The third element in life about which I wish to speak is LOVE.
In this picture we notice the delicate sense of companionship,
brought out by the young man and the young woman. It matters not
whether they are brother and sister, or lover and loved; there
you have the idea of friendship, the final ingredient in our life,
after the two I have named. If the man or the woman had been
standing in that field alone it would have been incomplete.
Love is the divine element in life, because "God is love." "He
that loveth is born of God," therefore, as some one has said, let
us "keep our friendships in repair." Let us cultivate the spirit
of friendship, and let the love of Christ develop it into a great
love, not only for our friends, but for all humanity. Wherever
you go and whatever you do, your work will be a failure unless you
have this element in your life.
These three things go far toward forming a well-rounded life. Some
of us may not have these ingredients in their right proportion,
but if you are lacking in one or the other of them, then pray for
it and work for it that your life may be rounded and complete as
God intended it should be.
Pax Vobiscum.
I once heard a sermon by a distinguished preacher upon "Rest."
It was full of beautiful thoughts; but when I came to ask myself,
"How does he say I can get Rest?" there was no answer. The sermon
was sincerely meant to be practical, yet it contained no experience
that seemed to me to be tangible, nor any advice that I could
grasp--any advice, that is to say, which could help me to find the
thing itself as I went about the world.
Yet this omission of what is, after all, the only important problem,
was not the fault of the preacher. The whole popular religion is
in the twilight here. And when pressed for really working specifics
for the experiences with which it deals, it falters, and seems to
lose itself in mist.
The want of connection between the great words of religion and
every-day life has bewildered and discouraged all of us. Christianity
possesses the noblest words in the language; its literature overflows
with terms expressive of the greatest and happiest moods which can
fill the soul of man. Rest, Joy, Peace, Faith, Love, Light--these
words occur with such persistency in hymns and prayers that an
observer might think they formed the staple of Christian experience.
But on coming to close quarters with the actual life of most of us,
how surely would he be disenchanted. I do not think we ourselves
are aware of how much our religious life is
Made up of phrases;
how much of what we call Christian Experience is only a dialect
of the Churches, a mere religious phraseology with almost nothing
behind it in what we really feel and know.
To some of us, indeed, the Christian experiences seem further away
than when we took the first steps in the Christian life. That life
has not opened out as we had hoped. We do not regret our religion,
but we are disappointed with it. There are times, perhaps, when
wandering notes form a diviner music stray into our spirits; but
these experiences come at few and fitful moments. We have no sense
of possession in them. When they visit us, it is as surprise.
When they leave us, it is without explanation. When we wish their
return, we do not know how to secure it.
All of which means a religion without solid base, and a poor and
flickering life. It means a great bankruptcy in those experiences
which give Christianity its personal solace and make it attractive
to the world, and a great uncertainty as to any remedy. It is as
if we knew everything about health--except the way to get it.
I am quite sure that the difficulty does not lie in the fact that
men are not in earnest. This is simply not the fact. All around
us Christians are wearing themselves out in trying to be better.
The amount of spiritual longing in the world--in the hearts
of unnumbered thousands of men and women in whom we should never
suspect it; among the wise and thoughtful, among the young and
gay, who seldom assuage and never betray their thirst--this is one
of the most wonderful and touching facts of life. It is not more
heart that is needed, but more light; not more force, but a wiser
direction to be given to very real energies already there.
The usual advice when one asks for counsel on these questions is,
"Pray." But this advice is far from adequate. I shall qualify the
statement presently; but let me urge it here, with what you will
perhaps call daring emphasis, that to pray for these things is not
the way to get them. No one will get them without praying; but
that men do not get them by praying is a simple fact. We have all
prayed, and sincerely prayed, for such experiences as I have named;
prayed, believing that that was the way to get them. And yet have
we got them? The test is experience. I dare not limit prayer;
still less the grace of God. If you have got them in this way,
it is well. I am speaking to those, be they few or many, who have
not got them; to ordinary men in ordinary circumstances. But if we
have not got them, it by no means follows that prayer is useless.
The correct conclusion is only that it is useless, or inadequate
rather, for this particular purpose. To make prayer the sole
resort, the universal panacea for every spiritual ill, is as radical
a mistake as to prescribe only one medicine for every bodily trouble.
The physician who does the last is a quack; the spiritual advisor
who dies the first is
Grossly ignorant of his profession.
To do nothing but pray is a wrong done to prayer itself, and can
only end in disaster. It is as if one tried to live only with the
lungs, as if one assimilated only air and neglected solid food.
The lungs are a first essential; the air is a first essential; but
the body has many members, given for different purposes, secreting
different things, and each has a method of nutrition as special to
itself as its own activity. While prayer, then, is the characteristic
sublimity of the Christian life, it is by no means the only one.
And those who make it the sole alternative, and apply it to purposes
for which it was never meant, are really doing the greatest harm
to prayer itself. To couple the word "inadequate" with this might
word is not to dethrone prayer, but to exalt it.