tihvavy of Che t^^eolo3^cal ^mimxy 
 
 
 PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY 
 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 
 The Estate of the 
 
 
 Rev. John B. Wledinger 
 
 
 BX 7327 .J8 W5 
 Jones, Edgar De Witt, 1876 
 1956. 
 
 The wisdom of God's f no i ^ 
 
 
THE WISDOM^^^P^ 
 GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 STUDIES IN SPIRITUAL SAGACITY 
 
 BY 
 
 EDGAR DeWITT JONES 
 
 Author of " The Inner Circle." 
 
 New York Chicago Toronto 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 London and Edinburgh 
 
Copyright, 1916, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 New York : 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago : 17 N. Wabash Ave. 
 Toronto : 25 Richmond St., W. 
 London : 21 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh : 100 Princes Street 
 
Co 
 
 MY GRANDFATHER 
 
 DAVID ALLAN RUMBLE 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. 
 
 The Wisdom of God's Fools . 
 
 9 
 
 II. 
 
 The Soul's Need of Silence . 
 
 23 
 
 III. 
 
 The Case of Judas of Kerioth 
 
 37 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Ministry of Mediation . 
 
 51 
 
 V. 
 
 Faith and Fortitude . 
 
 67 
 
 VI. 
 
 The Middle Estate 
 
 ; 83 
 
 VII. 
 
 Praiseworthy Prodigality . 
 
 lOI 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Doubts and Doubters . 
 
 117 
 
 IX. 
 
 The Gift of the Morning Star . 
 
 133 
 
 X. 
 
 RlZPAH OF THE MOTHER HeaRT . 
 
 147 
 
 XI. 
 
 The Besetting Sin .... 
 
 163 
 
 XII. 
 
 Christ the Creed . . . . 
 
 175 
 
 XIII. 
 
 The Keeping of the Faith . 
 
 187 
 
 XIV. 
 
 Christ and the Crowds . 
 
 199 
 
 XV. 
 
 Good-Bye to Glory .... 
 
 213 
 
Digitized by tlie Internet Arcliive 
 in 2014 
 
 littps://arcliive.org/details/wisdomofgodsfoolOOjone 
 
I 
 
 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son, 
 Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in, 
 Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone. 
 Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone, 
 Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one. 
 Thou canst not prove that thou art immortal, no. 
 Nor yet that thou art mortal — nay, my son, 
 Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee. 
 
 Am not thyself in converse with thyself ; 
 For nothing worthy proving can be proven. 
 Nor yet disproven: wherefore be thou wise. 
 Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, 
 And cling to faith beyond the forms of faith ! " 
 
 Alfred Tennyson. 
 
I 
 
 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 " And his servants came near, and spake unto him, 
 and said, My father, if the prophet had bid thee do 
 some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it? 
 How much rather when he saith to thee, Wash and 
 be clean." — // Kings 5: 17. 
 
 THAT was one of the wisest suggestions 
 ever made by a human being. If it is 
 possible to compress the quintessence of 
 common sense into a single sentence we have it 
 here in this advice of the servants to their mas- 
 ter, Captain Naaman. 
 
 Naaman was the miHtary commander of Syria, 
 honoured and highly esteemed by his king and 
 country; but withal, Naaman was a leper, though 
 in his case the disease was either incipient or of 
 a light form. Yet even so, the affliction was seri- 
 ous and the outcome full of peril. Very likely 
 Naaman had experimented with many cures, but 
 all in vain. His family, his friends, and his king 
 were gravely concerned about the matter. It hap- 
 pened that a little Israelitish maid, who had been 
 taken captive by a marauding band, waited on 
 Naaman's wife, and one day she said to her mis- 
 tress : " Would that my Lord were with the 
 prophet in Samaria, then would he recover him of 
 9 
 
10 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 the leprosy." Naturally, the remark of the little 
 maid at once interested her mistress, and it came to 
 pass that not long after this incident Naaman, with 
 a great retinue of servants and with much pomp, 
 journeyed to Israel's king and thence to Elisha, 
 the prophet, seeking to be healed of his leprosy. 
 
 The cavalcade alighted in front of Elisha's 
 house and expectantly awaited his appearance. 
 But the prophet did not even deign to come out 
 and see the great soldier. Instead, Elisha sent a 
 messenger to Naaman saying: "Go and wash in 
 the Jordan seven times and thy flesh shall come 
 again to thee and thy flesh shall become clean." 
 The commander-in-chief of the Syrian army was 
 amazed. Yea, more, he was shocked. He had 
 expected a demonstration, he had looked for the 
 prophet to come out and with much pomp and 
 ceremony pronounce a cure. As has been finely 
 said : " Naaman expected to be treated as a great 
 man who happened to be a leper; Elisha treated 
 him as a leper, who happened to be a great man." 
 
 " Bathe seven times in the river Jordan," — 
 such was the prophet's prescription. Captain 
 Naaman was angry, his pride was hurt, he believed 
 himself insulted. As for rivers, why, his own 
 country boasted of Abanah and Pharpar — much 
 more beautiful streams than the Jordan. Naaman 
 decided not to comply with the prophet's command, 
 and he ordered preparations for the homeward 
 journey. Naaman was going back to Syria, and 
 
THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 11 
 
 alas, he was going back still a leper. It was at 
 this critical point that the servants of Naaman 
 came near. They loved their master and that 
 spoke well for him. The servants said to the dis- 
 appointed and wrathful captain : " My father, 
 [the affectionate term is very tender and beauti- 
 ful]. My father, if the prophet had bid thee do 
 some great thing, wouldest thou not have done 
 it ? How much rather when he saith to thee. Wash 
 and be clean." 
 
 This advice of Naaman's servants is noteworthy 
 for more than one reason. In a wider sense than 
 the particular application to the case of Naaman, 
 the remark contains a' philosophy that is pro- 
 foundly true. The human race is tyrannized by 
 the so-called great things. \Yt are obsessed by 
 contemplation of the great, the unusual, the out- 
 of-the-ordinary, the dramatic and spectacular; 
 whereas, it is the simple, the commonplace, the 
 apparent trifle, that is oftenest the medium of 
 God's voice to us. Nature reflects this truth. 
 Every day in God's great out-of-doors, so far as 
 the average eye can see, is commonplace. Noth- 
 ing unusual is happening, growth is never clam- 
 orous or rampant. Flowers do not announce 
 their blooming by deafening explosions, the trees 
 do not leaf with orchestra accompaniment. Apples 
 and peaches do not advertise their ripening by the 
 ringing of bells. There is obedience to the law 
 of God in nature, and lo, quietly the green comes 
 
12 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 and goes, seedtime and harvest, planting and reap- 
 ing. Life is composed almost entirely of what we 
 wrongfully term commonplace things, the round 
 of daily toil of sewing and mending, of dusting 
 and sweeping, or the daily grind in office and 
 store and in shop and on the farm — homespun 
 ministrations are these, and yet Divinity is in and 
 among them every one. Likewise, growth in 
 graces of character is quiet, is not puffed up, goes 
 not on dress parade. Verily, there is much wis- 
 dom in the speech of Naaman's servants. 
 
 It is to the credit of Naaman that he heeded 
 the good advice of his servants. Proud man that 
 he was, he bowed his stubborn will and obeyed the 
 command of Elisha. He did precisely what the 
 prophet told him to do; he bathed himself not 
 once or twice or three times, but seven times in 
 the river Jordan, and his flesh came as the flesh of 
 a little child. Naaman became a fool for God's 
 sake and the wisdom of God was demonstrated 
 in the cure which followed. What had seemed 
 Naaman's wisdom was Naaman's folly, and what 
 had seemed foolishness in Naaman's eyes was in 
 reality the deepest wisdom. 
 
 The story of Naaman illustrates the wisdom of 
 God's fools, which consists in being willing to 
 take God at His word. The wisdom of God is 
 foolishness to many. The Apostle Paul, in his 
 first epistle to the Corinthians, amplifies this truth. 
 In the first chapter, eighteenth verse, he writes: 
 
THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS IS 
 
 " For the word of the cross is to them that perish 
 foolishness; but unto us who are saved it is the 
 power of God." And again in the twentieth 
 verse: " Where is the wise? where is the scribe? 
 where is the disputer of this world ? hath not God 
 made fooHsh the wisdom of the world? " And in 
 the twenty-first verse : " For seeing that in the 
 wisdom of God the world through its wisdom knew 
 not God, it was God's good pleasure through the 
 foolishness of the preaching to save them that be- 
 lieve." And once more in the twenty-fifth verse 
 of the same chapter : " Because the foolishness 
 of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of 
 God is stronger than men." And to these Scrip- 
 tures the Apostle's words in the same Epistle, 
 second chapter, fourteenth verse, may be added: 
 " Now the natural man receiveth not the things 
 of the Spirit of God : for they are foolishness unto 
 him; and he cannot know them, because they are 
 spiritually judged." 
 
 Naaman illustrated a common trait of mankind 
 when he flatly refused to obey the prophet's com- 
 mand because it displeased him. He was not will- 
 ing to take Elisha at his word, since his word was 
 so very different from what he had expected. In 
 Naaman's eyes the thing at first appeared ridicu- 
 lous. " Bathe seven times in the river Jordan." 
 It was absurd! 
 
 Christianity has been a stumbling-block because 
 of its very simplicity, a stumbling-block to the 
 
14 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 worldly wise. The very first steps of becoming 
 a Christian — the so-called " first principles of 
 Christianity," are to many as so much foolishness. 
 The matter of a confession of faith by word of 
 mouth in the belief of Jesus as the Son of God, 
 the confession of faith and the vow of consecra- 
 tion in the ordinance of baptism is as foolishness 
 to the wiseacres of the world. To walk quietly 
 down a church aisle during the singing of such a 
 hymn as : " How Firm a Foundation, Ye Saints 
 of the Lord," and in the presence of a congrega- 
 tion made up of people from all walks of life, 
 make a personal confession of faith in Jesus Christ 
 as Lord and Saviour, is to some a non-essential 
 act. Moreover, to the worldly wise, it has in it a 
 compromise of dignity, stubborn pride resists it, 
 and falls back upon the question " Is it really 
 necessary after all ? " 
 
 It is reported that a great lady once asked a 
 minister : " Do I have to become a Christian the 
 same way that my footman does ? " " Precisely 
 the same way," was the answer. " Then I won't 
 be one," she replied. Alas, the wisdom of the 
 world that demands some great thing, rejects the 
 prophetic word, and disobeys the heavenly vision, 
 simply because the task is unpleasant or the com- 
 mand seems unreasonable. God's fools are those 
 that take Him at His word, like Joshua, of whom 
 it was said : " He left nothing undone of all the 
 Lord commanded Moses; " like Samuel, who, as a 
 
THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 15 
 
 lad, answered the voice of God, saying: " Speak, 
 for thy servant heareth; " Hke Isaiah in the pres- 
 ence of the Almighty exclaiming: " Here am I, 
 send me; " like the three thousand on the day of 
 Pentecost crying out: "Brethren, what shall we 
 do?" like Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus way, 
 who, beholding a great light and hearing the 
 Divine voice, exclaimed : " What shall I do, 
 Lord?" like the great line of prophets, apostles, 
 martyrs, missioners, reformers — great souls who 
 became the fools of God and thereby the truly 
 wise. 
 
 The wisdom of God's fools consists also in doing 
 with wholeheartedness the ministries which at first 
 blush seem to be, in the fooHshness of man, beneath 
 his dignity. The great ethics that Christ taught 
 are in a way simplicity par excellence. The heart 
 of our Christian faith, so far as conduct is con- 
 cerned, is embodied in the Sermon on the Mount, 
 and the Sermon on the Mount is foolishness to the 
 wise of this earth. A famous statesman, now dead, 
 some twenty-five years ago, affirmed in a speech 
 which was widely quoted, that the Sermon on the 
 Mount and the Ten Commandments had no place 
 in politics. The opinion of the world, so far as it 
 gives consideration at all to the Sermon on the 
 Mount, is that this great teaching of Jesus is im- 
 practicable and visionary, the product of the mind 
 of a dreamer. Such virtues as resisting the evil, 
 suffering injustice rather than going to law, turning 
 
16 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 the other cheek to the smiter, walking the extra 
 mile, what foohshness these are to the worldly 
 minded! With what fine scorn some professed 
 Christians regard such ministries as teaching a class 
 in the Sunday School or leading a prayer meeting 
 or doing some necessary though humble work in the 
 name of the Nazarene, only to discover after ex- 
 perience in such work the wisdom, of it, the glory 
 and grandeur of it, the Christlikeness of such minis- 
 tries. 
 
 A minister spoke to a judge of his acquaintance 
 — a lawyer of distinction in the State — " Judge," 
 he said, " I want you to take a class of boys in the 
 Sunday School." " It is impossible," said the 
 judge, " I am a busy man and I can see no 
 reason why I should teach a class of boys even if 
 I had the time." " The boys all respect you," con- 
 tinued the minister, " you are a hero to many of 
 them, you could interest them from the first." But 
 the judge closed the interview abruptly by affirm- 
 ing that he simply could not think of taking a class 
 of boys in the Sunday School. A week later the 
 minister was surprised to receive a call from the 
 same judge, who began with strange hesitation, — 
 " I have called to say that ... I will try that class. 
 I thought it all out after you left. It was pride 
 that made me refuse. I thought I was too great a 
 man to teach a class of boys. I tell you, sir, I am 
 a hypocrite, I have tried to play the distinguished 
 gentleman and I have been worthless to the King- 
 
THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 17 
 
 dom. Put me to work. I do not know how to 
 teach little boys, I am too ignorant but I am willing 
 to learn." At the close of his first year in the Sun- 
 day School that distinguished judge said to his 
 minister : " Teaching that class has been the great- 
 est thing that ever happened to me. I never had 
 any definition of service before. I shall never cease 
 to thank God for opening my eyes to see myself as 
 I really was." The judge had learned wisdom by 
 becoming one of God's fools. 
 
 There is the language of wisdom as learned by 
 one who had become a fool for Christ's sake in the 
 simple hymn of consecration : 
 
 " It may not be on the mountain's height, 
 
 Or over the stormy sea; 
 It may not be at the battle's front 
 
 My Lord will have need of me. 
 But if by a still small voice He calls 
 
 To paths that I do not know, 
 I'll answer, dear Lord, with my hand in Thine, 
 
 I'll go where you want me to go. 
 I'll go where you want me to go, dear Lord, 
 
 Over mountain or plain, or sea ; 
 I'll say what you want me to say, dear Lord, 
 
 I'll be what you want me to be." 
 
 God's word to Naaman, through the prophet, is 
 through Jesus Christ to us, in essence, the same — 
 " Wash and be clean." Holiness, that is whole- 
 ness of character, clean minds, pure hearts, right- 
 eousness — this is the essence of Christianity. 
 Forms and ceremonies have their uses, but they 
 are the shell; the kernel of our religion is right- 
 
18 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 eousness, right living, right thinking, right acting. 
 The wisdom of the world is sceptical of the value 
 attributed to righteousness, and is inclined to chal- 
 lenge the good of it all. The worldly wise are of 
 the opinion that brilliance, cleverness, money, place, 
 and power, can and do accomplish more and ac- 
 complish it more quickly than the slow and quiet 
 processes of simple faith and good works. But 
 God's fool knows better, and there is only one 
 way to learn that the foolishness of God is wiser 
 than men and that is to take Him at His word, to 
 trust and obey. 
 
 " Wash and be clean," was God's word to Naa- 
 man. Naaman's leprosy made him a peril to 
 society, to his wife and family, to his king and 
 country, and bound up in that cure of Naaman's 
 leprosy was salvation for the society in which 
 Naaman moved. No man has ever lived or died 
 to himself unless he lived and died a hermit with 
 no other human being in sight or sound. God's 
 word today is as it was to Naaman — " Wash and 
 be clean " in way of thinking, in way of acting, 
 in attitude toward God and man ; and to heed that 
 word means more than the salvation of the in- 
 dividual — it means that every man and woman 
 who becomes a fool of God and so becomes wise 
 unto salvation serves society, supplies society with 
 saving salt, thereby making it more difficult for 
 society to go wrong and therefore easier for 
 society to do right. 
 
THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 19 
 
 Would you be God's fool? Then take God at 
 His word. Make the high venture of faith. 
 Launch out into the deep. " Whatsoever he saith 
 unto you, do it." Give the cup of cold water. Go 
 the second mile. Suffer injustice rather than go 
 to law. Turn the other cheek to the smiter. Wash 
 and be clean. Be numbered among the fools of 
 the world and accept for leader the Wisest. 
 
 " Wash and be clean ! Proud soul, doth this offend 
 Thy haughtiness? But half-convinced of sin, 
 The door of mercy will not let thee in 
 Until in meek humility thou bend. 
 Say, foolish soul, what did thy prayer intend, 
 Thy cry : O, how shall I salvation win ? 
 Zeal would consume thee, had the answer been 
 Of toils and tasks herculean, without end. 
 But to repent, believe, and be forgiven, — 
 A thing a child, a simpleton, might do ! 
 'Twas no such work as this thou hadst in view, 
 But by thy powers, full-strained, to merit heaven. 
 Behold, thy powers are nothing in God's eyes ; 
 Thy ransom is the blood thou wouldest despise." 
 
 GRACIOUS HEAVENLY FATHER, WE WHO HAVE 
 SO OFTEN BEEN AT HOME AMONG THE WORLDLY 
 WISE, NOW SEEK TO BE NUMBERED WITH THE 
 FOOLS OF GOD. THE WISDOM OF THIS WORLD WE 
 HAVE TRIED AND FOUND WANTING. WE ENTREAT 
 THEE FOR THAT PURE AND PEACEABLE WISDOM 
 WHICH COMETH DOWN FROM ABOVE. HUMBLY WE 
 BOW BEFORE THEE WILLING TO TAKE THEE AT THY 
 WORD. SPEAK, LORD, FOR THY SERVANT HEARETH. 
 
II 
 
 THE SOUL'S NEED OF SILENCE 
 
"Into the woods my Master went, 
 Clean forspent, forspent; 
 Into the woods my Master came, 
 Forspent with love and shame. 
 But the olives they were not blind to Him, 
 The little grey leaves were kind to Him, 
 The thorn-tree had a mind to Him, 
 When into the woods He came. 
 
 " Out of the woods my Master went, 
 And He was well content; 
 Out of the woods my Master came. 
 Content with death and shame. 
 When death and shame would woo Him last, 
 From under the trees they drew Him last; 
 'Twas on a tree they slew Him last, 
 When out of the woods He came." 
 
 Sidney Lanier. 
 
II 
 
 THE SOUL'S NEED OF SILENCE 
 
 " Be still, and know that I am God." — Psalm 46 : 10. 
 
 LIKE all immortal poems, the Psalms were not 
 written to order. The authors did not pro- 
 duce them by first deciding that it would be 
 a splendid performance to embalm Israel's hopes 
 and fears in verse and then with little thought 
 dashed them off straightway. The Psalms of 
 Israel are the irrepressible songs of her great sing- 
 ers. They could not be written until their writers 
 had passed through certain experiences; then they 
 had to be written. David, in the thirty-ninth 
 Psalm, gives some hint of their method of writ- 
 ing when he exclaims : " While I was musing the 
 fire burned." Quite naturally, it came about that 
 the Psalms are fraught with religious experi- 
 ences, either personal or national. The forty-sixth 
 Psalm has a background of uncommon interest 
 since it was likely written in commemoration of 
 the destruction of Sennacherib's host in the days 
 of King Hezekiah. The overwhelming tragedy, 
 which is recorded in II Kings, 19:35-37, occurred 
 during the nighttime, when the angel of the Lord 
 smote one hundred and eighty-five thousand 
 Assyrians, both horses and riders. The famous 
 23 
 
Z4, THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 lines of Byron, in his Hebrew melody, will be re- 
 called, especially the last stanza: 
 
 " And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail, 
 And the idols are broken in the temples of Baal, 
 And the might of the Gentiles unsmote by the sword 
 Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord." 
 
 It is this destruction of the Assyrian host by 
 the hand of the Lord that is in the Psalmist's mind. 
 In imagination he beholds the devastating power 
 of God descending in awful destruction upon 
 Israel's enemy. He beholds the earth heaped and 
 strewn with debris, broken bows, splintered spears, 
 half-charred chariots, the rigid bodies of men and 
 horses; and thus viewing the host laid low forever, 
 he realizes how feeble and futile are the devices 
 of man as compared with the power of Almighty 
 God. Indeed, that sight of wreck and ruin seems 
 to have a voice, the Almighty speaks, and the 
 Psalmist hears Him say : " Be still, and know 
 that I am God." 
 
 " Be still ! " That is the most difficult of all 
 commands for us moderns. Perhaps it never was 
 easy to be still, but it is particularly difficult now. 
 Ours is a fussy age, a fast and furious time, a 
 vociferous period. All the irons that we possess 
 are in the fire. Our activities are manifold. 
 There are organizations for every day and night 
 in the week and half a dozen for the Lord's day. 
 A mad haste characterizes our daily life; speed is 
 at a premium. When Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson, the 
 
THE SOUL'S NEED OF SILENCE 25 
 
 famous publicist, made his first visit to America his 
 conclusion was that the dominant American passion 
 was the desire for wealth. On his second visit he 
 revised that judgment and decided that our great 
 ambition was not for wealth so much as for power. 
 On his third visit, however, he decided that the 
 ruling passion of America was for neither one of 
 these, but the demand for acceleration. Of the 
 same tenor is the remark of a noted American 
 architect, who, in a conversation with the Italian 
 historian, Ferrero, said: "My fellow country- 
 men would willingly spend a hundred million dol- 
 lars to build a church as beautiful as St. Mark's in 
 Venice. But they would command me, as a con- 
 dition of my undertaking the work, to finish it 
 within eighteen months." 
 
 The word " feverish " describes better than any 
 other word our modern life. Our home life is 
 feverish; our business life is feverish; our social 
 life is feverish; even our religious life is feverish, 
 and the average church with its round of rallies 
 and special meetings aggravates rather than rests 
 its nerve-worn members. Our days are shortened 
 by anxiety, worry, and concern. We lack poise, 
 balance, and quiet reserve power. " Be still ! " 
 That is a hard command for us to obey. Rather 
 bid us to buy, to sell, to speak, to sing, to play. 
 Command us to do anything but " Be still." Ask 
 of us the reasonable, not the impossible. 
 
 In a very large way meditation is a lost art with 
 
26 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 us. Meditation is difficult, if not impossible in 
 the round of hurly-burly distractions of our way 
 of living. Many of us do not want to think; we 
 prefer to be entertained. We are not given to 
 musing, but we have a passion to be amused. Our 
 most popular form of diversion — the moving pic- 
 tures — is not an aid to meditation. Such words 
 as contemplation, reflection, and meditation are 
 not of our vocabulary. We dote on efficiency. 
 The word strenuous is popular with us; and if the 
 spirit of our times has any word of command for 
 us it is " Speed up! " 
 
 " Be still ! " There is a ministry in silence. Not 
 silence for silence's sake, to be sure, for that 
 might denote the quintessence of selfishness. Some 
 of us would like to be silent that we might be the 
 noisier by-and-bye. Silence with some would 
 be welcomed merely as a shock-absorber. I recall 
 reading some years ago the story of a business 
 man who was worn to the point of collapse by a 
 heavy round of official responsibility. One day 
 he happened to be in the office of a physician 
 where there was an odd-looking machine. The 
 physician pointed to it and explained : " That 
 machine can make you deaf. If you would like 
 to have your hearing deadened all you will need 
 to do is to sit down in this chair, look steadily at 
 that disc, and in five minutes you will be deaf to 
 all ordinary noises. This same machine can re- 
 store your hearing whenever you wish it. Would 
 
THE SOUL'S NEED OF SILENCE 27 
 
 you like to try the experiment ? " For answer the 
 weary business man sat down in the chair and 
 directed the physician to set the machine going. 
 Immediately the disc began to revolve rapidly, 
 producing a peculiar purring kind of sound not 
 at all unpleasant to the ear. In a few minutes 
 the man in the chair, who was intently watching 
 the disc, could distinguish no sound at all. The 
 experiment over, the physician reminded his 
 patient to return when he desired his hearing re- 
 stored. The man went out on the street where a 
 hush had fallen over all. He heard neither the 
 noise of traffic nor the cries of the newsboys, but 
 picked his way through the crowded streets now 
 gratefully silent for him. Everywhere he went 
 sweet silence reigned soothing and resting his 
 worn nerves; and the outcome of the story was 
 that the tired business man refused to permit the 
 doctor to restore his hearing, preferring deafness 
 and silence to the clamour and din of the world. 
 I recall that at the time I read the incident I 
 thought the cure a selfish one; but silence for the 
 sake of silence is not that which the Psalmist has 
 in mind. Instead he commands silence for a more 
 spiritual purpose. The word of the Psalmist is 
 not simply: " Be still! " but " Be still, and know 
 that I am God." The ministry of silence is that 
 of being still that we may come to know God. 
 
 There is only one way that we can know God 
 and that is spiritually. In Jesus' conversation 
 
28 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 with the woman of Samaria He declared that 
 " God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must 
 worship Him in spirit and in truth." We know 
 one another in our human relationships by the 
 physical senses, by joining hand to hand, eye look- 
 ing into eye, or as words passed from mouth to 
 ear. But God can neither be seen, nor heard, nor 
 touched, as we see, know, and touch one another. 
 He can be approached only spiritually; He can 
 be apprehended only as our spirit experiences con- 
 tact with His spirit. And this approach to God 
 is not accidental, but a matter of thought and 
 power of the will and fixed habits of life. Our 
 minds will have to be staid on Him if we are to 
 be kept in perfect peace; we shall have to be still 
 to know that He is God. Jesus gave wise counsel 
 when, in His Sermon on the Mount, He said: 
 " Thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet." 
 
 It is this closet experience that we are needing. 
 We must be alone with God and most of us sel- 
 dom are. Herein is where we fail. We make 
 little or no provision for increasing our knowledge 
 of God by deliberately choosing to be with Him 
 and with Him alone. The " skeleton in the closet " 
 of many nominal Christians is the ghost of prayer 
 habits once formed but now broken and aban- 
 doned. All the great souls who have known God 
 have come to know Him by this manner of ap- 
 proach. The biographies of the great preachers, 
 missionaries, every devout Christian, all bear wit- 
 
THE SOUL'S NEED OF SILENCE 29 
 
 ness to the potency of prayer. The lives of the 
 outstanding characters in the Holy Scriptures 
 bear eloquent testimony to the same source of 
 power. The secret of their strength is found in 
 those closet experiences where, alone with God, 
 they came to know Him and His purposes for 
 them; and their lives became channels through 
 which His spirit wrought wondrous things. 
 Jacob is the classic illustration of the Old Testa- 
 ment. The early life of Jacob is not pleasant 
 reading, and the wrong he did his brother is hard 
 to forget. The young man leaves his home and 
 starts out to make a place for himself in the world. 
 And that first night away from home he lays him- 
 self down to sleep beneath the Syrian stars and 
 moon; and whilst it is night he has a vision of 
 God and His angels. The experience makes a 
 deep impression on Jacob, who vows a vow, dedi- 
 cates his life to God in a larger and more intimate 
 way; sets up a pillar there and calls it: Bethel. 
 The years pass on and Jacob's life is a curious 
 mixture of good and evil. Seemingly he has for- 
 gotten Bethel; then comes his separation from his 
 father-in-law, Laban; his journeying back toward 
 his old home; and lo, the warning of Esau's ap- 
 proach with four hundred men. Again Jacob is 
 left alone with God, and that night came the crisis 
 of his life. Jacob confessing his dependence upon 
 God, is born again; he becomes a new creature and 
 Jehovah gives him a new name. Instead of Jacob, 
 
30 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 which means a supplanter, he is called Israel, 
 which signifies A Prince with God, And, as with 
 Jacob, so with all other great characters of the 
 Bible, they found power in and by close com- 
 munion with God. Abraham on the mountain; 
 Moses in the wilderness of Midian; Gideon on the 
 threshing floor; Samuel in the house of EH; David 
 in the cave; Elijah in the mountain fastness; 
 Isaiah in the temple; Daniel in his own room with 
 the windows open toward Jerusalem; John the 
 Baptist in the wilderness; Paul in Arabia; John 
 on the Island of Patmos; — the great company of 
 patriarchs, prophets, priests, apostles, martyrs, 
 missionaries, were all made strong through the 
 ministry of silence. 
 
 Mr. Stewart Edward White wrote a book a few 
 years ago called " The Silent Places," describing 
 some of the great silent stretches of God's out-of- 
 doors. Every life should have its silent places, 
 its closet experiences, where God and man meet 
 and commune. These places may vary in location 
 though alike in aloneness with God. As Isaac of 
 old went out to meditate in the field at eventide, 
 so God's out-of-doors may serve as an oratory for 
 many a soul who is seeking Him. Never shall I 
 forget a day when all alone I stood on the rim of 
 the Grand Canyon of Arizona and looked into 
 that Titan of Chasms, piled with mountains, fur- 
 rowed with valleys, and jewelled with " purple 
 peaks remote." A great silence came upon me 
 
THE SOUL'S NEED OF SILENCE 31 
 
 and I heard God's voice speaking in the majesty 
 and awful grandeur of that wonder of the world. 
 Sometimes in open field, sometimes along the sea- 
 shore, sometimes in the depth of a great forest, 
 alone with God we may experience the ministry 
 of silence and thereby enrich our knowledge of the 
 Almighty. But, oftenest and perhaps best and 
 wisest, is the silent period in the seclusion of one's 
 room. Not all of us can go to mountain, or sea- 
 shore; not all of us can walk every day in quiet 
 country fields. We are a busy people; families 
 are dependent upon us; we have much to do; but 
 there is not one of us who may not keep the quiet 
 hour if we choose to have it so. Fifteen minutes 
 every day, either in the morning or the evening 
 (the morning is perhaps the better time), in quiet 
 meditation and devotional reading of a brief Scrip- 
 tural passage, is the best possible preparation for 
 a busy day of work. Yet how few keep the quiet 
 hour or provide for the silent places. Perhaps 
 not one in a thousand who wears the Christian 
 name makes this provision for the soul's need of 
 silence. And because we neglect this our lives may 
 be powerless; defeat comes instead of victory; 
 discouragement enters where hope and expectancy 
 should abide. " Be still, and know that I am God." 
 The soul needs silence; our lives hunger for the 
 bread of heaven, and we know not where to find 
 supply. Behold a storehouse at our right hand ! 
 Of all who have ever lived, none knew God as 
 
32 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 Jesus Christ knew Him. How came it so? Be 
 sure it was not an accident. No busier man ever 
 walked the earth than Jesus during those days 
 when He journeyed through Gahlee, Judea, Perea, 
 healing, teaching and blessing the multitudes. But 
 diligent as Jesus was, His life was never feverish; 
 He never was rufifled; He never was caught off His 
 guard; His poise was perfect. And there is a 
 reason for it. Occupied as He was, thronged by 
 the multitude, sometimes too busy to rest or eat, 
 Jesus kept inviolate His times of retirement when, 
 alone with the Father, He found strength for His 
 unwearied ministry. Such sentences as these from 
 the Gospel narrative reveal the open secret of His 
 well-poised life: " He went out into the solitary 
 place and there He prayed." " He withdrew Him- 
 self into the wilderness and there He prayed." 
 " He rose up a little while before day and de- 
 parted into a solitary place to pray." " And it 
 came to pass in these days that He went out into 
 the mountain to pray, and He continued all night 
 in prayer to God." In the silent places Jesus 
 Christ came to know God as no one before nor 
 since has known him. Think of Gethsemane : 
 
 " 'Tis midnight, and on Olive's brow 
 The star is dim that lately shone. 
 'Tis midnight, — in the Garden now 
 The suffering Saviour prays alone." 
 
 It was in the Garden, and not on Calvary, that 
 Jesus won the great victory. He was alone in that 
 
THE SOUL'S NEED OF SILENCE 33 
 
 experience, parted a stone's cast from James and 
 John and Peter — His three intimates. And alone 
 in the Garden with God Jesus learned the Father's 
 will completely. And from that silent place, with 
 the light of victory bathing His brow in beauty, 
 He suffered Himself to be led away to His tri- 
 umphant victory 
 
 " Be still, and know that I am God." Aye, it 
 is hard to learn to be still. It is as hard for us to 
 be still when God bids us as it is for our children 
 when we bid them to be quiet. And yet the soul 
 has need of silence if we grow in knowledge of 
 God ; and whether or not we choose to be still, by- 
 and-bye the experience must come when we shall 
 perforce have to be still. Some great and bitter 
 disappointment will come like a bolt from the blue; 
 our hopes will be blasted into nothingness; our 
 castles in the air will dissolve; for us the heavens 
 will become as brass; our strength turned into 
 weakness; our manifold activities and boundless 
 energies suddenly paralyzed. We shall have no 
 heart to go about our wonted occupations; life will 
 have palled upon us and all the world wear the 
 weeds of widowhood. Or, it may be that still- 
 ness will come by way of death in the household. 
 A voice will be stilled that made music all the 
 day; the laughter of a little child heard no more 
 on stairway or through hall; wife or husband, 
 mother or father, may be gathered into the " vasty 
 halls of death " and over the household there will 
 
34 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 come such a stillness as can almost be felt. And 
 then, oh miracles of miracles, out of that great 
 silence there may be vouchsafed unto us a vision 
 of God that will satisfy our soul's deepest long- 
 ings. Scales will fall from our eyes, and like 
 Jacob of old we shall gain a new victory and win 
 for ourselves a new name. 
 
 " I walk down the Valley of Silence, — 
 
 Down the dim, voiceless valley — alone! 
 And I hear not the fall of a footstep 
 Around me, save God's and my own ; 
 And the hush of my heart is as holy 
 As hovers where angels have flown ! 
 
 " Do you ask me the place of the Valley, 
 Ye hearts that are harrowed with care? 
 
 It lieth far between mountains, 
 
 And God and His angels are there ; 
 
 And one is the dark mount of Sorrow, 
 And one is the bright mountain of Prayer." 
 
 THOU GOOD AND WISE FATHER, TEACH US TO BE 
 QUIET, HELP US TO BE STILL. HUSH THOU OUR 
 CLAMOROUS OUTCRIES, STAY OUR FUTILE STRIFE. 
 CALM OUR FEVERISH LIVES. STABLISH OUR SOULS 
 IN SILENCE THAT OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THEE MAY 
 GROW AND " MORE OF REVERENCE IN US DWELL."" 
 
Ill 
 
 THE CASE OF JUDAS OF KERIOTH 
 
"Who could have thought my shrivell'd heart 
 
 Could have recover'd greenness? It was gone 
 Quite underground: as flowers depart 
 
 To see their mother-root, when they had blown ; 
 Where they together 
 All the hard weather, 
 Dead to the world, keep house unknown. 
 
 "These are thy wonders, Lord of power. 
 
 Killing and quickening, bringing down to hel! 
 And up to heaven in an hour; 
 Making a chiming of a passing bell 
 We say amiss, 
 This or that is: 
 Thy word is all, if we could spell." 
 
 James Leakmount. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE CASE OF JUDAS OF KERIOTH 
 
 " And when it was evening he Cometh with the 
 twelve. And as they sat and were eating, Jesus said, 
 Verily I say unto you, one of you shall betray me, 
 even he that eateth with me. They began to be sor- 
 rowful, and to say unto him one by one, Is it I ? And 
 he said unto them, It is one of the twelve, he that 
 dippeth with me in the dish." — Mark 14: 17-20. 
 
 HERE were thirteen men present at the 
 
 Last Supper in an upper room in Jerusa- 
 
 lem; thirteen — yet as we gaze upon the 
 scene we can discern clearly but two — ^Jesus and 
 Judas. The eleven others are as so many lay fig- 
 ures and for the time they do but fill in the back- 
 ground. Jesus of Nazareth and Judas of 
 Kerioth, these two fill the canvas of that scene 
 completely; they dominate it wholly. And what 
 a contrast — Jesus and Judas! Set a day of sun- 
 shine and roses over again storm-filled night of 
 no moon or stars; limpid, life-giving stream over 
 against foul miasmatic swamp; set peace serene 
 and life buoyant over against war terrible and 
 death horrible; range heaven alongside of hell; 
 and at first blush the contrast is not greater than 
 that of Jesus and Judas. Even so, I am believing 
 that we have but skimmed the surface of this 
 
 37 
 
38 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 solemn and tragic narrative. We praise Jesus and 
 condemn Judas; and think we have finished. We 
 shall do well to examine this sad story yet more 
 searchingly and it may be that we shall discover 
 lessons hitherto overlooked. 
 
 Jesus knew what was in judas' mind, yet 
 without the slightest show of anger he 
 
 DEALT WITH HIM IN TENDEREST LOVE. Try tO 
 
 imagine the scene; put yourself in Jesus' place. 
 Here was a company of twelve who had been with 
 Him for three years, comrades, friends, intimates; 
 and now one of them was about to betray the 
 Master, to sell Him for a bagful of silver into the 
 hands of His enemies. Not only so, but that one 
 was in the room and to all outward appearance 
 as loving, as loyal, as the others. There is some- 
 thing serpentine about a traitor; there is some- 
 thing low and devilish in treason. If we had been 
 in Jesus' place what would we have done? If I 
 had been there what would I have done? If I 
 understand myself at all, I think I know what I 
 would have been tempted to do if I had been in 
 Jesus' place in that upper room. I think I would 
 have risen from the table, white faced and trem- 
 bling, full to overflowing with hot anger, and 
 pointing with shaking finger toward Judas, I 
 would have said: "That man is a traitor; he is 
 selling me into the enemy's hands; yet he pretends 
 to be my friend. This room is too small for him 
 and me; I cannot breathe with such an ingrate 
 
THE CASE OF JUDAS OF KERIOTH 39 
 
 here; take him from this place and as you take 
 him do with him whatever you think his damnable 
 treason deserves." In some such manner I can 
 imagine myself dealing with Judas. But recollect 
 now what Jesus did that last night in the upper 
 room. 
 
 First and foremost, Jesus washed Judas' feet. 
 In the absence of a servant, the twelve disciples 
 should have performed this menial service each 
 for the other; but engrossed in the discussion of 
 " which was accounted to be greatest " they 
 omitted it entirely. So Jesus girded Himself with 
 a towel and taking a basin of water began to wash 
 the feet of His disciples, one after another, John 
 and James and Peter and Judus ; yes, Jesus washed 
 the feet of Judas. 
 
 " Christ washed the feet of Judas ! 
 The dark and evil passions of his soul, 
 
 His secret plot, and sordidness complete, 
 His hate, his purposing, Christ knew the whole ; 
 
 And yet, in love He stooped and washed his feet. 
 
 " Christ washed the feet of Judas ! 
 Though all his lurking sin was bare to Him, 
 
 His bargain with the priest and more than this 
 In Olivet beneath the moonlight dim, 
 
 Aforehand knew and felt the treacherous kiss. 
 
 " Christ washed the feet of Judas ! 
 And so ineffable His love, 'twas mete 
 
 That pity fill His great forgiving heart 
 And tenderly to wash the traitor's feet. 
 
 Who, in his Lord, had basely sold his part 
 
40 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 " Christ washed the feet of Judas ! 
 And thus a girded servant, self-abased, 
 
 Taught that no wrong this side the gate of heaven 
 Was e'er too great to wholly be effaced, 
 
 And though unasked, in spirit be forgiven. 
 
 " And so, if we have ever suffered wrong 
 
 Of trampled rights, of caste, it matters not 
 Whate'er the soul has felt or suffered long, 
 
 O heart, this one thing must not be forgot, 
 Christ washed the feet of Judas ! " 
 
 Not only did Jesus wash the feet of His be- 
 trayer, but He also gave the sop to Judas: John 
 13 -.26. To give the sop was a mark of distinction, 
 a token of affection, and of special favour. When 
 an Oriental entertained his guests he singled out 
 the one he wished to honour most by dipping a 
 piece of bread in a syrup and handing it to a 
 favourite guest. Such was the manner in which 
 Jesus honoured Judas when that disciple stood on 
 the very brink of his act of treason and betrayal. 
 Jesus did not give this sop to Judas simply as a 
 sign to let John know who the betrayer was. That 
 was quite incidental and secondary. Jesus singled 
 out Judas for this honour and gave the sop to him 
 as a token of the love which was well-nigh break- 
 ing His heart at that very moment. And not only 
 for Judas, but for all His disciples who should 
 ever be tempted as Judas was, Jesus gave the sop 
 that awful night of His betrayal. As He dipped 
 the sop and handed it to Judas it was as if He said 
 in that very act: " Judas, I know what is in thy 
 
THE CASE OF JUDAS OF KERIOTH 41 
 
 heart. I know thy purpose to betray me; but I 
 love thee, Judas. See, here is the sop as a token 
 of my love for thee. Judas, now canst thou be- 
 tray me into the hands of my enemies? Judas, I 
 love thee." 
 
 This is one of the apparently slight incidents in 
 the Hfe of our Lord which is portentous with deep- 
 going lessons. In the attitude of Jesus toward 
 Judas in the upper room, there is a revelation of 
 the very heart of God. Jesus loved Judas to the 
 very end. It is beyond our comprehension that 
 neither the washing of his feet, nor the giving of 
 the sop, broke down utterly the purpose of the 
 betrayer. Evidently, Jesus saw then that the case 
 was hopeless; that Judas was determined to do the 
 deed, and He therefore said to him : " What thou 
 doest, do quickly." That is to say : " Since you 
 are bound to betray me, Judas, betray me as soon 
 as you can. Let it be over at the earliest possible 
 moment." W^hat a human touch this is! When 
 we know that something in the way of a tragic 
 experience impending and certain is about to come 
 upon us we want it to come at once and be ended. 
 If the waters are to overcome us we cannot bear 
 to hear them fall, drip by drip, and feel them rise 
 by slow inches about us. Instead, we welcome 
 the flood from the open gates which pour upon 
 us with terrible tide. 
 
 Judas' sin was not an isolated one, nor 
 does it place him in a class all by himself. 
 
42 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 Dante, in his picture of " The Inferno," attempts 
 to measure the terrible sin of the betrayer by plac- 
 ing poor Judas next to Satan himself. There is 
 no warrant for such a conception of Judas' sin, 
 either in the Scriptures or in reason. An eminent 
 English preacher informs us that in his early min- 
 istry he prepared and preached a sermon on Judas 
 in which he excoriated him and held his act up to 
 shame and terrible condemnation. He fairly 
 flayed poor Judas, and for several years the ser- 
 mon was with him a prime favourite. But there 
 came a time when he began to lose interest in 
 that sermon on Judas, and there came a day when 
 he laid it aside never to preach it again. I fancy 
 nearly every young preacher has had a similar 
 experience. In my early ministry I prepared with 
 great care a sermon on the betrayer which I called : 
 " Judas, a Study in Black." But I cannot preach 
 that sermon now. Similarly, there will come a 
 time in every young preacher's experience when he 
 will not preach that kind of a sermon on Judas. 
 He will leave off flaying Judas because he comes 
 to know that treason to Christ did not cease when 
 Judas died. He begins to understand himself, 
 and is too conscious of temptation to traitorous 
 thoughts and deeds to hold up Judas only to scorn 
 or flout his treason. There is a text from Paul, 
 sooner or later every conscientious preacher must 
 take to heart : i Corinthians lo : 12 — " When a man 
 thinketh he standeth let him take heed lest he fall." 
 
THE CASE OF JUDAS OF KERIOTH 4S 
 
 Reflect upon the exclamations of the disciples 
 when Jesus said to them : *' One of you shall be- 
 tray me." Immediately they all began to inquire: 
 " Lord, is it I ? " " Is it I ? " " Is it I ? " And 
 in like manner, when the matter of our Lord's 
 betrayal in these latter days is considered, so must 
 we all, if we are sincere and candid, inquire: 
 "Lord, is it I?" "Is it I?" Judas, for thirty 
 pieces of silver, betrayed his Lord; and Judas has 
 many successors. The solemn truth is that it is 
 easier to trace the succession of Judas than the 
 Apostolic succession. Judas sold Jesus for thirty 
 pieces of silver, and some sell their Lord today at a 
 lower price than that. Thirty minutes of compro- 
 mise of honour, virtue, or truth, a " passing thrill, 
 a momentary titillation of a nerve," political pres- 
 tige, public office, foolish pride, sordid ambitions 
 — all prizes, some great, some small, — which are 
 offered to nowaday disciples of Jesus to sell Him 
 out. Moreover, some who sell Jesus in these 
 modern times — unlike Judas — do not return the 
 blood money, but keep it in the bank and check 
 it out for pleasure trips, automobiles, and beauti- 
 ful homes. No, if we are honest with ourselves 
 we must be honest with Judas. He sinned deeply 
 and tragically; but his sin does not put him in a 
 class of infamy all by himself. Alas, Judas is but 
 one of a great company. Until our own hands are 
 clean and our own hearts pure, we cannot con- 
 sistently single out Judas for blow upon blow, 
 
44, THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 and stripe upon stripe, from the rod of our 
 censure. 
 
 Judas was with the sinless one for three 
 years, and he was not made better; there- 
 FORE HE WAS MADE WORSE. It is ever SO. It 
 
 could not be otherwise. If a man becomes a dis- 
 ciple of Christ and is not therefore made better, 
 he will become worse. Depend upon it, if he does 
 not become better he will deteriorate, and leanness 
 of soul will result. The very fact that it is possi- 
 ble for one to receive the tokens of preferment, as 
 Judas did the sop, and still close his heart to love 
 Divine, is a terrible warning to triflers with the 
 things of the soul. A man who listens to Jesus' 
 teaching, who sits under it Lord's day after Lord's 
 day, and yet is unmoved and makes no response 
 to that " tide too full for sound or foam," by-and- 
 bye, such a one will be overwhelmed by that very 
 flood of misused privileges. The last state of such 
 a one is always worse than the first. It is a great 
 responsibiHty to make the confession of Christ; a 
 weighty obligation to become His disciple; a seri- 
 ous business to become a member of His church. 
 To do so, and get no further than a form and 
 ceremony, or a nominal membership, necessarily 
 means a consequent falling away, a slow but sure 
 spiritual decay. 
 
 The strange incident of Jesus cursing the 
 " braggard fig tree," Matthew 21:20-22, Mark 
 1 1 : 20-25, contains the solemn warning for those 
 
THE CASE OF JUDAS OF KERIOTH 45 
 
 who wear the livery of heaven but possess not 
 heaven in the heart. The fig tree was condemned 
 not for being fruitless, but for being false. Out- 
 wardly it announced to the world that it was fruit- 
 ful; by the profusion of leaves that it put forth 
 it professed to have fruit; but instead there was 
 nothing thereon but leaves. As a symbol of moral 
 and religious character, the tree was a deceiver 
 and a hypocrite, and for this reason Jesus pro- 
 nounced a symbolic judgment upon it. 
 
 In a certain city, within a radius of four blocks, 
 there reside four former superintendents of Sun- 
 day Schools, who, according to a distinguished 
 minister, never so much as darken a church door 
 now. It is not necessary to know the reasons why 
 they fell away from their high estate; it is only 
 necessary to know they fell — that is enough. In 
 every community, and especially in the great cities, 
 there are multitudes of people who once found joy 
 and service in the Christian life who now never 
 enter a church, do not read the Scriptures, or have 
 any religious life whatsoever. 
 
 The career of Judas Iscariot needs to be studied 
 afresh by every minister, every prominent Chris- 
 tian worker, every professed follower of Jesus 
 Christ, as well as by those who have never named 
 that Name which is above every name. There is 
 a time in the life of every man and woman when 
 the better nature will respond to the appeal of the 
 highest. And there is, likewise, a place in the 
 
46 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 process of deterioration when the invitations of 
 Divine love and protests of the most appeaUng 
 character, fall upon dull and listless ears. So it 
 happened to Judas; so has it happened to thou- 
 sands; so it may happen to many of us if we per- 
 mit our souls to shrivel and close our hearts to 
 God. 
 
 If JUDAS WAS LOST IT WAS NOT BECAUSE HE 
 BETRAYED HIS LORD, BUT HAVING BETRAYED HIM 
 
 HE DESPAIRED OF FORGIVENESS. The Scriptures 
 tell us that Judas, when he died, went to his own 
 place. Wherever that place was, there he went. 
 But the tragedy of Judas is not his sin of betrayal, 
 but rather his sin of despair, which led him not 
 in penitence to Jesus' feet, but drove him to self- 
 destruction. Christina Rossetti's lines are appli- 
 cable to the case of the Man of Kerioth : 
 
 " A fall is not a signal to lie wallowing, but to rise. 
 It is not the signal I ought to choose, yet it is the signal 
 
 I have chosen, 
 Having chosen wrongly let me at least obey it rightly." 
 
 Peter's plight after his denial of Jesus was al- 
 most as pitiful as Judas', but Peter went out into 
 the night to weep bitter tears of penitence and so 
 came back to Christ. Judas came part of the way 
 back, Peter all the way. Repentance, as taught in 
 the Holy Scriptures, signifies a complete turn, a 
 ceasing to do evil, a learning to do good. One 
 may say that the beginning of repentance is a 
 knowledge of sin; and that sorrow for sin is the 
 
THE CASE OF JUDAS OF KERIOTH 47 
 
 Half-Way House on the way back to forgiveness. 
 Judas started back and got as far as the House of 
 Sorrow, and there he stopped. In that Half-Way 
 House, on the way to pardon, Judas bowed down 
 by remorse, broken, undone, believed himself too 
 vile to live and there his flickering light went out 
 in darkness. 
 
 Peter went the whole way to repentance. He, too, 
 came up to the Half-Way House of Sorrow, but 
 journeyed on to the Palace of Forgiveness. Wise 
 Peter, how we like to praise him! Poor Judas, 
 how can we but pity him! If only he had gone 
 back to his waiting Lord he would have found a 
 reception such as awaited the prodigal son at his 
 father's house. We ought never to despair of any 
 man or woman; we ought always to be willing and 
 anxious to lift up the fallen and rescue the perish- 
 ing. But we shall fail of our bounden duty if we 
 neglect to teach men that they can, if they choose, 
 put themselves in such an attitude toward God 
 that even God, Himself, cannot save them from 
 themselves. 
 
 The case of Judas is sad enough to make angels 
 weep, but no sadder than the case of multitudes of 
 his nowaday disciples. To what humility and con- 
 trition should a study of the case of Judas bring 
 us and how free from boastfulness and foolish 
 pride should such a study leave us ! 
 
 O CHRIST, FORGIVE US OUR WILLINGNESS TO 
 HEAP OPPROBRIUM ON JUDAS ISCARIOT WHEN WE 
 
48 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 OURSELVES HAVE FAILED THEE TIME AND TIME 
 AGAIN. CONTRASTED WITH THINE OUR LIVES AT 
 THEIR BEST ARE POOR AND MEAGRE. IN THE LIGHT 
 OF THY LOVE MAY WE SO WALK THAT NO SHADOW 
 OF TREASON SHALL EVER AGAIN FALL ATHWART 
 THAT WAY WHICH SHINETH EVER. 
 
IV 
 
 THE MINISTRY OF MEDIATION 
 
" Would I suffer for one that I love? So wouldst thou, so 
 wilt thou. 
 
 . . . He who did most shall bear most; the strongest shall 
 
 stand the most weak! 
 'Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for! My flesh 
 
 that I seek 
 
 In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be 
 A face like my face that receives thee; a man like to me 
 Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever; a hand like this 
 hand 
 
 Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the 
 Christ stand ! " 
 
 Robert Browning. 
 
IV 
 
 THE MINISTRY OF MEDIATION 
 
 " Go thou near and hear all that Jehovah our God 
 shall say, and speak thou unto us all that Jehovah our 
 God shall speak unto thee and we shall hear it and do 
 it." — Deuteronomy 5 : 27. 
 
 1 HE scene is impressive. In the background 
 
 is Mount Sinai lurid with Hghtning, over- 
 
 hung with smoke, resonant with thunder. 
 Below in the plain are gathered the Israelitish peo- 
 ple, fearful, wondering. Up into the fastness of 
 the mountain that might not be touched, Moses 
 makes his way and there he stands listening to the 
 voice of God. On the one hand, and afar off, the 
 Israelitish host; on the other, the symbols of God's 
 presence; and between Israel and Jehovah is 
 Moses, the Mediator. 
 
 A mediator, a " go-between," how old the idea, 
 how perennially fresh the need! This idea of 
 mediation and of mediator is woven all through 
 the warp and woof of the Jewish religion, and for 
 that matter, more or less, through every religion. 
 The Old Testament is full of it; the idea of priest 
 and sacrifice, symbol and type of mediation is 
 there; and the idea is also in the New Testament 
 and is part of the Christian faith. To a greater 
 or lesser degree the idea of mediation is recognized 
 
 51 
 
62 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 by all Christian communions, embodied in liturgy, 
 in hymnology, and forms of worship. In some 
 churches the idea of mediation is strongly stressed 
 and the office of mediator clothed with special 
 power and dignity. But quite apart from the for- 
 mal and priestly office, Christendom recognizes 
 this truth of mediation and applies it in countless 
 ways. 
 
 The Christian ministry, as conceived by all 
 churches, has in it something of the mediatorial 
 nature. Whether the minister be called pastor, or 
 priest, or preacher, or rector, or missionary, or 
 evangelist, or chaplain, he is a mediator and part 
 of his work is mediation. As the Israelites said 
 to Moses, so likewise a congregation of Christians 
 say in effect to their minister : " Go thou near and 
 hear all that the Lord our God shall say, and speak 
 unto us all that the Lord our God shall speak unto 
 thee, and we will hear it and do it." Not that the 
 ministerial office, as we conceive it, has, in and 
 of itself, any special approach to God that other 
 Christians have not, but that it affords unique 
 opportunities for study of the Holy Scriptures, for 
 reflection and communion with God. When a 
 church selects a minister it is as though the mem- 
 bership representing various vocations should say 
 to him: " We are a busy people; we are busy in 
 home and in store and in shop; we believe in God, 
 we wish to know more of His will. Go thou near 
 and hear what the Lord our God shall say, speak 
 
THE MINISTRY OF MEDIATION 53 
 
 thou unto us all that the Lord shall speak unto 
 thee, and we will hear and do it." 
 
 On reflection, it must impress us all as a wise 
 provision that God has chosen as mediators 
 human beings and so subject to all the vicissitudes 
 to which mankind is heir. Moses, Israel's media- 
 tor, was very human. Chosen as he was and 
 trained for his special work to lead Israel, and 
 to act as mediator between them and God, he was 
 from among their people, blood of their blood, 
 and bone of their bone. And in that very fact 
 is one secret and power of his mediation. If 
 angels preached the gospel to us doubtless their 
 preaching would be better than man's, but the 
 likelihood is that the appeal of the gospel as 
 preached by angels would be less effective than 
 when it comes by the lips of a fellow-mortal. A 
 glorious company of angels proclaiming the Word 
 of God would be a splendid spectacle, but not 
 nearly so persuasive as that same gospel preached 
 by Paul battling with the thorn in his flesh; or 
 Peter struggling with his impetuous nature, or 
 John seeking to control the tempestuous temper 
 that so beset him in his early days. 
 
 Recently I read an article on " New Ideals of 
 Church Leadership," in which the author said: 
 "If the church is to have power it must have 
 leaders who are specialists; if it is to have an 
 edifying pulpit, an efficient pastorate, a successful 
 business management, and satisfactory music, it 
 
54, THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 must have these departments headed by speciaHsts. 
 Let one man with a gift for preaching be employed 
 to do nothing else; let another with special quali- 
 fications for pastoral work visit the members; let 
 the finances of the church be shaped by special- 
 ists; and let the music director have charge of all 
 the music of the congregation." I am in sym- 
 pathy with the spirit of the writer and in hearty 
 agreement with some of his suggestions. I think 
 I understand, in part at least, the conditions that 
 moved him to suggest such division of church 
 leadership. It is true that no minister can preach 
 with power who is worn mentally and physically 
 by heavy detail and routine duties. The relieving 
 him of such burdens is not only right but is abso- 
 lutely necessary if the prophetic function of the 
 pulpit be realized in messages of power. Yet, I 
 question the wisdom of appointing a man to preach 
 and to do nothing else. Undoubtedly, he might 
 prepare fine and finished sermons and entertain- 
 ing lectures, but I am not at all sure that he would 
 be able to interpret the voice of God to his people. 
 Moses went into the Holy Mount, but he did not 
 remain there; he returned to the people, and he 
 returned not merely to deliver his message but to 
 mingle with them and help bear their burdens. 
 Moses had numerous helpers, but he bore the bur- 
 den of his people's needs and that burden was 
 often heavy on his heart. Therefore, his media- 
 tion was the better, the stronger, the truer, I think. 
 
THE MINISTRY OF MEDIATION 55 
 
 Once I listened to a great preacher in his own 
 pulpit when he was as the Holy Spirit set to music. 
 He was a fit vessel for the Master's use that morn- 
 ing; he had heard Jehovah and with winsome 
 power he told us what he had heard. The sermon 
 thrilled through and through; it made me feel 
 that nothing is worth having save God in the soul. 
 I heard this man again in his pulpit when he was 
 worn and weary and his thought was rather com- 
 monplace. His personality was not magnetic as 
 before. He preached with evident difificulty and 
 the sermon was uphill work all the way through. 
 I realized that the preacher was not at his best and 
 perceived that he was mediating God's Word to 
 the people under very great disadvantages, and 
 that very fact drew the messenger to me by bonds 
 of sympathy. I said to myself : " Here is a man 
 carrying the burdens of a very large congrega- 
 tion; he has been listening to the story of loss and 
 sorrow all week; he has been overtaxed; the virtue 
 has gone out of him. He is one with us in the 
 great common experiences of life; he is mediating 
 between us and God, as best he can, the Word of 
 Jehovah and to build us up in the faith that saves." 
 
 I am not excusing dullness on a minister's part; 
 on the contrary, if the dullness be through indo- 
 lence, it is not excusable. A preacher who is dull 
 and listless and commonplace because he is indo- 
 lent is positively harmful. Such a man has no 
 place in the pulpit. But Moses mediating Jehovah 
 
56 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 to the children of Israel, sometimes with breaking 
 heart, sometimes weary in mind and body, is a 
 figure at once majestic and potent. There is 
 something beautiful, even helpful, in the spectacle 
 of a Christian minister who, like Moses, speaks 
 for Jehovah; and like him, sometimes in stress 
 and anxiety, mediates his message through a per- 
 sonality weighed down by ministrations in behalf 
 of mankind. 
 
 If I were a member of a congregation sitting 
 in the pew Sunday after Sunday, I would give 
 the weight of my influence in behalf of the minis- 
 ter's release from much of the routine work of 
 church management, but I would not want him 
 to live apart over much from his people. I would 
 not want him on the mount all the week, coming 
 down only on Sunday to preach. I would want 
 him in the mount of silence and contemplation 
 long enough to hear the voice of Jehovah; but I 
 would want him, also, down on the plain with the 
 people as was Moses in the long ago. No media- 
 tor can remain in the mount and mediate God's 
 truth. Down below are the people who are need- 
 ing to hear of what has taken place in the moun- 
 tain fastness where, face to face, the mediator has 
 communed with the Invisible. Robert Louis 
 Stevenson's " Will o' the Mill," lived high up on 
 a mountain side and watched the world go by. 
 Below him the people came and went, below him 
 men and women and children lived and loved and 
 
THE MINISTRY OF MEDIATION 57 
 
 died. High up, almost amidst the clouds, " Will 
 o' the Mill " lived and died. He communicated 
 nothing to the world, he was not a mediator; he 
 lived and moved and had his being apart from the 
 people, beyond them, aloof and alone. The min- 
 istry of mediation requires contact and communion 
 with God first, and then contact and communion 
 with God's children, 
 
 " Go thou near and hear all that the Lord 
 our God shall say." There is a fine art of hearing. 
 " Take heed how ye hear," is one of Jesus' warn- 
 ings. For myself, I confess a difiiculty in hear- 
 ing; the subtle temptation which besets me is to 
 hear a little and talk a great deal. One of the ever 
 present perils of a preacher is that he become a 
 parrot, that he wax voluble, and his message grow 
 wordy rather than weighty. It is a great privi- 
 lege to be a " Voice; " John the Baptist was a 
 Voice and he was a prophet. It is easier to be- 
 come a " mouth," to be a word-monger, instead 
 of a word-mediator. 
 
 " Go thou near and hear all that the Lord our 
 God shall say." This privilege belongs not only 
 to the minister but to every Christian. All that 
 has been affirmed in this study with reference to 
 the ministry is true also of the laity. Theoreti- 
 cally, most of us believe in the mediatorship of 
 every believer. Practically, we ignore it. In 
 Sunday School or Prayer Meeting talk we are 
 sure that Christ has commissioned every believer 
 
58 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 to go and make other disciples. In the hurly- 
 burly of everyday life we act as though we bore no 
 such high commission. The New Testament, and 
 particularly the Hebrew Epistle, teaches the priest- 
 hood of every Christian. To be a priest under 
 the old Jewish order was a very great honour; 
 an honour and a dignity which in the old order 
 could belong to only a few may, under the new, be 
 bestowed upon the humblest follower of Christ. 
 If every Christian is a priest, then two things fol- 
 low: First, he has the priestly prerogative which 
 is the right to go to God without hindrance. 
 Our word for his priceless privilege is the short 
 and simple term " prayer " — prayer for one's self, 
 prayer for others. Second, if every Christian is 
 a priest, then the priestly function is his and that 
 is to ofifer sacrifice. Not the burnt offerings as 
 under the old Jewish order, but sacrificial minis- 
 try of a life dedicated to God through Christ. 
 The Apostle Paul, in Romans 12:1, sums up the 
 matter superbly: "I beseech you therefore, 
 brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your 
 bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, 
 which is your spiritual service." And in the He- 
 brew Epistle, 13:15, the idea is finely expressed: 
 " Through him then let us offer up a sacrifice of 
 praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of lips 
 which make confession to his name. But to do 
 good and to communicate forget not: for with 
 such sacrifices God is well pleased." 
 
THE MINISTRY OF MEDIATION 59 
 
 Truly, we are called to be mediators of the new 
 covenant and, higher calling than this there is not 
 in all the world. Yet, even so, they are incom- 
 plete, they are partial, and not altogether suc- 
 cessful. The frailties of human nature make the 
 mediation of human beings imperfect. The me- 
 diatorship of Moses was not perfect. And this 
 brings us to the recognition of that universal 
 yearning of humanity for a mediator between God 
 and man that shall be complete, lacking in noth- 
 ing, perfect. God seems so far distant, so awful, 
 so almighty; man so small, so futile, so feeble. 
 Who, or what, shall bridge the great gulf? Job 
 sets forth this longing of mankind eloquently 
 when out of his deep distress he cries : 
 
 " God is not a man that I should answer him. 
 There is no daysman betwixt us 
 That might lay his hand upon us both. 
 Then would I speak and not fear him." 
 
 This is the cry of all humanity, and this great 
 cry God has answered in Jesus Christ. Christ ful- 
 fills every longing of the human heart; He is the 
 " daysman " or " umpire " for whom Job longed; 
 He is betwixt us and the Father; and He lays, 
 so to speak, one understanding hand upon the 
 Father and one understanding hand upon us. He 
 is the answer to Phillip's pathetic plaint : " Show 
 us the Father and it sufficeth us." A wonderful 
 reach this Mediator has; He reaches through the 
 vast spaces and lays hold upon God; He reaches 
 
60 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 down into the vast depth to the fartherest fallen 
 humanity. His humanity commends Him to us; 
 He was of us and is one with us, and He is of 
 God and one with God. All the mediators be- 
 tween God and man, all the great line of prophets, 
 were conscious of limitations, were sensible of 
 sin; but here is One unbroken by sin and having 
 His being in closest fellowship with the Father, 
 One whose mediation is without flaw. 
 
 The author of the epistle to the Hebrews has 
 appraised this Mediator aright, has set Him be- 
 fore us at once as the highest and lowliest. In 
 Scripture that ought to be memorized by every fol- 
 lower of the Lord Christ, the author of the epis- 
 tle to the Hebrews writes : " We have not a high 
 priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of 
 our infirmities, but one that hath been in all points 
 tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us, 
 therefore, draw near with boldness unto the throne 
 of grace that we may receive mercy and may find 
 grace to help us in time of need." 
 
 Speaking by and large, the Scriptures record 
 on the one hand the ascent of man, and on the 
 other hand the descent of God. That is to say: 
 the Scriptural narratives show man reaching out 
 after God " if haply they might feel after him 
 and find him," to use Paul's meaningful phrase 
 in his speech on Mars Hill. And, the Scriptures 
 also show God's descent; said Jesus : " I am come 
 down out of heaven;" and so it comes to pass 
 
THE MINISTRY OF MEDIATION 61 
 
 that God's reaching out to man and man's reach- 
 ing out after God — that these two endeavours 
 meet in Jesus Christ. A mediation Godward and 
 manward, satisfactory, sustaining, incomparable. 
 Whatever theology one may have of the work 
 and office of Jesus Christ, every sincere student 
 of His life must concede this mediatorial minis- 
 try of the Nazarene. The world has never been 
 the same since Jesus came; Hfe has never been 
 precisely as it was before; death has lost some- 
 what its darkness and its tragedy. 
 
 The Old Testament looks forward to a better 
 mediator than Moses. The types and figures and 
 shadows of the old Jewish system are fulfilled and 
 given substance in the life and ministry of our 
 Lord. Alongside of the Old Testament books of 
 Exodus and Deuteronomy, the epistle to the He- 
 brews should be ranged and compared. The 
 epistle to the Hebrews has one great theme and 
 one alone, and that is to show the superiority of 
 Christianity over Judaism, of Christ over Moses. 
 If the account of Moses at Mount Sinai, mediating 
 between God and Israel, is impressive, the record 
 of the mediation of the New Covenant is surpass- 
 ing beautiful. Alongside of Exodus, the nine- 
 teenth and twentieth chapters, and Deuteronomy, 
 the fourth and fifth chapters, with their terrifying 
 descriptions of Sinai and the awestruck Israelitish 
 hosts, should be placed the twelfth chapter of 
 Hebrews and that ineffable description of the new 
 
62 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 mediation accomplished with beauty and grace in 
 Jesus Christ. " For ye are not come unto a mount 
 that might be touched, and that burned with fire, 
 and unto blackness, and darkness, and tempest, and 
 the sound of a trumpet, and the voice of words; 
 which voice they that heard entreated that no 
 word more should be spoken unto them; for they 
 could not endure that which was enjoined. If 
 even a beast touch the mountain, it shall be stoned ; 
 and so fearful was the appearance that Moses said, 
 I exceedingly fear and quake; but ye are come 
 unto Mount Zion and unto the city of the living 
 God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable 
 hosts of angels, to the general assembly and church 
 of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and 
 to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just 
 men made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of 
 a new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that 
 speaketh better than that of Abel." 
 
 I have read lately Henry Sienkieicz's little 
 booklet entitled : " Let Us Follow Him." I like 
 much that title, " Let Us Follow Him," for to fol- 
 low Him is to go near, yea, very near, to the Lord 
 our God; to venture unafraid into the vasty deeps 
 of the Spirit; to follow Him is to hear a voice 
 speaking like the Voice of Many Waters; to fol- 
 low Him is to come down from the mountain 
 and from out of the silence into the very midst 
 of the noisy multitude; to follow Him is to min- 
 ister to men and women storm-tossed, sin-smitten, 
 
THE MINISTRY OF MEDIATION 63 
 
 terribly-tempted, and all but undone; to follow 
 Him is to mediate God's forgiveness and restora- 
 tion to the Father's House of many Mansions. 
 
 OH CHRIST, THOU GREAT MEDIATOR, THOU WHO 
 ART ONE WITH THE FATHER AND ONE WITH US 
 ALSO, " GO THOU NEAR AND HEAR ALL THAT 
 JEHOVAH OUR GOD SHALL SAY AND SPEAK THOU 
 UNTO US ALL THAT JEHOVAH OUR GOD SHALL 
 SPEAK UNTO THEE, AND WE SHALL HEAR AND 
 DO IT." 
 
FAITH AND FORTITUDE 
 
" I have closed the door on Doubt ; 
 I will go by what light I can find, 
 And hold up my hands, and reach them out 
 
 To the glimmer of God in the dark and call : 
 ' I am thine, though I grope and stumble and fall, 
 I serve ; and thy service is kind.' 
 
 " I have closed the door on Fear. 
 
 He has lived with me far too long. 
 If he were to break forth and reappear, 
 
 I should lift my eyes and look at the sky. 
 And sing aloud, and run lightly by; 
 He will never follow a song. 
 
 " I have closed the door on Gloom. 
 His house has too narrow a view. 
 I must seek for my soul a wider room, 
 
 With windows to open and let in the sun. 
 And radiant lamps when the day is done. 
 And the breeze of the world blowing through." 
 
 British Weekly. 
 
V 
 
 FAITH AND FORTITUDE 
 
 " For we walk by faith, not by sight." — // Corinthians 5 : 7. 
 f I iHE second Epistle of Paul to the Corin- 
 
 thians is a most human document. Stu- 
 
 dents of the Scriptures are of the opinion 
 that nowhere else do we get so close to the heart 
 of the great Apostle as in this letter. Having 
 dispatched his first Epistle to the Corinthians by 
 the hand of Titus, Paul awaited the news of its 
 receptiort with no small anxiety. Six months 
 passed and then in Macedonia he met Titus, who 
 reported that the Corinthian Christians had re- 
 ceived the Epistle cordially and immediately set 
 about the accomplishment of the reform advised 
 by Paul. This information greatly encouraged 
 the Apostle and he at once wrote the second Epis- 
 tle, the first part of which is given over to expres- 
 sions of gratitude and affection. 
 
 The Apostle's gratitude overflows like a river 
 in time of flood. He is sure of God. He walks 
 by faith. Whatever his weakness, he rests upon 
 the Divine power of the Everlasting Arms. His 
 anxieties have been more than compensated for by 
 the willingness of the Christians at Corinth to 
 
 67 
 
68 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 correct the abuses that had crept into the church 
 there, and by the repentance of wrongdoers. 
 
 The closing verses of the fourth chapter are 
 as a mighty river approaching the sea, and the 
 opening verses of the fifth are as old ocean itself. 
 Paul was never more eloquent. He refers to his 
 affliction as light and only for a moment, which 
 will be transmuted into an eternal weight of glory. 
 The decay of the outward man, he explains, means 
 the growth of the inward man, and as the temporal 
 fades away the eternal becomes more and more 
 luminous and glorious. Then the Apostle sets 
 forth a most enchanting view of death. He be- 
 lieves that as the bodily frame fades and dissolves, 
 it exposes to view a building from God, eternal 
 in the heavens. The tent gives away to the man- 
 sion, the mortal body to a spiritual body; it is 
 as though there is a body within a body, as the 
 one decays the other grows and at death the 
 spiritual emerges from the physical. The mortal 
 is swallowed up of life. The poet builds upon 
 Paul's words for his great lines: 
 
 " This body is my house, it is not I ; 
 Herein I sojourn till in some far sky 
 I lease a fairer dwelling, built to last 
 Till all the carpentry of earth is past." 
 
 This servant of Christ is constantly thinking of 
 his Lord and of his meeting Him shortly face to 
 face and he writes : " Whilst we are at home in 
 the body we are absent from the Lord." And 
 
FAITH AND FORTITUDE 69 
 
 here it is that he throws in by way of parenthesis 
 the words of the text : " For we walk by faith, 
 not by sight," and affirms that he and his fellow- 
 workers make it their aim whether at home (with 
 Christ) or absent (from Christ), to be well pleas- 
 ing unto Him. 
 
 " For we walk by faith, and not by sight." 
 That we do, and not only in the sense of the 
 Apostle's use of the word here, but likewise in 
 another sense of the term we walk by faith every 
 day of our lives. It is not optional with us, we 
 are compelled so to walk; our daily afifairs are 
 done by faith — not necessarily faith in God, but 
 faith in one another, faith in institutions, faith 
 in organizations, faith in something. Two or 
 three homely instances of this fact are in order. 
 
 A man takes a long journey; he plans to cross 
 the continent. He will travel in the course of that 
 journey several thousand miles, and he will per- 
 force travel by faith. A train on which he is rid- 
 ing may be wrecked and his life crushed out. A 
 hotel in which he is sleeping may burn and con- 
 sume him. He may become ill on the way and 
 die far away from home and friends. There are 
 a dozen ways in which his life may be lost or his 
 body bruised and mangled on that journey. He 
 will simply have to make that journey by faith. 
 True, if he is a wise man he will minimize all the 
 risks and safeguard his life and facilitate his trav- 
 elling in every way possible; he will purchase his 
 
70 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 ticket over the best road, or roads; he will run no 
 unnecessary risks; he will attempt to keep himself 
 in the best physical condition. And yet, withal, 
 he will have to make that trip by faith. 
 
 Here are two men who are about to embark in 
 business. They have formed a partnership. They 
 purpose to establish a store or a manufacturing 
 concern, and they are compelled to do this by faith. 
 They are running certain risks — one of the part- 
 ners may prove dishonest, they may be unable to 
 establish their credit, they may not be able to keep 
 pace with the fierce current of competition. And 
 inasmuch as above ninety per cent, of business en- 
 terprises fail, they are certainly making a venture 
 of faith. If they are wise men, however, they will 
 reduce their risk to a minimum; each will en- 
 deavor to satisfy himself as to the integrity of his 
 partner; both of them will look well to their credit; 
 they will consider the wisdom of a good location; 
 they will be cautious in outlays and seek to keep 
 expenses down. But even so, they will have to 
 make their business venture by faith. 
 
 Here are two young people about to build a 
 home — not a house, but a home — an enter- 
 prise that calls for faith at one of its 
 highest ventures. There are a hundred and 
 one things that may make that home-building 
 process a wreck and ruin. They may be incom- 
 patible in temperament and unable to live in peace; 
 one or the other may be extravagant; their kins- 
 
FAITH AND FORTITUDE 71 
 
 people may interfere and bring about annoyance 
 and domestic infelicity; sickness or adversity may 
 come and death may leave husband or wife to face 
 the future with a family of helpless little ones 
 and no money. If they are wise young people 
 they will reduce these risks to a minimum. They 
 will not let the little blind god delude them and 
 they will be reasonably certain that they can live 
 together happily and usefully. They will have 
 some outlook financially before they make a ven- 
 ture so important as this; and they will, if they 
 are wise, deal gently and patiently with any fam- 
 ily relationship that might threaten to mar their 
 marital happiness. Yet, even so, they will have 
 to build their home and plan their wedded life by 
 faith. 
 
 " For we walk by faith, not by sight." Indeed 
 we do, otherwise we cannot walk at all. We live 
 every day of our lives by faith. We get up in 
 the morning by faith, and at night we lie down to 
 sleep by faith. We mail letters by faith; we send 
 telegrams by faith. We eat and drink by faith. 
 We sow and plant by faith. We choose the family 
 physician by faith, and engage the service of an 
 attorney by faith. A congregation of Christians 
 call a minister by faith and he in turn enters upon 
 his pastorate by faith. 
 
 Not only do we live by faith daily and walk 
 by faith hourly and conduct our business and 
 build our homes and take our place in society by 
 
72 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 faith, but every now and then our faith receives 
 a tremendous shock. Men and women in whom 
 we have had faith disappoint us and fail us, and 
 some betray us with a " Judas Kiss." Institutions 
 in which we have beHeved with all our heart go 
 down over night to wreck and ruin. Organiza- 
 tions in which we put our faith disintegrate and 
 dissolve in failure. Yet, nevertheless, while these 
 experiences are not uncommon, they are the ex- 
 ceptions rather than the rule and despite them we 
 continue to walk by faith, for if we try to walk 
 otherwise our days of usefulness are ended and 
 we are stranded on the barren shores of doubt and 
 distress. 
 
 For we walk by faith, not by sight." In the 
 sense that Paul meant this we walk by faith 
 scarcely more than in the daily conduct of busi- 
 ness and home and our relation in society in gen- 
 eral. Strangely enough, (or is it strange?) when 
 we turn to the realm of the unseen and considera- 
 tion of the great questions: "Whence am I?" — 
 " Whither am I bound ? " we are prone to stumble 
 and to stop at the very thought of walking by 
 faith. We want to see, we want to know. We 
 crave certainty. We plead for proof. And little 
 wonder! The mystery of life perplexes us. We 
 come into this world and we are not here very 
 long until we learn that it is a world of inequali- 
 ties, of tears, of pain, and of suffering. We look 
 about us and we see that righteousness is not al- 
 
FAITH AND FORTITUDE 73 
 
 ways rewarded here. We behold some of the 
 best and most unselfish souls suffering poverty 
 and heavy affliction. We see others who do not 
 live lives of honesty and sobriety and helpful- 
 ness, yet they are prosperous and live in luxury. 
 We see some men and women bearing grievous 
 burdens of mental and physical stress who deserve 
 the best that life can bestow; we see death strike 
 down the most useful members of society and leave 
 untouched for years characters that are worthless 
 to themselves and to the community. And we are 
 perplexed, we are sorely distressd, we wonder 
 why? 
 
 " This is the cry 
 That echoes through the wilderness of earth, 
 Through song and sorrow, day of death and birth ; 
 
 'Why?' 
 
 " It is the high 
 Wail of the child when all his life to face, 
 Man's last dumb question as he reaches space; 
 
 'Why?'" 
 
 Frankly, there are only two ways that we can 
 meet these vicissitudes of life and the mystery of 
 death, — one is to try to think them through, to 
 reason them out, — and the other is to meet them 
 in simple faith, believing where we cannot prove. 
 
 And if we are wise men and women we will 
 do in this great matter as we are doing daily in 
 other matters. We will take advantage of every 
 provision for the life of faith in God. Princely 
 
74 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 provision has been made for us; the Father hath 
 sent His Son, and the Son has shed upon Hfe's 
 dark mysteries a great and mellow light. His 
 was a life of faith, and such a faith the world 
 has never known before nor since. It was stead- 
 fast and stable. It was captivating and contagious. 
 He was sure of God, Jesus was. No experience, 
 however dark, could hide the Father's love. For 
 a single brief period on the Cross, enshrouded by 
 thick clouds, He thought Himself forsaken and 
 then, breaking out of the darkness, light and love 
 from the Father flooded His soul. With this 
 Father He lived in daily communion, He conversed 
 with Him freely; He found a fellowship with Him 
 unto the end. Even so, the life of our Lord was 
 fraught with suffering, and the author of the He- 
 brew Epistle declares that He was made "perfect 
 through sufferings." Jesus' faith triumphed over 
 pain, over misunderstanding, over malignment, 
 over rejection, over the Cross, over the 
 grave. As faith saves us, so faith saved our 
 Saviour. The great Founder of the Christian 
 faith did not accept the dilemma that if God is 
 good He is not Almighty, and if He is Almighty 
 He is not good. He taught and believed that God 
 is both. 
 
 A study of Jesus in Gethsemane should help us 
 all to walk by faith the sorrowful way over which, 
 sometimes, our feet must go. It was in the Garden 
 that the great souls of earth have come to know 
 
FAITH AND FORTITUDE 75 
 
 God best. It is in the Garden that we shall meet 
 the ministering angels. The Apostle, from whose 
 letter the text is taken, declares to the church at 
 Rome that " to them that love God all things work 
 together for good." " Work together for good," 
 yes, but this process is a long one and we cannot 
 see the end now. And yet there are those who 
 have lived long enough to know that some experi- 
 ences which overwhelmed at the time with grief 
 were for the best. Before we can determine that 
 loss and separation and death of dearly beloved 
 have in them naught but ill we must survey them 
 from a distance, we must view them from the high 
 hills of hope where the horizons widen wonder- 
 fully. Time is a sure and stalwart vindicator of 
 all God's plans. 
 
 Some years ago I was talking with a business 
 man who was sorely perplexed and distressed. 
 There had taken place in our community the sud- 
 den, though not unexpected, death of a splendid 
 man in the full strength of mature life, a man of 
 integrity, of keen insight, and a citizen of high 
 ideals and wide influence. The man who had died 
 was formerly a business associate of the man with 
 whom I was conversing. We were speaking about 
 his untimely death, the brave fight he had made 
 for life, and the business man voiced the doubt 
 and difficulty of thousands when he said to me with 
 some emotion : " I cannot understand it. Walk- 
 ing the streets of our city this morning are men 
 
76 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 that you and I know are worthless. They are 
 hindrances instead of helps both to their famihes 
 and to the community. Some of these men humil- 
 iate and even harm their families, and yet they are 
 living today and this good man is dead. It is all 
 dark and doubtful, and I cannot think my way 
 through it." I did not answer him at once. I 
 could not. But after a little silence I repHed: 
 " No, we cannot think our way through a prob- 
 lem of this kind. We have to trust our way 
 through. We have to walk by faith." And I re- 
 member his serious face and how he solemnly 
 shook his head as he said : " Yes, I suppose that 
 is the best way, but it is not an easy way." Then 
 a silence fell upon us again. At some time or 
 another I dare say we all feel as this man felt. 
 Faith is seldom, if ever, easy at first. Yet even 
 so, the way of faith is easier than the way of 
 doubt, which darkens more and more to the dismal 
 night, while faith shineth more and more unto the 
 perfect day. 
 
 I recall a memorable conversation I once had 
 with a man for whom I cherish an abiding affec- 
 tion. We were talking of this problem of suffer- 
 ing, of separation, and of death; and he told me 
 that many years ago his sister, after a little more 
 than a year of married life, died in a far Western 
 state, leaving a motherless babe. He described to 
 me the coming of the funeral party to the old 
 home of the young woman. It was in midwinter 
 
FAITH AND FORTITUDE 77 
 
 and the snow lay upon the face of the earth. He 
 said he recalled that together with other members 
 of the family he sat up until midnight talking in 
 subdued tones of their great loss, the first great 
 loss that had come to that home. He told me that 
 his sister was one of the most beautiful characters 
 he had ever known and that it seemed to him and 
 the other members of the family that if either the 
 mother or the child had to die it would have been 
 better that the beautiful life of the young mother 
 be spared. He said they welcomed tenderly the 
 little life to that home, yet cherishing still the feel- 
 ing, in those first days of bitter grief, that it would 
 have been far better had the child died and the 
 mother lived. That was more than thirty years 
 ago, so he told me, and the child had grown into 
 sturdy manhood and useful career, and he said : 
 " My sister has spoken through the life of her 
 son and through him served the world as she per- 
 haps never could have done had the child died and 
 her life been prolonged for many years." 
 
 The testimony of that earnest man is eloquent, 
 but not so eloquent as the fact that thirty years of 
 his life were necessary before he could bear such 
 witness. By faith we must walk else we shall faint 
 and fall by the way. With John Henry Newman 
 let us learn to say : " I do not ask to see the dis- 
 tant scene, one step enough for me." 
 
 Faith ? What is faith ? Like love and light and 
 truth, it is a hard word to define. Some have called 
 
78 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 faith the sixth sense — the eyes of the soul — the 
 sense of the unseen. Yet, while faith is difficult 
 to define, it readily yields to illustration. And I 
 can recall no lovelier illustration of faith than a 
 letter written by Robert J. Burdette on the bed of 
 pain, from which that preacher-poet went to be 
 with his Lord not long after his tired fingers 
 penned these words: 
 
 " Ever since June, 1912, when I made my last 
 public appearance, we have been living in our sum- 
 mer home down here by the sea. * Eventide,' Mrs. 
 Burdette named it, because it faces the sunset. 
 It is very pleasant, this * afternoon land,' in spite 
 of sickness. I watch the sunset as I look out over 
 the rim of the blue Pacific, and there is no mys- 
 tery beyond the horizon line, because I know what 
 there is over there. I have been there. I have 
 journeyed in those lands. Over there where the 
 sun is just sinking is Japan. That star is rising 
 over China. In that direction lie the Philippines. 
 I know all that. Well, there is another land that 
 I look toward as I watch the sunset. I have never 
 seen it. I have never seen any one who has been 
 there; but it has a more abiding reality than any 
 of these lands which I do know. This land be- 
 yond the sunset — this land of immortality, this 
 fair and blessed country of the soul, — why, this 
 Heaven of ours is the one thing in the world which 
 I know with absolute, unshaken, unchangeable cer- 
 tainty. This I know with a knowledge that is 
 
FAITH AND FORTITUDE 79 
 
 never shadowed by a passing cloud of doubt. I 
 may not always be certain about this world; my 
 geographical locations may sometimes become con- 
 fused. But that other world, — that I know. And 
 as the afternoon sun sinks lower, Faith shines 
 more clearly; and hope, lifting her voice in a higher 
 key, sings the songs of fruition." 
 
 What music that! What a swan song of the 
 soul ! And who but a follower of the Christ could 
 so shout " Halleluiah " in the presence of death? 
 
 " O MASTER, LET ME WALK WITH THEE 
 IN LOWLY PATHS OF SERVICE FREE; 
 TELL ME THY SECRET; HELP ME BEAR 
 THE STRAIN OF TOIL, THE FRET OF CARE." 
 
VI 
 
 THE MIDDLE ESTATE 
 
" Something kindlier, higher, holier. 
 All for each and each for all. 
 Earth at last a warless world, 
 A single race, a single tongue. 
 
 " Every tiger madness muzzled, 
 Every serpent passion killed. 
 Every grim ravine a garden, 
 Every blazing desert tilled. 
 
 " Robed in universal harvest. 
 Up to either pole she smiles ; 
 Universal ocean softly 
 Washing all her warless isles." 
 
 Percy C. Ainsworth. 
 
VI 
 
 THE MIDDLE ESTATE 
 
 " Give me neither poverty nor riches ; feed me with 
 the food that is needful for me: lest I be full, and 
 deny thee, and say, Who is Jehovah? or lest I be 
 poor, and steal, and use profanely the name of my 
 God." — Proverbs 30 : 8-9. 
 
 1HESE are the words of Agur, an ancient 
 
 sage whose epigrams are contained in the 
 
 thirtieth chapter of Proverbs. This is the 
 only place in the Holy Scriptures where his name 
 occurs. The fragment of his writings, however, 
 that has come down to us is bold and brilliant. 
 His proverbs are of the pungent, easily-remem- 
 bered sort. His literary style is very effective. A 
 favourite device in the writings of this wise man 
 is to arrange his subject-matter in numbers, thus : 
 " Two things have I required of thee; " — " There 
 be three things which are too wonderful for me; " 
 — "Three things that are never satisfied;" — 
 " There be four things which are Httle upon the 
 earth but they are exceeding wise." It is interest- 
 ing to know that some students of this thirtieth 
 chapter of Proverbs have found in places a simi- 
 larity to the style of the Book of Job. In the 
 midst of this chapter occurs Agur's audacious 
 prayer: — "Give me neither poverty nor riches; 
 
 83 
 
84) THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 feed me with the food, that is needful for me : lest 
 I be full, and deny thee, and say, Who is Jehovah ? 
 or lest I be poor, and steal, and use profanely the 
 name of my God." 
 
 " Give me neither poverty nor riches." Verily, 
 this is an audacious prayer, for there have been 
 those who held that poverty was a virtue, and 
 there are others who reckon riches to be life's most 
 desirable possession. On the one hand are those 
 who wrote in praise of poverty, the many sincere 
 Christians of the Middle Age taking vows of pov- 
 erty and subsisting all of their lives on the sim- 
 plest, even the meanest of food, going barefooted 
 and wearing only the coarsest and plainest of gar- 
 ments. Typical and representative of this extreme 
 at its best is St. Francis of Assisi, a lover of his 
 Lord, whose conception of Christianity resulted 
 in stripping himself of all his earthly possessions, 
 owning nothing save great good will toward all 
 creatures. 
 
 Contrariwise, one can easily recall certain well- 
 known names of these latter days who also claim 
 the Christ as Lord and Master, whose wealth in 
 stocks and bonds and other holdings aggregates 
 many millions. One such there is, and a most de- 
 vout churchman, who is unable to reckon accurately 
 his own possessions, so great they are both in in- 
 trinsic and potential values. Christendom, as a 
 whole, has never been consistent in its attitude 
 toward riches. In the words of a reverent but 
 
THE MIDDLE ESTATE 
 
 85 
 
 eminently fair-minded student of Christianity: 
 " The preaching of the church against wealth has 
 been equaled only by its zeal to obtain it." 
 
 St. Francis of Assisi has few modern disciples 
 and there is little likelihood of his extreme posi- 
 tion finding acceptance in our modern world which 
 estimates success so largely in the terms of silver 
 and gold, of lands and stocks. There are few to 
 speak in praise of poverty these days; there are 
 many to speak in praise of wealth. But here is 
 this comparatively unknown wise man of Old 
 Testament times offering a most unconventional 
 prayer : — " Give me," he prayed, " neither poverty 
 nor riches." Agur was a philosopher, a shrewd 
 observer. He looked about him and studied the 
 lives of his contemporaries; he reflected upon their 
 manner of living, and so discerned clearly the 
 dangers of riches and the perils of poverty. And 
 thus observing, he wanted to be saved from the 
 danger of both, and choosing the middle estate 
 prayed neither for the one nor for the other. 
 
 " Neither poverty nor riches." This was Agur's 
 conclusion, and the sanity of his logic was perhaps 
 never so apparent as today. Consider how peril- 
 ous is the problem presented by extreme poverty. 
 Robert Hunter, in his work entitled " Poverty," 
 estimates that there are ten millions of America's 
 population living daily on the brink of poverty's 
 abyss. Ten millions — one-tenth of our population 
 — are living from hand to mouth, eking out a 
 
86 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 sterile existence. Out of such a condition emerge 
 some of the most ominous of our country's perils. 
 Poverty is a breeder of disease, a fosterer of 
 crime, a destroyer of efficiency, a blighter of hope, 
 a fruitful source of pain and suffering, a slayer of 
 ambition, an enemy of good. Where one person 
 rises from abject poverty and forges to the front, 
 nine perhaps fall by the way. There is a point 
 somewhere in living, below which the lack of suffi- 
 cient clothing, the lack of wholesome food, the 
 lack of comfortable homes, means inefficiency, 
 disease, pain, despair, and suffering. Of a vast 
 multitude it has been true that 
 
 " Chill penury repressed their noble rage, 
 And froze the genial current of the soul." 
 
 Agur saw the peril of poverty and he shrank 
 from its approach. He feared the meagre exist- 
 ence that it offered would drive him to take that 
 which belonged to others; he dreaded penury lest 
 it would make him profane and call upon the 
 name of God in derision. And who will say he 
 was not wise in his wish to be spared the hopeless 
 struggle with want? 
 
 Reflect on the matter of excessive riches; the 
 perils of great possessions have been acknowledged 
 by the candid minds of every generation. The 
 Bible is a storehouse of admonitions against the 
 perils of riches; the entire Book of Proverbs scin- 
 tillates with warnings against the temptations of 
 
THE MIDDLE ESTATE 87 
 
 great prosperity. Jesus warned His hearers pre- 
 cept upon precept against the power of Mammon, 
 and of all His recorded sayings none is more singu- 
 larly impressive or more difificult to explain away 
 than His words : " It is easier for a camel to go 
 through a needle's eye than for a rich man to enter 
 into the Kingdom of God." Paul said that the 
 love of money was a root of all kinds of evil; and 
 in the same letter, his first epistle to Timothy, he 
 writes : " But they that are minded to be rich 
 fall into a temptation and a snare and many fool- 
 ish and hurtful lusts, such as drown men in de- 
 struction and perdition." Money assures power 
 and endows its possessor with gilded prestige. 
 Great possessions put into the hands of their own- 
 ers both weapons of defense and offense. The rich 
 are a law unto themselves. It is commonly be- 
 lieved that money can buy anything. A multi- 
 millionaire, in an article published some years ago 
 by a popular American monthly, wrote as follows : 
 " We have only to think of what we want to get 
 it. After a bit we begin to wonder why we do 
 not get as much pleasure out of things we wanted 
 as we thought we should before we had them." 
 
 Unquestionably, there is a point above which 
 the accumulation of property and the piling up 
 of wealth becomes a source of perplexity and pro- 
 ductive of evil. The book lover may have too 
 many books; the farmer too many acres of land; 
 the capitalist too big a fortune; the preacher too 
 
88 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 large a church. There is a " Great Divide " in 
 the matter of accumulating anything beyond which 
 accretion only adds burden and anxiety. And 
 there is, likewise, a definite period in loss and de- 
 pletion below which too little is as perilous to life 
 at its best as the opposite experience of too much. 
 Agur recognized the hazard of the two extremes. 
 He feared that riches would pufif him up with 
 pride and make him a doubter and lead him to 
 ask, Who is the Lord? Likewise, he was afraid 
 of abject poverty lest it would make him a thief 
 and a blasphemer of Almighty God. Therefore, 
 he prayed for the Middle Estate. 
 
 The Middle Estate — neither poverty nor riches. 
 Direst poverty and exuberant opulence, — how 
 vivid the contrast of the two extremes ! The Sub- 
 merged Tenth and the Upper Ten; Fifth Avenue 
 and Five Points; London's West End and Lon- 
 don's East End; Silk Stocking Row and Poverty 
 Flats; the perilously thin crust and the lower layer 
 trembling with impending eruption! However, 
 the connection between these two extremes is much 
 closer than we are prone to believe. 
 
 When the top of our social structure trembles 
 with some new experience of luxury, simultane- 
 ously the bottom quivers in pain. When the ill- 
 fated Lusifania made her first trip across the At- 
 lantic much publicity was given to the luxury of 
 her apartments and her speed was a ten days' 
 marvel. But the newspapers did not announce 
 
THE MIDDLE ESTATE 
 
 89 
 
 at the time that the Lusitania's turbine engines, 
 in order to justify her speed, were requiring such 
 terrific heat in the furnaces that the stokers were 
 frequently overcome and resuscitated only with 
 difficulty. 
 
 Halfway between these two extremes is the 
 Middle Estate, knowing neither abject poverty nor 
 great riches. In this country we call that large 
 section of the people who are neither very poor 
 nor very rich the "middle class." In some parts 
 of Europe this class is called the " gentry." In 
 other parts the " burghers." A still better term 
 for this most fortunate stratum of society is the 
 substantial phrase "the middle estate." And it 
 is the middle estate that has thus far been the 
 bulwark of civilization; with rare exception it is 
 from the middle estate that our most successful 
 leaders and our most efficient workers have come. 
 Sickness, disease, and inefficiency strike down 
 tens of thousands of poverty stricken; idleness, 
 extravagance and excesses sap the strength and 
 waste the vitality of the over-rich. 
 
 How beneficent the issue if only a balance 
 could be struck between the antipodes of society 
 as now organized! If only those high up would 
 come down, and those far below could climb up, 
 to meet and mingle midway; if the full-blooded 
 and vigorous but imparted their overplus to the 
 anaemic and wasted; if those of abundant leisure 
 but shared it with those to whom vacations never 
 
90 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 come; if this " give and take " of life should come 
 to pass, how beatific the sequence! 
 
 The abundant life is best attained where pov- 
 erty cannot pinch nor wealth enervate. Thus 
 Princess Stephanie of the unfortunate House of 
 Hapsburgh writes in her memoirs : " Happiness 
 depends on living naturally, and what increases 
 our distance from nature decreases our happi- 
 ness." 
 
 Once, when asked to act as arbiter in an in- 
 heritance case, Jesus replied : " A man's life con- 
 sisteth not in the abundance of the things which 
 he possesseth." Thus a distinguished New York 
 minister was accustomed to linger before the win- 
 dow displays of the metropolis during the gala 
 holiday season in order to observe " how many 
 things he could do without." 
 
 The class most susceptible to spiritual truth is 
 the middle estate. The very poor and the very 
 rich are the hardest to interest in religion, and 
 this is true for various reasons. The very poor, 
 because of their penury and want, question the 
 existence of God and if He does exist they wonder 
 if He knows and cares. Moreover, it is quite im- 
 possible to interest people in the spiritual when 
 the physical conditions in which they are com- 
 pelled to live are intolerable. It is difficult to in- 
 terest a man in the Bread of Life when his stomach 
 is fairly famished for a biscuit. It is not easy to 
 talk to a woman about the Water of Life when 
 
THE MIDDLE ESTATE 91 
 
 the water she must perforce drink daily is filthy 
 and foul. The Divine order is: first, that which 
 is natural, and then that which is spiritual. As 
 for the very rich, their temptation is to put their 
 trust in gold, to believe in bonds and stocks, to put 
 their faith in lands and skyscrapers. In the 
 midst of such plenitude God seems unnecessary 
 and a trifling embarrassing. Indifiference to the 
 spiritual under such luxurious conditions is easy; 
 the call of the motor, of the yacht, of the ocean 
 liner, of the golf links, is ringing ever in their 
 ears. 
 
 " Grown mad in the race for gold, 
 
 They are drunk with the wine of gain; 
 The truths their fathers proclaimed of old 
 Are spurned with a high disdain." 
 
 There are notable exceptions to this rule, both 
 at the top and the bottom of society; there are 
 persons of singularly pure and devout lives among 
 the very rich, and there are saints of rare and 
 lovely characters among the penniless. But such 
 exceptions only accentuate the inhospitality of ex- 
 treme poverty and excessive riches to spiritual 
 things. 
 
 Abject poverty and abounding wealth; the very 
 poor and the very rich ; — how shall we account for 
 such inequalities, such disparities, such extremes? 
 Explanations are numerous and the causes given 
 are many and diverse. 
 
 Time was when many planted the issue squarely 
 
92 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 with God. They said : " It is God's will that 
 some be poor and others be rich. It is not society's 
 fault, it is God's decree." Not very many hold to 
 such a view today. Such a belief is a gruesome 
 travesty upon the interpretation of God that Jesus 
 Christ brought the world. Not only so, but God 
 in nature repudiates so hideous a theology. 
 
 " The dew, the rain and moonlight, 
 All prove our Father's mind. 
 The dew, the rain and moonlight 
 Descend to bless mankind." 
 
 Others have explained these extremes by affirm- 
 ing it to be a question of sheer personality, of 
 pluck, of persistence. The difference between men, 
 they tell us, is the difiference in will power, in am- 
 bition, in initiative, in industry. This view also 
 leaves the issue with the Creator, though not so 
 candidly and directly as the first. 
 
 Another group assures us that the trouble has 
 its source in the mind. Some are poor because 
 they think poverty; others are rich because they 
 think riches. Imperial thinking is good, but it 
 has its limitations. If thinking riches would bring 
 riches then everybody would be rich, for who of 
 us has not longed for riches, and who does not 
 abhor abject poverty? 
 
 Still others hold that the fundamental cause of 
 poverty is land monopoly, and that as free access 
 to the soil is deprived, poverty increases. This 
 answer cuts deep and it is encouraging to know 
 
THE MIDDLE ESTATE 93 
 
 that an increasing number of thoughtful persons 
 are studying with profit the principles of the Single 
 Tax. 
 
 But whatever the reason or the cause, these in- 
 equalities are here. They have been here a long 
 time, but that is no reason that they are here to 
 stay. Many centuries ago Agur observed the per- 
 nicious evils of these extremes and thus observing, 
 offered his altogether out-of-the-ordinary prayer: 
 " Give me neither poverty nor riches." What will 
 bring about the meeting and the merging of these 
 two extremes? What forces may be confidently 
 expected to work out the solution of this vexa- 
 tious condition of society? 
 
 The state, the school, the home, the church, 
 must work it out together. At present all these 
 forces are working, but not always togfether. Some 
 are pulling one way and some another; but it is 
 good to believe that underneath the apparent cross- 
 currents there moves steadily but surely on toward 
 the great ocean of human brotherhood and equal 
 opportunity, a tide too full for sound or foam. 
 
 One thing is reasonably certain — outside forces 
 alone can never bring about the meeting of these 
 extremes. Outside agencies however potent, can- 
 not of themselves bring about the amelioration of 
 woes caused by wealth and want. Given every op- 
 portunity to realize life, health, and the pursuit of 
 happiness, in a state free from the blight of penury 
 and the peril of great riches, mankind, unregen- 
 
94. THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 erated by cleansing of the spiritual forces within, 
 would fail tragically. For a single overwhelming 
 illustration, read the history of the French Revo- 
 lution. Sociologists, economists, statesmen, re- 
 formers, must remember to reckon with God, else 
 their calculations will fail. Worldliness is some- 
 thing far more serious than indulgences in popular 
 amusements; worldliness is a view of life without 
 reckoning in the spiritual. Just here comes the 
 great function of the church as an inspirer and 
 the renewer of the spirit of God in man. Man, 
 working through state and school, may fashion the 
 body that is to bring about a more glorious and 
 equitable social order; but it is religion that must 
 breathe into that body the Spirit of Life. Men 
 and women must be born from above before they 
 can do their mightiest work here below; they 
 must be impelled from within before they can be 
 compelled from without. 
 
 It will not do for us to depend altogether upon 
 law, upon statutes, or ordinances. If we expect 
 laws to accomplish miracles we shall be disap- 
 pointed. Like the Sabbath, laws are made for 
 man, not man for laws. See to it that the inside 
 of the cup is clean; cleanse the platter perfectly 
 inside and out and all around. Enact wise and 
 equable laws and alongside of such enactment let 
 religion do her perfect work with man's inner life. 
 
 In the mighty anti-saloon movement now sweep- 
 ing in triumphal march over the land, there lurks 
 
THE MIDDLE ESTATE 
 
 95 
 
 a most subtle danger unless there shall be a cor- 
 respondent movement in behalf of self-control, of 
 clean and wholesome thinking, and of noble reso- 
 lution on the part of the individual. Truism that 
 it is, let it be said again and again that laws can 
 help to make us good, but laws alone cannot re- 
 deem society. Temperance is the keystone of life; 
 in all things not inherently wrong temperance is 
 greater than abstinence; and when abstinence and 
 indulgence meet and merge, temperance is the 
 issue. Nevertheless, in society as it is now or- 
 ganized, abstinence must often replace temper- 
 ance in order that the strong may bear the burdens 
 of the weak. 
 
 " Neither poverty nor riches," — the Middle Es- 
 tate. Will these extremes ever meet? If wealth 
 and want should wed what sort of a family would 
 they rear? If riches and poverty should marry 
 what would be the character of their children? 
 If the House of Too Little and the House of Too 
 Much should form a partnership could the new 
 firm be called The House of Enough and To 
 Spare? Is it only a dream that poverty — abject, 
 pitiful poverty, and riches — excessive and lavish, 
 shall some day merge into a middle estate? And, 
 if abject poverty and excessive wealth should cease 
 to be would humanity's struggles end? Undoubt- 
 edly not, for man was made to struggle; but his 
 struggles then could be for a higher goal. The 
 game would be different and the struggles not in 
 
96 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 vain. Life would be more normal, more natural; 
 consequently happier, holier. No nation half roll- 
 ing in wealth and half pinched by direst poverty 
 can long endure. If it is a disgrace for a man to 
 die rich, as one of America's multi-millionaires 
 has said, then it is society's disgrace that any man 
 or woman die poor. 
 
 " Yea, we would give to each poor man 
 Ripe wheat and poppies red, — 
 A peaceful place at evening 
 With the stars just overhead. 
 
 " A net to snare the moonlight, 
 A sod spread to the sun, 
 A place of toil by daytime 
 Of dreams when toil is done." 
 
 From Agur's prayer to Jesus' programme for 
 the Kingdom of God is a mighty stretch, a thou- 
 sand years perhaps in time — in spirit a greater dis- 
 tance still. Agur prayed that he might be saved 
 from either poverty or riches; Jesus announced a 
 kingdom that would usher in a reign of brotherli- 
 ness for all the world. Agur prayed : " Give me 
 neither poverty nor riches." Jesus prayed : 
 " Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be 
 Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done 
 in earth as it is in heaven." Agur's prayer was 
 individualistic; Jesus' socialistic. 
 
 There is but one approach to the social question 
 and that is the spirit of Him who would not break 
 the bruised reed nor quench the smoking flax. 
 
THE MIDDLE ESTATE 
 
 97 
 
 Calling down maledictions on the rich because they 
 are rich, and berating the poor because they are 
 poor, is both foolish and futile. The winsomest 
 personaHties in all the world are those like Abou 
 Ben Adhem, who love their fellowmen and love 
 them, too, regardless of their lot, their ancestry, 
 their character, or their creed. It is this fine 
 quality that makes Dr. V. Vivian, hero of " V. 
 V.'s Eyes," so irresistible. Behold " V. V." of 
 the farseeing eyes, quaint Doctor of the Dabney 
 House district; behold him addressing the mass 
 meeting assembled to consider the needs of the 
 poor, and listen to the music of his Saviour-like 
 speech : 
 
 " The things in which we are all alike are so 
 much bigger than the things in which we are 
 different. What's rich and poor to a common 
 beginning and a common end, common sufferings, 
 common dreams ? We look at these big freeholds, 
 and money in banks is a little thing. On Wash- 
 ington Street and down behind the Dabney House, 
 — don't we each alike seek the same thing? We 
 want life, and more life. We want to be happy, 
 and we want to be free. Well — we know it's hard 
 to win these prizes when we're poor, but is it so 
 easy when we're rich ? To live shut off on a little 
 island, calling the rest common and unclean — is 
 that being happy and free, is it having life abun- 
 dantly? I look around and don't find it so. And 
 that's sad, isn't it? — double frustation, the poor 
 
98 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 disinherited by their poverty, the rich in their 
 riches. Don't you think we shall find a common 
 meeting place some day, where these two will 
 cancel out? — when reality will touch hands with 
 the poet's ideal: 
 
 " And the stranger hath seen in the stranger 
 His brother at last, 
 And his sister in eyes that were strange." 
 
 IMPARTIAL FATHER OF US ALL, SENDER OF SUN 
 AND RAIN ALIKE ON JUST AND UNJUST, WE LONG 
 TO LOVE LIKE THEE. NEITHER FOR POVERTY NOR 
 RICHES DO WE PRAY " BUT TO DO JUSTLY, TO LOVE 
 MERCY, AND TO WALK HUMBLY " WITH THEE ALL 
 THE DAYS OF OUR LIVES EVEN AS WE HAVE 
 LEARNED OF JESUS CHRIST. 
 
VII 
 
 PRAISEWORTHY PRODIGALITY 
 
" Unfinished ! 'tis an echo still 
 
 That haunts us at our daily task; 
 Sometimes we do not know God's will, 
 Sometimes we do not dare to ask. 
 
 " Mayhap, what seems so incomplete 
 Is finished in the thought divine, 
 While self-wrought work laid at His feet, 
 Is but an ill-begun design. 
 
 " There is no ' broken hour ' to God, 
 No ' interruption ' in His plan, 
 And if we take the path He trod 
 We find revealed His will for man." 
 
 Helen F. Boyden. 
 
VII 
 
 PRAISEWORTHY PRODIGALITY 
 
 "Cast thy bread upon the waters; for thou shalt 
 find it after many days." — Eccleslates li:i. 
 
 IHE Book of Ecclesiastes belongs to that 
 
 portion of the Bible known as the Wisdom 
 
 Literature. To the same portion belong 
 also the Books of Job and Proverbs, Evidently, 
 the purpose of Ecclesiastes is to narrate the ex- 
 perience of a man who set out to find happiness. 
 The book has in it a strain of pessimism. The 
 author tries knowledge and finds it vain; he ex- 
 periments with pleasures and discovers them to be 
 empty ; he pursues the novel only to find that there 
 is nothing new under the sun; he accumulates 
 riches and confesses that they are but a bauble. 
 In the end, however, the author sums up his expe- 
 riences with the sensible advice that " to fear God 
 and keep His commandments is the whole duty or 
 happiness of man." 
 
 Scattered throughout the Book of Ecclesiastes 
 are some wholesome sentiments and sprightly 
 epigrams. For example : " A good name is better 
 than precious ointment." " Whatsoever thy hand 
 find to do, do it with thy might." " Remember 
 also thy Creator in the days of thy youth, before 
 
 101 
 
102 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 the evil days come and the years draw nigh when 
 thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them." " It 
 is better to go to the house of mourning than to 
 the house of feasting." " The race is not to the 
 swift, nor the battle to the strong." But of all the 
 epigrams in Ecclesiastes there is none more inter- 
 esting, nor more striking, than the first verse of 
 the eleventh chapter — " Cast thy bread upon the 
 waters; for thou shalt find it after many days." 
 
 Two explanations of this curious expression 
 have been made. Some have thought that there 
 is in this verse an allusion to the sowing of rice 
 or other grain from a boat during the inundation 
 of certain Eastern rivers, especially the Nile. 
 Sown thus on the surface of the water the grain 
 sinks to the bottom and there finds a resting place 
 in the silt and rich alluvium where, after the 
 waters have receded, is brought forth, by-and- 
 bye, abundant harvest. 
 
 This explanation is interesting, but the other 
 one is also, and much more likely to be correct. 
 In the East bread is commonly made in thin, flat 
 cakes and these thrown out upon the stream would 
 float for a while, then sink, and unlike the grain 
 would yield no return. To throw bread away, 
 especially in the far East, is an extravagance. So 
 apparently, are many of the services we render to 
 others. We should do good, hoping for nothing 
 in return. As foolish as throwing precious bread 
 upon the water some ministrations may seem to 
 
PRAISEWORTHY PRODIGALITY 103 
 
 be; and the teaching of this text is to persevere 
 in such ministrations despite the hopelessness of 
 any recompense, for sometime there will be, nay, 
 more there shall be, reward for every sincere 
 benefactor. I fancy this is the meaning of the 
 metaphor: " Cast thy bread upon the waters; for 
 thou shalt find it after many days." Investigation 
 of the teaching of this text in human affairs will 
 lead us into a realm where truth is stranger than 
 fiction. 
 
 Whosoever follows out this teaching is a prodi- 
 gal, yet praiseworthily so, a blessed spendthrift; 
 and the apparent wastefulness of his ministrations 
 is in reality the soundest spiritual economy. 
 Hearken unto the glory of such prodigality in 
 humanity's behalf. 
 
 Years ago a certain Methodist bishop, now 
 famous, was the successful pastor of a large 
 church. In the midst of his busy ministry he found 
 himself unable to decide on any theme for his 
 Sunday morning sermon. It was a busy week 
 with him, the days passed swiftly, and he came up 
 to Friday with no morning theme selected. Late 
 Friday evening he sat down amongst his books, 
 leaving word that he should not be disturbed. He 
 had just selected his theme and was well into the 
 preparation of a sermon when there was a knock 
 at his study door and a most urgent request that 
 he visit a sick man who could not possibly live 
 through the night. The minister hesitated for a 
 
104 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 single moment. By hard work and painstaking 
 preparation he had estabhshed a pulpit reputation 
 and the thought of a possible failure on Sunday 
 morning disturbed his mind. " I must have a ser- 
 mon," he reasoned, " Hundreds will be waiting 
 for a sermon. Better disappoint one man than 
 hundreds." The minister hesitated no longer, 
 turned away from his inviting books, left the un- 
 finished manuscript, and went out in the night to 
 the side of the dying man. And there at his bed- 
 side occurred a most moving incident which be- 
 came the inspiration of the sermon of the next 
 Sunday morning; a sermon, too, that carried that 
 minister's name throughout the English-speaking 
 world. "Cast thy bread upon the waters; for 
 thou shalt find it after many days." 
 
 When Lord Beresford, long an admiral in the 
 British navy and a most popular officer, was one 
 time in the North Sea with his fleet, a sailor fell 
 overboard from the flagship. Lord Beresford 
 caught up a rope, gave one end of it to a sailor, 
 and with the other end leaped overboard amid the 
 ice floes and saved the drowning man. At the time 
 the incident was commented upon in some quar- 
 ters as foolhardy and unnecessary. Time passed 
 on; Lord Beresford had ambitions to occupy a 
 seat in Parliament. He stood for office and the 
 opposition against him was considerable. One 
 night he was speaking in Manchester to a vast 
 audience which was against him five to one. While 
 
PRAISEWORTHY PRODIGALITY 105 
 
 he was speaking there was a commotion in the 
 rear of the room caused by a man attempting to 
 push his way to the front. The police stopped 
 the man and were about to eject him from the 
 building when Lord Beresford, in a spirit of ut- 
 most good humour, said : " If the man wants to 
 speak let him come up here and say what he has 
 to say from this platform." The man came to 
 the platform, and turning to the audience he ex- 
 plained : " I came here because Admiral Beres- 
 ford risked his hfe to save mine in the North Sea. 
 I owe my life to him. I am not an orator, but I 
 want to say that here is a man whom the voters 
 of this district can trust as a brother." The 
 speech was received with shouts of approval and 
 it saved the day for Admiral Beresford. He car- 
 ried the district by a vote unprecedentedly large in 
 the politics of England. " Cast thy bread upon 
 the waters; for thou shalt find it after many days." 
 
 Lyman Beecher went once to preach to a country 
 congregation on a stormy Sunday. Just one per- 
 son was present at the service and Lyman Beecher 
 had brought one of his strongest sermons, — one 
 that multitudes had listened to with delight and 
 profit. What would the average minister do under 
 the same circumstances? I know of a parallel 
 case in the South. A minister was announced to 
 preach at a country church upon a certain Sunday 
 evening. A heavy rainstorm swept the community 
 just about church time. The minister and his host 
 
106 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 were the only ones present. They laughed and 
 joked about the situation and the minister's host 
 said to him : " Well, shall you preach or shall I 
 preach?" The minister did not preach his ser- 
 mon and later he went back home with his host, 
 who, by the way, was not a Christian. Lyman 
 Beecher preached his sermon to his one auditor 
 and he preached it, so we are told, as carefully and 
 earnestly as though hundreds were present. And 
 surely it was worth while, for the young man be- 
 came a convert to Christianity, went into the 
 ministry, and wielded a great power for good. 
 And the turning point in his career was the ser- 
 mon Lyman Beecher preached to him on that 
 stormy Sunday. " Cast thy bread upon the 
 waters; for thou shalt find it after many days." 
 
 Some years ago a minister was called upon to 
 offer a prayer at a burial in a little country ceme- 
 tery. The day was wet and cold and he was a 
 total stranger to the people who had asked for his 
 services. It was a dreary, unfeeling burial. The 
 doors of two of the carriages were opened during 
 the prayer, but none of the occupants got out in 
 the driving rain. Nobody spoke to the minister, 
 nobody thanked him for losing a day from his 
 books and his parish duties; nobody showed any 
 grief for the dead, nor any courtesy to the living. 
 Six years passed and the minister had quite for- 
 gotten the incident when a letter came to him 
 from a college student whose name the min- 
 
PRAISEWORTHY PRODIGALITY 107 
 
 ister had never heard. As a boy of sixteen, the 
 young man said, he had attended the funeral of 
 a great-aunt. He told how greatly the dark lead- 
 ened sky, the driving of the rain on the carriage 
 windows and the jolting of the slowly mov- 
 ing vehicle had depressed him. Moreover, under 
 their heavy mourning veils the relatives had dis- 
 cussed the probable disposition of their aunt's 
 property and the sordidness of it all had affected 
 the boy's sensitive nature. " Ours had never been 
 a religious family," the letter went on, " and this 
 was my first contact with the serious side of life. 
 I don't think I heard a dozen words of the prayer, 
 but for days I could see you just as you stood 
 there, bare-headed in the pouring rain. I supposed 
 at first that you were paid for the service and 
 when I learned from a light remark on the way 
 back that you weren't, I wondered why you came. 
 I couldn't understand why a man should do what 
 brought him neither pleasure nor profit — why he 
 should do it for total strangers. By degrees I 
 came to see that the kind of life I was most 
 familiar with went to pieces when misfortune or 
 death came. Father was always nervous and rest- 
 less for days after any of the men in his business 
 circle died; and then I'd think of you, standing 
 so calm and quiet out there in the rain praying, 
 not because you were paid for doing it, but be- 
 cause you believed in prayer. That seemed to 
 point to something higher, and I began reading 
 
108 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 the New Testament to find the next step. Father 
 was angry when I joined the church and decided 
 for the ministry. He had other plans for me, 
 but I couldn't see my duty anywhere except in the 
 church; so here I am working my way through 
 college. I have written this to tell you where the 
 good impulse started — a place where you might 
 think there was the least chance of exerting any 
 influence at all." Verily, it is true — " Cast thy 
 bread upon the waters; for thou shalt find it after 
 many days." 
 
 A well-known citizen of Louisville, Kentucky, 
 was on his way one morning to attend Sunday 
 School in a downtown church. As he neared the 
 church he met a little newsboy who was sobbing 
 as though his heart would break. The man 
 stopped the boy and asked him what was the 
 trouble. The little fellow explained between sobs 
 that another newsboy had taken his pennies, 
 twenty-six in number. The man gave the boy a 
 quarter and as the money went into the little fel- 
 low's pocket the tears ceased to flow. " Say, mis- 
 ter," he said, " ain't you the man that stays in the 
 wallpaper store on Third Street ? " The gentle- 
 man said that he was. " Well, sir," the lad con- 
 tinued, " I would like to bring you a paper every 
 day until I pay you back this money." " All 
 right," agreed the man who was the head of a 
 leading wallpaper concern in the city. Then he 
 added, " Do you go to Sunday School anywhere ? " 
 
PRAISEWORTHY PRODIGALITY 109 
 
 Upon the little fellow answering in the negative, 
 the business man obtained a promise from him 
 to be at that corner at five minutes before nine 
 on the next Sunday morning and he would take 
 him to his Sunday School. The next Sunday 
 morning at the appointed hour the lad was there. 
 He was taken to Sunday School, enrolled in a class, 
 and the teacher asked to take an especial interest 
 in him. The papers were faithfully delivered until 
 the debt was paid. Then the boy asked the man 
 to become a regular customer. The business man 
 was so impressed by the bright little chap who 
 wanted to do the right thing that he secured him 
 a position in one of the mercantile houses of Louis- 
 ville. Time passed on and the boy continued to 
 do well; then, after a few years, he disappeared 
 and his benefactor quite forgot the incident. Sev- 
 eral years later a well-dressed, manly, and unusu- 
 ally prepossessing young man presented himself 
 in this same man's office. " You don't know me," 
 he said. The merchant looked the stranger over 
 and acknowledged that he did not remember him. 
 Then the young man spoke: " Well, sir, I am the 
 little newsboy whom you helped and started to 
 Sunday School nine years ago. I live in St. Louis 
 now; I am receiving a salary of three thousand 
 dollars a year; I am happily married; and, sir, I 
 want you to know that I still go to Sunday 
 School." 
 
 A church at Madisonville, Ohio, a dozen years 
 
110 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 ago was discouraged and pastorless, meeting in a 
 very small, rickety frame building which had been 
 erected as a sort of make-shift tabernacle. The 
 site was not a good one. For some months the 
 Cincinnati ministers preached there on Sunday 
 afternoons without any financial compensation. It 
 was either that or let the church go down. About 
 this time one of the bright young girls of the 
 community — then in high school — made up her 
 mind to become a Christian. Her mother and 
 grandmother were members of the little mission 
 church; her decision was reached by the help of 
 the preaching that she heard there, and by the 
 religious training she had received from her 
 mother and her grandmother in their home. But 
 she had an unusually great question before her as 
 to the matter of church membership. She was 
 a very attractive young woman, an accom- 
 plished musician, a charming reader and enter- 
 tainer, much sought socially. Her companions, 
 classmates, and social friends, were all members 
 or attendants at the big popular church. There 
 was no society in the little mission for her. She 
 was given definitely to understand that she would 
 lose caste in society unless she went into the same 
 church with all her young friends; that if she 
 went into the little mission there was nothing there 
 for her and that socially she would stand alone. 
 This was not meant as, nor received as, persecu- 
 tion, but as a simple statement of conditions. It 
 
PRAISEWORTHY PRODIGALITY 111 
 
 required real moral heroism for the young woman 
 to cast her lot with that little mission church and 
 give up a really enviable position in the society of 
 a large and popular congregation. But that is 
 exactly what she did. She confessed her faith 
 and cast her lot with the little struggling mission. 
 Her decision marked an epoch and was, indeed, 
 the turning point in the history of the mission. 
 The young woman went to work in church and 
 Sunday School, laying her talents on the altar of 
 God's service. She drilled the children and called 
 for help. She called for more children and she 
 called for more help. She was regular and faith- 
 ful in attendance at all services, prompt in the per- 
 formance of all tasks. Gradually there grew up 
 about her from unseen and unexpected sources a 
 delightful society, the church took on new life, 
 it grew by leaps and bounds. The little old frame 
 building is now a print-shop, the congregation 
 meets in a substantial, modern, commodious, beau- 
 tiful brick building on a splendid site just across 
 from two schools — the grade school and the high 
 school. Some two thousand school children see 
 this church building daily and it is worth looking 
 at, for it is a monument to the moral courage of 
 a high school girl. " Cast thy bread upon the 
 waters; for thou shalt find it after many days." 
 
 The other day I conversed with a great old man 
 who had been a school teacher for upwards of 
 forty years. He was in a reminiscent mood and 
 
112 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 he told me of the discouragements he had encoun- 
 tered in the course of his career as a teacher. He 
 sketched, in particular, the character of two pupils 
 who were bright but incorrigible and gave him no 
 end of trouble. " I bore with those two boys," 
 he explained, " with all the patience I possessed. 
 I ignored their slights, overlooked their indiffer- 
 ence, affected not to notice their insolence, and 
 all the time I strove to make men of them. I 
 thought I had failed; so far as I could see my 
 interest in their behalf was all in vain. But within 
 the past year I have had a visit from those two 
 boys, now middle-aged men. They reside in the 
 Middle West, one a circuit judge, the other a suc- 
 cessful ranchman noted for his benefactions; and, 
 sir, those two men travelled fifteen hundred miles 
 to tell me that they owed their success largely to 
 my kindness and patience as their teacher thirty 
 years ago. They urged me to take a trip West 
 at their expense which was fine, but my reward 
 for what was apparently unappreciated service 
 was greater than any three thousand mile trip as 
 I heard from their willing lips the fruitage of my 
 work as a teacher three decades ago." And as 
 the old gentleman told me this his face shone 
 like the face of an angel and his eyes were moist 
 with tears. He had cast his bread upon the waters, 
 and lo, he had found it after many years. 
 
 Such incidents could be multiplied indefinitely, 
 but these will suffice. Bread cast upon the water 
 
PRAISEWORTHY PRODIGALITY 113 
 
 is not lost, " thou shalt find it after many days." 
 How many? The Heavenly Father knows. Per- 
 haps a year; maybe ten or twenty years; perchance 
 fifty; possibly not in a life-time, and still the 
 promise holds good. The great law remains in 
 force, the good God is in His Heaven. 
 
 There is a sturdy philosophy in this text which 
 fattens faith and strengthens hope. Nothing good 
 is lost, n» labour of love is in vain, no perfume 
 was ever wasted on the desert air, no flower was 
 ever born to blush unseen. " Cast thy bread upon 
 the waters; for thou shalt find it after many days." 
 Thou shalt find it either in time or in eternity, 
 but find it ultimately thou surely shalt. 
 
 "Unanswered yet? Faith cannot be unanswered. 
 Her feet are firmly planted on the rock ; 
 Amid the wildest storms she stands undaunted, 
 Nor quails before the earthquake's shock. 
 She knows Omnipotence has heard her prayer, 
 And cries, It shall be done — sometime, somewhere." 
 
 O CHRIST, THOU ART THE BREAD OF LIFE CAST 
 so WONDROUSLY UPON THE WATERS OF A SINFUL 
 HUMANITY AND THOU CANST FIND NO FRUIT IN 
 US UNLESS WE WILL THAT IT SHALL BE SO. FILL 
 US WITH THY SPIRIT UNTIL WE SHALL KNOW 
 FROM EXPERIENCE THAT IT IS MORE BLESSED TO 
 GIVE THAN TO RECEIVE. 
 
VIII 
 
 DOUBTS AND DOUBTERS 
 
"Perplexed in faith, but pure in deeds, 
 At last he beat his music out ; 
 There lives more faith in honest doubt. 
 Believe me, than in half the creeds. 
 
 "He fought his doubts and gathered strength; 
 He would not make his judgment blind; 
 He faced the spectres of the mind, 
 And laid them ; thus he came at length 
 To find a stronger faith his own." 
 
 Alfred Tennyson. 
 
VIII 
 
 DOUBTS AND DOUBTERS 
 
 " I believe, help thou mine unbelief." — Mark g : 24. 
 
 DANIEL WEBSTER requested that this 
 verse of Scripture be carved on his grave- 
 stone as accurately epitomizing his biog- 
 raphy in the Hfe of the Spirit. Significant choice 
 of epitaph, for who of the vast multitude of Be- 
 lievers has not at some time or another breathed 
 the prayer: " I believe, help thou mine unbelief." 
 
 In this study it is assumed that we are all doubt- 
 ers in some sense of the term. Wherever there 
 is a normal mind questions are bound to rise. 
 It is probably true that all of us doubt some of 
 the time and that some of us doubt all of the time, 
 but it is not true that all of us doubt all of 
 the time. Robert Browning said : " We live 
 a life of doubt diversified by faith; or a life 
 of faith diversified by doubt." This is a distinc- 
 tion with difference, and the difference between 
 such lives is such a difference between a life of 
 sickness diversified by health, and a life of health 
 diversified by sickness. In the one instance the 
 trend of life is doubt, faith an incident; in the 
 other the trend of life is faith, doubt an incident. 
 Let it be thoroughly understood at the outset that 
 117 
 
118 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 when it is conceded that we all doubt and at one 
 time or another are all doubters, it is by no means 
 true that we are doubters in the same degree or 
 that the attitude of our lives toward doubt is one 
 and the same. 
 
 It will not be necessary to prove that doubt is 
 an experience common to us all, but it may be 
 profitable to illustrate this fact. Such illustrations 
 abound. Biography teems with them. Look at 
 the characters of the Bible. Religion is the great 
 theme of the Bible, and faith is at the forefront 
 of the pages of Holy Writ. Great heroes of the 
 faith are there, and yet what hero of that faith 
 whose life career is traced upon the Bible page was 
 without his experience of doubt? 
 
 Abraham's faith failed at least once. Moses 
 was beset behind and before with doubts. David's 
 doubts dampen his Psalms with tears. Elijah 
 doubted the existence of one other beside himself 
 who was faithful to Jehovah. Peter's faith weak- 
 ened woefully, and as for Paul — he fought the 
 demon doubt daily. 
 
 Take the case of John the Baptist — one of the 
 great characters of all times, forerunner of Jesus 
 Christ, the Voice in the Wilderness that came 
 crying: " Make ye ready the way of the Lord." 
 John the Baptist bore witness to One that should 
 come after him, the latchet of whose shoes he 
 counted himself as not worthy to unloose; and 
 when Jesus came John recognized Him as the long- 
 
DOUBTS AND DOUBTERS 119 
 
 promised Messiah and testified : " I have seen 
 and borne witness that this is the Son of God." 
 Time passed on and the sturdy prophet from the 
 wilderness, because of his courage in speaking the 
 truth before a Hcentious king, was cast into prison. 
 The great rugged soul, used to the open sky and 
 God's out-of-doors, pined and fretted in the nar- 
 row prison cell. Doubts began to rise in his mind, 
 doubts about Jesus. Was He after all the Christ? 
 And John sent his disciples to Jesus with the 
 pathetic query: "Art thou he that cometh, or 
 look we for another?" John the Baptist, who 
 bore witness to Christ, who had testified that He 
 was the Son of God, in a period of gloom and 
 despondency began to question what he had once 
 affirmed with deepest conviction. And is it not in 
 this one experience that John the Baptist comes 
 closest to us, O fellow-doubters of life's varied 
 pilgrimage? 
 
 Did Jesus ever doubt? Did He, too, who was 
 tempted in all points like as we are, know what 
 it was to doubt both man and God? There are 
 at least two passages of Scripture that seem to 
 answer this question in the affirmative. In Luke 
 i8 : 8, these words are attributed to Jesus : " When 
 the Son of man cometh shall he find faith on the 
 earth ? " This is one of the most pathetic inquiries 
 that Jesus ever made, and on the surface it seems 
 to indicate a doubt as to whetlier mankind would 
 accept the faith as He had taught it and lived it. 
 
120 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 In Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34 is recorded 
 the tense and awful sentence : " And about the 
 ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, 
 Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is. My God, my 
 God, why hast thou forsaken me ? " Here is an 
 expression of the deep and dreadful thought on 
 the part of Jesus that God had forgotten Him, 
 had cast Him off, that amidst the thick and awful 
 darkness He was forsaken by both God and man. 
 Whatever may be the true interpretation of these 
 Scriptural passages, they record experiences which, 
 though brief, were real to Jesus, and because of 
 them they make Him more than He could be 
 without them — our great Mediator, our great 
 High Priest, who can be touched with the feeUngs 
 of all our infirmities. 
 
 Not only is it true that doubts are common to 
 us all, but it is also true that there are particular 
 periods of life and certain experiences when doubts 
 assail us with incredible vigour and our minds 
 become veritable interrogation points. 
 
 There is, for example, the sceptical period of 
 youth, the period when the youthful mind begins 
 to question everything that he was taught as a 
 child to believe. Children accept at first the beliefs 
 of their parents without question, and are satis- 
 fied, but along in the late teens period comes the 
 disposition to question and even to assume that 
 the world is all out of joint and youth was born 
 to set it right. Some one has traced humorously 
 
DOUBTS AND DOUBTERS 121 
 
 the development of the human mind in the college 
 career : " The first year in college the student 
 knows that he knows it all; the second year he 
 only thinks that he knows it all; the third year he 
 knows that he doesn't know it all; and the fourth 
 year he begins to doubt that he knows anything." 
 This is a critical period and one that calls for 
 patience, for tact and sympathy on the part of 
 parents and teachers and pastors. 
 
 The period of middle life is another time peril- 
 ous for faith. Someone has coined the expression : 
 "The atheism of middle age," and the phrase 
 tragically describes the period of distress and those 
 obstinate questionings which come after the hey- 
 day of youth and young manhood is gone, and one 
 stands midway between the unfilled hopes of the 
 past and the nameless dread of approaching old 
 age. Faith bears a heavy strain in middle life, 
 and midchannel is where many vessels go down 
 in woeful wreck. 
 
 Then there is the doubt which rises from the 
 experience of affliction, of adversity, of loss, of 
 the advent of death in home and family circles. 
 These experiences come sometimes like a bolt from 
 the blue, smiting us to the very earth in awful 
 shock or grief, and shaking our faith to its very 
 foundations. Such experiences call plaintively for 
 that love " which beareth all things, believeth all 
 things, hopeth all things, endureth all things." 
 Strangely enough, these experiences have been the 
 
122 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 crucibles from which have emerged the purest and 
 strongest faith. 
 
 Then there are the experiences of great pros- 
 perity, which test faith so severely and furnish a 
 most fertile soil for the subtlest and most forbid- 
 ding sort of doubt. When people begin to trust 
 in gold they begin to lose faith in God by leaps 
 and bounds. Money will purchase so much that 
 is enjoyable. Money will protect its possessors 
 from so many things that are unpleasant. Money 
 is so real, so tangible, that the temptation to trust 
 in gold rather than in God is too strong for thou- 
 sands. And, I believe, it is more difficult to deal 
 with doubts that rise out of great prosperity than 
 the doubts that come from any other of life's 
 experiences. The very atmosphere that surrounds 
 the sleek, prosperous, independent, self-sufficient 
 doubter is not hospitable to faith. The wind 
 that blows from the' Doubting Castle where 
 wealth and luxury abound resembles the 
 cutting wind that blows from off some gigantic 
 iceberg. 
 
 What shall we do with our doubts? Shall we 
 ignore them ? What shall we do with those gloomy 
 doubts that rise between man and God, and be- 
 tween man and man, the doubts that threaten to 
 destroy us ? The best prescription that any Doctor 
 of Doubts can give is this: Doubt your doubts. 
 Don't believe your doubts. Face your doubts. 
 Don't run away from them. Question your ques- 
 
DOUBTS AND DOUBTERS 123 
 
 tions. Don't raise a question and be satisfied with 
 having raised it. 
 
 George Herbert, in his most readable little 
 volume, " The Country Parson," has this vi^hole- 
 some word concerning doubts : "If you ever have 
 any doubts do not run away from them, but always 
 face them. If you are going through a cemetery 
 and you think you see a ghost go up to it and 
 pull it to pieces. Possibly you will find that instead 
 of it being a real ghost it is only a sheet that was 
 hung out to dry and has been forgotten by the 
 servant." What sublimated common sense ! And 
 how many of us do just the opposite ! We think 
 we see a ghost and instead of doubting and investi- 
 gating Mr. Ghost we run away from him, spread- 
 ing abroad the wonderful story of the ghost we 
 saw, how he flitted among the trees and the tombs, 
 how sepulchral his tones, how dreadful his groans 
 — this is the way we are prone to treat our doubts. 
 We are inclined to believe our doubts, we are 
 tempted to feed our doubts. What we ought to 
 do is to doubt our doubts, investigate our doubts, 
 do battle royal with our doubts, and put them to 
 rout. This is precisely what John the Baptist did. 
 When he began to doubt Jesus he squarely faced 
 his doubt; he straightway began to doubt his 
 doubts; and he sent his followers to Jesus, Him- 
 self, with the pertinent question : " Art thou he 
 that Cometh, or look we for another? " 
 
 There is hope for every doubter who will doubt 
 
124 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 his doubts, who will deal with them fairly and 
 squarely, who will rigidly investigate the truth. 
 Here, as in everything else, the pioneer plainsman's 
 homely advice is good : — " Be sure you are right, 
 then go ahead." If you say you do not believe 
 the Bible be sure you mean what you say. It 
 may be you do not believe what somebody has 
 said about the Bible. If you say you do not 
 believe the Bible is inspired be sure that you do 
 not mean somebody's theory of Biblical inspira- 
 tion. If you say you do not believe in Christ as 
 Divine it may be you are disbelieving some defini- 
 tion of His Divinity. Cultivate the open mind. If 
 you are reading books that challenge what you 
 believe the Bible teaches is true, read carefully the 
 Bible with a view to finding out for yourself 
 what it does teach. Then decide what you will 
 believe, but not before. If you are uncertain as 
 to the value of Christianity put your doubt to the 
 test. You might read history and be profited by 
 the study of the effects of Christianity upon the 
 world's civilization. But there is a simpler, and 
 even more practical, test : Select the people whom 
 you know, the people whose lives are tolerably 
 well-known to you, and group them in two com- 
 panies. On the one hand group those who are 
 believers and are seeking the mind of Christ. On 
 the other hand group those whom you know to 
 be unbelievers and who estimate lightly religion. 
 Study the lives of each group. Talk with the 
 
DOUBTS AND DOUBTERS 125 
 
 members of each group. Obtain their views of 
 life, their attitude toward God and man; and 
 then, out of your intimate study decide with which 
 group you would rather cast your lot. Any great 
 truth must stand or fall by the test — " By their 
 fruits ye shall know them." 
 
 Doubt your doubts. Bring acid and test their 
 metals. Bring tape and take their measure. Bring 
 plummet line and sound their depths. Face them 
 squarely, probe them thoroughly. Drag them out 
 of the shadows where they lurk, and watch them 
 shrivel in the strong white light of investigation. 
 
 So much for the doubts. But what shall we 
 do with the Doubter? Doubt the Doubter? No, 
 the very opposite. Believe in the doubter. Doubt 
 the doubter's doubt, but believe in the doubter, 
 himself. The same distinction exists between the 
 doubter and his doubt as does between the sinner 
 and his sin. The distinction is not always easy 
 to make, but it is there. It used to be quite the 
 fashion to confuse the doubter with his doubt and 
 to run over him rough shod. It is still the fashion 
 in some quarters to doubt the doubter, to damn 
 him for his doubt, to put him outside the pale of 
 respectability along with the reprobate and the 
 scoundrel. But that was not Jesus' way. The 
 severity of Jesus was never visited upon the honest 
 doubter, btit instead upon those who prided them- 
 selves upon their religious attainments, yet were 
 actually hypocritical and loveless. Look at the 
 
126 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 attitude of Jesus toward John when John doubted 
 Him and sent the message : " Art thou he that 
 Cometh, or look we for another ? " Did Jesus 
 condemn John? Did He take advantage of so 
 favourable an opportunity to weaken John's influ- 
 ence or assail his character? He did nothing of 
 the kind. On the contrary He commended him. 
 He said : " Among them that are born of women, 
 there hath not arisen a greater than John the 
 Baptist." Jesus believed in John, and Jesus' 
 method of destroying John's doubts and increasing 
 John's faith is worthy our emulation. To the 
 Baptist's disciples He said : " Go and tell John 
 the things which ye have seen and heard ; the blind 
 receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are 
 cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, 
 the poor have good tidings preached to them. And 
 blessed is he, whosoever shall find no occasion of 
 stumbHng in me." 
 
 The attitude of some well-meaning persons 
 toward honest doubters is as certain to drive them 
 farther away from faith as though deliberately 
 designed to accomplish that very purpose. When 
 a young man questions some Scriptural truth, or 
 some view of the Bible, only to discover that in 
 raising the question he has drawn suspicion to him- 
 self and called forth censure, naturally enough his 
 doubt is deepened, not dispelled. He asks for 
 bread and is given a stone; he seeks for light and 
 experiences a thunderstorm. 
 
DOUBTS AND DOUBTERS 127 
 
 Jesus' attitude toward John the Doubter should 
 be the attitude of preacher and parent and teacher 
 toward the doubter in home and church and school. 
 Jesus' attitude toward John the Baptist in that 
 good man's experience of doubt is altogether 
 beautiful, patient, sympathetic. Such an attitude 
 invariably makes for faith. Imagine, if you can, 
 Jesus calling John an infidel; fancy, if you can, 
 Jesus calling Thomas a sceptic. How unchris- 
 tian our custom of flaunting the names infidel, 
 sceptic, atheist, agnostic before the faces of those 
 who are seeking truth and light, who need our 
 help not our hostility, who need to be builded up, 
 not destroyed! 
 
 I am not forgetting that there is a blatant, even 
 blasphemous, type of doubter. I am not speaking 
 of that type now. But, even so, the blatant and 
 blasphemous doubter is not helped toward faith 
 by calling him names. At its best calling names 
 is unprofitable, and at its worst contemptible. And 
 if we begin by having some faith in a doubter, 
 even a doubter of the coarse and noisy kind, might 
 not our faith in him begin to beget faith on his 
 part in our God and His Christ? 
 
 Here, then, is the prescription for our doubts 
 and for doubters: Doubt your doubts. Subject 
 them to the closest scrutiny and the most merciless 
 investigation. 
 
 Believe in the doubter. Fan the smallest spark 
 of faith into flame. Help him to doubt his own 
 
128 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 doubts by making him to know your faith in him. 
 
 I opened the other day the immortal allegory 
 of Bunyan and reread after some years the expe- 
 rience of Christian and Hopeful when they wan- 
 dered ofif through By-Path Meadow and were 
 made prisoners in Doubting Castle. And, as I 
 read I felt again somewhat of the thrill I experi- 
 enced when I read the Pilgrim's Progress as a 
 little boy. Giant Despair, you will remember, was 
 master of that castle, and his wife who was named 
 Diffidence was mistress there. It is not said that 
 they had any children but if they had a son and 
 daughter they might well have been named 
 Sarcasm and Ridicule. Bunyan's nomenclature 
 is richly suggestive. Look at the names of the 
 master and mistress of Doubting Castle, — Despair 
 and Diffidence. Are they not the finished products 
 of Doubt? The poor pilgrims suffered in Doubt- 
 ing Castle. Giant Despair beat Christian and 
 Hopeful with many stripes, and they were without 
 food or drink. They were in a sorry plight and 
 knew not what awful disaster awaited them on 
 the morrow. In the midst of their anxieties Chris- 
 tian remembered that he possessed a key called 
 Promise. He informed Hopeful, who suggested 
 that he pluck the key from his bosom and try 
 the lock of the dungeon door. Christian did so, 
 and lo, the bolts gave back and the door flew 
 open. Christian and Hopeful passed out into the 
 castle yard and lo, the same key opened the gate. 
 
DOUBTS AND DOUBTERS 129 
 
 Into glorious freedom they made their joyful way 
 and so came to the Delectable Mountains and there 
 they met the shepherds who bade them welcome 
 to the gardens and orchards, the vineyards and 
 fountains of water. And the names of the shep- 
 herds were — mark well these names — Knowledge, 
 Experience, Watchful, and Sincere. Then the 
 four shepherds pointed out from one of the moun- 
 tain heights Doubting Castle and traced for the 
 two pilgrims a path that led from that terrible 
 place to an enclosure where Giant Despair was ac- 
 customed to lead his prisoners and leave them after 
 he had put out their eyes. There they saw, wan- 
 dering in their blindness among the tombs in dark- 
 ness and distress, a number of the giant's victims. 
 And when Christian and Hopeful looked upon that 
 sight tears gushed from their eyes, although they 
 said nothing to the shepherds of their narrow 
 escape from that dreadful castle of doubt and 
 danger. 
 
 Ah, me! We have all known the interior of 
 Doubting Castle; Giant Despair and his wife, 
 Diffidence, are not entire strangers to us. But 
 no one need dwell in Doubting Castle. There is 
 a key that unlocks its dungeon doors. It is the 
 key of Faith. Subjects of Giant Despair, take 
 that blessed key, unlock the dungeon door, leave 
 Doubting Castle, and come into the Delectable 
 Mountains of Trust where the Good Shepherd 
 will lead you beside the green pastures and make 
 
130 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 you to lie down by still waters, will restore your 
 soul, and, by-and-bye, lead you home to go out 
 no more forever. 
 
 LORD JESUS, WE BELIEVE, HELP THOU OUR 
 UNBELIEF. LIKE THE TWO DISCIPLES ON THE 
 EMMAUS WAY WE ARE FOOLISH AND SLOW TO BE- 
 LIEVE ALL THAT THE PROPHETS HAVE SPOKEN. 
 PITY OUR WILLINGNESS TO DWELL IN VALES OF 
 GLOOM WHEN WE MIGHT ABIDE ON THE SHINING 
 PLATEAUS. ENRICH OUR AFFECTIONS TOWARD ONE 
 ANOTHER AND MAKE US FIT TO BE THY MESSEN- 
 GERS OF LIGHT TO ALL WHO SIT IN DARKNESS. 
 
IX 
 
 THE GIFT OF THE MORNING STAR 
 
"If you can wait and not be tired by waiting 
 Or being lied about don't deal in lies, 
 Or being hated don't give way to hating, 
 And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise. 
 
 "If you can fill the unforgiving minute 
 
 With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, 
 Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, 
 And — which is more — you'll be a Man, my son ! " 
 
 RuDYARD Kipling. 
 
IX 
 
 THE GIFT OF THE MORNING STAR 
 
 " And he that overcometh ... I will give him 
 the morning star." — Revelation 2 : 26-28. 
 
 1HIS closing volume of the Holy Scriptures 
 
 is a veritable field of the cloth of gold. 
 
 That the devout characters who glorify 
 the pages of " Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush " 
 should reserve the word " magnificent " for the 
 Book of Revelation is not surprising. Quite apart 
 from its theological significance, the book is a won- 
 der. Considered as a colossal canvas for the brush 
 of the Almighty, it is bewildering in gorgeous 
 colouring. Regarded as a vast augmented orchestra 
 it is a succession of Halleluiah choruses with melo- 
 dious interludes. As poetry it is epic, lyric, ode 
 and hymn in unforgettable combination. Texts 
 selected from this Book differ one from another 
 in glory and the one selected for study here is 
 among the most glorious of them all. Christ is 
 the author, the promise is of Him; to those who 
 overcome He declares : "I will give him the 
 morning star." 
 
 Observe carefully the beauty and bril- 
 liance OF the metaphor " THE MORNING 
 
 STAR." The very expression is synonymous with 
 
 133 
 
134, THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 glory and scintillating radiance. Just before day- 
 break the morning star may be seen in all of its 
 jubilant splendour. Reference is made by other 
 Biblical writers to the glorious star of the morn- 
 ing. Job, in the thirty-eighth chapter and seventh 
 verse, tells of the time " when the morning stars 
 sang together and all the sons of God shouted for 
 joy." Isaiah, in the fourteenth chapter and twelfth 
 verse, alludes to the downfall of Babylon under 
 the imagery of the morning star fallen from 
 heaven, and exclaims : " How art thou fallen 
 from heaven, O daystar, sun of the morning! how 
 art thou cut down to the ground that didst lay low 
 thy nations! " In II Peter, first chapter and nine- 
 teenth verse, are these words : " And we have 
 the word of prophecy made more sure; where 
 unto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a lamp 
 shining in a dark place, until the day dawn and 
 the daystar arise in your hearts." This allusion 
 to the daystar is a poetic one. After a night of 
 fishing on the sea of Galilee, Simon Peter had 
 many times beheld the glory of the daystar, and 
 watched it quivering in the mists of the early 
 morning, only disappearing when the sun arose 
 in fiery grandeur. Remembering in his old age 
 the splendid spectacle, the Apostle employs the 
 figure of the morning star to express the glory of 
 the crowning revelation that God gave us in His 
 beloved Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 On rare occasions I have beheld the indescrib- 
 
THE GIFT OF THE MORNING STAR 135 
 
 able glory of the morning star, but never in such 
 surpassing beauty as from the upper deck of a 
 steamship in the Atlantic Ocean a little while be- 
 fore daybreak on an August morning. The night 
 before the Captain had informed the passengers 
 that the ship would pass the Azores about four 
 o'clock the next morning, close enough to see the 
 signal lights from the harbour of one of the coast 
 cities. In company with a half-dozen other pas- 
 sengers I came on deck about 3 :30 o'clock and 
 there in the heavens, like some great electrical 
 aerial signal light, hung the most brilliant star I 
 ever saw. It seemed so close that I thought if 
 one had a ladder of but little more than ordi- 
 nary length he could set it up against the vault 
 of heaven and so easily reach the great and 
 glorious star that scintillated with sheen and pul- 
 sated in its loveliness like a thing of life. " The 
 morning star ! " What a wonderful figure is this, 
 and the splendid promise is of the Christ. " He 
 that overcometh," He says, " to him will I give 
 the morning star." Whatever the precise meaning 
 of this fine figure it assuredly signifies something 
 altogether glorious, something greatly to be de- 
 sired, something far above the price of rubies, 
 something better than gold, yea than much fine 
 gold. 
 
 We shall do the text no violence if we 
 accept this beautiful metaphor as a symbol 
 of the highest and holiest aspiration. the 
 
136 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 stars have long been associated with human 
 achievement. Astrology is older than astronomy. 
 Conversation, if not belief, still persists with refer- 
 ence to unlucky stars. In 1797, when Napoleon 
 returned to Paris after his campaigns in Italy, 
 he was astonished to see the crowds around the 
 Palace of the Luxembourg, fixing their eyes on 
 the sky. He looked up and saw Venus gleaming 
 there in the full daylight. The people enthu- 
 siastically applauded the apparition as his star. 
 Emerson's advice was : " Hitch your wagon to a 
 star," and he has phrased his thought well. 
 Christianity rightfully interpreted is first, last, and 
 always a forward-looking faith. Our great Leader 
 does not ask us to fling away ambition ; instead. He 
 requires us to make the noblest use of ambition. 
 Follow the Christ if you would know the glory 
 of going on. When Rubinstein was in America 
 some years ago his host asked him on Sunday if 
 he wanted to go to church. He answered : " Yes, 
 if you can take me to hear a preacher who can 
 tempt me to do the impossible." Every preacher 
 of the Christian faith ought to be able to do that 
 very thing. He whom we preach embodies the 
 highest and holiest ideals. Jesus' face was set 
 toward Jerusalem and Jerusalem was the place 
 of His crucifixion. " I must also see Rome," 
 exclaimed the Apostle Paul, although to see Rome 
 meant martyrdom. " I press on," is a great Chris- 
 tian motto. So we may think of the morning star 
 
THE GIFT OF THE MORNING STAR 137 
 
 as a symbol of perseverance in every worthy 
 undertaking. Whatever be one's life task, whether 
 in store or shop, in school or on farm, the Christian 
 faith supplies the mightiest incentive to invest 
 one's work with the very best and finest that one 
 can give. 
 
 The great painter, Rubens, believed more in 
 hard work and practice than he did in genius. 
 " Do well," he once said, " and some will be jeal- 
 ous. Do better and they will be confounded." 
 In his opinion a man who imagines that he can 
 do something marvellous without toil and patience 
 " must have a large dose of madness in him." 
 To an artist who boasted that he had painted a 
 certain picture in less than three weeks, Rubens 
 said coldly: " I am surprised, my friend, I should 
 have thought you had only daubed at it for three 
 days." Edison instructs his men never to send 
 anything out of his laboratory that is not, so far 
 as human eyes can tell, absolutely flawless. Biog- 
 raphy is luminous with the story of pluck's fruitage 
 and reward. Giotto could draw a perfect circle. 
 How many imperfect circles he drew before his 
 art mastered perfection we know not — likely many 
 thousands. One reason why so many are stranded 
 on the shores of failure is because they did not 
 invest themselves in the fullest sense, they followed 
 the line of least resistance, they failed to do with 
 their might what their hands found to do. There 
 is a httle gem of verse entitled : " Standing on 
 
138 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 Tip-Toe," by George Frederick Cameron, which 
 interprets accurately the forward-looking unbeat- 
 able soul : 
 
 " Standing on tip-toe ever since my youth, 
 Striving to grasp the future just above, 
 I hold at length the lonely future — Truth, 
 And Truth is Love. 
 
 " I feel as one who being a while confined. 
 Sees drop to dust about him all his bars ; 
 The clay grows less and leaving it, the mind 
 Dwells with the stars." 
 
 " I will give him the morning star ! " Such is 
 the symbol of the Christian life, the morning star 
 ever waxing, never waning. Let this splendid 
 promise be for every one a mighty commission to 
 " covet earnestly the best gifts." Let this great 
 declaration teach us that it is better to be defeated 
 in the battle for the best than victorious in a con- 
 test for the mediocre. The standard Christ set 
 up for His followers is perfection: "Ye therefore 
 shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is per- 
 fect." 
 
 This splendid figure may be taken also as 
 
 a symbol of self-mastery the reward of 
 
 OVERCOMING. To be a Christian is to overcome 
 the world, the flesh, and the devil, and the begin- 
 ning of conquest is self. In the opening chapters 
 of Revelation containing the letters to the churches 
 of Asia, there are seven distinct promises of which 
 this text is but one, and the promises are all condi- 
 tioned upon overcoming. Finally in the twenty- 
 
THE GIFT OF THE MORNING STAR 139 
 
 first chapter, seventh verse, the writer concludes 
 his memorable description of the New Jerusalem 
 with the impressive words : " He that overcometh 
 shall inherit these things; and I will be his God, 
 and he shall be my son." We who seek to follow 
 Him who overcame the world must perforce set 
 ourselves to overcome whatever may be contrary 
 to His mind. 
 
 There is the matter of an unruly tongue. A 
 host of church members have need to tame the 
 tongue. There is only one place where one can 
 tame a tongue that has a foul way of spreading 
 poison, and that is to tame it in the school of Him 
 who " when He was reviled, reviled not again." 
 
 And there is the obstacle of a violent temper. 
 A great many of us need to take our tempers to 
 Christ's school to learn control. In a recent life 
 of Thomas B. Reed there is a homely, yet illumi- 
 nating, incident told of that famous statesman. 
 Mr. Reed, who was a very large and heavy man, 
 went into the sitting-room of his home one even- 
 ing and came very nearly sitting down on a chair 
 where curled up comfortably was his little daugh- 
 ter's favourite cat. In her haste to save the cat 
 the little girl pulled the chair out from under her 
 father, who sat down heavily upon the floor. Mr. 
 Reed got up slowly and with fine control remon- 
 strated gently with the little girl, saying : ** My 
 daughter, it is easier to get a new cat than it is 
 a new father." 
 
140 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 Then there are those untoward passions that 
 will, if permitted to persist, consume our better 
 natures like some corrosive venom. Jealousy, 
 envy, and avarice — those enemies of the best must 
 be stubbornly resisted and conquered, else they will 
 conquer and destroy. 
 
 There, too, are the vicious habits. They can 
 never be conquered save by will power and a most 
 persistent endeavour to overcome them. The 
 mania for gambling, the love of strong drink, 
 indulgence in any vice, — only by the hardest kind 
 of battle can these enemies of the spiritual life be 
 defeated and put to rout. There is a joy in over- 
 coming, an actual elation in putting to flight the 
 aliens that seek the citadel of the spiritual. It is 
 a rich and wonderful experience to cooperate 
 with Christ in cleansing the temple of the Holy 
 Spirit of enemies that seek to defile it. John 
 Masefield in " The Everlasting Mercy," draws a 
 terrible picture of the interior of a public drinking 
 house at the closing time. A good Quakeress has 
 just stepped in on her round of tract distributing, 
 when she is assailed with ribald utterances by a 
 burly drunkard. She calmly listens until he has 
 finished, then she turns to him with these words : 
 
 " Saul Kane," she said, " when next you drink, 
 Do me the gentleness to think 
 That every drop of drink accursed 
 Makes Christ within you die of thirst; 
 That every dirty word you say 
 Is one more flint upon His way. 
 
THE GIFT OF THE MORNING STAR 141 
 
 Another thorn about His head, 
 Another mock by where He tread, 
 Another nail, another cross, 
 All that you are is that Christ's lost." 
 
 Would you possess the " morning star " ? Then 
 " put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not 
 provision for the flesh." 
 
 In a very proper sense we may think of 
 the gift of the morning star as none other 
 THAN JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF. Throughout the 
 Scriptures a star is the symbol of royal dominion 
 and the highest use of this symbol is its applica- 
 tion to Jesus Christ. As has already been inti- 
 mated in this study, Peter in his second epistle, 
 in his use of the daystar, refers to Jesus. In 
 Revelation 22: 16, are the words, " I, Jesus, have 
 sent mine angel to testify unto you these things 
 for the churches. I am the root and the offspring 
 of David, the bright, the morning star." That 
 every man and woman may possess Him is an 
 outstanding and glorious fact of Christian biog- 
 raphy. The pupils of any master come at last 
 to partake of their master's mind, and in a sense 
 the master is reproduced in his followers. In a 
 still more intimate sense this is true of the faithful 
 disciples of Jesus. Paul, the mystic, loved to 
 write and speak of the Christ as the priceless 
 possession of the believer. In Galatians 2 : 20 he 
 testifies: " I have been crucified with Christ; and 
 it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in 
 
142 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I 
 live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, 
 who loved me, and gave Himself up for me." In 
 Ephesians 3:17 he observes: "That Christ may 
 dwell in your hearts through faith." And in 
 Colossians i : 27 he employs the fine phrase : 
 " Christ in you, the hope of glory." While in 
 John 17: 23, Jesus prays that all who believe may 
 be one — " I in them, and thou in me, that they 
 may be perfected into one; that the world may 
 know that thou didst send me, and lovedst them, 
 even as thou lovedst me." 
 
 Recently I examined a curious picture taken by 
 an amateur photographer of the snow-clad weep- 
 ing-willows in Linden Grove Cemetery at Coving- 
 ton, Kentucky. Oddly, too, the photograph was 
 taken on a Christmas Eve. When the plate was 
 developed and the picture printed lo! in one of 
 the snow-shrouded trees appeared the outlines 
 strikingly distinct of the conventional portraits of 
 Jesus Christ, every detail of His form, the crown 
 of thorns, the serious upturned face. It is so 
 vivid, so unexpected that there is something almost 
 unearthly about that photograph. Copies of the 
 picture have been sold far and wide and the owner 
 of the negative is said to have refused forty thou- 
 sand dollars for the plate. For years to come that 
 chance photograph of a winter landscape with the 
 Christ's figure fashioned so surprisingly in the 
 snowy tree will call forth comment anew. As I 
 
THE GIFT OF THE MORNING STAR 143 
 
 recall this strange photograph and the circum- 
 stances of its making, I behold in it a parable of 
 spiritual life for all of us who seek the mind of 
 Christ. If we shall follow Him closely and per- 
 sistently seek His mind we shall at last — O 
 marvellous achievement ! possess Him, He shall be 
 in us and of us, and so become our all in all. 
 And if a spiritual photograph could be made of 
 such a lover of the Lord, might it not be that the 
 picture when finished would reveal radiant, glori- 
 ous, transcendent, the likeness of Him who is the 
 express image of the Father of us all? 
 
 " And he that overcometh ... I will give him the 
 morning star." 
 
 " 'Tis heaven alone that is given away, 
 'Tis only God may be had for the asking." 
 
 GIVER OF THE MORNING STAR, THOU ART HE FOR 
 WHOM OUR SOULS HAVE WAITED. THOU ALONE 
 CANST SATISFY OUR SPIRITUAL HUNGER. CREATE 
 WITHIN US A CLEAN HEART, O GOD, AND RENEW 
 A RIGHT SPIRIT WITHIN US SO THAT SWEPT AND 
 GARNISHED OUR LIVES MAY BECOME FIT ABODES 
 FOR THE GREAT COMPANION. 
 
X 
 
 RIZPAH OF THE MOTHER HEART 
 
" Mary, when that little child 
 Lay upon your heart at rest, 
 Did the thorns, Maid-mother, mild, 
 Pierce your breast? 
 
 " Mary, when that little child 
 
 Softly kissed your cheek benign, 
 Did you know, O Mary mild, 
 Judas' sign? 
 
 " Mary, when that little child 
 
 Cooed and prattled at your knee, 
 Did you see with heart-beat wild. 
 Calvary ? " 
 
 Rose TRUMBinx. 
 
X 
 
 RIZPAH OF THE MOTHER HEART 
 
 " And Rizpah the daughter of Aiah took sackcloth, 
 and spread it for her upon the rock, from the begin- 
 ning of harvest until water was poured upon them 
 from heaven ; and she suffered neither the birds of 
 the heavens to rest on them by day, nor the beasts 
 of the field by night" — // Samuel 21 : 10. 
 
 S Stars shine most in deepest tints of blue, 
 
 so this dramatic and tender incident shines 
 
 from out a dark and bloody background. 
 The time was in the early part of David's reign. 
 Saul and Jonathan were dead and a bloody war 
 of vengeance had been waged upon the entire 
 house of the slain monarch. The Gibeonites, be- 
 cause of havoc wrought upon them by Saul, de- 
 manded of King David seven of Saul's grandsons 
 that they might be put to death in retaliation. 
 Israel's king delivered up seven of Saul's descend- 
 ants, sparing only Jonathan's son, Mephibosheth. 
 Two of Rizpah's sons and five sons of Michal, 
 the daughter of Saul, were chosen. These seven 
 the Gibeonites put to death in the days of barley 
 harvest. Such stories of bloodshed make unpleas- 
 ant reading and David's act in complying with the 
 request seems base and heartless. Yet, it was in 
 accordance with the law of those times that a 
 
 147 
 
148 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 murdered man's nearest kin must requite the wrong 
 done his people. We judge these events by the 
 time in which they took place. It happened a 
 thousand years before Christ and was only a com- 
 monplace of those sanguinary times. In the very 
 heart of this dark and bloody deed there shines 
 steadily a most touching and beautiful ministry. 
 
 Rizpah, the wife of Saul, when her two sons 
 were hanged on the hillside, fetched sackcloth and 
 spread it upon the rock underneath their lifeless 
 forms. And from the beginning of the barley 
 harvest until the end, Rizpah of the Mother 
 Heart defended the bodies of her two boys from 
 the birds of the heaven by day and the beasts of 
 the field by night. Brave woman of a brutal age! 
 It was not permitted her to cut down the bodies 
 of her sons and give them decent burial, but she 
 did all that she could. A body left outside and 
 unprotected in that semi-tropic clime is soon the 
 prey of carrion birds or scavenger beasts, and such 
 a disposition of the dead was particularly horrify- 
 ing to the Israelitish people. 
 
 I have somewhere seen a celebrated picture with 
 this Biblical incident as theme. It portrays Rizpah 
 on the rock defending her dead from the ominous- 
 looking birds that sought to attack their bodies; 
 and defending them, also, from the skulking beasts 
 that sought to drag the bodies down. It is a dra- 
 matic picture : Rizpah's long hair is disheveled 
 and her attitude tense and militant to the core. 
 
THE MOTHER HEART 149 
 
 And this touching incident of that far away 
 period has lessons for us of today. The incident 
 of Rizpah defending her dead sons is typical of 
 the mothers of earth defending their living 
 progeny. Think of the brave mothers who are 
 protecting with sturdy heroism their helpless 
 young from the insatiable vultures of poverty. 
 There is no poetry in poverty, no halo about 
 penury, no rainbow over want. " Poverty," said 
 the Latin poet, " is death in another form." 
 Where one strong, vigorous character has over- 
 come poverty and pressed on to a competence and 
 to abundant life, nine less fitted for the battle 
 with such untoward conditions have gone down to 
 defeat. Much that is untrue has been written in 
 praise of poverty. It has been said that poverty 
 brings out the best that is in men. Alas, only too 
 often it brings it out by the roots. Oftener pov- 
 erty brings out the worst that is in men. Poverty 
 is a foe of civilization, a breeder of crime, a be- 
 getter of disease. Poverty is the great destroyer 
 and many a mother, by the death of her husband 
 or other misfortune, has been left to battle against 
 the loathsome vultures that hover darkly over 
 every home where want and penury flourish. 
 
 I know a mother left with five children to battle 
 against this relentless foe. For ten years she has 
 beaten back the vultures. She has brought up her 
 boys and girls to be economical and to know the 
 value of money. She has encouraged them to put 
 
150 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 their hands to every honest task. Considering the 
 disadvantages under which she has laboured, she 
 has wrought well. But alas! her once strong, 
 vigorous body is broken and pain-racked. She 
 is prematurely aged, a victim of an unequal battle. 
 Furthermore, the stern necessity of making a living 
 has compelled her to take the children one by one 
 out of the public schools before they had com- 
 pleted the lower grades. Speed the day when the 
 state or municipality, or both, shall rally to the 
 support of such a mother and make it possible 
 for every aspiring son and daughter to acquire at 
 least a high school education. 
 
 Behold, also, the mothers of today guarding 
 their children from the unclean birds of impurity, 
 the carrion crows of vicious influences and temp- 
 tations. These foul birds come from all direc- 
 tions; they come singly and in flocks; they come 
 in the guise of Hterature; they are on the streets 
 and in the school; and they abound in places of 
 amusement. They are especially numerous on 
 the stage. The pernicious play has ever been a 
 favourite breeding place for them, and now the 
 moving pictures have become their rendezvous. If 
 we have been slow to believe the motion pictures 
 are fraught with peril we have but to investigate 
 and learn our mistake. Not long ago the Cleve- 
 land censor of motion pictures secured one thou- 
 sand five hundred and ninety-five essays written 
 by children of six different schools giving their 
 
THE MOTHER HEART 151 
 
 opinions of the kind of pictures they Hked best. 
 The answers contain plentiful food for sober 
 reflection. 
 
 A boy in the third grade wrote : " I go to the 
 show about once a month. I would like to go 
 once a week. When you go to the show you see 
 men robbing houses and you learn to rob houses 
 and people." 
 
 A girl in the fifth grade wrote down this reveal- 
 ing sentence : " The pictures I like best are the 
 love pictures when a girl has to run away without 
 her mother or father knowing about it." 
 
 There is not a home in America where children 
 are that is not an object of attack by the foul birds 
 of impurity. 
 
 The evil beasts of intemperance likewise 
 threaten the home. The saloon and all the vile 
 influences of the drink traffic strike at the very 
 heart of the family. No boy or girl is safe from 
 their attacks. These beasts are vicious and they 
 are wary. They are beasts of prey; they stalk 
 their game. They spring upon their prey from 
 unsuspected ambushes. As the birds by day and 
 the beasts by night threatened the dead bodies of 
 Rizpah's sons, so the living sons and daughters 
 of the mothers of today are imperilled by the vul- 
 tures of poverty, menaced by the carrion crows 
 of impurity, endangered by the voracious beasts 
 of intemperance. 
 
 Like Rizpah, the militant motherhood of our 
 
152 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 own day is compelled to use weapons in defense 
 of sons and daughters. Rizpah used with good 
 eflfect a sword or perhaps a staff. One of the 
 weapons that mihtant motherhood may wield in 
 defense of her home is the keen, strong, ever de- 
 pendable, weapon of prayer. Most potent for good 
 are a mother's prayers; how they shield, protect, 
 and save! Hannah, the mother of Samuel, exer- 
 cised this weapon and right well did she protect 
 her little boy. There is a close connection between 
 Samuel, the great and pure character, and Hannah, 
 the devout mother praying for his welfare. John 
 Randolph of Roanoke, that grand, gloomy, and pe- 
 culiar Virginian, has left this eloquent testimony: 
 " I would have been an infidel if it had not been 
 for the remembrance of that time when my mother 
 bade me kneel by her side and repeat the prayer : 
 ' Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy 
 name.' " A prayerless mother is a weaponless 
 mother, and it is as if she threw away every de- 
 fense of her home and surrendered her hapless 
 brood to the enemies of the good and pure. Dr. 
 Theodore Cuyler, for thirty years pastor of the 
 Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn, 
 and one of the most distinguished preachers of 
 America, thus writes : " During my infancy my 
 godly mother dedicated me to the Lord as truly as 
 Hannah ever dedicated her son. When my paternal 
 grandfather, who was a lawyer, offered to be- 
 queath his law library to me my mother declined 
 
THE MOTHER HEART 153 
 
 the tempting offer and said to him : ' I expect 
 that my little boy will yet be a minister.' " 
 
 When young Matthew Simpson, one of Meth- 
 odism's greatest bishops, tremblingly broke the 
 news to his widowed mother that he felt called to 
 preach, she exclaimed with tears of joy : " Oh, 
 my son, I have prayed for this hour every day 
 since you were born. At that time we dedicated 
 you to the Christian ministry." Most of our great 
 and useful men were not self-made so much as 
 they were mother-made, and by mothers who be- 
 lieved in and practised fellowship with God in 
 prayer. Praying mothers watched over the lowly 
 cribs of a Lincoln and a Garfield. I believe in the 
 potency of prayer in general, and I believe with 
 all my heart in the potency of a mother's prayer 
 in particular. Many a mother carries today the 
 burden of her breaking heart for a wayward son 
 to God in unceasing prayer. And those prayers 
 shall be answered. They are so fraught with 
 love; they are so weighted with self-sacrifice; God 
 will have to hear them. 
 
 " If I were hanged on the highest hill, 
 Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine! 
 I know whose love would follow me still, 
 Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine! 
 
 " If I were drowned in the deepest sea. 
 Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine! 
 I know whose tears would come down to me. 
 Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine! 
 
154 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 ■' If I were damned of body and soul, 
 Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine ! 
 I know whose prayers would make me whole, 
 Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine ! " 
 
 A second weapon that militant motherhood may 
 turn triumphantly against the foes of her children 
 is that of sympathetic understanding of them; 
 companionship with them in all their trials, their 
 hopes, and joys. Mothers who have the confidence 
 of their sons and daughters, and in turn are made 
 the confidants of their children — such mothers are 
 as Gibraltar against the enemies of the home. The 
 press, and even the pulpit, have in recent years 
 condemned the " conspiracy of silence " on the 
 part of parents regarding instruction in the matter 
 of sex. For the most part such agitation was wise 
 and has borne fruit. Fathers and mothers are 
 God's school-teachers in this delicate and vital 
 matter, and no Christian home should be without 
 this necessary instruction from the fittest, natur- 
 ally, of mortals, to impart it. 
 
 One of the most motherly " first ladies " in our 
 land ever in the White House was Mrs. Lucy 
 Webb-Hayes. She was not only a mother to her 
 four sons, but their boon companion as well. Her 
 sons saved their choicest jokes for her, they shared 
 every joy and triumph with her, and in times of 
 doubt and perplexity she was to them as the 
 " shadow of a great rock in a weary land." There 
 is a story that at an out-door reception a man with 
 
THE MOTHER HEART 155 
 
 an upturned collar and a turned-down hat pressed 
 Mrs. Hayes' hand in the Hne of visitors, and 
 blessed her for her interest in the temperance 
 cause. Not until she had made some gracious 
 reply did she recognize the gleeful face of one of 
 her own prankish boys. At another time one of 
 the boys on returning home, said to her : " Mother, 
 just unpack my satchel." As she opened it, out 
 jumped two bantam chickens protesting loudly 
 against such sudden confinement, while mother 
 and son laughed loud and heartily over the joke. 
 While her husband was with his brigade in winter- 
 quarters during the Civil War, Mrs. Hayes and 
 her two sons spent two winters in the West Vir- 
 ginia camp. An old soldier, a member of the 
 brigade, thus described the family life of the 
 Hayeses in camp : "I can see Mrs. Hayes now. 
 Her hair smooth, her face like a madonna's, and 
 two or three little boys clinging about her waist 
 or hugging her skirts as she walked among the 
 soldiers to ask about our rations or our quarters. 
 We named our camp after her and there was not 
 a man in all those thousands but would have died 
 for Lucy Webb-Hayes." Such a motherhood is a 
 mightier defense of the home than a cordon of 
 soldiery armed to the teeth. 
 
 A third weapon — the ballot — has been put into 
 the hands of motherhood in some of the states; 
 by-and-bye this weapon will be put into her hands 
 in every state of the Union. It is a new weapon 
 
156 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 and an efficient one. It is a weapon that mother- 
 hood has needed lo these many years to defend 
 the home from manifold enemies. By means of 
 this convenient weapon miHtant motherhood is 
 given a better opportunity in her fight against the 
 foes of family. Whether or not a woman believes 
 in the academic question of woman suffrage, to 
 ignore this mighty weapon is a tragedy. 
 
 Illuminating, indeed, are these words of Jack 
 London in his memoirs of an alcoholic entitled 
 " John Barleycorn." " The women are the true 
 conservators of the race. The men are the was- 
 trels, the adventure-lovers, and gamblers; and in 
 the end it is by their women that they are saved. 
 About man's first experiment in chemistry was 
 the making of alcohol, and down all generations 
 to this day man has continued to manufacture and 
 drink it. And there has never been a day when 
 the women have not resented a man's use of 
 alcohol, though they have never had the power to 
 give weight to their resentment. The moment 
 women get the vote in any community, the first 
 thing they proceed to do, or try to do, is to close 
 the saloons. In a thousand generations to come 
 men, of themselves, will not close the saloons. As 
 well expect the morphine victims to legislate the 
 sale of morphine out of existence. The women 
 know. They have paid an incalculable price of 
 sweat and tears for man's use of alcohol. Ever 
 jealous for the race, they will legislate for the 
 
THE MOTHER HEART 157 
 
 babes of boys yet to be born; and for the girls, 
 too, for they must be the mothers, wives, and 
 sisters of these boys." 
 
 It is with the ballot that motherhood may strike 
 the deadliest blow at the beasts of intemperance 
 and the foul birds of impurity. 
 
 The daring deed of Rizpah melted the heart of 
 David, and he did for that militant mother of the 
 long ago the little that was in his power to do. 
 He gave the bodies of her sons decent burial, and 
 so Rizpah's vigil was not in vain. She attained 
 all that she fought for : she successfully kept from 
 her beloved dead the birds and beasts that sought 
 to prey upon them. 
 
 Rizpah's sons, alas, could not know of their 
 mother's heroic devotion and she, in turn, could 
 receive from them no expression of gratitude for 
 her tireless vigil. But it is otherwise with the 
 living sons and daughters of our modern militant 
 mothers. There is yet time and place and oppor- 
 tunity for grateful expressions of mother's sacri- 
 fice and her unwearied ministry in behalf of 
 her children. And what more beautiful service 
 can sons and daughters render than consid- 
 erate affection and undying gratitude for mother 
 love? 
 
 A few years ago there died, after a brave fight 
 for life, a noble and useful man. He was Gov- 
 ernor of Minnesota at the time of his death, and 
 prominently mentioned as a candidate for presi- 
 
158 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 dent of a great political party. His life career is 
 an inspiration to every boy in the land. His home 
 was one of poverty and his mother took in washing 
 to support the family. When John Johnson 
 reached the age of thirteen he said to his mother : 
 " Mother, you shan't do any more washings for 
 a living. Not another tub, not another day's work 
 of this kind. I will make our living now." And 
 that thirteen-year-old boy from that hour sup- 
 ported his mother and took a heavy burden from 
 ofif her drooping shoulders. Of such substance 
 are real statesmen made. And it was largely 
 because the citizenship of Minnesota knew the 
 kind of a boy John Johnson had been that they 
 elected him, a Democrat, governor in a state that 
 was overwhelmingly Republican. 
 
 The unpayable debt of militant motherhood 
 ought to be recognized by sons and daughters now. 
 Mother love in its very unselfishness is often 
 accepted as a matter of course until too late to 
 speak the words that only mother could fully un- 
 derstand and appreciate. Amidst such reflections 
 on mother love there arises before me the scene 
 of a never-to-be-forgotten experience. The sea- 
 son of the year was Christmas and the day was 
 that of Christmas Eve. The place was the interior 
 of a plain little home and the occasion was the 
 last simple service of the church for a mother 
 who, dying, left nine children, seven very 
 small. Think of such a service as this at Christ- 
 
THE MOTHER HEART 159 
 
 mastide when childhood's splendid fancies run 
 riot! Never did death seem so tragic as to those 
 of us gathered there that grey December day. The 
 Scripture reading, the prayer, and hymns were 
 alike difficult, almost impossible, so violent was 
 the wailing of the motherless nine. The brief 
 service over, there came the heart-breaking mo- 
 ments of leave-taking. Unable to endure the 
 pitiful sight I turned my face toward the wall 
 only to discover hanging directly in front of me, 
 in modest frame, this sentiment in verse: 
 
 " Mother works for you, 
 Looks after you, 
 Loves you, forgives you 
 Anything you may do. 
 
 " Understands you ; 
 And then the only thing 
 Bad she ever does to you 
 
 Is to die 
 
 And leave you." 
 
 Oh, Rizpah of the Mother Heart, militant 
 mother of the long ago, may your heroic vigil in 
 defense of your slain inspire the militant mother- 
 hood of today to defend their living progeny from 
 the subtle foes that threaten every home. 
 
 Oh, sons and daughters, sublimely sacrificed for, 
 bravely defended, speak, I pray you, the gratitude 
 of your hearts to mother now; break the box of 
 fragrant ointment as Mary did for Jesus ere He 
 went to His death on Calvary. 
 
160 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 GOD OF OUR MOTHERS, WE PRAISE THEE FOR 
 THOSE WHO MOTHERED US WHEN MOST WE NEEDED 
 THAT HOLIEST OF MINISTRIES. WE SHALL NEVER 
 CEASE PRAISING THEE FOR THOSE UNSELFISH SOULS 
 WHO TAUGHT US PATIENCE, FIDELITY, AND TRUST 
 AND THEREBY MADE US KNOW WHAT THINE OWN 
 LOVE IS LIKE. HELP THOU US TO BE LIKE THOSE 
 GREAT rtEARTS, WHO, HAVING FINISHED THEIR 
 EARTHLY CAREERS, STILL LIVE IN HALLOWED 
 MEMORIES. 
 
XI 
 
 THE BESETTING SIN 
 
"O lead me, Lord, that I may lead 
 
 The wandering and the wavering feet, 
 
 0 feed me, Lord, that I may feed 
 
 The hungering ones with manna sweet. 
 
 "O strengthen me, that while I stand, 
 Firm on the Rock and strong in thee, 
 
 1 may stretch out a loving hand 
 
 The wrestlers with the troubled sea." 
 
 Francis Ridley Havxrgal. 
 
XI 
 
 THE BESETTING SIN 
 
 "The sin which doth so easily beset us."— Hebrews 12:1. 
 rriHIS text is a clause from a sentence which 
 
 begins with the word, therefore, and the 
 
 word, therefore, always refers the reader 
 back to something that has gone before. The 
 word, therefore, like its twin brother, wherefore, 
 is a connecting link between an argument and a 
 conclusion. It will be observed by students of the 
 Holy Scriptures that many chapters of the New 
 Testament begin with either the words wherefore, 
 or therefore. Indeed, of the thirteen chapters 
 of the epistle to the Hebrews, four chapters open 
 with one or the other. These " wherefores " and 
 " therefores " are illustrative of a fact that every 
 reader of the Bible, and particularly the New 
 Testament, ought to bear in mind, that the chapter 
 divisions of the Bible books often break abruptly 
 into a train of thought and that in order to under- 
 stand the teaching of the Scriptures the only satis- 
 factory way is to read the preceding chapter, and 
 frequently the one that follows. Or, better yet, 
 read the Bible book by book if you would master 
 its contents. 
 
 The first and second verses of the twelfth chap- 
 
 163 
 
164 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 ter of Hebrews conclude impressively the lofty 
 eloquence of the eleventh chapter, and the eleventh 
 chapter might properly be entitled the " Heroes 
 of the Faith." The long line of martyrs and wit- 
 nesses is there — Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, 
 Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, 
 David— they are all there. And the unnamed 
 great are there " who through faith subdued king- 
 doms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, 
 stopped the mouths of lions," and they are all 
 commended for their fidelity. Having called the 
 roll of the faithful, the writer conceives of them 
 as a vast cloud of witnesses assembled as specta- 
 tors at one of the old athletic contests, looking on 
 as each generation of their successors run the 
 Christian race. The figure is striking and most 
 interesting, and the verses are climacteric. 
 " Therefore let us also, seeing we are compassed 
 about with so great a cloud of witnesses, lay aside 
 every weight, and the sin which doth so easily 
 beset us, and let us run with patience the race that 
 is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and 
 perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was 
 set before Him endured the cross, despising shame, 
 and hath sat down at the right hand of the throne 
 of God." 
 
 This is, indeed, a profound passage of Scrip- 
 ture, and a most fitting conclusion to the eloquent 
 verses that precede it. But attention is not 
 invited to this passage as a whole, but to a 
 
THE BESETTING SIN 165 
 
 single clause of this great sentence — " The sin 
 which doth so easily beset us." All of my life I 
 have heard of besetting sins, and while I do not 
 remember hearing a sermon from this text, this 
 is undoubtedly the origin of the phrase. 
 
 Examine these words carefully, " The sin which 
 doth so easily beset us." In the margin of the 
 Revised Version two other possible renderings of 
 the Greek are given and one of them is especially 
 interesting. It is : " The sin which doth closely 
 cling to us." The Modern Speech New Testa- 
 ment rendering of this clause is " The sin which 
 doth so cleverly entangle us." These renderings 
 are as flashlights upon the teaching of this text, 
 they carry with them the colour and spirit of the 
 old-time athletic contests. A runner is about to 
 run a race, he girds up his loins — that is: tucks 
 the loose ends of his outer flowing robe under his 
 girdle, and with nothing to impede the movements 
 of his limbs he is off like a flash. Imagine this 
 scene, and then examine these words : " The sin 
 which doth so easily beset us," that is, any sin 
 that hinders, embarrasses, and defeats. 
 
 " The sin which doth so easily beset us." The 
 writer may have in mind sin in general, not any 
 specific sin at all. Sin in the abstract, for instance 
 that power of evil of which we are conscious 
 sometimes as surrounding us, pressing in, and 
 moving against us. There are experiences not 
 uncommon when evil seems to envelop us like an 
 
166 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 awful black, damp, threatening peril and destruc- 
 tion. I have been indoors during a heavy storm 
 when the wind blew a gale and I observed the 
 power of the wind as it pressed its force against 
 the side of the house like some terrible monster 
 threatening at any moment to topple the house 
 over and overwhelm me with destruction. There 
 are times when sin in the abstract seems so to 
 threaten our characters. It may be that this is the 
 idea that the writer has in mind, sin in the large, 
 pressing in, besetting us on all sides and threat- 
 ening to overwhelm us. 
 
 " The sin which doth so easily beset us." On 
 the other hand the writer may have in mind a 
 specific sin and if so, most likely the sin of unbe- 
 lief. He has called the roll of the faithful, he 
 has shown how by faith and through faith the 
 great characters of Israel served God and man. 
 And over against this accomplishment of faith 
 he warns against the most subtle and destructive 
 sin of unbelief. It paralyzes, it destroys. Let a 
 man once lose faith in another man and his service 
 for that man is at an end. Lose faith in God and 
 a godly life is impossible. Faith is so funda- 
 mental, love and hope are fruitless possessions 
 without faith. And the writer here may have in 
 mind this dreadful sin of unbelief. No man can 
 run the Christian race so handicapped, so harassed. 
 As the loose hanging garment might trip the 
 runner and put him out of the running, so this 
 
THE BESETTING SIN 167 
 
 subtle sin of unbelief threatens, yea more, insures 
 defeat. 
 
 But whether the writer of these words has in 
 mind sin in general, or a specific sin, it is true in 
 either case that there are temptations to which 
 we are exposed, certain tendencies and weaknesses 
 that justify the phrase " besetting sins." 
 
 For example: there are the sins to which we 
 are exposed by temperament or disposition. Un- 
 questionably, we inherit tendencies toward certain 
 habits. There is a vast deal in heredity, though 
 not everything. Study the history of certain fami- 
 lies through several generations and peculiar traits 
 or dispositions may be traced like the waters of 
 the Missouri river as they mingle with the Missis- 
 sippi. It may be a quick, violent temper, a grasp- 
 ing and covetous disposition, a weakness for alco- 
 holic drinks, a disposition to falsify, to play fast 
 and loose with truth, or a jealous and envious 
 disposition. On the one hand these. On the 
 other, generosity, hospitality, a kindly and lovable 
 disposition, a large and forgiving spirit, a reputa- 
 tion for honesty and sobriety and truthfulness. 
 Hence the maxim : " It runs in the family." 
 Every neighbourhood, in its comment either of 
 approval or disapproval, illustrates this truth that 
 there are traits and dispositions for good or evil 
 handed down from one generation to another. 
 Bearing this in mind, we see that it is so much 
 easier for some people to do right than for others. 
 
168 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 One man, for example, deserves no credit for not 
 being a drunkard, there is no temptation in strong 
 drink for him. Another man fights the very demon 
 of strong drink daily, only God knows the rigour 
 of his battles. It is easy for one man to be honest, 
 he has back of him five generations of honest an- 
 cestors, it would actually be hard for him to do 
 a dishonest thing. But here is another man who 
 is the product of generations of kinspeople who 
 were dishonest, and the temptation that this man 
 must battle with continually is that of turning 
 aside from the path of integrity. We are all more 
 or less exposed to sins of this kind; the stream 
 of tendency pours steadily upon us, these heredi- 
 tary influences compass us upon all sides. These 
 besetting sins are not figments of the mind, they 
 are very real, they seem sometimes almost to have 
 personality; if we are to conquer them we must 
 be prepared to do them battle royal. 
 
 " The sin which doth so easily beset us." There 
 are also those sins to which we are exposed by 
 our occupation or profession. There are subtle 
 temptations that confront us which grow out of 
 our vocations. The doctor, the lawyer, the minis- 
 ter, the railroader, the politician, the salesman, the 
 editor, the tailor — every business and profession 
 offer particular and peculiar temptations. There 
 are subtle temptations to which the public 
 speaker is subjected. A man who does much 
 public speaking, and especially if he does it 
 
THE BESETTING SIN 169 
 
 well, is always on the brink of peril. The temp- 
 tation to exaggerate is ever present. Diamonds 
 are as large as hazel nuts, mountains as high as 
 the Himalayas, automobiles travel seventy miles 
 an hour, — these ajid kindred superlatives are ever 
 on the tip of the tongue. If he does not watch 
 himself under the spell of a great audience the 
 orator will find himself toying with the truth and 
 speaking not at all as the facts warrant. The fatal 
 gift of fluency has been the tragic undoing of many 
 gifted public speakers. The besetting sins of our 
 vocations must be taken into account, they are not 
 imaginary, they are only too true. They must be 
 met and overcome. 
 
 " The sin which doth so easily beset us." Then, 
 there are the sins, also, that beset us at various 
 ages. The sins that attract us in youth, the sins that 
 beset us in the early twenties, the sins that middle 
 age is exposed to, and the sins that beset even 
 the aged. Every period of life has its special perils. 
 If the temptation of youth is to have its fling, so 
 are there subtle temptations that come in middle 
 life for strange and tragic departures from paths 
 of rectitude. Some one has coined the phrase: 
 " The atheism of middle age," and thereby has 
 warned us of that perilous period between the 
 dash and optimism of youth and the quietude and 
 poise of old age. 
 
 " The sin which doth so easily beset us." Many 
 are the sins to which we are exposed through 
 
170 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 some peculiar weakness of character either from 
 any of the reasons stated above, or quite apart 
 from them. Even the strongest character has 
 somewhere a weak point. Men who could not be 
 tempted by money may be tempted by position and 
 fame. Men that you could not buy with gold may 
 be strangely won by praise. Every man has his 
 " blind side." There are a hundred avenues that 
 lead to the citadel of the human will and ninety- 
 nine of them may be closed and still the tempter 
 find entrance by way of the one hundredth left 
 unguarded. It is related in the Old Testament the 
 manner in which King Ahab met his death. He 
 went out to battle clad in his armour and a certain 
 man of the enemy drew his bow at a venture, that 
 is — without taking aim at any one in particular, — 
 and his arrow smote the king of Israel between 
 the joints of the armour, Ahab died at evening 
 of that same day from the effects of the wound. 
 We do well to examine the joints of our armour; 
 there may be a place through which an arrow of 
 the evil one may make its death-dealing way. 
 
 What shall we do with the sins which so easily 
 beset us ? What shall be our attitude toward them ? 
 How shall we be able to overcome them ? 
 
 Let us recognize our besetting sins. Self-rev- 
 erence, self-knowledge, self-control, " these three 
 alone," says Tennyson, " lead life to sovereign 
 power." " Know thyself," is the wise advice of a 
 great man of another day. While it is wrong to 
 
THE BESETTING SIN 171 
 
 brood upon one's sins, it is not only right but neces- 
 sary to know one's weakness. It is better to study 
 one's self and find out one's own shortcomings 
 than to be busy searching out the shortcomings of 
 others and holding them up as targets for censure. 
 Recognize your besetting sins, know your own 
 weakness, realize your most vulnerable point and 
 shield it, guard it, protect it, always. 
 
 Let us try to correct our besetting sins, and 
 not be too sensitive about it. It is related that 
 old Dr. Samuel Johnson went to a minister with 
 this request : " Will you tell me what are the 
 defects of my life so I may mend them and have 
 forgiveness for them ? " And when the minister 
 replied : " Well, I think you are rather hasty in 
 your temper, very dogmatic," Dr. Johnson ex- 
 claimed angrily : " What ? You are a fool ! If 
 there is one thing I am free from it is a dogmatic 
 hasty temper; get out of my sight, sir." 
 
 If we are to conquer our besetting sins we shall 
 have to be humble and be willing to learn. And the 
 author of this Epistle has shown us the great way 
 to overcome the sin that doth so easily beset us, 
 the wise counsel is in the very sentence from which 
 this text is taken : " Looking unto Jesus," is the 
 advice he gives us. God be praised for a perfect 
 example : " One who hath been in all points 
 tempted like as we are, yet without sin." If there 
 are besetting sins let us thank the good Father 
 that there is also a Besetting God. Says the Psalm- 
 
172 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 ist : " Thou hast beset me behind and before, and 
 laid thy hand upon me." If sin be around us 
 and about us, thank God we are likewise beset 
 behind and before and all about us by love of One 
 " who knoweth our frame." 
 
 " My soul, be on thy guard ; 
 Ten thousand foes arise; 
 The hosts of sin are pressing hard 
 To draw thee from the skies. 
 
 "O watch, and fight, and pray; 
 The battle ne'er give o'er; 
 Renew it boldly every day, 
 And help divine implore." 
 
 ADORABLE FATHER, WE BLESS THEE FOR HIM 
 WHO IS ABLE TO LIFT US FROM OUT OF OURSELVES 
 AND TO ESTABLISH US IN THE WAY OF HOLINESS 
 FOREVER. STRENGTHEN US TO KEEP OUR EYES 
 STEADFASTLY ON THE AUTHOR AND PERFECTER OF 
 OUR FAITH WHO HATH BEEN IN ALL POINTS 
 TEMPTED LIKE AS WE ARE YET WITHOUT SIN. 
 
XII 
 
 CHRIST THE CREED 
 
"Thou, O Christ, art all I want; 
 
 Boundless love in Thee I find: 
 Raise the fallen, cheer the faint, 
 
 Heal the sick, and lead the blind. 
 Just and holy is Thy name. 
 
 Prince of Peace and righteousness — 
 Most unworthy. Lord, I am ; 
 
 Thou art full of love and grace." 
 
XII 
 
 CHRIST THE CREED 
 
 " She saith unto him, Yea, Lord : I have believed 
 that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, even he 
 that Cometh into the world." — John 11:27. 
 
 WHAT a pity that there should have arisen 
 any controversy over Martha and Mary, 
 any setting of one over against the 
 other, resulting on the one hand in undeserved 
 depreciation of Martha, and on the other in ful- 
 some praise of Mary. Both were useful women, 
 both were good, both were needed. They repre- 
 sent two types of mind, two temperaments, two 
 attitudes toward life. Mary was the pensive, the 
 poetic, the devout; Martha the active, the alert, 
 the ministering. In the Scriptures from which 
 this text is taken the marked difference be- 
 tween the sisters is seen. When it was learned at 
 Bethany that Jesus was coming Martha went to 
 meet Him, but Mary still sat in the house. And 
 this difference is precisely what might have been 
 expected — it is the difference between Elijah and 
 Elisha, between Peter and John, between Luther 
 and Melanchthon. Leaving aside the tempera- 
 mental unlikeness of the sisters, let us follow 
 Martha as she goes to meet her Lord. When she 
 175 
 
176 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 comes in speaking distance of Him she says: 
 " Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not 
 died. And even now I know that whatsoever thou 
 shalt ask of God, God will give thee. Jesus saith 
 unto her, Thy brother shall rise again." Martha 
 replies : " I know that he shall rise again in the 
 resurrection at the last day." Then Jesus spoke 
 those large and comforting words that have been 
 as a pillow of softest down for earth's weary and 
 grief-stricken millions : — " I am the resurrection, 
 and the life: he that believeth on me, though he 
 die, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and 
 believeth on me shall never die. Believest thou 
 this ? " Martha answered : " Yea, Lord : I have 
 believed that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, 
 even he that cometh into the world." 
 
 These words of Martha invite our attention — 
 this noble confession of her faith in Christ. In 
 passing it may profit to observe that this confession 
 of Martha's is identical in substance with Simon 
 Peter's in Csesarea Philippi when Jesus asked him 
 the question : " Who say ye that I am ? " 
 Stripped of all verbiage and human accretions, 
 this is the Divine creed of Christendom. This 
 creed of Martha's is just " Jesus Christ " and that 
 is everything. 
 
 This creed is simple. Is a simpler creed than 
 this conceivable? It is within the range of the 
 humblest mind, even the mind of a little child can 
 grasp this creed; the most stupid savage in the 
 
CHRIST THE CREED 177 
 
 heart of darkest Africa or the South Sea Islands 
 can catch its gimmerings. The creed is concrete, 
 reveahng God in the terms of flesh and blood. 
 Travelling through the mountains of the south 
 a man passed a little cabin on the hillside in front 
 of which there sat on the doorstep a very old 
 black woman, "Living all alone, Auntie?" was 
 his kindly query. " No, suh, jest me and Jesus," 
 she answered. In her own way the devout old 
 woman expressed the conviction of Charles Wesley 
 in his memorable hymn : " Thou, O Christ, art 
 all I want." 
 
 Minds that are slow to see God in star or rose 
 or on old ocean or hear Him in oratorio, perceive 
 Him in Jesus Christ as He moves through Galilee, 
 Judea, and Perea, living in unbroken fellowship 
 with God and in tenderest ministry to the lowliest 
 of men. The simplicity of this creed is altogether 
 beautiful, it is a person — not a doctrine; a life — 
 not a dogma; not a crumpled and buried religious 
 enthusiast, but the risen, triumphant, regnant 
 Christ. 
 
 This creed is profound. It is deep; no one has 
 ever fathomed fully its depths. It is high; no one 
 has ever ascended its heaven-kissing heights. It 
 is all-encompassing; no mind ever circled it. The 
 greatest intellects have bowed in reverence before 
 this creed. " Our divinest symbol," Carlyle calls 
 it. " The realized ideal of humanity," affirms 
 Herder. " The highest object we can possibly 
 
178 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 imagine in respect to religion, the Being without 
 whose presence in the mind perfect piety is im- 
 possible," confesses Strauss. " The divine man, 
 the saint, the type and model of all men," attests 
 Goethe. " The most beautiful incarnation of God 
 — God in man," cries Renan. Comes also Brown- 
 ing: 
 
 " I say the acknowledgment of God in Christ, 
 Accepted by the reason, solves for thee 
 All questions in the earth and out of it." 
 
 Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Newton, and a great 
 company of other cathedral-minded men have set 
 the name of Jesus Christ above every name. The 
 world has had nearly two thousand years to learn 
 of Him and the world has learned much, and yet 
 there are profundities in Jesus' teaching and char- 
 acter not yet explored by the most massive minds. 
 
 This creed is comprehensive. It is both inclu- 
 sive and conclusive. It is possible to have pro- 
 fundity without comprehensiveness. In Jesus 
 Christ are both. To believe on Him, to seek His 
 mind, is to enter new paths to power with God 
 and man. There is such tremendous sweep to His 
 teachings, such wide range and rich versatility 
 in His mind. In Him are the finest and highest 
 of ethical standards as, for example, the surpass- 
 ingly wonderful Sermon on the Mount. In Him 
 are the choicest principles of conduct applying to 
 every human and Divine relationship. There is 
 
CHRIST THE CREED 179 
 
 not a side, an aspect, a phase, nor an experience 
 of human Hfe that is not included in this Christ 
 the Creed! God, man, sin, justice, grace, mercy, 
 brotherhood — they are all comprehended in Him. 
 
 This creed is practical. It is workable. With 
 great heights of idealism on the one hand it is 
 linked to the lowliest walks of ministry on the 
 other. It appeals not merely to the intellect but 
 also to the love faculty in humanity — the affec- 
 tions. Men who know nothing of the metaphys- 
 ical aspects of Christ's divinity and care less, see 
 in Him the beneficent example of gentle and min- 
 istering life. John Stuart Mill, observing the 
 practical nature of Christ's teaching, said : " There 
 is no better rule than so to live that Christ would 
 approve your life." This creed cannot be hon- 
 estly accepted without the fruitage of a life over- 
 flowing with love for God and man. This creed 
 centres in Him whose earthly ministry was 
 summed up in the eloquent sentence : " He went 
 about doing good." 
 
 This simple, profound, comprehensive, and prac- 
 tical creed needs no revision. Human doctrines 
 about Christ need to be revised; in truth, they 
 must undergo revision. Our opinions change, our 
 views grow, we learn truth from various angles, 
 but Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, 
 and forever. Even so, this is a growing creed; 
 the centuries are still in full chase after the Christ 
 and He is still far ahead. We cannot revise Him, 
 
180 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 there is no need that we should; but there is every 
 need that He revise us. We need to bring our- 
 selves to this creed and be measured by Him 
 instead of attempting to measure Him by our- 
 selves. What an all-sufficient creed is this Christ 
 of God, living — not dead, whom Martha confessed 
 long years ago ! 
 
 Acceptance of this creed combines loyalty with 
 the widest liberty. If there be loyalty to the Lord- 
 ship of Jesus then there may be the widest liberty 
 in methods and opinions. It must be apparent 
 that there can be no unity of opinion on various 
 phases of Scriptural subjects interesting, though 
 not vital, such as the nature of the resurrection, 
 the state of the dead, the manner and time of our 
 Lord's second advent. But if there be loyalty to 
 Christ as Lord and Leader of our lives, liberty 
 of opinion may be held in broadest charity. Has 
 not the time fully come when churches should 
 exemplify the wisdom of requiring only belief 
 in this creed without attempting to define the 
 nature of Christ either as to His humanity or 
 His divinity? Such definitions at their best are 
 speculative. Neither the terms " Unitarian " or 
 " Trinitarian " occur in the Scriptures, they are 
 products of theology, they are confusing and devi- 
 sive. On the one hand, schools of theology have 
 grouped parties about " Jesus " and ignored or be- 
 little His Lordship. On the other hand, parties 
 have grouped their followers about " Christ " and 
 
CHRIST THE CREED 181 
 
 quite disregarded Jesus and His humanity. What 
 a tremendous gain it would be for the unity of 
 the church if only belief in Jesus Christ were 
 required, without attempting to go into interpre- 
 tations of His person, insisting only on allegiance 
 to Him as the all-sufficient Mediator between God 
 and man and the full and soul-satisfying answer 
 to Philip's pathetic plaint : " Show us the Father 
 and it sufficeth us." 
 
 Christendom has suffered " more than tongue 
 can tell " because of human creeds which, while 
 made in unquestionable sincerity, have been the 
 fertile cause of division among Christ's followers. 
 That was a wise word spoken by Thomas Campbell, 
 a great Apostle of Christian unity, who, more than 
 a hundred years ago, thus averred : " If a creed 
 contains more than is in the Bible it contains too 
 much; if it contains less than is in the Bible it 
 contains too little; if it contains precisely what is 
 in the Bible it is unnecessary." It is occasion for 
 gratitude that human creeds and confessions of 
 faith bulk little today as compared with half a 
 century ago; let us hope that they will bulk less 
 and less as the years come and go, while Jesus 
 Christ as the all-sufficient creed of Christendom, 
 will emerge more and more from out the 
 historic confessions like some mighty mountain 
 peak. 
 
 I have recently read the spiritual biography of 
 Benjamin Fay Mills and found it of entrancing 
 
182 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 interest. Dr. Mills had a most extraordinary 
 career. From 1886 to 1897 he was one of 
 America's most eminent and successful evangelists. 
 Then his theology became greatly liberalized and 
 he turned to other " flower fields of the soul " for 
 spiritual nourishment. He took up theosophy and 
 became a lecturer for that cult. For some years 
 he occupied the pulpit of an ultra-liberal church on 
 the Pacific Coast. For fifteen years he devoted 
 himself to study, meditation, and prayer, that he 
 might discover an " essential, simple, practical, and 
 universal rule of life which if obeyed would 
 solve all of man's individual and social problems." 
 And, now recently, B. Fay Mills has come back 
 to the ministry from which he withdrew. The 
 account of his struggles for peace of soul is a most 
 revealing document. Noteworthy, indeed, is his 
 confession that this simple creed of Jesus Christ 
 as the Son of God, alone satisfied his soul's deepest 
 longings. Pathos and beauty commingle as this 
 seeker after God bares his very soul in contrite 
 confession. " I have had a creed," writes Dr. 
 Mills, " and it is this : I believe the best I can 
 think, being fully persuaded that if what now I 
 think be not the truth it is because the Truth 
 transcends my present power of thought. I still 
 hold this creed, but in my own ignorance and 
 limitations I have felt the need of a Spiritual 
 Master, and for myself and the world I have felt 
 the need of a Divine Saviour, a need that if it 
 
CHRIST THE CREED 
 
 183 
 
 is met at all is met once for all in Christ. Jesus 
 Christ to me is uniquely divine, and while I would 
 joyfully acknowledge the ' True Light that light- 
 eth every man that cometh into the world,' and 
 that ' God may be seen God, in the star and the 
 stone and the soul and the flesh and the clod,' I 
 have come to believe that in all the cases, even 
 to the greatest of Christless seers, it may truly be 
 said that ' the Light shineth in the darkness and 
 the darkness apprehendeth it not.' I think I have 
 needed my experience to prove the incompleteness 
 of the best man has known apart from Christ 
 and sufficiency of Christ; to enable me to speak 
 as a Greek to Greeks, a Jew to Jews, an agnostic 
 to agnostics, a pantheist to pantheists. I cannot 
 say I have acted contrary to the light I have had, 
 but I regret any obstacles I may have placed in 
 the way of any soul or in the path of the progress 
 of the church, and I ask all to whose attention 
 these words may come to pray that the Master's 
 words may be fulfilled in me, — ' Every branch in 
 me that beareth fruit. He purgeth it that it may 
 bring more fruit.' " 
 
 Thus B. Fay Mills turns again to Christ the 
 Creed, bringing with him " the fruits and flow- 
 ers " of painstaking study and long reflection, 
 laying them every one on the altar of his Lord. 
 There is something tender and beautiful in the 
 experience of this distinguished minister and there 
 is this much more — a suggestion of the rich fruit- 
 
184. THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 age that will result when seekers after God the 
 world over come bringing their all to the Christ. 
 
 " Our little systems have their day ; 
 
 They have their day and cease to be: 
 They are but broken lights of thee, 
 And thou, O Lord, art more than they." 
 
 O CHRIST, THOU CREED OF MARTHA, OF PETER, 
 OF PAUL, OF JOHN THE BELOVED, WE REST OUR 
 WEARY SOULS IN THEE. THOU AND THOU ALONE 
 HAST THE WORDS OF ETERNAL LIFE. FORGIVE OUR 
 CONTROVERSIES OVER WORDS AND NAMES AND AS 
 THOU AND THE FATHER ART ONE SO MAY WE ALL 
 FIND GLORIOUS ONENESS IN THEE. 
 
XIII 
 
 THE KEEPING OF THE FAITH 
 
" O brother-man ! the Master seeks 
 
 Today for men ; 
 Cause not the Lord, by thy delay, 
 
 To call again. 
 Gigantic ills oppress the land — 
 There's want and woe on every hand ; 
 For God and right take valiant stand — 
 
 Be faithful then! 
 
 " O brother-man ! now is the time 
 
 In which to live; 
 The Future is no mighty god 
 
 With power to give. 
 Do what thou hast to do today ! 
 From present needs turn not away! 
 Let sloth nor ease cause no delay — 
 
 Live ! brother, live ! " 
 
 S. S. Shepherd. 
 
XIII 
 
 THE KEEPING OF THE FAITH 
 
 "I have kept the faith." — // Timothy 4:7. 
 
 F all the places in Rome about which Chris- 
 
 tian history was made, none is so impres- 
 
 sive as the old Mamertine prison. In all 
 probability that ancient bastile contains the identical 
 dungeon in which Paul was confined and where 
 he wrote the second epistle to Timothy. You go 
 down a flight of stairs of steep descent and find at 
 the bottom a dimly lighted cell. The sides are of 
 rough and jagged stone and the floor is of smooth 
 slabs. The place is damp and a musty odour taints 
 the atmosphere. Nearby the yellow Tiber flows. 
 Here were confined some famous politicians and 
 soldiers, and the story of their lives is dark with 
 tragedy. The chief interest which this cell has 
 for us is that it was probably the prison of Paul. 
 Here he may have lived for several months. Here, 
 perhaps, Luke visited and remained to comfort 
 him. Here Demas was his companion until he 
 forsook the Apostle and left him to meet his fate 
 at the hands of pagan Rome. Here lived Paul 
 while without, the Romans consorted and con- 
 spired, or " drove in furious guise along the 
 Appian Way." 
 
 187 
 
188 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 Without was the Circus Maximus, filled daily 
 with pleasure lovers for whom the gladiators 
 fought while the multitude applauded wildly. The 
 devil, in the form of Nero, was on the throne, and 
 in a little while he was to let loose the fires of 
 hell upon the company of defenseless Christians. 
 And from this cell, in all likelihood, went forth 
 the last letter that Paul ever wrote. 
 
 " I have kept the faith." What is meant by 
 the word faith here? What is it that Paul had 
 kept to the very end? What does the Apostle 
 mean? It is comparatively easy to show what 
 he did not mean. For one thing, the word faith 
 here surely does not mean a set of doctrines, a 
 formal theology, or a credal pronouncement. 
 Paul might have held a mental assent to a dozen 
 doctrines of Christianity and not lost as much as 
 a night's sleep, much less a drop of blood in be- 
 half of the Christian religion. Speaking in gen- 
 eral terms, the word faith may here be rendered 
 life. " I have lived the life." When Paul was 
 converted to Christianity he became a new creature 
 and to the end that new creation was continuous. 
 Daily he was made over. Daily he died to the old 
 life and rose again to the new. To the end of 
 his days he was a growing Christian with an ex- 
 perience of soul expansion and enlargening vision. 
 
 Or, again, the word faith here may refer to 
 the vow or pledge Paul made on that Damascus 
 way when he saw the Risen Christ. That vision 
 
THE KEEPING OF THE FAITH 189 
 
 transformed Paul's life, or rather it was the be- 
 ginning of the .transformation. Standing before 
 King Herod Aprippa, Paul referred to this Divine 
 event and exclaimed: "Wherefore, O king, I 
 was not disobedient unto the heavenly Vision." 
 Here he writes : " I have kept the vow, I have 
 lived the life." It is as if Damon were dying, and, 
 looking in the face of his beloved Pythias, said: 
 " I have kept the vow." It is as if Jonathan were 
 on his deathbed, and clasping the hand of David 
 exclaims: "My brother, I have kept the vow." 
 It is as when Nathan Hale was led out to die, and, 
 turning his strong young patriot's face to the 
 company of British soldiers, said : " My only 
 regret is that I have but one life to give for my 
 country. I have kept the faith." 
 
 So much then for what it was Paul kept — not 
 a set of doctrines, but a life — not a formal the- 
 ology, but the passion of a spirit — not a solemn 
 ceremony, but a covenant made with none other 
 than the Christ, Himself, — "I have kept the 
 faith." And how, pray? By what means — after 
 what fashion — did he keep the vow and live the 
 life and make room for the Spirit? I fancy a 
 great many of us are more interested in the faith 
 keeping us than we are in keeping the faith. This 
 may be due to wrong conceptions of Christianity, 
 or to indifference, or to both. How strange it is 
 that we reason differently when we come to things 
 spiritual than we do in any other realm of 
 
190 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 thought! No student thinks that mere matricu- 
 lation in a college will provide his education. Only 
 a dunderhead would so believe. No man when 
 he opens a store or shop or bank believes for a 
 minute that the mere opening of store or shop 
 or bank is sufficient. He knows it is not sufficient. 
 His personality must be invested. There are cus- 
 tomers to please; goods to be bought and sold; 
 the business has to be carefully started and per- 
 sistently followed up. 
 
 A man's business, if it be successful, is not an 
 incident in his life, but in a sense life itself. A 
 man buys a farm. Behold the virgin fields tanta- 
 lizing in their fallowness! Sun, rain, and soil 
 will, when combined with intelligent sowing, 
 weeding, plowing, harvesting, and crop rotation, 
 produce certain results, but not without man's 
 labour. Working together God and the farmer 
 will obtain a rich fruitage from garden, orchard, 
 and field. 
 
 It is not different when we come to religion. 
 God and man must still work together. To the 
 Philippians Paul wrote : " Work out your own 
 salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God 
 who worketh in you both to will and to work, for 
 His good pleasure." Paul kept the faith by giving 
 himself in magnificent ministry to mankind. 
 There is no other way to keep the faith. A man 
 cannot enclose his faith in a Sunday suit, or fence 
 it with the Christian ordinances, nor build battle- 
 
THE KEEPING OF THE FAITH 191 
 
 ments of Biblical texts about it and then say : " I 
 have it here ! " Lo, when he examines himself, to 
 his astonishment, he cannot find what he thought 
 he had. 
 
 Jesus' parable of the pounds illustrates the folly 
 and futility of such an endeavour. A certain 
 nobleman about to go to a far country called his 
 servants and entrusted each with a pound (about 
 seventeen dollars) and said: "Trade ye herewith 
 until I return." Make an investment — go to work. 
 In the course of time the nobleman returned, the 
 servants were summoned to give an account. 
 One had earned with his pound ten pounds. He 
 was warmly commended. Another had with his 
 pound earned five pounds. He, also, was com- 
 mended, though not so cordially. A third servant 
 unrolled his pound from a napkin where he had 
 preserved it and apologetically explained that he 
 was afraid of losing what he had been given, 
 therefore he had kept it for his master intact. 
 And the nobleman was angered and took away 
 this pound and gave it to the man who already 
 had ten. 
 
 At first blush this seems unjust — on second 
 thought it appears exactly just. Men always lose 
 what they seek selfishly to keep. Sometimes this 
 may not seem to be true; yet when the final bal- 
 ances are made it has to be true. The pitiful 
 weakness of the church is that so many nominal 
 members do that very thing. They seek to keep 
 
192 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 the faith in that way and they lose the faith by 
 that very process. A man can keep the faith only 
 by going on. He compromises the faith by stand- 
 ing still. He betrays the faith when he goes back. 
 Paul kept the faith by losing his life and so be- 
 came " heir of the righteousness which is accord- 
 ing to faith." 
 
 The keepers of the faith are the world's sav- 
 iours. Humanity has ever been helped to march 
 Godward by men who have thus kept the faith; 
 men who have cherished ideals high and noble and 
 have cherished them to the very end. Of the many 
 great sentences Paul wrote none is more eloquent 
 than this one from his second epistle to the Cor- 
 inthian Christians : " I am willing to spend and 
 be spent for your souls." That was the manner 
 in which he kept the faith; and every soul, whether 
 in the limelight of publicity or in the obscurity of 
 homely toil, has kept the faith by living the life 
 and embodying the principle of fidelity to ideals 
 hard to achieve and harder still to preserve. Many 
 a young woman of that great company who toil 
 for wages has kept the faith with virtue by renun- 
 ciation and ministry of self to worthy goals. 
 Many a man sorely tempted to be dishonest has kept 
 the faith by living his life on the high level of his 
 ideals despite manifold hindrances. You can 
 hinder and harass such characters, but you cannot 
 overcome them; you can beat them down but you 
 cannot blot them out. 
 
THE KEEPING OF THE FAITH 193 
 
 In the wee small hours of a night session of a 
 national political convention a great leader, after 
 two nights without sleep — and suffering with a 
 heavy cold, went on the platform to address the 
 thousands. So far as human eyes could see, he 
 was defeated as a moulder of his party's thought. 
 He was far in advance of his party and the people 
 generally. They had not caught up with him. He 
 was and is a prophet. And that man spoke to 
 those delegates assembled these pulsating words: 
 " You may dispute whether I have fought a good 
 fight, you may dispute whether I have finished my 
 course, but you cannot deny that I have kept the 
 faith." Nor could they. Strong men wept when 
 he said that, — the words rang with the high note 
 of sincerity. 
 
 But this Tentmaker of Tarsus could affirm it 
 all without disputation : "I have fought the good 
 fight, I have kept the faith, I have finished the 
 course." And every word of this was grandly 
 true. What I am anxious to have you believe is 
 this: a man may fail in his methods, he may 
 bring defeat upon himself and his followers in 
 the advocacy of certain principles or policies, but 
 if his life rings true to lofty ideals he has kept 
 the faith and you cannot gainsay him. 
 
 " They who have strewn the violets reap the corn, 
 And having reaped and garnered, bring the plough, 
 And draw new furrows 'neath the healthy morn, 
 And plant the great Hereafter in the Now." 
 
194 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 I remember meeting, some years ago, " Golden 
 Rule " Samuel M. Jones, the famous three-term 
 mayor of Toledo, Ohio, the man without a party 
 whose only rule was " Whatsoever ye would that 
 men should do unto you, even so do ye also unto 
 them," and whose practice of this rule was literal 
 and love-wrought. I recall how that big freckled 
 hand looked as I clasped it; I delighted in the 
 twinkle of his blue eyes; I felt the power of the 
 man's simple life, his rugged personality, and all 
 because he was keeping the faith as he saw it so 
 magnificently. A little while after that, " Golden 
 Rule " Samuel M. Jones died. There is no monu- 
 ment to him in Toledo so far as I know, but if 
 you speak his name in praise there, you will bind 
 the common people to you by bands as strong 
 as steel. They believed in him because he believed 
 in them and trusted him to the fullest. 
 
 I read recently in the Christmas number of a 
 well-known magazine, a story entitled : " The Girl 
 Who Walked Without Fear." That story moved 
 me as only a few stories have. I tried to read 
 that story out loud to others and a sorry success 
 I made. I had to stop, I had to take out my hand- 
 kerchief, I lost my place — I could not go on. I 
 am not sure of myself now to tell that story in 
 detail, but this is the substance of it: a lovely 
 little Chinese girl, a Christian, brought up in 
 the home of missionaries, came to America 
 with her benefactors. This little girl, just bud- 
 
THE KEEPING OF THE FAITH 195 
 
 ding into winsome maidenhood, believed that 
 everybody — think of it — everybody in America 
 •wzs a Christian and therefore could be trusted 
 implicitly. Like a good angel from a better land 
 than ours that demure little maid walked through 
 New York's streets on Christmas Eve unafraid, 
 thinking no evil, believing all pure in heart, at 
 peace with God and man. And as she went she 
 imparted, and all unconsciously, her spirit of faith 
 to a poor, shivering tramp contemplating suicide 
 in the icy water; to a crafty, cynical, meagre-lived 
 newsboy; to two mothers, one poor and worn and 
 the other rich and lonely; to two shopgirls in a 
 department store, one of whom was motherless 
 and sorely tempted, and both imperilled; imparted 
 such faith, such hope, that the tramp took courage, 
 the newsboy went to church, the mothers found 
 peace, the shopgirls saw a great light, and all came 
 under the spell of Christmas Eve and by faith 
 they, like their benefactor, beheld Bethlehem — 
 the birthplace of our Lord, and felt the unseen 
 presence of the Saviour round and about them. 
 
 Are we keeping the faith or are we trying to 
 make ourselves believe the faith can keep us quite 
 apart from what we do, or think, or how we 
 love? Do we believe in saying prayers, or do 
 we believe in prayer? God is good, God is love, 
 God is wise; but goodness and love and wisdom 
 cannot get to us if we close the doors of our lives 
 against them, and if we invite them in and close 
 
196 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 the door upon them they shrivel and die for want 
 of food and exercise. 
 
 " A creed is a rod, 
 And a crown is of night; 
 But this thing is of God — 
 To be man with thy might; 
 To grow straight in the strength 
 Of thy spirit, 
 
 And live out thy Hfe as the light." 
 
 GREAT TEACHER, INSPIRE US TO MASTER THE 
 HARD LESSON OF LOYALTY. STEADY OUR WAVER- 
 ING PURPOSES. STRENGTH OUR FLABBY WILLS. 
 KEEP BACK THY SERVANTS ALSO FROM PRESUMP- 
 TUOUS SINS, LET THEM NOT HAVE DOMINION OVER 
 US, THAT WE MAY BE WORTHY TO WALK IN WHITE 
 WITH ALL THOSE WHO HAVE KEPT THE FAITH. 
 
XIV 
 
 CHRIST AND THE CROWDS 
 
" One stone the more swings to her place 
 In that dread temple of Thy worth; 
 It is enough that through Thy grace, 
 I saw nought common on Thy earth." 
 
 RuDYARD Kipling. 
 
XIV 
 
 CHRIST AND THE CROWDS 
 
 "But because of the multitude I said it."— John 11:42. 
 
 WHAT Italian skies and sunsets are to the 
 artistic minded, so to the seekers after 
 God is this eleventh chapter of John. 
 It would be well if all Christians read this precious 
 Scripture at least once a week. There are three 
 things that contribute to the value of this chapter. 
 
 In the first place: the narrative is as a flash- 
 light upon the most intimate friendship of Jesus' 
 life, revealing both the tenderness and the strength 
 of such a blessed bond. Public characters may 
 have numerous acquaintances, but not very many 
 close friends. The fact that so many have a claim 
 on them is one reason why few have special claim. 
 Besides, one's friends can never be as numerous 
 as one's acquaintances. Jesus was at home in 
 Bethany. There he could relax and enjoy to the 
 fullest, love and hospitality. Some day, perhaps, 
 an artist will paint as his masterpiece the Bethany 
 home with Jesus as guest, Mary sitting contentedly 
 at His feet, Lazarus reclining nearby, and Martha 
 busily plying her household cares. 
 
 In the second place: this chapter most tenderly 
 reveals Jesus' sympathy with sorrow and suffering. 
 199 
 
200 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 Here is that shortest verse in all the Bible — 
 " Jesus wept." And the Greek word translated 
 wept here means not the loud outcry but quiet, 
 suppressed weeping, quivering lip, and tear-moist 
 cheeks. The scene was full of pathos, the wail of 
 the mourners, the grief of the sisters, the heart- 
 break of it all moved Jesus strongly and He 
 wept: 
 
 "Jesus wept! those tears are oVer, 
 But His heart is still the same; 
 
 Kinsman, Friend and Elder Brother, 
 Is His everlasting name. 
 Lord, when I am called to die, 
 
 Let me think of Bethany." 
 
 In the third place : this eleventh chapter of John 
 reveals Jesus' unbroken consciousness of God. 
 You and I have a consciousness of God but it is 
 fragmentary, broken, and incomplete. We are 
 wonderfully conscious of God at times, then again 
 we grope in utter darkness. How different it was 
 with Jesus! To the mourners there at Bethany 
 it seemed that death was greater than God. To 
 Jesus, God was greater than death and it was 
 impossible for Him to think of death as extinction 
 or separation from God. Thus it was He was 
 able to say out of His knowledge of God these 
 words so vibrant with hope : " I am the resurrec- 
 tion and the life : he that believeth on me, though 
 he die, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and 
 believeth on me shall never die." 
 
 There are still other values to this great chapter. 
 
CHRIST AND THE CROWDS 201 
 
 but I omit reference to them now in order to con- 
 sider a sentence that fell from Jesus' lips at 
 Lazarus' graveside. Before He called upon Laza- 
 rus to come forth He prayed audibly. He lifted 
 up His eyes and said : " Father, I thank Thee 
 that thou heardest me. And I knew that thou 
 hearest me always: but because of the multitude 
 that standeth around I said it, that they may be- 
 lieve that thou didst send me." 
 
 " Because of the multitude." For a large part 
 of Jesus' public career the populace thronged about 
 Him wherever He went. The Gospel of Mark, 
 for instance, has been aptly called " The Gospel 
 of the Multitude." To read this book, the briefest 
 and boldest of the four in picturesque figure, is to 
 look out over vast crowds of men and women and 
 to hear the tramp, tramp, of thousands of feet and 
 the confused murmur of myriad voices. In the 
 four Gospels the word multitude occurs one hun- 
 dred and eighty-eight times. A great crowd 
 affects people differently — some are wearied and 
 harassed by the sight of a multitude — some amused 
 and entertained — some moved by the sight to ex- 
 pressions of contempt — others view a crowd with 
 cold, commercial eyes — while still others find 
 something mesmeric in a multitude and are quite 
 carried off their feet both literally and figuratively. 
 
 How did the multitude affect Jesus? For one 
 thing, Jesus had compassion on the multitude and 
 that word compassion is a great and good word. 
 
202 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 It means sympathy or pity or sorrow for. Jesus 
 looked upon the multitude with compassion and 
 two reasons are recorded why He so looked upon 
 the throngs that followed Him. In Matthew 9 : 36 
 it is written that " When he saw the multitudes 
 He was moved with compassion for them, because 
 they were distressed and scattered, as sheep not 
 having a shepherd." The figure is eloquent. A 
 flock of sheep in Palestine without a shepherd is a 
 pathetic sight, for a shepherdless flock there means, 
 sooner or later, a calamity. The Eastern shep- 
 herd lives with his sheep — " he goeth before them 
 and they follow him; for they know his voice." 
 Hence, to Jesus the multitudes were as wandering, 
 shepherdless sheep without protection, distressed 
 and in imminent peril. Jesus knew what was in 
 man, He saw as no other the possibilities in 
 men for both good and evil, and His great shep- 
 herd heart went out in deep solicitude for the 
 masses. And thus feeling for them and with them 
 Jesus was moved to say " The harvest is indeed 
 plenteous but the labourers are few. Pray ye, 
 therefore, the Lord of the harvest that he send 
 forth labourers into his harvest." 
 
 In Matthew 15:32 it is again recorded that 
 Jesus had compassion on the multitude and this 
 time because they were hungry and he feared if 
 they were sent away without food they would faint 
 by the way. The disciples, however, thought best 
 to send the crowd away unfed because seven loaves 
 
CHRIST AND THE CROWDS 203 
 
 and a few small fishes were all that could be found 
 and to supply so many with so little seemed to 
 them an utter impossibihty. But Jesus commanded 
 the multitude to sit down on the ground and He 
 took the seven loaves and the fishes and having 
 thanked God for them, He gave to the disciples, 
 and the disciples gave to the multitude. " And 
 they all ate, and were filled: and they took up 
 that which remained over of the broken pieces, 
 seven baskets full." 
 
 You will observe that Jesus' compassion for the 
 multitude found expression in ministering to them. 
 In the first instance He advised that His disciples 
 pray that labourers be sent forth into the field of 
 humanity, and straightway He sent the Twelve 
 out with authority to cast out demons, and " to 
 heal all manners of disease and all manner of sick- 
 ness." In the second, He supplied the hungry 
 horde with abundance of wholesome food. Dr. 
 J. H. Jowett finely says : " From this Scripture, 
 Matthew 15 : 32, I learn three things; first: I learn 
 what my Saviour thought about a crowd ; secondly, 
 I learn what my Saviour felt about a crowd; and 
 because I learned these two things I learn how 
 the disciples of Jesus have to think and feel about 
 a crowd." 
 
 " Because of the multitude." Followers of 
 Jesus Christ, who have caught His vision and are 
 filled with His spirit, will not be content merely to 
 sympathize with the masses but will set about to 
 
204 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 help them in their losing battles against poverty, 
 vice, and ignorance. Numerous churches that 
 wear Christ's name do not have compassion for 
 the multitude, they scarcely know that the multi- 
 tude exists, they only know their own little circle 
 and that none too well. Thousands of professed 
 followers of Christ are as indifferent to the needs 
 of the masses as the company who crucified Christ 
 were to His suffering when " sitting down they 
 watched him there." Jesus' programme for the 
 multitude is most inspiring. Jesus taught the mul- 
 titude, healed the multitude, fed the multitude. 
 For the four-fold record of this ministry of the 
 Master to the masses read Matthew 14: 13-23, 
 Mark 6: 30-46; Luke 9: 10-17, an<^ John 6: 1-15. 
 
 And now in Bethany by the grave of Lazarus 
 Jesus renders another service to the multitude. 
 He prays aloud, attributing all the power and 
 glory to God for the great event which was to 
 take place. Moreover, He offered that prayer 
 audibly that the multitude standing around might 
 know and recognize whence came His power and 
 authority. This simple and reverent act of Jesus 
 at Lazarus' graveside was characteristic of His 
 entire life. He claimed nothing for Himself apart 
 from the Father; He said : " The Father is greater 
 than L" It was not necessary for Him to pray pub- 
 licly at Lazarus' grave, He did it for the sake of 
 the surrounding multitude. 
 
 There is, in this simple act of Jesus, a philosophy 
 
CHRIST AND THE CROWDS 205 
 
 which is found in all social expressions of religion; 
 the ordinances of baptism and the Lord's Supper 
 are as much for the sake of others as for the 
 individual who receives and enjoys them. The 
 very idea of the church — " the called together " — 
 is a standing witness to the social nature of the 
 Gospel. Secret discipleship makes no converts. 
 Better half a dozen Barnabases than a score of 
 Josephs of Arimathea. Jesus wished the multi- 
 tude to recognize God as the source of every 
 blessing, and hence He prayed audibly in their 
 presence, giving all the glory and honour to God. 
 What rich fruitage would result if we were as 
 anxious to give God the glory for our achieve- 
 ments as we are to obtain the credit for ourselves. 
 It is a subtle temptation to believe and want others 
 to believe that our intellects, genius, industry, and 
 business acumen, have won for us the prizes of 
 life. We do well to remember that pregnant clause 
 in the first sentence of Holy Writ : "In the be- 
 ginning God," and so accord Him the glory and 
 honour. 
 
 " Back of the loaf is the snowy flour, 
 And back of the flour is the mill; 
 And back of the mill is the wheat and the shower. 
 And the sun and the Father's will." 
 
 Some years ago, in a southern city an extraor- 
 dinary amusing incident is said to have happened 
 at a college commencement. The valedictory 
 address was delivered by a young man who pos- 
 
206 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 sessed a large bump of originality, or arrogance, 
 or both. In his speech he said that it was the 
 custom for the valedictorian to say a lot of gush- 
 ing words complimentary to the faculty, but that 
 he saw no need of doing so, that he was rather 
 glad to get away from his teachers and likely they 
 were glad to see him go. He saw no reasons for 
 thanking them at all since they were paid for doing 
 what they did. If he had not applied himself 
 their instructions would have been in vain. Hence, 
 if anybody should be praised and complimented 
 it ought to be the graduates, not the faculty. As 
 I recall the story, this valedictorian closed his 
 truly remarkable speech by modestly thanking 
 himself for his diploma, and thanking the Lord 
 that he was about to say Good-bye to the college 
 forever. 
 
 This incident is comical, even ludicrous. We 
 wonder how the faculty received that speech, if 
 the audience applauded, if any flowers were given 
 the speaker. But it is also very crude, discourte- 
 ous to the core, and at its best a statement of only 
 a half truth. Who of us can truthfully say that 
 he is self-made? After we have done our best 
 could we have done it if others had not also made 
 their contribution ? Deep in debt we are to some- 
 body, be it wife or husband, parent or child, 
 friend or neighbour, — above all to God. 
 
 What of the multitudes today? What of their 
 plight, perils, and woes? What of our attitude 
 
CHRIST AND THE CROWDS 207 
 
 toward the masses? Whether or not we have a 
 message for the multitude, the multitude has a 
 message and a voice for us, a message of oppor- 
 tunity, a voice of invitation. If any one who 
 knows the grim facts of the life of the masses 
 today can look upon the vast crowd " hearing 
 oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity " with- 
 out a clutch at his heart and a lump in the throat, 
 he is not of the mind of Jesus. 
 
 Because of the multitudes General William 
 Booth dedicated his life to the city's poor and out- 
 cast and from his labours came the Salvation 
 Army, When the General was in America he 
 told how it all came about : " I hungered for hell," 
 he said, " I pushed into the midst of it — the West 
 side of London. For days I stood in the seething 
 streets drinking it in and loving it all. Yes, I 
 loved the souls that made up the muddy streams. 
 I went home one night to my wife and babies and 
 said to her: 'Darling, I have given myself and 
 I have given you and our children to the service 
 of these souls.' " 
 
 Vachel Lindsay in his "General Booth Enters 
 Into Heaven," with fine poetic fervour, portrays 
 the blind commander marching into the City that 
 " lieth foursquare " at the head of a great multi- 
 tude redeemed from vice and woe: 
 " Booth led boldly with his big bass drum — 
 
 (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?) 
 
 The saint smiled gravely and they said : ' He's come.' 
 
 (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?) 
 
208 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 Walking lepers followed, rank on rank, 
 Lurching bravoes from the ditches dank. 
 Drabs from the alleyways and drug fiends pale — 
 Minds still passion-ridden, soul-powers frail: — 
 Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath. 
 Unwashed legions with the ways of Death — 
 (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?) 
 
 " Every slum had sent its half-a-score 
 The round world over. (Booth had groaned for more.) 
 Every banner that the wide world flies 
 Bloomed with glory and transcendent dyes. 
 
 Jesus came from out the court-house door. 
 Stretched his hands above the passing poor, 
 Booth saw not, but led his queer ones there 
 Round and round the mighty court-house square. 
 Yet in an instant all that blear review 
 Marched on spotless, clad in raiment new. 
 The lame were straightened, withered limbs uncurled. 
 And blind eyes opened on a new, sweet world." 
 
 In our city recently there occurred the annual 
 field day for the children of the public schools, 
 and a right gala day it was. In company with five 
 thousand fellow citizens I beheld that spectacle 
 and was deeply moved by what I saw. The chil- 
 dren were dressed in white, the girls jauntily 
 beribboned for the most part, and all carried flags. 
 There were drills and marches and counter- 
 marches, there was band music, and there were 
 songs sung by those clear, young voices. It was 
 a beautiful scene. The gay crowds in the grand- 
 stand, brilliant in multi-coloured dresses, the wav- 
 ing of red, white, and blue streamers and pennants, 
 
CHRIST AND THE CROWDS 209 
 
 the laughter, the applause, the glory, the poetry of 
 it all, made it impressive beyond description. But 
 best of all was the singing of the state song by 
 that chorus of a thousand school children: 
 
 " Not without thy wondrous story, 
 
 Illinois, Illinois, 
 Could be writ the nation's glory, 
 
 Illinois, Illinois. 
 On the record of the years 
 Abraham Lincoln's name appears, 
 Grant and Logan, and our tears, 
 
 Illinois, Illinois." 
 
 And what of that multitude — our children and 
 our neighbour's children — what of that gay and 
 happy throng? What shall come out of that mul- 
 titude in the days that are yet to be? Will it be 
 virtue or vice, peace or war, God or Mammon, 
 what shall the harvest be? 
 
 We cannot say precisely, but this we know: if 
 we shall do for this multitude in our midst what 
 Christ did for those who thronged Him, if we 
 shall feel for them and with them, if we shall 
 teach them and be willing to learn from them, 
 heal them and feed them, it may be that some day 
 the meaning of a certain great passage of the 
 Revelation of John will flash out upon us: " After 
 these things I saw, and behold a great multitude, 
 which no man could number, out of every nation 
 and of all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing 
 before the throne and before the Lamb, arrayed 
 
210 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 in white robes, and palms in their hands; and they 
 cry with a great voice, saying, Salvation unto our 
 God who sitteth on the throne, and unto the 
 Lamb." 
 
 O CHRIST OF THE CROWDS, THOU FRIEND OF 
 SINNERS WHOM THE COMMON PEOPLE HEARD 
 GLADLY, THOU SHAMEST OUR INDIFFERENCE TO 
 THE FATE OF THE MASSES. MAY WE FOLLOW THEE 
 FROM THE CHURCHLY EDIFICE AND FROM OUR 
 COMFORTABLE HOMES INTO THE STREETS AND 
 ALLEYS OF THE GREAT CITIES AND MINGLE FREELY 
 WITH THE MULTITUDE TO WOO AND WIN THEM 
 FOR THEE. 
 
XV 
 
 GOOD-BYE TO GLORY 
 
" 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." 
 
 RuDVARD Kipling. 
 
XV 
 
 GOOD-BYE TO GLORY 
 
 "And she named the child Ichabod, saying, The 
 glory is departed from Israel." — / Samuel 4:21. 
 
 IT was a tragic day for the Hebrew nation. 
 The battle had gone sore against the Israel- 
 ites, and the Philistines were in possession 
 of the ark of God. Eli, the aged prophet and 
 judge, sat beside the gate of Shiloh anxiously 
 awaiting a messenger from the battle field. And 
 soon one came bearing the dreadful news that 
 the army of Israel was defeated, that Eli's two 
 sons, Hophni and Phinehas, were dead, and that 
 the ark of God was taken by the enemy. The 
 tidings were so terrible that the old man fell from 
 his seat, breaking his neck, thus adding another 
 tragedy to the sorrows of that day. Nor was that 
 all. Eli's daughter'in-law, the wife of Phinehas, 
 was so prostrated by the death of her husband 
 and the capture of the ark of God that she gave 
 birth prematurely to a son whom she named, with 
 dying breath, Ichabod, saying, " The glory is de- 
 parted from Israel, because the ark of God was 
 taken and because of her father-in-law and her 
 husband." 
 
 This is the Old Testament story that has made 
 213 
 
214 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 the name Ichabod synonymous with defeat, with 
 loss of prestige and honour. Ichabod — Good-bye 
 to glory, what a melancholy epitaph and how fit- 
 tingly though pathetically it has been written over 
 nations, institutions, and individuals! 
 
 The visitor to the Old World is seldom permitted 
 to forget that he is in the midst of monuments and 
 memorials reflecting a glory that is past and gone. 
 Ichabod is written over many a stately ruin and 
 broken column. Nowhere does one feel this so 
 profoundly as among the relics of ancient Rome 
 once called " The Mistress of the World," and 
 " The Eternal City." Standing ankle deep in the 
 dust of history, one looks upon the tomb of genius 
 and mighty minds, inspects statue and tablet, views 
 long stretches of scenery famous only because 
 once the theatre of some historic event or home of 
 a famous character. Gibbon consumes many thou- 
 sand pages to trace the story of the Roman Em- 
 pire's fall, but there is a huge canvas in the 
 gallery at Versailles that tells it truthfully in a 
 single picture. It is entitled : " The Last Days of 
 Rome," and portrays a banquet scene of revelry 
 and debauchery. Roman senators and chieftains, 
 instead of being busy with the affairs of the state, 
 are holding half nude women in their arms, while 
 others are drinking deeply from jewelled cups. 
 Still others are beastly drunken, some of them 
 lying stretched out upon the floor or under the 
 banquet table. It is a picture of moral depravity 
 
GOOD-BYE TO GLORY 215 
 
 such as one cannot soon forget. It is ever so! 
 When a nation loses the sense of sin it begins to 
 decay at the very heart. Jeremiah, in chapter 
 eight, the twelfth verse, charges the cause of 
 Israel's downfall to sodden immorality. " Were 
 they ashamed when they had committed abomi- 
 nation? Nay, they were not at all ashamed^ 
 neither could they blush." When Israel forgot 
 how to blush her national doom was sealed. 
 
 A nation may lose her glory, however, without a 
 departure into the grosser sins and vices. Com- 
 mercialism, for instance, may so enter into the 
 very heart of a people's life that lust for gain 
 corrodes the nobler and finer ideals. A close 
 observer has remarked that the attitude of America 
 toward the present European War is palpably 
 coloured by the commercial spirit. Said he: 
 " There is a very great danger that when the his- 
 tory of this world conflict be written that 
 America's part will be that of a supposedly neutral 
 onlooker shrewdly speculating the while how many 
 millions of dollars may accrue to the United States 
 because of Europe's misfortune." This criticism 
 is strongly phrased and is, perhaps, not exactly 
 just, but there is enough truth in it to give a sober 
 pause to every citizen of the United States who 
 holds dear to his heart the traditions that glorify 
 our country's history as a whole. 
 
 The true grandeur and glory of a nation has 
 often been dimmed and alas, blotted out by mili- 
 
216 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 tary ideals. Our own country faces a grave issue 
 in the policy of " preparedness," advocated by 
 many of our political leaders. Quite apart from 
 any partisan or political phase of the issue, the 
 average citizen is sorely perplexed by the gravity 
 of the preparedness doctrine. If once our nation 
 adopts the militarist policy no one knows where 
 it will end, but judging by the history of nations 
 that have adopted it the fruits of such a policy is 
 war — not peace. It has been our glory in the past 
 that our dependence was not in forts, in battle- 
 ships, or in soldiery, but in spirit of democracy, 
 justice, and liberty. The ideals of our fathers in 
 this high regard may " go a-glimmering " before 
 the new policy of a great army and a mighty navy 
 for American defense. 
 
 " 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 ! " 
 
 The hope of a people lies largely in the crystalli- 
 zation of sentiment against public and private 
 sin, against corporate delinquencies. Agitators 
 and reformers, even of the most radical type, are 
 necessary. They are the John the Baptists, the 
 Voices in the Wilderness, calling on the people to 
 repent. Without such voices we should soon be 
 undone and Ichabod written largely over every 
 
GOOD-BYE TO GLORY 
 
 217 
 
 institution. Splendid, indeed, are the words of 
 Wendell Phillips, spoken in behalf of the reformer 
 and agitator: "If the Alps, piled in cold and 
 silence, be the emblem of despotism, we joyfully 
 take the restless ocean for ours, only pure because 
 never still." 
 
 Glory has departed, too, from many a church 
 once useful, once the centre of peace and power. 
 Churches exist as a means to an end and when- 
 ever they become self-centered Ichabod is written 
 over their thresholds. A church is a body of Be- 
 lievers in Christ banded together for growth in 
 Christlikeness, for the carrying of the Gospel to 
 all nations, and for the conservation of human 
 life from birth to everlastingness. Every church 
 is a missionary organization, is such by its charter 
 in Christ. Whenever it becomes exclusive, caters 
 to any particular class, coddles grown-up folks, 
 neglects its children, dwindles into sort of a social 
 club, or becomes institutionalized, it loses place and 
 power. There comes to my mind a great city 
 church upon which Ichabod is written in letters 
 so large that every passerby may read. Fifty 
 years ago this church was in the height of its 
 glory. Splendid audiences filled its immense au- 
 ditorium. There were constant conversions. That 
 church ministered to the poor and needy, and flour- 
 ished the while like a green bay tree. By-and- 
 bye, the membership shifted, many going out to 
 the suburbs and back on the hills. In the course 
 
218 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 of a few years that church became what is known 
 as a downtown problem. The prosperous members 
 left the immediate vicinity, and apartment and 
 boarding houses crowded closer and closer. In- 
 stead of trying to serve the new constituency by 
 providing for the young men and women who 
 filled the nearby boarding houses, and caring 
 for the swarms of little children that played on 
 the nearby streets, that church went on in the 
 same old way, catering to the membership that 
 lived out on the hills, and boasting of what it used 
 to do in the good old days. That church today 
 presents a tragic picture of departed glory. It 
 stands like a spectre and a ghost of its great past, 
 a monument of failure and disgrace. 
 
 Ichabod — Good-bye to Glory — has been written 
 pathetically over unnumbered homes once rain- 
 bowed by the glory of deep religious life. Homes 
 where God was honoured, where the Scriptures 
 were loved and read, are in many instances the 
 homes today of a generation candidly indififerent 
 to the claims of the church and the life of the 
 Spirit. Like nations, families rise and fall. The 
 expression : " Degenerate sons of illustrious 
 sires," is alas, both eloquent and melancholy. It 
 is quite generally believed today that the home and 
 family life is disintegrating. Statistics available 
 are far from heartening. Divorces are on the in- 
 crease and marriages are on the decrease. The 
 Chicago Vice Commission, after an exhausting 
 
GOOD-BYE TO GLORY 219 
 
 survey of the causes of the disintegration of family 
 life, gives as the first contributing cause the lack 
 of religious instruction in the home. In tens of 
 thousands of homes where the parents are nominal 
 Christians there is no recognition of God, not even 
 grace at the table. Parental discipline has declined, 
 parental respect is lacking on the part of multi- 
 tudes of growing boys and girls. The glory of 
 the family life where affection rules has in numer- 
 ous cases disappeared. With many families home 
 is simply a place to eat and sleep. The members 
 of the family circle go elsewhere for amusement, 
 elsewhere for social life, nowhere for spiritual 
 food, and the glory of the sweet intimacies has 
 departed from such unfortunate homes. 
 
 The glory of the spiritual life has departed from 
 many who still hold to the forms and externals 
 of Christianity. There are nominal Christian 
 homes today where the mere announcement that 
 a son or daughter had decided for the ministry 
 or the missionary career would involve the house- 
 hold in a paroxysm of grief and bitter disappoint- 
 ment. Fifty years ago the same announcement 
 in a Christian home would have been the occasion 
 of tears of joy and of thanksgiving to God for 
 the unspeakable blessing. 
 
 That Ichabod is frequently written on the in- 
 dividual character is a melancholy fact. That 
 men and women say " Good-bye to Glory," that 
 they turn away and aside from the glory of high 
 
220 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 ideals and simple faith and give themselves over 
 to the world, the flesh, and the devil, is alas, only 
 too true. Mr. Ingersoll, in his oration at his 
 brother's grave, said that " A wreck at last must 
 mark the end of each and all," and that " Every 
 life, no matter if its every hour is rich in love and 
 every moment jewelled with a joy, will at its close 
 become a tragedy as sad and deep and dark as 
 can be woven of the warp and woof of mystery 
 and death." This is superb rhetoric but it is falla- 
 cious reasoning. There are far worse tragedies 
 than death. The loss of a good name is worse. 
 The wreck of character is infinitely sadder. 
 
 Never shall I forget a poor, beaten, and battered 
 hulk of humanity whose acquaintance I made early 
 in my ministry with a city church. He limped 
 into the building during a Sunday morning service, 
 as curious, as comical, and as pathetic a figure as 
 I ever saw. He followed the sermon with avid 
 interest and entered into the singing of the more 
 familiar hymns with apparent relish. He waited 
 to see me after the service and informed me that 
 he was an old sailor, a sinner of deepest dye, an 
 inmate of the county Infirmary. He had a peg leg 
 and walked with a crutch; his right arm was 
 maimed and hung stiff at his side; he was blind 
 in one eye and a long scar disfigured the right 
 side of his face. The lobe of one ear was punc- 
 tured and his nose was misshapen and looked as 
 though it had been broken. He laid a tremulous 
 
GOOD-BYE TO GLORY 
 
 221 
 
 hand on my shoulder and looked me straight in 
 the eyes as he inquired : " Do you think the Lord 
 would receive me, poor, broken, and sinful as I 
 am ? " " If you come to Him penitent and believ- 
 ing, most assuredly He will receive you," I 
 answered. " Then I am coming forward next 
 Sunday morning," he replied, and pressing my 
 hand he hobbled away, as tragic a wreck of hu- 
 manity as ever I laid eyes upon. 
 
 He came forward the next Sunday morning 
 and in the presence of a congregation made up of 
 men and women all bearing the marks of clean 
 thinking and decent living, he witnessed the " good 
 confession." One afternoon of that same week 
 he was baptized and it took four of our strong 
 men to assist with his immersion, so helpless and 
 crippled was he. After his baptism he sat with 
 me in the Sunday Schoolroom, his bruised and 
 battered face aglow with such a light as never 
 was on sea or land. He told me the tale of his life 
 — how I wish I had taken notes then and there 
 of his life among all sorts and conditions of men 
 the world around. If Jack London or Morgan 
 Robertson had heard that story either could have 
 woven from, the bare outline of the old man's tale 
 a story of the sea, thrilling with adventurous epi- 
 sode. The old man (he was seventy-four) had 
 been a sailor for the most of his life; a sailor of 
 misfortune, one would say. He had actually been 
 a pirate and the hole in the lobe of his ear was 
 
222 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 the work of a bullet fired by a sailor on a vessel 
 which he and his fellow-pirates were plundering. 
 He had been in numerous hand-to-hand fights and 
 the scar on his face had been made by a cutlass. 
 He had been wicked and wild all the days of his 
 life, and now he was homeless, penniless, and all 
 but invalid. " And to think," he said, " that God 
 will take an old battered hulk like me and fill my 
 flabby sails with the wind of His holy spirit. O, 
 if I had but given myself to Him when I had 
 health and vigour. I have nothing to offer Him 
 now but this poor old wreck of myself." And 
 the old man sobbed like a little child. 
 
 Every Sunday morning for full six weeks he 
 worshipped with us, entering into the service with 
 deepest joy and a wholeheartedness that was good 
 to see. Then came a Sunday morning when I 
 missed him and on calling at the Infirmary I found 
 him in the hospital a very sick old man. He was 
 overjoyed to see me. I read to him the fourteenth 
 chapter of John and other comforting Scriptures 
 and we had prayer together. I left him full of 
 hope and the marred face aglow with a peace that 
 was not of this earth. Busy with many pastoral 
 duties, I fogot the old man for a week or ten 
 days, and on recalling him I hurried at once to 
 the Infirmary hospital. He was not in the ward. 
 I made inquiries. Alas, he had died a week before 
 and since no one had seen fit to call his pastor, 
 or perhaps no one knew of the old man's church 
 
GOOD-BYE TO GLORY 
 
 223 
 
 connection, they buried him in potter's field with- 
 out a single song of Zion, a word of Scripture, or 
 prayer of faith. 
 
 Poor old battered hulk ! I see him sometimes in 
 my day dreams, hobbling out of the past, a great 
 gaunt figure, terribly maimed, fearfully broken; 
 and I seem to hear his deep voice wail out the 
 words of mingled regret and marvel : " O, if I 
 had but given myself to the Lord when I was 
 young and vigorous instead of now when I am 
 old, helpless, and poor. And yet, how wonderful 
 the mercy of God to receive an old battered hulk 
 like me and fill my flabby sails with the strong 
 wind of His holy spirit." 
 
 Glory has departed from lives in which the 
 grosser sins find no hospitable welcome. Glory 
 has gone from men and women whose lives are 
 correct in observance of form and customs, and 
 of whom perhaps not the slightest infraction of a 
 conventional moral standard might be charged. 
 These are the men and women who have become 
 worldly in their outlook, who are indifferent to 
 things spiritual, who have no prayer life, and to 
 whom the higher things of the soul are as so many 
 " old wives' tales." They have said " Good-bye 
 to Glory,"* unconsciously, perhaps, but nevertheless 
 glory has departed from them, leaving their lives 
 barren and bleak. 
 
 If glory is to abide with state, home, church, and 
 individual, our work will have to centre about 
 
224 THE WISDOM OF GOD'S FOOLS 
 
 the child. The early chapters of I Samuel, from 
 which this text is taken, will show that Eli's 
 sons, Hophni and Phinehas, were tragic failures, 
 due to some neglect on Eli's part; while on the 
 other hand, the overtowering character of that 
 same period, the prophet Samuel, was so nurtured 
 and trained by his devout mother and by the in- 
 fluences of religion that he grew up into a man- 
 hood that was invulnerable to all the attacks of 
 evil. " The child comes into the world," as 
 Wordsworth says, " trailing clouds of glory." It 
 becomes our bounden duty and our great privilege 
 to give our best to preserve that glory in all its 
 pristine splendour. Just here has been our great 
 weakness — we have not dealt honestly with the 
 child in our midst. We shall have to come back 
 to the child, we shall have to put the child in the 
 midst if glory abide. " We need not predict the 
 future. We can determine it if we educate the 
 whole of every child for the whole of life." 
 
 FATHER IN HEAVEN, WE HAVE CONFUSED GLORY 
 WITH DIZZY HEIGHTS OF PLACE AND POWER, WITH 
 WEALTH AND LUXURY. OUR EYES HAVE BEEN DAZ- 
 ZLED BY THE FLEETING AND THE TEMPORAL. BUT 
 WHEREAS ONCE WE WERE BLIND, NOW WE SEE. IN 
 THE LIGHT OF JESUS' TEACHING WE BEHOLD THE 
 GLORY OF THE CHILDLIKE SPIRIT AND THE PURE 
 OF HEART — THE GLORY THAT FADETH NEVER. 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
Date Due 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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