And in this I cannot 
 help noting how like a child I am again. I find 
 myself going up and down just for the novelty 
 of the adventure, or perhaps to be sure that the 
 old body is functioning. It seems to act as a 
 recall of one’s childhood. And what a muscle 
 builder it is! For the past decade we were shot 
 up to our little nest on the tenth floor in a lift 
 and then down again, along with a lot of other 
 cliff dwellers. I never realized that my legs 
 were getting tottery until one day at Wykagyl 
 when scaling that mountain familiar to golfers 
 on the way to the eighteenth green. “Why,” I 
 
Ube Skyscraper anb tbe Ibome m 
 
 panted to my partner, “I believe my legs are 
 giving out.” “Come and buy a bouse in the 
 country like me,” he made answer; “it won’t be 
 long till New Yorkers have no legs.” 
 
 Then think of having one’s own fireplace, a 
 real one too, none of your imitation gas arrange¬ 
 ments, but a big genuine stone fireplace with a 
 real chimney where great pine logs without any 
 holes in them crackle and blaze, and warm our 
 toes and stir our reveries and cheer our hearts. 
 Then think of being able to strum away at the 
 piano to one’s heart’s melodious content, and 
 just when one feels like it, without his conscience 
 pricking him that possibly he may be disturbing 
 his next door neighbour on the other side of the 
 plaster. This very morning indeed, the first 
 thing that caught my eye in the Times was the 
 story of one of New York’s 400 being summoned 
 to the police court to answer a charge of con¬ 
 ducting a disorderly apartment. It seems that 
 one Sunday night she had had a musicale dur¬ 
 ing which the orchestra disturbed the tenant on 
 the floor below. And indeed one can quite 
 understand the feelings of this poor tormented 
 sufferer. Because for years I have tried to do 
 a little after dinner light reading myself, when 
 the more serious worries of the day were over. 
 So I picked me out a room remote (if one can 
 call anything in an apartment remote), and 
 therein moved my morris-chair and my writing 
 
*82 Uhc Skyscraper anb tbe Dome 
 
 table and some magazines. No sooner done than 
 my neighbour on the other side of the wall pushed 
 her piano alongside of my writing desk, and her 
 little girl started taking music lessons. And as 
 luck, or something worse, would have it, her 
 hours for practice coincided exactly with my 
 hours for light reading and I had a free enter¬ 
 tainment every evening. And to make matters 
 still more interesting, the gentleman who lived 
 next door to us on the other side of our cliff 
 dwelling did not seem to live on the most af¬ 
 fectionate terms with his wife; or perhaps it was 
 the other way, for these were the days before the 
 18th Amendment and the poor unfortunate had 
 an over-fondness for something stronger than 
 apollinaris, and the screams she would utter and 
 the anathemas she would invoke would not in¬ 
 frequently give us another free entertainment. 
 
 I cannot say with my humorous friend who 
 filed a complaint that the tenant on the skyward 
 side of his abode was a pupil of Pavlowa, as the 
 plastered ceiling here and there bore unwelcome 
 evidence. For our excellent and exalted neigh¬ 
 bours were most peaceful and desirable and 
 charming folk. The only accusation I have 
 against them is another grievance that Milne 
 mentions, viz., that sometimes in taking a bath 
 they would forget the faucet. It seems the good 
 wife was afflicted with insomnia, for which her 
 physician, so I was subsequently informed, had 
 
ZEbe Skyscraper anb tbe ibome J83 
 
 prescribed a hot salt bath on retiring. So she 
 would turn on the bath in plenty of time and 
 then go off and prepare herself for the treatment, 
 occasionally overlooking the running solution, 
 and so giving us the benefit of the overdose. So 
 that when all the evidence is in, and I look back 
 soberly and serenely on my ten years’ stay in 
 the great city’s crowded lodgings, I feel a little 
 like another discontent who once remarked to me 
 in her country retreat, “ I don’t see why these 
 places should be called Apartments; I think a 
 much better name would be Togetherments. ” 
 But now I live in a house of my own by the 
 side of the hill and we are spared all this free 
 performance. Of course I’m a commuter and I 
 have quite a trip each day, but then I do not 
 have to hold on to a strap, crushed in with hun¬ 
 dreds of other poor sufferers of civilization and 
 stupidity on their tired way home. I do not 
 have to watch my step and worm myself into a 
 dirty germ-laden subterranean conveyance, or 
 be jammed in unceremoniously by a guard as if 
 one were mixed up in a football scrimmage. I 
 am not forced to undergo the immoral experience 
 of being squeezed like a human sardine in a 
 sealed can. I can always have my seat, and I 
 can always have my newspaper. No sooner in¬ 
 side the gates than I have an easy feeling of 
 relief that all ducking and dodging for one day 
 more are over. I get away from the crowd and 
 
*84 Ube Skyscraper anb tbe Ifoorne 
 
 the crush and the concrete and the city of dread¬ 
 ful pleasures, and then when I arrive I can 
 always have my quiet. 
 
 For that is one thing that no mortal must ever 
 expect in New York. It is the noisiest place on 
 the map. The air is rent with harshness, the 
 night is hideous with racket and deafening 
 shrieks. Peddlers, newsboys, old clothes men, 
 fruit vendors still cry their wares. Up and 
 down our concourse I have counted in fifteen 
 minutes 500 vehicles of every size and shape and 
 character and colour. As a police officer said to 
 us recently: 4 ‘Look down that Avenue; it looks 
 as if cars just cost a nickel.” On one side was 
 the elevated, on the other was a double surface 
 line, while down below the automobiles were 
 parked in rows with their honks of hooting horns. 
 It was like trying to sleep in a public garage. 
 
 But now we have the peace of the hills. From 
 the station we climb up through a row of silver 
 beeches and fine old walnuts, clambering part 
 way over rocks that crop out through the soil, 
 up to our cozy cedar knoll, from which one can 
 gaze over a long line of wooded country. We 
 can sit in our sun parlour and look out across the 
 meadow and the burn and watch the sun go 
 down. We welcome the primroses and daffodils 
 just arriving on the heels of winter. We can 
 linger and count the stars as they come timidly 
 out. Of course our pipes burst and our water 
 
T£be Sfesscvaper an& tbe t)ome 185 
 
 overflows too sometimes, and occasionally we for¬ 
 get to put the coal on, and every now and then 
 we have to dig out our goloshes and our mittens 
 and go forth and shovel some of our way to 
 Grand Central. But then think of the sunsets. 
 What are snow-banks compared with sunsets! 
 Why, I haven’t seen a sunset in the city for 
 years. My sun always went down behind a sky¬ 
 scraper. 
 
 I must not forget to mention one more trouble 
 about living on the tenth floor. You never know 
 how to dress in the morning. You cannot step 
 out on the veranda and see how cold it is. You 
 never know how strong the wind is blowing or 
 how fiercely the rain is beating. Not until you 
 are four blocks away do you decide, this overcoat 
 is too light and I must hie me back and get my 
 fur; or it’s too heavy, I must retrace my steps 
 and get summer weight. Better have rubbers 
 too. Of course you are always forgetting the 
 umbrella. And anyway, as another friend re¬ 
 marked, e 1 I’m tired looking down on people; 
 I’d rather see them on the level.” 
 
 There is quite a fad in New York to-day in 
 regard to buying one’s own apartment. That 
 has always seemed a bit ethereal. A home in the 
 air seems somewhat intangible. “ When I can 
 read my title clear to mansions in the skies” 
 may be good theology but I must confess to a 
 little suspicion as to its economic wisdom. And 
 
*86 ftbe Skyscraper anb tbe Dome 
 
 even its theology is questionable. The apart¬ 
 ment is not favourable to the religious life. Re¬ 
 ligion does not seem to thrive in the atmosphere 
 of skyscrapers; it needs homes. Churches only 
 prosper where there are homes. I haven’t much 
 real estate where I am, it is true, but then it’s 
 real and it’s estate and it’s on rock, and best of 
 all I insist, it’s home. For we never called our 
 corner in the clouds home. The question was 
 never asked, What time will you be home this 
 evening? It was always, “What time will you 
 be up?” or “What time will you be in?” or 
 “What time will you be here?” It was “up” 
 or “ in ” or “ here, ’ ’ never home. When Herbert 
 Spencer began to write his great system of ethics, 
 a critic said of it that it reminded him of the 
 architect that Gulliver met in his travels who had 
 contrived a new method to erect houses by be¬ 
 ginning with the roof and working down. And 
 that is a good deal how buying an apartment 
 seems. It looks a little like laying a foundation 
 for a habitation by starting with the rafters or 
 the gable end. The wiser way would seem to be 
 to break ground with terra firma and commence 
 with granite and drill and concrete, and so on 
 to cellar and basement and tenth floor. There is 
 a tendency to-day to swing away from the sub¬ 
 stantial. De Quincy said of Coleridge: “ He 
 lives in the sky; he wants better bread than can 
 be made with wheat.” As for myself, I prefer 
 
Ufoe Skyscraper ant> tbe f)ome X37 
 
 to keep firm hold of the definite and the tangible. 
 I prefer wheat, flour, facts, figures, foundation, 
 iron, steel, brick, marble, real estate. In the¬ 
 ology I like to dismiss speculation as far as 
 possible. I am not much inclined even to mys¬ 
 ticism. I favour history, testimony, witnesses, 
 signatures, evidence, credentials, documents—in 
 a word chapter and verse. Otherwise like Ixion 
 we are embracing a cloud. 
 
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 HEAVEN 
 
 A Pfc<e—A City—A Home 
 
 By EDWARD M . BOUNDS 
 
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