The cry, "How may I be right?" is the cry of the ages. Human history
is the record of our attempt to answer it. Man is naturally a truth
seeker, and this is the search of all truly great souls. The enduring
monuments of literature are those that have in some measure answered
this question. All things that have been worth while have helped us to
know and to realize the right. Health, happiness, freedom, morality,
all are but parts of the right; all are but sections of the sublime
whole for which man ever seeks. The search manifests itself in
different ways; it may be as science, the passion for the knowledge of
the right relations of things; as justice, for right relations amongst
men; as philosophy, as ethics, as religion. Back of all our life is
the instinct of progress; we push towards the perfect. And perfection
we now know rests not in more things but in bringing all the things
that are into right relations with one another.
The idea that any man can be right regardless of others we scout as
absurd. The ideal civilization we work for here, even the heaven we
long for, is simply a condition of living where the things that
separate, despoil, and introduce discord are no more. The hope of the
race is to be in right relations with all things. All the great
religions are as the footprints of peoples who have sought the truth
that would lead them to be right and just with one another, with the
world, and with the great unseen powers behind all being. Our
universal sense of wrongness is but part of our passion for rightness.
The sense of imperfection and the desire for improvement have marked
all religions that have influenced men. In the Jew this desire for
righteousness was supreme. Job is but a type. Coming to himself
amongst the ruin of all the things he counted most precious, he forgets
their loss in his desire to solve the great problem, What is right and
how may I reach it? Somewhere he knows there is a solution to all the
riddles of his friends and the questions of his own heart. An orderly
universe is not crowned by a being whose life must ever remain an
unsolved riddle. Men are not adrift in a fog with no hope of taking
bearings. If men have marked the natural world with lines of latitude
and longitude for the guidance of its travellers, the moral world is
not without its markings.
Job's very question contains the only answer that has ever satisfied
man. God Himself is the great meridian of all morality. From Him we
may measure all relationships and get them right. That is the
essential message of the Bible; it strikes that first of all in "In the
beginning God----" Every life is right in the measure that it adjusts
itself to the unvarying will; amongst the nations they have the kingdom
who do His will. The world has made progress in precisely the
proportion that this will has been realized. The promise of the
present is that this great standard, this universal law by which all
may find the right, has been made known to all through a life. One of
our own has set forth God. One has lived who has shown us how to live.
For every problem there is now an example of its solution. For every
difficulty there is something better far than a declaration of duty;
there is the great Doer of the deed. He has come near to man that men
might come near to one another. He reveals the right.
Yet we must not allow His perfection to make Him unapproachable. He is
only an example as long as His example is attainable. His divinity
does not depend on His distance from us but on the degree in which He
lifts us, inspires us towards the height He has gained.