¦ YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY THE LIBRARY OF THE DIVINITY SCHOOL THE WAY OF UNDERSTANDING BY THE SAME AUTHOR THE NEW EVANGEL JESUS: SEVEN QUESTIONS JESUS OB CHRIST ? PROBLEMS OF IMMANENCE WHAT IS THE BIBLE! James Clarke & Co. THE WAY OF UNDERSTANDING AND OTHER STUDIES IN THE BOOK OF PROVERBS J. WARSCHAUER, M.A., D.Phil. THE MAN THAT WANDERETH OUT OF THE WAY OF UNDERSTANDING SHALL REST IN THE CONGREGATION OF THE DEAD. — PrOV. Xxi. 15 BOSTON THE PILGRIM PRESS LONDON JAMES CLARKE & CO., 13 & 14 FLEET STREET 1913 Rev. J. BRIERLEY, B.A., THE WISE AND GRACIOUS TEACHER, THE "SPECULATOR IN LIFE'S HIGHEST VALUES," AS A SMALL TOKEN OF GRATITUDE AND ADMIRATION " Deines Geisies Hab' ich einen Hauck verspitrV Uhland. PREFACE The sermons composing this volume were preached on successive Sunday mornings to a city congregation in the industrial North of England. They are now printed practically as they were delivered, with few except verbal alterations, no attempt having been made to change their original form ; it was felt in every way better to retain the direct mode of address, and even to leave an occasional colloquial phrase unreplaced by its more literary equivalent. References to such events of the day as the loss of the Titanic, the war in the Balkans, etc., have likewise been allowed to stand ; and these, while disclosing the date of the book as surely as the year given on the title-page, will not, it is hoped, be found disturbing by readers. The author's aim has been to re-emphasise and illustrate some of the truths for daily living gathered in the Book of Proverbs, in their application to the life of to-day, and in the light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ ; if he be found to have succeeded in his re-setting of these ancient gems of wisdom, which have lost none of their lustre in the flight of the centuries, he will feel justified in offering this sheaf of practical addresses to a wider audience. CONTENTS I. The Beginning of Wisdom II. The Duty of Industry III. The Power of the Tongue IV. The Certainty of Recompense V. The Worth of Wealth VI. The Medicine of Mirth . VII. The Price of Truth. VIII. The Test of Praise . IX. The Excellence of Charity X. The Loneliness of Life . XI. The Grace of Humility . XII. The Curse of Meanness . XIII. The Candle of the Lord XIV. The Sin of Hurry . XV. The Fear of Man XVI. The Way of Understanding XVII. The Penalty of Temper . XVIII. The Winning of Souls XIX. The Secret of the Lord . XX. The Keeping of the Heart XXI. The Seeds of Discord XXII. The Harvest of Thought XXIII. The Probxem of Pleasure XXIV. The Heart of a Child XXV. The Sovereignty of Providence THE WAY OF UNDERSTANDING i THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." — Prov. ix. 10. We are about to commence a series of studies in one of the books of the Old Testament which has perhaps received less than its share of attention at the hands of preachers, and that in spite of the fact that it provides a veritable mine of material for the pulpit — the Book of Proverbs. When you look at the opening verses of this book in your Bibles, you find it described as " The Proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel " ; but you must not take that title too seriously or literally. If these thirty-one chapters contain any genuine sayings of Solomon's, we cannot identify them ; the overwhelming bulk of them belong with certainty to a far later age, and are of the most varied author ship, though popular fancy loved to attribute all these pithy counsels and pungent reflections to the great king whose splendour and wisdom formed one of the favourite traditions of the Hebrew people. As a matter of fact, we have in the Book of Proverbs something much better and more interesting than the production n The Way of Understanding of any one single mind : just as in the Psalms we listen to the voices of many singers expressing the devout aspirations of all Israel, so these hundreds of maxims and aphorisms give us in collected form the proverbial lore, the practical wisdom, of the whole Jewish nation, a popular compendium of popular philosophy, distilled from many minds. This book forms part of what is known as the Wisdom Literature of the Hebrews, because of the stress it lays upon the worth of wisdom, the necessity for it, its sovereign claim and virtues : " Wisdom is the principal thing," " With all thy getting, get wisdom," such are the exhortations constantly addressed to the reader, while in the great eighth chapter Wisdom is personified as standing at the meeting of the paths uttering her invitation to all : " Receive my instruc tion, and not silver ; and knowledge rather than choice gold." What is this wisdom ? let us ask first of all, so as to make sure of our bearings. Is it a kind of secret doctrine about the nature of God, speculations con cerning the universe or the human soul, glimpses into hidden mysteries or the final consummation of the ages ? No, there is nothing mystical or visionary in these chapters at all ; the atmosphere is clear enough for most accurate vision, yet not too rarefied for the most ordinary mortal to breathe. There is nothing abstruse, nothing metaphysical in Proverbs from beginning to end — it has no affinity with the dreamings of the farther East, where the soul loses itself in rapt communings with the Infinite. The Hebrew mind is nothing if not concrete ; just as Jesus Christ threw all His principles into story form — because there is 12 The Beginning of Wisdom nothing so "telling," in the true sense of the term, as a story — so, e.g., where we should say " Union is strength," it comes natural to the Hebrew to express the same idea in the phrase, " With two dogs they killed a lion." Instead of an abstract notion you get a vivid picture — and it sticks : you see the two dogs getting the fierce lion under by a concerted attack, whereas, singly, they would have been no match at all for the huge brute. So in the present case, I repeat, the " wisdom " of the Book of Proverbs is no speculative affair, but practical to a degree — it offers advice as pointed as that shrewd book " Letters from a Self-made Merchant to his Son," which you probably know. It is, if you like, not a heavenly wisdom, but a wisdom of this world, dealing with the art and science of life ; and I suggest to you that it is not to be despised on that account, for the business of living calls and enthrals us all, the problems of living present themselves with unfailing regularity and urgency to each one of us, and like importunate messengers decline to stir from our doorsteps without an answer. To-day's task ; to-day's trial ; to-day's dilemma -; to-day's struggle ; to-day's opportunity — they will not any of them wait until to-morrow to be dealt with, and delay merely aggravates the trouble we want to avoid or stave off. Really — let us be quite frank — you can get on just a httle longer without a completely satisfactory solution of all the theological or philosophical problems that may be of interest to you ; but in the meantime life itself has to be lived. You may not have settled the question of freewill in theory ; you have got to settle it fifty times a day in practice. Some of our clever men 13 The Way of Understanding at the CoUeges have recently made the discovery that the teachings of Jesus do not matter much — it is some theory about Jesus, on which unfortunately they are not agreed, that is all-important : well, we tell them to get on with their theory, but not to hurry themselves unduly, because for us commonplace mortals, who have not their learned leisure, the teachings, the practical precepts of the Master, are still good enough — in fact we find them indispensable. The need of everyday humanity is for everyday rehgion — never mind the mysteries and the subtleties. As Paul said with great candour and great good sense : " I speak with tongues more than you all : howbeit in the Church I had rather speak five words with my understanding that I might instruct others also, than ten thousand words in a tongue " — i.e., in a language not understood by the people. Preaching that does not help average people in their day-by-day lives is worse than super fluous — it is a pretentious nuisance ; I select this Book of Proverbs for preaching about on Sunday mornings because it drives at practice all the way. Not only so, but its exhortations and reflections come straight home to men's business and bosoms ; they appeal to the large unchanging factor in our composition. The other day you amused yourself and impressed your youngsters by telling them of all the things that did not exist when you were their age — no telephones, no phonographs, no motors, no typewriters, no aeroplanes, no wireless telegraphy, no cinematographs — " why," you wound up, speaking more to yourself than to them, " we're living in quite a different world nowadays." No, you are not. Nature 14 The Beginning of Wisdom and human nature are the same, and between them they make up ninety-nine per cent, of the world — the rest is only trimmings. If you want to feel how essentially identical human nature twenty-five centuries ago was with the human nature of to-day, in spite of all the dizzy rush of inventions and the rest, read the Book of Proverbs, and see if it does not find you. Our little lives are only short lengths cut from the same old fabric nature has been weaving and delivering to order all the while : there are the same human relation ships, the same necessity of earning a livelihood, the same temptations of appetite, the same fine possi bilities of exercising our foolishness, the same cares of household and business, the same disappointments overtaking the pleasure-loving, the spendthrift, the slothful, the same solid satisfactions attending a temperate, serviceable, laborious, God-fearing life — and what lies beyond it, in God's hand. And whether you write iooo B.C. — the approximate date of Solo mon's reign — or 19 — a.d., does not make much odds. So we can go to these ancient deliverances on the wisdom of life, and put our questions : On what principles is life to be conducted ? On what terms is it to be lived ? In what way is the maximum of personal happiness to be extracted from it ? Is the highest wisdom a prudent selfishness, a careful regard to one's own interests ? Or again, may not the true philosophy be this, which we read expressed in one of the Apocryphal books : " Short and sorrowful is our life ; and there is no healing when a man cometh to his end. Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow, and there is no putting back of our end. Come, 15 The Way of Understanding therefore, and let us enjoy the good things that now are. Let us crown ourselves with rosebuds ere they be withered, because this is our portion and our end is this " ? Alas, this materialistic philosophy has been tried again and again, and always failed, always ended upon a note of despair. Live as though the world held no higher content than material gain or material pleasure, and we are bound to find it a woefully unsatisfactory place ; try to minister to our own egoism, and though we be the most successful egoists, we are bound to finish with the disgusted confession of Ecclesiastes, declaring all things vanity and striving after wind. No, but the principal thing for those who would make a success of life is wisdom, and that not in the sense of mere worldly prudence, but a recognition of the true basis of our individual existence and the order of the world ; and the very beginning of wisdom, we read, the first condition of living aright, is the fear of God. The words of our text are among the most hack neyed in the Bible — which means they are among those which are habitually uttered with the least thought. Let us look at them rather more closely for once than is our custom. We do not hear so much of the fear of God nowadays as was cus tomary in former generations, and in many ways, perhaps in most, that is a good thing. We have ceased to believe in those presentations of God which drew a picture of a perennially frowning, perennially enraged tyrant, perpetually angry with man for something man could not help, viz., his descent from Adam — a circumstance for which, if anybody, God was responsible, and not His hapless creatures. Why, 16 The Beginning of Wisdom under the circumstances, God, who must have fore known the Fall, should have felt this wrath against the unfortunate offspring of Adam, and should have required an innocent Victim to suffer before He could forgive men the misfortune of their birth, was one of the many puzzles the barbarous theology of the past made no attempt to solve — instead of arguing, it threatened. But these threats no longer frighten us ; when we are offered a dogma we ask for a proof, and when we do not get it, we draw our own conclusion. When, e.g., a writer like Father Tyrrell tells us that Jesus taught that man, till baptism, was possessed by Satan, in virtue of his natural birth, we admit that it sounds very dreadful, but ask where Jesus did teach anything of the sort — and since Father Tyrrell does not condescend to tell us, we simply pass on, and take no further notice. Earlier generations yielded more easily to theological terrorism, and when they were told that God was very angry with them for something they had not done, they did not stop to argue the point, but were exceedingly afraid. In that respect our habits have changed, and such a " fear of God " as this — the terror of children after listening to ghost- stories in the dark — is no longer for us. And then we also feel, or at least most modern people feel, that fear is by no means a high motive. We do not think it a particular compliment nowadays to say of a teacher or anyone placed in authority that he rules his pupils or subordinates with a rod of iron ; it is a poor kind of discipline that is enforced by the weapon of fear, because such discipline is sure to be broken the moment the keeper's eye is turned, or the dread of pains and penalties removed. You cannot 17 B/ The Way of Understanding produce goodness by such means at all ; you can impose outward conformity, but that in itself has no moral value whatever apart from an inward motive. The soul of man cannot be driven into heaven, wild- beast fashion, with iron bars made red-hot in hell-fire. So if the fear of God signified only the terror of punish ment and Divine vengeance, such a motive might restrain a man from this and that form of wickedness, but you would not call that even the beginning of wisdom. But there is a true fear of God, which is quite a different emotion. It is whole worlds removed from the mere unwilling obedience rendered under compul sion to a stronger force, which can inflict awkward consequences upon disobedience. I would rather name it a holy awe, a feeling akin to what perhaps you have experienced in some mountain solitude, or when looking out on a majestic sea, or in the contemplation of a gorgeous starry sky : a feeling that all this wondrous universe sways to one transcendent WiU, is the mani festation of infinite Purpose, thriUs responsive to one Divine law, and that in all this scene of ordered splen dour we, too, have our place — we, too, form part of that great design, with this difference, which exalts us above stars and suns, that it lies with us to fill our part well and creditably if we will. We are called to be fellow-workers with God, but not as bond-slaves. You see that such a consciousness has nothing in common with terror or cowardice : it is, on the con trary, fraught with a new sense of confidence, if also necessarily a new sense of responsibility. This fear of God, or awe of God, gives meaning and content to life ; it adjusts our outlook to the truth of things ; it 18 The Beginning of Wisdom is the beginning of wisdom, and the condition of happiness. Let me show you, if I may, how it affects us and operates on us in relation to the world, in our relations to others, and in relation to ourselves. And first, in relation to the world. I think that, apart from belief in God, the very vastness of the universe is enough to give one at times a feeling of frightened forlornness. It is all so inconceivably huge; its laws operate with such seeming heedlessness of us small specks of humanity, that we feel utterly negli gible, as though we did not matter at all. Have you ever been alone in a large engine-room, like the Forces Motrices near Geneva, where complicated machinery was in motion ? The wheels revolve, huge arms reach out this way and that, little lights appear for a moment at regular intervals, and you do not know what it all means, but the movement just continues, taking no account at all of your presence — and after a while the whole inhuman business begins to get on your nerves. It is easy to feel like that about the universe disclosed by modern science, to be simply overwhelmed by it with a sense of our own insignificance. But once the sense of God's presence in it all and over all makes itself felt, our dread gives place to confidence. We see it as a glorious scheme revealing a beneficent purpose ; we see how by slow degrees God is bringing His handiwork to fruition, and the awe we experience is the awe of adoring trust. We can say with Brown ing's Fra Lippo : — This world's no blot for us Nor blank ; it means intensely, and means good. In such a world, which we feel pervaded by the Divine 19 b 2 The Way of Understanding Presence, we can move about freely and cheerfully, not feeling lost in its immensities, nor overlooked, but sure that we too have our appointed place to fill in it. If this is God's universe, then it is friendly to God's children ; its forces ask to be used for our benefit, its secrets wait to be discovered, its resources are ours if we will set ourselves to develop them ; yes, its very difficulties are intended to test and brace us, to chal lenge us and make us stronger. And you know that that is the true attitude towards the world — to regard it as the scene of Divine opportunity, of Divine discipline — and the man or woman who does so regard it, so uses as not abusing it, is the one who will achieve the truest success and know the highest joy. No atheistic or materialistic view of the world can give us that assurance, can supply that dynamic ; that is why the sense of God's overruling Mind and Might is the beginning of wisdom. And the same holds true in regard to our relations to each other. We begin to be wise when we realise that the moral, like the physical, universe is held together by an august and inviolable law which respects its respecters, and breaks its breakers. It is of God's ordinance, not of man's contrivance — that is why it cannot be set aside. And we try to evade that law, and imagine we can adroitly circumvent it and escape its action, just for one reason, or from one delusion, viz., because we do not recognise its Divine origin and authority. Do not misunderstand me. Of course we are not to think of God as a heavenly dominie with uplifted ferule waiting to bring down punishing strokes upon offenders ; nevertheless He is to be held in awe 20 The Beginning of Wisdom and reverence as a just and righteous Ruler, whose decrees are not to be mocked or lightly regarded. " He hath showed thee, O man, what is good ; and what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God ? " When men ruthlessly exploit their fellow-creatures, grind the faces of the poor, make their dirty dividends out of sweated labour, coin the misery of the economically helpless into gold, shall we not say in plain terms that what is lacking in their hearts is the fear of God, who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity ? When civilised nations aid and abet each other in nefarious plans for filching from another, weaker, less civilised people its land and liberty, or when they cultivate distrust and ill-will against each other until the dreadful arbitrament of war seems the only way to cut the Gordian knot skilfully made by diplomacy, has not the fear of God's statutes vanished from their darkened minds ? To have that fear is the beginning of a true estimate of life ; it is to begin to see light in God's light shining through the tangled undergrowth of passion, greed, selfseeking ; it is to rise above the ethics of the jungle, which still rule over large tracts of business, while they are supreme in international relationships, where we seem to have hardly emerged from the savage state as yet. But God's law is not merely to be feared ; when we recognise its beneficent nature and intent, when we perceive that in fulfilling it we fulfil our own highest possibilities, then we arrive at the stage when we render it our unforced homage, our free and glad obedience, and know it for the law of liberty, the law of Christ, the law of love. " A new command ment give I unto you — that ye love one another." 21 The Way of Understanding I need say very little, in conclusion, about this fear of God as it operates in relation to the individual soul. To know at each moment that we hold whatever powers we possess under God and from Him ; that we are responsible to Him for the use we make of our faculties ; that we stand in a direct, close and intimate relation to One who knows us altogether — that is at once a sobering and an uplifting consciousness ; it is in this that men and women have found the strength to over come the world, to despise its paltry bribes, to with stand its angry threats, to keep their hands clean and their hearts unenslaved, and to tread sin underfoot. Once a soul truly fears God he is liberated from every other fear. In this same consciousness, too, our sorrows may be bravely and patiently borne, instead of crushing us, because they are not inflicted by a blind and caUous fate, but are a fast of the Lord's appointing, and part of the counsel of Him in whose loving wisdom it is our own highest wisdom to confide. We do not fear Him as a tyrant, but reverence Him as a parent, whose whole intent towards us is good and gracious ; and in His strong hand, though many a hope may fail, and many a star grow dim in the heavens, and the solid ground rock beneath our feet, we are safe. In this world, and in all worlds, we are safe. In a multitude or alone, we are safe. For to fear Him is to trust Him, and to commit our spirits to Him — all whose tenderness we have seen shining in the face of Jesus Christ — for time and eternity. " The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom," says the Old Dispensation ; " but," adds and completes the New, " perfect love casteth out fear." 22 II THE DUTY OF INDUSTRY " He becometh poor that dealeth with a slack hand ; but the hand of the diligent maketh rich." — Prov. x. 4. We called the Book of Proverbs last Sunday morning a book of every-day religious counsel for every-day folk, a book which has much to say about wisdom, but means by wisdom the art and science of right living. It lacks aU romantic touch, it is free from any suspicion of mysticism ; in reading its chapters we are caught up into no third heaven — we are, on the contrary, kept uncommonly close to the realities, the tasks and duties and responsibilities of life. It has thus, like the Epistle of James, a special and most useful function to perform. Many people go to religion, when they do so at all, with a view to escaping from these pressing realities — they like a romantic, or sentimental, or soothing religion, something which shall act as a pleasant opiate, minis tering a grateful temporary oblivion of week-day cares and preoccupations. Well, of course, we do not get that in Proverbs ; the authors of these shrewd maxims, drawn from close observation and experience, are not concerned with ingenious speculations or soulful yearn ings, but with the problem of how men may make the most and the best of life — this life. They do not, for instance, profess to sing the praises of .poverty, or to 23 The Way of Understanding undervalue security from harassing economic care ; their advice is addressed to those who would become orderly, well-reputed, not unprosperous members of the community, leading useful lives, keeping their passions under control, enjoying the affection of their family, the esteem of their acquaintances, and leaving an unspotted name behind them. A very prosaic ideal, in short ; and yet, let us be quite honest, the ideal most of us would be abundantly satisfied to realise, the ideal which would give us a happy and healthy race of people if it were steadily aimed at. Suffer me to say another thing before I come to our immediate subject this morning. The morality incul cated in this book is by no means based on mere selfish calculations ; behind the faithfulness in the discharge of our daily obligations there lies all the time a working faith in God who has ordained our lot in His wisdom and righteousness. We are to be obedient, not to a soulless law, which will crush us if we are so foolish as to come into coUision with it, but to a beneficent Law giver, whose discipline is a parent's discipline, designed to help us and promote our own highest interests. And I ask, is it not good for us so to carry religion into our daily life, to feel that he who exercises the humblest virtues in relation to his fellows, as employee or as employer, as a buyer or a seller, is really serving God — is, indeed, rendering the particular service without which mere emotion, however sincere, is singularly unavailing ? People are always trying to escape from that interpretation of religion, on the pretence that it is too low ; as a matter of fact I suspect that they find it too hard. I have positively seen it stated in a modern work that "it is only the sacraments that 24 The Duty of Industry make us sons of God — morality can never do so ; " and that a fairly faulty life, with frequent sacraments, is more pleasing to God than a life of heroic virtue without sacraments ! Now I regard this kind of teaching as simply pernicious ; and instead of this morbid, incense- laden atmosphere we had better breathe the clean, wholesome air of morality based on religion which meets us in the Book of Proverbs. The passages we read this morning inculcate in the plainest terms the duty of industry, indicating its rewards, and warning against the vice of indolence. That is not merely Old Testament teaching ; it meets us again in Jesus' Parable of the Talents, with its praise of the good and faithful servant and its vivid con demnation of the wicked and slothful one. Jesus had grown up in an atmosphere which appreciated good and honest work, and set a very high value indeed upon manual exertion. The greatest Jewish rabbis all had a trade at their fingers' ends, and maintained themselves by their labour, as carpet-weavers, needle- makers and the like ; and no one looked down on them, but rather esteemed them more highly on that account. Paul wrought with his hands as a weaver of tent-cloth, and as the shuttle flew to and fro, the busy shuttle of his mind was at work likewise, and he wove the strange and intricate patterns of his doctrine. And in the seventeenth century you find the great Spinoza, a son of the same race, writing his philosophical treatises in a humble room, and earning his daily bread by polishing optical lenses. All these men were in the simplest sense of the term industrious, because they instinctively knew that self-respect and happiness lie that way ; and Jesus Himself knew the satisfaction of handling tools 25 The Way of Understanding in a workmanlike fashion, and finishing a job in work manlike style. Do not let us be afraid of coming down to very ele mentary things ; I often wonder whether any others are worth preaching about. And the first thing to recognise and proclaim aloud is that the universe, as has been happily expressed, is organised on a basis of labour. Never so fully as to-day have we understood the meaning of the words, " My Father worketh hitherto — even to this day." Creation is not a finished product, but a process that is continually going on. God never rests. The elements never rest — they carry out His bidding with ceaseless perseverance. The world does not stand still. To the eye of modern science, each atom presents a scene of swiftest move ment. It all does something, it all means something. Energy, action, industry, these are the mighty tune to which the whole creation moves. The hint to us is fairly obvious ; indeed, it defies misunderstanding, and we disregard it at our dire peril and severe practical incon venience. " My Father worketh hitherto, and I work," we read in John's Gospel ; the words are attributed to Christ as the ideal Representative of all humanity. We are not asked, broadly speaking, if we will work — if such an arrangement commends itself to us ; we have got to. The very savage has to hunt in order to live. The world offers us all the raw materials for our maintenance, but they are in such a state that we have to turn to before we can use or enjoy them. Every article we touch, everything that ministers to our necessities, is the product of labour ; and if we were all miUionaires, it would not make the slightest difference, or do away with the need for a single hand's-turn to 26 The Duty of Industry keep the world going. The biggest banking account would not keep a room dusted, or mend a pair of shoes, or bake a loaf of bread, or wash a pair of cur tains, or carry provisions across the sea, or drive a nail, or lay a brick. And we are on a system of short supplies all the time. Consumption and production only just keep pace with each other. Let there be a really general strike in any one industry, such as we have recently experienced, and calamity stares us in the face. Why do I remind you of these obvious things ? Because I want to bring it home, especially to the younger folk, that there is no meaner ambition in the world than to escape this general ordinance. Someone has got to keep the world — to keep the myriad homes in every country — going concerns ; if not we, still someone, by toil and patience and quiet performance of a hundred indispensable tasks. Think of a vessel that has sprung a leak, and the water can only just be kept under by everyone obeying the order, " All hands to the pumps " ; would it be a very glorious thing for any able-bodied person to loll in his state-room, relying on the exertions of the rest ? The image is not so far fetched, for we are, as I said, continually on short supplies ; and if it takes all sorts to make a world, it takes the contributions of all sorts, bodily and mental, to sustain the world, and satisfy the world's needs of body and mind. We aU live on work — either our own or other people's — with every breath we draw ; and to dream of being a mere parasite is a sheer self-degrada tion. To be among the world's workers is a necessity for most ; it should be a point of honour with all who are 27 The Way of Understanding not disabled, for the duty of industry is simply impera tive, while its fulfilment opens the road to self-respect for the humblest toiler. Let us get rid of the last trace of snobbishness in this respect — and in every other. Since all industry is indispensable, all is honourable. " A brave employment indeed for the son of a duke," sneered the French nobleman at his brother, who had turned monk, and acted as servitor, "to be washing up greasy dishes!" "A brave employment truly," was the quiet answer, " to labour in the service of Jesus Christ." For whatsoever craft or trade or pro fession we follow, it may all be exercised to the glory of God. And may I say this — that while the ordinary work the world requires calls for all the industry and fidelity we are capable of, the great achievements of the world have one and all been the outcome of truly terrible toil. Edison, who speaks with authority on the subject, has given it as his view that genius is two per cent, inspira tion and ninety-eight per cent, perspiration. We read that " when he was inventing his storage battery, he was at work in his laboratory every morning at 7.30. His luncheon was sent to him in the shop, and although he sometimes went home to dinner, he was always back at eight. At 11.30 his carriage came for him, and generally had to wait three or four hours before Edison could go home. He kept this up for over a year ; hundreds of experiments were made, innumerable models were built and discarded, and still the struggle went on steadily and persistently, until repeated failure ended in triumphant success." And of a worker in quite another field, Robert Louis Stevenson, we know with what immense and determined effort he 28 The Duty of Industry mastered the business of writing, what a long and laborious apprenticeship he served. And if he became a master, the mastery never grew easy. " He re-wrote some passages of his work four times over ; he burned the entire first draft of ' Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,' lest it should tempt him, when a criticism by his wife had revealed a fundamental flaw in it." Now that was neither more nor less than heroism. When he had already become famous wherever the English tongue was read, he confessed that there were times when he broke down at every paragraph, and had to " wring one sentence out after another." Every conscientious writer knows that feeling, and the desperateness of it — the temptation to let the second-best stand, rather than strive after an impossible best. I have known a man re-write and re-write pages, all for the sake of appar ently quite trifling improvements ; and that not for the sake of " style " as such, but from a resolute and scrupulous love of truth. But to turn to Stevenson's sheer indomitable industry again ; listen to this record : " When a temporary ill ness lays him on his back, he writes in bed one of his most careful and thoughtful papers. When ophthalmia confines him to a darkened room, he writes by the diminished light. When, after haemorrhage, his right hand has to be held in a sling, he writes some of the poems in his ' Child's Garden of Verses ' with his left hand. When the haemorrhage has been so bad that he dare not speak, he dictates a novel in the deaf-and- dumb alphabet." " I frankly believe," he once said, " thanks to my dire industry, I have done more with smaller gifts than any man of letters in the world." Well, his gifts were of the highest ; but they would 29 The Way of Understanding have availed the public nothing but for his prodigious application. The heights by great men won and kept Were not attained by sudden flight ; But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upward through the night. WeU might this man, whose life-long battle against odds is an inspiration and a tonic, say, " Acts may be for given, but not even God Himself can forgive the hanger- back." WeU then, this is the point I want to drive home — that since the world has a right to our best, and since the best means the full employment of our powers, there is no excuse for the shirker, the person who tries to manage on a minimum of effort. And incidentaUy let me say that the stars in their courses fight against the man whose chief aim is to find out how little he need do without, say, endangering his position ; some day he is sure to do just a shade too little, and then he wiU be surprised and saddened by the consequences. For this is one of the things that teU their own tale — the difference between this man, who is wondering how little effort he need put forth, and that one, who wonders how much he can put forth. But what are the rewards of aU this exertion, some one asks. WeU, let me be quite frank — they may, or they may not, take striking material shape, though the man who tries obviously stands a better chance to win the tangible prizes than the one who does not. But the best things are not done for money, and money cannot buy them. We aU know that Milton received five pounds for the manuscript of " Paradise Lost." 30 The Duty of Industry Go and put an advertisement in the Athenceum, offering five hundred pounds for a poem of the same quality, and wait for the result. You wiU have to wait a long time. Do you think Florence Nightingale earned as much in a year as a successful dancer does in a week ? The best work is not done for money, and the work that is done solely with a view to cash- results is never the best. The true rewards reaUy are elsewhere, and cannot be computed in pounds, shillings, and pence. Here is the great law, that aU work weU done brings a satisfaction of its own to the doer. It was no less shrewd and clear-sighted a thinker than Aristotle, who, in discussing the subject of pleasure, laid it down that while not all pleasures are desir able, yet the putting forth of energy, the exercise of faculty, was always pleasurable in itself. All work reacts upon the worker, and good work makes and leaves him a better man ; aU we do is an expression of the soul, and in turn leaves an impression upon the soul — our deed is never done with us when we are done with it. Just because, as I said, activity is the tune to which the whole creation moves, we feel at our best when we are actively employed, when our energies find fuU scope, and some work is growing under our hand. Of Huxley we are told that when he was in the meridian of his great gifts, and in the fuU career of joyful work, he used to say that at the end of every day he felt a strong desire to say " Thank you " to some Power, if he could only have known to whom to say it. I am sure to many a man or woman of im measurably lesser gifts than Huxley the same experi ence has come again and again, the experience of thank fulness for the opportunity and the ability to work — 3i The Way of Understanding though they do know what Huxley did not, viz., to whom to say " Thank you." And do you not think this delight in doing, which is the reward of industry, links us on, proves us to be akin, to Him who is Himself the Fount of all energy, that God who is described, and rightly described, as rejoicing in His work ? He might have placed us in a perfect, finished world, an environment that left us with nothing to do but sit and admire and enjoy it aU ; but God, in the language of the Epistle to the Hebrews, provided some better thing concerning us. He pro vided us with a world so constituted that apart from us it should not be made perfect, a world that called aloud for improvement, and challenged us to use our faculties for improving it. In the course of a public debate on " Theism or Atheism ? " Mr. Foote, the Editor of the Freethinker, once asked whether we were not always reminding God of what He had left undone. It was an odd question, coming from an atheist, who does not believe in God at aU ; but in any case, is it not obvious that, like a wise parent, God has purposely left us something to do, in order to train our faculties, and that He is graciously pleased to accept our co operation ? The normal, the rightly-constituted chUd wants something to do, not to have everything done for him ; his growing powers crave an outlet, and he is miserable if such an outlet is not provided for him. Either that, or, still more likely, he wiU, merely in order to do something, do something undesirable. And we are children of a larger growth, no more ; and the best feature of the world, for us, is that it invites and indeed compels us to prove our mettle, and toughen our fibre, and pit our brain against its difficul- 32 The Duty of Industry ties, and wrest from it its secrets and its treasures, and turn its barren wUdernesses into smUing fields and leafy gardens. And when we with full purpose of heart set ourselves to our task — it may be the highest or the lowliest : "all service ranks the same with God " — we discover that hidden forces work along with us, aid us, supply a measure of strength greater than we thought ourselves in possession of, give us fresh and unexpected resources. It may be, as I said, the highest or the lowliest task — what matters is our way of setting about it : whether it is brain-work or hand-work, or a combination of the two is immaterial. Goethe, with his prodigious output, teUs us of this experience — how at times, in producing, labour seemed strangely lightened by a very inrush of ideas, coming like a gift unsought. Yes ; but it is not only ideas that come in this fashion ) it is fortitude, a sudden replenishing of the physical power of endurance, in the case of some poor mother watching by the bed side of her chUd, and fighting for its life ; it is the tired worker, teUing himself that this task shaU and must be done ere he rises, who feels his pulses throbbing with new energy, exactly as if, his own capital exhausted, a loan had been granted him with which to complete his enterprise — nay, rather, as though a free grant has been made to him, he knows not whence. Or else, maybe, he does know : he knows that he is in tune with the mighty force that sweeps the world onward, and that just because he is co-operating with God, God in turn co-operates with him, filling his emptiness out of His infinite fulness. There lies the secret of power, there the sacredness of industry, in that it raises us to the tank of conscious 33 c The Way of Understanding helpers of the Most High God, whether we labour at household tasks, or in business, or in whatever useful profession or avocation. In realising that we are set here to help on His purposes, and that we do so by every faithful stroke of work, lies the realisation of our own dignity. We are children of His household, and in that great family each one is meant by his or her personal exertions to contribute to the comfort, the happiness of aU, the smooth working and efficiency of the whole. When we all come to see in our faculties, in our implements, in our varied spheres of labour, the opportunities of serving God by serving the world, the kingdom of heaven will be in the midst of us. I have spoken of Stevenson in connection with our subject, as one can hardly help doing when the subject is that of any manly virtue ; let me close by quoting a poem and a prayer of his, which wiU teU you more of the truth of the matter than many sermons. O to be up and doing, O Unfearing and unshamed to go In all the uproar and the press About my human business ! For still the Lord is Lord of might ; In deeds, in deeds He takes delight ; The plough, the spear, the laden barks, The field, the founded city, marks ; Those He approves that ply the trade, That rock the child, that wed the maid, That with weak virtue, weaker hands, Sow gladness on the peopled lands, And still with laughter, song and shout Spin the great wheel of earth about. And this is the prayer he prayed, and in which we 34 The Duty of Industry may all join : " Give us to go blithely on our business. Help us to play the man ; help us to perform the petty round of irritating concerns and duties with laughter and kind faces ; let cheerfulness abound with industry." 35 C2 Ill THE POWER OF THE TONGUE " Death and life are in the power of the tongue : and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof." — Prov. xviii. 21. A week ago, you may remember, I happened in passing to draw a comparison between the Book of Proverbs and a New Testament writing which is permeated by a very similar spirit, namely the Epistle of James. Both these books are very much concerned with the problems and the ethics of every day, with the commonplace duties, trials and pursuits that make up so much of the warp and woof of life ; both preach a religion of right conduct, and trouble themselves very little with the niceties of theological speculation, but are taken up with the " here-and-now " side of things almost to the exclusion of any other. Of course, such writers do not show us the whole of religion ; you may even say that they ignore some of its vital aspects ; but by pegging away at " this one thing " they perform a useful and much-needed service. You may remember the famous sarcasm in which Gibbon the historian indulged concerning the everlasting dis putes which rent the Christian Church during the early centuries, disputes on such points as whether the Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father only or from the Son as weU — just as though anybody could have known ; weU, Gibbon says that these zealous defenders of their various -isms were so busy 36 The Power of the Tongue wrangling over these abstract questions that they really had no time left for practising the precepts of their Founder. Books like Proverbs and James act as wholesome correctives to this tendency to forsake or neglect the weightier matters of the law for the tithing of mint, anise and cummin— they bring us back sharply and with relentless insistence to " the agenda of the faith " ; and since these writers share the same outlook, the same fundamental attitude, it is not to be wondered at that they deal very largely with the same topics, and in a very similar temper. This remark applies particularly to the subject we have before us this morning ; both in the Book of Proverbs and in the Epistle of James we find a very clear sense of the enormous power wielded by speech, its tremendous possibUities both for good and evil. Take, from the Hebrew writing, such contrasted utterances as these : "A man hath joy in the answer of his mouth ; and a word in season, how good it is ! " Then, on the other hand, this rather scornful estimate : "In all labour there is profit ; but the talk of the lips tendeth only to penury." Again, " Heaviness in the heart of a man maketh it stoop ; but a good word maketh it glad." True, but set over against this comes such a strongly-worded reflection as the foUowing : " With his mouth the godless man destroyeth his neighbour," and once more, " An evil-doer giveth heed to wicked lips ; and a liar giveth ear to a mischievous tongue " — words which, by the way, express the truth, worth remembering and underlining, that to listen to base tittle-tattle shows as vicious a taste as that of the purveyor and retailer of that kind of garbage himself or herself. After all, let us be candid, there would be no 37 The Way of Understanding tale-teUers — their occupation would be gone — if it were not for greedy appetites welcoming their spicy dishes. Now all we read on this subject in Proverbs is very much in the same strain as the reflections of James on the little member which boasteth such great things, and is so "powerful for good and for ill : " Behold, how much wood is kindled by how small a fire ; and the tongue is a fire . . . Therewith bless we the Lord and Father ; and therewith curse we men, which are made in the likeness of God ; out of the same mouth cometh forth blessing and cursing." Well now, taking the widest view of the subject, there can be no doubt that speech is by far the most wonderful instrument with which Providence has endowed us. I believe Max MiiUer was right when he said, " No thought without language ; no language without thought." Of course, in a rudimentary form, this endowment is shared by many animals ; birds, we are told, have one particular caU which covers all kinds of food, and another which warns against every sort of danger. And I think everyone who has had much to do with an intelligent dog feels at times that the animal is conscious of his limited powers of expres sion, is fretting against those limitations, and would like to say ever so much more than he is able, so keen are his emotions of pleasure, anticipation, disappoint ment, indignation, sorrow. Then, when we come to the human being, how wonderful to trace a child's gradual acquisition of word after word, his attempts to build up sentences — how much more wonderful to reflect that all the time he is simultaneously building up his whole universe ! And then again, what a difference between, say, a rural labourer who is supposed to 38 The Power of the Tongue manage with a vocabulary of five hundred words, and some highly-cultivated inteUigence which needs and uses, perhaps, ten thousand or more for the purpose of self-expression ! The most marveUous of tools, and the most powerful, is speech ; certainly, if we wiU think it over, the one by which we are, every one of us, made and moulded more than by any other agency. It is by what we hear aU day and every day — in the circle of our homes, in the houses of our friends, from the sharers of our daily labours in the office, the school, the warehouse, the shop, the factory — that we are shaped and fashioned, subtly and imperceptibly perhaps, but none the less surely. Carlyle, of whom it is said that he commended the value of silence, but did so in thirty volumes — Carlyle was also eloquent in discerning the influence of what he caUed the speaking-man ; and certainly in all generations God has entrusted His messages to the lips of His appointed agents, to make known His decrees among men. Who can measure what has been accomplished in the world's history by the power of speech ? Is not the ability to speak clearly, movingly, convincingly, one of the indispensables for all leader ship ? What has tyranny always dreaded and tried to suppress but the power of the word ? What is it that the slave-holding South sought with aU its might to fetter and gag but the propaganda of the word? There is no weapon comparable to the weapon of great oratory in immediate effectiveness. What was it made Herod shiver on his throne ? Just the uncom promising language of a rugged, plain-spoken, religious demagogue called John ! I remember once, at a minis terial gathering, the amazing statement being made 39 The Way of Understanding that " apart from the miracles Jesus would have been nothing but a mere talker." One could only gasp one's surprise. What — the Sermon on the Mount, the parable of the Prodigal, the denunciation of tie Scribes and Pharisees, mere talk ? But these wire deeds, they were battles, they made history. And so it has been from that day to this ; the people who have moved the world, in political emancipation, in the path of social reform, in the deepening of the spiritual life, have always been those who had the power of translat ing thought into speech, they were "lords of language," who played upon their audiences as on instruments. But now let me point out another thing, fuUy as important, and of even greater practical significance for us all. It is a fact that (apart from the words of a few supreme master-minds) the public utterance from platform or pulpit, however eagerly listened to, exer cises far less formative influence than the daily, informal conversation we carry on amongst ourselves. The preacher's opportunity comes once a week, and he delivers his mind in a couple of sermons which, taken together, occupy perhaps a little over an hour. WeU, though he speak with the tongue of men and of angels, his is just one note faUing upon the ears of his listeners, however resonant he may try to make it — just one note in a whole orchestra which may possibly be playing quite a different tune, or maybe half-a-dozen different airs. We will assume, for argument's sake, that he reaUy has a message to deliver, that he has had his intermittent glimpse of heavenly things and high ideals, and does his poor best to interpret the ones and commend the others to his hearers on Sunday : if their own habitual thought runs on quite other lines, if their 40 The Power of the Tongue general talk is on another level altogether, if their conversation is exclusively occupied with topics of an entirely worldly character, then the preacher, for aU his endeavour, sincere though it be, is in effect only a sounding brass, a voice whose utterances are swiftly forgotten, carried away and washed out of remembrance by a flood of commonplace talk dealing with anything and everything under the sun, but not with the things of God and His righteousness. And so what I would impress upon you is this — the enormous and incessant influence we exercise on each other simply in and by our talk — our every-day talk, which aUows the soul to appear in undress. What we say in our privacy to one another is not only much more characteristic than the views we may express in the presence of an audience, but in the aggregate these unstudied remarks exercise a far greater influence than what is said from platform or pulpit. The seventeenth and eighteenth century spoke of a man's character as his " walk and conversation," and I think that hit the nail on the head ; conversation, the give-and-take of social intercourse, is the true index of character — and here comes in the responsibility we aU incur for the use we make of that wonderful instrument of speech. Think how lives are made and marred by words ; how a rough jest wiU for ever destroy some chUdlike reverence ; how a hinted evil wiU taint and corrupt an innocent mind ; how a cynical profession of indiffer ence to right and wrong wiU remain as a memory in the listener, and perhaps at the critical moment sway the balance ; how unkind speech, or frivolous speech, or cheap sneers and scoffs at high and holy things rub the bloom off the young soul, so that things are never 4i The Way of Understanding the same again — think of this, and you will sympathise with the seeming harshness of our Lord's declaration, " I say unto you, that every idle word that men speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words shalt thou be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned." But there is one responsibility, or rather one abuse of speech, on which, as we have already seen, the Book of Proverbs has much to say, and says it very emphati caUy — the vice of scandal. " For lack of wood the fire goeth out," says the graphic old writer, " and where there is no whisperer, contention ceaseth." There is no social offence more cowardly and injurious than this ; it is perpetrated in secrecy, under the seal of privacy — it nearly always wears the mask of superior righteousness appaUed by other folk's misdemeanours, and I believe the mask sometimes deceives the very wearers ; you can seldom cope with the pest, for the distributors of evil gossip wiU not, if they can help it, come into the open to make good their statements or stand the consequences. Pascal probably exaggerated — at least let us hope so — when he remarked that " if people knew what was said about them, there would not be four friends in the world " ; but one may sympathise with Sir Peter Teazle's frame of mind when, after exclaiming against " these utterers of forged tales, coiners of scandal, and clippers of reputations," he meekly consented to call at Lady SneerweU's, " just to look after his own character." It is easy enough to smile at the propensity to gossip which — let me say it at once and with the utmost clearness — is no more the peculiar monopoly of one sex than of the other ; but the truth is that this habit does 42 The Power of the Tongue perhaps more to break hearts and ravage happiness than many vices we are far more severe in condemning. You find by little signs which at first you disregard — then, as they accumulate, can no longer ignore — that some subtle change is coming over your world ; that you meet with coldness in the place of cordiality, that there is an invisible barrier, a sense of constraint, yes, here and there what can hardly be anything but intentional avoidance ; and you wonder and puzzle what it can be, and are torturing yourself with sur mises, until, perhaps by mere chance, or by the good sense of some friend, you are placed in possession of the truth : some siUy, baseless slander, assiduously repeated, has been going the rounds concerning you, and you will be more than usually fortunate if you ever bring it home to the original disseminator ; even if you do so, the lie or half-truth has got so long a start that you wiU be hard put to it to overtake its gaUoping steeds. The mischief will have been done before you can track it to its source, and the undoing wiU prove weary and disheartening work. I have a recollection that it was, of aU people in the world, the gentle spirit of Edna Lyall that was once roused to write a little book called " The Autobio graphy of a Slander " ; but a living novelist wielding a more mordant pen than Edna Lyall has given us a pen-picture of such a trafficker in offal which no one who has read it is likely to forget — the flushed face, the gleam of malice in the eyes, the eager whispers of highly-seasoned " bits," the pledges of confidence exacted in the sure and certain knowledge that they would be broken, and that the scandal would travel, spread and infect the very atmosphere. And what 43 The Way of Understanding kind of experience must it have been that made a great living poet, Mr. William Watson, lash out in those terrible lines : — She is not old, she is not young, The Woman with the Serpent's Tongue, The haggard cheek, the hungering eye, The poisoned words that wildly fly . . . Burnt up within by that strange soul She cannot slake, or yet control ; Malignant-lipped, unkind, unsweet, Past all example indiscreet ; Hectic, and always overstrung — The Woman with the Serpent's Tongue. There are two things one wants to say before passing on ; one, that while in almost every other respect one is in favour of a gentler way with wrong-doers, one could wish that the punishments meted out to slan derers could be rendered more severe, so as to inspire anyone similarly disposed with a wholesome terror of the consequences attending such nefarious practices ; the other, that a community or society in which scandal and tale-bearing are rife, has the answer of death within itself, is suffering from a moral leprosy, is a danger to decent folk. But let us ask ourselves, as we always must when dealing with a disease, what are its causes ? — for only so can we possibly discover the remedy. There is, of course, in some twisted, perverted natures, a sheer love of mischief for its own sake, a desire to inflict pain and make others suffer ; the genius of Shakespeare has drawn that type of human devil for us in Iago — " honest Iago," as his deluded victim caUs him ; but that is happily an exceptional type, and I would 44 The Power of the Tongue again remind you that even such a one would be largely powerless for evil were it not that there are so many ready to form an audience and join in the chorus when someone's character is being attacked and defamed. The very Park orator must succeed in gathering his audience before he can preach his par ticular gospel. More frequently, I think, scandal springs from envy, from disappointment, from that ignoble ailment of ignoble natures, jealousy. To dim, by a httle skilful insinuation, the brightness to which they themselves could not attain ; to suggest a base admixture in some fine character, or a base motive for some noble deed ; or to hint at tales that might be told concerning the man or woman who stands high in pubhc esteem — that is the kind of revenge which is sweet to unsuccessful mediocrity or thwarted ambition. " Yes, he's got to the top aU right ; would you hke me to teU you how he got there ? " "A great artist, is she ? I daresay ; it takes the gilt off, though, when you know" — so-and-so. And sometimes, alas — "Yes, he's quite a leader in the denomination now ; weU, if you'd known him as I did when we were feUow- students ..." Oh, hideous, hideous, isn't it ? HeUish, that's the word. " But the Pharisees said, ' By the prince of the devils casteth He out devils.' " Let us watch and pray lest we enter into such temptation ; and let us habitually ask ourselves, when we hear some story to the discredit of the eminent and successful, how much of it may have its foundation, not in fact, but in the bitterness and jealousy of exasperated failure. But if I am to express my opinion quite frankly, I must say that in by far the greater proportion the vice of scandal is just the habit of the empty-minded, the 45 The Way of Understanding constitutionally duU and vapid. They have no inteUigent interests, nor intelhgent subjects of conver sation, and they must talk about something — heaven help them ! — so they talk scandal. The Spanish proverb applies to the mind : " Where there is nothing, there is the devil." It is certainly in duU societies where this poisonous plant flourishes most ; I am told that smaU cathedral towns in the South hold the palm for malevolent gossip, and I can believe it. There is a certain measure of truth in the cynical remark that scandal is the compassionate allowance the hvely make to the humdrum ; and that countless stupid folk derive a sort of brightness from the real or fancied indiscretions of others. But it is an ugly and heartless business for all that, and one of the most fruitful sources of misery. How shall we stop that source — how stamp out this infection ? WeU, I would in the first place direct your attention to the undertaking entered into by King Arthur's knights — " To speak no slander — no, nor listen to it." We can always refuse to give ear to tales that are obviously inspired by a malevolent motive ; and I submit that we are not bound to show the most scrupulous pohteness to the tale-bearer who will not take a hint that you have no use for his or her wares. Plain speech in such circumstances would stop an immense deal of base calumny if it were more frequently resorted to. And in the second place, let it be reahsed that to show a marked fondness for gossip is to write oneself down a duUard, to proclaim oneself inteUec- tually poverty-stricken, forced to subsist on rubbish and actuaUy liking such diseased diet ; let that impres sion sink in and gain ground quite steadily — let us lose 46 The Power of the Tongue no opportunity of emphasising it — and since most people have a keen dislike of being considered mentally inferior,, it wiU help them to restrain their proclivities towards insinuation and innuendo. A " School for Scandal" is not a gathering of agreeable rattles, but a pathetic assemblage of the feeble-minded. And thirdly — and this is most important — let us bear in remem brance that this is really a habit of empty minds, and so make it a habit to keep our own well stored. Life need not be humdrum for any of us ; there are objects of interest in plenty close by — we have only to reach out. We can become enthralled in any number of topics, enter the treasure-houses of knowledge at a mere nominal entrance fee, we can throw ourselves into this or that movement where workers are wanted : in any number of ways we can so employ our energies, so store our brain-ceUs, that there simply wiU not be any room or desire left for what is, after aU, very sorry trash. And if we are interested in people rather than in " subjects," there are the lives of the wise and good from which to derive profit and inspiration greater than from this or that discreditable and probably untrue piece of gossip. It is stagnant waters and stagnant minds that become putrid and breed corruption ; keep the mind whole some by keeping it alert and moving. Let there, above aU, be room, and plenty of it, for the supreme things, the supreme topics, in our thinking. To converse much with noble minds is the best cure for a taste for the common and unclean ; to tarry much and lovingly in the company of Christ Jesus, to immerse ourselves in that matchless Life and Per sonality, is to gain a deeper and truer insight into the meaning and worth of life, to acquire a habit of refine- 47 The Way of Understanding ment, and to grow dissatisfied with what is merely foolish and unedifying ; it is to see the greatness of existence, and to shrink from its disfiguring little nesses and nauseating trivialities. To have the pure and true much in our thoughts wiU prevent the tawdry and petty from having much place in our speech. And since by our words we are to be judged, to whom shall we go for guidance and example but to Him who is the Incarnate Word, and who has the words of eternal life ? 48 IV THE CERTAINTY OF RECOMPENSE " Evil pursueth sinners ; but the righteous shall be recom pensed with good." — Prov. xiii. 21. In that most wonderful of story-books which we caU the Book of Genesis there is no more familiar tale than that of Jacob's dream at Bethel on his way from his father's homestead to Padan-aram. It is indeed a masterpiece of story-telling, and the picture of the exile and fugitive, his head piUowed on a stone, dream ing of the ladder which reached from earth to heaven, and the angels of God ascending and descending, makes an immediate and striking appeal to the imagination, as does Jacob's startled cry when he awakes, " Surely, the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not ! " But for the purposes of our subject this morning I have to caU your attention to another feature of the narrative, which is generaUy overlooked, viz., Jacob's strange pact with the Almighty : " If God wiU be with me, and wiU keep me, and give me bread to eat and raiment to put on, then shah the Lord be my God, and of aU that Thou shalt give me, I wiU surely give the tenth unto Thee." Does not the strangeness of this vow come home to us the moment we consider it ? Jacob comes fresh from a detestable fraud practised on his father and 49 D The Way of Understanding brother — but there is nothing further from his mind than any expression of repentance or any resolution of amendment ; that God should require such has not so much as dawned on him ; that the Divine favour should in any way be dependent on his conduct, he has never dreamed. No ; but he will make a bargain with the Most High : let God keep him, protect him, and prosper him, and he in return wUl give God a tenth part of his prosperity. It is purely a business trans action, into which morality does not enter in the least ; a singularly unblushing business proposal, too, for Jacob is to have nine-tenths, and Jehovah a mere tenth — and that has always been the sort of bargain men have thought it perfectly fair and reasonable to strike with Heaven ! Yes, too much that calls itself religion has had for its real purpose simply the desire to conclude, as it were, favourable terms with the Deity, purchasing His protection, but purchasing it not too dearly. In all ages men have been quite wiUing to go through rites and ceremonies, to repeat formulas of prayer or confessions of faith, even to give up a certain proportion of their gains, so long as it was not reaUy extravagant — ready, in other words, to do something that would cost them little or nothing, in order to make sure, as they thought, of Divine favour in this life and celestial bliss in the next. The Italian highwayman used to take his aim in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and, after plundering his victim, rehgiously to devote one-tenth of the spoil to the Church, thus keep ing his part of the bargain, and assuring himself of a quid fro quo on the part of an obliging and business-like Omnipotence ; and even to-day, and in countries 50 The Certainty of Recompense nearer home than Italy, there are still people who imagine that they can make up for shady business methods by a lavish support of foreign missions and religious activities generaUy. Indeed, there is yet another type of religion which roundly declares that works do not matter at aU, that salvation is " free," and may be laid hold of simply by an act of faith in the sufficiency of Christ's sacrificial death ; of course, if we hold such a belief, the difference between right and wrong, virtue and wickedness, simply vanishes, so far as consequences are concerned, for on that supposition the worst of evil-doers is as acceptable in the sight of Heaven as the brightest saint, provided both give their assent to the doctrine of imputed guilt and righteousness, the cancelling of man's debt by Christ's sufferings or Christ's merits. Here again you have the notion of a bargain, of a trans action, in its most naked form — a fantastic bargain, true, -but one in which the advantage is all on man's side. And it is aU the merest, most baseless imagination, this whole idea, with which we meet in so many and various forms, that we can gain acceptance with God either by the correctness of our creed — by faith apart from works — or by the performance of certain cere monies, or the recital of consecrated forms of adoration. This is the most obstinate hallucination in human hearts — that it really is possible to juggle with the Divine justice, to get the better of the laws of the Eternal, that the Righteous One who reigneth over aU either desires or wiU content Himself with anything at all except right-doing. It is the notion of God as a none too impartial judge, whose verdicts can be swayed 51 D2 The Way of Understanding by flattery or bribes, who has his protegis and favourites who are secure from the annoyance of the law — and that notion takes a long while to dislodge from men's minds, because it is one they hug as a comfort to them selves. " He died, fortified with the sacraments of the Church," runs the Catholic phrase ; "he died, believ ing in Christ as the only Sin-bearer and Substitute," runs the orthodox Protestant equivalent — and in both cases the meaning is that God enters His judgment according to the belief professed, and not according to the plain standards of personal merit or demerit. From aU these vain delusions — which, between them, have been responsible for immeasurable harm — we turn to the sanctified commonsense of the Book of Proverbs, which declares again and again the certainty of recom pense, the prevailing power of God's holy statutes : " Evil pursueth sinners," we read, "but the righteous shaU be recompensed with good." " The wicked earneth deceitful wages : but he that soweth righteous ness hath a sure reward." "He that is stedfast in righteousness shaU attain unto life ; and he that pursueth evil doeth it to his own death." " Behold, the righteous shaU be recompensed in the earth : how much more the wicked and the sinner." Such sayings meet us on almost every page of this ancient coUection of maxims, and they might be multiplied indefinitely, showing how far the Hebrew nation had traveUed in insight since the old-time legend had thought it possible for Jacob to secure the protection of Jehovah on a purely commercial basis, into which no moral con siderations entered at aU. The question is, do we believe in this rule of recompense, this unfailing process of Divine justice ? 52 The Certainty of Recompense The fact of the matter would seem to be that in practice every one of us more or less frequently — I will not say more or less habituaUy — disbelieves in it. We think that we can evade that unfaUing law, escape or circumvent its action, or that an exception wiU be made for our especial benefit, and are most reluctant to let that delusion go. Let me remind you of the familiar passage in the " Seven Lamps of Architecture," where Ruskin inveighs agains the idea of liberty as something impossible. " There is no such thing in the universe," he exclaims. " There can never be. The stars have it not ; the earth has it not ; the sea has it not ; and we men have the mockery and semblance of it only for our heaviest punishment." Now it is not difficult to see that in denying liberty to man, who is a living soul, on the ground that there is no such thing in inanimate nature, Ruskin is misled by a false analogy and by a love of rhetoric ; but he might have said with entire truth, " Look at the stars, the earth, the sea — aU are swayed by unbreakable physical law ; and do you think that it is otherwise with the ethical law, that its commandments can be disregarded with impunity, or circumvented with any hope of success ? " The world is just, because it is under the governance of God ; and this certainty of recompense, proclaimed with so much sober emphasis in the Book of Proverbs, is one which we may disregard if we please, but only to be taught its truth in the hard and painful school of experience. " The labour of the righteous tendeth to life ; the increase of the wicked to sin." " Though hand join in hand, the evil man shaU not be unpunished ; but the seed of the righteous shaU be delivered." Over and over again the same clear, confident note — " There shall no mischief 53 The Way of Understanding happen to the righteous : but the wicked shall be filled with evU." Once more, do we believe it, or is not the statement far too absolute and unqualified ? Does not every day see merit slighted, virtue unrewarded, innocence abused, patient, plodding honesty exploited, while trickery sits triumphant, crowned with success, smiled on and flattered by the world, and the wicked flourish like a green bay tree ? How thoroughly na'ive, we exclaim, one must be to subscribe to these copy-book maxims about no mischief happening to the righteous, while the evil shall not go unpunished — statements calculated to provoke smiles, but very bitter ones ! Why, here is this man who has never been anything but an unscrupu lous gambler, with an inborn hatred of work, and we all know how his lucky deals in rubber and oil have made him fabulously wealthy, so that he has aU that heart can wish ; while there are the multitudes of hard working, hard-living men, glad enough to have work and health, and everlastingly afraid that one or the other will fail and they and their families be reduced to penury. No, no — the rewards are not given out with an even hand, or any pretence of fairness : the clever, unprincipled rogue has so often and so evidently the best of it, he escapes so many trials and troubles — the empty-headed seem all the lighter for climbing ; as Mr. John Masefield says in his new tragic poem, and with such seeming truth- — Heartless is ever swift at making friends, Heartless plucks honey from the evil time, The heartless soul makes many bells to chime : Joy-bells and death-bells, wedding-bells and dirges ; Heartless is one of God's appointed scourges. 54 The Certainty of Recompense Nay, is it not a fact attested by the central event in history — the multitudes clamour for and obtain the release of Barabbas, while Jesus Christ is nailed to the cross ? " Now Barabbas was a robber." What, in the light of aU this, becomes of our facile doctrine of Divine justice and unfailing recompense ? What have we to say in answer to this plea ? Only one thing — that if we will apply false standards, we shaU undoubtedly arrive at false results ; and the standards we have so far applied are false, the results at which we have been glancing are superficial and misleading. Jesus Christ, with His clear, penetrating vision, saw into the very heart of truth when He said, " Verily, I say unto you, that they have their reward." " Have," mark you, not " wiU have." In spite of appearances to the contrary, the world, being God's world, really gives us aU what we pay for — just that, and only that ; we get our return, as has been well said, in the same currency as we insist upon using. I grant you that the man who puts outward success above everything else stands a pretty good chance of obtain ing it ; for him the plaudits, for him the cheers, the limelight, the popularity, the flood of newspaper paragraphs — exactly : he has his reward, he has got the wages he has worked for, perhaps intrigued for, abased himself for — just that, and nothing else. But in his feverish pursuit of these things he has not had time to aim at other satisfactions — at an inner peace and a harmony not of the world's giving ; at storing his mind with the world's best, possessions which cannot pass away and which have a wondrous power of cheer ing and enlivening old age. Not for him the harvest of ingathered thought, or the serenity of the lightened 55 The Way of Understanding soul, or the quiet joy of the religious : he has played for other stakes, has won, and in winning proved himself the loser, for these things which he has so eagerly striven for are not those that abide. It is just the same with those who in our restless day seek above aU the gratification of the senses : only let desire be keen enough, and there is every likelihood that it wUl not go without fulfilment ; the crazy pleasure-seeker, too, wiU have his reward, but it is a reward which, so far from bringing him lasting joy, or sustaining the true part of him, turns to bitterness and ashes in his mouth, and leaves him, with the real prizes of life ungrasped, self-cheated out of what alone makes life worth living — worth having been lived, which is even more important, for it is in retrospect upon our days that our judgment grows most remorselessly — or may be remorsefuUy — keen. And so it is aU the way through : set your heart on power, resolve to be rich, and the chances are that you wiU have your reward, that your heart's desire will be granted you ; but if that has been your end-aU and be-aU, you wiU inevitably have missed other things by the way, too preoccupied to stoop and pick them up. The life of culture, the life of the affections, the life of the spirit — do you say, " What's the good of aU that ? There's no money in it " ? Very weU, the world does not force these gifts on those who do not seek them, who in fact openly despise them : yet shaU a time come when great possessions prove powerless to console the starved inteUect, the starved heart, the starved soul, and the master of vast riches would give anything if he could occupy his mind with the tastes he has never thought it worth cultivating, or had a heart to pour his 56 The Certainty of Recompense heart's troubles into, or could enter at wiU into the presence of that God whom he had frankly neglected and deemed negligible in his exclusive concern with material things. And on the other hand, when the Book of Proverbs reiterates the conviction . that the righteous shaU be recompensed, we may candidly admit that the writers did not mean rewards to be measured in cash or popular recognition. They, too, saw more deeply into life and human nature — they were perfectly aware that the man of high principle is no match for the rogue in the mere race for the prizes that are seen and touched ; but they knew of better and more satisfying joys than these can bring — the good name, the unsullied conscience, the heart at peace with itself and God — and these are prizes which, though they are not of the world's bestowal, or perhaps because of that reason, no one ever labours for in vain. The bubble fortune won in a speculation some other speculation may burst in an instant, and disperse to the four winds of heaven ; but the heavenly treasure of God's " weU done " no one can deprive us of, nor, of course, need we wait for another life in order that it may be ours. Tell me, who remem bers, or particularly wants to remember, the Barney Barnatos, the Alfred Beits, and the rest of the South Africa-cum-Park Lane millionaires ? And who forgets, or is likely to forget, the David Livingstones, Dr. Barnardos, Father Damiens ? Each of these two groups strove for one thing — and each got that thing ; and which was more worth striving after and spending one's energies upon, no one looking on has the slightest doubt. Which of them are the failures, when we weigh up the net results of their hves ? Do they not pro- 57 The Way of Understanding claim, in language there is no misunderstanding, " how vain unreality is, how unsubstantial is selfishness " as a basis of life ; and, " on the contrary, how enduring and gracious are truth and love " ? But I turn to the other side of the reckoning. From very, very old times good people have been sorely per plexed, and their faith tried, by the seeming impunity of evil-doers, the strange success which attends their nefarious enterprises, the unchecked assurance with which they flaunt the laws of God. Surely, if there were a God such as we are taught to believe in, we argue, He would intervene, and vindicate His majesty by inflicting the punishment so richly deserved. That a human monster like Leopold of Belgium should hve past the appointed span, meet with no hindrance in his criminal career, amass his blood-stained millions, gratify his shameful appetites, and finaUy die peacefuUy in his bed, seems to render the doctrine of Divine recom pense a screaming satire upon the facts. You remem ber the way in which the Psalmist states the difficulty which has been felt by millions of people since his day : " I was envious of the arrogant, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. For there are no bands in their death, but their strength is firm. They are not in trouble as other men, neither are they plagued as other men. Therefore His people say, how doth God know ? and is there knowledge in the Most High ? " Yes ; but then comes the extraordinary conclusion : " When I thought how I might know this, it was too painful for me, until I went into the sanctuary of God." Exactly ; many things grow clear to us in the sanctuary of God that elsewhere prove an aching puzzle. What is the solution ? This, surely, that we are 58 The Certainty of Recompense moving on altogether too low a plane when we think of punishment only as something that happens to a man, and is outwardly visible to others as an act of Divine judgment ; both punishment and reward are, in the first place, something that happens in a man — happens with the same inevitableness with which all God's laws act in physical nature. It is no argument against the righteousness of God that He aUows His laws to be broken ; it would only be an argument if He aUowed the breach to go unpunished — and that never happens. It is not a case of waiting for some future vindication of God's statutes, either here or hereafter : the effects of each deed are implicit in the deed itself — the doing makes them explicit, and that instantaneously, without any expectant interval, so surely as by pulling the trigger of a loaded rifle you speed the bullet ; and this buUet has an unerring aim — the doer. We are at each instant free to do or forbear ; but the instant foUowing we have become the products of our choice, of our acts, irrevocably the better or worse. Recompense is so certain because it is immediate and automatic ; instead of saying, with the Italian proverb, " God does not pay each Saturday," the truth is rather that God pays on the instant, with the most punctilious accuracy of assessing our wages. The good resolution carried out the generous impulse obeyed, the base suggestion repelled, result there and then in a better man or woman, with increase of power, the consciousness of victory, and the inner buoyancy which always foUows when we have said, " I will because I ought ; and I can because I wUl." And, on the other hand, there is the corresponding punishment, swift, just, untarrying, which foUows in the wake of every ill given rein to ; 59 The Way of Understanding the. wrong-doer becomes at once a worse man, his finer instincts blunted, his vision impaired, his power of resistance to evil lessened, his spiritual vitality lowered — and whether the world sees or does not see, the fact, solemn, and even appalling, is there. And in the end the world does see, and shudders at the spectacle of decay. If you have ever read "The Picture of Dorian Gray," you are not likely to have forgotten the terrible moral of the close — how the man who had hidden the vileness of his hfe under a dazzling exterior, gay and exquisite, at last, in death, involuntarily yields up the secret that had been so carefuUy kept from the world's scrutiny : so scarred and marred by sin are his features that, when the servants found him, " it was not till they had examined the rings that they recognised who it was." I know of no sadder, truer lines than these of Mr. Watson's : We shape our deeds and then are shapen by them. To some frail heart a cruel gift we bring, Turn from our acts away, and think to fly them : Ah, theirs the stronger wing. They come upon our peace with sound of weeping, They find us though we hide in clefts and caves ; They are with us waking, they are with us sleeping, And rend us in our graves. But it is not upon this mournful note that we wUl close. Let us think rather of those, for they are an exceeding great army, who in their lives witnessed the good confession, fought the good fight, vanquished selfishness, indolence and cowardice, shrank from no sacrifices in the cause of right, in the cause of love, and have gone up on high, following in the footsteps of the Captain of their salvation, with the banner of the 60 The Certainty of Recompense Crucified waving above their host, and ask of them : " Was it worth it, the struggle, the pain, the giving- up ? " With one consent they return the answer, " Yes." " Would they do it and suffer it all over again? " we continue our questioning. Once more the answer — stronger, clearer — is, " Yes." " Have they received their reward at length ? " " No — not ' at length,' for there never was a moment when they had it not." And the army passes on, chanting their song of triumph : — " thanks be to god, who giveth us the victory over sin and death : through jesus christ our lord." 61 V THE WORTH OF WEALTH " The rich man's wealth is his strong city." — Prov. x. 15. " He that trusteth in his riches shall fall." — Prov. xi. 28. To-day our studies in Proverbs bring us to a subject on which I venture to think that, for all our famiharity with it, there is more confusion than on most in people's mind's — confusion, and unreconciled contradiction between theory and practice — I mean the worth of wealth. That is a very bad thing, because if once we believe that our religion teaches us a view which in every-day life we are totally unable to translate into practice, rehgion itself will lose its reality, and become at best only a kind of Sunday profession — a very empty profession of ideals we have not the slightest intention of following out or carrying into execution. That is almost the worst thing that can happen to religion ; it would be far better to disavow it altogether as imprac ticable — then try and frame rules which with an effort we can keep, and try to observe them. That we should pretend to think poverty desirable, when all the while we regard it as nothing less than our bounden duty to protect ourselves and those dependent upon us against it, only lays us open to suspicion — just as when we profess the greatest eagerness to enter a heavenly home whUe as a matter of fact we take every care to 62 The Worth of Wealth prolong our sojourn on earth. Do not let us utter sentiments or pretend to cherish them merely because they are supposed to be rehgious ; and since this question of material possessions is always with us, let us look it straight in the face, and deal candidly with it and with ourselves. It is true, to begin with, that our Lord's first beati tude, as recorded in Luke's Gospel, reads simply, " Blessed are ye poor," while in Matthew the blessing is pronounced upon the poor in spirit ; it is true that the former version represents probably what Jesus said, but the latter teUs us what He meant. " The poor " had become in His time an almost technical term, which had reference not so much to material want or destitution as to a certain religious disposition — a disposition which was met among the toiling multitudes rather than the luxurious and pampered classes. Jesus did not mean that to live below the poverty line, unable to afford the necessaries of life, was a blessed condition ; when He uttered the words which have so puzzled later generations, everybody understood their apphcation, which was to spiritual attributes — to that receptiveness, gratitude, trustfulness which flourish in humble dwellings rather than in town mansions and country houses. Jesus was deeply and constantly aware that there were grave dangers inherent in great possessions — that gold had a tendency to dazzle men's eyes, to bhnd them to spiritual realities, to impair their moral vision, to act as a dead-weight preventing the spirit from rising ; He knew — as who does not ? — that money is liable to abuse, but He nowhere condemned ownership in itself, neither did 63 The Way of Understanding He extol the poverty, e.g., of the prodigal in the far country — a poverty due to thriftlessness and riotous living — as a state to be desired. On the contrary, He made the prodigal acknowledge that when he was in his father's house, on the prosperous farm with its warmth and plenty, he had been in a better place. I say all this in order to remove, if I can, certain misconceptions of Christ's teaching which weigh heaviest upon tender consciences, as though He had condemned the owning of money or of those things for which money stands. It is never a case of choosing between commonsense and the Gospel ; on the con trary, the Gospel is the highest and purest common- sense. Think of the widespread calamity involved in a Liberator smash, or the stoppage of payment by the Birkbeck Bank — think what it means to realise, as scores and scores of decent, thrifty folk did, when some minor Building Society failed in South London two or three years ago, that their savings had gone irretriev ably, that the provision they had made for old age had vanished, and they had to begin the world over again : who will dare to add to such disaster the mockery of calhng it blessed ? And in every tragedy of suicide in middle-life, is not the first question put whether the victim was financiaUy involved or harassed ? We will not pretend to despise possessions or decry money, for the very good reason that it is indispensable : indis pensable for the necessities and comforts of hfe ; in dispensable for the carrying on not only of every industry and business, but for aU our philanthropic and religious agencies as weU. A committee is formed for -the promotion of Anglo-German friendship — and 64 The Worth of Wealth its first step is to appeal for a fund with which to pursue an effective propaganda ; on the other hand, let the income of a Missionary Society be diminished, and it has to curtail its sphere of action. WeU, now, from these preliminaries we turn to the Old Testament book with which we are principaUy concerned in these addresses, and we find that in its pages the subject of wealth looms pretty large, as is natural and indeed inevitable in a coUection of aphorisms and counsels for the guidance of life. There is no affectation of contempt for possessions in these chapters, embodying as they do the experience of a race remarkable for its keen practical intelligence. You may remember what I observed on a previous occa sion : the writers of these proverbs have much to say about wisdom, but they mean no abstract philosophy, but the science and art of life. Thus, in the great eighth chapter, where Wisdom herself is speaking, bidding men to take fast hold of her, she commends herself in these terms : " Riches and honour are with me, yea, durable riches." There is no reproach in wishing, by one's own honourable exertions, to rise from the ranks of Ul-paid or slenderly-paid labour, to make and keep a comfortable home for those nearest to us, to have no need for material anxieties, to have a margin for books, for music, for travel, to be able to contribute to rehgious causes, and help support this or that movement we have at heart. To be able to do these things is a very creditable ambition ; to take that ambition away would be to cut at the very root of civilised society. So the duty of industry, on which the writers of Proverbs so strongly insist, is reinforced 65 E The Way of Understanding by the reflection, " He becometh poor that dealeth with a slack hand : but the hand of the dUigent maketh rich." The reader is admonished to lay by for the inevitable rainy day, when some extra resources will be wanted, and be found to make all the difference, in an aphorism like the foUowing : " The rich man's wealth is his strong city : the destruction of the poor is their poverty." And lest a man should rely overmuch on his own powers and the strength of his own exertions, and forget the Giver of all, we read : " The blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich, and He addeth no sorrow therewith." Now in aU this there is a perfectly undis guised appreciation of ownership and its solid satis factions : to be out of the reach of carking care, of sordid anxieties, so that a man may have his energies free for something else than the dreary struggle to make ends meet — this is in the frankest manner held up as a consummation devoutly to be wished, and the counsel of these old-time sages is that men may take thought to attain it. For my part, I could wish that these practical issues were realised a good deal more clearly by those who wiU presently, in a few years' time, find themselves with every kind of responsibility to face ; if only young men at the time when they are going out into the world would keep this thought weU fixed in their minds — that what they qualify themselves to be and to earn in that opening period wiU be one of the decisive, deter mining factors for the rest of their lives — a good many of the troubles and even tragedies of later life might be avoided. So long as the commodities of life are cal culated in money terms — so long as money means opportunities of health, culture, educational facilities, 66 The Worth of Wealth and the rest, that are not to be had without — it wiU be right and fit for men and women to seek to raise their earning capacity, to make themselves worth a decent income, which wUl enable them to make the most of themselves, and to do the best by those dependent on them. It is worth remembering that the gentle Charles Lamb, who was as far as anyone could be from a passion for riches, saw in money the equivalent of "health and liberty and strength," while Plato could soberly state that " the possession of wealth contributes greatly to truth and honesty." You have only to put it to yourselves negatively — the lives of men, women and chUdren that might be saved year-in and year-out, but for the lack of means to purchase medical attendance, strengthening diet, sojourn in a sanatorium — to appre ciate Lamb's point of view ; it is perfectly true, and why not admit it, that there are hundreds of thousands of deserving folk in this land of ours who would say — and that in respect of a very trifling increase of income— Oh the little more, and how much it is, And the httle less, and how far away ! But now, while we find in the Book of Proverbs this commonsense view of the value of possessions, the worth of wealth, quite clearly and unambiguously expressed, let me direct your attention to what, under the circum stances, is aU the more remarkable — I mean, the entire frankness and insight with which the same book recognises the other side there is to all this. The same book, I say, which declares that " The rich man's wealth is his strong city," states as uncompromisingly that " He that trusteth in his riches shall faU," and that " riches profit not in the day of wrath." We read, on 67 E 2 The Way of Understanding the one hand, that " the crown of the wise is their riches," but on the other the warning words, " Riches are not for ever ; and doth the crown endure unto aU generations ? " Material comforts, as we have seen, are by no means despised or undervalued by these writers — yet they also admonish us, " Weary not thy self to be rich," and " He that maketh haste to be rich shaU not be unpunished." So you see we have here a very balanced and sane philosophy of wealth, doubly valuable because it is free from every trace of other worldly contempt for the things money can buy. If only we were as keenly conscious of life's un- purchasables, of the things which money cannot buy ! Think of them ! This seems to me to be the most common — I had almost said the most vulgar — error people make with regard to this subject : they imagine that because money can do admittedly so much, it can do everything, and is therefore the one thing to be taken seriously ; and that mistake is common both to the capitahst hasting to be rich no matter by what dubious methods, and to the labourer who really fancies that the whole problem of happiness is to be solved by wages — though I confess that, seeing how much wages mean to the labourer, and how far they have to go, my sympathies are a good deal with him. Nevertheless, the limits to what money will do or purchase are quite clearly and even rigidly drawn ; and the man who makes money-getting his whole aim and purpose in life always seems to me like the owner of a fine mansion who should live in the basement aU his days, leaving the noble apartments above all unused — and not even suspecting their existence. And to begin with, to go back to a thought I ex- 68 The Worth of Wealth pressed last week, it is quite true here as elsewhere that if you set your heart on any one particular thing — let us say, in this instance, wealth — the chances are that you wiU have your reward, that your heart's desire wiU be granted to you : but if that has been anyone's end-aU and be-aU, he will inevitably have missed other things by the way, too preoccupied with money-making to stoop and pick them up. Occasion ally one meets a man of this type, who after thirty or forty years of this sort of existence retires from busi ness, only to discover that he has no use for his new found leisure, since he has no taste for anything but the one pursuit he has now given up. It is too late for him to acquire new tastes, to develop sides of himself he has studiously neglected ; and being unable to derive enjoyment from literature or science or music, having never interested himself in reforms which might now absorb his energies, having insufficient culture to feel the appeal of travel, and possessing no resources in a religion he has allowed to grow unmeaning to him, he drags out his remaining years in boredom, realising too late how httle money can do even to relieve his permanent ennui. Again, if there is one spectacle calculated to excite an equal measure of distaste and pity, it is that of the man who has made his pile, goes on adding steadily to it, and all the time has no idea how to spend what he has acquired — to whom nature and art are alike sealed books, kingdoms he cannot enter because he has not the key — the man who is a boor and a barbarian on a thousand or five thousand a year, his capacities of enjoyment quite conceivably lower than those of his pound-a-week employee. What does he get out of life, after aU ? He has not imagination 69 The Way of Understanding enough to live in the best style even on the material side : his house will stiU reflect in its very furnishings his crudity, the cramped condition of a mind that has never developed ; aU the finer pleasures of existence — which may be had on a mere fraction of his income — pass him by untasted, and when he departs this life, the real inscription on his expensive tombstone, visible to all seeing eyes, is, " Born a man, died a money-bag." Money cannot buy the best things, but it can pur chase all the worst, all that lead to the soul's undoing — there is its lure and its danger : irresponsibly used, it will minister to every one of man's lower and lowest desires, to senseless ostentation and luxury, laziness and love of ease, to the evasion of all serious responsi bilities and duties, to the pursuit of every depraved appetite. Seriously speaking, few people can bear the test of great possessions, and we may congratulate our selves that we are not among those so tested. Here is a certain volume of water, or the steam in a boiler, and by the pressure upon it power is generated : remove the pressure, and the power disappears. It is so with men : without pressure they will rarely put forth their full capacity — remove it altogether, and their life becomes self-indulgent, its fibre slackens, its edge grows dull. We see to-day perhaps a greater number of people than ever before in the world's history whose over-endowment with worldly goods is a sheer curse to them and to society at large — people who know no serious burden, who find themselves with no other task set them than to invent new and ever more costly methods of pleasuring ; and if in the discharge of that task they frequently degrade and demorahse others, they themselves are surely to be pitied as well, 70 The Worth of Wealth for while they exhaust aU their ingenuity in devising fresh ways of spending what they have not toiled for, they get precious httle joy — to say nothing of happiness — out of it. When we read of, and blush for, the costly stupidity of a freak-dinner costing an incredible amount per head, does anyone imagine that the host or any of his guests gets as much pleasure from such a desperate attempt to tickle their jaded palates as any working- class family sitting down to the meal the father has laboured for and the mother has prepared ? The fact is that what comes to us for nothing brings us no thriU of life, and it is not surprising that those seeming favourites of fortune who evade the law which com mands us to earn the right to live by service and sacrifice, should not find life particularly worth living. And the things which people barter in exchange for money — what bad bargains they make ! The coarsened dispositions, the stains upon their consciences, the sense of mean actions meanly done, great oppor tunities unworthily slighted, ignoble compromises readfly entered into — what a depressing tale it makes, and would we in cold blood be prepared to pay the same price ? If you have read that wise and witty book, " The Comments of Bagshot," you wiU remember how this very topic crops up, and how Bagshot triumphantly demonstrates that quite average persons wiU not buy prosperity at the cost of self- respect. How would it be, he asks, if things were so arranged that the heir to a property had also to take over the character, disposition and appearance of the testator ? Pardon a longish quotation : — " Supposing X.," he said, naming a notorious millionaire, 71 The Way of Understanding " left you the whole of his millions on condition that you took his cruel chin and snub nose and rascally disposition, would you accept them ? " The answer was a more emphatic than polite negative. " Which means," pursued Bagshot quietly, " that you would not for all his money change places with him. But let us take a less acute case not involving present company. Would my charming niece, Molly, who is sadly impecunious, and greatly desires to marry a most deserving but wholly unendowed young officer, take her Aunt Sarah's thousand a year if she had also to assume her honoured countenance and evangelical disposition ? " . . . Swiftly we judged, and declared that Molly would go penniless all her days, scrub floors, sweep crossings, and die at the last in a workhouse rather than take up that forbidding heritage. Bagshot pursued the theme with a wealth of illustration. Was there any painter, poet, musician worth his salt who would exchange his talents for the endowed Philistinism of Mr. T. ? (The initial concealed an extremely undesirable personality.) The offer would scarcely tempt even a starving journalist. And so, in short, they came to the unanimous con clusion that almost everybody is quite convinced that no money can possibly compensate for the loss of beauty, health, happiness, good temper, and that aU that really mattered in life was inaccessible to the money motive. Wealth, we agreed, can command all the worst things, but hardly any of the best. It has blemished and tarnished many a name — it is quite powerless to cleanse one that is blemished ; it has inflamed and incited men's hearts to the lowest deeds — it has never inspired an act of heroism, of self-sacrifice, of generous passion, for acts so inspired would at once lose their heroic, or generous, or unselfish quality. It can instigate treason — it cannot encourage loyalty, for a loyalty needing such encouragement would not be worthy the 72 The Worth of Wealth name. AU the money in the world wUl not purchase a heart at peace with itself and God ; all the money in the Bank of England would fail to create a fine thought, or to kindle a high ambition, or to add to the world's treasures of immortal song, or music, or painting. Great pictures fetch " fancy prices," for the simple reason that there is literaUy no cash standard to deter mine their value. A thinker of world-wide reputation like Professor Eucken, of Jena, after a lifetime's strenuous devotion to the deepest problems, is awarded the Nobel prize, and we are delighted ; but would the chance of winning that very handsome award — a fortune of some £8,000 — have produced Eucken's works ? No, no ; the world's finest achievements owe their existence to some other stimulus, they have not been executed for material emoluments, but in response to some other and more heavenly caU, which they who heard it dared not disobey. And the greatest motive power of aU — religion, and especiaUy the religion of the Cross — could never have originated in a money atmo sphere, has won its victories through the instrumentality of those whose eyes were fixed upon some brighter radiance than that of gold, and has ever found its staunchest votaries among men and women who found the true values of life elsewhere than in its cash values. Let us neither despise nor over-estimate possessions, seek them as a means, but not as an end of living, administer them as a trust from God, shun the dangers with which too frequently they are fraught, and pray for the advent of that better time when neither want nor waste wiU be known, but humanity itself be the great ossessor of all the earth's resources. In_the mean- 73 The Way of Understanding time, what wiser petition than that of the old writer in the Book of Proverbs : " Give me neither poverty nor riches ; feed me with the food that is needful for me : lest I be fuU and deny Thee, and say, Who is the Lord ? " To which we may link on the Saviour's words, who admonished us to lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven, to cultivate a filial spirit, gentle hearts, trustfulness, obedience, love — possessions incor ruptible ; for where our treasure is, there wUl our hearts, there will our home, be also. 74 VI THE MEDICINE OF MIRTH " A merry heart doeth good like a medicine : but a broken spirit drieth the bones." — Prov. xvii. 22. In thinking of the subject on which I am to speak to you this morning, a reminiscence came suddenly into my mind, which perhaps wiU form the best introduc tion. AU the day long our mule-drawn carriage had been taking us uphiU, from a little above the level of the Lake of Geneva, until the grey Hospice of the St. Bernard came into sight. We had started on a hot August morning, and the temperature had grown oppressive ; then, suddenly, a perceptible drop — a keen and searching air — announced that we had crossed the snow-line. Scantier and scantier became the vegetation until it disappeared altogether, colder and colder the air, and at last we moved in mid- August among the eternal snow and ice, so that we were very glad to reach our destination. What a life the monks on the St. Bernard live, with ten months' unbroken winter, exposed to appalling rigors of climate, while even in their wintry summer the surface of the little lake near the monastery was frozen ; a life full of privations, hardship, unremitting duties, which none can endure for more than nine or ten years, after which 75 The Way of Understanding those who survive are dismissed to a gentler sphere of service, but generaUy in impaired health. Yet, as we crossed the gate, and proceeded along the grim corridor, a most unexpected sound met our ears ; from the piano in the Common Room (a gift, by the way, of King Edward's), there came a sparkling melody, merry and vivacious, the lightest and cheeriest of music. For a moment it seemed oddly out of place in those solemn surroundings ; but then, as one reflected, one felt that, on the contrary, it was just here that such an antidote to gloom and depression was wanted, and one blessed the kindly thought of the English monarch who had commemorated his visit as Prince of Wales by bestowing such a boon where it would bring so much joy. Many were the lively tunes played that evening, and I suppose on many evenings, on the heights of the St. Bernard ; and we visitors had the opportunity of testing, in our intercourse with the monks, the wisdom of the old writers in the Book of Proverbs, who declared that " a merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance," and " a merry heart doeth good like a medicine." That is a good doctrine, essentiaUy a sound doctrine, and one is glad to find it among the maxims of this old-world collection. Here is a book which, on the one hand, is distinctly religious, and on the other hand distinctly practical, a book which deals with the conduct of life in almost every aspect ; it has plenty to say on the serious business of living, its duties, difficulties, trials and disappointments — but in the midst of other and more strenuous topics mirth is happily not forgotten, indeed, it is commended in very whole-hearted fashion. None knew better than the 76 The Medicine of Mirth framers of these counsels that each day brings its claims, its tasks, its worries and troubles, that for no one does existence roll quite smoothly, without ups and downs, and sometimes crises and sorrows that leave deep traces ; yet in spite of all these, or perhaps on that very account, they praised the merry heart, the blithe and buoyant spirit, as a possession to be envied, a gift to be cultivated. That they did so is proof both of their real wisdom and their real humanity ; just as on the other hand the most inhuman thing in Ecclesiastes is the remark, "I said of laughter, It is mad, and of mirth, What doeth it ? " Your pessimist is not content to be miser able himself ; he is offended that other people should presume to be having a good time of it, and to indulge in happy smiles and laughter, instead of wringing their hands and deploring their lot : the only thing that consoles him is the reflection that his carefuUy cultivated sense of wretchedness shows him to be a very superior person, while those who enjoy life are plainly mad ! It was the same with the Pharisees ; they practised so many abstinences and mortifications — which made them feel so very virtuous and uncom fortable — that they were terribly annoyed with normal, ordinary mortals who lived ordinary, normal lives in which, along with toil and trouble, cheerfulness and humour were not wanting. Such people they branded as " sinners " ; and their self -righteousness received a terrible shock when they found that Jesus frequented the society of these freer spirits, accepted their hos pitality, shared their harmless enjoyment, and showed by His general demeanour that He by no means took a sad or gloomy view of man's nature or destiny. 77 The Way of Understanding When they said, with eloquently raised eyebrows, "He eateth with publicans and sinners," they felt that no condemnation could be more scathing or final. What He, in His turn, thought of them and their behaviour comes out with sufficient clearness in the words, " Be not as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance." Nothing is more characteristic of His outlook than the harmonious words which close the story of the prodigal's restoration, " And they began to be merry." It is truly strange, in view of our Lord's plain words and avowed attitude, that there should be to this day professed foUowers of His who look askance, with disapproving eyes, upon aU that savours of humour and innocent gaiety. I grant you that there may be some religions whose very principle and essence it is to inculcate a dreary, dismal disposition, which turns suspiciously from all joyf ulness as a snare of the Evil One ; but the religion of Jesus Christ is Good News — and it is not particularly good news to anyone that this world is the devil's, and that we ought to pass through it with corrugated frowns and every manifestation of aversion. It is an infinite pity that so many good people should have imagined and acted on the assump tion that religion was necessarily and predominantly a gloomy thing, for all highly vital natures— and especially the young — instinctively hate gloom, and are repelled by a religion which mistakenly proclaims the holiness of ugliness. I see much more to be admired in the exuberance of a Salvation Army service, in a hymn every verse of which ends with " Hallelujah, what a Saviour ! " than in all the decorous, unsmiling grey-in-grey that passes as good form in religion. Who should be buoyant, good-humoured, glad-eyed, if 78 The Medicine of Mirth not Christian folk ? Do not, I beg of you, let us identify religion with owlish and sepulchral airs, or even with particularly plain and unbecoming garb, as though an offence to taste were really an outer sign of godliness — the connection is quite imaginary. I have always sympathised with Dante Gabriel Rossetti's quaintly despairing remark when his gifted sister Christina became a novice of an Anglican convent at Clewer : " Here is Christina, who has entered the rehgious life, and made herself look exactly like a penwiper ! " And I am bound to say that one has known some exceUent religious people conscientiously and deliberately affect a style that cast a chiU over a summer's day. What a mistake ! Jesus said — if I may modernise His words, while retaining their mean ing, — " But you, when you are engaged in the exercise of your religion, let your manner, your looks and even your dress attest your cheerfulness." The truth is that all the sombreness, drabness, melancholy, that too often are associated with religion, are the result of sombre and terrifying doctrines im ported into Christianity by others than its Divine Founder. Life is serious enough for most of us — we need not dim its hghts and deepen its shadows. Sin is real and actual enough — we need not invent artificial transgressions, and scowl mirth out of existence. I can quite understand that where the old dogmas of total depravity, a wrathful Deity and everlasting torments were thoroughly believed, human existence was overshadowed by a perpetual fear ; but we have shaken off these nightmare imaginings, which owe nothing to Christ, and have needlessly darkened myriads of lives. The truth is, as Mr. Brierley once 79 The Way of Understanding expressed it in The Christian World, that too many theologians have been dyspeptic to begin with, and their unfortunate biliousness coloured their doctrine. It is not uncharitable but the reverse to account for what is most repugnant in Calvinism by Calvin's truly atrocious health ; and lesser men than the great arch- dogmatist might have given forth a more cheerful theology, had they been cured of dyspepsia. But one serious fact is this — that a gloomy and for bidding religion wiU always turn to gloomy pleasures of its own, it wiU inevitably be a persecuting and intolerant rehgion. Calvin's reign over Geneva was httle short of a reign of terror, and culminated in a deed — the burning of Michael Servetus — which even in those days was regarded with horrified aversion ; and his successors to this day have ever been eager to indulge in heresy-hunts and the boycott of those who were honestly unable to repeat their inteUectual shibboleths. How a httle saving sense of humour would have prevented all these futile persecuting tactics ! Has it ever struck you how terribly unhumorous — I use the term ad visedly—bigotry always is ? Take the classical example, the Athanasian Creed, with its long, rambling, self-contradictory statements about the mystery of the Trinity — quite unintelligible stuff of no particular importance — which, it says, " except every one do keep whole and undented, without doubt he shaU perish everlastingly." Now aU I have got to say about such an assertion is that it is just ridiculous, neither more nor less. What its author lacked was exactly that merry heart which doeth good like a medicine — a glimmering sense of the ludicrous, which would have shown him how reaUy sUly it was to 80 The Medicine of MirLi suppose that God would inflict everlasting perdition upon a single soul for not holding these particular views about the Trinity, right or wrong. And, if men had realised this, just this — that, after aU, our mere opinions concerning Him cannot greatly matter to the Most High God, what floods of blood and tears would have remained unshed, what martyrs' stakes unlit, what horrible wars — miscalled wars of rehgion — un waged ! Nothing stood Martin Luther in better stead than his rough and homely humour ; it was this gift which enabled the reformer to pierce through many solemn disguises of ecclesiasticism, to smile at the Pope's thunders of excommunication, and to bear loads and anxieties which otherwise must have crushed him. But I wish to turn, if I may, to the value of this blessed gift of the merry heart in our every-day concerns. Some months ago there feU into my hands a novel which, without being in any way great, struck me as being a particularly charming production, entitled " A Spirit of Mirth." It was not at aU a rollicking book, but portrayed the battles, struggles and victories of a soul so happily balanced as to see and to seize instinct ively the brighter aspects of an existence which knew hunger and cold and poverty and temptation, and a particularly severe trial over which only an irre pressible buoyancy could have triumphed. It is a great help in the routine, the worries and besetments of existence to be able to detect the laughable side, not to take everything, not even ourselves, with unvarying seriousness, and so to overcome depression, to conquer disappointments, to smile bitterness away. After all, this means just a sense of proportion — and that sense can be encouraged, strengthened arid 81 F The Way of Understanding fostered like any other. There are people who think they are serious when they are merely duU ; and alas, often that dulness is cultivated, too, from a mistaken idea that merriment is undignified,; until what at first was merely an affectation has become second nature. But there is no merit, as Jesus told us, in being of a sad countenance ; there is no superiority in not joining in harmless gaiety. Let us lay hold of a sense of pro portion, and it is wonderful how it will increase our patience, our tolerance, our good-humour, and how at the same time we shall meet with the same qualities at the hands of our fellows. I put it to you that the sum of real troubles is at most half of those which men and women quite unnecessarily manufacture and aggravate for themselves — and aU for want of a little healing commonsense. It is really lack of humour which makes people so ready to take offence, to construe harmless words and acts into intentional slights, to remain so bitterly incapable of forgiving even real affronts or injuries ; it is lack of humour, I mean, which makes these things bulk so large in our sight, when so often we might laugh them off, laugh them out of memory and so out of existence. It was the same fatal deficiency which made people argue that every sin, being committed against the infinite majesty of God, was itself infinitely sinful, and therefore liable to infinite punishment. I hope I am the last man whom even his opponents would charge with teaching light views of sin— but just imagine the great God of the Universe being infinitely angry with such as ourselves for every trifling transgression, and not to be appeased except by an infinite sentence of doom ! The thing is too foolish to survive being thought of. 82 The Medicine of Mirth I am inclined to agree with Mr. Chesterton when he says that " the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear," and I find it easy to believe that the Heavenly Father many a time views our childish attempts to evade His laws, to defy His wiU, our disobediences and truancies, with the same half- wistful smile with which an earthly parent observes the naughty pranks of his youngsters — pranks which must not go uncorrected, but which in their sheer foolishness have their genuinely amusing side. Now, I suggest, we might take a similar view of each other — yes, and sometimes even of ourselves : it is well to be able to stand a little away from ourselves with humorous scrutiny, to see and say — as all but the most obtuse and priggish must do many a time — " How absurdly I behaved then ! " or " How perfectly ludicrous that was of me ! " and so to mingle self-reproach with a little self-derision. Beheve me, it is not at aU a bad way to self-amendment. And yet again, humour, ridicule if you like, is far and away the best weapon with which to pierce through the self-conceit of officialism, through pretentiousness and every manner of solemn make-believe. Dickens portrays the stupid pomposity of Bumbledom, and Bumbledom disappears in an avalanche of laughter. When honest mirth provoked by dulness or vanity shakes and cleanses the atmosphere, a good many conventional fabrics tremble and go down. No one could wield the lambent steel of satire with more terrific, yet wholesome, effect than the Apostle Paul. When he writes to the unruly Corinthians asking them to show indulgence with his foolishness, and adding, " For ye bear with the foolish gladly, being wise your- 83 F2 The Way of Understanding selves " — how uncomfortable his readers must have felt, and with what deadly precision he lanced the tumour of their conceit ! And, to go to quite another quarter, you remember how in the " Merchant of Venice," when the posturing, melancholy Antonio has given expression to the highly " superior " sentiment — I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano, A stage where every man must play a part, And mine a sad one — Gratiano, or rather the poet himself, bursts in with the healthy rejoinder : — Why should a man whose blood is warm within Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster, Sleep when he wakes, and creep into the jaundice By being peevish ? I tell thee what, Antonio, There are a sort of men whose visages Do cream and mantle like a standing pool, And do a wilful stillness entertain With purpose to be dressed in an opinion Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit . . . Exactly ; and the poet is most happy in his simUe of the standing pool, for stagnant water breeds corrup tion, and the sad countenance and dismal gravity are too often mere disguises assumed to hide far different dispositions ; they are, and always have been, part of the stock-in-trade of the type which for a pretence makes long prayers. And it is a fortunate circum stance that this is exactly the type which is most defenceless against ridicule — aU the dealers in super stition, whether it be the superstitions of priestcraft or of statecraft : it was the merciless shafts of Voltaire's 84 The Medicine of Mirth satire which killed the domination of the Roman Church in France, and I think myself that it was very largely the breath of laughter — indignant laughter, it is true — which put out the lurid flames of the orthodox hell. But it is above aU, as I have said already, in our daUy pursuits, with their friction, their monotony, their major and minor jars, that the merry heart is a posses sion devoutly to be desired — and a possession, let me hint it again, more insistently this time, which is far more easily within our reach than we are apt to imagine. Now listen. This probably sounds a hard doctrine to believe, but I feel convinced that you can discover its truth by practising it. Things go all awry, and how can you help being depressed ? But, my brother or sister, you are not simply so much plastic material, just to take the impress of outward circum stance ! Here is this wax cylinder, which we call a phonograph record, and when it revolves it plays this particular tune and no other. But you are not like that : the tune you play depends, in part at least, upon yourself — you can enliven even a dull theme, so I am told, by a tripping accompaniment. And so you need not be so entirely depressed even when things go provokingly wrong — as they will at times ; you need not luxuriate in grief, even though something grievous have befaUen you. Our own attitude to events matters at least as much as do the events themselves. And the world shows us very much the same face that we show to the world. We create our own atmosphere to a very large extent. It is a positive fact that by resolutely smiling at difficulties we put ourselves in a better position for surmounting them ; it is also a fact 85 The Way of Understanding that our facial expression is very much under our control, and that it lies with us whether we exhibit a dejected or a hopeful mien, whether we frown or let eyes and mouth and brow look serene. We think the feeling determines the expression ; as a matter of fact, it is just as true that the expression shapes and induces the feeling. And now I want simply to turn round the saying " A merry heart maketh a cheerful counten ance " into " A cheerful countenance maketh a merry heart." It may sound a paradox, but, like other seeming paradoxes, it is strictly true. One must needs in this connection quote Stevenson — a chronic invalid, suffering atrociously, yet deliberately pursuing what he called his great task of happiness, pursuing it as an act of decent gratitude to God, as an act of decent fairness to his fellows whom he did not wish to render miserable by exhibiting a fretful temper or giving way to low spirits. Dr. Kelman speaks rightly of Stevenson's " bright and daring gaiety," even in the darkest seasons : he would point his telescope right into the uttermost blackness — and discover a star. " Give us," he prays with and for his household, " to awaken with smiles, give us to labour smiling " ; and again, " Give us to go blithely on our business : help us to perform the petty round of irritating concerns with laughter and kind faces." And he understood his own case so well — " Werena my heart licht, I wad dee," he says, and doubtless it was the cultivation of brightness that did him good as a medicine, and kept him alive where a despondent patient would have succumbed years before. " Literally," he writes, after one of those attacks of haemorrhage, for which he invented a characteristic nick-name, " Literally, no 86 The Medicine of Mirth man has more whoUy outlived life than I : and still it's good fun." Friends, I do not say that we are to attain to quite such heroic heights, but we can imitate those who have done so. Let us preserve, and help others to preserve, the merry heart, the buoyant spirit, the hopeful disposition ; ward off the black demons of dejection, melancholy, despair ; let laughter and smiles and kindliness have as large a share as may be in our lives ; live as if we believed that Christ's Gospel really was tidings of great joy. " Have you ever contributed to the happiness of the world ? " asks one character of another in a German story ; " Yes," is the reply, " I have been very happy myself." I knew someone who was highly shocked by the answer, but I believe it contains an essential truth. For God's intent is that men, His children, should be happy, and the last thing a father grudges to his children is a spirit of mirth. For " melancholy," it has been weU said, " should be an interlude " at most ; " praise should be the per manent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half -holiday ; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live." Therefore let us choose hfe ; so shaU God's will be done not as an irksome task, but with joy and thanksgiving, and gladness reign on earth as it does in heaven. 87 VII THE PRICE OF TRUTH "Buy the truth, and sell it not." — Prov. xxiii. 23. In these Sunday morning talks about the Book of Proverbs we have had occasion again and again to insist upon the practical nature of its contents. These counsels deal with the problems and emergencies of every day, with the concrete and tangible realities of existence ; the writers give the kind of sensible advice which sensible people wiU take to heart in their own interests, because that is the way to get the most satis faction out of life, to avoid its pitfalls, to enjoy its true blessings, to turn its opportunities to best account. You could imagine a man who can look back upon an active and prosperous business career — a career which has widened his horizon, sharpened his powers of observation, brought him into constant contact with a great variety of people — you could imagine such a one, in the evening of his day, giving us his reflections on conduct and character in these shrewd and pointed aphorisms ; they all start from a basis of experience, and form what might be called a guide to success in life. We have incitements to industry, warnings against excesses and disordered desires, praises of temperance and self-control — often avowedly on quite utilitarian grounds ; while indolence, rash temper, entanglements The Price of Truth of finance or passion are warned against because they lead to disastrous results. It cannot be denied that one sometimes feels that virtue, in these chapters, wears rather too much of a prudential complexion — it is commended as a sound investment which will yield satisfactory returns. The advice is excellent so far as it goes, it is the embodiment of sterling commonsense — but we listen in vain for the heroic note, for any generous sentiment, any caU to unselfishness or disinterested service. One freely admits the merits of this plodding, respectable morality ; at the same time it soars to no great heights, it leaves certain deep-seated instincts in us unappealed to, practicaUy unrecognised. AU this makes more remarkable the utterance to which I would draw your attention this morning — " Buy the truth, and seU it not." Wedged in between warnings against the evil effects that attend gluttony and drunkenness come these startling words, a ray of sheer idealism, which lights up the whole page. Here are no calculations of profit as it is understood in the market-place and the counting-house ; here is no commendation of virtue on the ground that experience shows it to pay better in the long run than its opposite, nor the spirit which declares honesty to be the best policy — a maxim which might have been penned by any convicted pickpocket — but truth is praised for its own sake as a supreme possession, to be acquired and not to be parted with on any consideration ; it is like that pearl of great price which a merchant found, and in exchange for which he gave all that he had. It seems to me that this sudden and frankly un expected outburst of a purely idealistic sentiment in such 89 The Way of Understanding surroundings is in itself highly significant. There is this vein of idealism embedded in human nature, part of our inalienable endowment from on high, even while we may not be aware of it in ourselves or in those in whose midst we pass our days. We think that they and we are moved in the main by purely self-regarding considerations ; we are conscious, and see them conscious, of no particularly altruistic stirrings ; day succeeds day in the same struggle to maintain and increase our earn ings if we can, to keep to the windward side of adversity, to provide respectably for ourselves and ours, to buy and sell to best advantage, and there it seems to end. And yet that is only surface — a pretty hard surface, I grant you ; but let occasion arise, let a great emergency suddenly press its claims upon us, and it is astonishing how commonplace, ordinary humanity rises to it, responds unflinchingly to the call for unselfishness and fine conduct. Through that hard surface of concrete burst unsuspected floods of generosity, of kindliness, of heroism, there reveal themselves capacities for self- sacrifice that surprise us. You know there is never an accident of the mine or the sea, of fire or railway, but some obscure fellow-mortal exhibits quahties of cool courage, deliberate self-surrender, with which no one would have credited him, but which simply slumbered in the depths of his being, to be aroused in the hour of need. Oh, we're sunk enough here, God knows ! But not quite so sunk that moments, Sure tho' seldom, are denied us, When the spirit's true endowments Stand out plainly from the false ones, And apprise it if pursuing Or the right way or the wrong way, To its triumph or undoing. 90 The Price of Truth There are flashes struck from midnights, There are fire-flames noondays kindle, Whereby piled-up honours perish. Whereby swoln ambitions dwindle, While just this or that poor impulse Which for once had play unstified Seems the sole work of a lifetime That away the rest have trifled. Just this or that impulse called forth by some notable emergency, and given free play, reveals the truth about a man or woman in a flash, shows up the best that is in them, more effectively than years of monoton ous routine ; and of such unsuspected faculties, which reveal a famihar personage under quite a new and unfamiliar aspect, that love of truth for its own sake, of which our text speaks, the sense of its supreme and incomparable value, is not the least remarkable. We thought these writers of proverbs exclusively concerned with a fairly self-regarding morality, a wisdom mainly of this world — and lo ! here we come upon a most unworldly sentiment, an enthusiasm which extols truth above all earthly prizes and awards. And then, is it not a fact, and a very noteworthy fact, that it is such enthusiasms as these that speak to our instincts, that " find " us and move us, far more surely and powerfuUy than aU appeals to mere self-interest ? You point out what men will do and dare and endure for the sake of gain, or in order to satisfy some craving or appetite. Granted : but how much more men have done and dared and endured at the instance of quite unselfish motives — from love of country, love of man kind, love of God, love of truth. There is no danger, there is no suffering that has deterred patriots, re formers, bold thinkers, prophets and apostles, ay, and 9i The Way of Understanding myriads of humble souls that have beheld the beatific vision. They offer Spinoza, in his bare garret, a lucra tive academic appointment, on condition that he wiU say nothing to upset the creed of the estabhshed Lutheran Church — and he prefers poverty together with liberty to foUow truth ; they offer Giordano Bruno his life if he wiU recant his heresies, but he prefers to go to the stake and keep his allegiance to the truth untarnished. And the greatest dynamic in the world is the Cross of Christ, the symbol of His martyrdom for truth, and of truth's aU-conquering power. The fact is that deep down in our hearts — when we are really honest with ourselves — there is the intuitive certainty that truth is best for us, after all ; that we were meant to seek it and serve it, and that it cannot hurt us ; that, as the New Testament expresses it, we can do nothing against the truth, but with the truth. Of course there are any number of far more marketable commodities ; there are plenty of buyers for every kind of make-believe ; there are those who will be glad and grateful for pious fictions in the domain, either of religion, or in any other for the matter of that — who are nervously afraid of the truth, and eager to be fended off from reality. Instances of this kind of temper are only too plentiful ; let me name one or two. In the religious world it is notorious that there is an immense deal of popularity and outward success to be gained by anyone who will help large sections of the public to go on thinking that nothing has happened to shake the traditional conceptions of their grandparents. I daresay you have all heard the familiar story of the excellent lady who said to her minister, " Oh, Mr. 92 The Price of Truth So-and-so, even if there is anything in this ' Evolution ' or whatever you caU it, can't it be hushed up ? " The story may be fiction, but the attitude which it denotes is common enough. Any number of people will, for as long as it is possible, and far longer than is decent, deliberately keep themselves ignorant of the con clusions of modern scholars concerning the Bible, secretly wishing that even if there is anything in them, it might be hushed up, kept dark, left unmentioned ; and alas, so many religious teachers leave this subject carefuUy alone, keeping silence on topics with which their CoUege training and private reading have rendered them quite familiar, and excusing themselves with the threadbare phrase about the pews not being ripe for these things ! Well, aU I can say is that this aversion to facing the truth is fuU of danger ; for truth is like the tide of the ocean, and the poor attempts to keep it back, or sweep it back, are not only predestined to fail, but are doing an immense deal of mischief into the bargain. Suffer me, for a minute or two, to speak my mind quite freely upon this subject. The new knowledge of the Bible is being taught in every University, in every theological CoUege of any standing ; the facts are to be learned by anyone who wiU spend a shiUing on primers like those of Principal Adeney, Mr. Bernard SneU, Mr. Rhondda Williams, Dr. Boyd Carpenter — and now I see even a sixpenny book by Drs. Bennett and Adeney on " The Bible in the Light of the Higher Criticism " announced for publication. That being so, and the conclusions of scholarship being in the main no longer even in doubt, it is simply tragic that any body of Christian people should lend their countenance 93 The Way of Understanding to a kind of Bible Study — save the mark ! — which simply ignores the results of modern investigation, and which can only excite the contempt of educated people. The truth really does not wait upon our likes and dislikes ; but the worst thing that can happen to the Churches is that the impression should go forth that they cannot face facts. We might as usefully spend our energy and our substance on an attempt to rehabilitate the old Ptolemaic astronomy as the old uncritical view of the Bible — and with less peril. " Buy the truth, and sell it not," betray it not, scorn it not ; it is only from evasions, from suppressions, from self-deceptions that we have anything to fear, from building on foundations that will not bear ! And in quite another direction the same disinclina tion to read and accept clear facts may be found. The attempts made by a large portion of our Press to ignore or explain away the patent truth about the unhappy condition of Persia, and the inglorious part played in this matter by our own country, affords quite a startling object-lesson. By every conceivable means it has been sought to conceal what is quite palpable — that those who act for us have been outwitted by an unscrupulous partner in the unscrupulous game of diplomacy, while the interests of a weak and struggling nationality have been ruthlessly sacrificed. And all the desperate endeavours to get away from the real issue wiU not alter the facts, or avert the consequences ; for, believe me, it is better to buy the truth, to recognise it frankly, than to sell it — in the latter case we only seU ourselves. It is the same temper which stands in the road of every reform, it rises as a waU of defence behind 94 The Price of Truth which every kind of evil is safely sheltered. Wrong doers of most descriptions, the systematic exploiters of their feUow-creatures, can generally reckon upon the timidity of people who would rather not look at the truth if it happens to be unpleasant, or who, if they must look, wiU only do so through rose-coloured spec tacles. It is much more comfortable to ignore the facts about sweating, about overcrowding, about the horrors of the rubber traffic, about the ruthless strangling of Persia, and our share in the responsibility for it — much more comfortable for us, that is to say, though very much the reverse of comfortable for the victims of these abominations. It is the most difficult thing in the world to bring it home to the public that abuses exist, because to acknowledge their existence means to exert ourselves to abolish them. And it is only the spirit of truth that will lead to their abolition, and vanquish the powers of darkness. " Buy the truth " — but how, and where, and at what price ? WeU, there are many kinds of payment which we shaU have to make in order to come into possession of this shining gem. We shaU have to pay with patient and persevering study, to begin with, so far as real knowledge and understanding are concerned. Ours is an age of hurry and superficiality, tendencies which are nowhere mirrored so faithfuUy as in our feverish journalism. Fifty years ago, with books fewer and more expensive, with cheap reprints almost un known, there was a good deal of solid reading of solid books ; but to-day we want our information in tabloid form, quickly assimUated, paragraphs that can be taken in at a glance — and the result is that it was never, 95 The Way of Understanding perhaps, so easy to mislead vast numbers of the public by means of glaring misrepresentations. People who will not buy the truth, who wiU not pay what it is worth in hard thinking and reading, must be content with such shoddy imitations and perversions of it as flood the market. The purveyors of this kind of rubbish know their constituency, and take its measure with cynical accuracy; they know that these are people who are ignorant, and can easily be worked up into a panic or a war-scare, that they will believe the wildest inventions that can be circulated for party purposes, or in order to play the game of some powerful vested interest. Do you say, " What has all this to do with religion ? " But, friends, aU truth has religious value and religious sanctity ; and progress and weU-being are grievously delayed by an uninstructed democracy, by the type which cares only for sensational items pic turesquely served up, but has not the patience to pay for the knowledge of the truth' in steady and concen trated thought and study — and only the truth can make a people free. And again, those who would buy this possession will many and many a time have to pay in popularity and favour ; in any case — and to this rule there is no exception — they will have to set out with the deter mination that personal advantage, applause, the chance of preferment, shall not be allowed to weigh with them at all. The man who reasons within him self after this fashion, " Yes, I will buy the truth, provided it does not cost me too dear," has in his heart already sold it. What fills us with such admira tion in reading the story of natural science and its progress is the absolute devotion to truth, almost 96 The Price of Truth always in the teeth of prejudice and persecution, of the great pioneers, the path-finders, the innovators. They felt that they had no choice, that compromise was out of the question, and so they forged ahead through good report and evil report — chiefly the latter — believing in the absolute duty of loyalty to truth, and in its power to stand and prevail. Turn in what direction you wiU — astronomy, geology, biology — it has been the same tale, the tale of men who were quite ready to suffer for their convictions, assured that when the dust of controversy had cleared away, and the angry cries of obscurantists had died down, wisdom would be justified of her children. The scorn with which Darwin's great treatise was received, the superior manner in which it was dismissed as " un scientific," are matter of history; but the scorners and superior persons have long since been forgotten, while Darwin's name will be remembered for ever in the chronicles of human advance, enshrined in the pantheon of humanity's greatest sons. Yes, Truth requires from her votaries an absolute singleness of aim, a vision not to be deflected by glittering bribes or the fear of missing them. There is no story of modern times that shows such a perfect blending of courage, serenity and self-consecration to truth as the hfe of Bishop Colenso, the pioneer of the scientific study of the Old Testament in the English- speaking world. He had everything to gain by keeping his unorthodox conclusions to himself, and everything to lose by making them pubhc ; he had, after aU, only to keep quiet on this one topic, fuU as his life was of other interests ; but I do not think it ever occurred to him to shield himself or to save his career in the Church 97 g The Way of Understanding by cowardly silence. You remember his own account of the circumstances which first turned his mind to Old Testament criticism : " While translating the story of the Flood, I have had a simple-minded but inteUigent native look up and ask, ' Is all that true ? Do you reaUy believe that all this happened so — that aU the beasts and birds and creeping things upon the earth, large and small, from hot countries and cold, came thus by pairs and entered into the ark with Noah ? And did Noah gather food for them all, for the beasts and birds of prey, as well as for the rest ? ' My heart answered in the words of the prophet, ' ShaU a man speak lies in the name of the Lord ? ' / dared not do so." Reckless and malicious attacks, virtual deposition from his office, a general boycott followed, but could not deter him from foUowing along the path he believed, and rightly believed, to be the true one. " I trust," he wrote, " that I duly reverence both the Church and the Bible. But the truth is above both " ; and the one thing that pained him was to see how httle love of truth there was among those from whom he had hoped most. Well, he bore the obloquy, the isola tion, the loss inflicted upon him by bigotry, and to-day the views for which he suffered are those of educated people everywhere ; but it was he and such as he who paid the price of truth, and the least we can do is to cherish the possessions they bought at such a cost. But I must hasten on to my last — which is also my most important — point, though I shall have to content myself with treating it very briefly. It is not only truth in the sense of knowledge we want, but, above all, truth in action, in our relationships to each other, in 98 The Price of Truth our relation to God ; and for such truth we pay no less a price than life itself — not by laying it down in one act of renunciation, but by making it one continuous act of dedication. We must practise what is by no means easy — an entire and resolute candour with ourselves, a strict scrutiny of our own motives, we must exercise an untiring watchfulness over the springs of conduct ; we must, in one word, buy the truth by being true in thought and word and deed. Right opinions are very good and worth having, but right opinions by themselves have never yet saved a soul. During some great revivalistic campaign you have had httle cards thrust into your hands in the street by well-meaning, fussy people, bearing the inscription, " Get right with God," the idea being that you could do so once for aU by professing conversion and faith in the atoning merits of the Saviour's death. But there is no such short-and-easy method of " getting right " ; you do not buy saving truth by paying a stipulated amount across a celestial counter once, and then carry it away with you ; you have to keep on paying, day by day, hour by hour, and the price, as I already intimated, is nothing less than life — gentle, upright, courageous, equitable, dutiful, generous, forgiving. That alone is the true life, and we have not only to know the truth, but to live it. Do we ask in what way we are — I wiU not say, to achieve, but to aim at, such an ideal ? There is but one obvious answer — by foUowing after Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, Jesus Christ. We are none of us self-sufficient ; we need almost continu ally, in order to correct our own estimate of ourselves, the external standard of general opinion ; we need, 99 G 2 The Way of Understanding above aU, to keep our glance fixed upon that standard of ideal manhood which we have in the Person of our Lord. He is the Truth, not only about God, whose love we read and experience in Him, but the truth also about man, and man's relation to God, as it is meant to be. It is by His perfection that we measure and may correct our imperfection, by His attainment that we are to kindle our aspiration. And He, too, paid the price of truth, buying, not seUing it — the price of thought, the price of popularity, the price of life. May we keep His glorious humanity ever before us, calling and beckoning us on, tiU we all attain " unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ " — to the truth as it is in Christ Jesus. ioo VIII THE TEST OF PRAISE " The fining-pot is for silver, and the furnace for gold, and a man is tried by his praise." — Prov. xxvii. 21. The other day, when listening to that wonderful, ever-young veteran, Dr. Clifford, I was speciaUy struck by one among the many memorable observations that feU from his lips : " Cain," he said, " is at a discount nowadays ; he can't even get into respectable society unless he calls himself Abel." It was just one of those brilliant flashes of thought and phrasing that light up whole wide tracts, if only for an instant. " Cain can't get into respectable society unless he caUs himself Abel." The man with bad motives must skilfuUy hide them, and at least make a pretence that they are good ones. The speculator who desires the annexation of territories where he wants a free hand in making profits never avows his mercantile aims, but appeals to patriotic sentiment. The bigot, anxious to indulge his taste for theological persecution, will invariably pose as a zealous defender of the faith. A politician, intent on safeguarding the sacred rights of capital, wiU oppose the demand of fuU-grown men for a minimum wage of five shillings for a day's work underground, in a key of virtuous indignation, and describe such a demand as exceeding the cruelty of feudal barons and American JOI The Way of Understanding trusts. And all these tactics, so varied in themselves, prove one thing, and prove it very abundantly — the dependence of a man on the opinion of his feUows, the universal anxiety to earn, if possible, their praise — to avoid, if that should be impossible, at any rate their censure, not to incur their active displeasure. Nothing is more natural than this instinct which bids us seek to stand well with those who can visit their disappro bation upon us in every variety of ways — no motive more powerful or far-reaching in its effects than the desire for recognition, for popularity, for praise. It would have been strange indeed if in such a store-house of reflections on human nature as the Book of Proverbs there had not been any reference to this topic of aU others, to a proclivity which notoriously sways the minds and actions of men more than most ; and in the chapter (xxvii.) part of which we read again this morning, you notice that it is more than once touched upon under various aspects. " Let another man praise thee," we are admonished, " and not thine own mouth ; a stranger, and not thine own lips." " Better is open rebuke than love that is hidden. Faithful are the wounds of a friend : but the kisses of an enemy are profuse." Last of all — and most pointed of all — come the words of our text, which declare that "a man is tried by his praise." We are all anxious for praise, and justifiably, indeed inevitably, so ; and yet it is a truism that this natural wish, unless it is well and wisely guarded, and kept under control, may be and has been many a man's undoing. If we may keep to the image we have employed on a previous occasion — the image of an experienced and 102 The Test of Praise prosperous man of the world, a shrewd judge of men and matters, giving us, in the evening of his day, the benefit of his experiences and observations, we can fancy such a one expressing himself somewhat in this fashion : "I have seen people under most sorts of trials and difficulties ; I have seen them tried by poverty, tried by an obstinate and inexplicable run of unsuccess, by physical infirmity that made every effort doubly and trebly hard, by neglect and want of appreciation, by darkness and doubt of God's care and goodness — and I have seen them overcome aU these ; but a rock on which I have witnessed more people come to grief than on most others has been praise and popularity — both the desire and the thing itself." We may think it a paradox when Jesus says, " Woe unto you when aU shall speak well of you," but the seeming paradox is based on the keenest insight into human nature. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred such a universal popularity wiU have been purchased at too great a price, at the cost of principle, self-respect, loyalty to truth ; to please everybody is a dangerous enterprise, dangerous to oneself. To have no enemies, no detractors, must mean that a man has acquired considerable skiU in moral tight-rope walking and seeming to be on both sides at one and the same time — and that just for the sake of having the good opinion of all and sundry. No, no — the thing that tests a man more than any other trial is his attitude towards praise and what other people think of him. Let us look at this subject, then, for a short while together this morning, and see if we cannot discover certain leading principles, for our guidance ; and may I say this in passing — I trust that no one here feels that 103 The Way of Understanding when we are dealing with these questions of conduct and practice, we are any the less occupied with religion, for indeed we look upon faith and works not as two things, but as the two sides of one and the same. To begin with, let us admit that we are aU shaped and influenced for better or worse, to an incalculable extent, by the verdicts, the appreciation, the good or bad opinion of those in whose midst we move, and it is hard — we all know how hard, except those who have never tried — to stand against that pressure. A dozen times in the course of every day we are reminded that no one liveth to himself, and that our little world wiU not hesitate to pass its judgment upon our actions and' general demeanour. GeneraUy speaking, it is true that this verdict is informed with a rough justice ; it serves to remind us, and sometimes sharply, that the eyes of our fellows are on us, and that we must not think we can go on in independence of their approval or disap proval. Those eyes are quick to detect meanness, conceit, self-seeking, a vindictive or ungenerous spirit, nor are their owners usuaUy backward in visiting these things with their censure ; and since we are all of us given to self-deception and possess abundant resource in fashioning excuses for ourselves, it is just as weU that there should be this force of public opinion to correct our own estimate of ourselves, a force which in the last resort can make itself unmistakably felt. In this simplest sense of all a man is tried by his praise ; that is to say, there is a permanent tribunal sitting, a permanent jury empaneUed, to try him, occupied in weighing him day by day, and expressing its findings in swift and summary fashion. The people who work by our side in the office ; our colleagues in the school or 104 The Test of Praise on a committee ; our employees and dependents ; all these have a pretty shrewd idea of our qualities and defects — and their idea is worth hstening to. They could give us an outside view of ourselves that might amaze us ; yes, and the members of our own households, too, could assess us aU too accurately — let us be thankful for their forbearance ! You know the Rugby schoolboy's summing-up of Dr. Temple when the latter was headmaster : " Temple's a beast, but he's a just beast." WeU, you had it all there, and it was pretty correct, both the noun and the adjective. But now let us go a step forward ; a man is tried not only by the praise or otherwise which he receives, but also and especially by the praise he seeks, and those from whom he seeks it. The lowest and the highest ambitions find their scope and expression here. It is quite right and unavoidable that we should value the judgment of others, for we are not self-sufficient, nor meant to be ; but who those others are, by whose commendation we set store — that is the great and aU- important question ! Whose good opinion, whose applause, do we want ? With what set or section are we eager to be popular ? That is one of the truest and at the same time most searching tests of our real worth. Yes, men and women are tried, their value is assessed by the calibre of those who praise them ; the mob will always have its darlings, but they wUl be such darlings as the mob can appreciate, finding its own qualities faithfuUy portrayed in them. The sensational novelist, or for the matter of that the sensational preacher, will have his enthusiastic public among the shallow and thoughtless, but it is 105 The Way of Understanding a public whose enthusiasm one would not wish to arouse, because they do not understand or enjoy anything better than printed or spoken trash. Once more, whose praise do we desire to receive ? It comes back to this, that in the last analysis we are judged by our ideals. Here is this student working under a master who is such in reality and not only in name — accomplished, severe, not easily satisfied, but an unfailing judge of good work : to win a word of praise from him — that is an ambition worth cherishing, something to live up to, to work up to, for if he declares the performance good, that proves it so. Anybody can win plaudits of a kind, and from a certain type, if he is wiUing to address his appeal to them ; but we must aim high if we are to achieve anything of real worth. The tragedy of so many lives is this, that men are content with running after paltry prizes, and show the greatest solicitude to obtain the approval of some little circle or coterie whose opinion really carries no weight whatever, except possibly in the distribution of official smiles and emoluments. And when we think of the despicable things men have done in order to gain the most trivial and perishable laurels, how they have suppressed their convictions, falsified their principles, sold their very souls for popularity, we blush for shame. Do you know — to give just one illustration — who are the great hinderers of the work of rehgious reconstruction in the light of modern thought and knowledge ? It is not the out-and-out adherents to conservative positions — it is the men who hold the modern views, but hold them privately, very privately, because they desire to stand well with the powers that be ; and the irony of it is that these are the people who are actually praised and held 106 The Test of Praise up to us as models for their moderation and dis creetness in keeping silence — is it not true that a man is tried by his praise ? But " seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness " — that remains the true counsel ; when we refer our doings humbly and faithfully to the judgment of our Father in Heaven, when we endeavour to be conformed to the image of His dear Son, when we earnestly commend ourselves to Him, then we are in the way of obtaining His commen dation, His soul-satisfying praise, His " well done " — and what else is there besides this that counts ? But I turn for a moment to another, earthlier aspect of our theme. You know from your own experience how you have been encouraged by a timely word of appreciation, discouraged because it was withheld, and you felt that all your efforts did not matter, made no impression. Well now, are we ready enough in bestowing that encouragement, which so often would make all the difference between a hearty and a listless discharge of duties ? We do not get the best out of a horse, far less out of a human being, without the use of an occasional show of appreciation, of gratitude for work done, for value received ; and it is one of the greatest mistakes to be ungraciously grudging with our praise where praise has been earned ; for there are few things more depressing than to feel that after all nobody cares whether we do our work weU or ill. " Better is open rebuke than love which is hidden." Some people seem to be positively afraid of showing that they are weU pleased ; they wiU tell you that they don't wear their hearts on their sleeves — they don't want to be like demonstrative Frenchmen, and so they go to 107 The Way of Understanding the other extreme ; but I put it to you that there is a happy mean between frothy effusiveness and that show of stony indifference which takes the heart out of willing service, and chiUs and kills enthusiasm. True, plenty of people have had their heads turned by sheer excess of flattery ; but since we are not given to that form of indulgence, let us remember that others have had their hearts frozen by a lumpish apathy which could not express pleasure or even interest. But now I want to caU your attention to quite another reading of our text, which gives a different turn altogether to the meaning, and yet adds, if anything, to its significance. Instead of " a man is tried by his praise " the margin of the Revised Version renders the original, " a man is tried by that which he praiseth " — and here surely we have a perfect fund of suggestive thought. For there is nothing so self -revealing as our opinions, our tastes and antipathies ; in these we express our inmost selves, and that the more unre servedly because we do so for the most part quite unconsciously. If we want a sure criterion of anyone's character, we ask almost at once, or we try to discover by observation, what kind of thing he likes, what moves him to sympathy, what receives his praise. These are indications which never lie, which tell a perfectly plain and straightforward tale. To give a very obvious illustration, we shall all admit that a rapid survey of a man's store of books is almost as good and Uluminating as if we had had a ghmpse of his inner being ; for to the contents of those shelves the contents of his mind must in some measure correspond. What does he " praise," what does he delight in, in literature ; is it the genuinely 108 The Test of Praise fine, the distiUed best of the world's thought ? Or is it the shoddy, the trashy, the unwholesome ? A great man of letters, one of the few survivors from the Victorian era, has lately taken the world into his confidence by discoursing pleasantly about his books ; and it is impossible to read these papers of Mr. Frederic Harrison's without feehng that here is a man who has deliberately nourished his mind and character on all that is of sterling worth, aU that stimulates and conduces to fine thought and action. Tried by what he praises, he is shown a lover of whatsoever things are true, honourable, just, pure, lovely, of good report ; he has furnished us with a better means of judging him in these genial and almost casual talks than in his long autobiography — and happy is the man who comes out so well after giving this kind of evidence about himself. But, judged by the same criterion, how many people are not merely tried but condemned, tried and found wanting, by what they praise ! What fatal praise is given every day to unworthy qualities and performances ! I think that there are few things more lamentable to witness than the hearty appreciation with which numbers of men and women follow the most doubtful exploits, the court that is paid to any blatant success, the homage rendered to ostentatious luxury, the awestruck worship of Mammon and Moloch — wealth and force — these twin-idols of many professed foUowers of the Man of Nazareth who had not where to lay His head. The mere fact that a man is rich, no matter how he has acquired his possessions, suffices in the eyes of many people to invest him with extraordinary attributes ; he is lifted above the ranks of common mortals, the masses who toil to keep them- 109 The Way of Understanding selves alive ; he claims and receives respect and defence simply on the strength of a bulging bank- balance, and his power to scatter largesse opens for him the doors of even select circles — should he wish it, in too many instances even the doors of the sanctuary itself. How many Churches dare refuse notoriously tainted money ? And might we not learn from the example of the Synagogue, which will have no feUow- ship with the professional usurer ? There has recently appeared a biography of an American multi-millionaire — one of those personages possessed of the one sinister talent of making big industrial undertakings yield huge fortunes to himself, and a pittance to tens of thousands of workers engaged in them ; yet his biographer speaks of the great man in accents of almost pious awe, with bated breath — he evidently ranks him quite sincerely with the choice and master spirits of the age — and I have no doubt at aU that his attitude is typical of that of scores of thousands in two continents. Well, men are tried by what they praise, and this vulgar adoration paid to the golden calf is the sure mark of vulgar souls, upon whom it apparently has not yet dawned that though they may foregather in Christian Churches Sunday by Sunday, they cannot worship both God and Mammon ! And precisely the same applies to that awful and godless cult of brute force to which one sometimes fears that the nations are becoming more, rather than less, addicted. To talk of righteousness as exalting a nation is to expose oneself to ridicule nowadays : Dreadnoughts exalt a nation, we all know, and super- Dreadnoughts, and plenty of them, and then we need not be so particular about troublesome details of right no The Test of Praise and wrong, when the whole issue can be settled by guns and armaments — at least, if we are quite sure of being two to one ! Ah, but no issue is ever finally settled by guns and armaments and the mailed fist and superior numbers : Assyria overwhelms Israel and carries it into captivity — but Israel is alive and Assyria has been dead thousands of years, because the breath of life, the spirit of the Lord, was in the one and not in the other. But individuals and nations are tried and tested by what they praise and set store by, and the widespread reliance on material power is a symptom which condemns and shames us. Far-called, our navies melt away, On dune and headland sinks the fire ; Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre ; Judge of the nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget — lest we forget ! For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard, All valiant dust that builds on dust, And, guarding, calls not Thee to guard, For frantic boast and foolish word — Thy mercy on Thy people, Lord ! And time would fail me were I to enumerate all the poor and worthless objects, attributes, achievements, upon which praise and admiration are lavished by people who little dream that they are furnishing an exact measure of their mental and moral standard by the commendations they bestow. There are persons who reaUy, as the saying is, " love a lord," who look up with respect and even something like affection to those who treat them with insolence, who admire a man who in The Way of Understanding can afford to live without working : weU, they reveal the souls of flunkeys, that is aU. One has met persons who are tremendously impressed with the exploits of a swindler who is clever enough to baulk the law ; one hesitates to say what kind of verdict they pass upon themselves, but one has an uncomfortable feeling that they would like to do the same if they could. And on a somewhat higher plane, are not a great many people far too ready to applaud merely intellectual gifts even when they are unaccompanied by other and finer qualities ? I shall always remember an occasion when a group of men were discussing a certain well- known writer, one of us alone indicating, by silence rather than speech, an unfavourable estimate, from which we vainly tried to make him budge. " Well," someone exclaimed as a last resort, " you'll admit at any rate that he's very clever." " Yes," was the reply, given in the quietest tones, "that's just what he is " — and we one and aU felt rebuked. " The fining- pot for silver, and the furnace for gold, but a man is tried by the thing which he praises." Here is the conclusion of the whole matter — and if I put it briefly, you wiU be able to work it out in fuUer detail for yourselves : there is no greater need for each one of us than the education of the judgment in the light of Christian principle, for our judgment of men and things trains and portrays our character, and as a man thinketh, such is he. To habituate ourselves to praise and take delight in goodness wiU stimulate us by the grace of God to practise the like. To look not at the surface glitter and glamour, but at the things that abide and endure, not omitting " that best part of a good man's life, the little nameless, 112 The Test of Praise unremembered acts of kindness and of love " : to esteem strong principle, to prize humble loyalty, to value sUent dutifulness rather than show and self-advertise ment ; to spend as much time as we are able in the study of lives animated by unselfishness, simplicity, singleness of aim and sympathy with their brethren : that is the training for which none of us is too young or too old. And above aU, let us immerse ourselves in the life of Him in whom was life, even the light of men. To acquire not merely a taste but a passion for what is noble and beautiful and uplifting, that is to live truly, for if we are tried by our praise, it is true, as the poet says, that we live by admiration. Praise to the Holiest in the height. And in the depth be praise. In all His words most wonderful, Most sure in all His ways ! What more shah we add but this — " Oh that men would praise the Lord for His goodness, and for His wonderful works to the children of men ! " H3 H IX THE EXCELLENCE OF CHARITY " He that covereth a transgression seeketh love." — Prov. xvii. 9. , When the Revised Version of the New Testament appeared, a little over thirty years ago, one of the changes that struck everyone in the new translation was the disappearance of the word " charity," and its replacement by " love." Where people noticed the alteration most was of course in the great thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, where we were now taught to reverence love, not charity, as " the greatest of these " — greater than hope, greater than even faith. Needless to say, the change had not been introduced without due consideration. Charity is one of those words which have come down in the world through being misused and misapplied, made to stand chiefly for alms-giving, and that in not too generous or kindly a spirit, but rather of a perfunctory and official kind. On looking the matter up, I find that the phrase " as cold as charity " had become proverbial in English speech so long ago as the earlier half of the eighteenth century : does not the fact tell its own sad tale ? Then, besides the dislike of charity which its coldness excited, men began to view the system of doles with a very proper suspicion and resentment, both because they 114 The Excellence of Charity saw in it a means of undermining the manhood and independence of the poorer classes, and a cheap sub stitute for social justice — crumbs thrown from the table of the well-to-do in order to quiet the discontent of the disinherited. Who that knows rural England can deny that charity of this kind has been copiously used as an instrument of political corruption— an engine of snobbery and jobbery ? To this day, are there not districts where for a villager to show the colours of the candidate who is frowned upon by the Squire and Parson is to disqualify himself for the Christmas charity of coals and blankets and the like ? And in the industrial strata, with their rising self- respect, is there not the strongest objection to aU that savours of the patronage of the respectable poor by fussy people of the more prosperous classes who want to fiU up a few of their idle hours in a way which ministers to their self-complacency and gives them a gentle glow of satisfaction at a not very exorbitant cost of energy or money ? Have we not heard of processions of the unemployed with banners bearing the legend — horribly shocking to respectable senti mentalists ! — " Curse your Charity " ? Clearly there was a strong case for the course the Revisers took in striking out this unfortunate word from the New Testament and putting another in its place. Now I know that it is with nouns as with people — once they lose their characters, it is difficult to regain them. And yet I would like to try and put in a plea on behalf of the old word " charity " — to see whether we cannot give it back its former and better meaning. For to teU the truth, one is not quite satis fied with " love " as the substitute for it : love has 115 H 2 The Way of Understanding come to be so exclusively identified in popular speech with the passion which furnishes the theme of most of our popular fiction, that we instinctively feel that it lacks— nowadays at least — in strength, in sacredness, above aU in dignity. Charity, as the term was origin ally used, was neither a matter of doles and grants nor a mere emotional indulgence ; it was neither cold nor soft, but warm and strong ; it rested on a basis of character and insight/ and went to the making of character in its turn. To be sure, it stood for love in its truest sense — but a love infinitely removed from the sentimentality of the drawing-room baUad or the popular novelette. Now in our previous talks about the Book of Proverbs we have learnt to esteem these ancient sayings of the Hebrew sages for their close touch with life and conduct, their direct bearing upon the everyday problems we have to solve — the everyday affairs that come home to our business and bosoms. And the coUection of these counsels and maxims would have been incomplete indeed without some reference to this attribute of unselfish love, that truly godly attitude and temper in our dealings with others, which is still best described as charity. Twice over the sacred writers give utterance to this sentiment — " Love " (i.e., charity) "covereth aU transgressions," and "He that covereth a transgression seeketh love ; " and we all remember the New Testament echo, " Charity covereth a multitude of sins." Shall we try to gain a better understanding of this " more exceUent way," as the Apostle caUed it, and ask ourselves just wherein that exceUence consists ? Paul himself had begun life as a Pharisee, and in 116 The Excellence of Charity some respects his training clung to him until his life's end ; but he knew what was the root-evil in Phari saism : this was the sect which delighted in multi plying injunctions and prohibitions, and in so doing multiplied occasions of stumbling and transgression — stumbhngs which they judged in the most mercUess manner. In the end it became the chief pleasure of these men to detect others in the breach of this or that ritual detail, so that they might manifest by contrast their own superior holiness, and lift up hands of pious horror over the transgression of a feUow-mortal. Was not that exactly the object of aU the questions they put to Jesus — to prove Him in the wrong, to catch Him in His talk, to expose Him as ignorant or worse than ignorant ? And did they not exult when they had ground to suspect Him of woeful laxity and unsound ness ! You see, the temper of these men was essen tiaUy loveless, essentiaUy uncharitable : they were eaten up with self-righteousness, and to see ordinary people faU short of their lofty standards was meat and drink to them. Would they spare such a one ? No, they must make an example of the offender, with the fuUest pubhcity, exact the uttermost farthing of shame and suffering they could inflict, outwardly lamenting, but inwardly rejoicing. Well now, brethren, it is easy enough to wax vir tuously indignant over the Pharisees — they belong to ancient history ; but their spirit — that against which Paul invokes the good and gracious spirit of charity — can we say that that is dead ? Or do we not know, alas, to the contrary ? Are there not still people who, while pretending to deplore the actual or fancied short comings of others, in reality gloat over them, who 117 The Way of Understanding search out the transgressions and derelictions of their fellows with a bitter and perverted joy, who are pos sessed with an unholy lust of passing condemnation on the rest of the world, and so gratify their own desire to pose as beings of superior sanctity ? They have, as R. L. Stevenson puts it, " a devil of judging " : to shame and humiliate another, to bring him to discom fiture — that is triumph, that is an end worth com passing ; as for sparing a poor sinner the last humilia tion — they would protest against such an act of cul pable leniency, of which they would not be guilty. There is a book with the bitterly ironical title " The Tender Mercies of the Good " — and you may imagine that they were neither merciful nor tender, nor specially good. I do not say that such a temper is often to be met with full-blown ; but I do say that we need to beware even of its faintest beginnings, to be on the look-out for any symptoms of it in ourselves. It is this spiritual leprosy, this disease of the soul, Paul glances at, and indirectly describes and rebukes, when he says that charity envieth not, is not provoked, taketh not account of evil, is not puffed up, rejoiceth not in iniquity, whUe the uncharitable in their hearts do rejoice in the offences they see others commit, in the trippings and stumblings of frail humanity, in the prospect of seeing punishment meted out, or the still sweeter prospect of administering it themselves — drawing their severe garments severely, but ostentatiously, around them to avoid the defiling touch of the sinner. As a matter of fact, we are most of us prone to that very weakness ; and the next time you or I have occasion to discuss some detected failing, someone's downfall, let us try suddenly to flash a light into our own hearts, to see whether we are quite 118 The Excellence of Charity free from some degree of unholy pleasure and the self-congratulation that we are not as these others ! Friends, the secret of charity is sympathy ; and the great Teacher and perfect Example of sympathy is Jesus Christ. And by sympathy I wish you for the moment to understand what it literaUy means, viz., fellow-suffering. Jesus suffered from the very sight, from the very fact, of sin — suffered more than the sinners themselves ; it afflicted His consciousness, because He saw in sin the frustration of God's holy purpose, the grievous injury done by souls to them selves — not a spectacle, assuredly, for an amused feeling of one's own superiority. The loveless Pharisee and his modern equivalent like — and that is their con demnation — to see hapless men and women go astray, lay up chastisement and disgrace for themselves, and, when the consequences duly mature, they will be the first to say with a chuckle, " I told you so ! " or " Serve him right ! " Poor souls — their very righteousness, their lean and mean respectability, does not spring from any real love of the right, from a devotion to goodness for its own sake, but from prudent calculation and a cautious desire to avoid the unpleasantness which over takes indulgence ; they would go in for the indulgence too, if there was a way to dodge the results, and when some poor delinquent finds himself caught, their atti tude is one of delight that he has at last to pay for the good time they aU along envied him while pretending to be scandalised beyond expression. " Let him see how he likes it ! " they say, and their smUes are more eloquent than their words. But, as the Hebrew sage tells us, " He that is glad at calamity " — even deserved calamity for that matter — " shall not go 119 The Way of Understanding unpunished " ; indeed, his own disposition is his punishment, for he cuts himself off, and that at one stroke and with fatal certainty, from the grace of Christ, from the love of God, and from the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. You can imagine our Lord pre dicting the undoing of the wilful workers of iniquity ; you cannot imagine Him rejoicing in their fate — nay, on the very cross He prays for His murderers, " Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Sin grieved the spirit of Jesus, stirred Him to self-sacrificing efforts to remedy it, and unless it has the same effect upon us, we are none of His. Indeed — to go now a step further — I would suggest, if I may, that while right is right and sin is sin, there are strong reasons which should make us restrain the proclivity to judge and pass sentence upon our fellows. For one thing, our vision is never very clear, and above aU, never very penetrating : we see certain facts, but never all the facts, nor the forces behind them. It may or may not be true that " to understand all is to for give all," but who would deny, going over his own experiences, that if we understood more we should judge less harshly ? Burns has put it all in a few lines of wonderful simplicity and insight — you know them by heart : — One thing must still be greatly dark — The moving why they do it ; And just as lamely can ye mark How far perhaps they rue it. Then at the balance let's be mute ; We never can adjust it ; What's done, we partly may compute, But know not what's resisted. 120 The Excellence of Charity And, further, the slightest self-knowledge, the slightest candour with ourselves, must again and again inspire the question, " Who art thou that judgest ? " True, our conscience acquits us of this or that mis demeanour which our brother or sister has committed ; but are we so sure that, had we been exposed to pre cisely the same strain, we should have given a better account of ourselves ? Have we not rather cause for gratitude that we have been spared such and such a trial, which might have proved too severe for our principles or our habits ? Would not the truer atti tude, many and many a time, be that of Newton, the Puritan, who, at the sight of some transgressor being taken off to dire punishment, humbly exclaimed, " But for the grace of God, there goes John Newton " ? And if we have not fallen short in this of that par ticular respect, yet how grievously have we failed in others, and how little should we relish the merciless censure of the unpitying world ! Truly, in that con sciousness alone we each have sufficient cause for the exercise of charity ! And do not misunderstand me — I do not mean that, since we are aU open to rebuke on some count, we had better refrain from stone-throwing lest the compliment should be returned ; nor, above aU, do I mean that the most unmitigated sinners are the most charitable in dealing with others, for the contrary is notorious. Rather is it the case that those least stained with earth's mire, the true lovers of God, are least prone to harsh and unfeeling condemnations. I remember once hearing an eminent divine — to use the current phrase — predict with an evil sneer what a bad time was in store- for those who differed from his views, in the day 121 The Way of Understanding when the saints should judge the world : alas, aU that he proved was that he was no saint, but belonged to a dif ferent category altogether. When we read that the saints shaU judge the world, poor sinners may take comfort. But now I want, as briefly as may be, to direct your attention to one word, one phrase, which, while it is frequently misunderstood, or simply left un-understood, reaUy goes to the heart of our subject. What is the meaning of the expression, found twice in Proverbs, and repeated in the New Testament, about charity covering transgressions ? There is a real difficulty here, and it touches the whole treatment of the wrong doer. Are we, where there is a clear-cut moral issue — when we stand face to face with violations of the right — to hold our peace, utter no word of censure, make ourselves accomplices of the delinquent by sheltering him from the consequences he has incurred ? Are things to be made pleasant and comfortable for the offender, until in practice there is no difference between innocent and guilty, and a man may come to think that he might just as weU choose the path of indulgence, since he wiU not be caUed to account ? There is a good deal of this kind of charity about, we say, and what good does it do ? Look rather at the utter harm it does ! Yet what else is meant by " covering " trans gression ? WeU, certainly, that is not meant ; indeed, this manner of dealing with problems of conduct is only an emotional and thoroughly unwarrantable luxury — it springs too often from a lack of robust principle, coupled with a dislike of seeing anyone uncomfortable, and succeeds merely in doing further injury to the wrong- 122 The Excellence of Charity doer himself. We cannot cover his transgression from the clear eye of a just and offended God — we must not cover it from himself by suggesting excuses for him, and so administering opiates to deaden the pangs of conscience. But we may and should, in charity, shield him from the unsympathetic and the pitUess, always ready to jeer and mock at detected guilt, and to add to the guilty one's agony. Let justice be done, punishment meted out — but not everybody is caUed to be judge or even juryman in every cause. I think, for instance, that a very considerable limit should be set to the publishing of law reports, which as a rule serve only for the delectation of a public greedy of sensation, and hking to take its entertainment in that form — charity, and even decency, would suggest the " covering " of many transgressions with which the Courts of the country deal from the coarse crowd who have no legitimate interest in this man's downfall or that man's crime, but who want to be amused by picturesque descriptions of how the prisoner bore him self under a merciless cross-examination, and how he looked when the judge gave sentence. Cover it, cover it, for pity's sake : who is the better for these details which only pander to a diseased appetite that grows by what it feeds on ? And the same applies to our private relationships. We can be perfectly straight and candid with one who has offended, let him know how his conduct strikes us, how it grieves us — but we can at the same time refrain from needlessly making it known to anyone whose business it is not to know. We need not gratuitously add to the offender's humiliation ;_ there is a legitimate " covering " of his lapse from eyes that have no proper 123 The Way of Understanding concern with it, and this should be done in every case where it is possible — alas, the opposite method prevails too often ! I remember one extremely painful case, more than twenty years ago now, where a young man, by one superlatively foolish escapade, bade fair to ruin his whole career at the very outset. The gravity of his offence was not minimised, and he paid a price of scalding tears and bitter remorse for it ; but it was decided to keep the knowledge of the trouble within local limits, and the penitent culprit was sent to another part of the country where this episode was not known, and where he was allowed, being put on his honour, graduaUy to rise again, and to regain the position he had forfeited. He was fortunate enough to have friends — thoroughly upright, the salt of the earth — who, just because of their disinterested good ness, covered his transgression, without in any way extenuating his guilt, and so made a new and happier start possible for him : would that such cases were more frequent ! Once more — true charity is no mere leniency that has its root in laxity. To let an offender go scot-free may be no more than to save oneself trouble, or even to show contempt in the guise of pity. No, no : the Gospel itself, with its censure of sin, shows esteem for a man's possible by rebuking his faulty actual — it tells him, " You ought to have done better, and you can ! " But again, where we ourselves have been injured, and might be tempted to harbour vengeful feehngs, there a true charity will *' cover " the transgression from our own sight ; we shall try not to think of it, to think instead of the better side of1 the wrongdoer, for surely he has a better side. You say that is difficult ; 124 The Excellence of Charity weU, suppose it is — that is no reason for not attempting it ; and when we do attempt it, beheve me, we shall not find it impossible. Not that that — the ceasing from personal iU-will — is the end of the whole matter ; but it is a good and indispensable beginning. Not the end, but the beginning — for without good-will, how are we to help anyone? But an enlightened good-will is not likely to stop there, with harbouring no resentment. It must ever aim at saving the offender, not from punishment, but from wrong itself, to win him back to goodness, though that may involve stern and thorough dealings, to commend to him the pursuit of whatso ever things are true, just, lovely, of good report, to place restoration before him as a possible ideal. The exceUence of charity manifests itself, not in mere easy good-nature, but persists in seeking the highest good of the wayward, the erring, the fallen, helping them to rise and to find themselves once more. That can only be done by appealing to the best in human nature, and trusting to that best to assert itself, given encourage ment and opportunity — yes, and taking the will into account as weU as the deed, for the great thing, in the eyes of God at least, is surely not that we attain, but that we strive aright and earnestly. This is the conclusion of the whole matter, as I see it, and commend it to you : the highest charity is redemptive in purpose and essence ; and it " covers " transgression by supplying a new motive power, a new dynamic, which wins the transgressor to retrace his steps from the famine country of sin to the Father's house. Such an end can only be achieved by self- giving, and of that self-giving we have the perfect type and symbol in the Cross of Christ. Not as a substitute, 125 The Way of Understanding bearing our punishment, but as making the most moving, the most persuasive appeal to us, does Jesus surrender His hfe — for our sakes, not in our stead — in the grandest of all acts of self-sacrifice, in the crowning charity of Calvary. AU through life, but supremely in laying it down, He manifests " that disposition which, despite human unworthiness and refusal, persists in its purpose to lift us to His own height and blessedness." May we listen to that caU, and avail ourselves of what Christ offers to us. And may we pray for and strive to practise that " most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues," without which " all our doings are nothing worth." 126 X THE LONELINESS OF LIFE " The heart knoweth its own bitterness ; and a stranger doth not intermeddle with its joy." — Prov. xiv. 10. Let me begin this sermon by reminding you of one of the best-attested traits in the character of Jesus. AU the Evangelists agree in telling us that He — the Son of Man who moved with such evident delight among the sons of men, mingling with them and sharing their experiences — showed His real humanity not only in His habitual free intercourse with His kind, but in the need He felt every now and again to get away from them, to escape from the touch and presence of the crowd, to be by Himself. There are numerous passages in the Gospels to that effect, but I draw your attention to two that are typical. " And after He had sent the multitudes away," Matthew teUs us, " He went up into the mountain apart to pray : and when even was come, He was there alone." And in the Fourth Gospel we read, " Jesus, perceiving that they were about to come and take Him by force, to make Him king, withdrew again into the mountain Himself alone." On the one occasion He craved the relief of quiet and solitude after over-much, over-close contact with His feUows, and retired literally to recover Himself ; on the other, when the noisy populace would press upon Him an 127 The Way of Understanding unwelcome dignity against His will, He withdraws from their clamour into the innermost citadel of His inviolate self, across whose threshold none can foUow Him. There was a great deal of loneliness in the life of Jesus, inevitably so, at aU times ; but occasionaUy He experienced an overmastering need to have loneliness around Him as weU as within, and to re-invigorate His soul in the sUence of wide and unfrequented spaces. In satisfying this desire for solitude, Jesus, the most sympathetic and companionable of men, obeyed a wise and deep and true instinct, and one which we are in some danger of losing to-day. If He was able to identify Himself so completely with others, it was just because He kept a jealous guard over the portals of His individuality ; He hved a rich life out of sight, with experiences no one could share with Him — but the results of those solitary experiences He gladly and readily shared with the world. And this brings me to the saying in the Book of Proverbs which suggested my subject and its title — " The Loneliness of Life " — to me ; " The heart knoweth its own bitterness ; and a stranger doth not intermeddle with its joy." I Those words strike an unexpected note, standing where they do, in the midst of reflections which deal chiefly with the outward side of hfe, with aspects and activities that are obvious to the eye. But this very unexpectedness is significant. In the midst of absorb ing work, associations, interests, there comes to most of us at times quite suddenly the reminder — Why, all of this, which takes up so much room, and raises so 128 The Loneliness of Life much sound, is only on the surface of our being ; the larger part of ourselves is like the bulk of an iceberg, submerged ; there is an inner, deeper life of ours, with emotions — cares and joys and sorrows — of which the outside world has, and can have, no knowledge, but which is just our own. The other day you read in the papers of a man dying in a foreign capital, known to his neighbours only for the extraordinary economies he practised ; who would have thought that his whole dream and object in stinting himself of light and food and fuel was to leave a princely bequest to an orphanage ? That is an extreme case, but it iUustrates a very general fact : how httle we know of the inner experiences of thought and feeling even of those with whom we associate day by day ! How little we can guess of their impeUing motives, their governing ideas, the make-up and structure of their inner world ! Mysterious walls fend us off from our nearest ; a gateless barrier divides personality from personality ; we each inhabit, we each constitute, a separate universe. I want to suggest that this loneliness is not only inevitable, but is designed by God for our good ; and the first thing I would point out is that there are far too many influences at work to break in upon this solitude of the soul, and despoU it of one of the main conditions for its true growth and development. Wordsworth's complaint, " The world is too much with us," was never so well founded as in the present age ; people live more and more in huge aggregates, in swarms from which there is no escaping ; there is no rest from the besetting of humanity, from the life that is surging round us, pressing upon us. I am quite sure that there is something lost — something we cannot afford to lose — 129 1 The Way of Understanding in this gregariousness of modern life, this everlasting merging of our individual selves in a mass of other selves ; we do not give the soul a chance to send down its roots, take in its proper nurture, reach its maturity of selfhood, in this lack of quiet and collection. The process begins with our children. I am heartUy in sympathy with many of the changes that mark the treatment of children in our own age, but are we not losing something aU the same ? Is there not rather too much movement, too httle quiet, in the hves of growing boys and girls nowadays ? Are we not making men and women of them prematurely ? Is it not the fact that they are given more impressions than they can possibly assimilate, and is not a great deal of precocious brightness gained at the expense of inner depth ? In a word, is there not some serious danger nowadays of sacrificing that development of the child's mind and character which proceeds best in the calm atmosphere of a home such as the older ones among us recaU ? Few influences, but those good and simple and steady ; few distractions — much less in the way of amusement, probably, little that was calculated to assault the nerves or awaken the imagination of child hood before the time — yet I doubt whether those children were much less happy than ours, and I some times suspect that this quieter way of life, with its absence of rush and excitement, its greater simplicity and frugality, was better calculated to lay the founda tions of future character, of a godly, righteous and sober life. But the same tendency to merge and overlay and swamp individuality pervades the whole of our modern existence. More and more people every year are 130 The Loneliness of Life penned and herded together in our vast cities, unable to get away from each other, to be by themselves, to take a breath which someone else may not overhear ; there is a decay both of privacy and the desire for privacy — indeed, we are training up a population large strata of which cannot bear the idea of being alone, and that because they have no inner resources of feeling or thought ; they have hardly separate existences, and cannot face solitude. A thoughtful writer the other day gave us rather a terrifying description of one of our city crowds on Bank Holiday — not merely the vapidity of their amusements, but their puny, iU-set-up physique, above ah the insignificance of their features — features on which no individual emotion or reflection had set its stamp. " Compare them with an Afghan's face," he exclaimed ; " it is like comparing a chicken with an eagle." Now so far as our modern life tends to produce such results, to rub out the marks of separate selfhood, I cannot but think that civUisation has taken an unfortu nate turn ; our highest interests, our finest develop ment, demand that we should respect what Tennyson caUed " This main miracle that thou art thou " — each soul a special word of God, with its own message to deliver, its own contribution to make, its own destiny to fulfil. And in spite of all the influences which would reduce men and women to mere cogs in a vast machinery of which they form part without controUing any part of it, deep down we know the truth about ourselves to be quite other ; we have to face this lonehness of our own separate existence, yes, and to find it a means of grace in the formation of character. You remember when Helmer, in Ibsen's " Doll's House," says to Nora, 131 1 2 The Way of Understanding " Before everything else you're a wife and a mother " ; and she rephes to that sublime platitudinist, " Before everything else I'm a human being — just like you." It is exactly this truth, or the consciousness of it, which makes many people suspicious (I do not say whether rightly or wrongly) of Socialism : we do not want to have our conduct, our income, our leisure, our lives generally State-regulated, our initiative paralysed, our individuality blotted out and reduced to some general pattern chosen for us, not by us ; we want to preserve our inner freedom and independence, to be ourselves, even if that means being a shade less perfect than any uniform standard imposed by authority would make us — and the instinct is essentially right, it is founded in the constitution of the soul itself. We are not meant to be self-sufficient ; we reach out for the sympathy which makes life bearable ; we rejoice in every manner of associations with our feUows, and would miss none of them ; but in the last resort the soul stands and must stand alone. I said already that Christ's passion for an occasional spell of solitude was part of His real humanity ; let me show that in this, as in all other things, He is our true Exemplar, and that what applies to Him applies to us also. II To begin with, I venture to say that this lonehness of life, so poignantly expressed by our text, is quite a common experience, which has its awe and its pathos, just like physical solitude, but also, like this, its con solation and its grandeur. To find ourselves quite alone in a physical sense, cut off from our kind, may indeed bring us a sense of forlornness, of helplessness, 132 The Loneliness of Life according to the circumstances ; but it does also at times bring a glorious sense of relief, of liberation, of exhilarating freedom. You have aU at some time or other, I hope, set out on a long tramp with only your thoughts for company, and found the company none of the worst. I cannot speak of the joys of solitary climbs, but I have known the sensation of being far out in the dark water on dark nights aU alone, with not a soul or a sail in sight, and the rather exultant feeling of having only my own strength to rely on, if I wanted to swim back to the distant shore. Well, now, it seems to me that life is a good deal like that — and meant to be. In all that concerns us most deeply, most intimately, we are in the last analysis thrown upon ourselves and our own resources. Up to a certain point — a very high point if you will — we are helped and guided, cheered and comforted, warned or pardoned by others ; but beyond that point they wiU not, because they cannot, accompany us on our journey, nor can even their eyes foUow us along the windings of that upward or downward way. In aU great joys, in aU great sorrows, there is an incommunicable element, something no one can share with us, something we cannot reveal to anyone, because it is absolutely personal to ourselves. The realisation of this truth may come to us while we move in the midst of a multitude — suddenly we are conscious that not one of all these knows whether or why we feel lifted up or cast down ; but it is just as true that none even of our nearest understands us completely, and their very effort to do so adds at times a note of pathos to their inability to comprehend. Between soul and soul, unscaleable waUs ; in the fullest confidence, still something withheld, 133 The Way of Understanding because it cannot be expressed in terms that would convey a meaning to any but ourselves. The heart knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger doth not intermeddle with its joy. There are decisions, usuaUy vital, which no one can take for us, and which we can very poorly explain or justify to others, issues on which we alone must judge, burdens of which no shoulders, however willing, can relieve us, sins no outside tribunal can effectively absolve us from — and when that fact comes sharply home to us, we are apt to feel over whelmed by the knowledge how alone we are. I remember a phrase from a French book, where one of the personages, buffeted about by unfriendly fate, piteously exclaims, " On n'a que soi " — " One's only got oneself " — and we have aU felt like that on occasion. But this inevitable loneliness, this innermost isola tion of which we grow speciaUy conscious at times of crisis, is, like aU other ordinances of God, not intended for our undoing or discouragement, but rather for our training and the making of character. It is a school of self-reliance, of self-respect, of self-realisation. I think on the whole most of us feel pleased rather than other wise when someone set over us in authority says to us, " I want you to do this piece of work — you, and no one else, are capable of doing it." Is there not a thrill and an uplift about the thought that just you are regarded as fit to carry an undertaking through — is it not a tribute to your capacity ? Who wants to do particu larly what anybody else might do just as easUy ? Now that is how God treats us and deals with us ; to each one his or her own task, which has to be executed with out assistance — a task which no one can discharge in our stead : does it not grow honourable when we regard 134 The Loneliness of Life it in that light ? We have got to do this, to bear that, to refrain from the other, by ourselves, unaided, and it seems hard— often it is hard ; but the object is the fashioning of something that will last, the making of manhood and womanhood, the growing of a self — and that is worth enduring some amount of hardness and setting ourselves with a will to the unshared enterprise. It is that by which we are going to be made, that by which we are going to be judged. Are you called upon to tread the winepress alone ? Are you set to abide staunchly by principle against expediency, to fulfil some trying duty, to battle against difficulty, all unassisted and unregarded ? But One regards you, my brother or sister, nor forgets ; and the effort you put forth in your loneliness works for you a far more exceeding weight of glory, makes you worth so much more to God — may I not add, and to yourself. And in the end each man's work shall be made manifest, for the day shah declare it. Ill But I want to hark back, if I may, to this expression, " growing a self," because the moment we reflect, we can see that not only is this what we are here for, but it is what no one can do for us. There are many who shirk the labour, and many ways of shirking it ; but if we would accomplish it, we must learn to be alone and to stand alone. So many people have no other ambi tion but to be passable copies of some wretched, fashionable model ; they are anxious to get aU the correct shibboleths off by heart, and have a profound distrust of originality. They possess no opinions on any subject under the sun — whether it be music, religion, 135 The Way of Understanding clothes, politics or what not — but the accepted opinions, those that have the legible and unmistakable haUmark of respectable orthodoxy. They are never found guilty of saying or doing unpopular things, because it has never struck them that their business — yours and mine — is to be themselves. They do not accept the loneli ness of life — it terrifies them : none but the well- frequented paths for them — and verily, they have their reward ! That is to say, they miss all the joy of intrepid thought, of courageous action, they know none of the exhUaration of standing alone for the right and the truth as they see it, of breaking a lance on behalf of a cause the world has not as yet taken under its patronage. Here is Dreyfus, the victim of a vast clerical and militarist conspiracy, found guilty of high treason, publicly degraded and sent to a living death on Devil's Island ; and here is Zola, sacrificing popu larity, income, everything, to raise his voice on behalf of this man whom he had never set eyes on. How easy it would have been to keep silence ; how difficult to isolate oneself, to court ostracism, for the sake of justice — but what an inward triumph and satisfaction in so obeying the highest promptings and realising one's best self, even though it meant solitariness and persecution ! There has lately passed away in that whelming catastrophe in the Atlantic a man to whom above most others in this generation it was given cheerfuUy and ungrudgingly to make lonely stands for unpopular ideals — W. T. Stead. One often disagreed with him, but never without paying a tribute to his perfect sincerity, his total indifference to prudential calcula tions, or, more particularly, what the world would say 136 The Loneliness of Life about him. He just wanted to be himself — whether lonely or lionised was a secondary consideration with him. And his readiness to be, if necessary, in a minority of one, was the more remarkable since he rejoiced more than most in the sense of feUowship, in the company of his kind. He faced obloquy, ridicule, poverty, as though these things meant nothing ; to him they hteraUy did mean nothing in comparison with other possessions which he valued more highly by far. Towards the end of his life, we are told, he abandoned a lucrative position on the press for conscientious reasons. " Can you afford to do this ? " a friend asked him. " WeU," he said, " you see, I have a very wealthy partner." " Who is he ? " " God Almighty," was the reply. A man who reaUy believed that could afford many things ; he could afford, amongst the rest, to bear loneliness, for in aU his stormy career he had the consciousness of an inner quiet which the noise and clamour of the world could not pierce or disturb. As Burns said, A correspondence fixed with Heaven Is sure a noble anchor. The idealist, even when despised and rejected, has meat to eat which the world knows not of ; and his joy no one taketh away. IV And this brings me to what is the most important aspect of our subject. We read how, when Jesus had sent away the multitudes, He went into the mountain apart to pray, and when even came, He was there alone. The multitudes meant well enough, they were noisy and demonstrative and enthusiastic, and Jesus had done 137 The Way of Understanding His best by them and deserved their enthusiasm, but He felt the imperative necessity to get away from them, to escape from the plain into the mountain, to bathe and refresh His tired soul in sohtude, in contact with nature and with God. Friends, there is a solitude, a detachment from mankind which does not by any means spring from an inhuman want of sympathy, but which we must learn to cultivate, to be able to enter into at will, in order that we may know the Divine companionship. We reach our best, and are our best, in communion with the Unseen, in surrendering our selves to His action upon our spirits, and for that experience we need seasons of quiet when we shut out the outer world, so that the inner life may have free dom to manifest and exercise itself. It is the uniform experience of the great souls of the race that in those seasons, withdrawn from the things of sense, with human society excluded, they gained a strength and an insight which did not come to them otherwise. The heart which knows its own grief, but can make no feUow-mortal understand — which experiences its own joy, but can make no stranger share the experience — finds a perfect understanding of aU its needs, its moods, its very beats, with God. And the ultimate object of the loneliness of life is to drive us back upon Him, apart from whom we can know no rest. We have to be alone — really alone, as we seldom aUow ourselves to be — in order to feel the stillness athrob with the presence of God. Friends, in these last days through which we have been passing,* the thoughts of the most heedless have * This sermon was preached shortly after the sinking of the Titanic, 138 The Loneliness of Life of necessity turned to the brevity, the uncertainty, of this swift and solemn trust of life. Before us aU, far or close at hand, there looms through the mists of the future a last loneliness, when the world and its myriad interests and activities ebb away from us, leaving the soul solitary indeed, on the threshold of eternity. It were well for us to learn in this passing life to fill our moments of solitude with the sense of our Father's nearness ; so shall we face that final scene without dismay, conscious that the Everlasting Love is nigh, and that around us are the everlasting arms. May it be ours to say, when the spirit is about to set forth on its seeming-lonely voyage — " And yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me." 139 XI THE GRACE OF HUMILITY " Before destruction the heart of man is haughty, and before honour goeth humility." — Prov. xviii. 12. Thousands of years ago, as a nomad tribe was wandering across the Babylonian plain, they beheld with amazement the ruins of a mighty building which even in its decay dominated the monotony of the landscape, and seemed to rear itself into the sky like an ineffectual threat, a frustrated defiance. That this gigantic edifice was a temple-tower built in the dim past and abandoned for some generations, the wanderers could not know ; but as they camped in the vicinity of the huge mass of masonry that night their fancy began to play and weave a story round it : in the grey ages of the world's beginning, they said, the inhabitants of the earth, grown reckless and impious, had raised this monstrous pile in order to lay siege to heaven itself ; but on the eve of success their design was turned to nought, their headlong ambition ended in failure, and the unfinished tower stood to that day and for ever, a monument of that pride which comes before a faU, a warning to the overweening conceit of man. This idea, which we find in the Old Testament legend, is deep-seated in the human mind. The Greeks had their corresponding tale of the giants and Titans pihng 140 The Grace of Humility mountain upon mountain, Pelion upon Ossa, to reach and conquer the heavenly heights, of their being hurled back by Zeus with his swift thunderbolts, and then cast as prisoners into the underworld ; indeed, Greek sentiment consistently warned man against bearing himself too loftily, lest he should excite the Divine iU-will — they feared unbroken good fortune, as sure to arouse the envy of the gods and bring calamity and woes in its train. When success smiled too per sistently upon a mortal, then was the time for him to ward off the vengeance of the heavens by large voluntary sacrifices, and so to buy himself off from supernatural punishment. Of course, neither Jewish nor Christian thought countenances the notion of God grudging us happiness or plenty, or desiring to punish us for the mere fact of being successful ; for us this whole question is answered fuUy and finally in our Saviour's words : " If ye then desire to give good gifts unto your children, how much more your Father which is in heaven ! " Nevertheless, the feeling of the sinfulness of pride, the duty of humbleness, goes right through our religion, alike in the Old and the New Testament : "to walk humbly with thy God " is one of the three require ments laid on man by the Lord ; "he that exalteth himself shall be humbled, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted," proclaims the Gospel ; and the same note is sounded again and again in the Book of Proverbs : " Before destruction the heart of man is haughty," we read, " and before honour goeth humUity " ; and again, " A man's pride shall bring him low : but he that is of a lowly spirit shaU obtain honour." 141 The Way of Understanding Now the first thing which it occurs to me to say in connection with this subject is to utter a warning against the pitfalls of unreality which beset it. I am afraid that what I said in an earher sermon about charity applies equally to humility : the word is one which has lost caste, it has gathered around it associa tions that do not appeal to us. The prevalence of imita tions has made us suspicious of the genuine thing. The hat-touching, curtseying humbleness which fawns and cringes for favours is the ugly product and counterpart of the kind of charity which bestows doles and saps the independence of those who receive them. There is a cant of humility which is positively odious, because it is utterly insincere, a mere cloak which hides cunning and self-seeking. The genius of Dickens portrayed that loathsome type, smirking, shifty, treacherous, once for aU in Uriah Heap. Who has not had experience of the soft-spoken, deferential, self-effacing individual, who merely masks and disguises by those means his real disposition, and is all the while serving his own ends ? What diffidence, what lowliness some people wiU display when there is anything to be made out of it ! And again, how others will humbly decline to put themselves forward, when it would mean doing some extra work, or placing themselves in the fighting line ! The wonderful modesty and self-distrusting shyness which keeps men tongue-tied rather than give utter ance to unpopular, heretical, unfashionable opinions — the humihty, in a word, which is the excuse of the shirker, the coward, the man who wants to be friends with both sides, but chiefly with the side that has the loaves and fishes to distribute ! We know it all, and we instinctively despise and recoil from it. 142 The Grace of Humility And then again — for we may as well take stock of these shams, and nail them to the counter — there is the affected self-depreciation which is only an indirect way, and a very annoying one, of chaUenging an admir ing tribute. Let me use an illustration which always rises to my mind in this connection. You go to the wonderful islands on Lake Maggiore, owned by the Borromean famUy ; you survey the gardens with all their varied and beautiful growths, go over the ducal palace where everything bespeaks vast riches, and finally, as you stand on the topmost garden terrace, overlooking this glorious picture set in an azure frame of shimmering water, almost overwhelmed by so much splendour and lovehness, you note the stone-carved family motto of the owners — the one word Humilitas — and the pretence strikes you as so grotesque as to be not altogether decent. You remember the lines of Coleridge — and how well they fit the occasion : — A " cottage " of gentility ; And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin Is pride that apes humility. But, further, it has to be confessed, I think, that in rehgion particularly there has been far too much of this unreality of language and sentiment, with the result that honest and healthy people have been driven into revolt. Let me explain. It is not natural for average men and women — by no means angels or saints, but trying on the whole to live reputable lives — to profess themselves Sunday by Sunday " miserable offenders," or to speak of the filthy rags of their righteousness, or of themselves as worms ; they do not mean it, and they would be highly incensed if their 143 The Way of Understanding neighbours took their language seriously — how then can they expect God to take it seriously ? Do we think we can cajole Him, or deceive Him, or propitiate Him, by the use of such self-degrading phrases ? Let us shun unreality in all our relationships ; but let us shun rehgious unreality as the very pestilence, for if we strike false notes here, the whole music of our lives wiU be inevitably falsified. The man who habituaUy crawls to his Maker wiU in too many instances habitually ride roughshod over his dependents, deal harshly with his employees, be an overbearing despot and buUy ; and the crawl and the harshness explain each other. I leave that statement there ; every business man wiU bear me out. But now that we are done with the shams and counterfeits, I am afraid we must own that humility at its best is apt to strike the modern man or woman as rather a negative attribute — what MUton caUed a fugitive and cloistered virtue. We would rather have something to be proud of than to be humble about ; we would rather do and dare, and fight our way, than be everlastingly making excuses for ourselves. Let humUity, we say in our hearts, be the attitude and the apology of those who have done nothing with their lives, or even of the feebly and ineffectually good ; but for ourselves, we would rather take Browning's strenuous lines for our motto : — Let a man contend to the uttermost, For his life's set prize, be it what it will ! It is not by being self-distrustful and apologetic that men have overcome difficulties without and within, enlarged their powers, subjugated the forces of nature, 144 The Grace of Humility established their dominion, or developed their character. If we would not be left behind in the race, we must believe in ourselves, insist on ourselves, assert our selves ; and we distrust humility as the synonym of inefficiency and the prelude of failure — failure which renders no service to God or man, but in the counting up means only so much waste. In aU this, I confess, there is an element of truth ; but we may be very sure that it is not this kind of humUity that either the Old Testament or the New advocates and enjoins. On the one hand, the race which has gathered up its maxims of life in the Book of Proverbs has always had an abundant share of vitality and energy, it has fought for success and attained success along every variety of road ; and again, Jesus, who spoke of Himself as meek and lowly, and who commended the humble, flashed forth the quality of His mind in the bold assertion, " Ye have heard that it was said unto them of old . . . but I say unto you " ; He showed it in His whole uncom promising attitude towards the Law, and in driving the money-changers forth from the Temple. What, then, we ask ourselves again, is the humility we are asked to cultivate as a grace of character ? WeU, in the first place, I need hardly point out that, however much we may talk of the necessity of self- confidence for success, it is stiU a fact borne out by everyday experience that pride goeth before a fall, and that before destruction the heart of man is haughty. It is one of the commonest forms of insanity which culminates in a man's delusions that he is the Emperor of the world, or has amassed fabulous riches, or made some gigantic invention which places undreamt-of 145 K The Way of Understanding power in his hands. Every asylum has among its inmates some of these unhappy victims of self-conceit ; and even short of actual madness, sheer, o'ertoppling pride is the secret of many disasters. A Napoleon fiUs the world with his fame, subdues monarchs and nations, alters the map of Europe in a few tumultuous years, till he reaUy believes that there is nothing impossible for him — and then he carries his ambition to a frozen grave in Russia, and closes his meteoric career, an exile, at the age of forty-six. And how many Napoleons of finance have in their own sphere repeated the fate of the Corsican ! Pride, the exaltation of the ego, blinds its victims to the nature and force of the obstacles they set themselves to conquer, it duUs their moral sense, and so invites retribution ; it seeks to overleap the boundaries of the humanly feasible, fatally over-estimates its powers, and so comes to inevitable grief. In aU that ghastly tragedy of the Titanic which haunts, and wUl continue to haunt, our imaginations, I see above all else the stern verdict of the Nature of Things upon overweening human pride. Pride of engineering skiU, which confidently proclaimed the unsinkableness of a vessel — the hugest ever built — which on its first voyage sank from human sight after an impact with ice so seemingly slight that it did not disturb a card-party in progress ; pride of unlimited wealth seeking expression in an unheard-of sumptuousness of equipment, which took the place of proper life-saving precautions on board ; pride which exhibits itself in a blind trust in material and appli ances, seen too late to have been ill-founded. " In reading the reports," says Mr. Joseph Conrad, a writer of many years' experience of mercantile shipping, 146 The Grace of Humility " the first reflection which occurs to one is that if that luckless ship had been a couple of hundred feet shorter she would have probably gone clear of the danger. But then, perhaps," he adds with grim sarcasm, " she could not have had a swimming bath and a French cafe." Pride, finaUy, which in the result, though not in intention, sacrificed the lives of the poor to the luxuries of the rich. If ever we have had a terrific and soul-shaking admonition to humility, we have had it in the catastrophe of the iU-fated Titanic. We shaU cease our worship of bigness and bulk and bullion for a time, as we reflect how little power there is in these idols to save : " for in one hour so great riches is made desolate." But in the second place, and looking at our subject in its personal aspects, I would submit to you, that humility is the temper of aU who are conscious of their dependence, of their limitations, of their defects. When we remember our infirmities of wUl and character, when once we caU to mind our powerlessness against forces none of which we can control, we shall have little inclination left for boastf ulness. There is of course no such insufferable person as the man who is under the delusion that he is self-made — I am glad to think the type is dying out, though at one time he was a great and rather noisy nuisance ; but as a matter of fact, a httle reflection brings it home to us how little power even the most powerful has apart from the services, the good-wiU, the good opinion of his fellows. Capital always talks as though it was the beneficient provision of Heaven, but for which labour would go without its daUy bread — I read an address in that key only quite a short while ago — whereas capital could not have 147 K 2 The Way of Understanding been produced at aU apart from labour, and is quite powerless, duU and inert, without labour's help. So, then, the only wise attitude for each one of us towards our feUows is the humble one — quite remote from cringing — which readily acknowledges its depend ence and its sense of countless benefits received at their hands ; the attitude, too, of wiUing eagerness to serve in turn, to make some sort of contribution toward that store of the world's commodities which is ever in process of being consumed, and which has to be constantly renewed to supply the world's necessities. Humility says, "So much have I received," and in the same breath asks, " And now, what can I give ? " To make our service good enough — nay, to make our selves good enough to serve, fit to render help, to seek to increase our efficiency from a sense of obligation — that is the only becoming spirit, and in order that it may be ours, we must fight down the pride which wishes to be ministered unto rather than to minister. And then it seems to me that a measure of humihty — discontent with self and its performances — is indis pensable to all progress, whether personal or social. Self-satisfied civilisations are stagnant civilisations — self-satisfied people are unprogressive people. Show me a man who is persuaded that he does his particular job just weU enough — a workman who thinks he is a good enough workman, a musician who thinks he is just about a sufficiently accomplished singer or player, a preacher who fancies he has nothing more to learn about preaching — and I will show you every time a man from whom nothing further may be hoped in the future, who will go back automaticaUy through not attempting to move forward. As humility is the 148 The Grace of Humility grace which alone makes the successful tolerable, so it is the condition of all advance. And it is not the wisest or the most proficient who are satisfied with themselves ; a Paul, toward the very close of his phenomenal career, writes from his Roman prison to the Phihppians : " Not that I have already attained, or am already made perfect ; but I press on, if so be that I may apprehend." I shaU always remember seeing a letter written by Dr. Martineau, when that illustrious thinker was past ninety, in which he spoke with utter simphcity of returning from his Highland holiday to London " for much-needed study." Such men are great enough to be humble. And aU this applies with doubled and trebled force to our moral attainments, or rather to that sense of our moral deficiencies which can never be very far from those who deal honestly with themselves. As I said earlier in the sermon, we are not caUed upon at every turn to express contrition, to speak of ourselves as worms or as miserable offenders ; and yet, how far have we fallen short, one and all, of what we perfectly well know to be right, nay, of what we can by no stretch of imagination describe as outside our reach ! You and I, brethren, could have been better, done better, and there is no getting away from it. I do not know of any failing upon which Jesus was so severe as upon self-righteousness — He dealt with it in far more unsparing terms than with the common frailties of humanity, because He saw that this sin went so much deeper. " One might imagine," a would-be critic of Christ's once said, " to read the strictures of Jesus on the Pharisees, that these men were the lowest of the low — which they were not." Well, the Master ranked 149 The Way of Understanding them beneath those reputed lowest. He said that poor lost things from the street would enter into the Kingdom before the respectable Pharisees and Scribes. They were satisfied with the level on which they stood, consciously superior to ordinary poor sinners, and the sense of their meritoriousness and correctitude destroyed in them aU generosity, all compassion, aU love. They seriously fancied that they somehow placed God under an obligation — made Heaven their debtor — by keeping the Law so zealously ; and because aU their doing ministered only to their pride, it was nothing worth — of immeasurably less account in God's sight than the humble self-abasement of the publican. There is a mediaeval story concerning the DevU, which always strikes me as full of insight, just because it gives quite a different picture of the Prince of Dark ness from the one usually presented. The Devil, meeting a certain saint, tried his utmost to overcome him both by guile and force, but failed abjectly in his enterprise, and in the end owned himself beaten. " Why is it, think you," said he to the saint, " that I could not prevail over you ? You fancy it is because you abstain from aU dehghts of sense — but I am much more abstemious than you. You think it is because you are deeply versed in the Scriptures — but I, the Devil, know them by heart. Your fastings and vigils are nothing to mine, but I could not subdue you because your humility was with you — and I, being the Devil, have no humility." I think I may leave the story to be its own comment and convey its own lesson. Lastly, as we should feel humble in the knowledge of our weakness, our dependence on others, our secret 150 The Grace of Humility faults and presumptuous sins, so above all should we strive to realise what the ancient prophet means by " walking humbly with our God." Not to lie prostrate, not to grovel, with our foreheads touching the dust, but to walk humbly — a very different thing. By humility towards God is meant the attitude of unreserved trust, of childlike teachableness, of ready obedience — aU that was in the mind of our Lord when He made little chUdren the very type and pattern of those who would receive the Kingdom — all that He Himself exhibited in unique perfection. Quiet confidence in the Divine leading ; quiet receptiveness of the Divine truth ; quiet submission to the Divine command — those who have tried the method have found it make for happiness and a peace such as is not of the world's giving. It is true that the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, who dweUs in the high and holy place, dweUeth also with him that is of an humble spirit. It is true that when we take our orders from Him who has spoken to us through His Son, our spirits find rest and gladness in the knowledge that we are doing His will. It is true that when we feel sorely perplexed and unable to disentangle the coil of pain and disappointment, the conviction that He holds the threads of our destinies in His wise hand wiU aUay the soreness and come as a cool and healing breath upon our fevered impatience. And as spiritual humility is the condition of all spiritual advancement, so it is the source and mainspring of intrepid strength : what made the Puritans utterly fearless of men was their consciousness that they had yielded themselves implicitly as instruments to be employed as the Most High might choose ; what made Jesus strong and brave in the face of danger and death 151 The Way of Understanding was His complete acceptance of His Father's wiU as absolutely best. Here is the secret of power — and like all great secrets, it is an open one. We, too, can be brave and strong and more than conquerors if we will learn from Him who humbled Himself, and whom God has exalted ; and who, having been made perfect by obedience, has become unto all who obey Him the Author of eternal salvation. 152 XII THE CURSE OF MEANNESS " There is that maketh himself rich, yet hath nothing ; there is that maketh himself poor, yet hath great wealth." — Prov. xiii. 7. Let me begin what I have to say this morning by drawing your attention to that incident in the closing days of our Lord, which we have once more read to gether — that story of the woman with the cruse of ointment, who made such an unexpected appearance in the house of Simon when Jesus was a guest there. Of aU the company in that room only One understood and appreciated the significance of her act ; the rest, even the Master's own disciples, viewed it with dis approval as a piece of senseless extravagance, foolish and reprehensible. " Waste," they caUed it, and wondered that Jesus countenanced such recklessness ; why could not the woman have sold the precious perfume, given the proceeds to them, and let them use it in charity ? But Jesus, though His mind was already fiUed with sad forebodings, had not lost that keen intelligence which gave Him His unique insight into human motives. He knew what was in man ; He knew that the disciples were merely annoyed at the woman's superb prodigality, which their petty souls could not understand ; their concern for the poor, and the charit- 153 The Way of Understanding able use to which the price of the perfume might have been devoted, was only an afterthought — they would have liked, no doubt, to have the handhng and hoarding of this considerable sum, but their complaint and censure sprang, not from phUanthropy but from mean ness, and with meanness Jesus had no patience. It is a fitting foot-note and comment upon the whole episode that Judas went away — apparently straight from Simon's house — to interview the priests, and offered to betray his Lord for money. If Jesus did not value that commodity, he, Judas, did. Jesus was the son of poor people ; He had grown up in a household where there could never be more than just enough to satisfy very simple wants, and He Himself had worked at the bench for a livelihood until the last year of His life ; but He was as far from over-estimating as from under-estimating material wealth. He was, indeed, abundantly alive to the danger of great possessions ; He saw their power to draw the soul away from the things of the spirit, to bind it in fetters none the less heavy because they were golden ; He could not but have noted many an instance of uncontrolled riches furnishing the means to ruinous indulgence, and the degradation of self and others. But the real enemy, he discerned, was not wealth as such, but covetousness, avarice, a grasping disposition — not the having of money, but the idolatry of Mammon. Against this He never tired of directing His warning and rebuke — and it is significant that this part of His teaching should have provoked the particular derision of the Pharisees, because they " were lovers of money." I venture to suggest that it must have been a special disappointment to Jesus to find at the very close of 154 The Curse of Meanness His career that His own intimate followers manifested this spirit of meanness. And now turn again to the book which we are studying in these sermons — those " Words of the Wise " and their almost inexhaustible treasures of counsel, reflec tion and suggestion. What makes this Book so valu able is the fact that its piety is never open to the suspicion of other-worldliness, it never makes the ordinary man impatient — as I am afraid a good deal of well-intentioned devotional literature does — by ignoring the facts of every day. It does not deal with mysteries or abstractions, but with a concrete world and the concrete people who move in it. We do not feel tempted to say, as we read these pages, " Ah, weU, aU this does not refer to us," because we know that it refers very much to us. You may remember that when we were deahng with " The Worth of Wealth," I pointed out that these ancient sages make no pretence of despising that security from want which an adequate income confers, nor do they sing the praises of poverty — praises which we, frankly, do not mean, and which to our ears always savour of unreality. These writers are the spokesmen of a race which, above most others, has shown conspicuous talents in aU that pertains to money-making — a race which, it is true, contains to this day an enormous percentage of the very poor, but which has never glorified poverty. Now, it is a most remark able fact that in their collection of proverbial wisdom, together with a solid appreciation of solid possessions, we should also come upon warning after warning against an excessive devotion to riches, either as regards their acquisition or their hoarding. " Weary not thyself to be rich," the reader is exhorted, and the 155 The Way of Understanding warning comes home, for have we not all known men with whom the amassing of wealth had become quite a purposeless, wearying and rather uninteUigent routine, which they continued to foUow without being able to explain to a living soul — or to themselves, for the matter of that — what particular satisfaction they derived from it ? One can understand a man toiling terribly in order to escape from want or the danger of want, in order to provide those dependent on his efforts with comfort, a good education, a favourable start in life ; one can also understand his desire for such means as wUl enable him to indulge in certain hobbies, to gratify this or that taste — travel or study, and the like — but beyond that ? Why still go on with the same feverish intentness on profits as if any relaxation, any looking to right or left, were bound to speU ruin and disaster ? So this practical book for practical people has nothing but contempt for the money-grubber who " coveteth greedfly aU the day long," and misses so much that would give him a taste of real happiness. " There is that scattereth and increaseth yet more ; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth only to want," is one observation ; and another, even keener, goes to the heart of the matter by saying, " There is that maketh himself rich, yet hath nothing ; there is that maketh himself poor, yet hath great wealth." All honour to the industry, will-power, self-command and perseverance which enable a man to climb the steep ladder of honest success ; but for the spectacle of an immortal spirit enslaved by the desire for mere having, mere accumulation, it is im possible to feel anything but a strong distaste. On 156 The Curse of Meanness the sin of meanness the Book of Proverbs is speciaUy, and deservedly, severe. Let us look at this subject of the use of money with a httle care, for it is here that we discover one of the surest touchstones of character. With great shrewdness Mr. Gladstone once observed, " When you know what a man does with money — how he gets it, keeps it, spends it, and thinks about it— you know some of the most important things about him." Once more, then— it is natural and inevitable that we should seek to acquire what is so indispensable for the satis faction of our wants ; there is no need to be squeamish or apologetic for striving to obtain results which, in nearly every case, are reckoned in money terms — no need to affect contempt for that which puts us in possession of the things we want. As a friend of mine put it in conversation the other day, " To work hard to earn money which wiU purchase bread — bread that wiU feed the mouths one loves — that is worth while, and makes life worth whUe." Yes, and I would add that to increase one's earning power so as to be able to raise the lives of such a smaU circle to a level of material and intellectual well-being, to bring, say, good health, good books, good music and the rest within their reach, is an entirely honourable ambition, which has ever been the inspiration of much honest and excellent work. And let me say here in passing — it is so easy for those who are already not unprosperous to express their astonishment at some group or grade of workers stand ing out for another sixpence a day : "so sordid, so material of them," is the criticism one hears made — " these wretched people think of nothing but their 157 The Way of - Understanding bread-and-butter ! " WeU, if some of these critics had not quite enough bread, to say nothing of butter, it might help to correct their standpoint and to sober their social philosophy. I have myself heard of a very rich man expressing his wonderment and disgust because someone else was influenced in the acceptance of a post by a mere difference of a pound a week ; but then he had no notion of how great a difference that was to the one he condemned as mercenary. There is nothing to be ashamed of, I repeat, in the honest effort most men make to add to their earning for the purpose of legitimate spending. To have more leisure for the cultivation of one's mind, or for throwing oneself into some fresh movement or interest ; to hve, if you wiU, in healthier surroundings, with better air to breathe, with more beauty to gladden the eyes ; yes, for the matter of that, to furnish one's dweUing harmoniously, to dress or enable other people to dress tastefuUy — these are quite blameless aspirations in themselves, but they aU require money for their fulfilment. God hath made everything beautiful in its time, we read, and we certainly are meant to enjoy and appreciate aU that is fair in nature and art, in colour and sound, and to cultivate our capacity of appreciation. And this brings us to the sin, or the curse, of meanness. The honourable toU and effort of earning becomes unspeakably vulgarised and even preposterous when its main purpose is mere accumulation for accumula tion's sake ; and not for nothing has this temper always excited popular scorn and contempt. We lose our sym pathy with Shylock when he names his ducats before his daughter. To value wealth for its purchasing power is sane and sensible enough ; to value it for its own sake 158 The Curse of Meanness and keep it locked up — to hate the spending and exult in the having — is about as rational as to keep, say, a priceless violin under lock and key, not aUowing it to be played on. Money is an instrument of immense power and possibUities ; but an instrument which does not act is an ineptitude, and its possessor a pathetic sight. Yes, precisely because money can accomplish so much, are we responsible to God and man for its use, and its disuse, its mere miserly hoarding, is no more to be excused than its misuse, while of the two the former is often the less inteUigent. We have to get rid of the last remnant of the fancy that we may do precisely as we wUl with our own, for the simple reason that we our selves are not our own. The sin of meanness lies in the denial that we are God's stewards, accountable to Him for what we do or leave undone with what He lends us ; its curse is the double one, which takes effect in those who are guilty of this f aUing and those who have the mis fortune of being affected by the niggardliness of others. But before I come to deal with this latter point I would observe that a good deal of parsimony of the worse kind always strikes one as due to lack of imagina tion as much as anything. I spoke already of the type, aU too weU known, which goes on quite aimlessly and mechanicaUy, though with concentrated energy, making money for dear life, intent on increased gains, increased dividends, without being able to extract one whit more real enjoyment from the result of all this frantic effort. To the office, or the shop, or the mill, and back again at night ; mental interests, none ; public interests, none ; spiritual interests, none — a fact quite compatible with perfunctory Church attendance ; very little amusement, save of the more elementary sort ; neither 159 The Way of Understanding beauty nor grace in the general manner of living. What does this kind of man get out of aU his pursuit of money he has not the wit to use ? In what respect is he better off than someone with one-tenth his income ? I can understand anyone prostrating him self before some entrancing idol ; but Mammon, if the truth must be told, is such a desperately dull devU to worship — and its worshippers are such dullards, too ! The fact is, they have never learnt how to spend — they lack the knowledge or taste what to spend on, and so they go on confusing means with ends. Means with ends — exactly ; for what do we seek to express when we speak of a man of means ? Surely, that his possessions are only tools with which to fashion a life which shall be worth living, not an end in them selves ; and what is the good of unused tools that gather rust, and only proclaim how much might have been done with them had their owner but seen how to make them fulfil their function ? People have no outlet for their money because they have no inlets into their minds, and so they go on leading cheerless and dingy lives for which they themselves are no better, and for which their heirs are often the worse. And let me say this — that, deplorable as extravagance and recklessness are, popular feeling is not altogether at fault if it sees in the prodigal a charm which it fails to detect in the miser ; both extremes are bad, no doubt, but we know which is the more sordid and unlovable of the two. Yes, and often the spendthrift and scapegrace is the direct result of, or reaction from, the niggardly temper of some elder which laid its shackles and restraints upon his years of growth. But be the cause of such a disposition what it may, 160 The Curse of Meanness its effect, its curse, is always the same and unescapable. Let us look the fact in the face ; the Scripture is right when it speaks of " covetousness, which is idolatry," and no one can with impunity put anything in the place of God. No one who, in the language of the Book of Proverbs, " coveteth greedily all the day long," can escape deterioration aU along the line ; he must grow away from religion, for God Himself is the Great Giver, and how can one whose whole mind is set upon getting and keeping feel other than out of touch with that Divine Love which gave even its own Self for us men ? And as this vice cuts its victim off from communion with God, so it separates him from sympathy with his fellow-men, it isolates him, sets him apart. In his most developed state the miser is a hermit, shunning men and shunned by them, alone with his obsession. And the result is that though he maketh himself rich, he yet hath nothing, and though he withholdeth, yet it tendeth only to poverty, a poverty deeper than all material privation, leaving him something less than a man. You wiU say that these are rare cases ; so they are, but the disease is one that attacks the most diverse grades in varying measures of severity, and once contracted is seldom shaken off. You have heard of converted drunkards, gamblers, evil-hvers brought under conviction of sin and living new lives to the glory of God ; but when have we heard of some hard, dour, grasping individual making his way to the penitent form, professing a change of heart and thenceforward practising generosity ? Not that such a moral miracle is impossible with God ; but the fact that such cases are rare in the records of conversion is eloquent and full 161 L The Way of Understanding of warning. This, I say, is an infection the very first symptom of which should be fought most strenuously, for it is one which ravages and corrodes the very tissue of the soul. Let me give an iUustration from life. Here is a tired workman making his way home after a day's toil ; he passes a toy-shop, and something he sees in the window strikes him ; his lean purse can ill afford the luxury, but it is for a child at home, and so he enters the shop to buy. But the owner has shrewdly taken the measure of the man — he wants this particular thing and won't haggle — and so the other deliberately asks and obtains a higher price. Now it is not the extra threepence or sixpence ; but the person who was capable of coining that threepence or sixpence out of a poorer man's love for his child, might be more truly designated a son of perdition than many a criminal expi ating some rash deed by years of penal servitude. And — to exemplify the same taint on a larger scale— do we not remember the extraordinary outbreak of mean ness which followed the Budget of 1909, when Peers and landowners joyfully took the opportunity of reducing their subscriptions, withdrawing their grants to pen sioners, etc., because they could not — so they said — bear the burden that measure laid upon their shoulders ? Is it or is it not a fact that there are great firms of manu facturers to-day threatening to withdraw their support from medical charities in revenge for the Insurance Act ? These are depths which one would rather not contem plate ; but they show with what virulence the microbe of meanness attacks those who are not on their guard against it. And — to turn in yet another direction — what is it but the same evil proclivity, the determina tion to extract the uttermost farthing of profit, that 162 The Curse of Meanness accounts for the horrible system of " living-in " which prevails in so many of the large retail establishments of this country, a system fraught with the worst dangers to the bodies and souls of those whom it engulfs and imprisons ? Mean profits squeezed out of insufficient and ill-prepared food, served in stuffy underground rooms ; out of overcrowded dormitories, the conditions in which are sometimes indescribable ; out of a multi tude of petty fines deducted from the scanty wages of this defenceless class ; and public opinion even yet insufficiently alive to these abominations which should be ended — not mended — by law. Listen. We are always insisting, and rightly insisting, on the optimism of Browning. It is a remarkable cir cumstance that the one poem in which that optimism falters is one founded on fact, and describing a victim of avarice, a girl who had hved and died in the odour of sanctity, while aU the time she indulged her passion of covetousness — indulged it even beyond the portals of death, for she managed to secrete thirty gold coins in her golden hair, and there, years after, they were discovered when it was necessary to move the remains. Truth is truth : too true it was. Gold ! She hoarded and hugged it first, Longed for it, leaned o'er it, loved it, alas, Till the humour grew to a head and burst. With heaven's gold gates about to ope, With friends' praise, gold-like, lingering still. An instinct had bidden the girl's hand grope For gold, the true sort — " Gold in heaven if you will, But I keep earth's too, I hope ! " We need not foUow the poet in declaring that such a case proves the old doctrine of " original sin, the 163 L 2 The Way of Understanding corruption of man's heart " ; but we may well admit that from this quarter, more than from most others, does real corruption threaten human nature. But we must not content ourselves with denouncing a snare ; we must also try to point out a more excel lent way, and this I will do in the fewest words. Let us bear in mind that there are things purchasable by money — wholly or partiaUy — but ever so much better than money. We all know that health and happiness for the individual and the community may be almost indefinitely increased by wiser methods of administering and expending the enormous wealth that actually exists. With a saner spirit prevailing, we could have our city beautiful, healthy, clean — a city to be proud of. And it is just as true for the individual that by making himself apparently poor — by spending instead of hoarding— he may have great wealth, the reward and satisfaction of seeing his money do something to increase the sum of good, combat and lessen the forces of evil, assist some cause in which he believes and which would help the world forward and upward. That should be a great and really noble incentive to earning money — to have it to devote to the progress of mankind, to promote that progress economicaUy, sociaUy, spiritu ally ; in a word to go into partnership with God. And that partnership, let us remember, involves a real sharing in God's own joy ; for when our Lord spoke of the greater blessedness of giving, He only revealed one of those open secrets anyone may discover for himself. And secondly, there are things ^purchasable by money, which, alas, men have again and again bartered away for gold, but always to their own impoverishment and undoing — inward peace, a pure conscience, the 164 The Curse of Meanness sense of accord with the will of God, the goodwiU and affection of our fellows, joy in the Holy Spirit. These are the possessions which we cannot afford to be without, and the money was never coined that can compensate us for their loss. We shall never forfeit them by liberality — we shaU never gain them by its opposite. Lastly, there are things abiding and perdurable which alone will avail either rich or poor, when all our material possessions faU away from us, as at the last they must ; "for riches are not for ever," says the old writer, " and doth the crown endure unto all genera tions ?" We must store up enduring riches in our minds and hearts and souls — gentle thoughts and unselfish aspirations, and the memory of kindly deeds — if we would have treasure in heaven ; armed and equipped with such incorruptible wealth, we may await the great Beyond without disquiet, and when its portals open find ourselves not strangers in a strange land, but children called to their long-sought and promised home. 165 XIII THE CANDLE OF THE LORD " The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord." — Prov. xx. 27. When I chose my subject and set it down for to-day, I did not realise that it might have a special appro priateness to the occasion, but so it has turned out. For to-day is Whit Sunday, the Festival of the Holy Spirit, when the Christian Church celebrates the giving of the Spirit to the early believers in Jerusalem ; and my subject is part of a sentence from the twentieth chapter of Proverbs, where we read that the spirit of man is the candle, or the lamp, of the Lord. That is a striking phrase, full of suggestions at some of which we shall glance presently ; but the first thought it calls to mind is that which we find so often and in so many forms expressed in our Scriptures — namely that man is somehow akin to God Himself. If the human spirit is as it were a spark which shows forth something of the Father of spirits, then God and man must be of the same substance, and that fact is infinitely full of hope and encouragement. On that hope and encouragement I would chiefly insist this morning ; for somehow man has always been peculiarly fond of thinking meanly of himself and of human nature. In fact, the very term " human nature " has come to sound rather apologetic, as though 166 The Candle of the Lord it meant some poor, fraU material from which too much must not be expected. Why it should be so, I cannot teU, but you may remember that in an earlier sermon on the Grace of Humility, I pointed out that religion has often very mistakenly encouraged this spirit of exaggerated self-abasement. It is aU very weU to insist that we are to walk humbly with our God, but — once more — to walk humbly is one thing, and to crawl abjectly is another. We do not compliment our Maker when we whine about there being no health in us ; there is reaUy neither piety nor reason in the statement by one of our own leading theologians who declared the other day, quite in the style of the old Calvinism, that before God we have nothing save an equality of perdition. I say again, it is not compli mentary to God to talk in such a style about His creatures ; it is to charge Him with having created a miserable race of moral cripples and paralytics, and that He either could not, or would not, do better. Now what should we think of a human craftsman turning out such wretched handiwork ? We should call him a bungler, a spoUer of good material. And if the whole human race is such a ghastly faUure as Calvinism teUs us, would not that be a direct reflection upon its Maker ? We decline to believe such a libel upon God or man. But then we are told that if we are not totally depraved and utterly wicked, we are at any rate utterly insignificant in the vast scheme of things, and cannot possibly matter in the sight of God — which is like saying that if we are not " lost " in one way, we are " lost " in another. In the immense universe revealed by modern astronomy we are simply negligible, of as 167 The Way of Understanding little account as the myriads of gnats we see playing in the sunshine, and the inference is that our existence must be pretty weU as purposeless as theirs. It is nothing but our conceit and vanity, we are told, that led us to believe that in this universe of Ulimitable space and time we can be of sufficient value to engage the attention of the Most High God. Let us ponder such a fact as that 1,500 millions of miUions of miles away, where the naked eye with difficulty descries half a dozen points of light, the telescope reveals more than a thousand celestial bodies, some seventy of them larger than our sun, and each the centre of a solar system ; let us ponder what this implies, and reflect, " What, then, are we ! " We to count amid these immensities, we to claim life everlasting ? Rather let us realise how ephemeral we are, and understand that The eternal Saki from His Bowl has poured Millions of bubbles like us, and will pour ! And then, worst of aU, we are told, in the name of modern science again, to give up our proud, foolish notion of being in any sense God's special creation ; on the contrary, every schoolboy knows that we have but evolved from a sub-human ancestry, preserving in our organic structure and in many of our characteristics the indubitable evidence of our descent. Ought not that to make us humble and to reduce us to a lowly estimate of our value and our likely destiny ? Ought we not at length to admit that Ecclesiastes was right when he said that the sons of men should see that they themselves are but as beasts ? " For," says that genial and cheerful writer, " that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts ; yea, they have all one 168 The Candle of the Lord breath, and man hath no pre-eminence above the beasts." It is not a flattering conclusion to come to ; but if it is true, must we not accept it, and abide by it? Yes, if it is true; much virtue in an "if." But while one type of theology would make of man something like a devil, and one type of science would make him some thing like an ape, I hope to show you, however briefly, that there is more truth and rationality in the old Scripture doctrine which declares that God created man in His own image, and made him a little lower than the angels ; the doctrine of man which calls him a temple of the living God, and which, in the words of our text, states that the spirit of man is the candle of the Lord. That doctrine, of course, runs diametricaUy counter to the dismal theories at which we have just been glancing ; and if it is capable of proof, it assigns to man a dignity which cannot but give us much to think, and must act as an incentive to fine and worthy conduct — for if we are indeed indissolubly akin to God, we cannot aUow ourselves to act as we might if we had to class ourselves with the ape and tiger. Noblesse oblige : if we believed that we were descended from kings, we should try at any rate to bear ourselves like princes ; if we believe we are descended from God, shall we not try to bear ourselves as sons and daughters of God ? I knew, quite a number of years ago, a middle-aged lady in Hampshire of whom some of the young people made fun because she had been known to say, " I am a daughter of the King " ; but I can see now that it was just that consciousness, that firm belief, which clothed her with a certain dignity. 169 The Way of Understanding Now, in the first place let us dispose of the foolish fiction which would assign to man no pre-eminence over the animal creation. It is weU-nigh inconceivable how people of intelligence and education could ever have persuaded themselves of so preposterous an absurdity, except on the ground that for some reason they must have wished to believe it. Granted that in the unima ginably far-off past man evolved from a sub-human stage, and granted that in a variety of ways we still show our animal ancestry in unmistakable fashion, yet the distinctions are so overwhelmingly larger than the resemblances that only sheer perversity could overlook them. To begin with externals, there is more fundamental likeness between the skulls of the highest European and the lowest savage than between those of the lowest savage and the highest anthropoid ape. The upright walk, again, and the distinctive use of hands and feet, all proclaim the immense advance man has made from his brute predecessors. But above all, the gift of articulate speech, whenever and howsoever acquired, marks a broad ana deep gap between man and all the rest of creation. As has been weU said, " there is something amazing, almost miraculous, in two persons speaking together — the thought descending out of the mind of the first into words, and going across on an airy bridge of sound to the other, then ascending again out of the word into the mind of the second. If an animal could talk, it would cease to be an animal, and become a man. But though the lowest Hottentot can be taught any language of man, the highest animal cannot." And once speech had begun, immense possibilities of progress were in man's grasp ; for he could not only talk about what he saw, but reason 170 The Candle of the Lord about it, argue back to causes, and so to the Highest Cause of aU, the idea of God. And these reasoning powers, wonderful as they are, differentiating man from animals and relating him to God, are only the beginning. Not only can man, unlike all other creatures, say " I am I," but unlike all others he can plan and purpose, consciously set an aim before himself and foUow it out ; unlike all others he is haunted by the conception of some greater perfection than he has yet compassed, but which he means to strive after. Where is the animal that has dreams of being a better animal, and seeks to realise them ? Where is the animal that has deliberately advanced in the scale of being ? It is this faculty of vision, of idealism — manifesting itself in the moral sphere as the sense of sin — which has led men forward from the primitive stage to higher and higher levels, has never aUowed them to rest contented with the attained, and so given them the mastery not only over nature but over themselves, subduing their fiercer instincts to the dictates of reason and conscience. All this is plainly not inherited from the beasts that perish— and if not from them, if its origin is not from below, must it not be from above, proclaiming man's more than earthly nature ? And even this is not all ; even language, reason, conscience, the faculty of idealism, do not yet exhaust the full difference between man and his brute ancestors. Man, the world over, is conscious of belonging to another order of existence beside that revealed by the things of sense ; somehow, these do not satisfy him — there is a side of his nature which opens out towards another kind of realities altogether, realities not 171 The Way of Understanding apprehended by eye or ear — spiritual things which are only spirituaUy discerned by a special faculty. Man is universaUy, persistently, incurably religious. Wherever we meet him, he has had some glimpse into the truth that the visible and concrete things by which he is surrounded are not all, nor even the most impor tant ; he knows that there are unseen forces guiding and controlhng, forces to which, in some way, he is related and owes allegiance. Of course, that truth does not dawn with any clearness upon primitive man ; but even in its crudest and most distorted form it moves him to an awe and reverence that take him out of himself and contain the germ of all his subsequent religious progress. He builds his altars, offers his sacrifices, performs a hundred strange rites and cere monies, utters formulas of prayer and invocation — and one and all of these spring from the rehgious instinct and intuition, they attest his oneness of substance with that Unseen he seeks to enter into communion withal. As the steel is drawn to the magnet, and as the needle points to the pole, so the soul of man is athirst for God, for the hving God, with a dimmer or clearer consciousness that in Him alone is its fulfilment and its peace. As the writer of the Book of Job has it, " There is a spirit in man, the breath of the Almighty giveth them understanding " — an instinc tive understanding of their own nature : our reason, our sense of right and wrong, our aspiring faculty, above all our instinctive assurance of spiritual realities which we strive to apprehend — these make the human spirit the candle of the Lord, kindled by His unbegotten radiance, reflecting His own light, bearing testimony to another, higher order of 172 The Candle of the Lord things to which we belong — the eternal realm of the Spirit. You ask, What is the bearing of all this on life as we have to live it — what does it mean in practice ? I answer, Much, every way. If these are the faculties which we distinctively hold from God, in the sense that they make us what we are, and relate us to Him, we shall surely desire to cultivate them. If by reason of this indweUing spirit man is the lamp, the candle of the Lord, then let us see to it that we trim the lamp, that we guard the sacred flame, for if the light within us be darkness, how great is the darkness ! But we can kindle each one of these God-derived and God-like faculties to a brighter glow and, as we do so, enter into a fuller communion with Him who is the Source of our being. Take the power of reason, first of aU. The Book which we are studying lays great and legitimate stress upon instruction and understanding, it commends knowledge as one of the main paths that lead to a full and worthy hfe, and that because all true knowledge culminates in the knowledge of God. Religious people have not always had a fitting appreciation of the worth of knowledge : they have occasionally talked as if reason were the enemy of faith, and as though we had to choose between head and heart— or rather as though the head had to be cut off in order that the heart might beat the more strongly ! You remember the cynical definition of faith as the capacity to believe that which otherwise we know to be untrue. Frankly, the outlook which this epigram satirises is altogether lamentable. There is no conflict between faith and reason, between religion and science ; we need not turn down the lamp 173 The Way of Understanding of the understanding in order to luxuriate in some dim religious light, so-called. As the Apostle says, " We are all sons of light, and sons of the day : we are not of the night, nor of darkness." All truth is from God — all truth leads to God ; let us welcome it and trust it, let us " hear instruction, and refuse it not." And as we ought to keep the lamp of reason brightly burning, so we must guard lest the lamp of conscience grow dim and give an uncertain flicker where the fullest clarity is urgently required. I know that conscience will not teU us in every case just what is the right thing to do, for we have often seen equally conscientious people on opposite sides ; but the first and most impor tant thing is that there should shinfe- ai-.d burn in us an unquenchable conviction that there is a right, and that we ought under all circumstances to' follow the dictates of our awakened moral sense. We, have to believe that those dictates are from God — no r the variable rules of mere expediency and opportunism, but of Divine authority ; and as in the symbolism of the older Churches a sacred lamp was kept alight in the sanc tuary, which it was held sacrilege to extinguish, so we must beware of putting out or darkening by sophisms and self-deception that candle of the Lord which He has lit in our spirits. And all we have said of the light of reason and of conscience applies in the highest measure to that supreme faculty which brings our soul into the most direct relationship to God — spiritual vision. Protect this beam, for without it we can never have that clear iUumination thrown upon our path which we aU need in life's perplexities, in its griefs and sorrows ; protect it, for it is exposed to many dangers from worldly cares 174 The Candle of the Lord and worldly pleasures, from aU that is earthy and ashen in ourselves, and there are many in whom that ray has been put out or sadly obscured. In their seasons of prosperity, and when all goes well with them, men are apt to think they can dispense with this lamp, and take no care to keep it burning ; alas, if darkness suddenly overtake them, and the heedless, foolish children of the world, terrified by the gloom which surrounds them, exclaim in sudden panic, " Give us of your oil, for our lamps are going out." We touch here upon an exceed ingly sad and only too common experience : and the tragic part of it is this, that with the best wiU in the world it is generaUy impossible to comply with such a request — impossible, I mean, for one soul to kindle in another the faith which that other has allowed to become extinct. That is why the consolations of religion so often prove ineffectual : they cannot help being so when they are offered to people who have lost the faculty of responding to the religious appeal. No one can overcome long-ingrained habits of indif ference to spiritual things in a moment ; it takes time and effort to become a Christian ; even to pray effec tively — I mean, so as to enter at will into communion with God — requires much practice. But they who keep the fire of faith, the lamp of the Lord, undimmed, wiU find it in the day of adversity, when joy has suffered eclipse, to give forth that blessed light which shineth more and more unto the perfect day. There is another side to all this, and concerning that side I would say a few words before I finish. When we speak of the spirit of man as the candle of the Lord, we are reminded of the very important fact that while 175 The Way of Understanding God reveals Himself in all His created works, yet His highest revelation, normally speaking, is that which takes place in men and women. We speak about seeing God in nature — we do well ; but that which is seen of Him in the phenomena of the universe, leaving out humanity, though it might move us to awe and admira tion, would hardly be sufficient for religion in its warmer and more intimate sense. It is God's revela tion in man, manifested in the sense of right, the sense of sin, the faculty of aspiration, the mystery of love, that has given birth to religion ; it is certain human qualities which we instinctively recognise and reverence as Godlike, that commend God to men ; the very con ception of the Divine Fatherhood could only come to us through the medium of human fatherhood. Do you not see what that means ? God says to each one of us : " Go and be my candle ; let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and your goodwiU, and seeing, may glorify your Father who is in heaven." That, no doubt, is quite a familiar idea to you ; suffer me nevertheless to emphasise and reinforce it. The Christian, wherever he goes, is to show forth cer tain clear-shining qualities which will commend his Christianity, and so lead men, whether consciously or unconsciously, to Christ. Lives are the best preachers ; and many an obscure Christian man or woman, filled with the constraining love of Christ, practising day by day the dear simplicities of the Gospel, preaches a sermon which he who runs may read, or listen to, and whose closing notes are not heard on this earth at ah. Lives are the best preachers, I repeat ; it is they alone that " adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour in all things." It is too sadly true that many a one has lost 176 The Candle of the Lord his faith in God largely owing to the hardness, the lovelessness, the baseness and treachery he has experienced at the hands of men ; it is happily still more true that to numberless others the unselfishness, the staunchness of principle, the Christian manliness and womanliness they have observed in the followers of the Lord Jesus have been means of grace and invincible arguments for belief in Him. We are made and meant, in the words of the hymn, to " hold up to earth the torch Divine " : that is a great responsibility, but it is also an exceeding great privilege. I began by making allusion to our proneness to think that we do not matter, that we are of small account, and I must close upon the same note. In God's good Providence we are none of us cyphers, but units. We none of us know how far-reaching is the influence we exercise, and how, by practising faith fulness, patience, quiet fulfilment of duty, we may help and hearten another soul, making him feel that goodness is after aU the one thing worth whUe. You remember those lovely lines Shakespeare places in Portia's mouth when she returns from Venice to her home in Belmont : That light we see is burning in my hall. How far that little candle throws his beams ! So shines a good deed in a naughty world. And we are candles — our spirits the candles of the Lord ; lights whose clear shining may haply show to some perplexed soul the absolute worth of right-doing, the glory of steadfastness, the reward of trust, the joy of self-giving, self-forgetting love, the infinite affection of God — the way home to Him who is ready to receive 177 M The Way of Understanding the soul that longs for Him. May it be our lot in calm or storm to keep our lamps alight for such service ; may it be our wisdom, when their feeble light declines, to rekindle it by contact and communion with Him who is the Light of the World, Christ blessed for ever. 178 XIV THE SIN OF HURRY "He that hasteth with his feet, sinneth." — Prov. xix. 2. In Luke's Gospel there is a statement referring to the opening of the Lord's ministry, so quietly and almost casually introduced that we are liable to miss its force : " And Jesus Himself, when He began to teach, was about thirty years of age." Of those thirty years preceding His public activity we know practically no details ; we know they were years of obedience to His parents, of apprenticeship to His father, of plain living and unremitting toil for a livelihood at the carpenter's bench, of growth and inward preparation for His work of preaching the Good News of the Kingdom. Prior to His baptism I doubt if Jesus was at all known beyond the nearest villages ; but that one crowded year of ministry had been quietly prepared for during the thirty silent years at Nazareth. The greatest moral and spiritual Genius of the race did not approach His task until He had gathered that varied and matchless knowledge of His fellows which only experience of hfe and labour could give — until much reflection and communion with God had definitely assured Him of His vocation. Never did man act more decisively, once the moment for action had come ; never was decision more carefuUy and conscientiously weighed 179 M 2 The Way of Understanding than that which transformed this Galilean mechanic into the Prophet of the Highest, the Christ of God. There was nothing precipitate or ill-considered about His public appearance : the Flower unfolded in a day — but only after it had drawn abundant nurture from soil and sunshine and rain and the sweet airs of heaven. We are reminded of this circumstance, the long, unhasting preparation of Jesus for His immortal task, when we read that very unexpected saying in Proverbs which declares that " he that hasteth with his feet, sinneth." At a first hearing, let us frankly confess, the words fall upon our ears with a strange sound ; we are quite sure that there is no merit, no virtue, in dawdling, and we look with pitying contempt upon vaciUation, upon all poor weak-spirited folk who either cannot make up their minds as to what they want, or go on letting " I dare not " wait upon " I would." We believe in the strenuous life, in speed,' and still higher speed ; we delight to think that one powerful mechanism will do the work it formerly took scores of men twice the time or more to accomplish. You have heard about the " Brunsviga," a calculating machine which in so many seconds and with unfail ing precision does complicated operations such as a trained human brain could hardly manage in the same number of minutes : " the steel thinker," its proud inventors caU it, and with our sense of marvel at its uncanny performances there goes also a sense of mastery. To save time, to annihilate distance, to minimise labour — such are the aims of invention, and we glory in their being achieved ; we glory in these achieve ments so much that it does not strike us that the more 180 The Sin of Hurry time we save, the less time we seem to have — surely a strange paradox ! I suppose your preacher is one of the last people to have any temperamental sympathy with slow ways, with letting things occur, or doing them anyhow ; so great and genuine is my horror of stagnation, that in preference to mere standing stiU I would echo Living stone's impulsive exclamation, " Anywhere, so long a.s it is forward ! " Nevertheless this morning I am going to take up my parable against the Sin of Haste, to insist on the necessity of exorcising the Demon Speed, to commend to you the wisdom of the ancient writer who stated so positively, " He that hasteth with his feet, sinneth." For we have arrived at a pass when we have almost come to idolise speed for its own sake, when our concern is more and more to see how quickly we can get things done, without asking our selves what we mean to do then, how we intend to benefit by the time we may economise, and whether we may not be purchasing our gains in mere rapidity at far too high a price. I would suggest that our hurry and husthng, our idolatry of speed, are bad symptoms, and that we are in serious danger of sacrificing to them what are higher interests ; and I wish quite definitely to insist that in this ever intensi fied " speeding-up," which is so characteristic of our age, there is reaUy the element of sin. I Sin against ourselves, if you will, in the first place, for haste in thought and action alike is the enemy of thoroughness, the enemy of good work. We do not give ourselves the time which is necessary for all work 181 The Way of Understanding which shall be able to stand the wear of years. Our pulse is feverish, we hve for this moment, and perhaps the next, but there is no spaciousness about our out look. Life is a rush, a scramble, in which there is no room for large thoughts or emotions. We want our results quickly — and we get such results as might be expected from such a temper. We lack patience, and that means we lack faith — our too intense absorption in to-day covers a deep distrust of God's to-morrow. I say again, the best work, that which is to have some quality of permanence, requires time for its growth, for the laying of foundations that will support the super structure. Here is a man laying small lumps of chalk all over a field at Westerham in Kent ; he wanted to find out some important facts relating to the action of earthworms on the soil — how and at what rate they break up the ground — and he knew he could only discover that by digging up the field at some later time, to see how far the pieces of chalk had sunk in. Twenty-nine years he waited before he dug it up, and that is why Darwin's observations stand unchallenged, because the great naturalist was in no hurry — he was after truth, not after money or fame. And here, on the other hand, is a man of science who thinks that he is on the track of a specific against tuberculosis ; prema turely, without sufficient tests, his preparation is placed on the market, and proves a vast failure, causing disappointment and worse. That is a case where haste was positive sin — sin against unhappy patients, sin because it involved a reckless gamble with health and life itself. Or here — to iUustrate the same principle yet again — is Michelangelo, hard at work on a statue, and a friend visiting the studio observes that 182 The Sin of Hurry the master has made no progress since he saw the work so many days ago. " Pardon me," says the sculptor, " I have cut these wrinkles on the forehead deeper ; the lips now look as if speech were just about to issue from them ; the folds of the garment now reveal the form underneath ..." " Yes, but these are only trifles," exclaims the visitor. " Perhaps so," Michelangelo replies, " but trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle." On the other hand, you take a painter like Hans Makart, whose gigantic canvases, gorgeously coloured, were the sensation of their day — the seventies of the last century. But not only were these rapidly-produced works frequently faulty in drawing and modelling, but the brilliant colours have hopelessly faded within a generation, while the frescoes of many a fourteenth century artist still endure. There is a whole parable here, and I need not expound it. God Himself takes time in producing His results. We have given up the fancy that He created the Universe in six days ; we know that unnumbered millions of years have elapsed in the fashioning of this habitable earth alone, in the evolution of life on our planet, in the making of man — and that we are still at the beginning rather than at the end of that evolu tion : Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning age of ages, Shall not aeon after seon pass and touch him into shape ? All around him shadows still, but while the races flower and fade, Prophet-eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining on the shade, Till the peoples all are one, and all their voices blend in choric Hallelujah to the Maker, " It is finished, Man is made." 183 The Way of Understanding And haste is sin because it is so often prompted by unworthy motives ; work is scamped that pay may be the sooner drawn— and if the jerry-built structure tumbles to pieces, well, that means that another job wiU be going all the sooner. Haste is sin because so often speed means greed. And even where greed of the more sordid kind is absent, the mere godless craze for quickness at all costs, at all risks, has much to answer for. Where there is blind hurry, there wiU be many a rush down a steep place. We have aU been reading these terrible words in Senator Smith's Report on the wreck of the Titanic : No sufficient tests were made of the boilers or bulkheads or gearing or equipment, and no life-saving or signal devices were reviewed. No drill or station practice or helpful dis cipline disturbed the tranquillity of that voyage. . . . We shall leave to the honest judgment of England its painstaking chastisement of the British Board of Trade, to whose laxity of regulations and hasty inspection the world is largely indebted for this awful fatality. ... Of contributing causes there were very many. In the face of warning signals speed was increased, and messages of danger seemed to stimulate her to action rather than persuade her to fear. . . . The light and the electric letters in the engine-room indicated " Full speed " up to the moment of the collision. . . . Now there is no preacher's comment needed to point a moral ; here we surely have the most tremendous sermon preached on our text in modern times — preached with every accompaniment of terror and of tragedy. II But I pass on to deal with our subject under another aspect — haste as the destroyer of religion. In our 184 The Sin of Hurry hustle and jostle, in our craving for incessant move ment, we are in danger of losing the religious instinct, which does not flourish in an atmosphere perpetually athrob with unrest. We are too busy for religion — in reality we are too wanting in self-collection, in the self- discipline which for the soul's good sets apart a portion of its time for communion with Him from whom cometh our strength. We hurry after a dozen will-o'- the-wisps instead, and are left unsatisfied, not knowing what we lack, having forgotten that in the conscious contact of the spirit of man with the Spirit of God alone is satisfaction and the consummation of desire. We forget the great men of action who were also great men of prayer, and while holding speech with the Eternal renewed their power to deal with the events and claims of the moment. A Cromwell was not too busy to seek God ; a Gladstone, during his most strenuous sessions, was wont to kneel in the Abbey for a few moments before entering the arena in the House of Commons. So surely as we allow the rush of business or pleasure to crush out those habits that minister to our immortal part, we are simply laying waste our lives and powers ; for in the long run it is only our hold upon things unseen that gives us our mastery even over the things that are seen. And it is equally true that it is sheer haste, and the superficiality which goes with haste, which account for a very large amount of the unbelief that is so wide spread. Hasty, shallow thinking, the perusal of such poor, crude stuff as was served up week by week in the Clarion, was sufficient to unsettle the faith of thousands of people claiming to inteUigence — in fact, claiming it rather emphatically. Half-truths, half- 185 The Way of Understanding understood, seen out of focus and misapplied, turned these readers of Mr. Blatchford's into fervent devotees of agnosticism and determinism, seriously convinced that Christianity had to be smashed in order that society might be regenerated. These were people — I have met a good many of them, and had them firing questions at me — who had evidently never done half an hour's hard, consecutive thinking ; people who could tell you that there were contradictions in the Bible, but could not see the crass, gratuitous contradic tions in the writings of their pet oracle ! Now it was not at ah their superior mental acuteness that made such as these agnostics and determinists, that made them feel they could dispense with God for a Father and Christ for a Saviour — it was their impatience and frequently their inexperience of life — hot haste, setthng the great problems of faith off-hand, like jesting Pilate who, having asked, with a sceptical sneer, " What is truth ? " would not wait for an answer, being in a hurry to pass on to some more congenial theme. Let me say plainly — there is a type, and not a rare one, I am afraid, of people who would rather prefer to believe that there was nothing in religion, because such a conclusion would leave them so much more free to follow their own inclinations. Rehgion imposes re straints ; it speaks the language of duty — " thou shalt" and "thou shalt not;" it utters its sharp rebukes and unconditional injunctions ; it caUs sin, sin — not by some high-polite substitute name. Besides, religion makes claims upon our time— and we are busy ; with only a week-end, though sometimes of fairly generous proportions, in which to repair the waste of nervous tissue involved in our daily- labours, how can 186 The Sin of Hurry we find time for two services on the Sunday, or even one ? Much pleasanter to assume that religion is of no particular account, and spend the day in some form of pleasure, for choice, perhaps, racing along the high roads at a speed which makes any real enjoyment of nature impossible. I believe that one of the ways in which the King exercised an excellent influence during his recent visit to India was the respect he paid to the religious observance of Sunday ; a busy man, he yet found time for the worship of God, and probably did not find it wasted. And as a fast-living generation, grudging the moments for quiet reflection, rushes past religion and votes it " slow," so it also misses, and that inevitably, the comforts religion alone has to give. On that topic I had something to say a week ago, and need add only a word or two. Speaking normally, the deepest con victions are those that have grown slowly within us, twined themselves round the roots of our inner being, become part of ourselves. You may talk of in stantaneous conversions, and I shah not doubt you; but that is not God's regular method, nor is it one in which I have overmuch trust as a method. Light- come, light-go. What becomes of the great mass of the converts enrolled after any evangelistic mission ? Everybody admits that you cannot trace more than a very few per cent, of them after a year's time. Think of the Welsh Revival of a few years ago, and its deplorable results, which now are patent to everyone, and frankly deplored : the slump has succeeded the boom with a vengeance 1 That was the method of speed applied to religion, and a woeful failure it has proved itself to "be. No, no ; it takes time to grow 187 The Way of Understanding Christians as it takes time to grow trees, or to grow character : and if we shun the effort, we must not be surprised if the results proclaim the fact. You know the lath-and-plaster affairs people run up almost overnight for exhibition buildings or picture theatres ; weU, they cannot run up cathedrals at that rate. And there is a lath-and-plaster religion — showy, but a poor shelter in the storm and stress of life, when it goes to pieces ; and there is the cathedral type of religion, with foundations laid deep and strong, with prayer a habit from early childhood, the spiritual life cultivated and deepening with growing years, and the custom of referring all plans and desires to the judgment of God, and of trusting the issues of our life to His wisdom and mercy. You cannot improvise that kind of faith, any more than you can improvise York Minster ; but where it exists, there will be no rash despair in seasons of adversity, no surrender of courage or principle in the dark day, for we shall know Him in whom we have believed. " I said in my haste," confesses the Psalmist, " I am cut off from before Thine eyes ; nevertheless Thou heardest the voice of my supplications when I cried unto Thee." And on the other hand, " Here," exclaims the author of the Book of Revelation, writing at a time when the Emperor Domitian was doing his worst against the foUowers of the Cross, " here is the patience and the faith of the saints." The two things go together in each case — haste with despair, patience with faith and its triumphs. Ill We have spoken of haste as the enemy of thorough ness and the destroyer of religion ; let me now suggest 188 The Sin of Hurry that it is also the great stumbling-block, or at least one of the stumbling-blocks, in the way of a just and charitable estimate of our fellows, and that is a very serious matter indeed. " I said in my haste," to quote the Psalmist again, " aU men are liars." I always think it a very dehghtful touch when in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah the author makes the Almighty say, " I wiU go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it ; and if not, I will know." Jehovah is not going to accept the rumour offhand, on hearsay, not tiU He has convinced Himself directly, and in the meantime He is going to suspend His judgment. Would that men and women acted like that ! But we are too often quick to judge, quick to condemn our neighbour unheard, and such haste is of the very essence of sin. Pray, consider how very much aU men and women are at the mercy of other people's opinion of them, what deadly and irreparable injury may be done by the thoughtless, eager repetition of iU-natured gossip, passed on from mouth to mouth, and losing nothing in the carrying. It is a strange perversity which makes people so ready — to tell the truth, so pleased — to believe evil of others, to assume as a matter of course that the worst con struction that can be placed on any act is likely to be the correct one. I suppose that to indulge in aU manner of wanton, unfounded charges and innuendoes against others gives to such persons some of the pleasure of the transgressions they dare not commit themselves, plus a sense of superior righteousness. We had occasion ere this to refer to the Pharisees' special vice — their bitter delight in passing condemnation upon others ; do what you may, their successors will 189 The Way of Understanding prove yours to be a sad case, with pious groans and much shaking of heads. " John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, He hath a devil. The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold, a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners! " There is no pleasing a settled disposition to misinterpret, to think iU ; nor, to be quite candid, is there any reason why one should try. Not that I advise a mere policy of ignoring malicious evil-speaking — few of us are so placed that we can reaUy afford to disregard whatever may be said concerning us ; rather would I advocate an absolutely unflinching procedure, and that in order to clear the atmosphere of a vUe and poisonous miasma. All decent people must have sympathised with Mr. Winston Churchill, the other day, when he at last brought a libeUer to book ; just as aU decent people sympathised with King George when he took the same step, and sued in the courts of his country like any private citizen to clear his private honour from the unscru pulous aspersions made upon it. But surely Christian men and women are open to different methods of persuasion. It is our haste that inclines the balance unfairly in our judgments ; and " he that hasteth " — whether with feet or tongue — " sinneth," or is apt to sin. The trouble is with men's desire to believe evil ; this is what makes them accept unsifted rumours, which investigation would many a time entirely dispel. It seems to me that Christian wisdom, to say nothing of Christian charity, will nine times out of ten, when an unkindly or injurious story reaches us, make us unwilling to credit, and exceed ingly reluctant to pass it on ; we shaU in no case do the 190 The Sin of Hurry latter unless we have convinced ourselves that it is true — no, even that is far from being a sufficient justification : we shall observe sUence unless there is some positive moral obligation to act otherwise. We seldom can know all, or anything like all, the facts of any case ; and " who art thou that judgest another's servant ? " is a good motto to remember. Let us be slow to judge, slow to condemn, slow to cast stones — a dreary and hazardous amusement. Finally, if the desire for swiftness be very strong within us — weU, I am not an advocate of standing stiU, and there are any number of things we cannot be swift enough about. Ah, yes, let us be quick in composing unhappy feuds, in closing up enmities and disputes — life is too short for them. Let us be quick in acknowledging God's mercies towards us, and turn them to best account, thus showing our gratitude to the Giver. Let us be quick in storing minds and memories with things fair and lovely and noble in nature and art, in books and song, for those are in corruptible treasures. Let us be quick in putting our Christian discipleship into practice, and, being fiUed with the constraining love of Christ, bring gladness and hope, laughter and praise, into some other lives. The time passes, and we shaU not come this way again. Says the unbeliever, " Let us eat and drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die." Says the Christian, " Let us give thanks and join hands and work, for to-day we are alive." 191 XV THE FEAR OF MAN "The fear of man bringeth a snare." — Prov. xxix. 25. The story we have been reading from the Gospel again this morning is one that furnishes its own com ment. It is a lamentable example of human frailty and defeat. Here is a man who had not only professed the utmost loyalty, but had done so " exceeding vehemently " — no doubt meaning all he said ; yet within a few hours he is so utterly disconcerted by the chaff and chatter of a gossiping servant-maid that he denies with oaths and curses any knowledge of the Leader he had vowed to foUow to the very death. He was simply demoralised by panic. A moment later he knew what he had done, and we can weU believe that his repentance was as vehement as his former protestations of staunchness. Sobbing and bitterly ashamed Peter passes from the ruddy glare of the fire in the court-yard into the outer darkness that matches the darkness within his heart. History records no more pitiable instance of that " fear of man " which, as the wise old writer teUs us, " bringeth a snare." It is easy enough to express our disapproval of Peter's cowardice ; at the same time, let us remember that he acted under one of the most elemental of impulses, unnerved and unbalanced by terror. If we 192 The Fear of Man try to picture to ourselves the life of primitive man, we see it overshadowed by perpetual fear. We sing in accents of triumph and hope about That universe, how much unknown, That ocean unexplored — but to our ancestors the matter did not present itself at aU under such a hope-inspiring aspect. They were afraid — always afraid — of the nature-forces they did not understand, of the way in which winds and rain, drought and lightning might behave, destroying their crops, their dweUings, endangering their lives, all seem ingly in mere sport. Primitive man was quite assured that the powers which presided over this puzzling world were either malicious or at least quite irrespon sible and arbitrary, and his one endeavour was directed to discovering means of procuring their favour. For a long, long time this notion survived in man's mind, viz., that the world was his foe, and the gods themselves grudged him happiness and success, delighting in the discomfiture of poor mortals, mocking their hopes and bringing them to undeserved disaster : that, and that alone, is the theme of such sagas as those of (Edipus or the Nibelungs — terror broods over them, the sense of a dark, hostile fate ordained by heaven to pursue men and lure them to their inevitable doom. Only little by little man learns that he inhabits a friendly world, fitted and prepared to satisfy his every want — that its forces wait to minister to him as faithful servants as soon as he takes the trouble to understand them ; only by slow degrees does he cease to feel hunted, and come to believe that the laws of nature are to be trusted as steadfast and immutable — to be feared by none except 193 N The Way of Understanding those who break them — that they are the fixed expres sion of the fixed Will of God, and that that WiU is for man's good. We scarcely realise how modern a discovery aU this is ; we do not realise either to what extent the farther recesses of our minds are stiU haunted by the unlaid ghosts of those inherited, ancestral dreads. The very admiration and applause which we bestow upon courage only show how much we feel the power of this arch-enemy, Fear — how difficult it is to overcome. Let us look this subject in the face as believers in the God of Jesus ; and one of the first things we shall find is that even in the popular teaching of religion there is far too large an appeal to fear, an attempt to terrorise us into the right attitude or the right belief. We are told, e.g., that at the very opening of man's history there was a catastrophe which left us all equaUy lost before God, the objects of His fierce anger ; nothing but perdition awaits us unless we accept the salvation offered us from the Cross, and our apprehen sion and even despair are deliberately roused and played upon to frighten us into such acceptance. " Nothing but our despair," says one of our prominent living theologians, " gives us the whole Christ." It is all very pitiful, infinitely cruel and stupid ; there is nothing to choose between nursemaids terrifying babies with tales of the bogey-man and theologians terrifying grown-ups with tales of a bogey-God — except that the latter, of course, ought to know better. It is time, and more than time, we dismissed these sick fancies of an irrationally wrathful Deity who will punish men for the guilt of their first ancestors unless they accept a particular set of complicated and non-moral doctrines ! 194 The Fear of Man But when we have dispersed these unreal terrors and nightmares, is there nothing for us to fear in this world ? To ask the question is to answer it ; we all know that the most ordinary existence has its perils, its menaces, its enemies without and within, and it is no sign of superiority, but only of stolidity, not to be aware of them. As I said before, the very fact that we aU admire courage is an admission that we are all conscious of things to be feared ; indeed, the higher we ascend in the scale, the more complex our wants and relation ships grow, the more vulnerable and exposed to dangers do we become. We fear not merely for ourselves, but for our dear ones, for the success of causes we are interested in, for enterprises that lie near to our heart. To go through life without any kind of uneasiness or apprehension only shows want of imagination and sensitiveness ; it is not real courage, for courage worthy of the name does not exist apart from the realisation of danger. In one of his " Jungle Book " stories Mr. Kipling shows the different behaviour of gun-bullocks and chargers under fire — how the former stand stupidly still, unmoved because they do not know what is happening or likely to happen, while the horses, far more highly strung, are acutely aware of the deadliness of shot and shell flying and bursting around them, but do not give way to panic so long as they have faith in the rider who holds the reins. The whole .matter is there contained in a nutshell — I mean, the relation between fear and courage ; as has been well said, " the unsensitive man lives without fear because he sees no peril in his situation ; the sensitive man who is also courageous lives without fear because he sends his thought through aU the possibilities of 195 N 2 The Way of Understanding danger to the ultimate safety." Paul, than whom no braver soul ever breathed, was keenly conscious of the risks he was constantly running, and speaks of himself as having been " in perils of rivers, in perils of robbers, in perils from his countrymen, in perils from the Gentiles, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilder ness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren " — neither are there any of us who are spared some analogous experiences ; indeed, the wider our interests, the more numerous the points at which we are open to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, just as the Apostle confessed that besides aU external troubles there was that which pressed upon him daily, anxiety for aU the Churches. If in spite of all this he was the bravest of the brave, it was just because in the thick of the fight, in the roar of the storm, amid the hissings of malice, he "sent his thought through aU the possi bilities of danger to the ultimate safety." We shaU not simply pretend, then, that there is nothing a man need fear — that is the poorest kind of affectation, an actor's pose, not bravery but bravado ; the question is rather how we shall face our difficulties, and what are the right, what the wrong things to stand in dread of. We know, in the first place, that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but we know also that that fear has in it no element of abjectness, that it is no slave's crouching terror of the whip, but rather a holy awe in the Presence of an august WiU to whose decrees the soul yields obedience, believing them to be altogether righteous and wise and good. An affectionate child would really and properly fear to offend or show disrespect to a loving parent, not just because he was frightened of the consequences 196 The Fear of Man to himself, but because of the ingratitude of returning evil for good ; and so in our relations — in the right and normal relations of the awakened soul — to God. We should fear, and sad experience has shown us how weU founded is that fear, the sense of inner dishar mony that attends wUful sin, the self-degradation, the estrangement from God, which overtake the trans gressor. We should fear those things which hurt the soul, which lower our spiritual vitality, and let the earthy have dominion over us. Without that fear, a godly, righteous and sober life is not so much as possible ; here is the beginning, the very alphabet, of wisdom. But the fear of man bringeth a snare. Fear of what men will say of us. Fear of what men may do to us. Let me explain. As I have said more than once, I do not at aU mean to suggest that we are to be indifferent, or that we can be indifferent, to the opinion of our f eUows concerning us, to their attitude towards us. When I hear the opposite view put forward with much confidence, I confess I remain singularly unimpressed, for I know to the contrary. The very people who pre tend not to care what anybody thinks of them care very much what somebody happens to think. We cannot walk so loftUy as not to care. The simple fact is that we are not mere units, living and dying to ourselves, independent of aU the rest, but members of an organism, and exposed to the impact of aU the other members. Professor Huxley once put it half-seriously that no philosopher, however eminent, would be quite unmoved by a gutter-urchin shouting abuse after him in the street ; that may be exaggeration, but there is a solid core of truth in it. That same brave man, the Apostle 197 The Way of Understanding Paul, who faced aU manner of dangers without flinch ing, was unspeakably hurt by the false reports his enemies spread about him, and besought the Thessa- lonians in turn not merely to hold fast what is good, but to abstain from every appearance of evil. It occurs to me that what was good enough advice for Paul to give is probably good enough advice for us to follow. And again, there is a very real sense in which the most sincere and God-serving Christian may weU fear what men may do to him. The moment we leave abstractions and come to concrete facts, we know that it is so. The fear of unemployment, the fear of sickness, the fear of approaching age — these press heavily upon millions of industrial workers, and we can only wish that the fullest success may attend the legislative attempts now being made to lift this weight off their shoulders. Again, to be completely at the mercy of a cruel, or an arbitrary, or a merely indifferent will, as unhappily many people are, is not an inspiring prospect for any one. Think of Miss Malecka, before her release, with the thought of Siberia before her ! For the Jewish population of Russia, with the possibUity of an organ ised massacre never very far removed, existence must be coloured or shot through with fear. We aU realise instinctively what Tennyson's Sir Richard Greville conveyed in that passionate cry, " Fall into the hands of God — not into the hands of Spain" — "these Inquisi tion dogs and the devildoms of Spain." We may never come face to face with such extremities, but we know that there are men and women whose envy, hatred, malice and uncharitableness — whose covetous or vindictive spirit — are to be feared, in the sense that we may reasonably pray not to fall into their power. 198 The Fear of Man Neither is there any doubt that this fear brings many a snare. In a modern play, appropriately called " Chains," we have a pathetic picture of the city clerk who has to submit to any treatment, any curtailment of liberty, to a reduction of his scanty salary, rather than risk dismissal from a post there are plenty only too eager to fill, should he step out of the ranks. And there are employees who will tell you that their liveli hood depends on their willingness and ability to give misleading descriptions of the goods they are selling — and what, they piteously ask, are they to do ? I wonder whether you saw the evidence of one witness before Lord Mersey at the Titanic inquiry, quite frankly owning that he had signed a report recommend ing a reduction in the number of boats, when aU the time he was in favour of an increase ; such cases are merely typical of the snares that are brought, the consciences that are limed, by the desire to stand well with powerful superiors, to avoid trouble for oneself, not to get a black mark for a display of inconvenient sincerity. Go to the root of almost every form of dissimulation, every dishonest compromise, every abstention from plain speech or plain dealing, and you will find the fear of man, the fear of consequences. Every reform is hindered, every advance delayed by this same motive : — And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their current turn awry, And lose the name of action. You remember the case of Copernicus, putting off the publication of his epoch-making astronomical con clusions thirty-six years, terrified lest he should incur 199 The Way of Understanding the condemnation of the Church — as in the end he duly did. That is only a typical instance ; the religious reconstruction which we know is due and overdue is kept back to-day by the same influence, the dread of persecution, the fear of heresy-hunts. You remember the terrible satire with which Tennyson makes another of his characters, the Churchwarden, advise the curate : " But never not speeak plain out, an' thou'll be a Bishop yet." The light is carefuUy busheUed — or at least artistically shaded — from dread of unpopularity, dread of ostracism, from the fear of man. Not, "What is truth ? " but " How much dare I tell ? " is too often the question that is asked. It is the same in every field. Ibsen, in " Rosmers- holm," shows us a well-intentioned but essentially weak man who has been persuaded to lend his influence to an advanced pohtical programme of which he reaUy approves ; but the moment he avows his sympathies, a venomous press campaign is let loose against him, and with a few moves he is completely and effectually silenced — nominaUy persuaded that he was mistaken in the views he had espoused, in reahty simply terrorised. One wonders how many times the same sort of thing has happened in actual life ; not infrequently, I am afraid. But, friends, if we have described the disease, how shall we prescribe for it ? I say candidly that for that fear which is the result of economic conditions — unemployment, sweating and the rest — the social reformer and the legislature must in the end devise the economic remedy ; the problem is vast, but the solution should not pass the wit of man, especiaUy when we face it in the light of Christianity. But what 200 The Fear of Man of those other forms of the fear of man of which we have been speaking ? Well,„I believe the best antidote to it to be that fear of God which is the same as faith in God. In the last analysis all courage, as we have already seen, is rooted in faith : the same Peter who had denied his Lord when his faith in Him was shaken or imperfect, confessed Him with a total disregard of consequences before the High Priest when that faith had taken firm root ; and as fear misses its oppor tunities, so faith makes them. Cowardice is con tagious, and so is courage. Let me borrow an illus tration. General Havelock, we read, once said that in every regiment of British troops there were one hundred men who would storm the gates of hell, and eight hun dred who would foUow them. The eight hundred were inspired by faith in their dauntless comrades ; the one hundred by faith in their commanders, their cause, their training, or themselves. The remedy for fear is faith, the tonic that renders immune against the fear of man is faith in God. Please let me explain that, for you know the extreme danger of religious unrealities — and generalities are nearly as bad as unrealities. I mean in the first instance that faith in God, genuine and heart-felt, creates a feeling of security, even in the face of adverse circumstances, which is a safeguard against despair. The man who in all his struggle with external difficul ties, exposed to enmity and ill-treatment perhaps, believes that a Father cares for him and will not let him come to ultimate harm and discomfiture — such a one, I say, has meat to eat that the world knows not of. Just as in the material world the moment we obey the laws of nature they become our protectors, so in 201 The Way of Understanding the spiritual sphere the moment we render an implicit obedience to the law of God He rewards us with the consciousness of His protection. You can stand up and hold your own against great pressure, undismayed and refusing to be cowed, in the assurance that you have God for your Ally ; you have only to be resolutely on God's side to find Him as resolutely on yours — and one plus God is a majority, a working, fighting, pre vailing majority. " What ? " they say to Luther, " you are going to Worms to defend yourself ? Don't you know that that is simply to deliver yourself into the hands of your bitterest enemies ? " "If there were as many devils in Worms as tiles on the roofs," is the intrepid monk's reply, " thither I go " — and from Worms he safely returned. He knew whom he believed in, and his faith outweighed and routed his fears. It has been the same with every martyr for conscience' sake and conviction's sake — and by martyrs I do not mean those only who have gone to a violent death, but the far greater number who have endured ill-treatment, evil-speaking, worldly loss, gibes and sneers — all hard to bear and proportionately to be feared — because of their intense faith in something greater and worthy of their absolute loyalty. You see, we look for our heroes in romantic attire and situations full of glamour ; but to my mind the teetotal grocer who refuses to take out a spirit-licence, knowing that by so doing he places himself at a dis advantage and will certainly lose custom, is as real a hero as any knight of chivalry. He has something that compensates him for the fear, nay, the certainty, of loss — a faith in the worth of a principle, the unseen which is more than the seen. 202 The Fear of Man Here, I say, is the escape from the snare which comes through the fear of man ; here is the explanation of that dauntless courage of unnumbered believers who out of weakness were made strong, daring and bearing aU in Christ's name — an experience which cannot be explained away, and which again and again strikes such jubilant notes as these : "In God have I put my trust, I wiU not be afraid ; what can man do unto me?" " Thou art my rock in whom I trust ; my fortress — of whom shall I be afraid ? " Men spoke like that because they felt like it ; and because they felt like it they were strong and conquered. Here we see the secret of exploits such as those of the Maccabees ; these were men who knew only one fear — the fear of God — and it delivered them once for all from the fear of man, from the dread of earthly potentates, from paltering with their principles. If perchance we have not succeeded as they have, have we tried, have we trusted, as they did ? If we have found our wills too infirm to stand against threats and forebodings of what might happen to us, have we called up our spiritual reserves ? The same mighty forces are at our disposal ; and where others have triumphed— not in their own strength, but in the strength of the Lord and the might of His protecting arm — we need not fail. One word in closing. Life has been called a conflict, and for most of us it proves so, nor could we wish our days to flow in a serenity that knew no strife, along an even level with no obstacles to surmount, in a shuttered, sheltered atmosphere which would rapidly become in sipid, fataUy relaxing to mind and muscle and nerve. Let us rather be glad that we are called to be soldiers of Christ, and as such endure hardness. May I say 203 The Way of Understanding that the more seriously we take our vow of discipleship, the less likely we shaU be to faU into that merely defiant temper which sets itself purposely to ignore or to antagonise all and sundry in order to show its so- called strength and independence — a temper which in truth has all the weakness of selfishness. But by a steadfast reliance on God, submission to God, a Christian faith and fear of God, we shaU acquire that courage which, like love, its twin-sister, vaunteth not itself, doth not behave itself unseemly, is not puffed up, but wiU deliver us from the snaring fear of man, and enable us to withstand in the evil hour, and having done aU, to stand.' In quietness and confidence shaU be our strength ; neither shaU we be afraid of evil tidings, knowing that our times are in His hand, and that whether we live or die, we are the Lord's. 204 XVI THE WAY OF UNDERSTANDING " The man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall rest in the congregation of the dead." — Prov. xxi. 16. There is one aspect of the genius of Jesus Christ to which most of His foUowers have been strangely and persistently blind. They have gladly and reverently received from Him the revelation of the Father ; they have acknowledged — in theory, if not in practice — His supreme authority as a moral Teacher ; they have yielded to the speU of His sublime tenderness, and seen in Him the Embodiment of self-giving Love ; but they have largely missed, and the Christian Church has been the poorer for missing, what I must caU the inteUectual side of His appeal. The truth is, the fact of Christ is too great to be " taken in " by us in its fuU significance ; at the same time it is regrettable that we have neglected that feature of the Lord's teaching and outlook which makes Him, as has been said, " the world's greatest Rationalist." Let me explain. The Jesus of history was, if I may say so, very little of a mystic, and nothing at all of a sentimentalist : He drove at practice ; and to that end He addressed Himself to the reason of His hearers, encouraged them to use their commonsense in deahng with the problems of religion and conduct, and could 205 The Way of Understanding express His keen disappointment at their occasionaUy duU and lumbering inteUigence. He had been a bright, inquiring child Himself, and it is probably a true tradition of His early days which tells us that " all that heard Him were amazed at His understanding " ; and when He had become a public Teacher, instead of assuming dogmatic or superior airs, He appealed to the country-folk who formed His audiences by saying, " Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right ? " — thus giving His direct sanction to the great principle of private judgment in religion. When the disciples were slow to appreciate such a distinction as that between outer and inner defilement, or when they failed to see that a phrase like " the leaven of the Pharisees " could not refer to baker's loaves, He re buked their dulness with the sharp question, " Aie ye also even yet without understanding ? " " How is it that ye do not understand that I spake not concerning bread ? " Evidently He had scant toleration for sheer stupidity or thoughtlessness ! Above all, He emphatic aUy proclaimed that God was to be loved, not only with the whole soul and the whole heart, but also with the whole mind or understanding ; and we are told that when He saw that the scribe who had asked Him to name the first commandment answered " discreetly" — which does not mean cautiously, but discerningly, intelligently — He said, " Thou art not far from the kingdom of God." Consistently and invariably, Jesus shows Himself a true descendant of those elder sages of His nation who, in the Book of Proverbs, laid so much stress on wisdom, on instruction, on the worth of right knowledge, and who over and over again hold up as a warning example 206 The Way of Understanding " a foolish man, a man void of understanding." This is a note whose vibrations are heard from one end to the other of this national collection ; and nowhere is this governing thought more pointedly expressed than in the saying, " The man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall rest in the congregation of the dead." To starve the intelligence, to despise reason, the old writer says, is to condemn oneself to a living death ; to stultify the understanding is just a form of suicide. Words could not be plainer or more decisive : let us consider them for a little while. And in the first place one could wish that this particu lar principle had been more frequently applied in the field of religion itself. But just as the rational appeal of the Saviour's teaching has been lost sight of, so there has always been a mischievous tendency to cry down reason in rehgion, to discourage commonsense as the worst of heresies. This distrust of the understanding is most discreditable and injurious to the cause of faith itself, and it is hopeless to tell people, especially young people, with their minds just opening out, that they must not argue about, they must not seek to under stand, what they are expected to believe. In vain does a Cardinal Newman beseech men to avoid inquiry if they would escape despair ; it was a braver and truer voice which said that " human nature craves to be both religious and rational, and the life that is not both is neither." There is no merit in unquestioning submission to dogmas, any more than in the parrot-like repetition of creeds ; there is no virtue in mental indolence and shunning the effort of thinking for our selves, though every priesthood should offer to relieve 207 The Way of Understanding us of that trouble. " Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right ? " asks Jesus, and there is no evading that query. " Prove aU things — hold fast that which is good," urges Paul, and he does not suggest that someone else is to act as our substitute. " He that wandereth out of the way of understanding," says the wise old writer — though such a one should linger in paths that seem more pleasant — " shaU rest in the congregation of the dead." We have touched before upon this unreal antithesis between feeling and thinking in the region of faith, and shall have an opportunity of deahng with the matter at greater length ; surely, the gate to the kingdom of heaven is not so low that it will not admit that part of man which is above his shoulders. Of the duties incumbent upon Christians, this one — to walk in the way of understanding, to use their reason in matters of behef — is perhaps the one that has been most systematic- aUy neglected, and hence its fulfilment is to-day peculiarly urgent, the paying-off of a long-accumulated debt. We keep muddling along in so much religious uncertainty and bewilderment because so many Christians are too lazy, too timid, or both, to think things out with any degree of clearness — to draw, e.g., the obvious inferences from such an obvious fact as this, that the story of man's faU and expulsion from paradise is myth, that the race therefore is not lost or ruined, that mankind is not fallen, but rising. There is no mystery about aU this ; there is certainly nothing to be gained, but much to be lost, by denouncing reason or dehberately ignoring what is patent. Let me quote and commend to you a true and trenchant saying of Dr. BaUard's : " The religion which is not from 208 The Way of Understanding beginning to end amenable to reason is but superstition in disguise." II But turning from these prehminaries, let us frankly recognise that this way of understanding which we are asked to travel is not the easiest ; it demands exertion, it requires determination, for it is often rugged and generaUy uphill — and the primrose path of dalliance offers many rival attractions. Now the place where we are one and aU caUed upon to make a beginning, is the place nearest home ; we have to learn to under stand ourselves — and that is a task which needs not a little candour in the first instance, and possibly a good deal of patience afterwards. Put in this way, it may sound odd enough that we should be asked to go, as it were, in search of ourselves, for what is so familiar to each one as his own ego, the one fact he cannot so much as get away from ? But I believe this very familiarity is often the merest iUusion ; as a matter of fact, no one understands himself completely, and I should not like to guess the proportion of people who go about cherish ing absolute fancy pictures of themselves, pictures bear ing but the slightest resemblance to fact. Let me hint it to you, my brother or sister, the person who gives you the largest amount of trouble is just yourself, and in order to manage that complex individuality you must get properly acquainted with it, take its measure faith fully ; the old advice, inscribed in marble over the gate of the temple at Delphi, "Know thyself," still remains the epitome of wisdom : countless the pilgrims who went to consult the oracle, but to every one of them, in addition to whatever might fit their special case, this 209 o The Way of Understanding counsel was tendered — to know himself — and probably it was the best counsel of all. For if we are grossly in error concerning our own selves, we must needs be in error concerning almost everything else : if the light that is in us be darkness, how great is the darkness ! How to set about this understanding of oneself ? Shall I venture to suggest that in a majority of cases the enterprise needs not only candour but humility ? We are each the object of most importance in our own eyes, and we start with a considerable bias or prejudice in our own favour ; and the fact we have to discover is that we are just ordinary folk, with perfectly ordinary gifts, and certainly no special claims to preferential treatment from our feUows. A little, little gap, and that for a bare moment's space, is all that we can expect to leave in our environment when we depart. The reflection is not complimentary — nor does it convey the whole truth — but it is true so far as it goes, and if we will hold it steadily before our minds for a minute or two daily, it will help to correct our quite unfounded self-importance. There are no indispensable people, and if there were, I have an uneasy suspicion that we might not be among the number. The great world owes us very little in the way of deference or ceremony — very little beyond the chance of showing what we are worth— and that is a thing we have first of aU to find out for ourselves. To begin with a fairly modest estimate of our own capacities, plus the determination by the grace of God to make the most of them ; to prove our raison d'etre by the calibre of our performances, no matter in what department : this will at least set us on the way — the 210 The Way of Understanding way of understanding. And all the time we shall balance the sense of our smaUness in the vast total by the sense that however little we may matter to men, we matter greatly and intimately to God, that He cares for us and regards us individually, that He has made, if one may express it in that way, a certain venture in entrusting us with so much initiative and responsible power, and that as He is interested to see what we shall do with it, so we are in honour bound to make the best of His investment in us. You remember Rabbi Ben Ezra's words : " AU men ignored in me, this was I worth to God." It is this consciousness which will help us to search ourselves, to be frank with ourselves, to discover our limitations and our possibilities, to find the key to our own character, to note what are our strongest motives and propensities — the special weaknesses to which we are prone and against which we must proportionately be on our guard. After aU, this self of ours is the plot we have got to cultivate, and from which we have to raise a harvest ; it becomes us to understand the nature of the soil, the produce it is best adapted to bear, what measures to take in order to make it yield the maximum of increase and to keep under the enemies to which it is specially exposed. Above all — and this, though not the most inspiring, is by a long way the most salutary part of our task — let us face our besetting frailties squarely, and call them by their true names. Self-indulgence, greed, indolence, vanity, pride, envy, censoriousness, jealousy — is it in one of these directions that we are most open to attack ? I say deliberately that fully one half of the moral tragedies that wreck human hves and happiness have their beginning in a 211 O 2 The Way of Understanding fatal ignorance of self. Here is poor Cassio — a worthy, kindly enough soul, generous, honourable, devoted, but unable to resist excess in wine, and hardly responsible when he has had a glass too much : had he but known in time that for such as himself the only safe rule is to forswear all strong drink, he would have been spared disgrace and undoing and pitiful, unavailing self- reproach — and cases like Cassio's in one field or another are legion ! And when I speak of understanding ourselves, I mean something more than gaining a timely control over our weaknesses ; I mean that in each of us there are vast unexplored regions, our undiscovered, un realised, unutilised selves — large tracts we have never brought under cultivation, yet which might largely enhance our value to ourselves and to the world. There are all manner of subjects we could take a healthy interest in, only it has never occurred to us to do so ; all manner of activities in which we really could get as well as give a great deal of satisfaction, only we have never tried. We do not use anything like all our resources, and we are the poorer for leaving them unused. There has never yet been a Christian Church, for example, which did not contain at least four times the driving power, the possibilities of Christian service and usefulness amongst its members, of that which it actuaUy exhibited. The things we could do, the power for good we could be, if we would only let ourselves think so and act upon the thought ! • The flourishing state all our Church agencies might be in, the way we could advance Christ's kingdom ! Our selves are largely undeveloped estates, which the owners have never properly explored ; and the way to fuUest self- 212 The Way of Understanding realisation is none other than the way of understanding — of self-understanding. Ill But in order to understand ourselves — forgive the seeming paradox — we must understand more than ourselves, viz., our relation to our neighbours, to the larger society of which we are members, something of the world in which we live and move and have our being. That is far too big a subject to treat, as I must treat it, in a word or two, but let me at any rate point you in one or two directions to show what I mean. I wonder, e.g., do we, any of us, try sufficiently to understand the very people with whom we are brought into the most continual contact ? And are not most of the major and minor frictions and discords of every day in the last resort due to misunderstandings ? Mark you, we quite expect, as our right, to be " studied " by these other people, to have our moods and tenses properly — and favourably — interpreted, not to be judged by mere appearances or occasional hasty words — people surely should know us better ! Should they ? Do we know them better than to misjudge them ? Ah, is it not the case that often we are so concerned with ourselves and our dues as hardly to trouble to understand — in the sense of properly appreciating — other people and their point of view at aU ? How many of the tiresome specimens who are pleased to consider themselves " misunder stood " — poor things ! — have even made an honest effort to understand those by whom they think they are Ul-used ? And here I am going to lay down quite a dogmatic principle : to know people thoroughly means to know the best of them ; it is only our ignorance 213 The Way of Understanding which denies that best. The French aphorism has it that to understand aU is to forgive all. I have a feeling that that does not go deep enough. I believe that to understand aU means the discovery, nine times out of ten, that we have not so much to forgive. It was because Christ understood men, because He knew what was in man, that He was a more lenient judge of humanity than the Pharisees. It is because God knows all, understands all, that we go to Him for the forgiveness of our sins. Certainly, the way of understanding is that more excellent way which has peace and godly concord for its goal, and that alike between individuals and nations. IV And we want to understand more and more of the world we live in, of the social organism of which we form part, in order to enjoy the one and find our proper place and usefulness in the other— and that as religious duties. I am treading very familiar ground in urging the duty of developing and enlarging our interests, of becoming better acquainted with just a little of the immense wealth and variety of the world's wonders which only wait to charm and surprise and delight us if we will condescend to allow them to do so. Let me give quite a personal turn to this by avowing that I continuaUy chafe and fret under the narrowness of my own range, I feel that the points at which I touch life- life which is wonderful everywhere, God's handiwork — are not one tithe of what I would like to be the case ; I seem to be all the while passing doors that are not even locked, but would yield to a touch to swing open on their hinges, and through which I might enter 214 The Way of Understanding treasure chambers without number and enrich my mind and heart, had I but energy enough. If I may again quote those lines which speak of That Universe so much unknown, That ocean unexplored — well, they fiU me with sheer impatience that it should be " so much unknown " when science and travel and history, music and art and literature are aU offering themselves to us, competing for our attention, pressing on us an embarrassment of riches from which to choose — and we so slow in choosing ! You remember Fra Lippo's passionate exclamation : You've seen the world, The beauty and the wonder and the power, The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades. Changes, surprises — and God made it all 1 WeU, that, at any rate, seems to me the right way to feel about the world, and if we do so, perhaps we shall learn to open a door here and there, and enter the treasure chambers, and carry away unfading riches in a truer understanding of some corner of this marvellous Universe. And this enrichment of our own individuality through better knowledge and wider interests is not merely to minister to our selfish enjoyment ; it is to fit us for better service — for obviously we can only serve the world in proportion as we understand it, have mastered some subject, some department of knowledge. The only person who can help, say, in the task of social reform, the solution of social problems, is he or she who has walked in the way of understanding — not of mere ineffectual good intentions ; the man or woman 215 The Way of Understanding of disciplined mind, of stored knowledge, of trained imagination, of generous culture, of large ideals of life as it ought to be, as it might be. And of course the way of understanding is the way of sympathy with ordinary humanity, with the daily lives of the multitude, the power of putting ourselves in their place ; where that is lacking, all mere academic knowledge gathered from textbooks and statistics wiU be of little avail. And we can only understand men and women by loving them ; that was the secret of Jesus and His insight into the human heart. But as we could not hope to understand ourselves without understanding something of the larger life around us, so in the last resort we cannot understand either ourselves or the world aright unless and until we see both in the light of God, that light which burns and shines brightest for us in Christ Jesus. A God-less world is an inextricable tangle, a vexatious riddle without an answer, infinitely meaningless, at best deeply unsatisfactory. Apart from a Divine wisdom guiding the course of destiny, what were the purpose of it all, the struggle and pain, the long story of man's aspirations, faUures, triumphs, his pressing forward in spite of discouragements, his sense of something unful- fiUed which he has to endeavour to realise ? But for the knowledge of God, aU this would be so much delusion, and life would proportionately be degraded and lose aU real value, for the old phrase, " without hope and without God in the world " — without God and therefore without hope — stiU remains true. Believe me, no materialistic explanation of man or the universe can 216 The Way of Understanding satisfy us ; no scheme of life that leaves out religion can do justice to our deepest needs ; it is only in His light that we can see light. The arch-sceptic of the Old Testament, the writer of Ecclesiastes, has left us an immortal testimony of man's inability to find rest and happiness in the life of sense alone : " The eye is not satisfied with seeing," he complains, " nor the ear fiUed with hearing " — and why ? Let the same witness supply the answer ; it is because God " hath set eternity in their heart " — the heart of men — so that they must needs aspire beyond the seen and heard and temporal to the unseen and eternal. Thus the way of understanding, in the fuUest sense, is the way of those who say with inmost convic tion, " Thou art my God, early will I seek Thee " — who can take up the Psalmist's strain, " Blessed are they that keep His testimonies, that seek Him with their whole hearts." To interpret the world as the scene of His activities, held in its course by His power and pervaded by His Divine purpose ; to view ourselves as His chUdren, caUed to be His instruments in the fulfiUing of His beneficent designs and in the rendering of glad filial obedience to His law to find peace and joy ; to see the end of life in willing service and self-giving — that seems to me the noblest, the sanest, and the only satisfying outlook, and to this we are caUed by the Gospel and by Him who is its Bringer and its Consummation, Jesus Christ. In Him we understand God's purpose to us-ward, and find it to be love : to accept His purpose for ourselves, that is wisdom — to co-operate with it in simple loyalty, that is under standing. 217 XVII THE PENALTY OF TEMPER " A man of great wrath shall bear the penalty." — Prov. xix. 19. In that wonderful picture-gallery which we possess in the Books of Samuel, rich as it is in vivid portraits, there are few that stand out more forcibly than those of Nabal and Abigail, in that chapter part of which we have been reading together. Was ever likeness drawn in more telling strokes than that of this churhsh flock- master of three thousand years ago ? We can see him moving about among his sheep and his men, dark- browed, overbearing, uncouth, given to violent gusts of anger before which his subordinates tremble, and withal quite insanely proud of his possessions — the kind of rich boor who, because he is better off than anybody around, holds himself dispensed from the most elementary civihty ; we can hear one of the servants, after Nabal's contemptuous refusal of David's request, reporting the incident to Abigail, and in despair summing up his master's character in the unvarnished phrase, " He is such a son of Behal " — as who should say, such a limb of Satan — " that one cannot speak to him " ; we can see Abigail, her woman's-wit realising the imminent danger that David will take revenge for the insults heaped upon him, and quickly proceeding to avert disaster by rich gifts and 218 The Penalty of Temper humble words. The whole episode lives before us in the masterly narrative of the old chronicler ; and as we gaze upon the artist's canvas, its colours unfaded after thirty centuries, we behold a perfect picture, true for aU time, of the feebleness of rage, the strength of gentleness. The lesson is one of those which each generation, indeed, each individual, has to learn over again — which proves that it is a lesson difficult to learn, or at least to put into practice ; the truth which it teaches is set forth again and again, with peculiar reiteration, by Israel's sages in their proverbial wisdom, which in turn shows the importance they attached to the subject. You have noticed the habit of these writers to identify every kind of virtue with wisdom, and its contrary with foUy — it is the foolishness of sin that strikes them, and which they wish to impress upon their readers ; so, in the present instance, we are told that " a fool uttereth aU his anger : but a wise man keepeth it back and stiUeth it " — " It is an honour for a man to keep away from strife ; but every fool will be quarrelling." In dealing with this theme let me in the first instance safeguard myself against being misunderstood by saying plainly that there is a place for strife, a place for anger, for strong speech and strong action. We have no business to try to pass through a world of conflicting forces without taking sides ; we are simply cowardly when, in order to save ourselves possible discomfort or unpopularity, we cautiously forbear uttering a word of censure upon some powerful evil or abuse. We cannot sympathise very strongly with the right if we can see it overborne without coming forward 219 The Way of Understanding in its defence ; just as, e.g., you would not give very much for the alleged friendship of anyone who could hear you traduced and held up to scorn without quickly and warmly protesting. The truth is stated in those two famous lines of Browning's : Dante, who loved well because he hated, Hated wickedness that hinders loving. It was the Divine pity and tenderness in Jesus which filled Him with Divine indignation against the hypo crisy and hardness of the professional religionists of His day ; His was the wrath which has been weU described as " the second, hotter flame of love " — and those who have never felt the like anger when face to face with some great wrong, have small claim to be considered His disciples. I would go so far as to say that probably no vested abuse has ever been routed until men's hearts were stirred to a generous anger against it, and they determined that this must not continue. You can argue round and round some evil, show that it is wasteful of hfe and happiness, convince the intellect that it is unnecessary and could be remedied — and get no forwarder ; but let a spark of feeling be kindled — let men and women once say with conviction, " This is wicked, and we won't have it ! " — and the days of that abuse are numbered. " Be ye angry and sin not,'" says the New Testament : by aU means let us refrain from sinning — but by aU means let us be angry upon the right occasion, when some meanness has to be exposed, some injustice to be redressed, some conspiracy against the light to be unmasked. But when we have entered this necessary proviso 220 The Penalty of Temper against misinterpretation, we come back to the truth which the Book of Proverbs so frequently emphasises, and which both Scripture and hfe press upon us — the foolishness and feebleness of the habitually explosive disposition, the ungovernable temper, the petulant outbursts provoked by trifles, the storms of passion roused by any chance breeze. Here is Naaman, terribly disappointed because instead of having his leprosy cured by means of magic, he is recommended to take a course of frequent river baths — " and he turned away in a rage." Here is Jonah, annoyed beyond bearing, first because the repentance of the Nine- vites has averted the doom he had prophesied on the city, and again because of the withering of the gourd which had given him shelter. " Doest thou weU to be angry ? " asks the Divine Voice, gently rallying him on his ill-temper. " I do well to be angry, even unto death," comes back the sulky answer, almost smothered by resentment. . . . Wasn't he foolish ? Here is Peter, at the moment of supreme crisis, when his Master is being arrested, and the only thing he can do in his ineffectual wrath is to give a touch of the grotesque to the scene by an exhibition of bad swordsmanship, aiming at a man's life, and inflicting a scratch on his ear — wasn't he absurd ? Here is a member of Parlia ment, losing all sense of decency and control over himself, spluttering incoherent insults at the Prime Minister — and what has he done except injured the prospects of the cause he was championing, and incidentaUy made himself ridiculous ? "A fool uttereth aU his anger " ; and " a man of great wrath shaU bear the penalty." Now I believe that most people have a fairly keen 221 The Way of Understanding objection to being thought ludicrous, and hence probably the makers of maxims among the Hebrews displayed a great