In speaking thus I do but speak of those things which have been
revealed to me in my own experience. For many years I preached the
truths of Christianity with a real sincerity, but with a fluctuating
sense of their authority and value. Sometimes their authority seemed
supreme, and then I trod on bright clouds high above the world; at
other times they appeared to crumble at my touch, and then I walked in
darkness. One thing I saw at intervals, and at last with complete and
agonized distinctness, that however I preached these truths, they had
little visible effect upon the lives of others. Those to whom I
preached lived after all much as other people lived. I did not find
them more magnanimous than the ordinary men and women of the world, nor
less liable to take offense, to utter harsh words, to indulge in
resentments, and to retaliate on those who injured them. I did not
find that they loved humanity any better than their fellows; like all
mankind they loved those who loved them, and had domestic virtues and
affections, but little more. It was impossible to say that
Christianity had produced in them any type of character wholly and
radically different from that which might be found in multitudes of men
and women who made no pretense of Christian sentiment. Christianity
had no doubt imposed upon them many valuable restraints, so that
without it they might have been worse men and women, but this was a
merely negative result. Where was the spectacle of a character
composed of new qualities, a life wholly governed by novel impulses and
principles? I could not find such a life; nor ought I to have been
surprised; for I could not find it in myself. I also lived much as
other people did, except that I had a higher theory of conduct. Put to
the test, I also showed resentment and was moved with the spirit of
retaliation towards those who wronged me. Nor, save as a matter of
theory and sentiment, did I love my fellows any better than the average
of mankind. I sought those who were congenial to me, and had no
pleasure in the company of the common and the ignorant. I liked clever
people. I gave them my best, but I had nothing to bestow upon the dull
and stupid. How many times have I borne the society of inferior people
with ungracious tolerance, and hastened from them with undisguised
relief? How often when dealing with the poor and ignorant in the
exercise of conventional philanthropy, have I been careful to preserve
the sense of a great gulf that yawned between me and them? And what
was my daily life after all but a life existing for its own purposes,
as most other men's lives were; and what credit could I take for the
fact that the nature of those purposes was a trifle more consonant with
what the world calls high ideals than theirs?
So the years went on, and the sense of unreality in my teaching grew
steadily more intense and intolerable. I saw myself continually
expending all the forces of my mind on theories which left me and my
hearers alike unchanged in the essential characteristics of our lives.
I felt myself, like St. Augustine, but a "seller of rhetoric." I was
inculcating a method of life which I myself did not obey, or obeyed
only in those respects that caused me neither sacrifice nor
inconvenience. In order to continue such labours at all various forms
of excuse and self-deception were required. Thus I flattered myself
that I was at least maintaining the authority of morals. I did not
perceive that morals are of no value to the world until vitalized by
emotion. At other times I preached with strenuous zeal the superiority
of the Christian religion, and dilated on its early triumphs. This
pleased my hearers, for it always flatters men to find themselves upon
the winning side. What I wonder at now is that they did not perceive
that my zeal to prove Christianity true was exactly proportioned to my
fear that it was false. Men do not seek to prove that of which they
are assured. Jesus never sought to prove the existence of a God
because He was assured of it; He simply asserted and commanded. In my
heart of hearts I knew that I was not sure. But I did not easily
discover the reason of my uncertainty. I supposed the source to be the
destructive criticism of the Gospels which had reduced Jesus Himself to
a probability. In my private thoughts I argued that it was no longer
possible to feel the intense reality of Christ. Francis might feel it,
Catherine might feel it, because they lived in an atmosphere of poetry,
unchilled by criticism. I could never feel as they felt because I
could not transport myself into their atmosphere. Yet as often as I
turned to these great lives, something thrilled within me, some living
responsive fibre, so that I knew that I was not after all quite alien
to them. Could it be that there was that in me that made me, or could
make me, of their company? But how could I attain to their faith?
What could give back to a modern man, tortured by a thousand
perplexities of knowledge of which they never dreamed, the reality of
Christ which they possessed? And then the answer came--not suddenly,
but as a still small voice slowly growing louder, more positive, more
intense--_Live the Life_. Try to do some at least of the things that
Jesus did. Seek through experience what can never come through
ratiocination. _Be_ a Francis; then it may be thou shalt think like
him, and know Jesus as he knew Him. Live the life--there is no other
way.
Simple and far from novel as the answer seems yet it came to me with
the authority of a revelation. It illumined the entire circumference
of life. I could no longer hesitate: Jesus had never spoken from the
Syrian heavens more surely to the heart of Saul of Tarsus than He had
to me. And in the moment that He spoke, I also, like Saul, found all
my feelings altered, altered incredibly, miraculously, so that I
scarcely recognized myself. I no longer stood aloof from men, and
found pleasure in intellectual superiority; I was willing to "become a
fool for Christ's sake" if by any means I might save some. I issued a
card of invitation to the services of my Church with this motto of St.
Paul's upon it, which I now felt was mine. I had had for years
feelings of resentment towards one who I thought had wronged me; those
feelings were now dead. In another case I had been harsh and
unforgiving under great provocation; but when I met after a long
interval of time, the one who had injured me, my heart had only love
and pity for him. I sought out the drunkard and the harlot, and, when
I found them, all repulsion perished in the flow of infinite compassion
which I felt. I prayed with fallen women, sought them in their
miserable abodes, fought with them for their own souls, and O exquisite
moment!--I saw the soul awake in them, I saw in their tear-filled eyes
the look that Jesus saw in the eyes of Magdalene. On my last Sabbath
in London before leaving for America, one of these rescued girls, now
as pure of look and manner as those most sweetly nurtured, called at my
house to give my daughter a little present bought with the first money
she had earned by honest toil in many years. On the day we sailed
another said a special mass for us, and held the day sacred for prayer,
in the convent where her bruised life had been nursed back to moral
beauty. Love had triumphed in them, and I had brought them that love.
I had lived the life, I had tried to do something that Jesus did, and
behold Jesus had come back to me, and I knew His presence with me even
as Francis knew it when he washed the leper's sores, and Catherine when
she gathered to her bosom the murderer's guilty head, drew from him the
confession of his sin, and whispered to him softly of the Lamb of God.
There is no sense of unreality in religion now for me. There are no
weary uncertainties, no melancholy sense of beating the air in what I
teach. He who will try to live the life of Jesus for a single day, and
in such few particulars as may lie within his scope, will at once
realize the presence of Jesus with him. In the practice of love comes
the manifestation of the Lover, the drawing of the soul into the bosom
of that Christ who was the very love of God, and the exchange of our
poor proud carnal heart for the tender heart that yearned over
Magdalene, was moved with compassion for the people, and broke upon the
Cross.