{"collection":"scripture-revelation","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_18712/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_18712","id":"gutenberg_18712","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18712","summary":null,"tags":["Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches","Category: Philosophy & Ethics","Category: Religion/Spirituality","Conduct of life"],"text":"E-text prepared by Al Haines\n\n\n\nLEVELS OF LIVING\n\nEssays on Everyday Ideals\n\nby\n\nHENRY FREDERICK COPE\n\nAuthor of \"The Modern Sunday-School\nin Principle and Practice\"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNew York ---- Chicago ---- Toronto\nFleming H. Revell Company\nLondon And Edinburgh\nCopyright, 1908, by\nFleming H. Revell Company\nNew York: 158 Fifth Avenue\nChicago: 80 Wabash Avenue\nToronto: 25 Richmond Street, W.\nLondon: 21 Paternoster Square\nEdinburgh: 100 Princes Street\n\n\n\n\n  To My Wife\n\n  Not in the sentiment of dedication alone,\n  offering to you what I may have done, but\n  in simple acknowledgment of obligation\n  to you\n\n    Elizabeth\n\n  best gift of God and inspiration of man\n\n\n\n\nUnder the title of \"A Sermon For To-day\" these short essays, on the art\nof every-day living in the light of eternal life, were published by\n_The Chicago Sunday Tribune_, through a series of years, and were\nregularly printed in the Sunday editions of a group of the great\ndailies.  The short sentences were also published with the Sermons\nunder the head of \"Sentence Sermons.\"  The courtesy of _The Chicago\nDaily Tribune_ in permitting the publication of these \"sermons,\" with\nsuch changes as have seemed best, is gratefully acknowledged.\n\n\n\n\nCONTENTS\n\n\n     I.  THE HIGHER LEVELS\n         The Real and the Ideal--The Bread of Life--Life's\n         Unvarying Values.\n\n    II.  INVISIBLE ALLIES\n         More than a Fighting Chance--The Unseen\n         Hand--The One in the Midst.\n\n   III.  THE SOVEREIGNTY OF SERVICE\n         Self and Service--My Soul or My Service?--The\n         Satisfaction of Service.\n\n    IV.  THE RIGHT TO HAPPINESS\n         The Power of Happiness--The Secret of\n         Happiness--The Folly of Anxiety.\n\n     V.  THE CURRICULUM OF CHARACTER\n         The Great School--The Purpose of the\n         Course--The Price of Perfection.\n\n    VI.  THE AGE-LONG MIRACLE\n         The Sufficient Sign--Behold the Man--The\n         Life that Lifts.\n\n   VII.  SEEING THE UNSEEN\n         The Sense of the Unseen--The Brook in the\n         Way--That Which Is High.\n\n  VIII.  SOURCES OF STRENGTH AND INSPIRATION\n         Strength for the Daily Task--The Sense of\n         the Infinite--The Great Inspiration.\n\n    IX.  FINDING FOUNDATIONS\n         The Passing and Permanent--Facing the\n         Facts--The Real Foundation.\n\n     X.  THE PASSION FOR PERFECTION\n         The Great Search--The Hunger of the Ages--The\n         Sole Satisfaction.\n\n    XI.  THE PRICE OF SUCCESS\n         The Law of Selection--The Fallacy of\n         Negation--The Secret of All.\n\n   XII.  DIVINE SERVICE\n         The Ideal Service--The Orthodox Service--The\n         Heavenly Service.\n\n  XIII.  OUR FATHER AND OUR FELLOWS\n         The Primary Reconciliation--Faith in Our\n         Fellows--The Law of Forgiveness.\n\n   XIV.  MEN AND MAMMON\n         Riches and Righteousness--Religion and\n         Business--The Moral End of Money-Making.\n\n    XV.  THE EVERY-DAY HEAVEN\n         The Beauty of Holiness--The Gladness of\n         Goodness--The True Paradise\n\n   XVI.  TRUTH AND LIFE\n         Religion of a Practical Mind--The Head\n         and the Heart--New Truths for New Days.\n\n  XVII.  THE FRUITS OF FAITH\n         Root and Fruit--The Orthodox Accent--The\n         Business of Religion.\n\n XVIII.  THE FORCE OF FAITH\n         \"The Victory that Overcometh\"--Fear\n         and Faith--Faith for the Future.\n\n   XIX.  HINDRANCES AND HELPS FROM WITHIN\n         Worry--A Cure for the Blues--The Gospel of Song.\n\n    XX.  DOES HE CARE?\n         The One at the Helm--The Shepherd and\n         the Sheep--The Father's Care.\n\n\n\n\nI\n\nThe Higher Levels\n\n  _The Real and the Ideal_\n  _The Bread of Life_\n  _Life's Unvarying Values_\n\n\n_The ideal is the mold in which the real is cast._\n\n_Half of success is in seeing the significance of little things._\n\n_He finds no weal who flees all woe._\n\n_You do not make life sacred by looking sad._\n\n_Sympathy is a key that fits the lock of any heart._\n\n_Soul health will not come by taking religion as a dose._\n\n_Many a cloud that we call sorrow is but the shadow of our own\nselfishness._\n\n_To live wholly for possessions is to paralyze the life to the\npossibility of permanently possessing anything._\n\n_It takes more than willingness to be nothing to make you amount to\nsomething._\n\n_This is never a wrong world to him who is right with its heart._\n\n\nTHE REAL AND THE IDEAL\n\nIt is probable that from the age of sixteen up to thirty Jesus of\nNazareth spent His life in mechanical toil; He made wooden plows, ax\nhandles, and yokes; He served as a carpenter.  Then for three years He\ngave Himself to the ministry of ideal things, exclusively to the\nservice of the spirit.\n\nThere is a wonderful satisfaction in making things, in looking over\nsome concrete piece of work accomplished when the day ends.  It is a\nsatisfaction that belongs to the artisan.  Is it not probable that many\nsaid that it was a great pity when Jesus gave up so useful a trade as\nHis?  To them He seemed to be but chasing the rainbow.\n\nBut to-day who possesses a single one of the things that young\ncarpenter made?  And did we possess them all what better off would the\nworld be?  Yet, on the other hand, how ill could this world afford to\nlose what He gave it by those three years of the service of the ideal.\n\nIn our age of things we so easily forget how large is the place of the\nideal and the spiritual.  Ever estimating our assets in the concrete,\nwe fail to recognize that our real wealth lies in thoughts and things\nabstract.  The permanent possessions of humanity are spiritual.  Not\nacres nor armies, not banks nor business make a nation, but mighty,\ncompelling ideals and traditions.\n\nJesus, Shakespeare, Browning, Lowell, Emerson left no goods and\nchattels, no bonds and mortgages; they left inspirations; they\nbequeathed ideals; living first for the soul, their souls survive and\nremain to us all.  The truly great who still stand after the test of\nthe years are those who have lived for the spirit.\n\nThis is as true of the worker and the warrior as of the philosopher and\npoet.  All were inspired by glowing visions; they set their affections\non things above the trifles for which we struggle and spend ourselves.\nThey endured as seeing glories to us invisible; therefore their names\nendure.\n\nThe great undertakings of our own day are possible only under spiritual\ninspirations.  No rewards of money only can induce a man to steadfastly\nconduct affairs of great moment and enterprise; he is buoyed up by a\ngreat hope; often the very greatness of the task and the sense of\nserving great ends carry him on; always he sees the worth in the ideal\nrather than the wage.\n\nWe must learn to measure life with the sense of the infinite.  We must\nnot think that a man has failed because he has not left burdened\nwarehouses and bonds.  We must cease to think that we can tell whether\nwork be high or lowly by the size of the wage.  We need eyes to see the\nglory of the least act in the light of the glowing motive.\n\nA new estimate is placed on each act when it is measured not by bread\nalone but by the things of the soul.  The mother's care of the\nchildren; the father's steady humble toil for them, the faithful\nwatching over the sick, the ministry of the lowly, all have a new glory\nin the light of the love that leads the way and the spirit that guides\nthose who do the least of these things.\n\nWe need to learn for ourselves what is the work that endures.  It is a\ngood thing to lay a course of bricks so that it shall be true, but of\ngreater value to the world than the wall that stands firm is the spirit\nthat forces the man to build aright.  No man can do even this without\nan ideal set in his heart, and when the wall shall have fallen the\nworld shall still be enriched by his ideal.\n\nToo many of us are fretting because we are not getting on in the world.\nSeeing the apparent ease with which some acquire fortune, we become\ndiscontented with our small gains.  We talk as though fortunes and\nfollies, money and lands were the only things worth while.  Yet we know\nbetter, for we all find our real joys in other things.\n\n\n\nTHE BREAD OF LIFE\n\nThere are lives that have bread in abundance and yet are starved; with\nbarns and warehouses filled, with shelves and larders laden they are\nempty and hungry.  No man need envy them; their feverish, restless\nwhirl in the dust of publicity is but the search for a satisfaction\nnever to be found in things.  They are called rich in a world where no\nothers are more truly, pitiably poor; having all, they are yet lacking\nin all because they have neglected the things within.\n\nThe abundance of bread is the cause of many a man's deeper hunger.\nHaving known nothing of the discipline that develops life's hidden\nsources of satisfaction, nothing of the struggle in which deep calls\nunto deep and the true life finds itself, he spends his days seeking to\nsatisfy his soul with furniture, with houses and lands, with yachts and\nmerchandise, seeking to feed his heart on things, a process of less\npromise and reason than feeding a snapping turtle on thoughts.\n\nIt takes many of us altogether too long to learn that you cannot find\nsatisfaction so long as you leave the soul out of your reckoning.  If\nthe heart be empty the life cannot be filled.  The flow must cease at\nthe faucet if the fountains go dry.  The prime, the elemental\nnecessities of our being are for the life rather than the body, its\nhouse.  But, alas, how often out of the marble edifice issues the poor\nemaciated inmate, how out of the life having many things comes that\nwhich amounts to nothing.\n\nThe essential things are not often those which most readily strike our\nblunt senses.  We see the shell first.  To the undeveloped mind the\nmaterial is all there is.  But looking deeper into life there comes an\nawakening to the fact and the significance of the spiritual, the\nfeeling that the reason, the emotions, the joys and pains that have\nnothing to do with things, the ties that knit one to the infinite, all\nconstitute the permanent elements of life.\n\nBecause man is a spirit his life never can consist wholly in things; he\nmust come into his heritage of the soul wealth of all the ages; he must\nreach out, though often as in the dark, until across the void there\ncome voices, the sages and the seers, the prophets, and the poets\nspeaking the language of the soul.  In these he finds his food nor can\nhis deeper hunger be assuaged until it thus is fed.\n\nBecause man is a spirit and gradually is coming into the dominant\nspirit life in which things shall count for less and thought and\ncharacter for more, he seeks after his own kind.  The deeps of life\nhave their relationships.  The spirit of man cries out after the father\nof spirits.  By whatever name men have called the most high they ever\nhave sought after Him, the eternal, who would be one with them in soul,\nin all that is essential and abiding in being.\n\nEvery religion, every philosophy, every endeavour after character and\ntruth is but the cry of humanity for word with God.  Hearing His word\non any lip the heart of man answers with joy.  The words of eternal\ntruth have been the food of the great in all ages.  Fainting in the\nfight the message from the unseen, the echo of everlasting verities,\nhas revived their spirits; they have fought the fight that despises\nthings and seeks truth.\n\nWho would not exchange a mess of pottage for the benediction from a\nfather's lips?  Who is so dead he no longer finds more satisfaction in\ntruth and love and beauty than in food or furniture?  And why are we so\nfoolish as to seek to satisfy ourselves with things that perish, while\ndown to the least blade of creation earth is laden with unfading riches\nand God is everywhere?\n\nIf we might but learn this lesson, we people of the laden hand and the\nempty heart, that since life is more than digestion and man more than\nbeast or machine, since determining all is the spiritual world, they\nonly are wise who set first things first, who use the garnered\nexperience of the past and the opportunities of the present to the\nenriching of the soul, who listen among all the voices of time for the\nwords that proceed from the lips of Him who inhabiteth eternity.\n\n\n\nLIFE'S UNVARYING VALUES\n\nLife is the business of learning to use things as tools, the real as\nthe servant of the ideal, to make conditions even better that character\nmay grow the more, to serve in the making of things and the enduring of\nthings under the inspiration of the full and glorious purpose of life,\nthe realizing of the best for ourselves, the rendering of our best to\nothers.\n\nOnly an age that has lost both heart and intellect--the divinely given\nmeasuring rods of life--will think of estimating a life by the money\nmeasure.  It is a shallow world that knows a man as soon as and only\nwhen it has scheduled his marketable assets; nor is it a happy augury\nfor a nation when it acquires the habit of estimating its men by the\nlength of the catalogues of their possessions.\n\nA period of outer prosperity is always in danger of being one of inner\nparalysis.  Luxury is a foe to life.  Character does not develop\nfreely, largely, beautifully in an atmosphere of commercialism.  A\nmoral decline that but presages enduring disaster is sure to succeed\nthe supremacy of the market.\n\nThe great danger is that we shall set the tools of life before its\nwork, that we shall make life serve our business or our ambitions\ninstead of causing ambitions, activities, and opportunities all to\ncontribute to the deepening, enriching, and strengthening of the life\nitself.  In the details of making a living it is easy to lose sight of\nthe prime thing, the life; it is easy to forget that the great question\nis not, what have you? but, what are you?\n\nLife cannot consist in things any more than silk can consist of\nshuttles, or pictures of brushes and palettes.  Life is both process\nand product; but things and fame and power are no more than the tools\nand machinery serving to perfect the product.  Life must consist in\nthoughts, experiences, motives, ideals--in a word, in character.  A\nman's life is what he is.\n\nBut what a man is will depend on what he does with the things he has or\nmay have.  Let him once set the possession of things as his loftiest\nideal, let this avarice of things enter the heart and speedily the love\nof the good will leave.  To that god all honour, all truth loving, all\ngentleness and humanity are sacrificed.  When possession becomes life's\nruling passion it doesn't take long for principle to be forgotten.\n\nThe danger to-day is not that our people will fail in the world's\ncontests because they lack either money, mind, or muscle.  We are in\nlittle danger from illiteracy or from business incompetency; but we are\nin danger from moral paralysis, due to undue pressure on the money\nnerve.  We have talked before the youth in the home and amongst\nourselves on the street as though the only thing worth living for was\nmoney, as though they alone were great who had it and they only to be\ndespised who had it not.\n\nThe danger is neither in our market, our commerce, nor our laws; the\ndanger is in our own hearts.  No matter how world-potent our\nmerchandise, how marvellous our mechanical and material powers, how\nbrilliant our business strategy, all will not avail to silence the\nvoice, \"Thou fool, this night thy soul is required of thee.\"  Then\nwhose shall these things be?\n\nWe need, not fewer things, not the return to an age of poverty or\ndreary destitution; we need more power over things; to let the man, so\nlong buried beneath the money and the lands and houses, come to the\ntop; to set ourselves over our things; to make them serve us, minister\nto our lives and our purposes in living.\n\nThere must be an elevation of standards, the institution of new\nvaluations, clearer, nobler conceptions of what living means.  Boys and\ngirls must be taught from the beginning that life is more than\nself-serving, more than fame or glory; it is the service of humanity.\nA passion for humanity will cure the passion for gold, will teach the\ntrue value of life as something that only the infinite can estimate and\nwill give to the heart those true riches that do not tarnish and that\ncannot be stolen.\n\n\n\n\nII\n\nInvisible Allies\n\n  _More Than a Fighting Chance_\n  _The Unseen Hand_\n  _The One in the Midst_\n\n\n\n_Logic may illumine, but love leads._\n\n_The religion that produces no sunshine is all moonshine._\n\n_Imaginary evils have more than imaginary effects._\n\n_He who lays out each day with prayer leaves it with praise._\n\n_Light from above is for the path below._\n\n_Singing of heaven gives no certainty of singing in heaven._\n\n_It is better to have your bank in heaven than your heaven in a bank._\n\n_The burdens of earth demand that our hearts be nourished with the\nbread of heaven._\n\n_There are too many hungry for love for any ever to talk of suffering\nfrom loneliness._\n\n_The man who lives with God does not have to advertise the fact._\n\n\nII\n\nMOKE THAN A FIGHTING CHANCE\n\nWho has not cried out, in haste but still in anguish: \"Alas!  All\nthings are against me; foes are many and friends there are none!\"  The\nroads to pessimism are many; but surely this is the shortest one, to\nget to think that life is but a conflict waged single-handed against\ngreat odds, a long story of struggle, difficulties, pains,\ndisappointments, temptations, failures, wounds, ending only in death.\n\nEven though you escape that chronic jaundiced view of life there are\nseasons of depression when it seems easy to get out of bed on the wrong\nside and to plow all day into stumps instead of in the good, clear\nground.  Ever we need the vision that Elisha of old gave to his young\nman, to see the hills about us alive with our allies.  Otherwise it is\neasy to conclude the fates fight against us.\n\nHow slight is the evidence on which men base their gloomy conclusions!\nThe pessimist always argues from a single instance to a general law.\nIf he strikes a poor peach on top he throws the whole basket away--or\nsells them as soon as he can.  He insists on sitting square on the\ncactus bunch when there is only one on the whole bench-land.  He then\nbecomes an authority on cactus.  If he can discover a few foes on the\nhorizon he is blind to a regiment of friends close at hand.\n\nBut the seers, our poets and teachers, have a wider vision; they seek\nthe glory rather than the gloom and they tell us that every man has\nmore friends than foes.  This is the song of those who told us long ago\nof Providence, the one who backs a man up and fights on his side and\nfurnishes him in the hour of need.  This is the song of Lowell,\nTennyson, Whittier, and Browning.  Life is not a lone-handed fight\nagainst unnumbered foes; it is not a losing fight to any who will fight\nit well.\n\nEvery force in this world works with the man who seeks the good.  This\nis a right world and only he who fights the right faces the\nunconquerable.  A man may meet rebuffs, battle's tides may sweep back\nand forth, but in the end, as it has ever been in all the long story of\nman's conflict with nature, so in the conflict with every other foe, he\nis bound to win.  This is as true in the individual life of every\nfighter as nature and history show it to be in universal life.\n\nOn our side there is the great world of the unseen.  Little do we know\nof it, but still that little gives us confidence to believe it is\npeopled with our allies.  Our fairest hopes of good angels may be\ndelusions as to details, but they are essentially true, being born of\nan eternal verity.\n\nThe gospel of good hope declares there is One over all, the friend of\nall; greater is He that is with you than any against you; greater is He\nthan your temptations, your adversaries, your difficulties, and your\nsorrows.  This was what the great Teacher came to tell men, that God\nwas on their side, seeking to help them, loving, caring, cooeperating,\nleading them into the life of victory over every enemy.\n\nLet a man face life in this confidence and he is invincible.  He goes\nforth and an unseen army goes with him.  He gains the seer's vision to\nsee even the plotting of the enemy and the forces that fight against\nhim all working for his good.  From many combats he gains strength for\nthe decisive struggle.  All things work together for good.  He serves\nthe right, the truth, the things that are eternal; he fights for\ncharacter, for manhood, and the good; and the eternal forces that rule\nthe universe fight by his side.  He beholds the hills full of the hosts\nof heaven; though he has no time to enjoy the vision he knows they are\nthere, his allies, his assurance of ultimate victory.\n\n\n\nTHE UNSEEN HAND\n\nThe mightiest and the eternal forces fight ever on the side of the\nright.  True, things do not always look that way.  Sometimes Napoleon's\nsneer about God being on the side of the largest battalions seems to\nhave truth in it.  But ere long we see the large battalions swept away\nbefore the strange, unaccountable, and irresistible power of an\ninsignificant body having truth and God on its side.\n\nThe man who takes up the struggle for truth, who puts his hand to the\nsword for the oppressed, for the right, finds himself holding a\ntwo-handled weapon, and if he grasps firmly the one hilt it is as\nthough there were an omnipotent hand grasping the other.  He who fights\nworthily, in fitting battle, never fights alone.\n\nIt is not that some omnipotent person steps down from a throne in the\nheavens and plunges into the battle; it is that every time a man steps\nout for right and truth he places himself in accord with eternal\nspiritual forces that give themselves to him and his work.  It is not\nthat God comes to fight for a man so much as that a man finds himself\nfighting beside God; entering this battle, he sees that where he\nthought none had been serving heaven had long been waging the contest.\n\nIt is so easy, like old Elijah, to think that you alone are left to\nwitness for truth, to feel the loneliness of standing for things noble\nand worthy, to become oppressed with the hopelessness of the minority\nin which you find yourself.  When real and concrete things press upon\nus and their uproar is in our ears we become deaf and blind to the\ngreater forces that from the beginning of time have been working for\nthe best.\n\nEvery great reform has looked like a losing movement; it has begun with\nmost insignificant minorities; it has met with violent and\nwell-organized opposition; its supporters have often been\nfaint-hearted, and yet ultimately it has overcome always.  As men have\nfought on they have found an unseen hand grasping the sword beside\ntheirs.\n\nWe all need this sense of God with us, helping us in our lives.  This\ngives courage and confidence.  It does not mean weak reliance upon\nheaven to do things for us; it means entering on the things that look\nimpossible because we know that, if they are right, every great force\nin the universe will cooeperate with us.\n\nThis is the fine sense in which the human enters into partnership with\nthe heavenly.  This determines whether we may call our work divine or\nnot.  It is to be judged, not by whether it is pleasant or looks\nrespectable, but by whether it is the work in which we know the Lord of\nall can lay His hand to the tool or weapon alongside of our hands.\n\nWith a consciousness like this, one attempts anything.  The practical\nquestion is not, \"Can this be done?\" but \"Ought this to be done?\"  \"Is\nit such a task as will enlist the cooeperation of the eternal spirit of\ntruth and right?\"  With the cry of Gideon on their lips, men have fared\nforth facing fearful odds; their hands have fallen from their swords,\nbut the unseen hand has carried them on until the cause has won.\n\nThe Almighty, who would have love and peace and righteousness to\nprevail, needs your hand for His sword; the sword of the Lord is vain\nwithout Gideon.  Ideals and spiritual forces may exist, but men must be\ntheir realizations, their visible hands.  God's work waits for you to\nput your hand to the sword; you will find His already there.\n\nThis helping hand is always unseen; spiritual things are often\napparently unreal.  God cannot be reduced to figures nor to material\nelements.  This hand that works with ours may mean one thing to one and\nanother to another.  What we all need is to simply grasp the great fact\nof the spiritual forces that strengthen every good resolve, that give\nvigour in every good work, and give victory at last to the right.\n\n\n\nTHE ONE IN THE MIDST\n\nThere are always a thousand blind men to one who can see.  All have\neyes, but not all have vision.  The things we most need and the things\nfor which we most long are often nearest to us, while we, with eyes\nfast shut, grope our way to the place where we think they ought to be.\nThe best things are the things we miss.  The crowd by the fords of the\nJordan was longing to see the Messiah; yet of them all there was only\none, the son of the desert, who saw that He was actually with them\nalready.  John had eyes that pierced the husk of things.  He looked on\nthis son of the carpenter and a thousand years of prophecy sank into\ninsignificance beside its fulfillment; the multitude became as nothing\nbeside the all glorious Son of Man.  He alone knew his Lord, because he\nalone looked with eyes of love.\n\nJohn announced the sublime central truth that all the world's great\nseers have declared; God is in His world.  Man is an animal who seeks\nGod; he finds Him when his eyes are opened.  Some are looking for Him\nin the records of His ways with men; many are hoping to see Him in some\nother world; a few see Him by their side.\n\nSome, priding themselves on their spiritual vision, and boastingly\ndescribing God as He was or God as He will be, have eyes of stone when\nit comes to seeing God as He is.  They do not stop to think that we\nwant a God in the present tense--a God in our homes, on our streets, in\nour affairs.  And others say, this thing is unthinkable, for, if you\nsay that this is a spiritual presence, you at once remove the whole\nquestion from touch with real things.\n\nThey forget that the most real things lie beyond the senses.  Who ever\nsaw mother-love?  Yet who will not believe in it?  Ambition, affection,\npity, memory, hope; these are the real things, the lasting things;\nthese are the spiritual things.  No one ever saw these things, and yet\nthey can be seen everywhere; it only needs the vision; we all have seen\nthem at times.\n\nThere are the selfish, gross, and sensual who tell us there is no love\nin the world; and there are those to whom every common bush is aflame\nwith God.  So hearts that have forsaken the good see nothing but a\nGod-forsaken world; and, in this same world, hearts that are lifted up\nfind Him everywhere, they see Him in the movements of history, in the\nforces of nature, they hear Him in the hum of commerce and in the\nsilence of the fields, in every human voice they catch His tone.  He is\never in the midst.  He is more than a force, a dream, a thought.  He is\nto men to-day what He was to men when He walked their streets and\ntouched their sick; all that we think He would have been in that long\nago He is to-day.\n\nPersonal?  Yes, that He may reach persons, for we cannot know\nimpersonal love or impersonal help.  His personality turns the universe\nfrom an institution into an organism.  Yet more than personal; this one\nin the midst is infinite; He is the whole where we are but fractions.\nBut He does not hide Himself in His infinity; He is \"among you,\" with\nmen.  Not by descent into the grave of the past, nor by ascent into\nheaven do we find Him; He is here, on every hand.  This it is that\ntransforms individual character, to know that He is by my side; this it\nis that solves our problems, to see Him linking my fellow to me; this\nit is that gives strength, to hear His voice; this it is that gives\nhope, to know He is working with us; this it is that makes burdens\nbearable, to know that He is sympathetic and strong.  This one in the\nmidst explains suffering, inspires heroism, is the promise and the\npotency of all the possibilities of the sons of men.\n\n\n\n\nIII\n\nThe Sovereignty of Service\n\n  _Self and Service_\n  _My Soul or My Service_\n  _The Satisfaction of Service_\n\n\n_The fruits of sacrifice become the roots of love._\n\n_A tin halo makes a fine trap for a man to tangle himself in._\n\n_It takes the base line of two worlds to get a correct elevation of any\nlife._\n\n_Life is always a dull grind to the man who thinks only of the grist._\n\n_Knocking the saints will not open the doors of paradise._\n\n_Capacity for that heaven comes from creating this one._\n\n_Another man's burden is the Christian's best badge._\n\n_The only way to lift life is to lay life down._\n\n_It doesn't take long to choose between a sinner who swears once in a\nwhile and a saint who makes every one swear all the while._\n\n_You cannot lift folks while you are looking down on them._\n\n\nIII\n\nSELF AND SERVICE\n\nThere is such a thing as supremely selfish self-denial.  A man retires\ninto the monk's pietic seclusion; he isolates himself from interest in\nthe world battles; he shuts himself from sympathy with the struggles of\nbusiness, civil, and even social life.  To him these things are carnal.\nHe is engrossed with the complication of interpretations of languages\nlong dead, or with visions of an unknown heaven, and this, he thinks,\nis living the life of self-denial.\n\nThe denial of self is not the death of self; it is the leading of the\nbest self into larger life.  It is not the dwarfing of the life; it is\nits development into usefulness.  It is not the emasculation of\ncharacter; it is the submission and discipline of the life to new and\nnobler motives.\n\nHe best denies himself who best develops himself with the purpose of\nserving his fellows.  What Jesus meant was that if any man would be one\nof His he must cease to make his own selfish pleasures, ambitions, and\npassions the end of his living; he must make the most of himself that\nhe might have the more to give to the service of mankind; he must make\nthe one motive and end of his life the benefit and help of every other\nman.\n\nThat kind of a life means a change of centre.  Instead of regarding the\nuniverse as revolving about itself it sees that self as but part of the\ngreat machinery of life, planned and operating for the good of all.  A\nman begins to deny himself as soon as he begins to love another.  Even\na yellow dog may act to deflect the heart from its old self-centre.\nThe love of kin and family, of friends, and associates all serve to\nstrengthen the habit of self-denial.\n\nThe fewer people a man takes into his plan of life the more likely is\nhe to be selfish.  But some lives are but the more selfish because they\ntake in all mankind and look on them as designed to contribute to their\nsingle enriching.  That kind of a life commits suicide; ever grasping\nand never giving it dies of plethora.  It had never learned that\nstrange secret of the best self-development, sacrificing service.\n\nWe need to guard ourselves against the delusion that the denial of\noneself means the impoverishment of the life.  There can be no true\ngiving of the life in service unless there is a wise enriching of the\nself, a thorough fitting for that service.  The more of a man you are,\nthe brighter your intellect, the broader your sympathies, the better\nyour service to the world may be.  The sloth that sinks the soul in\nindifference to its own development is the most sinful of all forms of\nselfishness.\n\nThis way of denial is more, the Master tells His disciples, than an\nemptying of the life.  If some of the cares of self are cast out the\nburdens of others more than take their place.  It is a full life,\noverflowing with the interests, the fears, loves, hopes, and longings\nof other lives.  It bears the cross, not of an ornamental,\nvanity-serving glory, but the cross of a world's sin and sorrow.\n\nEach man must carry his cross not on his breast but on his heart and\nbrain.  It is what he can do, what he can plan, suggest, undertake\ntowards saving this world.  The cross of discipleship will be to some\nstatesmanship, to others science, to others the daily service of a home\nor the work in the shop; it is the kindly word, the cheering look, the\nlift by the way; it is whatever is done in unselfish desire to make\nlife better, to bring men nearer to one another and to the Father of\nall.\n\nYou have only to look at the great Teacher to know what self-denial and\ncross bearing really mean, and you have only to follow Him to fully\ncarry out their principles.  To Him they meant the life of doing good,\nof seeking the sorrowing, befriending the forsaken, helping the\nhelpless.  They who follow Him lead the world; they who seek to\nminister instead of being ministered to are the world's masters.  The\nvalue of every life must be measured at last not by what it has\ngathered to itself but by what it has given for the enriching and help\nof the whole life of the world.\n\n\n\nMY SOUL OR MY SERVICE\n\nThere is no more subtle temptation than that which sets the soul as a\nhindrance to the service we should render.  A surprise awaits him who\ncarefully will compare the emphasis laid upon the individual soul and\nits salvation by the modern church with the place given this in the\nteachings of the Bible.  Perhaps he will find in modern preaching, with\nits insistent appeal to men to save their own souls, an explanation of\nprevalent selfishness.  The moral effect of urging a man to save his\nsoul is not much better than that which comes from advising him to save\nhis skin at any cost.\n\nThe most serious objection ever made to religion is that it produces a\nnarrow, self-centred type of mind.  That type of religion cannot be\nright, regardless of its doctrinal orthodoxy, which produces a wrong\ntype of men and women.  But may not failure here be accounted for by\nthe selfish basis on which men build the plea for what they call\npersonal salvation?\n\nWhat could be more selfish than this continual appeal to fear, this\nurging of men to escape from punishment, to make sure of a house in the\nheavenly city, this offering of crowns and perpetual rest, plenty and\npeace, this emphasis on the great object of saving your own soul?  It\nis opposite directly to what the great Teacher told men.  Did He not\nsay that the man who would save his own life should lose it?\n\nThe concentration of mind on the self, whether in the name of religion\nor in any other name, is but moral suicide.  People who have no other\nobject in life than that of saving their own souls are but little\nbetter than those whose whole object is to fatten, protect, and keep\nsafe their bodies.\n\nBut Christianity must be perverted greatly to make it teach men to set\ntheir own interests first.  It is the religion of the other man.  Its\nappeal is not to the love of self, but to the love of society.  It\noffers a way of salvation, not as a thing desirable for your exclusive\nuse, but as the pathway for all lives, for all the people.  Its tree of\nlife is not for a single pair, but for the healing of the nations.\n\nTrue religion is not in self-centred culture, but in the culture of all\nthrough the service of the single ones and the culture of the one\nthrough his service for all.  Only in the atmosphere of service does\nthe soul grow, expand, and find itself.  To live in a circle is to die;\nit is the centrifugal life that finds salvation.  They court death who\nseek only their own lives; they find life who, disregarding death and\nloss, seek only to make others live.\n\nReligion is not simply a cure for my ills.  True, it does cure many of\nthem, but only that I may be better able to do its work.  It is a great\ncause, a mighty project, commanding the noblest enthusiasms and the\nhighest efficiency of effort, the project of bringing this whole world\nto salvation.  And that not the salvation of a mental condition but of\nthe perfection of its whole being, the realization of its highest\npossibilities, the full noontide of the day of God.\n\nIs not this enough to satisfy any man and to call forth the best in\nhim, that he should in some way serve this glorious ideal?  Is not this\nman's purpose in this world even as it was the purpose of the one who\ncalled Himself the Son of Man?  What nobler summary could any life have\nthan His, that He went about doing good?  How quickly would that\nkingdom of heaven come if this were the program of every life!\n\nLet but a man do his duty towards this shining ideal, let him but be\nlifted up, carried along in the mighty enthusiasm it ought to engender,\nand his own soul, his own development, his character perfection will\ntake care of itself.  No man ever did any great work without becoming\ngreater himself, and greatness never was found in any other way.  This\nis an unvarying law.  Service is the secret of culture.\n\nThe pious hypochondriac is sure to be a sickly soul.  The best thing\nyou can do for your soul is to forget that you have one, just as the\nhealthy man forgets he has a heart or liver.  The self-forgetting\nservice is the secret of happiness, of full finding of self.  Freedom\nin self-giving brings fullness in living.\n\nIn the right life the hour of prayer, the quiet thought, the search for\nabstract truth, may all have their place; but it is only the place that\nthe wise workman gives to his meals.  He does not live for these\nthings; they are but ministrants to his work.  He uses everything that\nwill make him a better workman; but not because he sees the workman as\nhis end.  He forgets himself in the perfection of that he seeks to\nmake.  The saving of the soul, the culture of the self, as an end is\nshame and suicide; as a means to service it is life and peace and\nperfection.\n\n\n\nTHE SATISFACTION OF SERVICE\n\nA man always thinks more of his work than of his wages.  He would never\nbe content to toil day in and day out but for the thought that somehow\nto some one his work was worth while.  Neither wages, nor salary, nor\nany other cash consideration would of itself be sufficient to satisfy\nhim.  The workman is proud of the product of his hands; his reward is\nin that he has made; the good shepherd thinks more of the flock than of\ntheir fleece or his pay.\n\nSatisfaction in work can only come from service rendered.  Whether a\nman be plowing or preaching, sweeping the streets or building empires,\nhis work is only worthy if his motive be the good he is doing, the\nvalue of the work itself.  We call the man who preaches a minister, a\nservant.  There is no more honourable title, but it belongs to every\none who seeks to do any worthy work in the world.\n\nThe purpose of living is service, therefore the business of religion\nmust be the cultivation of proficiency in service.  The work of\nChristianity is to teach men how to be most valuable and useful as\nchildren and parents, as neighbours and citizens, how to make the most\nof their lives and to do the most with them.  It aims to bring the race\nto its highest efficiency.\n\nReligion reveals to man the worth-while object of all his endeavours,\nto work as a servant for others.  Never was Jesus more glorious than\nwhen He stooped to lift the palsied, to heal the sick, to feed the\nhungry.  He found His right to rule men by His exercise of the\nprivilege of serving them.  The sheep belong to the good shepherd\nbecause he gives his life to them.\n\nThis marks the true follower of the great Teacher to-day; his business\nis to serve, he makes living an investment for humanity.  He is\ncommanded to lose his life, to be willing to give up, to sacrifice all\nin self-denial, to take his cross and suffer persecution and loss in\nthis way of walking after his Master.\n\nBut he is not told to throw his life away as a worthless thing.  He is\nto lose it as the seed is lost in the sowing, as the money in the\ninvesting; to sacrifice it as the tool is sacrificed to that which it\nis carving.  He who would be of real service to the world must\ncultivate the best in himself.  If living is seed sowing, then the seed\nmust be good or the harvest will be thin.\n\nTrue altruism finds right expression first in self-care.  It is a man's\nbusiness to be strong, healthy, sane, trained, developed; to be the\nbest kind of a man, complete in all his faculties, that he may have the\nmore to offer to the service of his fellows.  There is no merit in\noffering the wrecked body and soured mind.  If you are going to give\nyour life to the world you must make it worth the giving.\n\nHeaven's work demands the finest tools.  Nothing is too good for the\nservice of humanity.  There is a good deal more religion in the honest\nattempt to make the most of yourself, to keep health, to secure\neducation and culture, in order that you may have the larger, better,\nwealthier self to use in service than in unending ascetic exercises,\nprayers, devotions, meditations, mumbling, or visions of things\nspiritual.\n\nThe only way you can prove the genuineness of your religion is by your\ngifts to the children of God, your own brothers about you.  There is no\ngift that begins to compare in value with a well-trained,\nwell-equipped, strong and clean life.  We cannot all give gold or\nlands, or even learning to men, but we can all give lives, and that\nwhich heaven and earth both have a right to expect is that we shall\ngive the best lives we can.\n\n\n\n\nIV\n\nThe Right to Happiness\n\n  _The Power of Happiness_\n  _The Secret of Happiness_\n  _The Folly of Anxiety_\n\n\n_Happy is that happy makes._\n\n_Heaven leaves the heart when hatred enters._\n\n_The man who is so wise that he never laughs is the greatest of fools._\n\n_When your face spells failure it's no use talking of the glory of your\nfaith._\n\n_To set a child towards gladness is to incline him towards God._\n\n_The graces do not grow in gloom._\n\n_There's no argument equal to a happy smile._\n\n_Stealing sorrow is as much a sin as acquiring stolen joys._\n\n_Life's music is never perfect without the chord of pain._\n\n_Happiness is never found by dodging my neighbour's sorrows._\n\n\nIV\n\nTHE POWER OF HAPPINESS\n\nInstead of the strength of your faith being marked by the length of\nyour sighs, the genuineness of your religion is to be known by its\njoyfulness.  The same God who gives the sunlight and the smiling\nfields, who makes the brooks to laugh through the meadows and the stars\nto sing at night, would rather see smiles than frowns on the faces of\nHis children.  His glory is not in gloom but in gladness.  He designed\nthis world for happiness, and religion is but the pursuing of His plans\nfor the good of His children.\n\nThat which is holy must be happy.  Artificial sadness is always sinful.\nA church is not sacred because it looks like a sepulchre; music is not\nsacred because all the spring is taken out of it.  You do not keep a\nday sacred to divine ends by making it dismal.  It is a religious duty\nresting on all to cultivate happiness, to make this world less sad.\n\nNo matter how sincere a man may be, if his sanctity results only in\nsorrow to others its satisfaction to him must count for nothing.  There\nis a great deal of piety that needs an operation to cut the bands that\nbind its heart and reduce the inflammation of its spleen.  Happiness is\nthe very health of religion.  If religion does not give right relations\nto those things that determine the tone and colour of life it is a\nfailure.\n\nBut true happiness can never be selfish.  It grows only by giving.  No\none can eat a feast by himself.  Happiness is not found on lonely\nmounts of vision.  It is a fair, refreshing stream that flows through\nthe dusty ways of daily life.  Its waters are never so sweet and cool\nto you as when you seek them for others.  None ever find it who go only\nwith their own pitchers.  The reason so many would-be saints are sad is\nbecause they will not be other than selfish.\n\nIt is not strange that men who love this heaven-born life of ours\nshould turn away from the religion that represented every happy, joyous\nhuman thing as an enormous offense against its God.  Once men gathered\ntogether every dark and depressing thought and thing and said these\nconstitute the divine in this world; they looked out through the smoked\nglasses of sanctimony and declared that every glad, generous hearty\nimpulse and action must be evil because such things gave happiness.\n\nThe old boundary line between the pain that was piety and the pleasure\nthat spelt perdition has almost passed away.  Men now know that there\nis pain and loss in the way of sin, that the way of the transgressor is\nhard; they learn by tasting that the fruits of righteousness are joy\nand peace.  The age demands what the Lord of all has ever intended,\nthat religion should send men on their way with the vigour of happier\nhearts, with the upwelling love for men that should drive the squalor,\nmisery, despair, and heart-aches of sin before it.\n\nLife has its work and it has its sorrows; but they ought both to be for\nits enriching.  The business of religion is to teach us that\nunderstanding and adjustment of life which will make it a feast of fat\nthings, to teach us that the God of all desires the good of all.  The\nmore true piety--the seeking for the loving will of the all wise and\nloving--there is in this world the more pleasure there will be in it.\n\nThis happiness is the cure for the madness that some call pleasure.\nLife is a mockery indeed to those whose only hope is for the hours of\nleisure in which to drink the deadening drafts of excitement, the\nlethal cup that only hides life's misery by paralyzing the faculties\nagainst the possibilities of real pleasure.  If men might only hear\nagain the call of Him who bade the weary and heavy laden to come; if\nthey might but know that His way of life can give strength, rest,\npeace, joy, what an enriching life might have.\n\nMake life happier and you will make it holier.  Make it full of\npleasure--not that of a fool's paradise--but that of peace with\nheaven's plans, with the joy of knowing that over all is infinite love,\nthe strength that comes from knowing right is invincible, the tender\nand sweet joys that spring up at the touch of human love.  Go your ways\nto make them paths of gladness, to show love shining through sorrow, to\ngive love in the name of the Lord of love and yours shall be religious\nservice indeed.\n\n\n\nTHE SECRET OF HAPPINESS\n\nHow did your Puritan forefathers dispose of the text which in their day\nread, \"A merry heart is a continual feast.\"  Did they explain it away\nby saying that the man was made anyway for fasting and not for\nfeasting?  Perhaps underneath their austere exterior they, after all,\nknew something of deep joys and unfailing sources of refreshing\nhappiness.\n\nIn their teaching they made the mistake of insisting that it was\nnecessary to seem sad in order to please the Most High.  We make the\nmistake of being sad in order to please ourselves.  Their misery at\nleast had the grace of a high motive; ours is born of a short-sighted\nselfishness that grasps at the shadow of a fleeting satisfaction and\nloses the substance of lasting joy.\n\nHappiness is the highest aim of life, higher than holiness or\nusefulness, because it must include both.  To us it is so unfamiliar\nthat we do not know it from frivolity; we seek the excitement of some\npleasing sensation, and, rising to its stimulus, we fall afterwards\ninto the reaction of misery.  Happiness is the poise, calm, strength,\nand spring of the life fully in harmony with all things good and true.\n\nNothing praises God better than a happy disposition.  Many have thought\nto give Him glory by learned treatises on His majesty and mystery.  But\na little child, so happy that he only can kick and crow, praises the\nAlmighty more effectively and even devoutly than does the theologian\nwho only can offer his bloodless speculations.\n\nThe great Father gives His children a world brimming over with joy,\nwith laughing meadows, with smiling morns, with rippling bird song, and\nto man He gives faculties of immeasurable happiness.  Life is learning\nthe law of happiness and practicing its use and service.\n\nBut what is the secret of happiness?  How can we learn to be happy when\nlife has so much to make us sad?  The praise of happiness does not take\naway the fact of sorrow or solve its dark problem.  There remain the\nmillion aching hearts and all the griefs of a world.  True.  God forbid\nthat we should lose our sorrows; that were to make this a sad world\nindeed.  Our cares are but part of joy's curriculum.  Learning their\nlesson, bearing their load is essential to deep, lasting happiness.\n\nIt is not the life of the butterfly experience that is firm, calm,\nserene in times of storm and stress.  It is the life that by loads of\ncare has been forced to strike its roots down to the rocks.  There are\nsome lives that seem to run over with a happiness that is full of\nrefreshing to all who know them, and these have come out of great\ntribulation.\n\nAt first the multiplication table is a burden; later, when mastered, it\nbecomes a wonderful bearer of burdens.  To wear a careworn, fretful\nlook, to go through life shedding misery, is to confess that we have\nnot learned our lesson, that we are dunces in life's school.\n\nThe secret of happiness is in grasping the significance of living, to\nlearn that we live for things other and higher than those mad follies\nand fading prizes for which men sell their bodies and souls and fret\nout their nerves and hearts.  No man can be happy whose heart is set on\nthe changing fashion of things or who looks for satisfaction in things.\n\nThe lover is happy because he has discovered his prize and is\nenthralled by a pursuit that makes all other things seem mean and\npaltry.  Men are happy in proportion as they yield themselves to the\nbest, as they tune their hearts to strike the highest key of their\nlives.  Paul is happier in the dungeon, where he can be true to his\nideal, than Nero on the throne without one.\n\nThere is feast in days of famine for those who have the inner eyes for\nthe riches of life.  You always can find in this world what your heart\nis looking for.  But you cannot satisfy your heart on everything you\nmay chance to find, and until the heart is satisfied and the deeper\nneeds of the life are met there is no happiness.\n\nThe search for happiness is not altogether selfish.  Few things can we\ndo that will help others more than the cultivation of serene strength\nand cheer in ourselves.  Not the soulless, set smile, but the strength\nand sympathy that flow from a life fixed in confidence in eternal right\nand good and unfailing love.\n\n\n\nTHE FOLLY OF ANXIETY\n\nThe great Teacher does not say that we are not to be thoughtful, or\nprovident; but He insists that no event can be provided for by anxiety,\nby fretting over it before it comes.  Half the people on our streets\nlook as though life was a sorry business.  It is hard to find a happy\nlooking man or woman.  Worry is the cause of their woebegone\nappearance.  Worry makes the wrinkles; worry cuts the deep,\ndown-glancing lines on the face; worry is the worst disease of our\nmodern times.\n\nCare is contagious; it is hard work being cheerful at a funeral, and it\nis a good deal harder to keep the frown from your face when you are in\nthe throng of the worry worn ones.  Yet, we have no right to be\ndispensers of gloom; no matter how heavy our loads may seem to be we\nhave no right to throw their burden on others nor even to cast the\nshadow of them on other hearts.\n\nAnxiety is instability.  Fret steals away force.  He who dreads\nto-morrow trembles to-day.  Worry is weakness.  The successful men may\nbe always wide-awake, but they never worry.  Fret and fear are like\nfine sand, thrown into life's delicate mechanism; they cause more than\nhalf the friction; they steal half the power.\n\nCheer is strength.  Nothing is so well done as that which is done\nheartily, and nothing is so heartily done as that which is done\nhappily.  Be happy, is an injunction not impossible of fulfillment.\nPleasure may be an accident; but happiness comes in definite ways.  It\nis the casting out of our foolish fears that we may have room for a few\nof our common joys.  It is the telling our worries to wait until we get\nthrough appreciating our blessings.  Take a deep breath, raise your\nchest, lift your eyes from the ground, look up and think how many\nthings you have for which to be grateful, and you will find a smile\ngrowing where one may long have been unknown.\n\nTake the right kind of thought--for to take no thought would be\nsin--but take the calm, unanxious thought of your business, your\nduties, your difficulties, your disappointments and all the things that\nonce have caused you fear, and you will find yourself laughing at most\nof them.  In some you will see but friends in disguise, and in others\npuny foes decked out as giants.  But begin to dread them, brood over\nthem, look at them with eyes prejudiced with fear, and the least\ndifficulties rise like mountains.  In winter some people worry\nthemselves into malaria over the mosquitoes they may meet next summer.\n\nMistaken ideas of religion are responsible for a great many of the\nunnecessary wrinkles on the human face.  Too many have thought it would\nbe impossible to be happy in two worlds, and so, having elected\nhappiness in the one which they thought would last longest, they have\nno choice but to be unhappy in this one.  In fact, some seem to suppose\nthat the greater their misery here the more intense will their bliss be\nthere.  If heaven is to be bought that way certainly many are paying\nfull price for it.\n\nBurdens we all must bear; but they need not break us.  Sorrows we all\nmust share; but they need not unmake us.  They will not if we have\nlearned the Teacher's secret of living; He, the man of sorrows, was the\nman who could bequeath to His friends His joy.  To Him life lost its\nanxiety, because the chief things of life were not food or raiment, or\neven social standing, but manhood and unselfishness to men, and the\npossibilities of these were as easily realized in need and adversity as\nin riches and prosperity.\n\n\n\n\nV\n\nThe Curriculum of Character\n\n  _The Great School_\n  _The Purpose of the Course_\n  _The Price of Perfection_\n\n\n_A good many resolutions die of heart failure._\n\n_No man possesses more religion than he practices._\n\n_When men say \"our faults\" they usually mean yours._\n\n_There are no delights in the worship that dodges duty._\n\n_When fear gets into the pulpit faith goes out of the pews._\n\n_It's not the man with a putty backbone who is most truly resigned to\nthe will of God._\n\n_When a man buys a horse on its specifications he is likely to call his\nfolly faith and its consequences the dispensation of Providence._\n\n_It is folly to hope to have a clean heart when you pay no attention to\nwhat enters its doorways._\n\n_Some folks think they have the house of character because they possess\nthe plans of virtue._\n\n_It is folly to talk of being guided by the light of your conscience\nwhen you take pains to keep it in the dark._\n\n\nV\n\nTHE GREAT SCHOOL\n\nWith all our learning the greatest lesson before us is this one of\nliving right, of finding our full heritage and filling our places as\nmen and women in this world.  If our systems of education fail to teach\nus how to live they fail altogether.\n\nThe great need of our day is that we shall train the conscience to\nright moral judgment, that we shall educate all for the business of\nliving, and that we shall so educate all that we shall not only have a\ngeneration of bright, smart, money-making or fame-making machines, but\nthat we may have clean, upright, truth-loving, self-reverencing,\nGod-fearing men and women.\n\nThere is little likelihood that America will fail for lack of business\nability.  The danger is that we shall fail at the point of character;\nthat we shall fail where failure is fatal to every other kind of\nsuccess.  This is the crucial point.\n\nWe do well to perfect the plans by which we teach men the encyclopedia\nof their bodies, their country, the world and its history.  But we\ncannot forget, and recent events have reminded us with a terrible note\nof warning, that no amount of knowledge constitutes any sort, even the\nfeeblest kind, of guarantee as to rectitude of life.\n\nIf you neglect the heart, the will, and conscience, if you neglect the\nknowledge of and training in right relations with men, reverence and\nright relations to the most high, your culture of the intellect is\nworse than waste; it is the perfecting of the poison of our social\nlife; it is the whetting of the edge of a man's villainy and grossness.\n\nAbove all other things, the most desirable is that men shall love truth\nand hate a lie; that they shall love honour and truth so much more than\nfame, power, or possessions that never for an instant will these weigh\nin the scale against the former.  But for long it has been thought that\nthis choice flower of nobility grew by chance; the culture of the soul\nwas so mysterious as never to be brought under scientific law.\n\nIf a man grew up to be good it was due either to accident or to\nmiracle.  The realm of character has been the last to come under the\nreign of law.  Now we recognize that we must learn to live as truly as\nwe must learn to read, and that the culture of the soul must profit by\nthe wondrous strides that all educational science has made; that all\nour efforts to produce character must be so wisely directed that we\nshall secure the best and most enduring results.\n\nOne message comes from the lips of every seer, from every page of\nhistory.  It is that the man or the nation alone is wise, alone finds\nenduring life, who sets before commercial supremacy or political power\nor fame in learning the glory of righteousness, the beauty of practical\nholiness.  Their wealth lies beyond corruption and their days know no\nend who are wise and rich in the things within.\n\nThe greatest service we can render our day is by giving it the riches\nof worthy living, by setting before ourselves the production of high\ncharacter through all life's processes of learning, and by bringing in\nevery way we may to an age engrossed in selfishness and commercialism\nthe significance of the call of character.\n\nNo wonder it sometimes seems to us that we have forgotten to smile;\nthat our faces are so drawn with the tense struggle of life that we\nhave lost sight of the meaning of happiness.  How can we be happy\nunless we shall set our whole lives in harmony with the things that are\nfundamental and eternal?\n\nWe must learn to order our lives, not as machines to be driven at the\ntop of their efficiency in the money mill, but as part of the great\nlife of the spiritual world, as inheritors of things divine, sublime,\nand glorious, as possessors of the joy that made the morning stars sing\ntogether and the beauty that paints the evening red.\n\n\n\nTHE PURPOSE OF THE COURSE\n\nThe early question of the old creeds, \"What is the chief end of man?\"\nwas conceived in a spirit more practical than academic.  It was the\nvoice of the constant inquiry as to the purpose of living.  But the\nanswer given by the creed lacks the assurance of a moral conviction; it\nfails to find any response in us.  \"To glorify God and to enjoy Him\nforever\" may be the portion of angels, but honest men have to confess\nthat they have no great desire to be angels, yet.\n\nThe emphasis of the creed with that as its basis practically was on\ndying rather than on living; it owed whatever grip it had on men to the\npromise it held, to those who were in the midst of the sordid round of\ntasks or the dull, heavy grind of poverty, of a felicitude that knew\nneither hunger, fear, nor pain; it offered a heaven forever to those\nwho could endure a hell for a short time.\n\nThe logical consequence was to make dying the chief end of living.  Who\ncannot remember being told to despise the present, to consider how\nbrief it is, like a cloud before the dawn of the endless day?  It was\ncompared to the short waiting outside some door beyond which was\nwarmth, cheer, and unending bliss.  So that the pious soul thought of\nlife only in terms of waiting, watching, enduring.  Piety became\npositive only in prospect, negative in the present.\n\nTo say to a man, be patient with wrong and oppression to-day and you\nwill be prospered tomorrow, is to teach him to compound a felony, to\nwink at the despoiling of the earth by the iniquitous for the\nconsideration of a title to the riches of heaven.  It is to lose sight\nof the fact that unless the life finds itself now it never will find\nitself, that to dwarf a soul to-day is to dwarf it forever.\n\n\"Then,\" says the practical man, \"this means that we can ignore the\nfuture; we must make the most of the present; get all you can; keep all\nyou get; the whole purpose of life is to make a good living, to enjoy\nyourself.\"  This is only the swing of the pendulum away from the old\nthought.  The ideal of the present day is material advantage.  The\nchief end of man is to make money.  If once he was the slave of an\nunjust order, he now is the slave of an unworthy appetite.\n\nLiving only for wealth or for wages is not living at all.  Who knows\nless of life than the slave of modern commercialism, the man who lifts\nhis eyes no higher than the pay roll, or the ticker tape?  It is better\nto be the victim of a delusion that gives some happiness, that gives\nsome fortitude, and to live the simple life of the poor than to be the\nslave bound to the wheel of modern social greed and money madness.\n\nLife itself is the object of living; the chief end of man is to become\nglorious as his ideal of God is glorious, to realize the highest that\ncomes to him in the song of poet, the vision of seer, the hope of his\nown heart.  The money, the acres, the resources are the tools for the\ndevelopment of life.  This world is a workshop; it has failed utterly\nif it produces nothing but an array of machines and a heap of shavings;\nit must turn out the finished product of men.\n\nAre you living thus for life, or are you living to do no more than make\na living?  We need to educate our children to set honour, truth,\njustice, a high life, before all things, to prize noble attainments so\nthat they shall not be content with the lesser prizes of prosperity in\nthings, so that whether we win or lose in the markets of the world we\nshall stand rich and glorious in manhood, finding the ends of life in\nthe achievement of high character and finding in commerce but the\nservant of character.\n\n\n\nTHE PRICE OF PERFECTION\n\nGold may depreciate, stocks rise or fall, and business values change so\nas to leave the market in panic, but every man on the street or in the\nstore knows that one value forever remains permanent, unvarying, and\nthat is character.  Every other asset may be swept away and success\nstill achieved if this remain; every other aid may be at its best and\nfailure only await him who lacks the wealth of character.\n\nCharacter is that of which reputation is but the echo, often mistaken\nand misleading.  Character is the last, the ultimate, value of life.\nIt is the trend of the whole being towards the best.  It is the passion\nand power that holds one true despite all persuasion.\n\nIt is the one thing worth having, because upon it all other values\ndepend.  The wealth of the whole world still leaves poor him from whom\nthe soul, the power to appreciate, the purity of heart which sees God\nand the good, the peace and quietness of a good conscience, have fled.\nWhen we turn away from our fighting for fame and our grinding for gold\nlong enough to think, then we know that the things within determine\nwholly the value and reality of all things without.\n\nThe wise ever have set this treasure above all others.  Happy the\npeople that love righteousness more than revenue, the way of virtue,\nthe clear eye, the upward look, and the approval of a good conscience\nabove all other prosperity or advantage.  The days of national\ngreatness ever have been those when the things that make manhood bulked\nfar above all other considerations.  Alike to people and individuals,\nthe imperishable value ever has been that of character.\n\nThis asset comes not to a man by accident.  He who is rich in\ncharacter, whose success in many ways is built upon his resources in\nthis way, does not just simply happen to be good, true, and square.\nThere is a price to character; it costs more than any other thing, for\nit is worth more than all other things.  Essentially it never is\ninherited, but always acquired by processes often slow and toilsome and\nat great price.\n\nIf you would be perfect you must pay the price of perfection.   Unless\nthe passion of life is this perfection it never will be your\npossession.  Dreams of ideal goodness only waste the hours in which it\nmight have been achieved.  No man ever finds character in his sleep.\nThe education of the heart is a thing even more definite than the\neducation of the head.  The school of character has an infinite variety\nof courses and an unending curriculum.\n\nFolks who are sighing for goodness usually go away sorrowful when they\nlearn what it costs.  But life ever is putting to us just such tests as\nthe wise teacher put to the rich young man.  You say you desire\ncharacter, the perfection of manhood or womanhood above all other\nthings; do you desire this enough to pay for it your ease, your coveted\nfame, your cherished gold, perhaps your present good name and peace of\nmind?  Is the search for character a passion or only a pastime?\n\nThis does not mean that this prize of eternity falls only to those who\ndevote themselves wholly to self-culture, to the salvation of their own\nsouls.  The best lives have thought little of themselves, but they have\nlived for the ends of the soul, to help men to better living, to save\nthem from the things that blight and damn the soul.  Like the Leader of\nmen they have found the life unending by laying down their lives,\npaying the full price, selling all in order that right and truth and\nhonour and purity, love and kindness and justice might remain to man.\n\nThe world's wealth depends not on what we have in our hands, nor even\non what we can carry in our heads.  It depends on the things that we\nhave and the beings we are in our hearts.  Fools we are who live only\nto make a living, houses, shelter, food, rags, and toys, who might live\nto make a life, and to mold lives, to earn the riches and honour\nenduring; who have not learned the gain of all loss that leads the\nheart to look up, the joy of all sorrow that sweetens the soul, and the\nprofit from every sacrifice that is a paying of the price of perfection.\n\n\n\n\nVI\n\nThe Age-Long Miracle\n\n  _The Sufficient Sign_\n  _Behold the Man_\n  _The Life that Lifts_\n\n\n_Silent goodness speaks loudest._\n\n_Our loads lift us up to strength._\n\n_Life grows as love is given._\n\n_From the grind of drudgery comes at last the glorious divine spark._\n\n_The spirit of the father never works separation in the family._\n\n_That day best fulfills its purpose which is a preparation for the\nnext._\n\n_The proof of a faith is not in its prestige, but in its present power._\n\n_Things divine are not defended by dodging._\n\n_It is the heart that gives ease to any work._\n\n_The door of truth never opens to the key of prejudice._\n\n_Love never knows how much it gives nor what it costs._\n\n\nVI\n\nTHE SUFFICIENT SIGN\n\nThe scribe and the Pharisee are still with us.  \"Establish the\ncredibility of the miracles of Jesus, or, better still, let Him work a\nmiracle to-day, and we will believe,\" they say.  This age is credulous;\nit hungers to believe the extraordinary.  Yet, while it is running\nafter folly, it is blind to the most extraordinary fact, the most\nstupendous miracle that ever took place, although it goes on right\nbefore its eyes and is open to every kind of proof.  It cannot see the\nmiracle of Jesus in the world to-day, the miracle beside which all the\nworks He did in His lifetime sink into insignificance.\n\nHere is the sign to-day offered to the skeptic: Once, nearly twenty\ncenturies ago, a young preacher travelled and taught through the\nvillages and by the wayside in an obscure oriental country.  He\naddressed a subject race, insular in their prejudices, lacking in\npolitical genius and in artistic culture.  He lived in days calculated\nto chill the most fervid religious enthusiasm.  He was at first ignored\nand then hated by His own people; the religious leaders became His\nimplacable foes.  His work ended in apparent failure, in a death of\nshame.\n\nBut that was not the end.  It is strange that the world remembers\nanything about that young preacher; but stranger still is the fact that\nto-day He influences more than half the population of the globe,\nsurpassing all other teachers, more people are under His sway now than\nthe whole world held when He lived.  These millions make Him the object\nof their worship and devotion; in His name they gather regularly all\nover the world, without regard to language or race.\n\nMore than this, this one whom the wise men of His day ignored has been\nthe inspiration of the works of genius and art, of the deeds of\nheroism, of the lofty endeavours of the world since He died.  He has\nchanged the mind.  He has changed the appearance of the world; by Him\nnations have fallen and risen.  The humble, the despised, the rejected\nhas become the world's hero, the mightiest of all the sons of men, the\nsaviour of His race.\n\nOnce He touched a few who were blind and lame and they were healed;\nto-day in His name, in every city, a thousand suffering ones are made\nwhole.  Science does the work; but the opportunity for its development\nand the inspiration for its application came from Him.\n\nNor is this all.  He made the world to see; He touched the blind eyes\nof the people, as they groped in superstition, and has given them\nsight; He has made the ages, once limping and halting, to arise and\nmarch forward with magnificent tread; He found the world a babel of\njarring voices and fretting purposes, and His touch gave peace and\nsingleness of purpose until men could discern that \"through the ages\none unceasing purpose runs.\"  He did for man and mind what was first\ndone for matter, brought the cosmos out of chaos.  This is the miracle\nindeed.\n\nIt goes right on before our eyes.  They take His name to a dead people,\nand soon there is life there.  Light, and love, and larger life spring\nup everywhere in His name.  From this modern miracle of the power, the\ngrowing authority, the kingship of the once despised Jesus we cannot\nescape; we are perforce participants in its benefits; it conditions all\nour lives.\n\nIf all the gospel stories could be proved myths and the miracles but\ninventions, there would still remain the greater, the insuperable\nmiracle of the world's picture of the perfect and all glorious\npersonality of Jesus and the fact of His preeminent power in the world\nto-day.  This is the sign He gives this age, and to this the open mind\nanswers: \"Thou art the Christ, the saviour of the world.\"\n\n\n\nBEHOLD THE MAN\n\nThe two words, \"Ecce homo,\" contemptuously spoken by the cynical Roman\ngovernor contained the highest tribute that had been given to Jesus.\nHow empty appear all the high sounding titles, such as king and\nemperor, beside this significant one of Man.  How sad and self-damning\nthe bitter railing of His enemies in the light of that serene dignity.\nHow puerile the bickering over words and ways of worship, and all the\nwrangling that blinded them to the heavenly radiance of that all\nglorious manhood.  The wonder of Jesus is not in the deeds He did, but\nin the being He was.  And the wonder of His being is not in that it\noffers elements for arguments as to a divine personality, but it is\nthat of a simple, clear, sublimely perfect manhood.  It is upon this\nperfection of personal character that His abiding claim to divinity\nmust rest; it depends not on His birth but on His being.\n\nThere is something strange about the perversity with which the church\nhas emphasized the least attractive aspects of its master's person.\nThe preachers have scolded men for not coming to church, and when they\ndid come they offered them pictures of an emaciated, effeminate being\nfor their adoration.  With them the painters have conspired to set on\ncanvas and in church window representations from the reality of which\nwe would turn with repulsion or on which we would look with pity.\n\nIf Jesus is to be the leader of men He must go before them.  He must\nstand in the front, not set there by artificial arguments as to His\nright to rule over men, but there because He belongs there, first\nbecause He is first in all that makes manhood; He is king because He\ncan, and because He has overcome in life's great conflict.\n\nIf He is to show us the way we should go He must walk in that way; He\nmust be flesh of our flesh, true man, knowing the full fellowship of\nour lives.  If He was born with a halo; if He lived on angel's fare; if\nsomehow He belongs to another world and His perfections are not those\nof our nature, then, almighty as He may be as a leader for beings of\nanother world, He has no value to us.\n\nBut men have ever set aside the weavings of minds so absorbed in the\nwonder of their speculations that they could not see the truth.  They\nhave seen through the dreamings of poets, painters, and preachers, who\npictured only their sickly ideals.  And, instead of their caricatures,\nmen have held in their hearts a man, one of their own.  And this true\nfellow, brother and friend, has spurred them to noble deeds and lofty\nliving.\n\nPerfection is seen in strength, not in weakness, in virility and not in\ntears, in majesty, the majesty truly of meekness, but not of a maudlin,\nmooning etherealism.  The revelation of the perfect man cannot come in\na form that a child will pity; it will be admirable from all points of\nview.  It is the heroic rather than the esthetic we must admire.\n\nThe men who followed that one long ago did so not because they had\nheard arguments as to His divine claims, but because they were drawn by\nthe heavenly power of His manhood.  This it is that wins men ever, the\nmagnetism of manhood.  The force of a great life is mightier than any\nof the things it does.  There is about this leader, Jesus, that which\ncompels us to greatness, spurs us to strife for our better selves,\nstrengthens to sacrifice and to service for our fellows.\n\nIt matters little whence a life like this has come; the greater\nquestion is where does it lead us.  Childish minds spend time on the\ngenealogical trees of the giants; the wise men follow them.  The value\nof the life of the great Teacher does not depend on our ability to\ncomprehend it biologically or arrange it chronologically, but on our\nvision of its moral and manly perfections and on the power these\nattributes have over our lives.\n\nThis world will be little helped by the most irrefutable syllogism\nconcerning the peculiar nature and separate exclusive divinity of its\ngreat religious Teacher.  But lives will be lifted everywhere in the\nmeasure that they see the man in Him who taught us of God.  For men\nneed not so much a God who has come down as a man who has attained to\nGod, not a descent, but an ascent, one who is the life and the truth\nbecause He is the way which they may tread up to the glory that is\ntheir heritage and the God who is their own.\n\n\n\nTHE LIFE THAT LIFTS\n\nTo any save the few in the group of His friends that statement of Jesus\nthat being lifted up He would draw all men to Him must have sounded\nlike the ravings of one deluded.  It has taken the centuries to show\nthat He was right.  He was right in His estimation of His life's end;\nit was a lifting up.  His enemies thought it a casting down, a defeat;\nHe knew it to be a triumph.  Sorrow, injustice, oppression, hatred, the\nthings that seem to crush are the things that elevate.  Only by\nopposition has any life discovered power.  The fiercer blow these winds\nthe firmer grows the tree.  Out of the petty persecutions, the\ncountless meannesses, the littleness of those who oppose him the great\nsoul builds its greatness.  It is, and ever has been by a cross that\nmen are lifted up.  History abounds with prisons, gibbets, and crosses\nwhich have become thrones of eternal glory.\n\nWhether we shall be cast down or lifted up depends upon ourselves;\nneither enemies nor adverse circumstances have the power to do this.\nThe soul that seeks the stars builds its staircase out of the stones\nflung by the persecutor, out of the rocks of difficulties.  If your\nheart is great, my brother, nothing can keep you from greatness; if it\nis mean, no amount of o'ervaulting ambition can make you other than a\nlittle, obscure man, as truly lost on the peak as you would be at the\nbase.\n\nJesus died a failure; His friends were few, and the best of them\nthought His life a mistake.  It takes more than the span of our lives\nto measure their size.  It is better that a great soul should be called\na failure than that it should die a shrivelled success.  Earth measures\nby what the hands hold; heaven by the heart.  The hands at last lose\ntheir grasp, but the heart wealth goes on from more to more.  This it\nis that is worth while.\n\nJesus was right when He said that He would draw all men to Him.  Then\nit sounded like folly; to-day it demonstrates His divine insight.\nLifted up in shame the riches of His life were revealed.  After all,\nthe best in us answers to the best; it is love that leads.  In the end,\ngoodness, truth, gentleness, sincerity have the greatest attraction for\nmen.  Jesus is known and loved by millions who never heard of Nero or\nof Augustus.  Their glory was that of circumstance; His that of\ncharacter.  His life lifts.\n\nThis it is that most helps the world; not learning, but a life; not\npower or position, but simple passion for men; not riches, but wealth\nof the inner life.  You may not found a university or build libraries\nor hospitals, or even write books or preach sermons.  But every one may\ndo the principal thing that Jesus did.  That was to live a life amongst\nmen of love for them, of simple kindnesses, of God-seeking aspiration,\nof white sincerity.  The race needs not so much men who will shake it\nwith their power or dazzle it with their learning as it needs men and\nwomen who will lift it with the quiet earnestness and sincerity of\ntheir lives.  Herein is lasting greatness and true power, to live as He\nlived, to love as He loved, true to God, to yourself, and to your\nfellows, seeking the best and giving of your best.\n\nService and sacrifice are the things that lift to the supreme places;\nthe lower you stoop in helpfulness the higher you are lifted in lasting\nglory.  And they are lifted to heaven, they achieve immortality, they\ncan never die who were willing to die if death lay in the path of duty,\nto be sacrificed if sacrifice was part of their service.\n\n\n\n\nVII\n\nSeeing the Unseen\n\n  _The Sense of the Unseen_\n  _The Brook in the Way_\n  _That Which is High_\n\n\n_The song of sympathy never comes until the singer has been to the\nschool of sorrow._\n\n_True spirituality can see the altar in the cookstove and the washtub._\n\n_People who are always off the key are never content out of the choir._\n\n_The only version of the Bible authorized by heaven is that on two\nfeet._\n\n_Every life must have days in the desert but it does not need to build\nits house there._\n\n_Many a man thinks he is patient with pain when he is only perverse in\neating pickles._\n\n_No man knows how much religion he has until he goes of fishing alone\nwhere mosquitoes are many._\n\n_There are too many people to whom God has given wings who are\ncomplaining of corns._\n\n_It is some consolation to know that when you aim at nothing you are\nsure to hit it._\n\n_If you have large reserves of religion you will not be without the\nsmall change of kindness._\n\n\nVII\n\nTHE SENSE OF THE UNSEEN\n\nWhen the practically-minded man Paul writes of looking at the things\nwhich are not seen his words sound like either fantasy or folly.   Yet\nit is plain fact, practical, and certainly essential to any success.\nHe is blind who can see only with his eyes, and he only is sensible who\nknows there are many things beyond his senses.  Practical men consider\nall the factors to every problem, and things are not less real to them\nbecause they may chance to be intangible.\n\nThe unseen things are imminent to us always.  There are many things not\nyet pigeonholed by our science nor catalogued by our philosophies.  You\ncan dissect a daisy and enumerate its parts; but you never know a daisy\nuntil you have seen the unseen things thereof, until you have felt the\nsubtle appeal of its beauty.  Bobbie Burns saw more of the daisy than\nthe greatest botanist without his spiritual eyes.\n\nThe danger is that in our hard workaday we shall forget the reality of\nthe unseen, we shall get to think that gold and steel and land are the\nonly real things, and we shall shape ourselves by the blind and base\ncreed of gold, and steel, and land.  How easy it is to measure every\nman by his possessions in tangible things.  How easy to make these our\nchief end in life, to slight the real prizes, the unseen wealth that\nlies so close at hand or already possessed, while we rush and strive\nfor the rainbow of riches.\n\nDeep within us we know that he is rich, and he alone, who has wisdom,\nlove, patience, who possesses friends, who creates kindly thoughts,\nwhose life with simple joy abounds.  Once again and often do we need to\nsee Bunyan's picture of the man bending over his refuse, gathered with\nthe muck rake, and heedless of the angel holding the crown that only\nwaits his taking.\n\nA man is wealthy according to what is within him.  His greatness is of\nthe things that are unseen.  There are limits to the possession and the\nuse of the things that are seen; but who shall set a limit to a man's\npossible wealth in love and honour, in wisdom and integrity, in all the\nthings that make up the soul of man?  Few are the things that a man may\nhold for his own all the days of his life, and fewer still are those he\nmay grasp with pleasure when the hands are falling helpless by his\nside.  But many are the riches he may have to hold forever in the\nthings of the unseen.  Many a man walks through the fields penniless\nand yet richer far than their owner; to him the birds sing, for him the\nflowers bloom, to his eyes there are beauties in the blue beyond all\nwords, and all the loveliness of the fair land lifts his heart within\nhim.  The other man who holds the title deeds sees nothing beside them.\nPossession is wholly a matter of appreciation.  The earth is the Lord's\nand He gives it to those who have eyes to see.\n\nIt is the eye to see the unseen that gives wealth to the seen.  Values\ndepend on vision.  Appreciation does not prevent possession; it makes\nthe possession actual.  And the vision of the realities behind things\nkeeps a man from the sense of destitution when all things are taken\nfrom him.  He cannot be destitute.  He may lose all his fellows, but he\ncannot be friendless; the Father of Spirits cannot lose him, nor can he\nbe cut off from fellowship with those who die no more.\n\nThe seeing eye is the stimulus to the worth while endeavour.  The\ninventors who have enriched the world endured derision seeing the\nthings invisible to others.  The truth is that it is the unspiritual\nworld that makes the least progress in things material.  The men of\nfaith and vision are back of all advance.  They have endurance,\npatience, and strength.  The sense of another world where motives are\nrightly measured, the sense of a great cloud of worthy witnesses to\nother eyes invisible, the sense of reward in the very service itself,\nrewards intangible yet most real, the joy of sacrifice and service;\nthese all enable one to push on, to toil, to endure.  Then, long\nafterwards, the dull, weary world sees and understands.\n\n\n\nTHE BROOK IN THE WAY\n\nAlongside every highway runs the brook whereof a man may drink often if\nhe will and drinking lift up his head.  Its little song we scarce hear\nin the rush of our businesses; its refreshing we forget even though our\nthroats be parched with the dust of our petty affairs.  Yet it is ever\nthere, cool, refreshing, this world of spirits and ideals.\n\nNature has a prodigal way of scattering rivulets down the hillside and\nalong the pathways, little heeding whether men walk there or not.  The\npractical eye sees waste; these streams might have been made to turn\nwheels; the needs of the traveller, weary with the way, might be met by\nfaucets at regular intervals.\n\nIt is well for us all that the power of the practical man finds its\nlimitations, else all poetry would have gone from the world, and great\nand glorious as might have been our physical perfections our bodies\nwould be but the empty habitations whence souls had long since fled.\nThe utilitarian would have stolen from us the bliss of the deep draft\nfrom the pebbly brook.\n\nThe man who is proud of being practical tells us we are wasting time\nand nervous energy in stopping to think of ideal things; we must take\nthe world as we find it, he says, forgetting how fair and poetic we\nonce found it and how bleak and ugly we are likely to leave it.  But to\nhim trees are always lumber, grass and flowers but hay, bird songs\nspell poultry, wind and waters energy.  Many are too busy making things\never to enjoy anything that is made.\n\nIn this steel age it may seem folly and waste to stop and think of\nsacrifice and courage and love, to admire and answer to the thrill of\nhuman passions; but alas for him who never sees the light of heaven in\nanother's tear, nor hears the brush of angels' wings when men and women\nfly to their fellow's aid.\n\nIf you haven't time in your busy life to turn aside to drink of the\nbrook of human affection, to look deep into the eyes of friendship, to\nsympathize, to comfort, to taste this strange sweet and bitter cup of\nour common fellowship, then is your heart going dry and thirsty and\nlife becoming a whitened road that knows no wells or springs.\n\nBut something there is in man that calls for drafts at yet deeper\nstreams than these.  Foolish and unlearned he may be, ignorant of the\nwise conclusions of philosophers who have looked into these things with\ntheir lanterns, but through the ages he has been drinking eagerly at\nthe waters of eternity.  In every man there is a thirst after the deep,\nimmeasurable things divine; the deeper the nature of the man the\ngreater his necessity for drinking often here.\n\nThe consciousness of the great life that embraces all life, the sense\nof its nearness to us all, has been a perennial refreshing to all great\nhearts.  In some way to bring the life into touch with the infinite is\nto take down its limitations, break its barriers, and give it a sense\nof infinitude, to lift up the head in vision of the divinity of our\nlives and of every life.  We who walk in the dust often need to be\nfilled with the divine lest we become ourselves but dust.\n\nThis world of things is hungry for the life that is more than things,\nthe life of the spirit; that is why so many love to sing of heaven and\ndream of a fair world peopled by strange and glorious celestial ones.\nHeaven is nearer than we think; like the brook by the way, the life of\nthe spirit flows beside this life; happy they who drink of its waters,\nwho already enter into eternity, who find strength for this life's way\nand work by the contact with the life that is life indeed.\n\nIs it any wonder that life is a wearisome thing, a dead drag, when you\nare starving its very sources?  You neglect the soul at the peril of\nall.  So anxious are you to run this race that you have no time to\nallow him who rides in the chariot to drink of the water of life.  This\nis not utilitarianism; this is suicide from the centre out.\n\nThe most practical common sense demands that you feed the inner places\nof your life, the heart that has gone so long thirsty and longing for\nlove, for things too deep for words, for things that cannot be used and\ncannot be quoted in dollars.  Give your inner life its deep drafts of\nthe infinite life and your outer life shall take its place and do its\nwork in the world.\n\n\n\nTHAT WHICH IS HIGH\n\nThere are two ways of viewing the oncoming years, as burdens or as\nopportunities, with fear or with expectation.  The days of the new year\nmay loom up as a series of unwelcome tasks to be unwillingly done or as\nso many invitations to attempt and achieve great things.  The\ndifference between these two points of view marks the difference\nbetween enduring life and finding the life that endures.\n\nThe wise preacher of long ago caught sight of one of these distinctions\nthat cut clear through to the roots of things.  He says that the sign\nof old age is that a man is \"afraid of that which is high.\"  When\ncourage and ambition have gone old age and decrepitude have entered in,\nno matter whether a man be eighteen or eighty.\n\nHe alone has youth, he alone has life before him, who can still catch\nthe vision of the ideal, of that which is high, who can lift up his\neyes beyond the horizon of practicabilities and precedents and see the\nthings not yet realized.  There is a time when men must dream dreams\nand see visions, when they must feast on noble purposes or die so far\nas the inner spirit and all that makes real living is concerned.\n\nIf you find the will becoming dull and listless, with no quickening of\nthe pulses, but only apathy or a sneer for the high purpose or the\ngreat promise, it is but a sign of the approach of senility, of the\nfailure of the powers.  When the ambition can be satisfied with the\nless while the greater is before it, when things low and base are\npreferred to things high, afar off, and difficult to attain, the heart\nis dying already.\n\nCherish as the spark of life the aspiration to have and do and be the\nbest.  Yet who is there does not know the paralyzing chill that the\nsneer of the philistine or even the memory of our own many failures can\ngive when great possibilities offer themselves to us?  How easily enter\nin the cold considerations that deaden our aspirations; how subtle the\ntemptation to be content with the condition that involves neither toil\nnor pain.  How hard to realize that this is an invitation to death.\n\nTo all men comes the thrill of the passion to do some great thing, to\ngive to our world some worthy service.  To yield to this is to keep the\nheart young, is to defy time, to conquer the years.  Whether the coming\ndays shall bend the back with their burdens or shall nerve and\nstrengthen the life does not depend on whether they have cares or joys\nin them, but on whether they find us responsive to the call of noble\nthings.\n\nNo man can afford to let a pure and lofty impulse die, nor, for fear of\nfailure or of ridicule, to become afraid or ashamed of his ideals.\nLiving is more than a dull feeding at tables or troughs, more than\nshelter and sleep; it is growing, climbing, becoming, finding higher\nlevels and seeing yet higher before.\n\nNor is this all; the spirit of greatness finds ample play in daily\nduties.  The success of the year does not depend on whether you can do\nthings that shall amaze men to-day or make your name known forever, but\nupon whether into all the things you do, lowly, humdrum, commonplace as\nthey may seem to be, the daily duties of home or shop or store, the\ncare of the baby, or the running of a typewriter, there shall enter the\ngreat and high motive.\n\nThis is what we all need, the high vision of the lowly things, the\nsight of the fact that the least piece of work is an essential part of\nthe service of the whole universe, that a man serves the Divine not by\nwearing a black coat but by doing, as in God's name, with high motives\nthe least duties that may be his.  It is not place nor authority nor\nwage that makes the work high or low; it is the spirit of the service\nand the part it plays in the world's great business of perfecting\nhumanity.\n\nWould you ward off old age, cherish vitality and give value to your\ndays, seek the things that are above, the life that serves some worthy\nend.  One is young as long as his heart leaps responsive to a noble\ncall.  But he who lives to pleasure, to the satisfaction of self, who\nhas shut his eyes to the high things that call for self-denial, for\ntoil and loss, is dead already.\n\n\n\n\nVIII\n\nSources of Strength and Inspiration\n\n  _Strength for the Daily Task_\n  _The Sense of the Infinite_\n  _The Great Inspiration_\n\n\n_Living heartily is one secret of living happily._\n\n_Life is early blighted if it knows no clouds._\n\n_You can tell the character of any age by the place it gives to\ncharacter._\n\n_There is little danger in the discontent with conditions that is\nequalled by discontent with character._\n\n_Heart health never comes so long as the hand is kept on the pulse._\n\n_Feed on garbage and you soon lose faith in good things._\n\n_The fruitful life seeks showers as well as sunshine._\n\n_It's hard for a man who has ground of his nose on the money mill to\nsmell a taint on anything._\n\n_Many a man goes back by trying to put up a good front and nothing\nmore._\n\n_Every life is worth the love it gives._\n\n\nVIII\n\nSTRENGTH FOR THE DAILY TASK\n\nIt is the dull grind and monotony of life that makes it so hard to bear\nfor the ninety-nine per cent. of us.  Sometimes it seems as though we\nspend all our days toiling, wearing strength, and hope, and heart away\nfor no other end than to gain just bread and shelter so as to keep the\nmachine in condition for further toil.\n\nHow hopeless is the outlook of many a life!  The mother with the weary\nround of home duties day after day, the father who goes to the same\ntask year after year, seeing the same people, doing the same things,\nand coming home at the day's end with the same weariness, only\naugmented as age makes itself felt--all who toil feel at times these\ndepressing limitations.\n\nLittle wonder that lives snatch at every fleeting, alluring promise of\nrelief, through amusement, through anything that offers change and\nexcitement.  Little wonder that, robbed of opportunity for vision, they\nfoment blind discontent, so that we all feel there is a mighty\nsubstratum of wretchedness and of menace lying under our social order.\n\nYet there are few lives, perhaps no worthy ones, without tasks that\noften seem monotonous and become matters of dull grinding that bring\nweariness and longing for relief.  All worth while work involves much\ntediousness, painstaking exertion.  All great things stand for so much\nlife poured out, and life is never poured out without pain and loss.\n\nThe stern Puritan was doubtless wrong when he saw nothing in life but\nrepression and stern duty, but he was nearer right than he who looks\nonly for frivolity and amusement.  Life is too large a business to be\nalways light and trivial.  Yet we must not allow its high purposes to\nbe thwarted by robbing ourselves and our fellows of all joy and\nbrightness and converting life into dull, mechanical servitude.\n\nHow may we find that proportion of toil and relief, that happy mixture\nof duty and delight that shall make life not only endurable but also\nuseful, fruitful, and enjoyable?  For it is man's duty to be happy;\notherwise he can never be useful in any high or valuable sense.\n\nIt would be easy to try to give comfort by the philosophy which sees\nthe fine fruitage that is coming from to-day's stern discipline.  That\nfair fruitage is coming, but the trouble is it is too far off to give\nus much comfort now; we want something nearer and more easily\napprehended.  Then, too, the truth is no high fruitage will ever issue\nfrom a life crushed by slavish subjection.\n\nAfter all, what life is to every one of us depends not on the demands\nof outer circumstances, but on the development of the life within.  The\nheart determines the worth and beauty of life.  It makes all the\ndifference whether the physical determines its circumference or whether\nyou have an intellect that is reaching out to the things unmeasurable\nand a soul that grows into glory indescribable.\n\nYou can tie a great soul down hand and brain to a loom or a machine and\nhe will still see his visions and dream his deep, refreshing dreams;\nyou can set the brutish being down in a gallery of the world's\ntreasures of art and beauty and he will think of nothing and see\nnothing but bread and beer.\n\nWe must do our dull and heavy tasks, but we can do them and not be\ncrushed by them so long as within there are fragrant memories, high\naspirations, great thoughts; so long as the task does not set the\nboundary of the life.  And it is the cherishing of these eternal riches\nwithin that lifts any life and makes it worthy of higher tasks.\n\nWe need to seek out the springs of noble thoughts, to find in the\nriches of the world's literature, in music, and in beauty of art the\nfood for that inner life in the strength of which, drawing often on its\nsecret resources, we can go many days through the desert of toil.\n\nThe wise life uses every opportunity of refreshing; it drinks of every\nspring of the up-welling waters of life; it seeks communion with every\ngreat soul.  Holidays and rest days are to it times of replenishing\nwhen the eyes that ache from bending over the machine or desk lift\nthemselves to the eternal hills and the heart turns to the things that\nare infinite.\n\n\n\nTHE SENSE OF THE INFINITE\n\nOne does not have to believe in the same kind of a god as did the seers\nand singers of long ago in order to obtain the spiritual values which\nthey found in the thought of his nearness to them.  David and Browning,\nIsaiah and Whittier, with all the centuries between them, still come to\nthe same thought--we know that Thou art near.\n\nThrough all ages and in all peoples this sense of that which is other\nthan ourselves, from which our highest good comes, towards which our\nideals and aspirations strain, the ultimate force of our being, this\nfeeling after the infinite is universal.  It is the essential and\ndeterminative mark of every religion.\n\nWhen those singers of long ago tried to express their sense of the\ninfinite life and love they used words which make it appear that they\nthought only of some being larger, mightier, wiser than themselves,\nyet, after all, like themselves, a great man deified because He was\ngreat.  Perhaps that really was their conception; still, we use\nprecisely the same language, even though our ideas are entirely\ndifferent.\n\nIt makes relatively little difference what their conceptions were, so\nfar as ours are concerned.  Their words are not accurate, detailed pen\npictures of some being who can be described or photographed.  No man\nhas seen the infinite at any time.  The great thing is that ever and\neverywhere men find themselves with a hunger after this sublime unseen.\n\nOne may use terms of personality and another terms of power; to one the\ninfinite may be but a local deity; to another, that which embraces all\nspirit and being, and each may have all of the divine his heart is\ncapable of containing.   Here none may dogmatize for others.\n\nReligion does not depend on uniformity of conceptions of the divine.\nIt depends more upon universality of consciousness of the infinite and\nopenness of mind and life to whatever we may feel and know, from any\nsource or through any means whatsoever, of that life or energy which\nlies back of all life and energy, of that love and light which cheer\nand lighten every son of man.\n\nDefinitions determine nothing, but they do work great damage when minds\ncapable of being stereotyped to them agree to impose those definitions\non their fellows as final, authoritative, and essential to their\nwelfare.  The divine is neither infinite nor sublime when you can say,\nHere are His lineaments and He has no other likeness or appearance.\n\nTo the question, How shall we think of the divine? there can be but one\nanswer--in higher, wider, deeper, nobler, purer ways than yesterday.\nThe conception must be a developing one.  A man's spiritual capacities\ndevelop as his inner vision becomes more keen.  The soul takes wider\nflight, and in our deep thoughts we discover that which language cannot\ncompass.\n\nThere are those who think they must be atheists because they cannot\nbelieve in the God of the Hebrews, the God of the Old Testament--a\nlimited personality.  But the genuine atheists are more likely to be\nthose who are without a sense of the divine, because they have taken\ndefinitions and descriptions prepared by others instead of seeking\ntruth for themselves.\n\nWe are but poor learners of those ancient teachers if we have not\ndiscovered that their greatest lesson to us is not truth, as they had\nfound it, but the blessing of the persistent search after truth.  To\ncherish as final past presentations of truth is to be false to its\npresent possibilities.\n\nWe do not need to worry over definitions of the divine.  We do need to\ncultivate the temper of mind and the sensitiveness of spirit that will\nsave us from blindness to the higher facts of life, that will save us\nfrom the blasting whirlwind of materialism, with its sense of nothing\nbut a soulless world of things.\n\nWe need to avoid the mind that shuts the divine up in some far off\nheaven to be reached only by formal telephony called prayer; that fails\nto see the infinite in all things--in sunlight and flower, in\nchildren's laughter, and in misery's wail, in factories and stores, as\nwell as in churches.  We need the mind that argues not about\nomnipresence, but in duty and delight cries, Always and everywhere,\nThou art near.\n\n\nTHE GREAT INSPIRATION\n\nChristianity is distinguished and dominated by the ideal of the life\nand character of Jesus of Nazareth; it is a philosophy and a system of\nindividual and social ethics under the inspiration of a glowing ideal.\nNo matter how greatly its people may differ on other points, all are\nagreed in recognizing in Jesus the fairest of the sons of men.\n\nThere never was a time when the thought of this life was more potent\nthan it is to-day.  Men think of Him as a fellow being, one who went\nabout doing good, who looked out on life with the windows of His soul\nunsullied and who lived out ever the holiest and highest that came to\nHim.\n\nThe thought of such a one has become so real to men that they do not\nstop to argue about His existence, as once they did.  If it was\npossible indisputably to disprove the historic Christ men still would\ncherish, as highly as ever, the ideal, the vision of such a life, and\nin their hearts would know that such a picture could only have been\nborn of such a person.\n\nThis goodly, glorious man no longer is one who now sits on the throne\nof heaven.  Men are not particularly concerned as to whether He is\nartistically glorified and perpetuated by some divine decree.  He has\ncrowned Himself in the glory of a pure and beneficent character; He has\nperpetuated Himself in human loves and admiration.\n\nBecause He once showed Himself as the friend of all, the pure, high\nsouled friend of the down-trodden and the outcast, the strong,\ninvigorating friend of the rich and successful, He to-day walks by many\na man as His unseen friend, and in busy mart or office men feel the\npresence of a heavenly guest.\n\nOnce men made that life the centre of dispute; they sought to prove His\ndivinity by His unlikeness to ordinary humanity.  But the facts\ndefeated them.  This man whom men so learned to love that they became\nwilling to die for Him was in all respects a man.  His life is worth so\nmuch to us because He was so much like us.\n\nIt has come as a new revelation to the world that the supreme religious\nsoul of the ages should be so tenderly, naturally human.  We cry\n\"Father!\" with a new sense of relationship and fellowship when we see\nthe likeness of the father in the face of such a son.\n\nWe are coming to believe that just what the great friend of mankind was\nso is the great father of us all to us all, that just as the Son of the\nmost high moved amongst men seeking to help, cheering, comforting,\nloving, so is the eternal spirit moving in our world, going about doing\ngood.\n\nOnce every effort of the theologian was bent to setting this majestic\nfigure apart from mankind to secure Him sovereignty over us by\nseparation from us.  How different is that from the simple pictures\ndrawn of Him, from the naturalness of His life, from the love which He\nhad for homes and human friendships, from the life which earned the\nilluminating rebuke of being called a friend of sinners.\n\nIt is a good thing for us all often to remember that there has been\nsuch a life, that one born in poverty and unknown, far removed from\ncentres of culture and wealth, living the hard life of a peasant,\nknowing all our temptations and weaknesses, yet should open His life so\nfully and completely to spiritual influences as to become to all the\nages the greatest of all spiritual leaders.\n\nWhat one has done another may do.  What He has been we may be.  He but\nshows the possibility of any life.  He had no advantage over us; we\nknow no disadvantages against which He did not have to strive.  The\ndivine heights have been scaled by human feet; His footprints beckon us\non.\n\n\n\n\nIX\n\nFinding Foundations\n\n  _The Passing and Permanent_\n  _Facing the Facts_\n  _The Real Foundation_\n\n\n_Things not right can never be religious._\n\n_Bigotry puts blinders on the best of men._\n\n_Submission is the first step to sovereignty._\n\n_The principle of expediency expels all other principle._\n\n_Quiet lives are often eloquent._\n\n_The love of wealth steals wealth of love._\n\n_It's the common virtues that make uncommon saints._\n\n_Many a man is shouting his convictions to drown the voice of\nconscience._\n\n_A little learning is dangerous if you are planning to get to heaven by\ndegrees._\n\n_When a man gets over anxious about the gnat it's time to hang on to\nthe camel._\n\n\nIX\n\nTHE PASSING AND PERMANENT\n\nWhen the walls are being rebuilt it is easy to imagine that the\nfoundations are being destroyed.  Old creeds pass away, but truth\nremains; if they were true in their day they do but give place to the\nlarger truth of the new day.  We need to distinguish between the\nturmoil attendant to the process of building and the beauty of the new\ntemple that arises.\n\nThe old folks hear the new truths and ask, where are the foundations\ngone?  The young hear the discussion between the old and the new and\nask, is there anything settled, anything worth believing?  What are the\npermanent elements in religion on which the life may build while the\nthings that are but temporary are adjusting themselves?\n\nIt would be the height of folly to assert that there is no change.\nSome say that we must believe precisely the same things as our fathers\nbelieved.  To do so would be to be false to our fathers, for they\nrefused to accept the traditions of their elders.  The landmarks we\nleave behind once were far in front of the seekers after truth.\n\nTruth never changes but our vision is ever enlarging.  The road\nremains, but the traveller moves on.  With the living every day has\nsome new light.  Creeds are crystallized statements of truth; truth is\nvital and cannot be contained in unchanging forms.  Credulity blindly\naccepts yesterday's picture of truth; faith, with open eyes, seeks\nto-day's truth itself.\n\nSkepticism is much less sinful than credulity.  The sloth of the man\nwho will not examine things, will not prove them, who prefers to buy\nhis garments of truth ready made, results in what is worse than\nunbelief, and that is blind belief in the false.  It is a religious\nduty to question every teaching, to prove all things.\n\nHow may we find those things that are certain?  How may we discover the\ntruth for our day, the truth upon which we may build?  Surely there are\nsome things fixed and certain, there is somewhere pole star and\ncompass.  How may we find that truth which belongs to our day and in\nwhich we may have the confidence that our fathers had in their truth?\n\nThe test of the vital truths is a practical one.  Only those truths are\nvital which concern the present business of living in all its wide\nsweep.\n\nIt is a matter of indifference what we may think of the colour of\nangels' hair or the number of strings to their harps; it is a vastly\ndifferent matter what we may believe as to moral obligations, human\nrights, and duties.\n\nThe test of creed is an ethical one.  What things work out best in\nliving, what are the ideals, doctrines, beliefs that make the noblest\ncharacters and the most useful citizens, the best sons, and daughters,\nand parents, and neighbours?  What are the things that help me most in\nmy life, the things that give me moral stimulus and bracing, the things\nthat lead me to covet the best?\n\nThe way to find the truth is to do the truth; only the truth that we\ncan do is worth discussing.  If you will give yourself to the business\nof living the truth you have you soon will have the living truth for\nthis new day.\n\nToo many people are holding up as saving doctrines matters of\nphilosophy and speculation, matters of childish curiosity, because it\nis easier to hold these things theoretically than to hold living truth\npractically.  The truths that save men are the ones that change their\ncharacters; the great authorized and divine translation of the Bible is\nits translation into present day lofty living.\n\nBuild your life on the belief in goodness, in eternal, infinite\ngoodness as the order of the universe, on the superiority of love to\nhatred, on the final victory of love and goodness, on the ideal of this\ngreat human family of ours that shall come to live in unity and\nbrotherliness, and so fulfill the will of the infinite father of all.\nThese things work well.\n\n\n\nFACING THE FACTS\n\nThis is the age of the dominance of science.  When a man asks, What\nshall I believe? only one answer can be returned: Believe the things\nthat are.  An age now past found it easy to believe that it believed\nwhat it was told, even the things that it knew were not so.  But to-day\nat least has the merit of finding no merit in that form of\nself-deception.\n\nThe passion for absolute truth and rightness is one of the noblest that\ncan spring up in any breast; it is a ripe fruit of religion.  The\nscientist, by his devotion to exact facts, to pure truth, is the\nreligious man of our day, and the schools become religious educators in\ntheir power to instill a primary love for truth and to lift up ideals\nof exactness and equity.\n\nWhen we translate religion into terms of life, into actuality as\ncontrasted with imagination, we begin to discover the necessity for\nfoundations deeper than legend or romance.  So long as a man's religion\nconsisted in what he might picture in glowing colours of imagination on\nthe canvas of fancy about his past or future he did not need to take\nhis designs from facts.\n\nBut when religion becomes the science of right living, the process of\nsecuring right social relationships and character as the expression of\nideal personal and individual character, it is evident that in such a\nwork religion must proceed on ascertained, indisputable verities.\n\nWe may be satisfied with myths as to the ordering of the first family,\nand we may leave to the play of fancy the specifications of an ideal\nheaven; but when we begin to order our own families and adjust our\nsocial and civic affairs we are compelled to wait for principles based\non facts, for truth.  Religion thus becomes a science.\n\nMuch eloquence was spilled over the conflict between religion and\nscience.  It was only a conflict between the old religion and its new\nform, between the gray dawn and the growing day.  Our fathers were not\nwilfully false, holding on to darkness when the light came; but they so\nlong had held sacred the pictures seen in twilight they were loath to\ngive them up for those of the full day's printing.\n\nThe most damaging infidelity is the lack of faith in truth, the fear\nthat it might not be safe to allow all the facts to be known.  He who\nin the name of religion seeks to prevent our seeing and accepting the\nfull facts is religion's greatest foe.  Only the full truth can set us\nfully free, intellectually, spiritually, morally.\n\nWhy should we fear the light of investigation on the things of\nreligion?  There is more sacredness in simple truth than in secrecy.\nIt were better to be lost forever seeking truth than saved by\nsophistry.  How foolish to attempt to adjust our lives by laws built\nout of speculation, to attempt to steer by a compass when there is no\npole of truth?\n\nIn to-day's changing tides of thought, when the old faiths seem\nslipping away, when we wonder why we have lost the simple faith of our\nown youth or our father's, looking for some firm ground for our feet,\nwe do well to set them down on nothing but facts, to discriminate among\nthe sands of time and the alluvial deposits of tradition till we find\nthe rock of truth.\n\nBut facing the facts we find everywhere one writ large, over all one\ngreat principle of unchanging law, one great purpose moving through all\nnature and all history, and what we once only dared to hope and dream,\nthat back of all there throbs infinite love and there rules infinite\nwisdom, now is attested by the impressive array of the witnesses of\nscience.\n\nTruth always is safe.  The holiest error must be born of hell.  We can\nmake no mistake in refusing to go beyond truth, and we will find that\nshe leads to the ordering of life according to eternal laws, to the\ndoing of duties and finding of sweet joys as old as the hills and as\nunchanging; she will lead in the paths of rightness.\n\nSome day our race will know all the alphabet of nature and be able to\nread the story of the unchanging goodness; some day we shall comprehend\nthe wavering handwriting of history; some day we shall catch the\nharmony of love and law; we shall know the full truth that is religion;\nshall know things as they are and be what we should be.\n\n\n\nTHE REAL FOUNDATION\n\nA good many thousand sermons have been preached on the parable of the\nhouses built on sand and on rock, probably nearly all of them with the\nintent to prove that the way to build the life on a rock foundation is\nto pass through the experience known as conversion, obtain saving faith\nand join the church.  This is typical of a popular way of interpreting\nthe scriptures: First, determine what you wish them to mean and then\nmake them mean that.  The purpose being to persuade people to join the\nchurch, then by hook or crook that duty must be discovered in every\ndivine precept.\n\nBut this is simply to ignore the plain words of the great Teacher.   It\nwould be impossible to clarify His statement: \"If any man hears and\ndoes the things I have been teaching he is like one who builds on a\nrock.\"  One thing marks the rock founded life, the doing of Christly\ndeeds.  The course of conduct, the kind of character He has just\noutlined in the sermon on the mount gives the established staple\ncharacter.\n\nThe enduring life is not built on dreams.  Many people think that their\nlives are rock founded because they have a nebulous admiration for the\nmoral teachings of Jesus.  On the whole they admire the sermon on the\nmount; having taken the trouble to say as much as this they sit back\nwith the comfortable feeling that they have set themselves right with\nthe universe, that the Almighty will be delighted with their\nindorsement.\n\nOne of the most dangerous hypocrites is the easy-going, thoughtless\nbeing who fancies that the indorsement of a duty is equivalent to the\ndoing of it.  He evaporates his convictions into compliments instead of\ncrystallizing them into conduct.  So far from being built on a rock he\nfloats around like a wisp of hay in a high wind.  A butterfly might\nbetter hope to drill and quarry out a foundation than he.  Besides\nthis, his hypocritical praise of right precepts makes them only\noffensive to those who might desire to practice them.\n\nOthers imagine that an intellectual assent to certain statements\nconcerning the church or the Bible or Jesus is sufficient to fix the\nlife in stability.  But the great Teacher does not place the emphasis\nso much on what men may think of His character or mission, nor even on\ntheir honest opinions on the theories of the past and the future, which\nhave delighted mental gymnasts since the world was young, to Him the\ngreat differentiating fact touches those dynamic convictions that are\ndetermining your conduct this day.\n\nHe places conduct before creed.  He long ago took that method of\nteaching which modern pedagogy approves.  He taught religion by the\nmanual method.  Instead of saying, as theologians do, first comprehend\nthese doctrines and then you will be able to do them, He says, first do\nthese things, practice My precepts, and they will ere long become plain\nto you.  Men learn religion by doing.  Begin to do the right and you\nwill get the reason; get the rule through the example.  Deeds are the\nsolvents of doctrines.\n\nThe house of life is built differently from any other; we get the plans\nby erecting the structure.  In the realm of character it is houses\nrather than architecture we need.  Build but one hour's conduct\nsquarely on the plain, cogent teachings of the man of Nazareth and you\nwill serve the world better than if you gave a lifetime to the\nexplanation of His words.\n\nDoctrines are but teachings intended to be done into deeds.  Doing them\nyou gain a larger peace of mind and sense of stability of life than in\nany other way.  If you want the equilibrium of faith you will find it\nby simply laying life's daily details on the plain foundation of His\nprinciples.  Nothing could be plainer; there are no hair-splitting\nmetaphysics, no subtle questions of policy here; do these things and\nthe heart finds calm, the life certitude, the soul satisfaction.\n\n\n\n\nX\n\nThe Passion for Perfection\n\n  _The Great Search_\n  _The Hunger of the Ages_\n  _The Sole Satisfaction_\n\n\n_Pain is the parent of power._\n\n_Marking time leaves no mark on time._\n\n_The proof of love is loving the unlovely._\n\n_Truth never is found by twisting the facts._\n\n_Wings come not to those who refuse to walk._\n\n_An ideal usually is what we want the other man to be._\n\n_There is no righteousness without some self-respect._\n\n_You cannot lead men to the divine by crawling in the dust._\n\n_The real saints have no time to write their autobiographies._\n\n_When a man boils over quickly you soon find out what is in him._\n\n_True piety simply is the prosperity of the eternal things in a man._\n\n_The world never will be won from the love of evil until we make the\ngood lovely._\n\n\nX\n\nTHE GREAT SEARCH\n\nThe cry, \"How may I be right?\" is the cry of the ages.  Human history\nis the record of our attempt to answer it.  Man is naturally a truth\nseeker, and this is the search of all truly great souls.  The enduring\nmonuments of literature are those that have in some measure answered\nthis question.  All things that have been worth while have helped us to\nknow and to realize the right.  Health, happiness, freedom, morality,\nall are but parts of the right; all are but sections of the sublime\nwhole for which man ever seeks.  The search manifests itself in\ndifferent ways; it may be as science, the passion for the knowledge of\nthe right relations of things; as justice, for right relations amongst\nmen; as philosophy, as ethics, as religion.  Back of all our life is\nthe instinct of progress; we push towards the perfect.  And perfection\nwe now know rests not in more things but in bringing all the things\nthat are into right relations with one another.\n\nThe idea that any man can be right regardless of others we scout as\nabsurd.  The ideal civilization we work for here, even the heaven we\nlong for, is simply a condition of living where the things that\nseparate, despoil, and introduce discord are no more.  The hope of the\nrace is to be in right relations with all things.  All the great\nreligions are as the footprints of peoples who have sought the truth\nthat would lead them to be right and just with one another, with the\nworld, and with the great unseen powers behind all being.  Our\nuniversal sense of wrongness is but part of our passion for rightness.\n\nThe sense of imperfection and the desire for improvement have marked\nall religions that have influenced men.  In the Jew this desire for\nrighteousness was supreme.  Job is but a type.  Coming to himself\namongst the ruin of all the things he counted most precious, he forgets\ntheir loss in his desire to solve the great problem, What is right and\nhow may I reach it?  Somewhere he knows there is a solution to all the\nriddles of his friends and the questions of his own heart.  An orderly\nuniverse is not crowned by a being whose life must ever remain an\nunsolved riddle.  Men are not adrift in a fog with no hope of taking\nbearings.  If men have marked the natural world with lines of latitude\nand longitude for the guidance of its travellers, the moral world is\nnot without its markings.\n\nJob's very question contains the only answer that has ever satisfied\nman.  God Himself is the great meridian of all morality.  From Him we\nmay measure all relationships and get them right.  That is the\nessential message of the Bible; it strikes that first of all in \"In the\nbeginning God----\"  Every life is right in the measure that it adjusts\nitself to the unvarying will; amongst the nations they have the kingdom\nwho do His will.  The world has made progress in precisely the\nproportion that this will has been realized.  The promise of the\npresent is that this great standard, this universal law by which all\nmay find the right, has been made known to all through a life.  One of\nour own has set forth God.  One has lived who has shown us how to live.\nFor every problem there is now an example of its solution.  For every\ndifficulty there is something better far than a declaration of duty;\nthere is the great Doer of the deed.  He has come near to man that men\nmight come near to one another.  He reveals the right.\n\nYet we must not allow His perfection to make Him unapproachable.  He is\nonly an example as long as His example is attainable.  His divinity\ndoes not depend on His distance from us but on the degree in which He\nlifts us, inspires us towards the height He has gained.\n\n\n\nTHE HUNGER OF THE AGES\n\n\"Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for\nthey shall be filled,\" is the central beatitude; in a measure it\nembraces all the others, for every virtue they inculcate is included in\nrighteousness.  But it is often rejected as impracticable because\nfanciful teachers who substitute subtle definitions for simple duties\nhave twisted its plain words until righteousness is made something so\nunreasonable as to be repulsive to a right mind.  As a matter of fact,\nit means no more than rightness; the hunger and thirst for\nrighteousness is but the earnest, supreme desire and endeavour to be\nright and to do right at all times, the appetite for the right.\n\nTheological righteousness may mean some strange imputed quality laid on\na man like a cloak to cover his real condition or a bill of health\ngiven to a sick man.  But men who live next to real things care nothing\none way or the other for theoretical rightness; they want the real\narticle.  And a right man will not be satisfied to have even the Most\nHigh think of him as being perfectly right when he knows he falls far\nshort of it.  He would rather be the faltering pursuer of actual\nrightness than the possessor of a hypothetical, ascribed perfection.\n\nThe great Teacher cares nothing about imaginary virtues; He praises\nthose who ardently seek the real ones.  He knows that in the market of\ncharacter cash alone is currency; here you cannot draw checks on some\nother person's deposits.  To Him it is better by far to die facing the\nright than to live in smug content with borrowed merits.  This world\nwill never be content with a gospel that offers only vicarious virtues;\nat its heart it knows too well its need of the genuine usable ones; it\nhas at least the dormant faculties of an appetite for rightness.\n\nAnd all this world story is but a record of the struggle for rightness.\nAll human progress is but its fruitage.  In every age there have been\nglorious souls who have made this passion a thing that glowed in their\nlives and became a light to their day.  In every man the divine\ndiscontent that divides him from the animal is the sign of this desire\nin some form; it shows man seeking to find more perfect, more nearly\nright relations with the things about him.  As the things about him\ncome to include God and heaven and things unseen so will his search for\nrightness become wider and deeper and more spiritual.  Every form of\nspiritual aspiration, every religion, no matter how uncouth and\nstrange, is still the soul of man seeking right relations to the\ninfinite.\n\nWhat a glorious thing is this passion for the right; what visions it\nhas seen, what strength it has given to their realization.  It is the\ngreat tide that, moving restless and resistless in our bosoms, has\ncarried us on towards God.  We cannot but believe it is born of him.\nIt does not originate in him, for it disturbs his peace, it stirs him\nfrom sloth, it spurs him to new and often unwelcome endeavours.  It\never holds before him the shining possibility of a perfect being in a\nperfect world.\n\nNo wonder Christ used the figure of hunger and thirst.  Literal\nappetites have been the motives back of the world's struggle for\nphysical rightness; yet these cravings have not been more general or\nmore forceful than those of the soul.  But for hunger and thirst man\nwould have lived in perfect content with the form and facts of life as\nhe found them; progress, all that we call civilization, would not have\nbeen.\n\nMan is happy in proportion as necessity compels him to heed these\ncravings.  So is it in the moral world; the struggle has been our\nsalvation.  To cease to strive for rightness is to cease to live.\nIndividually and nationally they are happy who accept the rigorous\nclimate of lofty ethical ideals, who are not content to take life as\nthey find it, but who seek to cultivate flowers and fruits of paradise\non the sterile, rocky soil of the human heart.  This is the life that\nJesus shows, the life that seeks and finds the truth, that with\npassionate ardour seeks right relations both with His fellows and with\nHis Father.  Out of the fullness of experience, in the midst of His own\nstruggle He encourages all who strive; they shall be satisfied.  No\nideal, no noble passion, no glorious sacrifice, no honest endeavour for\nthe right was ever in vain; the soul finds itself in seeking the\nsupreme good.\n\n\n\nTHE SOLE SATISFACTION\n\nThrough the ages men have waited for voices to speak from out the great\nunknown.  Answering to this universal longing for larger light, to this\nsearch for truth, there has been the conviction that, where our own\nscanty knowledge ended, there something akin to revelation would give\nus light.  We have been listening for voices that would speak with an\nauthority transcending that given to our fellows.\n\nCold reason may mock at revelation, but the soul struggling in\ndarkness, baffled by its problems, lost in the night, still looks up\nand hopes.  For what awaits us but despair if the mysteries of the\nuniverse are forever sealed, our questions forever unanswered, and no\nhigher appeal to be known than that to our own selfish interests?  It\nis not strange that men have heeded those who, though often mistaken or\nbut impostors, have cried, \"Thus saith the Lord!\"\n\nIt would be strange if in a world of spirits there might be no\ncommunication of spirit.  If the fairest thought of our era is that\nwhich was given us when man was taught to think of the omnipotent as\nfather, it would be strange if there should be no way by which such a\nfather might speak to his children.  Such a world would contradict all\nour best instincts.  Such a world would mean that man was better than\nhis maker.\n\nThe divine voice speaks, but we too often listen in the wrong\ndirection.  It falls not from the skies; it comes not in strange,\nunusual ways of visions and portents.  But it is ever speaking through\nthe things of daily life; it is ever revealing truth and beauty to the\ninner ear, for it comes not from without but springs up within; heard\nby the heart rather than by the ear.\n\nThe best things have not dropped down; they have grown up.  Life is not\nfrom without, but from within.  God speaks not in thunders, but in the\nhopes and the longings of hearts.  Even the voice we hear in the\nsighings of the wind or the message we read in the rays of setting sun\nmust be in us before it means aught to us.\n\nThe ten commandments owe their force not to any writing on stone but to\ntheir writing on our hearts; to them the soul of man answers\naffirmatively.  The only moral code we can follow is that which speaks\nwith the authority of a conscience convicted.  That does not mean that\nman is his own God, nor that he knows no law higher than himself; it\ndoes mean that by the laws of spiritual development the law is being\nwritten on every heart.\n\nEvery real revelation is a divine revelation, since all truth is\ndivine.  Once we thought the scientist the enemy of religion; now we\nknow that whenever science lays bare one of the facts of the universe\nwe do but look on what the finger of the Infinite has written.  When\nreligion fights truth simply because truth speaks an unfamiliar tongue\nor fails to respect her traditions, she is fighting against God Himself.\n\nOur need is not some strange, awe-inspiring voice that shall break the\nsilence of the midnight sky; our need is an ear trained to hear, a\nspirit to understand and reverence the sublime voices that are ever\nspeaking in our world, the voices of the beauty of nature, the joy of\nliving, the stories of every-day divine heroism, the forces that are\nmaking a new world to-day as truly as ever one was made long ago.\n\nThe life of our day has not less of the divine than the life of long\nago; but the message is harder to read; it is for an educated race; it\nis spiritual rather than merely material; it is from within; it is\nfound in every good impulse, in every outgoing sympathy, in the\nkindling of eye as friend greets friend, in the good that men are\ndoing, in the toleration that is becoming wider, the love stronger\nbetween man and man.\n\nGod speaks to men now as He spoke to Moses or to David, though the\nmanner may have changed.  But the poor in spirit, those with whom pride\nof the past has not served to make them unwilling to learn, these hear\nthe voice; the pure in heart see Him; the seekers after truth find Him,\nand to all He comes in the thrilling moment or in the quiet hour when\nthe voice of the heart makes itself heard.\n\n\n\n\nXI\n\nThe Price of Success\n\n  _The Law of Selection_\n  _The Fallacy of Negation_\n  _The Secret of All_\n\n\n_No life is lost that is lived for love._\n\n_The only wealth you can possess is that you have in the heart._\n\n_Love never knows hardship, even when it meets it._\n\n_When men pray for harvest they often get a plow._\n\n_A man's holiness is to be measured by the happiness he creates._\n\n_The only way to reach heaven is by attempting to realize heaven now._\n\n_Whatever is saved by selfishness is lost to the true self._\n\n_One of the worst offenses against humanity is the pretense of\ndivinity._\n\n_Weapons that fly off the handle have little effect on the walls of\nsin._\n\n_Many a man thinks that taking a lease on a front pew gives him a\nfreehold on a corner lot in heaven._\n\n_Success is not in an endeavour to do a great things but in repeated\nendeavours to do greater things._\n\n\nXI\n\nTHE LAW OF SELECTION\n\nJesus said, \"If thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and\ncast them from thee,\" but this age finds it hard to accept that saying.\nIt asks, If we are to throw life away why should it have been given to\nus?  Why this selfhood with its passions, its surging desires, its\ngreat longing to be untrammelled and free if all is to be restrained\nand the passions are to be perpetually denied?  If religion means, as\nsome plainly have said, doing the things you don't want to do and\nleaving undone those you desire, then it is a mockery, a contradiction\nof our lives and natures.\n\nTherefore there exists another philosophy which says, boldly: Live out\nall that is in you; do all the things you want to do; your passions in\nthemselves are sufficient justification for their gratification.  They\nsay man is free; therefore, let him realize himself by giving free and\nfull expression to every thought, inclination, appetite, and\npossibility within him.\n\nWhen the average man puts the two philosophies in contrast he is likely\nto conclude that the path of self-denial, of stern repression, is the\nmistaken one; for, he will say, does it not contradict nature?--does it\nnot involve the repression of natural instincts and make all life a\nperpetual fight against ourselves, a waste of forces, instead of, as it\nshould be, a plan by which a man might find success through the\nrealization of the best in himself?\n\nBut let another test be put to this philosophy--the test of life.  How\ndoes it work out?  What are the best lives, the lives that are richest\nand that have most enriched the world?  Are they those that have given\nfree rein to every fancy, that have nurtured and brought to fruitage\nevery growth of the heart's garden, whether it be thistle, brier, or\npoison root, or fair, nutritious product?  Are they those that have\ngiven the tiger and the beast of prey free and full range of the life?\n\nThere is striking unanimity in the answer.  The rich and the enriching\nlives have been those that have come by the path of the cross; they\nhave learned repression, practiced denial, and suffered death.  In\nevery sphere the lights that have illumined the way of man's advance\nhave not been the dancing flames of selfish, sensual passion but the\nconsuming of the bodies of the martyrs and heroes, either burning in\ntheir passion for others or denying and losing all rather than denying\ntruth and light.\n\nThe law runs through all; if you would have a perfect flower you must\ndeny existence to many weeds, you must repress the rank growth, you\nmust pluck off many a leaf and nip many a bud that the one may come to\nthe fullness of its beauty.  Through the grain of character goes the\nwise husbandman, and death is in his hand--the death of the less\nworthy, the harmful, and the enemy that life may abound yet more and\nmore in that which is worthy.\n\nIn those fields where all things grow in their own way the weeds become\nthe standard for all; license brings all down to the level of the\nlowest.  But life is not license--it is choice, selection, sacrifice,\ndeath.  Pain is the only price at which perfection may be purchased.\nSelf-realization comes not by permitting all things to have their way\nbut by subjecting all parts to the securing of that high end.\n\nIt is but cowardice that cries for the so-called natural outworking of\neverything within man; it seeks to save the labour of weeding, the pain\nof cutting here and pruning there.  It asks only to be left alone.  But\nthat way lies the deepest pain of all, the pain of a life where there\nis nothing but tangles of weeds--no flowers, no capacities for joy, no\npower to will, no eye to see the good and true and beautiful.\n\nNo; the great Teacher was right when He called for self-denial and\nself-victory.  He only is great, he alone has found life who has\nlearned to bring all his parts and faculties into service, who brings\nall his body and self into subjection that all may be keen and well\nkept tools in the work he is doing as a servant of his brothers and his\nage.  This service gives the supreme and sufficient motive for the\nsuppression and elimination of all things that might hinder; the\ndevelopment of the best self for the best service by means of the\ncutting off of anything that might hinder or thwart the high and holy\nservice purposes of a life.\n\n\n\nTHE FALLACY OF NEGATION\n\nThe ancient law that nature abhors a vacuum holds true in the moral\nrealm.  The heart of man is never long empty.  And yet the whole scheme\nof modern ecclesiastical regulation of life is built on the plan of\nmaking a man holy by emptying him of all evil and stopping there,\nleaving a negative condition, without a thought of the necessity of\nfilling the void.\n\nSo long have we been trained in this that we are all a good deal more\nconcerned about the things we ought not to do than about the things we\nought to do.  We spend our days nipping off the buds of evil\ninclinations, pulling up the weeds of evil habits, wondering how it\nhappens they multiply so fast, forgetting altogether the wiser plan we\nwould adopt with weeds and briers in our gardens.\n\nThere are many who still think of the pious man as one who succeeds in\naccomplishing the largest number of repressions in his life, the ideal\nbeing the colourless life, never doing a thing that is wrong or subject\nto criticism.  The energy of many a life is being spent in a campaign\nagainst a certain list of proscribed deeds.  Blessed is the\nman--according to their beatitudes--who has the largest number of\nthings he does not do.\n\nBut if rightness is abstinence from evil, then a lamp-post must always\nbe better than a man, for it justly can lay claim to all the negative\nvirtues.  What an easy way of life is this, simply to find out the\nthings we know other people like to do and to determine that if we only\ncan leave them undone we are holy in the sight of heaven.\n\nBut not only is this a way of folly, it is a way of positive harm, a\nway fatal at last to the true life.  To do no more than to turn out one\nset of devils only is to invite other and worse devils into the heart.\nTo seek emptiness only is to invite yet more iniquity.  An empty heart\nis as dangerous as an empty hour.\n\nEmptiness is not holiness, it is idiocy.  There cannot be an empty\nheart.  To take a bad thing away from a man gives an opportunity for a\nworse thing to enter unless you simply choke the bad by implanting the\ngood.  Some of the most dangerous people are those who feel pious\nbecause they can say, We never did any harm.\n\nReligion often has come to mean only a multitude of repressive\nregulations, apparently a scheme for making others abstain from those\nthings for which we have no appetite.  Little wonder that children feel\nonly repulsion for a church which seems to take delight in finding\nimpiety in every natural pleasure; that men turn from a path which,\naccording to its prospectus, promises nothing but pain, privation, and\nemptiness.\n\nWe do not object to the pain and privation provided they have their\npurpose.  But all nature objects to a course of life that maims,\npinches, and restricts without corresponding and compensating\ndevelopment and liberty somewhere.  We fight against every law of life\nand court the ways of death so long as we endeavour to develop\ncharacter by putting it into bandages, leading strings, and legal\nrestrictions.\n\nThere is evil to be eliminated; there are thousands of things we ought\nnot to do.  But the best way to get rid of the tares is to sow good\nwheat in abundance.  The way to avoid the things we ought not to do is\nto do the things that ought to be done.  The empty life is a standing\ninvitation to temptation; the busy man seldom finds the devil's card\nleft at his door.\n\nLive the life above the things you would overcome.  It never has been\nfound necessary to pass a law prohibiting the president from playing\nmarbles; larger interests fill his life so that these things do not\neven occur to him.  Give a man a great work to do and you will save him\nfrom a thousand temptations to do small and unworthy things.  Do not\nallow the modern conception of religion as gloom and denial to keep you\nfrom that which is your right as a spiritual being, the strength, joy\nand beauty of the divine life.\n\nHoliness of life is not in innocence of evil but in positive\nforcefulness for good; not in doing as little harm as we can, but in\nfilling the whole life with worthy, helpful, uplifting deeds.  The good\nlife not only has no debts--it has large assets, deep and lasting\nvalue; it enriches all life.  It offers to the world not barren land\nclaiming the virtue of freedom from the thorn and the brier, it crowns\nall with the abundance and glory of fir and myrtle.\n\n\n\nTHE SECRET OF ALL\n\nThe words hold a large place in every alert life: Happiness, Health and\nHeart; some may put them Success, Strength and the Soul.  It is easy to\nrecognize the importance of the first two; that of the third is more\nremote.  Some have imagined that religion emphasizes the last alone and\nignores the other two.\n\nEvidently it is a legitimate thing for the Christian to pray for\nprosperity; and it is right for him to try to answer his own prayers.\nPoverty is no proof of piety.  Nothing about God is or can be\npoverty-stricken.  He gives us a rich and glorious world, prolific in\nits resources; its life is rich and prosperous.  Nature is running\nover, fairly rioting in splendour and wealth.  The Creator has given\nman this garden of glory that he might enjoy it.  It is a sin not to\nenter into its possession; he is dead already who does not desire\nprosperity, who no longer seeks success in life.  It is an easy matter\nfor the man who has made an all around failure to talk about the\ndispensations of Providence and the compensations of the future.\nProsperity is always a sin to the man who lacks the pluck to secure it.\n\nYet many who seem to have failed may have succeeded best of all.\nProsperity often comes in strange packages; it may even be labelled\nAdversity.  Not all will succeed according to popular standards.  Many\nwill be more fortunate; they will win the riches of influence,\nfriendship, family, thought, knowledge, love, character.  It is not the\nthings we have that make us rich; it is the amount of life we are\ncapable of enjoying.  The soul determines prosperity.  It is the\nenergizing spirit of man, stirring him out of the ignoble dust,\ncreating the desire for more of the things of life and then for more of\nlife itself.  It determines values.  It has a way of reversing things\nso that one man gets more out of a dollar book than another gets out of\na million dollar bond.  It alone gives appetite and appreciation, and,\nwithout these, though there may be many possessions, there is no\nprosperity.\n\nWhat is true of prosperity is true also of health.  Happily the days\nare gone when sickness passed for saintliness.  No longer is red blood\ncounted a foe of righteousness.  We are getting back to the simpler,\nearlier thinking.  It is not only right to seek health; it is wrong not\nto.  The haggard face no longer indicates the holy heart; it is likely\nto evidence the opposite.  We are getting over the notion that God is\nglorified by ruining the fair temple He has given us.  Men no longer\ncount on being beautiful angels in the skies because they have looked\nlike walking sepulchres on our streets.  It is an imperfect holiness\nthat does not have health.  Health, that is physical prosperity, is a\nduty.\n\nAnd here, also, the soul is central.  The clean heart, pure thoughts,\ncontrolled appetites, aspiring hopes, these make health.  Evil temper,\nlust, worry, care, envy, these are the soul processes that disturb the\nlife and destroy health.  Happiness is health, and happiness is wholly\nof the heart.  The soul is but the sum of all the things within, the\nforce that moves all things in life; if within the man looks up, then\nhe lives up; if the soul droops, he decays.  What you are within\ndetermines what you are without; he who is poor in heart, in this inner\nlife, will be poor in prosperity and weak in health, no matter how much\nhe possesses.  But he who with his soul takes in the world of beauty,\nof love, of joy, who reaches out to heaven and God, all these things\nare his and he is rich and strong indeed.\n\n\n\n\nXII\n\nDivine Service\n\n  _The Ideal Service_\n  _The Orthodox Service_\n  _The Heavenly Service_\n\n\n_Kindness is the evidence of kingliness._\n\n_The surest way to impoverish your heart is to hoard up your love._\n\n_A really smart man will refrain from saying things that smart._\n\n_Many a prayer for vision ought to be changed to a petition for\nvertebra._\n\n_The damning doubts are those that deter us from good deeds._\n\n_The leaders of men are not the ones who are trying to get ahead of\ntheir fellows._\n\n_Folks who are too good for anything are good for nothing._\n\n_It's hard to steer a straight course if your conscience is in your\npants pocket._\n\n_You do not have much faith in your Father unless you have some in His\nfamily._\n\n_No man can have a place in the kingdom of heaven who is complacent to\nthe ills of earth._\n\n\nXII\n\nTHE IDEAL SERVICE\n\nNever was the greatest of all greater than when He put about Him the\nbadge of the servant.  His example has made the towel, the apron, the\nbadge of true honour.  Nothing could have surprised those men who were\nquarrelling over their precedence more than that their great Master\nshould stoop to perform this menial service of washing their feet.\nLike many who call themselves His to-day they strove over chief seats,\nhonours, titles, and dignities.  They were seeking the chief places and\nby their strife showing themselves fit only for the lowest.  Nowhere is\nthe sense of honour more easily slain than in the search for honours.\n\nThe only dignity that really adorns a man is that which comes without\nhis demanding it.  How often have the servants of the meek and lowly\nJesus turned the world away from Him by their examples of vanity,\ngreed, lust for power, their pomp and pride of self-glory.  They who\nwere sent to be the shepherds of men have fleeced the flock for their\nown adorning and then fought amongst themselves to see who should wear\nthe choicest robes.  History has shown that they were wrong and their\nMaster was right.  The greater their greedy ambition the greater their\nshame; the higher the place they have claimed the lower has been that\nwhich the voice of humanity has awarded them.\n\nOn the other hand there shine forth those who have followed Him in\nlowly service; theirs is the honour to-day.  Because He took upon Him\nthe form of a servant then now is the kingdom and the power and the\nglory His.\n\nSo it has always been, sovereignty comes by way of service; heaven and\nearth unite in honouring those who have not scorned the humble place of\nhelpfulness.  John says that it was because Jesus was conscious of His\ndivine origin and His glorious destiny that He took the towel and did\nthe work of the slave.  Only those who realize their true greatness can\nignore the littleness of man's petty dignities, can lose all sense of\nstooping, of condescension when they serve others, and so can be of\nservice to mankind.  A man proves that he is the son of a heavenly\nFather by his service for his least brother.  When that dignity, heaven\nborn, is in a man's heart there is nothing in the dirt he may touch by\ndeeds of kindness that can defile him; contact does not contaminate.\n\nLove never thinks of any of its services as loathsome.  That from which\na superficial dignity would revolt love does with rejoicing.  It thinks\nnothing of the honour or the dishonour, but only of the helpfulness it\nmay render.  It is not asking whether men are approving or whether\npromotion is coming.  It needs no promotion or approval; the work\nitself is the highest reward; the service elevates to the loftiest of\nall positions.\n\nThe world's sovereigns are its servants.  He makes an alliance with God\nwho helps a fellow man.  Work is that by which the Creator has lifted\nman above the creatures of the field, and the work that sacrifices that\nit may serve is that by which God lifts man to Himself.  The heavenly\ngate may be shut to robes and miters, epaulettes and crowns; but it\nshall be open wide to that great throng who bear the stains of toil,\nwho have served their fellows, who wear the apron of sacrificing\nservice; and the Son of the carpenter shall lead them in.\n\nThis is a working world; its Maker is pictured as a worker; there is no\nbetter evidence of religion than willingness to serve.  Work determines\na man's worth to the world.  And religion must be known by the things\nit does, and not, as many have fondly supposed, by the dreams it has.\n\n\n\nTHE ORTHODOX SERVICE\n\nThis is a working world, with no place for the idler, whether he be\nhigh or low, rich or poor.  The measure of a man is the service he\nrenders humanity.  Actions are measured by the same rule.  The value of\nreligion to life, its right to time and place, is measured by this,\nDoes it help or inspire men to service, does it increase the quantity\nor improve the quality of the work that they do for their world?\n\nMen rightly ignore the piety that satisfies itself with platitudes on\nthe duties of others, or with philosophical speculations on problems\nwhich, if they were accurately solved, would contribute nothing either\nto our peace, our possessions, or our personal characters.  Yet, how\nmany imagine that they are profoundly pious because they cherish\nproperly indorsed opinions, duly certified as to their antiquity.\n\nThey who profess to follow the Man of Nazareth cannot do it by sitting\nin their pews or kneeling at their altars; they cannot do it by\ndreaming of a place of bliss or picturing one of torment.  One of the\nfirst lessons He gives His disciples is that it is not he that speaketh\nthe word, but he that doeth the will, who is pleasing to God.\n\nNor do men do His will in any important or complete sense by going to\nchurch or serving in its meetings or on its committees.  When a man is\nordained to divine orders, that is, to give himself wholly to do the\nwill and work of the Most High, it is said that he becomes a minister.\nIf \"minister\" means anything at all it means servant, one who works for\nothers, who ministers to them.  The Master spoke of Himself as being\namong men as one who served them.  The only orthodox service is the\nservice of humanity.\n\nThis is religion, such a consciousness of the reality of the Infinite\nSpirit that you will steadily do the things that that spirit of love is\ndoing in this world, ministering to men, binding up the broken in\nheart, lifting the lame, and leading the wandering, feeding the hungry\nand clothing the naked, bringing light and love and cheer to those that\nsit in darkness, you will become feet and fingers to God.\n\nOne does not need to wait for a special garb to do this religious work;\none does not need to wait for formal ordination; whoever loves men\nalready is divinely ordained to serve them.  One does not need to wait\nfor a church or a special organization; the sufficient motive is deep,\nsacrificing love; the method will be just what the Master's was, to go\nwhere men are and help them.\n\nAfter all, what this world needs is not so much that men shall go to\ntheir fellows with money, with clothes, or even with employment; it\nneeds that they shall just go to them.  The good mixer, who mingles\nwith men, who knows how they live, and what they think, how they\nsuffer, and what they feel, if, going amongst them, he carries a clean\nheart, a love for his fellows, a firm faith in heaven, and hope for\nmen, is doing them more good by his presence than he who may send\ncarloads of goods.\n\nMen did not need that Jesus should wear a label saying that the Most\nHigh was with Him; the more He mingled with men, the more clearly they\nsaw He belonged to God.  What He was willing to do for them showed that\nthey, too, were the children of the Most High.  If any man would have\nthat infinite presence with him, if he desires the deep sense of the\nspiritual, let him seek it not in closet or convent, but in the touch\nof hand and in the sight of the face of friend and fellow being.\n\nMany of us are worried at times because our lives seem wasted in doing\nlittle things; we would become immortal by saving our powers for some\ngreat deed.  We need to remember Him whom the world most easily\nremembers and most highly honours, the Man of Nazareth, whose life was\nspent in trivial services, doing the next thing that came to hand,\nhelping ordinary people in every-day needs.  Yet God was with Him, as\nHe ever is with those who love their fellows in sincere service.\n\n\n\nTHE HEAVENLY SERVICE\n\nIt seems easy to see something peculiarly holy, something deeply\nreligious in the occupations and acts of the priesthood or the\nministry.  But thinking of these as religious and of such service as\ndivine we fall into the habit of thinking that they alone, in all the\nworld of action, are divine.  We set on one side of life the religious\nservice limited to these formal acts and on the other side what we call\nthe secular life and service.\n\nWe have sacred days, sacred deeds, sacred callings, religious services;\nall separate from the rest of life, belonging in a department, a\npigeon-hole, by themselves.  Whatever is not of these is of the world,\nworldly, secular, lacking in the peculiar aroma of sanctity that\nattaches to the church or the profession of religion.\n\nThere are many who desire to do some religious work; who fain would\nengage in divine service.  There is in almost every breast a desire to\ndo something high and holy, something that is not necessary,\nutilitarian, with some other motive than bread-winning.  But there\nseems to be no opportunity; such deeds are supposed to belong to\nspecial callings; one must be ordained to do divine service.\n\nThe truth is, divine service is the duty and high privilege of every\nhuman being; we all are divinely called to the ministry; the service of\nGod and humanity belongs to us all.  We must not wait for ordaining\nhands nor ecclesiastical robes nor for the environment of official\nsanctity.  Every impulse to do good, to show human love, and do loving\nservice is a commission from high heaven.\n\nThe good Master invites men and women to His kind of service, the\nhighest and holiest known to all the ages.  He never was separated to a\nclerical calling; He did not wait for an ordaining council nor did He\nconfine His divine service to prayer and praise or to the activities of\nthe church ritual.  His divine service was the service of the sons of\nmen, the going about doing good.\n\nHeavenly work is not work for some far off heaven; it is the work of\nmaking this present earth like heaven.  The work of God is not working\nfor an absent deity; it is doing the work that the God of all love\nwould do in this world; it is being feet and fingers, voice and lips to\nthe great Spirit who is over and in us all.  It is making that spirit\nof love real, actual, concrete to our fellows.\n\nThe holiest work in this world may be done in the humblest places; the\nmost divine service may not be in the cathedral but in the cottage; the\nangels may pass by the intoning choir to listen to a mother's crooning\ncradle song or to watch the patient service, the loving kindness shown\nin washing the faces or wiping away the tears of dirty and destitute\nchildren.\n\nThe holy service which will fill your heart with joy and give you the\nunfading crown of eternity, never will be done if you are waiting for\nsome ecclesiastical uniform to do it in.  Whatever is done in the\nspirit of the infinite love, in the spirit of the great Master, that\ntruly is divine and glorious.\n\nIt is the good work that is glorious.  It is a thing more truly divine\nto do well your daily duty, to put out good, honest work, than it is to\nwear a clerical garb or perform professional religious duties.  The\nhonour, the worthiness, the glory of your work may be measured by the\nspirit in which it is done and by its helpfulness and worth to the\nworld.\n\nAll life becomes glorious as we see that even in the least of our daily\ntasks we may be doing the will of God, that it may be just as necessary\na part of the divine service that I should serve at a desk, a counter,\nor a machine, should sweep a room or tend a child as that another\nshould preach or pray.  For the great Master of all who knows all our\nwork, measures it all, not as we do; He sees the glory of the cup of\ncold water and the divinity of the commonplace.\n\n\n\n\nXIII\n\nOur Father and Our Fellows\n\n  _The Primary Reconciliation_\n  _Faith in Our Fellows_\n  _The Law of Forgiveness_\n\n\n_Sorrow is sympathy's school._\n\n_Love makes the heaviest load seem light._\n\n_To be willing to be saved alone is to be lost._\n\n_The truly godly see something divine in all._\n\n_Your appreciation may be another's inspiration._\n\n_Kindness is the sign of divine kinship._\n\n_You cannot knit the souls of men with soft sawder._\n\n_You cannot be a leader and lose sight of those who are to be led._\n\n_The shortness of the day excuses no man from greatness of endeavour._\n\n_When a man thinks of nothing but his sins and failures he will have\nnothing else to think of._\n\n_Lots of people who talk of their lives as blue are only colour blind,\nthey either are green or yellow._\n\n_He is only shortsighted who pronounces the world bad after looking in\nhis own heart._\n\n_Many a man is waiting for an inspiration who would find success at\nonce if he was not so afraid of a little perspiration._\n\n\nXIII\n\nTHE PRIMARY RECONCILIATION\n\nMen in the days of the great Teacher were as we are to-day, prone to\ncompound for the neglect of duties near at hand by the adoration of\nspiritual delights far off.  They talked about getting right with God\nwhile they continued to do wrong to men.  The problem of the hypocrite\nwho is so thrilled with the delights of heaven that he scorns earthly\nduties and decencies is not a new one.\n\nHow easy it is to substitute syllogisms for service, to think that we\ndo our duty by describing it, so to exhaust oneself in pleasant and\nseductive dreams of a distant heaven that we have no power left to\napply to the problems of a needy present-day world.\n\nThe mockery of religion to-day is that men and women are going to the\nchurches, singing themselves into ecstatic complacency and imaginary\nharmony with their God while their greed is crushing the hearts of the\nhelpless and they are blinding themselves to the world's gloom and pain\nthat unhindered they may enjoy spiritual delights.\n\nThings cannot be right in our relations to the Father of spirits until\nthey are made right in our relations with our brothers in the flesh.\nIn Christianity social righteousness is basic to spiritual blessing.\nThe ideal kingdom waits for ideal conditions and relations amongst its\nsubjects.\n\nThe way to the Father lies through the brother.  If you would learn to\nlove God--and how indefinite and idealistic that seems to most of\nus--the lesson is simple, first learn to love His other children,\nespecially the helpless, needy, and wronged.  Delights high and\nspiritual always will be remote until duties near at hand are done.\n\nThe revival we most of all need to-day is a revival of the social\nconscience, the recognition of the fact that we can offer no gift\nacceptable, in the temple of worship or the place of prayer, until we\nhave washed our hands from the blood of our fellows, that we can pay\nnothing to God until we have in earnest set about paying our debts to\nmen.\n\nAnxious, perhaps, to claim our rights as children of the Father in\nheaven, we have forgotten that that title is promised to the\npeacemakers.  What avail is it to pray, Thy kingdom come, if we block\nits advent by cherishing enmity in our hearts?  What use is it to carry\nhearts torn with malice, souls sunken in selfishness, and spirits torn\nwith pride and covetousness to the place that belongs to the meek and\nlowly?\n\nMany a man is going to church and coming away empty in heart; perhaps\nhe has given up any hope of finding solace in religion, who would find,\nas it were, the windows of heaven opened up if he should give himself\nfor an hour to making some other helpless lives happy, to righting some\nwrong or bringing some joy to lives embittered and oppressed.\n\nThe pathway to God is a plain one, strikingly lacking in romance, with\nno attendant visible angelic choir.  It is the doing of whatever duty\nor kindness I owe to those near me, the breaking down of walls of\nprejudice--spite fences built in ignorance and hatred--the learning to\nlove and help, the seeking of peace, good feeling, and harmony with all\nmen.\n\nThis does not mean that all must become professors of sociology; the\nstudy of social theories often is a substitute for the practice of\nsocial duties; but that we must seek out the good in men, we must set\nourselves right with them, we must discharge all our responsibilities\ntowards men before we can realize God.  The kingdom comes as we\nrecognize the kingliness in all the sons of the kingdom, as we express\nour faith in God by friendship for our fellows.\n\n\n\nFAITH IN OUR FELLOWS\n\nPoor Peter has never been much of a favourite with the preachers; he\nwas so thoroughly unstable, unideal.  But the people have always had a\ntender feeling for him, partly because he was a fisherman, partly\nbecause he was so much like the rest of us.  Nothing is more striking\nin the life of Jesus than His affection for ordinary men.  The cultured\nPharisees, the philosophical Sadducees seem to have much less\nattraction to Him than the rude fisherman and the toiler.  These men\nwere often weak, sometimes cowardly, obstinate, dull, mediocre; yet He\ncommitted His kingdom to them; He believed in them.  Before they had\nfaith in Him He had faith in them; and that ultimately made them men.\n\nIt sounded much like cruel sarcasm when He told that weak, vacillating\nSimon that he was a rock.  Those who knew Peter best must have smiled;\nhe was more like a jellyfish.  But Jesus could see the best that was in\na man.  He detected the hidden good even in Peter.  He proves His own\ngoodness by His faith in the good in every man.\n\nSomewhere in every man there is some good.  Overlaid it may be by\npassion, by habits, by prejudice grown out of wrong and suffering\nperchance; but still it is there.  Faith in this and sympathy, these\nare the golden keys that unlock the doors to where the good lies buried.\n\nThe saviours of society have always been those who looked for the best\nin it.  If you go through life seeking the beast in man, you will find\nit, and the chances are it will devour you; if you look for the beauty\nthat is from above you will find it, and it will bless you.  It is just\nas necessary to have faith in man as it is to have faith in God.  If\nmen cannot become good, then there is no God in the sense of a power\nthat makes for goodness.  The optimist not only believes in the best,\nhe creates the better.\n\nSome there are who reluctantly admit that God is a little better than\nthey are, though that may be due to His circumstances, but they have\nnever imagined for an instant that any one else is at all good.\nBelieve that men are wholly bad and they will not disappoint you.\nEvery man somehow responds to the expectations of others.  You had\nbetter damn a man than despair of him.  Neither a church nor an\nindividual can help this world when they have more confidence in the\npower of evil to become all pervasive than in the power of the Most\nHigh to make His purposes felt in every heart as truly as He makes His\nsun to shine on the just and the unjust.  The church first consigns men\nto perdition and then wonders why they are reluctant to walk with it\nthe other way.  So long as you have faith in total depravity you will\nfind some facts to substantiate it.\n\nBut there is a better way.  Sympathy with men will do more for them\nthan sermons on their sins.  Look for the best in them and you will\nfind things better than you expected.  There are flower beds as well as\ngarbage heaps in every heart; at least, there are spots where seeds of\nthe fairest flowers of heaven may be sown.\n\nYou do not have to be a fool to have faith in your fellows.  You do not\nneed to take the padlocks off your house; but you do need to take them\noff your heart.  There may be those whom it would be wrong to trust\nwith your cash box; but it is a greater wrong to withhold from them\nyour kindness.  You can show them that you believe the best instead of\nthe worst of them.\n\nThe great Teacher told men that He came not to condemn but to give\nlife.  His followers have too often occupied themselves wholly with\ncondemnation and then wondered that their sentences saved none.  Every\nsoul knows its own sentence; what it needs to feel is that God and all\ngood men are with it, helping it to shake off that sentence, to arise\nand return to the Father, that, instead of all things conspiring to\nkeep a man down, there is a cloud of witnesses cheering him on, a\nmighty choir invisible inspiring his heart.  And there is nothing any\nman can do of greater worth to the world than to cheer on another by\nhis faith in him, his high expectation of him, his wise blindness to\nsome little faults, and his propagating approval of the least\nbeginnings of any good.  Men are the saviours of men by their faith in\nmen.\n\n\n\nTHE LAW OF FORGIVENESS\n\nA silly interpretation often leads to the utter rejection of a law.\nSentimentalists have caused men of sense to pronounce Christ's law of\nforgiveness an impractical one.  Yet we indorse it every time we utter\nthe Lord's prayer, and still we hope to be forgiven whether we find it\npossible to forgive or not.  If this law means the mental flabbiness\nthat sends bouquets to bloody criminals and petitions the pardon of\nmurderers and the release of the foes of humanity, we must reject it as\nthe utterance of one unacquainted with the rugged facts of life.\n\nBut forgiveness and pardon are two different things; forgiveness is\nbetween man and man; pardon is a matter of executive power.  You can\nforgive a child and still punish him.  The forgiveness that does away\nwith consequences would make this an immoral world.  No greater wrong\ncan be done to a man than to protect him from the deserts of his evil\ndeeds.  This is as unjust as to withhold the rewards of the right.\n\nThe difference between the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a\ntooth and the law of the great Teacher lies largely in the spirit of\ndealing with the offenses.  The old spirit was that of getting even\nwith the wrongdoer.  His act was largely regarded from the personal\nstandpoint; a crime was individual and not social.  Revenge followed\nwrongdoing.\n\nBut Jesus says it is better to lift a man up than to get even with him.\nIt is better to help men to the right than to satisfy your desire for\nrevenge.  Forgiveness is more than saying, \"Go without punishment\";\nrather it says, \"Come learn a better way; live without sin.\"\nForgiveness takes malice from the mind of the offended; it substitutes\nfor it the motive of friendship for the offender.\n\nRevenge says, \"I will make it worse for you than you have made it for\nme.\"  Sentimentalism says: \"Let the poor victim of circumstances go;\nsend him a rosewater spray and an embroidered text and he won't do it\nagain.\"  But love, she of the clear eye and the steady hold, takes him\nby the hand in silence, lifts him up, and leads him, perhaps by paths\nof pain, to his better self.  Love puts his sins behind her back and\nteaches him to face her way.  Love lets the wrong teach its own lesson,\nbear its own fruit.  And in her labour for him she forgets her own pain\nand loss caused by his offense.\n\nThe best way to forgive a burglar would not be to let him out of jail,\nbut to teach him the laws of property, to train him in the self-respect\nthat would lead to industry, to make him a brother and a fellow worker\namong men instead of an outcast and a social parasite.  The test of any\nforgiveness is its helpfulness, the manner in which it wipes out the\nenmity of the victim and turns the guilty into better ways.\n\nMany say, I can forgive, but I cannot forget.  No one asks you to\nforget; but you cannot fully forgive unless you will forego the feeling\nof enmity and the desire for revenge.  You cannot make any one forget\nthat which he has once known; but you can substitute helpfulness for\nhatred and restoration for revenge.  True love simply discounts the\npast as a ground for present action; it refuses to determine its\npersonal bearing and deeds in to-day by the other's ill deeds of\nyesterday.\n\nAll we are asked to do is to forgive as we are forgiven.  Our hope is\nthat when we have fallen our friends will not lose their faith in us\nnor entirely forsake us, that they will give us another chance; not\nthat they will shield us from the fruitage of our follies and our\nfalseness, but that they will not shut us off forever from their faces.\n\nSo far from forgiveness being the weakness of the thoughtless, it is\nthe helpfulness of the strong and the wise.  To forgive a man will not\nmean to escape from the trouble of securing his punishment; it will not\nmean the weak complaisance of indolent tolerance.  It will mean thought\nfor his weakness, taking up his burden, doing the brother's part for\nhim, the endeavour to do for him what we would like to have the Father\nof us all do for us all.\n\n\n\n\nXIV\n\nMen and Mammon\n\n  _Riches and Righteousness_\n  _Religion and Business_\n  _The Moral End of Money-Making_\n\n\n_Better a sweet failure than a sour success._\n\n_An itching palm causes a crook in the fingers._\n\n_Many a moral squint comes from a money monocle._\n\n_The fortunate people are those who believe they are._\n\n_We are always building bridges for things with wings._\n\n_The best way to wipe out a friendship is to sponge on it._\n\n_Many a man thinks he is pious when he is only petrified._\n\n_A little plain honesty is worth untold professional holiness._\n\n_The religion that runs to fever usually evens up with chills._\n\n_Nothing is easier than being benevolent with other people's money._\n\n\nXIV\n\nRICHES AND RIGHTEOUSNESS\n\nLet no man take it, that the statement on the inaccessibility of heaven\nto the rich involves the opposite, how easily shall they that have\nnothing enter in.  The people who have lived pulseless lives are apt to\npoint to their poverty as the proof of their piety.  But righteousness\nis neither a matter of riches nor of rags.  The great Teacher glorifies\nneither.  The qualifications for citizenship in His kingdom strike\ndeeper than that.\n\nHis words have nothing to do with the bitter envy of the demagogue who\ndenounces those who have earned that for which he would not labour.  He\nmeasures men not by that they have but by that they are.  He looks\nthrough both the fine linen and the tattered rags to the man.  Money\ninterests Him only as it affects character.  The question of riches and\npoverty is not a matter of housing and eating, but what a man does for\nhimself and his world with that which he has.\n\nRiches of themselves do not bar a man from heaven; but they full often\neat into his heart, become of absorbing interest, and so effectually\nand forever blind the inner vision to the best things.  It is not that\nheaven has shut its gates, but that the love of money, the selfishness,\nborn of cupidity, has paralyzed those spiritual senses by which he\nmight have found his way therein.\n\nThe possession of wealth is not a sin; to some it has come almost\nwithout effort, even against their wills; but it does constitute one of\nthe most severe tests that can be set before a soul.  It increases the\ndifficulties of the right life, because it enlarges so greatly the\nresponsibilities.  The greater the wealth the greater the trust laid\nupon a man as the steward of the produce of the earth.\n\nThe principle holds of all possessions; all are tests of character.  A\nman can love gold just as ardently when he has but a grain as when he\nhas possessions beyond computation.  A single dollar, laid on the\nheart, can shut out the light of heaven as effectually as can a\nmillion.  The relation between riches and righteousness is not\ndetermined by the balance in the bank, but by the balance that a man\nsucceeds in maintaining in his heart between his own interests and the\ntrusteeship which possession places upon him.\n\nMoney makes men as well as unmakes them.  The burdens, the tests, the\nresponsibilities it entails, the temptations it presents, all form part\nof life's great lesson.  Out of the struggle between self and the\nservice we owe the world, out of the keen fighting against\ncovetousness, and the battle against the debasing tendencies of the\nlove for gold and the greed for gain arise the giants--or fall the lost\nsouls.\n\nThe rich young ruler came to Jesus and faced his test; the demand that\nhe should sell all and give to the poor simply put his heart on trial;\nit set before him the great choices; it decided as to the things which\nhe held first.  To him the possession of things was more than the\npossibilities of using them in service; before the great test he fell.\n\nIt is just as easy and often fully as dangerous to set your heart on\nthe gold you haven't got as it is to fall into the snare of the miser.\nEverything depends on the place you give to riches in your life.  One\nman seeks them as a prize to be won and enjoyed for his own\ngratification, his own glory and fame; another seeks them only as\nlarger avenues to usefulness, and to him riches come as tools, as\nservants, as possibilities of making his life count for more.\n\nSome men die with their houses full of tools unused; they have made the\nfatal mistake of setting their hearts on the tools instead of on the\nwork.  Others come to their accounting possessing as many tools, but\nall of them shining from hard use, and counting as their treasures not\nthe tools but the things produced, the good accomplished.  Wealth is\nfor work and the work is for the making of the man.  They enter the\nkingdom who are kingly, whether they learned the royal lesson and\nacquired the heavenly character through the school of poverty or that\nof riches.\n\n\n\nRELIGION AND BUSINESS\n\nThe question, can a man be a Christian and succeed in business, though\nold, is still asked every day.  There are yet a great many who regard\nreligion and business as conflicting pursuits, and they attempt a\ncompromise by the clear-cut division of time into business hours and\nchurch time.  Others are answering this question in the negative.\n\"Look at me,\" they say.  \"I have always been pious and honest, and\ntherefore I have failed to make money or achieve success; religion does\nnot pay.\"\n\nIf the question means, can a man take out his backbone and succeed in\nbusiness, there need be no hesitancy as to the answer.  If becoming a\nChristian means the elimination of all virility from the character, the\nsubstitution of soft soap and sawder for strength and diligence,\nreligion cannot be regarded as a help in business.  There are too many\npeople who think that sloth is a sign of spirituality and that you\ncannot be a saint unless you have softening of the brain.\n\nBut it is simply whether you can keep your whole life, in the market or\nout, up to the level of a certain ideal, whether you can be honest,\ntrue, fair-minded, unselfish, merciful, and kind and at the same time\ndo the work and meet the exigencies of modern commercial and industrial\nstrife.  It is whether you can measure steadily towards heaven's ideal\nwhile mastering earth's daily duties.\n\nThe question is either a reproach to religion or to business.  It is\nassumed by many, with especial conviction by those who know business\nonly by reputation, that it demands the sacrifice constantly of honour,\ntruth, mercy, and every other virtue.  The man who thinks that he is\npious because he is pulseless, draws a fancy picture of red-blooded men\nfighting, intriguing, slaying, like demons new from the pit; and that,\nhe thinks, is modern business.\n\nStrife is everywhere.  If religion means sequestration from temptation\nwe need to pray to be delivered from it.  There is as much danger of a\nman's losing his character, selling his soul, in the church as in the\nmarket.  The temptation to the merchant to misrepresent his goods for a\nlarger profit is not greater than that which comes to the minister to\nmagnify his abilities for an increase in fame.\n\nThings honourable are the same everywhere; they are written deep within\nus, and by them church and mart both are judged.  Every man knows that\nthe chief business of life, whether through commerce, toil, study,\nrecreation, or worship, is to develop the best life, to make of himself\na true, full grown man, who shall render to this world a full man's\nservice.\n\nBusiness is a more effective school of character than any other we\nhave.  If some of the standards of that school have been unworthy--and\nwho shall say they have not?--it is our duty to revise them, to make\nthem higher; not to abolish the school, not to stay away from it\nbecause it is imperfect, but to make it fit to serve its true purpose.\n\nBusiness always will be immoral as long as it is an end in itself.  The\nproduct is greater than the machine, the making of character greater\nthan the mechanism by which we make a living.  The serious danger comes\nwhen a man begins to lay his soul on the counter, when he reverses the\ncourse in this school of character and makes the end serve the means,\nwhen he sacrifices honour, truth, and the soul that business may\nsucceed.\n\nOnly failure lies that way.  No business ever became permanently great\nby making its people small.  Success here is to be measured by the\nsoul.  No matter what a man may be doing he must keep himself above his\ntask.  The work must serve the worker.\n\nThe question is whether we are serving business or it is serving us.\nIf a man lives for his wage he will sacrifice everything to get it, but\nif he works that he may find life, then he will ever refuse to lose the\nthings of which life is made in the pursuit of success.  He knows he\ndoes not have to make money, but he does have to make manhood.  That is\nthe end both of religion and of business.\n\n\n\nTHE MORAL END OF MONEY-MAKING\n\nThere are those who talk of money and business as though these were\nnecessarily and intrinsically evil.  It is often supposed that capacity\nfor goodness is established by incapacity for business, while those to\nwhom poverty seems inevitable find consolation in regarding it as\nevidence of piety.\n\nLarge numbers of otherwise sensible people feel that there is some\nunavoidable conflict between the ideal and the real, between what they\ncall the sacred and the secular, between the things they would like to\ndo and to be and the things they actually have to do as part of their\ndaily affairs and duties.\n\nProbably the greater number try to meet the difficulty by dividing\ntheir lives and interest into separate parts.  They say, business is\nbusiness; religion is another thing altogether; I will work hard and\nhonestly at my business and look forward to the comforts and pleasures\nof religion and ideal things.\n\nSo it happens that there are those who feel that to speak of religion\non a week-day reveals a lack of the sense of the fitness of things,\nwhile other good people are quite sure that it is a wholly irreverent\nthing to speak of business on a Sunday.  We tend to dwell alternately\nin two sets of apartments, the practical and the pious.\n\nEven where there are no such sharp lines through the life we feel that\nmanufacture and the market, money-making, and trading tend to blunt the\nfiner sensibilities and act as a hindrance to the realization of our\nideals, while, on the other hand, we are sure that the life of ideals\nis unfitted for business.\n\nThe result of this separation and apparent antagonism is that we cannot\ndevelop our lives symmetrically; we are torn by conflicting purposes;\nwe fail to see any ideal ends in business or to find any practical\nvalues in religion.  Religion without business tends to dreamy,\npurposeless moral enervation; business without ideal ends and aims to\ngrossness and materialism.\n\nWe need to spiritualize all our acts, our whole lives, our business,\nour work, our pleasures, by giving them moral intent and value, so as\nto unify the sacred and the secular, the utilitarian, and the ideal by\nmaking each serve the other.\n\nIt does not make so much difference whether a man is engaged in\nmoney-making or in writing poems and picturing the fair dreams of\nbetter things; the question is this, is the money-making for the sake\nof the money or for some high and worthy end?  What is the motive that\nimpels either the dealer in dollars or the dealer in dreams?\n\nOur ideals, visions, aspirations, and our religion become most damaging\nif they fail to find expression in conduct and work; lacking the\npractical, they result in a character that is satisfied with\ncontemplating the good instead of realizing it.  The man who sinks his\nsoul in dollars may personally be no worse than he who allows it to\natrophy while he dreams.\n\nHere in religion are the dynamic and the motives that bear men on and\nbuoy them up to do the toil, bear the burdens, stand in the fight of\ndaily living; here are the visions that lift our eyes from the desk and\nthe machine, from profits and discounts, and help us to see the worthy\nprizes of life.\n\nNo man could become a saint by separating himself from this world's\nturmoil and reading his Bible alone; neither can any man find strength\nand stability for life's business and battle, find satisfaction in its\nservice and rewards, unless he sees through its dollars and its dirt\nthe moral ends of all this world's work.\n\nThis noisy mill of daily living may be the greatest blessing we know;\nit is the opportunity for the expression of our highest ideals, for the\ntranslation of religion into terms of daily living; it is the place\nwhere character is molded by its stress, its calls to the strong will,\nand its manifold opportunities for the service of all mankind by each\nman in his place.\n\n\n\n\nXV\n\nThe Every-Day Heaven\n\n  _The Beauty of Holiness_\n  _The Gladness of Goodness_\n  _The True Paradise_\n\n\n_Self shrinks the soul._\n\n_The keen eye needs the kindly heart._\n\n_There's no argument equal to a happy smile._\n\n_Imaginary evils have more than imaginary effects._\n\n_You never find truth by losing the temper._\n\n_Menial work may be noblest service._\n\n_They who live off the flock are never willing to die for it._\n\n_The life that would be fruitful seeks showers as well as sunshine._\n\n_Kindness makes all kin._\n\n_All we get from heaven we owe to earth._\n\n_Pain is a small price to pay for the joy of sacrifice._\n\n_He who gives on feeling generally begrudges in fact._\n\n_Every loss met by love leads to gain._\n\n_The long look within ourselves will cure us of a lot of impatience\nwith other folks._\n\n_The last person to enter heaven will be the one whose religion has all\nbeen in the first person singular._\n\n_We often talk a good deal about the salvation of souls in order to\nescape service for the salvation of society._\n\n_Much that is called orthodoxy is scepticism at heart, fear to examine\nthe foundations lest there are none._\n\n\nXV\n\nTHE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS\n\nReligion ought to be the most natural, desirable, and attractive thing\nto man, for it simply stands for the development of the best in us, the\ncoming into the full and rich heritage that is ours as spiritual\nbeings, and the realization of our highest possibilities of character\nand service.  He who ignores religion is cutting himself off from the\nbest and most beautiful possibilities in his life.\n\nSome have talked of the necessity of making religion attractive.  It\ndoes not have to be made attractive; there is nothing more desirable\nthan the peace, the power, and prosperity of the real life which it\nconfers.  It is the imitation, the false and prejudiced presentation of\nreligion that men endeavour to dress up attractively.  In that they\nnever succeed, for cramping the soul and twisting the intellect ever\nare opposed by the best in us.\n\nFrom the caricature of religion we turn with loathing.  Mummeries and\nmockeries, fads and forms leave us empty and impatient.  The heart of\nman goes out to things fair, lovely, joyous, and uplifting, and they\nwho find no God in the elaborate sermon or the service in the church\nsomehow are thrilled with the feeling of the divine and inspiring in\nthe woods and field and mountains.\n\nAll things good, all things attractive and lovely, uplifting and\nsublime have but one source.  They touch our hearts because they come\nfrom the heart of all being; they reach our spirits because they are\nspiritual.  Deep calls unto deep when the divine in man answers to the\ndivine in the world without, in human affections, in noble aspirations,\nand in glorious deeds.\n\nToo long have we believed that only the unpleasant, the gloomy, and\nrepellent could be right or religious.  There is a type of conscience\nthat determines action by the rule that if a thing is pleasant or\nbeautiful it must be sinful and wrong.  To such souls it is a sin to be\nsunny in disposition, to delight in the Father's fair world, with its\nglowing riches and bounty dropping daily from His hand.\n\nIt would be safer to say that sin must be somewhere lurking wherever\nthere is deformity, pain, or discord--that, as a common phrase has it,\nthe bleak and barren is the evidence of that which is forsaken of God.\nThings desolate are not divine.  Religion is not repression but\ndevelopment into a fullness and beauty far beyond our dreams.\n\nIt is a good thing to see the divine in all things fair and lovely; to\ntake them as evidences that the love that once pronounced this world\ngood in its primeval glory still is working, still is seeking to enrich\nour lives and lead them out in fullness of joy.  Why should not we,\nlike the poets and preachers of ancient Israel, taste again of the\ngladness of living.\n\nCharacter may need for its full development the storms and wintry\nblasts of life, but it needs just as truly and just as much the\nsunshine, the days when the heart goes out and joins in the song of\nnature, when something leaps within us at the gladness of being alive,\nand we drink in of the infinite love that is over all.\n\nJust as the sun seems to call the flowers out of the dark earth and\ndraw out their beauty, calls forth the buds and brings the blossom into\nperfect fruit, so there is a spirit of divine life in our world calling\nus out to the best, seeking to woo us to the things beautiful.  Man\nneeds not to repress his life, but to learn to respond to every worthy\nimpulse, every high hope, to find the life beautiful.\n\nThe beauty of holiness is the beauty of character.  It is the\nadjustment of life to nature and neighbour and heaven so that strength\nand harmony ensue, so that duty becomes a delight, labour a song of\npraise, and out of life's burden and battle the beauties of godliness,\nof love, and tenderness, joy and gratitude begin to bloom.\n\nLay hold on everything good and true, on all things glad and elevating;\ncherish every fair thought and aspiration; learn to see the essentially\nreligious in whatever lifts up life, in whatever helps humanity, and so\nmake life rich in heavenly treasure and glowing with the glory of other\nworlds.\n\n\n\nTHE GLADNESS OF GOODNESS\n\nLife's poverty is due, not to what we have had and lost, not to what\nhas been withheld or taken from us, but to the good which we might have\nhad which we  carelessly have passed by.  No others despoil us as we\ndespoil ourselves by our blindness and indifference to the wealth of\nour own lives and the beauty ever close at hand.\n\nWe who scurry over land and sea, who dig, and toil, and fret to find\nhappiness, come back at last to learn that the sweet-faced guest has\nbeen waiting close by our door all the time.\n\nHe perishes in the pitiless snows who, blind to the good and the glory\nin every valley and hillside, heeds only the impulse to climb and find\nthe good in some remote height.  Ambition and pride lift ever new peaks\nahead only to mock him when at last, worn, spent, and empty in heart,\nhe falls by the way.\n\nThe old theology talked much of a heaven far away, to be attained in\nthe remote future; the new theology often seems inclined to ignore any\nheaven, but what the hearts of men need is the sense of the heaven that\nis all about them, the God who ever is near, and the blessedness even\nnow attainable.\n\nSome live in the past, complacently contemplating the glories that once\nwere theirs or their ancestors'; some live in the future, dreaming of\nfelicities yet to be; but they are wise only who live to the full in\nthe present, who catch the richness and beauty, all the wealth that the\npassing hour or the present opportunity may have.\n\nHe is truly godly who sees God in all things, in the affairs of this\nday, in the faces of living men, in the flowers and fields, who sees\nall the divine wonder and beauty of life, and not he who sees the Most\nHigh only in some legendary past or in a strange, imaginary future.\n\nNo man becomes strong by reminiscence of his breakfast or dreaming of\nhis next meal alone; each portion of time must have its own fitting\nfood.  The soul of man never can find its fullness through either\nhistory or prophecy; it needs the sense of the spiritual in this\nliving, pulsating, matter-of-fact present.\n\nThis world is slovenly, sinful, and evil because so many of us are\ncontent with the past or the future, with myth or with imagination, and\nfail to demand the development of the good that is our heritage to-day.\nThe better day comes not by dreams, but by each man doing the best he\ncan and securing all the good he can for his own day.\n\nWe need to give up the plan of saving the world by the piety of\npostponed pleasures and to find the fullness of life in the present, to\nget below the surface of things and discover life's real riches, to\ninterpret this daily toil and struggle, and all this world of ours, in\nterms of the divine and infinite.\n\nHow much it would mean to our lives if we might learn, instead of\nsighing for the impossible, to get all the sweetness and joy that is in\nthe things we have, how rich we would find the common lot to be, how\nmany things that now seem dreary and empty would bloom into new beauty.\nIn a child's smile, a wild flower's fragrance, a glint of sunlight,\nthings possible to all, we would find joys unspeakable and full of\nglory.\n\nThis does not mean dull content with things as they are; it does mean\nthe development of the faculties of appreciation, the growth of the\nlife in power to see, the development of vision.  It means the\ntransformation of the dull earth with the glory of the ideal.\n\nSome day, when we look back over our lives, how keen will be our regret\nas we realize what we have missed, how we have spurned the substance of\nlife's lasting treasures, human loves, friendships, every-day beauties,\nand happiness, while chasing the shadows of imaginary joys.\n\n\n\nTHE TRUE PARADISE\n\nThe religion that has relations only to heaven and angels, or only to a\nsupreme being remote and detached from daily life and from our families\nand friends, our business and affairs, issues in personal selfishness\nand is one of the causes of social disorganization and need.\n\nIt postpones to that dim future the problems that ought to be solved in\nthe present.  It promises those who are broken with the injustice and\ngreed of their fellows a place where right would prevail and rest would\nbe their portion in the future.  It shifts to an imaginary and ideal\nworld all the perplexities and wrongs of the real present world.\n\nThat kind of teaching ingrained in generations accounts for the dull\npatience, the stolid, brute-like content of the peasant in Europe; he\nis born a bearer of burdens, a tiller of the soil, to walk bent and\nnever look up; it is all endurable because it is all so short; he some\nday will be better off than kings and emperors are now.\n\nBut as the generations are born the inspiring vision of that future\nloses its force; the ideals are gone and the children come into the\nworld with their fathers content with their present condition, but\ndevoid of aspiration and also devoid of their father's faith in the\ncompensations of the future.\n\nThen comes the reaction.  Some daring spirits assert that if there is\nany good, if there is equity and rights, men ought to enter into and\nenjoy them here and now.  And some who catch the vision of a God of\nreal love are unwilling to believe that He keeps from His children the\npresent joys of His home; they invite to a present heaven.\n\nThen how easy it is to fall into the error of seeking only a material\npresent-day paradise, to live as if the only things worth living for\nwere food and clothes and pleasant circumstances.  Better a worthy,\nbeautiful ideal afar off than an unworthy and debasing one already\nrealized.  The heaven that so many are seeking will but bring all men\nto the level of the brute.\n\nThe danger is that we shall miss the real benefit of this great truth\nthat whatever good is designed for man may be realized in large measure\nwhile he lives and shall make his good to consist only in goods.\nBetter conditions of living easily become the foe of the best.  Heaven\nis not meat and drink; it is the better heart.\n\nMaking houses and lands the supreme end of living is little better than\nlooking forward to harps and crowns.  It is easy, being freed from\nslavery to a superstition to relapse into slavery to our lower selves.\nWe are in danger of living for a living instead of for our lives.  We\nare \"on the make\" instead of being engaged in making manhood.  We are\ndigging the lead of commercial advantage with the gold shovels of\ncharacter.\n\nWe may be measured by our own measurements.  In sermons and orations we\nassure ourselves that we are a great people because we have here so\nmany acres, so many millions of bushels of corn and of wheat, so high\nwages, so vast financial resources.  We are living in the glut of\nthings and setting these things as the end of living.\n\nAll this does not mean that prosperity is wrong; it does not mean that\nmisery or poverty is a virtue.  The danger is not in our many acres,\nour high wages, our millions of money; the danger is that these are the\nends instead of the means; that we are existing for our living; that we\nmake the man the tool of his money instead of the money being the\nmaking of the man.\n\nEvery man has in his breast the keys to his own heaven.  If he will he\nmay find the riches of character; he may enter into the paradise of a\nmind at peace; he may taste of the divine joys of serving his fellows;\nhe may, in thought, commune with all the good and great; he may hear\nthe morning stars sing together.\n\nThe eternal crown of glory is the crown of character.  The streets\npaved with gold are the fair, clear ways of virtue.  The harps of whose\nmusic we never weary are the strings of sympathy and love and pain;\nthese make the heavenly harmony.  The angels are in the faces we learn\nto love.  These make heaven when we see them in the light of the\npresence of eternal love.\n\n\n\n\nXVI\n\nTruth and Life\n\n  _Religion of a Practical Mind_\n  _The Head and the Heart_\n  _New Truths for New Days_\n\n\n_A life is an empty lamp without the oil of love._\n\n_The only way to have happiness as a permanent guest is to keep your\ndoor open to the helpless._\n\n_Self shrinks the soul._\n\n_It is much easier to get interested in art doilies for Hottentots than\nit is to be simply human to the washerwoman at home._\n\n_Whoever helps us to think kindly of another aids the coming of the\nkingdom of heaven._\n\n_You are not likely to cheer the hearts of men by looking down in the\nmouth yourself._\n\n_No man climbs to the Father by treading on his brother._\n\n_Many things may keep you from the triumphs of life but only\nselfishness can keep you from the victories of love._\n\n_The child of heaven always sees something of heaven in the child._\n\n_There are too many people trying to clean up the world by scalding\ntheir neighbours._\n\n\nXVI\n\nRELIGION OF A PRACTICAL MIND\n\nIs there a faith for the practically minded man and woman?  Or is\nreligion exclusively for the dreamers and those who are contented with\nsentiment and feeling?  These people of action, who measure by results,\nwho have no life to waste on things not evidently useful; these who\nfeel so intensely the needs of humanity that they have no time to waste\nin anything other than work--is there a religion for them?\n\nBut religion is not a form of life nor a point of view for one kind of\npeople alone; it is the spirit of higher things coming into the lives\nof all kinds of people.  Its expression will depend on the temperament\nof the individual.  It may lead some to sing hymns, but it will\ncertainly compel others to build houses and to care for the sick and\nneedy.\n\nIn a world of men and affairs no man is actually religious unless his\nfaith is finding some practical expression, and the greatest need of\nour day is that our hard-headed men and women who do things shall\nbecome inspired with the spirit and ideas of religion and shall do\nthose things which religion's spirit of love and service would indicate\nas needing to be done.\n\nPious people are deluding themselves if they think that they are\ncultivating the religious life and meriting the rewards of faith by\nsimply sitting in church and feeding themselves on beautiful sentiments\nand thrilling visions, or even by vigorously attacking all those who\ndare to differ from them in matters of religious philosophy.\n\nNor can religion find full expression in harking back over the\ncenturies and elucidating the mysteries of ancient miracles or tracing\nthe history of ancient peoples.\n\nIf as much brain and energy had been given to solving the problem of\nsociety and leading men into the way of right living to-day as have\nbeen given to digging into the historical and philological problems of\nScripture this world would be a better world by far.  We must let the\ndead past bury its dead.  Stay not weeping by the tomb of yesterday; do\nthe work of to-day.\n\nThere will be much more real religion in the intelligence, care, and\nsacrifice applied to the problem presented by the millions coming in at\nthe gates of our country than in the most pains-taking study of the\nemigration of a horde of Israelites millenniums ago.  This is what the\npractical man feels; there is so much to be done, why waste time in\ndreaming of how things once were done or in wishing for a world where\nno need or sorrow exists?  Therefore, he is apt to say, in the business\nof bringing things to pass religion has no place; it is only for the\ndreamers.\n\nYet no one needs religion more than the man who would do any worthy and\nlasting work in the world.  Indeed, the possibility of such a work will\nnot dawn upon him unless some of the spirit of religion and the\npossession of desire to do great and worth while things is evidence of\nthe heavenly flame within.  Any work for the sake of humanity needs a\nwider vision than that of its own field.  Courage fails and hope dies\nif we see only the dismal problem; if we have only the practical\noutlook.  Some vision of the ideal must enter into all great work; one\nmust learn to see humanity in the light of divinity.\n\nIt is a good thing to be able to see the Divine in the commonplace, the\nhand of Providence in American history, the work of the Most High as\nrecorded in the daily papers, as well as in the Gospels; to do our work\nwhether it be laying railroad track, selling dry goods, making or\nteaching or trading, as part of the service necessary to bring in the\nbetter day.\n\nHere is the religion of the practical mind, to express by the service\nof heart and brain and hand the belief that he has in the possibilities\nhumanity, the hope that he has of a fairer, sweeter, nobler age than\nthis, to make real the world's best ideals.  So, seeking to bring to\nearth the best that heaven has dreamed, men have found themselves\nlifted into the light of infinite truth and love.\n\n\n\nTHE HEAD AND THE HEART\n\nThere are temperamental types which never reach any conclusion by pure\nreasoning; intuitions, emotions, and inspirations take the place of\nintellectual processes.  It would be the height of folly to attempt to\nmake such natures reduce their religion to syllogisms, or to ask them\nto bring to the bar of the head all the findings of the heart.\n\nThe emotional nature does not comprehend the manner in which the\naverage mind must wait for its own light.  These souls that move by\ngreat tides often reach sublime heights.  The world would be poor,\nindeed, without their all-compelling enthusiasms, their glorious\nvisions, and their dominant convictions.  But such ones must not forget\nthat there is no royal road to truth; that human nature is not cast in\none single, unvarying mold; diversity is not necessarily heresy.\n\nThere are other natures, not less necessary to the world, not less\nglorious in their records of leaders, martyrs, and masters of men.\nThese are those that find truth by the slow steps of reasoning; that\nseek the way of right, with hearts of reverence and feet of faith, in\nthe light of the faculties heaven has given them.  They do not feel,\nthey do not understand the winds that, sighing round them, convey such\nmighty meaning to other souls; they cannot buy progress at the price of\nblindness.  They are the intellectual type.\n\nThe conclusion that the emotional type must, after all, be the right\none is a common one.  This is because it makes the most noise and the\nmost easily apprehended demonstration.  And, therefore, some tell us\nthat the man who seeks to find the way of truth by the light of the\nintellect must, without fail, wander into the pit of error; that the\nonly way to come to religious truth is to shut the eyes of the mind and\nyield to emotion.\n\nThe thinker constantly is being warned that he cannot apprehend God\nwith his intellect; that he cannot see the way to heaven with the eyes\nof reason.  He is urged to give up the use of his head that he may\ndevelop his heart.  He even is told that faith is incompatible with\nreason, and love with logic.  So strong is the emphasis on this that he\nis led to suspect that indolence is seeking to deify ignorance, and\nthat men whose intellectual faculties have atrophied by their\nsubjection to the emotional now are envious of those who retain the\npower to think clearly, and would have them also deprived of these\npowers.\n\nNothing could be more clearly opposed to the way of truth than the\nnotion that religion can be bought only at the price of reason, or that\nthe consequence of using the intelligence is the losing of the power of\naffection for the divine, the good, and the true--of the warmth of\nheart and feeling that often determine character and conduct.\n\nIf the faculties are God given they are given for working purposes.  If\nman has a mind and yet may not think concerning the deepest and highest\nthings of his own nature and destiny, then the giving of that mind or\nthe permitting it to develop is the most cruel mockery known to human\nhistory.\n\nBut the simple law of nature that every faculty has some purpose, that\nno power is without its duty, is the answer to all this.  The mind is\nas sacred as the heart; it is as much a sacred duty to think as it is\nto aspire.  There is nothing too holy for men to think about, to reason\nabout.  The mind must serve the truth--must with reverence lead to\nlarger truth.\n\nNo man is religious who represses any of his reasoning faculties.\nEvery one of the higher powers must be brought to their greatest\nperfection.  Not by dwarfing but by developing themselves do men\nglorify their Creator.  Just as the finest tree in the forest speaks\nmost eloquently of the bounty and beauty of nature, so does the\ngigantic intellect glorify the intelligence that ordered its being.\n\nFear not to think of sacred things; nothing is sacred because it is\nmysterious; reverence does not dwell apart from reason.  Faith does not\nreach its perfection in the fool; it shines most glorious where wisdom\ndwells.  There still are the superstitious souls who confound darkness\nwith divinity; who cry aloud against the light of knowledge.  But they\ncan no more stay the discovery of truth than the bats can hold back the\ndawn.\n\n\n\nNEW TRUTHS FOR NEW DAYS\n\nThere are many who think they must live without religion because they\ncannot be content with the views held by their fathers.  The facts on\nwhich the faith of the past was based have come into the light so that\nthe modern man, examining them, finds himself in all honesty compelled\nto question them and often ultimately to call them fables.\n\nThe attempt to answer the questions of the clear-eyed modern scientific\nmind by accusing it of inherent antagonism to religion is cheap and\nineffectual.  There are honest doubters who at the same time are\nearnest seekers after truth, who desire the best, who are willing to\npay any price for personal character and social righteousness.\n\nIt is because such men are honest that they refuse to be bound by\ncreeds they cannot believe and to buttress beliefs they cannot indorse.\nNo greater loss could come to character than to insist that we shall\nact and speak a lie in order that the body of religious teaching shall\nremain undisturbed.  The heresy we most need to fear is that which\nblatantly declares one thing while at heart fearing that another is\ntrue.\n\nThe old generation in religion is accusing the new of treason to faith\nand the new is accusing the old of blindness to truth.  When the father\nsays to the son, \"Believe this or be lost,\" the son answers that he\nrather would be lost in company with truth and honesty of conscience\nthan be saved at the cost of both.\n\nBut do these divergencies mean that the man of the modern mind must\ngive up religion and that those who hold to the traditional views can\nfind no fellowship with those who see new light?  This is more than an\nacademic question; it presses on every man who, finding in him the\nuniversal thirst for religion, finds also standing before the living\nwaters him who says, \"You can drink only out of this cup handed down\nfrom the fathers; you can approach only on speaking our shibboleth.\"\n\nOur fathers looked on religious truth as something complete and\nunchangeable, once for all delivered to the saints.  But they forgot\nhow different was the truth, as they saw it, from its vision as given\nto their fathers.  Every age tends to look upon itself as the final\ngoal and on its views as the last possible statement of truth.\n\nYet how clearly does the past teach us that our vision of truth is ever\nchanging.  The science of to-day will be largely the folly of\nto-morrow.  Truth, in any realm, is a country whose boundaries lie ever\nbefore us, whose geography each age must write anew.  Truth is a road,\nnot a terminus; a process of search and not the thing discovered alone.\n\nHe only is religious really who opens heart and mind to the increasing\nvision of truth, in whom religion is not a cut and dried, fixed and\nunchanging philosophy, but to whom it is a method and motive for\nliving, a process of adjusting himself to all his world in the full\nlight of all the truth that can come to him.\n\nThere is a religion for the man who must deny many things that once\nseemed essential to religion; for the man who feels compelled to doubt\nall things; it is the religion of the honest, open souled, unreserved\nsearch for truth and the translation of that truth as it is known into\ncharacter, and living.\n\nIf the setting of the face towards truth means breaking through ancient\ntheology it also will mean bringing us face to face with the infinite.\nIt is a good thing to lose the symbol if we only will seek for the\nsubstance.  The heart of man cries out for the reality that lies back\nof all our words and for the realization of our doctrines in deeds.\n\nWhen the test of trouble comes, when earth is a desert and the heavens\nare brass, we find our refreshing, we find the real resources of\nreligion not in doctrinal statements, not in formal creeds, but in that\ncreed which experience has written on our hearts, in the consciousness\nof an eternal love not demonstrated by logic, in the sense of the unity\nof ourselves and our race with the infinite and divine.\n\nEvery day must have its new creed, its enlarging vision of truth, but\nback of all lies truth itself, the reality upon which our fathers\nleaned and the unfailing springs where they were refreshed and the\nglowing visions that led them on.  In that reality lies every man's\nreligion.\n\n\n\n\nXVII\n\nThe Fruits of Faith\n\n  _Root and Fruit_\n  _The Orthodox Accent_\n  _The Business of Religion_\n\n\n_Killing hope is moral suicide._\n\n_Sow happiness and reap heaven._\n\n_Every man is made up of many men._\n\n_You cannot travel towards heaven with your back turned to honour._\n\n_Earthly prudence is a large part of heavenly providence._\n\n_Homes are often closest knit about some grave of separation._\n\n_Your credit in heaven depends on earth's debts to you._\n\n_To attempt a great work is to become a great worker._\n\n_The practice of happiness does much for the power of holiness._\n\n_No man ever found this world a weary place who had a worthy work to\ndo._\n\n_It's no use talking about the religion in your heart if it is not\nvisible in your home._\n\n\nXVII\n\nROOT AND FRUIT\n\nThere is honest inquiry rather than querulous criticism in the\nquestion, often asked, Why does not religion produce a higher and\nstronger type of moral character?  Enthusiasm for the teachings of\nChrist often is cooled by contact with some flabby-willed,\nnarrow-minded professed follower of those teachings.\n\nIt is a common saying with business men that it is hard to find a man\nof absolute integrity, one who even measures up to the standards of\ncommercial honour among those who are religious, either by vocation or\navocation.  At any rate, it is true that a certificate of religious\naffiliations by no means is equivalent to a guarantee of high moral\nworth.\n\nYet it is easy to arrive at wrong conclusions when judging the effect\nof religion on personal character as tested by daily business and\nliving.  One is in danger of judging from exceptions.  We may remember\nas a religious person the man who makes the loudest protestations of\nhis piety and fail to recognize the religious sources of strength in\nthe quieter one of whose sterling qualities we need no persuasion.\n\nWhen religion has little root it often springs up with a rapid\nself-assertive growth; but it withers even more quickly under the\nscorching sun of the market and business affairs.  It also would be the\nheight of folly to conclude that religion contributed nothing to a\nman's moral worth, because the morally worthless seek to hide their\nnakedness by wearing it as a cloak.\n\nIf we stop to think of the strong men and women we know, of those whose\nintegrity is undoubted, whose character wealth constitutes the real\nreserve and bulwark of our business stability, we shall find that they\nare controlled by religious ideals and principles, that the strength\nand beauty which we admire in them in itself is religion.\n\nThey may have or may not have ecclesiastical affiliations; these are\nbut incidental.  They do have religion.  Somehow we feel that their\nactions rise not from superficial wells of policy or custom but from\ndeep springs that go back into the roots and rock of things.  They look\nout on life with eyes that see beyond questions of immediate and\npassing advantage; they see visions and ideals; they are drawn on by\nlofty aspirations.\n\nThe recognition which we accord to real worth, to high, and noble, and\nstrong manhood and womanhood, with the scorn we have for the canting\nweakling, is but part of our discrimination between a living, deep\nreligion expressed in conduct and a mask or pretense adopted for profit\nor convenience.\n\nStill there are many good people, sincere in their religious\nprofessions, who practically are no good at all when they come to some\nstrain on conscience, or some real test in life.  Is it not because in\ntheir minds religion never has been related to conduct?  They are\ngrounded on the eschatology of Christianity but not on its ethics.\n\nIt is possible to go through a full course of religious instruction in\nthe regularly appointed agencies of many churches and to come out with\nclear-cut conceptions of heaven and angels, but with the most misty and\neven misleading conceptions of right relations among men, of honesty,\nand justice, and truth.\n\nThe schools teach us about the stars and the earth, about men dead and\nbeasts living; the church teaches us of saints and seraphs, and about\nan ancient literature; but who shall teach us and our children the art\nof living, the laws of human duties?  Of what value is all our\nknowledge unless we get the wisdom of right living?\n\nNo man is saved until he is made strong, sane, useful, and reliable.\nThe most irreligious thing in this world is a religion that makes\npeople think that an imputed or technical salvation absolves them from\nthe necessity of practical salvation, the working out of the best and\nnoblest in their lives.  Religion without morality is a mockery.\n\nReal religion is the secret and source of the highest, strongest,\ncleanest character.  It furnishes the life with motives mightier than\nany considerations of advantage or profit; it ties the soul up to\neternal and spiritual verities; it refreshes the heart as with living\nwaters when life seems all desert; it sets the heart in step with the\nInfinite One who marches on through the ages.\n\n\n\nTHE ORTHODOX ACCENT\n\nPerhaps the chief damage done by the confusion of tongues at Babel was\nthat it tended to a multiplicity of words.  Whether it was so before\nthat time or not, it is certain that ever since there has been a\nconstant likelihood of religion and every other good thing being\ndrowned in floods of rhetoric.  Where there are ten ways of saying a\nthing it is so much easier to use them all than to do the thing in the\none way in which it may be done.  Words become the chief enemies of\nworks.  A volume containing all the words of the great Teacher would\nlook mighty insignificant beside the ponderous tomes of the modern\nexponents of His teachings.  That is because the minister has become\nthe preacher.\n\nThe tendency also is for laymen to prove their piety by becoming\nteachers.  It is so in every direction.  Reforms dissipate into theses;\nit is always easier to make speeches on the city beautiful than it is\nto refrain from throwing the refuse in the street.  We are all talking\nabout what ought to be done.  Perhaps some leader will arise and\ninstitute the order of the practicers.\n\nDreamers, philosophers, thinkers, writers have poured forth their\nfloods upon a thirsty world.  But the only words that have been worth\nanything to mankind have been those that have grown out of the\nspeaker's soul as it has been molded by his living and doing.\n\nBecause talking is so easy to the knowing ones it is not strange that\nthey should water their stock of superstitious prestige with the less\nknowing ones from their reservoir of words.  Then it is the most\nnatural thing for the glib man to set up the thing he can do most\neasily as the thing essential to salvation, and thus a shibboleth\nbecomes the saving sign.\n\nBut salvation does not depend on any shibboleth.  No man is going to\nfail of seeing the Most High because he cannot render the precise name\nby which one race chose to call Him, nor will the sun cease to shine\nupon him should he seek the highest good in other ways than names.  The\nheart of the universe asks not that we be consistent with the\nsyllogisms of the past, but that we be true to the truth we know\nourselves.\n\nEvery man has some creed back of every deed; but when he puts his creed\nup in front his deeds soon die.  Where words reign they soon reign\nalone, with nothing but words to serve them.  Orthodoxy is so general,\nbecause it is so easy and so meaningless.  Catch the accent and you are\northodox.  But if heaven is to be won by an accent most honest men\nwould rather pay board, somewhere else.\n\nNo life can be interpreted in language alone.  The church is but an\nobscuration on Christianity when it meets only to analyze the life of\nits Lord and never to exemplify His deeds.  What must heaven think to\nsee a thousand able-bodied men and women gather in a beautiful building\nto sing hymns of praise to their Diety [Transcriber's note: Deity?] and\nto listen to arguments about His divinity while, within block of them,\nthere are, in sickness and squalor, distress and sorrow, the ones to\nwhom He sent these people to minister?  The doctrines manufactured\nabout Him have hidden the directions given by Him.\n\nThe trouble is not that we have too much doctrine so much as that we\nhave the wrong kind.  The Master's great teaching was, Do the divine\nthings, and the divine truths will take care of themselves.\n\nThe kingdom will never come until His will is done.  Half-tones of\nheaven will not keep people warm in winter; it is half tons of coal\nthey need.  The world will believe in any church that tries to do good.\nBut the church does not believe in itself yet; half the people are\nstrenuously endeavouring to fool themselves into what they call\nspiritual warmth.  What they need is plain Christian perspiration.  No\nman really credits his own religion until he converts it into reality.\n\nBut the man who prides himself on his heterodoxy is often equally\nguilty here.  He ridicules the old type of piety and thinks to improve\non it with new sets of phrases.  All these critics have is new\narrangements of words.  Even the man who rejects all religion satisfies\nhimself with the cant phrase of irreligion.\n\nWe need most of all to treat religion as sensibly as we do business, to\nleave the science to those interested while we give ourselves to the\npractice of its art, the doing of its deeds, the living its life.\n\n\n\nTHE BUSINESS OF RELIGION\n\nAny religion that will not stand the strain of modern business may have\nbeen good for some other age; but it is valueless in this one.  The\ntest of your piety is not peace in the pews of the church, but power\nand direction in the stress of the market, its adaptability to your\nactivities as well as your meditations.\n\nThe problem of the reconciliation of business and religion is not\nnearly so complex as we would believe.  The people who are saying it is\nimpossible to be upright and get on in the world mean that it is\nimpossible to be honest and to gain all the questionable advantages on\nwhich they have set their hearts.  When a man says that religion and\nbusiness will not work in harmony he either has a wrong brand of piety\nor a false conception of business.\n\nReligion is built for business.  The only creed that is worth a\nmoment's thought is a working creed, that is, one that gets into\naction.  Religion is not the mere acceptance of a speculative\nphilosophy of this and other worlds.  It consists in principles,\nideals, and motives which dominate conduct.  It is more concerned with\nthe kind of a world you are making here than with the conceptions you\nmay have of a world beyond.\n\nReligion is more than an institution; it is a course of life.  It has\nto do with the church only in so far as the church serves its purposes.\nIt is more concerned with what a man pays his employees than with what\nhe puts into the plate at the collection.  The man who can put all his\npiety into the prayer-meeting and the services of the church never has\nenough seriously to embarrass him under any circumstances.\n\nIf for your religion you have adopted principles of high living; if you\nhave set the worth of the soul above all other things; if you have\ndetermined to frame your life according to the golden rule of the great\nTeacher, and, with Him as hero and ideal, are seeking to do good to\nothers and make this world a better place for us all, with less of sin\nand sorrow and more of joy and love, you will make your business as\nwell as your praying the servant of these ends.\n\nBut if you have said that you wish to do these things, that you wish to\nlive the pure and beneficent life while in your heart your sole desire\nis to get riches, to gain fame, to secure power, then there is bound to\nbe conflict between the religion you profess and the business that\npossesses you.\n\nEverything depends on the purposes of living, on the things a man\nreally and deep within himself sets first in his life; he will follow\nthose things no matter what other professions he may make.  Business as\na servant deserves our allegiance and devotion; business as a master is\nthe most evil and soul devastating thing in this universe.\n\nThere is the most perfect harmony; there is relatively easy settlement\nof problems and difficulties if but this principle be adopted; that you\nhave taken as your chief business in life the ends of true religion,\nthe development of character and the service of humanity, and, with\nthis purpose, the daily toil, the opportunities and enginery of your\ntrade or profession shall be made to serve these higher ends.\n\nReligion then becomes the motive in business and business the\nmanifestation of religion.  A man serves the Most High in his office\nwith the same devotion and elevation of spirit as a priest at the\naltar.  He is doing a great work, because the spirit is great.  In\nquestions of conscience he can afford to lose everything except the\ngreat end; he will not sacrifice the lesser to the greater.\n\n\n\n\nXVIII\n\nThe Force of Faith\n\n  \"_The Victory that Overcometh_\"\n  _Fear and Faith_\n  _Faith for the Future_\n\n\n_Some talk so hard about duty they have no strength left for deeds._\n\n_When a good man gets down in the dirt some one is sure to stumble over\nhim._\n\n_Many a man who would make a first-class lighthouse is wasting his life\ntrying to be a fog-horn._\n\n_The mournful saint works a good deal more harm than the cheerful\nsinner._\n\n_The faith that shows up strong on the fence may fail altogether when\nit gets on the field._\n\n_It's not the man who says the loudest amen who makes the most\nimpression on heaven._\n\n_There are too many folks trying to meet the world's hunger for love\nwith essays on affection._\n\n_Lots of people let their daily manna spoil while they pray for butter\nand sugar to spread on it._\n\n_People who lay their sins on the old Adam are not anxious to have\ntheir successes attributed to him._\n\n_Many a man thinks his life is clouded over when the truth is he is\nburying his head in the steam of his own sighings._\n\n\nXVIII\n\n\"THE VICTORY THAT OVERCOMETH\"\n\nYou cannot believe little things and do great ones; you cannot believe\nin half successes and accomplish whole ones.  A man's faith sets the\nboundaries of his work.  He will do what he believes and accomplish\nwhat he believes can be accomplished.  Mountains are not subdued by men\nwho stand discouraged at a mole-hill.  A man must conquer the fatigues\nof the way in his own heart or he will never set out on the road.\n\nBack of all free action lies some creed, some conviction.  All great\nbattles have been fought and either lost or won in the heart.  The\nsimple or stubborn confidence that leads to all-conquering effort, this\nis faith, the vision that vitalizes.  The eye of faith sees the prize\nat the end long before it is reached; the eye of fear looks so closely\nat the difficulties and dangers of the course that the prize is not\nseen at all.\n\nThere is a good deal of fatalism seeking to pass as faith.  People say\nwe must have faith in God; let things take their course and they will\ncome out all right.  The church long commended the slothful who let\nthings drift, and called their laziness resignation.  But faith feels\nthe certitude of a harvest because it has first diligently plowed and\nsown and because of the goodness that has ever brought the seed-time\nand the harvest.\n\nSuperstitious credulity is not faith.  It is more than the foresight\nthat feeds on visions of a future heaven; it is the clear eye that\nlooks keenly at the things of to-day.  No truth is the better for being\ntaken on trust; it cannot be possessed until it is known, not on the\nauthority of another but on your own experience.  No man ever became a\nmartyr for a truth he received at second hand.\n\nOnly a first hand faith is a force in the world.  It is born of life;\nit determines life.  Your faith forms you.  If you do not believe men,\nhow can you be a man?  If you do not believe in things better, nobler,\npurer, how can you move towards them?  If at bottom your faith is in\nthings mean, sordid, sensual, base, then thither turns your life, and\nno extraneous efforts, no badges, buttons, or creeds can change its\ncourse.\n\nYou can measure a man's weight in this world, by the strength and\nclearness of his convictions.  Poor you may be, friendless, alone,\nweak, unlearned; but all this can be overcome if bright in the heart\nthere burns the unquenchable flame of some great passion, some high\nfaith.  Given this fire within them, all the tools shall be found, but\nwithout it the finest endowment of brain and body is valueless.\n\nGiven but some great principle, some purpose that becomes a holy\npassion, something that leads you, like one of long ago who\n\"steadfastly set His face to go up to Jerusalem,\" then all power is\nyours.  The man who has faith to remove mountains always finds the\npicks and the steam shovels somewhere.  He takes the tools he has,\nthough they may seem but toys beside his task, and lo! some morning\nwhen the dreamers awake the mountain is no longer there.  Faith has had\nher perfect work.\n\nIt is faith that gives fortitude, faith that gives force.  The dreamers\nof dreams have ever been, after all, the doers of the great deeds.\nSeeing the things that are not seen is the secret of doing the things\nthat remain to be seen.\n\nNo worthier word was ever said of the divine Man than that which spoke\nof Him as the leader and completer of faith.  So great a work was\npossible only with sublime confidence in the glorious possibilities of\nmankind, only with unshakable assurance that all that was good and true\nin the universe was working with Him for the good of all.  With Him\nfaith was an eye that saw man's hidden good, a hand that grasped the\ninfinite might moving for the best.\n\n\n\nFEAR AND FAITH\n\nTo many faith simply means denying the reason and relying on emotion.\nThey have what is called saving faith and are able to feel that the\nAlmighty forgives their wrong-doings, ceasing to be angry with them;\ntheir faith being perfect when it takes away fear of punishment.  To\nthese faith is that which they pay in the form of credence to whatever\nis ecclesiastically asserted in exchange for the complaisance of diety\n[Transcriber's note: deity?].\n\nThose who deny all religion assert that it is founded on fear.  There\nis enough in that assertion to give it the colour of truth.  Yet fear\nof the unseen is but the survival of savagery.  Faith founded on fear\nbecomes servile, debasing, superstitious.  If religion has no higher\nmotive than that of fear, the trembling and dread before some great\nomnipotent unknown, it can give the world neither help nor uplift.\n\nWhat is there in God to fear?  Is the Lord of life also the foe of our\nlives?  Is the author of a world so fair and lovely, inviting us to joy\nand inspiring with feelings of pleasure, the foe of happiness?  Has He\nmade the world a paradise and planted in man's breast the seeds of\nkindness, gentleness and sweet thoughts only to glower over His world\nin hatred and to damn it with dread of Himself?\n\nAll things that can be known argue the goodness of the unknown.  As\nsoon as a man learns to live with nature he loses his fear of forest,\nbeast, and sea.  Familiarity breeds confidence, affection and\nreverence.  Only the remote and unfamiliar fill us with dread.  The\ncity bred tremble in the woods at night, where the native feels himself\namongst well loved friends.\n\nIn the same manner the fear of the divine, born of unfamiliarity,\ninstead of being an evidence of reverence or of religion, becomes the\nmark of ignorance and cowardice.  Rectitude of conduct, resulting\nwholly from regulating oneself as under an all-seeing critical eye and\nin dread of a far-reaching devastating hand, cannot produce enrichment\nof character.  Hatred never gave birth to holiness.\n\nThe souls that in all ages have lived nearest to things spiritual, that\nhave most enriched the world with thoughts, whose inner visions pierced\nour outer clouds, seeing something of the glory of the infinite,\nbrought back no pictures of a face austere, of a cruel despot, or of\naught for love or truth to fear.\n\nTrue faith instead of being a compromise to allay our fears of unknown\nills and calamities, ever has been the fearless, reverent search for\nthe face of the infinite.  It does not say: \"I believe that God will\nlet me alone because I did those prescribed things\"; rather it says: \"I\ncannot be satisfied alone and apart from Him, the source and sole\nsatisfaction of all life.\"\n\nScience with its passion for truth, art with its passion for beauty,\nethics with its passion for rightness, are all but parts of true\nreligion, the soul's passion for the infinite heart and mind in which\nall ideas of truth and beauty take their rise and find their full\nrealization.\n\nThe soul of man never has ceased to cry out for the living God; the\nreligion of fear has given it no satisfaction.  Its followers have been\ntoo busy building themselves shelters from the heaven they dread,\nshelters that become as leaden shields shutting out the eternal\ntenderness and beneficence.  No man ever found the celestial city or\nits glorious king so long as he regarded his religion as a cyclone\ncellar.\n\nTo those who, with eyes of reverence, seek to find the good in all\nthings here, believing that love is better and mightier than hate, that\nwhatever is good, kindly, tender, pure, and ennobling in us, is but the\nreflection from the glory of the infinite, traces in our dust by which\nwe find our way to Him who inhabits eternity, these, through eyes of\nfaith, have found a presence beyond description or definition.\n\nFear sets afar off a mighty monarch; faith finds near at hand one whom\nit calls \"Father.\"  Fear shrinks from the impending wrath, love rests\nin the unchanging goodness.  Fear imagines a throne and flaming sword;\nfaith has confidence in a better day ever dawning, in the triumph at\nlast of right, in the reality of an incomprehensible love that sings in\nits joy, soothes in its sorrow, strengthens in its discipline, a life\nand love nearer and more real than any of the other facts of living.\n\n\n\nFAITH FOR THE FUTURE\n\nYou cannot tell much about a man's faith by his willingness to deal in\nfutures without any foundation in fact.  And yet no man is ready to\nface the future unless his heart is nerved by a high and worthy faith.\nThis alone can give strength to look down the coming days and to take\nup their tasks.\n\nNone of us can know what these new days hold for us; fear readily\nconjures up pictures of disaster.  But because of certain sublime\nconfidences we hold we banish our fears, shake off our sloth, and\ngladly step out into the unknown and untrodden country of to-morrow.\n\nFaith is the force of all the ages.  It accounts for the past; it\nenters and determines the future.  Because certain men in days gone by\nbelieved certain things intensely; because they were thrilled by great\nvisions, by glorious ideals, history was wrought out in the forge of\ntheir convictions, under the hammer of their wills.\n\nNo great things are done except by the power of faith, under glowing\nhopes and compelling convictions.  It is her faith in her boy's future\nthat makes the mother willing to suffer, keeps her patient, that buoys\nup the father in the strife and weariness of life.  No man or woman is\ndoing anything that makes the world richer for mere bread and butter;\nsome purpose and vision is behind the worthy work.\n\nIt is because somehow we believe, no matter how we may phrase the\nbelief, that destiny is behind this strange weaving we call life that\nwe are content to seem to be the shuttles jerked hither and thither.\nWe bear the ills of to-day because we dimly see the glorious goal of\nthe good of all.  We do a full day's work only as we see somehow an\neternal wage.\n\nIt makes little difference what creed a man may hold, for that has\nbecome almost wholly a matter of philosophical speculation regarding\nthings unknown and often unimportant, but it makes all the difference\nwhat measure and quality of faith he has, whether he feels the force of\ngreat aspirations and is controlled by eternal principles.\n\nIt may belong to few of us to be heralded as heroes, and the judgment\nof history may confer on none the martyr's crown, but the hero's joy\nand the martyr's glory are in the heart of every one who boldly reaches\nup to and lives out the highest he conceives, for he will not do that\nwithout sacrifice and pain on his side nor without enriching for\nmankind on the other.\n\nThe largest faith may be manifest in the lowliest places.  When all the\nwork of the ages appears, when the weaving of the centuries is turned\nwith its finished side towards us, we may see that the man who has laid\nthe brick or fed the furnace or the woman who has washed and cooked in\nthe home and tended the little ones, doing these things for love, has\nshot the most glowing colours into the great fabric.\n\nIt is not the thing you do so much as the spirit in which you do it\nthat makes it great or small.  Faith determines this spirit, for faith\nis that which fashions the ideal of the one we love, the ideal we serve\nand for which we joyfully suffer.  The prophet whose burning words\ncannot forget lives by the faith in a vision broad and sweeping; but\nnot less is the faith of the humble toiler who lives each day by the\nvision of his home and fireside.\n\nNor is this all.  It is faith that draws on life's invisible sources of\npower and refreshing; it is faith that finds inner contact with the\ninvisible.  How empty is life if it hold nothing but things; how hungry\ngrows the heart fed only on cold facts.  For each day as it comes we\nneed to be able to draw on the deep springs of the water of life, the\nsprings from which our fathers drank and found strength to lay the\nfoundations of our day.\n\nFaith is not the blind confidence that, somehow, Providence will send\nus daily bread.  It is the faculty by which the heart eats of the bread\nof heaven, by which it comes into fellowship with the great and\nimmortal of all ages, by which it walks with Jesus of Nazareth and\nevery spirit like His and learns to read life as love law and see it as\nleading to eternal good.\n\n\n\n\nXIX\n\nHindrances and Helps from Within\n\n  _Worry_\n  _A Cure for the Blues_\n  _The Gospel of Song_\n\n\n_Airing our aches will never heal them._\n\n_This would be a sad world but for our sorrows._\n\n_A merry heart kills more microbes than any medicine._\n\n_It is always a pleasure to boost another sinner down._\n\n_We make mistakes; other people commit sins._\n\n_Nothing worries worry worse than work._\n\n_A little modesty often hides a lot of vanity._\n\n_He whose life leads nowhere is never late in getting there._\n\n_Love runs over but it never gives over._\n\n_Never put off to-morrow the meanness you can put off to-day._\n\n_Happiness rests on thoughts and not on things._\n\n_He who has friends only to use them has them only to lose them._\n\n_To-morrow's burden is the only one that breaks the back of to-day._\n\n\nXIX\n\nWORRY\n\nWorry is wicked because it causes weakness.  It robs the life of its\npowers; it thwarts our possibilities.  Anxiety is wrong, not because it\nindicates infidelity as to the wise and loving providence overruling\nlife, but because it is a criminal waste of life's forces, it prevents\nour doing our own work, and it irritates and hinders others.\n\nWhat a great cloud would be lifted from our world if all the needless\nfears and frowns were chased away.  One scowling man, going to his work\nworrying over it, will spread the contagion of apprehension and\ncowardly fretfulness through almost every group with which he mingles.\nOur mental health has as much to do with our success and happiness as\nany other thing.\n\nThe fog that bothers us most of all is that we carry on our faces, that\nwhich rises from our heart fears.  Once savage man lived in perpetual\nfear of innumerable malignant spirits; civilized man lives in fear of\ninvisible and imaginary accidents.  For every real foe that has to be\nfaced we fight out hypothetical battles with a dozen shadows.\n\nWorry is a matter of outlook and habit.  It depends, first of all, on\nwhether you are going to take all the facts into account and look on\nlife as a whole, or see only the dismal possibilities.  Then it depends\non whether you will yield continually to the blue moods that may arise\nfrom apprehension or from indigestion until you have become colour\nblind to all but the blue things.\n\nHow trivial are the things over which we worry, by means of which we\ncultivate the enslaving habit of worry, whether we will catch the\napproaching car or the one that will come two minutes later, whether it\nwill rain when we want it to shine, or shine when we want it to rain.\n\nHow ineffective it all is.  Whoever by worrying all night succeeded in\nbringing about the kind of weather he wanted?  More than that, it is\nfatal to successfully accomplishing those things that do lie within our\npower.  The worry over catching a train or doing a piece of work so\nagitates the mind and unsettles the will that it reduces the chances of\nefficiency.\n\nBut there are larger causes of worry than these, sickness, loss,\nimpending disasters.  Yet how futile to help and how potent to increase\nthese ills is worry.  The darkest days and the deepest sorrows need\nthat we should be at our best to meet them.  To yield to fear and\nfretting is to turn the powers of heart and brain from allies to\nenemies.\n\nNo occasion is so great or so small that we can afford to meet it\neither with fear or without forethought.  The imperative obligation to\nmake the most of our lives is not met by apprehending the worst, but by\ndoing the best we can.  We have no right to give to forebodings the\ntime and force we need for preparing for and actually meeting our\nduties.\n\nThe best cure for worry is work.  In the larger number of instances if\nwe but do our work well we shall have no need to worry over the\nresults.  Much of our fearful fretting is but a confession of work illy\ndone and the apprehension of deserved consequences.\n\nThen faithful work by absorbing the thought and energies cures the\nhabit of worry.  It is the empty mind that falls first prey to\nforeboding, and is most easily filled with the spectres of woe.  Do\nyour work with all your might; let it go at that, knowing that no\namount of further thought can affect the issue of it.\n\nNo matter how dark the way, how empty the scrip, the cheerful heart has\nsunshine and feasting.  And this not by a blind indifference, a\nchildish optimism, but by the blessed faculty of finding the riches\nthat are by every wayside, of catching at all the good there is in\nliving.  If you would dispel your gloom and depreciate your burdens,\nbegin to appreciate your blessings.  Do your best, seek out the best,\nbelieve in the best, and the best shall be.\n\n\n\nA CURE FOR THE BLUES\n\nThere is an honest confession, and one that proved to be good for the\nsoul of the man who made it, in the Seventy-seventh Psalm.  Asaph, the\nsinger of that song, had had a bad spell of the blues.  He was nervous,\nsleepless, fretful, full of vague regrets and querulous complainings.\nHe had reviewed the whole troop of his imaginary miseries, and wound up\nby wondering whether God really cared anything about him.  One might\nwell believe that he had been taking in altogether too many social\nfunctions.  Whatever the cause, he had come to an exceedingly\ndisagreeable condition.\n\nDespite the fact that many suppose that saintliness is never fully\nachieved unless the whole nature be soured, it still remains true that\nof all the blights upon this earth, few are more contrary to the will\nof a God of love and sunshine than the disposition that abides in the\nchronic blues.  It lives on regrets for the good things that might have\nbeen and dreadings of the evil things that yet may be.  It is either\ncomplaining or criticising.\n\nTheir gall enters the hearts of such people.  They who look within and\nsee nothing but bitterness, when they look without find a film over\ntheir eyes that colours their whole world, until they lose faith in God\nand hope for man.  Then they lay the blame on their circumstances, or,\nworse yet, on what they call an \"All Wise Providence,\" whom they\nimagine to be as bitter against them as they are against the world.\n\nThis attitude soon becomes fixed.  Unconsciously it is cultivated.\nThen friends and members of the family turn with loathing from the\natmosphere of chronic pessimism; the habitue has become a cuttlefish\namong his fellows, only emanating floods of inky misery.  He wonders\nwhy things do not come his way; why business associates desert him and\ntroubles assail him more and more.  The truth is that imaginary\ntroubles tend to become real, and fortune never smiles on a man who\nturns a sour face towards her.\n\nCharacter is contagious.  Even if we had the right to enjoy our own\nmisery we have no right to infect our neighbours with it.  You are\nbound by social obligations as well as by selfish reasons to cure the\nblues every time you have them.\n\nAnd there is a remedy.  Asaph began to cure himself when, instead of\nsaying, \"All things are against me,\" he said, \"This is my infirmity,\"\nmy fault; I am enough to turn a beehive sour.  His cure was almost\nperfect when he said, \"I will remember the years of the right hand of\nthe Most High.\"  The cure for the blues is simple, then.  First, own up\nto it that the largest part of your miseries comes out of your own\nmind, out of your distorted views of things.  Then begin to thank God\nfor His goodness, call to mind the many things for which you should be\ngrateful.\n\nTo remember our mercies is to bury our miseries.  There is a lot of\ngood in this old world and they get it who go for it.  There is\nsomething good in every man; the best people find the best in people.\nAfter all, our lives are determined not by the things about us but by\nthe things we invite into us.  It is impossible to keep that man blue\nwho persistently looks for the bright side of things, or to keep him\npoor or sad who is affording a welcome to every good thing, every\nhappy, cheering thought.  Soon the man who lives like that gets so busy\nkeeping track of his own and other people's happiness that he forgets\nto think whether he is happy or not, just as a healthy man forgets to\ncount his pulse or his respirations.  So, if you are tempted to feel\nblue, remember it is a sin to nurse your sadness; it is a duty to\ncultivate happiness.\n\n\n\nTHE GOSPEL OF SONG\n\nSinging cures sighing.  Lift up a note of praise and you can raise the\nheaviest off and roll it clean off the heart.  Christianity is a\nreligion of song.  Its forerunner, Judaism, left the ages the rich\nlegacy of the Psalms.  Its founder, when he knew that death was\nimminent, sang one of those ancient songs with his friends.  His\nfollowers early gathered for worship in song.  Peter beguiled prison\nhours with hymns.  Meeting in the catacombs, the early Christians made\nthe galleries echo with their praise.\n\nTo-day every revival is but a wave of song.  The successful churches\nknow the inspirational and the ethical power of good hymns.  The\ndecline of many a church may be traced to the exclusion of the people\nfrom their share in the worship, to the attempt to praise God by proxy,\nor to substitute an artistic exhibition for an act of exaltation.\n\nNot only in public worship, but in private life, hymns and songs have a\nsignificant influence.  It is always easy to remember rhymed forms of\ntruth; happy the heart with a store of good hymns; it is provisioned\nfor many a long voyage.  When the light burns low the heart is\nillumined by the memory of choice thoughts expressed in poetry, by\nsongs sung long ago.  When the burden seems all too heavy, and the\ntraveller would fain lie down in despair, he remembers some word of\ncheer, some stanza from another pilgrim's song, and he is strengthened\nfor the road.\n\nChristianity is a singing religion, because it is a happy religion.  It\ncame to end the gloom of this world.  The song must take the place of\nthe sigh.  Happiness must rule the utterance.  Even a hearty whistle\nmay be a wonderful means of grace.  Every natural expression of\nhappiness becomes a religious act.  The flowers praise the gardener by\nbeing beautiful and fragrant, and men praise God by being happy.\n\nSong is a creator of happiness.  You cannot sing songs of joy and\nnourish jealousy or hatred.  A song of gratitude for things you have\nwill often chase away the clouds of gloom over those you dread.  It is\na sin to be sad when you might as well be glad, and it is a sin to be\nsilent when you might as well be singing.\n\nOne song may surpass many a sermon in its power over a life.  Great\nsongs have sung men into battle and stiffened their melting hearts.\nGreat songs have touched our clay and thrilled it to the divinely\nheroic.  Songs sung in the stillness of the evening over the baby's\ncradle have ever been the mother's consecration for all her sacrifice.\nHymns bring back hallowed memories; a strain of song will touch a chord\nno syllogism could sound; the simple words of an old hymn bring comfort\nand new hope to hearts broken and crushed.\n\nWe may not all make sermons, but we can all sing songs.  To make the\ngood singer there is needed not the artist but the heart.  Sing away\nthe gloom; sing in the gratitude, the joy, and love, and strength; sing\nin the courage, the aspiration and hope.  Men may reject our sermons,\nbut they will rejoice in our songs, for they are theirs also.  The\ncreeds change, but the old hymns stand.\n\nStore your memory with the songs that time has tried.  The thoughts\nthat were meat and strength to others shall be your bread in desert\ndays, your light in darkness.  Praise God by a life of happy praise.\n\n\n\n\nXX\n\nDoes He Care?\n\n  _The One at The Helm_\n  _The Shepherd and The Sheep_\n  _The Father's Care_\n\n\n_Faith's fervour is more than effervescence._\n\n_The lights of the world are not advertising signs._\n\n_Sow the sand and you reap only cinders in your eyes._\n\n_No man ever broke his back under his brother's burden._\n\n_The fear of reputation is often taken for the love of righteousness._\n\n_You cannot cure your sorrows by taking them out in a wheel chair._\n\n_A niggardly purse in the pocket becomes a thorn in the side._\n\n_Tears over yesterday's broken toys blind us to today's treasures._\n\n_Things do not prove themselves sacred by segregating themselves from\nsecular concerns._\n\n_Heaven intrusts no great cargo to the vessel that spreads its sails to\nevery wind that blows._\n\n_When a man is getting fat out of the fall of others he is sure to be a\nwarm advocate of their right to be free to fall._\n\n_Many a man will be surprised when he gets to heaven to find how large\na place his little kindly deeds occupy in its history._\n\n\nXX\n\nTHE ONE AT THE HELM\n\nDanger tears away our disguises.  In hours of peril the true man\nappears, and at such times, if ever, the man speaks the truth.  Fearing\nthe boat was sinking, the disciples had little thought of the dignity\nor the divinity of the one who lay asleep in the helmsman's place.\nRudely they awaken Him with their indignant cries, wondering why one\nwho had spoken such wondrous words before seems indifferent now to\ntheir danger.  \"Carest Thou not that we perish?\" they cry.\n\nEvery man who has been accustomed to take God for granted has used\nalmost the same words at some time in his life.  The hour of tempest,\nwhen the uncontrollable waves of trouble and winds of adversity seemed\nready to overwhelm him, when he had done all that mortal might do, then\nit seemed as though this God to whom he had prayed so often, of whom he\nhad learned to think as part of his life, was absent or indifferent.\n\nIt is the question of every soul in sorrow or testing, \"Does God care\nanything about me?\"  It is more than a speculative inquiry then.\nTheologians may have drawn up their specifications of the Most High,\nand, in the peaceful ways of their lives, they may be satisfied with\ntheir handiwork.  But when, even into their cloistered walks, some\ngreat sorrow or grim death has come stalking, then, with dry lips and\nmoist brow they cry, \"Master, are you asleep?  Do you not care?\"\n\nWhat is there at the helm of this great ship of life?  Is there any one\nor is it steered automatically, blindly holding its way and heeding\nneither waves nor rocks nor other craft?  Has this universe a heart or\nonly an engine at its centre?  The inquiry becomes pressing and\npertinent, indeed, when inexplicable distress and anguish that seem all\nunnecessary break down all the man's strength and courage.\n\nA man can no more content himself with a far off being, sitting in the\nheavens in royal state, winning reverence by remoteness, than his own\nchildren would be satisfied to know him only as a sovereign.  He craves\nthe friendship of that one; he longs for compassion, sympathy,\nassistance such as friend gives to friend; in a word, he looks for\nlove.  You cannot love an absentee God any more than you can love an\nabstraction or a theory.\n\nBut the need of one who will come close into our lives, who aids in the\nhour of extremity, does not meet itself.  The fact remains that often\nwe seem to be left to the mercy of the tempest; the elements do their\nworst and no hand is lifted and no voice is heard that still the waves.\nFull often the storm seems to finish its work and only clinging to the\nwreckage or swept on the waves do we come into port.\n\nIs there any answer to the great question, Does any greater one care\nfor our lives?  If we are looking for an answer as susceptible to\ndemonstration as a mathematical proposition we are doomed to\ndisappointment.  It is possible to believe in providence without being\nable either to prove or fully comprehend it.  The child must become the\nparent before he can understand the ways of the father or mother with\nhim; yet he can know their love before he can comprehend their ways.\n\nNothing could do more harm than to have the absolute assurance that an\nalmighty friend would fly to our aid and protection in every time of\ndanger or need.  A friend whose power relieved us from the necessity of\nprudence or courage or endeavour would be a foe indeed.  The All Wise\nloves man too well and too wisely to make plain always His ways of\ncaring for him and His purposes of protection.\n\nThe furrowed faces and whitened heads of men may be the will of love as\ntruly as the smooth ways of ease and complacency.  There is one at the\nhelm, but His concern is more for the making of strong sailors than for\nthe securing of smooth sailing.  The best evidence of the care of the\nMost High for all the sons of men is not in the immediate unbaring of\nHis arm for their protection, but rather in the manner in which He\ncauses the wind and the waves, the struggle with the tempest, the need\nfor the nerving of the soul in the hour of peril all to work out His\nwill, the will of great love, the bringing of the mariner to His\nlikeness in character and soul.\n\n\n\nTHE SHEPHERD AND THE SHEEP\n\nMillions have lived and died in faith in that word, The Lord is my\nShepherd; nations have sung its strain into the strength of their\nbeing.  The picture of the one who leads His flock, who carries the\nlambs in His arms, appeals to all; yet who has not some time, perhaps\noften, questioned: After all, is there any one who cares; is there any\neye to see or heart to heed if I--or, indeed, all men--should faint or\nfall by the way?\n\nPerhaps there are some who no longer find aught beyond an imagery of\npoetic beauty in the old strain, who even feel that it would be\nretreating intellectually to conceive of an infinite heart that broods\nover men or a hand that helps.  They tell us that science has wiped out\nthe possibility of such an one as this great Shepherd of the flock of\nhumanity.  Yet even they are not dead to this great thought that so\nlong stirred men's souls and made them brave, ready to sacrifice, to\ndie.\n\nThe truth is, the singer of long ago was but giving expression, in\nfigures familiar to him, of a truth we all apprehend with greater or\nless clearness, one that alone gives strength, hope, and faith to our\nhearts, the conviction that back of all the warring purposes and\njangling discords of our lives and our world there is reason, and\norder, and beneficence.\n\nThe science that seemed to wipe out the conception of a mighty Creator\nwho fashioned the first man with His fingers, but emphasizes with a\nstress that grows from day to day the fact that this universe is not\nwithout order, its forces as sheep without a shepherd; that the stars\nare not wandering, nor the least atom without guidance; that, as one\nput it long ago, all things work together for good.\n\nIf the remotest particle of matter is bound up with the mighty laws of\nthe universe, guided, governed, led to its appointed end, bound to\nserve its purpose, shall we not have faith that the law that guides the\natom and holds the planet, pervades all the universe and takes us in\nits mighty grasp?\n\nNot with doubt but with larger meaning and deeper assurance may I sing,\n\"The Lord is my shepherd,\" thinking not only of one who takes up my\nlittle life and carries it, but of the great fact of all life under\nlaw, law divine, all pervading, moving in majesty on to the completion\nof its purposes.  I may not know what the Shepherd looks like; I may\nhave lost my old simple pictures of personality and appearance; the\nlarger fact grows too great for fixed words.\n\nThis is to see the guidance of the Shepherd in the great things of our\nworld as well as in the little.  It is a strange, a poor religion that\nbelieves that providence will send a man his dinner but never gives a\nthought to the great purposes working out through all the strife of our\ncommon life, through our industrial, social, and political problems,\nnor remembers that life is more than meals or millinery.\n\nThere is the large faith which we need for all times, to believe that a\nplan is being wrought out behind all the seeming chaos, that there is a\npurpose even though we cannot yet trace its lines, to be willing to go\non doing our work, laying down our lives, because the great world needs\nus; the Shepherd cannot bring His flock to the green pastures and the\nstill waters unless we live and labour and die.\n\nThere is only one solution to all the mystery of our lives, the riddle\nof history and the universe; it is the spirit solution, that we are but\nthe offspring, as all things are but the creation of Spiritual forces;\nthat we are working out spiritual destinies, the green pastures and the\nstill waters are but emblems of felicities and beauties beyond our\ntongue, the full orbed glory of the soul to which the Shepherd leads by\ntoilsome mountain ways or dreary desert trails; but at last we come to\nthe house of the Lord, where we may dwell forever.\n\n\n\nTHE FATHER'S CARE\n\nFormal creeds have little to say of the belief in the overruling care\nof the All Father.  Perhaps the belief is so nearly universal as to be\nwithout the range of debate so dear to creed makers.  Yet at all times,\nin all lands, man, whether the savage, the oriental mystic, or the\ncool-headed Christian, in various ways and with different phrases, has\nrecognized the hand that, from behind the scenes, touched his affairs\nand often seemed to order his life.  Whether it be the hand of force or\nof friend, the fact has been felt.\n\nTrue, the laziest man is apt to have the readiest sense of the\nintention of Providence to care for him, to send him bread well\nbuttered; the foolish and thoughtless depend on heaven to do their\nthinking, and many court bankruptcy while praying for solvency.  But\nthe improvidence of man does not disprove the providence of God.  So\nfar from encouraging sloth and recklessness this truth provokes to\nprogress by the assurance of the cooeperation of infinite powers with\nour best endeavours.\n\nIt is a thought we cannot escape; the all wise must be the all loving.\nThe spirit at the centre of all must embrace all within the circle of\nhis love; and that love will not lie quiescent, helpless when its\nobjects are in distress, in perplexity, or need, when it might succour,\nsave, or suggest the way of success.  If there is a heart of love there\nis a hand of help.\n\nYet it seems too great a thought.  What are we but dust on the wheels\nof the universe?  Often do our fainting hearts question whether there\nbe any, outside our own little circle, who care whether we suffer,\nwhether we succeed.  Can it be that the petty affairs of a life that\npasses like the hoar frost before the morning sun can even interest,\nstill less call forth the aid, of the one in whom we all live and move\nand have our being?\n\nDespite all questionings men will ever go on praying to that one; they\nwill turn to an ear that hears, they will seek a heart that feels, and\nlook for hands reached out in hours of necessity.  Experience indorses\ntheir faith.  Nearly all can look back and see where destiny has seemed\nto breathe upon them; their old plans wilted, and new ones, and new\nways sprung up, bearing other and fairer flowers than they had ever\ndreamed; a mighty, mysterious power had intervened.\n\nWhat does it all mean?  That we are but puppets in these strange unseen\nhands; that we can neither will nor work for ourselves?  No; it but\nmeans what poets sang long ago when, seeking after that which far\ntranscends all thought and all imagery, they cried, \"Surely Thou art\nour Father.\"  That which was best in them, the holy fire of fatherhood,\nbecame a mirror in which they saw the infinite.\n\nFrom the source of all life, humanity has learned the great lessons of\nfamily care and provision.  All that is good in our families is true of\nthis great family of all mankind.  The great purpose of this family, as\nof all families, is the development of the highest, fullest life in its\nmembers.  Fatherhood regards the provision of food, clothing, and\nshelter but as incidental to the great purpose of training the children.\n\nThis is the purpose of the Father of us all, to develop the best in us.\nWhen our weak hearts cry for ease, for rest, for pleasures, He sends\nthe task, the sorrow, the loss.  When we think all life's lessons well\nlearned He sends us up to higher grades with harder tasks.  Yet ever\nover all is the pitying, compassionate yearning of a father's heart\nthat never forgets the weakness of the child.\n\nWisely the father's love seems to hide its working.  Like all things\ndeep and sublime it passes comprehension; it may often seem like\nindifference.  All the child can do is to bend every effort to do his\nbest, to work out the father's plan so far as he knows it, to know,\nthrough all, that God is good.  Then, when the child grows to the man,\nthe man towards the divine, the things that seemed strange are made\nplain in the light of the Father's face.","title":"Levels of Living: Essays on Everyday Ideals","tradition":"scripture-revelation","translated_text":null,"word_count":46844}