_The Inspiration of Responsibility_
The responsibility of the sons of God has been the theme of this book,
and the writer trusts that in dwelling upon the duties of the Christian
life he has not failed to bring out something of its glory and
inspiration. But the thing out of which we can gather the largest help
to fulfil our responsibility is the responsibility itself. If God dwells
high up on the hills of difficulty, He has a throne, too, in the heart
of every claim made on human character.[38]
The presence in our life of a difficulty is a call to responsibility,
and the acceptance of a responsibility is the admittance into personal
experience of God in His triumphant march toward the great consummation;
it is correspondence with victory. Just as the glory of duty consists,
not in its immediate issue, but in its performance, so the main
inspiration for responsibility comes not from external goads and spurs,
but from the very thing which lies at our feet, looking at first sight
like a task given to mock rather than inspire, to denude of what little
power we have rather than to equip, to undo the would-be doer rather
than to be done by him. Responsibility without doubt is a task, but much
more is it an inspiration. Of course the measure of inspiration which it
imparts is proportionate to the faith and courage with which it is
approached. Responsibility handled with dilettante fingers will only cut
and wound; grasped in firm embrace, it will bestow so much illumination
and vigour that the pain which inaugurates the gift will be forgotten
almost before the last ache has faded out. And again, it is not too much
to say that the greater a responsibility is, the greater is its power to
inspire. In other words, inspiration is always commensurate with
responsibility. "As thy days, so shall thy strength be." In the common
Christian duty, which has been outlined in the foregoing pages, so great
is the responsibility imposed that nothing short of the highest
conceivable incentive can carry a man through. And the inspiration lies
within the task and will declare itself only in the doing of the task.
Even on the natural side man finds attraction and inspiration in
problems, puzzles and difficulties.[39] No sooner is one problem solved
or one difficulty surmounted than another is eagerly sought for and
grappled with. The spice of life lies in its antagonisms.[40] It is not
the prospect of some reward of wealth or honour that carries men to the
crown of their task; it is the joy of the doing, a joy that is felt even
in those preliminary experimentations which only pave the way to the
real undertaking. Men--we are not thinking of butterflies--cannot exist
without difficulty. To be shorn of it means death, because inspiration
is bound up with it, and inspiration is the breath of God, without the
constant influx of which man ceases to be a living soul. Responsibility
is the sacrament of inspiration. The miracles of Christ, whatever else
they did, suggested new responsibility to the race, opened up a new
field of daring and enlarged the scope of human operations. They
encouraged men to attempt the impossible; and without question the
hidden but no less effective cause of all scientific development has
been and is Christian aspiration, roused to its highest pitch by the
marvels performed by the Man Christ Jesus. Christian faith has educated
us to a belief that the first promise of order lies in the discovery of
chaos, and that every problem carries in its own pocket a key formed to
fit the hand of man. Thus interest in the sorrows and perplexities of
the multitudes rises from a nerveless compassion that of yore worked
laboriously with its "law-stiffened fingers," to a wide-reaching
ministration of power; the secrets of nature become invitations to
knowledge; and effort that was once merely instinctive and random
becomes rational and triumphant.
But Christ enabled men to achieve what before they had only sighed
after, not by releasing from, but on the contrary by adding to human
responsibility. He saw the inspiration of responsibility, so by making
the latter great He made the former reach its height; He equipped man to
do the smaller duties of life by giving larger ones. It will for ever
hold true that to bring men up to their best, we must call them to the
highest. They are to be won, not by the promise of a gift, but by a
ringing call to duty, not by something to eat, but by something to do.
One reason at least why Christianity is bound to supersede all other
religions is because of the supreme largeness of its demands on human
character and the supreme inspiration that those demands contain. The
fault of most modern prophets is not that they present too high an
ideal, but an ideal that is sketched with a faltering hand; the appeal
to self-sacrifice is too timid and imprecise, the challenge to courage
is too low-voiced, with the result that the tide of inspiration ebbs
low. The call to each soul to contribute its quota toward the
realization of the most remote ideal so far from being depressing is
stimulating, and a necessary goad to the promotion of individual as well
as corporate development. Mr. Kipling's prophetic voice rings out above
the Babel of a garrulous age and inspires men in the only way they can
be inspired, by pointing out human responsibility and bidding men take
up their burden.
_Go to your work and be strong, halting not in your ways,
Baulking the end half-won for an instant dole of praise.
Stand to your work and be wise--certain of sword and pen,
Who are neither children nor gods, but men in a world of men!_
Clothed with the conviction that true inspiration lies in
responsibility, what better words of inspiration can this closing
chapter bear than what will come from a final insistence upon the
vastness of the ordinary man's spiritual responsibility and the grandeur
of his opportunity? In these days a true man rises instinctively to a
broad outlook. He does not labour for his own self-fulfillment and
nothing more. Of course, every act of self-sacrifice for the Kingdom of
Heaven's sake helps toward that end, for self-sacrifice for the
promotion of whatever cause is always the negative aspect of
self-fulfillment. But Christians strive toward the best not from selfish
motives, not merely because what God commands must be done, but because
He has opened up to our gaze a vision of His world-purposes and shown us
that obedience means cooperation with Him in their fulfillment. Thus
small actions become big with import. Personal purity means a
contribution toward the solution of the divorce question which exceeds
in its constructive influence the most wisely worded canon of marriage.
The commercial honour of the individual is the forging of a ward in the
key that will some day unlock the closed door of the industrial problem.
Faithfulness in spiritual duties in the most circumscribed life is a
voice that reaches the uttermost part of the earth and gives its undying
witness to all who have ears to hear. Loyalty and charity working hand
in hand in the Christian soul will do as much as the most carefully
framed and comprehensive formula of agreement, to bring about that
Christian unity for which our Lord prayed[41] when His time was short
and His thoughts only upon that which was the objective point of the
Incarnation.
Whether or not men recognize the extent of their influence, that
influence tells. But what a source of inspiration and strength is lost
when these things are hidden and one sees only the natural side of life,
the prison-house of environment and the task without its incentive! The
Architect of life would have His least workman know the full plan and
not merely that of the small bit of it which is his special care. Once
to discern our personal relation to God's world-purposes is to be for
ever purged of dilettantism; is to be for ever emancipated from a
certain religious littleness that shackles so many Christian feet, and
to move out into a breadth which involves no loss of depth; is to shake
non-essentials into the background, and bring fundamental truths to the
fore, where they can burn themselves into our very being; is to receive
a new motive for living and doing.
Fired by a sense of large responsibility, sustained spiritual effort on
a high plane becomes possible for each in his own little corner. The
demand upon men to pray well, to seek to make the moral life blameless,
and to deepen and enlarge the sphere of service,--in a word, to aspire
to the stars and reach out to the four corners of the world, suggests
privilege rather than hardship to the rank and file of the Christian
army. The layman may not look to the priest as a vicarious man of prayer
and of righteousness. The priesthood is representative, not exclusive,
in character and service. The priest is a man of prayer not because he
is a priest, but because he is a Christian, his priesthood but
determining the accidental features of his devotional life. He is a holy
man not because he is a priest, but because he is a Christian, his
priesthood but determining the sphere in which his holiness is to be
expressed. The priest does spiritual work not because he is a priest,
but because he is a Christian, his priesthood but making him a leader in
service, _primus inter pares_. Faithfulness in prayer, righteousness in
life, full spiritual service, are the responsibility as much of the
layman as of the priest. Failure in any one of these departments of life
is as culpable in the layman as in the priest. It is notable that of all
the vows in the Ordinal, whether in the ordering of priest or deacon, or
in the consecration of a bishop, the majority are but the expansion of
common Christian duty and could be as well taken by layman as by cleric.
The functional peculiarities are as few as the representative duties are
many. The priestly life is mainly, though not solely, the
intensification of fundamental relations with God and man, as the
Ordinal testifies, and the ideal priesthood, so far as it touches
devotion, morals and common service, is but the perpetual and living
reminder to the laity of what they should be and do. There are many
ready to decry sacerdotalism; but few of these have sufficient logic to
recognize that the more completely the ministry is denuded of all but
its representative character, the more fully is the layman weighted with
spiritual responsibility.[42]
And spiritual work is as wide as human activity. The tendency to make
religion a department of life instead of the Christian synonym for the
whole of life, has given rise to such a redundancy as "applied
Christianity." The life of common activities, social and industrial, is
as truly the sphere of religion as the sanctuary. The natural is not the
antithesis but the foundation of the spiritual. First that which is
natural and afterward that which is spiritual--by transformation, not by
substitution. The Resurrection of Christ is a parable as well as a fact.
And it is for the layman, whether he be the thinker in his study or the
labourer in his ditch, to exercise his priesthood in the sphere of his
occupation, lifting to God for His transforming touch each transaction
in which he is engaged, recognizing that all life is divine, and all
business God's business. It is for the layman to enter into the bent of
his age and train it to God, not holding aloof from popular movements
and ambitions, but laying hold of them and labouring for their
conversion and sanctification. Thus will the natural become the
spiritual. The witness that the world of to-day is most in need of is
that which will testify that if God is the God of the supernatural and
extraordinary, just as really is He the God of the natural and ordinary,
revealing Himself through and using common things as the general rule,
turning to what is uncommon as the exception. Who can bear this witness
so well as the layman in the home and in the market? Certain it is that
until this is done and theology has become much more than now part of
the web and woof of common life among common men, theological assent or
ecclesiastical unity will accomplish but little toward unifying life in
Christ in any worthy sense.
This, then, is the ordinary duty of a Christian layman. It is not
something optional, to be assumed or not as we prefer. It is what we
must accept as our responsibility, if we accept Christ and look for
acceptance in Him. The Church of to-day is coming to recognize this more
and more, and is settling down to the work before her with wisdom and
zeal. Even beneath the reaction against "organized Christianity," which
has appeared of late, and partially explanatory of it, is moral
earnestness, an earnestness that deprecates that conventional religion
which, narrow in both its vision and methods, fails to touch life with a
hand of power. Men of action wish a Christianity which is weighted with
responsibilities. Here and there one finds a nerveless Amiel who can
speak fine phrases, but who shrinks from responsibility. And here and
there, too, is a doctrinaire philosopher or an idle onlooker who croaks
of degeneration and declares that life lacks inspiration. But all the
while the workers, with eyes gleaming with hope, plunge into the most
hopeless problems, and reap their inspiration from their toil.
FOOTNOTES:
[38] _See Appendix._
[39] _See Prof. William James in, Is Life Worth Living? "Too much
questioning and too little active responsibility lead, almost as often
as too much sensualism does, to the edge of the slope, at the bottom of
which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicidal view of life."_ [The
Will to Believe and other Essays.]
[40] _See Dr. John Fiske in his recently published, Through Nature to
God, where in a study of the Mystery of Evil, he developes this thought
most admirably, though making the unnecessary deduction that God is the
creator of moral evil._
[41] _St. John xvii._
[42] _See Moberly's Ministerial Priesthood, chap. ii._
Appendix
Where God Dwells[43]
There is no truth so thrilling as that which speaks of God's abiding
presence, not merely _with_ but _in_ His creation, though He is neither
limited by nor dependent upon it. Having created, He sustains, sustains
from within, so that the most recent manifestation of energy, whether in
the radiance of a sunrise or the smile on a child's face, is not the
reflection of a far-off movement of God, but an indication of His
present working. God is behind the world of things, controlling and
using all that is visible, so that the voiceless speaks and the lifeless
lives and imparts life. But His delight is among the sons of men. He
dwells in men, making their bodies His temple and their souls His
throne. He dwells in nature because He dwells in man, as well as
dwelling in man because man is part of nature. What will help a man to
honour his own body and to reverence the bodies of others, more than
the thought that the Spirit of God fills the human frame as light fills
the room, leaving no part untouched? It is not sufficient to think of
God as being in some organ of the body--the most worthy part, such as
the heart or the brain. God's Spirit fills His temple with His glory and
His power, making the least comely parts noble. He sanctifies each
member in the fulfillment of its proper function. To misuse or abuse any
power or faculty, is to drive the Spirit of God from His chosen
resting-place; whereas to surrender the members of the body and the
faculties of the soul to His influence, is to lift up the whole man into
increasing glory and beauty.
But it is not difficult to accept the truth that God lives within His
wonderful creation. The earliest dawn of religion perceived Him in His
works of beauty and majesty,--the sun, the stars, the river, the
tempest. And if He is immanent in that which is less, it is only logic
to say that He must of necessity be in that which is greater--if in the
world of things, much more then in the world of men, in the individual
and in society. But so deep is man's instinctive reverence, so abiding
his sense of unworthiness, that it needed the Incarnation to convince
man that he was destined to become the heaven of God. Yes, the heaven of
God, for heaven is where God is rather than God where heaven is.
All this has become an elementary truth of religion. Only it has to be
expressed in new terms from time to time. The thought has to be recoined
as the edges of language wear smooth, that its force and value may be
recognized. The immanence of God, as thus considered, is not difficult
for men to accept, unless indeed they wander into the barren wastes of a
deistic thought, which banishes God from life as we know it, and makes
Him a transcendent unreality.
What _does_ stagger men is the existence in a world in which God dwells,
of the dark mysteries from which none can escape,--the disastrous
storms, the difficulties, the pains of life. If, they argue, God dwells
in the world, why does He not sweep away these heavy shadows, this
over-much grief? There is only one answer, and it is this: God does not
annihilate these things because He has a high use for them; He cannot
destroy that which He can inhabit; God dwells in the dark places, in the
wilderness, in the storms; He has taken possession of them, and they are
His just as much as the sunshine and the fertile land. In short, God
dwells in everything short of sin, even in the fiercest, gloomiest
penalty of sin. The angel of vengeance is the angel of God's blessing
for all penitents who will accept him as such.
When our Lord came in the flesh, He entered into every human experience
to abide in it all the days. He invested temptation, so that temptation
is henceforth man's highest opportunity. He seized upon difficulty, and
behold, it becomes a revelation. He invested responsibility till it
became inspiration, duty till it became privilege. He wrapped Himself in
sorrow, and sorrow is turned into joy. He explored the darkest recesses
of death, and death is the gate to life immortal. And these
transformations are for all time.
It is a process of transformation, let it be noted, which these
mysteries undergo. It is not that the temptation in time is swept away
and an opportunity substituted in its place; but the temptation
_becomes_ an opportunity, and man mounts upon it to a higher level of
self-sacrifice, or purity or honour. It is not that the difficulty is
burned up by God's fire and a revelation comes gliding in as a sunbeam
athwart the ashes of the difficulty; but the difficulty itself becomes
the revelation. The pain of Rebekah in child-birth as the children
struggled in her womb, made her inquire of the Lord, and God flashed
back the reply from the heart of her difficulty: "Two nations are in thy
womb." Joseph brooded over the condition of Mary, his espoused wife,
until, in the night vision, the angel of the Lord appeared, and said:
"That Which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost." His difficulty
became a revelation. Similarly the dominant feature of responsibility
becomes not its weight but its inspiration, of duty not its 'ought' but
its 'may.' And so it is with sickness, and sorrow, and death. S. Paul's
sickness, whether it was a malady of the eyes or Asiatic malaria is of
little consequence, became to him spiritual health and power; "My grace
is sufficient for thee; my strength is made perfect in weakness." As for
sorrow, it is turned into joy,--the very thing that caused tears
becoming the spring of smiles. And death, the king of shadows, is shorn
of its horrors and becomes the entrance chamber to introduce into the
presence of the King of Light.
The Bible is full of phrases (in the Old Testament, of course, they are
prophetic, pointing to Messianic days) that tell of God's transforming
power. Darkness shall be turned into light; the desert shall blossom as
a rose; the barren shall be a mother of children; the glowing sand shall
become a pool; and the thirsty ground, springs of water; the deaf shall
hear, and the blind see; defeat becomes victory; and the instrument of
shame and torture, the symbol of glory and joy. And all this, which,
through the Incarnation, has become a fact in common life, is a
revelation of God's power, not to say love, which far exceeds in wonder
whatever we knew before. It is appalling to think of a power so strong
that it can annihilate with the irresistible force of its grinding heel;
but it is inspiring to consider an Almightiness that transforms the
works of evil into the hand-maidens of righteousness and converts the
sinner into the saint. And it is this latter power which eternal Love
possesses and exhibits. He persistently dwells in the sinner until the
sinner wakes up in His likeness and is satisfied with it; He enters into
the shadows and holds them until they become first as the morning clouds
fingered by the earliest rays of the rising sun, and eventually as the
brightness of the noonday light.
But men must not accept this as a mere poetic fancy, beautiful but not
of practical value. It is nothing, if not a source of power. We must
experiment with our own difficulties, sickness, sorrows--yes, and our
own death. There are those, Christian scientists and others, that
espouse a false idealism, who meet the grim realities of life with a
courage that is born of a lie. They deny the existence of everything
they do not like, saying that sorrow and sin and death are not, that
they are phantoms. They are not unlike the silly bird, which, finding
itself hard pressed, buries its head in the nearest bush, and being
unable to see its pursuers, deceives itself into thinking that it is not
pursued. But "things and actions are what they are," so why should we
desire to deceive ourselves? The Christian's course of action is to say
that these dark mysteries are real, but the Spirit of God in us will
enable us to find the Spirit of God in them.
Our Lord on the Mount of the Transfiguration, and later on in the
Passion, tells the whole story. Calmly contemplating His own approaching
death, which He had just foretold, and bringing it before the Father in
prayer, He sees the transfiguration of the king of terrors, and, in a
blaze of spiritual exaltation, speaks of His own decease so soon to be
accomplished. Then afterward in the Garden of Gethsemane, on the way of
sorrow, and upon the Cross, He was in every detail the victor. These
final experiences of life did not seize upon Him; it was He who seized
them; He wrung them dry of all that they had to give and for ever
changed their character. Frowning monarchs they can never be to the
followers of our Lord, but, on the contrary, powerful servants. Christ's
victory was not in the Resurrection any more completely than in the
Passion. It was in the former because it had been in the latter. Good
desires brought to good effect, as the Easter Collect puts it, end in
the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Victory is not only a
thing of to-morrow; it belongs to to-day. The Christian's life is
victory all along the line.
Let men, then, take their own hard, grim, specific pain or difficulty,
and face it fearlessly and expectantly, and they will find that the
"worst turns the best to the brave." Let them throw their arms about it,
and say with Jacob: "I will not let Thee go except Thou bless me." And,
lo! they will find that their arms are about God and His about them. If
we pray God to sanctify our sickness, it is not that we expect Him to
touch it from without. No, we look for more than that, much more. We
expect Him to reveal Himself out of the depths of the suffering, so that
the more earnestly we look at it the more clearly shall we see Him and
His Face of Love. Men who have done this with the lesser of the dark
mysteries will be quite ready when the time comes to act in the same way
toward death, and say triumphantly: "Thanks be to God which giveth us
the victory."
What is true of personal difficulties, perplexities and sorrows, is
equally true of the sorrows of a world. Let men remember that those who
hold back timidly or discouraged from hand-to-hand conflict with social,
political and industrial difficulties, are forfeiting their share in the
largest kind of revelation. God dwells there, in corporate sorrows, as
well as in those of the individual experience, and, if one may say so,
in a fuller measure. The world needs brave men to-day, men who are
determined to see God wherever He is, and He is in everything,
everything short of actual sin. There is no philosophy so false to facts
as pessimism, except perhaps cheap and unthinking optimism. It is only
the Christian philosophy that is equal to the situation, a philosophy
which ignores nothing, howsoever gruesome, but which sees God master of
His world, and nowhere in such complete possession as in its darkest
corners.
When God's storms come sweeping along, it is the Christian alone who can
lift his head, look up, and stand erect as they enshroud him, for a
Christian cannot fear where God is. Elijah could not find God in the
storm that swept by him. But the youngest Christian can do what the
stern prophet of old could not; he can find God in all storms, for all
storms are God's.
_LAUS DEO_
FOOTNOTES:
[43] _The Bishop of Ripon, under the title of "Seeking and Finding,"
gives the following text and exquisite little poem as a Diocesan Motto
for 1899_:
_Master, where dwellest Thou?--St. John i: 38._
THE QUEST
_O Master of my soul, where dwellest Thou?
For but one Sovereign doth love allow,
And if I find not Thee, quite lost am I;
Tell me Thy dwelling place: this is my cry._
_No travel will I shrink, no danger dread,
If to Thy home, where'er it be, I may be led:
Not where the world displays its golden pride,
Only with Him, Who is the King, would I abide._
THE FINDING
_Nay, not in far distant lands, but ever near,
Near as the heart that hopes or beats with fear;
My Home is in the heaven, and yet I dwell
With every human heart that loveth well._
_Not where proud perils are I place My throne,
But with the true of heart, and these alone;
So where the contrite soul breathes a true sigh,
And where kind deeds are done, even there dwell I._
_And those who live by love need never ask,
They find my dwelling place in every task;
Vainly they seek who all impatient roam;
If brave and good thy heart, there is My home._
End of Project Gutenberg's With God in the World, by Charles H. Brent