Men in the Making Part 4

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 COMPANIONSHIPS

"Is Saul also among the prophets?"--1 Samuel x. 12.

VI

SELF-RESPECT AND COMPANIONSHIPS

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 scholarship 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.

Saul had ceased to respect himself, and this very probably supplies the explanation of his being found in this questionable company. Bear in mind who, and what, these so-called prophets were, and you gather the force of the surprise with which it was asked: "Is Saul also, the king, the Lord's anointed, in the company of men like these?"

For in this connection it suggests the influence of companionships.

There is a well-known saying that a man is known by the company he keeps, and it is truer than many sayings that are oftener on our lips.

"Do you think him beyond further effort?" I said lately to a good man concerning one in whom we were both interested--a young man fast heading towards ruin. "I am afraid there is, humanly speaking, no hope," was the answer; "he has taken up with company that forbids it."

When we are young we are apt to evolve friendships out of our imagination. We do not so much prove them as create them, according to the impulses and undisciplined generosities of our disposition. It is only time, here as elsewhere, that can teach us how much there is that is human about the best of friends. But how much may have been done, for better or for worse, before we realize that the angels have gone away only because they were never here? As we get older outside friendships count for less. Life fills with other interests, or it empties in a sense friendships can never fill. If we who are older have carried into the later years one or two, or two or three, well-laid, well-tested and useful friendships, let us be very thankful, and cherish them. They are pearls of great price, for no friends are like old friends, and as they drop off we have to make the best we can of acquaintances. It is when we are young that we have the genius for friendships; they are, indeed, a necessary part of our life. And whether or not it is much use to warn young people about the formation of friendships, the warning is seriously needed. Much will be determined by affinities and by mutual sympathies. You may have to sample many friendships before you find a friend. And while it is difficult, not to say impossible, to lay down rules where affinities are involved, one thing you can do, you can allow the moral instinct to decide, as it can decide, whether in the real interests of character a given friendship is worth cultivation. If you realize that you must surrender something of your better self to be the friend of a certain person, you will be almost sure to establish that friendship at your peril. It is far harder to save your life than it is to lose it, and the chances are, not that you will lift the friendship up to your level, but that it will pull you down to its own.

These remarks on the general subject of personal friendship are warranted by its importance. But there is another aspect of it which, as a question of widespread and deep-seated influence, is even more important. And it is one that is too rarely touched in or out of the pulpit. There is something which begins with only an acquaintance, but it readily grows into more, and that more is supplied at a heavy cost to the individual and to the community.

In a well-known pa.s.sage in one of his letters, St. Paul asks: "What concord hath Christ with Belial, or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? Wherefore come out from among them, saith the Lord, and be ye separate; touch not the unclean thing." Both the question and the admonition apply to personal friendships and to other relationships, such as marriage, social and business intercourse. But it has another and wider application. They refer to the general att.i.tude of our thought, our bearing towards interests and people whom we have reason to believe are hurtful themselves and represent hurtful inst.i.tutions. For me to call myself a Christian, and yet be on terms of apparent friendship, of easy good nature and tolerance of men and things that stand for Belial, that are Belial, is one of the most effective ways I know of crucifying Christ afresh, and putting Him to open shame. Whatever the King of Israel might think of his company, the fact that he was in it gave to their worthlessness a new tenure of existence and to their wickedness an added licence. He did not make them better men, but they made him a worse man. And for us to appear to countenance wrong things, so as to favour an impression that possibly they are not so wrong after all; to strengthen the wickedness which would hide itself behind the sinister expression, that the "devil may not be so bad as he is painted," is to be on the side of the devil.

It is to hearten the foes of good and perplex and discourage the enemies of evil.

In that remarkable book, _Mark Rutherford's Deliverance_, the writer speaks of a day when politics will become a matter of life or death, dividing men with really private love and hate. "I have heard it said," he tells us, "that we ought to congratulate ourselves that political differences do not in this country breed personal animosities. To me this seems anything but a subject of congratulation. Men who are totally at variance ought not to be friends, and if Radical and Tory are not totally but merely superficially at variance, so much the worse for their Radicalism and Toryism. Most of us," he goes on to say, "have no real loves and no real hatreds. Blessed is love, less blessed is hatred, but thrice accursed is the indifference which is neither one nor the other, the muddy mess which men call friendship." The truth underlying these words is put in a severe form, but there is truth in it. Our compromises in politics, and the consequent slow and doubtful progress we make in social conditions, have many explanations, but the abiding one is, that at the moral root of things we have not, as Mark Rutherford means it, those real loves and hatreds which vitally influence conduct. Take any wrong that happens to appeal to your sense of indignation, and ask why it continues? in what does it get its lease of existence? And the answer is, the fact that we have too many Sauls among the prophets. The wrong remains because, although we do not profess to be its friends, its friends have no need to reckon with us as its foes.

I have already alluded to my experience in a hard school. Indulge me if I return to it for a moment. My earlier years were spent in a Lancashire cloth mill. In it I wrought from morning to night side by side with youths of my own age and men who were older. For the most part, young and old, they were practised in almost every conceivable coa.r.s.e and brutal way of casting their existence as rubbish to the void. But I think I can truthfully say that, while I tried to be loyal to the conditions of contact, and as a comrade in the ranks was not unpopular, yet they knew that neither within those grim walls nor without them was I of their world.

It is not easy, sometimes it is very hard, to take up this positive position amid one's daily surroundings. And it is not only hard to do the thing itself; it may be even harder to do it wisely. It is not pleasant to have your conscientious att.i.tudes to things which to you are neither expedient nor permissible interpreted by the old words used as a sneer: "Stand aside, for I am holier than thou." Young people like to be what is called "popular" with those who touch their lives; and within well-defined limits they owe it to themselves and others to cultivate the qualities that invite popularity. If, however, the price of popularity is some form of compromise with things that harm and things that hate--then, if you are worth world-room, you will draw the line sharply and keep on one side of it. And that can be done without giving the impression that you are either a prig or a sn.o.b. When you go the right way about it, the att.i.tude I advise is far harder in contemplation than it is in practice. The real difficulty in eight out of every ten of the critical places in life is not what is in them, but what we imagine is in them. Let it be felt that the things you hold to be wrong must expect from you neither compromise nor show of friendship; that you are the open and declared enemy of unclean speech, filthy jesting, secret sins, with their hints and implied fascinations, brainless pursuits, frivolous conversation, and low down levels of existence, and, with the exception of those whose enmity it is a distinction to have, people will come to realize that your position is neither that of the religious crank nor of self-righteous conceit--that it is the expression and outcome of your reverence for whatsoever things are pure and lovely and of good report.

Human society has no need more pressing than its need of young men and women with moral courage and religious conviction to take up the right att.i.tude to wrong things. "Know ye not that whoever will be the friend of the world is the enemy of G.o.d?" When Saul was found in a certain company he had ceased to respect himself. This is why he was found there; and these two things were more than enough to sweep his life to its tragic close. How many of us have read this man's life-finish?

Let me suggest to you something new to read. A story that has in it more elemental material than half the fiction that ever was written, or half the facts that mortgage the attention of a superficial world.

Read that chapter where Saul, face to face with the last things in his darkened career, and hard upon the Nemesis of his own evil past, seeks out the woman with the familiar spirit, and in the words that he addresses to the apparition which he conjures up before his distorted vision you have the confession of a lost soul: "The Philistines make war against me, and the Lord answered me no more, neither by prophet nor by dream." "I have read nothing," says a well-known novelist, "quite like this man's experience in its utter abandon of lonely horror."

Think what you may about the setting of this story, you will be strangely lacking in moral insight if you miss the meaning that pulsates through the words that were wrung out of Saul in his extremity. They point to the lost, which once lost is lost for ever.

Even G.o.d, I say again, cannot give us back the yesterdays. Once they are gone we can only say: "That which is written is written."

Many of you have practically the best of your chances before you, but every day takes some part of them out of your hands, and gives it to an irrecoverable past. Be jealous about your own self-respect, and do only the things that command it. Take care of your self-respect, and your success will take care of itself; as also will your companionships. "Seek ye the Lord while He may be found; call ye upon Him while He is near." Do not put off and forget, forget and put off until your clock strikes, and so far as the best of your opportunities are concerned, you have to say: "The Lord answereth me no more, neither by prophet nor by dream." Lay hold at once upon the help that comes through genuine decision for G.o.d. Place yourself in position where G.o.d can help you; and you will find that G.o.d in Christ denies you nothing except that which disappoints in the seeking and defeats in the finding. You will realize that He offers you life; strong, sane, happy life all the way, and at the end the more life and the fuller.

THE ROYAL LAW

"Howbeit if ye fulfil the royal law, according to the Scripture, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, ye do well."--St. James ii. 8.

VII

THE ROYAL LAW

What St. James calls the Royal Law, is mentioned as far back as the time of Moses. It is one of the two commands to which our Lord gave new incidence, into which He put fresh meaning.

There has been, I hardly need remind you, endless debate about the source of some of Christ's most characteristic sayings. Was He original in His teaching, as we use the word, or was He eclectic, gathering together the most luminous things that had been said? Jewish scholars, as we might expect, have not been slow to point out that many of the sayings attributed to Jesus, and certainly many of His ideas, are to be found in the old Rabbinical writings; that many of His highest truths had been announced by saints and seers of His race long before He came.

We need not question that there is truth in this representation. But we must question the inference from these words, "long before He came."

For time has known no such solitude. He, which is, and was, and is to come, has ever been in the world teaching men how to pray, inspiring them what to say. He had taught "them of old time." "Before Abraham was," He says, "I am." And St. John tells us that "He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not."