meetings, my friends, without reminding myself and without reminding you
of that; without reminding myself also and without trying to remind you
of how absolutely conformable it is to everything that man does in this
world. The great richness of nature, the great richness of life, comes
when we understand that behind every specific action of man there is
some one of the more elemental and primary forces of the universe that
are always trying to express themselves. There is nothing that man does
that finds its beginning within itself, but everything, every work of
every trade, of every occupation, is simply the utterance of some one of
those great forces which lie behind all life, and in the various ways of
the different generations and of the different men are always trying to
make their mark upon the world. Behind the power that the man exercises
there always lies the great power of life, the continual struggle of
nature to write herself in the life and work of man, the power of beauty
struggling to manifest itself, the harmony that is always desiring to
make itself known. To the merchant there are the great laws of trade, of
which his works are but the immediate expression. To the mechanic there
are the continual forces of nature, gravitation uttering itself in all
its majesty, made no less majestic because it simply takes its
expression for the moment in some particular exercise of his art. To the
ship that sails upon the sea there are the everlasting winds that come
out of the treasuries of God and fulfil His purpose in carrying His
children to their destination. There is no perfection of the universe
and of the special life of man in the universe until it comes to this.
The greatest of all forces are ready without condescension, are ready as
the true expression of their life, to manifest themselves in the
particular activities which we find everywhere, and which are going on
everywhere. The little child digs his well in the sea-shore sand, and
the great Atlantic, miles deep, miles wide, is stirred all through and
through to fill it for him. Shall it not be so then here to-day, and
shall it not be the truth, upon which we let our minds especially dwell,
and which we keep in our souls all the time that I am speaking and you
are listening, that however He may be hidden from our sight God is the
ultimate fact and the final purpose and power of the universe, and that
everything that man tries to do for his fellow-man is but the expression
of that love of God which is everywhere struggling to utter itself in
blessing, to give itself away to the soul of every one for whom He
cares?
It is in this truth that I find the real secret, the deepest meaning,
of the everlasting dissatisfaction of man that is always ready to be
stirred. We moralize, we philosophize about the discontent of man. We
give little reasons for it; but the real reason of it all is this, that
which everything lying behind it really signifies: that man is greater
than his circumstances, and that God is always calling to him to come up
to the fulness of his life. Dreadful will be the day when the world
becomes contented, when one great universal satisfaction spreads itself
over the world. Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes
absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts
that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not
forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do
something larger, which he knows that he was meant and made to do
because he is the child of God. And there is the real secret of the
man's struggle with his sins. It is not simply the hatefulness of the
sin, as we have said again and again, but it is the dim perception, the
deep suspicion, the real knowledge at the heart of the man, that there
is a richer and a sinless region in which it is really meant for him to
dwell. Man stands separated from that life of God, as it were, by a
great, thick wall, and every effort to put away his sin, to make himself
a nobler and a purer man, is simply his beating at the inside of that
door which stands between him and the life of God, which he knows that
he ought to be living. It is like the prisoner hidden in his cave, who
feels through all the thick wall that shuts him out from it the sunlight
and the joyous life that is outside, who knows that his imprisonment is
not his true condition, and so with every tool that his hands can grasp
and with his bleeding hands themselves beats on the stone, that he may
find his way out. And the glory and the beauty of it is that while he is
beating upon the inside of the wall there is also a noble power praying
upon the outside of that wall, The life to which he ought to come is
striving in its turn, upon its side, to break away the hindrance that is
keeping him from the thing he ought to be, that is keeping him from the
life he ought to live. God, with His sunshine and lightning, with the
great majestic manifestations of Himself, and with all the peaceful
exhibitions of His life, is forever trying, upon His side of the wall,
to break away the great barrier that separates the sinner's life from
Him. Great is the power, great is the courage of the sinner, when
through the thickness of the walls he feels that beating life of God,
when he knows that he is not working alone, when he is sure that God is
wanting him just as truly, far more truly, than he wants God. He bears
himself to a nobler struggle with his enemy and a more determined effort
to break down the resistance that stands between him and the higher
life. Our figure is all imperfect, as all our figures are so imperfect,
because it seems to be the man all by himself, working by himself, until
he shall come forth into the life of God, as if God waited there to
receive him when he came forth the freed man, and as if the working of
the freedom upon the sinner's side had not something also of the purpose
of God within him. God is not merely in the sunshine; God is in the
cavern of the man's sin. God is with the sinner wherever he can be.
There is no soul so black in its sinfulness, so determined in its
defiant obstinacy, that God has abandoned his throne room at the centre
of the sinner's life, and every movement is the God movement and every
effort is the God force, with which man tries to break forth from his
sin and come forth into the full sunlight of a life with God. Do you not
think how full of hope it is? Do you not see that when this great
conception of the universe, which is Christ's conception, which beamed
in every look that He shed upon the world, which was told in every word
that He spoke and which was in every movement of His hand--do you not
see how, when this great conception of the universe takes possession of
a man, then all his struggle with his sin is changed, it becomes a
strong struggle, a glorious struggle. He hears perpetually the voice of
Christ, "Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world. You shall overcome
it by the same strength which overcame with Me."
And then another thing. When a man comes forth into the fulness of that
life with God, when at last he has entered God's service and the
obedience to God's will, and the communion with God's life, then there
comes this wonderful thing, there comes the revelation of the man's
past. We dare to tell the man that if he enters into the divine life, if
he makes himself a servant of God and does God's will out of obedient
love, he shall then be strong and wise. One great element of his
strength is going to be this: A marvellous revelation that is to come to
him of how all his past has been filled with the power of that spirit
with which he has at last entered into communion, to which he has at
last submitted himself. Man becomes the child of God, becomes the
servant of Jesus Christ, and this marvellous revelation amazes him. He
sees that back through all the years of his most obstinate and careless
life, through all his wilfulness and resistance, through all his
profligacy and black sin, God has been with him all the time, beating
himself upon his life, showing him how He desired to call him to
Himself, and that the final submission does not win God. It simply
submits to the God who has been with the soul all the time. Can there be
anything more winning to the soul than that, anything that brings a
deeper shame to you, than to have it revealed to you, suddenly or
slowly, that from the first day that you came into this world, nay,
before your life was an uttered fact in this world, God has been loving
you, and seeking you, and planning for you, and making every effort that
He could make in consistency with the free will with which He endowed
you from the centre of His own life, that you might become His and
therefore might become truly yourself? Through all the years in which
you were obstinate and rebellious, through all the years in which you
defied Him, nay, through the years in which you denied Him and said that
He did not exist, He was with you all the time. What shall I say to my
friend who is an atheist? Shall I believe that until he comes to a
change of his opinions and recognizes that there is indeed a ruling
love, a great and fatherly God for all the world, that he has nothing to
do with that God? Shall I believe that God has nothing to do with him
until he acknowledges God? God would be no God to me if He were that, if
He left the man absolutely unhelped until the man beat at the doors of
His divine helpfulness and said, "I believe in Thee at last. Now help
me." And to the atheist there appears the light of the God whom he
denies. Into every soul, just so far and just so fast as it is possible
for that soul to receive it, God beats His life and gives His help. That
is what makes a man hopeful of all his fellow-men as he looks around
upon them and sees them in all the conditions of their life.
And this could only be if that were true, if that is true, which we are
dwelling upon constantly, the absolute naturalness of the Christian
life, that it is man's true life, that it is no foreign region into
which some man may be transported and where he lives an alien to all his
own essential nature and to all the natural habitudes in which he is
intending to exist. There are two ideas of religion which always have
abounded, and our great hope is, our great assurance for the future of
the world is, that the true and pure idea of religion some day shall
grow and take possession of the life of man. One idea, held by very
earnest people, embodied in very faithful and devoted lives, is the
strangeness of religion to the life of man, as if some morning something
dropped out of the sky that had had no place upon our earth before, as
if there came the summons to man to be something entirely different from
what the conditions of his nature prophesied and intended that he
should be. The other idea is that religion comet by the utterance of God
from the heavens, but comes up out of the human life of man; that man is
essentially and intrinsically religious; that he does not become
something else than man when he becomes the servant of Jesus Christ, but
then for the first time he becomes man; that religion is not something
that is fastened upon the outside of his life, but is the awakening of
the truth inside of his life; the Church is but the true fulfilment of
human life and society; heaven is but the New Jerusalem that completes
all the old Jerusalem and Londons and Bostons that have been here upon
our earth. Man, in the fulfilment of his nature by Jesus Christ, is
man--not to be something else, our whole humanity is too dear to us. I
will cling to this humanity of man, for I do love it, and I will know
nothing else. But when man is bidden to look back into his humanity and
see what it means to be a man, that humanity means purity, truthfulness,
earnestness, and faithfulness to that God of which humanity is a part,
that God which manifested that humanity was a part of it, when the
incarnation showed how close the divine and human belonged
together--when man hears that voice, I do not know how he can resist,
why he shall not lift himself up and say, "Now I can be a man, and I can
be man only as I share in and give my obedience to and enter into
communion with the life of God," and say to Christ, to Christ the
revealer of all this, "Here I am, fulfil my manhood."
And do not you see how immediately this sweeps aside, as one gush of the
sunlight sweeps aside the darkness, do not you see how it sweeps aside
all the foolish and little things that people are saying? I say to my
friend, "Be a Christian." That means to be a full man. And he says to
me, "I have not time to be a Christian. I have not room. If my life was
not so full. You don't know how hard I work from morning to night. What
time is there for me to be a Christian? What time is there, what room is
there for Christianity in such a life as mine?" But does not it come to
seem to us so strange, so absurd, if it was not so melancholy, that man
should say such a thing as that? It is as if the engine had said it had
no room for the steam. It is as if the tree had said it had no room for
the sap. It is as if the ocean had said it had no room for the tide. It
is as if the man said that he had no room for his soul. It is as if life
said that it had no time to live, when it is life. It is not something
that is added to life. It is life. A man is not living without it. And
for a man to say that "I am so full in life that I have no room for
life," you see immediately to what absurdity it reduces itself. And how
a man knows what he is called upon by God's voice, speaking to him every
hour, speaking to him every moment, speaking to him out of everything,
that which the man is called upon to do because it is the man's only
life! Therefore time, room, that is what time, that is what room is
for--life. Life is the thing we seek, and man finds it in the fulfilment
of his life by Jesus Christ.
Now, until we understand this and take it in its richness, all religion
seems, becomes to us such a little thing that it is not religion at all.
You have got to know that religion, the service of Christ, is not
something to be taken in in addition to your life; it is your life. It
is not a ribbon that you shall tie in your hat, and go down the street
declaring yourself that you have accepted something in addition to the
life which your fellow-men are living. It is something which, taken into
your heart, shall glow in every action so that your fellow-men shall
say, "Lo, how he lives! What new life has come into him?" It is that
insistence upon the great essentialness of the religious life, it is the
insistence that religion is not a lot of things that a man does, but is
a new life that a man lives, uttering itself in new actions because it
is the new life. "Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom
of God." So Jesus said to Nicodemus the ruler, Nicodemus the amateur in
religions, who came and said, "Perhaps this teacher has something else
that I can bind into my catalogue of truths and hold it." Jesus looked
him in the face and said: "It is not that, my friend, it is not that; it
is to be a new man, it is to be born again. It is to have the new life,
which is the old life, which is the eternal life. So alone does man
enter into the kingdom of God." I cannot help believing all the time
that if our young men knew this, religion would lift itself up and have
a dignity and greatness--not a thing for weak souls, but a thing for the
manliest soul. Just because of its manliness it is easy. "Is it easy or
is it hard, this religion of yours?" people say to us. I am sure I do
not know the easy and the hard things. I cannot tell the difference.
What is easier than for a man to breathe? And yet, have you never seen a
breathless man, a man in whom the breathing was almost stopped, a
drowning man, an exhausted man? have you never seen, when the breath was
put once more to his nostrils and brought down once more into his empty
lungs, the struggle with which he came back to it? It was the hardest
thing for him to do, so much harder for him to live than it was for him
to die. But by and by see him on his feet, going about his work, helping
his fellow-men, living his life, rejoicing in his days, guarding
against his dangers, full of life. Is life a hard thing for him? You
don't talk about its being hard or easy any more than you talk about
life itself. The man who lives in God knows no life except the life of
God. Let men know that it is not mere trifling, it is not a thing to be
dallied with for an instant, it is not a thing for a man to convince
himself by an argument, and then keep as it were locked in a shelf: it
is something that is so deep and serious, so deep and serious that when
a man has once tested it there is no more chance of his going out of it
than there is of his going out of the friendship and the love which
holds him with its perpetual expression, with the continued deeper and
deeper manifestation of the way in which the living being belongs to him
who has a right to his life.
Now in the few moments that remain I want to take it for granted most
seriously, most earnestly, that the men who are listening to me are in
earnest, and I want to try to tell them as a brother might tell a
brother, as I might tell to you or try to tell to you if sitting before
my fireside, I want to try to answer the question which I know is upon
your hearts. "What shall I do about this?" I know you say; "Is this all
in the clouds? Is there anything I can do in the right way?" If you are
in earnest, I shall try to tell you what I should do, if I were in your
place, that I might enter into that life and be the free man that we
have tried to describe, of whom we believe certain special and definite
things. What are they? In the first place I would put away my sin. There
is not a man listening to me now who has not some trick of life, some
habit that has possession of him, which he knows is a wrong thing. The
very first thing for a man to do is absolutely to set himself against
them. If you are foul, stop being licentious, at least stop doing
licentious things. If you, in any part of your business, are tricky, and
unsound, and unjust, cut that off, no matter what it costs you. There is
something clear and definite enough for every man. It is as clear for
every man as the sunlight that smites him in his eyes. Stop doing the
bad thing which you are doing. It is drawing the bolt away to let
whatever mercy may come in come in. Stop doing your sin. You can do that
if you will. Stop doing your sin, no matter how mechanical it seems, and
then take up your duty, whatever you can do to make the world more
bright and good. Do whatever you can to help every struggling soul, to
add new strength to any staggering cause, the poor sick man that is by
you, the poor wronged man whom you with your influence might vindicate,
the poor boy in your shop that you may set with new hope upon the road
of life that is beginning already to look dark to him. I cannot tell you
what it is. But you know your duty. No man ever looked for it and did
not find it.
And then the third thing--pray. Yes, go to the God whom you but dimly
see and pray to Him in the darkness, where He seems to sit. Ask Him, as
if He were, that He will give you that which, if He is, must come from
Him, can come from Him alone. Pray anxiously. Pray passionately, in the
simplest of all words, with the simplest of all thoughts. Pray, the
manliest thing that a man can do, the fastening of his life to the
eternal, the drinking of his thirsty soul out of the great fountain of
life. And pray distinctly. Pray upon your knees. One grows tired
sometimes of the free thought, which is yet perfectly true, that a man
can pray anywhere and anyhow. But men have found it good to make the
whole system pray. Kneel down, and the very bending of these obstinate
and unused knees of yours will make the soul kneel down in the humility
in which it can be exalted in the sight of God.
And then read your Bible. How cold that sounds! What, read a book to
save my soul? Read an old story that my life in these new days shall be
regenerated and saved? Yes, do just that, for out of that book, if you
read it truly, shall come the divine and human person. If you can read
it with your soul as well as with your eyes, there shall come the Christ
there walking in Palestine. You shall see Him so much greater than the
Palestine in which he walks, that at one word of prayer, as you bend
over the illuminated page, there shall lift up that body-being of the
Christ, and come down through the centuries and be your helper at your
side. So read your Bible.
And then seek the Church--oh, yes, the Church. Do you think, my friends,
you who stand outside the Church, and blame her for her inconsistencies,
and tell of her shortcomings, and point out the corruptions that are in
her history, all that are in her present life to-day--do you really
believe that there is an earnest man in the Church that does not know
the Church's weaknesses and faults just as well as you do? Do you
believe that there is one of us living in the life and heart of the
Church who don't think with all his conscience, who don't in every day
in deep distress and sorrow know how the Church fails of the great life
of the Master, how far she is from being what God meant she should be,
what she shall be some day? But all the more I will put my life into
that Church, all the more I will drink the strength that she can give to
me and make what humble contribution to her I can bring of the
earnestness and faithfulness of my life. Come into the Church of Jesus
Christ. There is no other body on the face of the earth that represents
what she represents--the noble destiny of the human soul, the great
capacity of human faith, the inexhaustible and unutterable love of God,
the Christ, who stands to manifest them all.
Now those are the things for a man to do who really cares about all
this. Those are the things for an earnest man to do. They have no power
in themselves, but they are the opening of the windows. And if that
which I believe is true, God is everywhere giving himself to us, the
opening of the windows is a signal that we want Him and an invitation
that He will be glad enough to answer, to come. Into every window that
is open to Him and turned His way, Christ comes, God comes. That is the
only story. There is put aside everything else. Election,
predestination, they can go where they please. I am sure that God gives
Himself to every soul that wants Him and declares its want by the open
readiness of the signal which He knows. How did the sun rise on our city
this morning? Starting up in the east, the sun came in its majesty into
the sky. It smote on the eastward windows, and wherever the window was
all closed, even if it were turned eastward, on the sacred side of the
city's life, it could not come in; but wherever any eastward window had
its curtains drawn, wherever he who slept had left the blinds shut, so
that the sun when it came might find its way into his sleepiness, there
the sun came, and with a shout awoke its faithful servant who had
believed in him even before he had seen him, and said, "Arise, arise
from the dead, and I will give thee life." This is the simplicity of it
all, my friends. A multitude of other things you need not trouble
yourselves about. I amaze myself when I think how men go asking about
the questions of eternal punishment and the duration of man's torment in
another life, of what will happen to any man who does not obey Jesus
Christ. Oh, my friends, the soul is all wrong when it asks that. Not
until the soul says, "What will come if I do obey Jesus Christ?" and
opens its glorified vision to see all the great things that are given to
the soul that enters into the service of the perfect one, the perfect
love, not until then the perfect love, the perfect life, come in. A man
may be--I believe it with all my heart--so absolutely wrapped up in the
glory of obedience, and the higher life, and the service of Christ, that
he never once asks himself, "What will come to me if I do not obey?" any
more than your child asks you what you will do to him if he is not
obedient. Every impulse and desire of his life sets toward obedience.
And so the soul may have no theory of everlasting or of limited
punishment, or of the other life.
Simply now, here, he must have that without which he cannot live, that
without which there is no life. Jesus the soul must have, the one
yesterday, to-day, and forever; He that is and was and is to be. Men
dwell upon what He was, upon what He is; I rather think to-day of what
He is to be. And when I see these young men here before me looking to
the future and not to the past,--nay, looking to the future and not to
the present, valuing the present only as it is the seed ground of the
future, the foundation upon which the structure is to rise whose
pinnacle shall some day pierce the sky,--I want to tell them of the
Jesus that shall be. In fuller comprehension of Him, with deeper
understanding of His life, with a more entire impression of what He is
and of what He may be to the soul, so men shall understand Him in the
days to be, and yet He shall be the same Christ still. The future
belongs to Jesus Christ, yes, the same Christ that I believe in and that
I call upon you to believe in to-day, but a larger, fuller, more
completely comprehended Christ, the Christ that is to be, the same
Christ that was and suffered, the same Christ that is and helps, but
the same Christ also who, being forever deeper and deeper and more
deeply received into the souls of men, regenerates their institutions,
changes their life, opens their capacities, surprises them with
themselves, makes the world glorious and joyous every day, because it
has become the new incarnation, the new presence of the divine life in
the life of man.