.. "s ".*...'

' I AHE contact between Dr. Black's Scotch
training and the vivacity of his adopted
American life has produced an order of public
addresses that are most justly popular. These
sermons and addresses have been delivered
before the students and faculties of the leading
American Universities and are aflame with the
problems of American life and their spiritual
beariDgS- PUBLISHERS' NOTE.

TUntverstts Sermons

THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE

By HUGH BLACK, M.A.

Friendship 8vo, de luxe edition, cloth, gilt top,
deckle edge, boxed . . net $1.50
In full morocco binding . net 3.00
12mo, cloth, in two colors . . 1.25
Work
8vo, de luxe edition, cloth, gilt
top, deckle edge, boxed . net 1.50
The Gift of Influence AmeriAddHsns7frsHy
12mo, cloth . . . net 1.25
Listening to God Edinburgh Sermons
12mo, cloth . . . .net 1.25
Chris fs Service of Love Communion Sermons
12mo, cloth .... net 1.25
Culture and Restraint
12mo, decorated cloth , gilt top, net 1.50
The Drea?n of Youth
12mo, decorated boards . . .30

University Sermons
The Gift 0/ Influence

BY

HUGH BLACK
JESUP PROFESSOR OF PRACTICAL THEOLOGY
UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, NEW YORK

New York Chicago Toronto
Fleming H. Revell Company
London and Edinburgh

Copyright, 1908, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

New York : 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago : 80 WaTjash Avenue
Toronto : 25 Richmond Street, W.
London : 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh : 100 Princes Street

CONTENTS

PAGE
THE GIFT OP INFLUENCE  11
The keeper of the prison committed to Joseph's
hand all the prisoners that were in the prison;
and whatsoever they did there, he was the doer
of it. — Genesis xxxix. 22.
II
THE FAILURE OF GOD  22
Howbeit I sent unto you all My servants the prophets,
rising early and sending them, saying, Oh, do
not this abominable thing that I hate. But they
hearkened not nor inclined their ear to turn
from their wickedness. — Jebemiah xliv. 4.
Ill
RIGHTEOUS OVERMUCH  33
Be not righteous overmuch; neither make thyself
overwise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself?
Be not overmuch wicked, neither be thou fool
ish: why shouldest thou die before thy time? —
Ecclesiastes vii. 16. IV
WISE OVERMUCH  45
Neither make thyself overwise: why shouldest thou
destroy thyself? — Ecclesiastes vii. 16.
1

CONTENTS

PAGE
IS LIFE A BLESSING?  57
It had been good for that man if he had not been
born. — St. Matthew xxvi. 24.
VI
HUMILITY AND SELF-CONFIDENCE .... 68
For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every
man that is among you, not to think of himself
more highly than he ought to think; but to
think soberly, according as God hath dealt to
every man the measure of faith. — Romans
xii. 3. VII
THE SOLITARINESS OF PRINCIPLE .... 79
A certain people . . and their laws are diverse
from all people. — Esther iii. 8.
VIII
THE WAY OF TRANSGRESSORS  90
The way of transgressors is hard. — Pbovebbs xiii.
15. IX
SPIRITUAL APPREHENSION  101
Then said I, Ah Lord God! they say of me, Is he not
a speaker of parables? — Ezekiel xx. 49. R. V.
X
CHRISTIAN CONTROVERSY  HI
Speaking the truth in love. — Ephesians iv. 15.

CONTENTS 3
XI
PAGE
THE ATTRACTION OF THE PRESENT . . .122
And Esau said, Behold I am at the point to die: and
what profit shall this birthright do to me? —
Genesis xxv. 32. XII
AN UNFINISHED LIFE  132
I said, O my God, take me not away in the midst of
my days. — Psalm cii. 24.
XIII
THE LOVE OF PRAISE  142
They loved the praise of men more than the praise of
God. — St. John xii. 43.
XIV
THE SHAME OF DETECTION  153
As the thief is ashamed when he is found, so is the
house of Israel ashamed. — Jebemiah ii. 26.
XV
A NARROWING LIFE  163
For the bed is shorter than that a, man can stretch
himself on it: and the covering narrower than
that he can wrap himself in it. — Isaiah xxviii.
20. XVI
A FALSE STANDARD  174
But they like men have transgressed the covenant:
there have they dealt treacherously with me. —
Hosea vi. 7.

4 CONTENTS XVII
PAGE
THE FRIENDSHIPS OF PAUL  186
Furthermore, when I came to Troas to preach
Christ's Gospel and a door was opened unto me
of the Lord, I had no rest in my spirit, because
I found not Titus my brother. — 2 Cobinthians
ii. 13. XVIII
THE REPROOF OF LIFE  198
The ear that heareth the reproof of life abideth
among the wise. — Pbovebbs xv. 31.
XIX
THE COURAGE AND THE COWARDICE OF SIN . 211
His blood be on us and on our children. — Matthew
xxvii. 25.
Ye intend to bring this man's blood upon us. — Acts
v. 28.
XX
PERMISSION WITHOUT SANCTION . . . .222
And God said unto Balaam, Thou shalt not go with
them. . . . And God came unto Balaam at night
and said unto him, If the men come to call thee,
rise up and go with them. . . . And God's anger
was kindled because he went. — Numbeks xxii.
12, 20-22. XXI
RIGHTFUL CONFORMITY  231
Suffer it to be so now; for thus it becometh us to
fulfil all righteousness. — St. Matthew iii. 15.

CONTENTS 5
XXI
PAGE
NEEDFUL NONCONFORMITY  243
The Scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat: all
therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that
observe and do ; but do not ye after their works :
for they say and do not. — St. Matthew xxiii. 3.
XXIII
THE CHURCH'S APPEAL TO MEN . . . .256
Come with us and we will do thee good. Leave us
not, I pray thee; forasmuch as thou knowest
how we are to encamp in the wilderness and
thou mayest be to us instead of eyes. — Numbebs
x. 29-31. XXIV
THE GIFT OF YOUTH  266
Let no man despise thy youth. — 1 Timothy iv. 12.
XXV
THE IMMORTALITY OF MEMORY . . . .276
The memory of the just is blessed: but the name of
the wicked shall rot. — Pbovebbs x. 7.
XXVT
PAST AND PRESENT  287
Say not thou, What is the cause that the former
days were better than these? for thou dost not
inquire wisely concerning this. — Ecclesiastes
vii. 10. XXVII
THE PRINCIPLE OF JUDGMENT . . . .298
I will bring evil upon this people, even the fruit of
their thoughts. — Jebemiah vi. 19.

INTRODUCTORY
One of the sermons in this volume was preached at
Mansfield College, Oxford, and two at Scottish uni
versities ; the rest were preached during the last two
years at many of the American universities and col
leges. My own seminary sets me free for some
months each year of express purpose to visit the
universities, and I appreciate the great privilege so
freely offered me of entering somewhat into the col
lege life of America. The open-mindedness which is
so attractive a feature of American life is also char
acteristic of the universities, and whatever be the
special religious colour of each, I have had the same
cordial invitation and generous welcome from all.
These sermons were delivered as university preacher
at some of the older universities, such as Yale and
Harvard and Princeton, and at some of the smaller
colleges, like Williams and Amherst, and also at some
of the newer universities, and even at some of the
State universities, which, though they do not have
the office of university preacher, make other provi
sion. Four of the sermons are in pairs, which were
7

8 INTRODUCTORY
given on successive Sundays, one pair at the Univer
sity of Chicago and the other at Cornell University.
The sermons generally were not chosen for their
academic character, but were expressly designed to
avoid scholastic issues. It is my experience that the
last thing an academic audience at public worship
wants is an academic discourse, partly because stu
dents have a surfeit of that in their ordinary studies,
and partly because a college congregation, after all,
consists very largely of young men who are not much
more than beginning their education, and whose
problems are the practical problems of all youth.
More than guidance in speculation, do they need
simply inspiration for life. At many colleges where
opportunity offered, in addition to the regular chapel
service I met the men later in a less formal way, and
we discussed the intellectual and speculative bearings
of religion, often in the form of questions supplied
by the students.
Superficial observers sometimes speak of the ma
terialism of America. Nothing could be further
from the truth, when we look deeply and broadly.
It might even be said with far more truth that
America suffers in every region of life from an un
regulated idealism. Certainly no one can know inti
mately the mass of students without being struck by

INTRODUCTORY 9
the ready response they give to every high thought
and every generous passion. No one can despair of
the future who knows the splendid material the col
leges of the land contain, and how eagerly men long
to attempt great tasks. If anything, the practical
and ethical interests overmatch the intellectual. In
religion the social side bulks largest, and this be
cause of the new ideals of social service, which is only
another way of stating the demands of the Kingdom
of Heaven. Men are anxious to know how best to
invest their lives, and never before was there such
keen desire to find a place to serve. It is the most
hopeful thing in our situation that our educational
institutions are supplying men with large and noble
ideals of social duty.

THE GD7T OF INFLUENCE
The keeper of the prison committed to Joseph's hand all
the prisoners that were in the prison; and whatsoever they
did there, he icas the doer of it. — Genesis xxxix. 22.
Joseph, as depicted in the beautiful Biblical nar
rative, was a born leader. His sweet and gracious
nature with its brightness and alertness gave him
easy access to men's hearts. He was naturally
lovable. His personal comeliness for one thing pre
possessed everybody in his favour ; for he was " a
goodly person and well-favoured." Then he was of
a gentle and affectionate disposition, which delighted
in giving people pleasure and in serving them. He
had also early learned in the school of affliction,
which only made his heart more tender and consid
erate of others. He was a man of principle, too,
conscientious, trustworthy, willing to suffer rather
than commit a base or dishonourable act ; and in the
long run character counts for much and makes men
instinctively trust the man of tried probity. His
supreme qualification was that he had an inner life
11

12 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
of simple faith, which kept him from personal
anxiety about his own future and left him free to
think of others.
There was in him in addition the unusual combi
nation of the imaginative and the practical. The
young man who dreamed dreams and saw visions was
also a man of affairs with remarkable talent for
business, efficient in managing all he undertook. The
gift of vision always attracts, compelling men by
the force of a bold spirit, but the dreamer who can
inspire to action is not always able to direct the
force he sets in motion. He is often impractical
and unbusinesslike. The born leader of men must
have something of both qualities, the power of the
dreamer of appealing to sentiment and creating en
thusiasm, bringing a glimpse of the ideal to his
more prosaic followers; and at the same time he
must prove his capacity and create confidence in his
practical wisdom. Joseph showed he possessed both
sets of qualities in all the varied situations in which
he was placed. The young slave, who rose to be
overseer in the house of his master, when he sank
to be a prisoner impressed all there with his charac
ter and with his capacity, so that the keeper of the
prison trusted him, and all the inmates readily as
sented to his personal superiority, till he took his

THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE 13
natural place as leader, so that " whatsoever the
prisoners did there, he was the doer of it." The
prisoner became the real governor. He was the in
spiring force, bringing light and hope and accom
plishing more by his influence over others than was
possible by any individual exertion.
This is the way all leadership works. It is the
power to do this which constitutes leadership. No
man can do a. great work single-handed. He must
work with, and through, others. He must have
friends and comrades of some sort, or at least in
struments; and the highest kind of leadership is
that which makes all its instruments into friends,
working together for a common end, comrades in
a common cause. This peculiar magnetic power
of a great leader makes his followers associate them
selves utterly with his fortunes, so that his triumphs
become theirs, and his ambitions write themselves
on their minds. They will serve and obey and
gladly sacrifice that his ends may be advanced. It
is said of Napoleon in his best days that before a
battle on which much depended he summoned his
officers into his tent one by one, grasped their hand
and looked right into their eyes without a word ; and
they went out all Napoleons, ready to die for him if
need be.

14 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
It is one of the noblest things in human nature
that men give such pure devotion to an admired
and loved leader, that they are hero-worshippers,
though sometimes the hero is very poor clay at the
best. In truth the world waits for leaders in every
branch of thought and activity, waits for men whom
it can follow with a whole heart, whether or not we
believe with Carlyle that universal history, the his
tory of what man has accomplished in this world, is
at bottom the history of the great men who have
worked here. We may think more of the mass and
less of the individual than Carlyle did; we may
think that the followers have more to do with the
making of their leaders than the leader has in shap
ing events ; but it remains true that every generation
stands in dire need of men of light and leading, men
who can thrill and inspire and direct and move
their fellows to high thoughts and noble passions.
¦ Even for practical success in every great enter
prise there is a clamant need of leadership. The
best designs and the best organizations will come to
little without some inspiring head. Every great
work needs a controlling brain and heart, a centre
for affection and devotion. If this be a-missing it
is like the skeleton without the vital spark to make
it live. If this be a-missing, even though all else be

THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE 15
there, the best results are impossible. In every
sphere we are ready to welcome the commanding in
fluence, if only the pre-eminence be justified by
qualities that warrant it. We even content our
selves with sham leaders when no better are forth
coming; and Carlyle is right when he insists that
the sole problem is to find out the true heaven-born
leaders, to select the real heroes if such are to be had
at alL In religion, and politics, and social service,
even in business, we need the inspiring influence
of leaders. We are all natural hero-worshippers.
There is plenty of raw material for all the world's
highest needs, plenty of humble eager souls who
could be fired with zeal and devotion. A cry of our
hearts is to be taken and held and drilled and sent.
Even in Pharaoh's prison men bent to the fascina
tion of a man like Joseph, who could direct them and
lead them, so that, whatsoever the prisoners did, he
was the doer of it. It is the dream of youth to be
some day swept into the circle of which a true and
great man is the centre, to do his bidding gladly, to
move to any mission at his request, proud to serve in
some great cause.
Shine on us all in armour, thou Achilles,
Make our hearts dance to thy resounding tread.
The history of the world may not be what it has

16 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
been called, merely the biography of great men ; but
at any rate the history of the world would be dif
ferent if the influence of even a few of its great
men had been left out. Sometimes a whole epoch
has been dominated by one man, who has made his
tory because he was able to move men by the impulse
of his mind and soul. We sometimes think we can
explain a great man by our common phrase, that he
was the creature of his time; and there is usually
much truth in the use of the phrase. The leader
gets as well as gives. He cannot be put in a sepa
rate category as a thing apart, as if he were a pecu
liar creation, unrelated to the past and independent
of the present. No man could affect his age if he
were not in the fullest sense the fruit of the age,
entering into its thought, knowing its problems, feel
ing the pulse of its life. The great world-move
ments do not owe their origin to one man's thought,
like Minerva sprung full-grown from the brain of
Jove. They grow from the needs of the time, the
slowly gathering vital forces that will find outlet.
The Reformation, for example, was greater than the
reformers, greater than Luther or Calvin or Knox.
In its political aspect it was the breaking of bonds in
Western Europe that had become intolerable. In
its inner aspect it was the movement of the soul of

THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE 17
man towards liberty of mind and conscience, towards
a fuller knowledge, a truer faith, a purer worship.
But the acknowledged truth of all this gives us no
warrant for imagining that we have explained the
great man by calling him the creature of his time.
If he brought no free and individual force to the
situation it would only be where it was. Granted
that the Reformation would have been without Lu
ther, there would need to be some other sort of
Luther somewhere else, or, if you prefer it, some
score of pigmy Luthers to do his work. There could
be no Reformation without at least some kind of
reformers. It is a foolish way to treat history as if it were
in a vacuum, the whirl of impersonal forces without
father or mother or any definite human connection.
We have got so scientific to-day with our tendencies
and streams of influence and movements of thought,
though it is not easy to see how there can be spiritual
tendencies without spiritual beings, and moral in
fluence without moral life, and movements of thought
without thinkers. As if there were in the world
man but not men, the generic man without the indi
vidual ! It is of a piece with so many arguments of
political economists about human life in terms of
x and y, and their talk of the masses, as if the masses

18 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
were not composed of units, each with his own
heart's bitterness and his heart's joy. We play with
words when we talk of tendencies and movements,
as if we were really accounting for anything by the
use of words like these ; and our preference of such
general terms to acknowledging the creative influence
of individuals is part of the latent infidelity which
dislikes to admit creation in any sphere, the launch
ing of a force straight from the hand and the heart
of God.
We say also in similar strain that the occasion
makes the man; and the truth of that is evident.
But all life, every day, is an occasion ; and many an
occasion has arisen in history, great enough to be
called a crisis, but the man was not forthcoming, to
the great loss of the occasion ! Sometimes rather the
man makes the occasion, comes with his new mes
sage of truth, his new vision of good, his fresh in
spiration of duty ; and it is his coming which is the
occasion. If a generation has any distinctive char
acter at all, it is and must be the fruit of personal
character. To treat the world of man without
reference to the power of personal influence is to
make it inexplicable. Joseph was the key of what
soever the prisoners did; for he was the doer of it.
The lines the Reformation took cannot be under-

THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE 19
stood unless you understand something of Luther.
History is impossible without biography; and some
history is an enigma to us because we cannot learn
the source of the hidden unseen power at its heart,
the inspiration that gave life to the deeds.
After all, the subtle magnetic force of a great man
is only a common fact of life and experience, seen
on a larger scale than usual. It is only a striking
illustration of the common fact of influence, where
height answers height, and soul catches fire from
soul. It is, or may be, the gift of all in some meas
ure; and is not merely the privilege of the few.
Indeed the most potent influences in the world are
not always the most obtrusive. In a region like this
we cannot judge by the eye. The doer of it all in
the Egyptian prison was a very obscure person at
the time. The men and things that make the big
gest splash in the world are sometimes the least im
portant. It is not always the man you praise who
does the real work. The scheme for which the cabi
net minister gets credit is often the doing of an
unknown permanent official. There is usually
somewhere a man behind the throne of more im
portance than the man on the throne. How often
the real source of even a great man's strength is
derived from some humble and winsome soul who

20 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
shrinks from notice, and who could not believe that
whatsoever is done he is the real doer of it. You
never can tell how even a word of comfort and cour
age will nerve another for a task which otherwise
would be left undone. Who can say what of the
great deeds of the world and the noble lives of men
have been inspired by one who was unregarded by
dull eyes and unpraised by blatant voices ?
Take the common sphere of a mother's influence.
How many men will admit that all the good in
them they owed to the example or teaching or mem
ory of their mother, and whatsoever of good they
have done, she was the doer of it ? The young man
who goes out like a knight of old to fight in the
battle of life, with his armour girt on him by a
mother's hand, may not have even the largest
share in the glory of the conquest. There is no
end to spiritual influence; and you cannot al
ways put the finger on the place where it begins.
The way of the spirit is the way of the wind. Thou
canst not tell whither it bloweth nor whence it
cometh. There is none so bereft of power, so barren of op
portunity, that he may not serve in this great con
federacy of good. There is none who may not share
in the burden and the glory of the Kingdom of

THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE 21
Heaven. It cometh not with observation ; and not a
thought or an effort or a prayer is lost, not a kindly
deed or a gentle word is spent for nought. The
patience of the sufferer, the faith of the lowly, the
prayers of the saints, the love of loving hearts, the
ministry of kindly hands, are as incense swung from
the censers of the angels. You do not know when
you touch the spiritual forces that surround life.
In seeming inaction even, you may be the doer of
whatsoever is done.
This sacred gift of influence which is yours —
what are you doing with it ? Are you wasting it on
selfish ends, or hiding it in a napkin? If you have
no consecration in your life, you are losing your best
gift, you are losing your soul — and the souls of
others. In the great Temple of human lives, what
matter who puts on the cope-stone, and the gleam
ing pinnacle? What matter who does the work,
and gets the credit, so that the work is done? If
you consecrate yourself to God, you will get your
place, and wield your influence. What higher work
is there than to help another to a clearer vision of
truth, or to a nobler sense of duty, to encourage in
good and inspire to high ends ?

II
THE FAILURE OF GOD
Howbeit 1 sent unto you all My servants the prophets, ris
ing early and sending them, saying, Oh, do not this abominable
thing that I hate. But they hearkened not nor inclined their
ear to turn from their wickedness. — Jebemiah xliv. 4.
There is a timid anaemic religion which is afraid
to speak of God except in vague general terms, such
as the Absolute, the First Cause, the Power that
makes for righteousness, and the like. It is afraid
to ascribe to God the emotional and moral qualities
familiar to us in human nature, love, fear, jealousy,
passion, eager desire. This is partly due to a worthy
feeling, which dreads to degrade the divine by too
close association with human attributes. Figures of
speech, which speak of God performing acts like a
man, sound offensive to superfine ears. This type
of religion would worship God as the Infinite, or
the Eternal, or as Absolute Law; and takes care to
avoid the anthropomorphism which frankly attrib
utes human qualities to God, by invariably using
ethereal and colourless ideas. It is shocked by such

THE FAILURE OF GOD 23
an idea as ascribing jealousy to God, or by such a
figure as here, which pictures God rising early in
the morning that He might lose no time in sending
prophets and messengers to the people He loved
in the eager desire for their good. It will have
nothing but abstruse philosophical words to express
spiritual things, and as a religious result it ends in
expressing nothing; for it whittles away any real
notion of God at all, and soon is submerged in a
vague Pantheism.
Religiously it is a failure ; for mere philosophical
terms, however accurate, can never touch the hearts
of men and inspire either true love or true worship.
There is no irreverence in the way Scriptural writers
ascribe to God thoughts and feelings and actions
derived from human life. If God is to be real to
us at all, a living personal Being, we are compelled
to speak of Him in terms of the human. All
language that we can use to express the divine
attributes must necessarily be imperfect. We can
have no conception of what we have no experience.
We are forced by the limitations of our nature to
think of God in human terms. Revelation also must
do the same, or it would pass over our heads without
effect. The Bible declares God to be infinite above
thought or speech or imagination of man, with ways

24 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
and thoughts higher than man's as the Heaven is
higher than the earth. But it takes the highest that
we know in man, love, generosity, mercy, justice,
righteousness, and extends them, and declares that
God is that and more, infinitely all that, the highest
and best in man. We have said that this is a neces
sity both philosophically and religiously; and there
fore it is absurd to boggle at figures of speech wliich
are designed to make vivid and real some aspect of
these divine qualities.
From a literary point of view also such superfine
criticism is stupid. It is pedantry of the worst sort
to condemn the prophets for depicting God as jeal
ously anxious for His people, or as pleading pas
sionately with them, rising early and sending mes
sengers beseeching them for their good, and yet
failing in achieving His heart-felt desire. If God
is love and is the living God, then these figures of
speech are truer than any metaphysical subtleties
to express the divine nature could possibly be. It
was true insight, therefore, as well as moral bold
ness, that made the writers of the Bible fearlessly
speak of God in the language of human nature, even
the language of human passion. Again and again,
for example, Jeremiah uses this same homely figure
of speech as of a man rising early in his eagerness,

THE FAILURE OF GOD 25
despatching messengers, leaving no means untried
to bring His people to a right mind, pleading with
them, and yet failing in His benign purpose as a
man fails. It is a figure of the everlasting patience
of God, refusing to be tired out, bearing and for
bearing, trying new plans and new agents, and
yet beaten back by invincible obstinacy, His best
schemes frustrated, His kindest designs defeated,
having at the last to acknowledge Himself baffled.
" I sent unto you all My servants the prophets, rising
early and sending them, saying, Oh, do not this
abominable thing that I hate. But they hearkened
not, nor inclined their ear to turn from their wick
edness." It is a vivid picture of the failure of God. From
the philosophical point of view where God is the
Absolute, eternal irrefragable Law, His purpose can
never be said to fail; the immutable word cannot
return void but must accomplish that which it will.
And in a logical system of doctrine, of which there
is none so logical and consistent as Calvinism, the
Sovereignty of God must be maintained, with radi
ance undimmed and supremacy unchallenged. His
decrees go out and inevitably achieve their purpose,
unerring as natural law. But there is another sense,
true to the highest attributes of the divine nature,

26 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
in which God may be said to fail often, to attempt
what ends only in disaster. The Bible is a record
of the failures of God, the putting forth of divine
grace with no result, the travail of heart and soul
with no fruit. Whenever we speak of His designs in
terms of love, when we think of Him as the gracious
Lord or Heavenly Father, dealing with disobe
dient vassals or with wilful children, we are brought
face to face with this strange mystery, that the Lord
of lords and King of kings can fail of His purpose
and be unable to attain what He most desires. The
Bible constantly depicts God as putting forth to the
utmost His redemptive grace, seeking ever to find
an opening to the heart of man, trying every shift
that wisdom and love can suggest, putting Himself
on the level of men, pleading with them, " Oh, do
not this abominable thing that I hate," rising early
and sending His servants, asking for obedience and
reasonable service; and yet every effort repulsed,
His grace made of none effect, beaten back by the
obstinate defence of man. It is failure so complete
that the terrible words could be said, " It repented
the Lord that He had made man."
This is the heart-breaking pathos of the wonder
ful literature of the Bible, the failure of all the
gracious means designed by perfect love, not merely

THE FAILURE OF GOD 27
that so much of the world lay in darkness though
the light shone, not merely that so little impact was
made, and even is still made, on the great mass of
men outside ; but even with God's own people, His
covenanted folk, chosen of express purpose to know
His will and to carry out His design, even there
what failure? The whole history of revelation
reads like an extension of this pitiful figure of our
text, detailing the steps taken, the different efforts
made, of which this is but the summing up, " I sent
unto you all My servants the prophets, rising early
and sending them saying, Oh, do not this abominable
thing that I hate. But they hearkened not nor in
clined their ear to turn from their wickedness."
Is not that the plain and simple impression left on
us by the whole story of God's dealing with Israel,
the tragedy of unrequited love, the failure of re
peated attempts to establish permanent relations of
devotion and service ?
It is our Lord's own interpretation of that history
of revelation with Israel given so graphically in
the parable of the Vineyard, planted with care,
hedged round with love, enriched with winepress,
protected with tower, and let out to husbandmen.
What more could be done to the vineyard than had
been done? It was to be expected that when the

28 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
time of fruit drew near and He sent His servants
to the husbandmen, that He would receive of the
fruit. This is our Lord's solemn pronouncement on
the history of Israel — "The husbandmen took his
servants and beat one and killed another and stoned
another. Again he sent other servants more than
the first ; and they did unto them likewise. But last
of all he sent unto them his son, saying, they will
reverence my son. But when the husbandmen saw
the son they said among themselves, This is the
heir; come let us kill him and let us seize on the
inheritance. And they caught him and cast him out
of the vineyard and slew him." It is the same figure
of the Lord rising early and sending His servants,
making continual allowance, patiently persisting in
His effort, hoping against hope. It is the same fig
ure also of ultimate failure, a failure more disas
trous, more irretrievable, because the very last re
source has been tried and again has failed. " Last of
all He sent His own son." What more now could
love suggest that love has not done ?
To see how essentially true is Jeremiah's moving
picture of God's eagerness and God's failure, we
need only think of that scene in the last week of the
Saviour's passion when He mourned over the holy
city with yearning pitiful love, " O Jerusalem,

THE FAILURE OF GOD 29
Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and stonest
them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have
gathered thy children together as a hen gathereth
her brood under her wings — and ye would not."
They would not listen; they would not respond;
they would not obey; they would not be saved. Is
there any failure in all the world like the failure
of God?
Now this great solemn fact of the failure of God
on wliich we have been insisting is really no failure
on His part, because the possibility of it is involved
in the very nature of the case. It is essential to
moral life, which means the life of beings capable
of falling, capable of rebellion, open to sin. Moral
law cannot from the very constitution of moral law
be classed with natural law, which has unerring sway
and cannot be broken. But in the realm of morals
such inevitable compulsion is impossible. Moral
and spiritual freedom is a necessity of the case.
Only by self-determination of the will, only by free
choice of man, can God gain the victory. If men
will not hearken and will not incline their ear to
turn from their wickedness, if they will not submit
their heart to the obedience of Christ, then though
God send His servants rising early and sending them
with everlasting patience and resourceful love,

30 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
pleading, beseeching, the great purpose of religion
cannot be accomplished. God cannot succeed, if
man fails. So that, if we consider rightly, it is
not the failure of God after all which we have been
lamenting, but the failure of man. And the ulti
mate issue of it is not merely evil against God, but
as the prophet puts it great evil against your own
souls. The failure is yours — and the penalty. The
divine grace can accomplish anything, can overcome
every obstacle, till it comes down to the bed-rock of
human will ; and then, if it fails, it is the failure not
of God but of man. Human will is an ultimate in
religion and in life. It cannot be evaded; and be
fore the great benign purpose of religion can be
accomplished the citadel of the will must be cap
tured, and that can only be by willing submission
by which the will is conformed to the will of God.
So the failure of God is the failure of man. Also,
if this pathetic figure of Jeremiah which depicts
God as so eager to win man that He is as an Over
lord who rises early and continues late devising ex
pedients, sending servants with never a break in the
benevolent chain, giving them pleading messages to
deliver — if this figure represents the facts, what
wilful inexcusable failure is ours? Does not the
figure fairly represent the fact? We have seen it

THE FAILURE OF GOD 31
to be so in the long record of Biblical history; and
if we appeal to our own hearts to sustain that sad
verdict, do not our hearts condemn us ? If we have
failed to understand and to fulfil the law of God
wliich is the law also of our own life, if we have
failed to enter into the filial relationship with God,
if we are living only as the beasts that perish with
dull ears that never respond to the higher call and
fat hearts that never move to the divine impulse,
it is not for want of opportunity (be magnanimous
enough to bear God witness), it is not for lack of
messengers — He has sent them all, rising early and
sending them, one by one, pleading with burning
words, Oh do not this abominable thing that I hate,
Turn ye ; why will ye die : Hear and your soul shall
live. The world has been vocal with the call of God
if we would but hear, and ablaze with signs of God,
if we would but see. By silence and by sound, by
mystery and by revelation, by providence and by
grace, by holy days and holy places and holy men,
love has clambered at our hearts, knocked at the
door till deathless love itself has almost died of
hopelessness — at sundry times and diverse manners,
if by any chance one might succeed where others
fail, He has spoken by the prophets, rising early and
sending them.

32 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
Last of all, He sent His own Son, standing beside
us, touching us with human hands, calling us with
human voice. By the blood and the tears and the
passion and the cross — and " ye will not come unto
me that ye might have life." If the failure of God
is mystery, the failure of man is tragedy.

ni
RIGHTEOUS OVERMUCH
Be not righteous overmuch; neither make thyself over-
wise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself? Be not overmuch
wicked, neither be thou foolish: why shouldest thou die before
thy time? — Ecclesiastes vii. 16.
Otje text is characteristic of one of the lines of
thought which run through this strange Book. The
Book is autobiographical in the true sense, that it
gives a record of personal thought and experience.
The Book is the fruit of the contact of a Jew with
alien philosophy and civilisation. There is ever the
echo of the great world outside Jewry. The author
had seen the world, and had tried the different ways
of life wliich have ever been possible for men.
Brought up in the strict training of his race, he
had escaped from what appeared its narrowness; he
had seen the cities and the ways of men, and had
become cosmopolitan. He had wealth, which opened
all doors to him of education and culture and social
enjoyment. The Book is full of world-weariness. The satiety
83

34 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
which comes from such a life seems at first to have
destroyed all serious earnest purpose; and he pro
nounced upon all things the verdict of vanity, that
everything was equally worthless, and nothing
counted much anyway. It is the judgment of a man
who had seen everything, done everything, enjoyed
everything, tried all the pleasures and experiences
within his reach, and over all he sighs failure, vanity,
and vexation of spirit. The early zest for life was
soon blunted. Pleasures no longer pleased. The
heart was satiated to sickness. He had set out to
know life, as many young men mean by knowing life,
and life had broken him and held him in its toils.
He had not given himself altogether to lower
pleasures. He had tried literature, knowledge, phi
losophy, the higher and more intellectual delights.
He had tried to find out a satisfactory philosophy of
life, but here too is the same vanity. Truth seems
ever to elude him. And ever and again he comes
back with longing to the faith of his childhood, with
its inexorable moral law, with the fear of God as the
one only worthy aim of life. The Book is not a
systematic treatise. It is the record of all these
conflicting experiences and influences. All these dif
ferent threads mingle in the yarn, and we cannot
separate them completely. But the withered world-

RIGHTEOUS OVERMUCH 35
weary life, so frankly revealed in this Autobiogra
phy, is itself the most terrible sermon that could be
preached from the Book, of the vanity of a life lived
apart from God.
The words of our text, with their doctrine of
moderation, suggest a common thought in Greek
philosophy. A warning against excess was usual
even in the Epicurean philosophy, as excess would
inevitably ruin the end aimed at, happiness. Mod
eration in everything, the golden mean, was a watch
word. Avoid extremes, do nothing in excess, be pru
dent in pleasures, in nothing be violent and intem
perate — this is the surest way to be happy. But
quite apart from the question of happiness and
pleasure, in typical Greek thinking the good, or vir
tue, or moral excellence lay in avoiding extremes.
It might be called the very central thought of Aris
totle's Ethics that virtue is moderation, not of course
meaning moderation in indulging in anything
wrong, but that wrong itself means either excess or
deficiency. He defines virtue as a habit or trained
faculty of choice, the characteristic of which lies in
observing the mean. " And it is a moderation,
firstly, inasmuch as it comes in the middle or mean
between two vices, one on the side of excess, the
other on the side of defect; and secondly, inasmuch

36 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
as, while these vices fall short of, or exceed, the due
measure in feeling and in action, it finds and
chooses the mean or moderate amount." How true
this is as a principle of ethics can easily be seen.
Take the matter of giving money, virtue or modera
tion would be liberality ; the two corresponding vices
would be excess, which is prodigality, and deficiency,
which is meanness. Even in details of life like
pleasant amusing conversation, Aristotle would call
moderation wit or humour, and undue excess buf
foonery, and undue deficiency boorishness, as of a
man who frowned gloomily on every innocent jest.
This great principle of the mean is in keeping with
the whole Greek ideal of culture, as the harmonious
development of every part, without onesidedness.
We can see how attractive it must have appeared
to a man like the author of this Book, and how
easily the principle would give itself to a moral
descent in a Jew, whose religious faith was break
ing down. He describes one of his moods in what
he calls the days of his vanity. He had seen good
men failing, and wicked men succeeding, and liv
ing out their years, just because they were prudent
in their wickedness. And so from that he draws
the cynical conclusion of our text. " Be not right
eous overmuch, neither be thou overwise. Be not

RIGHTEOUS OVERMUCH 37
overmuch wicked, neither be thou too foolish."
The great thing is prudence. Do not overdo any
thing. Do not stick too much to principle ; you will
only make yourself a bore to other men, and give
yourself needless unhappiness. Do not aim too high
in anything. If you try to be too good, people will
give you the cold shoulder as a fanatic. If you try
to be too wise, you will only bring sorrows on your
self, and besides after all it is not very much you can
know. Yet, on the other hand, you must not go into
excess in the other extreme. Be not overmuch
wicked. Don't be a fool. Why shouldest thou die
before thy time? And excess means decay of
powers, and premature death. Stick to the safe and
middle course. It does not pay to be violent on
either side. To be desperately religious, or to be
desperately irreligious, makes people look askance on
you. You will be like a speckled bird in the nest
for all the others to peck at. Do not obtrude your
principles too much, if you have any. Moderation
is the mark of respectability. Take religion
easily. Wink a little at others' faults and they will
wink at yours. " Be not righteous overmuch." It
is not a very high-toned morality this, when we ex
tend it thus, and see what it comes to, but it is the
ordinary morality of the world, the practical good

38 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
sense of moderation which the world approves, the
prudent self-control which passes for wisdom among
men.
There is much to be said for this doctrine of
moderation even in what is called righteousness, at
a time like that in which the writer lived, when
righteousness was looked on by most as external cere
monies and keeping of endless rules, rather than as
spiritual passion. There is often much justification
for the sneer at overmuch righteousness at all times,
when the soul has died out of religion and the punc
tilious keeper of the law becomes self-complacent
and censorious of others. It is this gives point and
sting, and even justice, to Robert Burns' " Addres3
to the Unco Guid," or the Rigidly Righteous,
O ye wha are sae guid yoursel,
Sae pious and sae holy,
Ye've nought to do but mark and tell
Your neibours' fauts and folly!
Censoriousness, such as Burns describes, is the
temptation of the over-righteous. If righteousness
means a rigid adherence to points and details, and if
it leads to what St. Paul calls the vainly puffed up
mind, then the counsel is good, " Be not righteous
overmuch." It is, however, only in a very limited degree, and

RIGHTEOUS OVERMUCH 39
only when the true meaning of righteousness is ob
scured, that there is any truth in the cynical counsel.
If righteousness is inward conformity to the holy
will of God, then there can be no limitations set to
the standard of righteousness. From this point of
view the prudential policy of our text is really a
terrible moral degradation. What a decline and fall
it was for the author of this Book to have been ever
able to so mistake religion ! For a Jew to think this,
even in a passing mood, was to belie his race, and to
betray the faith of his fathers. The Jews had a
zeal for God — Paul bears them witness, and the
world must bear them witness. It is their glory
that they gave the world religion, because of the
passion in their very blood for righteousness.
How different this attitude of our text is from
that of the prophets and psalmists and saints of the
Old Testament ! To the prophet Amos this was the
most terrible of all punishments of national sin that
there would be a famine in the land, not a famine
of bread nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the
word of the Lord. Not the search after happiness,
but the search after holiness is the keynote of the
Bible. We can feel the throb, and hear the cry,
even in the cold printed page. " As the hart
panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul

40 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
after Thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God,
for the living God." Another exiled saint, thinking
of the privileges of worshipping in the House of
God, cries, " My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for
the courts of the Lord: my heart and my flesh cry
out for the living God." In presence of this how
mean and pitiful appears the worldly policy of pru
dence, to be moderately good, and not too outrage
ously bad, because such extremes do not pay !
The doctrine of the golden mean in religion, as
our author states it, only needs to be put alongside
of such words of psalmists and saints, to stand in con
demnation. It is true that moderation is a good
quality, but it is not, as Aristotle made it, the essen
tial condition of virtue. Morality needs a higher
standard than anything that can be associated with
prudence. To dethrone duty from the first place in
order to give its room to policy ; to make expediency
the rule of conduct instead of principle, is to debase
man and deny God. Our Lord pronounces His in
effable blessing upon the very men whom this
worldly wisdom sneers at. " Blessed are they that
hunger and thirst after righteousness." They may
not have the success and popularity which the pru
dent trimmer achieves. They have not the pleasant
satisfaction and easy contentment which come to the

RIGHTEOUS OVERMUCH 41
dulled soul. Nay, they are torn by a passionate de
sire, and burn with the fervour of longing. They
have the pain of heart-hunger and thirst of soul,
keener in its sense of* need than any craving of ap
petite. They are weighted by the consciousness of
sin, and are driven by a sense of spiritual want.
They are tormented by a passion for purity, and
they pine after holiness — and nothing but God can
fill the aching void of heart.
Victims of unsatisfied desire, smitten by the mal
ady of the ideal, Striving to attain
By shadowing out the unattainable,
how are they blessed ? . Surely there is much to
be said for the policy which avoids burdening the
life with spiritual discontent, " Be not righteous
overmuch." Is that not the way to attain to
comfort and respect and a pleasant life, and the
affection of our fellows? Yes, that is the way. If
you want that harvest, that is the kind of sowing
you must do.
But how can there be blessing along with pining,
with want, with hunger and thirst, with unappeased
desire? Wherein are they blessed? In this way,
that desire is ever a note of life. When life begins,
need begins. Life is a bundle of want. And the

42 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
higher the desire, the higher the life. The body can
hunger and thirst, and has its own bodily cravings.
The mind hungers and thirsts for knowledge, and
when desire stops mental development stops. All
development is along the line of desire. The mark
of spiritual life is spiritual desire, a moral longing
for conformity to the will of God.
There is a school of philosophy, pretentious in its
claims, which disposes of the whole question of re
ligion by extending even further the cynical counsel
of Ecclesiastes, " Be not righteous overmuch." It
says in some form or other, Reduce your wants : Give
up all this searching after God, all this attempt to
conform to an impossible ideal: Why strive after
the unattainable? Why torment yourself with vi
sions of perfection ? Why not rest content in a lower
plane ? The unknown is the unknowable. " Be
not righteous overmuch, neither make thyself over-
wise." It is a craven creed at the best. Even if
there were no satisfaction, even if the world-weary
advice of Ecclesiastes were the better policy, even if
the malady of the ideal were incurable, it would still
be duty to hunger after it, it would still be the best
and highest for the living soul, it would still be the
master-light of all our seeing. But says Christ, who
walked with unclouded vision and certain tread

RIGHTEOUS OVERMUCH 43
among spiritual things, " They shall be filled."
The unattained is not the unattainable.
" Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after
righteousness, for they shall be filled." Filled with
righteousness, that is. Instinct does not play man
false here any more than in any other sphere of
need. Bodily hunger means that there is food that
can satisfy it. If there is a God-given instinct of the
soul, that want also can be supplied. If there is
spiritual hunger, there is bread of life to appease it.
If there is soul-thirst, there is water of life to
quench it. They shall be filled with righteousness;
they shall get their desire, obtain that to which they
have given their hearts. If a man's earnest desire is
God, God will be all in all to him one day. " Ho,
every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and
he that hath no money, come ye, buy and eat; yea,
come, buy wine and milk without money and with
out price " — without price, except the price that ye
should really hunger and really thirst.
You cannot follow Jesus on the heights, if yours
is the creed of the blase sensualist, " Be not righteous
overmuch." You may go far, but you cannot go
there. You cannot know the blessedness of His
Kingdom, unless you hunger and thirst after right
eousness, with a spiritual craving that will not be

44 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
satisfied until you awake in His likeness. To all
who watch and pray, with a desire more than they
that watch for the morning, this is His blessed prom
ise, " In the last day, that great day of the feast,
Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst,
let him come unto Me, and drink."

IV
WISE OVERMUCH
Neither make thyself overwise: why shouldest thou destroy
thyself? — Ecclesiastes vii. 16.
In last sermon we saw how the author of Ecclesi
astes applied the doctrine of the mean, of modera
tion as the secret of life, to religion, and reached the
conclusion that it was best for a man to steer a middle
course, and not be either over-righteous or over-
wicked. We saw what truth there was in the advice
as satire on formal religion ; and we saw its inherent
falseness when contrasted with our Lord's pro
nouncement, " Blessed are they that hunger and
thirst after righteousness."
Here the same doctrine of moderation is extended
to the intellectual sphere that the safest course is to
avoid extremes here also and to do nothing in ex
cess. As the prudent man will not pain himself by
vain efforts after perfect moral excellence but will
be content to be moderately righteous and will not
seek to pitch his principles to too high a tone ; so also
45

46 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
in matters of intellect the prudent man will not
shorten his days with too eager speculation and too
deep thought. He knows that wisdom is good, and
that it is a terrible thing to be a fool, but it is almost
as bad to be too wise. The worldly-wise man is not
concerned with insoluble problems, and life is full
of such problems. He is more concerned about
practical things, and he sees that what pays best is
practical good sense, and knowledge of life, and
skill in affairs. He carefully avoids touching the
mysteries, and infinities, and immensities, that sur
round human life. He feels that such knowledge is
too high for him ; and besides, that is not the gate to
success in the world. As in the question of holiness
he shrinks from being infected by the malady of the
ideal, so in the question of wisdom, he knows his
limitations and will not aim at the stars. " Be not
righteous overmuch, neither make thyself over-
wise ; why shouldest thou destroy thyself ? "
The truth of this advice from his own point of
view is seen more clearly if we translate the word
" destroy " a little more fully. The primary idea
of the word is that of silence, being put to silence,
and thus it came to mean to be laid waste, or de
stroyed. But the root meaning is to be made deso
late, solitary, and was sometimes used of a lonely

WISE OVERMUCH 47
solitary way. So that the question of the writer
might be put, Why make thyself solitary? Why
isolate thyself? If you are too good, people will
turn from you, and call you a fanatic. If you are
too wise, people will call you a bore. In any case
you only make yourself unhappy. The exceptional
always isolates. This is true on both sides, both of
too high and too low, and explains why our author
should in the same breath counsel his readers against
being wicked overmuch and against being too much
of a fool. Exceptional goodness or wickedness re
pels. Not many can breathe the rarefied air of the
pit. Not many can have sympathy with the trans
cendental thinker, and nobody can have patience
with a perfect fool with no ideas at all. The success
ful man is the man versed in the details of life, who
knows his way about, who is not too much burdened
either with overfine principles or with thin-spun
notions; and yet who is both honest and capable.
That is the sort of man everybody trusts, the shrewd,
prudent, unimaginative, unimpulsive man of affairs,
of good principles and clear brain, and yet not an
enthusiast either for holiness or for new ideas.
Ecclesiastes warns people off from the dangerous
ground of the ideal. Why put others out of sympa
thy with you? he asks. The ordinary man of the

48 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
street cannot see your far-away visions of truth or
beauty or holiness. If you speak to him of them he
will not understand, and will only shrug his shoul
ders and pass on. The thinker is lonely.
Besides, too much thought unfits you for the ordi
nary happiness and comfort of life. Confine your
self to the practicable. Man with his limitations
can only get a certain length in all his investigations,
when he is brought up against an impassable wall.
He is baffled in every effort to know more. Like a
bird in a cage, he only breaks his own wings with
fluttering against the bars. All speculations end in
mystery. All knowledge carried far enough up
lands in deep darkness. Truth is elusive and only
mocks the eager searcher. You scorn delights and
live laborious days to find in the end — nothing.
He who speaks thus knows; for he has tried. In
his youth he too had dreamed of climbing the heights
of truth. " I gave my heart to know wisdom. I
perceived that this also is vexation of spirit [rather
" pursuit of wind "] . For in much wisdom is much
grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth
sorrow." How pitifully true this is can be seen in the whole
history of human thought. Every line on the page
is traced in blood. Here too it seems the law of life

WISE OVERMUCH 49
that in the sweat of brow shall man eat his bread.
In loneliness, in sickness of heart, in despair of the
unknown, has every inch of ground been gained for
the mind of man. The martyrs of truth are more
than are to be found in any Church's hagiology.
Only the shallow mind can be satisfied with what
it knows, and can imagine that it amounts to very
much. Only the trifler with truth can shut his eyes
to the infinite mystery that enfolds every subject of
knowledge. Why, then, not give up the fruitless
quest, and the vain soaring into the empyrean,
which ends only in " pursuit of wind " ? Stick to
the regions which are more accessible. Some things
are unknowable: do not fret your soul over them,
but confine yourself to what can be ascertained and
understood. Let your speculations and question
ings and problems alone. There is much force, and
a strong appeal to our modern temper of mind, in
the advice of our text, " Make not thyself over-
wise." Further, there is justification for it even from a
moral point of view. As the temptation of the over-
righteous is censoriousness and self-satisfaction;
so the temptation of the overwise is what St. Paul
calls the vainly puffed-up mind, a besotted conceit
and pride, as if wisdom will die with them, and

50 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
which looks down with contempt on the vulgar un
lettered throng. Priggishness dogs the feet of the
overwise. But as we saw that censoriousness came
not from too much righteousness, but from too little,
from a lack of the true spirit of righteousness; so
contemptuous pride is the failing not of real but of
spurious wisdom. When wisdom is supposed to be
information, knowledge of facts, knowledge of books,
it lends itself to the puffed-up mind. But these
things, scientific facts, literature, are not wisdom;
they are only the implements of wisdom, the mate
rial by which wisdom works. Wisdom is always
humble ; for it knows how little it knows.
Quite apart, however, from the possibility of this
mistake which gives a kind of colour to his sneer,
the advice of Ecclesiastes appeals to us to-day be
cause it fits in with our modern temper. Ours is a
time when the supremacy of the practical over the
speculative is complete. We see this even in the rela
tive position which science has taken as compared to
philosophy. To discuss the questions of philosophy
is thought by many to be a foolish waste of time, a
vain attempt to make oneself overwise. Even theol
ogy, the Queen of the sciences as she used to be
called, has been dethroned. Why trouble yourselves
with such airy speculations as philosophy and theol-

WISE OVERMUCH 51
ogy occupy themselves with? Better assume that
there is a region which the mind of man is incapable
of entering, such things as God and the human soul,
and the ultimate end and meaning of life — these
things can never be adequately known, even if they
exist. To seek to know them is to try to make your
self overwise. Stick to facts, to material science,
and to the practical details of life, and the knowl
edge of the world. All else are but cloudy vapours
which obscure the mental vision, bottled moonshine,
of no use for human nature's daily food. It is the
merest futility to be ever probing into deep myste
ries, and asking with Pilate, What is. Truth ?
We are over-ridden by the practical in everything.
In politics we say that we do not want theories, and
ideal reforms, and Utopian schemes; we want the
practicable, the thing that is expedient at the mo
ment. Not principle but policy is the important
thing. In religion we are told that theology, opin
ions, beliefs, convictions do not count, but only the
plain duties of life, the practical virtues, kindness,
tolerance, and such like. Even in science the specula
tive is ruled out, or must take a back seat. To invent
a new kind of steam boiler, or a new explosive for
shells, to do something that can be classed in the
market, or made the basis of a joint-stock company,

52 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
that kind of science takes precedence over the deep
est knowledge of the truths of nature.
The value of this modern practical spirit must be
admitted. It is true that in all these regions, in poli
tics, and religion, and science, the test of the tree
must always be its fruit. But we are inclined to take
too narrow a view of what the fruits are, and we can
easily overreach ourselves by our exclusive standard
of what is practical. These practical things on which
we lay so much stress do not arrive ready-made, but
are the results from a hidden source. In politics,
will the fruit, expediency, not wither, when the root,
principle, is cut away from it? In religion, will
the plain moral duties remain when faith is dead?
In science, even the practical man can only apply
the discoveries and ascertained truths acquired by
the natural philosophers. In all branches of life,
though it may not pay to be overwise, and though
the secret of success may be to confine yourself to
the narrow limits of practical things, yet the
progress of the world has been due, and must always
be due, to these very same eager strenuous searchers
after truth, to those who sought for knowledge as
for hid treasure, to those finely tuned spirits who
have followed truth though it led them into the
wilderness.

WISE OVERMUCH 53
A man may give himself to the practical in every
sphere of activity simply from cowardice or even
meaner motives still. It is possible to avoid some
kinds of error by never seeking truth, possible to be
free from some ways of going wrong by never trying
to go right; but that position is to abrogate our
rights as men, and it is to give up in despair all
chance of truth, and besides it leads to certain er
ror. It can only mean ignoble error, rather than
what is at the worst noble failure. It is easy to
sneer at all who are consumed by a passion for pu
rity as over-righteous, and it is easy to sneer at all
votaries of truth as making themselves overwise,
but it remains true in religion that the one and com
plete aim of man is to be perfect even as God is
perfect; and it remains true in things of intellect,
that, as Bacon's noble words have it, " the inquiry
of truth, which is the lovemaking or wooing
of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the pres
ence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the
enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human
nature." It is in the region of divine truth that the cynical
counsel of our text is most commonly given. To seek
to know God, to find out His will, to understand
anything about His purpose with us and the world,

54 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
is we are told the futile attempt to make ourselves
overwise. These things are beyond the bounds of
the knowable for us. It is the part of the prudent
man to give up all such fruitless strivings. He
chooses the lower plane, where there can be some
certainty, among the things we can see and touch,
and which are open to the senses. If there be a God,
man with his finite capacities cannot know Him.
He is not only the Unknown, but also the Unknow
able. Even if it were true, as it is false, the counsel
would not be the wisdom it claims to be. Even if
there were no certain goal for the spirit of man, it
would not follow that we should weakly give up the
search. The same argument could be applied to all
spheres of human knowledge. Not the simplest
thing in the so-called matters of fact can be ade
quately explained. It is not only in religion that
there is mystery, but everywhere. By the same
argument all knowledge is impossible; for nothing
can be completely known. Matter is as great a mys
tery as mind: mind is as great a mystery as soul.
And even if the pursuit of this higher wisdom were
doomed to failure, it does not follow that man should
fall back on the lower level supinely. It can be no
more his duty to let his spiritual faculty become

WISE OVERMUCH 55
atrophied than any other power he possesses. There
are some failures that are greater than some suc
cesses. " That soul makes noble shipwreck who is
lost in seeking worlds."
God is not the phantasm that this cynical creed
assumes. He has been known of men. Man was
made for God. His heart-hunger declares it. And
says Christ, who spoke with the assurance of One
who stood in the full noon of truth, " Ye shall know
the truth, and the truth shall make you free." " I
am the Truth," He says. He is the truth about
God. If we would know God, we must know Him.
There is in these words opened up to us a different
conception both of man and of God than we have
in the agnostic counsel of despair. It is not making
ourselves overwise thus to seek to know God: it
is indeed fulfilling the law of our own nature. It
is an infinite task that is presented to us, but not
therefore an impossible task. Because we have not
attained is the very reason why we must follow after,
not why we must give up. " In Him are hid all
the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." To know
Christ, to love Him, to follow Him, to serve Him, to
become like Him — this is the task of life. Your life
has its value not from its attainments and posses
sions, but from its aim and spirit. Your life has

56 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
value not from what you get but what you seek.
Shut your ears to the -low creed that would degrade
you as man. Pray, believe, hope, love. " Ask and
it shall be given unto you; seek and ye shall find;
knock and it shall be opened unto you."

V
IS LIFE A BLESSING?
It had been good for that man if he had not been bom. —
St. Matthew xxvi. 24.
Can it be said of a human life that it would have
been better that it had never been? Men have
sometimes said it of themselves. In some deep
affliction, in some spasm of pain, in some great de
pression of soul, a man has cursed the day of his
birth. Many a time life has appeared a very doubt
ful blessing, and sometimes a positive evil. Men
have longed for death to get out of their troubles
or sorrows or pain. Overworn, over-weary souls have
sighed for the rest of the grave with a sentimental
pleasure in the thought of the long sleep, where the
wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at
rest. This is different from the other judgment
which makes the gift of life itself a mistake. Bet
ter dead is not the same as better never to have been
born. A man might well have a mood which wel
comes death, but who still is glad to have lived and
counts life a blessed thing. A good man who had
57

58 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
made much of life and done much in it and fought
the good fight manfully might yet be willing to lay
.down his arms. It is not necessarily to despise the
gift of life to be ready to have done with it and to
think that he has had enough of it here. We may
even say that it is the natural fruit of the best life
to be ready for the harvest, to be timely wise for the
inevitable. Age should bring the mellow ripeness
to which all earth's suns and summer can add noth
ing further. God shepherds many a soul into the
eternal fold with great peace and even with glad
hope. There is nothing unnatural and unexpected
in age, for example, being ready and perhaps eager
to go when the summons comes.
It is time to be old,
To take in sail: —
The god of bounds
Who sets to sea a, shore,
Came to me in his fatal rounds,
And said, No more!
St. Paul, who had filled up his glorious life with
great thoughts and great deeds, was willing to re
main for his life-work's sake, that he might still
serve, but was also willing to depart, which he said
was to him far better. There are some weak and
cowardly reasons which make some long for death

IS LIFE A BLESSING? 59
and even seek it, but a similar mood may be induced
by the noblest of all reasons. A high sense of hon
our even will make death seem preferable to dis
grace. " It were better for me to die," said Paul,
" than that any man should make my glorying void "
— better dead than that he should so lose his reputa
tion that he would be a hindrance instead of a help to
the great cause he had at heart. It is no reflection
upon the value of life to make such a judgment ; in
deed it may be because of the high worth placed
upon life that death may also be valued.
There is thus a clear distinction between the ver
dict that it would be better to die, and the other ver
dict that it would have been better never to be born.
This latter suggests that life itself is a mistake, or
at least, that the particular life has been no good gift.
Even here we cannot indiscriminately label this as
unworthy pessimism, the weak whimper of a craven
soul. It is our Lord's deliberate judgment here
about a man who was a disciple of His own
and who therefore had made at least one high and
noble decision. And if we think seriously and ob
serve dispassionately, there are probably occasions
and circumstances about which we would all declare
that should a man be there, " it had been good for
that man if he had not been born." ' This, too, not

60 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
always in the way of passing a moral judgment on a
particular life. We can easily conceive of situations
where it might be true of even whole populations.
Have we not thought it reverently and sorrowfully
of the little children who have suffered under
the shameful atrocities of the unspeakable Turk?
Might we not say it often of some of our
own little children in our cities, born to little
chance of anything true and pure and beautiful
in life?
There is a bright cheerful optimism which speaks
largely and gaily of the joy of life, and which shuts
its eyes to the facts or looks at them through rose-
coloured spectacles. That surface good opinion of
the world as the best of all possible worlds fills one
with nausea at its shallowness and comfortable make-
belief. If you wink the eyes very hard on occasions,
you can see what you want to see and hold on to your
pleasant theories. Pessimism may be false, but that
sort of facile optimism is false. It is not big enough
to take in the facts of life and history. Pessimism,
which holds that it would have been better for men
not to have been born, at least accepts the hard
and ugly and crooked facts, acknowledges evil and
pain and unhappiness, all the shame and despair of
life. It draws the dismal deduction from the facts

IS LIFE A BLESSING? 61
that life is not a blessing, that the world's evil is
incurable, and that the judgment of Christ here on
Judas would be a true judgment on all men. What
ever we have to say about the deduction, it is much
to have the facts acknowledged.
Now it is a fact that good men not only have felt
this despair of others and of mankind as a whole,
but have also sometimes confessed it of themselves.
Job in his pain cursed his day and said, " Let the
day perish wherein I was born." He is represented
as having had a happy and prosperous life, full of
peace and plenty and usefulness and faith. Does it
seem like pettish irritation that, when he suffered
loss and pain and sorrow, he should bemoan his lot
and despise the whole gift of life ? That is to mis
read his situation. It was not just his own personal
pain that made him cry out in despair. It was the
deeper problem which his pain represented. It was
all bound up in his faith in God ; and for him to lose
that faith was to lose everything. The whole fabric
of his faith was falling, and he seemed to be sitting
in his misery and solitude among the ruins. Would
it not be true still of all men of faith, that if they
could not believe in God they could no longer believe
in human life ? Life in its large sense would be an
intolerable burden, tantalised by its mystery and

62 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
oppressed by its futility. They might well think
it all a huge farce, and declare that it would be bet
ter for men never to have been born, if they are only
born for this ultimate failure.
Or it may come in another form as it did to the
prophet Jeremiah, who said, " Cursed be the day
wherein I was born. Cursed be the man who
brought tidings to my father, saying, A man child
is born unto thee ; making him very glad," he adds
pathetically. He was a sensitive soul, feeling him
self called to a great work to proclaim God's will to
his people whom he loved, and meeting with obloquy
and contempt and his message received with scorn
and refusal. He had to see the fated nation stagger
to its doom in spite of himself, seemingly in spite
of God also. The anguish of his soul forced from
him the bitter cry, because here, too, it was not his
own personal pain that was the problem. It was,
as in Job's case, almost like the negation of God to
the prophet; for it looked as if God were powerless,
or as if Jeremiah was cherishing a delusion in think
ing himself a prophet of God at all. But these we
may say were only temporary moods in both Job and
Jeremiah ; for they both kept their faith in God and
came out into the light. That is true, and so there
is nothing like real pessimism in either Job or

IS LIFE A BLESSING? 63
Jeremiah. There it was only a mood and not the
central faith. Out-and-out pessimism could not be
better denned than by the words of our text that it
says bluntly and almost brutally, It had been good
for man if he had not been born.
It may begin with a personal sense of emptiness
and disappointment, making a man believe that his
own life is not worth living. Or it may come through
looking out on the world, seeing its evil with sharp
eyes and believing that the evil is incurable, till
mere life is thought of not as a boon but a curse.
As in Ecclesiastes, " I returned and considered all
the oppressions that are done under the sun; and
behold the tears of such as were oppressed and they
had no comforter; and on the side of their oppress
ors there was power; but they had no comforter.
Wherefore I praise the dead which are already dead
more than the living which are yet alive. Yea,
better than both is he which hath not yet been, who
hath not seen the evil work which is done under the
sun." This terrible depression of mind was due not
to any sorrow of self, but to the contemplation of
the sorrows of others. It is the same sentiment as
the verse of the Chorus in Sophocles' Oedipus
Coloneus, commenting on the grief and woes of the
hapless Oedipus,

64 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
The happiest fate of man is not to be;
And next in bliss is he who soon as born,
From the vain world and all its sorrows free,
Shall whence he came with speediest foot return.
Does this solemn judgment of our Lord on Judas,
using the same words almost, give colour to the ver
dict of pessimism ? It at least disposes of the shal
low optimism of which we spoke. But what has it
to say to the rival theory of the worthlessness of
life ? It also pronounces on that man that it would
have been good if he had not been born. Yet there
is no support given to the idea that life as such is
a curse and a mistake. Rather the words of Jesus
imply the very opposite, that life is a blessed and
glorious thing, a great gift which is also and there
fore a great responsibility. Here Judas is stated as
a great exception, a burden of guilt and misery so
heavy as to counteract the immense value Jesus put
upon a single life. It is judgment not on life, but
on an evil life, a pronouncement of doom on the
waste and tragic failure of a life. The whole under
lying implication is that life itself is a great gift and
a great blessing, but Judas had forfeited the gift and
turned the blessing into a curse.
Was it not a true judgment ? To have been born,
to have tasted both the joy and the power of life,

IS LIFE A BLESSING? QB
to have grown into manhood and had glimpses of the
best possible in life, to have met the Christ and
heard His call, to have felt the thrill of response
as he turned and followed the highest, to have com
panioned with Jesus and spent days and nights in
His fellowship, and then to have ended in this in
famy, to have nursed the traitor's heart against all
the promptings of his best nature and to have done
the traitor's deed — what else could be said of that
tragedy but that it had been good for that man if he
had never been born ? It is not to pronounce a judg
ment of pessimism on human life, but to pronounce
a judgment of failure on that wasted life. It is not
to declare that life itself is a curse, but that a man
may make it a curse to himself and others.
What distinguishes absolutely our Lord's judg
ment from pessimism is that with Him the standard
is not personal happiness, but the moral value of
the life. Those who say that life is not worth living
usually mean that it has not enough happiness or
too much unhappiness in it. If pleasure fails and
peace departs, if days of darkness come and sorrow
is the portion, then you may curse the day of birth
and be sorry you ever lived. But our Lord had
other standards of life than that, and judged the
worth or the worthlessness of life by other measures.

66 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
It might be better never to have lived indeed He
held, but for other reasons than because evil days
come when a man may say with truth, I have no
pleasure in them. Life meant a great gift with op
portunities of being something and becoming some
thing, as well as enjoying something. It is the moral
value of a life which judges it, not the personal hap
piness it contained.
Is life a blessing ? It depends on what you mean
by life. From this standpoint you may have had
no success and little of the sunshine ; you may have
nothing to show for all your years of effort ; you may
have known pain and tasted sorrow, and yet life may
be eminently worth living, and having finished the
course you pass out rich with the spoils of life.
While, you may have had your years filled with suc
cess and happiness, have hardly known ache or pain,
tasted of every pleasure and joy, drank of the cup
of life that ran over, have been quite sure that it
was worth your while to live since it brought you so
much satisfaction, and yet for the higher ends of
life, for the true meaning of living, it may be said
that it would have been good for you never to have
been born.
If we would escape from the doom of Judas we
must take our life solemnly as a great gift, thank-

IS LIFE A BLESSING? 67
fully rejoicing in all that is light and sweet and beau
tiful in it, but also seriously accepting the great
moral responsibility of the gift. Even if the joy of
life is gone, its duties remain, and its opportunities
for service. This is certain, from Christ's stand
point, that if a man's life has been a curse to others,
if he has lived to blight and corrupt, it had been good
for that man if he had not been born. Remember the
stern word of the gentle Christ : " Whoso shall cause
one of these little ones which believe on Me to
stumble, it were better for him that a millstone were
hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in
the depth of the sea."

VI
HUMILITY AND SELF-CONFIDENCE
For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man
that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than
he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God
hath dealt to every man the measure of faith. — Romans xii. 3.
Aftee the dogmatic statement of Christian truth,
contained in the first part of this great Epistle, with
its keen logic and wealth of historical illustration,
St. Paul proceeds to give the practical conclusions
which follow to the Christian community. He
shows how the faith which he has built up in rea
soned steps carries an implication, on their part, who
hold the faith, to live it out in conduct. St. Paul
never elaborates the doctrinal side of religion for
its own sake. The doctrinal exists for the sake of
the ethical. The two are ever interwoven into the
fabric of his thought. Christian conduct, Christian
duty, Christian character, flow from Christian doc
trine, as a stream from its fountain. Having shown
the depths of the riches of the wisdom and the
knowledge of God in the scheme of Christian truth,
68

HUMILITY AND SELF-CONFIDENCE 69
he drives home the conclusion that complete self-
surrender to God is reasonable service. The purpose
of it all in the mind of God, and therefore the aim
that men are called on to set before them, is a trans
formed life, a renewed mind, a proving in practice
of the perfect will of God.
St. Paul begins with the fact of the existing
Church, and the duties which rest upon all members
of the Church. The keynote of the whole is mutual
service. All organisation, all individual gifts of
teaching, exhorting, liberality, must be subservient
to this great end. So the first emphasis is laid
on personal humility and modesty. Because the
Church is one body of which we each are members,
because the Church exists for the good of the whole,
there is no room for self-exaltation. St. Paul is
himself here an example of humility in the very way
he recommends the duty. He presumes to advise
" through the grace given unto me " — not of his own
wisdom or goodness. The sweet humble way in
which St. Paul advises is the strongest argument
of his sermon. The Christian is not to be haughty
and lofty-minded, but to think soberly of himself,
with insight into his place in the body of Christ, with
wise discretion, not asserting himself, considering in
all things the edification of all. This is essential for

70 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
the sake of peace in the Church, for the sake of
order and good government. The Christian must
not be self -pushing, but should measure his gifts and
opportunities of service, ever subserving self to the
good of the whole. There is no scope for selfish
ambition and boasting ; for the wise man knows that
his talents and position are not due to merit in him
self, but have been given him by God. The fellow
ship of faith and life is the common bond, which
will cure all individual excess. The true solution is
not shutting the eyes to the fact of difference among
men : the difference is there, a palpable difference of
gifts; but they are all given by God, and must all
be consecrated to God and to the service of others.
The very finest gifts in the world are ruined by
vanity and conceit, and their social value is lost.
The value of a gift is its social value. This is
why St. Paul insists so much in all his Epistles on
humility when he refers to the function of the
Church. Without it the Church cannot do her work.
This is why St. Paul says in this very letter, " Be not
high-minded, but fear " and " Be not wise in your
own conceits " ; and here, " I say," a solemn dec
laration as the word implies, " I say unto every
man among you, not to think of himself more highly
than he ought to think ; but to think soberly, accord-

HUMILITY AND SELF-CONFIDENCE 71
ing as God hath dealt to every man the measure of
faith." There is here the true middle course be
tween the extremes of false self-esteem and false
humility. His purpose is to encourage them to serv
ice, to cultivate their gifts. Thus, he does not set
before them as an ideal any kind of self-abnegation
which would mean the withdrawal of any from
service. That on the one hand. And on the other
hand, in order to make that service really effective
it is necessary to purge it from self-exaltation.
They are to measure themselves in all sobriety of
judgment, that without presumption, and yet with
out shrinking, they may put all their gifts at the
service of the Church.
This touches on one of the greatest difficulties of
life in every sphere, as well as in the religious.
From the failures on both sides of the golden mean,
we see how difficult it is for men to get a just and
true estimate of self. It is not easy to steer a
straight course, to avoid Scylla on the one side, and
Charybdis on the other, to avoid being driven on
the rocks by undue self-trust, and avoid being
sucked into the whirlpool by undue self-mistrust.
For true balance of character and to produce the
best work in any line, it is necessary for a man to
have both humility, and also self-confidence. There

72 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
is a false humility, which weakens a man and un
fits him for the duties of life. It is often indistin
guishable from moral cowardice, a refusal to put
forth the best powers, a slackness of moral tissue
which may be as fatal a form of self-indulgence as
any other form of it. Some escape the snares of am
bition and worldliness by falling willingly into
meaner snares. If ambition is an infirmity, it at
least often submits to scorn delights and live labo
rious days. If vainglory will make a man think too
highly of himself; so this cowardice will make him
think so meanly of himself that he shrinks from all
high endeavour. It will make him say weakly to
every noble cause, to every urgent appeal, " It is not
for me ; such things are too high for me ; I am only
a very humble member of the family, or the com
munity, or the Church." There are many cheap and
exaggerated reputations in the world; but I am not
sure but that the reputation for humility may not
be the cheapest of them all in some cases. To get it,
you only need to lie low, and say nothing, and never
take an independent stand. No useful work is pos
sible from the man who is so mistrustful of himself
that he will not even try.
As there is a false humility which spoils charac
ter and work, so there is an overweening conceit

HUMILITY AND SELF-CONFIDENCE 73
which is equally weak and which keeps a man from
his true place of usefulness. An exaggerated sense
of personal importance, an inordinate ambition for
the first places, an egotism which judges of every
thing according as it affects that sweet gentleman
self, a self-pushing, self-advertising spirit which will
not enter into anything unless self is to be the first
dog in the hunt — that is the other extreme against
which St. Paul warns the Roman Christians. We
see it in life in all quarters, marring harmony
among brethren, preventing successful co-operation
in good, a source of strife and failure, hindering
progress in every branch. We see it in Church and
State, in the family and the civic life, in business
and play. Even a football team cannot win a match
because single members think so highly of them
selves, and aim at personal glory instead of the suc
cess of the side. We hear it said of a strong man
in politics, in business, in religion, even in the
Christian Ministry, that he will not work alongside
of others, that he is too self-opinionative, that indeed
nobody can work with him, however good the cause
may be. Ambition in this sense of self-esteem, is
not the infirmity of noble minds alone; it fastens
even more securely on mean minds.
Now, it is no easy task to which St. Paul sets us

74 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
not to think more highly of ourselves than we ought
to think. For it is difficult to convince us that we
do think more of self than we ought. To himself
each man is the universe. A man knows his own
needs and wishes better than he can know those of
others. His own inclinations make imperious de
mands on him. It is easy to become self-centred;
for nobody is so important to you as you yourself.
The difficulty is increased if, as we have seen, it
is at the same time essential not to minimise and
undervalue any gift a man has. We can see this
difficulty in every sphere of human life. Take art
for example. It is necessary for an artist to know
his limitations, and to submit to them. If he thinks
he has reached the summit of his art and is filled
with self-complacency, his work becomes weak and
worthless. Without humility he can never rise above
the commonplace. Here, as elsewhere in all hu
man endeavours, it is only the meek who inherit the
kingdom. Yet much feebleness in art and tiresome
repetition are due to lack of courage, to a false hu
mility, a base content with the small. This is only
an illustration of our text that both modesty and
confidence are needed.
St. Paul's whole argument in this passage is that
God has given to men certain gifts, different in

HUMILITY AND SELF-CONFIDENCE 75
kind and in degree; and it is essential for each to
know these with accuracy, and to judge of them with
sobriety, that we may use them effectively. Hu
mility is thus not an ignorance, real or affected, of
what our gifts are, but a proper valuation of them.
Vanity comes from a false estimate. Think what it
would mean for the Church as an associated endeav
our after the Christian life, if every member looked
on this subject sacredly, as St. Paul asks. If none
shirked responsibility ; if none avoided work through
weakness, and none assumed it through conceit; if
all thought of mutual service, what diligence would
be put into our ministering, what patience into our
teaching, what liberality into our giving, what fer
vency into our prayers, what love into our service !
If we only thought of the complete good of Christ's
body the Church, and Christ's strayed sheep in the
wilderness, how we would comfort and strengthen
each other; and look for open doors for well-doing!
The sobriety of judgment about self which St. Paul
recommends would induce humility; and humility
would make the whole social atmosphere sweet.
Candid and courageous self-examination would
for one thing kill censoriousness, the canker of so
many Christian characters. An enlightened man,
who has looked at himself steadily, is more concerned

76 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
about his own faults than about the faults of others,
of which he has less knowledge. Censoriousness is
fed by vanity. The social relations which begin with,
" conscious as we are of each other's infirmities,"
are sure to be strained relations. Vanity gets rid
of the thought of personal weakness by magnifying
the faults of others; and that is why censoriousness
can only be cured by adopting St. Paul's method of
self-examination. Humility is a thing of the spirit,
and cannot be put on like a cloak. A man does not
become humble by simulating the form of it, by any
outside method of repression, such as refusing to
speak about himself, or by speaking about the bad
in him. Self-condemnation is often only a subtler
vanity. It may even be that a man is thinking more
highly of himself than he ought to think, when he
imagines that his importance is such that he may
indulge in the luxury of confession. Poor weak
human nature can enjoy itself immensely with mak
ing confession, as many criminals used to do before
public execution, making their confession as spicy
as possible, and getting pleasure from the thought of
the sensation they would create by the relation of
their sins and their repentance.
How are we to attain to the balance of charac
ter, which will be both humble and strong, which

HUMILITY AND SELF-CONFIDENCE 77
will avoid both self -exaltation and self-abnegation?
" Lead me to the Rock that is higher than I." We
need to have heart and life submitted to the search
ing light, which while it reveals all flaws, yet in
spires with hope. The first vision of Christ seems
given for our despair ; and then He becomes our in
spiration. This seems an impossible combination of
ideas; and yet it is natural. When a man comes
into the presence of God, the first effect seems
blighting, and withering. He can only be to himself
a poor worm of the dust, and realise for the first
time the absolute nothingness of the human. He is
emptied of all pretensions, in complete effacement
of self. The trembling question is, " What is man
and the son of man ? " Nothing great is possible
to the man who has not been thus emptied of self,
beat down, and broken, lying helpless at the feet of
God. But it does not end there. There comes a strange
revulsion of feeling, and the dawning of a new
hope. The thought creeps in that it is possible for
man to have relations with the eternal, that God
does visit him, and does remember him; till the
thought becomes a word of encouragement and com
mand, " Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will
speak unto thee." This inspiring consciousness of

78 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
communion with God strengthens, as well as
humbles. It is a new stream of vitality flooding
every vein, and bathing every nerve. And the man
rises, never again to think presumptuously, not to
think more highly of himself than he ought ; and yet
stronger in the knowledge that God thinks him wor
thy to be His and to serve Him. True self -surrender
to God takes away self-exaltation, and at the same
time saves from despair ; for it shows a man that God
has a place for him in His purpose of love, and
crowns him with the nobility of service. This is the
secret of St. Paul's declaration through the grace
given unto him, to every man among us, not to think
more highly of ourselves than we ought, but to think
soberly, according as God has given to each the
measure of faith.

vn
THE SOLITARINESS OF PRINCIPLE
A certain people . . . and their laws are diverse from all
people. — Estheb iii. 8.
In this story of the Persian Empire it is related
how Haman, the king's chief favourite, felt insulted
because Mordecai the Jew neglected to give him
sufficient honour. His wounded dignity demanded
revenge, but could not be satisfied with merely in
flicting punishment on the man who had offended
him. To offend the second man in the Empire
needed a wider punishment than that. Because
Mordecai was a Jew he would have the indignity
wiped out by the extermination of the whole tribe.
So Haman, by a little judicious flattery of the
king, and by misrepresenting the character of the
Jewish exiles who lived within the bounds of the
great Persian Empire, got a decree against them.
The charge that he brought against them was of
course not the personal one of injured dignity, but
that they were a peculiar people, who had laws of
79

80 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
their own other than the laws of the Empire, that
therefore they were a source of danger to the king
dom, and it was in the king's interest and in the
interests of peace to get rid of them. " There is a
certain people dispersed among the provinces of thy
kingdom, and their laws are diverse from those of
every people." It was a false charge, as Haman
made it, implying a Jewish conspiracy against the
empire. It was meant to prejudice the king against
them, as if they were seditious and practically rebels.
But in another sense it was true. It is often the true
word that comes from the mouth of the enemy, in
another sense than that in which he uses it. Ha
inan's accusation was true. The Jews were a sepa
rate people even in the midst of the Persian Empire,
with rites, and ceremonies, and religious beliefs, and
practices of their own. They were apart from all
others, peculiar, unique among all the provinces of
Persia, with separate faith, with strange ways,
with laws diverse, from those of every people.
The same sort of charge was made against the
Christian faith in the Roman Empire, with the
same falseness and evil purpose, and with the same.
inherent truth. Christians were persecuted and
harried because of their singularity, because they
were in Rome and yet did not do as the Romans did.

SOLITARINESS OF PRINCIPLE 81
They were charged with sedition and rebellion; and
their singularity gave point to the accusation. Many
a Haman vented his personal spite by similar
charges. The process began early with the Chris
tians. At Philippi, when the masters of a maid that
Paul had cured saw that the hope of their gain was
gone, they laid hold of Paul and Silas and dragged
them into the market-place before the rulers; and
when they had brought them unto the magistrates
they said, " These men, being Jews, do exceedingly
trouble our city, and set forth customs, which it is
not lawful for us to receive, or to observe, being Ro
mans." At Thessalonica they were again brought
before the rulers with the charge, " These all do con
trary to the decrees of Csesar, saying that there is
another King, one Jesus." It was true that these
Christians were turning the world upside down. In
a deeper sense than their accusers knew, or meant,
the charge was true that they were singular, and
stood apart from all others, a world within the world
of Rome, and had laws diverse from those of all
other people.
Progress is ever got by dissent. There must be
points of departure, lines of cleavage, difference ; or
else there is stagnation and ultimate death. The
law is universal in the development of life; and it

82 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
is true in the higher reaches of the spiritual in
man. It is from singularity that the race has hope
for the future. Great movements of thought have
ever sprung from dissent. Men might go on till
doomsday, repeating the old and the usual, but at
the best that is only marking time, not progressing.
Our Christian religion lays greater stress than ever
on the solitariness of principle, making it even an
individual thing instead of a racial difference, as
with the Jews. The Church is set in the world as
a model for the world, a great object-lesson to induce
it upward to a higher level of thought and action.
And what is the Church but a certain people whose
laws are diverse from those of all other peoples. That
at least is the standard and ideal for the Church.
But the Christian faith, with its doctrine of the
special illumination of the Holy Spirit to the recep
tive soul, goes even further, and puts the emphasis
on the individual, making the soul responsible to
God alone. It enforces the imperative of principle,
calling a man out, if need be, to stand alone, making
him, it may be, diverse from all people for con
science' sake. Faith has ever a protest, tacit often,
but none the less real.
A great soul is alone. From the very nature of
the case greatness in anything isolates. The more

SOLITARINESS OF PRINCIPLE 83
exceptional you become, the smaller becomes the
circle of true relationship. Socially this is so, in its
own petty way. In a society which is rigidly ruled
by impassable social laws, the higher up you go, the
more rarefied the atmosphere becomes, the more se
lect the members of the society are and therefore the
more isolated. Intellectually the same fact is seen.
The larger the brain, the fewer the mental peers.
A great scholar can have scholarly intercourse only
with a limited number. Even morally and spiritu
ally there is a very real sense in which this fact is
true. The higher a man's ideal, the fewer are the
hearts that can share it. The mass of men have lit
tle sympathy with the transcendental thinker. Be
hold this dreamer cometh — and they put him in a
pit. Only with a man's peers can he have full
communion. The crowd is repelled by too great
earnestness and zeal. Have you never felt uncom
fortable in the presence of an ardent reformer, a
zealot for something you were lukewarm about?
You vowed you would give him the cold shoulder
next time he tried to button-hole you. This may
not necessarily mean blame to you, for he may have
been only a faddist or a busybody. But still it illus
trates the fact. Kinship of soul is necessary for com
munion. I daresay there were many who thought

84 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
Paul a faddist; certainly he repelled people as
well as attracted. Few ever had such bitter enemies
— well-meaning men some of them, who thought him
dangerous. The laws of his life were too diverse for
them. It is a commonplace of criticism that the
great men are often neglected while they live, and
only discovered when they are dead. The prophet
runs the risk of having no honour in his own country
and time. A great man is always, to begin with, in
a minority. Commonplace men on the whole prefer
the commonplace. Jeremiah, the most spiritually-
minded man of his day, had to stand alone. He was
a tender soul, capable of the truest personal love,
and yet felt that he was a man of strife and conten
tion to the whole land. A man who faces a great
enterprise must be prepared for defections even
among his closest friends. The larger the claims
made on them, the smaller becomes the response.
The longer the race and the harder the pace, the
fewer stay out to the goal. Now here, now there, a
Demas forsakes Paul. He is no longer in full sym
pathy with him, or finds the demands on his friend
ship too many — at any rate, he goes to his own place.
We think of Christ's words, with their keen in
sight into the deeps of human nature, " Behold the
hour cometh, yea, is come, that ye shall be scattered,

SOLITARINESS OF PRINCIPLE 85
every man to his own, and shall leave Me alone."
Even before the scattering He was isolated, because
He was unique. In a sense He was alone all His
life. Typical of His whole ministry is that striking
scene when He set His face to go to Jerusalem for
the last time. The disciples were awed by the very
look on His face, and drew back to discuss together
their petty questions about precedence in the king
dom, while the Master walked on alone. He had
thoughts they could not enter into, feelings they
were strangers to, desires such as they never
dreamed of ; there were things they might know here
after, but could not know then. " They understood
not His sayings," is a note that can be often made re
garding His intercourse with them. Christ's eleva
tion of soul and purity of heart meant solitude. He
was alone in a sense, and a degree, in which neither
Paul nor any other man could be alone, though
Paul also in his degree had to pay the penalty of
greatness. The servant could not escape where the
Master suffered. It is the law of solitariness of
principle. So, for the making of a great character, there
must be a certain contempt for criticism. A man
must be willing to be diverse in his standards of
judgment and in his way of living. He must dare to

86 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
be singularly good. " With me," says St. Paul, " it
is a very small thing that I should be judged of you,
or of man's judgment." A man must rate current
opinion at its right value, and must never lay too
much stress on popular favour and praise. Milton
expresses this contrast in his own great way: —
They extol
Things vulgar, and, well weighed, scarce worth the praise.
They praise and they admire they know not what,
And know not whom, but as one leads the other.
And what delight to be by such extolled,
To live upon their tongues, and be their talk,
Of whom to be dispraised were no small praise?
His lot who dares be singularly good.
But this singularity must be the fruit of prin
ciple to be worth anything ; it must be for conscience'
sake. The diverseness from all other people must be
in obedience to laws, which make their irresistible
appeal to conscience. If it is due to desire for noto
riety, or through eccentricity, it is beneath contempt.
A good deal of dissent from accepted positions has
an unworthy source, sometimes due to mere temper
and stupid self-will, or to conceit and love of being
singular. It is a cheap way to notoriety for a thick-
skinned man by protesting, and dissenting, and rid
ing rough-shod over established custom. But the
cure for such is simple. This weak craving for notice

SOLITARINESS OF PRINCIPLE 87
will be curbed by the thought that all singularity
carries with it a corresponding responsibility. It
tunes the life to a high pitch ; and failure is all the
more pitiful. It demands stern adherence to prin
ciple. It fixes a more inflexible standard. Dr. John
son, writing of Dean Swift in the Lives of the Poets,
says : " Singularity, as it implies a contempt of gen
eral practice, is a kind of defiance which justly pro
vokes the hostility of ridicule; he, therefore, who
indulges peculiar habits is worse than others, if he
be not better." This is a true principle of judgment
in all matters of dissent from established opinion
and custom. It is a principle which our Lord ap
plied to His followers. He made demands on them
larger and higher than the world asked. " What do
ye more than others ? " He asked. If you are diverse
from others, if you are set apart from them, and yet
obey not a grander law, what do ye more than
others? The only excuse for laws diverse from all
people is that they should be higher laws, and be
obeyed with whole-hearted loyalty. And the very
moral necessity laid upon a man's conscience to be
singular, the unflinching advocacy of an unpopular
cause for conscience' sake, gives to the character
strength and solidity. Such a man, called to live a
life of protest, serves his generation better than the

88 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
whole unthinking crowd who are swept along by the
mere momentum of numbers. He may make mis
takes, and lay the emphasis wrongly on accidental
details sometimes; but better that than dull uni
formity, where every coat is cut to the same pattern,
every opinion and idea is rounded off, and smoothed
down, and hall-marked. The conventional has al
ways its swarm of adherents; the original has to
fight for even a foothold.
In the last issue a man is not absolved from com
plicity in evil because he has followed a multitude.
He is called to be loyal to the truth as he knows it,
as conscience directs, however diverse it seems to
make his way from the common path. However
many are the temptations on the one hand to cranki
ness, and eccentricity, and conceit, far more deadly
are the temptations on the other side, to weakness,
and cowardice, and pliable principles, and the sti
fling of conscience. Young men are sometimes
charged with forwardness, and too great desire to be
singular, and to take up a position different from
the conventional. That may be so with a few; but
with most the very opposite is the charge that could
be substantiated, of moral cowardice, of weakness in
following their own instincts. They are too easily
cowed into giving up their principles, too easily

SOLITARINESS OF PRINCIPLE 89
moved by a sneer, too easily brow-beaten by a ma
jority. If in the presence of temptation they stood
to their guns, there would be more moral victories,
and a finer type of manhood developed amongst us.
If we were less afraid of singularity for conscience'
sake, if we lived to God and not to our fellowmen,
there would be less marking time and more march
ing in the battlefield of life.
Be true to your best self ; be true to principle ; be
true to God. Let the world stand where it will, stand
you on the side of whatsoever things are pure, hon
ourable, just, lovely, of good report. Be not ashamed
of the Gospel of Christ, which is the power of God
unto salvation. Work not with eye-service as men-
pleasers, but as servants of Christ, doing the will of
God from the heart. When sinners entice, consent
ye not. Give Christ His place in the midst, the
throne of the heart, the judgment-seat of the
Church; and the charge spoken in blame will be an
eternal glory, " a certain people whose laws are di
verse from all people."

vni
THE WAY OF TRANSGRESSORS
The way of transgressors is hard. — Pbovebbs xiii. 15.
The actual words of this proverb are difficult, and
it looks as if the text were corrupt. The Revised
Version translates it " the way of the treacherous is
rugged." With the best emendations of the text it
may be impossible to make sure of how this partic
ular proverb actually ran. But fortunately there is
nothing at stake in the way of doctrine. The words
I have taken as text are no isolated words, and the
thought they contain does not depend on the transla
tion of a single proverb. I could easily have found
other sayings from this very chapter, without looking
any further, sayings which simply repeat in other
forms the thought of this verse. " A righteous man
hateth lying, but a wicked man cometh to shame."
" Righteousness guardeth him that is upright in the
way, but wickedness overthroweth the sinner."
" The light of the righteous rejoiceth, but the lamp
of the wicked shall be put out." " The law of the
90

THE WAY OF TRANSGRE SSORS 91
wise is a fountain of life, to depart from the snares
of death." " Evil pursueth sinners, but the righteous
shall be recompensed with good." These are all
taken from this same chapter; and our special text
thus not only agrees with one stream of teaching in
the Bible but is in keeping with the special somewhat
prudential morality of this chapter from which it is
taken. I choose the words though they are differently
translated in the Revised Version, and though they
are even pronounced untranslatable altogether by
some critics, because the words themselves are so
common and express so simply and clearly an ac
cepted fact of moral life. They have been used as
the headline of copybooks for generations, and have
been quoted till they are embedded in the common
morality of the man in the street. When a man
breaks the law, gives way to sudden temptation, em
bezzles a trust, or the like, and then in consequence
is beset with difficulty and face to face with exposure
and shame, and at last is confronted by the avenger
and the expected disgrace and punishment are
meted out, the words that come to us to sum up the
moral of the situation are that the way of trans
gressors is hard.
It is more on the surface than other more pro-

92 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
found judgments of the Bible, such as " The wages
of sin is death." Being more of a surface judgment
it has naturally more currency among us ; for at the
best we can only judge of the surface of life. When
we see a man reaping thus publicly the fruit of his
own misdeed, we think of all he has suffered long be
fore the crisis came, the shifts he employed to escape
discovery, his constant alarms and fears. We imagine
him walking on his chosen way, but never with peace
of heart, on the alert at every touch, never knowing
when the hand will be laid on his shoulder that tells
him the sorry game is up. We can imagine him even
almost glad that the worst has come and that his sin
has found him out ; for at least he will be done with
all the pain of suspense. The actual punishment
meted out by the broken law is not the only, nor
always the worst, element of all that goes to prove
the truth of the proverb that the way of transgress
ors is hard. The words are thus a part of our con
ventional ethics, rising to our lips to point a moral.
All our great dramatists and novelists preach this
one sermon. What studies in nemesis Shakespeare
has given in King Richard III, in Macbeth, in all his
great tragedies ! Relentlessly, unerringly he shows
the disclosure of the wages of sin. In Richard III
he gives a picture of the complete villain, panoplied

THE WAY OF TRANSGR E S S OR S 93
against remorse, callous, cruel, selfish, an artist in
crime, disavowing even the ordinary restraints of
conscience, asserting
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.
He knows himself to be subtle, false, and treacher
ous. Without compunction, without natural weak
ness, without pity he goes on from crime to crime and
from success to success. There seems no way to get
at him, no way even to truly punish him, impene
trable in his utter callousness. And yet with match
less skill and keenest moral insight Shakespeare
makes us feel, and in the climax of retribution rep
resents Richard himself as feeling, that nemesis has
been dogging him all his life, that his way has been a
hard way and its end destruction. The irony of it
all makes us almost pity the miserable wretch who
is heaping up wrath against the day of wrath,
though we too breathe in relief at last as Richmond
comes with the news :
God and your arms be praised, victorious friends;
The day is ours, the bloody dog is dead.
All the great masters who have depicted human
life, poets, novelists, dramatists, bring out in varied
form the invariable wages of sin ; and we can under-

94 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
stand why George Eliot, who has herself given us
some tragic studies, should say, " Nothing in this
world is worth doing wrong for." You could finish
up all their studies of life with this concluding
moral, that the way of transgressors is hard. It can
not be simply a surface truth when we find all these
great observers uniting in the one moral of life.
There are many illustrations of the proverb to be
seen in our own daily experience, in business life, in
professional life, in private and public life. Every
daily newspaper furnishes new illustrations. Every
town can show its victim, of a young man who has
begun the work of life in innocence and hope, stray
ing from the path of probity, entangling himself
with many sorrows and difficulties, ending in disgrace
and misery and shame. I could paint pictures to you
from real life, of cases I have known, that might
sound a little sensational but whose substantial truth
you would admit. I could take you to hospitals and
asylums and prisons and tell you chapters from real
life-stories with gruesome endings of disease and
death, which would make you say yourself as the
only fitting commentary, Truly the way of trans
gressors is hard.
But life is not run on these simple lines, else there
never could be any doubt nor possibly any tempta-

THE WAY OF TRANSGRE S S ORS 95
tion. It is not the case that men and events resolve
themselves so easily into two distinct sections. There
are not only many exceptions to this item of common
ethics, but if we look closer we are sometimes
tempted to think that there is no rule at all and that
the moral world is topsy-turvy. The Old Testament
writers who held most firmly to the truth of our prov
erb were confronted by these manifold exceptions
and doubts. They saw the wicked prosper and the
righteous suffer. We too, as we look on life, cannot
be sure that the way of transgressors is always hard.
It often seems, and is, a broad way and an easy, while
the other is the hard and narrow path. It is true
that all our earthly law is made of express purpose
to make the way of transgressors hard, but it so often
fails of its purpose. It sometimes even brings penal
ties to men of conscience, and the meshes of the legal
net are not fine enough to catch all offenders against
true justice. Even in the breaking of physical and
moral law the penalties are often so unfairly di
vided. A sin of ignorance is as savagely treated as
a sin of wilful evil. There seem no distinctions,
none of the discriminations we feel to be necessary
for justice. An evil man who plays his cards care
fully can get off, and a mere blunderer is caught in
the wheels and mangled. Take any sin you like, can

96 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
you say that punishment is measured out in due pro
portion to desert ? Can you say that the way of the
transgressor is made hard according to the quality
of the transgression? Of our earthly penalties and
social punishments can you say that they are tem
pered to the colour and degree of the particular
guilt ? Is the light of the righteous always a bright
flame and is the lamp of the wicked always put out?
Is the good man always recompensed with good and
the bad man always brought to shame ?
Neither in our day nor in any day has this been
so ; and so we take the words that the way of trans
gressors is hard, and look a little deeper into them
to see if there is truth deep down as well as on the
surface. The truth on the surface we have already
seen, though it is not invariable. But the very word
transgression suggests to us an element of hardness
more constant than the surface truth. To transgress
means to pass over or beyond, to get across, and so
to violate bounds, such as the limits of a law. Trans
gression brings before us what a man has to sur
mount, something he has to climb or leap or get over
somehow by effort. There are bounds natural and
acquired which a man must break through to trans
gress, and it is always hard to do that. In a sense
sin is easy and seems even natural. It appears

THE WAY OF TRANSGRE S SORS 97
to be along the line of least resistance. You only
need to let yourself go with the crowd without the
pain of thought or decision, without breaking with
any pleasant custom or habit or companionship.
The way is easy and broad, and it is the narrow way
that seems the hard way. It is simple and easy to
appease the lower nature, and know nothing of the
long passion of the saints, no tears, no drops as it
were of blood, no soaring aspirations with which to
keep up, no large ideal for which to strive. It is not
the way of transgressors that is hard, but the other
way that is so straight and strict.
But that is only a surface view of human nature
and life. That is to leave out of account the other
factors, the higher side of your being as truly part
of your being as any physical appetite. That is to
leave out of account instincts and memories and stir
rings of soul, all that is now become part of your
spiritual constitution. Transgression is not only
want of conformity to God's will, but also it is to do
violence to your own nature. You have to break
bounds to transgress. There are barriers which are
in our life through heredity, through education,
through environment, or however they have come,
barriers in memory, in instincts, in conscience, in
the law written on the heart. There are very real

98 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
barriers and difficulties in our nature which we must
break down before we can transgress, and which
make the way of transgressors hard though there
should be no outward penalty. If it should never
end in any sort of outward exposure or punishment,
yet the violation of moral law carries its own sting.
" Whose breaketh a hedge a serpent shall bite
him." Life for you means an enclosure with definite lim
its on certain sides. There is a hedge confining you.
You are restricted by the moral laws of life, and
even by the social rules of your upbringing. You are
free, yet bound. You may kick over the traces and
make for what you think liberty, but not without
pain and danger and hardship can it be done. You
who have been hedged round with precept and ex
ample, with religious training, with Christian edu
cation, who have been hedged round with law and
with love, you cannot transgress without hardship : —
" Whoso breaketh a hedge a serpent shall bite him."
It may be that others who have known no better can
find the broad way easy, but it is not so for you.
Never think it. The inheritance of ages does not
come for nothing. You are born the heir of your
Father's house, and you have to do despite to your
own nature if you refuse. You may go to the far

THE WAY OF TR AN SGRE S S OR S 99
country, but the hungry soul is brought to confess
that it is not his own country. In Bunyan's great
allegory whenever the pilgrims get out of the way
they come to grief, wherever they stray from the
path into what looks an easier way it is made hard
to them in one way or another. Remember when
they went over the stile into the grounds of Doubting
Castle the owner whereof was Giant Despair, or
when they followed the Flatterer, a man black of
flesh but covered with a very light robe, and were en
tangled in a net. Others may transgress and not feel
this particular hardship and difficulty to which we
are referring, but not you who have ever walked a
pilgrim on the King's highway, not you who have
ever seen the vision, not you who have been com
passed about with mercy. For you it is solemnly
true that the way of transgressors is hard. Before
you can do it you have to get over some barriers that
should have safeguarded you from danger. It is
hard for you to silence the reproving voice of con
science, hard to throttle every high thought and
noble instinct, hard to bury the memory of the past,
to deny your best nature, hard to forget early edu
cation, to forget a mother's prayers, hard to quench
the Spirit of God, to blot out the vision of the face
of Christ with a look in the eyes that breaks the

100 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
heart. It is hard for thee, O human soul, to kick
against the pricks. The way of transgressors is hard.
" My son, enter not into the path of the wicked,
and go not in the way of evil men. Avoid it, pass
not by it, turn from it and pass away. The way of
the wicked is as darkness. But the path of the just
is as the shining light that shineth more and more
unto the perfect day."

IX
SPIRITUAL APPREHENSION
Then said I, Ah Lord God! they say of me, Is he not a
speaker of parables? — Ezekiel xx. 49. R. V.
In spite of the first partial exile, in which Ezekiel
shared, by which the King and nobles and natural
leaders of the Jews were deported to Babylon, the
great religious lessons which the prophets sought to
teach the people were rejected. Both the exiles and
those left at home buoyed themselves up with the
vain thought that everything would turn out all
right; for was not Jerusalem the Holy City still re
maining, and were not the tokens of their old nation
ality still left to them ? Ezekiel, who for years had
preached the inevitable destruction of Jerusalem and
the complete fall and exile of Judah, was disbelieved
and despised. He was only an irreconcilable croaker.
Now when at last under the influence of their shal
low optimism Judah again rebelled, Nebuchadnezzar
set the armed might of his Empire against the rebels.
The people still hoped that something would happen
101

102 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
to break the chains which bound hapless Judah, and
would make her once more a free independent na
tion. Ezekiel repeated the judgment of doom, and
we can imagine something of the impatience and
anger with which he was met by the excited people.
When the vision came to him of a complete destruc
tion as of a forest on fire, the terrible conflagration
devouring even every green tree, a flaming flame that
shall not be quenched, he knew that nobody would be
lieve him, and that they would call it just another
effort of the literary artist in him to put his croaking
in a new and startling form. He seems to have hesi
tated to express his vision in the exact manner it
came to him. He feels it almost useless to convince
them that he spoke the truth of God. Men will pass
by his warning with a sneer about himself. He knew
they would discount his words, and call it only an
other trick of his old manner.
One of the burdens of every original teacher and
thinker and artist is the feeling that the truth he has
to declare seems so dependent on the limitations
of his particular mental equipment. He can only
utter his message according to the bent of his own
individuality. He has his own manner of speech,
his own way of expressing himself. And the fear
constantly strikes him that his manner may obscure

SPIRITUAL APPREHENSION 103
the truth, and men will pass by the reality, and think
of it as only another evidence of what they call his
mannerism. Ezekiel seems to have felt this fear.
He knows that his way of speaking is in figures,
similitudes, parables, and he is fully conscious of the
popular objection which his manner created. So,
when this appalling vision of the destruction of Jeru
salem came to him, he is well aware that the people
will discount what he has to say, and will repeat the
parrot-cry that it is only another of his strange liter
ary figures.
It is to him a heavy burden that his own peculi
arities of mind and method should seem to stand in
the way of his message being received. With a cry
of anguish he seems to ask to be relieved from the
necessity of speaking — but the prophetic fire is in
his bones also, and will not let him be silent. " Then
said I, Ah Lord God! they say of me, Is he not a
speaker of parables ? "
Of course the suggestion in the taunt, which gives
it its sting, is that his words are only figures of speech
without any reality behind them. The pain of the
thought to the prophet is that the people will make
the form of his words an excuse for not really listen
ing. The truth he has to declare is unpleasant to
them, and they pretend they do not understand, and

104 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
ride away on a sneer from even considering them.
With cheap sarcasm they shelter behind the assumed
difficulty of the words, and pretend they do not un
derstand. It is a popular device, but never so popu
lar as in dealing with matters of religion, and the
keenest pain that can come to a preacher is the knowl
edge that there are some who escape the divine ap
peal because of some fault or insufficiency in him,
that there are some who are offended by his manner
of presenting the truth, some even who have excuse
for despising the very water of life because of the
earthen vessel that brings it.
The experience is not confined to religious teach
ers. It is the fate of every interpreter of truth,
whatever be the medium in which he works ; and es
pecially is it the fate of every original thinker.
" We mistake men's diseases," says Richard Baxter,
" when we think there needeth nothing to cure them
of their errors but the evidence of truth. Alas, there
are many distempers of mind to be removed before
they receive that evidence." One of these distem
pers certainly is making so much of the personal equa
tion of the man who teaches. Let a man paint much,
or write much, or speak much, and people think
more of his manner than of what he has to reveal.
Their criticisms are almost altogether of his methods ;

SPIRITUAL APPREHENSION 105
and many are offended because they do not like his
methods. Wagner, who at least had the zeal of an Apostle,
had to hear much of his work dismissed as Wag
nerian. Reams and reams have been filled with idle
talk about Browning's style. Anything that Carlyle
said was discounted as Carlylesque. The charlatan
in all the arts is of course vain of such notice, and
strives by all dodges to create outre effects to com
mand such attention; but the man with even a spark
of the prophetic instinct is sick at heart that it should
be supposed that he had worked for that, and sick at
heart that men should never get past his method of
utterance to the living truth he has striven to
utter. But in religion more than in all other regions is
this offence disastrous ; for the utterance of religious
truth asks not for admiration, or approval, or even in
tellectual agreement, but spiritual assent, the thrill of
soul which recognises the truth and bends to its do
minion. The offence here is greatest, because in the
very 'nature of the case, unless the truth is spiritually
discerned it cannot but appear as a parable, a simili
tude of words without reality behind it. If it is not
welcomed by the very intuition of the soul that
hears ; if it does not make its appeal directly as truth,

106 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
it can have no real meaning, and can be dismissed
as idle talk.
Religious truth is not like mathematical proposi
tions, which, if they are accepted at all, must be ac
cepted in the same way. If you accept the definition
of a straight line, a straight line must be the same
thing practically to all of you, however you may pre
fer to define it. Two and two as four, if you accept
that, are always four, and in the same way to all of
you. But spiritual truth is a matter of spiritual in
terpretation to each soul. The discernment of it is
a spiritual thing. Its fulness can only be hinted
at by any human words; and all who do not see
it and accept it, can look on these words only as
parables. Even apart from revealed truth this is so, in the
interpretation of anything that exists. The same
thing will appeal differently to different people ac
cording to capacity, understanding, experience. One
may look on a flower with the eye of a florist, another
with the eye of a market-gardener, another of a bot
anist, another of an artist. Buttercups and daisies
may be a nuisance to a farmer, and a delight to a
child. Roses may be considered from the commercial
standpoint, or the aesthetic, or the spiritual. As with
Wordsworth's Peter Bell,

SPIRITUAL APPREHENSION 107
In vain through every changeful year
Did Nature lead him as before;
A primrose by the river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.
To speak of it in any other way would be to speak
in parables, meaningless.
If this is so in such things, how much more is the
difficulty of finding a common denominator when we
speak of the unseen and eternal. Every man who
has tried to make plain the things of God knows that
his way of speaking will be an offence to some, who
will meet his words with blank unintelligence, or
with complete misunderstanding, or with a jest of in
difference ; and all such can enter somewhat into the
pain of Ezekiel, when he cried, " Ah Lord God ! they
say of me, Is he not a speaker of parables ? " Our
Lord warned His disciples of this, and of the indif
ference with which the world would receive their
message. " Unto you," he said to the inner circle, " it
is given to know the mystery of the Kingdom of God,
but unto them that are without all these things are
done in parables." Religion can only be a matter of
inward apprehension, moral adjustment to the truth,
spiritual susceptibility to the religious impression.
The distinction between men, involved in our Lord's
saying, is not an arbitrary one, but an essential one,

108 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
dependent on the state of the heart. This itself is an
eternal truth of religion, that it is a question of
the heart, a question of holy affections. Christ
did not arbitrarily determine that there should be
some that were without, whom His words only
mystified. The distinction is a fact of life in all regions intel
lectual and moral, as well as spiritual. His words
were only the occasion which tested men, and divided
them into the two classes. We speak of judging
truth, but also truth is judging us. By hidden al
chemy it discovers whether we are in sympathy with
it, whether our life is in unison with it. We are not
the standard of truth by which it is measured,
Truth is its own standard, and measures us. It is
true that we have to judge Christ ; but far truer is it
that Christ is judging us ; our attitude to Him is judg
ing us. When Christ spoke of the effect of His par
ables, He meant that they acted like sieves sifting
out the different kinds of hearers by the influence pro
duced on them. Susceptible minds received the im
pression. Childlike hearts opened to let Him in.
Receptive souls felt His powerful appeal, and quiv
ered in restless eagerness, till they found rest in
Him. Some found in Him the way, the truth, the
life. Others said of Him, as their fathers said of the

SPIRITUAL APPREHENSION 109
prophets before Him, " Is He not a speaker of par
ables?" When the verities of the faith appear to you as
mysteries, when the unseen makes no appeal to you,
when spiritual truth sounds like an idle tale, when all
religion seems like playing with words, when God,
and the human soul, the divine Christ, and the life
eternal appear to you but figures of speech, with no
reality for which they stand, no passion of truth
which the words half conceal but also half reveal, if
in Gospel and Epistle, in the burning lips and
gleaming eyes of men, you do not feel Christ's im
perious claims, if you do not see His transcendent
beauty, if you do not hear His insistent appeal,
what can we say, but that, seeing, you see, and do not
perceive, and hearing, you hear, and do not under
stand ?
All spiritual truth must appear as parables to
all who do not know the language, to all who can
not recognise the accents of truth even in forms that
sound harsh or uncomely to them. The principle of
spiritual interpretation is ever the same, — by spir
itual discernment. " Know ye not this parable ?
And how will ye know all parables ? " asked our
Lord. The Christian position is not reached by an
intellectual process. It comes to the simple, humble,

110 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
responsive heart. To know God gives at least the
capacity to recognise the things of God. If
you feel like an outsider in the Courts of the
Lord, if in the presence of Jesus you feel that you
have no relationship to Him, if at the mention of re
ligious truth you feel that you are among those that
are without, who care not for these things, or at
least understand not these things, do not ride away
from the appeal by a cheap sarcasm. Say not, " Is
he not a speaker of parables ? " as if that absolved
you from further concern about it all. Turn to
Christ with a heart-pang that your soul should be
so seared and hardened. Bend to Christ humbly,
and He will unstop the deaf ears and unseal the
blind eyes, and give you a heart to understand; for
He will take you into the Holy of Holies, into
the very presence-chamber of the King, and reveal
the Father to you, homeless, fatherless child of His.
Christ is His own evidence. He brings conviction
with Him. And when He comes the music of His
words will touch chords of infinite harmony in your
heart. And unto you it will be given to know the
mystery of the Kingdom of God no longer in
parables.

CHRISTIAN CONTROVERSY
Speaking the truth in love. — Ephesiaws iv. 15.
Although this is not a controversial Epistle in the
sense in which the Epistle to the Galatians is con
troversial, there is an underlying fear of division
and strife being introduced into the Church through
the divisive courses of mischief-makers. This un
spoken fear makes St. Paul insist on the unity of the
faith, the common elements by virtue of wliich they
are Christians. Amid all the diversity of opera
tions in the Church there is one body, and one
Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God
and Father of all, who is above all and through all
and in all. The different gifts possessed by different
members of the Church are all designed for the one
sole end, for the perfecting of the saints, for the edify
ing of the body of Christ. The whole Church is
meant to be carried forward and upward in the unity
of the faith to a higher level of Christian living and
Christian character. Christ is the beginning, and
Christ is the end. He is the source of the unity, and
111

112 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
He is the fulfilment for which it is designed. We
are expected to grow up out of all the immaturity
and fickleness of childhood to full-grown men, grow
up into Him in all things who is the head, even
Christ. One of the stages of the growth, as it is one of the
methods by which the growth is attained, is follow
ing truth, or " speaking truth, in love." This is
the connection of our text in the sublime passage in
which St. Paul speaks of the constitution of the
Church. It is quite evident that Paul anticipated
controversy and strife in the process of this growth
to which he looked forward; for the truth-speaking
is set against the evil efforts and cunning craftiness
of men who seek to subvert the foundations of their
faith in Christ. Against such cunning craftiness
they must oppose the truth, which means conflict and
controversy. The Apostle's anticipation has been
amply realised in the history of the Church.
From one aspect that whole history is a record of
strife — and strife among brethren, rival factions,
rival doctrines, rival systems of government. It is
useless to recall the dead and buried controversies
of the past centuries, but every student of Church
history knows that not an item of the creed was
accepted by the Church without the fiercest quarrels

CHRISTIAN CONTROVERSY 113
and the keenest discussions — sometimes even to the
drawing of the sword and the shedding of blood.
It is not necessary to rake among the embers of
burnt-out controversies to establish the truth of
Paul's anticipation; for we have among ourselves
evidences enough what violent strife and disputation
can be caused by religion. Christian Churches are
divided on points of doctrine, and points of worship,
and points of government ; and even within the same
Church, as in the Church of England to-day, there
are parties arrayed agamst each other about ritual,
and even about the sacrament of the Lord's Supper
itself, which is the one thing which ought to unite all
Christians. Many of our churches were born in the
throes of conflict, and cradled in controversy. Men,
following truth, constrained to speak truth, have had
to live at variance with brethren, whom they re
spected, but with whom they could not agree. From
one aspect the history of the Church looks like a
dreary waste of polemic, and through the Christian
centuries we can still hear the jarring discord of end
less dissensions. Lord Rosebery in a very beautiful
speech at Epsom at the opening of a Church-room
referred to a controversy in the English Church at
the time, about incense and lights in worship, and
said, " Theological discussions are, for some reason

114 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
unknown to the layman, conducted with more asper
ity than any other form of discussion. Why that
should be so, why the Gospel that came to preach
peace and goodwill in this world should be so often
the means of provoking the most violent disputa
tions, is a problem I confess I am unable to solve."
It is a problem above us all, but two things may be
said, which, though they do not excuse the heat of
religious controversy, help to explain it.
One is that there is no subject to religious men
so near their heart. It is because the issues are so
great, because it is a matter of life and death to
them, that they take it so seriously. If they cared
less, they could be more dispassioned and cool. It
was because Athanasius realised the tremendous im
port of the creed for which he contended that he was
willing to fight on, though it meant Athanasius
against the world. It was because religion was
everything to Luther and Calvin and John Knox
that they dared so much, and suffered so much, and
spent their lives in controversy. If they had not had
such intense convictions they would not have been
so concerned about the purity of religion, and could
have let things swing as they hung. There is a fine
easy tolerance which many profess, which looks
down upon the fever and zeal of others with philo-

CHRISTIAN CONTROVERSY 115
sophic scorn, but the tolerance is only another name
for indifference. They do not understand why men
should wage relentless warfare about certain ecclesi
astical issues, because they do not really understand
the issues. Even the quarrels in England about in
cense and lights in worship, which seem so petty put
that way, have far-reaching roots in creed, and in
the long run will have far-reaching effects on charac
ter and conduct. What is at stake to men of insight
is not merely the details of incense and lights, but
the theory of the ministry as a priesthood, with mag
ical powers over the sacraments, and divine powers
over the conscience of members of the Church. This
accounts for a little of the asperity of tone and the
keenness of the fight. Upholders of truth feel that
truth is all-important, and so are compelled to fol
low truth wherever it leads them.
Another explanation of the sharpness of religious
controversy is the very nearness and common stand
ing of the parties. The bitterest disputes in life oc
cur among those who are nearest each other in spirit.
You do not quarrel with the man with whom you
have little or no communication. It is not the man
in the street who chafes your soul, and has power to
ruffle your temper. You can afford to despise or
neglect him. It is the man of your own household,

116 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
with whom you have points of contact. You only
make enemies among your friends. This is so in all
domains of life as well as in religion. A quarrel
between a Democrat and a Republican is never so
acute, has not so many barbs and pricks and spines
in it as a quarrel between two Democrats. Not the
outsider, but the familiar friend who lifts up his
heel, has power to hurt. Home-quarrels of all kinds
are according to the facts of human nature the bit
terest of all ; and Church disputes are of the class of
home-quarrels. All this does not excuse the asperity of theological
discussion, it only helps to explain it. With all the
faults of much religious controversy, its wronghead-
edness, its false emphasis on what is accidental and
not essential, its forgetfulness of the charity which
suffers long and is kind, yet it has often been in
spired with sincere zeal for righteousness, and with
earnest desire for truth. Truth at every hazard;
justice though the heavens fall; against the cunning
craftiness of men whereby they lie in wait to deceive,
truth is the panoply, speaking the truth fearlessly.
Truth has ever a face for the foe, opposing in Bacon's
phrase the lie that sinketh in and settleth in the mind
and doeth the hurt. There are times when tolerance
is sin, when a true man must range himself among

CHRISTIAN CONTROVERSY 117
one of two opposing forces. There are times when
truth must be defended strenuously, unreservedly;
times when neutrality is not wisdom but cowardice ;
times when the true word must be spoken though
thrones shake; when falsehood must be unmasked,
and attacked at any and every cost — except the cost
of love.
When the Apostle adds "in love" to his admoni
tion to follow truth, he is not limiting the idea of
truth-speaking; he is really extending it; he is de
fining what it means. It is here that all the mis
takes of religious controversies are made. Men in
the stress of the fight get so easily hard, and bitter,
and revengeful, and censorious ; and even when they
are right, the bloom departs from the truth. Truth-
speaking is a manner as well as a matter. It cannot
be divorced from its spirit. Truth-speaking in the
Christian sense cannot be done at all without love.
The object of it is not to confound and convince
men; but to win them. Hard and loveless truth is
not truth at all. This is the condemnation of so
much controversy. The spirit of it is wrong, some
times even when the cause is right. Truth is a
subtle thing; it enters into the fibre of mind and
life. To extend the truth falsely is to lose it. The
religion which needs, or receives, support by fagot

118 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
and stake is false, or is falsely understood. Truth-
speaking must be conditioned by love to save it from
the grossest errors. Only love will teach us wisdom
in speech, teach us to avoid the excesses and even
the brutalities into which partisans are so often
hurried. It will save us from the virulence of per
sonal disputes. It will teach us what are the real
essentials of religion, and keep us from laying stress
on the accidental.
Most of our disputations are beyond the point.
So much of it is a matter of wrong emphasis. We
put the accent on the wrong syllable, like a foreigner
speaking English. To speak a foreign tongue with
anything like accuracy we must live among the peo
ple, till the language saturates our ear. If we Uved
in the atmosphere of Christ's love, and not merely
paid a hasty visit to it now and again, if Christ's
love were the climate of our soul, truth-speaking
would be our mother-tongue, and we would not make
so many mistakes of emphasis. Truth would be
bathed in love, till the two became as one. We
would see that truth is love, and that without love
there is no truth.
This does not mean emptying truth of its force.
It would strip much of what passes for truth-speak
ing of its barbarities ; but to truth itself it would give

CHRISTIAN CONTROVERSY 119
wings. We are inclined to look upon the fanatic
as the type of the truth-speaker, the man of red-hot
zeal who splutters forth his ardent rage against men
and things he hates. It is because we are so prone to
one-sidedness. But true culture in anything is per
fect sanity, balance of power, proportional develop
ment of the whole man. We need proportional de
velopment in the spiritual sphere also — love strength
ened and stiffened by truth; truth ennobled and in
spired by love. The men who have influenced you,
if you think of it, have had both elements in their
character. They were men of principle, of strong
character, with the wise large vision and the wise
large tolerance of a loving heart. John Stuart
Blackie, beloved by all who knew him, made this text
of ours the motto of his life, and used to write it in
its Greek form on every envelope he addressed. It
was the key-note of his character, which combined
in a way, not common in that grey north country, the
perfervidum ingenium Scotorum with a winsome
•genial sweetness of soul. It is no weakening of the
life to add gentleness to strength. It is only then
that strength is perfected. Think how our Master
combined in its perfectness both elements; with
truth and love the twin passions of His heart, His
life clear and bright as the sunlight — and as warm !

120 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
If this qualification of love were always made,
how much of our truth-speaking on which we pride
ourselves would be true ? If we thought less of put
ting others in the wrong, and more of winning them
to the right ; if we in all our disputings thought less
of personal triumph and more of truth, would there
be so many conflicts among brethren, after all ? We
have not learned Christ, if we have not learned
something of the love that thinketh no evil, the love
that beareth and endureth and hopeth, the love that
seeketh not her own, and is not easily provoked.
There comes to us through tradition the pathetic
picture of St. John, who had lived through the first
fierce struggle of the early Church, with scars of
fight on his heart, having drunk to the dregs of the
cup of Christ's suffering, too old and frail to preach
to the congregation, carried in to say to the Church,
" My little children, love one another, for love is of
God." When earthly ambitions are balked and dis
appointed, or when they are fulfilled and the heart is
still empty ; when the cup of earthly joy is withheld,
or when it is given and the soul is still unsatisfied;
when the fires of human passion die out; when we
look at life steadily and on every side of it ; a man
comes to see that nothing else counts but this. If we
have gained everything and lost this, what have we

CHRISTIAN CONTROVERSY 121
gained ? How our ambitions wither before the glory
of this ideal! How our common aims dwindle and
fade in the presence of its serene beauty!
How poor and petty seem our selfish schemes,
our personal rivalries, our strife of tongues,
our self-assertion, and our weary noises! We
speak about maintaining the truth, and extend
ing the truth, as if it were a logical proposition, or
a mathematical theorem, that we can learn and some
how drum into people's heads. It is a subtler thing
than that, elusive to the coarse touch, a spiritual
thing to be spiritually discerned. The only means
of attaining it is by love : the only medium of propa
gating it is love. You have not begun to know even
the rudiments of Christian truth, till you have
opened your heart to Christ's love. And you can
do nothing to extend that truth, except through love.
Even the statement of truth has social aspects and
is judged by its social fruits. Service is the test of
Christ in speech as of Christian life.
" Speaking the truth in love, may we grow up in
all things into Him who is the head, even Christ."
Be to other soi^ls
The cup of strength in some great agony,
Enkindle generous ardour, feed pure love,
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty.

XI
THE ATTRACTION OF THE PRESENT
And Esau said, Behold I am at the point to die: and what
profit shall this birthright do to me? — Genesis xxv. 32.
We cannot suppress a natural sympathy with
Esau in this scene between the two brothers. He
seems as much sinned against as sinning, and in
comparison with the cunning, crafty character of
Jacob he appears the better of the two. His very
faults lean to virtue's side, we think, as we look at
his bold, manly, impulsive figure. There is nothing
of the cold calculating selfishness, the astute trickery,
the determination to get his pound of flesh, which
make his brother appear mean beside him. With
our swift and random and surface judgments we are
inclined to think it unjust that Esau should be set
aside in the great history of grace for one who could
be guilty of both malice and fraud in advancing his
own interests. We are not at present dealing with
the character of Jacob or we would see that this
hasty judgment, true so far as it goes, is something
122

ATTRACTION OF THE PRESENT 123
less even than half the truth, and that though he
here and elsewhere sinned and was punished through
all his life for his subtlety and selfishness, yet he
was not the monster of unbrotherly malice merely
wliich this scene might suggest, and that he had
qualities of heart and spirit which made it inevitable
that he, and not Esau, should be chosen for the line
of God's purpose. Our subject is Esau and his
weakness and fall in the presence of his overmaster
ing temptation.
Esau's good qualities are very evident, being of
the kind easily recognised and easily popular among
men, the typical sportsman who is only a sportsman,
bold and frank and free and generous, with no in
tricacies of character, impulsive and capable of
magnanimity, the very opposite of the prudent, dex
terous, nimble man of affairs, rather reckless indeed
and hot-blooded and passionate. His virtues are al
ready, we see, dangerously near to being vices. Be
ing largely a creature of impulse, he was in a crisis
the mere plaything of animal passion, ready to sat
isfy his desire without thought of consequences.
Without self-control, without spiritual insight, with
out capacity even to know what spiritual issues
were, judging things by immediate profit and ma
terial advantage, there was not in him depth of

124 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
nature out of which a really noble character could be
cut. This damning lack of self-control comes out
in the passage of our text, the transaction of the
birthright. Coming from the hunt hungry and
faint, he finds Jacob cooking porridge of lentils and
asks for it. The sting of ungovernable appetite
makes him feel as if he would die if he did not get
it. Jacob takes advantage of his brother's appetite
and offers to barter his dish of pottage for Esau's
birthright. There would be some superstition in the minds of
both of them as to the value of the birthright. Both
of them valued it as a vague advantage, carrying
with it a religious worth, but it meant nothing
tangible; and here was Esau's temptation, terribly
strong to a man of his fibre. He was hungry, and
before his fierce desire for the food actually before
him such a thing as a prospective right of birth
seemed an ethereal thing of no real value. If he
thought of any spiritual privilege the birthright
might be supposed to confer, it was only to dismiss
the thought as not worth considering. Spiritual
values had not a high place in his standard of things.
He could not be unaware of the material advantages
the possession of the birthright would one day mean.
He must have known that it was something to be

ATTRACTION OF THE PRESENT 125
recognised as the eldest son, with special rights of
inheritance and precedence and authority after his
father's death. These things were real enough to
him, even though he might have no notion of a
deeper meaning in being the heir of the promise.
But in the grip of his appetite even these temporal
advantages were too distant to weigh much. In the
presence of immediate satisfaction the distant ap
peared shadowy and unreal and not worth sacrificing
present enjoyment for. He feels he is going to die,
as a man of his type is always sure he will die if he
does not get what he wants when the passion is on
him; and supposing he does die, it will be poor con
solation that he did not barter this intangible and
shadowy blessing of his birthright. " Behold I am
at the point to die ; and what profit shall this birth
right do to me ? "
The Bible writers speak of Esau always with a
certain contempt, and with all our appreciation of
his good natural qualities, his courage and frankness
and good humour, we cannot help sharing in the con
tempt. The man who has no self-control, who is
swept away by every passion of the moment, whose
life is bounded by sense, who has no appreciation of
the higher and larger things which call for self-con
trol, that man is after all only a superior sort of ani-

126 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
mal, and not always so very superior at that. The
author of the Epistle to the Hebrews calls Esau " a
profane person who for one morsel of meat sold his
birthright." " Profane " means not blasphemous,
but simply secular, a man who is not touched to finer
issues, judging things by coarse earthly standards,
without spiritual aspiration or insight, feeling every
sting of flesh keenly, but with no sting of soul
towards God. Bold and manly and generous and
with many splendid constitutional virtues he may
be, but the man himself lacks susceptibility to the
highest motives of life. He is easily bent by every
wind of impulse, and is open without defence to
animal appetite. He is capable of despising the in
tangible blessing of such a thing as a birthright, even
though he feel it to be a holy thing, because he can
not withstand present need. A profane, a secular
person as Esau, is the judgment of the New
Testament. This scene where he surrendered his birthright did
not settle the destiny of the two brothers — a compact
like this could not stand good for ever, and in some
magical way substitute Jacob for Esau in the line
of God's great religious purpose. But this scene,
though it did not settle their destiny in that sense,
revealed their character, the one essential thing

ATTRACTION OF THE PRESENT 127
which was necessary for the spiritual succession to
Abraham; and Esau failed here in this test as he
would fail anywhere. His question to reassure him
self, " What profit shall this birthright do to me ? "
reveals the bent of his life and explains his failure.
True self-control means willingness to resign the
small for the sake of the great, the present for tho
sake of the future, the material for the sake of the
spiritual, and that is what faith makes possible. Of
course Esau did not think he was losing the great
by grasping at the small. At the moment the birth
right, just because it was distant, appeared insig
nificant. He had no patience to wait, no faith to
believe in the real value of anything that was not
material, no self-restraint to keep him from instant
surrender to the demand for present gratification.
This is the power of all appeal to passion that it
is present, with us now, to be had at once. It is
clamant, imperious, insistent, demanding to be
satiated with what is actually present. It has no
use for a far-off good. It wants immediate profit.
This is temptation, alluring to the eye, whispering
in the ear, plucking by the elbow, offering satisfac
tion now. Here and now — not hereafter ; this thing,
that red pottage there, — not an ethereal unsubstan
tial thing like a birthright. What is the good of it

128 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
if we die ? and we are like to die if we do not get
this gratification the senses demand. In the infatua
tion of appetite all else seems small in comparison;
the birthright is a poor thing compared to the red
pottage. It is the distortion of vision which passion pro
duces, the exaggeration of the present which tempta
tion creates, making the small look like the great,
and discrediting the value of the thing lost. The
vivid lurid description in the Proverbs of the young
man void of understanding snared in the street by
the strange woman gives both these elements of the
effect of passion, the weak surrender to impulse, and
the distortion of vision which blinds to the real value
of what is given up for the gratification — " He goeth
straightway as an ox goeth to the slaughter, till a
dart strike through his liver ; as a bird hasteth to the
snare, and knoweth not that it is for his life."
But it is not merely lack of self-control which
Esau displays by the question of our text. It is also
lack of appreciation of spiritual values. In a vague
way he knew that the birthright meant a religious
blessing, and in the grip of his temptation that looked
to him as purely a sentiment, not to be seriously
considered as on a par with a material advantage.
The profane man, the secular man, may not be just a

ATTRACTION OF THE PRESENT 129
creature of impulse, he may have his impulses in
good control, but he has no place for what is unseen.
He asks naturally, What shall it profit ? Men. who
judge by the eye, by material returns only, who are
frankly secular, think themselves great judges of
profit, and they too would not make much of a birth
right if it meant only something sentimental as they
would call it. The real and not the ideal, the actual
and not the visionary, the thing seen and not the
thing imseen — they would not hesitate more than
Esau over the choice between the pottage and the
birthright. They judge by substance, and do not
understand about the faith which is the substance of
things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
How easy it is for all of us to drift into the class
of the profane, the secular, persons as Esau ; to have
our spiritual sensibility blunted; to lose our appre
ciation of things unseen; to be so taken up with the
means of living that we forget life itself and the
things that alone give it security and dignity ! How
easy, when soul wars with sense, to depreciate every
thing that is beyond sense, and let the whole moral
tone be relaxed! There is much cause for the
Apostle to warn us to " Look diligently lest there be
among us any profane person as Esau who for one
morsel of meat sold his birthright."

130 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
We too can despise our birthright, by living far
below our privileges, and far below our spiritual op
portunities. We have our birthright as sons of God,
born to an inheritance as joint-heirs with Christ.
We belong by essential nature not to the animal king
dom, but to the Kingdom of Heaven; and when we
forget it and live only with reference to the things
of sense and time, we are disinheriting ourselves as
Esau did. The secular temptation strikes a weak
spot in all of us, suggesting that the spiritual life,
God's love and holiness, the Kingdom of Heaven and
His righteousness, the life of faith and prayer and
communion are dim and shadowy things, as in a land
that is very far off. " What profit shall this birth
right do to me ? "
What shall it profit? seems a sane and sensible
question, to be considered in a businesslike fashion.
It is the right question to ask, but it has a wider
scope and another application. What profit the mess
of pottage if I lose my birthright ? What profit the
momentary gratification of even imperious passion
if we are resigning our true life, and losing the clear
vision and the pure heart? What profit to make
only provision for the flesh, if of the flesh we reap
but corruption? What profit the easy self-in
dulgence, if we are bartering peace and love and

ATTRACTION OF THE PRESENT 131
holiness and joy ? " What shall it profit a man if he
shall gain the whole world [and not merely a con
temptible mess of pottage] and lose his own soul ? "
What profit if in the insistence of appetite men go
like an ox to the slaughter, knowing not that it is for
their life ? " Thus Esau despised his birthright."

XII
AN UNFINISHED LIFE
/ said, 0 my God, take me not away in the midst of my days.
— Psalm cii. 24.
The inscription of this Psalm is unique. It is not
like the other inscriptions of the Psalms, with refer
ence to musical instructions or to the supposed author
or the historical circumstances of their composition.
In this case it describes the inner subject of the
Psalm, and makes a very beautiful heading, " A
prayer of the afflicted when he is overwhelmed, and
poureth out his complaint before the Lord." The
afflictions are those of the nation and of the Psalm
ist himself, who added to his own sorrows the sorrow
of his people. It seems to have been written towards
the close of the exile in Babylon. The author has
known sorrow and tears as one of the homeless
people, and has shared all the misery that came upon
Israel. The keenest pang is that the city of God
sits like a widow with her hair in the dust.
It is not possible to disentangle the elements of
personal sorrow of which the Psalmist speaks from
132

AN UNFINISHED LIFE 133
this general sorrow which he has with all who loved
Zion. The elegy moves with mournful strains as he
describes the bitterness of his pain. He has eaten
ashes like bread and mingled his drink with weeping.
His days are shortened; his strength wasted, and
death has crept up close to him, so that he is withered
like grass. It seems to him so untimely, so prema
ture that he should be taken; for he is assured that
God is about to remember Zion and have mercy upon
her. He feels that the deliverance is at hand. God
will hear the groaning of the prisoner and regard the
prayer of the destitute. The time is near when
those who take pleasure in the stones of Zion and
love her very dust will have glorious opportunity for
rejoicing. For himself, however, his strength is ebbing out as
the expected consummation approaches; and there
breaks from him the pathetic cry, " O my God, take
me not away in the midst of my days." To have
gone through all the pain and tribulation without
tasting the ultimate joy, to have borne all the toil
and the burden without sharing in the harvest and
in the joy of the harvest-home, to have taken part in
the long and weary strife and to fall in the hour
of victory ; that eyes which had seen all the desolation
and been salt with tears through many a sorrow

134 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
should be closed in death as the new era breaks
— that is the dreadful pathos of the situation. It is
untimely thus to be balked of the true fruitage of
life, to be prematurely cut short ere he has truly
lived out his days. We can enter with sympathy
into the pitiful prayer, " O my God, take me not
away in the midst of my days." He feels his life is
unfinished. The winter has come before there has
been any autumn. He has sown in tears but not for
him to reap in joy.
We, too, have often a similar feeling about what
we call unfinished lives and untimely deaths. We
have this sense of pathos not for the victor of a hun
dred fights, but for the soldier who falls in his first
campaign; not for the statesman who passes away
laden with years and honours, but for the promising
novice who was just earning his first laurels; not
for the man who can say after a strenuous and long
life, " I have fought a good fight ; I have finished
the course." Pity to him is an insult. He has lived
out his life, and done his work, and entered into his
rest. It may be hard for those who loved such a man
and leant on him for wisdom and direction, but for
himself it is a blessed and expected end. We do not
feel this pity at the passing away of the old in the
fulness of time, rich with the spoils of life, a golden

AN UNFINISHED LIFE 135
shock of sheaves for the great harvest-home. The
real pathos is the untimely death when the hail-storm
cuts the grain unripe and robs it of a harvest, the
premature disaster, the unfinished life where the tale
has not been fully told but broken off abruptly in the
middle. There is little or nothing to show for it all,
for the years of preparation, for the training and
the planning and the first trial of the practice of life.
We feel there has been miscarriage somewhere, a
great waste of power. He has been taken away, we
feel as the Psalmist felt, not at the end, the natural
and destined end, but in the midst of his days, not
in the autumn of life but the springtime or the
early summer. This tragedy is common enough —
the eager brain stilled ere it has done its thinking;
the tuneful heart stopped ere it had uttered its
melody ; the busy hands lying quiet ere they had done
their work; the keen eyes closed ere they saw the
fruit of all their labour.
We are oppressed with the thought of the irony
of human life and of the vanity of human wishes at
the sight of all unfinished work, the manuscript
with the sentence broken off where the pen fell from
the fingers, the picture with here and there a
figure only sketched in charcoal, the statue with
only suggestions of the beauty that was designed by

136 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
it. We sometimes come across buildings in ruins,
but not ruins in the ordinary sense ; for the buildings
have never been finished, a monument sometimes of
the folly of men, sometimes of their lack of fore
thought — like the man in our Lord's parable who be
gan to build a tower without first of all counting the
cost. The great undertaking to cut a canal through
the Isthmus of Panama cost many millions of pounds
and cost many human lives, and then was left, with
valuable plant rusting away, and the cut filling in,
and the fine harbour silting up. Since the days of the
tower of Babel there have been many enterprises of
man begun and never completed ; and most of them
suggest some thought of sadness.
But unfinished work can never be half so sad as
unfinished lives. For one thing, a man is not judged
by the one work he may have left unfinished. Dick
ens died with his last manuscript, The Mystery of
Edwin Drood, incomplete ; but there is the long roll
of his great works to sustain and explain his fame.
Michael Angelo left unfinished work, as indeed most
artists have done, but we do not think of these when
we estimate his work. Even De Lesseps, who made
such a colossal failure of the Panama Canal, left the
evidence of his engineering skill in his previous
work of the Suez Canal. We pass by the

AN UNFINISHED LIFE 137
unfinished work to consider the work actually ac
complished. But an unfinished life has no such
other reference to offer. It stands in all its naked
incompleteness, a seeming failure with no complete
meaning. It is a crop blighted before the harvest.
The Psalmist's cry, when he felt that his life was
unfinished and his death would be premature, was a
natural cry of anguish, " O my God, take me not
away in the midst of my days."
The pathos of unfinished lives, and how common
they are ! We do not need to go to literature for
illustrations, though they abound there, with a deep
sense of the mystery of the providence, as witness
Tennyson's In Memoriam of his friend Arthur Hal-
lam, and Milton's Lycidas, " Young Lycidas, dead
ere his prime " — the great mystery which has been
so often felt that the bud should become no flower
or the flower wither before the time of fruit, while
the faded leaf will sometimes hang on the tree of
life long past the time of its fall. Untimely we call
it, as something opposed to the fit and proper, some
thing unnatural. We feel it to be natural rather
that a man should sing out all the melody that is in
him, and think out all his thought and work out all
his activity; that he should at the end fall on sleep
having served his generation, and not be taken away

138 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
in the midst of his broken days ; that he should sing
his own swan-song at the last, as Tennyson did of
himself many years after he wrote of Arthur
Hallam, Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as, moving, seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
This is the meaning of the old petition that God may
deliver us from sudden death, not because it is sud
den ; for that in itself may be a great and crowning
mercy. It is a prayer to be delivered from a death
that is untimely, premature, unprepared for; saved
from the fate of an unfinished life, taken away in the
midst of our days.
But in all this natural train of thought we are
liable to fall into a great and grievous error. We
may have a wrong standard of judgment as to what
is a finished life. We mostly think of it as length of
days, the telling of a long tale. Bulk and size are our
common measure in this as in most things. A long
life may be an unfinished life, though it has run out
to the last sand undisturbed. It may be unfinished

AN UNFINISHED LIFE 139
in all the essentials of true life, without having
secured or attained or even once touched man's chief
end. It may never have grasped for one moment
the real purpose of living, so that to all intents it is
cut off in the midst of its days, though the days were
as the days of Methuselah. Life is more than mere
existence. It may stretch out far beyond the three
score years and ten, but that too is vanity, unless
there be more in it than mere length of days. A long
life may be an unfinished one in all that makes for
real living. Whereas, a short life may be finished in
every best sense. Remember, that our Lord, who
said at the end, " It is finished," with a depth of
meaning that could be applied to no other human
life, died a young man. That itself is a lesson and
a warning to us when we speak of an untimely death
and a premature end. Life may be long, sloping
slowly to its natural ending, reaching its full fruition
in our eyes, and at last passing to a soft and easy
departure like gentle sleep, and yet be after all un
finished. Extent of life empty of moral sig
nificance is nothing and less than nothing. And on
the other hand can we not enter with some sympathy
into the new measure of time which made a Psalmist
declare, " A day in Thy courts is better than a
thousand! "

140 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
Human life cannot be judged by its years nor even
by its works, but must be judged by its spirit. Not
the palpable and outside, such as the years passed or
the deeds accomplished, but what is attained through
the time and through the deeds, the true set of the
character, the bent of the life, the discipline of the
heart, the culture of the soul. Sir Thomas Browne
in a letter to a friend about a young man who will
ingly left the world at an age when most men think
they may best enjoy it, makes in his own fine way
the distinction we are seeking to bring out as to a
truly finished and an unfinished life. " He that
early arriveth unto the parts and prudence of age is
happily old without the uncomfortable attendants
of it; and 'tis superfluous to live unto grey hairs
when in a precocious temper we anticipate the vir
tues of them. In brief he cannot be accounted young
who outliveth the old man. He that hath early ar
rived unto the measure of a perfect stature in Christ,
hath already fulfilled the prime and longest inten
tion of his being : and one day lived after the perfect
rule of piety is to be preferred before sinning im
mortality." Early or late, young or old, that is a finished life
when the true end of life is apprehended. Truly he
cannot be accounted young who outliveth the old

AN UNFINISHED LIFE 141
man in him. If a man has learned to love God and
obey Him, if he has submitted his will to the will of
God, if he has linked his life to the Eternal Life and
his love to the Eternal Love, his life is not unfin
ished, though it seem taken away in the midst of his
days. There can be nothing untimely, when his
times are in God's hands. Nothing can happen too
early or too late. The Psalmist felt this; for im
mediately after his cry, " O my God, take me not away
in the midst of my days," in the next breath he ex
claims, " Thy years are throughout all generations."
The thought of God's eternity settles and strengthens
him, with the assurance that the Eternal God is his
refuge from the frailness and vanity of human life.
That life is finished which knows the love of God,
and is ready any day for the angel's Harvest-home.
But life out of God, what is it at the best, at the last,
but incomplete, unfinished, open at every point to the
doom of decay and death, like stubble that blackens
on the sodden earth ? The end of such life without
spiritual contents, without God, is always untimely,
always premature. With our unloving hearts and
our unfinished lives well may we pray, O our God,
take us not away till we have found our true life:
take us not away in the midst of our days.

XIII
THE LOVE OF PRAISE
They loved the praise of men more than the praise of God.
— St. John xii. 43.
" He came unto His own, and His own received
Him not." That is a broad statement of the result
of Christ's work, in spite of the fact that He was
enthroned in the hearts of some and received their
boundless devotion till death. But when we speak of
the failure of Christ's work, we have to do so with
many limitations. It could be no failure when He
found such passionate response. The hearts of some
leapt in a moment to their eyes in glad recognition.
Everywhere He made a great impression on men.
An enthusiasm that could be called national more
than once swept over the country. At times His
name was in every one's mouth; and if His claims
had been less and His objects more material and
political, He would never have wanted for followers.
His aims seemed to many to be too impalpable, too
unearthly, too far apart from the things of the world,
to induce them to throw in their lot with them.
142

THE LOVE OF PRAISE 143
This was especially the case with the upper, ruling
classes, who by temperament and training were ever
inclined to sit long on the fence about any new
movement, and who liked to make sure of the ground
before they ventured down on the other side. Among
them there was a great deal of half-faith, very akin
to doubt. They were accustomed to balance ad
vantages, and could hold feeling in check till they
could examine the pros and cons. This was only
human nature as we know it. It was easy for poor
Galilean fishermen to let sentiment carry them away
without too carefully examining the possible risks.
They had not much to lose at the worst; and above
all they had not the same difficulty socially. They
ran little risk of damaging their reputation and their
credit among men. We know what a power for re
straint the feeling of society is, and the higher in the
scale the more terrorism it seems to have. A fear
of ridicule, of loss of esteem, the fear to be set
down as a fool, the fear of being singular, all that
has great weight with a man in forming his opinions
and in shaping his conduct. The fear of social
ostracism is a great deterrent in the face of new
decisions appealing to be made. A man who has
been in the habit of determining his life by the ex
ternal conscience of his set cannot break away from

144 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
the custom of a lifetime. The man who has not been
in the habit of settling questions by his sense of duty,
by the spiritual appeal they make to him, can
not all of a sudden without great effort begin to
do it.
St. John tells us that many of the rulers really
believed on Christ in their hearts, but were kept back
by some such fear. " Because of the Pharisees they
did not confess Him, lest they should be put out of
the synagogue." To be shunned as a social leper, to
be excommunicated as a religious heretic, to incur
the shame of offending the unwritten but strong
rules of their caste — only those who can enter with
sympathy into such a case can understand the ter
rible temptation to be silent and just acquiesce in the
verdict of the majority. They naturally feared to
lose the good opinion of their fellows, to forfeit the
praise of men. It was not so much the fear of actual
persecution, as the loss of credit and prestige and
that general estimation which men rightly prize so
much. A ruler of the Jews risked much who threw
in his lot with the despised Teacher of Nazareth.
Some of them felt the attraction of Christ's appeal,
and were moved to forsake all to follow Him; the
beauty of holiness touched them with desire; they
lingered wistfully over the thought of it; they half

THE LOVE OF PRAISE 145
believed, were almost persuaded to bend to the sweet
fascination; the narrow horizon of their petty life
seemed to lift and beckon them on to explore its
wonders beyond; but as they hesitated and feared,
down came the narrowing walls of their spiritual
prison, and confined them in the old bondage. The
vision of Christ's larger life faded before the world-
liness and the false standards of their hearts.
Thoughts about reputation, respectability, and all the
cramping ideas of their little circle, froze the gen
erous impulse, and killed the growing faith as the
rain kills the kindling beacon. " How can ye be
lieve," Christ had asked them on another occasion,
" ye, who receive honour one of another, and seek
not the honour that cometh from the only God ? "
True faith could not live in such a stifling atmosphere
where high thoughts were forbidden. Ambition
choked faith. They were too fond of glory from
men, and looked upon the praise of men as the high
est reward; and so were blinded to the heavenly
glory of Christ's life. They sought the esteem of
men and could not imagine that God's approval
could balance the loss of it. They sought other
sources of honour than that of following truth wher
ever it led them through good or evil report, satisfied
to be blessed with a conscience void of offence. Their

146 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
condemnation is that they loved the praise of men
more than the praise of God.
The praise of men within certain limits is legiti
mate, though it may be a dangerous motive. Chil
dren are taught what they should follow by praise
and blame. Even for older people than children to
seek to do what will be pleasing to some one we
reverence and love may be a very high motive for
good. To do praiseworthy things, things that de
serve to be commended is quite a recognisable motive
in life. The esteem and regard, which we give to
beneficent and noble lives, are some of the best prizes
of society. The greatest of our public servants get
no other reward. To be praised in your work by one
who knows what good work is; to have a word of
commendation and encouragement in an art from a
master of the art — that is worth striving for, and
may be, and often is, an inspiration to better work
still. , If it ends in vainglory and laziness it is evil ;
but that is only an evidence that the object of it is
weak. I am not so sure but that as much work is
ruined by cruel criticism as by a generous estimate^
and as many young people are spoiled by discourage
ment as by judicious praise. Envy and detraction
and jealousy are too common inmates of men's hearts
to make us hard on the gentle company of encourag-

THE LOVE OF PRAISE 147
ers. There is too much captious criticism that we
can afford to lose the cheerful, hopeful elements.
The encouragers of the best sort distribute their kind
words not through the insincerity of flattery, but
through their fine gift of sympathy. Their friend
never did better work than he is doing now, they
honestly think and say: their intimates were never
more worthy of esteem : their minister never preached
a better sermon than his last. There may be a little
of the blindness of love in their judgments, but we
need some love to sweeten the acrid bitterness of life.
Not that it is good for any body of men to be a
mutual admiration society, living an enfeebling life
of flattery and praise. Still we must see from all
the reasons given that, up to a certain point, it is
quite a legitimate aim to seek to please others, hon
ourably, and honestly, and sincerely.
If this is so, why should the condemnation of
these rulers be merely that they loved the praise of
men, and why should all who know anything of the
deeps of the human heart and who know anything
of the spiritual life fight against this as the enemy
of their souls and warn others against it as a deadly
danger ? " Whoso knoweth himself well," says
Thomas a, Kempis, " groweth more mean in his own
conceit and delighteth not in the praises of men."

148 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
Augustine devotes two trenchant chapters of his Con
fessions to this snare of praise. " Our daily furnace
is the tongue of men," he groans; for he confesses
how his heart loveth praise. He feels how hard the
subject is; for he knows that to have the influence
for good he desires it is necessary to be loved of men ;
and he knows that a really good life deserves to be
praised, and often is praised, and that it would be
absurd for a man to live ill in order to avoid the
temptation of being praised.
The explanation of any problem that may be con
tained in this seeming contradiction is to be found in
the region of motive. If praise be a legitimate re
ward to seek, the question which settles everything
is whose praise is it you desire, and value, and would
like to have ; and is it for the sake of the praise f Is
it to feed self-conceit ? The vain man is a glutton of
praise. He can take it of any quality: it may be
of the grossest, sort if only it minister to self-esteem.
He will fish for it as keenly as ever angler cast for
salmon. And he will take it from any quarter. One
of the many satires, touched with genial kindly wis
dom, of the great satire of Don Quixote, is the
scene where Don Lorenzo, the would-be poet, reads
his poems to the poor crazed knight. Don Quixote
thinks him the best poet in the world, and says he

THE LOVE OF PRAISE 149
deserves to be crowned with laurel. " I need not
tell you," says the author, who knew human nature
so profoundly, " that Don Lorenzo was mightily
pleased to hear Don Quixote praise him, though he
believed him to be mad ; so bewitching and welcome
a thing is adulation, even from those we at other
times despise." It is a keen satire, and true to life.
Vanity will gulp down with eager relish the most
fulsome praise. It does not even ask whether it is
worthy of it, and does not ask whether the source
of it is such that a truly self-respecting man can
drink of it. The praise of the bad is worse than the
blame of the good. The praise of some men is al
most an insult, and is enough to make one question
whether his conduct is really worthy. " They that
forsake the law praise the wicked," is one of the
sharp thrusts of the Book of Proverbs. Many a man's
character is damned by the praise he gets. To get
the goodwill of the unthinking, all that is needed is
a pliable conscience and a weak will. Only the col
ourless character can escape without some enmity.
This is the terrible temptation of the love of
praise, that it tends to make a man invertebrate, turn
ing towards the easy part. The insatiable desire to
be acknowledged, to have your work recognised, to
have your self-esteem flattered, has an evil effect on

150 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
the whole standard of action. We readily become
what will receive praise, what will be accepted, and
what will sound well in the mouths of men. It is as
debilitating mentally and spiritually, as dram-drink
ing physically. The constant danger is that we make
1 others our conscience, and ask not what is right, what
is well-pleasing to God, what is consistent with recti-
, tude, but what others will say of us. We judge
ourselves not by a rigid standard of right, but by
the flexible one of fleeting opinion. The weak char
acter cannot stand alone ; cannot live out of the sun
shine ; and withers before the east wind of criticism.
For true living we need a higher standard than the
praise of men. To serve God a man must be ready,
if need be, to do without the sweet savour of popular
acclaim. It is the demagogue, to whom applause is
the breath of his nostrils. Here, too, we must learn
from our Master, who was unmoved by the plaudits
of the mob. He knew what value to put on them.
Steadfastly He pursued His course of good, and did
not alter His determination to go on with His work,
though He knew that the shouts of Hosannah would
change to the hoarse cries of rage and hate. Some of
this independence of praise or blame, this aloofness
of temper, enabling a man to stand firm, is needed in
every strong character. All really great men have

THE LOVE OF PRAISE 151
had it. To keep a conscience void of offence to God ;
and to men, a man must be willing to dispense with
praise, must be willing to suffer, must have some of
the stuff of the martyrs in him, like St. Stephen,
Who heeded not reviling tones,
Nor sold his heart to idle moans,
Tho' cursed and scorned, and bruised with stones;
But looking upward, full of grace.
He prayed, and from a happy place
God's glory smote him in the face.
This is the secret of true independence — the ;
praise of God, not the praise of men. If we stopped
to ask not what men thought of us but what God
thinks of us, we would be saved from weak com
placency on the one hand, and from bitter loveless
pride on the other. For, this independence of which
we speak, is not a proud consciousness of right, a
self-centred faith which enables a man to dispense
with outside help and resent outside interference.
Such an attitude hardens a man, and makes him
contemptuous. It is not the self-centred life which^
is the true life ; but the God-centred life, which turns 1
jto God as the flower turns to the light. The weak
ness of these rulers was that men were more real to
them than God; and naturally they yielded to the
strongest influence. But if your heart is fixed on
God, if to please Him and do His will is the bent of

152 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
your life ; though all the world condemn, it is enough
' that He commends : though it is hard to do without
the encouragement of our brethren, it is harder still
to do without the smile of our heavenly Father;
however desolate it is to stand alone, with Him they
that be with us are more than they that be against
us : like our blessed Lord, however misunderstood on
earth it is enough to be understood in heaven : how
ever reviled by men it is enough to be praised by
God. He hides us in the secret of His presence from
the pride of man ; He keeps us secretly in a pavilion
from the strife of tongues.

XIV
THE SHAME OF DETECTION
As the thief is ashamed when he is found, so is the house of
Israel ashamed. — Jebemiah ii. 26.
The prophet is accusing the nation of apostasy, of
unfaithfulness to her true Spouse. To awaken re
pentance he points to the base ingratitude which
could forget the early days of their history when
God espoused them, in love and favour brought
them up out of the land of Egypt, led them through
the wilderness, and brought them into a plentiful
country. He points next to the wilful and wicked
obstinacy which made them forsake God and choose
the lower worship and the lower moral practice of
heathenism. And here he points to the folly of it.
Besides its ingratitude and its wickedness, it is also
unspeakably foolish, an insensate stupidity at which
the heavens might well be astonished, not only that
a nation should change its God, who had taken them
by the arms and in endless love and pity taught them
to walk, but that it should change Him for such
other gods — that Israel should have given Jehovah
153

154 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
such pitiful rivals. This is the folly at which the
heavens may be amazed, that my people " have for
saken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed
them out cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no
water." To a monotheist who had grasped the prin
ciple of the One God, and who had experience of
spiritual communion, polytheism with its lords
many and gods many, must have seemed a system
almost beneath contempt. Intellectually it intro
duced confusion instead of order: morally it meant
that life would be lived on a much lower plane : re
ligiously it was the degradation of the pure spiritual
worship to which the prophets pointed the people.
This is why the prophets always speak of the
shame of idolatry. It seemed incredible that men
in their senses should prefer what appeared to them
to be brutish superstition. Both intellectually and
morally it was a disgrace. Especially the prophets
of the exile and after it, who had come into close
connection with heathen idolatry, had this sense of
superiority, and withered the stupidity of polytheism
with their most mordant irony. It was shame, at
which they blushed, to think of Jews descending to
such puerile worship and practices. It was folly for
the heathen who knew no better: it was shame for
Israelites to grovel before a stock or stone. The

SHAME OF DETECTION 155
prophets confidently predicted that experience would
prove the folly and vanity of idolatry. " They shall
be turned back," says the prophet of the exile, " they
shall be greatly ashamed that trust in graven images,
that say to the molten images, Ye are our gods."
The prophets with their spiritual insight already
saw the disgrace and vanity of such worship ; but the
people, who were seduced by the lower and more
sensuous rites of idolatry, would have to learn their
folly by bitter experience. When the pinch came,
when the needs of life drove them like sheep, when
in the face of the great necessities, they would find
out how futile had been their faith. " As the thief
is ashamed when he is found out, so the house of
Israel will be ashamed; they, their kings, their
princes, and their priests and their prophets, saying
to a stock, Thou art my father ; and to a stone, Thou
hast brought me forth; but in the time of their
trouble they will say, Arise and save us. But where
are thy gods that thou hast made thee ? Let them
arise if they can save thee in the time of thy
trouble." Ah, in the time of trouble they would find out
their folly; and the vanity of their trust in idols
would be found out. They should feel already the
disgrace; but, though they are insensible to that

156 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
now, they will yet be convicted and the hot blush of
shame will cover them with confusion of face. They
are not ashamed of the ingratitude and wickedness
and folly of their conduct, but their sin will find
them out, and then surely the conviction of their fool
ishness and guilt will abash them, and then at last
they will know the sense of degradation and self-
contempt which should be theirs now. " As the
thief is ashamed when he is found out, so the house
of Israel will be ashamed."
The same dulness of mind and darkening of
heart and obtuseness of conscience can be paralleled
among ourselves. Is it not true that in social ethics
the unpardonable sin is to be found out ? In many
cases it is not the thing itself that men fear and con
demn and are ashamed of, but anything like ex
posure of it. There is a keen enough sensibility to
disgrace, but not for the thing itself which is the dis
grace. Men will do things with an easy conscience
for which they would be ashamed — if- they were
found out. Our moral standard of judgment is to a
great extent only that of the community. Our con
science is largely a social conscience merely, not in
dividual and personal and vital, but imposed on us by
society, a code of manners and rules which we must
not transgress. It is no exaggeration to say that we

SHAME OF DETECTION 157
live more by this code, by the customs and restraints
of society, than by the holy law of God as a light to
our feet and a lamp to our path. Much of this is
good, and represents the accumulated gains of the
past, a certain standard of living below which men
are not expected to fall, a moral and even a Chris
tian atmosphere which affects us all and which is
responsible for much of the good that is in us. One
only needs to live for a little in a Pagan community
to realise how much we owe to the general Christian
standard of our country, such as it is. At the same
time we must see how insecure this is as a guard and
guide to life.
For one thing, it is bound to be largely an ex
ternal thing. Society can only take account of what
is evident, what is on the outside. It cannot consider
motives much or even character, and can only con
sider actual events that obtrude themselves into
notice. It has its standard of respectability and of
decency and even of morals, but that standard is
bound to be external. A man might have a corrupt
heart and be filled with all evil passions, but it stands
to reason that society cannot take him to task for that,
unless it gets something on which it can lay a finger.
Apart even from such deeper moral depths of
character, there may be actual transgressions, but

158 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
until they are discovered and proved, society must
treat them as if they did not exist. A man might
be a thief, not only in desire and heart, but in
reality, but until he is found out he rubs shoulders
with honest men everywhere as "one of themselves.
Society is not ashamed of him, and he need not be
ashamed of himself. A man may break all the com
mandments, even the social commandments every
where recognised, but if there is no exposure noth
ing outward happens. So that the constant tempta
tion of us all and of society generally is to lay the
stress on the outside aspect. Men dread the open
exposure of an evil, not the thing itself; they dread
the scandal, not the sin; the outward disgrace, not
the inward dishonour. According to our necessary
social ethics the thief need not be ashamed until he
is found out, and unless he is found out.
The subtle temptation of the whole attitude is
that we are ever inclined to conform merely to an ex
ternal set of rules and not to an inward moral or
spiritual standard. The first and chief of the social
rules becomes not to create a scandal, not to be found
out; and so long as there is no fama clamosa, no
fierce exposure, we can be anything and do anything
and live at peace with ourselves and with society. If
punishment comes from the transgression of any

SHAME OF DETECTION 159
moral or social law, the culprit smarts not for
the sin, but for the punishment. He is ashamed at
last and at first when he is found out. There is
nothing necessarily of evangelical repentance in it,
nothing healing in the sorrow or the shame, no vir
tue in the tears. William Seeker makes the distinc
tion in quaint fashion, " Pharaoh more lamented the
hard strokes that were upon him than the hard heart
that was within him. Esau mourned not because he
sold his birthright which was his sin, but because he
lost the blessing which was his punishment. This is
like weeping with an onion; the eye sheds tears be
cause it smarts." It is a proof that we are only liv
ing by the most superficial of moral rules when we
are more concerned about the punishment than the
sin, more concerned about public exposure than
about the evil itself. To be ashamed only when
found out means a somnolent conscience and an ex
ternal standard of conduct.
But what a common state this is ! What types of
false shame regulate our life, like that of the unjust
steward who was ashamed to dig, but not ashamed
to steal! We need a deeper standard of ethics, a
more sensitive conscience, which would make us
ashamed of the dishonesty or falsehood or moral
cowardice or impurity, not because they happen to

160 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
be brought home to us from the outside, not because
we are detected by others, but because we have
fallen from our own high standard, and have
wronged our own true selves, and broken the high
and holy law of God written on our own hearts. Till
this is so, we are not safe, and have no reliable code
of conduct.
The shame of being found out may, of course,
induce this better feeling, and be the beginning of a
nobler and more stable moral life. It is one of the
blessed functions of punishment to offer us this
point of departure, as the house of Israel through the
shame of idolatry reached a loathing of it that ulti
mately made it impossible in Israel. Welcome the
retribution which brings us self-knowledge : welcome
the detection which makes us ashamed and makes us
distrust ourselves at last: welcome the punishment
which gives repentance of sin : welcome the exposure
which finds us out because it makes us at last find out
ourselves! All true knowledge is self-knowledge.
All true exposure is self-exposure. The true judg
ment is self -judgment. The true condemnation is
when a man captures and tries and condemns him
self. Real repentance means shame, the shame of
self that he should have permitted himself to fall so
far below himself, and have dimmed the radiance of

SHAME OF DETECTION 161
his own soul. Long after others have forgiven, it
may still be hard for a man to forgive himself. Long
after others have forgotten, he may still remember.
To this sensitive soul, to this vitalised conscience
there may be even wounds hidden to all sight but
his own sight — and God's. As the thief is ashamed
when he is caught, the house of Israel is ashamed, at
last not because of the mere exposure, but because of
the ingratitude and wickedness and folly that made
an exposure possible and necessary. We need to
have the law written on our hearts, to conform to
that and not to a set of outward social rules : we need
to walk not by the consent of men, but by the will of
God : we need to see the beauty of Christ's holiness,
and then our sin will find us out though no mortal
man has found it out.
" As the thief is ashamed when he is found out,
so the house of Israel will be ashamed." Shall be —
must be! We are only playing with the facts and
forces of moral life if we imagine it can be other
wise. Real and ultimate escape from this self-ex
posure is impossible. There is no secrecy in all the
world. " Murder will out " is the old saying, or old
superstition if you will. The blood cries from the
ground. It will out in some form or other, though
not always by the ordinary detective's art. Retribu-

162 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
tion is a fact of life, whether it comes as moralists
and artists of all ages have depicted or not. Moral
life writes itself indelibly on nerves and tissues, col
ours the blood. It records itself on character. Any
day may be the judgment-day, the day of revealing,
declaring patently what is and what has been. The
geologist by a casual cut in the earth can tell the
story of the earth's happenings by the strata that are
laid bare, deposit on deposit. The story of our life
is not a tale that is told and then done with. It
leaves its mark on the soul. It only needs true self-
knowledge to let us see it all. It only needs awak
ened memory to bring it all back. It only needs the
fierce light to beat on it to show it up as it was and is.
" There is nothing covered that shall not be revealed
and hid that shall not be made known. Therefore,
whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard
in the light, and that which ye have spoken in the
ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the house
tops." Ashamed when he is found out! If to be
undetected is the only defence, it is to gamble against
a certainty. Found out we shall be, as we stand
naked in the revealing and self -revealing light.
The recognition of this is the great ethical awak
ening to a man, teaching him to submit to self-judg
ment and compelling him to live his life in the open.

XV
A NARROWING LIFE
For the bed is shorter than that a man can stretch himself
on it: and the covering narrower than that he can wrap him
self in it. — Isaiah xxviii. 20.
This chapter is one of the most powerful of the
prophecies of Isaiah, characteristic of his mag
nificent literary qualities, and characteristic of the
man himself, with his keen mind and noble heart.
It has the knowledge of life, the insight into human
nature which made him a great statesman, and the
insight into God's will which made him a great
prophet. It is full of dialectic skill, argument and
sarcasm and epigram; and full of passion, with the
line and plummet of judgment and righteousness in
it, and swept by an indignant storm of hail that
sweeps away the refuge of lies. It begins with a
reference to the northern kingdom of Israel, and the
fate in store for their luxury and self-indulgence, the
drunkards of Ephraim, who have forfeited their
rights to exist as a separate nation. Judgment yawns
for them, as the first-ripe fig of summer, which a
163

164 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
man looks on, and while it is yet in his hand he eat-
eth it up.
Then coming nearer home, he accuses Judah of the
same sin, the same luxury ; and for them too will be
the same judgment unless they repent. The reference
to Ephraim is meant to drive the lesson home to
Judah. The great Assyrian power which will swallow
up Ephraim like a ripe fig, will be used to be to them
also the scourge of God. With incredible levity,
they only mock at him, and ask if he thinks them
children ; and act up to the name which Isaiah hurls
at them, " ye scornful men, that rule this people
which is in Jerusalem." Their argument is that
they are not so simple, so childish, as he seems to
think when he presumes to counsel them. They
are clever skilful statesmen, and have bargained
against all the possible chances of disaster. While
he has been preaching, they have been planning and
plotting. They have their alliance with Assyria,
and have concocted a counter-alliance with Egypt,
and mean to play off one against the other. They
are clever rulers, and have provided for all the
chances. " We have made a covenant with death,
and with hell are we at agreement; when the over
flowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come
unto us." That is to say, they have now concluded

A NARROWING LIFE 165
their treaties by which they need no longer be afraid
of disaster. The statesmen at Jerusalem were miser
able opportunists, with no fixed principles, no con
sistent policy, dreaming that they can make up for
the weakness at home by moves and counter-moves on
the political chessboard. They put their trust on
secret alliances and underhand intrigues.
Over against this Isaiah places the true policy,
which accepts the facts of the situation, the present
overpowering strength of Assyria, and which be
lieves in the future of Israel, and therefore devotes
all energies quietly to strengthening the life of the
nation. Let them put away the sin and luxury and
drunkenness which are eating out the heart of the
people; and let them put away their trivial diplo
matic schemes and opportunist intrigues. Let them
rely upon God. Let them think upon justice and
righteousness and obedience to the moral laws of
life. They will save themselves from the fever of
intrigue and from the ruin which inevitably must re
sult from their policy. He presents to them instead
the calm policy of faith, faith in God's purpose with
them, if only they will be true. " He that believeth
shall not make haste."
In support of this argument, Isaiah uses the pro
verbial expression of our text to suggest the futility

166 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
of their political schemes to bring peace. Their op
portunism is not sufficient : it will fail to satisfy the
needs of the situation. " The bed is shorter than
that a man can stretch himself on it : and the cover
ing narrower than that he can wrap himself in it."
The proverb carries a suggestion of the very opposite
of peace — discomfort, unrest, ever hampered and con
fined ; a distorted, cramped, fretful life. As opposed
to the faith which brings calmness and peace of
heart, their lack of faith, seen in the sinful indul
gence at home and the foolish diplomacy abroad, is a
totally inadequate support for men or nations.
There can never be true peace on the terms dreamed
of by the scornful men who ruled this people in
Jerusalem. Peace is not got by making covenants
with death and agreements with hell. There can
never be peace to men who make lies their refuge,
and who hide themselves under falsehood. He that
believeth shall not make haste. He that believeth
alone can know peace. The other way is the way of
unrest, and alarm, and fever, and constant dispeace.
" The bed is shorter than that a man can stretch
himself on it."
It is still true, as in these old days, that the lack
of faith means the narrowing of life. Without faith
there is no sufficient support for life. Without faith

A NARROWING LIFE 167
there is no chance of peace. It is still the true
policy; all else are but painful makeshifts, leaving
life cramped and fevered and bare, stretched on a
narrow rack. Faith alone provides a sphere large
enough for our powers and our needs. The logic of
events proved Isaiah to be right when he assured
Judah of this. And it is true to-day, as in Isaiah's
time, that the only safe national policy must be based
on religion. If the desire to do justly and love
mercy and walk humbly before God has died out of
our heart as a people, if we are concerned only about
our dignity or our trade, then we shall lose both our
dignity and our trade. If the passion for pleasure
rules our life in our cities, if we work only for gain,
and seek gain only for luxury and self-indulgence,
then our crown of pride, like that of the drunkard of
Ephraim, shall be trodden under foot. When the
eye of a people grows dim, and sees no visions of
truth and right, then the sceptre falls from the
nerveless hand.
If we think to stay the plague at the heart by
skilful diplomacy, and the tricks of the political
trade, tricks as old and as threadbare as the days of
these scornful men that ruled in Jerusalem, it is but
a bolstering up a rotten substance, and a breath of
God's North Wind will crumble it to dust. To every

168 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
building of state that man builds, the line of judg
ment and plummet of righteousness must be laid;
and his work must be tried by the storm of hail that
sweeps away the refuge of lies., It may not be
to-day, nor to-morrow : it may be slow of coming, but
it is none the less sure. There is no permanence, no
stability, no real prosperity, no true peace for a
people except in sincerity of faith and righteousness
of life. Have we no cause to take home the
Prophet's message to ourselves, when we know that
the dreadful picture of the drunkards of Ephraim is
a true picture of much that goes on in our midst,
when the lust for gold and the quest for pleasure are
such imperious motives among ourselves? Authori
ties lament to us the weedy specimens of manhood
bred in our cities, and make all sort of peddling sug
gestions, many of them good enough in their own
small way. The physique is more dependent on the
morale than most of us are willing to admit. We
need something more than mere palliatives. The
cause must be adequate to the effect desired. We
need to go deep to the roots of the evils of our
civilization. Ultimately, nothing but a truer religion, a stronger
faith in God, a more resolute determination to do His
will, can bring new life and strength to a nation.

A NARROWING LIFE 169
" The people that know their God shall be strong
and do exploits." Sinful self-indulgence impairs the
judgment, distorts the vision, as well as weakens
the bodily powers. Isaiah who saw this knew that
the only hope for Judah lay in turning to God. He,
the Lord of Hosts, is for a spirit of judgment to him
that sitteth in judgment, and for strength to them
that turn the battle at the gates. And no diplomatic
moves, no devices of government, no schemes of al
liances affect the essential features of the problem.
Is France inherently stronger because of the alliance
with Russia? Isaiah knew that the alliance with
Assyria and the secret intrigues with Egypt, instead
of really strengthening Judah, only weakened her,
and made her trust to a bruised reed. It was an
uneasy bed on which Judah lay, with no prospect of
true peace, too short for a man to stretch himself on,
and covering too narrow to wrap himself in. A pain
ful makeshift, instead of the policy of faith, based on
moral principles, bringing strength, and courage, and
self-reliant, because God-reliant, hope.
In our individual life also we find the narrowing
of life through lack of faith. Religion does not
mean the weakening and impoverishment of life.
Rather it brings an expansion of powers, and broad
ening of opportunities. Religion enlarges, because it

170 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
inspires. It widens the horizon, and opens up life,
and leads a man out to a large place. The end which
faith sets before itself is not a broken, wounded life,
but fulness of life, true life for the first time, life
so large and full that it can be called even here
eternal life. We are deceived about this because we
look so much on the externals. We see religion mak
ing a man give up this and that, curtail here and
there, sometimes even cut off a right hand and pluck
out a right eye, that we are inclined to think that re
ligion means shrinkage, the attenuation of life. But
faith can dispense with much of the outward in life,
just because it enriches the inward. It deepens and
enlarges the real life, and brings ever the joy of ex
pansion. To be open on the side of God, to be re
sponsive to spiritual influences, is to have unclosed
to ourselves a larger and ever larger world of thought
and feeling and aspiration. " What was a speck ex
pands into a star."
Historically, Christ's faith brought this expansion
to the world. It lifted the life of man forward with
a great impulse. To the most degraded of men it
brought undreamt of possibilities. It ennobled life
to souls in the narrowest surroundings. It made a
slave a free spiritual being, leading him out in spite
of his serfdom into a large place. It changed the

A NARROWING LIFE 171
face of the world, revived the outworn pagan life,
making all things new. It is so still to every man
who opens his heart to God. The narrow lot of man
is broadened by God; and in such communion there
is always the potency of continual expansion. Faith
introduces a new motive power, which alters the
standpoint of life, which changes the current of life.
In spite of all appearances of curtailment, this en
largement is a fact of experience, as all who have
bent to the strait gate know. Our faith comes as a
great motive power, driving the life to large ends.
The consciousness of God changes the world to a
man. The knowledge of a personal love brings
strength. The Christian faith touches the heart
with love, and so gives the life a new buoyancy, and
an exultant sense of victory. Duty is ennobled by
the new spirit in which it is faced. The things done
may be just the petty details of living, or even be
irksome in themselves, but they are glorified by be
ing done for love. St. Paul could say, not as a glow
ing piece of rhetoric, but a plain fact of life, " I can
do all things through Christ that strengtheneth me."
And faith brings peace, because it satisfies the heart
of man. When a man knows the love of God, he
feels that it was for this he was born. His spiritual
being has at last an adequate support. The old un-

172 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
rest and sense of failure pass away; for the soul
comes into its kingdom.
But to live without faith, with no contact with the
spiritual world, with no communion with heavenly
things, is to have life hopelessly narrowed. It shuts
in the natural powers, and dwarfs the spirit. There
are only the two ways of it — to build your life on a
material basis, or on a spiritual. We have seen how
the spiritual gives an inspiring motive, and a calm
assurance. To try to fill the insatiable heart of man
with the things of sense alone is to try to fill a sieve
with water. If no provision is made for the
spiritual, it can only be a poor narrow, wizened life,
even in the fattest of fat valleys. Woe to the crown
of pride which has no other ground of assurance than
that of the drunkards of Ephraim.
All earthly satisfaction must be from its very na
ture but as a fading flower. And the peace of which
the prophet speaks is a peace that the world cannot
give, as it is a peace that the world cannot take
away. If we are shutting our hearts to God, and
quenching His spirit, and rejecting His Christ, if we
are building on the shifting sand of time and sense,
if we have no communion with the eternal, no
prayer, no life of the spirit, if with all our getting
we get nothing but what is material and temporal, we

A NARROWING LIFE 173
are in penury and distress, and are robbing our
selves of our only hope of peace. Be it what it may,
with satiated desire, gratified ambition, intellectual
attainment, it is a cramped and narrow life, with al
ready the gnawing of the worm in it. Man is of
bigger mould than any materialist view of life can
mateh. It does not give you scope for your true and
full powers. There cannot be even a semblance of
peace except by atrophy of soul. Any form of
materialism, gild it never so cunningly, brings man
to a sphere too small for him. You are built on a
larger plan, and the fever of unrest, the pain of a
cramped life, must consume the heart which is not
fixed on God. The bed is shorter than that a man
can stretch himself on it, and the covering narrower
than that he can wrap himself in it.
And each will have one anguish — his own soul,
Which perishes of cold.

XVI
A FALSE STANDARD
But they like men have transgressed the covenant: there have
they dealt treacherously with me. — Hosea vi. 7.
With the possible exception of Jeremiah, there is
no prophecy which shows such a personal note as
Hosea's, a note of tenderness which pleads tirelessly
for God. He was a man of fine sensitiveness of na
ture, which was the source of his keenest pangs. He
lived at the time when the northern country of Israel,
which he loved so passionately, was drifting to its
doom through the folly of rulers and the sin of all
the people. As a preacher of righteousness he makes
the strong indictment demanded by the facts, laying
bare the terrible evils of the time : the gross super
stition which passed for religion, the consequent cor
ruption of life, the social crimes which were sapping
the moral foundations of the nation, perjury, mur
der, theft, adultery. But it is not as a mere moralist
that the denunciation is made, as if he were content
to prove intellectually the inevitable connection be-
174

A FALSE STANDARD 175
tween the moral disorder and the political decay of
the nation. It is a burden on his heart almost too
heavy to bear. He could not have borne it but for
the revelation he had of the forgiving love of God.
God led him to a wide vision of his redemptive pur
pose, and gave him the key to the pain of his own
life and to the mystery of providence in the sad his
tory of Israel. There is a melting, moving tone in
all his pleading, and ever and anon a cry of anguish
breaks out in spite of his self-mastery ; for while the
vision of God's love brings him comfort, it also adds
a sting to the thought that the people of God should
wantonly trample upon that love. Yet that is his
only hope, the thing that kept him from despair,
namely, that above the sacredness of law there is the
sacredness of love, above the eternal righteousness
of God there is His eternal love. So that in the
strongest appeal to conscience there ever is felt the
appeal to the heart, as in the beautiful lyric of re
pentance which precedes our text, " Come, let us
return unto the Lord : for He hath torn and He will
heal us; He hath smitten and He will bind us up.
. . . He shall come unto us as the rain, as the lat
ter rain that watereth the earth."
But Hosea was not privileged to see a true re
sponse to his appeal. There was not moral depth

176 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
enough in their hearts for them to have anything but
a facile and evanescent repentance, born of emotion
and withered at the first temptation as the fleeting
mist is withered by the rising sun. " O Ephraim,
what shall I do unto thee ? for your goodness is as a
morning cloud, and as the early dew it goeth away."
They disappointed all the prophet's loving and wist
ful expectation for them; and belied their own
providential history as a nation; and betrayed the
gracious covenant which God had made with them.
They were no better than the very heathen round
about them, no better than others who had not
had their privileges and opportunities. Instead of
loving and obeying and serving God, they lived
as if they had never stood in a special relation
towards Him. " They like men have transgressed
the covenant."
In the Old Testament the idea of covenant colours
the whole history. Pious Jews, looking back, inter
preted the past of their race by this great thought.
They were the children of the promise and the prom
ise was the gracious relationship into which God en
tered with the people of Israel. From what has been
said of Hosea's prophecies, we can see that it did not
mean any legal agreement, a formal bargain; and
still less could it give ground for arrogance and pre-

A FALSE STANDARD 177
sumption. To him it was a figure of speech by which
he expressed his interpretation of the spiritual his
tory of Israel, stating the terms of love in which God
stood towards them, and on the other side the moral
obligations that lay upon them in view of that
gracious attitude. Israel's privilege meant Israel's
duty. The covenant was broken when they ceased
to do justly and love mercy and walk humbly with
God. They put themselves out of that sweet rela
tionship, wilfully robbed themselves of the prom
ise, when they did not perform their part of the
loving contract They took the rank and place
of other men. " They like men trangressed the
covenant." Thus these words are more than an assertion of
universal human fallibility, more than saying that it
is human to err, like men to transgress. It is the
assertion of a higher standard for Israel. Israel had
special privileges, peculiar opportunities, and was
charged with a mission. To fail, to be after all only
like other men, was to come under heavier con
demnation. They should not be like men, like the
rest of the world. It is no excuse to them that they
are just like others. If they are not better than
others, they are worse ; for they have sinned against
clearer light, and sinned against special love. Their

178 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
degradation is deeper far than even that of the
heathen. To ordinary sin they have added the sin
of apostasy. It is treachery against the gracious God,
an insult thrown in the very face of Love. " Like
men they have transgressed the covenant: they have
dealt treacherously against me."
The principle of this greater condemnation is a
common one, and works out in every relationship of
life. Every step of progress sets a new standard;
and men are judged not by what they have passed on
the way, but by what they have attained. The
Christian conscience of our time and country is our
standard, not the pagan conscience of a past time or
of a heathen land. Every advance is a fresh obliga
tion. New knowledge is new duty. New light is
new responsibility. A privilege is also a penalty.
Israel cannot be as the heathen, cannot be like other
men, without greater sin than even theirs ; for Israel
has had clearer knowledge and higher privilege.
The law is invariable, and reasonable. " To him
that hath is given." To him that finishes a task is
set a new burden. The more you do, the more you
get to do. The higher you rise, the higher rises the
standard of judgment. Do you complain? Nay, it
is the reward of efficiency. In business the capable
man is not laid on the shelf as a reward for his

A FALSE STANDARD 179
capacity. He is promoted, advanced to harder and
more responsible positions. It is the practice of
life; and we recognise the principle in every
sphere. There is, however, a constant tendency to level
down the standard, and to be content with just what
is expected by the mass. It was against this tendency
that the prophets ever had to strive. Israel was al
ways tempted to give up being a peculiar people in
this sense of having special moral responsibility.
Every gain, physical and moral, is held by effort, by
continual conflict with that from which it rises. The
lower form of worship and the lower type of life of
the nations round about them had many attractions.
The surrounding influence was like an all-embracing
atmosphere from which they could not shake them
selves. The higher religion with its sterner, simpler
rites, with its great moral claims on life, was ever
menaced by the surrounding idolatries with their ap
peal to sense, and their laxer standard. There was
always a heathen party in Israel, even in her most
faithful days, a party ever ready to take ad
vantage of every weakening of the religious con
science and ever making a strong appeal to the
lower instincts of the nation. Why should they alone
attempt the impossible ? Why should they be bound

180 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
to a covenant so severe? Why not be like the men
of the place, like the men around them, who get on
very well and have a happier time where less is ex
pected of them ? The strongest count in Hosea's in
dictment against them, that " they like men trans
gressed the covenant," was also the strongest
temptation. It is the common temptation still to accommodate
oneself to environment. We excuse ourselves that
we are just like men when we transgress the cove
nant, the covenant which our own hearts acknowledge.
We are only doing as others; and we are no worse
than others if we are no better. We know the weak
spot in our defence where this temptation finds us
and draws blood. We know from sad experience
how easy it is to slip down to lower levels and con
tent ourselves with the attainments and the conduct
expected by society. And we do not need to look far
for encouragement. The men who will sneer at you
for being a " saint " will admire you for being what
they call a man of the world. You will get plenty
of help in being like others, and plenty of hindrance
in attempting the exceptional or uncommon. It
needs a staunch heart and a consecrated will to re
sist the worldly influences to be as the men of the
place. Count Zinzendorf, when sent to make the

A FALSE STANDARD 181
grand tour to finish his education, wrote before he
set out, " If the object of my being sent to France
is to make me a man of the world, I declare that this
is money thrown away ; for God will in His goodness
preserve in me the desire to live only for Jesus
Christ." His friends did not want him to be unlike
men, in the absorbing passion for Christ he had
even as a boy, which afterwards produced the great
missionary zeal of the Moravian Church. They
would rather he had gone to Paris, and did as others
did, and come back to be like his set, as we say. It is
of a piece with the other worldly wisdom that we
should do at Rome as the Romans do, which has of
course a surface truth, but which has often served
an evil purpose. To accommodate oneself to environ
ment in thought and conduct, to do at Rome as
Romans do, to adopt the common tone, only careful
to avoid singularity, means in practice the choice of
the lower part. Evil is none the less evil, though we
follow a multitude to do it. The covenant is trans
gressed, and the penalty of transgression is ours,
though it be like men to transgress. There can be
little moral backbone in a character without a certain
independence, forming judgments and making de
cisions and regulating life according to conscience
and not according to outside opinion. A man may

182 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
succeed in being like men without any initiative of
his own and without any development of his own
character. In addition to this outside pressure of a low
worldly standard, another subtle encouragement to
reduce the level of conduct is due to a disillusion
ment which comes regarding others, sometimes in
men we have admired and looked up to. We find
out their limitations, and are often disappointed in
them. We find they are like men, hampered by the
same weakness, liable to the same temptations, over
taken by the same faults. We take a low estimate of
human nature, and bring down our own standard of
duty to suit it. Men are all alike, we say in our
mood of pessimism, and I may as well be like them :
Why should I be different? Why strive to attain
the unattainable ? You know the temptation, and
you know how and where it touches yourself, the
temptation to say in some form or other, I do not
pretend to be better than my neighbours; I do not
set myself up as on a higher platform. Perhaps it is
in some business point about which you once had
searchings of heart, some doubtful practice which
you now condone as merely the custom of the trade.
Or it may be some social evil which you join in and
call the ways of your set, the habits of your circle,

A FALSE STANDARD 183
and it would be puritanic of you to object. You are
only doing what others do.
On such reasoning there could be no progress at
all. There would be no stainless peaks on earth;
only a dreary level. This is true in every region of
man's activity. On the same principle why should a
man seek truth and pursue it earnestly? Why
should he ever oppose the prejudices of the crowd in
science or philosophy, in art or literature ? Can he
not content himself with the knowledge and attain
ments that are common, and be like men ?
So in the moral world we could argue a defence
of anything by finding companions, sink we as low
as we might. There is no devilish practice, no foul
habit, no cruel selfishness, which might not be con
doned. We could excuse " the vilest things beneath
the moon " to which " for poor ease sake we give
away our heart." We have not come to our kingdom
as men till we have got past the merely social
conscience, the outside standard of others, and have
within ourselves a measure of right and wrong, and
are parties to a personal covenant in which we stand
to God. Only this spiritual fellowship will save a
man from the spirit of the world around, which eats
like an acid into his highest ideals.
In practice it comes to be simply this as the prac-

184 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
tical rule of life, that we who have stood in the
new covenant through Christ are called not to do and
be like men, but to do and be like Jesus the Son of
Man, who has given us an Example that we should
follow in His steps. He henceforth represents man
to us as well as God. Whatever dishonours Him dis
honours our own soul. Whatever is unworthy of
Him is unworthy of us. Whatever is unlike Him
in mind and spirit is also unlike our own true selves.
His very presence in our sinful world is an eternal
protest against the low creed which would disinherit
us from our divine portion, which would link us to
all beneath us and break the links with all above us.
To see the beauty of His holiness; to see Him full
of grace and truth, and behold the glory of the Son
of Man, is to know once for all our true place in the
universe of God, and to know that we are called to
walk worthy of our great vocation.
Not in presumption, as if we had attained or
were already perfect, and may idly sun ourselves
in the divine favour. The more we are thrilled with
the passion of God's love, the less likely are we to
forget that we are " like men," in their weakness
and need. We will feel that in every temptation we
need the reinforcement of God. We are never with
out need of His pity and love. Like very children

A FALSE STANDARD 185
we need a Father's hand over rough places. We are
never without need of forgiveness. " Like men we
have transgressed the covenant " all the more basely
because it is a covenant of grace.
Nay, unlike men, unlike what men should be and
do. " So ignorant was I, I was as a beast before
Thee." Like silly sheep who stray in stupid wanton
ness, " All we like sheep have gone astray." And
ever we move to the music of Hosea's sweet lyric of
repentance, " Come let us return to the Lord our God.
He shall come unto us as the rain that watereth the
earth."

XVII
THE FRIENDSHIPS OF PAUL
Furthermore, when I came to Troas to preach Christ's Gos
pel and a door was opened unto me of the Lord, I had no
rest in my spirit, because I found not Titus my brother. — 2
COBINTHIANS ii. 13.
I desire to speak of an aspect of St. Paul's life and
character not often noticed, his friendships, his re
lation to those who were in the inner circle of his
associates. This does not lie on the surface either of
the record of his deeds or on the surface of his let
ters, but has to be gathered little by little from stray
remarks and casual incidents. That this should be
so is to be expected from the nature of the materials
at our disposal, which are the Acts of the Apostles
dealing with the amazing spread of the Church as a
record of events, and the Epistles, which as a rule
were not personal letters but addressed to a com
munity and dealing therefore with general subjects
interesting to the Church at large. At the same time
a man of Paul's temperament could not escape from
giving us evidences of his depth of feeling for in-
186

FRIENDSHIPS OF PAUL 187
dividuals ; and so we find him revealed in his letters,
as we would never have known him from his ac
complished works. If we were confined to the record
of the Acts for knowledge of his personality we would
have gathered much from what he was enabled to do,
his tireless energy, his magnificent success in build
ing up the Church of Christ. Here and there we
would have had a glimpse into his heart through one
or other of his speeches, such as the affecting address
to the elders of Ephesus, when he had to tell them he
was going to Jerusalem not knowing the things that
would befall him there. We would see his mingled
courage and fine sensibility and deep and tender af
fection for the men with whom he had laboured. We
only need to read that speech with sympathy to un
derstand why at its close they all wept sore, and fell
on Paul's neck and kissed him, sorrowing most of all
for the words which he spake that they should see his
face no more. But we could not get much insight
into the deep world of feeling within the man merely
from the history of all his labours and journeys, re
lated largely as they had to be from the outside.
In his letters, however, though they were not per
sonal letters in our sense of the word, ever and again
there is a rift and we see into his heart. If we read
with care and sympathy we gradually piece together

188 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
features that let us see in some completeness the
human character of the writer. At present I do not
speak of the many qualities which are so traced —
the strength and delicacy of feeling, the fearless in
dependence of mind, the unselfishness, the passion of
zeal, the great grasp of intellect, and such like, for
which one could find many illustrations. Our sub
ject rather is the need he shows for human inter
course and help, the relations in which he stood
towards his intimate friends.
This is somewhat different from his relations with
the different Churches he founded, the group of
converts he made at every step in his great mission
ary journeys. In a sense the two subjects are alike
at least in this that Paul always gave more to others
than he ever needed to receive, which is the privi
lege of the strong and the gifted. Alike to his most
intimate friends, and to the great mass of Christian
converts the Apostle was as one who served, who
stood as master and teacher and adviser and ruler.
He was so easily first in his magnificent qualities of
brain and heart and soul, that it seems absurd to
speak of any mutual relation. All his converts were
beloved friends towards whom he had the tenderest
feelings, and his letters abound in instances of
courtesy and sweet thoughtfulness and tender appeal

FRIENDSHIPS OF PAUL 189
to affection. Read the Epistle to the Philippians,
which is one of the noblest and sweetest love-letters
ever written, full of loving reminiscences and affec
tionate touches, addressing them in endearing terms,
" my brethren dearly beloved and longed for, my joy
and crown," and you will realise what a pastor's
heart Paul had. In a very true sense he was the
friend of all the Churches, and looked upon all who
named the name of Jesus as his friends.
But like other men he had human needs for the
closer intimacies, the need for an intercourse nearer
than even that close tie. And there is for us all a
great and useful lesson in this. We can put a man
like St. Paul so far from us in our contemplation of
his virtues that he ceases to really influence us ex
cept as something to wonder at. We can think of him
as so unapproachable, and look at his goodness as
like the sunlight that strikes upon the stainless peaks,
that his example has for us no real inspiration. This
is a distinct danger when we realise what things there
were in his life which divide him from his common
place brethren. His untiring energy, his greatness
of soul, his superiority to the things that tempt other
men, the loftiness of mind which raised him above
jealousies and envyings, the unselfishness of life
which makes us feel poor and mean beside him, all

190 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
the phenomenal qualities that constituted his great
ness, all tend to isolate him from our level. He rises
more than once almost above the high-water mark
of human nature, as when he says with such fervid
sincerity, " I could wish that myself were accursed
from Christ for my brethren's sake." He seemed to
forget that he was a man when, in the passion of a
wondrous love, he counted all things for which other
men strove as dross. He seemed above human frailty
and human passion. God knows how small we men
feel beside such a man, who had won his sainthood
with blood.
It is good for us, then, to note the common grounds
of his life with ours, not that the idol has feet of clay
as mean natures love to remark, but that he never
posed as an idol at all, that he was human in his every
need. It is good to note the times when Paul comes
near us and opens his heart ; for it may be that the in
spiring thought may grip us with that quick intensity
which cuts the breath that even we may in our meas
ure become like him. He hungered for the help and
sympathy of his friends, and felt desolate and help
less when he was deprived of them. More than once
he lets us see that he was cast down and needed to
be comforted by the coming of a friend like Titus.
Our text is a case in point. He had gone to Troas

FRIENDSHIPS OF PAUL 191
expecting to meet there a fellow-worker, and his dis
appointment made him almost powerless, " I had
no rest in my spirit because I found not Titus my
brother." It would need a sermon for each to trace
the relationship in which Paul stood to Timothy, to
Titus, to Luke the beloved physician, to Barnabas.
There is this to be noticed first of all about all
these friendships, that it was not merely a relation
of master and disciples. It was that in many cases
and added a new and sweet bond between them. But
he also seemed to lean on them for sympathy and
help, as for example Titus, of whom he says, " When
we were come into Macedonia our flesh had no rest,
but we were troubled on every side, nevertheless God,
that comforteth those that are cast down, comforted
us by the coming of Titus." Or again he writes to
Timothy with a tone of pleading in the words, " Do
thy diligence to come unto me shortly; for Demas
hath forsaken me, having loved this present world;
Crescens hath gone to Galatia, Titus unto Dalmatia,
only Luke is with me. Take Mark and bring him
with thee; for he is profitable to me for the min
istry." He was not afraid to let his comrades know
how much he leant on them and prized their faith
fulness; he never tried to pose as self-contained as
smaller men do. He was not afraid to let his friends

192 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
know how he loved them, and never grudged praise
to his associates.
What a generous, large-hearted friend Paul was !
He hardly ever mentions one of his fellow-workers
without an endearing epithet, such as " My be
loved," or " our sister," or " our labourers in the
Lord," or as with Timothy, " my dearly beloved
son." No wonder he received such devoted love,
and found men who would willingly have faced
death for one look of commendation from him.
Though he was one of the best-hated of men, he was
also one of the best loved. Read the last chapter of
Romans with its beautiful salutations, and you
realise how Paul was blessed with friends. There is
a chapter in every epithet, a chapter of his heart,
as this one, " Salute Rufus chosen in the Lord, and
his mother — and mine." What an unrecorded
chapter these words hint at, when the mother of
Rufus succoured the wandering Apostle, it may be
nursed him in some sore sickness, so that she was to
him ever after " the mother of Rufus — and my
mother too."
I wish I could go over in detail all these references
scattered through Paul's letters which illustrate this
aspect of his great character. We would be struck
with their complete appreciation of the good qualities

FRIENDSHIPS OF PAUL 193
of his friends, the generous gratitude he offered, the
noble praise. Take just one other which also has a
chapter of incident in it — when he speaks of Pris
cilla and her husband Aquila and calls them "my
helpers in Christ Jesus, who have for my life laid
down their own necks." As I went over the Epistles
to note all the references, sometimes to nameless
names embalmed in the New Testament by Paul's
love, I did not know whether I was more affected by
the humble, loyal, and faithful service of so many who
are just names to us, or by the great-hearted Apostle
who loved to speak of them in his generous pride of
them. There have been many sermons preached
about Paul's genius for statecraft, his genius for
Church government, his genius for theology; but I
do not remember ever hearing of a sermon on Paul's
genius for friendship ; and yet is it not so ? It would
be to tell his noble life's story to adequately treat
this subject ; for all his work is associated with some
evidence of friends. Think of his gratitude to Luke
the beloved physician ; his tender care like a mother's
for Timothy's health, the delicacy of his appeal to
Philemon, whom he feels he might well have com
manded, " yet for love's sake I rather beseech you,
being such an one as Paul the aged, and now also a
prisoner of Jesus Christ."

194 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
Of course we know there must have been great
personal magnetism in Paul which gave him easy
hold of men, but all his friends were tried by fire
afterwards, and though some failed him as Demas,
and the ranks were thinned by the loss of all fair-
weather friends, yet the tie that bound them was
stronger far than any mere personal attraction. This
has to be said about all Paul's friendships that they
were conditioned by his work. They were not idle
gossips and dilettante companions, who had some
opinions and tastes in common. He for one had no
time and no heart for the comradeship that meant
nothing but a graceful adornment of life. His
friends were all fellow-workers, all in sympathy with
the great object for which he lived. Their relation
ship went down to bed-rock, and they could not be
moved so long as each remained true. The first re
quisite for Paul was sympathy with the great work
he had in hand. This seemed sometimes to make
him a little hard and relentless, as when he refused
to take Mark on the second missionary tour because
he had turned back in the first journey and went not
with them to the work. Paul with his eager im
petuous nature, unable to understand vacillation and
almost contemptuous of weakness, would not lean any
more on such a broken reed. He preferred to

FRIENDSHIPS OF PAUL 195
separate altogether from Barnabas rather than let
the craven Mark come with them. But when the
young man proved himself true and staunch, he seems
to have won Paul's admiration and love. The warm
hearted Apostle from his references afterwards
seems almost eager to make up to Mark for his
former poor opinion of him. *
It was not exclusiveness which made Paul limit
his comradeship to those who were like-minded. It
was essential for the great work to which he bent
every thought and energy. If a man had no interest
in Christ, and in the extension of the Kingdom of
God, he could be no fit friend for Paul. If a man
turned back from the large venture for the world, as
Demas did in the hour of trial, it was a stab to Paul's
heart and to that love which lay deepest in Paul's
heart. To him it would be as a treachery to his
Lord, and friendship under these circumstances could
only be a name. This is not due to any tone of hard
ness in Paul's mind, a narrowness which made him
sacrifice any one who could not see eye to eye with
him. For, after all, it is the one essential condition
of all true friendship.
The only permanent relationship among men is a
spiritual one. It does not mean thinking alike, and
being alike in temperament and capacity, but it must

196 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
mean some community in the things of the soul. If
men never plumb the deepest parts of their nature
they cannot really know each other. No relationship
founded on physical contiguity or on intellectual
tastes can from the very nature of the case be lasting.
There can be no permanent basis of deep agreement
except in spiritual community. If another has no
sympathy with us in our highest thoughts and noblest
passions and holiest aspirations, it is only desecrating
the fine word to speak of friendship. It may be
partnership, or intercourse more or less pleasant, but
it cannot be fellowship. If Paul goes on to his great
service pouring out his noble heart for high ends,
and Demas loves this present world, what can it be
but separation ? The only permanent relationship is
one of spiritual community : the only permanent sev
erance of hearts is lack of that community. Be not
unequally yoked, is a solemn word. Unless men love
the same love, and are in sympathy in the high things
of the soul, it can only be a form of friendship deny
ing the power of it.
For Demas or any other to have had the chance
of friendship with Paul, and to have bartered it away
for some poor pittance of worldly good, is a tragedy.
Perhaps he did not realise of how much worth it was
to gain a smile from Paul, until he lost the chance

FRIENDSHIPS OF PAUL 197
of doing it. All that he would gain from his deser
tion, however much it brought him, was a poor ex
change for the days and nights with Paul, and the
fellowship of the faith of Christ, and a share in the
service of the Kingdom of Heaven. It was more
than Paul's friendship that Demas lost
If you want to have noble friends, you must be
willing to be noble. If you want to be bound in ties
stronger than the tie of blood, you must meet to
gether in the inner sanctuary, you must in the lar
gest sense of the word make your friends in Christ.

xvni
THE REPROOF OF LIFE
The ear that heareth tlie reproof of life abideth among the
wise. — Pbovebbs xv. 31.
The great subject of this Book of Proverbs is Wis
dom. The teaching of it, so varied, so seemingly dis
connected, can yet be summed up in that one word.
Judged from one standpoint, the Book is not on the
highest levels of the Bible, like the sublime poetry
of a Psalmist or the passionate pleading of a
prophet. But the Bible is for life, and life has
many sides and many open doors. In many cases
indeed, the wisdom inculcated here may almost be
called worldly-wisdom, shrewd advice about the con
duct of life, sarcasm, caustic satire of the follies of
men, astute counsel, sometimes genial, sometimes
cynical, about the ways of cities. It deals largely
with the wisdom of experience, observation, common
sense, the intelligent understanding of the facts of
life which we call mother-wit. There is an acute dis
cernment of human nature in its weakness as well
as its strength, and such a profound sagacity in the
198

THE REPROOF OF LIFE 199
management of affairs, that the Book appeals to some
minds as poetry and prophecy do not. And though
the counsel is so often prudential, making its appeal
to observation such as the man in the street can
verify, there is everywhere a keen ethical insight,
laying bare the moral facts of life on which indeed
all life rests.
It is natural in such a Book which makes wisdom
its subject-matter, that much should be said about
the way of receiving instruction. Life is a business
which men have to get through if possible decently
and well, and so they have to learn the proper ways
of conducting the business. There is a training in it,
a necessary education, things that must be found out
somehow if failure is to be avoided. The young man
especially who is beginning this business of life needs
to be willing to learn, to listen humbly to warning
and advice. Of course, life will teach its own les
sons by its own method of encouragement and pun
ishment, but the discipline in the school of life is
very hard, making no allowance for ignorance or
mistakes. It strikes hard when the time for striking
comes, and it seems a pity that beginners should not
be able to utilise the hard-won experience of the
wisdom of the race. They might at least be so fore
armed as to be able to take advantage of the first

200 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
indication of a lesson from the great school-master
life. So, the teachable mind, the willing ear, the
open tractable disposition, these are the first req
uisites for an apt pupil. Pride is the one unas
sailable stupidity. Pride is not looked on here as
a deadly sin, but as an absolute bar to knowledge. It
is the quality which marks the fool. This is ever
the attitude of the Proverbs. " Seest thou a man
wise in his own conceit? There is more hope of a
fool than of him." The chief reason the Book
gives for this consistent attitude to pride and self-
sufficiency is that pride makes it impossible for a man
to learn wisdom. It deprives him of any advantage
to be got from the experience of others : it even takes
away any chance of learning from the experience of
self. This is in line with a deeper spiritual note
which is all through the Bible that humility is the
door to everything, the way to life itself. The
humble soul, ready to hear, willing to accept reproof,
will learn the secret of God. Repentance comes
easy to humility, and repentance is the only method
of forgiveness, and the only way to peace. To the
humble alone are given the vision and the revelation :
of such sweet, docile childlike souls is the Kingdom
of Heaven. We can thus understand the stress laid

THE REPROOF OF LIFE 201
i
on this virtue in this Book and the despair with
which it speaks of the proud and haughty, and of
their inevitable failure. It is failure all along the
line. For even in the ordinary conduct of life pride
makes it impossible for a man to profit by the counsel
or criticism, or warning, or reproof of others.
Whereas, on the other hand, the humble i3 open to
learn and to become wise.
Naturally, the sorest test of this disposition is
found in the region of reproof : and so the Proverbs
is full of counsel as to the right manner and the right
spirit in which to receive rebuke. It is thi3 which
affords the dividing line. " A rebuke entereth deeper
into one that hath understanding than a hundred
stripes into a fool." " He is in the way of life that
heedeth correction, but he that forsaketh reproof
erreth." " Whoso loveth correction loveth knowl
edge, but he that hateth reproof is brutish." The
one utterly hopeless folly is the folly that will not
learn. The Book of Proverbs has many hard re
marks about the fool, but by far the most frequent of
the references is to the fool whose weakness is shown
in his ignorance and self-conceit. He is the man who
will have his own way, who, if he would only listen
to reason, would see that his own way was a wrong
way, but to listen to reason is the last thing he will

202 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
do. It is the temper that will not submit, that will
not be trained and disciplined, that will not learn
from reproof or counsel, so that the mind is a muddy
mixture of ignorance and arrogance. That is the
utter hopelessness of his case. " Though thou
shouldest bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with
a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him."
It is ingrained ; and when the inevitable consequences
of his stupidity or vice fall upon his doomed head,
he blames everybody and everything but himself.
He puts it down to misfortune, to hard luck, to the
lack of opportunity, to the evil of men, to the in
justice of God — to anything but to the right cause,
his own wilful neglect of all the lessons with which
the world is vocal. It is not the simple who is con
demned in the Proverbs, the witless, the scant of
brain; it is the stubborn, the morally senseless who
will go his own misguided way. And it is not the
clever as such who are commended, but the humble
who will listen to counsel and be warned against evil
and learn to submit to the laws of all living, meekly
accepting even reproof when merited.
The evidence of this laudable temper is to be found
not only in listening to advice, but most of all in the
attitude towards life itself which such a man takes
up. Life is looked on as a discipline, a training for

THE REPROOF OF LIFE 203
character, replete with experiences both joyful and
sorrowful which can enrich the whole nature. The
world is not a place to find pleasure in first of all, but
to find wisdom. So, not happiness but duty becomes
the chief motive of those who appreciate the true
situation. All experiences are full of meaning with
a purpose if only we will use them aright. They can
and ought to develop in us a true and pure, and
sweet and strong character. They are meant to
teach us wisdom, the knowledge of the world, the
knowledge of self, the knowledge of God. Life i9
the great educator. None can teach us lessons as
life can, and encourage and reprove as life does.
Thus the humble teachable man, whom this Book
calls the wise man, is he who sees these moral and
spiritual possibilities in ordinary providence and
pays heed to them. " The ear that heareth the re
proof of life abideth among the wise."
The reproof of life ! Life has that for all of us,
the bursting of the bubble of youthful hopes, the
rude awakening from the idle dream. Things indeed
are not what they seemed. The world is a different
place from what we once imagined, and our lives
have run upon different lines from what we once
fondly hoped. We have been chastened. We have
been reproved. We have been pulled up against the

204 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
inevitable. We have wounded our feet kicking
against the pricks. It has taken some of us long to
learn even the commonest facts of life, to say nothing
of the inner facts and spiritual meaning of the whole.
But it is something to be sure that we ought to
have learned and that there is indeed something to
learn. What I3 the reproof of life ? In keeping with the
general shrewd wise teaching of this Book of Prov
erbs the reproof of life will mean, to begin with, the
sane and sensible bearing towards the laws of health
and life which experience teaches. We ourselves
have a proverb which says that a man at forty will be
either a fool or a physician, with the evident
thought that by that time a man ought to have
learned the simple elementary rules of health. We
are inclined, however, to make too much of mere ex
perience, or rather we limit the idea of experience to
mere length of living. We speak of experience as if
it were everything, and as if years necessarily
brought it, something which only came by a regula
tion method. It does not follow that length of days
brings wisdom. It does not follow that to have come
through many vicissitudes of fortune, to have had
many experiences, will give the right temper in which
to meet and learn the reproof of life. Experience

THE REPROOF OF LIFE 205
teaches fools, we say. It ought to, but really it
teaches everybody but fools. The important thing is
not the number of the experiences. The impression
able heart can from one learn all. The stubborn
heart will from all learn none. The important thing
is not even the kind of experience, but the spirit in
which it is met, the attitude taken up.
If the proof of this deepest of all wisdom is that
the heart should hearken to the reproof of life, then
the lesson can come in countless ways, and it can be
learned soon, if only the heart is bent to it. If the
fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, if to
know God is essential to truly know life, then that
disposes at once of the many devilish sayings ex
pressive of the devilish doctrine that wisdom con
sists of knowing evil in the sense of doing it. We
speak of learning life, and seeing the world, and sow
ing wild oats as if that was the appointed way to
life. It will only lead to a sorer, fiercer form of the
reproof of life. " The road of excess leads to the
palace of wisdom," is one of William Blake's
aphorisms, with a certain truth in it, namely that so
many only learn wisdom after the severe punish
ment that came from unwisdom. The road of ex
cess may sometimes lead to a palace of wisdom, but
it is not the road to it, be assured by the testimony

206 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
of all the saints, by the witness of all the wise. It is
a wisdom which is too late. It is a joyless wisdom,
the wisdom which comes when the heart is eaten
out, when life has lost its beauty and grace, and the
world which might have been, which ought to be, the
scene of purity of thought and grace of speech and no
bility of deed turns to dust and ashes at the touch.
Nay, my son, be wise, be admonished,Jearn the reproof
of life on easier terms than that. " Wisdom crieth
aloud in the street, she uttereth her voice in the
broad places ; in the city she uttereth her words, How
long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity? And
scorners delight themselves in scorning? And fools
hate knowledge ? Turn you at my reproof. Behold,
I will pour out my spirit unto you, I will make known
my words unto you."
No man who would be wise need wait for the full
reproof, which comes as a rod for the back of fools.
Sooner, much sooner, is the time ripe for amend
ment than the heart is ripe. Easier comes the oppor
tunity, than comes the will to use the opportunity.
Not at the first reproof of life, nor at the second, do
our stubborn hearts bend to the lesson. Not at the
first knock, nor at the second, do we open the door
to the gracious visitor who stands and knocks. The
ear might have heard the reproof of life and been

THE REPROOF OF LIFE 207
counted among the wise long before it happened, even
if it at length did happen.
Ten years ago, five years ago,
One year ago,
Even then you had arrived in time,
Though somewhat slow.
Yes, and even then you might have arrived in wis
dom as you had arrived in time. It is not for want
of opportunity, not for want of reproof, that you
have let things slip, and are to-day like a knotless
thread in the seam of life, with little or no meaning
in your existence, with no relation to the divine wis
dom of the world, because no relation to God who
made the world, with no relation to Christ, the wis
dom of God and the power of God. Is it for nothing
that you have lived in this rich world with its les
sons and revelations, with its sanctities and sacra
ments ? If you have lived on the mere froth of ex
istence, with petty thoughts and petty desires, filled
with stupid meaningless frivolity, with never a true
conception of life with its menace of death, or of
death with its lesson of life, what about the reproofs
that have come to you once and again, the dealings
of providence, the pleadings of grace, the strokes on
the heart, the knocks at the door, the sorrow and dis
appointment and affliction, the mystery, the passion,

208 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
the pathos, the tragedy, the reproof of life showered
on your impenitent heart and your senseless mind ?
And what about the day of calamity that shall be,
when your fear cometh, when the black terror that
lurks for you somewhere in some corner of the road
will at last grip you, when the last and final reproof
comes, is it nothing that failure must be writ over it
all, a life redeemed by no nobleness or sacrifice or
love, saved by no deathless hope, sanctified by no
hidden communion ? The pity of it — the miserable
folly and shame and mistake of it ! " The ear that
heareth the reproof of life abideth among the wise."
Is this all the reproof of life? a pitiless conse
quence of cause and effect, a punishment of mistake
when it is irretrievable, " judgment prepared for
scorners and stripes for the backs of fools " ? Nay,
to the hearing ear and the understanding heart the
reproof of life, however hard it may have pressed, is
more than the discipline of an inflexible law. It
has a secret, which the humble enquiring ear hears to
its sweet and lasting content. We know that it is not
easy to accept reproof from another man, even when
our conscience tells us it is merited. How we flare
up when any one tries it! It needs a very humble
tongue on the one hand, as well a3 a very humble ear
on the other, to speak and to hear words of reproof.

THE REPROOF OF LIFE 209
There is usually a touch of the Pharisee in the tone
of the reprover, if there is also a touch of irritation
in the reproved. Now the secret of the text is this.
It is easy to receive reproof, when we know that it is
prompted and guided by love. If we were always
sure that reproof was not for the personal triumph
of the reprover, nor the fruit of vanity and self-
righteousness, nor out of malice ; if we were sure it
hurt the reprover as much if not more to rebuke be
cause he loved, we would submit humbly.
Now, this is the secret in the larger affair of the
reproof of life. When we realise that the reproof of
life which comes to us in our sorrows and losses is
the very evidence of love, and because our Father
cares for us, and cares most of all for the best in us,
we will bend to it and hearken. That is the ripe
wisdom which comes to some — we see it sometimes
in their faces with their serene brow and calm eyes
and patient lips — the reproof which has been ac
cepted and taken to feed the soul. That is the ripe
wisdom which this world can afford to those who are
obedient to the will of God, the true knowledge of
life which is knowledge of God, which looks upon life
as Paul looked upon the Jewish law as a school
master to bring us to Christ. This is the secret of
the reproof of life, to learn the secret of the Lord,

210 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
to bend to the will of God, to see the touch of a piti
ful love in all the dealings of providence, to be calm
at the heart amid all the ferments of the world, with
an ear that hearkens for God, a heart that asks to
know His will, a soul that cradles itself in the love of
the Father in Christ Jesus our Lord ; the faith which
brings peace, and will bring, if it be God's will,
An old age serene and bright
And calm as is a Lapland night.

XIX
THE COURAGE AND THE COWARDICE OF
SIN
His blood be on us and on our children. — Matthew xxvii. 25.
Ye intend to bring this man's blood upon us. — Acts v. 28.
How differently things look at different times ! In
the heat of passion consequences look small and of
little account, but when the blood has time to cool the
whole matter takes on another aspect. Looking for
ward in eager desire to a coveted object, nothing can
be allowed to stand in the way, nothing is worth con
sidering compared with the thing wanted; but look
ing back on the attainment, we cannot imagine that
we offered such a price for it. When the balance of
judgment is shaken by passion any risk seems small,
any consequence seems cheap, but afterwards we
think we must have been besotted to make such a
poor bargain. Passion gives a spurious courage
which throws down the gauntlet with an air of
bravado, to be succeeded by a cowardice all the more
apparent after the high and vaunting words. There
is a daring of sin which is not afraid to assume all the
211

212 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
responsibility if there is to be any, which is willing
to accept any consequences. Who is afraid to pay
the price, to reap the fruit of the deed ? " His blood
be on us and on our children." But when the deed
is done, men whimper if the consequences they de
rided come, and cannot believe that they should be
expected to pay the price they foresaw. " Ye intend
to bring this man's blood upon us " — a grieved com
plaint of injured men who refuse any sense of re
sponsibility. The courage and the cowardice of sin!
In cold blood how differently this judicial murder
of Jesus looked to all the actors in the tragedy!
Pilate, whose blood had never been anything but cold,
had washed his hands of it, saying, "lam innocent
of the blood of this just person ; see ye to it." Judas,
who betrayed his Lord, went back with the thirty
pieces of silver in despair when the dark passion had
left his heart. " See thou to it," the priests said to
Judas. You did it, and that is your concern; you
cannot cast the burden on us by throwing back the
money. And now the rulers who engineered the ac
cusation say complainingly to the men who by their
preaching were keeping green the memory of their
victim, " Ye intend to bring this man's blood upon
us." None can be brought to accept the responsibil
ity for this deed of shame. But the refusal did not

COURAGE AND COWARDICE OF SIN 213
alter any of the facts. Judas had to see to it : Pilate
had to see to it: priests and people, themselves and
their children, have had to see to it ever since. It did
not need these formal words when the passion was on
them to fix the responsibility. It was there, whether
they owned to it or not. But the formal words are
there too, giving point to the irony of history.
You remember how the words came to be uttered.
At the trial of Jesus; Pilate had no heat of passion
to overturn his reason. He was cold and calculating
all the time. He did not want to condemn an inno
cent man, but he did not want government to be
troubled with a possible riot and did not want his
own name to be implicated at Rome. He pacified
the populace by assenting to the crime, and appeased
his conscience by disowning it. It was an absurd and
impossible thing, though it is a common enough de
vice. He cleared himself of the guilt by taking water
and washing his hands before the multitude, as a sign
that he acquitted himself and refused to contract any
guilt in the matter. " I am innocent," he said, " of
the blood of this just person; see ye to it." How
readily we think that if we protest against a thing
formally we absolve ourselves ! Pilate did not want
to have his name associated with a riot at Jerusalem ;
and his name has been associated for ever with this

214 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
judicial murder. Little did the proud Roman think
that his name would go down to all the years, to all
the world in infamy. To get what they wanted
priests and people formally and solemnly consented
to take the guilt on themselves. In the heat of pas
sion it was done, and in the cunning policy that pas
sion dictates even when it boils. It was done to tie
Pilate down to their will. It was as much as to say,
If it is only a qualm of conscience that troubles you,
we will take the responsibility, our conscience is
strong enough to relieve you of the guilt. In their
fierce unrelenting madness of hate they utter the im
precation on themselves, regardless of any sort of con
sequence, " His blood be on us and on our children."
Look on that picture, and now look on this. The
deed was forgotten, buried, and life in the city went
on as before, till the priests and rulers are annoyed
by a little band of men keeping alive the name of
this same Jesus whom they had crucified. Those re
sponsible for government are always and naturally con
tent with keeping things going smoothly, and do not
want to be troubled with new doctrines. When it suited
their own purpose the chief priests could create a
disturbance better than any, but in normal times they
want to avoid disturbance. So they set themselves
by threats and imprisonment to choke off this new

COURAGE AND COWARDICE OF SIN 215
movement. In prison or out of it, however, Peter
and the Apostles go on firmly and calmly, and the
people are being won over. They are summoned be
fore the council, and this is the charge, " Did we not
straitly command you that ye should not teach in
this name ? " — this name which they thought they
had disposed of, but which was reappearing like an
accusing ghost. " Behold, ye have filled Jerusalem
with your doctrine, and intend to bring this man's
blood upon us." It was fear of the people that was
at the bottom of this complaint. They were not
thinking of the moral guilt before God of having
done to death an innocent man, but of the possibility
of vengeance at the hands of an inflamed populace
who might be taught to think that they should right
the wrong by vengeance. They do not want those
things which they had quietly buried to be raked up
again. They take it as an affront that blame should
be laid at their door. Was not this man punished at
the hands of Roman justice ? What had they to do
with it ? They would now wash their hands of it all.
Let Pilate or somebody else see to it. They feel they
have just cause of complaint, " Ye intend to bring
this man's blood upon us." Peter replied, " The
God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew
and hanged on a tree." His answer is a simple state-

216 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
ment of fact, " We are witnesses of these things."
Protestingtand asserting and denying will not affect
facts. " Ye slew Him and hanged Him on a tree."
The priests probably did not remember the words
that had been used at the trial of Jesus. The words
had only been used as a move in the game with
Pilate, and the present protestation had no reference
to the previous words, but the two sayings give a
dramatic turn to the situation, and bring out the deep
truth we have suggested of the false courage and the
weak cowardice of sin. In the heat and passion of
the persecution of Jesus they took on them with light
hearts all the guilt, if there was any. They were not
afraid to assume responsibility, but now they would
creep out of their own contract, shuffle off any guilt
in the matter and wash their hands of the whole con
cern. Have they not themselves to thank if the blood
is brought upon them? Ye slew Him and hanged
Him on a tree, says Peter relentlessly. Had they
not said in their hate, " His blood be on us and on our
children ? " But the daring has ebbed out of them,
and they whimper out the charge, " Ye intend to
bring this man's blood upon us."
It is so with all forms of passion. In the fever of
desire a man is willing to pay any price, to accept
any consequences. He believes that this thing he de-

COURAGE AND COWARDICE OF SIN 217
sires is worth paying for, or he shuts his eyes to the
fact that payment will be demanded. Tell him in
the heat of his passion that this will follow, and
this, and this. Show him the inevitable conse
quences, what he risks, what he must lose, what may
happen. He will say in the spasm of Dutch courage,
Let it happen, let it all come, let the consequences be
what they may, this I must have and shall. It is
madness if you will, derangement of judgment ; but
that is part of the deceitfulness of sin, the way temp
tation overturns the will and unseats the reason.
Is it only a leaf from ancient history this, or has
it a living moral for living men and women to-day ?
Does not the drunkard know all that you can tell
him, better than you can tell him, what he is paying
for his sin, what he is losing, what he must suffer and
cause others to suffer ? He knows it and in a way he
counts the cost, but when the fierce temptation strikes
him he will say that he will take the consequences.
It is derangement of judgment, giving for the mo
ment a kind of daring, a spurious courage like the
hoarse cry of priests and people that day in Jerusa
lem, " His blood be upon us and on our children." It
is no musty moral from an old record, but a fact
true to human nature now as ever, where the same
temptations strike the same place in the heart, and

218 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
the same devil's reasoning deludes the soul. When
the mad jealousy finds its seat in Cain's mind, when
the smell of the pottage rises to Esau's nostrils, when
the lust kindles in David's eye, when the jingle of
the silver sounds in Judas' ear, when hate grows in
the priests' heart and rage grips the mob before
Pilate's seat, passion in each case sweeps away the
defences and consequences are nothing. Any price
so it be afterwards, the consequences be ours — we
take them — the blood be on us ! But when the pas
sion has cooled and the price is demanded the tune
changes, the whole situation looks different, the con
sequences which were despised when remote loom
up in their true proportions. The daring tails off
into weakness : the courage turns to cowardice. The
confident cry, " His blood be upon us," becomes the
whine, " Ye intend to bring this man's blood upon
us." How differently things look before and after !
It reminds us of the old stories of men selling
themselves to the devil, signing a contract by which
special powers are granted with the chance of every
gratification for a term of years. The stories show
us the man beginning with the idea that he is getting
a good bargain and rather over-reaching the devil.
The other side of the paction is meanwhile far-off
and is assented to with an airy easy assurance. The

COURAGE AND COWARDICE OF SIN 219
man is boastful of his powers, and is willing to accept
all the consequences. When the term expires and
the time for payment comes, a different song is sung.
The stories show the man trying to convince himself
that he has no responsibility, that the payment will
never be demanded. He puts all the blame on the
devil and none on himself. Something will be sure
to happen to relieve him of his side of the paction.
Then we see him in the climax of terror and alarm
as the moment arrives; and the story ends with a
mysterious disappearance, the squaring up of the
liabilities. The courage and the cowardice of sin! We see
them exemplified every day. We. recognise them in
our own hearts at the two different stages, both often
false. It is part of the deceitfulness of sin to deceive
us in both stages, in the first to convince us that the
consequences are nothing, and in the second to drive
us to despair. Let not passion blind you to the fact
that we live in a moral world governed by moral
cause and effect as well as physical. What men some
times call chance, and sometimes call fate, God calls
consequence. " Be not deceived, God is not mocked,
whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap."
" His blood be on us and on our children," cried the
Jews on that fatal day, thinking that it meant noth-

220 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
ing, that they were only idle words. The words may
have been idle, but the deed was not idle and bore its
dread fruits. The fickleness and folly and prejudice
and impenitence and cruelty, of which the deed
spoke, brought their harvest in kind ; and upon them
came all the righteous blood shed upon the earth,
from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of
Zacharias, son of Barachias, whom they slew between
the temple and the altar, and the more precious blood
still of Jesus, whom they slew and hanged on a tree.
Every page of their history since shows how tragic
ally true their own self -judgment was that madly and
blindly called for the blood to be on them and on
their children. Spurn the subtle temptation which
suggests that sin has no consequences. Distrust the
spurious courage which shuts the eyes to risks. Re
fuse to listen to the folly that a man can sow the wind
and yet somehow avoid the necessity of reaping the
whirlwind. In the other stage the deceitfulness of sin works
equally falsely and insidiously, tempting a man this
time to despair, suggesting that he is now past re
demption, that he has made his bed and must lie on
it, and that the best he can do is to evade as much as
possible any disagreeable consequences. When evil
can no longer deny moral results and moral punish-

COURAGE AND COWARDICE OF SIN 221
ments, its last resource is to deny redemption, deny
forgiveness, deny hope. " Ye intend to bring this
man's blood upon us," querulously complained the
priests. Yes, he did, as boldly he charged them, " Ye
slew Him and hanged Him on a tree." But he had
also a deeper and further intention, if they would
but throw down their wretched defences, and confess
their guilt and shame. He intended to show how
they too might be cleansed by the penitential fires,
how they too might be broken by that cross and saved
by that blood. For them, too, was possible forgive
ness, pardon, and peace, with their cruel eyes washed
soft by tears, and their vile hearts washed clean by
blood. For them, too, brooded the divine love and
pity. In this world of moral cause, of just law, of
righteous judgment, let no man presume. Be not de
ceived ; God is not mocked. In this world of grace,
and love, and mercy, and compassion, this world
which was the scene of Christ's life and ministry,
this world for which Christ died, let no man despair.

XX
PERMISSION WITHOUT SANCTION
And God said unto Balaam, Thou shalt not go with them.
. . . And God came unto Balaam at night and said unto him,
If the men come to call thee, rise up and go with them. . . .
And God's anger was kindled because he went. — Numbebs
xxii. 12, 20-22.
I do not propose at this time to enter into a consid
eration of the complex character of Balaam as re
lated in this story, except in so far as it may illus
trate the subject suggested by our text. These words
we have chosen touch some of the deepest problems
of life and religion, 4he problems that circle round
the subject of the place and freedom of the human
will. I wish to treat it as little philosophically as
possible, and as practically and ethically as I can.
It is not necessary to enlarge much on the setting of
our text. The situation of Balaam at this point of
the narrative is a common one, allowing for the dif
ferences of time and custom and the accidentals of
life. It is simply the situation of a man keenly de
sirous of doing something which he knows to be
222

PERMISSION WITHOUT SANCTION
wrong, and who seeks to reconcile a real conscien
tiousness with his desire.
Balak offers him things which his heart covets, if
he will go to him and curse for him the Israelites.
Balaam is persuaded in his own mind that he cannot
do this as things stand, that it will be contrary to the
will of God who has blessed Israel ; and yet he would
fain earn the reward in some way without being ab
solutely false. He would not accept once for all the
plain intimation of God's will and the simple ac
ceptance of duty; but at the same time he is de
termined not to disobey the dictates of conscience.
This at least is his attitude to begin with. When
Balak's messengers came with the bribes and prom
ises, he held firm to what he believed to be God's
will, and came out of the shock of the first tempta
tion unharmed. " God said unto Balaam, Thou shalt
not go with them. And Balaam rose up in the morn
ing and said unto the princes of Balak, Get ye into
your own land: for the Lord refuseth to give me
leave to go with you." He had no doubt in his mind
as to what God's will was in the matter, and he stated
that unflinchingly in spite of the fact that he fain
would have gone; and if nothing further had oc
curred, it would all have looked like a moral victory
for Balaam ; and indeed, so it was to some extent.

224 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
But it is not the way of temptation to come once
and be content with a single repulse. On Balaam's
refusal a still more imposing embassy was sent with
more lavish promises of reward. If the former oc
casion had represented a complete moral victory, this
would not have been much of a temptation. The
prophet could only have repeated his refusal. He
had learned what his duty was. But, enticed by the
promised bribes, he cast about for some way of getting
what his heart was set on. He thought he might pos
sibly obtain leave to do what God had before forbid
den. Instead of sending the envoys away, he bade
them wait in the hope that he might be able to get a
more favourable answer. He seemed to succeed ; for
he did receive permission to go. " God said unto
him, If the men come to call thee, rise up and go with
them." Nothing was really altered. He knew he
was not allowed to curse instead of bless. But he
still hoped that some further concession might be
granted which would enable him to earn the reward.
He was only entering into temptation, getting nearer
to it, playing with it, going with open eye3 into a
situation which would inevitably make it more dif
ficult for him to be true. The permission he received
to go did not change the facts of the case, did not
alter God's will, could not alter it; it only brought

PERMISSION WITHOUT SANCTION 225
Balaam himself into deeper waters, and gave him a
harder battle to fight with temptation ; it was a long
step towards the ultimate degradation and the final
plunge. This is no character-sketch of Balaam; or there
would here lie on the very surface for us many les
sons of warning and counsel, warnings about the be
ginning of evil and the genesis of sin in the mind,
and dallying with temptation. I prefer just now to
touch a deeper thought suggested by the words of
our text, with their startling contrast, " God said
unto Balaam, Go. . . . And God's anger was
kindled because he went" Subtle and complex as
Balaam's character may have been, it contains no
such strange and dark mystery as the mystery of
God's providence shadowed forth in these astounding
words. At first it seems a mistake, an impossible
reading of events. What tragedy, and what mystery
underlie these sentences, " God said unto Baalam,
Thou shalt not go with them." And then because
Balaam wanted it, longed for it, set his heart on it,
" God said unto him, Go." And all the time he was
going to his own hurt, compassing his life about with
many evils. " God's anger was kindled against him
because he went." The paradox of Balaam's char
acter, great as it is, is nothing to the appalling para-

226 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
dox that God should permit what is against His will
— that a man should receive a permission which was
not a sanction.
Yet is not this the common situation of us all ? Is
this not the invariable environment of all moral life,
that we are allowed to enter into temptation, al
lowed to go against the very will of God ? That this
should be so, that man should possess such terrible
power, seems the great mystery of our life ; and yet
it cannot be otherwise if we are to remain men. It is
no isolated instance, this case of Balaam's. Right
through the Bible we find the same explanation of
this weird power of man to go against God and to get
his way against God to his own undoing; as when
Israel desired a king, in order to be like other na
tions, rather than be a theocracy in which they had
no king but God, it is stated that God gave them a
king in His anger; or the Psalmist's explanation of
the fatal time in the desert, when the Israelites lusted
after the flesh-pots of Egypt and despised the manna ;
and when the flesh-meat came it brought with it a
terrible plague from which many died. The Psalm
ist points the same moral, " They lusted exceedingly
in the wilderness and tempted God in the desert.
And He gave them their request; but sent leanness
into their soul."

PERMISSION WITHOUT SANCTION 227
It represents a fact of moral life. Permission
which implied no sanction, nay, which carried with
it inevitable danger! We sometimes ask why it
should be so, and wonder if it might not have been
otherwise. Is it necessary that we should have to
run such risks and undergo such menace ? If God's
anger is to be kindled against Balaam if he went,
why ever permit him to go? If to agree to the
Israelites' request means to send leanness into their
souls, why ever give them their request ? This is the
great mystery of sin, and the great mystery (of
which it is a part) of man's free will, which means
freedom to do wrong as well as to do right, freedom
to sin, freedom to go against the law of our own be
ing and against the law of God and the will of God.
In this respect God cannot keep from us what we
want. God does not — cannot — violate man's will,
compelling him as by physical necessity to do right.
It would cease to be a moral world, and we would
cease to be men in the sense we are. Only moral
means can be used to achieve a moral end. Thus the
place of a man in the spiritual kingdom is settled
not by his gifts, or attainments, or capacities, or ac
tions even, but by his will. When Balaam desired,
longed, willed to go, what could even God do but say
to him, " Go " ?

228 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
For, notice further, that from the point of view of
pure morality the evil was done. The birth of sin
is not in the sinful act, but in the sinful desire.
Lady Macbeth's argument to her husband, after he
had planned the murder of Duncan, and then wav
ered — not because he repented, but partly for reasons
of fear, and partly for reasons of policy — is a cogent
argument from the purely moral point of view. Her
argument is that he was guilty of the crime already,
since it was still in his heart. Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour,
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem;
Letting I dare not wait upon I would,
Like the poor cat i' the adage J
Not that a man who thinks evil may as well go on
to commit the evil, though that is the devil's argu
ment which comes to many a man, and which Lady
Macbeth made use of in the passage quoted ; but that
the first guilt of sin does lie in the evil will ; and an
evil will only needs opportunity in order to blossom
out into the full-blown crime, or vice, or cruelty, or
shame. Balaam had disobeyed God in his heart be
fore he set out for Balak's court. He was not really
a worse man through the permission to go. Indeed,
it was perhaps the only chance for him to become

PERMISSION WITHOUT SANCTION 229
a better man by being compelled to realise that he
was offending God. This permission to go was only
the natural and even the inevitable result of the
kindling passion in his heart.
What we lust after, what we give our heart to,
what we really request from God and from man,
what we desire as our chief good and foster in our
thoughts as the imperious need of our lives, that we
cannot but get. Though it be tempting God as the
Israelites did, God will give us our request, though
it means sending leanness into our soul. When we
make our deliberate, conscious, persistent choice, the
mere practical form it takes is a detail. If our mind
is ever turning towards some darling sin, as Balaam
lusted after the reward, how can we, in a world like
this, which is built on moral principles, be prevented
from carrying our desire into action? We cannot
will the evil, and be saved from all the consequences
and the fruits of evil. The sin of the heart only
lacks an opportunity to be turned into conduct; and
God cannot keep the opportunity from us for ever.
The evil is already done, when the heart is wholly
given up to it. Sooner or later we have our way. We
persist : we tempt God for it : we desire it : we seek it :
we will have it and must have it — take it, the sin and
its sting, " Go. . . . And God's anger was kindled
because he went."

230 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
Safety is to be found alone in the sphere wherein
lies the danger, in the will. Even from the most sin
ful life and surroundings there is ever a point of de
parture for each of us in the will. The free will of
man is at last justified, and only then, when it is
freely given to God. If sin finds its hold and seat
there, so also does salvation. We always come back
to heart-religion ; for nothing else is of any avail. No
outside prevention, no careful cleansing of the out
side of cup and platter is of use. Even if Balaam had
not gone and yet had his heart full of covetousness,
the mere abstention was nothing. Balaam is only
safe when he does not even want to go since it is
against God's will. He is only safe if he would not
go though he could, since he knows it is contrary to
the will of God. Only that will is safe, which is con
formed to the will of God, which really seeks to do
the will of God, which is guarded and inspired, at
once protected and driven, by the will of God. Only
that heart is safe which is fixed upon God. The ideal
for man is a holy will which voluntarily chooses the
good, which says, " Lo, I come to do Thy will, O
God." If we make God's will our will, His way shall
be our way ; and when He bids us go, we need fear
no evil, for He is with us, even in the dark valley of
the shadow of death.

XXI
RIGHTFUL CONFORMITY
Suffer it to be so now; for thus it becometh us to fulfil all
righteousness. — St. Matthew iii. 15.
One of the practical problems of life is to know how
far we should comply with established custom and
conventional ways of both thinking and acting. At
first sight it appears an easy question to decide by
saying broadly and generally that every man is in the
last resort responsible for himself, and ought there
fore to do what seems right in his own eyes, refusing
to submit to the authority of numbers, and the as
sumed sacredness of custom which would drag all
alike down to the same dead dull level. To conform
to others in anything is to lose the most precious gift
of independence, which alone makes progress possible
for the race. No man should be asked to give up his
own opinions, to acquiesce in traditional standards,
to comply with accepted habits. We have our in
dividual lives to live, and not any man, and not all
men, can arrogate the place of judge. Freedom of
thought, independence of action are indisputable
231

THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
rights which follow from the sense of personal re
sponsibility. If man's life should be ruled by
conscience (and all schools of morals not only admit
this, but insist on it), if the moral burden of de
cision rests on a man's own soul ; then he must be al
lowed to rule his own course, he must not be terror
ised by mere convention and expected to conform to
what others think right'; nay, if need be, he must be
allowed to dissent from the opinions, and practices,
and beliefs, and manner of living of others.
In theory at least, every school of thought grants
this freedom. In political affairs this is the founda
tion of all democratic government. The majority
governs, but it is left to the minority to become a
majority whenever it can, by protesting, by influenc
ing opinion. The same is true in the region of ab
stract thought. The mind of man has been freed
from the shackles of mere authority. Men need not
think according to pattern. They need not give in to
any prejudice or any custom whatever. And re
ligiously this nonconformity is an accepted prin
ciple : it is at the very heart of all personal religion,
which starts with the idea of personal responsibility.
This freedom from the bondage of others' opinion
was St. Paul's claim for all Christians. " To his own
Master he standeth or falleth.. Who art thou that

RIGHTFUL CONFORMITY 233
judgest another man's servant? We must all stand
before the judgment seat of Christ " — therefore, we
need not stand before the judgment seat of men now.
This is the inevitable implication from the personal
relationship between God and the human soul on
which religion is based.
All this is easy in theory. Freedom is the natural
right of man. All conformity with others for mere
conformity's sake is sinful cowardice, an abrogation
of the rights of man. This would seem to settle the
question, and make the title of our sermon, " Right
ful Conformity," a contradiction in terms. But in
practice this doctrine of unlimited liberty does not
work out so well. If we lived separated lives, apart
from each other, with no responsibility for others, and
no duties towards others ; if we were able to shut our
selves off from the impact of other lives on ours,
there would be no difficulty. But we live in society,
with social obligations, with mutual interdependence.
The whole problem of living is how to adjust the
rights of others with the undoubted rights of self.
How far in practice can we carry out our doctrine
of freedom ? Is it unlimited ? We need only ask the
question to know the answer. The social bond,
through which all progress hitherto has been ac
quired, would be impossible under such a strain. If

234 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
minorities have rights, does the mind of the majority
count for nothing? Practically in every region of
thought and activity, in business, in politics, in
social duties, we are ever face to face with this ques
tion, Is it not necessary often to come to a compro
mise when we differ, a modifying of some element of
what we consider truth in order to work and live to
gether ?
Now as a matter of fact we have to make con
cessions, and do make them in every sphere of life ;
give up some of our liberty of thought and action;
even comply with the opinion and feelings of others.
You see the problem that emerges. Theoretically we
should ever be independent truth-seekers in things
of intellect, fearless followers of right in things of
conscience, thinking, and saying, and doing every
thing according to our own mind and heart, un
fettered by the conventions of the present and by the
traditions of the past: and yet practically we know
that we are not so free as our theory makes out ; we
know that this liberty of ours is qualified by the
facts of social life.
In religion the problem is keener than elsewhere,
for the reason that religion deals with the very soul
of man. St. Paul, who formulated his doctrine of
freedom from the interference of men in the things

RIGHTFUL CONFORMITY
of the spirit, yet professed that he would become all
things to all men, and made expediency almost a
principle. He was too shrewd and too sane a man to
think that he could serve the cause he had at heart by
running counter to every established custom, and of
fending every prejudice. To him also the new faith
was the fruition of the old, as every faith must be
to be worth anything to the world; and so the new
had to displace the old, not by cataclysm, but by
growth. St. Paul, therefore, would go as far as he
could in compromise. For example, circumcision was
nothing to him, and he would never consent to make
it essential for Gentiles to be circumcised, but he
would not prohibit Jew.s from continuing the old
rite of their race; and even himself circumcised
Timothy, in order to avoid giving offence to the
Jews. In this attitude he was only following the example
of Jesus, as illustrated from the passage of our text,
" Suffer it to be so now." From this attitude of our
Lord we can learn some things which should help us
to solve our practical difficulty. Our Lord did not
renounce the religion of His fathers. He was a re
former, an innovator, and the effect of His work was
to make old things pass away and make all things
new. But the key-note of all His teaching was that

236 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
He came not to destroy but to fulfil. The true re
former is never an iconoclast, bent only on destruc
tion, ever denouncing, ever tearing down the old with
out an eye to what is to replace the old. Men cannot
start fresh as if the past had brought no gains and no
conditions. Progress is nothing if it is not growth,
and growth implies roots. Every human institu
tion has roots in the past, long roots. To cut the
roots is to kill the plant. John the Baptist was a
voice crying in the wilderness, a protester, apart from
the life of his time, and so his work has had no last
ing influence. He was a nine days' wonder, and af
fected the surface of his time, but that was all. Our
Lord's work was essentially related to the life of the
past and of the present ; and so it has been the life of
the future ever since. It was intensely original, and
aimed at reformation so great that it amounted to
revolution; but it was joined on to life, and carried
forward all that was good in the past. He con
formed with all the law as pious Jews did. He was
circumcised: He kept the feasts and went up to
Jerusalem as others did : He went to the Synagogue
as the custom was : He paid the temple-tax ; and here
we find Him submitting to John's baptism, even when
John protested that it was unseemly that he should
do it.

RIGHTFUL CONFORMITY 237
John did not know Jesus as we know Him, prob
ably had no very clear conception of Christ's charac
ter ; but he was sufficiently impressed by Him to feel
the incongruity of the situation. And this fact that
Jesus submitted to be baptised must have meant a
difficulty to many Christians reading it in the Gos
pels, if this explanation given by our Lord had not
been stated. For was it not admitting almost in
feriority, or at least admitting need like other weak
men? Does it not take away from His dignity?
Should such an original teacher conform to the pre
scribed rules and forms of his predecessors ? Jesus
sought to show John the essential seemliness and fit
ness of it. " Suffer it to be so now ; for thus it be-
cometh us to fulfil all righteousness."
Every religious form that could be useful to the
spiritual life would be used by Him. Just because
He was above all forms, He would take them and fill
them with new meaning ; carry them forward into the
new era. Christ was a Jew, and so took on Him all
the privileges and all the disabilities of His race,
entering into human history where it was, coming as
a man among men, not as a bolt out of the blue. God
had spoken to men through the law and the prophets ;
He did not come to destroy the law and the prophets,
but to carry them out to their true fulfilment. He

238 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
took up the task and the burden where it was, and led
men on to a higher life. To have done otherwise, to
have ridden rough-shod over the dearest possessions
of Jewish history, even if that were His ultimate
aim, would have been bad policy. He never could
have ushered in the new era by such means. And it
would have shown that He did not understand the
real state of the case and the real problem of human
development. Many would-be reformers err here, laying em
phasis on accidental details, irritating people by
stupid protests, which even if they could be carried
would not touch the real point. There is an impro
priety in many protests, which are only evidence of
bad taste and want of sense — sometimes by putting
stress on little things, lacking the sound sense of
Richter (as Mr. Hamilton Mabie puts it in an Essay
on the Failings of Genius) — Richter, " who when he
found that his habit of omitting the omnipresent col
lar from his toilet set all tongues a-wagging, wisely
concluded to conform to the fashion in a trivial mat
ter, in order that he might put his whole strength
into a struggle on vital principles." Of course, if a
man's aim is to come out as a reformer of dress, it is
his duty to take liberties with the ordinary civilised
toilet. But if he has deeper things in his mind, he is

RIGHTFUL CONFORMITY 239
only giving needless offence and risking his great
cause by indulging the vanity of eccentricity.
Another common way in which reformers hurt
their own cause is by refusing to take any bread be
cause they cannot get the whole loaf, refusing any
compromise even that will meanwhile advance their
cause. A man may be a Republican in theory, and
may hold that Monarchy is wrong and a weakness to
any nation; but even on his own grounds, it would
be foolish to refuse to take part in any movement
which had the good of the people at heart because
it was not done under his ideally perfect government
A man may be a Prohibitionist in theory, but if he
refuses even to work with any who have smaller
schemes in hand because they do not go so far as his
views, he is a traitor to his own cause. The principle
can be applied to every sphere of progress. A man
may have a nobler conception of religion than that of
the Churches, a more spiritual and more living faith ;
but the question for him to settle with himself is
whether he is justified in separating from the wor
ship of his fellows. To cut yourself off from the life
of your time is to mutilate your own life and to im
poverish the life of others. It prevents you from
really understanding and helping them. You make
yourself a yoluntary outlaw, with no relation to

240 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
others. Some reformers have too many corners and
angularities about them to allow others to work along
with them.
Now there are times when it is necessary for true
men to make their protest, to refuse any compromise,
to wash their hands of any complicity with an
established state of things, times when conformity is
sinful and cowardly, and nonconformity alone is
right (and with that side I hope to deal in my next
sermon), but there is a reverence which is becoming
to us even when we see imperfections in the form
which tempts us to protest. Our Master's view
even of baptism was larger and grander than John's
view; for to John it was the baptism of repentence
merely, but to Jesus it meant also entrance into the
fuller, larger life, the life of love; yet He said,
" Suffer it to be so now ; for it becometh us to fulfil
all righteousness."
This attitude is not the indifference of those to
whom nothing matters much, and who choose to con
form just to save themselves from the pain of pro
test ; nor is it confession of failure, the pessimism of
Matthew Arnold's intolerably sad poem of unfaith,
Creep into thy narrow bed,
Creep and let no more be said.
Let the long contention cease.

RIGHTFUL CONFORMITY 241
Geese are swans and swans are geese.
Let them have it how they will.
Thou art tired; best be still.
That is a counsel of despair, ceasing to protest be
cause there is no longer any more fight in him, giving
up the conflict in weariness, the unbelief which won
ders whether it can ever be worth the sacrifice for a
man to run counter to the customs to which the world
is wedded. That sort of conforming is the essence of
weakness, laying down the arms in a mood of hope
lessness. When our Lord said, " Suffer it to be so
now," it was a prelude to victory, taking a form which
to many was dead, and filling it with living meaning,
reverently using what had represented a great re
ligious truth to many a soul, and carrying it forward
to the new and larger future. It altogether depends
on the spirit as to whether conformity with any es
tablished rite is a sign of weakness or of strength, a
crime and a cowardice, or a virtue and a glory.
For (and this is the touchstone to try our own
motives), the motive of our Lord's conformity related
in our text was not worldly-wisdom, not the crafti
ness of wily ecclesiasticism seeking to make men
imagine He accepted forms He really meant to de
stroy. Its ethical motive was love. It was not that
He needed to be baptised, not to confess sin, but a

242 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
desire to stand beside others. It was the fruit of
sympathy, seeking to identify Himself with men,
sinning sorrowing men, whom He longed to save and
lead to God. There was a seemliness about it hid
even to John's eyes. It became Him who for love's
sake was to be baptised with another baptism. Well
did it become Him to fulfil all the law even in form
who came to fulfil it in very essence. Love is the
fulfilling of the law.
If love akin to the Master's is in your heart, you
will be saved from any of the dangers and tempta
tions which accompany conformity with what you
acknowledge is imperfect. You will never conform
through sluggishness and love of ease, or through
indifference and despair of good; but because you
will not be separated from your brethren, but will
work for them and strive with them and give your
life in their service, seeking to lead them to higher
things ; not haughtily and proudly standing aloof in
fancied superiority, but one with them in all things.
Your conformity will never be selfish, to avoid
trouble or pain to yourself; but inspired by the love
which gives unity of the spirit in the bonds of peace.
You will be all things to all men, if by any means you
may gain some.

XXII
NEEDFUL NONCONFORMITY
The Scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat: all there
fore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do;
but do not ye after their works: for they say and do not. — •
St. Matthew xxiii. 3.
Again and again in the course of His public minis
try our Lord was forced into opposition to the re
ligious leaders of His time. He was thwarted and
obstructed in His work. His teaching was met with
contemptuous indifference in the first instance, and
afterwards with active and inveterate enmity. They
stood in the way of enlightenment for the people;
and did all that envy and malice could do to counter
act His influence. This attitude of opposition was
none of His choosing. He was not a mere destruc
tive reformer, a critic of existing things, an image-
breaker who looked upon the breaking of images as
in itself a great work. He came not to destroy but to
fulfil. It is true that the fulfilment implied the pass
ing of the old into new forms, and would mean
change, the displacement of some cherished ideas and
243

244 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
practices, the transformation of the letter by the in
spiring spirit. But the attitude which our Lord
took to the religion of His day was not one of criti
cism, or of negation. He was scrupulous in con
forming to all the law, as we saw in the last sermon
in considering His attitude to John the Baptist when
he submitted to be baptised by Him.
He knew that much had to be changed in Jewish
religion before it could bless the Isles with its law:
it was His life-work to change it. But He never cut
Himself off from the religion of His time: never
disfranchised Himself as a Jew. If He had, where
would He have begun, where got foothold to pursue
His work? If He had been a mere protester, a
mere destructionist, much good of a kind might have
been done, abuses might have been remedied, and
reforms been introduced as a result of His criticism,
but there would not have been the great reach for
ward to a spiritual religion. The God who spoke to
men in Christ was the same God who had spoken at
sundry times in diverse manners unto their fathers
by the prophets. His revelation was the sum and
completion of all previous revelations, the perfect
round of which these were the broken arcs. On all
occasions, even when denouncing and condemning, He
safeguarded the law itself. He would not give ex-

NEEDFUL NONCONFORMITY 245
cuse for any of His hearers to imagine that the law
was abrogated because He criticised the interpreters
of the law. The law of God is the law of all life ;
and " till heaven and earth pass away one jot or
tittle of the law shall in no wise pass away."
So here, when the fundamental differences between
Christ and the Pharisees reached a climax, when He
was compelled to pronounce upon them the most
scathing condemnation, He is still consistent with
His whole attitude of conformity. He recognises the
Scribes and Pharisees in so far as they sit in Moses'
seat, in so far as they teach the law; and He calls
upon His audience to reverently bend to the yoke of
the law. " All whatsoever they bid you observe,
that observe and do." Christ did not wish His hear
ers to think that because He condemned the Pharisees
they were at liberty to release themselves from the
moral obligation of the law of God. He enforces
upon them the duty of complying with the demands
of the law. Never once did He preach rebellion; or
let men dream that they could reach any solution of
difficulties by simply cutting themselves off from the
life of their time. At this very moment, when He
Himself is breaking irrevocably with the religious
leaders of Israel, He prefaces His indictment with
an admonition to obey. The teaching underlying

246 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
these awful woes is really conservative in its tone,
protecting the essential good of Jewish religion.
The true reformer is the true conservative. He de
stroys abuses that the good of the past may be pre
served. Still the whole passage is a protest, burning with
the white heat of dissent, preaching the need and the
duty of nonconformity. The keynote of it is struck
at the very first in these words, " Do not ye after
their works." The problem of how far we should
comply with established custom in thinking and act
ing is a very real one. It confronts us in every region
of life. In business, and politics, and ordinary social
duty, and religion we are continually face to face with
it. It is not only the political or social or religious
reformer who feels the pinch of the problem ; though
to him it is perhaps keener. But every young man
especially, before his manner of thinking and way of
living have got set and hardened, is presented with the
problem in some of its forms. How far should he
accept compromise, and make the best of the pres
ent conditions, and just take things as they are, and
conform himself to the accepted views and habits of
his circle? He begins business, and enters at once
into a certain atmosphere for which he is not re
sponsible, with recognised customs of trade and

NEEDFUL NONCONFORMITY 247
standards of obligation. Is he to accept these as
sacred, the unalterable conditions of his particular
lot? Or is he to run counter to tradition and con
ventional usage in the interests of what he considers
a higher morality? He wants to do what is right;
he wants to keep his hands clean and his heart pure.
But he finds that he cannot start fresh even in busi
ness. He soon finds that he can do right things
wrongly, and hurt the cause he has at heart.
He may become hypersensitive, laying stress upon
minor points and accidental details, needlessly creat
ing offence and opposition, which he finds afterwards
might have been avoided with a little more tact. He
can run amuck against cherished notions that do not
count much one way or another, mistaking windmills
for giants. Or, on the other hand, he can settle down
to the common standards of his circle, the approved
morality and traditional customs of others, however
alien to his true spirit. Life is not an easy thing to
a man of mind and heart and soul ; and this problem
of conformity is not an academic and interesting in
tellectual discussion. No young man can begin life
anywhere, in business, or office, or in one of the pro
fessions, without having this subject forced on him
somehow. He has to make up his mind about the un
written but strong laws which custom binds on men,

248 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
the standards of commercial morality, the customs of
trade, the etiquette of profession, the social ma
chinery of which he is a part.
In the region of opinion and belief, the difficulty
is no less real. We are born into an intellectual and
spiritual climate, as well as a physical. Are we to
set up our own individual opinion against the
thoughts and faith of our time ? How far must we
be willing to make compromise in order to achieve
some purpose we desire? In politics, for example,
should a man be a member of a party, since that in
evitably means that he must be ready to concede in
some things more than he would like, and in other
points take less than he thinks right, in order to get
something practicable done? If he does enter a
party, he must make concessions, must comply with
the feelings and even the prejudices of others, must
modify some side of what he considers truth, must
conform with the opinions of others in order to work
along with them. Or should he be a free-lance, bend
ing to no yoke but his own will, making no compro
mise, giving in to no judgment but his own ? In the
one case he runs the risk of being false to truth and
conscience ; in the other he runs the risk of wasting
his life, and being put aside as a hopeless irreconx
cilable. In the deepest of all questions, in religion,

NEEDFUL NONCONFORMITY 249
the same problem of conformity arises. Should a
man stand aloof from the worship of his brethren,
because he does not see eye to eye with them in all
points of faith and Church government? Must we
not give and take here, too, as well as in other
spheres of practical life ?
In the preceding sermon we discussed this side of
the problem, and showed the place of rightful con
formity, the need of it to give continuity to life, to
keep it from being broken up into separate and unre
lated fragments, illustrating it by the example of our
Lord, who conformed in all things though He was the
most original thinker in religion the world has ever
seen. We saw the necessity for conformity, even in
the interests of growth and reform. Here the whole
line of our thinking is setting in the opposite direc
tion, asserting the place and function of needful non
conformity. To avoid the appearance of one-sided-
ness on both occasions, I could have wished that it had
been possible to consider both sides together. It is
only another illustration of the terrorism of custom,
and the need to conform even with unwritten law,
which prohibits a preacher from taking an hour for a
single sermon. Even with the danger of one-sided-
ness I am glad to make this side of nonconform
ity the last word on the subject; for after all the

250 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
temptations here are stronger than on the other
side. Now, it is true that some dissent from accepted
positions is due to temper and stupid self-will, or to
eccentricity and conceit and love of being singular.
It is true that a man can find cheap ways to notoriety
by protesting, and dissenting, and riding rough
shod over established custom. It is true that every
young man of any intelligence is tempted to show
his cleverness by being very advanced, and very heret
ical, and very unlike the common crowd. These and
other such-like temptations to nonconformity we
know. But, on the whole, the weight of the balance
is on the other side. The tendency of life is to harden
and set itself in dead forms. Much of our lives must
be conventional — and it is easy to make the whole of
it an unthinking conformity. The basis of every art
is common to all artists, and while the weaker ones
are tempted to show superiority by discarding the
laws of art, by extravagance and outre effects, yet the
other temptation is also real never to move outside
the recognised limits, and, to go on repeating the old
forms in helpless imitation. We must discriminate
between rightful conformity and the conformity of
dulness. In all things there is possible also the conformity

NEEDFUL NONCONFORMITY 251
of cowardice. Men shrink from the pains of dissent ;
for where it is real and the fruit of principle, there
is often no anguish like that of feeling oneself
separated from one's brethren. Society sometimes
punishes the dissenter terribly. To a sensitive man
nothing is so painful as to be ostracised and excom
municated. It is easy to silence conscience which
would prompt us to stand for truth, by telling over
to ourselves the penalties to be paid by the truth-
seeker. We speak of expediency, and tactfulness in
making changes, and that is all very well in ordmary
matters that don't involve principle; but there is a
false expediency much worshipped to-day, an ex
pediency which seems to think that ignoble and de
grading compliance is excused by being done for the
sake of peace. Peace is dearly bought at the ex
pense of principle. The whole character is en
feebled, and the whole life is impoverished. Timid
ity, fearfulness of standing alone, love of ease, can
all be allies to war on the side of letting well, or ill,
alone. If to the conformity of cowardice we add the con
formity of indifference, through which many a man
refuses the noble part because he is not sufficiently
alive to the distinctions between right and wrong;
and if we add also the conformity of despair, of un-

252 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
belief, which makes earnest men give up the struggle
for truth and right in hopelessness : I say, if we con
sider all the temptations to think, and speak, and act
with the multitude, we will see that we must be care
ful to preserve to ourselves, and to others, the right
of freedom of conscience and of intellect, and will
admit the need of nonconformity.
When we realise the strength of conformity ever
acting on us, we will guard against weak compliance,
and will be very tender towards any who take it upon
themselves to suffer for conscience' sake. For, after
all, it is from the individual that the race has hope
for the future. The rising light touches the topmost
peak first, and is the herald of the universal dawn.
And in the last issue a man is not absolved from com
plicity in evil because he has followed a multitude.
He never can shake off his own personal responsibil
ity. He is called to be loyal to the truth as he knows
it. If no man thought differently from others ; if no
man greatly dared and was content to stand alone,
where could progress come in for all of us ? We are
too conformable, too gregarious, too conventional, too
timid about being ourselves. Emerson's doctrine of
Self-reliance is needed to brace us to the highest
work, " Trust thyself : every heart vibrates to that
iron string. . . . Whoso would be a man must be

NEEDFUL NONCONFORMITY 253
a nonconformist. . . . Nothing is at last sacred
but the integrity of your own mind."
Issues come before us that demand a rigid adher
ence to right, to what we believe in our heart to be
truth ; and no casuistry can alter the plain fact that
in choosing to go with the many in the broad and easy
way we are making the great refusal: nothing can
take from us the responsibility of our decisions.
Lord Bacon in his Apophthegms quotes Jason the
Thessalian as saying that some things must be done
unjustly that many things may be done justly. It is
the world's favourite doctrine of expediency, which
can excuse anything. It is a devil's doctrine, against
which there cannot be too strong a protest. Our
Lord's attitude towards the Pharisees, based on wise
conformity, and yet fearless in the cause of God's
right — our Lord's example should be our guide. It is
never right to temporise with wrong, to participate
in a lie, to pretend for the sake of peace that dark
ness is light and evil is good. What they say in ac
cordance with the law of God that observe and do,
but do not ye after their works. He went to His
death in protest.
A good, if rough and ready, test as to your own
character is to be found in asking what are the limits
of compromise with yourself ? In what are you non-

254 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
conformists, standing up against the tendencies of
your world ? A man can know himself by what he
does not do, by the company he does not keep, by the
customs he will not conform to. You will not carry
the principle too far after all that has been urged on
the other side; for it must not be forgotten that a
man is judged by his positives, not by his negatives.
But you have not come to your majority as a man,
till you have learnt negation, denial, dissent, protest,
nonconformity. Great movements of thought have
ever sprung from dissent. Every change must have
a point of departure. And individually, if there is
to be anything higher and nobler in your life than it
has yet seen, there must be somewhere a point of de
parture. " Do not ye after their works " will be a
voice that sounds in ear and heart and conscience.
As conformity must be inspired by love, not by
worldly-wisdom to be saved from sin, so noncon
formity must be inspired by truth and not by pride
and self-opinionative conceit. It must have back of it
the thought of God and what is well-pleasing to
Him. Then anything is possible, even the pain
of separation, even the desolation of loneliness.
" What," said the cardinal legate, who had been sent
from Rome to bring Luther to terms, " do you think
the Pope cares for the opinion of a German boor?

NEEDFUL NONCONFORMITY 255
The Pope's little finger is stronger than all Germany.
Do you expect your princes to take up arms to de
fend you — you, a wretched worm like you? I tell
you, No! and where will you be then — where will
you be then ? "
Luther answered, " Then, as now, in the hands of
Almighty God."

xxin
THE CHURCH'S APPEAL TO MEN
Come with us and we will do thee good. Leave us not,
I pray thee; forasmuch as thou knowest how we are to
encamp in the wilderness and thou mayest be to us instead
of eyes. — Numbebs x. 29-31.
At this point of the story of Israel, Moses and the
rescued tribes have begun their wanderings through
the desert. The future is full of difficulty and
danger, though it is bright with the confidence of
faith. Moses does not doubt but that the ultimate
issue must be great good for all associated with the
fortunes of Israel. He appeals to Hobab, so near
of kin to himself, to share in that great future, to
cast in his lot with them. " The Lord hath spoken
good concerning Israel." The blessing will rest on
all who belong to Israel. To share in the toil is to
share in the reward, and the reward is sure. There
is no hesitation in the offer to Hobab. It is plainly
for his own good that he should accept it. They are
journeying unto the place of which the Lord said, I
will give it you ; and there is not a shadow of doubt
256

CHURCH'S APPEAL TO MEN 257
in the words but that it shall be so. Moses has
Hobab's interests at heart when he asks him to ac
company them. This is so even if Hobab like Moses
himself should never enter the promised land; for
he will be in the channel of the promise, under the
blessing of God. For his own sake he ought to
come, " Come thou with us and we will do thee
good; for the Lord hath spoken good concerning
Israel." Hobab's reply was a refusal. Not perhaps because
he did not believe in the future of Israel, but simply
because he had other interests which seemed good
enough for him without any further addition. He
had his home and his country, and his own life to
which he was accustomed; and he did not care to
venture on a new enterprise. He did not specially
want the good that Moses promised ; he did not feel
any special need for further blessing. He was content
with his life as it was, and had sufficient interests
already. " I will not go ; but I will depart to mine
own land and to my kindred." The offer did not ap
peal to him. He did not see it to be anything very
special. The prospect did not appear so very promis
ing that he should sacrifice what he had of good. He
quite believed that Moses was considering his inter
ests when he invited him to join them ; but since he

258 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
did not feel great need of the promised good he re
fused. " I will not go."
But Moses had another plea, even after this dis
tinct refusal, a plea under the circumstances far
more powerful to such a man than the offer of per
sonal good. It was the plea not of Hobab's need of
Israel, but of Israel's need of Hobab. He knew the
country, knew all its dangers and resources: he was
a man of great influence and wisdom ; and cared for
Moses and presumably also for the great religious
interests at stake in Israel's future. To have him
with them would be a source of strength to all. And
so Moses' invitation took another form. He appealed
to Hobab's heart and not to his interests: he ap
pealed to their need of him, and no longer to any
thing of good that might come to himself. " Leave
us not, I pray thee ; forasmuch as thou knowest how
we are to encamp in the wilderness, and thou mayest
be to us instead of eyes." He could be their guide
and their guardian, and could be a help to them of
untold value. He might be as their very eyes. And
we are left to assume that this second appeal was
successful. This twofold argument is the appeal the Church
makes to men. It says with assurance, Come with us
and we will do thee good ; for the Lord hath spoken

CHURCH'S APPEAL TO MEN 259
good concerning Israel. It says this with emphasis :
it says it pleadingly. It has blessings, promises, and
powers, of which it is sure. It knows that men are
in need of what it possesses. It sees men living to
little purpose and for little ends. It sees the sin and
the sorrow. It has deep pity for the deep pathos of
human life. Its whole work is to do men good, as it
declares the gospel of the Kingdom, calling them to
pardon and peace, offering them salvation, present
ing to them the manifold riches of Christ, pointing to
the way of life and of joy. The heart of the true
Church yearns over men with a great longing, seeing
them to be, though they may know it not, wretched
and miserable and poor and blind and naked. It has
a message for you, which it is irreparable loss for you
to neglect. It offers you a great and eternal good.
Like Hobab you may think you do not specially
need it. You may be quite content with what you
have, and may refuse the Church's call because you
are concerned about other things which you think
enough for you. You have other interests which
you imagine are sufficient for life, other ties that
bind you to your present lot. You are not oppressed
with any sense of need, and treat cavalierly the offer
of good. You may even despise the deep anxiety
displayed by the Church on your behalf, and may

260 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
resent the interference. You are not consciously in
want. You are not, for example, overwhelmed by a
sense of sin, stained with the guilt of it or burdened
with the power of it — and so the offer of forgiveness
does not seem very much to you. Salvation seems too
far off, a promise of little practical meaning or value.
It is not that you deny, or very much doubt, but just
that you don't care. If you feel any of the attraction
of religion, the invitation is to you only as a very
lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice and can
play well on an instrument ; for you hear the words —
and that is all. You have never felt the all-control
ling power, nor seen the all-absorbing vision. You
have never been driven to your knees with empty
hands and a broken heart, blinded by the very glory
of God, and stricken by the shame of your own sin.
Or you have never tasted of failure and the dis
appointment of hope, and never realised your own
weakness, and so are still supported by a sense of
self-sufficiency. When the words are uttered in your
hearing, " Come with us and we will do thee good,"
you say, What good? It does not strike you as a
very attractive promise. In a kind of unthinking
way you probably admit some of the evident features
of religion, some of the good that lies on the surface ;
but you are not deeply enough moved by the promise

CHURCH'S APPEAL TO MEN 261
to take any novel step. You have your life as it is,
and that is good enough for you. Like Hobab you
say, " I will not go, but I will depart to mine own
land and to my kindred." The Church's first appeal
to you to come for your own sake, does not hold you.
The things of the soul do not specially interest you
and you have refused. In spite of your interest in
many things connected with religion, you have not
given yourself over to the cause, and bent to the
King's Highway of the Holy Cross.
But there is another strand in the cord with which
the Church would grapple you. There is another ap
peal which comes to you, and you cannot shut your
ears to it without feeling the sting of cowardly self-
contempt It is the same appeal as Moses made to
Hobab when the first failed. He said, Come, if not
for your own sake, come for our sake : if you do not
need us, we need you: we are to encamp in the wil
derness girt round with danger, and weighted with
heavy tasks, and you can be to us instead of eyes. If
you will not come because the Lord hath spoken
good concerning Israel, come to help us to achieve
that good. " Leave us not, and thou mayest be to us
as eyes."
It is a powerful argument to a high heart ; and the
Church's very existence — encamped in the wilder-

262 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
ness, fighting the great battle against principalities
and powers of evil, seeking, striving, suffering for
that Promised Land, for man's higher life on earth,
waiting for the consolation of Israel, giving itself to
the great task of establishing the Kingdom of
Heaven on earth — the Church's very existence is an
appeal to you. God had spoken good concerning
Israel whether Hobab came or stayed; but it was
much to have Hobab's help in the great enterprise,
much to have one who could be to them instead of
eyes. And the Kingdom of Heaven will come with
you or without you ; but just because it is a task high
and hard, you should be in the thick of it, taking your
part of the glorious burden. Though you might not
think of coming for your own sake, can you resist
this other appeal to come for our sake? Some will
vibrate to the heroic note, who will be deaf to the
sweetest music of invitation. The first appeal might
miss some, but is there any to whom the twin appeal
should be made in vain? There is a message not
merely to the weak, the consciously weak, but also to
the strong. The young who have not entered into
some of the deepest experiences of religion and who
are not yet conscious of need, are still not left out in
the appeal. " I have written unto you, young men,
because ye are strong."

CHURCH'S APPEAL TO MEN 263
You may be refusing the appeal of religion be
cause of a narrow and mistaken notion of what the
appeal is. It is not simply an appeal to what you
half think is the selfish side of your nature, to come
that you may receive good, to consider your own soul,
to concern yourself merely about your own personal
salvation. The Christian salvation is not just sal
vage, rescuing the flotsam and jetsam, the human
wreckage that strews the sea of life ; though it is the
glory of the faith and its divinest attribute that it
does save even the broken and battered lives of men.
But salvation includes and implies service also. It
is a summons to participate in a great work, to share
in a glorious venture. Hobab, who refused to go for
any possible good to himself, responded to the call
for service of others. And though you may not now
feel any deep sense of personal, need, what have you
to say to this claim upon your help ? Can you resist
the appeal to come to our aid, as we are encamped in
the wilderness, beset by peril in the pursuit of a great
enterprise ? Think of the Church's task in its widest
aspect — to claim the world for God, to let them that
sit in darkness see the great light, anointed like the
Church's Lord to preach the gospel to the poor, to
heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the
captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at

264 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
liberty them that are bruised. Think of the terrible
warfare to which it is committed — to subdue the
beast in man, to oppose evil in high places and in low
— a warfare that knows no truce, relentless, lifelong ;
and, as here in this corner of the field we are hard
bestead and appeal to you for reenforcement, will
you sit at ease and refuse the call ?
You do not feel now your need of Christ ; though
one day you will; you too will learn the emptiness of
life without spiritual communion; you too will be
forced to confess your weakness when heart and flesh
fail you; for you as for others there will lurk at
some dark corner of the road the inevitable surprise ;
when the floods go over your head you will cry out of
the depths like those who have tasted the desolation
of Life. But meanwhile the subject is not closed be
cause you think you have no need of Christ. What
have you to say to this other appeal — that Christ has
need of you ? Though you know nothing of the pas
sion of the saints, what about the service of the
saints? You are not sure about the supreme claims
over your life which Christ makes ; but have you no
opinion about the great purposes He seeks to ac
complish in the world, the high ends He seeks to
serve ? And as you see Him go to the world's re
demption, have you never thrilled to the tacit appeal

CHURCH'S APPEAL TO MEN 265
to come to the help of the Lord against the mighty ?
You who may be instead of eyes, can you hold back
ingloriously ?
The Son of God goes forth to war,
A kingly crown to gain;
His blood-red banner streams afar: —
Who follows in His train?
Even if Christ's venture for the world be a for
lorn hope ; even if the fair vision of the Kingdom of
Heaven on earth be but a beautiful dream; even if
the foe be too strong to be dislodged; aye, even if
there be no Promised Land at all (put it as an im
possible, an almost unthinkable hypothesis) ; even if
good could never conquer evil, and love triumph over
hate ; even then it would be the better part for you ;
it would still be the master-light of all your seeing;
and you could not escape the appeal Christ makes to
you to stand by His side. This is the heroic note the
Lord of the human heart strikes in your heart now ;
and it would be craven to refuse. "Whoso would
serve Me, let him follow Me."

XXIV
THE GIFT OF YOUTH
Let no man despise thy youth. — 1 Timothy iv. 12.
The Apostle is instructing Timothy in his behaviour
towards the people, how he is to teach and rule and
make full proof of his ministry. With the fine fibre
and sweet disposition of the young man there seems
to have been a constitutional timidity. Of loving and
trustful and gentle nature, he had as a defect of his
quality an undue distrust of his own judgment, and
was inclined to fall back on external authority. He
lacked somewhat confidence and courage and the ro-
buster virtues. The Apostle seems to have been
anxious lest he should be underrated, as men are apt
to underrate a man who lacks confidence. There is a
type of youth which is extravagantly assertive, with
the sublime conceit of ignorance ; but there is another
type as common, which is too subservient to the opin
ions of others, easily discouraged, easily laughed out
of opinions, or frightened out of principles, too diffi
dent to let it be thought that he has convictions and
266

THE GIFT OF YOUTH 267
principles from which he will not be moved. The
writer seemed to have in mind Timothy's special
temptation in this respect to timidity, and seeks to in
spire him with the necessary confidence and self-re
spect and the authority which his work needs and
should give. " Let no man despise thy youth."
It is a double-barrelled charge, to the people to re
spect him for his office, not to let any prejudice
hinder his influence, and not to depreciate his work
because of his youth ; and to himself also to give him
a touch of independence, to brace him up to his high
task, to make him assume the authority of truth and
command the respect of the people. But the way he
is to command this respect is not by insisting on the
authority of his office, not by arrogance of manner,
or any sort of self-assertion, but by making his in
fluence so true and potent that all will be compelled
to acknowledge his claims as a teacher. The author
ity which depends merely on an office, on a fact of
external position, on what we call " the cloth "
speaking of the clergy, is a very poor sort of author
ity at the best. It is moral influence to which the
Apostle here points. To gain and hold real respect
Timothy is to make himself an example. He is to
win his place of authority by his character, and faiths
and zeal, and determination, and good works. " Let

268 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
no man despise thy youth ; but be thou an ensample
to them that believe, in word, in manner of life, in
love, in faith, in purity." His Christian character
and Christian conduct are to impress themselves so
persuasively that men will forget the things that
might prejudice them against his message, will for
get that he is young.
It is not always easy for men to forget that an
other who assumes the right to teach, or who ad
vances anything original, or who is zealous over some
reform, is young. The words which Dr. Johnson
put into the mouth of Pitt as defending himself
against " the atrocious crime of being a young man,"
describe the situation for many another besides Pitt.
There is a common despising of youth, especially in
the region of opinion, as if wisdom could only be, and
must always be, on the side of experience. The de
spising may be done with a look which says plainly
" You are very young," as the supreme and clench
ing argument, or which says in the presence of en
thusiasm and fervid zeal, " When you are old you
will take things more calmly." That is too true, and
indeed it constitutes the great and magnificent qual
ity of youth that it can glow and blaze. It is a very
commonplace thought after all that when men are
old they will take things more calmly, meaning only

THE GIFT OF YOUTH 269
that the fires will have burned low. Cynicism is a
poor exchange for enthusiasm. There are many and
manifest temptations of youth, such as rashness, both
of judgment and of conduct, hotheadedness, passion,
unbalanced zeal, but these are all the extravagances
of what is its finest quality. The world needs the
strong hopefulness and buoyancy of youth, as well as
the large experience and cautious wisdom of age.
Youth is the motive power of the world, driving it to
new ends, and bringing to it new hopes.
Only the foolish despise youth: only the foolish
look down upon it and seek ever to cramp and stifle
it; though few even of the wise estimate aright the
glorious gift of youth. Poets and romancers sing the
praises of youth, but often only for its capacity of
joy, as a wonderful time of abounding energy and
fresh optimism, a time of joy and hope and strength.
Older men will sometimes envy youth because of this,
not for its opportunity, but for its capacity for en
joyment Even for that it is not to be despised. The
pleasures of health and strength, the first delight in
the world of nature; the pleasures of friendship,
meeting in the fresh glow of loyal feeling without
suspicion, without self-interest, without consider
ing motives, without thought of anything but sym
pathy, and kindness, and goodwill; the pleasures of

270 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
acquiring knowledge, of finding new intellectual in
terests ; the pleasures of beginning work, of entering
on a definite pursuit ; the pleasures of acknowledging
greatness in others, ungrudgingly admiring and lov
ing some without thought of jealousy or envy or
meanness — all these and others have surely been the
portion in some degree of all who remember their
youth. I put it that way retrospectively because we do
not recognise what a great gift youth is till we have
lost it, or at least till it has lost its first zest. It is on
looking back on it that we see how blessed it is or
might have been. When we are in it we cannot esti
mate its full value. Thus youth is inclined to look to
the future for its great moments, going on in
imagination to some distant time for the best things,
except in the season of absolute gaiety and lighthearted
happiness with the present. On looking back we see
what usually was forgotten, namely, not only the
great gift youth is, but also the great responsibility,
the wonderful opportunity of that wonderful time of
joy and hope. Thus, far worse than letting men de
spise thy youth is it to despise your own youth;
and that can be easily done by neglecting the oppor
tunities which make it the most solemn as well as the
gladdest time of life. What ways youth has of

THE GIFT OF YOUTH 271
despising itself and giving excuse for others to
despise it also ! To take this great gift thoughtlessly
and selfishly merely as a gift with no thought of it
as an opportunity, to accept the privilege with no
sense of responsibility, is really to despise it and to
make it also despicable. To look upon it merely as
a time of enjoyment and never as a time of prepara
tion, to take the springtime as a season of happiness
and never as a season of sowing — that is to throw
away the boon and despise it as worthless. No con
tempt of others can equal that self-contempt.
The first great temptation of youth is the reck
less prodigality of itself. In youth we look upon
health as measureless, and time as boundless, and
our opportunities as limitless. We do not look upon
life as a whole, the future of which will be con
ditioned by how we treat the present. Many a man
afterwards has to lament the waste of his powers,
and all his life long has to combat habits acquired
thoughtlessly, or has to toil terribly to make up for
lost time. What stores of enthusiasm and energy
and moral passion are lost to the world because youth
despises its best gifts, and squanders its powers in
gay unconcern. If we do not learn self-control and
industry and discipline of body and mind then, when
can we do it? The loss to the world's best life is

THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
terrible, to say nothing of the loss to ourselves who
might have been so different. It is right and natural
to look upon the dawn of life as a time of happiness,
to take youth as a blessed gift of joy and hope and
strength ; but to take it merely as an occasion for per
sonal pleasure is infamy, a wrong to the world as
well as an insult to God. Enjoyment may be the first
word about youth, but the last word is judgment;
and that should make it solemn as well as glad. " Re
joice, O young man, in thy youth ; and let thy heart
cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the
ways of thy heart and in the sight of thine eyes ; but
know that for all these things God will bring thee
into judgment." Let no man despise thy youth —
least of all, let no man, by self-indulgence, by weak
surrender to dominant impulse, make his own youth
despicable. There is a more subtle way still of youth despising
itself than the common, careless indifference, or the
reckless prodigality which are its besetting tempta
tions. It is by belittling its real greatness, by being
half - ashamed of its high thoughts and noble
passions and generous impulses. This self-pitying
shame comes when the spirit of the world is allowed
to play on us undisturbed. That spirit suggests that
enthusiasm, and ardour, and high ideals are rather

THE GIFT OF YOUTH
laughable things, at which every sensible man of the
world smiles. These splendid visions are imprac
ticable, the fruit of ignorance. When we are older
we will know better and will accommodate ourselves
to the hard facts of life. Older people often despise
their youth by sneering at their past earnestness, and
rather pride themselves on having at last learned pru
dence and worldly interest, on knowing on what side
their bread is buttered, and generally on being at
last comfortably down on the common level in prac
tice and custom and ways of thinking. What pitiful
apostasies there have been! The fires are damped
down pretty low, when a man despises himself for
once having seen the vision and once followed the
gleam, when a man despises the time when his heart
flamed at some great injustice, or his eye kindled
with some great hope, or his life was given to some
great service, and his soul trembled to the touch of
the adorable Christ who gave it the vision splendid.
Would the world and the Church be as they are to
day if there had been no apostates, no Judas to sell
the Master for pieces of silver ?
We bless God for the old men who dream dreams,
who once as young men saw visions, for those who
have kept their youth, evergreen in faith, and hope,
and love. Listen to them, and not to the blase world-

274 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
ling whose heart is eaten out and whose dull eyes can
not see the shining of the glory. Believe in the ideal,
for in that lies the hope of the world. Follow the
gleam, as such an one when he was old sang it out to
cheer and encourage his younger brethren to keep
their visions and be faithful to their ideals —
There on the border
Of boundless ocean
And all but in Heaven
Hovers the gleam.
Not of the sunlight,
Not of the moonlight,
Not of the starlight!
O young mariner,
Down to the haven.
Call your companions,
Launch your vessel,
And crowd your canvas.
And ere it vanishes
Over the margin,
After it, follow it,
Follow the gleam.
The world and the Church look to the young for
the visions that keep us from sordid acquiescence in
the commonplace and the accepted. It is an irrep
arable loss to both when these visions fail, when
youth becomes prosaic and unaspiring, when the ideal
loses its currency among us, when the young cease
to picture the perfect state both for self and for

THE GIFT OF YOUTH 275
society. It always means a relaxing of the vital hold
of religion over the community. It is the dying out
of faith in God. One of the main functions of re
ligion is to keep before us the ideal; and the young
who see visions are a natural channel of its working.
Despise not your youth in this its best aspect. Keep
your visions : nurse them : correct them by the mind
of Christ. As He knocks at the door of your heart,
offering you not merely a state of blessedness, but a
career of service, open to Him willingly. He will
inspire passion in you, and will regulate it ; and will
set you to your work in the world for Him and for
the brethren. He will give you a vocation which will
fill your life, and will save it from gross temptations
and redeem it from many evils. The heart that has
seen the vision will never be satisfied with lower
loves. The hand that has felt the touch of His
finger will not move to evil ends. Bend to Him,
responsive to His love, eager for His great service;
and even when you become old you will dream dreams
of beauty and peace ; and you, young men, will see
visions of purity and joy, and noble life that will
change the world. Let no man despise the youth
which has in it such powers and potencies.

xxv
THE IMMORTALITY OF MEMORY
The memory of the just is blessed: but the name of the
wicked shall rot. — Fbovebbs x. 7.
In the varied strands that make up human motive
this one is not the least powerful. It is a common and
a natural desire of men to leave a good name behind
them. It is a pain to think of anything hereafter
smirching their fair reputation when they can no
longer speak for themselves. And at the last it has
been a comfort to many a man to think that he has
left his name untarnished, with no disgrace attached
to it. When we think of it, it seems a strange thing
that men should be so concerned about posthumous
reputation. It seems due to an instinctive faith in
immortality, a stubborn belief in the persistence of
personality. It is more than an extension of the or
dinary human foible to be thought well of by friends
and neighbours. It is a kind of feeling that what a
man is and was and did goes with him past the gates
of death, that there is no real break in the continuity
of his life, and his character on earth remains as the
276

IMMORTALITY OF MEMORY 277
great asset with which he stands at the bar of the
great future. In any case this desire to leave an
honourable memory and an unblemished reputation
influences all men who think of the future at all.
On the whole it is a noble motive, and has helped
among other nobler motives to produce many a heroic
life. Perhaps in all of us it has had some moral
effect if only as a deterrent
It is also part of the same motive which induces the
strong desire for •posthumous fame. We see this
often displayed in the lives of artists and literary
men and statesmen. The ordinary man in all these
branches is as a rule content if he can gain some
hold on his own generation; but the greatest men
have always an ideal audience and an ideal con
stituency to which they appeal. It is the judgment
of posterity, which is supposed to be calmer and more
dispassioned, with the coarser ingredients filtered out
through the years. The poet or artist who is sure of
himself and of his art is thus not too much disturbed
by contemporary neglect, or when mediocrity makes
its clamorous bid for popular favour. He appeals
from Philip drunk to Philip sober ; he appeals from
present prejudice to a wider and calmer tribunal.
Even in practical life a man has often been sup
ported by the thought that though at present mis-

278 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
understood and looked askance at, he will in later
times have credit for good motives and upright ac*
tion. And sometimes when a man is conscious that
he has soiled his reputation by some weakness he
thinks that in a complete review of all he has at
tempted and achieved he will be more tenderly
judged, or at least his best work will be rightly
valued in spite of his faults. There is a pathetic
sentence in Lord Bacon's will which suggests this,
" For my name and memory I leave it to men's
charitable speeches, to foreign nations, and to the
next ages." Bacon knew well that he had ruined his
reputation as a public man and needed the charitable
judgment of his contemporaries, but he also felt that
his great work done for human learning would re
ceive its meed of honour, especially when the circum
stances of his fall did not loom so large in men's
minds, " in foreign nations and the next ages." The
desire for posthumous fame or at least to leave an
honourable memory to all whom it concerns is thus
a very strong motive and a legitimate one in moral
action. In moments of doubt we may say, What does it
matter what men think of us when we are off the
scene ? or in moments of cynicism we may say that
none of us is much missed, and few if any will remem-

IMMORTALITY OF MEMORY 279
ber us long, and the kind of memory we bequeath is
of little account; but these are only fleeting moods,
and the original motive comes back in all its force.
Hamlet's cynical remark was forced from him by his
own keen memory of his father, " O heavens ! die
two months ago and not forgotten yet ? Then there's
hope a great man's memory may outlive his life half
a year," though he thinks he must build churches
even to attain that immortality ; but it was Hamlet's
own regard for his father's reputation and his own
loving memory of his father which made him cynical.
We know that we will be remembered by some, and
that the kind of memory they have of us will mean
much to them, and so it means much to us.
We know, too, that the things that really count in
that memory are the things of character. In our
final judgment of men the principle of judgment is
that of our text, " The memory of the just is blessed ;
but the name of the wicked shall rot." It is the
statement of a fact that the ultimate standard of
judgment among men is a moral one. Death clears
off all adventitious and accidental details, clarifies
vision, and shows us the essential things in a man's
life. When our judgment" is so purified by the fact
of death our standard becomes not capacity but char
acter. We find ourselves classifying according to

280 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
the old division of good and evil. Reputation in the
general estimate of the world takes on a moral col
ouring. Instinctively we feel that that is the only
thing that really counts. Other things drop off and
pass out of sight. We begin to look at things from
the standpoint of eternity, with something of the
eyes of God. Things take a different perspective.
Some of the things that counted most fall into the
background and the simple qualities of moral char
acter stand in their natural precedence. The memory
of a good man is blessed ; the memory of a bad man
is infamy. This is a true rule of history and experi
ence, though we may think we can point to some ex
ceptions ; and there are against the rule the classical
lines which Shakespeare makes Antony say of
Julius Cassar, The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.
Shakespeare puts the words into the mouth of a
schemer, a man who is playing on the passions of the
crowd. On the whole the opposite of Antony'3
words is true, the good of a man's life does not die,
and certainly it is only for the good in it that we
ever bless him.
The promise of our text is that men will remember

IMMORTALITY OF MEMORY 281
a good man and find in the memory a softening, sweet
ening, inspiring influence. The memory of the just is
blessed — it makes men bless the memory with proud
grateful recollection — and the memory blesses those
who remember, makes them rise to a higher level of
aspiration and endeavour. There is a true im
mortality of memory, not the external sort in which
a name reverberates through the ages held in rever
ence and recollection by men on earth for ever — that
sort of immortality is impossible to many, if indeed to
any at all in any complete sense. The renown of the
greatest poet or artist or statesman or warrior is but a
shadowy thing at the best, to most only a name signi
fying nothing. New immortals take their place and
also pass away to the shadowy realm. The pale
ghosts elbow each other out ; and life goes on serenely
with its own joys and sorrows and hopes and needs.
There is no immortality of fame. Here and there a
student revives a reputation for a dead author, or
statesman, or king; but there are ever new candi
dates for the seats of the immortals, new brows for
the laurel wreaths, new hands for the sceptre of
power. There is not even any sure principle by
which the remembered names are chosen: one is re
membered for good and another for evil, one for his
wisdom and another for his folly. " The iniquity of

282 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy," says Sir
Thomas Browne in his quaint and learned Urn
Burial, " and deals with the memory of men without
distinction to merit of perpetuity. Herostratus lives
that burnt the temple of Diana, he is almost lost
that built it. Time hath spared the epitaph of
Adrian's horse, confounded that of himself. In vain
we compute our felicities by the advantage of our
good names, since bad have equal durations, and
Thersites is like to live as long as Agamemnon.
Who knows whether the best of men be known, or
whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot
than any that stand remembered in the known ac
count of time ? " It is a bloodless dream after all to
think of handing down one's name to countless gene
rations of men. Cowley's lines have stirred the blood
in many an ambitious youth,
What can I do to be for ever known,
And make the age to come my own?
But if there be nothing but this hopeless and
shadowy immortality of memory to look to, then the
cynical words of Ecclesiastes are true, " A living dog
is better than a dead lion; for the living know that
they shall die; but the dead know not anything,
neither have they any more a reward ; for the memory
of them is forgotten."

IMMORTALITY OF MEMORY
But even in this region of memory, though there
is no real immortality of fame, there is a real im
mortality of influence. Here again we are brought
back to the fact that the ultimate standard of judg
ment is a moral one, that both the good and the evil
men do live after them, the good for a blessing to all
the world, the evil for a curse. The true and only
permanent contribution men can make to the world
is that they have advanced the cause of the highest ;
and the one condemnation is if they have hindered
that cause. When a life is resolved to its elements,
these elements are moral in the widest sense ; and the
life comes absolutely within the scope of the great
principle of our text that " the memory of the just is
blessed, but the name of the wicked is a curse."
This is the mystical communion of the saints, a very
real thing in the Church's faith, even although few
of the saints be known by name. They minister to
the life of the Church, and are still, even as they
were, the very salt of the earth.
We can get an easy point of contact with this
great thought by thinking of the saints we ourselves
have known and perhaps loved and lost. We realise
the truth of the benediction of our text ; for we have
happy memories of some blessed dead who lived up
rightly in God's faith and fear. They have entered

284 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
into an immortality of memory within us and of
moral influence that can have no end while the world
lasts. Thus the memory of the just is an inspiration
as well as a happiness. It is a real aid to faith, per
haps the best aid we have ever had or can have ; for
religion is life not creed, and only life can beget life.
They of blessed memory help us; for they make it
easy for us to believe in goodness and God and
eternal life and heaven. They are even our last
strand in the evidence for personal immortality; for
we cannot believe that all that power of loving and all
that wealth of grace and all that beauty of character
have ceased. He lives a poor attenuated life who has
never thrilled to the mystic union, who does not
know that There are two societies alone on earth;
The noble living and the noble dead.
And sometimes even we see that they are not two but
one great society, the one irrefragable bond of souls,
the one Communion of the saints. The memory of
the just is blessed, a blessing to us more than we can
put into words, not only in stimulating us to emula
tion, not only exciting us and guiding us to all good,
but also establishing us in faith in good and faith that
we too have the same great vocation, to which we are
called to walk worthy.

IMMORTALIT'Y OF MEMORY 285
Many churches do not keep the so-called Saints'
Days, having some well-grounded fears of the super
stition and false worship to which such celebrations
tend to minister ; but there is one day in the Chris
tian year we might well keep, and that is All Saints'
Day, when we reverently think of the blessed mem
ory of the just, when we celebrate the triumphs of
faith and trophies of grace, and remember the
glorious company of the Apostles, the goodly fellow
ship of the prophets, the noble army of martyrs, the
holy Church throughout all the world, the whole
family in heaven and earth, named after the
name of Jesus, all the endeavours after pure faith
and holy living of the humble and true-hearted fol
lowers of Christ. It would not be just an empty cele
bration, doing idle homage to the great lives of de
parted saints. It might be a mighty inspiration for
more heroism of faith and life. There is inspiration
in the thought that we are not alone in our fitful en
deavours, but that we come in a great succession and
are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses. It
is a source of strength to know that we are not ex
ceptional in our struggle, or sorrow, or joy ; that we,
if we are faithful, are treading where the saints
have trod ; that we belong to the ageless Church, and
take our place among those who have fought the

286 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
good fight and witnessed the good confession, in
spired by the blessed memory of the just. With all
our petty divisions and small distinctions, it is some
thing to realise the unity of the spirit, and be held in
the bonds of peace and love.
And what higher ambition can there be for us than
to be counted also among those whose memory smells
sweet, who have helped not hindered the world in its
steep ascent to God ? What nobler part to play than
be a link, however humble, in that golden chain of
testimony which binds the ages together? We all
know in some form the truth of the other proverb,
" A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children's
children." That is true even in a worldly sense, but
the inheritance of good is not confined to such nat
ural descent. It is part of the life of everything
that lives. It is part of the light that lighteth every
man that cometh into the world. All personal am
bitions dwindle before the majesty of this desire to
partake of the true posthumous fame, the true im
mortality of memory, to partake of the very influence
of Christ, and be blessed with the memory of the
just " Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord
from henceforth : yea, saith the Spirit, that they may
rest from their labours; and their works do follow
them."

XXVI
PAST AND PRESENT
Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were
better than these? for thou dost not inquire wisely concerning
this. — Ecclesiastes vii. 10.
The actual connection of these words of our text is
quite in keeping with the tone and temper of the
writer of this Book. He does not mean, at least as
the chief purpose of this rebuke, to glorify the pres
ent with its opportunities and possibilities at the ex
pense of the past It would hardly be in accordance
with the prevailing pessimism of the writer to strike
here a hopeful and inspiring note. He is sick with
life, and out of tune with the airy hopes of youth and
its golden dream that the world is a fairer, sweeter
place than it was in bygone days. We would not ex
pect this bright, cheerful philosophy from the man
whose verdict on all earthly things is Vanity of vani
ties ; and we do not get it. The whole trend of his
teaching is that life is illusive, and a man should not
build his hopes too high, and look for permanence
in any source of joy. Rather he advises moderation,
287

THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
to take things calmly, and make the most of life. To
be over-sanguine is to court disappointment: to be
over-righteous is to destroy happiness : to be over-evil
is to be broken by inexorable law. Moderation is the
great secret.
So here, he deprecates anger, and hastiness of
spirit. It is foolish to be angry, and patience is bet
ter than pride. Seneca said, " Anger is like rain :
it breaks itself on what it falls." All worldly wis
dom preaches this, whatever it practises. You don't
do any good and you only hurt yourself by losing your
temper and getting over-excited about anything. It
is a mark of folly to be hasty of spirit : " Anger
resteth in the bosom of fools." Even to be angry
about symptoms of the present and by comparison
magnify the past, and ask petulantly, what is the
cause that the former days were better than these ?
the wise man will not do that. " Thou dost not in
quire wisely concerning this." The wise man of this
creed takes things as they are, and does not fret him
self with repining about good times gone, and with
discontent about the present, and gloomy views about
the future. He makes the most of what cannot be
helped. He cultivates a cheerful pleasant tempera
ment. Not that he deceives himself with Utopian
dreams that the world is improving and will soon be

PAST AND PRESENT 289
a paradise — he only just wants peace to enjoy what
good there is, and won't let the present be lost by a
barren worship of the past. The truth of this atti
tude (what truth there is in it) , and the danger of it,
are both too obvious for us to spend time enlarging on
them. But we can see how, from this standpoint of
somewhat cynical worldly-wisdom, the writer should
exclaim, " Say not thou, What is the cause that the
former days were better than these ? "
In any case, for higher and larger reasons than
the writer's, the advice is good, and is applicable to
us ; for it touches on a temptation which robs life of
its full power. It is a common infirmity of old age,
but it is not confined to age, to disparage the present
and to glorify the past. Especially in times of trial
this is so : when the present is a wail it is natural to
think that the past was a hallelujah. In reviewing
times that are gone memory has a hallowing, soften
ing power. It is a merciful provision of our nature
which makes us forget the pains and sorrows of the
past, and when we do remember them sets them in a
soft and tender light, letting us see some of the good
which has come from them. And as the sorrows of
the past seem diminished by distance, by a strange
reversion the joys loom larger and finer. To a re
flective mind the pleasures of memory are sweeter

290 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
than the pleasures of possession, or even the pleas
ures of anticipation. Of course it is largely a matter
of temperament, but this must be the experience of
many. In looking back on a journey we forget the
many discomforts and little annoyances which marred
perfect pleasure, or if we remember them it is to
laugh at them and see the humorous side they had;
and fond memory glorifies the great sights enjoyed.
I am quite sure that the Matterhorn was not to me as
grand, or Florence as fair, as I now picture them;
and am content to have it so. With the journey of
our life the same is true. We paint our pictures with
what perspective we please, and put ungainly things
far in the background, or leave them out altogether.
We look at the sorrows of the past through an in
verted telescope which sends them further away and
diminishes their size: we look at the joys through
the magnifying end.
And this tendency seen in our everyday life is also
reflected on a larger scale in history. All old institu
tions gain allies for their continued existence in
sentiment, and respect for what has displayed the
quality of permanence. We judge of the past by
what has come down to us of the past; and make
unfavourable comparison of the present with it. We
imagine all ancient architecture to be as the relics

PAST AND PRESENT 291
that survive in magnificent cathedrals and abbeys
and castles. We think of them all as belonging to
the same period; and in our comparisons contrast
the present point of time practically with all time.
We forget among other things the greatly extended
sphere for human activity now; and we forget that
with the treasures of the past which we possess time
has weeded out much that was inferior. In art and
literature, as well as in architecture, the same unfair
comparison is unconsciously made between what is
produced now and what has been produced through
out all the ages. We ask almost indignantly where
we have a philosopher like Aristotle, a poet like
Homer, a dramatist like Shakespeare, a scientist like
Newton, an artist like Raphael, a sculptor like
Michael Angelo; forgetting that you can hardly get
another from all history to make a pair with any one
of these. To be quite just, before you can say that
the former times were better than these, you must
fix on one particular time, and you must take the
whole of it, every branch of knowledge, every sphere
of activity, every condition of life ; and then, if you
can, you must draw your completed contrast.
If by the former time you mean some earlier
period of your own life, are you taking into account
all the facts, and not allowing prejudice or the nar-

292 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
rowing vision of age to make your judgment
jaundiced ? It is a natural bias of the mind as we
have seen, and in many respects a very beautiful
thing, to glorify the past. The danger of it comes in
when it makes light of the present, and destroys the
healthful faith that would save the present from
despair. When a lady complained to Mr. E. J. Mil-
liken, long one of the most brilliant of the staff of
Punch — as people have ever complained since the
first number I suppose — that Punch is not so good as
it used to be ; " No," assented Milliken, " it never
was." To be a praiser of the past is often not only
a harmless thing, but even it may be a great in
spiration to high endeavour ; for a nation for example
to keep in mind some heroic period of their history
when great deeds were done and great ideals pre
vailed; for poor, broken, oppressed Italy of Gari
baldi's day to dream of Rome and her great Empire,
for the Swiss to remember their stern struggles for
freedom, for England to point back to the days of
good Queen Bess when the Spaniard was beaten back,
and the bounds of knowledge were widened. All
this is good if it be used as an inspiration to fire gen
erous ardour. But we must not let the past sit on us
like an old man of the sea, choking us and fettering
our movements. It is for this stupid purpose that the

PAST AND PRESENT
past is generally used by the ordinary laudator
temporis acti. The underlying idea is anything that
now can be done must be feeble and not worth
doing. Such an idea kills effort and robs life of dig
nity. It paralyses the present and mutilates the
future. In this sense it is a word apt and oppor
tune, " Say not, the former days were better than
these." On the one hand we have ever with us the man
whose attitude to life is summed up in the dictum,
Whatever is is right, who opposes change of all sorts,
and is quite content with the actual state of affairs.
On the other hand some adopt the opposite, and
equally false, statement as a motto, Whatever is is
wrong. Strange though it may appear, the two posi
tions may be the fruit of the selfsame spirit, and
have their origin in the same point of view. In their
essence they have both their cause in want of faith.
The man who is content with the present does not see
that it exists to be carried forward into a nobler
future ; and the man who disparages the present and
glorifies the past does not see that the very same
causes are at work, that the present is really the out
come and fruition of the past which he praises, and
if he be right the poverty of the present stultifies the
past he loves. And both attitudes, that of the un-

294 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
reasoning conservative who will not look forward,
and that of the sentimental medisevalist who will
only look back, deprive us of the hope and vigour to
make our days true and noble. Things cannot be let
alone. They will change in any case, and by them
selves will change for the worse. Time changes
things with your will or in spite of it. Things be
come the worse for wear ; and no achievements of the
past can take from us the task of to-day. " Time is
the great innovator," says Bacon, " and if time of
course alter things to the worse, and wisdom and
counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall
be the end ? " It is a pertinent question to put to
those who would tie our hands by senile idolatry of
the past, or make us mark time in puerile com
placency with the present.
In the days when men were fonder of abstract
discussions than they are now, there used to be a great
controversy among philosophers and theologians as
to whether it was true to speak of the perfectibility
or the corruptibility of human nature. In the one
case it was held that the race tended towards
progress, a stately and regular march of mind : in the
other case that the race tended to settle and sink. I
would hold a brief for neither. Neither is true, and
both may be true. It all depends on the forces that

PAST AND PRESENT 295
are brought to bear on life. Life is ductible, elastic,
and takes shape according to the forces that act on it.
To have the manly, hopeful attitude that I would
commend to you instead of the despairing one of our
text, we do not need to believe in the perfectibility
of the race: we only need to believe in its un
provability under the right conditions. It does not
mean the cheap optimism, the easy-going faith that
things must go on somehow all right, that all is for
the best, and every change is progress. When we
know the facts of history and the facts of life we are
kept from braggart comparisons between ourselves
and our fathers. We see cycles of degeneracy,
periods of barrenness, times when good seems van
ished out of the earth. We see that there is no innate
principle in the world raising it ever higher without
effort or hindrance. We see that progress has to be
bought by blood. We see that every gain of the past
has to be acquired at great price, and has to be kept
at the point of the sword. The shallow rose-coloured
views about perfectibility, so common in the writers
at the period of the French Revolution, are false,
even though to-day these views are expressed in
scientific dress, under names like evolution and such
like. It does not follow that our days are better than
former days. Say not that. Thou dost not speak

296 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
wisely concerning this. You must show that it is so
by larger thought and grander build of character and
nobler life.
But our days are better than former days in this,
that we have greater opportunities, to us have come
the wisdom of the ancients, the ripe fruit of experi
ence, advantages of knowledge, wider outlets for
every gift. All this will be none avail if we lose
faith. We cannot lose faith in God, and keep faith
in ourselves and our future. Without faith we have
no sure guarantee that will make effort purposeful,
and we will sigh for a mythical golden age lying be
hind us as a race. The golden age is before us if
God leads us on. We prepare for the coming of His
Kingdom when we make His will ours, and serve
His ends, in which are bound up the true end of
man. With such faith we need not look back upon
former days longingly, upheld in our own day by the
thought of God's presence. We face our own task,
and take up our own burden with hope and self-re
spect. Said Moliere, " The ancients are the ancients ;
and we are the people of to-day." We need a manly
faith in our own destiny, the faith that God has a
place and a purpose for us — even us the people of
to-day, as He had for the ancients.
Christ is to us the pledge of that, and the promise

PAST AND PRESENT 297
of it In the faith of Him we take large views in
space and in time.
Say not the struggle nought availeth,
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward look, the land is bright.

xxvn
THE PRINCIPLE OF JUDGMENT
/ will bring evil upon this people, even the fruit of their
thoughts. — Jebemiah vi. 19.
To the prophets punishment was never a mere
misfortune, an adventitious thing that came to some
and missed others as by chance, some hard lot that
befell a certain number who did not have the luck
to escape, as falling stones strike individuals of a
crowd by haphazard. It had an essential relation to
life, the result of cause and effect as universal as
physical law. It was not fortune ; it was fate. Not
fate in the sense of a blind, resistless, remorseless
force ; but the result of purpose, reason, law. They
traced everything past the external appearance to
the inward moral source, which alone gives consist
ence and true meaning to human life. They, no
more than modern science, could conceive of any
thing as causeless. But they were not content to
find out secondary causes and rest there. They saw
the will of God as the inspiring force of nature, the
298

PRINCIPLE OF JUDGMENT 299
hand of God shaping history, the law of God ruling
all life.
Jeremiah pronounces judgment in the name of
God, and points to outraged law, to wicked deeds,
to disregard of the moral conditions which alone
make life possible. He speaks with certitude as of
a man who sees into the sources of things and will
not abate his warning because the appearance at the
time seems to give the lie to his fears. The rulers
of the people took roseate views of the situation, and
said, " Peace, peace," deceiving their own hearts and
the hearts of others with pleasant dreams that all
was well, and lulled themselves into a sense of secu
rity. Jeremiah saw that there could be no peace on
such conditions. It was a frivolous age, when men
thought to silence the thunder by shutting their
ears ; and when God's watchmen said, " Hearken to
the sound of the trumpet," the trumpet that pre
sages doom, they said, " We will not hearken." To
people in such a frivolous mood punishment when
it came would be looked on as calamity: they would
think themselves the sport of cruel fortune. Where
the prophet saw law, they would only see chance:
where the prophet saw cause, they would only see
accident. So, he strives to enlighten them and con
vince them that God's judgment was based on prin-

300 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
ciple, the harvest of the seed sown. " Hear, O
heaven: behold I will bring evil upon this people,
even the fruit of their thoughts."
This inevitable consequence of cause and effect is
the basis of all prophetic writing, and rewards and
punishments are regarded as the product of the ac
tual state of moral life. From the outside stand
point judgment is the result of conduct: from the
inner standpoint it is the result of character. Con
duct is character unfolding itself; and character is
the way a man thinks. From the one standpoint
judgment is the fruit of men's deeds ; from the other
it is the fruit of their thoughts. Isaiah puts the
same message thus : — " Say ye to the righteous, that
it shall be well with him : for they shall eat the fruit
of their doings. Woe unto the wicked! it shall be
ill with him: for the reward of his hands shall be
given him." Jeremiah's statement is the same, only
carried a little deeper to its source. Our destiny is
the fruit of our doings and the reward of our hands ;
and our doing is the fruit of our thoughts. The
common feature of both messages is that judgment
is not something superimposed on life, a sentence
arbitrarily passed on a man. Punishment is not
retribution exacted from a man by a superior power
outside him; it is the necessary and inevitable con-

PRINCIPLE OF JUDGMENT 301
sequence flowing from the condition. You see what
a keen and deep diagnosis the prophet makes when
he defines the impending national punishment as the
fruit of their thoughts.
It is the fashion to speak of thoughts as of little
importance in the review of a life. The opinions a
man has, the creed he holds, the way he looks at
things, the colour and bent of his mind, these are
supposed to count for very little in determining re
ligious value. Morality is made the standard of re
ligion ; and morality is taken to be the things a man
does, and the things he refrains from doing. That
is a very outside and wooden way of defining moral
ity. The spiritual test of an act is its motive. There
may be right acts with wrong motives : there may be
even wrong acts with right motives. Robert Burns
was a much better theologian and a better moralist,
when he said, The heart's aye,
The part aye,
That mak's us right or wrang.
Legality is not always equity for the simple rea
son that except in special cases it is not possible to
make sure of motives, and so the law has to content
itself with acts. But we know from experience how
the best-intentioned man will sometimes blunder into

302 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
.mistakes; and we also know that many an irre
proachable deed may be damned by the cunning or
deceit or crooked purpose at the bottom of it.
Christ's teaching was full of this inwardness of
aspect. As opposed to the formalists, who had buried
the spirit under a mass of outward observances and
made the law of none effect by their traditions, He
showed that men were judged by the attitude of
their hearts. It was held that if a man did not kill
he was guiltless of breaking the commandment: but
the Master taught that if hate was harboured in the
mind the sin of murder was committed. With im
peccable and respectable conduct, He showed that
there could be adultery committed in the heart.
Sinful deeds there were in plenty, but the root of
the sin lay in the corrupted will, the depraved heart,
the evil thought. Defilement did not mean the
omission to perform any of the idle ceremonies, of
which the Pharisees made so much : but out of a de
filed heart came the things that defiled the man. We
judge by the eye, by our common rough-and-ready
standards, and from our limitations it cannot be oth
erwise to some extent ; but God's judgment is not so
limited. It is the fruit of our thoughts.
Again, it must be remembered that in the long
run as we think so will we act. Thoughts issue in

PRINCIPLE OF JUDGMENT 303
speech and in deeds. The whole stream of life is
coloured by the colour of the source. The bent of a
man's mind is the bent of his life. The way he looks
at God and the world and life must determine his
every act. Our Lord's statement is a general state
ment of fact, that " a good man out of the good treas
ure of the heart bringeth forth good things; and
an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth
evil things." There never was a more absurd and
inept idea than the common one that it does not
matter much what a man thinks and believes. By
comparison nothing else matters. It is true that a
man may hold certain opinions and speculations in a
loose fashion without these affecting his life ; but that
is because these opinions are not his true creed.
They are really outside his mind. If they entered
into the fibre and tissue of his thinking they would
represent the exact man. We speak of convictions
when we only mean vague impressions : we speak of
creed when we only mean surface views taken on
trust floating lightly on what we call our minds. But
below the stream of what we show to the world there
flows strong and deep the current of what we really
think and believe: and that is the measure of the
man. For example, it is the accepted cant of the day that

304 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
a man can hold any views he likes about God and
human life (or for that part no views at all) with
out making much difference. It is the most imbecile
of all popular fallacies. The character of your God
will be your own character. What you really believe
about the government of the world regulates your
whole conduct. Will it make no difference whether
you think life to be a medley of chance, or the or
dered march of wise and loving purpose? Will it
make no difference whether you look upon the su
preme ruler of the universe as blind to moral issues,
or as an unjust judge, or as a hard man who gathers
where he hath not strawed, or as just and holy and
merciful ? Will it make no difference whether He is
to you the Despot of heaven or the Heavenly Father ?
That is if you really believe ? Instead of creed be
ing of no importance, it is all-important: instead of
your thoughts not counting, nothing else counts. As
a man thinketh in his heart so is he — that, no more
and no less. Your life is the fruit of your thoughts.
We are tempted to miss the inwardness of life and
religion, and so have shallow views of sin and pun
ishment and redemption. Sin is not merely mis
take, the neglect to observe certain rules. It is a
spiritual thing, and its roots go deep, past flesh and
blood down to the very fountain of life. Sin is the

PRINCIPLE OF JUDGMENT 305
mother of sins; and that is why redemption cannot
come by any process of pruning and cutting. Sin is
the foul creature from which springs the hateful
brood which we call sins ; and her nest is in the heart
So repentance is made the gate to life because it
touches the source. It means a sorrow that turns
the heart from its old loves and lusts, and gives the
life a new direction. It means a change of route and
thus a change of destination. It means the bringing
forth of new fruit, the fruit of our new thoughts.
When will we learn, therefore, that judgment is not
arbitrary or incidental or capricious ? It is self -reg
istering, automatic, the harvest of our life. Conduct
we have seen is the outgrowth of character; and char
acter conditions destiny. To this people — to all peo
ple God brings the fruit of their thoughts. It is
your reward or your punishment; your heaven or
your hell. No change of lot, no alteration of outward
condition, can make essential difference. " What
matter where," asks Milton's Satan, "if I be still
the same ? "
The wages of being good is not some recompense
added on like a perquisite to a salary. Its highest
wages is goodness itself. The recompense of being
holy is holiness : the reward of being pure is purity.
The punishment of sin is itself, its own loathly;

306 THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
deathly self. The harvest of the flesh is itself, cor
ruption. The penalty of a depraved mind is deprav
ity. The retribution of an impure heart is impurity.
Who will deliver you from the body of that death?
" I will bring upon this people the fruit of their
thoughts." Well might the Proverb say with wist
ful solemnity, " My son, keep thine heart with all
diligence ; for out of it are the issues of life."
Who is sufficient for these things ? Who can guard
his thoughts and keep a watch, a sleepless watch at
the citadel of life ? There is no safety for a man
except by giving up his heart to the keeping of a
stronger than himself, submitting his thoughts to
the very thought of God, yielding his will to be con
formed to the will of God, making surrender of his
whole being till he is truly God-possessed, bringing
into captivity every thought to the obedience of
Christ. It is a process, including the whole work,
the life-long work of sanctification ; but it begins as
an act of will, an act of faith, opening the door of the
heart to the gracious Master who stands knocking for
entrance. Where He has possession there is no room
for any kind of evil. It cannot live in His presence.
Evil lives with us because we have not made full sur
render of ourselves to Him. We know in fragmen
tary form how it is possible for one man to dominate

PRINCIPLE OF JUDGMENT 307
another by his personality, till the other thinks his
thought, speaks his words, performs his will. So,
it is possible to willingly let Christ dominate our
every power that the same mind as was in Him is in
us, His very way of looking at things is our way,
His life is our life. That is the Christian ideal and
the Christian task to have Christ formed in us. If
He were, could there be for us a fearful looking
forward to of judgment? If His pure thoughts
were our thoughts, could we ever be afraid to see the
fruit of our thoughts ?

THE QUINN * BODEN CO. PRESS, RABWAY, N. J.

YALE UNIVERSITY

.a39002

.:>¦ - r-p;