True Manliness

CXV

I believe that the writers of Holy Scripture were directly inspired by God, in a manner, and to an extent, in and to which no other men whose words have come down to us have been inspired. I cannot draw the line between their inspiration and that of other great teachers of mankind. I believe that the words of these, too, just in so far as they have proved themselves true words, were inspired by God. But though I cannot, and man cannot, draw the line, God himself has done so; for these books have been filtered out, as it were, under his guidance, from many others, which, in ages gone by, claimed a place beside them, and are now forgotten, while these have stood for thousands of years, and are not likely to be set aside now. For they speak if men will read them, to needs and hopes set deep in our human nature, which no other books have ever spoken to, or ever can speak to, in the same way – they set forth his government of the world as no other books ever have set it forth, or ever can set it forth.

But though I do not believe that the difference between the inspiration of Isaiah and Shakespeare is expressible by words, the difference between the inspiration of the Holy Scripture – the Bible as a whole – and any other possible or conceivable collection of the utterances of men seems to me clear enough. The Bible has come to us from the Jewish nation, which was chosen by God as the one best fitted to receive for all mankind, and to give forth to all mankind, the revelation of Him – to teach them His name and character – that is, to enable them to know Him and in knowing Him, to feel how they and the world need redemption, and to understand how they and the world have been redeemed. This Bible, this Book of the chosen people, taken as a whole, has done this, is in short the written revelation of God. This being so, there can be no other inspired book in the same sense in which the Bible is inspired, unless we, or some other world, are not redeemed, require another redemption and another Christ. But as we and all worlds are redeemed, and Christ is come, and God has revealed his name and his character in Christ so that we can know Him, the Bible is and must remain the inspired Book, the Book of the Church for all time, to which nothing can be added, from which nothing can be taken, as they will find who try to take from it or add to it. There may be another Homer, Plato, Shakespeare; there can be no other Bible.

CXVI

The longing for a Deliverer and Redeemer of himself and his race was the strongest and deepest feeling in the heart of every Jewish patriot. His whole life was grounded and centred on the promise and hope of such an one. Just therefore when his utterances would be most human and noble, most in sympathy with the cries and groanings of his own nation and the universe, they would all point to and centre in that Deliverer and Redeemer – just in so far as they were truly noble, human, and Godlike, they would shadow forth His true character, the words He would speak, the acts He would do. Doubtless the prophet would have before his mind any notable deliverance, and noble sufferer, or deliverer of his own time; his words would refer to these. But from these he would be inevitably drawn up to the great promised Deliverer and Redeemer of his nation and his race, because he would see after all how incomplete the deliverance wrought by these must be, and his faith in the promise made to his fathers and to his nation – the covenant of God in which he felt himself to be included – would and could be satisfied with nothing less than a full and perfect deliverance, a Redeemer who should be the Head of men, the Son of man, and the Son of God.

Men may have insisted, may still insist, on seeing all sorts of fanciful references to some special acts of his in certain words of the Bible. But I must again insist that men’s fancies about the Bible and Christ are not the question, but what the Bible itself says, what Christ is. The whole book is full of Him, there is no need to read Him into any part of it as to which there can be any possible doubt.

Holding this faith as to the Scriptures, I am not anxious to defend them. I rejoice that they should be minutely examined and criticised. They will defend themselves, one and all, I believe. Men may satisfy themselves – perhaps, if I have time to give to the study, they may satisfy me – that the Pentateuch was the work of twenty men; that Baruch wrote a part of Isaiah; that David did not write the Psalms, or the Evangelists the Gospels; that there are interpolations here and there in the originals; that there are numerous and serious errors in our translation. What is all this to me? What do I care who wrote them, what is the date of them, what this or that passage ought to be? They have told me what I wanted to know. Burn every copy in the world to-morrow, you don’t and can’t take that knowledge from me, or any man. I find them all good for me; so, as long as a copy is left, and I can get it, I mean to go on reading them all, and believing them all to be inspired.

CXVII

Our Lord came proclaiming a kingdom of God, a kingdom ordained by God on this earth, the order and beauty of which the unruly and sinful wills of men had deformed, so that disease, and death, and all miseries and disorder, had grown up and destroyed the order of it, and thwarting the perfectly loving will of God.

In asserting this kingdom and this order, our Lord claimed (as he must have claimed if indeed he were the Son of God) dominion over disease and death. This dominion was lower than that over the human heart and will, but he claimed it as positively. He proved his claim to be good in other ways, but specially for our present purpose by healing the sick, and raising the dead. Were these works orderly or disorderly? Every one of them seems to me to be the restoring of an order which had been disturbed. They were witnesses for the law of life, faithful and true manifestations of the will of a loving Father to his children.

Yes, you may say, but he did other miracles besides those of healing. He turned water into wine, stilled the waves, multiplied loaves and fishes. These at any rate were capricious suspensions of natural laws. You say you believe in natural laws which have their ground in God’s will. Such laws he suspended or set aside in these cases. Now were these suspensions orderly?

I think they were. The natural laws which Christ suspended, such as the law of increase, are laws of God. Being his laws, they are living and not dead laws, but they are not the highest law; there must be a law of God, a law of his mind, above them, or they would be dead tyrannous rules. Christ seems to me to have been asserting the freedom of that law of God by suspending these natural laws, and to have been claiming here again, as part of his and our birthright, dominion over natural laws.

All the other miracles, I believe, stand on the same ground. None have been performed except by men who felt that they were witnessing for God, with glimpses of his order, full of zeal for the triumph of that order in the world, and working as Christ worked, in his spirit, and in the name of his Father, or of him. If there are any miracles which do not on a fair examination fulfil these conditions – which are such as a loving Father educating sons who had strayed from or rebelled against him would not have done – I am quite ready to give them up.

CXVIII

You have another charge against Christianity. You say it is after all a selfish faith, in which, however beautiful and noble the moral teaching may be, the ultimate appeal has always been to the hope of reward and fear of punishment. You will tell me that in ninety-nine of our churches out of a hundred I shall hear this doctrine, and shall find it in ninety-nine out of every hundred of theological or religious works.

If it be so I am sorry for it. But I am speaking of Christ’s Gospel, and I say that you will not find the doctrine you protest against there. I cannot go through our Lord’s teaching and his disciples’ to prove this. I ask you to read for yourselves, bringing honest and clear heads to the study, and not heads full of what you have thought, or this and the other man has preached or written, and I say that then you will give up this charge.

But as I have tried to do in all other cases, so here, I will tell you exactly what my own faith on this matter is.

Christ has told me that the only reward I shall ever get will be “life eternal,” and that life eternal is to know God and Him. That is all the reward I care about. The only punishment I can ever bring on myself will be, to banish myself from his presence and the presence of all who know him, to dwell apart from him and my brethren, shut up in myself. That is the only punishment I dread.

But this reward he has given us already, here. He has given us to know God, and knowing God involves entering his kingdom, and dwelling in it. That kingdom Christ has opened to you, and to me, here. We, you and I may enter in any hour we please. If we don’t enter in now, and here, I can’t see how we are ever likely to enter in in another world. Why should not we enter in? It is worth trying. There are no conditions. It is given for the asking.

I think you will find it all you are in search of and are longing for. Above all, you will find in it and nowhere else, rest, peace – “not a peace which depends upon compacts and bargains among men, but which belongs to the very nature and character and being of God. Not a peace which is produced by the stifling and suppression of activities and energies, but the peace in which all activities and energies are perfected and harmonized. Not a peace which comes from the toleration of what is base or false, but which demands its destruction. Not a peace which begins from without, but a peace which is first wrought in the inner man, and thence comes forth to subdue the world. Not a peace which a man gets for himself by standing aloof from the sorrows and confusions of the world in which he is born, of the men whose nature he shares, choosing a calm retreat and quiet scenery and a regulated atmosphere; but a peace which has never thriven except in those who have suffered with their suffering kind, who have been ready to give up selfish enjoyments, sensual or spiritual, for their sakes, who have abjured all devices of escape from ordained toils and temptations; the peace which was His who bore the sorrows and sins and infirmities of man, who gave up himself that he might become actually one with them, who thus won for them a participation in the Divine nature, and inheritance in that peace of God which passeth all understanding.”

This kingdom of God is good enough for me at any rate. I can trust him who has brought me into it to add what he will, to open my eyes, and strengthen my powers, that I may see and enjoy ever more and more of it, in this world, or in any other in which he may put me hereafter. Where that may be is no care of mine; it will be in his kingdom still, that I know; no power in Heaven or Hell, or Earth can cast me out of that, except I myself. While I remain in it I can freely use and enjoy every blessing and good gift of his glorious earth, the inheritance which he has given to us, his father’s children, his brethren. When it shall be his good pleasure to take me out of it he will not take me out of but bring me into more perfect communion with him and with my brethren. He nourisheth my heart with good things on this earth, he will not cease to do this anywhere else. He reveals himself to me here, though as a man I cannot take in his full and perfect revelation, but when I awake up after his likeness I shall be satisfied – and not till then.

CXIX

One stumbling block in your way is, you say, that you are revolted and kept at arm’s-length by the separatist and exclusive habits and maxims of those who profess to have the faith you want. Many of them are kind, exemplary men, but just because they are Christians, and in so far forth as they are Christians, they are calling to you to come out from amongst the people of the world – to separate yourselves from an adulterous generation.

Against this call something which you know to be true and noble in you rises up. You have felt that what your age is crying out for, is union. You acknowledge the power of that cry in your own hearts. You want to feel with all men, and for all men. If you need a faith at all, it is one which shall meet that cry, which shall teach you how all men are bound together; not how some may be separated from the rest. You will not be false to your age. You will have no faith at all, or a faith for all mankind.

Keep to that; take nothing less than that; only look again and see whether that is not just what Christ offers you. Again I urge you not to look at his followers, real or professing – look at him, look at his life.

Was He exclusive? Did ever man or woman come near him and he turn away? Did he not go amongst all ranks, into every society? Did he not go to the houses of great men and rulers; of Pharisees, of poor men, of publicans? Did he not frequent the temple, the marketplace, the synagogue, the sea-shore, the hillside, the haunts of outcasts and harlots? Was he not to be found at feasts and at funerals? Wherever men and women were to be found, there was his place and his work; and there is ours. He who believes in him must go into every society where he has any call whatever. Who are we that we should pick and choose? The greatest ruffian, the most abandoned woman, that ever walked the face of this earth, were good enough for our Lord to die for. If he sends us amongst them, he will take care of us, and has something for us to do or speak, for or to them. The greatest king, the holiest saint on earth, is not too high company for one for whom Christ died, as he did for you and me. So, if he sends us amongst great or holy people, let us go, and learn what he means us to learn there.

I know how deeply many of you feel and mourn over the miseries and disorder of England and the world – how you long to do something towards lightening ever so small a part of those miseries, rescuing ever so small a corner of the earth from that disorder. I know well how earnestly many of you are working in one way or another for your country and your brethren. I know what high hopes many of you have for the future of the world and the destiny of man. I say, mourn on, work on; abate not one jot of any hope you have ever had for the world or for man. Your hopes, be they what they may, have never been high enough – your work never earnest enough. But I ask you whether your hopes and your work have not been marred again and again, whether you have not been thrown back again and again into listlessness and hopelessness, by failures of one kind or another, whether you have not felt that those failures have been caused more or less by your own uncertainty, by your having had to work and fight without a leader, with comrades to whom you were bound only by chance, to journey without any clear knowledge of the road you were going, or where it led to?

At such times have you not longed for light and guidance? What would you have not given for a well of light and hope and strength, springing up within you and renewing your powers and energies? What would you not have given for the inward certainty that the road you were travelling was the right one, however you might stumble on it; that the line of battle in which you stood was the line for all true men, and was marching break at the point which had been given you to hold, whatever might become of you? Well, be sure that light and guidance, that renewal of strength and hope, that certainty as to your side and your road, you are meant to have; they have been prepared, and are ready, for every man of you, whenever you will take them. The longings for them are whispered in your hearts by the Leader, whose cross, never turned back, ever triumphing more and more over all principalities and powers of evil, blazes far ahead in the van of our battles. He has been called the Captain of our Salvation, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Lamb who was slain for the world; He has told us his name, the Son of God and the Son of Man; He has claimed to be the redeemer, deliverer, leader of mankind.

CXX

My younger brothers, I am not speaking to you the words of enthusiasm or excitement, but the words of sober every-day knowledge and certainty. I tell you that all the miseries of England and of other lands consist simply in this and in nothing else, that we men, made in the image of God, made to know him, to be one with him in his Son, will not confess that Son our Lord and Brother, to be the Son of God and Son of man, the living Head of our race and of each one of us. I tell you that if we would confess him and lay hold of him and let him enter into and rule and guide us and the world, instead of trying to rule and guide ourselves and the world without him, we should see and know that the kingdom of God is just as much about us now as it will ever be. I tell you that we should see all sorrow and misery melting away and drawn up from this fair world of God’s like mountain mist before the July sun.

CXXI

I do not ask you to adopt any faith of mine. But as you would do good work in your generation, I ask of you to give yourselves no peace till you have answered these questions, each one for himself, in the very secret recesses of his heart, “Do I, does my race, want a head? Can we be satisfied with any less than a Son of man and a Son of God? Is this Christ, who has been so long worshipped in England, He?”

If you can answer, though with faltering lips, “Yes, this is He,” I care very little what else you accept, all else that is necessary or good for you will come in due time, if once he has the guidance of you.

CXXII

My faith has been no holiday or Sunday faith, but one for every-day use; a faith to live and die in, not to argue or talk about. It has had to stand the wear and tear of life; it was not got in prosperity. It has had to carry me through years of anxious toil and small means, through the long sicknesses of those dearer to me than my own life, through deaths amongst them both sudden and lingering. Few men of my age have had more failures of all kinds; no man has deserved them more, by the commission of all kinds of blunders and errors, by evil tempers, and want of faith, hope, and love.

Through all this it has carried me, and has risen up in me after every failure and every sorrow, fresher, clearer, stronger. Why do I say “it?” I mean He. He has carried me through it all; He who is your Head and the Head of every man, woman, child, on this earth, or who has ever been on it, just as much as he is my Head. And he will carry us all through every temptation, trial, sorrow, we can ever have to encounter, in this world or any other, if we will only turn to him, lay hold of him, and cast them all upon him, as he has bidden us.

My younger brothers, you on whom the future of your country, under God, at this moment depends, will you not try him? Is he not worth a trial?

CXXIII

Precious as his love was to him, and deeply as it affected his whole life, Tom felt that there must be something beyond it – that its full satisfaction would not be enough for him. The bed was too narrow for a man to stretch himself on. What he was in search of must underlie and embrace his human love, and support it. Beyond and above all private and personal desires and hopes and longings, he was conscious of a restless craving and feeling about after something which he could not grasp, and yet which was not avoiding him, which seemed to be mysteriously laying hold of him and surrounding him.

The routine of chapels, and lectures, and reading for degree, boating, cricketing, Union-debating – all well enough in their way – left this vacuum unfilled. There was a great outer visible world, the problems and puzzles of which were rising before him and haunting him more and more; and a great inner and invisible world opening round him in awful depth. He seemed to be standing on the brink of each – now, shivering and helpless, feeling like an atom about to be whirled into the great flood and carried he knew not where – now, ready to plunge in and take his part, full of hope and belief that he was meant to buffet in the strength of a man with the seen and the unseen, and to be subdued by neither.

CXXIV

Far on in the quiet night he laid the whole before the Lord and slept! Yes, my brother, even so: the old, old story; but start not at the phrase, though you may never have found its meaning. – He laid the whole before the Lord, in prayer, for his friend, for himself, for the whole world.

And you, too, if ever you are tried – as every man must be in one way or another – must learn to do the like with every burthen on your soul, if you would not have it hanging round you heavily, and ever more heavily, and dragging you down lower and lower till your dying day.

CXXV

The English prejudice against Franklin on religious grounds is quite unreasonable. He was suspected of being a Freethinker, and was professedly a philosopher and man of science; he was a friend of Tom Paine and other dreadful persons; he had actually published “An Abridgment of the Church Prayer-Book,” dedicated “to the serious and discerning,” by the use of which he had the audacity to suppose that religion would be furthered, unanimity increased, and a more frequent attendance on the worship of God secured. Any one of these charges was sufficient to ruin a man’s religious reputation in respectable England of the last generation, but it is high time that amends were made in these days. Let us glance at the real facts. As a boy, Franklin had the disease which all thoughtful boys have to pass through, and puzzled himself with speculations as to the attributes of God and the existence of evil, which landed him in the conclusion that nothing could possibly be wrong in the world, and that vice and virtue were empty distinctions. These views he published at the mature age of nineteen, but became disgusted with them almost immediately, and abandoned metaphysics for other more satisfactory studies. Living in the eighteenth century, when happiness was held to be “our being’s end and aim,” he seems to have now conformed to that popular belief; but as he came also to the conclusion that “the felicity of life” was to be attained through “truth, sincerity, and integrity in dealings between man and man,” and acted up to this conclusion, no great objection from a moral or religious standpoint can be taken to this stage of his development. At the age of twenty-two he composed a little liturgy for his own use, which he fell back on when the sermons of the minister of the only Presbyterian church in Philadelphia had driven him from attendance at chapel. He did not, however, long remain unattached, and after his marriage joined the Church of England, in which he remained till the end of his life. What his sentiments were in middle life may be gathered from his advice to his daughter on the eve of his third departure for England: “Go constantly to church, whoever preaches. The act of devotion in the Common Prayer-Book is your principle business there, and if properly attended to will do more toward amending the heart than sermons… I do not mean you should despise sermons, even of the preachers you dislike, for the discourse is often much better than the man, as sweet and clear waters come through very dirty earth. I am the more particular on this head as you seem to express some inclination to leave our church, which I would not have you do.” As an old man of eighty, he reminded his colleagues of the National Convention (in moving unsuccessfully that there should be daily prayers before business) how in the beginnings of the contest with Britain “we had daily prayers in this room… Do we imagine we no longer need assistance? I have lived now a long time, and the longer I live the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God rules in the affairs of men.” Later yet, in answer to President Yates, of Yale College, who had pressed him on the subject, he writes, at the age of eighty-four: “Here is my creed: I believe in one God, the Creator of the universe; that he governs it by his providence; that he ought to be worshipped; that the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children; that the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this.” These are his “fundamentals,” beyond which he believes that Christ’s system of morals and religion is the best the world is ever likely to see, though it has been much corrupted. To another friend he speaks with cheerful courage of death, which “I shall submit to with less regret as, having seen during a long life a good deal of this world, I feel a growing curiosity to be acquainted with some other; and can cheerfully, with filial confidence, resign my spirit to the conduct of that great and good Parent of mankind who has so graciously protected and prospered me from my birth to the present hour.” One more quotation we cannot resist; it is his farewell letter to his old friend David Hartley: “I cannot quit the coasts of Europe without taking leave of my old friend. We were long fellow-laborers in the best of all works, the work of peace. I leave you still in the field, but, having finished my day’s task, I am going home to bed. Wish me a good night’s rest, as I do you a pleasant evening. Adieu, and believe me ever yours most affectionately, – B. Franklin.”