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DIVINITY SCHOOL
TROWBRIDGE LIBRARY

The Method of The Master

The Method of The Master

A Study of
The Clinics of Jesus

By
GEORGE CLARKE PECK, D. D.

With Introduction by
S. PARKES CADMAN, D.D.

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

Copyright, 1912, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 125 North Wabash Ave.
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street

Introduction
IN these studies Dr. Peck has approached
the permanent problems of life and
character in an admirable manner. His
discussions are pithy and pertinent. Nothing
of the trite or the conventional can be found
in the following pages ; and he properly sub
mits every perplexing issue to the lucidity and
the simplicity which are in Christ Jesus. The
reader cannot fail to be interested by the tempt
ing page of contents. Every theme is deeply
involved in humanity and its progress, and
while the author has wisely discarded the
purely homiletical form, there is here abundant
material for any trustworthy guide and teacher,
who is concerned for private and public right
eousness. The relation of goodness to the
religious value of Jesus is succinctly traced
and expounded. The essays are also notable
for their reasonableness and breadth ; and they
possess that element of reserve in the presence
of many mysteries, which is perhaps their
strongest feature. Dr. Peck has a high and
deserved reputation for eloquence of the best
5

6 Introduction
sort"; by which I mean the power to state the
truth in a judicial and weighty manner. This
volume will confirm and add to that reputation,
and I deem it a privilege to give a hearty and
sincere word of commendation to so timely and
thorough a production.
S. Pabkes Cadman.
Brooklyn, New York.

Contents

Preface

9

I.

The Problem of Finding God

ii

II.

The Problem of Doubt

27

III.

The Problem of Sin

43

IV.

The Problem of Salvation .

58

V.

The Problem of Poverty

77

VI.

The Problem of Divorce

95

VII.

The Problem of the Sabbath

no

VIII.

The Problem of Sickness

124

IX.

The Problem of Conflictinc
Duties ....

'. 138

X.

The Problem of Sorrow

152

XI.

The Problem of the Future

. 169

XII.

The Problem of Jesus .

189

Preface
IT is quite the fashion to speak — some
times exultingly, sometimes wearily — of
the world's new problems. And in certain
technical senses the characterization is war
ranted. But as touching the fundamental
stresses and moralities of life, there are few if
any new problems. "What we call " new " are
chiefly modern accentuations or combinations
of problems older than the Chinese wall. For
men of to-day to front and grapple, there is no
problem which, in essence, Jesus did not meet.
The purpose, therefore, of the following pages,
is to indicate Jesus' attitude towards, and
method of coping with, the world's timeless,
outstanding problems. To say the least, He
had a wonderful way with them : to say the
most, He uttered the final word beyond which
neither philosophy nor humanitarianism can
hope to go.
It is to be remembered, however, that Jesus
rarely dealt with problems as such. He uni
formly declined to discuss those great speculative
questions over which so many lances and hearts
9

io Preface
have been broken. He is the world's supreme
clinician : He handled " cases." Not the prob
lem of poverty, but poor people; not the
problem of sin, but sinners; not the problem but
the presence of God — these were His vital
concern. His is the truest science, the science
of facts. By His unerring address, His un
hesitating competence, His reserve not less
than His utter frankness, He justifies His title
as The Great Physician. And in sheer joy of
watching Him among His " cases," the chapters
of this volume have been written. If to the
reader there shall come freshened realization of
the truth of Peter's great confession — " To whom
(else) shall we go? Thou hast the words of
eternal life," this consciously inadequate volume
will have achieved its author's wish.
G. C. P.
New York City.

THE PROBLEM OF FINDING GOD
AMONG the holiest and most distinct
memories of my childhood are mem
ories of a woman singing a strangely
beautiful song. I could not understand the
meaning of the song, nor why the singer sang
it so rapturously, nor the far-away, hallowed
look in her eyes, but the words come back to
me now as clearly as though I had heard them
yesterday, with all their strange wistfulness
still clinging to them, like the scent of lavender.
" Oh, that I knew where I might find Him."
The phrases, as will at once be recognized,
were Job's ; the music was from Handel's " Mes
siah," and the singer was my mother. I can
understand it now. Sitting at the old square
piano, as I see her still, she was singing out her
own beautiful soul in a quest more ancient than
the pyramids and as new as this morning. She
had merely borrowed the glorious cadences of
Handel and the words of the stricken Job to
voice her own unutterable longings. Sister
was she of a company that " no man can num
ber, out of every nation and kindred and tribe "

12 The Method of The Master
who have obeyed what James Russell Lowell
called our "climbing instinct," and have sent
their souls in search of God.
Seekers of God ! In the days of my mother's
singing, the word " seeker " had a sharply de
finitive meaning. It signified kneeling at an
altar of penitence, or raising one's hand in ex
pression of desire for divine help. A " seeker "
was a man or woman who accepted the evangel
ical invitation to come to God through Christ.
Religion's progress in those days was estimated
chiefly in terms of such " seekers." And, by
implication at least, those who remained ob
durately in their seats when the invitation to
rise was given, or who stayed away from the
place, of invitation, were, therefore, not " seek
ers " of God. A thousand pities if this were
true ! And ten thousand thanks that this con
venient thesis is most desperately false ! The
world is full of seekers of God; has always
been. No census of them was ever yet made.
I sometimes wonder if there was ever born a
man who totally failed, at some time in life, to
strike the trail which leads to God. Careless,
inconsequent, perverse; preferring vanity and
money-making and sensuous delight; man,
nevertheless, is a son of the Eternal Father.
And I do not see how he can wholly escape the

The Problem of Finding God 13
pull of that relationship, any more than he can
avoid the call of love or the grip of gravitation.
Our human species has been variously dif
ferentiated from its brute cousins and forbears.
Thus, for example, man has been described as
the animal which laughs, the talking animal,
the commercial animal. But if I had to char
acterize this intricate paradoxical creature which
we call man, I should mark him off in a very
different way. I should call him the animal
which cannot leave God alone ; is always look
ing for God ; always wanting to know some
thing about God ; even begging a certification
of, or audience with, the Most High. Monkeys
laugh, dogs have a language of their own,
squirrels are acquisitive. But man keeps for
ever crying, " Oh, that I knew where I might
find Him ! "
"Word comes back occasionally that a tribe of
the human family has finally been discovered
totally lacking the idea of God. No sacrifices
to appease the wrath of outraged deities ; no
rudimentary conceptions of worship ; not even
a name for the Great Spirit. Gleefully,
Materialism says : " I have always said so :
God is a myth." And, meantime, the con
vinced materialist, who needs this latter-day
discovery to bolster up his theory that God is a

14 The Method of The Master
myth, is himself a startling illustration of the
human impulse he would like to deny.
Lalande once boasted that he had scoured the
heavens and had not found God. And, from
one point of view, it is unfortunate for himself
that Lalande made such an assertion. If he
had not been seriously looking for God, he was
hardly qualified to say that he had not found
Him. And, having searched for Him, even
vainly, he was still a witness of the world-wide
quest of the soul for God. When La Place
told Napoleon that he had no need for God in
his hypothesis, he virtually admitted that the
God he had been looking for was not worth
finding. Voltaire, the arch enemy of Church-
dom, called by churchmen of his day a " son of
Satan," certified to an innate impulse of the
soul, when, within the enclosure of his park at
Ferney, he built a church for his servants, in
scribing above it, "Deo Erexit Voltaire."
Some one says that every page of Haeckel
blazes with the author's search for God. And
what did Omar Khayyam mean when he said
he had " sent his soul through the invisible,"
unless he, too, had been looking for the Creator ?
Let it even be true, as a witty Frenchman said,
that " God in the beginning made man in His
own image, and man has ever since been return-

The Problem of Finding God 15
ing the compliment by making God in man's
likeness." Man would stop such folly if he
could forget about God. But because he can
not forget God, or totally ignore God, man is
forever looking for Him.
There came to my hand many years ago, by
chance, as I recall, a volume from the pen of
Farrar. It was entitled " Seekers After God."
In the book Farrar described, with rare sym
pathy and insight, three famous heathen : Sen
eca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. The selec
tion, however, does not matter : it is the idea
that counts. For, as I read the volume, my
thoughts leaped to many another unchurched
seeker, worthy of being also classed as a " seeker
after God." I have been looking for such
" seekers " ever since. And it is part of the
joy of ripening years to find everywhere seek
ers after God. I realize, sadly enough, that the
present generation is not fond of church ; does
not set great store by altars and litanies. Such
a cry as David's, uttered in precious envy of
the swallows which had built their nests around
the altars of his -Father's house, is quite for
eign to the average man of to-day. One feels
materialism rampant in many of the sacredest
precincts of life. My brother-man has gone
astray from the paths which I was taught to

16 The Method of The Master
tread. Even so, I do not expect him to stop
looking for God. I do not think he cam, stop.
He is " incurably religious." He cannot quite
forget his birthright, even though he may
barter it for a mess of pottage. And some day
he may strike the trail again.
Towards this world-old, world-wide, world-
lifting impulse and movement of the souls of
men, the attitude of Jesus was surpassingly
beautiful. I notice in the first place that He
took for granted the fact of this seeking after
God. So far as the gospel records show, He
never spent a moment trying to prove the
reality of the soul's quest of the Father. He
assumed it. Some of us recall that the first
thing we found in our geometries was a set of
axioms. The instructor never seemed to think
it necessary to prove for our edification that
" the whole is equal to the sum of its parts " or
that "a straight line is the shortest distance
between two given points." So much as was
involved in these assumptions, good brains
were supposed to allow. Hence the instructor
went on to help us prove, for example, that the
square on the hypothenuse of a right-angled tri
angle is equal to the sum of the squares on the
two remaining sides. So in the school of
Christ : there must be axioms, or we cannot get

The Problem of Finding God 17
on at all. Here is where so many honest
souls have stuck. They have come to Jesus
asking an argument for the existence of God,
or a proof of immortality, or a theodicy. And
it is precisely these things which we never find
in Christ's teaching. He constantly assured
certain things to be axiomatic, and went on to
talk about duty and destiny.
Not otherwise is the case with respect to
His bearing towards the huge fact of man's
quest of the Father. Jesus' whole ministry
begged the question of such a seeking. He of
fered Himself as " The Way," because men
were evidently looking for a Way. He took
for granted the homesickness of the soul. The
men He came to redeem were ungrown chil
dren of His own Father. And their cry for
their Father was not less veracious than His
own. Of the World's Fair at Chicago, I have
forgotten practically everything except one
canvas and the following incident. The inci
dent occurred while I was watching the proc
ess of incubation, then a new device. A few
fluffy little chicks had just picked their way
out of their shells and were staggering aim
lessly over the broken shells. They were
cheeping plaintively, too. Tes, as I put my
ear close to the cabinet, I could hear the chicks

18 The Method of The Master
cry. They were crying for a mother they had
never seen. If men ever succeed in manufac
turing an egg, we may be sure that the chick
hatched from it will not cry for a mother.
The cry is witness to the reality of the mother
that laid the egg. Just as instinctive, just as
commanding, is the cry for God which Jesus
came to honour. Why should He argue about
the reality of the cry? The cry was what
brought Him. Its passion, its pathos, its pity
and its perversion underlay His entire minis
try. Himself was the recognition of the ve
racity of the cry.
But Jesus did far more than recognize the
soul's cry as real : He interpreted it. Just as
scientific thought to-day explains the meaning
of certain common phenomena, such as the
flash of lightning, or the phosphorescent gleam
at the ship's side, or the turning of flowers
towards the sun ; so Jesus interpreted to men
the significance of their heart-cries. He was
Prophet for the souls of men. Never do we
make a vaster mistake than when we suppose
that the mission of Jesus was to make men
rehgious. As httle was it His mission to teach
men to breathe with their lungs, or to walk
with their feet. Men were painstakingly, often
painfully, religious when Jesus came. The

The Problem of Finding God 19
whole life of the people He preaohed to was
timed to the beat of rehgion. The Hebrew cut
his meat, wore his clothes, and divided his days
religiously. He was peculiarly a " religious
animal." He had a genius for religion, as
the Greek had for art and the Roman for
government. And Jesus came to disentangle
men from certain besetments of rehgion ; to
reduce rehgion to the simplest terms of love
and service. He interpreted the seeker to Him
self ; showed what the seeking really implied.
In a letter to Charles Kingsley, just after the
death of his first-born, Huxley expressed con
viction that " a deep sense of religion is com
patible with an utter absence of theology."
To phrase his words differently, he had dis
covered in himself the world-old quest of the
soul : he was convinced that even he was, at
bottom, religious. Jesus was constantly help
ing men make that discovery concerning them
selves. Striking into the subsoil of the soul,
He kept bringing up into view new wonders.
They say that below certain strata of the
earth, all streams are pure. So from the
lowest veins of the human soul, Jesus was con
stantly bringing to the surface currents of hfe
as clear as crystal. How else shall we explain
Zaccheus and what happened to him ? To

20 The Method of The Master
his contemporaries, Zaccheus was a bad man.
For accepting Zaccheus' invitation, it was said
of Jesus that He had " gone to be the Guest of
a man who was a sinner." But it was not the
sinner with whom Jesus went home to dine.
It was the tax-gatherer who wanted to be a
good man, and was really trying to find God.
And when Jesus probed the soul of the
wretchedly guilty woman, was sin the deepest
thing He discovered? Assuredly not. Else
would the story have a different ending.
Further down than the woman who was will
ing to be bad, Jesus found the woman who
wanted to be good. Always the soul needs an
interpreter of its own best moods. Paul on
Mars Hill was very near the heart of Christ
when he said to the Athenians: "Whom ye
ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you."
But, fortunately, Jesus did not rest the
matter even here. It is of dubious advantage
to emphasize the reality of the soul's quest of
God, unless one can also exalt the certainty of
finding God. It is not even dignified to send
souls on fools' errands. Life is short; and
there are many other things to do besides look
ing for God. One remembers that when
Hagar was dying of thirst in the desert, she
suddenly discovered water. Where ? Very

The Problem of Finding God 21
near; so near we marvel that the sweetness
and coolness of its breath had thus far escaped
her. And we could not at all understand her
denseness, except that the finest things in the
world get missed that way— God most of all.
The " Problem of Finding God " is, ordinarily,
the problem of looking for Him through the
wrong end of the telescope. The tragedy of
our quest of God is not that life is too short to
find Him, but that we have hurried past Him
on the road. " Closer is He than breathing,
Nearer thau hands and feet."
But we have persisted in looking for Him at
the end of great distances.
On the day following His healing of the
blind man, Jesus sought him out in the temple,
putting to him this significant question : " Dost
thou beheve on the Son of God ? " The former
blind man, with characteristic blindness of soul,
stared clear past his Lord, out into the open
spaces where God is commonly supposed to be,
and rephed, " Where is He, Lord, that I might
beheve on Him ? " How small and stupid he
mnst have felt when Jesus rejoined: "Thou
hast both seen Him, and it is He that talketh
with thee." Somebody tells of being enter-

22 The Method of The Master
tained by an emperor, and not realizing the
honour until the event had passed. According
to the teaching of Jesus, we are guests of God
all the time. So near is God, and so intimate
His care, that He is interested in the flight and
fall of sparrows, and has a census of the hairs
of our heads. So watchful is He that He
knoweth what things we have need of before
we ask Him. To find Him is to go home. Of
course, Lalande missed God with his telescope.
God is not a star to be gazed at, or a fugitive
to be caught. To use the musical phrasing of
Faber, " Our God is never so far off as even to
be near." Even Moses tried to teach his people
this truth : " The word is very nigh thee : in
thy mouth and in thy heart." And though we
live so many centuries later, we do not quite
believe that saying yet.
But the supreme thing remains to be said.
Jesus did infinitely more than remind men how
near God is. He honoured the age-long quest
of the human soul by showing men the Father.
He is the revelation of the Father, so gloriously
that even Goethe confessed, " The Divine can
never be more divine than this." There is a
sense in which the finding of God is no problem
at all. Bather, it is a practical certainty that
the seeker will find Him. He can hardly miss

The Problem of Finding God 23
God even if he tries. In this sense there are
no atheists. Let men spell the name of God as
Force, or Eternal Energy, or the Unknowable,
and anybody can find Him without trying.
" A fire mist and a planet,
A jellyfish and a saurian,
A crystal and a cell,
And caves where the cavemen dwell :
Then a sense of law and beauty,
And a face turned from the clod, —
Some call it Evolution
And others call it God."
It is no trouble to find that sort of a God. Nor
Emerson's, either.
" He is the axis of the star,
He is the sparkle of the spar,
He is the heart of every creature,
He is the meaning of each feature ;
And His mind is the sky
Than all it holds more deep, more high."
But it was not for that sort of a God that Job
cried — " Oh, that I knew where I might find
Him ! " Job had " found " the God of force
and wonder in ways awesome and ugly. Light
nings, stars, cataclysms — all were glimpses of
God to Job, as the sufferer himself would have
been prompt to confess. Job had found that
kind of a God, as surely as Kepler centuries
later, exulting, " I think God's thoughts after

24 The Method of The Master
Him." Still the sufferer cried for the Father.
Tou catch the echo of the same plea in the
petition of Phihp : " Show us the Father, and it
sufficeth us." But unless "morning skies . . .
and summer rain had knocked on his sullen
heart in vain " Phihp must already have known
the sort of Father that Emerson knew.
It is the God that is infinitely more than this,
the God who is not It but He, for whom the hu
man heart keeps asking. " Only the personal can
help the personal," says Schelling, " and God
must become man in order that man may come
again to God." Or as Browning pungently
puts it, it is
" ... my flesh that I seek
In the Godhead."
And it was this quest which Jesus honoured
when He looked into Philip's eyes and said:
" He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father."
The plot in one of Myrtle Beed's stories turns
about a veil which the heroine wore over her
supposedly scorched features. Nobody had
ever doubted that the veil concealed ugliness,
any more than average men doubt the rank
power of the Almighty. The lover of long
ago, taking for granted the terrible aspect of
his injured fiancee, repudiated her before she

The Problem of Finding God 25
left the hospital. Nobody ever questioned the
reality of the scar, nobody except the pedler
who, from away in the woods, used to " call her,"
as he said, with his pipe. He kept begging for
a sight of her face. " Spinner in the sun," he
would say, " I know that you are very beauti
ful." And the best of it is that the pedler was
right. For when at length she removed her
veil to meet his ardent eyes, she was, in fact,
surpassingly beautiful.
May I reverently apply this story to the un
veiling of God in Jesus Christ ? To the world-
old longing for a sight of His face; to the
lover-like insistence that His face must be un
speakably beautiful, God unveiled Himself in
Jesus Christ. And the world is still palpitant
with the surpassing glory of the vision. Such
pity as only mothers know ; such chivalry
towards weakness as the knights of the Middle
Ages never dreamed ; such forgiveness as is
only possible to the Infinite — such, and what
more, was in Jesus' revelation of the Father.
One feels like echoing the old saint's cry at the
splendour of his vision : " It is enough, Lord :
stay Thine hand." The vision of God in Christ
was enough for Peter ; enough to transform a
turncoat into an apostle. It was enough for
Thomas, for we still hear him shouting : " My

26 The Method of The Master
Lord and my God ! " It was enough to break
the heart and transform the life of the persecu
tor Saul. It is enough for men like Lord
Kelvin, who confesses proudly that the greatest
discovery of his hfe was the discovery of God
in Christ. Plato once said, " God may forgive
sin, but I do not think that He ought." But
the God whom we have seen in Jesus Christ,
whose glory hath shined in the face of the
Son of Man, ought to forgive sins ; must forgive
sins. " 'Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for, my
flesh that I seek
In the Godhead ! I seek and I find it. O Saul,
it shall be
A Face like My Face that receives thee ; a Man
like to Me
Thou shalt love and be loved by forever. A
Hand like this Hand
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee.
See the Christ stand ! "

II
THE PEOBLEM OF DOUBT
WHEN Henry Van Dyke's " The Gos
pel for An Age of Doubt " was first
issued some dozen years ago, I read
it eagerly. To say the least about it, I liked
the title of it. I enjoyed the begging of the
question involved in the title. The Gospel
must be a bigger thing than I had sometimes
conceived it to be, if it was big enough to
grapple with the skepticism of a modern age.
"An Age of Doubt" — that was what I had
been calling the age in which I lived. And it
was pleasant to find a far wiser head than mine
describing the age in similar terms.
For, by some strange law of human nature,
when one finds himself in a situation which
cannot be truthfully described as the best pos
sible, one is inclined to call it the worst possible
situation. For example, those who alternately
bake and parboil during the heat waves of July
and August have a sense of grievance when the
thermometric record fails to show that the sum
mer has been excessively warm. Multitudes
of us are sure it is the hottest summer through
27

28 The Method of The Master
which temperate-zone dwellers were ever called
to pass. The ordinary patient likes to think he
is the sickest man who ever sent for a doctor.
If a lover is in the seventh heaven of rapture,
no previous lover was ever so exalted. If he is
in the hell of despair, no such hell was ever so
deep or black. In short, our problem, what
ever it is, whether the problem of earning a
livelihood, of bearing disappointment, of meet
ing suffering, or what not, is the most teasing,
most exasperating, most insoluble problem that
any pupil of God was ever asked to solve.
So, I say, I liked the implication in the title
of Dr. Van Dyke's book. Being a modern man
engaged in a grapple for my own faith and the
faith of my friends; fighting no vague his
toric battle over again — say with Athanasius
against Arius, or Calvin against Servetus — but
meeting the frosts, the artillery, the sabre-
thrusts of modern skepticism, it pleased me to
feel that no churchman of an earlier age ever
had so hard a fight. Was not mine, character
istically, an " Age of Doubt " ?
The trouble with this grimly comforting
assurance is that it is not altogether warranted
by the facts. In the first place I doubt if it is
ever fair to characterize certain ages as respect
ively ages of faith and ages of doubt. Such

The Problem of Doubt 29
generalizations are altogether too sweeping to
be valid. Each age is both an age of faith and
an age of doubt. The worst feature of modern
unbelief, so called, is that it is so very old.
Doubt is as ancient as the Garden of Eden ; for,
according to that vivid panorama, our first
parents were entirely safe until the serpent
insinuated into their minds a doubt as to the
veracity and fairness of God. Doubt is not an
annual ; it is a perennial. It is native to human
soil. It springs up every new season of the
soul, without replanting. In essence every
form of modern unbelief is older than the
Chinese wall. Celsus barked just as loud eight
een centuries ago as Strauss did in the last
century. Frederick Harrison is a sort of echo
of Julian the Apostate. And the grief of
Clifford over the death of his faith is a sort of
refrain to the lament of those who stood about
the Cross and said: "We had trusted it had
been He which should have redeemed Is
rael" Of course, unbelief has the rostrum to-day,
as perhaps never before. The printing-press
has given doubt a tremendous vogue. When
Thomas A. Edison recently avowed his disbehef
in immortaUty, many milhons read about it
in next morning's papers. Haeckel's famous

30 The Method of The Master
books, thanks to the printing-press, are fireside
companions in thousands of humble homes of
Europe. Herr Bebel, the revolutionary social
ist, cries, " Down with God," and Blatchford
blows infidel blasts through his " Clarion," in
the ear of the whole world.
Tet over against all these noisy facts is the
quiet, granitic fact that man, as Sabatier says,
" is incurably rehgious." It is hard work to
make an infidel of him. Just when he thinks
he is " - . . safest, there's a sunset touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's
death,
A Chorus ending from Euripides  "
and he has the whole matter to thresh out
again. The child of the stoutest denier, by an
instinct deeper than any implanted doubt, may,
any day, find himself upon his knees again.
Man is not only a child of an earthly father :
he is a child of the Eternal Father. And God
has ways at him more direct, more compelling
than those of science or logic. So, while we
must deplore the myriad new forms of ancient
doubt ; more seductive, more specious than ever
before ; more like the flora of Paradise than
the poison flowers of perdition, we may profit-

The Problem of Doubt 31
ably give ourselves the chance, as Lowell said
he did, to " take great comfort in God."
And while we are doing that, and as one
means of helping us into the luxury of that
comfort, we may remember one thing more :
" There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Beheve me, than in half the creeds."
If all that glitters is not gold, neither is all that
does not glitter dross. Arthur J. Balfour
wrote some years ago "A Defense of Philo
sophic Doubt " to show how much the world
owes to the challengers of its accepted catego
ries of thought. What volumes could be writ
ten, nay, what a library, on the contributions of
scientific doubt to our physical comfort and
well-being. Somebody doubted if the earth
was flat. Somebody doubted that the pillars
of Hercules stood at the end of everything.
Somebody's doubt gave us the telescope, the
printing-press, the steam engine, the telephone.
Those immortal men of faith were also men of
doubt. Their faith was the obverse side of
their doubt. And now I wish that somebody
would write a book on the service of religious
doubt to the souls of men. We are under incal
culable obligations to the heretics of yesterday ;
intellectual pioneers who resented the carefully

32 The Method of The Master
set limits of human research ; spiritual explor
ers who refused to stop at the surface of things ;
mystics who insisted that "there are more
things in heaven and earth" than have ever
been "dreamed of" in men's philosophies.
Buddha, David, Socrates, John Baptist, Boger
Bacon — but I dare not begin to call the roll ; it
is too long !
To admit all this, however, is to leave the
case unfairly stated. Let doubt be as old as it
certainly is, it is nevertheless terribly alive to
day. In its dwarfing and blasting effects, it is
peculiarly alive in the beginning of the twenti
eth century. Poppies, whose parent seeds date
back to the time of the Pharaohs, are still pop
pies. And though we have discovered some
heavenly uses for them, they have not lost their
diabohc service. " When all's said and done,"
doubt is still doubt ; a medicament rather than
a food ; a dangerous explosive rather than a
harmless condiment ; a weapon that kills at
both ends. The victims of doubt are legion to
day. Granting that their number is not greater
proportionally than in the days of Elijah or
Calvin or Jonathan Edwards, it is still huge
enough to make the heart sick. The record of
heartache, of riot, of terror, chargeable to
unbelief, is too big for any book except God's.

The Problem of Doubt 33
Still there is the blinding fact of doubt ; still
its racking problem. We may, then, spend a
few earnest minutes dealing with the problem
as Jesus dealt with it. For if it cannot be
cured in His way, it will never be cured.
One recognizes the Great Physician, the soul's
Greatest Physician, by the way He handled
cases of doubt. Notice that I said " cases " of
doubt. For apart from cases of doubt, there is
no problem of doubt. Jesus took httle time to
discuss the "problem, of doubt." He handled
"cases." One recalls Lydgate in "Middle-
march." Of Lydgate George Eliot says that
he " had a flesh and blood fellowship with suf
fering which withstood all the abstractions of
physical science. He cared not only for cases,
but for John and Elizabeth, particularly Eliza
beth." Reverently, we may say that this is
divinely true of our Lord. The doubter was, of
course, part of a problem, but, first of all, he
was Nicodemus or Thomas or Peter.
Moreover, Jesus was keenly discriminating
in dealing with doubt. It is sometimes said to
be only half safe to consult a specialist to-day : he
will be so certain to find us ailing with his
specialty. If his hobby, for example, be ap
pendicitis, out with our appendixes. If he be a
throat specialist, we shall all be sure, upon

34 The Method of The Master
examination, to need sprays and throat powders.
If his specialty be the spine, depend upon it, he
will find at least one of the vertebra? of each
back displaced. In short, he finds what he is
looking for, as folks usually do. And every
ailment that flesh is heir to easily reduces
itself to the lowest terms of his specialty. Ac
cording to this analogy, then, we may say that
Christ was not a specialist, but a diagnostician.
His business was not to find support for a
particular theory of doubt, but to discover what
ailed doubters. With the openest mind that
ever searched the souls of others ; with a ten
derness hke that of woman, yet with an audacity
which did not hesitate to prescribe the plucking
out of an eye, or the cutting off of an offensive
hand, He approached His " cases."
Moreover, He was intensely personal and
individual in His treatment of people. I have
heard it said that the average physician gradu
ally reduces his list of ordinary remedies to a
dozen, or even six. So far as he is concerned,
the rest of materia medica may go hang.
Jesus never treated two cases of doubt alike.
Pilate and Herod were both doubters ; yet how
different was Jesus' treatment of them ! Philip
and Thomas were doubters, both of them : the
story of their doubt is recorded in the same

The Problem of Doubt 3$
chapter of John's Gospel ; yet how distinct was
Jesus' treatment of the two men. Peter had
several attacks of unbehef, but Jesus never
treated Peter twice alike. Had we been more
discriminating in dealing with our own doubts ;
had we realized that in the cure of skepticism
as truly as in the cure of physical distempers,
" one man's meat is another man's poison," the
world would not include so many skeptics to
day. I beg to suggest, then, three species of doubt,
as dealt with in the practice of Jesus. First,
the skepticism of the head. This is intellectual
doubt. Nathaniel had it when he came to Jesus
at the solicitation of Phihp. He distinctly told
Phihp that there was no use of coming. He was
persuaded beforehand that nothing good could
come out of Nazareth. His heart was unaf
fected : so was his hfe. His doubt was chiefly
a matter of prejudice ; of preconceived opinion ;
a sort of sophomoric cock-sureness. And this
is the sort of academic skepticism of which the
modern world is full. One of the first tempta
tions of a httle knowledge is to pull down all
the gods. Perhaps this is one reason why a
httle learning has been styled "a dangerous
thing." One remembers how many eternal
questions he could settle, offhand and finally,

36 The Method of The Master
during his second year in college. It is astonish
ing how much wisdom the average reader can
skim from a few magazines or a couple of ad
dresses by Elbert Hubbard. One hears people
telling what cannot possibly be true ; what in
the nature of things is contrary to all reason —
as if, forsooth, they had already canvassed the
universe and scoured the mind of God 1
" Why, even Charles Sumner does not believe
in the Bible," said some one to General Grant,
apropos of the matter of skepticism. "Why
should he ? " quietly responded Grant. " He did
not write it." And there are multitudes of
people who have ceased believing in the Bible
because they had no hand in its writing ; people
who have given over faith in God and immortal
ity on hke childish grounds.
How tactful Jesus was with this species of
doubt. He never grew hysterical about it.
He always seemed surprised that anybody
should doubt. Some one tells of a famous
minister who, coming into his library one day,
found his son devouring a volume of Voltaire.
The father was startled, of course. But, instead
of ordering the book out of the house and the
boy to the pillory, he suggested to the boy that
perhaps a very careful reading of the book
might reveal the weakness of its argument.

The Problem of Doubt 37
With that cue, the boy got up from his reading
a more convinced Christian. Such would have
been our Lord's way. It was not the doubt of
the head which troubled Him. See how adroit
He was with Nathaniel, for example. Jesus
did not reproach him ; He did not sneer at him ;
He merely reminded him that the doubt Na
thaniel had expressed so glibly might have been
a bigger doubt if Nathaniel had known more
things. He used a very similar treatment in
the case of Nicodemus; for, after leading
Nicodemus on, through Socratic methods, Je
sus expressed astonishment that one so wise
as Nicodemus, in many matters, should have
missed the alphabet of wisdom.
Or, consider that wonderful moment when
Jesus and Pilate stood facing each other in the
judgment hall. Pilate asked Him : " Art
Thou the King of the Jews ? " and Jesus
plowed deep with His answer, yet ever so
kindly, " Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or
did others tell it thee of Me ? " So I might
carry this suggestion through a series of Bible
instances. Jesus showed no terror of intellec
tual skepticism. He felt its desolation, but He
seems not to have feared that its contagion
would become virulent. It was too bleak ever
to satisfy the human heart.

38 The Method of The Master
" If I lay waste and wither up with doubt
The blessed fields of heaven where once my
faith
Possessed itself serenely safe from death ;
If I deny the things past finding out j
Or if I orphan my own soul of One
That seemed a Father, and make void the
place
Within me where He dwelt in power and
grace,
What do I gain, that am myself undone I "
But there is a second species of doubt, as dis
tinct from the doubt of the head as rattle
snakes are from humming-birds. This second
species I may call the Infidelity of the Life.
It has a moral root. It grows not out of in
tellectual confusion, but from loss of the path
of rectitude. It is the sort of unbehef the
Scripture describes in the Fourteenth Psalm,
" The fool (that is, the depraved man) hath
said in his heart, There is no God." We
have an instance of this form of skepticism
in the famous well-side interview in Samaria.
How cleverly the Samaritan woman dodged
the Master's appeal. A woman with less
brains than she displayed would be called
brilliant to-day, and might have a salon of her
own. Her trouble was moral, as Jesus fear
lessly showed her. Another instance may be
found in one of our Lord's fiery encounters

The Problem of Doubt 39
with the Pharisees. With scorn and con
tumely, they challenged His life, His purpose,
His doctrine. None can be more righteously
furious than a hypercritical churchman.
"Thou hast a devil," they said. Jesus quite
ignored their scorn, as He bored deep into
their souls with His terrific reply : " Te are
of your father, the devil, and the lusts of your
father ye will do ! " Evidently there is no
gentler way of dealing with skepticism of the
hfe. Take the classic rejoinder of that famous
chaplain who was approached by one of his
men with the complaint that " there are so
many difficult things in the Bible." The chap
lain evidently knew his man, for he quietly
rephed : " Tes, there are many things in the
Bible difficult to understand, but the seventh
commandment is perfectly plain."
One day Shelley walked into the tavern at
Montanvert and after registering his name,
added these words : " Democrat, Philanthro
pist, Atheist." He might have used the first
two appellations without serious offense. But
intellectual doubt never makes men brazen
with their skepticism. By such an exhibition
Shelley gave himself away. Just as a vast
multitude of people do still. When a man
admits infidelity, especially of the roaring,

40 The Method of The Master
blatant type, we may look for the trouble, not
in his head, but in the practices of his hfe.
Could we know the source of the brilliant,
rapier-like thrusts of certain modern unbe
lievers, we should find the pathology, often, in
a soul strayed from God. Such a man needs
to have his soul flung inside out, just as Jesus
showed the men of Galilee to themselves.
" What think ye of Christ, friend, when all's
said and done ?
Like you this Christianity or not 1
It may be false ; but will you wish it true ?
Has it your vote to be so if it can 1 "
There is one further variety of skepticism as
dealt with by Jesus. I mean the Skepticism of
the Heart. John Baptist had this sort when
he sent from Macchaerus his quivering ques
tion : " Art Thou He that should come, or do
we look for another ? " John's head was per
fectly sound. His life was pure to the verge of
austerity. But his heart was broken. He had
poured out his strength in prodigal fashion ; he
was soon to empty his veins. And while he
waited for the hour of his doom to strike,
doubt pierced his heart, and he groaned:
"Art Thou He that should come, or do we
look for another ? "
Thomas was a victim of the same sort of

The Problem of Doubt 41
doubt when he stayed away from meeting on
the night of the first Easter Sunday. One can
never understand Thomas fairly except as re
membering that it was Thomas who said when
the shadows began to thicken about his Lord :
" Let us also go that we may die with Him."
And the Master, for whom Thomas would
gladly have died, had died instead. Into that
Judean tomb in the hillside had gone the best
of Thomas. His heart was broken.
Ah, we can never be too patient, too gentle
with that kind of doubt. When faith has been
killed by grief, let our own hearts bleed, too.
There is no other doubt on earth or in heaven
like the doubt of a broken heart. Some
mother who has buried her child ; some wife
who would be grateful to have buried her hus
band's body rather than to have buried her
respect for his soul ; some man who has emptied
his veins into the service of his age, without
requital ; some Carlyle who has cried aloud for
righteousness and then felt that " God sits in
His heaven and does nothing ! " — may God
forgive us if we ever deal harshly with such
doubters as these ! It will pay us to remem
ber how Jesus invariably treated the doubt
of the heart. He treated it with inimitable,
exquisite pity. To John, for example, He

42 The Method of The Master
sent glowing witness that John had not be
lieved in vain. To Thomas He showed His
hands and His side. What He never did in
cases of doubt of the mind; what He never
could do with the infidehty of the life, He
was eager to do with the skepticism of the
heart. He gave demonstration. Nay, He
gave Himself to the doubter.

m
THE PROBLEM OF SIN
ACCORDING to Walt Whitman, a dog
has at least this distinct advantage
over his master ; he " never lies awake
nights to whine and sweat over his sins."
Cleverly said, and truly Whitmanesque. But,
as usual in dealing with some of the prof ounder
realities and meanings of life, Whitman here
quite misses the point. The real advantage of
being a dog — to adopt the phraseology of
Whitman — is not that his sins fail to keep him
awake, but that he lacks sins which might
justify wakefulness. We may call him a
" bad " dog, and rouse him out of sound slumber
to whip him. We do not, however, mean that
in any of the conventional senses a dog is a
" sinner." And the only way man can recover
the lost ground between his dog and himself is
for the man to stop thinking of his sins as
sins. Perhaps this is what Whitman meant. At
least this is what many modern philosophers
are saying. George Bernard Shaw's "Super-
43

44 The Method of The Master
man " is a man who has grown so great or rank
that he has outgrown ordinary distinctions
between good and evil. Certain of Ibsen's
heroes are able to commit various kinds of
crime without apparent rackings of conscience.
Nietzsche, who probably has more disciples than
are willing to admit themselves to be such,
hoped that some day humankind would grow
bold enough to pluck flowers of self -gratifica
tion wherever they might be found, unharassed
by circumstances or suggestions or duty. Regi
nald T. Campbell, whose heart is so much
sounder than his philosophy, is spokesman for
a host of modern thinkers when he talks
fluently of the unreahty of sin. Christian
Science, with the backing of Oriental occultism,
assures us that, in the final sense in which it
uses the term, sin is merely a great misfortune,
an error of mortal mind. And even so true a
prophet of the human soul as Robert Browning
says: "Evil is naught, is null, is silence implying
sound."
And now that we come to think of it, our
race has lost a vast deal of sleep over its sins.
William James in his " Varieties of Religious
Experience" gives classic instances of the

The Problem of Sin 45
anguish through which men have passed on
their way to forgiveness. The great religions
of mankind have always made their appeal to
the unrest of minds diseased, and have found
their successes in proportion to their ability to
minister to that sickness. Hardly one of us,
perhaps, but can recall perfect horrors of con
trition and earthquakes of remorse. And it is
this most dramatic case of all the ages, the case
of man against himself, which Whitman would
throw out of court. If Whitman is right, we
cannot afford to lose any more sleep over our
sins. But whether sin, as we call it, is fact or
fallacy, it is the most ubiquitous presence —
except goodness — in human history, and in the
present circumstances of men. Whether, in its
final analysis, we must pronounce it a moral
distemper to be cured, or a mental uncouthness
to be outgrown, or a painful delusion to be
banished, it is here. And to whomsoever the
world shall finally award the palm for banish
ing sin, to Ritschl or Comte or Jesus, some
thing ails our present world. Surely a planet
so thick-strewn with jails and court-houses,
with reformatories and states' prisons, testifies
amply to this — that something is radically
wrong. Our hospitals for the sick and our

46 The Method of The Master
various asylums for mentally and physically de
formed children are scarcely more beautiful in
their ministry to suffering than they are terrific
in their indictment of the moral cause of a vast
deal of physical suffering. Here are uncensused
broken hearts and unfulfilled vows and blighted
hves. Here are war and poverty and unloved
children and caste and cruelty. Even a specta
tor from another planet would find his heart
aching at contemplation of the havoc of what
men call sin.
And it is against this grim, menacing shadow,
so densely black it has cost a multitude of men
their vision of the Father ; in the chill of which
many hearts have grown faint and faithless,
we must measure the genius and glory of
Christ. Whatever He is elsewhere, He must
be master here. By His bearing towards the
problem of sin, and by His grip upon its fact,
He must justify His name. For " His name
shall be caUed Jesus, for He shall save His
people from their sin."
How magnificently He meets this challenge !
How He dwarfs all the Whitmans and Fred
erick Harrisons and Mrs. Eddys, all the fussy
philosophers of and laborious apologists for
sin ! He fairly fills with His splendid presence
the doorway through which He comes to men.

The Problem of Sin 47
To men confused by a Babel of tongues ; to
men fighting the world-old battle between good
and evil — a battle as terrific as Sedan and as
bloody as ChanceUorsviUe, what a presence
Jesus brings with Him ! Not to Jesus the
Healer of men's bodies, beautiful though His
ministry to bodies was; not to Jesus the
Teacher of ignorant minds, glorious though He
was in such role ; not to Jesus the Banisher of
doubt, heroic as He was in achieving that, but
to Jesus the Saviour from sin, human hearts
instinctively cry, " My Lord and my God ! "
Jesus and the problem of sin. The first
thing one notices with respect to our Lord's
treatment of this old, heart-racking problem is
His utter absence of speculative spirit towards
it. Here are no academic discussions, no meta
physical inquiries, no confusing questions. Con
cerning the origin of sin, Jesus said practicaUy
nothing. He set Himself to work upon sinners.
There is a type of lawyer who, when you take
him your case, fairly makes the volumes tumble
down about your head. Court records, Black-
stone, Roman jurisprudence, aU are shown to
have bearing upon your special case. It is
wonderful to think how intricately ramified is
human law. And you are glad, of course, that
your advocate is an expert in such matters.

48 The Method of The Master
Tet the fact is that your chief concern at the
present moment is with the case you bring.
There is a kind of philanthropist for whom
each fresh instance of destitution starts a train
of thought reaching as far back as the Pharaohs.
Our industrial feudalism, the fierceness of com
petition, the influence of poor sanitation, the
lack of eugenics, aU are caUed into requisition
to explain a particular case of poverty. The
poor man is poor because of this or that.
Meantime, the claimant, who is chiefly a man
with a stomach to be fiUed and a chiUy back
to be warmed, is growing hungrier and colder.
There is a sort of physician who, immediately
upon entrance into a sick room, begins to learn
edly descant upon the pathology of disease
in general, and of your sickness in particular.
This present iUness to which the physician is
caUed has a history as long as the Manchu dy
nasty and as tragic as the house of Hapsburg.
AU of which might be immensely entertaining
if the man on the bed were a student at a cUnic,
instead of waiting for somebody to come and
heal him.
How different was the attitude of Jesus.
Advocate of the rights of the feeblest, Servi
tor of poverty and Physician of sick bodies, He
gave Himself to sinful man with an immediacy

The Problem of Sin 49
of address, a whole-heartedness of attention
which proclaimed Him Master. So far as His
treatment of Peter, of Zaccheus or the woman
taken in adultery, there might have been no
problem of sin at aU ; merely cases. He even
declined to discuss theories of evU. What was
passing through His mind, while His hands and
feet were so interminably busy, I should Uke
to know? That He understood origins and
finalities one would be slow to deny. One
would reverently love to probe the resources of
that mind concerning which contemporaries
said, " He spake as one having authority and
not as do the scribes." Flashes of insight tell
us how deep the mind of Jesus was, as a part
ing of clouds at the top of a mountain gives
the cumber a ghmpse of the vaUeys below.
But the ministry of Jesus was a ministry not
of speculation, but of healing.
We may notice, in the second place, the real-
ness of sin, as Jesus treated it. To His thought,
sin was the realest thing in the world, next to
God. I have wondered how He would enjoy
having His name given to those sophistical sys
tems which explain away the reahty of sin.
That malign force which cost Him Peter's
loyalty and John's courage and Judas' disciple-
ship ; wrestUng with the roots of which cut

50 The Method of The Master
those lines which portrait painters have tried
to show in the face of the Man of Sorrows ;
that active evil which poisoned the atmosphere
He Uved in, and drove into His soul spikes
more terrible than the iron which pierced His
hands and feet; I wonder what His feelings
might be, to hear it caUed unreal ?
Evil not real ? Then what is real ? and by
what token ? We hear Paul crying : " When
I would do good, evil is present with me."
And I cannot, for the Uf e of me, see how the
good he wiUed to do was more real than the
evU which he did not intend. H Paul had
never truly been a sinner, what warrant for
caUing his saintship real ? Goethe, in his
" Confessions of a Beautiful Soul," says, " For
more than a year I was forced to feel that if
an unseen Hand had not protected me, I might
have become a Girard, a Cartouche, a Damiens,
or almost any moral monster that one can
name. I felt the predisposition to it in my
heart. God, what a discovery ! " But if, ac
cording to the specious phuosophy so popular
in modern times, " every evil is a coming good;"
wherein consists the shock of the discovery re
ferred to ?
And here are we. Only yesterday we took
advantage of another's weakness, told a false-

The Problem of Sin 51
hood, perhaps ; indulged an unchaste thought
or a vicious act. Was that " good in the mak
ing " ? Was it virtue adolescent ? Was it less
real than to-day's kindness or truthfulness or
sobriety ? A friend writes me that he has for
days been looking for a couple of pinched Uttle
waifs whom he met in Whitechapel, London,
and whom his heart prompted him to feed and
clothe, but from whom, in the hurry of busi
ness, he turned away. And he says, in remorse
for his carelessness, he wiU never leave London
until he finds those two lads, or two others just
like them. Is his quest of them, therefore,
more real than his once neglect of them ?
Fie on such nonsense perpetrated in the name
of pmlosophy or humanism or the metaphysic
of Christian Science ! If sin be not real we
might as weU go the whole figure of the Berk-
leian phUosophy, and admit the chair we sit on
is not real, or the elbow we bump, or the food
we eat, or the voices we talk with. Or, for
that matter, the souls that sometimes stir within
us at consciousness of sin. Once started on
that sophistical road, there is no sure stopping.
Let metaphysicians say what they will, most of
us prefer the teaching and ministry of Jesus
Christ. To His thought the sin of the bedrid
den man was as real as his shrunken sinews.

52 The Method of The Master
When he told the adulterous woman to " go
and sin no more," He gave no intimation that
her previous iUicit loves had not been real sin.
The sin of Judas was as real as the suver pieces
he flung at the feet of the rulers. Hear
our Lord pouring out His soul over His
chosen city, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how
often would I have gathered thy children to
gether, as a hen gathereth her chickens under
her wings " — and then fancy that, in the agony
of His travail, He was not dealing with reaUty !
To pronounce sin less than real, to make it less
real than the stone waUs which shut the con
victed criminal in, or the court which sentenced
him, is to rob the life of Jesus of its unique sig
nificance, to vacate His teachings of their pro-
f oundest content, and to make of His Cross a
solemn farce. Sin is real or Jesus is not Saviour.
In the next place, observe that Jesus looked
upon sin as an essence, rather than a form.
Back of each concrete piece of lawlessness lay
a lawless heart. Back of Peter's cowardice
was a cowardly heart. Back of Puate's shifti
ness was an unstable nature. Back of the sol
diers' brutahty were imbruted souls. " Out of
the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adul
teries, fornications, thefts, falsehoods, blasphe
mies " ; so said Jesus. But He went further

The Problem of Sin 53
than that. He declared that sin coddled and
caressed in the heart is of the same quality
with sin outbreaking. What a law of brother-
liness He taught : " He that hateth his brother
without a cause is a murderer ! " Or take His
law of chastity; "He that looketh upon a
woman to lust after her hath committed adul
tery already." In other words, sin, according
to the thought of Jesus, was an essence, a
spirit. M. Albert Levy, the famous French
chemist, says that the most dangerous poison in
the air we breathe is oxide of carbon, a waste
product which is given off in the household uses
of gas. And he says it is the more perilous be
cause it is odourless and ordinarily ineluctable.
So Jesus teaches concerning the malefic power
which destroys happiness and blots out ideals
from the souls of men. It is a poison whose
mischief is as deep as its subtlety. Not merely
when it breaks out into open view, but when it
merely genders in the heart, it is deadly.
Whether in contemplation or in act, it is sin.
Most emphaticaUy, then, the world needs
this sort of doctrine. That human organ of
which with a somewhat naive philosophy the
Scripture says, it " is deceitful above aU things
and desperately wicked," is never more traitor
ous than when it tricks us concerning the sin-

54 The Method of The Mastef
fulness of sin. The startling iridescence found
upon ancient vases, and adding so greatly to
their value in modern eyes, is the result of de
cay. By some chemical changes of substance,
the darkness has wrought beauty: yet the
beauty is the beauty of decay. So with certain
human quaUties which rank as virtues. Not so
much by intention as by the fraud of sin
have we learned to say : " Evil, be thou my
good." There has recently been discovered by
a Russian chemist an anaesthetic several thou
sand times more powerful than chloroform.
And experiments are being conducted with a
view to using it in warfare upon the enemy.
Sin is such a weapon. It defeats by putting
its victim to sleep. Mixed with the good air of
life, it denies us the privUege of striking a blow
in defense of our souls. It has been said by a
celebrated churchman that he had received
confession of every sin except the sin of parsi
mony. So seductive, so akin to the virtue of
frugaUty is stinginess, that its most conspicuous
possessor counts it a virtue. Doubtless a care
ful reading of our own hearts would add to the
length of the Ust of unconfessed sins. For
nearly every one of us finds plenty of opportu
nity to sin without specificahy breaking the
Decalogue.

The Problem of Sin ^
Charles H. Spurgeon once said, apropos of
certain strictures upon his use of tobacco, that
he objected to having other men add to the
Ten Commandments. Tet, as a matter of fact,
unless some one has a right to add to the Ten
Commandments, or, rather, to apply the Deca
logue in all its ramifications, we may find some
day that we have transgressed more than ten
laws. It was the assumption of this right on
His part which brought Jesus to the crowning
tragedy of His life. That Pharisee who, in the
parable, stood forth and thanked God that he
was not as other men — and doubtless told the
truth — did not propose to be called a sinner
by anybody. And when Jesus laid bare the
subtle unrighteousness of the Pharisaic heart ;
when He showed the oneness of a self-righteous
spirit with stealing and adultery, He made sure
His own doom.
What is this essence, then, which leaves us
aU smiting upon our breasts and asking for for
giveness ? What is sin ? According to a very
beautiful chapter in Dr. McCleUand's volume,
" The Mind of Christ," sin, in the thought of
Jesus, consists in being "lost." Sin is being
lost by heredity as the sheep goes astray ; or by
circumstances, as the coin is mislaid; or by
vohtion, as the prodigal son seeks the far

56 The Method of The Master
country. Very beautiful, indeed. One could
wish that our theology had more often been
modeUed upon such lines. But this is not the
whole case of sin. Sin is more than a personal
undoing. Sin is treachery to the entire aim
and purpose of creation. Sin, according to
Jesus, is dust on the bearings of God's world.
Sin short-circuits the currents of the Father's
power and love. Sin is defiance of God. It is
unbrotherhness. It is essential treason.
But I have left unsaid until now the most
important feature of Jesus' treatment of sin.
He not only dechned to speculate about sin. He
did more than pronounce it real and describe
it as an essence. He made bad men good.
Leaving to those who had plenty of time for
discussion, questions as to the origin and ne
cessity of evU, He addressed Himself to the
practical cure of evU. He cast out aU sorts of
devils. He turned sour tempers sweet. He
gave abandoned women the glimpse and the
power of a white hfe. He transformed turn
coats Uke Peter into rocks of strength. He
remade Shylocks like Zaccheus into saints of
His Church. Just as I was writing these lines,
there came a card of invitation to help a once
Bowery thief celebrate his "majority" as a
Christian. For twenty-one years he has been

The Problem of Sin 57
Uving a lif e of sobriety and immense usefulness.
He is a sample of what Jesus has in all ages
been doing. The world is different to-day
because of such miracles of the grace of Christ.
And the brightest pages of human history are
those which record such ministries.
And the Cross of Christ ? Just what relation
that Cross bears to forgiveness and cleansing,
who can adequately say ? For myself, I accept
the Cross as a terrific testimony to the reality
of sin ; as a declaration of the white righteous
ness of God ; and as the pledge of an Infinite
Love which yearns to outwear aU human
wanderings and bring aU prodigals home.

IV
THE PEOBLEM OF SALVATION
A NOUN may, as Crothers said of an
adjective, be " known by the company
it keeps." Nor is " bad company " the
only kind of hurtful company for a good noun.
Too exclusive company may be as damaging
as corrupt company to the reputation of a
word. Take, for example, the wholesome word
" Society " as mortgaged by the " Smart Set " ;
or the brave, clear-eyed word " Science," nar
rowed to the uses of materiahstic research ; or
the ample, enfolding word " Charity," as de
scribing a sort of professional or patronizing
pity. The misfortunes of the royal word
"Holiness," at the hands of an ungenerous
section of the Church, are a painful memory of
present day Christendom.
So with the altogether vital, inclusive word,
" Salvation." I do not say that the word has
ever gotten into "bad company," yet some
thing aUs its reputation at large. Imagine an
average, modern man singing zestfully :
"Salvation ! Oh, the joyful sound ;
What pleasure to our ears I "
58

The Problem of Salvation 59
As a matter of fact, the sound of " Salvation"
is anything but joyful to the average man.
The word itself has a terribly ecclesiastical, not
to say uninviting, sound. It suggests mechan
ical plans for pacifying an unnecessarUy excited
Creator, and for getting to heaven at length.
Nor is the entire fault for having such absurd
notions to be set down at the door of the
average man.
The fact is that this key-word of Christianity
has been too much in theological company.
Wittingly, or otherwise, it has been emptied of
a host of meanings it can iU afford to lose. To
the man in the street — and it is the man in the
street with whom we must always reckon,
since he is the man who most needs salvation —
the word has become anaemic. It has lost too
many red corpuscles. It fans to signify any
force he is concerned with, or feels need of, in
the fashioning of his life.
It is a matter of record, if not of personal
memory, that when the Salvation Army was
launched on its great mission, it met with
few snules and many sneers. Frankly, we did
not like its name, and we particularly objected
to the way it had of spelhng that name upon
bonnets and coat-collars. Well enough for
miUtary organizations to declare, in their uni-

60 The Method of The Master
forms, their aUegiance to their flag ; but some
how our aesthetic sense revolted from the
practice of announcing, in gUt letters, a prop
aganda of salvation. What accounts, then, for
the wide-spread change of heart towards the
Salvation Army? Why is it that one hears
irreligious men, even, confessing that they
" beheve in the work of the Salvation Army " ?
To say that the world is tardUy coming to rec
ognize the sincerity of General Booth and his
coadjutors is to offer a quite too superficial
explanation. The real explanation is far deeper
and more heartening than that. We have dis
covered, as the Army itself has increasingly
done, that the word " Salvation," blazoned on
its banners, and trumpeted with unharmoni-
ous bands on street corners, has many vital
meanings. Industrial homes, wood-yards, soup-
kitchens, shelters for repentant Magdalens,
employment bureaus, campaigns of soap and
sunshine in the slums — aU are integral parts of
the " great salvation" which the Salvation Army
proclaims. Nothing calculated to catch the eye
or ear on the inner man ; nothing which can en
courage a first halting step towards Christ ; noth
ing which promises nourishment to the seed of
a new life just planted, is foreign to the spirit
and enterprise of the Salvation Army. And

The Problem of Salvation 61
thus, inoidentaUy, at least, the Army has
helped to save to the world the meaning of
the word it proclaims.
Here, then, it seems to me, is a lesson the
rest of us may profitably learn. It is good
business to let the world know that the word
" Salvation " as we employ it, nay, the force
for which it stands, contains aU that the Sal
vation Army, or rational SociaUsm, or settle
ment houses have ever put into its meaning.
The word has been exclusive long enough. It
is time now to make it inclusive, in the name
of Christ.
It would be difficult for me to forget a morn
ing, two years ago, when I sat in the chapel
of a notorious agnostic and heard him read the
thirty-fifth chapter of Isaiah. He read it as I
have never heard it read before or since ; read
it with such tenderness and rapture that my
heart sweUed and my eyes fiUed. " The wil
derness and the sohtary place shaU be glad for
them; and the desert shaU rejoice, and blos
som as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly,
and rejoice even with joy and singing. . . .
Then the eye of the bUnd shall be opened, and
the ears of the deaf shaU be unstopped. Then
shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the
tongue of the dumb sing ; for in the wUderness

62 The Method of The Master
shall waters break out, and streams in the des
ert. . . . And an highway shall be there,
and a way, and it shaU be caUed The Way of
holiness. . . . And the ransomed of the
Lord shaU return, and come to Zion with songs,
and everlasting joy upon their heads; they
shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and
sighing shaU flee away." That is a saved world.
A world with its bUndness and fear, its hurt
and sin banished, is a saved world. The noto
rious scoffer at so many articles of my faith, the
man who ridiculed the idea of anybody's being
saved by Jesus Christ, had been reading aloud
the description of a saved world. Evidently,
according to his Ughts, he, too, beheved in sal
vation. And, perhaps, if the preacher and the
unbehever ever got together, they might find
that they had in common more than they had
ever admitted.
At any rate, there are more believers in sal
vation — taking the word in its amplest mean
ing ; more people interested in salvation ; more
hearts and hands confederate looking to a
world's salvation than in any age since Jesus
trod the lanes of GaUlee. And it seems a pity,
if not an outright perfidy to Christ, to admit
that any essential feature of a world's salvation
is not included in our definition of the word.

The Problem of Salvation 63
Even the government is becoming concerned
with a particular sort of salvation. Part of
the wonderful thirty-fifth chapter of Isaiah
might have been adopted as the programme
of the Bureau of Reclamation. That bureau
has UteraUy been making " waters break forth
in the wUderness " and " streams in the desert."
Vast areas of the sand have actuaUy been made
to " rejoice and blossom as the rose." And en
terprising engineers now talk of turning the
ocean into the blistering wastes of Sahara, with
a view to redemption of huge territories on the
banks of a new inland sea.
But these Uteral programmes of salvation
are merely hints of more vital, if less dramatic,
apphcations of the truth. A partial Ust of the
redemptive exactments of Congresses and Par-
Uaments ought to help quiet the voice of mod
ern pessimism. Laws requiring safety coup
lers and other devices for the protection of
those who run our trains and those who travel
on them ; laws providing for the dotting of our
coasts with life-saving stations; laws limiting
the number of hours which a labourer may be
compeUed to work per day ; laws assuring to
chUdren a chance for school and play ; laws for
safeguarding the morals as weU as the prop
erty of citizens ; pension laws, insurance laws,

64 The Method of The Master >
workmen's compensation acts — aU testify to
an increased interest of governments in realiz
ing Isaiah's vision of a saved world. The ex
ploit of Colonel Waring in the sanitation of
Cuba, an exploit which cost that splendid citi
zen his life, expresses the genius of an age
which is concerned with saving people. Hull
House, Chicago, under the impulse and direc
tion of Jane Addams, is a concrete instance of
the increasing spirit of modern times. Definite
figures are offered as to the number of chil
dren's lives actually saved during the past
summer by Nathan Strauss' provision of pure
milk. And here we have consumers' leagues,
demanding fairness, if not kindness, for factory
workers and shop-girls. Here, also, the Big
Brother Movement, asking a second and third
chance for delinquent boys. And if further
instance were needed, here are the model tene
ments just erected by Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt,
Sr., for the housing of persons afflicted with
incipient tuberculosis. This is not salvation, in
the conventional, religious sense; but what
other suitable word shall one use ?
And then, there is Socialism, with its often
crude enthusiasms, its half-digested plans to
bring in a millennium, its heat and violence ;
Socialism, varying from the gentle philosophy

The Problem of Salvation 65
of Maurice to the revolutionary programme of
Herr Bebel ; Socialism far too Uttle concerned
with the saving of people from their own sins,
and very much concerned about saving them
from the sins of their employers and unscrupu
lous pohticians. One might properly wish that
the socialistic doctrine of salvation had a more
distinctly evangelical note. Meantime, there is
occasion to be grateful that the idea of saving
folks, even industriaUy, has taken possession of
so many minds. A devout Christian worker
returned recently from a visit among settle
ment workers, with many compliments for
their work, but with this drastic criticism:
" It is aU very beautiful, but it isn't salvation ! "
Her comment is timely enough. What settle
ment workers preach and practice is not al
ways salvation. But it is a part of salvation.
And it seems to me our business to prove that
our idea of salvation includes theirs also. In
a very significant sense the world is ready for a
sweeping revival. It beUeves, as never before,
in " saving " people. And when men at large
find that aU the best features of a practical
salvation, as understood by them, are contained
in the programme of Jesus, with immeasurably
more, they may turn a readier ear to the ap
peal of the Church.

66 The Method of The Master
Reverently, then, but with confidence born
of experimental acquaintance with Jesus, we
put this problem up to Him. His name com
mits Him to an adequate solution of the prob
lem. The larger His solution, the more reason
for every knee to bow at His name. It is not
as Teacher of ethics, nor as Idealist, nor yet as
Social Reformer, but as Saviour that Jesus jus
tifies His name.
In the first place, then, notice that salvation,
in the precept and practice of Jesus, is always
personal. He saved folks. He created no ht
erature; He made no change in the maps of
the world ; He buUt no hospitals. It can
scarcely be said that He enunciated a single new
doctrine. He spent His days upon people ;
driving the darkness out of ugly hearts, revers
ing the currents of life, endowing men and
women with new impulses. He even declined
to take issue with a tyrannical government — so
intent was He upon saving people. As con
cerning His work, He might have used a classic
modern definition : " The soul of aU im
provement is the improvement of the soul."
Whatever this grim, disordered world needed
to have done to it, in order to make it fit for
His brethren to live in, Jesus trusted the re
made souls of men to accomplish.

The Problem of Salvation 67
How sane and far-sighted His method is !
We have a great deal to say about the power of
environment in the production of character.
We are easUy persuaded that the first requisite
looking to character-improvement is a change
of moral climate. The ministry of Jesus,
however, leaves a totaUy different impression.
He put the emphasis upon folks. He sought
to change their hves, with confidence that
changed hves would alter their own moral
climates, or even be able to cope with disad
vantageous conditions. History vividly de
clares that Jesus was right. Genial climates,
whether physical or other, have never made
men and women. Not in the South Sea
Islands where bread-fruit fairly drops into the
mouths of supine natives, but rather amid
snows and perils and pain, where men have
had to fight for every possession, from their
bread to their souls, do we find sturdy char
acter. Let one locate the Waldenses on the
map. Let him taste the rough climate which
produced Knox and Bruce. Let him analyze
the blood of conquering races, and if his
tests are fine enough, he wUl discover in
the blood the iron of incessant struggle. The
truth of Emerson's famous saying, that "An
institution is but the lengthened shadow

68 The Method of The Master
of a man," underlay the working creed of
Jesus. The only salvation with which Jesus ever
concerned Himself was personal. Surprise Him
anywhere in His ministry and He is always
endeavouring to save somebody. Take a cross-
section of His life and you find it a hfe of
personal service to persons. His famous dia
logues with Nicodemus and the woman at the
weU were not held for the sake of argument,
but with a view to reaching the persons in
volved. Whether we instance the case of the
woman whom He saved from an inveterate
illness ; or Bartimeus whom He saved from
bUndness ; or the leper whom He saved from a
Uving death ; or Zaccheus, or Peter, or Mary
Magdalene, the story is the same. Jesus had a
perfect passion for saving people. Somebody
once asked the lighthouse-keeper at Amagansett
if he did not get lonesome. " Not since I saved
my man ! " was his glowing reply. And, as
interpreting the reply, it is weU to notice that
he did not say " boat " or " cargo," but " man."
" Not since I saved my man ! " Was not this,
humanly speaking, the real secret of Christ's
ministry ? As sometimes the brute in us be
comes a passion for killing, the divine in Jesus
became a passion for making ahve. His days

The Problem of Salvation 69
were all too short, His nights too few for the
business of saving people.
But to say this beautiful thing is to leave the
most unique thing unsaid. The unique, incom
parable feature of Jesus' way of saving people
was that He saved them from their sins. The
most tragic thing that ails this world is not
poverty or ignorance or sickness, but sm.
Back of a thousand ills that flesh is heir to is
usually somebody's sin. Back of aU industrial
cruelty is somebody's personal greed. Back of
war and caste and inhumanity are sins. And
Jesus justified His name by saving Zaccheus
from sharp practices, and John from vainglory,
and a scarlet woman from shame.
I wonder if Socialism, under its many forms,
realizes this ? Karl Marx's social state would
prove a poor substitute for our present social
order, unless there shaU be good men and
women to Uve in the new state. Plato's Utopia
requires Utopian folks for its population.
" There go the walls of Sparta," said an ancient
king, pointing to his troops. The building of
that sort of human walls, by cutting men loose
from their sins, bringing them from the far
country, and restoring them to the Father's
favour, was the unique work of Jesus.
If any one objects that, according to this

70 The Method of The Master
idea, salvation is too catastrophic, that it is
a work of rescue chiefly, I shaU agree.
There is a stiU better way to save a man than
by regathering his scattered energies and re
deeming his moral losses. John Hay once said
that " to take a little chUd by the hand and
conduct him to his own is better business for
men and angels than swinging censers and loaf
ing round the throne." Precisely so. And to
take a chUd by the hand and set his feet early
in the path of Jesus ; to save men and women
by a sUent, undated birth into the Christian hfe,
rather than by a second birth, is the greater
salvation whose glory we have too often missed.
I do not say that we have made too much of
such Scriptures as, " The Son of Man is come
to seek and save that which was lost " ; but we
have made too little of chUdren in the arms of
Jesus ; have laid too scant stress upon salvation
by prevention ; have forgotten the impUcation
of the "ninety and nine just persons which
need no repentance." If reconstruction is bet
ter than construction, why should Jesus say,
" Whoso shall offend one of these little ones
which beheve in Me, it were better for him
that a millstone were hanged about his neck " ?
There is no record that Mary, the sister of
Lazarus, ever needed a great forgiveness : there

The Problem of Salvation 71
is quite as Uttle doubt as to the richness of her
Uf e as a disciple. For the future, then, we are
to advance the programme of Jesus, not so
much by a gospel of rescue, even, as by a
gospel of safeguarding and moral hygienics ;
to help Him justify His name by helping Him
save His people from their sins, not after but
before commission.
Notice, in the second place, that the " saving "
which Jesus practiced was always present. He
said surprisingly Uttle about the salvation of
which our fathers talked and sang much — a
salvation in the future, to the accompaniment
of harps and crowns. Jesus continuaUy urged
salvation as a present process. The kingdom
He was so anxious to buUd was a kingdom on
earth. Most of His wonderful parables have a
terrestrial setting. The greatest thing that
God came to do for man man needs to have
done now. Observe, then, that the redeeming
operations, which Jesus says are so fascinating
that the " angels desire to look into " them, are
always present. To the rapacious tax-gatherer,
Jesus said : " This day is salvation come to
this house." To the woman whose touch ar
rested Him on His way to the home of Jairus,
He said : " Thy faith hath made thee whole."
To the repentant daughter of sin He said: " Go

72 The Method of The Master
and sin no more." To the emissaries of John,
pleading the anxiety of their master, He said :
" Go teU John aU the things which ye have
seen and heard." This is the sort of message
and ministry the human heart craves. " Our
people die weU," observed Wesley long ago.
But even the matter of dying weU is never so
important as the mattter of living weU. The
least test of Uf e is to be found in its last chapter.
The greatest triumph of the Gospel is a life
saved now.
We might, in the third place, linger for a
moment over one other feature of Jesus' sav
ing work. It was practical, both in its begin
nings and its results. One is almost startled at
the simpUcity of salvation as taught and iUus-
trated by Jesus. Any sort of handle sufficed
Him to get hold of a soul. Nathaniel came to
see if anything good could come out of Naza
reth ; and Jesus made use of the occasion to win
a convert. Peter came to Jesus at the solicita
tion of his brother, and was won by Jesus to
discipleship. Nicodemus came for theological
discussion, and Jesus stirred unsuspected depths
in Nicodemus' soul. Mary opened her house
to the Master, and the Master opened His
Father's House to Mary. Sometimes, indeed,
He asked a question or two. More often, ap-

The Problem of Salvation 73
parently, the soul of Him went out and gripped
the seeker. And a busy man likes to remem
ber how immensely practical salvation was in
the days when Jesus wrought it in Galilee.
The proof of the reaUty of salvation was, to
Jesus' thought, not less practical than its proc
ess. FuU fruitage was to be the outward sign
of a deep, inward experience. " By their fruits
ye shaU know them," He said. And on an
other occasion He asked, "Why caU ye Me
Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I
say ? " And when He sketched the final f elic-
ity of those who had unwittingly practiced
upon " the least " of His " brethren " their love
for Him, He was plainly emphasizing a spirit
ual fruitage which there is no gainsaying.
" When thou art converted," He said to Peter
once, " strengthen thy brethren." This was
not merely a command, it was to furnish proof.
By Peter's abiUty to " strengthen " his brethren,
he was to declare, both to himself and to them,
the reality of his own conversion. Similarly,
one might go through a long hst of Scripture
aUusions. According to St. Theresa, the world
has always had one virtue : it has never con
doned the faults of saints. Neither did Jesus.
He insisted that a disciple ought to declare
plainly his celestial vocation. The entire Bar-

74 The Method of The Master
bizon School of painters shows indehble marks
of one master. When one becomes a pupU of
Paderewski, his friends justly expect the pupil
to repeat, in part at least, the skUl of his mas
ter. And the tests which Jesus proposed for
proficiency in the salvation He came to accom
plish were quite as practical.
I am weU aware that this treatment of so great
a theme wiU be thought by some inadequate.
And they are right. It is inadequate. I have
spoken thus far only of the outward aspects of
the work of salvation, as recorded by the evan
gelists. Of its inner content ; of the spiritual
processes and functioning of a Saviour's grace
in the hearts of men ; of the redemptive power
which remains to be accounted for after natur
alism has had its fuU say concerning Jesus;
of the reconciliation wrought by that death,
which Rousseau said was " the death of a God,"
— what language is competent to speak ? Let
the history and credal statements of Christian
dogma confess. To save a man as Jesus saved
him is different from the salvage of a ship, or a
physician's saving of his patient, or a mother's
salvation of her boy. And the difference is
both essential and unique. Granted that Jesus
used the same word when He saved a woman
from her physical affliction as when He saved

The Problem of Salvation 75
others from their sins, the fault is to be found
in the inadequacy of language. The whole
problem of saving men is not contained in the
parable of the prodigal son. Who shall dare
to treat Ughtly such declarations as this : " The
Son of Man came ... to give His hfe a
ransom for many." " Do you know that I am
an understander of men ? " said Napoleon once.
"WeU, He was no man." He was more!
What that "more" is, and how it became
"more," theologians of aU ages, with the as
sistance of phUosophy, have laboured in vain
to say. Who in this latter day can understand
it? But who, for that matter, knows what
Raphael or MuriUo mixed their paints with?
Who can explain the difference between a
" Uve " wire and a " dead " wire ? The hand
of a tyro can detect the difference, but who
can explain it ? Chemists are able to manufac
ture a seed with every aspect of the real thing.
Both look aUke to me. But give the real seed
a few weeks or months, and its distinction wUl
appear. Who is competent to say what has gone
out of the face of our friend with the advent
of death? Everything that we could see or
touch before remains. Tet our friend is dead,
and our heart is broken. So I cannot even be
gin to guess the whole difference between other

76 The Method of The Master
men and Jesus. Concerning the mystery of
the Incarnation and Atonement we know as
much and as httle as did Francis of Assisi, or
Athanasius, or St. Paul. Paul himself said of
it, " Great is the mystery." But the incontro
vertible miracles of the ages since Jesus are the
results of the contact of men with the human
Uf e of God. Jesus once said, as reported by
St. John, " I, if I be lifted up from the earth,
wUl draw aU men unto Me." The bystanders
did not understand Him. Neither do I. But I
see a changed world, lifted higher and ever
higher, until it shaU eventually become, indeed,
" the earth of the redemption."

THE PROBLEM OF POVEETY
" ' II ^^^ P°°r ye nave aiway8 wu,n y°u»"
I rephed Jesus when chaUenged for
-*- acceptance of a woman's fragrant
gift. It was very true, as the treasurer of the
disciples declared, that the precious ointment,
which had just been poured upon Jesus' head
and feet, might have been "sold for three
hundred pence and given to the poor." But
how utterly unchivalric such treatment of the
woman's gift would have been. Love has cer
tain inalienable rights, as Jesus was quick to
maintain. Moreover, by defending this unusual
gift, Jesus was reaUy exalting a spirit which,
educated and turned to largest uses, would
finally banish the poverty which He was ac
cused of forgetting. Tes, the poor did, indeed,
" remain " after Jesus had finished His work on
earth. And the early disciples had ample
opportunity, as our Lord promised that they
should, to practice upon multitudes an extrava
gant love such as one woman had once lavished
upon Him. 77

78 The Method of The Master
The history of the ApostoUc Church is beau
tiful with ministries to the poor in the name
and for the love of Christ. And down to this
day no part of the propaganda of Christianity
is more sure of itself, more unapologetic and
fearless than that which concerns itself with
the feeding and housing and shepherding of the
poor. Those who doubt the value of creeds
and rituals, and even prayers, wiU readily agree
upon our Lord's own definition of service of
Him. " Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one
of the least of these My brethren, ye have done
it unto Me."
AU of which is immensely comforting in its
way ; and exceedingly beautiful, from a certain
angle. Since up to the present time we have
had the poor with us always, it is immensely
fortunate that the Church has followed her
Lord in a ministry of loaves for His needy
brethren. But there are those who, to-day, are
solemnly asking if it is not nearly time to cease
having in each community a class on which to
"practice the heavenhes."
The problem of poverty — it has, at least, a
high antiquity. Nobody disputed Jesus when
He said, " The poor ye have with you always."
Had He not spent a generous part of His short
ministry in aUeviating the hungers and poverties

The Problem of Poverty 79
of the poor? If He had been expressing in
Rome the sentiment I have just quoted, He
might have Ulustrated it by aUusion to the
pubUc dole. The law of His own country was
softened and sanctified by gracious provisions
for the poor, as, for example, we discover in
the exquisite Book of Ruth. It was a cry of
poverty which led to the Exodus. Many an
ancient tablet bears the bitter record of hunger
and deprivation. As far back as the first faUure
of harvest, the first plunder by his foes, primi
tive man knew what poverty meant. That is,
indeed, an ancient problem with which Robert
Hunter and Henry George and other earnest
spirits have been wrestUng.
But the worst feature of the problem of
poverty is not that it is old, but that it is so
terribly new. Certain human evils, given suffi
cient time, seem to exhaust themselves, as
typhoid fever runs its course in the human
system. But poverty, alas, justifies its high
antiquity by stalking abroad in a pecuharly
high-handed and desperate fashion, in our day.
Robert Hunter in his volume says that ten
mUUons of our people live in poverty, four
millions or more in actual want, and the re
mainder at the verge of it. Figures for the
past year show that one out of seven persons in

80 The Method of The Master
England had recourse to the poor rates. And
recent cables from Russia affirm that, by reason
of crop failures, some twelve mUUons of people
are in danger of starvation. It has been said
that not more than two-thirds of the human
race ever have enough to eat. These are only
general statistics, of course, to be supplemented
and interpreted by personal observation and
study. The average wage-earner, except so far
as he Unks up his fortunes with others by
membership in Trades Unions or Beneficial
Orders, has but a few days between loss of
employment and actual want. Henry George
used to say that if we could know a smaU
fraction of the story of destitution in our own
land, we should have hard work to sleep nights.
The assertion sounds absurdly paradoxical, but,
take the world over, poverty has had no trouble
in keeping pace with progress. As against
sixty-thousand-ton steamships, and guns that
carry a dozen mUes, and crude oU made into aU
sorts of useful products, cotton at a fraction of
its former price, cables under aU oceans, and the
world at our door — as against aU these advan
tages, the poor man is, in some sense, more
helpless to-day than in the days of savagery or
Egyptian slavery. True, he is possessor of cer
tain distinctly modern advantages ; at least, we

The Problem of Poverty 81
fluently and frequently remind ourselves and him
that it is so. The average bank deposit, for ex
ample, is larger now than ever before, showing
thrift and assurance against want on the part of
an increasing number. There are more comforts
and conveniences, not to say refinements, in the
homes of the working classes. Any man with
a nickel in his hand and a half hour to spare
can travel from the Battery to University
Heights, a trip which for his grandfather would
have required several nickels and haU hours.
Or, he can step into a telephone booth and for
five cents cry his need ten mUes away. He
may have a pint of milk served at the door of
his tenement, a hundred mUes from the cow
which gave it ; inspected, certified and sealed,
in addition. The city government wiU force his
landlord to provide water for him in his top-
story tenement. A beggar, lolling on a bench
in a pubhc park, may watch the progress of sky
scrapers whose advent would make our grand
fathers dream of Babel; hear automobUes go
"honking" down the street as if pedestrians
were a nuisance ; and see biplanes floating, like
giant hawks, far above his head.
We must not, however, so lose our breath in
praise of progress as to omit to state that the
" hobo," as we caU him — and there are in this

82 The Method of The Master
country perhaps a half milUon of him — feast
ing his soul on various marvels of modern
science, whUe his stomach is raveningly empty,
is as truly a product of modern civilization as
is structural steel, or the by-products of cotton
seed. As Henry George says, "The tramp
comes with the locomotive, and almshouses and
prisons are as surely the marks of material prog
ress as are costly dwellings, rich houses, and
magnificent churches." It was of the modern
world, with its express trains and manifold
conveniences that Thorold Rogers said : " There .
is every reason to fear . . . that there is
collected a population in our great towns which
equals in amount the whole of those who lived
in England and Wales six centuries ago ; but
whose condition is more destitute, whose homes
are more squahd, whose means are more uncer
tain, whose prospects are more hopeless than
those of the peasant serfs of the Middle Ages
or the meanest drudges of the mediaeval cities."
It was of this same modern world, minus a few
of its latest contrivances, such as the storage
battery, the automatic telephone, and colour
printing, that John Stuart MU1 declared, " It is
questionable if all the mechanical conveniences
yet made have lightened the day's toU of any
human being." Looking out upon this same

The Problem of Poverty 83
modern world, some tlurty years ago, Huxley
observed that in aU countries, and amid an in
creasingly large proportion of the industrial
population, " la misere reigned supreme."
What misery he meant, we may judge by
samples. In London, one in every five of pop
ulation dies in an almshouse or a jail or a hos
pital. In the metropolis of the New World,
one in every ten is buried in a potter's field.
It is from the streets and tenements of our
modern world that the cry of the unemployed
besieges heaven, and with aU too inadequate
answer, so far as they can hear. Apropos of the
question of unemployment, an otherwise intelU-
gent merchant said to me recently, " Anybody
who wants a job can get one." I am sure he
never tried to find a " job " for a man out of
work. Even granting, for the sake of argu
ment, that there is always a plumber's job
waiting for an unemployed carpenter, and vice
versa ; that a discharged bookkeeper might, for
example, find employment on the streets among
the " White Wings," stUl it is not so easy to
change one's vocation as to change one's clothes
— even if there were no Labour Unions to
hinder. What a terrible paradox it is for
thoughtful students ; that the nearer a com
munity approaches the ideals which aU com-

84 The Method of The Master
munities are seeking ; the more paved streets
and better sewers it has ; the more perfectly
its means of production and exchange are
developed, the more harrowing and terribly
menacing becomes the cry of the unemployed.
Our social evil, so caUed — though why any
thing so anti-social as evU should ever be caUed
" social," I cannot see — the Uke of which no
ancient civilization ever encountered, has its
roots in the same problem. That pitiful army
in skirts, whose real heart-ache and bitterness
are but scantily hidden by feathers and furs
and adornments, is recruited not so much by
wantonness as by starvation wages. " How
am I to hve on the wages you offer me?"
asked a young woman of the superintendent
who had just offered her a position. "The
same as other girls," was his brutal reply.
The answer is reaUy the answer of modern
industriahsm. Surely, something ails a civiU-
zation which virtuaUy compels the average
shop-girl to traffic in her own body in order to
present herseU suitably attired at her employer's
office. The problem of poverty, — it wiU do weU
enough for Maurice Hewlett to beguUe us
with the innocent deUghts of " Senhouse," and
for Edward J. Locke to take us around the

The Problem of Poverty 85
world with " The Beloved Vagabond." But the
fact is that the blessings and advantages of
poverty are far more poetic on the pages of a
book than in the pages of experience. For
most of mankind, the lad's description of pov
erty is terribly true : " It's hell to be poor ! "
It may be " no disgrace to be poor," as we con
stantly remind poor people, stiU, to be poor is
" heU " of a good many different kinds.
This is the problem we have got to meet. It
wiU not suffice that we dodge it, or philosophize
about it, or explain it. We have got to meet
it. The days of talking of the inevitabUity of
poverty, as of death and taxes, have passed.
The modern socialist knows, whether we admit
the truth of his knowledge or not, that this
long-time evU, older than taxes, and nearly as
old as death itself, is not inevitable. We have
passed out from under the shadow of that Mal-
thusian cloud which for generations darkened
the skies of economists. We now know that
we have by no means reached the limit of
nature's productivity. This earth of ours, after
allowing for its incorrigible deserts and seas,
wUl support in comfort myriads more people
than have ever tested its resources. Scientific
farming is a vivid suggestion of the things men
wiU yet do to push back the Umit of popula-

86 The Method of The Master
tion. "Both the jayhawk and the man eat
chickens, but the more jayhawks the fewer
chickens, while the more men the more chick
ens. Both the seal and the man eat salmon,
but when the seal takes a salmon, there is a
salmon the less, and were seals to increase past
a certam point, salmon must diminish ; whUe
by placing the spawn of the salmon under
favourable conditions, man can so increase the
number of sahnon as more than to make up for
aU he may take." ' The modern socialist knows
these things, and remembers them, while we
are talking mournf uUy about the inevitabihty
of poverty.
Neither shaU we talk so much in the future
about the inferiority of the poor, as if poverty
with its bUghting concomitants were the best
that the poor ought to hope for. Aristotle
once said a thing we should hardly be prepared
to accept to-day : " There are, in the human
species, individuals as inferior to others as ani
mals are to men. Destined by nature to sla
very, they can hope for nothing better than to
obey." Where, according to that judgment,
would Epictetus come in ? — " born a slave,
maimed in body, and dear to the immortals."
Or where Charles Lamb, bred in servants' quar-
1 Henry George, " Progress and Poverty."

The Problem of Poverty 87
ters, with a squaUd outlook on life ? Or
where Oliver Cromwell, son of a quite insular
squire ? If to be fair, one must grant that
these Ughts of history, and hundreds like them,
were never " destined by nature to slavery,"
the modern proletariat replies that aU it wants
is a chance to show that it also was not " des
tined by nature to slavery." Nay, it goes fur
ther and declares that after a few generations
of adequate food and suitable housing, with
educational advantages, some who under the
present regime are " destined by nature to sla
very " would be " destined " to over-lordship of
their present masters. " Danger and Hunger "
may be, as WatMnson suggests, " the true king
makers," hke the wolf which suckled Romulus.
Doubtless. Then let a few of the parasitic
class be given opportunity to see what kings
real " Hunger " and " Danger " will make of
them! Such, in its many phases and involvements,
is the problem of problems with which our
world is wrestUng to-day. If the problem is
not to be solved by the principles of Christ, the
Church has already met her Waterloo. Let us
spend a few minutes, then, watching our Lord
in His ministry to poverty. It is not too much
to say that He was meeting poverty aU the

88 The Method of The Master
time. Had His chief earth-business been the
abatement of human poverty, He could hardly
have been more wisely circumstanced for His
mission. Laid first in a " borrowed cradle," so
poor that He had nowhere to lay His head,
buried in the tomb of another, He was pecul
iarly the Son and Brother of the poor.
Take the famous scene on the hillside where
Jesus fed the multitudes. It was He who re
membered that the multitude was hungry.
" Give ye them to eat," He commanded the dis
ciples. Worthy, or unworthy, the people before
Him were hungry, and that was enough for our
Lord. He had f ulfiUed the Scripture : He had
preached the Gospel to the poor. Perhaps
after they had time to absorb His teaching
they would be more provident. But, mean
time, they were hungry. Hunger was their
primal need just then. The only Gospel which
could appeal to them under such circumstances
was a Gospel of food. And this was the Gos
pel which Jesus preached, as " He took the
bread and fishes into His hands and brake them
and gave ... to the multitude."
No Gospel which fails to include daUy bread,
nay, which fails to begin with a recognition of
the prime need of bread, wiU ever reach the es
tranged masses. Our Charities Organizations

The Problem of Poverty 89
find in the hfe and teaching of Jesus Christ
ample warrant for existence. Notwithstanding
their shortcomings, and their perils in practical
operation, we cannot do without them. Phys
ical distress needs physical aUeviation before it
needs anything else. Jacob Rns says that
when the then President Roosevelt, after
vainly trying persuasion upon the coal-opera
tors, decided to interfere with the strike, he
said : " Tes, I wiU do it. I suppose that ends
me, but I must do it." So far as the mine
operators are concerned, it did "end" him.
They have never, to this day, had further use
for him. But who doubts that, by bis uncon
ventional use of his office, he did right ? With
the imminent approach of freezing weather,
millions of our people needed coal more than
they needed a settlement of the respective
claims of Labour and Capital ; more than the
coal barons needed the privUege of being the
unassaUed patrons of Providence ; more than
the Miners' Union needed the granting of its
demands. A plain human need was the first
need of aU.
But this is only part of the problem of pov
erty. Even the disciples who suggested send
ing the multitudes away knew, nevertheless,
that the multitudes were hungry. How about

90 The Method of The Master
those needs which are not so obvious? The
most pathetic human wants are sometimes least
seen. Not long since I sat in a prominent law
yer's office, and heard him take the Charities
Organization as a text to declaim against pau
perizing the poor. " Where, pray," he asked,
" are aU these urgent needs on behalf of which
charitable donations are asked ? " He never
had seen any convincing evidence of poverty,
though he had lived in a great city for many
years ! He doubted if a case of genuine and
deserving need could be found in his city.
Now, Jesus dealt with this phase of the prob
lem, too. One recalls readily the story of Dives
and Lazarus. It is not stated that the man of
purple and fine linen saw the beggar at bis gate.
It may not even have been reported to him,
personally, that just outside his palace lay a
Lazarus who would be grateful for crumbs
from the other's table. If ignorance were jus
tification for neglect, then no blame attached
to Dives. Ah, but as the sequel declares, Dives
ought to have known. Who shaU excuse him
or us for f ailing to find out ? To know a hun
dred interesting and urgent things about a
city's need; to understand its traffic problem
and its housing problem ; to watch its treasury
against the wolves of graft ; and not to know

The Problem of Poverty 91
the squalor, the hunger, the bitterness of its
poor, is inexcusable. De TocqueviUe suggests
that we become so " used to the thought of
want that we do not feel that an evil which
grows greater to the sufferer, the longer it lasts,
becomes less to the observer by the fact of
its duration." One of the purest reform
ers New Tork City ever had took occasion
to sneer at the incongruity of sending doUars
to the heathen, when here at home are thou
sands of babies tugging at the dry breasts of Ul-
nourished mothers. In a sense his sneer was
warranted. No devotion to the world-wide ex
tension of Messiah's kingdom can ever condone
in us ignorance of plain human needs here at
home. But Jesus not only met hunger as it arose.
In another series of ministries He went far
deeper into the problem of poverty. His cure
of the blind beggar and of the impotent man at
the pool, of the woman who had " spent aU her
Uving upon physicians, nor had been healed of
any," stand for the placing of incompetents
where they can help themselves. There is no
hint that the cleansed leper was to exhaust
himself in shouting the praises of his Healer.
Henceforth, doubtless, he was to find his place
among men, earning his Uving as they. Are

92 The Method of The Master
we trying to do this for the indigent ? Greater
than to meet their temporary necessities is to
help them to their feet for self-support. We
are beginning to consider already the need of
old-age pensions and of systematic compensa
tion for injured workmen. But as yet we have
hardly touched the problem of taking the
lameness away from a nation's cripples ; or of
anointing their purblind eyes that they may see
the dignity of labour.
. One further lesson remains to be gathered
from Jesus' ministry to poverty. We find it
in that parable out of which certain socialists
have read support for their communistic doc
trines. " Why stand ye here aU the day idle ? "
asked the lord of the vineyard. " They say unto
him, Because no man hath hired us. He saith
unto them, Go ye also into the vineyard ; and
whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive."
The record does not state that the householder
needed more employees. It may even be
suspected that he had already more than he
needed. The cry which reached him was the
cry of their need of him. We are doubtless a
long way from recognizing the vaUdity of that
cry. In our present competitive age, such
a practice is quite inconceivable. Precisely.
And it is the competitive feature of our age

The Problem of Poverty 93
which our Lord would bitterly condemn. It is
the feudalistic type of our industrialism which
grinds the faces of the poor. When Jesus told
a certain rich man to sell aU that he had and
give to the poor, and thus find treasure in
heaven, He was certainly not showing that rich
man how to reach heaven by exploiting the
misfortunes of the poor. On the contrary, He
was inviting him and his beneficiaries, whoever
they might be, into a common kingdom. For
the kingdom which Jesus continually preached
was a kingdom of brothers on earth.
In a dainty, undenominational seaside chapel
where I worshipped last summer was a crude
memorial window, representing the Good Sa
maritan holding his wounded charge on the
beast. The drawing of the picture was sadly
defective ; the colouring was far too vivid for
artistic effect. It doubtless, as such things go,
was a cheap affair. Tet I Uked that window.
Its lesson more than compensated for artistic
fault in the teaching of it. The Good Samar
itan is always putting his shoulder under the
burden of the other man. That function
makes him worthy of his name and his Lord's
high praise. Some day we shaU adopt our
Lord's standard, and shaU measure greatness
as Jesus measured it in the parable just referred

94 The Method of The Master
to. As Louis Blanc confidently declares : " The
day wiU come when it wUl be recognized that
each one's debt to his feUow men is in propor
tion to the strength and inteUigence he has
received from God ; and it wiU be a part worthy
of genius to assert its legitimate empire, not by
the amount of the tribute it wUl levy on society,
but by the greatness of the services that it wiU
render." When, seriously and conscientiously,
we really aUow ourselves to get "under the
load " of poverty with the poor, the problem
of poverty wiU be on its way to beautiful
solution.

VI
THE PROBLEM OF DIVOECE
IT used to be the boast of Paris that she
had the finest sewers in the world. Her
cathedrals might be equaUed by those of
MUan and Cologne ; her galleries and Ubraries
chaUenged from Rome and London; her Champs
Elysees not finer that the Uhter den Linden of
Berlin. One distinction, at least, remained to
her : she had the finest sewers in the world.
To see Paris, a generation ago, meant to inspect
her vast underground system of conduits, per
haps to make a trip through them in a row-
boat. Whether, with the marveUous develop
ment of urban communities in later years, her
former distinction remains, I cannot say. The
boast of Paris is what interests me, for her boast
is itself a confession of the existence of an
unsavoury and sometimes almost unmanageable
problem. So with divorce laws, good or bad. Doubt
less there is a better and a worse in such things.
The best criminal jurisprudence, however, in
one aspect, is a system of disposing of the waste
95

96 The Method of The Master
products of the city of Man-soul. Divorce is a
recognition of the untrustworthiness or wanton
ness of the human heart. Divorce courts, Uke
prisons and reformatories, register our present
remove from the establishment of the kingdom
of God. And the alarming increase in the
ratio of divorces to marriages is pathetic, if not
tragic admission of the dominance of the
problem. For example, three times as many
divorces, per hundred thousand, were granted
in 1900 as in 1870. Figures taken from the
latest census are even more disturbing. One
in seven marriages issues in divorce ; Japan,
with whose private and pubhc morale we
should hardly rehsh comparison, being the only
nation showing a percentage of divorces higher
than ours ; the next country below in the list
being Switzerland, with a percentage less than
half as great as ours.
Now, it is undoubtedly true that the various
technicahties and restraints involved in modern
divorce processes represent a distinct improve
ment over more primitive methods of disposing
of undesirable partners; just as the modern
sewage system has its advantages over the old
fashion of throwing soapsuds and potato-parings
out of the window. Moreover, we should
scarcely be justified in admitting that the eth-

The Problem of Divorce 97
ical standards of the two countries above named
— leaving Japan out of consideration for the
moment — are lower than those, say, of Ger
many and France. Nevertheless, the problem
remains. It might be interesting, if time permitted, to
trace the beginnings and development of the
problem of divorce. If we were able to carry
our quest far enough back, we might indeed
antedate the problem of divorce, as simUar re
search antedates the problem of clothes, of
hygiene, of transportation. Tet, even in so re
mote and hazy a past, it is doubtful, as Charles
Darwin concludes, if human sex relations were
ever promiscuous. John Fiske beheved that
the lengthening period of helplessness of the
human offspring, which he caUed the " cosmic
root of self-sacrifice," sanctified and tended to
make permanent an otherwise transient and
precarious relation. For that matter, hints of
absolute monogamy may be found among
birds ; leading one eminent ornithologist to af
firm that real marriage is found only among
the feathered tribes.
But whether man " f eU " when he became a
man, or had not yet risen to man's estate, there
was terrible laxity in sex relations among the
most famous nations of antiquity. In Rome,

98 The Method of The Master
in Greece, and among most of the peoples of
the Orient, marital ties were loose and divorce
correspondingly easy. Egypt, on the other
hand, with a civilization old when Moses was
born, shows to distinct advantage in this par
ticular. Not once in that pictorial history
which her monuments furnish us, is there indi
cation of more than one Uving wife to a man.
The Old Testament shows a steadUy rising ap
preciation of the inviolabiUty of the marriage
bond. And even among certain primitive
tribes which may be studied to-day, as, for ex
ample, the Veddahs of Ceylon, death alone is
competent to break the marriage tie.
This much, at least, we may say in general ;
that after aUowing for refluent forces, for the
back-waters of human progress, the real tide of
advance may be measured by regard for the
sanctity of the marriage bond, and reluctance
to break it. History most unequivocaUy
teaches that, wherever the marriage altar has
grown insecure, the nation thus characterized
has become weak. And it is significant, at
least, that those Northern hordes which swept
down into the vaUeys of France and Italy, in
ferior in many respects to the conquered, had
this distinct advantage — their reverence for the
honour of women and the sanctity of marriage.

The Problem of Divorce 99
But the problem to-day is pecuUarly ar
resting, as many voices attest. A variety of
forces, some of them normaUy antagonistic to
others, are combining to put the problem of
divorce before us in aggravated form. For ex
ample, there is a lessening sense of authority
in the old familiar sanctions of custom and
rehgion. By a series of rude shocks, men have
learned to distrust certain ancient voices of
command. The prophets of a thousand or two
thousand years ago were doubtless useful in
their day ; perhaps were inspired to their task.
We are apt to disclaim, however, their right to
speak to or for us. Some one caUed Emerson
" an iconoclast who took men's gods down so
gently, it seemed an act of reverence." The
business of taking down another's gods is,
however, never an act of reverence. No man
ought to touch another's gods untU sure that
he can put better gods in their place. When
once the gods are down, they are down. And
a multitude of gods, to whom ready homage
was paid in other days, are to-day in the dust
of disdain. Professing ours to be a govern
ment of laws and not of men, we are in many
respects a singularly lawless people. And the
growing disrespect for marriage vows, a disre
spect expressed in fiction, trumpeted on many

100 The Method of The Master
platforms, and quietly avowed in multitudes of
Uves, is one result of a half-digested freedom.
Since Moses is dead, and even Hammurabi,
why not " trial marriages " and " affinities "
and their ilk ?
The second force which I may name as mak
ing for lax conceptions of marriage is raw in
dividualism. We have done so much preaching
to the effect that the greatest thing in the
world is f uU-blown personaUty, we ought not
to wonder at men's discovery that this same
doctrine may be apphed to domestic relations.
Nothing must nowadays interfere with the in
dividual ; surely not the conventions of effete
civilization ; nor respect for canons of antiq
uity ; nor fear of criticism on the part of con
temporaries. Not even marriage vows. "I
want to Uve my own life ! " cried a modern
woman when her divorce was granted. Of
course she wants to live her own life, and
ought to Uve it. Up to a certam point we
must applaud her determination. Bulwer was
right when he said that " the soul of one man
is of more account than the vicissitudes of the
whole globe." Nay, Jesus Himself asked,
" What shaU a man give in exchange for his
soul ? " Not to Uve one's own hfe is treachery,
both to oneself and to one's Maker.

The Problem of Divorce 101
There is worse treachery than that, however.
To live one's own life as tf it were solitary ; as
if mine were all the rights and my neighbour's
were aU the duties — this is worse treachery
than not Uving one's own life. Certain forest
kings attain their height by robbing the soU
for many yards around, putting every other
generous growth out of business, in order' to
reach their own maximum. It is ordinarily
too big a price for a tall tree. And before we
start a campaign of individuaUsm, we may
profitably pause to ask what sort of world this
would be if everybody else in it did the sort of
things we would hke to do.
Then, at the opposite pole from individuaUsm
is its inveterate and implacable enemy, socialism,
out-Heroding Herod in the marriage matter.
German socialism, by the Ups of Bebel, de
clares that marriage is slavery. Hating aU
property with a more or less holy hatred,
stalwart socialism denounces marriage in the
same breath with capital and rent. In the new
state which is to be when sociahsm is rampant,
" husbands " and " wives," as such, will disap
pear. ChUdren will be educated en masse.
Parenthood wUl be regulated by the state.
And meantime, in the Uves of a few advance
agents of this new era of universal prosperity,

102 The Method of The Master
we have striking iUustrations of how felici
tously the doctrine works.
MateriaUsm, too (if one may differentiate it
from individuaUsm, which is essentiaUy ma-
teriaUstic; and from sociaUsm, which seems
chiefly concerned with the loaves and fishes), is
also contributing its quota to the divorce prob
lem. That materialism to which
" A primrose by the river brim "
is a primrose and nothing more ; which explains
motherhood and conversion by certain nervous
reactions ; which asks concerning any enterprise
or propaganda whether it wiU bake bread, does
not leave the marriage tie alone. Rather, it
tends to make of the marriage altar an auction
block, and asks of such divinely intended rela
tions merely the " pound of flesh." Love of
the finer sort never yet grew ; love of the sort
that saves marriage from shame and defeat
never will grow in the hard, dry air of material
ism. Marriage must be an ideahsm or nothing.
Tested by dollars or even by raptures, it is not
worth whUe, as many are confessing to-day.
Like any other bad bargain, commerciaUy con
sidered, an unhappy marriage should be gotten
out of as cheaply as possible.
Now into this modern welter comes Jesus

The Problem of Divorce 103
Christ with His bursting frankness, His invinci
ble ideaUsm, His compelling hopefulness. Agree
with Him or not, it is tonic to hear Him talk.
Knowing the instabiUty of the human heart as
none other ever knew it ; meeting its fraUties
with a vaster patience and tenderness than the
stoutest apologist for human weakness ever
displayed, Jesus was inexorable in His moral
demands. And He was never more positive
and unequivocal than in His attitude towards
marriage. Compared with those fetid airs
which from all quarters blow upon the problem
to-day, He is a clean, anti-cyclonic breath from
the very hills of God.
Notice what Jesus actuaUy did say concerning
marriage and divorce. He said three things, as
Dr. Terry helpfuUy points out ; and all the rest
that He said on this problem may be reduced
to these three terms. In the first place, He
insisted that the marriage bond is sacred. " Is
it lawful for a man to put away his wife ? "
asked the Pharisees, " tempting Him." When
they countered upon His reply by quoting Moses
in support of their position, Jesus reminded
them that God was interested in marriage long
before Moses was. " From the beginning of
the creation God made them, male and female.
For this cause shaU a man leave his father and

104 The Method of The Master
mother, and cleave to his wife ; and they twain
shall be one flesh : so, then, they are no more
twain but one flesh" (Mark x. 2-8). The
sanctity of marriage, then, was the first thing
Jesus had to say concerning marriage. That
which justifies the chUd in leaving his or her
profoundly sacred relation to father and mother
must also be sacred. Moreover, anything less
than the sanctity of it makes the marriage rela
tion intolerable. A wise physician read me re
cently some extracts from a letter which he was
writing to a young married couple. The letter
was very beautiful. In it my friend talked as
one might of rose-gardens and star-set skies,
" without fear and without reproach." But the
word which caught my attention was the word
" sacredness." He reminded the lovers that
marriage was essentiaUy an altar ; that it must
therefore be approached with reverence always,
and with the gifts of a clean spirit.
Sometimes I think it is a pity that the re
formers dropped marriage from the category of
sacraments as practiced by the Romish Church.
By which I do not mean that the wonderfully
intimate relation of husband and wife was
esteemed more holy or practiced more sacredly
under Romanism than it has been under Prot
estantism. It was perhaps the mockeries and

The Problem of Divorce 105
bestialities involved in the ordinary marriage
which made the reformers agree to reduce
marriage from the rank of a sacrament. What
they ought to have done, however, if I may
say so ; what we, at least, ought to do, is not to
remove the sacramental character of marriage,
but to bring marriage up to the range of a sac
rament. I am grateful, therefore, for aU the
glamour and romance with which we have
surrounded the wedding ceremony. Better
flowers on marriage altars, themselves the em
bodiment and expression of love among God's
lower creatures, better there than at funerals.
Justified, too, our hundred extravagances,
providing they help to set the passion and prose
of marriage in royal garb. There is a sense in
which the old, romantic novel, which broke off
the story at the sound of the marriage beUs,
was truer than our modern novel, which deals
with the marriage problem so frankly. At
least, the old-fashioned novel left the reader as
before an altar, to approach which, unveiled,
was a sort of sacrilege.
The sanctity of the bond, then, was the first
emphasis which Jesus laid in treating the sub
ject of marriage. His second emphasis grows
out of the first. H marriage is sacred, it also
is permanent. " What God hath joined to-

106 The Method of The Master
gether, let not man put asunder." "What
God hath joined together" — granting that,
there would be Uttle hesitance in agreeing
with the rest of the sentence. Indeed, we
should readily go further and say that " those
whom God hath joined together" not only
ought not to be " put asunder," but cannot be
" put asunder." They belong to each other for
time and forever. Jesus, however, was not
speaking of the ideal marriage, such, for ex
ample, in modern times, as Charles Kingsley's
and Robert Browning's. An Intimate of many
Uves, and Guest in many homes, Jesus doubtless
knew that the average marriage was far from
ideal. And though He carried from His Naz
areth home a host of holy memories to counter
act the bitterness of disUlusion, yet with frank
eyes Jesus saw things as they were. In this
connection, one recaUs His talk with the Sa
maritan woman at the well. Tet, in view of
all the unhappiness and hardship, of the cruelty
and chUdlessness involved in many marriages,
Jesus said : " What God hath joined together,
let not man put asunder." And when His
disciples pursued the question later, He said :
" Whosoever shall put away his wife and marry
another committeth adultery against her.
And if a woman shaU put away her husband,

The Problem of Divorce 107
and be married to another, she committeth
adultery " (Mark x. 11, 12).
It is noticeable that Jesus did not make ex
ception of the single offense which New Tork
State, for example, recognizes as justifying a
dissolution of the marriage bond. The qualify
ing phrase " except for fornication," as we have
it in Matthew, was, according to the ripest
modern scholarship, added to what Jesus origi-
naUy said. Mark and Luke offer no exception
to Jesus' sweeping word: "What, therefore,
God hath joined together, let not man put
asunder." Would He, then, compel husband and wife
to Uve together as such after one of them had
violated what is almost universaUy regarded as
the essence of the marriage contract ? Two
distinct questions are involved here. As to
the first, it is weU to notice that Jesus gave no
hint of requirement that an estranged husband
and wife should continue to live together.
When their relations should have reached the
pitch at which it was not possible to live
decently together, He would doubtless have
been prompt to require that they live apart.
AU He said was that, according to a primal
law of His Father, neither the injured person nor
the guilty was free to contract a new relation.

108 The Method of The Master
As to the sin of adultery, which Protestants
in general unite upon as furnishing adequate
basis for severance of the marriage tie, it may
be doubted if Jesus would look upon this sin
as furnishing exception to His rule. Accord
ing to His teaching, sins of impulse were al
ways treated as less heinous, less unforgiv
able than sins of disposition. Adultery, then,
abominable, indecent, and execrable as it cer
tainly is, might be more pardonable to His
thought than certain more deeply hidden sins
of the soul.
There remains a third aspect of Jesus' atti
tude towards this problem. " For the hardness
of your heart, (Moses) wrote you this precept,"
said Jesusj concerning the law which the
Pharisees were quoting. In other words, the
lax legislation which they held in such high
esteem was an accommodation to human weak
ness. Hence, according to Jesus, the Mosaic
law was defective and temporary. And against
aU such concessions to fraUty, Jesus held up
triumphantly the law of His Father.
Shall we then believe in a prohibition which
does not prohibit ? According to the authority
of Jesus, yes. In all matters of cardinal ethics,
there is no question at all as to where Jesus
would stand on the question of prohibitive en-

The Problem of Divorce 109
actment. Though every second person in the
world should violate the prohibitory law, still
Jesus maintained it. What else, indeed, is to
prevent any discontented partner from saying,
as one said to me recently, and on what he
considered the highest ground, "Mine was
not a heavenly union. God did not join us to
gether. Hence it can be no sin to put us
asunder." In closing, it may be profitable to caU atten
tion to the immense value of the unequivocal
attitude of the most ancient church on this
question. I do not say that average marital
virtue is higher in the Romish Church than in
Protestantism. I merely affirm that the ideal
ism represented in the attitude of the Church
of Rome on this question is itself a huge asset.
Without casting discredit upon the sincerity of
any of those whose conjugal ties have been
severed by other than death ; flinging no as
persion upon new vows which may have been
taken in all integrity, it is for the Christian
Church to hold up plainly and unflinchingly
the teaching of Jesus — one man for one woman,
one woman for one man, " tiU death do them
part."

VII
THE PEOBLEM OF THE SABBATH
NO less a man than Daniel Webster
once expressed the conviction that
this RepubUc could never survive by
a century the destruction of the Sabbath. One
may, of course, question the arithmetical exact
ness of Webster's prediction. Prophecies are
usually safer when they are undated. More
over, the cardinal matter at issue is not whether
or not this RepubUc can survive the passing of
its Sabbath, but whether man, as man, can en
dure that loss. There have been, it must be
said, times when certain jealous world-powers
would not have grieved to see this "colossal
experiment in democracy " fail. And if neglect
of one day in seven should happen to bring
about the coUapse of the Repubhc, those jeal
ous world-powers would have no fault to find.
So I reaffirm that the real question at issue is not
whether, as De TocqueviUe believed, a despotic
government is better calculated than a Repub
lic to bear the loss to man of a weekly rehgious
day, but whether man can afford to lose it.
Man with a body unequal to seven days' work

The Problem of the Sabbath 1 1 1
in seven ; man with social and mental reaches
not provided for in the area of working days ;
man as a chUd of the Eternal Father has a huge
stake m the fortunes of the Sabbath. Edmund
Burke declares that " civilized man cannot bear
the pressure of seven days' work and worry in
a week." It has certainly a notable history, this seventh
day around which so keen a controversy rages.
Nobody knows just how old the Sabbath is.
It is one of the things man has brought with
him from a past immemorably dim. Centuries
before the days of Moses and the tables of
stone, a fuU thousand years before Abraham,
there were rigid Sabbatical observances in Bab
ylonia. Regulations as to the keeping of the
seventh day may be found on those Chaldean
tablets which give such vivid glimpses of the
land from which Abraham came. The Egyp
tian could scarcely have been surprised when
Hebrew immigrants brought down into Egypt
their traditions of the Sabbath ; for the institu
tion was already ancient in Egypt when Joseph
was sold into slavery. Somehow, the number
" seven," quite universaUy recognized as sacred,
came early to be appUed to the division of time.
Eusebius observes that " almost aU the philoso
phers and poets acknowledge one day in seven

112 The Method of The Master
to be holy." In short, as Brierly says, " If the
doings of humanity could be chronicled by the
inhabitant of some outside planet, he would
find in them probably nothing more striking
than the observance of the Sabbath."
And scarcely less interesting than its antiq
uity are the fortunes of the Sabbath. This
seventh part of the week, hke many another
precious possession of mankind, has been a bone
of bitterest contention. It has been fought
over by savagely opposing foes, not to say oc-
casionaUy carried off, Uke the ark, into the land
of the Philistines. Away back in the days of
Chaldea, there were, I suppose, Sabbatarians,
sticklers for a legalistic observance of the day.
Puritanism, as regards keeping the Sabbath, is
a thousand generations older than CromweU.
If it had happened to occur to the ancients to do
so, they might, as satirically said of certain
Blue Laws, have forbidden a man to kiss his
wife on Sunday. The Jewish Talmud gives a
fair idea of what the rehgionist is likely to do
when he has his way with the Sabbath. In
instance, one has but to recaU the collisions of
our Lord with this blighting legalism ; as, for
example, when He healed a cripple on the Sab
bath, or permitted His disciples to pluck ears
of corn to meet their hunger as they passed

The Problem of the Sabbath 113
through a field. The world has never been
without such advocates of the sanctity of the
Sabbath. And their so-caUed " keeping " of
the Sabbath is only less reprehensible than the
" breaking" of the Sabbath by Philistines. In
reahty, though doubtless with the highest mo
tives, the Sabbatarian is a desecrator of the day.
That is to say, he devitalizes it, dehumanizes it.
He commits sacrUege by emptying the Sabbath
of aU sunshine and gladness and "beauty of
holiness." What memories of rebeUion some
of us have who were chUdren during the latter
days of Puritanism. Every toy and doU, every
picture-book, except perhaps an iUustrated Bi
ble, went out of sight with the advent of the
Sabbath, or even with the gathering shadows
of Saturday evening. We were not even al
lowed to take a stroll on Sabbath afternoon.
Moreover, there was cold dinner, perhaps.
There is no need, however, for the average
member of the younger generation to feel sorry
for himself in the matter of Sabbath restriction.
The vast majority of the present generation
have grown up under a very different dispensa
tion. And we should no doubt find, away back
in Chaldea or Babylon, the root of the same
liberalizing spirit that we meet to-day. The
human heart of the year 1912 can claim Uttle

1 14 The Method of The Master
novelty for itself. Some one says that if a cit
izen of Pompeu could be resurrected long
enough to look in upon the revelries and dissi
pations of a modern city, he would yawningly
declare that they had just such vices in his day.
Hence I am sure that when the first temple
was erected to the worship of God, there must
have been some who, in truly modern fashion,
declined to join in worship ; or preferred a day
in the fields, with bow and arrow, to a season
in the sanctuary. Cain, for example, would
surely have resented any Sabbatic restrictions
upon his hberty, just as he refused to be gov
erned as to his sacrifices by divine require
ments. Bitter, indeed, is the cry of the proph
ets as we catch sound of it in Jeremiah and
Micah, that their people had forgotten the
Sabbaths of their God. And if we ineUne our
ear to the golden-mouthed Chrysostom, we
shah hear him complaining that whUe theatres
and circuses were thronged on Lord's Day,
churches were well-nigh empty.
Dr. Hillis reports an eminent man as saying
that, whUe he stUl believed in reUgion, and re
quired his chUdren to attend church, for him
self he could find wiser uses for the day than
to spend it within the cloister. He chose a day
on the golf links or by the trout stream. And

The Problem of the Sabbath 1 1 5
he considered it merely a question of time
when, by a judicious use of golf clubs and fish
ing poles, he should be able to commerciaUy
out-distance any competitor who used up his
energies on Sunday teaching a Sunday-school
class or attending pubUo worship. So he said :
and what he said was comparatively pious by
contrast to the things rabid, anti-Sabbatarians
are saying in our day.
Thus, as of old, are the lines drawn stUl.
One scarcely need remark which side of the
controversy has the advantage to-day. What
with the Romanist beginning the Lord's Day
with attendance at Mass, and closing it with
an excursion to Coney Island or a whist party ;
with good Protestants who, a score of years
ago, would have scorned the suggestion of a
"century-run" on Sunday, now quietly de
parting in an automobUe for a week-end hoU-
day ; not to mention " sacred " concerts and
vaudeviUe, crowded restaurants and parade,
dissipation and shame, that Parisian, who
claimed that a London Sunday was about as
" Uvely as the bottom of a weU," would feel
quite at home among us. Secularism, frivohty
and sensuality have taken greedy possession of
the day. Theatrical managers and others
claim that they cannot justify the investment

1 16 The Method of The Master
of their money without a seven day return
upon it. And certain corporations have
frankly declared that seven working days are
better for working men than six days of work
and a seventh of debauchery. The ordinary
law-abiding citizen is a thoroughgoing PhiHs-
tine in the matter of observing the Sabbath.
Whether he elects to he abed until noon, or
play goU, or potter about the house, or mow
the lawn, or take a hand at poker — he dechnes
to be dictated to.
What, then, can be said, in the name of
Christ, concerning a just use of the Sabbath ?
That most reasonable if inexorable moral
Teacher, most human while most divine, where
would Jesus stand on the Sabbath question ?
Not, perhaps, where the stalwart, epochal
saints of Plymouth Colony or CromweU's
England might wish. It is significant that the
phrase found oftenest upon the lips of those
who still feel need for justification of their use
of the Lord's Day is a word of Jesus on the
subject: "The Sabbath was made for man."
That is hkely what the golf enthusiast would
say if you interrupted him on his way around
the links, and he happened to feel Uke defend
ing himself: "The Sabbath was made for
man ! " Or, dig him out from amid the fallen

The Problem of the Sabbath 1 1 7
leaves of the Sunday newspaper, and, scatter
ing them to right and left, he will remind you
that " the Sabbath was made for man." Or,
break into his Sunday evening's entertainment ;
and with an indolent look and a reminder that
young people are only young once, he may
quote as his final word, " The Sabbath was
made for man." And if the man for whom
the Sabbath was made prefers to worship God
in nature, or over a tool bench, or in his yacht,
or not at all, that is his business !
"The Sabbath was made for man." Tes,
Jesus is responsible for the phrase. But it is
never fair to quote words without giving the
sense of them. Few practices are less defensi
ble than the use of a citation wrenched loose
from its settings. To make Jesus sponsor for
any part of the harlotries practiced against the
Sabbath to-day is not a whit more worthy
than to turn a thumbscrew or cut out a tongue
" in His name." When, in that never-to-be-for
gotten interview, He sUenced His critics by de
claring that " the Sabbath was made for man,"
He certainly did not intend that the Sabbath
was made for man the secularist, nor for man
the commerciaUst, nor yet for man the epicure.
It is perfectly preposterous to suggest that the
Sabbath was given to man in order to help him

1 18 The Method of The Master
make himself more of an animal. The seventh
day was differentiated from- the others, and
sanctified for man as the son of the Eternal
Father. It was " for man " as Jesus came to
recreate him, " born again not of corruptible
seed but of incorruptible," entering the king
dom " as a Uttle child." " The Sabbath . . .
for man ? " Tes, to keep him a man, to build
him into the likeness of the Son of Man, was
the Sabbath ordained.
It is only fair to remember, moreover, while
we are quoting His words, that the Sabbath
which Jesus was trying to rescue for man's
sake had fallen into the hands of the strict
constructionists of rehgion, the most juiceless
religionists on earth. Had Jesus been living in
our day, and found the Sabbath carried off
quite bodUy to the camp of desecration, He
would surely have said some drastic things on
the other side of the question. Even so, His
attitude towards the use of the Sabbath is quite
sufficiently Uluminating and corrective. And
anybody who feels the need of a more rigorous
and ascetic day than Jesus taught must ask
in a name other than our Lord's.
Let us look, briefly, then, at Jesus' attitude
towards Sabbath observance. We shall find it
in three distinct phases. I have just been quot-

The Problem of the Sabbath 1 19
ing His most famous utterance on the subject.
And it is weU not to forget how He happened
to say that " the Sabbath was made for man."
He was passing through a corn field, " and His
disciples began as they went to pluck the ears
of corn and eat them." It was the claim of
the body which the Pharisees challenged in
their comment upon the incident. It was the
righteous claim of the body which Jesus main
tained that day, as against all rabbinical tradi
tions and codes. And it is the claim of the
body which we must never lose sight of in our
treatment of Sunday. Barbers say that a razor
which " rests " one day in seven is a better
razor for the other six days of the week.
What, then, about the man who wields the
razor ? Are the ultimate atoms of the human
body better calculated than the electrons of
steel to stand seven days' continuous toU ?
Some years ago one of the wisest physicians
startled me by laying down a most stringent
rule for keeping the Sabbath. Knowing his
agnostic reputation, I asked why he stressed
the Sabbath so urgently. " Because," he said,
"the Sabbath law is written in the human
body . " Chalmers' observation was quite within
the zone of scientific findings : " I never knew
a man who worked seven days in the week

120 The Method of The Master
without becoming a wreck in health." Latest
biological experimentation demonstrates that
the human body cannot advantageously be
forced to work seven days in the week. Dr.
Haegler of Basle, a foremost authority, puts
the matter thus. He says that a workman
uses, for example, thirty-one ounces of oxygen
per day. He takes into his system only thirty
ounces. At the end of a day he sleeps, and
during sleep breathes in more oxygen than he
gives out. He recovers, however, only five-
sixths of the lost ounce. And next Sabbath
morning he is just six-sixths of an ounce in
arrears. Dr. Hodge, of Clark University,
draws the same lesson from observation of the
functions of nerve cells. France, which once
did away with the seventh-day rest in favour
of a rest-day once in ten, has latterly been con
ducting some painstaking experiments, and
now pleads for a Sabbath in behalf of the
bodies of men. Organized Labour, also, not
too sympathetic with churches in our day, yet
insists that each man must have one day each
week for rest.
But it is not the body, merely, or even pri
marily, which needs the Sabbath. " We have
bodies, but we are souls." And if it takes six-
sevenths of the week to provide and prepare

The Problem of the Sabbath 121
bread to meet our bodily hunger, we must be
sure to use the seventh part of the week to re
mind ourselves how many hungers there are
which cannot be met by bread only. Black-
stone observed that a "corruption of morals
usuaUy foUows a profanation of the Sabbath."
One would Uke to remember aU the beautiful
social uses to which Jesus put the Sabbath.
The episode of the corn field, to which allusion
has been made, occurred whUe Jesus was walk
ing with His disciples in the intimacy of friend
ship. His healing of the impotent man at the
pool was a Sabbath ministry. From the kiU-
ing Uteralism whieh forbade the restored cripple
to carry the bed from which he had been raised
by a miracle, Jesus sought to rescue the Sab
bath. He tried to make it man's day, for out
going as weU as deepening of Ufe. Dr. HUlis
thinks that Sunday ought to be used as a
"Library Day," "for the culture of reason,
conscience and duty." Anything which helps
to preserve the Sabbath in the interest of con
science and duty would have the applause
of Jesus. What a chance, for example, the
seventh day offers to make good certain arrears
of brotherhood, to " visit the widows and or
phans in their affliction," as weU as to keep one
self "unspotted from the world." Macaulay

122 The Method of The Master
was not pleading the cause of reUgionists ; he
was stating the case of brotherhood when he
insisted that " we are not impoverished . . .
but enriched by this seventh day."
And this brings me to a closing suggestion.
We cannot afford to leave this theme without
showing it in one other aspect. One of our
earliest glimpses of Jesus shows Him in the
temple on the Sabbath. Grown to manhood,
we find Him in the synagogue, " as His custom
was." Needless to say, He saw the shaUow-
ness and shams of Churchianity. What other
ever rebuked the Pharisaism of rehgion more
scathingly than He ? And yet to the end of
His ministry, so far as we know, He practiced
the presence of God in the sanctuary. It was
the souls of men, primarily, He came to touch.
And He never seems to have intimated that
the souls of men could get on without a Sab
bath and a temple.
Why not be honest about the matter ? Most
of this fluent talk about communing with God
in nature is arrant nonsense ; and nobody knows
it to be such better than those who use it so
ghbly. Granted all the defects and abnormali
ties and anachronisms of the Church, stiU the
Church remains the best school of ethics and
spiritual life in the world. It suggests moods

The Problem of the Sabbath 1 23
and ministries we are not so apt to meet else
where. It particularly reminds us that our
most intimate relationship of aU is with the
Father of Spirits. "Reason and experience,"
said Washington, with prophetic solemnity,
" both forbid us to expect that rational morahty
can prevaU in exclusion of reUgious principles.
In vain would that man claim the tribute of
patriotism who should labour to subvert these
great pillars of human happiness." It is quite
as true to-day as in the days of Washington
that, for the culture of those prime soul-
qualities for which the Sabbath stands, no sub
stitute for the Church has been devised.

VIII
THE PROBLEM OF SICKNESS
r\ OBERT G. INGERSOLL put into epi-
§"% grammatic form a wide-spread cyni-
•JL ^- cism, when he assured folks that " if he
had made the world, he would have made
health catching instead of colds." No doubt
he " caught " his audience by such specious ap
peal. Hurt souls make alarmingly free with
suggestions to the Creator. Men who could
not run a country-store or a smaU branch-raU-
road are positive that they could run the uni
verse better than God does. "Health catch
ing?" As things are, health is better than
" catching." IngersoU himself would not have
liked to Uve in a world in which health was
left to the hazard of being " caught." Suppose
he had not been properly " exposed " ? Good
health has a far safer basis than that. It is
the normal condition for the vast majority of
folks, for the huge majority of their days.
Sickness is not the rule of Ufe ; it is the excep
tion. Nevertheless, this terrible exception remains.
Though it be the exception and not the rule, it
124

The Problem of Sickness 125
is still common enough to give violent pause to
any easy plulosophy of life and experience.
The man or woman who does not need to con
fess to having spent at least one sick day in
bed during a score of years is all but a curios
ity. No adequate census of sickness was ever
attempted. Among the features of the Anti-
Tuberculosis Exhibit held in the New Tork
Museum of Natural History, two years ago,
was an electric hght which flashed at regular
intervals, each recurring flash recording a death
from the " White Plague." One found himself
counting creepUy until a new flash recorded
another death. No single other feature of the
notable exhibit left so vivid an impression. It
gave one a sense of impotence in the presence
of the pale Destroyer. Be it remembered,
however, that that ingenuously suggestive, not
to say harrowing device, registered fatalities
only. It furnished no hint, except by general
impUcation, of the number of homes invaded
by the sUent terror. StUl less did it attempt a
census of sick people throughout the world.
Had it been recording aU cases of illness, it
would have needed to flash faster, I suppose,
than the eye could perceive. From one point
of view, earth is a huge hospital, out of whose
wards the moans of the tortured, and the not

126 The Method of The Master
less heart-breaking sighs of the dying, ascend
to the Great Physician.
And when, at length, medical science has
succeeded in finding an infusion for the cure of
"White Plague," and phiaUed an exorcist of
the scourge of cancer — as it has already taken
the terror from diphtheria and smaUpox — what
then ? Then, as an eminent physician admitted
recently, there will be new broods of bacteria to
study and fight. Certain diseases which phy
sicians are battling with now are as " new " as
hquid air or the storage battery. Just as evU
changes its form and alters its mask, yet it
self abides, so with the genius of destruction
which haunts and cripples our bodies.
But I need not enlarge upon the obviousness
of the situation. We are interested just now
in Jesus' way of dealing with sickness. Here,
as in a previous chapter, it may be profitable
to remind ourselves that Jesus concerned Him
self primarily with cases of sickness and only
incidentally with the problem of sickness. I
do not mean that the problem, therefore, was
absent from His thought. Facts constitute the
problem as the facts of poverty make the prob
lem of poverty. One would Uke to know how
Martha's anguished cry to Christ, " he whom
Thou lovest is sick," presented the problem of

The Problem of Sickness 127
sickness as weU as a case of sickness. But Jesus'
attitude towards suffering was least of all
speculative. He spent His time and strength
treating individuals. It was a blind man or a
leper or a cripple who engaged the healing
ministry of Christ. When, on one occasion, the
disciples attempted to trap Him into a discus
sion of the significance of a case of congenital
blindness, He cut the argument short with His
reply : " I must work the works of Him that
sent Me."
We may, then, study the Great Physician in
practice, meeting in the bodies of His friends,
and even among passers-by, that ever near and
always threatening foe of our health and hap
piness- — disease. And the first thing to notice
in Jesus' treatment of sickness is that He con
stantly recognized sickness to be real. Nor is
this so commonplace an assertion as it might
have sounded a generation ago. We have in
this day a variety of cults assuring us that
toothache, malaria and rheumatism are not
reaL Rehgion, as pohtics, makes strange bed-'
feUows. Thus we have orthodox Christian
Scientists, who profess no dealings with the
Samaritans of New Thought, yet in doctrine
agreeing as to the unreahty of disease.
It is true, of course, that these occultists

128 The Method of The Master
have grown more cautious in their use of moot
terms. As one of them said recently : " We
do not mean to affirm, we never did affirm,
that a broken leg is not really broken."
(Which, however, is precisely what they did
affirm until the facts threw their case out of
court.) I confess that this distinction is quite
too fine for me. How so entirely unreal a
member as a human arm, for example, can in
any real sense be broken, is beyond the range
of my imagination. Accepting gratefully aU
the incidental good which these modern sys
tems of thought have accomplished; blessing
them for the sour tempers they have sweetened,
and the pseudo-cripples they have sent back to
life's tasks ; granting eagerly, as eagerly as they,
the marveUous power of mind over body, I sub
mit that they are fundamentaUy and sometimes
crueUy wrong in their thesis.
And wherever else they got the idea that
sickness is not real, they never got it from the
teaching and practice of Jesus. He treated sick
ness as if it were most terribly real. Only by an
inane and perverse interpretation of His teach
ings can He be made to teach anything else.
Fancy Him telling a blind man that lack of
sight was merely a faUacy, an " error of mor
tal mind " ! Or a leper that his terrible affile-

The Problem of Sickness 129
tion was in fact no more contagious than tooth
ache. Or a bedridden paralytic that the chains
which bound him were as unreal as dreams.
One cannot even fancy Christ talking thus to
sick people. It is contrary to everything we
know about Him. His bearing is not that of
an alienist dealing with mental perverts, but of
a Brother, infinitely tender to His brethren.
Take the case of the man with a withered
hand. " Stretch forth thine hand," challenged
that Voice whose command has not lost its
sweetness through the echoing corridors of
nineteen centuries. Humanly speaking, the
crippled man could not "stretch forth" his
hand. The uselessness of his withered hand
was just as real as the serviceability of the
other. To assure him that he might have been
cured any day by an act of faith was only less
cruel than to teU him he did not need curing at
aU. Shrunken sinews, microbes, weak lungs,
anaemic bodies are just as real as stars and grav
itation. Thus Jesus treated them. And hun
dreds of hospitals in our own city, with similar
institutions girdling the earth with their heal
ing ministry, making " the lame man leap as an
hart and the tongue of the dumb sing," beauti-
f uUy perpetuate the spirit of the Great Physician.
Some day, perhaps, Christian Science wiU buUd

130 The Method of The Master
and endow just one asylum for the housing of
those poor deluded cripples who "imagine"
that they are sick. MeanwhUe the honours, as
weU as common sense, belong to our gracious
Houses of Mercy, by whatever name or sign
known. In the second place, Jesus treated sickness as
inevitable. Not all of it, of course, but the fact
of it. He never once, so far as we know, en
couraged His most intimate friends to fancy
that they could escape the ills of the body, any
more than He deluded them with the hope of
escaping temptation. On the contrary, He
said, with utmost plainness of speech, "WhUe
ye are in the world, ye shaU have tribulation."
It is conceivable, of course, that every human
being might live out a fuU "threescore and
ten," and then suddenly cease to be. Perhaps
this is how we would have arranged the mat
ter ; raising the age hmit, httle by little, to a
fuU hundred years ; or with Metchnikoff to a
hundred and thirty, by a judicious use of sour
milk and the like. But the fact is that, even
under such conditions, and granting, as some
one suggests, that it wUl some day be counted a
disgrace as weU as a misfortune to die young,
sickness will remain. It is just as normal as
the way we came into the world. Unless we

The Problem of Sickness 131
have the fortune to be bit by a train, or put out
of business by a conflagration of worlds, we
shaU go out of life by the sorry path of sickness.
In an aspect which we can never afford to ig
nore, siokness is quite as normal as being born
or eating a meal. And there is nothing in the
heaUng ministry of Jesus to contradict this ;
nor in His teaching either. To be sure, He did
put sight back into sightless eyes; banished
fever from burning brows ; restored an epUep-
tic to his anguished father. Nay, He fiUed
His short ministry so fuU of such " wonders "
that John says of them that he supposed if all
that Jesus did were written in a book, the
world itself could not contain the books that
should be written. We know, however, where
Jesus' sympathies would be to-day. Every pa
tient inquiry into the cause and cure of disease
would appeal to Him. Every scientific effort
to mitigate the ills of the body, to banish plague
from earth ; every sane protest against the un
necessary ravages of disease, would find en
couragement from the heart of Christ. That
famous group of scientific men to whom Metch
nikoff, in the introduction to his " Nature of
Man," pays so glowing a tribute, Jesus would
have called His '.' brethren," though not one of
them acknowledged brotherhood with Him.

132 The Method of The Master
Even so, as Friend and Elder Brother of every
sick person, He would never delude the sick
with false hopes. Sickness wUl always be — at
least until this world puts on immortaUty. It
is no more abnormal than the brUUant hues of
October fohage. Having come into the world
at aU, we must presumably go out of it from a
sick-bed. As to Jesus' employment of means in the
treatment of disease, a word may suffice. It is
fortunate that He furnished no list of specifics,
no materia medica. Tet He was prompt to
make use of means with His patients. In the
case of the blind man He made clay and
anointed the unseeing eyes. To the same unfor
tunate, later, He said, as any modern physician
might recommend the heahng Spa of Germany,
" Go, wash in the Pool of Siloam." To the
paralytic He said, as part of the cure, " Take
up thy bed and walk." If the way of Christian
Science or Faith Curists, the way of word-jug
gling or prayers, were rationally adequate, it is
a pity that Christ did not lend better sanction
to it. No, plasters and medicaments, sanita
tion and surgery, with the blessing of the Great
Physician, are stiU the way of good sense.
But again — for we have not thus far glimpsed
the heart of our Lord towards sickness — if the

The Problem of Sickness 133
most He could say to sick people was that their
racking maladies were both real and inevitable,
that were a bleak sort of evangel to preach.
What He did teach was infinitely warmer than
that. He rescued mankind from the foul as
sumption that sickness invariably argues sin.
To-day that rescue, and that alone, would es
tabhsh Him as a prophet immortal. Poor Job !
He had not only to bear real boils, in addition
to the loss of his famUy and fortune. He had
not only to admit that boUs were inevitable in
the lot of man. He had further to put up with
his comforters whUe they tried to rub in the
conviction that his boils were accounted for by
his sins. The more boils, the more sins! Thus,
in the oldest book of the Bible, we find a dogma
that, gathering support from the Decalogue
which describes God as " visiting the sins of the
fathers upon the chUdren, unto the third and
fourth generations," remains husky and preva
lent still. As HUlis puts it, "Man's sins are
seeds, his sufferings harvest." And modern
science lends staggering support to this dogma.
What a story of sin the physician is often able
to read in a diseased body. What a commen
tary he could write on the text : " Be sure your
sin wiU find you out."
This conviction — that every case of suffering

134 The Method of The Master
had a " history " of sin — prompted the famous
question of the disciples in the presence of the
bUnd man : " Master, who did sin, this man or
his parents, that he was born bUnd ? " Their
logic worked like a modern trip-hammer ; pre
cisely, hopelessly. No sin, no bhndness. And
the world can never afford to forget Jesus' re
ply : " Neither hath this man sinned nor his
parents." I do not understand Jesus to deny
the frequent connection between sin and suffer
ing. Indeed, He would have been prompt to
affirm such relation. He merely refused to
argue back from suffering to antecedent sin.
He denied our right to grade sinners by the
measure of their sufferings. And then, to com
plete His lesson, He gave Himself to most ex
cruciating torments in His own precious body,
that He might naU that old, brutal he. Let,
therefore, no white soul ever go to ransacking
its past for adequate key to its torment. Sick
ness is no more infallible testimony to personal
or inherited sin than the blackness of a cat
proves its birth on a dark morning.
But what, precisely, was it that Jesus said in
the instance before us? "Neither hath this
man sinned nor his parents, but that the works
of God should be made manifest in him." The
pathetic figure of a beggar, with hand out-

The Problem of Sickness 135
stretched for alms, was not a horrible example
so truly as a divine opportunity. Let no pass
er-by, then or to-day, draw aside the skirts
of his respectabUity from afflicted humanity.
Pharisaism is worse than drunkenness and
burglary. And even the physical victim of his
own sins has a better chance of the kingdom of
heaven than has some self-righteous man who
argues his own piety from the state of his health.
But a fourth characteristic of Jesus' treat
ment of sickness must also be noticed ; His
alert and beautiful sympathy. How richly fuU
of that rare quahty was Jesus' ministry among
the sick ! I have tried to imagine how the
leper must have felt when the hand of Christ
rested upon him. Hungry, he, for the touch of
a human hand. Never, perhaps, since a priest
years ago declared him leprous, and sent him
forth, an outcast among his feUows, with a
cloth over his mouth, crying, "Unclean, un
clean ! " had this leper been touched by a fellow
being. And now, after the desolate, interven
ing years, a Brother-Man had touched him!
The touch was almost a miracle in itseU. And
apart from the cure which foUowed it, this un
fortunate would have carried to his grave the
memory of Christ's sympathetic touch.
Standing between two cots in a hospital

136 The Method of The Master
ward, I was prompted to turn from the child I
was visiting towards a fevered face adjacent.
With a passing word of sympathy, I laid my
hand haU diffidently on the tossing head of the
stranger. And I shaU never forget the look
and tone which greeted my touch : " Oh, I was
so hoping you would do that ! " Tes, sym
pathy is oftentimes more than medicine. The
anonymous author of " Conf essio Medici " says
that no man can ever be a great surgeon until
he has passed through a personal surgical ex
perience to teach him sympathy. Sympathy is
more than flowers and sweetmeats and books.
In one aspect, the cheapest thing we can give ;
in another aspect, it is the most expensive. At
least, I discover that people can pay for flowers
and fruit and tramed attention more easUy than
they can give personal care. Whereas the fact
is that these lesser gifts, in the average instance,
gain their maximum value as expressions of
sympathy. One further word needs to be said. Those
who have read thus far will be waiting men
tion of the cures which Christ wrought. Pur
posely, then, I have put the emphasis elsewhere.
In the first place, because it does not appear
that the cures Jesus wrought were intended as
samples of cures to be wrought by us. Here I

The Problem of Sickness 137
take square issue with the propaganda of Chris
tian Science and Faith Cure. No explanation
of Jesus' healing in terms of mental psychology
or therapeutics is known to me. Marie Corelli,
in " A Romance of Two Worlds," expressed as
good an opinion as any. As for me, I accept the
cures of Jesus as being as unique as His Person.
In the second place, it appears that the cures
which He wrought were comparatively unim
portant. I say " comparatively " for, gauging
the success of His Ufe by His victories over
disease, His Ufe was a huge faUure. He left
Galilee and Judea full of infirm and sick folk.
Every one of His patients finaUy died violently
or of disease. As He said of Himself, He came
to minister to the souls of men, and only inci
dentally to their bodies. His mission was not
to show us how to live a hundred years in
health, but how to Uve to God forever. As in
the case of the paralytic, Jesus healed the man's
body as a hint of what He could do for the
soul. " That ye may know that the Son of
Man hath power on earth to forgive sins.
. . . Rise up and walk ! "
" The healing of His seamless dress
Is by our beds of pain."
But His cure was and is, primarily, a cure of souls.

IX
THE PEOBLEM OF CONFLICTING DUTIES
"T ALLUS know my duty," confessed
I Samantha AUen, " because I hate it so."
-*- Doubtless the majority of folks would
agree with Samantha in her rather caustic
characterization. Duty is the bete noir of a
hundred innocent pleasures ; the ghost at our
merriest feasts ; the consistent, if somewhat
inconsequent interrupter of many a weU-laid
plan. In short, we often recognize a duty by
the cordial way we hate it. A certain church
man who had faUen from the grace of church
attendance explained to the pastor his absten^
tion. " I know the things I ought to do, with
out need of going to church to be reminded
of them. Why should I put myself in the
position of being made still more uncomfortable
about things which I have no intention of do
ing ? " He had evidently passed the stage of
experience of which Miss Hooper sang :
" I slept and dreamed that life was beauty."
For he, also, had
" . . . Waked and found that life was duty."
138

The Problem of Conflicting Duties 139
And, quite possibly, he would have gone on to
agree with Nietzsche, whom some one calls " a
physician for sick souls," to declare that the
only way to insure a pleasant voyage through
life is to be early rid of the stars and compass
of duty. At any rate, we easUy understand
how the aforesaid particular churchman felt,
though we, perhaps, have not quite the courage
to say what he said. We know our duty by
our frank, instinctive aversion to it.
But to leave the matter thus would be
criminal Ubel against humanity. For if there
is in us a soft strain in the presence of duty,
there is also an heroic strain — a survival of
Puritanism, if you please, or something further
back — which holds us to the obligation we
dishke. We do our duty because it is our duty.
With a very wry face, as chUdren take bitter
medicine, we swaUow our prescribed dose of
duty, with " the everlasting yea " of conscience,
and assure ourselves that we doubtless feel
better for the dose. There is even a sort of
grim satisfaction in the ordeal. We are not
altogether compounded of putty and cotton, and
the sheer bracing of oneself to self-denial is
a sort of tonic for the soul. In its way it is
" magnificent," even if, as one said of Balaklava,
it is " not war." We stiU hear Carlyle crying :

140 The Method of The Master
" I wiU Uve a white life : I wiU Uve a white Ufe,
if I go to heU for it ! " Even unhappiness in so
good a cause has a sort of subdued happiness
about it. A dutiless world is an unthinkable
world; an impossible, uninhabitable world.
Hence we continue to praise duty, and to
practice it, at least spasmodically, with such
enthusiasm as may be possible under the
circumstances. " When the fight begins within himself
A man's worth something.
God stoops o'er his head,
Satan looks up between his feet — both tug.
He's left himself in the middle."
Tes, "in the middle" — between duty and
desire. And, God be thanked, there is stiU
enough iron left in a multitude of us to
"Prolong that struggle through . . . life."
But it wiU be noticed that I have not yet
arrived at my theme, " Conflicting Duties."
If obUgation were always set clearly over
against incUnation, we should at least have the
satisfaction of knowing what we ought to do,
even in the absence of wUl or wish to do it.
But when duty chaUenges duty, when one thing
we ought to do is nicely balanced against some
thing else we ought also to do — and we cannot

The Problem of Conflicting Duties 141
do both — there's the rub. To choose between
duties takes fibre and flint. Concerning a
famous battle, the historian says that in the
final melee friend and foe were so terribly
mixed that brother slew brother, and friend
struck down friend. No smaU part of the
pathos of " Stonewall " Jackson's untimely
death lay in the fact that he was kiUed by a
shot from his own lines. To be put out of Ufe
were piteous enough at best, but to be slain
by one's own legions is double tragedy. Simi
larly we often feel in the hot scrimmages of life.
We find ourselves wounded in the house of our
friends. We come out of battle defeated, not
by life's wanton enemies, its lusts, its greed, its
meanness, but by some unrecognized duty.
Setting forth to slay our foes, we sometimes
find, too late, that we have struck down the
friends of our souls. Duty at war with duty —
good pulling against good — this is the battle
which turns hair gray, which makes brains reel
and hearts faint. The experience is so familiar
that I hardly need to suggest iUustrations of it,
except from our own Uves.
Take that colossal figure which stands forth
larger and more luminous every year against
the cloud of civU war. Some one said recently
that the sadness of Lincoln's face registers

142 The Method of The Master
the sorrow of his unwillingness to foUow the
highest hght of Ufe. This might be so.
Rather, I beheve, the sadness of that saddest of
faces records the strain of conflicting duties.
Does anybody really beUeve that a man so
tender that he more than once pardoned a
youthful army deserter because of unwilling
ness to let the lad die ; who, on one occasion,
sat through the night holding the hand of a
stripling dying in a hospital, could be compla
cent whUe North and South were tearing each
other's throats ? None more eagerly than he
would have obeyed the voices which were
calling for peace. That is a true word, if not
an historic one, which ChurchUl puts into the
mouth of Lincoln : " Say not that I have suf
fered for the South : say, rather, that I have
suffered with the South." Every day of the
cruel conflict tore Lincoln's own heart wider
open. So with Grover Cleveland during his
second term, disappointing the friends who
elected him, whUe he surprised the enemies
who had traduced him. So with McKinley,
holding off the dogs of war when, with all
but ample justification, they bayed for a fight.
So with President Taf t, inflicting many a pain
upon business interests, whUe trying to keep
his party vows.

The Problem of Conflicting Duties 143
Or, to put the truth in another setting, recall
what David Livingstone said as he turned his
face towards Africa for the last time : " Gen
tlemen, to leave my motherless chUdren be
hind is hke tearmg out my vitals ; but, gentle
men, I must go ! " Heaven save us ordinary
mortals from a tearing process Uke that ! It
was not only love that he was leaving behind :
it was duty to his motherless chUdren. And
there wUl be some to say that he disregarded
the greater duty for the less. Concerning
which it is not my business to debate the point
at the present moment : I am merely record
ing the conflict of his soul.
Or, to reverently take Ulustration from an
other field. See that Man in the Garden. It
is aU but impious to ask the meaning of His
bloody sweat. There was, of course, a healthy
man's shrinking from death. There was the
grief of being misjudged and condemned.
There was the burden of the unrepented sins of
the world. But there was something more — I
do not say greater, but different. He was
leaving His friends to almost certain death.
For Him to be true to His highest vows in
volved a sort of disloyalty to the pleas of His
friends. Remember what He said concerning
the issue : " The time cometh that whosoever

144 The Method of The Master
killeth you will think that he doeth God
service." So long as He lived, He could pro
tect His disciples ; as He did in the Garden,
when, delivering Himself to the authorities,
He asked leniency for His friends. Fancy
what it meant to such a Friend to leave His
friends undefended.
And here are we robbing Peter to pay Paul,
or Paul to pay Peter ; and not enjoying the
business, either. God alone knows the jolts
and misgivings of the process. Our news
papers printed recently the pathetic story of a
clerk who had been systematicaUy robbing bis
employer in order to provide food and medicine
for an invalid sister. To suppose that he for
got his obligation to honesty is to miss the
tragedy of the incident. He simply could not
bear to see his sister dying for lack of suppUes
which his thieving could provide. It was the
conflict of duties which made his soul seem old
at twenty. Sometimes it is the case of a mer
chant torn between the claims of business and
of home. If he gives what his heart prompts
to his home, he wUl be worsted in the fierce
competition of the street, and thus be denied
the privilege of doing generously for his own
chUdren. Sometimes it is the wife's claim as
against the claim of the woman who gave her

The Problem of Conflicting Duties 145
husband birth. Heaven pity the man who
finds himself owing to both mother and wife,
and unable to pay both adequately! Some
times it is the case of the soul as against the
world. Not every man, who comes up to Sun
day too exhausted for the enjoyment of wor
ship, is pleased with his absence from church.
Not every woman who sees her ideals crushed
beneath the heel of domestic duties is compla
cent over her loss.
Now, it was into this arena that Jesus came
with the Ught of His wondrous countenance,
and the healing of His example. We find Him
dealing with the staggering problem of con
flicting duties in ways and with eternal princi
ples which we cannot afford to forget. I do
not mean that He furnished automatic rules for
dealing with such problems. He did better
than that. He left on record some deathless
instances. RecaU the first temple scene, which Holman
Hunt has so wonderfully portrayed in his
" Christ Among the Doctors." The presence
of the boy Jesus at such a place, at such a
time, involved apparent neglect of a primary
duty, that of the chUd to his parent. Tou can
hear His mother's cry, stiU poignant with an
anguish which every mother understands :

146 The Method of The Master
"Son, why hast thou dealt thus with us?
Behold Thy father and I have sought Thee sor
rowing." And His reply ! It is so big, so
fraught with vast involvements that we do not
wonder " His mother understood not His say
ing," when He said, " Wist ye not that I
must be about My Father's business?" Or,
put beside this incident that moment when it
was announced to Him that His mother and
brothers stood outside waiting to speak with
Him. "And He stretched forth His hand
towards His disciples, and said, Behold My
mother and My brethren."
Was He, then, indifferent to one of the
greatest obligations of life? the duty which
a man owes to his mother ? Tou would not
want to say so. Remembering the sanctities
which He threw about womanhood and mother
hood ; remembering that almost His last breath
spent itself in a piece of exquisite consideration
for His mother, you would not dare to say so.
No, He was teaching that there are some
exigencies in life in which a man may need to
seem untrue even to his mother whUe he is
being true to himself. God must come first.
If we ever find ourselves between the horns of
a dUemma, there is little question as to the
horn on which we must impale ourselves :

The Problem of Conflicting Duties 147
" . . . To thine own self be true
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
We must be true to self before we can be
thoroughly true to any one else. The " Cir
cuit Rider's Wife," in a recent delightful
volume by that title, does some very pretty
complaining because her husband, WUUam,
seemed to have been married to his caUing
rather than to her. I suppose that nearly
every woman who has given her hand to a
doctor or a minister can understand this com
plaint. And it may be that, as Paul suggested,
a man with such a profession ought not to ex
pect to " lead about a wife." At any rate, as
this very human woman discovered, everybody,
from the man in the pulpit to herself in her
faded black dress, must be true to the inner
Ught. Whoso is not obedient to the highest
calling of aU cannot be trusted long to be true
to any lower caUing. God must come first, as
Jesus incessantly affirmed. Not the God of
the creeds; certainly not the God of mint,
anise and cummin ; but the God of our in
most selves. When the case comes to conflict
between the highest duty and the next highest,
our business is to name the highest and then be
true to that.

148 The Method of The Master
" I conferred not with flesh and blood,"
cried St. Paul, after his startUng caU to the
apostolate. Shall we not admit he did not
dare to ? Even so stalwart a soul as his could
not trust itself to " confer with flesh and blood."
He had to be true to his heavenly caUing.
" Ich kan® nichtSf, anders," cried the intrepid
TeutonT'Of couraenecould not. There were,
assuredly, other duties than the one involved
that day. He might be wrong in his decision.
But whatever came, he must stand where God
had placed him. To do aught else is to put out
the Ught in one's own soul.
But there are other phases of this conflict
of duties. And Jesus met another of them in
a famous passage which has often left us dis
turbed and questioning. " Lord, I wiU foUow
Thee ; but first, let me go bid f areweU to them
which are at home, at my house." It seemed
a very reasonable request for a prospective dis
ciple to make. Any modern man who should
espouse a cause, and start off to serve it with
out taking time to say " Good-bye " to his
friends, would be thought . inconsiderate, to say
the least. And most of us have never liked
the sound of our Lord's reply. For He said :
" No man having set his hand to the plough,
and looking back, is fit for the kingdom."

The Problem of Conflicting Duties 149
But what if the harshness of the answer be
in our own ears and not in our Lord's utter
ance? May it not be true that the greatest
consideration which Jesus could show to this
man's parents and friends would be by sending
the man to them, a httle later, with a larger
message as weU as a larger Ufe ? I know a
mother who loves her boy so dearly that she
cannot leave him at boarding-school. She
brings him home frequently that she may teU
him how much she loves him. But if she loved
him still better, she would leave him at school
to work out his problem, that some day he
might return to her with an ampler manhood.
"Stick to your post, lad," wrote the Pros
pector's mother to him. Not for the joy of
sight of him at her death-bed could she con
sent to caU him from his task in the West.
One of our commonest temptations is to go
to work, or to our friends, or to our responsibU-
ities unprepared. What the world needs from
us, first of all, is not ardour, great as that is ;
not even conviction, tremendous as that also
is ; but adequate preparedness. Japan waited
a period of long, patient years before she
ventured to strike her terrific blow at Russia.
As between the duty of an early display of
courage, and the duty of deUvering one's great-

150 The Method of The Master
est strength later, who shaU doubt where the
emphasis hes ? The Master constantly empha
sized this truth. His own hfe was full of it.
And to those eager, flashing spirits who were
burning to tell their wonderful news about
Him, He said : " Tarry ye at Jerusalem, untU
the Holy Ghost be come upon you ! "
I may cite one further Scripture instance of
conflicting duties. We find it in an episode
which has hurt the feelings of aU the Marthas
from that day to this. If that first Martha
had Uked housekeeping as much as we have
sometimes fancied she did, she would scarcely
have challenged Mary : " Lord, carest Thou
not that my sister hath left me to serve alone ?
Bid her that she come and help me." Martha
was not criticizing Mary for enjoying a place
at Jesus' feet. Martha wanted a similar place
for herseU. It was conflict of duties which
made Martha fretful that day. With such a
Guest in her home, the dinner must be of the
best. Tet with such a Guest in the home there
was so much besides dinner to think of. Hence
Martha's reproach of her sister. Everybody
knows what Jesus said in reply. Then, let
everybody remember that, as between these
two sisters, the Scripture names first our Lord's
love for Martha : " And Jesus loved Martha

The Problem of Conflicting Duties 151
and her sister Mary." And, finally, let nobody
ever again forget that the warning which Jesus
sounded to Martha, because He loved Martha,
is everlastingly vahd. There are human needs
more imperious than hunger, crying as that need
is. There are seasons in which Bibles are more
important than beefsteaks, and prayers than
phUanthropy. We have had a great vogue of
soap and soup-kitchen. We have been preach
ing, thank God, the useful gospel of coats and
shoes and clean tenements. And, incidentally,
we have been taking good care of " Number
One." But now, when next we find ourselves
in this conflict of duties, it may be weU to
remember the gospel of a place at our Lord's
feet.

THE PROBLEM OF SOEEOW
ONE morning recently there limped into
port, as reporters say, a member of
the great fleet of transatlantic vessels,
with a tragic record behind her. She had
been boarded in mid-ocean by a tidal wave.
From the bridge, the officers on watch had seen
it coming, a mUe or two away. With prompti
tude characteristic of mariners, they had pre
pared their vessel for the onset. A moment
later the ship fairly shuddered beneath an
avalanche of water. If the ship had not been
staunch, or the night had been so dark that
the wave had come upon her unawares, another
horror might have been added to the unchron-
icled annals of the sea. "It was the worst
experience in my thirty-seven years of sea
faring," said the captain upon reaching port.
Such characterization was enough for the re
porters, and for readers of the daUy prints.
But as I read the narrative, my thoughts
travelled back over the captain's long life of
danger. For nearly twoscore years he had
*52

The Problem of Sorrow 1 53
been steering his ship through the treacherous
waters of the "unplumbed, salt, estranging
sea." The particular wave which boarded his
vessel during this latest voyage was only a
chmax in a Ufe of battle with engulfing seas.
And my real wonder was not that he had come
through this latest experience safely, but that
he had hved through so many dangers to meet
this newest one.
Life, for aU of us who make a long journey,
is Uke the life of that sea captain. Sometimes
it happens that a tidal wave of sorrows rolls up
against our craft. Again, aU the fury of com
peting seas seems to gather to sweep our decks.
And we limp into port, if at all, battered and
with salt-crusted sides. Such are the experiences
which win for us the notice of an otherwise
uninterested world. "I never knew that the
world was so kind," confesses many a sufferer
in the climax of his anguish. And it may well
be worth the horrors of Messina or Galveston
to find the warm heart of the world.
The real seriousness of life, however, is not
to be found in those exceptional experiences
whose fury brings us into the pubUc eye. The
real seriousness of hfe is, rather, in the thirty-
seven or fifty-seven years we spend battling
with head-seas or foUowing- waves. Just to saU

154 The Method of The Master
on day after day, year after year; to drive
through summer fogs and winter gales ; to
hold on through mists of tears and hurricanes
of anguish ; to plunge and roU as if the best
purpose of our lives were served by maximum
disturbances of equihbrium — this is the real
event of life. This is what Ufe is to the major
ity of us, and for most of the voyage. And
the world often seems to forget that these
things are so, untU some special acquaintance
with sorrow is singled out as the worst in a
long Ufe of sorrow.
But, dropping this sea-imagery, which lends
itself with such singular appositeness to the fret
and havoc of sorrow ; as in the Psalmist's cry,
" AU Thy waves and Thy bUlows have gone
over me," or in such modern hymns as that
which sings :
" But should the surges rise
And rest delay to come,"
let me, emphasize for a moment, as characteris
tic of the present age, a wide-spread recognition
of the fact of sorrow. "Never, I beheve,"
says Paul Desjardins, "were men more uni-
versaUy sad than in the present time." It is
not merely that modern sorrow has a new qual
ity in it, though I think such assertion may

The Problem of Sorrow 155
safely be made. It is that our widening obser
vation of life, with our more sympathetic inter
est in its movements, has laid the world's sor
row upon our hearts as never before upon the
hearts of men. We have come to feel how
much sorrow there is in the world. " Tour
boy, Tom, long out of his school days, now has
faUen very lonely, very lame and broken in
this pUgrimage of his life," wrote Thomas
Carlyle to his dead mother, as he faced the
facts of his century. Huxley affirms that there
is no sadder story than the story of sentient
life upon our planet. Thompson, in his " City
of Dreadful Night," makes his readers' hearts
burn with his account of the miseries and trav
ails of men. Even Tennyson can scarcely
keep minor chords out of his minstrelsy.
Modern fiction, Uke the modern drama, when
it is not fuU of "sound and fury signifying
nothing," is streaked with grief. One has but
to make a partial Ust of those who write books
because they have something to say — Zola and
Ibsen, Thomas Hardy and Paul Bourget, Tol
stoy and Mrs. Ward — to be reminded of the pre
vailing sadness of modern Uterature.
And stiU more significant is the fact that
these conspicuous figures of Uterature — of let
ters, of science, of phUosophy — with the tower-

156 The Method of The Master
ing apostles of pessimism, Schopenhauer and
Hartmann, are prophets for so many of us. We
dumbly feel the truth of the mournful things
they say. The sorrow of life is an outstanding
presence we cannot seem to get away from. It
is a sort of atmosphere of the age. like the
uncanny chUl of certain malarious districts,
it gets into one's bones. Whichever way we
turn is somebody's sorrow ; if not ours, then
our neighbour's ; if not our neighbour's, then
the sorrows of the chUd-widows of the East, or
the half -fed children of the slums. Job, crying,
"Man that is born of a woman is of a few
days and fuU of trouble," is our splendid spokes
man. Or, in rougher vein, the " Preacher "
with his bitter summary, " Vanity of vanities,
aU is vanity." Or in glories of language bril-
Uant as the fohage of autumn, Omar Khayyam.
It is true, of course, as Paul said of the flesh,
that all sorrow is not the same sorrow. One in
essence, Uke sin, with which it is so often
linked ; like the world's pain, of which it is a
part, sorrow is as various as the hearts which
experience it. There is, for example, the sor
row of the child, crying because the moon will
not drop into his lap — the irrational sorrow of
disappointment. There is the sorrow of poor
John Wilkes Booth, holding up his paralyzed

The Problem of Sorrow 157
hands and moaning, " Helpless ! Helpless ! "
— the sorrow of futUity. There is the sorrow
of old Dr. Johnson standing out in the rain at
Uttoxeter, on the spot where he once dis
obeyed bis father — the sorrow of remorse.
There is the sorrow of Wolsey, gathering a last
breath to lament that he had not served his
God as faithfuUy as he had served his king —
the sorrow of humiUation. There is the sorrow
of Rachel mourning for her chUdren, and re
fusing to be comforted, because they are not —
the sorrow of empty arms. There is the sorrow
of a modern Magdalen, tugging at her stubby,
bleached hair, and crying : " My hair ain't long
enough to wipe His feet ! " — the sorrow of re
pentant love. There is the sorrow of the
Seventh Earl of Shaftsbury, exclaiming : " I
cannot bear to leave the world with so much
misery in it ! " — the sorrow of an exalting pas
sion. And there is the redeeming sorrow of
Jesus, lamenting, "Te would not come unto
Me that ye might have life," — the sorrow which
is the world's hope. These are only samples
from a Ust too long to be catalogued. It is a
far remove from the sorrow of the chUd to the
sorrow of Jesus ; yet, in essence, all sorrows are
one, Notwithstanding differences in its pathol
ogy and expression, sorrow is sorrow ; in a hut

158 The Method of The Master
or a palace, in a prodigal or a saint. The char
acteristic thing about sorrow is that it is unlike
anything else in the world. It is sorrow.
And it is in fearless, masterful grip with this
bUnding fact of Ufe ; nay, close beside us in the
huge shadow of sorrow, there stands " That
Man," whom the world, not always in fairness
to the other aspects of His countenance, has
loved to caU the " Man of Sorrows." Hosts of
people who do not care for Jesus in any other
role yield Him prompt homage in this. For
the tears He dried on the cheeks of repentant
women and lonely men ; for the consolation He
ministered to broken hearts ; for the hght of
His presence in the homes of Jairus and Martha,
the world loves to remember Him.
Notice in the first place, then, the prompt
ness of Jesus in the presence of sorrow. Its
cry found Him alert and instantly ready for
response. It appears that He never had any
more important business on earth than to min
ister to those in trouble. He could be inter
rupted anywhere, at any time, as His disciples
found to their dismay, by the caU of suffering.
He never even thanked His friends for trying
to save His rehgious hours against the urgent
need of a supphant. He knew that sorrow is
one need which can never wait patiently ;

The Problem of Sorrow 159
hence He came in haste to meet it. He did
not even delay to ask what kind of sorrow it
was, nor how it had been caused, nor whether
the results of it were likely to be serious. Put
ting aside every other business, He answered
its caU with passionate promptness, as a mother
wakes at the faintest movement of her sick
child. "How can you distinguish a cry for
help ? " asked a curious spectator of a Ufe-
saver on the bathing-beach at Newport. " With
such a bedlam of noises made by the bathers,
how can you teU when one is in distress ? "
"Very easUy," was the reply. "Never once
have I faded to distinguish the cry of distress
from aU other sounds. I can always teU it."
Jesus was hke that. An appeal for help rose
piercingly clear above aU clamours and confu
sions. See Him start for the home of Jairus, where
a sick child lay dying. The narrative, as fur
nished us by St. Mark, hurries us so rapidly
that Jesus seems to have started almost before
Jairus' errand was named. Anybody who ever
set out in such a moment for a physician can
feel that father's heart leap at Jesus' prompt
ness of response. Ah, but it was not because
Jairus was rich and prominent ; it was because
Jairus had a breaking heart that Jesus hurried.

160 The Method of The Master
And it was entirely characteristic of our Lord,
illustrative of His eagerness to help, that He
should stop on the way to the home of Jairus to
acknowledge the timid touch of a sick woman
on the street. I am glad He paused as He did.
I Uke best to think that not even a high errand
could engross Him to the exclusion of an im
mediate need. He always had time, appar
ently, for the nearest claim upon His sympathy.
Thus one rereads the story of His promptitude.
The piteous cry of the blind ; the haU-defiant
chaUenge of the leper ; the unspoken grief of
the widow of Nain, whose boy, her only sup
port, was being carried to his burial ; the tears
of His own mother at His cross found His
heart instantly.
Upon that sort of alert ministry to the sor
rowing Jesus sent His disciples. The history
of the early Christian Church is beautiful in
specimens of instant service. And I hke to
think that the age we hve in is recovering that
note. Anthropologists caU attention to the
fact that civilization has been attained at the
expense of certain faculties which our forebears
possessed in a singular degree of perfection.
Thus, for example, primitive man, by laying
his ear to the ground, could hear distant sounds
almost as clearly as we do over the telephone.

The Problem of Sorrow 161
Meantime, we have the telephone and other
modern conveniences. And, what is more to
the point, we, by the aid of ocean cables and
the Uke, have achieved a use of our ears to
which primitive man was a stranger. We are
able to hear the cry of the underfed and the
underpaid from the lower East Side or the
teeming acres of China. Let famine or pesti
lence strike the globe in any quarter, and we
are prompt to start means of relief . The mis
sionary propaganda, so characteristic of the
past century, represents human inabiUty to
sit stiU in knowledge of " how the other half
hves." In countless holy, and preciously prac
tical, ways, we have been learning to come to
the succour of human grief. Cluldren's Courts,
Fresh Air Funds, Movements for the Conserva
tion of Manhood and Womanhood, strUtingly
mark the history of the past two or three dec
ades. Surely the "Man of Sorrows" would
find less to make Him sad than when He gave
Himself to sorrowing folks in GaUlee.
We may pause a moment, also, to notice, in
the second place, that sorrow was looked upon
by Jesus as inevitable. I do not mean, of
course, that aU of it was, to His thought, inev
itable. Else were His ministry of consolation a
denial of the truth of His Creed. But the fact

162 The Method of The Master
of sorrow He seems to have reckoned with as
being native to humankind. His teachings
contain no word to the contrary. He speaks,
for example, of the sorrow of a woman in trav
ail — as if it were inevitable. He warns His
friends, who were looking for the " golden isles
of the blessed," " while ye are in the world, ye
shaU have tribulation." And by calling atten
tion to the inopportune grief of the chUdren
of the bride-chamber who put on signs of
mourning whUe the bridegroom was stiU with
them, He plainly suggests that the time would
certainly come when the sorrow of His disci
ples would be mark of their loyalty to Him.
Not untU the end of the ages did He look for
a griefless world.
But His acceptance of the fact of sorrow was
vastly different from the attitude of WiUiam
Watson, for example, or Matthew Arnold. His
acceptance of sorrow had a rose at the heart of
it. Sorrow, in many of its aspects, seemed to
Jesus to be radiant with all rainbow tints. It
was, to His thought, a possibly splendid asset
of the higher seU, a knife which inflicts tem
porary pain that it may heal the soul.
Modern medical science assures us with con
viction that pain, in its physical aspects, at
least, is not a punishment, but a sign of hope.

The Problem of Sorrow 163
Painless disease is a far more fearsome thing.
Pain indicates that nature is stUl fighting for
victory in the interest of hfe. For example,
freezing is exquisite agony, up to a certain
hopeless point. From that moment on, it is
far easier for the victim to die than to come
back to life. Only through excruciating tor
ments does a freezing person recover. Why,
then, may not sorrow, which is merely one
aspect of pain, play the same high rdle in the
economy of God ? According to the teaching
and practice of Jesus, it does do this. " Blessed
are they that mourn," He said, " for they shaU
be comforted." Tet, unless the comfort of
those who have been comforted is a bigger
thing by reason of its precedent sorrow, there
is neither sense nor kindness in this Beatitude
of Jesus. "This sickness ... is for the
glory of God," He said, when word was
brought Him that the man He loved was sick,
and that the sick man's sisters were needing
their Lord. That indescribable pain which the
doctors learnedly caU " nostalgia " was, to the
thought of Jesus, a godsend to the prodigal
son : for when his heart hurt him sufficiently,
the prodigal started home. One can imagine
how eagerly Jesus searched for a look of re
morse in Peter's face, as the physician watches

164 The Method of The Master
for a flush of colour in the face of a patient in
collapse. Some years before his death, Robert G.
IngersoU gave the papers for pubUcation, on
Christmas Eve, an article entitled, "Chris
tianity, A Message of Eternal Pain." He took
violent issue with the idea that a gospel of
repentance can ever be " good news " to the
world. How Uttle IngersoU knew the human
heart! Or, at least, how httle evidence he
gave of such knowledge when he wrote the
article in question. Without shedding of one's
own blood, there is no remission. Most of the
saints, calendared and uncalendared, were born
into saintship through agonies of repentance.
One reason why we are producing in these
latter days an anaemic type of Christian, is
that we have lost the power of creating in the
sinner a godly sorrow for sin. Always there
must be John calling to repentance before
Jesus giving peace. Always the pain and the
dark of the desert before that " light that never
was on land or sea."
Fortunately, we are doing better with a sort
of vicarious sorrow than we are in the matter
of personal sorrow for our sins. And I look
upon the world's prevalent sadness as a sign of
hope. When my friend assures me that he

The Problem of Sorrow 165
cannot sleep nights when he gets to thinking
of the chUdren who have gone supperless to
bed, I thank God. For by and by, after he
and others Uke him have lain awake long
enough thinking of supperless children, such
chUdren wiU not need to go supperless to bed.
The world is melancholy, perhaps morbid, over
certain harrowing revelations. But our shame
is, or ought to be, a Uving, generative thing.
Out of the ashes of old hopes, new hopes and
ideals, Phoenix-like, wiU rise.
But there is stiU more to be said about Jesus'
attitude towards sorrow. Recall that when the
shadow which, soon or late, darkens the doors
of aU of us, had fallen upon Mary's home, this
message was brought to Mary : " The Master is
come and caUeth for thee." Lazarus was dead
when the message came. So far as the burning
heart of Mary could go that day, Jesus had
arrived too late. She told Him so frankly:
"Lord, if Thou hadst been here, my brother
had not died ! " Nothing was changed when
Jesus came. And yet everything was changed,
except that Lazarus was dead. Somebody had
come to identify Mary's grief with His ; rather,
to make her grief His own. I know what that
experience of sympathy means. I have for
gotten aU the wise things that were said to me

166 The Method of The Master
when my mother lay dead in the house. But
the man who came quietly in, and stood beside
her casket, and looked reverently into the face
which had opened heaven for me, I have never
forgotten. He stood in the shadow with me.
Something from within him eased the pain in
my heart. And when Mary and Jesus stood
together at the tomb of Lazarus, and Mary saw
the tears in her Master's eyes, I am sure that
her own sorrow became an altered thing.
We may be willing, then, to let higher
critics have their way with certain passages
of Scripture, providing they leave us record of
the tears of Jesus.
" . . . That tear of sorrow
Is a legacy of love."
It is a legacy which men have taken with
them into poverty, and have stiU counted them
selves rich ; into exUe and have kept a sense
of exalted companionship ; into the " valley
of the shadow of death " and have been un
afraid. It is the priceless legacy of sympathy.
One of the most mournful words ever
brought across the sea is the confession of
Benedict Arnold. Asked by an American vis
itor if he, the traitor, " wanted anything," Ar
nold sadly rephed: "Only a friend." A

The Problem of Sorrow 167
friend? Tes, the traitor wanted a friend as
no untraitorous man ever wanted one. It is
weU enough to talk about the loneliness of
undeserved sorrow; but the loneliness of de
served sorrow is stUl worse, for the desert of
the thing has probably cost the sufferer his
friends. I want my friend, because he is my
friend, to stand by me when I have done
wrong. That is the sort of friend Jesus proved
Himself to be. The jibe of His enemies was
gloriously true. He was " The friend of publi
cans and sinners." And it was the kindhng
sense of His sympathy which helped turn sin-
broken hearts towards the hght.
Tet one word more. Jesus met sorrow, not
merely as the Master of Mary and her broken
heart; of Peter and his cowardly heart; but
as the Master of sorrow itself. I am convinced
that Christian art has generally maUgned Jesus
Christ. It has shown us the "Man of Sor
rows," whose face, in Isaiah's expressive words,
was " so marred more than any man." But
Christian art has almost entirely failed to show
the " Man of Sorrows " as the Master of sor
row. "Wounded for our transgressions, and
bruised for our iniquities," He, nevertheless,
must have carried a radiant face. Else would
httle children have scarcely held out their arms

168 The Method of The Master
to Him. Jesus was constantly talking about
joy. He prayed for His disciples that His
joy might remain in them, and that their joy
might be full. He must have carried sun
shine in His face. Since it was His business
to give " songs in the night season," He must
have been a bearer of songs in His heart.
WilUam Watson said of Wordsworth, "He
had for weary feet the gift of rest." Then
Wordsworth must have known the secret of
rest himself. And surely He, who invited to
Him aU tired, all despondent, aU grieving folk,
must in His own Ufe have conquered sorrow,
and found His Father's joy at the heart of it.

XI
THE PROBLEM OF THE FUTUEE
AT the ripe age of three and twenty,
poor Byron protested: C"I wUl have
nothing to do with your immortaUty ;
we are miserable enough in this Ufe without
the absurdity of speculating upon another ! "
Concerning which summary dismissal of the
theme of so many prayers and longings, it
might suffice to characterize it as the fretful
sentiment of a man who, a few years later,
sang: " My days are in the yeUow leaf,
The fruits and flowers of life are gone ;
The worm, the canker and the grief,
Are mine alone,"
and who greeted his thirty-third birthday with
these dirge-like words: "Here Ues in the
bosom of eternity the thirty-second year of a
misspent life . . . inconsolable that there
should be any successor." But for some rea
son or conspiracy of reasons, people who have
scant respect for the morals or poUtical opin
ions of Lord Byron, take him very seriously in
169

170 The Method of The Master
the above quotation. They even let him be
their prophet. For they, also, wiU " have
nothing to do with immortahty." They are
either "too miserable," or too busy, or too
skeptical, or too devout to spend valuable time
over so vague and unprofitable a theme. A
theme which is responsible for the " Phaedo " of
Plato, and the fifteenth chapter of First Corin
thians ; for Wordsworth's " Intimations of Im
mortaUty," and Gray's "Elegy in a Country
Churchyard " ; for Tennyson's " In Memoriam "
and Fiske's " Life Everlasting " ; for bursts of
music hke Handel's "I Know That My Re
deemer Liveth," does not interest them.
So they say, and I, for one, do not beheve
them. It is doubtless true that the subject of
immortaUty is less discussed to-day than for
merly on street corners, at social clubs, and even
in Christian pulpits. It does not make what
reporters call " good matter." Review articles
on the theme are growingly infrequent. So
that, thus measuring popular interest in immor
tality, one might affirm that the present gener
ation had lost concern with the subject.
This indifference, however, is chiefly superfi
cial. Dig into the human soul at the right
place and at the right moment, and you shall
touch the old quivering nerve. An apathetio

The Problem of the Future 171
world would not have used precious time to
read Edison's recent dehverance on the ques
tion of human immortaUty. Nor would it
attend spiritualistic seances, or even take the
trouble to sneer at them. Nor would it con
cern itself with the latest word of Professor
Myer or Hyslop. At a recent dinner given in
honour of one of New Tork's foremost citi
zens, two of the speakers, one of them a lead
ing exponent of Trades-Unionism, the other a
lecturer on Positivism, went so far afield from
usual after-dinner topics as to discuss, and
express their personal faith in, immortaUty.
Most inappropriate, assuredly, if the human
heart had lost interest in the question of the
future. Tet the sequel says that the guests
were stirred by these two addresses as men
who have " weU eaten and drunken " do not
often Uke to be stirred on such occasions.
Men indifferent to immortaUty ? Not yet !
UnbeUef wUl need to break far more celestial
circuits than she has yet broken before she can
make men indifferent to what lies beyond the
door. The question of human immortaUty has, at
the least, a speculative interest. We should
Uke an answer to Job's question, "If a man
die, shall he Uve again ? " We should Uke an

172 The Method of The Master
answer for the sake of knowing more than Job
did, if for no worthier reason. In a certain
section of our country, the metropolis of which
is said to be best described not according to its
geographical situation, but as a psychological
condition, there was once in coUoquial use this
phrase, " I want to know." TeU your one-time
Tankee neighbour a piece of incredibly bad
news, or even an unhkely story, and he would
draw down his mouth, Uf t his eyebrows, and
say : " I want to know ! " It did not by any
means foUow that he reaUy " wanted to know,"
and it would be quite unwise to presume too
far upon his interest ; but that is what he said
— " I want to know ! "
How significant the phrase is ! What jour
neys, what privations, what labours it records !
Merely to know what nobody else has found
out ! I recaU that, as a New England boy, I used
to wonder where the robins went each autumn.
" Down South," I was told. But in those days,
when the waU between North and South was
almost as real as the Chinese waU, I never hap
pened to find anybody who had seen our North
ern robins in the Southland. And I made up
my mind that, if I Uved to grow opulent enough
for travel, I should some day find out for my
self where the robins go when they leave our

The Problem of the Future 173
Northern cUmate. Not that it made any par
ticular difference to me where they went.
Seed-time and harvest, sohool-terms and skat
ing would come and go, no matter where the
robins spent their winters. I merely wanted to
know. Now that we come to think of the matter
with entire calmness, the man who actuaUy dis
covered the North Pole did not rosily find very
much more than did the man who said he had
found it, and Ued. Perhaps that is one reason
Congress showed such reluctance to make ade
quate recognition of Peary's exploit. Merely
to know that there was so Uttle to be known
was hardly worth the good money and human
Uves spent in questing the North Pole. So
says common sense, in Congress or out of it.
And, meantime, the rest of us, who all our lives
have been foUowing the lure of some incorrigible
longing to know, begrudge to Peary not a syl
lable of praise, or a medal of honour.
Sir J. J. Thompson thinks he has discovered
the ultimate subdivision of matter. For a good
many centuries the poor atom has had a hard
time. It has been investigated, baked in ovens,
torn apart. And now it has been electrocuted,
so to speak. And all to what purpose ? Sup
pose that each atom is a sort of solar system set

174 The Method of The Master
with points of flying energy ? We shaU hardly
sleep better for the knowledge, or enjoy our
breakfast more thoroughly, or get an increase
of salary. We do not particularly care whether
matter has one " face " or two. But the cease
less, passionate, indomitable longing to find out
things, if only for the sake of knowing what
nobody else has ever known — this we inevitably
honour. How then shall man, being a man and " want
ing to know," drop his quest and shed his sec
ond nature when he fronts the subject of im
mortahty ? Granting that he has no interest
whatever beyond a speculative one; that he
has no wish to Uve hereafter, no friends to
meet, no love to perpetuate ; stiU his specula
tive interest remains. My friend is dead. I
may forget for the moment that he was my
friend. I may think of him as of any pU-
grim who has completed his earthly journey.
But just because he is a pilgrim, making the
same journey which I am making, I can
hardly help asking myself if he has "ar
rived " anywhere. An hour ago, a week ago,
a year ago, he was here. What is missing now
that was present then? Everything of him
that I could see or touch yesterday remains to
day when my friend is dead. Tet everything

The Problem of the Future 175
that made the rest of him worth having and
loving is gone. Moreover, he was my friend ;
and I realize now that it was not the colour of
his eye nor the shade of his hair, nor the sound
of his voice that made me love him. It was
not even the grip of his hand ; for others may
grip my hand as earnestly as he, yet without
making my heart glow. The part of him
which I cannot see, and never did see, is gone.
Where did it go ? What relation does it bear
to its former tenement ? Does it stiU Uve and
know and love ?
But even speculative interest in the question
of immortaUty is rarely so cold and impersonal
as this. It is normaUy coloured by certain
ethical considerations. We have a persuasion,
amounting in many cases to conviction, that the
soul ought not to die ; that God cannot afford
to let it die. Throughout the modern world
there is evident an increasing impatience with
waste of any sort. The buUding of vast indus
tries by utilization of what was formerly
thrown away is characteristic Ulustration of
the modern spirit. Less and less are we com
placent with waste of anything, whether in
field or factory or human Ufe. This is one rea
son we hate war with growing intensity— it
costs so many Uves. This is the reason we have

176 The Method of The Master
taken up the chUd-labour question and various
kindred matters. Opulence is never so great
that it can afford to be wasteful. And this is
true when we think of the opulence of the
Creator. A wasteful God cannot expect to
hold our respect. We feel that the economy
which we find Him practicing in so many de
partments of nature ought to be practiced by
Him upon human souls.
Recently I sat by a woman in the hospital,
after the ordeal of a dreadful operation. And
I watched the weariness fade from her eyes as
she talked of her children. Poor though she
was, and worn by domestic cares, hers was a
transfigured face when she talked of her babies.
Nothing mattered in comparison with the chil
dren. " It means so much to be a mother ! "
she said. But if it means so much to be a
mother, how much must it mean to be God !
Somehow, though, as one sneers, it be a " piece
of irrepressible egotism " to say it, the reputa
tion of God is bound up with His care of His
children. To produce a WiUiam Shakespeare
or a John Wesley or a Norton Goddard, and
after a few years to fling such glorious material
to the scrap-heap, is unpardonable, even in the
Almighty. Modern science declares that na
ture is not guilty of such waste, even in the

The Problem of the Future 177
matter of our bodies. According to the laws of
conservation and correlation, not an atom of
our bodies is wasted. No single particle of
hydrogen or carbon is thrown away. Even at
the lowest consideration, our mouldering forms
wiU some day feed the roots of flowers. As
Omar Khayyam has it :
" I sometimes think that never blows so red
The rose as where some buried Caesar bled ;
That every hyacinth the garden wears
Drop't in her lap from some once lovely head."
And the tenant of the body, who organized its
activities and purposes, who made it a human
body ; nay, in one instance, made it worthy to
be the body of the Son of Man; shaU God
waste him, or dissolve him back into original
elements ?
" Can a finite thing, created in the bounds of
time and space,
Can it live and grow and love Thee, catch the
glory of Thy face,
Fade and die, to be gone forever, know no be
ing, have no place 1 "
I used, as a lad, to wonder where the sparks
from the engine go. To-day we are scientific
ally assured that not one of the sparks is lost.
I am glad it is so. And shall the " spark of in-

178 The Method of The Master
finity," man, go out into the night, " fade and
die, be gone forever " ?
This brings us to a third element of human
interest in the theme of immortaUty. For lack
of a better word, I may call it our practical
interest in immortaUty. And if any one pre
fers the word " pragmatic," weU and good.
This is the meaning : we need the truth of im
mortaUty in order to keep us human. Paul
Desjardins said, " It is necessary to have a soul."
And an eminent countryman of his expressed
the half -serious opinion that, if there were no
God, it would be necessary to invent one.
FoUowing the same line of argument, humanity
needs a doctrine of immortaUty. It may be
doubted if the skeptical Gibbon realized how
much he was admitting when, in his now
famous list of reasons for the growth of early
Christianity, he named faith in immortaUty.
When one attempts to account for the Mariposa
grove of California, it is necessary not merely
to caU attention to the fact that the trees have
deep roots, but that there are earth-riches for
the roots to lay hold of, vital elements to be
drawn through deep roots into the trees. So,
only, can we explain one of the most startling
phenomena of history, the rapid spread of the
doctrine and practice of Jesus. The early

The Problem of the Future 179
Church struck deeply into great truths, partic
ularly the truth of immortality. The early
Christians were " citizens of two worlds."
Heaven was to them more real than sword or
flame. Strength, fortitude, gentleness, the pa
tience of hope they drew in no smaU measure
from their sublime confidence in a Ufe beyond
the door.
Now it is with respect to this vital soul-root
that we moderns are weak. And it is in this
weakness that we may find stinging diagnosis
of certain alarming symptoms of the day. The
man in the street has nowadays lost assurance
of immortahty. He is stiU interested in the
theme ; likes occasionally to hear about it ;
would be glad to know that the theme repre
sents a fact. But he has lost what BushneU
caUed " the power of an endless life." Nearly
aU his estimates are made on the basis of three
score years and ten. What he has to do or
enjoy or suffer must be encountered quickly.
For, as the Preacher says, " There is no work,
nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the
grave, whither thou goest." And if occasion-
aUy he forgets his most sacred vows, and,
having forgotten, descends to the level of the
brute, he hopes to be excused, since he wiU
be "so long time dead." In short, modern

180 The Method of The Master
Epicureanism, whether in forms which the
founder of the school could approve, or in
grosser orgies of eating, and dances Uke the
" turkey trot," and plays such as fiU too many
of our theatres, is the perfectly logical, the in
evitable result of loss of grip on the truth of
immortality. Nor wiU a gospel of Stoicism
save the day. Only the setting of human
work and love and f eUowship in the Ught of
eternal years wiU help man to recover his lost
ground. There is one further interest of which I may
speak. It is the tenderest and most human
interest of all, our personal interest in immortal
ity. Among the letters of Edwin Booth is one
written just three weeks after the death of his
girl- wife, Mary. "I lie awake at night and
look for her in the darkness. I hold my breath
and hsten, and I sometimes fancy I can feel her
speak away in somewhere — in my soul, perhaps.
. . . She is in heaven, and I must live to
meet her there. I know all this, at least as
well as they know it ; but I do need some sign
from her, some Uttle breath of wind, nothing
more, bringing comforting words from her.
If Mary should come to me, I feel that my soul
would become purified." If Mary should come,
or John, or Elizabeth, or any one of those whom

The Problem of the Future 181
we " have loved long since, and lost a whUe " !
Edwin Booth's beautiful letter might have been
written by almost any of us, providing we had his
skUl with the pen. How much we have given
up to that " land that is very far off " ! What a
populous country is the country of our hopes
and dreams ! " I have been twice to the
cemetery within a month," said a salesman to
me across the counter in a great store. Rev
erently, only, might one guess the loneliness and
misery which the salesman must bluff over by
the need of standing at his post and seUing
clocks. Ah, but our longing is not merely a longing
for the touch of a vanished hand, or the sound
of a voice that is stiU. We could wait for that.
Notwithstanding the impatience of lonehness
and the yearning of love, we could wait. We
could wait a hundred years if we could be sure
that at their expiration a reunion was certain.
What our hearts cry for is deep assurance that
we do not and cannot bury any vital part of
our friend ; that the friend could not possibly
die. " I shall be lonesome," wrote Jacob Rus,
when the waters of widowerhood swept over
him, " God knows how lonesome . . . but
what are a few years of lonehness to the
eternity of joy ahead ? " "I do not know

182 The Method of The Master
what I have done to make people feel towards
me like that," said Tennyson, as he read his
mail on his eightieth birthday. " I do not
know what I have done to make people feel
towards me like that, except that I have always
kept my faith in immortality." To have kept
that faith is enough — and to have shared it
with a hungry-hearted world. Merely to have
written " In Memoriam," and " Crossing the
Bar," not to say other exquisite hnes of eternal
hope, is enough to make the world remember
him with gratitude. Tennyson helped human
hearts to be like the bird which
" . . . feels its branch give way, yet keeps
on singing,
Knowing it has wings for flight."
Many a man would rather have that hope than
the miUions of Rockefeller, or Shakespeare's
brain. To be able to say with Browning :
"... What's time?
Leave now for dogs and apes.
Man has forever,"
would for a multitude of people enrich life
beyond aU commercial computation.
So much, then, for this aU too inadequately
phrased statement of the problem which lies
upon the minds and hearts of a race. Notice,

The Problem of the Future 183
briefly, how Jesus met this world-wide, inex
tinguishable longing. Observe what a splendid
answer He gave to the question of Job. In the
first place it is obvious, from a study of His
whole life and ministry, that He assumed the
fact of immortaUty. We shall look vainly
among the recorded sayings of Jesus for an
argument such as that of Socrates, or William
James. Jesus spent no more time arguing the
truth of immortaUty than He did concerning
the existence of God or the soul. He never
seemed to think that the case needed argument.
He assumed the fact that the soul is immortal.
Sometimes, indeed, the assumptions which men
make are more valuable than their labori
ous pieces of logic. " The truths which are most
essential for us to know cannot be discerned by
speculative arguments. Chemistry cannot tell
us why some food is wholesome and other
food is poisonous." Democracy is based upon
a huge assumption, the assumption that the in
dividual can be trusted to choose good things
and stand for righteousness. Most of the
exploits of modern science start with certain
basic assumptions. I want my friend to assume
the fact of my friendship for him, as ship-buUd-
ers assume the buoyancy of water ; I want him
to assume my friendship and begin the com-

184 The Method of The Master
merce of hearts. Jesus Uved His human Ufe
and wrought His redemption in the atmosphere
of a great assumption. He recognized only one
kind of worthful Ufe. In reading some of His
parables, it is difficult to say whether He was
talking of Ufe in this world, or of Ufe in the
future. In His vocabulary of the Christian Ufe,
there was no such word as death.
In the second place, Jesus asserted the truth
of immortaUty. Not as Professor Royce as
serts it in his argument based upon the fact of
individuality ; not as John Fiske asserted it in
his philosophic scorn of Moleschotte's famous
dictum, " No thought without phosphorous " ;
not as Sir OUver Lodge and Lord Kelvin, when
they declare the chasm between crystal and
cell; not as Bergson, when he confesses "no
repugnance in admitting that in man, perhaps
in man alone, consciousness pursues its path
beyond this earthly Ufe." But in His own,
inimitable, final way, Jesus boldly, unequiv-
ocaUy and triumphantly declared the truth of
immortaUty. If sometimes there is in His
words a note of reproach that it seemed nec
essary for Him to affirm immortaUty, as in
the famUiar words, " If it were not so I would
have told you," the affirmation is but the more
convincing. Hear Him say, as He did to the

The Problem of the Future 185
stricken Martha, " Thy brother shaU rise again."
It does not appear that Martha ever doubted the
certainty of the resurrection. She says plainly :
" I know that he shaU rise again ... at the
last day." But immortaUty was to her a far
more profoundly Uving thing after Jesus had
declared it. His calm assertion of the Ufe
everlasting, His identification of Himself with
immortaUty, made assurance for Martha doubly
sure. Truth is truth, of course, whether spoken
by knave or saint. Science is science at first
hand or third. But wireless telegraphy means
most to me when Marconi declares and explains
it; the storage battery, when expounded by
Edison. I Uke my science best at first hand.
So I like my rehgion. Eternal hope is a new
thing when Jesus affirms it. Immortal Ufe as
declared by Him who could say — "I am
the resurrection and the life " — becomes an as
set in my day's work. All the goodness which
the world seems never tired of praising in
Jesus, aU the insight which was given Him as
to no other son of woman, aU the majesty of
that business which brought Him to earth, Ue
back of His unequivocal assertions concerning
life beyond the door.
But Jesus did far more than this. He made
the truth of immortality human, intimate, lov-

186 The Method of The Master
able. He fashioned it for hearts. Some of us
are frank enough to say that we find ourselves
unsatisfied after repeating with Burns :
" The voice of nature loudly cries,
And many a message from the skies,
That something in us never dies."
Nor are we particularly comforted when Goethe
affirms that "it is to a thinking being quite
impossible to think himself non-existent, ceas
ing to think and Uve." " It is an intolerable
thought that man and aU other sentient beings
are doomed to complete annihilation," said
Darwin. But not more "intolerable" than
the idea of being lost in a stream of being, or
caught back into the nondescript all of Panthe
ism. With Jesus, immortaUty carried aU per
sonal terms and relations. Heaven was a place
of intimacy, of affection. The agony of heU,
as portrayed in the parable of Dives and Laz
arus, was accentuated by its personal quahty.
Whenever, in paraboUc or other teaching, Jesus
speaks of the future, it is never in abstract, but
always in personal terms.
In the churchyard at Eversley, on the stone
which marks the resting place of Charles
Kingsley and his wife, are these three words :
" Amavimus ; amamus ; amabimus." To say

The Problem of the Future 187
concerning ourselves and our dead that " we
have loved," or even that "we do love," is
rarely adequate. To be able to say that " we
shall love " is the sort of assurance of immor
tahty we long to entertain. Kingsley had
found that. And he found it, not in the soul
of the woman he loved with such exquisite de
votion, but in the sure word and testimony of
Jesus. And this brings me to the climax of Jesus'
teaching concerning immortahty. His su
preme " Amen " to the hopes and longings of
His brethren is not an assumption of im
mortaUty, not an assertion of its truth, nor yet
a winsome statement of its quahties, but a
colossal fact. The "Amen" of Jesus is His
resurrection. I have never quite agreed with
St. Paul in his conclusion that " If in this hfe
only we have hope in Christ, we are of aU men
most miserable." I beUeve that the Christian
Ufe is worth living, even if death ends all. But
with the Easter fact before us ; a fact which,
however we may explain it and whatever we
may do with the physical body of Jesus, is
better attested than the hemlock of Socrates or
the death-bed of George Washington, we, of
aU men, ought to be most joyous. Our confi
dence in immortaUty rests upon the broken

188 The Method of The Master
sepulchre in Joseph's garden, and the trium
phant, risen Lord. What we otherwise never
could beUeve comes Uke a flood of faith, as it
came to Thomas, when Jesus said to him,
"Reach hither thy finger, and behold My
hands." It was sight of the PUot which gave
Tennyson those stanzas by which a host of
people best remember him. He said once,
" What the sun is to the flower, Jesus Christ is
to my soul." It was that profound persuasion ;
that intimate touch of Christ ; that power of
Christ's resurrection, which lay back of the
lines: "For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar."

xn
THE PROBLEM OF JESUS
MRS. SUTHERLAND ORR, in her
"Life of Robert Browning," de
scribes the poet as walking with
Carlyle in Paris. As they passed an image of
the crucifixion, the gruff Scot glanced up
hurriedly, and said in his broad native accent :
" Poor feUow, your part is played out." Poor
Carlyle, rather! That day in the gayest of
cities must have been a dark, dyspeptic one on
Carlyle's personal calendar. Good men are
often guUty of dismal lapses of judgment. And
few admirers of this rough, unterrified prophet
of righteousness wiU be ready to accept the
above quoted comment as representing his real
opinion concerning Jesus. Besides, the remark
fits UI with certain other things which Carlyle
said. However, letting this commiserative
word stand as expressing a certain mood of the
grim Scotchman — not to say a mood of many
people to-day — it is a pity that Carlyle could
not have Uved a Uttle longer, or studied the
world with more generous eyes.
189

190 The Method of The Master
" Played out " ? For One whose role has
suffered so disastrous a misfortune as Carlyle
suggests, Jesus has an astounding place in the
world to-day. If it be said that He is less con
spicuous than formerly "among the doctors,"
it must on the other hand be admitted that He
is more conspicuous than ever in the serious
thought of multitudes of people. He increas
ingly deserves the name Dawson gave Him of
being "the unavoidable Christ." One cannot
read modern Uterature, or frequent the better
theatres, or take interest in social amehorations
without encountering Jesus. Neither fiction
nor philosophy, neither drama nor human
service can let Jesus alone. As the eyes in His
famous portrait in the cathedral at Antwerp
seem to foUow the visitor and to be always
looking at him, no matter which way he turns,
so with Jesus in our age. It is far more true
than when Renan said it, " Whatever else be
taken from us, Christ is left." Left to be ac
counted for, as in the famous Roberts' article,
" Jesus or Christ " ; or in White's " CaU of the
Carpenter" — stUl He is "left." Analyzed as
He has been by Wernle, Bossuet, Harnack and
others, stiU He is " left." Exploited in the in
terest of stage revenues, if one can say nothing
better concerning such plays as " The Servant

The Problem of Jesus 191
in the House " and " The Passing of the Third
Floor Back " and " The Miracle," stiU Christ is
" left." Claimed for the benefit of His gracious
name, by Mrs. Eddy and John Alexander
Dowie, by serious students and propagandists
of social reform, stiU He is " left." Preached
in dilute, perfumed doctrine as Theodore Parker
preached Him ; or as Foster in his " Finality of
the Christian Rehgion " or the anonymous
author of " The Creed of Christ," stiU He is
" left." Not the least significant feature of this
wonderful century is that the Peasant who
once walked the lanes of Palestine, lacking the
prestige of a Buddha and the dramatic action
of a Mohammed, draws to Himself to-day so
many thoughts and hopes. Whether because
of His invincible idealism, or His tender human
sympathies ; whether as the protagonist of the
unfit in the struggle for existence, or as the
revelation of the eternal Father; whether as
the Founder of a huge organization caUed the
Church, or the source of the spiritual raptures
of St. Francis and Madame Guyon — or aU
together — He is the most colossal figure against
the background of the present century. Looked
at through the cold eyes of speculative interest,
or with the adoring love of those whose hearts
He has touched, He is to be accounted for : He

192 The Method of The Master
must be reckoned with. He is the problem of
problems of the modern world.
To say this is to, say nothing irreverent or
even new. Jesus has always been a problem.
To that Hebrew maid who carried Him under
her heart, He was a problem. "How shah
this thing be ? " was her instinctive maiden re
sponse to the incredible tidings brought her.
When He lay in the arms of Mary, the
" Sweetest type of the whole race of mothers,
With her soul one white uplift of prayer,"
He was nevertheless a problem. What but
the problem of Him accounts for the record
that " Mary kept all these things, and pondered
them in her heart " ? The day she found Him
in the temple, obUvious, apparently, to the
claim of her love upon Him, added fresh twinge
of pain to the problem. When on another oc
casion He turned aside, with apparent brusque-
ness, saying, " Woman, what have I to do with
thee ? " fancy how acute the problem became !
His growing ministry of kindness and sacrifice
made the problem always bigger, untU that
Friday when Mary stood under His cross and
watched Him die.
But if Jesus was a problem to His own
mother, fancy what He must have been to the

The Problem of Jesus 193
group of six chUdren, four brothers and two
sisters, with whom He was raised. Professor
Rendel Harris considers it a pity that we have
so rarely aUowed ourselves to think of Jesus as
a chUd ; even to speU His name " boy " without
a capital "B." Had we permitted ourselves
reverently to watch His development in " wis
dom and stature," we might have seen the prob
lem of Him grow in the minds of His brothers
and sisters, up to the hour of the depressing
chronicle: "Neither did His brethren beUeve
on Him." Somehow, Jesus must have been
"different" from the beginning. I do not
mean, however, that He was less boy than were
other boys ; less a brother and playmate. Tet
those who shared the same home-Uf e with Him
must have been conscious of a difference be
tween themselves and Him. The difference
made the problem, as it always does ; whether
we deal with the " sports " of botany, or the
" ninth wave," or the genius of Roger Bacon.
Even to those two brothers, who became apolo
gists for Him in letters which perpetuate their
names, Jesus was stUl a problem.
Or think what the problem must have been
to the man who said he was not worthy to
loose the Other's shoe-latchet. The cry of John
from the prison at Macchaerus is the cry of a

194 The Method of The Master
man who could not solve his problem. 'Tis a
terrible moment when one who has poured out
his strength in any cause is not quite sure that
his sacrifice was warranted. And John would
not have been quite human if he had not sent
his embassy to Jesus. Long, weary months
had passed since the scene at the Jordan. The
kingdom which John had preached with such
fervour and fearlessness seemed as far off as
ever. The Man with a " fan " in His hand, as
John described Him, had done very much less
spectacular work than John had evidently antic
ipated. Rumours reached the Baptist in prison
that this new prophet had so far disappointed
traditions as to be " Friend of pubhcans and sin
ners." And into the face of this racking prob
lem, John flung his question, " Art Thou He
that should come, or look we for another ? "
And the Pharisees? We shaU hardly do
justice to those ancient churchmen if we fancy
that Jesus was reaUy no problem to them. As
a matter of fact, we have rarely been fair to
the Pharisees. It is easier to abuse those an
cient zealots and sticklers than to understand
them. Apropos of this spirit, an English
woman complained to Thomas Carlyle because
Jesus had not deferred His advent until our
day. "How delighted we should aU be to

The Problem of Jesus 195
throw open our doors to Him, and listen to His
divine precepts ! Don't you think so, Mr. Car
lyle ? " she asked. And Carlyle, with his char
acteristic grimness, repUed, "No, madam, I
don't ! I think that had He come fashionably
dressed, with plenty of money, and preaching
doctrines palatable to the higher orders, I might
have had the honour of receiving from you
a card of invitation, on the back of which would
be written, ' To meet our Saviour ' ; but if He
had come denouncing the Pharisees, and asso
ciating with the lower orders, you would have
treated Him much as the Jews did, and have
cried out, 'Take Him to Newgate and hang
Him ! ' " It is worth whUe to be magnanimous
to Pharisees as weU as to wantons. " What
the Puritans have been to Protestantism, what
the Jesuits have been and stUl are to Roman
ism, what the Ritualists are to AngUcanism,
that the Pharisees were to latter-day Judaism."
They were tremendously earnest folks, accord
ing to their lights. For a time they gave this
new teacher their attention and interest. He
was a curious problem to them. And when the
problem became too big and portentous for them
comfortably to Uve with, they crucified Him.
It would be fascinating, if time permitted,
to carry this thought through the New Testa-

196 The Method of The Master
ment. The Gospels are scarcely more full of
the glory of Jesus than they are of the shadow
His Ught cast in the hearts and minds of His
contemporaries. Wherever Jesus went, and
whatever He attempted to do ; sometimes by
too far transcending the ideals and aims of
His friends ; again by disappointing Messianism
with His sheer humanness, He created a prob
lem. " How knoweth this Man letters, never
having learned ? " they asked. And, on another
occasion, " Is not this the son of the carpen
ter?" Even the bUnd man had to admit:
"Whether He be a sinner or not, I know
not." And those were friends who confessed
sadly, as they turned towards Emmaus : " We
trusted that it had been He which should have
redeemed Israel." His beneficiaries were quite
as incapable as His enemies of understanding
Him. Let Peter suffice for a single example.
We have made a great deal, and properly, of
Peter's one splendid deliverance : " Thou art
the Christ, the Son of the Uving God ! " It
was a great moment for Peter. But it is
worth remembering that Peter's troubles did
not end there. His new confession led him
into deeper water. In the same chapter which
records his great confession, we find him re
buking so divine a Master for daring to set His

The Problem of Jesus 197
face towards a cross. On another occasion,
we see Peter drawing up his feet, exclaiming,
" Thou shalt never wash my feet ! " The world
can imagine just how Peter felt when Jesus
healed an ear which Peter, in impulsive loyalty,
had hacked off. And the whole world knows
what Peter, in despair of his Lord, did in the
high priest's palace. In fact, the greatest suc
cess that Peter ever had with the problem of
Jesus was to accept Jesus, problem and all.
The history of Christian doctrine, a history
stUl quivering with the heart-beats of men,
dark with blood-stains and bitterness, is to no
smaU extent Christological. Arius, Montanus,
Nestorius, Eutyches are unfamUiar and uninter
esting names to the majority of churchmen to
day. Nevertheless, those names, with a host
of others, stand for the address of the human
soul to the problem of Jesus. Ancient sym
bols, such as the Nicene Creed, and that of
Constantinople, throb stUl with the passionate
zest of earnest search. And it UI behooves any
one who has never hotly asked concerning Jesus,
" Whose son is He ? " to think or speak sneer-
ingly concerning the creeds of Christendom.
Those who gathered their impressions of
David Strauss from the later volume in which
he answered, with more heat than Ught, the

198 The Method of The Master
critics of his " Leben Jesu" do well to remem
ber that it was not as an iconoclast that Strauss
published the earher volume. I give him
credit for thinking he had solved the problem
of Jesus. It was not as a bomb filled with
hurt, but as a Ught for the healing of darkness,
that he wrote his " Leben Jesu." And it was
the bitterness of being misunderstood which
turned his spirit acid, and perpetuates his name
as that of a convinced enemy of the Church.
So, I believe, with respect to such works as
Renan's " Tie de Jesu " and Wendt's " Teach
ing of Jesus " ; these books, just as truly as
Forsythe's " Place of Christ " or Denney's
" Jesus and the Gospel," represent, at bottom,
a genuine, reverent effort to solve the problem
of Jesus.
And here are we, pressed by a nineteen-cen-
tury-old problem ; unable to dodge it, some
times trifling with it ; continually confronted
by it. The desperate question which dug deep
into the soul of an ancient, by answer to which
he has been weighed and found wanting, is stiU
the question of questions : " What shall I do,
then, with Jesus ? " It is one glory of our
lives that we cannot help asking PUate's ques
tion. It is a chief solemnity of life that we
must answer the question. It is the consum-

The Problem of Jesus 1 99
mate tragedy of many lives that the question
may be answered wrong. More fascinating
than the problem of air-flight or radio-activity ;
more urgent than the problem of poverty or
divorce or pain ; more vital than the problem
of the future, is the problem of Jesus.
One of the first objects to meet the eye of the
incoming ship's passenger, as he saUs up New
Tork Bay, is the shining tower of the Metro-
poUtan BuUding in Manhattan. High above
all other roofs it stands, gleaming white in the
sunshine, piercing the dark with its quiet eye.
Once within the canons of the lower city, one
may lose sight of the tower, untU a chance out
look from an upper window or a clear view up
some avenue brings it into range again. Tet
there it stands aU the time : taU, serene, marble
white ; scattering the melody of its great beUs
upon the ears of passing thousands ; timing the
movements of pedestrians who rarely look up
to its summit. So, though the simUe fails woe-
fuUy, stands Jesus in the midst of hf e's crowded
thoroughfares, white, towering, glorious ; never
to be surpassed as the new Woolworth or the
proposed Equitable BuUding wiU surpass in
height the MetropoUtan tower; filling the
streets and the hearts of men more and more
with the tones of mingled command and com-

200 The Method of The Master
passion ; recording the hours of work and play,
" tUl traveUing days are done." The incoming
pUgrim may not happen to catch sight of Him.
Busy men and women may become so used to
His taU presence that they forget Him "in
Ufe's throng and press." Sorrow and poverty
may miss Him. Tet there He stands in the
thick of things, provoking the lifting of men's
souls to Him ; chaUenging them with the ever-
new question of PUate: "What shah I do,
then, with Jesus ? "
I hardly need say that, with the phrasing of
PUate's question, we have passed from the
speculative to the practical phase of the prob
lem of Jesus. To the " pure reason," Jesus is
stiU an insoluble problem. How the divine
and the human met in Him ; how the uncreated
God could take up His tabernacle in human
flesh ; what it meant for Him who, according
to Paul, was " in the form of God," to humble
Himself and become "obedient unto death,
even the death of the Cross " ; all that redemp
tion signifies looking manward or Godward —
these and a hundred other questions find no
answer in cold reason.
Those who have been interested in the
wonders of microscopy realize what is meant
by the limitation of the "field." Only one

The Problem of Jesus 201
drop of blood or section of an insect's wing
can be examined at a time. Secrets which re
main hidden in a single drop of water, or a hun
dred, may be discovered in the next. Thus,
we are always embarrassed by the fact that
one observer misses what another finds. More
over, there is something forever withheld from
the piercing eye of the microscope. So it is in
the study of Jesus. When we put Him under
the microscope, we never succeed in seeing the
whole Jesus. We limit ourselves to single
words and acts. Thus one student misses what
the other finds. Looking at Him thus, the
Rev. Mr. Roberts, whose article in the Hibbert
Journal two years ago won him a merciless
drubbing at the hands of Chesterton, said that
he found serious defects in the ethical teach
ings of Jesus. He went further : he pronounced
Jesus a commonplace man. He seemed to
object because, as some one suggests, "Jesus
spoke Aramaic instead of Esperanto." Sidney
Lanier, on the other hand, said, after putting
Jesus under the lens of his study :
" What if or yet, what mole or flaw or lapse,
What least defect, or shadow of defect,
What rumour tattled by an enemy,
^c * * * *
Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee,
Jesus, Good Paragon, Thou Crystal Christ ! "

202 The Method of The Master
But the problem, which "pure reason,"
whether in theologian or rationalist, is as far
as ever from solving, becomes as simple as
breathing or walking to the " practical reason "
of the least instructed of men. " How may I
know that God is?" asks Matthew Arnold
somewhere. "Just as I may know that fire
burns, by experience." So with the problem
of Jesus. Only incidentally is He a problem for
the inteUect. He is, rather, a force to be en
countered. He is a presence to be entertained.
He is a life to be experienced. And some
simplest disciple, some headstrong Peter or
wayward woman or beggar by the roadside,
may, therefore, know Jesus better than the
savants of the universities do.
Observe how this problem works itself out
for the practical reason. The ancients talked
variously of prophet, priest and king. They
dreamed of one who should combine aU these
functions in Himself. And far beyond all
dreams, the Son of Man fiUed with His
own presence the outhnes of ancient hope.
In proportion as He becomes "Wisdom
and righteousness and sanctification and re
demption," He ceases to be a problem, and
becomes " Christ formed within, the hope of
glory."

The Problem of Jesus 203
" I say the acknowledgment of God in Christ,
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee
All questions in the earth and out of it,
And hath so far advanced thee to be wise."
First, as prophet, then. We may think of
Him as that. The soul of man never gets on
without its prophet. There must be the forth-
teUer to speak to the best of us, and to speak
out the best of us. We are conscious that there
is more in us than has ever been brought out.
As the sculptor said about the impossible angel
in the stone, so the soul says of its better seU :
" AU I could never be
AU men ignored in me,
This was I worth to God."
And if one is " worth " this to God, then it is
God's purpose somehow to evoke the better
self. When Jesus spoke to Peter or Nico
demus or the lawyer, the listener heard a new
Voice challenging him. Why, indeed, should
the rich young ruler go away " much grieved "
unless he knew, by a process deeper than that
of logic, that the thing which Jesus said about
him was essentiaUy true ? " He spake as one
having authority, and not as do the scribes,"
confessed men who neither Uked Him nor fol
lowed Him.
Literature sparkles with recognition of the

204 The Method of The Master
prophetic office of Jesus. To Diderot Jesus
was " the unsurpassed Story." To Lecky He
was " the highest pattern of virtue." To
Pecant He was " holy before God, terrible to
devils." To Robert Owen He was the " un
approachable." Renan, whose most famous
volume was heralded as the bomb which
should destroy Christianity, confesses in that
same volume : " Whatever the surprises of the
future may be, nothing wiU ever transcend the
moral grandeur of the Lord Jesus Christ as it
shines and glows in the canonical Gospels."
John Stuart MiU, who could scarcely be ac
cused of undue leaning to orthodoxy, said:
" Even now " it is not " easy even for an un
believer to find a better translation of the rule
of virtue from the abstract into the concrete
than to endeavour so to live that Christ would
approve our Ufe." Gibbon pays glowing trib
ute to the "sublime simpUcity of His actions
and character."
But Jesus as prophet is not enough. If the
head needs a prophet, the heart needs a priest.
It rarely suffices to have a door of opportunity
opened before us : we want some one to shut
the door on our past. The cry for a redeemer
is as old as sin and as new as the latest wanton
ness. Let me refresh in memory the story

The Problem of Jesus 205
which Dr. Jowett tells of a ministerial friend
of his. To that Mend, the Rev. Chas. A. Berry,
in his study, came a caU to go and pray with a
dying woman. The minister was in his slip
pers, and indisposed to such a night visitation.
Moreover, he wondered what his congregation
would think to see him walking the streets late
at night with a shabbUy dressed girl. Finally,
however, he yielded to the daughter's persist
ence, and, after a half hour's walk, found him-
seU in a house of Ul-fame. Down-stairs were
drinking, profanity, shame. Up-stairs a woman
lay dying. Mr. Berry sat down, and for a time
talked of Jesus as the beautiful example:
praised Him as the world's greatest teacher
and prophet. And the dying woman looked
at him, bewUdered and helpless. " Mister,"
she said, "that's no example for the likes o'
me. I don't want an example : I'm a sinner ! "
" Jowett," said Mr. Berry, relating the inci- "
dent, " there I was face to face with a poor
soul dying, and had nothing to teU her. I had
no Gospel ; and I thought of what my mother
had taught me ; and I told the story of God's
love in Christ's dying for sinful men." " Now
you are getting at it," said the woman ; " that's
what I want. That's the story for me." It is
the story for innumerable hearts. It is pre-

206 The Method of The Master
eminently the story for the heart that needs a
priest. And lest one should fancy that old
crones, only, cry for a priest, hear again the
desperate word of Bronson Alcott, as he broke
from a gathering of the famous group to which
he belonged, " I want a rehgion with a redeemer
in it ! " To the sin-struck David, groaning,
" I have sinned ! " came Nathan's word : " The
Lord hath put away thy sin." Thus Nathan
became priest as well as prophet. But who
ever said what Nathan said, who ever did
what Nathan did, as did that High Priest, who,
as Paul says, was " touched with the feeling of
our infirmities."
Once more. If the head needs a prophet
and the heart needs a priest, the human wiU
needs a king. The greatest thing that ever
happens to a sick man in the hospital is not a
correct diagnosis of his case, nor yet the re
moval of the cause of his disease, but the
ability to walk out of the hospital a weU man.
Jesus comes to perform that miracle for the
souls of men. He fills the whole programme
of those who need prophet, priest and king.
To a cripple of old He said, " Arise, take up
thy bed and walk." To a sick woman in
Peter's home He gave His hand, " And the
fever left her, and she ministered unto them."

The Problem of Jesus 207
When He said to another, "Go and sin no
more," He gave that which was better than a
command : He gave power. Here, then, mod
ern psychology and Jesus are at one. Psy
chology says that the need of a bad man is a
good wUl. Jesus knows how to give that. The
gift of a new wUl is conversion. He recreates
us unto good works. He breathes into the
prodigal power to say : " I will arise and go
unto my father." Paul says that his trouble
was with his wUl. " The good that I would,
I do not : but the evU which I would not, that
I do." He needed a king for his wiU. And
this is what he found "through Jesus Christ
our Lord."

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