SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE
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SPIRITUAL ENERGIES
IN DAILY LIFE
BY
RUFUS M. JONES, LITT.D., D.D.
Professor of Philosophy in Haverford College
Author of _Studies in Mystical Religion_; _The Inner Life_;
_The World Within_, etc.
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1922
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1922
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PREFACE
I wish to thank the editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_ for his permission
to print in this volume the chapter entitled “The Mystic’s Experience of
God,” also the editors of _The Journal of Religion_ for their permission
to use the article on “Psychology and the Spiritual Life.” Some of
the shorter essays have been printed in _The_ (London) _Friend_ and
in _The Homiletic Review_. Kind permission has been granted for their
reproduction.
INTRODUCTION
RELIGION AS ENERGY
Religion is an experience which no definition exhausts. One writer with
expert knowledge of anthropology tells us what it is, and we know as
we read his account that, however true it may be as far as it goes, it
yet leaves untouched much undiscovered territory. We turn next to the
trained psychologist, who leads us “down the labyrinthine ways of our
own mind” and tells us why the human race has always been seeking God
and worshiping Him. We are thankful for his Ariadne thread which guides
us within the maze, but we feel convinced that there are doors which
he has not opened—“doors to which he had no key.” The theologian, with
great assurance and without “ifs and buts,” offers us the answer to all
mysteries and the solution of all problems, but when we have gone “up
the hill all the way to the very top” with him, we find it a “homesick
peak”—_Heimwehfluh_—and we still wonder over the real meaning of religion.
We are evidently dealing here with something like that drinking horn
which the Norse God Thor tried to drain. He failed to do it because
the horn which he assayed to empty debouched into the endless ocean,
and therefore to drain the horn meant drinking the ocean dry. To probe
religion down to the bottom means knowing “what God and man is.” Each
one of us, in his own tongue and in terms of his own field of knowledge,
gives his partial word, his tiny glimpse of insight. But the returns are
never all in. There is always more to say. “Man is incurably religious,”
that fine scholar, Auguste Sabatier, said. Yes, he is. It is often wild
and erratic religion which we find, no doubt, but the hunger and thirst
of the human soul are an indubitable fact. In different forms of speech
we can all say with St. Augustine of Hippo: “Thou hast touched me and I
am on fire for thy peace.”
In saying that religion is energy I am only seizing one aspect of this
great experience of the human heart. It is, however, I believe, an
essential aspect. A religion that makes no difference to a person’s life,
a religion that _does_ nothing, a religion that is utterly devoid of
power, may for all practical purposes be treated as though it did not
exist. The great experts—those who know from the inside what religion
is—always make much of its dynamic power, its energizing and propulsive
power. _Power_ is a word often on the lips of Jesus; never used, it
should be said, in the sense of extrinsic authority or the right to
command and govern, but always in reference to an intrinsic and interior
moral and spiritual energy of life. The kingdom of God comes with power,
not because the Messiah is supplied with ten legions of angels and can
sweep the Roman eagles back to the frontiers of the Holy Land, but it
“comes with power” because it is a divine and life-transforming energy,
working in the moral and spiritual nature of man, as the expanding
yeast works in the flour or as the forces of life push the seed into
germination and on into the successive stages toward the maturity of the
full-grown plant and grain.
The little fellowship of followers and witnesses who formed the nucleus
of the new-born Church felt themselves “endued with power” on the day of
Pentecost. Something new and dynamic entered the consciousness of the
feeble band and left them no longer feeble. There was an in-rushing,
up-welling sense of invasion. They passed over from a visible Leader
and Master to an invisible and inward Presence revealed to them as an
unwonted energy. Ecstatic utterance, which seems to have followed,
is not the all-important thing. The important thing is heightened
moral quality, intensified fellowship, a fused and undying loyalty,
an irresistible boldness in the face of danger and opposition, a
fortification of spirit which nothing could break. This energy which came
with their experience is what marks the event as an epoch.
St. Paul writes as though he were an expert in dynamics. “Dynamos,”
the Greek word for power, is one of his favorite words. He seems to
have found out how to draw upon energies in the universe which nobody
else had suspected were even there. It is a fundamental feature of his
“Aegean gospel” that God is not self-contained but self-giving, that He
circulates, as does the sun, as does the sea, and comes into us as an
energy. This incoming energy he calls by many names: “The Spirit,” “holy
Spirit,” “Christ,” “the Spirit of Christ,” “Christ in you,” “God that
worketh in us.” Whatever his word or term is, he is always declaring,
and he bases his testimony on experience, that God, as Christ reveals
Him, is an active energy working with us and in us for the complete
transformation of our fundamental nature and for _a new creation_ in us.
All this perhaps sounds too grand and lofty, too remote and far away,
to touch us with reality. We assume that it is for saints or apostles,
but not for common everyday people like ourselves. Well, that is where
we are wrong. The accounts which St. Paul gives of the energies of
religion are not for his own sake, or for persons who are _bien né_ and
naturally saintly. They are for the rank and file of humans. In fact his
Corinthian fellowship was raised by these energies out of the lowest
stratum of society. The words which he uses to describe them are probably
not over strong: “Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters,
nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,
nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners
shall inherit the kingdom of God. _And such were some of you_: but ye are
washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name [i.e. the
power] of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.”[1]
It is to be noticed, further, that St. Paul does not confine his list
of energies to those mighty spiritual forces which come down from above
and work upon us from the outside. Much more often our attention is
directed to energies which are potential within ourselves—even in the
most ordinary of us—energies which work as silently as molecular forces
or as “the capillary oozing of water,” but which nevertheless are as
reconstructive as the forces of springtime, following the winter’s havoc.
If the grace of God—the unlimited sacrificing love of God revealed in
Christ—is for St. Paul the supreme spiritual energy of the universe,
hardly less important is the simple human energy which meets that
centrifugal energy and makes it operate within the sphere of the moral
will. That dynamic energy, by which the man responds to God’s upward pull
and which makes all the difference, St. Paul calls faith.
We are so accustomed to the use of the word in a spurious sense that
we are slow to apprehend the immense significance of this human energy
which lies potentially within us. Unfortunately trained young folks and
scientifically minded people are apt to shy away from the word and put
themselves on the defensive, as though they were about to be asked to
believe the impossible or the dubious or the unprovable. Faith in the
sense in which St. Paul uses it does not mean _believing_ something.
It is a moral attitude and response of will to the character of God
as He has been revealed in Christ. It is like the act which closes
the electric circuit, which act at once releases power. The dynamic
effect which follows the act is the best possible verification of the
rationality of the act. So, too, faith as a moral response is no blind
leap, no wild venture; it is an act which can be tested and verified by
moral and spiritual effects, which are as real as the heat, light, and
horse power of the dynamo.
Faith has come to be recognized as an energy in many spheres of life. We
know what a stabilizer it is in the sphere of finance. Stocks and bonds
and banks shift their values as faith in them rises or falls. _Morale_
is only another name for faith. Our human relationships, our social
structures, our enjoyment of one another, our satisfaction in books and
in lectures rest upon faith and when that energy fails, collapses of the
most serious sort follow. We might as well try to build a world without
cohesion as to maintain society without the energy of faith.
We have many illustrations of the important part which faith plays in
the sphere of physical health. The corpuscles of the blood and the
molecules of the body are altered by it. The tension of the arteries and
the efficiency of the digestive tract are affected by it. Nerves are
in close sympathetic _rapport_ with faith. It is never safe to tell a
strong man that he is pale and that he looks ill. If two or three persons
in succession give him a pessimistic account of his appearance, he will
soon begin to have the condition which has been imagined. Dr. William
McDougall gives the case of a boy who was being chased by a furious
animal and under the impulse of the emergency he leaped a fence which he
could never afterwards jump, even after long athletic training. The list
of similar instances is a very long one. Every reader knows a case as
impressive as the one I have given. The varieties of “shell-shock” have
furnished volumes of illustrations of the energy of faith, its dynamic
influence upon health and life and efficiency.
Faith in the sphere of religion works the greatest miracles of life
that are ever worked. It makes the saint out of Magdalene, the heroic
missionary and martyr out of Paul, the spiritual statesman of the ages
out of Carthaginian Augustine, the illuminated leader of men out of
Francis of Assisi, the maker of a new world epoch out of the nervously
unstable monk Luther, the creator of a new type of spiritual society out
of the untaught Leicestershire weaver, George Fox. Why do we not all
experience the miracle and find _the rest of ourselves_ through faith?
The main trouble is that we live victims of limiting inhibitions. We
hold intellectual theories which keep back or check the outflow of
the energy of faith. We have a nice system of thought which accounts
for everything and explains everything and which leaves no place for
faith. We know too much. We say to ourselves that only the ignorant and
uncultured are led by faith. And this same wise man, who is too proud to
have faith, holds all his inhibitory theories on a basis of faith! Every
one of them starts out on faith, gathers standing ground by faith, and
becomes a controlling force through faith!
There are many other spiritual energies, some of which will be dealt with
specifically or implicitly in the later chapters of this book. Not often
in the history of the modern world certainly have spiritual energies
seemed more urgently needed than to-day. Our troubles consist largely
now of failure to lay hold of moral and spiritual forces that lie near
at hand and to utilize powers that are within our easy reach. Our stock
of faith and hope and love has run low and we realize only feebly what
mighty energies they can be.
I hope that these short essays may help in some slight way to indicate
that the ancient realities by which men live still abide, and that
the invisible energies of the spirit are real, as they have always
been real. We have had an impressive demonstration that a civilization
built on external force and measured in terms of economic achievements
cannot stand its ground and is unable to speak to the condition of
persons endowed and equipped as we are. We are bound to build a higher
civilization, to create a greater culture, and to form a truer kingdom
of life or we must write “_Mene_” on all human undertakings. That is
our task now, and it is a serious one for which we shall need all the
energies that the universe puts at our disposal. I am told that when
the great Hellgate bridge was being built over the East River in New
York the engineers came upon an old derelict ship, lying embedded in
the river mud, just where one of the central piers of the bridge was to
go down through to its bedrock foundation. No tug boat could be found
that was able to start the derelict from its ancient bed in the ooze.
It would not move, no matter what force was applied. Finally, with a
sudden inspiration one of the workers hit upon this scheme. He took a
large flat-boat, which had been used to bring stone down the river, and
he chained it to the old sunken ship when the tide was low. Then he
waited for the great tidal energies to do their work. Slowly the rising
tide, with all the forces of the ocean behind it and the moon above it,
came up under the flat-boat, raising it inch by inch. And as it came up,
lifted by irresistible power, the derelict came up with it, until it
was entirely out of the mud that had held it. Then the boat, with its
subterranean load, was towed out to sea where the old waterlogged ship
was unchained and allowed to drop forever out of sight and reach.
There are greater forces than those tidal energies waiting for us to use
for our tasks. They have always been there. They are there now. But they
do not _work_, they do not _operate_, until we lay hold of them and use
them for our present purposes. We must be _co-workers with God_.
Haverford, Pennsylvania.
Mid Winter, 1922.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION: RELIGION AS ENERGY vii
CHAPTER I
THE CENTRAL PEACE
I. PEACE THAT PASSES UNDERSTANDING 1
II. THE SEARCH FOR A REFUGE 5
III. WHAT WE WANT MOST 10
CHAPTER II
THE GREAT ENERGIES THAT WORK
I. TRYING THE BETTER WAY 15
II. HE CAME TO HIMSELF 23
III. SOME NEW REASONS FOR “LOVING ENEMIES” 29
CHAPTER III
THE POWER THAT WORKETH IN US
I. WHERE THE BEYOND BREAKS THROUGH 35
II. CONQUERING BY AN INNER FORCE 41
III. LIVING IN THE PRESENCE OF THE ETERNAL 46
CHAPTER IV
THE WAY OF VISION
I. DAYS OF GREATER VISIBILITY 50
II. THE PROPHET AND HIS TRAGEDIES 54
III. A LONG DISTANCE CALL 60
CHAPTER V
THE WAY OF PERSONALITY
I. ANOTHER KIND OF HERO 65
II. THE BETTER POSSESSION 69
III. THE GREATEST RIVALRIES OF LIFE 74
CHAPTER VI
AGENCIES OF CONSTRUCTION
I. THE CHURCH OF THE LIVING GOD 79
II. THE NURSERY OF SPIRITUAL LIFE 83
III. THE DEMOCRACY WE AIM AT 86
IV. THE ESSENTIAL TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY 91
CHAPTER VII
THE NEAR AND THE FAR
I. THINGS PRESENT AND THINGS TO COME 98
II. TWO TYPES OF MINISTRY 102
III. WE HAVE SEEN HIS STAR 106
CHAPTER VIII
THE LIGHT-FRINGED MYSTERY
I. THE RELIGIOUS SIGNIFICANCE OF DEATH 111
II. THE NEW BORN OUT OF THE OLD 127
CHAPTER IX
THE MYSTIC’S EXPERIENCE OF GOD 133
CHAPTER X
PSYCHOLOGY AND THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 160
SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE
CHAPTER I
THE CENTRAL PEACE
I
PEACE THAT PASSES UNDERSTANDING
We are all familiar with the coming of a peace into our life at the
terminus of some great strain or after we have weathered a staggering
crisis. When a long-continued pain which has racked our nerves passes
away and leaves us free, we suddenly come into a zone of peace. When we
have been watching by a bedside where a life, unspeakably precious to us,
has lain in the grip of some terrible disease and at length successfully
passes the crisis, we walk out into the fields under the altered sky
and feel a peace settle down upon us, which makes the whole world look
different. Or, again, we have been facing some threatening catastrophe
which seemed likely to break in on our life and perhaps end forever
the calm and even tenor of it, and just when the hour of danger seemed
darkest and our fear was at its height, some sudden turn of things has
brought a happy shift of events, the danger has passed, and a great peace
has come over us instead of the threatened trouble. In all these cases
the peace which succeeds pain and strain and anxiety is a thoroughly
natural, reasonable peace, a peace which comes in normal sequence and
is quite accessible to the understanding. We should be surprised and
should need an explanation if we heard of an instance of a passing pain
or a yielding strain that was not followed by a corresponding sense of
peace. One who has seen a child that was lost in a crowded city suddenly
find his mother and find safety in her dear arms has seen a good case of
this sequential peace, this peace which the understanding can grasp and
comprehend. We behold it and say, “How otherwise!”
There is, St. Paul reminds us, another kind of peace of quite a different
order. It baffles the understanding and transcends its categories. It is
a peace which comes, not after the pain is relieved, not after the crisis
has passed, not after the danger has disappeared; but in the midst of the
pain, while the crisis is still on, and even in the imminent presence
of the danger. It is a peace that is not banished or destroyed by the
frustrations which beset our lives; rather it is in and through the
frustrations that we first come upon it and enter into it, as, to use St.
Paul’s phrase, into a garrison which guards our hearts and minds.
Each tested soul has to meet its own peculiar frustrations. All of us who
work for “causes” or who take up any great piece of moral or spiritual
service in the world know more about defeats and disappointments than
we do about success and triumphs. We have to learn to be patient and
long-suffering. We must become accustomed to postponements and delays,
and sometimes we see the work of almost a lifetime suddenly fail of its
end. Some turn of events upsets all our noble plans and frustrates the
result, just when it appeared ready to arrive. Death falls like lightning
on a home that had always before seemed sheltered and protected, and
instantly life is profoundly altered for those who are left behind.
Nothing can make up for the loss. There is no substitute for what
is gone. The accounts will not balance; frustration in another form
confronts us. Or it may be a breakdown of physical or mental powers,
or peradventure both together, just when the emergencies of the world
called for added energy and increased range of power from us. The need
is plain, the harvest is ripe, but the worker’s hand fails and he must
contract when he would most expand. Frustration looks him straight in the
face. Well, to achieve a peace under those circumstances is to have a
peace which does not follow a normal sequence. It is not what the world
expects. It does not accord with the ways of thought and reasoning. It
passes all understanding. It brings another kind of world into operation
and reveals a play of invisible forces upon which the understanding
had not reckoned. In fact, this strange intellect-transcending peace,
in the very midst of storm and strain and trial, is one of the surest
evidences there is of God. One may in his own humble nerve-power succeed
in acquiring a stoic resignation so that he can say,
“In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.”
He may, by sheer force of will, keep down the lid upon his emotions
and go on so nearly unmoved that his fellows can hear no groan and
will wonder at the way he stands the universe. But peace in the soul
is another matter. To have the whole heart and mind garrisoned with
peace even in Nero’s dungeon, when the imperial death sentence brings
frustration to all plans and a terminus to all spiritual work, calls for
some world-transcending assistance to the human spirit. Such peace is
explained only when we discover that it is “the peace of God,” and that
it came because the soul broke through the ebbings and flowings of time
and space and allied itself with the Eternal.
II
THE SEARCH FOR A REFUGE
Few things are more impressive than the persistent search which men have
made in all ages for a refuge against the dangers and the ills that
beset life. The cave-men, the cliff-dwellers, the primitive builders of
shelters in inaccessible tree tops, are early examples of the search for
human defenses against fear. Civilization slowly perfected methods of
refuge and defense of elaborate types, which, in turn, had to compete
with ever-increasing ingenuity of attack and assault. But I am not
concerned here with these material strongholds of refuge and defense. I
am thinking rather of the human search for shelter against other weapons
than those which kill the body. We are all trying, in one way or another,
to discover how to escape from “the heavy and weary weight of all this
unintelligible world,” how to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune. We are sensitively constructed, with nerves exposed to easy
attack. We are all shelterless at some point to the storms of the world.
Even the most perfectly equipped and impervious heroes prove to be
vulnerable at some one uncovered spot. Sooner or later our protections
fail, and the pitiless enemies of our happiness get through the defenses
and reach the quick and sensitive soul within us. How to rebuild our
refuge, how to find real shelter, is our problem. What fortress is there
in which the soul is safe from fear and trouble?
The most common expedient is one which will drug the sensitive nerves
and produce an easy relief from strain and worry. There is a magic in
alcohol and kindred distillations, which, like Aladdin’s genie, builds a
palace of joy and, for the moment, banishes the enemy of all peace. The
refuge seems complete. All fear is gone, worry is a thing of the past.
The jargon of life is over, the pitiless problem of good and evil drops
out of consciousness. The shelterless soul seems covered and housed.
Intoxication is only one of the many quick expedients. It is always
possible to retreat from the edge of strenuous battle into some one of
the many natural instincts as a way of refuge. The great instinctive
emotions are absorbing, and tend to obliterate everything else. They
occupy the entire stage of the inner drama, and push all other actors
away from the footlights of consciousness, so that here, too, the enemies
of peace and joy seem vanquished, and the refuge appears to be found.
That multitudes accept these easy ways of defense against the ills of
life is only too obvious. The medieval barons who could build themselves
castles of safety were few in number. Visible refuges in any case are
rare and scarce, but the escape from the burdens and defeats of the
world in drink and drug and thrilling instinctive emotion is, without
much difficulty, open to every man and within easy reach for rich and
poor alike, and many there be that seize upon this method. The trouble
with it is that it is a very temporary refuge. It works, if at all, only
for a brief span. It plays havoc in the future with those who resort
to it. It rolls up new liabilities to the ills one would escape. It
involves far too great a price for the tiny respite gained. And, most
of all, it discounts or fails to reckon with the inherent greatness of
the human soul. We are fashioned for stupendous issues. Our very sense
of failure and defeat comes from a touch of the infinite in our being.
We look before and after, and sigh for that which is not, just because
we can not be contented with finite fragments of time and space. We are
meant for greater things than these trivial ones which so often get our
attention and absorb us; but the moment the soul comes to itself, its
reach goes beyond the grasp, and it feels an indescribable discontent
and longing for that for which it was made. To seek refuge, therefore,
in some narcotic joy, to still the onward yearning of the soul by
drowning consciousness, to banish the pain of pursuit by a barbaric surge
of emotions, is to strike against the noblest trait of our spiritual
structure; it means committing suicide of the soul. It cannot be a real
man’s way of relief.
In fact, nothing short of finding the goal and object for which the soul,
the spiritual nature in us, is fitted will ever do for beings like us.
St. Augustine, in words of immortal beauty, has said that God has made
us for himself, and our hearts are restless until we rest in him. It
is not a theory of poet or theologian. It is a simple fact of life, as
veritable as the human necessity for food. There is no other shelter for
the soul, no other refuge or fortress will ever do for us but God. “We
tremble and we burn. We tremble, knowing that we are unlike him. We burn,
feeling that we are like him.”
In hours of loss and sorrow, when the spurious props fail us, we are
more apt to find our way back to the real refuge. We are suddenly made
aware of our shelterless condition, alone, and in our own strength. Our
stoic armor and our brave defenses of pride become utterly inadequate.
We are thrown back on reality. We have then our moments of sincerity and
insight. We feel that we cannot live without resources from beyond our
own domain. We must have God. It is then, when one knows that nothing
else whatever will do, that the great discovery is made. Again and again
the psalms announce this. When the world has caved in; when the last
extremity has been reached; when the billows and water-spouts of fortune
have done their worst, you hear the calm, heroic voice of the lonely man
saying: “God is our refuge and fortress, therefore will not we fear
though the earth be removed, though the mountains be carried into the
midst of the sea.” That is great experience, but it is not reserved for
psalmists and rare patriarchs like Job. It is a privilege for common
mortals like us who struggle and agonize and feel the thorn in the flesh,
and the bitter tragedy of life unhealed. Whether we make the discovery
or not, God is there with us in the furnace. Only it makes all the
difference if we do find him as the one high tower where refuge is not
for the passing moment only, but is an eternal attainment.
III
WHAT WE WANT MOST
There are many things which we want—things for which we struggle hard and
toil painfully. Like the little child with his printed list for Santa
Claus, we have our list, longer or shorter, of precious things which
we hope to see brought within our reach before we are gathered to our
fathers. The difference is that the child is satisfied if he gets one
thing which is on his list. We want everything on ours. The world is
full of hurry and rush, push and scramble, each man bent on winning some
one of his many goals. But, in spite of this excessive effort to secure
the tangible goods of the earth, it is nevertheless true that deep down
in the heart most men want the peace of God. If you have an opportunity
to work your way into that secret place where a man really lives, you
will find that he knows perfectly well that he is missing something.
This feeling of unrest and disquiet gets smothered for long periods in
the mass of other aims, and some men hardly know that they have such a
thing as an immortal soul hidden away within. But, even so, it will not
remain quiet. It cries out like the lost child who misses his home. When
the hard games of life prove losing ones, when the stupidity of striving
so fiercely for such bubbles comes over him, when a hand from the dark
catches away the best earthly comfort he had, when the genuine realities
of life assert themselves over sense, he wakes up to find himself hungry
and thirsty for something which no one of his earthly pursuits has
supplied or can supply. He wants God. He wants peace. He wants to feel
his life founded on an absolute reality. He wants to have the same sort
of peace and quiet steal over him which used to come when as a child he
ran to his mother and had all the ills of life banished from thought in
the warm love of her embrace.
But it is not only the driving, pushing man, ambitious for wealth and
position, who misses the best thing there is to get—the peace of God.
Many persons who are directly seeking it miss it. Here is a man who hopes
to find it by solving all his difficult intellectual problems. When
he can answer the hard questions which life puts to him, and read the
riddles which the ages have left unread, he thinks his soul will feel the
peace of God. Not so, because each problem opens into a dozen more. It is
a noble undertaking to help read the riddles of the universe, but let no
one expect to enter into the peace of God by such a path. Here is another
person who devotes herself to nothing but to seeking the peace of God.
Will she not find it? Not that way. It is not found when it is sought for
its own sake. He or she who is living to get the joy of divine peace,
who would “have no joy but calm,” will probably never have the peace
which passeth understanding. Like all the great blessings, it comes as a
by-product when one is seeking something else. Christ’s peace came to him
not because he sought it, but because he accepted the divine will which
led to Gethsemane and Calvary. Paul’s peace did not flow over him while
he was in Arabia seeking it, but while he was in Nero’s prison, whither
the path of his labors for helping men had led him. He who forgets
himself in loving devotion, he who turns aside from his self-seeking aims
to carry joy into any life, he who sets about doing any task for the love
of God, has found the only possible road to the permanent peace of God.
There are no doubt a great many persons working for the good of others
and for the betterment of the world who yet do not succeed in securing
the peace of God. They are in a frequent state of nerves; they are busy
here and there, rushing about perplexed and weary, fussy and irritable.
With all their efforts to promote good causes, they do not quite attain
the poise and calm of interior peace. They are like the tumultuous
surface of the ocean with its combers and its spray, and they seldom know
the deep quiet like that of the underlying, submerged waters far below
the surface. The trouble with them is that they are carrying themselves
all the time. They do not forget themselves in their aims of service.
They are like the ill person who is so eager to get well that he keeps
watching his tongue, feeling his pulse, and getting his weight. Peace
does not come to one who is watching continually for the results of his
work, or who is wondering what people are saying about it, or who is
envious and jealous of other persons working in the same field, or who is
touchy about “honor” or recognition. Those are just the attitudes which
frustrate peace and make it stay away from one’s inner self.
There is a higher level of work and service and ministry, which, thank
God, men like us can reach. It is attained when one swings out into a
way of life which is motived and controlled by genuine sincere love
and devotion, when consecration obliterates self-seeking, when in some
measure, like Christ, the worker can say without reservations, “Not my
will but thine be done.”