DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY

Whether there should be compulsory military training in America is a

question which some people will answer yes or no according to their

general theories and others according to their observation of the

actual effects of such training on moral character. But whatever our

views may be on this familiar question, whether we regard military

service as ethically helpful in its influence or as morally injurious,

we cannot differ as to the need in our national character of those

qualities of self-control, of quick and unquestioning obedience to

duty, of joyful contempt of hardship, and of zest in difficult and

arduous undertakings which, rightly or wrongly, we consider soldierly,

which we attribute in such rich measure to our forefathers, and which

the moral exigencies of our national task to-day as peremptorily

demand. To put these primary and elemental needs as sharply as

possible, let us call them discipline and austerity. Our American

character needs more of both.

I do not know a better starting point than is found in one of those

vivid modern touches upon which we constantly come in the Old

Testament. This one is in the account of the closing year of King

David’s life. The story seems ancient and far away until we suddenly

read: “His father had not displeased him at any time saying, Why hast

thou done so?” If we were to translate the words more directly into

the language of our own day, we should say, “His father had always let

him do exactly as he pleased.” The reference is to David and his son

Adonijah, and to the want of discipline by which the father had ruined

his boy.

It is not hard to reconstruct the story. David was busy about his cares

as king, and his heart was indulgent towards his children. Adonijah

seems to have been his youngest son, and the father let him have his

way, never reining him up or checking him by asking why he had done

thus or so. David pursued, in other words, the modern theory of child

training: that the one principle by which children should be educated

is the principle of letting what is naturally in them come out; that

they must not be crossed or frustrated, or have any external discipline

or control laid upon their lives. This is, of course, the extreme of

it, but in some form we hear the theory and see it applied all about us

every day.

And it is a modern theory of self-education, also. We are told that

life should be left free to follow its native impulses; that it should

not be thwarted and intimidated by the conventions and prohibitions of

society; that men and women should consult their own hearts and then

should move out quite freely in obedience to their promptings; that

their lives and the lives of their children should not be twisted or

deflected by the imposition of any external authority or command.

Well, that was the way Adonijah was brought up. His father was rich.

The boy had his own establishment, his own horses, his own retinue of

attendants, and round about him, as about any oriental king’s son,

there would be the usual crowd of flatterers and sycophants. There was

no will or desire that he had not the means to gratify, and his father

let him have his way.

Further, he was the younger brother of Absalom, and the ancient record

says that they were handsome and popular boys. They had a way that

carried along those who came in touch with them, and as the king’s

sons, and the leading young men of the city, we have no difficulty in

understanding the atmosphere in which they lived and the conditions

within which they grew.

It must be confessed that this was the easy way of going about the

matter. It is far easier to let a child have its own way than to

endeavour by wisdom and patience and strength, to study and decide what

is best for the child and without hurting the child’s will, to guide it

into the better way. It was far less care to David to let Absalom and

Adonijah go than it would have been to take these high-strung sons of

his in hand and endeavour to break them to discipline and truth, and to

send them out into life real men of power. It was much easier never to

call them and to say, “Boys, why did you do this?” Much easier never

to lay any authority or guidance upon them from without, much easier,

especially for a man like David. He had grown up on a farm, with all

the hardship and frugality of farm life, with no privileges as a lad,

and now that he was the king of his nation, he was able to do anything

whatever for his sons. It was difficult to refuse them the things he

had never had. Easily and indulgently――for he was a man of kindly heart

all his days――he found it simpler not to lay hard restraints upon his

boys when he could give them their own way.

And, of course, this is the easier way of self-education too. For a

man to love himself so much that he never thinks of his neighbours, to

blind his eyes so completely to consequences that he can live for the

passing moment,――this is a very easy philosophy, and the man or the

woman who is able to practice it will seem, for a while, to live in

the sunshine, a fine butterfly, smooth-going life. All this is easier

than to say, not, What is my impulse? but, What ought I? not, What do

I like? but, What is best for all the world? not, What is the easy

way? but, What is the hard way over which the feet go that carry the

burdens of mankind, that bear the load of the world?

But, though it is the easy way for a while, there comes a time when

it is no longer the easy way. When in his little room above the gate

the old king bowed his gray head in his hands and with breaking heart

sobbed out: “O my son Absalom! my son, my son Absalom! would God I had

died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”――it was no longer the easy

way. When Adonijah rose up in insurrection against his old father as he

lay on his dying bed, gathering his little company of sycophants around

him and setting himself up in his father’s place, then it was no longer

the easy way that the old man had pursued.

And to-day still, fathers and mothers who for a little while thought

the easy way was never to ask their children why they had done so, but

to let them go their own way with no imposition of outward authority or

control, find after a while that the easy way has turned bitterly hard.

I have a friend, a leading merchant in one of our large cities. Some

time ago another friend was visiting him, and as they walked down the

street together, suddenly a large car whizzed around the corner, full

of young people, among them the merchant’s son. This was the middle of

the forenoon and the boy was supposed to be at work in his father’s

establishment. The father turned to his friend and said: “I wish I knew

how I could hold my boy in.” But my friend understood why he could not.

He knew that only two or three years before the son had been rewarded

for passing examinations at college, examinations that it ought to have

been taken for granted that he would pass. But his father thought he

should be rewarded for passing them, and he bought a car and sent it

up to him at college. Now he wonders why this son does not know how to

bind himself to arduous duty.

And in our own lives the easy education does not go easily all the way.

There comes a time when, having always indulged ourselves, we can’t

break the habit; when, never having taken our lives in our hands and

reined them to the great ministries of mankind, we discover that we

cannot. We find that we obey our caprices; follow any impulse; cannot

stick to any task; do not know a principle when we see it; have no

iron or steel anywhere in our character; are the riffraff of the world

that the worthy men and women have to bear along as they go. In Mr.

Kipling’s inelegant lines:

“We was rotten ’fore we started――we was never disci_plined_;

We made it out a favour if an order was obeyed;

Yes, every little drummer ’ad ’is rights and wrongs to mind,

So we had to pay for teachin’――an’ we paid!”

Now I suggest that we put all this positively to ourselves, for every

one of us knows that we are treading near some of the moral realities

of weakness and need in our day and nation. Why should restraint,

obedience, the authority of duty and God be let into our lives? In

order that out of all these things self-control may come. And why

should there be this submission and control of our lives by duty, and

truth and God? Well, the reasons are obvious, the moment we begin to

think about them.

There is the indisputable fact that the strongest and best men and

women we know are men and women who were trained in this school, who

some time during their life, and the earlier the better, passed under

the discipline and influence of that chastening spoken about in the

twelfth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, without which we are not

children of a clean God. All around us are these men and women, fathers

and mothers, who indulge their sons and daughters, who never confront

them with moral principle and obligation and duty, and then lament

because their children do not seem to have the old iron grasp of duty,

the old rigid love of truth and righteousness. Well, it is all very

simple. It is because those fathers and mothers are denying to their

children the very education that made themselves what they are. The men

and women, who will not run away from any task, who stand steadfast in

the truth, upon whose every word we can rest our whole soul, grew out

of a certain discipline, a certain education, and it was the kind that

Adonijah did not have. And all men and women who want to be masters of

their lives and to have strength to lay beneath the work of the world

must ask God that such discipline may be given to them.

Not alone is this the only kind of training that can produce this kind

of character, but unless a man learns control from without, he will

never learn self-control. Unless he passes under the discipline of a

wiser and stronger hand at the beginning, he will never come to the

time of deliberate and moral self-discipline, which alone is character.

For this only is character,――the binding of life beneath the firm

sovereignty of the principle that is the heart of God. If nations do

not realize this they will pay heavily for their failure. “Make your

educational laws strict,” said Ruskin, “and your criminal laws may be

gentle; but leave youth its liberty and you will have to dig dungeons

for age.”

And it is this that gives freedom. There is no freedom outside of

character. Liberty, as Montesquieu says, is not freedom to do just as

we please. Liberty is the ability to do as we ought. And the freedom

that we need is not the freedom of caprice and whim and listening to

our impulses. It is the freedom that enables our eyes clearly to see

what right is, and then empowers us to do it. Symonds put it in his

verse:

“Soul, rule thyself. On passion, deed, desire,

Lay thou the law of thy deliberate will.

Stand at thy chosen post, faith’s sentinel.

Learn to endure. Thine the reward

Of those who make living light their Lord.

Clad with celestial steel these stand secure,

Masters, not slaves.”

And if such self-control goes as far even as the self-extinction of

that voluntarily accepted Cross, on the green hill outside Jerusalem,

even so it will bring victory at the last, because it has brought

one long succession of victories over self all the days. I cut this

fugitive bit of verse from a newspaper the other day:

“Pausing a moment ere the day was done,

While yet the earth was scintillant with light,

I backward glanced. From valley, plain and height,

At intervals, where my life path had run,

Rose cross on cross: and nailed upon each one

Was my dead self. And yet that gruesome sight

Lent sudden splendour to the falling night.

Showing the conquests that my soul had won.

“Up to the rising stars I looked and cried,

There is no death! For year on year reborn,

I wake to larger life, to joy more great.

So many times have I been crucified,

So often seen the resurrection morn,

I go triumphant, though new Calvaries wait.”

And this freedom and victory are waiting only for those lives that have

been broken beneath the cross of an absolute restraint of God, and

have so mastered themselves under God’s name by the help of Christ that

control has been given over in trust into their own hands.

And we all know that power is to be won here in this school where men

are trained both to feel and to wield dominion. There is no power in

the world that is not power cabined, power held in some way. Loose

power is imperceptible and utterly useless. The only power we know is

power walled in, shut down, confined and beating against its barriers

and its walls. We know this in the athletic life of our colleges

to-day. No athletic trainer in any college ever followed David’s method

with Adonijah. The trainer is there to say: “Why did you do it that

way?” “Why did you not do it this way? You have no right to waste your

energy in that way. You must do it so.” There is one scene in _Quo

Vadis_ that redeems much else in the book. It is the scene in the

Coliseum, when the giant Gothic slave is shown saving the life of his

mistress, whom he loved. The great bull has come out with the girl’s

form tied to his horns, and there is dead silence as the bull stands

angrily facing the man. You remember the picture. As Ursus lays one

hand on each horn of the auroch the struggle begins. There is not a

sound. The great multitude watches the man’s muscles rise and harden

and the sweat come out and drop from every pore. They see his feet

sinking down in the arena, until the sand is above his ankles. Suddenly

the great head of the bull begins to twist under that awful strength.

Then the neck breaks and the giant lifts the limp form from the beast’s

neck and stands with the burden in his hands before the Emperor. One

likes to read such a picture of power secured by self-discipline. Do we

want to go out limp and beaten and ineffective in our lives against the

great mass of work in the world that waits to be done? Or do we want to

go in the strength of Him Who, having bent beneath His Father’s will,

was able to carry on the Cross the whole burden of human sin?

And we must learn in this school the things we value and desire most:

purity and delicacy and refinement of character, for they cannot be

acquired elsewhere. So much social standing nowadays is uttered in

terms of self-assertion and indulgence and the ability to have any whim

or caprice gratified. This sort of self-assertion, this caprice, is

regarded by many of us as the highest mark of social authority, whereas

we know it is precisely the opposite, that it is self-restraint and

self-control and self-surrender that mark the finest lives.

There is a beautiful story in the life of Goldwin Smith that

illustrates what I mean. In the early sixties, when he was one of the

keenest liberal minds of England, he was associated with Cobden and

Bright in the Manchester School. Again and again he found himself the

mark of the bitterest criticism from Disraeli. Later Goldwin Smith,

resigning his professorship at Oxford, came to Canada. At that time

Disraeli’s novel, “Lothair,” appeared in which he attacked Smith――of

course, without using his name――as a social parasite. It stung Smith

to the depths of his soul, but as it was an anonymous book there was

nothing he could do but sit down and write this note personally to

Disraeli:

“You well know that if you had ventured openly to accuse me

of any social baseness, you would have had to answer for your

words; but when sheltering yourself under the literary forms of

a work of fiction, you seek to traduce with impunity the social

character of a political opponent, your expressions can touch

no man’s honour――they are the stingless insults of a coward.”

That was all he did. And yet, at that very moment, Goldwin Smith had in

his possession letters of Disraeli, with which he could have crushed

him. Openly in Parliament Disraeli had said that he had never asked

Peel for any position. But among Peel’s papers which had been placed

in his hands Smith had a letter in which Disraeli had abjectly begged

Peel to give him office. All that Smith needed to do was to publish

Disraeli’s own letter to Peel and it would have ruined Disraeli’s

career. But to Goldwin Smith that was not a noble thing to do. Peel’s

correspondence had not been given to him to use in self-defense, or

for any personal justification of his own, and he repressed that

letter until Disraeli was dead. Then, years after, all of Peel’s

correspondence was published and the whole world knew what a gentleman

Goldwin Smith had been. Our modern ideals of what constitutes high

social and national standing and character say: “Fight fire with fire.

Dishonour releases honour from itself. He struck you foul; strike him

so in return.” But the man who had learned self-restraint in the school

of God’s loyalty and truth, who understood that power is ours, not to

use for self-seeking, but for the good of men and for God’s honour,

would not stoop to any such disloyalty and shame.

Once more. Whose judgment is of any value? Who would have thought of

going to Adonijah and asking his opinion on anything whatsoever? He

did not know right from wrong. He never thought over the issues of

right or wrong. What would I like to do? What does passion bid me do?

What is my whim or caprice for to-night?――that was as far as Adonijah

had ever thought. No man would ever go to him, as no men will ever

come to you and me if we have not been trained in the school of moral

discrimination, if we have not looked on ethical principle and duty in

deciding the question whether each thing is really right for us and for

the whole world. If we are to be men and women to whom people will come

for comfort and strength and guidance, to whom our own children can

come with assurance that they will get the truth, we must be men and

women who now place ourselves beneath the firm discipline of God.

We see all this put simply in two great things. We see it in our Lord’s

constant appeal, while here in the world, for men and women of fiber

and discipline. One came to Him and said: “Lord, what shall I do to

inherit eternal life?” And Jesus, looking upon him, loved him and

said: “I would not think of counselling anything hard. You must not

sacrifice anything. It is all very easy. The Father above is a Father

of great tenderness and compassion. He would not lay a straw’s weight

upon any child of His. Go; live according to your desires and by the

natural impulses of your heart, and for that you shall have treasure

in heaven.” Oh, no; He did not say that. He said: “Go, sell all that

thou hast, and come and follow me. Except ye love less than duty your

father and mother and brother and sister, yea, and your own life also,

ye cannot enter the kingdom of God.”

We see it, too, in God’s way with men as He laid down His great laws at

the beginning, when His people were but as a race of little children.

Why did He not say to them: “This ye may do. The world is sweet and

fair. This ye may do, and all shall be easy to you”? Why, on the other

hand, did He speak to them in the stern admonitions of the Decalogue:

“Thou shalt. Thou shalt not”? God never hesitates to lay His great

denials upon mankind and at last to stifle us beneath the restraint

of death that He may issue us forth through that restraint into the

infinite liberties of the life immortal.

Now do not brush all this away to-day, or any day, light-heartedly, as

it can be so easily brushed away. “Oh, don’t shadow our lives,” you

will say, “with your denials and your prohibitions and your restraints.

Leave life free and sweet as the summer air and the flowers of the

field”――that last how long? No, my friends, it were well for us that

we should learn this lesson, and learn it now, ere the time comes when

the silver cord is loosed and the wheel is broken at the cistern and

the grinders cease and the long shadows fall. You remember a tragic

incident in New York a few years ago――I do not need to recall the

details of it――when two young lives made shipwreck of themselves just

because they thought that impulse and caprice were the free voices that

they might obey. When it was all over, and the two lives had drawn the

veil of night across their short-lived evil joy, one of the papers

published a letter which the girl had written to a friend:

“My friend,” she wrote, “you and I and Fred, young, heedless,

cynical, living in this reckless town of New York, may laugh

sometimes at the old things like law and religion, when they

say, ‘Thou shalt not.’ We may think that phrase was written for

old fogies, and we may sneer at ‘the wages of sin is death’;

but, my friend, there comes to us some time knowledge that the

law and religion are right. What they say we shall not do, we

cannot do without suffering. Fred and I have learned that. The

wages of sin is death.”

It is worse than death; for what was Hell in that great vision that

John saw? Why, nothing but the removal of all restraint. “He which is

filthy, let him be filthy still.” He is unclean, let him be unclean.

He is unholy, let him be unholy. Take all the restraints away. That is

Hell.

Away from the dark gates that open thither may another voice call us

here to-day, the clear, strong, summoning voice of Him Who said of

Himself: “I came not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent

me. I do always those things that please my Father,” and Who in the

garden of Gethsemane, when the anguish was almost greater than He could

bear, yet found rest when He prayed, “Father, not my will, but thine

be done”; that out of the willfulness and capriciousness and the whim

and mood of our little self-indulgent lives we may pass into the great,

strong, steadfast, sovereign will that waits for us; that we may stand

fast and be strong in the strength and chastening of God!

Now I have put it――this matter of our need of discipline――in the

most personal and individual way, but it is our great national and

corporate need. The body of a nation can only exist through the

ordered discipline of its members and the spirit of a nation like the

spirit of a man needs to be cleansed of all the lusts of willfulness

and self-indulgence. The spirit of our American nation needs such

cleansing. Mr. Kipling has drawn us his picture of it:

“Through many roads, by me possessed,

He shambles forth in cosmic guise;

He is the Jester and the Jest,

And he the Text himself applies.

“His easy unswept hearth he lends

From Labrador to Guadaloupe;

Till, elbowed out by sloven friends,

He camps, at sufferance, on the stoop.

“Calm-eyed he scoffs at sword and crown,

Or panic-blinded stabs and slays:

Blatant he bids the world bow down,

Or cringing begs a crust of praise;

“Or, sombre-drunk, at mine and mart,

He dubs his dreary brethren Kings.

His hands are black with blood――his heart

Leaps, as a babe’s, at little things.

“But, through the shift of mood and mood,

Mine ancient humour saves him whole――

The cynic devil in his blood

That bids him mock his hurrying soul;

“That bids him flout the Law he makes,

That bids him make the Law he flouts,

Till, dazed by many doubts, he wakes

The drumming guns that――have no doubts;

“That checks him foolish-hot and fond,

That chuckles through his deepest ire,

That gilds the slough of his despond

But dims the goal of his desire;

“Inopportune, shrill-accented,

The acrid Asiatic mirth

That leaves him, careless ’mid his dead,

The scandal of the elder earth.”

Doubtless we do not like this picture. We call it a libel or a

caricature. Let it be so. Draw your own picture. If there is any

truth or faithfulness in it, if it is not blind with national vanity

and self-deceit, it will still be a revelation of national need of

discipline and of self-empire.

And how can such discipline and self-empire be won? Well, it will

not be won on any ground of prudential expediency or practical

self-interest. It is well for men and nations to discern their moral

shortcomings and to realize their need of a new character. But there

are no automatic processes of community salvation. The disciplined

nation comes in only one way――by the answers of individuals to the

austere call of the one Person who can remake character and mould

the stuff of manhood and nationality. The austere call! This is the

nation’s need and it is the fundamental summons and the central note

of Christianity. “Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will

come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow

me.”

The appeal of Christ was always addressed to the sacrificial and

the heroic. In every call which He issued to men there is this

unmistakable note of austerity. He never smooths things over for the

sake of pleasing people or of winning followers. There were times when

He seemed almost needlessly to draw in these repelling aspects of

discipleship, and to make the conditions of following Him unnecessarily

hard. It is related that it came to pass that, as they went in the way,

a certain man said unto Him, “Lord, I will follow thee whithersoever

thou goest.” And Jesus said unto him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of

the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.”

And He said unto another, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, suffer me

first to go and bury my father.” Jesus said unto him, “Let the dead

bury their dead; but go thou and preach the kingdom of God.” And

another also said, “Lord, I will follow thee; but let me first go bid

them farewell which are at home at my house.” And Jesus said unto him,

“No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit

for the kingdom of God.”

Christ never concealed His own judgments and convictions as to life’s

values in these matters, and spoke with the greatest scorn of all

indulgence and softness of life. “What went ye out for to see?” He

asked the people, regarding John. “A man clothed in soft raiment?

Behold, they that wear soft clothing are in king’s houses.” He was

looking after men of iron and of austerity. “If any man will come after

me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.”

The beautiful thing is that this appeal of Christ’s was not futile.

Instead of repelling men it drew them. He actually obtained the men

whom He was hunting for, not by offering them worldly inducements,

not by making such appeals as anybody but Christ would have made, but

by addressing the sacrificial spirit in them, and making an appeal to

their latent capacity for heroism. There is a wonderful tribute in

Jesus’ method to those characteristics in human nature which have never

been destroyed, which can answer to the highest motives, which do not

need to be bought by any low compensations, but which spring into full

life when appealed to on the most heroic and unselfish plane. We know

how, in consequence, this exultation in difficulties, this love of

hardship, this scorn of ease became the characteristic note of early

Christianity. In the best summary description which Saint Paul gives

of Christian character and manhood, in the twelfth chapter of Romans

we find him speaking of “rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation.”

And when he comes to write his conception of the character of the happy

warrior, we find him setting this in the foreground, “Endure hardship,

as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.” The praise of the New Testament is

never given to those who have lived in luxurious, indulgent ease. It is

for that little company of men and women who have loved the difficult

tasks, and who with joy trod the rough ways that transcend the stars.

Every one of the great New Testament leaders is a man who exalts for

us this same love of moral hardship, this same scorn of indulgence and

smooth ease, and this same virtue of steadfastness, “And not only so,”

says Paul, “but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation

worketh stedfastness; and stedfastness, experience; and experience,

hope.” And Peter writes, “Yea, and for this very cause adding on your

part all diligence, in your faith supply virtue; and in your virtue

knowledge; and in your knowledge self-control; and in your self-control

stedfastness; and in your stedfastness godliness.” James joins in,

“My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations;

knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience.” And you

remember the description which John gives of himself in Revelation as

“your brother and partaker with you in the tribulation and kingdom and

stedfastness which are in Jesus.”

Now, we ask ourselves the question why our Lord poured out all this

scorn on what the world counts the desirable condition and atmosphere

of life, why the New Testament has no patience with self-seeking,

indulgence, contentment, or ease as the standard of a human life,

why it speaks contemptuously of smooth ease of every kind, and

exalts, instead, the austere life, the life of strength, and of

self-discipline, why our Lord said to men when He came to call them

into the best thing there was in the world, “If any man will come after

me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow after

me.”

Well, one reason why the whole New Testament pours out such contempt

upon the smooth life and exalts hardness, is because only hardness can

make a great soul, and the end of the Gospel, the end of life, was the

growing of souls. The words of Socrates, understood in the social sense

which he intended and not selfishly, contain the central end. “For I

do nothing,” said he, “but go about persuading you all, old and young

alike, not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but

first and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul.”

It is true, in a sense, that we are here for the work we can do, but it

is also true, in a yet deeper sense, that we are here to become the

best workmen that we can become, and that the work we do has a large

measure of its value in its reflex power of making us capable of doing

better work. Evidently this is not the real workshop where God needs

His best men and women. When He has perfected His workmen and workwomen

and recognizes that they are prepared to do their best work, does He

make use of them here? Never. He takes them elsewhere, where evidently

the real work is to be done. Everything we see in this world would seem

to indicate that it is only the preparatory school, a place where men

and women are equipped for the real thing, that the career that is to

abide lies elsewhere than here. The purpose of these days is to make

us ready for the work God has for us to do in a larger sphere than

this, where we pass on, as Chinese Gordon told Mr. Huxley, to have a

larger government given to us to administer. God pours out His contempt

on smoothness of life because it cannot make greatness of soul, and

greatness of soul is one object of our being here.

The Christian ideal despised, also, this smoothness which seems to many

of us the most desirable thing that life has for us, because there is

such little knowledge given with it. At best it can only play on the

very surface of life. We know no more than springs out of the deep

experience through which we pass. You remember the lines of Father

Tabb:

“‘Where wast thou, little song,

That hast delayed so long

To come to me?’

‘Mute in the mind of God

Till where thy feet had trod

I followed thee.’”

It is only where we have gone that we know the way; it is only the

experience in life that we have passed through that gives us our true

knowledge of life, because the end of life is its relationships, and

wealth of life depends on the breadth of true knowledge and the riches

of true relationship. Smoothness of life is simply deadening because it

keeps us out of what is real life.

And Christianity derided smoothness of life, and scorned it, because

it separates us from fellowship with the noble and suffering life

of God. You know the long controversy in theology as to whether the

idea of suffering is compatible with the idea of a perfect God. There

have been some theologians who insist it could not be possible that

God should suffer. If He could suffer, He could not be God. Well, I

suppose all of us here are prepared without one moment of hesitation

to range ourselves on the other side, and to say that if God cannot

suffer He cannot be our God. He could not be a father if He did not

suffer. Christ could not have been the revelation of Him if He is not

a suffering God; for “He was the man of sorrows, and acquainted with

grief.” What He laid bare was a heart of love sharing the anguish of

others; for we have not a Father who cannot be touched with the feeling

of our infirmities,――We can say that of Him because of what we know

of Him who revealed Him,――We have not a Father who cannot be touched

with the feeling of our infirmities, no impassive God sitting where “no

sound of human sorrow mounts to mar His sacred everlasting calm,” but

a Father who pities His children, who enters into their life, and who

loves them with all His soul. We can have no knowledge of that God, no

fellowship with His life, if what we are living is the smooth, easy,

indulgent life, everything bought for us by others, nothing done by us

for others, no blood of sacrifice colouring our life red with the glow

of God and His incarnate Son. The New Testament despises the smooth

life that makes it impossible for men and women to have any part in the

deepest life of their Father.

And the New Testament scorns the smooth, indulgent life because it

cannot connect men and women with the real springs of strength and of

power. No strong man was ever made against no resistance. We develop no

physical power by putting forth no physical effort. All the strength of

life we have we get by pushing against opposition. We acquire power

as we draw it out of deep experience and effort. And the new Christian

ideal made no place for indulgence and ease because these things leave

men and women weak, with no strength either themselves to bear or to

achieve for others. It is as Mrs. King puts it in Ugo Bassi’s “Sermon

in the Hospital”:

“The Vine from every living limb bleeds wine;

Is it the poorer for the spirit shed?

The drunkard and the wanton drink thereof;

Are they the richer for that gift’s excess?

Measure thy life by loss instead of gain;

Not by the wine drunk, but the wine poured forth

For love’s strength standeth in love’s sacrifice;

And whoso suffers most hath most to give.

* * * * *

God said to Man and Woman, ‘By thy sweat,

And by thy travail, thou shalt conquer earth,’

Not, by thy ease or pleasure:――and no good

Or glory of this life but comes by pain.

How poor were earth if all its martrydoms,

If all its struggling sighs of sacrifice

Were swept away, and all were satiate-smooth,

If this were such a heaven of soul and sense

As some have dreamed of;――and we human still.

Nay, we were fashioned not for perfect peace

In this world, howsoever in the next:

And what we win and hold is through some strife.”

And it was because our Lord knew this that He set over against men’s

wills the strait door of the kingdom of life. He did not betray the

trust that had been given to Him. He did not say, “Come, I will make

life easy for you.” He did not say, “Come, let us indulge ourselves

to heart’s content.” He said, “If any man will come after me, let him

leave all that behind, let him deny himself, and let him take up his

cross daily, and let him come after me.”

Now, I know what many of us will be saying of all this. We will be

saying, “God did not bring us into the world with any cross. All our

life long has been a sheltered life. None of this hardness of which

you speak has ever come to us. Maybe our fathers and mothers knew it

before us, but they have shielded us from its pressure. Are we to go

back to crudeness and asceticism for the good of our souls? Are we who

have no cross deliberately to take our smooth lives and roughen them?”

Yes, that is precisely what I am saying. Those of us who were not born

with a cross must find one, those whose lives have been smooth are

deliberately to find ways of roughening them, so that we may know a

life of power and fellowship with the suffering God, and can go out to

real work, and be prepared for that greater life and greater service

which await us elsewhere than here.

We shall not have any great difficulty in obeying this call of Christ

to roughen our lives. There are many crosses in the world too heavy for

the men and women who are trying to carry them. We can go out and find

one of these crosses and help to bear it. They are not far away. Here

is a clipping from the New York _Sun_:

“A comely young Hungarian woman with a three-months-old baby in

her arms dropped to the sidewalk at Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth

Street late yesterday afternoon and lay half conscious. An

ambulance surgeon who came said the woman was starving and that

her baby had bronchitis.

“The woman recovered enough to tell the surgeon that she was

Mrs. Mary Scheinn, twenty years old, and that her husband had

died recently. She had been living with a friend at 97 Seigel

Street, Brooklyn, she said, but this woman also was very poor

and expected to be evicted to-day, so Mrs. Scheinn had walked

to New York to try to get her sick child into a hospital. She

tramped from hospital to hospital, and everywhere they refused

to take the child, she said. But she kept up the quest until

she gave out. She had had nothing to eat since yesterday and

little then.

“The ambulance took the woman and child to Bellevue Hospital.

Both are in a rather serious condition.”

Being young and comely, doubtless, if she had not had the baby, some

pimp or other American citizen, for a consideration within her power,

might have helped her, but being innocent and carrying a baby there she

stood until she fell down, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth

Street, in the heart of the city, a woman carrying a baby and a cross

that were too heavy for her. There were millions of Christian people

round about her. Thousands of us never knew what a cross was and we

let the woman with her child in her arms fall down under the weight of

hers. This world is black with the shadows of crosses. If we have none

of our own, in the name of the great Cross, let us borrow one.

Here is a note from a girl. She is one of thousands and the note is

real. I had been speaking in one of the New York churches and the next

day came a letter from her asking me, if I really believed what I had

said, to answer some questions for her. I wrote in reply and this was

part of her answer: “The great trouble with me is that I have to fight

continually against despondency. Life to me is a series of sorrows and

troubles, that accumulate and grow larger, and just when I am at the

point of giving up altogether some little word or act deters me.... I

know I would be happy if I were, as you say, truly trustful towards

God, but God to me seems very far off and rather mythical. Your letter,

also the fact that you wrote, was a help to me. The part that perhaps

appealed to me most was the idea that God and God’s love are longing

for us. It is very fine to feel that when one is always lonesome.” I

learned more of her story but it is not for telling here. It was a

cross too heavy for her which she was trying to bear. Women who knew

her lifted its weight for her, taking it over upon themselves.

And not only by taking up crosses, of which the world is full, can we

roughen our lives. Many of us can do it by simply cutting off some of

our waste and extravagance. There are many of us who never ask before

we spend money, “How can I get the greatest return from this money?” We

waste it like water, while Belgium, Serbia, Poland and Armenia call. It

is said that there are thirty million people in India who have only one

meal a day, and who never know what it is to have enough to eat. Some

of them say that if they could have enough to eat for just two days,

they would be willing to lie down and die content. Again and again,

hundreds of thousands of people in China have been the victims of

famine, while we were throwing wealth away. We can roughen life a bit

by denying ourselves, by abridging expenditure and devoting the money

to human need and to some of the services the world is dying for.

Students often reject the ethical and economic arguments against

gambling. These arguments are valid but it is very hard to get a

clutch for them on many minds. You can point out how dishonourable

and essentially immoral it is for a man to have money which he did

not earn, for which he gave no equivalent, which came to him as no

expression of friendship or by no legitimate inheritance. All this

is clear to the healthy and manly moral sense. But the gambler does

not have such a sense. I have often wondered that the case is not

more frequently put from the other side, from the side of the wrong

of spending money in gambling. When a man has won on a bet the moral

question is lulled but when he has lost there is a chastened mood which

can be invited to reflect. What moral warrant did he have for throwing

his money away? What does he have to show for it? A million hungry

hands were outstretched to him, a world of want and suffering called

towards him over land and sea? And he threw his money away――got nothing

for it, did nothing with it. In a world like ours, there are parched

lips waiting for drink; there are hungry mouths in need of bread:――do

we have any right to waste in indulgence in a world like this? Men

should scrutinize every dollar that passes through their hands and ask,

“What is the very best thing that I can do with this?”

And frugality, self-imposed for the sake of service, will come back

to us in rich reward in character and power. Horace Bushnell drew a

noble picture of the fruitage of true parsimony in his address at the

Litchfield County Centennial in 1851, on “The Age of Homespun”:

“It was also a great point, in this homespun mode of life, that

it imparted exactly what many speak of only with contempt, a

closely girded habit of economy. Harnessed, all together, into

the producing process, young and old, male and female, from the

boy that rode the plow-horse, to the grandmother knitting under

her spectacles, they had no conception of squandering lightly

what they all had been at work, thread by thread, and grain by

grain, to produce. They knew too exactly what everything cost,

even small things, not to husband them carefully. Men of

patrimony in the great world, therefore, noticing their small

way in trade, or expenditure, are ready, as we often see, to

charge them with meanness――simply because they knew things only

in the small; or, what is not far different, because they were

too simple and rustic to have any conception of the big

operations by which other men are wont to get their money

without earning it, and lavish the more freely because it was

not earned. Still, this knowing life only in the small, it will

be found, is really anything but meanness.

“Probably enough the man who is heard threshing in his barn of a

winter evening, by the light of a lantern, (I knew such an

example) will be seen driving his team next day, the coldest day

of the year, through the deep snow to a distant wood-lot to draw

a load for a present to his minister. So the housewife that

higgles for a half hour with the merchant over some small trade

is yet one that will keep watch, not unlikely, when the

schoolmaster, boarding round the district, comes to some hard

quarter, and commence asking him to dinner, then to tea, then to

stay over night, and literally boarding him, till the hard

quarter is passed. Who now, in the great world of money, will

do, not to say the same, as much, proportionally as much, in any

of the pure hospitalities of life?

“Besides, what sufficiently disproves any real meanness, it will

be found that children brought up, in this way, to know things

in the small――what they cost and what is their value――have, in

just that fact, one of the best securities of character and most

certain elements of power and success in life; because they

expect to get on by small advances followed up and saved by

others, not by sudden leaps of fortune that despise the slow but

surer methods of industry and merit. When the hard, wiry-looking

patriarch of homespun, for example, sets off for Hartford, or

Bridgeport, to exchange the little surplus of his year’s

production, carrying his provision with him and the fodder for

his team, and taking his boy along to show him the great world,

you may laugh at the simplicity, or pity, if you will, the

sordid look of the picture; but, five or ten years hence, this

boy will probably enough be found in college, digging out the

cent’s worths of his father’s money in hard study; and some

twenty years later he will be returning, in his honours, as the

celebrated Judge, or Governor, or Senator and public orator,

from some one of the great states of the republic, to bless the

sight once more of that venerated pair who shaped his beginnings,

and planted the small seeds of his future success. Small seeds,

you may have thought, of meanness; but now they have grown up

and blossomed into a large-minded life, a generous public

devotion, and a free benevolence to mankind.

“And just here, I am persuaded, is the secret, in no small

degree, of the very peculiar success that has distinguished the

sons of Connecticut, and, not least, those of Litchfield County,

in their migration to other states. It is because they have gone

out in the wise economy of a simple, homespun training,

expecting to get on in the world by merit and patience, and by a

careful husbanding of small advances; secured in their virtue by

just that which makes their perseverance successful. For the men

who see the great in the small, and go on to build the great by

small increments, and so form a character of integrity before

God and men, as solid and massive as the outward successes they

conquer. The great men who think to be great in general, having

yet nothing great in particular, are a much more windy affair.”

Every one ought to roughen life by friendships that will bring into it

those influences which are not naturally in our daily associations and

will carry us into contact with men and women who struggle harder than

we do. A few such friendships will help to keep life from petrification

and to make us aware that the world is under a cross, and that our

hearts must be as open to all its needs as the heart of the Father of

human life is open always.

And we can help to roughen our lives in the very sense in which Christ

meant them to be roughened if we will resist the steadily increasing

tendency of our day to multiply ways in which we are released from

doing things for ourselves. There are none of us who do not have a

hundred things done for us that our fathers and mothers had to do

for themselves. Little by little, we are ridding ourselves of the

responsibility of doing any service for ourselves whatsoever. There is

immense gain in this. It gives freedom for larger living but it can go

too far, and it would be a great thing if we resolved at periods that

we would not let anybody else do for us what we could do for ourselves.

There was a day, perhaps, when men needed the other rule, when it

was a great deal better to get other people to do things for us than

to do them ourselves, but the time has come when the world needs to

reverse that principle. What the world wants is not organizers, but

deorganizers, men and women who will increase the number of personal

services and activities, and who will bring something frugal, simple

and elementary back into life to deliver us from the false heaven of

ease and self-indulgence, which is as bad as any other kind of hell.

Christ came to save us from that.

There is one other way in which we can answer this call, and can

deliver ourselves from the curse of smooth living. Around about us on

every side there are causes waiting for what men and women can do for

them. I do not mean crosses in any great, general, organized sense,

in which we send our five, our twenty-five or our hundred dollars to

some society and think we have, in that way, carried all the cross that

Christ means to have us carry. We cannot fulfill Christ’s command by

paying an organization to carry a cross for us. All the work they do

must be done, and it must be supported. Millions of dollars that are

not being given now ought to be given. But what Christ is waiting for

also and what we have got to do if we are to have the satisfaction of

the enduring life is to find each of us for himself some true cross of

personal service. There are men and women around us who are waiting for

some touch of sympathy, some kindness, some unflinching word of ours to

them that shall mean the awakening of their own discouraged or sleeping

souls, that they may come out to live. “If any man will come after me,

let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.”

One of the saddest things in the world to-day is the principle under

which those are living who are unwilling to bear these crosses and

to bring home into their lives the wholesome spiritual stimulus that

this roughening of life alone can give to them. We have reacted too far

from the old monastic idea. Men speak with scorn now of those men and

women who went away into monasteries and convents, despising the joys

of the world for the sake of their souls. But these men and women were

infinitely better than the great multitudes who go out into the world

to-day, despising their souls for the sake of the joys of the world. If

a man or woman wants to do any despising it is better to despise the

world than the soul. It were well for us to go back a little to the

spirit of the mediæval time. When that spirit was pure and good the

world’s richest service flowed out from it.

The glory of life for us consists in finding the rough, the morally

austere things in life and then fearlessly and unhesitatingly doing

them. There is no splendour in the easy indulgent way. The splendour

lies in finding the hard thing to be achieved and revelling in it.

Many years ago I clipped this story from the editorials of what was

then our ablest newspaper:

“A young Briton named Felix Oswald became interested a while ago

in the geology of Turkish Armenia. He made long journeys through

that country and finally came home with an important amount of

valuable new material. It was not matter, however, that would

find favour in the eyes of the general publisher and Mr. Oswald

had to undertake its publication himself. He had the type set at

the lowest rates in a small town. There were 516 pages of print

and the author undertook the large task of doing the printing

himself. He hired a hand press and after weeks of hard work he

had produced 101 copies of the book. Feeling certain that this

edition would fill the demand he went about the next large job,

which was the hand colouring of all his maps and profiles. Then

the copies were bound and the book was out.

“Leading geologists say that the work is one of the best of its

kind. The small edition is exhausted and the book will not be

reprinted. The editor of _Petermann’s Mitteilungen_, believing

that a wide circle of geologists would be glad to have the

important results of Oswald’s investigations, has just printed

in his periodical an extended résumé of them together with some

of the maps. The University of London has crowned the work with

its approval by conferring the degree of Doctor of Science upon

the author. Oswald has certainly earned the congratulations of

all who admire the qualities of courage, perseverance and

intelligent devotion to a special task.”

A man does not have to go to Armenia to find the hard thing to do,

although there are harder and nobler tasks waiting there to-day than

Oswald undertook, tasks that are crosses in the divinest sense, scarred

with sorrow and grief. And perhaps there are some among us here now who

are bearing crosses and finding them beyond their strength. But they

are not to be mourned over. They were not of our making, were they? If

they were of our making, perhaps there is some penitence to be felt,

some restitution to be made. If they were not of our making, we may be

sure that they were built just for our shoulder, that One who knew us

made them that we might carry them, and become under them what we could

never become without them. And if we have no such cross, out from our

smooth and easy living, our cozy shelters in which we have been kept

and are kept now, One is calling us to come whose ancient word we hear

to-day: “I came not to send peace, but a sword. Whosoever would be my

disciple must love nothing as much as me, and must be willing to rise

up and follow me.” For men and women who will do this in the full and

joyous spirit of Francis of Assisi but in the forms suitable to our

modern life the summons of God and the world is clear.