Chapter IV: Part 4

Men rightly ignore the piety that satisfies itself with platitudes on the duties of others, or with philosophical speculations on problems which, if they were accurately solved, would contribute nothing either to our peace, our possessions, or our personal characters. Yet, how many imagine that they are profoundly pious because they cherish properly indorsed opinions, duly certified as to their antiquity.

They who profess to follow the Man of Nazareth cannot do it by sitting in their pews or kneeling at their altars; they cannot do it by dreaming of a place of bliss or picturing one of torment. One of the first lessons He gives His disciples is that it is not he that speaketh the word, but he that doeth the will, who is pleasing to God.

Nor do men do His will in any important or complete sense by going to church or serving in its meetings or on its committees. When a man is ordained to divine orders, that is, to give himself wholly to do the will and work of the Most High, it is said that he becomes a minister. If "minister" means anything at all it means servant, one who works for others, who ministers to them. The Master spoke of Himself as being among men as one who served them. The only orthodox service is the service of humanity.

This is religion, such a consciousness of the reality of the Infinite Spirit that you will steadily do the things that that spirit of love is doing in this world, ministering to men, binding up the broken in heart, lifting the lame, and leading the wandering, feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, bringing light and love and cheer to those that sit in darkness, you will become feet and fingers to God.

One does not need to wait for a special garb to do this religious work; one does not need to wait for formal ordination; whoever loves men already is divinely ordained to serve them. One does not need to wait for a church or a special organization; the sufficient motive is deep, sacrificing love; the method will be just what the Master's was, to go where men are and help them.

After all, what this world needs is not so much that men shall go to their fellows with money, with clothes, or even with employment; it needs that they shall just go to them. The good mixer, who mingles with men, who knows how they live, and what they think, how they suffer, and what they feel, if, going amongst them, he carries a clean heart, a love for his fellows, a firm faith in heaven, and hope for men, is doing them more good by his presence than he who may send carloads of goods.

Men did not need that Jesus should wear a label saying that the Most High was with Him; the more He mingled with men, the more clearly they saw He belonged to God. What He was willing to do for them showed that they, too, were the children of the Most High. If any man would have that infinite presence with him, if he desires the deep sense of the spiritual, let him seek it not in closet or convent, but in the touch of hand and in the sight of the face of friend and fellow being.

Many of us are worried at times because our lives seem wasted in doing little things; we would become immortal by saving our powers for some great deed. We need to remember Him whom the world most easily remembers and most highly honours, the Man of Nazareth, whose life was spent in trivial services, doing the next thing that came to hand, helping ordinary people in every-day needs. Yet God was with Him, as He ever is with those who love their fellows in sincere service.

THE HEAVENLY SERVICE

It seems easy to see something peculiarly holy, something deeply religious in the occupations and acts of the priesthood or the ministry. But thinking of these as religious and of such service as divine we fall into the habit of thinking that they alone, in all the world of action, are divine. We set on one side of life the religious service limited to these formal acts and on the other side what we call the secular life and service.

We have sacred days, sacred deeds, sacred callings, religious services; all separate from the rest of life, belonging in a department, a pigeon-hole, by themselves. Whatever is not of these is of the world, worldly, secular, lacking in the peculiar aroma of sanctity that attaches to the church or the profession of religion.

There are many who desire to do some religious work; who fain would engage in divine service. There is in almost every breast a desire to do something high and holy, something that is not necessary, utilitarian, with some other motive than bread-winning. But there seems to be no opportunity; such deeds are supposed to belong to special callings; one must be ordained to do divine service.

The truth is, divine service is the duty and high privilege of every human being; we all are divinely called to the ministry; the service of God and humanity belongs to us all. We must not wait for ordaining hands nor ecclesiastical robes nor for the environment of official sanctity. Every impulse to do good, to show human love, and do loving service is a commission from high heaven.

The good Master invites men and women to His kind of service, the highest and holiest known to all the ages. He never was separated to a clerical calling; He did not wait for an ordaining council nor did He confine His divine service to prayer and praise or to the activities of the church ritual. His divine service was the service of the sons of men, the going about doing good.

Heavenly work is not work for some far off heaven; it is the work of making this present earth like heaven. The work of God is not working for an absent deity; it is doing the work that the God of all love would do in this world; it is being feet and fingers, voice and lips to the great Spirit who is over and in us all. It is making that spirit of love real, actual, concrete to our fellows.

The holiest work in this world may be done in the humblest places; the most divine service may not be in the cathedral but in the cottage; the angels may pass by the intoning choir to listen to a mother's crooning cradle song or to watch the patient service, the loving kindness shown in washing the faces or wiping away the tears of dirty and destitute children.

The holy service which will fill your heart with joy and give you the unfading crown of eternity, never will be done if you are waiting for some ecclesiastical uniform to do it in. Whatever is done in the spirit of the infinite love, in the spirit of the great Master, that truly is divine and glorious.

It is the good work that is glorious. It is a thing more truly divine to do well your daily duty, to put out good, honest work, than it is to wear a clerical garb or perform professional religious duties. The honour, the worthiness, the glory of your work may be measured by the spirit in which it is done and by its helpfulness and worth to the world.

All life becomes glorious as we see that even in the least of our daily tasks we may be doing the will of God, that it may be just as necessary a part of the divine service that I should serve at a desk, a counter, or a machine, should sweep a room or tend a child as that another should preach or pray. For the great Master of all who knows all our work, measures it all, not as we do; He sees the glory of the cup of cold water and the divinity of the commonplace.

XIII

Our Father and Our Fellows

_The Primary Reconciliation_
_Faith in Our Fellows_
_The Law of Forgiveness_

_Sorrow is sympathy's school._

_Love makes the heaviest load seem light._

_To be willing to be saved alone is to be lost._

_The truly godly see something divine in all._

_Your appreciation may be another's inspiration._

_Kindness is the sign of divine kinship._

_You cannot knit the souls of men with soft sawder._

_You cannot be a leader and lose sight of those who are to be led._

_The shortness of the day excuses no man from greatness of endeavour._

_When a man thinks of nothing but his sins and failures he will have nothing else to think of._

_Lots of people who talk of their lives as blue are only colour blind, they either are green or yellow._

_He is only shortsighted who pronounces the world bad after looking in his own heart._

_Many a man is waiting for an inspiration who would find success at once if he was not so afraid of a little perspiration._

XIII

THE PRIMARY RECONCILIATION

Men in the days of the great Teacher were as we are to-day, prone to compound for the neglect of duties near at hand by the adoration of spiritual delights far off. They talked about getting right with God while they continued to do wrong to men. The problem of the hypocrite who is so thrilled with the delights of heaven that he scorns earthly duties and decencies is not a new one.

How easy it is to substitute syllogisms for service, to think that we do our duty by describing it, so to exhaust oneself in pleasant and seductive dreams of a distant heaven that we have no power left to apply to the problems of a needy present-day world.

The mockery of religion to-day is that men and women are going to the churches, singing themselves into ecstatic complacency and imaginary harmony with their God while their greed is crushing the hearts of the helpless and they are blinding themselves to the world's gloom and pain that unhindered they may enjoy spiritual delights.

Things cannot be right in our relations to the Father of spirits until they are made right in our relations with our brothers in the flesh. In Christianity social righteousness is basic to spiritual blessing. The ideal kingdom waits for ideal conditions and relations amongst its subjects.

The way to the Father lies through the brother. If you would learn to love God--and how indefinite and idealistic that seems to most of us--the lesson is simple, first learn to love His other children, especially the helpless, needy, and wronged. Delights high and spiritual always will be remote until duties near at hand are done.

The revival we most of all need to-day is a revival of the social conscience, the recognition of the fact that we can offer no gift acceptable, in the temple of worship or the place of prayer, until we have washed our hands from the blood of our fellows, that we can pay nothing to God until we have in earnest set about paying our debts to men.

Anxious, perhaps, to claim our rights as children of the Father in heaven, we have forgotten that that title is promised to the peacemakers. What avail is it to pray, Thy kingdom come, if we block its advent by cherishing enmity in our hearts? What use is it to carry hearts torn with malice, souls sunken in selfishness, and spirits torn with pride and covetousness to the place that belongs to the meek and lowly?

Many a man is going to church and coming away empty in heart; perhaps he has given up any hope of finding solace in religion, who would find, as it were, the windows of heaven opened up if he should give himself for an hour to making some other helpless lives happy, to righting some wrong or bringing some joy to lives embittered and oppressed.

The pathway to God is a plain one, strikingly lacking in romance, with no attendant visible angelic choir. It is the doing of whatever duty or kindness I owe to those near me, the breaking down of walls of prejudice--spite fences built in ignorance and hatred--the learning to love and help, the seeking of peace, good feeling, and harmony with all men.

This does not mean that all must become professors of sociology; the study of social theories often is a substitute for the practice of social duties; but that we must seek out the good in men, we must set ourselves right with them, we must discharge all our responsibilities towards men before we can realize God. The kingdom comes as we recognize the kingliness in all the sons of the kingdom, as we express our faith in God by friendship for our fellows.

FAITH IN OUR FELLOWS

Poor Peter has never been much of a favourite with the preachers; he was so thoroughly unstable, unideal. But the people have always had a tender feeling for him, partly because he was a fisherman, partly because he was so much like the rest of us. Nothing is more striking in the life of Jesus than His affection for ordinary men. The cultured Pharisees, the philosophical Sadducees seem to have much less attraction to Him than the rude fisherman and the toiler. These men were often weak, sometimes cowardly, obstinate, dull, mediocre; yet He committed His kingdom to them; He believed in them. Before they had faith in Him He had faith in them; and that ultimately made them men.

It sounded much like cruel sarcasm when He told that weak, vacillating Simon that he was a rock. Those who knew Peter best must have smiled; he was more like a jellyfish. But Jesus could see the best that was in a man. He detected the hidden good even in Peter. He proves His own goodness by His faith in the good in every man.

Somewhere in every man there is some good. Overlaid it may be by passion, by habits, by prejudice grown out of wrong and suffering perchance; but still it is there. Faith in this and sympathy, these are the golden keys that unlock the doors to where the good lies buried.

The saviours of society have always been those who looked for the best in it. If you go through life seeking the beast in man, you will find it, and the chances are it will devour you; if you look for the beauty that is from above you will find it, and it will bless you. It is just as necessary to have faith in man as it is to have faith in God. If men cannot become good, then there is no God in the sense of a power that makes for goodness. The optimist not only believes in the best, he creates the better.

Some there are who reluctantly admit that God is a little better than they are, though that may be due to His circumstances, but they have never imagined for an instant that any one else is at all good. Believe that men are wholly bad and they will not disappoint you. Every man somehow responds to the expectations of others. You had better damn a man than despair of him. Neither a church nor an individual can help this world when they have more confidence in the power of evil to become all pervasive than in the power of the Most High to make His purposes felt in every heart as truly as He makes His sun to shine on the just and the unjust. The church first consigns men to perdition and then wonders why they are reluctant to walk with it the other way. So long as you have faith in total depravity you will find some facts to substantiate it.

But there is a better way. Sympathy with men will do more for them than sermons on their sins. Look for the best in them and you will find things better than you expected. There are flower beds as well as garbage heaps in every heart; at least, there are spots where seeds of the fairest flowers of heaven may be sown.

You do not have to be a fool to have faith in your fellows. You do not need to take the padlocks off your house; but you do need to take them off your heart. There may be those whom it would be wrong to trust with your cash box; but it is a greater wrong to withhold from them your kindness. You can show them that you believe the best instead of the worst of them.

The great Teacher told men that He came not to condemn but to give life. His followers have too often occupied themselves wholly with condemnation and then wondered that their sentences saved none. Every soul knows its own sentence; what it needs to feel is that God and all good men are with it, helping it to shake off that sentence, to arise and return to the Father, that, instead of all things conspiring to keep a man down, there is a cloud of witnesses cheering him on, a mighty choir invisible inspiring his heart. And there is nothing any man can do of greater worth to the world than to cheer on another by his faith in him, his high expectation of him, his wise blindness to some little faults, and his propagating approval of the least beginnings of any good. Men are the saviours of men by their faith in men.

THE LAW OF FORGIVENESS

A silly interpretation often leads to the utter rejection of a law. Sentimentalists have caused men of sense to pronounce Christ's law of forgiveness an impractical one. Yet we indorse it every time we utter the Lord's prayer, and still we hope to be forgiven whether we find it possible to forgive or not. If this law means the mental flabbiness that sends bouquets to bloody criminals and petitions the pardon of murderers and the release of the foes of humanity, we must reject it as the utterance of one unacquainted with the rugged facts of life.

But forgiveness and pardon are two different things; forgiveness is between man and man; pardon is a matter of executive power. You can forgive a child and still punish him. The forgiveness that does away with consequences would make this an immoral world. No greater wrong can be done to a man than to protect him from the deserts of his evil deeds. This is as unjust as to withhold the rewards of the right.

The difference between the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth and the law of the great Teacher lies largely in the spirit of dealing with the offenses. The old spirit was that of getting even with the wrongdoer. His act was largely regarded from the personal standpoint; a crime was individual and not social. Revenge followed wrongdoing.

But Jesus says it is better to lift a man up than to get even with him. It is better to help men to the right than to satisfy your desire for revenge. Forgiveness is more than saying, "Go without punishment"; rather it says, "Come learn a better way; live without sin." Forgiveness takes malice from the mind of the offended; it substitutes for it the motive of friendship for the offender.

Revenge says, "I will make it worse for you than you have made it for me." Sentimentalism says: "Let the poor victim of circumstances go; send him a rosewater spray and an embroidered text and he won't do it again." But love, she of the clear eye and the steady hold, takes him by the hand in silence, lifts him up, and leads him, perhaps by paths of pain, to his better self. Love puts his sins behind her back and teaches him to face her way. Love lets the wrong teach its own lesson, bear its own fruit. And in her labour for him she forgets her own pain and loss caused by his offense.

The best way to forgive a burglar would not be to let him out of jail, but to teach him the laws of property, to train him in the self-respect that would lead to industry, to make him a brother and a fellow worker among men instead of an outcast and a social parasite. The test of any forgiveness is its helpfulness, the manner in which it wipes out the enmity of the victim and turns the guilty into better ways.

Many say, I can forgive, but I cannot forget. No one asks you to forget; but you cannot fully forgive unless you will forego the feeling of enmity and the desire for revenge. You cannot make any one forget that which he has once known; but you can substitute helpfulness for hatred and restoration for revenge. True love simply discounts the past as a ground for present action; it refuses to determine its personal bearing and deeds in to-day by the other's ill deeds of yesterday.

All we are asked to do is to forgive as we are forgiven. Our hope is that when we have fallen our friends will not lose their faith in us nor entirely forsake us, that they will give us another chance; not that they will shield us from the fruitage of our follies and our falseness, but that they will not shut us off forever from their faces.

So far from forgiveness being the weakness of the thoughtless, it is the helpfulness of the strong and the wise. To forgive a man will not mean to escape from the trouble of securing his punishment; it will not mean the weak complaisance of indolent tolerance. It will mean thought for his weakness, taking up his burden, doing the brother's part for him, the endeavour to do for him what we would like to have the Father of us all do for us all.

XIV

Men and Mammon

_Riches and Righteousness_
_Religion and Business_
_The Moral End of Money-Making_

_Better a sweet failure than a sour success._

_An itching palm causes a crook in the fingers._

_Many a moral squint comes from a money monocle._

_The fortunate people are those who believe they are._

_We are always building bridges for things with wings._

_The best way to wipe out a friendship is to sponge on it._

_Many a man thinks he is pious when he is only petrified._

_A little plain honesty is worth untold professional holiness._

_The religion that runs to fever usually evens up with chills._

_Nothing is easier than being benevolent with other people's money._

XIV

RICHES AND RIGHTEOUSNESS

Let no man take it, that the statement on the inaccessibility of heaven to the rich involves the opposite, how easily shall they that have nothing enter in. The people who have lived pulseless lives are apt to point to their poverty as the proof of their piety. But righteousness is neither a matter of riches nor of rags. The great Teacher glorifies neither. The qualifications for citizenship in His kingdom strike deeper than that.

His words have nothing to do with the bitter envy of the demagogue who denounces those who have earned that for which he would not labour. He measures men not by that they have but by that they are. He looks through both the fine linen and the tattered rags to the man. Money interests Him only as it affects character. The question of riches and poverty is not a matter of housing and eating, but what a man does for himself and his world with that which he has.

Riches of themselves do not bar a man from heaven; but they full often eat into his heart, become of absorbing interest, and so effectually and forever blind the inner vision to the best things. It is not that heaven has shut its gates, but that the love of money, the selfishness, born of cupidity, has paralyzed those spiritual senses by which he might have found his way therein.

The possession of wealth is not a sin; to some it has come almost without effort, even against their wills; but it does constitute one of the most severe tests that can be set before a soul. It increases the difficulties of the right life, because it enlarges so greatly the responsibilities. The greater the wealth the greater the trust laid upon a man as the steward of the produce of the earth.

The principle holds of all possessions; all are tests of character. A man can love gold just as ardently when he has but a grain as when he has possessions beyond computation. A single dollar, laid on the heart, can shut out the light of heaven as effectually as can a million. The relation between riches and righteousness is not determined by the balance in the bank, but by the balance that a man succeeds in maintaining in his heart between his own interests and the trusteeship which possession places upon him.

Money makes men as well as unmakes them. The burdens, the tests, the responsibilities it entails, the temptations it presents, all form part of life's great lesson. Out of the struggle between self and the service we owe the world, out of the keen fighting against covetousness, and the battle against the debasing tendencies of the love for gold and the greed for gain arise the giants--or fall the lost souls.

The rich young ruler came to Jesus and faced his test; the demand that he should sell all and give to the poor simply put his heart on trial; it set before him the great choices; it decided as to the things which he held first. To him the possession of things was more than the possibilities of using them in service; before the great test he fell.

It is just as easy and often fully as dangerous to set your heart on the gold you haven't got as it is to fall into the snare of the miser. Everything depends on the place you give to riches in your life. One man seeks them as a prize to be won and enjoyed for his own gratification, his own glory and fame; another seeks them only as larger avenues to usefulness, and to him riches come as tools, as servants, as possibilities of making his life count for more.

Some men die with their houses full of tools unused; they have made the fatal mistake of setting their hearts on the tools instead of on the work. Others come to their accounting possessing as many tools, but all of them shining from hard use, and counting as their treasures not the tools but the things produced, the good accomplished. Wealth is for work and the work is for the making of the man. They enter the kingdom who are kingly, whether they learned the royal lesson and acquired the heavenly character through the school of poverty or that of riches.

RELIGION AND BUSINESS

The question, can a man be a Christian and succeed in business, though old, is still asked every day. There are yet a great many who regard religion and business as conflicting pursuits, and they attempt a compromise by the clear-cut division of time into business hours and church time. Others are answering this question in the negative. "Look at me," they say. "I have always been pious and honest, and therefore I have failed to make money or achieve success; religion does not pay."

If the question means, can a man take out his backbone and succeed in business, there need be no hesitancy as to the answer. If becoming a Christian means the elimination of all virility from the character, the substitution of soft soap and sawder for strength and diligence, religion cannot be regarded as a help in business. There are too many people who think that sloth is a sign of spirituality and that you cannot be a saint unless you have softening of the brain.

But it is simply whether you can keep your whole life, in the market or out, up to the level of a certain ideal, whether you can be honest, true, fair-minded, unselfish, merciful, and kind and at the same time do the work and meet the exigencies of modern commercial and industrial strife. It is whether you can measure steadily towards heaven's ideal while mastering earth's daily duties.

The question is either a reproach to religion or to business. It is assumed by many, with especial conviction by those who know business only by reputation, that it demands the sacrifice constantly of honour, truth, mercy, and every other virtue. The man who thinks that he is pious because he is pulseless, draws a fancy picture of red-blooded men fighting, intriguing, slaying, like demons new from the pit; and that, he thinks, is modern business.

Strife is everywhere. If religion means sequestration from temptation we need to pray to be delivered from it. There is as much danger of a man's losing his character, selling his soul, in the church as in the market. The temptation to the merchant to misrepresent his goods for a larger profit is not greater than that which comes to the minister to magnify his abilities for an increase in fame.

Things honourable are the same everywhere; they are written deep within us, and by them church and mart both are judged. Every man knows that the chief business of life, whether through commerce, toil, study, recreation, or worship, is to develop the best life, to make of himself a true, full grown man, who shall render to this world a full man's service.

Business is a more effective school of character than any other we have. If some of the standards of that school have been unworthy--and who shall say they have not?--it is our duty to revise them, to make them higher; not to abolish the school, not to stay away from it because it is imperfect, but to make it fit to serve its true purpose.

Business always will be immoral as long as it is an end in itself. The product is greater than the machine, the making of character greater than the mechanism by which we make a living. The serious danger comes when a man begins to lay his soul on the counter, when he reverses the course in this school of character and makes the end serve the means, when he sacrifices honour, truth, and the soul that business may succeed.

Only failure lies that way. No business ever became permanently great by making its people small. Success here is to be measured by the soul. No matter what a man may be doing he must keep himself above his task. The work must serve the worker.

The question is whether we are serving business or it is serving us. If a man lives for his wage he will sacrifice everything to get it, but if he works that he may find life, then he will ever refuse to lose the things of which life is made in the pursuit of success. He knows he does not have to make money, but he does have to make manhood. That is the end both of religion and of business.

THE MORAL END OF MONEY-MAKING

There are those who talk of money and business as though these were necessarily and intrinsically evil. It is often supposed that capacity for goodness is established by incapacity for business, while those to whom poverty seems inevitable find consolation in regarding it as evidence of piety.

Large numbers of otherwise sensible people feel that there is some unavoidable conflict between the ideal and the real, between what they call the sacred and the secular, between the things they would like to do and to be and the things they actually have to do as part of their daily affairs and duties.

Probably the greater number try to meet the difficulty by dividing their lives and interest into separate parts. They say, business is business; religion is another thing altogether; I will work hard and honestly at my business and look forward to the comforts and pleasures of religion and ideal things.

So it happens that there are those who feel that to speak of religion on a week-day reveals a lack of the sense of the fitness of things, while other good people are quite sure that it is a wholly irreverent thing to speak of business on a Sunday. We tend to dwell alternately in two sets of apartments, the practical and the pious.

Even where there are no such sharp lines through the life we feel that manufacture and the market, money-making, and trading tend to blunt the finer sensibilities and act as a hindrance to the realization of our ideals, while, on the other hand, we are sure that the life of ideals is unfitted for business.

The result of this separation and apparent antagonism is that we cannot develop our lives symmetrically; we are torn by conflicting purposes; we fail to see any ideal ends in business or to find any practical values in religion. Religion without business tends to dreamy, purposeless moral enervation; business without ideal ends and aims to grossness and materialism.

We need to spiritualize all our acts, our whole lives, our business, our work, our pleasures, by giving them moral intent and value, so as to unify the sacred and the secular, the utilitarian, and the ideal by making each serve the other.

It does not make so much difference whether a man is engaged in money-making or in writing poems and picturing the fair dreams of better things; the question is this, is the money-making for the sake of the money or for some high and worthy end? What is the motive that impels either the dealer in dollars or the dealer in dreams?

Our ideals, visions, aspirations, and our religion become most damaging if they fail to find expression in conduct and work; lacking the practical, they result in a character that is satisfied with contemplating the good instead of realizing it. The man who sinks his soul in dollars may personally be no worse than he who allows it to atrophy while he dreams.

Here in religion are the dynamic and the motives that bear men on and buoy them up to do the toil, bear the burdens, stand in the fight of daily living; here are the visions that lift our eyes from the desk and the machine, from profits and discounts, and help us to see the worthy prizes of life.

No man could become a saint by separating himself from this world's turmoil and reading his Bible alone; neither can any man find strength and stability for life's business and battle, find satisfaction in its service and rewards, unless he sees through its dollars and its dirt the moral ends of all this world's work.

This noisy mill of daily living may be the greatest blessing we know; it is the opportunity for the expression of our highest ideals, for the translation of religion into terms of daily living; it is the place where character is molded by its stress, its calls to the strong will, and its manifold opportunities for the service of all mankind by each man in his place.

XV

The Every-Day Heaven

_The Beauty of Holiness_
_The Gladness of Goodness_
_The True Paradise_

_Self shrinks the soul._

_The keen eye needs the kindly heart._

_There's no argument equal to a happy smile._

_Imaginary evils have more than imaginary effects._

_You never find truth by losing the temper._

_Menial work may be noblest service._

_They who live off the flock are never willing to die for it._

_The life that would be fruitful seeks showers as well as sunshine._

_Kindness makes all kin._

_All we get from heaven we owe to earth._

_Pain is a small price to pay for the joy of sacrifice._

_He who gives on feeling generally begrudges in fact._

_Every loss met by love leads to gain._

_The long look within ourselves will cure us of a lot of impatience with other folks._

_The last person to enter heaven will be the one whose religion has all been in the first person singular._

_We often talk a good deal about the salvation of souls in order to escape service for the salvation of society._

_Much that is called orthodoxy is scepticism at heart, fear to examine the foundations lest there are none._

XV

THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS

Religion ought to be the most natural, desirable, and attractive thing to man, for it simply stands for the development of the best in us, the coming into the full and rich heritage that is ours as spiritual beings, and the realization of our highest possibilities of character and service. He who ignores religion is cutting himself off from the best and most beautiful possibilities in his life.

Some have talked of the necessity of making religion attractive. It does not have to be made attractive; there is nothing more desirable than the peace, the power, and prosperity of the real life which it confers. It is the imitation, the false and prejudiced presentation of religion that men endeavour to dress up attractively. In that they never succeed, for cramping the soul and twisting the intellect ever are opposed by the best in us.

From the caricature of religion we turn with loathing. Mummeries and mockeries, fads and forms leave us empty and impatient. The heart of man goes out to things fair, lovely, joyous, and uplifting, and they who find no God in the elaborate sermon or the service in the church somehow are thrilled with the feeling of the divine and inspiring in the woods and field and mountains.

All things good, all things attractive and lovely, uplifting and sublime have but one source. They touch our hearts because they come from the heart of all being; they reach our spirits because they are spiritual. Deep calls unto deep when the divine in man answers to the divine in the world without, in human affections, in noble aspirations, and in glorious deeds.

Too long have we believed that only the unpleasant, the gloomy, and repellent could be right or religious. There is a type of conscience that determines action by the rule that if a thing is pleasant or beautiful it must be sinful and wrong. To such souls it is a sin to be sunny in disposition, to delight in the Father's fair world, with its glowing riches and bounty dropping daily from His hand.

It would be safer to say that sin must be somewhere lurking wherever there is deformity, pain, or discord--that, as a common phrase has it, the bleak and barren is the evidence of that which is forsaken of God. Things desolate are not divine. Religion is not repression but development into a fullness and beauty far beyond our dreams.

It is a good thing to see the divine in all things fair and lovely; to take them as evidences that the love that once pronounced this world good in its primeval glory still is working, still is seeking to enrich our lives and lead them out in fullness of joy. Why should not we, like the poets and preachers of ancient Israel, taste again of the gladness of living.

Character may need for its full development the storms and wintry blasts of life, but it needs just as truly and just as much the sunshine, the days when the heart goes out and joins in the song of nature, when something leaps within us at the gladness of being alive, and we drink in of the infinite love that is over all.

Just as the sun seems to call the flowers out of the dark earth and draw out their beauty, calls forth the buds and brings the blossom into perfect fruit, so there is a spirit of divine life in our world calling us out to the best, seeking to woo us to the things beautiful. Man needs not to repress his life, but to learn to respond to every worthy impulse, every high hope, to find the life beautiful.

The beauty of holiness is the beauty of character. It is the adjustment of life to nature and neighbour and heaven so that strength and harmony ensue, so that duty becomes a delight, labour a song of praise, and out of life's burden and battle the beauties of godliness, of love, and tenderness, joy and gratitude begin to bloom.

Lay hold on everything good and true, on all things glad and elevating; cherish every fair thought and aspiration; learn to see the essentially religious in whatever lifts up life, in whatever helps humanity, and so make life rich in heavenly treasure and glowing with the glory of other worlds.

THE GLADNESS OF GOODNESS

Life's poverty is due, not to what we have had and lost, not to what has been withheld or taken from us, but to the good which we might have had which we carelessly have passed by. No others despoil us as we despoil ourselves by our blindness and indifference to the wealth of our own lives and the beauty ever close at hand.

We who scurry over land and sea, who dig, and toil, and fret to find happiness, come back at last to learn that the sweet-faced guest has been waiting close by our door all the time.

He perishes in the pitiless snows who, blind to the good and the glory in every valley and hillside, heeds only the impulse to climb and find the good in some remote height. Ambition and pride lift ever new peaks ahead only to mock him when at last, worn, spent, and empty in heart, he falls by the way.

The old theology talked much of a heaven far away, to be attained in the remote future; the new theology often seems inclined to ignore any heaven, but what the hearts of men need is the sense of the heaven that is all about them, the God who ever is near, and the blessedness even now attainable.

Some live in the past, complacently contemplating the glories that once were theirs or their ancestors'; some live in the future, dreaming of felicities yet to be; but they are wise only who live to the full in the present, who catch the richness and beauty, all the wealth that the passing hour or the present opportunity may have.

He is truly godly who sees God in all things, in the affairs of this day, in the faces of living men, in the flowers and fields, who sees all the divine wonder and beauty of life, and not he who sees the Most High only in some legendary past or in a strange, imaginary future.

No man becomes strong by reminiscence of his breakfast or dreaming of his next meal alone; each portion of time must have its own fitting food. The soul of man never can find its fullness through either history or prophecy; it needs the sense of the spiritual in this living, pulsating, matter-of-fact present.

This world is slovenly, sinful, and evil because so many of us are content with the past or the future, with myth or with imagination, and fail to demand the development of the good that is our heritage to-day. The better day comes not by dreams, but by each man doing the best he can and securing all the good he can for his own day.

We need to give up the plan of saving the world by the piety of postponed pleasures and to find the fullness of life in the present, to get below the surface of things and discover life's real riches, to interpret this daily toil and struggle, and all this world of ours, in terms of the divine and infinite.

How much it would mean to our lives if we might learn, instead of sighing for the impossible, to get all the sweetness and joy that is in the things we have, how rich we would find the common lot to be, how many things that now seem dreary and empty would bloom into new beauty. In a child's smile, a wild flower's fragrance, a glint of sunlight, things possible to all, we would find joys unspeakable and full of glory.

This does not mean dull content with things as they are; it does mean the development of the faculties of appreciation, the growth of the life in power to see, the development of vision. It means the transformation of the dull earth with the glory of the ideal.

Some day, when we look back over our lives, how keen will be our regret as we realize what we have missed, how we have spurned the substance of life's lasting treasures, human loves, friendships, every-day beauties, and happiness, while chasing the shadows of imaginary joys.

THE TRUE PARADISE

The religion that has relations only to heaven and angels, or only to a supreme being remote and detached from daily life and from our families and friends, our business and affairs, issues in personal selfishness and is one of the causes of social disorganization and need.

It postpones to that dim future the problems that ought to be solved in the present. It promises those who are broken with the injustice and greed of their fellows a place where right would prevail and rest would be their portion in the future. It shifts to an imaginary and ideal world all the perplexities and wrongs of the real present world.

That kind of teaching ingrained in generations accounts for the dull patience, the stolid, brute-like content of the peasant in Europe; he is born a bearer of burdens, a tiller of the soil, to walk bent and never look up; it is all endurable because it is all so short; he some day will be better off than kings and emperors are now.

But as the generations are born the inspiring vision of that future loses its force; the ideals are gone and the children come into the world with their fathers content with their present condition, but devoid of aspiration and also devoid of their father's faith in the compensations of the future.

Then comes the reaction. Some daring spirits assert that if there is any good, if there is equity and rights, men ought to enter into and enjoy them here and now. And some who catch the vision of a God of real love are unwilling to believe that He keeps from His children the present joys of His home; they invite to a present heaven.

Then how easy it is to fall into the error of seeking only a material present-day paradise, to live as if the only things worth living for were food and clothes and pleasant circumstances. Better a worthy, beautiful ideal afar off than an unworthy and debasing one already realized. The heaven that so many are seeking will but bring all men to the level of the brute.

The danger is that we shall miss the real benefit of this great truth that whatever good is designed for man may be realized in large measure while he lives and shall make his good to consist only in goods. Better conditions of living easily become the foe of the best. Heaven is not meat and drink; it is the better heart.

Making houses and lands the supreme end of living is little better than looking forward to harps and crowns. It is easy, being freed from slavery to a superstition to relapse into slavery to our lower selves. We are in danger of living for a living instead of for our lives. We are "on the make" instead of being engaged in making manhood. We are digging the lead of commercial advantage with the gold shovels of character.

We may be measured by our own measurements. In sermons and orations we assure ourselves that we are a great people because we have here so many acres, so many millions of bushels of corn and of wheat, so high wages, so vast financial resources. We are living in the glut of things and setting these things as the end of living.

All this does not mean that prosperity is wrong; it does not mean that misery or poverty is a virtue. The danger is not in our many acres, our high wages, our millions of money; the danger is that these are the ends instead of the means; that we are existing for our living; that we make the man the tool of his money instead of the money being the making of the man.

Every man has in his breast the keys to his own heaven. If he will he may find the riches of character; he may enter into the paradise of a mind at peace; he may taste of the divine joys of serving his fellows; he may, in thought, commune with all the good and great; he may hear the morning stars sing together.

The eternal crown of glory is the crown of character. The streets paved with gold are the fair, clear ways of virtue. The harps of whose music we never weary are the strings of sympathy and love and pain; these make the heavenly harmony. The angels are in the faces we learn to love. These make heaven when we see them in the light of the presence of eternal love.

XVI

Truth and Life

_Religion of a Practical Mind_
_The Head and the Heart_
_New Truths for New Days_

_A life is an empty lamp without the oil of love._

_The only way to have happiness as a permanent guest is to keep your door open to the helpless._

_Self shrinks the soul._

_It is much easier to get interested in art doilies for Hottentots than it is to be simply human to the washerwoman at home._

_Whoever helps us to think kindly of another aids the coming of the kingdom of heaven._

_You are not likely to cheer the hearts of men by looking down in the mouth yourself._

_No man climbs to the Father by treading on his brother._

_Many things may keep you from the triumphs of life but only selfishness can keep you from the victories of love._

_The child of heaven always sees something of heaven in the child._

_There are too many people trying to clean up the world by scalding their neighbours._

XVI

RELIGION OF A PRACTICAL MIND

Is there a faith for the practically minded man and woman? Or is religion exclusively for the dreamers and those who are contented with sentiment and feeling? These people of action, who measure by results, who have no life to waste on things not evidently useful; these who feel so intensely the needs of humanity that they have no time to waste in anything other than work--is there a religion for them?

But religion is not a form of life nor a point of view for one kind of people alone; it is the spirit of higher things coming into the lives of all kinds of people. Its expression will depend on the temperament of the individual. It may lead some to sing hymns, but it will certainly compel others to build houses and to care for the sick and needy.

In a world of men and affairs no man is actually religious unless his faith is finding some practical expression, and the greatest need of our day is that our hard-headed men and women who do things shall become inspired with the spirit and ideas of religion and shall do those things which religion's spirit of love and service would indicate as needing to be done.

Pious people are deluding themselves if they think that they are cultivating the religious life and meriting the rewards of faith by simply sitting in church and feeding themselves on beautiful sentiments and thrilling visions, or even by vigorously attacking all those who dare to differ from them in matters of religious philosophy.

Nor can religion find full expression in harking back over the centuries and elucidating the mysteries of ancient miracles or tracing the history of ancient peoples.

If as much brain and energy had been given to solving the problem of society and leading men into the way of right living to-day as have been given to digging into the historical and philological problems of Scripture this world would be a better world by far. We must let the dead past bury its dead. Stay not weeping by the tomb of yesterday; do the work of to-day.

There will be much more real religion in the intelligence, care, and sacrifice applied to the problem presented by the millions coming in at the gates of our country than in the most pains-taking study of the emigration of a horde of Israelites millenniums ago. This is what the practical man feels; there is so much to be done, why waste time in dreaming of how things once were done or in wishing for a world where no need or sorrow exists? Therefore, he is apt to say, in the business of bringing things to pass religion has no place; it is only for the dreamers.