ms LIFE AND WHAT TO LIVE FOR By SHERWOOD EDDY Association Press New Yorke: 124 Easr 28TH Srreet 1916 COPYRIGHT, I916, BY THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF YounG MEN’s CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATIONS Price: 10 cents each; 80 cents per dozen; $5.00 per hundred, plus carriage Life: And What to Live For Something is wrong in the world, and somehow I am wrong myself. There seems to be an inward cleavage, a central contradiction; a rift in the very center of my personality. I am not what I ought to be, what I was meant to be, or all that I might be. I am alive, but what am I living for? I have an ambition, but am I realizing it; a conscience, but am I living up to it; I seek happiness, but am I finding it? If there is something wrong, what is it? Is it life that is wrong, or I myself? “What is the meaning of life?’ asks Tolstoi; and every thinking mind or doubting heart has asked the question, in one form or another, since the world began. Ever since the ancient Greeks sought the summum bonum, and long before, men have tried to understand the problem of existence. Kant asks the question of philosophy, “What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope for?” Ruskin faces life with the same challenge from the point of view of practical living, “Whence came I? Why am I here? Whither am I going?” Sir Oliver Lodge in his “Reason and Belief’? asks essentially the same question from the standpoint of science, “Why do we exist? What are we here for? What does existence mean?” 3 Life is a problem, a paradox; worse still it is a con- tradiction. The very magnitude of human suffering would indicate that if life means anything it must mean something very intensely. The measure of our desires, our ambitions, and the capacities within us, and of. the far flung universe without us, suggest both magnitude and meaning. But what is life itself? Biology, while it cannot define, describes life as harmony with environ- ment: “the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations”; it is to be in vital connection with surroundings, in relation to the sources of life. But it requires at least two terms for its definition, the organism and the environment. In other words life is a relation- ship. There is no such thing as life in isolation, for absolute isolation is death. To be in correspondence with our material environ- ment means physical life. But even this leaves us un- satisfied, with all our higher powers craving a similar correspondence with a higher environment. What are the relationships of my super-sensible or higher life? Cor- responding to the three positive physical functions of as- similation, growth, and reproduction, there seem to be three similar relationships of the spiritual life. I shall find that to live truly I am confronted by the necessity of assimilation from my spiritual environment, of growth that I may become all I am capable of becoming in char- acter, and of the reproduction of life by self-sacrificing service for my fellow men. That is, I shall find I stand in some relation to the source and ground of existence that is religious, I have a relation or duty to myself that is moral, and to my fellow men that is social. 4 Let us, however, change the order and start with the second, as the simplest. I find that this doubting, ques- tioning, unsatisfied life within stands in a relation to myself, that is to my ideal, or possible or higher self. My whole being cries out for growth, for freedom, for self-realization. Conscience within and the moral order without summon me to noble living, to a life of purity, victory, and power. But life must mean not only growth, but reproductive service. A world of fellow men about me, often in physi- cal need, in mental ignorance, in conditions of social injustice, or in spiritual want, summon me to such a life of service. But this does not end my obligation. Even apart from my fellow men my life is not independent, isolated, and self-sufficient. I am a creature made debtor anew in every breath that.I breathe and in the power that comes from every pulse-beat. [ am not my own. I do not own my life but I owe it. My whole life, physical, mental, moral, and spiritual is dependent upon the source of life, upon the ground of existence, upon God. We have not time or space here to labor to prove the existence or nature of God.* For most of us the ques- tion of the existence of God is not our real difficulty, rather it lies within us. Our chief problem is not in God but in ourselves. It is within ourselves that we find the *An answer to those who have serious questions regarding religious fundamentals is given in the pamphlet “Doubt: or Practical Suggestions for those having Intellectual Difficulties regarding the Christian Faith,” published by Association Press, 124 East 28th Street, New York City. 5 central contradiction of life. It is here that something seems to be wrong and here that we wish to be right. THE Man Who Is WronGc Instead of fulfilling my duty to myself, instead of growth in character for the realization of my ideal, somehow I am wrong here in the very center of my being. My mind approves the ideal, my heart craves it, my will strives to achieve it, yet is it realized? Instead of purity, victory, and power I find impurity, defeat, and weakness. Instead of a natural and normal growth, I find rebellion and discord in the very center of the citadel of personality. If I have not yet found myself and if I am an honest man, I will cry out with that moral wrestler of old, and with the great souls that have faced the moral conflict since the world began, “O wretched man that I am!’ “The good that I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.” And when likewise I face the obligation to my fellow men and the call to build a new social order, 1 am com- pelled to say, “O selfish man that I am!” And when I turn to God, from a goading conscience which says “I ought” or, in more modern English, “I owe,” here before the final tribunal, and in the last court of appeal, I stand finally condemned and pronounce my own sentence, in the words, “O sinful man that I am.” But what is sin? I find within myself a rift, a cleavage, a divided self. Instead of glad obedience to my own conscience, I find the uprising of low desires. Instead 6 of glad service for a world of needy men, I find a self- centered life in conflict with the social good. Instead of life in God as the spiritual environment of the soul, a life as natural as breathing, glad as the sunshine and free as the air, I find this inner cleavage which makes me uncomfortable at the very thought of God. And this is sin. It is selfishness. It is the assertion of my lower self- life against my own conscience, the welfare of my fellow men, and the law of God. It is a voluntary break with my rightful and natural environment. It is a starving or stifling of the higher possibilities of life. It is disease, which is only the thriving of a lower parasitic form of life at the expense of the higher or normal life. Sin, then, is a break with the higher environment. It implies a false center in the organism and a corre- spondence with a false environment. And what a break it is—what misery it entails! Morally it breaks the law of my own being; socially it breaks the law of human happiness; religiously it breaks the law of God; and finally it breaks the law of life and ends in a moral wreck, in death itself. It is wrong, wrong every way, abso- lutely and infinitely wrong. It fills our prisons, hospitals, asylums. It wrecks men, ruins homes, divides society, undermines nations, blots out human happiness, kills life. It? Nay, rather “Thou art the man!’ It is no imper- sonal abstraction, but the rebellion of a free will against the sovereign will of God, against all that is right. It is just being wrong, wrong in yourself and wrong all round. Professor James thus defines two contrasted moral states or conditions. On the one hand there is “a self 4 hitherto divided, and consciously wrong, inferior, and unhappy.” And on the other hand there is a life “united and consciously right, superior, and happy.” We might draw up in two parallel columns the con- trast between the two states. One is divided, the other is unified; one is a life of discord, the other of harmony. One is fundamentally and inevitably inconsistent, the other is consistent. The divided life is wrong with itself, wrong with its fellow men, wrong with God. The divided life is of necessity the unhappy life, for happiness, as Aristotle shows, depends on the harmonious exercise of function, the unified realization of all the higher ends of being. And the ultimate negation of life, and its final alternative, is death, or the want of correspondence between the spiritual organism and its spiritual environ- ment. Here then are two contrasted conditions: life or death, harmony or discord, unity or division, right or wrong, light or darkness, happiness or unhappiness. It may be maintained that to err is human, that we cannot be perfect or realize our ideal, that life always is and there- fore must be divided. Tue IDEAL REALIZED But one did realize the ideal, did live life at the full. One lived the unified life and claimed that He lived it. Harnack has pointed out that all other founders of religion have passed through some crisis or “conver- sion” or found deliverance from a once broken, divided, and discordant life—all save one, Jesus of Nazareth. 8 As we recall His life, is anything more marked or manifest than its consistent unity? There is no regret, no compromise, no shifting, no repentance. His life moves to some hidden harmony. He is right with Him- self. There is no break between profession and practice, life and teaching, religion and morality. He is what He teaches. He teaches what He is, and calmly says, “I am the Truth.” He is right with mankind. With an enthusiasm for humanity, a sense of the infinite worth of the individual, and with infinite love for all men as His brothers, He proclaims a new social program, creates a new social consciousness, furnishes a new social motive, provides a new social dynamic, and conceives a new social order—the Kingdom of God. And He is right not only with Himself and with men, but with God. He lives in the sunshine of His presence, conscious of perfect harmony and oneness with Him. God, for Him, is the one great reality, and He makes Him real for all men. Always emphasizing His oneness with us and sharing His fellowship with us, He seems to have enough of God for Himself and all humanity, for time and all eternity. Finding life at its center and source, He goes out to call all men to be His brothers and children of the loving Father in Heaven. He has brought to men the realization of God as Father and made Him the common possession of all mankind. Certainly no other ever had such unity in himself, such a passion for service for humanity, such a fulness of God in human life. And certainly no other has so helped individuals and society toward the realization of this threefold, unified life. 9 If you have not yourself realized your ideal, if you are wrong instead of right, could you not take Him as your ideal? The whole significance of His life was that it was lived for others, that they might have life, have it abun- dantly, with every faculty raised to its highest power and every relationship realized. To whom else shall we go? How strong He was: strong in temptation—fiercely tempted forty days, He returns with power enough to save a defeated humanity; strong in His power over nature, which seemed to spring up in miracle in answer to His touch; strong in His hold upon men, who forsook all to follow Him and after sixty generations still gladly go to the ends of the earth or to martyrdom for Him; strong in His hold upon God, the center and source and substance of Life. How pure and holy, how right He was. He is a kind of “personalized conscience” to us, a realized ideal, a revelation of all we might be. He calls a whole world to repentance but needs none Himself. If I am wrong, He at least was right. And how loving He was. Through days of healing, and nights of prayer, with compassion for multitudes, yet lavishing His care upon obscure individuals, loving the poor, touching the leper, healing the sick, laying His hands on the heads of little children; here is love vast as the ocean, forced through the channels of a single heart, the very love of God in a single human life. For what- ever be our doubts about Jesus, we can ask no more of God than that He should be like Christ. If God is like Christ then indeed “God’s in His Heayen—all’s right with the world.” His cross was the last limit of boundless 10 love, laying down its life for the utmost limit of sin, and pledging Himself and all the goodness of God to us, to the uttermost and forever. Well, if you are honest, and you are, you will admit that somehow you are wrong and He is right—strong, pure, and loving, right with Himself, right with the world, right with the loving God. He was the ideal realized, and realized for us. The first step in the realization of an ideal is to accept it. Will you then just as you are, and wrong as you are, begin to follow Him just as He is, and whatever your doubts or difficulties about Him may be? Thus simply began the first few disciples to follow Him when they knew less of Him than you do, as He called them with glad assurance, “Follow me; learn of me.” THe Man Woo Is RicHT To begin to get right you must aim right, you must choose right, you must follow right. Now to be frank, to begin to follow Christ would be to begin to be a Christian. You may not like the word, but what is a Christian but a follower of Christ, or one who is trying to live His life? And could we take this as a provisional, working definition that “a Christian is one who is re- sponding to all the meanings which he finds in Christ?” The first disciples, or learners, had not learned much about theology or philosophy or even about Himself. They had everything to learn, but they were willing to begin; they had a long journey to go, but they were following. They had a great moral stature to which to II grow, but they were growing; a world to win, but they were serving; a God to know, but they were learning. It was a very small and a very imperfect organism and a very great Environment, but they had begun to respond and they were living. To revert to the original order of our threefold relationship, a Christian would seem to be one who is responding to Christ in these three funda- mental relations of life, or one who is right with God, with himself, with his fellow men. He is one who, through Christ, seeks to live a right life, for God as his Father and for men as his brothers. First of all, to be a Christian is to be Right with God. The man is no longer cut off from his environment, starved, stunted, or dead. As naturally as the flower seeks the sun, by assimilation he lives and grows and has his being in God. He has entered upon the filial life, and the daily wonder of his Father’s love, new every morning, fresh every moment, surprises him at every turn. God opens to His child His very heart in the words, “Son, thou art ever with me, and all that is mine is thine.” The sense of being wrong, the sense of guilt for the past is now gone forever: for the man feels himself no longer a condemned slave but an accepted son. All sense of loneliness is gone, for he has ever with him the Great Companion, who has called us “friends.” All fear is banished from the true Christian life, for fear is expec- tation of evil and all evil is excluded from the will of God, for, “If God be for us who can be against us?” All sense of incompleteness, of being lost and forgotten and insignificant is gone, for “We are complete in Him,” 12 and the child finds his Father the supplement and com- plement of his own imperfect but growing life. The great adventure of life is now alluring, glad, and free; fraught with infinite possibilites, and assured by all the promises of God. At last, in the breadth and length and depth and full sweep of life, he lives. Secondly, to be a Christian is also to be Right with one’s self. Not that by any means he has yet attained his end or approached perfection, but he has accepted the ideal in the purpose and plan of God manifested for him in Christ. He has not attained to merit, but obtained a gift. He has not achieved a completed character, but entered a relationship. He has not satisfied a judge, but he has found a Friend. He has not reached an end, but he has made a beginning. His aim at least is right. To be righteous is to be right. The man is counted right because he is right, right in attitude, right in faith, And faith will in time make it a fact in experience. As the acorn is the promise of the oak, and the seed of the tree, faith is the germ of the full grown fact, the promise of the perfected character. Under Christ’s touch Simon, the ‘“‘fickle one’ becomes Peter a very “rock” of strength, and the obscure and insignificant fisherman a world-saint. John a “son of thunder” becomes the apostle of love. The hardened “Saul” becomes “Paul” writing with many tears, and the caste-ridden Jew becomes the apostle to the Gentiles. At His touch the foul leper becomes clean, the\ miserly Zaccheus becomes the first Christian philanthropist, and the very thief on the cross the first to enter with Him the life beyond. His touch has still its ancient power. And 13 we, in turn, like the great multitude who have gone on before us, become today His moral miracles. And, thirdly, to be a Christian means to be Right with men. Weare saved to serve. The Christian life cannot be lived in isolation. Here, too, we follow the example of Christ, for to be a Christian is, as the word implies, to be a Christ-one. It is the reversal of the old selfish life, for it shifts life to a new center. It is as revo- lutionary to character as the passage from the old earth- centered Ptolemaic plan of the heavens to the sun- centered Copernican system. “The hero is the man who is immovably centered,” says Emerson, and the Christ-centered man finds all things new. He now lives, not to get but to give, not for selfishness but for sacrifice. He, too, catches the spirit of Christ and joins the gathering host in the great succession of service. Here, too, the touch of Christ has still its ancient power to make men serve. An Augustine at His touch turns from the life of the libertine to that of the bishop, scholar, and writer. Francis of Assisi leaves his revels to go out in poverty, in joy, in song, till all Italy awakens at his call. Loyola yields his sword in the night’s vigil, and with it his life of lust, to muster the fighting “company of Jesus” and awaken southern Europe. Luther, the peasant-miner’s son, calls northern Europe to reform, at His summons. Count Zinzendorf, the worldling, becomes the missionary enthusiast. George Whitefield, the bartender, becomes at His touch the revivalist of Britain and America. John Bunyan, the drunken tinker, writes Pilgrim’s Progress; Jeremy Taylor, the barber, becomes the great bishop 14 and theologian; Wilberforce leaves his own bondage to free the slave; John Howard rescues the prisoner ; George Williams, the crude country boy, founds a new lay order. George Muller turns from his lusts to rescue the orphan. Lincoln, the rail splitter, rises as the liberator of the American slaves. Jerry McAuley, the river thief, goes out to save a thousand criminals and Samuel Hadley, the drunkard, to become the winner of men. These and all men who have caught His spirit or felt the throb of His love were quickened to a new life of service. Who but Christ so served or inspired service, so lived and died and lives again and ever again in each new life that He dominates? Ah, this it is to be a Christian! It is just to be what we know we ought to be, what we were made to be—to be right—right with God, right with ourselves, right with the world, right all round, and happy all through. For the unthought and unsought and inevitable resultant of the full Christian life is a radiant joy and gladness, the sheer happiness of the man who lives, the harmonious exercise of function with every power in full play. DIAGNOSIS AND CLASSIFICATION Have you got it? Are you living in this relation? Let your own heart speak and judge for itself. Professor James in his “Varieties of Religious Experience” defines conversion as the process by which “a self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong, inferior, and unhappy, becomes united and consciously right, superior, and happy, in consequence of its firm hold on religious realities.” 15 By this test is your life united or divided? Is it con- sciously right, superior, and happy? Or is it consciously wrong in its relationships, inferior even to its own im- perfect standards, and unhappy as a result? A little fearless and honest diagnosis will help us at this point. If we are right we can know it “consciously” and have a resultant happiness, and if we are wrong there must be some reason for it. Test your life by the tuning fork of conscience and see if it rings true and is in harmony, or if it is discordant and out of tune. Test it in the light of the three relationships which characterize the normal life. Are you right with God? Have you recognized Him as your Father and taken the filial attitude of a little child? Have you the glad sense of sonship? If not, ask yourself frankly why not? A man is conscious of his physical or mental life; surely the man who has it may be equally conscious of his spiritual life. A man has no doubt about his calling, whether he is a carpenter or a mason, a lawyer or a doctor, a follower of this trade or that; surely he may know if he is a follower of Christ. He has no doubts about his citizenship, whether of Tarsus or Jerusalem, whether he is English or American, Jew or Gentile. Surely he may know also if his “citizenship is in heaven.” He knows and is not ashamed of his family or of his father. He bears his name and lives in his fellowship. Surely, he may know and rejoice in his heavenly Father. To His child He is not some dim, distant, impersonal First Cause, or Inscrutable Energy, or World Ground, but the central certainty and joyous reality of his daily 16 life. Is He this to you? Have you become or are you willing to become His child? Again, are you right with yourself? Have you accepted the ideal and God’s way of realizing it? Is your life like a comet rushing madly through space, colliding with all that comes in its way; or like the planet that has caught the music of the spheres in its ordered orbit round the sun? Or apply the third test, are you right with a world of needy men? Have you a genuine love for men that leads you to effective service for them? Have you a message for men with a moral dynamic that can save men from themselves and their lower lusts, that can lift those who have lost themselves, or remend and make anew men who are like “broken earthenware,” the moral wrecks of life of which Harold Begbie tells us? If not, there is a great, verifiable human experience to which you are still a stranger and which you may know and prove if you will. How To Get RIGHT Most men want to be right in the relations of life, but some go about it in the wrong way. There are three common errors, three mistaken methods to be avoided here. First of all, no man can get right within, merely by outward forms and ceremonies. For the essence of religion is an inward relationship, not an outward cere- monial. We must “cleanse first the inside of the cup... . that the outside thereof may become clean also.” We must transform personality at its center and source, we must affect character. No outward act is a substitute 17 for this inward transformation. “My son, give me thy heart’? must ever be the reality of religion. The Pharisee thought he was saved by his outward institutions and privileges; by circumcision, the passover, the scrupulous tithing of petty trifles; he overlooked the great essentials of the love of God and man. But “neither is circum- cision anything nor uncircumcision, but a new creation” —life from within is the essential. Every formal religion has relied upon its sacraments, but if the heart is wrong, no sacrament, Christian or non-Christian, can be a sub- stitute for character. Judas had been baptized and had partaken of the Christian privileges; Ananias and Sap- phira had had their part in the Christian sacraments. Simon Magus had been baptized but he had neither part nor lot in the reality of religion; for his “heart is not right before God.’ Here are the two eternal poles of religion, “thy heart,” and “before God.” Again, a man is not made right by selfish or legal good works. These have always been the first impulse of the natural man in every age and in every religion. If there is something wrong he naturally tries to right himself. But the inevitable failure of this method is evident in the very nature of the case. For religion, as we have seen, is not an attainment but an attitude, not a series of Pharisaic meritorious works, but the loving personal rela- tionship of a son to a Father, not the making of a record but the making of a man. Though it implies morality, it is much more than morality. The self-righteous Pharisee was ahead of the Publican who prayed “God be merciful to me a sinner,” in attainment, but not in attitude. His very selfish attainment rendered vital reli- 18 gion almost impossible. His self-satisfied pride in his cheap outward record of respectability had turned its back on God as the loving Father, and kept him from entering the spiritual Kingdom as a little child. Many a modern man, who never dreams himself to be a Pharisee, sets up some subjective or arbitrary standard of his own of outward morality and because he is better than some others around him, or prides himself on his generous impulses, or has done “about as near right as he can,” thinks he has all the religion he needs. He draws his circle of heaven just large enough to include himself. But he forgets that religion is not only doing right, but being right, with God, with himself, with his fellow men. A third error is avoided if we remember that religion does not consist in knowledge, nor in dead and formal faith without works, nor in mere orthodoxy of belief, We may know all about the theory of religion and never practice it. We may have been brought up in a Christian home or church and have a lot of second-hand religion that we have received from our parents or teachers or friends, to whom it was a vital fact, and yet we may never have appropriated it for ourselves. We may know all about the Bible and about Christ, without ever having yielded our lives to Him. But how often He has Himself warned us that this is not religion, “Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father who is in Heaven.” It is not the great in intellect but the pure in heart who see God. It is not outward familiarity but inward response that determines religious reality. What then is the relation between faith and works? We 19 are rightly related to God by faith alone, but true faith is never alone, it always manifests itself in works. Faith is the root, works are the fruit; faith is the cause, works are the result. We work because we are right, not in order to get right. Briefly, then, a man is not made right by outward forms and ceremonies, by self-sufficient good works, nor by knowledge. He becomes right by entering into a right relation with God as his Father through the simple trust of a little child. Let us turn then from the wrong way to the right way of getting right. To realize what is needed, let us see where the man is wrong. Any personal relation may be viewed from the standpoint of either party. If religion is the establishment of a right relation with God, we may view it from the point of view of what God does or of what we have to do; that is, objectively or sub- jectively. On God’s side it is the giving of a gift, on our part the receiving of it; on the divine side there is the giving of life or “regeneration” and on the human the turning to receive the gift in “conversion.” Jesus, however, did not speak of this experience as of a deep theological mystery, but as the simplest and most natural thing in the world. In the first gospel He speaks of it as simply entering a door or gate, accepting an invitation to a glad wedding feast, turning to God with the teachable spirit of a little child. In the second gospel He says it is just believing a piece of good news, following a person in fellowship and service, with the resultant healing of a divided, broken personality so that life is made “whole” with all its powers restored. In the third gospel the experience on God’s side is likened to the 20 finding of a lost sheep or a lost coin and on the man’s side the return of a lost son to his father. In the fourth gospel it is the receiving of a person as an indwelling guest in the heart, or, to an ignorant woman, it is likened to taking a drink to quench the thirst of life.* Only once to a theologian does He speak of the mystery of a new birth, and after all what more is that, on the human side, than just entering life, or beginning to live as a little child? Becoming a Christian is just beginning to be one, just becoming a learner of Christ’s teaching and a fol- lower of His life. Perhaps the clearest teaching of all is that of the simple story of the son who lost his father in Luke XV. Observe throughout that it is a relation of a father and son, personal, vital, voluntary; not legal, judicial, govern- mental. There were three things wrong with this young man. He was wrong with his father, with himself, with his family. He gets as far away as he can from his father. He turns his back upon his father and his face to his own selfish life of sin. There are no letters, no love, no fellow- ship, no correspondence on the son’s side. He is “lost” to his father, away from the one to whom he belongs. Being wrong with his father he cannot be right with himself. Before he “came to himself” he was living as it were beside himself or rather beneath himself, out of his true self, out of center. Rags, swine, and harlots were only the outward symptoms of the wrong that started when he turned his back on his father ; for he was equally *See Matthew 7:13, 18:2, 22:2. Mark 1:15, 17. Luke 15. John 1:12, 3:16, 4:10, 14, 5:24, 10:9, 10. 2I wrong whether in rags or in respectability, with swine or with selfish Pharisees. Wrong with his father, and wrong in himself, he could not be right with men. Separation from his father sepa- rated him from his home, his brother, his duties, from right relations with all men. Observe now how simple and natural and right is his return. He says “I will arise and go to my father.” He does not stay away to earn merit or become more respectable. What the father wanted was not respecta- bility but his son. “He came to Himself”; he found him- self. As the meaning of the word conversion implies, he simply turned round. And, he came home to a new life of joy with all its rightful relationships and possi- bilities of service. All wrong before, he becomes right all round now. Essentially it was one act, but it affects all his relationships. It was one act but it has two aspects ; it was a turning from and a turning to, a break with the past or lower environment and a correspondence with the higher, which in theological language would be repentance and faith. In other language, conversion is a definite change of ethical standpoint, of the moral direction of a man’s life. “It is the birth of a new, dominant affection by which the God-consciousness, hitherto marginal and vague, be- comes focal and dynamic.” In another aspect, it is the response of the whole personality to the personality of Christ. This change of ethical standpoint is illustrated, as Dr. Fosdick points out, by the contrast of the two requests of the son “give me” and “make me.” His first thought is, give me the inheritance: life for him is the 22 selfish possession of things, of pleasures, of passions. But the higher conception is, “make me” what I ought to be: life is now a character in right relationship. Indeed religion, and life itself, is just the sum total of a man’s personal relationships. Even as Christ said, a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of things; this is life, to know God. Which of these two characterizes your own life? Have you known this change or experience which has been repeated and verified by men in every one of the last nineteen centuries? WHEN To GET RIGHT Professor James in his classic essay “The Will to Believe,” shows that every proposal to act comes to us in the form of an hypothesis. It may be an issue that is either living or dead; it may be one that is either forced or avoidable; it may be either momentous or trivial. The question that we now have before us is that of the very meaning of life, involving also the questions of the existence and nature of God, the value of Christ, the question of duty, of social obligation and of human destiny. It is a living issue, it is unavoidable, and it is momentous. It affects character and destiny for time and eternity. It is for every man the supreme problem of existence, for upon it all the issues of life depend. There are two fundamental questions that may be asked concerning Christ. The first was asked by Jesus Him- self as the test question to His disciples, “Who say ye that I am?” The second was asked by Pilate at His trial. “What then shall I do with Jesus that is called 23 Christ?” The first is a question of opinion or belief, the second, one of action or decision. The latter is well illustrated in Pilate’s own case. The issue was unavoid- able. He had to do something with Jesus. He tries first every possible evasion. He thrice pronounces Jesus inno- cent, he sends Him to Herod to escape the necessity of deciding for himself, but Herod is equally cowardly and sends Him back. He offers to release Him instead of Barabbas. He then has Him scourged as a compromise. He washes his hands in protest. He finally appeals to the multitude with the words, “Behold the man.” But still he had to decide; he had to do something. He must crucify or release Him, accept or reject, confess or deny Him. Ultimately no middle ground was possible. Silence, procrastination, excuses, compromise, or cowardice did not solve the question. What motives beat upon him in this soul conflict! In judging Christ he was really judging himself. If he rejects Him he rejects God who sent him; if he rejects Him, he rejects his own conscience and higher nature; if he rejects Him he is rejecting the hope of his nation and of mankind. And everyone who rejected Him that night sealed his own doom. Pilate himself was finally recalled to Rome to appear before Caligula, and, as Eusebius tells us, wearied with misfortune committed suicide. Herod, the mocker of Christ and murderer of John the Baptist, was banished and died in disgrace. Judas His betrayer went out and hanged himself. The Jews who said, “His blood be on us,’’ were conquered, their temple and city destroyed, and scattered to the ends of the earth for twenty centuries. 24 But on the other hand those who accepted Christ found the joy of life, abundant and eternal; right with God, right with themselves, right with a world of men. The issue is now before you. It is living, it is unavoidable, it is momentous. What then will you do with Jesus who is called Christ? Will you not, just as you are, whatever may be your doubt, or difficulty, or sin, accept Christ and begin to follow Him? Do it today. For the present is the moment of duty, of opportunity and of action. Do it now. Like the son who came home to his father, just turn round and do right. Come home to your Father, come to yourself, come to a life of service. For this is the meaning of existence. This is Life—and what we should live for. 25 vA Wat \ ; Lay A Beh 4hhh ; San 13 . ii nt i isa y re) fi! 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