Jesus said, "If thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and
cast them from thee," but this age finds it hard to accept that saying.
It asks, If we are to throw life away why should it have been given to
us? Why this selfhood with its passions, its surging desires, its
great longing to be untrammelled and free if all is to be restrained
and the passions are to be perpetually denied? If religion means, as
some plainly have said, doing the things you don't want to do and
leaving undone those you desire, then it is a mockery, a contradiction
of our lives and natures.
Therefore there exists another philosophy which says, boldly: Live out
all that is in you; do all the things you want to do; your passions in
themselves are sufficient justification for their gratification. They
say man is free; therefore, let him realize himself by giving free and
full expression to every thought, inclination, appetite, and
possibility within him.
When the average man puts the two philosophies in contrast he is likely
to conclude that the path of self-denial, of stern repression, is the
mistaken one; for, he will say, does it not contradict nature?--does it
not involve the repression of natural instincts and make all life a
perpetual fight against ourselves, a waste of forces, instead of, as it
should be, a plan by which a man might find success through the
realization of the best in himself?
But let another test be put to this philosophy--the test of life. How
does it work out? What are the best lives, the lives that are richest
and that have most enriched the world? Are they those that have given
free rein to every fancy, that have nurtured and brought to fruitage
every growth of the heart's garden, whether it be thistle, brier, or
poison root, or fair, nutritious product? Are they those that have
given the tiger and the beast of prey free and full range of the life?
There is striking unanimity in the answer. The rich and the enriching
lives have been those that have come by the path of the cross; they
have learned repression, practiced denial, and suffered death. In
every sphere the lights that have illumined the way of man's advance
have not been the dancing flames of selfish, sensual passion but the
consuming of the bodies of the martyrs and heroes, either burning in
their passion for others or denying and losing all rather than denying
truth and light.
The law runs through all; if you would have a perfect flower you must
deny existence to many weeds, you must repress the rank growth, you
must pluck off many a leaf and nip many a bud that the one may come to
the fullness of its beauty. Through the grain of character goes the
wise husbandman, and death is in his hand--the death of the less
worthy, the harmful, and the enemy that life may abound yet more and
more in that which is worthy.
In those fields where all things grow in their own way the weeds become
the standard for all; license brings all down to the level of the
lowest. But life is not license--it is choice, selection, sacrifice,
death. Pain is the only price at which perfection may be purchased.
Self-realization comes not by permitting all things to have their way
but by subjecting all parts to the securing of that high end.
It is but cowardice that cries for the so-called natural outworking of
everything within man; it seeks to save the labour of weeding, the pain
of cutting here and pruning there. It asks only to be left alone. But
that way lies the deepest pain of all, the pain of a life where there
is nothing but tangles of weeds--no flowers, no capacities for joy, no
power to will, no eye to see the good and true and beautiful.
No; the great Teacher was right when He called for self-denial and
self-victory. He only is great, he alone has found life who has
learned to bring all his parts and faculties into service, who brings
all his body and self into subjection that all may be keen and well
kept tools in the work he is doing as a servant of his brothers and his
age. This service gives the supreme and sufficient motive for the
suppression and elimination of all things that might hinder; the
development of the best self for the best service by means of the
cutting off of anything that might hinder or thwart the high and holy
service purposes of a life.