Part 4 (1/2)
Educate and cultivate your conscience, and never disregard its voice.
Keep your heart with all diligence; keep your heart, and always have in it room for G.o.d.
In the open, and in the secret of your life, watch and pray that day by day you may say with Spurgeon: ”Write, if you like, all you know about me across the heavens.” And while you may have your enemies in men and circ.u.mstances, they will be as nothing and vanity compared with the friend you have in G.o.d and yourself. Never seek to refer your moral responsibility for actions to influences outside you. Settle it once and for good, that a thing can radically hurt you there only so far as you place yourself within its reach. Yield yourselves to the Power that can lift you by your real need, the need of regeneration, which can so change your nature that while you are free to many things that have in them the elements of temptation, you are yet too free to want them--the Power which can enable each one of us to say: ”I fear no foe, because, by the help of G.o.d, I am my own friend.”
[1] George Dawson, M.A.
[2] Rev. Dr. Falding--_Clarum et venerabile nomen_.
SELF-RESPECT AND COMPANIONs.h.i.+PS
”Is Saul also among the prophets?”--1 Samuel x. 12.
VI
SELF-RESPECT AND COMPANIONs.h.i.+PS
Ever since we could hear or notice sayings and things, and for long before we were here to do either, this text has been in the world as a kind of proverb-question: ”Is Saul also among the prophets?” If a man says something which is decidedly in advance of his generally-accepted reputation for intelligence and good sense, if he surprise us by doing something which rises sheer above the plane of his average life, if we happen to find him in company that is made up of men who are his superiors in attainments, character, and social importance, we mark the unlooked-for circ.u.mstance by repeating this text. We say: ”How does this come to pa.s.s? What is the explanation?” ”Is Saul also among the prophets?” If we think out our impression, it means that the unexpected has somehow happened; that the man must have more in him, or about him, than hitherto he has been credited with having, or by some accident he is found where we should least have thought of looking for him. In a word, the popular interpretation of Saul among the prophets is that Saul had taken a step up. The truth is, the text may mean that he had taken one down. It all depends who these prophets were. Before we can say that it is to a man's credit to be found in a certain company, and that because he is there we must revise our judgments about him, we must know what the company is, and why for the moment he is in it. It is also well to reflect that a man may be in a company and not of it.
In these prophets of the time of Saul, when we first meet them, we have the type which prophesying had first a.s.sumed on Canaanitish soil. They were men, as Professor Cornill in his suggestive book tells us, after the manner of Mohammedan fakirs, or dancing and howling dervishes, who express their religious exaltation through their eccentric mode of life, and thus it comes that the Hebrew word, which means ”to live as a prophet,” has also the signification ”to rave, to behave in an unseemly way.”
These men lived together in Israel until a very late date in guilds, the so-called schools of the prophets. They were, in fact, a species of begging friars, and were held by the people in a contempt which they evidently did their best to deserve. To Ahab they prophesied whatsoever was pleasing to him to hear; and as one of them came into the camp unto Jehu with a message from Elisha to anoint him king, his friends asked him: ”Wherefore came this mad fellow to thee?” Amos likewise indignantly resents being placed on the same level with this begging fraternity: ”I was no prophet,” he says, ”neither was I a prophet's son.” And so when the people exclaimed in astonishment: ”Is Saul also among the prophets?” they did not mean: ”How is it that such a worldly-minded man finds himself in the company of such pious people?” Their meaning is better represented in a question like this: ”How comes a person of such distinction to find himself in such disreputable company?”
Let it be understood that these last two or three paragraphs are roughly paraphrased from Professor Cornill's book, _The Prophets of Israel_. My opinion as to how far his reading of this proverb-question will bear criticism is of no value. It may be open to debate whether, historically, he has not placed certain hysterical phenomena recorded of these prophets much too late. But whatever scholars.h.i.+p may have to say about his interpretation of our text, the interpretation commends itself to my judgment, and it serves the purpose before me. It has, I venture to think, a very timely message for us all, and especially to young people.
You have heard the question a score of times, and you will hear it again if you live. Hear it then, for once, as the remembrancer of this truth--that when Saul was found among these so-called prophets he had ceased to respect himself, and when a man does that he must either recover himself, or accept moral ruin. I care not what his exterior circ.u.mstances may be; just so far as he fears self-scrutiny is he self-d.a.m.ned, and he knows it. We talk about the ”basis of character.”
It is this, or it is that, according as a man may regard it from his standpoint of morals or religion. We may call it what we choose, but one thing is certain, there can be no worthy character where we have not established some right to respect ourselves. And this right must be born and reared, not out of egotism, nor in religious professions, but in the findings of a cultivated conscience on the motives and actions of our everyday life. A man may have many things, and many things pre-eminently worth having--but as a question of character, if he have not the right to respect himself, that is the lack of the one thing which is virtually the lack of all.
I have mentioned religious profession, and it is well to mark the commonplace but important distinction there may be between religion and our profession of it. Religion, while it is a possession of infinite worth, may be of no worth to us so long as we know that we are keeping back some part of the righteousness which is the backbone of any religion worth the name. A man's religious beliefs and convictions are his own business. They are between him and a higher tribunal than ours. What he does concerns us; and what he does he is. It may take a time to identify the true relation between the two, but our instinct decides the question, long, it may be, before the actions appear to justify the verdict of the instinct. Somehow we know through this worth-discerning faculty whether a man is trying to be what we mean when we speak of a good man.
I believe that human character is h.o.m.ogeneous. It is of one substance and quality in each particular person. Untold mischief has been done by excusing the unpardonable in a man, on the ground that in some other directions he is a good man. If he is ill to live with in the home, or is hard and overreaching in his business, if he willingly makes life more difficult than it need be for others, this is conduct which is character; and when it is found with a profession of religion, let the man, who thus outrages religion, be anathema. But at the same time, young people should not conclude too hastily that a man is a hypocrite because he does some things they cannot reconcile with his profession.
A man may be a very faulty man, and yet be a genuinely good man. His goodness does not excuse his faults, nor do his faults destroy his claim to goodness. I have known many a son judge a father very harshly, and find himself in after years glad to find a place of repentance. If you would have less reason later on to call yourself a fool, be told that as yet you are not the best judges of what are but faults on the surface of a man, and what are vices that are the man himself. The truth about others will out sooner or later; what most concerns you in the meanwhile is to know the truth about yourselves.
While always trying to think fairly, and even generously about others, have you the right to think well of yourselves? ”It is above all things necessary,” said the late President Garfield, ”that in every action I should have the good opinion of James Garfield; for to eat, and drink, and sleep, and awake with one whom you despise, though that one be yourself, is an intolerable thought, and what must it be as a life experience?”
This is his way of saying that, as he puts it, above all things he must be able to respect himself; and therefore there must be no double existence, no secret sin, no side streets off the open thoroughfare of his life, which he preferred to visit when it was dark--for, although his neighbours and friends might not know about them, James Garfield would know about them, and to be this creature whom you despise was Garfield's idea of what every rightly ordered man should think of with loathing. It is the word of wise old Polonius over again--
”This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
Let a man have the right to respect himself, and he has that which can take the sting out of his disappointments and the tyranny of victory out of his failures. He may be no great success, as the world appreciates success. He may not make much show at money-getting; the position he fills may not excite much envy. Whether or not he achieves this order of success will be all the same fourscore years hence.
These things, seen and temporal, will be past and forgotten, but that which he makes himself in the use of them will remain, and that will _not_ be all the same whatever it is.
I myself have been through a hard mill. I know what it is to have to struggle for self-respect over the toil by which I earned my bread. I have been counted as just a ”hand” among a few hundred others, of importance only so far as it affected the cost of a certain production.
But I say it advisedly, and speaking out of years which have left their mark, I would rather have this experience to the finish of my mortal days and all the way, and at the end be able to look my soul in the face and say: ”There is no shadow between us, we are at peace”--rather this, I say, than any such success as I have had, multiplied a hundredfold, if it can only turn to conscience to be smitten by it.
I would have you succeed; and by success I mean, for the moment, what the world means by the term. Why should you not? There is no necessary connection between a straight life and failure to win the kingdoms of this world. You can be clean and conscientious in your methods, and you can succeed if you have it in you to succeed. If you have not, scorn the trick of blaming honesty for what is really lack of ability. There may be cases where honesty handicaps a man for a time, but they are comparatively few and short-lived in their operation. But lift the definition of success to higher levels, and I a.s.sert without qualification that with the right to respect ourselves there can be no failure, and without it there can be no success. That I do or do not make money is a question of gift or the favour of circ.u.mstances; that I am an honest man haps neither upon accident nor contingency. It is the deliberate and responsible exercise of my own moral will. I may make money or position and be a failure; I may do neither and be a success.
Let me counsel you to hold it true with the great President: ”I must, above all things, have the good opinion of myself.” Look up to G.o.d and pray: ”Keep Thou me from secret faults”; then look in upon yourselves and say: ”By the help of G.o.d I will make it possible for G.o.d to give me the help I ask.” To thine own self be true. Put this estimate upon yourself, and whatever price the world may put upon you, time will show that you have no more valuable a.s.set than your own self-respect. You may not be able to command the declarative success upon which the world places its emphasis, but you can always deserve it. He is the great man who can say, and mean it, I would rather be beaten in the right than succeed in the wrong.