A Day at a Time, and Other Talks on Life and Religion

There is, for example, the question of material goods. It's easy to talk unreal nonsense here, and we all must confess to wishing to have more of this sort of property than we do possess. But I honestly believe that the Apostle Paul did not greatly concern himself whether he was, materially speaking, well-off or ill-off. There are other men that one knows who have attained to the same point of view. There's no question either that for those whose religion is a vital thing it is the right point of view. The real man is independent of either riches or poverty, because the real man is the man inside. Riches is not you. Poverty is not you. You are what you are in your inner spirit. The riches there are invisible, but they are eternal-love, faith, hope, peace. And the man who has these, as Paul had them, can honestly say that it is of relatively small moment whether he is in a material sense, rich or poor.

Or take the question of friendship. Who can tell in adequate words what it means to have one true, loyal friend? But it has happened sometimes that the very closest friendships are broken and a man has to stand alone, not by his own choice, but in the grim ordering of things. There is a higher obligation than that you keep faith with your friends. First and foremost you must keep faith with yourself, with your own conscience, with the voice within. And it may be that obedience to that involves seeming disloyalty to your friends, either for a while or permanently.

Such a time came to Paul. He had for conscience' sake to stand alone; and he did it. He was able to do it because his life did not rest for its ultimate pillar on his friendships any more than on his riches. Paul's real life was within. That inner life of his was enriched and made radiant and constant by one supreme fact-he believed that Jesus Christ his Lord deigned to share it with him in spirit. It is not irreverent to say that in his inner soul Paul lived with Christ.

Maybe his words are too big for us to use, but each of us who, at some hard bit of our journey, has appealed beyond friends to the Christ within, saying, "I have done, O Lord, what seemed to me right. And my friends are hurt and angry. But Thou knowest" – that man has learned, even in a slight degree, that there is a nearer and truer blessing possible for sinful men than even human friendship.

Then there is another thing that has sometimes to be done without. There are privileges that belong to every Christian man and woman, and are in a sense their birthright-the sense of God, confidence, quietness of heart, hope. There is no doubt that every real Christian should be walking and working in the light and gladness of God's presence.

But it is just as clear that not all are so blessed. It may be their own fault. Doubtless in many cases it is. Or it may be temperament or outward circumstances that determine it. Anyhow, many have to walk, not in the light but in uncertainty, perplexity, and misgiving, and sometimes even in darkness.

But "a bird is a bird even though it cannot sing." And a Christian is a Christian still even though his soul is dark within him, and he goes on in fear, never daring to look up and hope at all.

That is spiritual abasement. It ought not to be. It is never to be lightly acquiesced in. But it happens sometimes to earnest men and women, and it seems to be the settled condition of a few. Is it possible to do without these things? Can a man manage to exist and even move forward who has for a while lost his hold on his faith and on God? There are good and godly men who have done it. Brother Lawrence did it. Robertson of Brighton did it. Horace Bushnell did it. And many, many more. When all that they held most precious in faith had been eclipsed for the time, they steered still by the little light they knew. Though there should be no heaven, they resolved that they were called to be pure, truthful, patient, kind, since these things could never be wrong. Though there were no Christ, they would still follow where He had once seemed to invite them. And so doing and so following they came again to know. The darkness passed, and faith and gladness returned. They had lost hold of God for a little, but He had never lost hold of them. And, brethren, whatever the doubt or darkness be, that's always true. That is what makes it possible at all. That is what may make it even blessed. For

"It's better to walk in the dark with GodThan to walk alone in the light;Better to walk with God by faithThan to walk alone by sight."PRAYER

Our Gracious God and Father in Heaven, whether Thou dost appoint for us poverty or riches, save us from thinking that a man's life consisteth in the abundance of the things which he possesseth. Beyond all our friendships, be Thou our Friend and Helper, and grant us to seek first the blessing of our God. Make us very sure, for their comforting and our own, that when men in their darkness sorely seek Thy face, the very ache of their quest is token that Thou hast already found them. For Jesus' sake. Amen.

"And Moses said, I will now

turn aside and see this great sight."

(EXODUS iii. 3.)

XXVII

WONDER

Moses, adds one commentator significantly, was then eighty years of age. By the ordinary standards, he was an old man, yet he had not lost his youthful sense of wonder. It is a good sign, the best of signs, when a man has lived so long and yet finds wonder in his heart. It is a bad sign when a man at any age, or when a generation of men, find nothing in all God's world to wonder at.

Yet in many quarters it is regarded as the correct attitude to refrain from expressing surprise at anything, no matter how striking. The utmost concession to be made to what is really wonderful is a languid and patronising "Really?" That is always a pitiful thing. For where there is no wonder there can be no religion worthy of the name.

The instinct of worship and the instinct of wonder are very intimately related. And where the one has died, the other cannot be in a very healthy state. "I had rather," said Ruskin once, "live in a cottage and wonder at everything, than live in Warwick Castle and wonder at nothing." And his preference is to be commended. For he who has never wondered has never thought about God in any way to be called thinking.

It was our Lord Himself who said that the ideal of religion was the child-like heart. Everyone knows that these little people are always being brought to a halt to wonder at something. And Heaven is in very truth nearer to them then, and they are more truly filled with its spirit, than either you or I are when the glory and bloom of this world unfold before our eyes, or the thought of the Infinite and Eternal God comes to us and we have not felt impelled to bow our heads in silence and worship, spell-bound, and in a godly fear.

It is not hard to lay one's finger on some of the causes that have brought about this state of things. A silly fashion, for one cause, has decreed that wonder is vulgar. Why that should be so, no one can tell. But if there be higher intelligences than ours in God's Universe, and they see the sons of men, as they have plenty of chances to do, casting an indifferent glance at the full pomp and majesty of the setting sun, or reading such a Psalm as the 103rd with an untouched heart, how they must marvel indeed!

And then, of course, familiarity tends to blunt the sense of wonder in a certain and common type of mind. The best men have always resisted that tendency and recognised that it works harm to life and character. They have remembered to look for God in the common and familiar, and that is a search that goes far to make a man a saint, just because it is a continual prayer, a continual holding open of the heart to God. His answer is to fill the wondering heart, bit by bit, with Himself.

Ignorance, too, is often a cause, the kind of ignorance that calls itself knowledge. It is an innocent delusion on the part of the youthful tyro in Science that after he has made a little experiment with a prism and a beam of sunlight, there is nothing wonderful in the rainbow. Pure, profound Science on the other hand, speaks very humbly-and wonders all the while.

Nature is dumb and silent concerning the Infinite behind it to him who goes but to catalogue and dissect. Take a heart that can wonder with you on your country-walk, open your eyes and look, open your heart like a child and listen, and you will find, as Moses found, that even in a bush there may be the Voice of God. Hold the door of your heart ajar in simple wonder, and some thing of God will enter to cleanse and freshen it, as the hot and dusty street is washed by the rain from Heaven.

Just as he who goes to Nature with a heart that cannot wonder, will find no message there for him, so he who looks out upon the sanctities of home, of human life and love, in that dull mood of mere acceptance, must often find himself hard pressed for material when he makes his thanksgiving to God. George Eliot has spoken somewhere of the agony of the thought that we can never atone to the dead for the stinted affection we gave them, for the "little reverence we showed to that sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest thing God has given us to know." The divinest thing God has given us to know!

Have we realised that that gift of God to us lives now in the same home with us? Do you know what it is? It is a wife's devotion, a mother's care, a brother's comradeship, a sister's love. It is the trust and affection of little children, and the patience of those who love us. And yet there have been men-judge ye if this be not true-who have lived close to gifts of God like these, and taken them all unquestioned and never wondered at the undeserved bounty of them or their continuance from day to day.

How easy it is to discover the gifts and charm of a stranger, how easy to wonder at that! But to wonder at the sacrifice and the patience of the love that dwells under the same roof with us, and stoops, in Mrs Browning's happy phrase, "to the level of each day's most quiet need," how few of us do that! And yet, without daily wonder, how can we be sure that we do not slight it, or requite it ill, how can we truly give our thanks to God whose gift it is?

Most important of all, he who brings no wonder in his heart can never be touched with the sense of God. The lack of the great deep and awful wonder of our fathers in all their thought and speech about God, has brought it about that our religious speech to-day is too often either superficial, flippant and easy, or syllogistic, mechanical, and hard. It is the absence of wonder that tempts men to imagine that God can be enclosed in any formula whatever, or brought to the hearts of men in so many rigid propositions. If men would but give their wonder expression when they frame their creeds, there would be less chafing where the edges are too sharp.

I am bound to confess that my sympathies are altogether with a working man who once listened to a fervid evangelist at a street corner unfolding a scheme of salvation as clean-cut and mechanical as a problem of Euclid, and buttonholed him afterwards to inquire if he had ever read any astronomy. No, he said, he had not. "That's a pity," said the artisan, "for, eh, man, but ye have an awfu' wee God." In all reverence, my brothers, that is what the absence of wonder brings us to, a small God, a small salvation, and a merely mechanical Christ.

Men have sometimes asked what that childhood of the Kingdom is on which Jesus laid so much stress, and some have taken it to mean renunciation of intellect and reason in favour of a Church's dogma. But it means, says John Kelman, something far more human and more beautiful-"it means wonder and humility and responsiveness, the straight gaze of childhood past conventionalities, the simplicity of a mind open to any truth, and a heart with love alive in it." That is surely right. That is what becoming a little child in Christ's sense does mean. First of all, wonder.

PRAYER

Almighty and eternal God, Creator and Ruler of the Universe, dwelling in light that is inaccessible and full of glory, whom no man hath seen or can see, what is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou visitest him? Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us that we should be called the sons of God! Such knowledge is too wonderful for us; it is high, we cannot attain unto it. O come let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker. Amen.

"If ye then, being evil, know

… how much more … your

heavenly Father."

(LUKE xi. 13.)

XXVIII

THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD

If it were a conceivable thing that we had to part with all the words of Scripture save one, and if we were allowed to choose that one, there are some of us who would elect to retain that great declaration of Jesus-"If ye being evil know … how much more … your heavenly Father." For, having that, we should still be rich in knowledge of the Love and Fatherhood of God. We should still know Christ's dominating conception of God, and have His last and highest word regarding Him. We should still be able to rise, as Jesus not only warrants but invites us to do, from the little broken arc of true fatherhood on earth to the perfect round in Heaven.

At the warm reassuring touch of that "How much more your heavenly Father" whole systems of brainy divinity vanish away! The truth of the Fatherhood of God, vouched for and lived on by Jesus, kills men's hard and unworthy and hurtful thoughts about God as sunshine kills the creatures that breed and prevail in darkness and ignorance. They can no more live alongside of a realisation that Christ's name for God is His true name, and really describes His attitude to all the sons of men, than the dark, creepy things that live under the stone can remain there when you turn it over and let in the air and the light.

But, say some, you must not carry the truth of God's Fatherhood too far. What is too far? I ask. I want to carry it, and I believe Christ means us to carry it, as far as ever it will stretch, and that is "as far as the East is from the West." Think of a father's GOOD-WILL. It is conceivable that other men may do you a deliberate wrong. But you are entitled to believe that your father won't. You may not understand what he proposes, but you can be quite sure that he means only your good. Henry Drummond tells how his early days were made miserable by the conception he had of God as of some great staring Eye in the heavens watching all he did. But that is a policeman's eye, not a father's.

There are many tokens that, even yet, we have not realised what these blessed words of Jesus mean and imply. A mother vainly trying to answer the old, old question why her little one was taken from her, will say, "Perhaps I was too fond of him." Or, should sudden sorrow come, the explanation suggested by the troubled one himself is, "I was too happy." There are plenty of people who are afraid to declare that they feel very well or are very happy, in case the upper Powers should hear and send trouble, apparently out of sheer malice! "Bethankit, what a bonny creed!" Oh! what a dreadful caricature of God! How it must pain the Father to hear His children talking so!

There is another mark of fatherhood, as we know it on earth-COMPASSION, pity, the willingness to forgive. There is no forgiveness on earth like a father's or a mother's, none so willing, none that will wait so long and yet give itself without stint at last. Pity, as the world of business and of ordinary relationship knows it, is at best a transient emotion. It murmurs a few easy words and then forgets. But parent love suffereth long and is kind, hopes against hope, and waits and is still hopeful when every one else has written the offender down irreclaimable. It is such compassion and pity for us sinners, how great soever our sins be, that Jesus would have us come for to God in Heaven.

But will not men abuse such patience and long-suffering? it is asked. Is it not a risky thing to tell them that God is our Father? It is. But it is the risk that Love takes cheerfully, and that only Love can take. And when men talk lightly and complacently about the great mercy of God, there is something, I think, which they have forgotten, namely, that at the heart of the divine Fatherly forgiveness there lies the shadow of the Cross. I do not say that in any conventional sense. I say it because I have seen for myself that at the heart of all true earthly forgiveness of a fatherly sort there lies this same mysterious shadow. Shall not the father forgive his returning prodigal? Yea, verily, and with all his heart. But, ah, before that, think how the father has suffered with his son, and for his son. The prodigal's shame is the father's shame too, and lies heavy on his heart. And it is out of a chamber where he and that pain have long been companions that the earthly father issues to welcome and receive at last the lad who has sought his face penitent and in his right mind. The welcome is real. The forgiveness is full and free. And yet behind it there is sacrifice. The price of it is suffering. Aback of it lies-the Cross! That is what silences cheap thinking and glib speech about the forgiveness of God. If God's long-suffering be like a father's here, it is, first, long suffering.

The danger, however, is not that we abuse God's grace knowingly and in callous complacency. Far more is it, I think, that we never actually accept and realise and build our lives upon the gracious compassion of the Heavenly Father and His willingness to forgive.

Every parent ought to know Coventry Patmore's beautiful lyric, "The Toys." In it a father tells how, when his little son had been disobedient again and again, he struck him, and sent him with hard words and unkissed to bed-"his mother, who was patient, being dead." And when, later, he went upstairs to see him, he found him asleep, his lashes still wet with tears, and-what touched him most-on a table beside his bed all his little treasures heaped together to comfort his sad heart-a box of counters, and a red-veined stone, a piece of glass abraded by the beach, and six or seven shells, a bottle with blue bells, and two French copper coins-all his little store of precious things.

So when that night I prayedTo God, I wept and said-"Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,Not vexing Thee in death,And Thou rememberest of what toysWe made our joys,How weakly understoodThy great commanded good,Then, fatherly not lessThan I, whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,Thou'lt leave Thy wrath and say:'I will be sorry for their childishness.'"

One word more about our Father's SILENCE. Our fathers here on earth had their silences when we were children. We asked him for something that we wanted very much. And he gave no reply. We went on asking. We expected to get what we had set our hearts on. He heard us hoping and believing that this good thing would come to us, and he held his peace. But we knew that silence, and we trusted it. We were quite sure that he would have told us if we were deceiving ourselves, that his gift, when it came, would, at least, not be a mere mockery of our hopes.

And I often think of these words of Christ's, "If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone?" when I stand by a graveside, and speak the words of radiant hope with which we lay our beloved to rest. Our Father hears us speak that hope. He has heard hearts in an agony through all the generations wish that it might be true-that this bleak fact of Death is not the end, but only the beginning of a better thing. But He keeps silence. We have no sure proof, only the blessed hope of the Christian evangel.

He keeps silence. But, my brethren, can we not trust that silence since it is our Father's? We have asked this bread in our pain and through our tears. We have asked it because it seems to us we need it so. And whatever gift His silence hides, this at least is certain, it is not, it cannot be, only a stone.

PRAYER

Almighty God, who through Jesus Christ has taught us to call Thee our Father, we thank Thee that Thou hast chosen a name so dear to us to reveal Thy care and Love. When our way is dark and our burden is heavy and our hearts are perplexed, grant us the grace to know that Thou who art directing every step of our journey art a God of Love, and Thy true and perfect Name is Our Father in Heaven. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

"Whosoever will lose his

life for my sake shall find it."

(MATTHEW xvi. 25.)

XXIX

THE UNRETURNING BRAVE

(EASTER DAY, 1915)

NOTE. – I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to Sir Wm. Robertson Nicoll's "When the Wounded Go Home," a tender and courageous message.

Christmas in war time was like an evil dream. Easter is like a breath from Heaven itself, a wind from the pure and blessed heights of God blowing the clouds of battle-smoke apart for a brief space so that we all may see again that beyond the smoke and beyond grim death itself there is the Life Enduring, a Divine Love compared to which ours at the best is untender and hard, a Fatherly welcome beside which welcomes here are faint and cold. This is the strangest Easter Day the world has ever known, yet never have the thousands and thousands of stricken homes and sore hearts needed more the living hope that is begotten anew in the Christian Church this day by our Lord's rising again from the dead. It is assuredly of God's mercy that Easter should fall in these days, when so many fathers and mothers, wives and sisters and lovers need its hope and comfort so.

We cannot but think to-day of the many, many homes in our own and other lands from which strong and brave men marched away weeks or months ago, because they had heard the call, and were willing to make the supreme sacrifice for righteousness' sake, who will never come back again, who have died a soldier's death and sleep in a soldier's grave-fathers, husbands, sons, lovers, gallant men, dear lads, cheerful, willing, dauntless. You find their names by the hundred and the thousand in the casualty lists, but the loss you cannot measure unless you could see all the shadowed homes. How many such homes there are in our own land alone, How many such in our own little circle!

Try to realise that, and then ask if a more gracious message could fall upon all these hearts to-day than the Easter message of the Christian Church, – that there is no death and that its seeming victory is not a victory. The old, old question, If a man die shall he live again? is answered to-day by the triumphant Yes! of Christendom. Yes, he never ceases to live. From the inferno of the battlefield the mortally stricken do but pass across the bridge and stream of death to God's Other Side. When they fall in battle, they fall into His everlasting Arms. They do not die. They are not dead. It is only their poor mortal bodies that the shrieking shells can maim or destroy. They themselves, the real self and spirit of them, no material force can hurt, for that belongs to a higher kingdom than the visible, and its true goal and home are not here at all.

To all who are sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death in these days, to all who have watched their beloved go out where every true man would wish to go, and know only too surely that they shall never return, – to these to-day Jesus Christ has His Word to speak, – and would that all might hear it and give it room in their hearts to do its blessed work! It is to Him we owe it, and He is our authority for believing that beyond the darkness and separation of death there is the morning of a new and fairer day. The valley of the Shadow, yea, the valley of battle itself opens out again at its far end to the sun's rising and the untrammelled life in the light and liberty of God. The happy warrior is borne by gentle hands to God's own land of peace, where the fret and fury of battle slip from him like a discarded garment, and beside the still waters of that better country he finds healing for his hurt. It is that quiet and blessed hope that is being reborn in our hearts this day as the Church keeps her festival of a Risen and a Living Christ. It is that lively hope the Church offers for comfort to all stricken homes and to every sorrowing heart.

They offered themselves, these gallant lads, not for anything they hoped to gain, but for the sake of honour and liberty, of justice and righteousness. And when a man casts himself on God in that fashion, offering not the words of his lips, nor the homage of his worship, but himself, all that he has, his life and all that life holds for him, think you that upon that poor soul, with his priceless offering borne humbly in his hands, the God and Father of us all is going to turn His back? "He that loseth his life," said Jesus, "for my sake shall find it."