Part 25 (1/2)

Throughout the Christian centuries nothing has been more typical than this of the Master's influence on men. He has come to innumerable sodden lives, held slaves to tyrannous sin, saying in the hopelessness of bondage, ”I cannot,” and he has touched them with his contagious confidence, until they rose into freedom, saying, ”By the help of G.o.d, I can!” He has come into social situations, where ancient evils, long entrenched and seemingly invincible, withstood the a.s.sault of reformation, and he has put inexhaustible resource into his people, until they said with an old reformer, ”Impossible? If that is all that is the matter, let us go ahead!” He has come to his Church, reluctant to undertake a world-wide mission, staggered by the task's magnitude, and he has made men pray with _life_ and not alone with lip, ”Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Wherever the influence of Christ vitally has come, the horizons of possibility have widened and the sense of power grown inexhaustible.

_Such influence is of the very essence of saviorhood and the att.i.tude that appropriates it is saving faith._ When John B. Gough, desperately enmeshed in habit, faces the Christian Gospel of release one easily may trace his changing response. Dubious at first, he wants to believe it but he does not dare. He wishes it were true, but the whole logic of his situation, his long habit, his spoiled reputation, his weakened will, argue against the possibility. As Augustine said about his l.u.s.t, ”The worse that I knew so well had more power over me than the better that I knew not.” Still, a note of authority in the Gospel, as though spoken by one whose power to perform is equal to the thing he promises, arrests Gough's mind, captures his imagination, awakens his spirit's deep desire, until at last the Master's call, ”You can,”

is answered by the human cry, ”I will,” and the man moves out into new possibilities, new powers, and increasing liberty. That _is_ salvation. It is no formal status decreed by legal enactment, as though a judge technically acquitted a prisoner. It is new life, inward liberation from old habits, apprehensions, anxieties, and fears. It lifts horizons, consumes impossibilities, and at the center of life sets the stirring conviction that what ought to be done can be done.

Christians who are accustomed lightly to a.s.sert that they are saved need specially to take this truth to heart. Some speak as though salvation were a technicality and they sing about it,

”'Tis done, the great transaction's done.”

To many such, were candor courteous, one would wish to say: Saved?

Saved from what? You are habitually anxious. Your life is continually vexed with little fears and apprehensions. When trouble comes, you are sure that you cannot stand it; when tasks present themselves, you are certain that you cannot perform them. You have pet self-indulgences, from major sins to little meannesses; you know that they are wrong; but when suggestion comes that you surrender them, you are sure that you have not the strength. When causes, plainly Christian, on whose successful issue man's weal depends, appeal to you for help, you weaken every enterprise by your disheartenment. Saved from _what_? Not from fear, timidity, selfishness, and stagnation! And if you say, Saved from h.e.l.l--what is h.e.l.l but the final subjugation of the soul to such sins as you now are cheris.h.i.+ng? The words of Jesus are promises of saviorhood from real and present evils: ”Be not _anxious_” (Matt.

6:34); ”Go, _sin_ no more” (John 8:11); ”_Fear_ not, little flock”

(Luke 12:32). When one, by faith, turns his face homeward from such destroyers of life, he begins to be saved; but only as he lives by faith in fellows.h.i.+p with the Divine and so achieves progressive victory, does he keep on being saved. _The heart of salvation is victorious power._

II

Not all men feel the need of the power which comes from disciples.h.i.+p to Christ. They live content without such increment of strength as Christians find in faith. Their power is equal to their tasks because their tasks are levelled to their power. One cannot understand, therefore, what the Saviorhood of Christ has meant to men, unless he sees how Christ has created the need of the very power he furnishes.

He has done this, in part, _by awakening the desire for an ascending life_. Men do not naturally want to believe in possibilities too great and taxing; it always is easier to leave undisturbed the _status quo_. Even changing one's residence is difficult. Though one may move to a better house, yet to decide to move, to break old relations.h.i.+ps, to tear up and refit the furnis.h.i.+ngs, and to adjust oneself to new a.s.sociations mean stress and strain. So men come to be at home with habits; they are comfortably accustomed to timidity and self-indulgence. Release into a new life does not lure as privilege; it repels as hards.h.i.+p. Some sins, indeed, are followed by remorse, but others, grown habitual, bring a sense of well-being and content. We like ourselves; we do not want a better life; we are unwilling to pay its cost. Our sins are no bed of nettles, but a lotus land of decent ease. Were we candidly to speak to them, we should say, O Sin, you are a comfortable friend! When most we want forbidden fruit you suggest excuses. You side happily with our inclinations and save us from the struggle that high duty costs and the sacrifice of striving for the best. Among the blessings of our lives, we count you not the least, O decent, comfortable, self-indulgent Sin!

Idlers thus drift listlessly and refuse a voyage with a purpose and a goal; youths living by low standards, look on Christlike character as beyond their interest and possibility; undedicated men find excuse for holding back devotion to great causes in the world--we shelter ourselves from aspiration and enterprise behind our faithlessness.

Into such a situation Christ repeatedly has come, bringing a vision of what life ought to be, too imperative to be neglected, too challenging to be denied. Men have been shaken out of their content; the true color of their lives has been revealed against his white background, the meanness of their plans against the wide ranges of his purpose. From seeing him they have gone back to be content in their old habits, but in vain. Can one who has seen a home be happy in a hovel? Ranke, the historian, says, ”More guiltless and more powerful, more exalted and more holy, has naught ever been on earth than his conduct, his life, and his death. The human race knows nothing that could be brought even afar off into comparison with it.” So he has been the disturber of man's ign.o.ble self-content, and to say that we believe in him means that, no longer able to endure the thing we are, we go on pilgrimage toward the thing he is. Faith means that we decide to _move_. This first essential work of saviorhood Christ has wrought, and when men start to follow him, they feel the need of power.

For another thing, Christ has created a thirst for the power he furnishes by _revealing the quality of character in the possession of which salvation ultimately consists_. At the beginning of the ethical development whether of the individual or of the race, goodness is defined in terms of prohibitions. There are many things which men ought _not_ to do; they walk embarra.s.sed in the presence of their duty like courtiers before an exacting prince. How negative and repelling such goodness is! As another exclaims: ”They do not break the Sabbath themselves, but no one who has to spend it with them likes to see the dreadful day come round. They do not swear themselves, but they make all who know them want to. They are just as good as trying not to be bad can make them.”

Discerning spirits, therefore, turn to goodness positively conceived.

”Thou shalt not” becomes ”Thou shalt”; duty consists of rules to be kept, precepts to be observed, principles to be applied, and we go out to do good deeds to men. But whoever seriously tries to do deeds really good, faces a need of moral elevation, as much beyond the outward act of good as that surpa.s.ses the observance of prohibitions.

_Good deeds are not a matter of will alone, but of spiritual quality._ Let the wind blow to fan the faces of the sick, but if it discover that it is laden with disease, what shall it do? To blow this way or that may be within volition's power, but not to _cleanse_ oneself. The task of character reaches inward, beyond the things we do or refrain from doing to the man we are. Goodness is something more than girding up the loins, blowing upon the hands, and setting to the work of being dutiful. It springs from the spirit's depths; it is tinctured with the spirit's quality; and deeds are never really better than the soul whose utterances they are. From ”Thou shalt not do” to ”Thou shalt do”

and from ”Thou shalt do” to ”Thou shalt be,” man's flying goal of goodness moves. And this ideal in Christ has been incarnate, visible, imperative. He _was_ right in the inner quality and flavor of his life; and to be like him involves a pure and powerful personality.

Whoever sets that task ahead knows that he cannot strut proudly into it. Like Alice entering Wonderland he must grow very small before he can grow large. The Christ who has power to give has revealed the need of it.

Not only by the intensifying of the ideal, but by its extension, has Christ created thirst for divine help. In youth the problem of character concerns personal habits. Our untamed strength must be broken to the harness, and the snaffle bit be used upon our wayward powers. We justly fear our sins and in their triumph we see the wreck of individual prospects and the ruin of our families' hopes. Our concern centers about ourselves, and its crux is self-mastery. But when in maturity, somewhat ”at leisure from ourselves” in settled habits, we no longer fear our own ruin nor think it probable, goodness extends its meaning. To play our part in man's advancement, to live, work, sacrifice, and if need be die for causes on which our children's hopes depend, becomes our ideal. As boys in spring-time when the ice is melting see from a hill-top the swirling flood that overflows the plain, and know that somewhere underneath the unfamiliar and tumultuous rapids the main channel runs, from which the floods have broken, to which in time they must return, so in a generation when man's life has broken its banks in fury we still believe that the main course of the divine purpose is not forever lost. To believe that, and in the strength of it to toil for the ends G.o.d seeks, becomes to awakened spirits the essential soul of goodness.

When such meanings enter into his ideal, a man runs straight upon the need of G.o.d. For we may make our contribution to the cause of man's good upon the earth and our children may make theirs, but if this world is a spiritual Sahara, never meant for character and social weal, and against the dead set of the desert's power we are building oases here with our unaided fingers, then the issue of our work stands in no doubt. The Sahara will pile its burning sands about us and hurl its blistering winds across us, and we and our works together come to naught. By as much, then, as a man really cares about democracy and liberty and social equity, about human brotherhood and Christian civilization, by so much he needs G.o.d, who gathers up the scattered contributions of his children and builds them into victory. A man alone may keep the decalogue, but alone he cannot save the world. Who dreams of that wants power. And Christ has made men dream of that, believe in that with pa.s.sionate certainty, until ”Thy Kingdom come” is the daily prayer of mult.i.tudes. To no human strength can such prayer be offered; we are not adequate to an eternal, universal task. Again Christ has brought us to the need of power, and his people call him Savior, because the need which he creates he also satisfies.

In one of the tidal rivers near New York, the building of a bridge was interrupted by a derelict sunk in the river's bottom. Divers put chains about the obstacle and all day long the engineer directed the maneuvering of tugs as they puffed and pulled in vain endeavor to dislodge the hulk. Then a young student, fresh from the technical school, asked for the privilege of trying, and from the vexed, impatient chief obtained his wish. ”What will _you_ do it with?”

the engineer enquired. ”The flat-boats in which we brought the granite from Vermont,” the young man answered. So when the tide was out, the flat boats were fastened to the derelict. The Atlantic began to come in; its mighty shoulders underneath the boats lifted--lifted until the derelict had to come. The youth had harnessed infinite energy to his task. To the consciousness of such resource in the spiritual world Christ has introduced his people. They have meant not formula but fact, not technicality but experience, when they have called him Savior.

III

This consciousness of power has come in part from Christ's revelation of G.o.d the Father. Whoever has sinned against his friend or unkindly wronged a child knows what sin does to personal relations.h.i.+ps. How swift a change comes over a son's thought of his father when the son has sinned! The wrong may have been done secretly so that his sire does not know, and the boy alone on earth is conscious of it. But for all that the filial relations.h.i.+p has lost its glory. Before the sin, the son was happy with his father near; they were companions, confidants, and to the boy fatherhood was very beautiful. Now, he is most unhappy with his father near; the father's eyes like a detective's pierce him through, the face like a judge's waits sternly to condemn. He is looking at his father through the dark gla.s.ses of his sin, and they distort his vision. When one considers the G.o.ds whom men have wors.h.i.+ped, approaching them by b.l.o.o.d.y altar-stairs, offering their first-born to a.s.suage wrath or win from apathy to favor, he sees, extended to a racial scale, our boyhood's tragedy. _Mankind has been looking at the Father through its ignorance and sin and it has seen him beclouded and awry._ Christ changed all that. By what he taught, by what he was, by what he suffered he has said to man, so that man increasingly has believed it--You are wrong about G.o.d. He does not stand aloof--careless or vindictive; he is not as he looks to you through the twisted lenses of your evil. He loves you. He _cares_ beyond your power to understand, and all my compa.s.sion but reveals in time what is eternally in him. He is pledged to the victory of goodness in you and in the world, and you have not used all your power until you have used his, for that, too, is yours.

From that day the fight against sin has been a new thing, and men have gone into it with battle-cries they never used before--”_G.o.d_ was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself” (II Cor. 5:19); ”_G.o.d_ commendeth his own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8); ”If _G.o.d_ is for us, who is against us?” (Rom. 8:31).

This access of power has come in part from Christ's revelation of _man_. When a jewel is taken from darkness into sunlight, there is a two-fold revealing. The sunlight is disclosed in new glory, for it never seemed so beautiful before as it appears breaking in splendor through the jewel's heart. And there is a revelation of the jewel.