Men in the Making Part 6

Was there no place in that canvas-crowd for one of those devoted men who, ill-paid, half-starved, and overwrought, toil night and day in that most awful work on this earth, the attempt to rescue and raise the lapsed ma.s.ses of our large populations? Was there no room for the man who penalizes body and soul to straining-point for words and thoughts that shall inspire and hearten men to steer their lives by the higher stars, those eternal principles of truth and right? Was there no room for a woman of the Salvation Army who is out of some hideous slum for a moment's breathing, before returning to it with a great self-renouncing life of love and healing?

But take the picture as the artist's impression of the ail-but universal indifference about Him who is yet declared to be the soul and centre of our Scriptures, our creeds, and our religious life, and how do we explain it? Or if we put the artist's impression aside, and on our own account face the truth which, for the purposes of constructive art, he may have exaggerated, is there any less need that we should ask: Why is Christ despised and rejected of men? Why is it that they do not come unto Him that they may have life? The answers are legion.

To my thinking, they resolve themselves into practically one. Before we can know Christ, before we can understand Christ, before we can come to Christ, we must come to ourselves. And not a face on that crowded canvas suggests a hope that he, or she, had taken an honest step in this all-determining direction. Before I can look to Christ as my Saviour I must know that I need a Saviour. Before I can realize my need of salvation from sin I must realize that I am a sinner. So much, if not all, turns there. It is not every man who feels that he is a sinner because he talks about being one. But let him feel it, and out of the knowledge will come his saving health, or the death that dies.

It is declared to be the work of the Holy Spirit to convince men of sin, and the unbelief growing out of sin. a.n.a.lyse the causes of indifference about the things that belong to our peace, and you find that for the most part they resolve themselves into sin, and the unbelief that follows sin, as consequence comes out of cause. I know with what impatience the world turns from what is called the evangelical teaching about the nature and effects of sin. And we need not go outside the Church to find the same impatience, not to say contempt. We have in our pulpits men who represent sin to us as good in the making. It is in some sense a necessary means to an end. They speak of arrested development, of defect of will, of inheritances and surroundings, of a vacancy as yet unfilled by virtue. It is hard to think that people held by a half-sceptical pantheism, and the relativity of evil, have ever been face to face with the awful deeps and disobediences of their own heart, or have felt the hot breath of the devil on their own cheek. If we have any worth-discerning faculty, we know when a man is handling certain subjects whether he knows what he is talking about; whether or not, to use an expressive colloquialism, "he has been there." No man who with the eyes of the soul has looked down that awful cleft that separates between the carnal mind and the holy will of G.o.d, can use words here under the wasting impression that he knows things. If Christ only died to save us from something which, after all, is only good in the making, then the Cross of Calvary is the supreme irony of time. We shall never find a Saviour by the road that, at the most, leads but to a martyr.

Here is a man--and he is not an imaginary case--who is married, and has young people growing up in the home. He is wealthy, with a reputable position in society. But there is a sinister something in the background of his life, and he sets himself to do what he knows full well is an irreparable wrong to an inexperienced and defenceless creature. He makes no fight against the wicked prompting, and does the hurt which if another man were to do to one of his own family he would willingly shoot him dead. And say when the hurt is done, a searchlight--he knows not whence it comes--is flashed across his soul and he sees himself as he is, a base scoundrel before G.o.d and man, will it help him to think of his sin as good in the making? For whatever he may become, he has done his part to d.a.m.n another. And let his conscience become, as it can become, and woe to him if it do not become, as real as the wicked thing he has done, and his first and devastating question will be, not can G.o.d forgive him, but can he ever forgive himself? Let his one hope come to be in some means of expiation, which can give him a degree of rest from the sin by paying what he can of its wages, and he will begin to realize what is meant, not by the remission of the consequences of sin, but by the remission of sin. He will know the need, where the need is agony, which G.o.d in Christ has met for us, and which, had He not met, would have left the need something greater than G.o.d Himself. It is when a man must have peace with himself or die to all that is immortal in him--it is then I will trust him never again to pa.s.s by with unconcern the anguish of Him who bore our sin in His own body on the tree.

Sometimes we look at the Lamb of G.o.d without feeling that we are sinners, and then we have a thousand difficult questions to ask. At other times the burden of sin is so heavy upon us, we see the sinfulness of sin so vividly, that we get away from the mere accident of place and time as far as it relates to sin, we see sin as G.o.d saw it, and must ever see it--then it is we look to the Crucified One.

"When I feel myself in my heart of hearts a sinner," I once heard Dr.

Parker say, "a trespa.s.ser against G.o.d's law and G.o.d's love; when I feel that a thought may overwhelm me in destruction, that a secret, unexpressed desire may shut me out of heaven and make me glad to go to h.e.l.l to be away from the face of Him that sitteth upon the throne--then when I am told that Jesus Christ was wounded for my transgressions, that upon Him was laid the chastis.e.m.e.nt of my peace, I press my way through all the difficulties and say: If I perish I will pray and perish at the Cross; for if this be not sufficient, it hath not entered into the heart of man to solve the problem of human depravity, and the human consciousness of sin."

I am not seeking to explain or defend what I am saying. I may try to make it a little more clear before I close. For the moment I am putting before you what I believe to be the truth of very truth. To some I may be speaking in an unknown tongue, but not to all. If there is one here who, with some years behind him, has ever been in serious conference with himself, he knows that there is something radically wrong with himself, which calls for something he is powerless to supply. He knows that the springs of his being have been poisoned, and he has no detergent to make them sweet. It is the fashion in our day to speak of the old description of "h.e.l.l-deserving sinner" as marred by exaggeration, if not to say morbid. I do not fall into that fashion, for it expresses just what I am--a h.e.l.l-deserving sinner. When the great Puritan, John Newton, saw a man taken out to be hanged, he said: "But for the grace of G.o.d there goes John Newton." It is when the true idea of sin is realized under the convincing power of the Holy Spirit, that the "necessity of the sacrificial work of Christ will be felt, understood, and become the one foundation of human hope."

Do you say that you have felt nothing of this convicting and convincing power? Then I ask: Have you ever pa.s.sed through an hour of serious inquest with your own soul? Have you ever tried to know yourself even as you are known? The debate cannot be all on one side. A man only knows that he is ignorant through the need of a knowledge he has not got. Before I can persuade you that Christ is your Saviour, you must realize that it is a Saviour you need. Before you can start out for Christ you must come to yourself. And while men make a mock of sin, while they regard it as a matter of indifference, or profess to explain it away under the terms of science and philosophy, we need not wonder that they have so little faith in higher things. We need go no further for an explanation of the thoughtless unbelief which is eating its way like a festering sore to the heart of our modern world. If the l.u.s.ts of the flesh and the pride of life sum up the totality of our being here, why should that crowd on the artist's canvas be represented as moved by an anguish that touches no chord in its soul; which is, indeed, foreign to its every thought, sympathy, and pursuit? So long as men are indifferent about the very question, Why that anguish? vain is the appeal, "To you is it nothing your Saviour should die?" So long as men are utterly unconcerned about the fact, and nature, and effects of moral evil, then selfishness will remain for men the only recognized law of self-preservation.

And here is where I come into line with the practical side of the Christian evangel. The Cross of Christ is no arbitrary arrangement.

It is not the expedient of a system cunningly devised by priest, theologian, or Church. It is the grimmest, sanest, divinest thing ever set up in this human world. The Cross is symbol of the only Power that can enter the lists against selfishness, and enter to throw it. And let me plead with you to think about this: every wrong in the world has selfishness, if not for its root, yet at its root. Cast out the selfishness which is sin, and you cast out the first and the last thing that stands between us and the new heaven and the new earth. Think of this, and you will better understand the anguish of Him who carries the sorrow, and is wounded in the wounds made by man's inhumanity to man.

Refuse to think of it, and cease to wonder why countless thousands mourn; why the strong oppress the weak; why might is worshipped as right; why men seem to fear nothing but the h.e.l.l of not making money.

Think of it, and cease to wonder why men's bodies and souls are sacrificed in what is little better than a murderous struggle to exist; why one man has so much more than he earns, and others earn so much more than they have. Think of it and cease to wonder why our age is distinguished by a bad pre-eminence of restlessness, by feverishness, a panting for excitement, and a poisonous atmosphere of pessimism.

The Cross of Christ means the life that lives in unselfish service as against the selfishness that is death and defeat. It means not only individuals and Churches, but the race, redeemed and lifted from the dark and narrow life of self, into the life and light of the kingdom of G.o.d. Can we wonder, then, that the rejection of the Cross blasts our beliefs in everything divine and hopeful, and is accompanied everywhere by a "melancholy introspection and lack-l.u.s.tre view of human life?"

Recall then in this connection what I have said about sin, and the relation of Christ's death to the forgiveness of sin. What I am saying now does not include all that is implied in that relation; but see in it what I have just put before you, and you will realize that I am not talking in mere morbid terms, nor in those of theology except so far as it is the theology of life. Long as men are willingly in their sin--which means selfishness in all its deadly forms--can we wonder at the unbelief portrayed on that canvas? Can we marvel why the Christ is still despised and rejected?

It may be asked, and justly, what are the professed followers of Christ doing to convince men of their need of Him as their Saviour; to convince them by lives that are the evidence of triumph over sin? What are Christian people, what are the Churches doing to fight down the wrongs, the hurtful conditions, the curse-centres that degrade men, keep them ignorant, and as by a satanic ingenuity hide the real Christ from those who most need to find Him, and are the least able to oppose the things that make Him so misunderstood and even unknown? How far are we responsible, not only for the deliberately cultivated wickedness of men who choose evil as their good, but for the indifference that pa.s.ses by only because our lives have never compelled its attention?

The Church is a Church but to the extent that it is the organic expression of Christ's life, the visible Body of His soul. What, I ask in all faithfulness, are we doing to make real and living to men the presence of a Lord who is ever suffering in their sin and for it? The artist was well inspired to give his picture a twentieth-century setting. What an amount of grim Calvary there is in Glasgow every day under the shadow of our Churches; ah! and behind the sanction of their power. That is the word that should smite us; it is the word that must be said--behind the sanction of their power.

The world would begin to see Christ, if we ourselves would see Him crucified, not merely in the remote Palestine of the first century, but, I say once more, in this Glasgow of to-day. In the foul slum, in the haunt of shame, in the abode of crime and wretchedness, in the places where children are robbed of their birthright before they know what things mean; in the sweater's den, in the heartless side of business compet.i.tion, in the drink h.e.l.ls, in frivolous pursuits and brainless amus.e.m.e.nts, in the insolence of wealth, and the sullenness of poverty--in every place or thing where despite is done to the Divine Humanity. Let us feel that whatever wrong is done to a single human being, throughout the world-wide family of man, is literally done to Jesus Christ, and we shall better understand that central Figure in the artist's picture. Let us see Christ crucified in whatever evil is done, in whatever good is left undone that we could do, and sin will become to us not a term only, not a thing to be excused and explained away, but a real and tremendous horror. We shall feel it to be what it is, a stab struck at the living heart of Jesus Christ. As it has been truly said: "Fellowship with Christ's sufferings will become less of a mystical phrase, and more of a vital fact."

"To you is it nothing, all ye that pa.s.s by?" As I sat and looked at that picture, this was the question that oppressed my thoughts. And then the further question forced itself--Why, in so many cases, and to all human seeming, is it just that--nothing? It is not enough to talk of sin, and unbelief, and indifference, outside our life: they are real enough, but do they suggest no responsibility on our part? Let it be a call to prayer, an incentive to unceasing watchfulness lest one should be pa.s.sing by because there is nothing in us which constrains him, or persuades her, to look and be saved, to look and live.

I said at the opening of this address that I would tell you later why I include it in this series. I am not sure that I can keep my word.

What has been said will glance from your mind unless you have, like Luther, and for the same reason, wrestled with the question: "How shall a man be just with G.o.d?" But a.s.suming that as yet this is outside your experience, still you know the difference between what may but arbitrarily be called sin, and sin that is what it is called. Believe me when I say that the first, and worst, and nearest of all problems for each man of us, and for societies, is the fact of sin; and that with it no one deals, or can deal, save Him upon whom the chastis.e.m.e.nt of our peace was laid, and with whose stripes we are healed. What is the exact relation between the death of Christ and the forgiveness of sin no one can tell us; but that there is a relation charged with redeeming power is not a theory about Christianity--it is Christianity.

I read some time ago that a "Van Missioner," who was preaching Unitarianism in the villages of Hampshire, found himself at one of them interrupted by a number of farm labourers, who began to sing--

"What can wash away my sin?

Nothing but the blood of Jesus!

What can make me whole again?

Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

It washes white as snow, No other fount I know."

To the modern enlightenment which patronizes Jesus as a teacher and rejects Christ as a Saviour, the theology, or sentiment, in these lines is not so much crude as grotesque. At the best it is but curiously reminiscent of the ignorance of a by-gone day. Doubtless this well-meaning man had much to say worth hearing; but he was talking in the name of religion, and to these villagers there was in it the lack of the one thing, which is the lack of all. Theology apart, these simple folk found in these crude lines the heart of saving truth. It is my conviction that they were right. In this conviction I live, and in it, by G.o.d's grace, I trust I may die and live again.

"I do not despise Jesus: with all that is best in me do I reverence Him as one of the world's supreme teachers; but I cannot regard Him as more than that," said a friend to me after reading over the ma.n.u.script of this address. "And yet," he added quietly, "if there is anything in Christianity which distinguishes it from any other great religion, it must be near to the place you have been trying to get at."

'WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED?'

"What must I do to be saved?"--Acts xvi. 30.

"If any man will do his will, he shall know."--St. John vii. 17.

IX

'WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED?'

"When I was well into my teens," said a very intelligent woman to me some time ago, "and for long after I had left them, I listened to preachers and preaching; and such powers as I had I put into my listening, for I wanted to get at something I could hold for sure and real in the promises of religion. I was told Sunday by Sunday to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, to trust in Him, and commit to His keeping my soul's welfare. And as far as I knew what belief meant I believed; and tried to persuade myself that I was trusting Christ. But I was not conscious that it made any real difference in my life; that it gave me anything I had not before. Hence I gradually came to the conclusion that either the preachers could not tell me what it was on which I had specifically to lay hold, or it was useless for me to prosecute my attempt to grasp it."

This woman said what many think, who are as yet within listening distance of our pulpits. They want to understand what they must do and believe, to lay hold of that which can make a difference in their life; which can find in it, or bring into it, something that answers in very truth to what the Bible calls "the power of G.o.d unto salvation."

It is, surely, a reasonable thing to ask. As religious teachers we can have no right to plead with people to believe what we are not prepared to help them to understand. Some of you may have reason, as you think, to endorse this woman's testimony as a fair statement of your own experience. Can I help you? Most gladly will I do so if I can.

One thing should be said, as I come closer to the attempt. If you are really anxious to find help, guard against mistaken impressions of what that help should be, or can be. In religion, as in all the deeper places of human life, one great teacher is experience; and you can neither antic.i.p.ate nor rush experience. A mother says in answer to certain questions of her child: "Wait until you are older and you will find out." That, to the child, is no answer at all; but, while the child is a child, it is the only answer there is.

Divine truth is infallible; but, as it has often been pointed out, there is no human infallible apprehension of divine truth. We have to admit that there may be, and indeed must be, many phases and aspects of saving truth which we cannot comprehend. There are others, again, of which we get only distant and fugitive glimpses as we study the Word of G.o.d. But we shall also admit, that these higher reaches of truth are not those alone on which our faith is called to repose. It may seem to many of you, that in my treatment of the subject now before us, I overlook much that is essential to the Christian doctrine of salvation.

I may even seem to eliminate the supernatural element from it. A little thought, however, should correct the latter impression. In pa.s.sing I have only to say, that I am not trying to exhaust this theme, but simply to give it a setting which, I venture to think, is worth consideration.

"What must I do to be saved?"--a question which may be put in two very different states of moral being. It may be asked in a temper merely curious and academic; or it may, as in the case of the text, voice a profound sense of need. If we would be saved, we must realize that we need to be saved. It was when the prodigal "came to himself" that he said: "I will arise and go to my father."

We are to be saved from what? and into what are we to be saved? In other words, not only must old things pa.s.s away, but all things must become new. From what, I repeat, are we to be saved? There is but one answer to the question: We are to be saved from sin by being delivered from the power of evil; and sin is the wilful a.s.sertion of our self-will against the holy will of G.o.d. The sense of sin may vary in different people; it may vary with the moods of the same personal experience. There are people who appear to be quite callous about the evil within them and the evil they do. But just as our moral nature is educated, just as we grow in sympathy with the divine will, do we become increasingly sensitive to the distance there is between what we are, and do, and the holiness of Him who is a consuming fire. We feel that the Apostle was neither morbid, nor did he exaggerate the actual situation when he cried: "O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"

It has been said that the "only way to be saved from sin is to cease to sin." And it is true that a man cannot, at the same time, sin in any given direction, and cease from that sin. But it is also true that he may cease from sin in the sense of not doing certain things, and yet be the greater sinner in the sight of G.o.d, because of the motive which acts as his deterrent or restraining force. I have seen men repent of their sin, as the process was called, when I have had no faith in it whatever. They were not repenting of their sin, but lamenting the cost of its indulgence.

We must do more than cease to do evil things only because evil has its price; we must learn to do well by learning to love all that is meant by well. There is no escape from evil except through love of good.

The Christian salvation, which means the saving of the whole self-hood of man, is a positive thing from its inception into its endless development. Where it is repression it is that there may be expression. This, I imagine, is what Robert L. Stevenson must have meant when he said "We are not d.a.m.ned for doing wrong, but for not doing right." Christ, he contends, "would never hear of negative morality; 'thou shalt' was ever His word, with which He superseded, 'thou shalt not.'" According to Stevenson--I do not say he is right, but I do quote his words as worth attention--we are not d.a.m.ned so much for yielding to evil, as for not getting into our life its oppositive virtue; some content vital enough to cast out the evil, and to keep it out. To go on fighting some besetting sin is only to repeat, for the most part, an experience many of us know but too well. It almost invariably ends one way. In weariness and despair we ask: "Why should we war with evil? It is more than our test, it is our fate; let us take what sweet we can before it becomes all bitter." Which is but another way of saying: "Evil, be thou my good."

Mark well, then, our next step. It is not enough to tell us that we must conquer the wrong by doing the right. The question is this: Is there any power, anything in what is called saving grace, which is adequate to the struggle on our part, and which appropriated can make us, to use the Apostle's description, "more than conquerors"?

There is; and I will try, first, to tell you what it is, and, secondly, how we may realize it. It is--call it by what name we may for the moment--that which casts out the mean, the ign.o.ble, and the selfish, by filling out life with the great, the n.o.ble, and the unselfish. It is, in a word, the salvation which means the "highest character and blessedness, which we, individually and collectively, are capable of reaching and realizing." Let us, then, call it what it is--the power of G.o.d unto salvation. And how are we to get it into our possession?

The answer is, it needs no getting in. Potentially it is there. "The kingdom of G.o.d is within you," says Jesus, and it is ours to bring it out in all its actual reality. It is the greater which includes the less, of the gracious possessions G.o.d has put in our being, and of which we know so little because we do not work these inward mines: "Work out your own salvation, for it is G.o.d that worketh in you."

Some one makes a great inventor say: "Anybody might have done it, but the secret came to me." Do you believe the first part of this statement? Would you hold me true in saying that anybody might have antic.i.p.ated the discovery of wireless telegraphy? There are times when the world appears to halt for want of some new thing, or for want of some one to put new meaning into the old. And when the fulness of time has come, the secret, which has been sleeping through centuries of men, awakes in a man. He is the chosen of Providence to deliver unto us that which he also has received.

What is true of a few in the endowment of what we call genius, may be true of us all in the power of G.o.d unto salvation. When we were "made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth," the Maker of us all put a part of Himself into the mysterious substance.

"Let each man," says Browning, "think himself a thought, an act, a breath of G.o.d." There is evil in our nature; but evil can mar us only so far as we allow it to become sin. It is in victory over evil that we find character and make. There is evil in our nature, but there is also a germ of G.o.d which He can touch into immortality and glorify with the very splendour of His own image and being. When that germ is quickened into life, we are, in the language of theology, converted; as it develops and becomes the more life and the fuller, we are, in the same language, sanctified and made meet for the Master's use.

Is there anything mysterious in this; anything we may not understand?

Christ did not think so, if we may judge from His conversation with Nicodemus. "Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again."

Our Lord, if I understand Him aright, tells this master of Israel that there is nothing more wonderful about this new birth than there is about a new affection or a new love. And what cannot love do? No one enters our life except through love. They may influence it profoundly, but that of itself gives no admittance to the heart. What, I ask again, cannot love do? Have we never known lives changed, and indeed transformed by a new affection? I have seen love work miracles; and so far from not believing in such miracles within their sphere, I believe in nothing else. But does that which wakes love put it there? Is some new thing added to life? Rather let us say that it is life coming to its own; just finding what was already there. This may be what the Psalmist means when he speaks of deep calling to deep. The deep in man answers to the deep of attraction which appeals to it. If man was conceived in the image of G.o.d, then G.o.d is immanent in man. This is not to say that this immanence is equal to, or implies the whole content of what is known as Christian salvation. It is true that the "eye and the brain must be there before the light can be perceived or any object interpreted." But it has been pointed out with equal truth that the "eye would be useless did not the light come to it, and that the brain would have nothing to work on, were not objects from without brought for our perception." [1] Which means that immanence alone would be powerless apart from some transcendent influence. Unless this be so, what are we to say of the mult.i.tudes which sit in darkness and the shadow of death? Our salvation is in the answer of the life immanent to the life transcendent, and the connecting and combining power is the Holy Spirit.

But what, in the next place, is our part in this matter? How is this power to come? How, to use a better term, are we to realize it? Have we to wait for something, or have we to do something to make it a real experience?

A youth, let us say, or a girl, is beginning to learn music, to play the violin or the piano. At first it is drudgery, and its immediate results are a trial unto all that are in the house. The parent or teacher says: "Persevere, obey instructions, and as you pa.s.s through routine into the soul, the task will soon be lost in the pleasure."

The beginner may not believe it; but granted the facility is there, and determination to bend to the task of learning, and the reward comes.