I
STONES ROLLED AWAY
Gentlemen, I am very much astonished at this
spectacle. I told you last night it was against our principles in Scotland to
have religious meetings on a week night. It seems to me that if you come to a
meeting of this kind you mean business, and you may just as well own it. If a
man comes to a shorthand class, it means that he wants to learn shorthand; and,
if a man turns up at what I suppose I must call a religious meeting, it means
that he is less or more interested in the subject.
Now I should say that I think a man has to give
himself the benefit of that desire, and he should not be ashamed of it. The
facts of religion are real; and, as mere students of life, you and I are bound
to take cognizance of them. Of course, many very fair minded men are kept away
from going into this subject as they would like by a number of exceedingly
surface reasons. I cannot help calling them surface reasons. For instance, you
meet a man who tells you that he doesn't like Christians, that they always put
his back up.
Now, Christians often put my back up. There are
many of them I find, with whom it takes all my time to get along. But that is
not peculiar with Christians. It is only peculiar to peculiar Christians, and
there are just as many of the other sort. A man might just as well say, I don't
like sinners. A man might just as well keep out of the world because he doesn't
like some people in the world, as to keep out of Christian circles because
there are some objectionable creatures in it. We cannot be too fastidious. We
cannot join any sect without having the weaker brethren in it. We cannot get on
in this world entirely by ourselves. We must join this thing and that if we are
going to be of any service at all, so that I think the difficulty of having to
join ourselves with objectionable men applies pretty much all around.
Other men are kept away from Christianity by what
I might call its phrases. A great many people, not so much in your country as
in ours, talk in a dialect. The older people especially, our grandmothers, have
a set of phrases in which all their religion is imbedded, and they can't talk
to us about religion without using those phrases; and when we talk to them, if
we do not use those phrases, we are put out of the synagogue. Now what we can
do in this case is to translate their dialect into our own language, and then
translate into their dialect when we speak back. It is a different dialect. We
would put it upon a different basis; but after all we mean pretty much the same
thing, and if we can once get into this habit of translating our more modern
way of putting things into this antique language that those worthy people use
to us we will find ourselves more at one with them than we think.
I meet another set of men who tell me that they
don't like churches, that they find sermons stale, flat and unprofitable. Now,
if any man here hates a dull sermon, I am with him. I have intense sympathy
with any man who hates dullness. I think the world is far too dull, and that is
one of the greatest reasons why the brightest men should throw themselves into
Christianity to give it a broader phase to other people. One must confess that
some church work, at all events, is not of a very cheerful or lively order. But
of course that is not an argument why one should abstain from religious
service. There are many reasons why we should even sacrifice ourselves and
submit to a little dullness now and again if it is going to gain for us a
greater good. After all, we live by institutions, and by fixed institutions.
There are very few men who are able to get along without steady institutions of
one kind and another. Some men are so tremendously free that they hate to be
tied down to hours, to places and to seasons; but there are very few men big
enough to stand that for a long time. If we look about for it, we will find
some place that we can go and get some good. When a man goes to church really
hungry and goes because he is hungry, he will pick up something, no matter
where it is. Christ himself went to church, and even if we know something more
than the minister knows, the fellowship, the sense of the solidarity of the
Christian church throughout the whole world, the prayer and the inspiration of
the hymn and the reading will at least do us some good. I do not say that a man
cannot be very religious without that. There are tens of thousands of
Christians who never go to church; and there are tens of thousands who go to
church who are not Christians. But, as with substantial meals taken at
intervals, man is no worse and may be much better for it.
The religious life needs keeping up just as the
other parts of our life need keeping up. There is nothing more impossible than
for a man to live a religious life on an hour's work or an hour's thought a
week. A man could not learn French, German or Latin by giving an hour per week
to it; and how can we expect a man to get in this great world of the spirit,
this great moral world, this great ideal region, and learn anything about it by
merely dabbling in it now and again? We must make it a regular business, and,
if the religious part is a vital part of the whole nature, we may as well
attend to it.
You may remember a passage in Mr. Darwin's life.
He says: "In one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty
years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, the poetry of many kinds, such as
the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Coleridge and Shelley, gave me great
pleasure; and even as a school boy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, and
especially in the historical plays. I have always said that pictures gave me
considerable, and music very great, delight. But now for many years I cannot
endure to read a line of poetry. I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, but
found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also lost my taste
for pictures and music. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for
grinding general laws out of large collections of facts. But why this should
have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain, I cannot conceive. If I had
my life to live over again" (this is the point) "I would have made the rule to
read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week." There is
the greatest authority on degeneration confessing to his own personal
degeneration, and in the same paragraph telling us how we may avoid it. He says
by leaving these things out of his life for so many years, although he had a
real liking for them, his nature at these points began to atrophy, and when he
went back to them he found that they disgusted him; and then he says that, if
he had his life to live again, he would have made it a rule to read some poetry
and listen to some music at least once a week, and that would have kept the
thing up. There is nothing magical about religion. If a man is to keep it up,
he must use the means, just as he would use the means to keep up the violin, or
his interest in art of any kind.
I find another set of men who have never got
beyond this difficulty, that they find the Bible a somewhat arid and slow book.
Now, in the first place, I want to say that I have, again, great sympathy with
that objector because, as a matter of fact, there are whole tracts of the Bible
which are distinctly dull, which are written in an archaic language, and about
departments of history in the past which haven't any great living interest for
us now. One must remember that the Bible is not a book, but a library
consisting of a large number of books. By an accident, we have these books
bound up in one as if they were one book; and to say that all the books of the
Bible are dull is simply to pass a literary judgment which is incorrect. It is
not true, as a matter of fact, that all these books of the Bible are dull. Of
course a sailing directory is very flat on the shore; but when a man is at sea
and wants to steer his way through difficult and dangerous wastes, where the
currents are strong and the passages narrow, he wants the best chart he can
get, and he wants to use it as carefully as he can; and when a man wakens up to
the difficulty of life and the reality of its temptations, he wants some such
chart as he gets in that book to help him through.
As a mere literary work, there are books there
that are unsurpassed in the English tongue, and for their teaching, for their
beauty and for their truth they have never been surpassed. Christ's words, of
course, are beyond comparison; but even Paul had a far greater brain than
almost any writer of history.
John's writing is far deeper and more beautiful
than Emerson's, for instance. Let the man who is in love with Emerson, as I am
happy to say I am, take up the book of John just as he would take up Emerson,
and see if he doesn't get in it a great deal that Emerson has, and a great deal
more. If a man doesn't like the Bible, it is because he has never struck the
best parts of it, or because he has never felt any great need in his own life
for its teaching. As a matter of fact, however, reading the Bible is a new
thing. There were Christians for hundreds and hundreds of years before there
was any people's Bible; so that it is not even essential, if you can't overcome
this matter of taste, that you should read the Bible. There are hundreds of
Christians at this moment who cannot read the Bible. There are Christians in
heathen lands in whose language there is as yet no Bible; so that you see there
is no absolute connection between these two things. Besides that, the Bible has
now become diffused through literature to such an extent that you can often get
the heart of the Bible in a very bright and living and practical form through
other forms of literature. If you don't care to get it direct from the book
itself, you can get it from our modern poetry, even from our modern novel; and
Christianity has now been so long in the world and is diffused over so many
things that it reflects itself in almost everything in life. Some one was once
trying to convince a certain lady of that point as they were sitting at dinner;
and he said to her that in the pudding which they had just eaten there was an
egg, and that that morning at breakfast he had also eaten an egg. He saw the
egg at breakfast, but he did not see the egg in the pudding; yet he had no
doubt the egg in the pudding would nourish him just as much as the one he had
for breakfast.
A man may get his nourishment straight out of the
Bible. He may see it there, shell and all; but he may also get his nourishment
mixed up with other ingredients, and it will do him just as much good.
There is another class of men, however, whom none
of these minor difficulties touch--men who have come up to college, and who
have got upset on almost all the main doctrines of Christianity. Now, I want to
confess to you that, so far as I know my old friends, they have all passed
through that stage. Every man who is worth a button passes through that stage.
He loses all the forms of truth which he got in the Sunday School; and, if he
is true to himself, gains them all back again in a richer and larger and more
permanent form. But, between the loss and the gain, there is sometimes a very
painful and dismal interlude, during which the man thinks that he is never
going to believe again, when everything lies in ruin, and he doesn't see where
any reconstruction is to come in. These are dark days and dark years in a man's
life, and they are inevitable to every man who thinks. They are inevitable,
because we are all born doubters. We came into the world asking questions. The
world itself is a sphinx and tempts us to keep on asking questions. There are
no great truths in the world which are not to some extent doubtable; and the
instrument with which we look at truth is largely impaired, and has to be
corrected by long years of experience for its early aberration. So that when we
look at truth we only see part of it, and we see that part of it distorted. The
result is a certain amount of twilight where we expected full day. One
consolation to give that man is to tell him that we have all been through that.
We take it like the measles. It lasts a certain number of months or years, and
then we come out with our constitutions better than ever. There is a real
rationale for that. Everything in the world passes through these stages,
provided it be growing. You remember how the philosophers describe it. They
describe the three great stages as position, opposition and composition.
Position: Somebody lays down a truth, you look at it and say, "Yes, that is
truth." I heard a clergyman say that when I was a boy, and I believed it. Then,
one day, you read a book or hear some one else talk, and he put a query on it;
and then there came the revolt against it, and for a long time your mind was
seething with opposition to this original thing which was positive. And then
you went on and put all these contradictory things together and composed them
into a unity again. You reached the third stage--that of composition.
It is the same with everything. You begin to
learn the piano, and after you have played about a year you think you know all
about it; and you tackle the most difficult pieces, dash away at them, and
think you can do it as well as anybody. Then you go into Boston and hear some
great pianist, and come home a sad man. You see you know nothing about it. For
the next six months you do not touch a single piece. You play scales day after
day and practice finger exercises. Then, after six months, you say: "What is
the use of playing scales? Music does not exist for scales;" and you turn to
your old pieces and play them over again in an entirely different way. You have
got it all back again. There are men here going through the scale period with
regard to religious questions. What is the use of all this opposition? Is it
not time to go back again, you ask, and put all this experience into something,
and get at some truth at the other side? You see the same truth in a novel.
Volume I., they will. Volume II., they won't. Volume III., they do.
We see the same thing in art. A man paints a
picture. He thinks he has painted a grand one. After a few months, some one
comes along and says: "Look here! Look at that boat! You don't call that a
boat? And look at that leaf! That is not a leaf." And you discover that you
have never looked at a boat and never seen a leaf. You are disheartened and do
nothing the next six months but draw boats and leaves; and, after you have
drawn boats and leaves until you are sick, you say: "What is the use of drawing
boats and leaves?" and try again and produce your first landscape. But it is
altogether a different thing from the picture you painted before. Now, when a
man is working over the details of the Christian religion and struggling to get
one thing adjusted and another, he will very soon find out that that does not
amount to much. It is a useful thing, and he has to go through it, but he has
to come out the other side also and put these things together.
The best advice, I think, that can be given to a
man who is in this difficulty is, in the first place, to read the best
authorities on the subject; not to put himself off with cheap tracts and
popular sermons, but to go to the scientific authorities. There are as great
scientific authorities in Germany, in England and in America on all the subject
matter of theology as there are on the subject matter of chemistry or geology.
Go to the authorities. You may not agree with them when you have read them. But
if a man reads all the books on the opposition side he will very naturally get
a distorted view of it. So, for every book he reads on the one side, he should,
in justice, read a book on the other side.
Next, let a man remember that the great thing is
not to think about religion, but to do it. We do not live in a "think" world.
It is a real world. You do not believe that botany lies in the pages of Sachs.
Botany lies out there in the flowers and in the trees, and it is living. And
religion does not live in the pages of the doctrinal books, but in human
life--in conflict with our own temptations, and in the conduct and character of
our fellow beings. When we abandon this "think-world" of ours and get out into
the real world, we will find that, after all, these doubts are not of such
immense importance, and that we can do a great deal of good in the world.
For my part, I have as many doubts on all the
great subjects connected with theology as probably any one here; but they do
not interfere in the very slightest with my trying, in what humble way I can,
to follow out the religion of Christ. They do not even touch that region; and I
don't want to lose these doubts. I don't want any man to rob me of my problem.
I have no liking and little respect for the cock-sure Christian--a man who can
demonstrate some of the most tremendous verities of the faith, as he can the
Fifth Book of Euclid. I want a religion and theology with some of the infinite
about it, and some of the shadow as well as some of the light; and if, by
reading up one of the great doctrines for five or six years, I get some little
light upon it, it is only to find there are a hundred upon which I could spend
another hundred lives. And if I should try to meet some specific point upon
which you are at sea to-night, it would not do you much good. To-morrow a new
difficulty would start in your mind, and you would be simply where you were. I
would be stopping up only one of your wells. You would open another out of the
first book you read. Try to separate theological doctrine from practical
religion. Believe me that you can follow Christ in this University without
having solved any of these problems. Why, there was a skeptic among the first
twelve disciples, and one of the best of them, and one of the most loyal of
them. That man sat down at the first Lord's table, and Christ never said any
hard words against him. He tried to teach him. That is the only attitude, it
seems to me, we can take to Christ still. We can enter His school as scholars,
and sit at His feet and learn what we can; and by doing His will in the
practical things of life, we shall know of this and that doctrine, whether it
be of God. The only use of truth is that it can do somebody some good. The only
use of truth is in its sanctifying power; and that is the peculiarity of the
truth of Christianity, that it has this sanctifying power and makes men
better.
Now you say: "What am I to do? If I am to block
up this avenue and am not to expect very much along the line of mere belief, in
what direction am I to shape my Christian life?" Well, I cannot in the least
answer that. Every man must shape his Christian life for himself, according as
his own talents may lead him; but the great thing to do is simply to become a
follower of Christ. That is to become a Christian. There is nothing difficult
or mysterious about it. A Darwinian is a man who follows Darwin, studies his
books, accepts his views and says, "I am a Darwinian." You look into Christ's
life, into His influence; you look at the needs of the world; you see how the
one meets the other; you look into your own life and see how Christ's life
meets your life; and you say, "I shall follow this teacher and leader until I
get a better." From the time you do that, you are a Christian. You may be a
very poor one. A man who enlists is a very poor soldier for the first few
years, but he is a soldier from the moment he enlists; and the moment a man
takes Christ to be the center of his life that man becomes a Christian. Of
course that makes a great change in his life. His friends will know it
to-morrow. On the steam engine you have seen the apparatus at the side called
the eccentric. It has a different center from all the other wheels. Now, the
Christian man is to some extent an eccentric. His life revolves around a
different center from many people round about him. Of course, it is the other
people who are eccentric because the true center of life is the most perfect
life, the most perfect man, the most perfect ideal; and the man who is
circulating around that is living the most perfect. At the same time, that
man's life will to some extent be different from the lives round about him, and
to some extent he will be a marked man.
But what difference will it make to a man
himself? For one thing, it will keep you straight. I fancy most of the men here
are living straight lives as it is; but it is impossible that every man here
is. Well, I will tell you how to keep your life straight from this time--how
your hunger after righteousness can be met. If you become a Christian, you will
lead a straight life. That is not all. If you become a Christian, you will help
other men to lead straight lives. Seek first the kingdom of God and His
righteousness. The only chance that this world has of becoming a righteous
world is by the contagion of the Christian men in it. I do not know any country
with the splendid pretensions and achievements of America where there is so
much unrighteousness in politics and to some extent in commerce, and where
shady things are not only winked at, but admired. That is acknowledged and
deplored by every right thinking man in the country. I get it, not from
observation, but from yourselves. There is not a day passes that I do not find
men deploring political corruption and the want of commercial integrity, in
some districts of this country, at all events. Now nothing can change that
state of affairs unless such men as yourselves throw your influence on to the
side of righteousness and determine that you will live to make this country a
little straighter than you found it.
There is a career in Christianity as well as an
individual life. How do you test the greatness of a career? You test it by its
influence. Well, can you point me to any influence in the world in the past
which has had anything like the influence of the name to which I have asked you
to give your life's adherence? That life started without a chance of succeeding
in anything, according to the received theories of a successful life. Christ
was born in a manger. If you and I had been born in a manger, the shame of it
would have accompanied us through our whole lives; and yet there is not one of
us born to-day who is not baptized in the name of Christ and who has not a
Christian name. Christ went to no university, and had no education; and there
is not a university in Europe or in America which is not founded in the name of
Christ. This university was founded in the name of Christ. Aye, and the very
money which has gone to build the universities of the world has come from the
followers of Christ. The education of the world, gentlemen, has been done by
the followers of Jesus Christ. Christ had no political influence, and sought
none; yet there is not a President placed in the White House, there is not a
sovereign in Europe placed upon a throne, but acknowledges, in the doing of it
and in public, that the power to do it has come from Christ, and that the
object in doing it is to secure the coming of Christ's kingdom. Take it in any
direction, and you will find that this influence, judged from mere worldly
standards of success, has been supreme.
Napoleon said, "I do not understand that man. He
must have been more than human. I used to be able," he said on St. Helena, "to
get people to die for me. I got hundreds of thousands of them, but I had to be
there. Now that I am here on this island, I can't get a man. But He," said he,
"gets hundreds of thousands of the best men in the world to lay down their
whole lives for Him every day." Judged as mere influence from the standpoint of
an ambitious man like Napoleon, you see that that Life was supreme.
You remember the dinner that Charles Lamb gave to
some literary men, and how they were discussing after dinner what their
attitude would be if certain great figures of the past were to come into their
dining room. After they had all spoken, Lamb said:
"Well, it looks to me like this, that if
Shakespeare entered the room I should rise up to greet him; but if Christ
entered the room, I should kneel down and keep silent."
And so I ask you if you have feelings of that
kind about any figure in history compared to the feelings that spring into your
mind when you try to contemplate that Life. Some of you have never read
Christ's life. You have picked up a parable here and a miracle there, and a
scrap of history between; but you have never read that biography as you have
read the biography of Washington, Webster, or the life of Columbus. Read it. Go
home and read one of the four little books which tell you about His life. Take
Matthew, for instance; and if you don't run aground in the 5th chapter and find
yourself compelled to spend a week over it, you haven't much moral nature left.
I have known men who have tried that experiment, who have begun to read the
gospel of Matthew, and by the time they had finished reading the 5th chapter,
they had thrown in their lot with the Person who forms the subject of that
book. There is no other way of getting to know about Christ unless you read His
life, at least as a beginning. If you want to become a Christian you must read
up, and that is the thing to read. If you like, after that you can read the
other lives of Christ. How do men get to know one another? They simply take to
one another. Two men meet here to-night. They go downstairs and exchange
greetings. To-morrow night they meet in each other's rooms. By the end of a
month they have got to know each other a little, and after another year of
college life they have become sworn friends.
A man becomes a little attracted to Christ. That
grows and grows, into a brighter friendship, and that grows into a great
passion, and the man gives his life to Christ's interest. He counts it the
highest ambition he can have to become a man such as Christ was. You see there
is nothing profound about a religion of that kind. It is a religion that lies
in the line of the ideals a young man forms, and that all the reading that he
meets with from day to day fashions. In fact, it is a man's ideal turning up,
and the man who turns his back upon that is simply turning his back upon his
one chance of happiness in life and of making anything off life. Every life
that is not lived in that time is out of the true current of history, to say
nothing else. It is out of the stream --the main stream that is running through
the ages, and that is going to sweep everything before it. A man who does not
live that life may not be a bad man. The Bible does not say that everybody who
is not a Christian is a notorious sinner; but it says that the man who lives
outside that is wasting his life. He may not be doing wrong, but his life is
lost. "He that loveth his life," Christ said, "shall lose it; and he that
hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal." I am not
ashamed to quote that to you; and I ask you to regard it with the same
validity, and more, that you will give to any other quotation.
You will not accuse me of cant because I have
used sacred words in this talk. There are technical terms in religion just as
in science and philosophy. Just as in science I should speak of protoplasm, of
oxygen or carbonic acid gas, so in talking of religion I must talk about faith
and Jesus Christ. Just as I should quote authorities in speaking of chemistry
or political economy, so I must use authorities in speaking about Christ. You
will not take the words that I have said tonight as a mere expression of
phraseology of a cant description, because it is not that; and I would ask
those of you who are very much frightened to use such words to consider whether
it is not a rational thing and a necessary thing, if you speak at all on this
subject, to use these words. We must not be too fastidious, or thin-skinned, or
particular on a point like that. While we are not in any degree to advertise
our Christianity by our language, there are occasions, and this is one, when
these things are necessary.
I want to say, in closing, that I hear almost
extraordinary accounts of you Harvard men. Robert Browning once came to the
Edinburgh students to talk to them; and he said, after he had gone away, that
he had never in his life seen such a body of young men. Now I have no
acquaintance with you whatever; but I have been asking up and down this
district what sort of men the Harvard men are, and I want to let you know that
you have a fairly good character. So far as I can learn, you have a character
such as none of our Scotch universities have. Now live up to it. Let this
university in the years to come be famous over America not only for its
education, but for its sense of honor and manliness, and purity and
Christianity. Seek first the kingdom of God. You know the whole truth. Live it.
Want of interest in religion does not acquit you of taking your share in it.
Why should I be here to talk to you? A Scotchman hates talking. I believe an
American is dying to talk all the time. Well, I say want of religion does not
absolve you from taking your share of it. The fact that you do not care about
Christ does not alter the fact that Christ cares about you, that He wants you
men, and that His kingdom cannot go on unless He gets such men as you. Are we
to leave the greatest scheme that has ever been propounded to be carried out by
duffers? It is easier, somebody says, to criticise the greatest scheme superbly
than to do the smallest thing possible. The man who is looking on from the
outside sees things in the game that the players do not see. He sees this bit
of bad play and that. Well, stop criticising the game. Take off your coat, and
come and help us. Our side is strong, and it is getting stronger; but we want
the best men. Christianity ought to have the superlative men here in every
department--in classics, in poetry, in literature, in humor, in everything that
goes to the making of a man. The best gifts should be given to Christ. We are
apt to despise Christianity and keep away from it because there are many
weak-minded people in it. That is one reason why we ought to take off our coats
and throw ourselves into it, heart and soul. And I leave you with that appeal.
I appeal to the strong men here to consider their position and see if they can
do anything better with their life than to help on this great cause.