the first I will venture to speak about is the sin of Impurity. And
when I say I will venture to mention it, I quite realize that I am
taking some risk. He who would speak with authority and with wisdom on
this subject to a mixed audience, should possess a poet's gifts in the
art of putting things. But some one must speak, and to whom does the
duty fall, if not upon him whose calling it is to stand between the
quick and the dead? If the good work of the world must wait to be done
by perfect men, the lease of evil has a long while to run. It is, in
truth, a sad reflection which should stir up strong protest in every
earnest soul, that this sin--so deadly in its nature--should be
practically safe so far as the pulpit is concerned. In many cases this
is a result of sensitive timidity, or it may be an affectation of
refinement which is but veneered coarseness. If it be the first, it
should be respected but not yielded to; if it be the second, it should
receive no indulgence from us. The great Hebrew prophets, and the
Supreme Teacher Himself, did not surrender this stronghold of the soul
to the evil one from a shrinking which, if a man cannot conquer, he is
no preacher, and still less to a mental indolence that will not seek
out acceptable words through which to convey a warning. I speak as
unto wise men, and submit it to your judgment whether the preacher who
has to any extent the ear of young men can afford this eternal silence
concerning a subject that so vitally affects character, society, and
the race to which we belong.
There are many reasons why this sin of impurity seems to be on the
increase. The old order of town and country is fast breaking up, and
practically the whole migration and emigration is to the former.
Britain is fast becoming a series of congested centres of population.
One consequence is the increasing number of women and girls who find it
terribly hard to survive in the pitiless struggle to exist. And we
know what this means in so many cases. It is no secret how the scanty
earnings of a growing body of girls are eked out. This is not a matter
on which to dwell, and while it is serious enough to compel some very
searching thoughts, I refer to it in order to say how much I want to
see the day when every calling, profession, and trade in which a woman
can earn her bread and efficiently make her way, shall be open to her
equally with a man. The education of our girls should be the care of
parents and the State, every whit as much as the education of our lads.
There are positions in which I should not care to see women, and hence
I would work all the harder to bring about the economic conditions in
which sex, and the means of livelihood, can have some fitting
correspondence. This I say, that he who would exclude a woman because
of her sex from any place where she can turn to honest account her
capacities and industry, is the enemy of women. To the extent you
restrict what is called the sphere of a woman who is dependent upon her
own toil, you set up temptations which every man worthy the name of man
should sacrifice much to make impossible.
There is also the growing reluctance of young men, more especially in
the upper and middle classes, to undertake the responsibilities of
married life; so rarely now are they content to creep before they walk.
They must begin where their parents leave off in position, appearances,
and comforts. This often means to defer marriage until these can be
secured; but it does not always mean that these men keep a clean record
in the meanwhile. A sinister consideration which has much to answer
for in the existence of a class of women which, in turn, takes a
terrible revenge on its makers! Nor are parents always as free from
blame as they might be. I have known fathers and mothers who had the
reputation of being good men and women, sternly forbid their daughters
to engage themselves to young men who had most things to recommend
them, except too much means; and I have known them encourage the
advances of men whose past and present should have excluded them from
any decent home--only because these men had money.
My purpose, however, in these remarks is not to discuss the sources or
temptations to impurity, so much as to say a faithful word to young men
about the thing itself. Permit me to counsel you to face the truth and
not to fear it, that past a given age in your life and up to another
the cravings of our lower nature are tremendously strong. If you would
fight the good fight for a clean manhood, make no mistake about the
task that lies before you. These cravings implanted in a healthy man
or woman are in themselves beautiful and right. All turns upon the
control of them. If Nature could have let us off more easily the
conflict would have been less searching; but nothing weaker would have
secured the perpetuation of the race, and all that it involves in
struggle, anxiety, and self-sacrifice.
A young man came to me not long ago to ask for my signature to an
application he was making for a certain position. He told me in a few
words about the years he had given to the fitting of himself for the
place he was seeking, and how anxious he was to get it, because, as he
said, he wanted to be married and to make a home for himself. As he
talked to me there was something so clean that looked out of the eyes
of him, while at the same time he gave me the impression of so modest a
self-efficiency, that my entire sympathy and heartiest good wishes were
won for him. I mention this incident because I want to hint much that
I cannot put into words. As you sight the years of responsibility you
will, if you are wise, prepare yourselves by industry, thought, and
control, with a view to married life; for marriage, among other things,
is the natural, the honourable, and the divine provision for the
legitimate cravings of our nature. Whenever I hear a man speak
sneeringly of marriage, if I have to conclude that he says what he
feels, I may not think him a fool, but I strongly suspect that he is a
blackguard. "He who attacks marriage; he who by word or deed sets
himself to undermine this foundation of our moral society, must settle
the matter with me, and if I do not bring him to reason, then I have
nothing more to do with him." So wrote Goethe, and I echo his words in
your hearing.
Keep marriage before you as a sacred goal, and as an incentive to put
out the best there is in you in order to reach it. Do more than this;
resolve that when you enter this covenant you will carry into it as
clean a conscience about the past as you expect her to have who gives
her happiness into your keeping. One sex can substantiate no claim to
licence, or even indulgence in this matter, that can be morally denied
to the other. There are events in life that are worth more than it
costs to meet them well; marriage is pre-eminently one of them, and you
can, if you elect to do so, enter it unspotted men.
Get control of your imagination. Be lord over your thoughts. You
cannot, as an old Puritan writer says, "prevent the birds from flying
over your head, but you can prevent them making their nests in your
hair." Which means that while you may not be able to prevent given
thoughts from darting into the mind, you can forbid their finding a
home there. The danger is not in what comes, but in what is permitted
to stay. You have some sense of the training that is needed in certain
parts of your nature; and if you join that training to the help of God,
you can not only cast evil cravings out of your life, you can do
something that is harder still--you can keep them out. Be careful
about companionships. Have no friendship with him who boasts of his
"amours," the "affairs of the heart," that he can sustain at the same
time. Shun, as you would a pestilence, the man of unclean speech. Let
it be a truth with you which must not be questioned, that the truest
indication of nobility of character is reverence for womanhood. By the
sweet and holy thoughts of your mother, by your sacred love and wishes
for your sister, I would remind you of words in which the "wisdom of
many buried ages lingers": "Keep innocence, keep purity, and do the
thing which is right, so shalt thou be brought at the last to thine end
in peace." May you watch and pray, that you yield not to temptation.
May you watch and pray, that you enter not eternity with that stain
upon the soul which no tears of your own can ever wash away, or time
blot out of the memory.
Another way in which we may defile this temple of the body is by the
habit of Betting. We usually speak of "betting and gambling," but the
latter term includes and covers transactions so wide in extent, and
complex in their nature, as to make it impossible for me in this
address to do more than refer to them.
It must be understood in the few remarks I purpose to offer on this
subject, that I confine them to what I have called the habit of
betting. I shall not affirm that betting is necessarily a sin, but I
do state it as my conviction that its tendency and results are
practically always in that direction. William Cobbett--than whom no
man has ever written more sensibly to young men--says that "betting is
always criminal in itself, or in what it leads to. The root of it is
covetousness, a desire to take from others something for which you have
given, and intend to give, no equivalent." These statements may be
debated, but they appeal to me as essentially sound. A young man says:
"If I choose to risk a sum of money which I can afford to lose over a
bet with some one else who can afford to do the same, what has talk
about equivalent got to do with it? What, or where, is the wrong in
such a transaction?" This is a test question, and I am disposed to
answer it by saying that I do not think any young man who takes himself
seriously will urge it; and when put on a lower plane, the closer you
examine it the more rotten it is found to be. Is it wrong to cultivate
and indulge a habit that inevitably leads to bad results? And that is
what betting does, apologize for it as you may. Putting aside for the
moment any considerations about the money you can afford to lose, you
cannot afford, either in your own or in the interests of the community
of which you are a part, to take the moral risks that are involved in
betting. It is to insult our intelligence to deny that,
comprehensively speaking, the basis of betting is cupidity, and
cupidity of a particularly dangerous kind. There may be exceptions,
but they are scarcely worth mentioning; whatever may be the inception
of the habit of betting, it almost inevitably roots itself as greed;
and it is greed that consumes character like a furnace. It is the
black altar on which everything worth being must suffer immolation.
I was told some time ago of a place of worship which had a
billiard-table on its premises. Provided at the suggestion of the
minister with the best of intentions, it was soon turned into a means
of betting. The managers were obliged to take the matter into serious
consideration, and out of a regard to the susceptibilities of the young
men who used the table, they decided not to prohibit stakes upon a
game, but to insist that all winnings should be handed over to the
Hospital Fund. The room was soon comparatively deserted. The interest
was not billiards, so much as billiards plus the money won or lost in
betting on billiards.
When I am told that to stake a trifle upon a game is not for the sake
of winning money, so much as to give the due seasoning of excitement to
amusement, I have to remark that in a few cases this may be so, but it
is not the explanation of betting. Almost entirely it comes to mean
the desire to win money for which we have given, and intend to give, no
just equivalent. That almost deserted room on the church premises
tells the truth about the whole squalid business. Almost any kind of
amusement, not accompanied with betting, is, to an increasing number of
people, as insipid as water is to the palate of a brandy-drinker. In
the case of young men the habit does two things: it gives rise to false
and ruinous impressions, and it murders the soul. As touching the
former, it tempts a young man to think he can get a living, and a
flourishing one, without working for it--a greatly coveted science in
these days. It seems so much easier to put money in the pocket this
way, than by honest toil with head or hands, or both. The notorious
fact that betting strikes at the root-principle of worthy and strenuous
labour, is not the least of the vicious features of this many-sided
evil.
It also creates the most hopeless form of selfishness, and it grows by
what it feeds on. The avarice of betting destroys the best part of us.
As I have said, it kills the soul. Who, indeed, can call that which is
left in the confirmed gambler, a soul! It is rather, as one well
describes it, "a shrunken, useless organ, a noble capacity sentenced to
death by an ignoble passion, which droops as a withered hand by the
side, and cumbers Nature like a rotten branch."
To my thinking, it is a waste of time to ask, and it is an abuse of
time to discuss the question, wherein the wrong or evil of betting
consists. The practice has evil consequences, and evil consequences
only; and they necessarily become the more evil the more widely it is
diffused throughout society. What other proof of wrong does a
right-minded person ask? My estimate of the effects of betting is such
that I would neither employ nor trust any man who is addicted to it.
I hope and believe that I am talking to young men who have never
touched this dangerous thing. Continue to be wise. Others, it may be,
have ventured a little way. My message to you is, turn away from it,
another step may make retreat impossible. As you value the things that
rightly enter into life for attainment and possession--honest
enterprise, true success, worthy ambition, upright character, peace of
mind, and hopefulness of outlook--bind these words about your neck,
write them upon the table of your heart: "He that getteth riches, and
not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end
shall be a fool."
And once more, we may defile the temple of the body by Drunkenness. Or
if this term, and the state it connotes, be unduly aggressive, let me
say by an intemperate use of strong drink.
There are those who tell us that any use which passes it through the
lips is intemperate. If I offer a word of criticism on this position,
it is because I want the assent of your reason in the few things I have
to say about this part of the subject before us. The first condition
of permanent reform is, that it shall be founded on truth. The
peculiar temptation, it has been said, of the ardent reformer is to
exaggerate. Intense feeling is apt to build upon a half-truth--the
unsafest of all foundations. It is one thing to insist upon the evils
that are inseparable from an intemperate indulgence in strong drink, it
is quite another thing to assert that it is evil, and evil only, to
touch it at all. The latter order of polemic is always liable to bring
about a reaction which is terribly prejudicial to the good we desire to
accomplish.
I have no warrant to question a man's loyalty to the forward movements
of our time, who conscientiously for the sake of health, as he thinks,
or social arrangements, cannot recognize it as his duty to forswear
drink altogether. When a man claims his liberty to be the arbiter of
his habits in his home, or in society, for me to arrogate the right to
censure him may be impertinence; and, so far as I am concerned, to read
him out of Christian consistency may be to make myself, as St. James
puts it, a judge of evil thoughts. When a man has reached fifty years
of age, and has worked hard and lived sparingly, if he should consider
it advisable to relax somewhat the severities of earlier years, I have
nothing to say to him unless it be to remind him of the example he owes
to others, and of the need there always is to keep before us the
warning: "Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall."
I think it right to put this side of the question in its just evidence,
and having done so I willingly dismiss it with the remark that I am not
talking to middle-aged nor to old men. My appeal is to young men, and
I say to you without qualification, without a suspicion of mental
reservation, you do not need strong drink. There are conceivable
circumstances where it may be medically prescribed, but such
prescription from competent men has well-nigh reached the
vanishing-point. Near as any statement can get to its ultimate, I
affirm that you never have need of this drink. Keep it, then, out of
your blood in your threshold years, and you will have less or no
craving for it at all in those that are travelling your way. If you
should imagine that you inherit the craving, there is, at any rate, one
rampart which, if held, the craving cannot force--that is, total
abstinence from the thing craved. Range yourselves with the
abstainers, and be proud of your legion. It will be better for you in
every way, whether it be in physical health, mental efficiency, moral
force, or spiritual attainment. Settle it with yourselves, that there
are no conditions in your life which can be called normal, and few that
are abnormal, where you need the drink, and that to trifle with a thing
so unnecessary, and yet so dangerous, is moral idiocy.
I plead with you to take high ground in your conceptions of the duty
you owe to yourselves, and to your day and opportunities. As a nation
we have to conquer drunkenness, or it will go far, as it is doing now,
to conquer the nation. And we have a right to look to you young men to
lead us forth to this great victory. We have the right to ask you to
quit yourselves like men in mighty attack upon this devil's trinity of
impurity, gambling, and drunkenness. I have said little in this
address on what is called its distinctively religious side. The
religion is in the subject itself. Realize what it is that needs to be
done in yourselves and in the world around you, and I will trust
religion to take care of itself. Face this work of conquest first by
self-conquest, and you will find the need of a help not yourselves and
greater than yourselves. And the help will come: "I can do all
things," said the Apostle, "through Christ which strengtheneth me."
"I wish he would find the point again in this speaking man, and stick
to it with tenacity, with deadly energy, for there is need of him yet."
So wrote Thomas Carlyle of the preacher. "Could we but find the point
again--take the old spectacles off his nose, and looking up discover,
almost in contact with him, what the real Satanas, the soul-devouring,
world-devouring devils are." I have tried, however imperfectly, yet
faithfully, to talk to you about three of these "soul-devouring,
world-devouring devils." Give them no inch of foothold in your life,
and do a brother's part for others who, perhaps weaker than you, are
waging the same conflict in the interest of the things that are sacred,
and kingly, and divine. And when your brief mortal life is over you
shall have the noble satisfaction of knowing that you have done
something to make sure and real the power of that new day when our
"sons shall be as plants grown up in their youth, and our daughters
shall be as corner-stones, polished after the similitude of a palace."
TEMPTATION AND RESPONSIBILITY
"Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot
be tempted with evil, and He Himself tempteth no man; but each man is
tempted, when he is drawn away by his own lust, and enticed."--St.
James i. 13, 14.
V
TEMPTATION AND RESPONSIBILITY
St. James has been called the Saxon of the goodly company of the
Apostles. It is in many ways a happy description. We associate the
term with thought, rugged, perspicuous, easily grasped, and expressed
in the shortest and most readily understood words. St. Peter, in a
reference to the letters of his "beloved brother Paul," warns the
reader of these letters that there are things in them hard to be
understood, which the ignorant handle only to their own confusion. If
the former part of this warning were written about the Epistle General
of St. James it would be dismissed at once, as having neither point nor
application.
St. James does not think deeply, but he thinks clearly. He knows what
he wants to say, and he says it in language that he who runs may not
only read but understand. He touches most of the great themes that
engage the commanding mind of St. Paul, and settles them--for no other
word so well describes the process--in his own characteristic fashion.
In the passage before us he attacks the most difficult subject which
the mind of man can approach, and disposes of it to his own
satisfaction in some forty-two of the shortest and most decisive words
to be found in any speech or language.
It is well to come across a man like this occasionally; he may not be
profound, but he has abundance of common-sense. We see him just as God
made him--genuine, sincere, calm, and clear, touching with searching
words, if not quite the roots of things, yet, without a doubt, the
things themselves. He was the Apostle of that myriad-headed person
known as the "man on the streets." St. Paul, however, to the end of
his manifold and strenuous life, was always the student and the
theologian.
And in nothing does the difference between these two men better
illustrate itself than in their separate treatment of what is called
the Problem of Evil. St. Paul speaks of evil as the law in his nature,
as so entrenched there that the good he would do he does not, and the
evil he would not do he does. Unless we weigh these words carefully,
we overlook the significance, in the connection before us, of this term
law. It implies that evil is, somehow, a part of our being; a
something not our higher selves, and yet so deeply rooted in our
nature, that like an unsleeping sentinel must a man be on his guard
against it to the end of his mortal days. Were it not for this
Apostle's mighty faith in Him who can give us the victory through our
Lord Jesus Christ, we should say that he stands ever on the margin of
that dark river in whose mysterious deeps are possibilities of
wickedness and disaster, the sorrow of God, and the despair of man.
St. James would not have put himself in opposition to a single thing
that St. Paul wrote about the seat and nature of evil, but to him the
practical question was not its source but its control, and concerning
the latter he is sufficiently explicit: "Let no man say when he is
tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil,
neither tempteth He any man; but every man is tempted, when he is drawn
away of his own lust, and by his own lust permits himself to be
enticed." You will notice that in this passage the writer puts no
emphasis on outward inducements to sin; he says nothing, for example,
about a devil. I do not assume that he would have questioned for a
moment the traditional teaching about Satan. But he will allow no man
to transfer to circumstances, inheritances, temptation, or devil, a
responsibility which is his own. Comprehensively speaking, he declares
that if men do wrong it is because they want to do wrong, or because
they are not disposed to make a creditable fight against it. So far as
men know the right, the right they can do, if they will.
We can readily imagine how this Apostle would handle one of the modern
and enlightened critics, who appear to think they have but to refuse a
name in order to get rid of the thing which the name is held to
represent. "You tell us," he says to a man of this order, "that there
is no devil; that to think or talk of him in any personal sense, say in
the sense that Milton incarnates him in _Paradise Lost_, is mischievous
and absurd. That sounds formidable, but to what does it amount? The
word, or name, 'devil,' you, tell us, simply connotes a principle.
Very well, take the initial letter from the word, and what have you
left? You have 'evil,' and that is the only thing about which you and
I need concern ourselves. In what degree have you advanced 'liberal
thought,' as you choose to call it, by telling us there is no devil,
while yet there is so much that is devil-like in yourself and in us
all?"