thoughts and motives that most powerfully impel and govern us in the
common actions of life, are latent thoughts and motives. Have you
not often experienced that curious law--a law, perhaps, contrived by
God with an express view to this its highest application--by which
a secret thought or feeling may lie brooding in your mind, quite
apart from the particular work in which you happen to be employed?
Have you never, for instance, while reading aloud, carried along
with you in your reading the secret impression of the presence of
the listener--an impression that kept pace with all the mind's
activity in the special work of reading; nay, have you not sometimes
felt the mind, while prosecuting without interruption the work
of reading, yet at the same time carrying on some other train of
reflection apart altogether from that suggested by the book? Here
is obviously a particular "business" in which you were "diligent,"
yet another and different thought to which the "spirit" turned. Or,
think of the work in which I am this moment occupied. Amidst all
the mental exertions of the public speaker--underneath the outward
workings of his mind, so to speak, there is the latent thought of
the presence of auditory. Perhaps no species of exertion requires
greater concentration of thought or undividedness of attention than
this: and yet, amidst all the subtle processes of intellect,--the
excogitation or recollection of ideas,--the selection, right
ordering and enunciation of words, there never quits his mind for
one moment the idea of the presence of the listening throng. Like
a secret atmosphere, it surrounds and bathes his spirit as he goes
on with the external work. And have not you too, my friends, an
Auditor--it may be a "great cloud of witnesses,"--but at least one
all-glorious Witness and Listener ever present, ever watchful, as
the discourse of life proceeds? Why then, in this case too, while
the outward business is diligently prosecuted, may there not be
on your spirit a latent and constant impression of that awful
inspection? What worldly work so absorbing as to leave no room in
a believer's spirit for the hallowing thought of that glorious
Presence ever near? Do not say that you do not see God--that the
presence of the divine Auditor is not forced upon your senses as
that of the human auditory on the speaker. For the same process
goes on in the secret meditations as in the public addresses of
the preacher--the same latent reference to those who shall listen
to his words dwells in his mind when in his solitary retirement he
thinks and writes, as when he speaks in their immediate presence.
And surely if the thought of an earthly auditory--of human minds and
hearts that shall respond to his thoughts and words can intertwine
itself with all the activities of a man's mind, and flash back
inspiration on his soul, at least as potent and as penetrating may
the thought be, or Him, the great Lord of heaven and earth, who not
only sees and knows us now, but before whose awful presence, in the
last great congregation, we shall stand forth to recount and answer
for our every thought and deed.
Or, to take but one other example, have we not all felt that the
thought of anticipated happiness may blend itself with the work
of our business hours? The laborer's evening release from toil,
the schoolboy's coming holiday, or the hard-wrought business-man's
approaching season of relaxation--the expected return of a
long-absent and much-loved friend--is not the thought of these, or
similar joyous events, one which often intermingles with, without
interrupting, our common work? When a father goes forth to his
"labor till the evening," perhaps often, very often, in the thick of
his toils, the thought of home may start up to cheer him. The smile
that is to welcome him, as he crosses his lowly threshold when the
work of the day is over, the glad faces, and merry voices, and sweet
caresses of little ones, as they shall gather round him in the quiet
evening hours--the thought of all this may dwell, a latent joy, a
hidden motive, deep down in his heart of hearts, may come rushing
in a sweet solace at every pause of exertion, and act like a secret
oil to smooth the wheels of labor. And so, in the other cases I
have named, even when our outward activities are the most strenuous,
even when every energy of mind and body is full strung for work, the
anticipation of coming happiness may never be absent from our minds.
The heart has a secret treasury, where our hopes and joys are often
garnered--too precious to be parted with even for a moment.
And why may not the highest of all hopes and joys possess the same
all-pervading influence? Have we, if our religion be real, no
anticipation of happiness in the glorious future? Is there no "rest
that remaineth for the people of God," no home and loving heart
awaiting us when the toils of our hurried day of life are ended?
What is earthly rest or relaxation, what that release from toil
after which we so often sigh, but the faint shadow of the saint's
everlasting rest--the repose of eternal purity--the calm of a
spirit in which, not the tension of labor only, but the strain of
the moral strife with sin, has ceased--the rest of the soul in God!
What visions of earthly bliss can ever--if our Christian faith be
not a form--compare with "the glory soon to be revealed"--what joy
of earthly reunion with the rapture of the hour when the heavens
shall yield our absent Lord to our embrace, to be parted from us
no more for ever! And if all this be not a dream and a fancy, but
most sober truth, what is there to except this joyful hope from
that law to which, in all other deep joys, our minds are subject?
Why may we not, in this case too, think often, amidst our worldly
work, of the Home to which we are going, of the true and loving
heart that beats for us, and of the sweet and joyous welcome that
awaits us there? And even when we make them not, of set purpose,
the subject of our thoughts, is there not enough of grandeur in the
objects of a believer's hope to pervade his spirit at all times
with a calm and reverential joy? Do not think all this strange,
fanatical, impossible. If it do seem so, it can only be because your
heart is in the earthly hopes, but not in the higher and holier
hopes--because love to Christ is still to you but a name--because
you can give more ardor of thought to the anticipation of a coming
holiday than to the hope of heaven and glory everlasting. No, my
friends! the strange thing is, not that amidst the world's work we
should be able to think of our Home, but that we should ever be able
to forget it; and the stranger, sadder still, that while the little
day of life is passing,--morning--noontide--evening,--each stage
more rapid than the last, while to many the shadows are already fast
lengthening, and the declining sun warns them that "the night is at
hand, wherein no man can work," there should be those amongst us
whose whole thoughts are absorbed in the business of the world, and
to whom the reflection never occurs that soon they must go out into
eternity--without a friend--without a home!
Such, then, is the true idea of the Christian life--a life not
of periodic observances, or of occasional fervors, or even of
splendid acts of heroism and self-devotion, but of quiet, constant,
unobtrusive earnestness, amidst the commonplace work of the world.
This is the life to which Christ calls us. Is it yours? Have you
entered upon it, or are you now willing to enter upon it? It is
not, I admit, an imposing or an easy one. There is nothing in it to
dazzle, much in its hardness and plainness to deter the irresolute.
The life of a follower of Christ demands not, indeed, in our day,
the courage of the hero or the martyr, the fortitude that braves
outward dangers and sufferings, and flinches not from persecution
and death. But with the age of persecution the difficulties of
the Christian life have not passed away. In maintaining, in the
unambitious routine of humble duties, a spirit of Christian
cheerfulness and contentment--in preserving the fervor of piety
amidst unexciting cares and wearing anxieties--in the perpetual
reference to lofty ends amidst lowly toils--there may be evinced a
faith as strong as that of a man who dies with the song of martyrdom
on his lips. It is a great thing to love Christ so dearly as to be
"ready to be bound and to die" for Him; but it is often a thing not
less great to be ready to take up our daily cross, and to live for
Him.
But be the difficulties of a Christian life in the world what they
may, they need not discourage us. Whatever the work to which our
Master calls us, He offers us a strength commensurate with our
needs. No man who wishes to serve Christ will ever fail for lack of
heavenly aid. And it will be no valid excuse for an ungodly life
that it is difficult to keep alive the flame of piety in the world,
if Christ be ready to supply the fuel.
To all, then, who really wish to lead such a life, let me suggest
that the first thing to be done--that without which all other
efforts are worse than vain--is heartily to devote themselves to
God through Christ Jesus. Much as has been said of the infusion
of religious principle and motive into our worldly work, there
is a preliminary advice of greater importance still--that we be
religious. Life comes before growth. The soldier must enlist before
he can serve. In vain are directions how to keep the fire ever
burning on the altar, if first it be not kindled. No religion can
be genuine, no goodness can be constant or lasting, that springs
not, as its primary source, from faith in Jesus Christ. To know
Christ as my Savior--to come with all my guilt and weakness to Him
in whom trembling penitence never fails to find a friend--to cast
myself at His feet in whom all that is sublime in divine holiness
is softened, though not obscured, by all that is beautiful in human
tenderness--and, believing in that love stronger than death which,
for me, and such as me, drained the cup of untold sorrows, and bore
without murmur the bitter curse of sin, to trust my soul for time
and eternity into His hands--this is the beginning of true religion.
And it is the reverential love with which the believer must ever
look to Him to whom he owes so much, that constitutes the mainspring
of the religion of daily life. Selfishness may prompt to a formal
religion, natural susceptibility may give rise to a fitful one, but
for a life of constant fervent piety, amidst the world's cares and
toils, no motive is sufficient save one--self-devoted love to Christ.
But again, if you would lead a Christian life in the world, let me
remind you that that life must be continued as well as begun with
Christ. You must learn to look to Him not merely as your Savior from
guilt, but as the Friend of your secret life, the chosen Companion
of your solitary hours, the Depositary of all the deeper thoughts
and feelings of your soul. You can not live for Him in the world
unless you live much with Him, apart from the world. In spiritual as
in secular things, the deepest and strongest characters need much
solitude to form them. Even earthly greatness, much more moral and
spiritual greatness, is never attained but as the result of much
that is concealed from the world--of many a lonely and meditative
hour. Thoughtfulness, self-knowledge, self-control, a chastened
wisdom and piety, are the fruit of habitual meditation and prayer.
In these exercises heaven is brought near, and our exaggerated
estimate of earthly things corrected. By these our spiritual
energies, shattered and worn by the friction of worldly work,
are repaired. In the recurring seasons of devotion the cares and
anxieties of worldly business cease to vex us; exhausted with its
toils, we have, in daily communion with God, "meat to eat which the
world knoweth not of;" and even when its calamities and losses fall
upon us, and our portion of worldly good may be withdrawn, we may be
able to show, like those holy ones of old at the heathen court, by
the fair serene countenance of the spirit, that we have something
better than the world's pulse to feed upon.
But, further, in availing yourself of this divine resource amidst
the daily exigencies of life, why should you wait always for the
periodic season and the formal attitude of prayer? The heavens are
not open to the believer's call only at intervals. The grace of
God's Holy Spirit falls not like the fertilizing shower, only now
and then; or like the dew on the earth's face, only at morning and
night. At all times on the uplifted face of the believer's spirit
the gracious element is ready to descend. Pray always; pray without
ceasing. When difficulties arise, delay not to seek and obtain at
once the succor you need. Swifter than by the subtle electric agent
is thought borne from earth to heaven. The Great Spirit on high is
in constant sympathy with the believing spirit beneath, and in a
moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the thrill of aspiration flashes
from the heart of man to God. Whenever anything vexes you--whenever,
from the rude and selfish ways of men, any trials of temper cross
your path--when your spirits are ruffled, or your Christian
forbearance put to the test, be this your instant resource! Haste
away, if only for a moment, to the serene and peace-breathing
presence of Jesus, and you will not fail to return with a spirit
soothed and calmed. Or when the impure and low-minded surround
you--when, in the path of duty, the high tone of your Christian
purity is apt to suffer from baser contacts, oh, what a relief to
lift the heart to Christ!--to rise on the wings of faith--even
for one instant to breathe the air of that region where the
Infinite Purity dwells, and then return with a mind steeled against
temptation, ready to recoil, with the instinctive abhorrence of a
spirit that has been beside the throne, from all that is impure and
vile. Say not, then, with such aid at your command, that religion
can not be brought down to common life!
In conclusion, let me once more urge upon you the great lesson
on which we have been insisting. Carry religious principle into
everyday life. Principle elevates whatever it touches. Facts lose
all their littleness to the mind which brings principle and law
to bear upon them. The chemist's or geologist's soiled hands are
no sign of base work; the coarsest operations of the laboratory,
the breaking of stones with a hammer, cease to be mechanical when
intellectual thought and principle govern the mind and guide the
hands. And religious principle is the noblest of all. Bring it to
bear on common actions and coarse cares, and infinitely nobler even
than the philosophic or scientific, becomes the Christian life.
Live for Christ in common things, and all your work will become
priestly work. As in the temple of old, it was holy work to hew
wood or mix oil, because it was done for the altar-sacrifice or the
sacred lamps; so all your coarse and common work will receive a
consecration when done for God's glory, by one who is a true priest
to His temple.
Carry religion into common life, and your life will be rendered
useful as well as noble. There are many men who listen incredulously
to the high-toned exhortations of the pulpit; the religious life
there depicted is much too seraphic, they think, for this plain
and prosaic world of ours. Show these men that the picture is
not a fancy one. Make it a reality. Bring religion down from the
clouds. Apply to it the infallible test of experiment; and, by
suffusing your daily actions with holy principles, prove that love
to God, superiority to worldly pleasure, spirituality, holiness,
heavenly-mindedness, are something more than the stock ideas of
sermons.
Carry religious principle into common life, and common life will
lose its transitoriness. "The world passeth away!" "The things
that are seen are temporal." Soon business with all its cares
and anxieties--the whole "unprofitable stir and fever of the
world"--will be to us a thing of the past. But religion does
something better than sigh and muse over the perishableness of
earthly things; it finds in them the seed of immortality. No work
done for Christ perishes. No action that helps to mold the deathless
mind of a saint of God is ever lost. Live for Christ in the world,
and you carry with you into eternity all of the results of the
world's business that are worth the keeping. The river of life
sweeps on, but the gold grains it held in solution are left behind
deposited in the holy heart. "The world passeth away, and the lust
thereof; but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever." Every
other result of our "diligence in business" will soon be gone.
You cannot invent any mode of exchange between the visible and
invisible worlds, so that the balance at your credit in the one
can be transferred, when you migrate from it, to your account in
the other. Worldly sharpness, acuteness, versatility, are not the
qualities in request in the world to come. The capacious intellect,
stored with knowledge, and disciplined into admirable perspicacity,
tact, worldly wisdom, by a lifetime devoted to politics or business,
is not, by such attainments, fitted to take a higher place among the
sons of immortality. The honor, fame, respect, obsequious homage
that attend worldly greatness up to the grave's brink, will not
follow it one step beyond. These advantages are not to be despised;
but if these be all that, by the toil of our hand, or the sweat of
our brow, we have gained, the hour is fast coming when we shall
discover that we have labored in vain and spent our strength for
naught. But while these pass, there are other things that remain.
The world's gains and losses may soon cease to affect us, but not
the gratitude or the patience, the kindness or the resignation,
they drew forth from our hearts. The world's scenes of business
may fade on our sight, the noise of its restless pursuits may fall
no more upon our ear, when we pass to meet our God; but not one
unselfish thought, not one kind and gentle word, not one act of
self-sacrificing love done for Jesus' sake, in the midst of our
common work, but will have left an indelible impress on the soul
which will go out with it to its eternal destiny. So live, then,
that this may be the result of your labors. So live that your work,
whether in the Church or in the world, may become a discipline for
that glorious state of being in which the Church and the world
shall become one,--where work shall be worship, and labor shall
be rest,--where the worker shall never quit the temple, nor the
worshiper the place of work, because "there is no temple therein,
but the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple thereof."
STORRS
THE PERMANENT MOTIVE IN MISSIONARY WORK
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
RICHARD S. STORRS was born at Braintree, Mass., in 1821. In his
book "Preaching Without Notes," he tells of his early practise and
experience in pulpit delivery. After fifteen years patient effort
he became one of the most accomplished extemporaneous speakers
in America. He wrote much at first, developing a fine rhetorical
style and a rich vocabulary that subsequently served him well as an
impromptu speaker. His advice to divinity students was: "Always be
careful to keep up the habit of writing, with whatever of skill,
elegance, and force, you can command." Because of this early
training in writing he was able later in life to adopt the method
of thoroughly preparing his thought for his sermons, and of leaving
the choice of words and the framing of sentences to the moment of
delivery. His greatest success was achieved after he became a purely
extemporaneous preacher. He was for fifty-four years pastor of the
Church of the Pilgrims, Brooklyn. During this time he produced a
number of books, of which the most important is "The Divine Origin
of Christianity, Indicated by its Historical Effects." He died in
1900.
STORRS
1821-1900
THE PERMANENT MOTIVE IN MISSIONARY WORK
_Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every
creature._--Mark xvi., 15.
The Permanent Motive in Missionary Work: it is a catholic and
comprehensive, even a cosmopolitan theme. It does not concern itself
simply with the interest of foreign missions, technically so called.
But, if you think of it, it concerns those in every Christian
communion who are trying to further the cause and kingdom of our
Lord on the earth. It concerns not the missionary fields alone, as
they are popularly called, in other lands, but every field in which
Christian service is sought to be rendered, from the obscurest slum
in this town of Boston to the ragged edges of the circumference, the
outmost circumference, of the world of mankind.
We are familiar, of course, with the temporary, local, changing
motives to missionary enterprise, which meet us at times, impress us
forcibly for the moment, and pass away; the influence of great and
signal occasions, when sympathies are almost tumultuously excited;
the impulse which comes with a sweeping eloquence, which lifts us
from the common levels of earth, and bears us as on wings toward
issues and actions which we had not anticipated; perhaps the impulse
which comes with personal interest in missionaries whom we have
known, or mission fields which we have traversed. Great successes
on certain fields move our enthusiasm; or tragic and terrible
experiences in others, as recently among the Armenians, stir the
deep fountains of our feeling. No one of these impulses is to be
disregarded. Each one in its place has a power of its own, and all
are to be valued and welcomed for their effect. But what we are to
look for is the motive more deep, permanent, governing, which will
be beneath and behind all these; as the tide-motive is beneath and
behind the advancing and retreating waves which rise and flash,
and break upon the beach; and this will be a motive not simple and
single, but no doubt combined of several, distinguishable from
each other, as a powerful current is made up of different uniting
affluents. We must separate them in thought, that we may afterward
combine them.
I think first, then, we shall all recognize this as essential to
the missionary motive: a clear and profound recognition of the
evilness and misery of the actual condition of mankind, certainly
as compared with the powers which are instinctive in every human
soul. It makes no difference really, or very little, at this point,
whether we accept the Scriptural declaration that man has fallen
from a higher estate to his present level, or conceive, with some
modern theorizers, that man is just now partially emerging from the
conditions of his brute ancestry, stumbling up, through sin and
error and manifold tremendous mistakes, toward wisdom and virtue,
and the blessedness which they bring. In either case, the present
condition of mankind is one of imperfection, weakness, unsatisfied
desire, unrealized promise, and manifold peril. It is not the
missionary who tells us this, principally or alone. Every observant
foreign traveler repeats the same. Everyone who has resided abroad,
and then he comes back to testify with an unprejudiced mind to that
which he has observed, relates the same. The supreme difficulty
here is in the want of the recognition of God, and of the great
immortality.
It used to be a reproach against Christian scholars, made by
skeptics, that they investigated the ethnic religions in the spirit
of suspicious hostility, by which their processes were diverted
from true lines, by which their conclusions were colored. I am not
concerned to argue the case of the Christian scholars of fifty
years ago, or more, but I can certainly affirm that the Christian
scholars of our own time investigate these religions carefully,
patiently, sympathetically, with an eager desire to find everything
in them that is of beautiful worth; and they do find many things
of truth and beauty, many things which excite their admiration, as
illustrating the attainment of the higher aspiration of the human
mind, reaching after the unseen if haply it might find it. But
they find nowhere the discovery of one personal God, eternal in
authority, immaculate in character, creating man in His own image,
and opening before him the ageless immensities beyond the grave;
and in the absence of such recognition of God, and such recognition
of the immortality, man is left to grope where he can not fly, to
clutch the earth where he misses heaven. So it is that industrially,
politically, commercially, socially, intellectually, he is on the
lower level, until some exterior power reaches and ennobles him. So
it is that crime, such as is unknown in Christian communities, is
familiar and tolerated in the world. In fact, we need not fix our
thought, prominently, on the more devilish crimes which still exist
in parts and portions of the earth,--cannibalism, infanticide, human
sacrifices, self-torture, the slavery that would destroy body and
soul together in its own hell. Commoner vices have told us the story
sufficiently,--drunkenness, licentiousness, the gambling passion,
the opium habit, the fierce self-will that rushes to its end,
regardless of anything sacred, in order to attain its pleasure.