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The Bible and Life

by Edwin Holt Hughes · English · Gutenberg #41520 · 307,258 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Bible and Life

Author: Edwin Holt Hughes


        
Release date: December 1, 2012 [eBook #41520]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BIBLE AND LIFE ***

BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR


  THANKSGIVING SERMONS     12mo, net, $1.00
  LETTERS ON EVANGELISM    16mo, cloth, 25 cents;
                                 paper, 15 cents




  The Mendenhall Lectures, First Series
  Delivered at DePauw University


  THE BIBLE AND LIFE


  BY EDWIN HOLT HUGHES
  Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church


  THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN
  NEW YORK      CINCINNATI




  Copyright, 1915, by
  EDWIN HOLT HUGHES

  First Edition printed February, 1915
  Reprinted June, 1915




TO CHARLES RAISBECK MAGEE




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                           PAGE

        INTRODUCTION                   9

        FOREWORD                      11

        BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE             13

        THE HUMAN OUTLINE             19

     I. THE BIBLE AND LIFE            21

    II. THE BIBLE AND MAN             49

   III. THE BIBLE AND HOME            76

    IV. THE BIBLE AND EDUCATION      102

     V. THE BIBLE AND WORK           125

    VI. THE BIBLE AND WEALTH         151

   VII. THE BIBLE AND SORROW         185

  VIII. THE BIBLE AND PRACTICE       213




INTRODUCTION


By the courteous invitation of the President, Faculty, and Trustees of
DePauw University, the writer had the privilege of delivering the first
series of lectures under the foundation as endowed by his friend, the Rev.
Marmaduke H. Mendenhall. The following comments are the only introductory
words that need be given.

The terms of the lectures were kept strictly within the radius of real
life. The author does not claim to be a biblical scholar in any technical
sense. Nor did he deem that the primary need of the students whom he
addressed would be met by a discussion of theories of inspiration or of
dates and authorships. College students have a passion for reality, and
the most convincing apologetic for them is the argument from actual
living.

Under the instruction of the founder the lectures are to be placed in
permanent form for the students of the University and for the wider
public. The lecturer having been rewarded by the close attention of
hundreds of youthful hearers, the writer will have a still greater reward
if those who heard the words as spoken in Meharry Hall are joined by the
larger company who will listen for the voice of the Spirit in these pages.

EDWIN HOLT HUGHES.




THE MENDENHALL LECTURES

FOREWORD


The late Reverend Marmaduke H. Mendenhall, D.D., of the North Indiana
Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, donated to DePauw University
the sum of ten thousand dollars, the purpose and conditions of which gift
are set forth in his bequest as follows:

The object of this gift is "to found a perpetual lectureship on the
evidences of the Divine Origin of Christianity, to be known as the
Mendenhall Foundation. The income from this fund shall be used for the
support of an Annual Lectureship, the design of which shall be the
exhibition of the proofs, from all sources, of the Divine Origin,
Inspiration, and Authority of the Holy Scriptures. The course of lectures
shall be delivered annually before the University and the public without
any charge for admission.

"The lecturers shall be chosen by an electing body consisting of the
President of the University, the five senior members of the Faculty of the
College of Liberal Arts, and the President of the Board of Trustees,
subject to the approval of the Board of Bishops of the Methodist
Episcopal Church. The lecturers must be persons of high and wide repute,
of broad and varied scholarship, who firmly adhere to the evangelical
system of Christian faith. The selection of lecturers may be made from the
world of Christian scholarship without regard to denominational divisions.
Each course of lectures is to be published in book form by an eminent
publishing house and sold at cost to the Faculty and students of the
University."

  GEORGE R. GROSE,
    _President of DePauw University_.




BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


Inasmuch as future lecturers on the Mendenhall Foundation may not have had
the privilege of personal acquaintance with the founder, it is doubtless
good that this first volume may record the outlines of his life and
character. Marmaduke H. Mendenhall was born at Guilford, North Carolina,
May 13, 1836. He died at Union City, Indiana, October 9, 1905. He was the
son of Himelius and Priscilla Mendenhall, who, when their son was about
one year old, came northward and settled near Peru, Indiana. Doctor
Mendenhall did not suggest in manner or bearing that he was Southern born.
Had one chosen to judge of his birthplace by the man himself, one would
have said that he was a typical son of New England. His deeper self was
typified by his personal appearance. He was tall, stately, dignified,
serious, earnest.

He joined the North Indiana Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church
in 1856. Those days were still pioneer, and he entered gladly into the
sacrificial ministry of that period. It is a singular coincidence that he
was doubtless the first minister of his faith to begin work near Union
City, where he closed his earthly labors. It was his privilege, also, to
build the first Methodist Episcopal church in the city where he died. The
history of his ministry shows that he served all classes of
charges--country, city, village, county seat. Several times the record is
dotted with the word "Mission," which would indicate that he frequently
followed the apostolic fashion of building strictly on his own
foundations. He came to a place of leadership in his own Conference. To
the day of his death he was an influential factor in all its plans and
programs. Though he had been technically "superannuated" for sixteen years
prior to his death, his mind kept its full vigor, and his word kept its
full weight. Twice he was elected a reserve delegate to the General
Conference, while in 1880 he was chosen as one of the regular delegates.

From the beginning of his ministry Dr. Mendenhall showed the signs of a
remarkable mind, and at the end of his ministry he was still manifesting a
keen interest in current questions and in theological problems. His
library to the last was freshened by the purchase of new books. When he
turned his many volumes over to Gammon Theological Seminary that
institution did not receive hundreds of antiquated volumes, but rather a
collection brought down to date and selected by a master judgment. The
intellectual, though suffused at times by a proper and restrained emotion,
was his noticeable characteristic. He was given to thorough analysis. He
was markedly painstaking. Records that he made of the conduct of his
public services indicate that the final details were all regarded, and
that hymns and Scripture lessons were chosen with a view to their bearing
on the instruction of the day.

Being a vigorous personality, he held his views with strength. He was
keenly loyal to his convictions, whether these related to methods of work
or to statements of doctrine. In his advocacy or in his antagonism he was
always frank and open. His opponent could see him standing out in plain
view, with no effort to protect himself by secrecy. Men could never doubt
his sincerity, however much they might question the correctness of his
positions. He knew no sinuous paths. He was as direct as sunlight, and he
traveled in straight lines.

In all his spheres of work Dr. Mendenhall made deep and lasting
impressions. Highly intellectual as he was, he was still an excellent
administrator. His business qualifications were signal. Every matter
committed to him was cared for with scrupulous nicety. He left no loose
ends to any of his work. Although his salaries were never large, as
salaries are counted to-day, he secured a comfortable property, and this
in spite of the fact that throughout his lifetime he was a generous
contributor to good causes.

He served as a trustee of De Pauw University longer than other member of
his Conference had served, up to the time of his death. From 1878 to 1887
he served in this capacity, while in 1896 he was reelected and was an
active worker on the board up to the end of his life. He aided in pushing
the institution through its crisis. The files of this writer disclose a
careful and helpful correspondence upon matters vital to the welfare of
the University. In the sessions of the board he was always urbane and
conciliatory. He crowned the work of his life by leaving to the University
all of his estate. Upon the increase of the estate to a certain figure,
the income was to be used in founding a lectureship on Revealed Religion,
especially as related to the Holy Bible.

Although the writer was an intimate friend of Dr. Mendenhall, he cannot
remember any statements made to him which would indicate the founder's
views of inspiration or of the other questions that have made the
biblical problem of the last two decades. But his library showed that he
was fully aware of the modern discussions. Perhaps he felt that a
lectureship, broadly founded and practically directed, would be of special
service to the church in a time of transition. The writer entertains the
conviction that, even though Dr. Mendenhall might not agree fully with all
that is found in the following pages, he would still appreciate the effort
to bring the Bible within its divine purpose as a Book of Life.

The home of the founder revealed him as a model of courtesy and
kindliness. Friends who saw him by his own fireside noted the benignity
that matched his dignity, the tenderness that equaled his seriousness.
Those who came into the nearer circle of his life regarded him most
highly. To the wife who survives him he was in all ways a helper, gentle
in demeanor and loyally careful in the administration of her interests. As
the writer reviews the drift of these first lectures delivered under this
foundation, he is persuaded that the founder's relation to Himself, to his
Home, to his Work, to his Wealth, to his Pleasure and Sorrow, and
particularly to the cause of Education, is not misrepresented herein. The
Bible was his Book, and its ideals were achieved in his living. It is the
sincere wish that these pages may accomplish somewhat the main purpose of
the founder's heart in making the divine Book a brighter lamp for the
guidance of youth.




THE HUMAN OUTLINE


It may be well to give in human form the outline which will be followed in
these pages. The story is the story of millions of men on as many days.

A man awoke one morning to the consciousness of himself. Looking about he
saw the familiar sights of his own home, and soon he heard the voices of
his wife and children. Ere long the little people were on their way to
school. The man proceeded to his work, while his wife took up her domestic
duties. He returned in the evening with the proceeds of his day's labor
added to his stock of goods. He partook of the evening meal and then
indulged in the pleasure of "the children's hour." He later called upon a
friend who had met with sorrow and in the trouble of his friend he found a
fresh reminder of his own affliction. He retired in due season to his
slumber and went forth the next morning to make the like round of the day.

This is a piece of constant biography. It could be duplicated by reference
to many a personal journal and diary. If we analyze the description, we
shall find that the man was driven to take a relation to Himself, to Home,
to Education, to Work, to Wealth, to Pleasure and Sorrow.

The aim of this book is to state somewhat the bearing that the Bible has
upon these great departments of our human living. The apologetic tests the
Book under the terms of this human outline.




CHAPTER I

THE BIBLE AND LIFE


The Bible is a book of power. The man who would deny this statement would
impugn his own intelligence. It is to-day the Book of the strongest
nations. If the strongest nations selected it for their inspiration and
guidance, that fact is significant. If, on the other hand, the Bible has
trained the strongest nations, that fact is more significant. In either
case power is lodged in the Holy Scriptures. The miracle is this: That a
very ancient Book rules a very modern world.

Various explanations are given. Some men say that the Bible is powerful
because it has been promoted by a powerful organization. But this
explanation needs explaining. How did the Bible secure the aid of this
organization? Why did not the organization take the Dialogues of Plato and
become the evangel of Socrates' splendid wisdom? Why did it elect one
particular volume? And what would have been the effect on its own life if
it had chosen some other book? Would the writings of Marcus Aurelius or of
Seneca, with their high moral grade and their marked religious insight,
have served the holy purpose as effectively? When we attempt to substitute
some other book in the Bible's place, our hesitancy quickly passes on to
positive refusal. The Christian Church, with any other volume as its
textbook, is simply inconceivable.

Other men will say that the power of the Bible has come from its girding
by a doctrine of authority. This explanation must likewise be explained.
Could a Book without inherent authority be long maintained among
intelligent peoples on the basis of artificial authority? Why is the Bible
the best seller and the greatest worker in those lands where it has been
set free to yield its own message? What is the peculiar quality in the
Book that has saved any theory of its authority from appearing absurd? The
Bible showed its power long before men adopted any theory of its power.
Doubtless the claim of authority has increased the influence of the Book
over certain types of minds. Still it may be confidently asserted that the
claim of authority has depended far more on the power of the Bible than
the power of the Bible has depended on the claim of authority. The effect
should not be allowed to pass itself off as the main cause.

Nor does the power of the Bible depend upon mere bulk. Shakespeare wrote
enough to make several Bibles. So did Scott. So did Dickens. So did
Parkman. If the Bible is a moral and spiritual Encyclopedia, its material
has been strangely condensed. It is a brief Book, yet out of its small
compass men gather texts for fifty years of preaching and at the close of
their life's task feel that the pages are still exhaustless. The Bible has
inspired literature far beyond its own bulk. It is a small library of
books gathered from many authors, but it has filled great libraries with
commentaries and sermons and discussions. Its brevities have provoked
measureless pages of writing. The world is big, yet it is measurably ruled
by a small Book.

It would seem likewise that a Book written so long ago would fail of the
element of timeliness. That an old volume should keep its place in a new
century is in itself an anomaly. The last of the Bible was penned hundreds
of years since. Accepting the most radical views as to dates, its youngest
book was produced quite more than a millennium and a half ago. Meanwhile
the world has been making amazing progress. We boast of our achievements
in transportation and communication. All ancient things seem to be
outgrown, save only the Bible. The books that were written as
contemporaries of parts of the great Book have either slipped into
oblivion or are known to-day only by the intellectually elect. The
classics are studied by a small circle of scholars. The average man knows
nothing of Virgil, or Cicero, or Homer, by any direct contact with the
works of those authors. But the Bible, which is out of date by the
calendar, is not out of date by its own meaning. It is singularly
contemporaneous. Its different portions were called forth by passing
events and the Book itself is clearly touched by its own times. For all
that, eternity appears to have lodged itself in its contemporaneousness.
The twentieth century, eager and thrilling as it is, accepts a Guide Book
from the distant years. Roman Law and Greek Art are filtered to the new
age through modern channels. The Bible itself comes to us more simple and
more powerful than any modern interpretations of its messages. There is a
sense in which it declines to apply to itself its own figure of speech
about the new wine in the old bottles.

The Bible defies geographical distance as well as calendar distance. For
the most part its record relates to what happened in a small and remote
section of the earth. It reaches its climax in an obscure province which
was smaller than many a modern county. The customs of which it tells are
mostly gone. Sandals and tents and camels and parchments are curiosities
in the new lands and new times. Much of the setting of biblical events is
wholly unknown to our day, and so must be reproduced for our children in
pictures and for our adults in descriptions. An Oriental Book is the chief
literature of an Occidental world.

In spite of its small size, its great age, its cramped geography, its
vivid Orientalism, the Bible keeps its mastery. What is the explanation?

It must be that the Bible appeals to something fundamental in life itself.
The final test of inspiration must, of course, be found in what the Bible
does for life. A book that is not inspiring cannot be proved to be
inspired. It cannot give what it does not have and it must surely have
received what it gives. It would be a mistake, however, to confuse formal
truthfulness with inspiring vitality. The description of a street scene,
dealing with the passing relations of pedestrians, wagons, trees, birds,
houses; the lengths and widths of sidewalks and streets; the figures of
population; the social status of the various groups--all this may be told
with exact and mathematical truthfulness. It may be correct and still not
be inspired or inspiring. On the other hand, the parable of the prodigal
son is a story which in its precise detail may represent something that
never occurred. But it has impressed the world as both inspired and
inspiring. Its words haunt and pierce and coax and subdue men. This
indicates that a story given for a spiritual purpose shows more essential
truthfulness than does a description given for formal exactness. The
reason is that the parable appeals to something fundamental in life
itself. The son and the father are ever with us. God and his children are
the everlasting facts. The story is more true than is the description.
This contrast represents the biblical trend. The Book penetrates through
the husk to the kernel, through superficial facts to deepest truths,
through passing events to eternal meanings. It is the Book of Life.

What gives the Bible this appeal? Whence did it secure its vital quality?
The only reply is that the appeal to life must be born of life itself.
Sometimes a bizarre explanation is given of the source of a religious
volume, the assumption being that a human origin denies a divine origin.
The more men have to do with its production, the less may we presume that
God has touched the work. A curious illustration of this viewpoint is
found in the claim for the Book of Mormon. The story is as follows: A
heavenly visitant appeared to Joseph Smith and told him that in a certain
place he would find the miracle book. Smith obeyed the directions and
found in the place named a box of stone. In this box was a volume half a
foot in thickness. It was written on thin plates of gold, and these plates
were bound together by gold rings. The writing was in a strange language,
but with the book was found a pair of miraculous eyeglasses which
conferred the ability to read the pages. In other words the Book of Mormon
was not born of human life under the guidance of the divine life. It was
the product of a straight miracle, and the power to decipher its meaning
came only by miracle. Such a theory of the origin is easy to understand,
even though it may be difficult to believe. It represents the extreme form
of that faith which minimizes the partnership of man with God in the
making of all genuine gospels of life.

The incarnation was Man and God together. The church is being fashioned by
man and God together; the Spirit and the Bride are colleagues. Worship is
possible only when man and God are together in fellowship. If the Bible
came by any method other than the coworking of man and God, its production
would stand for a departure from the usual divine method. The power of the
Bible, however, grows out of the fact that it is not an abnormal book,
fantastically given to men. There is a humorous story of an old woman who
was discovered in diligent study of the Hebrew alphabet. Asked why at her
age she was beginning to learn so difficult a tongue, she made reply that
when she died she desired to address the Almighty in his own language!
There have been theories of the Bible that are scarcely caricatured by
this tale. If there have been doctrines of the Book that made it the
product of a lonely man, there have likewise been doctrines that made it
the product of a lonely God. Neither doctrine is correct. The Bible grew
out of human life that had been touched and glorified by the divine
presence and power. Because it grew out of life it makes its appeal to its
native element in life itself. It simply claims its own.

A review of the different parts of the Bible will show how true this
statement is. Practically every book is localized and personalized.
Something that happened among men called forth the writing. The names of
the books in the Pentateuch show this fact. Genesis treats of the origins
of the earth and of man, and is an answer to the inevitable question that
springs in the human mind. Exodus treats of the going forth of the Hebrew
people from their Egyptian bondage. Leviticus is a description and
discussion of the Levitical rules. Deuteronomy is a second giving of the
Law and an enlargement of its sphere as well as an enforcement of its
precepts. The Ten Commandments make a human document because their sole
aim is to ennoble and protect human life.

It is so with the historical books. They are the records of actual human
living. Their pages are sprinkled with the names of real men and women.
Joshua, the Judges, Ruth, Samuel, the Kings are all there, eager
participants in earth's affairs under the sense of God. These books are
not theoretical dissertations on life by a dreamer in his closet; they are
rather the general descriptions of life itself as it moved along a period
of seven or eight centuries. They give us the salient and meaningful
happenings among God's chosen people. They tell the story of a crude race
as it is being led forward to the heights. The pages record limitations
and faults simply because they tell us of actual life. The sins of the
Bible's premier heroes are written down with entire frankness. The human
touch is everywhere. We shall not read the historical books long ere we
find that they, too, are human documents. But these human documents,
covered with the names of men and women, are likewise covered with the
ever-recurring name of Jehovah. In the record one discovers man and God.

In the prophetical books the like fact is apparent. The prophets were men
of flesh and blood. They rushed into the prophetic work from the ordinary
occupations of ancient life. From the fields they came, and from the
vineyards. Perhaps one came from a royal palace. Surely not more than one
of them came from the altar of the priesthood. They were men who knew the
shame and glory of contemporary life. They did not hesitate to touch the
politics of their day. They decried kings. They denounced landlords. They
made frontal attacks on all forms of wickedness. Their appeal was for
reality. They declared that God hated all pretense. New moons and feasts
and fasts that did not grow out of devout hearts they declared to be an
insult and an abomination before a righteous God. They talked from life to
life. They came in response to some human demand in their times. They were
not theorists, discussing academic problems of conduct. They were blazing
moral realists. We do not need to detail the list of those forthtellers of
the Word of God. Even the book of Jonah is full of life. Parable,
allegory, history--its descriptions are based in life and its appeal is to
life. In its moral lesson for the individual, and in its missionary lesson
for a narrow race, it offers enough duty to keep life busy for a million
years. If men would heed its lessons for life and cease their petty
debates about the anatomy of whales, the Book would meet them with vital
urgings. The one point now is that the prophetical writings grew out of
life. They did not come encased in stone boxes, written on gold leaves, to
be read and understood only by miraculous spectacles. They came from real
living, and they claim their own wherever real men are living to-day.

We need not follow the same idea into the later books of the Old
Testament. The Proverbs were gathered from the streets of life.
Ecclesiastes is the pronouncement of life vainly satiated. Even the
Psalms, classed as devotional books, were usually evoked by some actual
happening. The king goes out to war; a psalm is penned. The ark is moved
from one place to another; a psalm is written. A man is jaded and
discouraged; a psalm is written to recover him to a consciousness of the
care of Jehovah. A monarch falls into grievous sin; a psalm is written to
express his penitence. A study of any Commentary on the Psalms will show
us that nearly all of these devotional utterances were prompted by some
human experiences. They are the shoutings and sobbings of living men. The
book of Psalms is not the liturgy of academicians. Its processionals and
its recessionals show actual men and women in the real march of life.

In the New Testament this same law of life rules. Jesus comes before the
Gospels. Without the Life there could not have been the record of the
Life. In any worthy Bible life must always come first. This phase will be
treated later. Now it must be emphasized that the entire New Testament
sprang from a Life that was lived among men. The Word must become flesh
before it could become literary record. Grace and truth walked the earth
ere they were traced on pages. Here again the Bible comes from life in
order that it may return to life again.

The statement concerning the New Testament will admit of more detail. The
Gospels grew immediately out of the disciples' life with the Lord. The
Acts grew out of the life of the disciples in their daily contact with
that ancient world. The Epistles all came from some urgency of life. While
there were minor reasons for writing each of them there was still a main
purpose that dictated the writing in every case. The Epistles to the
Thessalonians seek to produce a right attitude toward the doctrine of the
Lord's return. The Epistle to the Romans is a discussion of the doctrine
of justification by faith and the relations of that doctrine to Judaism.
That to the Galatians is both a personal defense of Paul's questioned
apostleship and a declaration of freedom from bondage to the law. The
Philippians grew out of an experience of human kindness, being an
expression of gratitude for help in trouble and sympathy in sorrow. The
Ephesians is a composite of moods--the victories of grace, the hope of the
heavenlies, the expectation of ascension with the glorified Christ, the
nature and aim of the true church. Colossians expresses the universal
Lordship of Christ and tears down every theory that denies the reality of
the incarnation and the utter preeminence of Jesus.

Even those Epistles that are personal in their character deal with
universal life. Philemon reappeared in the contests concerning slavery
both in England and America and scattered the arguments of Christian
democracy. The bondage of men could not well live with the tender
brotherhood that breathes in the letter which Onesimus carried back with
him to his former master. Titus and Timothy are the pastoral advices sent
by the aged apostle to his younger sons in the faith, while one of the
Epistles is the hopeful farewell to earth and a glad trust toward the
Eternal City. Revelation may be filled with strange imagery and may be
shaken by the tremors of a perilous age; but men who know real life will
say that the Beast and the Lamb are not merely wild figures of speech. The
writer of the Apocalypse knew the world, and he knew the churches in its
various cities.

Thus it seems literally true that all the New Testament was penned for the
aid of life. When life went wrong, warning came. When life went aright,
encouragement came. When life was mistaken, correction came. Whether the
need was for doctrine, for reproof, or for instruction in righteousness,
God met the need by the message that he gave to his servants. The Book is
not a series of infallible abstractions; it is rather a vital Guide Book
won from the experience of life's ways. The Bible is not a ready-made
product dropped down from heaven; it is rather a Library made by men in
many ages in partnership with the God who lives with men in all ages. In
the best and truest fashion it makes record of the life of God in the
souls of responsive men. Because it came from life it inevitably seeks
life. It was born of God among men. Therefore, it lives among men with
God.

We may carry the relation of life to the Bible quite beyond this point.
The Bible not only grew from life, but it came back to life for its
testing. Even as there have been theories of the making of the Book that
ignored the element of human living, so have there been theories of the
canon of Scripture that ignored the element of human testing. Years ago a
renowned teacher said to his pupils, "Never go deliberately to work to
make a book. The only volumes worth while are those that grow out of your
deepest life." The advice was good. In a way it suggests the manner of the
Bible's making. There is no evidence whatsoever that any writer of its
pages ever thought that his work would become part of a Bible. No man ever
said, "I will now write a book of the Holy Scripture." Nor did any group
of men assign departments to each other, saying, "We will prepare a divine
Book." The Bible came in no such mechanical way. Written because of life's
needs, as seen in the light of God, it was tested and collected by life's
needs, as seen in that same light. It was once strikingly said that the
words of Jesus were vascular; if you cut them they would bleed. One
shrinks from the metaphor. Yet it presents a truth about the whole Bible.
A Book written by life and selected by life has naturally a message for
life.

How did the books of the Bible secure their place in the canon? The
romancer offers his tradition here again. We find a very fantastic legend
coming down from medieval times to this effect: In the church at Nicæa one
day a great mass of religious writing lay in an indiscriminate heap
beneath the altar. A miracle gave an answer to the question as to what
books should secure permanent places in the Holy Book. The First
Ecumenical Conference was in session. The year was 325 A. D. While man
wondered and questioned, God settled the issue. Suddenly the genuine books
were lifted from the mass of volumes and, without visible power, lay on
the sacred table. The writings miraculously declared uncanonical remained
beneath the altar. This theory of selection corresponds to the theory of
dictation. We have in both cases an active God and a passive man. While it
would be unfair to say that this medieval legend has any modern following,
it is true that certain theories of the selection of the canon resemble it
in that they discount the human factor. Even as God and men worked
together in the writing of the books, so God and men worked together in
the binding of the books into their volume of fellowship. Life that
confessed God and tried to do his will chose the books and decreed that
they should dwell in unity.

As there has been a tendency to overstate the miracle feature in the
selection of the canon, so has there been a tendency to overstate the part
played by the authoritative councils of the church. The assumption has
been that arbitrariness was the chief feature of the whole process.
Certain men met in conference, debated the merits of the several books,
and finally settled by vote what particular writings should have their
place in the Bible of the church. Now while something of this kind did
occur, it is far from the truth to affirm that the councils lacked a
representative capacity. The vote may have been recorded by theologians,
but the vote had previously been determined by the Christian democracy.
Abraham Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. His predecessors were
the people. In a dignified sense Lincoln was their clerk, expressing their
will after many years of agitation. The wisdom of the Great Commoner was
shown not only by the personal conviction that he put into the document,
but also by his keen appreciation of the will of the multitude. Though the
parchment of liberty was proclaimed by one man, it is a fact that it was
dictated by many men. Something parallel to this occurred in the selection
of the material of the Bible. Councils played their part; their part,
however, was the part of agents.

This was true of the Old Testament. Many persons may still have the vision
of Jewish officials with long robes and sober faces deciding the ancient
canon. Indeed, there was for long a tradition that Ezra founded a kind of
Imperial Synagogue which continued for not less than two hundred years
and which in that period finished the collection and authorization of the
Old Testament. This synagogue had various presidents, including Nehemiah.
No such organization for the selection of the Scriptures existed. Accurate
ancient history gives no trace of its work. The work of testing the
writings was slow. The arbiter was life. Life had determined the writing.
Life must now determine the authority.

We can catch an interesting glimpse into this process by studying for a
moment the story about Josiah, the young king. Hilkiah, the priest, finds
the book of the law. Shaphan carries the book to the king and reads to him
from the ancient lore. The book quickens the royal conscience. God and the
earthly ancestors of Josiah speak to him from the pages. He is made to
feel how far he and his people have gone from the will of Jehovah. He
rends his clothes. He sends for the human voices of the Most High. Huldah,
the prophetess, is the chief instructor. The people are called back to
their allegiance. The land is purged. A manuscript has done all this. It
inspired the king and his people until abominations fled from Israel. The
land continued in obedience until the archers sent King Josiah to his
sepulcher. That portion of the law that had been read to the king by
Shaphan and had then been delivered to the people proved its inspiring
quality in its effects on life. On that day a portion of the Old Testament
canon was selected.

Doubtless this incident is somewhat typical of a procedure that was more
or less constant. The imperial synagogue was the Jewish people. The debate
that settled issues was the debate of experience. Life was electing its
own books. Words that touched the conscience into an impression of God and
then worked their way outward to the blessing of the multitude were
gaining for themselves the popular vote. Candidates for the canon were
rejected. Other candidates were held in long suspicion. Ecclesiastes,
Proverbs, Esther, Solomon's Song--all these served a long probation ere
they proved themselves worthy of their place. The ancient world, like the
modern world, was not willing to surrender Proverbs, with their homely
wisdom; Esther, with its lesson of loyalty to race and kindred; Solomon's
Song, with its refusal to listen to the blandishments of royal
lasciviousness luring to the betrayal of a true and humble lover; or even
Ecclesiastes, with its pessimism uncured until the writer once more finds
God.

After books secured their place in the authorized list of the Jews, they
had still to contest to keep their place. As late as the first century of
the Christian era, debate was frequent. Life was slow to render its
decision. There was no hasty authority. The final judgment was rendered by
the experience of a race. When Eck reminded Martin Luther that the church
had decided what books should go into the canon and that Luther must
accept a quotation from Second Maccabees as authoritative, the great
Reformer made reply, "The church cannot give more authority or force to a
book than it has in itself. A council cannot make that be Scripture which
in its own nature is not Scripture." So it came to pass that in due season
the freed religious consciousness of the church took certain apocryphal
books from the Old Testament canon. That consciousness seemed to feel a
difference in spiritual power between the Apocrypha and the other portions
of the Old Testament. Life was still coming to the polls in order that it,
far more than any stately council, should elect the true Word of God.

This same process of selection went on in relation to the New Testament.
The early Christians started with no New Testament whatsoever. Their Bible
was the Old Testament. We do not find any warrant for saying that they
expected to make additions to the Bible. Jesus came first. Then the
Gospels and Epistles came as natural consequences. The early Christians,
as we shall later see, had received the very purpose and climax of
Revelation, because they had received Christ. But the Gospels and Epistles
which grew up out of life had in their turn to be tested by life.
Believers began by reading these as if they were suggestive; after the
writings had wrought their full impression upon the minds of the
believers, they began to consider them inspired and holy. This decision
did not come abstractly, nor did it come quickly. Gradually the sense of
the value of certain writings grew upon the early church. Almost two
centuries of the Christian era passed ere the collection so commended
itself to believing hearts as to be given definite form. As in the case of
the Old Testament, so in the case of the New, life declined to be hurried
into a decision. The books must prove their authority in the experience of
the people. The Christian republic was engaged in the task of choosing its
Bible from life.

We find, too, that certain books appeared as claimants for permanent
authority that did not win their case. The ancient manuscripts were passed
from church to church and were read to the people. The task of sifting
went surely forward. Directly lists of books that peculiarly commended
themselves to the Christians began to appear. In the first two centuries
such leaders as Irenæus, Clement, and Tertullian present their lists which
show some of our present books omitted, some other books included, and
still other books declared as good but inferior. The Christian
consciousness had not yet reached a confident verdict. But a review of the
period shows the Christian leaders verging toward unanimity. Slowly some
books were eliminated; and slowly other books asserted their right to be
included. By the beginning of the fifth century the canon had been
practically determined. The great Augustine, with his immediate
predecessors and his close successors, reveals the well-nigh unanimous
conclusion to which the church had come. It may well be noted that the
voting booth stood open for almost four hundred years. The Councils of
Hippo and Carthage were simply the servants of the people. The books that
had sprung from life had received the testing of life.

It must be allowed that here, as in the case of the Old Testament canon,
some books had to re-prove their right to the place of authority. The
Council of Trent may have settled the matter for all Roman Catholics, but
it did not irretrievably close the canon for Protestants. It is well known
that Luther himself wished to remove several books from the list, and that
he called the Epistle of James "strawlike." Luther's reason was a
polemical one. He felt that the vivid practicalness of James conflicted
with the principle of justification by faith alone. It is only a stronger
evidence of the demands of life in the selection of the final canon that
even the powerful influence of Luther could not prevail. The church well
knew that the Epistle of James would be a good antidote for any lazy
mysticism. Life voted against Luther in this instance, and life won.
Zwingli wanted to exclude the Book of Revelation from the canon. The
Christian republic felt that beneath all the weird imagery of the
Apocalypse God was speaking by his servant to the churches of all time.
Life voted against Zwingli in this instance, and life won. When life was
given its freedom the most influential voices of authority could not
prevail against its verdicts. This completes the circle. The Bible was
written by life, and the Bible was selected by life.

Perhaps it is well to note that when any portion of the Scripture has been
taken away from the purpose of life, it has lost its note of authority;
when it has been brought back to that purpose of life, it has regained
that note. The Song of Solomon illustrates this point. It had slight hold
on the life of the world as long as it was used as a complex allegory or
symbol relating to Christ and the church. All labored attempts to so
construe the book did the book itself injury. But when the Song was
permitted to recover its own relation to life, it recovered its own power.
The lesson of the book, rightly used, may save many young women from
selling themselves to lascivious luxury and may give them strength against
tempting allurements away from loyal love. However old the world may
become, it will always need that lesson. In some way the Song came from
life; and when it is tested by life, it regains its relation to life.
Released from the strain of an allegorical interpretation, it proves
itself a servant of one of life's holiest causes.

We come now to the primary consideration. The Bible grew from life. The
Bible was tested by life. The Bible climaxes in Life. Jesus said that the
Scriptures testified of him. It is even so. In the Sargent pictures in the
Boston Public Library the prophets are represented as pointing forward to
him. We may even more surely represent the writers of the Gospels and
Epistles as pointing backward to him. The Bible is to be judged by its
goal; and the goal is Christ. Other sacred books, such as the Koran, were
written by one person; the Bible was written by many persons for one
Person. Jesus himself insisted on this. He claimed to surpass the old
revelations. With all his reverence for the Old Testament, he still put
himself above it by words like these: "Ye have heard that it hath been
said by them of olden time, But _I_ say unto you." This is as much as to
affirm that he was the end of a progressive revelation. A skeptic once
said that the whole Bible turns upon Jesus. The skeptic was right. One of
the Gospels gives a word that may safely be applied to the whole trend of
the Bible, "These things are written, that ye might believe that Christ is
the Son of God, and that believing ye might have life through his name."
The very purpose is declared to be that men may be brought to faith in
Christ.

It would be too much to say that all revelation ceased with the closing of
the canon. Lowell's claim that the Bible of the race is written slowly,
that each race adds its texts of hope and despair, of joy and moan, and
that the prophets still sit at the feet of God, cannot be denied. But we
may confidently assert that revelation came to its culmination and crown
in Jesus Christ. When once the essential things concerning him had found
place in a Book, the Bible found its consummation. Thus do we see that the
books that were written by life, and then were tested by life, came to
their climax in Life. The only way to secure a book better than the Bible
is to secure a person better than Jesus. The best men entertain no such
vain expectation because they know that nothing can be more perfect than
Perfection.

We have set forth these three main reasons for the unique influence that
the Bible exercises over life. Some are fond of saying that the Bible is
merely one of many sacred books. Those who have read the bibles of other
races will not be misled by the statement. Max Müller writes that the
Sacred Books of the East "by the side of much that is fresh, natural,
simple, beautiful, and true, contain much that is not only unmeaning,
artificial, and silly, but even hideous and repellent." Of the Brahmanas
he affirms that they "deserve to be studied as the physician studies the
twaddle of idiots and the ravings of madmen." The Koran sets forth a very
fine morality, but it was written by one man and really presents a legal
religion. Moreover it offers no perfect example. The author of the Koran
himself claimed to receive revelations that opened a path to immorality.
One voice declared the authority of the book, and an obedient people
accepted this verdict. The Koran was not written by a wide range of life,
expressing God's dealing with many persons under diverse conditions. It
was not tested for its authority by the free conscience of a people.
Mohammed wrote and adopted his own canon. The Christian's Bible, written
by life, tested by life, and culminating in Life, has come back to life
with transforming power.

The insistence of these chapters is that, when the Holy Scriptures are
given a free opportunity to do their work with life, they prove their own
inspiration. After all, there can be no other proof. The Bible is what it
is, no matter what theory men may adopt as to its formation. It creates
its own evidences. The argument for its inspiration is the life that it
inspires. If the Book gives power and purity to all departments of life,
the Book defends itself against attack and makes its own conquests. Does
the Bible rightly exalt man? Does it sanctify the home? Does it promote
education? Does it glorify work? Does it save wealth from greed, pleasure
from excess, sorrow from despair? These questions reach the center of the
problem.

We can go but one step beyond them, and that step is most significant. Do
we find in the Bible not only a way to be followed, and a goal of truth to
be gained, but a Life that will help lives along the way toward the goal?
Does the Book really reveal the way, the truth, and the life? The answer
must again be found in life. The evidences of dynamic are in the realms
of human experience. More and more the students of the Holy Scriptures,
who seek the pages with a religious purpose, will find that all the
departments of human living wait on Jesus for their meaning and come to
him for their power. He is the Saviour. He lifts men out of their sins, up
into a trembling and glorious idealism, and still up into a passion for
efficient goodness. The supreme apology for the Bible will ever be found
in men who have been so instructed, reproved, and corrected, that they may
be named as perfect men of God, thoroughly furnished unto every good work.
Given its full right, the Book that was born of life, tried of life,
glorified of Life, will find its own best witnesses in redeemed lives.




CHAPTER II

THE BIBLE AND MAN


The natural outline of a human life which has suggested the method of
these lectures represents a man as awaking each morning to the
consciousness of himself. Every man lives perforce in his own company. He
walks with himself on every road of life. He sits with himself in its
resting places. He lies down with himself in its slumbers. He is his own
friend, and his own enemy. Omar Khayyám declares that he is his own heaven
and his own hell. There is a story of a farmer who said that when he
climbed to the roof of his barn and looked about, he always found that he
himself was the center of the world. The roof of the sky at all points was
equally distant from him; the walls of the world made by the dipping
horizon showed the same length of radius from himself! The story has its
serious, as well as its amusing side. Every man is the personal center of
a world which gets its meaning from his own heart. It is no wonder that
the old Greek motto was "Know thyself."

Yet the knowledge of self is not easy knowledge. The fact that no man has
ever seen his own face, save by reflection in some mirror, is a parable.
The very eyes that see cannot see themselves. They are so near that they
are hidden. The moral literature of the race always emphasizes the
difficulty of self-revelation. Its cry is, "Who can understand his errors?
Cleanse thou me from secret faults." It has a yet deeper desire: that it
may know more of its own essential nature. Each man longs for a revelation
of God; and each man longs for a revelation of himself. The present
emphasis is that the Bible is the medium of this human revelation.

We do not go far in the reading of its pages without discovering that the
word "thou" looms large in its spiritual grammar. Those curious persons
who often bring their arithmetic to the Bible could doubtless tell how
many times "thou" and "thee" and "thy" and "thine" are found in its
chapters. In the Ten Commandments and in the New Commandment "thou" is the
recurring word. Personal address is prominent everywhere. Indeed, the
whole Book is a kind of prophet coming into the court of each soul and
saying, "Thou art the man." Sometimes the approach is an accusation,
sometimes an approbation; in any case the note is intensely individual. In
the New Commandment the "self" is made the standard by which the relation
to the neighbor is to be tested. The implication would seem to be that the
man who does not love himself lacks the law by which his love for other
men may be made efficient. Polonius was not far from the biblical idea
when he said:

                To thine own self be true,
  And it must follow, as the night the day,
  Thou canst not then be false to any man.

In daily parlance it is often said. "Put yourself in his place": but the
value of that transfer of self is small if you do not know what the self
is after you give it the new place! The revelation of self is likewise the
revelation of other men. We know our neighbors only as we know ourselves.

Presuming, therefore, that we send a man to the Scriptures to find the
doctrine of his own nature, what will be his discovery? The question is
not a new one, and its answer has sometimes been touched by prejudice.
Many have contended that in its effort to magnify God, the Bible is guilty
of belittling man. Fragments of Scripture might be presented to support
this criticism. We must, however, insist that the biblical teaching is to
be determined by its main current rather than by its eddies. The Book does
present God as high and lifted up, while man lies with his lips in the
dust. It does make God a King, while it proclaims man a subject. It does
stress divine sovereignty, while insisting on human obedience and
reverence. It does call for humility on the part of man. We may well admit
that it is possible to overdo the call to humility. That good mood may
easily pass over into a false mood. Occasionally men, in an effort to be
humble, speak untruth concerning their own souls. It is just here that the
"worm-of-the-dust" theory gets its chance. That phrase was a biblical one,
used by a character in his moment of self-abasement. Yet the Concordance
will prove that this lowly estimate of man is by no means the staple of
teaching, as well as that much of the cheap preaching of human nature is a
radical departure from the doctrine of the Book. It is always good to keep
clear the distinction between vanity and self-respect, so that if a man
may not have the right to look down on his neighbors he may still have the
right to look up to himself. Humility must ever be based on truth, and
self-respect can have no other foundation. The two moods are not
contradictory. The one comes from the recognition of the nature of God, in
the utter and unspeakable perfection of his attributes; the other comes
from the recognition of the nature of man as being himself a partaker of
that divine nature. In reality the two moods grow out of the same truth.

A still deeper objection is sometimes offered against the scriptural
theory of human nature. It is charged that the doctrine of the Fall,
together with the constant emphasis of man's "exceeding sinfulness,"
deprives man of special dignity. Without doubt the theory of the Fall has
sometimes been presented in such a manner as to cancel all human claims to
greatness. Whenever a religious teacher carries his doctrine of the Fall
to unjust lengths, we must all be tempted to declare that we can readily
prove an alibi! And if he shall employ that doctrine as a vast slur on
humanity, we shall insist that the length of the fall must be the length
of the possible rise! In harmony with this idea a great preacher has given
the world a sermon on "The Dignity of Humanity as Evidenced by its Ruins."
Much of the glory of the Coliseum at Rome has departed, but even its ruins
are a testimony to its greatness. Seeing its gaunt grandeur in the
sunlight, or viewing its impressive shadows in the moonlight, the tourist
gets the shock of its glory. The simple truth is that a doctrine of the
Fall is possible only when you start with human greatness. God made one
creature strong enough to resist Himself--one creature with sufficient
self-determination to make mutiny in the world. We would not torture the
doctrine of the Fall into a mere compliment for humanity; but we would
insist that the possibility of a Fall implies a height to fall from, and
that responsibility for a Fall implies a nature great enough and free
enough to make far-reaching choices. The evidence of the dignity is still
found among the ruins.

We must always supplement any doctrine of the Fall with a doctrine of
human responsibility. The Bible is most explicit in this insistence. Its
pages are crowded with the moral imperative for man. The thorn and the
brier are on the earth; but they are not blamed, because they wait for the
era of the good people. The whole creation groaneth and travaileth
together in pain; but the creation is not blamed, because it waits for the
revealing of the sons of God. The lion and the lamb do not lie down
together; but they are not blamed, because they wait for the age of peace
that can issue only from the hearts of men. The coin rolls into dust and
shadow and is lost; we do not blame the coin. The sheep wanders into
desert and darkness and is lost; we do not blame the sheep. The son goes
off into the swine field and is lost; and we do blame the son. The coin
and the sheep have no communings with self, no sense of guilt, no road of
repentant return; but the son has all these. The Bible does utter its
vigorous charge against man's sin; it is the ever-open court room into
which the human conscience is summoned for judgment. The Book does not
treat man as a machine whose cogs and wheels are moved only by outside
force; nor does it treat him as a manikin, jerked hither and yon by
irresponsible sensations; it rather dignifies him with personal
responsibility. The Fall does not prevent climbing, if only man will take
advantage of those gracious powers that are offered for his help. Emerson
saw the meaning of this when he wrote his tribute to mankind based on its
ability to respond to the moral order:

  So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
    So near is God to man,
  When Duty whispers low, "Thou must,"
    The youth replies, "I can!"

Words like "ought" and "should" and "must" have gone forth from the Bible
and have fairly penetrated the moral consciousness of the race. No other
book so honors human nature with a sublime call to responsibility.

We now leave these general considerations and take up the several portions
of the Scriptures with a view to ascertaining their contributions to a
doctrine of man. The foundation of that doctrine is seen in the account of
the creation. Whether that account be poem, parable, allegory, or history,
its meaning for this special point is the same. The climax of the creation
is man. God is represented as changing chaos into cosmos, separating
waters and land, fixing sun and moon in their places, bringing verdure to
the surface of the earth, assigning birds and beasts and fishes to their
spheres, and then as giving to man a wide rulership. "God made man to have
dominion"--that is the biblical word; and the ages have been telling how
true that word is. The Bible theory and the facts of life join in a
coronation of man.

The account of the creation goes deeper than this in its estimate of
mankind. Its conferring of power on man is explained by its conferring a
nature on man. Man is made in the divine image. The Word was not content
with one statement of that fact; it must needs give it double emphasis.
"So God created man in his own image"--that would seem simple and strong
enough. But the statement is strengthened by repetition, "In the image of
God created he him." These twice-repeated words are the real charter of
man's greatness. The atheist must admit that man has the dominion, but the
believer holds that man has the dominion because he has the birthright.
Man is not only God's submonarch, he is God's image.

It is interesting and convincing to note how soon that primary truth about
man's nature began to work. In the persecution under Diocletian the
precious parchments of the Bible had been secretly carried from house to
house. The charge that a Christian had given up the sacred Book in order
to save himself from death was one of the most serious that could be
presented. Many martyrdoms occurred because men preferred the Bible above
their own lives. Though circulated under such difficulty, and though made
into readable parchments at such expense of labor and money, the Bible was
slowly impressing its doctrine of man upon the stubborn period. We are
often smitten with horror as we read stories which show how lightly human
life was regarded by the Romans. Those dreadful scenes in the arena, where
thumbs so often declined to turn down as a sign of mercy, are dire
mysteries to men who have gotten the biblical standpoint. We are distant
from that heartless mood because we are near to the Bible. The Book and
the gladiator could not live together in peace. The Book at once began to
call men from the tiers of bloody pleasure. With the conversion of
Constantine, superficial as it may have been, the change began. The
emperor ordered many splendid copies of the Bible for the churches of his
capital. He himself came under the spell of its human doctrine. Zealous
Christian teachers may sometimes overstate the influence which the Bible
exercised over later Roman law. Still there are some undoubted evidences
of that influence. Constantine made a law forbidding that a criminal
should be branded on the face, and he gave as his reason for the law that
the image of God should not be marred! This leaves us in no doubt as to
what had inspired the legislation. It was the simple beginning of a
program that has not yet come to its consummation. The biblical idea of
man routed one form of slavery, and it will yet rout all other forms. When
men come to believe that man is made in the divine image all good
movements for the betterment of life are set in the way to victory.

The legal portions of the Bible give us the like lesson, even though the
approach to the lesson is different. Here we discover that humanity is
worthy enough to call for conservation and protection. The legislation
reaches to hygienic and sanitary details of minute character. The whole
effort is to build a protecting fence about men. The Ten Commandments,
studied in this light, become a very human document. Their harsh and
negative quality is softened into gentleness. They guard the goods of
man--his property, his wife and children, his body, his good name. It
would be possible to regard the Decalogue as a series of prohibitions in
which the word "not" occurs with forbidding frequency. In this case the
appropriate accompaniment is thunder and lightning, and the appropriate
scroll for the writing is stone. This viewpoint is one sided and unfair.
The Ten Commandments are prohibitions only because they are protections.
They have been through many ages the kindly sentinels of society. They
have taken the side of God, of his dumb creatures, and of men and women
and little children. Considered in any just way, the legal portions of the
Bible are a tribute not merely to divine authority, but to human worth.

The prophetical books add their lesson, and from a still different angle.
They are filled with protests against man's conduct, with wrath against
his insincerities, and with predictions of his coming woe. The mouths of
the prophets were not filled with compliments. Those stern men were not
the flatterers of their own generations. Their sayings could be so elected
as to make a degrading estimate of men. But here again we must get the
full meaning of the message. In their last analysis the prophecies are a
marked tribute to potential man. Beyond the disturbed present they see the
peaceful future. Beyond the clash of swords and the swish of spears they
see the mild and productive era of the plowshare and the pruning hook.
Beyond the unreal altars they see the incense of true worship arising to
God. The prophets were, in the best sense, optimists, and they were
optimists because they believed that all men would some day yield to the
Lord. They beheld the whole earth filled with righteousness. They saw the
stone cut loose from the mountain and filling the wide world. The healing
river was to flow to all peoples. Jerusalem was to be the universal joy.
The day would dawn when it would be unnecessary to say to any man, "Know
thou the Lord." The most dismal of the prophets foretold the perfect day.
But all this means that the prophets foretold the perfect man and the
perfect race. To proclaim that humanity, under the guidance of God, is so
capable is to dignify human life beyond measure.

Nor are we lacking among the prophets an individual example of the power
of self-respect. Nehemiah may not be the premier among his fellows, but he
talks with a royal self-consciousness. When messengers come, desiring
that he shall go down into the plain for a parley with Sanballat, he
declines by saying, "I am doing a great work, so that I cannot come down."
Again he is told that the enemy is coming, and he is counseled to go into
the temple and cling to the altar for protection. Once more self-respect
comes to the rescue; the reply is, "Should such a man as I flee? and who
is there, that, being as I am, would go into the temple to save his life?
I will not go in." Here the potential man, foretold by the prophet, was
the actual man. He had reached such a high doctrine of his own nature that
the doctrine itself became the prevention of triviality and of cowardice.
The rebuilded walls of Jerusalem arose from that spirit. Those walls were
likewise an expression of the prophet's faith in the future of his people.
The prophetic confidence in man was second only to the prophetic
confidence in God. This form of tribute to humanity is preeminent in the
books of the prophets.

In the devotional part of the Bible we should not naturally expect that
tribute would turn manward. The tendency is seen in those sections of
prophecy where the prophet himself has close dealings with God. When the
greatest of the prophets sees the ineffable One and hears the awful
trisagion of the seraphim, the prime confession is that his own lips are
unclean and that he dwells in the midst of a people of unclean lips.
Inasmuch as the Psalms are in large measure a liturgy of worship, their
emphasis is on the greatness of Jehovah. Yet sometimes the emphasis turns
toward man. The most striking illustration occurs in the eighth psalm. The
writer there utters the feeling that we have all shared. The limitless
expanse of the heavens, the shining of moon and stars in the far heights,
the workmanship of the Lord in the vast universe--all this makes the
psalmist feel that he is a mere speck in the scheme. Tried by those
celestial measurements, he drops into insignificance. He is rescued from
self-contempt only by a return to the message of Genesis. His despairing
cry issues in a shout of personal triumph. "When I consider thy heavens,
the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou
visitest him?" If materialism should conquer the Bible there is but one
answer. The psalmist is saved by the Scripture, "Thou hast made him a
little lower than God, and hast crowned him with glory and honor." It is
no marvel that the first translators lowered the tribute and substituted
"the angels" for God. The reverence that so often used a sign for the
divine name trembled on the verge of such a human tribute. Still that
tribute was a return to the doctrine that God had made man in his own
image and had given him dominion over the works of his hand. In addition
to all this, the Psalms are girded with the consciousness that man can
enter into the august presence of the Lord. The mutual element in worship
is an exaltation of man. The greatness of Jacob is greater when he meets
with the heavenly visitant by the Jabbok brook. He becomes a prince. In
the devotional books man claims his princely heritage. He treads the
courts of the infinite King.

Moving forward into the New Testament, we find that the doctrine of man
gathers more impressiveness. Jesus never cast any doubt upon the supreme
place of man in the program of God. He put his harshest blame upon those
who wickedly misled the children of the Father. He himself was chided
because he sought the lowliest and the worst among men and women. He ate
with the publican and gave his choicest lesson to the harlot. He was
willing to exchange his social reputation for the privilege of associating
with the humblest people. For a woman with a dark past he delocalized
worship. From another he accepted the offering of grateful tears and put
her conduct in contrast with that of the lordly Pharisee. He was the
Prophet for the soul as such. He was the Priest who mediated gladly
between the least one and the greatest One. We search his words in vain
for anything that put contempt on man as man.

When he compared men to the rest of creation it was always to human
advantage. He told of the care of the shepherd for the sheep, and then he
asked, "How much is a man better than a sheep?" He declared that God noted
the fall of sparrows, though they brought small price in the market place,
and then, speaking to ordinary men and women, nearly all of them ignorant
and more than half of them slaves, he said, "Are ye not much better than
they?" Nor were these sayings really interrogative; they were exclamatory.
Jesus knew that every normal man would feel the answer in his own soul.
The worth of man was, in the teaching of Jesus, beyond debate.

He moved, also, from inanimate things to the assertion of man's worth. The
lilies and grasses were in the care of God and waited on him for their
vesture. "Will he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?" He made
the worth of man the warrant of the care of God. At last he put man on one
side of the scale and the whole world on the other side, and he affirmed
that man outweighed the world. Men may barter themselves for half a
township; but Jesus declared that it would be a disastrous bargain, if a
man should accept the world in exchange for himself. "What shall it profit
a man, if he gain the world and lose himself? Or what will a man give in
exchange for himself?" This is the final answer to any paltry teaching
about the worth of man.

When choice had to be made between man's interests and sacred laws and
ordinances, Jesus gave preference to man. The shewbread was consecrated,
but he approved the taking of it to satisfy human hunger. The Sabbath day
was holy, but the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath; so
the plucked ears of corn were a testimonial to men.

The attitude of Jesus toward childhood is tender evidence of his thought
of humanity. The child has not yet won any achievement, save the loving
assertion of its own dependency. The child in the midst represented
humanity in its freshest and most natural form. It is said that some
ancient religionists were accustomed to debate whether or not a child had
a soul. Jesus would have scorned such a debate. He made the child the
model of the kingdom. Human life unspoiled was lifted up as an example. To
offend a little one was worse than being sunk by a millstone into the
sea. A cup of cold water given to a child would win a special reward. The
angels of the children behold ever the face of the Father. Thus the child,
in all the teaching of Jesus, was made the creditor of the race.

Jesus carried this doctrine of man on to the uttermost issue. We have
never yet secured the full meaning of that "inasmuch" in the account of
the final judgment. The Lord lives beyond the need of man's overt aid. But
human beings are his representatives. The righteous had so far overlooked
this fact, that they were forgetful of any ministry to him; and what had
been the unconscious glory of the righteous was the unconscious tragedy of
the wicked. The judgment day will be filled with human tests. He who has
not acted as if human beings stood for God cannot meet the final
standards. Jesus's picture of the judgment is a statement of divine
authority; and it is an appraisement of human worth.

Thus do we see that from whatever side we come to the teaching of Christ,
we find an exalted doctrine of man. The incarnation itself is a
contribution to that doctrine. If we call it "the human life of God" it
was a life lived for the sake of man. The Word became flesh and dwelt
among men, full of grace and truth, because men needed the message of
that Word. The whole life of Jesus was lived for man. He himself said,
"For their sakes I sanctify myself." All those sacrificial phrases that
describe the purpose of his coming add glory to human life. The joy that
was set before him was the goal of a redeemed humanity. His living for men
was simply his teaching about men, made over into concrete terms. In the
Parable of the Good Shepherd he gives the revelation of his own attitude
toward men. One soul, brought back into right relations with God, makes
joy in heaven. It is the Eternal One who is represented as saying,
"Rejoice with me." Men may deny the doctrine of the only begotten Son, but
they can scarcely deny that that doctrine leads on to a wondrous doctrine
of human worth.

The Cross, viewed in one light, becomes the very climax of the doctrine of
man. Theologians have often laid their stress upon some single purpose of
the divine sacrifice. One has said that the Cross appeases the anger of
God; another that the Cross maintains the majesty of the law; another that
the Cross is a moral influence wooing and winning the heart of man to God;
another that the Cross is the expression of the Father's sorrow with the
sins and sorrows of his children. But we may surely take one meaning of
the Cross to be the divine estimate of man. God's sense of values must be
preserved. He did not send his Son to die for worms of the dust. That idea
may fit an extreme mood of spiritual abasement. We may grant all possible
condescension in the atoning act of God, but we cannot grant a
condescension that dedicates infinite worth to finite worthlessness. Jesus
died for men just because men were far more than worms of the dust. If we
are to keep that theory of atonement that has long held the heart of the
church, we are driven to affirm that the Cross gives us a divine estimate
of mankind. No man ever appreciates the worth of himself until he gets the
appraisal of Calvary. The dying of Jesus is not out of harmony with his
teaching and his living. The whole program is like the garment taken from
him on the day of crucifixion; it is woven throughout without seam. Men
may decry a doctrine of substitution, but they cannot say that such a
doctrine is a slight tribute to human worth. In such a doctrine thorns and
nails and spears and all the drama of the Cross are made into tributes to
the soul of man.

This carries us on to the biblical teaching of man's permanent worth. The
doctrine of immortality makes its incalculable addition to the doctrine of
man. There is a story, for which the writer cannot vouch, that Thomas
Carlyle in a mood of pessimism one day wrote this peevish estimate of man:

  What is man? A foolish baby!
    Vainly strives and fumes and frets!
  Demanding all, deserving nothing,
    One small grave is all he gets!

Language like this is certainly no contribution to the literature of
self-respect. The story proceeds to relate that Carlyle's wife found this
poetic depreciation lying on the table, and that she wrote the following
confession and correction:

  And man? O hate not, nor despise
    The fairest, lordliest work of God!
  Think not he made thee good and wise
    Only to sleep beneath the sod!

Doubtless the tale is apocryphal. In any case the latter estimate is far
nearer to the biblical conception, and it is altogether worthy of a
woman's moral instinct. If man is to live forever, as the climax of
Revelation insists, it is quite impossible for him to "think too much" of
himself, unless he indulges in comparison of himself with others. An
argument for immortality does not fall within the scope of this lecture;
but the bearing of immortality, as declared in the Holy Scriptures, on the
view that men must take of human nature, touches our purpose in a radical
way. A deathless person must respect himself. A deathless person must
command the respect of a world--and of God. The doctrine of immortality
adds an infinite measure to the doctrine of human worth.

Even the biblical representation of heaven secures a relation to this
subject. The abode for immortal life, as well as immortal life itself, may
be turned into a human estimate. The book of Revelation declares that the
nations shall bring "their glory and honor" into the Eternal City. This
can only mean that men shall make some contribution to the eternal life.
What they are and what they have done shall fill heaven with added value.
The cities of earth shall transport treasures to the Heavenly City. Here,
again, we come upon a reason based on the divine sense of values. God will
not provide an Eternal Home that is any better than the Eternal Beings for
whom he makes it ready. The gem is to be better than the setting. In a
certain sense, therefore, jasper walls and pearl gates and gold streets,
as seen in the descriptions of heaven, are tributes to human souls. The
Bible tells us that "greater than the house is he that built it," and the
Bible would tell us, also, that the occupant of the house is greater than
the house. God will provide no everlasting dwelling that is better than
the everlasting dwellers. Heaven is made for man, and not man for heaven.
The many mansions are tributes to the people that shall live in the
Father's house. The Scriptures are reserved in their revealings of the
other land; but their descriptions of celestial glories may be united with
those other portions of the Bible that dignify the human spirit and may be
taken as standing for the divine valuation of the essential selves of men.

This review of the teaching of the several sections of the Bible has
confessedly sought for the words and ideas that exalt the doctrine of man.
Allowing all possible discounts, and admitting all possible offsets, the
residuum of instruction tending to glorify human nature is significant. We
need not wonder that some thoughtful men have affirmed that the chief
characteristic of Christianity is the value that it places on man. If we
do not accept this statement, we can still declare that the Bible is the
supreme Book when judged by its emphasis on human values.

Nor can there be any doubt of the need of this emphasis in our own age. As
men crowd more and more into the great centers of population, the tendency
will be to hold men cheaply. In former times man was often highly valued
because of his rarity. On the far Eastern plains a new face, not being
often seen, was regarded with curious interest. Thus Abraham stood in the
door of his tent in the heat of the day and welcomed the stranger, because
the stranger was an event. But in the modern city the stranger is no
longer an event; he is only an episode, or perhaps an incident. We pass
him on the dense street, and we do not notice him at all. There are so
many of him that, unless we are heedful, we shall come to regard him
lightly just because he is hidden by the crowd. When factories grow so
huge that men are known, not by their names, but by their numbers, only
the scriptural emphasis upon men as such can save human beings from being
deemed "hands" rather than souls. If the sin of the countryside is an
excessive social interest that makes for gossip, the sin of the city is a
social carelessness that makes for indifference. The various problems of
our social life wait for their solution upon the Christian doctrine of
man. When that doctrine has done its full service, race problems, labor
problems, liquor problems, and all their dreadful accompaniments will
issue into a righteous and intelligent peace. An immortal son of God,
knowing himself, cannot be unjust to another immortal son of God, when
once he knows his Brother.

This hints at the personal bearing of the doctrine. As men grow in moral
and spiritual experience, they find themselves using more and more the
test of self-respect. Knowing that the reaction of certain behaviors makes
them feel that a fragment of the soul has slipped away from them, so that
they have the sense of smallness, they guard their natures lest legitimate
pride should be destroyed. Andrews Norton once wrote to his son, Charles
Eliot Norton, who was about to go abroad for an important service, telling
the young man that his family and friends recognized that he had special
powers for doing large and worthy things. Then he added that "this ought
not to make one vain. On the contrary, their true tendency is to produce
that deep sense of responsibility--of what we owe to God, to our friends,
and to our fellowmen--which is wholly inconsistent with presumption or
vanity." It was a wise father who wrote thus to his son. If the Christian
doctrine of man be true, no man can think too much of himself. There is a
type of saving pride. Clough stated it in his well-known lines:

  Then welcome, Pride! and I shall find
  In thee a power to lift the mind
  This low and groveling joy above--
  'Tis but the proud can truly love.

The pride that comes from the consciousness of the divine image has power
to restrain from sins and trivialities, and it has power likewise to
constrain toward holiness of character and largeness of service. One who
has come to believe that he is made in the divine image, that he is one of
the divinely appointed rulers of the world, that the great laws are
designed for his protection, that the alluring prophecies of the future
are declarations of his coming power, that his worship is the symbol of
his partnership with the Most High, that the incarnation is in his
interest, that the Infinite Teacher brought him matchless tributes, that
the Cross of Calvary is an expression of his own valuation, that immortal
life is his destiny, and that a glorious heaven is the fitting place for
his final dwelling--such a one has gained all the preventions and all the
inspirations of the Christian doctrine of self-respect. Sins and
trivialities cannot flourish when one thinks so much of oneself; great
affections and lasting consecrations seem natural to one so highly
endowed. The conception that makes for the dignity of self makes also for
the consideration of others. He who entertains this view begins to

  Find man's veritable stature out,
  Erect, sublime, the measure of a man,
  And that's the measure of an angel,
  Says the apostle.

To such a one life becomes solemn and beautiful. He is now the son of God.
While he knows not yet what he shall be, he sees the vision of the Elder
Brother and so purifies himself even as he is pure. The world needs the
gospel of the Son of God in order that it may learn the gospel of the sons
of God.




CHAPTER III

THE BIBLE AND HOME


The significance of the home is seen in the fact that every human being is
a son or a daughter. This ordinary statement at once insists on becoming
extraordinary. It is difficult to think what life would have been, or even
how it could have been, if children had been pushed upon the earth from
some mysterious void and had been nurtured without the providential agency
of fathers and mothers. So much do we realize the importance of the home
that where it is impossible to maintain one, owing to the death, or
inability, or worthlessness of parents, we still make provision for an
institution that shall provide as many domestic features as can be won for
the orphaned. This we call an Orphans' Home. It is significant that the
sociological tendency of the period drifts away from even this
institution. The effort now is to bring the childless and the parentless
together. Goldsmith said that the nakedness of the indigent world might be
clothed with the trimmings of the vain. There are those who affirm that,
if the parentless and the childless could be brought into the company of
homes, the Orphan Asylum would be no longer needed.

Our imaginations may make an easy test. Let an authoritative edict go
forth that after the approaching midnight the home would be banished, and
that each community must adjust itself to some other form of social life.
What would such an edict mean? The homes from which students have come are
no more responsible for them. They constitute no longer the bases of
supplies on which they can draw, nor the alluring hearthstones to which
they can return. The workman turns no more his eager feet toward the
lights of his cottage. The prince finds his palace removed and all its
splendor ceases to invite him. Little children are herded into impersonal
surroundings and become public rather than domestic charges. The scene of
disaster could be described without merciful stint. These suggestions are
enough to show that society could scarcely escape chaos if the home were
to be destroyed. How much do the words father, mother, brother, sister,
wife, husband, son, daughter mean? Empty out their closer significance,
and you vacate much of life's meaning.

Nor is this the narrow word of an ecclesiastic or theologian. Drummond in
The Ascent of Man claims that the evolution of a father and mother was
the final effort of nature. John Fiske, as scientist and historian, points
out the helplessness of infant life as binding parents into unity that
grows out of responsibility. Soon after its birth the wee animal runs and
leaps, while the wee bird does not wait long ere it flies from limb to
limb; but the human babe in the ancient forest lies helpless in its log
cradle for many months. Both Drummond and Fiske agree that by this program
the God of nature was introducing patience, devotion, and sacrifice into
the world and was making ready for the kingdom of heaven. It is plain that
Drummond does not state it too strongly when he says that "the goal of the
whole plant and animal life seems to have been the creation of a family
which the very naturalist had to call Mammals," or Mothers.

This represents somewhat the divine history of the home. The prophecy of
the home likewise does some convincing work. The truth is that the home as
an institution plants itself squarely in the path of some modern social
theories. Some of those theories have begun by boldly demanding that the
home be abolished because it has been made a buttress of private life and
property. Not only has this suggestion been met with a horror that in
itself expresses the instinctive conviction of the sacredness of the home,
but it has been met with the insistence that the prophets should name
their substitute for the hearthstone. This insistence has received nothing
more than hazy and vague replies. The prophet stammers out some dark
saying about "something better" or about the home as having fulfilled its
mission in "the evolution of society"; and by the very helplessness of his
speech he really becomes an advocate of closer domestic relations! It is
interesting to note how these reformers seek to find a good path back from
their social desert! They soon declare that the new regime must keep the
home intact, and that only sporadic and irresponsible voices from their
camp are lifted against the home's sanctity! The antihome prophet always
has a hard task. He collides with one of the granite convictions of
humanity. If he would save the rest of his theory he must save the home
from the proposed destruction. God has set the solitary in families. Men
look in vain for a better setting for the jewel of life. From all their
seeking they come back in due season to the truth that, imperfect as the
home may often be, it is still rooted and grounded in outer life and in
inner instinct, and that it is futile to try to make better what God has
made best.

All this will serve for emphasizing the importance of the home, though
much more might be added. When the man awakes in the morning, becomes
aware of himself, and then hears the voices of his wife and children, he
is immediately related to one of the fundamental institutions of society.
If the Bible be, as we have claimed, preeminently the Book of Life, it
must relate itself vitally to the home. Our inquiry, therefore, is, What
bearing does the Book have upon the home? The answer must necessarily be
sketchy and incomplete; but we can soon gather an answer that will
establish the biblical drift of teaching.

The Bible begins with an impressive lesson of monogamy. In the Eden life
one man and one woman join hands as partners in joy and work. Let the
account be poetry, allegory, parable, the lesson is the same. In that
intimate communion with God that found him in the garden in the cool of
the day, bigamy and polygamy are not represented as being at home. Even
the Fall is not described as quickly dropping man low enough to reach the
dreadful level of promiscuity or of any of the approaches to so-called
free love. It required time ere that downward journey could be made.
Humanity in its innocence is not described as starting from the dens of
polygamy.

But in season the Bible gives us some disconcerting facts. Bigamy and
polygamy confront us in the lives of some worthies. Let it be allowed that
sometimes the motive is the perpetuation of the home itself. Provision is
sought against the curse of barrenness. Let it be allowed, also, that the
Bible does not represent bigamy as working well. It brought discord into
Abraham's tent. The peevish wife drives her own wretched substitute from
the door, until the desolate Hagar stands in her loneliness and repeats
the comforting ritual of the seeing God. The son of bigamy goes off into
his wild life, with his hand against every man and every man's hand
against him. The admirable thing about the second patriarch is his
devotion to one woman. Neutral and characterless as Isaac seems to be, he
still won a mention in the marriage service of the ages by his
faithfulness to Rebecca alone. Upon the third patriarch bigamy was forced
by a cruel deception. In truth a review of the Old Testament will show
that any departure from the unity of the home made for trouble. It filled
the moving tabernacles of the patriarchs with quarrels. It led David on to
murder. It drenched Solomon in debauchery. It degraded the successive
kings until it destroyed their power and ruined the nation. Its
inevitable end was the loss of the land and the sadness of captivity.

The Old Testament records polygamy, but it does not applaud polygamy. When
once a polygamist stood in the halls of Congress and defended his right to
a seat by quoting the examples of the patriarchs, his plea did not avail.
Not only was the conviction of the nineteenth century against his
contention, but the mood of the very Book from which he quoted was his
enemy. So far as we can judge, monogamy was the general rule among the
Jewish people. The exemplars of bigamy and polygamy were mainly those
whose position enabled them to flaunt the public sentiment of their day.
The history of Old Testament polygamy is so sorrowful that the Hebrew
people have reacted from it into a stanch defense for the monogamic home.
The seduction of Tamar, the murder of Amnon, the unfilial licentiousness
of Absalom, the sordid road of impurity trod by the later monarchs of
Israel, and the despair of the Babylonish captivity, make a piercing case
against polygamy. On the other hand, the unwavering faithfulness of the
maid in the Song of Solomon, the patience of Hosea with his prodigal wife,
the idyllic story of Ruth, all these became persuasive pleas for a home
wherein one man and one woman should live together in loyal love even
until death. When Jesus came to give his message contemporaneous polygamy
had all but ceased in Palestine. But easy divorce, sometimes called
"consecutive polygamy," had become prevalent. The world was waiting for
the voice of authority, and it heard that voice when Christ began to
teach.

The teaching of Jesus in reference to marriage is unmistakable. It may
impress many as severe; it cannot impress any as doubtful. If we accept
him as the Supreme Teacher we receive a decision given with no equivocal
terms. It is often said that the method of the Lord was to offer general
principles and to leave his followers to carry out these principles in the
spirit of loving discipleship. Thus he declined to give detailed rules for
the observance of the Sabbath, explicit instructions for the division of
estates, definite laws for prayer and worship and almsgiving. Yet when he
discussed marriage he gave both general principles and specific rules. If
this was not the only case where he became sponsor for a rule it was
surely the most emphatic case. He seemed to feel that concerning marriage
and the home he must give a mass of distinct precepts. It was as if he
deemed the home so sacred and its enemies so subtle and powerful as to
make necessary some particular instruction.

Perhaps we shall not err in saying that Jesus found in his time urgent
reasons for specific and strong teaching about marriage. The Jews, who
went to a mechanical extreme in their observance of the Sabbath law, had
gone to an opposite extreme in their attitude toward the law of the home.
In this regard the period was worse than our own, but it was not unlike
our own. The domestic conscience of the Jews had been more or less
weakened. Mere trifles were made excuses for the breaking up of home.
Doubtless the influence of the Romans was making itself felt among the
Hebrews. Professor Sheldon quotes Dorner as showing the reckless ease of
divorce among leading Romans. One man divorced his wife because she went
unveiled on the street; another because she spoke familiarly to a
freedwoman; another because she went to a play without his knowledge. Even
Cicero, proclaimed a very noble Roman, divorced his first wife that he
might marry a wealthier woman, and his second wife because she did not
seem to be sufficiently afflicted over the death of his daughter! "In
fine," says Professor Sheldon, "it was not altogether hyperbole when
Seneca spoke of noble women as reckoning their years by their successive
husbands rather than by the Consuls" (History of the Early Church, pages
29, 30).

The records of this same period among the Romans will rout the claim that
easy divorce tends to purity. Faithlessness to marriage vows was not
seriously regarded, and there were instances of so-called noble women
registering as public prostitutes in order that they might thus avoid the
penalties of the laws! Easy divorce seemed to be accompanied by easy
virtue, as if, indeed, both evils grew naturally out of the same soil. The
Roman fashions were having their influence on the Jews. The sacred law was
searched and was explained away with evil subtlety in order that men might
be religiously released from the marriage bond.

Evidently, then, the times demanded that Jesus should save the marriage
law from looseness. The ease of divorce was not unlike that in our own
land to-day. If the teaching of Jesus was needed then it is needed now in
order that marriage may recover its binding solemnity. On general
principles we must all rejoice that Jesus did not give a dubious word on
this sacred matter. It may be doubted whether any man who did not have the
cause of his own pleasure to serve and who was not willing to subordinate
a social law to the superficial joy of his own life, would be willing to
modify the Saviour's teaching. Certainly that teaching has long been the
firm bulwark of the married life. Had Jesus spoken with doubt, or had he
given sanction to easy divorce, what would the results have been? Our
homes would have been builded upon the sands of freakish impulses and of
hasty tempers. But Jesus's word puts rock into the domestic foundation.
When it was given it was met by all of the objections which it still
evokes. Some said that the teaching was extreme in its severity, quite
outdoing the law of Moses in its demands. Others said that rather than to
submit to a bond so unbreakable, it would be better not to marry at all.
Still Jesus did not lower his teaching. God was the author of marriage;
man must not assume to be its destroyer. God takes two persons and makes
them one flesh; man must not cut that vital bond.

Plainly, then, Jesus felt that marriage established a family relationship
which was to resemble other family relationships in its indissolubleness.
How can a man get rid of his brother, or his sister, or his father or
mother, when God has decreed a relation in the flesh that cannot be
severed? One may live apart from brother or sister, or father or mother,
as a matter of convenience or peace; but how can one destroy the
relationship? In spite of angry decrees, is not the brother still a
brother, and do not father and mother remain father and mother in
defiance of all unfilial pronouncements of divorce? In Jesus's view the
second family relationship was as indissoluble as the first. If one were
to argue from a certain standpoint it might be easy to claim that it must
be even more indissoluble. A man does not choose his first home. It
represents a necessity against which he may not strive. But he does choose
his second home, and it represents a union for which he is himself
distinctly responsible. Why should a man be allowed to divorce himself
from the home which is founded by his liberty while still being inexorably
bound to the home which was founded without his choice? Jesus taught that
the very constitution of society, as resting on the word of God, demanded
that the second home be as sacredly unbreakable as the first. The "one
flesh" must not be severed in either case.

Hence it comes about that, while the law of Jesus does not allow divorce,
unless for the one reason mentioned later, it does not forbid separation.
The sin does not consist in putting away the wife when conditions are
unbearable; it does consist in marrying another. He does not insist that
the quarrelsome shall live amid their brawls; but he does insist that they
shall not go into another experiment that degrades a sacred covenant. We
do not long listen to the specious arguments for easy divorce, with the
privilege of remarriage, without discovering that these arguments affirm
either that personal purity is impossible or that personal convenience and
pleasure are the primary demands of life. Jesus did not so teach. Dr.
Peabody, in his matchless discussion of Jesus's teaching about the family,
well says: "The family is, to Jesus, not a temporary arrangement at the
mercy of uncontrolled temper or shifting desire; it is ordained for that
very discipline in forbearance and restraint which are precisely what many
people would avoid, and the easy rupture of its union blights these
virtues in their bud. Why should one concern himself in marriage to be
considerate and forgiving, if it is easier to be divorced than it is to be
good?" (Jesus Christ and the Social Question, p. 159.) That these words
touch the evil heart of many modern divorces there can be no doubt. The
emphatic teaching of Jesus was that marriage should not be regarded as a
breakable agreement of convenience, but rather as an indissoluble pledge
of permanent union.

Whether Jesus allowed any exception to this law remains a debatable matter
among the scholars. Some contend that the "save for fornication" clause is
an interpolation, and that the teaching of Jesus admitted no divorce
whatsoever. Others contend that the gospel writers who omit this clause
regarded the one reason for divorce as so certain that it was not deemed
necessary to mention its legitimacy. It may be claimed with a show of
reason that the regarding of adultery as an exceptional sin against the
married life stands for something instinctive in human nature.
Notwithstanding all statements that desertion and abuse and drunkenness
may be so aggravated as to constitute offenses worse than fornication,
normal men and women continue to assign a lonely infamy to the sin of
carnal unfaithfulness. If Jesus did use the exceptional clause there is
not wanting evidence that his word is confirmed by an all but universal
feeling. Many races have been disposed to decree that the sin of adultery
is the one iniquity sharp and incisive enough to sever the "one flesh."
Perhaps it is safe to affirm that the great majority of good men and women
do not shrink from the exception as being unworthy of Jesus's teaching.
But, the exception being granted, that teaching is clear and
uncompromising. When that teaching becomes the law of the world divorce
courts will be largely emptied and the marriage vows will be assumed with
less haste and with more solemnity.

The New Testament is thus seen to be the headquarters of that conception
of marriage that alone gives a firm foundation to the home. It is
impossible to conceive what would have been the dismal statistics of
divorce, if Jesus had made the marriage bond of slender strength. Truly
the situation is bad enough as it is. Often the causes for divorce are
trivial; sometimes they are deliberately arranged by the separating
parties! and occasionally the much-married comedian is hailed on the stage
with a joking tolerance. But when more than ninety per cent of the
marriages of the land stand the tests of time and are kept in fidelity
until the "one flesh" is severed by death, it is evident that some strong
force still guards the home from desecration.

We need not inquire what that force is; it is the Word of Christ. Among
those who follow him least, he has made divorce "bad form"; among those
who follow him somewhat, he has made it doubtful morals; while among those
who accept him as Lord and Master, he has made it sacrilege and blasphemy.
The devotees of pleasure and convenience and lust may well quarrel with
the decree of Christ. The devotees of compromise may seek to refine and
discount his explicit law. Yet all those who see in the home the very
center and heart of a properly organized society, as well as the very
ordination of the Lord God Almighty, will not cease to be grateful that
Christ spoke so unmistakably concerning its solemn sanction. He fixed
forever the difference between the civil marriage and the Christian
marriage. He filled the marriage service with religious terms. "The sight
of God," "instituted of God," "mystical union," "holy estate," "Cana of
Galilee," "reverently, discreetly, and in the fear of God," "God's
ordinance," "forsaking all other," "so long as ye both shall live," "for
better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health,"
"the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost," "God hath
joined together," "in holy love until their lives' end"--all these words
are Christ's words, his Spirit confirmed them in the service of his
church. That service may well close with the prayer which declares that
his is "the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever."

More and more careful students of both sociology and Christianity will see
that no safe conception of marriage can be found save in the words of the
Lord. The civil contract idea is full of peril. The case of Percy Bysshe
Shelley, the English poet, is in evidence. The illustration may be
extreme, but it will the better show the sure goal of that theory of
marriage that forgets God. Shelley, for a time at least, was an outright
atheist. Bowing God out of the universe, he could not consistently leave
God in his theory of marriage. His college thesis was an argument for
atheism. Given sufficient provocation and motive, Shelley was sure to
reach the limit of a godless idea of marriage. It seems almost impossible
for men with a literary mania to see social or moral fault in their
heroes, and their tendency often is to absolve writers of genius from the
usual laws. Shelley married the daughter of a retired innkeeper. In two
years he separated from his wife and two children. Three years later the
wife drowned herself, meeting voluntarily a fate which Shelley was to meet
involuntarily. An apologist for Shelley says, "The refinements of
intellectual sympathy which poets desiderate in their spouses Shelley
failed to find in his wife, but for a time he lived with her not
unhappily; nor to the last had he any fault to allege against her, except
such negative ones as might be implied in his meeting a woman he liked
better." The more we study this language the more does its superficiality
impress us. Let it be said that Shelley was young and heedless when he
first married; let it be said, also, that he was in general strangely
lovable and warmly philanthropic; and let it be said, even, that he was in
his lifetime execrated beyond his deserts. But it would not be so easy to
palliate his conduct if one's own daughter had drowned herself to end her
sorrow, or if one's own daughter had traveled with him, unmarried, over
France and Switzerland! Somehow literary admiration plays tricks on moral
natures. Doubtless the judgment of Shelley on the basis of his boyish poem
"Queen Mab" was unfair, even as its surreptitious publication without his
consent was unfair. None the less one may trace a connection between his
college production in defense of atheism and his later domestic conduct.
No marriage has a sure foundation apart from a religious sanction. The
more we consider the possibilities suggested by this confessedly extreme
illustration, the more will we cling to the strict theory of Jesus as
against the limping logic of any loose sociologist.

We have thus seen that the foundation of the home comes to the Bible, and
particularly to the goal of the Bible's revelation in Christ, for its
solidity. Other foundations are fashioned of yielding sand. The marriage
ceremony might well be modified in some minor regards; but the word of
Christ will insist that the ceremony shall represent no flimsy contract.
While he rules the pronouncement will be, "God hath joined together"; and
the human response will remain, "till death us do part."

The relation of Jesus to the home goes farther than his word about
marriage, deep and far-reaching as that is. His life emphasized the
sacredness of the family relation. He went back from the scene in the
Temple to be "subject unto his parents." He wrought his first miracle on
the occasion of a marriage. Many of his miracles of mercy were performed
in answer to a family plea. He heard the cry of a mother when he healed
the daughter of the Syrophoenician woman, and again when he raised up the
son of the widow of Nain. He heard the cry of a father when he cast out
the evil spirit and restored a stricken son, clothed and in his right
mind. He heard the cry of sisters when he stood weeping at the grave of
Lazarus. The domestic plea quickly reached his heart and summoned his aid.
It was so even in the personal sense. In the agony of the crucifixion he
did not fail to commend his mother to the care of his best-to-do disciple,
and to cause the writing of that simple statement, "From that day that
disciple took her into his own home."

Indeed, through all the life of Jesus he glorified the family, unless the
family stood in the way of his truth or work. Emerson said once, "I will
hate my father and my mother when my genius calls me." We all know where
Emerson got those words; they were not written on his own authority. Jesus
made our human ancestry subject to our divine ancestry. Above the earthly
parents he saw the heavenly Father. The God who ordained the home was
above the home. But Jesus would allow no other exception. He himself lived
by that supreme law. He was homeless in obedience to his own divine
mission. There is a peculiar illustration of this, hidden somewhat by our
awkward distribution of the Bible into chapters and verses. The seventh
chapter of John ends with the words, "They went every man to his own
house." It is not difficult for us to reproduce the scene, even with its
Oriental touches. The discussion of the day is over. The hearers did what
men and women have been doing ever since--they turned to the twinkling
lights of their homes. Soon the crowds had disappeared and the various
persons had joined themselves to their family groups. The homeless One was
left alone. The first verse of the eighth chapter of John says, "Jesus
went unto the mount of Olives." It was just an instance of his tragedy,
"The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of
man hath not where to lay his head." The homelessness of Jesus was
vicarious. Sometimes still he calls his own into the same vicariousness.
He separates sons and daughters from their fathers and mothers and sends
them afar to preach his kingdom. Wherever those homeless ones may go, the
meaning of home takes on a new and sacred meaning. They carry with them
the Word and Spirit of him who, being weary, invited the weary ones to
come to him for rest; being thirsty, invited the thirsty ones to drink of
the water of life; being poor, invited the poor to come to him for riches;
being dead, invited the dying ones to look to him for eternal life; and,
being homeless, still commands the world to look to him for the spirit of
home. Even though he himself went down into the darkness of the Mount of
Olives, ever since his day the people that have heard and heeded his word
have found the lights of home more inviting and the mission of the home
more divine.

There is yet another consideration which must be noted ere we receive the
full message of Jesus about the home. The teaching of Jesus concerning God
was almost wholly based on a figure of speech derived from the home. In
the Old Testament God is mentioned under the title of fatherhood but seven
times. Five times he is spoken of as the father of the Jewish people;
twice he is spoken of as the father of individual men. Only once in the
sweep of the ancient Scriptures is there found a prayer addressed to God
as Father. God was the King of kings, and the Lord of hosts; he was
Creator and Lawgiver. But in the knowledge of the people he was not yet
Father. The world waited long ere men found an Elder Brother who could
break the spell of their orphanhood and reveal to them a Father. When
Jesus desired to tell men what God was like he went to their homes and
found therein the form of his teaching. He sprinkled the New Testament
with the domestic name of God. Two hundred and sixty-five times God is
spoken of under the title of Fatherhood. The sacredness of the home
relation could not receive holier emphasis.

Thus the homes which are founded by the Lord become revelations of the
Lord. Domestic relations are teachers of theology. Well may we speak of a
Family Bible! There is such a Bible. The illustration of theology is the
family illustration. Some day we shall recover that theology, and we shall
place the theologies that have superseded it in their secondary place.
Jesus was the final Teacher of theology, and we must give him the primacy.
Under his teaching every true home is a symbol of the divine household;
every true parent is a limited representative of God; every true son is an
example of the filial spirit that is religion. The path of prayer starts
with the word Father. The doctrine of providential care is explained by
the word Father. The call to obedience refers to the will of the Father.
The deeper tragedy of sin comes from the fact that the offense is against
the Father. Conversion is a return to the Father.

Taking, then, the direct teaching of Jesus with reference to marriage as
the founding of the home, taking his life in its merciful relation to the
home, and taking his teaching about God as based on the home, we are
justified in saying that Jesus was the Prophet and Saviour of the Family.
The vision that he gave of the other life took on that form again. He
declared that he was preparing a place for his own, and he called that
place the "Father's house." He was likewise preparing a home this side of
the many mansions. A Carpenter he was. He has builded many sanctuaries,
some for worship, and some for the mercy that we show to the sick, and
aged, and destitute. But the Carpenter of Nazareth is the builder of the
true home. His word lays its foundations, raises its walls, places its
capstone, and furnishes its atmosphere of peace and love. The home that is
placed on any other word cannot stand the shock of the tempest. It is
based on sand; and when the winds and rains and storms of passion come,
the home will fall, and great will be the fall thereof. The world needs
to-day the lesson of Jesus about the home; and it needs, also, the spirit
of Jesus in the home. When men and women yield to that spirit,
extravagance will be checked, forbearance will be increased, love will be
promoted, peace will be established. Husband and wife will not then plead
that Jesus's strict decree concerning marriage may be annulled. Earthly
homes will be like vestibules of the Father's House.

There remains for brief discussion the relation of the Epistles of the New
Testament to the home life of the people. The tendency here has been to
give undue emphasis to certain phases of Paul's teaching. Some reformers,
especially some radical feminists, have spoken of the great apostle's
teaching with scant respect. The command to wives to obey their husbands
has been kept apart from the command to husbands to love their wives even
as Christ loved the church. Christ loved the church so that he gave his
life for it; and when husbands love their wives to that sublime extent,
obedience is no longer demanded for tyranny. All technical matters aside,
it will be seen that the apostolic treatment of the domestic relations,
touching the relative duties of husbands and wives, parents and children,
and masters and servants, shows a marked balance. When each party keeps
his portion of the precepts, and is strictly minded to fulfill precisely
his part of the apostolic contract, debates about primacy and authority
find their gracious solution in mutual love. Unless we should wish to make
undue account of Saint Paul's doctrine of the husband's primacy, we cannot
say that his attitude toward womankind was marked by anything other than
utmost respect. Just what his own domestic experiences were is a question
of age-long doubt. If we study his actual references to women we shall
find a series of compliments too deep to serve as the expression of a
superficial gallantry and too genuine to allow the author to be classed as
a hater of the mothers and sisters and wives of the race. Near the end of
his life Paul caught the vision of his Master. Beyond his wanderings he
saw a destination; above his imprisonments he saw a freedom; after his
shipwrecks he saw a haven; and the destination and freedom and haven were
all expressed in the words "at home." "At home," "at home with the Lord,"
this was Paul's conception of the waiting heaven. He, too, exalted the
home by making it the forefigure of heaven.

We have now presented enough to justify the statement that the Bible is
the stanch friend of the home. As long as men and women read and obey the
Book, and love and follow the Lord of the Book, their feet will turn
reverently homeward as to the place of God's appointing, as to the school
of God's own discipline, as to the place of God's own joy, and as to the
anteroom of God's own heaven.




CHAPTER IV

THE BIBLE AND EDUCATION


The man whose program of daily life suggests the outline of these chapters
awakes in the morning to the consciousness of himself. He is soon aware of
the presence of his family and catches the sense of home. Directly the
children are made ready for school and join that romping procession that
moves each day at the joint command of parents and teachers. In the normal
Christian community this fact of school-going is all but universal. In
such a community the illiterate person is so exceptional as to be a
curiosity; he is marked by separateness if not by distinction. All of us
have marched to school; all of us have had teachers.

The fact is still more significant. School-going is not merely a general
experience; it is a long experience. It controls about one fourth of life.
Indeed, if we figure the average span of life, the school claims more than
one fourth of the individual career. Many persons continue formal school
work into the third decade, while many give a score and a half of years
in making educational preparation for the remaining twoscore years of the
allotment.

Beyond this, the whole educational scheme involves countless millions of
dollars. Our bookkeeping is scarcely rapid enough to keep up with the
finances of the system. In our own country it really seems as if education
had become a primary passion. Our school buildings yearly become more
imposing and more costly. Our college endowments annually leap to more
generous figures. Our largest philanthropies seek the privilege of
enlarging educational opportunity. It thus requires no long observation to
convince any thoughtful man that our educational program, involving every
young life in the nation and ideally every young life on the planet, is of
incalculable meaning. Each morning an army of many millions, ranging from
wee kindergartners up to adult postgraduates, moves to the schoolroom
door. The whole scene is as impressive as it is human. The question
naturally comes, What started that procession? What inspiration keeps it
moving through the years? Is there one Book that leads in some forceful
way to the study of many books? Does the Bible have any sure relation
either to the enthusiasm or to the efficiency of our educational life? If
our friend of the day's program could discover the intricate influences
that unite in sending his children to the school, would he find that any
large credit must be assigned to the Book?

The aim now is not to show the place that the Bible has had in the
curriculum of the world's education; nor yet is it to show the direct
effect that the Bible has had upon the world's instruction. The Bible has
been the supreme text-book, even as it has been the supreme force, in the
schools of nearly two millenniums. These facts have been well set forth in
many treatises. The purpose now is simpler and more meaningful: to trace
to its main sources the influence which the great Book has had upon the
intellectual life of the race.

We are met at the outset by the singular fact that the Bible has little to
say specifically concerning education. Nowhere in its pages do we read the
command, "Thou shalt found schools." The literalist who started out to
find a biblical order for education, as such, would come back from an
unrewarded search. But we have long ago discovered that the silence of the
Bible does not constitute a commandment. There are some things that are
stronger than detailed orders. An outer law that has fought an inner
sanction has usually fared badly in history. On the other hand, the inner
sanction, unenforced by any objective form of obligation, has won some
big victories. An explicit command to act as an immortal is not so
powerful as the implicit conviction that we are immortal. It is safe to
declare that the implications of Scripture are often as deep and
influential as its explications. If, then, the flowers of knowledge bloom
not by command in the fields of the Bible, may we still find there the
seeds out of which such flowers inevitably grow? If the school building is
not definitely prescribed, as was the Temple of Solomon, does the Book
yield in a deeper sense the wood and stone and mortar by which the
building must surely rise? Answers to these figurative questions will go
far toward determining the relation of the Bible to education. The
contention now is that the Bible has been the fountain whence streams of
intellectual life have flowed, and that, minor influences being freely
admitted, these streams may be traced to the Scripture's implicit doctrine
of human responsibility.

In discussing the bearing of the Bible on learning much has been made of
the example of the Bible's mightiest characters. This fact is striking,
and it lends itself to popular treatment. The average man takes a truth
more readily when it is offered to him in a human setting. Hence it may be
granted that the spirit of the Book in its influence on education has
been supplemented by its concrete examples. In the patriarchal era the
majestic figure is that of Abraham. Whatever the critics may say about the
historicity of his person, they can hardly doubt the historicity of the
intellectual process by which some "Father of the Multitude" must have
reached the creed of the divine unity and spirituality. We could not
expect, of course, to find organized education in the primitive days of
religious history. But, after all, education is relative. An eminent
American graduated from Harvard in 1836 when he was sixteen years of age.
In this day his sixteen years and his completed course of study would
barely admit him to the Freshman class. So Abraham's education must be
graded by the standard of his dim and far day. Tradition represents him as
reaching the central doctrine of the Jewish, Mohammedan, and Christian
faith by a method of reasoning. You may say of his physical journey that
he went out, not knowing whither he went, but you cannot say that of his
intellectual journey. While his feet pressed an unknown way, his mind and
heart traveled straight toward the discovered God. If the best educated
man of a period is he who sees most deeply and clearly into its essential
truths and problems, then the "Father of the Faithful," whoever he was
and whenever he came, was the supreme scholar of his generation.

As the life of the chosen people reaches more definite form, the place of
education is more plainly seen. Doubtless most men would agree that Moses
was the arch figure of the Old Testament. He is represented, both by the
Scripture and by the tradition given among the Jewish historians, as
having the best mental furnishing of his day. The book of the Acts says of
him that he "was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians." Clemens
Alexandrinus records that Moses had the finest teachers in Egypt, and that
the choicest scholars were imported from Greece and Assyria to instruct
the adopted prince in the arts and sciences of their respective countries.
Perhaps we must allow something for the idealizing habit here; but it is
significant that both sacred and secular history unite in declaring that
the Lawgiver was learned.

In the era of Prophecy we find the same development, only it is more
speedy. Elijah may have been the crude and forceful son of mountain and
rock, but his successor is the product of one of the numerous "schools of
the prophets." Although intellectual training might be presumed to have
little to do with the stern function of Old Testament prophesying, the
"school" arrived quickly and began the training of the young men.
Criticism has not attacked the view that the book of Isaiah bears marks of
high culture. If that book had two authors, the ancient world is entitled
to the credit of a second scholar. When the radical is done with the story
of Daniel we have left at least the schoolroom in which the youthful
prophet gained his superior wisdom. It would appear that the examples of
the worthies of the Old Testament give slight encouragement to the idea
that any type of selection or any mood of afflatus may not be supplemented
by trained intellect in the kingdom of God.

We need not halt long with the like lesson from the New Testament. Much
has been made of the fact that the twelve apostles were uneducated men.
Doubtless we often do their intellectual life scant justice. Desiring to
score in an argument, we give it out as an evidence of the divinity of the
faith that it conquered in spite of the disciples' lack of education. The
truth is that the New Testament does not warrant the application to the
apostles of such words as "illiterate." Some of them wrote books that have
moved the ages. But, whatever the fact be here, he would be wild indeed
who would find in ignorance any explanation of the gospel's victory. Let
us remember, moreover, that, when the "unlettered" Twelve were cramping
the universal faith into a local religion, the corrector of their blunder
was the "lettered" Paul. In his statement of experience he was ever ready
to say that he had sat at the feet of Gamaliel, the greatest Jewish
teacher of the day. After Christ Paul is the colossal figure of the New
Testament; and there are those who would confidently declare him the
greatest man who has walked the earth since Calvary. For a review of his
education, let anyone read a standard Life of the Apostle. We thus gather
the one result from both the Old and the New Testament. Moses was the
mightiest personality of the one, and Paul was the mightiest human
personality of the other; and both were highly educated. The signal
examples of the Bible range themselves on the side of education.

As in all things else, so in the relation of the Bible to the intellectual
life we reach the climax only when we come to Christ. Here, too, we find
in the life of Christ that same element of paradox that we often find in
his words. That saving was losing, giving was getting, and dying was
living were apparently contradictory statements that real life proved to
be true. Where words seemed to fight each other, the deeper facts were
found to live in peace. So Jesus in his personal influence was ever
reaching goals of which the paths did not give promise. This is seen
peculiarly in his relation to the intellectual life. He left no
manuscripts. The only time he is represented as writing was when he wrote
the sentence of the sinning woman on the forgetful sands of the earth. Yet
he who wrote no books has filled the world with books. Something in him
quickly evoked Gospels and Epistles which were forerunners of a marvelous
literature. Even this moment thousands of pens are being moved by him. He
wrote no books, and still he writes books evermore.

It was so with his relation to the schools. Men tell us that the
incarnation imposed a limitation on intellect--that it involved a kenosis,
an emptying of knowledge even as of power. Be that as it may, our human
explanations do not easily reach the mystery of his influence on the
schools of the world. Did the boy Jesus go to school in Nazareth? Was his
mother his only earthly teacher? Did his neighbors speak literal truth in
the question, "Whence hath this man wisdom, having never learned"? The
silent years give no answer to the questions. But this we do know: He who
went to school slightly or not at all has sent a world to school. He who
founded no immediate institution of learning has dotted the planet with
colleges. His schoolroom was itinerant and unroofed. It moved quickly from
town to city, from capital to desert, from mountain to seashore. We have
dignified it with a great name. The school of Jesus, whose plant and
endowment and faculty all centered in one life, is named "the College of
Apostles."

He said to them, "Go, teach." They went and they taught. They were not
deliberate founders of schools. But the heart of Jesus contained schools,
and they, having gotten their hearts from him, carried schools with them.
When the gospel reached England and Germany, education reached those
countries and began to thrive. The vast majority of the first one hundred
colleges founded in America were builded by the followers of the Great
Teacher.

Now, this unique relation of Jesus to the educational life of men is not
accidental. Subtle as are the laws which determine it, those laws work
effectively. They are elusive, but once in a while we glimpse their ways
and meanings. The New Testament seems to feel their presence. It calls
Christ a Teacher. Forty-three times it uses his name in connection with
the word "teach" in its various forms. The world gets the same impression.
It persists in calling Jesus the Greatest Teacher. It must note the
schoolroom phrases with which the account of his life is filled. The
prologue of his wonderful message on the Mount illustrates this. "And
seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set,
his disciples came unto him; and he opened his mouth, and taught them."
The posture of Jesus was that of the teacher. His audience was made up of
"disciples," that is, of pupils. He "taught" them. All this might be
called a superficial play upon mere words. But we may go further and
discover that the method of Jesus was the method of the teacher. He put
his effort into other lives in order that these lives might, within their
various limitations, duplicate his own. His work was largely devoted to
the preparation of a select few. Often he left hundreds and thousands that
he might be alone with Twelve. He poured himself into his disciples, his
scholars. He thus did what every true teacher must do: He committed the
cause of his life to those whom he schooled into faith and character and
power.

Nor did the teaching method halt here. The good teacher makes the things
of the earth serve as approaches to the highest developments. This Jesus
did supremely. Long before men made "nature study" an educational fad,
Jesus made it an ethical and spiritual service. He pressed flowers,
mustard seeds, grapes, wine, thistles, corn, figs, into the lessons of
his roving school. He made nature study so effective that along a path of
lilies men walked to God. When it was necessary to individualize in order
to come to this high result, Jesus took up that burden of teaching. His
school, like all other schools since its day, enrolled "a son of thunder."
It took the love that suffered long to make John, the son of thunder and
lightning and vaulting ambition, into the son of tender love. It took the
patience that knows no failure to change the shifting sand of Simon's
nature into the rock of Peter's character. All these considerations will
convince us that we may go to Christ with the pedagogical, as well as with
the religious motive. We do not wonder that a man should have crept to him
in the darkness and should have said, "We know that thou art a teacher."

There is yet another side of the subject that calls for emphasis. The
Bible and Jesus give the ideal of the intellectual life, an omniscient
God. The God who is perfect in character is often lifted before us. We
hear the voice saying, "Be ye holy; for I the Lord your God am holy." Yet
we interpret the call narrowly. Christ has come to us with the call to
purity. To the attentive he comes just as truly with the call to
knowledge. He has given us a gospel for the body, and that gospel teaches
that drunkards and other defilers of the human temple of God cannot
inherit his kingdom. He has given us a gospel for the spirit, and that
gospel commands that the inmost realm of life be given to his sway. He has
likewise given us a gospel of the mind, and that gospel cannot be omitted
from the fullness of the blessing of Christ. The God revealed in Christ
knows all things. He counts the hairs of our heads. He marks the petals of
the flowers. He notes the fall of the sparrows. He is all-knowing and
all-wise.

Even though the ideal be a staggering one, we are still told to be like
God. Some day we shall appreciate more the duty that speaks to us in
Jesus's revelation of an omniscient God. As yet we hardly dare press to
its full meaning the call implied in that revelation. We have said that
the man who neglects and stunts and poisons his body is a sinner. We have
said that the man who dwarfs and represses his spirit is a sinner. Are we
ready to say that the man who gives his mind no chance, the man who fails
to move on to the ideal of an omniscient God, is likewise a sinner? Is
God's perfect spirit a goal for his children, and is God's perfect mind
removed from our vision of duty? If we are to start on the endless march
that leads to the purity of God, are we freed from the obligation of
starting on the endless march that leads to his knowledge? We may shrink
from the conclusion that is here involved; and our shrinking may be only
an added evidence that we have omitted one element from the divine ideal.

Just here we are struck with the consciousness that we shall need some
great dynamic, if we are ever to start toward this unspeakable goal.
Evidently we have not reached the last thing in Christ's relation to
education. Confucius was a great teacher, but his system has not produced
schools. Mohammed was a great teacher, but his system has left his
followers wallowing in ignorance. Though Mohammedanism has proclaimed an
omniscient God, somehow that beacon on the infinite height has not coaxed
the Turk on to its shining. Mohammedanism has offered the ideal, but it
has lacked the power. On the contrary the system of Jesus seems to have
had a genius for diffusing education. It has been a vast normal school.
The purer and freer and more spiritual its form, the mightier has it been
as an educational force. If we list the nations of the earth in classes
with reference to literacy and illiteracy, we shall find that the farther
the nations are from the Bible, the more dense is their ignorance. We
shall find, too, that where the people are the freest in their relation
to the Bible, there the ignorance is least. Plainly the Bible with its
crowning revelation in Christ does furnish something of a dynamic toward
education. The school has been the inevitable companion of the church.
This is because the church, in addition to giving a list of inspiring
examples, and in addition to lifting up the uttermost ideal, has also
emphasized an obligation under the leadership of the ever-present Spirit.
It remains to show the nature of the obligation which the Spirit has
enforced with reference to knowledge. Perhaps this can be done more
clearly by taking the attitude of the Scriptures toward slavery as
illustrating their attitude toward ignorance.

When Jesus faced his audiences he looked upon men who were in bondage as
well as upon men who were in ignorance. It is frequently said that Christ
did not attack slavery. In the days before the war the biblical
literalist, who believed in freedom, had a hard time with his Bible. He
found that the Bible did not condemn slavery, but that the Bible did give
concerning it certain regulations. The pro-slavery orators made good use
of the letter to Philemon. The people who believed in human liberty, and
who likewise believed in a mechanical and verbal theory of biblical
inspiration, passed through intellectual agony in the period of
anti-slavery agitation. If human bondage was the sum of all villainies,
why did not Jesus condemn it with unsparing invective? Why did not the
apostles enter upon an immediate crusade for its downfall?

The answer is that Christ in the deepest way did condemn slavery, and that
the apostles in the realest way did begin their crusade. They gathered no
visible army, and they enforced no written statute, but Christ stated and
his followers promulgated a conception of humanity that prophesied the
melting of all chains. Usually the claim is that the Golden Rule was the
primary foe of slavery, but the Golden Rule is of little force, apart from
that doctrine of human personality that pervades the New Testament. Give
that doctrine power, and it would refuse to live in the same world with
slavery. That doctrine, under a Captain, was a delivering army. That
doctrine, under a King, was an Emancipation Proclamation. The Golden Rule
had been given in negative form by Confucius, and it went to sleep in his
maxims. That rule had been uttered negatively by Plato, but it nestled
quietly in his poetry. Hillel approached the positive statement of the
rule, but he does not get credit for being its author. The glory of a
truth lies with the one who gives it power. Jesus made the Golden Rule
leap to its feet. He turned it into a most effective traveler. It praised
God on its wide journeys. It began to work wonders.

That work was slow, but it was both sure and thorough. The Rule had power
behind its saying. At length the Spirit carried that gracious weapon over
the seas and laid it in the hearts of Clarkson and Wilberforce. Soon the
English flag floated over freemen everywhere. Again the Spirit carried the
doctrine over other seas and lodged it in the hearts of Lovejoy, Phillips,
and Garrison. Directly four million sable faces were glowing with the
light of liberty. Jesus had said, "If the Son therefore shall make you
free, ye shall be free indeed." The word had essentially a spiritual
meaning, but it was worked out, also, in a splendid literalness. The Son
made men free, not primarily by the force of law, nor yet primarily by the
violence of armies, but rather by the conquest of disposition. The honor
of the victory is with the Bible theory of humanity, made strong with the
power of Christ.

Now what the truth of the Bible did in tearing down slavery, it is
continually doing in routing ignorance. The connection is subtle, but it
is vitally real. The doctrine of personal responsibility is atmospheric in
the Bible. It is equally comprehensive. Men are held responsible for
their bodies. Drunkenness, adultery, and all forms of sensuality are
condemned. This is at the bottom of life. But at the top of life firmer
stress is placed. The spirit of man is made a field of reckoning. The
divine dominion over motive is strongly asserted. And that comprehensive
responsibility claims the mind. The first great commandment of the new
dispensation is that we must "love God with all the strength, with all the
soul, with all the _mind_." Men may differ about the precise meaning of
the mind's love for the Lord, but the Christian sense of duty has asserted
it in strange fashions. From vast revivals young men and women have gone
forward intellectually and have sought the higher education. Conversion
has set free their intellects and has made them feel the duty of
intellectual development. The pressure of the Christian ideal has been on
them. They have answered the call of the God who is infinitely good, and
they must now answer the call of the God who is infinitely wise. An
elusive intellectual law is written sure and large in the code of the
Great Kingdom. It is as certainly a commandment of God as if it had been
thundered among the crags and lightnings of a new Sinai.

The conviction of the church at this point has not always come to
definition; nor has it always risen even to consciousness. For all that,
it has risen to practical life and has struggled always for outward
expression. Feeling that the empire of God is over all of life, man must
submit his mind to the divine rule. Hence it follows that the man who is
intellectually lazy, as well as the man who is intellectually dishonest,
is a sinner. This statement may shock those who have a surplus of caution,
but these may reassure themselves with the conviction that any theory may
be fearlessly accepted, if it brings us face to face with God at any point
of our total life. The failure to follow this biblical idea has brought a
penalty always. No denomination that has fought or slurred education has
led a large and victorious life; on the contrary it has invariably become
one of the fading and dwindling forces of God's work. The God of wisdom is
evermore against the promoters of ignorance. So do we find that, by the
examples of its greatest characters, by the life of its Greatest Teacher
and its ruling Lord, by the vision of its supreme ideal, by the assertion
of its inclusive theory of consecration, and by the divine dynamic which
it brings to bear upon the mind, the Bible has become the steadfast friend
of proper education. It has opened the doors of countless schools and has
bidden the children of men to enter the portals of learning with the
assurance that all truth is of God.

The Bible renders education the service of inspiration, and it renders it
the service of proper restraint. When any one faculty of human life
becomes a monarch it always makes for trouble. Zeal without knowledge
tends to breakage; knowledge without zeal tends to waste. The Bible does
not make intellect all. Man has mind, and he must use that. Man has
sensibility, and he must use that. Man has will, and he must use that. Man
must get the truth out of his integral self rather than out of his
fractional self. The man who does not use his heart and will in the
gaining of truth is just as faithless as is the man who will not use his
mind. Without attempting to use psychological terms with exactness, we may
say that Jesus brought in the reign of the practical intellect, which gets
truth from all there is of man. Even as truth comes not from the naked
will of God, nor yet out of his cold thought, but rather out of the full
nature of the Infinite, so truth finds man, not at some one point of his
being, but in the glowing center of his whole life.

We may assert, also, that the Bible saves education from frigidity.
Tennyson speaks of "the freezing reason's colder part." We all know the
meaning of the phrase. Jesus put into the search for truth the mood of
humility. The method of learning was obedience. Obedience is the organ of
intellectual vision as well as of spiritual vision. The method of Jesus
was not merely for the spiritual life, as men speak in their fragmentary
way; it was a universal method. It takes humility to make the beginnings
of a scholar, and weariness and shame of ignorance, and faith in an
intellectual empire, and a high trust that the mind is made for truth, and
the truth for mind. Ere we have done, we have a huge creed wrapped up in
our intellectual processes. But the creed has been saved from its cold
pride. The Bible says in one of its marginal readings, "Knowledge puffeth
up; love buildeth up." Knowledge alone may be swollen with pride, and the
higher demand of the Bible would save from that disaster. This gives us
the clue to more than one biblical sentence. There is a "science falsely
so called." There is a sense in which "not many wise after the flesh are
called." These implied warnings are not the cries of prejudice. They stand
for the effort to touch learning with humility, which alone can save it
from being distant and icy.

The good Book rescues education from a selfish inaction. There was a
living and serving element in Jesus's relation to the intellectual life.
He did not deal in barren metaphysics or in helpless abstractions. His
truth went to work. He fastened it to life's burdens, and they were
lifted. He dropped it amid life's problems, and they were solved. He cast
it against life's temptations, and they were defeated. He attached it to
life's duties, and they were fulfilled. He sought those truths with which
men had to dwell. He never attempted to set forth the essential mystery of
things. He was no dealer in an intellectual cure-all. He spoke with
authority and yet with reverent limitation. There was a great reserve in
his explanations. Yet in the realm where men must live their present
lives, Jesus gave enough truth to keep men busy all their days. Here again
comes in the question of dynamic. Men sometimes prate about their "love of
truth." The intellectual life, like the religious life, may be guilty of
cant. It takes more than an open mind to get the truth; it takes a working
mind. Truth does not come to the passive man by way of transfer. One
teaching of the parable of the virgins is that, while the coarser goods of
life may be transferred, the finer goods of life must be won by spiritual
effort. It takes dynamic to secure a real intellect. Perception may see a
truth, but only inward power can use the truth. Jesus conferred that
power. He gave us the truth in the doctrine about God. He gave us the way
in the spirit of obedience. He gave us the life in the willingness to make
the truth the servant of the world for the sake of Christ.

This leads us to the biblical idea of consecrated intellect. As we have
often failed to indicate the sin of needless ignorance, so have we failed
to point out the sin of an unconsecrated mind. All truth can be dedicated
to Christ. His great call to-day is for more men with the highest culture
placed under the thrall of his grace and under the guiding power of the
Spirit whom he sends--more Luthers from Wittenberg, more Wesleys from
Oxford, more Pauls from Gamaliel's school; more men from all our modern
seats of learning who will know that gifts of learning can be placed at
the service of the King and that all science and philosophy and literature
may be placed at the foot of the Cross. In the coming day of the Christian
intellect

  Mind and heart, according well
  May make one music as before,
  But vaster.




CHAPTER V

THE BIBLE AND WORK


The frank purpose of the present lecture is to discuss the relation of the
Bible to the moral and spiritual aspects of work. The aim is not a study
in economics. Without doubt the Bible stands for justice; and without
doubt, also, the intent of the Bible is to make just men. But the great
Book does not give an infallible table of wages; neither does it offer any
sure rules whereby we can determine the working value of any particular
individual. It declares that "the laborer is worthy of his hire," and it
leaves the details to be wrought out by men whom it summons to the spirit
of justice and love. Interested as we may be in the economic problems of
our day, we must still rejoice that the Bible does not surrender its work
of inspiration in an effort at mechanical guidance. The wage scale must
necessarily vary with the conditions of living; and, therefore, a textbook
of money wages would have made a cumbersome volume with most of its pages
as lifeless as the Book of the Dead. The very suggestion ends in
ridiculousness. The effort of the Bible is not to give directions for
working machines, but to give motives to working men. It is not a
taskmaster, but a task-inspirer.

True toil of whatever sort is in need of inspiration. It must go by system
and by schedule, and the element of monotony makes itself felt. The man
leaves his home six mornings of the week and takes up his accustomed task.
The bell calls him to work at an appointed hour, and it dismisses him by
the demand of the clock. The husband goes to the store or office or
factory to do the same things again and ever again, while the wife goes
about the household duties that have engrossed her on thousands of
previous days. One of the victories of life is to be a worker and not to
be a drudge. We have all known people who have not won that victory. Their
work is a grim necessity. It is not acquainted with poetry or with music.
When the idealist speaks of the man who sings at his toil, they sneer at
his sentimentalism or they doubt his sincerity. Work is a ceaseless grind;
it is a dreary round; it is a hard compulsion. The poet who wields a pen
may tell the man who wields a pick that work is joy and refreshment and
liberty, but the sour toiler will regard his teacher as a condescending
comforter. The complaint of many people is not simply that they must make
bricks without straw, but that they must make bricks at all. In their
vocabulary pleasure contrasts with labor because labor itself is pain.
They are weary in their work and weary of their work. The only ideal for
this sort of laborer is that he may labor so successfully as to be able
some day to get on without labor. This man is the drudge.

Oddly enough, he has had his theological partners. There have been Bible
students who have held that all work is a penalty of the Fall. They say
that when God said to Adam, "In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat
bread," he entered toil among the punishments of life. Undoubtedly sin
adds to the hardship of work, especially if the sin be the sin of a wrong
attitude. Thorns and thistles do prosper more around the broken gate of
the sluggard. The earnest expectation of a groaning and travailing
creation does wait for the revealing of the sons of God. Discontent puts
its evil reflex on the muscles. The rebellious worker is ever the tired
worker. But even the literal story of Eden does not give the ideal of
worklessness. Adam had been placed in the garden "to dress it and to keep
it." Wherever God places the man, he places the task for the man. Any
other conception of life is unworthy and utterly irreligious. A silly
theology that puts a premium on idleness is not born of the God that
"worketh hitherto." Still the view that work is a curse persists even
after the theory that encouraged the view has gone to the discard. The
sanctified escape the fret of work, but they do not escape its fact. The
Perfect Life, as we shall later see, was the life of a Worker.

Admitting, as we all must, that work is sometimes tragic because it lacks
its proper outer reward, we may still contend that often its deepest
tragedy is a wrong attitude of spirit. Doubtless much of this comes from
maladjustment. Some idealists believe that if every man were given his own
task, every man would be happy at that task. Kipling so states it in the
"L'Envoi" of "The Seven Seas." He sees the good time when there shall be
an adjustment between man and his task. The lower motives for work shall
all be done away, and the one satisfying motive shall abide.

  And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame,
  And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,
  But each for the joy of the working, and each in his separate star,
  Shall draw the thing as he sees it, for the God of things as they are.

Ideal as this is, it gets a response from us all. Besides there are some
foretokens of this age of joyful toil. Usually these are seen most clearly
in work that has a relation to beauty. The woman works cheerfully at her
fine embroidery, and she works just as cheerfully over the flowers in her
garden. With men the form of toil that stands for genuine achievement
often becomes not only a pleasure but a veritable passion. Where a
spiritual motive allures, work frequently becomes the gladness of life.
Agassiz declined to accept the remunerative call to lecture by saying, "I
am only a teacher. I cannot afford to make money." Wesley poured back into
his work all the results of his work and died a poor man whereas he might
have become rich. In America college professors have been known to save
their meager salaries in order that they might return their slight estates
to endow more fully the institutions for which they labored. They received
from their work so that they could give back to their work.

The more we study cases of this fine sort, the more will we be impressed
that the workers labored under the biblical sense of life. The men just
mentioned were all profound believers in God, and they lived their lives
as under his eye. Hence they saw their portion of work as a part of the
infinite whole that makes for the kingdom of God. There is a story of a
workingman who, standing on the street opposite the Cathedral of Cologne,
was overheard saying, "Didn't we do a fine job over there?" Turning about,
the listener saw a rough hand pointing at the wonderful cathedral. "What
did you do?" he asked the man. The reply was, "I mixed the mortar for
several years." The tale was told by the thoughtless as being humorous. It
is, however, serious and beautiful. That workman had gotten the vision of
himself as a partner in a plan that covered centuries of grand toil. He
was a helper of God in the fashioning of his temple. In reality he had
joined the company of Hiram and of Solomon. Now all honest work must have
a direction that is both long and high. It reaches down into the years of
men. It reaches upward into the heart of God. Precisely this idealism is
needed in order that toil may be redeemed from its drudgery. George Eliot
gives us a striking illustration of it in her tribute to Stradivari, the
maker of violins. This immortal mechanic is said to have had a reverence
for his labor. He felt that, whereas God gave men skill to play, God
depended on Stradivari to furnish the instruments. He was the partner of
the Most High. God had chosen Stradivari as a helper. Hence he could say,

                          God be praised,
  Antonio Stradivari has an eye
  That winces at false work and loves the true,
  With hand and arm that play upon the tool
  As willingly as any singing bird
  Sets him to sing his morning roundelay,
  Because he likes to sing and likes the song.

We may not all have this attitude toward our work, but we are all
idealists enough to wish that we felt just that way. The singing workman
is not altogether a figment of the imagination; neither is his spirit
impossible in the day that now is. The men who regard work as a blessing,
and not as a penalty and a curse, are found in many trades and
professions. They are the forerunners of the Eden life. Certainly the main
teaching of the Bible, that labor is designed to aid in the bringing in of
the kingdom of God, must give to the honest laborers in every realm an
exalted joy.

This primary consideration is joined by the human examples of the Bible.
We find in its pages a procession of workers, and from this procession God
selects many of his chosen leaders. Moses was tending his flock on the
hillside when the voice of the Lord summoned him to his manifold
leadership. Saul was seeking his father's cattle when he found the kingdom
of which he was to be king. David was busy in the sheepfold when the
prophet called him to his work as warrior and monarch. Ruth was gleaning
in the fields, in her pathetic effort to care for her widowed
mother-in-law and herself, when she found her way into happiness and into
the ancestry of our Lord. Gideon was beating out wheat in the wine press
when he was drafted for the campaign that was to break the power of the
Midianites. Elisha was plowing with twelve yoke of oxen when the mantle of
Elijah was cast over his shoulders. Nehemiah was serving as cupbearer to
the king when he evoked from Artaxerxes the permission to return and
rebuild the walls of his beloved city. Amos was among the herdsmen of
Tekoa when the word of God took him captive and sent him to his prophetic
career. These are the instances in the Old Testament where mention is made
of the form of toil from which God called men to some spiritual service.
Without doubt the full record would show that other signal servants
received their commissions while they were faithfully performing their
duties on threshing floors, out in the fields, and within counting-rooms.

The New Testament is less specific in its descriptions, but it often gives
us the like hint. Matthew was at the seat of custom when he was invited
into the fellowship of the disciples that he might tell men of the eternal
exchange. James and John were engaged in their occupation as fishermen
when they heard the voice on the shore and pulled their boat over the blue
waves that they might become fishers of men. The shepherds were in
faithful watch over their flocks by night when they heard the evangel of
song and were startled by the message of peace. The illustrations make us
feel that the favorite meeting place of God with man is the meeting place
of man with his work. A motto says that "the best reward of good work is
more good work to do." The providence of God upholds the motto. The Bible
shows a preference for the workers as against the shirks. It puts the
premium on industry, whether the type of toil be manual or spiritual.

Here, as in all other themes of real life, we come to Christ for our
highest teaching and our best example. We have noted elsewhere that he
made the home the illustration of our relations with God; and we now note
that he made the common work of earth the illustration of our
responsibility for service to God. This he did so often and so urgently
that we are driven to feel that work was not only the form of illustration
but also the form of service itself. How many parables did he gain from
the ways of toil? He would say, "The kingdom of heaven is like unto--,"
and straightway his hearers' minds were sent to the places where men
wrought for their daily bread. In most places the blanks can be supplied
by some form of employment. "The kingdom of heaven is like unto--" a
merchant and his pearls; a sower and his field; a woman and her leaven; a
fisherman and his net; a husbandman and his vineyard; a merchant traveler
and the intrusted talents. Where his words were used as deft and quick
illustrations rather than as lengthy and formal parables, he gathered his
material from the realms of toil. The builder and the house; the shepherd
and the sheep; the axman and the tree; the tailor and the cloth; the
housewife and the coin; the rich man and his steward; the woman and her
grinding; the man and his plowing; the watchman and his vigil; the
husbandman and the vine; all these entered into his speech as showing what
God would expect of men. Here we have almost a cyclopedia of labors.
Inasmuch as Jesus commended the qualities shown in these various phases of
service, we are allowed to think that he regarded the legitimate
occupations of everyday life as both representing and fulfilling the
kingdom of God. Nor will reverent thought be satisfied with any less
comprehensive view. There would be a dread of living if we were made to
feel that the work which we must do, both to meet our own sense of
self-respect and to provide for the needs of ourselves and our beloved,
was either in opposition to the grace of God or stood for neutral
territory between the realms of good and evil. The teaching of Jesus saves
us from that practical atheism. He allows every honest man to take the
oft-repeated phrase, "The kingdom of heaven is like unto--," and to
complete a portion of its meaning from his own form of labor. If a man is
engaged in any task that makes sacrilege and blasphemy when it is used to
fill out the sentence, then let that man look well to his own heart and
life. Every man's work should serve as a parable of Christ.

But Jesus was not simply the doctrinaire of toil; he was its exemplar. The
emphasis here is usually placed upon the fact that Christ was a carpenter.
He transformed crude materials into useful tools. An overdone stress on
this point is itself a confession that manual toil needs an apologist! The
significant thing is that such a stress is wholly absent from the speech
and attitude of Jesus. With him carpentry seems to have been a natural
part of life. He never refers to it as something that he had outgrown. His
backward look toward the occupation of his youth betrays no condescension,
like to that occasionally seen in so-called self-made men! After he had
left the carpenter's bench he said, "I work." When he saw the night
closing down about him, the brevity of the working day became an incentive
to more work, and he said, "I must work." Even in the agony we can catch
the exultation of the cry, "I have finished the work which thou gavest me
to do." It was his meat to finish his "work." Jesus did the appointed task
for each period of his life. Then he passed on to the task of the next
period without the least hint that the varying tasks were not joined in
the harmony of the divine purpose. The work of his life was like his
garment; it was all of one piece. From the building of the Nazareth
cottage on to the building of the "many mansions," there is no
consciousness of contradiction. With Jesus the working life was a unity.

And at the risk of being mechanical in the use of bungling divisions we
may declare that Jesus entered into all the large divisions of toil. The
note of universality is seen here as it is seen elsewhere. We have been
told that the three forms of temptation that Jesus encountered on mountain
top and temple pinnacle exhaust all the types. It has been said, too, that
the thankfulness of Jesus is directed toward all the channels by which the
good of life can flow in upon us. This same characteristic of universality
appears in the work of Christ. As a carpenter he worked upon material
things. As a healer he worked upon the bodies of men. As a teacher he
worked upon the minds of men. As a preacher he worked upon the souls of
men. All the workers of the world can be brought into one of these
divisions, and so all true workers can enter into partnership with Jesus.
We call him the Carpenter, the Great Physician, the Greatest Teacher, the
World's Saviour! The manual toilers claim him. The doctors claim him. The
teachers claim him. The evangelists claim him. He is at home in the shop,
in the hospital, in the schoolroom, and in the temple. All the classes of
toilers can appeal to the sanction of his example.

Still we must again assert that these clumsy divisions were not emphasized
by Jesus himself. There has been an age-long debate, ofttimes degenerating
into a wrangle, as to the relative hardships of the different forms of
labor. Men who cling to their occupations will still declare that those
occupations have trials beyond all others. Into this debate Jesus did not
enter. He never set one form of toil against another by entering into any
comparisons or contrasts. As he experienced all the general forms of
labor, so did he honor all forms. In his view they were all good and all
cooperative. On the surface they may seem to be rivals, but in the center
they are actual partners in the divine program. Hence Jesus passed from
one realm of work to another with little sense of transition. Carpenter,
Healer, Teacher, Preacher, he was ever the servant of the Kingdom.
Faithfulness, honor, industry, efficiency, patience--in short, all the
virtues were possible in any good way of work. The life of Jesus unites
all our types of labor in a divine purpose and rebukes that quarrelsome
spirit which so often sets the manual laborers and the mental and moral
laborers in opposition. The hand cannot say to the head, "I have no need
of thee," nor can the head utter the like speech of egotism and
self-sufficiency. The workers are all one body, and every one members of
another.

So do we find Jesus putting himself with willing sacrifice into his
varying tasks. He had said to his parents in Jerusalem, "Wist ye not that
I must be amid my Father's matters?" and then he went into what men call
the silent years. But they were not wholly silent. The attentive can hear
the sound of the hammer. The point is that in passing from the Jerusalem
temple to the Nazareth shop Jesus did not depart from his Father's
business. We may all resent the particular descriptions of the quality of
his work as a carpenter; and we may be quite content in our faith that
all his work was done faithfully and well. Holman Hunt's "Shadow of the
Cross" relates Jesus's work in the shop to his sacrificial character. At
the end of a weary day the Nazareth Carpenter extends his arms to relieve
his weariness. The sunshine coming through the window casts his shadow on
the wall in the form of a Cross. His mother glancing in through another
window sees the Cross foreshadowed there and gets her glimpse of the sword
that should enter her own heart. Nor did Jesus escape hardship and
exhaustion when he became a healer and teacher of the people. The crowds
thronged him wherever he went. The hillside became like an open-air
hospital. The multitudes hung upon his words of instruction. Some have
said that one reason why he commanded men who were healed or who were told
the deeper secret of his nature that they "should tell no man," was that
he might avoid the greater press of the throngs. Be that as it may, we are
surely justified in saying that he gave himself lavishly to the work of
each period. In each section of his life his action said, "I must work."

It would be easy, however, to overstate Jesus's relation to work. He did
not labor all the time. Knowing how to toil he knew likewise how to rest.
Men may plead the example of Satan against a vacation season, but they
cannot plead the example of Christ! He rested after he had worked and in
order that he might work again. When the crowd became importunate and the
drain upon his power had become severe, he sought the desert and in its
quiet restored himself for the new labors. He bade his weary disciples to
come apart to the spot of respite. He was the exemplar of proper rest even
as he was the exemplar of proper work. Industrious men often need one
lesson even as lazy men need the other. There are persons who are greedy
of toil. They are as avaricious for it as the miser is for gold. They are
what Carlyle would call "terrible toilers." They die before their time
because they work after their time. Jesus knew this danger. He wished to
guard against it by keeping the Sabbath for man. He wanted to save the
resting place between the weeks because he wanted to save man to his best
self and work. He prescribed the working day and the shop, and he
prescribed the resting day and the desert.

We need not be surprised, then, to find that the new day puts the emphasis
on the sanctification of common work. Professor Peabody gives the contrast
between two well-known poems as illustrating a change that has come over
the personal side of the social question. A generation since Lowell gave
us his "Vision of Sir Launfal." The hero of this poem, after traveling in
many lands, finally finds the holy grail in the cup which he had filled
for a way-side beggar, while the more personal presence of Jesus is
discovered in the beggar himself to whom the searcher has given alms. The
characteristic of the new day is seen in Van Dyke's "The Toiling of
Felix." The hero of this later poem, after seeking the direct vision of
his Lord in caves and deserts of idle contemplation, at last secures the
coveted revelation as he enters gladly into a life of toil and
particularly as he flings himself into the swollen river to rescue a
fellow laborer. Felix finds that there is a holy literalness in the words
which he found on the piece of papyrus as a recovered gospel of Christ:

  Lift the stone, and thou shalt find me;
  Cleave the wood, and there am I.

The ranks of labor are "the dusty regiments of God." The Lord, being a
worker, is mindful of his own:

  Born within the Bethlehem manger where the cattle round me stood,
  Trained a carpenter of Nazareth, I have toiled and found it good.

The good work of the world is the work of Christ. There is really no
contrast between sacred and secular; the actual contrast is between the
sacred and the wicked.

  They who tread the path of labor, follow where Christ's feet have trod,
  They who work without complaining, do the holy will of God.

         *       *       *       *       *

  This is the Gospel of labor--ring it, ye bells of the kirk,
  The Lord of Love came down from above to live with the men who work.

The inevitable drift of this emphasis on the working experience of Jesus
has swept admiration away from the monastic life. The "religious" are not
those who shun the world of toil in order that they may gain the world of
personal peace and salvation. The modern saint is not a Simon the Stylite.
Saint Francis of Assisi projects himself into the admiration of the
twentieth century because he was a worker rather than a recluse. The
attitude toward monasticism among the healthier and more energetic peoples
goes further than this: there is a feeling that in the last analysis the
religious hermit is spiritually selfish. That is deemed a poor kind of
religion which forsakes a world in order to save one's soul. The argument
that the recluses may render the world the service of constant prayer does
not appeal to those who know that work is itself a form of prayer; and
that in Jesus prayer and work lived together in harmony. A better
understanding of the religion of Christ demands that its followers shall
be socially efficient. If Jesus is to be the world's example, more and
more men and women will find in their legitimate toil one of the
sacraments of life.

Already we have come to feel that the Bible doctrine of work, especially
as that doctrine is incarnated in Christ, lays stress upon the man as well
as upon his task. It asks, "What is the man doing with his work?" It also
asks, "What is the work doing with the man?" The reflexes of activity
often become a topic of teaching. Paul said that the man reaps the harvest
of his own sowing. Jesus said, "With what measure ye mete, it shall be
measured to you again." This is much as if he had said that in the upper
realms of living action and reaction are equal and in opposite directions.
He told his disciples that, if they pronounced the benediction of peace
upon a house unfit or unwilling to receive it, the benediction should
return to them again. The meaning is that no work done with the right
spirit can really fail. The poets give this idea currency. George Herbert
declares that a servant with the proper clause in his creed makes
"drudgery divine":

  Who sweeps a room as to thy law
  Makes that and the action fine.

He had already implied that such a servant made himself fine. Mrs.
Browning emphasizes the need of a serious purpose in work when she uses
her picturesque description:

  I would rather dance at fairs on tight rope
  Till the babies dropped their gingerbread for joy,
  Than shift the types for tolerable verse, intolerable
  To men who act and suffer. Better far
  Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means
  Than a sublime art frivolously.

It is "better far" because our seriousness comes back to dwell with us;
and our frivolousness does the same. Many of the parables get their
meaning from this certainty of reaction. The good shepherd is good because
he does his work well, and the return of his work makes him better still.
Just as physical work reacts on the muscles, so that sometimes men
exercise without any outward object in view, even so does the moral spirit
of work come back to dwell with the man and to make his last estate either
better or worse. Our bodies are built into strength by a series of
reactions, and our spirits evermore receive their own with usury.

This idea, as we have observed in another connection, has wrought some
marked changes in the social program. It has largely superseded
almsgiving by workgiving. Scientific charity seeks to remove the causes of
poverty, knowing that this is the sure way to remove poverty itself. The
conviction is that a day's work with a day's pay is far better for the man
than a day's pay without the day's work. In the latter case the man loses
both independence and self-respect, while in the former case he keeps both
of these and gains in addition the rebound of faithful labor. The tramp,
or the man with the heart of a tramp, always fails. Outwitting others, he
outwits himself more truly. He plays tricks on his own soul. The weakness
of his life settles back into his spirit. He drags with him always his
evasions and neglects. Scamping his toil, he scamps his own soul. All
shoddy material gets built into his own being. He erects a dishonest house
for another, but with it he erects an evil structure in which he himself
must live. So it is that a man's work may be his blessing, or it may be
his vengeance.

While this idea has its terrible side, it has also its side of glory and
comfort. It provides amply for the failure of the faithful. Goldsmith says
that "Good counsel rejected returns to enrich the giver's bosom," just as
Jesus says the declined benediction of peace comes back to the true
disciple. It follows that for the good workman there is no real failure.
The house that he has builded may go up in smoke and flame, but the
industry and honor that fashioned its walls and fashioned themselves in
the making of the walls cannot be destroyed. The fortune that he has
gathered may take wings and fly away, but the deeper treasures that have
been garnered by fair-dealing in the marketplace abide in the deposit of
the heart. Jesus said, "Your hearts shall rejoice, and your joy no man
taketh from you." We see here that there are possessions that human power
cannot remove. They have been woven into the self. The treasure house is
too deep for the touch of man. A minor poet tells us:

  I've found some wisdom in my quest
    That's richly worth retailing;
  I've found that when one does his best
    There's little harm in failing.

He corrects this mild statement in his concluding verse. He wanted riches,
but he was rich without them; he wanted to sound the depths with his
philosophy, but his ship sailed on anyhow; he wanted fame; but he
discovered the secret of greatness without it; and so he adds the lines
which declare that the failing of the faithful not only does "little
harm," but even that it furnishes its own enrichment of the real life:

  I may not reach what I pursue,
    Yet will I keep pursuing;
  Nothing is vain that I can do;
    For soul-growth comes from doing.

David "does well" that it is in his heart to build the Lord's house, even
though the honor be passed on to another. The good purpose helps to make
the good man; and the good purpose that expresses itself in work is sure
of the inner reward. This conception may be twisted into a soft gospel for
the inefficient; but the evident purpose of the Bible is to offer it as a
comforting gospel for the faithful.

It would be easy to follow the guidance of the Concordance as it notes the
word "work" in the Epistles. All of the conceptions that have thus far
been treated reappear in the apostolic writings. The symbol of everyday
work is constantly lifted to the highest. We do not need to see Paul
bending over the sailcloth and thrusting his needle into the canvas ere we
know that he is a worker. His whole life was one of toil. He was not
slothful in his apostolic business; and the fervor of his spirit would
have been a good example to the ancient mechanic or merchant. He saw good
men as his colaborers with God. He saw the men that he helped to make good
as a husbandry that he was cultivating for the Lord, as a building that he
was fashioning for Christ's sake. The cure for thieving was work. He that
stole was to steal no more, but was to work with his hands the thing that
was good; and the benevolent motive was to impel to work that the former
thief might have something to give to the needy. It was of the hard toil
of servants that Paul said, "Whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same
shall he receive of the Lord." It is the idea of reaction again; God
suffers no faithful worker to lose his reward. The apostolic rule is very
thoroughgoing in dealing with laziness. "If any will not work, neither
shall he eat." This rule may be an offense to the idle rich, but it
appeals to the sense of justice. Perhaps some day society will be skillful
enough to starve its tramps and shirks until they flee to toil as to a
refuge.

It is peculiar that the end of the Bible should have been misconceived,
even as the beginning, in its teaching concerning work. We have discussed
the heresy that declares that work is a penalty of sin. There is another
heresy which pictures heaven as a place of everlasting idleness. If we
select certain of the descriptions of Revelation, it is easy to see how
the error arose. Yet in each of the weird pictures of the eternal city
there is one sentence at least that hints at heavenly service. For
energetic souls no other conception will be satisfying. Surely inactivity
is not the goal of a redeemed race. Shortly before his death Mark Twain
published in a magazine a satire on the usual idea of heaven. Introduced
in a dream to the city of our hope, he was told by an attending angel to
take his seat on a cloud and to occupy himself by wearing a crown and
holding a harp. Soon becoming weary of this do-nothing life, he came down
to the golden streets. He was asked to keep for a time the crowns and
harps of the passers-by, and he noted that the way was strewn with these
rejected ornaments! Some good people may have been offended by the satire;
and some whose life has been filled with weariness will insist that heaven
must offer rest. So indeed it must. One suggestive passage says concerning
the souls of those that were slain for the testimony of Christ that they
should "rest yet for a little season." Those that have come out of great
tribulation are given service as a reward of their tribulation. "Therefore
are they before the throne of God and serve him day and night in his
temple." In the later description the land of rest is seen as a land of
work, and "his servants shall serve him." The race does not look back to a
workless Eden; neither does it look forward to a workless heaven. Kipling
puts it well for either here or there:

  We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it,
    Lie down for an eon or two,
  Till the Master of all good workmen
    Shall set us to work anew.

The ideal of the Bible is service, and that ideal is not rejected when
life comes to its crowning.

One of the great hymns of the church gives to the worshipers in a
sanctuary the Bible's Gospel of Work:

  Yet these are not the only walls
    Wherein thou mayst be sought;
  On homeliest work thy blessing falls
    In truth and patience wrought.

  Thine is the loom, the forge, the mart,
    The wealth of land and sea;
  The worlds of science and of art,
    Revealed and ruled by thee.

  Then let us prove our heavenly birth
    In all we do and know,
  And claim the kingdom of the earth
    For thee, and not thy foe.

  Work shall be prayer, if all be wrought
    As thou wouldst have it done;
  And prayer, by thee inspired and taught;
    Itself with work be one.

The biblical ideal for earth sends men forth to their daily tasks, while
the biblical ideal for heaven breaks its reserve sufficiently to show us a
City wherein the saints at rest are likewise the saints at work.




CHAPTER VI

THE BIBLE AND WEALTH


The word "wealth" as used in this discussion does not mean simply great
riches; it rather means those outer and visible means which have a certain
purchasing power and which gain their value from that fact. The word is
relative at best. A wealthy man of fifty years ago would by many be deemed
a poor man now; while, in the individual estimate, one man's poverty would
be another man's riches. We have all discovered, too, that persons may be
tested by their attitude toward little as well as by their attitude toward
much. The man who breaks down in his use of a thousand dollars is not
likely to recover his conscience in his use of a million dollars. There is
high authority for the belief that he that is faithful in a few things can
be trusted with rulership over many things. This principle will apply to
riches quite as well as to cities. We must necessarily take at large
discount the vigorous attack that is made on great wealth by the man who
is narrow and selfish in his use of moderate wealth. One ray of light
falling into a dark dungeon will test a man's attitude toward light; and
so the real personal attitude toward one coin may become the revelation of
a human heart.

All of us must live within the realm of material endeavor. Six days of the
week are given by the average man in an effort to win worldly goods. If,
as is generally supposed, Jesus went back from the temple scene in
Jerusalem when he was twelve years of age and worked in the village
carpenter shop until he was thirty, he spent eighteen years in a
remunerative employment ere he entered upon the three years of public
ministry. It is a mechanical conception again; but it is interesting to
observe that the proportion of his years spent in his trade is the same
six sevenths of the time that most men must spend in the effort to gain
the necessaries or luxuries of life. One has only to stand on the streets
of the city in the early morning and see the throngs as they move to their
places of work to appreciate how large a part the wage motive plays in
actual living. Each day many millions of men and women go down to the
various marts in order that in the evening time they may come back from
the struggle with increased gains. If the Bible takes an attitude toward
the spirit that dominates work it must also take an attitude toward the
spirit that dominates the object of work. It would be small use to have
men made right toward toil if they were to be twisted in their relation to
the proceeds of toil. We should expect, then, that the Bible would give
some explicit teaching to individual men concerning the right attitude
toward wealth; and when we turn to the Holy Book this expectation is fully
met.

Beyond this, the social consequences of wealth are manifold and important.
To see this point clearly exemplified in a wide field, we have but to
study the history of the wars waged by our own nation. At some point every
one of these great struggles has been caused by a false relation to
wealth. Just where we locate that false relation will depend somewhat upon
our prejudices; but the dilemma in each case is such that we are driven to
locate it somewhere. The French and Indian War was a military debate as to
whether the English or the French should gather the furs in the region of
the Upper Ohio and should secure the profits in the world's markets. In
the settlement of that issue many lives were sacrificed. The War for
Independence was caused by taxes--not, as many people suppose, by a tax on
tea alone, but by a long series of taxes covering many years. If the
English had a right to levy the tax and if the tax was just, then the
colonists were greedy. If, on the other hand, the Americans refused to pay
an unjust tax, inspired in their rebellion by a lofty spirit of liberty,
then the English were the greedy party. The War of 1812 was caused by the
seizure of our vessels on the French coast and related to freedom of
commerce. The dilemma is the same as before. Some one was at fault in that
commercial war. A wrong attitude toward property caused the long-drawn-out
struggle.

Our later wars show the same form of contest. Historians declare that the
war with Mexico was occasioned by the desire to extend slavery territory;
by the nation's lust for the enlargement of her borders; and by certain
debts owed to citizens of the United States by citizens of Mexico. All of
these motives touch somewhere on gold. The Civil War grew from the same
"root of all evil." Northern men aided in bringing African slaves to this
land in order to turn forced labor into money, while Southern men
continued African slavery because it was deemed necessary for the
production of cotton. The cry "Cotton is king" was not always spoken above
a whisper, but as a slogan it caused some fierce struggling. Boston
merchants helped to mob Garrison. The sentiment of England flowed against
the North because it was thought that the abolishing of slavery would
demoralize the markets of the world. The hooting crowds that Beecher faced
in England were unconsciously influenced to their hostile attitude by a
commercial argument. The whole struggle was broadened and heightened until
words like "liberty" and "unity" put a moral passion into the fray. But,
while the nature of the government and the question of human rights were
to be settled, the primary occasion of the contest was commercial.

Nor was the war with Spain any exception to this rule. If we absolve the
United States from any motive of greed in our claim that the struggle was
purely humanitarian in its character, we must still grant that the heavy
taxes assessed against her Western colonies by the Spanish government led
to the series of revolutions that occasioned our interference. Thus do we
find that somewhere in the heart of each war there was the lurking passion
for gold. When we make up the mournful lists of the many thousands whose
lives have gone out in these contests, we can debit them against the
spirit of greed. Milton in Paradise Lost represents that the rebellion in
heaven was caused by the like lust, and that Satan's eyes were ever bent
in anxious desire toward the very gold of the streets! Milton's
imagination concerning heaven stands for the historical fact about earth.
The demon of greed is usually the demon of war.

The great problems of current national life all trench upon the same
influence. If money be not the principal in each of them it comes in as an
important confederate. The tariff problem, the currency problem, the canal
tolls problem, the trust problem--all these are quickly classified by
their names. The cleavage between American political parties for the last
fifty years has been made by a wedge of gold. Tariff, or coinage, or
trusts--these have been the large words of political speech. In the
problems that have a more apparent moral bearing the same commercial
element appears. The Labor Problem is with us quite as acutely as it was
with the Romans when long ago the plebeians left the city and camped on
the hillsides, leaving the patricians to do their own manual toil. Whether
the employer gives too little or the employee asks too much in any given
struggle, the demon of greed plays his part again. In the Temperance
Problem the case is even clearer. Distillers and brewers and saloonists do
not enter their trade because they thereby add either to their social
standing or to their moral peace. We cannot eliminate from the problem the
factor of the human appetite that craves a stimulant; at the same time we
know that the motive for the business itself comes from the lure of gold.
That gleam invites many men into a path which, as they themselves know
well, cannot lead to any large political preferment or to any great
personal admirations.

The problem of social purity is, of course, related to another human
passion. But there has crept into the vocabulary of the people a
suggestive phrase, "commercialized vice." There is the general feeling
that, if the element of monetary profit could be taken from the loathsome
trade, the problem would be much nearer its solution. Hence we have our
Red Light Abatement Laws by which we seek to make it dangerous for men to
rent their property for the traffic in virtue. On the legal side the
present efforts at the solution of the problem all strive to fix a set of
conditions, making commercially unprofitable the house of her whose feet
take hold on death. If, as is earnestly contended by some, low wages tend
to furnish the recruits for the pitiable ranks of the trade in bodies, we
have another commercial factor in the campaign. Explain it as we may, it
is still true that money makes the unholy alliances. It is no marvel that
the Bible has sent down to all the centuries its phrase, "the mammon of
unrighteousness."

Of course, many will overstate the case of American greed. The Almighty
Dollar is not our God. Our passing celebrities may be mere millionaires,
but our permanent heroes were quite more than traders. If we have seemed
more commercial than other peoples it has been because a new continent
gave such sweeping opportunities for wealth. Some one has said that it is
an evidence of the degeneracy of our period that the word "worth," which
once had a noble and inner significance, is now controlled by the market.
The fact that the word has gone downhill is taken to mean that the people
who use it so have gone downhill too! But these verbal arguments are not
reliable. While the word "worth" has dropped somewhat from its old glory,
the word "talent," which once had merely a monetary significance, has
mounted to a higher meaning. The one word is just as good a witness as the
other. The truth is that we meet to-day the world-old problem. The
evidence of this lies in the fact that the Bible dealt with the problem in
emphatic fashion. It lists for us the victims of greed: Lot, Gehazi,
Ananias and Sapphira, Simon Magus, the young ruler, Judas. We shall find
in its pages some general principles by which it seeks to warn wealth away
from pitfalls and to send it forth to service.

The first of these principles is that God is the only and absolute Owner.
Our human conceit makes for us another theory, and our legal codes write
out that theory in complicated formulas. We have our "clear titles" and
our "quitclaim deeds." Formal records at a courthouse tell men that we
"own" houses and lands, while formal certificates assert our right to so
many shares of stock or so much value in bonds. The Bible confronts our
complacency with its plea for the ownership of Another. God has the only
clear titles! God has never put his signature to a quitclaim deed! The
courthouse record is a temporary convenience; the higher record gives the
eternal fact. "The silver and the gold" are God's. "The cattle on a
thousand hills" are God's. "The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness
thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein." There is here not merely
the assertion of a property ownership, but an assertion of the ownership
of the very men who think that they own the property! The sea and the land
are the possessions of God. So spiritual a prelude as that to the Gospel
of John claims a divine dominion, while many words could be quoted from
both Testaments which make God the one august Possessor. The history of
all our materials leads us back to God alone. He fashioned the wood in
the forests. He stored the coal and iron in the hills. He packed the
fertility in the soil. When we look for the source of the medium of
exchange we must go back of men to God himself. We pursue the gold coin to
the bank, and then to the mint, and then to the mine, only to hear the
silent proclamation of the gold itself that it is of God. When
congregations sing:

  All things come of thee, O God,
  And of thine own have we given thee,

it is not an instance of poetic license in reverence; it is sober fact
expressed in worship.

The claim of the Bible for the divine ownership is still more
comprehensive. All property is his; all men are his. There is, too, a bent
of human power which God confers. We are in the habit of speaking of
"gifted" men. The meaning of the word in its usual connection must be that
God gives certain powers to men--to one the power of poetry, to another
the power of moving speech, and to another the power of scientific and
inventive insight. Now there is a suggestive verse in Deuteronomy which
declares that it is the Lord God that "giveth thee power to get this
wealth." The "thee" is collective and refers to the people; but the rule
applies as well to the individual. There is no reason for supposing that
poetic genius or oratorical genius or inventive genius is a gift, while
financial genius is an achievement. Yet there are probably no men who are
more inclined to call themselves "self-made" than are the men who pass
from poverty into vast wealth. Their complacency would be diminished, and
their humility would be increased, if they perceived that all property
belongs to God, that they themselves belong to God, and that their "power
to get this wealth" comes from God. We find, then, that the first sweeping
principle which the Scriptures give concerning wealth is that God is its
inclusive and ceaseless owner.

The second principle follows as a matter of course. God being the absolute
owner, man is a trustee, a lessee, a borrower. When the man in the New
Testament asked, "Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine
own?" he may not have reached a worthy definition either of "lawful" or of
"mine own." He may have deemed a loan a final gift, a lease a purchase, a
possession a creation, a stewardship an ownership. It is just this error
that more than any other leads to the abuse of wealth. We treat it as
"personal property," and the "personal" looks selfward rather than
Godward. This was the blunder of the foolish rich man. His ground brought
forth plentifully. His crops could not be crowded into his granaries. He
resolved to tear down his barns and to build greater. He told his soul to
eat, drink, and be merry, for that it had much goods laid up for many
years. Then came the sentence of eviction. In a moment the man discovered
that he was a tenant and not an owner. "Whose shall those things be which
thou hast provided?" This is the question that every man of means must
ask. Wills are never shrewd enough to secure the property for the dead.
Jesus said that the man who acted on the idea that wealth was his own was
a "fool." He missed the primary point of the divine ownership, and he
missed the secondary point of the human trusteeship. All his work was
based on impossibilities; and surely this is the supreme foolishness.

This lesson is impressed upon men when they return to their former places
of residence after an absence of many years. They recall who "owned"
yonder house, yonder farm, yonder lot, yonder block. The old "owners" are
gone, and the new "owners" have come. Changes of apparent ownership have
been entered in the civil records; but these in their turn will be
changed. The procession of trustees moves down through the millenniums;
above the trusteeships is one changeless Owner. "We brought nothing into
this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out"--this is the
surest of edicts. It is said that one of the wealthiest of men in our
nation called his wife to his bedside just before he passed away and asked
her to sing to him, "Come, ye sinners, poor and needy." The man knew that
in a few moments he would be stripped of every earthly possession. It was
a pungent reply made when one man asked another how much a certain rich
man had left--"All he had!" was the response. Even so. Whenever any person
shall make a stout claim for his ownership of property, it is a wholesome
lesson if he be asked to postpone the discussion for a hundred years!

The law of giving is compulsory. We may defer surrender, but we cannot
avoid surrender. The hand may grasp for fourscore years, but its final act
will be to "let go" of every earthly object. The loan must be returned.
The trusteeship must be dissolved. The lease must be transferred. The
account must be rendered. Directly all that remains of the gold is the
reflex of gold. We may decide when to give, to what to give, in what
spirit to give; but we may not decide whether we shall give. There is
lasting truth in the much-quoted epitaph: "What I spent I had. What I
saved I left behind. What I gave away I took with me." In this respect the
whole problem of life is the problem of a faithful stewardship. This is
the teaching of what we may call the commercial parables. We are
responsible for the use of our talents and pounds to an authority higher
than our own. The trustees pass away. The Owner abideth forever.

The third biblical principle declares that this stewardship is attended by
grave temptations. For a hasty reading the New Testament judgment will
seem like a reversal of the Old Testament judgment. The ancient record
often traces a relation between piety and prosperity. Jacob's proposal at
Bethel reads like a bargain struck in the market place. The book of Job
was meant to correct this error and to drive from the world those needless
suspicions that would be directed against the sick and the poor. In the
vigorous debate with his friends the patriarch declines to plead guilty to
the charge that his bodily ills and property losses are the results of his
sins. But although the commercial value of piety may often be found among
Old Testament motives, still there is a constant offset. The period of
plenty is described as accompanied by a "leanness of soul." The deeper
insight of the psalmist saw the end of the man "who made not God his
strength, but trusted in the abundance of his riches." Then there stood
before him the perplexing sight of prosperous wickedness, the bad man
spreading himself as the green bay tree and having everything that heart
could wish. Slowly the artificial nexus that had been fashioned between
piety and prosperity and wickedness and misfortune was broken, and men
began to seek for the different types of reward in their own fields. More
stress was laid upon the methods by which wealth was gained, and more upon
its charitable uses. The prophets came to thunder against a false outer
prosperity and to give their advance hints of the wealth of the kingdom of
God.

In its warnings the New Testament is still more emphatic. The word
"riches" becomes most often a symbol of the higher wealth of spirit. It is
made over into deeper meaning. Besides, the early Christian leaders saw
the enticing dangers of wealth. Visits to Ephesus or Corinth or Rome made
them see how multitudes could be caught in the snare of riches, while
examples among the Jews gave them the same lesson with a personal
emphasis. There were likewise some concrete illustrations of a most
forbidding kind. Judas betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. The
lust of the treasury had betrayed him ere he betrayed his Lord. The first
persecution of the Christian Church was caused by greed. It is written,
"And when her masters saw that the hope of their gains was gone, they
caught Paul and Silas, and drew them into the market place unto the
rulers." Soon the two missionaries are beaten with rods and are taken to
the inner prison. The second persecution of the church was caused by the
same spirit of greed. Demetrius, the silversmith, makes his appeal to his
fellow-craftsmen: "Sirs, ye know that by this craft we have our wealth.
Moreover ye see and hear, that not alone at Ephesus, but almost throughout
all Asia, this Paul hath persuaded and turned away much people, saying
that they be no gods, which are made with hands: So that ... this our
craft is in danger to be set at naught." As is the custom of men with the
commercial heart, he lifted the issue to a specious height and made his
plea for Diana of the Ephesians!

With the memory of Christ's betrayal and of the first two persecutions of
their brethren fresh in their memories, it is no marvel that the New
Testament writers began to stress the perils of greed. The work of Luke as
a physician had doubtless given him an intense sympathy with the poor, and
his Gospel records eagerly our Lord's warnings to the rich. James in his
Epistle fairly bristles with indictments against the rich. He asks: "Do
not rich men oppress you, and draw you before the judgment seats? Do not
they blaspheme that worthy name by the which ye are called?" When he wrote
thus did he have visions of Ephesus and Philippi? Later he breaks into
violence, "Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that
shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are
moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall
be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire." The
later verses indicate that he saw their injustice to the poor laborers and
heard the cries which these poor had sent "into the ears of the Lord of
Sabaoth." Severe as the indictment is, we can see how it was prompted by
memory as well as by scenes of recent greed. Moreover, we have all known
modern cases to which the language would apply. If the Bible is to be
complete, it must give room to such indignant words as these.

The records would show that Paul included among his friends men and women
of worldly means; still his words of chiding and warning are not withheld.
He writes of a "cloak of covetousness." He had seen men don that cloak--by
their paltry excuses for withholding gifts; by their effort to make an
intent for the future stifle a present cry for help; by a deft transfer of
income to principal which "must not be disturbed"; by the plea that
luxuries were necessities; by a recital of past generosities; by setting
one good cause against another. All these modern cloaks Paul doubtless
found in the wardrobes of long ago. He carries the charge against
covetousness on until he identifies it with heathenism. He writes of the
"covetousness which is idolatry," and in yet another place he speaks of
the "covetous man who is an idolater," as if he wished to make the charge
personal. Idolatry is the worship of something less than God. When,
therefore, any man bows down to idols of silver and gold erected in banks
rather than by temple altars, he joins the ranks of the idolatrous. He may
be even worse than those idolaters who strive to reach beyond their
hideous images if haply they may feel after God and find him. These words
of Paul are urgent warnings that covetousness may destroy personal
genuineness and may defeat spiritual worship. Greed may shut us away from
both man and God.

But the apostle's strongest word is given in his counsel to Timothy, a
young man whose ideals he would seek to mold. We can imagine the
impression the advice made upon the susceptible youth when he read Paul's
letter in rich and worldly Ephesus. "They that will be rich fall into
temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which
drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root
of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the
faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows." It is a modern
account again. The twentieth century has already given thousands of

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