E-text prepared by Al Haines
MEN IN THE MAKING
by
AMBROSE SHEPHERD, D.D.
Author of
"The Gospel and Social Questions," Etc.
Hodder and Stoughton
London
MCMIX
I INSCRIBE THIS BOOK
TO
TWO VALUED FRIENDS
JOHN GLAISTER, M.D.
PROFESSOR OF FORENSIC MEDICINE
UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW
AND
CHARLES SCARTH, ESQ., J.P.
OF MORLEY, YORKS.
PREFACE
The addresses which make up this book are printed, almost exactly, as
they were spoken from my pulpit in Glasgow. I have yielded to repeated
requests that I would put them in a more permanent form than memory, or
notes, can supply. There is always room for a book to young men; whether
or not the book I now offer them is worth its room, is a matter about
which I, possibly, am not the best judge. This I can say: There was a
time in my life when I should have been helped, had I met through the
spoken word, or printed page, some of the things I have tried to say as
faithfully as I know how to say them, within the limits of taste and
discretion. Whatever these addresses lack in thought, and in the
handling of the subjects discussed, I have done my best to make them
readable. In the case of the average young man of to-day, if a book does
not interest him in the matter of style, any other merits it may possess
will have a weakened chance of making themselves felt. If I have failed
to meet this one condition of securing his attention--provided he give me
a fair trial--I shall be disappointed and, to be candid, surprised.
Should, however, his interest be tolerably well sustained through the
ethical part of these addresses, say to the end of the chapter on "The
Royal Law," I shall, perhaps, have no reason to complain. At the same
time I would advise him to persevere with the rest, even at the cost of
some effort.
There are one or two things which should be said by way of introduction
to these addresses. When the manuscript was out of my hands and in those
of the printer, I was informed that Archdeacon Wilberforce had, in one of
his books, a sermon on much the same lines that are found in my chapter
entitled "A Devil's Trinity." I have only to say that, so far as I
know, I have never seen a line from the pen of Archdeacon Wilberforce.
And in this connection I should like to quote a sentence or two from the
Preface to my book on _The Gospel and Social Questions_. I remark there
that, fortunately or otherwise for me, I have a tenacious memory which
retains for long, not only a thought which arrests me, but the form in
which it is expressed. Where I have made use of a quotation, or tried to
paraphrase something I have read--and this applies to the following
addresses--I have indicated the circumstances in the usual way.
The concluding chapter of this series is, in the main, a transcript of my
booklet on _The Responsibility of God_, published by Oliphant, Anderson
and Ferrier, of Edinburgh. I have to thank these gentlemen, and I do so
heartily, for their permission to make this further use of it.
Considerable changes are made in the reproduction; but I think this
admission is due to any buyers the book may secure. I have also to
mention my great indebtedness to Rev. J. F. Shepherd, M.A., of
Manchester, for his help with the proofs, and for some valuable
suggestions as to emendations of expression.
AMBROSE SHEPHERD.
6, Thornville Terrace,
Glasgow.
CONTENTS
I
YOUTH AND AFTER
II
YOUTH'S STRATEGIC PLACES
III
THE WORSHIP OF LUCK
IV
A DEVIL'S TRINITY
V
TEMPTATION AND RESPONSIBILITY
VI
SELF-RESPECT AND COMPANIONSHIPS
VII
THE ROYAL LAW
VIII
'HE WAS DESPISED AND REJECTED'
IX
'WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED?'
X
DOES GOD HAVE FAIR-PLAY?
YOUTH AND AFTER
"And Terah died in Haran."--Gen. xi. 32.
YOUTH AND AFTER
"And Terah died in Haran." This bit of prosaic information becomes
suggestive by the emphasis of one word: "And Terah _died_ in Haran."
This was not his birthplace, but here he ended his days, and that for a
reason over which it is worth our while to pause. "And Terah died in
Haran." What of that? All people have died somewhere, who have lived
and are dead.
When we first meet this man, he was a citizen of no mean city. Ur of
the Chaldees was a great and representative centre in its day. Rising
sheer from the midst of it, we are told, was an immense tower, or
observatory, from the height of which men, reputed wise, watched the
movements of the heavenly bodies; and especially the moon, for the moon
was worshipped in Ur of the Chaldees as the great tutelary deity of
this people. Here it was that Terah lived, at this time an old man,
and "to trade," as the Scotch people would say, a maker of images. His
craft was in things which symbolized some form of this lunar worship,
and which people bought to put in their houses.
Terah had a son called Abram, who, as he came to years of thought, did
not fall in very readily with this worship of the moon. He appears to
have become very early in life one of an order of doubters to whom the
world owes much; to have suspected, at least, that the moon was not, as
the priests taught, a cause in itself, but the effect of a cause. What
was that cause? What was the fashioning hand behind the effect? In
other words, he had come upon the doubt which explains much of the
faith and achievement of the reformers and path-finders of the world.
Neither doubt nor belief has any virtue in itself; we must determine
the moral quality by its expression in action. Had Abram merely begun
and ended with his doubts about the moon, he would have died and been
as soon forgotten as any other commonplace sceptic before or since his
day. The trouble is not that men doubt, but that they are often
content to do nothing else. It may be better that they should believe
wrong things, than that they should cease to believe in anything.
Abram began, we imagine, to talk to his father about his misgivings,
and notwithstanding the fact that Terah's trade was dependent on the
popular religion, he seems to have yielded with something like
enthusiasm to the greater personality of his son. Eventually they
determined to leave Ur of the Chaldees and go, no matter how far, until
they came to some place where they could worship in the new light which
had come to them, or, as we should say, according to conscience.
It was a formidable undertaking, for they knew not their
destination--if even, indeed, they knew their direction. Some one--I
forget who--has traced their route through Larsa, where men worshipped
the sun; through Erech, where they worshipped the planet Venus--the
bright evening star; through Nipur, where they bowed the knee to Baal;
through Borsippa, where they worshipped the planet Jupiter; and on and
on until they came to Haran, where the people worshipped--the moon! It
was not until they came to Haran, that they touched, as it were, their
first footprints, and found the old religion.
And this was the finish for the poor old father Terah. Whatever the
motives with which he had set out on this pilgrimage, whether of
conviction more or less, or parental affection entirely, he was now
weary. There had been little temptation to pause before on the score
of a people's worship. That of the sun, of Venus, of Baal, of Jupiter,
probably did not arouse in him even a passing interest. But when, worn
out in body and mind, he suddenly came upon the old religion, his
journeyings after another faith and form of worship were at an end.
This powerful appeal to his past, with its resurrection of old
memories, old prejudices, and the pathos of old associations, was too
much for the old man. No second call came to him; or if it did, he had
neither heart nor ear for it. It was Abram the younger man who
withstood the temptations of Haran and with the faithful went on to a
land they knew not of. It was the younger who had the staying power
which, when acquired early, goes through life, and rejoins it in
eternity sure as ever it came to it in time. Terah travelled some six
hundred miles--a big journey in those days--to get away from the
worship of the moon, and in the worship of the moon he ended his years.
His evening and his morning were the same day: "And Terah died in
Haran."
You see the thought underlying this bit of prosaic information. It
simply means that the years close down the possibilities of a certain
kind of moral exodus. It is in the days of your youth that you must
make the "legs of iron," as Emerson calls them, for the journey which
lies before you. If you wait until you get into years before you find
right principles, and form good resolutions--well, even then it is
better to make some start in the right direction. But why pile up the
odds, that start you never will; or that you will not go far if you do?
The enthusiasms of old men are as rare as they are short-lived, unless
they are evolved out of earlier and worthy days.
There may be exceptions. If there are, I have never known one. The
rule is practically a law, that old men, who are nothing more than old
men, cannot make mighty resolves and carry them through. They may, for
many reasons, start out from Ur of the Chaldees; but it is not often
they get past Haran, if, indeed, they ever get so far. More likely
will it end in the old defeat: "I will return into the house whence I
came out," which is much the same, or, in some cases, is even worse,
than if they had never left it. The old man Terah would get an
interesting tour; although very probably people would hear from him
more about it at the end than he had ever seen on the way. He would be
a much-travelled man for those days, but he never found the new
religion. It was the old religion that re-found him.
Understand me: I am far from saying that old age necessarily blocks the
way to great attempts, or to conspicuous success in them. All history
would cry out against such a statement. There is an old age we delight
to honour, and which reverses the ordinary attitude to it in the
general world. Instead of considering it a legitimate matter for lying
about, and polite not to be aware of its presence, we make our boast in
the virility which, in some men, accompanies their years until they
quite shade out in a mellow maze of glory.
Take some of our statesmen. Were not the mighty men of the great
nineteenth century aged men, if we count age only by shadows on the
dial? At a time of life when most men are honoured with a natural
right to senility, Mr. Gladstone was girding on his armour for one of
the biggest conflicts ever waged in the arena of our Parliament. And
years after, as the struggle still raged--to see him, almost blind and
deaf, looking like so much vitalized parchment rather than a figure of
flesh and blood, as night after night he stood up to the agility of a
Chamberlain, and the subtlety of a Balfour--each perfected to a fine
art--surely never gamer, grander sight ever challenged the imagination
of poet, patriot, or historian. It was a testimony to all time of what
can come out of the brain and soul of a man, when the body that houses
them is written and re-written over with the hieroglyphics of age. It
was a fitting termination to what may be, and ought to be, the great
and sacred processes of life.
But Mr. Gladstone was great at the end, because all the way had been a
preparation for it. This is the secret, if secret it be, which young
men cannot know and master too soon. To end well, you must begin well;
and you must fill in well the distance between the one and the other.
Study carefully the triumph of old age in statesmanship, in science,
and in affairs, and you will have to connect them with years of stern
discipline and strenuous endeavour. In no case will you find strength
where there has been no strain, or palm where there has been no dust.
There are levels on which the truth, that "we reap what we sow," admits
of no qualification. Omnipotence itself cannot make it possible for us
to gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles. To attempt after a
given age, and on the strength of a chance impulse, to leave Ur of the
Chaldees with its old habits and associations, its old moral settings,
will carry us far as the impulse lasts, but that in all probability
will be only as far as Haran. And as Terah died at Haran, so shall we.
It will be from moon to moon. Youth is the time to determine whether
old age shall be a beautiful consummation, or a bitter regret. The
threshold of manhood is the place to form resolutions that will have
some chance of being kept, to cultivate the thoughts you would have
ultimately become things. The serious danger is that, with the
impression of a long future before you, you should merely drift in the
present, and forget how inextricably the texture of to-day will be
woven into the fabric of to-morrow.
I am quite aware that what I have so far said is more likely to hinder
than help the purpose I have in saying it. You will not question that
a clear nexus runs through our years, but my teaching about it, you
tell me, is needlessly severe. If as the beginning is, so must the end
be, what are we to say of a man's will? What are we to say about the
power and working of divine grace? While there is life, does there
ever come a time when it is no longer true to say that out of it can
pass the old, or into it can come the new?
Surely to affirm that such a time can be is to give the lie to religion
and experience. Many a young man is having what is called his "fling,"
who is yet quite sure in his own mind that when the time comes to
accept the more serious responsibilities of life, he will change his
habits and turn to ways that befit the new occasion. So we are told.
And is it not true? Have we not known young men cover a considerable
space of life with questionable, and even more than questionable
courses, and yet settle down into exemplary domestic men and admirable
citizens?
Yes, we have known them, and, whatever influences have brought about
the change, let us be thankful for it. But what proportion do they
bear to the legions who, once in Ur of the Chaldees, have neither
thought nor desire for a better country? While, again, they may leave
it from anything but worthy motives. Men may be compelled to change
their habits without changing their natures. It is really to multiply
words to no profit to debate the question. Your instinct tells you
that it would be wickedness to encourage you to take your "fling" in Ur
of the Chaldees on the risk that you can get away from it when prudence
speaks the word. Settle it, then, as true for you, that out of to-day
walks a to-morrow; and that what you shall do with to-morrow is
practically determined by what you are doing to-day.
This counsel, or admonition, cannot be over-emphasized. I assume that
I am talking to young men who do not intend to make a failure of life;
then, I tell you again, that you must seize the one great chance you
have, to make it a success.
Permit me now to apply very briefly what has been so far advanced,
first, to your pleasures; and, secondly, to something more important to
you than old age, and that is--middle life.
To everything, says the Preacher, there is a time and a season, and it
must be that youth is the time for amusements and pleasures, which are
not so much the privileges of youth as native to it. We are told that
Darwin in his old age expressed regret that he had deprived himself of
so many of the pleasures and resources of life by his concentration
upon that study, the results of which have made his name so justly
famous. He gave to get; but he lived to doubt his own right to pay the
price. And no young man should give place, no not for a moment, to a
doctrine of work which excludes his right to the joys and abandon of
his years. There is danger, and very real danger, lest we should take
for granted what the "Grad-grinds" tell us, that the only thing which
matters is that we do work, and are not idle. Work for its own sake is
not enough. It may turn men into machines--all clatter and monotony;
or it may make them fussy nuisances. "A soulless activity," says Canon
Ainger, "may save a man from vagrancy only by turning him into a thing;
or it may keep him from idleness by making him an egotist." There is
the man who, to use the common phrase, "sticks at it" with scarcely a
competing thought or interest. He scorns ease, and lives laborious
days. For what? I once heard it said, and I believe it was true, of a
prosperous Yorkshireman, that the real pleasure he had in his money,
for which he had toiled hard, was in a kind of mental calculation as to
how many of his neighbours he could buy up.
"I do all things that I may honour the Father," said Jesus: and work
which is not under this impulse, has in it no element of permanent
satisfaction. In some way every work has to be brought into a
conscious relation to God, or we only swell the crowd either of
self-seekers, or of the men whose toil leaves no such impression upon
their character as gives sign or evidence of a sane or worthy aim and
end.
To give to work its essential dignity, and preserve it from mechanical
routine we must bring motive into it--high and worthy purpose. There
is no virtue necessarily in being always at work, but there is
tremendous power in being able to work when we do work. Do not
discount the old advice because it is commonplace: "work when you work,
and play when you play." Master the distinction there is between
having what is called your "fling," and having your really "good time."
Get all the rational pleasure you can out of your young days. Let your
religion be no dog Cerberus, snarling at the heels of innocent
enjoyment. But never lose sight of the fact that unless you have a
definite and worthy purpose, to attain which you keep your good time
subordinate, that good time will have the same relation to genuine
pleasure that the throbbings of an ulcer have to the healthy action of
the heart. And a very plain word is needed here. Our trouble to-day
is not that young people will have their pleasures and amusements; it
is that so many of them will have nothing else. One who knows his day
has told us, that were it not for the sporting intelligence in the
evening paper, not a few of our young men would forget how to read. It
is a common experience to meet young men who have been decently
educated, as things go, and yet they are ignorant as babies about the
social and political questions which so vitally affect the welfare of
the State. Decently educated, I say, as things go. But how far is
that? "I have five clerks in my office," said a Bradford merchant
lately, "who probably could tell me all I want to know and more, about
a horse race, a cricket, or a football match; and not one of them could
translate for me a foreign business letter. This is one principal
reason," he added, "why Bradford is overrun with Germans, and why the
Germans are getting hold of so much of our trade." On what is called
the practical side of life, the first duty of a young man is to be
efficient in whatever honest thing he is doing to earn his bread; and
at the same time be preparing himself for whatever surprise or
opportunity the future may have in store for him. A few hours in the
week given seriously to the latter, will leave an ample margin of time
for recreation and amusement; and who knows what he may need, until the
need is there to test what he knows? To be great on sport, and a
"stick" at one's business; to be an authority on amusements, and an
ignoramus about almost everything else that is anything, is the
surrender of manhood, and that in a day which has no need comparable
with its need of capable men.
And such surrender has consequences that lie nearer than those which
make themselves manifest in old age. Your next step is into middle
life; and it is here where the question is finally decided whether it
is, or is not, well for us that we are here at all. If a man has put
little more than the rubbish of a selfish existence into his years he
will, by the time he is old in them, be the victim of a callous
insensibility which will carry him over into the stage beyond our human
ken. An unworthy old age rarely feels much moral suffering; that but
waits its awakening in the fires which shall try every man's work of
what sort it is.
But when a man begins to sight the middle years, he learns to know
himself as never before or after. This is the stage where increase of
knowledge often means increase of sorrow. It is, in truth, the sorrow
of finding out our limitations which, on their first acquaintance,
often seem more appalling than they actually are. While youth may be
saved by hope, by what is to be, middle life is often lost in the drab
reality of what is. Every youth, who is not as indifferent to his
possibilities as though he were nothing more than a lump of flesh, is
about to become a numeral in the world. The tragedy enters when he
knows himself to be what in a sense he must remain--a cipher, merely
giving value to the men who do represent the numerals. When the youth,
who used to talk about having the "ball at his feet," seems to have
become very much the ball itself, to be kicked hither and thither as
circumstances may determine, what then? Will he show that kicked he
may be, but ball he is not? That circumstances may use him, but they
shall not make him? The answer to this question will very much depend
upon the stuff he put into his years, while as yet he knew not his
limitations.
And even where middle life has won success in the things men covet, and
for which they strive, it may be the success that is just deadly in its
reaction of monotony. How often do we hear it said of a prosperous
man, who in middle years is giving place to unworthy habits, or to
ill-humour and chronic depression: "Would he had something to take him
out of himself; some interest in anything, if it were but a harmless
hobby." Think of a man being reduced to the need of a "hobby" to keep
him out of moral mischief! What such a man, if man he can be called,
really needs is some higher interest or a coffin. A hobby is well
enough in its place, and much can be said for it, but when it becomes a
man's only peradventure between himself and the devil, the world can
probably spare him to its own advantage. The young have no little
safety in their years, in the temporary buoyancy of the blood. It is
when the former draw in, and the latter thins out, that dangerous
things get their more obvious and, too often, fatal chance with men.
It is when the first fires of passion have slowed down, and the ties of
early friendship have relaxed, and the outlook appears to leave us with
the problem, not how to live, but how to exist. I tremble at times
when my experience suggests the dangers of those long stretches of
emptiness, that so easily fill with the sinister and the unspeakable.
I would pray, as a man in mortal terror, against the bottomless pit of
a motiveless existence.
This is why I put emphasis upon the threshold of manhood; not that I
believe it to be the most dangerous part of human life, but because I
believe it is the time to safeguard the part that is. It is the time
when habits can be cultivated, and resources acquired, which can make
middle life as crowded with interest and good to enjoy as any of the
earlier years, and infinitely more useful. But this is possible only
when the middle years can command their own. Just as many of us
"postpone life until after our funeral," so may we find ourselves in
middle life discouraged and sullen because we cannot do what we would,
only because we have not done what we ought. Men do not always go
under because they cannot do things. They fail, not because they do
not know what it is well to do, but because they do not choose to
attempt it. And why do they not choose? So far as this question
affects middle life, it is largely because so few of us have the grit
to face its difficulties, and attack them, when we have to do it with
the serious handicap of self-made disadvantages. It is while you are
young that you must lay up these stores of living material for the
after years; and this is the significance of it all--you can only do
it, or you can do it most effectually, when you are young. As touching
certain advantages, "the day after to-morrow is the only day that never
comes."
Have your good time, I say, and in it fear God, and fear nothing else.
Keep a clean youth, and enjoy it to the full. But let the thought have
its place as a goad when required, or as a steadying influence when the
spirits would gallop too fast--the thought in the question: How will it
be with me when my years are thirty-five or forty? That trying, and in
so many cases, that fatal forty! When the youth of "rose-light and
romance has faded into the light of common day, and the horizon of life
has shrunk incalculably, and when the flagging spirit no longer answers
to the spur of external things, but must find its motive and energy
from within, or find them not at all." See to it while you may, that
these forces, when needed, are there, or whatever else you may gain
will be but a mocking remembrancer of the greater thing you have lost.
I have but another word to add. If there are, as I trust there are,
middle-aged, or even old men, who would leave this Ur of the Chaldees,
with all its unworthy past, and make for a better country, do not, I
plead with you, be discouraged by anything I have said. Remember, I
have been talking to the young; but God forbid that what I have said to
them should seem to exclude hope for you. Make your start, though you
should get no further than Haran. In a matter so supreme, it is better
to have tried and failed, than never to have tried at all. But you
need not fail in any degree that success is possible to you; and a
success is possible to you in which are issues of everlasting life.
Whatever the past, build up with courage and humility what you can do.
God willing, and by His grace, you have time yet to prove how a
consecrated determination can stretch out life's limits, and wondrously
redeem no little of past failure.
YOUTH'S STRATEGIC PLACES
"I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong."--1 St.
John ii. 14.
II
YOUTH'S STRATEGIC PLACES
"I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong." This
description "young men" probably indicates that those to whom this part
of St. John's letter was addressed were seriously engaged in the work
of grounding their character, forming their habits, disciplining their
inclinations, and confirming the election all must make between good
and evil. He was not writing to those who had failed in the struggle,
and had accepted their defeat. He was not writing to those who,
beaten, knew that they did not intend to try again, and had thus
written themselves out of the progressive forces of the human world.
He was writing to those who had shown promise of better things, who
were evidently pressing "toward the mark for the prize of the high
calling of God in Christ Jesus." I do not take it that the Apostle
credits the young men to whom he wrote with having won a victory which
is never finally decided on this side the grave, or with having
attained to a moral altitude outside the reach of their years. When he
says, "I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong," he
may be understood as referring to a strength consistent with, and yet
peculiar to, their years--a strength the whole force of which was set
in a right and healthy direction.
I want now to deal with the first part of this particular reference to
the strength of young men. It would be away from my present purpose to
weight this address with any attempt to say what the writer means when
he tells them that, "The word of God abideth in you, and ye have
overcome the wicked one." I shall take the words of our text out of
their context, and use them as a topic: "I have written unto you, young
men, because ye are strong." Strong in what sense? How may we give
the words a useful setting, as a remembrancer and a call to the young
men of to-day?
In the first place, one great constituent of strength which is, or
ought to be, the special possession of young life is--Hope. It is a
common remark that as we grow older we become chary of convictions, and
content ourselves with opinions. I should be sorry to believe it, but
I am obliged to admit that age, even with good people, changes to a
large extent their centre of gravity from hope to faith.
It is suggestive to mark the order of these in St. Paul's famous
procession--faith, hope, love. Love, he says, is the greatest. But he
ranks hope before faith. Why? The passage in which this
classification occurs is part of the distinctive literature of the
Bible. Hence terms are not used carelessly. What is the difference
between the two? "Hope," says David Hume, "is the real riches of human
life; as fear is the real poverty."
Hope is that which is "at the bottom of the vase," as the ancients
said, when "every other thing has gone out of it"--by which, as it has
been suggested, they probably meant the human heart. "While hope
trembles in expectation, faith is quiet in possession. Hope leaps out
towards what will be; faith holds on to what is. Hope idealizes; faith
realizes. Faith sees; hope foresees." [1] In other words, faith is
apt to be content with what it has; hope ventures out to annex the
wider provinces of the imagination. Faith is the prose of our
religious life, hope is its poetry.
Unless you think about it, this will glance off your mind as a
distinction without a difference. It is more than that, in the sense I
am using the distinction. The loss of youth is not so much in the
flight of years, as in the stealing away of our hopes. We may be
justified by faith, but we are saved by hope, in theology and in life.
There are twenty men who have faith in Christ for one man who has hope
that His Spirit will ever incarnate itself in the life of the world.
As we get older, most of us, I am afraid, are only too glad to keep our
faith in great principles, without hoping much for them. The usual
product of experience, and more especially experience gained in
attempting some great reform, is, as Dr. Martineau remarks, "a certain
caution and lowering of hope. When the spent enthusiast looks back
upon the riches of his early hopes, and the poverty of his
achievements, he is tempted to regret the magnitude of his aims, and
advise a zeal too temperate to live through the frosts of inevitable
disappointments."
Nothing more damps the ardour of young people with good stuff in them
than this caution called wisdom, which so often creeps over us as we
advance in years. Then it is so frequently the case that the precepts
that most naturally flow from our lips are the negatives that stifle
hope. "I can no longer afford convictions," said a man to me once, "I
have come to limit myself to opinions; they can be held at less risk,
and changed at less cost." And the disposition to regard both faith
and hope in great things as subject to the same insecure and miserable
tenure, is apt to grow with the growing years, until we come to
sympathize with nothing which cannot take out a policy of assurance.
When we are young we may be susceptible to the new, only because it is
new to us. We are ready to welcome in book or speech anything which
charms us with a novelty we readily mistake for originality. After we
have crossed a line it may be well that most of us should become a bit
obstinate, a little stiff in our beliefs, lest we be blown about by
every wind of doctrine.[2] At the same time, there is always the
danger of becoming so rigid in our opinions and faith as to permit no
horizon of hope. There are multitudes, in our churches and outside
them, who, from want of the hope that saves, are dying from the top
downwards.
And among them is an increasing proportion of young men. I hear them
boast that they have no ideals, no hopes or aspirations that are above
the earth earthy. For once, at any rate, they have a conviction, and
it is, that man lives by bread alone, that his life is in the abundance
of the things which he possesses. They are too "knowing" to be caught
prisoners by ideas, too much "men of the world" to concern themselves
about the "Utopias of religion." And they call it strength. Strength!
It reminds one of the bitter remark of an historian on the march of the
Roman legions: "They make a solitude, and call it peace." Strength!
There are those in perdition at this moment who could tell them that
what they call strength is the stupidity which adds to sin the
increment of a huge blunder.
The young man who is strong is he who has the moral genius of his
years. He does not deny that man lives by bread, but he does deny that
man lives by bread alone. He has faith in the upward trend of the
world; and he has the hope which can give to faith its adequate
translation. He does not believe that there are two Almighties in the
world and that the devil is the greater; that sin shall breed sin for
ever. He does not believe that the many must drudge to the limit of
endurance and starve their higher nature as long as the world lasts,
that the few may taste the sweets of culture and opulence. He does not
believe that brute force shall for ever trample splendid intelligence
underfoot, or that we must always stand on the margin of the dark river
of wrong, in the unfathomed depths of which lie mysteries of
terror--the despair of man, the sorrow of God. He has hope, that
mighty dynamic--God's pledge to the young and unspoiled soul of a
coming day when all that is false and unbelieving and wicked shall be
cast into the consuming fire of divine holiness. He has faith in the
great day of the Lord; and with the splendid optimism, the hope
peculiar to his years, he cries: "I can, and I will, hasten the coming
of my Lord." This is one great element of a young man's strength--hope
in goodness, which goes so far to sustain the toil that can realize it.
"I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong."
Another factor in this strength is--Freedom. I hardly like the word,
but I want to express by it immunity from certain responsibilities.
Young men, up to a given period, are, as never again, free to sacrifice
for what look like the forlorn hopes and apparently lost causes of
humanity. "My six reasons for taking no risks," said a man in the
American Civil War, "are a wife and five children." The reasons which
in one man may resolve themselves into prudence, in the case of another
man, differently circumstanced, may be nothing better than cowardice.
Some years ago four men stood on the cage at the mouth of the shaft
that penetrated to the workings of a Yorkshire coal-mine. There had
been an explosion, and over forty men were imprisoned in what seemed
likely to be their grave. The brave fellows on the cage knew they were
taking their lives in their hands, but they stood calmly waiting the
signal which should lower them into a possible death. While some
detail of the machinery was being adjusted, a fine stalwart young man,
some three-and-twenty years of age, forced his way through the crowd,
and, seizing one of the rescue-party, literally flung him out of the
cage to the pit-bank, and before the people could recover from their
astonishment the men were being lowered through the pathway of the
deep. Then they realized the meaning of the action. "He did it," said
the man who had been so summarily handled, and his voice shook with
emotion, "because I have a wife and bairns." The younger man was free
from responsibility; he could better afford the risk.
There is a very real sense in which the same consideration tells in the
warfare against sin and wrong. Some of us have less to risk in taking
up the challenge which the powers of death and hell throw down to every
true man. I write unto you, young men, because from your relationship
to circumstances you are more free to accept risks.
We often hear men lament, and it may be sincerely, that they cannot
afford to face the practical logic of their social, political, and
religious beliefs. They shrink from the consequences of the good fight
of faith. "Had I only myself to consider," says one, "how gladly would
I sacrifice myself to attack this wrong or that iniquity." We need
offer no opinion about the moral quality of such a position; enough to
say that it is idle to ignore, or even to underrate, the force of it.
There are circumstances which are too strong for most men after they
have put themselves in a given relation to circumstances.
Let me say a word here about circumstances, which will seem to
contradict some things you will find in this book, if you have interest
enough in it to read it through. A Glasgow minister some time ago made
a stand against a considerable minority in his church over some matter
that, as he said, involved a principle for which he should fight. It
cost him many of his more wealthy members and adherents. "Not many of
us," I said to him after, "have your courage to take so serious a
risk." "Nor should I have had it," he answered, "had I not means that
make me independent of my salary." It was a candid admission, and it
reaches a long way. The strength of this man was in his position quite
as much as in himself; and this is probably true of the great average
of us. Circumstances may mean possibilities, more often than
possibilities mean, or create, circumstances. What we can do is not
only determined by what we bring into the world, but by what we find
when we get here. Give, then, whatever courage is native to you its
full purchase, by whatever favour you have in circumstances. It is
here the young man has a great advantage; he is at an age when he can
afford risks; let him use it before his years are mortgaged by other
demands.
In public life he can base his efforts on the fact that there are
tremendous evils that need resistance, that there are sacred causes
which need assistance. He can afford, as never again, to close with
the truth that there is a corporate life, a public virtue, a humanity
of the body politic, with laws, responsibilities, and duties. In
social life he can refuse to bow to an arbitrary and often empty
fashion, or to immolate himself on the altar of mammon. He can be a
living protest against the tyranny and lust of money, which are eating
away the heart and destroying the soul of Christendom. He can stand
for the sane and rational ideas and habits of life, without which
society but personifies the unscrupulous and vulgar parvenu. And in
religion he can accept the teaching and obey the commands of Christ
without any overwhelming temptation to escape them behind some
exegetical device or the plea of expediency. He can devote the rose
bloom of his years to great principles, before he has had time to catch
the infection of a commonplace belief in God. He can be a soldier of
the Cross, and have himself placed in the forefront of the battle. He
can go down into the pit to rescue the perishing, and take daring,
awful risks for the Captain of his salvation and the race of which he
forms a part. I have written unto you, young men, because you can
afford to be strong.
A third, and for my present purpose a closing consideration in a young
man's strength is--Audacity. I might call it courage, but it is that
plus something else. It is courage carried to a point of daring that
amounts to what I have called it, audacity, or, as the world would call
it, foolhardiness. It is the merciful blindness which will not see
difficulties; it is the glorious recklessness which will not be stopped
by them. It is neither blindness nor recklessness; it is the baptism
with which a young man must be baptized whose life is penalized for the
Cross.
When a certain woman came into the presence of Jesus, and anointed Him
with an ointment very precious, He answered the selfish criticism of
some of the disciples with the unqualified remark that "long as His
Gospel should be preached, this that she had done would be told for a
memorial of her." To these disciples it is probable that the answer
sounded like a benediction on waste. Jesus saw in the deed an abandon
on the side of good, which on the side of evil makes evil so popular
and, as it seems at times, almost universal. No one but a woman,
unless it were a young man of true fibre, would have broken the vessel.
Your middle-aged or old man would have cautiously taken out the
stopper, that the costly unguent might have been expended economically,
even on the Saviour. But this woman, in her uncalculating devotion,
broke the vessel, that all its contents might issue forth in one
consecrated gift of love. And it was what this broken vase symbolized
that explains, or does something to explain, the unmeasured recognition
of the action.
This is the moral temper of the young man whom St. John describes as
strong. He does not fumble with the stopper in the vase-held forces of
good. "If you believe," he cries, "what Christ lived believing and
died believing, then break the vase, and do not keep as a private
possession powers that are meant for the world. Do not keep as a
personal luxury what is meant to be the family treasure." Such a young
man is the living exegesis of Christ's revolutionary word: "The kingdom
of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force."
When he is warned not to expect too much from human nature, not to put
too much trust in men, not to waste his strength in trying to remove
mountains, not to jeopardize his chances on the threshold of manhood in
trying to serve a world which, so far from thanking him, will very
effectually resent his most disinterested efforts on its behalf; when
he is reminded of some once aspirant who, young and confident as he,
set out to reform the world, and now cynically affirms that the only
wisdom is to let the world go to the devil in its own way--the young
man who is strong says: "I acknowledge your facts, such as they are,
but they are not facts for me. I, too, may be beaten in the right, but
I would rather be that a thousand times over than succeed in the wrong.
It is the temptation of the wicked one to conclude that, because
history is said to have repeated itself hitherto, it must needs repeat
itself for ever. I do not live on history; I live to make history. I
believe that I was sent into the world new from the fashioning hand of
the Creator, and that I have a new man's work to do. If my life of
faith on the Son of God seem recklessness to you, wanting in proportion
and eccentric, hold your opinions for all they are worth; but you shall
not influence me by your abandoned hopes, you shall not even chill me
with the east wind of your selfish ethics."
These are the young men we need to-day. Strong in hope, in position,
and in daring; strong in the strength which they find in their years,
and the strength they put into them.
And the Church has a right, society has a right, the nation has a right
to look to young men for a greater and a better future. We who are
older have a claim to look to you to confirm our faith in the survival
of Christianity as the living force of the future. We need fresh
leaders and men who incarnate new forces. We need, in fact, a certain
style of man--we never needed him more. We want young men who are
inspired by the truth that ideas are realities, and that scepticism
about high principles is the most destructive form of ignorance.
We want young men of vision in business. Not cranks, not men who are
responsible for their own failure in whatsoever their hand findeth to
do; but men who see that the institution of business is God's present
plan for distributing wealth, comfort, and intelligence. We want men
in law who shall realize that the function of the legal profession is
to build up justice and ensphere it in the will of the people. We want
men in politics who have a clear conception of what the kingdom of God
is, who recognize that the work of legislation and legislators is to
think and speak and act for the interests of that kingdom--in the
spirit and on the basis of Divine Fatherhood and human brotherhood.
And in the pulpit we want men who have in them the vision of an Isaiah,
a Paul, a John, and a Luther; men who shall make themselves felt as
perennial gifts to their day--to tell us what we can do and what we
ought to do, to lift up a voice for the eternally true, amid the
clamour of self-interest and cries of craven fear.
"The world needs nothing more; the great English-speaking race has no
need comparable with this need of men who can carry the spirit of
vision, which is really the power of achievement, into every phase of
our individual and collective life." [3]
Many of you represent great possibilities. You are, or you ought to
be, at the flow-tide of an untainted enthusiasm. Your life should be a
moral heat, which radiates in ever-enlarging circles of hope and
service. But there are fires which, once they are allowed to slow
down, can never be rekindled. There are large and generous beliefs at
twenty-five years of age which, unless we cultivate and keep ourselves
in the love of them, thin out like wasting magic, and no necromancy can
ever conjure them back again. You young men have potencies of hope and
enthusiasm which, if denied expression, strike inwardly and corrupt the
source out of which they came.
And now, I repeat, is the time when you can give a true man's best
hostages to the future. Now is the time to make the most of your
strategic places in life. Almost before you know it, your power to
determine many things will have merged into obligations that not one
man in fifty is free to disregard. While it is called your day--before
you are compassed behind and before with a commonplace that locks up so
many lives like a numbing fate--signalize your record by some bit of
heroism. If you would have posterity call you wise, seize your chance,
while you have it, to be God's fool. Find the faith that can help you
to play a man's part in the world; find in your faith the power which
can grasp you by your weakness and sin, and lift you into strength and
achievement. The Church needs you. For of all the institutions in
Christendom the Church is stifled with safety, propriety, and
conventional wisdom. It is the world which seems to monopolize the
sparkle, the daring, and the picturesque. Respect us, your seniors in
years, if we have done anything worthy in the past; but do not let it
influence you unduly if now we seem to you perhaps timid and
conservative. Time will bring most of you to the same place. But
if--which God forbid--you do little after, do at least something now to
redeem your career from impotence or from miserable aims that all end
in selfishness. Find, I say again, on the threshold of your years, the
power that can grasp you by your real requirement. Your first need is
not wisdom, but grace; it is not education, but regeneration; it is not
an ideal even, but a Saviour. Wisdom, education, and moral enthusiasms
are but the machinery of our uplifting, the driving-power is Life. You
know the Source of this power; you know the way to Him of Whom it is
written: "In Him was life; and the life was the light of men." Now is
your accepted time--
"Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute:
What you can do, or dream you can, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
Only engage, and then the mind grows heated;
Begin, and then the work will be completed."
[1] Robert Collyer.
[2] Dr. Maclaren.
[3] Dr. Lyman Abbot.
THE WORSHIP OF LUCK
"The lot is cast into the lap; but the whole disposing thereof is of
the Lord."--Proverbs xvi. 33.
III
THE WORSHIP OF LUCK
It is reported that Prince Bismarck once and again attributed some of
the most remarkable successes he had won in diplomacy to the
circumstance that he had used truth as one of his greatest resources.
Well aware of the fact that truth, for its own sake, was not the first
thing that was expected from him, the use of truth gave him the
tactical advantage of knowing how almost inevitably the opposite
diplomacy would interpret it. He told the truth in order that it might
be acted upon as something else. To adopt his own characteristic
phrase, he "used the truth." If half the truth, or an untruth, would
have served his purpose better, either most likely would have been
adopted and as readily used.