tibrarp of 'the 'theological ^ewmarjo PRINCETON * NEW JERSEY PRESENTED BY The Estate of the Re v. John B. Wie 6 . in£ e r BX 9527 .P6 1923 Poling, Daniel A. 1884-1968. What men need most WHAT MEN NEED MOST Rev. DANIEL A. POLING, utt.d., ll.d. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/whatmenneedmostoOOpoli WHAT MEN NEED MOST and Other Sermons BY Rev. DANIEL A. POLING, litt.d., ll.d. CO-MINISTER AT THE MARBLE COLLEGIATE CHURCH NEW YORK NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY WHAT MEN NEED MOST. II PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA To MY FRIEND CHESTER PAUL GATES and TO THE MEMORY OF OTHER FRIENDS GONE BUT NOT AWAY FOREWORD The first twenty-three chapters which follow contain several sermons which have appeared in the columns of the Christian Herald and the Christian Endeavor World. Appreciation is expressed to these publications for the privilege of including the material in this vol¬ ume. Among sermons preached in connection with the pulpit programme of the Marble Collegiate Church will be found several that were prepared for special oc¬ casions,—Easter, Christmas, New Year’s and the birth¬ day anniversaries of Washington and Lincoln. Two chapters contain as many special citizenship sermons, and there are three that appeared first as a series, “Erom the Service.” The eight concluding chapters are “Sermon Stories” delivered before young people on special occasions and as part of carefully planned programmes. D. A. P. CONTENTS PAGE 1, What Men Need Most .... 13 2 Clown or King?.25 3. The Greatest Fact of History . . 36 4 Three Facts and a Question ... 46 5 Dead King or Living Lord ? . .58 6. Remember Jesus Christ .... 68 7. What the Devil Asked . . . . 76 8. The Grip that Holds .... 86 9 Daniel, the Hebrew Who Purposed . 95 10 Extremity and Opportunity . . . 102 11 Conquerors of Circumstance . . . Ill 12 From the Manger to the Throne . . 122 13 We Finish to Begin. 132 14 The Light that Has Never Failed . . 141 15 The Call of the New Crusade . . . 145 16 The Curse of Cowardice .... 154 17 Come On ! Let’s Go !.158 18 _ “Lafayette, We Are Here !” . . 166 19 Who Won the War? .... 176 20 What Is War?. 187 21 Civic Grafters . ., . . . 192 ix X 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 PAGE 200 205 207 210 212 214 218 221 226 230 Contents Peesonal Libeety Homesick .... The Man Who Was Pardoned Lead On, Lokd Jesus ! . “Unto the .least” A Heart Stoey . “He Did It” .... My Fiest Peayee A Pathee’s Dilemma . The Land of Time Enough WHAT MEN NEED MOST 1 WHAT MEN NEED MOST Text: St. John 12: 21. “Sir, we would see J esus* y For the maintenance of physical life there are four absolute necessities,—oxygen, water, food and sleep. Without air one can live only the briefest time. Shut it off, and almost immediately begins the torture of suffocation. A little more than five years ago a group of forty men found themselves in the horror of im¬ pending mustard-gas immersion, standing together in a closely sealed dugout room of Kambecourt, north from Toul in France. The lantern light played fitfully upon the figures whose faces were covered with masks; the earth about trembled from the vibrations of great guns just behind and overhead. Finely minutes passed, and eyes were starting from their- sockets, blood was seep¬ ing from mucous membranes, bodies were wracked with almost unendurable agonies. Then, with swelling glands and fairly bursting lungs, men fought to keep their reason. When- relief came, and the place was unsealed, to those who staggered out, it was as though a hell had opened into heaven. One may survive longer without water. I have never known the extreme torture of thirst. But what a relief is a spring in a desert! What a comfort a living stream in the wilderness! And we city dwellers learn to respond with a measure of enthusiasm that 13 u What Men Need Most reaches at times a restrained ecstasy, to the singing of a faucet. We are troubled when an unusually long, dry season has diminished our water reserves to the point where caution must be observed, and where some may feel a lack, both in quality and quantity. The lawns become a distressing sight. What richness many of the figures of the Psalmist and similes of Jesus have for us, in such a time; “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, 77 —and “Take of the water of salvation . 77 It is not many years since practically every large city of America was subject to periodical typhoid epidemics, because of impure drinking water. How our great com¬ munities are in almost every instance immune to this former plague. Even isolated cases are becoming rare. A few weeks ago I found myself following the high climbing forest trail that leads to the mountain lake which is the natural reservoir of Portland, Oregon. After leaving the automobile at the point where the great water mains begin and where all ordinary trans¬ portation ceases, thirty miles from the city itself, we travelled on horseback for twenty-one miles through a veritable sylvan paradise; firs towered above us a hun¬ dred and thirty feet “in the clear 77 before their limbs began. Where the trail dipped toward the river which carries the lake to the huge pipes below, the ferns stood higher than our heads as we sat our horses, and once we came upon a cedar forty-eight feet in circumference. In twenty-one miles we passed or crossed one hundred and thirty-six living springs or swiftly flowing moun¬ tain torrents; or one such natural fountain flowing into that central river from the north as it hurried downward from the great lake to quench the city’s thirst, for every two hundred and seventy yards of that little more than What Men Need Most 15 twenty miles. And later our wonderment was to be further increased, when we saw the river itself issue from the face of the mountain, as though from the very breast of nature. For half a mile it flows under¬ ground beneath the range. The unfailing lake, fed by springs and snows, hung high among the emerald hills, has no outlet human eye may see. Tens of thou¬ sands of people in the valley below have a gigantic and perfect natural water filter, the like of which is found nowhere else in the world. Yes, there is life or death in a city’s drinking cup. “Water or I die,” is one of the inexorable physical ultimatums. One may survive longer still without food; but what a terrifying sight starvation is, whether it be a colossal spectacle spread across the high plateau of Armenia or the bleak steppes of Russia, or whether we come upon it in the tenderly kept chamber of the invalid whose mal¬ ady no longer permits nourishment to be taken. Ringing in my ears as I turn back in thought across the years, is the cry of a little boy who could not eat,—a little boy about to die: “Bread, bread! I am hungry,—give me bread.” Ah, we do well to open our purses at the invi¬ tation of such agencies as the Year East Relief. And in our great American cities there is always the threat of starvation for some, a threat we dare not ignore. But the question of food has become tremendously complicated in our time. The abandoned farms of Yew England are a growing cause of anxiety,—the falling price of wheat a growing menace. Has it ever occurred to you that Yew York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and the rest, are helpless, and perhaps pres¬ ently starving, giants? They cannot feed themselves, and their country cousins seem to be tiring of the task. What a problem is here suggested,—a problem that a 16 What Men Need Most congressional grain subsidy will never solve; a problem that has to do with foreign markets, quite as much as it has to do with domestic markets; a problem that is as international as it is internal; a problem, my friends, that our so-called “splendid isolation” has not solved nor lessened. In its more personal aspects, its more individual phases, the question of food is to-day not at all as it was even a decade ago. “Have you had your calories V 9 is a modern query; “How to Live,” the standard text of the Life Extension Institute, a rather recent publi¬ cation. But I am not one to decry the science of cor¬ rect eating, nor would I belittle the profession of the dietitian. My observations convince me that to-day more people are eating themselves to death than other¬ wise. Conditions have changed since the clearing of the pioneer, with the forests and streams surrounding it, provided practically everything he and his sturdy outdoor family ate; and our manner of life is so dif¬ ferent now that for us to eat what and as our fathers ate, is suicide, nor is it always slow. A few years since I awoke to find myself spending nearly all of my time in my study; doing practically no physical labour, but remaining absolutely faithful to the meat, bread and Irish potato menu of my days in the sawmill and logging camp. Modern white bread, we are told by practical scientists, paves the wav to a vast number of physical ailments for our children. You who recall, as I do, the steaming, vast and fragrant loaves of our unscientific childhood, will do well to be reminded, as I have been, that white bread is different now; that the perfections of the modern miller’s art have refined it until it is of itself alone, too fine to hold the coarse and sturdy elements that in a cruder time What Men Need Most 17 made brawn and brain. Ah, bow far-reaching and how complicated has become that simple cry of a hungry child, “Bread, bread! I am hungry; give me bread.” Again, one may survive longer without sleep; but one of the most excruciating tortures of the Dark Ages was the walking agony; the keeping of prisoners awake until they became gibbering idiots or fell dead before their inquisitors. Life, without the complete relaxation of sleep, is impossible. Some require more sleep than others; children are especially dependent upon it; a distinguished inventor is said to get along famously with an almost unbelievably short time in bed. But no man can long survive absolute insomnia. How much attention our physician gives to our sleeping habits now. Are you subject to cold? What does the health column in your daily paper say ? “Lots of fresh water; good, nourishing food regularly, and at least eight hours of sleep in twenty-four,—at least eight.” I am entirely out of harmony with the night schedules of many American homes,—dances, theatre parties and moonlight rides for juveniles make pale and puny people to do the world’s work, and plan the world’s play. Back to the old motto, “Early to bed and early to rise,”—but with the emphasis, the immediate em¬ phasis for our great cities, upon “Early to bed.” And now, because there are some sadly troubled people who are having a hard time to follow their doc¬ tor’s prescription, who are, as I once fought, fighting to fall asleep, let me say just these words of encourage¬ ment. We really sleep more than we think we do. Slumber is swift while sleeplessness is appallingly slow. One hour, two hours, and three pass as an age, while the rest of the night is a flash. And men who know, tell us that we also have wee naps we do not 18 What Men Need Most remember, that we “drop off” when we are quite sure we have been boring holes in the darkness with wide¬ awake eyes unceasingly. And at any rate, no person ever wins sleep who fights for her. After an accident of some time ago, when for many nights I had turned back insomnia’s anguish with only poor success, a wise practitioner said, “Well, to-night begin by saying, ‘I’ll not worry; I’ll rest, since I cannot sleep. I’ll rest eight hours, or two,—rest with my eyes open until they fall closed; I’ll have repose and relaxation. Others get along with five hours; I’ll be comfortable with as many or less!’ ” And the big principle buried in my friend’s counsel had its vindication,—immediately I began to recover. But sleep goes along with air, food and water. These four absolute necessities are strangely as well as strongly related. Let the organs of respiration be affected by impure or poisoned air, and we become the victims of wild nightmares and dream terrors; and have we not all of us learned the folly of asking the mind to carry repose while the stomach is burdened with the mixed dainties of modem man’s gastronomic adven¬ tures ? Yes, for the maintenance of physical life, there are four absolute necessities,—oxygen, water, food and sleep. But if life is to be more and better than bare exist¬ ence, there are other necessities; if life is to be well- rounded, fruitful and happy, we must have more than bread to live by. The lowliest brute breathes, drinks, eats and sleeps, and remains a brute. On our physical side we will do well to consider the claims of exercise, especially we of the office and bank, who have a tendency to waist extension rather than What Men Need Most 19 chest expansion. Now and then one finds the exception to the rule. I have known a man of eighty who was hale and hearty in spite of the fact that habitually he never walked when he could ride, and who slept with his windows tightly closed. Such an exception proves the rule for most of us, however. Best and recreation are necessities, too. From the fierce clamours of our cities we must periodically find relief, or become nervous wrecks, and, worse, nerve mannikins. We need to place another emphasis upon recreation and make it in our vacation season, in our holiday, however short, a re-creation. Unless we do, we will find ourselves dreaming of times when we will turn aside to enjoy a well-earned relaxation, and play, but coming into an early old age, a premature decrepi¬ tude, with our dreams unrealised. I have seen a mansion of a hundred rooms on Long Island, which the builder never occupied. He died at his desk the day before he was to have moved in. The newspaper accounts stated among other things that he had never taken a vacation. But perhaps our order has been inverted. To place an emphasis upon rest and recreation implies that work has a large and fundamental place in the scheme of life. Is it not an absolute necessity to generous, worth-while living? Pity the person without a task, a task worth giving body and heart to. The electrical wizard Steinmetz was credited with saying, a little while ago, that presently electricity would be so applied as to make possible doing the menial, the drudgery tasks of society, in four hours out of the twenty-four, leaving for us all, twenty in which to find repose and enjoyment. Even with such a programme, such a divi¬ sion of time, the world would be far from an ideal 20 What Men Need Most society unless our minds and souls had been schooled to appreciate and rightly use the time. I have known men and women who really seemed to love that which others called drudgery,—the old cob¬ bler of our childhood town, the venerable farmer who made our first time away from home a garden of happy recollections, and the singing laundress who said that she preferred washing (and that before the day of power washers) to dusting. These had a philosophy that others would be happier for learning. Perhaps if I cannot come into the task that I have longed for, I can fall in love with the one that I have. Ah, and how friends have become a necessity,—an absolute necessity in my life! Who would live without them? And could we? Unconsciously we lean upon them; they are part of our unexposed, innermost being, —true friends, I mean, deeply true, vastly intimate, friends who are not questioned and could not be. With such a friend I stood one evening by the open grave of another friend, and later when I spoke of our in¬ frequent visits, our irregular letters, our wide separa¬ tions, he replied, “Yes, and how great a thing it is to possess a friendship that does not stand at last upon even its most delightful forms, that does not depend upon pen or contact or speech!” Again, life needs to-day, needs imperatively, a great ambition. Woe is the man who never hears a high call, in whose ears never sounds a mighty shout of challenge. Woe is such a man, for his character has in it a fatal defect; something,—something vital, has been left out. A great English mountain-climber on being asked why he took the risks involved in climbing Mt. Blanc, replied, “Because Mt. Blanc is there.” When I read of each fresh attempt to swim the English What Men Need Most 21 Channel, I find something elemental stirring within my own breast. Do I hear you say, “A useless waste of time and energy 77 ? Well, nearly so, I grant, but at least an indication of the fact that the divine fire burns and needs only to be given a better torch. Another follows the same gleam to find an elusive disease germ and iso¬ late it. Youth, with the passion of it in his blood, dedicates his life to a great cause; becomes a Gough, or John G. Woolley of prohibition, a Love joy or Gar¬ rison of emancipation; a Lincoln of patriotism. Ah, and the distraught times in which we live wait on men and women to hear high ambition’s call to-day. The East Side of Jacob Riis is crying for his spiritual descendants. A thousand cities of this continent alone need as many Hull Houses, and the terrifying war clouds which stand again along the horizon of Europe remind us that we have done little enough to keep our promise; that we have scarcely inconvenienced our¬ selves to strengthen society against the bloody-mawed monster of armed conflict. What a generation for the soul of ardent, generous, Jehovah-led youth to come upon! Here is the new impossible to be dared; here is the new earth waiting for new-born men and women to give it birth. We have come quite naturally now to what man needs most—to his supreme necessity. Is it health? Ho. Is it water? Ho, it is not. Is it food? Ho. Is it sleep? Ho, it is none of these nor is it all of them. Hor is it rest, recreation, friends, work, ambition; nor is it the divine fire of an overwhelming compulsion. What does man need most ? But first we must know two things about man,—these two things. Where does he come from—what is he ? 22 What Men Need Most And where is he going—what is he to be ? There are certain living creatures which die when their physical environment is changed; in these species tragedy fol¬ lows tragedy, until a careful study has been made of the creature itself, and until the fundamental things about its life are known, its peculiar needs supplied. Thus it is with man. Give him breath and bread, drink and repose,—all of these,—but give him nothing more, and he will die, for man has come from God, and his destiny is heaven-born. His soul is restless until it rests in Him: all of the physical necessities, however abundantly supplied, are not enough. And so, after he has tested every other, man comes at last, as came the Greeks of the text, with the importunate request, “Sir, we would see Jesus.” We would see Jesus, not the disciples, nor the high priest, hut Jesus. Sir, we would see Jesus: We would see Jesus, for He alone can for¬ give our sins, cover them with the divine alchemy of His forgetfulness, until the corrosion of our blighting remorse is arrested. We would see Jesus, for He alone can satisfy our insatiate thirst; He alone can give us peace. We would see Jesus,—Jesus of the well, who cries, “Whosoever shall drink of this water shall thirst again; but whosoever shall drink of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst, for the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water spring¬ ing up into eternal life.” We would see Jesus and know His companionship, for earthly friends, however true, must fail us in the end; the father stands upon the threshold of the innermost chamber of his child’s suffering, and struggles to enter, but cannot; the mother bends low over the fevered brow of her now unconscious darling, and with travail of soul heats against the inexorable provision that places a limit What Men Need Most 23 upon her ministry. Ah, we would see Jesus, for He crosses the threshold, he takes captivity captive, and with Him there is no, “Thus far shalt thou come and no farther.” Out to the end of the world He goes with us; brother to every human woe is He; healer of the last agony; comforter of the deepest sorrow, and cap¬ tain of our salvation. The importunate cry of the text is the voice of every language; it is the voice of the multitude surging about these ancient foundations, the multitude that all unknowing passes by. Somehow these must be led to find Him. “We would see Jesus.” Hen and women, do you hear it? It is a supplication and a challenge,—a sup¬ plication and a challenge to the church first of all. One winter Sunday night at the close of an evangelistic service, in response to a special invitation, a man in one of the rear pews of a great church raised his hand. Later, while in a personal conference with the minister, he confessed his sins to his Maker, called upon the name of his Saviour, and found forgiveness and peace. His first words, as he rose from his knees, will remain with that preacher so long as he lives. O Church of God, hear them; these were the words, spoken not in bitterness, but in great surprise,—“How does it happen that for twenty years, because I promised my mother, I have been going to at least one church service every week, sometimes Catholic, sometimes Protestant, and last Sunday night was the first time I was ever given a chance to get to the foot of the Cross ?” Sir, we would see Jesus! That cry sounds like a wail of death above the rav¬ ished cities of the Hear East where so-called Christian nations have signed the terms of Mahomet the bloody. “We would see Jesus. We have seen the statesmen and 24 What Men Need Most the warriors; we have heard their promises, and in a delirium of joy have shouted the praises of those we acclaimed as our emancipators, only to find that again we had been deceived. Now we, a broken remnant, in hospitals and refugee camps, in orphanages and secluded mountain fastnesses,—we would see Jesus.” This is the cry of every division in our complicated society. I hear it in the coal conferences and in steel— We would see Jesus! and see Jesus it is or know again the hardship of strike and of lockout; see Jesus and find the Jesus way, or fail, fail and face again the empty furnace of the poor and the bitterness of indus¬ trial strife. Here is a programme in idealism,—and only such a programme has even the promise of success. All others have already and absolutely failed. Here is a pro¬ gramme in idealism founded upon the Decalogue and illumined by the light that lighteth every man coming into the world: a programme in idealism that declares its ultimatums in terms like these: “Thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not covet; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not hear false witness;” and that trumpets its great summation, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbour as thyself.” Only one thing remains to he said. Those who came seeking Jesus in the story of the text, sought an intro¬ duction from those who knew Him. The supreme busi¬ ness of the Christian Church is the introducing of men and women and society to Jesus Christ. But only those who know Him themselves are competent to introduce others to Him. It is the cry of a dying world: Sir, we would see Jesus. My friends, are we, we of the church, prepared to answer that cry? 2 CLOWN OR KING? Text : Proverbs 23: 7. “For as he thinketU in his heart so is he In other times the difference between a clown and a king was frequently the distance between a step and a throne. They were very close together, but with this distinction,—one sat or grovelled at the feet of the other. As a rule, one thing they had in common,— the accident of birth. Each was as he was born,—a clown or a king, a fool or a monarch; one wore a cap, the other a crown; one held a bauble, the other a sceptre. And it is whispered that there were instances in which headdress might have been exchanged and stations reversed, without grief to society. To-day the clown and the king are physically even closer together, though in reality they are farther apart; for now, by the measure of his thinking, a man is a clown or a king. Eor as he,—fool or monarch,—think" eth in his heart, so is he. The words, more literally translated, are, “For, as he calculates with himself, so is he,” and in their setting refer to a selfish and evil-minded host who while he with words urges his guests to enjoy his viands, in his heart resents their presence at his table. With fine directness the Psalmist tells us that such a host is not as his words or his wealth, but as his thinking; that he 25 26 What Men Need Most is little and mean because of his thoughts, that his cal¬ culations, the arithmetic of his soul, make him a clown. If we accept this standard, if we apply the text, birth and station have little if anything at all to do with civilisation’s real aristocracy. For, as men and women think, deeply think, so they are,—clowns or kings. But we are surrounded to-day,—and it is, I suppose, quite natural for us to feel, as never before,—with temp¬ tations to think small and cynical thoughts. Surely the times are selfish. Men of large affairs have been almost daily quoted as saying that following the war the motto of business seemed to be, “Make up for lost time,—get yours and get it quick.” Government investigations still incomplete reveal a sickening degree of faithless¬ ness and an appalling amount of profiteering on the homeward side of the Atlantic. Recently the daily press carried a story of peonage in Florida that makes Uncle Tom’s Cabin look like a pallid nursery story,— a boy sent to a convict camp for being a trespasser on a freight train, sent into slavery by a county sheriff who was given $20.00 a head for each man delivered to this particular lumber company, a sheriff who on his own testimony disregarded a registered letter from the lad’s family and ordered a misleading message returned. Picture, if you will, this under-nourished youth from a respectable Dakota home, who had rashly started out to see the world,—and while you do so, remember your own youth:—working ankle-deep in the swamp muck, stricken with weakness, smitten with fever, stumbling and falling; and then hear the sing of a seven-pound mule-whip as it wraps itself around that white back for a hundred lashes, and as for extra measure the flogger beats his helpless prisoner’s head with its weighted handle. Remember, men and women of a proud civili- 27 Clown or King? sation, that this murder occurred in connection with a state-wide system, and in America,—the United States of America,—under the sanction of law, and on the estate of a law-maker, at the hands of a duly-authorised brute who worked for a legally incorporated lumber company. Heaven pity us for feeling ourselves superior to the Turk and for looking askance at the Bolshevist. The record of our American civilisation in peonage, in lynchings, where the black man has been the chief vic¬ tim, in child-labour and in industrial slavery, for the last quarter century, is, at times, and in spots, enough to shame us before God and man. It should send us in sackcloth and ashes to the feet of the one who said, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of one of these ... ye have done it unto me.” So far as I am concerned, I do not hold myself as free of the shame, merely because my hands did not swing that instrument of torture. I am an American, and until these evil matters have been adjusted, these wrongs righted, these blasphemies against the democ¬ racy Washington and his associates established, and Abraham Lincoln suffered martyrdom to save,—-until these blasphemies, I say, have been utterly repudiated by law, and completely destroyed in practice, I shall feel myself as one citizen, to the reach of my voice and the limit of my ability, responsible . Yes, our present environment has a tendency to in¬ spire cynical and small thinking. The Hew York Times of April 18th, 1923, carried a statement from Commissioner Haynes, saying that thirty-three Federal enforcement agents had been killed outright by boot¬ leggers while in the line of duty,—murdered by liquor outlaws, and that more than three hundred others had 28 What Men Need Most suffered gunshot wounds of a more or less serious na¬ ture,—and we still have a laugh for a bootlegger’s joke! By the sorrow of the widows and the fatherless of these thirty-three who died in defence of the law,—not this law alone, hut the law that protects us,—I cry Shame. Again, the experiences of our own lives have a tend¬ ency to incite the mind to morbid thinking. Where are the dreams, the hopes of youth, or, as the poet has it, “the loves of yesteryear” ? Behind the majority of you are little shoes in treasure-boxes,—tiny things that were never worn out; faded roses of memory in dusty frames of recollection; or houses of high ambition that were mortgaged to the necessity of a fateful hour of need; or the perfidy of a business associate perhaps, or, yet more terrible, the treason of a friend; failure in busi¬ ness, the tumbled ruins of a structure raised by economy and self-denial and the calloused hands of hard work; or physical visitations that have bowed a once-proud form and lined a smooth and placid brow with the deep furrows of pain unutterable. And be¬ hind all of us is disillusionment,—we have come to know the world, each other,—and—ourselves. Once we believed all things and hoped all things; now we count the cost; anticipate the settlement, doubt the wisdom of the enterprise, for time has led us to the tree of knowledge, and we have eaten of its bitter fruit. Yes, our own experiences make royal thinking dif¬ ficult. It is not hard to dream when you lie in the sunshine upon the green grass of unenlightened child¬ hood. Then it is not hard to hope and plan. To-day we stand mature and scared by old graves, beneath skies that have frowned at least as often as they have smiled. Clown or King? 29 In the once-shining casket that our youth gave us is a pierced and shrunken heart. The log of any city church for a single week is mel¬ ancholy reading,—men out of work; home providers sick; mothers distracted; children undernourished. Yes, the times in which we exist are conducive to in¬ fidelity in thought. But do you think that I would have said as much as I have said, if this were all to he said? With the facts before me, with these experiences, many of them blazed upon my body and my soul, I bring a message not of despair, but one altogether of hope. These suf¬ ferings and disappointments and disillusionments and tragedies do not make you a pessimist, a cynic, an in¬ fidel, a mental clown. Ho, only your thinking. As you think in your heart, in your innermost mind,— and the Hebrew word here may be translated mind as well as heart,—as you think in your innermost mind, that you are. Are you broken, wrecked in body, ruined in purse, bereft in loved ones, forgotten, de¬ serted, defeated % If you would rise from the steps of the clown to the throne, if you would be king, then claim imperial thoughts and think a king. A man lay upon a white bed with consciousness just returning, and with consciousness came pain,—pain excruciating, unbearable, destroying. The opiates brought the mercy of stupor; then consciousness, again with pain. Days passed and weeks. One morning the sufferer, now a convalescent, turned his eyes toward the window, just in time to see a tiny spider cast off from the awning and drop with his first web cable to an anchorage on the sill. Bor hours now the man lay with his eyes upon that marvellous spectacle, the spinning of a web. He became less conscious of his body as he 30 What Men Need Most took new lif ewvithin his mind; he was like a child, and with the secretiveness of a child,—and as a result came tragedy. The nurse rolled up the awning at sunset, and ‘destroyed the half-spun web. The man was senselessly, violently, disturbed, and had a very bad night; but when his mind had cleared from the sleeping potion in the morning, and he turned again, half fearfully, toward the window, the little fel¬ low was busy once more and now in safety, for even the nurse would not risk another outburst on the part of her patient. The spider went on to complete his task, and through the long August days he swung there in his castle»and den, ’twixt the sunlight and shadow, while the watcher’s mind caught the glory of the lesson and his will set itself to the herculean task of building up again the broken walls of his body. It is not the experience that makes you what you are,—it is your thinking. Paul wrote Philippians,— his joy letter, his epistle of gladness,—while chained and in a Roman dungeon. “I thank God for every remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all, making request with joy.” Thus does the prisoner, the buffeted, flogged, stoned and ship-wrecked, herald of the cross, thank God for remembrance, and pray with joy. It is not the experience that makes you what you are,—it is what you think. And this same period of history which sees us re¬ luctantly and under pressure abolishing flogging and convict leasing,—this same generation which sees so- called Christian nations exploiting oil concessions at the expense of Christian minorities, and throwing a gambler’s dice down the line of international boun¬ daries,—which witnesses sabotage on the one hand and industrial slavery on the other, which crucifies priests 31 Clown or King? in Russia and lynches negroes in America, this same generation has produced the wireless, that phantom ministry of enlightenment and pleasure which makes the ether above us a shoreless sea of song, bearing richly laden ships of culture; has found new worlds beyond the suns above us and new riches beneath our feet, has given us a way of travel down the path of the lightnings, has brought to our suffering humanity new cures for disease, relief and postponement for incurable maladies and has enlarged the key of charity until now it opens the world’s store-house to supply the world’s need. As another has written, and whatever the time and circumstance, “You are what you think you are,”— clean or filthy, hopeful or despairing, weak or strong, rich or poor, you are what you think you are. Schiller’s dying cry was “Give me a great thought.” What a morning prayer that is for all of us! “Give me a great thought!” I have a friend whose chamber window overlooks the Hudson, and we have stood together there with the sunlight marching down the Palisades. As I listened to him describe the morning and the noon, the evening and the twilight, and as we followed their pathways across the majestic plane of the water, I saw not the Hudson, but my friend. Great thoughts have come to him upon the tide of that mighty river. It is springtime; Central Park is wearing her green carpets and her tapestries of emerald and sapphire; presently her hair will be braided wfith flowers, and the trees of her gardens alive with the songs of many birds, while around her at night a million stars will shine out from house windows, blending with God’s candles set in the sky, until the imperial city’s breath- 32 What Men Need Most ing place will seem an island world, afloat upon a silver sea. Ah, great thoughts will come to you if you visit Central Park in the springtime. Go and stand in front of the venerable municipal building of America’s largest city and look up, fol¬ lowing the chaste and regal lines of the Woolworth tower, the “cathedral of commerce,” until you rest your gaze at last upon the clouds that ride before the waves of the winds that break upon her topmost spires. Then there will come to you that for which the dying Schiller cried. I have found it in the desert and among the moun¬ tains and on the sea, in the soiled face of a little gamin of the street, in the homecoming welcome of my dog; in the laughter of playing children, in the warping in of an ocean liner, in the discordant clatter of coal pour¬ ing into a cellar,—telling of the red in its black. I have found it in steaming dugouts where men wrapped bandages about wounded bodies, and in battle grave¬ yards where crosses were as plentiful as the pines upon' my native mountains. I have found it in the house of the living and in the chamber of the dead, in singing and in weeping, in love and in laughter, in sickness and in health, in prosperity and adversity,—that for which the dying Schiller cried,—I have found,—a great thought. And if the text is more than a text, if it is true, then we must think great thoughts about ourselves. “For as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,” and lest we make the mistake of a wrong emphasis at the begin¬ ning, let us remember first another text, “Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall.” And another, “What is man that thou (God) art mindful of him?” 33 Clown or King? In the last analysis we appraise ourselves. Are we sensual''and'brutish creatures? Yes, if we think sen¬ sually and as brutes; then absolutely we are. Are we slave-drivers in industry, Shylocks in trade, tyrants in our home relationships ? What are our thoughts, first; then I will answer. Or are we children of the king, brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ, heirs of immor¬ tality, with work to do in the world, strong work, hard tasks, helpful ministries ? As are our innermost thoughts, so are we. Tennyson but puts it in another way when he says, “The man who can is the man who will,” and you remember the words of Channing Pol¬ lock’s hero in “The Fool,” which is a very great play. Answering the eager query of the little cripple girl, so anxious to be strong, he says, “If you believe, if you believe hard enough.” Such great thoughts about ourselves lead us into true humility, for in so thinking we come at last to the realisation of the fact that we are but the culmination of the past, and that we are debtors to the ages. As Quinet has it, “Old Chaldea, Phoenicia, Babylon, Mem¬ phis, Judea, Egypt, Etruria, all have had a share in my education, and live in me.” Finally, if you would reign, if you would hold a sceptre instead of a clown’s bauble, if you would be a king, identify yourself in your thinking with great causes, and give your life to tasks that are big and true. I met Jacob Biis just fourteen days before he started on his last journey. Jacob Biis would never have been more than any one of a thousand push-cart merchants of his race had he not heard the cry of the East Side; as it was, Theodore Roosevelt called him the most useful citizen of Few York. Edith Cavell would have 34 What Men Need Most passed from the hospital of her service an unknown, had she not for truth’s sake kept a rendezvous with death; as it is, her words, “Patriotism is not enough,” will have the resiliency of youth when the marble of her statue is dust. Savonarola was a monk, until for a cause he became a martyr; now, with Lincoln and Calvin and Wesley and Livingstone and the rest, he belongs to the ages. It is very true that we are not and will not become Lincolns, but we are in a world of need and oppor¬ tunity. Hot all great tasks are completed. Many bur¬ dens are upon man, too great for him to bear alone. “Think on these things.” Study to find yourself. Lend your voice and influence and your example to law en¬ forcement, register against sharp practices in business, align yourself with movements working intelligently and in Christlike ways to destroy war. Give money and time to famine relief in the East, and far and near. Be alive to your duties as a citizen. Do not disfranchise yourself, do not make yourself in reality a man or a woman without a country, by remaining away from the polls on Election Day. Improve your mind by reading good literature and by hearing pro¬ phetic messages. Install a radio. Defuse to allow your own affairs, your personal, your business, your selfish affairs, to immerse you. There are many women and men who are my corroborating testimony when I say that fine thinking and abiding happiness are the reward of those who tithe (or better) their time, who return to God service that, measured by hours and reduced to the cash values of the street, represent a fortune. Yes, if you would think great thoughts, identify your¬ self with greatness in loyalty and service; live and grow Clown or King? 35 in the mental and spiritual atmosphere of greatness, in the environment of the sublime. In Lake Sunapee, Hew Hampshire, Chinook salmon have a maximum weight of fourteen pounds; in the Columbia Kiver and the sea this same royal fish attains a growth of sixty pounds and more. Scientists tell us that fish of certain species at least are large or small in relation to the size of the bodies of water they in¬ habit, that physical life in this strange way is a crea¬ ture of environment. A Hew York physician, speaking to* a father con¬ cerning tentative plans which the man had for taking his children into another section of the continent, said, “By all means take them if you can; it will give them an inch more of chest expansion and add inches to their height.” But beyond any possible truth the doctor’s words may contain, we are the children and the adults of our mental environment. Physically, intellectually, morally, spiritually, we are, by the measure of our thinking, clowns or kings. Then let me pray— Give me great thoughts, 0 God, Lend me the royal mind; Lead me where truth has trod, Where faith has been refined. I, too, would know the plan Thou hast to others brought,— Crown me, a common man, With high and kingly thought. r What matters, then, my dole, Upon this peasant clod ? Within my cloistered soul I keep a tryst with God. 3 THE GREATEST FACT OF HISTORY Text: St. John 12:32. “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.” Christianity is the greatest fact of history,—greater than creation, greater than discovery, greater than in¬ vention, greater than government. Creation is the act of causing to exist; creation is first, save only the Creator who is greater than His created. Christianity is the supreme product of the creative mind and will; also Christianity is the supreme expression of the mind and will of God in man. Discovery is a making known, as in science, educa¬ tion, art or exploration. Christianity is a making new; the recreating of the souls of men, the ways of institu¬ tions, and the spirit of human relationships. Invention is the act of devising or creating in the mechanical world that which has not before existed; Christianity has to do with inventors and is the ulti¬ mate expression of the best that is in them as it is the “summum bonum” of all others. Government is control, direction, order, authority, regulation, as of church, the home, or the affairs of state. Christianity is spiritual authority; the control of the act by the direction of the heart and will. Chris¬ tianity dictates and commands the motive, and rules 36 The Greatest Fact of History 37 governments by exercising dominion over the con¬ sciences of subjects. Christianity is the greatest fact of history because of its promises. In my father’s library was a set of books entitled, “Thirty Thousand Promises,” and all of these were taken from the pages between Genesis and Revela¬ tion. Promises for every age and circumstance of life were there, and all were the sure word of the eternal, all-wise and all-powerful Father in Heaven. Other religions have promises too, but it is safe to sav that no follower of Confucius or Buddha or Mo- t j hammed would be able to stand successfully at this point in debate with a Christian. Where other sys¬ tems of faith promise extermination, the chance to forget and disappear, Christianity promises a glorious immortality; where other religions promise a change of form or a later return to earth, as a new creature, or at best a future of self-gratification and sensual pleasure, Christianity promises the fulfilment of life, the perfecting of the soul, and the eternity of good. The promises of Christianity cover every condition, every circumstance of human experience. To me they find their richest expression in those words so all-com¬ prehensive, “As are thy days, so shall thy strength be.” To me that means everything; strength and healing for body, mind and soul. Again and again I have thrown myself upon that promise; again and again under the drive of the most extreme necessity I have turned to it. “As are thy days, so shall thy strength be.” I know a man who remembers a crucial second on a college oval years ago when his limbs failed and his spikes no longer gripped the cinders; when things went suddenly black before his eyes, and the control of his physical being had all but gone from his hands. The 38 What Men Need Most finish of the gruelling race was twenty strides away, and in a flash of desperation he realised that with the deciding event of a great meet all but won,—fairly, magnificently won,—for his Alma Mater, he was being unhanded by a muscular seizure such as every athlete comes to know at one time or another. And then came the remembrance of that promise, “As are thy days, so shall thy strength be,” and on it he lunged across the tape to victory. “As are thy days, so shall thy strength be.” The widow gathers her fatherless children under its shelter; the dying turn their failing eyes toward its unfailing beacon; the tempted take from it grace with which to overcome their dearest sin; the discouraged find it sounding a bugle of hope. For remorse it has the courage of confession; for the wronged it has the sooth¬ ing waters of forgetfulness, and in it they find the blessing that comes to those who forgive. To the young it may be a long time unheeded, and for its ministry they may feel conscious of no need; but for youth, ardent, impetuous and wasteful, it has reserves of caution and conservation; while for ma¬ turity it has the finishing genius of high emprise. Al¬ ways it comes with-those superb qualities that crown success, and for all it releases the energies of body, mind and soul, that raise a task to its completion, that bring an endeavour, however humble, into the morning of its perfect day. And here lies the divine in the promise, here is God—this all-pervading assurance of perfection,—perfect health, perfect joy, perfect peace, perfect work, perfect life. This all-pervading assurance of perfection, I say, is peculiarly Christian, for with the promise comes the demonstration and example of Jesus Christ, and from 39 The Greatest Fact of History Him radiates the glorious invitation, “Follow Me/ 7 and “Where I am, there ye shall he also. 77 The con¬ firmation of one who did follow Him far and who is with Him now, is, “We shall he like Him. 77 Yes, Christianity, by the number, the measure, the quality and the demonstration of its promises is the greatest fact of history. Were you to call the witnesses, were it possible to gather them together and to take their testimony, you would fill the earth, and their voices would drown the sound of all the waters. Again, Christianity is the greatest fact of history because of what it has done, because of its accomplish¬ ments. Measure an institution by its contribution to human good. Judge every tree by its fruits. Christians have not always been prompt to apply this principle to others. Perhaps the hard school of the early church trained some to deal harshly and with a spirit of intolerance altogether foreign to their great teacher. Something at least of the homely philosophy found in the familiar verse, “There is so much of bad in the best of us and so much of good in the worst of us, that it does not behoove any of us to say anything about the rest of us/ 7 should permeate our spirits. Vast contributions have been made to the happiness, health and knowledge of man by movements and insti¬ tutions other than those associated with Christianity. Indeed, it is when we contemplate and study these, properly evaluating them, that we find our most inspir¬ ing comparisons and our fairest perspective as Chris¬ tians. For Christianity has not only made its distinc¬ tive contributions but it has refined and perfected those of others. As to what the supreme contribution of Christianity to man has been, there may be a wide difference of 40 What Men Need Most opinion. To me there is no question that it is the sacredness of personality, the sense of the soul, the soul of the individual as priceless above rubies, as richer than riches. Jesus gave the right-about-face to human society when He said, “Ye are the temple of the Holy Ghost”; ye,—not the altar of the innermost sanctuary,—ye are the holy of holies. Then did he set a little child, babe of the humblest toiler, above the diadem of a kingdom. Then did he set in motion forces that make a thorn in the heel of a barefoot boy of greater concern to society than the spangled trappings of a prince, while the hours of toil for women and children are a more vital problem for governments than the protection of temporal wealth. And against everything that violates personality, every influence that degrades the human body, debases the human mind, pollutes the soul, Jesus has arrayed Christianity. With hospitals and schools, institutions of mercy and programmes of healing, He and His fol¬ lowers have set about the task of setting in order the world. Yes, this sense of the sacredness of life, the sacred¬ ness of personality, the sacredness of that which is the supreme expression of God’s creative instinct, power and love,—this into which He pours Himself, this which, as God Himself is deathless, can never die,— this is the supreme contribution of Christianity to man. And the mighty movements of reform that the Chris¬ tian Church has inspired and led, the missionary adven¬ tures of her most intrepid saints, the social programmes that take their life from the fountain which flows from His side who said, “Love thy neighbour as thyself,” the ever growing sentiment against war,—these are expres- The Greatest Fact of History 41 sions of the Christ-filled mind against that which in¬ jures and destroys personality. Slavery died because it debased personality,—-the personality of the slave and of the slave-driver. Duel¬ ling was outlawed because it degraded personality. Prohibition could never have succeeded had it not been for the fact that beverage alcohol and the saloon raised the brute and destroyed personality. Organised vice everywhere faces the inevitable ban of civilisation be¬ cause it leaves a blotch of shame upon personality, and armed conflict will pass from the stage of human action because it is the destroyer, red-handed and colossal, of human personality; because by one fell stroke it ends the present and slays the future, leaves its victims twice upon the plains of battle, once in fair-eyed sons who had but just begun to live, and once in generations sealed forever in the dead loins of potential fatherhood destroyed. This is Christianity’s greatest contribution,—the exaltation of personality, the sense of its sacredness, “Thou art the temple of the Holy Ghost”; within thee God dwells, not in stone, nor in golden vessels, not in shrines nor yet in arks and temples, not in pride of station, nor in pomp of state. But within thee, a little child, a maiden fair, or stalwart youth,—a woman, a man, seamstress or maid, princess or queen, toiler or captain of trade,—within thee God dwells; thou art His holy place. Other religions and institutions have made contribu¬ tions to the happiness and knowledge of man, have enriched art and given to science, have measured their strength in numbers against the followers of the Galilean, and we do ourselves no credit when we ignore 42 What Men Need Most or despise their gifts. They have raised the walls of beautiful cities and stretched wide the boundaries of empires; they have taught man’s mind and strength¬ ened man’s body, filled his coffers and feasted his am¬ bitions,—aye, and they have fed his soul,—fed it with husks perhaps, but they have recognised the deathless longings of his immortal spirit and have sought to give back an answer to his cry, “Light, light, more light!” But when this has been said, and when all has been said, they have failed,—failed because they lacked that which Christianity alone had to give in its simplicity and fulness, the sense of the sacred in man, the divine in personality. Again, Christianity is the greatest fact of history because of its authority. Authority is not a popular word with the multitude just at present, but it is a very important word,—a word that home, business, church and state need to hear more often. Discipline and control, which are but expressions of authority, are not particularly popular, either. But until they are given more attention among us, our children will continue to be late on the streets and early into trouble; our courts will continue to be advertising agencies for shameless stories of broken vows; our business relationships will continue to wait too frequently at the door of the shrewd manipulator rather than in the office of the honest ad¬ viser, and our government will not cease to be a foot¬ ball for corrupt politicians. Christianity is the greatest fact of history because it is the religion of supreme authority; its government is above all governments, and we are told in the book of its law that it shall “never end.” Its rule is for time and for eternity. We are committed on this con¬ tinent, thank God, to a separation between church and 43 The Greatest Fact of History state, but, thank God again, that in the words of former Associate Justice Brewer of the Supreme Court of the United States, “This is a Christian nation,” in God we put our trust, and must! But how idle seem these brave words when we con¬ template so many of our individual and national ac¬ tions. Xo wonder pessimists find comfort and infidels their “evidence.” Xot until we have compared the records of the generations and assembled all the facts, do we see the upward bend of civilisation, do we catch a vision of the state that is to be, and find faith to unite our voices in those stupendous words of God’s supreme declaration of authority, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbour as thyself.” Our eyes turn upward to the King upon the throne of the eternities,—to the High Command of the soul, and with discernment, with a full regard for our place and responsibility in the great event of salvation,—sal¬ vation for the individual and for society,—we sing with Browning, “'God’s in His Heaven; all’s right with the world.” But Christianity is the greatest fact of history be¬ cause of its method. The most amazing words ever spoken by a leader were these, “I, if I he lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.” All other con¬ querors came with power and force, lashes in the hands of drivers herded the minions of Xerxes, a million strong, into the pass of Thermopylae; terror ran before the hordes of Attila and Genghis-Khan; lustful prom¬ ises and fanatical hate incited the hosts of Mohammed; fear in a thousand hideous forms has been the bulwark of every jungle worship. But Jesus Christ, who stands to-day, supreme, alone, 44 What Men Need Most in the hungry soul of the world, when He laid down before His lieutenants His final plan of campaign and gave them the directions that were to continue until the heavens roll back as a scroll, said, “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.” “Love, so amazing, so divine!” “Hot by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.” And, in the last analysis, Christianity is great because it is a spirit, and because it captures, commands, controls, the spirits of men. What confirmation that promise that He would draw all men has had! They swung Him up between earth and sky; lifted Him upon the slave’s cross, between thieves, and with the first breath of His, “It is finished,” began the disintegration of the Roman Em¬ pire. They stoned Stephen, and one of that very com¬ pany of persecutors became the field marshal of His first advance toward earth’s last frontiers. They fed His followers to lions they had starved for the occa¬ sion, and presently the bloody sand became the seed- ground of His church. They burned His Book, only to find that they had but unchained His Word. At last, when persecution and martyrdom had failed, popularity came to more seriously threaten His plan. Men took on His name in easy fashion and hid their true selves behind loud professions. Wealth and dis¬ tinction turned the heads of His captains; they came to serve earthly monarchs with zeal that was greater than their passion for their Lord; the visible church became corrupt with temporal power. But though shaken to its foundations, His cause stood fast, and to-day, with perilous times behind and yet weightier events before, His spirit rises an irresistible The Greatest Fact of History 45 tide in human affairs, bearing man forward, drawing him upward and on. In all history there is no other spectacle like this,— a king without a capitol, a conqueror without an army, an empire without a sword. The fact is proof that love is the greatest thing in the world. Its only answer is God. And here we come to the conclusion of the whole matter, and the conclusion is the whole matter: Chris¬ tianity is the greatest fact of history because Chris¬ tianity is Jesus Christ. When we turn to Him, how futile are all words, for He is love; He is man; He is God. 4 THREE FACTS AND A QUESTION Text: Esther 4:14. “Who knoweth whether thou art come to the 'kingdom for such a time as this?” The message has its basis in the life of a queen, in the character of a woman,—Esther, the Jewess. His¬ tory presents her in the white light granted only those who serve and save; who battle mightily and minister largely. She symbolises three vast virtues,—loyalty, liberty, and faith. She was true to her people; she lib¬ erated her race; she believed implicitly in her God. In her time she turned wrath into praise and brought life out of death; for our time she is a brave example and lofty inspiration. These are the words of the message: “Who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” In them there are three facts and a ques¬ tion. The first fact of the message is the fact of person¬ ality, “Thou art come.” That I am, staggers me. There are times when I search for the reasons behind my birth, when I would lay hold of the barriers that fence me from the field where my life-germ was planted. There are times when my mind rushes on to leap the chasm between me and the things that are hid with 46 Three Facts and a Question 47 Christ in God. But I never cease to wonder at my being. Yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow are three mysteries, and the greatest of these is to-day. I have watched my children in their cradles, in the first discovery of infancy, playing with their hands, and I am bound to confess that my own hands are quite as much a miracle to me now as they were back in the grey dawn before memory began, when I saw them first. But I am and “thou art,” and though I cannot ex¬ plain, I should be a fool to deny. I am hands and feet; I am a body, but my body is not I. I am a spirit. There is a container and there is the thing contained. How superficial, how inconsistent, is the man who uses vocal organs he cannot understand, to deny the fact of a soul he cannot understand! He would better begin by denying the existence of his own voice. Do you debate the question by insisting that eyes may see eyes and ears hear voices, and hands touch hands, but that no one can measure a soul? I have touched my cold dead; and, though the form of it was there, it had neither eyes nor ears, neither hands nor feet; it did not speak, and it did not smile. That which I had clasped was gone. “Thou art come.” Hot a thing of flesh and bone, but a being of brawn and brain; a living soul, an im¬ mortal. “Thou art come.” Sprung from the loins of all the past, and inheritor of the past’s taint and virtue, subject to disease and tempted, poor or rich, versatile or dull “thou art come.” There are dignity and terror in the personal pro¬ noun. Up from the dust into which have crumbled the moulds that fashioned the unnumbered billions of humans who preceded you; out of the matter God breathed upon after He had shaped the first Adam, 48 What Men Need Most and back into which jour earthly house shall pass, “thou art come.” At the risk of inciting you to overvalue yourselves, to overestimate your qualities by misunderstanding the direction of the emphasis, I give you the supreme truth: Personality is eternal. The second fact of the message is the fact of place. “Thou art come to the kingdom. 7 ’ And the kingdom is the kingdom of the present. You are in the world; just now it may not be easy to realise it, but your feet are on the earth, and all about you are people with faults and follies as well as with smiles and congratu¬ lations. There is before you the humdrum business of bread-making and child-rearing, of harvesting and ship¬ building, of preaching and teaching, of suffering and dying, of service and of sacrifice. You have missed the message of life unless you go out every morning of the working day to master practical affairs, to solve immediate problems, to meet the crisis of the moment, whether that crisis be a high circumstance such as Esther faced, or a small sum that wrinkles the brow of a child. We have not seen the beauties or caught the lessons of the radiant Jewess, whose soul was more exquisite than her form or face, until we have thrust her great ordeal into the life of our times, into the affairs of our generation. Do not misunderstand me. God pity us when we lose our dreams or when we cease to see visions. We must never become so engrossed with ministries that we have no patience or time for musing, for prayer, and for communion. Eventually he runs in a circle who runs without rest. A business bankrupts itself when it becomes a mere counting machine. There is an efficiency that is inefficient. We must cultivate the Three Facts and a Question 49 amenities of the heart; we must wait with friendship and tarry with God, if we are to see developed within ourselves that spiritual initiative that, more than phys¬ ical force and mechanical genius, shapes the destiny of the world. But we must bring this spiritual initiative, we must apply this moral fervour, this divine optimism, to the tasks of the kingdom. We must harness our dreams; we must put a sword into the hands of our visions; we must honour our friendships by rendering a service, and glorify our God by making a life. The kingdom is your kingdom, yours to-day as it was Queen Esther’s yesterday. Again the dignity of per¬ sonality. Yours; for you is the opportunity, and will you sulk because of one who seems by birth or environ¬ ment to be more favoured than you are ? Will you hang back because of handicaps, fancied or real, when a small-bodied and humbly-born Welshman may rise to stand at the head of all liberal statesmen, when a farmer boy may become a President, and when un¬ named private soldiers may make a human levee that holds back a flood of absolutism as the dikes of Hol¬ land hold back the Horth Sea? Will you despise your present ministry because of geographical limitations or because of its smallness when measured by the deeds of others? There is no excuse for failure, for God is the final arbiter, and He measures a life, not by its accomplish¬ ments, but by what it struggles to do; not by the work of its hands alone, but by the motives of its heart. The kingdom is your kingdom, for yours is the re¬ sponsibility. Ho life ever faces an opportunity to render a service without looking into the eyes of moral obligation. Standing at a crowded street-corner in Hew 50 What Men Need Most York City one day, I saw a blind man hesitating at the sidewalk’s edge. Suddenly a Boy Scout leaped “out of the somewhere into the here/’ and in a moment the stranger was led in safety across Fifth Avenue. There are blind men everywhere. The world is going it blind to-day. Guides are needed, guides who have all the dash of the Boy Scout and as much informa¬ tion. You are bound, and so am I, in a small corner or in a larger place, and to the utmost of physical strength and moral stamina, to show the way. Any man or any woman who has as much as a handful of the flour of influence, or a thimbleful of the oil of ability, and hoards it in these starving times, is not a Christian, is not a patriot, is a poltroon. We must give, give unto the uttermost, give our all. The kingdom is your kingdom, for yours are the rewards, and the rewards are unfailing and ample. There is the joy of honest work, of a task well per¬ formed. There is no satisfaction greater than that which comes with the consciousness of having completed a project. There is no sleep sweeter than the slumber that follows level-best endeavour, whether your hands have swung an axe in the forest or your mind has chiselled an angel out of marble. There is the growth of soul that attends all service, the breaking of the bands of prejudice, the laying down of the barriers of narrowness, the developing of a re¬ sourceful and beneficent character. I would rather have it said of you, when they put away the tools with which you have gardened in the rich fields of human progress, that you were a great heart than that you garnered a golden harvest. You have stern problems and hard work before you, but you will not become hard if the prayer with which Three Facts and a Question 51 yon greet each new day has the spirit of the words, “Father of us all, help me this day to love men and women, little children and Thee. 77 During the great war I heard a brilliant young Canadian lieutenant-colonel say, in a farewell address delivered at a banquet given in his honour by the church of which he was a member, “I do not go into this bloody thing because I want to go; because I have a passion to slay. I go because duty calls me, and I am glad to do my bit. As I try to analyse the conflicting emotions of my heart, I find terror as well as determination. But one great desire I do have, to so carry myself at the front and everywhere that when I come back, if I come back, little children will run to me as confidently as they do to-day. 77 The kingdom is yours, because the rewards are yours, and the highest reward of all is the “Well done 77 of heaven. I do not hesitate to tell you that I am work¬ ing for that. I may miss a certain peace of mind that comes when men speak well of me; but I must not miss His approbation, and I need not. There is no chance for Him to misunderstand me. The judgments of the world are superficial and finite; the judgments of God are infinite; they are “true and righteous altogether. 77 This leads us naturally to the fact that the kingdom which is our kingdom is also God 7 s kingdom. “God 7 s in His heaven; All 7 s right with the world. 77 Does the quotation seem out of place? Does it jar? If it is not true, then where is our hope? At a great convention an international leader of religious thought and activity declared that while in Europe during the war he heard an English diplomat say that a complete 52 What Men Need Most world catastrophe could not be averted “unless God performs a miracle.” And God did and God will! He is performing miracles; miraculous beyond the turning of water into wine was the driving from Ameri¬ can civilisation of beverage alcohol; miraculous beyond the raising of Lazarus is the new birth of democracy in all the world. I do not profess to see a way through the present darkness but I do know that there is a way, and that our halting feet will find and tread it. I am not a prophet; I cannot see the end from the beginning. But I have the sure knowledge of the omnipotence of God, an omnipotence that maketh even the wrath of men to praise Him. Christianity has not failed, for it has been neither un¬ derstood nor applied. Men called Christians have mis¬ erably failed, but Jesus has the only balm for the war- sores of the world. The race is on a pilgrimage of dis¬ covery; it is the quest of Christ. We have taken the wilderness way of hunger and thirst; of delay and denial; but to-day our backs are against Egypt, and we are moving towards Jordan. If it were not for the assurance and for the pro¬ gramme of the Christian religion, I should utterly despair. But for our terrible sins we are now aton¬ ing. Eor our iniquitous neglect of the clear teachings of Him who spake as never man spake, for our failure to apply those teachings to governments as well as to individuals, for the money that we have “sluiced out of rivers of blood” we are paying the price. It is a price vast beyond human comprehension, but who will say that it is too great a price to pay if by it we gain an international conscience; if by it we democ¬ ratise the last threatening autocratic government; if by Three Facts and a Question 53 it all states come to accept brotherhood responsibilities, each for the other and the strong for the weak; if by it we learn the truth written in letters of fire and blood above every mined sea and every shell-ploughed field, “Without me ye can do nothing.” Yes, “thou art come to the kingdom,” thy kingdom and God’s. Come to be a toiler with the infinite in promoting the common good and in making a new earth. The third fact of the message is the fact- of time. “For such a time as this.” Already we have appre¬ ciated together the stupendous problems to which we are born, problems far more complex and appalling than those confronting the queen whose character is our real message to-day, but problems no less solvable, for they are human problems, and we are labourers together with God. But first of all, we must go to our knees. First of all, our preparedness for these great tasks must be spiritual. America must be made increasingly worth living for, as well as increasingly worth dying for. And why is a nation worth dying for ? Yot because of her forests and rivers, not because of her ranges crowded with ore, not because of her ripening harvests and her orchards in full bloom; not because of her busy marts of trade. A nation is worth dying for because of her ideals, because of her spiritual institutions, be¬ cause she has a soul to save. The challenge of our patriotism to-day, for such a time as this, is the call to a supreme self-surrender for God, for America, and for the world. If this were the place for an extended survey, we should be bound to discuss at length the grave economic and social crises that have followed the war. Half the 54 What Men Need Most world is hungry to-day, and millions are said to he slowly starving. While the great war, with the lesser wars following it, is responsible for much of this physical suffering, other and more fundamental causes of waste and in¬ equality have been revealed. Until these causes are squarely faced and honestly dealt with, no superficial juggling with effects can give lasting relief. Sixty per cent of our families are living on incomes of less than $800 annually, when unprejudiced investigators prove that no family can supply itself with essential neces¬ sities and comforts and provide properly for its future on less than $1,200 annually. Apples rot on the trees of Ohio and berries decay on the bushes of Oregon while children lift up the cry of hunger in the streets of New York. Drunken feasts of the parasite rich and bread riots of the helpless poor join their voices to the disgrace of our modern city life. In the mountains of Pennsylvania coal waits while grates are empty in New England and the Middle West. “God give us men. A time like this demands Strong minds, great hearts, true faith, and ready hands.” And God is giving men, men and women, unselfish, prophetic, and competent for the leadership and service of this time. Great Britain is wrestling constructively with the liquor octopus of recognised vested rights. America has achieved national prohibition. The slogan, “A Saloonless Nation by 1920,” has become the proc¬ lamation for a saloonless world. God is giving com¬ pensation for our appalling tragedies. The millions Three Facts and a Question 55 that were under arms have eaten of the tree of knowl¬ edge. They have learned their human values and their divine rights. The poor are claiming their birthright of the earth and its fruits; and increasingly the rich are coming to accept their obligations as stewards. In spite of grave moral reactions we believe that upon the common altar of sacrifice raised by the war, where the high and low joined their offerings of blood and treasure, has been kindled a fire that will burn out the dross of economic slavery, and that will light the way to the wiser times of equal opportunity in the benefits of democratic government and in the gifts of nature’s God. "For such a time as this,” ghastly, glorious time! There are armies of graves across two hemispheres, and the world is still a charnel-pit. The ruined cities of northern France still bear the marks of never-to-be- forgotten vandalism and the spots of blood that will not out. But as truly as the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church, so there is a resurrection for every tomb, and a daybreak for every midnight. The path of civili¬ sation rises and dips, but it remains permanently at no lower level. The key-word of the whole social order is progress, not decline. To-morrow will be better than to-day, and we are the builders of the to-morrow. These are the facts of the mesage: The fact of per¬ sonality, the fact of place, and the fact of time. The question of the message, the question upon the correct answer to which your whole life waits, is a Who know- eth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this ?” Who has the answer to the question ? Who knows ? There are always a number of people who think that 56 What Men Need Most they know,—our friends and our parents, for instance. They may or they may not have the correct judgment of our possibilities. But in other generations class dull¬ ards have taken life’s prizes, and university honour men have become prodigal sons of learning. Our im¬ mediate associates are too close to us to see on all sides of us. Distance gives perspective. Who knows? Mentally and spiritually lazy people, when confronted with such a problem, are likely to say, “God knows.” But shall we satisfy ourselves with “God knows whether I am come to the kingdom for such a time as this” ? Men and women, handling every day the service tools of life, in reverence let me say that unless you know, the fact of God’s omniscience does not matter. Unless you have the conviction that for such a time as this you are born, trained, and equipped, the wisdom of the Almighty, in so far as it relates to you, a free moral agent, is a palsied arm. Some one has said, “Egotism is divine.” Egotism may be very foolish, and the word has come to signify obnoxious self-esteem. But no brilliancy, no physical prowess, no mechanical efficiency, no refinement of birth, no indorsement of influential friends, no mere mental equipment, can build for you the life trium¬ phant, unless these are united in you, to your own abso¬ lute knowledge, that you have a place to fill in the world, that you have a ministry to perform in your generation, that you are sent of God, that you are come to the kingdom for such a time as this. Here is the knowledge that is power. Such knowl¬ edge is very exalting and very humbling, and those who possess it are the humblers of the mighty. “Know thyself” is the first principle of true wisdom and the secret of success. Three Facts and a Question 57 Hone of us should ever cease to be a learner. But our wisdom-gathering must be more than academic. It must be applied. What we already have we must use while each new discovery must be channelled in service; and of wisdom’s quest there is no end. Finally, we must know God, and God’s Son, the only sufficient Saviour and Shepherd. We must know Him whom to know aright is eternal life, eternal life for ourselves and for our labours. I have no apology to make for the last emphasis of the message. In a rocking world, with civilisation peel¬ ing her thin veneer, the only mighty fortress is our God. And here faith and knowledge blend. Only the truly wise believe, and only those who from the crum¬ bling foundations man has laid, spring to the Rock of Ages, have wisdom enough to lead us now. “I know of a world that is sunk in shame, Where hearts oft faint and tire. But I know of a name, a name, a name That can set that world on fire. Its sound is a brand, its letters flame, I know of a name, a name, a name, ’Tis Jesus.” Faith, faith in ultimate good because of an unlimited God, is the victory that overcomes the world. Let us anchor our lives here. 5 DEAD KING OR LIVING LORD? Text: St. Luke 24: 5-6. “Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen/' The supreme question of Easter morning is not, “Did Jesus Rise?” but “Is Jesus Risen?” Here joins life’s greatest issue. Immortal hope trembles in the balance for us all, as we turn our eyes toward the tomb in Joseph’s garden where Mary hurried through the dews of that first Easter dawn, and as we hear again the angels’ stupendous declaration, “Why seek ye the living among the dead ? He is not here, but is risen.” What does Easter mean to us ? As we look upon that great event and lose the sense of time and space, what does our angel spokesman say ? What is the mes¬ sage of the voice,—“He rose,” or “He is risen” ? He was, or, He is ? The tense is everything. Our peace of mind, our happiness, our moral health, depends upon our answer to the question. There are those who give at least mental assent to the miracle which opened the tomb, but who by their practice deny louder than any words the living Christ. They move with those who, as the day went dark upon the skull-shaped hill, named Him a dead king; they are of the mixed multitude which turned away from his agony, whatever else their judgment may have 58 Dead King or Living Lord? 59 been, however well they may have loved, or hated Him, without a promise for their grief or a premonition for their exultation. The challenge of the ultimatum, then, is “Dead King or Living Lord V’ When Pilate wrote the super¬ scription for the cross, “King of the Jews,” he was not uncertain of the crucifixion's outcome. He made let¬ ters to brand a dead man and not to honour a living ruler. Vascillating, pusillanimous, cowardly and jeal¬ ous, he would have them acknowledge no personality longer able to dispute with him for public attention and homage. Xor would he have taken the chance of of¬ fending the greater Caesar by acclaiming the wonder¬ working Jew, had he not already, though to be sure with a certain fearful reluctance, made the destruction of the Xazarine a certainty. Hot until the way was cleared to Calvary, not until his own first and entirely selfish objections had been overruled, and God’s dear Son was on His Via Crucis, did the nervous Pilate take his stencil in hand. To the Prsetor of Pome Jesus was a broken body, a powerless will, a dead king. And to the church whose priests mixed their hate with spittle to drown His forgiving glances, the church decadent and infidel, straining gnats and swallowing camels, praying at length in public, and in secret short- changing the people:—the church, a tomb of putrid sacrileges, Jesus was a charlatan exposed at last, a re¬ pudiated prophet, a popular idol overthrown, a dead king. That His had been a name to conjure with, their very presence at the cross confirmed; their shameful demonstrations proved; but to them His day was ended; His glory was departed:—He was dead. There were strangers in that mount of suffering, merchants from the far corners of the earth, curiosity- 60 What Men Need Most seekers who came for the spectacle, and who, encour¬ aged by the rumours of this man’s miraculous gifts, hoped for a new thrill. Thousands watched that day upon the green hill without the city gate, the painful ascent of the cross, as other thousands watched the “Human Fly” go to his death up the sheer walls of the Martinique in Hew York City. How these rude fel¬ lows must have waited, breathless, for His answer when his temple tormentors cried out in derision, “Come down from the cross,” and when they had shaken them¬ selves free of the momentary terror the darkened heavens and other strange manifestations must have inspired; I suppose they sought their lodgings thought¬ ful, but disappointed, and saying, “Well, whatever he was, he is dead now. Strangely we felt ourselves drawn to Him; Ah! we were sure that He would come down, and even now we somehow believe that He could have come down, but he is a dead king.” And what of the little group which gazed through weeping eyes upon that spectacle,—the faithful John, to whom the royal son bequeathed his mother, and those others who had taken bread from his now pierced hands. And what of her who bore him ? woman of infinite woes. Surely these knew! Surely these un¬ derstood! Ho! Their judgment, different in quality, was not different in character. They saw a beloved form stiffen; eyes that had so often looked upon them with vast yearning, glaze; hands that had so often car¬ ried to the suffering multitudes the touch of healing, become lifeless; the voice that had spoken as never man spake, grow dumb, and as they watched and wept, hope saw no star, for hope was dead, and listening love heard not even “the rustle of a wing.” “For as yet,” as you will find it written in the 9th verse of the twentieth 61 Dead King or Living Lord? chapter of St. John’s Gospel, “they knew not the scrip¬ ture, that he must rise again from the dead.” And heyond that first Easter morning their great doubt stalked, until Thomas had thrust his fingers into the yet open wounds. Then faith found tongue. After¬ wards, came the vindication of history, and the fulfil¬ ment of time. He was not a dead king who commanded the intrepid saints of the early church, who led them out on the most sublime adventures of human experience. He was not a dead king who lit the signal fires of the Pen¬ tecostal upper room; who held the gaze of Stephen, when through the showering stones that first Christian martyr lifted his dying eyes to the opening heavens and claimed forgiveness for his murderers. He was not a dead king who took command of Saul of Tarsus, blinded him with lightnings and then thrust him forth to compass the earth with the truths of redemption. He was not a dead king who conquered Rome more completely than did Hannibal or Attila; who made out of a heathen Coliseum a Christian church, and who set up a spiritual empire by the Golden Horn more extensive and potent than the temporal throne of Con¬ stantine. He was not a dead king who went before the cross of Augustine, who tamed the fires for Savonarola, who led the Ironsides of Cromwell, who calmed the seas that broke about the prow of the Half-moon and eased the waves that washed the decks of the May¬ flower. He was not a dead king who opened up the wilderness before the circuit rider and gave to the first missionaries the islands of the sea for an inheritance. John Calvin and John Wesley, Zinzendorf and Luther, Carey and Paton and Morison, Livingstone, Adoniram Judson, Bishop Thoburn and MacKay, Sam 62 What Men Need Most Lapsley and Horace Pitkin, and that numberless com¬ pany of their faith and kind who accepted the great commission and went forth to make the waste places of superstition and idolatry blossom with the flowers of salvation, followed not the banner of a dead king hut marched in the train of a living Lord. A supreme evidence of the fact that Jesus broke out of His tomb, rose from the dead and conquered death, is this other fact, scarcely less sublime, that men and women live and die for Him and for His cause, and that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” The institutions of modern civilisation that are our greatest pride are not monuments of a dead king; they are memorials to a living Lord. And the finest im¬ pulse of the human heart, the free and unselfish aspira¬ tions of the human mind, the holiest ambitions of the immortal soul, these two thousand years since Pilate wrote that taunt for Israel and had it nailed above the Galilean’s thorn-crowned head, have sprung from the deathless fountain opened under the cross for the heal¬ ing of the nations. Pilate was wrong; the priests were wrong; the curi¬ ous onlookers, the disappointed spectators were wrong; the disciples and Mary were wrong. He was not dead w T hen on the cross His body died,—He was the living Lord. And now we have cleared the way to the more vital matter. He rose. Is He risen ? What is the answer ? It is not difficult to be an infidel. A very ordinary mind can doubt, and doubt impressively. To this fact I am a competent witness. Any poor fellow can deny. And beyond this, the times in which we live are fruitful gardens for rank growths of cynicism and discourage- 63 Dead King or Living Lord? ment. It takes a far vision to catch the promise of a dawn beyond the moral, the social, the industrial, the international night in which we seem to live. Hor would I have you think that I refer only to a state of mind when I speak of doubt and denial. The most dangerous infidel is not the one who with his lips denies; it is possible for me to sit in church on Easter Sunday, before the resurrection lilies, joining with affirmation in the creed, and uniting in the hymns of faith, giving mental assent to all the most evangelical of preachers might say, and yet with my life acknowl¬ edging not a living Lord, but confirming with Pilate and the priests and the rest, a dead king. What is my confession on Easter day? Yes, and also what is my confession the following day? What is my life? Do I practise Jesus Christ? And how far have His principles which we declare to be true and righteous altogether possessed the mind and prac¬ tice of human relationships? Does a dead king lie beneath the Ruhr valley to-day, or shall a living Lord of reconciliation patrol the boundaries of Europe ? Will the leaders of capital and labour worship at the tomb of a dead king or listen to the voice of a living Lord? Statesmen and captains of industry, employers and employes, those who sell and those who buy, rich and poor, you and I, must face the great question,— must meet the ultimatum. As individuals and as social units we must meet it, and we must make reply not only with our lips; we must answer with our lives. Llave I confessed a situation that has encouragement for the pessimist? Well, I might go even farther, and confess a sense of at times appalling discouragement, a mood that cries, The Days are evil; the good is dead; the end is worse than the beginning; what’s the use ? 64 What Men Need Most But then I hear a voice that never fails the ears that strain to hear the bugle of the dawn, “Say not, the days are evil, who’s to blame. Stand up, speak out and bravely, in God’s name. Be strong.” Against the present chaos in internationalism sounds the Christmas chorus of Bethlehem, and in the awak¬ ening, sacrificial conscience, opposed to the futility and wastage of war, I see a star of hope that will shine more and more unto the perfect day of brotherhood. Against the greed of profiteers and the cruelty of the exploiters of weakness, who are satisfied to fill their coffers at the expense of empty bins and scanty larders, appear the ever-increasing number of men and women who measure their profits by the Golden Rule, and who share their power. “Say not the days are evil,” nor advertise the mote of infidelity in others, unless and until you have taken the beam of selfishness or idleness or injustice or idolatry out of your own eye; unless and until you have joined yourself to that goodly and growing com¬ pany that challenges the evil and battles the wrong. I know a man whose name a little while ago was on the lips of millions. He is drilling an oil well. He is the kind of an adventurer men call by another name, “wildcatter.” He of course is sure that he will find flowing gold. Perhaps he will. At any rate, he will deserve to; he has sold no stock and has interested no one with him who cannot afford to share disappoint¬ ment as well as success. And where, always before, I believe, the rule of work in oil fields has been the seven day week and the twelve hour day,—the latter being two shifts, he has introduced another policy,—six days a week, but with pay for seven, and eight hours a day, with the added expense of three shifts instead of two, 65 Dead King or Living Lord? for twenty-four hours. Seasoned oil men call him a fool; he knows it, and smiles. I call him a pioneer and a Christian. I think of him when I read my Easter lesson, and thinking of him it is not hard to sav, “He is risen.” Hot long ago I sat in an old trading post, "built from adobe and hewn logs. It stands a hundred miles from the nearest railroad, at Chin Lee, near the mouth of Canyon de Chelly, and six miles below the famous white house of a thousand rooms—that prehistoric cliff-dwelling which housed an industrious people be¬ fore the foundations of the pyramids were laid down. How the old post is a mission church, and in it several times every week gather the Christian Havajos. I talked to my dark-skinned, desert brothers as I would talk to you. I wish that you might know them as I have come to know them;—their children, their herds, their hogans. I wish that you might see the changes wrought by the spirit of the living Christ that I have witnessed; that you, too, might compare the pagan who still exists in filth and fear, with his neighbour whom God hath healed and who lives now with a countenance of light in a home which fully vindicates the theory that clean¬ liness is next to Godliness. I talked with William Gorman, one of the most prosperous and intelligent of the Havajos. He is a fine and handsome man. His wife, his sons and daugh¬ ters are worthy of him. I met him first when, seems; v 7 0 our automobile in distress, he hurried across his fields and helped dig us out of the sand. He has visited the great cities and has been the spokesman of his people in Washington. We talked of many things,—this dark-skinned Pres- 66 What Men Need Most byterian elder of a struggling Indian church set in the mighty desert stillness. We talked of the new adobe house of prayer with the manse the heroic missionary and his little band have slowly raised by their own hands; of the bell they some day hope to have to peal its golden message down the arroyas and across the mesas. William Gorman (his Navajo name you would not understand) loves those tiny buildings with a peculiar affection, for he it was who pled with Secre¬ tary Lane of President Wilson’s cabinet for the privi¬ lege of erecting them,—pled eloquently and success¬ fully against bitter opposition. And then, at last, through the interpreter (for Wil¬ liam Gorman speaks no English) I asked a question that brought a flood of words. With glowing eyes, rich and rapid voice and gesticulating hands, he spoke of his personal Christian experience; of his old fears and evil doings, of how as a lad he prayed to the river, the mountain, the bear, the coyote, the lion, and the sun; of how he had once lived as his neighbours lived, and then of the great change that came. When he told of his Christian faith he became so impressive that we who sat in that rude room caught the sense of an un¬ seen, benign presence, as he concluded, “And all of this I do fully believe.” Sir, if you have somewhere, somehow, lost your faith, come with me to the great open places, to the vast silences where God still speaks as from the burn¬ ing bush. I remember my Navajo friends and their church as I read again the Easter message. Not a dead king but a living Lord has changed and now commands William Gorman and his house. For me this is the message of Easter, and while it underlies and undergirds the entire structure of Chris- 67 Dead King or Living Lord? tian faith, while it is the most profound theological element of our religion, it has a warmth in its personal application, an intimate tenderness that makes it a balm of Gilead to a wounded spirit, and a song in the night to a sorrowing soul. When we stand beside the graves of our departed, while winter winds of death blow chill about us, we have the promise of another springtime, for He is risen. We know that, as the blossoms bud and bloom and fade; then lift their heads again in fairer forms, so we shall rise. Then, when at last we close our eyes upon these scenes and fold our hands from work, we do not die; that we but pass from work to greater work. Be¬ cause He lives, we shall live also. Jesus Christ is not a dead king. In spite of time and change, with all the ardour of my youth, those years when faith first came to build an altar in my heart, I answer all my doubts and silence all my fears with “He is Risen.” 6 REMEMBER JESUS CHRIST Text: II Timothy 2:8. “Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, of the seed of David, according to my gospel ” Love is memory’s great compulsion, and next to love is remorse. We cannot forget when we love, and until love has covered them we always remember our sins. Does the text arrangement then seem arbitrary and unwarranted? “Remember Jesus Christ?” Is it not altogether unnecessary to say, Remember Jesus; to admonish against forgetting the Christ ? Do you smile at the very thought of the world, of any of us, ever forgetting Him ? Is it not like warning a son not to forget his mother; to remember the hands that held him close against the warm breasts of his babyhood; the eyes that lingered upon his first efforts to break the shackles of his in¬ fancy’s helplessness; the voice that sang him to sleep; that called him from his play; that comforted his grief and admonished his wrong-doings:—the one above all others who believed in him; hoped for him, communed with him? How unnecessary to say to you, “Remem¬ ber Mother.” Is it not like admonishing a man to keep in mind the mother of his children; the woman who shares his bitter and his sweet, who feels more deeply than he does his 68 Remember Jesus Christ 69 reverses, and who is the genius of his triumphs? Is it not like saying, Husband, remember your wife; or, Son, remember your father; or, Woman, remember your dearest, your truest, most unselfish friend? As I think in these terms of the text I catch myself re¬ peating fragments of the old song, “How can I forget Him? How can I forget Him? He’s done so much for me.” Hor can I. Hot until I forget the holiest recollec¬ tions of childhood, youth and young manhood, can I ever forget Jesus Christ. It is a. mental impossibility for me to blot out the memory of him. Hot even were I to will to forget, could I; for again and again I have been reminded that memory is not subject to will. Hor can the world forget Him. He stands at every cross-road of her progress. He is at the centre of every great spiritual impulse that thrusts civilisation upward; cathedrals that have stood a thousand years crumble in an hour under the concentrated fire of long¬ distance guns. But the One who raised them by the hands of men His sacrifice inspired, stands unscarred, unshrunken, and unobscured. He has enemies, hut none who match His strength. Many deny His au¬ thority, hut even they must walk in the light He car¬ ries ; and His rivals are as children who puff up their cheeks to blow out the sun. Why then the text ?—because in this case it serves to concentrate our gaze upon the central figure of the great truth we wish to emphasise. Remember Jesus Christ, and in particular remember these things about Him:—these characteristics that belong to Him; “Re¬ member Jesus Christ of the seed of David; raised from the dead.” First, remember that Jesus Christ was a man. Re- 70 What Men Need Most member that Jesus Christ was a human being; that He was flesh, bone, blood; mind to think and grieve and rejoice; body to grow and suffer; that He was like as we are. Remember this to-day. Is it unnecessary to say as much as has already been said? Frankly, I often have greater difficulty with the humanity of J esus than with the divinity of Jesus. This is especially true during the weeks of His growing passion. “Love so amazing, so divine. Can it be?” and can it be that a man, a human being, possessed it? Small wonder that the first heretics in the church were not those who denied that Jesus was God, but those who refused to believe that He was or could have been human. It was the Gnostic that the early church first drove out; those who met the embarrassment of His visible pres¬ ence by the shores of Galilee and in the earthly counsels of men by saying that He only seemed to have a human form, that His apparent flesh and blood were only a phantom, that His suffering and His death were not reality. Apollonaris was not an infidel in the sense that we now regard the word; nor was he a Unitarian. The deity of J esus Christ He did not question, but His humanity he did absolutely deny. Our text to-day is not a covered word; in it is no hidden meaning. Re¬ member Jesus Christ of David’s seed; descendant of a long earthly line, fruit of a woman’s womb, babe of a woman’s travail pain. Remember Jesus Christ, the man, and of all men the most human. And so remembering him, remember that He had man’s limitations. We know by the record that He could be hungry, hungry for friends, as well as for food; hungry for fellowship and understanding, a$ well as for drink; that because He had the limitations of a man He could not, physically speaking, be in two Remember Jesus Christ 71 places at the same time. Lazarus died in His absence. Remember that because lie was a man be could not go on without weariness; that because He was a man, a flesb-and-blood creature, He could not escape tempta¬ tion; tempted in all points like as we are, was Jesus. We know that because He came as a normal babe ? so He grew as a normal child; as the Scripture has it, “He increased,” increased in stature, increased in in¬ tellect. He was wiser at twelve than He was at two, and wiser at thirty than He had been when He con¬ founded the temple priests. Ho we seem to commit ourselves at this point to a moot question ? Do we raise the issue as to what Jesus would have been had He lived a decade longer than He did;—that is, would he have been wiser at forty than He was at thirty? Well, moot questions of this sort do not trouble me, and I have small patience with those who spend their time in communion with them. I know that Jesus completed a perfect work at thirty- three, and am satisfied that there He reached His phys¬ ical, his human perfection. The essential matter is that He increased while He lived; that He grew in all of His human attributes; that He was not handed down from heaven in all of his final perfections. Yes, re¬ member, remember, all of you, that Jesus was of Da¬ vid’s seed; that like as we came, He came; that by the upward way of our youth, struggle, temptation and development, He climbed; and, climbing, reached the heights of manhood’s perfection. And that now from these heights He calls down to us, calls with invitation and a promise, “Follow me.” But this text has two parts, it is in halves. Remem¬ ber Jesus Christ, of David’s line; do not forget His manhood; and, also remember Jesus Christ who was 72 What Men Need Most raised from the dead, who broke from Joseph’s tomb as a giant breaks from a shackle of straw. If Easter is not a lie, then Jesus is more than a man, more than any man. Eemember Jesus Christ, the Son of God, with em¬ phasis upon the definite article; remember that He so confessed Himself when He confirmed Pilate’s inquiry with “Thou hast said,” and when He even more specifically declared, “He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father; the Father and I are one.” And were I to deny the claim of Jesus Christ at this point, I often wonder how I could believe in God at all, at least in a God of fatherly consideration and love. God, who created the world and all worlds; God, who set up the universe and the universes; who organised the preces¬ sion of the equinoxes, who made life out of His pur¬ pose and then at last allowed a situation in which nature destroys her own children, a situation in which cold becomes cruelty and heat a blistering torture, and in which man follows his divinely ordained passions into selfishness and lust. It is easier for me to believe in Jesus Christ as God than it would be to believe in God the Father without Jesus Christ. And of course it was to meet this very difficulty, this very situation in man, that God sent His only begotten Son; Jesus came to reveal the Father; to make Him clear; to bring Him nigh; to prove Him as love,— love unto sacrifice, love unto death, and vastly more, love unto everlasting life. You may say, sir, it is hard; it is impossible to understand His nature, both human and divine; or you may go as far as some who it seems to me should know better, and say, He cannot be both God and man. And I will grant you that in terms of human reason, as to all the details, it is hard Remember Jesus Christ 73 if not quite impossible to understand; that truly now we see through a glass darkly. But I am bound to say that with all the facts before me, I cannot believe anything else. I am forced to faith; His humanity is a historical fact; Jesus Christ was as Caesar was; as Hapoleon was; as Lincoln was; and His divinity, Llis deity, with me are unescapable conclusions if He ever lived at all. For he lived as never man lived; He spoke as never man spoke; He healed as never man healed; He died as never man died; He rose as never man rose; He lives now as never man has lived. The great truth of the incarnation, the fact that God came into human life, as He was in Jesus Christ, is easier for me now than the doubt of that fact, and do not, oh, do not go out misled into believing that my way in faith has been one of easy grades. Out of my own experience I am trying to translate for you what this text has come to mean to me. Has come to mean, I say, for unto this day I have struggled against all the odds that you have faced; I have wrestled with all the questions in your minds; I have fought for every con¬ viction and assurance, which I now possess. But we are to remember something more to-day than the great, the central truths that Jesus Christ was man, and that at the same time Jesus Christ was God. We are to remember that we are to be like Him. That we are to be perfect as He is perfect, is the supreme decla¬ ration of this profound principle. We know of course that this is our ultimate goal which now is hid with Christ in God. But that it has very direct implications for this present life we must not overlook. At this point some find the basis for a great error; they say ‘‘He was God's son but so are we, and as He was God’s 74 What Men Need Most son so we are; or may become. Just as, in a sense (they go on) God became incarnate in Jesus, so lie will become life within us. It is only a matter of degree, lie is our example, our invitation, our inspiration; He is a good man, incomparably better, perhaps than any other who has ever lived; but certainly He is not God. Let us emulate Him.” With these scholars I must and do part company. We are sons of God; we are heirs with Jesus Christ, and joint heirs, but we are not sons as Jesus was the Son. If he were merely a perfect man, to ask any person to be like Him would be piffle; it would be like ordering a cripple to become like Sandow, or a dis¬ figured imbecile like a queen of beauty, or a deaf and dumb man to become a Caruso. It is God in Christ who makes the invitation for us to become like Jesus, to become like Jesus more and more unto the perfect day, a reasonable request ; a glorious invitation, and a divine assurance. Christ in us is our hope of glory; not the Christ who was a man, man of our manhood and limitations, but the Christ of God. To-day as you look back upon your failures, as you remember your transgressions, remember Jesus Christ. Eemember that you may correct your ways; find for¬ giveness for your sins; that from the dead things of yesterday you may have a glorious resurrection. Why ? Because and only because “He is thy life,” because and only because in Him even though we have been for a long time dead in trespasses and sins, we become alive forever more. Men and women, let the call of every Communion service be a call to the great confession; your confession of Jesus Christ as Lord and King. But there is another word that must not be over¬ looked. What does it mean to fail of remembering Remember Jesus Christ 75 Jesus Christ? Hot to remember Jesus Christ is to forget God, and to forget God is self-destruction. We turn with horror from the suicide; but moral and spiritual suicides are all about us. What a vast wreck¬ age human society carries upon the open seas of its life! How hapless and hopeless are the souls without faith in Jesus Christ. And I am reminded that the application of this principle is not confined to indi¬ viduals. The nation that sinneth, it shall die; the gov¬ ernment that blasphemes God, it shall perish; Soviet Russia could have sinned against every sound economic principle and perhaps survived; debased her currency and still held at least the allegiance of her own people; cursed the governments of her rivals and remained im- mune from foreign attack. But Soviet Russia cannot blaspheme God and live; her own people will forge weapons of a terrible vengeance in the white fires of their deathless religious instincts; forge them even though their churches be desecrated and their priests slain; forge them and use them. And let us not in fancied isolation and proud self¬ ishness feel a false security. This is to me the message of the day when we gather about the table of His remembrance:—when together in the bonds of a deathless fellowship we eat and drink, showing forth His death and resurrection :—Remember Jesus Christy # 7 WHAT THE DEVIL ASKED Text: Job 1:9. “Doth Job fear God for naught V* “Doth. Job fear God for naught?” are the words of the devil which might be stated in their converse and modernised form, “What’s his price ?” The prince of darkness is frankly of the opinion that Job, whose out¬ ward goodness he does not deny, is merely keeping the bond, returning God service,—unusual service, to he sure,—but for very unusual temporal and spiritual blessings received by divine favour. “Hast thou not made a hedge about him V 9 continues Satan, pressing his contention, “and about his house and about all that he hath on every side ? thou hast blessed the work of his hands and his substance is in¬ creased in the land,”—“but put forth thy hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face.” In other words, “Certainly Job is reli¬ gious; hut Job is prosperous. Impoverish him and watch him revert to type; let him know bitterness and sorrow, and he will become another devil.” Also we see the inference that godliness inspired by selfishness is worthless, that it is a counterfeit; and good doctrine this certainly is even when the devil be¬ comes its mouthpiece. The eminent Scottish divine, Dr. Watkinson, has said, “The devil’s theology is usually orthodox; his failure is elsewhere.” At this 76 What the Devil Ashed 77 point one might well paraphrase the immortal words of an heroic nurse, and say, “Theology is not enough.” And now to those who have followed the exquisitely written story of Job, one of the literary masterpieces of all masterpieces, unfolds the travail of the soul; and the torture of the body of this man who stands for all ages as the epitome of faithfulness and the sum of human virtues. Have you found any test he was not called upon to meet? Ah, there was not one link of weakness in his armour; he survived, came off more than conqueror, gave the lie to Lucifer; vindicated God; won the victor’s crown. I wonder whether we accept the principle; whether we believe this story of the man of many trials, or whether the ancient riddle has a certain fascination for us: ‘‘Does Job fear God for naught?”—has every man his price ? What think you ? Cynical days these are, we say. Why I read,—but what’s the use? I read and you read—what? the current jazz of public life; the lurid tale of spectacular moral failure; not the wholesome best nor the average commonplace. We wait here for reasoned truth. Does Job fear God for naught ? Hot the addle-headed chaser after latest fads. Does Job, the representative man of affairs, the churchman of repute,—does he serve God for naught ? Are all men, or most men, average, home-making men, liars ? That’s the question. What of the underpinning of society ? its foundations ? Once a friend said as we talked in the lobby of a hotel, “Come downstairs and watch Young America in the dance of death.” As he spoke, he looked at me half-mockingly. Presently we saw them,—a hundred, perhaps two hundred, hardly more,—about crowded tables, and then when the music began we saw them 78 What Men Need Most hurrying to the cleared centre of the great room:— mere boys and girls, many of them; they belonged at home (I wonder how many had no fit homes). I loathe the steps they seemed to revel in; I find it hard at such times to keep these two hands off the necks of the gray¬ haired roues who now and then appear upon the scene. I tremble for the boyhood and the girlhood of the land, and, thinking of my own, pray God with agony of soul, to save them from the body of such death. But I have no time for certain implications of the devil’s riddle. I turned to my friend a little later, and said, “You wouldn’t care to say that all, nor nearly all, nor many of those lassies and those lads are evil?” He waited, and I continued, “And I am glad when I watch them that God reminds me that the population of the metropolitan area of Hew York is nine mil¬ lions.” And his face sobered as he came upon a new thought. How few there are, after all, who live out at the moral extremes of society, even in Hew York! Listen, it so happens that my friendship circle which, because of circumstances in my ministry that have made me a wanderer on the face of the earth is very wide, does not, to my knowledge, include a husband and wife separated by law; nor a man who committed murder. It has in it ghastly figures of suffering and grief and sin; and standing out like a rugged peak of renuncia¬ tion, confession and transformation, is one man who betrayed a trust; confessed a crime; served a sentence in a federal prison, and then returned to his own peo¬ ple to win back all. that he had lost, and more. I distrust the individual to-day who persists in say¬ ing, with a knowing half-leer: “He has his price,—if you can find it”; “You can get him if you go after What the Devil Ashed 79 him right.” That man says more than he realises; tells too much about himself. “Does Job fear God for naught?” I believe in Job. Every man who serves God, serves Him for naught. Any man who in selfishness puts a price on his labour when he turns to the Architect of the universe, in reply to the “help-wanted” advertisement of the eternities, finds himself without work, not because the work is done and not because the Master of the workmen is unreasonable, or unwilling, but because he himself has laid down a condition that not even God can meet. A religion dependent upon temporal rewards is not true religion; is not Christian; for religion is an experi¬ ence of the soul, and the soul cannot live on bread and meat and physical reward. There were those who fol¬ lowed Jesus because He distributed fish and cakes; not a small company they made: but they did not fear Him, love Him, serve Him, and in reality these got nothing from Him. The gifts of God are different; they are unique. Cakes and fish are found in many shops. Ho, the multitude that came out from the towns to sit at His feet and munch sandwiches, those who came for that purpose -had scarcely managed their last swallow, be¬ fore they were howling, “Crucify Him.” Those who fear, who serve God, serve Him for naught. It took the disciples some time to discover this; they quarrelled over the seats they desired to occupy in the Heavenly kingdom; they had not learned the lesson when Cal¬ vary reared its skull-shaped head above their path; but they learned it! They learned it! Does Job fear God for naught? Ask Stephen and Peter and John and Paul! But religion and worldly prosperity very frequently 80 What Men Need Most go forward hand in hand. Job is not the only man who has been both rich and godly; honoured and hon¬ est. Nor is poverty necessarily a sign of purity, or misfortune a mark of godliness. Other things being equal, a Christian ought, to have a better chance for honest temporal success than a sinner. I am fully per¬ suaded that honesty,—plain, old-fashioned honesty,— is the best policy. But no Christian asks God to give him an automobile, a bank account, a cabinet position, or domestic felicity, as a return for being Christlike. And it is equally true that the graces and the unique powers of religion cannot be purchased. You perhaps recall the disillusionment of Simon the Sorcerer: “Now when Simon,” the Scripture runs, “saw that through the laying on of the apostles’ hands the Holy Ghost was given, he offered them money . . . but Peter said unto him, Thy silver perish with thee, because thou hast sought to obtain the gift of God with money.” Profit and piety are, as another has said, “utterly irre¬ concilable in religious thought and motive, although they are often and naturally coincident in practical life.” The rewards of God for those who truly serve Him, the rewards that do not wait for eternity, are spiritual, and therefore abiding. The Christian may not be as¬ sured temporal blessings or even physical immunities, because he is a Christian; he may even see the ungodly man favoured in his storehouse and market above the children of light. But he is assured attention and approbation,—divine attention and approbation. God looketh upon a good man with approval; a good man findeth favour in his sight. To those who love God such attention and such approbation mean infinitely more than gold. What the Devil Asked 81 I have a friend whose grandfather was a Virginia slave-owner before the Civil War. When that dark / tragedy of divided households settled down upon the land, he donned a uniform of grey and went out to i give his youth, his all, to his state. Behind him were the holiest values of his life,—a young wife and an infant son. In the sad days which followed, the time came when the darker evils of war,—fear, the fear of violence and hunger, starvation,—approached the white house in which the young mother and her helpless child sat in their agony of waiting. Then two negroes, a black woman and a black man, two of the new free- ' men, refused the gift of emancipation, scorned the alluring promises of their old plantation associates, and without a promise or a hope of reward stood guard over that distracted home. They tended the pitiful crops; they kept the fires upon the hearth and the milk in the crocks; they filled the long winter evenings with their sona:s and in the bosom of their childlike faith nourished the soul, comforted the mind of their mis¬ tress whose love was often close to despair. I When after Appomattox the husband and father re¬ turned, a broken and penniless man, and found them standing guard, the only reward that he could offer them was gratitude,—gratitude unutterable, unmeas¬ urable. But that was all he could have paid them had he come back a millionaire. Their cup of happiness overflowed; only a few years ago that old master, a grey-haired Confederate veteran, stood in the Senate of his state and said, “When I am tempted to doubt my God and my fellowman, I wander in memory, if not in fact, to the private burial plot behind the house where I was born, and stop beside two graves, the graves that hold the sacred dust of my coloured mammy and her 82 What Men Need Most ) son, who kept the greater curse of war from my loved ' ones while I fought, who without a thought of gain ‘ scorned freedom and risked their lives, because they loved me and my people. I never paid them because I never could, and because I understood.” The highest reward is the attention and approbation of one we love and the greatest gift a man may receive is God’s recog- I nition and understanding. Men and women, there are relationships and associa¬ tions in life which are “desecrated” by the very thought of temporal profit, of worldly gain. Let us paraphrase that text again; “Does a mother serve her children for naught?” What conditions your attitude toward your child? Have you ever stopped to analyse your feel¬ ings toward your son or your daughter? Why do you love them, plan for them, dream for them, worry about them, toss restless upon your sleepless bed pondering the problems that affect them? Why? Because they will repay you some day, somehow? You don’t even give consideration in seriousness to my query. I say, there are relationships in life that are dese¬ crated by the very thought of profit, temporal gain. Is friendship conditioned upon cash returns? God pity you if yours is, for then you have never possessed a friend. Some years ago a Boston man of wealth was approached by one of his long-time associates with the request for a loan. The man approached, hesitated for a moment and then said, “I can’t loan you money; for I won’t think of you in terms of business. You may be willing that I should, but I can’t afford to. Take the money and let me forget it. Then if you can’t forget, give it back some day when I’m not look¬ ing.” The man may have been lacking in sound busi¬ ness judgment, but I am bound to believe that his What the Devil Ashed 83 instinct was sound, that it did not lead him astray, for there are relationships which are desecrated by the very thought of gain. The highest achievements in science, the most sub¬ lime creations in art, have been the children of the womb of poverty, and of the lap of unselfish sacrifice. Another has said, “It is only when we serve God for naught that we discover the infinite riches God’s naught stands for.” The affairs of the heart; the arrange¬ ments of genius; the high adventures of the human mind; the conquests of the immortal soul;—these oc¬ cupy realms among the relationships which are dese¬ crated by the very thought of temporal gain. And I say to you that human nature is capable of far more disinterestedness than we give it credit for. Don’t doubt your fellows:—trust them; believe in them. Of course you will be disappointed in some and deceived in others; disappointed and deceived in the future as you have been in the past. But keep on believing. Make it a habit of your mind; the exercise will enrich and beautify your own soul and it will make others better than they ever dreamed they could become. God only knows how much of cleansing in my heart has been accomplished by the faith that my friends have dared repose in me. God trusts us! Let us emulate His spirit, and trust each other. Down with the devil’s riddle, and its unsavory satellites of cynicism and sus¬ picion. Do you say, Ah, well, one never knows, though, until the test comes. Lob without the boils is not Job. To be sure, but by the goodly examples that Job and the rest have set out before us, I elect to believe, to believe, —not to doubt; to believe, until Job by his failure in the test proves the implications of the devil’s riddle, to 84 What Men Need Most be true and not to doubt, to doubt with soul-destroying cynicism and miserable speculations, until the perse¬ cuted hero, surrounded by his mockers and false friends, has vindicated himself. Job is a supreme illustration of the fact that supreme characters are revealed only by great ordeals, and fre¬ quently great ordeals reveal individuals we had ap¬ praised as commonplace or ordinary, as supreme. I remember a Victoria Cross captain of the Gordon Highlanders whom I met in London during the war. He was having his first leave in three years; had just returned from the front in Mesopotamia. We travelled as far as Glasgow together. When the war opened he was a second-rate pugilist. One of the characters I remember best of all those glorious fellows I came to know in France had been a shoe salesman in a small central western town. I cannot think of him without a warm glow flooding my soul. Hoes Job fear God for naught? Absolutely yes, Mr. Devil. You don’t know it; you can’t know, but there are relationships and dedications in life which are desecrated by the very thought of gain. Finally, we will not overlook the fact that Job, not God, answered the devil’s question, the question Satan asked of the Heavenly Father. And Job answered, not as speaks a witness in the chair, but with his life. Job answered with ruined crops and burned storehouses, a broken household and a diseased, festering body. Yes, Job’s answer cost much, and nearly all. Do I serve God for naught, or have I named my price? I rather think that the question is especially timely for the minister to-day, and I have been think¬ ing about it in the light of an old experience. Years ago a young preacher stood in the combination parlour, What the Devil Asked 85 dining-room and sitting-room of a small home mis¬ sionary parsonage, stood in front of a small air-tight wood stove with a letter in his hand. He was slowly reading the letter to his wife. It was to the man a remarkable communication,—a call to a city church and to a salary of $1,500.00—exactly five times the salary he was then receiving, a call to personal oppor¬ tunity in study, to the fellowship with kindred spirits and to the pride of preaching. As he finished reading he looked beyond his young wife and out through the window to the half-finished church building. The carpenters had laid down their tools when he had picked up that letter to read it to his wife! The little house in which he stood, his hands had nailed together; and now his eyes dropped to the slight figure of the beautiful girl in front of him, the bride he had led three thousand miles from home and kindred to share with him the hardships of a pioneer life. What he found in those steadfast, unfaltering eyes of brown must have reassured him, for he reached out and drew her into the circle of his arm, lifted the top of the old air-tight stove and with a melodramatic flourish, an air of high mock tragedy, he dropped the “call” into the flame that leaped up to receive it. That was years ago, but to the eyes of one who saw it all, the picture of the strong man and the beautiful woman, and the letter falling into the stove, will never fade. Doth Job fear God for naught? There are some things that the very thought of gain desecrates. 8 THE GRIP THAT HOLDS Text: St. Matthew 17: 20. “If ye have faith . . . nothing shall he impossible unto you” Years ago I went with a famous Indian artist and others on a fishing and picture expedition into the Cas¬ cade Mountains in Oregon. One afternoon, near the head waters of the Hood River, a few miles below the Hood River Glacier, I had an experience out of which this message comes. Our party had for several miles followed the “hur¬ ricane-deck” of a precipitous range of lesser mountains, when it became necessary to descend to the river level for a greatly desired picture. The two United States forest-rangers who were piloting us began cautiously to drop downward. After a time, being somewhat familiar with the country generally, and growing im¬ patient with our slow progress, I started off alone by what I thought to be a more direct and an easier way. The region of the Cascades, in which we were, abounds in great ledges and slides of decomposed or “rotten” granite. Often what at first appears to be a safe and sound path crumbles suddenly beneath the climber’s feet. I had taken only a few steps from my companions when my footing failed, and, sprawling headlong, I shot over the ledge. I still have very vivid 86 87 The Grip That Holds recollections of how that thread of a river looked with its spray dashing into mist against jagged, up-reaching rocks, several hundred feet below. But, fortunately for my story, a kind Providence had timed and directed my fall. Out from the sheer wall of the cliff at my “point of departure” grew a sturdy little mountain-pine. For five miles in either direc¬ tion I have scanned that mountain-side for a similar growth,—in vain. It was the one place where my acro¬ batic demonstration could he completed without the assistance of an undertaker. Madly I hurled myself upon the tiny tree. Its twisted trunk was scarcely larger than my two wrists. I clutched it with my hands. I entwined it with my limbs, and prayed that it might not fail,—and all this in a winged second of time that was an eternity of fear. The tree held! After my horror-stricken companions had lifted me to safety, and I had recovered my nerve sufficiently to complete the journey ,—following the guide ,—I stood by the boiling, thundering stream, and looked up at the little tree. Gnarled, stunted, scarred by the rocks of avalanches, it was not a thing of beauty; but I am sure that you will understand me when I say that it looked better to me than any lordly sequoia of the forest. Out of that mountain experience, so nearly a tragedy, has come to my life a message well worth the terror of the ordeal—a message of faith, a message of power for service, a message of triumph,-—the message of the grip that holds. A tiny seed falls into the narrow crevice of a mighty granite cliff. The warmth of the sun-heated stone opens a way for the first eager rootlet. The rootlet follows the moisture-widened seam into the very breast 88 What Men Need Most of the precipice. It grows, strengthens, and multi¬ plies. It forces new chambers, establishes new strong¬ holds for itself, and its fellows. The tree develops. It beats away the unfriendly storm, and hardens in the tempest. When spring opens, and slides thunder down upon it from the upper heights, it fastens itself the more firmly in the heart of the mountain. And, when it stands between the plunging body of a careless man and broken ledges far below, it does not fail; its grip holds. Tradition What is the grip that holds? It is the grip of tradition. Tradition handles the strong man as a nurse handles the babe; and it is master of trades, in¬ dustries, labour, and systems of business. It is the director of our simplest habits; it clothes us, shaves us, feeds us, and smiles for us. It gowns woman. It says, “Yes,” for the child, and “Ho.” It is polite and impolite; circumspect and cruel; it is good and it is bad. Here it binds a church with the usages of yes¬ terday, and holds her eyes closed to the larger meaning of “Feed my lambs,” while yonder it fastens a poten¬ tially great philanthropy in the groove of mere charitv. t/ Only a few years ago tradition called the Wright brothers fools. Tradition said the world was flat, and sent snapping curs and mobs tapping their foreheads after a certain citizen of Genoa who declared that the world was round. Tradition says that things are and will be, because they were. It is the friend of both good and evil, and frequently the enemy of better and best. 89 The Grip That Holds How strong is tlie grip of tradition ? He knows who has struggled to break it. Statesman, teacher, artist, inventor, prophet, reformer, business man, and school¬ boy,—these all have felt its heavy hand. We are all in the grip of tradition. And he who breaks the grip of tradition where it is evil, is every whit a man. But there are worthy traditions, kindly, smiling, holy traditions. There are landmarks of faith and practice; there are traditions of truth and hope; there are treas¬ ured memories, and habits of prayer and ministry that are as the perfect fruits of an unscarred tree. Men do well to be held in the groove of an ethical standard that a less complex business life fixed; men do well to cherish the prejudice against a lie and the reverence for liberty that opened wounds in the bodies of their fathers; men do well to honour an ancient virtue by the continued application of its truth. Tradition has bands that can be broken only with infinite loss to mankind. Knowledge What is the grip that holds 1 The grip that holds is the grip of knowledge. The world has no successful protest or argument against knowledge. The world surrenders to the man who knows. Generally men and women fail in business or politics because they do not know. “My people are destroyed for lack of knowl¬ edge.” The call of industry, the call of the church, the call of public life everywhere, is for men and women who know. The greatest discovery that any man ever makes is the discovery of himself, his strength and weakness, his-true relation to life. Emerson has said that no great task is ever accom- 90 What Men Need Most plished without enthusiasm, and there can he no last¬ ing fervour of enthusiasm without knowledge. No man becomes greatly in earnest over a proposition with which he is not thoroughly familiar. Information plus inspiration multiplied by perspiration equals con¬ summation; this is the equation of victory. A few generations ago the Northwest was an un¬ known and unappreciated country to the East. The president of the United States announced that it was not worth a struggle with England. Daniel Webster said that it was not worth while because the day would never come when a railroad would cross the Rockies; that the Oregon country was forever too far removed from the centres of world-trade. But Marcus Whitman with his “golden-haired Nar- cissa” “farther than flew the imperial eagles of Rome/’ journeyed from New England to his life’s work on the Columbia. He saw the great rivers crowded with fish, the mighty mountains crowned with forests of emerald, the far-stretching, fertile valleys, and the sunset ocean with its fabulous commerce of centuries to be. He came to know what others had not dreamed of. Marcus Whitman was a patriot as well as a mis¬ sionary ; he loved his country; and, when there reached his ears the Hudson Bay traders’ whispered plottings, he turned his pony’s head toward Washington. Across a frozen continent he rode, the mightiest ride of his¬ tory. Reaching Washington after unspeakable hardships, he told his story. So well did he tell it, because he Itnew, that the president’s mind was changed, Daniel Webster’s mind was changed, and in the early spring the intrepid pioneer, preacher and patriot turned his face again toward the Northwest, this time at the head The Grip That Holds 91 of the first caravan of settlers to cross the great West¬ ern wilderness. Ah, what a journey it was! The rivers were full of rotten ice, and there was no grass on the prairies. The Indians were unfriendly, and the passes of the Rockies were still choked with snow. Often the faint¬ hearted murmured, and would have turned back. But in the hours of deepest gloom Marcus Whitman stood before his followers and told them of the Oregon coun¬ try. With flaming eyes and burning cheeks he told them of great rivers, fertile valleys, and the far- reaching sea. And always he pointed to the flag. He knew. They did not turn back. They followed on and on. Some died and were buried in that first, unmarked Oregon trail; but those ‘‘heralds of empire” fixed their faces as a flint on the sunset. They possessed the land, and to-day the Stars and Stripes has four stars, Ore¬ gon, Washington, Idaho and Montana, because Marcus Whitman knew. Faith What is the grip that holds? Faith is the grip that holds. Xot tradition, for tradition is broken and set aside; not knowledge, for knowledge “passeth away” and the present knowledge becomes to-morrow’s tradi¬ tion. The w T orld surrenders to the man who knows, but heaven and earth belong to the man of faith. What do we know? How much absolute knowledge have we to-day ? The farmer plants the seed, tends the crop, gathers the harvest, without knowing the chemistry of the grain. The motorman drives the electric car without having fathomed the mystery of 92 What Men Need Most the electric fluid; and how it goes even Edison knows not, hut he knows that it goes! We see results and. effects; our knowledge of causes, our real knowledge, is limited. And how little we know of what we really may know! How many legs has a fly? We sit, we eat, we stand, we walk, we ride, by faith. “We live by faith.” The man who denies God because he cannot understand Him is one of the most incon¬ sistent fellows in the world, because he continues to live, and who has explained life ? My best things, my holiest treasures, are those intangible, mysterious gifts, that mortal mind has never fathomed—friend¬ ship, my mother’s smile, the love of the mother of my children, faith, God. Eaith sent messages under the sea years before the first Atlantic cable was laid. Faith has bridged every great river and opened every deep mine. Faith tun¬ nelled the Hudson and dug the Panama Canal. Faith finds a desert and leaves a waving wheat-field, a blos¬ soming orchard, a garden in full bloom. Faith swings the cranes of industry, raises cities in the wilderness, outlives oppression, advances steadily the whole social order, and lifts men and women above angels. Faith is the only bridge that ever spanned the grave, the only knight who ever conquered death. Faith spoke, and Abraham journeyed into the west, pitching his tent and building his altars. Faith spoke, and Moses led Israel out of Egypt, and gave the world her laws. Faith spoke, and science brought inventions and medicine and great learning and a million helpful things and dropped them into the outstretched hands of the race. Faith spoke, and kingdoms rose and fell as Faith willed. Faith spoke, and the Bible was opened, the Magna Charta was given, the western 93 The Grip That Holds world was discovered, and liberty found a new name. Faith spoke, and Washington led the ragged Conti¬ nentals from Lexington to Yorktown. Faith spoke, and Abraham Lincoln by way of Appomattox and his own Golgotha guided the republic through tempestuous seas of slavery and disunion into the safe harbour of “liberty and union, now and forever, one and insepa¬ rable.” Faith spoke, and the Galilean freed the souls of men from time’s beginning to its end. And faith is speaking, and faith will speak,—will speak until labour and capital understand each other; until business is firmly established in its just profits, and the man who toils wfith his hands enjoys an ade¬ quate return for the sweat of his brow; until little children are no longer sacrificed to mines and factories, and the virtue of women is no longer bartered to the lust of man; until the comity of nations is no longer a theory alone, but spreads over all the earth in a benign mantle of peace and brotherhood. “If ye have faith nothing shall be impossible unto you.” Joaquin Miller might well have given his “Colum¬ bus” another name, and called it “Faith.” “Behind him lay the grey Azores, Behind the gates of Ilercules; Before him not the ghost of shores, Before him only shoreless seas. The good mate said, ‘Yow must we pray, For lo! the very stars are gone; Brave Admiral, speak, what shall I say V ‘Why, say, “Sail on! sail on! and on!” ? “ ‘My men grow mutinous day by day; My men grow ghastly wan and weak.’ The stout mate thought of home; a spray Of salt wave washed his swarthy cheek. 94 What Men Need Most ‘What shall I say, brave Admiral, say, If we sight naught but seas at dawn?’ ‘.Why, you shall say, at break of day, “Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on! 77 7 “They sailed and sailed as winds might blow, Until at last the blanched mate said: ‘Why, now not even God would know Should I and all my men fall dead. These very winds forget their way, For God from these dread seas is gone. How speak, brave Admiral, speak and say— 7 He said, ‘Sail on! sail*on! and on! 7 “They sailed. They sailed. Then spake the mate: ‘This mad sea shows his' teeth to-night. He curls his lip, he lies in wait, With lifted teeth as if to bite! Brave Admiral, say but one good word: What shall we do when hope is gone V The words leaped like a leaping sword: ‘Sail on! sail on! sail on! sail on! 7 “Then pale and worn he kept the deck, And peered through darkness. Ah, that night Of*all dark nights! And then a speck,— A light! A light! A light! A light! It grew a star-lit flag unfurled! It grew to be Time’s burst of dawn; He gained a world; he gave that world Its grandest lesson, ‘On, sail on ! 7 77 9 DANIEL, THE HEBREW WHO PURPOSED * Text: Daniel 1 : 8. “But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself I must frankly confess that I cannot sympathise with those unfortunate individuals who have struggled along through the years with names that they despise, for I have always liked my name. But, lest credit he given me that I do not deserve, I must make another confession and admit that my name was not popular with me at the beginning because of its Biblical asso¬ ciations. I fell in love with the name Daniel because of a horse! At the foot of a hill called “Piety,” because three ministers lived upon it, in the quiet Oregon town of my childhood, resided the “Senator,” a kindly man of rugged worth, who was the father of my boyhood chum. The “Senator” owned the splendid animal that from the first day I saw him—and I was a very small lad then—caused me to glory in the name my parents had assigned to me, the first-born of their nine chil¬ dren. What a horse he was! He was as black as night, with flowing curly mane and thick, glossy, though not over-long tail. His broad back curved easily over hips of huge proportions, and his limbs were as flawless as *From a series of sermons prepared for The Christian En¬ deavor World by writers bearing Bible names. 95 96 What Men Need Most the chiselled work of a master sculptor. His ample neck was proudly arched and fixed between mighty shoulders. His great head was never lowered for more than an instant, and his eyes were brimming lakes set kindly wide in a forehead smooth and deep. His ears were as delicately poised as a woman’s; his spirit was the spirit of the high mountains where he was sired; and his name was “Dan.” Of course I have long since learned that in addition to having been arbitrarily fixed as an abbreviation of Daniel, the name Dan stands alone with a distinction quite its own. But Dan was the nickname fastened upon me after the passing of the diminutive Danny, which I despised, and this Dan of life’s intimacies with the Daniel, now more intelligently valued than when the great horse gave me my first heartiness for it, have always been to me one and the same. Of course when the heroic Hebrew of the Scriptures stood before me, and my soul began to apprehend the heights and depths of him, my whole mental attitude changed, and from a boisterous spirit of self-congratu¬ lation I became quiet and humble. Since the first change in my spiritual attitude toward the name Daniel, the change from loud to quiet, from self- satisfaction to self-searching, there has come no other change; for who could ever be worthy of such a name, however proud he may be to bear it? Daniel, the divine judge of the Scriptures, given the name Belteshazzar by the prince of the eunuchs, was royal born and lived a royal life. He was led away as a captive into a land not of his fathers, but his soul was never in chains, for he never surrendered the spiritual authority of his life. It takes a real man to survive riches; poverty is more easily borne. Do Daniel , the Hebrew Who Purposed 97 not pity the child reared in worthy surroundings, how¬ ever humble; but children of the rich, pampered and unrestrained, with every whim granted and every ap¬ petite served, must be indeed of a sturdy mind and morally well-favoured to survive their temptations. Daniel the Hebrew was rich in his physical inherit¬ ance, but he had a richer soul, and, when in his early youth temporal holdings were swept away and he was set down in the centre of a drunken court, he could not be spoiled. It is hard to withstand hatreds, but it is even more difficult to survive some friendships. This lad who held fast the faith, who could not be over¬ whelmed by either adversity or success, failed not, be¬ cause “he purposed in his heart,” and trusted in his God. Every life is determined by its purposes. Daniel purposed that he would not defile himself, and his character shines on the page of history as a white light. Because he had “purposed,” he refused the king’s meat and drink; because he had “purposed,” he would not bow down to an idol, but would pray with win¬ dows open toward far-away, humbled Jerusalem; be¬ cause he had “purposed,” the lion’s den could not turn him back; and, faithful to the truth, he translated dreams that announced ruin to his benefactors when silence must have seemed to be for himself the surer safety. Because Daniel “purposed,” he made his body strong to live a hundred years, his mind alert to com¬ prehend all learning, and his soul a fit place for God to conceive and bring forth mighty prophecies. Daniel’s purpose against defilement slew lustful ap¬ petite, destroyed selfish fear and unworthy ambition. It gave to his life a fixed goal and high objective. It drew him inexorably on so that he stopped nowhere; He tarried not with Hebuchadnezzar, with Belshazzar, 98 What Men Need Most with Darius, with Cyrus, though he served them all faithfully and well. He was ever moving toward the fulness of the will of Jehovah, and he belonged to no earthly king; he was the property of God. We will not deceive ourselves; standing alone Daniel was as helpless as any man of us, but he never stood alone. He practised perfectly the constant presence of his heavenly Father. His faith was magnificent in its simplicity and its promptness. There is no indi¬ cation in the record that he hesitated a single instant about entering his room for his accustomed devotions after the establishing of the imperial decree against any other worship than that offered to the king. He did not move an eyelash to question the order that came as the result of his obedience to God rather than to men, and which cast him to the man-eating lions. Daniel knew “whom he had believed / 7 and was “fully persuaded . 77 He saw through because he lived through; because his spiritual dwelling place was established far beyond the black darkness of the evil times in which he had his physical existence. His gaze pierced the mysteries of a monarch’s nightmares; his vision swept beyond the cloud-hung mountains of the old dispensation to the glorified slopes of the new, because the real house of his habitation was not made with hands, and was not set down in the heathen city of his captivity. “Faith is the victory that overcomes the world , 77 and to-day, as in the days of Daniel, this faith in the living and one God is translating dreams into realities. It is helping to keep men and women erect in the cur¬ rents of passion and greed that swirl about them. It is refusing the command of an age that bows lower before gold than the Chaldeans bowed before the great Daniel, the Hebrew Who Purposed 99 image. It is addressing the growing programme of social justice in the terms of Jesus. It is saving the heathen cities of civilisation from themselves, with social settlements, night-schools, and play-grounds, with child-betterment legislation and pure-food laws. It is this faith, this Daniel faith, that is evangelising the world; and this same faith will end war, and bring out of the chaos of it a new order of brother¬ hood the like of which no sun has ever shone upon. Do we hear the challenge of “our” faith? What boots it, then, where we live, how we feel, what we suffer, when we die? The same unfailing resource of power that Daniel drew upon is our supply to-day. The courage of Daniel has always inspired me. In a great book at home, as a lad, I first saw a copy of the famous picture of the Hebrew prophet with hands bound in front of him, standing erect before the cow¬ ering lions. From that first hour when he dared argue with the director of the king’s dining-room to the late afternoon when tradition says that his eyes beheld again his beloved Jerusalem and rested for the last time upon its rebuilt walls, Daniel was daily facing lions, and daily taming them. His physical courage was unsurpassed. He was a virile, manly man. His moral courage in its supreme moments, in all the re¬ corded profane and sacred history of the world, no man has ever surpassed; perhaps one man, Joseph, equalled it. The secret of Daniel’s courage was hid in what he believed. A doubter is never a brave man, and courage depends very much upon the elements of a man’s faith. I have read somewhere of a pygmy African tribe whose medicine-men teach that there is nothing after 100 What Men Need Most death; that the grave ends all. As the result of this teaching, the tribe gives all of its energies to the sus¬ taining of physical life, to the satisfying of bestial pas¬ sion. It has gone to the most remote places of interior jungles to escape conflicts with neighbouring tribes, and it has developed great cunning in ensnaring and crippling wild animals without danger to its hunters. Its women are cruel, and its men are cowards. On the other hand, the Japanese soldiers are the most invin¬ cible, because physical life to the Japanese is abso¬ lutely as nothing when compared with the honour and pleasure that are in the next world as immediate re¬ wards for dying in battle for the emperor. Daniel knew that he was not accountable to earthly kings, but to the King of all kings. He knew that his body was simply the house of his spirit; he was con¬ cerned to keep it clean; but, when wild beasts threat¬ ened it, he was not disturbed; for he knew that their fangs could not tear his immortal soul. The perspective of Danieks life was spiritual. Therefore, while he was eminently practical, and found favour with his captors because of what he knew and did, not once did he make the mistake of putting temporal and minor things first. Whenever the issue was drawn, he always decided without hesi¬ tation for the things that are eternal. The statement, “It does not make any difference what a man believes so long as he lives right,” is a great fallacy. Ho man does live right who grovels in his mind, who goes through life without any deep-set convictions. “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” A coward is the child of doubt. Daniel is the world’s towering human example of the power of a fixed character. Living through three Daniel, the Hebrew Who Purposed 101 heathen dynasties and under four kings, he was coun¬ sellor, confidant, and prime minister to them all, though they held him nominally a captive. But at no time in his long life did he sacrifice a single prin¬ ciple of his religion or swerve a hair’s breadth from his spiritual purpose. He was implicitly trusted, and his personality caused him to be greatly loved. We find no record that he was ever doubted by God or man. A life that changes its fundamentals easily, that vacillates morally, that has no fixed course, could not have survived the disasters that overtook the vain¬ glorious Xebuchadnezzar, the drunken Belshazzar, and the martial Darius. Daniel survived the rulers who successively honoured him, and was left undisturbed in his high estate while his temporal benefactors were utterly destroyed, because his reliability and great moral worth, coupled with his profound wisdom, made him an indispensable asset to a new king. “The tumult and the shouting dies, The captains and the kings depart”— but some values never change. If there have been a few men without whom the world would have failed and in whom God was supremely honoured, Daniel was one of those men. In only one other personality of history have body, mind and spirit been so har- moniouslv svnchronised into a svmmetrical whole. tJ V Jesus alone “of all the sons of woman born” trans¬ cends in completeness of character, diversity of serv¬ ice, and supernatural authority, this purposeful He¬ brew, Daniel, the “divine judge.” 10 EXTREMITY AND OPPORTUNITY Text: St. Matthew 26: 45. “The hour is at hand” Jesus had come to His hour. He was the central figure in the supreme paradox of time. He was help¬ less and He was all-sufficient; He was defeated and He was triumphant; He was on the road of humilia¬ tion, facing Calvary and His feet had begun to press the glory that led to His coronation; He was at the ex¬ tremity of His humanity and about to accept the op¬ portunity of His divinity. As a teacher He was the rejected; as king of the Jews He was the denied, but as Saviour of the world He was settling into His throne. To-day man is in the hour of his extremity. It is the hour of suspicion. We feel suspicious of one another; we feel suspicious of ourselves. Nations put their trust in doubts again, and a world that had begun to vision the era of good feeling, for which it had paid dearly enough, hears once more the ancient hammers of discord clanging upon anvils of envy and greed. It is the hour of broken vows. We promised our¬ selves, we promised one another, we promised God. All of our treasure had been brought forward. In limb and life and liberties, in blood and bonds, in body and in soul, we pledged ourselves to build the new world. Nothing that we could lay upon the sacrificial 102 Extremity and Opportunity 103 altar was dear enough to he withheld, and so supremely epic was the need that small gifts came to have colossal value. Disaster stalked our institutions; our lines were bending behind Att. Kemmel; armies had been swal¬ lowed up; morale was a tottering wall, a crumbling tower; we were a sober, a repentant people; we made our covenant with God. As nations we made it. We said, “Never again will we build a peace upon armaments and fleets; the rec¬ ognition of the will to conquer, the strength to take and hold. We will perish in these bloody fields; we and all of ours will leap to greet the bitter death; but dying we will pay the price of the better part, and our children’s children shall at last be free.” As churches we made it. The cloaks for selfishness and pride slipped from us as garments outgrown. We talked little of denominational programmes as such. We emphasised the larger things that as Christians we possess in common. We spoke as prophets of the brave days to come when all should toil together. We heeded voices that called us into conference, and the dreams of a united Protestantism began to take form. As individuals we made it. We promised God; we, who in peaceful years had been able to deceive the world or brazenlv to flaunt it, could not in those naked hours find a covering for smallness. We grew in spiritual stature, and became men and women for the times. Now the enemy has withdrawn; and as, when Nebuchadnezzar turned away from the walls of Jeru¬ salem to meet the Egyptians coming out of the south, Israel bound again the slave she had in the penitence of her adversity set free, so we even now are reaching 104 What Men Need Most for the renounced weapons of our political partisan¬ ship, the discarded vices of our ecclesiastical divisions, the sins confessed, and the flesh-pots of our unregen¬ erated hearts. Are we to lose the spiritual values established by the World War? God forbid that we should, and God pity us if we do; for, if we lose them, we have lost the war. It is the hour of unrest. ISTo man is satisfied. Labour strikes,—strikes in spite of contracts and against the orders of leaders; capital profiteers; to those who would appraise the times a wild array of charges and countercharges present themselves. A thousand social physicians shout their panaceas. Noth¬ ing is stable. In politics party lines are not only obliterated, but traditional policies are repudiated with all the unconcern of a thoughtless guest who ignores a dinner engagement. In the church we are violently mystical, or we spend passionless days in W T riting social-service creeds, or we wander listlessly over the paths between. Our patriotism is a coat of many colours; it has the red of anarchy to comfort the bomb-thrower, and from its sinister black we make a gag for freedom. Economically we are at two ex¬ tremes; at the one we cry: “Eow we will throw off the restraints imposed by the war; we will repudiate the agreements and compacts made between labour and capital when the terror of impending defeat forced us to the conference table. Again it shall be master and man.” At the other extreme we shout, “The millennium has come to Russia. Let us enter in.” It is the hour of suffering. The world is a vast house of sickness. Mr. Hoover has said, that in a single year fifteen millions of people face starvation. John R. Mott has declared that more children, women, Extremity and Opportunity 105 and men have died as the direct results of the war, since the Armistice, than were slain during all the years of the bloody struggle. What shall we do ? What can we do ? Let no man say that the evil in man now has the undisputed right of way. By the side of the pictures of promises broken and selfishness returning to its own, hang those of the purpose to be true, in the faces of men and women who have not ceased to pour themselves out in benefactions for mankind. In these is the hope of the race; with them lies our promise for the better to¬ morrow. But what of this hour, the hour of suspicion, and broken vows, of unrest and suffering and need ? It is the hour of man’s extremity; the plans of man have broken down, for man himself has failed. He used the weapons that he knew, and they have buckled in his hand. It is the hour of man’s extremity, but the hour of man’s extremity is God’s opportunity. In September, 1915, a young Scotchman, a lieu¬ tenant, only a few days before he died, while gallantly leading his men in a charge, wrote to his mother, describing the fearful nature of the conflict, his grow¬ ing appreciation of the issues involved, his great fear that the super-preparations of the enemy would compel an early conclusion of the war with disaster to the Allies. In one yivid paragraph he spoke of the in¬ adequacy of eyerything his eyes had seen or his mind conjured, and concluded with the words: “Mother, God must be.” To-day we are face to face with ex¬ tremity’s conclusion, which is extremity’s compulsion. “God must be” Whateyer my definition of God may be, however I may describe and declare Him, if I am an intelligent 106 What Men Need Most creature, a mind released to think, then I am bound to accept the fact of God, for God must be. No other hand than His has laid the paths of planets and filled space with universes; has made the sun and moon and stars, the earth and sky and sea and all that dwell therein. No other will than His has brought all things together. No other mind than His can shape the answers to these questions. No other love than His can heal these wounds, allay these suspicions, quench these thirsts, comfort these sorrows, forgive these sins, raise these dead. God must be. Who is God ? How shall we find God ? There are a thousand answers to the question, “Who is God?” and no one of them, nor all of them together, answer. It is impossible for a man to comprehend God, Our approach to Him now is as awesome as it was in the days of the exodus, as impossible as when Moses heard His voice from the burning bush. But what of the second question? Ah, that is dif¬ ferent; for we have a mediator, one who stands be¬ tween, and to the question, “How shall we find God?” the testimony of the ages, the sum of all Christian experience, replies, “We find God in Jesus Christ His Son, our Lord and Saviour.” And does not the simple necessity of the occasion, freed of all dogma, stripped of every creedal statement, demand that this Jesus, through whom and in whom alone we find God, God the omniscient and omnipotent,—that this same Jesus must be omniscient and omnipotent too ? that He must Himself be very God? Now our path becomes clear, for Christ has blazed it through the wilderness of human doubt, lifted it high above the tides of human folly; and He Himself has walked upon it. Stumbling blindly about, over- Extremity and Opportunity 107 whelmed by insupportable odds, in our last extremity we find “the way.” He was called the Galilean, and a Hazarene. He is Jesus. And when we find Jesus we find the answer to our question, the solution of our problem, the reason for our existence, comfort for our sorrow, healing for our sickness, forgiveness for our sin, and resurrection for our dead, for in finding Jesus we have found God. Who is Jesus? Let Him answer: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” He is speaking for all the times and circumstances of man. Is this the hour of suspicion, of broken vows, of unrest, of suffering and needs ? Is this the black hour of man’s extremity ? Then Jesus cries, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” “Cast your burdens upon me, and ye shall find rest for your souls.” This is the invitation, the invitation all-inclusive and all-satisfying. But it has an alternative. Above the scarred and suffering world, the empty ruins of its cities of pride and the heaps of its dead, He flings His words in crimson letters against a flaming sky, “With¬ out me ye can do nothing.” He alone can beat swords into ploughshares, equalise social inequalities, destroy racial hates, bring the world back from its lust of blood to that respect for law and order without which no freedom is secure. Christ alone can effectuate the parliament of nations; bring to pass the federation of the world, and perfect peace. Where is Jesus? Let Him answer again: “I am with you alway,” and “even unto the end of the world.” He was speaking to His disciples, and thus He addresses His disciples to-day. And, as those first 108 What Men Need Most faithful eleven were charged with responsibility for the message of Christ’s kingdom in their time, so are we who are called Christians charged with the message in this fateful hour. His physical feet no longer press the path that winds between Bethany and Jerusalem; we must be His feet. His physical eyes no longer rest upon the walls of Jerusalem; we must be His eyes. His physical voice no longer cries, “Come unto me”; we must be His voice. If Christ has a physical presence to-day, He has it through us. He stands or falls as His disciples, as Christians, as we, are true or false. And by the law of first things, by the call of the needs of dying men, by the claims of time and of eternity, our su¬ preme business is the discovering of Jesus Christ to the groping lost world. But the message of this hour will have very largely failed if it does not finally become even more per¬ sonal. We have said that Christ is dependent upon His disciples, that He functions through men and women. How vastly important, then, is the task of those who would see men and women “Christ-like.” Only as we are spiritually equipped can we perform our ministry as the representatives of the Lord and Saviour of mankind. We are discussing the new world, the world that is to be, the new world that shall rise from the ashes of the old; but there can be no new world without new world-builders, and how shall a man become new? The answer to that question is in the voice of the ages, “Ye must be born again.” We are “new creatures” in Christ Jesus, or we are yet dead in our trespasses and sins. Let there be no misunderstanding here; not by the gifts of our opulence, not by the deeds of our Extremity and Opportunity 109 vanity, not by self-inflicted penalties, not by high honours, nor by fine speech, do we fit ourselves to be the spiritual torch-bearers of the new era. “What can wash away my sin ? Nothing but the blood of Jesus. What can make me whole again? Nothing but the blood of Jesus. Oh, precious is the flow That makes me white as snow; Ho other fount I know, Nothing but the blood of Jesus.” Approaching the present crisis in man and in man’s world from any direction, considering him and his from all angles, we arrive at the same conclusion; as individuals, and as individuals brought together in society, we need first of all, we need above all and always, Jesus Christ—His forgiveness, His salvation, His praise, His power, His passion. We need Jesus, Jesus Himself; for Christ in us is our “hope of glory,” and our grace to conquer. Without Him we are lost. Then let the church give herself anew and fully to her supreme, her unique task. With the abandon of the disciples who burned with the flame kindled by the fiery tongues of the first Pentecost let her cry, “One thing I do.” She will release her omnipotent energies only by proclaiming “Christ and Him cruci¬ fied.” Raise the cross! Point to the blood! Preach the word; for “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw,—will draw —I will draw all men unto me.” I come to you with this message and with no other, not alone because the very atmosphere of the times is charged with it. I come to you with this message be- 110 What Men Need Most cause it is the only message that I know in which are hope and life. It is the message that I heard first in the dear days when I buried my face in my mother’s lap and lisped the prayers of my childhood; it is the message that my father preached in the church that his own hands nailed together, and now I tell it to my children. It is the message that spoke to me in college, and that no words of honest doubt, no super¬ ficial criticisms, were able to destroy. I have listened to it beneath the low-bending skies of the desert and in the solitary places of the mountains. I have heard it speak in the storms of the sea. I have been alone in the valley of the shadow with my* dead, and it has comforted me. Once when the earth about me opened, and geysers of molten metal poured upward through shattered trees and heaving fields, while walls -crum¬ bled and the sky was filled with the missiles of man’s hell, when the breath of death came out of the night and smothered me, I heard its voice; and pain and terror passed from me when he said, “Fear not; I am with thee.” It is the message that to this hour has followed me all the days of my life; it is the only adequate message for a world sick unto death. 11 CONQUERORS OF CIRCUMSTANCE Text: Philippiaxs 4:13. “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me. “Resolved: That circumstances make the man rather than that man makes his circumstances/ 7 was the sub¬ ject of the first debate the writer participated in. He spoke in favour of the negative, and still finds himself on the same side of the proposition. Scientists point to both animals and plants that have gradually become extinct as the result of climatie changes. They tell us of races of men that have dis¬ appeared from the face of the earth as the result of their inability to adapt themselves to new physical environments. Many of you have seen the sightless fish of the Mammoth Cave, creatures of environment. In one of the issues of The National Geographic Magazine appeared a very interesting story of the game territory of the Lake Superior region. It is quite remarkable how with the cutting away of the great trees and the springing up of smaller trees, underbrush, berry-bearing vines, and nut-growing bushes that could not flourish in the dense shade of the heavy timber, animal life has increased in that region until to-day more deer, moose, bear, and other wild animals are said to be there than there were a hundred years ago. Are they not, very largely, at least, creatures of circumstance ? ill 112 What Men Need Most Certainly we must consider the far-reaching influ¬ ence of environment upon all life. The inhabitants of Africa are increasingly dark as they approach the equator, and as their habits of life leave them to a greater extent exposed to the direct rays of the sun. The trees of our Southwest, beginning with the sage¬ brush of the lower altitudes and up to six thousand feet, blend first into the dwarfed desert cedar, then into the more symmetrical and slightly taller pinon, and finally reach their full glory, at an altitude of from eight to nine thousand feet, in the white pines of the San Francisco and White Mountains. These trees are certainly the children of the climate and environment in which they live. Recently a young man was electrocuted in New York, who began his career of evil-doing at the age of nine. When he was destroyed by the execution of the law, he had been twice a murderer, had committed other crimes too numerous to mention, and was less than twenty-one. He was conceived and born in sin, and reared in exceptionally vile surroundings. A leader of public thought, referring to the case, spoke of this youth “as the inevitable growth of a degenerate social soil.” How often great plans have failed because of cir¬ cumstances quite beyond the control of those who made the plans! The sunken road at Waterloo may havq overthrown the incomparable military genius of Na¬ poleon and dictated European history for a hundred years. Yes, we must concede the mighty influence of en¬ vironment upon men and upon events. But circum¬ stance, environment, the characteristics of the external world—these are not the main factors. Another scien- Conquerors of Circumstance 113 tist, Dr. Thomson, says that “in higher plants as well as in higher animals, there seems to he greater free¬ dom from the direct grip of environment.” And Dr. Watkinson declares, “All history is the record of the revolt of the spirit against the rule of circumstance, and of the victories of the human will in life’s gigantic struggle.” In this fact, in the colossal and continuing warfare of the human soul, is the fascination of his¬ tory. Upon Alpine heights fighting the icy blasts and choking snow are some of earth’s most refined and exquisite blossoms. In the deep sea are fish physically helpless against their voracious foes, but able to hide themselves against the colouring of the ocean’s floor. Camels are prepared for their long journeys through burning desert sands by nature’s cushioning on their feet and a natural water-reservoir. And what of man? Have nature and nature’s God been less prodigal with him, and is he less resourceful, less competent, than the flowers of the field and the beasts of the forest ? What of man ? Is he a creature of circumstance, held by chains of environment, sub¬ ject entirely to external forces and conditions? Jesus loved the flowers that smiled up at Him as He walked; and He lingered long, I am sure, in grassy glades and by purling streams. But it was not over a field of daisies nor a rippling lake that He wept; it was over Jerusalem, the city. Hot over its stones and walks and towers, but over its women and children and men. Humanity was His concern, the salvation of the people was His mission and His passion. What, then, is the attitude of Jesus toward man? How does He look upon circumstance and environ¬ ment ? The Hew Testament shows little respect for 114 What Men Need Most position, for prestige and power, as such. The weak, the poor, the humble, are invited to inherit the earth. The overcomers, the conquerors of circumstance, are exalted. Jesus, in selecting His disciples, went among the lowly, to fishermen instead of to financiers. The men with whom He left the interests of His kingdom, to whom He gave the stewardship of His cause, were men despised and rejected as was their Lord. The lowly Hazarene, and not the haughty Pharisee; the Bethlehem manger Babe, and not a child from Herod’s palace; the Galilean peasant, and not a noble¬ man of Capernaum; a simple speaker of the truth, unordained; a quiet-voiced companion and healer of men, not the high priest nor the praetor of Borne, was this wonder-working Christ who rose from shame to glory, from the cross to the crown, from the manger to the throne, from the stripes of the soldiers and the spittle of the rabble to the hosannas of angels and the right hand of God. And every new crusade, every unacclaimed reform that has come at last to popular approval, has found its first supporters and leaders, not among earth’s recognised great men and women, but in the study of a Calvin, or in the shop of a Socrates, or where some village Hampden plies his trade. I do not remember now a single character who stands in history like a sun among falling stars, who was not a conqueror of circumstance, who did not rise in spite of surround¬ ings, who was not the master of his environment. Paul, whose journeys for the time in which he lived and the means of transportation at his disposal, were the most adventurous of history as well as the most far-reaching missionary tours of his age; Paul, whose Christian ministry stands for all time as second only Conquerors of Circumstance 115 to that of Jesus, held the word of the law and broke the bread of life with fingers already callous from the needle and cord of a tentmaker. Every mile he trav¬ elled was a thrust of torture to his pain-racked body, and he was the mightiest orator of the early church in spite of his insignificant presence. The hand that wrote some of Walter Scott’s rarest passages was the hand of a man suffering unutterable physical torture. Milton, who looked into the future far enough to see, and clearly enough to portray, paradise, was blind. George Washington, in spite of wealth and family distinction, espoused the cause of a humble people, cast his lot with a revolution whose failure seemed inevi¬ table and whose failure meant the confiscation of property and the loss of life. Hot all conquerors of circumstance are poor, nor are all unknown. Other things being equal, undoubtedly it is harder for a man of position or a woman of standing to follow principle in the espousing of an unpopular cause, than it is for a person who has nothing in the way of temporal value to lose. In 1904 J. Erank Hanly was elected governor of Indiana by the largest majority ever received for the gubernatorial office in that State. ITe was the leader of his party, and the popular idol of his common¬ wealth. Ho office within the gift of the people seemed beyond his reach. During the first year of his term his attention was drawn to the saloon’s violations of the law; and then, as he attempted to enforce the sta¬ tutes in cities where municipal authorities were de¬ linquent, he became convinced of the inherent evils of the liquor traffic itself. He came eventually to believe in absolute prohibi- 116 What Men Need Most tion. His friends in dismay sought to silence his public utterances. They made a determined effort to keep his new-found convictions out of his official life. Prohibition was most unpopular then, even in the Middle West. Among politicians it was tabooed, and no man with serious ambitions made the “mistake” of allowing the question to creep into his platform. Gov¬ ernor Hanly was told, and without the mincing of words, that if he had any idea of remaining in public life in Indiana, if he hoped ever to realise for himself the yet higher ambitions of his friends, he must silence his conscience with regard to prohibition. Some of us, who knew and loved Governor Hanly and who were greatly honoured! by having his affec¬ tion and confidence, know how bitter, how heart¬ breaking, the struggle became, but Governor Hanly clid not falter. He remained absolutely loyal to his convictions, and with flashing eye and burning elo¬ quence proclaimed them, first throughout Indiana, and then through the length and breadth of the continent. He lost the United States senatorship, and perhaps the chance to be President of the United States, for some of us believe that no man since Lincoln has been in¬ herently greater; but he won a glorious immortality. When in a terrible accident his life was suddenly cut off, he had seen the cause for which he had made su¬ preme sacrifices, and to which he had brought con¬ tributions perhaps greater than those of any other one man, triumphant at the polls and a fact in government. But how utterly impossible it is to call the long roll! The Lincolns and Grants who came from log cabins to the White House; the Uapoleons of the land, the Nelsons of the sea, who rose from obscurity to hold the centre of the world’s stage of war; the poets who like Conquerors of Circumstance 117 Burns walked in poverty while they sang songs for the a