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 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE. 
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 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 Boston and New York 
 
THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2007 with funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/adventureoflifebOOgrenrich 
 
THE 
 ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 BEING THE 
 
 FOR 1911 
 BY 
 
 WTLFBED THOMASON GRENFELL 
 
 M.D. (OxoN.). C.M.G. 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 1912 
 

 COPYRIGHT, I912, BY WILFRED THOMASON GRBNFELI. 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published March rgra 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 .^'* 
 
 
 '^Z 
 
THE WILLIAM BELDEN NOBLE LECTURES 
 
 This Lectureship was constituted a perpetual foundation 
 in Harvard University in 1898, as a memorial to the late 
 William Belden Noble of Washington, D. C. (Harvard, 
 1885). The deed of gift provides that the lectures shall be 
 not less than six in number, that they shall be delivered 
 annually, and, if convenient, in the Phillips Brooks House, 
 during the season of Advent. Each lecturer shall have 
 ample notice of his appointment, and the publication of each 
 course of lectures is required. The purpose of the Lecture- 
 ship will be further seen in the following citation from the 
 deed of gift by which it was established : — 
 
 " The object of the founder of the Lectures is to continue 
 the mission of William Belden Noble, whose supreme desire 
 it was to extend the influence of Jesus as the way, the truth, 
 and the life ; to make known the meaning of the words of 
 Jesus, *I am come that they might have life, and that they 
 might have it more abundantly.' In accordance with the 
 large interpretation of the Influence of Jesus by the late 
 Phillips Brooks, with whose religious teaching he in whose 
 memory the Lectures are established and also the founder 
 of the Lectures were in deep sympathy, it is intended that 
 the scope of the Lectures shall be as wide as the highest in- 
 terests of humanity. With this end in view, — the perfection 
 of the spiritual man and the consecration by the spirit of 
 Jesus of every department of human character, thought, and 
 activity, — the Lectures may include philosophy, literature, 
 art, poetry, the natural sciences, political economy, sociology, 
 ethics, history both civil and ecclesiastical, as well as theology, 
 and the more direct interests of the religious life. Beyond 
 a sympathy with the purpose of the Lectures, as thus defined, 
 no restriction is placed upon the lecturer.'' 
 
TO MY WIFE 
 
PREFACE 
 
 I SHOULD like to preface these lectures 
 which I am about to deUver by a brief fore- 
 word concerning the man in whose memory 
 they have been founded. WilUam Belden 
 Noble was unknown to me personally, while 
 probably some of you at least had the 
 advantage of his acquaintance. I think I 
 can truly say, however, that I am conscious 
 of his friendship. A life like his makes him, 
 like Kim, a friend of all the world. 
 
 He loved the things I love: football and 
 athletic games. He was human in social 
 relations and a member of clubs which, 
 had I been at Harvard, I should have 
 wished to join. He worked and played 
 and loved — hard. His was just a strenu- 
 ous, natural human life. And in addition 
 to all this, but not in spite of it, he had 
 the vision of the real value of life. He 
 ranked high at college. It cannot be said 
 that it was lack of intellectual ability which 
 gave him the faith, which I hold is of more 
 value than anything else on earth. 
 
X PREFACE 
 
 So I am fully persuaded, not only that 
 William Belden Noble lived, but that he 
 still lives the imperishable life of those 
 through whom the life of God is manifested. 
 
 Those are the alumni of Harvard who 
 will ever be among her benefactors. Have 
 you no debt to her and to those who shall 
 fill your places when you too shall have 
 "passed beyond the bourne of time and 
 place"? See that you strive to discharge 
 your indebtedness while you can. If of the 
 gold and silver some of you may be able to 
 give her, there is that which has cost you 
 both in labor and life, to you who give, 
 that shall sweeten tenfold the joy of giving. 
 But that which alone all of us can give, and 
 which all of us must give if, like William 
 Belden Noble, we are to be worthy to be 
 remembered as her sons, is what her truest 
 counselor, Phillips Brooks, asked of you, 
 — the gift of yet one more regenerated 
 human life. 
 
 Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. 
 
 December, 1911. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. LiFB AND Faith 1 
 
 II. Christ and the Individual ... 39 
 
 m. Christ and Society 80 
 
 IV. Christ and the Daily Life . . 120 
 
THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 LIFE AND FAITH 
 
 The object of the Noble Lectures, as I 
 conceive it, is decidedly a practical one. It 
 is that something may be said, and in such 
 a way that it shall induce in the minds of 
 the hearers a keener desire to stand for just 
 those things which Christ did stand for. It 
 is to beget a determination to reincarnate 
 his life, in the conviction that so our brief 
 tenure of human life may be most useful, 
 most completely fulfill the purpose for 
 which it was given, and so attain the whole 
 achievement of which it is capable. 
 
 I cannot but realize the diflSculty of the 
 problem presented, while at the same time 
 I entirely believe in the supreme importance 
 of it. I appreciate most deeply the honor 
 that I should be asked to attempt the task. 
 
S: .;.•: the' ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 >*•»** t" • • ■ ^ ■■ 
 
 I must be enjoying much the same sensa- 
 tion as the diminutive Jack when he stood 
 before the giant's gate, which is exactly 
 my idea of the " joie de vivre." 
 
 The choice of the medical profession as 
 a lifework should of itself be a guarantee 
 that one looks upon human life as worth 
 while. For it is scarcely conceivable that 
 one should devote his entire stay on earth 
 to the effort to discover and carry out 
 methods for preserving and prolonging 
 that which he considered practically value- 
 less. Being unskilled in philosophy and 
 theology, the method I propose to adopt 
 in these lectures is bound to be empirical, 
 and may possibly appear egotistic. As I do 
 in purely professional work, so now, I can, 
 I believe, best argue from my own experi- 
 ence as to what I think may be helpful to 
 others. I recognize, however, that there 
 are spiritual and mental variations in hu- 
 man minds corresponding to well-known 
 physical difiPerences known to medicine as 
 idiosyncrasy, and I can only plead for 
 
LIFE AND FAITH 8 
 
 indulgence if I am guilty of judging others 
 too much by myself. 
 
 I therefore begin my first lecture by stat- 
 ing that I am an intense believer in life as an 
 asset of incomparable value. I cannot re- 
 member the day when I had not a passion 
 for life, — it seemed so full of adventure. 
 Stimulated by trophies of Indian jungles 
 which had been sent back by our uncles and 
 which graced our home, I decided, almost 
 before I learned my alphabet, that the pro- 
 fession of tiger-hunting was the only one 
 worthy of the name. Indeed, all my lean- 
 ings, hereditary or otherwise, were towards 
 a life of action. My forebears have almost 
 all been physical fighters, and I presume 
 I could hardly have escaped the heritage 
 of a hatred for peace and platitudes. An 
 English public school only emphasized in 
 my mind the conviction that physical con- 
 tests were the most desirable in which to 
 excel. It never occurred to me that the 
 boys who labored at their books could have 
 discovered a field for adventure. I did not 
 
4 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 for one moment think that they were 
 worthy of anything but the general con- 
 temptuous opinion so aptly expressed in 
 the names by which we knew them. 
 
 It was in London, when I was first on 
 my own allowance, and free from any super- 
 vision of body or mind, that I discovered 
 that mental activities offered a chance for 
 adventure as real and as worthy as any 
 physical field. There I began to appreciate 
 the value of knowledge because it enabled 
 one to do things. When in the operating 
 theatre I watched men familiarly and with 
 confidence achieving magnificent results 
 in relieving pain, prolonging life, and re- 
 storing capacities by their masterly mental 
 qualifications, life seemed suddenly to loom 
 up ten times as attractive as I had ever 
 dreamed it could be. But there was a 
 larger realm of thought which no one could 
 fully comprehend. Many of my teachers 
 were men with wide reputations, who were 
 to me almost as demigods, but among them 
 there was a vast difference of opinion on 
 
LIFE AND FAITH 5 
 
 this subject. Some were silent, all were 
 reticent regarding it. 
 
 The ordinary exponents of the Christian 
 faith had never succeeded in interesting 
 me in any way, or even in making me 
 believe that they were more than profes- 
 sionally concerned themselves. Religion 
 appeared to be a profession, exceedingly 
 conventional, and most unattractive in my 
 estimation, — the very last I should have 
 thought of selecting. I considered it effemi- 
 nate, and should have strongly resented the 
 imputation, and felt heartily ashamed, if 
 any one of my companions had suggested 
 that I was a pietist. I am not excusing my 
 position: I am stating it. I made an ex- 
 ception of the home religion of my mother, 
 which I simply put in a category by itself. 
 
 I was attracted one day by the excite- 
 ment of an enormous crowd outside a tent. 
 I was living at that time in Whitechapel, 
 in the sordid purlieus of which the famous 
 Jack the Ripper was contemporaneously 
 carrying on his profession. One saw every 
 
6 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 kind of evil, and every variety of wrecked 
 humanity, but among many vanquished, 
 some victors. The fight between good and 
 evil in the individual was always an evident 
 fact. It never occurred to me that I must 
 at some time, willy-nilly, enter consciously 
 into the same arena. I went into the tent, 
 and there I heard a plain common-sense 
 man talking in a plain intelligible way to 
 a huge concourse of really interested people. 
 The man made me feel in all he said that at 
 least he had thrown every ounce of himself 
 into the issue. In a most matter-of-fact but 
 kindly way, he pulled up a long-winded 
 prayer-bore, who was irritating the audi- 
 ence with droning platitudes, and the 
 Almighty by conferring quite unnecessary 
 information upon him. He even cut short 
 the choir and braved the organist, when 
 he realized that their silence helped more 
 than their art. He ended with an address, 
 the simplicity of which left no doubt in 
 any man's mind that he was a fighter for 
 the practical issues of a better and more 
 
LIFE AND FAITH J 
 
 cheerful life on earth, a believer in a possible 
 life of big achievement for every soul of 
 us, both here and hereafter. His self-for-. 
 getful appeal for help left a determination 
 in my heart at least. Perhaps I had been 
 wrong in considering the main object of the 
 preaching profession to be preferment 
 rather than social uplift. It was a revela- 
 tion, it opened a new vision, and I guessed 
 for the first time the meaning in the eyes 
 of the knights of chivalry in familiar famous 
 pictures. Somehow religion as an insurance 
 ticket had never interested me. The selfish- 
 ness and even cowardice of that appeal, to 
 which I had so often listened, now loomed 
 up in the worse light of distrust. That which 
 I had called faith was after all unfaith. The 
 new faith which there dawned on me for 
 the first time was not the conviction that 
 God would forgive me, but that he had 
 already given me things of which I had 
 not even known ; not that he would save me, 
 but that he would use me. I went out with 
 yet a third field for adventure before me. 
 
8 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 and far the largest, to add to the glory and 
 beauty of life. 
 
 A new factor which now forced itself 
 upon me was my will. I believed in free 
 will : it seemed common sense. I knew that 
 materialists did not, and that most of my 
 comrades believed in Darwin and Huxley, 
 and in the teaching that we are all slaves of 
 unbreakable laws. I believed that I was at 
 the fork of two roads, and could go down 
 the one which I liked. For my venture I 
 wanted knowledge. At that time I thought 
 nothing of reading just as late at night as 
 I could stay awake with a wet towel round 
 my head; but I recognized limits to my 
 capacity. I was forced to admit that there 
 were some things too high for me. And yet 
 — I must go ahead. Only thus will any 
 man find his field for adventure. Courage 
 and every noble virtue, and every idea of 
 the romantic, worth-while world in which 
 I live would be gone, if I did not believe 
 in free will. "After all, it is not that we 
 strive to do the impossible, but that which 
 
LIFE AND FAITH 9 
 
 to the self of mere experience looks im- 
 possible." ^ 
 
 I was prejudiced for an adventurous 
 world. The other dull material world was 
 unbearable to me anyhow. Science taught 
 us that the phenomena of life worked out 
 in an orderly manner; and that from ob- 
 serving the facts governing that order, cer- 
 tain results were discernible. The embryo 
 of an egg developed wings and flew. A 
 similar embryonic cell in the ocean grew 
 fins and swam. The processes never got 
 mixed and no human being could alter 
 them. Some men who posed as scientists 
 (that is, those who knew) talked as if "na- 
 ture" or the "laws of nature" controlled 
 all these wonderful things. They were so 
 familiar with them that they might almost 
 have invented them. But the "forces of 
 nature," the force that is outside ourselves 
 thenceforth to me spelled "God." It is 
 merely a fact that no man, however much 
 he wishes, can really make mystery a bar 
 to faith. 
 
 ^ Bishop Brent, Leadership, 
 
10 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 All business has to be conducted to some 
 extent on a credit basis. The same system 
 applies occasionally in the realm of thought ; 
 and I am justified in using it in the sphere 
 of convictions. I am convinced that this 
 is a case in which wisdom is justified of her 
 children. In Ottawa there is a statue of 
 Sir Galahad, erected to the memory of a 
 young man who, seeing two skaters fall 
 through the ice on the Ottawa River, sprang 
 in to save them and was drowned himself. 
 On the granite base of the statue are carved 
 the young knight's words, "If I save my 
 life I lose it." Reason may say he was a 
 fool, but is that wisdom? When the Lake 
 Erie steamer caught fire, in order to save 
 the passengers it became necessary to steam 
 fuU-spead ahead to the nearest beach. The 
 flames drove the passengers forward. Some 
 one must stay at the wheel to steer, or all 
 would be drowned or burned. The keel 
 struck the beach just in time. But when 
 they looked for the helmsman, Robert 
 Marsden, only a common sailor, they found 
 
LIFE AND FAITH 11 
 
 him dead, his blackened body lying sunk 
 down on its knees in the chart-room; he 
 himself had lashed his hands to the wheel. 
 The Master was ridiculed as a madman; 
 but the Greeks did not blame Achilles for 
 his choice. Are all heroism, all impulsive 
 nobility, all honor, because they are unrea- 
 sonable, to be classed as folly, and to be 
 sneered at? 
 
 Once in a heavy cross-loop on the Dogger 
 Bank, the forestay of our schooner suddenly 
 broke. While I was reasoning out what to 
 do, the skipper had her before the wind, re- 
 lieved the pressure at once, and saved the 
 mainmast, and probably our lives. A snap 
 judgment, an instinctive decision, is not 
 necessarily an unreasonable one. 
 
 For my part, I came to see I must start 
 somewhere, and stand on some basis. 
 Should I stand on the current knowledge of 
 the early eighties, which was about as stable 
 as a Labrador bog and has already gone 
 the way of flesh, or should I stand on faith .^^ 
 Down which road should I go? Whether 
 
12 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 demonstrably intellectually correct or not, 
 I decided I would prefer and therefore 
 would try to follow the Christ. 
 
 What is the explanation of the biased or 
 even bitter spirit in which many men deal 
 with the claim of Christianity to their 
 attention? In medicine and in all other 
 branches of science we are at best supposed 
 to bring our problems to the bar of our in- 
 telligence, without a bias for proving or dis- 
 proving, but simply to find the truth. I have 
 had men come in the middle of the night, 
 come many miles, incur considerable ex- 
 pense, just to discuss prolonging the life 
 of a patient, who had no more claim on 
 them than that he was a fellow man in dis- 
 tress. Their sole desire was to get wisdom 
 for action, and they considered it a mean 
 thing to worry one iota about the trouble 
 involved in the attempt to prolong mortal 
 life. The very men who strain at gnats 
 when it is a question of real life, swallow 
 a camel when it relates to mere animal 
 existence. 
 
LIFE AND FAITH IS 
 
 Among other odd things which struck 
 one with regard to the acceptance of Christ- 
 ianity as a method of Hfe was the fact that 
 the people to decry it most loudly as a rem- 
 edy were those who had never tried it at 
 all. The loudest denouncers of a remedy 
 for the body should be those who have 
 tried it without prejudice and found it a 
 failure. It is considered unscientific and 
 irrational for a man to do more than re- 
 main silent about a remedy he has not tried 
 personally. If, however, he were to form 
 his opinion by watching others try it, 
 it would be equally unscientific to judge 
 of the experiment unless he were assured 
 it was the unadulterated remedy he was 
 seeing used. Those who have studied 
 Christ's own teachings for themselves, and 
 seen his varied methods tried for human- 
 ity's sins and sorrows, have never been dis- 
 appointed. Most of us must find God, if 
 at all, in the experiences of everyday life. 
 One cause is almost alone enough to justify 
 and quite suflScient to explain the attitude 
 
14 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 of mind in which men of science approach 
 the Christian religion. For the claim of 
 priest and theologian and religious teacher 
 of succeeding ages, that their particular 
 faith was knowledge and included absolute 
 truth, was as demonstrably false as it was 
 immodest. "Truth cannot exist in a church 
 any more than learning can in a univer- 
 sity." Again, their ceaseless attempts to 
 stereotype the intellectual and social re- 
 lation of every man of all ages according 
 to their own conception of what the relig- 
 ion of Christ called for has patently held 
 back the true advance of the race. They 
 captured the title of the Christian Church, 
 "vi et armis," just as a knight does the 
 token from his adversary's helm, and ar- 
 rested the growth of the real church, till 
 it became like a miserable stunted cretin, 
 for whom for centuries no cure was thought 
 possible. Moreover, they enforced their 
 tenets in a way well calculated to leave 
 objectionable impressions on the minds 
 of scientists, even if they did escape the 
 
LIFE AND FAITH 15 
 
 experience of Galileo. No wonder that, as 
 MeComb says: "People are weary of the 
 burden of theological doctrines, and are 
 asking for something permanent, something 
 verifiable in experience, which no criticism 
 can touch and no progress in culture 
 wither."^ A young German divine is re- 
 ported to have said, " Christ came to save us 
 from the theologians ! " Not to be misunder- 
 stood, I would say here that I am myself a 
 member of a church, and comforted by the 
 fact that the visible church is, willy-nilly, 
 enlarging its views as to what it means to 
 be a Christian, and is ever more and more 
 recognizing the social side of the service of 
 the Master. On the other hand, with the 
 increase of knowledge, the arrogance of 
 current thought is groundless, and the 
 scholar no longer believes he has a mono- 
 poly of religion. As Peabody has pointed 
 out, the scholar has discovered that "the 
 conceit of learning arises from not discern- 
 ing the dimensions of truth"; and that "the 
 
 * Christianity and the Modem Mind. 
 
16 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 contest between religion and science now 
 interests only a few belated materialists 
 and a few overslept defenders of the faith." ^ 
 We must reach the hilltop of learning be- 
 fore we can hope for the full view. Emer- 
 son says, "Talent sinks with character." 
 The Master differs from teachers like Rous- 
 seau, for there is no hiatus between his 
 precepts and his character. Spiritual 
 satiety has been the trouble with many 
 scientists, just as men, after a dinner they 
 cannot digest, are unable to climb the hill. 
 Besides this cause, the heritage of wrong 
 aim, the fact of sin, the heirloom of bad 
 advertisement also remain. To make men 
 enter the church to-day there exists only 
 the same road which leads to love for her 
 Founder. After an address at the Cooper 
 Union in New York, a rabid anti-Christian 
 was fiercely heckling the speaker from the 
 audience and abusing the church of to-day. 
 His arguments were so drastic and yet so 
 specious that there was only one way to 
 
 ^ Religion of an Educated Man, 
 
LIFE AND FAITH 17 
 
 answer him. "Are you a member of any 
 church?" the speaker asked. "What are 
 you getting at?" was the astonished reply. 
 "Well, I've been for twenty-five years," 
 continued the speaker, "and I assure you 
 it never encouraged me to rob, to kill, or 
 to vilify. If you really want to satisfy your 
 mind, I advise you to go and join the 
 church, and see for yourself what she 
 stands for." The suggestion was so novel 
 that the critic rose and walked out. 
 
 On returning to Labrador one spring, I 
 chanced to be discussing with a group of 
 men on the wharf the reported conver- 
 sion of some of the toughest and hitherto 
 untouched characters among the settlers. 
 It happened that, like so many others, they 
 had been bred to despise the idea of con- 
 version, though laboriously drilled in many 
 denominational doctrines of doubtful value. 
 That a conversion like St. Paul's, which 
 meant something practical, could occur 
 in the twentieth century, or anywhere out- 
 side the Bible, seemed to them ridiculous. 
 
18 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 There was a lot of looking down and nervous 
 kicking the ground when we endeavored to 
 talk of it as one would of catching fish. 
 They all admitted, however, that the whole 
 cove had been altered, and men and women 
 entirely changed for the better. Various 
 boats with different kinds of apparatus for 
 catching fish were coming to and fro from 
 the company's wharf as we were talking. 
 All were engaged in getting fish for the 
 same firm, and all were eager enough to gain 
 their end. The fish were not trapping well, 
 and the humbler " hook-and-line " men were 
 the only ones who were getting anything. 
 I suggested that it would not be to their 
 credit as loyal employees or as men of com- 
 mon sense, if the trap-net men should re- 
 gard as enemies, or find fault with, or try to 
 ridicule, their successful comrades, for using 
 methods other than their own. The sug- 
 gestion that the adoption of such a course 
 of action could possibly be considered a 
 fair demonstration of what Christ taught 
 at once brought a denial to their lips, and 
 
LIFE AND FAITH 19 
 
 a side-glance as well to see if I were really 
 in earnest. Yet this was exactly the atti- 
 tude of one body of Christians to another. 
 There was no rejoicing, that I could see, 
 that the sole purpose for which their own 
 organization avowedly existed was being 
 accomplished, but recrimination that it was 
 not being accomplished in their way. In 
 this case, however, the whole group of men 
 immediately indorsed the general prin- 
 ciple that different methods were entirely 
 necessary in the material world, and also 
 that excellent results had been obtained 
 in this instance, for which their own sect 
 had nominally striven. It had certainly 
 failed for so long a period as to endanger 
 the desired result being accomplished dur- 
 ing the lifetime of the very people who had 
 now become new men. 
 
 I could cite many instances where faith 
 in Christ has very apparently altered a 
 man's whole outlook and action. Naturally, 
 most of my observation has been among 
 fishermen, and it has included men of al- 
 
20 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 most every kind of temperament. One was 
 a man with whom I afterwards made 
 several voyages. A man of exceptionable 
 physique, he had been the victim of un- 
 controllable temper, and various of his 
 drinking sprees had ended in the police 
 station, as the result of violent assaults on 
 others. He had destroyed his home and his 
 wife had left him. He was rapidly ruining 
 his own splendid physique, and the lives 
 of all those with whom he came in contact. 
 Suddenly he became sober and peaceful, 
 built up his home again and took back his 
 wife, and developed an absolutely unselfish 
 passion to try to save his fellows from 
 the slavery that had been his. He always 
 claimed that his faith in Christ was the 
 secret of the change. He was so cheerful 
 and so uniformly optimistic that his very 
 face became transparent with happiness, 
 and I have never had a more delightful 
 shipmate. I once asked him to say a word 
 to encourage other men. He stood up to 
 try, and unaccustomed tears coursed down 
 
LIFE AND FAITH 21 
 
 his cheeks. At last he said, "To think of 
 the Hke of me talking to them men," and 
 sat down. This class of men has been well 
 illustrated by Mr. Harold Begbie in his 
 "Twice-Born Men " and "Broken Earthen- 
 ware." In my own experience it has been 
 multiplied many times. Indeed, I have 
 often wondered why so many clergy and 
 other workers have asked me whether I 
 have read these books, as if the results they 
 describe were rare experiences. It is only 
 the recording of them that is rare. There 
 is a reticence always on the part of all good 
 workers to draw deductions from their own 
 work prematurely. There can be no ques- 
 tion of their occurrence, however, though 
 my own experience shows me that these 
 more emotionally susceptible men are 
 most liable to temporary retrogression. But 
 even so, I am devoutly thankful for such 
 changes as may occur to change their life 
 and environment, changes which I can 
 attribute to nothing else but their faith. 
 I am certain that any one who, even though 
 
22 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 without faith himself, though also without 
 prejudice, would seek to record such cases 
 in the way we record cures of disease, — 
 which only affect part of men's lives, — 
 would be surprised at the extent and value 
 of suddenly acquired faith in the Christ. 
 
 Before leaving my seafaring friends, 
 however, I would say that, while the sud- 
 denness of the change of habits and of 
 life has been unquestioned, the process, it 
 has always seemed to me, has been less 
 brief than they themselves supposed, and 
 the conversion could have been almost as 
 justly attributed to many previous experi- 
 ences. Yet I ought to add that the majority 
 among these fishermen who are endowed 
 with the kind of faith that dominates their 
 whole life are conscious of the day on which 
 it became a potent factor in their lives, — 
 a most helpful experience, it always seems 
 to me. 
 
 Among those of my own class in life, I 
 have been privileged also to see not a few 
 very remarkable changes; but the process 
 
LIFE AND FAITH 23 
 
 has almost always been gradual, and usu- 
 ally accomplished through unselfish service, 
 which is Christ-following. In men of my 
 own profession I have seen just as unmis- 
 takably the results of Christian faith. From 
 self-indulgent, destructive, wasted lives, 
 I have seen them become just such minis- 
 ters to humanity as I conceive that Christ 
 calls for. Among the unfortunate victims 
 of extreme wealth I have known some sud- 
 denly accept the Christ's view of steward- 
 ship, and without dumping their wealth, 
 for which Christ never called, they have 
 accepted their responsibilities, and admin- 
 istered it with such love and wisdom that 
 their renewed lives have entirely stopped 
 the mouths of critics. 
 
 I do not beheve in labels, but I must ac- 
 cept that of utilitarian. For such an atti- 
 tude faith is an absolute necessity. At the 
 age of nineteen I was living with a clever 
 lecturer on the "Evidences for Christian- 
 ity." His shelves were literally crowded 
 from floor to ceiling with scientific and phil- 
 
24 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 osophical works of every kind, ancient and 
 modern. His life and talents were entirely 
 devoted to demonstrating that our Christ- 
 ian faith was in accord with the scientific 
 knowledge of that day. He was popular, 
 and I believe to some extent successful in 
 influencing men's opinions and lives. Any- 
 how, I have seen him carried home on the 
 shoulders of a London crowd, and finishing 
 his address from our upper window. At 
 that same time my own brother, who had 
 taken an open scholarship and a brilliant 
 "first" in Classics at Oxford, had just fin- 
 ished his "greats" examination in philo- 
 sophy. In this, to my infinite surprise, he 
 had secured only a second-class. His fault, 
 according to the examiners, was his bril- 
 liant memory. He had quoted accurately 
 the teachings of masters at variance with 
 one another to examiners who did not 
 agree with any of them. " Where wise men 
 differ, fools may come in," and I rejoiced 
 that I felt free to decide to order my life 
 on the basis of Christian faith, a position 
 
LIFE AND FAITH 25 
 
 I have never regretted having adopted. 
 Phillips Brooks says somewhere that "free- 
 dom of belief should not mean freedom to 
 believe little but freedom to believe much." 
 On a perfectly common-sense basis, I have 
 always trusted that when I diflFered from 
 the teachings of creeds and sects, possibly 
 I was as likely to be right as they, since I 
 had as direct access to and as great a claim 
 on the promises of the Giver of all wisdom 
 as they. 
 
 There exists an absolutely undeniable 
 antipathy on the part of theologian and 
 scientist alike to allowing this freedom. 
 One says you shall not have it, the other 
 says you cannot, though the value of its 
 acquisition has the indorsement of thou- 
 sands, nay, millions of our fellow men of 
 all ages. 
 
 Yet we cannot take up a newspaper 
 without seeing accounts of these same men 
 suing others for restitution of goods or 
 money out of which they have foolishly 
 allowed themselves to be swindled. In 
 
26 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 these cases any judge would like to say to 
 them, "You'll get no redress, for it is only 
 what you deserve." The same applies 
 to matters which affect our lives more 
 intimately and permanently. Take, for 
 instance, marriage. The ever-increasing 
 number of divorces show how these most 
 vital and personal relations are undertaken 
 without any reference whatever to reason. 
 It is the same with our play: aviation, 
 motoring, polo, football, cards, billiards, 
 etc. We go into them entirely without 
 reference to their value to our especial 
 temperaments or requirements or capaci- 
 ties or physical interests. In food and drink 
 the folly and credulity of man is shown in 
 the absolutely unreasonable extent to which 
 men indulge themselves. Whatever the 
 result may be in the brevity or longevity of 
 life, these excesses affect every expression 
 of mind or spirit as surely as they do the 
 physical capacities. It is not unusual for 
 the famous Billy Muldoon to announce to 
 a new degenerate, "Sir, you have no mind. 
 
LIFE AND FAITH 27 
 
 For the next six weeks you will have the in- 
 finite advantage of Billy Muldoon's mind." 
 One might multiply these instances in- 
 definitely, but the only point I wish to 
 urge is that it is these very people who in 
 everyday life stigmatize even the man 
 whose life has been demonstrably benefited 
 by the Christian faith as a fanatic, as a 
 man of ill-balanced mind, as credulous. 
 But so strange are the contortions of 
 mentality that many times men have said 
 to me, "I wish I could believe as you do; it 
 would be such a help and such a comfort." 
 At the same time I have known men with 
 death threatening, and in agony of mind 
 for those they must leave behind them, to 
 whom I have wished above all else I could 
 give that peace and rest which the acqui- 
 sition of that faith invariably carries with 
 it. But it has been impossible. "Christ's 
 appeal is not primarily to the emotions or 
 to the intellect, but to the will." It is not 
 that men cannot accept the Christ nearly 
 so much as that they will not. 
 
28 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 One of the causes of this mistrust of the 
 Christian faith in men's minds is the age- 
 long misrepresentation of it. We have such 
 erroneous ideas of what the Christ pleads 
 for. "In that unhappy moment, centuries 
 ago, when the church set up a metaphys- 
 ical text, in place of the standard of moral 
 excellence and personal fellowship with 
 Christ, it lost its supreme distinction of 
 symbolizing the unity of all life in a com- 
 mon divine source and in a common im- 
 mortal destiny." ^ Such bad advertising as 
 Christianity sometimes gets would cer- 
 tainly kill the desire even for an Eastman 
 kodak or a Winchester rifle. D. L. Moody 
 said, "The Christian is the world's Bible, 
 but we often need a revised version." 
 
 It was at this decisive point that for the 
 first time I realized I was, and puzzled as to 
 who I could be, and why I was, and what 
 I could do, and where I was bound. Some 
 people think the last question is mere silly 
 sentiment. But it really is not only most 
 
 * Paradise, The Church and the Individual, p. 248. 
 
LIFE AND FAITH 29 
 
 natural but most common sense. In passing 
 a vessel at sea we almost always ask first, 
 "Where are you bound?" Somehow that 
 actually interests us most. I have found 
 that if I know the vessel and have any 
 affection for the skipper I am ten times as 
 likely to be concerned. I never knew one 
 to resent my question, and his answer usu- 
 ally closed with "Where are you?" 
 
 Now it so happens that most of my cruis- 
 ing has been done in the foggiest region of 
 the world, and I myself have often enough 
 been for days together in the fog. Because 
 the season is short and the distance to be 
 covered so great, to get along is always 
 a question of first and imperative import- 
 ance if we are in any way to satisfy our- 
 selves that we have done our duty. It is a 
 horrible feeling at the end of the season to 
 find one has delayed and had to miss out- 
 sections of the work. This is not because 
 we have to render account to any one but 
 ourselves, but simply because we find that 
 we are far less wiUing to condone any faults 
 
30 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 or omissions than a master over us would 
 be. It therefore happens that often we have 
 to run ahead in spite of the fog and take 
 the risk. Incidentally these are among the 
 most exciting times of our lives. The risk 
 itself, the adventure, is the real spice of 
 what would otherwise be prosaic and dull. 
 Indeed the fact that the coast is badly light- 
 ed, poorly charted, and devoid of landmarks 
 and buoys on the shoals, not only keeps us 
 alive and quickens our capacities but gives 
 us a realization of fellowship with our friends 
 sailing the same seas. Thus we get a much 
 more intelligent love for one another as 
 we see each other's fallibility, and we come 
 to feel that the work is more worth while 
 because it involves adventure, and because 
 we have seen that not every man can or 
 will "launch out." 
 
 I must admit, however, that when run- 
 ning in the fog the first question on one's 
 lips as one sights a fellow voyager is not, 
 "Where are you bound?" but "Where are 
 we?" I remember the first time we were 
 
LIFE AND FAITH 81 
 
 crossing the Newfoundland Banks. We had 
 spent some days in blanketing fog without 
 a heavenly or earthly body to give us any 
 information about our position. We were 
 somewhat anxious, not knowing which 
 way to go. Suddenly, a huge three-masted 
 ship loomed up out of the fog, apparently 
 running oflF her course with conj&dence. 
 We had time to cut her oflF and ask where 
 we were. She replied by hanging over the 
 side a huge blackboard with the approxim- 
 ate latitude and longitude on it, and then 
 disappeared into the gloom. We were not 
 able to prove it, but we trusted her good 
 faith and acted as if it were true. We did n't 
 in the least resent the suggestion of inter- 
 ference in our private aflfairs. Many and 
 many a time since I have had to rely on the 
 opinions of others and even their gratui- 
 tous help. At one time we were running 
 somewhat too confidently on a part of the 
 shore which we thought we knew perfectly 
 well. Indeed, we were running full speed 
 in spite of our inability to see. We were 
 
32 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 suddenly aroused in the wheel house by 
 the united shouting of half a dozen sten- 
 torian voices, "Hard a' starboard! Full 
 speed astern! — or you'll be ashore." 
 These presumptuous people in a trap 
 fishing-boat had, quite unasked, interfered 
 to make us change our course, and had 
 thereby saved us from a catastrophe. It was 
 so dense we could not see the breakers. 
 However, we found we had made no mis- 
 take in instantly acting on the faith that 
 they were wiser than we, without waiting 
 to argue the rationality of it. But beyond 
 this, on yet another occasion in thick 
 weather we ran right by a boat full of men 
 and almost instantly afterwards sighted 
 breakers. We escaped practically by a 
 miracle, but we felt badly that the men 
 in the boat had not interfered to warn 
 us. 
 
 These and every experience of life seem 
 to teach that when the question at issue 
 is of vital, practical importance to us we 
 have no prejudice against outside advice. 
 
LIFE AND FAITH 83 
 
 and that there is no reason why we should 
 not offer such as we may possess, nor why 
 we should not accept it and act upon it as 
 if it were true, without needing intellectual 
 demonstration. 
 
 Dr. Crile has shown that anger, fear, 
 love, anxiety render protoplasm granular; 
 just as the shaking of steel makes a much- 
 worked axle brittle and unreliable, so these 
 emotions destroy the cells in the cortex 
 of the cerebral hemispheres just as would 
 poison or a blow. It is through these im- 
 portant cells that the outside world is in- 
 terpreted to us. So faith that brings peace, 
 is, in any case, a physical desirability if 
 not a moral one. 
 
 The man who has no interest in life, its 
 meaning and its future, is only intelligible 
 to me on one of three hypotheses : either he 
 has never faced himself and never stopped 
 to think, or he has done it with blind 
 eyes and closed ears, or he is no man 
 at all. 
 
 I can understand the position of the spec- 
 
84 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 tator at the great games; being unable to 
 play himself, he certainly does his best to 
 show his sympathy and give his support 
 to the players. He spends much energy 
 and at times makes a very fine show. But 
 his outlay is more or less pathetic, for he 
 is only a spectator after all, — and he is 
 so numerous! I know there is no need to 
 waste sympathy on the actual players. The 
 glory of the game liberally compensates 
 them for any damage they may receive. 
 The man to whom my sympathy always 
 goes out is the substitute, ready and 
 anxious to get into the game — but to whom 
 the chance is never given to use his capa- 
 cities. His loyalty calls for unbounded 
 admiration. 
 
 If there is iniquity in accepting a course 
 for true, the axioms of which cannot be 
 demonstrated by mathematics, this is the 
 reason why I rejoice in my iniquity (in 
 accepting the Christian faith). My choice 
 has given me such fun in life, and still 
 promises to do so. For no capacities need 
 
LIFE AND FAITH S5 
 
 go unused in the field of Christian ad- 
 venture. 
 
 I have as much right to my position as 
 any man has to unfaith, — and I have the 
 deductions of common sense to support 
 me. As for the materialist, he at least can- 
 not blame me. If I am all wrong, I am at 
 worst the victim of his own inexorable 
 system. When we recognize our finiteness, 
 we come to faith as rational. I do not ex- 
 pect to see God here, and live. As Chester- 
 ton^ has pointed out, though somewhat 
 sweepingly, "Between Hegel who believes 
 in nothing but himself and his senses, and 
 the materialist who believes not at all in 
 his senses," stands Christianity as the great 
 Modus Vivendi. 
 
 If I were to quote in the classroom the 
 words of the Scripture, that the natural 
 man does not want the things of the spirit, 
 I should probably be hooted at or mildly 
 ignored, and yet it is perfectly obvious that 
 this is really the case. Even if we know the 
 * G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 
 
86 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 best path, we wish to walk the one that 
 may not cost us anything in everyday life, 
 rather than let reason sit master on our 
 control. If I were to quote Christ's saying, 
 "I came not to send peace, but a sword," 
 the retort, even if unspoken, would un- 
 doubtedly be, "What did Christ know 
 about it?" Yet the unfailing evidence of 
 facts shows every day the inevitableness of 
 the contest if the best is to be made of life. 
 Life to the Christian sounds a clarion call 
 like the last words of Marmion : — 
 
 "Charge, Chester, charge; 
 On, Stanley, on." 
 
 Without question unfaith is too often a 
 synonym for "don't want." It is like the 
 farmer who, when urged to give up whiskey, 
 remarked, "Prove I don't like un, and 
 I'll give un up." 
 
 "The great causes of God and humanity 
 are not defeated by the hot assaults of the 
 Devil, but by the slow, crushing, glacier- 
 like mass of thousands and thousands of 
 indififerent nobodies. God's causes are never 
 
LIFE AND FAITH 37 
 
 destroyed by being blown up, but by being 
 sat upon. It is not the violent and anarch- 
 ical whom we have to fear in the war for 
 human progress, but the slow, the staid, 
 the respectable. And the danger of these 
 lies in their real scepticism. . . . Though 
 it would abhor articulately confessing that 
 God does nothing, it virtually means so 
 by refusing to share manifest opportunities 
 of serving Him." ^ 
 
 It is not to complain weakly of prejudice, 
 to besmirch those who do not believe as I 
 do, that I have thus dwelt on the strange 
 reluctances in accepting faith as a guide 
 for action in matters which relate to our 
 highest interest and life. Surely in the 
 business world men take ventures with- 
 out waiting for intellectual comprehension. 
 When the venture is of such vast importance 
 as accepting a guide for life's action, when 
 the Christian faith has been so unanimously 
 approved by those who have really adopted 
 it, when there is at least a possibility that 
 
 * George Adam Smith, Minor Prophets, vol. n, p. 54. 
 
S8 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 not only our day of life here but the life in 
 eternity will be benefited, why is it irra- 
 tional to accept the mystery and stand on 
 the ground of "Lord, I believe. Help thou 
 mine unbelief." 
 
LECTURE II 
 
 CHRIST AND THE INDIVIDUAL 
 
 In my first lecture I endeavored to defend 
 the deductions of my own experience, 
 namely, that as we all must act the con- 
 scious selection of the pathway pointed out 
 by Christ is rational : first, because it is the 
 most remunerative solution of the prob- 
 lem; secondly, the most interesting, as 
 affording a sound basis for fighting, for 
 loving, and for hoping; thirdly, the most 
 manly, as involving hard work with no 
 immediate vision of finality; and last, be- 
 cause it bases the whole on the satisfactory 
 presumption that I am I, and choose this 
 course myself. 
 
 I now propose to try and indicate how 
 this choice works out in men's lives what- 
 ever their temperament or activity. I am 
 convinced that no man can truly say, 
 "Christ's way succeeds for the man across 
 
40 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 the street, but not for me." I do not argue 
 that a man can by his will power make 
 himself believe this suddenly, if his edu- 
 cation and mentality make him sceptical 
 of it, or that any other man can by super- 
 ior wisdom convince his mind of the truth 
 of it by much talking. But I do contend that 
 with however Httle faith a man starts out 
 if he is willing to work on that faith instead 
 of arguing he is on a sure road to satisfy 
 himself of the truth of it, and eventually 
 to know, as far as we can know anything, 
 that the Master was and is perfectly right. 
 You cannot find the Christ by searching 
 with the eye in books and pamphlets; 
 you cannot demonstrate him to the ear in 
 theological lectures. I have known more 
 than one man try these very ways, and 
 lose in the process the little faith with 
 which he began. The way to find the truth 
 about the Christ is to be willing to under- 
 take the kind of life that common sense 
 translates his teachings to mean in this age. 
 When at Christ's bidding the paralyzed 
 
CHRIST AND THE INDIVTOUAL 41 
 
 man found that he could walk, and the 
 palsied man that he had strength in his 
 arm, and the blind man that he could see 
 clearly, they were all convinced of the 
 Master's power, — and the cleansed lepers 
 acclaimed him before ever they went to 
 the priests for confirmation of their cure. ' 
 
 The popular idea that Christ asks men 
 to sit down in life and admire him is absurd 
 on the face of it. The greatest Worker the 
 world has ever known asks men to be men 
 and follow him in the manifold directions 
 which always commend themselves to man- . 
 kind in the supreme moments of life. It is 
 not our recognition as we pass on the road 
 of life that he desires, but our personal 
 loyalty; not vain oblations, but "ceasing 
 to do evil and learning to do good." His 
 direct appeal is to our sense for a reasonable 
 service. It is always more the appeal of the 
 musician than that of the dialectician. The 
 ear hears, but the soul interprets. The mu- 
 sician does n't argue; he plays, and the 
 ear that hears recognizes or interprets the 
 
42 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 beauty of the message without being driven 
 into a hole by words. Alas, for the ears 
 to which a Beethoven sonata reveals no 
 beauty, or the eyes which cannot see the 
 glory of the solar spectrum. To me it is cer- 
 tainly the fault of our interpretive faculties 
 if we find no attraction in the person of Jesus 
 Christ. Just so it is sin or moral perversion 
 which prevents flesh and blood revealing 
 Christ, and that is why faith is the best 
 service we can render humanity. 
 
 A long and varied experience with many 
 of the churches has left me confident of the 
 wisdom of joining one or other of them. 
 None have a monopoly of perfection, but a 
 roving life has taught me that when a man 
 is hungry he can well afford to overlook 
 imperfections in the service, so long as the 
 food is good. One morning, after I had 
 been addressing a large Bible class, a keen 
 young fellow came to the house where I was 
 staying and asked for an interview. He 
 said: "I got an entirely new view of what 
 Christ really expects of me, and I realized 
 
CHRIST AND THE INDIVTOUAL 43 
 
 that that is not taught in my church. What 
 would you advise me to do?" I told him 
 I had had some patients who could n't 
 assimilate food even in the form of milk, 
 and that I should advise him to go around 
 till he found nourishment in some church, 
 and then cultivate loyalty to that; not to 
 stay out just because it was human and im- 
 perfect, but to go in and make it better. 
 I find that the cause of the trouble is just 
 as often the stomach or constitution as 
 the meals, in these days when the public 
 also is enlarging its views of what good food 
 is, and beginning to insist upon having 
 it. While the Master always insisted upon 
 faith, he had no severe rebuke for doubt. 
 I don't believe any of us would have let 
 Thomas oflF quite so easily. 
 
 Bishop Brent ^ has said: "A man's vo- 
 cation is the sphere in which to illustrate 
 his precepts"; and I now propose in a few 
 words to try and show how the Christian 
 faith affects my own profession. 
 * Brent, Leadership. 
 
44 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 The temptations of the surgeon are not 
 the same as those of the priest or the scholar. 
 His special temptations are to think that 
 the prolongation of existence limits the 
 call of life on him, and affords a field large 
 enough for all he can contribute; secondly, 
 professional prejudice against lay inter- 
 ference. 
 
 Regarding the first point I have never 
 doubted that the prolongation of some 
 lives is altogether undesirable. One or two 
 examples of this type will suflfice. An old 
 sailor captain with cancer of the throat, 
 which woke him with horrors that some 
 one was strangling him as soon as he dozed 
 off to sleep, would ask me so piteously at 
 night for a lethal draught that I used to 
 try and tiptoe past his bed as I went round 
 the wards to avoid the pain of having to 
 refuse him. A poor fisherman, incurable 
 and mentally degenerate, owing to a creep- 
 ing paralysis, is here after six years, killing 
 and starving his family, as he, an abso- 
 lutely unintelligent mass of flesh and bones. 
 
CHRIST AND THE INDIVTOUAL 45 
 
 lies groaning and moaning in bed. Already- 
 one married daughter has died, worn out 
 with caring for him and her own young 
 family as well. His wife is rapidly sinking 
 also. 
 
 Among my patients in hospital to-day 
 is a young man of nineteen. He has been 
 under my care for eleven months. He has 
 tubercular disease of the hip and spine; 
 there is no hope of his recovery. We can- 
 not keep him, and must instead send him 
 home to be a source of physical danger, a 
 ruinous expense, and a cause of untold 
 mental anguish to his loved ones. In the 
 cases of the criminally insane, the tuber- 
 cular insane, the hopelessly insane, the 
 sufferers in the last stages of incurable dis- 
 eases, and others, it is at least open to de- 
 bate if a year or more added to their life 
 on earth is of any value. It is questionable 
 if the same may not be said of the hope- 
 less moral degenerate whose vice has in- 
 jured him beyond possible physical re- 
 covery. The state admits this to a certain 
 
46 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 extent in the use of capital punishment, and 
 in its methods of preventing criminal re- 
 production. Theologians as well as materi- 
 alists have assented to a limit to the day 
 of grace. Pathologists have demonstrated 
 the damage caused by the neglect of these 
 precautions on the part of the state. I am 
 not arguing that it is possible as yet to 
 identify the candidates for extinction, but 
 that it is not a worthy end for our profession 
 in any case to limit their aspirations to 
 utility to the prolongation of mortal life. 
 To have life is not nearly so important as 
 to use it well. Emerson aptly asks, " What 
 is the use of eternal life to a man who can- 
 not use half an hour of this life well.f^ " What 
 we have is never so important as what we 
 do with what we have. 
 
 The world will, I know, acquit me of 
 egotism in claiming for the profession of 
 healing a special capacity for influencing 
 the whole life of the whole man, if only be- 
 cause of the advantages it has in getting 
 really close to men when they are apt to be 
 
CHRIST AND THE INDIVTOUAL 47 
 
 both impressionable and thoughtful, and 
 stripped of all conventional restraint. The 
 real end of all social service should be to 
 build up character; "to educate personal- 
 ity is true religion." ^ The ideal object of 
 the best doctors, lawyers, scholars, priests, 
 or indeed of every good man, is in reality 
 the same as that of the Master. 
 
 I once carried a plant I had found to 
 our professor of botany for identification. 
 "Young man," he said, "a botanist does not 
 know one plant from another." Rousseau 
 wrote a standard textbook on how to bring 
 up children, and dropped all five of his own, 
 on the day they were born, in the post-box 
 of the foundling hospital. An aurist pro- 
 posed the theory of the telephone, and a 
 business man made it of service to the pub- 
 lic. But science and utility are coming to- 
 gether. It was left to the young University 
 of Kansas to risk the opprobrium of having 
 prostituted learning to commercialism, by 
 appointing an unlimited staff of industrial 
 ^ Peabody, Religion of an Educated Man* 
 
48 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 "Fellows," the object of each being to 
 discover practical values for apparently 
 useless products. Through their special 
 scientific knowledge they obtained casein 
 from buttermilk, diastase from alfalfa 
 stalks, pituitin from the hypophysis of 
 whales. To-day the school and university 
 and social training in England still discount 
 all commerce and practical productive 
 work, as less worthy of the true gentleman 
 than either fighting, sporting, or speculat- 
 ing. When the first site for a hospital in 
 Labrador was given me by a merchant, he 
 embodied in the deed of gift that I was not 
 to trade there, for fear of competing with 
 his own store. I remember that the proviso 
 jarred on me in those days as being almost 
 an insult. Since that I have started a long 
 series of cash stores, believing them to be 
 the most necessary remedy for many of our 
 diseases. But it still seems to rub the wrong 
 way when I am asked for how much I will 
 sell a gallon of molasses. Christ himself 
 teaches that the effective use of learning 
 
CHRIST AND THE INDIVTOUAL 49 
 
 is not purely intellectual. The awakening 
 of the soul to the need for an alliance of the 
 utilitarian motive with our will is one sure 
 stepping-stone to the Christian faith . * * This 
 faith can be kept alive," said Cardinal 
 Newman, "only by personal holiness of 
 life." It is not irreverent to classify the in- 
 tellectual concessions rendered imperative 
 by the willingness just to be useful, or by 
 the view of life that the object is greater 
 than the way in which it is achieved, with 
 those greater sacrifices of faith which in- 
 duced men to go uncomplaining to physical 
 death for others. This is far from saying 
 that the end justifies the means. I plead 
 only for the adoption of a concession that is 
 as ennobling as it is invaluable. 
 
 The great risks and sacrifices that doctors 
 have ever been willing to accept — and our 
 profession yields to none in the long list 
 of willing martyrs to duty, or the advance- 
 ment of learning, when the value of the 
 object in view has been demonstrated to 
 them — is indisputable. It would indeed 
 
50 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 ill become so humble a member as myself 
 to offer any criticism whatever on a pro- 
 fession able to claim such a record of heroic 
 deeds for the sake of others. I am but ven- 
 turing to suggest, because I love it above 
 all others, that it too may not yet have 
 mounted high enough on the hill of divine 
 truth to value to the full the glories of its 
 own opportunities. 
 
 I make this statement because I am ab- 
 solutely convinced of the value of religious 
 faith to the bodies as well as to the souls 
 of men, and because the true physician 
 must minister to the whole man if he is to 
 accomplish his best work. Nor is this de- 
 duction founded upon abstract argument, 
 but upon concrete proof. Admitting as we 
 must that prevention is better than cure, 
 my own experience teaches me that the 
 Christian faith has succeeded in eliminat- 
 ing causes of disease by stimulating people 
 to adopt the provisions of preventive 
 medicine. It is conceded that the greater 
 number of bodily ailments are avoidable 
 
CHRIST AND THE INDIVIDUAL 51 
 
 and due to preventable causes; and that 
 the real contagion that produces many 
 diseases is evil spiritual influences, such as 
 feeble wills, together with evil companion- 
 ship and bad environment. It does not 
 take special knowledge or apparatus to 
 discern this fact. 
 
 Lawyers and clergy, as well as doctors, 
 know the endless evils to which alcohol 
 leads. True, they may not attribute di- 
 rectly to it the subtle sclerosis of liver and 
 kidney and brain, the hard artery, the fat 
 and generally degenerate body. But they 
 see the poverty, starvation, cruelty, ac- 
 cidents, and injuries to which it leads. This 
 is just as true of the sexual and social vices. 
 They see the provisions that society makes 
 to pander to them, the red-Hght districts, 
 the ruined girls, the debased men. But 
 they do not, as we do, see young wives most 
 literally murdered, blighted and miserable 
 children, and the evident results in re- 
 ducing vitality, making people incapable 
 of withstanding disease or responding to 
 
52 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 surgical help, or in producing cancer or in- 
 sanity. This is no less true in the case of the 
 other great enemy of our race, tuberculo- 
 sis. 
 
 If the employers of labor were Christian 
 men following Christ, labor would receive 
 fairer reward, workmen would be better 
 housed and able to provide more healthful 
 conditions for their families. Cleanliness, 
 ventilation, and sanitation would be made 
 easy instead of almost impossible. It would 
 seem that the physician might well object 
 to the ideal Christian conditions. Surely 
 Christ-following is my worst enemy, for 
 there will be no room for me in a really 
 Christian community, when tuberculosis, 
 sclerosis, typhoid and social evils are eradi- 
 cated. In the City Beautiful of the Christian 
 vision it is said there shall be no more sick- 
 ness or suffering or death. Unless the call- 
 ing of the physician is a mere isolated fac- 
 tor, disjointedly cast into a hotch-potch 
 of a universe without definite aims and 
 views, this must be the ideal he wishes to 
 
CHRIST AND THE ESHDIVroUAL 53 
 
 attain. If he does not believe it is ever 
 realizable, and yet thinks of it at all, his 
 only alternative is insanity. 
 
 The answer is simple. It is this that is the 
 glory of our profession, namely, that, work- 
 ing in the spirit of the Master, it must 
 evolve, its keynote being self-elimination. 
 It has cleared the Panama of yellow fever; 
 it has banished typhus and plague and 
 black death, and almost eradicated small- 
 pox, diphtheria, and malaria; it has broken 
 the back of cerebro-spinal meningitis and 
 sleeping sickness, and many other ills of 
 the flesh. The world does acclaim that the 
 doctor is the best missionary if only he 
 has the vision and follows it. I heard Sir 
 Frederic Treves, the famous surgeon, aptly 
 say, "Medicine is the best education in the 
 world, yet it seems the worst profession to 
 follow." Because, while it gives men in- 
 finite power, incomparable opportunities, 
 when competition from overcrowding of 
 the profession arises it leads to such awful 
 temptations. A selfish politician, lawyer. 
 
54 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 clergyman, or merchant has not quite the 
 same power over flesh and blood, and does 
 not depend so directly upon other people's 
 misfortunes for his income. But it was the 
 Master's profession, if he had a special one, 
 and to me it calls as loudly for men of his 
 mind and life, with the true Christ-following 
 faith, as ever it did, and as insistently. It 
 still calls for men endued with the power 
 that comes from on high, as well as with 
 an up-to-date knowledge of surgical pro- 
 cedure, and fully sympathetic with the 
 desire which made Paul say, "I am eager 
 to tell the good news, since faith is the 
 power by which God brings salvation." 
 
 To be more concrete for a moment, I would 
 state that the whole stress of the modern 
 view of medicine is that fresh air, pure food, 
 more hours of rest, better playgrounds, and 
 schools and garden villages are a more 
 remunerative investment from a medical 
 point of view than an enlarged pharma- 
 copoeia. The use of drugs seems to be falling 
 more and more into unprofessional hands, 
 
CHRIST AND THE INDIVmUAL 55 
 
 and I doubt very much if the unquahfied 
 chemist and patent-medicine vendor are 
 not far the firmest behevers in them. Of 
 course there are valuable drugs, and natur- 
 ally the physician should know best how 
 to handle them. But often enough he gets 
 into a routine, and it has been said that 
 the average doctor never uses more than a 
 dozen diflferent prescriptions, and those no 
 longer contain a dozen ingredients each. 
 I asked a world-famous surgeon the other 
 day what he used if he sprained his own 
 ankle. He named a well-known patent 
 liniment; for an irritable cut or scratch he 
 used a patent ointment; for a digestive 
 trouble, a famous patent pill. 
 
 On the other hand, who to-day doubts 
 the intimate correlation between health of 
 mind and of body, or the mutual inter- 
 relation and dependency of both of these 
 with the soul, which expresses itself through 
 them. Take for instance the nervous in- 
 stability that results from the high pres- 
 sure of modern life. What an enormous 
 
56 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 factor it forms in the category of sicknesses. 
 The records of every member of om- pro- 
 fession well confirm the statement that a 
 large proportion among our cases consists 
 of neurosis, neurasthenia, nervous prostra- 
 tion, and so-called functional and idio- 
 pathic disorders dependent upon causes 
 the nature of which we cannot identify 
 under the microscope, but which we think 
 are due to brain-cell instability. What a 
 long step toward the millennial conditions 
 will be covered when these disturbances 
 can be banished. 
 
 Once in a clergyman's ^ study before 
 morning service I noticed on his table a pile 
 of unopened letters quite a foot in height. 
 "Why don't you open your letters?" I 
 asked. — "Those all came this morning," 
 was the reply. — "They are all from people 
 wanting help or money?" — "No, mostly 
 for nervous disorders and such troubles." — 
 " I wish you would give me an example." — 
 "Well, here is one. This young man has 
 
 * Dr. Elwood Worcester, Emmanuel Church, Boston. 
 
CHRIST AND THE INDIVIDUAL 57 
 
 been to no less than three doctors, and 
 in one hospital, for subjective stomach 
 troubles. They found no cause they could 
 remove. We discovered he had a burden on 
 his mind, which he could n't get rid of. It 
 prevented his sleeping. We found we could 
 help him, and he has lost all his pains." 
 
 One day while I was attending Dr. Bar- 
 ker's clinic at Johns Hopkins, the first pa- 
 tient brought into the theatre gave much 
 the following history. He had had nose 
 trouble, went to a specialist and had his 
 adenoids removed; got throat trouble, and 
 had his tonsils out; got bladder trouble, 
 and had his prostate removed; got an ob- 
 scure pain in his abdomen, and had his 
 appendix out; had headaches and pain 
 in the eyes, went to an eye specialist and 
 got glasses. Altogether this was the tenth 
 clinic he had experienced. On entering 
 the very room in which we sat we had heard 
 the sound of the builders of an enormous 
 new wing to the hospital, for which millions 
 of dollars had been given. Dr. Barker ex- 
 
58 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 plained to his classes, as soon as the patient 
 had gone out, that in all probability this 
 new psychiatric hospital might have saved 
 this unfortunate gentleman some of his 
 organs. It is quite an error to suppose that 
 specialization and limitation of a surgeon's 
 field always marks the advance of scienti- 
 fic treatment. On the contrary, in ancient 
 Rome there were specialists on diseases 
 of the eyelashes. I presume if they could 
 have made a living they would have 
 specialized on one eyelash. That a germ, 
 a poison, a fee; or an injury, a knife, a clean 
 scar, should describe the whole role of the 
 doctor, is untenable. 
 
 At the beginning of this lecture I sug- 
 gested that prejudice against lay inter- 
 ference is as characteristic of our profes- 
 sion as of any other. We certainly believe, 
 and every now and again state, that there 
 is no "hinterland" containing remedial 
 methods of demonstrable value outside our 
 own field, though our aslyums for the in- 
 sane plainly show us that no one is so in- 
 
CHRIST AND THE INDIVTOUAL 59 
 
 conceivably certain he is right, and knows 
 it all, as the person of unsound mind. It 
 is lamentable but true that we have to con- 
 fess this, though that is better than that 
 we should have to learn that there is some 
 value in the statement from outsiders like 
 Bernard Shaw. 
 
 Recently the English papers have been 
 full of a lawsuit against a well-known mani- 
 pulator of joints and bones in London. This 
 man, though without a professional degree, 
 has for years, according to the evidence of 
 his numerous patients among the rich and 
 educated, been effecting cures of joint 
 troubles. A patient with an incurable knee 
 trouble who went to him endeavored sub- 
 sequently to get money out of him, alleging 
 malpractice. The hostility and generally 
 unfair attitude of the doctors who were 
 called in as witnesses evoked a most con- 
 vincing and scathing article in a magazine, 
 from one of the most famous of the English 
 surgeons, enumerating cases that he had 
 himself been unable to relieve and which 
 
60 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 had been greatly benefited when he sent 
 them to the defendant. He clearly proved 
 that the man knew and used methods 
 which we ought to adopt as being superior 
 to our own. It so happened that one of my 
 friends in India whose polo pony fell upon 
 him had an exactly similar experience with 
 this very bonesetter. While I believe pa- 
 tent remedies as a rule are used in inverse 
 proportion to the intelligence of the people, 
 I claim that humility rather than arro- 
 gance is the best attribute of the physician, 
 and that more faith in powers outside him- 
 self is justifiable and desirable. Osteopathy, 
 Eddyism, Dowieism, faith-healing, opto- 
 logy, and all extreme swings of the pen- 
 dulum of protest, afford evidence of the 
 desirability of the larger view for which I 
 am pleading. There can be no doubt of the 
 physical value of a peaceful mind. Yet 
 it almost cost Mesmer his reputation and 
 his life when he suggested that mind could 
 be made a remedy for bodily ailments. 
 Morton, the unfortunate introducer of 
 
CHRIST AND THE INDIVIDUAL 61 
 
 ether, fared even worse. Harvey, the dis- 
 coverer of the circulation of the blood, met 
 a similar fate. Lister did not escape bitter 
 attacks when he discovered antiseptics. 
 Whole societies have come into existence 
 to discredit the work of men like Jenner, 
 Pasteur, and other incomparable benefac- 
 tors of our race, while no available means 
 are to-day neglected to prevent the oppor- 
 tunity of acquiring new truths by experi- 
 ments on animals; to minimize the value 
 of the results achieved, or even to injure 
 the personal reputation of those who are 
 humane enough to endure being so greatly 
 misunderstood in order to minister to man- 
 kind. 
 
 It cost Paul much suflfering and eventu- 
 ally death to advocate at Rome faith in 
 the Christ as the means of a man's salva- 
 tion. The same preaching of the same Gos- 
 pel, interpreted in terms of our modern 
 view of what Christianity means, its ap- 
 plicability to the whole man, has, to my 
 knowledge, cost more than one good man 
 
62 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 almost as bitter an experience of hostility 
 in the United States of America; for I 
 question if words do not hurt as much as 
 stones and whips, in these days when the 
 advance of civilization has made us "more 
 sensitive to and more capable of suffering." 
 The preacher of to-day is saying that not 
 only are physical remedies called for, not 
 only are mental suggestions needed, but 
 that we must ourselves be channels of the 
 higher life, through which spiritual streams 
 from the Power above us must come forth, 
 if we are to contribute our best service 
 to our fellow men. In this latter point we 
 rejoice that he is beginning to overtake 
 George Fox, who preached the same mes- 
 sage three hundred years ago. We must 
 consciously reach up our trolley arm, that 
 contact with the Power above may give us 
 an impetus which we cannot have of our- 
 selves. 
 
 The value of mental suggestion has been 
 greatly impressed upon me by many cases 
 in my own experience. The following will 
 
CHRIST AND THE INDIVIDUAL 63 
 
 serve as an example. While the guest of a 
 doctor in Montreal I was much interested 
 by his experiments in alcoholic cases with 
 chloride of gold, which I had always thought 
 to be an inert drug. A whole series of cases 
 of ordinary alcoholism and of paroxysmal 
 dipsomania were successfully treated, many 
 of which had defied all former efforts. One 
 specially interesting case was that of a 
 cook who for over forty years had been a 
 chronic rather than a periodic drunkard. 
 She was savagely drunk when she came to 
 the surgery, and a better impersonation of 
 our vague idea of the Devil I have never 
 seen. She was immediately injected with 
 gold chloride and told she could drink all 
 the whiskey she liked, but that soon she 
 would n't care for it. She came again next 
 day and was admitted to a private ward 
 for a few days' rest and upbuilding. She 
 was again injected and told to go on drink- 
 ing the liquor, which was actually poured 
 out and put in a glass on the table beside 
 her bed. She was also told not to drink it 
 
64 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 if she did n't like it, since now that she had 
 been given the drug the Hquor would make 
 her sick. I went in to see her that evening. 
 The whiskey on the table was untouched. 
 She made a good recovery and returned to 
 her occupation. I not only purchased the 
 drugs and outfit, and tried them, but sent 
 the directions to a well-known London 
 physician to try also; but in our hands the 
 system failed. Some years later the Mon- 
 treal doctor, who was to read a paper on 
 the subject before the medical society there, 
 wired me to come and testify to the authen- 
 ticity of some of his cures, as he feared the 
 society was hostile to him. He read his care- 
 fully prepared paper, and narrated case 
 after case. Afterwards, I gave my con- 
 firmatory evidence. The president said, 
 and the meeting indorsed the statement, 
 that chloride of gold in their hands was 
 as useless as water, but none of them for 
 one moment doubted that in the hands of 
 the author it was perfectly successful. 
 Recently Lord Mount Stephen gave a 
 
CHRIST AND THE INDIVIDUAL 65 
 
 large share of his immense wealth away to 
 his heirs and friends, that in his Kfe he 
 might have the real joy of sharing it with 
 others. 
 
 "... For if our virtues 
 Did not go forth of us, 't were all alike 
 As if we had them not." ^ 
 
 A doctor's joys, no more than his success, 
 can be estimated by the size of his fees, or 
 what he gets out of his profession, but only 
 by what he contributes to it. That "he 
 who will be greatest must be the servant of 
 all " is certainly true of this ministry. This 
 is surely what the lawyer and the clergy- 
 man and the doctor desire : the conversion 
 of the aims and efforts of the mind, the body, 
 and the soul. When this is realized, a man 
 may say, "I am a living factor in the cre- 
 ative purpose, and fidelity in my place is 
 the test of the effectiveness of the whole 
 design. This unity of the world saves some 
 men from the conceit of wisdom, as it saves 
 others from the despondency of work." 
 
 1 Measure for Measure, i, i, 34-36. 
 
66 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 To refer to the value of ministering to 
 the whole man and not to connect it with 
 the name of Dr. Richard Cabot were im- 
 possible. While approaching it from an- 
 other point of view, the world is learning 
 to look upon him as chief apostle of the need 
 for this all-inclusive ministry. 
 
 Myers has said that when it is a ques- 
 tion of inquiring into whether mind acts 
 on mind without the body, savants can- 
 not, and theologians will not, accept evi- 
 dence. But while there may be much truth 
 in satirizing many preachers as Stigginses, 
 I am convinced that it is not the whole 
 truth, any more than that there is no truth 
 in the subliminal self. 
 
 To turn now to the second division of 
 our lecture, the profession of the law. I 
 almost fear to tread on that ground. Though 
 acting as a magistrate for over ten years, 
 I am obliged to confess that I have been 
 unhampered by any special knowledge of 
 the technicalities of the profession, and 
 as a medical exponent I have naturally 
 
CHRIST AND THE INDIVmUAL 67 
 
 had a remedial and not a retributive 
 bias. 
 
 Surely, the true lawyer's ideal is not a 
 crime, a retribution, a fee, though he too 
 is tempted to keep so close to the mill which 
 grinds out dollars that he may lose the full 
 vision of his potentiality. Christ as a law- 
 yer would, exactly as if a doctor, be work- 
 ing for big and worthy ends, — to produce 
 conditions that would abolish crime, — and 
 so unselfishly working for the elimination 
 of his own profession. To me it seems just 
 as certain that if the true physician must 
 treat the whole man, if he is to cure phys- 
 ical ailments, so moral obliquities demand 
 the same treatment of the true lawyer. That 
 disease leads to sin and crime is quite as 
 true as that sin and crime lead to disease. 
 A man in the full flush of health and in good 
 surroundings is less likely to become a 
 criminal than a weakling in a bad environ- 
 ment. 
 
 One of our first pieces of work among the 
 fishermen was to oust the floating grogshops 
 
68 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 from the fishing fleet, by supplying vessels 
 in their midst which made provision for all 
 their legitimate demands: such as cheap 
 tobacco, social opportunities, and simple 
 religious teaching, but not alcoholic liquors. 
 This policy so commended itself to the 
 magistrates of the fishing seaports, that 
 we hold their written and unasked testi- 
 monials to the lessening of crime and even 
 the reduction of police forces in the fisher- 
 men's quarters, and the diminution of 
 poverty and the need of poor-relief. Event- 
 ually the results seemed so desirable to 
 conservative governments bordering the 
 German Ocean that they agreed to an in- 
 ternational convention. It favored and 
 enforced the most severe laws against sell- 
 ing any liquors on the high seas, on the sole 
 ground that if their environment was im- 
 proved, the lives of the people would also 
 be improved, a deduction fully indorsed by 
 the results founded on the experimental, 
 the best of all bases. The same principle 
 obtained on the shore when we supplied 
 
CHRIST AND THE INDIVmUAL 69 
 
 institutes belonging to the fishermen, and 
 had laws passed to prevent wages being 
 paid in saloons or annexes thereto. The 
 same results accrued in Labrador and North 
 Newfoundland when the sale of liquor was 
 prohibited in a region where such a law 
 could be enforced. The aged mayor of 
 Portland, Maine, near the close of a most 
 successful business career, told me that 
 though the liquor traflSc, almost all-power- 
 ful, had done its best to make the prohib- 
 ition laws ineffective, and to falsify their 
 results, crime had unquestionably been 
 lessened. 
 
 The absence of the environment of the 
 open saloon and flaunting windows, and 
 the nameless crimes connected with that 
 traffic, are alike dependent largely on the 
 prevention of the sale of intoxicants. The 
 celebrated Judge Altgeld, when governor 
 of Illinois, stated pithily that ninety-five 
 per cent of crimes of violence and burglary 
 were due to the same cause (alcohol). To 
 my mind part of the privilege of the life- 
 
70 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 work of the Christian lawyer is to help to 
 improve the environment of the tempted 
 classes. To see justice impartially admin- 
 istered is of course his supreme special 
 function; and there again he has the same 
 opportunities as the doctor for the real joys 
 of personal service to the oppressed, and for 
 righting the wrongs of the injured. But 
 would any worthy member of the bar con- 
 tend that therewith ended the function of 
 the true lawyer; that to exact retribution, 
 to deter evildoers by threats, or even to 
 get justice for those in trouble, made a 
 great lawyer .^^ Such a course might make 
 him a rich lawyer, a popular lawyer, but 
 would not make him great. To render 
 crime unattractive, to implant new as- 
 pirations, to regenerate the individual, and 
 to make laws remedial, are surely truer 
 claims to immortality. 
 
 The laws have been framed by the pow- 
 erful of a generation gone, and naturally 
 leave us a heritage that demands remodel- 
 ing if it is to meet the needs of a new era. 
 
CHRIST AND THE INDIVIDUAL 71 
 
 Why should men hesitate to apply the 
 same test to the dogmas of the churches, 
 which are the outgrowths of despotism, 
 and not applicable to a true democracy as 
 are its teachings? A real human sympathy 
 with the life of to-day shows that there 
 is infinite opportunity for simplifying the 
 processes of the law, if it is to express our 
 views of Christ's ideal of brotherhood, or 
 even to give the poor man a chance of get- 
 ting justice or to make the rich man fear 
 punishment. 
 
 While working eight years in the purlieus 
 of Whitechapel, I learned beyond all ques- 
 tion, first, that often all the punishments 
 invented by the law and all the provisions 
 made for the protection of life and pro- 
 perty failed in many cases; and further, I 
 saw, as I have seen since that time, that 
 the very men whom the punishments only 
 made worse were perfectly capable of re- 
 formation. Intelligent sympathy and prac- 
 tical love cure individuals who have been 
 pronounced incurable — the very methods 
 
72 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 the Master advocated and calls for still. 
 Among such translations of love is the 
 administration of the new kind of prisons, 
 such as that of the Massachusetts Reform- 
 atory. Here men are not punished again 
 and again in prison for little or big breaches 
 of discipline, but are simply helped not 
 to fail by offering them temptations to 
 be good and by rewards for success in the 
 attempt. Thus, instead of insane isolation 
 and brutalization, making men revengeful 
 and despairing, interesting and remunera- 
 tive industries are taught and work is de- 
 manded, — good solid work, a temptation 
 many criminals never get outside, and a 
 gain, as they never had a chance to learn 
 any craft before. More important still, 
 good work is immediately made remunera- 
 tive. Decorations, such as good conduct 
 stripes, are displayed on the uniforms, and 
 each new one means a shortened sentence. 
 Responsibility and trust are gradually 
 given them, and self-respect, hope, and 
 aspiration induced and encouraged; pride 
 
CHRIST AND THE INDIVIDUAL 73 
 
 and even esprit de corps are cultivated, — 
 though as yet there are no inter-reforma- 
 tory athletic contests, so far as I know! 
 
 There are plenty of people, however, 
 who still maintain "once a criminal, al- 
 ways a criminal." There are many ever 
 ready to condemn to the pathologically in- 
 curable class, those who often enough are 
 only the victims of circumstance. The Mas- 
 ter never was among these critics. He 
 was ever the world's apostle of optimism 
 and of hope. The amazing records of this 
 Reformatory show that seventy-five per 
 cent of these poor fellows are cured; of the 
 remainder, fifteen per cent being physical 
 degenerates. I say poor fellows, for my 
 view is that they are to be pitied, if only 
 because of the hell on earth which they 
 make for themselves, and the loss of ca- 
 pacity and the vision of what God intended 
 them to be. But unless we have a vision 
 ourselves of the true greatness of our op- 
 portunity, we can hardly expect to sympa- 
 thize with them for their blindness. 
 
74 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 It is not the intellectual faculties to 
 which Christianity seeks to supply new 
 information, but it is the heart that it is 
 necessary to reach. The Master always 
 taught that the renewal and perfecting of 
 a man was dependent upon a new heart, and 
 no one has improved on that treatment that 
 I know of. The efforts of the conventional, 
 perfunctory religious teacher, hke those of 
 the sloppy and shallow pietist, remind me 
 strongly of such drugs as tartarated anti- 
 mony. If rightly given, the desired result 
 is obtained, but if wrongly, it is promptly 
 rejected. It is not religiosity or intellec- 
 tualism, but love, that is needed. I claim 
 that the great lawyer will be as eager as 
 any specialist in talking, to translate wisely, 
 into permanent effective methods for re- 
 clamation, the true religion, namely, the 
 love that saves. 
 
 Dr. Richard Cabot and others in medi- 
 cine. Dr. Elwood Worcester and other 
 clergy, have accepted and eloquently 
 taught by example and precept the neces- 
 
CHRIST AND THE INDIVIDUAL 75 
 
 sity and the privilege in their two profes- 
 sions of considering causally and remedially 
 the family and the immediate home sur- 
 roundings of those they are endeavoring 
 to help. Of course a great deal of a law- 
 yer's work does not permit any such oppor- 
 tunity, yet I feel that the Master himself 
 as a lawyer to-day would find chances to 
 exercise the same spirit. ^Etiology and 
 pathology, sociology and theology, have 
 found a parallel in the study of criminology 
 which is evidence of the opening of fresh 
 and glorious channels for life energies in 
 the sister profession of the law. So young 
 is it, however, that the Italian Lombroso, 
 who is considered the parent of it, is still 
 living in Italy. Germany has developed 
 the study, and Professor Wigmore of 
 Chicago is responsible for a society and a 
 journal of criminology of Illinois. 
 
 In the amusing comic opera, the "Mi- 
 kado," a verse of song runs: — 
 
 "My object all sublime 
 I shall achieve in time. 
 
76 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 To make the punishment fit the crime. 
 The punishment fit the crime." 
 
 Yet what an ideal service, what a real suc- 
 cess and joy the universal accomplishment 
 or even serious effort toward its fulfillment 
 would be, working in the Master's spirit 
 of love for the man and hatred for the sin. 
 That would imply that success in the effort 
 spelled new men out of old, though science 
 and evolution call the criminals hopeless. 
 The real object of the lawyer's life can 
 be attained only by offering his quota, 
 infinitesimal though it be; but he can 
 contribute it by reincarnating the spirit 
 of the Master. 
 
 I would inquire here in what possible 
 way the achievement of this glorious and 
 ultimate end can be materially influenced 
 by the lawyer's mere mental apprehension 
 of or submission to subtle theologic dogmas 
 or refinements in the precise method of ex- 
 pressing his devotion to God. What con- 
 nection have such things, 'per se, with real 
 religion? They may help his religion, but 
 
CHRIST AND THE INDIVIDUAL 77 
 
 they are not it. Plain, common courage 
 has much more influence than intellectual 
 attitude. Heney, who in the face of almost 
 every pessimist on earth, in the face of ap- 
 palling difficulties and opposition, in the 
 face of persecution and attempted murder, 
 sent the great civic burglars in San Fran- 
 cisco to jail, preached a gospel in the true 
 spirit of the Christ. For a poor Carpenter 
 to stand alone before the powers that be, 
 knowing that no protection was afforded 
 life by the law of his day, and say publicly, 
 "You generation of vipers! How can you 
 escape the damnation of hell?" required 
 courage, not theology. The cross of Christ 
 calls for intelligent courage and not intellec- 
 tual effacement and mere ability to swal- 
 low. When Heney went back after scarcely 
 recovering from his wounds, and faced the 
 court, and again, after two mistrials, com- 
 menced a third, he, a volunteer, unpaid 
 in dollars, fighting almost as a lone man 
 against the immeasurable burden of hatred 
 and opposition, to me presented at least 
 
78 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 one aspect of the truly great Christian 
 lawyer. 
 
 What is a corporation lawyer to do, you 
 say, when possibly his very living depends 
 upon his winning a technicality for the 
 bosses against equity for the community. 
 Abraham Lincoln would not take cases 
 when he knew his side was in the wrong, 
 and that winning meant doing a wrong. 
 To connive at the defeat of justice is to 
 prostitute a holy duty. That's all; you 
 must be brave if you are to have courage. 
 You must take adverse chances if you are 
 to be a hero. It is simply a question of 
 what you seek in life. The purely imper- 
 sonal position of the lawyer of course is the 
 easiest path, exactly as it is for the doctor 
 who asks, as Cabot says, "What is in the 
 waiting-room? Anything of interest.?" I 
 acknowledge that to sympathize with each 
 case is difficult; it makes a claim on a law- 
 yer which must ciu*tail his practice. But he 
 is doing what he would like done for him 
 were he the client. And I am contending 
 
CHRIST AND THE INDIVIDUAL 79 
 
 that it is possible, and constitutes the true 
 scale by which to measure greatness, and 
 is what the Master would give, and what 
 faith in him calls for. 
 
 Although owing to lack of time I have 
 been unable to touch upon the three types 
 of mind into which it would appear one 
 might divide men, — the scientific, the lit- 
 erary, and the practical, — still I maintain 
 that one principle applies to all. "But Jesus 
 does not classify people. He gathers up the 
 different types of human life into one com- 
 prehensive unity of discipleship." ^ In 
 discussing the doctor and the lawyer I be- 
 lieve that I have in substance demonstrated 
 the working-out of the Christian ideal, 
 whatever the category into which a man 
 may fall. "There is no activity of man 
 which may not be the door, and into which 
 and through which cannot enter that power 
 of God which makes the man indeed to be 
 God's servant." ^ 
 
 1 Paradise, The Church and the Individual, 
 
 2 Phillips Brooks. 
 
LECTURE III 
 
 CHRIST AND SOCIETY 
 
 "Granted the reality of religion, what is 
 its contribution to modern life?" I have 
 already warned you that my idea in these 
 lectures is to defend the rationality and 
 value of faith in Christ on the iDasis of my 
 own physical, mental, and spiritual experi- 
 ences. I do not pretend that I possess 
 scientific acquaintance with our peculiar 
 social conditions, nor do I claim to have 
 any special expert knowledge of the most 
 successful ways of improving them. The 
 world is just learning that the first can only 
 be gained by the same patient study we 
 devote to medicine or law; the second, I 
 am certain, only by a life of personal de- 
 votion. 
 
 It is necessary to do, not merely to talk, 
 if we are to know the truth about the reme- 
 dies for life's troubles and difficulties. Still, 
 
CHRIST AND SOCIETY 81 
 
 with Browning, I realize that "God must 
 be gained by first leap," and the object of 
 this lecture is not to show that by any 
 intellectual process man by searching can 
 demonstrate God, but only that, with the 
 advance of civilization, there is not a less 
 but an ever-increasing need for what real 
 religion has to contribute. There is proof 
 enough of this on every hand for the man 
 who is willing to experiment, to justify to 
 his own mind his taking that leap, for 
 society's benefit if not for his own. 
 
 One thing more is necessary to be made 
 clear before going further, and that is, 
 what do we mean by religion? Byreligion,\ 
 in this lecture, I mean that following of the / 
 Christ which is a daily endeavor to inter- L 
 prethis teachings by translating them into { 
 action; or, in other words, trying to do whaty 
 he would do if he were in our circumstances. 
 If you were a housemaid, that would re- 
 quire you, in the words of the Salvation 
 Army hymn, "to dust the shelf behind 
 the door"; or if you were a king, "just to 
 
82 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 king well," as one of your own humorists 
 suggests. 
 
 Jesus was peculiar among religious teach- 
 ers in being "no mere speculative philo- 
 sopher," no pure scientist for science' 
 sake. He was not of the type of Holmes's 
 Scarabee. I always think of him as the 
 family physician of the human race. Re- 
 ligion to him existed for the purpose of 
 action; it was valuable solely for the serv- 
 ice of mankind. In the very simplest 
 language he tells us, not what God would 
 have us think, but what God would have 
 us do; putting within the reach of our daily 
 life that which not only spells our redemp- 
 tion here and now, but also enables us 
 to be redeemers ourselves, and so allows 
 us to contribute that which is lasting to 
 modern life. Was it not exactly in this 
 faith that these lectures were founded .^^ 
 
 Yet religion in the past has spent far 
 more time and energy, and endured far 
 more suffering and sacrifice and defeat, in 
 endeavoring to perpetuate crystallized intel- 
 
CHRIST AND SOCIETY 83 
 
 lectual attitudes and man-advised organ- 
 izations, all calling themselves "churches/* 
 than in trying to reincarnate the life of the 
 Master in their own. 
 
 A few years ago the visible churches 
 awoke to the fact that they were fast be- 
 coming what is known as "back numbers"; 
 and that the profession of the minister of 
 religion was in danger of being side-tracked. 
 They are awake now, however, and on 
 all sides they are olBFering an increasingly 
 valuable quota to modern civilization. 
 "Churches" to me comprise all those reli- 
 gious institutions which, through helping 
 forward the reign of peace, mercy, and 
 reverence, induce righteousness, joy, and 
 peace, which is the Kingdom of God. Christ 
 himself says that their labels do not count 
 for anything. The way we salute our gen- 
 eral is of much less importance than the 
 way we obey him. Victory is more momen- 
 tous than tactics. "Christian men," to 
 the Master, were those who were on his 
 side, and every such institution, whether 
 
84 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 Protestant or Catholic, Jewish or purely 
 ethical,^is directly enriching our hfe to- 
 day. Nor is "the state merely a local as- 
 sociation existing to prevent mutual injury 
 and promote universal exchange. . . . The 
 object of the political association is not 
 merely a common life, but noble action," 
 says Aristotle.^ 
 
 The churches are awaking to the fact that 
 the state can and must be "religious"; and 
 that just in proportion as an institution 
 has no creed, its religion can be universal. 
 Christ himself propounded no creed, and 
 all the churches can unite on those lines 
 which call for no special creed, but merely 
 for the recognition of man's brotherhood, 
 which each and every church acknowledges. 
 In this way we see the great hope of their 
 future in the federation of churches which 
 is everywhere growing up, and which is 
 striving to unite all their ejfforts for the 
 betterment of social conditions. 
 
 Let us take now, as instances, some of the 
 * Dr. Lyman Abbott, Yak Lectures, 
 
CHRIST AND SOCIETY 85 
 
 outgrowths of the churches. I myself have 
 seen enough of the Young Men's Christian 
 Association and Young Women's Christian 
 Association to know that, with their 
 splendid buildings and intelligent work, 
 they are materially adding to the comfort 
 and upUft of Hfe of tens of thousands, nay, 
 of thousands of thousands, not only in this 
 country, but the whole world round. They 
 have even tried to make war comfortable. 
 Apparently it narrows the limits of agencies 
 to have to give examples and to name any 
 particular helpful factors; but a doctor is 
 impelled to illustrate his principles by 
 quoting cases. Thus, again, who that 
 knows anything of Robert College and its 
 work, which helped so much to give free- 
 dom to Turkey; of the Beyrout College 
 and its magnificent work for Syria and for 
 the Mohammedan world generally; of the 
 colleges in India which have shown that, 
 given a chance, the downtrodden classes 
 can successfully compete with the highest 
 castes; of the huge hospitals in China, Ja- 
 
86 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 pan, India, and the Islands of the Sea, — 
 but knows perfectly well the truth that the 
 churches are contributing liberally. To the 
 nations everywhere Christianity is teach- 
 ing the real value of human life, and so, 
 especially in the East, is raising the whole 
 aspiration of the people by making them 
 understand what they may become. This 
 is so much the case that in Japan the 
 wisest scholars have declared that only 
 in Christianity can they see an adequate 
 basis for individual and national life. They 
 make this statement in spite of the facts 
 of the liquor and opium traffic carried on by 
 Christian nations; in spite of anti-Christian 
 travelers, bad officials, the selfishness of 
 so-called governments, and the fallibility 
 of missionaries and their methods. 
 
 To-day there is so much prejudice against 
 the title "missionary" that many people, 
 apparently, prefer to consider their lives 
 purposeless rather than to admit that 
 "mission" is only a synonym for "life." 
 We must remember that there are many 
 
CHRIST AND SOCIETY 87 
 
 failures in American social life, and yet 
 here also are many lives which are eflPect- 
 ive contributions to the world's economy. 
 I do not wish to weary you with examples, 
 but my interests being among sailors I 
 might here testify to the value of such 
 splendid institutes as that of your Ameri- 
 can Seaman's Society, recently erected in 
 New York; to the similarly efficient but less 
 expensive plants here in Boston, and to in- 
 stitutions of the same kind scattered all 
 round the world. These all give men who 
 are away from their homes a warm welcome, 
 a place to rest and play, a good cheap lodg- 
 ing, and a safeguard from the land-shark 
 and the crimp. Through all of these relig- 
 ion is making a serious Christian eflfort 
 towards the solution of a problem which 
 menaces the domestic life of those whose 
 life-service to the community necessarily 
 deprives them of the natural protection 
 and help of their own homes. To me this 
 is simply paying a debt to those to whom 
 the cost of catching our fish and transport- 
 
88 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 ing our merchandise is often only to be 
 reckoned in "lives of men." It is still the 
 privilege of religion to see that this debt is 
 paid. If she fails to do so, some day it will 
 be recognized by the men themselves as 
 their right, and their own unions will pro- 
 vide it, once more taking from the church 
 a chance to justify herself. Nay, more, this 
 will anyhow be just as surely the case, if 
 into the church's interpretation of relig- 
 ion she introduces the sense of patronage 
 and intellectual superiority which have 
 characterized her too much in the past, and 
 which so ill become her as a servant of the 
 Master. 
 
 There are more instances than one of 
 big plants of this kind, just suited for prac- 
 tical messages of love, being totally unsuc- 
 cessful because their flavor is spoiled by a 
 sense of the "holier-than-thou" arrogance. 
 It is this fact that makes men say that these 
 efforts do little more than touch the real 
 problem. Believe me, it is sadly enough 
 that the working man passes the building 
 
CHRIST AND SOCIETY 89 
 
 which promises exactly what he needs. If 
 he does not enter, it is because he feels that 
 the building is not really his. Per contray 
 an eminently successful eflFort of this kind 
 to meet the needs of the working men is 
 Hollywood Inn at Yonkers, New York. It 
 was created by an Episcopal clergyman,* 
 but is owned and run by the men them- 
 selves. They and their unions all find a home 
 there, as do their clubs, their societies, and 
 their friends. It is theirs. There they play 
 what games they like. It just stands for 
 clean games without gambling, and for 
 drinks without alcohol. No public worship 
 or preaching is considered necessary. It 
 is just a demonstration of love, not a verbal 
 message. As a result of it, Mr. Freeman's 
 church found a thousand new commun- 
 icant members, because he preached the 
 undeniable Gospel. 
 
 Ten thousand other practical agencies 
 are ever more and more trying to do things 
 
 ^ Rev. James Freeman, now of St. Mark's Church, 
 Minneapolis. 
 
90 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 in Christ's spirit, and these are forcing the 
 world to acknowledge the contribution to 
 life which religion can make. The increas- 
 ing number of thoughtful men pouring 
 out of our colleges, anxious to give life 
 and intellect and money to the service of 
 the world, is itself an offering which no 
 man can estimate — though any fool can 
 sneer at it. The growing passion for serv- 
 ice has helped as many to work at home 
 as it has sent out for that purpose to for- 
 eign fields. 
 
 To all intents and purposes, the old idea of 
 the church is dying, if not dead. Thank 
 God if it is. I could say with a whole heart, 
 "The Church is dead! Long live the 
 Church!" 
 
 But while it is good to review what the 
 churches have accomplished, and to be 
 able to derive from that courage and zeal 
 for more service, the fact that there has 
 been some success must be used only to 
 prove to us that we can, and therefore 
 miLsty do more. It is from the lips and pens 
 
CHRIST AND SOCIETY 91 
 
 of acknowledged leaders of many churches, 
 and from those who have given the most 
 earnest thought to the subject, that we learn 
 that, so far as some of the most vital is- 
 sues of modern life are concerned, the visible 
 churches at the present time are practically 
 a side issue. Most assuredly their future 
 existence depends upon the attitude which 
 they now adopt. Other agencies outside 
 all the communions will, if they fall short, 
 take out of their hands the only functions 
 which they can find to occupy their ener- 
 gies. 
 
 Thus, for example, at one time the church 
 aflForded all the educational advantages. 
 At the bar of public opinion she was found 
 guilty of prostituting that sacred office for 
 purely party purposes, and so she has 
 forfeited her right to the performance of 
 that most vital function. 
 
 Social settlement workers, civic leagues, 
 rightly administered labor unions are ad- 
 vancing ends which righteousness demands, 
 and which the churches have considered 
 
92 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 "outside their province." As if they could 
 afford to be silent, or sit on the fence, when 
 any question affecting the vital issues of 
 life was concerned. Only the other day 
 here in Boston, in a book shop, I overheard 
 two clergymen talking of the efforts made 
 by the charity organization in their town 
 to cope with the "social evil." They had 
 evidently been asked to cooperate, and one 
 minister was explaining his refusal to the 
 other by the remark, "But of course that 
 sort of thing is quite outside the church's 
 domain." 
 
 The man who is going to advance the 
 Kingdom of God in the world in any way 
 must be in the world enough to understand 
 it. A clergyman whom I know always 
 dresses in a light business suit and inva- 
 riably lunches at a down-town club, that 
 he may mix with other men, as the Galilean 
 Carpenter did, and so may know the real 
 minds and interests of those he is trying to 
 help. Only by understanding a patient's 
 needs can any physician hope for success. 
 
CHRIST AND SOCIETY 93 
 
 It is no use merely shouting, "Down with 
 rich corporations," however bad they may 
 be, unless we are prepared to find substi- 
 tutes for them. Christ's religion especially 
 is bound to be constructive. There is a 
 danger of the shallow man ^shouting that 
 his voice may be heard, just as there is 
 that the scholar may be led into thinking 
 too much. The proof of this is not diflScult 
 to discover. We have only to go and see 
 why it is that some preachers face empty 
 pews while other churches are packed with 
 men. 
 
 The people in these days gauge things 
 by their practical value; and men go to the 
 church only if it has something to give 
 them. They will go to " divine service'* 
 only if they find it inspires them to express 
 better their own devotion in human serv- 
 ice. This fact has further been exemplified 
 among our own fishermen by a fishermen's 
 union which started twelve months ago, 
 and now has seventeen thousand members. 
 In another twelve months it promises to 
 
94 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 include the whole number of the most 
 virile among them, because it has already- 
 helped them to get a fairer return for their 
 labor, and to make their own voices heard 
 in matters which concern their direct home 
 and personal interests. 
 
 In our country the church buildings are 
 more ornate and comfortable than ever, — 
 better auditoriums, better heated, aired, 
 and seated. The clergy are adding lantern 
 lectures, social gatherings, and all the latest 
 attractions copied from the churches here. 
 But in spite of all this the pews are actually 
 not one whit more crowded than when I 
 went there twenty years ago. 
 
 The fact is that as yet church members 
 have not realized the acuteness of the social 
 problem. In Labrador this is excusable. 
 There we are still living in a period of a 
 hundred years ago. Our laboring classes 
 have not yet acquired the advantages of 
 education. They have only just begun to 
 discover that if the workers go hungry and 
 naked, while the thinkers live in super- 
 
CHRIST AND SOCIETY 95 
 
 fluous luxury, there must be something 
 wrong. Nor do they yet Hve near enough 
 to the offensive selfishness of the idle rich to 
 contrast their condition with the poor op- 
 portunity and wretched lot in life which is 
 the best they can expect their own unceas- 
 ing toil to afford. A large proportion of the 
 aged and physically incapacitated workers 
 still expect at the end of life to have to 
 look to charity for the merest means of sub- 
 sistence. The labor unions have already 
 improved conditions, and the working 
 classes are beginning to see that many 
 things are not right; and that customs pre- 
 vail which the men following Christ should 
 never have countenanced. 
 
 Similarly, your own newspapers almost 
 daily expose some abuse of the control of 
 public utilities which is putting absolutely 
 unfair remuneration into the hands of 
 grafters. These offenses are beginning to 
 grate badly on the sensibilities of the worth- 
 while citizen. 
 ^ The same is true, again, of the injuries 
 
96 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 inflicted upon communities by the hold- 
 ing-up of large tracts of land, and the 
 consequent absorption of the unearned 
 increment, by those who do absolutely no- 
 thing either to produce or to deserve it; who 
 only cramp and crowd unmercifully those 
 whose labor makes the value. The making 
 of outrageous piles of money from the pro- 
 moting of companies, by those who have no 
 intention of carrying on the enterprises, is 
 all wrong. While in London, it was largely 
 advertised that I was to lecture under the 
 title, "Midst Ice and Snow in Labrador." 
 It so happened that quite a number of 
 speculators had recently taken grants for 
 timber areas in our country. Representa- 
 tives from more than one such company 
 offered me remuneration if I would consent 
 to have my name used in connection with 
 the scheme. The value of their proposi- 
 tion to the public was more than doubtful. 
 One at least, which was the most insistent, 
 was to my mind perfectly unsound as an 
 investment, and I knew that no proper 
 
CHRIST AND SOCIETY 97 
 
 precautions had been taken to insure the 
 interests of the investors. It was simply 
 a scheme of rogues for swindling the public 
 and then reaping the benefits. The repre- 
 sentatives were evidently shaking in their 
 shoes as to what I was going to say of the 
 country in my lecture, for they told me 
 that my very title would make it difl5cult 
 for them to sell the shares which they had 
 underwritten. 
 
 Every method of accumulating wealth 
 without working for it, or of reaping greater 
 returns than the work done justifies, is be- 
 ginning to arouse the ire of the great masses 
 of the people. Whether they can find the 
 remedy is open to question, but there is 
 no doubt they are starting to look for it. 
 Thank God, so are some of the churches. 
 The church is bound by its philosophy to 
 believe that it has a contribution for this 
 as well as every other social trouble, and 
 that there is a remedy, and that it is the 
 church's business to find it. 
 
 The other day I came to get a few days* 
 
98 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 rest at one of your large hotels, directly 
 from Labrador, where a man has to work 
 for every cent he earns. Far the most 
 marvelous room in the immense luxm'ious 
 pile was a small one in the basement, with 
 a blackboard all over one side of the wall, 
 on which were endless chalk figm*es. The 
 manager, who was showing me around, 
 said, "I saw one of the guests make six 
 thousand dollars in that room last summer 
 in the course of one morning. He gave a 
 thousand of it to another man, and he lost 
 it in an hour or two. It is really a kind 
 of gambling-hell. They call it the Stock 
 Exchange!" 
 
 A couple of years ago I was in the Casino 
 at Monte Carlo, watching the roulette 
 players. It amused me to see their antics 
 for an hour or so. Yet most of them were 
 playing for only paltry twenty-franc bills. 
 
 All that I am contending is that such 
 indecent display of luxury, and all these 
 other things cannot be right. I am not sug- 
 gesting a remedy. But I am certain that 
 
CHRIST AND SOCIETY 99 
 
 true religion offers one, and offers the only 
 one. 
 
 With us in Labrador there are so few 
 clergy, and so hard is it to get the chance 
 to be married, that it is not an uncommon 
 part of my duties as a siu'geon and a mag- 
 istrate to have to tie the wedding knot. 
 But with us, when it is tied, it is tied, and 
 it is never unloosed. Our law allows no di- 
 vorce. We have to come to the United 
 States and reside six months to obtain that. 
 Bishop Potter, Shailer Mathews, Peabody, 
 and others among our foremost modern 
 thinkers on these matters are unanimous 
 that the relation between husband and 
 wife is second only to that between God 
 and man — is the most sacred human re- 
 lation. We all know what Christ said, — 
 "that a man should forsake all others, and 
 cleave to his wife." 
 
 In France the proportion of divorces is 
 enormous, and the death rate more than 
 ever in excess of the birth rate. But right 
 here in America, even taking into account 
 
100 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 the increase of population, the proportion 
 of divorce in thirty years has increased over 
 one hundred per cent. It is interesting to 
 note that in times of commercial depres- 
 sion the decrease in income has apparently 
 knit the family closer together, and the 
 number of divorces has dropped. It is also 
 interesting to note that the proportion of 
 divorces in the Western States is many 
 times larger than in the Eastern. 
 
 Here again, in our modern life something 
 is wrong. It seems right to me that at last, 
 those who are being heard most forcibly in 
 this matter, are members of the churches. 
 But religion has not yet made itself felt as it 
 might have done, and ought to have done, 
 on so vital a question. Many of us are too 
 busy with om* own little dogmas or ritual 
 or polities, and our own special doctrines, 
 to attend to any of these things. We are 
 so afraid that the saving faith which has 
 outlived nineteen centuries without us 
 needs us now to keep it in the old crystal- 
 lized form in which it was when every 
 
CHRIST AND SOfilETY: ' ^ ' '• \i&i 
 
 single aspect of the life it came to save was 
 different. We consider it far more import- 
 ant for us to see that the remedy is ad- 
 ministered in exactly the same shape as it 
 was then, than that the active principle 
 should be clothed and adapted to the idio- 
 syncrasies, needs, and capacities for assim- 
 ilation of the patients of to-day. If the 
 church stands still, and everything else 
 goes on, it seems quite probable that event- 
 ually she will be left behind. Calomel is 
 the same drug as ever, and is still adminis- 
 tered, but not as it was twenty-five years 
 ago. Even if they are only new forms of 
 old diseases, the treatment of the same old 
 typhoid and the same old heart troubles is 
 quite different nowadays. 
 
 Again, I am certain that no form of 
 government can ever remedy these evils, 
 so long as men's hearts are selfish. There 
 seems little to-day to encourage reformers 
 to hand over money and business respon- 
 sibilities and control to modern legislatures, 
 whether civic, state, or federal. Judging 
 
102 lUE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 by the report in the Book of Exodus, mat- 
 ters don't seem to have improved much 
 since Moses' day. He was able to find one 
 man out of every ten who hated covetous- 
 ness, but he had promptly to appoint such 
 persons to look after the other nine. 
 
 "America, to be saved from barbarism," 
 says Dr. Abbott, "must be safeguarded by 
 force from without, which is despotism, or 
 by force from within, which is religion." 
 He also quotes De Tocqueville, who says: 
 ** Religion is much more necessary in the 
 republic which they [atheistic republicans] 
 set forth in glowing colors than in the 
 monarchy which they attack. It is more 
 needed in democratic republics than in any 
 others. How is it possible that society 
 should escape destruction if the moral tie 
 be not strengthened in proportion as the 
 political tie is relaxed .^^ And what can be 
 done with a people who are their own mas- 
 ters, if they be not submissive to the 
 Deity?" 1 
 
 * Dr. Lyman Abbott, Yale Lectures. 
 
CHRIST AND SOCIETY 103 
 
 But it is no religion of scribe and Phari- 
 see that is needed. It is said of a certain 
 rajah that he kept as a pet a Httle white- 
 haired pig. Nothing would cure it of wal- 
 lowing in every mud pool it came to, till 
 one of the ruler's wisest counsellors suc- 
 ceeded in removing its heart and substi- 
 tuting that of a young lamb. Education 
 cannot give this new heart any more than 
 political institutions can. 
 
 The world needs religion more than ever 
 it did, but a religion that concerns every 
 feature and phase of life. To be perfectly 
 effective, it must separately inspire every 
 individual with the spirit of unselfish love. 
 For society is only an aggregate of individ- 
 uals. That was distinctly the teaching of 
 the Master, and his method of achieving 
 his end. 
 
 It is as important in small matters as 
 in large. Take the hundred and one other 
 get-rich-quick methods, commercial shams 
 and swindles. Reference to such trifles as 
 the use of patent drugs and fraudulent 
 
IM THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 cure-alls imposed upon a gullible public 
 might, it seems, be almost out of place in 
 a discussion of this kind. But I have seen 
 how the sale of these is almost in inverse 
 proportion to the intelligence of the vic- 
 tims, which means so often in proportion 
 to their ability to lose their money. If one 
 of us loses a hundred dollars in a bucket- 
 shop swindle, he can afford to laugh at the 
 cleverness of the trick. But I have seen 
 the bread-winner of a hungry and naked 
 family stinting his children in proper food 
 that he might send twenty dollars for an 
 electric belt which was n't even a belt — 
 much less electric. It is the privilege of 
 those who know (i.e., of religion) to save 
 those of their brethren who can't and don't 
 know for themselves, from all unright- 
 eous imposition. 
 
 Perhaps this is more easily recognized 
 when the question is one of foods. The pure- 
 food acts are, apparently, just the very 
 kind of exceedingly mundane regulations 
 which most men would disassociate from 
 
CHRIST AND SOCIETY 105 
 
 religion. I believe they save as much suflFer- 
 ing as many of the discoveries of medicine 
 cure after the trouble has been caused. 
 Those who enforce these acts certainly do 
 Christian work. 
 
 The so-called social question is another 
 matter of immense general importance. 
 The veil which is drawn over it is a very 
 thin one, and the existence of red-light 
 districts is alone a blot on our social life. 
 No doubt there is good in most of us, but 
 alas, we have no imagination. If only the 
 awful pathos of the intolerable burden of 
 misery and shame which this spells were 
 realized, the innate chivalry of manhood 
 would rise in loathing against that which 
 now it even dares to wink at. If men could 
 see as I, a physician, have been forced to 
 see, some of the last piteous scenes in the 
 drama of these lost lives, they would realize 
 that hell existed right alongside them, and 
 that they were as surely creating it as the 
 sentry who sleeps at his post causes de- 
 struction and death in his own household. 
 
106 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 Just think of a brute who would condemn 
 his own sister and daughter to such a fate. 
 Then consider the creature who would spare 
 his own, but damn the defenseless of others. 
 Then imagine this creature posing as a 
 man; nay, even daring to assume the title 
 "Christian," attending public worship and 
 arguing as to the intellectual method of 
 salvation. Wrapped in her country's flag 
 I buried on a rocky headland of our lonely 
 coast just such a broken life — a tender 
 girl of eighteen years, dead only because 
 she dare not see her own home again. Has 
 religion nothing to offer .^^ Is there no rem- 
 edy? If I thought so I would here and now 
 in these lectures brand the pretenses of the 
 Christ as false. It is because he has shown 
 us the remedy and put it right into our 
 hands, for this and every other social 
 trouble, that I stand here to-day. Neither a 
 Solon nor a Solomon can invent laws which 
 will prevent this evil. Only Christ has 
 taught us the cure for this canker of civil- 
 ization — a cure which we all can use. It is 
 
CHRIST AND SOCIETY 107 
 
 only by passing many laws against others, 
 but one law against ourselves, and then 
 seeing to it that it is carried out. You can- 
 not make children good by punishing them; 
 truly loving them is the only way; the love 
 shown by the Master himself being our ex- 
 ample. The fact is, the less you say "don't," 
 the nearer you get to Christ's teaching. 
 The "thou shalt nots" were all said by 
 Moses. The religion of my youth was, 
 practically, though not quite in the sense 
 in which Harvard uses the word, "Thou 
 shalt not — or the Gridiron ! " That is 
 no way to induce righteousness. It merely 
 fixes in the mind a desire for the forbidden 
 things. This is pathetically shown when for 
 any reason the will control is suspended — 
 for instance, by the language a most un- 
 likely person may use when under an 
 anaesthetic, or in a period of temporary in- 
 sanity. 
 
 The Master teaches that a negative, a 
 void, is our greatest danger, and that our 
 supreme source of strength is first to love 
 
108 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 some one else. He says, "Thou shall love." 
 Experience teaches that to love him is the 
 real remedy. I have been asked why some 
 men, to use your expressive slang, "go 
 to the devil" young, and why some others, 
 after an apparently innocuous life, follow 
 the same road after middle life. Experi- 
 ence again suggests that there is, as it were, 
 an opsonic index of character as well as in 
 physical things — and a personal and 
 possibly a physical nervous equation of 
 resistance. Both speak to me of the need 
 of some other positive source of strength 
 outside ourselves, to supply our lack. 
 
 The drink question is another modern 
 problem of exactly the same kind. I don't 
 know where to begin to bring this subject 
 from the abstract to the concrete. One can 
 begin anywhere. Its tragedies are familiar 
 to all of us. They are positively common- 
 place. We were fighting in the city in 
 which I lived for the closing of saloons on 
 Sunday. Half an hour before the meeting 
 I was called to see a distracted mother 
 
CHRIST AND SOCIETY 109 
 
 whose only boy, a splendid young fisher 
 lad, had just fallen drunk over the quay- 
 side and lost his life. The scene of the 
 accident was within easy stone's throw of 
 the platform of the town hall, from which 
 I tried to address an excited and turbulent 
 meeting packed by hired supporters of the 
 liquor traffic. Even while the crowd in- 
 side was passing a hostile resolution not 
 to close the saloons, the piteous crowd 
 outside was dragging the river for the body 
 of yet another victim of the evil. The 
 specialist in physiological chemistry of 
 your largest hospital declared not long 
 ago, that alcohol is without doubt the 
 greatest ciu-se of civilization. I heard re- 
 cently at Lowell how the liquor traffic is 
 forcing drunkenness just for gain on the 
 large Greek quarter, by planting in their 
 midst a saloon with a renegade Greek as 
 manager. 
 
 Among my own patients was once a 
 university graduate, a young married man, 
 a millionaire, of brilliant mind, an only son. 
 
110 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 raving with delirium tremens. Think of 
 the misery and wretchedness which even 
 his palace could do nothing to mitigate. I 
 could duplicate this sort of instance many 
 times, and from my own University of Ox- 
 ford, showing that education, family, rank, 
 and intelligence are no safeguards against 
 this danger. 
 
 This question has agitated the public 
 mind very seriously for many years. A 
 consensus of opinion of our judges holds 
 alcohol responsible for nine tenths of our 
 crimes. Statisticians have proved that it 
 costs more in money than any other earthly 
 thing. Philanthropists have shown that 
 in mental and bodily suffering it is the most 
 expensive modern agent. Physicians are 
 equally decided that it is more fruitful in 
 disease than any other single poison, or- 
 ganic or inorganic. In short, the world 
 is at last convinced that as a beverage, it 
 is neither necessary nor desirable. But 
 alas, no one can prove that mankind can- 
 not be trained to like it, and even if we 
 
CHRIST AND SOCIETY 111 
 
 could prove it, that is not the contribution 
 of religion. The contribution of religion is, 
 we do like it but we will not touch it, be- 
 cause of the stumbling-block it is to others. 
 What answer the Christ would give to this 
 question, I leave each man who loves his 
 brother to settle for himself. His religion 
 can never be satisJBed anyhow with "thou 
 shalt nots": something more than that is 
 needed for others — but He himself set 
 the example of "I will not." 
 
 Too long the idea of the divine revela- 
 tion has been that it is like a kind of fairy- 
 story beginning with "Once upon a time 
 there was"; a passable method for child- 
 hood, like milk for babes, but a passing 
 one also, and of no use for rapidly growing 
 manhood. To be divine at all, revelation 
 must be "living." There is too much of 
 the flavor of death about "life in abey- 
 ance," and to religion the only alternative 
 to life is spiritual death. The vital contri- 
 bution of the church is, moreover, only 
 by the life of its individual members. Not 
 
112 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 by setting up ideals and talking about 
 them, but by being the ideal yourself, will 
 you exhibit the treatment of the Master 
 for these ills. 
 
 The fact is you yourself are the only 
 offering you can make which is undeni- 
 able, to this or any other problem. This 
 is the true service which love demands of 
 you. When religion stands for this, Noble 
 Lectures will be unnecessary, and preach- 
 ing will once again have reached its climax 
 — at its own starting-point. 
 
 I admit that it is only a little of the 
 burden at best which any one of us can 
 lift, but together we can lift a lot. I was 
 once most generously accorded a reception 
 by a representative of every church, in- 
 cluding some laymen like myself. Amongst 
 us were the Catholic priest, the Protestant 
 clergy, and the Jewish rabbi. I ventured 
 to suggest that if in the centre of our circle 
 were placed a visible burden like that of the 
 world which needed lifting, we should all 
 rush together, and however little each 
 
CHRIST AND SOCIETY 113 
 
 accomplished, the result would be that the 
 whole weight would be raised. 
 
 I have not referred to every question 
 of modern life. If I tried to do so, the end 
 of these lectures would probably be de- 
 livered to empty seats. I should have liked 
 to touch upon the problem of world peace 
 — a question on which so much thought 
 and eflFort are now being expended. Re- 
 ligion has everything to contribute to 
 this. 
 
 How to contribute is always a far more 
 important question than "Can I contrib- 
 ute ? " and here the function of the minister 
 or specialist in service should naturally come 
 in. "What can I do to inherit eternal life? " 
 was treated by the Master as a perfectly 
 sane question. He never said, " You've 
 nothing to do." Human reason refuses any 
 longer to accept the idea that the faith 
 which is without works can save anybody. 
 The virtuous man is no longer regarded as 
 a distinct species from the holy man. For 
 my part the social settlements as well as 
 
114 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 the churches have all my aflfection, though 
 I was once taught to look upon them as a 
 positive menace to religion. 
 
 For some years I had the privilege of 
 watching at close range the work at Toyn- 
 bee Hall in Whitechapel. From the time 
 of its inception one thing at least I can 
 vouch for, many lives were elevated by their 
 efforts, many sufferers relieved, many home- 
 less ones cheered, the power of many evil 
 men was taken away, the hungry were fed, 
 the naked clothed, wrongs were righted, 
 hope inculcated, comfort carried, — and 
 all these things at great personal cost. 
 There was a singular absence of being 
 puffed up, of seeking their own, of being 
 easily provoked. There is simply no room 
 for the sounding of brass and the tinkling 
 of cymbals in the modern settlement as I 
 have seen it, and my experience seems to 
 be similar to that of thoughtful and quite 
 unprejudiced people with whom I have 
 discussed the matter. I have often thought 
 I should value the title of "Christian" 
 
CHRIST AND SOCIETY 115 
 
 more if I might be allowed to share it 
 with those friends in the settlements. He 
 who would say of such, " Go to, I am holier 
 than thou," seems to me to be suflSeiently 
 presumptuous to risk his own right to 
 the title. I know few who could afford to 
 throw the first stone at them. The mere 
 fact that in a place like Hull House no 
 assemblies for public worship are found 
 advisable seems to me as sane an argument 
 for condemning them as for a similar reason 
 condemning the claims of a surgical oper- 
 ating theatre or a convalescent ward. Is 
 not Hull House truly an operating theatre.'^ 
 "There can be no truth of science," says 
 Paradise, "which is not also a truth of re- 
 ligion. There can be no discovery of nature's 
 laws which is not also a revelation of God. 
 There can be no passion of service to 
 mankind which is not also true disciple- 
 ship of Jesus Christ." ^ 
 
 I was taught to consider labor move- 
 ments as anarchical and atheistic. I have 
 * The Church and the Individual. 
 
116 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 been immensely encom'aged to find the 
 reverence for the Christ which so many of 
 the leaders possess. They are now by no 
 means alone, thank God, in realizing that 
 idealism must dominate the production of 
 wealth as well as its distribution. The finan- 
 cial pirate no longer ranks higher in the 
 world's estimate than the poor fellow who 
 steals a loaf, even if he does subscribe to 
 dogmas unknown to the latter. The way- 
 ward city juvenile is being treated in an 
 intelligent Christian manner, and efforts 
 are being made to save his soul, rather than 
 merely to punish his body. So also the 
 study of scientific sociology and the estab- 
 lishment of the new profession of the ex- 
 pert sociologist is a Christian advance. 
 They are all, after all, only the study of 
 how-to love your neighbor wisely. 
 
 There is no snobbery in recognizing that 
 money has a religious value, and, like time, 
 should be put to a religious use. To my 
 mind the advice which Jesus gave to the 
 rich young man, to sell all he had and give 
 
CHRIST AND SOCIETY 117 
 
 it to the poor, has, Hke much else of the 
 Master's teaching, been willfully misunder- 
 stood. The young man was n't told to make 
 a fool of himself, or dump his wealth, or 
 injure others by senseless gifts, or that 
 every rich man should shirk his responsi- 
 bility and put it upon other shoulders. To 
 even give away money is a worthy life 
 problem, and the world is recognizing it to 
 be such; nay, it is not only demanding that 
 men shall use their wealth, but that they 
 use it wisely. It is perfectly true "that 
 the condition for permanence and primacy 
 is service, and that knowledge is the con- 
 dition of service." There are men, and 
 perhaps the rich young man was among 
 them, — I know one or two, — whom I would 
 certainly class in the category of those 
 whom it would be wise to separate from 
 their money in order to save their own 
 lives. More and more are endeavoring 
 wisely to distribute their own wealth 
 themselves, and so prevent its doing harm 
 and causing waste; and this is ever more 
 
118 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 and more being demanded of them as a 
 religious service. 
 
 As in my last lecture I urged upon you 
 the consideration that any manly profes- 
 sion may be, nay, to be truly manly must 
 be, carried on as a Christian service, in 
 this I wish to emphasize a yet higher and 
 wider conception — that all social service 
 in its broadest sense is but a reasonable 
 Christian activity. Not only in his private 
 life, but also in his public life, a man may 
 bring Christ's dynamic power into the 
 community; and only in that way can 
 rich and poor, the struggling and those at 
 ease, ever hope to behold "how good and 
 pleasant a thing it is to dwell together in 
 unity." In that state "there can be no 
 truth of science which is not also a truth 
 of religion. There can be no discovery of 
 nature's laws which is not also a revelation 
 of God. There can be no passion of serv- 
 ice to mankind which is not also true 
 discipleship of Jesus Christ." 
 
 The knowledge of God is life; complete 
 
CHRIST AND SOCIETY 119 
 
 correspondence with him is eternal life. 
 To ask what is the contribution of religion 
 to life is to ask what life is. Religion can 
 contribute to existence, but real religion 
 makes Lifb. 
 
LECTURE IV 
 
 CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 
 
 In this, my last lecture, I am anxious to 
 show that which I most truly believe, 
 namely, that all through the ages, all that 
 which has been worth while, all that which 
 has tended to uplift the world, all that which 
 has made for the noblest ends, has been ac- 
 complished by the possession of the spirit 
 of the Master, if not the profession of his 
 service or the knowledge of his name. I 
 read a story once by Laura E. Richards, 
 called "The Grumpy Saint." While walking 
 along the highway one day he met a poor 
 woman staggering under a burden which 
 she was not fit to carry. When she asked his 
 help, he scolded her for attempting such a 
 task, upbraided her husband for permitting 
 it, and the world for making it necessary. 
 But he took the load and carried it to her 
 door. A little farther along he met a child 
 
CHRIST AND THE DAH^Y LIFE 121 
 
 who had lost her way and was crying with 
 fear and cold and hunger. When she asked 
 him the way he demanded what the child 
 thought he was for! How could he waste 
 time? Besides, he did n't know where 
 her home was, and in any case it was her 
 own fault for being disobedient and run- 
 ning away. But he took oflF his coat and 
 wrapped it about the child, and gave her 
 the food he had prepared for himself on the 
 journey. Then he lifted her up and car- 
 ried her, until eventually he left her in her 
 mother's arms. Was or was not this man 
 a disciple of Jesus Christ.? 
 
 It is with this thought in my mind that 
 I have decided, though without any more 
 claim to be a historian than a theologian, 
 to try to show, though it can be little more 
 than a mere suggestion in one brief lec- 
 ture, that the records of achievement left 
 throughout history by men who are Christ- 
 ians by Christ's own standard are such as 
 any common-sense person at his best would 
 envy. If we understand them rightly, they 
 
122 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 show us that just in proportion as the men 
 had the spirit of Jesus, they were worth 
 while; and they teach that if we wish to 
 make good in life, we too must aspire to 
 gain it. He who, gauged by the Master's 
 valuation, deserves of posterity the title 
 "Christian," has never left behind him a 
 record of ineflSciency. On the other hand, 
 I want to leave it in your minds as my testi- 
 mony that those who are consciously striv- 
 ing to follow a Christ whom they know, and 
 whom they acknowledge, possess a com- 
 pelling power over and above the force of 
 those men who have only a passion for 
 abstract righteousness, or an innate fine- 
 ness of moral calibre. Beyond question the 
 Master himself taught this. That is the 
 power which has given the world pictures 
 like that of James Gilmore of Mongolia, 
 absolutely alone crossing the great wall of 
 China, and alone wandering on foot along 
 the byways of Manchuria, that he might 
 reach the hitherto untouched Mongols of 
 the desert of Gobi. It was that spirit which 
 
CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 123 
 
 kept Livingstone in Africa, sent Gordon 
 to Khartoum and Father Damien to 
 Molokai. These men's lives are valu- 
 able heritages for all time, to hold up as 
 examples of unselfish courage, exactly as 
 Christ's own is. They are an heirloom of 
 which any nation may be proud, whether 
 or not the men had a correct apprehen- 
 sion of absolute truth. 
 
 The Christian of Christ's lifetime was 
 a very human person, in direct natural 
 communication with the Master. He was 
 not peculiar in his dress, his method of 
 worship, or his theories of life. He was not 
 remarkable for his mysticism, his idealism, 
 or any other "isms." He loved and married 
 like other folk, and enjoyed the good things 
 of life as well as they. He was just a man. 
 He could lie like Peter, seek graft like James 
 and John, be conceited like Thomas, or 
 fail in loyalty like Judas. He was not 
 gifted with any peculiar perspicacity. 
 
 None of the disciples apparently, in spite 
 of their singular advantages, knew who 
 
124 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 Christ was, or why he was unlike other 
 men in not seeking to save himself. The 
 Christian of that day was not, so far as we 
 can tell, an intellectual genius or a spiritual 
 giant. What Christ made these men we 
 all know; and what he made of them he 
 can make of us. Fisherman John became 
 wise enough to describe the Master as "the 
 Word of God," and leave the world mono- 
 graphs which will outlive the writings of all 
 the sages. Custom-house officer Matthew 
 left us a document which even a Hawthorne 
 with a similar training in the nineteenth 
 century could not parallel. There is no 
 reasonable doubt that the courage of 
 Simon Peter and his runaway friends, in 
 later life, has never been excelled. In their 
 tireless bodily work, in their marvellous 
 mental productions, in their lofty unselfish 
 conduct, in mind, body, and spirit, this 
 company of men, through contact with 
 Jesus Christ, came to embody all that 
 would make any good man wish to be 
 ranked of their number. The lofty posi- 
 
CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 125 
 
 tion which they have occupied in men's 
 estimation, and which they still occupy, 
 was fully justified, and will, I believe, be 
 more and more deeply realized, whatever 
 happens in the future to dogmatic theology. 
 Their attractiveness was undoubted, for 
 everywhere men joined them; not for what 
 they could get, for that was seldom attract- 
 ive, but for what they could in their turn 
 give. It certainly was not so much the 
 desire for gain here or hereafter, as the be- 
 lief that the Kingdom of God on earth 
 could use what they had to contribute, that 
 fired men's hearts to loyalty for the or- 
 ganization they founded. The mistaken 
 idea of the immediate coming of the end 
 of the world and the short road to eternal 
 bliss was no doubt a comfort and an at- 
 traction to them. But it was not their 
 Master's teaching as we read it. It is evi- 
 dence of the continued human liability to 
 error even among those who were the very 
 closest to Christ's person. When men were 
 near to Christ, they needed nothing but 
 
126 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFEf 
 
 the atmosphere of his spirit to attract them 
 to him, but as they got farther and farther 
 away from him in spirit and in time, they 
 used this doctrine as a bait to compensate 
 for the loss involved in this world by be- 
 coming his followers. But I will not believe 
 it was ever the chief factor in the appeal to 
 follow Christ, any more than the promise 
 attached to the Fifth Commandment makes 
 me honor my father and mother. 
 
 As for the name "Christian," it was 
 originally given in contempt, and was used 
 by men of the world as a stigma and a re- 
 proach. From that reproach Christians 
 themselves soon redeemed it by displaying 
 the spirit of Christ. It came to stand for 
 that humility, mercy, and justice which 
 the Scripture tells us God calls for still. 
 It spelled loyalty, courage, and self-sac- 
 rifice; and the world, ever able to recognize 
 if not always willing to accept the noblest, 
 in a few centuries changed its attitude. 
 The Christian knight became the ideal of 
 history. 
 
CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 127 
 
 It was not long, however, before the 
 organization of the scattered groups into 
 bodies for mutual strength and protection 
 began seriously to disturb the minds, not 
 only of those who represented the vast 
 interests of religion, but of the temporal 
 powers as well. Rich as well as poor began 
 to feel the force of the call of Jesus, and 
 he found followers even in Caesar's house- 
 hold. The simplicity and attractiveness 
 of the Christian was a protest against evil. 
 How is it we seldom see any persecutions 
 of modern Christians? ItUs certainly not 
 because there is no graft in high places. 
 
 When for the first time I wandered 
 through the old Coliseum at Rome, it was 
 at night, by moonlight, and the spirits of 
 the men who had suflFered upon the very 
 ground I trod seemed almost visible. I, a 
 so-called Christian, felt humiliated, not 
 repelled. 
 
 Yet persecution never really injured the 
 growth of faith in Christ. Those who tried 
 to follow in his footsteps grew more and 
 
128 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 more numerous. Rottenness began from 
 within. In the organization itself there 
 grew up rank and privilege; talkers began 
 to count as higher than workers and claim 
 for themselves special proximity to the 
 Master. As if Jesus himself had not talked 
 far more in works than in words, had not 
 laid far more emphasis on works, had not 
 devoted far more time to works, and had 
 not referred those in doubt to his works as 
 his indorsement. This restraint on Christ's 
 part from laying down dogmas is more re- 
 markable, the longer one thinks about it. 
 That sects should still be unable to settle 
 whether Satm-day or Sunday is the true 
 day of rest, that men should be able even 
 to attempt to defend slavery, or to try to 
 enforce celibacy on the authority of his 
 teaching, is evidence of the scope he left 
 for individuality by never laying down 
 minute rules, but only enunciating general 
 principles. 
 
 Yet it is always easier to talk than to do, 
 and presumably the cleverer men soon dis- 
 
CHRIST AND THE DAH^Y LIFE 129 
 
 covered this. Alas, talking, more especially 
 on matters or facts about which we cannot 
 appeal to our physical senses, is just as 
 likely to divide as doing is certain to unite. 
 As late as the Reformation, no theological 
 question was too slight to engender hatred, 
 and even to provoke civil war. Indeed, 
 so began the differences which invented 
 "heresy," and then councils and creeds to 
 define and locate and eradicate it. 
 
 With the advent of classes in the church, 
 one ruling and the other serving, social 
 differences became easy to justify, and in 
 fact almost inevitable. Moreover, it seemed 
 suddenly to dawn on the real outsiders, the 
 men without the Master's spirit, that Chris- 
 tianity was a mighty force, and formed 
 a bond between men which was far more 
 durable than any involuntary one. It 
 only needed careful using and it would 
 serve to bolster up temporal as well as 
 spiritual power. So gradually was evolved 
 the complex and immense structure of the 
 Papacy. Eventually there followed in the 
 
130 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 name of Christ so fantastic an interpreta- 
 tion of his service as the Crusades. What- 
 ever the church taught verbally, it practi- 
 cally set up at that period the possession 
 of property as an object for worship, and 
 so at once destroyed the Christ vision of 
 the paramount value of life. 
 
 Like the graphic representation of the 
 human heart beat on the sphygmographic 
 drum, the track of real Christ-following 
 through history seems to have risen and 
 fallen in a kind of rhythm, though at times, 
 like a hectic temperature chart, to have 
 been little above the neutral line. Whether 
 there will ever be millennial peace on earth, 
 or whether the waxing and waning war- 
 fare is essential for the evolution of our 
 souls' welfare, may be open to question, 
 but that the true Christ-following has al- 
 ways brought out the heroic in men is not 
 open to doubt. It seems somehow that 
 conflict is necessary for the perfection of 
 character. I know that in navigating our 
 coast to-day I feel twice as reliable a pilot 
 
CHRIST AND THE DAH^Y LIFE 131 
 
 for the bad times I have had on so many 
 rocks. 
 
 Anyhow, the organization designed to 
 foster and safeguard Christ's Kingdom 
 gradually deprived men of all personal 
 freedom. The leaders not only "suffered 
 themselves to be called Master," but posi- 
 tively liked it, and eventually insisted they 
 were so, till the persecutions which they 
 themselves instituted against men who 
 evinced Christ's spirit were ten times more 
 cruel than those instigated by the early 
 pagans. The Duke of Alva was a type of 
 such men. But in spite of this, the organ- 
 ization harbored all the while the living 
 germ, without which it must have died, 
 and with which, with all its shortcomings, 
 it slowly helped to advance the true King- 
 dom of God. The germ, however, some- 
 times sank to the bottom, like the currants 
 in a badly mixed cake, and few managed to 
 obtain it. 
 
 The biographies and autobiographies of 
 men of action have always been the most 
 
132 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 attractive literature to me. Whether or 
 not they have had the orthodox label, the 
 appeal of such lives is just as great and 
 must tend to kindle any spark of manliness 
 in us — that our brief day of life may also 
 be used to some noble pm-pose. To me it 
 has been a thousand times helpful to look 
 back upon the story of the centuries, and 
 realize how differently men interpret the 
 call of God to them, and how varied are 
 the services which can be approved as 
 "Christian." It is only the brave efforts 
 through the ages of men of that type, men 
 often of very ordinary attainments, which 
 have even partially given us back our free- 
 dom to-day. But we are still far from spirit- 
 ually free. Numbers of men and women 
 are still tangled up in the meshes and intri- 
 cacies of theologies and theories and con- 
 ventions. Many are still satisfied to sub- 
 mit to external authority instead of their 
 individual vision. But if religion is to 
 grapple with the social questions of to-day, 
 to attract when it can no longer compel, 
 
CHRIST AND THE DAH^Y LIFE 133 
 
 and to satisfy the practical minds of mod- 
 ern youth, it must come down from heaven 
 to earth, and this even though the process 
 will involve much heart-burning on the part 
 of the theologian, and still some martyr- 
 dom on the side of those who break with 
 the old order. 
 
 How are men to decide who is a Christian 
 or how far the inability to say, "Rabbi, 
 thou art the Christ, the Son of God," 
 made eleven out of twelve disciples for- 
 feit their right to the title? For example, 
 no body of men will agree as to the claims 
 of world-influencing writers like Goethe, 
 Shakespeare, or Locke; of scientists who 
 have advanced knowledge, like Coperni- 
 cus, Newton, or Darwin; of artists who have 
 altered the conception of art, like Raphael, 
 Michael Angelo, or Da Vinci; of statesmen 
 who have changed the course of history, 
 like William of Orange or Oliver Cromwell; 
 of earnest truth-seeking philosophers so 
 different as Plato, Kant, and Spencer; in- 
 deed, any of the whole gamut of human 
 
134 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 beings whose lives have been used for the 
 amelioration of the conditions of life on 
 earth, and have contributed their quota 
 toward making the Kingdom of God more 
 possible here and now. We are too apt to 
 grudge other people their haloes, and too 
 fond of trying to preen our own — a diffi- 
 cult matter under any circumstances ! Our 
 judgment ought surely to depend upon 
 what we consider was the Kingdom Christ 
 came on earth to found. The Kingdom 
 of God for which I am working is an ideal 
 world, a world in which the soul's environ- 
 ment, which of course includes the body 
 in which it dwells, must be made more ideal. 
 Even pagans so long ago as the philosopher 
 Lucian stated the opinion that the soul is 
 as much helped by the flesh as the flesh by 
 the soul. Yet it has become necessary for 
 both of these truths to be demonstrated 
 alongside us in Boston, as if they were new 
 discoveries of the twentieth century. They 
 seem to have been forgotten or neglected 
 by the churches. 
 
CHRIST AND THE -DAILY LIFE 135 
 
 That is exactly what gives us the fun 
 of service — because it includes everything 
 we can do to help out. The "joy of serv- 
 ice" is so much exalted in these days that 
 one might almost suppose there existed 
 normally a craving for the joy of useless- 
 ness. That is the supreme joy of the bar- 
 nacle, who, though born a free-swimming 
 animal, prefers even in his youth a life of 
 inaction, and after fastening his head to 
 a rock spends the remainder of his days 
 kicking food into his mouth with his hind 
 legs. 
 
 Again, surely we can look upon as dis- 
 ciples of the Christ all those who from 
 purely patriotic motives have devoted their 
 stay on earth to the welfare of their coun- 
 try, and at personal risk and sacrifice have 
 sought to raise her to their highest ideals. 
 Fighting may not be the ideal Christian 
 way to gain an end, but we must remember 
 that Christ does not judge men by what 
 they do not see, but by what they do see. 
 Who would not gladly face the supreme 
 
1S6 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 tribunal, so far as their patriotism is 
 concerned, with the record of Gustavus 
 Adolphus, Joan of Arc, Count Cavour, 
 Louis Kossuth, the Duke of Wellington, or 
 George Washington, and among living men 
 the heroes of the Japanese War ? Or, seeing 
 the cruel straits and horrible conditions 
 inflicted on Germany by Napoleon, who 
 would not follow a Stein, a Bismarck, or a 
 Moltke? Certainly many of these men 
 think themselves Christians just as much as 
 we regard ourselves in that light. I was 
 reared on stories like that of General 
 Havelock and his saints, of Clive and 
 Lawrence, of Wolfe and Drake. It will 
 probably be long, however, before the 
 French believe Bismarck was not lying 
 when he said: "If I did not believe Provi- 
 dence had destined this nation for some- 
 thing great and good, I should at once 
 give up my position as a diplomat or 
 never have entered on it at all." Yet 
 human judgment on a Gordon who stayed 
 the cruelties of the Taiping Rebellion, or 
 
CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 137 
 
 a Cromwell who opposed the divine right 
 of kings, or even a Lincoln who fought to 
 free his fellows from slavery will no doubt 
 be different according to the tribunal be- 
 fore which they are tried. The right inter- 
 pretation of true loyalty must be left 
 to each man's conscience. Moses, David, 
 and Paul expressed their willingness to be 
 castaways themselves if their people might 
 be saved. For my part, I can quite con- 
 ceive the profession of arms, at any rate 
 in the past, as being a religious service, and 
 as often seeming to such men the only 
 means available for advancing the King- 
 dom of God. Centurions were among 
 Christ's first followers. Personally, I thank 
 God for the view of a wide and ever- 
 changing range of service. 
 
 The unendurable miseries of the masses 
 at the time of the French Revolution 
 called for a Christian champion and found 
 none. Surely this was only for lack of the 
 vision of their opportunities. Even if the 
 churches of any day are no more Christian 
 
138 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 than the temporal powers, nevertheless, 
 God's purposes will be wrought out with- 
 out us if we will not help. There can be no 
 doubt that the ultimate result of the Re- 
 volution was a distinct gain to the kingdom 
 of righteousness, joy, and peace, — that 
 the present happy and prosperous French 
 peasantry was made possible by it, and 
 'that the lessons it impressed on the rulers 
 of the world materially hastened the broader 
 brotherhood of man. But had true men 
 with the Master's spirit been forthcoming 
 to guide the process, who can doubt but 
 that the same ends could have been ac- 
 complished without the horrors and in- 
 famies that the Revolution involved? It 
 was Guizot, not an ecclesiastic, who, when 
 he fled to England as the only stable throne 
 in Europe, said to Lord Shaftesbury, "Sir, 
 it is their religion which has saved the 
 English nation." 
 
 It sometimes takes catastrophes to show 
 the church as well as the world the incal- 
 culable opportunities to make life worth 
 
CHEIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 139 
 
 while, which they are constantly throwing 
 away. That it is as much the vision as the 
 will which men need is shown by the fact 
 that only five years before the Revolution 
 a French historical philosopher wrote: 
 " The political system of Europe has ar- 
 rived at perfection. Few reforms are 
 needed. There is no need nowadays to 
 fear a revolution." ^ 
 
 As an absolute antithesis to the services 
 of the physical fighter to the Kingdom of 
 God, take that of the philosopher, Hugo 
 Grotius. Stirred by the wholesale con- 
 demnation of people to death for heresy, 
 and the frightful cruelties perpetrated on 
 the innocent and noncombatants in war, 
 he satisfied his passion for service by the 
 writing of long books in Latin. By his 
 immortal work, "De Jure BeUi et Pacis,'' 
 he awakened the world to the Christian 
 sense of God's international family, and 
 he laid the foundation for all future inter- 
 national law. There seems no fear of the 
 
 * Seven Great Statesmen. 
 
140 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 overcrowding of this particular branch of 
 service to-day; the writing of books in 
 Latin is a little out of vogue. But who shall 
 doubt that it was a truly Christian service, 
 and that the law schools to-day have God- 
 like opportunities yet open to them before 
 the reign of peace universal. 
 
 It is not part of my scheme to publish a 
 schedule of Christian services. In ten thou- 
 sand experiences of everyday life we cannot 
 fail to see that God not only permits but 
 seeks our cooperation in the establishment 
 of his Kingdom. If we find this out too 
 late and have to look back on a life full of 
 opportunities which we have let slip, we can 
 have no longer any excuse to mitigate our 
 remorse. 
 
 Now that we cannot be forced to do so, 
 we no longer admit that God will only make 
 his will plain through a third party. God 
 certainly does make plain the way of life 
 to those who seek it in sincerity and truth. 
 We are no longer accountable to human 
 authority. Bismarck once rebuked the 
 
CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 141 
 
 autocratic Wilhelm the First for sneering 
 at the word "pietist," by saying, "Christ- 
 ianity is not the creed of Court chaplains." 
 And the finicking arguments of the religion- 
 ists made the great Doctor Jowett of Bal- 
 liol, Oxford, once say, "All wise men have 
 the same religion, but no wise man will say 
 what it is." 
 
 It will surely comfort some who, from 
 their evangelical point of view, might be 
 troubled with fears that this broad inter- 
 pretation was dangerously modern and in- 
 compatible with the simple teaching of the 
 Gospel, to know that so unquestionable a 
 Christian as George Fox taught that "every 
 hunger of the heart, every dissatisfaction 
 with self, every sense of shortcoming, shows 
 that the soul is not unvisited by the Di- 
 vine Spirit. To want God at all implies 
 some acquaintance with Him." In all 
 sorts and conditions of men Fox always 
 appealed to "that of God," or "the Christ 
 within them." We know them by their 
 fruits, not by their catechisms. 
 
142 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 The only real heathen and heretics are 
 the purely selfish. It is for our own sakes 
 as well as theirs that we desire their con- 
 version. For while they are losing all life 
 has to give, we are losing the share they 
 might contribute. Alas, there are still many 
 rich in talents who find it costs too much 
 simply to follow the Master. 
 
 For my part, I am so sure that God is 
 Love that I never worry a moment about 
 whether divine wisdom and power could n't 
 have devised an easier road for redemption 
 than willing personal service. That to me 
 is simply loyalty, and of that quality the 
 professing Christian has no monopoly. 
 
 I never believed that following the Mas- 
 ter meant having no will of our own. Christ 
 had a will of his own. We are "to stand 
 on our feet, and hear what the Lord will say 
 to us." God wants men with a will. Only 
 that will must be linked with God's. Self- 
 will and selfishness are always obviously an 
 absolute bar to unity between God and 
 man and between man and man. I have 
 
CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 143 
 
 always had a holy horror of the teaching 
 that the Christian religion calls for a back- 
 boneless type of person, the simpering, long- 
 haired, effeminate creatm'e so familiar in 
 "sacred art." 
 
 ' Art is no art at all if it is n't sacred, if it 
 does n't comfort and uplift. It does n't in- 
 spire me to see my ideal of human life, the 
 Christian knight, the man of every age and 
 every station and every calling who is doing 
 God's work, held up to ridicule as a sickly, 
 effeminate imbecile. I always pictured the 
 Christ at college as captain of the foot- 
 ball team, or stroke of the 'Varsity boat, 
 or one of the honor men, because these 
 were what I wanted to be myself. 
 
 It is this hideous teaching, that secular 
 and sacred can be separated, and must be 
 labelled so, which formerly made men esti- 
 mate the claimants to religion at their own 
 valuation: namely, that they were fitted 
 for talking, but not for competing in any- 
 thing else which pertains to human life, 
 and were chiefly remarkable for the things 
 
144 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 they did not do. " Consecration, not renun- 
 ciation, makes the highest character." ^ 
 
 So long as we make the division, so long 
 as Christ-following does not mean every 
 single method and way that can make this 
 world better and brighter, Christ-following 
 is robbed of its dignity, its joy, its utihty, 
 — and its future. 
 
 Let us descend to the concrete for a mo- 
 ment. In Labrador it was religious to con- 
 duct public worship, to lead a prayer- 
 meeting, to marry, to baptize, to bury, to 
 take up collections, to foster guilds. It was 
 secular to do medical, legal, commercial, or 
 any kind of work by which men can earn a 
 living. It was religious to visit and condole 
 with the hungry. It was very distinctly 
 secular to run a cooperative store and 
 feed them. It was religious to pray on 
 Wednesday night that God would give the 
 people a good fishery. It was secular on 
 Thursday to make twine cheap, to build a 
 bait freezer, and to introduce motor dories. 
 
 ^ Doctor Allen. 
 
CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 145 
 
 It was religious to give old clothing to naked 
 families. It was secular to introduce looms, 
 sheep, reindeer, and to teach the women to 
 weave durable and fitting woolen clothing 
 for their families. It was religious to pray 
 that God would keep idle folk's hands from 
 mischief. It was secular to set to work to 
 keep those same hands remuneratively busy. 
 Finally, in Labrador, none but "fossil men" 
 wondered why every one wanted to be 
 ** worldly." If Christ's men are to be known 
 by their works, surely Christ's work is to 
 be known by its efficiency to redeem. 
 
 I have spent now much of your time and 
 mine in defending the perfect rationality 
 of Christian faith. I have suggested many 
 times that like all other things it must be 
 accepted or rejected on the ground of its 
 practical value. But I realize that it is as a 
 surgeon that I am addressing you. I would 
 naturally expect you to ask now, "What are 
 the specific things which I can do to gain 
 the faith which you consider so valuable? " 
 
 If I am right and you are looking to these 
 
14f6 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 lectures for such advice as I may have to 
 give here and now from my own experience, 
 I should say first of all cut out whatever sin 
 you are conscious of. You will find it an 
 immense help to let it be known on which 
 side you are. It takes a lot of pluck to do 
 that, but it makes a man of one. It is still 
 true that *' whosoever would save his life 
 shall lose it," and it must often be at the 
 cost of ambition and popularity that the 
 door of the Kingdom of Heaven is opened. 
 
 If the certain deterioration of physical 
 and mental capacities through dallying in 
 the slightest degree with drink and vice 
 does not deter men from indulging in them, 
 at least if they will follow the Christ they 
 will refrain for the sake of making the path 
 of righteousness easier for others. 
 
 All through my lectures my attitude 
 will have appeared as depreciative to the 
 organized churches. Believe me, my criti- 
 cisms, are the wounds of a friend. I realize 
 that the conditions in America to-day are 
 not those of England twenty years ago. The 
 
CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 147 
 
 church certainly is beginning to wake up. 
 Its members are realizing that there is a 
 loose screw, and are looking about to lo- 
 cate it. I believe to-day you will find in 
 her that which is essential for your develop- 
 ment, namely, constructive work which 
 you can do. She will also give you the real- 
 ization of spiritual fellowship between your- 
 self and God, and between yourself and 
 others who are in earnest about life, which 
 it is her especial prerogative to afford, and 
 of which she should allow no other interest 
 to deprive her. Join her and help her. She, 
 too, to-day is making for the uplift of hu- 
 manity. She needs all you can give; and 
 she certainly will give it back to you again 
 with interest. 
 
 For my part, I find the world is good. It 
 is a most reliable paymaster, whichever 
 way you make your investment, and I am 
 glad to be in it. Everything seems to have 
 a purpose, and from that fact I deduce a 
 purposer. The world seems reasonable, and 
 therefore likely to end reasonably. Theevo- 
 
148 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 lution of love, the development of intellect, 
 the unceasing metabolism of the body, con- 
 sidered with the principle of the conserva- 
 tion of energy, always seemed to me to argue 
 against the annihilation of personality. But 
 after all, it is only a reasonable service in 
 this world, not omniscience, which is asked 
 of me. Some men hate the whole universe, 
 because they realize how brief the tenure of 
 the things they love in life is. But I am no 
 pessimist. Knowing that I only stay for a 
 time alongside of what I call my property, 
 I am still delighted with all I get, enjoying 
 immensely the use of it while I have it, and 
 believing, as Christ teaches, that so-called 
 death cannot rob me of spiritual friendships 
 and assets. If I count what I can contribute 
 to life, and not what I can get out of it, that 
 of itself makes it worth while. The gauge 
 is not what we have, but what we do with 
 what we have. 
 
 I am as sure that I am not my body as I 
 am that I am not my house. But for all that, 
 I know that I am I, and that I shall always 
 
CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 149 
 
 continue to be so is sufficiently probable 
 to satisfy me. Exactly what will befall me 
 hereafter has not yet entered into the heart 
 of man. Judging from popular ideas, very 
 far from it. 
 
 That men in this world are by no means 
 physically equally endowed, every doctor 
 knows, and every mother ought to know. 
 Christ never taught that they were. He 
 insisted only that we should recognize our 
 common brotherhood, not that we should 
 quarrel about being unequal. As for the 
 free-will controversy, Christ taught that 
 the only free men are those whom he sets 
 free from the slavery of self. Self-service 
 was the captivity from which he came to 
 set his people free. 
 
 To suppose that all men's intellectual 
 capacities are identical is absurd, and yet 
 with this premise in a world of utterly im- 
 perfect knowledge we play at the solution 
 of religious unity, as if, under the circum- 
 stances, it could ever be uniformity, either 
 in thought or in method of expression. There 
 
150 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 must ever be endless permutations and com- 
 binations when it comes to intellectual ap- 
 prehensions. So long as we cling to any hu- 
 manly devised definitions, which we insist 
 upon as articles of faith necessary to salva- 
 tion, we shall inevitably insure discord for 
 all time. Together with these initial dif- 
 ferences, and with imperfect data, we must 
 take into consideration the changes which 
 new environments and new experiences 
 make in the same individual. Thus for my 
 own part I was once absolutely intolerant 
 of all forms and ceremonies in public wor- 
 ship. Now I expect to value ever more and 
 more beauty and orderliness in the expres- 
 sion of it. 
 
 At the time of my own decision, twenty- 
 five years ago, the current version of the 
 doctrine of evolution was a very new and 
 staggering idea to every one. But my faith 
 was never seriously troubled. Perhaps the 
 fact that at that time I was deep in the 
 study of anatomy and physiology showed 
 me that the temple of man's soul was so 
 
CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 151 
 
 marvelously adapted to the environment 
 of a world like this, that I saw no reason 
 why we should have expected, as Balfour 
 has since suggested, that just because a 
 similar form suited lower animals, some 
 new design ought to have been devised for 
 us. Further, evolutionists argued, not only 
 that all improvements in physical conditions 
 were attained by intellectual processes such 
 as the Davy safety lamp, or Jenner's vac- 
 cine, merely fortuitous advances further 
 fitting our race for survival, but also that 
 every disinterested motive, every spiritual 
 impulse was just one more device for the 
 same end. I never could believe such good 
 fruit could come from such unpromising 
 trees. Anyhow, I did n't want to believe 
 it, for the boys I was teaching at that time 
 needed no encouragement to go and steal 
 the jam, as I found more than once at our 
 annual summer encampment. 
 
 Materialism has shot its bolt anyway, 
 and of late the pendulum has swung the 
 other way. The new knowledge of the 
 
152 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 periodic law, the divisibility of the atom, 
 the possible identity and intermutability of 
 what we used to consider elements, the hypo- 
 thesis that all matter is only after all a form 
 of electricity or motion, the discovery of ra- 
 dium and the suggestion of the possibility 
 of perpetual motion, all show us that of all 
 the ways in which we interpret Scripture, 
 none can possibly be considered final. Or- 
 thodox Christianity has suffered a good deal 
 from lack of humility, but our scientific 
 friends have little to boast of in that direc- 
 tion. 
 
 Because no one has been able to compre- 
 hend the doctrine of the Atonement, or to 
 compress the definition of it into words, I 
 see no reason to reject it, or for me to be 
 anxious for those who fail to accept it. De- 
 finitions and doctrines, anyhow, were never 
 vital to my faith. The realization of a hving 
 Christ, with all that that implies, seems all 
 that he expected of me. Just to live, "as 
 seeing him who is invisible," is my one ideal 
 which embraces all the lesser ideals of my 
 
CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 153 
 
 life; to do in all circumstances what I think 
 he would do in my place, not what he would 
 have done in Judaea two thousand years 
 ago. There was no temptation to waste 
 golden hours over bridge-whist in those 
 days. 
 
 The expression of my religion has to be 
 practical to satisfy me, though I have no 
 doubt whatever of the religion of those 
 who are satisfied with mystical experiences 
 alone. I quite realize that my faith is only 
 faith. But I know that every one has to 
 begin all knowledge with faith. My faith 
 is only my base for action, as is every one's 
 else. Moreover, it is the only possible base. 
 The faith of exceedingly fallible senses is 
 at the bottom of all actions. It is a marvel 
 that we get on as well as we do, seeing that 
 the evidence of our senses so frequently de- 
 ceives us. In reality they afford us no road 
 at all by which to arrive at truth. 
 
 To act on faith seems to me to be on surer 
 ground, and I try to strengthen it by read- 
 ing my Bible with common sense. I am 
 
154 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 glad to believe that his faith gave Barti- 
 meus his eyesight, — especially for Barti- 
 meus' sake, — for the value to me to-day of 
 a single cure done nineteen hundred years 
 ago is problematical, unless it teaches me 
 how to repeat it. But I believe my faith not 
 only made me see, but what is more, I do 
 actually believe it has enabled me to help 
 others to their vision, both physically and 
 mentally. 
 
 But what is the use of all this talking! I 
 would not cross the road, much less come 
 all the way from Labrador, unless I felt 
 there was some desirable end which might 
 be reached thereby. The object of the Noble 
 Lectures, as I have said, seemed to me a 
 decidedly practical one, namely, to induce 
 in the minds of the hearers a keener desire 
 to stand in life for just those things that 
 Christ stood for, to beget a determination 
 to reincarnate his life, and so attain the 
 whole achievement of which ours is capable. 
 
 How far this effort has been successful 
 only God knows. I have worried you with 
 
CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 155 
 
 long lists of names of men and the long re- 
 cords of deductions from other lives than 
 mine, solely because it seemed to me that 
 the best way to advocate the adoption of 
 principles is to illustrate their effect in ac- 
 tion. Moreover, it is only from the em- 
 pirical standpoint that I, a physician from 
 the confines of civilization, venture to ad- 
 dress you in this metropolis of all philo- 
 sophies. The knowledge of the immense 
 factor in public life which your universities 
 have become was an additional incentive, 
 emboldening me to accept the invitation 
 you extended. 
 
 I have seen the results of the change of 
 attitude of the exponents of Christ's relig- 
 ion from the controversial and tyrannical 
 methods of so many centuries back to the 
 brotherly methods of the Master; from 
 the failure of their attempts to be their 
 brother's keeper, to success in becoming 
 their brother's brother. And to-day, ten 
 times more than ever before, I am an op- 
 timist as to the future. In spite of the in- 
 
156 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 
 
 crease of Dreadnoughts and superdread- 
 noughts, I seem to see a distinct moral 
 progress in the relation of nations to one 
 another, and in the new social movement 
 opportunities and improvement in the rela- 
 tion of man to man. Experience has taught 
 me what a blessing for the real ills of hu- 
 manity this promises. Surely I may plead 
 that it is as compelling a force to a physi- 
 cian, this desire to give to others the bene- 
 fits of a remedy he has come to value so 
 highly himself, as is any professional oath 
 he may have taken to keep secret no treat- 
 ment he uses for physical ailments. Pos- 
 terity has nothing but blame for a Morton 
 who tried to patent the discovery of ether 
 for his own benefit. 
 
 If our eyes are only open for vision, in 
 ten thousand daily experiences we cannot 
 fail to see opportunities for what we can 
 give. We shall see God himself, not waiting 
 for us to be good, but seeking our coopera- 
 tion just where we stand, in the establish- 
 ment of his Kingdom. What could be more 
 
CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 157 
 
 terrible than to have to look back upon a 
 life of opportunities, as is that of each of 
 you, all of which we had let slip ! 
 
 This experience brings me here to-day to 
 try to induce you to accept as your life 
 axiom, not merely that God was once re- 
 incarnated in human life, as an emotional 
 submission, but that as an everyday matter 
 of fact Christ walks in our streets to-day, 
 and can again prove his divinity to us be- 
 yond question if we will permit him, by 
 living in our human lives. There is no life 
 but the life which comes from him; to me, 
 as I have said, the rest is merely existence. 
 The reason that Christ came was that we 
 might have life, here and now, and that 
 we might have it more and more abun- 
 dantly. 
 
 THE END 
 
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