Chapter III: Part 3

A few days later he led the way to one still farther point in the ascending scale of human experience—the gate of glory. He gained each of these points in order to show men that it is possible to reach them. It is for others not merely to admire, not merely to admit, not even merely to worship, but to follow. Wherever Jesus has gone, he has gone that others might also come.

Not all the places by which his footprints lead may seem pleasant. They lie along paths of sacrifice, daring, and suffering. With an unfailingly majestic spirit, he faced whatever presented itself as incident to the fulfilling of a great mission.

A valley of pain matters much less, however, when a mountain of achievement lifts its head beyond. It seems an insignificant thing that one must follow him into the chill of the grave when one knows that he has already broken the way through on the other side. It is not a permanent condition. It is almost too swift in its passing to even be called a temporary experience. A sunset would be a tragedy did one not know that the sun will rise again. We cease to dread the twilight when we reflect that it is but the pathway to another dawn.

The silences of the resurrection morning said still another thing. They answered the old question as to whether the soul can exist when separated from the body. The physical frame of Jesus had seemed that of a dead man when it was taken from the cross three days before, and laid in the hospitable tomb of the kind-hearted Joseph. Now it was again inhabited by the same spirit which had shone from its eyes in other days.

This was no new miracle. Its like had been repeatedly performed by the power of Jesus. The body and soul of his friend, Lazarus, had been reunited after an even longer separation. Other spirits had been rewedded to the tenements which they had inhabited, each time by the wonderful will of this man who himself lived in such positive fashion and for such abiding things that the hand of death could not permanently enchain him.

Let it be as it will with these earthly frames of ours. The sooner they return to dust, after we are gone, the better. The human soul, however, was not made to perish. It is a thing of universal interests and eternal possibilities. It is life in its highest terms, and it was life with which Jesus was essentially concerned.

The silences were eloquent as Mary stood by the tomb that morning. They told her that immortality was not a dream, but a fact. They declared that everlasting life was not a baseless hope, but a wonderful reality. They gave an unspoken answer to an age-long question. They proclaimed the glorious fulfillment of a precious promise.

They spoke with a reminding voice, and it can still be heard across the years. They bid us not to think of the words of Jesus too vaguely. The greatest beauty of the gospel is its truth. The ideal of Jesus will remain unrealized until men have learned to accept his words at their face value, and to act upon the assumption that they are true. Faith knows no other testimony so worthy as that of obedience. The wonder of Jesus is the fact that his power so far outreaches the limits of our experience.

The Laboratory Test (1921)

We may argue about the Christian faith all we will, but the only way to appraise its real merits is to apply the laboratory test. An ancient singer challenges: “Oh, taste, and see that the Lord is good.” This is an invitation to possess the knowledge of experience.

Certain things about Christianity must be taken by faith. Its practical value, however, is demonstrable. It is demonstrated in our civilization. It is seen in the new life of mission lands. It is revealed in the personal experiences of twice-born men.

The testimony of opinion is uncertain. The testimony of experience is final and unanswerable. Arguments on the existence of love do not count with one who loves. The thing experienced demands no proof by logical processes.

A laboratory test of anything demands two things. First, one must enter the laboratory with an open mind. One does not go there to confirm his prejudices, but to discover the truth. He must be willing to accept the truth which he discovers. One cannot alter the truth to suit himself. He must conform himself to the truth.

Second, the honest investigator in the laboratory must put a thing to a complete and honest test. He must do so regardless of his own opinions or desires. The explorer must fulfil all the conditions of discovery before he announces his conclusions. One has no right to deny Christianity until he knows it fully, and has proven it a failure by actual test.

Were this condition fulfilled there would be no unbelievers. The faith has nothing to fear from being tested. Indeed, the more it is tested the better. Whoever tries it honestly will find that it works. It can afford to invite the pragmatic test, for it is supremely a workable religion. The best things never can be adequately appraised at the first glance. They must be tried.

The Nearness of Destiny (1921)

In the opening sentence of the Book of Revelation John states that in it are related the things which must shortly come to pass. In that sentence he indicates an attitude toward the events of life which it is worth while for all to hold. He appreciates the fact that the future is not remote. With at least some of its events we are face to face. From none of them are we very far removed. Destiny is no far distant thing. The processes that build it are continually going on.

The events of life are like the landmarks on a highway. Some of them may look to be very far ahead, but they are approaching us very swiftly. We travel the journey of life at great speed. The tomorrows are never long in arriving. We may not know what the future has in store for us, but one thing we do know. Whatever it has in store will not be long in arriving.

To the eyes of childhood the day of maturity seems very far away. To the young the days drag slowly. The time of independence, maturity, and responsibility seems to creep toward one at the pace of a snail.

One by one the days pass, and each seems to pass a little more swiftly than the last. Maturity finally comes, and then it seems that the years that brought it have been altogether too short. Our natures are so constituted that the morning is always calling for the noon. Then the noontime is always regretting that the morning has passed by.

Only to the idle and the aimless do the passing days seem long. To one who possesses a commanding purpose in life they are very brief indeed. There is never time enough to do a great life work. Few great servants of their times pass out of this world feeling that they have completed their task to their own satisfaction.

The worker who has a great deal of ground to cover before he ceases his toiling often learns this fact to his regret. He is called to his task by the sunrise, and he feels that the day is long. He goes about his work in leisurely fashion, feeling that there is no occasion for haste. As the day wears on he begins to measure his task by the vanishing hours. He begins to hasten, but the sun declines in the West all too soon. As the shadows lengthen he grows feverishly hurried, but it is generally too late. The sun goes down upon an unfinished task. The only thing that would have saved the day would have been an early morning sense of the swiftly hurrying hours.

Some years ago a distinguished leader of thought in America remarked in the last public address he made before he died that the longest time is short when it is past. His words were true. The years always look long as they lie ahead of us, but when they have passed we are always saying how short a time it was.

It has been the human habit to think of the Kingdom of God as a distinct thing. We have kept it far from us both in space and time. We have so thought of it in spite of the fact that we were told by Him of Galilee that the Kingdom is at hand. We have waited and waited for the Kingdom, sometimes half doubting that it would ever come, and all the while it was at our very finger-tips. We had only to lay hold upon it, feel it, realize it, and live it, to make it ours.

We have assumed, too, that eternity lies somewhere in the uncertain reaches of the infinitely distant future. In this also we have been mistaken. Eternity has been going on all the while. We have simply taken a little section of eternity and arbitrarily named it time. It is still a part of eternity, just the same. Every day that goes by is just that much of eternity. Therefore, everything that a day holds bears an eternal significance. Its every event is built into the walls of destiny. All the issues with which we ever have to do are eternal.

Such is the process of judgment. Another name for it is the law of cause and effect. Causes and effects swiftly succeed each other in life. The effect is as inevitable as the cause is definite. Moreover, it is not long delayed.

I once knew a teacher who had inscribed in large letters over the door of his classroom these words: “What you are to be you are now becoming.” He understood this principle. The judgment is going on all the while. We can never hope to be in the future anything else than what we are allowing ourselves to become in the present.

The mills of God do not grind so slowly as one might think. From the larger point of view it may be seen that they do some of their work with surprising swiftness. We cannot afford to dream away our days in the ease of thinking that life’s responsibilities and tests lie far in the future. We are very apt to find ourselves mistaken. Often they lie just ahead.

The events of the life of Jesus came and went with a tragic and growing swiftness. During the last few days of His life in Jerusalem they seemed borne upon the current of a swiftly rushing stream. To Him things always shortly came to pass. The Christ of revelation was the same who had walked in Galilee. He had the same habits of thought.

This is the reason why He was able to crowd ages into years. Before He had fairly passed the threshold of maturity, He had already succeeded in living the biggest life of all the centuries. He simply understood the nearness of destiny. He realized that time will not wait.

An old Hebrew prophet called upon men to prepare to meet God. We have assumed that this meeting is to be at an indefinite future date, called the Judgment Day. We greatly need to understand that our meeting with Him is not only a future but also a present event. Each of us is repeatedly face to face with God. All through the years we have been meeting Him every day and hour. He is the Silent Partner in all our upward struggles. He is the Inevitable Factor with which we must reckon in all our considerations. He is the Absolute Quantity to which we must relate ourselves, and to whose standards we must conform. These obligations do not belong to some far future time. They belong to the present. We are not dealing with a static order, but with a progressive one. We are the children of One who takes into consideration but one tense. His word is _NOW_.

We are not facing the future in blindness to these things. The curtain has been drawn back from their real nature that we might behold it. We know that the events of the future closely impend. The tomorrows are at our finger-tips. No dam can hold back the stream of destiny. It hurries along the years so rapidly that there is never too much time to prepare for the coming of whatever its current may sweep to our feet.

The hand of prophecy never draws back the veil that we may look upon a lie. The Almighty does not trifle with us. The revelation of the Scriptures is of inevitable things. The events which they disclose are more certain than the course of the stars and planets. The sun may falter in its path, but the plans of God never do.

One of the most serious and significant things the Scriptures disclose is the fact that the gates of the future are not far removed. They open directly before us. Even now our hands are upon them. Our feet are upon the threshold of the tomorrows.

Objectively, this earthly existence is merely a rapid succession of events. The holidays to which we look forward with expectation, the meetings for which we can hardly wait, the partings that give us pain, the joys and the woes that make up life’s intermingling of sunshine and shadow, the birthdays that register our years, love, toil, death—all are things that “shortly come to pass.” The years hurry onward. Therefore, whatever one would do he must do quickly.

Children and the Church (1922)

The strength and membership of the Christian Church are great, but they are not what they should be. After all, the Church is only a comparatively small fraction of the sum total of human society. The plans of Jesus will not have been realized and the Kingdom of God will not have become an actual fact until the Church and the race are one.

The Church is growing, but one of the evidences why there remains a great deal of ground to be possessed by the Kingdom is to be found in the fact that the race is growing more rapidly than the Church is. It is possible for an institution to be growing and yet losing ground if its problems are growing more rapidly than its power to meet them.

Viewed alone, the reports on Church membership for any single year look somewhat encouraging. When one reflects, however, upon the growth of the race and the encroachments of paganism, the encouragement is diminished. The Church is supposed to represent a leavening force. It is quite proper to consider its mission in that light. A leavening force, however, must not remain such. Its work is to leaven the whole lump.

A degree of failure is involved somewhere in the question. Otherwise, the mission of Christianity would have been achieved before this time. The difficulty is not in the matter of learning, for Christian leaders were never so well trained for their work as now. It does not relate to wealth, for it has been a long while since the Church could truly protest its poverty of silver and gold. It is not even in the matter of service, for there were never so many people working in the Kingdom as now.

=The Vital Point=

The trouble does not lie in our failure to work, though it does lie in our failure to work to the best advantage. We have toiled with the problems, but we have not yet unitedly attacked it at the vital point. That point is childhood.

This word of warning does not seem to be needed by the Roman Catholic branch of Christendom, for that church grows rapidly. The reason for the following it has does not lie in the quality of its preaching, for it does not emphasize the sermon. It is not to be found in its form of worship, for that is in a strange tongue and according to antiquated formulae. The secret most largely lies in the persistent nurture of children in the faith of their fathers.

In this regard Protestantism is lacking. We have cultivated too little conviction on the question of a child’s relation to the Church and the Christian faith. We have kept our minds free and easy on the question, until a situation has arisen to remind us that the real fruit which we desire for the Kingdom comes not as the result of indifference but of intense effort.

Even a democratic conception may be carried to such an extreme that it counts for nothing. While Bolshevism and Anarchy have been tolerated under the protection of the State, they have also been fostered about the very firesides of many homes. We have tried to place Protestantism upon a democratic basis, but we must not forget that the principle of democracy does not diminish the necessity for conviction and fidelity. The disregard of obligation is not freedom.

The mistaken notion that there is no place for religion in the child mind is already bringing forth its pitiful harvest. Its fruit is a generation of younger people dwelling largely apart from the Church, more vitally concerned with other than religious questions, and living for ideals which are chiefly moulded by the standards of the present world.

Whatever the Church has meant in the progress of the race, and many thoughtful people believe that has been much, it will not be able to permanently maintain itself and its work unless this situation is reversed. It will not normally be able to realize upon the product of any home in which no definite emphasis has been laid upon the things for which it stands. We can hardly expect sustained support for the one institution dedicated to the saving of men in both this world and the world to come, unless each generation accepts the responsibility of teaching the next a wholesome love for and a genuine devotion to its teaching and its activity.

One cannot say that the parents of today are not concerned about their children. In most ways children were never so well cared for. In this particular thing, however, there is a distressing neglect. This is not true because parents mean to neglect any vital thing, nor is it true because they are antagonistic to this necessity. It is true because many fail to see that it is a necessity for childhood. People simply blind themselves to the fact that spiritual growth requires food as imperatively as does physical development.

In some cases, perhaps, it is the result of simple neglect. People are busy about so many things in these days that it does not always seem easy to give their children training in all the points requiring it. Some assume that the matter of religious training may properly be left to the church and the Sunday School.

=The Necessity for Religious Nurture in the Home=

Religious nurture is, however, a matter which requires the cooperation of the home. Some phases of it cannot be so successfully promoted anywhere else as there. Pastors and Sunday School teachers have a part to play in the religious education of the young, but certain great life lessons can never issue from any other source quite so appropriately as from the loved lips of fathers or mothers.

Nothing can be more groundless than the notion that a child should not be influenced religiously until he is old enough to settle such questions for himself. Ultimately he will settle them, but his decision will be largely the result of early training. Home teaching and influence affect every decision one makes through life.

One might as well refuse to feed a child until he could declare his own choice of food as to starve his religious nature until he could choose its satisfaction in his own way. Certain fundamental necessities are too constant and imperative to justify waiting. A life must be fed or it must perish, and this principle holds as true with childhood as it does with age. Indeed the necessities of a growing life are only the more acute.

Occasionally parents will insist that their failure to bring their children up in the ways of the Church is the result of their own rearing. They declare that it is a reaction against the strictness with which they were sent to Church in their own childhood. First, this is a calumny against good parents who tried to lay in the lives of their children the foundations of happiness and success. Second, it looks to the spiritual starvation of the younger generation, the decadence of a fundamental instinct, and the strangling of a necessary social institution. They probably owe much of their success to the thing for which they unjustly blame their parents. Whoever is not physically equal to an hour or two in the sanctuary is hardly a fit candidate for the world’s responsibilities.

We should assume a universal Church. By this I mean that we should assume that every child is born into the church, to be reared in its ways and teachings, and to be included among its numbers until he wilfully forsakes it. In other words, we should throw the chances on the right side instead of the wrong one as we have been doing. It is well enough to save lost sheep, but it is better to keep them from being lost. The religious experience will take care of itself if the religious life is properly nurtured.

Children are born for the kingdom of better things. Their Maker meant us to keep them true to it. He will care for their regeneration, if we will keep them in line for it by protecting them from blighting influences.

The Church’s Fourfold Program (1922)

To-day the Church has her face toward the future. She has a great purpose throbbing in her soul. She is directed by leaders of wisdom and vision. She has a program as broad as life itself. That program is fourfold.

It is, first, a program of evangelism. The Church is everywhere reminding herself that the winning of souls is her prime duty. This is true for many reasons, among which two are outstanding. This is the thing she has been set to do as the one means of ever really establishing the kingdom of God. Moreover, it is the one hope she herself has of surviving to continue her work.

It is, second, a program of education. One of the first commands God gave to nature was, “Let there be light.” That command has been ringing through the creative process all the ages. As the sun of warmth and light brought new strength to created things, so the sum of knowledge brings a new blessing to the inner life of man. The Church’s program of Christian education in the home, the Church, the school, and the college, is already bearing fruit. It will do so more and more as time passes.

It is, third, a program of social welfare. The Church is striving in this day to make itself known and felt for better things in the community. The organized life of the world as well as the individual life of men must be bettered by it. The apostolic Church was not a temple but a community. It must be the same with the modern Church.

It is, fourth, a program of finance. It is a great thing to-day to walk about Zion, tell her towers, and consider her bulwarks. Back of all of it is the money given by faithful servants of the kingdom. What many people need for blessing of their own lives as well as for the growth of the kingdom is an adequate financial standard and program.

Newer Conceptions of Religion (1922)

We can never have a new set of principles of truth, but we can have new discoveries of old ones and new attitudes toward them. We can never change the constitution of life and nature, but we can learn more about it and better adapt ourselves to it. We cannot alter the divine plan of life and redemption, but we can make progress in our understanding and use of it. Not to do so would be an inexpressible pity. We do not have a new religion, but we do have newer and more adequate conceptions of the old faith.

The older type of religious thinking was largely derived from the speculations of the cloister. That of the present is taken directly from the facts of life. The Bible was the basis of the old, and is the basis of the new; but in the one case it was viewed from the quiet shadows of the cell, while in the other it is seen from the viewpoint of the dusty road, the busy market place, and the domestic hearthstone.

In so far as the older religious thinking did take its conclusions from life, it tended to place the stamp of divinity only on the unusual phases and outstanding experiences. It saw God in the violence of the thunder and lightning, but it did not always sense him in the gentle sunshine of the ordinary day. It recognized him in the ecstasy of the mountaintop, but it did not always find him in the duty of the valley. It connected him with the exceptional moments, but not with quiet hours, prosaic tasks, and drab days.

The older religious thinking tended to glorify every tense except the present. It had its good old days on which it looked back with loving tenderness, and its Golden Age, toward which it looked forward with longing hope. The newer thinking recognizes the value of the past and the importance of the future, but lays its supreme emphasis upon the present. It glorifies only one tense, and that is the Golden Now.

The International Religion (1923)

The Book of Revelation is full of significant pictures, but none is more so than that presented in the Ninth Chapter. It is drawn in climaxes. The first part might seem disturbing if considered alone. As to whether God proposes to save the many or the few, it would seem to favor the first answer. John says that he heard the number of them that were sealed, and there were only twelve thousand from each of the tribes of Israel.

But let us not form our conclusions too hastily. John has more to say. He follows the above assertion with this: “And after these things I saw, and behold a great multitude which no man could number, out of every nation and of all tribes, and peoples, and tongues standing before the throne and before the Lamb arrayed in white robes; and palms in their hands.” This second part of the vision is the answer as to whether God proposes to save the many or the few.

From this point one might move out along any one of many lines of thought. He might think of Christianity as the religion of the masses. He might think of it as the religion of the long ago with their changes and their progress. He might see it as the religion of the nations. This leads to the outstanding significance of the passage under discussion. Christianity is the international religion. It is potentially so today. It will be actually so tomorrow.

This means something finer than that Christ will become the temporal or political ruler of nations. It means more than that he will become the king or lord of any land. It means he will become King of kings and Lord of lords. He will become the spiritual ruler of the hearts of men. No power can go beyond that. He will be enthroned in the hearts of peoples everywhere. The New Jerusalem will be world-wide in its scope.

The Great Teacher (1925)

One day long ago a young man stepped out from the throng, took a place on a hillside, and began to teach the people. He did it in such a way that they were amazed. They said he taught as one having authority, and not as their scribes. Consequently, the common people heard him gladly.

From that day he has been known as a teacher. The years have taught us to call him the Great Teacher, for they have shown us how well that title is deserved.

I. Jesus is a great teacher because he teaches vital things. The shallow and inconsequential have no place in his curriculum. Some spend years learning what is hardly worth the trouble, but not in the school of Christ. Whatever is presented there must really count. His test of subject-matter is, “Is it worth-while?”

II. He is a great teacher because he teaches in ways so simple and plain that none can mistake his meaning. Sometimes he speaks in the plainest expository form with nothing of embellishment and utterly void of the tricks of the rhetorician. Sometimes he makes it a story. The narrative is always one with familiar settings and characters, and it always makes a vital point before it is through. Jesus introduces a man and a truth to each other and sees that they become friends. The person who can do this well is a master instructor.

III. He is a great teacher because he always makes his own position clear and lets the force of his own influence fall on the right side. In these days, there are teachers who consider it a mark of scholarship to present various sides of a question and then leave the helpless student to make his own choice—and often a wrong one. Whether or not this is a scholarly procedure, it certainly is not a helpful one. Jesus never followed it. He went after the one vitally true viewpoint, committed himself to it without reserve, and sought to influence his hearers to do the same. It is such a teacher who builds history.

What Can We Believe? (1928)

One is made or unmade by his beliefs. They determine his doings and shape his destiny. Therefore, what we believe is a matter of vital importance. The demands upon our credulity are confusing. We wish to be receptive to truth, but on our guard against error. What may we believe with a reasonable degree of assurance and conviction? What may safely enter into the making of one’s personal faith?

A considerable number of claims upon our credulity may be put aside and disposed of once and for all. Among them are the claims which violate the evident laws of truth, the merely controversial claims of the various Christian groups, the superficial formalities of observance and organization, the vagaries of popular thought and personal opinion, and the mental effects of the shifting tides of emotion. Certain things we are driven to accept by the very facts of life.

One of them is that back of all the wonder of the universe and of life is a great Source, a First Cause, a Divine Something that we have named God. This Architect of the universe has not always dwelt among clouds and thick darkness. He has given us one revelation of Himself in human terms. It is the sweet spirit, the rugged strength, and the simple life of the Peasant of Galilee. It is not difficult to believe in God when one has contemplated the story of Jesus.

Another is that life has its consequences, that the results of right and wrong action are cumulative and reactive, and that each person now and forever reaps the reward of his doings. Some call it the law of cause and effect. Others call it judgment. Whatever it be called, it is not a penalty imposed, but a result arrived at. The goal one reaches depends upon the road he chooses and the direction in which he goes. The day one arrives at his destination is his judgment day.

Another is the everlastingness of spiritual values, the chief of which is the human soul. If nature treasures each atom of matter, and across long ages does not permit one of them to be destroyed, shall not that which transcends matter be even more jealously guarded and preserved? Nothing else in the universe can be destroyed. How, then, can life be done away?

The Christ of the Sea (1929)

It is an old and well-known story, recounted anew each Christmas time, that the Wise Men from the East were led to the cradle of the infant Jesus by a star. That fact has taken a large place in Christian imagery and symbolism. But of what is a star a symbol? It is suggestive of an ideal. How appropriate that a star should have shown the world to the cradle of one who set it thinking about ideals?

Jesus was a dreamer. His spiritual lineage ran far back into the life of the Jewish race. The nature of Esau was such that wherever he went, he was haunted by his physical desires. The nature of Jacob was such that wherever he lay down at night, even though his head were pillowed upon a stone, he dreamed of heaven and of angels. Jesus was of the line of Jacob. He lived with His head among the stars.

He wasted no time in getting the current of idealism under way. He began at once promoting the kind of thing the practical world calls impossible because it is right. The night He was born angels sang of glory to God in the highest, peace on earth, and good will among men. It was a warring and hating world to which they sang, but their song was a note in the new harmony He had come to establish.

This man who walked with His head among the stars did and said all kinds of impractical things. He said a kingdom of happiness was at hand, but that a man had to be born again in order to see it. He said the best way to save one’s life was to lose it. He said one should treat others as he wished them to treat him. He said one should love his neighbor as well as he loved himself. He told a rich, young man to give away everything he had and consecrate his life to service. The world is slowly catching the idea. You cannot conquer an ideal. Some time it will win.

What was this ethereal, star-like dream that so commanded His life? It was a race redeemed from its sin, ignorance, littleness, and woe. He saw how His people were fettered by their own tendencies. He dreamed of a day of freedom to be and achieve their best. And it will come. Some day the world will be a picture of the vision of the Man who lived with His head among the stars. The light of the Bethlehem star falls across the centuries lighting the way to a new heaven and a new earth.

The Comrade Perfect: An Appreciation (1929)

In the “Passage to India,” Walt Whitman speaks of the longing of the soul for the “Comrade Perfect,” and asks if somewhere such a comrade does not wait for us. We all know perfectly well that life is not all that it ought to be without the presence of the Personality which completes us.

There is such a comrade, and He does something better than wait for us. He comes to us. The abstraction of the idea of God found concrete realization in Him who was called Immanuel, or God with us. All this was made more intimate still by the coming of the spirit divine, which brought God not only to us but into us.

God does not rule the world from some distant throne but from the dusty road. He does not occupy a height and frown upon His people in patronizing condescension. He seeks a warm place in their hearts, where He may guide their thoughts and actions. The divine plan looks only to the constant narrowing of the chasm between man and God.

The philosophers and theologians dispute whether God is transcendent or immanent, whether He rules from above us or beside us. As is true of many arguments, both viewpoints are right. God transcends us in all power, all knowledge, and all goodness. At the same time, He is immanent in the ministry of Jesus, in the guidance of Providence, and in the presence of the Holy Spirit. The life of Jesus makes that plain, for Jesus is a picture of God going where men go, living where men live, and meeting the struggles that men meet.

And so He is the Comrade Perfect. No one needs to be friendless in this world. No one needs to be lonely. We are always within speaking distance of an unfailing Friend. We need to search neither across the years nor across the miles. We need only to look and listen, and He is there. We need only to open the way, and He enters our hearts in response to our silent welcome. We need only to make a place, and He walks beside us, whatever our way may be. He is the great completing element in our otherwise incomplete lives.

Four Addresses to Young People (1929) (Ages 16 to 22)

1. Heralds of the Name.

In one of his letters John speaks of those who for the sake of the Name went forth, taking nothing of the Gentiles. He was thinking of the already growing army of heralds of that Name which is above every name. Probably, too, he was remembering that day by the Sea of Tiberius when Jesus came by and he heard and answered the challenge to life’s highest adventure.

No one should offer his life for special Christian service merely because he thinks it would be nice work to do, nor because it has been done by someone he likes or admires, nor because someone he would like to please wishes him to do it, nor because he thinks he can speak well or has an attractive personality for social contacts, nor because he thinks it will serve him as a stepping stone to something else. To begin on any such a basis means to be doomed to failure from the beginning. It also means injustice to the work itself.

Least of all should one enter special Christian service because he thinks it easy. That is one of the greatest possible mistakes. Whoever goes out to serve Christ must prepare his soul to endure hardness as a good soldier. He will discover that it is a real warfare into which he is going. If he likes the thrill of adventure, if he enjoys doing difficult things, if privation appeals to him, if he does not mind standing up to duty in the face of opposition and danger, then he will like soldiering for Christ. Otherwise, he will not.

Only one thing should lead one to dedicate his life to Christian work. It is the great compulsion. One has it when he is conscious that he cannot do anything else and be quite content. That was the feeling that drove Moses to the end of the wanderings of his people, that sent Jeremiah to thunder the warning to a nation drifting to its ruin, and that impelled Jesus to the tears of Gethsemane and the anguish of Calvary.

The person who does not find it in his soul to give his life wholly to Jesus is to be congratulated. He will pluck many thorns, but each thorn will bear a rose. He will travel many hard paths, but he will have the joyous consciousness of being a world builder for God.

2. The Conditions of Communion.

One day in 737 B.C. a young man of high social standing was in the temple at Jerusalem. There he saw a vision of the Lord upon His throne. The experience humbled the young man’s soul, cleansed his lips, and sent him forth to sound a warning to a people swiftly rushing to their doom. The temple atmosphere furnished Isaiah with the conditions of communion.

About 625 B.C., when the storm clouds were still hovering near Judah, a young priest named Jeremiah saw in the presence of the Scythian army on Syrian soil the possibility of invasion by them and their Assyrian allies. He warned his people of coming destruction, at the bidding of Jehovah, who told him that he had been set apart for the task since before his birth. The peril he saw drawing near his people furnished Jeremiah with the conditions of communion.

One day a young man named Jesus, His as custom was, entered the little synagogue at Nazareth. He was one who took part in the meeting. Taking the roll of the prophet Isaiah, He read from it the words of a commission to proclaim the day of God under the compulsion of the divine spirit. As He read, His heart told Him that commission was His own. Jesus heard His great challenge to duty as He stood in the place of worship reading the words of those who in earlier centuries had intimately known God.

One day, still later, John saw the curtains of eternity drawn aside to reveal to him the things that must shortly come to pass. Three things made his vision possible. He was in a quiet and secluded place. It was the Lord’s Day. He was in the spirit. Such a situation is very apt to carry anyone within seeing and hearing distance of God. John met God face to face by the fulfilment of certain fundamental psychological conditions of vision and communion.

On the evening of the twenty-fourth of May 1738, a young man who had believed in God all his life, but had sought vainly for a heart experience of faith, went into a meeting in Nettleton Court, on the East side of Aldersgate Street, in London. At a quarter before nine o’clock he knelt at an altar and felt his heart strangely warmed. The altar of a church furnished John Wesley with the conditions of communion.

3. The Kingdom Partnership.

On the day when Moses enjoyed that high privilege, direct communion with the Great I Am, he heard the call of heaven to high duty and responsibility. He shrank from it, as greatness usually does. True worth is seldom a candidate. In church and state alike, things go better when the office seeks the man.

Among the reasons Moses offered why he should not be chosen to lead Israel from its bondage was one very commonly heard given in reply to calls to religious duty. Moses said he was not eloquent.

God was ready with a counter proposition. After having a man in training for forty years the Almighty was not to be put off so easily. He proposed that Moses should undertake the task of leadership as a man of action, while his brother Aaron should share it with him as a man of speech.

It was the old but ever-new combination of the man of deeds and the man of words—the practical leader and the spiritual one. We see it later in the case of Ezra and Nehemiah, and still later in the necessary partnership between the modern minister and laymen in the work of the kingdom. Neither type of service can be at its best unless it is in cooperation with the other.

In fact, each type of service is so necessary that the kingdom suffers when these two types of Christian workers get their functions confused. It is usually a mistake for a minister to forsake the altar to serve tables, and just as much so for a layman to forsake the things for which he is peculiarly qualified and usurp the place of the minister. In the work of the kingdom, Moses and Aaron each has his own function, and his highest ministry is to perform his own function well.

The work of the minister is with the dynamics of Christianity, while that of the layman is with the mechanics of it. Too often each stands and debates with the other that his part is most important, or else each envies the other his task and neglects his own. The mechanics of the kingdom could not exist if the dynamics were not maintained, and the dynamics would be wasted if the mechanics were not intelligently promoted.

4. The Institutionalization of Religion.

The selection of Aaron as priest was a step toward religious organization. As nearly as such things can be determined among the mixed currents of human history, it was the beginning of the institutionalization of religion. What has been gradually growing up in the form of spiritual vision now began to take the form of a system of rites and ceremonies, housed in an especially designed building, held at fixed times and under specified conditions, and presided over by men especially selected, qualified, and prepared for their task.

Subsequently, this became a stumbling block to many people. A certain type of mind easily becomes confused in its thinking and fails to recognize the difference between an institution and the thing it represents. On the one hand, the priest has sometimes made the mistake of regarding the institution as an end rather than a means. On the other hand, the man on the street has sometimes assumed that the church pretends to be the sum and substance of the faith and has, consequently, failed to use it as a clearing house for the service he should have rendered to God and his fellow men.

Any great idea or interest, however spiritual in its nature, must be incarnated in an institution or it will die. The life of the race could not be nurtured without the family. Commerce would die without the market place and the transportation system. Government could not be maintained without the state. Education could not be effected without the school. Religion would long ago have perished without the temple and the altar. Spiritual ideas do not cling to human custom. An institution must make them visual, real, and effective. Such is the reason for the existence of the church.

The final vision of the Book of Revelation is of a social order without a temple. We are led to think that such a day will come, but that it will come only because the whole world shall have taken on the spirit and viewpoint of the house of worship. The mission of the church is to make itself unnecessary. It will be dispensable when all the world shall at last have conformed to the purposes of God.

What Is Happening to Religion? (1929)

A recent book makes the point that the old notion that science had defeated religion has been banished more by what has happened in the field of science during the last twenty-five years than by what has happened in the fields of religion and theology. Certain implications in this statement are worthy of consideration.

With all its vaunted moral ideals, the boasted Victorian age did develop a rather marked and dangerous hostility to religion. It was the age of Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley and, therefore, an age of discovery. The newness of some of the conclusions it reached caused the public mind to be carried away by its own enthusiasm. The pendulum is gradually coming to rest, and the scientist now understands that a new discovery is not a substitute for God.

The greatest sobering influence science has known has been its own constant success in the field of discovery. The theory of development, at first thought to have overturned God’s throne, when studied was found to be full of previously unsuspected implications of the divine. Science discovered that it was not a substitute for God, but only a new theory of divine creation.

The only dogmatism as prejudiced and unreasonable as that of some religionists is that of some scientists. No one is more prone than the scientist to assume the finality of what is as yet only a hypothesis, and to offer himself as a martyr to the cause of some fantastic phase of scientific fundamentalism. The knowledge of science can grow, even as may that of religion.

It appears to be a fact that unless the theologians gird themselves anew, they may find the very gospel they were raised up to champion more zealously and loyally defended by the scientists than by themselves. Eminent scientists announcing their faith in and support of religion are a growing company. The technique of the scientific laboratory forbids compromise. The scientist discovers what is true and stands by it. The theologian must do the same.

Has the Day of Great Preachers Passed (1921)

Every little while we hear anew the question, “Has the day of great preachers passed?” Sometimes it is asked in a sincerely interrogatory spirit. In other cases it is meant as an implication that the times of great preaching are no more.

All keen observers of social and spiritual influences know that the prophet is one of the most potent factors in the building of our destiny, both as a nation and as a race. It is, therefore, important that we should occasionally stop and take account of our situation as to ministerial supply. The invoice should, of course, be qualitative as well as quantitative. Especially do we need to do this in a time of crisis and need like the present.

The past has indeed boasted some great preachers. Paul, Savonarola, Wesley, Whitefield, Edwards, Beecher, and Brooks—these are all men whose names stand out upon the scroll of fame with a luster which any soldier or statesman might envy. They will continue to occupy an honored place in the memory of men when the names of many soldiers and statesmen have been obscured by lapse of time.

There is no reason, however, why the average of ability should vary much from one age to another. Changing times mold men into different types and call for new forms of service, yet the force with which they rise to the occasions that confront them is about the same in one period as in another. The preachers and the preaching of one age measure with those of another without much of discredit to either. They differ in type, but not in ability or purpose. This being true, those of the present average creditably with those of any period of the past.

Of course, this is doubted by some good and sincere people. A number of things give seeming basis to their doubts. However, a second look at these conditions is worth while.

First of all, we must recognize the common human tendency to glorify the past to the disadvantage of the present. We all have reason to look out for this disposition, but it especially besets older people. Something about human nature makes it prone to live in the past. We are continually hearing it said or suggested that the great statesmen, the great poets, the great scholars, the great preachers, the great virtues, and the good days are all dead and gone. One may read something of this sort in the literature of ancient as well as modern ages. Yet the progress of the world has gone right on.

The fact is that we quickly forget what the past actually was. When to-day becomes yesterday, we forget its troubles and glorify its redeeming features. It is well enough that we do, yet the habit often leads us far afield of the truth. If people were really called upon to live again some of the good old days they talk about so much, they might soon conclude that the change was for the worse.

Next, we must remember that the standard of greatness constantly lifts. It takes more to make a great man to-day than it did in other years. The judgment of those who pass upon the question of a man’s greatness and accord him his place in history was never so exacting. The Harvard of Emerson’s day represented about the grade of scholarship obtainable now in a good high school. What then was exceptional scholarship is now commonplace. It is the same with statesmen. Men who were outstanding in their day would seem altogether mediocre in the face of the demands of this present period. In this time of widely diffused knowledge, it takes more than it ever did before to win the name of greatness in the pulpit.

Next, we must remind ourselves that the minister occupies a very different place in the community from that which he held in other days. He is, therefore, judged by very different standards. Of old he was apt to be the chief educator of the community, and was judged by his learning. That place is now filled by the expert educator with the best equipment money can place at his disposal. He was the chief commentator on current affairs, and was judged by the wideness of his information. That place has been taken over by the editor. He was often the only trained public speaker in the town, and was judged by the polish of his oratory. Now the land overflows with capable public speakers.