Chapter III: Part 3

Religion does not depend on uniformity of conceptions of the divine. It depends more upon universality of consciousness of the infinite and openness of mind and life to whatever we may feel and know, from any source or through any means whatsoever, of that life or energy which lies back of all life and energy, of that love and light which cheer and lighten every son of man.

Definitions determine nothing, but they do work great damage when minds capable of being stereotyped to them agree to impose those definitions on their fellows as final, authoritative, and essential to their welfare. The divine is neither infinite nor sublime when you can say, Here are His lineaments and He has no other likeness or appearance.

To the question, How shall we think of the divine? there can be but one answer--in higher, wider, deeper, nobler, purer ways than yesterday. The conception must be a developing one. A man's spiritual capacities develop as his inner vision becomes more keen. The soul takes wider flight, and in our deep thoughts we discover that which language cannot compass.

There are those who think they must be atheists because they cannot believe in the God of the Hebrews, the God of the Old Testament--a limited personality. But the genuine atheists are more likely to be those who are without a sense of the divine, because they have taken definitions and descriptions prepared by others instead of seeking truth for themselves.

We are but poor learners of those ancient teachers if we have not discovered that their greatest lesson to us is not truth, as they had found it, but the blessing of the persistent search after truth. To cherish as final past presentations of truth is to be false to its present possibilities.

We do not need to worry over definitions of the divine. We do need to cultivate the temper of mind and the sensitiveness of spirit that will save us from blindness to the higher facts of life, that will save us from the blasting whirlwind of materialism, with its sense of nothing but a soulless world of things.

We need to avoid the mind that shuts the divine up in some far off heaven to be reached only by formal telephony called prayer; that fails to see the infinite in all things--in sunlight and flower, in children's laughter, and in misery's wail, in factories and stores, as well as in churches. We need the mind that argues not about omnipresence, but in duty and delight cries, Always and everywhere, Thou art near.

THE GREAT INSPIRATION

Christianity is distinguished and dominated by the ideal of the life and character of Jesus of Nazareth; it is a philosophy and a system of individual and social ethics under the inspiration of a glowing ideal. No matter how greatly its people may differ on other points, all are agreed in recognizing in Jesus the fairest of the sons of men.

There never was a time when the thought of this life was more potent than it is to-day. Men think of Him as a fellow being, one who went about doing good, who looked out on life with the windows of His soul unsullied and who lived out ever the holiest and highest that came to Him.

The thought of such a one has become so real to men that they do not stop to argue about His existence, as once they did. If it was possible indisputably to disprove the historic Christ men still would cherish, as highly as ever, the ideal, the vision of such a life, and in their hearts would know that such a picture could only have been born of such a person.

This goodly, glorious man no longer is one who now sits on the throne of heaven. Men are not particularly concerned as to whether He is artistically glorified and perpetuated by some divine decree. He has crowned Himself in the glory of a pure and beneficent character; He has perpetuated Himself in human loves and admiration.

Because He once showed Himself as the friend of all, the pure, high souled friend of the down-trodden and the outcast, the strong, invigorating friend of the rich and successful, He to-day walks by many a man as His unseen friend, and in busy mart or office men feel the presence of a heavenly guest.

Once men made that life the centre of dispute; they sought to prove His divinity by His unlikeness to ordinary humanity. But the facts defeated them. This man whom men so learned to love that they became willing to die for Him was in all respects a man. His life is worth so much to us because He was so much like us.

It has come as a new revelation to the world that the supreme religious soul of the ages should be so tenderly, naturally human. We cry "Father!" with a new sense of relationship and fellowship when we see the likeness of the father in the face of such a son.

We are coming to believe that just what the great friend of mankind was so is the great father of us all to us all, that just as the Son of the most high moved amongst men seeking to help, cheering, comforting, loving, so is the eternal spirit moving in our world, going about doing good.

Once every effort of the theologian was bent to setting this majestic figure apart from mankind to secure Him sovereignty over us by separation from us. How different is that from the simple pictures drawn of Him, from the naturalness of His life, from the love which He had for homes and human friendships, from the life which earned the illuminating rebuke of being called a friend of sinners.

It is a good thing for us all often to remember that there has been such a life, that one born in poverty and unknown, far removed from centres of culture and wealth, living the hard life of a peasant, knowing all our temptations and weaknesses, yet should open His life so fully and completely to spiritual influences as to become to all the ages the greatest of all spiritual leaders.

What one has done another may do. What He has been we may be. He but shows the possibility of any life. He had no advantage over us; we know no disadvantages against which He did not have to strive. The divine heights have been scaled by human feet; His footprints beckon us on.

IX

Finding Foundations

_The Passing and Permanent_
_Facing the Facts_
_The Real Foundation_

_Things not right can never be religious._

_Bigotry puts blinders on the best of men._

_Submission is the first step to sovereignty._

_The principle of expediency expels all other principle._

_Quiet lives are often eloquent._

_The love of wealth steals wealth of love._

_It's the common virtues that make uncommon saints._

_Many a man is shouting his convictions to drown the voice of conscience._

_A little learning is dangerous if you are planning to get to heaven by degrees._

_When a man gets over anxious about the gnat it's time to hang on to the camel._

IX

THE PASSING AND PERMANENT

When the walls are being rebuilt it is easy to imagine that the foundations are being destroyed. Old creeds pass away, but truth remains; if they were true in their day they do but give place to the larger truth of the new day. We need to distinguish between the turmoil attendant to the process of building and the beauty of the new temple that arises.

The old folks hear the new truths and ask, where are the foundations gone? The young hear the discussion between the old and the new and ask, is there anything settled, anything worth believing? What are the permanent elements in religion on which the life may build while the things that are but temporary are adjusting themselves?

It would be the height of folly to assert that there is no change. Some say that we must believe precisely the same things as our fathers believed. To do so would be to be false to our fathers, for they refused to accept the traditions of their elders. The landmarks we leave behind once were far in front of the seekers after truth.

Truth never changes but our vision is ever enlarging. The road remains, but the traveller moves on. With the living every day has some new light. Creeds are crystallized statements of truth; truth is vital and cannot be contained in unchanging forms. Credulity blindly accepts yesterday's picture of truth; faith, with open eyes, seeks to-day's truth itself.

Skepticism is much less sinful than credulity. The sloth of the man who will not examine things, will not prove them, who prefers to buy his garments of truth ready made, results in what is worse than unbelief, and that is blind belief in the false. It is a religious duty to question every teaching, to prove all things.

How may we find those things that are certain? How may we discover the truth for our day, the truth upon which we may build? Surely there are some things fixed and certain, there is somewhere pole star and compass. How may we find that truth which belongs to our day and in which we may have the confidence that our fathers had in their truth?

The test of the vital truths is a practical one. Only those truths are vital which concern the present business of living in all its wide sweep.

It is a matter of indifference what we may think of the colour of angels' hair or the number of strings to their harps; it is a vastly different matter what we may believe as to moral obligations, human rights, and duties.

The test of creed is an ethical one. What things work out best in living, what are the ideals, doctrines, beliefs that make the noblest characters and the most useful citizens, the best sons, and daughters, and parents, and neighbours? What are the things that help me most in my life, the things that give me moral stimulus and bracing, the things that lead me to covet the best?

The way to find the truth is to do the truth; only the truth that we can do is worth discussing. If you will give yourself to the business of living the truth you have you soon will have the living truth for this new day.

Too many people are holding up as saving doctrines matters of philosophy and speculation, matters of childish curiosity, because it is easier to hold these things theoretically than to hold living truth practically. The truths that save men are the ones that change their characters; the great authorized and divine translation of the Bible is its translation into present day lofty living.

Build your life on the belief in goodness, in eternal, infinite goodness as the order of the universe, on the superiority of love to hatred, on the final victory of love and goodness, on the ideal of this great human family of ours that shall come to live in unity and brotherliness, and so fulfill the will of the infinite father of all. These things work well.

FACING THE FACTS

This is the age of the dominance of science. When a man asks, What shall I believe? only one answer can be returned: Believe the things that are. An age now past found it easy to believe that it believed what it was told, even the things that it knew were not so. But to-day at least has the merit of finding no merit in that form of self-deception.

The passion for absolute truth and rightness is one of the noblest that can spring up in any breast; it is a ripe fruit of religion. The scientist, by his devotion to exact facts, to pure truth, is the religious man of our day, and the schools become religious educators in their power to instill a primary love for truth and to lift up ideals of exactness and equity.

When we translate religion into terms of life, into actuality as contrasted with imagination, we begin to discover the necessity for foundations deeper than legend or romance. So long as a man's religion consisted in what he might picture in glowing colours of imagination on the canvas of fancy about his past or future he did not need to take his designs from facts.

But when religion becomes the science of right living, the process of securing right social relationships and character as the expression of ideal personal and individual character, it is evident that in such a work religion must proceed on ascertained, indisputable verities.

We may be satisfied with myths as to the ordering of the first family, and we may leave to the play of fancy the specifications of an ideal heaven; but when we begin to order our own families and adjust our social and civic affairs we are compelled to wait for principles based on facts, for truth. Religion thus becomes a science.

Much eloquence was spilled over the conflict between religion and science. It was only a conflict between the old religion and its new form, between the gray dawn and the growing day. Our fathers were not wilfully false, holding on to darkness when the light came; but they so long had held sacred the pictures seen in twilight they were loath to give them up for those of the full day's printing.

The most damaging infidelity is the lack of faith in truth, the fear that it might not be safe to allow all the facts to be known. He who in the name of religion seeks to prevent our seeing and accepting the full facts is religion's greatest foe. Only the full truth can set us fully free, intellectually, spiritually, morally.

Why should we fear the light of investigation on the things of religion? There is more sacredness in simple truth than in secrecy. It were better to be lost forever seeking truth than saved by sophistry. How foolish to attempt to adjust our lives by laws built out of speculation, to attempt to steer by a compass when there is no pole of truth?

In to-day's changing tides of thought, when the old faiths seem slipping away, when we wonder why we have lost the simple faith of our own youth or our father's, looking for some firm ground for our feet, we do well to set them down on nothing but facts, to discriminate among the sands of time and the alluvial deposits of tradition till we find the rock of truth.

But facing the facts we find everywhere one writ large, over all one great principle of unchanging law, one great purpose moving through all nature and all history, and what we once only dared to hope and dream, that back of all there throbs infinite love and there rules infinite wisdom, now is attested by the impressive array of the witnesses of science.

Truth always is safe. The holiest error must be born of hell. We can make no mistake in refusing to go beyond truth, and we will find that she leads to the ordering of life according to eternal laws, to the doing of duties and finding of sweet joys as old as the hills and as unchanging; she will lead in the paths of rightness.

Some day our race will know all the alphabet of nature and be able to read the story of the unchanging goodness; some day we shall comprehend the wavering handwriting of history; some day we shall catch the harmony of love and law; we shall know the full truth that is religion; shall know things as they are and be what we should be.

THE REAL FOUNDATION

A good many thousand sermons have been preached on the parable of the houses built on sand and on rock, probably nearly all of them with the intent to prove that the way to build the life on a rock foundation is to pass through the experience known as conversion, obtain saving faith and join the church. This is typical of a popular way of interpreting the scriptures: First, determine what you wish them to mean and then make them mean that. The purpose being to persuade people to join the church, then by hook or crook that duty must be discovered in every divine precept.

But this is simply to ignore the plain words of the great Teacher. It would be impossible to clarify His statement: "If any man hears and does the things I have been teaching he is like one who builds on a rock." One thing marks the rock founded life, the doing of Christly deeds. The course of conduct, the kind of character He has just outlined in the sermon on the mount gives the established staple character.

The enduring life is not built on dreams. Many people think that their lives are rock founded because they have a nebulous admiration for the moral teachings of Jesus. On the whole they admire the sermon on the mount; having taken the trouble to say as much as this they sit back with the comfortable feeling that they have set themselves right with the universe, that the Almighty will be delighted with their indorsement.

One of the most dangerous hypocrites is the easy-going, thoughtless being who fancies that the indorsement of a duty is equivalent to the doing of it. He evaporates his convictions into compliments instead of crystallizing them into conduct. So far from being built on a rock he floats around like a wisp of hay in a high wind. A butterfly might better hope to drill and quarry out a foundation than he. Besides this, his hypocritical praise of right precepts makes them only offensive to those who might desire to practice them.

Others imagine that an intellectual assent to certain statements concerning the church or the Bible or Jesus is sufficient to fix the life in stability. But the great Teacher does not place the emphasis so much on what men may think of His character or mission, nor even on their honest opinions on the theories of the past and the future, which have delighted mental gymnasts since the world was young, to Him the great differentiating fact touches those dynamic convictions that are determining your conduct this day.

He places conduct before creed. He long ago took that method of teaching which modern pedagogy approves. He taught religion by the manual method. Instead of saying, as theologians do, first comprehend these doctrines and then you will be able to do them, He says, first do these things, practice My precepts, and they will ere long become plain to you. Men learn religion by doing. Begin to do the right and you will get the reason; get the rule through the example. Deeds are the solvents of doctrines.

The house of life is built differently from any other; we get the plans by erecting the structure. In the realm of character it is houses rather than architecture we need. Build but one hour's conduct squarely on the plain, cogent teachings of the man of Nazareth and you will serve the world better than if you gave a lifetime to the explanation of His words.

Doctrines are but teachings intended to be done into deeds. Doing them you gain a larger peace of mind and sense of stability of life than in any other way. If you want the equilibrium of faith you will find it by simply laying life's daily details on the plain foundation of His principles. Nothing could be plainer; there are no hair-splitting metaphysics, no subtle questions of policy here; do these things and the heart finds calm, the life certitude, the soul satisfaction.

X

The Passion for Perfection

_The Great Search_
_The Hunger of the Ages_
_The Sole Satisfaction_

_Pain is the parent of power._

_Marking time leaves no mark on time._

_The proof of love is loving the unlovely._

_Truth never is found by twisting the facts._

_Wings come not to those who refuse to walk._

_An ideal usually is what we want the other man to be._

_There is no righteousness without some self-respect._

_You cannot lead men to the divine by crawling in the dust._

_The real saints have no time to write their autobiographies._

_When a man boils over quickly you soon find out what is in him._

_True piety simply is the prosperity of the eternal things in a man._

_The world never will be won from the love of evil until we make the good lovely._

X

THE GREAT SEARCH

The cry, "How may I be right?" is the cry of the ages. Human history is the record of our attempt to answer it. Man is naturally a truth seeker, and this is the search of all truly great souls. The enduring monuments of literature are those that have in some measure answered this question. All things that have been worth while have helped us to know and to realize the right. Health, happiness, freedom, morality, all are but parts of the right; all are but sections of the sublime whole for which man ever seeks. The search manifests itself in different ways; it may be as science, the passion for the knowledge of the right relations of things; as justice, for right relations amongst men; as philosophy, as ethics, as religion. Back of all our life is the instinct of progress; we push towards the perfect. And perfection we now know rests not in more things but in bringing all the things that are into right relations with one another.

The idea that any man can be right regardless of others we scout as absurd. The ideal civilization we work for here, even the heaven we long for, is simply a condition of living where the things that separate, despoil, and introduce discord are no more. The hope of the race is to be in right relations with all things. All the great religions are as the footprints of peoples who have sought the truth that would lead them to be right and just with one another, with the world, and with the great unseen powers behind all being. Our universal sense of wrongness is but part of our passion for rightness.

The sense of imperfection and the desire for improvement have marked all religions that have influenced men. In the Jew this desire for righteousness was supreme. Job is but a type. Coming to himself amongst the ruin of all the things he counted most precious, he forgets their loss in his desire to solve the great problem, What is right and how may I reach it? Somewhere he knows there is a solution to all the riddles of his friends and the questions of his own heart. An orderly universe is not crowned by a being whose life must ever remain an unsolved riddle. Men are not adrift in a fog with no hope of taking bearings. If men have marked the natural world with lines of latitude and longitude for the guidance of its travellers, the moral world is not without its markings.

Job's very question contains the only answer that has ever satisfied man. God Himself is the great meridian of all morality. From Him we may measure all relationships and get them right. That is the essential message of the Bible; it strikes that first of all in "In the beginning God----" Every life is right in the measure that it adjusts itself to the unvarying will; amongst the nations they have the kingdom who do His will. The world has made progress in precisely the proportion that this will has been realized. The promise of the present is that this great standard, this universal law by which all may find the right, has been made known to all through a life. One of our own has set forth God. One has lived who has shown us how to live. For every problem there is now an example of its solution. For every difficulty there is something better far than a declaration of duty; there is the great Doer of the deed. He has come near to man that men might come near to one another. He reveals the right.

Yet we must not allow His perfection to make Him unapproachable. He is only an example as long as His example is attainable. His divinity does not depend on His distance from us but on the degree in which He lifts us, inspires us towards the height He has gained.

THE HUNGER OF THE AGES

"Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled," is the central beatitude; in a measure it embraces all the others, for every virtue they inculcate is included in righteousness. But it is often rejected as impracticable because fanciful teachers who substitute subtle definitions for simple duties have twisted its plain words until righteousness is made something so unreasonable as to be repulsive to a right mind. As a matter of fact, it means no more than rightness; the hunger and thirst for righteousness is but the earnest, supreme desire and endeavour to be right and to do right at all times, the appetite for the right.

Theological righteousness may mean some strange imputed quality laid on a man like a cloak to cover his real condition or a bill of health given to a sick man. But men who live next to real things care nothing one way or the other for theoretical rightness; they want the real article. And a right man will not be satisfied to have even the Most High think of him as being perfectly right when he knows he falls far short of it. He would rather be the faltering pursuer of actual rightness than the possessor of a hypothetical, ascribed perfection.

The great Teacher cares nothing about imaginary virtues; He praises those who ardently seek the real ones. He knows that in the market of character cash alone is currency; here you cannot draw checks on some other person's deposits. To Him it is better by far to die facing the right than to live in smug content with borrowed merits. This world will never be content with a gospel that offers only vicarious virtues; at its heart it knows too well its need of the genuine usable ones; it has at least the dormant faculties of an appetite for rightness.

And all this world story is but a record of the struggle for rightness. All human progress is but its fruitage. In every age there have been glorious souls who have made this passion a thing that glowed in their lives and became a light to their day. In every man the divine discontent that divides him from the animal is the sign of this desire in some form; it shows man seeking to find more perfect, more nearly right relations with the things about him. As the things about him come to include God and heaven and things unseen so will his search for rightness become wider and deeper and more spiritual. Every form of spiritual aspiration, every religion, no matter how uncouth and strange, is still the soul of man seeking right relations to the infinite.

What a glorious thing is this passion for the right; what visions it has seen, what strength it has given to their realization. It is the great tide that, moving restless and resistless in our bosoms, has carried us on towards God. We cannot but believe it is born of him. It does not originate in him, for it disturbs his peace, it stirs him from sloth, it spurs him to new and often unwelcome endeavours. It ever holds before him the shining possibility of a perfect being in a perfect world.

No wonder Christ used the figure of hunger and thirst. Literal appetites have been the motives back of the world's struggle for physical rightness; yet these cravings have not been more general or more forceful than those of the soul. But for hunger and thirst man would have lived in perfect content with the form and facts of life as he found them; progress, all that we call civilization, would not have been.

Man is happy in proportion as necessity compels him to heed these cravings. So is it in the moral world; the struggle has been our salvation. To cease to strive for rightness is to cease to live. Individually and nationally they are happy who accept the rigorous climate of lofty ethical ideals, who are not content to take life as they find it, but who seek to cultivate flowers and fruits of paradise on the sterile, rocky soil of the human heart. This is the life that Jesus shows, the life that seeks and finds the truth, that with passionate ardour seeks right relations both with His fellows and with His Father. Out of the fullness of experience, in the midst of His own struggle He encourages all who strive; they shall be satisfied. No ideal, no noble passion, no glorious sacrifice, no honest endeavour for the right was ever in vain; the soul finds itself in seeking the supreme good.

THE SOLE SATISFACTION

Through the ages men have waited for voices to speak from out the great unknown. Answering to this universal longing for larger light, to this search for truth, there has been the conviction that, where our own scanty knowledge ended, there something akin to revelation would give us light. We have been listening for voices that would speak with an authority transcending that given to our fellows.

Cold reason may mock at revelation, but the soul struggling in darkness, baffled by its problems, lost in the night, still looks up and hopes. For what awaits us but despair if the mysteries of the universe are forever sealed, our questions forever unanswered, and no higher appeal to be known than that to our own selfish interests? It is not strange that men have heeded those who, though often mistaken or but impostors, have cried, "Thus saith the Lord!"

It would be strange if in a world of spirits there might be no communication of spirit. If the fairest thought of our era is that which was given us when man was taught to think of the omnipotent as father, it would be strange if there should be no way by which such a father might speak to his children. Such a world would contradict all our best instincts. Such a world would mean that man was better than his maker.

The divine voice speaks, but we too often listen in the wrong direction. It falls not from the skies; it comes not in strange, unusual ways of visions and portents. But it is ever speaking through the things of daily life; it is ever revealing truth and beauty to the inner ear, for it comes not from without but springs up within; heard by the heart rather than by the ear.

The best things have not dropped down; they have grown up. Life is not from without, but from within. God speaks not in thunders, but in the hopes and the longings of hearts. Even the voice we hear in the sighings of the wind or the message we read in the rays of setting sun must be in us before it means aught to us.

The ten commandments owe their force not to any writing on stone but to their writing on our hearts; to them the soul of man answers affirmatively. The only moral code we can follow is that which speaks with the authority of a conscience convicted. That does not mean that man is his own God, nor that he knows no law higher than himself; it does mean that by the laws of spiritual development the law is being written on every heart.

Every real revelation is a divine revelation, since all truth is divine. Once we thought the scientist the enemy of religion; now we know that whenever science lays bare one of the facts of the universe we do but look on what the finger of the Infinite has written. When religion fights truth simply because truth speaks an unfamiliar tongue or fails to respect her traditions, she is fighting against God Himself.

Our need is not some strange, awe-inspiring voice that shall break the silence of the midnight sky; our need is an ear trained to hear, a spirit to understand and reverence the sublime voices that are ever speaking in our world, the voices of the beauty of nature, the joy of living, the stories of every-day divine heroism, the forces that are making a new world to-day as truly as ever one was made long ago.

The life of our day has not less of the divine than the life of long ago; but the message is harder to read; it is for an educated race; it is spiritual rather than merely material; it is from within; it is found in every good impulse, in every outgoing sympathy, in the kindling of eye as friend greets friend, in the good that men are doing, in the toleration that is becoming wider, the love stronger between man and man.

God speaks to men now as He spoke to Moses or to David, though the manner may have changed. But the poor in spirit, those with whom pride of the past has not served to make them unwilling to learn, these hear the voice; the pure in heart see Him; the seekers after truth find Him, and to all He comes in the thrilling moment or in the quiet hour when the voice of the heart makes itself heard.

XI

The Price of Success

_The Law of Selection_
_The Fallacy of Negation_
_The Secret of All_

_No life is lost that is lived for love._

_The only wealth you can possess is that you have in the heart._

_Love never knows hardship, even when it meets it._

_When men pray for harvest they often get a plow._

_A man's holiness is to be measured by the happiness he creates._

_The only way to reach heaven is by attempting to realize heaven now._

_Whatever is saved by selfishness is lost to the true self._

_One of the worst offenses against humanity is the pretense of divinity._

_Weapons that fly off the handle have little effect on the walls of sin._

_Many a man thinks that taking a lease on a front pew gives him a freehold on a corner lot in heaven._

_Success is not in an endeavour to do a great things but in repeated endeavours to do greater things._

XI

THE LAW OF SELECTION

Jesus said, "If thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee," but this age finds it hard to accept that saying. It asks, If we are to throw life away why should it have been given to us? Why this selfhood with its passions, its surging desires, its great longing to be untrammelled and free if all is to be restrained and the passions are to be perpetually denied? If religion means, as some plainly have said, doing the things you don't want to do and leaving undone those you desire, then it is a mockery, a contradiction of our lives and natures.

Therefore there exists another philosophy which says, boldly: Live out all that is in you; do all the things you want to do; your passions in themselves are sufficient justification for their gratification. They say man is free; therefore, let him realize himself by giving free and full expression to every thought, inclination, appetite, and possibility within him.

When the average man puts the two philosophies in contrast he is likely to conclude that the path of self-denial, of stern repression, is the mistaken one; for, he will say, does it not contradict nature?--does it not involve the repression of natural instincts and make all life a perpetual fight against ourselves, a waste of forces, instead of, as it should be, a plan by which a man might find success through the realization of the best in himself?

But let another test be put to this philosophy--the test of life. How does it work out? What are the best lives, the lives that are richest and that have most enriched the world? Are they those that have given free rein to every fancy, that have nurtured and brought to fruitage every growth of the heart's garden, whether it be thistle, brier, or poison root, or fair, nutritious product? Are they those that have given the tiger and the beast of prey free and full range of the life?

There is striking unanimity in the answer. The rich and the enriching lives have been those that have come by the path of the cross; they have learned repression, practiced denial, and suffered death. In every sphere the lights that have illumined the way of man's advance have not been the dancing flames of selfish, sensual passion but the consuming of the bodies of the martyrs and heroes, either burning in their passion for others or denying and losing all rather than denying truth and light.

The law runs through all; if you would have a perfect flower you must deny existence to many weeds, you must repress the rank growth, you must pluck off many a leaf and nip many a bud that the one may come to the fullness of its beauty. Through the grain of character goes the wise husbandman, and death is in his hand--the death of the less worthy, the harmful, and the enemy that life may abound yet more and more in that which is worthy.

In those fields where all things grow in their own way the weeds become the standard for all; license brings all down to the level of the lowest. But life is not license--it is choice, selection, sacrifice, death. Pain is the only price at which perfection may be purchased. Self-realization comes not by permitting all things to have their way but by subjecting all parts to the securing of that high end.

It is but cowardice that cries for the so-called natural outworking of everything within man; it seeks to save the labour of weeding, the pain of cutting here and pruning there. It asks only to be left alone. But that way lies the deepest pain of all, the pain of a life where there is nothing but tangles of weeds--no flowers, no capacities for joy, no power to will, no eye to see the good and true and beautiful.

No; the great Teacher was right when He called for self-denial and self-victory. He only is great, he alone has found life who has learned to bring all his parts and faculties into service, who brings all his body and self into subjection that all may be keen and well kept tools in the work he is doing as a servant of his brothers and his age. This service gives the supreme and sufficient motive for the suppression and elimination of all things that might hinder; the development of the best self for the best service by means of the cutting off of anything that might hinder or thwart the high and holy service purposes of a life.

THE FALLACY OF NEGATION

The ancient law that nature abhors a vacuum holds true in the moral realm. The heart of man is never long empty. And yet the whole scheme of modern ecclesiastical regulation of life is built on the plan of making a man holy by emptying him of all evil and stopping there, leaving a negative condition, without a thought of the necessity of filling the void.

So long have we been trained in this that we are all a good deal more concerned about the things we ought not to do than about the things we ought to do. We spend our days nipping off the buds of evil inclinations, pulling up the weeds of evil habits, wondering how it happens they multiply so fast, forgetting altogether the wiser plan we would adopt with weeds and briers in our gardens.

There are many who still think of the pious man as one who succeeds in accomplishing the largest number of repressions in his life, the ideal being the colourless life, never doing a thing that is wrong or subject to criticism. The energy of many a life is being spent in a campaign against a certain list of proscribed deeds. Blessed is the man--according to their beatitudes--who has the largest number of things he does not do.

But if rightness is abstinence from evil, then a lamp-post must always be better than a man, for it justly can lay claim to all the negative virtues. What an easy way of life is this, simply to find out the things we know other people like to do and to determine that if we only can leave them undone we are holy in the sight of heaven.

But not only is this a way of folly, it is a way of positive harm, a way fatal at last to the true life. To do no more than to turn out one set of devils only is to invite other and worse devils into the heart. To seek emptiness only is to invite yet more iniquity. An empty heart is as dangerous as an empty hour.

Emptiness is not holiness, it is idiocy. There cannot be an empty heart. To take a bad thing away from a man gives an opportunity for a worse thing to enter unless you simply choke the bad by implanting the good. Some of the most dangerous people are those who feel pious because they can say, We never did any harm.

Religion often has come to mean only a multitude of repressive regulations, apparently a scheme for making others abstain from those things for which we have no appetite. Little wonder that children feel only repulsion for a church which seems to take delight in finding impiety in every natural pleasure; that men turn from a path which, according to its prospectus, promises nothing but pain, privation, and emptiness.

We do not object to the pain and privation provided they have their purpose. But all nature objects to a course of life that maims, pinches, and restricts without corresponding and compensating development and liberty somewhere. We fight against every law of life and court the ways of death so long as we endeavour to develop character by putting it into bandages, leading strings, and legal restrictions.

There is evil to be eliminated; there are thousands of things we ought not to do. But the best way to get rid of the tares is to sow good wheat in abundance. The way to avoid the things we ought not to do is to do the things that ought to be done. The empty life is a standing invitation to temptation; the busy man seldom finds the devil's card left at his door.

Live the life above the things you would overcome. It never has been found necessary to pass a law prohibiting the president from playing marbles; larger interests fill his life so that these things do not even occur to him. Give a man a great work to do and you will save him from a thousand temptations to do small and unworthy things. Do not allow the modern conception of religion as gloom and denial to keep you from that which is your right as a spiritual being, the strength, joy and beauty of the divine life.

Holiness of life is not in innocence of evil but in positive forcefulness for good; not in doing as little harm as we can, but in filling the whole life with worthy, helpful, uplifting deeds. The good life not only has no debts--it has large assets, deep and lasting value; it enriches all life. It offers to the world not barren land claiming the virtue of freedom from the thorn and the brier, it crowns all with the abundance and glory of fir and myrtle.

THE SECRET OF ALL

The words hold a large place in every alert life: Happiness, Health and Heart; some may put them Success, Strength and the Soul. It is easy to recognize the importance of the first two; that of the third is more remote. Some have imagined that religion emphasizes the last alone and ignores the other two.

Evidently it is a legitimate thing for the Christian to pray for prosperity; and it is right for him to try to answer his own prayers. Poverty is no proof of piety. Nothing about God is or can be poverty-stricken. He gives us a rich and glorious world, prolific in its resources; its life is rich and prosperous. Nature is running over, fairly rioting in splendour and wealth. The Creator has given man this garden of glory that he might enjoy it. It is a sin not to enter into its possession; he is dead already who does not desire prosperity, who no longer seeks success in life. It is an easy matter for the man who has made an all around failure to talk about the dispensations of Providence and the compensations of the future. Prosperity is always a sin to the man who lacks the pluck to secure it.

Yet many who seem to have failed may have succeeded best of all. Prosperity often comes in strange packages; it may even be labelled Adversity. Not all will succeed according to popular standards. Many will be more fortunate; they will win the riches of influence, friendship, family, thought, knowledge, love, character. It is not the things we have that make us rich; it is the amount of life we are capable of enjoying. The soul determines prosperity. It is the energizing spirit of man, stirring him out of the ignoble dust, creating the desire for more of the things of life and then for more of life itself. It determines values. It has a way of reversing things so that one man gets more out of a dollar book than another gets out of a million dollar bond. It alone gives appetite and appreciation, and, without these, though there may be many possessions, there is no prosperity.

What is true of prosperity is true also of health. Happily the days are gone when sickness passed for saintliness. No longer is red blood counted a foe of righteousness. We are getting back to the simpler, earlier thinking. It is not only right to seek health; it is wrong not to. The haggard face no longer indicates the holy heart; it is likely to evidence the opposite. We are getting over the notion that God is glorified by ruining the fair temple He has given us. Men no longer count on being beautiful angels in the skies because they have looked like walking sepulchres on our streets. It is an imperfect holiness that does not have health. Health, that is physical prosperity, is a duty.

And here, also, the soul is central. The clean heart, pure thoughts, controlled appetites, aspiring hopes, these make health. Evil temper, lust, worry, care, envy, these are the soul processes that disturb the life and destroy health. Happiness is health, and happiness is wholly of the heart. The soul is but the sum of all the things within, the force that moves all things in life; if within the man looks up, then he lives up; if the soul droops, he decays. What you are within determines what you are without; he who is poor in heart, in this inner life, will be poor in prosperity and weak in health, no matter how much he possesses. But he who with his soul takes in the world of beauty, of love, of joy, who reaches out to heaven and God, all these things are his and he is rich and strong indeed.

XII

Divine Service

_The Ideal Service_
_The Orthodox Service_
_The Heavenly Service_

_Kindness is the evidence of kingliness._

_The surest way to impoverish your heart is to hoard up your love._

_A really smart man will refrain from saying things that smart._

_Many a prayer for vision ought to be changed to a petition for vertebra._

_The damning doubts are those that deter us from good deeds._

_The leaders of men are not the ones who are trying to get ahead of their fellows._

_Folks who are too good for anything are good for nothing._

_It's hard to steer a straight course if your conscience is in your pants pocket._

_You do not have much faith in your Father unless you have some in His family._

_No man can have a place in the kingdom of heaven who is complacent to the ills of earth._

XII

THE IDEAL SERVICE

Never was the greatest of all greater than when He put about Him the badge of the servant. His example has made the towel, the apron, the badge of true honour. Nothing could have surprised those men who were quarrelling over their precedence more than that their great Master should stoop to perform this menial service of washing their feet. Like many who call themselves His to-day they strove over chief seats, honours, titles, and dignities. They were seeking the chief places and by their strife showing themselves fit only for the lowest. Nowhere is the sense of honour more easily slain than in the search for honours.

The only dignity that really adorns a man is that which comes without his demanding it. How often have the servants of the meek and lowly Jesus turned the world away from Him by their examples of vanity, greed, lust for power, their pomp and pride of self-glory. They who were sent to be the shepherds of men have fleeced the flock for their own adorning and then fought amongst themselves to see who should wear the choicest robes. History has shown that they were wrong and their Master was right. The greater their greedy ambition the greater their shame; the higher the place they have claimed the lower has been that which the voice of humanity has awarded them.

On the other hand there shine forth those who have followed Him in lowly service; theirs is the honour to-day. Because He took upon Him the form of a servant then now is the kingdom and the power and the glory His.

So it has always been, sovereignty comes by way of service; heaven and earth unite in honouring those who have not scorned the humble place of helpfulness. John says that it was because Jesus was conscious of His divine origin and His glorious destiny that He took the towel and did the work of the slave. Only those who realize their true greatness can ignore the littleness of man's petty dignities, can lose all sense of stooping, of condescension when they serve others, and so can be of service to mankind. A man proves that he is the son of a heavenly Father by his service for his least brother. When that dignity, heaven born, is in a man's heart there is nothing in the dirt he may touch by deeds of kindness that can defile him; contact does not contaminate.

Love never thinks of any of its services as loathsome. That from which a superficial dignity would revolt love does with rejoicing. It thinks nothing of the honour or the dishonour, but only of the helpfulness it may render. It is not asking whether men are approving or whether promotion is coming. It needs no promotion or approval; the work itself is the highest reward; the service elevates to the loftiest of all positions.

The world's sovereigns are its servants. He makes an alliance with God who helps a fellow man. Work is that by which the Creator has lifted man above the creatures of the field, and the work that sacrifices that it may serve is that by which God lifts man to Himself. The heavenly gate may be shut to robes and miters, epaulettes and crowns; but it shall be open wide to that great throng who bear the stains of toil, who have served their fellows, who wear the apron of sacrificing service; and the Son of the carpenter shall lead them in.

This is a working world; its Maker is pictured as a worker; there is no better evidence of religion than willingness to serve. Work determines a man's worth to the world. And religion must be known by the things it does, and not, as many have fondly supposed, by the dreams it has.

THE ORTHODOX SERVICE

This is a working world, with no place for the idler, whether he be high or low, rich or poor. The measure of a man is the service he renders humanity. Actions are measured by the same rule. The value of religion to life, its right to time and place, is measured by this, Does it help or inspire men to service, does it increase the quantity or improve the quality of the work that they do for their world?