THE NEAR AND THE FAR
I
THINGS PRESENT AND THINGS TO COME
Anaxagoras said twenty-five hundred years ago that men are always
cutting the world in two with a hatchet. William James, in one of his
living phrases, says with the same import that everybody dichotomizes
the cosmos. It is so. We all incline to bisect life into alternative
possibilities. We split realities into opposing halves. We show a kind
of fascination for an “either-or” selection. We are prone to use the
principle of parsimony, and to be content with one side of a dilemma.
History presents a multitude of dualistic pairs from which one was
supposed to make his individual selection. There was the choice between
this world and the next world; the here and the yonder; the flesh and the
spirit; faith and reason; the sacred and the secular; the outward and
the inward, and many more similar alternatives. This “either-or” method
always leaves its trail of leanness behind. It makes life thin and narrow
where it might be rich and broad, for in almost every case it is just as
possible to have a whole as to have a half, to take both as to select an
alternative. St. Paul found his Corinthians bisecting their spiritual
lives and narrowing their interests to one or two possibilities. One of
them would choose Paul as his representative of the truth and then see no
value in the interpretation which Apollos had to give. Another attached
himself to Apollos and missed all the rich contributions of Paul. Some of
the “saints” of the Church selected Cephas as the only oracle, and they
lost all the breadth which would have come to them had they been able
to make a synthesis of the opposing aspects. St. Paul called them from
their divided half to a completed whole. He told them that instead of
“either-or” they could have both. “All things are yours; whether Paul or
Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present or
things to come, all are yours; and ye are Christ’s and Christ is God’s.”
This is the method of synthesis. This is the substitution of wholes for
halves, the proffer of both for an “either-or” alternative.
That last pair of alternatives is an interesting one, and many persons
make their bisecting choice of life there. One well-known type of person
focuses on the near, the here and now, the things present. Those who
belong to this class propose to make hay while the sun shines. They glory
in being practical. They have what doctors call myopia. They see only the
near. Their lenses will not adjust for the remote. They believe in quick
returns and bank upon practical results. Those of the other type have
presbyopia, or far-sightedness. They are dedicated to the far-away, the
remote, the yonder. They are pursuing rainbows and distant ideals. They
are so eager for the millennium that they forget the problem of their
street and of the present day. Browning has given us a picture of both
these types:
“That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it:
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.
That low man goes on adding one to one,
His hundred’s soon hit:
This high man, aiming at a million,
Misses an unit.”
Browning’s sympathies are plainly with the “high man” who misses the
unit, but it is one more case of unnecessary dichotomy. What we want is
the discovery of a way to unite into one synthesis things present and
things to come. We need to learn how to seize this narrow isthmus of a
present and to enrich it with the momentous significance of past and
future. Henry Bergson has been telling us that all rich moments of life
are rich just because they roll up and accumulate the meaning of the past
and because they are crowded with anticipations of the future. They are
fused with memory and expectation, and one of these two factors is as
important as the other. If either dies away the present becomes a useless
half, like the divided parts of the child which Solomon proposed to
bisect for the two contending mothers.
We are at one of those momentous ridges of time at the present moment.
Some are so busy with the near and immediately practical that they cannot
see the far vision of the world that is to be built. Others are so
impressed with past issues that have become paramount, with the glorious
memories of the blessed Monroe Doctrine, for instance, that they have no
expectant eyes for the creation of an interrelated and unified world.
Another group is so concerned with the social millennium that they
discount the lessons of the past, the message of history, the wisdom of
experience, and fly to the useless task of constructing abstract human
paradises and dreams of a world-kingdom which could exist only in a realm
where men had ceased to be men.
What we want is a synthesis of things present and things to come, a union
of the practical, tested experience of life and the inspired vision of
the prophet who sees unfolding the possibilities of human life raised to
its fuller glory in Christ, the incarnation of the way of love, which
always has worked, is working now, and always will work.
II
TWO TYPES OF MINISTRY
Most people like to be told what they already think. They enjoy hearing
their own opinions and ideas promulgated, and no amens are so hearty as
the ones which greet the reannouncement of views we have already held.
The natural result is that speakers are apt to give their hearers what
they want. They take the line of least resistance and say what will
arouse the enthusiasm of the people before them, and they get their quick
reward. They are popular at once. There is a high tide of emotion as they
proceed to tell what everybody present already thinks, and they soon find
themselves in great demand.
The main trouble with such an easy ministry is that it isn’t worth doing.
It accomplishes next to nothing. It merely arouses a pleasurable emotion
and leaves lives where they were before. And yet not quite where they
were either, for the constant repetition of things we already believe
dulls the mind and deadens the will and weakens rather than strengthens
the power of life. It is an easy ministry both for speakers and hearers,
but it is ominous for them both.
The prophet has a very different task. He cannot give people what they
want. He is under an unescapable compulsion to give them what his soul
believes to be true. He cannot take lines of least resistance; he must
work straight up against the current. He cannot work for quick effects;
he must slowly educate his people and compel them to see what they have
not seen before. The amens are very slow to come to his words, and he
cannot look for emotional thrills. He must risk all that is dear to
himself, except the truth, as he sets himself to his task, and he is
bound to tread lonely wine-presses before he can see of the travail of
his soul and be satisfied.
Every age has these two types of ministry. They are both ancient and
familiar. There are always persons who are satisfied to give what is
wanted, who are glad to cater to popular taste, who like the quick
returns. But there are, too, always a few souls to be found who volunteer
for the harder task. They forego the amens and patiently teach men to see
farther than they have seen before. Their first question is not, What do
people want me to say? but, What is God’s truth which to-day ought to be
heard through me? and knowing that, they speak. They do not move their
hearers as the other type does; they do not reach so many, and they miss
the popular rewards—but they are compassed about by a great cloud of
witnesses as they fight their battles for the truth, and they have their
joy.
But this is not quite all there is to say. It is not possible to teach
the new effectively without linking it up with the old. The wholly new is
generally not true. New, fresh truth emerges out of ancient experience;
it does not drop like a shooting star from the distant skies. The great
prophets in all ages have lived close to the people. They have not had
their “ear to the ground,” to use a political phrase, but they have
understood the human heart. They have lived in the great currents of
life. They have heard the going in the mulberry trees, and have felt the
breaking forth of the dawning light just because of their double union
with men and God.
All sound pedagogy recognizes this principle. The good teacher knits
the new material which he wishes learned on to the old and familiar. He
takes his student forward by gradual stages, not by leaps and bounds, and
he binds the known and unknown together by rational synthesis, not by
some strange, foreign, magical glue. The more we wish to belong to the
prophet-class and to raise our hearers to new and greater levels of truth
and insight, the more we shall strive to understand the truth that has
already been revealed, to saturate ourselves with it, to fuse and kindle
our lives with those immense realities by which men in past ages have
lived and conquered. So, and only so, can we go forward and take others
forward with us to new experiences and to new discoveries of the light
that never was on sea or land.
III
“WE HAVE SEEN HIS STAR”
Every time the Christmas anniversary returns, the heart renews its
youthful joy in the thrilling stories of the nativity. We cannot be too
thankful for the inspiration and poetry and imagination which touch and
glorify every aspect of our religious faith. Some dull and leaden-minded
pedants appear to think that the “real” Christ is the person we get when
we take, for the construction of our figure, only those facts about him
which can be rationalistically, historically, and critically verified. We
are thus reduced to a few religious ideas, a little group of “sayings,”
a tiny body of events, which explain none of the immense results that
followed. The real Christ, on the contrary, is this rich, wonderful,
mysterious, baffling person whose life was vastly greater even than his
deeds or his words, who aroused the wonder and imagination of all who
came in contact with him, who touched everything with emotion, and fused
religion forever with poetry and feeling. He, in a very true sense,
“ ... touches all things common,
Till they rise to touch the spheres.”
Not only over the manger, but over the entire story of his life, hovers
the glory of the star. It is a life that will not stay down on the dull
earth of mere fact; it always rises into the region of idealism and
beauty. It always transcends the things of sight and touch. We have a
religion which cannot be confined in a system of doctrine or a code of
ethics; it partakes too intimately of life for that. It is, like its
Founder, a full rounded reality, rich in inspiration and emotion and
wonder, as well as in intellectual ideas and truth. When the star wanes
and imagination falls away, and we hold in our thin hands only the husks
of a dead system, the power of religion is over.
The same thing is true of the cross. Its power lies in the fullness and
richness of the reality. We do not want to reduce it, but to raise it
to its full meaning and glory as a way of complete life. The direction
of present-day Christianity is certainly not away from Calvary, but
quite the opposite. The men who are in these days trying to deliver our
religion from formalism and tradition find not less meaning in the cross
than a former generation did, but vastly more. The atonement remains at
the center, as it has always done, in vital Christianity. All attempts to
reduce Christianity to a dry and bloodless system of philosophy, with
the appeal of the heart left out, fail now as they have always failed.
It is a Savior that men, tangled in their sins and their sorrows, still
want—not merely a great thinker or a great teacher.
The Church has, no doubt, far too much neglected the idea of the kingdom
of God as Christ expounded it in sermon and parable, and hosts of
prominent Christians do not at all understand what this great, central
teaching of the Master meant then and means now. His transforming
revelation of the nature of God has, too, been missed by multitudes, who
still hold Jewish rather than Christian conceptions of God. But patient
study of the gospel is slowly forcing these ideas into the thought of
men everywhere, and books abound now which make his teaching clear and
luminous.
What is needed above everything else now is that we shall not lose any
of our vision of Christ as Savior, and that we shall live our lives
in his presence. It is through the cross that we touch closest to the
Savior-heart, and it is here that we feel our lives most powerfully moved
by the certainty of his divine nature. Arguments may fail, but one who
looks steadily at this voluntary Sufferer, giving himself for us, will
cry out, with one of old, “My Lord and my God.”
Nothing short of that will do, I believe, if Christianity is to remain
a saving religion. Good men have died in all ages; great teachers have
again and again gone to their deaths in behalf of their truth or out
of love for their disciples. It touches us as we read of their bravery
and their loyalty, but we do not and we cannot build a world-saving
religion upon them. Christ is different! We feel that in him the veil is
lifted and we are face to face with God. When we hear with our hearts
the words, “In the world ye shall have tribulation; but fear not, for I
have overcome the world,” we feel that we are hearing the triumph of God
in the midst of suffering—we are hearing of an eternal triumph. Christ
can not be for us less than God manifested here in a world of time and
space and finiteness, doing in time what God does in eternity—suffering
over sin, entering vicariously into the tragedy of evil, and triumphing
while he treads the winepress. No one has fathomed the awfulness of sin,
until, in some sense, he feels that his sin makes God suffer, that it
crucifies him afresh. If Christ is God revealed in time—made visible and
vocal to men—then, through the cross, we shall discover that we are not
to think of God henceforth as Sovereign—not a Being yonder, enjoying his
royal splendor. We must think of him all the time in terms of Christ. He
is an eternal Lover of our hearts. We pierce him with our sins; we wound
him with our wickedness. He suffers, as mothers who love suffer, and he
enters vicariously into all the tragic deeps of our lives, striving to
bring us home to him. Jan Ruysbroeck says:
“You must love the Love which loves you everlastingly, and if
you hold fast by his love, he remakes you by his Spirit, and
then joy is yours. The Spirit of God breathes into you, and you
breathe it out in rest and joy and love. This is eternal life,
just as in our mortal life we breathe out the air that is in us
and breathe in fresh air.”