'Make the tree good.'
Yes. And there are a whole set of would-be arboriculturists who tell
you they will do it if you will trust to them. Let us look at them.
First comes one venerable personage. He says, 'I am Law, and I
prescribe this, and I forbid that, and I show reward and punishment,
and I tell you--be a good man.' Well! what then? It is not for want of
telling that men are bad. The worst man in the world knows his duty a
great deal more than the best man in the world does it. And whether it
is the law of the land, or whether it is the law of society, or the
law written in Scripture, or the law written in a man's own heart,
they all come under the same fatal disability. They tell us what to
do, and they do not put out a finger to help us to do it. A lame man
does not get to the city because he sees a guide-post at the turning
which tells him which road to take. The people who do not believe in
certain modern agitations about the restrictions of the liquor traffic
say, 'You cannot make people sober by Act of Parliament,' which is
absolutely true, although it does not bear, I think, the inference that
they would draw from it, and it just puts into a rough form the fatal
weakness of this would-be gardener and improver of the nature of the
trees. He tells us our duty, and there an end.
Do you remember how the Apostle put the weakness of law in words,
the antique theological terminology of which should not prevent us
from seeing the large truth in them? 'If there had been a law given
which could have given life, then righteousness should have been by
the law,' which being translated into modern English is just this,
If Law could impart a power to obey its behests, then it is all that
we want to make us right. But until it can do that it fails in two
points. It deals with conduct, and we need to have character dealt
with; and it does not lift the burden that it lays on me with one of
its fingers. So we may rule Law out of court.
And then comes another, and he says, 'I am Culture, and intellectual
acquirement; or my name is Education, and I am going to make the
tree good in the most scientific fashion, because what makes men bad
is that they do not know, and if they only knew they would do the
right.' Now, I thoroughly believe that education diminishes crime. I
believe it weans from certain forms of evil. I believe that, other
things being equal, an educated man, with his larger interests and
his cultivated tastes, has a certain fastidiousness developed which
keeps him from being so much tempted by the grosser forms of
transgression. I believe that very largely you will empty your gaols
in proportion as you fill your schools. And let no man say that I am
an obscurantist, or that I am indifferent to the value of education
and the benefits of intellectual culture, when I declare that all
these may be attained, and the nature of the tree remain exactly
what it was. You may prune, you may train along the wall, you may
get bigger fruit, you will not get better fruit. Did you ever hear
the exaggerated line that describes one of the pundits of science as
'the greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind'? The plain fact is that
the cultivation of the understanding has little to do with the
purifying of the depths of the heart.
And then comes another, and says, 'I am the genius of Beauty and Art.
And my recipe is pictures and statues, and all that will refine the
mind, and lift the taste.' That is the popular gospel of this day, in
a great many quarters. Yes, and have we never heard of a period in
European history which was, as they call it, 'the Renaissance' of art
and the death of morality? Do we not know that side by side there have
been cultivated in all ages, and are being cultivated to-day, the most
exclusive devotion to the beauty that can be expressed by art, and the
most intense indifference to the beauty of holiness? Ah! brethren, it
wants something far deeper-going than pictures to purge the souls of
men. And whilst, as before, I thankfully acknowledge the refining
influence of this new cult, I would protest against the absurdity of
putting it upon a pedestal as the guide and elevator of corrupted
humanity.
And then come others, and they say, 'Environment is the thing that
is to blame for it all. How can you get decent lives in the slums?'
No, I know you cannot; and God bless every effort made to get the
people out of the slums, I say. Only do not let us exaggerate. You
cannot change a man, as deeply as we need to be changed, by any
change of his circumstances. 'Take the bitter tree,' as I remember
an old Jewish saying has it, 'take the bitter tree and plant it in
Eden, and water it with the rivers there; and let the angel Gabriel
be the gardener, and the tree will still bear bitter fruit.' Are all
the people who live in good houses good? Will a 'living wage'--eight
shillings a day and eight hours' play--will these change a man's
character? Will these go deep enough down to touch the springs of
evil? You cannot alter the nature of a set of objects by arranging
them in different shapes, parallelograms, or squares, or circles, or
any others. As long as you have the elements that are in human
nature to deal with, you may do as you like about the distribution
of wealth, and the relation of Capital to Labour, and the various
cognate questions which are all included in the vague word Socialism;
and human nature will be too strong for you, and you will have the
old mischiefs cropping out again. Brethren, you cannot put out
Vesuvius by bringing to bear on it the squirts of all the fire
engines in creation. The water will go up in steam, and do little or
nothing to extinguish the fire. And whilst I would thankfully help
in all these other movements, and look for certain limited results
of good from them, I, for my part, believe, and therefore I am bound
to declare, that neither singly, nor all of them in combination,
will they ever effect the change on human nature which Jesus Christ
regarded as the only possible means for securing that human nature
should bear good fruit.
For, if there were no other reason, there are two plain ones which I
only touch. God is the source of all good, of all creatural purity
as well as all creatural blessedness. And if a life has a blank wall
turned to Him, and has cut itself off from Him, I do not care how
you educate it, fill it full of science, plunge it into an
atmosphere of art, make the most perfect arrangements for social and
economical and political circumstances, that soul is cut off from
the possibility of good, because it is cut off from the fontal
source of all good. And there is another reason which is closely
connected with this, and that is that the true bitter tang in us all
is self-centring regard. That is the mother-tincture that, variously
coloured and compounded, makes in all the poisonous element that we
call sin, and until you get something that will cast that evil out
of a man's heart, you may teach and refine and raise him and arrange
things for him as you like, and you will not master the source of
all wrong and corrupt fruit.