the lips of the poet! These forces of love and grace are universal and
enduring as the stars. To fight them spells defeat. To coöperate with
them, bringing the scattered and aimless activities of the life into
harmony with the supreme purpose of God declared in Jesus Christ, means
life abundant and eternal.
XI
THE POWER OF VISION
In an old school reader there was a sketch, “Eyes or no eyes.” Two
young men went for a walk in the same field. One of them saw just
the commonplace shapes and forms; he saw nothing that a dog or a
kodak would not have seen. He had eyes to see, but he saw not. The
other one saw the bumblebees appearing later in the season than do
the honey-bees, and thought of the relation this fact sustains to
the production of red clover seed--a relation which every farmer
understands when he cuts the second crop in place of the first to get
seed. He saw at one side of the field a great granite boulder deposited
there in the glacial period, and although the day was hot his mind was
cool as it dwelt upon that age of ice. He saw the imprint of the shell
of some water-breathing creature deep bedded as a fossil in a piece of
stone. His imagination went back to the time when that very field was
part of an inland sea, and this bit of life was making its impress upon
the soft mud of some ancient seashore. He saw a score of interesting
things which need not be named here; they were all there to be seen,
but his friend had overlooked them. It was a question of “eyes or no
eyes.” What any man sees in a field, or in his fellow beings, in his
college course, or in life as a whole, depends upon the power of vision
that he carries with him.
Here in a well-known story was a man keeping sheep on the slopes of
Horeb. In reading the narrative it seems that the imagination of the
poet has blended with the plain prose facts of history. We do not know
what kind of fire it was which burned in that mysterious and vocal
bush. We may believe it was the same kind of fire which burns in the
grate or we may conclude that it was an extraordinary bit of autumnal
splendor which at a certain season of the year is aflame on many
hillsides as if the glory and color of a thousand sunsets might have
lodged in the tree tops. However that may be, what Moses actually saw
and heard that day is far more important than any conceivable amount of
literal fire or of autumn color.
“I will now turn aside and see”--and what he saw his own subsequent
career indicates! He had the power of vision and he saw not merely
the shapes and colors present in that sheep pasture. He saw things
absent, things historic, things possible as present and real. He saw
away yonder on the banks of the Nile where he formerly lived, the
life of his own fellows being crushed out of them by wrong industrial
conditions. He saw the capacity of that race, burning but unconsumed
even by those years of oppression, for moral idealism and spiritual
leadership among the nations of the earth. He felt within his own
breast a fitness for service wider, higher, and more significant than
that of keeping sheep. He felt himself commissioned from on high for
that responsible service, and he became dissatisfied with his own easy
content there in the land of Midian. He saw the great divine heart
filled with sympathy for an enslaved and oppressed people. He heard
the divine voice say, “I have seen the affliction of my people which
are in Egypt; I have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters,
and I am come down to deliver them.” He saw the divine hand reach out
to employ mysterious agencies for the release of that people from the
bondage of Egypt.
He had the power of vision and this is what he saw when he led his
flock to the back side of the desert, even to Horeb, the mountain of
God. The sheep saw nothing of that burning bush or of those other
mysterious realities. The dull Midianites watching their flocks a few
hundred yards away on the same slope saw nothing of it. A man standing
in Moses’ own shoes, his face turned in the same direction, would have
seen nothing unless he had brought to the situation the insight of this
man of vision.
And Moses himself saw and heard what he did in that high hour because
through long years he had cherished a profound sympathy for his brother
men and a great abiding faith in God as one who works on behalf of
suffering people everywhere. It was the whole mood and purpose of his
life which stood declared in those splendid words, “I will now turn
aside and see.” He was always saying just that! He was never content
with the mere surface of reality. He was never satisfied with that
which a hasty glance would bring in any given situation. He must get
beneath the surface and know the deeper, hidden meaning.
How much depends upon that power of vision! What mighty issues are knit
up with it in this familiar scene! If Moses that day had seen and heard
nothing more than did the Midianites, he would have gone on keeping his
sheep and would have died a comfortable and prosperous sheep grower.
If the Israelites along the banks of the Nile had been without the
power of such leadership as he alone among the men of his generation
seemed to be able to furnish, they would have gone on making bricks
without straw until all capacity for spiritual advance would have been
crushed out of them. If that Hebrew race, first among Semitic peoples
in its ability to see and to impart spiritual truth, had never had its
chance to develop in the free air of the steppes or within the pleasant
borders of that land of promise, how different apparently would have
been the moral history of the race! It is idle to speculate on what
would have been the result had something never happened which did
happen, but just this glance shows the momentous consequences which may
at any juncture attach to the ability of some man to see. It is of the
utmost importance in every quarter that some man should be at hand who
can see the great sight.
Your own life, the richness of it, the promise of it, the successful
unfolding of it on higher levels, is bound up with this power of
vision. If the world about you is only a sheep pasture, if success in
life is to be measured solely or mainly in terms of wool and mutton, if
the skilful avoidance of discomfort and the securing of easy content
for yourself and your family are the main considerations with you, then
by that limited outlook you are doomed. If here in these days of high
privilege on the campus no bushes burn for you with a strange fire, if
no hillsides in life become vocal with a divine voice, if no flames of
sympathy, of moral passion, of aspiration burn within your breast, then
alas for you! You are not entering into the meaning of life! You have
eyes, but you see not, ears, but you hear not!
“Can ye not discern?” Jesus said to those who regarded themselves as
the most exemplary people of his day. They could look up at the sky
and from the fact that it was red or lowering make a fairly good guess
about tomorrow’s weather, but they could not discern the signs of the
times. There they were in the presence of the beginnings of the most
important spiritual movement in history, yet all they saw was the tired
face of the Man of Nazareth, whom they finally put to death because his
claims confused them. Can ye not discern? Will you not take pains to
cultivate the power of turning aside to see the great sights awaiting
you all in the sheep pastures of earth, in all scenes of industry and
in all places of trade, in all lines of civic effort and in all forms
of charitable intent, in every schoolroom and in every home? Will you
not turn and with heightened power of vision see there the hidden,
unrealized possibilities?
“Where there is no vision, the people perish!” Something lives
on--flesh and blood shapes which buy and sell, walk the street and
talk small talk, but the people created potentially in the likeness
and image of the Most High are gone. Where there is no vision, any
life perishes. What keeps alive the mother-love in the face of all the
hardships, sacrifices, buffetings it is called upon to meet? It is
the power of vision cherished and cultivated more actively, perhaps,
by women than by men. When her child is first laid in her arms it is
only a bit of red flesh--that is all the canary in the window or the
thoughtless observer who cares not for children would see. This bit of
existence, so undeveloped as to have nothing one could call moral life,
no power to choose or to aspire; so undeveloped as to have nothing
one could call mental life, no power of recognition, discrimination,
inference, has only the power to cry and to feed. But the mother sees
in that tiny form another promise of a diviner day when the unsearched
possibilities of that new life shall have been trained and nurtured
by her love. And throughout the years when she nurses the child in
sickness, bears with him in his ignorance, woos and wins him back from
his moral waywardness, she is sustained by her maternal vision.
No one can live strongly, effectively, joyously in any other way. The
dull, dry, prosaic man who never sees the deeper significance of any
given situation may be able to saw wood or add up columns of figures,
but when it comes to relating these ordinary details of life to some
over-arching, underlying, far-reaching purpose which will bring out
the meaning and the beauty of existence, he fails. He has no power of
vision and his real life goes down in defeat.
It might be illustrated in this way--read Baedeker on Mont Blanc and
then read Coleridge! Baedeker has the facts; he tells the height of
the mountain, the exact distance from Chamounix to the summit in
kilometers; he describes every glacier and crevasse. But Coleridge’s
“Ode” to the mountain brings out the meaning and the beauty of it.
Baedeker has facts, Coleridge has vision.
Read Baedeker on Edinburgh and then read Robert Louis Stevenson’s
little book on the same city; read Baedeker on Northern Italy,
including his description of the city without streets, and then read
Ruskin’s “Stones of Venice.” Read Baedeker on Belgium, including his
description of the field and of the Battle of Waterloo, and then read
Victor Hugo’s chapter on the same event in “Les Misérables.” In one
case you have the camera recording the outward, visible, prose facts;
in the other you have insight and vision interpreting the meaning of
them. It is written, man shall not live by Baedeker alone, but by every
word which proceedeth out of the mind and heart of that higher power of
vision shall man live.
Let me urge this habit upon every young man! Put your own personal life
under the power, not of some lower mood or some ill-advised impulse,
but under the power of the best you have ever seen or heard or felt as
in any wise possible to you. It was a man in a million, measured by
character and achievement, who said, while he was still in the vigor
and promise of his youth, “Wherefore I was not disobedient unto”--what?
I was not disobedient unto the rules and regulations posted on the
wall of my schoolroom or the door of the factory where I earned my
bread--that would have meant little! No one can set up the way of life
in type and print it to be nailed on a door. I was not disobedient to
the usages and customs of the society where I moved--that, too, might
have meant only a weak, cheap mode of life. “I was not disobedient unto
the heavenly vision!” I was true to the best I saw and heard and felt
as possible to me!
That habit of putting the life deliberately and persistently under the
power of some noble vision caught in an hour of spiritual privilege
will mean advance. You may, if you will allow your attention to be
diverted by the underbrush around you and never see the bush that burns
with a strange fire, never see things absent, things historic, things
possible but unattained. The small things, the ant-hills, and the
gopher mounds, may, because they are near, shut out your view of Shasta
and Whitney. It is one of the tragedies of life that the insignificant,
the unimportant details have a way of crushing out the finer purposes,
thus bringing defeat to interests which are vital.
When Abraham Lincoln had been unusually harassed by some professional
politicians as to the bestowal of patronage, he said one day, half
humorously and half sadly, “It is not the carrying on of the Civil War
which is killing me; it is the work of deciding who shall be postmaster
at the Four Corners. There is Mr. Blank”--naming a very troublesome
office-seeker--“I never think of going to sleep at night without first
looking under the bed to see if Blank is not there waiting to ask me
for some office.”
It was one of the tragedies of those hard years in our history that the
great president of the republic, who himself had caught the vision and
heard the voice--“I have seen the affliction of my people which are in
bondage; I have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters, and
I am come down to deliver them”--it was one of the tragedies of that
period that his eyes should be turned away from the bush which burned
with fire to study the underbrush piled up round him by narrow-minded
politicians. It is one of the tragedies of many lives in less exalted
station that the great things suffer defeat by the multiplicity and
insistence of the small things. Busied here and there with a thousand
petty interests--what we shall eat, what we shall drink, what we
shall put on, and, what other women will say about it when we get it
on--the vital things are left undone. The whole wretched habit of life
comes from the lack of the power of vision, the inability to put these
matters in right perspective, the great things great and the small
things small.
Your real life does not consist in what you have. Your real life does
not consist in what you are actually able to do. Your real life does
not consist even, as men often say, in what you are. Your real life
consists in what you see as possible and desirable for you, and in
that capacity you feel stirring within you to gain all that sometime!
Not your possessions, not your outward achievements, not your inner
acquirements, but your persistently cherished aspirations tell the
story of your real life. It is what you hold in vision and steadily
strive for which marks you up or down.
But suppose one feels his lack of this power of vision, how shall he
gain more of it? How shall we cultivate our own meager share of this
fine ability? You may recall that word of Paul, “Eye hath not seen,
nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to
conceive the things that God hath prepared for those that love him.”
This does not mean merely that the things prepared for us are superior
to anything that eyes have seen or ears heard in this world; it means
rather that they are discerned in another way. They come to us through
the power of spiritual perception. “Eye hath not seen,” not by physical
sensation; “ear hath not heard,” not by hearsay or common report; God
reveals them to us by his Spirit. It was not that Moses had better eyes
or better ears than the Midianite shepherds upon the hillsides; he had
within him a soul of sympathy for his fellows, a spirit of trust toward
God, an attitude of personal aspiration for the highest, which enabled
him to see and to hear what they failed to detect.
This power of vision grows like other powers, by right use. The soul
sees and sees more as the man obediently translates his visions into
deeds, his insights into actions. If any man, gifted or humble, will
do his will he shall know, for “obedience,” as Robertson said, “is the
organ of spiritual knowledge.” The power of vision grows through right
use as each added insight becomes an effective impulse for noble action.
It is this power of vision which keeps men alive all the way up and
all the way in. It is for you who stand on the slopes of Horeb, the
mountains of God, by reason of the higher education you have received
to cultivate this power by a spirit of obedient trust and by the habit
of loving service. In every situation form the habit of turning aside
from the commonplace shapes which engage your eyes that you may see
some great and significant sight. Watch for the bush which burns with a
mysterious fire! Listen for the voice which issues out of it, calling
you to larger and higher service! Welcome these finer impulses which
burn within your own breast, for they will aid you in building your
personal life into that great, divine plan of which you have caught a
far-off vision.
XII
“THE WAR AGAINST WAR”
In my selection of a theme I have ventured to break away from the
conventional style of baccalaureate address. I bring you no word of
counsel touching those moral values which are altogether private
and personal. I would undertake rather to direct your minds to the
consideration of a certain problem, vast and grave, whose scope is
national and international.
We live in a land governed by public opinion. The seat of authority
is not at Washington; the seat of authority is to be found in those
prevailing sentiments and convictions which determine the real attitude
of the people themselves. As college-trained men and women you are to
be leaders in the work of forming that body of public opinion. Where it
is wise, honest, resolute, it becomes the final source of safety for
the republic. It is of vital importance, then, that your contribution
to that section of public opinion which bears upon the problem I have
in mind be grounded in reason and conscience.
Let me remind you of two sentences taken from Holy Writ, one from the
greatest book in the Old Testament, “His name shall be called the
Prince of Peace”; the other from the last book in the New Testament,
“And he shall reign forever and ever.” His name shall be called the
Prince of Peace and he shall reign forever and ever! We have here a
miniature picture of one of the sublime processes of the ages! The
highest anticipation of the Hebrew looked toward the coming of One who
should establish a new line of succession. He saw a new quality of life
winning its way to empire. The heir to the throne of Israel would be
no more a man of war, he would be the Prince of Peace. And the highest
anticipation of the Christian looked toward the complete success of
that finer method of sovereignty--that coming One would reign forever!
It is a splendid picture of that righteous and enduring conquest to
be accomplished not by force but by principle; not by compulsion
through slaughter but by moral instruction, persuasion, and reasonable
agreement. It is a picture which will furnish any man a worthy ideal
to hang in his sky and it will help him, as he takes part in shaping
the public opinion of his country, to place the crown of his ultimate
allegiance where it rightly belongs.
His name shall be called the Prince of Peace! But what terrible mockery
has been offered to that name by his avowed followers! It is one of
the ironies of history that the most costly and deadly armaments for
the killing of men in war are being wrought out in cold steel, not by
the nations which owe their allegiance to Mahomet, the prophet of the
sword, but by those nations which profess allegiance to the Prince of
Peace. “Put up thy sword,” he said twenty centuries ago! The command
has never been withdrawn nor revoked. Yet look out across the face of
what we call Christendom and see the wicked and costly refusal!
Christian Germany, where the Protestant Reformation was ushered in
by the preaching of Martin Luther, has increased her national debt
in a single generation from eighteen millions of dollars to over one
thousand millions, chiefly by expenditures upon her army and navy.
Christian England, known to the ends of the earth as a center of
missionary impulse, is almost beside herself in her mad desire to
increase the number of _Dreadnoughts_. She is spending three
hundred millions of dollars a year on her army and navy as against
eighty-two millions all told on education, science and art. Christian
Russia, professing in her orthodox Greek Church to have the only true
faith to be found upon the globe, is planning a billion dollar navy
and is actually spending two hundred millions a year upon armament
as against twenty-two millions a year upon education. And our own
Christian country has been making a strange departure from that policy
which has made us prosperous and happy, honored and useful, among the
nations of the earth for more than one hundred years. The United States
in the last ten years has increased in population ten per cent, and it
has increased its military expenditures during that period by three
hundred per cent. And this is Christendom! These are the nations which
look up to the One whose name is called “The Prince of Peace” and crown
him Lord of all! Alas, for the bitter irony of such a course!
And all this at a time when the bare problem of bread is becoming
more and more serious! England, spending her three hundred millions
of dollars a year on military outlay, has little children in the
streets of London and Glasgow eating refuse out of the garbage barrels
because they are hungry. The problem of poverty and unemployment
there is so grave that the British Parliament sets aside whole days
for its consideration. In Germany a government expert said recently
that, according to carefully prepared estimates based upon detailed
investigation, there were two men applying for almost every job which
promised a living wage; one-half of the skilled labor of the empire
was out of employment. In Russia, people by the thousand die, like
flies, from malnutrition at the very hour when her military experts are
talking about that billion dollar navy. It is criminal to take thus the
children’s bread and fling it to the dogs of war! How terrible all
this is for nations which profess to honor and follow the One who came
not to destroy men’s lives, but to save them!
In our own country, while the situation is less serious, there are men
enough out of work and unable to find bread to put into the mouths
of their families. Never a week passes when men do not come asking
me to use my influence with the employers in my congregation to find
them work. Our national leaders are looking in every direction to
discover how the revenue may be increased. The present revenue is sadly
inadequate for the things which ought to be done. There are millions of
acres of arid land to be irrigated by national enterprise and offered
for settlement to industrious families. There are great areas of swamp
land to be drained which would support a busy, happy population. There
are forests to be conserved and renewed in a way that would change
the whole face of the situation for the farmer and the fruit-grower
in great sections of our country. There are inland waterways to be
improved and developed, bringing producer and consumer nearer together
by better means of transportation, thus reducing the cost of living.
There is a merchant marine sadly needing assistance, for our flag
should fly on all seas and in every port, in what could be a useful
and profitable trade. All these things ought to be done, if only there
was money available to do them. All these interests suffer for lack
of money in the very period when within ten years we are increasing
our military expenditure by three hundred per cent. His name shall
be called “The Prince of Peace,” and it is under his banner that we
profess to march!