Eett : as : a chr eatin sr sie ie : . ; : : Aes he Big eneicas mareat ieee aditaoeeaesc 1 faces ie f : gg vaiiewy Aik vate er E ieee Ay tees - np pocpotinn ciao t pal gre Sara Mcrioyt atts Fetes fy ; : : pie oe Saeooe ; irig adage Choke terres ue sees eee \ : ica Reh Me feeds wperasie sts aryaeenecees Of sat By mre nary Oe ey aes SEX Poteet ‘ . ees " we coe 2 hon ws eee nae : ages Dr Soe : Bee 3% alg ORME tee Se bi ae . a: = ~ . et art £0 oe ew nie ete ie: h rath Fie (eh ei te resins ar. oe a ty Svaise § ; 2S hain ein PME yo ele Pa eet ee ae ; sae yimeaey eee aah a he pte ohio ep ie a vem sage =< Saari Se Reseed Pere ee een, w PU ae eee ee Dy Fe PEN wack Paaa) es a air oie oP ere SoNrraney re repent 3 seen Ss da 7 ~ Ree oee Pipaaiee once rales : testis SESe StS ‘ RES iee a ciunrae perm 2 ftir Soe : Ge wot wee 3 wie SESS Peete oo 239 hase pao rosacea wh, seen peepee it eens ones yh os ipl eee dy Shea aes = +> 1 an . ee we cab Aas SE net Ba Se er ore pee Tate peter ite Ppt AA SS Slory lays ds ina dhah diet , . + PR - ~ K inp aepclae wren ah Set < ar sd eines ide M es 7] vi P s eBid F : Bap Nat Fa oe army Spe arenes 3 Se aati ra LE STS e-tetis : eine Re GR Fee SC sackny ak ee thats iy Coaead Sa Oe: a La heey: x oneal SETI ers ay way \ at uf Ly mt, q j bf enn fan ayZ ; LB) wey fe \ The Unfathomable Christ WORKS BY FREDERICK F. SHANNON The Economic Eden God’s Faith in M an The Breath in the Winds The Enchanted Universe The New Personality The Soul’s Atlas The Land of Beginning Again The Untathomable Christ And Other Sermons By FREDERICK F. SHANNON, D. D. Minister of Central Church, Chicago, Ill. Author of ‘*The Soul’s Atlas,’’ ‘‘The Economic Eden,’’ **God’s Faith in Man,’? ete. New Yor« CHICAGO Fleming H. Revell Company LoNDON AND EpDINBURGH Copyright, 1926, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY New York: 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. London: 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh: 99 George Street To MR. AND MRS. FREDERICK H. RAWSON Workers in the Kingdom of Humanity and Learners in the School of Christ Digitized by the Internet Archive In 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/unfathomablechrid0shan VII. Contents THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST ........ 11 Luke 8:25 INVISIBLE BILLS FOR INTANGIBLE Depts 30 Matthew 18:28 ASPECTS oF THE EpUCATIONAL IpEAL.. 51 Romans 7:25 THE SDIRRERENT: ROAD HUY oie ecto s 72 «© Matthew 2:12 Tue APPEAL OF THE CHRISTIAN MInN- ISTRY Me iy eee ete Ue dao ont ggey Monae 97 Colossians 4:17 HE GODOB SUCCESS Ui arene Siu seston 116 : Iuke 3:19, 20 Ghrisi’s NEW LAW ih dase ee 1320 John 13:34, 35 THE IDEALS OF BRITAIN AND AMERICA... 148 1 Chronicles 16: 31 ADVENTURES OF THE CHRISTIAN SOTTO tures ie teen oil ayeL unos trae 163 Hebrews 12:18, 22 ADVENTURES OF THE CHRISTIAN LF Od GL OD a LN A HN RS pa 179 Hebrews 12:18, 22 bth ey ihe may ; I THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST “And being afraid they marvelled, saying one to an- other, Who then is this, that He commandeth even the winds and the water, and they obey him?’—LuKE rue). UR text reminds us that in stress of circum- () stances the soul sometimes frames its mightiest questions. A moment before the disciples were panic-stricken, terribly frightened by the sudden storm on the lake. But while the storm was raging, the Master slept on, as if wind and wave had said to each other: ‘He will not mind our play- ing a bit while He takes His bodily rest. If we get too noisy, He will command us to be still.” So, per- haps the Master would have slept right on, had not the disciples become terror-smitten. Awakening Him, they ask: ‘Master, carest Thou not that we perish?” A great question that! It is dynamic, historic, even cosmic. It fits the tongue of all times and peoples. For as our earth-ship goes sailing through the lakes of space at terrific speed, is it not swept by storms of sin and waves of death? Does Anybody care? Or is the Eternal asleep? But if Somebody does care, is He able and willing to silence the planetary storm—sometime, somewhere? Verily, standing on tiptoe and even trembling with fear, the soul asks its biggest questions, 11 12 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST Moreover, in their hour of distress, did not the disciples ask one of the most profoundly interest- ing questions man ever heard? After our Lord had quieted the storm, they asked: ‘‘Who. then is this, that He commandeth even the winds and the water, and they obey Him?” That, surely, is one of the absolute questions of history. It is so compelling, so fascinating, so central that all ulti- mate thinking revolves about it. Men push it into the background, and lo! it suddenly turns up again in the foreground. Some time ago a scholar said that, up to the present, Christianity had weathered every storm of opposition—infidelity, materialism, science, philosophy, and what not. But now, he added, we are in the age of psychology and the question is: Will Christianity be able to weather psychology? Why, certainly! Psychology is the special field in which Christianity thrives. Its greatest victories have always been won there; they will continue to be won there; for Christian- ity is, transcendently, a matter of the soul. Yet, after all, true Christianity is Christ—the Eternal Christ in the souls of men. We are to study, then, the second of the two questions the disciples asked in their time of stress and fear. Such a considera- tion leads straight to the unfathomable Christ. I Consider Christ’s Lordship over the cosmic forces. For, after we have reduced Jesus to the “irreducible minimum,” there is still the very defi- nite impression that He is, in some unique fashion, Lord of the physical world. We meet this fact here in the first of the four “works” in the eighth THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 13 chapter of St. Luke. Nor is this an isolated case. We have it, also, in the feeding of the five thousand, in the turning of the water into wine, in the walk- ing on the sea. These are all set down as a part of His earthly career, always keeping this question on the tongue of the centuries: ‘Who then is this that even the winds and the water obey Him?” His- tory’s most interesting question, the whole of his- tory will be required to give it a complete answer. “But,’”’ says someone, “these are violations of, or contrary to, Nature.” The objection is, of course, familiar and unscientifically dogmatic. Occasion- ally a superficial preacher, trying to conceal his mental and spiritual nakedness, joins in the chorus of the groundlings by saying: ‘We now know that Jesus never performed the miracles attributed to Him.” To all such assertions, there are two answers. First: No one knows enough about Nature to positively assert that the “works” of Jesus violated any law whatsoever. What if He worked in har- mony with laws which may sometime be well under- stood? In any case, the philosophic scientist today shows how far we have journeyed from the obso- lete mechanistic conception of the universe held by such out-of-date thinkers as Haeckel and his school. Opening the latest, most authentic works on physi- cal science, one comes upon samples of the modern viewpoint. ‘The very dust,” says J. Arthur Thom- son, “has a complexity and activity heretofore un- imagined.” Again: ‘The new theory of the atom amounts almost to a new conception of the uni- verse.” Once again: “The great question today is: is there one primordial substance from which all the 14 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST varying forms of matter have been evolved?” Speaking of the eight planets composing our solar system, he says that they “are secondary bodies, but they are most important, because they are the only globes in which there can be life, as we know hfe.” I have italicized the last four words. They not only qualify the preceding statement, but they dis- close the attitude of the higher thinking practiced by scientific men who are also human beings. Such thinkers refuse to allow their knowledge of physi- cal facts so to victimize them that they become as fanatically dogmatic as any medievalist. Is it nota distinct gain that our most thorough-going scientific workers have learned that there are more things in heaven and earth than are revealed by retorts and test tubes? We know now that the cosmos is not a dead, lifeless uniformity; we think of it somewhat as a vast organism, a vitalized entity, alive from atom to angel. “The very dust’’—let me repeat the words again—“has a complexity and activity here- tofore unmagined.”’ Yet has not the dust always been complex, always active? If even the dust has managed to baffle us so long, spirit may continue to perplex us for sometime to come! Consequently, the old type of scientist who goes about screaming, “My laws! My laws!” is done for, as well as his parrots and hangers-on, whether clerical or lay. Yet we do not believe one whit less in the majesty of law; we simply believe vastly more in the possibility of human ignorance, and, therefore, our once loud-mouthed “ignorant liberal- isms” are now quite unappalling. Never was there THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 15 a time when men had the scientific right to believe in the absolute spirituality of the universe as today. We may not only affirm that there is one primordial substance from which all the varying forms of mat- ter have been evolved; but that, furthermore, with- in, behind, and beyond that one primordial sub- stance is the living God—even the God and Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. In final matters, ‘‘ask saints of Heaven,” said Chaucer, “for they can tell.”’ What if the saints have always lived where the scientists are at last slowly arriv- ing? Anyway, the only method of getting on speaking terms with Reality is to try it. This is the laboratory method applied in the realm of Chris- tian faith; and it never fails to work, if the worker himself is honest and faithful. Do you remember how Thoreau discovered how much pumpkin there was in the back yard? Why, he simply planted a pumpkin seed. In due season that seed, working with the soil, the atmosphere, the solar system, and the unfathomable mystery of its own being, hung fifty pounds of pumpkin over Thoreau’s back yard fence. In other words, the seed did what all the chemists in the world could not have done, without the seed. In quest of pumpkin, they might have analyzed the soil until doomsday and found none— without the seed! Well, the seed of Christian faith is more vital, more germinant, more creative in the soul than any pumpkin seed in the soil. Plant it, O man, and it will hang the fruits of the Spirit all over the garden fences of your being. Never again will you be guilty of the simpleton’s empty boast: “The miracles of Jesus are contrary to the laws of 16 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST Nature.” Why, the simpleton’s poor little spirit- ually denatured mind is simply functioning contrary to the wonder and beauty of being! Second: A further answer to this outworn method of approach is in the fact that Christ was such a Person that cosmic forces naturally obeyed Him. He exhibited “the consciousness of being an agent and playfellow of the original laws of the world.” Ultimately, the miracle is not in the thing, but the Thinker. ‘Obey the law of a force, and the force will obey you.” Is not man doing this on a tremendous scale today? Every human discovery begins just here. Man obeys the law of sight, and sight obeys him by enabling him to see great dis- | tances. ‘Then must there not be sight in the uni- verse? Man obeys the law of hearing, and hearing obeys him by enabling him to hear across vast spaces. Must there not be hearing ini the universe? Man obeys the law of thought, and thought obeys him by enriching and expanding his mental life. Must there not ‘be thought in the universe? The worlds are full of eyes, ears, and tongues. Perhaps the first radio-telephone message to Lon- don was sent by President Thayer of the American Telegraph and Telephone Company. Commercial code messages were sent before, but Mr. Thayer’s was the first distinctly transmitted radiophone con- versation across the sea. Now people heard him in London, but they had no equipment for telling him so. While they could receive, they could not re- spond. Would it be good sense to argue that the Englishmen’s lack of radio equipment nullified the fact that President Thayer actually talked across THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 17 the sea? Hardly! The rational conclusion would be something like this: ‘We heard Mr. Thayer’s voice distinctly over here in London—no doubt about it! We wanted to tell him so, but lacked the radio-telephony means. However, sometime we ex- pect to have the necessary equipment for making adequate response.’’ Every week I receive checks and messages from the radio congregation of Cen- tral Church. They hear me distinctly, but I cannot hear them. Yet does the fact that I cannot hear my great invisible congregation prove that they cannot hear me? Why, these checks, dollar bills, and letters are welcome evidence to the contrary! Now what I am coming at is this: The universe is fairly alive with facts and forces of which we are as yet densely ignorant. But as human person- ality learns how, by obeying and commanding these facts and forces, to manipulate them for beneficent ends, the world will go so far in advance of our present attainments as to make these seem like child’s play. The relation of human personality to the mysteries hidden away in the cosmic storehouse is as yet somewhat elementary, notwithstanding the progress man has made. I rarely step into a tele- phone booth, drop a nickle in the slot, and ask for Hyde Park 3036, that I am not reminded of this fact. For the universe is the garment of the living God, woven without seam from top to bottom. Somewhere within its ample folds are ready re- sponses to all feeling, finding fingers. Or, to return to the figure of the telephone, as man learns more perfectly to drop in the cash of thought and faith, the fact of communion, creation, and revelation will 2 18 ~-THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST come forth to meet and greet him with growing splendor and power. Why, therefore, being Who He was and is, should it be deemed incredible that wind and wave obeyed the voice of our Lord and Master? Are we so hard put to it to be atheists and skeptics that, in a system of teeming wonders, we must conclude that matter is superior to mind, that physical power is higher than Christly Personality? We shall probably go on forever asking, What manner of Man is this? Our answer will not be far wrong if we reply, “Just the kind of Man that it is perfectly natural for wind and wave to obey.” I] A second case shows Christ’s lordship over bodily disease. It is the woman afflicted by hemorrhage of long standing. Physicians of the time had failed to relieve her. Approaching Jesus from behind, she touched one of the four tassels of His garment and was immediately cured. Then she sought to steal away with her stolen benefit. But no! Ours is a supersensitive universe—so sensitive that the perfume of the rose troubles the star. Jesus asked, “Who is it that touched Me?” After all had denied touching Him, Peter said, “Master, the multitudes press Thee and crush Thee.”’ Yet how can masses of pressing, crushing matter short-circuit the heal- ing power of the self-conscious God? Impossible! And so Jesus said, ‘‘Some one did touch Me; for I perceived that power had gone forth from Me.” Then, assured that her identity was known, the THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 19 woman. ‘“‘came trembling’’—for her touch had com- municated Levitical uncleanness—and confessed that it was she who had touched Him. And Jesus said unto her, ‘Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace.” Now, what are the two facts here disclosed in Christ’s lordship over bodily disease? First, there is the manifestation of healing power on its physi- cal side. Perhaps this woman’s case resembles, somewhat, cases of healing not altogether unknown in our day. Is it akin to what we know as auto- suggestion or psycho-analysis? We need not be surprised or alarmed at what we are seeing and hearing. Did not the Master say, “Greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto the Fa- ther?” “But,” someone interposes, “so many of these modern operators do not even mention the name of the Master.” O, foolish ones and blind, do you not remember how our Master rebuked James and John, who wanted to call down fire and destroy the in- hospitable Samaritans? However, I am not trying to bring the Lord Christ down to the modern mind; I would like to see the modern mind brought up to the mind of Christ. Meanwhile, is it not well for us to consider that the Eternal Christ is in all mind, ancient, medieval, and modern, whether recognized or not? We must not conclude that Christ is not around simply because we are not aware of Him. One of the queerest of human aberrations, thought that brilliant Englishwoman, is this: When people learn how things are made, they immediately rush to the conclusion that God did not make them! 20 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST Thus, the fact that certain people see nothing more in Christ than just another saint or prophet is no reflection whatever upon Christ; it is a little side- light on certain people’s “insight.” Meantime, as Lowell suggested, the universe is fireproof (though not foolproof; according to Dr. Cadman) and we can afford to strike a match. The second fact here is our Lord’s manifestation of saving love. “Thy faith hath made thee whole” —that is the physical healing. ‘Go in peace’’—that is the spiritual healing. It is the first golden note of heavenly music heard only down the green paths of forgiveness. It is not altogether strange that in a world where flesh and blood relentlessly press and crush us, we are ofttimes stolidly indifferent to the greater, the spiritual work. Yet is it not unpardon- able for us to be content with the lesser when the greater is always close at hand, verifying one of oe abiding aspects of Christ’s Godhood? And what is that? Why, His power to forgive sins! ‘That is the point God in Christ is ever driv- ing home in his wonderful cures. For, is it not a fact that there is too much mired mind in an un- questionably attractive bodily setting? Cure all the physical diseases that flesh is heir to; perform all the brain operations which relieve criminals of the insane desire to debauch and slay. But think not that the root of human ills has thus been uncovered. Too many perfectly fit people, physically and men- tally, are at hand to gainsay any such conclusion. Therefore, we moderns need to recover the New Testament emphasis. Crippled bodies are dread- ful, but crippled souls are more dreadful still. Un- THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 21 developed minds are pathetic, but unchristianized hearts are tragic. We mortals do not have to be in the horrible condition of Lady Macbeth to vindicate the truth of the doctor’s words to her husband and partner in crime: “More needs she the divine than the physician.” “For all have sinned,” says that in- spired diagnostician of the root-wrongs of mankind, “and fall short of the glory of God.” Face to face with his sin, man’s one hope is in Christ Jesus; no power in Heaven or upon the earth can help here but the power of God in Christ. “TI believe that an acute consciousness of sin is more needed now than an enormous accession of conceit,” says Professor William Lyon Phelps. ‘“The old theologians, with all their dogmatism, got down to the bedrock of human nature; they believed in the reality of sin, and they did their utmost to convict their audiences; some hearers walked out of church realizing their shortcomings, and determined by the grace of God that something must be done to improve the situa- tion. And even now I believe that religious faith will elevate the average man more effectively than he can do it by talking encouragingly to himself. The latter method has all the disadvantage of try- ing to lift oneself by tugging at one’s boot straps.”’ So, we need both the human and the divine. Neglect of either impoverishes the central idea of Christianity; overemphasis of either neutralizes the efficiency of both; therefore, why not give both their rightful place in thought and practice? Christ Jesus is the God-Man; in Him humanity and Di- vinity are met together in absolute perfection. This is why Jesus is at once the riddle and the ruler of ee THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST the ages. Men cannot let Him go because He will not let men go. We travel down our long fool- trails, winding in and out, up and down, only to find Him standing over against us, not even so far as to be near, saying: ‘‘Come unto Me, all ye that labor, and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” The Being who can give rest—poise, perfect activity—to the soul, can surely breathe quietude into the heart of the storm and speak peace to the noise of the moaning wind. True, the sea is large, and our boats are small; but He made the sea, and the sea knows His voice. True, there are stars in the Milky Way a hundred thousand trillion miles beyond our sun; but “He made the stars also.” True, there is oppressive cold and dark in the vast, unlit gulfs of space; but both cold and dark are dispelled by His heavenly warmth and unearthly light. For there is no “broken stammer of the skies” in Christ’s speech; it is flawlessly round and full, star-clear and universe-deep, profound with its feeling of humanity and authentic with its con- sciousness of Godhood. ‘The Great Reconciler, He brings the discordant into unison; He interprets Moses and the Muses each to each, while all the reconciled join in the chant: “Ah! let the sweet birds of the Lord With earth’s waters make accord; Teach how the crucifix may be Carven from the laurel tree, Fruit of the Hesperides Burnish take on Eden trees, The Muses’ sacred grove be wet With the red dew of Olivet, And Sappho lay her burning brows In white Cecilia’s lap of snows!” THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 23 Ii] Consider, now, the third case, in which Christ demonstrates His lordship over mental disorder. Leprosy, blindness, paralysis, dumbness, deafness, fever—every kind of mortal malady yielded up its terror to Him. Braving the Inferno of disease, He bade its victims all despair abandon and enter forth- with into health and hope. As Orpheus descended into Hades and brought the serpent-bitten Eurydice back to the upper world, so Christ entered the dens of doom and rescued the victims of sin, disease, and death. What an etiologist He was! He knew the origin of disease—why the hand was shriveled, why the flesh was drawn, why the eye was dead, why the tongue was wordless. In our day, of course, physi- ology, biology, chemistry, philosophy, and psychol- ogy have enabled man marvelously to explore his own mysterious being. Yet doubt not, my friends, “within that complex nature of ours are oceans of mystery which Thought may indeed explore, but which she cannot fathom, paths which the vulture eye of Reason hath not seen, whose voices are the voices of unknown tongues answering each other through the mist.” Yet do they not all recognize and obey the voice of Christ? His creative Word shivers through their impenetrable gloom and lo! new worlds of light and joy spring into being. But, surely, that wild, unstrung, chaotic piece of human nature named the Gadarene demoniac is one of the most appalling specimens that ever challenged our Lord’s healing and expulsive power. Naked, houseless, friendless, terrible with almost superhu- 24 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST man strength and raging with homicidal mania, he lived in caves and tombs, far removed from human dwellings. For before the Christ of God came to earth, hospitals and asylums were almost unknown. Banished from society, this demoniac made the night hideous and the day itself a thing of dread. Here was a divided personality indeed, a subverted consciousness, an instance of lost self-identity. “The contradictory and often merely verbal ex- planations of the moderns,” says Giovanni Papini, “do not invalidate the fact that demoniacs, in many cases, are such in the real sense of the word.” Now, ours is the age of psychology; we know that in every human being lies a realm of unfathom- able mystery. We have learned to search out and correct countless ills, hiding away in secret lairs, that mind and flesh are heir to. Moreover, we are just on the edge of these occult realms; we shall steadily push our way beyond the twilight borders into the subtle interiors themselves. Yet, as I have just intimated, does not every new advance only disclose that in every human being is a world of in- exhaustible mystery? What terrors thunder, what splendors flash from within the unexplored depths of the soul! What heavens and what hells are even now forming within us! What abysses await the swinish human, what heights beckon to the climb- ing human! “There is infinitely more in a human consciousness,’ says Bergson, “than in a corre- sponding brain.”” We are all the time—the last one of us—leaning over the edge of the unfathomable. Unless man’s spiritual orbit is around Christ, the soul’s central sun, he flies off into the cold and dark- THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 25 ness of religious space—an eccentric spiritual comet, a veritable wanderer through the heavens of reality, at home in none. Candidly, are there not other and more modern demons than the ones which tormented the degraded Gadarene? It may be that our modern devils, after all, are true descendants of their long-vanished an- cestors. There is, for example, the demon of un- belief. What a sly, powerful demon he is! No philosophic chains can bind him, no scientific fetters can hold him in. Ina universe continuously speak- ing of the living God, the demon of unbelief drives his victim into tombs of despair. Consider, also, the demon named selfish ambition. How subtle he 1s, how voracious his appetite! Always agitated by “that last infirmity of noble minds,” the demon of ambition promises the soul what can never satisfy the soul; for— “It is by God decreed Fame shall not satisfy the highest need.” “Tt has been my lot to know,” says George John Romanes, “not a few of the famous men of our generation, and I have always observed that this is profoundly true...... As soon as one end of dis- tinction is reached, another is pined for. There is no finality to rest in, while disease and death are always standing in the background. Custom may even blind men to their misery so far as not to make them realize what is wanting; yet the want is there.’ And what shall we say of the demon of lying? At last he so completely possesses his dupe that truth itself becomes abnormal. Stripping 26 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST every vestige of veracity away, he drives the liar into barren deserts of falsehood. One of the worst demons, surely, that can overtake a mortal is to be- come so morally perverted as to deliberately believe a falsehood, opposing the truth with a kind of dev- ilish delight in loving and making a lie. Moreover, who shall expel the demon of jealousy from souls thus ruinously possessed? The green-eyed mon- ster, mocking the meat it feeds on, jealousy urges men forth into the waste places of hate, cutting themselves and others with stones as deadly as death. Evidently, then, we are not now dealing with “old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long’ ago.” We are living in the tragic present. We are here facing problems for whose solution auto-sugges- tion, psychology, and psycho-analysis are inade- quate. Raking among the ashes of a burnt-out per- sonality with the latest mental fads may disclose the magnificence of human nature even in its ruins; but to create a clean heart in the depth of moral squalor, and to renew a right spirit warped and withered by the practiced wrongs of a lifetime— why this, according to all whose opinion is worth while, requires the efficacy of Godhead in the Cross of Jesus Christ. Oh, give me a God Who can ex- pel the demons of unbelief, of lying, of selfish am- bition, of jealousy, and all that black confederacy of deviltry, to which these belong, and I will let the panderers to the groundlings pander on as to the Goodhood of Jesus! As for myself, I prefer to be humbly numbered with that company out of all THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 27 climes and peoples who know and believe “‘that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins.” Give little heed, therefore, to these shallowly clever preachers who, as they modestly confess, do not have their copy pigeon-holed by the city editor! By the way, when did the average editor become an average judge of Christian values? I may be wrong, but I tell you there appears to be something insinuatingly suspicious about this clerical craze to be classed among the heretics. And this, too, in face of the fact that there is a vast deal of wooden- mindedness among the so-called orthodox that makes Christianity a parody instead of a planet- shaking power. Nevertheless, when ministers are so “modern” that they are more eager to fit Jesus into contemporary mental molds—whether psycho- logic, philosophic, or theologic—than they are to proclaim Him as the God-Man no molds can con- tain, is there not such a loud-mouthed response on the part of the sheer humanitarians and ethical theorists and hotel cultusts as to make one question the wisdom of overmuch modernity in this matter? I respect both the humanists and the apostles of ethics; they are usually more attractive than dry- as-dust dogmatists. Yet, after appraising all their high qualities, they are hopelessly blind in one eye when reporting their vision and conception of Christ. However brilliant their intellects, they are astonishingly dull and commonplace in heart and soul. They seem to think that the universe is a big ice pond which can be easily negotiated with a fine pair of mental skates. But there are so many holes in the ice these skates either ignore or laugh at! { i 28 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST Sin, guilt, judgment, moral accountability, the re- actions of an anodyned conscience suddenly come to life, the unplumbed depths of the soul all alive with the deeds of undying yesterdays—these and other spiritual facts as old as A%schylus and as modern as Shakespeare, as ancient as Babylon and as new as New York, are conveniently brushed aside to make way for up-to-date propositions. Well, there is nothing essentially new in this at- titude, my friends. Only the outward guise has changed. Enterprising “modern men” were all astir in Vesuvian Pompeii twenty centuries ago, as they were in Egyptian Luxor ten centuries before that. The yellow edition of the morning Tribune and the pink edition of the Evening Journal, now being constantly dug out of the earth in the form of accusing bricks, contain significant reports of men who, knowing God, glorified Him not as such, but gave themselves up to unnatural and vile passions which self-respecting and unfallen beasts of the field never indulge. And of all men, for a minister to give the “modern mind” the impression that all it needs is just a little more coaching in the elements of humanism, ethics, and psychology! Why, he is too superficial to be aware of his own shallowness, too publicity-poisoned to feel his own shame, too far gone from original righteousness to be rescued by any power save the redemptive passion of God in Christ Jesus! Here is a prayer modern men might pray with profit: From dry-as-dust ortho- doxy and bright-minded heterodoxy, Good Lord, deliver us! Furthermore, about the cheapest specimen of re- THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 29 ligious imbecility in our day is this: The preacher who thinks that all that is wrong with the world is ignorance, poverty, political and social maladjust- ments. We know that these are terrible enough, and no man having either common or moral sense will speak lightly of these things, so flagrantly un- just and inhumanly wrong are they! Yet, in God’s name, do not the wickedly brilliant men, the richly selfish women, and the hopelessly rotten children of luxury all about us, forever discredit the modern delusion that mere distribution of property and whetting of intellectual faculties will correct the ills of mankind? What we all need—rich and poor, educated and ignorant, employer and employe, leaders and followers—is a new heart, a new soul, a new mind—even the mind which was and is in Christ Jesus, ‘“Who, existing in the form of God, counted not the being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled Himself, becoming obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the cross.” Here is, indeed, the heavenly serum that can cure our modern world-demoniac, destroying the bacil- lus of sin, and causing this fierce twentieth century monster to forsake his ferocity as he goes, trans- formed and in his right mind, about the world-task of Jesus and the men and women He has Christed through and through. II INVISIBLE BILLS FOR INTANGIBLE DEBIS * “Pay what thou owest.’—Matruew 18: 28. P SHE Master’s ability to make the material dis- close the spiritual is inexhaustibly full and fresh. He talks of sheep, and instantly the shepherd care of God is exposed. He talks of money, and the value of money is quickly sub- merged in the value of man. He talks of a build- ing, and we are soon thinking of the “house not made with hands.” He talks of lilies, and we con- sider not only how they grow, but how worlds grow also. He talks of sparrows, and never again can men forget that the seemingly insignificant is big with the beauty of the divine. He talks of bread, and, half unconsciously, our souls begin to feed upon the Bread of Life. Thus, in the parable from which our text is taken, Jesus makes a material: debt declare those infinite spiritual obligations everywhere imposed upon hu- man beings. A man, says the Master, owed his lord the sum of ten million dollars. The man, unable to pay and pleading for mercy, finds his vast indebt- edness graciously cancelled. But a fellow-servant owes this same man the paltry sum of seventeen ie Peace at Union Services of Methodist and Presbyterian Churches, Chazy, New York, August 24, 1924. 30 INVISIBLE BILLS 31 dollars. Quickly forgetting how generously he has been treated by his lord, the rascally ingrate seizes his own debtor by the throat, saying, “Pay what thou owest.” Thence the Master immediately passes from the material to the spiritual, from the temporal to the eternal. So does He present, to each of us, our invisible bills for intangible debts. Likewise, I wish to seize you, not by the throat— although I like the thrill of spiritual energy the figure suggests—but by the intellect, the will, the imagination, the conscience, and make you aware of some of these tremendous debts which cannot be paid by any coin of the realm, but only through the gold minted in the Kingdom of God. I You owe a debt of Christian Faith. We are all, both individuals and nations, talking lustily about our rights. Let me remind you of one right you have no right to: You have no right to go through this world without Christian faith—faith in God, faith in man, faith in yourself. Now, why do I speak thus? Because, to make the journey across the years without faith, is too lonely a task for any mortal to impose upon him- self. Such a mood brings him stark up against a spiritually meaningless universe. For sheer pathos that deepens into tragedy, Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach reports the soul bereaved of faith in lines which long ago became a classic of spiritual despair. He beholds a calm sea, a full tide, a fair moon ly- ing upon the straits. On the French coast, the gleaming light comes and goes, while out in the 32 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST tranquil bay the cliffs of England stand, glimmer- ing and vast. It was such a scene, Arnold thinks, as challenged Sophocles on the Agean centuries be- fore, bringing “into his mind the turbid ebb and flow of human misery.” Then, sings he: “The sea of faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the edges drear And naked shingles of the world.” As a matter of fact, the great classicist and noble soul is simply voicing his own mental and spiritual condition at a given period. Yet Arnold also had his calm, clear, triumphant hours, when his bugle blasts of moral and religious challenge sound deep and golden. Witness Morality, The Buried Life, and Rugby Chapel. But how can we ever thank him enough for his royal figure, ‘“The sea of faith!” For faith is like a vast, invisible sea, forever full, forever flowing. All any mortal has to do is to become a spiritual plumber, lay his spiritual pipes, tap the infinite, and turn on the faucet. Then a pressure, as real as the Atlantic behind the water pouring through every main, comes throbbing and beating into our spiritual pulses, cleansing our out- looks and aspirations, even as the roots of our deeper selves are watered by the eternal tides of God. The other day I went with some friends to that wonderful Cold Spring, which is one of the many INVISIBLE BILLS 33 glories of Heart’s Delight Farm. There it is, far back from the highway, very close, indeed, to the edge of the wilderness itself. What romance gathers about that secluded spring! It is ages and ages old. Think of the wild animals, before civili- zation began, gathering about that cool, liquid splendor and slaking their thirst! Think of the In- dians, wild and nimble as the deer, who also knew its haunting draughts, coming at morning, midday, and midnight to quench their thirst!) Think of the long-vanished settlers and pioneers—your ancestral great-grandfathers—who likewise knelt, drank, and went on refreshed about their long, lonely tasks! Long ago their bodies became level with the dust of these mountains, and even their children’s children have gone the mysterious way of the unreturning. And yet Cold Spring flows coolly on! Why, if its waters were kissed by the lips of ice, they would be but slightly cooler and no purer at all. And yet, ‘Cold Spring—calm, deep, sweet, refreshing — calmly waits to quench all the fires of thirst, raging in animals and humans that set their yearning lips to its bubbling coolness. Coming in out of the heat and strife of the struggle for existence, all alike have their thirstiness kissed away by the generous waters of haunting, century-old Cold Spring. So, likewise, “the sea of faith’ is inexhaustibly full. The Christ of God has His own Cold Spring for every mortal. “Whosoever shall drink of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall become in him a well of water springing up into eternal life.’ We neglect this water, at our peril; we drink it to our §3 34 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST utmost satisfaction. All other drinks spoil upon the taste—the liquor of lust, the champagne of wan- tonness, the wine of pleasure, the beaker of selfish- ness. One morning at the close of a service a cul- tured, beautiful woman came to the minister and thanked him for his message. Her face was like an April shower, and, therefore, her words were sweetly watered with tears. “You have put a soul into life,” she said. Ah, what a sermon! I shall remember it long after most sermons are forgotten. Putting a soul into life—that is what Christian faith does. And is not this one of the profoundest needs we humans have? So much of life seems to be utterly soulless. The whence and the whither of things—the whys and the wherefores of being! Do not these problems sometimes threaten to turn our years into a waterless, songless waste stretching be- tween the two eternities? And then—ah, then—if happily we know the sure, silent, sylvan paths that lead straight to the ever-flowing wells of God, we kneel and find that upgushing spring which “puts a soul into life.” The object of religion, according to Arnold, is conduct, and “conduct is three-fourths of life.” Moreover, he says, “the true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.’ But what or who, let me ask, is to touch, and not merely touch, but discipline emotion? Can- didly, has not our Christian faith the deepest and most disciplinary spring of emotion yet uncovered to men? ‘That spring is not a theory, nor a philos- ophy, nor a definition, nor a theology; it is Jesus the Christ—the very roots of the Godhead thrust _ INVISIBLE BILLS 35 through and hanging over the walls of matter, so that mind, humanized, in its simplest and sublimest manifestations, may be grafted into the True Vine of God, producing spiritual fruits so rich, varied, and beautiful that new clusters of Christian love- liness continuously appear in the Gardens of Time. The Christian faith does not ask you to feed upon a creed, but upon the Eternal Christ. Not often did Jesus ask the disciples to define Him; very often did He yearningly plead with them to obey, experience, and love Him. Definitions may or may not lead us into the psychological complex of verbal logomachy; but love and duty and goodwill lead us into the soul of That which the litanies and ora- torios strive in vain to tell. Words are too empty to express the full grandeur of Morality; but, after all, is not Browning grandly right? “Morality to the uttermost Supreme in Christ, as we all confess, Why need we prove, would avail no jot To make Him God, if God He were not? Where is the point where Himself lays stress? Does the precept run, “Believe in good, _ In justice, truth, now understood For the first time ?’—or, ‘Believe in Me, Who lived and died, yet essentially Am Lord of Life?” Down the road this morning—somewhere be- tween Lake Champlain and these wheat fields of bil- lowing gold—I met a boy with a bucket of milk. I soon got into a conversation with him—so irresist- ible was he, with his wholesome ways and morning face. I asked him what he was going to do with his 36 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST milk. Thinking, perhaps, that he had fallen in with a dunce, he said: “I’m going to drink it.” Now, suppose I had told him, before he drank his milk, that he must commit to memory this definition, else he could not adequately and philosophically enjoy the bovine constituents composing the contents of his pail! “Milk: A white or yellowish fluid se- creted by the mammary glands of female mammals for the nourishment of their young, consisting of minute globules of fat suspended in a solution chiefly of casein and other proteid matters, milk sugar and inorganic salts.” Well, I didn’t read the boy that definition; there was no ambulance near, and I fear he might not have survived the shock! But I did give him a coin and asked what he was going to do with it. “Why,” said he, “I’m going to buy candy, of course!’ Certainly! What a dull, stupid preacher- man I was to ask such a foolish question! Coins, candy, and boys gravitate toward each other, and then swiftly part, with a sureness quite their own. Now, there is a divine candy which may be had for the coin of faith. But you must mint the coin your- self, if you would greatly enjoy the fresh, new- made things of God. The old mintings—the other mintings—are good; but, strangely wise, they are not good enough for you, or me, or any other mor- tal. This is why I say you owe the immortal debt of Christian faith. It is individual, personal, in- volving you in social, commercial, national, and re- ligious obligations which may not be ignored. Therefore, by the love of Christ, I send you this in- INVISIBLE BILLS 37 visible bill for your intangible debt of Christian faith. “Pay what thou owest.” II You owe a debt, also, of Christian Vision. I first wrote that “world vision’; but the original adjective, I am convinced, is deeper, more vital, more inclusive. The world, Wordsworth thought, is too much with us; it is certainly with us today, so far as time and distance are concerned, on a scale the seer little dreamed of. I was in San Fran- cisco when Maughan made his new world-record trip from coast to coast. In considerably less than twenty-four hours he flew from the Atlantic to the Pacific, dropping out of the air at nightfall into the City by the Golden Gate like some strange, space- dazzled bird from the star-spangled heavens. Since then, Maughan has ridden his mechanical Pegasus to the home of his venerable father, who celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his settling somewhere in Utah. Think of it! Only fifty years ago the elder Maughan drove westward with his ox-cart, building his crude home in the wilderness. Long, lonely months did he trudge through the barren wastes before reaching his haven. And now the son, borne upon whizzing wings of wonder and traveling twice as far, starts from New York in the morning and dines with his pioneering father on the same day. If the father awoke the wolves as he jogged along with his ox-team, I think the son must have excited the angels as he went wheel- ing under their starlit floor with his airplane! 38 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST Thus, concretely, are we made aware of the mov- ing in of the ends of the earth upon each other. Consequently, Asia is now much closer to America than was Washington to the Boston of our fore- fathers. Surveying the universe itself, we are amazed at its vastnesses even as we are overwhelmed by its smallnesses. The sun, as compared with the earth, is of gigantic proportions; and yet the sun is small in the presence of millions of worlds com- posing our own and other universes. The shores of space sparkle with stars as countless as the shores of the Atlantic sparkle with sands on a brilliant day in June. And now, also, to bigness men are compelled to annex the awe and mystery of small- ness. For is not the atom as bewildering as the constellation? Growing up before our eyes, says Sir Oliver Lodge, is an atomic astronomy, causing thinkers to wonder whether there is any limit to littleness any more than there is to bigness. And yet, in the presence of the infinitely large and the infinitely small, Christian vision may stand unabashed. ‘The scholar reminds us that Mount Everest is certain to be conquered because man con- tinues to grow while the mountain does not. The fact is, the insignificant ant, on any worthy scale of values, is greater than the mountain; for the ant is alive with intelligence, while the mountain is dead with unfeeling inertness. So man, in the illimitable systems of matter, is profoundly signifi- cant in that he is the center of thought, will, faith, and vision. Consider his lowly physical beginnings. Like every bodily organism, man begins his aston- ishing journey through the cosmos as a microscopic INVISIBLE BILLS | 39 speck of matter, the physical basis of life. Gazing upon that speck of germ plasm, in its awful glory, the most powerful microscope cannot disclose whether it will turn out to be a Plato or a pig, a Shakespeare or a shark, a Beethoven or a baboon. But never fear! What the microscope searches for in vain, the living God has already definitely pre- determined; and, therefore, the universe could wreck itself more certainly than that bit of matter, teeming with intelligent purpose, could fail of be- coming the philosopher, the poet, or the creator of harmonies. Now, this Power has been given the name of Fatherhood. Luminous souls are gripped and steadied by the Christlikeness of the Eternal every- where thinking and working and loving amid His worlds. Is it not unthinkable that this mighty scheme of things could have moved blindly up out of the firemist to its present awe-inspiring propor- tions? Moreover, it is quite as unthinkable that, having come so far, the Power not ourselves mak- ing for righteousness will not carry everlastingly on until He, Himself, is conscious that the whole is tuned to His own conception of completeness. What that conception is, I think all the high- powered imaginations functioning in the fields of time, if they could become tangible, stretched out and laid end to end, would not be long enough to measure more than a small proportion of its grandeur. That is why the Master says, caught as we are within our far-stretching wildernesses of difficulty, ‘““Have faith in God.” ‘Think you that our Lord was unaware of the hells of sin raging 40 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST throughout the worlds and the zons? Think you that death slipped up on Him and waylaid the Lord of Glory? ‘No man,” said He, “taketh My life from Me. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.’”’ He exhibited that power here on the fields of history. More amazing still, He has thrust His death-defying, life-giving consciousness into the hearts of millions. And this, I think, is the most satisfying treatise on immor- tality men can have. I like to read Socrates and Aurelius and Kant. They stir up a healthy verbal dust that quite adequately envelopes infidels and atheists, mercifully hiding them from our intellectual gaze. But after all the arguments are in, I think this is the best one, “I know Him Whom I have believed.” Is it not just the apostolic rendering of the Master’s own words, ‘“This is life eternal, that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Him Whom Thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.” Thus, I affirm, Christian vision is for use here and now. It is not a talent we are to lazily lay away in a moth-eaten, creedal napkin in the hope of finding it again somewhere in distant realms. By paying our debt of Christian vision, which is deeper and more redemptive than our so-called world vision, we receive authority to do business with Heaven while we are on the way. Last night I read some lines that fairly haunted me with their beauty. ‘This morning, down in the clover fields, I read them again. I think they have a freshness that matched the dewdrops glistening on the pink domes of the clover. Moreover, I picked up these little wild flowers, almost leaning against each other, INVISIBLE BILLS 41 each having a different shape and color, reminding one of Keats’ exclamation, “How beautiful are the retired flowers!’ I have placed them here amid the fragrance of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. The morning, the flowers, and the poem belong in the same bundle of beauty. “The streets of heaven, I’ve been told, Are paved with bricks of solid gold; The gates are all of precious stone, And poverty’s a thing unknown; No thunder-showers enter there, For every day is dazzling fair. Yet, strangely, I have never heard A flower mentioned, or a bird; And I’m quite sure that I would tire Of playing on a golden lyre. So, if there’s room, along the walks I think [ll plant some hollyhocks ; And soon as they begin to grow I’ll tend them with a golden hoe. If Gabriel should pass my way, I’m certain he’d sit down and stay.” Is not Christian vision, a pressing, invisible bill for one of our vast, intangible debts? ‘Pay what thou owest.” Iil Another debt you owe is fidelity to intelligent Christian Conviction. In a world like ours, the necessity of honorable compromise is everywhere 42 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST apparent. Woodrow Wilson was both a writer and maker of history. “In no case,’ says Wilson the historian, “can you do more than convey an im- pression, so various and complex is the matter.’ Thus, no day dawns for any of us in which prob- lems do not arise that ask for wise compromise. Without it, we could scarcely live in home, shop, office, or school room, so various and complex are the matters constantly demanding our attention. Hence that noble plea of Voltaire for heroic toler- ance, “I wholly disagree with what you say; but I would defend to the death your right to say it.” Yet there is a decisive limit to the spirit of com- promise. ‘The hour comes when every soul must take its stand for the right as God gives each soul to see the right. And is not that a holy, solemn hour indeed? Its loneliness would be unendurable were it not for the living God at the center of such a tremendous, white-hot experience, to guide and sustain. But the experience is worth all that it costs. ‘Talk about the revelation of God in star or atom or mountain or sea! I tell you such revela- tions are tame when studied in the light of those souls pressed back against an invisible wall of flam- ing truth and crying, “Here I stand. God helping me, I can do no other!’ Then all that Nature tried to say and could not, becomes vocal with fused conviction and intelligence; out of the core of reality they burn a splendor across the ages; and history is never quite the same after such souls have come and spoken their word and done their deed and grandly returned into That out of which high deeds and true words have their birth. INVISIBLE BILLS Pine’ k Consider Jesus before and during His so-called trial. We see Him, first, in the garden over the Kidron with His disciples. Thither come the sol- diers and Judas, from chief priests and Pharisees, to arrest Him. They are armed against the Un- armed; they carry lanterns and torches to seek the Light of the World. Asked whom they sought, they replied, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Just here is recorded one of the most amazing outbursts of pure moral majesty the world can ever know. ‘‘When therefore He said unto them, I am He, they went backward and fell to the ground.’ If we are seriously interested in the higher kinds of power released within the worlds, I think we may set this down as supreme. How puny, in the last analysis, does crude physical might appear in the presence of pure moral heat and spiritual flame! Even that horrible midnight among the olive trees becomes luminous for an instant with a splendor surpassing the light of rising and setting suns. Oh, I wonder, what that Power was which made those misguided men tremble and quail and falter and fall? I think it was none other than the Power that gives the morning stars their song; that lends the seas their tides; that imparts to mountains their majesty; that colors the Spring with green and the winter with white; that takes a drop of water— the very same kind of water you find in sea and rain and. dew—sets it in emotional relations to the human soul, and lo! that drop of water becomes a tear, the wordless language of the heart when the tongue is bereft of the power of speech! Moreover, I think it is the selfsame Power that 44 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST smote Abraham with his faith; that kindled Moses with his morality; that enraptured Isaiah with his vision; that enchanted David with his psalmody; that sublimed John with his Gospel; that greatened Paul with his ministry. Yea, I think it is the very Power that sweetened the heart of Homer, so that he sang like a human nightingale in the early morn- ing of the world; the Power that fit Dante’s rhythmic feet into their flame-shot path; the Power that lifted great Shakespeare to the high hills of life, that he might see and tell the vast human dramas being enacted down in the valleys thereof; the Power that gave Handel his harmonies, and Rodin his curves, and Newton his laws, and Rem- brandt his colors; the Power that fired the soul of Luther and Knox and Wesley and Beecher and Liddon; the Power that is moving this moment upon the face of our international deep to shape our outgrown nationalisms into a world-order of justice and truth, in which militarists and war shall have no place under the whole heaven. Now, why have I thus dwelt upon this unique Power manifested in the Garden of Gethsemane? There is a valid reason for it, believe me, and here it is: “Jesus therefore, knowing all the things that were coming upon Him, went forth.’ Up to this moment, His time had not yet come. But now His hour is striking from the clock of eternity. He must go forth from the shadow of the trees and face the darker shadows over the souls of men. And so, knowing all the things that were coming upon him,—the laughter, the coarseness, the brutal- ity, the spitting, the injustice, the ignominy, the INVISIBLE BILLS 45 suffering and death; knowing, also, that third-day dawn of resurrection and glory, flinging out a sal- vation for men that angels desire to look into— knowing all things that were coming upon Him, when He said unto them, I am He, they went back- ward and fell to the ground! Here, then, is the result of fidelity to intelligent Christian conviction in its original and transcendent aspects. But it does not stop there. Wherever, in Church or State, men and women practice a similar spirit, are they not paying down, in spiritual and intellectual cash, one of our huge invisible bills for great intangible debts? Mrs. J. Borden Harriman, in her brilliant book, tells of an incident at one of the City Hall hearings in New York. Mother Jones had said something complimentary to John D. Rockefeller, Jr. “I’m afraid you flatter me, Mother Jones,’ the rich man replied. “I don’t throw bouquets,” she retorted, “I am more used to throwing bricks.” Well, in a world like ours, I think both bricks and bouquets have their place! On another occasion, Mother Jones said to Mrs. Harriman: “You can’t do anything worth while till you get over minding what people say.” Mrs. Harriman confesses, inasmuch as minding what people say had always been one of her besetting sins, her indebtedness to the plain-speaking woman. And is not “minding what people say” one of the sneaking, besetting sins of most of us? Perchance some of us carry the spirit of compromise so far that we smother the feeble fires of conviction before they have the opportunity of thoroughly catching and burning up the dross and stubble piled high 46 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST upon the grates of our. smooth, insipid conven- tionalisms. Fidelity to intelligent Christian convic- tion is one of your unpaid debts. ‘Pay what thou owest.” For, in paying off such debts, the morally incomprehensible becomes strangely clear. Thus is there reality as well as poetry in the words: “And fierce though the fiends may fight, And long though the angels hide, I know that Truth and Right Have the universe on their side.” IV Most of all, perhaps, you owe a debt of Christian Forgiveness. Our study began in the scriptures of forgiveness, and, quite properly, it must end there. Are we not frequently indebted to Peter for start- ing something nobly worth while? He may not have the slightest idea as to where he will fetch up on the road of discussion; nevertheless, he makes such amazing starts that the finish, under the Master’s guidance, is all that could be desired. When Peter set the limit of forgiveness at seven times, he outdistanced the rabbinical code more than half; for the rabbis thought asking forgiveness three times was enough. As we know, the Master pitches the scale, in His picturesque way, to the mathematics of infinity. “TI say not unto thee, Until seven times; but, Until seventy times seven.” ‘Now, why do mortals owe this momentous debt of forgiveness? First of all, to help God. God Himself cannot forgive the unforgiving. The heart that refuses hospitality to the very soul of forgive- ness ties the hands of Omnipotence. For at this INVISIBLE BILLS 47 point manhood moves up into a realm merging into the moral genius of Godhood. God can compel all physical forces and energies to do His bidding; but can God compel man—man being what he is—to do His will, without destroying the ethical meaning of His Fatherhood and fatally wounding, also, the sense of human sonship? I do not see how He can. If man were a thing, belonging solely to the cate- gory of stars and plants and beasts, the problem would be comparatively simple. But endowed as he is with mind, man asserts a kind of moral sover- eignty over the Infinite, even tragically and patheti- cally limiting the Illimitable. What a universe of spiritual majesty and mystery is disclosed in the petition of the prayer, “Our Father, forgive us our debts, even as we have forgiven our debtors!” Until the spirit of forgiveness is actively at work in the heart—however wondrously the grace of God in Christ may create and direct it—I repeat: God Himself is morally handicapped in completing the work of forgiveness—one of the grandest and most difficult of all moral achievements. The principle involved is familiar enough in our human world. For example: You are a father; you desire the education of your son; you send him to college. But without your son’s enthusiastic cooperation, neither you nor his instructors nor all the libraries and laboratories can make him a scholar. You provide the conditions, and he must do the rest. So, somewhat, is it with our Heavenly Father. He not only creates the conditions and atmosphere of forgiveness; He also generates the spiritual power that makes it possible. Yet I must 48 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST tap the power, turn it on, by my own faith and initiative, thus helping God in His redemptive won- ders. Second: We owe the debt of forgiveness to help our own selves. Call it enlightened self-interest, spiritual selfishness, if you choose; but no mortal can afford, in defense of his own soul, to withhold the spirit of forgiveness. Out of their own experi- ence, ministers can tell you, when at close and solemn grips with this matter, of being brought very near to fires more terrible than medieval brim- stone. Witnessing the lurid flames of hate destroy- ing the innermost foundations of justice and hu- manity in a soul, their final plea has been: “For your own sake, if not for God’s or man’s, cast off this venomous snake of hatred coiled about the vitals of your being!’ And sometimes, thank God, this plea has proven effectual, when all others seemed of no avail. Third: We owe the debt of forgiveness to help other selves. The forgiving heart moves down the ways of men like a clean, bracing wind singing across the world. Sometimes we enter a close-shut room; the air is stifling; we feel as if we would smother. ‘Then we run up the blinds, open the windows and doors, and lo! the morning and the sea and the dews and the songs of birds all start for that stuffy room on their invisible tides of oxygen! Nor is it otherwise when a cool, deep, radiant, good-willed personality moves royally about the house of living men. Feeling his Christian vitality, they, too, begin to religiously pulse and quiver and glow. ‘What is it?’ men ask, as they INVISIBLE BILLS 49 feel his presence. There may be many answers— moral, philosophical, psychological, theological, and otherwise. But the best answer, I think, is this: The Christ of God, in the Holy Spirit, has been allowed to come in, make Himself at home, and have His glorious way with this strong and beauti- ful soul. And this is the secret of his moving like a sweet, fertilizing wind across our human ways, reminding us of calm stars and great hills and silken seas and vast horizons and Heaven and Christ and God. I have a young friend in Chicago who had a lost little girl wished upon him one day. Coming into contact with a lost child, you know, spells one of those moral obligations we dare not sidestep; we must face it, no matter how important other matters seem to be. This child thought that her mother was in the Community House near by; but the youth soon found that his ward was mistaken. After looking around for sometime without results, the boy got his car, took the child in with him, and drove around from home to home, at last finding the child’s own home. As he left, the little girl said: “Say, Big Boy, when I get lost again, will you come and find me?’ And we are always get- ting lost—we older children—in the sinuous moral ways and bewildering spiritual mazes of life. Our Elder Brother has often found us and taken us tenderly back home to God. He still is out upon His errands of recovery. His chariots of salva- tion are abroad in every highway of being, and there is abundant room for every wanderer. Speaking of the seasons, a friend wrote me: 4 50 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST “The Junes and Julys are of the earth earthly. They have form and color—they riot and fade; but October is the spiritual substance of the whole year. It is not form, nor fragrance, nor color, but essence. Past and future meet in one rapturous now—a morn that fulfills more than hope ever promised.” So, as Christ’s minister, I am sending you these invisible bills for your intangible debts. Discharge them, by the grace of God, and you shall have the thrill and sense and awe of the Christian morning—“a morn that fulfills more than hope ever promised.” “Pay what thou owest.” In going about our many-colored task, I think Walter Byn- ner’s lines on “Lorenzo” will remind us of what a big, strange, glorious world we are in, offering joys to people we look upon as joyless, holding com- pensations for those whom we are sometimes tempted to call even our enemies: “T had not known that there could be Men like Lorenzo and like me Both in the world, and both so right That the world is dark and the world is light. I had not thought that any one Would choose the dark for dwelling on, Would dig and delve for the bitterest roots Of sweetest and suavest fruits. Though I had neither been a fool Nor won a scholarship at school, I never once had dared to doubt That now and then the light went out; But I had not known that there could be Men like Lorenzo and like me Both in the world, and both so right That the world is dark and the world is light. I had not guessed that joy could be Selected for an enemy.” BUT ASPECTS OF THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL* “So then with the mind . . . serve the law of God.” —Romans 7:25, HE purpose of education is the unfolding of the Mind. Next to the being of God Himself, here is the wonder that outtops all wonders—the evolution of the human mind. In discussing the purposeful aspect of education, we should remember, first, the premise of Aristotle, that there is nothing in the end which was not also present in kind in the beginning, and, second, the conclusion of J. Arthur Thomson, that “by no jugglery of words can we get Mind out of Matter and Motion.” Thus convoyed by the noble past and the living present, we may go on to reflect upon the grandeur of the unfolding mind as it is inter- preted by the best education of the world. I Consider, first, how Mind is always stemming the tide of Matter to build a home for itself. This consideration did not much trouble the ancient, far- away man. Like the majority of his descendants, he had not been bitten by the curative teeth of thought. To him the world was a kind of cozy “Commencement Address at Vanderbilt University, June 13, 1925. 51 52 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST corner, in one small part of which he slept tonight, and on the morrow struck his tent, which he pitched otherwhere with each successive nightfall. But with the dawn of the Greek mind some twenty-five centuries ago, man.began to report his reflections upon the mystery of Matter. And he has been at it ever since—so awful, so profound, so unfathom- able is this stuff which universally leans upon Spirit, which is somehow the elusive child of Mind. We are indebted to those early Greeks for the atomic conception of Matter. Now, an atom is said to be a million times smaller than the breadth of a hair. Armed with the most powerful microscope, no man has ever seen an atom. Yet the founda- tions of the universe are built of atomic bricks, or electronic grains of sand, if you desire a suggestion of overwhelming infinitesimal proportions. For if a molecule is a microscopic house of which atoms are the bricks, is not an atom a super-microscopic house of which electrons are the invisible stones? What I am trying to say is this: All editions of Matter, large or small, simple or complex, are but the clothing of Mind, according to Plato and Kant and Bergson. Or, recurring to Aristotle’s concept, all that comes out in the end as Matter was in at the beginning as Mind. Now, are we not ready to appreciate, somewhat, the long road the Divine Mind has traveled that He might build a home for the habitation of the human mind? ‘The process, which has been in operation from the genesis of life, is, first, the action of the external world upon simple creatures; second, the reaction of simple creatures to the external THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL 53 world; third, according to the efficiency of ac~- tions and reactions, living creatures have been sifted through the cycles of time. It is at once evi- dent, therefore, that the preparation for our human beginnings are far back—zonianly back! But even behind the preparation is the purpose of the Infinite Mind to unfold Himself in million-toned variation, it may be, but with one increasing goal—the produc- tion of a flesh-and-blood home in which the human mind may be palatially housed. Thus do we behold the Infinite steadily stemming the tide of Matter— rising through instinct, intelligence, reason, speech, until at last self-expression stands forth in human majesty and says: “I think; therefore, I am.” Now, so far as our human part of the universe is concerned, that was the beginning of man’s im- perial moods and epochs. But did it not also flash forth the purpose of education—the unfolding of the human mind? Thrust forward out of the eternities by the I AM THAT I AM, man Says to the earth, as he boards his wonder-loaded ship sailing furiously through the spaces: “I AM hath sent me unto you.” Moreover, in that wondrous hour when man exclaimed, “I think; therefore, I am,” was not man invited to peer over the abyss of the Infinite through his own finite being? For man never gets to the end of himself; man never gets to the top of himself; man never gets to the center of himself; man never gets to the bottom of him- self. Therefore, all true education reckons not only with the unfolded mind, for most of us can expose our unfolded mentality in terms of gro- tesquely “eloquent ignorance’; but all education 54 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST worthy of the name reckons with the unfolding mind—that which discloses great realms opening upon ever greater realms; golden doors swinging wide that other golden doors may swing wider still; peaks flushed with dawns prophetic of still loftier peaks and lovelier dawns. Is not the immortal sonnet of Keats an illustration of the spirit of edu- cation? Surely, George Chapman has been abun- dantly compensated for his arduous toil in trans- lating Homer by these fourteen deathless lines of Keats, who, unable to read Greek himself, has been pronounced the purest Greek spirit in English literature. “Much have I travelled in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demense: Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific—and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” So, guided by our educational Homers and Chap- mans, we travel much in realms of intellectual gold, see many goodly states and kingdoms of the mind, only to feel like some Barnard when a new planet of truth reports itself, or like some Columbus of the soul before whose eyes Atlantics and Pacifics of reality unroll everlastingly. Then, indeed, because THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL — 55 our mental mountains are so high and our spiritual Pacifics are so deep, our mood is properly moulded to the majesty of silence, as we, too, gaze with a wild surmise upon our own peak in Darien. Is it not a kindred mood we discover in the familiar words of Sir Isaac Newton? Dying, the great scientist said he was like a child picking up shells here and there on the seashore, while before him stretched the boundless and unplumbed ocean of truth. What, I ask, are his discovery of the binomial theorem, the method of tangents and fluxions, his investigations of the nature of light, his construction of telescopes, or even his discovery of the law of universal gravitation—what are they all in the presence of this greatly educated human being, whose unfolded capacities are but large hints of the unfolding powers which are still at work in those vast realms where Mind is unclogged by Matter ? I think, just now, of Edward Emerson Barnard. Simon Newcomb first saw Barnard in Nashville in 1877. “It would have taken more prescience than I was gifted with,” says Newcomb, “to expect that I should live to see the bashful youth awarded the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society for his work.” ‘The only time I ever saw Dr. Barnard was on this platform twenty-seven years ago. But I shall never forget his face nor the letters he wrote me—one in particular about Adelaide Proctor’s The Lost Chord, beginning, ‘‘Seated one day at the organ.” Wonderful indeed is an organ! Touched by a master’s hand, the keys release sounds which are 56 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST the noblest speech of the soul. Yet what is an organ compared to the brain, or the brain to the thinker who masterfully uses his delicately wrought instrument? Well, one fact that convinced me of Doctor Barnard’s genuine education was this: He grew to the last day of his life, richly unfolding his mental and moral powers, prelusive of refinding those “lost chords” which are gathered up and per- fectly harmonized in the Soul of Infinite Love. Therefore, I think of him in the words of Francis Thompson : “Starry amorist, starward gone, Thou art—what thou didst gaze upon! Passed through thy golden garden’s bars, Thou seest the Gardener of the Stars. * he PH * * * * *k When thy hand its tube let fall, Thou found’st the fairest Star of all!” Moreover, if, etymologically speaking, education means to draw out, let us ask: Does Mind, in stem- ming! the tide of Matter, become more mind? Per- haps yes, perhaps no. But that is a question capable of leading us into a psychologic labyrinth more in- tricate than that of Daedalus, and from which no devoted Ariadne could hope to rescue us. What we do know is this: Mind, in the highest embodiment we know, becomes humanized; and the highest humanization of Mind seems to suggest that all of its hidden wealth can never be entirely disclosed or led out. Herein lies further evidence, it seems to me, that all valid education must have to do with the prop- osition of an unfolding mind rather than an un- THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL 57 folded mind. As this is not an academic matter, nor a subject to be wholly confined to the expert— who has been described as a man a long distance from home—consider how the most competent minds shed a kindly, inspiring light upon this idea. Angelo disimprisoned many angels from _ the marble; but his mind seemed still to be the nesting place of unchiseled shapes of loveliness. Rem- brandt was a miserable financier, the courts of Hol- land declaring him bankrupt; but he was artistically solvent enough to reproduce Nature instead of the Italian modes of art, and his luminous shadows but reveal the unexhausted depths of genius still vital and green within his inexhaustible nature. Pascal invented geometry anew at the age of twelve and achieved renown with his celebrated treatise on conic sections at seventeen. Dying before he was forty, yet infinity seems to brood upon him, as upon Marpessa, and he is full of significant whispers and great thoughts unexpressed. As long as splendid mental galleons sail the seas of time, the one named Shakespeare must be reckoned among the stateliest of all. One authority says: “When or where Shakespeare was educated is not known.” Nor does it greatly matter about the “when or where’; what does matter is that this vastly versatile and fertiliz- ingly dramatic seed-man was the incarnation of so much humanized mind, that his fifty and two years of education on the earth were apparently inade- quate for so mighty a shepherd to lead forth more than a small part of his many-colored mental flock. This, then, is the good confession of the unfolding mind : 58 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST “T am the reality of things that seem: The great transmuter, melting loss to gain, Languor to love, and fining joy from pain; I am the waking, who am called the dream; I am the sun, all light reflects my gleam; I am the altar fire within the fane; I am the face of the refreshing rain; I am the sea which flows to every stream; I am the utmost height there is to climb; I am the truth mirrored in fancy’s glass; I am stability, all else will pass; I am eternity, encircling time; Kill me, none may; conquer me, nothing can,— I am God’s soul, fused in the soul of man.” I] A second aspect of education may be defined as the process of coming to terms with life. We find set down in the lexicon of humanity certain great ineffaceable words. They are such as honor and dishonor, choice and mischoice, goodness and bad- ness, justice and injustice, morality and immorality, selfishness and unselfishness, ignorance and en- lightenment, self-seeking and self-sacrifice, false- hood and truth, religion and irreligion. Now, un- less we beg the question by asserting the predomi- nance of heredity and environment over our human world, we must believe that individualized person- ality, achieved and paid for in terms of will, is unquestionably the net result of our own actions within, and reactions to, the universe. I am aware that this viewpoint is contested by philosophic de- terminism, materialism, atheism, and a vulturous brood of other “isms.” But any education that THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL 59 gives more than temporary quarter to these and their progeny, does so at the expense of the hal- lowed gains agonizingly and bloodily won for us by uncounted ages of solid valor and lofty living. Just here, it seems to me, must be refought some of the old, old battles of moralized as contrasted with unmoralized scholarship. Frankly must we say, with Doctor Coulter, “It is unscientific to deny religious truth; it is irreligious to deny scientific truth.” Consequently, misinformed, dogmatic ig- norance need not engage in the fray. For ours is an increasingly hard world for unenlightened good- ness to get along in. Goodness there must be, white-hot and terrible in its earnestness; for with- out this, man is the most diabolical animal in jungle or sea. But it must be high-minded, faith-inspired, intelligent goodness—goodness in which head, heart, and hand function in perfect coordination; the quality of goodness voiced in the aspiration of Woodrow Wilson in which “we wish companion- ship and renewal of spirit, enrichment of thought and the full adventure of the mind; and we desire fair company; and a large world in which to find them.” Education implies, therefore, the coming to terms with life. For example, Life says, “Honor is one of my imperatives.”’ When a man answers, “I will choose dishonor,’ not even the royal endowments of a Bacon can protect him from the judgment of either himself or society. However great and clever, it is still true, as of Lancelot: “His honor rooted in dishonor stood, And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.” 60 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST Life says, “Another of my aphorisms is this: He who lives for himself will, in the end of the day, find a self that has not really lived at all.” And yet a Napoleon or a Wilhelm—to say nothing of mil- lions of unhistoric characters—fling these words back into the teeth of life, only to find imprison- ment upon a desolate island or exile in a foreign land, that every syllable of life’s words may be authentically confirmed. Half of the wild, discor- dant elements raging through our modern world are due to the fact that men and women have ignored the truth that education is the process of coming to terms with life; that these terms are not merely in the salutatory and valedictory of being, but that they are of its very essence, the soul of its argument, advancing step by step to the climax named life or death. It is true for all of us, as it is true of that “One Woman” of whom Knowles sings: “The souls of Strauss and Schubert Swept through the violins, But what cared she who danced apart— She, alone with her sins! For under the roses and diamonds, And back of the lips that smiled, Sat Memory holding the secret As a mother holds her child!” But why should we dwell overmuch on the nega- tive, when the positive, creative side of this truth pleads to be heard? Notwithstanding the mystery and terror of the years, countless hosts in all lands have come to an understanding with life and found THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL 61 it abundantly rewardful. It is a truism that the best of life escapes record; and is it not to its his- torically unrecorded heroes and heroines that so- ciety owes its existence? ‘Think of the toiling fathers! Think of the moiling mothers! Think of the faithful sons! Think of the dutiful daughters! Think of the teachers, preachers, editors, laborers, merchants, lawyers, doctors, nurses, inventors, shep- herds, farmers—men and women from every walk of the world shouldering their burdens and facing their tasks in the Stevensonian spirit of making others happier and their own selves better. In a quiet nook I sometimes watch the waves of a shallow stream divide against a stepping-stone placed therein to aid pedestrians in crossing. Love- ly, indeed, are the flowing curves wrought by those breaking waves—lovelier far than the most skilled pencil could trace. I have also seen the pattering drops of rain tenderly beat their liquid music out upon the bosom of this same secluded, shadow-hung brook. Each falling drop makes a perfect circle— a circle such as Rodin might dream of describing in terms of stone, or such as Mozart might long to define in terms of melody. Watching those circles made by bursting raindrops flow into each other; watching those flowing curves flow over the brook’s pebbly surface—this has afforded me many a rhythmic moment and left me unfading memories of beauty. So, into the flowing stream of Time, do individual human drops fall, make their tiny circles, the circles pass into each other, and are in turn taken up by the current that flows on forever through the checkered years. Yet I cannot forget 62 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST the circles and curves of the brook, though they vanished in the moment of formation, even as the brook itself must soon pass away. Neither can I forget these white, strong, tender, and valiant hu- mans who, in coming to terms with life, personify that fine saying of George Eliot that ‘‘character is educated will.” | A third commandment of life is this: To keep the best we must continuously give the best away. This brings us to the verge of a sphere governed by no physical laws. “In the physical realm,” says a thinker, ‘any mass or velocity conveyed from one body to another is lost by the first body when gained by the second, but in the realm of mentality the transmission of knowledge from one individual to another involves no loss to the giver, however great the gain to the receiver.” Consider what the great German means by this law of spiritual increase. If I have two dollars and give you one, I have only one left. That is a mathematical fact, as well as a matter your banker will duly weigh. But if I have two thoughts and give you one, I still have the two thoughts myself, though you have received one. If I have two houses and sell one, I have but one left. That is a fact of real estate. But if I have two poems in my memory and give you one, you have been en- riched by receiving while I have been enriched by giving. If I have two farms and dispose of one, the recorder of deeds will prove to the satisfaction of any court that I have but one farm left. But if I have two good acts pulsing through my will and perform them on your behalf, I shall not only lose THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL 63 nothing, but set in motion circles and curves of influence lovelier than those of my sylvan brook and more durable than the stars which are nightly reflected within its quiet pool. Yet this, I take it, is the sphere in which the teacher, the reformer, the statesman, the composer, the missionary, the prophet, and the martyr render their immeasurable service to mankind. And do they not prove that a large part of our task consists in teaching people that education is the process of coming to terms with life? Anything short of this, surely, is miseducation, which cannot be atoned for by any efficiency, however brilliant, in physics, chemistry, athletics, language, philosophy, or litera- ture. And is it not because of the creative power and sustaining vigor of such an ideal that institu- tions like this continue their unfolding life through the generations? Their conclusion is that the open- ing up of the human mind, though a necessarily un- finished task because of its essential grandeur, is worth all that it costs in pain and patience and pur- pose. And the nobility of the work is such that each successive human generation, from Socrates with his Plato down to Arnold of Rugby with his Dean Stanley, looks back upon its teachers with veneration and love too deep for tears. {il A third aspect of education is the personalization of moral worth. Culture for its own sake may be good; but culture for its own sake is not good enough for a completely unfolding human being. 64 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST I have all along assumed this; but this aspect of education is so profoundly important that it cannot be emphasized too often. Let us try to define our terms. What, then, do we mean by moral worth? Moral worth, unless life itself be a kind of idiot’s tale, is that which the universe has ever been struggling to fully spell out. We find Cicero first using the word moral to translate the Greek term from which we get our English word ethics. We may define the moral as the sense of right with which God has veined the soul of the human. But long before Cicero lived, Moses was wrestling with the same sublime fact. Nor is the thing itself confined to the Greek and Hebrew consciousness. Go wherever we choose, and the moral, very dimly, even crudely, it may be, is nevertheless decipherable from the crudest tablets of the human mind. ‘This, indeed, is the finding of those masterful volumes by Sir James Frazier, The Golden Bough. Secondly: What do we mean by the personaliza- tion of moral worth? We mean simply this: That until a sense of right is rooted in the human con- sciousness deeply enough to be the controlling power, Man is only, to use Tennyson’s figure, a cunning cast in clay, a magnetic mockery, or, at best, the larger ape. Now, to personalize this reality is the goal of education. And is not the method absolutely scien- tific? For example: There is music in the universe, but the musician must make it his own music by obeying the laws of harmony. There is beauty on every hand, but the artist makes it his own -beauty THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL 65 by complying with the rules of art. There are in- numerable compounds possible within the vast jar of Nature, but the scientist makes them his own by adhering to the subtle demands of chemistry. There is rhythm throughout the cosmos, but the poet makes it his own rhythm by observing the rules of metre and language. So, too, there is Morality in the universe, older than the stars, deeper than the seas; but a human being knows it as his morality only as he, by planting himself solidly upon the foundations of justice, mercy, and love, acts as if the moral were a finality, and finds it to be indeed that without which civilization is a veneer that god- less men will tear to shreds and then destroy by their infernal hatreds. Therefore, in considering the personalization of moral worth, we come to one of the most momen- tous questions our earth has ever confronted: What is mankind going to do with its new-found mental and physical powers? This, I maintain, is one of the most momentous questions ever asked because, never before, has it been possible for men to tear down all that Man has built up. Yet, we are told, by unemotional, thoroughgoing, competent men all over the world, that another outbreak of human bad temper such as we witnessed in 1914, means the destruction of civilization itself. If this is even measurably true, then our most pressing and far- reaching problem is the prevention and outlawry of war. And, my young friends, whether we will or no, this matter concerns America to the quick. It can- not be sidestepped by national antics patterned after 5 66 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST the proverbial stupidity of the ostrich. Nor can it be laid on the Congressional table by the incapable hand of tradition. Neither will it be ultimately hushed up and asphyxiated by political hot air, blowing from the partisan coasts of the high or the miasmatic swamps of the low. Because this is at once a question for the personalization of moral worth on the individual and national scale, consider the two methods by which it is proposed that the monster of war may be destroyed. There is, first, the strictly moral way—an appeal to the innate sense of righteousness and justice, which both men and nations are capable of respond- ing to. This is, of course, the long way, the diffhi- cult way, and the way most devoutly to be wished. But the fact is, this ideal way is impossible without every human will pronouncing its hearty “Amen” to the right it knows. Unfortunately, this nobler way is faced by many obstacles. One is an unideal world, bustling with unideal men and women— “even as you and I[.’”’ Another obstacle, rooted in the first, is designing political chicanery in the chancelleries of Asia, Europe, and America. A third obstacle is this: Human beings have been jostled and thrown together, in national and inter- national relations, by the inventive genius of the modern mind; therefore, the exigencies of bad temper are so appalling and close at hand, that our war-cursed world cannot possibly wait for the dawning of the day of the ideal. On the other hand, there has been conceived, created, and put into operation a scheme that has done and is doing effective work among the nations. THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL 67 I cannot say that this federation of more than half a hundred sovereign States is ideal. No! More- over, the honest, fair-minded, practical, humanistic American; the inane traditionalist, wrapped about in the grave-clothes of the past, as if the Almighty Himself died in the deaths of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton; the stand-pat, verbal volcanoes of no-entangling alliances, aided and abetted by the white-in-the-face haters of Woodrow Wilson—these, one and all, can readily inform us that the League of Nations, with its International Court, is not ideal. But it is at least a unique and auspicious beginning. In the judgment of many, it bids fair to succeed quite as well as did those Thirteen Colonies, laughed at by most of Europe, even while the “lucky Thirteen” were bitterly and scandalously quarreling among themselves as to the merits and demerits of the very Constitution which is now recognized as one of the supreme State docu- ments in the history of mankind. What irks me is this: In the eighteenth century it was Europe that sat in the seat of the scornful, jeering at what God and men were doing in this Western Wilderness; but, in the twentieth century, shall America climb into the very seat of scorn vacated by tottering thrones, and laugh at what God and men are doing, not in one nation alone, but in more and greater nations than ever before under- took to work out the political destiny of the world? Swear by the fathers as loudly as we may, I protest that such a spirit is un-American—that is, it is un-Washingtonian, it is un-Adamslike, it is un- Jeffersonian. Yet, the League seems to have within 68 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST it the vitality of an international seed, notwith- standing the fact that America has done about all it can to kill both the sower and the seed. But, like the sound of infinite seas breaking upon our smudgy human coasts, that Old, Eternal Voice keeps sounding mysteriously and triumphantly on: “Verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” In hours of depression, men exclaim, “How strange that America should refuse to recognize its own child!’ Well, it may be unfortunate, even tragic, but I deny that it is altogether strange. Did not Athens poison her Socrates? Did not Florence burn her Savonarola? Did not France feed her Joan of Arc to the flames? Did not England hang even the bones of her Cromwell? Did not Jeru- salem crucify her Christ? It is a biographical axiom that it is not possible adequately to appreciate a truly great man in his own time. If he is unduly popular, universally applauded, set it down that he has not cut an abiding moral swath into his own and after times. You need not be popular to be great. When some of you become President of the United States, you need not be a professional hand-shaker and back-slapper in order to be known to coming ages. The fact is, if you are illustriously known in history, it will not be because you were popular in your own generation, but probably be- cause you had the courage to tell large sections of your generation to “Go to!’—and the law of what Emerson called “the gravitation of spirits” will de- termine the particular locality to which they must THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL 69 go! “All things will not be well,” said Sir Thomas More, “until all men are good, which I think will not be this long time.” Nevertheless, we are all human, wagons in which the generations are jolting along. As nations and individuals, we must not only learn to strike the iron while it is hot; we must strike the iron until it is hot. By thus exercis- ing our moral muscle upon the anvils of reality, we shall strike out sparks that will expand into orbs of imperishable moral beauty. The goal of education, then, for the world and the individual, is the personalization of moral worth. And the moral task is atmosphered with solemn seriousness. To be everlastingly justifying ourselves, developing the potential pharisee already house-keeping within each of us, proves many things, and among them this: That we are not wisely serious; that we are eager to be morally coddled; that we are unworthy of the hard-won gains of lofty character wrung from the heart of the ages; and that, finally, we are headed for the abyss, if we do not correct our superficial and un- moral attitude by sacrificial thinking and acting. “The gentleman of easy virtue restores our credit with ourselves,” says Professor Hobhouse; and is not “the gentleman of easy virtue’? much in request today? He strolls about in Church, State, Univer- sity, and Market Place as if he had quite forgotten what the guns in No Man’s Land were trying to say to his anodyned soul, “Both the nation and in- dividual that sinneth shall die.” Therefore, let none of us conclude, on this day, that solving intellectual difficulties is the final end 70 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST of education. A man may produce an exquisite intellectual pattern while his personal life remains the shoddiest moral patchwork; indeed, he may be left with the feeling, as has been said of Rousseau, “that it is rather charming to be _ salaciously wicked.” ‘To make-the mental and moral colors match—this is the ultimate aim of education. Any- thing short of this, however versatile, brilliant, or clever, is mis-education. The truly educated human is a seed-human. There is within him something germinant and vital. More deeply than he knows, he lives a large, resultful life, splendid in its sug- gestiveness as well as definite in its achievement. True education enables one to wisely live in the Country of the Real while he journeys triumphantly on te the Country of the Ideal. Responding to One Who says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” he pursues his own vast and varied ways with a song that sings the soul and synthesis of life: God in the fire, God in the mire, God in the germ, God in the sperm, God in the spar, God in the star,— But God in Christ My soul’s own tryst. God in the sea, God in the tree, God in the flower, God in the bower, God in the rain, God in the pain,— But God in Christ My soul’s own tryst. God in God in God in God in God in God in THE EDUGATIONAL, IDEAL the air, the fair, the moon, the tune, the mole, the whole,— But God in Christ My soul’s own tryst. God in God in God in God in God in God in the gem, the stem, the thing, the wing, the loss, the cross,— But God in Christ My soul’s own tryst. God in God in God in God in God in God in the spaces, the faces, the gloom, the bloom, the shriven, the Heaven,— But God in Christ My soul’s own tryst. 71 IV THE DIFFERENT ROAD “They went back to their own country by a dsfferent road.’—MarttHEew 2: 12. EYOND its historic value, I think this story B of the Wise Men is a kind of pilgrims’ par- able for all men. Read understandingly, al- most everything, in outline at least, is packed into it. The universe, with its stars and angels and men and God, is here focussed toa point. There is noise and noiselessness; there is energy and restraint; there is the unchanging East and the ever-changing West—everything, I say, is here. Do you like cre- ative calm? Stand here for the nonce, and feel the true meaning of tranquillity. Do you like the pulse of power? Put forth your mental fingers, and touch its very throb. Do you like calmness and energy harmoniously wedded? Stand by for a mo- ment, please, and listen to this ungrinding change of gear from low things to high. Behold this new wedding in the heart’s new Cana of Galilee! Sometimes I watch my gulls on Lake Michigan in stormless, placid days. Then are they as quiet and playful as the waves that make love to the shore. And I like my gulls in this mood; for they remind me of great white roses peacefully raining their petals upon quiet waters. But I like my gulls, also, when the storm-king comes with invisible strides 72 THE DIFFERENT ROAD 73 across the troubled deep. Then do my graceful white birds forsake the lake below and tumble wingedly about in the lake above. Drunk with the wine of spilling rains, of screaming winds, of dizzy heights and depths, they are mad with joy. And yet, through it all, my gulls seem to blend and unify the quietude of the unruffled lake with the majesty of the roaring storm. Consequently, there comes a sense of poise and power beautifully fo- cussed. Something like this, I think, awaits us as we set our mental and spiritual feet in the differ- ent road traversed by Melchior, Caspar, and Bal- thazar. I Centuries before Emerson exhorted us to hitch our wagon to a star, men were actually doing it in a somewhat remote corner of the planet. What an arresting sentence St. Matthew has left us! Tell- ing of the return of the Magi, he says, “They went back to their own country by a different road.” “They”—that is the subject of this challenging sen- tence. And who are “they? Wise men, of course, sages who “saw the star.” They are star-track minds; they hitch their wagon to a star, climb in, and the star pulls both them and the wagon. Urged by a kind of spiritual gravitation, they keep their feet in the dust while their souls move forward, pulled by a star. So the different road, does it not, suggests souls with an ideal? Here, then, is one of our abiding human neces- sities: The wisdom that closes with ideals big enough for the big business of life. We lack spir- 74 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST itual height because we do not stretch ourselves up toward the heavens of the ideal. As we know, no man undertakes to run a business without genuine business relations. His key-word is capital—which means, besides property values, good-will, integrity, diligence, determination to put something useful in- to the markets of life. Indeed, when we consider the network of which modern industrial concerns are wrought, we are amazed at its intricacy. And yet, what is the most proficient business man with- out a spiritual roof? Just a business man, and nothing more—a human cog in the mechanism of being when it is his privilege to establish personal contact with the Love and Power and Wisdom that moves the stars even while it transfigures souls. There are many blooms upon the Tree of Life, but this transfiguring power produces the fairest bloom of all. In a poem entitled, Conspiracy, the author sings how two lovers met and were con- quered by Love. First, it was the stars that did it —the stars, the wind, and the sea that rode behind in wildness and whiteness and freedom. Next, it was the wind that did it—the wind, the sea, and the stars that burned their flame into souls. ‘Then, third, it was the sea that did it—the sea, the stars, and the wind “that blew in gales of high romance.” But, finally : “It was the three that did it— Conspirators, dream-shod, They made of me a worshiper, They made of you a god!” “Oh,” but you protest, “that is only romance, and has no place in religion!’ Ah, I see! And seeing, THE DIFFERENT ROAD 75 I wonder if such an attitude is not largely respon- sible for much of the dust, dullness, and doddering to which certain expositions of Christianity are un- worthily related? Here is a question I want an- swered—and I want the answer to be quick and deep and divine: Why does anybody love? Why, in the long roll of the ages, has anybody ever loved anywhere and at any time? That is the question, and here, also, is the answer: “We love, because He first loved us.” "Talk about romance! Here is New Testament romance that gets in behind stars and winds and seas and souls and whispers to every understanding heart, ““You love because the Eter- nal Lover is Love and is everlastingly loving His creation and creatures out of the depths up to the heights from which He continuously comes down to move the whole up to Himself.” It is the living Christ Who helps us to realize somewhat, even here and now, the creative power pulsing through the Christian ideal. Perhaps we are a bit shy of the word! Yet, thrust as we are into the muck and mire of materialism, we have no right to be afraid of this term. Speaking for phi- losophy, Thomas Hill Green says: “It will be un- derstood by an ideal object is meant an object pres- ent in idea but not yet given in reality.” We must not quarrel with philosophy while it speaks its own tongue; let us, rather, retain our philosophy even while we experience something better—I mean the life, the light, the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. He is the center toward which all Platonic and Kantian roads lead. But He is more than that; He is the Divine Breath which, like the morning, 76 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST breathes a sweet Annunciation after the night-rain. And that, for garden and hill and meadow, spells vitality and greenness; which, when lifted into the realm of human values, brings assurance and pas- sion of the Reality playing into the human heart out of the Heart of the Infinite. This, then, is one of the big meanings of the different road: It guides star-led souls into the light of sovereign ideals. Translated into everyday speech, our ideal is just the name and number of the street whereon we inwardly live. “As a man think- eth in his heart, so is he.” The last one of us can afford to let the universe go by, until we honestly learn where we are living on the invisible and un- marked street of our mind, heart, strength, and will. For nothing greatly practical can come out of us until this has been done. Do you remember the old mortar-mixer on one of the English cathedrals? At the dinner hour, instead of companying with his fellow-workmen, he sat close by the office, looking at a colored sketch on one of the walls. Rebuked by his comrades for his lack of comradeship during the noon recess, the old man said: “No, my friends, you are mistaken about that. That’s not the reason I’ve got for sitting here day after day. As you all know, I’m only an old mortar-mixer on this job; but it helps me to mix my mortar better when I see what a beautiful building I’m working on.” Now, each of us is working on a building. We use our brains and hands and feet in the task, yet it is “a house not made with hands;” it is the house made by our thoughts, our aims, our ideals. I am sure we shall mix a better quality of spiritual mor- THE DIFFERENT ROAD 77 tar if we pause, daily, to see what a mysteriously enchanting building we are working on. God said to Moses: ‘See that thou make them after their pattern, which hath been showed thee in the mount.” And are not hours of prayer and meditation the times when we ascend our own invisible mount and behold the Divine Pattern of character in Christ? Therefore, we must guard these times most dili- gently. Many, no doubt, will accuse us of fellow- less isolation and lack of interest in things practical. But never mind the accusation! ‘There is a thing greater than the spirit of the age,” said a seer, “‘and that is the spirit of the ages.” Men must be bap- tized into the spirit of the ages—that is, the Holy Spirit revealed and sent by the Lord Christ—before they can properly do the work of the age, before they can gain any worthy conception of the nobility and grandeur of the building they are working on in the midst of the years. And this, one may re- affirm with strenuous insistence, is creatively prac- tical work. Is it not at this very point that we need a new and sensible understanding of the words realism and idealism? “A thing utterly baffling to me,” said that rare soul, Gene Stratton Porter— whose untimely death was one more of thousands reminding us of our death-dealing era of wheels within wheels—“is why a life history of the sins and shortcomings of a man constitute a book of realism, and the life history of a just and incorrupt- ible man should constitute a book of idealism. Is not a moral man as real as an immoral one?” Once we have asked the question, how utterly 78 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST silly the gutter-snipe philosophy appears! John Galsworthy says of Joseph Conrad that he “had an almost ferocious enjoyment of the absurd.” And is not a large section of the crazy-mindedness of to- day ferociously devoted to the enjoyment of its own absurdity? We see it in fiction. Hugo, Thackeray, and Dickens—ah, me, they lack style. We see it in art. Angelo, Raphael, and Rembrandt—poor souls, they are not cubists. We see it in poetry. Long- fellow, Browning, and Tennyson—were they not ultra-Victorian? I do not belong to those who think that all romance has been exhausted, that all beauty has been painted, that all poetry has been written. Nevertheless, I challenge large sections of our twentieth century story-tellers, painters, and poets to bring forth works that will cause the next generation to seriously consider either their names or their works. And if this should be actually so, the explanation will not be due entirely to craftsmanship; the para- mount reason will be: Cleverness dedicated to prov- ing that art for art’s sake is all there is, while morality—not the medieval type nor the mid-Vic- torian—but just plain, decent, unwithering moral- ity is not really essential in the warp and woof of life. And is there not something deadly and dead- ening in this spirit? Coarse womanhood as well as immoral manhood, cannot be held guiltless in large sections of our society that walks with its body and soul unbuttoned and is, tragically enough, un- ashamed. Sacrificing its sense of modesty, it has lost the power to blush! ‘“‘Why don’t you treat us with respect?’ a woman asked a man, who rebels THE DIFFERENT ROAD 79 at the feminine brazenness that crosses his own threshold. “Because,” he replied, “you women act too much like indecent men to deserve the respect of decent ones.” A hard saying, indeed; but has not immorality the hardness of death itself within its own godless heart? No age ever yet got by with it without summoning the undertaker to direct its unhallowed corpse to the graveyard. For, as the wise man said, there is a greater thing than the spirit of the age, and that is the spirit of the ages. Moreover, history shows that the Spirit of the Ages has an uncanny method of rising up at the most un- expected moment and declaring: “When thou hearest the fool rejoicing, and he saith, ‘It is over and past, And the wrong was better than right, and hate turns into love at the last, And we strove for nothing at all, and the gods are fallen asleep ; For so good is the world agrowing that the evil good shall reap’— Then loosen the sword in thy scabbard and settle the helm, on thine head, For men betrayed are mighty, and great are the wrongfully dead.” One twilight a friend of mine went into his office. He thought nobody was in the room, but the woman who told me the story happened to be there. A short time before, he had sent a picture to his office to be hung on the walls. Entering the office, he walked straight up to the picture, which had not been properly hung. Having eyes, seemingly, on the tips of his fingers as well as in the front of his 80 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST head, he began hanging the picture as it should be, saying loud enough to be heard by the one who told me the story: “Lord, Thou knowest that I hate a bad job.” Does not this spell the difference between a muck- heap mind and a star-led soul? We have to hate something terribly before we can love the supreme enthusiastically. Suppose, then, we learn to harbor a fresh new hate for those bad jobs named lies in word or deed; for the petty parochialism which would pack the universe into our national and indi- vidual back-yards; for the iron-footed hurry that tramples the flowers of gentleness and courtesy into the unfertile dust of aimless mental and moral vag- abondage. Up in the Northwest I undertook to tell some people of the things I got, along with the pur- chase of a bit of property on the South Side of Chicago. Besides the building and the lot, I said that my Swedish neighbor threw in a bundle of values the income tax man can never send me a bill for. For example—the sky, the wind, the lake, the park; human things, too—faithful fathers, devoted mothers, happy children, good neighbors, lovers and sweethearts; Divine realities, also, faith, hope, and love—in a word, God over all and through all and in all. A friend up there in Duluth—a good min- ister of Jesus Christ—has since sent me a poem with the legend, “Read it and pass it on.” So I am obeying the injunction: “Just out on the rim of the city, As the records and files relate, I have title and sole possession To a princely and vast estate. THE DIFFERENT ROAD 81 It is only one-half of an acre, As it’s marked and arranged in the plat; But my ownership awes and inspires me, For it runs a bit deeper than that. It goes from the tree roots downward Half as far as the world is through, And up from the rustling branches Past the clouds to the heavenly blue. And well pleased with my great dominion, I gaze through the night sky afar, And lo! at the end of the trillionth mile I find that I own a star!” II The different road suggests souls with self-ad- apting genius. “They went back to their own coun- try by a different road.” Now, life is full of differ- ent roads; indeed, the different road is one of the Divine methods of educating us. Therefore, suc- cessful soul-travel is largely determined by our seli- adjusting capacity. Consider this truth with reference to one’s call- ing. Not every man easily finds his sphere. Some- times a long, steep path, zig-zagging in and out, up and down, has to be trodden before our feet fit into the right road. Think of Steinmetz, almost failing to get past our immigration authorities. There he stands knocking—knocking—a physically mal- formed man, well-nigh friendless, a stranger at the gates of the New World. Grant that a certain unity of genius rules such a spirit anywhere and under all circumstances, but do not ignore, in the interest of facts, the confusing roads of chance and 6 82 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST opposition, all converging about the house of life occupied by this outcast German Socialist. Sick, unable to speak our language, did he not stand by the side of the most unpromising road? And yet, in that hour something mightier than the chaos of mere circumstance began to stir within the lonely German’s disordered world. It was nothing less than his own ability to adjust himself to the high- way of destiny that mysteriously beckoned. He seems to be saying, all through those fateful years: “Yes, the roads are many; the roads are confusing —they wind everywhither. But there is something greater in life than roads, easy or difficult; it is the stern stuff that fits itself to environment and com- mands environment to help unfold a masterful genius in the realm of electricity.”’ The same law operates in all high friendship. How many different roads of acquaintance have lured and lured when, somehow, one golden road of friendship suddenly stopped at our door! Quite bewildered by the richness of it all, we ask, in our luminous hours: ‘‘How did such holy good for- tune come to me?” It must have been in some such hour that Joseph Parker was asked: “Tell me, how did the Lord ever call Judas in the first place?” The great preacher answered: “I have a harder problem than that; I have been wondering how the Lord ever called me.” But the road of friendship, human and Divine, is not strewn with primroses. “The tragedy of life,” said an old mother, “is not age or poverty or pain. It is man’s failure to his friends. Twenty years of happy association, twenty years of trust and work THE DIFFERENT ROAD 83 and play together are swallowed up in five minutes of bitterness. If friendship cannot endure five minutes of heat, of impulsive words after twenty years of trial, friendship is a pretense. That is the tragedy of life.” So, when the road of misunder- standing, of slander, of baseless inference, of seem- ing or real neglect, comes running by, what is it but a high challenge to my faith in God and man to say: “This road is wrong; it is essentially crooked, however straight it may appear; I will not allow my feet to walk init. There is a great road, a for- giving road, a cleansing road—yea, the Christly road! By the grace of God, I will set my feet in that, and save myself, my friend, and our friend- ship.” Whoever acts thus, makes contribution of the first order, I hold, to the universe itself. It is not given to man to create an atom of matter; all he can do, at most—which is very wonderful—is to change the form of matter. But in the realm of heart, mind, and will, man is a creator second only to God Himself. When the Good Will that dwelt in the bush is enshrined in a human soul, the final fashion and meaning of the universe has found ex- pression. And just because this work is at once so holy, grand, and arduous, we must put into it more patience, more sacrifice, more intelligence, more longsuffering. Not otherwise does the Christian road differ from one of many. “What do ye more than others?” is the eternal challenge of the Eternal Christ to eternally aspiring souls. Why, when everything else has failed, lo! we are at the begin- ning of victory! 84 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST Failing to adjust themselves to this higher way, nations inevitably plunge into the abyss. Then do the Four Horsemen break loose upon the world. Until we learn to put as much enthusiasm and com- mon sense into the ways of international comity and friendship as we put into the preparation for and waging of war, we not only have no right to be called Christians, we have no right to be called morally intelligent. For thousands of years men held that the earth is the center of the solar system. Now, however, nobody but a mental illiterate holds that view. For thousands of years, also, men have held that the only way to settle disputes is by fight- ing. But just here the comparison between the mental illiterate and the morally illiterate militarist ends. For all practical purposes, it makes little dif- ference that the ignoramus maintains that the sun revolves around the earth. The sun keeps its plane- tary children revolving about it, no matter what men may say. But in the matter of settling dis- putes by war, a new situation has made such a phi- losophy horrible to contemplate. For the first time in history Man is capable of bringing about his own self-destruction. “Is it true that practically the en- tire population of London could be killed by gas within twelve hours?’ Edison was asked. “It is not true,’ he answered. The thing could be done within three hours.” So the problem before mankind today is this: Shall we continue to practice the worst philosophy imaginable, or shall we try out on an international scale, the best untried philosophy we know? Sup- pose, therefore, we change a single word of the THE DIFFERENT ROAD 85 Golden Rule and make it read: ‘Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that nations should do to you, do ye even so to them.” The instant re- ply of the Iron Rule is: “But the application of this law is not within the keeping of a single or even many nations.” Well, then, inasmuch as no first-class power has ever tried the Golden Rule out, some of us are eager to see such an experiment made. With all the problems involved, moral and otherwise—heart-rending and soul-excruciating as they are—would it not be worth while for one na- tion to invoke vicarious sacrifice than for all na- tions to invite world-wide disaster? “But what practical good could possibly come out of a nation’s self-effacement?” is asked. Is lofty moral example a practical force or not? Is self-sacrifice for a great end practical or not? Is the unarmed right worth dying for or not? These are questions that go straight to the soul of the deepest, most sacred things in the history of nations and individuals. At any rate, as this crimson road of war comes past the heart of humanity, Man must somehow learn to say: “My feet shall no longer take the road made of skulls and drenched with blood. They that take the sword shall perish by the sword. I am resolved to adapt my goings up into the high mountains of God, where men shall not destroy or learn war any more.” ‘The road is rugged and steep, inlaid with thorns and suffering, but it leads to the higher hero- ism which can withstand weapons of flesh through the war of the spirit. And there are those—a larger number in the world today than ever before—who yearn to see this super-statesman-like method put to 86 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST the test. Perchance God would thereby work out a new thing in the earth! Once, when Thoreau was addressing a crowd, he said: “A good time is com- ing.” A heckler shouted: “Tell us when?” Thor- eau’s answer was: “Will you help?” Yet, as I have assumed all along, the different road brings up, supremely, in the Country of Re- ligion. And religion, for us, is not just a generic term; it is something specific, unique, even the Absolute focused in Christ, functioning through Christ. One of the subtlest ways of short-circuit- ing the currents of God in Christ is to put them upon a competitive basis with other interests or re- ligions. “What do ye more than others ?’’—that is not only our Lord’s challenge to His disciples; it is His undying challenge to Himself. If He was not in Himself what no other was or could be; if He did not do and teach what no other could do and teach; if He is not now alive and at work within the world and the universe—we Christians are not only of all men most miserable, but we are also in- excusably foolish and have no right to idolatrously follow a megalomaniac. But because we know that God in Christ is leading humanity by a different road, here is strategic opportunity for our self-ad- apting powers to come into full play. “If any man would come after Me, let him take up his cross, daily, and follow Me.” In fine, the human will is the hinge on which turns the door that opens wide for the entrance of God; and whatever other doors may be swinging to and fro within the worlds, this Door is different—so different that only One would dare to say: “I am the door; by Me if any man THE DIFFERENT ROAD 87 enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and shall find pasture.” What a wondrous Door! “T am the door’’—unique personality is there. “If any man enter in’—universal humanity is there. “He shall be saved’’—complete salvation is there. “And shall go in and out’—illimitable and life- giving freedom is there. “And shall find pasture” —nourishment, green, ageless, satisfying, is there. I repeat: What a Door—what a wondrous, golden door for all the strayed, torn human sheep of God to pass through into the Sheepfold of Heaven! So, after all, it is this different road in religion that matters most. Countless other roads come twisting by, but they all stop short of the goal. They are good roads, useful roads, beautiful roads; we will love them all and use them all, if we are vitally Christed through and through. One road is named Science; another Philosophy; another Edu- cation; another Industry; another Art; another Poetry; another Nationality; another Philan- thropy. Many and necessary and interesting are the other roads. Yet, I insist, it is only as the other roads converge at last in the Christly road, that they get any true meaning as to where they are going and what they are going for. “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.” Now, we moderns are very smart; let us frankly admit it, with our characteristic and unblushing audacity. Yet I have the feeling that our chameleon-like smartness shall be transformed into heavenly states- manship when we grow wise enough to set the Kingdom of God first—first in industry, first in 88 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST politics, first in education, first in internationalism. Then, indeed, we shall have learned the secret of spiritualizing our material possessions, so that all these things—food and drink and raiment, the very things against which the modern world has cracked its brilliant brain and hurt its restless soul—shall be added unto us, which is vastly different from allow- ing ourselves to be added unto mere things. Years ago a boy was in the graduating class of Denison University at Granville, Ohio. This youth was commissioned to engage a band to play at the commencement exercises. First he tried Columbus and then Cincinnati, but was unable to find musi- cians willing to come for what the graduating class could pay. At last he heard of a good band at New Concord in Muskingum county. He wrote to the leader, who was also a young man. The band went to the Denison commencement and played to the satisfaction of all. Many years afterward, these two young men met—the one a Minneapolis lawyer, the other a Chicago educator. “I hear it said, Dr. Harper,” began the lawyer, “that you used to play in a band at New Concord, Ohio. Were you a member of that band that went up from there once to play at commencement at Granville?’ President William R. Harper—for it was he—looked sharply at the lawyer and asked: “What do you know about that New Concord Band?” ‘Well,’ an- swered the lawyer, “I was the fellow who wrote over to New Concord and engaged that band to come.” “You were, were you? Did the band please you? Did it play well?” The educator still looked at the lawyer as if he had him on cross-examina- THE DIFFERENT ROAD 89 tion. “Indeed it did play well,’ said the lawyer. “Tl always remember what good music it fur- nished us.”’ Harper’s manner changed in an instant. Jump- ing at the lawyer, he almost wrung his hand off as he shouted: ‘“You’re the man who’s responsible for me. That was my band, and I’m proud to hear you say it furnished good music. And if you’re the man who wrote that invitation, you’re responsible for everything I’ve done since then.” Then Harper told the lawyer how, after graduating from Mus- kingum College in New Concord, he didn’t have an ambition on earth; how he loved to play the cornet and organized that band; how the letter came from Granville and he accepted the invitation to play at commencement; how, after the exercises were over and the other boys had gone home, young Harper lingered in Granville, talked with some of the pro- fessors, and decided to take up some special studies, paying his way through tutoring. “Well,” said William Rainey Harper, ‘“‘something began to stir in me of a desire to make something more out of myself, and I said I would do it. So I went back to Granville that fall and began both teaching and studying there in the college. I got thoroughly wrapped up in the college life. Then along in mid- winter, there came a great revival of religion in the college. I was converted that winter, and I made up my mind I would be a minister. So my friends there arranged for me to go to Yale. Everything that has come to me since grew out of that.’’ Look at the factors in this great man’s life. What are they? First, there was a great revival of religion; 90 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST second, he was converted; third, he made up his mind to be a minister. “Everything that has come to me since grew out of that.” Verily, all roads at last meet in the different road, even the spiritual highway cast up by the Lord of the Soul. Ill The different road, moreover, may impart to pil- grims a new insight into the meaning of country. “They went back to their own country by a differ- ent road.’”’ For my own part, I heartily love this word “country.” It signifies, literally, “that which is over against or before one.” But I love it, also, for what more than sheer literalness implies. I love it first because, in the nature of things, it contains something intensely individual, ineradi- cably personal. I wonder if these wise men, after they returned home, may not have said something like this: “Well, we followed the star; it brought us to the cradle; we made our gifts; we saw Judea and many different kinds of people and modes of life. Still, it is good to be back home again. Here in our own country the stars seem to shine brighter; the birds seem to sing sweeter; the winds seem to blow kindlier; the flowers seem to bloom lovelier.”’ Mind you, I am not saying that these men said such things at all; I am simply suggesting that they might have said them and felt the sincerity of their words. The fact is, true love of country is so in- dividual and fine a matter that only superficial peo- ple disregard it. Moreover, is it not impossible for men to wholly THE DIFFERENT ROAD 91 ignore their national strain? For Pharaoh to say, “TI will have none of the Egyptian in my blood,” is not sufficient cause for the Egyptian to move out; Egypt would still manage to camp in a few of Phar- aoh’s corpuscles. Socrates could never get over the fact that he was a Greek; and did not the Eternal Mind haunt the philosopher through Greek molds? And Michel de Montaigne, wakened from child- hood’s slumber by strains of music, astounding the college at Bordeaux by his Latinity at the age of six, climbing many hills of knowledge as a man, feeder of Shakespeare and inspirer of Emerson— did not Montaigne have so much of the French genius veined into his make-up, that he was never - quite able to break loose from it, nor had he any desire to do so? And that English Cromwell—he of the Ironsides and the Psalms and other things! —is there not something so definitely English about him as to make us apply the words of young Rupert Brooke to the two of them: “Tf I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is forever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed ; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England’s, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blessed by the suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the Eternal Mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; 92 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness; In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.” As for our own Lincoln, surround him with kings or angels, I think something of the cabin and the prairie would continue to wind through his goodly talk—yea, too, the American cabin, the American prairie! Thus, I like this word “country” because it has been dipped in both the vats of nationalism and individualism and its colorful stains will not come out. But I like the word for a second reason: It con- tains something necessarily world-wide and inter- national. Since “the far away and long ago”—the time of the family, the clan, the tribe—there has not been, in reality, any such thing as only “me and my own country.” Things have been so jammed together in late years that we are liable to overlook the fact that countries have always had to depend upon each other. This is just the indisputable premise of what we call civilization. My own coun- try is because all countries are. The modern man, no matter what his own country, has to confess: “The Egyptian, the Assyrian, the Carthaginian, the Greek, the Roman, the Anglo Saxon—all have un- mistakably gone into the making of my country. In spite of time and distance and change and mis- understanding and hate and war, all the countries of mankind have silently and surely contributed to my own. Loving my own country as no other, in- telligence, duty, and privilege compel me to acknowl- edge the indebtedness of my country to all peoples and all ages.”’ THE DIFFERENT ROAD 93 “But,” exclaims the cynic, “this is rather trite, vague, and non-Nordic!” Very well! Let us have both triteness and vagueness rather than the rabid nationalism which seems to think that devotion to one’s own country carries with it corresponding hatred and distrust of all countries. Moreover, however real the cause of hatred and distrust may be, it certainly cannot be removed by more hatred and distrust. Do we try to cure disease by adding more disease? Well, the only way to cure national and political disease is to inject the germs of nat- ional and political health. As almost every con- ceivable formula has been tried without permanent success, is it not high time for men to become wise enough to test the Way that leads to the unfolding of national genius, and at the same time helps all nations toward the self-realization which merges into the Kingdom of God? I like the word country, thirdly, because it con- tains something absolutely spiritual. “Now this Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to the Jerusalem that now is: for she is in bondage with her children. But the Jerusalem that is above is free, which is our mother.” As certain geologi- cal strata run under all oceans, so the spiritual herit- age of mankind runs above all nations and reaches unto the City of God. “For they that say such things make it manifest that they are seeking after a country of their own. And if indeed they had been mindful of that country from which they went out, they would have had opportunity to return. But now they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed of them 94 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST to be called their God; for He hath prepared for them a city.” Here, then, is the heavenly secret of the new in- sight into my own and other countries. It is rooted in the spiritual, which is the eternal. And upon this, the sixty-eighth anniversary of his birth, I think the emphasis he placed upon this truth is one of the outstanding contributions of the Great War President. ‘It is my deliberate belief,” says Elihu Root, ‘that the greatest contributions to the his- tory of world peace are the negotiations and ex- changes that have failed in their immediate object. The man who has spent himself in the march or in the charge before he reached the breastworks is a greater benefactor to the world than the man who sets the flag.” Now, in one of the four or five biog- raphies which have been published within a year of his death, an announcement reads: “It is high time for a thorough, frank, and impartial appraisal of Woodrow Wilson as man and President.” Hardly! That sentence was written by the “ad. man,” not by the historian. We are reminded of the Great War Library presented by Mr. Herbert Hoover to Leland Stanford University; it is sealed, and will not be opened for twenty-five years. We are re- minded, also, of the judgment of Doctor Charles W. Eliot, that in about fifty years historians will be able to take the historic proportions of the world’s first international statesman. ‘‘Woodrow Wilson,” says William Allen White in his volume, ‘‘the ad- ministrator, the head of the Army and Navy, put into battle millions of men, and treasure beyond the dream of avarice. During the nineteen months of THE DIFFERENT ROAD 95 the War, those men and that treasure, hurtling out of the catapult of our physical fortress, crashed into the German forces terrifically. Probably no con- queror in the world, not Philip of Macedon, not Cesar, not Genghis Khan, not Napoleon, ever in so short a time assembled so much death-dealing force against an enemy. Wilson, meeting force with force, was an Ajax hurling thunderbolts. And yet, what he did with force will crumble. If only force had conquered the Kaiser, he and his kind could return again. But the conflict in the upper zone, the weapons of the spirit, the thunderbolts of reason, the shafts of resistless logic, Wilson’s will for a more abundant life on this planet, his vision of a new order, his call to a nobler civilization, the Olympian debate which he began April 2, 1927, and continued for three years until he was stricken— that is a part of the conquest of this War which leaves him a world conqueror, the only one whose fortifications will not turn to dust.” In other words, Woodrow Wilson’s insight into his own country and all other countries roots itself, finally, in the soil of the Better Country, that is, a Heavenly. Walking along the seashore with a friend, years before he was President, he remarked that if he ever attained to that great office, it would mean for him the supreme sacrifice. Looking out into the mysterious deep, he quoted aloud his own elegy—the last poem in The Oxford Book of Eng- lish Verse: “In the hour of death, after this life’s whim, When the heart beats low and the eyes grow dim, 96 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST And pain has exhausted every limb— The lover of the Lord shall trust in Him. When the will has forgotten the lifelong aim, And the mind can only disgrace its fame, And a man is uncertain of his own name— The power of the Lord shall fill this frame. When the last sigh is heaved, and the last tear is shed, And the coffin is waiting beside the bed, And the widow and child forsake the dead— The angel of the Lord shall lift this head. For even the purest delight may pall, And power must fail and pride must fall, And the love of the dearest friends grow small— But the glory of the Lord is all in all.” Like the wise men, all human beings may be led by the Undying Star of God. Coming out of the mystic deeps, our feet may be lured by many roads; but, following the Star, we shall find with joy un- speakable the different road. It will lead us back to our own Country, whose capital is the City of God, whose citizens are the redeemed out of all na- tions, whose Saviour is the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the universe. V DHESAPE DAD ION DHt CHRISTIAN MINISTRY * “Take heed to the ministry which thou hast received in the Lord,’—Cor. 4:17. IKE, my predecessors in this lectureship, I find ip my subject already stated: “The Appeal of the Christian Ministry.” Thus, the state- ment of theme does not vary from year to year; the variousness will consist in the approaches and expositions of the various lecturers. While I did not choose the subject, let me add that I like it im- mensely. It is big and vital, entirely worthy of the best that our most competent Christian thinkers can bring to its elucidation and development. I The first note in the appeal of the Christian min- istry relates to Manhood. The minister must be something; this is in the category of first things that must come first. The Christian minister is compounded of the elements of. Christlikeness. There is about him a tang and tone that distin- guishes him from other men; and this, too, without implying that there is not a genuine Christlikeness in other men. Yet this distinction, it cannot be said too emphatically, is not in his dress nor his walk *The Mills Lecture, Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Ind., March 12, 1924, 97 "f 98 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST nor his talk, primarily. These may all be more or less modified and influenced by the subtle airs blow- ing through any profession whatsoever. Each bears its own external marks. But the distinguish- ing and definitive phase of the Christian minister is so deep and unustal as to be explained by noth- ing less than his own Christianized self. Too much emphasis can scarcely be placed upon this aspect of our study. Christ within the soul, Christ manifesting Himself through the activities of the soul—that is the mark of any Christian, of course; but for a Christian minister to be wanting in this absolute qualification spells a tragedy too deep for words or tears. “I know Him Whom I have believed’—that is the apostolic and classic Christian experience of these twenty centuries. Many things the Christian minister may not know; but this one thing he must know if he is to perform, acceptably to God and man, the duties of his high calling. I shall not tarry at this juncture to point out what one may call the lesser religious conceptions. They are ethical, humane, intellectual, shot through with the light of morality. At the same time, either com- paring or contrasting them with the New Testament and historic experience of those believing in the God and Father revealed only in Jesus Christ, they betray an incompleteness which can be accounted for solely by the absence of faith in the personal, living, redeeming, reigning Christ. To believe in God is one thing, and a very great thing; to be- lieve in “the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord,” is a much larger and greater thing. THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY 99 This, then, is the first necessity of the Christian minister, and, through him, the matchless appeal of the Christian ministry: He must be something. Upon this particular point Woodrow Wilson has spoken words every minister should hide in his heart. “When I hear some of the things which young men say to me by way of putting the argu- ments to themselves for going into the ministry, I think that they are talking of another profession,” he says. “Their motive is to do something, when it should be to be something. You do not have to be anything in particular to be a lawyer. I have been a lawyer and I know. You do not have to be anything in particular, except a kind-hearted man, perhaps, to be a physician; you do not have to be anything, nor to undergo any strong’ spiritual change, in order to be a merchant. The only pro- fession which consists in being something is the ministry of our Lord and Saviour—and it does not consist of anything else. And that conception of the minister which rubs all the marks of it off and mixes him in the crowd so that you cannot pick him out, is a process of eliminating the ministry itself.” Now, in being something, the Christian minis- ter is the greatest of all beings known to our world. He is man marked with the plus mark. A man by virtue of race, he is a minister by virtue of grace— even the grace of God in Christ. An edition of Christian manhood is so rich, so wrought of all at- tractive virtues, that I shall attempt to single out only one feature at this time; but in this one fea- ure lies a very strong appeal to young men deter- mined to become strong men in the noblest sense. 100 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST It is summed up in the word Courage. Significantly enough, in both Latin and French the word for courage is a blood-relation of the word for heart. Get a man’s whole heart and you get the whole man. And is not that what the Christian ministry de- mands—a whole man? Yet how dare we think of a whole man devoid of courage? We simply can- not. Therefore, the Christian minister must be alive with courage. ‘That means physical courage —ready to die, if need be, for his cause. It means intellectual courage—bravery to face the tremen- dous intellectual problems always contesting his progress. It implies, of course, moral courage— the rarest of all and the greatest of all. Now, has there ever been an era when this full- toned courage was more imperative than our own? I think not. The times have always been out of joint, but never have the times been so jointless on a world-scale as today. Humanity is indeed on the march, but where is it marching to, and what is the ideal that is moving it? These are questions of in- finite and contemporary moment. ‘They cannot be answered in the old nationalistic strain without re- sultant doom and destruction to civilization itself. Yet multitudes are sincere in their conviction that the nations must continue to war and make war as in the past. Egged on by politicians in various nations, these very patriots are in danger of be- coming super-patriots. We have a few in America. Nevertheless, what all men everywhere need to be told is: The God of the whole earth has a con- tention with the nations of the earth in the matter of fostering and conducting war. But the super- THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY 101 patriot of any nation is in no mood to listen to common sense, much less the spirit of Christianity. Consequently, the new crusade has no less a task than to change the outlook of the majority of peo- ple with reference to the place, value, and meaning of their own nation among all nations. As Mr. A. Clutton Brock suggests, we must learn to pool our national self-esteem, even as we pool our personal and family self-esteem. To be everlastingly harp- ing about one’s self or family is the height of bad manners; so much have we already learned as indi- viduals. A similar lesson must be learned by na- tions. To be incessantly talking about the superior- ity of “my country” is stock-in-trade for the pro- fessional politician and militarist; we rather expect this of these gentlemen; but intelligent, patriotic citizens, willing to both live and die for their coun- try if their country is right, knowing that their own citizenship is bound up with the welfare of man- kind, must insist, as never before, upon the true and more Christian viewpoint. But to do this—make no mistake!—requires courage of the grandest and deepest sort. Person- ally, I am not able to accept the philosophy of pacifism. In a world such as ours designing men may compel even Christians to fight a righteous war, though it means a kind of moral crucifixion to them. Perhaps it was this feeling that caused Franklin to say: “There never was a good war or a bad peace.” Yet, bad as all wars are, it is some- times necessary to wage them on behalf of the right itself—and right, said our World-War President, is more precious than peace. But while I am not a 1022 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST pacifist, I admire many pacifists for this reason: They exemplify a high-minded courage. In many instances they manifest more physical, mental, and moral courage than is required “‘to kiss the lips of a blazing cannon.” It is only the yellowest of yel- low journals that impute either physical cowardice or moral weakness to many of those calling them- selves pacifists. In not a few instances the pacifists embody 'more manhood, more mentality, more mor- ality, and more genuine patriotism than their tra- ducers. For example, Bertrand Russell can intel- lectually swallow most of the English and American penny-a-liners and run no risk whatever of suffer- ing an attack of mental indigestion therefrom. Well, this is the kind of courage that the Chris- tian ministry must have; and having it—illustra- ting it by words and deeds—he ranks with those who make the Christian ministry offer its irresist- able appeal to the true, the brave, and unselfish of every generation of youth. If The second note in the appeal of the Christian ministry is Vision. ‘The minister must see some- thing. And upon this matter of vision I wonder if those familiar words of Ruskin have not a kind of finality? He said that the longer he lived the more deeply he was convinced that the greatest thing a human being ever does is to see something and then tell what he sees in a plain way. If not final, the words are at least tremendously sugges- tive, because they contain two of the most essential qualifications of the true minister. THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY 103 The first, as already indicated, is vision. Let us try to grasp the meaning of Christian vision by at- tempting to say what it is not. We may do this with the aid of the dictionary—a book in which many ministers are altogether too little read. Vision, we are told, is the act of seeing external objects. Well, Christian vision is not that. Again: It is the faculty that perceives the luminosity, color, form, and relative size of objects. Christian vision is not that. A third definition says vision is ‘‘that which is seen; an object of sight; specifically, a supernatural or prophetic appearance; something seen in a dream, ecstasy, trance, or the like; also, an imaginary appearance; an apparition; a phan- tom.” ‘This definition brings us to the point, as the children say in playtime, where we are, in the game of definition, “getting warm.’ And yet, we may almost say again, Christian vision is not that. However, when we leave the verbal territory gov- erned by adjectives and nouns and cross the vital frontiers into the land of the verbs, we make a real approach to the heart of the idea. For vision, we then read, is to “perceive by the eye of the intellect or imagination.” In this definition we approach the heart of what I take to be the Christian concept of vision. For to arrive at and within the reality so far as words may assist us, I think there is a mysterious blend- ing of the intellectual and imaginational, trans- figured by the light radiating from the Person of the historic and eternal Saviour; in a word, what Paul calls “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Wherever this 104 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST focus occurs in a human soul, that soul is lifted to what we may name, for want of a better term, the fourth dimension of reality. ‘Metaphysics?’ O yes—plenty of “it” or “them” or “both!” Still, we must not get frightened at a big word, especially when the thought it contains haunts us, finally, in every stick or stone by the wayside. Is it not a fact that the moment we undertake to ultimately explain anything at all we leap into the ocean of metaphysics? ‘The science of physics and the phi- losophy of metaphysics dwell far apart in our de- partmental methods of thinking; and there are ex- cellent academic reasons why this should be so. Yet, when we dare to venture into the realm of causality—that which lies behind and within elec- trons, worlds, wills, minds, logic, philosophy, art, and science—the Infinite All comes thundering down upon our academic houses built of mental egg-shells, and the ruins thereof are engulfed in a soundless sea of metaphysics! However, let us get back to our thought of vision. Everybody should have vision, of course; but there is one body who must have it or fail; and that body is the minister. And now it is time to add what the content of his vision must be. As always, the Master has left nothing vital to be said upon this subject. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart’—we have heard it a thousand times, but after we have been in Heaven a million years, we shall still be wonder- ing at its ever-growing meaning!—‘“for they shall see God.” Here, then, is the content of our vision. “But what does it mean?” you ask. Frankly, I don’t know; and again, frankly, if I could tell you THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY 105 all that it means, it could not possibly mean all that it unquestionably does mean. We know, of course, the surface significance—that it means moral and spiritual as contrasted with formal or ceremonial purity; that it has to do with the eyes in the soul rather than with the eyes in the head. This much we know. But to see God—what does that mean? Again, I can’t tell you. But it must mean more than to define God; yea, it means more than to experience God. Every soul may experience all of God it is capable of experiencing, and there are still inexhaustible, unfathomable depths of God- hood which remain unexperienced. “But now,’ you exclaim, “to metaphysics you have added mys- ticism!”’ Yes, mysticism also contains a part of our vision of God. The mystics, the poets, and the prophets usually have a more inspiring conception of God than the scientists, the logicians, and the philosophers. It ought not to be so, but it is; and due, perhaps, to a reason somewhat akin to that given by a scholar in criticism of the evil ways into which a certain university had fallen. This institu- tion, it seems, was making more of social prestige and financial pull than of scholarship and character. “The sideshow,” laconically remarked the reform- president, ‘‘has swallowed the circus.” That is what often happens with thinkers in their attitude towards God. They become so engrossed in forces and laws and secondary matters that they lose sight of the Great Original; their mental sideshows simply swal- low, for them, the Eternal Performer. And then, unfortunately, they forthwith conclude that God is not, or that He is just a chimera to everybody else 106 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST in the world. Happily, the saints, the mystics, the prophets, the poets, the child-hearted, and the pure- hearted, out of every age and people, correct the aberrations of those who have allowed “the side- show to swallow the circus.” Now, for the minister to be hesitant or uncertain about his vision of God in Christ, is fatal to his supreme usefulness. As I have already said, there are many things he cannot know, may never know. But one thing he may know and must know: that, whereas he was spiritually blind, he now sees; he sees God, he sees the universe, he sees souls in the light of his subliming vision of God and is authentic with a glowing energy to help them up the high hills whereon they, too, may have their own vision of that Fatherhood out of Whom all fatherhoods and motherhoods are a processional of unaging reality. Ruskin’s words imply vision not only, but ex- pression also. Among the great acts of the soul, he says, is to see and tell in a plain way. Here, then, is one of the undying appeals of the Christian ministry; its votary must tell, must utter, its vision of God. We come, therefore, upon one of the sublimest and simplest facts in the history of the world. For, at bottom, all the great moods and movements of mankind lie in the efforts of men to publish their vision of God. All great music, art, eloquence, prophecy, literature, freedom, govern- ment, statesmanship—all are based, finally, upon man’s growing vision of God and his high resolve to tell that vision in terms of a better civilization. For there are those who believe that civilization it- THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY 107 self can be Christianized. Confessing that the process is only in its birth-throes, yet is not birth a necessary stage of life? Never before have birth- pangs smitten the planet upon such a scale. ‘“‘We are living,’ says a thinker, “in one of the immense upheavals of the world. There has been no change comparable to it among the States of Europe since the downfall of the Roman Empire.” But the sur- vey cannot be confined to the States of Europe; the States of America—of all the Americas—are like- wise involved. ‘True, some of us are not aware of it; but this is not altogether strange when we reflect that most people are not thrillingly alive, either, above the position of their Adam’s apple. If, as tradition has it, a piece of the forbidden fruit stuck in Adam’s throat, bits of the core must have lodged in the larnyx of hosts of his political de- scendants, thus affecting their mental apparatus also. For ampler elucidation of this matter, consult the Congressional Record. If some of the discussions therein of the League of Nations and World Court do not verify the foregoing statement, no other illustrations of our political ineptitude would be at all convincing. Seriously, however, there is one phase of the situation that is heartening. It is the historic; and the man of vision invariably makes his appeal to history. Look at the past, and inquire when and where a great and original movement ever had a majority on its side? All epoch-making inventions, for example, make their way slowly. Have not most great poets been crowned after the graveside rather than at the fireside? All introducers of new 108 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST orders go forth alone, lost in the distance amid the shouts and taunts of the stay-at-homes and tradi- tion-idolators. But the next generation starts up the road built by the pathfinder. This is at once the lesson and inspiration of history. For within and behind all history is that One Who says: “Re- member ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing; now shall it spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.” I do wish somebody would preach an epoch-making, nation-quaking, political-shaping sermon on “The Divine Iconoclasm.” But never mind! Even though such a sermon may never be preached, God—the great and terrible and glorious God—will practice His heavenly iconoclasm through all future history even as He has through all past history. “Learning to read the Bible,” says Bishop F. J. McConnell, “is a continuous process.” Learn- ing to interpret God in history is likewise a con- tinuous process, and no stand-patter is qualified for the task. Now, if we are opulently human and thoughtful, we reverence the past, with its travail, and tears, and triumphs; but when the past becomes religious or social or political petrification, look out! Something big and divine and wonderful shall come to pass. When traditions embarrass God, listen for the Voice, always young, always old, be- cause eternal: “Behold, I will do a new thing; now shall it spring forth; shall ye not know it?” This, therefore, is the sublime fact that the Chris- tian minister must express, tell forth. Yet, para- doxically enough, within the sublimity there is the THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY 109 soul of an uttermost simplicity. Is not the sublimest Soul in history the simplest Soul in history? The grandeur within the simplicity of Jesus is the moral miracle of the ages. All the loftier currents of personality seem to set toward His being, even as a thousand streams, springing from a thousand water-sheds, set toward the receptive deeps of the ocean. And as the ocean poiselessly enters all streams within its vast and encompassing bosom, so Jesus receives all the rills and rivers of personality into His own being, humanizes them, and sends them flowing through the generations of sensitive, receptive souls, who keep the shores of the River of Time green with the beauty of God, foretelling the day when all the far islands of humanity shall be verdant and vital through the knowledge of Him which shall cover the earth even as the waters cover the sea. | I ask you to consider this: Within the wedded sublimity and simplicity of Christianity lies one of the secrets of its power and universality. There may be religions which can be understood by phi- losophers alone; but Christianity is not one of them. ‘There may be religions which appeal to a particular class alone; but, let me repeat, Chris- tianity is not one of them. It is for all as the sun is for all. Christianity is to the soul what space is to the builder. No sane builder argues about the existence or non-existence of space. He pre- pares his plans and erects his building because racial and individual experience has taught him that the building and space fit into each other. Thus, any wisely simple soul may assume that Christianity is 110 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST real and proceed to build his house of being within its waiting spiritual spaces. Faithful to his task, he shall never be put to permanent intellectual or moral confusion. Always the wisdom of the wisest, Christianity may become the wonder of the worst. “And such also were some of you,” says Paul, writing to blossoming saints who were once burnt-out sinners. When Augustine had become a human morass, infested by all manner of loathsome, creeping things, he was rescued by the simplicity which is in Christ, Who finally transformed him into one of the great human and historic splendors of God. But before Augustine, was that incom- parable First Century with its John and Peter and Paul. The scholar, trying to classify these mighties, says that Peter determined the polity of the Church, John expounded its mysticism, and Paul wrought its philosophy. Without stressing this conclusion too dogmatically, consider that two of the three were untaught and had no social standing beyond that of Galilean peasants. And yet, says Harnack, Saint John, in whom the east of Peter and the west of Paul met, portrayed “the Life of eternity lived in the midst of time.” John combined, in a su- perlative degree, both the practical and mystical phases of Christianity. Consider, then, these four— out of the hundred and forty and four thousand harping with their harps; consider these four— John, Peter, Paul, and Augustine—without the Christ of God, and what.a difference it would have made to mankind! Consider, moreover, that in these four is illustrated the natural simplicity of the mind, as in Peter and John, and the natural vigor THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY 11) of the mind, as in Paul and Augustine, and we have a concrete example of the self-adjusting capacity of the Christian religion to every grade of tempera- ment and intellect. Further research will disclose that this same self-adapting principle is at work in every age, in every land, in every tongue. Little wonder, therefore, that the appeal of the Christian ministry must ever be in the demand upon its devotees to see something and then tell what they see—if not in a plain way, at least in their own way. For original individuality contains the note of authenticity. Each of us must take the raw material of the universe and recreate it in our own image and likeness; but it can never be a supremely beautiful image and likeness if our own souls are not already being fashioned under the touch of the One Lord and Master. Indwelt by Him we shall see something in the universe, some- thing in history, something in the souls of men; and that something will always suggest its own deeper aim and goal—the possibility of becoming the Kingdom of our Lord and His Christ. See deep enough, said Carlyle, and you will see musi- cally. Well, somewhere in the heights and depths of being, I think vision and music must speak the same tongue. If so, perhaps this is the import of what they say: “Worthy art Thou, our Lord and our God, to receive the glory and the honor and the power: for Thou didst create all things, and because of Thy will they are, and were created.” Til Character and vision lead us, sequentially, to the third thing: The Christian minister must do some- 112 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST thing. Activity is the normal forth-putting of pregnant personality; therefore, should not activity in the highest values and ventures be the result of a person who is something and sees something on this wonder-teeming earth? What Jesus was—that is the priceless heritage of the race. What Jesus saw—His vision of God and man and the uni- verse—that is the pillar of undying fire that haunts and illumines humanity’s darkest midnights. What Jesus did—Jesus Who went about doing good— that is the measure of every soul to whom and through whom the Christian ministry makes its high appeal. As in no other calling, the Christian ministry makes demands upon the active and passive sides of human nature. Perhaps the activity of the ministry has never been more marked than in our own generation. If one’s life-work is to be gauged by the number of things he does and is expected to do, then the twentieth century minister in the United States of America would seem to be very near a solution of the problem of perpetual motion. It is certain that the charge of quietude or quies- cence, if made against the average minister of our time, could not be sustained by the evidence in the case. Just here, it seems to me, is our glory or doom. Our glory if, by the grace of God, we keep our being centered upon the central things of our call- ing; our doom, if we fail to remember that triviali- ties may nibble away the measure and meaning of abounding realities. What, then, is the solution to this vexing prob- THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY 113 lem? Or is there any solution at all? I believe there is. It is at once old and new, apostolic and ageless. What many of us need, perhaps, is a deeper and firmer grasp of the largeness and variety of the service to be rendered by the Church through its ministry. Now, however much we may have gone beyond the methods of Paul—as in all Chris- tian grace and common sense it has been our privi- lege and duty to do—we have not outgrown Paul’s conception of the manifold wisdom of God in the Church. We still need to ponder over that tremen- dous passage in the Third of Ephesians. Without daring to undertake an exposition of it at this point in our study, just recall a few of the phrases. “The unsearchable riches of Christ”; here is a prospector, a miner of inexhaustible realms, amazed at his dis- covery—discovery and disclosure all in one! ‘And to make all men see what is the dispensation of the mystery which for ages hath been hid in God Who created all things.” “All men—all things’’—the universality of it! How dare we parade our crass literalisms, our petty nationalisms, our creedal squabbles, our loud-mouthed, passing fanaticisms in the presence of such all-inclusive verity? Why, the God of redemptive grace is none other than the God of the illimitable universe. May the cosmic majesty of it burn us clean of our littleness! “To make all men see,’—let me repeat it—“what is the dispensation of the mystery which for ages hath been hid in God Who created all things’: all sys- tems, all universes, all forces, all angels, all prin- cipalities, all powers, all human beings—“all things!’ Now let us read on, that we may glimpse the goal: 8 114 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST “To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in the heavenly places might be made known through the Church the manifold wisdom of God.” Yes, manifold—‘“numerous and varied; compre- hending various features, kinds, functions.” Let us not forget it: the wisdom of God is manifold, and it is to be made known through the Church. To this manifold wisdom through the Church, let us add another of the great Christian concep- tions. It is in the Twelfth of First Corinthians, that wondrous vestibule to the House of Love. Or, changing the figure, the apostolic heights of love are not reached by perpendicular but by spiral ascents. Round and round the roads wind, each bringing the spiritual mountain-climber a little nearer the summit of reality, which is Love. With- in diversities of gifts, diversities of ministrations, diversities of workings, says Paul, there is the same Spirit. ‘Now ye are the body of Christ, and severally members thereof. And God hath set some in the Church, first apostles, secondly prophets, thirdly teachers, then miracles, then gifts of heal- ings, helps, governments, divers kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? are all prophets? are all teachers? are all workers of miracles? have all gifts of heal- ings? do all speak with tongues? do all interpret?” And then Paul sinks and soars—sinks below all deeps, soars above all heights; he has reached the Land of Love, which has no ups and no downs, no ins and no outs; for the Land of Love is the Home of God and all those who have the Spirit of Christ. If, then, the Christian minister and ministry must THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY 115 do something, surely there is abundant room for individual and collective endeavor within these apostolic and dynamic spiritual worlds. Men cannot exhaust them; Time cannot age them; Society can- not outgrow them. Human degeneration, whether individual, national, or international, comes through failure to realize them; world-progress itself comes only through mankind growing up to and making real to its inner consciousness these everlasting truths by which men and races live. Out of them issues the abiding appeal of the Christian ministry. When their truth possesses the human heart, men go even their wounded ways with the stride of spiritual conquerors; and this, I think, must be the song they hear at the back of their minds: “What care I for caste or creed? It is the deed, it is the deed. What for class, or what for clan? It is the man, it is the man.. Heirs of love, and joy, and woe, Who is high, and who is low? Mountain, valley, sky, and sea Are for all humanity. What care I for robe or stole? It is the soul, it is the soul. What for crown, or what for crest? It is the heart within the breast ; It is the faith, it is the hope, It is the struggle up the slope. It is the brain and eye to see One God, and one humanity.” VI THE GOD OF SUCCESS* “But Herod the tetrarch, being reproved by him for his brother Philip’s wife, and for all the evils which Herod had done, added yet this above all, that he shut up John in prison.’—LukE 3:19, 20. M ANY people have learned to spell it with a small “g.” Believing that success is synonymous with three meals a day, a fat bank account, a high-powered automobile, a good time, a world from which aches and pains have been banished by the magic of mystery and the brazen- ness of ignorance, these uproarious devotees of the external, the infernal, the occult, the subconscious, and the unconscious are proclaiming “the new sal- vation” with a zeal which captivates the innocent and dazzles the unsuspecting. But it is allin vain. The God of Success refuses to have His great and glorious Name spelled with small letters, though they should resemble gold or fame or popularity or even psycho-analysis. As the Kingdom of God is not meat and drink, so the Hill of Success is not ascended by the superficially clever, the mentally bright, the morally inane, or the spiritually wan and cold. Consequently, I think it might be wholesomely invigorating for us to turn *Preached in the First Congregational Church, San Francisco, Sunday morning, July 13, 1924. 116 THE GOD OF SUCCESS 117 away, for a little, from the false gods of success and seek that One Who said and still says: ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” And this, I think, is what our text invites us to do. For Herod may shut up John in prison; but he cannot shut up John; he merely lifts John into a position to talk about Herod and his followers as long as time shall last. I We have in the first of these three characters the failure that looks like failure. ‘“Herodias his brother’s wife.” Some things are so ugly that we need no argument to prove their ugliness. Herodias — is one of these human things. Once, when Herod was in Rome, she fell in with her brother-in-law, and the twain were soon bound together in the bonds of iniquity. An adulteress, a murderess, at once the sister-in-law and niece of her royal para- mour, Herodias blackens the spiritual sky like some vast vulture, poisons the atmosphere like some deadly plant. Even to mention her name is to recall a whole company of sinister women—Clytemnestra, Cleopatra, Jezebel, Lady Macbeth, Madame Pompa- dour—a terrible group of venomous females! Visualizing, as Herodias does, the slimy, the vulgar, the painted, the pampered, the tawdry, the tinseled, do we need to linger long over this portrait of failure that looks like failure? One would think that, in itself, there is something so repulsive as to make its warning agelessly effective. But alas! it is not so. Loosen the bonds of moral restraint, break the ties which bind womanhood to God and 1188 THE OUNFATHOMABLE CHRIST home and purity, and of all the black tragedies en- acted beneath the merciful heavens, this is the blackest. Moreover, the degradation of woman- hood always brings the judgment-dooms of God upon individuals and nations ominously nearer. Terrible as the decay of manhood is and must be, the degeneracy of womanhood is even manyfold more disastrous. Personally, I do not believe in the false and unjust double standards of society. The same high practices should be demanded of men that we demand of women. And yet I know, and you know, when womanhood sets the down- ward pace to doom, it is all the more monstrous just because the deed is done by woman. It is not only woman’s doom to be more beautiful than man; she must also be more dutiful, more moral, more re- ligious, more Christlike. Carrying within her own soul these finer seeds of loveliness, it is required of her, by a kind of unwritten and yet very real law, that she produce a crop of virtues which man, in his limitations, seems incapable of. This is not to conclude, however, that morality is a matter of sex—male or female; it is simply the forthright recognition of a fact which right-thinking people will not allow to become obscured. Is there anything in the womanhood of our day to remind us of Herodias—of the failure that looks like failure? Verily, there is! I believe that there are more fine women in the world today than ever before in history. And there are many, to speak temperately, who are not so fine. In the New Testa- ment—the greatest book in all the world—such women are characterized, sometimes, as “silly.” THE GOD OF SUCCESS 119 These are they who think more of paint than of purity, more of vulgarity than of virtue, more of pearls than of principles, more of adornment than of adoration, more of hats than of holiness, more of dress than of duty, more of mirrors than of manners. No just indictment may be made against “style” as such. Indeed, there are excellent reasons why beauty and good taste should always have place in the attire of both women and men. But when the style-chaser falls victim to the style-maker, then does style itself become a kind of nightmare while decency is sacrificed on the altar of degradation. Thus do the words of Saint James describe the con- dition of many a woman in our own time: “She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth.” What a picture these ten words contain! Is it not a close-up of death in veneer? Essentially dead while she is apparently alive—that is the fact ex- hibited by the life of every Herodias, no matter what her environment, or epoch, or creed. Being in France in 1717, Peter the Great visited Madame de Maintenon, a former prostitute of Louis XIV. She was now eighty-three years old and living in the convent she had founded after the King’s death. Drawing aside the curtains of the bed on which she lay, Peter asked: “Of what disease do you suffer?” “Of old age,” replied the erstwhile royal harlot. Now, old age may not only be venerable; it may foretell the approach of the Spring Eternal; beneath its white there may be the green of the youth that knows not age. But what lay behind this old age? Was it merely a “disease” superin- duced by fourscore Summers and Winters? Hard- 120 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST ly! For behind that disease named old age is that other and worse malady named spiritual death. In that first quarter of the eighteenth century, Europe: was in the throes of gambling and lust. Says a historian: ‘The kings gambled, the queens gambled, the nobles gambled, the priests gambled, the com- mons gambled. There are well-authenticated in- stances in which the mourners played cards on the coffin of the deceased on the way to the cemetery.” They that live in pleasure are dead while they lve— that is God’s judgment upon the failure that looks like failure. Going through a department store, one woman remarked to another: “I want something cheap and good-looking.” Now, very few men have the heart to criticize the joy and thrill experienced by femi- nism when assembled on bargain-counter day. I must confess, however, that while standing at a reasonably safe distance, I have had a sort of mental reversion to type, as it were, and fancied myself in the midst of some of the social or religious rites practiced by American Indians. Well, something “cheap and good-looking” at the bargain-counter may be all right; but when something “cheap and good-looking’ gets into the blood, creeps into our moral stream, look out! For there are two forces unalterably opposed to any such thing. They are God and human nature. There is a divine and ever- lasting opposition to what is merely cheap and good- looking. It could not be otherwise in a moral order; God—just because He is God—is actively and in- evitably against everything that hurts human be- ings. The second opposition resides in human na- THE GOD OF SUCCESS 121 ture itself. Men and women, though every drop of their blood becomes so polluted as to produce eyes that look downward, can not always come to terms with what is “cheap and good-looking.” There is an irreducible grandeur in the human soul, created by God and guarded by Him, that, when dragged down into the lowest hell, must still reckon with the indestructible and immortal—the soulhood made in the Divine Image. What inner explosions, what purging fires may be necessary to consume what is only morally cheap and good-looking, God alone, in His wisdom and redemptive passion, has the right to say. Meantime, every mortal of us, while it is yet day and the sun of opportunity is still shining, should nerve our soul to seek and follow the Light of the World, that we may be saved from that vulgar, sordid, Herodias-failure that looks like failure, standing, “With hell in her heart and death in her hand Daring the doom of the unknown land.” II Our text exposes a second view of the philosophy of success. It is in ‘Herod the tetrarch.” He em- bodies the failure that looks like success. We pos- sessed his father’s genius for building; he also in- herited from his infamous sire the provinces of Galilee and Paraea, founding the town of Tiberias, with its flavor of Greek culture, on the west shore of the Sea of Galilee. In brief, Herod was the in- carnation of push, pomp, and power. He was a strange mixture of the forces named heredity, 122 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST politics, cunning, greed, creed, and conscience. For about the best thing in Herod seems to be the faintest flicker of the fading fire of conscience. The majesty of John the Baptist evidently touched the meanness of Herod into something akin to whole- some fear. True, it was not strong enough to with- stand the tigerlike fierceness of Herodias in her hatred of the prophet of God; but, let us not for- get, that Herod the tetrarch had momentary flashes when he might have seen life and seen it whole. Well, is there not a certain bleak tragedy, too, in the failure that looks like success? This is the kind of failure that dogs the steps of all of us. There is something subtle and snakelike in its glit- tering, hypnotic power. And it is the brand that is almost universally heralded today. Like an at- mosphere, this gospel of success makes its strong, silent pressure felt in every walk of life. Its key- note is bulk or bigness. Big talk, big dividends, big cities, big congregations, big armies, big circulation, big cars, big buildings, big—well, big everything! I think if some doctor were to visit us from an- other planet and made an honest diagnosis of our case, he would say that we had been keenly stung by the bug of bigness. In a certain city I watched a boy spinning his top. He was a crippled lad, all crumpled up and twisted together in knots of pain. He moved himself along the pavement by a wagon, which he managed in a skillful manner. Stretched almost prone in his little vehicle, he would throw a top onto the street and make it spin like a planet in the spaces. Why, the whole thing was done so wonderfully that I just THE GOD/OF SUCGESS 123 had to stop and look. Moreover, the lad’s face was as lovely as the morning itself. To see him smile as he placed his rhythmic toy anywhere he chose was a means of grace. Many times did he spin his top for my enjoyment. At last, when I slipped a coin into his hand, he paid me with a look of delight that outshone the lustre of diamonds. So he went on spinning his top as I went on my way to preach the sermon he gave me. That very noontime, in a great club of that city, a company of commercial and industrial kings sat down to lunch. Some were bankers, some were railway operators, some were publishers, some were mining engineers, some were steel and iron mag- nates, some were realtors—men who play a neces- sary part in the civilization of the twentieth century. They have a genius for transacting business, and they do it on an immense scale. Giving employment to thousands, they are among our modern giants sent forth to wrestle with matter and shape it into useful ends for human welfare. No sane person questions the honor, the serviceableness, the human- ity, the high-mindedness of many of these men. They are not horribly wicked just because they visualize what is popularly known as success. In the main, they are serious-minded men, energeti- cally set about the accomplishment of worthful tasks in a world of work. And yet, if there is nothing more than this; if making and building and hauling and digging and buying and selling—if these constitute the summum bonum of human beings, all rounded with a sleep and mounded with a handful of dust, then are not 124 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST these capable, clever, industrious, twentieth century citizens top-spinners also? In no mere figurative sense, are they not the devotees, yea, the victims, of the failure that looks like success? Once there was a youth resolved on succeeding in life—a right noble resolve, and one every mortal should entertain, provided his idea of success is big enough, worthy of an immortal soul. For- tunately, there was a wise man—the Seer, as he was affectionately called—living in the same com- munity. People, especially young people, loved him and considered it a privilege to “have out’ their problems with him. So, haunted by the ghost of a false success, the youth said: “I will talk it over with the Seer.” Four things the young man had resolved to do in life. ‘First of all,’ he said, after the Seer had welcomed him into his Place of Quiet, “T am going to obtain a first-class education.” “Good,” replied the Seer, with enthusiasm. “And what then?” “Then I am going to the city where sO many ways of success are always open.” “Per- haps that may be well,” said the Seer. “And what then?” That whip-crack question came sharp and searching as each successive step was disclosed. “Well, then,” said the youth, “I shall probably think of marrying and making a home.” “And what then?’ came the same challenging interrogation, with deepening emphasis upon the last word. “By that time,’ replied the youth, “I suppose that I shall be more and more engrossed in building up my fortune, or, as it is sometimes expressed, in making my pile.” The young man’s face flushed a bit as he uttered these words. But once again the THE GOD OF SUCCESS 125 Seer, with a mystic fire dancing in his eye and a new meaning thrilling through his voice, asked: “And what then?” Plainly, the youth was em- barrassed. It began to dawn upon him that his program, after all, was scarcely large enough; and in that hour, let us believe, he began to conceive a worthier criterion of success. My friends, should not the Seer’s question be fairly burnt into the consciousness of our age? When things climb into the saddle and ride man- kind; when “getting on” in the world becomes the norm of being; when success cults fatten their finances at the expense of common sense and com- mon, honesty; when the lure of luxury and the evil of extravagance threaten to blind multitudes to the blazing ubiquities of conscience and character, is it not high time we are facing once again this ques- tion: “And what then?” James Bryce said that Lord Acton was the most truly cosmopolitan of Englishmen, that Europe it- self regarded him, by universal consent, in the fore- most rank of her men of learning. Well, it was this same Lord Acton who, in his inaugural lecture as Professor of History at Cambridge University, said: “Jt ts the office of historical science to main- tain morality as the sole impartial criterion of men and things.’ Ah, that is what we modern people, busy with our business and noisy with our national- isms, need to grasp with a spiritual tenacity which will not let go. Otherwise, we shall doom our- selves to the fate of blind Samsons grinding in the mills of a remorseless materialism. In the essay to which I have referred, Mr. Bryce 1246. THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST tells of a conversation he had with Lord Acton at the latter’s home at Cannes. It was late at night, says Bryce, and the great scholar discoursed for about six or seven minutes on how a history of liberty might be written. ‘The eloquence was splendid,” he continues, “but greater than the elo- quence was the penetrating vision which discerned through all events and in all ages the play of those moral forces, now creating, now destroying, always transmuting, which had moulded and remoulded in- stitutions, and had given to the human spirit its ceaselessly-changing forms of energy. It was as if the whole landscape of history had been sud- denly lit up by a burst of sunlight.” What a speaker and what an audience assembled yonder in that “silence of the sleep-time!”’ I never saw Lord Acton, but I have seen James Bryce and heard him speak. The wisdom of his speech proved that he was a great and eloquent listener. And what was the subject of that memorable discourse of the celebrated scholar? ‘The play of moral forces’’—that is the subject, finally, of every thinker of the first order. And it is this, and this alone, that lights up the whole landscape of history with bursts of sunlight. Therefore, neither Herodias— incarnation of the failure that looks like failure— nor Herod—exemplar of the failure that looks like success—shall be able to stand with the realities that abide when all shams are tried by fire, and oul the fire remains. iil There is a third figure moving majestically about in our text. “He shut up John in prison.” Never THE GOD OF SUCCESS 127 mind, now, about Herodias, or Herod, or the prison. This man John has something to say that men will hear as long as they have any hearing. And what is the theme of John’s speech? Why, John pro- claims the failure that is success. Behold John—he of whom the Master said: “Among them that are born of women there hath not arisen a greater than John the Baptist.” Rob- ertson of Brighton, with the insight of genius, em- phasizes the three things that thrust John into prison. In his rebuke of Herod, the prophet is an example of straightforwardness—he does not mince his words when condemning wickedness in high places; of unconsciousness—he does not say, “‘Lis- ten, as I give this Herod a needed scolding”; of unselfishness—he had nothing to gain and life it- self to lose by doing his duty. This, then, is John— straightforward, unconscious, unselfish. Looking a little closer, various strains and tones, it seems, enter into the making of this sublime man. There is, first of all, the mystic. For thirty years John had gone to God’s school in the desert. The color of the ground, the light of dawn, the heat of noon, the fire of sunset, the wailing wind, the viper wriggling through the grass, the desert sand stretching along its own gray waste, the wild beast with its howl and hunger and rage, the vulture that blackened the sky like a winged scavenger—yea, the desert, with its gray, creeping, running, flying creatures, had gone into John’s blood. I think the desert had imparted to John’s eye the flash and vision of uncourtly, lonely, far-off things. The 128 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST desert was John’s altar and thereon he sacrificed to the living God. Next we see John as the minister. Out of the inmost soul of things the mystic is wrought into God’s prophet. At last John comes forth not with a book but with a soul that makes books. John was not a reviewer of what others have said; he was a reviewer of what God is saying. It will take some of us, I fear, a long time to see the difference. But even when John the Mystic has become John the Minister, there are many, many things he does not know. If he did, what would be the use of faith? To know everything would be to negative, turn into sheer disuse, the mightiest power God has placed at the disposal of mortals—the power of faith. So John the Minister, when Herod shut him up in prison, hears the croakings of the raven of doubt. Yet even the sickness of doubt may have its compensating recuperations if we take it into the presence of the Christ. Look once again at John, and this mystic-minister is a martyr. MHerodias gets her revenge while Herod gets a deeper stain of blood upon the gar- ments of his soul. The pawn of fate, apparently, John pays blood down for the privilege of wit- nessing unto the truth. While some forsook and some denied, he went his lonely way, thinking his long, long thoughts. Now, I suggested at the outset of our study, the God of Success may be spelled with either small or capital letters. To spell it with little letters means little, false judgments and ideals. As we spell it, so we are. If we accept the conventional and popu- THE GOD OF SUCCESS 129 lar notion that success is the “attainment of a pro- posed object, as wealth, position, or the like,” we shall never climb God’s holy hill of spiritual great- ness. If, on the other hand, we are resolved to make things the servants of the soul; if we con- sider life the privilege of manifesting the meaning of the Cross; if, blinded though we ofttimes are by the dust and dirt flying from the ever-building Temple of Truth, we still have eyes for the unseen and eternal; if, as the scholar says, “we maintain morality as the sole impartial criterion of men and things’; if, moreover, we see to it that our morality is fired by faith in Christ, lest our souls be fed upon philosophic or theologic crumbs rather than upon the Bread of God; if, living or dying, in sickness or health, in poverty or prosperity, in good report or evil, we follow on to know the Lord, even though such knowledge should stretch us prone upon our cross of defeat and death, we shall find ourselves at last on the side of God, on the side of the angels, on the side of the prophets and martyrs, on the side of the faithful out of all climes and times— yea, on the side of Him Who says: “My sheep know My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me: and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of My hand.” No; my friends, there is no true success that fails to reckon with the Cross. And the Cross is God’s way with the soul because it is God’s way with Himself. “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.” This is the wonder that never grows old; this is the truth that the A , 130 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST souls of men must have; and it is my conviction that, finally, they will close with no other, even ‘though they may perish in refusing this. Like Stevenson, if we wake in hell, we may still believe in an ultimate decency of things; but there can be no ultimate decencies in Hell or Heaven without the power of the Cross—the Love that will not let us go—because He Whose Name is Love is set on making all souls Christlike lovers. So I, too, proclaim the God of Success unto you, but I spell His Name with capital letters. Once a man went through our country writing poems for his bread. He wrote a poem for every home that kept open house to him. But sometimes this mod- ern Homer, begging his bread with bits of beauty, was mistreated. Finally, he came upon a man liv- ing in a cabin in the woods. He proved to be an unknown Greatheart. ‘This is what I came out into the wilderness to see,” says the Poet. ‘This man had nothing, and gave me half of it, and we both had abundance.” It is Love’s way, whether in mansion or wilderness. It is the way of true suc- cess. This morning I stood once again by the tomb of Thomas Starr King. San Francisco may well be proud of her great preacher and patriot. Yonder monument in Golden Gate Park fittingly bespeaks your appreciation of this minstrel and prophet. Someone said that no heart ever ached because of him until he died. “God,” he once declared, “‘is the Infinite Christ. Jesus revealed under human limi- tations the mercy and love of the Father.” Great soul! Pure heart! Mighty mind! Dying, he said: THE GOD OF SUCCESS 131 “T see a great future before me. Tell my friends that I went lovingly, trustfully, peacefully.” Then, as Thomas Starr King left the City by the Golden Gate for the City with Gates of Gold, he repeated, softly: ‘The Lord is my shepherd: I shall not want.” An older man than King—more massive, more mountain-like of proportion—lay dying yonder at Marshfield a few years before. Like a vast ship that has outridden many a storm, the soul of Daniel Webster—the greatest orator in history and one of its supreme intellects—is coming in out of the night, drenched to the quick with the bleak, bitter rains of Time. But, like Carlyle, Eternity had already be- come Webster’s strong city. So, as this colossal human lays aside his vestments of clay, that Night- ingale of the Psalms begins to sing in his heart, as he, too, whispers: “The Lord is my shepherd: I shall not want.” Thus did the Atlantic and the Pacific kiss each other in these two kingly souls; three thousand miles of space are melted into the moulds of spirit; time itself became no more as Webster and King breathed their souls back to God to the undying tune of the singer of olden years: “The Lord is my shepherd: I shall not want.” Any success that fails, finally, of this divine criterion, is not the suc cess the soul of man was created to enjoy. VII CHRIST'S NEW LAW * “TI give you a new command, that you love one an- other—as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this shall all men know that you are My Ere you have love one to another.’—JouN 13: 34, 35. Y WAY of preéminence, the upper room, in B which the Master spoke these words, has be- come the whispering gallery of Heaven let down, Jacob’s ladder-like, upon the earth. In that hour a new edition of thought came from the whirl- ing presses of matter, space, and time. All that the . universe had been striving to say so long and had never found a fit instrument of expression for—all the yearning at the heart of things at last blossomed into speech, becoming articulate in the words of our Lord and Master. Great is the man who learns and tells how atoms and stars are held together. Great is the man who learns how colors blend and paints a picture immortal. Great is the man who listens to harmonies unheard and then woos them into the land of melody. But greater, far greater by all the diameters of being, is that One who heard the Heart of Love beating and breaking through the heart of things, and then told what He heard in language as Ngee in the First Presbyterian Church, New York, March 8, 1925. 132 CHRIST’S NEW LAW 133 simple as the speech of childhood, and lived it, also, in deeds as sublime as stars in their courses. Let us think, therefore, of Christ’s New Law. It will answer more questions, soothe more heartaches, correct more misunderstandings, create more joy, dry more tears, foster more efficient industrial re- lations, solve more individual, national, and inter- national problems than any power or wisdom yet released into the ways of men and society. I Consider, first, in what sense this law is new. For if we really believe in God, there is a sense in which it is not new at all. Our Master’s law of love is as old as the nature of God. ‘God is love; God so loved; we love, because He first loved us.” These are a few flashes out of the Sun of Love, which suggest that love is as old as God, and, con- sequently, as agelessly new as the Divine amid His worlds. And yet, our question is necessary: In what sense is our Lord’s law of love new? I think the answer , is at hand. First, it is new in the quality of person uttering it. “J’—that is the central fact—‘I give you a new command.” We shall never get away, even if we desired, from the wonder and mystery of personality. For personality, in its least attractive expression, is still more unfathomable than a whole universe of material elements. Matter in itself is mysterious enough, but when matter embodies mind, when mind functions through matter, there comes into being one of the illimitable creations that 134 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST thinking persons stand in awe of. I am not think- ing now of the greater, the sublimer editions of per- sonality—such as Moses, or Confucius, or Plato, or Rembrandt, or Beethoven. That little, pale, frail, undeveloped specimen of personality—‘“with no language but a cry’’—that, I say, is a uniquer crea- tion than the star-hung spaces. But when we reflect upon personality in its noblest embodiment, then, indeed, do we begin to take off our mental shoes. And is not that what we are compelled to do when we see the light of the Eternal Mind blazing through matter-molded forms and listen to words that bloom out of the dust of things? “J give you a new command.” All that Sinai tried to say and could not; all that Isaiah dreamed and dreaming on, died, with his dreams unfulfilled: all that the harps of Greek and Hebrew melodists strove to sing,—here, at last, law and dream and song are embodied, moving about the haunts of men, telling them that their visions are true, but too small; that the reality goes beyond the ideal. The quality of person uttering this law, I insist, is altogether unique. Sometimes men follow a stream that is not always visible. Here it flows through the open spaces, reflecting its silver en- chantment; there it goes through the wooded tracts, half concealed amid the golden glooms; but yonder it goes, and where? Why, the stream is no longer visible, it is lost to view, winding about in the dark, underground. How do men then track the course of their lost stream? Why by the verdure—clean, sweet, and April-kissed — growing immediately above the sunken stream. Thus, somewhat, the CHRIST’S NEW LAW 135 River of God’s Love has always been flowing across and over and under the world; but that unique, par- ticular, and verdurous expanse of loveliness cast up by the sunken river of love Divine—that is the Lord Christ. “I give you a new command.” And just as a river—visible or invisible—is always giving, so, too, the Master gives with riverlike bountiful- ness. He gives His new law to the universe of created intelligences as naturally as a river gives greenness and beauty to the plant life along its shores or rooted in its bosom. There is a second answer to the sense in which this law is new. It is new in the kind of character it produces. The true Christian is a new species in the gardens of time. This fact is so extraordinary that comparatively few of us ever seriously regard it at all. Moreover, the achievement of Christlike character is so rare that, when achieved, men have a right to exclaim: “Here, indeed, is one of God’s human gods come down to dwell upon the earth.” But why such extraordinariness and rarity? Just because the Christian type of character is so diffi- cult of attainment. Most of us, I suppose, are Christianized in spots. We have our intermittent hours of unselfishness, of big dreams of big deeds; of the high hills of purpose calling down to our low valleys of performance; but the long, steady, uphill pull and sacrificial, love-girded way—how inconse- quentially most people fit their clumsy feet into that! Our wills are as uncertain as the March winds, and quite as uproarious when crossed. Our outlook upon the vast, teeming world extends about as far as the back yard fence,—if the day is per- 136 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST fectly clear. Our resolution to be kind and tolerant lasts until the fundamentalist or modernist in us is challenged by the Christlike; and then our theol- ogies and philosophies, old and new, take wings and fly away, giving place to the imp of suspicion and unbrotherliness. And why are we so easily tripped up in these matters? It is not enough to answer: Because we are human and poor worms of the dust! Even poor worms plow their furrows deep, in preparation for the crops of God. Our failure, I think, is largely here: We have never realized that the Christian is a new type of human—an offshoot from the Vine of God, blooming over the walls of humanity. The Good Lord deliver us all from that smug, easy-go- ing, conventional kind of discipleship that functions one day in seven, and scarcely one hour of that one day! The Good Lord deliver us, also, from that colorless kind of religion that makes much of the particular color of the skin behind which it color- lessly hides, as if the very heart of God Himself were somehow red or black or white or yellow! The Christian God is not a Nordic creation. | No, my friends, to be a Christian is the hardest task God, the Father Almighty, has set for mortal minds, wills, and hearts. And when one of these great-strided souls comes marching down the road- ways of the world, are not men thrillingly aware that something new and unusual has been released out of the heavens? Consider that first disciple band. It was not their cleverness, but their Christ- likeness, that out-lived, out-loved, out-willed, and out-thought the hard, pagan world, on which, ac- CHRIST’S NEW LAW 137 cording to Arnold, disgust and secret loathing fell. And always, the dreary centuries through, when some Francis of Assissi, or some Booth of London, or some Livingstone of Africa, or some Brainerd of America, or some Mary Slessor of Caliabar, has trodden the path of the Divine otherism, over and over again the after-glow of the Eternal Christ has made the human skies more glorious than the after- glow of the sunset heavens, burning with altar fires kindled in cosmic furnaces. We ordinary people need a truer understanding and a finer practice of what it means to be a disciple, a scholar in the school of Christ. Such a realization would make our ordinary world to pulse with the power of our extraordinary and all-glorious Lord, functioning through wills set to do the will of God on earth, even as it is done in Heaven. There is still a third answer concerning the new- ness of Christ’s new law. It is new in its method for transforming the world. “I give you a new command, to love one another—as I have loved you, you are to love one another.” “But,” you say again, “love is not new, love is as old as God. ‘Therefore, love is older than the morning stars that sang to- gether at the creation.” And you are right—only you are not right enough in the deeper interpreta- tion of love. While love always was, love never had a chance to fully express itself in the world of human beings and human relationships, until the Lord Christ took up the harp of life and smote on all its chords—not with might, but with love, which is infinitely mightier than might. So, the Master does not say, merely, that all disciples are to love 138 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST one another; for men, women, and children have always loved one another the world around, the ages long. To be sure, they have loved imperfectly, but they have loved, nevertheless. What the Mas- ter says is this: “As I have loved you, you are to love one another.” Ah! therein is the unfailing newness of it all! Who ever loved on this earth as Christ loved those first disciples? Never before was love so wisely, patiently, discriminatingly, heartbreakingly humanized, because never before had love ever found an instrument whereby to utter forth its whole Divine and human self. But now, in the fullness of the times and the eternities, love has found an organ fine enough, rich enough, strong enough, tender enough, wise enough, tearful enough, dying enough, deathless enough, to utter all its wailing minors and wooing majors. “As I have loved you.” Here is the sun at the center of God’s new human solar system. “But tell me,” you demand, “how could mere mortals, beset by hate and prejudice and ignorance and sin, ever hope to love like Christ?” That is a tremendous question, a just one, and it requires a great answer. ‘Therefore, the Lord of the Soul must give His own answer; I cannot, I dare not. “You will understand on that day,” He says, “that I am in my Father and you are in Me and I am in you.” Mystical? Yes, very, but life is mystical, mysterious, and majestic. Here is a buried root. The sun away off in the spaces says: ‘Oh, root, you must grow a stock! The stock must push through the soil; then branches must come, and then bud and bloom and fruit.” But the buried root protests: ’ CHRIST’S NEW LAW 139 “It is all so strange, so mysterious, so impossible.” And then the sun whispers: “Nothing is impossible, little root. I will be in you, you will be in me, and, thus giving and receiving light, we will grow and unfold and bloom and be fruitful together.’’ So the sun-energy and the root-response produce together their luscious fruit. Take a human fact: Fathers and Mothers so love themselves into the lives of their children that chil- dren wear their ancestral and hereditary habits like a garment. Parenthood is in the child and child- hood is in the parenthood—so in-wrought are they that nothing is able to deface, entirely, the resem- blance of children and parents. Lying behind and working through all laws of heredity and environ- ment is the living God, even the Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. When God in Christ shines into human beings, the very roots of human- ity begin to quiver with new power and the law of Christian resemblance is fulfilled. ‘‘We all, be- holding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Spirit of the Lord.” II Consider, secondly, that Christ’s new law is the final test of discipleship. We should proceed very judiciously at this point. “By this’—by what? Why, by loving one another as I have loved you! Here, then, is the absolute norm of the Christian. “But it all seems so simple and easy,’ someone affirms. Nobody who has really tried it and under- 140 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST stands its implications has found it simple and easy. It is crucial and sublime—so great, indeed, that the best of us never master more than the alphabet of love’s language. In this day of autobiographies, men may read their anti-biographies, if they have a mind to. It is all there in the Master’s life and teaching, and in First-Corinthians Thirteen. The whole vast conception is so contrary to the ordinary ways of human thought and action that some of us, summoning ourselves before this bewildering judg- ment-bar of God, wonder if we have any right what- ever to the name of Christian. The law of Christian love easy? Why, every- thing else—all attainments and possessions whatso- ever—are by comparison veritable gewgaws and artificialities. Without love, we may speak with the tongues of men and angels, and still be as noisy gongs and clanging cymbals. That is easy to miss, hard to attain. Wauthout love, we may prophesy, fathom all mysteries and secret lore, have such ab- solute faith as to remove hills from their place, and still count for nothing. That is easy to miss, hard to attain. Without love, we may distribute all our possessions in charity, and give up our bodies to be burnt, and still make nothing of it. That is easy to miss, hard to attain. Negatively, love knows no jealousy, makes no parade, gives itself no airs, is never rude, never selfish, never irritable, never resentful, never glad when others go wrong, always slow to expose. Positively, love is very patient, very kind, is glad- dened by goodness, always eager to believe the best, always hopeful, always patient. These white CHRIST’S NEW LAW 141 heights in the land of love, I repeat, are easy to miss, hard to climb. Yet, “by this,” says the Mas- ter, “and not by anything else, comes the ultimate test of discipleship.” Certain questions emerge just here—questions re- lating to Christ’s new law in State and Church. “Am I not a Christian,” asks one, “by virtue of my being a citizen of a Christian nation?’ The late Justice Brewer, of the Supreme Court of the United States, wrote a volume declaring the United States a Christian nation. He emphasizes the fact that “all the early Colonial charters expressed the pur- pose of the pioneer immigrants and the wish of the consenting sovereign to found Christian civil com- munities upon the North American Continent.” The Roman Catholics in Maryland, the Puritans in Massachusetts, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, the Hugenots in South Carolina—all alike desired to found Christian civil communities. Moreover, in one of the two oldest American written constitu- tions are the words: “We all came into these parts of America to enjoy the liberty of the Gospel in purity and peace.” Is it not a high and holy thing to remember that this nation, under God and righte- ous men, was conceived and brought forth in the spirit and purpose of Christianity ? And yet, Christ’s new law is so far-reaching and regenerative in its personal and social bearings, go- ing in behind all charters and constitutions, that no thoughtful person would seriously regard himself as a member of the Kingdom of God on account of citizenship in a so-called Christian nation. “By this,’ not by patriotism—for “patriotism is not 142 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST enough,” said Edith Cavell, in the presence of death —that you love one another, even as I have loved you, shall men be made aware of your discipleship. The second question has to do with the church. “Am I not a Christian, because of membership in the church?” The best way to answer some ques- tions is to ask them. ~They are verbal cafeterias— self-helping and self-answering. Now, it is a serious and beautiful act to assume the vows of Church membership; and multitudes are cheating themselves and denying definite obligations to so- ciety by refusing to do so. Still, church member- ship is not the last word in discipleship; it is much easier to be churchmen than to be Christians; much easier to be concerned about “the five points” than it is to sun ourselves in the radiance of the five re- alties—the Fatherhood of God, the Saviourhood of Christ, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the Life Eternal, and the Universal Kingdom. Francis Bacon held that one of the authentic stamps of the thinker is to be able to perceive the resemblances in things, and also to perceive the dif- ferences in things. ‘That, it seems to me, is what the Master invariably does. And in our text, He lays bare the method and power whereby the faded and fading world of humanity may take on a spir- itual and unaging greenness. Have you considered the oak tree during these March days? Coming through Indiana last week, 1 saw groves of oak trees set in stainless fields of snow. ‘The enchant- ing thing to me about the oak tree is the tenacious hold it keeps upon its leaves. When most of the other trees; even “the seven sister-poplars that go CHRIST’S NEW LAW 143 softly in a line,” have shed their leaves and become “bare ruined choirs,” the oak still counts his cling- ing brown leaf-children as greedily as a miser counts his gold. And when he drops a single leaf- coin into the coffers of the snow, he seems to groan- ingly lean over with the wind and try to pick it up again. But precious little help does Brother Wind give Miser Oak, for the wind has been whipping at his golden leaves the whole gusty winter through. But never mind! Cheating the snow and defying the wind, the oak must noiselessly yield up its last stubborn brown leaf just the same! March will call to April and April will call to May, and these three, with their warm, irresistible, rising tides of sap, will steal along the old oak’s roots and stock and branches, pushing off his last dead leaf as sweetly as a smile fits into the cheeks of a babe. With his new suit of twinkling green, perhaps the oak may zealously upbraid himself for clinging to the old and outworn, when the new and vital was pleading to enter his nature and make all things new. Just which of the theologies, or philosophies, or sciences, or socialisms, or political economies, the oak best symbolizes, you may work out at your leis- ure and without excitement or sensation. What the Master insists upon is this: God’s greening tide of love is running deep and strong across the world. When the soul of man is caught within its trans- figuring vitality, old leaves of thought and vision and custom are pushed off by the new buds of prom- ise, that the Tree of Life may drop its fruit into all the gardens of the wide world. “And this word, Yet once more, signifies the removal of things that 144 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST are shaken as of things that are made, that the things that cannot be shaken may remain.” Both earth and heaven sometimes fall into a kind of spir- itual lethargy. But God forthwith shakes them out of their sleep; for He who neither slumbers nor sleeps will have His redemptive way with atoms and angels, with matter and man. From everlasting to everlasting, God in Christ moves marvelously on, sowing the wilderness of space with worlds even while He shows the wonders of grace to those work- ing with Him in cooperative goodness. iil Consider, finally, that Christ’s new law contains the one universal language of man to man. “By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples.” The science of language is interesting and compli- cated. Comparatively few people use understand- ingly any dialect or tongue other than that unto which they were born. But love is so comprehend- ing, so sympathizing, so understanding throughout its moods, tenses, syllables, and sentences that all men can catch love’s meaning. Men cannot agree in their creeds; it is not good that men should agree in their creeds, so many-sided and profoundly com- plex is truth. Men cannot agree in their politics, or economics, or forms of government; nor, let me re- affirm, is it wise that they should, so necessarily changeful and imperfect are all these worthful as- pects of civilization. There is only one fact spaci- ous enough for men to move about in, understand each other in, interpret the meaning of life in, and, CHRIST’S NEW LAW 145 through the process, get them characters more dur- able and divine than the cosmos. It is the fact of love—love that can so speak its own mystic tongue that all men may hear and heed its mighty music. Let us get a close-up of love’s universality. It reaches down into the sub-human. Your dog, your horse, your sheep, your bird, denied as yet the maj- esty of human speech, can, nevertheless, under- stand whether your voice is keyed to tones of love or lovelessness. At Heart’s Delight Farm, I watched a Mother Robin illustrate the all-compre- hending genius of love at work in the universe. It was the middle of September, and the first frost had just begun to weave its silver tapestries across the land. Mother Robin had built her home on the strong arm of a noble tree and hatched her young. One of her fledglings somehow fell out of that tree- apartment, and lay, panting and half-dead, on the ground beneath. The Mother could not lift her fallen baby back into its cradle, but she did some- thing far more wonderful. She did this: Leaving the other little robins tucked safely up in their bird- fold, she came down, and, expanding her wings and adjusting her bosom to her nestless babe, she sat there as patient as fate the long day through, going away at intervals to get food for the birds above, while her chief solicitude was for the little one on the ground below. With awe and tears, I watched that Mother Bird—watched through the morning and afternoon, and when the curtain of darkness fell, the Mother was still warming her child with her love-taught wings and bosom. Next morning, I found the frozen fledgling dead upon the ground, 10 1446 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST but for all the mornings yet to be, I shall hear One saying: “By this great law of love shall even bird and beast act according to the love-veined genius of the universe.” Yet, of course, it is up in and through the great human world that Christ’s new law is to be su- premely effective. “The marks of civilization dis- close man’s uses of matter. Hence the steamship, the railroad, the automobile, the telegraph, the tel- ephone, and wireless wizardry. But man’s great discovery is yet to'come. It is this: The power of love in human relations. When men learn to trust and work with the creative power of love, as they now trust and work with the constructive power of matter, they shall have the one sure guarantee that their vast and complicated house named civilization shall not be destroyed by the insane forces of hate, functioning through Christless mind and turning the world into an international graveyard. The most hopeful sign of an almost hopeless and heart-broken world is the emphasis thoughtful men now place upon Christ’s new law for the solution of our human and world-problems. President Cool- idge, in his inaugural, after stressing the various formulae looking toward permanent peace—such as the clarification of the principles of international law, the outlawing of aggressive war, and relief from the economic pressure making for war—adds these most searching words: ‘But there is another element, more important than all, without which there cannot be the slightest hope of a permanent peace. That element lies in the heart of humanity. Unless the desire for peace be cherished there, un- CHRIST’S NEW LAW 147 less the fundamental and only natural source of brotherly love be cultivated to its highest degree, all artificial efforts will be in vain. Peace will come when there is realization that only under a reign of law, based on righteousness and supported by the religious conviction of the brotherhood of man, can there be any hope of a complete and satisfying life. Parchment will fail, the sword will fail, it is only the spiritual nature of man that can be triumphant.” Have you considered, my friends, that when all men are at their best—whether presidents, poets, preachers, painters, musicians, journalists, teachers, hod-carriers, or politicians—they invariably artic- ulate the truth of the Christ? ‘By this shall all men know’’—love is so deep and strong and perceptive and immeasurable that love alone lends itself to man’s universal speech to man. Yet, our ending must be with our beginning. “God is love.” Therefore, love, reaching down into the sub-human and pervading the Christian human, overarches the world as the skies overarch lands and seas. Hence the climax of all thinking and dreaming and doing comes as magnificently as morning breaks over the hills of earth. “For I am persuaded,” says one who was caught in the clasp of Christ’s law of love and lifted to heights super- nal and eternal, ‘I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Vill THE IDEALS OF BRITAIN AND AMERICA * “Tet men say among the nations, The Lord reigneth.” —1 Curon. 16: 31. P NHIS is an auspicious hour for both Britain and America. It is always a salutary thing when any two nations reach a better under- standing, no matter what their names or geographi- cal location. But, at this time in history, the draw- ing together of no two nations signifies greater good for the world than this deepening fellowship of the English-speaking races. Understanding is always an excellent thing. Without it, individuals and races travel in confusion the road to chaos. If we but knew each other better, if we had a more illuminating and sympathetic comprehension of each other’s aims and ideals, half of our individual, so- cial, national, and international questions could be satisfactorily answered. As dear, genial Charles Lamb knew, it is difficult to dislike people we really know. Because of this, we never tire of repeating the pleasant story of Lamb and his friend. It seems that the essayist, who stuttered in speaking but whose writing flows with the spontaneity of a mountain brook, was criticising, rather severely, a *An address in the First Congregational Church, San Francisco, July 10, 1924, on the occasion of the visit of the British Fleet to America. 148 IDEALS OF BRITIAN AND AMERICA 149 certain person. ‘‘Why, Charles,” interposed his friend, “I didn’t even know that you knew him.” “Oh,” said Lamb, “I d-d-o-n’t. I-I- c-c-couldn’t d-d-dislike a m-m-man I-I-know.” Likewise, if we really come to know each other as individuals and nations, it will be increasingly difficult for us to hate and destroy that which should be loved and protected. To this end, all right-thinking Britons and Americans are resolved that nothing shall in- terfere with the ever-growing appreciation of these two great peoples for each other. In speaking, therefore, of the ideals of Britain and America, I desire to emphasize our creed and our deed, our belief and our conduct. I What, then, is the creed of Britain and America? Is there some common ground, some universal, all- inclusive aim and motive that actuates them? Without attempting an exhaustive answer, I wish to consider that which is at least suggestive and fun- damental. We believe in ourselves—that is the first article in our bi-national creed. Perhaps we believe in our- selves too much! Consequently, it is unnecessary for us to obey the injunction of the Scotchman who said: “TI hae been prayin’ the Lord for forty years to gie me a good opinion o’ myself!’ Neverthe- less, a wholesomely good opinion of one’s self, both personally and nationally speaking, is eminently worth while. That was bad theology and worse humanity which characterized men as worms of the 150 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST dust. No such conception has the slightest founda- tion in the teachings of our Lord and Saviour. He well-nigh exhausts the splendor and power of speech in setting forth the essential dignity and grandeur of human nature. No worm-of-the-dust philosophy can withstand the heavenly power of His keen, searching. breath; He blows it everlast- ingly back into the dusty death out of which it came. Thus, I insist, that it is salutary and invigorating for these English-speaking peoples to think well of themselves, to believe in themselves, and to do so in that spirit of soberness and wisdom which will en- able them to discharge the tremendous responsibil- ities imposed upon them by duty and destiny. We believe, secondly, in the right of every na- tion to lead its own life. We have no disposition to impose our national habits or peculiarities upon other peoples. Advisedly do I say impose. We have wrought out, in our varied careers, certain great principles of government, certain clearly de- fined principles of democracy, which are of uni- versal moment to mankind. These values, in time, are bound to become nationally contagious; there- fore, it is not necessary to impose them. They will operate with the power and momentum inherent in pervasive and peaceful penetration. Nothing can stop them any more than one can stop the shining of the sun. You may go into your house, shut the doors, fasten down the windows, and draw the blinds. For you, all within may be dark, musty, and desolate. But God’s golden sunshine is pour- ing down upon the earth just the same. It is im- partial, universal, life-giving to plants, animals, and IDEALS OF BRITIAN AND AMERICA 151 men, even though you have elected to live in your dungeon of death. So, individuals and nations en- deavor, sometimes, to shut out the inshining light of freedom and humanity. For a time, and to their own terrible injury, they may fatally succeed. Yet, the sun of liberty and law—the center of the solar system of human governments—shines on and on with inexhaustible brilliance and power. Sometime that kindly light is bound to search out the most backward peoples. The privilege and the duty of these two puissant nations is to keep the light of law and order shining; or, to speak more correctly, we must expose our national windows to the sun of righteousness and justice. Then the undying light will stream in upon us, making our national homes all glorious within. “Why do we believe in the right of every nation to lead its own life ?’’—that is a question deserving of the profound answer which may be given to it. We believe it, in the first place, because there is such an immeasurable value as national individuality. Since the dawn of civilization and with the more definite unfolding of nations, something distinctive has grown up in the life of the various peoples and races. ‘Take ancient Egypt, for example. We would not willingly exchange our civilization for that of those old Egyptians. Nevertheless, we should be inexcusably parochial—as many of us in- excusably are—if we were dead to some of the great things that shone through the lives of the Egyptians. What builders they were! How pro- foundly they believed in immortality! Think, also, of what we owe to the Greeks. Why, they had a 152 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST genius for beauty. Their power for dreaming of loveliness and then, of embodying it in painting and sculpture is unparalleled. Some of their artistic creations are as lovely as if they had blown the breath of angels into bloom. That Greek sense of beauty is so distinctive that it will never wear out. Rome, also, has made her vast contribution in her organizing genius and her conception of law.. This same principle holds of modern nations. Russia, Italy, Germay, France—all have contributed some- thing to the general good. As for Britain, her colonizing power is as wide as the circle of the suns. If, on the one hand, she has given mankind a Shakespeare, a Newton, and a Bacon, on the other England has sent her civic and commercial genius to the ends of the earth. Mean- time, what have we, as Americans, to offer to the great family of nations? We have a passion for freedom; we believe in the average man; we are almost overwhelmingly practical. Our energy is the eighth wonder of the world to our neighbors bordering the seven seas. Now, this distinctive contribution of peoples to the general welfare is rooted in one of the great laws of the cosmos. Alfred Russel Wallace says that infinite variety is the law of the universe. He comes to this conclusion after studying the diver- sity of life-forms everywhere in evidence. He finds this variousness in star and flower and bird and an- imal and man. After making his immense survey, the scientist turns philosopher. Now and then it is a splendid sight, I think, to watch a philosopher swallow a scientist. I would not invariably recom- IDEALS OF BRITIAN AND AMERICA 153 mend such a menu for philosophers because, in the first place, they might be smitten by the pangs of philosophic indigestion; and, furthermore, the sci- entist himself might not enjoy the experience. Nevertheless, as I say, it is good to see Wallace the philosopher eat Wallace the scientist alive. Thus, after fetching a vast circle of scientific scrutiny round about, Darwin’s co-discoverer of evolution asks this question: Why, after all, was the universe created? Then follows his answer: “It is that this earth, with its infinitude of life and beauty and mystery, and the universe in the midst of which we are placed, with its overwhelming immensities of suns and nebulae, of light and motion, are as they are, first, for the development of life culminating in man; secondly, as a vast school-house for the higher education of the human race in preparation for the enduring spiritual life to which it is des- tined.” I recommend these words to all super-nat- ionalists, isolationists, and atheists! We believe, furthermore, in the rights of little peoples—what Woodrow Wilson called the right of self-determination. Never again, let us pray God even as we highly resolve, shall the little, nation- ally-weak peoples be bandied about by the so-called major nations for selfish ends. It may take certain people in all nations a long time to realize it, but the era of exploitation and rapine, directed against the weak and desolate and forlorn, is doomed, is giving place to a time in which that woefully wanting ele- ment among nations shall irresistibly assert itself— the majesty and quickening power of an internat- ional conscience. Where would civilization be to- 1544 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST day were it not for the stand taken by the little peoples during those fateful years beginning with 1914? If Britain and America ever forget what Belgium and Serbia did in a time of awful terror and peril, they will be ingrates and traitors to hu- manity. When the great breach came, the little peoples were the fillers of the breach. When the crack of doom sounded, the little peoples were un- terrified as they received the iron-heel of that huge man-beast from the Rhine, who went forth to trample civilization itself into the muck and mire. If we forget the little peoples, may our right hands forget their cunning, O Britain and America! There is another article in our bi-national creed. We believe that right makes might; we do not be- lieve that might can make right in any world in God’s universe. And just because we believe this, we are determined upon two things. The first is, we can die, if need be, for a great cause. There are times when it is far more necessary to die than it is to live. These are the times when iniquity and op- pression gain a temporary upper hand and threaten to hurl civilization back into the dark ages. Then does the human soul rise superior to disaster and death. There has been such an exhibition of this high human mettle on the earth in the last ten years that the most heroic ages of the past never witnessed its like on such a colossal scale. The second thing we are determined on is this: We are determined to so organize our international life that war, with its waste and terror and desola- tion, shall not be practiced by the peoples of the earth. This can be done; it must be done; it will IDEALS OF BRITIAN AND AMERICA 155 be done. We have already made a beginning; the seed has been planted; the sentiment is spreading. One of the healthiest things in the wide world today is the growing antipathy to war. If we reverence God, if we love men and women and children, if we hold dear the priceless treasures of civilization, we must do everything within our power—and do it now—to prevent another war, big or little, national or international. We modern people have grown too ingenious in the science of self-destruction to give ourselves over to bad temper. Therefore, we must, in time of peace and sanity, prepare to pre- vent war. God helping us, we can and must do no other. Il If, then, I have roughly sketched our bi-national creed, I must now say a word concerning our bi- national deed. Our duty—which Robert E. Lee characterized as the sublimest word in the language —what is that? It is our duty, in the first place, to guard our in- dependence. In the new world-movement for or- ganization against war, the death-enders, last- ditchers, and their like, play up the false idea that we are about to relinquish our independence as na- tions. Nothing could be further from the truth; and, moreover, nothing could be less desirable. The idea of the Kaiser was that of a government for the entire world, in which he himself should be the chief mogul. Such a scheme would be to commit international suicide by monotony. No; neither the League nor the World Court 156 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST contemplates the yielding of our national sover- eignty and independence. Knowing as we do the soul of Britain and America, to say nothing of the other nations, we know that they are too deeply de- voted to the principle of independence to yield it up on any account whatsoever. Why, the spirit of in- dependence is bred in our bone. Nearly six hun- dred years lie between the birth of Magna Charta and the Declaration of Independence. But the blood of the men of Runnymede flowed in the veins of the men who signed the Declaration in Phila- delphia. The barons who fought King John were the spiritual and patriotic ancestors of the men who fought George III. With a great price has our in- dependence on both sides of the sea been bought and maintained. Not until every drop of blood within us has eyes that look downward, will the men and women of these two great countries barter away their independence, their national autonomy, their right to make and enforce laws. Therefore, let me repeat: It is our duty to guard our independ- ence. But there is a second thing we must do. We must foster our interdependence. ‘Today, with man- kind’s widening vision and larger contacts, I do not hesitate to say that the spirit of interdependence is just as imperative as the principle of independence. I believe, moreover, that the time is coming when the only possible means of nations maintaining their independence will be through recognition and prac- tice of the principle of interdependence. I do not get this conclusion, I need hardly say, from the average partisan, nationalist, or politician. I get it IDEALS OF BRITIAN AND AMERICA 157 from the nature of things, from the social forces at work in the world and the universe; in a word, from God Himself. This law of interdependence is operative throughout the physical order. Every atom has business with other atom; every flower blows for every other flower; every star shines for every other star. So sensitive is the cosmos, thought Victor Hugo, that the fragrance of the cornflower troubles the constellation. ‘Nothing in the world is single,” sang Shelley. “All things, by a law divine, mingle and merge in one another’s be- ing.” That interdependence which is in nature is man- ifesting itself, as never before, in the life of men and nations. Woe to the people who dispute the imperativeness of this unfolding, God-given law! And because of its absoluteness, one of the big tasks confronting mankind today is this: We must slay our national cave-man. ‘There are individuals in every land who understand the necessity of inter- dependence among peoples—I mean definite, or- ganized cooperation. But when it comes to a na- tion—a whole people—doing it, we are made to realize, somewhat poignantly, how far we are from things as they ought to be and may be. Consider this: Every civilized community has its courts of law. As misunderstandings arise—and in a world such as ours there will always be misunderstandings —law-abiding people do not think of taking the law into their own hands; they submit their cause to judge and jury. But this was not always so. Time was when the man with his spear of flint killed his neighbor, cooked him, and ate him. But in the 158 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST long course of the ages that custom was outgrown. Of course there are individuals—bandits, swash- bucklers, bootleggers, murderers, gamblers, and brothel-keepers—who still follow the spirit of the cave-man. Yet the vast majority of citizens are amenable to courts of law. But just here we come upon one of the strangest cases of arrested development; it pertains to the habits of nations. Every nation ts the judge of its own cause. Within the nation we have courts of law that the individual may not judge his own case and that justice may be done. But until compara- tively recent times, each nation has been the sole judge of its own cause. Do you not think that it is about time we began to consider seriously a method for correcting this anomalous situation? Entirely aside from the fact that our national self-judgments are not necessarily just and correct, such procedure, in this tremendously complex modern era, is very dangerous. Any national adventurer, responsible to nobody but his own nation, may set the world on fire overnight. Is it unreasonable to assume that such a person or people should be internationally arrested and compelled to submit their cause to a Court capable of rendering a just judgment; and then of having that judgment executed, if neces- sary, by a police duly qualified for such an office? This practical interdependence amounts to what Clutton-Brock has defined as “pooling our national self-esteem.” We are constantly doing this as in- dividuals—at least the majority of well-bred people are. Now and then’ we meet an individual who de- lights in everlastingly bragging up his ancestors. IDEALS OF BRITIAN AND AMERICA 159 Unfortunate, indeed, is the person who does not have forbears of whom he can gratefully think and speak, But some people overdo their ancestral sig- nificance. ‘They are liable to forget that it is more important to become a first-class descendant than it is to have a blue-blooded ancestor. We must reckon with the law of heredity, but we must not wreck the law of individual responsibility and personal achievement. I think that in Heaven we do not get nearly as much credit for our ancestors as we do for our descendants. At any rate, we feel like shunning persons who make a hobby of family affairs. They are strangely oblivious of the fact that, after all, there are other families and other affairs; and the well-bred person gives due empha- sis to this truth. Why may we not give free play to a similar prac- tice among nations? Why may we not learn to pool our national self-esteem as well as our individual self-esteem? This, as a matter of fact, would prove to be one of the supreme creators of good-will among' nations. We know that an individual is de- veloped through his appreciations rather than through his fault-finding capacity. The same is true of peoples. As long as a man is bitten by the bug of nationalitis he will be blind to the virtues of other nations. Neither England nor America nor France nor Germany has a monoply of all the nat- ional values; humanity is of God; therefore, hu- manity is bigger than nationality can possibly be. Pooling our national self-esteem simply means that while we are to love our respective countries we must not forget the Country of Mankind. If we 160 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST do, the God of Mankind will severely remind us of our delinquency in this regard. Briefly, I must speak of the third thing pertain- ing to our bi-national deed. I know of no way whereby we may truly guard our independence and foster our interdependence save through our de- pendence upon God. The task is too great, the or- deal too severe, the problems too overpowering, the details too baffllng—in a word, the mightiness of the situation can be met only through faith in the almightiness and guidance of the living God. Statesmanship, said my great, dear friend and pred- ecessor, Doctor Frank W. Gunsaulus, consists in men finding out which way God is going and then in men going that way. If we really believe in our Lord Christ, we know at least some of the ways God is going. God is going the way of justice; therefore, all injustice must be overthrown. God is going the way of mercy; therefore, the spirit of unmercifulness must be banished. God is going the way of hope; therefore, all hopelessness must be removed from the human heart. God is going the way of love; therefore all hate must be turned out of the house of life. God is going the way of righteousness and peace; therefore, all war—and the causes which make for war—must give way be- fore the spirit of goodwill and organized practices of mankind. ‘Civilization,’ said Edmund Burke, “is a contract between the great dead, the living, and the unborn.” But civilization is not enough; patriotism is not enough; nationality is not enough; science is not enough; sentiment is not enough. It is when these are fired by faith in the God and IDEALS OF BRITIAN AND AMERICA 161 Father of our Lord Jesus Christ that men shall be- come brothers all the world around; ‘nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” ‘To this end, let us join in praying one of the greatest prayers ever written, highly resolving as we pray, to translate its truth into individual and social life: “God of our fathers, known of old, Lord of our far-flung battle line, Beneath whose awful Hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine,— Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! The tumult and the shouting dies; The Captains and the Kings depart: Still stands thine ancient sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! Far-called, our navies melt away, On dune and headland sinks the fire; Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard, All valiant dust that builds on dust, And guarding, calls not thee to guard, For frantic boast and foolish word,— Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!” 1i IX ADVENTURES OF THE CHRISTIAN nSOUL, + (iE) “Ye are not come to what you can touch...... you have come to.” Hesrews 12:18, 22. P \HERE are few if any Scriptures that set forth, more vividly, the long, hard, and wise educational journey of mankind than the twelfth chapter of Hebrews. It is a study of what we know as the two great dispensations—the Old and the New. Considering it, do we not feel the difference? One suggests the beginning, the other the completion of Christianity. One is external, the other is internal. One is legal, the other is spir- itual. One is like a vast tree, whose body, branches, and leaves are all aflame with dazzling and unap- proachable lightnings; the other is like the same tree, vast, stately, far-spreading, and lo! its very body is alive with tenderness, its every branch is vocal with love, and all its leaves are quick with twinkling drops of song rained from the heavens of melody. We are to meditate upon the adventures of the Christian soul. Pilgrims of the infinite, our begin- nings are far back. We have come, already, a long, tortuous, moral and spiritual journey. For is not man’s venture from everlasting to everlasting? I 162 THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 163 sometimes fear we miss the majesty of that ocean- deep threnody of a planet called the ninetieth Psalm; and we are certain to miss its tremendous inner sig- nificance, if we merely read it in the light of the psalmist’s vision of God rather than in the light of our Lord’s revelation of God. With the ancient minstrel we chant the solemn words and grand: “Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all gen- erations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.” For hymning the eternity of God, loftier words our sweet English tongue does not hold. ‘Thou turn- est man to dust, and sayest, Return, ye children of men.” “Return?” Return whither? According to the Psalmist, God says, ‘Return to the dust.” But that is not the speech of Christ. He, too, has somewhat to say about the great return. And it is a return, not to dust, but a return home. “In My Father’s house are many rooms.” The walls of that upper room have expanded into the spiritual cathedral of humanity, and all of its interiors are golden with echo-organs pealing forth the deathlessness of the human soul! Why, in the light of Jesus, the very dust is haunted by God. So, if it were possible for man, instead of man’s body, to return to the dust, the dust itself would become melodious and sing, haunting God with the memory of the children of men originally created in His image and likeness. As God could not endure a haunted universe, He would have to begin all over again, recreating His human children of the dust and setting their frail 164 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST feet once more in the spacious ways of the Lord Christ. At any rate, I like Obermann’s challenge to the Almighty. “And tf it be true,’ he exclaims, “that annihilation awaits us, let us so live that tt shall be an unjust fate.” We have no right I repeat, to interpret the psalm- ist’s words in the light of the psalmist’s vision of God. It is neither human enough nor divine enough. Therefore, we must leave the ancient man’s dust- heap for the eternal man’s home—the House not made with hands. And this is what our writer in text and context, does for us. “You have not come to what you can touch,” he cries. “You have Come tomo.) Then he undertakes to give us our spiritual bearings. He compels the whole universe to take part in his service. We shall do well to catch even the faintest outline of his colos- sal scheme, shot through with a spiritual grandeur that thrills, deepens, heightens, and expands the soul it fits into as perfectly as a raindrop fits into the bosom of the sea. I The first step in the adventures of a Christian soul is toward the Universal Father. ‘You have come to the God of all as judge.’’ Consider these words; they are like light—they must be broken up, resolved, analyzed, before their wonder and beauty can break into the mind. They are so great, so magnificent, that we shall never exhaust their meaning. “The God of all!’ Why, that will com- mand the exercise of human and angelic minds to all eternity. “The God of all!’ Do we not need THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 165 to be seriously bitten by such a comprehensive and curative thought? The God of all—what? Well, the God of all that was, of all that is, of all that shall be. The God of all energies; of all forces; of all atoms; of all electrons; of all acids; of all gases; of all waves, whether ether, water, or sound; of all dynamics, kinetics, and statics; of all gravi- tation, impact, stability, and capilarity. The God of all stars and suns and constellations; the God of all colors and perfumes and melodies; the God of all animals and men and angels. This, then, is a part of what we have come to— even the Creator Who was creating millions of ages before there were Bibles or calendars or philoso- phies or sciences; the Creator Who is still creating and will continue creating—forevermore. But there is something far grander here than even the idea of a Creator; it is the moral judgeship of God. Is not this much loftier? We pass, in this higher thinking, from creation to morality. And, surely, only the God of all is capable of judging all. We sometimes say, in the words of the prophet, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” And that is awfully true. But I can think ~ of a more fearful thing still. It would be to fall out of the hands of a dead God—just to be whipped up and down the universe by the wild, blind, un- thinking, unloving lashes of Fate. For as long as there is a living God, there is hope for individuals and society; but a dead God, or a past-tense God, —why, the very thought freezes the genial currents of human nature and threatens us with an ultimate system of chilling cold and impenetratable gloom. 166 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST So, as there is a living God, it is good to know that He is our Judge. I would rather have God as my judge for a moment than have all men as my judges for a millennium. I think more of true justice would flash out of the Divine instant than could be eked out of a thousand years of human judgeship. But there is something nobler here than Creator or Judge. It is Fatherhood—the universal and indi- vidual Father of all humans—even “the Father of our spirits.” What a disclosure! What a spiritual distance men have traveled! Little wonder, when our sin and ignorance and prejudice and passion are weighed, that we so often pervert this gradually un- folding and inexpressibly consoling idea of the all- glorious God! Do you remember the Hall of Mir- | rors on the Midway in the days of the World’s Columbian Exposition? Walking innocently in, you were instantly caught within the reflections of those concave mirrors. And what tricks they played upon you! If you were small, you looked large; if you were thin, you looked fat; if you were ugly, you looked handsome. In other words, the mirrors made you look just like what you didn’t look like! Well, it would seem, sometimes, that the good God has walked into our human halls of concave mirrors also. Endeavoring to reveal Himself to us, God has often—owing to our perverting mediums—been made to appear the direct opposite of what He eter- nally is. The caveman within us has monstrously conceived an infinite caveman without us; and tribes and peoples, and even some so-called Christians, have worshipped a monstrosity instead of “the Fa- ther of our spirits.” THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 167 Yet, I insist, the mistake is not altogether strange or inexplicable when we consider the long, long journey we have made up the slopes of being and measure our capacity for misseeing, misdoing, and misunderstanding. ‘Think of the ages that have passed, of the superstitions that have come and gone, of the tribes and races that have flowered and faded, before this glorious Christian concept could root it- self in the heart of mankind! Beecher confessed « that one of the most significant experiments he ever saw was one performed by Professor Tyndall in New York. Analyzing a beam of light by the spec- trum, the physicist showed all the different elements existing in white light. But that was not all Tyn- dall did. “At this end of the spectrum,” said he, “there is another quality, but it is a quality for which we have no sense. It is a fact, but you can neither see it, nor smell it, nor taste it, nor feel it, nor hear it. It is there, but we have no sense to discover it.” “And,” says Beecher, “the scientist demonstrated that this other quality was there by certain chemical effects. It was an active power, producing certain effects at that part of the spectrum, yet the on- lookers stood outside of it, simply because they could not understand its physical quality. And’—added Beecher, with a spiritual genius surpassing even the scientific genius of Tyndall—‘‘how many other things are there all around about us that exist and are necessary in the universe, that we never know anything about! So, in the Divine nature, how many principles, how many points, how many emotions, how many beauties there must be, and we do not 168 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST discern them simply because we are so lacking and deficient in our spiritual organisms.” Now, even in view of this first adventure of the Christian soul, questions like these are frequently asked: Can we believe in the immortality of the soul? Can we believe in the Kingdom of Christ? Can we believe in the Fatherhood of God? Can we believe in the final victory of righteousness? ‘The answer to all such questions is: Of course we can! We can’t believe in anything else and remain Chris- tians. Only—let us be on our guard about details, which can be neither proved nor disproved. “When shall these things be?’ Some twentieth-century people seem to think that question originated with them. But we know that it is twenty centuries old, and its verbal ancestry may extend still farther back. When the question was put to the Master, He said: “Tt is not for you to know times or seasons, which the Father hath set within His own authority.” In other words, it is not imperative that we should know. But there is something absolutely impera- tive—something upon which the issues of life, death, faith, hope, love, peace, joy, and victory are absolutely dependent. “But ye,’ says our Lord— and He is saying it still—‘‘ye shall receive power, when the Holy Spirit is come upon you: and ye shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judeea and Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of thereaqrthy, Here, then, is Christ’s corrective of all chart- making—-whether past, present, or future; of all epoch-scheduling; of all putting non-essentials first; of all literalistic-mongering, which is a sure sign of THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 169 spiritual illiteracy; of all excommunicating tenden- cies; of all multiplication of new divisions in the Army of God, lest there be so many generals that we run short of soldiers, or even so many obtruding generals and soldiers that we lose sight of our Eter- nal Captain. No; we are to be so full of the Holy Spirit, so busy living and witnessing all the time, everywhere, unto all peoples and ages, that God, through our living and serving and witness-bearing, may be enabled to usher in the Kingdom which shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. We have not come to what we can touch; but we have come to God—the God of all as Creator and Judge of all, the Father of our spirits! II The second step brings us to the Mediator of the New Covenant. “You have come to Jesus Who meditates the new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood whose message is nobler than Abel’s.” Re- trace your thought-movement for a moment. It says you have come to the Universal Father. But how did you arrive? Here is your answer, match- less and golden. Come away from Sinai; come away from flames of fire and mist and gloom and stormy blasts and the blare of a trumpet and a voice whose words made men stand terrified and aghast. Come away to Calvary! Behold the new covenant, written in agonies of mercy and tears of blood! There you may see Christian Fatherhood, in the vast ways of redemption, in its threefold aspect and movement. There is, first, the Great High Priest in His min- 170 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST istry of intercession. “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” Love older than the stars! Love that has journeyed past the Milky Way is now stretched upon the Cross! The nails and blood have met within the quivering fires of pain, within the heartbreak of God Himself. Yet, sin and shame and suffering are impotent to destroy the music of Fatherhood that keeps playing up from the depths of being and finds expression through those love-tuned lips. Yea, as the course, callous soldiers send their spikes cutting through tendon and muscle and nerve, the High Priest, upon His altar of sacrifice, finds opportunity to pray for the unprayed-for, even apologizing for the ignorance of His murderers. Look again, and behold the kind of Fatherhood here exposed. “To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.” Our High Priest not only prays for the ignorant law-enforcers, but He opens the Garden of God to penitential lawlessness, granting pardon and hope to an unpardoned and hopeless bandit. Here is Fatherhood that would fain stretch itself to the utmost, stoop itself to the lowest, and thereby— oh, wonder of wonders !—exalt itself to the heights beyond which heights there are none! Look again at this High Priestly Fatherhood, and you will see love’s inflowing tide—love return- ing upon its own unfathomable tenderness. Love must not only love the law-abiding and the lawless- ness; Love loves its own with incomparable love- liness. “Woman, behold thy son,...... behold thy mother.” Thus far, love has been out in the wild, terrible places agonizingly feeling its way through THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 171 No Man’s Land of sin and hell—looking for mor- tals whom love and life and law have seemingly passed by. But now, love is caressing its own. Love is whispering and singing by its own fireside. Love is talking back to the woman-motherhood of the race, to the sons of all the mothers of men. Second: There is the movement of the Sin-Bear- ing Sufferer. Already love has been terribly tested, Fatherhood has been severely strained. But there are more terrible things to come out of the envelop- ing midnight of sin and wrestle with love for the mastery. ‘‘My God, My God, why hast Thou for- saken Me?” Has sin at last dethroned God? The worlds are whirling through darkness; devils are driving fast and furious; mind is dizzy while mat- ter seems to shout over the triumph of doom. Hours of silence and darkness go bleeding by, while Heaven apparently hides its face and leaves the Son of God to tread the winepress alone. Here, verily, is the blackest moment in the history of mind and soul! We shall never know—in time or eternity—all that took place in that immeasurable hour. We be- lieve that the Lord of Glory went mysteriously out into the waste places of sin, tasting the bitter drops of the second death that men might be recovered from both the second death and the first. Whatever it was, whatever the experience of the Saviour in that dread time, it appears, almost, to have been the place either forgotten by God or well-nigh unknown to Him. Yet, paradoxical as it may seem, I think that the Father-God was never so near His well-beloved Son 172 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST as in that dire hour of sin-bearing. There is no bridge over which mortals can pass to these things understandingly. Realizing this, the early Chris- tians, in their litanies, prayed: “By Thy sufferings known and unknown, Good Lord, deliver us.” After returning from No Man’s Land in the spir- itual world, Jesus said: “I thirst.” For six eternal hours our Lord had hung there amid the jeers and the bloody rain and the fiery doom. No wonder that excruciating thirst was eating, like molten flame, through every portion of His body. Refus- ing the drugged wine which was given to malefac- tors, He accepted the undrugged potion, thus dis- allowing narcotics to deaden the cup of pain He drank to the last bitter drop. As in the Garden, so upon the Cross, the Saviour is still saying: “The cup which the Father hath given Me, shall I not drink it?” The third movement discloses the triumphant Saviour of the world. Completion is the first note in the oratorio of redemption. “It is finished.” Finished—the House of Salvation, begun before the foundations of the world were laid in atomic galaxies! Finished—the Music of Prophecy, begun thousands of years before the angels sang above Bethlehem! Finished—the Activity of Consecrated Will, written in the volume of the book whose pages had held the gaze of heavenly intelligences the ages long and the worlds through! Finished—the Vicarious Sacrifice—full, perfect, absolute—born in the emotions of the Godhead, Who so loved that He was constrained to give nothing less than Himself —even His only Begotten Son! Finished—the THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 173 Celestial Bell of the Atonement, various with many tones and thrilling with many variations, but pro- foundly melodious with the one fact—God is Love, Love is God, and God and Love everlastingly feel and find their way to ultimate victory. The second note in the oratorio of redemption is rest. “Father, into Thy hands I commend My spir- it.” The siege has been terrible; the winds of sin and death have blown bleak and black; the Cup has been mixed with poisoned fire; the waste places of being have been lone and horrible. But now, O Father, Thy Son is Home again! Henceforth all men may be at Home! Throughout the unfolding universe the lilies of peace shall ever unfold, and even the thorns of sin shall be made to bloom with the roses of grace. For have we not come to Jesus, the Mediator of the new covenant? Therefore, we are no longer pursued by tongued vengeance from the ground—Abel’s blood pleading, at best, in tones of mingled justice and hate. No! We have come to the sprinkled blood—the Life of God that stains the worlds even as it feeds angels and men—whose message is nobler than Abel’s! And oh, how new, how wondrous new! New as the twitter of April birds; new as drops of dew on the breast of dawn; new as the giving and receiving of forgiveness. And yet not too new! New not so much in calendar measurements as in heavenly quality. New not so much in recentness as in superiority. In a word, new as the morning, but as old as the Maker of the morning. New as the rose, but as old as the Fash- ioner of the rose. New as the Spring, but as old as the Creator of all Springs. New as love, but as 174 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST old as Love’s Original. Thus, in coming to the Mediator of the new covenant, we have come to That which sets man’s spiritual feet in the highways leading to Finality; for the revelation of the Fa- therhood of God in Christ is a millionfold more wonderful than the creation of the physical uni- verse. iil Another step in our adventure brings us to the Spiritual City. ‘‘We have come to Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.” Properly defined, man is a pilgrim to the City of the Ideal. The ideal city is graven on the heart of humanity because it is originally in the Heart of God. ‘The history of civilization,” says the scholar, “is the history of cities. Babylon, Nineveh, Jerusa- lem, Athens, Rome, Alexandria, Venice, Florence, and the medieval cities, all mark stages in the higher development of the race.” Now, we are keenly aware that our modern cities constitute one of the gigantic problems of the world. Bryce, in his study, Modern Democracies, proves this propo- sition, if any person requires proof of the obvious. Thoughtful people know that nothing short of the reality of the Christian religion can save our mod- ern cities from themselves and so make them con- tribute to the city of the living God. Nevertheless, the spiritual city is coming, and we, by faith and hope, are already come to the heavenly Jerusalem. Consider, for a moment, the evolution of the spiritual city, confining our survey within Judaism and Christianity, though these do not ex- THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 175 haust the content of the idea. Our God is the God of the whole earth, the entire universe, and He is just as busy in any one part as in any other part. God is toiling on what we call the backward races just as wisely, lovingly, and unceasingly as He is toiling with the so-called forward races. Find a square inch of space where God is not at work this moment, and you may prove that Nature loves a vacuum! Our first glimpse of the spiritual city is back, away back. Its proportions are not outwardly com- manding, but it is big with creative promises and meaningful prophecies. Its invisible foundations are laid down on good human dirt, all astir with mystic whispers and foregleams divine. God plants a kind of city dream-seed in the soil named Abra- ham. After awhile the seed gives birth to that divine-human child called Faith. And is not Faith a majestic architect? Yea, verily! Set Faith down anywhere—in desert, garden, mountain, city, or sea —and Faith will at once begin to build. Out of its own inalienable rights and intrinsic genius of being, Faith is a shaper, a weaver, a fashioner, drawing materials out of the unseen and compelling them into things that are. So the Architect of Faith builds Abraham, and Abraham begins to build the City of God. “By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed to go out unto a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.” ‘When he was called.” When was that? I don’t know exactly; but I think, from the start he got and the journey he made, Abraham must have been called somewhere back in 176 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST Eternity! “Abraham obeyed to go out unto a place.” What place? Why, the Land of Promise, of course! Faith always deals in lands of promise; and the best lands of promise, according to Faith, are not on the map at all. But remark, also, Abra- ham went out, not knowing whither he went! Well, then, how did he arrive, if he didn’t know where he was going? Perfectly simple! Faith already knows the way, because Faith was before ways be- came. And how did Abraham behave when he reached the land of promise, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob? Just as Faith always behaves! Faith looks around and out and up for what can- not be seen. So, at last, we catch Abraham in one of his supreme moods. “For he looked for the city which hath the foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” Did I not say, Set Faith down anywhere, and it will begin to build? Thus, Faith builds Abraham, makes him a spiritual architect, and lo! we see him standing on tip-toe, looking over the tops of things, until his vision finally gets under and rests upon the city of the living God! ‘When all is said and done,” says Emerson, “the rapt saint is found to be the only logician.” And is not this logician hid- den away in the soul of each of us? We may bury him beneath the debris and dust of things; but he refuses to die, sweetly tormenting us through the very visions he gives us of the men and women we might have been. Is it not in such moods as these that we catch sweet strains floating through the win- dows and walls and gates of our own spiritual city? The Something within us answers to the Something THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 177 without us—and are not these two Somethings the Soul of the One Reality? Arnold’s noble lines, “Morality,” chant this truth, it seems to me, with a simplicity worthy of its grandeur. We cannot al- ways kindle the fire divine, says the poet. The spirit bloweth and is still, for the soul abides in mystery. Nevertheless, we have our golden hours of insight, and the tasks we then behold can be fulfilled through hours of gloom. With aching hands and bleeding feet we dig and heap and build, bearing the burden and heat of the day, and wish ’twere done. With the returning light, however, we discern what we have done through hours of gloom and discourage- ment. Then, when the clouds are off the soul and we are basking in the eye of Nature, we ask her how she viewed our fidelity and struggle and “tasked morality.” And Nature, whose answer we dreaded, whose eye we could not look into, has a glow upon her face and a strong emotion on her cheek: “Ah, child,” she cries, “that strife divine, Whence was it, for it is not mine? “There is no effort on my brow— I do not strive, I do not weep; I rush with the swift spheres and glow In joy, and when I will, I sleep. Yet that severe, that earnest air I saw, I felt it once—but where? “TI, knew not yet the gauge of time, Nor wore the manacles of space; I felt it in some other clime, I saw it in some other place. *T was when the heavenly house I trod, And lay upon the breast of God.” Aye, that is it—‘“‘the Breast of God!’ “We have come to Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.” 12 Xx ADVENTURES OF THE CHRISTIAN SOUL (II) “You have not come to what you can touch...... you have come to.’’ Hesrews 12:18, 22. I A FOURTH step in the adventures of the Chris- tian soul brings us to angelic beings. “You are come to myriads of angels in festal gath- ering.” The fact that angels do not attract the ma- jority of people is no reflection whatever upon the angels. There are two creatures yonder in the pond—a crawfish crawling in the mud at the bot- tom, a swan swimming over the silver surface. But because the crawfish does not see or appreciate the swan’s grace and beauty—what logic or philosophy has taught us to conclude that that is the slightest reflection upon the swan? Without pausing to apply my illustration, angel- ology is a very old theme. It figures largely in the thought of the Persians and Hebrews, to say noth- ing of other peoples. The Bible, of course, makes much of angels. Sometimes they are represented as a mighty host or army; sometimes as composing the court of the King of Eternity; sometimes they form a choir as at the Advent. They are also called the sons of God, owing their existence, says Godet, 178 THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 179 not to the ordinary processes of filiation, but to an immediate act of creation. We know, furthermore, that angels are free from sensuous feelings; that their knowledge is vast, and yet limited; that they are intensely interested in the salvation of human beings. These are only a few of the representations of angels we have in the Hebrew and Christian Scrip- tures. ‘‘But,” you say, “I don’t believe in angels.” Very well! Still, let me repeat, that that is no dis- credit whatever to the angels. ‘Moreover,’ you also protest, “the modern mind does not believe in angels.” Again I say, Very well! Meantime, may I ask this question: Is the modern mind, including your own, absolutely final in this matter? Perhaps our generation, by its bent and training, is more capable of appraising animals than angels; but that is no reason why, in a universe with such teeming manifoldness of life, the subject of angels should go into the discard. Jesus believed in angels, and never has mind, in any realm of thought whatsoever, func- tioned with even the approximate authority of the Lord Christ in matters spiritual and eternal. Once the Sadducees presented this proposition to Jesus: There were seven brothers who married, in succes- sion, one woman. ‘Then the woman died. And they wanted to know to which of the seven brothers she would belong in the resurrection? Thus did the materialists of their day undertake to drive the Master into a logical and spiritual cul-de-sac. But with the calm of the sea and the flash of the light- ning, Jesus answered them: “You are wrong for two reasons: First, you do not understand the 180 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST Scriptures—even your own Scriptures; and, sec- ond, you do not understand the power of God.” So, when you speak of the modern mind repre- sented, it may be, by Wells and Shaw and Bennett, disbelieving in angels, here is your twofold reply. It does not understand the Scriptures—both the written and the unwritten Word. As to the written Word, it is the simple truth to say that the Bible 1s the highest and noblest expression of the revelation of God in the literature of mankind. But, accord- ing to this very Bible of ours, God has never left Himself without witness at any time or among any people. Consequently, every civilized tribe and peo- ple have their own particular Scriptures. We think that ours are so superior to theirs that they are en- titled to this larger light and that it is our duty and privilege to acquaint them with the revelation con- tained in our Bible. Yet, according to Jesus, there is more—infinitely more—than the written Word. There is “the power of God.” What immense facts and truths are here! You do not believe in the resurrection or angels, O Sadducees, because you do not under- stand the power of God. It is the Power that makes no two snowflakes alike; that splits a drop of rain on the mountain-top, sending half to the Pacific Ocean and half to the Atlantic; that constructs a universe out of invisible foundation-stones named atoms and forever moves the whole upon electronic wheels; that hides a bluebird in an egg, a sequoia ina seed, and a human ina germ. Failing to under- stand the power of God, your spiritual roof is as low as yonder lowering sky. Stretch your true THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 181 selves out and up! Push in your smothering roof and angels will sing and shine through! Yes, in the goodness of God, we have journeyed up from atoms to angels—‘‘myriads of angels in festal gathering.” Why, this whole subject demon- strates the relativity of mind; and I mean mind from its lowliest embodiment up to its loftiest at- tainment. As a country lad, I used to watch the tadpoles in a pond. One day I said to a certain an- cestor of the frog: “Up here where I live are lovely flowers and gorgeous birds and wonderful human beings.” But Taddy leaped away in disgust, leav- ing behind the faintest suggestion of a croak; that’s how I learned, by the way, that tadpoles are the fore- runners of all human croakers! But I translated that croak, and this is how it reads: “Go on your way, foolish boy. I don’t believe in flowers or birds or humans; I believe in mud and scum and tadpoles only; they are my universe—the only universe there is— and I refuse to believe in any other.” Many an autumn have I interviewed the caterpil- lars. ‘These miraculous worms dress themselves up in rainbow colors just to show the dust they creep through how beautiful that same dust, when organ- ized into golden worms, may become. I said to Mr. Caterpillar: “Where are you going?” ‘Please don’t bother me, Preacher-man,” he protested. “I’m going just as fast as I can to get my wings.” “Wings?” I replied, with a scoff. ‘How dare you to speak of wings in my presence, you poor little worm of the dust!” SoI was getting up a fine pres- sure of indignation, when the caterpillar rejoined: “Just now, you'd better go on studying your old dry 182 . THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST sermen; I see you’re in no mood to listen to a real sermon. If you were a merchant, you would, like many other preachers, be forced to announce your wares as ‘Dry Goods and Notions.’ But just come around next summer, and I will show you my wings.” Did not the worm have the better of the argument? For when I call upon the many-colored citizens of God’s amazing out-of-doors next June- time, I shall probably see that worm of the dust rid- ing on gorgeous wings down the morning-ways of summer. Now, suppose we leave tadpoles and caterpillars for a moment and visit an Australian bushman— the nearest living human relation we have, perhaps, to our far-away and long-ago ancestors. There is nothing singular, by the way, in the fact that some of our friends and fellow-workers, deny our phy- sical descent from and kinship to the lower orders. Man is universally supersensitive on the matter of ancestral pride. Do we not boast of royal blood and Pilgrim blood and blue blood? Some of us came out of huts, but this fact is not unduly stressed in our social rosters. In the case of great men, like Lincoln, we point with pride to the log cabin. But the majority of us are not great; therefore, we ig- nore even the comfortable home and godly parents and Christian friends and neighbors from whom we sprang. Why? Well, gold and fame and pride and position blind us to truth. So we buy pictures of fictitious ancestors and hang them in our halls. Did you know that there are picture-merchants in Amer- ica who will sell you a noble ancestor for so much cash? Yes-siree! What I am saying is this: Most THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 183 of us are ridiculously sensitive as to what we came from and tragically supine as to what we have come to and whither we are going. But to return to my illustration. Suppose I said to the bushman: “In the land where I live, we have horseless wagons—automobiles that run by their own power.” But the bushman who never saw an automobile, would shake his head and say: ‘“Im- possible!’ “But that is not all we have in America. We fly through the air like a bird; then, descending in the same machine, we swim through the water like a fish.” By this time the bushman’s incredulity would beget indignation. Still, fully aware of the danger of indignant ignorance, I add: “We do something else in America. We talk through space without any wires. In Central Church, for example, I speak to multitudes every Sunday whom I cannot see; and, most remarkable of all, the man a thou- sand miles away hears my voice before the man who is only ten feet away.” ‘That, of course, would be the limit. The bushman would explode with wrath and say: “Look here, American man, ideas natur- ally make me sleepy, but insults to my intelligence make me angry. Inasmuch as I am hungry already, I will just order you cooked up and served for din- ney But what has all this to do with angels? Very much. The modern mind, relatively speaking, is, at its best, a kind of Australian bushman wandering about in our wilderness-wonder of a _ universe. Knowing electrostatics, it does not know “the power of God.” Knowing chemistry, it does not know “the power of God.” Knowing physics, it does not 184 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST know “the power of God.” Knowing wireless waves, it does not know “the power of God.” Knowing atoms, it does not know angels. Like the tadpole and the bushman, the modern mind says there are no such creatures. Now, I believe in angels because angels sound a higher note in the music of personality than it is possible for human personality to sound. The unt- verse, according to all competent thinkers, is the result of the Cause named Infinite Personality. The three phases of personality within the worlds are— the illimitable, the angelic, and the human. For aught we know, there may be personality in the sub- human world. Some of our under-relations, such as dogs and horses, have so much more nobility and good manners than some humans have, that, if in the march of the All-glorious God through His sys- tems, the flash of personality should bite into our lesser non-human friends, would it not be entirely worthy of the grace of God in Christ? Why, a universe without angels is as impossible as world without spring. An angel is as plausible asanatom. The undying miracle is this: That any- thing at all is or can be. You do not have to ex- plore the nature of angels to be driven in upon meta- physics; a germ, a stick, or a stone will serve as well. In the last analysis, everything is wonder- fully miraculous; everything—from atom to angel, from dirt to duty, is big with the bewildering beauty of the Divine. In the poem, one says to God: “Eider Father, in Whose shining eyes hoary secrets are hidden, canst Thou tell what is in the heart of a cowslip blossom?” “Yea,” saith God, “smaller than THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 185 all lives that be, secret as the deeps of ocean, a little house of seeds, like an elfin granary, stands within the cowslip blossom.” “But tell me, Eider Brother, skilled in Nature’s creeds and crafts, speller of the weeds and stones, O tell me what is in the heart of the smallest of the seeds?” “God Almighty’”—an- swers the Voice Divine—“God Almighty is within the smallest of the seeds, and with Him cherubim and seraphim, filling all Eternity, Adonai Elohim!” I] A further adventure brings us to the Christian Church. “You have come to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in Heaven.” Here is one of the most august concep- tions of the Church we have anywhere in the Bible or out of it. It includes the whole Commonwealth of God, the old dispensation and the new. What a world of suggestiveness flashes from these words— Church of the Firstborn! The firstborn of every Jewish family was peculiarly sacred to God. Israel itsel{i—the people and nation likewise—has a singu- lar significance. But, supremely, the conception is fulfilled in Christ, Who is called “the firstborn of all creation, the firstborn from the dead.” Now, in speaking of the Christian Church, we sometimes distinguish by saying the church mili- tant and the church triumphant; for, in so far as this world and present conditions are concerned, we know that, only figuratively speaking, is there any such thing as the Christian Church. We have scores of sects, many of which claim, of course, to be the true and only Christian Church. Neverthe- 186 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST less, we know that, properly speaking, they are all merely major and minor sects of the Universal Church of Christ. I have in mind the Roman Cath- olic Church, the Greek Catholic Church, the Church of England, the American Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church, the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Congregational Church, the Unitarian Church, the Baptist Church, the Lutheran Church, and all the others. Yet notwithstanding the obvious imperfections of our warring and ofttimes un- Christian sects, we would not forego the grandeur of the truth embodied in the idea of the Christian Church to which, by the grace of Christ, we have already come through faith and hope and love. The Church on earth is so imperfect because it is composed of imperfect human beings. And this— is it not?—is one of the major reasons for the Christian Church being in the world at all. If we were all thoroughly Christianized, fullgrown, and spiritually perfect, what, pray, would be the need of the Church? Thus, what we have in actuality, here and now in the world, is this: Many different sects holding, however imperfectly, the heavenly ideal of the Church. And what we must learn to do is more and more to emphasize the ideal and minimize the unideal. This has been done, it is being done, and it will continue to be done. Our various sects, to be sure, are frequently narrow and provincial. Their counterpart is quite adequately seen in those super- patriots, roaring through many of our political par- ties—narrow and provincial Americans, poisoned by partisanship, who are pathetically unaware of THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 187 the importance of other nations in the progress and work of mankind. But the Church, which is cath- olic and universal, at once in Heaven and upon the earth, is large enough to make room for every temp- erament, every type, every degree of ignorance, learning, and spiritual attainment possible to men. Some sincere and honest souls disagree with this proposition. Nevertheless, I maintain that the Christian Church, in the conception of its Founder, is big enough and capacious enough to include all morally and spiritually aspiring souls. Let me illustrate. There are some good friends who would oust some of us because we believe in the philosophy of evolution. We believe in the same God and Father; we love and adore the same Saviour; some of us believe in the Virgin Birth of our Lord, as I most emphatically do, and find within it the most beautiful and holy example of the move- ment of the Godhead in His vast unfolding and evolving processes, yielding us the cosmic and eter- nal Christ in terms of flesh and blood; the One and Only Saviour of the World; Who was before all things, and will continue to be, after all things have returned into those eternal thinkings out of which they came. Well, then, we all believe in the same God, the same Christ, and the same Bible, what is all this trouble about? It is just a difference in interpreta- tion of the one Reality—the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Some of my friends believe that the Bible teaches how God created the universe. I believe that the Bible does a much more important thing: It gives us an utterably glorious God, and 188 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST permits us to find out, if we can, how God created in the beginning and is still creating to-day. So, evolution is not God, does not and cannot take the place of God, but is just an endeavor to account for the way in which God does things. Yet, it is said that some of us have no right to the name of Christian, or to be members of the Chris- tian Church, because we hold this philosophy. It seems to me, that something more than words and ideas are at stake. It is the attitude, the atmosphere, the spirit; in a word, it is Christian love—the most terrible, the most difficult, the most glorious, the most destiny-fraught fact in a universe of moral be- ings. Do you think that I would put good people such as I have just described out of the Church? Why, the thought is absurd! If they are Chris- tians—that is, if they have the Spirit of Christ— they belong to the true Church. You canot put a Christian out of his own Christ-built home; the most you can do is to put him out of one of our in- numerable sects. My argument is: The Christian Church is capacious enough to include even those we exclude, if the excluded have the Spirit of the Master, the final token of membership in the Church, whether on earth or in Heaven. Now, take another illustration—My friend, Dr. John Haynes Holmes. He is a thinker, a scholar, and an orator. Mentally brilliant, morally upright, militantly reformatory, does not Holmes, like each of us, have his blind spot? What I mean is this: He lacks what I may venture to call the faculty of discriminating final values in the realm of personal- ity. For example, he seems to think that Jesus and THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 189 Gandhi, the great Indian mystic and reformer, are upon the same level. Now this, I maintain, is a serious defect in spiritual vision, incapacity to wor- thily evaluate in the realm of personality. Anybody who fails to see the difference between Christ and any other person, living or dead, is, in the last analy- sis, tremendously unjust to himself. Suppose I go over to the Art Institute and find a Turner and a newspaper cartoon hanging side by side. If I were to say that both represent the same values in the world of art, you would say that my capacity for judging art is not of the highest. Yet the difference between Jesus and any other person is vastly greater than the difference between the finest Turner and the most commonplace cartoon. Suppose, again, that we had Caruso back in the flesh, right here upon this platform, singing in those golden tones no other mortal seems to have had. After he had finished, suppose we were to listen to a good, even an unusual singer. Then, having lis- tened to both, what if I were to say that there was no difference in the music they produced? You would quite properly reply that I, at least, am not a qualified judge in vocal music. Yet the difference between Jesus and any other person whatsoever is infinitely greater than the difference between Caruso and other singers. But notwithstanding what I re- gard as a blind spot in Doctor Holmes, do you think I would expel him from the Christian Church? Again, the thing is absurd. At most, I could only expel him from a sect; for, if he has the Spirit of Christ, his soul-adventure has already made him a member of the Christian Church. 199 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST “But hold on!” some one protests. “Answer me this question: As Dr. Haynes Holmes does not be- lieve in the deity of Christ, how could he be a Chris- tian and a member of the true Church?” Well, now, I am sincerely glad that you have asked that question. I confess that it is perfectly legitimate; I believe, also, that I have a great answer for you. But let me say, before answering, that, personally and individually, I could not be the kind of Chris- tian I desire to be without a firm belief in the deity of our Lord. Nevertheless, the question is authora- tively answered—but not in terms of modernism or fundamentalism—by our Lord Himself: “Then shall the King say unto them on His right hand, Come, ye blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was hungry, and ye gave Me to eat; I was thirsty, and ye gave Me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took Mein; naked, and ye clothed Me; I was sick, and ye wsited Me; I was in prison, and ye came unto Me. Then shall the righteous an- swer Him, saying, Lord, when saw we Thee hungry, and fed Thee? or athirst, and gave Thee drink? And when saw we Thee a stranger, and took Thee in? or naked, and clothed Thee? And when saw we Thee sick, or in prison, and came unto Thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily, I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these My brethren, even these least, ye did it unto Me.” In that day I would rather be one of Christ’s right-handers than to be able to recite all the creeds of Christendom. Mark this: The blessed of the THE CHRISTIAN SOUL . 191 Father—Christ’s right-handers—are among the most surprised people in the far-flung universe. While upon the earth, they seem never to have seen or known the Christ. But listen—and this is the profoundly, important fact in the end of things: The Eternal Christ knew them! ‘The final question, my friends, the destiny-question, is: Not—do I know Christ? but—Does Christ know me? O brothers, let us get up into the high mountain- tops of God! We have got to be Christian lovers sometime; let’s begin now! We are already being enfolded in the clasp of Heaven’s new law and standard for mankind. “A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another even as I have loved you. By this’—not by anything else, finally, on earth or in Heaven—“shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another.” So, we have come at last, falteringly, imperfectly, with tears and agony and blood, to the Jerusalem which is above, the Mother of us all. Yes, the Mother of us all! I like to think of the Christian Church in terms of a mother-hen I saw last Sum- mer. She had twelve or fourteen chickens—so many, indeed, that I was tempted to think for a mo- ment that she had adopted another hen’s feathered orphans. A storm had broken, the thunders were rolling, the lightnings were flashing, and the rain was falling. That mother-hen had gathered all her chickens under her wings in a green plot of grass and flowers. And while the mother furnished them a roof from the storm, some of those little creatures were thrusting their heads out from under her wings and bosom, eating seeds and insects as vora- 192 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST ciously as June robins eat worms at the early-worm- restaurants in Jackson Park. And is not the Christian Church our Mother? She is great-minded and great-hearted enough to stretch her protecting wings over us and hold us close to her mothering-bosom. I noticed, moreover, that the mother-hen did not dislike her chicks be- cause they were of various colors. Some wore little feathered dresses of brown and gold; some wore light yellow frocks; some had on black velvet skirts; a few, being more gaudily disposed than the others, had put on dresses of many colors—black and white and brown. But inasmuch as they were all chickens, the mother seemed to be proud and happy. We, too, my brothers and sisters, are folk of many colors of ancestry, temperament, disposi- tion, training, mentality, and religious inclination. But that is no reason why the great Christian Church—the Mother of us all—cannot find room for us within the beatings of her most glorious and sacrificial heart. Ii The final adventure of the Christian soul brings us to the perfected human society. ‘You have come to the spirits of just men made perfect.” I think these are truly great and wonderful words. Like everything noble and beautiful and divine, they lend themselves to various degrees of emphasis and mean- ing. Consider, first, that they were just men. And who are they? ‘To mention but a few, there is Moses the murderer, and David the adulterer, and John the fire-eater, and Peter the denier, and Paul THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 193 the persecutor. Yes, and there are others. There are Augustine the libertine, and Dante the unfor- giving, and Savonarola the reformer. There are also Jerry McAuley the river thief, and Sam Jones the drunkard, and Dwight L. Moody the shoe-clerk, and Channing the saint, and Martineau the philoso- pher, and Robertson the preacher, and Fox the mys- tic, and Bradford Lee Gilbert the inventor of the skyscraper and great soul-saver, and Frank Wakeley Gunsaulus the educator and orator, and Willis and Edgar MacDonald, brothers in blood and lovers of Christ and men. Oh, it is a glorious company! Ah, yes, but look again. They are just men made perfect. Bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood, see what the grace of God in Christ has wrought for them! I shall not try to describe it, because it cannot be said or thought or pictured. It would be somewhat like my telling the tadpole of long ago that above him were the blue sky and vel- vet grass and gorgeous birds and immortal humans! Things which eyes cannot see, things which ears cannot hear, things which have not entered into the heart of man—even the things God has prepared for them that love Him. Nor has this perfected human society to which we have come and are com- ing, been suddenly improvised or extemporaneously produced. It has its beginnings in something older than mind, more ancient than matter, more antique than atoms; it is as old as the Heart of God and as green and vital as His long, eternal purpose. “For whom He foreknew,” says Paul, “He also foreor- dained to be conformed to the image of His son, that He might be the first-born among many breth- 194 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST ren: and whom He foreordained, them He also called: and whom He called, them He also justified : and whom He justified, them He also glorified.” One of the choicest who in recent years to shed his body join the great society of the living dead was John Henry Jowett. Jowett’s soul was full of loveliness and awe and pity. He wandered into our confused time like a saint out of the Middle Ages— a kind of Francis of Assisi. And yet—make no mistake—Jowett read our ailments far more clearly than most of us who are fond of preaching and pre- scribing temporary measures of relief. Looking round upon us, he understood our fevers, our strife of tongues, our industrial and political meanness, our national and international hatreds. Then he spoke as one having authority because he himself _ was authentic with the glad tidings of God in Christ. When such spiritual and interpreting focus is prop- erly made in a human being, the result is unique, magnetic, faith-inspiring, Christ-compelling. And such was Jowett. Laid aside and waiting for the chariots of God, he was ofttimes companioned by a vicar of the Church of England. ‘Said my friend once,” writes the vicar, ‘Lord, I am one of the cavalry, and I am laid low!’ Then the Lord said to me, ‘You are not one of the cavalry, you are one of My sheep.’”’ Well, if a soldier, Jowett fought in the good fight; if a sheep, he is now folded in the Heavenly Sheepfold—one of the spirits of just men made perfect. To all such souls, death is a door opening not upon outer gloom, but into inner bloom! Printed in the United States of America Date Due “+ | | il 1 MW | | | | | 7 ee al a Oo Ss 2 —7———_— = ———— —_— ES ———— rT) o——— -—————— oF aq = 5 TT #§ i 1