i
things present and things to come
anaxagoras said twenty-five hundred years ago that men are always cutting the world in two with a hatchet. william james, in one of his living phrases, says with the same import that everybody dichotomizes the cosmos. it is so. we all incline to bisect life into alternative possibilities. we split realities into opposing halves. we show a kind of fascination for an “either-or” selection. we are prone to use the principle of parsimony, and to be content with one side of a dilemma. history presents a multitude of dualistic pairs from which one was supposed to make his individual selection. there was the choice between this world and the next world; the here and the yonder; the flesh and the spirit; faith and reason; the sacred and the secular; the outward and the inward, and many[99] more similar alternatives. this “either-or” method always leaves its trail of leanness behind. it makes life thin and narrow where it might be rich and broad, for in almost every case it is just as possible to have a whole as to have a half, to take both as to select an alternative. st. paul found his corinthians bisecting their spiritual lives and narrowing their interests to one or two possibilities. one of them would choose paul as his representative of the truth and then see no value in the interpretation which apollos had to give. another attached himself to apollos and missed all the rich contributions of paul. some of the “saints” of the church selected cephas as the only oracle, and they lost all the breadth which would have come to them had they been able to make a synthesis of the opposing aspects. st. paul called them from their divided half to a completed whole. he told them that instead of “either-or” they could have both. “all things are yours; whether paul or apollos, or cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present or things to come, all are yours; and ye are christ’s and christ is god’s.” this is the method of synthesis. this is the substitution of wholes for halves, the proffer of both for an “either-or” alternative.
[100]
that last pair of alternatives is an interesting one, and many persons make their bisecting choice of life there. one well-known type of person focuses on the near, the here and now, the things present. those who belong to this class propose to make hay while the sun shines. they glory in being practical. they have what doctors call myopia. they see only the near. their lenses will not adjust for the remote. they believe in quick returns and bank upon practical results. those of the other type have presbyopia, or far-sightedness. they are dedicated to the far-away, the remote, the yonder. they are pursuing rainbows and distant ideals. they are so eager for the millennium that they forget the problem of their street and of the present day. browning has given us a picture of both these types:
“that low man seeks a little thing to do,
sees it and does it:
this high man, with a great thing to pursue,
dies ere he knows it.
that low man goes on adding one to one,
his hundred’s soon hit:
this high man, aiming at a million,
misses an unit.”
[101]
browning’s sympathies are plainly with the “high man” who misses the unit, but it is one more case of unnecessary dichotomy. what we want is the discovery of a way to unite into one synthesis things present and things to come. we need to learn how to seize this narrow isthmus of a present and to enrich it with the momentous significance of past and future. henry bergson has been telling us that all rich moments of life are rich just because they roll up and accumulate the meaning of the past and because they are crowded with anticipations of the future. they are fused with memory and expectation, and one of these two factors is as important as the other. if either dies away the present becomes a useless half, like the divided parts of the child which solomon proposed to bisect for the two contending mothers.
we are at one of those momentous ridges of time at the present moment. some are so busy with the near and immediately practical that they cannot see the far vision of the world that is to be built. others are so impressed with past issues that have become paramount, with the glorious memories of the blessed monroe doctrine, for instance, that they have no expectant eyes for the creation of an interrelated and unified[102] world. another group is so concerned with the social millennium that they discount the lessons of the past, the message of history, the wisdom of experience, and fly to the useless task of constructing abstract human paradises and dreams of a world-kingdom which could exist only in a realm where men had ceased to be men.
what we want is a synthesis of things present and things to come, a union of the practical, tested experience of life and the inspired vision of the prophet who sees unfolding the possibilities of human life raised to its fuller glory in christ, the incarnation of the way of love, which always has worked, is working now, and always will work.
ii
two types of ministry
most people like to be told what they already think. they enjoy hearing their own opinions and ideas promulgated, and no amens are so hearty as the ones which greet the reannouncement of views we have already held.
the natural result is that speakers are apt to give their hearers what they want. they take[103] the line of least resistance and say what will arouse the enthusiasm of the people before them, and they get their quick reward. they are popular at once. there is a high tide of emotion as they proceed to tell what everybody present already thinks, and they soon find themselves in great demand.
the main trouble with such an easy ministry is that it isn’t worth doing. it accomplishes next to nothing. it merely arouses a pleasurable emotion and leaves lives where they were before. and yet not quite where they were either, for the constant repetition of things we already believe dulls the mind and deadens the will and weakens rather than strengthens the power of life. it is an easy ministry both for speakers and hearers, but it is ominous for them both.
the prophet has a very different task. he cannot give people what they want. he is under an unescapable compulsion to give them what his soul believes to be true. he cannot take lines of least resistance; he must work straight up against the current. he cannot work for quick effects; he must slowly educate his people and compel them to see what they have not seen before. the amens are very slow to come to his words, and he cannot look for emotional thrills.[104] he must risk all that is dear to himself, except the truth, as he sets himself to his task, and he is bound to tread lonely wine-presses before he can see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied.
every age has these two types of ministry. they are both ancient and familiar. there are always persons who are satisfied to give what is wanted, who are glad to cater to popular taste, who like the quick returns. but there are, too, always a few souls to be found who volunteer for the harder task. they forego the amens and patiently teach men to see farther than they have seen before. their first question is not, what do people want me to say? but, what is god’s truth which to-day ought to be heard through me? and knowing that, they speak. they do not move their hearers as the other type does; they do not reach so many, and they miss the popular rewards—but they are compassed about by a great cloud of witnesses as they fight their battles for the truth, and they have their joy.
but this is not quite all there is to say. it is not possible to teach the new effectively without linking it up with the old. the wholly new is generally not true. new, fresh truth emerges out of ancient experience; it does not drop like a[105] shooting star from the distant skies. the great prophets in all ages have lived close to the people. they have not had their “ear to the ground,” to use a political phrase, but they have understood the human heart. they have lived in the great currents of life. they have heard the going in the mulberry trees, and have felt the breaking forth of the dawning light just because of their double union with men and god.
all sound pedagogy recognizes this principle. the good teacher knits the new material which he wishes learned on to the old and familiar. he takes his student forward by gradual stages, not by leaps and bounds, and he binds the known and unknown together by rational synthesis, not by some strange, foreign, magical glue. the more we wish to belong to the prophet-class and to raise our hearers to new and greater levels of truth and insight, the more we shall strive to understand the truth that has already been revealed, to saturate ourselves with it, to fuse and kindle our lives with those immense realities by which men in past ages have lived and conquered. so, and only so, can we go forward and take others forward with us to new experiences and to new discoveries of the light that never was on sea or land.
[106]
iii
“we have seen his star”
every time the christmas anniversary returns, the heart renews its youthful joy in the thrilling stories of the nativity. we cannot be too thankful for the inspiration and poetry and imagination which touch and glorify every aspect of our religious faith. some dull and leaden-minded pedants appear to think that the “real” christ is the person we get when we take, for the construction of our figure, only those facts about him which can be rationalistically, historically, and critically verified. we are thus reduced to a few religious ideas, a little group of “sayings,” a tiny body of events, which explain none of the immense results that followed. the real christ, on the contrary, is this rich, wonderful, mysterious, baffling person whose life was vastly greater even than his deeds or his words, who aroused the wonder and imagination of all who came in contact with him, who touched everything with emotion, and fused religion forever with poetry and feeling. he, in a very true sense,
“ ... touches all things common,
till they rise to touch the spheres.”
[107]
not only over the manger, but over the entire story of his life, hovers the glory of the star. it is a life that will not stay down on the dull earth of mere fact; it always rises into the region of idealism and beauty. it always transcends the things of sight and touch. we have a religion which cannot be confined in a system of doctrine or a code of ethics; it partakes too intimately of life for that. it is, like its founder, a full rounded reality, rich in inspiration and emotion and wonder, as well as in intellectual ideas and truth. when the star wanes and imagination falls away, and we hold in our thin hands only the husks of a dead system, the power of religion is over.
the same thing is true of the cross. its power lies in the fullness and richness of the reality. we do not want to reduce it, but to raise it to its full meaning and glory as a way of complete life. the direction of present-day christianity is certainly not away from calvary, but quite the opposite. the men who are in these days trying to deliver our religion from formalism and tradition find not less meaning in the cross than a former generation did, but vastly more. the atonement remains at the center, as it has always done, in vital christianity. all attempts to reduce[108] christianity to a dry and bloodless system of philosophy, with the appeal of the heart left out, fail now as they have always failed. it is a savior that men, tangled in their sins and their sorrows, still want—not merely a great thinker or a great teacher.
the church has, no doubt, far too much neglected the idea of the kingdom of god as christ expounded it in sermon and parable, and hosts of prominent christians do not at all understand what this great, central teaching of the master meant then and means now. his transforming revelation of the nature of god has, too, been missed by multitudes, who still hold jewish rather than christian conceptions of god. but patient study of the gospel is slowly forcing these ideas into the thought of men everywhere, and books abound now which make his teaching clear and luminous.
what is needed above everything else now is that we shall not lose any of our vision of christ as savior, and that we shall live our lives in his presence. it is through the cross that we touch closest to the savior-heart, and it is here that we feel our lives most powerfully moved by the certainty of his divine nature. arguments may fail, but one who looks steadily at this voluntary sufferer,[109] giving himself for us, will cry out, with one of old, “my lord and my god.”
nothing short of that will do, i believe, if christianity is to remain a saving religion. good men have died in all ages; great teachers have again and again gone to their deaths in behalf of their truth or out of love for their disciples. it touches us as we read of their bravery and their loyalty, but we do not and we cannot build a world-saving religion upon them. christ is different! we feel that in him the veil is lifted and we are face to face with god. when we hear with our hearts the words, “in the world ye shall have tribulation; but fear not, for i have overcome the world,” we feel that we are hearing the triumph of god in the midst of suffering—we are hearing of an eternal triumph. christ can not be for us less than god manifested here in a world of time and space and finiteness, doing in time what god does in eternity—suffering over sin, entering vicariously into the tragedy of evil, and triumphing while he treads the winepress. no one has fathomed the awfulness of sin, until, in some sense, he feels that his sin makes god suffer, that it crucifies him afresh. if christ is god revealed in time—made visible and vocal to men—then, through the cross, we[110] shall discover that we are not to think of god henceforth as sovereign—not a being yonder, enjoying his royal splendor. we must think of him all the time in terms of christ. he is an eternal lover of our hearts. we pierce him with our sins; we wound him with our wickedness. he suffers, as mothers who love suffer, and he enters vicariously into all the tragic deeps of our lives, striving to bring us home to him. jan ruysbroeck says:
“you must love the love which loves you everlastingly, and if you hold fast by his love, he remakes you by his spirit, and then joy is yours. the spirit of god breathes into you, and you breathe it out in rest and joy and love. this is eternal life, just as in our mortal life we breathe out the air that is in us and breathe in fresh air.”
