It is interesting to note two contrary tendencies in the current
appraisal of spiritual values in America. On the one hand there is
what has been called, not altogether happily, the tendency of ethical
materialism. In its best form it is simply a demand for reality, the
renewal of the old words, “By their fruits ye shall know them.” “Show
me thy faith by thy works.” In its less worthy forms it is the effort
to eliminate spiritual expression and formal religion from areas of
life where these have been most familiar. Illustrations in extreme
forms abound.
We are told now that in charity love has nothing to do with the matter,
that the introduction of religious sentiment is only mischievous and
misleading, that the issue is one purely of proper economic principle
and organization. It is a question of employment for the unemployed,
or of calculating accurately the amount of need, counting the hungry
mouths and fixing the quantity of bread, and then determining
scientifically how much of the bread the hungry should earn, and how
much society through appropriate and unsentimental machinery should
supply.
In medical philanthropy the new idea is that ideas have nothing to do
with it. The good Samaritan, we are told, did not give the wounded man
a tract or say anything to him about the religious views or motives of
his benefactor. He was satisfied to heal his skin and stop at that. Let
the chaplains depart from the hospitals.
And so also in social service. The legitimate work is to improve the
culinary methods of the neighbourhood, to provide innocent games and
sports, to secure more adequate food supplies for living bodies and to
assist in the burial of dead ones; but Christ must not be mentioned,
and religious issues must not be raised.
These are extreme illustrations, but they are perfectly familiar, and
the tendency they represent is indisputable. In this view our Lord,
of course, was far astray when He talked to His disciples by Jacob’s
well about having meat to eat which they knew not. “Meat!” say our
modern ethical materialists. “Meat is meat――beef or bread. It is not a
metaphor. Meat that is a metaphor is a mockery.” Well, it would be if
it were offered for food to a hungry man, but it is not a mockery to
the man who would go hungry to feed the hungry. And the whole modern
question is not between those who would give real meat to the hungry
and those who would give only metaphorical meat. It is between those
who want to deal with people’s skins only and those who mean to deal
both with their skins and with their souls, between those who conceive
of man as mainly belly and back and those to whom our real life is the
life invisible.
It is a very curious phenomenon, this exclusion of Christian ideas from
the very area which they created. For all this charity and philanthropy
and social service were produced by the ideas of Christianity. And now
the fruit says to the vine and to the inward life, “I have no need of
thee.” Of course not all the fruit says this. Some of it only says,
“Vine and inward life, there is a prejudice against you. You would do
well to conceal yourself. I will pretend to be the real thing.” But
some of the fruit has gone further. “I am the real thing,” it says. “I
know more than James. Faith must not only show works: works are faith.
There is no need of metaphysics or creeds. Deeds are religion. The
only wealth is tangible wealth, things handled, works seen, bread out
of the ground, not down from heaven. Meat that the disciples could not
see is too pallid for this earth. Man is his skin and the bag which it
contains, and religion must understand this.”
At the same time that this suicidal tendency is operating in the
field of man’s highest values seeking to destroy his standards and to
discredit the title-deeds of all his greatest treasures, a precisely
contrary tendency is acting in commerce and politics, in the field of
man’s lower values. While men are busy on the one hand in the effort to
materialize the spiritual wealth which Christianity has produced, other
men are seeking with a new earnestness to spiritualize our material
wealth. As education, science, philanthropy, surrenders the spiritual
vision and ideal, trade and politics clutch after it. Never before
in the history of the world has there been such an effort as there
is to-day to idealize nationalism, to build up spiritual conceptions
behind the State, to make racial feeling a religion. If some men think
that religious values and spiritual ideas and so-called “metaphysical”
notions can be spared from charity and social service, other men are
striving with all their might to secure all this rejected mass of
vitality and power for patriotism and the national life.
And the same spiritualizing and idealizing tendency is even more
evident in commerce and finance. Wealth becomes less and less material.
In primitive times riches consisted in flocks and herds and land and
in actual gold and silver bullion or coins which their owner put in
a crock and buried in his house. Now wealth consists in credit and
securities, in figures written on a ledger in a bank, or in scraps
of paper in a tin box. The world’s work is done with little visible
wealth. Our new banking system is meant for this very purpose,
to provide immaterial instrumentalities. Millions of dollars are
transported invisibly. By a cable message or a message through the air
untold wealth that was in London can be made to appear in New York. And
all these intangible forms of wealth are exceeded in the judgment of
the late Mr. J. P. Morgan by the credit of character, something still
more “metaphysical.” The spiritualization of the material keeps pace on
one side with the materialization of the spiritual on the other.
However clear or foggy our ideas on these issues may be now, viewing
them as present issues, we cannot fail to see sharply the indisputable
facts of the past. Looking backward we simply do not discern and cannot
remember the visible and outward values or possessors of values at all.
Where is the actual material wealth of earlier days, the flocks, the
gold and silver, the palaces? The amazing thing is that it is all gone.
The gold and silver which Rome gathered from the world, which went home
to Spain in the days of the Conquistadores, where is it all now? Where
are those who boasted it and built their fame or power on it? Shelley
tells us in his sonnet, “Ozymandias,”
“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said, ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on those lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’”
And what befell Ozymandias’ image has befallen almost all the works of
the ancients’ hands. A few of their temples remain, and the arches of
their viaducts and some of the images of their public worship and of
their national ideals. But their wealth and the treasure houses which
they kept it in and the palaces of their pleasure and the cities of
their pride are gone. I never felt more keenly the tragedy and the
truth of this utter transitoriness and insecurity of all national glory
than looking over the massive ruins of the palace of the Chosroes kings
at Kasr-i-Shirin. All of Browning’s “Love Among the Ruins” seemed to be
there in mute evidence before one’s eyes:
“Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles
Miles and miles
On the solitary pastures where our sheep
Half-asleep
Tinkle homeward through the twilight, stray or stop
As they crop――
Was the site once of a city great and gay,
(So they say)
Of our country’s very capital, its prince
Ages since
Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far
Peace or war.
“Now,――the country does not even boast a tree,
As you see,
To distinguish slopes of verdure, certain rills
From the hills
Intersect and give a name to, (else they run
Into one,)
Where the domed and daring palace shot its spires
Up like fires
O’er the hundred-gated circuit of a wall
Bounding all,
Made of marble, men might march on nor be pressed,
Twelve abreast.
“And such plenty and perfection, see, of grass
Never was!
Such a carpet as, this summer-time, o’erspreads
And embeds
Every vestige of the city, guessed alone,
Stock or stone――
Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe
Long ago;
Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame
Struck them tame;
And that glory and that shame alike, the gold
Bought and sold.
“Now,――the single little turret that remains
On the plains,
By the caper overrooted, by the gourd
Overscored,
While the patching houseleek’s head of blossom winks
Through the chinks――
Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time
Sprang sublime.
And a burning ring, all round, the chariots traced
As they raced,
And the monarch and his minions and his dames
Viewed the games.”
All this is gone. The only wealth of the past which has survived is
such as Christ referred to. “I have meat to eat that ye know not of.”
The ideas and the literature which enshrined them alone remain. Not the
manuscripts. They are gone, as though God would show in the most vivid
way His scorn of the visible and earth’s “real.” Not one original page
of Plato exists. But Plato’s mind is here still. The kings are gone.
But Isaiah and Jeremiah, the men of the inward resources, spokesmen and
ministers of the invisible life, abide.
“The tumult and the shouting dies
The captains and the kings depart
Still stands Thine against sacrifice
A humble and a contrite heart.”
And the issue is clear enough when we look at it concretely to-day
and contrast the men who have the inward resources with those who
have not, the movements which are fed from deep ideal springs with
those which deal skin-deep only with humanity. In one of our American
cities the president of a large institution was shelved in the prime
of life by younger and less conservative men who acquired control of
the business. They treated the older man well, gave him the nominal
headship with his former salary, but really transferred all the power
to other men. It was the chance of a lifetime for the older man. He had
his strength and his time for any service or ministry or pleasure he
might choose. But the only meat which he had to eat was the management
of the business, and accordingly he starved to death in a fine home
and with a large salary. All that the bag of his body needed he had,
but man cannot live by bread alone without a word from God. The Tinker
of Bedford Jail heard the key turn in the lock behind him. And did
he famish alone? He opened the gate of his house within and out they
came――Christian and Great-Heart and Hopeful and Evangelist and Mercy
and Dare-to-Die――and the loneliness of John Bunyan’s cell became the
greatest society on earth, and the immortals who marched out of the
wealth of his soul are the companions of millions who could not name
one human being who was Bunyan’s contemporary. The rich men who have
transmitted real wealth have been the lovers, the dreamers, the servers
who ate bread at God’s hands and who knew and taught men that the life
is more than meat and the body than raiment. “She was not daily bread,”
wrote her niece of Emily Dickinson. “She was star dust.”
This above all was characteristic of Christ. Part of our Lord’s
preëminence of nature and of achievement was the untold wealth of His
inward resources. No philanthropist or social worker ever lived who
was His equal in all that our ethical materialists admire and praise.
But behind all this and as explaining all this He had meat to eat that
men knew not, thoughts of God, ideas of origin and destiny, of whence
He came and whither He was going, fellowship, purposes, a spiritual
program. His wealth was an inward, a communicable and eternal treasure.
It nourished Him and was for all men.
“I have meat to eat,” said He. “Who brought it to Him?” asked they. “A
primrose by the river’s brim a yellow primrose” was to them; and it was
nothing more. Meat was meat, mutton or beef to His disciples. But to
Him the primrose was a volume of revelation. Meat was very life of God
within His soul. Language to Christ was windows into the wealth of the
eternities and the infinites. To men it was words. His discernment of
latent values in men made Him a rich man wherever He found a fellow.
He had cargoes of redeemable character afloat on the wide waters of
mankind, and these He was forever drawing home. Men brought Him a
sinner, flotsam of Galilee; and Jesus saw Himself rich with the latent
life of Peter of Pentecost, victor of the gates of hell. The stained
hand of the Samaritan concubine became under His faith purified to bear
the chalice of the life of God. He had more wealth latent in human
character than Crœsus ever dreamed of. His universalism, also, made
Him rich with all the wealth of humanity. All around Him men choked and
died in the stifling air of racial exclusion and prejudice. He lived in
the whole free world. Thinking in terms of all mankind and all the ages
makes the thinker rich beyond all the dreams of any racial avarice or
national pride.
But above all His meat was simply this: to walk with God, to do the
will of God and to accomplish His work. His life was in God’s will, His
strength in God’s companionship. He lived powerfully among men because
He dwelt deeply in God. His wealth was not herds and gold, nor bonds
and credits, nor deeds; but the power to do deeds in the might and pity
of God.
And the inward resources of Christ which are true wealth are accessible
also to us; and not accessible only, but indispensable. We need not set
much store by what the world calls wealth. Its one worthy use is as
capital for human service; and Christ who had none of it here still did
and inspired more service than all the world’s capital has performed.
Louis Pasteur was living on a salary of a few hundred francs. All
that he did was to examine with a microscope things infinitesimally
small and to reflect upon them, and then in his laboratory to write
down and send forth some new ideas. The practical men derided his
“pure science,”――a mere student of theories, spinner of silk dreams
thinner than the filaments of the silkworms of southern France. But
Pasteur’s thoughts were the richest source of wealth in France.
“Pasteur’s discoveries alone,” said Huxley, “would suffice to cover the
war indemnity paid by France to Germany in 1870.”[3] True wealth is
inward resources, the love of God’s world, of truth and holy thoughts,
friendship with the living and the dead, the possession of the Son of
God and His words which are spirit and life, and of His Spirit “whom
the world cannot receive; for it beholdeth Him not, neither knoweth
Him; ye know Him; for He abideth with you, and shall be in you.”
[3] Vallery-Radot, “Life of Pasteur,” popular edition, p. 374.
And all this wealth may be ours without going anywhere for it. No man
brought it to Him. “I have meat,” He said. So He calls us to be rich.
We do not need to go anywhere for it. No man needs to bring it to us.
It is here. It is Himself――the Bread of Life. Can we also say, “I have
it――meat to eat, of the world unknown, within my soul, within my soul”?
To be able to say that is our great American need. I will not say
that it is a greater need now than it has ever been because we have
deteriorated and need to recover the element of spiritual idealism in
our national character. We have not deteriorated. Doubtless we have
lost many things that it would have been well for us to have kept,
and have kept much that it would have been better to lose. But we have
gained in our perception of the higher values and we seek them more
and not less than ever before. We are far from being what we ought to
be, but the past was farther, and we only think otherwise because we
clothe the past in mists of idealization. That very error is proof of
our deeper spiritual discerning. Evils are challenged now which passed
uncondemned a half generation ago. But though we have gained, we need
to gain more, and what we need to gain is not something æsthetic or
intellectual only, not broader philosophies or wider social programs,
not anything external or merely ethical, but something biological and
dynamic. We need the push and power of what One and One only offers.
“The thief cometh not,” said Christ, “but that he may steal, and
kill, and destroy: I came that they may have life, and may have it
abundantly.”
Not long before his death, as all remember, the late Mr. Morgan was
summoned to testify before a congressional committee which was seeking
to locate the seat of the money power. The object of those examining
Mr. Morgan was to bring out the extent of his own influence and
control, and to show, if possible, that in the hands of a few men was
concentrated the real domination of the financial life of America.
The popular impression, after the examination was over, was that Mr.
Morgan’s modest disavowals were justified by all the testimony, and
that there was no one person, or any group of individuals, in this
country who possessed so much power as was supposed to reside in the
hands of a little company of men.
Now, at the best, there was no question of creating or producing
anything. Nobody thought of asking Mr. Morgan whether he could create
a grain of wheat, or heal a disease, or bring into existence anything
that was not already here. The main question was how much of something
that was here already was he, or any other man, able to control. As one
read the testimony, the one dominant impression it made on his mind was
how small and weak and ineffectual even the strongest human life was,
and how little was the effect that it could produce in what it was able
to do in behalf of others.
How weak does even the strongest personality appear when contrasted
with One Who can say such words as these I have just quoted! Suppose
some great man now living were to say to us: “Come unto me, all ye
that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. If any man
thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. I am come that they may have
life, and may have it abundantly,” how startled we should be! But
we have become familiar with the claim on the lips of Christ and do
not realize what we are really confronted with in that single great
Personality standing among men and offering to meet the ultimate human
need, to give us the deepest, richest, most priceless thing in the
world, which no one of us can give another. “I am come that ye may have
life, and that ye may have it abundantly.”
And notice that here is not a claim only. There is a strange and
startling contrast. “The thief cometh to steal, and to kill, and to
destroy: I am come that ye may have life.” On the one side is our Lord.
Him we know. But who is this thief on the other side who has come, not
to give life, but to reduce it, contract it, dilute it――destroy it
altogether? Well, we know well enough that sin is such a thief, that
wherever sin is allowed to come into our lives it abridges those lives,
draws in the walls of their expansion, cuts down and impoverishes their
joys. And there are many things short of sin, less coarse and evil,
which, nevertheless, draw in the boundaries of life, narrow and stifle
it, and do the work of the thief who came to kill, and to destroy, and
to steal. Over against all these He stands Who said: “I came to give
life, to give it abundantly.”
Now we know very well what men and women say when you bring them this
offer of Christ’s about His life. “Oh,” they say, “it all depends upon
what you mean by life. I have my own idea of life. The life I am living
is rich and satisfying to me, and I am not drawn to this life that
your tepid religion offers me in exchange.” But are those who answer
so fully satisfied? Are they really satisfied at all with any part of
their life except such of it as consists of the kind of life that Jesus
Christ our Lord Himself came to bring, with which alone the hearts of
men can be content?
What do we mean when we speak of life that really satisfies us? I
asked some boys a little while ago what they meant when they spoke
about life, real life that would satisfy men. Four were boys at the
Hill School, Pottstown, Pa. They sat down and collaborated for a while
as to what real life meant to them, and when they got through it
came to this: Purity, integrity, the principle of Christian service,
unselfishness, and the desire to be perfect. I asked another man at
Princeton what life meant to him, real life. He was one of the best
athletes in the college, and this was the answer he gave: Humility,
charitableness, bravery, strength of conviction, honesty, sincerity,
truthfulness and the power to forgive. I asked a man at Yale what he
thought life was. He was the most popular man in the senior class at
that time. This was what he wrote down: “Service after the manner of
Jesus, honesty carried all the way through, sympathy, capacity for
work, patience in holding to principle, as well as fidelity in actual
duty.”
Now if we were to define life better than these boys, and yet in the
way they were feeling after, not in any concrete expressions, but in
its central principle, we should borrow the words which Professor
Drummond borrowed from Herbert Spencer. Spencer said that the perfect
correspondence of any organism with its environment would be perfect
life. Professor Drummond modified this by adding just one word: the
perfect correspondence of any organism with a perfect environment would
be perfect life. Or, to put it as it is stated in one of our best
dictionaries: life is that state in any animal or plant in which its
different functions are all occupied in active healthy expression. Now
that is just what those boys were feeling after. Life is the free and
fearless completion of ourselves. Life is our utter unfolding in the
direction of that of which we are capable. Life is the pushing out of
the rim of our world into the great and boundless riches of God. Life
is the opening up of the gates of our prison house that we may go after
Him Whose word to men was: “If ye abide in my word, then are ye truly
my disciples; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make
you free.” Life is what Jesus Christ came to give, for His mission was
this: “The thief came to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I am come
that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.”
One great purpose of the Incarnation was to show what we are in our
deepest being in the purpose of God, and what we are capable of. Our
Lord did not come to parade before men the exceptional life to which
they could never attain. He came, as He Himself said, to show them
what it had been His Father’s will that they should all be. “As my
Father hath sent me, even so send I you.” “I go unto my Father, and
your Father; and to my God, and your God.” What Jesus Christ was in the
fullness of His unlimited life was the revealing of what God has in
His will for every one of us. The amplitudes that we see in Him, the
subsidence of all the petty boundaries, the unhampered outgoing of His
free spirit in the area of His Father, God,――all that is just a picture
of what God meant the life of each one of us to be. That is why they
called Him the Son of Man, because He was the picture of what God had
meant that His son, man, might be.
And Christ came, not only to show the possibilities of such being, of
what men could do and what they could be made, but to be Himself that
expression of power in them competent to effect such a result, the tide
of the boundless life flowing through all the channels that they could
offer to Him. He came to be in mankind the deep, flowing stream of a
new life. One regrets to find in some churches to-day in the repetition
of the Apostles’ Creed the omission of the sentence: “He descended
into hell.” There is no word in the Creed which expresses more fully
the uttermost reach of the purpose of our Lord and the scope and
boundlessness of His love. Down even into hell He went in the utterance
of His love for mankind. How much this means! But to say no more, it
means this, that deep into the dark of our human life He came, that
there, below all sight, below all thought, He might release the vital
streams that have been flowing from the fountain of Calvary ever since,
and which have no other fountain.
We know what would happen in our bodies, to put it simply, if some
great artery that fed our life were tied. Atrophy and palsy would
creep at once over our unnourished frames. Precisely the same thing is
true in the deeper life of our souls, if the arteries, those channels
through which Christ would pour His energy and strength and power, are
tied. To put the same thing still more simply: Suppose the Mississippi
River instead of running into the Gulf ran out of the Gulf deep into
the land. Suppose all of the rivers poured into the land instead of
into the seas. As a matter of fact, that is in one sense what they do.
We have got long past looking at rivers as drains for the land. We
know that they are arteries through which the life-blood of the seas
flows upon the land by way of the skies. And suppose there were no
Mississippi River. Suppose it were stopped at the gate. What a chill
and death would fall upon the land! And how often that life of Christ
which comes up to the gates of men’s lives is stifled, the stream that
would pour in kept out, the power that would control and remake blocked
at the door through which it would enter. “The thief is come,” He says,
“and you let him in, to kill, and to steal, and to destroy; I am come,
and you keep Me out. And I am come that you may have life, and that you
may have it in all the abundance of God.”
And we know that this life of Christ is real and abundant life because
it fulfills the tests of life. It is a life of fullness in all its
correspondences and relationships. It completes life to the uttermost
of its possibilities, setting it in all those ties with that which
is outside of it, which constitute life. For, after all, there is no
separable life. All the life that we know is relationship. Our Lord
defined it in such terms in His great prayer: “This is life eternal,
that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom
thou hast sent.” Life can only be construed in terms of correspondence.
We know that the life Christ came to give, and does give, is the
satisfying and real life, because it meets these testings. It gives us
this wealth of correspondence of relationship.
“Oh, the pure delight of a single hour,
That before Thy Cross I spend,
When I kneel in prayer, and with Thee, my God,
I commune as friend with friend.”
We know that the life Christ brings is complete and full, because it
reëstablishes the tie and union between ourselves and God, and He
becomes to us again our Father and our Friend. We know it, because it
is the root of all deep and true and satisfying human relationships.
How can there be a real and full union of one man and one woman that is
not a union in Christ? And for the highest friendship and its ideals
we find sanction and nourishment best in Him and the groundwork of His
life.
And Christ’s is the real and satisfying life, because it is creative and
energizing. It is not like the influence of that thief――selfishness, low
desire, sin and small ambition――who kills and steals and destroys. But
the life that Christ is teems with vitalizing power; it is strength and
energy and new service in men. I have never seen it more beautifully put
than in a letter of Stanley to David Livingstone. It was found by Lady
Stanley in a little pocketbook which her husband had carried on the
expedition for the relief of Livingstone. It was written in lead pencil.
It was a copy of the letter that Stanley had written to the great
explorer the very day after he left him. It has sometimes been
questioned whether Livingstone really made on Stanley the impression
which Stanley describes in his autobiography. There have been those who
said that that picture was but the reading back over the intervening
years of a growing hero worship. But here is the letter which Stanley
wrote as he came fresh from the old missionary’s companionship and the
inspiration of his personality:
“MY DEAR DOCTOR:
“I have parted from you all too soon; I feel it deeply; I am
entirely conscious of it from being so depressed.... In writing
to you, I am not writing to an idea now, but to an embodiment
of warm, good fellowship, of everything that is noble and
right, of sound common sense, of everything practical and
right-minded.
“I have talked with you; your presence is almost palpable,
though you are absent....
“It seems as if I had left a community of friends and
relations. The utter loneliness of myself, the void that has
been created, the pang at parting, the bleak aspect of the
future, is the same as I have felt before, when parting from
dear friends.
“Why should people be subjected to these partings, with the
several sorrows and pangs that surely follow them?――It is a
consolation, however, after tearing myself away, that I am
about to do you a service, for then I have not quite parted
from you; you and I are not quite separate. Though I am not
present to you bodily, you must think of me daily until your
caravan arrives. Though you are not before me visibly, I
shall think of you constantly, until your least wish has been
attended to. In this way the chain of remembrance will not be
severed.
“‘Not yet,’ I say to myself, ‘are we apart,’ and this to me,
dear Doctor, is consoling, believe me. Had I a series of
services to perform for you, why then! we should never have to
part.
“Do not fear then, I beg, to ask, nay, to command, whatever
lies in my power. And do not, I beg of you, attribute these
professions to interested motives, but accept them, or believe
them, in the spirit in which they are made, in that true David
Livingstone spirit I have happily become acquainted with.”
And out from that lonely spot in eastern Africa, the younger man came
to begin a new career; all the old aimlessness and shiftlessness and
drifting gone forever from his life, to pass on now to lift up the
mission which, beneath the dripping eaves of the hut in which he died,
David Livingstone laid down. The tide of a new life and a new service
was in him. “I came that ye may have life, and that ye may have it
abundantly.” He had seen Christ and felt the contagion of the life of
Christ in Livingstone, and Christ’s word, articulate or inarticulate,
had come to live in him. And that life is life in the power and desire
to serve.
This life that Christ came to give is the only real and satisfying
life, because it alone endures. We gather at Northfield each summer
and always go up to read afresh the brief inscription on Mr. Moody’s
grave on Round Top, “The world passeth away, and the lust thereof; but
he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.” We sing the same great
truth constantly in George Matheson’s hymn:
“I lay in dust life’s glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.”
I wrote the other day to a friend about her sister-in-law’s death, and
this was the last sentence of the letter which she wrote in reply:
“I do not know if he”――that was her brother――“told you how
beautiful it was at the last; how S――――’s face lighted up with
such an expression of surprise and adoration, with her eyes
open to their fullest extent, and then it was all over. Only a
glimpse into the life that was not to end could have brought
such a look to a human face.”
“And that life,” said He Who was the life, “I brought with Me and will
give to you.”
Let us lift our hearts to the life that shall endless be, to the
liberty on which there never lay a chain, to the light of the land that
hath no need of any sun, because the “Lamb is the light thereof,” the
land of the new morning and the tearless life. The thief cometh――let
him not come in!――only to kill, and to steal, and to destroy. “I am
come, and I stand at the door and ask you now to let Me in, that you
may have life abundantly.”
As these lectures close I would press all this in the most earnest and
personal terms upon each one individually. The processes of social and
moral progress in humanity are retarded or broken down because they
are not carried on a volume of adequate spiritual life in men. There
ought to be a Kingdom of Living Love and Brotherly Will on the earth.
And some day there will be, but there is not now and there cannot be
until the anemia of man is healed, and it can be healed in only one
way――by more life in man, by life abounding in men. The commercial and
materialistic solution of the world’s problem has been fully tried.
For a generation it has been preached and practiced as the one saving
gospel and out of the depths to which it brought us we begin to turn
heavenward again. The day for a new creed has dawned――the old creed of
truth and hope and freedom and life, of the wealth and glory of a city
unseen as yet, hid in the heavens and only possible on the earth as
drawn down by men to whom the invisible things are the surest of all
realities and who live and are strong in God.
_Printed in the United States of America_
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