Chapter XII: The War Against War 201 (4)

Next door to my home I have two little neighbors, boys of three and five. They are close friends of mine and they have taught me much. Their father is a physician, a busy, useful, Christian man. The boys understand their father’s life “in part.” They know that he is a doctor and that he goes to see sick people and make them well. But as to the methods he employs and the remedies he uses they know nothing at all. They know in a dim sort of way that he makes the money which pays the bills and keeps them in a home full of comfort and beauty. But as to his financial standing, his investments, and his prospects, they know nothing. They know that along with the hearty good-will which he feels for everybody, he loves their mother and them supremely; but how he came to love that particular woman rather than some other one, and how they were born of that love, or how far that love might go in defending and providing for them, they do not concern themselves for one moment. They know their father’s love in part.

But the part they know is the part they use. They live in their father’s house; they sit at his table; they greet him with a shout when he comes in from his practise. They obey him and trust him and think he is the best man in the world. They climb up into his lap and talk to him, not about his practise, but about their own small affairs, their tops, their marbles, their little wagon--as he wants them to do. He meets them always on their own ground and deals with them in the terms and interests of their own lives. Thus my two little friends live and grow, knowing their father’s life in part.

“Except we become as little children” in the house of our Father, whose total life exceeds our present comprehension, whose plans and purposes for us are too high for complete understanding, whose outlook for us is vaster every way than our own outlook--“except we become as little children we shall in no wise enter his kingdom.” But if we take the part we know and use it, acting on it and living by it, we will be treading the way which leads to a fuller and more blessed experience of the Father’s wisdom and love as surely as my two small friends are doing as they grow up toward their manhood in their father’s house.

In how many ways Jesus made plain this duty of utilizing the near and the familiar when we would learn the remote! He seemed to realize that religion would be crusted over with misconceptions so that ordinary people would find it hard to get at; that some men would write big dull books about it, which no one would want to read; that other men in talking about it would use words which would not go into a suit-case without being folded twice, thus confusing the people. For that reason, perhaps, he made his own teaching simpler than that of any one whose words stand recorded in Holy Writ.

He stood once at midnight among the trees talking with a thoughtful man as to certain aspects of the religious life. “How can these things be?” the man asked. “How can a man be born when he is old?” Just then the wind rustled the leaves at his side and Jesus remarked: “The wind bloweth where it listeth. You hear the sound thereof, but you cannot tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth.” We cannot tell why the wind blows one day from the north and we have cold, another day from the south and we have heat, another day from the east and we have rain. We cannot explain satisfactorily many of the mysteries connected with the wind. But a man who is a fisherman can put up his sail and fill it with this wind which is such a mystery. He can sail out through the Golden Gate and come back in the evening with a boatload of fish for the needs of his family and for other hungry men. The wind that fills his sail he knows, but the origin, the ultimate destiny, and all the relationships it sustains to the other forces in the universe he does not know. The part he knows, however, is the part he uses by relating it to his own life. And this is the act of a man of sense in matters spiritual as well. He knows the life of the Infinite Spirit in part, but he uses the part he knows by relating it helpfully to his own life.

When we start in after that fashion it is a straight course. The boy begins his study of mathematics by learning to count ten--one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. He moves straight along by that path until, with these same ten figures, he is computing the courses the planets take and measuring the distances of the fixed stars. He begins his study of literature by learning his letters, a, b, c, etc. By and by, using these same familiar letters, he is making his way through the intricacies of “Hamlet” and “Macbeth”; he is walking with Emerson and Hegel across the fields of philosophy. He begins his study of music by learning the elementary sounds, do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do. Presently, with these same tones, he is singing in a great chorus which renders “The Messiah” or playing his instrument in some orchestra which is producing the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven. In every situation in life progress is made not by being appalled over the amount we do not know, or by vainly wishing we knew more, but by taking the part we know, relating it to our lives, and making it the instrument of gaining that fuller knowledge.

God is greater than any wise and good father but not different. Carry the love of a wise and good father up to the _nth_ degree and you have the love of God for his people. The life of the spirit is nobler than the life of the flesh, but it stands closely related; it is a life which hungers after righteousness, thirsts for the living God, and grows strong by exercising itself in useful service. Heaven is finer and purer than earth, but not unlike. It was for the Jew a “New Jerusalem,” and it is for every man a “new --” whatever may be the name of the city where he dwells. It is the ordinary life ennobled and glorified by the infusion of a finer spirit. The glorious fulfilment comes through the richer combinations and the fuller development of the simpler parts we know already.

I wish I could persuade the college man who has never entered into an open, joyous, Christian life to just begin. There are many things which he does not understand nor, perhaps, believe. We will put them aside for the moment, not ignoring them, but postponing their consideration. Let him take the part he knows, the moral imperative of living the best life one sees, and no finer life than that of the Christian can be named; the necessity for some competent guide, and none better than Jesus of Nazareth has thus far appeared; the clearly ascertained benefits to be gained by trust and obedience; the helpful reactions which come through prayer and the reading of the Bible; the manifest advantage of cherishing the hope of a future life and of facing squarely upon the fact that what we sow we reap. All this he knows! Let the part he knows be the part he uses. If he will only act upon it, building it into his own life and following where it leads, he will be on his way toward the place where he will know even as he is known.

X

FIGHTING THE STARS

In an ancient song we find this striking statement, “The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” This is poetry. It must be dealt with according to the rules which govern poetical expression. The plain prose facts underlying the statement were these: The northern tribes of Israel were being oppressed by the warlike Canaanites of that region. Israelites living on the outskirts were frequently slaughtered until certain villages had been entirely destroyed. The oppression became so bitter that it was not safe for an Israelite to travel the ordinary roads. “In the days of Shamgar the highways were unoccupied, and the people walked through by-paths.” They were in constant fear for their lives and the situation at length became unendurable.

Then there came an armed revolt of the Israelites against their oppressors. Ten thousand men under the leadership of Deborah and Barak went out to give battle in the plain of Esdraelon. The commander of the opposing army was Sisera. He had been uniformly victorious over the Israelites chiefly by his use of chariots and war-horses, riding his enemies down before they could accomplish anything with their slings and arrows. And into the famous battle referred to in the song the author says, “Sisera brought nine hundred chariots of iron” to fight against the army of Israel.

But just as the battle opened there came a fierce storm converting the black loam of that fertile field into a morass. The heavy war-horses and huge chariots were unable to charge. The song pictures them as floundering, helpless, in the deep mud. The cold rain turned gradually into sleet and the sleet driven by a fierce wind directly into the faces of the advancing Canaanites made their use of sling and spear comparatively ineffective. On the other hand, the Israelites, with the storm at their backs and with their courage heightened by the feeling that all the circumstances of the situation were in their favor, fought splendidly and successfully. They slaughtered the helpless men who were trying in vain to use the heavy chariots; they put to flight the foot soldiers who could not properly defend themselves with the storm beating in their faces, and thus they won a notable victory over the army of Sisera.

When the Israelites came to add up the forces which entered into the result, they were not so short-sighted as to fancy that their own right arms had gotten them the victory. They saw that certain other forces which they had not created, which they did not in any wise control, had entered decisively into the determination of the issue. “The Lord discomfited Sisera, and all his chariots,” they said. “The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” The wind and the rain, the hail and the sleet, coming down out of the skies by no act of theirs, had lined up with them as effective allies; and as their eyes ran over the complete muster roll, the forces from above combining with their own determined valor, they knew that Sisera was foredoomed to defeat because he had been fighting against the stars.

The stars in their courses fought against Sisera--this is poetry! It is a bold literary statement of a splendid moral truth. In the long run the forces of earth and sky are alike hostile to the low type of life which Sisera represents. Cruelty, oppression, inhumanity, are doomed to defeat. Individuals or nations cultivating those qualities are fighting the stars, and the stars will be too much for them. As it was with Sisera, so it is now and ever shall be, world without end! Those evils are sometimes victorious in a skirmish; now and then they win a battle, but the war goes always against them. When the end comes and the articles of capitulation are signed, they are to be found with Sisera, biting the dust. Forces, human and divine, seen and unseen, are perpetually at war with wrong-doing and the combination of all these mighty energies makes the outcome inevitable. The man who, in any wise, undertakes to live a wrong life is undertaking to fight the stars.

The presence of universal moral forces is here symbolized. All about us are familiar forces which we did not originate, which we do not control--the light and the heat of the sun, the power of gravitation, the movements of the winds, and the pulsating tides. We cannot control them; we can only adjust ourselves to their movements and wisely cooperate with them for certain ends. Even while I am speaking this huge mass under our feet is whirling us swiftly onward, covering the whole twenty-five thousand miles in a single twenty-four hours. Scientific men thus far have nothing to offer as to how it gained its initial velocity; we find it moving and it carries us with it whether we will or no.

This is a symbol! There are other forces, unseen but mighty, moving the race up out of darkness into great and ever greater light. With all its groping and stumbling the race has never been allowed to lose its way altogether. Yesterday it thought as a child and understood as a child; today it puts away childish things and knows in part; tomorrow it will know still “in part,” but a larger part. And it is the sublime conviction of serious men that it is on its way to know even as it is known. This movement is as resistless as the motion of the planets.

The race is also making headway in righteousness. Certain forms of evil which once stood out naked and unashamed have been driven into rat-holes. Presently these holes will be stopped up from the top and those forms of evil will be seen no more. The power of conscience grows and its dominion widens. Matthew Arnold, speaking as a poet, said, “There is a power not ourselves which makes for righteousness.” Herbert Spencer, speaking as a philosopher, said, “There is an infinite and eternal energy from which all things proceed,” and in his judgment it was, on the whole, friendly to righteousness. The Psalmist, speaking as a religious man, said, “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether, and in keeping of them there is great reward.” It does not matter what words are used; it all amounts to the same thing. The very stars are symbols to us, as they were to this writer of old, of forces unseen, august, cosmic, which are insistently set upon righteousness. Sisera and all the horde of wrong-doers are compelled to look that fact in the face.

The antagonism of these universal forces spells defeat for those who are willing to do wrong. Sometimes the letters which spell out defeat are formally arranged in order; at other times the letters must be selected from a mass of confusing details, but they are there, and they spell the same word, “defeat.” The stars never tarry long in bringing in their verdict upon the coarser sins of the flesh, murder and adultery, stealing and lying, drunkenness and gluttony. But the operation of this law reaches all the way down to those subtler sins of pride and envy, meanness and selfishness, moral indifference and spiritual neglect--all these in their final outcome make for misery and discontent as surely as two and two make four. No man ever outwitted or vanquished the stars, no man ever will. The sun rises when it is due, no matter how he chooses to set his individual clock, no matter what lies he may tell in his particular almanac. No man ever outwitted the moral order of the universe which is august and irresistible in its ongoings. He may have sought out many devices, but at last he is compelled to settle by the books. He must reap what he has sown, no matter how terrible the harvest may be.

Go through any modern city with your eyes open and you will find this statement about Sisera written out in a plain hand. You will find people, some of them well-dressed, some in rags, with their hearts draped in wretchedness and despair. Poor deluded mortals, they have been butting their brains out against the moral corner-stones of the universe in the vain hope that possibly the way of the transgressor might not be hard for them. Some by intemperance and some by licentiousness, some by sly dishonesty and some by cold-hearted selfishness--the roads to ruin are various, and men travel them all! Here they come at last, bruised, battered, and broken! They have been fighting the stars with the usual result. If here and there one keeps his head up and his face like polished brass, thinking he may escape the same ugly fate, you have only to wait for a time to see him with his face broken and his heart crushed like the rest.

Here are two young men at college, one of them living a true life, maintaining good habits, keeping himself hard at work, cultivating the right sort of friends! The other young fellow keeps his lungs drenched with cigarette smoke, his brain drugged with alcohol; he seeks out the shady places in the life of the city and cultivates the refuse; he loafs when he ought to be at work. You can tell at a glance which one will be sitting in the directors’ meeting or in some similar place of responsibility twenty years from now, and which one will be out somewhere on a high stool or tramping the streets periodically in search of a job, wondering why his luck has been against him. There is no luck about it. He enlisted in the great army of fools who, under the leadership of Sisera, are undertaking to fight the stars. Certain habits, certain courses of action, certain aspirations bring honor, joy, advancement; certain other courses of action bring just the reverse. It is all as sure as the movement of the planets; it comes according to law equally unyielding.

The ultimate well-being of any life is secured through cooperation with those forces symbolized by the stars. I was on the Mediterranean once on my way from Italy to Egypt when off the coast of Crete our ship ran into a terrible storm. We were beaten and tossed, for the wind was contrary. An accident made it necessary to lay to for several hours while the waves dashed over the highest decks. In the absence of either sun or stars, exact reckoning was lost, but toward midnight of the second day the storm broke and presently the stars shone out, here and there, in the irregular patches of the sky. Then the first officer appeared on deck with his instruments and soon he knew exactly where we were on the face of the troubled waters. All uncertainty was over; we were sailing by the stars and the next day we were casting anchor off the coast of Egypt. The motion of the ship and the tossing of the waves were uncertain, but the movement of the stars was sure.

Our safety in the whole cruise of life depends upon the adjustment of our movements to those universal forces which enfold us. My watch, carried though it is in my individual pocket, keeps step with the stars so that I could show you where each hand will be tomorrow morning when the sun comes up over the horizon. And our purposes, our affections, and our wills are to be similarly adjusted so that they shall keep step with God’s infinite will and purpose for us. Those universal forces of love and grace, of forgiveness and redemption, of guidance and comfort, to which in all ages men have learned to look, they are all ours if we will only use them. And when we learn to use them aright they bring peace, and strength, and joy.

There was the sense of an adequate horizon, then, in the words of this ancient poet as he stood that night on the field of battle looking up at the stars. The wind and the rain, the hail and the sleet had all aided the Israelites in winning the victory. The very skies seemed to be interested in that moral struggle there on the plain of Esdraelon. And he was correct--the stars helped; they always help; they fight perpetually in their own appointed way on the side of right.

You may trust the forces which they symbolize! You may work out your own highest well-being in joyous confidence, for God is working within you toward the same great end! You need have no doubt about it, for the evidence is plain. Heroes and martyrs lay down their lives for a principle. The mother cares for the sick child, counting not her pleasure, her comfort, or even her own life dear if she may save the child. The poor dog attached to his master goes to the spot where he saw them lay the body and whines for the sound of a voice that is still. Has the Creator of such moral integrity in the heroes and martyrs kept none of it for himself? Has he out of the ages gone produced such devotion in the heart of the mother with no devotion in his own heart toward his helpless child? Has he instilled such faithful affection in the very dogs that perish, but failed to share in that love himself? Serious men cannot bring themselves to believe in anything so absurd. These forces which produce attachment to the right, devotion to the helpless, faithful affection, are universal forces.

“O heart I made, a heart beats here”--that was the word of God through the lips of the poet! These forces of love and grace are universal and enduring as the stars. To fight them spells defeat. To coöperate with them, bringing the scattered and aimless activities of the life into harmony with the supreme purpose of God declared in Jesus Christ, means life abundant and eternal.

XI

THE POWER OF VISION

In an old school reader there was a sketch, “Eyes or no eyes.” Two young men went for a walk in the same field. One of them saw just the commonplace shapes and forms; he saw nothing that a dog or a kodak would not have seen. He had eyes to see, but he saw not. The other one saw the bumblebees appearing later in the season than do the honey-bees, and thought of the relation this fact sustains to the production of red clover seed--a relation which every farmer understands when he cuts the second crop in place of the first to get seed. He saw at one side of the field a great granite boulder deposited there in the glacial period, and although the day was hot his mind was cool as it dwelt upon that age of ice. He saw the imprint of the shell of some water-breathing creature deep bedded as a fossil in a piece of stone. His imagination went back to the time when that very field was part of an inland sea, and this bit of life was making its impress upon the soft mud of some ancient seashore. He saw a score of interesting things which need not be named here; they were all there to be seen, but his friend had overlooked them. It was a question of “eyes or no eyes.” What any man sees in a field, or in his fellow beings, in his college course, or in life as a whole, depends upon the power of vision that he carries with him.

Here in a well-known story was a man keeping sheep on the slopes of Horeb. In reading the narrative it seems that the imagination of the poet has blended with the plain prose facts of history. We do not know what kind of fire it was which burned in that mysterious and vocal bush. We may believe it was the same kind of fire which burns in the grate or we may conclude that it was an extraordinary bit of autumnal splendor which at a certain season of the year is aflame on many hillsides as if the glory and color of a thousand sunsets might have lodged in the tree tops. However that may be, what Moses actually saw and heard that day is far more important than any conceivable amount of literal fire or of autumn color.

“I will now turn aside and see”--and what he saw his own subsequent career indicates! He had the power of vision and he saw not merely the shapes and colors present in that sheep pasture. He saw things absent, things historic, things possible as present and real. He saw away yonder on the banks of the Nile where he formerly lived, the life of his own fellows being crushed out of them by wrong industrial conditions. He saw the capacity of that race, burning but unconsumed even by those years of oppression, for moral idealism and spiritual leadership among the nations of the earth. He felt within his own breast a fitness for service wider, higher, and more significant than that of keeping sheep. He felt himself commissioned from on high for that responsible service, and he became dissatisfied with his own easy content there in the land of Midian. He saw the great divine heart filled with sympathy for an enslaved and oppressed people. He heard the divine voice say, “I have seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt; I have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters, and I am come down to deliver them.” He saw the divine hand reach out to employ mysterious agencies for the release of that people from the bondage of Egypt.

He had the power of vision and this is what he saw when he led his flock to the back side of the desert, even to Horeb, the mountain of God. The sheep saw nothing of that burning bush or of those other mysterious realities. The dull Midianites watching their flocks a few hundred yards away on the same slope saw nothing of it. A man standing in Moses’ own shoes, his face turned in the same direction, would have seen nothing unless he had brought to the situation the insight of this man of vision.

And Moses himself saw and heard what he did in that high hour because through long years he had cherished a profound sympathy for his brother men and a great abiding faith in God as one who works on behalf of suffering people everywhere. It was the whole mood and purpose of his life which stood declared in those splendid words, “I will now turn aside and see.” He was always saying just that! He was never content with the mere surface of reality. He was never satisfied with that which a hasty glance would bring in any given situation. He must get beneath the surface and know the deeper, hidden meaning.

How much depends upon that power of vision! What mighty issues are knit up with it in this familiar scene! If Moses that day had seen and heard nothing more than did the Midianites, he would have gone on keeping his sheep and would have died a comfortable and prosperous sheep grower. If the Israelites along the banks of the Nile had been without the power of such leadership as he alone among the men of his generation seemed to be able to furnish, they would have gone on making bricks without straw until all capacity for spiritual advance would have been crushed out of them. If that Hebrew race, first among Semitic peoples in its ability to see and to impart spiritual truth, had never had its chance to develop in the free air of the steppes or within the pleasant borders of that land of promise, how different apparently would have been the moral history of the race! It is idle to speculate on what would have been the result had something never happened which did happen, but just this glance shows the momentous consequences which may at any juncture attach to the ability of some man to see. It is of the utmost importance in every quarter that some man should be at hand who can see the great sight.

Your own life, the richness of it, the promise of it, the successful unfolding of it on higher levels, is bound up with this power of vision. If the world about you is only a sheep pasture, if success in life is to be measured solely or mainly in terms of wool and mutton, if the skilful avoidance of discomfort and the securing of easy content for yourself and your family are the main considerations with you, then by that limited outlook you are doomed. If here in these days of high privilege on the campus no bushes burn for you with a strange fire, if no hillsides in life become vocal with a divine voice, if no flames of sympathy, of moral passion, of aspiration burn within your breast, then alas for you! You are not entering into the meaning of life! You have eyes, but you see not, ears, but you hear not!

“Can ye not discern?” Jesus said to those who regarded themselves as the most exemplary people of his day. They could look up at the sky and from the fact that it was red or lowering make a fairly good guess about tomorrow’s weather, but they could not discern the signs of the times. There they were in the presence of the beginnings of the most important spiritual movement in history, yet all they saw was the tired face of the Man of Nazareth, whom they finally put to death because his claims confused them. Can ye not discern? Will you not take pains to cultivate the power of turning aside to see the great sights awaiting you all in the sheep pastures of earth, in all scenes of industry and in all places of trade, in all lines of civic effort and in all forms of charitable intent, in every schoolroom and in every home? Will you not turn and with heightened power of vision see there the hidden, unrealized possibilities?

“Where there is no vision, the people perish!” Something lives on--flesh and blood shapes which buy and sell, walk the street and talk small talk, but the people created potentially in the likeness and image of the Most High are gone. Where there is no vision, any life perishes. What keeps alive the mother-love in the face of all the hardships, sacrifices, buffetings it is called upon to meet? It is the power of vision cherished and cultivated more actively, perhaps, by women than by men. When her child is first laid in her arms it is only a bit of red flesh--that is all the canary in the window or the thoughtless observer who cares not for children would see. This bit of existence, so undeveloped as to have nothing one could call moral life, no power to choose or to aspire; so undeveloped as to have nothing one could call mental life, no power of recognition, discrimination, inference, has only the power to cry and to feed. But the mother sees in that tiny form another promise of a diviner day when the unsearched possibilities of that new life shall have been trained and nurtured by her love. And throughout the years when she nurses the child in sickness, bears with him in his ignorance, woos and wins him back from his moral waywardness, she is sustained by her maternal vision.

No one can live strongly, effectively, joyously in any other way. The dull, dry, prosaic man who never sees the deeper significance of any given situation may be able to saw wood or add up columns of figures, but when it comes to relating these ordinary details of life to some over-arching, underlying, far-reaching purpose which will bring out the meaning and the beauty of existence, he fails. He has no power of vision and his real life goes down in defeat.

It might be illustrated in this way--read Baedeker on Mont Blanc and then read Coleridge! Baedeker has the facts; he tells the height of the mountain, the exact distance from Chamounix to the summit in kilometers; he describes every glacier and crevasse. But Coleridge’s “Ode” to the mountain brings out the meaning and the beauty of it. Baedeker has facts, Coleridge has vision.

Read Baedeker on Edinburgh and then read Robert Louis Stevenson’s little book on the same city; read Baedeker on Northern Italy, including his description of the city without streets, and then read Ruskin’s “Stones of Venice.” Read Baedeker on Belgium, including his description of the field and of the Battle of Waterloo, and then read Victor Hugo’s chapter on the same event in “Les Misérables.” In one case you have the camera recording the outward, visible, prose facts; in the other you have insight and vision interpreting the meaning of them. It is written, man shall not live by Baedeker alone, but by every word which proceedeth out of the mind and heart of that higher power of vision shall man live.

Let me urge this habit upon every young man! Put your own personal life under the power, not of some lower mood or some ill-advised impulse, but under the power of the best you have ever seen or heard or felt as in any wise possible to you. It was a man in a million, measured by character and achievement, who said, while he was still in the vigor and promise of his youth, “Wherefore I was not disobedient unto”--what? I was not disobedient unto the rules and regulations posted on the wall of my schoolroom or the door of the factory where I earned my bread--that would have meant little! No one can set up the way of life in type and print it to be nailed on a door. I was not disobedient to the usages and customs of the society where I moved--that, too, might have meant only a weak, cheap mode of life. “I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision!” I was true to the best I saw and heard and felt as possible to me!

That habit of putting the life deliberately and persistently under the power of some noble vision caught in an hour of spiritual privilege will mean advance. You may, if you will allow your attention to be diverted by the underbrush around you and never see the bush that burns with a strange fire, never see things absent, things historic, things possible but unattained. The small things, the ant-hills, and the gopher mounds, may, because they are near, shut out your view of Shasta and Whitney. It is one of the tragedies of life that the insignificant, the unimportant details have a way of crushing out the finer purposes, thus bringing defeat to interests which are vital.

When Abraham Lincoln had been unusually harassed by some professional politicians as to the bestowal of patronage, he said one day, half humorously and half sadly, “It is not the carrying on of the Civil War which is killing me; it is the work of deciding who shall be postmaster at the Four Corners. There is Mr. Blank”--naming a very troublesome office-seeker--“I never think of going to sleep at night without first looking under the bed to see if Blank is not there waiting to ask me for some office.”

It was one of the tragedies of those hard years in our history that the great president of the republic, who himself had caught the vision and heard the voice--“I have seen the affliction of my people which are in bondage; I have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters, and I am come down to deliver them”--it was one of the tragedies of that period that his eyes should be turned away from the bush which burned with fire to study the underbrush piled up round him by narrow-minded politicians. It is one of the tragedies of many lives in less exalted station that the great things suffer defeat by the multiplicity and insistence of the small things. Busied here and there with a thousand petty interests--what we shall eat, what we shall drink, what we shall put on, and, what other women will say about it when we get it on--the vital things are left undone. The whole wretched habit of life comes from the lack of the power of vision, the inability to put these matters in right perspective, the great things great and the small things small.

Your real life does not consist in what you have. Your real life does not consist in what you are actually able to do. Your real life does not consist even, as men often say, in what you are. Your real life consists in what you see as possible and desirable for you, and in that capacity you feel stirring within you to gain all that sometime! Not your possessions, not your outward achievements, not your inner acquirements, but your persistently cherished aspirations tell the story of your real life. It is what you hold in vision and steadily strive for which marks you up or down.

But suppose one feels his lack of this power of vision, how shall he gain more of it? How shall we cultivate our own meager share of this fine ability? You may recall that word of Paul, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive the things that God hath prepared for those that love him.” This does not mean merely that the things prepared for us are superior to anything that eyes have seen or ears heard in this world; it means rather that they are discerned in another way. They come to us through the power of spiritual perception. “Eye hath not seen,” not by physical sensation; “ear hath not heard,” not by hearsay or common report; God reveals them to us by his Spirit. It was not that Moses had better eyes or better ears than the Midianite shepherds upon the hillsides; he had within him a soul of sympathy for his fellows, a spirit of trust toward God, an attitude of personal aspiration for the highest, which enabled him to see and to hear what they failed to detect.

This power of vision grows like other powers, by right use. The soul sees and sees more as the man obediently translates his visions into deeds, his insights into actions. If any man, gifted or humble, will do his will he shall know, for “obedience,” as Robertson said, “is the organ of spiritual knowledge.” The power of vision grows through right use as each added insight becomes an effective impulse for noble action.

It is this power of vision which keeps men alive all the way up and all the way in. It is for you who stand on the slopes of Horeb, the mountains of God, by reason of the higher education you have received to cultivate this power by a spirit of obedient trust and by the habit of loving service. In every situation form the habit of turning aside from the commonplace shapes which engage your eyes that you may see some great and significant sight. Watch for the bush which burns with a mysterious fire! Listen for the voice which issues out of it, calling you to larger and higher service! Welcome these finer impulses which burn within your own breast, for they will aid you in building your personal life into that great, divine plan of which you have caught a far-off vision.

XII

“THE WAR AGAINST WAR”

In my selection of a theme I have ventured to break away from the conventional style of baccalaureate address. I bring you no word of counsel touching those moral values which are altogether private and personal. I would undertake rather to direct your minds to the consideration of a certain problem, vast and grave, whose scope is national and international.

We live in a land governed by public opinion. The seat of authority is not at Washington; the seat of authority is to be found in those prevailing sentiments and convictions which determine the real attitude of the people themselves. As college-trained men and women you are to be leaders in the work of forming that body of public opinion. Where it is wise, honest, resolute, it becomes the final source of safety for the republic. It is of vital importance, then, that your contribution to that section of public opinion which bears upon the problem I have in mind be grounded in reason and conscience.

Let me remind you of two sentences taken from Holy Writ, one from the greatest book in the Old Testament, “His name shall be called the Prince of Peace”; the other from the last book in the New Testament, “And he shall reign forever and ever.” His name shall be called the Prince of Peace and he shall reign forever and ever! We have here a miniature picture of one of the sublime processes of the ages! The highest anticipation of the Hebrew looked toward the coming of One who should establish a new line of succession. He saw a new quality of life winning its way to empire. The heir to the throne of Israel would be no more a man of war, he would be the Prince of Peace. And the highest anticipation of the Christian looked toward the complete success of that finer method of sovereignty--that coming One would reign forever!

It is a splendid picture of that righteous and enduring conquest to be accomplished not by force but by principle; not by compulsion through slaughter but by moral instruction, persuasion, and reasonable agreement. It is a picture which will furnish any man a worthy ideal to hang in his sky and it will help him, as he takes part in shaping the public opinion of his country, to place the crown of his ultimate allegiance where it rightly belongs.

His name shall be called the Prince of Peace! But what terrible mockery has been offered to that name by his avowed followers! It is one of the ironies of history that the most costly and deadly armaments for the killing of men in war are being wrought out in cold steel, not by the nations which owe their allegiance to Mahomet, the prophet of the sword, but by those nations which profess allegiance to the Prince of Peace. “Put up thy sword,” he said twenty centuries ago! The command has never been withdrawn nor revoked. Yet look out across the face of what we call Christendom and see the wicked and costly refusal!

Christian Germany, where the Protestant Reformation was ushered in by the preaching of Martin Luther, has increased her national debt in a single generation from eighteen millions of dollars to over one thousand millions, chiefly by expenditures upon her army and navy. Christian England, known to the ends of the earth as a center of missionary impulse, is almost beside herself in her mad desire to increase the number of _Dreadnoughts_. She is spending three hundred millions of dollars a year on her army and navy as against eighty-two millions all told on education, science and art. Christian Russia, professing in her orthodox Greek Church to have the only true faith to be found upon the globe, is planning a billion dollar navy and is actually spending two hundred millions a year upon armament as against twenty-two millions a year upon education. And our own Christian country has been making a strange departure from that policy which has made us prosperous and happy, honored and useful, among the nations of the earth for more than one hundred years. The United States in the last ten years has increased in population ten per cent, and it has increased its military expenditures during that period by three hundred per cent. And this is Christendom! These are the nations which look up to the One whose name is called “The Prince of Peace” and crown him Lord of all! Alas, for the bitter irony of such a course!

And all this at a time when the bare problem of bread is becoming more and more serious! England, spending her three hundred millions of dollars a year on military outlay, has little children in the streets of London and Glasgow eating refuse out of the garbage barrels because they are hungry. The problem of poverty and unemployment there is so grave that the British Parliament sets aside whole days for its consideration. In Germany a government expert said recently that, according to carefully prepared estimates based upon detailed investigation, there were two men applying for almost every job which promised a living wage; one-half of the skilled labor of the empire was out of employment. In Russia, people by the thousand die, like flies, from malnutrition at the very hour when her military experts are talking about that billion dollar navy. It is criminal to take thus the children’s bread and fling it to the dogs of war! How terrible all this is for nations which profess to honor and follow the One who came not to destroy men’s lives, but to save them!

In our own country, while the situation is less serious, there are men enough out of work and unable to find bread to put into the mouths of their families. Never a week passes when men do not come asking me to use my influence with the employers in my congregation to find them work. Our national leaders are looking in every direction to discover how the revenue may be increased. The present revenue is sadly inadequate for the things which ought to be done. There are millions of acres of arid land to be irrigated by national enterprise and offered for settlement to industrious families. There are great areas of swamp land to be drained which would support a busy, happy population. There are forests to be conserved and renewed in a way that would change the whole face of the situation for the farmer and the fruit-grower in great sections of our country. There are inland waterways to be improved and developed, bringing producer and consumer nearer together by better means of transportation, thus reducing the cost of living. There is a merchant marine sadly needing assistance, for our flag should fly on all seas and in every port, in what could be a useful and profitable trade. All these things ought to be done, if only there was money available to do them. All these interests suffer for lack of money in the very period when within ten years we are increasing our military expenditure by three hundred per cent. His name shall be called “The Prince of Peace,” and it is under his banner that we profess to march!

What is it all for? I know the scare-heads which sometimes fill the sillier type of newspaper. I know how frightened some people are when some “military expert,” as he calls himself, has the nightmare. “Men who spend the best years of their lives looking at the world through the bore of a gun get their vision distorted.” They cannot see straight; they become sorry and unreliable leaders, as Europe, staggering under her grievous burden, knows to her sorrow. Sir Edward Grey, foreign secretary in the present Cabinet, said recently in the British Parliament, “The vastness of the expenditure on armament is a satire on modern civilization and if continued it must lead Europe into bankruptcy.” The real security of any nation depends upon its schools and its churches, its useful industries and its happy homes a thousand times more than upon its army and navy. And the conceit of these militarists who are throwing dust in the eyes of the people would be funny, if it were not so costly and so perilous to our national well-being.

It is the duty of the church and of the university, where men do not live in that state of chronic hysteria which possesses many a newspaper office, to arraign this evil of militarism as the most cruel and inexcusable burden, as the most gigantic crime against the toiling people, as the nearest approach to the unpardonable sin known to our twentieth century. The men who watch the world from that narrow station “behind the gun” are not competent leaders of public sentiment. The merchant and the mechanic, the wise lawyer and the skilled physician, the farmer, the miner, and the trained teacher, engaged in peaceful, useful industry, are vastly more competent to see things as they are and to aid in shaping a wholesome public sentiment. International relationships are being formed today as never before in the history of the race through community of interest in trade and by those associations which come through labor organizations and through literature, through the work of education and by religious affiliation. It is for these men and women whose main interest lies in those productive vocations to insist upon being heard.

What are the reasons urged for this cruel and costly outlay? “In time of peace prepare for war!” This stupid sentiment is trotted out as if it were a fragment from the wisdom of the ages. History as well as common sense laughs it to scorn. In time of peace prepare for peace! We did just that with England along our northern border where for four thousand miles only an imaginary line divides us from one of the mightiest nations on earth. We agreed with her that not a solitary fort should mar that border, that not a single war-ship should trouble the friendly waters of the Great Lakes. If these two nations can make that treaty of disarmament for a frontier of four thousand miles and observe it faithfully for a century, what is there in the nature of the case to prevent the extension of that noble line of friendly agreement indefinitely?

We prepared for peace and we have had peace. The whole history of our country has been, in the main, a history of peace. Since 1789, a hundred and twenty-one years ago, only three foreign wars have interrupted our progress, and they lasted, all told, less than eight years. For the other one hundred and thirteen years our swords have been plowshares, our spears have been pruning-hooks, the fine steel of our young manhood has been devoted to those useful activities which do not destroy, but feed and save. If we can thus live and grow to be one of the mightiest nations on earth by the policy of peace, why this sudden spasm of military preparation now retarding our genuine development!

But we have become “a world power” men say, and some of the nations might attack us! Why should they? Never since we became a republic have we been attacked, though for decades and decades our navy was a negligible quantity. “But suppose Germany should land a hundred thousand soldiers on our Atlantic coast,” some man shrieked out recently. Why should she? Sane people deal with probabilities, not with wild and imaginary possibilities. If Germany wanted to attack us, why did she not do it in those years when we had no navy at all worth mentioning? We buy millions and millions of dollars worth of goods every year “made in Germany.” Does Germany wish to fight one of her best customers? If some man who keeps a meat-market has a customer who comes in every day to order chops or a steak for his lunch and a roast of beef or a leg of lamb for his dinner, does the butcher want to beat that customer over the head with a musket? Any one can see the absurdity of it! Is folly any the less folly when raised to the _nth_ power by being made international?

So much for Germany! As for England, she ruled the sea for all those decades when we had no navy worth considering and she never thought of attacking us. Why should she fight the people of her own race and language whose commercial interests are so closely interwoven with her own economic life? France is our traditional and hereditary friend. No other nation on that side of the globe need be taken into our calculation. What a nightmare it is which sets us to building ten million dollar warships for fear some respectable neighbor might attack us!